Prior to his exploits at the Festa di San Zeno, Arrigo Pepe was renowned in Castelluccio for his adventures with the Cacciatori delle Alpi – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was renowned for talking about those adventures. Almost every evening he would spend an hour or two at the Pergola, a tavern that used to occupy a corner of Piazza Sant’Agostino, and there, ‘enthroned on his rustic bench,’ in the words of Tommaso Galli’s diary, he would, in return for a bottle of wine, regale any newcomers with tales which, on each retelling, were ‘garnished with fresh exaggerations and outright lies’. He had fought at Bezzecca, and been wounded there – this much was indubitably true. And it might have been true that the missing fingers had been removed by a bullet during the defence of the church at Locca, and that, having been bandaged, but still bleeding copiously, he had straight away rejoined his comrades for the assault on Bezzecca, where a burst of shrapnel had given him the scars on his legs, which would inevitably be displayed to his audience. Perhaps he had killed a man at the church and another one at Bezzecca, and it was not impossible that he had, as he would sometimes claim, shot an Austrian at Locca with the Austrian’s own gun, having overpowered him with his bare hands after the firearm had jammed. Most were inclined to believe him when he swore that the maiming of his leg was so severe that the doctors had despaired of saving the limb – indeed, of saving his life. Some were convinced, or almost convinced, that Arrigo had, as he claimed, been present in the piazza at Bezzecca when, on August 9th, Garibaldi had received news of the armistice and had given his famous one-word reply to the order to end his campaign. And some were even persuaded that, in the aftermath of the battle, Garibaldi himself had commended Arrigo for his valour. The credulity of most, however, expired when assured that the bloodstained glove that Arrigo Pepe would on occasion produce from his coat pocket had belonged to the Hero of the Two Worlds himself, who had insisted that Arrigo keep it. Nevertheless, for many years Arrigo Pepe was known in Castelluccio, with varying degrees of affection, as ‘our little hero’.
Arrigo was a small man; in the one authenticated photograph of him, taken in 1905, he is standing between the grandsons of Silvio Ubaldino, who were then aged ten and eleven, and Arrigo is the tallest of the trio by less than a hand’s span. The photograph was taken after the crossbow competition at the conclusion of that year’s festival, and it commemorates the achievement that has perpetuated the name of Arrigo Pepe. A year before, Arrigo had been cajoled by Tommaso Galli into participating in the shooting contest. His reluctance to compete, it had been assumed by many, was explicable by the ageing hero’s fear of damaging his self-sustained reputation of having been the best shot in the history of his regiment. So there was some astonishment when the less than robust veteran of Bezzecca placed a bolt in the very heart of the target, calmly reloaded, and fired a second bolt with such accuracy that, according to Galli’s diary, ‘a sheet of paper could not have been slipped between the two’. The marksman acknowledged the applause, wrote Galli, ‘with the curt bow of a man who had silenced his slanderers.’
The following year, Arrigo Pepe consented to take part again, and on this occasion he achieved a feat that was even more remarkable: his first bolt landed in the centre of the gold; his second split the first right down the middle. At the instigation of Tommaso Galli, the trophy bearing Arrigo’s name was commissioned. Arrigo was allowed to believe that most of the money for the trophy had been raised by donations from the common people of Castelluccio, whereas in fact nearly all of it had been donated by Paolo Campani, the one person in Castelluccio who was despised by the little hero, partly because of Cambino’s effeminacy, and partly because of his exalted social position.
Arrigo Pepe never competed again in the Palio. The newspaper report on the 1906 event makes reference to an ‘infirmity’; the pain of his wounds, it was written, had never ceased; the death of his wife, in the winter of 1905, had reduced him. In 1909 it was reported that Arrigo Pepe was absent from the festivities. In 1910 he died.
He was buried in the cemetery at Castelluccio, beside Agata. He had attended the church of Sant’Agostino regularly with his wife and their children and his stepson, but it had been known that, like his revered Garibaldi, he had held anti-clerical opinions, and his recorded utterances are indicative of a philosophy that did not accord with the tenets of the Catholic faith. Asked if he had ever feared death on the battlefield, he had once replied: ‘Where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not; we shall never meet.’ A few months before Arrigo’s death, a neighbour, concerned at his frailty and despondency, encouraged him by telling him that, if only he would take better care of himself, he might live for another decade or more. ‘Nothing awaits us,’ replied Arrigo. ‘Another year of life doesn’t reduce eternity by one jot.’ His heart was weak. A doctor told him that he must not exert himself, and on no account should he ever try to walk further than one kilometre at a time. On the day of his death he walked to Radicóndoli, a distance of four kilometres; he returned without resting, and collapsed and died within sight of the Porta di Siena. The priest of Sant’Agostino adjudged that the death of Arrigo Pepe was not to be regarded as suicide. As Arrigo had requested, the glove of Garibaldi was buried with him.
11.10
Having taken a call from a miserable-sounding Teresa, Robert has left the Antica Farmacia first, with apologies, promising to be livelier in the morning.
‘He’s preoccupied,’ Gideon tells her.
‘I’d noticed,’ says Claire.
‘Never knew what he saw in her, I have to say,’ he remarks. ‘What did you make of her?’
‘Attractive woman.’
‘Of pleasing lineaments, certainly. But an empty vessel, if you ask me. Half-empty, at best.’
‘Well, other people’s choices are often baffling, aren’t they?’ she answers. ‘We can’t see what they see.’
‘True,’ he says, staring ahead pensively, like a man who has been cast aside.
‘Come to that, if Joe Yardley walked in now, and I’d never met him before, I don’t think I’d give him a second look.’
It takes Gideon a full five seconds to register who Joe Yardley is, then he smiles as you’d smile at someone who’s putting on a brave face. ‘Oh well,’ he sighs, rising from the table.
Out in the street, he proposes a last ramble. Within a couple of minutes they are on Piazza Maggiore, and the enigma of Teresa and Robert seems to be troubling him no longer. Stopping in the centre of the square, he raises his face as if to receive the beneficent rays of the moon of Castelluccio. He loves this town, he says, with the fervency of a man declaring his love of the woman to whom he’s been married for many years. Everything he needs is here, he declares. In the first few years of living here he had thought, now and then, that one day he’d be going back to London; he’d had this fantasy that only after leaving and returning could he truly belong in England. ‘But I’ll never leave,’ he says, as though making a vow to her. ‘This is my natural habitat.’ He needs to have the hills around him. When he was a boy, he goes on, he used to sleep in the garden on summer nights, and in his teens he’d sometimes take the train out into the countryside at the weekends to go camping, on his own, usually. ‘But I went camping with your father once,’ he says. ‘Did he tell you about that?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘Funny story,’ he says. ‘Before it was time to turn in for the night we’d argued, inevitably, and David took himself off to sleep in the open air, leaving the tent to me. David was a very heavy sleeper – he could sleep anywhere. We’d pitched our tent at the edge of a wood; David went in a bit farther, but what he didn’t know was that he’d put his sleeping bag close to a path. I was woken up in the morning by a terrible scream: a woman had been walking along the path and she’d seen my brother lying in the bracken, mouth open, pale – and she’d thought he was dead.’
‘Which now he is,’ she almost responds, but instead she smiles effortfully; tomorrow she’ll be home.
‘But you like London?’ he asks, as if requesting verification of a strange predilection.
‘Couldn’t live anywhere else,’ she says.
‘I had to go there last year. I found it unbearable.’
‘Comes with getting older,’ she suggests.
‘You may be right,’ says Gideon. ‘I’m getting tired,’ he admits. He fears he may not have many more paintings left in him. The unavoidable distractions of the artist’s life – the commercial side of things – have become increasingly burdensome. He would like to be left alone now, but he cannot afford to: he has to sell himself.
‘Doesn’t Robert take care of all that?’
‘The worst of it, yes. He does the donkey work. But I have to be involved. Nowadays, in the age of the infernet, you have to have a presence. You have to project a personality,’ he complains, performing a mime in which his innards are disgorged through his abdomen. ‘The business of self-promotion is a distasteful racket,’ he says. ‘But it has to be done. If you don’t sell, you don’t work, and I have to work. That’s my justification. “You see that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone”,’ he proclaims, laughing. He proposes a last drink at the Caffè del Corso. ‘Come on,’ he urges, nudging her towards the light. ‘One for the road. And I’ll tell you one last story. It’ll amuse you. It doesn’t reflect well on me,’ he says, though clearly, from the forgiving slant of his smile, it doesn’t reflect too badly either.
Gideon’s last story – for her ears only, though told in public – concerns his degree show at Camberwell. For a young artist, he explains, the degree show is a big event: it’s an opportunity – in most cases, the last – to make people take notice. ‘You have to sell something, if you’re to have a future,’ he says, seizing a block of space with both hands. A few people in his year, by the time the show closed, had sold a single picture; Gideon had sold six of his eight. ‘I was the one person in my year who could really draw – let’s not be falsely modest,’ he says. ‘And I was the only one who sold so much work. I was the hit of the show. People talked about me. I’d made my mark.’ He pauses, basking in remembered glory. ‘But it was a con,’ he goes on. ‘Not completely a con, but a semi-con, because in fact I’d sold only two pictures, not six. The other four buyers existed solely in my imagination. In the course of the first day of the show I placed a little yellow dot beside the four pictures I least liked. I’d thought up a description of each of my buyers. I’d given them jobs and addresses, so I could spin a good story if anyone asked. And it worked. People saw the four little dots and they thought: “This chap is being taken seriously. Let’s give him a closer look.” Opinions are modified by success, you see. Fake success brought real success. And when the show was over, to cover my tracks, I destroyed the four that I’d sold to myself. So there you are,’ he concludes. ‘The tricks to which one feels obliged to resort. Disgraceful. And you and Robert are the only people in the world who know about it.’ Hands raised in surrender, he awaits her judgement; and, to her surprise, she finds herself smiling.
He ushers her into the Caffè del Corso and towards a corner table. For himself he orders a grappa; when Claire requests an amaro he nods approvingly – ‘Gone native, I see,’ he remarks. Then, with a sudden change of register, he gives her the sort of look you might give an employee who has come into your office for her annual assessment, an employee whom you like but haven’t quite fathomed, and he says: ‘You find people disappointing, generally, don’t you?’
‘No more than average, I’d say.’
By means of a small smile he answers that what she’s said may be true, but is an evasion; he wrinkles the skin around his eyes, signifying kindliness. ‘It’ll happen,’ he says.
‘What’ll happen?’
‘You’re a good person,’ he tells her; he seems to be saying that this is a realisation at which he has only now arrived.
‘That’s nice to know,’ she replies.
‘What happened with your husband was a blow, I know. And when your parents have gone, it’s difficult. But you’ll be all right. Someone will come along.’
‘Ah, I see. You’re telling me not to worry about being left on the shelf.’
‘Not how I’d put it.’
‘I’m not worried, Gideon.’
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Just give it time.’
‘That’s what I’d planned to do.’
He laughs and chinks his glass on hers, as if they’ve reached an agreement. ‘Now,’ he restarts, leaning back, ‘tell me more about the new job.’
For half an hour she talks about the new job, and Gideon interrupts only to ask questions. He appears to remember every remark she’s made about her work since she’s been here; he remembers every name she’s mentioned, however briefly, and he remembers what these people did, and to whom, and when. ‘I’m sure it’ll be a good move,’ he says, when she’s finished. ‘A sympathetic woman with a clear head – you’ll be perfect,’ he says, and his directness momentarily disarms her. ‘I couldn’t do what you’ve been doing,’ he states. ‘Too absorbed with my own dramas.’
And as they are strolling back to the apartment, along the Corso, he tells her that a woman once remarked to him, at a private view, under the misapprehension that he was one of the other artists in the show: ‘I have nothing but respect for Westfall’s talent; I just don’t like what it does.’ He chuckles at the recollection. ‘And that’s your view, more or less, isn’t it?’ There is no accusation in the question.
‘It’s not—’ she begins, but he touches her shoulder to stop her.
‘That’s OK,’ he says. ‘The world would be intolerable without variety. You’re not keen on what I do, and that’s perfectly all right. You are not alone. Universal acclamation I do not need. Small applause suffices,’ he assures her. They are passing the old theatre; he halts to look at the façade of the building; it seems that he is finding it difficult to continue with what he’s saying, and needs a distraction in which to compose himself. Still facing the doorway, he goes on: ‘And I’m not quite your cup of tea. Personally, I mean. I know this is the case. I’m a little too rich for your palate, shall we say. At times, to tell you the truth, I’m a little too rich for my own palate.’ He turns, presenting to her a face of wistful resignation. ‘To some people, sometimes, I am preposterous. I am aware of this. On the other hand, I can also be entertaining, I hope. I try not to bore. Occasionally I fail. I overdo it, I know. But,’ he declaims, walking on, raising a forefinger, ‘as the sage of Rotterdam once put it, “fictions and illusions are what hold the gaze of spectators”. I rest my case.’ A hand goes out, to hook itself under her arm; she lifts an elbow to let the hand in. ‘I’m very glad you came,’ he says.
11.11
She can’t settle to read. Robert isn’t back, so she goes into the living room and turns on the TV. On one channel there’s an Italian rapper; on the next one it’s three men talking earnestly – about football, it turns out; then it’s an excitable man strolling around a huge warehouse of leather furniture, being admired by a comely twenty-year-old whose skirt is the size of a handkerchief; a film, dubbed into Italian; an interview with a depressed-looking elderly man; a young man dancing badly between two leggy specimens in spangly bikinis. She watches the dancers until they have finished; the audience – in which there are some very beautiful young women, almost as glossy as the ones on stage – claps and cheers in a delirium of happiness. The dancing man goes to a desk, and the leggy specimens perch on it, pouting at the cameras while the man gabbles. It’s appalling and fascinating and incomprehensible. She watches for another quarter of an hour, then returns to the bedroom. It’s still very warm; she starts to pack her bag. A notion occurs to her; she will go to the pool.
To the east the hump-backed horizon is revealed against the low glow that rises from Siena. Across the valley, a dozen tiny lights are strung across the lower hills; above them, two villages show as clots of yellow, and above the villages the stars are like a scoop of salt thrown o
nto blue-black paper. It’s a richer sky than she will see at home; tomorrow she will be sorry, a little, not to be seeing it. The moon, almost full, gives a slate-grey top to a narrow veil of cloud underneath it, and there’s no sound, almost no sound – just the buzz of a scooter shrinking into the silence. Standing neck-deep in the water, she moves her arms slowly, like weeds in a stream, and a few seconds later she can hear the water moving in the gutter, as quiet as a small fish breaking the surface.
In the benign night air her thoughts of her uncle turn benign: she can admire his expertise; he is generous, with his money at least; and she can imagine that she could, in time, find his extravagances more palatable. His dedication to the image of himself is impressive, in a way, and almost pitiable too. She recalls their afternoon in Siena and in her mind she takes his hand again, but differently. This scene is sentimental and nonsensical, she knows; she stops it, instead bringing to mind the worst of him – the self-absorption and the pettiness; the bombast. And from this arises the image of her faithless husband. His spectre appears, and she regards him as he cringes in the attitudes of guilt; the hands wrestle with each other, but his eyes are the eyes of a man whose mind is on the imminent day of release. She holds him there, in the pen of her memory, and she feels nothing. It is true: she feels nothing, and this is new. So perhaps she is not identical to the woman she was two weeks ago. The things that she has observed and heard: it is possible that they have had an effect. How could they not have? She recalls being waylaid by grief when she walked out of the town on the third or fourth night here, the night she saw the porcupine. Her father has gone: she reiterates the fact; she sees it in its entirety, she thinks, and the sadness of it is grievous. But what she feels at this moment is something different from the grief that she recalls being pierced by before, on that evening; it is not acceptance, but perhaps the beginning of it – his absence is becoming a part of who she is. Acceptance is a condition she will never fully achieve, she knows: her mother’s death, after so many years, can still make her stagger. But a change may be happening; or this may be only an interlude, she warns herself – a simulation of change, not change itself. Nothing significant, she tells herself, can have happened in so short a time.
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