Of his books, these days he most pored over the many volumes of memoirs by the writer he referred to as ‘The Venetian’, Casanova de Seingalt. One day he showed me a quote and asked me to copy it out:
Man is a free agent; but he is not free if he does not believe it,
for the more power he attributes to Destiny, the more he deprives
himself of the power which God granted him when he gave him reason.
I thought I understood Domenico’s message and intent; they were good ones for a boy with my background in slavery and sulphur. But it wasn’t until much later that I learned the true import of these words, and how vital they were for both of us to keep in mind.
It didn’t take long before we settled into a companionable routine, like father and son – or perhaps simply like brothers. The relationship was in no way one of master and serf. At first Domenico would rise with the sun, make coffee, dress into whatever was appropriate for the weather, then go tend his small community of livestock. Swill for the pigs, grain and leftovers for the chickens and goats. His chores would go on until midmorning, when he would finish by watering and grooming the horses. Soon I let him know that these were tasks I preferred to do. I didn’t need Don Domenico’s supervision and neither did I need his constant company. I liked the quiet of this place as much as he did, and though it might seem we had completely withdrawn from the world, neither he nor I felt a moment’s loneliness or a moment’s longing for anything else. At the time I had no explanation for why this was so.
Domenico acquiesced and I enjoyed the work, finding it neither onerous nor dull. After I finished those morning duties, on the kitchen table I would find various books and academic texts set out and waiting. Don Domenico had recorded exactly where my old studies had reached and here always was the way forward.
While I occupied myself and felt what it was like to live unshackled, unsupervised, unpunished for infractions real or imagined, he would work in the study with his papers and notes and books. Some days he emerged excited and eager to continue with whatever it was that he was doing; other times he was drained, as if he’d worked outside in a long day of blistering heat. But whichever his demeanour, he was always ready to sit down at the table and review what I’d read and learned, and try to explain the things I hadn’t quite grasped.
He was a good teacher because he made up for those areas in which he wasn’t knowledgeable by calmly retracing his steps through my books until he made sense of things. Above all, he was interested in my progress.
‘What will you study at university?’
I remembered those gorgeous grounds, the thrillingly dark cloisters and lecture halls at Bologna, and was horrified he might think I’d want to become a part of that world.
‘Nothing at all. I don’t want to study. This is enough here.’
‘But you’re young,’ he would explain. ‘You can’t stay out here in the wilderness forever. A young man has to make his own life. Reading about characters in books and all the exciting things they do isn’t enough.’
‘Enough for what?’
‘Young men have needs that go beyond the present. If you don’t fulfil them, Cesare, you won’t live.’
‘But I’m happy. I only want what we’ve got.’
‘Then what will you be?’
I couldn’t mix with students, with teaching masters and intellectuals. I was a slave from the sulphur mines. A new name and a better leg didn’t change that.
‘I want to be just like you.’
‘Like me?’ he asked, feigning incredulity.
‘Yes, just like you.’
‘And what exactly do you think I am?’
It was a better question than I could have imagined, and for the present it went unanswered.
That evening we took the horses and rode until it was too dark to see ahead. This was something Don Domenico liked to do whenever he’d completed some substantial portion of his work. I wasn’t completely certain what his work was supposed to be, but it involved papers, pens and endless pages floating around the floors of his study. Often it was punctuated by melodies from his piano, his thinking time.
We camped by a stream, built a fire and grilled fish I’d caught on my line that afternoon.
‘You can’t do anything from here,’ he said, and we’d become so close that I knew he was continuing our earlier conversation. ‘Life doesn’t stop in our home and this island should be too small to hold a young man’s dreams.’
‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘You’re not so old, and I don’t see you going any further. So why can’t that be enough for me too?’
He took a drink.
‘Maybe think of it this way: all Doctor Vliegan had to do was fix your leg. He’s got no solutions for fixing what’s wrong with my head.’
Domenico glanced at my expression and smiled, even though I tried not to give anything away.
‘I know you’re aware I’m not quite right, but in this place I’m fine. The reason’s simple enough. Peace. Peace and beauty. When I’m not around people and when I don’t have to deal with troubles, the fire in my head stays away. The countryside and our home are perfect for me. It won’t be like this forever. There’ve been wars in Sicily and over Sicily for thousands of years, nothing will change that. And the more I know about world events the more I realise we’re in the eye of a storm. There’ll be another war. This is simply an intermezzo.’ He took more sizzling fish out of the pan and savoured it. ‘Well, let’s not worry until there’s something to worry about.’
I struggled with the feelings I needed to express. He was happiest away from people and the truth was that I felt the same way. Why did I have to pretend differently?
By the flickering fire he now gazed at me, his eyes steady.
‘When you’ve become more worldly and when you understand more about the substance of the human soul, then you can come back. You have to become who you are, Cesare, and that’s not me.’ He thought a moment longer, becoming pensive. ‘You, I think, are something a little better than what I am . . . and maybe you shouldn’t be as alone as I’ve been.’
‘What if I won’t go?’
‘You’ll go. You’re too smart not to.’ He studied the dark shape of Etna. ‘You’ll need proper papers, a family name,’ he said.
‘Amati?’ I suggested.
‘We wouldn’t want to connect you to those fools.’
The flickering firelight made his satanic features seem even less of this world. Above us was the black mountain where I’d been both killed and saved.
It was as if he’d read my thoughts.
“‘Montenero”,’ Domenico said, and so I was made.
My master used his influence and money to get me papers, documentation, a birth certificate and a passport. All of this was no easy task and would take him away for long journeys into the city of Catania, and once further afield to Palermo. That’s where he told me he had to grease the greediest but the most useful palms. I didn’t accompany him on any of these trips, remaining where I was to work the gardens and tend our livestock. Always he would return exhausted and harried, white-faced in fact – and I would wonder if on his own in hotels, or in public, on trains or in government offices, for example, his ‘head on fire’ returned, and how he’d dealt with it.
As if to provide himself with a salve for all the public effort he’d had to undertake, for weeks Domenico joined me in my outside duties and together we planted new trees and new vegetable and herb patches. I was enrolled and had to wait for the university year to begin; it would have pleased me if war had broken out in the meantime and all institutes of education were closed down. For now we constructed rock walls held together by mortar we learned to mix by perusing Domenico’s encyclopaedias, and we even found instructions for building ponds. Ours became a large and deep tract of water fed by the clear str
eam running near the house. When we were satisfied with our accomplishments we hiked or rode as far and as wide as we liked. In those excursions we only altered course whenever we saw groups of people along the way.
In a similar manner we also continued to give one another our privacy. Domenico returned to his habit of spending long hours in his study, and I worked my way through the library from Alighieri to Zola, with plenty of stops for more volumes of Casanova’s fictions and further memoirs, and writers such as Chekhov, Tolstoy, and foundlings such as Lawrence and American writers in new Italian translations. I was also just as happy to care and play for our new dogs: three puppies, white, black and brown. Three seemed to be the perfect number for the villa, and I learned to train these young dogs in good behaviour and obedience. Soon I could trust them to sleep in my room with me, which they did without creating the slightest nocturnal disturbance.
One day Domenico came to help me as I slaughtered two chickens for the pot. The birds lay twitching, then with absolutely no foreshadowing at all my master and I hesitated in going any further. Plucking, cleaning, the dogs salivating as they waited to be fed the entrails they knew would be coming – all at once this seemed a barbarous task. We sat down in the cool of the shaded courtyard. Something like this had never interrupted us before; Domenico and I had feasted on almost every form of livestock, all of it fresh from the knives we wielded ourselves.
‘Why don’t we stop killing?’ he asked. It wasn’t really a question. Somehow the thought, the feeling, the change had already occurred between us.
And we smiled our agreement.
In his study, sometimes Domenico worked at his desk, but the majority of the time he stretched out on the plush sofa, feet up and with a large embroidered pillow in his lap, where his pages were supported on a flat ledger. His ink wells would be close at hand and he was so comfortable in this position that he could sit for hours composing whatever story or stories, whatever scenarios involving whatever people, that came into his head.
I did my best not to intrude and had never been tempted to sift through that ever-increasing stack of handwritten pages, but one day he offered a clue about what he was doing by telling me the title.
‘Sulphur.’
‘And?’
‘The active ingredient of gunpowder, and the source of the Amati fortune. Source of misery and slavery, but because of it we’ll never want for anything.’
‘Called “brimstone” in hell.’
‘Yes.’
I thought it had to be a history of his family’s armament dealings, but when he finally presented the entire manuscript of seven hundred and ninety-three pages to me, the first paragraphs introduced the travails of a five-year-old boy sold by his peasant family into labour.
‘If you could give me some thoughts I’m sure they will benefit the manuscript. I’ve written others but the only person I’ve been able to ask is Signora Rosa. She’s no help; simply not a reader.’
‘You mean you’ve written other books?’
‘Manuscripts,’ he corrected me. ‘Garbage not fit to be printed. I’ve been doing it all my life.’
That night I started reading, and over the next three days I learned that Domenico had fashioned a tale out of my own story.
In the end the boy escapes his master and the sulphur mines and survives an epic journey across land and mountains to hide in a cave in the barren regions of Etna. The boy, however, is tracked mercilessly and eventually found. There is no rescue by an unexpected saviour. He retreats deeper into his cave, travelling so far into an increasingly hot and monstrous pit that the rock around him literally steams and the stench of hot sulphur permeates the air. When all seems lost, the boy feels a gust of cool breeze from a tiny passage in front of him. He scurries through, then uses rock to wedge the opening completely shut behind him. As he emerges into a vista of blue sky, the hunters suffocate in the underground, having lost their way.
Domenico stopped me before I could say anything. ‘It’s too long and it isn’t truthful.’
‘In parts . . .’ I replied, with some hesitation.
‘I was never there.’
‘So you can’t know it exactly.’
He gave a nod of agreement and passed me a blue ink well.
I didn’t like to use his study, or any room indoors, so I started to revise and rewrite his manuscript at a shaded table near the vegetable gardens with the dogs at my feet. Sometimes I shivered in the cold winds rushing down from the mountain, and sometimes perspiration fell from my face right onto the pages, staining the blue ink. There would be the sound of the piano from the house. On one of our trips into a larger town for extra produce and grain Domenico had found a deceased estate’s entire holding of music books, and so the strains of Tchaikovsky, Chopin and eighteenth-century Italian composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti, Domenico Scarlatti and Luigi Boccherini poured out of the house.
I could never have created this work from a raw beginning, but for whatever reasons of my real experience with slavery and sulphur, or of a better sense of written composition itself, I was able to follow his blueprint and recreate it into something stronger than it had been. I also meticulously excised all the varied allusions to floating winged women, and characters who travelled the Sicilian plains with spirit guides at their side.
To my surprise Domenico agreed with these changes. Our disagreements had to do with more mundane matters: the best way to express an emotion or the simplest way to describe a face or a hand.
Every day that Domenico read my work he either nodded in agreement or patted my shoulder and said, ‘Keep going,’ which I did, until an official date intruded and I had to drop the project. I found myself on a train again heading north, leaving my master to his solitude and the things he did or didn’t see around him.
Bologna was as beautiful as ever and the university was full of lovely young faces from all strata of society, but I travelled through those few years like a ghost. Sicilians were in short supply and the ongoing joke among northerners seemed to be that the island was inhabited by monkeys from Africa who’d barely learned to talk. They regarded my language as a bastardised dialect of their rarefied Italian, some abomination that wasn’t worthy of a great nation – but Don Domenico Amati had long since taught me the truth, that the Sicilian we spoke was its own language, a combination of all the civilizations that had ruled over us as our masters, diluting our blood and turning us into what we ourselves called ‘i bastardi puri’ – ‘the pure bastards’.
My master had taught me to speak the mainland’s language without any signs of southern inflections, but I wouldn’t hide my heritage, only the catastrophe of my early years. There were times when I sat in lectures or in a café or at a train station, or merely when walking down the street, that I wanted to shake my fellow students out of their airs and affectations, out of their easy contempt for everything that wasn’t of them.
Don Domenico had sent me to learn these lessons myself, but to me the privileged student class was like a kindergarten of little children. In their high education they were totally uneducated, and in the politesse with which they carried themselves there appeared to exist a complete lack of understanding of what men could do to others.
To my fellows I was Cesare Montenero from the dreary Sicilian isle, a thoroughly ‘B’ student no matter how I worried over my papers or how diligently I consumed the pages of musty books for my exams. People were told I was the ward of a fallen nobleman from the great agrarian and industrialist Amati family, and it took some time before I understood the true connotations of the word. What everyone assumed was that I was some decadent ex-nobleman’s kept boy. Now I’d been sent to receive an education so that I wouldn’t be too embarrassing in Society. Once started, the whisper never stopped, and it hardly helped that I avoided contact with fellow female students, with waitresses, with the few local bawdy houses. Sex had si
mply never entered the equation of existence for me: I had none of the urges I read about in Lawrence, cheap books, or heard other boys and young men speak of with such longing and hunger.
And as it was true for me, I suspected it was just as true for my master.
To combat the milquetoast tag attached to me, I joined a university boxing team and for the first year hammered at bags and my opponents like the brute Domenico didn’t want me to be. The coach fumed at how regularly I was beaten by young fools I ought to have dominated, at least until I learned the dance of the quick step, the blur of the lightning jab, the endless combinations that could be put together in order to lay flat a man otherwise made of oak. Then I started to win, leaving bloodied noses and cracked cheeks and split lips in my wake, and the word went out that the Sicilian ought not be toyed with. My chest should have puffed with pride, but I found that this was just another barrier I’d placed between myself and others. None of it brought me any joy, of course, so I dropped out of the team just as I was climbing their rankings.
Other students had shared living arrangements in apartments and dorms but I was able to stay on my own in two very clean rooms. Doctor Vliegan had kindly found me employment at his hospital, and I worked part-time picking up after him and his surgeons, wheeling patients in distress and those who’d just died, and I fed the fires in the great basement furnace with bloodied bandages, clothes that had been cut off accident victims, not to mention limbs and other body parts recently removed. When these activities became too much I had an outlet, the field track below my window. Boxing had been for show, studies were for Don Domenico, but running was for myself.
Black Mountain Page 14