September in the Rain

by Peter Robinson

  Ah yes, their spies … You remember the time Alice and I were walking beside the lake and, thinking out loud about how life imitates art, I happened to notice that the reed beds looked like a Japanese print.

  ‘But wait a minute now, the reeds aren’t the cliché,’ she suddenly said. ‘It’s your idea of them that is.’

  And so I will have carried that off-the-cuff cutting remark straight back to you in search of repairs to my wounded amour propre. Not that you gave what I wanted to hear—far from it. You too had a line in what I needed to be told; and, given the very different subjects we studied, you were ready on innumerable occasions with prompts for me to become less self-absorbed. You know how it was: I would be going on again about the ‘bricks and mortar, grass over fields, the shadows of trees … the little figures here and there’ in a Dutch genre scene, when you would counter with one of the case histories you had to write up for your finals dissertation.

  ‘You have a class problem?’ is how the tutor I shared with Alice responded if any of us so much as dared to ask how our work was progressing. The first time it happened to me, I thought he was referring to my accent.

  Then when it all got too much, you would find the address of some B & B and we’d escape for a day or two, explore the countryside around, take a tour of Skipton Castle, visit the remains at Bolton Abbey, walk across the stepping stones there, or climb up the Wharf to the Strid. It was on those excursions that you always seemed to be most yourself, doing the things you liked so much: looking round old country houses, picking through antique shops, staring into estate agents’ windows, and, most of all, taking those long country walks.

  You would gaze up at the crags, the dry stonewalls, the heaped clouds that cast great moving shadows across the moors. Your lips would be set in a determined grin as we battled against the stiff gusts blowing along ridges and backs of hills. And I suppose it was that limestone landscape of springy turf and curving river, narrow tracks and beck-side paths, which really got you under my skin. Your chestnut hair would be blowing across your face, your long slim fingers reaching out to unhook the cord that held a farm gate closed. You’d be vaulting a stile, or leaping from stone to stone across a shallow ford. We would be scampering down a dale- or moor-side in time for hot drinks and sandwiches in a Kettlewell pub …

  Yes, it was definitely those long walks and the endless talks we had that helped to establish our fondly self-preserving cabal, our conspiracy of two that went such a long way to binding us together.

  CHAPTER 21

  Only ten minutes later than expected, my sister had come striding across the square with a wince of stage embarrassment distorting her tanned face.

  ‘Sorry—bad hair day,’ she said all in a fluster, sitting down, crossing her legs, and immediately launching into a series of explanations for her being so on edge. The graphic designers had screwed up her portfolio of magazine and hoarding ads for Intimissimo, the women’s underwear firm whose brand image she was revamping. The public relations team at the client company had been on the phone all morning about how her ideas were completely bloody hopeless and the sketches even worse. Her boss was breathing down her neck about when he could announce to the world another major advertising coup for his agency. Giovanni had left a message on the answer-phone to say he wouldn’t be back that evening from his trip to Zurich. And if that weren’t enough, Leopardi, their cat … But as she kept on about her job, her life, her problems with ‘abroad’, and even their domestic pet, a strange bit of TV from the night before came flickering back across my mind.

  It had been her idea for me to book a room in the little hotel by the Porta Ticinese. The spacious flat she and Giovanni now owned was way out by San Siro in the Via P. A. Paravia. That would have been far too inconvenient for the brief visit planned to Milan’s gallery district, and a day trip to Emilia Romagna. So, after taking the air a while, strolling amongst the book stalls, antique markets, going past soloing saxophonists with accompaniment tapes around the Naviglio, I headed back, ate a tuna salad nearby, then returned to my hotel.

  Single rooms in modest places like that one always find me at a loss, being no more than alive and left to my own devices. After no time at all in such confined spaces I’ll start feeling flat as a faded news cutting pasted to the back of a personal box like one of Joseph Cornell’s—or, come to think of it, the one with that prize fish in James’s bathroom. Scholarly tomes that in any other circumstances would provide hours of absorption just dull over the minute my glasses go on. So there was nothing else for it last night around ten but to go to bed and hope against hope for a good eight hours’ uninterrupted sleep. Then, just about to snuggle down under the covers, I noticed the remote on the bedside table and decided on impulse to see what Italian TV had to offer that evening.

  I was channel hopping between food ads and game shows—their scantily clad, tall hostesses crowding around the breast-high presenter, his evidently dyed and transplanted hair groomed to within an inch of its life. No, thank you. Suddenly, looking like they’d stepped out of an old master painting, one with a gilt-moulded frame, two characters flickered on beside a broken Doric column. The first was another dumpy man, dressed as a waiter, his head bowed, standing and waiting silently with, in his arms, a high and toppling pile of the day’s newspapers. The other was a suave commentator, his mouth talking nineteen to the dozen, face and hand gestures seeming to say that, no, he was merely expressing his opinion. The previous user had left the sound turned down. I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Still, it gave every impression of being an advertising company’s idea for a party political broadcast, doubtless on behalf of Forza Italia, since the logo in the corner of the screen indicated that this was one of the channels owned by Silvio Berlusconi himself.

  ‘Where do you want to eat?’ I asked, interrupting the apology for her lateness that my sister was working up into a routine of complaints about the job that, actually, she loved.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘no time for a meal. I’ll just have a toasted sandwich and a cold milk right here, if that’s OK with you.’

  ‘Sure, same for me—but another San Pellegrino instead of the milk.’

  My sister summoned the waiter and dispatched him with an order in grammatically fluent, but faintly accented Italian.

  ‘So why don’t you quit advertising?’ I asked just to tease her. ‘You don’t need the money now, and do you really need the grief?’

  ‘Might as well tell you, then, mightn’t I?’ she replied.

  ‘Make a change,’ I smiled, lifting my sunglasses to look her in the eye. ‘After all, you never tell me anything.’

  ‘Vanni wants to start a family.’

  ‘What? You’re not … Congratulations!’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ my sister laughed. ‘It’s just an idea. After all, my clock is ticking and, as you say, we can certainly afford it. And really I’ve got about as far as I can in this job. The next step up would be hiring and firing, juggling budgets, that kind of thing—whereas my thing’s the contact with the clients. I’ve been talking to my boss about going part-time, but he’s not very keen. So Vanni’s going to put in a word, and if nothing comes of it, well, I’m thinking of taking up knitting!’

  ‘Come on; let’s order something stronger. We could drink a toast to that.’

  ‘Did you get what you were looking for in Parma?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ I replied. ‘I did get to see the picture, but finding a reproduction could well turn into another Divine Comedy.’

  ‘Why so? As if I couldn’t guess.’

  The Soprintendente della Galleria Nazionale at Parma had sent a fax to the office at the Art School. In response to my courteous request, it ran, she hereby communicated to il Dott. English that he would be able to view the following below-listed work which was not at present placed on display: C. Preti, La lattante, inv. n. 89, by making an appointment with la sign
ora Serra at the following telephone numbers.

  So I arranged with Marta Serra, as her name turned out to be, to visit Parma for the day. She would arrange for a viewing of that particular work in their picture store. When told that, unfortunately, I didn’t know the town, let alone the Galleria Nazionale, she kindly arranged to meet me in a bar opposite the Teatro Reggio, just off Piazza Garibaldi. A taxi from the station, she said, would of course drop me there—though it was, in fact, no distance along the via Garibaldi in the direction of the famous Battistero, quite visible from the Piazza della Stazione.

  Marta Serra was already waiting outside the bar. Dressed in a high street reworking of the Stoke Newington drabby look, she was a studious professional who specialized in the works of Parmigianino and Correggio. Marta was left-handed and, as she raised the espresso cup to her peach-coloured lips, I noticed the wedding ring. Her husband, it turned out, was a manager at Parmalat. Their two boys were attending the Liceo Classico. When she reciprocated with a polite enquiry, I decided to tell her there was no Mrs. English—without going into the business of how you hadn’t changed your name after we got married. Marta couldn’t, unfortunately, miss the faintly hapless note in which I referred to you, and graciously she let the topic drop. Coffees downed, we set off past a more than life-size, socialist-realist sculpture of a partisan. He was standing above the body of a fallen comrade in a strong wind that ruffled his hair, holding a Sten gun that must have been air dropped by the Allies.

  Across a vast square called the Piazza della Pace we headed towards La Pilotta—an enormous, ugly palazzo that looked as though half of it had been pulled down to create the desolate space across which we were strolling. When asked about its half-built look, Marta explained that it had been designed by an engineer, not an architect, and was bombed by American Liberators during the assault on the Linea Gotica in the final stages of the war. For the last fifty years the city council had been divided about what should be done with this vast bombed site right in the middle of their town, while the citizens had arranged for a covered market to be held there once a week. Divided, I thought, like most of Italian history—all the other Septembers of confusion and betrayal, when the country was yoked together by violence.

  The offices for the Soprintendenza per i Beni Artistici e Storici di Parma e Piacenza were themselves in a bit of a state. The staircases and corridors were covered in heaps of building gear, rubble, and concrete dust, but through the middle of the old stairwell rose a futuristic glass and steel lift which seemed to be suspended by a hair from the ancient ceiling some six floors above. Up in the lift we went, and stopped on the top floor. Marta pointed out the rooftops, the domes, campanili, skyscrapers and cranes of Parma. Then she showed me the way along a corridor into the spotless new offices of the Superintendent herself.

  Out came the explanation that not only did I want to see the picture by Preti, but also that I was writing a book called Genre Painters of Nineteenth-Century Italy and would need a transparency of the work to be used for the illustrations. Which is where things began to get difficult. The Superintendent was one of those people who likes to hold office and demonstrate she has power, but not exactly to use it, since this would involve the trouble of getting something done and something right. So she announced in no uncertain terms that though they did hold some negatives of a reproduction, I would not be able to purchase or take any of these away. Furthermore, should I wish to arrange for the painting to be photographed at my own expense, I would first have to provide full details of the publisher of the book, its size, its print run, purchase price, and so on and so forth. But by this point it had became only too clear what the obstacles were, and I managed to put in that perhaps before deciding whether to go to all that trouble it would be best to see the canvas itself.

  Thankfully, the Superintendent left that task in the capable hands of Marta Serra, who positively burst out laughing when we were safely inside the futuristic lift and descending to the floor where her far more modest and not yet restored office space was located. The gallery’s library housed its books in dark wooden shelves all along the walls with other cases jutting out to form alcoves in which the scholars and archivists worked. There were volumes in precarious piles all over the floor, and plaster flaking from the high vaulted ceiling. Marta explained that the place was due to be refurbished, but somehow the funding had got put on hold. She confided that her boss, the Superintendent, happened to be one of those political appointments, meaning she was somebody’s relative and didn’t actually know anything about the history of art in Italy—or anywhere else for that matter.

  Perhaps Marta would be able to arrange for a reproduction of the picture to be sent to England? She couldn’t promise anything, but would see what might be done. Then she led the way through a maze of public galleries, across the immense and spectacular wooden Teatro Farnese. As we went, she described how the court engineer had constructed the space so it could be filled to a certain height with water. That way small ships might be sailed below the audience for the purpose of staging masques with naval battles and such like. Once across the imposing structure, restored after its damage during the bombing, we ascended some further flights of stairs back up into the roof space of La Pilotta where the gallery’s deposits were located.

  Born in 1842, Cletofonte Preti lived around Reggio Emilia, the neighbouring town to Parma, for all of his thirty-eight years. He painted ‘La Lattante’ in about 1875, approximately half a decade before his death. Marta pulled inventory number 89 out from its storage rack on the rolling frame to which it was attached, and I was immediately struck by what a fine picture ‘La Lattante’ actually is, further convinced as I was that it would make a suitable subject for one of the later sections of my long-meditated book.

  As the title suggests, it represents a young woman of poor origins breast-feeding a thriving child in the corner of a humble brick-floored bedroom. The youthful wet-nurse is standing in bare feet resting her weight against the end of the bed, its pillow visible behind her arm, and her dark green dress set off by the light blue and white check of the bedspread. The woman wears a loose cotton blouse, pulled down off her shoulders so that she can feed the baby with her right breast. The child’s one visible arm is raised and divides the bosom, its tiny fingers reaching towards her clavicle. The baby’s kicking legs, the woman’s smile and lowered eyes all show reminiscences of Madonna and Jesus treatments by Preti’s far more illustrious Renaissance predecessors. There were signs of pentimenti clearly visible around the young woman’s breasts and the feeding baby’s arm.

  The wet nurse has a ruby-red earring dangling against one cheek, and a matching red headscarf which only half covers her thick russet hair. The skin of her head, torso, left arm, and bare feet are lit by a very strong warm light source—a putative window beyond the right edge of the picture. Against the left wall, jutting into the lower corner of the picture is a beaten-up wooden chair with a woven-reed seat, fraying at the front. Underneath the chair, on a bar connecting the two front legs, a white dove is perched. A small piece of the paint on the right side of the bedspread had chipped off, revealing a patch of bare canvas. A new transparency would reveal that damage, and I mentioned the possibility of restoration.

  As if to excuse the poor condition of the work, Marta mentioned that Preti had been more or less an amateur painter and the technical quality of his pigments was far inferior to those of Scaramuzza. He had also painted a genre piece with a wet nurse, Il baliatico—which, since we were there, she was only too willing to show me. But a glance at inventory number 82, its grey skin tones and cool palate of dark reds and blues, made it clear that ‘The wet-nurse’ by Cletofonte Preti had everything that was needed.

  ‘And how about the Gallery Schwarz?’ my sister asked, as we were sipping the white wine and nibbling at the toasted sandwiches brought to our table.

  ‘Didn’t find it, I’m afraid. Don’t think it’s there any more.’

&n
bsp; On the evening of my arrival from Linate, in an uncharacteristic fit of tidy-mindedness, I decided to see if the place where the Arp exhibition had been held in 1965 was still in business. A glance at the tattered old street-map bought all those years before, the city coming to pieces at each worn-through fold, showed that the via Gesú runs parallel to via Spiga and via Monte Napoleone. It was only about five or six minutes walk from the Duomo or San Babila and, approaching it, I quickly picked up the signs of a distinctly smart area—one lined with designer-label emporia.

  The via Gesú itself turned out to be a narrow, elegant stroll of about two hundred and fifty metres, with no bars and no trees, past eighteenth-century buildings that had become five-star hotels and the like. Far less Japanese tourists crowded its pavements; but they were there nonetheless, burdened down with enormous artsy carrier bags, eyeing the windows of its Chiara Boni boutiques. Number 17 was on the left, converted into two shops, mirror images either side of the door: one for Chinese antiquities, the other selling Italian rarities like the Venetian vessels arranged about its window display. A 1920s-style picture of a musical instrument had been placed in the entrance. Gesú, it went without saying, would have overturned quite a few tables in the temples of mammon that lined his street.

  ‘Come to think of it,’ she said, ‘I seem to remember reading somewhere that a guy called Arturo Schwarz left a whole load of weird art to the State … probably the same bloke who owned your gallery.’

  ‘What? Sorry, what were you saying?’

  My sister looked across the café table. My sunglasses where thankfully hiding the state of my eyes.