Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  Assuming that he’s referring to her feelings about himself, she doesn’t speak.

  ‘When the second parent goes, it’s terrible,’ he goes on. ‘Especially if it’s the one to whom you were closer.’

  ‘I don’t know if we were closer,’ she answers. ‘I had more time with him. That’s the difference.’

  ‘OK,’ he concedes. ‘The one with whom you had the longer relationship. I know it’s very hard.’

  ‘It is,’ she says, not meeting his gaze.

  ‘I think about my parents every day,’ he says. ‘Particularly my mother. We were close.’

  This is peculiar, she thinks, because it was a fact within her family that Gideon and her grandmother hardly ever saw each other after she moved back to Cheshire. ‘You’d think she’d gone to live in Greenland,’ she remembers her father saying. She says nothing, but Gideon seems to intuit what she’s thinking: he didn’t see as much of her as he would have wished, he says, but they spoke on the phone two or four times each week. This does not accord with what she’d been led to believe. And she recalls another comment: that Gideon carried on as though being the son of shopkeepers was a misfortune from which he was determined to extricate himself.

  ‘I owe her a great deal,’ he goes on. It saddens him, though, that it was only in the last years of her life, when she was on her own, that she had time to devote to herself, to develop interests, to develop aspects of herself that had lain dormant for so long. ‘Do you know, as far as I’m aware she had never read a book from beginning to end before she reached her sixties? Isn’t that incredible? Then she discovered that she loved Dickens. I think she read his complete works,’ he tells her, as if giving his mother a pat on the head. But she could have done so much more, he says with regret. For a woman of her generation, of her social class, education was something that stopped on the day she left school, he informs her.

  Claire’s image of her grandmother Rita is faint and incoherent: she often seemed a fussy woman, a little too prompt to complain, and something of a snob as well; but she was generous, and affectionate – though sometimes, through these demonstrations of affection, a certain coldness could be glimpsed, or if not a coldness then a preference for being left alone. She doesn’t know. She reminds herself that she knew Rita only for a few years, and who knows what she misunderstood or misperceived as a child, or has forgotten since?

  ‘I owe her a great deal,’ Gideon repeats. ‘Above all, she impressed upon me the importance of hard work.’

  This much, at least, tallies with what she remembers – Rita never had much sympathy when her mother complained about the hours that doctors had to work.

  ‘I must have been in quite a state the last time you saw me,’ Gideon supposes.

  ‘Not as I recall,’ she answers.

  They are at the Porta Siena, and here Gideon halts. His gaze roams over the hills and fixes on a point at which there is nothing notable to be seen; he appears to be willing himself into being upset. Narrowing his eyes, still staring at the horizon, he says: ‘You were wearing a dark indigo coat and thick black tights. And new black shoes. You were hobbling by the time the burial was done.’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she lies.

  ‘But you were very demure. You conducted yourself admirably, with great maturity,’ he says, making her understand that such a compliment, from him, is to be valued. ‘The car’s parked over there,’ he says, pointing into the shade of the trees on the opposite side of the road. He takes the keys from his pocket, and is about to say something else when his name is called, and here’s his number one pal, hastening from the garage.

  Gideon does the introductions: ‘This is my niece, and this is my good friend Carlo Pacetti, master mechanic and prize curmudgeon.’ Hands are shaken, then the prize curmudgeon, betraying no reaction to being thus described, takes a step back, smiling as if the niece is something in a shop window, perhaps remembering their previous encounter, or entertained by the exactness of the correlation between what he’s now seeing and the description that Gideon has given him.

  ‘Welcome,’ he says. She thanks him. ‘You like our town?’ She does, she tells him. He nods; this is as it should be. Then he asks, as if to verify a rumour that she’s a resident of Ulan Bator: ‘You are vegetarian?’

  ‘I am,’ she answers.

  Mr Pacetti smiles amiably, uncomprehendingly. He jabs a thumb at his friend. ‘He says you—’ and he turns to Gieon to say something in Italian.

  ‘You speak your mind,’ Gideon translates, almost bashfully.

  ‘You don’t like his paintings,’ Mr Pacetti tells her, scowling as you’d scowl, half in jest, at a misbehaving child.

  ‘That’s not true,’ she says.

  Mr Pacetti regards her gravely, then laughs, as an overalled man comes out of the garage, a phone in one hand and a wrench in the other, and shouts in their direction. ‘My son,’ explains Mr Pacetti. ‘I go.’ Again he shakes Claire’s hand; he offers a slack military salute to his friend, then limps towards his son.

  Gideon leads Claire across the road. He opens the car door and starts to dip his face towards her cheek, but recollects himself.

  6.7

  Five days ago Carlo Pacetti placed a single flower outside the deconsecrated church of San Lorenzo, as he has done on almost every Thursday morning since his mother left Castelluccio; Thursday is the day of the week on which his father was killed.

  The problem with Italy today, Carlo Pacetti will readily tell you, is that the people distrust the law and they distrust each other. They are irresponsible, and little better than children. His great-uncle Lino and his grandmother had been contemptuous of those whose allegiance to the cause had faltered as soon as the bombs began to fall: ‘They care only for themselves, not for Italy,’ Lino would say. This attitude, according to Carlo, prevails again today. Success is everything, and only the cunning, the masters of furbizia, can succeed – witness, as evidence, the success of Maurizio Ianni.

  One evening, in the bar on Piazza Sant’Agostino, Maurizio Ianni confronted Carlo Pacetti, demanding that he apologise publicly for a lie that Carlo had broadcast in the bar the previous evening. ‘And what lie would that be?’ Carlo enquired. This disingenuousness further enraged Maurizio Ianni, who began to talk of proceedings for slander. ‘That should be interesting,’ commented Carlo, because he didn’t think there was a single person in Castelluccio who did not believe that the mistress of a certain local politician had on a number of occasions been accommodated free of charge in Ianni’s hotel, and he was furthermore certain that when he had remarked that many people in Castelluccio were of the view that there might be a connection between this largesse and the ease with which Ianni had obtained permission to disfigure the old candle factory in order to convert it into another Ianni enterprise, he had merely been stating an incontrovertible fact. Maurizio Ianni denied that anyone’s mistress had received preferential treatment at the Ottocento. Carlo Pacetti said that he was grateful to be disabused of this misapprehension, and would endeavour to spread the news. The two men have not spoken to each other since.

  Carlo Pacetti is renowned in Castelluccio as an inexhaustible exponent of dietrologia, the ‘science of what lies behind’. He believes, for example, that the Freemasons are in charge of Castelluccio’s town hall, and every other town hall in Italy, come to that; that Pope John Paul I was assassinated by the Jesuits; that the British secret services were responsible for the death of Princess Diana; that the CIA killed both JFK and his brother; that the US government murdered Aldo Moro; that the US government connived at the destruction of the Twin Towers; that the Bilderberg Group is the world’s covert government; and so on.

  Carlo Pacetti loves slapstick, in particular the exploits of Stanlio e Ollio.

  Like his uncle, Carlo Pacetti is something of an autodidact. The history of ancient Rome is something of an obsession for him. He claims to own more than 500 books on the subject, but there is no independent verification of this claim. Even Gideon
has never been inside Carlo’s apartment.

  Carlo Pacetti has a problematic relationship with Silvia, his daughter-in-law. Silvia is an arch-consumerist, and exemplifies everything that is wrong with Italy today. She spends more on clothes in a year than Carlo’s wife has spent in her whole life. In the past five years she has nagged Ennio into buying a new kitchen and a new bathroom and a new car. They have three TV sets, one of them as big as a dining table. Every year she buys a new phone, and she spends hours each day in pointless conversations that say little more than: ‘Hello, I’m phoning you.’ Carlo Pacetti will be the last man in Italy without a mobile phone.

  Though some of his fellow drinkers at the Sant’Agostino bar are of the opinion that the idea of global warming is an intellectualist/communist conspiracy, Carlo Pacetti is not. ‘Humanity is consuming itself to extinction, and the Italians are leading the way,’ he says. The Pacetti garage, he would have you believe, is an environmentally sound enterprise, doing its bit to forestall the inevitable by keeping old cars on the road, and thereby, however infinitesimally, reducing the demand for new machines.

  Carlo Pacetti thinks of himself and his son as craftsmen, struggling to make a living in a world in which car maintenance is becoming a branch of computer technology rather than a manual skill. Fausto Nerini, though his workshop is now infested with computers, is also a craftsman; he takes pride in his work, and is therefore to be respected, for all his socialist claptrap.

  Carlo Pacetti has a problematic relationship with his daughter Edda, who is married to a sociology teacher called Franco, who cannot abide Carlo, and vice versa. ‘This man,’ Carlo has complained to Gideon, ‘has no sense of humanity. He talks about people as you’d talk about apes.’ Edda and Franco have two sons, who spend half their waking time playing video games, which Carlo believes to be an instrument of an Americo-Japanese plan to suppress the human spirit in the interests of capitalist enterprise.

  Carlo Pacetti wears a blue shirt most days; his father wore a blue shirt most days.

  Passing a half-devoured rabbit and attendant buzzard, Carlo Pacetti once said to Gideon that the ‘voice of Nature is the sound of perpetual screaming’. When drunk, as he not infrequently is, Carlo Pacetti will often remark, in the course of one of his monologues, that ‘Man is a sick animal’.

  In the office of the Pacetti garage, before Ennio took over from his father, a heavy black glass ashtray was usually to be seen in the centre of the desk. One could stub out a cigarette in this ashtray without noticing anything unusual about it. Were one to lift it up, however, and angle it into the light, a bust of Il Duce would appear in the base. The observant might also notice, above the door, a strip of yellowed paper bearing these words, in Carlo Pacetti’s careful script: ‘Io rispetto i calli alle mani. Sono un titolo di nobiltà.’

  Carlo Pacetti’s first love, he has confessed to Gideon, was a woman from Mensano: a widow, thirty-eight years of age, a seamstress. Carlo was twenty at the time the affair began. The woman’s reputation was far from spotless: it was said that she had slept with six different men since her husband had died. One morning, as Carlo was walking back home from Mensano, a priest accosted him. The priest warned him that his relationship with this woman was widely known, that it was sinful, that he must end it forthwith. The woman was of doubtful character, said the priest. She was, in fact, little better than a prostitute, and was old enough to be his mother. Young Carlo received the priest’s chastisement in silence. It was a magnificent day, already hot, though noon was hours away. When the priest was done, Carlo wiped his face with his hands; his face was damp with perspiration; the perfume of his lover’s skin rose from his palms. Then calmly he replied that the priest knew nothing of life, and that if he had to make a choice between the goodness of the widow and the shrivelled virtue of the priest, he would choose the former and let his soul take its chances. He has not set foot in a church since that morning. He continued his affair with the widow for months after he had ceased to love her, out of contempt for the village gossips and the priest.

  Lino Pacetti was in Grosseto on April 26th 1943, Easter Monday, when American bombers destroyed the playground in Piazza De Maria and all the children in it. From that day on Lino Pacetti despised all things American, as Carlo often professes to do.

  Carlo Pacetti is an avid hunter. The animal skulls that feature in many of Gideon Westfall’s still lifes were all gifts from Carlo.

  Carlo Pacetti’s mother, Maria, married Lauro Pacetti on her twentieth birthday, two days before Germany and Italy signed the Patto d’Acciaio, the Pact of Steel. Prior to his marriage, Lauro and his mother, Costanza, lived with his uncle Lino, his father’s older brother, who had established a small business supplying and repairing farm equipment. Lauro was one of his employees. Maria, the daughter of a butcher from Monteguidi, was a pretty girl who loved her husband, and was afraid of him, and relied on him for everything. Anyone who remembers the young Maria will tell you this, and they will tell you that after Lauro was killed she was helpless and in a constant state of distress. It was said that for many months she spent more time at church than at home, and that it was only at Mass that she stopped weeping. After Lauro’s death she went back to Monteguidi with their son, where they lived, with her parents, until 1956, the year in which she married a man called Marco Belluzzi, a carpet salesman, whose eye she had caught at the Festa di San Zeno parade in 1954. Carlo had not liked Signore Belluzzi at first: he seemed insincere and stupid, and he dressed like an American gangster. By the time of the wedding, two years later, Carlo’s antipathy had matured into loathing: Marco Belluzzi was indeed an oily dimwit, and the boy took his mother’s attachment to this man as an insult to the memory of his father. Disliked in return by his stepfather, Carlo returned to Castelluccio, to the apartment of Costanza Pacetti, in 1959, two years after the birth of his twin half-brothers, Michele and Mauro. His mother seemed to have forgotten his father as you might forget an old friend; Carlo, on the other hand, revered his father – or rather, having been born just four years before his father’s death, he revered the idea of him. From the stories that his grandmother told him, from her half-dozen photographs of heroic Lauro, Carlo pressed the essence of his father, like the last drops of oil from olive stones. In their hearts the self-described orphan and his grandmother honoured unceasingly their two dead patriots, discerning a profound significance in the symmetry of their sacrifice: for just as the infant Carlo had lost his father to assassins in wartime, the infant Lauro had lost his father to the Austrian guns on the Isonzo. The faithless Maria was discarded. She and Marco are still alive, in their nineties, living in Siena; Carlo has seen neither of them since 1973, when they met in Monteguidi to bury Maria’s father. This was also the last occasion on which he saw his semi-siblings, Michele and Mauro. The twins were the most sinister people he has ever encountered, he will tell you: flawed replicas of their father and perfect replicas of each other, they spoke always in the same tone of voice and in half-sentences, each leaving it to the other to finish his utterance. Carlo will tell you that his meeting the twins was the only occasion in his life that he has truly been frightened, apart from the time he took Gideon hunting and let him use a gun.

  In his prime, Carlo Pacetti looked somewhat like an abbreviated version of Victor Mature.

  When Carlo Pacetti came back to Castelluccio in 1959 his great-uncle Lino was dead and his business had long been defunct. Carlo was given a job by a man called Matteo Negri, a former classmate of Carlo’s father. Matteo had remained on good terms with Lauro until what turned out to be the penultimate year of Lauro’s life, when the German occupation made Matteo undergo a change of heart, for which Lauro could not forgive him. Nevertheless, Matteo retained a residue of affection for his erstwhile friend: he had known Lauro for twenty years, after all. So Matteo gave Lauro’s son a job in his workshop, repairing cars and motorbikes, and the lad proved to be as talented a mechanic as his great-uncle had been, if not better: he had a feel for machines, as if they w
ere living things that could tell him what they needed. Carlo worked for Matteo Negri until 1970, when he set up a car workshop on his own, leaving the agricultural stuff to his boss. He made a decent living, even though, twenty-five years after the war had ended, there were people in Castelluccio – turncoats and the sons of turncoats – with whom Carlo Pacetti would not do business, and vice versa. He worked long hours; Gideon Westfall is the only man he has ever met who works as many hours in a day as he used to work.

  Carlo Pacetti spends an hour or two, three or four nights a week, in the Sant’Agostino bar. Once or twice a month he takes his wife, Patrizia, for a meal at their favourite restaurant, a trattoria near Mensano. Other than these evenings, their social life consists of little more than visits, more or less monthly, to her sister and her family, in Radicóndoli, the village in which the sisters were born. Piera, a shy and uncomplicated and generally happy woman, like Patrizia, is excessively devout. There’s not a room in the apartment without a picture of Padre Pio, says Carlo: the shameless old fraud even watches you when you’re taking a piss. But Carlo keeps his godless thoughts to himself whenever they visit Radicóndoli, out of respect for Patrizia, and for Piera too: she is a good woman, if credulous, and her husband, Stefano, a carpenter, is a good man as well, though he lets himself be pushed around too easily, and is much too content with the status quo. Stefano regards politics as a thing like the weather – it happens, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Piera, like Patrizia, has no interest in politics. And Carlo will at times admit that he himself has little interest in politics nowadays, now that Italy is run by crooks, salesmen and TV producers.

  In November of 2006 Carlo Pacetti achieved some local notoriety after an altercation with three Arabs who expected him to drop everything to perform emergency surgery on an Opel that had a broken water pump, no functioning shock absorbers, and a hole in the floor so big you could have put a watermelon through it. When Carlo declined to assist, the three men became aggressive, accusing Carlo of being an incompetent mechanic and a racist. Ennio, returning from his lunch break, found his father cornered by the door to the back office, with one of the men jabbing him repeatedly in the chest while screaming at him in Arabic. At this point, a police car happened to pass by. Ennio ran after it, and the three men leapt into the Opel, with suspicious alacrity; the vehicle would not start. Explaining the incident to the police officers, the trio stated that the old man had insulted them, and accused them of stealing the car. Carlo did not deny having said that it would not have surprised him to discover that the Opel was stolen. It was not stolen, but the three men – Libyans, who had come from Calabria, where they had been picking fruit for much of the summer – were not, it turned out, legally entitled to be in the country. ‘I knew at once they weren’t right,’ Carlo told a reporter.