Gondi was not, for the moment, quite able to redistribute his attention. He took some photographs out of the blotter. ‘Perhaps these would interest you, Giancarlo. You see how wide we throw our net. A sub-committee on private worship. These are Mexican images of the Redeemer; each with a hinged plastic door in the breast which can be opened to show the Sacred Heart illuminated by a bicycle lamp.’ He selected several, and as though dealing cards, handed them over. ‘Operated from a battery, or they can be plugged in directly.’
It was amazing how the Monsignore, as he moved from one strenuous appointment to the next, expected his relations to follow the details of his work, not only with polite attention but with something like excitement. However, it was this belief that everything which interested him was interesting that had preserved him in a condition of suspended middle age. And of course the bureaucratic faith, like all faith, must be a gift from God. But Giancarlo thought he might risk the truth without impoliteness. He looked at the photographs and said: ‘But Beppino, these don’t interest me in the least.’ This did not quite work, in the sense of recalling Gondi to the present situation. He began to talk about some memorial or other in Florence, in the Cemetery of Rifredi. There had been some kind of scandal or difficulty. In this way the Count heard for the first time the name of Dr Salvatore Rossi. He forgot it immediately.
Now, as though some internal mechanism had corrected itself, Gondi snapped the blotter shut and with a look of reproof said: ‘Well, but so far you’ve told me nothing. What is the news of Maddalena?’
‘She’s in Vienna.’
‘And the casa di riposo, I mean the asylum for old women and infants? I think there were some irregularities, weren’t there, but I imagine they’ve been put right since the war.’ As there was no answer he nodded and went on, ‘And Cesare, it’s not easy for him up there. I hope you don’t allow that to escape your attention. The old part-share tenant system is gone for good, labour costs are high. But let him stick it out. In a few years replanting will begin at the expense of the Ministry, or even of the European Community. However, in my view Cesare is too solitary. His life is bizarre. Sometimes it occurs to me that he may end up by joining a contemplative Order.’
Giancarlo felt as though with these brisk words Cesare’s future was actually being disposed of. ‘I don’t see, in that case, who would farm Valsassina.’
‘It isn’t a crime to sell land for a good purpose.’
‘What purpose?’
‘Let us say, of having a little ready money to repair the Ricordanza.’
‘I’ve never heard Cesare say anything about the religious life.’
‘The strong current runs silently. And now, what about our little Chiara?’
‘She’s at via Limbo at the moment, with a school friend who’s been asked to stay.’
‘An English girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘A Catholic?’
‘From the convent, a girl called Lavinia Barnes.’
The Monsignore frowned a little, turning over the index cards of his mind.
‘I imagine she would be related to Lord Barnes, the Markham Castle lot. Converts, I think. Did she mention them at all?’
‘She’s mentioned a number of things,’ said Giancarlo, ‘but not that, as far as I remember.’
‘And what is Chiara’s present course of studies? What are her principal interests?’
‘Music, but she doesn’t think her voice is good enough to train. The nuns thought so, but well, we must take advice.’
‘Oh, this diffidence, this Ridolfi refusal or inability to trust oneself!’
‘It doesn’t have to be regarded as a failing. You might think of it as humility.’
‘Well, humility is an attractive virtue, though unfortunately it’s impossible to give it a political form.’
‘But you wouldn’t object to it on that account?’ Giancarlo asked, bewildered.
Giancarlo knew that to be admitted to one of the individual offices of the Vatican, instead of a waiting-room, was against protocol and a favour to him as a relation by marriage. It was a relief when the favour came to an end, and reception rang through to say the Monsignore’s taxi was waiting for him in viale Vaticano.
The conversazione was to be held in the studio of a Roman princess, Billie Buoncampagno, about whom Giancarlo felt he was expected to know more than he did. This sensation was familiar to him on his visits to Rome. Giuseppe was not very enlightening, saying that ‘much is due to the Princess’s generosity and devoutness,’ but this mattered less because it seemed that she wouldn’t be present, as she never came back to Rome before October. The taxi headed for the Piazza del Popolo, and he realized that the Princess’s studio must be in the Via Margutta, from which the artists themselves had been emigrating for several years so that now perhaps not one was left.
In the taxi Gondi had explained that the little gathering was not to be clerical, or in the first instance social, but cultural, or, to be precise, literary. He explained, as if it were an available course of medical treatment, the suppleness of the mind, the deepening of knowledge, which might result in meeting and talking to contemporary writers, ‘occasionally, you understand, as with all things’. Possibly, too, Giancarlo thought, it was part of a determined attempt by Gondi (and one could only admire him for this) to extend his Congregation’s sphere of influence over all the arts, writing as well as painting (perhaps later the most intractable of all, music). But for the most part it was a courageous attempt to modernize Giancarlo himself, as the father of Chiara, and perhaps as the uncle of Cesare.
He was struck, when they arrived, by the anxious care of the manservant who had been detailed, at long distance, by the Princess to look after the Monsignore’s guests. ‘Your Eminence’ — Gondi rejected this title with a slight downward sweep of the head — ‘will stand at the head of the stairs? Her Highness has authorized me to get in any other help that may be necessary —’
‘Simply show them in. One glass of vermouth each will be quite sufficient. They will all have left by seven o’clock.’
‘Do you often give parties here?’ asked Giancarlo, looking round the wide pale spaces and the wall frescoes, painted and artificially faded, with delicious traces of colour, by Campigli.
‘Occasionally I give a Press conference here, when an artistic ambiente is needed. We all have our own arrangements.’
On the dot, the very tick of five thirty, when the conversazione was to begin, three guests were announced, two Italian, one French. They are novelists,’ Gondi murmured. ‘More to come.’
‘All your guests are novelists?’
‘Yes, I think all.’
‘You know them well?’
‘I don’t know them at all. I entrusted one of my secretaries with the whole matter. I believe he looked up their addresses.’
Giancarlo was amazed that any relation of his, even by marriage, could have had such a disastrous idea. He was seized with embarrassment, so strong that it resembled fear. And all this, all this time put aside by Gondi out of a crowded working life, was, as he knew, intended solely for his benefit. One of the two Italians was a Southerner, stout and impressive in his black suit, his trousers supported by a broad leather belt as a reminder that he was still in touch with the people. He struck his breast, and uttered the one word: ‘Gastone’. The name evoked at once his European reputation as a humanist and his years of exile. The second Italian, a Milanese, pale, sharp and watchful, mouthed silently: ‘Luigi Capponi’, giving the effect of an unpleasant party game. Capponi was not so well known, and Giancarlo, not much of a reader, could not pretend to remember the title of anything that he had ever written.
Searching his memory, he sipped at his wretched glass of vermouth, which had just been distributed. It tasted strongly of parsnips. ‘It’s not that Beppino is mean,’ he thought, ‘but he’s indifferent to material pleasures, which has much the same effect.’
Capponi moved towards him and without any further introducti
on began to explain the substance of his forthcoming novel. Its purpose, he said, was to expose the absurd pretensions of his native town of Popolograsso. In it not only the author himself but the streets, the statues, the furniture and the main drains spoke freely and reproached the citizens for the bourgeois way of life. Refrigerators, when opened, vomited over their owners, and when a couple entered a bedroom the mattress split itself lewdly and lay wide open, discharging its springs. The film rights were already said to have been sold for five hundred million lira, and Giancarlo pretended to recognize the name of the director.
Gastone had shown no signs of listening, in fact he was standing in the middle of a circle of late arrivals who kept a short respectful distance away from him, as though on the edge of a bull-pen. Now, however, he said, without even a glance in Capponi’s direction: ‘Satire, when all is said and done, is an ignoble art. The writer’s only true subject is Nature.’
‘But Nature should be satirized,’ cried Capponi. ‘We are all against exploitation, I trust. In this country the earth itself is the principal exploiter, a bloodsucker, living off man’s work, three thousand years of sweat and mule dung on the same little terrace. In the end one has to agree with poor Marinetti. Nothing is more of a bourgeois capitalist than Nature.’
‘What, you defy Nature?’ bellowed Gastone.
The Monsignore interposed, pointing out, with a pastor’s air of having said it more than once before, that all Nature’s functions must be taken into consideration. She was not only creative. It is her business to erase the signs of damage, to heal wounds and gradually to restore the status quo. ‘This surely the writer can also do by thoughtful detachment and patient observation.’
‘Screw patience!’ Capponi hissed, seizing the Count, for some reason, by both hands. ‘Patience is the same as resignation.’
‘Surely not,’ said Giancarlo, freeing himself. ‘Patience is passive, resignation is active.’
Gastone had been deflected, but only a little, and he now returned to the charge, declaring that no-one was fitted to write who didn’t know, from personal experience, what it was to sleep like a peasant.
‘Ah, one thinks of Tolstoy,’ said the Monsignore. ‘You remember that one of his peasants prays to lie down like a stone and rise up like new bread.’
‘Then Tolstoy was an idiot. Country bread hardly rises at all. Country people sleep as I do, or as the beasts do, with one eye open, constantly on the watch.’
Giancarlo felt a light touch on his arm. ‘My name is Pierre Aulard.’
It was the tiny French writer. ‘You’re the Monsignore’s brother?’
‘No.’
‘Never mind. Do you often go to England?’
‘Now and then. I’ve been quite recently.’
‘Tell me, que font les jeunes?’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t asked them what they’re doing.’
‘Do they still speak of me, Pierre Aulard, as young?’
He paused expectantly.
‘You must think me very ignorant,’ said Giancarlo.
Aulard fixed his large, feverish eyes upon him. ‘I have been told that it’s possible to live decently at the moment in London for twenty-five shillings a week. Is that so?’
‘No.’
‘Gentlemen,’ the Monsignore was saying. For a moment his voice was in competition with Gastone’s, then even that rich bass wavered and fell silent. ‘Gentlemen, dottori, I have to admit to you that much as I am enjoying your company I have asked you to do me the honour of coming here partly because as a Christian and a priest’ — he smiled a little — ‘it is my duty to spend even the happiest moments of my day profitably. You are the experts. I am doing no more than ask you, in the name of the Church, for your professional assistance. My responsibilities at the moment, as you know, extend over the whole field of popular religious art — not only in Europe — with the exception of the cinema, which has its own distinct advisory body. My question to you is simply this: at what point does the professional artist or indeed the professional writer make contact with the man or the woman of the people? What can be hoped for in this field?
‘An example.’ He picked up from the wide marble sill, which ran round the whole interior of the studio, a little statuette. It was a portrait of himself, a terracotta about twenty centimetres high, almost pyramidical because of the stiff folds of the cassock. There was no glazing except on the eyes, which were touched in with white. It was a very good likeness and surely it had been a pardonable vanity to show it as an object lesson.
The terracotta looked as if it must be by the Bergamese sculptor Giacomo Manzu, and in fact it was a genuine Manzu. The Monsignore began to enlighten them. Manzu was the eleventh son of a poor sacristan in a Benedictine monastery. As a small boy he had sat quietly in the sacristy, watching the monks divest themselves after the Mass, and turn back into approachable human beings.
This won’t quite do, thought Giancarlo. ‘Manzu is always the same,’ Gastone rumbled. Since no-one remarked on the likeness or made any other comment, except for Aulard, who asked how much the Princess had been prepared to pay for it, Giancarlo asked if he might hold the statue and stood there with the dignified little terracotta object, which rapidly became warm in the hand.
‘I’m not attempting a critical commentary on the work,’ the Monsignore continued. ‘It’s simply a convenient way of opening what I hope will be a short, but stimulating discussion.’
‘Art is finished in Italy,’ exclaimed Capponi furiously. ‘Artists are finished, writers as well. Essentially I work only for the cinema. All that is wanted now is film and design. Fellini, Nervi, Olivetti, Pinaferrati. Everything else is shit. The people are shit, and their art consists of chromium, straw fringes and pink light bulbs. All that we are saying and have been saying and are about to say is shit.’
Gastone confronted him ominously. ‘Rhetoric, filth! Olivetti could not design a cream cheese, neither could Pier Luigi Nervi. On the threshold of Nature the man of science must pause.’
‘I use the word “design” only in its most important sense.’
‘What are the other senses?’
‘There are none,’ said Aulard, drooping like a sick marmoset.
In a private moment, under the cover of the din, Gondi said quietly to Giancarlo: ‘They are insane.’
‘Reckless, perhaps. They’re without the normal safeguards of social life.’ In that way, he thought, they weren’t unlike Signorina Barnes.
‘They’re ignoring the possibilities of a serious moral discussion, which were implied by my invitation.’
‘Don’t let it distress you, Beppino. They’re only story-tellers.’ He added: ‘Perhaps better to ask only one of them at a time.’
But here he had gone too far. The Monsignore could not accept advice from the frail relative whose quality of life he was improving. Gallantly he turned back to the group of guests, where jagged hostilities were flying. Giancarlo was left with his empty glass and in his other hand the little terracotta.
33
‘What happened?’ Barney asked. ‘I came here because I was your best friend. We were best friends to the extent that Reverend Mother wouldn’t let us walk round the grounds without a third for fear we should get up to something. Remember that. Admit that. I came because you distinctly said it was urgent. You said you couldn’t manage without me. I came because you were showing symptoms of weediness. I’ve got my own life to think seriously about. I told you I’d got to go to Painstake, and this whole question of my He. But first of all it seemed I had to inspect yours. Perhaps you didn’t actually ask me to do it, but in my view it was absolutely necessary as a preliminary step. That was how I saw it. Now tell me what happened.’
Barney was packing, not hastily, but with august and deliberate movements. The expression on her handsome face showed that she was deeply hurt.
‘Let me just tell you, Cha, that when this Rossi found you weren’t there, and I told him that straight away, he just got on his scoo
ter and made off. The Harringtons were left flat with all their bottles and little plates and bits and pieces. They’d meant it to be nice, they’d meant to sit out on the terrace. You can’t do things like that. If he does things like that, he’s just not possible. Then when I got back here, poor Mrs H. drove me back, agonies of indigestion after helping her finish up everything, I couldn’t leave them like that facing it all, and then I found there was bloody no-one here. I couldn’t even get in, and listen to this, I had to go to the dreaded Uffizi again, it was the only place open in the afternoon, what happened?’
‘I did mean to go to the Harringtons by the field-path from Terrapetrosa. But when I got there I didn’t stop, I went straight on. I passed Salvatore just before the main road at Sangallo. Then when I got to the Ricordanza I turned up there.’
‘Jesus Christ, why didn’t you go on to Florence?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I suppose you were running away from him,’ said Barney with queenly scorn.
‘I don’t know, perhaps.’
‘Well, what did he do?’
‘He came straight after me to the Ricordanza.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said: Why weren’t you at the English people’s house? I said: They didn’t ask me. He said, I want to talk to you, why is this place always shut? I said, it’s not shut, I have the key.’
‘And then.’
‘Barney, he was furious. He shouted, how convenient that you’ve got the keys! I said, I don’t always have them, sometimes I forget them and I have to try and find the gardener’s wife. He shouted again, not so loudly but still it was quite loud, how convenient for you that you were born to have the keys, and if you forget them to call out for the gardener’s wife!’
‘You shouldn’t have let him shout at you. You should have asserted yourself.’
Chiara had opened the side door, which gave almost straight onto the limonaia, so that the best thing to do was to walk in at one end and out at the other. This was the place that as a small girl she had loved above all others, particularly in the winter months, when the lemon trees were waiting in their pots to be taken out in April, all those bitter green leaves passing the long season together, and giving off a cold bitter green smell, the ghost of the lemons. The gardeners kept a number of other things in there, wheeled carts, terracotta vases, and frames for training the climbing plants, twice as tall as a man, and lying in heaps like very tall sleeping men.
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