Pliny's Warning

by Nicholson, Anne Maria

  ‘It’s just a first draft,’ Camilla explains as she opens her briefcase.

  ‘Clever woman. I picked you straight away.’

  The car is barely moving but Umberto is calmer now and Camilla wonders if he even realizes it was she who picked him. He puts on a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and opens the folder.

  He flicks through it, quickly at first, his beady brown eyes flitting from page to page. He returns to the introduction: ‘The threat posed to local populations of an eruption of Mt Vesuvius.’

  He reads slowly, and turns to a page with two maps, one labelled ‘The Existing Red Zone’, the other, ‘Recommended Changes to the Red Zone’. His stubby forefinger traces over the towns circling the volcano: Torre de Greco, San Sebastiano, Herculaneum, Pompeii, eighteen in all.

  He runs his finger along lines, blue marking the boundaries of each municipality, yellow marking safe areas to build, and red excluding all construction. His eyes dart back and forth between the two maps.

  Camilla puts her hand on his and places his finger on the map. ‘There, I think that’s what you’re looking for. Your land, or should I say your wife’s.’

  His finger lingers on the spot where she knows one of his construction companies recently bought large tracts of wasteland south of the mountain. On the first map this is part of the Red Zone. On the second map, the boundary has moved to include it in the Yellow Zone.

  ‘Brilliant!’ he mutters under his breath. He turns to the last page and reads a summary. At the bottom of the page is a signature in well-rounded handwriting:

  Professor Camilla Corsi.

  As he puts the report down, his breath forms into a long slow whistle. ‘Well, you’ve exceeded yourself.’ Umberto squeezes her hand hard. ‘If this goes through we can have the land rezoned and build the shopping centre and school.’

  Camilla pulls her hand away gently and sinks back into the seat. ‘As I said, it’s a first draft. There are still many people who will comment, and don’t expect them all to agree. But in the end, the chancellor, Alfonso Galbatti, will have the final say and then it goes to the government.’

  ‘Perfect! In that case I think we can move our plans ahead with confidence.’ He picks up the report again and continues to study the maps. Camilla can almost hear his brain calculating the profits he will make from the land he ‘persuaded’ a family who had held it for generations to sell to him cheaply before they moved north to Milan.

  Mario beeps the horn at a group of motorcyclists stopped on the road in front of them. They scatter and he accelerates. Soon they are skirting around the grey stone walls of Castel Nuovo. The massive castle blocks her view of the bay and seems to stop the city of Naples from falling into the sea. They drive around it only to stop again a few seconds later behind a line of cars. Two blue police cars on the piazza in front of the castle push their way into the traffic. She can see the faces of the young carabinieri enjoying a joke through one of the windscreens.

  Seconds later an African man emerges from shadows on the square. His gaze follows the police cars disappearing around a bend. He raises his hand and four or five others, all tall, black and rake thin, appear carrying suitcases. Just a few metres from their car, they spread blankets onto the footpath and tip dozens of fake designer handbags onto them. Camilla watches the men carefully arranging the bags into colours and styles, occasionally glancing about like nervous gazelles. She recognizes copies of new designs for Prada, Gucci, Chanel, Dolce et Gabbana and Fendi she’s seen in Naples’ most expensive boutiques.

  ‘A hard way to make a living,’ Camilla muses, ‘constantly dodging the carabinieri.’

  Umberto’s mood has lifted. ‘The Sengelese? They’re all part of our economy those men, the clandestini. Always having to hide, yet an important link in the chain—I’m probably making a euro commission from each of their sales,’ he laughs. ‘We all have to support our families. Would you like one of the bags, cara?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Just the real thing for you, Camilla? Like me?’ He pulls her towards him again and kisses her hard on the lips. ‘I should divorce my wife and marry you.’

  Camilla pulls back, her voice cold. ‘Over her dead body, I should think.’

  ‘Now, now. Let’s not speak badly of the living.’

  ‘Finally!’ Mario calls over his shoulder. ‘We’re moving. I’ll have you at the restaurant in no time, boss.’

  Already small groups of tourists are gathering around the handbags as they leave the castle behind them. They drive along Via Nasario Sauro towards Santa Lucia and she can see the illuminated tips of giant yachts berthed in the marina near the restaurants, swaying gently back and forth.

  Mario pulls up at the kerb behind a line of expensive cars.

  ‘Wait here,’ Umberto tells him. ‘We’ll be an hour.’

  As they walk along a jetty towards Borgo Marinato where the restaurants are clustered, she reaches into her handbag for a cigarette and lights it.

  ‘There’s no time for that.’

  ‘Indulge me. I’m not allowed to smoke in the restaurant. Give me a minute.’

  She inhales deeply and then blows the smoke into the air.

  ‘Filthy habit,’ Umberto mutters, striding ahead.

  Camilla trails behind. The silhouette of Castello Dell’Ovo rises in front of her like a small island. It occurs to her that Naples has expended a lot of energy over the centuries building fortresses in a vain attempt to repel its enemies. The enemies were often the victors, and they in turn clung to power until the next wave of marauders came calling. The Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, the French Angevins, the Spanish Aragonese, the French Bourbons—a never-ending roll call of foreign rulers followed by a procession of Italians. These days it was impossible to pick who was friend and who was foe, as the gates keeping out strangers had been well and truly left open. Camilla smiled ruefully, knowing the enemy was usually within.

  Beyond the castle, across the sea, the slopes of Mt Vesuvius glimmer under a full moon, eternally indifferent to the power play of mortals. Camilla shivers and drapes her red silk pashmina tightly around her shoulders.

  Violin music fills the night air and she hears a better than usual rendition of her favourite folksong. She sings the words of ‘Santa Lucia’ quietly to herself. ‘O dolce Napoli, o suol beato, ove sorridere, volle il Creato, tu sei l’impero, di armonia! Santa Lucia! Santa Lucia!’

  On a night like this—boats swaying, moonlight on the rippling sea; she imagines it must have been on a night just like this, so long ago, that the composer of ‘Santa Lucia’ stood here, moved by the magic of Naples at its most beautiful. He must have been inspired by a real boatman enticing passersby to board his boat to admire the city, the place of holy soil, smiled upon by the Creator, the empire of harmony.

  My God, harmony! Where did that disappear to? The only harmony she knows is in music. She spots the busker, tall, wearing a long black coat and woollen beanie. His face is in shadow but she can see his hands clearly, the right lightly gripping the bow, the left around the neck of the violin. She lingers a few more seconds, not wanting to leave, absorbing the passion and longing in the music.

  ‘Bravo,’ she says quietly. She drops a twenty euro note into his open violin case. He doesn’t look up but nods his thanks and plays on.

  She hurries to catch up with Umberto, then pauses, taking a final puff and stubbing her cigarette out on the ground with her shoe. As the sound of the violinist fades, she hears another one ahead. A second busker, shorter with gelled hair, picks up the melody. The music has lifted her spirits, allowed her to escape for a few precious moments.

  ‘Hurry up, Camilla!’ Umberto is just ahead, waiting at the front of the restaurant where a line has formed. She drops a coin into the second player’s case and joins him. He guides her to the front where the patrone spots them immediately.

  ‘Your usual table, Signor Dragorra?’ The patrone lowers his head respectfully and ushers them inside.

  ‘Ye
s. The usual table, the best wine and your best food,’ Umberto booms as they head towards the prime spot overlooking the water. They are barely seated when a waiter in black pants and waistcoat, gleaming white shirt and a peculiarly old-fashioned waxed moustache offers them the menu.

  Umberto waves it away. ‘A bottle of Fiano de Avellino, cameriere, and show me today’s catch.’

  The waiter reappears with the wine and as he pours it the white liquid sparkles in the light from the flickering candles in the centre of their table.

  Umberto drinks a large mouthful while Camilla sips hers tentatively. She feels uncomfortably on show. Their public appearances have been rare and always with the excuse that they are meeting on university business.

  All of the tables around them are full and she notices a few of the diners glancing furtively their way. Is it fear or recognition on their faces? She can’t tell. Umberto ignores them and, unusually for him, smiles so broadly that in the candlelight he looks vaguely handsome.

  ‘I feel like celebrating. We will eat well tonight, you and I.’

  The waiter returns with a large pewter platter of glistening raw fish.

  ‘The sardines look good. Those, and the calamari to start, lightly done in a little oil and garlic.’ Umberto points to the pile of tiny shining silver fish lined up like sentries and the curly white mounds of squid.

  ‘And then?’ The waiter flexes his arms and holds the dish closer.

  ‘Pesce spada, for both of us.’ He points at thick cutlets of swordfish. ‘Grilled.’

  Camilla learnt early that when keeping Umberto’s company her choices counted for nothing. It didn’t even occur to him that she might prefer to eat something different. It was a small price to pay for his patronage. If she felt like veal tonight, so what? Swordfish would be fine.

  ‘Hey, Fabio, come over here!’ Umberto is waving across the restaurant.

  A broad-shouldered man with wavy brown hair salutes him from the entrance to the restaurant and makes his way around the other tables towards them. ‘My son. It’s time you met,’ he says quietly.

  Camilla twists the white serviette on her lap and squeezes it tight between her fingers. Meeting her lovers’ families is something she’d rather avoid.

  ‘Fabio, this is the professor from the university I was telling you about. Camilla Corsi. She’s very helpful to our business interests.’

  He’s slightly taller than his father, dressed in a black leather bomber jacket and the latest blue jeans, fashionably worn. She smiles at him and proffers her hand, staring into hard jet-black eyes that tell her nothing. She recognizes that penetrating gaze—he is trying as hard as she is to gauge her measure, the possibility of a threat. He shakes her hand quickly then steps back, bowing slightly in what seems to her a mocking gesture.

  ‘Charmed, I’m sure, professor.’ He leans over to Umberto. ‘Father, I was hoping to find you here. Can I have a word?’

  ‘Sit, sit.’ He gestures to a seat next to him and turns his back to her as the two speak quietly together. Camilla strains to listen but can barely hear a word. She recognizes the odd phrase but they speak in a dialect peculiar to their village north of Vesuvius.

  Fabio is agitated, his face strained and humourless and he looks older than a man not yet thirty. He taps one of his highly polished boots nervously on the floor as he talks. His hands are thick like his father’s and he wears an identical gold signet ring with an eagle’s head on the middle finger of his right hand. There are other family likenesses: an aquiline nose and the same unusual red streaking his hair, perhaps a legacy of the ancient Norman Viking ancestry shared by many Neapolitans. As she muses that his eyes must come from his mother’s side, the waiter arrives. He places a metal tray in front of them with the cooked sardines and calamari arranged on a bed of spinach and sliced lemons and stands to one side. The delicious aroma drifts into her nostrils.

  Fabio stands. ‘Your meal is here, I’ll leave you.’

  ‘Call me later tonight. Let me know how it goes.’

  ‘Buon appetito!’ He nods at his father then walks swiftly away.

  The waiter steps back to the table and, with a steady hand, uses two spoons to lift pieces of the fish onto their plates. He pours more wine into Umberto’s empty glass then discreetly disappears.

  ‘A smart boy, that one; he runs our garbage disposal operation. A very tough negotiator.’

  Camilla resists the urge to complain about the mountains of garbage blocking the streets. ‘And good looking, like his father,’ she says instead.

  Umberto laughs. ‘No wonder I find you irresistible!’

  Fabio’s visit has made Camilla lose her appetite. But she doesn’t want to lose Umberto’s attention so she tries to look enthusiastic as she nibbles on a sardine and picks at a piece of calamari while he hungrily empties his plate and refills it again. The waiter replaces the plates with two clean ones. He returns with a hot plate sizzling with swordfish and lifts a piece onto each plate. The flesh of the fish falls apart easily as Camilla scoops some up with her fork. It is so fresh and tender that in spite of herself, she eats a large piece in no time.

  Concentrating on his meal, Umberto is silent until he is finished. He drinks the rest of his glass of wine and refills it. Only then does he speak. ‘So when will the report go to the government?’

  ‘Soon. Maybe a couple of months.’

  ‘I hope it’s no longer. We want to give out contracts for the buildings. The school plans are ready to go and one of Europe’s largest furniture retailers wants to open a showroom. A major deal.’

  ‘Does your wife know her name is on the sales contract for the land?’

  ‘Rosanna’s no fool. We will all prosper from this deal. You included.’

  Camilla glances up at the mountain but it has disappeared. A cloud covers the moon and she can see only darkness. She sips her wine and frowns. ‘Do you worry at all about the safety of building there? What might happen if Vesuvius erupts?’

  Umberto laughs. Then he leans over and whispers in her ear. ‘Don’t say you are losing your nerve, cara. You said yourself—it may not erupt for two hundred years. We will all be dead and gone. It won’t be our problem.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Although still early, the pizzeria near the university is already humming with the evening crowd when Pasquale arrives with Poppaea and Satore. He presses through to the counter where the customers are calling out their orders.

  ‘Two margheritas and a Napoletana, please, Francesco,’ Pasquale says to the man serving, ‘and half a litre of the house red.’

  Behind him, the pizzaiola is kneading piles of dough with the practised ease of a masseuse working on a line of knotted muscles. His chubby young assistant has switched from stacking firewood to spreading spoonfuls of bright red tomato purée onto the finished rounds.

  Pasquale savours the smell of pizzas already cooking in the hot wood oven and realizes he hasn’t eaten since breakfast. He often skips meals when he’s practising and feeling anxious. Without thinking, he puts his hand under his T-shirt and pinches his stomach, feeling how skinny he’s become.

  Poppaea and Satore sit at a bench by the window. He props himself up on a stool next to them and places his violin alongside Satore’s. Poppaea puts her hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re playing well, don’t look so worried.’

  Pasquale sees his sister’s concern etched on her face, an expression she’s been wearing ever since he can remember—putting him first, standing in for their mother. Sometimes he stares at the faded photos of their mother taken a few months before the car crash, but it’s as though he’s looking at a stranger. It was always Poppaea looking after him, encouraging his music, going without to buy him clothes and pay for lessons and always protecting him from their father, who wanted his son to follow him into the cement business.

  He remembers his father well—his hands worn and stained from a life of concreting, his face lined and mournful. Most of all, he remembers his disappointment, worn as oft
en as his navy overalls. How different they were. Pasquale knew he was never the son his father wanted. He glances down at his own hands. Calluses on the fingers of his left hand from years of playing the cello and violin but otherwise, soft and unmarked.

  He leans over and kisses Poppaea on the cheek. ‘Another month. Will I be able to master the Bach suites in time? Sometimes I curse the man for writing them.’

  ‘Sure you will,’ Satore interrupts. ‘But we can have a rest from the German tonight. We have the delights of our own wonderful songs of Napoli!’

  Pasquale groans. ‘Sometimes I think “O Sole Mio” is the accompaniment of my worst nightmares!’

  ‘Don’t knock it. It will help pay for that cello!’

  The chubby assistant turned waiter places three wine glasses and a carafe of red in front of them. ‘Pizzas won’t be long.’

  Pasquale looks back towards the oven and sees the pizzaiola sliding out a fresh batch with his long-handled peel, the ferocious heat reflecting on his glowing face. As he lines a dozen or so pizzas along a bench, the steam rises and fills the room with their aroma.

  ‘Ecco!’ A minute later the waiter delivers their order.

  ‘The Napoletana is mine,’ Pasquale reaches for the plate.

  ‘No cheese?’ Poppaea looks at his pizza with its simple topping of tomato, oil, garlic and a sprinkling of fresh oregano.

  ‘No, it gives me a stomach ache.’ Pasquale bites into the puffy lip of his pizza. After hungrily eating the rest, he drinks his wine. ‘Maybe it’s my nerves but I’m getting a lot of indigestion these days.’

  ‘I’m glad I’ve got a strong constitution,’ Satore replies, globs of melted mozzarella dribbling down his chin.

  ‘We’re going to need one tonight,’ Poppaea says. ‘I think the meeting will test us all.’ Church bells playing ‘Ave Maria’ herald the evening mass as the three of them stroll through a large piazza in the historic centre. A small crowd is milling by the vast walls of the cathedral of Gesù Nuovo when a hearse pulls up outside. Four black-suited men remove a white coffin covered with pink roses.