Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

‘How do you know all that?’ she asked.

  So he gave credit to Cinzia Zappalorto, and his admiration for the eccentric Signora Zappalorto appeared to improve significantly his standing with Agnese Littarru.

  They talked until it was time for Giosuè to lock up. ‘I live on the Volterra road,’ she told him. The house was cheap, and it had a large garden – she couldn’t live in a place that had no garden. It was a forty-minute drive to work, which wasn’t ideal, but she had to admit that she enjoyed driving, and it was a small car, which did a lot of kilometres to the litre; and she’d fitted solar panels to her house, to redress the balance. ‘It’s a nice place,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you one day, if you’re interested.’ This was said in a tone and with an expression so devoid of flirtatiousness that it did not seem impossible that all she had in mind was showing him the solar panels and the highly productive garden.

  ‘Thank you,’ he answered, as if in response to a business proposition.

  To which she responded, still with no smile: ‘How about now? It’s not late.’

  She drove fast, with one hand almost constantly on the gear-stick, braking late; it was a performance of great concentration and insouciance; the face was that of a woman watching a mediocre show on TV. She had learned to drive from her brother, who raced go-karts, she explained. ‘He isn’t as good as me,’ she added, with a quick smile of victor’s sympathy. Regular and high dosages of adrenaline were, it turned out, essential to the well-being of Dottoressa Agnese Littarru. Whitewater kayaking was a favourite activity, as was hang-gliding: they spent a weekend in the Monti Sibillini, where he watched her wheeling in the sky above the Piano Grande, higher than all the others. They went up to the Dolomites, to clamber along the Ivano Dibona via ferrata; he edged along the Ponte Cristallo without risking a glance at the abyss below him; fearless Agnese strolled across as if it were the path to her front door. She played tennis as though she thought the purpose of the game was to destroy the ball; being driven by her – she couldn’t bear to be a passenger – was like riding in a rally car.

  And in bed too she was energetic, and brisk. When he proposed that there might be benefits in taking things a little more slowly, it was as if he’d suggested that it might be nice to let their food go cold before eating it. What would be the point in delaying, when they could achieve the desired result so readily? He should be pleased to get such a response, surely?

  There was another problem: it soon became apparent that, although she could muster some interest in the technologies of art, in the materials and techniques of it, she believed that art, in the final analysis, was a form of entertainment: the highest form, one might argue, but nonetheless frivolous, in essence. An hour with Robert in the Museo Civico, learning how the old paintings were made, why some had lasted better than others, was more enjoyable than she would have thought possible, she said, and she could concede that pictures of saints and Bible stories did once perform a valuable social function. In the twenty-first century, however, art was no longer a source of information about anything except the artist; to her way of thinking, she had to say, it was too often a self-indulgence. She didn’t see much point in what Gideon produced, and didn’t warm to him; when Gideon asked if he could draw her, she laughed.

  Agnese Littarru was as conscientious as she was intelligent. At weekends she brought work home; on any evening she might spend two or three hours on the various online forums to which she contributed lengthy postings that were as tightly argued and thoroughly referenced as an academic paper, on climate change, conservation, recycling, et cetera, et cetera. She was entirely admirable, as Robert came to tell himself frequently in the last weeks of their relationship.

  The night it ended, she was at her laptop, and had just pressed ‘Submit’ after writing five hundred words on the prospects for electric cars. It had taken her less than twenty minutes – it was the sort of thing she could compose as quickly as she could type it. Two more postings and she’d be finished for tonight.

  ‘I think,’ said Robert, ‘that there’s something missing here.’

  He had her full attention: she encouraged him to continue, in the expectation, it appeared, of being be able to refute whatever point he was about to make.

  Deploying as many Italian approximations to ‘spark’ as he could find in his vocabulary, Robert made his point.

  Agnese looked at him as though he were reciting the lyrics of some inane pop song, and not even getting them right. ‘We have a good time together,’ she reminded him, which was largely true.

  ‘I’m not saying we don’t.’

  ‘Is there someone else?’

  ‘No,’ he stated.

  For a minute or more she stared at the computer screen; she said nothing; he moved to her side, and saw that she was crying.

  ‘I would like us to be friends,’ he said.

  She smiled, as at a weak gesture of consolation. ‘Thank you,’ she said, selecting a Favourite from her browser menu. ‘But no.’

  Less than a month after this, on Corso Diaz, Agnese greeted him as you would greet a former colleague with whom you’d had a good working relationship, and introduced him to Filippo, a thin and anaemic-looking individual with a slight wilt to his stance, like a week-old stick of celery. His pale eyes directed an incurious attention onto Robert. Filippo worked for the Parco tecnologico e archeologico delle Colline Metallifere grossetane, for which organisation he was employed to investigate the condition of the abandoned mine workings of the Colle Metallifere, particularly with regard to the pollution of the water table by acid drainage and the reconstitution of the topsoil. This information was proffered by Filippo as if reciting a paragraph of his CV, and delivered in a voice as unmodulated as the hum of a generator. While he was speaking, Agnese gazed at him as if he were a war hero modestly admitting to an action that some might call brave.

  Filippo was not a frivolous man, evidently, but he looked so flimsy that one blow from a tennis ball struck by Agnese could lay him out. ‘I give it two months at the outside,’ thought Robert.

  11.3

  Carlo Pacetti and the maestro, like a pair of senior security guards on patrol, are ambling across Piazza Santa Maria dei Carmini. The subject of the previous night’s attack has been exhausted; Gideon has accepted, several times, that his friend had indeed warned him that the Senesi girl would bring nothing but trouble. Now Carlo has another criticism to make: he had been a little disappointed when he’d heard that Gideon was to take part in the parade, and he is still disappointed. A man of Gideon’s good taste should not have consented to participate in an event that is merely a show for the tourists. ‘Maestro,’ he says, ‘you must promise me that you will not do it again.’

  Gideon regrets that he can make no such promise. As he has often done before, he invokes the concepts of community, of ritual, of continuity. What the tourists see is not necessarily what the festival is, he tells his companion.

  There are not ten people in Castelluccio who believe that a boy called Lodovico di Piero once fell out of a window and was saved by Saint Zeno, argues Carlo. ‘It’s make-believe, a stupid fantasy,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t think it’s stupid,’ says Gideon.

  ‘We have become a circus,’ grumbles Carlo. ‘We are making ourselves into clowns. The clowns of the history circus,’ he says. This formulation gives him some satisfaction; he walks on in silence, along Via Sant’Agostino, his jaws working as if on a little cube of hard rubber.

  And here are some tourists, coming out of the Cereria: two children and six adults; Dutch. Within half a minute one of the adults has taken a photograph, of a boy in particoloured stockings and tabard, sitting on a step.

  Travellers no longer have a use for memory, says Carlo. They don’t use their minds at all. People used to travel to a foreign country and write down what they saw, or draw it. Now you just press a button: no effort is involved, no engagement. Gideon agrees with this thesis, for perhaps the tenth time this year. One of the women, having pointed
her phone at a basket of flowers, takes note of the two older gentlemen, one limping, the other with a black eye. Grabbing Gideon’s wrist, Carlo says: ‘Let’s give her a show.’ With great vehemence, and much operatic flailing of an arm, he tells his friend that he agrees with those Africans – or whoever they are – who think that they lose a bit of their soul whenever someone takes a photo of them. ‘Every damned snap takes away a bit of the soul of Castelluccio,’ he shouts, with complicated finger gestures that do not mean anything. ‘Death by a million photographs.’ Abruptly he calms himself, and presents to the woman an over-bright smile; she smiles uncertainly and rejoins her companions, as a friend of the Cabrera boy appears, with a snare drum slung at his hip, twirling drumsticks between his fingers. A photo is taken. Carlo links an arm with Gideon’s, and they continue to the Porta di Siena.

  11.4

  Hell, a Tuscan poet once wrote, would smell like a tannery. The production of leather at that time was indeed a noxious business: hair was removed from the hides by steeping them in vats of urine, or by allowing them to putrefy for weeks, before the skins were softened by being pounded in a stew of animal excrement. For many years, nevertheless, the largest tannery in Castelluccio was located within the town walls, in the building that nowadays contains the holiday apartments of the Antica Cereria. Then, in the early 1300s, fearful of the effects of the bad air that emanated from the vats and troughs, and of the filth that the place discharged in such quantities, the comune banished the tanners to a site downstream from Castelluccio. The vacated building became a wheelwright’s workshop, which it remained for several decades. A vintner was the next occupant, then a blacksmith and farrier. In the 1550s, after it had been put to a multitude of other uses, the building in Via Sant’Agostino became a candle factory, or cereria.

  The candles used most widely at that time were of tallow, which was made by rendering animal fat; these candles dripped, gave off a lot of smoke, required frequent trimming, and smelt vile. The cereria of Castelluccio manufactured only beeswax candles, which burned slowly and cleanly, with very little smoke, and produced a pleasing perfume. These candles were, however, expensive, as the raw material is not in plentiful supply: bees have to consume around eight kilos of honey to produce one kilo of wax, and it takes the nectar of more than thirty million flowers to make that quantity of honey. The Castelluccio candles were of the highest quality, and were supplied to churches all over the region, as far away as Siena, as well as to the area’s wealthier families. Deliveries were made every week to the Palazzo Campani, and in 1728 the cereria of Castelluccio achieved its highest accolade, when it was commissioned to make candles for the wedding of Cornelia Barberini – the daughter of Urbano Barberini, the last male Barberini – and Prince Giulio Cesare Colonna di Sciarra. Some of the Barberini candles were as tall as the eleven-year-old Cornelia, and every one was adorned with the emblems, in painted wax, of the two families: the three bees of the Barberini and the crowned column of the Colonna.

  The candle-making industry changed rapidly in the nineteenth century. Stearine, a wax first described in 1814 by the French chemist Michel Chevreul, was used to manufacture candles that burned more slowly than tallow, were odourless and smokeless, and were far less costly than beeswax. In 1834, Joseph Morgan created a machine that could turn out 1,500 candles per hour, and in 1850 the Scottish chemist James ‘Paraffin’ Young filed a patent for the process of extracting paraffin from coal. Consequently, inexpensive and high-quality paraffin wax candles were soon being mass-produced. Just four years after Young’s patent, George Wilson – brother of William Wilson, the founder of Price’s Candles – carried out the first distillation of petroleum oil, from which paraffin could also be extracted. By the end of the century, Price’s had become the world’s biggest manufacturer of candles.

  Though business declined with these advances in technology, the cereria of Castelluccio continued to function until 1891, making beeswax candles, mostly for local churches, as well as producing polishes and modelling waxes. After the factory closed, the premises were used as storage space by the Teatro Civico before becoming a warehouse for timber. While working on the town’s war memorial, Achille de Marinis had his studio here. When bought by Maurizio Ianni in 2004, the bottom storey of the building had last been used by a welder, who had left Castelluccio twelve years earlier; families lived on the upper floors until 1997.

  11.5

  La Cereria, Castelluccio, midday, April

  Oil-tempera on canvas; 100cm x 134cm

  1993

  Jeremies Collection, Boston, Massachusetts

  The Cereria was the subject of the first painting completed by Gideon Westfall in Castelluccio. Walking around the town on a Sunday morning, a few days after his arrival, browsing for scenes that might have the makings of a picture, he was arrested by the sight of this workaday building. He could not remember if he’d passed it before, during those two days in Castelluccio when he had decided that this was where he would live. As he must have walked along every street in the town, it was probable that he had seen it, and taken no notice of it. It was, after all, not a distinguished thing. The churches, the theatre, the town hall, the Caffè del Corso, the town gates – these would have made a stronger claim to the attention of someone who was new to Castelluccio. But on this quiet Sunday morning, with the pale April mid-morning light striking a pattern of small shadows from the rough, silver-yellow stones of the wall, the Cereria made him stop. A splintered wooden gate, painted myrtle green, occupied the arch that today is glazed with a sheet of thick glass, on which L’Antica Cereria has been inscribed in gold. Above the gate were four small windows, a pair for each storey; the shutters of the upper pair were half-open, and from one of these windows hung a towel, maroon and yellow – a detail that became the focal point of the painting, in which the colour of the gate was darkened a little, and the graffiti that then defaced it was omitted. The next day, he set up his easel in Via Santa Maria, and began work on what was to become a series of sketches in watercolour and oil; by the end of the month he had completed La Cereria, Castelluccio, midday, April.

  It was while he was at work on these sketches that he came to the attention of Carlo Pacetti. Their first encounter was inauspicious. It was again a Sunday; Mass was in progress at Santa Maria dei Carmini, the Redentore and San Giovanni Battista; the streets were so empty that in an hour Gideon saw no more than half a dozen people. Then he became aware of a man in a blue shirt, loitering a short distance away, smoking, possibly watching him. Gideon glanced his way, raised a hand, and was ignored. A couple of minutes later, the blue-shirted man ambled past, behind him; Gideon turned and observed a sniffing kind of expression, as if the man had expected to be unimpressed, and duly was. Later that day, around five o’clock, the man again wandered past; he looked at the picture, looked at the wall, and gave a begrudging grimace, as if to say: ‘Could be worse’.

  The following week, on Piazza del Mercato, where he was making a drawing of the loggia, Gideon perceived the blue shirt passing close to him, risked a ‘Buongiorno’, and received, or so he thought, a blink of acknowledgement. When they next met, again on a Sunday morning, this time on Piazza Maggiore, an exchange of words occurred: ‘On holiday?’ Gideon was asked, in Italian, and he replied ‘I live here,’ in English, then in Italian. The man frowned, making Gideon wonder if he’d not said precisely what he had intended to say, or was it that his pronunciation was even worse than he feared? ‘Is good,’ said the man, indicating the watercolour of the Palazzo Comunale. Gideon thanked him, and the man departed. Seven days later, by the Cereria, names were exchanged; Carlo Pacetti tried to explain to the Englishman what this building had been, and where he worked. Soon after, late in the afternoon, Mr Pacetti stepped out of his garage for a cigarette and saw Mr Westfall seated on the grass embankment, sketching the walls and the Porta di Siena; he brought the artist a glass of wine, in an oily beaker.

  One other immensely significant relationship in the life of Gideon Westfall
is associated with his first painting of the Cereria. In May 1994, Milton Jeremies, a partner in a Boston law firm, was on holiday in Tuscany with his new wife, Jane. On May 12th he and Jane stopped for a coffee at La Costarelli in Siena; they sat on the terrace, overlooking the Campo, and Gideon was at an adjacent table, with a sketchbook on his knee. From where he was sitting, Milton Jeremies could see the page on which Gideon was drawing: it was covered with sketches of the waiter who had served them. Every time the waiter reappeared on the terrace, Gideon did a sketch – a dozen lines or less, fluid, interwoven, capturing the essence of a movement. When the waiter brought a glass of water, Gideon set the sketchbook aside, whereupon Milton Jeremies struck up a conversation, with: ‘You’ve been here before.’ It was almost a question. ‘You’re not looking at it,’ he went on, waving an arm at the Campo below them, ‘so I assume it’s familiar.’ Gideon confirmed that it wasn’t new to him.

  ‘We’re walking round with our mouths open all the time,’ said Jane, though it was impossible to imagine that this refined young woman would ever gawp. Milton made some remarks about the cathedral, which they’d visited that morning: his comments were far from banal; he was astute, and very personable. Jane told Gideon that they’d been in Florence for a few days. ‘Wonderful, but too many people like us,’ she said, with attractively dry self-deprecation. ‘And there’s just too much, you know? Like eating caviar all day.’ They talked about the restaurants they’d eaten at, and then, without a pause, Milton asked if he could take a look at the sketchbook. Studying the drawings of the waiter, he made no comment, but his silence seemed thoughtful and complimentary. He passed the sketchbook to Jane, and told Gideon how much he liked Rembrandt’s drawings. There was no pretension in the remark. ‘If I could own one piece of art, just one, I think it would be that sketch of Saskia asleep,’ he said. Now Jane murmured ‘Wow,’ and handed the sketchbook back to her husband, opened at a drawing of Carlo Pacetti, which Milton studied for a full minute, without speaking. He did not yet tell Gideon that he was something of a collector, and that he’d begun to consider commissioning a portrait of Jane to mark their marriage, but the conversation continued for an hour, at the end of which it had been agreed that Milton and Jane, after taking their planned drive through Chianti, would tomorrow take a diversion to Castelluccio. The result of that visit was that La Cereria, Castelluccio, midday, April became the first picture bought by Milton and Jane Jeremies, whose collection of Gideon Westfall paintings was to become the most extensive in the world.