‘The most important monument from the height of Etruscan culture is the Temple of Belvedere, which is thought to date from the beginning of the fifth century bc. The podium of this ceremonial complex, which was purposefully sited to afford it a panoramic view over the Paglia Valley, is built on a natural rocky outcrop. A flight of steps leads to two lines of columns, behind which are three stone chambers, one leading on from the other. From the position of the complex, scholars surmised that this was where haruspices – seers trained in the art of reading entrails and other auguries – brought their human sacrifices. In addition, many terracotta artefacts from the Etruscan period were excavated here, primarily small decorative architectural adornments, along with the bronze figurine of a female dancer and a number of larger figural reliefs, in which the influence of the Greek sculptor Phidias and echoes of the Parthenon frieze were identified.’
The Etruscan burial chambers cut into the tufa rock cliffs around Orvieto, notably those at Crocifisso del Tufo and Canicella, yielded a particularly rich haul of finds. Yet even more was to come: when, some years back, a landslide dislodged a large chunk of the tufa outcrop on which Orvieto is built and sent it crashing down into the valley, it happened to expose one of the ancient burial sites, and the city’s inhabitants tried to identify through binoculars what the chambers that were now laid bare contained. When Peter and I attempted to do the same, all we could make out was soil, ancient soil.
In the afternoon, we went for a dip in the river, and while I lay listening on the sandy bank, Peter, who was standing in the reed beds, recounted to me the twelve ways in which you could inadvertently drive the woman who loved you to give you the elbow. These included; always talking too loudly, having to have jokes repeated and explained to you, wiping your runny nose on your sleeve and giving a running commentary on it … Never again have I encountered a guy who exerted such a magnetic pull on women.
I went down to the station with him in the evening, and as the train pulled out, his hand stayed sticking motionless out of the compartment window in farewell, even when the train began to tilt into the curve and disappear from view. Then, all of a sudden, there were two policeman at my side. They seized me by the right and left elbow, led me away and interrogated me in a small office in the station building; who was the man I’d just seen off? What had we talked about down at the river? Where did we come from and why wasn’t I telling them the truth? From outside came the sound of birdsong, occasionally interspersed with the clanging of the level crossing bell as the barrier was lowered.
I submitted willingly to their questioning, answering them readily, precisely and exhaustively. To this day, I have no idea what these two policeman wanted from me. When they finally released me, I got the feeling that grilling me had simply been an amusing way for them to kill time, or maybe they’d just wanted to practice their interrogation technique on me, but in any event my train to Florence was long gone by that stage. I stayed one more night at our Locanda in Orvieto and set off on my return journey a day late.
Three weeks later, I met a German singer on the streets of Florence, and spent an evening with him and his coterie of expats and transients in the garden of the Villa Scifanoia in San Domenico, just outside Fiesole. This motley crew had taken up residence there and because the night was so exquisite, we just didn’t want it to end. I only made it back to my monastery in Settignano as dawn was breaking the next day and had managed to grab no more than two hours’ sleep when I was woken by someone shaking my shoulder. My friend Antonio, the Uffizi attendant, was kneeling at my bedside, repeating the same phrase over and over:
‘Tanti saluti di Bernadette!’
At first, I could make no connection between his face, my room in the ‘Clausura’ and the name Bernadette.
‘She was here,’ Antono whispered. ‘Una vera donna!’
It seems that she’d arrived late on the previous afternoon and sat waiting for me on the low wall outside the monastery as evening fell. When night fell, the monks took her inside, and Don Carlo allowed her to sit in the refectory, outside the ‘Clausura’ and wait for me. Antonio came and sat with her to keep her company, entertaining her with his fund of funny stories. Even so, after a couple of hours, when he asked her whether she’d rather he left her in peace, she’d replied ‘Yes’ and then spent a while working on a drawing – here, he showed me it – after which he’d sat by her again in the dim light in the empty, echoing refectory, by the window that looked out over the distant city. At 3 a.m. she’d finally decided to leave; Antonio walked her out to the taxi and was rewarded with a kiss on each cheek.
The drawing showed one of the standard-bearers from the Palio in full costume. The flag he was carrying was emblazoned with Bernadette’s message to me:
‘Hi, lover! I’ve spent half the night waiting for you. It’s two in the morning now. I’ve finally managed to shake off that pain in the neck Antonio, your Uffizi attendant friend, for a bit. I’ll give him this so that you’ll know I sat up half the night waiting for you. I’ve got to get back to Rome now. Then I’m flying back to Denver from Rome. Leave me not,’ she signed off, ‘Be here.’
And beneath she’d printed, all in capitals, her full address in the States, including the apartment block number and the floor she lived on.
Not long after, I left Settignano and returned to Germany. Bernadette and I wrote each other long, fond and convoluted letters – hers covered in a mass of little doodles and drawings, interrupted by clauses in parenthesis, and embellished with stars, annotations, footnotes and inserts, while mine were full of innuendo, double-entendres and excessive presumption. We kept up our airy-fairy and mutually titillating correspondence until the following summer. Then she sent me a photo, which showed her standing on the sidewalk next to a broad American boulevard, laughing. She was leaning toward the camera, and on the left side of her head, a ponytail dangled down as far as her waist. There was something unwholesome about the way she was laughing, despite the fact that a little dog was nuzzling round her feet and that she was bathed in strong, warm light.
Oh, Bernadette, I thought, that’s you all right, and recalled how she’d collapsed into our arms at the Palio and conjured up the image of her stumbling onto the station platform, propped up on Peter’s arm and with her jeans covered in grass stains, after several hours spent doing things that Peter had called ‘not good, not right’.
A week later I got back to my place in the small hours – life back home had finally begun to pick up pace again – only to be greeted by a high-pitched yelp of delight that filled the room when I checked my messages on the answerphone: ‘Guess who-hoo?’
So euphoric it was positively scary.
She’d done it! She’d finally done it, and she was free, free at last! She didn’t say from what, but she was clear about the upshot: ‘I’m coming!’
No later than twenty days precisely from then, she’d be expecting me at twelve o’clock sharp inside the cathedral in Orvieto, in front of Luca Signorelli’s Last Judgement naturally, ‘to reinvent history,’ as she put it. There followed some brief chitchat, which was hard to grasp as it was evidently being drowned out by the street noise of Denver wafting in through her apartment window. Then came another exuberant yell: ‘I’m leaving!’
Her voice, which had always been high-pitched and full of vibrato, already sounded like it was caught in the slipstream of a moving vehicle, and her sheer happiness burst into the deep German night of my room like a communication from another plane of existence.
There was no point calling her or writing her, she’d told me. She was already on the move.
‘Just be there,’ she shouted joyfully and hung up, though it sounded like she kept on talking all the same. I played the tape a second and third time. Fascinating. Whatever we did in Orvieto, whoever we were, it would have very little to do with the world we were leaving to hook up with one another again. My fantasy life was at something of a low ebb, and I was keen to exorcise the memory of the coward who’d w
andered off to the station that time. It was summer. I dreamt of grass stains and bought myself a train ticket to Orvieto.
Climbing up the steps to the cathedral, which on this midday was shrouded in the same shimmering heat haze as the year before, I was overtaken by a brief spasm of unease at this reenactment. Wasn’t life slipping back all too readily into a wornout posture? The flight of steps, the façade, the sunlight, the smell of the warm stones were exactly as before. But my gaze took it all in much more sketchily than before; after all, this time I wasn’t there to sightsee a church, a fresco, a Last Judgement, but to meet a woman.
But that’s not how it panned out. No longer curious, but simply biding time and determined to get through viewing Signorelli’s fresco as quickly as possible, I sat myself down on the front row of pews and cast my eyes fleetingly over the paintings, whose bold and dreadful power couldn’t help but draw you in. In fact, the drastic and vulgar nature of these ruthless images, the way they so insistently strove after visual effect and impact, violated the sanctity of this space somehow. The local clergy had even given Signorelli religious instruction while he was working on the frescos. They been concerned to wring his conception of the work from him and trammel his creativity into pre-agreed lines. Yet he proved to be a recalcitrant pupil; hardly surprising when one considers how the principal work of Signorelli’s teacher Piero della Francesca, the Legend of the True Cross fresco in Arezzo, depicts, immediately to the right of the altar in the High Chapel, a workman with one testicle hanging out of his tunic.
In one of her letters, Bernadette had told me how devout she’d been as a child. At the age of seven, during communion classes, the pastor had granted her remission for all her sins. All those she’d committed up to that time were absolved, he said, and in her mind’s eye she’d envisaged the blank white sheet of paper that was her list of transgressions and thought long and hard about what new sin might be worthy of being the first one to be recorded there. She’d duly stolen the pastor’s eraser, and was quite pleased with this new sin of hers.
While he was working on his fresco cycle, Signorelli conducted anatomical experiments with cadavers. He’d also painted his dead son, to keep his memory alive, and had learned how to use poses and facial expressions in order to portray people in crowd scenes as individuals. He twisted the corpses into unlikely contortions, experimented with the way they stood and the human body’s centres of gravity, all the while tirelessly asking himself: what is a naked person? What does he signify?
In the Resurrection of the Dead scene, and above all in The Damned Cast Into Hell, his fantasy is dangerously unchained. Here he opens up the dungeon and the images burst out. In an daring mix of the heathen and Christian worlds, he expands the act of creation out into a cosmic anarchy. Deluges loom threateningly over the horizon, while the animal world cowers in terror, errant people wander across the plain, false prophets scan the firmament for signs of hope, while many human souls have already been possessed by demons. A blood-red moon shines dimly from the heavens, and the Antichrist is seated on his throne, heeding the advice of a demon. Soldiers in black uniforms are razing the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the ground. Even the elements no longer obey natural laws and are now behaving erratically and randomly.
The sky is a murky soup, the stars have been wrenched from their usual path across the heavens and almost casually are setting the whole world aflame. The seas overwhelm human settlements, fire consumes the land, earthquakes shake the ground and people are seen pressing forward up slope and out of the picture, like they’re attempting to break the illusion of pictorial space and step into the real world of the viewer, who on this day happened to be me, sitting on my pew and waiting to commit a sin that had come a long way from the original ‘resurrection of the flesh’. And for sure, there on Signorelli’s fresco, skeletons were rising up out of the ground and taking on corporeal form or blossoming forth into the full glory of their anatomical beauty, as yet still pure, conceived in God’s image, but still flesh for all that.
When she was twelve, Bernadette had told me in one of her letters, she took part in a competition to find the prettiest doll. And hers ended up winning, even though it was the ugliest, and could only move its eyes. But its owner was everyone’s favourite back then, pretty as a picture and with exclusively cute friends, and if all that wasn’t enough, a perfect black dog called ‘Arrow’ too. Bernadette had her first kiss in the graveyard behind her house. No sooner had she been kissed than she resolved never to undergo such an intense experience again.
‘Why?’ asked the boy, who was four years older than her.
‘Because it’s a sin,’ she replied.
‘What’s so sinful about it exactly?’ the boy pressed her.
‘I dunno,’ she answered, ‘but it sure felt like a sin. That’s all I know.’
The next day, she spent ages trying to explain to the lustful boy what a sin was. As she was doing so, ‘Arrow’ was run over by a car. Whereupon she stopped talking to the boy entirely, and instead, with a guilty conscience, gave him the push instead.
Signorelli’s pictorial spaces are dramatic stages, and he sees the end of the world in very theatrical terms, with the descent to Earth of the Antichrist, a scene that is evoked in the Apocrypha, in the chronicler Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend, or in the visions of St Brigitte of Sweden. It is a matter of ultimate questions and last things, with humanity required to awake to a new life. It is the end of the world; the Cumaean Sibyl points to her ‘book of prophesies’, where ships are shown teetering on the crests of waves, the ruins of ancient buildings stand as stark warnings, a bank of cloud the colour of spilt blood lowers in the sky, an impending firestorm threatens in the background, while in the foreground a throng of mercenaries and soldiers, devils and demons advances. But in all this, the aspect of the painting that appears so nightmarishly personal is the pedantic way in which Signorelli dissects a mass fate into a whole series of individual dramas.
An artistic soul, too artistic for her home environment of Denver, shone through the personal vignettes that Bernadette’s letters sketched out for me. She wrote about her early boyfriends – handsome bores who wanted to save themselves for marriage, a slacker, a guy called Elwyn who she loved in a platonic way and with whom she went on seven-mile walks every day. But the inside of his mouth turned her stomach.
Later, she’d had a dog called Bronco. It was run over one time when she was out walking with Elwyn. She promptly made up her mind never to go out with him again, and as she was telling him this, she kept her eyes fixed firmly on the chamber of horrors behind his open lips. That made it easier to ignore his tears.
After this resolution and Bronco’s death she also took a long hard look at herself and decided henceforth to live like an Amish girl, keeping her eyes lowered, wearing plain black and white clothing, singing folk songs and renouncing the world of technology. That did her a power of good. Friends in the city started to think she’d gone into a convent. But in actual fact, adopting a supposedly Amish lifestyle was just her surreptitious way of neglecting herself. She duly woke up one day in hospital. Days of her life had gone missing, and all she felt was a strong urge to eat some ice cream again. She conducted running battles with the nurses, the well-meaning, strong nurses with the calloused hands. She was determined to stay there, but all to no avail; in due course, she was sent back out into the wide world again.
‘Since the age of fourteen I’ve been living in a state of disillusion,’ she wrote, and after emerging from her spell in hospital she drifted into university, where she attempted a dual-track approach to her education, thinking in epicurean terms and avoiding the platonic. But Marlon, the only toy boy she could ever have imagined in her life, escaped the tidal wave of desire she felt herself being born aloft on in the nick of time and went to Europe.
In the Resurrection of the Flesh, Signorelli’s figures are not seen climbing out of graves. Rather, these bodies emerge straight out of a barren field and take on fleshly
form. On the open expanses, people gather, transfixed by the state of emergency, and seeking safety in numbers in this situation of general confusion. The only figures that stand separate from these knots of humanity are those who are beheading, tormenting or liquidating others.
On their way to the place of judgement, the damned are led through hell, where a woman stands burning in the infernal abyss. The naked bodies writhe in an orgy of disinhibition, given over to the excess which at the Apocalypse goes hand-in-hand with a surfeit of lust. On a bare stage in Purgatory waits inescapable damnation, and the mass of people, shot through with a complex rhythmic pattern like in bebop jazz, swells back and forth, and up and down, leaving us with the impression that nothing exists under this dismal firmament other than a despairing humanity, united only in their attempt to escape.
And what is humanity’s lot here; more specifically, what is the fate of women in this world? Exposed to a sovereign form of sadism, they find themselves subjected to every kind of humiliation. Their nude state is not that of Paradise, but of pornography. They are thrown to the ground, kicked head-over-heels out of heaven with their legs splayed; they are shown being bound and beaten, run over and bitten, abducted and dragged by the hair. Their naked bodies, depicted in the willing poses of pin-ups, abandon themselves to the cruel fantasies of the Last Judgement. Yet their nakedness, as if in some biblical men’s magazine, is already an integral part of their degradation, their punishment.
On the other hand, it is only in the context of damnation that these nudes possess any sexual identity at all. As soon as they have been raised from the dead or received into heaven, they begin to wear their naked form like an accessory. Only in damnation does their countenance become an animated human face, and their backside turn into an arse. What a chance I was being offered, here and now, just before my so hotly and obsessively imagined rendezvous, to renounce sexuality! But in the light of what had motivated me to come on this journey, I was firmly on the side of the Damned, and stimulated by the meat market of these supine bodies.
The Ends of the Earth Page 40