‘Well, it has an origin,’ said Gentilini. ‘The origin is this, that you want what, it seems to me, you can’t have.’
Salvatore, calm now, turned round his empty glass.
‘Why shouldn’t I have her? I shall have her, if I want her as much as I do. That must be taken for granted between us.’
‘And so far you’ve met her just this one time.’
But this turned out to be barely relevant. The turbulence arose from an argument which Salvatore was conducting with an imaginary listener, or perhaps with himself, as to the terms on which he would accept the marriage. He was to be taken, in the first place, entirely on his own value, never to be expected to behave in any particular way, never to be excused or praised or accounted for as a product or an example of one district or another, or approved of as a clever fellow or a lucky one or a successful one. Above all the two of them must take each other without explanation, and stand equal and undifferentiated before each other as human beings were once thought to stand equal before God. ‘But, even then, in those early days, there was a difference of sex,’ said Gentilini, taking advantage of a moment’s silence. There was another ten minutes before they needed to start back to the hospital. But once again he had to resign himself to listen. His friend had now taken an entirely different tack, although with the obstinacy of the lost he was bound to let it lead him back to the same starting-point, and was asking, with a show of cold rationality, why there should be even the slightest probability that he should ever meet this young woman again.
‘But surely it could be arranged without much difficulty?’ said Gentilini. ‘You might —’
‘I don’t choose that it should be a matter of arrangement!’
Then Salvatore broke off, and abruptly held out his hand. ‘Think of me as a cripple, if you like, don’t turn away from me, take my hand.’
17
‘There is no relationship more durable than friendship,’ Gentilini told his wife that evening, ‘perhaps because it is tried so hard.’ He paused, fearing that he had been tactless, however Signora Gentilini showed no offence, but on the contrary seized the opportunity to ask him why he didn’t bring his friend, Dr Rossi, round more often. Even when he did, it was just for a talk between one man and another, whereas it would be a pleasure to prepare a meal for a thinking man, and anyone could see at a glance that he was lonely.
‘How can you see that?’ asked Gentilini.
‘He’s so silent, so unsure of himself, the poor man.’
18
Gentilini’s place was not where he would have liked it to be, in the university quarter and near S. Agostino, but in a back street where he was more or less resigned to living. A powerful smell of cauliflower met him as he turned the corner, still talking to Salvatore. Possibly something had gone quite seriously wrong in the kitchen, because the cage birds had been hung outside the window to get a breather although it was a cloudy day. ‘So you persist in despising intellectuals as a class?’ he asked, hesitating on the pavement, postponing the entry into the house, where the discussion of general subjects was difficult.
‘Certainly, cleverness is the curse of human history,’ Salvatore said. ‘Again and again the simple assert themselves, the soldierly Romans, the early Christians, no matter who, but while they’re doing the necessary work of every day the intellectuals step in, and after them the vulgarizers . . . But honestly, all that matters very little. What I want to know is whether you’ve seen her.’
‘Seen, seen . . .’
‘You know who I’m talking about. I’m not asking what you think of her, that doesn’t interest me in the least, I simply want you to tell me, have you seen her lately?’
‘Of course not, I don’t know these people.’
‘I’ve been told she has an aunt, an eccentric, possibly of unsound mind. Don’t you think that Chiara should be forcibly separated from her?’
‘You can’t expect me to give an opinion. But if she has an aunt, I suppose it’s natural that this young woman should be fond of her.’
‘Natural! It’s not natural, Nature is something quite else. Do you think that a horse, or a pigeon, is fond of its aunt? Could it recognize its aunt as such?’
‘Perhaps not, but in ordinary human society . . .’
‘So you’re trying once again to distinguish us from the rest of animal creation,’ cried Salvatore in tones of angry satisfaction. ‘You renounce behaviourism. Is that what I’m to understand?’
The Gentilinis’ maid opened the front door. So regular was Gentilini in his habits that lunch, at thirty-five minutes past twelve, was timed absolutely by his return. The smell of cauliflower gained strength. The girl looked in dismay at the two men. Salvatore had seized Gentilini by the forearms and was shaking them up and down as though he had lost his temper with an empty ticket machine. The neighbours began to come to the windows, and even out onto the balconies.
‘Mere superstition . . . peasant magic . . .’
Gentilini reminded himself of his friend’s deserved reputation at the hospital, and indeed in the profession, as a reliable, knowledgeable and brilliant consultant. He persuaded him cautiously into the house.
The dining-room was uncomfortably crowded. The family were all there, two of the little girls, with their clean napkins, sitting on the huge radio which stood diagonally across one corner. Everyone had to move with care to avoid dislodging the pieces of ornamental pottery and the small brass jugs which were fastened at intervals to the walls. The Signora tried at first to fetch the dishes herself from the kitchen, but the servant, who had a sense of occasion and hoped that the good-looking doctor would start to shout again, insisted on managing everything herself, although she could only just push her way between the backs of the chairs and the wall. She wore a sleeveless black dress, the heavy fleece of her armpits was visible every time she lifted the casserole above the bowed heads of the family. The girls, too timid to make themselves heard directly, were interpreted at table by their brother Luca. ‘Papa, Vittoria and Bice say they can feel something strange running through them from the inside of the radio, it might be a short circuit.’
‘A little wine, doctor,’ pleaded the Signora, kind and motherly, ‘we know how hard you work in the hospital.’
‘Papa, it’s a scientific fact that if the girls were to spill their water on the radio the current would double in strength.’ Gentilini made no intervention, except to ask his wife whether there had been any telephone calls.
‘Tomato sauce is also an efficient conductor of electricity!’ shouted Luca. Without warning Salvatore got up from his place, colliding sharply with the wall behind him, and throwing down his napkin, was gone. The children spread out immediately to fill the vacant space.
‘Everyone in the street must have seen him leave before the main course!’ exclaimed the Signora.
‘He’s not himself,’ her husband told her.
Salvatore told Gentilini that he was afraid he must have taken leave of his senses. ‘Not at all,’ Gentilini replied. ‘I could see that it suddenly struck you, “this won’t do, this is marriage, I can’t bring her to a state of life like this.” You apparently forgot that when you start out you will be better placed in your career than I am and you won’t have four children. It was an emotional reaction, you were not behaving rationally, as I imagine you intended to do.’ Asked if the Signora could possibly be induced to forgive, Gentilini replied that she had always felt a great interest in his friend Dr Rossi, simply from description, and believed that he was destined to great things. This did not cause either of them the least jealousy, they were too fond of him for that. ‘Of course,’ added Gentilini, ‘I have to admit that she is often wrong about these matters.’
Subsequently he brought a message from his wife, asking whether it would not be possible for Dr Rossi to come to them on some other day, preferably a Wednesday, when the children came home earlier and could be got rid of sooner, or perhaps he would like to accompany them one Sunday when they went u
p to Monte Morello or out to the country. The truth was that she had been impressed by his abrupt behaviour, which was exactly what she would have expected from a genius.
19
It was impossible for Salvatore to see Chiara again, no matter how many concerts he went to, or to avoid seeing her, no matter how many he failed to go to, because she had left Florence. She had to go back to England for the summer for her last term at Holy Innocents, at Champerdown in Berkshire. She had never been particularly happy there, or at any school except her primary, to which she had walked down and up the hill in her black smock in charge of Annunziata, until the villa’s roof had been blown in and the water cut off. At the convent she was undistinguished, having little aptitude to offer beyond music and roller-skating, which she had practised for hours round the ruined corridors of the Ricordanza. At Holy Innocents, roller-skating was forbidden.
In Florence, Gentilini feared that his friend might be developing a disordered personality. There was not much more sympathy for Chiara in Berkshire.
‘You’re just playing into the hands of the nuns. They want us all to get married early. It’s a compensation fantasy. Never mind.’
Barney was Chiara’s greatest friend at the convent. Chiara loved her because of her capacity to dispel opposition, like a tractor going stolidly through the heavy ploughland of Champerdown. Decisiveness has a nobility of its own. For her part, Barney felt a generous sympathy towards the delicate-looking Chiara, who was unlucky enough to be a foreigner.
‘First things first. Now, have you written to this man?’
‘I don’t know his address.’
‘But you could find out.’
‘I could find out.’
‘But you don’t know what to write to him.’
‘I don’t know how to begin.’
‘Well, at all events he was at this concert and you met him and you know his name and you know he’s a doctor.’
‘Yes, who’s done Mimi Limentani a great deal of good.’
‘Who’s Mimi Limentani?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t remember her ever not being in Florence.’
Barney looked at her forcefully.
‘Tell me, what would your father and your aunt think of this man, and all their friends and so on, would they approve of him?’
‘Oh, but it’s not like that in Italy.’
‘It’s like that everywhere,’ said Barney.
Chiara was silent.
‘However, you met this doctor, and you were mowed down. I can see the effect it’s had on you, but we must assume it won’t last. And if it does, he won’t like it when he hears you’ve done all that domestic science. He’ll think you’re after him.’
Chiara felt it was better to let this pass also.
‘Or perhaps he’s after you,’ Barney continued. ‘He may be an adventurer. Only you haven’t any money, have you? How do they manage to pay for you here, by the way?’
‘I don’t know. I wish they didn’t. I should have preferred the liceo. Perhaps they’re selling bits of the furniture.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t have had my advice if you’d stayed in a foreign school,’ said Barney. ‘On the other hand, I suppose you mightn’t have needed it, and now you do. Let me summarize it all for you. You’re coming up North with us in August, aren’t you? Then, when you get back to Florence, if you haven’t heard from him and nothing’s happened, you may have to reconsider.’
‘Oh, but it will be all right, it can’t be anything else, I know it, once I get home again.’
‘But you’re coming to us first. If it had been my grandmother’s house in London I wouldn’t have asked you, because it’s a sink, but you get fresh air in Scotland, and you need plenty of fresh air. Besides, if you don’t want to come, my parents will be insulted.’
‘I do want to come, I do want the fresh air, but it’s such a long time to wait.’
Barney looked at her more attentively.
‘Chiara, you’re getting weedy.’
At this damning word, of which she didn’t know the Italian equivalent, Chiara hung her head. She accepted it absolutely. To be weedy, as she understood it, is to be alien, not to grow in the right place, but at the same time to lack stoutness and self-reliance. She knew her tendency to fragment, often against her will, into other existences. The convent was intended to provide for life a fixed basis of judgement, but it had not done this for Chiara, who could not escape from the unsettling vision of other points of view, the point of view of every living creature, all defensible. At Parenti’s she had felt for the old couturier’s pride (her back had stiffened in sympathy with his), but also for her aunt’s disappointment, and as they walked back through the workrooms she had known that the pressers and hand-seamers had a perfect right to laugh as soon as the door shut behind her. Why shouldn’t they? Why not? But the too readily-obliging ‘why not?’ must be a serious failing, even a disaster, unless one could remain unperturbed and stable among countless sympathies clamouring for attention, not turn and turn about, but, as it seemed, at the same time. When Salvatore had spoken to her all these distractions had settled, for the first time she could remember since early childhood, into tranquillity. The relief was indescribable. No more wear and tear of the heart.
‘It’s weediness,’ Barney said.
20
At the S. Agostino the restless currents of energy in Dr Rossi broke out in sometimes inconvenient directions. Florence, in summer, is supposed to be empty, but in the years of the Italian economic miracle it was as full as every other city of country people crowding in for high wages. At the same time these people had decided, by a common impulse, to discard the habits of centuries. One of these habits was the dread of hospitals. Contadini now occupied all the benches, more benches were requested on loan from other hospitals but refused because all were in use, and the new patients, well accustomed to waiting, became connoisseurs, in a few weeks, of hospital treatment. ‘Treatment is only a small part of the story,’ Salvatore urged the deputy administrator, who had closely studied the art of leaving well alone, ‘here you’ve got people who’ve never before eaten bread with salt in it, the effect on them of permanent city life is unpredictable, we shall need both primary and secondary preventive methods.’ The administrator, who had managed to resist the introduction even of microscopes for years on the grounds of economy, was dismissive. ‘And yet the new clinic,’ shouted Salvatore, ‘dispenses antibiotics by the litre, just as the Grand Dukes once caused the fountains to run with wine.’ But these, of course, were paid for by the Americans.
Without abandoning this matter for a moment, Salvatore threw himself furiously into the scandal of flood prevention. Throughout recorded time the Arno had flooded every thirty years or so, why, now that there was money to spend, was there no decent warning system so that the information from the hydrometers could be centralized and the information passed on to the emergency services in concise form. This time his indignation carried him as far as the Civil Engineering Department of the Prefettura, where he was told that such a scheme would cost forty million lire. ‘The price of a footballer, and second group at that,’ Salvatore said.
He glared at the umber-coloured river, sunk to its lowest point. ‘Note that it’s not much more than a gutter, this Arno of yours, a gutter between the hills.’ Gentilini, to whom this was addressed, replied that it wasn’t his Arno, and that in the Po valley they found it much cheaper and more practical to put up with the floods and give up prevention altogether. He himself would never have been able to start out on a medical career if it hadn’t been for the flood compensation his family received in 1924. Much more alarming, in Gentilini’s view (if such things can be classified, and he was watching his friend carefully) was the affair of L’Inconsolabile.
This was a gravestone which had been executed from the sculptor’s designs by a respectable monumental mason in the suburb of Rifredi. The sculptor, an elderly man named Josz, claimed to have carried out his instructions from the client
exactly. But the finished work had been rejected by the directors of the Cimeterio Rifredi, who had declared it non-admissible.
The grave was that of a respectable small dealer in sports goods. It was the widow who was inconsolable, and she had ordered as a memorial a marble statue of herself, L’Inconsolabile, lying full length on the grave, beating in protest on the grating with her fists, dishevelled and in tears. The creased skirt was shown from behind in folds of greenish marble, also the slight gap, at one point, between the skirt and the top of the stocking. The widow had found the public in general, against her. The neighbours thought it a vulgar display of new money, no art critic and not even a single artist could be found to defend it, and the Cardinal Archbishop’s office ruled that on no account could it be allowed admittance to the Campo Santo. The Church’s spokesman on the radio and on page 3 of the national newspapers was Monsignor Giuseppe Gondi who, indispensable as ever, was now adviser to the Sacred Congregation for Popular Religious Art. He was able to speak, too, as a Florentine. ‘The duty of monumental sculpture is to illustrate a spirit, not of rebellion, but of peace, resignation and acceptance.’ The widow declared, this time in an interview on Radiouno, that on the night of her husband’s death she had been seized with a frightful bilious spasm and had said to him: ‘If you go out of this world and leave me alone I shall knock and hammer on your grave.’ — ‘And so, signora,’ the interviewer suggested, ‘you are expressing the desire to beat, so to speak, the earth as if the departed could still hear.’ — ‘Not at all, I’m beating precisely because he can’t.’
Salvatore’s indignation was not in the cause of art. He had never given it much thought, but now that he did he saw that if art is of any use at all it must be to get rid of surplus emotion. In that way it functioned much like a dream. He had known hospital patients so heavily medicated that they were unable to dream, and compensated with hideous delusions by day. The Church, in this particular case, had suppressed the transference of human grief in the way best adapted to human beings. ‘You know of course that this Monsignore is Chiara Ridolfi’s uncle by marriage?’ said Gentilini. Salvatore ignored him, and joined battle with an article in the Nazione: ‘In the city of Michelangelo, Art is Forbidden.’ This had good results, at least for the old sculptor, Adelaido Josz. By chance the casual attention of Federico Fellini was drawn to the just-decipherable photograph of the statue printed at the top of the article. He ordered a replica, which soon joined the heaps of magic-realist junk in Rome’s Cinecittà. The original remained in a kind of half-way house, a shed at the cemetery gates full of marble limbs and crosses, some awaiting admission, some ejected. But Fellini’s purchase meant that old Josz, who was not much good at pressing his claims, was paid something at last. With senile persistence he tracked down the author of his good fortune, and waited outside the hospital until he saw a man, identified for him as Dr Rossi, leaving by a private door in via del Castelaccio. Then he came forward, and introducing himself in quiet tones, told the doctor that he had put aside a small block of top-grade marble — impossible to get anything like it nowadays — as a gift, to serve when the time came for Rossi himself to die.
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