On the otherwise empty platform a group of adolescent boys were playing the fool, knocking each other about to keep warm; and Gianni, watching them, remarked sadly, ‘When Italians are silly, they are sillier than anybody.’
Gianni and I were private once again, separated from the scene for the last time. We might have been the only passengers on that cold train – which stirred at length and with metallic groans breathed its stuffy heat into us and over the thick upholstery, and slowly jolted from the station towards its first resting place at Pisa. We trundled through suburbs of Florence, and on to a plain of fields so bleakly divested of summer that they gave the impression of having been cleared of wreckage.
A guard came and took our tickets, a boy brought us hot coffee and promised us lunch later on. An older man in a white jacket put his head round the door and asked if we had any requests to make.
‘It’s like being in the condemned cell,’ Gianni remarked. ‘They’ll be sending the priest in next.’ He released my feet and let me put my shoes on. He leant across and kissed me. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘when I kissed you at Herculaneum, that first time?’
‘That was hateful.’ It was curious that he should seem more faithful to Gioconda now than he had then.
‘You looked at me as if I’d uttered some intolerable banality.’
‘Yes. I was furious the whole afternoon.’ We were like a couple discovering the origins, tracing the course of their love.
‘I don’t know how this will seem to you —’ meaning our time together, Gianni indicated the compartment with a splaying of his fingers — ‘looking back.’
‘Much as it does now, I expect.’
‘I don’t even know how it seems to you now.’
‘Like a great courtesy. An act of rescue.’
‘The rescue is all the other way,’ he said, but after a while added, ‘It is my speciality, the act of rescue.’
Another time he said to me, ‘Are you sure, won’t you blame me for this, for all of this? Because a woman like you, you would only – would rather – do this for love.’
‘You might say, I have done it for love.’ For their love, I meant: his and Gioconda’s.
‘No, that’s rubbish. It’s too far-fetched. And not even desirable. I am not so lofty in my thinking, I assure you – though in this case not entirely despicable either. I meant, will it seem, afterwards, like another renunciation?’
‘It ought to, no doubt. Instead it feels more like choosing.’
‘Not just a label I pasted on you? Here.’ He laid his hand to my forehead as if testing me for fever.
‘That was for the journey. I chose the destination.’
‘One where I cannot come.’
We both knew it to be otherwise, to be worse than that: for he could come, but would not.
All that morning we moved up the coast of Italy, past hills and promontories, uplands crowned with chapels and castles, slopes of orchards and vineyards. Stone farms and rosed-walled villas ascended terraces of autumn fields, or stood forward from autumnal woods. The sea, when it appeared on our other hand, was level, brilliant, bordered with a motionless litter of summer towns and shuttered bathing places.
‘What I like about the landscape of Italy,’ Gianni informed me, ‘is that there’s none of this nonsense about the great outdoors. That sort of thing’s all right elsewhere. Here you could practically say it’s an indoor landscape. It’s Nature with beautiful manners – no, that’s too tame. Rather, it’s as if Nature were capable of thought, of joy.’
Neither of us mentioned the volcano.
Above our lunch tray we sighted the Apuan mountains. ‘Gianni, look. There’s already snow up there.’
‘That’s not snow. Those are the scars of the quarries. Soon we’ll be passing the towns where they bring the marble down – Pietra Santa, Forte dei Marmi. Up there, though, it’s fascinating - those men in the quarries have an existence that has nothing to do with ours. It’s as if they’re at work on the mountains of the moon.’ It turned out that Gianni had made a documentary once, some fanciful factual version of Michelangelo’s life in the quarries at Carrara. ‘He built a road there, Michelangelo. We recreated the conditions, as they say: what presumption – if only we could. We had the men banging away at any old boulder – just for the picture, you know – had them shivering or sweating to denote the seasons. They thought we were lunatics, those men at the quarries … I learnt a lot up there. The mountains take revenge on the men – kill them in all sorts of ways, with falls, accidents, through the lungs; places are like that, like people, they don’t care to be exploited and they find ways of avenging themselves. When the masons try to remove the marble in monoliths, it thwarts them by cracking; when they want it in sections, it splits in just the wrong place. The men talk about the stone as if it’s active. As if it had a will and destiny of its own. Beautiful, the marble – round here it’s mostly white, further north it’s green, rose around Verona.’
It was Gianni’s best show of patriotism, this pleasure in the coloured stones of his country.
At Sestri Levante the guard came by for the last time.
‘What was that about the frontier?’ I asked Gianni when we were alone again.
‘He wanted to be sure we were getting out at Genoa. There’s one carriage that goes on, you see – this one. Goes beyond Ventimiglia. Crosses into France.’
‘Into France – to where?’
‘Oh … Monte Carlo, I suppose. Nice. Cannes.’
It made Gioconda seem very near, this same train going on to Nice, these same reticulated luggage racks and seats of bristly plush fetching up practically on her doorstep this very night. I thought how Gianni must have imagined staying on the train, reaching her this evening. If it were not for me, how soon he might be there.
‘Rapallo,’ Gianni said. ‘We’ll soon be there.’
Approaching Genoa, leaving Italy, drawn along between these hills (that were now contoured with social prestige, posted with the villas of the rich: hills of a portentous topographical melancholy unknown at Naples, as if the landscape itself were missing its own past) and the sea, it was not apprehension that increased in me, but the sense of place. If places were vengeful, as Gianni said, they were also more magnanimous than any human benefactor, making provision for us for the rest of our lives, asking nothing more of us than to take pleasure in their memory. Gioconda had said it was a way to go on caring about a place, to miss it; yet it was rather, for me, that there now existed at last a place that could be missed. Arriving in America, I was coming from this. Some part of me would always be coming, now, from this. Like the dye they had injected into my veins, the country coloured my essence, illuminated the reaction to everything else. Here, literally, I had come to my senses.
Unimaginable to my relatives, even had they been informed of them, were the circumstances of my sitting there in the train, every fact and object unrelated to their concept of my past. The inconceivability of ever explaining was the measure of distance from them now. They were like people who have been interrupted in the telling of some story and who, even were they to resume, could never manage now to make their point: the impetus, the timing, the advantage had been lost.
Thinking about this new past of mine – that was still the present, though imagination leapt ahead to seal it from the perspective of departure – I contrasted it with what had hitherto served me for a past: that other past, of exile, of Africa and England, Edmund and Norah. And it was as if I had come upon old letters addressed in a hand unrecollected but poignantly familiar, an envelope over which the hand may tremble but which must be opened before the writer can be identified. So must I eventually retrace these sources of self — later on, as the search drew closer to home. Aspects of remorse, of injury, of forgetfulness would make their belated bridges over courses that had run dry, or been diverted. Justin had been the last of it, a transition.
Here, at the moment of arrival, the point of departure, Justin in this way re-ent
ered my experience and made himself wondered about.
‘It isn’t so far from here,’ said Gianni. ‘The frontier. A couple of hours from Genoa, that’s all.’
And so, each thinking of another, we arrived.
Gianni and I were walking on the deck of a ship. Children ran past us, there were women in fur coats, a young man with red roses, a steward with a basket of fruit enclosed in cellophane. The ship itself, similarly enclosed in warm air, smelt of food, paint, deodorizer, anything but the sea. Indoors there were sofas and armchairs, and an enormous bar. It was as if a piece of land were casting off, instead of a vessel.
‘Gianni, you could have gone on to France this evening.’
He shook his head. ‘Just as soon pass the night here. No sense killing oneself for the sake of a few hours.’
There was, in his manner of saying this, something endearingly, uncharacteristically gauche – so unpractised was Gianni in the art of dissembling his own good actions – that touched me as much as his delicacy in not going instantly, as he must have wished to do, from me to Gioconda, but allowing, instead, a single night to intervene. It was an act of almost formal observance: the sort of tribute you might pay to the dead.
I pressed his arm as we walked. ‘After this, anything’s possible.’
‘Anything was possible before this, too; but you didn’t know it.’
I could picture, in the space of a second or two, his early start tomorrow on the twisting drive, the mountains descending clear to the sea, the road signs changing to French; his sense of solitude in the car all tapering away from me, all shaped to the imminence of meeting Gioconda. And his arrival. It was so much of a piece with what I had known of them that I could scarcely credit I was to have no part in it – as I stood on the deck, cut off already from their joy, imagining how they would walk perhaps tomorrow along the sea front with their arms about each other. So utterly did this future belong to them that I could not even ask of Gianni whether he would tell our story, his and mine.
Every few minutes a voice went off like an alarm clock, shaking at us. ‘La nave è in partenza’, and then in English, ‘The sheep is living’. Stirred by the wash of a tug, the deck swung softly, suggesting its power like an animal in captivity.
‘You have to go,’ I told him.
We leant on the rail. There were some inches of dirty water, then the soiled timbers of a pier. A couple beside us discreetly turned away, seeing us in tears.
‘They think we’re lovers,’ said Gianni. ‘They think it’s something simple like that.’
‘Gianni,’ I said. ‘My darling, please go.’
He said to me, ‘This is awful,’ as if he had expected something else. ‘Is there nothing but this?’
‘Please go. Go quickly.’
He took my face between his hands and kissed me on either cheek – as if I were a member of his family or a hero. ‘Dear, lovely Jenny. Be brave. Be happy. Never forget.’ I felt the separate pressure of his fingers, the texture of his skin and clothes. And then the vacancy where these had been.
Leaning again on the rail, I saw him, below, emerge from the covered gangway and set off along the pier. Although the dark was coming down, he had put on sunglasses to hide his tears and, because of this, people stared after him – thinking, perhaps, that he was some public figure, an artist, possibly, or an actor, who on this occasion wished to be his private self and depart unrecognized.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
So much was being carried along, carried away: the carved frame of a chair, uncushioned; a glassless mirror in which the bearer’s head showed, unreflected; the empty metal outline of a garden table, tilted between two staggering men; cups of coffee borne on chromium discs by boys in stained white coats. It was like an exodus, everyone had something of the city in his hands.
Outside the building an old man was carrying the shaft of a Doric column on his shoulder. When I got out of the taxi I saw it was a roll of pale, corrugated plastic, the sort that is used to roof a terrace or make a sloping shelter for a car.
A fat girl in curlers put her head out of the portiere’s window. ‘Was she’ — she reached back to subdue her transistor — ‘was she expecting you?’
‘I wrote from Rome at the beginning of the week. The telephone doesn’t answer.’
Rome impressed her. ‘From Rome, imagine. Well – she’s been away, in and out. That’s the way it is, this time of year.’
‘Shall I go up?’
‘You can try. Perhaps there’s someone.’
She watched me go on, into the courtyard. Because I hesitated she thought I had lost the way. ‘To the left,’ she shouted. And, ‘Coraggio.’ A man came out of the driving school to see what was going on, and stayed to see what would come next.
The stairs had been lighted – there was a begrimed switch at the foot of them, and a twisted cord was tacked in loops along the wall. But the light did not work. So that after all it was like before and one went up in darkness.
A voice came down, tender, desperate. ‘Let me dream that you love me again —’
No need to ring, for both doors were open and a woman I had never seen was polishing the handles and lock, and the brass knocker. She was squat and low-browed, and wore an overall of dark flowers.
‘And let me die in my dream,’ she sang, the word dream fading as she applied the duster, with her fingertip, to the brass doorbell, causing it to wobble through a few sporadic, strangled calls. Seeing me, she stood straight, the duster in one hand and a reeking tin of polish in the other. ‘Signora?’
I could see past her into the hallway where, on a mat of wrinkled brocade, my letter lay with others on a table; as Gioconda’s own letter had lain, years ago.
‘Do you expect her?’ I asked, giving Gioconda neither name nor designation. For she might have married; and it was strange to me to bring out her name again, at last.
The woman said, ‘She has gone to the island.’
‘Is Tosca here?’
‘Dear lady,’ said this woman. ‘Tosca is dead, poor thing.’
The way she talked. Everything was a pronouncement, as if she had never had to utter commonplaces.
‘I haven’t been here for a long time.’
‘Tosca died – well, it has been five years, six years. Poor thing.’
Inside, a pale cat sauntered through variegated shadows in the hall. By the long heavy flanks and wide head I was misled into imagining that it could be locasta, and when it turned to stare at me with a mask half-extinguished by a long blotch of black, the revelation was absurdly horrifying.
‘Will she come back?’ It was not Tosca, now, we spoke of.
‘In a few days.’ The woman spread her hands, the duster one way, the polish the other. ‘At this time of year —’ It was the end of winter, the start of spring — ‘she’s often away.’
‘How can I – where is she staying?’
She didn’t know – and this too seemed to be an answer. The cat came out to the landing and looked at me with its frightening face. Knowing I did not want it, humorlessly it passed itself from ear to tail along my leg.
‘If you go to the island, you’ll find her in the piazza. Sitting in the café.’
I myself would never make such a statement without in some way qualifying it. But she did not spoil her oracular utterance – made it, in fact, the more compelling – when after a moment she repeated it. ‘You will find her sitting in the café.’
I gave her a couple of coins, more from admiration than gratitude, and she was genuinely shocked by them. ‘No. Absolutely not,’ she said, hiding them in the pocket of her apron as if they were unsightly.
Because now I must go further than I thought, I did not stop to give an account of my findings to the deputation in the cortile — unsportingly; but it was in this way that I learnt Gioconda was unmarried still. As I walked out to the street, under the archway, a window was flung up in the courtyard behind and the sibyl’s voice called down to them, ‘It’s a foreigner.’
‘Yes, from Rome.’
‘She’s after the Signorina.’
I had to take the last ferry, which happened to be the aliscafo — - one of those vessels, looking like a space-ship, that rip about the Mediterranean these days. In fact the journey was altered in every detail, as if each move of memory were being meticulously checkmated and penalized. The aliscafo did not leave from the port at all, but from the mole at Mergellina at the other end of the town; one did not have a coffee on board, waiting for the boat to cast off, but stood at the end of the pier in cold twilight until the machine came thudding and spinning alongside; and hurried aboard before she could blast off again. I had been relying on the slow transition of the boat trip, a couple of hours, to do the work of years, setting my thoughts like sails towards our meeting; now that I was to be hurtled across the harbour in a fraction of the time, it was possible to blame, on that surprise, all one’s unreadiness.
Thoughts were as little to be commanded as events. It was Tosca who kept coming to mind as we waited, small group of passengers, at the tip of the mole. I remembered how Gioconda had told me, from her mother’s account, of Tosca’s arrival in their house – a country girl, barefoot, carrying her belongings swathed in a bundle on her head. Tosca, almost grim, almost wordless, part Northerner, would take time to know, I used to think; and now there was no time to know her, and all the time in the world. Had she disliked Gianni, had she disliked me? Had she a private life of crises and sorrows that ran, undivulged, parallel to ours?
It was as if, in going to Gioconda’s house, I had turned up at the scene of an accident – that it might just as easily have been Gioconda’s death that I had learnt of, and that her survival, rather than Tosca’s, was a matter of pure chance.
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