Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  Tomorrow he is driving to Sansepolcro, to study Piero’s Resurrection. ‘To some of us, the Renaissance is still news,’ he says. ‘True art never ceases to be news.’

  From: Quentin Scammell, “Gideon Westfall: radical traditionalist”, Painting Today, vol 25, no. 3, April 2001.

  3

  3.1

  CROSSING PIAZZA MAGGIORE, Robert sees a woman in jeans and a white shirt taking a photo of the square, then he realises that she’s Claire. The lens is pointing in his direction, but she doesn’t see him until he waves to her; she reacts with a start, and lowers the camera. ‘I think I might have wandered into your shot,’ he tells her; they take a look, and there he is, on the edge of the picture, arm partly raised. ‘How are you this morning?’ he asks.

  ‘Very well,’ she says. She looks rested and relaxed, and the casual way she holds the camera – at her side, fingers encircling the lens – is suggestive of competence. The white shirt suits her, and there’s a good perfume too: a pleasant musky scent that has bergamot in it, and perhaps violets, and vanilla.

  ‘What does the day hold?’ he asks.

  ‘Gideon rang the hotel – we’re having lunch,’ she says, with a flexing of an eyebrow.

  ‘Give it time,’ he says.

  She raises her face and momentarily closes her eyes in the sunlight. ‘And where are you off to?’ she asks, as though accusing him of playing truant.

  Before starting work, he explains, he has a coffee in the Corso, then he walks to the Santa Maria gate and back.

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Most days.’

  She smiles at this. ‘Gideon and his schedule. You and your ritual,’ she comments.

  ‘Habit might be a better word,’ he says.

  She has been reminded of her ex-husband – his need to have all doors and drawers shut perfectly, which was once an endearing quirk, and later an irritant.

  ‘You’re welcome to join me,’ says Robert. Claire looks around the square, as if assessing whether it might offer something better than a stroll to the Santa Maria gate.

  She’s about to answer that she’ll stay here for a while when a chubby bald man, bespectacled, in a rumpled black suit, making a detour across the square, comes towards them. He shakes Robert’s hand, says something that has the word maestro in it, and Robert introduces Mr Lanese, director of the Museo Civico of Castelluccio, to the maestro’s niece. Mr Lanese removes his glasses before squeezing her palm with fingers as soft as chamois; in English he professes to be delighted, and observes a resemblance to Mr Westfall. But he must hurry, he apologises, as if to say that nothing could have pleased him more than to linger with them.

  ‘A very nice chap,’ remarks Robert ruefully, as soon as Mr Lanese is out of earshot. ‘He deserves better.’

  ‘Better than what?’

  ‘Being in charge of the most boring museum in Italy. You should give it a look. It’s terrible. Like a Renaissance degree show, but worse. Anyway, I mustn’t dally. Coming?’ he asks, and she goes with him.

  Before they have reached the end of Corso Diaz at least ten people have greeted Robert. Three have stopped for a quick word. ‘Tell me,’ she says, after the third has left them, ‘do you know absolutely everybody in this town?’

  ‘A small place,’ he answers. ‘And we’ve been here a long time. Everybody knows Gideon, and I’m his representative on earth.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘What, being his representative?’

  ‘Living in a tiny town. Everyone knowing your business.’

  ‘Oh, they know your face,’ he says, ‘but not necessarily much more than that.’

  As they arrive at Santa Maria dei Carmini a stout woman, of Gideon’s age or thereabouts, comes out of the church and, seeing Robert, smiles as a woman might do on encountering a favourite nephew. ‘Ciao Roberto,’ she calls across the square, and performs a mime – which involves turning a key in a door – to explain why she’s not stopping.

  ‘This is ridiculous,’ Claire says.

  ‘Her name’s Luisa,’ he tells her. ‘A pal of Gideon’s. She has a shop, near the hotel. The window full of industrial-strength knickers and bras.’

  ‘She seems to like you.’

  ‘She likes Gideon. And vice versa.’

  ‘You’re telling me she’s his girlfriend?’

  He laughs at the idea; he is watching Luisa, waiting for her to disappear into Corso Diaz, as if this conversation cannot be continued until she has gone. ‘Got a minute?’ he asks. ‘I’ll show you something, in here.’ He leads her into the church, where he stops at the entrance to the sacristy, below a life-sized Virgin, a bearded man and a pair of angels, all made of white plaster. ‘Right,’ he begins. ‘You need to understand what’s going on here.’ He proceeds to explain that this tableau represents the moment at which, on July 16, 1251, in Cambridge, the Virgin Mary appeared to St Simon Stock, the vicar-general of the Carmelites, and placed the scapular – ‘that rectangle of cloth with strings attached’ – in his hands, with the words: This shall be a sign of grace for you and for all Carmelites: whoever dies clothed in this shall not suffer eternal fire. ‘That’s what it says, on the ribbon the angels are holding,’ he tells her.

  She is facing the figures, but her eyes don’t seem to be looking. ‘Am I boring you?’ he asks.

  ‘Not at all,’ Claire replies. ‘Really. I’m interested. It’s bonkers.’

  ‘Well,’ he continues, ‘several years ago, one Sunday morning, the left arm of St Simon fell off and crashed to the floor. You can see where it’s been repaired,’ he says, pointing to a thick grey seam above the elbow. ‘The arm landed here, where Luisa had been standing only a minute earlier. She’d been standing right on this spot, talking to the priest. If the arm had come away sixty seconds earlier, she would have been killed. And the thing is, Luisa wears the scapular. Which of course explains why she survived. The scapular of St Simon Stock saved her from his arm. Celestial vigilance; no casualties.’

  ‘You believe that?’ she asks.

  ‘No. Of course not.’

  ‘Just checking.’ After a few more seconds have passed, she smiles.

  ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘Like I said,’ she replies. ‘Life in a small town. We pass an old lady in the street, and you have a story about her. Everybody knows everybody.’

  ‘Coincidence. We happened to see Luisa, but I couldn’t tell you anything about anyone else we’ve seen this morning. Hardly a thing.’

  ‘Ah, “hardly,”’ she says. ‘A lot of leeway there.’

  Robert has to get to work; he leaves her in the church. For a moment or two she regards the broken-armed saint, though it’s not of much interest. When she comes out, the movement of a lizard on the wall makes her jump, and her pulse races, for longer than it should, as though she’s just climbed a dozen flights of stairs.

  3.2

  The Common Wall Lizard (Podarcis muralis), which is widespread in Mediterranean Europe, was first described in 1768 by the Austrian naturalist Josephus Nicolaus Laurenti (1735–1805). Of the various subspecies that have been classified, several are native to Italy, including Podarcis muralis breviceps, Podarcis muralis nigriventris, Podarcis muralis bruggemani, Podarcis muralis cerbolensis and Podarcis muralis maculiventris, which was identified in 1838 by Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Musignano and Canino, and nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte. The lizard that has startled Claire is a female Podarcis muralis nigriventris. Being three years old, this specimen is approaching the midpoint of the average life span for the subspecies; measuring 135mm from nose to tail-tip, it is of moderate size for a creature that rarely exceeds 190mm in length. Purely insectivorous, Podarcis muralis nigriventris is prey to birds, snakes, scorpions, spiders, cats and various other mammals.

  3.3

  It’s a Saturday, so when his father closes the shop Giovanni Cabrera will have a meal with his parents, then he’ll meet Alessandra and they’ll see who’s around at the Torre, and at ten or eleven th
ey’ll pile into Ivo’s Lancia and they’ll drive to a club on the coast, or maybe they’ll go to Florence. If they go to Florence they’ll clear their heads in the morning with a walk by the river, and have a smoke on the Trìnita bridge, with the water sliding underneath them, then they’ll drive back, fast, with the hills changing colour all around.

  It was Alessandra who told him what Ilaria was doing. And after he’d split with Ilaria he was down by the stream with Ivo one evening, shooting cans with the air rifle, and Alessandra had turned up and said she’d just seen Ilaria with the Englishman, the younger one, and although it didn’t matter any more this made him miss a can or two, which made Alessandra laugh. A few days later she came down to the stream again, and this time he shot ten cans in a row, including one that Ivo balanced on the palm of an outstretched hand. That night Alessandra came with him to the cypress trees, where he often goes when the sky is clear, because the trees screen out every bit of light from the town, so with his binoculars he can see thousands of stars. An astronomer is what he would be in a perfect world, but what he’ll do instead is run the shop when his father packs it in. He has wanted to be an astronomer ever since the day at school, ten years ago, when the class was shown a film about Mount Palomar, but later he’d realised that he wasn’t smart enough to do that kind of thing for a living, though he was smart enough to do it as a hobby. So he would have sat by the trees with Alessandra and showed her which constellation was which, and explained how the stars were formed and how far they were, and what that meant: that this speck of light started its flight through space when there were dinosaurs walking where Castelluccio now was. He would have told her, as it would seem he tells every girl he brings here, about the signal that came from the direction of Sagittarius on August 15th, 1977: the 37-second pulse that made an astronomer called Jerry Ehman write “Wow!” on the printout at Ohio State University’s radio telescope. It’s an exciting story, and it makes a girl move closer. And soon Giovanni and Alessandra were going up the hill nearly every night, even though Alessandra’s father doesn’t like him, and neither does her mother.

  It was Alessandra’s best friend Bernarda who told her what Ilaria was doing. Bernarda, like Alessandra, was in the same class as Ilaria, and for a few months, unlike Alessandra, had been her friend, until Ilaria became too much of a drag, always moaning or talking about the things she was going to do to get famous. They had gone riding together a few times, and for a while they were both in the group that used to hang out at the Torre. It was at the Torre that Ilaria got to know Giovanni. There was a shoot-’em-up game in the bar, and one night Giovanni made the highest score ever. They took a liking to each other, though they didn’t see eye to eye about Castelluccio. ‘This place will drive me insane,’ she told him, raking her hair back in despair. ‘I like it,’ he said. His mother was born here; his father was born here; three of his grandparents were born here. ‘I belong here,’ he said. ‘There is nothing to do,’ she said. He had to agree, but he found it hard to imagine living anywhere else. ‘Castelluccio is my shell,’ he told her. ‘I am not a tortoise,’ said Ilaria. For her, Castelluccio was a cage, and she couldn’t stand living with her father and mother; her father made her work like a slave. When they went up to the cypresses, she was like a girl on leave from prison. When she fired the air rifle, she seemed to be settling a score. Ilaria was sexy as hell, even when she was going around as if she had her own private thundercloud hanging over her head. They argued, usually at the weekend, when her father wouldn’t let her go with them in the car. He’d no more let her go clubbing in Florence than he’d let her have heroin for breakfast, she said. On one occasion, after Ilaria had stayed out until midnight, he ambushed Giovanni on the street and swore at him for getting his daughter drunk. So Giovanni would have to go to Florence without her, every other week or so, and the following day she wouldn’t speak to him, or she’d arrange to meet him and not turn up, or shriek at him for an hour non-stop, as mad as her father.

  It was Viviana who told Bernarda about Ilaria and the painter. Viviana left the Torre late one Saturday night and saw Ilaria opening the gate that led to the apartments. As soon as he heard this, Giovanni confronted his girlfriend. ‘Why were you going in there?’ he demanded. ‘What business is it of yours?’ answered Ilaria. She wanted to know if he’d had a good time in Florence. He asked her again what she’d been doing, and this time she replied, with no hesitation, as if he’d merely asked what she’d had to eat that evening: ‘I am a model.’ You could see the information working its way into the depths of Giovanni’s mind, she said, like a tiny drop of coffee trickling into a sugar cube. ‘You take off your clothes?’ he asked; he could not have been more bewildered if she’d just told him that she was in fact a man. ‘That is what models do,’ she told him. ‘He says I’m good,’ she went on, ‘and he pays me. He says good models are hard to find.’ She showed him the envelope with the notes in it. ‘What exactly is he paying you for?’ Giovanni enquired. She was going to slap him, she said, but as her hand moved upward it changed its shape and she punched him instead, on the ear. Then he slapped her, right in the middle of Via Sant’Agostino, in broad daylight, and that was the end of that, more or less. Within a week, all of her friends and all of his knew what Ilaria was doing. One afternoon she stormed into the shop and emptied a carton of milk over him. And that really was the end of that.

  The following week, Giovanni was on his way back from Volterra, on his Vespa, when he saw Ilaria walking along the road with the painter’s assistant. They were walking close to each other, and he could tell by the smile on Ilaria’s face and the smile she was getting back from him that something was going on. He rode past as if he hadn’t noticed them, but a few days later he went up to the stables to have it out with her. ‘So, what’s happening?’ he asked. Nothing was happening, she told him, and if something was happening it wouldn’t be any of his business, would it? Voices were raised. ‘Are you fucking him?’ Giovanni shouted. ‘Maybe I am and maybe I’m not,’ Ilaria shouted. Her father appeared, and Giovanni kick-started the Vespa.

  Giovanni rode through the Porta di Santa Maria at speed, at precisely the same instant as a lizard, crawling up the wall beside the gate, was spotted by a cat that had been taking the sun on the pavement on the opposite side of the gate. The cat sprinted across the road, into the path of angry Giovanni, who was not quite as attentive as he should have been. He swerved too sharply, skidded, and fell. Some skin was scoured from one forearm, a hip was heavily bruised, and a shin was cracked, so now he can’t take his place in the parade, because you can’t hurl a flag and catch it when you’re on crutches.

  3.4

  Following Via Sant’Agostino, Claire passes a nice-looking building called L’Antica Cereria, which seems to contain apartments or maybe offices, and comes to a narrow street that cuts back towards Corso Diaz. She takes it, and after twenty yards the street widens out, in front of an old house that has a crumbly piece of stone – perhaps a coat of arms – stuck between the ground-floor and first-floor windows. It looks like a solidified sponge; she can make out the tail of what might have been a dolphin. Sunlight is on the top of the building; the bronze-coloured guttering glows; she can hear applause on a TV set – and then, for no discernible reason, Joe appears in her head, and suddenly she’s remembering that evening, arriving home from work to find him at the kitchen table, waiting for her, obviously, with his face pre-set in Remorse mode. ‘We need to talk’: she can hear him saying it, and it’s funny now, usually – as if he’d rehearsed for his big moment by memorising lines from a terrible film. And she can see him: the anguished clamping of hands to brow; the watery-eyed protestations of self-loathing; the woebegone stare. There’s still a sting in the memory, but no longer any great sense of loss. She is not thinking about him, yet he is in her mind, like a phrase from a stupid tune that she can’t get out of her head. To chase him out, she starts looking for things that would make a picture.

  She crosses Corso Diaz, saunters back
to Santa Maria, frames a shot of the façade, thinks better of it, then goes through the gate. On the outside of the town wall, ILARIA TI AMO has been sprayed in scarlet paint; the script is angular and quite elegant; she takes a photo. She returns to Piazza Santa Maria, and this time goes right, into Via Santa Maria. Halfway along, she finds a lane: she walks up it, and within a few seconds she becomes aware of a sound, a pulsing clatter with a hiss in it, which is coming from somewhere in front of her. The lane makes a right-angled turn to the left, and at this angle she finds the source of the noise: a door is open, and through it she sees a large room and a printing press. It’s an old contraption, black, the size of a small car, and a man in blue overalls is standing beside it, with his back to her, watching sheets of yellow paper rolling through fast-spinning drums. To the right of the door is a small barred window, which allows her to look for longer, unseen. One whole side of the room is taken up by a machine that looks like a vast white cupboard with a computer attached to it; a young woman is sitting at it, tapping at the keyboard, and then Claire notices that, to the side of the young woman, cards are being ejected into racks at a remarkable rate. And in a corner, surrounded by packets of paper, an older woman is taping the wrapping of a brick-sized parcel; a shoulder is hunched to hold the phone into which she’s shouting. The man keeps patting the printing machine, as if it were an animal. He gathers a printed yellow sheet, plucking it with a quick pinch of thumb and forefinger; he presses a button and the drums wind down; he turns, inspecting the sheet, and she sees who he is – he’s the man with the flattened nose. Feeling conspicuous now that the din has stopped, she moves away from the window.