In my world, the spaghetti was greasy with the juice of clams; the veal that followed it was covered in marsala sauce and came with something I hadn’t seen for a long time, mashed potato. At Luisa’s insistence, they even brought us some Falernian wine of a brownish-amber color. I told her the Latin poets had praised this wine. I even half remembered a bill of fare on the wall of a preserved Pompeian tavern that showed how expensive it was, but I thought I’d showed off enough.
After lunch, we had been walking for a few minutes when Luisa suddenly put her hand on my arm. “Wait. I must go in here.”
She disappeared into a shop with gold lettering on the glass and mahogany frames round the window; it was the sort of place you might have found in any European spa town in the last century. There were dummies draped in corsets and stays amid wool dressing gowns and nightdresses. The bell above the door jangled as Luisa came out carrying a parcel in tissue paper.
She was laughing. “I buy something like my nonna would wear. Come on. Andiamo.”
The car was where we had left it, being watched over by a sullen youth in an American infantry undershirt. He asked for more money than I had agreed with the doorman, but I didn’t want to waste time haggling. Soon we were on our way, with the engine growling and Luisa asking me questions more urgently than she had ever done before.
She wanted me to tell her more about my life, though it seemed to me we had covered most of it in the last ten days. Had I been lonely? Why had I studied so much? Who were my other friends in the army? Had many of them been killed?
Within half an hour we were at Pozzuoli, a small town quite different from Naples. It had escaped the bombing and the travails of occupation; it seemed self-contained and not Italian. It was on this strip of coast, I told Luisa, that the cruelest Roman emperors had their villas, away from the eyes of the curious city.
“It was in Pozzuoli, I think, that Nero murdered his mother and passed her body parts round his friends. Just over there Tiberius was killed by the commander of his guard.”
“I thought he lived on Capri.”
“That’s where he went for boys and girls. Terrible things he made them do. And what about you, little Luisa?”
“What?”
“Were you lonely? Did you have boyfriends?”
“No … I … No.”
“Don’t be shy.”
I was teasing her, but when I glanced across, her face was set in sadness.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, reaching out a hand. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Listen, my dear,” she said. “It is good that you ask me the same questions. I like that you are interested. I love you very much.”
I brought the car sliding to a halt in the dust at the side of the road. Ahead of us was a small volcano and beyond it Lake Avernus.
“Are you sure?” I said.
“I am sure.”
She looked down at her hands before daring to raise her eyes again with a smile. I kissed her. And it was as though she wanted to consume me, to eliminate the space between us.
We drove on to the lake and left the car in an olive grove. I was confident that we were far enough from the thieves and parasites of war for it to be safe. Hand in hand we went down to the edge of the waters of Avernus, a large, almost circular lake with reeds at its fringe and low clouds of insects on the surface.
This place meant a great deal to me from the days of my childhood: Styx, Acheron, Lethe, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Avernus—the rivers of the underworld … When a place or a hero comes out of one’s mythology and takes a shape, in life, there is a sense of strain: of two realities grappling for control of the mind. I wanted to be transported into Virgil’s underworld, to give in to myth, but I was frightened of the power of other lives.
I was starting to regret our languid afternoon. We had wasted time in the city and now the sun was starting to go down.
“Do you know the story of the Aeneid?” I said.
We were sitting on a dry, raised tuft of grass.
“Yes,” said Luisa. “I remember the Fall of Troy. Aeneas escapes with his father—”
“Anchises.”
“Yes. He carries him on his back. And his son. They have many adventures and then a shipwreck. The father dies.”
“Yes,” I said. “The father dies.”
“And they land in … the place where the queen lives.”
“Dido. In Carthage.”
“You remember well, Robert.”
“I was there myself last year. Tunis we call it now.”
“Then what happens?”
“Aeneas is told he must leave Dido.”
“Though he loves her.”
“Yes, he loves her, but he must leave because his destiny is to found a great city. Rome. Aeneas and his men sail from Africa and eventually they land in Italy, just along the coast, over there, where he meets the Sibyl of Cumae, a holy woman. She says he must go down into the underworld. She brings him here to Avernus, where they descend. When he has been ferried across the river he comes to the Fields of Mourning, which are filled with the ghosts of those who died of love. He sees Dido and tries to make his peace with her, but she … she turns away.”
Luisa put her hand on mine. “Go on. Don’t stop.”
“It’s so…” I couldn’t find a word for it. Sad, I wanted to say, though it didn’t seem enough. Unbearably, transcendentally sad. “He goes to the Elysian Fields, which are beautiful meadows inhabited by those who have lived on earth, and there he finds … he finds his dead father, Anchises, who greets him and tells him how much he has worried about him. He has feared that Aeneas has been deflected from his destiny by his love for Dido and by staying so long in Carthage. Aeneas can’t speak for the joy of seeing his dead father. He reaches out to embrace him, but his father’s shade slips through his arms. Three times he reaches out to hold him and three times…”
I couldn’t go on.
“It’s all right, carissimo. It’s just a story.”
When I had collected myself, I told her about the river Lethe, over which souls hover like swarming bees, and how they must drink from the waters of forgetfulness before they can be born again. By the time I finished, it was almost dark. “And from then on,” I said, “Aeneas stops striving to be happy. Instead, he dedicates himself to his destiny, which is in the hands of the gods, and not his to shape.”
Luisa stood up. “It’s dark. I don’t want to go back tonight. Can we stay here?”
“Won’t they wonder where you are? Magda and Lily? Won’t they be worried?”
“I think Magda will know. She’s my sister. I tell her … things. And Lily, she’s away tonight, I think. But she comes early in the morning to see that we are safe.”
“What time?”
“Tomorrow … Sunday. Not so early. Maybe nine.”
“If we leave here by seven I can have you home by eight.”
The streets of Pozzuoli were still glowing from the stored heat of the day. As we drove slowly, looking for somewhere to spend the night, I felt I had somehow slipped out of Italy and into the Bosphorus; on the left was a church with an onion dome, to the right were houses with pointed shutters. When we stopped to ask for help, Luisa told me they spoke a dialect she found hard to understand.
We ended up at a hotel overlooking the sea. Luisa moved a ring from her right hand over to her wedding finger, though there was no register to sign and the manageress looked indifferent. The only luggage we had was Luisa’s loot from Master Sergeant Stark, carried in a paper bag, and her tissue-wrapped parcel from the shop.
“Ask her if she can give us some toothpaste and a brush,” I said.
We were told we could have dinner in a restaurant at the end of the street but no later than eight o’clock.
Our room had bare floorboards and two tall windows with green shutters and a small wrought-iron balcony that overlooked the dock. Between the windows was a wooden crucifix and over the bed a bad reproduction of a painting of Lake Avernus.
It’s odd that I remember these unimportant details. Because when we closed the shutters and turned off the overhead light, leaving only the bedside lamp to shed a feeble glow, Luisa took off all her clothes and laid them on a chair.
“Now you, my love,” she said, standing there in front of me with her hands by her sides.
I did as I was told, then held her close against my skin.
The mattress was hard when we lay down on it. I was ashamed of my arousal and worried that this delicate girl would take fright. It was confusing to me that she seemed so calm; I tried to arch myself away from her but felt her hand gripping me and heard her whisper reassurance in my ear.
What happened later in the evening is vague now in my memory. I suppose we must have dressed and gone down to the restaurant for dinner. I think we were in a hurry to get back to the hotel.
I awoke before Luisa in the morning and took the toothpaste and brush—someone must indeed have brought them up—and went down the corridor quietly to the bathroom. I had heard no other guests the night before. It was about six o’clock and just getting light. I couldn’t shave and I remember hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew on the way back. I washed in cold water.
Quietly, I returned to our room and lay down beside Luisa. She seemed to be sleeping still, and in the sunlight between the shutters I was able to see for the first time the archipelago of dark freckles between her shoulder blades. I wanted to trace them down her spine with my finger. Her skin was pale, stretched tight across the flesh; as she lay on her side I could see one of her breasts uncovered against the white sheet. One knee was drawn up and I could also make out the shadow between her legs, where the two halves of her body met. I wanted very much to kiss her.
It was as though she could sense the heat of my gaze, because she stirred and rolled onto her back. She opened her large, dark eyes, looked into mine, and smiled.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY found us back again in Pozzuoli. The beach was laid with huge flat stones that for generations had been used by the fishermen as a base on which to haul up boats and spread their nets. We were told that the Americans had also found them useful—as a dry dock for their landing craft while they filled them with vehicles and men for the trip north to Anzio.
That had been in January. The Americans had cleared out and left no trace of their occupation, so that by high summer the town had lapsed back into its secretive self, with its own dialect and cross-bred architecture. We went for a walk along the coast and found a café where we ate shellfish of a kind I’d never seen, like small clams, dipped in flour then fried. Luisa was at first amused by the mezzogiorno offerings, scraped, she suggested, from the bottom of a boat, but then, after tasting them, she ordered more.
I wasn’t sure when I would be rejoining the battalion and in what capacity. Luisa had already turned down one request to move to the Red Cross in Rome and thought it unlikely she could deny them a second time. I said I might manage to go with her if need be. I liked the idea of living with her in a small apartment with a roof garden overlooking some backwater piazza.
The sense of being on borrowed time gave us no anxiety that I recall, but it made me mindful of each moment I spent looking at Luisa’s skin, at her black hair, at the way she threw back her head when she was thoughtful or unsure and stared down at me through dark, half-closed eyes. It allowed me to scrutinize the arc of her thigh, a shape I loved, so gently curving from hip to knee. It made me aware that each cell in my body was alive, individually, but in concert too, responding to the presence of this young woman with what I could only think of as a sort of riotous applause.
When I caught myself with such thoughts, I smiled to think of the millions of synaptic events, sketchily imagined from my neurological studies, that made themselves known to me only as an incoherent, if stupendous, “yes.” This was a time when I was beginning to see which of her many ways of speaking, thinking, or moving were repeated often enough to be “characteristic.” Some that I was enchanted by never reappeared; others that I barely noticed acquired charm in repetition. It was a thrilling time, like seeing a photograph emerge in a developing tray. She had strong views but was happy—as in the case of the shellfish—to change them. In that way she was not at all proud. On the other hand, she could fire up in a moment—like a flash of lightning, like a trench mortar—if she felt affronted. But then it was done, and there was no aftermath.
I had always found something sanctimonious about the way young lovers flaunted their dependencies, as though they were the first to have such feelings. So I tried not to be self-congratulatory, even in private. I couldn’t deny, however, that one of the things that made me laugh was the sense of how unlikely it all was. This Genoese girl, daughter of a businessman, sister in a well-off Catholic family, fearful but fiery, lover of Puccini, enthusiast for wine and the paintings of Caravaggio, had taken an English farm boy, half-orphaned, dirty, blood-covered from the war, into her bed and her utmost confidence. I felt like a peasant indulged by a countess; it was absurd. Yet she understood me better than anyone I had ever met before. She knew each pore of my skin, each hair of my young, wounded body. It was only when I looked into her eyes, very close to mine, that I knew for the first time who I was.
Why had she shown me this unmerited, this fathomless generosity? Hard though it was for me to accept, I came to believe she found joy in me too. I think I enabled her to be what she most wanted to be, without shame or compromise. That was what she told me. I think she was as surprised as I was that such self-knowledge had come in the shape of a foreign soldier who had merely swum out to a platform in the sea and tried his luck.
That night we lay together naked on the bed in the hotel beneath the blotchy painting of Mount Avernus. Luisa insisted on the same room in the same hotel. She was proud of the silk stockings Master Sergeant Stark had provided; the reggicalze she had bought from the old hosiery shop was a girdle of numerous straps and panels, which, as she said, looked like something her grandmother might have worn. All had to be carefully removed and set on top of her discarded dress, not touching the wood of the chair itself, which might have had splinters that would have laddered the precious fabric. She loved clothes with a passion that was strange to me.
Once she was satisfied that all was as it should be, she was like a child in her nakedness. I could never satisfy her desire to know more about me. I always thought of her as the girl I’d taken to dinner at the officers’ club that first night. I closed my eyes and saw her looking down when she had finished speaking before she dared to glance up again at those of us round the table, her hands folded in her lap and the cotton dress pulled down to her knees. Then I opened my eyes and looked down to what was happening on the bed.
She was happy to talk about her own life, though in her version it seemed to have started only when she saw Donald and me diving off the jetty. Before that was a series of tableaux, all more or less healthy but comprising scenes in which she seemed not fully involved. I found this incompleteness puzzling.
In the small hours of the morning, when we had made love again and talked softly, we began to fall asleep. We’d pulled the shutters on the lights of the port but left the window open for some air. It was too hot to lie entwined or even touching, but I left one hand between her legs. I couldn’t bear to take my hand away, even when my wrist began to ache.
I believed for the first time that Luisa loved me, and this made me feel uneasy. Suppose that without me she could never be fully herself. Suppose something might develop—almost as an offspring or third party—that was outside the power of either of us to control.
* * *
THROUGH THE LATE summer, I reported at regular intervals to Brigade headquarters, but it seemed as though I had become dispensable. A bored staff officer would make a further appointment for me with a medical board, but no one seemed anxious to have me back in action. I put the delay down to the lull in our advance after the fall of Florence while the Allied commanders weighed up t
he challenges ahead.
Each time I was granted a further week of freedom Luisa would weep tears of joy, and we would celebrate with a candlelit dinner in the walled garden of her lodgings as the evening sun slid down into the sea.
This paradise ended suddenly one morning when I received an order to go for a final assessment in Rome. I crept out from Luisa’s lodging early the next day and caught the first bus to the railway station in Naples.
The men in the carriage were unshaven, and the women wore patched frocks made from any material that had come to hand. Some carried chickens in basketwork cages; many had ragged children who stood in the middle of the carriage, staring with big eyes at the English soldier, now in his best major’s uniform, the buttons polished just the night before by his tearful Genoese lover.
A few people read newspapers, others played card games, but most were involved in a conversation that included the whole carriage; it dwindled or caught like a bonfire in the breeze. Thanks to Luisa, I knew enough Italian by now to understand the outlines of what was said, though my own speech remained primitive (I had stupidly believed Vesta Swann when he told me it was an easy language; it wasn’t). After an hour, an old woman sitting nearby offered me a thick piece of salami from a piece of newspaper. She insisted in a way that was between jest and threat, thrusting out the paper at me. It tasted better than it looked.
In the course of the next hour, the grimy clothes of a dozen people seated nearby were opened to reveal bread rolls, peaches, bits of cheese, and, in one case, a goatskin of wine. It was the bread that seemed most prized, but it was all shared around. They chattered about how the Allies had entered Florence to find the Germans had blown every bridge except the Ponte Vecchio, because the Führer himself had deemed it “too beautiful.” Some were proud of this tribute to their country; others had fun at the expense of a man who could cause the death of millions but draw the line at a bridge.
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