The little man turned on her the most extraordinary, wrenched smile while the tea trickled unheeded from his tilted cup on to his already stained trousers. ‘Why, yes,’ he cried. ‘My dearest one, I’ve searched for you high and low to give you them. My Clara.’
It was an instant which froze us all. I remember the thick thrill in my stomach when I saw the tears run down the little man’s face. This was the moment for my father to interpose decisively; yet again it was my sister who seemed more capable of a reasonable response, as if she were touched rather than frightened by the stranger’s pathetic charm.
‘I’m afraid my name isn’t Clara,’ she told him. ‘Awfully sorry.’
‘Not Clara?’ he whispered.
‘No. I’m Caroline.’
‘Caroline.’ He stared at a clump of bracken. ‘But it nearly contains her. The anagram, you see. One letter short. So nearly. Always so nearly.’ He dried his face with his sweater. ‘Never mind. These days it’s getting late and you’re a dear, sweet child and a pianist as well so I want you to have them.’
He began to wrestle in his trousers, tugging at a pocket. An object flew out and landed rattling in the middle of the tablecloth but the man’s attention was on the crumpled pages he had found. He smoothed them and we could see music manuscript with notes and staves.
‘There,’ he said, now on his feet and handing them down to my sister with an archaic bow. I wondered for a moment if he would kiss her hand but he became distracted by the lost object my father was holding out to him. ‘Ah, my bonbonnière,’ he said with a dire wink. ‘Thank you, doctor.’
I had recognised it at once as a pillbox: one of those circular off-white affairs made of pleated waxed paper. You don’t see them nowadays. My father had given its label a knowing glance and now said, ‘You might perhaps take one, Mr Pinckney?’ But something in the little man’s mood had broken for he only repeated: ‘Never mind, it’s getting late,’ before muttering ‘It’s been charming. Quite like old times,’ while hurrying away without a backward glance, head bent, his awful sweater quickly lost among the dapples of the tree trunks.
Nobody said much as we rapidly repacked the picnic things. All I could register was an eleven-year-old’s certainty that we would never be coming back to this spot. Other ghosts had taken the place of my mother’s. On the way back to the car my father took a short cut across the flank of a wooded hill which suddenly afforded us an unexpected downward view. In the middle distance stood a grim Victorian pile from one of whose outbuildings rose a brick smokestack like that of a steam laundry. He paused.
‘And that, I fear, is the magical country house.’
Once we were safely back in the car I asked, ‘Was he mad?’
‘Rather off his chump, I’d say,’ came the diagnosis.
‘But harmless really,’ said Caroline.
‘No doubt,’ said my father with a fretful smile. ‘No doubt.’
The pages the little man had presented to her seemed nowhere to be found and for some time there was nothing tangible to remind us our haunted picnic. Months later they turned up in the AA book; Caroline must have dropped them into the Wolseley’s door pocket. The crotchets and quavers were indecipherable; the crude, aching drawings were not.
All this was long ago, of course, and now our father, too, is dead. Certain of his details are already slipping away. But to this day when Caroline can be persuaded to play Carnaval the music at once brings back an intense memory of faces sliding one behind the other – our mother, our father, the little man and his sad fantastic company, all moving in that far-off summer glade with the unease of an inexhaustible longing. Our yearnings, it seems, express us more memorably than do our compromised equanimities. The piece called ‘Chopin’ has a particular effect on Caroline. She once described it as claiming an unfair intimacy, like being made love to in public by a perfect stranger.
Jaro
HE HAD BEEN leaning against the Aperto/Chiuso sign at the entrance to the filling-station and now hovered diffidently on the forecourt as the Agip man rummaged in his greasy satchel for change, sidling up rapidly at the last moment and speaking through the open window on the passenger’s side.
‘You’re not going towards Manciano? Even a kilometre?’
He looked all in. Sixteen, seventeen, ratty blond hair; beaky, with the bones of a sparrow. Clearly foreign but speaking good Italian. He sank into the seat and momentarily closed his eyes, let his mouth sag enough to show greenish teeth. His clothes exhaled.
‘You’re not really going to Manciano, are you?’ he asked with weary canniness. ‘But anything’s better than walking.’ He had crusts the colour of breadcrumbs in the corners of his eyes. ‘My cousin might be there.’
With unexpected formality he turned and offered a thin, dirty hand as the car gathered speed. He was called Jaro; said he was from Croatia, somewhere up not far from Trieste. Maybe this explained his fluency in Italian. But then he gave an account of wandering for eight months in Italy, eight months looking for scattered remnants of his family, living on scraps of information passed on by other refugees, titbits of hope which were less useful than kindly meant in an ironic sort of way. He had, it seemed, an instinctive aversion to authorities of any kind. Whosever mercy he would throw himself on, it would not be that of official charity, still less that of men and women in uniform.
‘You don’t understand,’ he flatly said, hunched by the window and watching Umbria pass with an indifferent eye. ‘Confidence? What do you mean?’ (for efforts were being made by the Italian authorities to keep some sort of track of illegal immigrants, though it was always less trouble to pick up Africans and Arabs and ask for their papers than it was to pester blonds). ‘What do you mean, have confidence in you? Why care what I think of you? It’s good to be taken somewhere near Manciano if it’s not out of your way. That’s all.’ Unexpectedly he flipped down the sun visor and stared at himself in the vanity mirror.
Wherever Manciano was it was a good few kilometres off. He accepted with equanimity the car’s stopping by a group of houses at the roadside, and whatever suspicion had sparked behind his derelict child’s mask was swamped at once by the smell inside the pizzeria. The pizzas came sliding out by the shovelful from a blazing brick hole in the wall, their bubbles of puddled cheese adding a savoury layer to the ambient scent of hot dough. Jaro ate three without stopping, later bringing out with him in a cardboard box the uneaten two-thirds of another. When not actually eating he had spent a long time in the little washroom, to the inconvenience of several patrons who were obliged to keep returning to their tables and continue scowling and plucking at their fingers with napkins. Jaro now climbed back into the car with a certain bounce and immediately examined himself again in the mirror on the sun visor. He had washed his hair in the sink, evidently, for it hung limply in damp clots and smelt of the peppermint-scented soap found in motorway washroom dispensers. The crusts had gone. The whitish rime around his mouth had been replaced by a fresh orange moustache from the cans of Fanta he’d drunk. He wiped this away with a clean linen napkin plainly just stolen from the pizzeria.
‘Mean bastards,’ he observed, flipping up the visor. ‘No soap in the washroom, can you imagine? Only a titchy basin and no soap. No problem, though. You just carry a condom of liquid soap and keep refilling it, did you know that? The things you learn.’
Post-pizza Jaro was a more expansive creature, though still not entirely relaxed. Enough had happened in his short life to convince him that free lunches weren’t. At least he evidently felt enough grim confidence to tackle the matter head-on. He was sometimes given lifts by people with intentions of their own, he said. He particularly remembered some German or Austrian who’d picked him up outside Bolzano a month or two ago in an olive-green BMW.
‘The car was really hot inside. He had the heating turned up like a greenhouse. He drove out of town fast until we came to this deserted lay-by on the edge of a wood. Snow everywhere and this deep black forest off to the right. It was l
ate afternoon and getting dark and the cars were passing us with their sidelights on. There weren’t many of them. I hadn’t eaten for two days, got these soaking feet like lumps of wet ice. So the old sod tries it on, shifting around in this squeaky leather jacket on the squeaky leather seat. On and on he goes till he starts getting really pissed off that I can’t get a hard-on. In the end he throws me out and drives off – rawrr! – in a great spray of snow all red from the tail lights.’
Odd for its interpolated detail and sound effects, this little story was told without apparent grudge. It was entirely up to the listener to fill in whatever blanks as the still frozen, hungry, homeless child was left standing at the forest’s edge as punishment for his cancelled libido. What cheerless landscape was this, with war raging somewhere over the horizon and disbanded families straggling across alien territory like hibernating ants burnt out of a hollow tree? Just Europe at the twentieth century’s end, as at its beginning and middle. Jaro had walked to the next town because no-one else would stop, not on a darkening road with snow coming down and a mass of shopping to do before the hypermarket closed. – You couldn’t blame them – he seemed to be saying. – There’s no connection between one person’s life and any other’s. People wander in and out of our field of vision, some smiling and some limping. Even their own kids are unrecognisable in the wrong light. –
Shortly after he had told this story the car was held up for what seemed like hours at a set of temporary traffic lights marking roadworks. In the interval Jaro fell asleep, head sagging back against the window and mouth open. Among the furred teeth a few neat fillings were visible which, like a certain mannerliness, suggested a quite underelict past. Once the lights had changed Manciano appeared a couple of kilometres down the road. He was not easily woken. In barely ten minutes his face had taken on the crushed shapelessness of an infant’s.
‘Manciano,’ he repeated uncomprehendingly at the window as if the view of outskirts it offered ought to mean something to him. His eyelids kept drooping. Apparently his cousin should be here somewhere but there was no address. Would it be too much to ask at the police station for him? The post office? The town hall? If Jaro himself went he might be detained or worse. ‘Trust me,’ he said pleadingly. ‘I’ll write his name for you. Please. Can’t I stay here just for a bit? You can take the car keys with you. And remove the radio if you want, and anything else.’ He was asleep before the door closed on him.
Predictably, Manciano gave up not the smallest shred of evidence of a cousin, a refugee or even a foreigner – not unless (as someone in the Town Hall remarked) you counted the Tunisian vu cumprà who pushed his pram about town on Tuesdays and Fridays selling Biros, quartz watches and Bic lighters. ‘Friend of a friend?’ said a carabiniere in a way which hinted at illicit flirtations. ‘Better try the hotel. It’s in the square. Why not come back if you have no luck there?’
A fruitless hour thus passed, at the end of which the car was still there and so was the sleeping Jaro who didn’t even wake as the door opened, the engine started, the road flowed back beneath the tyres. Manciano had indeed been a detour and it was some time before the car slowed to drive across a bridge of railway sleepers and along a track edged by olive terraces. It stopped outside a small farmhouse. A dog barked a greeting from the end of a chain. Doves sat in a glimmering row on the garage roof, outlined against the dusk. After repeated shakings Jaro opened his eyes. The courtesy light revealed them full of the tears squeezed out by dreams.
‘I bet this is your house, right?’
Once inside, in the brick-floored kitchen with the brick-lined ceiling from whose rafters hung bunches of this and that, he said, ‘But you live here alone? No family? No children?’ His eyes were quite round now, empty of sleep. They contained a child’s intense curiosity about families, possibly tinged with an orphaned wistfulness. He quickly lit on the photograph hanging by the door. ‘Your son? Where is he now? Why America? He looks my age.’ Then the doubt, verging on suspicion. ‘Is Luca really your son?’ His unresting prowl and his questions filled the kitchen with a sense of disintegration, as though the sole purpose of people known and loved was to be forever doubted, separated, dispersed. It was only when the dog came in and took excitedly to this sour-clothed wanderer that the atmosphere began to knit itself together again. On the floor by the fire they sprawled over each other in a meltdown of puppification. The only thing which could distract Jaro was the prospect of a bath while supper cooked. In the bedroom assigned him (which had a heavy round-topped door like that of an ancient chapel) drawers were opened and rummaged through for suitable clothes. ‘Good old Luca,’ he said with a flawed smile and vanished into the bathroom.
He reappeared in the kitchen after nearly an hour, heralded by wafts of myosotis, wearing clean jeans and a T-shirt. The beak of his nose was very pink, adding vulnerability to its prominence. Adolescence had pushed it out ahead of the laggardly rest of him. His teeth were distinctly whiter. Scoured and renewed, he moved about with the confidence of one who has regained the persona his own mother might have recognised.
‘There’s a guitar on the wall upstairs,’ he said. ‘It’s been put up at an angle so it must be an ornament.’
This was well observed. Taking the chastened silence for permission Jaro left and returned with it. He blew the dust off and peered inside.
‘You don’t play, do you? And I’ll bet Luca doesn’t, either. Look, it comes from Valencia. Oh, the strings are dried out. I don’t know if they’ll stand tuning.’
He sat on the raised hearth and, as the roasting chicken poppled and spat quietly in the oven, tuned the guitar. As he did so his nose, impendent above the instrument, began to lose its appendage-like awkwardness and turn instead into a delicate sense organ, sniffing at the notes as they rose.
‘That’s A,’ he said at last, satisfied. ‘You don’t believe me. Trust me, that’s A. Now we can get bottom E and top E.’ A blond lock of hair dangled as he bent further over, listening to the harmonics beating. Despite his intentness the tuning filled the kitchen with an unpropitious sound, the nasal whangings of notes sliding up and down at their pegs’ adjustment, the plunk-plunk-plunk of repetition. It all seemed to herald the kind of tedium which promised to stretch illimitably ahead until it infected the very stones of the house. That was until Jaro’s hands took the place of his nose as his best feature. Most hands remain little better than paws but sometimes the unlikeliest hand becomes transfigured the instant it closes around a chisel, kneads dough, touches an instrument. Jaro’s fingers now had no connection with the row of grubby digits which had mutely gripped the car’s windowsill in the filling station. These were fingers happily at home on familiar territory and all at once, after the briefest pause, they began to play.
The music was startlingly loud in the kitchen, absolutely arresting in its presence and immediacy in a way which made a mockery of the record industry’s claims to their products’ lifelike fidelity. There was no substitute for the real thing; and Jaro was the real thing. – Listen – said his fingers – this is who I am. The rest is anonymous flotsam. –
‘Very bad,’ he said delightedly at the end. ‘My hands are too stiff. It’s been so long. That was supposed to be a study by Fernando Sor but my teacher wouldn’t have recognised it. And these old gut strings of yours are useless. They’ve lost their resonance.’
Over supper he withdrew a little. Or rather, he wouldn’t be obedient in his answers. He was from the Istrian peninsula, from near Fiume (which d’Annunzio and his Fascists had annexed in the early Twenties) and his guitar teacher lived in Zagreb but was a Slovene. Or something like that. Now was not the time to try and make sense of Balkan ethnic divisions. Jaro wouldn’t talk at all about his family but became intent on his food as questions about mothers and fathers and siblings hung sadly in the air. Instead he offered more stories from the last eight months’ odyssey, full of the hangdog wisdom of marginal living whose subtext of time-wasting was swamped by the rococo energy of youth. He to
ld of ferocious urchins encamped on wastelands around the great cities of Milan and Bologna, professional thieves of nine and ten indentured to gangsters and too young to be prosecuted. They had been filtering steadily down from the Balkans years before Yugoslavia fell apart. He told of sleeping in sheds and barns and begging food and running from vicious dogs; of being shot at by a nervous farmer in the foothills of the Alps. He spoke of talismans: of passports and carte d’identità and work permits (in the back pocket of his sour trousers had been a valid driver’s licence – clearly stolen – belonging to someone in Parma).
‘You know, that’s the best meal I’ve had for months,’ he said when he could eat no more. He was thin enough that, like a puppy’s, his stomach beneath the T-shirt made a tight dome. There was nothing uncivil in this form of thanks: it was more a token of naturalness as of a boy in his own kitchen. Refusing coffee as he’d refused all but a single glass of white wine, Jaro reached once more for the guitar which had attracted his avid glances throughout the meal. Again he played the piece by Sor, this time with more confidence, listening with head on one side instead of watching his fingers on the frets. The house did not yet have electricity and a quality in the lamp-or firelight fleetingly made visible the man of sixty he might turn into, or maybe revealed a grandparent in his blood. The beaky profile became for that moment immensely refined, the hollowed eyes contemplative, the set of head and shoulder alert with habitual listening. Finishing the study he switched immediately into an altogether lengthier piece, melodious, vaguely Mozartean and initially of a haunting plangency. It ended with a lightweight rondo whose figurations became more complex at each repeat of the merry theme. Jaro threw it off with such panache that his occasional fluffs only added to the music’s vividness.
The Music Page 2