Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  The relics of Saint Zeno were removed from their shrine and rinsed in holy water. A procession made its way through every street and alley of Castelluccio, reciting prayers to Saint Zeno and Saint Sebastian, and sprinkling the water on the doors of the houses. The blessing brought no respite. Some citizens, in a frenzy of penitence, then burned their most valued possessions in a bonfire on Piazza Maggiore; on the same night, a sodomite was attacked and killed. Some thirty people, from families that had remained untainted, withdrew to a building that until recently had been a tannery – the air there, still noisome, was thought to be repellent to the plague-bearing air. Throughout the day, half of their number prayed without pause; at night, the others prayed; twenty of them survived. Others, however, in despair or defiance of death, gave themselves over to carousing and fornication. On the first Sunday of August, a great company of these desperate revellers – some in their finest clothes, others almost naked, all bearing flowers or spices to cleanse the air they breathed – made its way through the town, playing flutes and drums and pipes so loudly it was as if they thought they might revive the dead with their cacophony.

  The last victim of the Black Death in Castelluccio was buried on August 23rd, having died on the feast of Saint Zeno. Between one third and a half of the population of Castelluccio had been killed, and many families had been extinguished entirely. Of the Caraceni, previously one of the wealthiest families in Castelluccio, only one young man and his grandmother were left alive. In 1350, in response to Pope Clement’s declaration of a Holy Year, young Giovanni Caraceni travelled to Rome, only to die there, almost certainly of the plague. But one Castelluccio clan escaped unscathed: the Falcucci family, who had withdrawn to their palazzo, by the Siena gate, two days after the death of Antonella Vecchioni, having filled their larders and sealed all doors and windows. They emerged, every one of them, on September 1st, and the following day they attended the ceremony at which the people of Castelluccio committed themselves to the construction of a new church, in thanks for their deliverance.

  5.3

  Niccolò Turone has sent an email telling Mr Bancourt that he would be very grateful if the maestro could give him a firm date for the delivery of his picture, because Niccolò Turone’s brother and his wife will be arriving from Canada in October for a two-week vacation and they would be very disappointed if they were unable to see it. Also in this morning’s in-box is an email from Max Jelinek, the entire text of which is: Great – we have a deal – let’s talk dates. This is a reply to a message from Robert, who, having discussed with his employer Mr Jelinek’s request that he should simply ask Mr Westfall to name his price for painting a portrait of Mr Jelinek’s wife, had responded with a fee that exceeded by some margin the maximum amount that the artist had ever been paid for a comparable commission.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ moans Gideon. ‘I thought he’d tell us to bugger off. How do you get to be a successful businessman if you don’t recognise overcharging when you see it?’

  ‘The customer is always right,’ Robert reminds him. ‘So what shall I tell him?’

  ‘We’re committed now, aren’t we?’

  ‘I think we are.’

  ‘Christ,’ mutters Gideon, wiping his hands slowly down his face. ‘What did he have in mind? December, was it?’

  ‘November.’

  ‘OK. Let’s get it over with. Tell him November would be unutterably wonderful.’

  ‘And what about Turone?’

  Gideon is standing at the easel that has Niccolò Turone’s still life on it. He looks at the painting as if it were a pat of diarrhoea smeared on a wall. ‘End of this month,’ he says. ‘He’ll have it by the end of the month. Guaranteed.’

  Robert goes into his room to write the replies and open the morning’s post. When he comes back, Gideon is seated at the easel, holding a brush that’s charged with steel-grey paint. It seems that he hasn’t added a single stroke to the picture, and Gideon’s expression is one that has on occasion been followed by a furious swipe of a brush or palette knife across the canvas. On the other hand, this is a commission, and the deadline is nearing, so the risk of an outburst is low.

  With the demeanour of a chess player making a move that can only delay defeat, Gideon places the brush on the table; he summons Trim, to give the dog a self-consoling stroke. And here it comes: ‘A hundred years from now, this will be gathering dust in an attic somewhere, if I’m lucky.’

  ‘A hundred years from now there won’t be an I to be lucky,’ Robert responds.

  ‘But in the great scheme of things—’

  ‘Sod the great scheme of things. One day the planet will be burnt to a cinder. But here we are, and you have work to do for a client who’s paid you. Like in the good old days when artists were artisans and they weren’t squeamish about working to commission. Before the era of the Great I Am, et cetera.’

  Pretending not to recognise his own words, Gideon turns his doleful eyes to the doleful eyes of Trim.

  ‘Just get on with it, Gideon. Stop moping. Unless you want me to quit.’

  Gideon smiles at the dog, brought back to sense but not out of melancholia. ‘Check the contract. It says till death do us part,’ he jokes, then he picks up the brush, gingerly, as if it were a filament of glass.

  There is no more talk for the rest of the morning, and by the end of the session he has completed the largest steel cog; the pitted surface of the steel is painted with such finesse that when Robert looks at it a taste of metal appears on his tongue.

  ‘Time for Claire,’ Gideon announces, refreshed, it appears.

  5.4

  Myrto Jelinek

  Oil-tempera on canvas, 100cm x 66cm

  2011

  Collection of Max and Myrto Jelinek

  The portrait of Myrto Jelinek, delivered in March, 2011, is the last portrait that Gideon Westfall completed.

  Portraiture was always crucial to his livelihood, and his work in this genre was particularly popular in the USA. As late as 1995 he was telling an interviewer that portraits were ‘absolutely central’ to his work. Velázquez and Ingres were artists he revered primarily, he said, because of their ‘unsurpassable mastery’ as portraitists. He ruminated on the ‘two-way flow of influence between artist and subject’, a relationship that made portraiture a ‘uniquely rewarding endeavour.’ Comparing the richness of the painted portrait with what he saw as the ‘impoverished immediacy’ of the photograph, he said: ‘With a photograph you know everything you’re going to know about the person in the first two seconds. In a successful painting the character emerges in time, as one looks at it, just as the character emerged in time as the artist observed the subject. Time is the essence of the painted portrait.’

  But time was becoming problematic for him: a portrait for an American client, though remunerative, might require a long absence from Castelluccio. The travelling made him weary, and his temperament was not suited to American cities – being in Manhattan, he complained, was like being shouted at all day. And he was becoming tired of the people he was being asked to portray. ‘I’ve had enough of being a face-painter to the rich,’ he said, on returning from a two-week commission in Houston. ‘If I could afford it,’ he said, ‘I’d never do another one.’ But a year after Houston he was back in New York, to paint the forty-year-old ex-model wife of an eighty-year-old property developer. She insisted that she be depicted in a manner that respresented her artistic leanings – a piano in the background, ballet shoes strewn on the floor, and a volume of poetry, French, in her hand. One morning she appeared in a Gainsborough-esque hat, and it took an hour to convince her that this accessory should be discarded; her make-up was drastically different from day to day; on the fifth day she had her hair cut short, and dyed. ‘It’s just a tiny bit shorter’, she assured him skittishly, as if she thought he might be flirted out of believing the evidence of his own eyes. He did not complete the portrait, and on returning to Italy he announced that he would not be travelling again; if necessity compelle
d him to do another portrait for money, it would have to be done in Castelluccio.

  Myrto Jelinek came to Castelluccio in December 2010, with her husband, and again the following February, alone. Expectations, based on emailed photographs, were not high, and the first sitting was not an unalloyed success, partly because Mrs Jelinek’s facial muscles had been even more extensively decommissioned by injections and incisions than the photograph had suggested, but chiefly because Max – a voluble, pugnacious and shrivelled little chap, about a foot shorter than his wife – remained in attendance throughout, as if he thought Gideon or his sidekick might get up to something if he were to leave his wife with them, though at regular intervals he interjected comments on his wife’s attractiveness, apparently unconvinced that the painter had yet appreciated what a gem he was dealing with here. From time to time Max would creep round the easel to assess what progress had been made. On his fifth or sixth inspection, Myrto’s embarrassment shifted into exasperation: ‘For crying out loud, Max,’ she snapped, ‘let the man do his job.’ Max resumed his seat, and limited himself to asking Gideon questions about ‘the art business’, until instructed by his wife to shut up. The next day, she came to the studio unaccompanied; Max, she explained, had been persuaded to make a nuisance of himself in Siena.

  Unencumbered by her garrulous husband, Myrto Jelinek was a most enjoyable subject: sardonic, self-aware, frank, intelligent. ‘I am sixty-two years old,’ she told Gideon, ‘and I’m finding it hard to accept that reality. Same for Max. He’s sixty-eight, and he finds that tough, but me being sixty-two is tougher. I used to be a doll,’ she said, with a laugh that left her eyebrows and everything northward entirely unmoved. ‘The boobs have been done as well,’ she told him, cupping her chest in a parody of kittenish self-delight. ‘I’m on my third pair,’ she said. ‘You have to downsize when you reach a certain age, otherwise you look fucking absurd, like coconuts on a surfboard.’ She didn’t know if the surgery was more for Max’s sake than for hers, but what she did know was that the last bit of face-work was a tuck too far. She showed him the scars behind the ears, and what happened when she tried to open her mouth really wide. ‘I can’t scream,’ she complained. ‘And a woman has to be able to scream.’ Litigation was being discussed. One of her friends – a trustee of the same charities that Myrto supported, ‘in lieu of meaningful work’ – was suing her doctor after being left with an eyelid that she couldn’t control, ‘so guys on the street think she’s a mad old woman giving them the come-on.’ In the end, said Myrto, you always go too far; you never know where the limit is until you’ve passed it. ‘But if you think I’m overdone – you should see some of my girlfriends. The Mummy Returns,’ she said, settling back into the pose that Gideon had chosen for her. Keeping still, as she said, was not a problem.

  Max’s idea, said Myrto, was that this portrait would capture forever what was left of her looks, and maybe put back a bit of what had been lost. Gideon obliged, employing a few euphemisms in the delineation of her face, heightening the palette to put a slightly fuller bloom on the skin. But when Max saw the finished item, he was not at all pleased. The eyes were all wrong, he protested, phoning Castelluccio on the day he took delivery of the picture. Myrto had beautiful eyes, eyes that were full of life, but this picture made her look like she’d just come back from a funeral and was about to start an argument with someone. ‘My wife is a positive person, Mr Westfall, and what I’m seeing here is not a positive person.’ Myrto, on the other hand, was more than happy with her portrait, as she informed him in a letter sent too late for Gideon to read it. But although she liked the picture very much, her husband had refused to hang it in their New York apartment; instead, it had been installed in a room in their summer house in Connecticut, and Max had commissioned another portrait from a more compliant artist. ‘I couldn’t relate to him at all,’ she wrote. ‘You look at this thing, and it’s like he’s never met me. He’s made me into a woman from the House of Wax. Max thinks it’s great.’

  5.5

  Of course he knows the perfect place to park, a quiet street that’s only twenty minutes’ walk from the Campo, and of course he knows a terrific alimentari where they can get the most wonderful sandwiches made to order, and some fruit as well; and he knows just the spot where they can sit in the shade to eat, with a lovely view of the city. And it’s all as good as he promised. They sit on a stone bench, under a pine, breathing air that’s scented with resin and hot stone and dust. The city is stacked up in front of them in a pattern of biscuit-coloured walls and pink-red roofs, with the tower of the cathedral at its summit.

  Gideon passes her the last of the huge sweet grapes; he removes his Panama to fan his face. ‘Right,’ he says, placing the empty water bottles and wrappers in the carrier bag, ‘I’m off for my rendezvous with Mister Buoninsegna. You must not feel obliged to accompany me. I would like you to see it. It’s one of the greatest things in all of Italy. But you may have other preferences. We could—’

  ‘No,’ she interrupts. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Righty-ho,’ he declares, rising with a groan at the stiffness of his knees. ‘Andiamo, cara.’

  They walk side by side along the shadowed sides of the streets, slowly. ‘I see no reason to rush, do you?’ he says. And: ‘Strolling is the gastronomy of the eye.’ Inevitably, he begins to proffer opinions. Halting in front of a clothes shop, he urges her to regard its sign, and those of the shops to left and right: one in florid script, gold on black glass; one in stark letters of stainless steel; one a name written in a single continuous strand of neon tubing. ‘This is why I love this country,’ he declaims. ‘The British high street – nothing but brands. Transplant a street from Coventry to Hull – nobody could tell the difference. Here it’s about people. There’s variety, individuality, the human scale. Family businesses. The family is the focus, not the company. Not the corporation.’ He appears not to notice the irony of what he’s saying. Yet his pomposity today is less objectionable than it has been; the quotient of geniality is higher.

  When she stops to take a photo he saunters ahead and waits for her, examining a detail of a building or reading a poster, encouraging her to take her time. He points out something she may like to take a picture of: a terracotta emblem of this part of the city – the Tartuca, the turtle. In another street he shows her a small stone panther above a door: ‘We’ve just crossed the border, into the contrada of the panther,’ he tells her, then he lists the other districts: the goose, the caterpillar, the dragon, the unicorn, the porcupine. ‘Social cohesion, that’s what it’s all about,’ he says. ‘Cohesion through rivalry.’ He tells her about the shenanigans of the Palio – the parties, the fights, the horses being taken into church for blessing before the race. ‘Lunacy. Sheer lunacy. But glorious,’ he sighs.

  Passing a shop window full of kettles, pots and other household stuff, he puts a hand out. Standing at the edge of the window, he squints inside. ‘Look here,’ he says, crouching a little, to point through a gap in the display at the woman who is standing at the counter, her back towards them. ‘See her? Laura, her name is. Laura Ottaviano. Daughter of the owner. You’ve seen a picture of her, in the exhibition. Reclining figure, back view. But just wait until she turns round,’ he murmurs, like the presenter of a nature programme on TV, peering through the fronds at a timid creature. The woman turns. ‘Isn’t she remarkable?’ he whispers, and she really is: pale eyes, a helmet of straight black hair, beautifully curved nose, shapely full-lipped mouth, long arms and legs, dark-skinned, with a dancer’s slender muscles; she’s extraordinary.

  They walk on. ‘Robert discovered her,’ says Gideon. ‘He spotted her, and he thought she was a possibility.’

  ‘As a model?’

  ‘As a model, yes.’

  ‘Well, she’s beautiful. Anyone can see that.’

  ‘But there’s more to it than beauty. To model you need more. To model well. Some women are beautiful but you know they won’t work. There has to be reciprocity. Like lo
ve. Looks aren’t everything.’ His smile, she supposes, is meant to be vaguely rogueish; it does not suit him; sententiousness is more his style.

  ‘So Robert saw this gorgeous shop assistant and said to you: “I reckon this one will reciprocate.” Is that it?’

  ‘He said he thought I should see her, so I did, and I agreed with him.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then he approached her.’

  ‘Not you?’

  ‘Not me, no,’ he answers. ‘I tend not to make the right impression.’ A guffaw follows. ‘Mind you, Robert’s getting a bit too long in the tooth for it now. Rebuff rate has been going up, this past year or two.’ He explains the procedure: when a potential model has been identified, Robert introduces himself as the artist’s assistant; he says a few words regarding the eminence of the artist; he makes a gift of postcards of a variety of works by the artist – portraits, still lifes, figure studies; finally, he produces a business card. ‘He doesn’t ask for an answer – he merely begins the process. Some say No, immediately. A lot say No. More than used to.’ He grimaces, as if he were talking about an aspect of his bodily decline. ‘But if she says “I’ll think about it”, Robert can tell if this will become a refusal or a Yes, and if it’s a Yes, how long it will take to get there. If he says “She’ll phone tomorrow”, she will phone tomorrow. If he says “She’ll phone next week”, she will phone next week. It’s uncanny. He’s always right. The recruitment of Laura required two visits. Robert predicted she’d agree after another talk. He wasn’t going to take No for an answer. No, I don’t mean that. We always take No for an answer. I mean, he’d have been disappointed if she’d said No. He was smitten, though she wasn’t the most fascinating girl. Immensely vain – reasonably enough – and a little dull.’