Their cruelty could not be shamed. No revelation of its origins or its consequences abashed them. Armoured with the most brutal of emotions, self-pity, they were invulnerable to the human claims of others.
These days I would be more comprehending of them, and less tolerant; but then I was baffled by all the seething and tried, quite mistakenly, to make allowances for it. I should never have got mixed up with them. But on the whole, having the compensations of the city, I was more contented than any of them; and vaguely suspect for being so.
I had fallen to the lot of the English Colonel in whose office I sat. A great seether, he had been military attaché at any number of British embassies, whose superior organization he often cited to us. He was small and trim, with a thin mouth beneath a thin bristle of moustache, shiny little shoes, and an upright bearing; taken together, these attributes conveyed a state of continual defiance. As a child he must have been impressed with the merit of looking people in the eyes, and had in consequence developed a fixed glare that so revealed him that, out of common humanity, one could only look away. He had been divorced, and lived alone on the Posillipo, in a building next to mine. It was arranged that the car that called for him each morning should bring me, too, to our offices at Bagnoli, and in this way I started the day with him a full half hour earlier than might otherwise have been the case.
One morning, as we stood side by side in wintry sunshine, he and I, waiting for the car to change the setting of our silence, J. P Tulloch drew up to the kerb in a dark green MG.
He threw the door open for me. ‘I’m going to Bagnoli. Hop in.’ When I was in and had closed the door, he waved to the Colonel – whom he did not know – made a U-turn, and we set off down the hill towards Mergellina.
So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,
So light to the saddle before her he sprung.
he recited, sing-song.
I said, ‘I hope he doesn’t mind. The Colonel.’
‘How can he mind? There are only two seats – and he would hardly expect me to take him instead. How can he mind?’
‘You’d be surprised how he can mind.’ I was pleased with the turn my morning was taking, riding along in the sharp air without the Colonel. The man was breezy too – I had not seen him since the day of first meeting Gioconda, when his manner had been, as I described it to her, tightly furled.
‘Much has been said and written about the military mind. Nothing, however, harsh enough.’
‘They’re appalling,’ I agreed. Then went on, mealy-mouthed, ‘I suppose one ought to be more tolerant.’
‘Why, pray? I am a man, and everything inhuman is alien to me. All right, giggle away then. What’s he doing there, straddling your doorstep?’
I wondered how he knew about my doorstep. I explained how we lived, the Colonel and I, side by side. ‘He’s divorced,’ I said.
‘So am I,’ said Justin Tulloch.
‘Well … you’ll marry again.’
‘But will it be any different?’
He was more of an oddity than I’d imagined, telling me these serious things in a kind of banter that made it difficult to know how to take them. I had a sense, not agreeable, of being deliberately put at a disadvantage. I twisted round in the seat. ‘He’s right behind us. The Colonel.’
The MG went faster.
‘She is won! we are gone over bank, bush and scaur;
They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,’ quoth young Lochinvar.
‘I hope that’s your favourite poem,’ he said, ‘as it is mine, and that of every thinking person.’
‘I don’t like the part where he says about there being betterlooking women who’d be glad to marry him.’
There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far
Who would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar.
‘Well, it was only a ruse.’
‘The sort of ruse,’ I said, ‘that one wouldn’t be likely to forget.’
‘True love,’ said Justin Tulloch, ‘is the cultivation of forgetfulness. And don’t you forget it. In any case, I won’t hear anything against Lochinvar. Listen to this:
The bride kissed the goblet, the knight took it up,
He quaffed off the wine, and threw down the cup -
No, I’ll not hear a word against it. As a Scottish Nationalist, which I happen to be.’
I said nothing, and he went on, ‘You don’t believe it, but I am.’
‘I do believe it.’ In fact it seemed very likely he might follow some unexpected cause of the kind. I fancied he was disappointed that I showed no surprise. ‘Have you moved from the hotel? How did you happen to come past at this hour?’ Then it occurred to me that it was indiscreet to ask him this.
‘I expect to be in that hotel for months. I’ve been at my Italian lesson, and was going – am going – to Nisida, about my lawful business.’ On the enisled cape of Nisida, off Bagnoli, there were other offices, other officials. He said, ‘Write down your telephone number for me.’ After a silence he continued, ‘All right: please write down your telephone number, I implore you to write down your telephone number.’
‘I don’t have a pencil and paper.’
He took his left hand off the wheel and reached in his pocket. ‘There. As a matter of fact I tried to get it from your office, but they wouldn’t give it out. Possibly your po-faced Colonel wants to keep you for himself. I did get your address.’ He took the paper back from me. ‘What do you do in the evening? Do you have friends here?’
I told him about Gioconda, and how I had met them both on the same day.
Justin often drove me to work after that, and we began to see one another now and then in the evenings. There was a studied irregularity to our meetings, and if at any of them we particularly enjoyed each other’s company he would then stay away for a week, or two, or three, it was part of his neurosis of self-protection. I think that his anxiety to remain uncommitted had been aroused, so far as I was concerned, at the very moment of his taking an interest in me, the one operating in conjunction with the other; and made it impossible for him to be natural. The reserved, unaffected person with whom I had worked that December morning, at the Hotel Royal was never again revealed to me: the more I was to know Justin, the further we were to get from his spontaneous, direct self, and the more enmeshed in badinage and circumlocution. Even his appearance was altered somewhat by dissimulation.
I minded this only moderately. What I minded most was its being manifest and yet unmentionable. I was not as ready as his caution suggested to offer him, or anyone, the devotions of love: for that, I was at least as unready as he. The offence to my vanity in his casual exploitation of my company would, so I coolly felt, be avenged the first time he attempted to make love to me. Meantime I rather enjoyed his erratic companionship. I enjoyed something else, too – the new sensations of power and control that went with what I have just said; the knowledge that I had ceased to be accommodating. I suppose this is what is known as the loss of innocence. I had no cause to regret my lost innocence, for it had never done me any good: I have lived a much more virtuous life without it.
It was extraordinary, though, the way Justin’s defensive, flippant tone imposed itself. One would find oneself falling into line, making elaborately absurd under- or over-statements, to meet the mocking tone he set, using antiquated schoolgirl phrases to amuse him, describing a colleague as ‘a Juggins’, saying ‘ripping’ or ‘spiffing’ or ‘jolly-dee’. Even to die was to ‘keel over’, just as to live was to ‘press on regardless’. This ironic jargon became the bond between us; we operated, the two of us, in code.
Cosy private jokes of language, used against themselves, were the sort of thing that, in leaving England, I had wished to escape from. Yet their resuscitation in that bizarre setting gave them a nostalgic – almost an anthropological- interest. That is something one does not foresee in wishing to elude one’s traditions: that the threat, once its fangs are drawn, may become transfigured into intimacy, a frame of refere
nce. In the same way that the forms of social class, or of an oppressive religion, are retrospectively regarded with sentimental longing when – and simply because – their influence has been extinguished.
Justin, when alone with me, talked quite a lot, often incorporating an instructive note into his whimsical speeches. If he wished to terminate a conversation, he would wait till I began to deliver my own views and then cut me off in mid-sentence: it was one of his man-made defences, part of his plan of attack. Irritated at the beginning, I later would lead him on in order to observe his technique. One day he noticed, I think, from my smile that this was so, for he turned my face to his and said, ‘To grow older and bolder, Jenny: those are things to be shunned.’ And when I did not answer, he urged me, ‘Don’t turn into a cool customer, Jenny. I don’t like it.’
I told him, ‘When I was a warm customer, I was asked to cool off.’
His greatest compliment was that I was ‘old-fashioned’. ‘There you go again,’ he would say, but approvingly, of some judgement of mine, some turn of phrase. ‘What an old-fashioned girl you are, Jenny.’ This was, I suppose, a tribute to the lost innocence; but I looked on that, with my interesting new detachment, as something of which I still possessed merely the physical attributes – as at school, when I noticed that teachers found me particularly attentive and would sometimes address themselves exclusively to me, though my thoughts were all the time elsewhere: it must have been some accident of expression, or the unblinking nature of my adolescent stare. So with that impression of an obliging openness that Justin valued in me. I believed it to be no more than a habit I was beginning to grow out of. It would take time – a lifetime perhaps – to lose the outward aspect of an ingenuousness I no longer completely possessed. It was a deception I did not seek, but which I did nothing to dispel.
My new awareness had not extended, as yet, to finding in all this anything to mourn, on his side or on mine.
There was a larger reason for not minding this casual courtship of Justin’s, and that was the city itself. In our office, in those days, I was always aware of the city, like someone compelled at a dinner table to be attentive to a boring neighbour while listening all the time for the voice of a loved one at the other end of the room. Since I was willing to do any errand that took me into town, they sent me out every so often in the back of the Vehicle to buy cameos or corals for visiting generals, or to get opera tickets for an association of military wives who called themselves The Culture Vultures.
By these means I was able to meet Gioconda occasionally in the centre of town. Standing up at a counter we would have coffee, fierce black coffee, a spoonful apiece, served in tiny cold cups that were always wet from the draining board. Or she would take me, on some general’s behalf, to a source of tablecloths, or gloves, or tortoiseshell boxes. We made an expedition of the kind one bitter day towards the end of that year, when the Colonel sent me out to find him a genuine Christmas tree to replace the miniature nylon one that had been issued to him. I don’t suppose the Colonel’s commission was as hilarious as it appeared to us, but I remember that Gioconda and I went together to Via Foria, where the trees were sold, giggling all the way like schoolgirls and wiping away tears of joy. The slain trees, niggard and meridional, lay about in dismal heaps in a little park there, and we walked round in the cold examining them. A merchant heating his hands over an improvised brazier was astounded by our request for a better specimen, flinging his hands apart then quickly re-aligning them over the coals. He reminded us this was not Canada and advised me to take what was going – which I did, lugging it back to Bagnoli in the Vehicle.
I had not had a female friend since childhood, and novelty made this one the more singular. Perhaps it was something the same for her. At her house, from time to time, I was to meet women she had gone to school with, a relative who lived at Vico Equense, two plump girls, twin sisters, with a curious English name that derived from the Napoleonic wars. She might recount to me a conversation she had had at some dinner party or on the telephone, but the very diversity of these connections suggested that she had no single close friend – no friend, in fact, closer than I.
For my part, I kept Gioconda to myself, as I had in writing to Norah. I had no circle to which I might have admitted her. I could have introduced her to Justin, but I feared his comments on Gianni – whom he quickly characterized, from my accounts, as a blatherskite. In the same way, Gianni would refer to this unknown acquaintance of mine as ‘Lo Scozzese’, as if a Scotsman were scarcely entitled to a name of his own. For Gianni, who was always urging me to extend my experience, resented even so mild a show of interest in any man other than himself.
Gioconda’s English was excellent, though she had little use of it in Naples. Gianni spoke English poorly and rarely, though priding himself on idiomatic phrases that he always got wrong – the crucial word getting omitted or mispronounced – and which he would preface accusingly with ‘as they put it in England’, or ‘as the English say’. (Gioconda, on the contrary, would occasionally make over-literal renderings into English, saying ‘belfry’ for campanile, or ‘Saint Januarius’ for San Gennaro; and once, preposterously, speaking of ‘the Carabineers’.) They both spoke good French, and once in a while, curiously, they spoke it to one another. I suppose they wished sometimes to escape from the succession of trenchant ironies that are the conversational fate of cultivated Italians, but I noticed that this usually happened when they were in some way agitated – Gioconda, who detested the telephone, would call out, ‘Sois un ange, prends le téléphone,’ if she heard the bell from an adjoining room; or Gianni, berating her for some imagined shortcoming, would cry, ‘Mais tu es bête’ reserving for tenderer moments his Italian endearment, ‘Cretin’.
There are things one will not say in one’s own language, they carry too much weight; to have said them in another tongue is an extenuating circumstance, like being drunk or demented. So Justin, too, if he admired the style of my hair or the colour of my shawl, would be foolishly italianate, crying ‘Bellissima’, or ‘Un amore’; or might even comment, quite soberly, ‘Che bel colore’.
Entering Gioconda’s flat late one Friday, I passed from room to room without finding her, at last hearing voices from the terrace. It was January and the days were then as fine as spring, but that was the first night mild enough to sit outside. The sight of the doors open to the evening expanded the terse, wintry sense of darkness instantly, luxuriously, into summer. On the threshold I heard their voices more clearly – but low, insistent, and speaking French. They were leaning on the balustrade with their backs to me, side by side but not, it was clear, together. Gioconda’s head was the lower; Gianni’s was slightly turned to her as he talked. I could tell that they were quarrelling. And I realized that Gianni was asking something of Gioconda, and she was refusing him.
It was dismaying to come upon them like that. A loss of equilibrium, frightening, like overhearing one’s parents quarrel. For I had come to rely on them, even then, to provide me with a measure of stability. Of course Gianni gave Gioconda a hundred reasons a day to quarrel with him, but the fact was that she never accepted the provocation, her love apparently directed to some idea of Gianni- some misconception as I saw it – more profound, more entire, that allowed her to overlook his irascibility as no more than a bad habit. I had got used to this imbalance, this counterpoise of their relations, and was beginning to depend on it as something immutable.
More distressing still was the glimpse of Gianni as supplicant. As long as he had continued to antagonize me with his dictatorial ways, I had been required to consider him in no other light. Besides, there had been an infuriating consistency to him. Now I felt I might have to take account of something more, even to feel humiliated for him as one would not have felt for someone less committed to self-assertion.
‘Ne dis pas non,’ he said to her, and put the flat of his hands together on the wide stone railing. ‘Penses-y un peu.’
Gioconda shook her head. I heard few words of
what she said. ‘ … déjà … pourrait pas durer.’ She trailed her forefinger along the convex railing in a preoccupied yet conclusive gesture; as she might have drawn it down the keyboard of a piano before closing the lid.
Tosca, quietly letting me out, said merely, ‘Ah Signorina mia’-whether addressing me, or speaking of Gioconda, one could not know.
CHAPTER SIX
Having cleared my rooms, I started to add to them small objects of my own. Most Saturday afternoons were free now, and I would take a bus across the city to the junkstalls (‘the junkies’, as Gianni in his English called them) in Piazza Francese, or to antique shops in Via Costantinópoli, to buy a little painting on glass, or a shelf of flowers painted on gesso, or a piece of fissured majolica. Afterwards I might walk down into San Biagio dei Librai and spend an hour or two with Gioconda before taking these purchases home. At week-ends Gianni was often there – usually dismissing my jugs and plates as rubbish; at other times approving them but ridiculing the price which, according to him, no Italian would have dreamt of paying.
‘You might as well go to the swellies in Via Chiatamone,’ he would cry, saying ‘swellies’ in English and mispronouncing the name of the street to make an obscene pun, an allusion to the prostitutes who patrolled it in the evening. ‘If you go to the junkies, you should pay the junky price.’ I could hardly conceive of paying less than I did – for the prices of these meaner fragments of the eighteenth century had not then begun to climb – and throughout that winter continued to visit the rigattieri, letting Gianni rave on about my gullibility. It was strange how one did let him rave on: one found oneself letting his complaints pass uncontested, just as Gioconda did. He had a knack of eliciting indulgence – or perhaps it was merely that Gioconda’s indulgence of him was contagious. One was always letting him off with something – with his fault-finding, his bragging, his ludicrous English – quite as if, in return, he were making some immeasurable, compensating addition to our lives.
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