The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  The only pieces of furniture in the Trattoria were two long tables, and there was no menu. You simply sat down at one of the tables, often among complete strangers, or with a mixture of strangers and friends, chose between fish and chicken and left the rest to the chef.

  The first person from home to venture forth and visit me in Florence was a woman who – don’t ask me why, I’ve no idea – went by the name of ‘Matubi Hühnchen’ – a large, blonde, shy woman who invariably responded to my witticisms by exclaiming: ‘Ooh, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you!’ Not that she ever did, mind.

  Back home, she lived in a one-room attic flat above a confectioner’s. All the other apartments were unoccupied; in other words, there were lots of spare rooms with beds and fusty old furniture, and when we wanted to have sex we always decamped to one of these other rooms. When we’d finished, Matubi would sit naked on the windowsill with the curtains open and breathe in the baking smells that wafted up from below, day and night. Her snow-white body and the smell of the confectioner’s were so intertwined in my mind that, even in Florence, the aroma of warm baked buns and cakes always filled me with thoughts of summer love and homesickness. Yet this habit of sitting naked on the windowsill was the only truly liberated act of Matubi’s that I could recall.

  Nor did that change when she came to see me in Florence. Everyone around us was some sort of Bohemian, yet all the two of us could think of was that we missed the aroma of confectionery. So on the second night of her visit, when I’d drunk too much Vin Santo, I confided in her:

  ‘I really just feel like talking wildly, no holds barred.’

  To which she responded: ‘There’s plenty of time for that later.’

  That second evening, I’d taken her to Trattoria Giusti, where we soon found ourselves surrounded by a group of American tourists. One of them, Peter, a painter, swam through European art like a biological cell through its surrounding medium. His main interest was in the Catalan informal artist Antoni Tàpies. He carried around a reproduction of one of his works in his wallet, and in the run-down Trattoria he was able to point out certain places where the fabric of the building had decayed in interesting ways that Tàpies would surely have found intriguing. Peter wanted to become a pupil of Tàpies, and to this end had already written him three painterly letters, liberally larded with artistic formulations and offbeat metaphors, which he hoped would persuade the master to invite him to Spain. All three letters remained unanswered.

  In the meantime, though, Peter had also become interested in Greek philosophy and studied Plato’s theory of art and the edifice of ideas in Neoplatonism. It all made for a very animated evening in the Trattoria. Drink was quaffed liberally, and the discussion flowed freely between such topics as impressions from our travels, biographical snippets, cultural knowledge and jokes, with everyone chipping in where appropriate. The only surprise at the end of the night was that no one insisted on exchanging addresses. So it was and should remain, then, this one-off, unrepeatable evening, at the very last gasp of which Matubi told me that there was no future for us and that she was going to go back home early.

  Some weeks later my six-square-metre room had grown too cramped for me, so I moved into a commune with two American girls, an Argentinian girl and a Turkish guy. The girl from Argentina, Anna-Maria, was, in her dark splendour, one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. Several times a week in the afternoon, she entertained her lover, a squat Neapolitan called Luigi. He’d put on Ravel’s Bolero and, as a master of his art, would arrange it so that that he and his girlfriend came to a climax in synch with the music, and as the orchestra reached a crescendo, so would they. The ensuing diminuendo would coincide with Anna-Maria’s loudest orgasmic moan, and all the while I’d be sitting in my room beneath a reproduction of Jacopo della Quercia’s ‘Tomb of Ilaria del Carretto’, shaking along in time to their exertions.

  One day, there was a ring at the front door and a man’s voice enquired:

  ‘C’é Riccardo?’

  And I responded, as arranged:

  ‘Non c’é Riccardo!’

  We were having trouble with the landlords, so we only let in people who gave the correct passwords. And duly, up the stairs came Peter, Peter the painter, who turned out to be a friend of one of the two American girls in the commune, or to be more precise, her discarded lover. The first thing we said when we saw one another was that we knew it, we just knew we’d run into one another again.

  Since we’d last met, Peter had sold his return ticket to the US and was planning to stay in Europe to study aesthetics, visit Tàpies – who still hadn’t replied – and devote himself to his painting. For the time being, he was eking out a living renovating apartments.

  Thereafter, we saw one another almost daily and shared the crises that hit the commune: Anna-Maria found out that Luigi had a wife and four kids back in Naples, the Turk got involved in pushing drugs near the Ponte Vecchio, and the clash with the landlords reached such a pitch that we took a joint decision to quit the place.

  At that time Peter was living in a Benedictine-Olivetan monastery in Settignano, in the hills above Florence, a building that had once housed fifty or more monks, but where now only four were left. Accordingly just four of the remaining cells were rented to secular guests, who were only outwardly required to abide by the order’s rules: no music, no noise, and no women visitors in the cell wing, over whose exit hung a sign bearing the sombre legend: ‘Clausura’.

  The abbot, Don Carlo, was so short and pot-bellied that his monk’s habit was clearly the only garb he could possibly have worn. He received me and gave me a soul-searching examination, which I passed without taxing my soul excessively. But when Peter wanted to take a photo of us both, because he liked the way the rubicund man of faith only just reached up to the height of my belt, the abbot demurred:

  ‘I’m not a vain man, but you really mustn’t take this photo.’

  His proscription had all the force of an Old Testament ‘Thou Shalt Not’. Over the ensuing months, I came to learn all the foibles of the other monks: Don Tarcisio liked to read out loud the instruction leaflets from the tablets and other medication he took, Don Lorenzo remonstrated with politicians on the television from a distance of two metres, and Don Gabriello had two collections, a public one of perfume bottles and a private one consisting of pictures of transvestites, which he filed between the pages of a hymnal that he kept well hidden.

  Don Gabriello had become a monk when he was twenty-one, but by twenty-three he’d realized that it couldn’t possibly be God’s will for a young man to be confined to a monastery from such an early age. Consequently, he had found himself committing transgressions on a regular basis. Indeed, we only addressed him as ‘Don’ out of sympathy, as he’d never actually taken holy orders, so in fact was the only ‘Fra’ among the brotherhood. Peter and I like him best out of all of them, and sometimes of an evening we’d sit either side of his high bed, in which he, cocooned in a sheath of eggshell-coloured jersey, sat looking like a large mealworm and regaled us with smutty stories.

  In the mornings, we’d go and put the tables out for the two women who ran the bar on the nearby square, and eat our brioche there, before Peter headed off into the hills to paint, while I went into the institute to immerse myself in the art theory of the Early Renaissance. Sometimes we arrived at the bar in the early morning and found the mother and daughter kneeling in front of the television, where the Pope appeared briefly standing on a red carpet. After a couple of months, Peter was finally flat broke, accepted a larger renovation job in Rome, and so the plan was that I would travel with him as far as Orvieto, stopping off in Siena along the way, where we wanted to go and see the famous horse race known as the ‘Palio’ around the city’s main square.

  On the eve of our departure, Peter took a couple of hefty swigs from a bulbous brown bottle of grappa, strapped all his paintings on his back and went from bar to bar, where he hoped to talk the bored owners into purchasing sketches in oil and watercol
our showing corners of walls, haystacks and forlorn animals to decorate the walls of their taprooms, which were already covered with pictures. And the impossible actually happened! By the end of the evening Peter was blind drunk but had managed to offload most of his paintings, earning him enough to buy a ticket to Rome and pay off his debts. Don Carlo nodded in satisfaction: despite his handsome exterior, here was a good lad who wouldn’t end up doing a flit while still owing him rent. He’d known it all along.

  From midday that day we stood on the mussel-shaped Piazza del Campo in Siena, where the racetrack had already been cordoned off and the square was soon barred to any more visitors, as the crush was already so great. A Red Cross ambulance did the rounds, picking up people who’d fainted. All round the square, small groups sat playing games, eating, sleeping or arguing.

  By the time the riders in their medieval costumes – each individual representing his quarter of the city and bearing the coat of arms of his Contrada – nervously embarked on their first lap, the crowd were already yelling their support for the ‘Tower’, the ‘Ram’, the ‘Snail’, the ‘Wave’, the ‘Giraffe’, the ‘Panther’, the ‘Dragon’ and so forth.

  The race itself went down in history as the Palio that had seven false starts. The jockey of the ‘Giraffe’ Contrada was injured in the melée and had to be carried off the track on a stretcher by the Red Cross. But just before he reached the open maw of the ambulance, he suddenly jumped off the trolley, got hold of his horse again and went on to win the race. The ensuing uproar culminated in a pitched street battle between the ‘Giraffe’ and ‘Tower’ districts. Although Peter and I managed to jump over the balustrade separating the rest of the square from the race track and the back alleyways and escape into one of the side streets, that was precisely where the two main fronts of the battle had converged. So, we pressed our backs against a house frontage and let the two cohorts lay into one another in front of us with raised sticks and bare fists, while residents in the upper storeys poured buckets of cold water down onto the hot-headed brawlers.

  A young woman, who like us had got caught between the two warring fronts, fainted at our feet. We caught hold of her just in time, propped her up against the wall behind and waited until the fighting had moved on past us. The crush suddenly abated, the girl came to, and with us supporting her on either side, she let herself be steered into a café in one of the side streets.

  Bernadette had, it transpired, come to Rome as an American au pair, in search of some cultural life. Instead, she’d found love there, and then lost it again. Her stories only gave off faint whiffs of this lost love, and as she scraped her fingers through her long brown locks and gazed into our eyes, she convinced herself that life was fated to take another romantic turn, some coup de foudre, a piece of sheer craziness, like finding herself cast into the company of two strangers in the wake of a street battle in the summer heat of Siena.

  As night fell, Bernadette still hadn’t taken a step without us propping her up on either side. She’d given each of us a peck on the cheek, showing equal favour, and the instant either one of us nipped into a shop or went off to the loo for however brief a time, she gave the other such a passionate French kiss that he couldn’t help but feel he was the Chosen One. Indeed, her kisses were profligate and intemperate, she fairly launched herself into each one, flinging her bare elbow round your neck as she did so, so that you couldn’t avoid it and so she’d enjoy the experience all the more. Whenever she stopped kissing, she’d throw her head back and give a guttural laugh, which sounded a bit insane, a bit dirty, and a bit proud all at once, and sometimes she’d even wipe her lips with the back of her hand. She was determined to drive us wild, the both of us, and while she was kissing us, we were definitely also meant to feel her girl’s body nuzzling up against us as our tongues intertwined with hers at the back of our throats.

  Shortly before midnight, things had progressed to such a stage that there was no question of us going our separate ways. Bernadette made no secret of the fact that she really didn’t want to be on her own. The idea was for us to find a meadow somewhere outside the city and spend the night together there. When we hesitated, she walked a few steps ahead, lifted her T-shirt almost up to her breasts, bent over and asked:

  ‘So, which one of you wants me?’

  Men are both drawn to and terrified of women like this, while also despising them a little. But Bernadette was radiating the promise of a warm summer night, and there was enough desire in her for two. Peter was a dog, game for anything, and spreading his arms out munificently like Jesus, ceded the decision to me. I, however, was a coward, and with a curt ‘Just get on with it, you two!’ beat a retreat. As I did so, I could read two emotions in Bernadette’s eyes: regret at having to pass up on one of us, and contempt – ultimately melting into friendliness – for the bashful guy who was probably just afraid of the competition.

  So, for her part, our leave-taking was so motherly as to be almost hurtful. Peter was quick to assume the role of the loyal friend who was still prepared to forego the pleasure; there were more important things when all was said and done. But in no time we’d agreed to meet up at twelve noon the next day outside the cathedral in Orvieto, and once that was settled, his lust was shameless and urgent. I headed off to the station. When I turned round to look at them one last time, Peter’s hand was grabbing her bum as if to say: look, that’s how you do it, and as they walked away she threw her head back and laughed at the night sky.

  At the station, once I’d found out that the next train to Orvieto was only due to leave early next morning, I bunked down in the corner of the waiting room next to a couple of backpackers and slept for hours, though I woke in good time to catch my train.

  It was just pulling into Siena station when a couple – with tousled hair and rumpled clothes – lurched onto the platform. Peter was clearly sober by this time, while Bernadette wore a blissful but deranged expression and was leaning against him, clutching his arm, with grass stains on her jeans. All Peter did by way of a farewell was give her a pretty peremptory kiss. And as the train pulled away, it was me who kept waving the longest at her as she stood there on the platform, beaming, enthusiastic, and finally sweeping her arms above her head in a wide arc – this slightly crazy young woman who was very much of her time.

  On the train, the first thing Peter wanted to know was whether I was angry with him. When he found I wasn’t, he took off his brown suede jacket and presented it to me. Yet when I asked him about his night in the meadow, he shook his head and grew taciturn, like someone who had gorged himself and now had nothing to show for it but a guilty conscience. It had been too wild, too crazy, he said, he’d lost all self-control, and that wasn’t good.

  It was still before midday when we pulled into Orvieto, that soaring town that seems to reach for the heavens. The cathedral stands at its highest point, scraping at the sky and alarming the populace with its outrageous visions. At one time, the local burghers must simply have jogged along, content in the knowledge that tomorrow was just another day. And then suddenly they found themselves confronted with Luca Signorelli’s fresco cycle in the San Brizio Chapel in the cathedral and must have come to believe that hell had the most beautiful naked figures and Heaven the angels with the fluffiest wings. For when, one day, the Day of Judgement arrived, they’d suddenly find themselves handed over to the grizzled ferryman Charon by the hosts of heavenly soldiers and rowed across the Styx into eternal damnation. And they’d discover that they’d failed to inform themselves about the need for repentance in good time.

  Luca Signorelli, who envisaged the Last Trump and set it down in paint, was himself an enigmatic figure who came to Umbria from Tuscany. He had an obsessive interest in anatomy, and his painterly imagination was fired by Dante, whose work may be said to have influenced or even determined popular conceptions of hell for many centuries. Signorelli is even reputed to have fallen from the scaffolding once while executing his frescos, but then again nobody’s descent into hell is exact
ly featherbedded.

  I told Peter all I knew about the fresco cycle: that it was begun at the end of the fifteenth century, that Signorelli was a contemporary, and perhaps also a rival, of Michelangelo, and that his work in Orvieto Cathedral was the largest, most ambitious depiction of the Last Judgement that had ever been attempted up to that time.

  ‘Here we can see,’ I lectured him, ‘that only the young and naked and pure in spirit are admitted to heaven, which recognizes no class distinctions. The base and vile, on the other hand, aren’t even let into heaven, but are simply massacred where they stand, while prostitutes are spirited away through the air by winged devils with athletic figures who torment them, and are spat at by demons. At the Apocalypse, the trees sweat blood, and blood also rains down from heaven, while the stars vanish from the firmament and the earth is consumed by fire. Skeletons emerge from the ground and put on new flesh. And they’re all fit and trim.’

  Despite the fact that Peter had spent months living in a monastery and was acquainted with the motif of the Apocalypse, Signorelli’s work left him cold, particularly because of the anatomically exaggerated and decidedly un-sensual human figures, with their heads turned toward heaven. Repelled by the weak materiality of the corporeal and the painter’s evident lack of interest in material things, he launched into a paean of praise for the great Tàpies, who precisely in matters of materiality …

  ‘You really ought to write to him one more time!’

  In the event, then, we didn’t spend long looking at the Last Judgement. Instead, Peter felt far more at home among the ancient ruins of the Etruscan period. In Orvieto, you come across these in walls and gates, burial objects and stelae. They sometimes look like they’ve developed directly from primitive art forms, so I, in my assumed role of travel guide, summoned up all the knowledge I had about the Etruscans: