by John Harris
Hannay nodded. ‘I’m interested in that mountain behind the town. I want to know if it’s going to erupt?’
Pelli laughed outright. ‘Erupt? Amarea’s extinct. We’ve long ago ceased to fear it, Captain. The peasants regard it with affection. It keeps the wind off them.’
He leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his fingers making a spire. ‘Surely there’s nothing to cause anxiety?’ he said.
Hannay flushed but gave no ground. He was sitting bolt upright in his chair, his red face stern. ‘What about all that noise just now?’ he asked. He had no more intention of being put off by Pelli than he had by Patch.
‘I heard no noise.’ Pelli cocked his head gaily.
Hannay scowled. ‘You could hear it in the square lower down – the Piazza Martiri.’
Pelli stared at him, then he turned to the young man who was bending over a table near the window reading a paper. ‘Piero,’ he said, ‘did you hear any noise?’
Tornielli turned round and there was a pause before he spoke. ‘No, Signor Pelli,’ he said. ‘I heard nothing.’
Pelli turned to the indignant Hannay and spread his hands.
‘I heard it with my own ears,’ Hannay said. ‘So did lots of other people.’
‘The Piazza Martiri’s notorious for its excitability.’
As he gazed at the Mayor, Hannay’s features were marked with a clear disbelief. He had already decided he didn’t like Pelli, for all the vermouth and the welcome and the apparent willingness to be helpful. Hannay was a cautious slow-moving man with a natural distrust of smoothness and too many smiles. In spite of what Pelli was trying to tell him, he knew the rumble as he had heard it must have been noticeable to everyone in the Porto, and Pelli’s attempt to convince him it was nothing more than his own imagination antagonised him.
He looked hard at the Mayor and then at Tornielli but they were both ingratiatingly friendly.
‘I heard it,’ he insisted, a suspicious expression on his face, ‘and I want to know if my ship’s safe down there. I’m a ship’s captain and I’ve got to think of things like this.’
‘Of course. Of course. But you can be quite certain, Captain, that your ship is quite safe. Amarea’s extinct.’
‘It didn’t sound extinct. In fact, they tell me it’s made these noises before.’
Pelli nodded his head. ‘There have been occasions,’ he said. ‘Very rare, though. A shifting of the rock below the surface. No more.’ He smiled. ‘You can rest assured, Captain, that Amarea, extinct though it is, is carefully watched. Experts from the universities on the mainland still visit it every six months and make tests. They’re well aware of the noises it makes from time to time and they’d warn us if anything were likely to happen, I can promise you. We can’t start worrying now when we’ve never worried before. If people worried over mountains, there’d be no Naples, no Castellamare, and no Catania in Sicily.’
Hannay was still not entirely satisfied. ‘It sounded a pretty loud noise to me,’ he said doggedly. ‘Even if you didn’t hear it. Don’t you think it might be a good idea to have ’em check up on it? I look like being here some time and I don’t want to take any risks with my ship.’
‘Signor Captain’ – Pelli rose – ‘believe me, if I thought there were any danger, an expert could be summoned very quickly. But Italian volcanoes are all of the same type and they give plenty of warning. Remember, we have two of the most active in the world not far away and we know a little about them, I think.’
Hannay pushed back his chair with a deliberate movement that indicated his dissatisfaction. He was aware already that he was going to get nowhere with Pelli, but the Mayor’s reassurances were just a little too glib to put him off. While he knew nothing about volcanoes, when he got his teeth into a principle nothing in the world could shake him off, and Pelli’s easy friendship in no way budged him an inch.
‘I always thought,’ he said slowly and with meaning, ‘that with a volcano, anything could happen – even with an Italian volcano.’
Pelli laughed. ‘You’ve read too much about Pompeii, Captain,’ he said. ‘A lot has been learned since then.’
Hannay finished his drink and stood up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t say I like it even now. And I’ll like it even less if it does it again. On the other hand, thank you for helping.’
As the door closed behind him, Pelli sat back, his smile gone, his black eyes curiously bright. Then he lit a cigarette, puffing at it slowly. The young man behind him had turned round and straightened up.
‘I did hear it,’ he said abruptly.
Pelli nodded. ‘So did I, Piero.’
‘The staccatos have been coming more frequently, Tornielli pointed out. ‘There was one last week.’
‘I know, I know.’ Pelli waved his hand. ‘But they’re nothing.’
‘We don’t know much about it. ‘Tornielli seemed nervous. ‘People are talking. Shouldn’t we get someone here from the mainland–?’
Pelli sat up abruptly. He was a man dedicated to freedom and the belief that the only hope for his politically sundered country was a democratic government. To that end he was desperately anxious to retain his tenuous hold on Anapoli and was prepared to take risks because of it. ‘Certainly not,’ he said brusquely. ‘We can’t have some irresponsible geologist from the mainland going about uttering warnings just now. He could do untold harm. Volcanologists are delightfully vague when it comes to making prophecies – I’ve heard them – and what he said could be misconstrued. The election’s only three weeks away, Piero. People could easily be panicked. The Communists might even use what he said to drive our voters away and a vote from everybody’s our only hope of victory. They might even start a scare as they did at Vicinamontana in Calabria. They blamed the flooding there on the Christian Democrats. They said they’d neglected the Ruffio dam, and they’d do the same sort of thing here if they got half a chance.’
‘I suppose they would.’ Tornielli stood in the middle of the room, fiddling doubtfully with a pencil. ‘All the same, people are beginning to notice.’
‘That’s why we mustn’t have any geologists here,’ Pelli said sharply. ‘People are talking too much already. It’s the most natural thing in the world to talk, of course, but that doesn’t mean that what they say is right.’ Piero continued to fiddle with his pencil, still unconvinced.
‘I’m not happy about the mountain either,’ Pelli said, brushing aside his doubts. ‘But I don’t think it’s dangerous. Obviously rumbles are bound to cause anxiety. But we mustn’t forget that with every one of them the Communists are just that little bit more happy about the result of the voting. They’re the only ones who’re likely to gain anything from the sort of panic that our friend the English captain’s suffering from.’
‘I heard that the Communists were complaining about the mountain in the Piazza Martiri last night,’ Piero said.
‘Of course they were.’ Pelli sat back and gestured with wide-open arms. ‘Of course they were. It suits their purpose perfectly to encourage the belief that the mountain’s dangerous. We all know just how many years these odd rumblings have been going on.’ He pointed with a pencil, jabbing with it as though it were a stiletto. ‘But have the Communists ever worried about them before? Of course not. Then why are they worrying now? Because there’s an election on. Many of our voters could afford to leave Anapoli for a few weeks if they wish. The Communists’ supporters, for the most part, can’t. Therefore any false alarm such as our friend the captain subscribes to can only decrease the number of our friends and leave the Communists exactly as they were. It’s up to us to deride all this talk of danger before it does us any harm. The balance in the voting’s too delicate to upset it for a mountain that’s been rumbling uselessly on and off throughout most of its existence. After three hundred years of it, we can safely forget it for another three weeks.’
Five
It was dark and the crowds had dispersed by the time Patch reached the Via dei Pescatori where he lived. Th
e dim night-streets were still a little noisy with groups of young men shouting and gesturing in doorways and across the pavements, and he felt bored and left out of all the arguments that were going on.
Just above the harbour, he turned into a narrow street like a chasm where the scents of cheese and olives and ravioli and uncorked wine came out at him in gusts with the whiffs of charcoal and the smell of ancient stone, and pushing through the great half-opened door of a peeling block of apartments whose shutters hung awry and unpainted at the windows, he mounted the stairs to the rooms he rented from Mamma Meucci.
Through an open door above him he could hear Mamma Meucci herself, already hoarse from shouting, carrying on one of her everlasting arguments across the narrow street with the old woman who lived opposite and spent all her time in the window watching what went on in Mamma Meucci’s rooms and passing on the information to the neighbours. Then, as he trudged up the stone steps where the children had chalked their names on wet days and gouged faces in the cracked plaster, the stomachic boom-boom-boom of a trombone played by old Tornielli, the caretaker, came up the well of the winding staircase in the ‘Jewel Song’ from Faust.
Somewhere among the rafters a baby was crying – there was always a baby crying – and the wasp hum of a sewing machine; and the sound of two older children arguing while their mother threatened to knock some sense into both of them; some wife tearfully begging her husband to stay home; and through it all a wireless blaring out a popular song – ‘Il bosco è ingiallito, da quando sei partita tu’ – in a shuddering dispossessed way as though it didn’t belong to anybody.
It was a great barracks of a place, noisy, none too clean and anything but private, but in his self-dependent, self-absorbed way that ignored the need for anything in the nature of comfort Patch loved it. It was too chipped and scarred to be called beautiful but it had life and colour and light and people – and it was the people and the life and the colour he crammed into his pictures that sold them to the galleries.
He listened for a moment, pausing on the stairs to enjoy the variety of sounds, the straw hat on the back of his head. ‘All at home,’ he thought. ‘The whole barmy lot. All wrapped up in their own little worlds of words and music.’
As he halted by the next flight of steps, he saw Piero Tornielli, old Tornielli’s son, at the top with Cecilia Leonardi, who lived in a third-floor apartment. He was gesturing importantly and with a touch of arrogance, the immaculate clothes that went with his job with Mayor Pelli oddly out of place on the dark stairs.
As he saw Patch, his gestures drooped and he frowned quickly, his eyes flickering sullenly downwards, so that he looked exactly like Patch’s portrait of him, the Young Man in Love, that graced Forla’s Rome house – dreamy with jealousy and torn by internal strife.
‘Signor Patch,’ he said uncertainly. He had been on the point of descending and he now stepped back to let Patch pass.
‘No, no! Signor Tornielli!’ Patch smiled and, with a caricature of a gesture, stepped back too.
Tornielli hesitated, trying to will Patch to move first, but holding the battered straw hat across his chest, Patch leaned nonchalantly on the banister and waited, and finally Tornielli’s bluster collapsed. He gave a quick unhappy glance at the girl then ran down the stairs, not looking up at Patch as he passed him.
Patch watched him go before mounting the steps. The girl’s blue eyes were on him all the way up, resentful and challenging. ‘Why do you do that?’ she asked in English. ‘You know he hates it.’
‘It pleases me to see the collapse of the legal mind.’ Patch grinned. ‘Every time we meet here, Cecilia, we have that little passage of arms. He always gives in. I’m waiting for the time when he’ll try to punch me on the nose. I’ll buy him a dinner if he does.’
‘Piero’s only young,’ Cecilia pointed out defensively, as though she were as old as Patch instead of only nineteen.
Patch grinned again, feeling vaguely sorry for young Tornielli. He knew his tormenting was senseless and cruel and perhaps included a degree of gasconading for Cecilia’s benefit. He was constantly promising himself he wouldn’t do it again, but there was a quality of petulant vanity about the boy, a querulous self-assertion that drove Patch to debunk him. Somehow, Piero didn’t belong in that haggard building with its disfigured paint work and the washing that plastered its façade – a stranger in spite of being born and brought up there among the noisy inhabitants whom Patch set down with such gusto in his paintings, just as he found them, hard-working, lazy, proud, profane or religious. Piero had been clawing his way for ages out of that class of society, forgetting as he went where he came from, and aiming for the arrogant and self-important, the better-than-the-rest class that to Patch was always like a red rag to a bull.
‘Has he asked you to marry him lately?’ he asked.
Cecilia frowned. ‘Piero’s been asking me to marry him since he was twenty. Since before you came here. Ever since my grandfather and his father decided it would be a good match. I’m still saying no. But I don’t laugh at him.’
Her eyes were sullen as she looked up at him, a small figure in a yellow dress that lit the shadows.
‘You make too many enemies,’ she said.
‘They’re more exhilarating than friends.’
‘You don’t care, do you?’ She looked puzzled and uncomprehending, and vaguely worried about him. ‘I don’t understand you not caring. I don’t understand anybody not caring when they make enemies.’
‘Piero’s not an enemy. Perhaps he’d like to push me down the stairs, but no more.’
‘Piero takes himself – and me – very seriously.’ She was vaguely hostile towards him, even defensive towards Piero because he was young like her and unsure of himself. ‘Sometimes he makes me afraid. He sets such store by this arrangement of his father’s.’
‘He’ll get over it.’
She looked up at him, smiling a little, a suggestion of contempt and pity in her expression. ‘How little you understand us,’ she said.
He stared at her for a second, sobered by her seriousness. God, he wondered, why can’t I get at the thoughts behind those eyes? – all the fears and doubts of youth, all the gaiety and the pride. There was nothing could make a picture so much as the character beyond the flesh and bone. That was where all the great portraits came from, the Mona Lisa and those magnificent Titians and Barbaris.
He wondered even if he knew her features too well, for he’d painted them so often he could almost do it blindfold. She’d modelled uncomplainingly for him through the whole of the stormy two years he’d lived there and in between had helped Mamma Meucci to feed him when he was too absorbed to feed himself, had sewed on his buttons, washed his clothes, tidied his room whenever he permitted her, typed his letters at the office where she worked, quarrelled with him, even told lies to free him from the irresponsible love affairs he embarked upon.
Theirs was an odd relationship. For the most part, he hardly noticed her when he was absorbed in his work, bullying her to hold her head still when he was painting her, thoughtlessly making her stand for hours while he caught the details of a drape he’d wrapped round her, then as she finally rebelled against his domination in a flood of impassioned Italian, suddenly becoming alive to the fact that under the sulky surface she was a pretty girl with fire and laughter in her veins and taking her off on some riotous picnic at the other side of Anapoli in a hired car or in a boat to one of the neighbouring islands.
He woke up as he realised she was watching him, too.
‘Any coffee, Cecilia?’ he asked. ‘I feel a bit fuzzy round the edges.’
‘Has there ever not been any coffee?’ she demanded.
He laughed at her hostility. ‘That’s what I like – the warm glow of welcome. I’ll come in.’
Without returning his smile, she held the door open for him, and he crossed the little studio that old Leonardi, her grandfather, had once used for photography, but which was now rapidly falling into disuse from lack of clie
nts. By the door was the glass frame that had originally hung in the street until the wind had blown it down. It was still full of brown portraits ten years out of date with a background of rustic seats and waterfalls, their edges growing green-grey with damp and age. On the bench there were boxes of long-developed plates, but no sign anywhere of new work. The whole place smelled of cleaning but the pungent odours of acids and developers had long since vanished.
Cecilia moved ahead of him into the apartment and watched him drinking his coffee for a while, his lean predatory nose in the cup, then she moved to the window. The Tyrrhenian was picking up the stars and a few white birds like puffins were mewing over the headland. The lights from the ship in the harbour were doubled in the water alongside, like sequins against the oily surface, and at the other side the windows of the flat-fronted houses glowed yellow in the mirror-still waters of the bay. In preparation for an open-air meeting, the loudspeaker car was still tearing the quietness to shreds down by the harbour with a gramophone record of a brass band, and a dog was howling in retaliation in one of the narrow courtyards.
‘It’s hot tonight,’ she said.
‘Election fever,’ he pointed out.
‘Elections!’ Her eyes flashed as she turned on him, and he thought how young she looked with that small face of hers, how incredibly young in the yellow dress that made her seem slighter than ever. ‘There’s nothing in anybody’s mind but elections. But it isn’t elections. I don’t like it. It makes me afraid.’ She moved closer to him. ‘There was another staccato today.’
Patch looked up quickly. ‘Cristoforo says there were two,’ he said. ‘But what about it? The mountain’s been rumbling for fifty years on and off.’
‘The mountain’s been there for forty million years,’ she said, her blue eyes bright under the smoky lashes. ‘And everyone still says nothing will happen because nothing’s happened for fifty years. What’s fifty years in forty million?’