I liked him better on this home ground of his – he was kinder and less dictatorial there; and, with Gioconda, even loving.
Just then it was as though he could not let her out of his sight. If she went on to his terrace or disappeared into another room (and she wandered about that place pulling out books and touching plants like a nosy child that seeks, in strange surroundings, the sources of home), he would shout her name; and at once she would call back to him, ‘So’ qua’, or appear in a doorway, ‘Eccomi’. I remember that they had asked me to lunch one Sunday – it was that Sunday of the Borghese Gardens – and Gioconda went out of the room to fetch something from her coat or her handbag. Gianni suddenly got up from the table and went after her; and in that long mirror that went from floor to ceiling I saw him take her in his arms without a word.
The apartment was open for business at all hours. Even on Sundays the phones were ringing and people were let in and out carrying briefcases and big flat portfolios. Gianni had a secretary, a soft, quiet, humorous man called Bindi who wore glasses (he had a chronic eye infection) and was prematurely bald. Bindi’s pink-rimmed, unshockable appraisal missed nothing. Since he was always present, always overworked, I assumed he lived in the building; but later found out that he had a wife and many children and an apartment of his own quite far away, near Piazza Bologna. It was hard to see how he had contrived to create these ulterior circumstances.
At night there were always friends who dropped in – screenwriters, actors, businessmen, foreigners who lived in Rome, and a great many women. These women of the film world were fascinating to me. I was hypnotized by their lifted hair (hair then was beginning to be teased, though not yet into those conical towers that were to be erected the following year), or curled sideburns sleekly flattened to the cheek, their marvellously pencilled eyelids, and silvered lamé breasts deflecting, like so many armoured plastrons, any remark not exclusively concerned with themselves. There were other women, too, brought by men and no less notable in their capacity for total preoccupation with a new scarf or bracelet, and in their total incuriosity regarding the world – or even the room – around them. Their white-blonde, or blue-black heads carried high, never inclining to any expressive attitude, they reminded me – as they stood about on Gianni’s terrace or his Persian rug – of those columns that support the mosque at Crdoba, each with its diversified capital, serving extravagantly to show how many varieties of a single object can be put to a common purpose.
Coming from an upbringing and a society in which at that time even married couples – or, rather, especially married couples - affected to ignore their sexual connection, or to treat it as something apart and almost irrelevant to their shared life, I liked to see the forthrightly sexual pairing of woman with man. On the other hand, it struck one that the women were required only to be vain, and the men to be proud, any attributes beyond these being unlooked-for, and not always welcome. Their talk was like their appearance – well expressed and without intellect.
‘What did you expect?’ said Gioconda, when I remarked on this. ‘Italians don’t say interesting things – everyone knows that. You’re not in Paris, after all.’ This circle of Gianni’s exasperated her.
In one way, though, their talk affected me with homesickness, for I envied the intimacies of language and upbringing, all the puns and jokes and local allusions that even such a gathering as this could generate – and in which I could never truly participate even were I now to live among them always. These regional codewords should come forth naturally or not at all, if one is not to sound over-accommodating in one’s own ears. The American in England who treats himself to an occasional broad A and talks about draught Bass, the Englishman who in Paris takes up gallic mispronunciations of English words, abjectly relinquishes his identity without gaining an authentic substitute; thus in Naples I could not speak of Via Roma by the old name – Via Toledo – by which I had never known it, though to everyone else it might be the ‘Tuleto’.
It was of course the very game of language that with Justin I resisted – because in his case I felt that it was being played against me.
Of Gianni’s colleagues, or collaborators, or rivals, whom I met there – men whose names, like his own, were associated with post-war films, I could rarely get him to say a good word: their work was ‘sciocchezze’ or ‘cafonaggine’; this one had run out of ideas, that one had become a megalomaniac, another was an imbecile.
‘But Gianni, he seems a literate man, at least.’
‘As long as you don’t talk to him about literature.’ Or, ‘Nothing special,’ he would declare. ‘As the English say, very run of the mile.’
Gioconda took me to see her own friends in Rome – a young antiquarian, an ancient physicist, a prolific novelist, and a journalist who almost succeeded in shaming, on one or two occasions, the Government of Italy with his pitilessly documented revelations. I remember how we went, she and I, to faceless modern buildings near Piazza Vescovio or off Via Salaria, and squeezed ourselves into tiny lifts that ascended, shuddering, to these shrines where the high priestess – wife, mistress, or mother, always beautiful, always anxious – would usher us down the dim corridor to the darkened sanctum murmuring her warning. ‘X is in a bad mood today’, or ‘You will find Y a little distraught’ (these women invariably referring to the object of their devotion by the single last name). X or Y, sunk in gloom, immobile as the Buddha, sometimes suffering the intrusion with barely a greeting, would receive our opening remarks with an expression of excruciating ennui. The first morose, monosyllabic responses, like the heavy, separate drops preceding a great storm, would be followed at length by the inundation – castigation of the government, of the church, of modern art, modern literature, modern Italy: ‘Italians hate beautiful things – look how they are destroying Rome,’ X or Y would thunder, gripping the arm of his ugly modern chair or pounding his plywood table. Or, ‘They worry about the bandits in Sicily, but the real bandits are in Rome, sitting in Parliament.’ ‘As to the Front Populaire …’ With outmoded expressions they expounded dated causes – or was it we who were more and more successively dated, passing from one timely issue to the next, while they had remained constant, unfashionably, untopically altruistic?
The ultimate impression they made was of innocence – the novelty of passions not yet turned to slogans, of gifts not deployed for gain, of goodwill not turned to self-importance. Artists, then, had not yet begun to talk of their influence, nor journalists of their artistry. When he spoke, X or Y, wistfully of New York or Paris or London, as places where one could be free of cliques and jealousy and parochialism, one could only feel protective towards this moving belief in the existence, on the earth, of some wider and loftier society in which human nature was represented only by its virtues.
Of them Gioconda said to me, ‘They don’t have to justify themselves, and that gives them less to talk about than other people. In the war we all had to choose, there are no hypothetical positions left to be taken. In this country, everything has been demonstrated. That’s why the talk is often about trivialities - who has the malocchio, who is stingy, who is homosexual; whereas in other countries people can go on talking out their moral positions on the assumption they will never be called on to live up to them by sacrificing their means, or their standing, or their children, or their lives. These friends of mine are rather disliked for having done the right thing. And for choosing obscurity afterwards.’
Another time she told me, ‘I think that’s why films were such a big thing in Italy after the war. It was something fresh, untainted – an art whose practitioners hadn’t as yet disgraced themselves.’
All these friends of Gioconda’s were men. And watching them lean forward to talk to her, to bend over her hand as she arrived, or embrace her on her departure, I would think any one of them more eligible than Gianni to be her lover.
CHAPTER TEN
June came, and there was no more rain. Gianni was making a film at Tripoli – ‘One of those films, y
ou know,’ Gioconda told me, ‘that take place in Siberia but are filmed in Africa.’ He was to be there some weeks, and wanted Gioconda to come down for a while before it got too hot. He wrote that there was a plane to Tripoli from Naples once a week.
‘Why should Gianni want to make a film like that?’ On some days I was more unkind to her about Gianni than on others.
‘I suppose he wants to get rich,’ she said, as if it had no more meaning than if she’d said, ‘for his health’ or ‘for a joke’. Gianni, apparently, had not chosen obscurity. She went on about the journey: ‘It would only be for ten days or so.’ We were sitting in the sun at a café on the seafront of Naples, and it was the first fine week-end of that summer. She put Gianni’s letter away in her handbag. I could see she wanted to go.
‘Of course you ought to go,’ I urged her, giving the right response. ‘It’ll be fascinating.’
‘What will be fascinating?’
‘Oh – Roman ruins, all that.’
She smiled. ‘One doesn’t leave Italy to see Roman ruins. Then there’s all that crowd -’ She disliked the prospect of appearing there as Gianni’s mistress. Still she wanted to go. ‘I’ll have to have a dress made.’
She and I had coffee together again, on the day of her departure. I was bringing some documents to the airfield that noon, and we arranged to coincide. Arriving hot and nervous in a taxi, Gioconda joined me in the civil airport, at a little bar that no longer exists, and we waited for her flight to be called. She put perfume on a handkerchief and touched her ears with it, the scent at once evaporating into the smell of espresso and of the solution used to wash the terrazzo floors. She was more agitated than I had seen her. She had been delayed at the hairdresser - her too-rigidly dressed hair was strained back and lacquered; her brow was pink and shiny from the electric drier. She was wearing, for the first time, a suit quite matronly in its self-effacement, its good sense. It hurt me to see this suit with its instinctive repudiation of her position (a wife, I suppose, might have decked herself out like a courtesan for such a reunion). A gesture of pressing her forehead, then tucking the handkerchief into her sleeve was prim, even spinsterish.
I was moved, too, to see her excited as a child – but no, for there is no childhood excitement to equal the adult journey to the beloved.
She held out her hands to me over the coffee cups. ‘My nails. There was no time to have my nails done.’
I see her, upright in that pale linen suit, holding her hands out over the stained table.
‘It will be the first thing he’ll notice.’
‘Then he won’t be very observant.’ Childishly, I could not bring myself to send love to Gianni.
‘I’ll send you a card, Jenny. Of the Roman ruins.’
When her flight was called and we embraced, I felt anxiety that the plane might crash, that something else might go wrong. I felt as if I were being let down: nothing connected with Gioconda had ever seemed inauspicious until this. For the instant of our farewell, the roles were reversed and I was playing her protector. I watched her pass through a railed enclosure banked by eucalyptus and across a field of glittering concrete to the plane. Her thoughts already on Gianni, she did not look back and wave.
That day was the beginning of a heat wave that lasted till Gioconda’s return. The days were hot at dawn. My bed faced double doors that gave on to the terrace, and I would be wakened at five by rails of scalding light that spilt through the shutters. When I looked out the sea would be still as a lake, the sky blindingly red, and the volcano against it black and enormous. Serafina, arriving from a sleepless night, had always the same cynical gesture of supplication, and the same remark to make about the heat – ‘Da morire. Un caldo da morire.’
Combinations of colour flared out in spontaneous combustion, like fires all along the Posillipo – plumbago and oleander, bougainvillaea heaped on vermilion walls: the sun made everything possible. Germani had flowered too, as at a signal, into large, shockingly white shoes that came above his ankle. In the car he kept a tube of cleaner with which, at stop lights, he was forever furtively chalking off small blemishes from these feet of clay.
The Colonel, who had given up ‘Sunny Naples’ just when it would have meant most, was revelling in his new disenchantment: he had been in the tropics, in the desert, in the jungle, so it turned out, without ever experiencing worse heat than this. ‘But there,’ he would say as we stood in the shade of the portone, or perspired in our boiling car, ‘there life was arranged for it, they knew how to handle it. Here they haven’t a clue.’
In the evenings it seemed that each window of Naples framed some pale woman or trio of exhausted children leaning out for air. The waterfront, the park below the palace, every street in the city was a refuge from rooms that heated throughout the long day; and the population of Naples walked about all night, unsurprised, as if of all their afflictions this was the one they were most prepared for. Small boys with over-large, overknowledgeable Neapolitan heads trotted up Via Chiaia on bare feet, wearing wet bathing slips and carrying here a fishing rod improvised from a curtain rail, or there a float consisting of a patched inner tube.
A week after Gioconda’s departure a postcard came from Tripoli – the arch of Marcus Aurelius in pink and yellow, with a chartreuse minaret in the background. ‘Roman ruins, just as you said,’ Gioconda wrote, and concluded, ‘So here we are – enfin.’ ‘Killing heat,’ Gianni had added, ‘Un caldo da morire. Be glad you’re in Italy where they know how to handle it.’ I wondered about ‘enfin’.
A second card – Sciara Adrian Pelt from the Castle – showed a flat and windy shore, office buildings, and a corniche lined with palms. ‘Back no later than the 18th,’ and Gioconda had signed herself ‘tua Gioconda’. Underneath was scrawled, ‘Bacetti – tuo Giannino.’
Gioconda came to see me one evening, a week or so after her return. I was just back from work when she arrived and was changing my dress. On the way home I had bought a carton of milk at the PX. For hygienic reasons this milk was brought down from a NATO installation in West Germany, where its waxed container had never entertained the possibilities of Neapolitan high summer: in the heat of the taxi the container melted entirely away, leaving the floor of the car awash with purified milk. I consoled the stupefied driver with banknotes and squelched into my flat a few minutes before Gioconda came to the door.
She was deeply sunburned, to a high colour that flushed her cheeks and burnished her hair. She wore an immaculate white dress, a dress that no one would launder for themselves. Because of the milk I had come to the door in bare feet, and she seemed to me statelier and taller than before. She laid down on my hall table a wide hat of stitched blue linen she had carried in her hand.
She stretched out on a long chair on my terrace, saying little, turning her head against the cushions to look at the bay, languidly, like a convalescent. Crowds of children were swimming off the rocks along the Posillipo, or from packed rowing-boats, shrieking at one another in summer ecstasy; every evening they shrieked there as long as the light lasted. Turning on their backs, kicking frantically, they sometimes looked up to us and waved, and she waved back or called out ‘Ciao’, while I set out a jug and glasses on a table between us.
She leant forward to slap at an insect on her bare leg. Along her shoulders, above the back of the dress, the skin was peeling in white flecks. The imperfection was a relief, making her beauty human, vulnerable.
‘When it gets dark, I’ve got a candle that keeps the insects away. A chemical thing.’
‘What a good idea. Where did you get it?’
‘At the PX.’ I told her the story of the milk.
She laughed, and her own laughter seemed to enliven her. She looked at the city and at the sea. ‘What a good place to be.’
‘And Tripoli?’ I asked her.
She spread her hands.
I filled our glasses. ‘Do you wish you hadn’t gone?’
‘If I hadn’t gone, I would have had to wonder whether I ought to
have gone. Something else would have happened – gone wrong – and I would have wondered if it was my fault for not going … The thing is – one shouldn’t have to wonder this much about everything.’ She took her cold tumbler in both hands and looked over it at the sea. ‘Ah Jenny, I beg your pardon. I am always telling you my sagas.’
‘Tell me the Tripoli saga, if you like.’
‘It was awful. Ciao, ciao, divertiti!’ She lifted her hand to the shriekers and splashers. ‘Awful. Oh God, do you remember when we said good-bye at the airport and I was going on about my fingernails? Well, that’s how it began.’ To my surprise she began to laugh again, shaking her head. ‘Disastrous. That plane stopped at Malta, supposedly for an hour, and I went off to look for a place – a hairdresser’s or something – in the airport there that would do those bloody nails of mine for me. There wasn’t one – or if there was I never discovered it. But in the meantime they must have called the flight early, and it took off without me.’
‘Oh no.’ My hand went to my mouth in her own gesture.
‘Yes yes yes. When I found it had gone — Oh Jenny, I tell you. It seemed so much worse at the time too. Isn’t it exactly the kind of nitwitted thing that women get the name of doing? I was furious with Gianni for terrorizing me about things like fingernails and for turning me into the sort of person to whom this could happen. Well, it wasn’t so bad – fortunately there was another plane to Tripoli within the hour, by mere chance. It was a private affair, chartered for some congress of economists, but I flung myself on their mercy and very kindly they took me with them.’
I imagined the delight of the kind economists. It was the sort of thing only an innocent might have done, someone who had not taken the sacrament of officialdom.
‘So I got to Tripoli, and there was Gianni at the airport. By then the other plane had come in without me, and he was raising hell with the airline … He was so astonished to see me that we didn’t even greet one another, just stood and shouted questions. When he heard what had happened – you can imagine.’
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