Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Is she nice?’

  ‘She is. Very agreeable.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Nothing is going on,’ he says, to which she answers with a doubtful hum. ‘I promise you,’ he adds.

  ‘Attractive, is she? Pretty?’

  ‘I told you. She’s nice.’

  ‘You said “Very agreeable”. I distinctly remember a “very”.’

  ‘Indeed you do. She is. But nothing is going on.’

  ‘You behave yourself, Robert.’

  ‘For God’s sake, ma. I lead a sedate life.’

  ‘I know. But the girlfriends come and go, don’t they?’

  ‘Not as often as you seem to imagine.’

  ‘I’m not imagining, Robert.’

  ‘Nothing is going on. Nothing will go on.’

  ‘But you like her. I can tell.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I said so.’

  ‘You know what I mean. What’s she do, this—’

  ‘Claire, mum. Her name’s Claire.’

  ‘Oh, I can hear something. I can tell,’ she says again.

  10.10

  Gideon has been in her mind all day. Even in San Gimignano, amid the hundreds of people trudging towards the main square as if under orders, she could not rid herself of his voice. She picks up her book, but cannot concentrate on the page. He has had the last word. He has scrawled on the image of her mother and father: it was self-serving what he told her, and certainly false in some way, but the mark is there. Only the words of her parents could remove it quickly. She hears his voice clearly: ‘The same thing happened to me’. The flabby face, drooping with bogus sympathy, appears before her. She wants to be at home. It’s not possible to read, nor to sleep. She decides to take another lap of the town to tire herself; the Corso café should still be open.

  At the door to the living room it occurs to her to tell Robert that she’s going out; she is about to knock when she realises that the sound she’s hearing isn’t the television, it’s Robert talking. She registers the word ‘mum’ and a tone of affection. Then she hears ‘agreeable’ and ‘nothing is going on’, and ‘she’s nice’. Again he says: ‘nothing is going on’. She isn’t sure what she should do. ‘For God’s sake,’ says Robert, raising his voice; she tiptoes back to the bedroom.

  10.11

  Gideon has failed to quell his indignation at the effrontery of that absurd music, and to work in such a state of mind has proved impossible. A walk is the only way to regain his composure. Trim is summoned.

  As he reaches the end of Corso Diaz, Gideon begins to sense that he is being followed; he looks back; he’s the only person on the street. He crosses Piazza Maggiore and passes the Caffè del Corso. At the Teatro Gaetano he seems to hear footsteps, a little quicker than his own, approaching from behind. Again he turns; two people, a couple, are moving towards him; he lets them overtake, and when there’s nobody on the Corso between himself and Piazza Maggiore he starts walking again. Now he hears only the sound of his own feet. He turns into Via dei Giardini; as he passes the gardens, the leaves make a sound that recalls the ridiculous scratchings of the violin. At the Porta di Volterra he turns left; he follows the walls to Sant’Agostino, where he stops. The little piazza is dark; the streetlamp is off, and in the surrounding apartments only three or four windows are lit; a shadow moves across the ceiling in Teresa’s place; from somewhere comes the crooning of a male voice, then applause.

  He looks at the church, at the buildings around it, and it occurs to him that he might use this place for a night scene, with a high viewpoint, perhaps. The black glass of the rose window could be juxtaposed with the white disc of the moon, or maybe the piazza itself should be the focus, viewed from the campanile. The latter idea has the feeling of a beginning: something should happen here, on the piazza, something with the atmosphere of a dream. He envisages a scene: a figure stalking another one (one of them death-like; perhaps not the pursuer but the one being stalked?), and a third, in a dimly lit window, watching. Then a man is standing in front of him, ten paces off; he’s stocky, and is wearing a dark top with a hood, which is up, and topped with a baseball cap. In the gloom it’s not possible to make out the face. His presence having been registered, the man starts talking, quietly. Gideon can’t hear him clearly and cannot understand the sounds that he does hear; this character appears to be drunk. ‘What do you want? Who are you?’ Gideon asks, so disconcerted that he asks in English. The man recoils and says something, as he raises his arms and bends them inward, so the fingertips rest on his chest. Now it sounds as if he’s reciting a list; he appears to be ticking off points on his fingers. The fingers look like gargantuan termites and his lips have a strange way of moving up and down, in and out, as though testing the fit of his teeth. Gideon knows who this is: it’s Ilaria’s father. And in that instant, as if seeing that he’s been recognised, Alfredo Senesi approaches. With two rigid fingers he taps firmly on Gideon’s breastbone, forcing him to take a step back. ‘Cosa vuoi?’ shouts Gideon. Senesi, aghast, emits a scream. Behind him, a light goes on, in a room on the second floor; a silhouette appears. Gideon repeats his question: ‘Cosa vuoi?’ Another light goes on, high to the right, with two silhouettes in front of it. Senesi scratches his chin and nods, dourly, as though this charade of not understanding were just the sort of trick he should have expected. A fist comes up and batters twice into Gideon’s left eye. He totters, putting a palm to his face; when he takes the hand down he sees blood on it. The lights in the apartments go out and Senesi is jogging out of the piazza, hands held high at his sides, like a boxer on a training run.

  10.12

  A chapel is known to have stood on the site of the church of Sant’Agostino as long ago as the first decade of the twelfth century, when a community of monks lived here, in obedience to the Rule of Saint Augustine. Following the papal bulls Incumbit Nobis and Praesentium Vobis, both of which were issued by Pope Innocent IV on December 16th, 1243, many monastic communities in Tuscany were consolidated within the reformed Augustinian order. In the wake of this consolidation, the small chapel in Castelluccio was rebuilt as the church of Sant’Agostino, with a monastery being raised on the adjacent orchard. Not until 1370 was the church completed.

  The façade’s rose window is the most substantial visible remnant of the fourteenth-century building. The church was greatly modified between 1580 and 1650, when the façade was embellished, an elaborate baldacchino was raised over the high altar, the side chapels were constructed, stucco-work was applied throughout the church, and the gilded ceiling was put in place. The pictures on the walls above the columns of the nave, illustrating sixteen scenes from the life of Saint Augustine, were painted in the 1650s by followers of the Sienese artist Raffaello Vanni (1590–1659); in style they bear similarities to the work of Pietro da Cortona, to whose work Vanni himself was considerably indebted.

  Between the first and second altars on the left-hand side of the church is the memorial to Tommaso Galli, which takes the form of a marble stele; Galli’s profile is sculpted on a medallion held by Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, and Thalia, the muse of comedy. Of the numerous memorial stones in the cloister, the most conspicuous is the wall plaque for Domenico Vielmi (1350–1424), which features a finely carved panel depicting the three crosses of Calvary, with an angel descending to take the soul of the good thief.

  11

  11.1

  ON CORSO GARIBALDI people are on ladders, stringing pennants across the road in readiness for the parade; the shutters of the Caffè del Corso are half raised, and Giosuè is outside, smoking a cigarette while talking to a young man who wears crimson and gold silken pantaloons and white stockings below his denim jacket. A dog with a rosette on its collar lies in a sunny corner of Piazza Maggiore. Barriers are being put in place beside the Palazzo Comunale, and scarlet and gold banners have been unfurled from its windows.

  Robert pauses on Corso Diaz to listen to the trills of a flute, coming from a room opposite an alley from which a woman now hurries, bearing
a bright blue dress on outstretched arms. It’s Agnese. She stops, and looks at him as though her eyes are having difficulty in adjusting to the light. ‘Hello Robert,’ she says, in the tone of a teacher encountering a former pupil who was disruptive but bright.

  ‘Nice outfit,’ he comments.

  She examines it for a few seconds. ‘It’s been altered by Signora Nerini,’ she tells him. ‘I’m a centimetre wider than last year.’ It’s said as a simple statement of fact, as you’d remark on the growth of a plant in your garden.

  He pretends to inspect her waist for thickening. ‘Looking good,’ he tells her, which is true. The narrow black-framed glasses are subtly different from the last pair; they go well with her frown.

  ‘And how are you?’ she asks. ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘And Mr Westfall?’

  ‘Fine too. How about yourself?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ he says.

  She’s been to a conference, she says, in New Zealand. They made a holiday of it – Filippo came too.

  Surprised to hear that Filippo is still on the scene, he asks: ‘And how is Filippo?’

  Filippo is well, but very busy: there are big problems with acid leaking from one of the mines. Before he can think what to say to this, she asks: ‘Have the police been to see you about the girl?’

  ‘They have.’

  ‘I saw her,’ she says. ‘On the day she disappeared. I gave her a lift.’ She’d been driving to work and had passed her outside Radicóndoli, walking along the road. The girl wasn’t hitching, but she’d given her a ride and dropped her off in Castelnuovo. ‘She didn’t want to talk,’ remarks Agnese. ‘It didn’t strike me that anything was wrong. Have you heard anything?’

  ‘Not a thing, no.’

  Agnese shrugs. ‘I must go,’ she says, raising the dress by way of explanation.

  ‘Of course. Nice to see you.’

  ‘And you,’ she says. Nobody observing them would have guessed that they had been close, not so long ago.

  11.2

  Of the various women with whom Robert has been involved since the move to Castelluccio, Agnese Littarru is the one that Gideon most liked, and he liked her because, as he told her in the course of their conversation in the Antica Farmacia, on the first and penultimate occasion on which the trio ate together, she possessed a clarity of purpose such as one too rarely encounters. ‘I admire that,’ he told her. ‘I admire it immensely.’ The compliment was received with something less than the gratitude he had doubtless anticipated: Agnese nodded slightly, as if taking note of a disclosure that had nothing whatever to do with herself.

  She had given him a synopsis of her career, a story as full of purpose as a fable. Her grandfather, born in the heart of Sardegna, in the village of Desulo, had been a partisan; wounded by a grenade, he’d been nursed in the cellar of a farmhouse near Massa Maríttima until the Americans passed through and patched him up. Back home, he stayed in touch with the family who had cared for him, and promised he would visit them one day, but he had a family to raise and no money, so that day was a long time coming. Eventually, though, Agnese’s father landed a good job at Cagliari airport, and he paid for the grandparents to come with the family on a holiday across the water. And on the day that her grandfather and grandmother went to the village near Massa Maríttima to be reunited with his saviours, Agnese and her brother were taken to Monterotondo. She was only twelve years old, but the course of her life was set by that afternoon: she stood by the fumaroles at Monterotondo, with the wisps of pungent steam flying around her face, and her father telling her about the eruption of Krakatoa, an explosion so loud that it was heard three thousand miles away, and as she listened, and breathed that chemical air, she experienced a thrill that she had never experienced before. She was an intelligent child, and she’d known that studying would be her future; now she knew what it was that she would study – the earth, the substance on which we lived. From that moment, said Agnese, it was inevitable that she would do what she went on to do.

  Gideon had first noted her among the spectators of the 2007 San Zeno parade: a young woman conspicuous initially for her height, her maelstrom of brass-coloured and windswept-looking hair (though the day was becalmed), and her concentratedly observant demeanour, which gave her the appearance of an anthropologist conducting fieldwork, rather than of a participant in the festivities. Her beauty was remarked upon by Robert; Gideon judged her to be too severe – he could imagine that face, he later remarked, on a forty-foot statue of a Heroine of Soviet Industry, sledgehammer in hand. Enquiries were made: it was learned that her name was Agnese and she was a new arrival; she lived outside the town, on the Volterra road; she worked at Larderello, at the power plant.

  Later that year, in the Palazzo Comunale, Agnese Littarru gave a talk on energy conservation and new initiatives in power generation. It was an eloquent and passionate lecture, an hour long, delivered without notes, and was well received by the great majority of the twenty or thirty people in attendance, with one vociferous exception: Maurizio Ianni, whose objections to the ‘leftist consensus’ on the subject of global warming were denounced robustly by Carlo Pacetti, speaking from the floor, before being skewered with exquisite precision, and an impressive array of memorised statistics, by Dottoressa Littarru. Afterwards, Robert caught up with her halfway down the staircase of the town hall, to congratulate her. ‘Thank you,’ she answered, continuing to descend.

  ‘It gave me a lot to think about,’ he said.

  ‘I am glad,’ she replied.

  ‘My carbon footprint is around a size 40, I’d say,’ he told her, failing to amuse, ‘but it could be smaller.’

  She gave him a glance. ‘It can always be smaller,’ she said.

  ‘You work at Larderello?’ asked Robert, to which her eyes responded: ‘That’s what it says on the poster.’ They were now at the door. Holding it open for her, he asked: ‘What exactly do you do?’

  She stopped, and delivered her answer as if identifying herself to a persistent journalist: she was at the Centro di Eccellenza per la Geotermia di Larderello, an institution that functions as a point of reference for research into all aspects of geothermal energy.

  ‘That sounds very interesting,’ remarked Robert.

  To this fatuity she responded: ‘It is.’ Her eyes regarded his as if they were items in a cabinet, but he chose to be encouraged by a movement, a very small twist, of the corner of her mouth, and was on the point of asking if she had time for a coffee, because there were some things he’d like to ask her, when her look took on an unambiguous meaning, which was: ‘Will that be all?’ She was very pleased he had enjoyed the talk, she told him; she shook his hand, and clamped her document folder to her side; and she departed, alone, at speed, as if another audience awaited.

  It was discovered, soon after, that an open day at Larderello would be featuring a talk by Agnese Littarru of the Centro di Eccellenza per la Geotermia. Robert attended, taking a seat at the back of the hall, lest he appear too eager. ‘Beneath our feet is an unexploded volcano,’ announced Agnese, arms and hands spread in tension, as if to counteract the pressure of the earth. Pacing the narrow stage, demonstrative as a Pentecostal preacher, she showed pictures of the torrents of steam that shoot out of the ground here at 200 degrees Celsius, of the turbines that those torrents propel, of the drills with which the even hotter strata, 4,000 metres down, would be tapped. She made them comprehend how remarkable this engineering was; she explained how it was that geologists and seismologists could predict where the untapped wells were located. Robert was entranced by her: by her flashing eyes, her floating hair, the immensely flattering glasses, the provocative trousers.

  Questions were invited at the end. Robert didn’t speak, but stayed behind to ask her, as she was gathering up her papers, a question which, she pointed out, had been answered by her talk. ‘But perhaps I spoke too quickly for you?’ she suggested.

  ‘
No,’ he assured her. ‘I was following.’

  ‘You are English, yes?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘And you are interested in geothermal technology?’

  ‘It’s an interesting subject.’

  ‘What do you do? What work?’ she asked, putting the contents of her briefcase in order. He told her. ‘OK,’ she said, as though he had applied for a job for which being an artist’s assistant did not automatically disqualify him. ‘And is that interesting?’

  ‘To me, yes,’ he answered.

  ‘Good,’ she said, with a bright and professional smile; within a minute he was alone.

  But one Friday evening, the following April, he was in the Caffè del Corso, sitting at the table underneath the painting of Tommaso Galli, reading the Corriere della Sera, when Agnese came in. She appeared not to notice him, and he made no attempt to attract her attention; he carried on reading his newspaper, and she came over to him, coffee in hand, to ask if she might join him. And straight away, as though their acquaintanceship were well established, she told him she’d been for a meal with a friend and her new husband, and it hadn’t gone very well, because the husband was such a fidgety and irritating little man, like a jockey, and he’d clung to her friend’s arm all evening, as if he’d thought she might run away if he let go of her. ‘Which is what she should do,’ she said, ‘because he has nothing to say.’ She gazed at Galli without looking at him, shaking her head at the recollection of the evening. ‘Tell me about what you do,’ she said, which he did, and she in turn told him more about herself, about her studies at the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology in Rome and her work at Larderello. ‘Who’s that guy?’ she asked, interrupting herself to indicate the portrait of Galli.

  ‘He used to be the boss of the theatre,’ Robert answered; he added a few details.