Raffaele gave me a shrug of amused despair. “My wife has an extravagant talent for exaggeration,” he smiled. “Sometimes it confuses me also. But I think you must be Martin Crowther. Gabriella has been telling me of your work.”
“Has she indeed?” I returned his smile. “I don’t think she entirely approves of it.”
“On the contrary. She expresses considerable admiration. But come, Angelina is ready for us, I think. Let us dine together with these young people” – he gestured to the three women and the black man in braided locks and a Manchester United football shirt with whom he had been talking – “perhaps they will teach us how to improve the world.”
Gabriellamade off across the room as we sat down. Looking around, I saw Larry holding forth to Adam at their table, while Meredith and Dorothy were laughing among a group of young people. In a distant corner, Marina and Allegra sat deep in conversation, and were soon joined by Gabriella. Meanwhile a line of people had formed at a bar where Angelina was ladling soup from a large tureen. Despite the chandeliered grandeur of the room, the occasion had a relaxed and informal feel. Raffaele touched me on the arm and opened his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Forgive me, I was forgetting. In this company one must serve oneself. Shall we?”
Given the chance, I would have preferred to be sitting beside Marina, but I glanced her way every now and then and was relieved to see her smiling. The people around me spoke engagingly about themselves, and I soon began to build a clearer picture of who they were and what they were doing in the world. I learnt that the Irish woman’s brother had been gunned down five years earlier on the Shankill Road. Now she was running a drama group for people from both sides of the sectarian and political divide in Ulster, encouraging them to tell their stories and to find common ground in the wounds and losses inflicted by the violence of that turbulent province. The young black man came from South Africa, where he was a law student working as an intern with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. One of the other women was Lebanese, a teacher from Beirut, who listened with critical interest as her friends discussed the problems they encountered in their work, and answered questions that Raffaele and I put to them.
When the meal was over, Raffaele pushed back his chair and turned to me. “I think I would like to smoke a cigar,” he said, “for which pleasure I shall go into the garden. Will you keep me company?”
“It’s a remarkable thing that Gabriella’s doing here,” I said, when we were outside.
“I do not always understand my wife,” Raffaele smiled across at me. “Sometimes she even alarms me a little. But I confess I admire her very much.” He eyed me with keener interest through a cloudy haze of smoke. “I understand you have been admitted to our beautiful water theatre. It is good to see it in operation again. Tell me, what did you make of that?”
“It was certainly an experience,” I said. “And yes, more than a bit alarming too.”
He seemed amused by the reply. “I think perhaps you are a braver man than I am,” he said. “For myself I prefer to keep my wife’s activities at a distance. I find it safer so. Of course I raise funds for her adventures. I introduce people to her work. And truly I believe in it myself. But the troubles of this world are so big…” He opened his hands in an expansive gesture. “We understand this, you and I, do we not? So I think you will agree that what Gabriella and the others are trying to do, imaginative though it may be, is too small in scale, and perhaps a little too fanciful to make much difference?”
I was about to press the subject further when he favoured me with a conspiratorial smile. “You and Marina,” he said, “I understand there is hope you will be united at last?”
“More than hope,” I said.
“Ah, then you are a very fortunate man. I congratulate you. I even envy you a little. Marina has not yet told you then?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“She and I,” he said with no sign of embarrassment, “we were lovers once. In the old days.”
Despite my best efforts, the pang of jealousy searing through me in that moment must have reached my face. Immediately he added, “Please, do not be dismayed. It was a beautiful thing. I am sure she will tell you so. And there was no deceit. After all, Gabriella also has her lovers.”
“Adam,” I guessed out loud.
“For a time, yes.” With a little shrug, Raffaele drew on his cigar again and looked up at the stars. “This night is also very beautiful,” he said.
But my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking of Gail and of the other women with whom I’d made love during the course of the past thirty years, and how few of those encounters had been beautiful. As for Marina… What else could I have imagined? She was a passionate woman. Of course she too must have taken lovers, and if this attractive Italian count was among them, well… why not? I had never assumed that she would have kept herself chaste throughout those long years out of some self-denying loyalty to the memory of me. But neither, until this moment, had I thought too closely about it – and yes, the feeling hurt.
Raffaele stubbed his cigar on the stonework of the balustrade, took a breath on the night air, turned to me and said, “We are still friends, of course, you and I?”
“Of course… Why on earth not?”
“Good, good. That is how it should be. Perhaps it is time we rejoined the others?”
As we went back into the dining hall, he patted me on the arm and excused himself, saying that he must visit the kitchen to congratulate Angelina on the excellence of the meal. By that time all the tables had been cleared and people were now standing around in small groups, laughing and chatting together. Slipping past those who stood near the doorway, I made for the corner where Marina was still sitting with Allegra and Gabriella, who looked up at my approach.
“So,” she smiled, “how did you find my husband?”
“He’s certainly an interesting man.” I reached out to touch Marina’s shoulder.
Allegra was also smiling. “And quite a charmer, don’t you think?”
“Yes, that too.”
“Everyone finds him so,” Gabriella said. “Even I adore him still! Now, tonight there is a final ceremony. It begins soon. We are hoping that you will like to take part.”
I looked for Marina’s response to this invitation. “Is that what you’d like?”
Before she could answer, Allegra delivered another arch smile. “Of course, if the two of you would rather be alone…”
Marina laid a silencing hand on her arm and lifted her face in my direction. “It would be a lovely thing to do together. There’s something I’d really like you to see.”
In the final chapter of The Golden Ass, Apuleius draws a veil over the rites by which his narrator is initiated into the mysteries. Having told us that he crossed the threshold of death, Lucius declares that he saw the sun shining at midnight and that he worshipped the gods of both the upper world and the underworld face to face. He then declines to say more about it, because there would be no point. If you haven’t been there yourself, he says, you simply won’t understand.
The rational sceptic I once was would have been infuriated by such claims to privileged esoteric knowledge. But in my more open-minded moments, it might have occurred to me that the same holds true about trying to explain to someone who has never made love just what the experience is like. Or telling the deaf about music for that matter, or someone born blind about light. In any case, after what happened later that night, I have a better understanding of the difficulties which Apuleius encountered. But I’ll try to convey what happened to me.
Arrangements had already been made for the final gathering before the company was to disperse the next day. Some time after the conversation in the dining hall, Marina and I joined the long candlelit procession that passed out into the courtyard and through the archway leading to the water theatre. This time there were no elaborate costumes and no masks, just people in their everyday clothes, walking silently in pairs, each carrying a candle in a sim
ple tin holder through the night. Marina and I were among those at the tail end, while Allegra and Giovanni walked together in front of us. Adam and Larry brought up the rear. Loudspeakers had been set up in a high window of the main house, from where the sound of Monteverdi’s Vespers floated across the air.
Though a few leaks still dripped from the mythological figures at either side of the tunnel, this time no spurts jetted from their wineskins, mouths and shells. But we could hear the cascade of the water theatre in full flow, and when we came out on the far side, I looked up and saw the Revenant of Fontanalba gazing down where the silver cataracts poured among the figures and the beasts. In the radiance of a nearly full moon it was like watching the stone fabric dissolve into an insubstantial veil.
Ahead of us, each couple was parting company to walk on either side of the semicircular pool. Releasing Marina’s hand, I followed Giovanni to the right, glancing across to where Allegra trailed a hand to guide her mother round the margin of the pool. But Marina was walking with her head held confidently high. Evidently she found all the guidance she needed in the sound of the cascade. When we met again at the centre of the façade, I took her hand once more, feeling its responsive warmth as we passed together through the door that stood open on the world below.
The music faded behind us as we entered the atrium of the cave. After we had passed through the inner door beyond, the sound of falling water faded too. Here the narrow passage forced us into single file. I walked slightly ahead of Marina still holding her hand. Candlelight flashed off chips of mica and burnished the colours in the stone. Again I was possessed by the sensation of entering a living organism, though with no apprehension this time of the massive tonnage of rock bearing down above our heads. In the company of so many other people it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear laughter or chatter or nervous whispers somewhere, but the procession passed through the silence of the cave with the same hushed reverence with which we might have walked along the nave of a cathedral.
The comparison felt apposite. The last time I had come this way I had been so preoccupied with my own inner struggle between scepticism and trepidation that I had shut off much of my sense of wonder. Even so, some feeling for the power of the place had stirred me. Now I understood that this was truly sacred space. Sacred long before men found their way down inside its halls to worship there. Sacred of its own essential nature, prior to all stories and superstitions. Sacred because it was mysteriously here, a hollow place inside a hill beneath the moon. Sacred simply as a gesture of that primal energy through which a universe of matter, time and space was conjured into being, so that there was something – a magnificent, heart-shakingly beautiful something – rather than nothing at all.
Walking through the passages in the rock was like walking back into the same state of astonished expectancy in which I had wandered the hills and crags around Calderbridge as a boy. In that exalted state I had watched cloud shadows altering the contours of the landscape. I had listened to the clatter of beck water pouring among stones. I had marvelled at the way the winter light seemed to buckle in the wind. In those days I had begun to dream that I was a poet. My heart quickened to recall those times. Perhaps that dream might come again. Remembering how I had watched Marina dance on a sodden hillside in the smoky light of a thunderstorm, it occurred to me that, for all the frenzy and terror of the times I had endured reporting on the war zones of the world, I had never felt so completely alive as I did now, walking through this Umbrian hill with the woman I had loved for so long.
Some time before the rough track took its steepest incline downwards, I heard the sound of water falling into the pool. We took a turn, and I saw the candles ahead of me lighting the roof of the natural arch which led through into the vaulted chamber where Adam and I had pushed out in the skiff, and to which I had returned, having encountered my father in the dark hall of the dead. That was surely the right place in this limestone underworld for our company to gather. I was wondering what form the celebration would take when Marina halted beside me. “Can you see into the cave?” she whispered.
“Not yet, no. Just the entrance arch, but we’re nearly there.”
Marina turned her head towards Adam and Larry who were held up behind us and told them to come past. Puzzled by her hesitation, I leant back into the wall so that Larry could squeeze by me and follow Allegra and Giovanni, who had now moved on. By the light of his candle, I saw Adam lean forward, take his sister in his arms and lightly press his lips to her cheek before he too brushed past me and walked on down the slope.
“What is it?” I asked. “Don’t you want to go down?”
“In a moment. I want to talk to you first. Tell me when the others have gone.”
I looked down the slope, and saw the glow of Adam’s candle pass beneath the arch some thirty yards away before it vanished into the dark.
“They’ve gone,” I said. “Come here. Let me hold you.” Keeping my candle away from her hair, I took her into the reach of my free arm. Evasively, she tilted her head away a little.
“Earlier,” she said, “when you came back into the dining hall, there was something strange about your voice. It didn’t feel as if quite all of you was inside it. What was the matter? Was it something that Raffaele said to you?”
“Yes,” I admitted, “it was.”
“He told you that he and I were lovers once?”
“Yes.”
“And how did that make you feel?”
“I know this is foolish,” I said, “but it made me jealous.”
“I’m glad that you know. I was going to tell you myself, because I didn’t want any secrets between us. And it’s not foolish at all. I’m pleased that you’re jealous.”
“But it’s completely irrational of me. After everything I’ve done. I mean.”
“We only feel jealous about the things we prize,” she said. “I like being prized by you. In fact, I love it.”
I lowered my head to kiss her, but she lifted the tip of a finger to my lips and said, “Will you do something for me?”
“Anything,” I said.
“Are you ready for another risk?”
“Are you daring me again?”
“No, not this time. I’m asking you.”
“I’m yours,” I answered. “You don’t have to ask.”
She said, “I want you to blow the candle out.”
Only the still distant sound of water filled the silence of the cave.
“But how…” I began.
“I’ll guide you there.”
Without a word, I lifted the candle closer to her face, so that she could feel its warmth. Then I blew at its little crocus flame of light, and darkness as thick and black as any I had encountered in the halls of the dead shut down round us.
“Come with me,” she whispered, taking a firm grip on my hand, “there’s something I want you to see.”
I let the candle drop and responded to her pull, feeling my way along the wall with my free hand. Marina drew me down the slope, walking not quickly, but with the confidence of someone who had made this dark journey many times before. Nowhere could I make out any glimmer of light. All I could hear was the tread of our feet on stone and the sound of water pouring into the pool. The slope steepened. She slowed down ahead of me. When the plunge of water into the pool sounded louder, I knew we must be coming out through the arch into the vaulted chamber, but not a candle flickered anywhere. Was she leading me by a different route than the others had taken? Now I heard the sound of her foot sliding cautiously across a rocky surface. She took a small step down, waited for me to do the same, and we progressed together haltingly down tier after shallow tier, until she pulled me around some obstacle she had encountered and I gasped out loud at the starry figure of light that appeared.
Some distance below me, a crowd of candles had been arranged so as to illuminate nothing but the formation of rock on which they stood. My hand tightened in Marina’s grip, and I gazed for a long time, aware that this cave m
ust be full of people, all quietly doing what I was doing – meditating in silent wonder on the power and beauty and strength of what was present to us all: a stack of rock shaped by random collisions of water and stone over thousands of years into the image of a female figure so grave and timeless that she must have been venerated as sacred by almost every generation preceding ours. Marina tightened her embrace about my waist. My hand moved to cover hers, and in the very moment when she whispered, “Have you seen yet?” a tremor of understanding passed through me in a stroke of midnight light. I knew now why the Revenant of Fontanalba was transfigured by his vision into a person who was no longer either man or woman because both male and female were now newly reconciled in him. And as surely as I felt Marina beside me – warm, alive and present to my senses, freely given to me as mine, yet still inalienably her own – I felt the light glittering from the figure in the rock softly illuminate a figure that had long been dark inside myself.
“Yes,” I answered quietly, “I’ve seen.”
Music sounded. Allegra had begun to sing. I turned my head to look in her direction. Her hair was now gleaming in the candlelight. Then I made out the people around her, coming to reclaim the candles they would need to light their exit from the cave. One by one they took their share in light. Soon the stone figure would have returned into the dark. I drew Marina closer to me. Gradually she came into focus as the first of the candles passed by, and it felt as though we too were being conjured out of darkness by the breaking of the light.
Already, somewhere across the earth, day was dawning, while elsewhere in the self-same moment midnight struck. And it was all one. The earth was turning even as we stood inside it. Beyond the prodigious variety of life in all its many forms, beyond all the divisions which, year in year out, devastate so many lives, it remained seamlessly itself, all one. I saw it and I felt it so, and because this was an experience, not just an idea, I knew that I was inseparably part of it. I knew too that I would not be able to hold on to this exalted state for ever, but everything would be changed by it, and never again would it be possible to live as though it wasn’t so.
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