by Simon Mawer
‘Not a secret, no. But something I told you.’
‘I’m sorry.’ She seemed not to understand, as though she hadn’t grasped the significance, the secret shared. ‘I’m sorry if I betrayed a confidence but I didn’t think it was particularly private.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I’m sorry, Leo. Is that OK? I didn’t realise and now I’m sorry, all right?’
‘Let me have war, say I!’ Jack cried to the empty seats. ‘It exceeds peace as far as day does night.’
‘Why do you get so angry?’ Madeleine asked.
‘I’m not angry.’
‘Yes you are.’
‘– It is spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent! – ’
‘You just can’t accept an apology. God, is that what comes of living the life of a celibate?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘Not much.’
‘Peace is a very apoplexy!’ Jack declaimed. The girls ran circles around him and laughed. ‘A getter of more bastard children than war’s a destroyer of men!’
‘It’s got nothing to do with it,’ Leo insisted. ‘Nothing at all.’ And he told her, there and then he told her, while Jack pranced round the amphitheatre of Sutri and the girls screamed with delight at his antics, and Howard and Gemma laughed.
Another picnic, another era, another pair of cars. The main road to the town of Sutri is only tarmacked in places now, mere hard-packed gravel in others. But there is the same avenue of umbrella pines, the same modern cemetery (less full now and without electric light) and the same row of Etruscan tombs on the opposite side. Tomb country, this, a landscape of the dead. And the same village on its perch of volcanic rock at the end of the avenue, like a ship about to enter the narrows and confronted by the small flotilla of cars coming towards it.
‘Over here!’ The leading car is a convertible, an Alfa Romeo, and the sound of the guide’s voice can be clearly heard above the noise of engines as he turns in his seat and waves to the left. A white silk scarf billows. ‘The theatre!’ He is a young man, narrow and dark, darker than the others, who are clearly his seniors. His car lurches and swerves (no traffic but a donkey cart) and runs off the gravel on to a flat area beside the road, beside the cliff and the gateway that leads into what he has indicated, a rock-carved amphitheatre.
Mercedes follows and draws to a halt alongside the Alfa. The passengers get out. The ladies are in floral print dresses with square shoulders and narrow waists. They wear wide-brimmed hats against the sun, and platform sandals against the earth, and they pick at this and that like birds. Three of the men are in flannels and soft shirts and white canvas shoes, and look as though they may be about to play some kind of game, tennis or badminton or something. In sharp contrast to them the man in command wears a suit. His only concession to the day, to the sky of untrammelled blue and a sun as sharp and painful as a thermic lance, is a battered and incongruous panama hat. ‘How can you bear it in this heat, darling?’ The woman who half admonishes him is blonde (hair rolled into an elaborate sausage that frames her face), lean and busy.
‘This amphitheatre is unique,’ the young man explains in the manner of a professional guide. ‘Probably Etruscan in origin, it was of course used through the Roman period.’
‘The first Roman Empire,’ one of the men says. There is a hint of mockery in his voice, and some, but not all, of the others laugh. The blonde woman does not laugh, for example. When the young man speaks she is inclined to look away, to busy herself with other matters, like directing the operations of the fifth male, the servant who takes things from the back of the Mercedes – hampers, a tablecloth, a canteen of cutlery – and carries them through the entrance into the amphitheatre. The woman instructs him like a general deploying troops, while her husband – the suited, hatted man – watches her keenly. ‘Over there. Not here. And those there, so that people can take them as they wish. And put the wine in the shade. We used to picnic in the woods at Buchlov,’ she explains to the others, as thought to justify her orders by claiming great experience in the matter. ‘Carriages, not cars. And tables, chairs, everything. And my brother would organise games for the children …’ The white cloth is laid out in the very centre of the theatre, as though a performance is expected and all these are props – the silver cutlery, the long-stemmed glasses, the white bone china. The servant makes a number of journeys to and fro, from cars to picnic, while a peasant with the donkey cart observes them soundlessly from the road.
What does he make of it? Seven adults and a young boy, all milling round in the spring sunshine, exclaiming at the place, at the rough tiers of seating that rise up and outwards from the space in the centre like ripples in pond, all talking in tones he cannot grasp, words that mean nothing. But he knows them as German. That much. ‘Ciao, nonno,’ the boy calls to him in accented Italian. He acknowledges the greeting with a toothless grin before thumping his donkey on the flank and continuing along the road towards the village.
‘Spätlese,’ says the tall man, picking a bottle out of a hamper. The label is elaborate with Gothic script, bearing a picture that looks like a scene from the Ring der Nibelungen. The glass is beaded with condensation. ‘Wonderful.’
‘I prefer our wine,’ his wife says.
‘Absurd. Your wine is Austrian rubbish. This is the finest Rheinwein.’
‘Not Austrian, Moravian.’
‘Worse. Nothing but Jews and Slavs.’
There is laughter. He draws the cork (this is a picnic: the servants can’t do everything) and pours the pale wine and they all take a glass and hold it to the light and sip, and agree with Herr Huber that this is delicious. They sip and swirl and make noises with their appreciative lips. Frau Huber bends down to adjust something on the tablecloth and the young man pauses to watch her skirt’s soft rise. She wears silk stockings (rare these days). They are wrinkled slightly at the knee and their seams lead eyes irrevocably upwards into the shadows where one can, for the moment, imagine stocking tops and fasteners and the cool, living silk of flesh. Herr Huber notices the young man’s glance, and frowns. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to sit on the ground,’ Frau Huber says, dropping to her knees as though to show the way. Her legs fold demurely beneath her. The men relax. The servant begins to serve the food, awkwardly, far too much part of the group as he stoops to present the ladies with their portions of prosciutto crudo (‘not as good as Viennese Schinken,’ Herr Huber says) and green figs, far too close to the ruling class and conscious of it.
And then there is a sound – sudden and intrusive, like the fabric of the blue sky being torn apart. The group pause in their eating – ‘I prefer Prague ham,’ someone is saying – and glance upwards as something dark and silver, something awkward, cruciform, loud, flashes overhead from behind the fringe of holm oak and streaks over the theatre and away over the road and above the umbrella pines, tearing at the sky as though doing it a great hurt.
‘Amerikaner!’ the boy cries in excitement, getting to his feet and running to the entrance to the theatre as though he might catch the great, dark machine.
‘Nonsense,’ says one of the men. ‘Luftwaffe! A Messerschmidt.’
‘Leo!’ shouts the woman after the running child. The noise is background now, a distant, departing roar against the spring day. ‘American,’ agrees one of the men, and Herr Huber begins a lecture, directed mainly towards the youngest of the men, the dark, Latin one, a lecture about how the great tragedy of the war is that it has given the Americans an excuse to get into Europe, and things will never be the same again, whatever happens …
Figures in a Distant Landscape
The Villa was built by some Polish count in the nineteenth century during the brief and hopeless flowering of the Kingdom of Poland. It is a grandiose pile, all pillars and porticoes, cupolas and pediments, as though the architect had a rudimentary grounding in the work of Palladio but none of his sense of harmony and balance. But the garden that surrounds it is another thing altogether:
formal and classical behind the building, it transforms into a Piranesi fantasy below, a temperate jungle with Roman brickwork (the remains of one of the aqueducts that used to supply the city), falling water, sinuous paths, damp, vegetable shade. Columbine, clematis, honeysuckle, dog rose, the heavy scents of jasmine and orange (a small orangerie with the blossom as white as distant doves amongst the lucid leaves), the elusive perfume of box, the vulgar scent of tuberose, everywhere a litter of Roman marble fragments found during the building of the garden in the previous century and left scattered around, mossy and mildewed, for the passer-by to rediscover for himself. Halfway down the hill is a small tempietto, modelled on Bramante’s masterpiece. The whole is a perfect Roman phenomenon, at once artefact and natural, fantasy and reality, past and present.
Two figures are in the garden. They have made their way from the formal garden on the far side (still ponds, an artificial grotto, clipped hedges, parterre paths) round the side of the building and down the paths of the lower garden. The woman appears to be giving her companion instructions, and the instructions (a shock to any would-be eavesdropper) are in English.
‘If you were to over-water the plants they might easily die,’ she says.
‘If I were to over-water the plants, they might easily die,’ the young man enunciates. Then he repeats the phrase they might easily die as though trying to consign it to memory.
Frau Huber pauses to inspect a casual blossom beside the path, a florid fuchsia dancing in the shadows, the Adelaide variety she happens to know. ‘To tell you the truth,’ she admits, ‘I’m not certain whether it should be might or may.’
He seems shocked. ‘You don’t know? Are not there rules?’
‘You’d say aren’t. In ordinary conversation.’
‘Aren’t, then.’ He is slightly impatient. ‘You see, there are rules.’ His face is solemn, bright, made up of contrasting lights and shadows. You might hesitate to use the word of a young man, but he is beautiful. No one would have any hesitation in his own language: bello. Un bel uomo.
‘Yes, I suppose there are rules. But English is a funny language. Perhaps you could describe it as …’ The woman pauses, as though the word that has occurred to her is rather shocking ‘… democratic. So the rules get broken, and then people forget them, or don’t bother with them, and …’
‘I like your definition of democracy. I will remember it. It sounds very like Italy. And yet there are right words, because you say I have wronged.’
‘You say, I am wrong.’ She glances round from the plant. ‘It’s difficult, Checco. It’s an instinctive language.’ Her own use of it is almost perfect. A native speaker might wonder about her origins, about the overemphasised vowel sounds and the precision of her consonants, but the wondering would not lead anywhere very much. There are no real clues. Frau Huber. Gretchen. Blonde, sharp of both body and mind, possessed of a kind of beauty. You might hesitate to use the word of a woman, but she is handsome. You wouldn’t hesitate in her own language: schön. ‘You don’t think of the English as instinctive, do you? People imagine them as hidebound and obedient. But they are not. That is the mistake the Germans have made.’
‘The Germans have made a mistake?’
‘You must work on your endings, Checco. It’s the great problem with Italians speaking English. Mistake, not mistakah. Chop the consonant off at the end. Oh, yes, they have made a mistake all right.’
‘And you?’
‘Me? Oh, I’ve made many mistakes.’
‘Was marrying Herr Huber one?’
She is silent, perhaps considering the question, perhaps wishing to ignore it. ‘This flower.’
‘Fuch-sia,’ he says.
‘In English one says fushia.’
‘But it is fuch-sia, after the botanist Fuchs.’
‘But in English that sounds rather rude. So it is fushia.’
‘To be polite. That is typical, isn’t it? Instinctively polite.’
She laughs. ‘We grow these at home, do you know that? My father’s hobby. We have a fuchsarium. Very famous in Moravia.’ Her hand holds the flower, turning it upwards so that the delicate inner parts are exposed, the stamens and the inside of the corolla. ‘Have, had, who knows what will happen to it?’
She drops the flower and goes on down the path towards the gravel clearing where the tempietto stands. The wooden door opens as she pushes it. Inside is swept bare. Light filters down from the lantern at the summit of the cupola, but it is not strong enough to disperse the shadows that collect at the circumference of the floor. He closes the door behind them. Standing inside the cylinder it is as though they are at the bottom of a dry well, cool and damp and secret.
‘We had a hut amongst the rhododendrons,’ she said. ‘Have. It’s still there, I suppose. It was our den, die Bude – my brother’s and mine. It was … oh, dozens of things: a ship, a cave, a fortress, a home.’ She glances round the drum that surrounds her, the exactly fitted stones, the ribs of the dome, the lights above them. ‘The light was like this. There must have been some kind of skylight … yes, a window in the roof … and it gave light just like this.’
‘And your brother?’
‘My brother is dead. He died at Rostov.’
They stand still for a moment, and let that fact – a distant, presumably cold death that is difficult to picture in this lush, bright garden, with the paths winding down between the beds, and the sounds of crickets and birds loud in the luminous air – lie between them.
‘Why did you marry Herr Huber?’
She looks at him in surprise. ‘Why is it anything to do with you?’
‘Was that a mistake, marrying him?’ He talks in German now, and with the change of language his tone is more insistent, as though he is now more confident that what he means is what he says. ‘He is so much older than you. Gretchen, tell me.’ And suddenly, surprisingly he takes hold of her hand, as though almost to shake her into giving some kind of answer – ‘Was it a mistake?’ – while she looks at him with an expression of faint bewilderment. ‘That is none of your business.’
But what is his business? Where do the bounds of intimacy lie? He holds her hand – a narrow, fragile hand – and watches her as though waiting for an answer.
‘Please let me go,’ she says quietly.
‘Do you realise what I feel for you?’
‘Francesco, don’t be absurd. Please let me go.’
He lets her hand drop. She stands for a moment looking at him, bewilderment still there in her expression.
‘Have I offended you?’ he asks.
‘Of course not.’ She smiles. ‘You have flattered me. But you have trodden on dangerous ground.’
‘A minefield?’
‘If you like. It might be better if you wait here for a while,’ she says. And then she has pulled open the door and gone out into the sunlight, leaving him alone in the block of light that comes in through the doorway. Her steps are brisk on the path, fading away into the general sounds of the morning.
Magda
Far below the apartment, on the piano nobile, groups of tourists shuffle round the relics of the once great past of the Casadei family, peering at the portrait of the family pope – Innocent the something-or-other – and wondering when the ceiling will be re-gilded. Up here beneath the rafters birds and rodents scrabble in the wainscot. When it rains water drips through on to the kitchen floor with a dull persistence. A bucket stands ready and provides an echo of rain long after a storm has passed on.
Apart from the kitchen – little more than a galley – there is a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. The bathroom is awash with Magda’s things: her tights hanging like flayed black skins over the bath, her knickers soaking in the cracked bidet, her pots of face cream, her lipsticks, her mascara brushes littering the shelves.
Days pass. Spring becomes summer, with that imperceptible shift that brings harsh white out of effulgent amber; and Magda draws, observes, takes domes and roofs and towers and transfers them, with a soft mu
tation, on to her paper. She draws other things, and paints them as well (the apartment fills with the organic smell of oils and turpentine and acrylic resin, like an artist’s studio). She paints the sun, setting like a bloody wound behind the ragged knife edge of the Janiculum Hill; she paints the strange, spiky plants that grow around the terrace (abstract shapes these, like something by Yves Tanguy); she paints the interior of the flat.
Magda is an artist, and an artist possesses what she sees. It was an insidious possession, step by cautious step: first the view, and then the flat itself, the random assembly of things within it, the broken furniture, the dusty books, the dirty dishes, the sagging, ruined sofa in the sitting room; and then the occupant: Leo at the stove making coffee, Leo asleep in the armchair (his mouth half open, a thin ribbon of saliva trickling from one corner of his lips; pen and ink with a grey wash), Leo sitting and watching her quizzically and hiding who knows (except Leo) what thoughts? Leo the lion, looking old and ragged, scarred by time and circumstance. Interior with figure.
Magda is an artist, and an artist possesses what she touches. She touches my flesh, with the tenderness of a nurse, the softness of a mother. She touches the slick, waxy skin of my trunk, the frozen waves of lucid skin which lap at my neck, the wax-paper tissue on the back of my hands where the tendons have fused and the fingers are clawed and almost useless. She touches this silently, as though the touching alone may do something for me.
‘What happened?’
‘Flames,’ I tell her. ‘Fire and brimstone.’
Fire she understands, but not brimstone. Fire she can understand, but not hell. ‘You can feel?’ Her finger moves down the smooth, morbid tissue. ‘You can feel?’
My skin is dumb. But I can still feel. I am alive to every twitch and whisper of the world, every movement she makes in the shadows of the flat, every breath she takes, every murmur of the city outside our walls.
‘Tell me,’ she says.
Leo on fire, squatting like a pope on his throne, like a Bacon pope, Pope Innocent the something-or-other, screaming and burning, his flesh falling like molten wax, dripping like wax, his eyes staring out of his agony as though through a grimy pane.