Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  Once, when I was teaching her, I asked her to describe in English a dream she’d had. She told me she had dreamt about swimming in a beautiful silvery sea, and around her there had been all sorts and sizes of coloured fish, gentle whales, iridescent weed. It was, she said, the happiest dream, it was so lovely to be there, and when she woke up she was still happy. Looking at her face as she told me this, I thought of the threat-filled nightmares that habitually tormented my sleep. I never had dreams like the one Lucia had just described.

  The money on the light meter had run out, and the church slipped abruptly into blackness again. Narrowing my eyes, I tried to see the man standing beside me.

  ‘The next time I go to Florence,’ I said to this stranger in a loud stage whisper, ‘can I come and visit you?’

  4

  When I travelled away from S. Giorgio any further than about thirty kilometres, I used to take the train. It meant I could relax and look out at the landscape, and think about things. I don’t like driving in big cities, and it’s almost impossible to find a parking space in Italian towns. So although the train system isn’t the greatest, particularly on our line, I don’t think it’s as bad as many of the Italians used to make it out to be. They just prefer to travel by car, when at all possible. That’s another thing that’s not widely admitted about Italy. You’re told that the most abiding memories you’ll bring home are of the Trevi Fountain, or the sun setting over the bay of Naples; but it’s more likely to be the memory of being driven at every time you go out, of turning into a street and a car inevitably following you, so you stop and let it past and once that’s done, it’s quite likely to start reversing back towards you. It’s nothing personal, but you can begin to feel that it is when yet another car starts to do a three-point turn on the piece of road where you’re standing. The car, the television, chewing gum – they’re every bit as important in Italy as they are in America, but these modern obsessions can be hidden behind a screen of past culture, and they get away with it because not many people want to see contemporary Italy as it really is. But if you go to any of the smaller medieval hill towns like S. Giorgio, you see how unsuited they are to traffic. They were designed without that in mind, and it simply doesn’t work to try and incorporate it. It’s as if you decided to go around in the house on a bicycle. Technically you could probably do it, but you might begin to think that there was something wrong with the house.

  When I took the train north that morning in October, it was still dark, although before long the light came over the land, and I thought of how much I like this landscape in winter, possibly even more than I do in summer. I like it when the soil is turned up in the empty fields: sometimes the earth lies in thick brown clods, sometimes it’s as fine as powder. Through the leafless trees you can see the configurations of the land, as if its bones have been laid bare. Just past Assisi, the train rolled slowly over a level crossing, and past the backs of some houses, past hen-runs and small wire pens full of geese and ducks. A mean-faced ginger cat stared at the train as it trundled past, so slowly that I could clearly see the grapes on the vines. Soon, they would be harvested. There were persimmon trees, near enough to touch. I love that tree so much; I love that combination of bareness and fertility, the black, leafless branches and the solid orange fruit, (even though I don’t like to eat it, the flesh is too pulpy, and it tastes as though it has already begun to rot). The tree is wonderful, though, with all the fruit like orange lamps; it looks like something a child has decorated.

  A few miles further on, I kept a particular lookout for a long row of coloured beehives, in a hollow below a farm. It always gave me a real delight to see them, but they were only ever visible in winter, when there were no leaves on the trees. A little while later, we passed Lake Trasimeno on the left, and everything was blue – the water, the sky, the distant hills, all different muted shades of blue, the sky a colour quite unlike either the heaped clouds of where I lived in Ireland, or the high bare sky of an Italian summer. As we went on north into Tuscany, the land changed, and the rounded hills closed in gently around the track.

  I liked the landscape there, and in winter I liked it for that particular combination of bareness and softness. Even though it can be bitterly cold in Italy, I always had the feeling there that winter wasn’t going to last long, that it was a brief aberration, while in Ireland you feel that it’s the summer that’s the freak, having somehow managed to break through the usual wind and rain for a short while.

  I have a theory, a strange, maybe a silly theory of my own, to do with landscape: I think that each particular landscape has its own period of time, its own moment in history when it is, or was, most in harmony with the society which exists in it. In Umbria it was the Middle Ages, in Tuscany the Renaissance – the time when the spirit of the land was most complementary to the spirit of the society. I always think of Tuscany as a merchant landscape, able to submit with unparalleled grace to the forces of money and power, in the form they took at that time. You only have to look at the buildings. The merchant towns of pink stone, defensively walled, with solid churches, blend perfectly with the hills, in the way the factories and warehouses of today do not. But the land itself is rich and fertile, yielding easily to cultivation, with its olive trees in neat rows, and its twisted vines. It is so self-evidently a land which has submitted for hundreds of years to the stamp of human power, more than any other I can think of. But it bears that stamp so graciously that people love it for that. Central Italy is one of the most humanized landscapes you can imagine, a place which soothes rather than frightens. It lacks the violence of the sea, and the hard indifference of high, bare mountains.

  And much as I liked Umbria and Tuscany, sometimes their prettiness got on my nerves and I missed the violence of nature. I used to think of the Burren, in Ireland, where I grew up. It’s a place that can be full of threat, and doesn’t feed any illusions about humanity being the most important factor in the natural world. To apply the same theory of landscape and society, the Burren was at that particular point in time thousands of years ago, when the dolmens were built, as stark as the land around them. The people who built them must have understood that land in a way we can now hardly begin to imagine. As the train went north, I thought of the Burren in spring. It was the time of year I most missed being in Ireland, to see the tiny orchids growing in the cracks in the rocks, the flowers so bright against the greyness of the stone. I had shown photographs of the Burren once to Franca and Lucia, but they didn’t like it, they thought it was ugly and bleak. The idea of the flowers interested them, but they thought that once a year huge swathes of vivid blooms appeared, and when I told them that no, the flowers were so small, they lost interest again, and I got annoyed. Since then I had avoided talking to people about where I came from: they rarely asked me in any case, and when they did it was always just a conversational reflex, which I could fob off by saying Ireland was very green and, of course, ‘bella, tanto bella’. I couldn’t describe the magnificence of the scenery, nor could I explain the psychic violence which I felt there, certainly pre-Christian, perhaps previous to any social life at all.

  Was it that that haunted me? I had carried that blackness south with me. It was with me, as irrevocably as the colour of my eyes, and the demons that tormented me seemed to have settled down well in a hot climate. I looked out at the groves of olives, at the red roofs of the houses, and I felt so anxious.

  From early that morning, I had had in my mind the image of a woman’s body being hanged. It was like a scene in a film, once seen and remembered, and although I found it disturbing to think about it, I could not root it from my mind. The image kept returning to me again and again, unbidden.

  I wondered if Ted had found it strange, my calling him up in the middle of the week, to say that I wanted to see him that weekend, and then I realized that I didn’t really care. He had sounded pleased on the phone, and I was glad that he was willing to see me. I felt the need of company at that time. During that autumn, I had occasi
onally felt quite lonely, which was an unusual thing for me. I wanted new companions, a new friend, and there was little chance of that in S. Giorgio. There were Franca and her family, and there were a few other people, all Italians, with whom I got on well, but to whom I wasn’t really close. When you make friends with Italian people, there’s often an absence of the kind of intimacy and confidences that you expect as a natural part of friendship if you come from Northern Europe. At least that’s how it struck me, and for a long time I liked that, I liked the privacy it gave me. It meant that I could be quite close to people without their really getting to know me.

  I wasn’t popular with the expatriate community in S. Giorgio. When I first arrived, I went along to some of the things they organized, lectures and parties and so forth. Then, one night, I attended the opening of an exhibition of Umbrian landscape paintings by a woman from Cologne. They were watercolours: views of pink churches seen through olive groves, the usual bland, decorative stuff. I remarked how difficult it must be to be a painter in Umbria, because the place itself is such a cliché that it must be almost impossible to produce work inspired by it which isn’t also clichéd. The comment wasn’t appreciated. As the evening went on, and people made a point of not talking to me, I realized that I’d put my foot in it. Then I realized that I didn’t care, and that I was bored. I was always bored at these gatherings, and then I began to wonder why I was there at all. I had nothing in common with those people, and after that evening, I stopped pretending that I did. They began to think of me as cold and aloof, which was fair enough. I wasn’t friendly to them, but I didn’t want their friendship, and if they had known me, really known me, I don’t think that they would have wanted mine. I’ve lived away in two countries now, albeit in Europe both times, and if I’ve learnt anything, it’s that you can’t be too careful of foreigners living abroad. You often find they’re strange people, that they’re not happy in themselves, that they’re trying to run away from something, and that they’re only half aware of all this. There can be a great sense of unreality about them, something I always try to avoid. They always get together to whinge and moan about the country they’ve chosen to live in, the damn French and the bloody Italians, as if they were doing the nation in question a great favour by being there. Although it may not sound like it, I’m not setting myself loftily above these people: some of the things I’ve said about them, like their trying to escape from certain things, are true for me too, but it doesn’t interest me to be around people like that.

  Most of the time I was happy on my own, but that autumn I was lonely, and I did want company. I liked Ted, and I thought it was ideal that he was living in Florence. If I went there and the whole weekend was a disaster, I could go back to S. Giorgio and no one would ever know anything about it, and Ted and I need never see each other again.

  The train was on time. I felt nervous as we pulled into S. Maria Novella Station, because in spite of my rationalization, I dreaded a disastrous weekend. I try to be cut and dried about such things, but it isn’t really possible. The station was busy, as it always is. Even out of season, when there are no visitors in places like S. Giorgio, cities like Venice and Florence still have tourists. There were a few blonde backpackers wandering about on the platform, holding plastic bottles of mineral water in their arms; there were some nuns in long cream habits; there were super-elegant people with smart, co-ordinated luggage. Above all this there was the usual torrent of train announcements, the mellifluous list of city names – Bologna, Milano, Brindisi, Roma, Terontola – and the occasional announcement in English. Just as I was stepping down from the train, I saw Ted, at the very moment he saw me. A man with one of those big deep trolleys from which they sell drinks and sandwiches almost ran him down. The man with the trolley paid no heed, but pushed on up the platform, bawling at the top of his voice, ‘Panini, gelati, patatine, bibite, acqua minerale …’

  There was something wrong with me that day – more wrong than there usually is, if I can put it that way, for the world often seems out of kilter to me. I had been to Florence many times before, but that Saturday it seemed different, it was hyper-real, the way things in a dream can appear more real than things in life. I told myself I should have had something to eat before leaving S. Giorgio, and then I saw how foolish a thought that was. As if the light-headedness and the gnawing feeling of terror that there was in my stomach, and the weird look of everything, could have been eliminated simply by having had a cup of coffee and a cake three hours earlier.

  My initial reaction when I saw Ted was sheer terror. I wished that I had seen him before he saw me, so that I could have sneaked off and hidden. I could have rung him later in the day and pretended still to be in S. Giorgio, could have told him I missed my train that morning, and then skulked around the city hoping not to meet him. Even when he walked up to me, I wondered for one wild second if I could just smile at him and say, ‘Why, hello!’ and then walk straight past him, as if seeing him there was pure coincidence. After all, he was almost a total stranger to me.

  But he saw me as soon as I saw him, and he headed straight for me, so there was no chance to do any of these crazy things. He came up and said ‘Hello’ and took my bag, and then I saw that there was nothing else for it, so I settled down to the day that I had set up for myself, and which now frightened me so much.

  We went straight to a café for breakfast, and although I felt much better for some coffee and a cake, it didn’t stop me from feeling nervous and strange. We talked about the usual nothings you talk about when you meet someone off a train, but we talked about them for longer than usual – the weather, how long the journey had taken, whether or not I was tired, had I had a good journey, and other classic topics of non-conversation. Ted appeared very happy that I had come to Florence for the day. He asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to see or do while I was there. I said I would like to walk up to Piazza Michelangelo, to look out over the city, as it was a bright day.

  Florence is a strange city – although everywhere and everybody are strange, I suppose, according to your particular perception, and even the oddest things can appear normal, if that’s how you choose to see them. What I find strange in Florence is the effect of tourism there. It is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and you can buy there some of the ugliest things possible, like a plastic ashtray with a reproduction of a Botticelli on it, so that you can stub your cigarette out on Venus’s breasts. A thing like that is so crass that you can hardly believe that it’s not deliberate. It becomes a work of art in itself, deconstructing the accepted canon. As we crossed over the Ponte Vecchio I said to Ted how I always was struck by this aspect of Florence every time I visited it. You see so many visitors there, particularly around the Ponte Vecchio area, and they’ve come from all over the world, often during the only period of free time they have all year and at great expense. And yet when you look at them you have no feeling at all of their being happy, or even reasonably contented. You just see this tide of passionless life, with crowds of people looking through each other, bored and listless, gazing at the identical shop windows along the bridge, with their silks and gloves and gold jewellery. Ted said that he often felt the same looking at people who dripped money: you could sense the boredom and sterility there was in their lives.

  ‘But if you really want to see miserable people,’ he said, ‘you should go to Venice. It’s like Christmas – you know what I mean? There are times and places which are supposed to be happy, happy, happy, and if you feel bad there, you feel guilty too, for not feeling the way you think you ought to. Venice is full of people who’re as miserable as hell, because their expectations for the place are so high that there’s no way reality can match it.’

  He was right. When we got up to the Piazza, we stood for some time leaning on the parapet, looking out over the roofs of the city. Here I was with someone I liked and who gave every appearance of liking me, and we were in Florence together, and yet I still felt troubled and anxious. I’m not a
person who has much talent for happiness, but I remember one of the best moments in my life. It was in Paris, where I used to live. It was a wet weekday morning in March, and I was standing up at a bar counter having a quick coffee on my way to work. I remember I was tired because I hadn’t slept well the night before, and then I caught sight of myself in the mirror behind the bar. I saw myself as if I were a stranger, as if I were someone other than myself, and in that moment I realized that I had everything I wanted in life. I had been in Paris for about four months then. I had my job, a little apartment, I had money in my purse to pay for my coffee, I was an adult. I felt free. And with all these things I felt a sublime happiness, which was all the more intense for the banality of the surroundings – the tattered pricelist on the wall, the rain on the window. I don’t really understand why I felt like that at that particular moment, but I didn’t try too hard to understand, it was a mysterious feeling, and I thought that it was best not to try to analyse it. I was just grateful. I’ve often remembered that morning when times have been bad, for if you know that such moments of peace have been possible, you know that they might happen again. And if you’re really troubled in your soul, it can mean so much to know that.

  Later, when we were walking back into town, we passed a group of street traders, Nigerians and North Africans, who sat silently by their wares, which were set out before them – sunglasses and hairslides, fake designer bags and sweatshirts, and cassette tapes. Ted said, ‘I feel sorry for them: they’re not welcome here.’

  ‘I know,’ I replied. When I was teaching English in the past, one of my students said that he had been to England the previous summer. He had very little money, and had difficulty in finding a room, so he ended up in a hostel. It was full, but they let him bunk down in a sleeping bag on the floor of one of the rooms. There were six beds, he told me with a shocked air, and all the people in them were African. I said, ‘Maybe when they got back to Africa they told their family and friends, “When we were in London, we stayed in this joint that was so cheap and tacky that there was an Italian sleeping on the floor of the bedroom.”’ But my irony was lost on him.