Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  That was five years ago. Since then, she has had just two relationships of any significance: a two-month fling with a cousin of Gianluigi Tranfaglia, which was never going to amount to anything but made her feel better about herself for a while; and now she’s with Robert, who is much more like Vito in many ways – tender, calm, and a little melancholic. Maybe he’s too calm at times. It’s one o’clock and he is asleep. She looks at him. He always sleeps deeply, and his face is as composed as a face on a coin. He seems to have no dreams.

  Through the open window the cry of the owl comes in, and she recalls the first time she spoke to Robert. She had left Gianluigi and his family an hour earlier, and had sat for a while by the Porta di Siena, looking at whatever was there, not wanting to go back to the apartment; Renata was with her father for the weekend. She walked through the sleeping town; a man was smoking a cigar on Piazza del Mercato; on the Corso there was only a cat, sauntering down the middle of the road. Walking past the gardens, she saw someone standing under a tree, gazing up. She recognised him as the painter’s assistant: she had never spoken to him, but had often seen him, nearly always on his own. He had never seemed unfriendly, but she’d had the impression that he was happy to be left alone, which she quite liked, even if Gianluigi, who’d spoken to him once or twice, had described him as ‘very English’, which was not intended as a compliment. He was, said Gianluigi, a man who wouldn’t talk to you unless you said something to him first, so she was surprised when, as if she’d asked him what he was looking at, he pointed into the branches and told her to look: and there was the owl, staring at him.

  She’s awake for another hour, and sometimes the call of the owl is so faint she’s not sure if she’s hearing it or remembering it.

  1.11

  Gideon, in his studio, regards his self-portrait. The picture is progressing slowly: the disc of canvas is almost bare, with only part of a table painted, and the outline of a picture on the wall in the background, behind the orbits of pencil-marks that will become his face. Every year he commits himself to this exercise in self-scrutiny, and never before has it proceeded so haltingly. Previously it has always been a pleasure, this self-scouring; it has brought a satisfaction akin to what he imagines the satisfaction of confession must be. The disappearance of Ilaria, he decides, is the explanation for his slowness: to look at himself, into himself, with absolute honesty he must concentrate, and concentration in these circumstances is too difficult. When he tries to study his face, he evades himself. Glancing aside, he sees his reflection in the black glass of the window, and what he glimpses is a man who is in no mood to be examined.

  He takes a sketchbook from a shelf. It opens on a drawing of Ilaria leaning against a wall, arms folded over her breasts, sullen; the lower half of her body is a flimsy outline. The date, on the reverse, is seven months past; he cannot recall if the expression was one he’d asked her to assume, or if this had been one of her truculent days. On the opposite side of the room, near the head of the stairs, is the place where she had stood to be drawn; he looks across at that area of blank wall, and the air in front of it seems to be charged with her absence, as if she has disappeared from it just an instant before.

  He opens the window and silence comes in, then the hum of a car on the road outside the walls. A voice calls across Piazza del Mercato. Shutters scrape against a sill. A crate of empty bottles is being placed on the pavement below. Another Buona notte. Normally they help him to work, these sounds of the town falling into sleep. He hears the cry of the owl. His niece has the air of someone who has come in judgement; she is like her father, he can tell – minds that think in monochromes and right-angles. He must work.

  For a few minutes he inspects the still life: he applies a spot of Terre Verte to the head of the lizard; he stops. With this painting there is nothing to think about: in his mind he can see it, finished. All he has to do is allow his hand and eyes to complete it, but tonight there is a great torpor in him. It occurs to him that he might go for a coffee at the Corso – it will be open for another half-hour. He goes over to the self-portrait again, like a doctor making a round of the wards. The picture on the wall behind his head might be better as a window, and the angle of the head is wrong, too aggressive. With a pencil he makes adjustments. The owl cries again. Usually it comforts him, like the soft chiming of a clock; now it seems to deride his lack of resolution.

  The spot of paint that he has added to the lizard is superfluous; with a knife he teases it off. In an hour he completes the tail. This picture is boring him, but his boredom is an irrelevance: art is servitude to reality, and servitude is wearying. Before going to bed he makes a sketch, in charcoal, of the spotlit tower. It is a poor piece of work; he tears it up.

  1.12

  Had he lived one hundred years earlier, Muzio Bonvalori might have been assigned a place in Dante’s Inferno, immersed to the brows in the seventh circle’s river of boiling blood, beside Ezzelino da Romano and Obizzo d’Este. He was perhaps a lesser monster than these two, and a person of lesser significance to the history of his country, but he was indubitably a man of habitual and extravagant violence, and a deserving candidate for damnation.

  Ercole Bonvalori, his father, had two sons and two daughters by his wife, Maria. A third son, the youngest, Muzio, was illegitimate: it is believed that his mother was a cook in the kitchens of the Rocca Nuova. Muzio was for many years his father’s favourite: he was a beautiful child, with hair as curly as a lamb’s and the colour of new brass; and he was intelligent, too – he could read and write at an age at which his siblings had been able to utter only syllables, and he quickly learned to play the dulcimer with a dexterity that astonished his tutors. He grew into a prodigiously well-developed child, but at around the age of ten he began to show signs of an unnatural cruelty. One afternoon his mother found him, in his chamber, squeezing the body of a songbird in his fist, like a lemon; blood trickled through his fingers; he had cut the wings off the creature. At the age of twelve he slew with one stroke of his sword a horse that had thrown him.

  His father, in the last years of his life, as Muzio was later to boast, would often lament that Muzio’s mind was diseased. One incident in particular became as well known in Castelluccio as a folk tale: on Muzio’s orders, a man who had stolen food from the larders of the Rocca Nuova was kept in a cell without food for many days before being nailed into a wooden cask; a small hole was bored into its lid – not to give air to the captive, but so that the curious Muzio might observe the soul of the miscreant escaping at the moment of his death.

  Ercole Bonvalori died in 1420, and his two legitimate sons were dead within one year – poisoned, it was rumoured, by their half-brother. The younger of their sisters became pregnant; she was unmarried, and the child she bore had hair the colour of brass. Maria, Ercole’s wife, died soon after this grandchild’s birth; everyone knew that she had died of shame and grief. Muzio’s wife, Lucia, a beautiful and pious young woman, was subjected daily to his brutalities. Little more than a year after her marriage to him, she lamented to her family that she had been treated like a dog since the day she had become his wife. Whenever Muzio was displeased with her, she was made to perform the most menial of duties, and to sleep on the bare stone floor. At twenty-one, driven to the brink of madness by the things she had endured and witnessed, she abandoned their twin daughters and fled to a convent in Siena, where she died, her health broken, only three years later. Muzio married again: his second wife died after giving birth to their first son, and was said to have welcomed her death with joy. The child died on the same day. Muzio mourned him to excess; he spent weeks on end alone; a servant who disturbed him in his weeping was struck in the eye with a blade. Before long, however, Muzio had married for a third time; his new wife soon fled, and nothing more is known of her. Many saw these misfortunes as punishment for Muzio’s innumerable sins, but Muzio Bonvalori, contemptuous of judgement, continued to inflict miseries of every description on his birthplace.

  For more than
twenty years, without respite, Muzio brought suffering to the innocent people of Castelluccio. There was not a man or woman who did not live in fear of him. Given to proclaiming that he was the enemy of God and of compassion, Muzio was a drunkard, a thief, a blasphemer, a murderer, a violator of women. He was reputed to have deflowered both of his daughters, and to have tortured men solely for the pleasure it gave him. The grass below the walls of the Rocca Nuova was said to grow so thickly because of the quantity of blood that had flowed into the soil. It seemed that the soul of Muzio seethed in a perpetual fury; when his anger was at its most demented pitch, the whites of his eyes would turn black. A chronicler of the time describes him as a devil in exile.

  But then, on the eve of the forty-third anniversary of his birth, Muzio Bonvalori was changed. A servant whose name was either Marta or Margareta, recently taken into the Rocca Nuova, one morning caught the eye of her master, who later that day assaulted her. A stable-lad, a boy called Lodovico di Pietro, hearing her screams, ran into the chamber in which the attack was occurring and threw himself between the woman and her assailant. Enraged, Muzio Bonvalori pursued the boy into a room on the uppermost floor of the tower, and there drew his sword. Retreating in terror, the child stumbled, fell backwards, and tumbled from the window. But Lodovico did not die, because as he toppled from the window he called out the name of Saint Zeno, and at that instant, at 3pm on the afternoon of August 22nd, 1443, an angel appeared in a golden whirlwind above the walls of Castelluccio and flew into the courtyard of the Rocca Nuova to catch Lodovico di Pietro and place him on the ground, as softly as a landing dove. And then the angel flew upward into the room in which Muzio Bonvalori stood aghast, and a light brighter than the sun was seen to blaze from the window from which Lodovico had fallen.

  Muzio Bonvalori emerged from that room transformed: in all but his physical features, he was a different man. He lived for another twenty-seven years, and in that time he was constant in his care for the people on whom he had hitherto inflicted such misery. For the welfare of the poorest, he founded the Ceppo dei Poveri, which distributed alms to the distressed. No citizen died unattended by a priest. In times of bad harvest, the granaries of the Rocca Nuova were thrown open. Muzio paid for the building of the Cappella Bonvalori in the church of San Giovanni Battista and for the altarpiece depicting Saint Bernardino. He commissioned a copy of the Gospels, and another of The Golden Legend and he read them continuously from first light to last. The man who had for so many years been impervious to any sentiment of pity was seen to weep like a child at the thought of the pains of the martyrs. On his deathbed, in his final hours of consciousness, though reduced by illness to little more than a breathing skeleton, he recited the vision of Saint John on Patmos as perfectly as if the text had been inscribed onto the bedsheet he was clutching.

  2

  2.1

  THE MANAGER COMES OUT of the office as she drops the key on the counter. He introduces himself as Maurizio, and gives her a handshake; his hand retains hers for a good five seconds longer than is necessary. He is a good-looking man: fiftyish, slim, hands slender and manicured, bold blue eyes, hair swept back into thick curls behind the ears, handsomely veined with grey. The shirt – white with sky-blue stripes – is pristine; he wears a heavy black-faced watch. ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ he says, maintaining eye contact. ‘You are, I believe, the niece of Mr Westfall, our great artist,’ he goes on.

  She’s not sure if sarcasm is intended – it may be nothing more than an effect of the accent. ‘I am,’ she confirms. ‘How did you know?’

  The innocence of the question amuses him. ‘Mr Bancourt,’ he explains. ‘We are friends.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  This response appears to be charming. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘we are friends for many years. You have met him, yes?’

  ‘I have,’ she answers.

  ‘Yes,’ says Maurizio, gratified. ‘Yes. Of course. Good.’ He glances to the side, through the window, as an old woman hobbles by, carrying a bag that makes her tilt twenty degrees to the left; watching her pass, he smiles again, as if the old lady were a relative going about her daily routine. ‘You are going to the exhibition?’ he resumes.

  ‘Gideon’s?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Maurizio. ‘You know where it is?’ he asks, as a formality.

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘It is very good,’ he says, his face now appropriately serious. ‘Very beautiful.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ she says.

  ‘He is a master.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘You are going now?’ he asks; there’s a possibility that he’s going to volunteer to accompany her.

  ‘This morning, yes, but not right away,’ she answers, hoping to give the impression that an experience as serious as the Master’s exhibition should not be rushed. ‘I’ll wander for a while first. Explore,’ she says, making a meandering motion with her hand.

  Maurizio watches her hand as if her gesture were one of extraordinary elegance. ‘That will not take a long time,’ he says, in a tone of apology. ‘But it is a nice town, for people who do not want big lights and activity all the time. I like it. I hope you will like it as well.’

  ‘I think I shall,’ she says, with a glance at the door.

  ‘You must go,’ says Maurizio, imposing another handshake, but brief.

  Less than ten minutes later, having sauntered the whole length of the main street and doubled halfway back, she is in the entrance hall of the Palazzo Comunale, where a black cardboard arrow, attached to a poster bearing her uncle’s name and the image of a painting of a stone wall, directs her up the staircase. At the head of the stairs a second arrow diverts her into a long vaulted room, past a table and unoccupied chair. To the left, beyond the doorway, five laminated sheets of card are attached to the wall: texts in Italian, English, French, German and Spanish, each with a photo of a brooding Gideon in the top right-hand corner. She scans the English page, and reads that Gideon Westfall regards himself as ‘the medium of the image’ … that in his portraits he strives to capture what he calls ‘the third person, that volatile product of the fusion between the spirit of the sitter and the spirit of the painter’ … that he reveres, ‘in no particular order’, Raphael, van Eyck, Ingres, Morandi, Poussin, Piero della Francesca. Someone called Angelica Martinuzzi believes that Westfall ‘meets the enormous demands of his concepts with certainty and conviction’.

  The pictures are hung on tall partitions that make a maze in the middle of the space. Facing the door, alone, is a self-portrait, a drawing, in which Gideon – though much younger than he is now – presents himself to the public much as he presented himself to her: challengingly, confident of his charisma. Round the corner she comes upon a line of pictures – sketches in pencil and charcoal and oil paint – of a small chapel that appears to be situated in the middle of fields of grass, and to have been abandoned. The sketches, the labels inform her, are all from the same year, 2008, and several are almost identical: slight changes in the shape of the shadows or in the tone of yellow that he’s used for the walls are all that differentiates them. At the end of the line hangs a finished painting of the chapel, in which every little element – sprigs of weed; crumbs of stone; flaking paint on the door – has been raised to a more than natural focus. It strikes her as the sort of thing that photography has made redundant, but it’s accomplished, very. The sky behind the building, cloudless, has a dozen different shades of blue in it.

  A similar sequence faces the chapel pictures: here the subject is a flight of stone steps with an arch of brick above it. It’s the same idea: a run of sketches, then the final item, which is again remarkably precise, unquestionably fine, but finicky. Drawings come next – highly worked pencil drawings, all of them, and all are of women, naked: women from the front, women from the back, women lying down, women standing up, women sitting down, women looking straight at you, women looking winsomely askance. She knows what a woman looks like unclothed. But the following s
ection is full of women too: small paintings, in which the figures are finished but have areas of roughly applied paint all around them, as if the artist had been testing out colours for the background and then given up. She is on the point of giving up herself, but she feels that she is under an obligation, so she works her way along the queue of nudes. The labels all follow the same form: Nude Study (June 2005), Nude Study (August 1992), Nude Study (May 2001) and so on. There’s more than twenty years between the first and the last, but you could swap the dates around and it would make no difference; this doesn’t seem right – shouldn’t artists, like everyone else, develop with time? She stops at Nude Study (September 1999). This is a beautiful young woman; the body is delectable; there is skill here, immense skill; but the picture could have been made by Gideon in 2009, as far as she can judge; it might have been made in 1899, come to that.

  She is no longer alone in the hall. At the far end, a large painting of a pile of fruit and books is being scrutinised by a man who’s more interesting to look at than any of the pictures: he’s tall, gaunt, around Maurizio’s age or a little older, with close-cropped white hair and a nose like you might see on a cartoon of a Roman emperor, on which is perched a pair of expensive-looking glasses, rimless. The general demeanour is academic, but the suit – blue, linen – and the immaculate white shirt have the look of designer clothing, and he’s carrying a stylish briefcase. On the way out, she stops at the fruit and books; the man has moved on, to a small painting of a monk in his cell. He glances at the picture she’s looking at, then at her, and he cocks an eyebrow as she passes, seeming to have intuited that she too has her doubts.