Innocence

by Penelope Fitzgerald

‘I should need a little time to think about that. Nobody in the family does very much writing.’

  He thought of Chiara, who spelled incorrectly in four languages, and then of Cesare.

  ‘I can supply a writer, no worry about that,’ said Robiglio. ‘A reasonable fee will be paid, and the Azienda can make an appointment any time convenient to you. Only your approval is wanted, this is fiction, not history.’

  Giancarlo at first thought nothing much about the matter, then it began to hover on the threshold of his mind. What do I think about the story? he asked himself. I don’t even know if we’ve got the right version. But no, that’s not the point. The right version would presumably be true, and a legend doesn’t have to be true, it has other things to do. On the other hand, some of it, some part of it, must have taken place, because there are the letters in the Biblioteca Nazionale. Now the whole story is being altered in the interests of tourism. Should I mind if it were being altered to please myself?

  It was the moment to take advice from his family. Chiara (how odd it was, now that she was back, to ring up and ask for her, as though she was an acquaintance, in a flat which he must bring himself to accept was where she lived, while he himself was speaking from her home, where she didn’t live any longer. — The enormity of this!) — Chiara was touchingly ready to help him, but said she was afraid she would be of no use.

  As a tiny child, before the war, she had spent a whole day at the Ricordanza with her father. Giancarlo was still under house arrest and they had had to bring with them two men from the questura, who went to have something to eat with the gardener and Giannina. Aunt Mad had not been there. They had simply walked about the gardens all day. What was walking to Giancarlo was running, at that age, to Chiara. She found it difficult to manage up and down the grass staircases, impossible on the giant steps. She was, for that summer only, the right size to re-enter the past. The Count had arranged all this with unusual concentration, imagining that it might be for the last time.

  After the war, at the beginning of the Reconstruction, when Chiara was not quite twelve, there had been an evening party at the Ricordanza. The party had really been given by and for Annunziata, to celebrate the gradual withdrawal of evacuees, refugees and partisans from the various rooms, the removal of the corpses in the rose-hedge and the digging up of barrels of oil under the graves in the chapel where no graves were supposed to be. There was wine, no food, but lights in the garden, where the great rose-bushes rampaged. Chiara, small, thin, and still as flat as a board, wore a black dress because her uncle had been killed and her aunt was dead. She moved from one group to another and they interrupted what they were saying and gave her an affectionate word. From head to heel long shivers of excitement passed through her at the realization of what could be made manifest, like the scent of the roses itself, from human beings known and half known to each other, dressed differently, speaking and behaving differently from their everyday or earthly selves. The women were made up; the men, who couldn’t be, compensated by the additional effort they made, as though they were compelled to amuse on penalty of sinking into the earth. Only gradually it came to her — or perhaps it was more and more so as the night went on — that as she listened, anxious to learn, almost all of them turned out to be speaking unkindly about someone else who was present, but out of earshot. The unkindness produced laughter and a kind of gentle intoxication. The garden was divided not only into moonlight and shadow but into areas of risk and safety as the guests, moving up or down, in or out, or under cover of the music, might or might not happen to overhear what was being said about them.

  When she had taken Salvatore through the limonaia and made love with him in the vast bedroom she believed she would feel differently in future about the Ricordanza and come to think of it tenderly and sentimentally as you were supposed, after all, to think about the place where you spent your childhood. Nothing seemed to have changed, however, and she only had to shut her eyes to see the unlucky Gemma, the cripple, floundering up the grass stairs.

  ‘Suppose we forgot it,’ she said. ‘Suppose we got rid of the whole thing.’

  ‘And your husband, what does he think?’ Giancarlo asked rather stiffly.

  Salvatore must have come in while she was speaking and taken the telephone from her. Everything had to be repeated once again. ‘I am putting it to you simply as a member of the family,’ said Giancarlo.

  ‘The story is a superstition,’ answered Salvatore. ‘I have no opinion, none at all. A superstition concerns things that don’t exist, and it isn’t possible to have an opinion about things that don’t exist. Ask me anything else, anything. Please don’t get the impression that I’m holding back, you can be sure that I’ll answer absolutely frankly.’

  Giancarlo would very much have liked to ask him what his ideas were about marriage, but knew that the moment for this was not now, or ever.

  Cesare was, as always, a satisfactory listener. He thought it would be an opportunity, even if the Turismo wouldn’t help, to get a bank loan to replace the grass staircases, which in his opinion couldn’t be older than the eighteenth century.

  Maddalena was against any kind of change.

  Largely because he had seen him again, after too long an interval, at the wedding, Giancarlo also consulted Professor Pulci. The professor replied from London: ‘I can’t tell from your letter how serious you are. I take it that you’re appealing to me in reference to my earlier work on the myth as a justification, a theory which I now reject as totally misconceived, but perhaps I’m flattering myself in thinking, old friend, that you remember any of my books. The Ricordanza material, including the statuary, shows that at some unspecified time one branch of your family was considered kindhearted but incompetent, and ill-judged in carrying out their good intentions to a grotesque degree. This of course may well have been so then and may even be so now. The story is an illustration only. I am taking the banal point of view. However, if you are asking me whether the character of a family and perhaps their general prosperity could improve or deteriorate because someone had been allowed to fiddle about with their definition through myth, then I think my answer may surprise you. It is yes. Thirty years ago we none of us believed in either magic or miracles, but I notice that both of them have managed to survive very well without our belief. I should be inclined to leave the story alone.’

  As to Beppino Gondi, Giancarlo was determined not to consult him at all. It must have been entirely a coincidence that the Monsignore opened his regular check-up call from Rome by saying: ‘You remember Luigi Capponi?’

  Giancarlo did not. He was reminded impatiently that Capponi was a well-known novelist and cinéaste. ‘You met him last year at one of my conversazione.’

  ‘Was he a Milanese?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Now he has the idea, which will of course depend on what financial backing he can obtain, of writing a screen play on the subject of the Ricordanza.’

  ‘I’m surprised that he should find it at all interesting.’

  ‘You’ve remembered who he is?’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I’m surprised.’

  ‘Well, the mutilated girl, you understand, mutilated by your family, the mutilated child of the people. That is what interests him. Capponi of course is a communist, but I flatter myself that I have a little influence with him and I have a notion that I can induce him to give the whole tragic story a Christian colouring, in the manner of Pasolini.’

  ‘You’d better hurry,’ said Giancarlo, ‘or it won’t be a tragic story.’ Gondi did not understand this, and was too proud to ask for an explanation.

  Meanwhile the Deputy Director of Tourism was anxious to go to press. The Count assumed that Robiglio would have chosen for the job of rewriting the legend, a writer or a journalist connected with his own family or his wife’s family or failing that someone who wasn’t a writer at all but to whom he owed an obligation or some money. He never discovered, however, what connection there was, if any, between Robiglio and Signorina Monti. She was
a journalist, on the Woman’s Page of the Nazione, accustomed, as she pointed out herself, to solving problems very rapidly. She appeared at the flat in via Limbo at nine o’clock in the morning, wearing dark glasses, and dismissed immediately all the usual little politenesses. At the prospect of having a decision made for him by someone who was not his sister and not his late sister-in-law’s brother, the Count felt a delicious relief. Is it not a natural duty, after all, for the weaker to follow the stronger?

  ‘I have every confidence in you, dottoressa,’ he said.

  ‘You think it’ll be an easy job?’

  ‘Not at all. In fact, I have the impression that in spite of all we have been promised since the war, journalism is still not an easy profession for a woman.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Signorina Monti. ‘I myself can’t afford to rely on impressions.’

  Giancarlo saw that he had deserved this reply, but no longer felt so friendly towards Signorina Monti.

  She began, ‘I know the story in question, of course. I’ve been living here in Florence for nearly two years. When I arrived I made it my business to familiarize myself with all the aspects, even the most trivial. Robiglio is right, the story as it stands, won’t do. Are you sure there’s no grave?’

  ‘There used to be a small family chapel, in fact there still is, but it’s been closed for a long time.’

  ‘And none of the family were buried there?’

  ‘I fear not, I’m very sorry. I’m afraid it never occurred to them.’

  ‘A grave is a prime attraction for international tourism. It doesn’t matter that Juliet’s tomb in Verona is an old horse trough. If the Protestant Cemetery in Rome is shut there’s a special opening made in the wall so that you can have a look at the grave of Keats. You insist that there’s no tomb at your villa?’

  Giancarlo told her that the little Contessina, like most of the family, was buried in the vaults of Santa Maria a Quarto. ‘Not her,’ said Signorina Monti impatiently. ‘The other one, the legless one.’

  ‘If she ever existed.’

  ‘You’ve no idea where she was buried. She was a nobody, more or less bought over the counter, it wouldn’t have been thought worth recording. I daresay the dogs’ graves were marked, and the cage-birds’. Not to worry, Count. I’ve had to manage with much worse material than this.’

  13

  In the Monti version of the story, Gemma da Terracina avoided the fate in store for her by escaping from the Ricordanza. She climbed over the wall at a spot where there was now a pull-in on the opposite side of the road, so that photographs could conveniently be taken by visitors sitting in their coach. Gemma was said to have been dearly loved by all. The statues of the midgets facing outwards were looking regretfully after her. Those looking inwards were waiting to break the news to the little Contessina. ‘To have a hearty laugh at her disappointment, I suppose,’ said Giancarlo. Robiglio approved of the alterations, but hesitated over the location of Gemma’s flight. The pull-in was for three small or two long vehicles only, and once tourists were allowed out of their coach to take photographs it was difficult to get them in again. But the story itself he liked, it had atmosphere and struck, he thought, a bright note. Before sending it to press he added: ‘Thus the “good intentions” of the Ridolfi were frustrated, and it was at this time they gave the villa its name, as a memory or reminder of their own folly.’

  14

  Salvatore knew that he was more than ever obliged to defend himself on all sides against merciless attacks in order to retain the little ground he had gained. These attacks were largely, though not entirely, by women.

  The most irritating, perhaps, was his mother, who (as he now found out) had burst into tears at the wedding and told everyone within earshot that if he had searched the whole world he could not have made a better choice. She had no reason to say this and he couldn’t conceive why she had said it. Repeating again and again that her son must have thought, when he made up his mind to marry, first and foremost of his old mother, she had cut him off, by a kind of instinctive encircling movement, from his independence. Ingratitude to those who have given us life is a luxury and Salvatore now felt deprived of it. Marta, on the other hand, hadn’t burst into tears, but had taken the opportunity to make another two hundred thousand lire. Then, Giulia Gentilini, who refused, in the teeth of the evidence, to admit that he was ill-mannered and unpredictable. Only Chiara was not in the grand conspiracy. However much they disagreed there would surely never be anything to forgive.

  What is all this about happiness? he asked himself. — We never talked about it in Mazzata.

  They had a flat a long way out from the centre, via Emilio Münz 261. There were two rooms, a cucinetta, and a shower. The agent had called it luminoso and so, being four floors up, it was, as light, in its way, as via Limbo, but while he was showing them round it was quite difficult for them not to get in each other’s way. Chiara threw her clothes and possessions all over the place and felt immediately at home. She had a poor grasp of time, and was not the sort of person on whom watches keep going for very long, but fortunately she could hear the tocco from the bell of the junior school across the road. Salvatore was punctual, but impatient. The lift in their block often didn’t work, and rather than wait to find out whether it did that day or not he would take to the stairs. Then, four floors down, she could hear the engine of the Vespa, for he hadn’t parted with that, roaring, fading, rising again and dying away abruptly as he turned the corner southwards towards the Agostino.

  Running down and even up the stairs was a simple counter-irritant against rage. The flat was what Salvatore could afford at the moment. The money from the sale of his inheritance was still in hand, but the 100% mortgage at 2½% which he had hoped for, and still did hope for, from the hospital, in fact it was his contractual right, had not come through as yet. ‘I’ve been to them time and again,’ he told Gentilini. ‘What is wrong with them, what possible authority have they not to do this?’ Gentilini reminded Salvatore that he was popular with his patients but not with the S. Agostino’s finance committee, and in particular not with the Chief Administrator (formerly the Deputy Administrator).

  ‘He didn’t like the trouble about that woman’s grave in the Campo Santo at Rifredi. He didn’t like your recommendations about the contadini and the effect of commercial bread on their diet. After all, you’re not a nutritionist.’

  ‘Nor is he. It’s impossible that he can be so childish. He must know his own ignorance.’

  ‘He isn’t ignorant of how to manage a committee,’ said Gentilini. ‘In any case, your place is perfectly all right for a young couple with no children. Giulia, when we were first married, would have been glad of it.’

  ‘My God, do you think I want Chiara to live a life like Giulia’s?’

  ‘Has your wife complained about the flat?’ asked Gentilini stiffly.

  ‘I don’t want to ask her what she thinks.’

  ‘That strikes me as absurd. Marriage, surely, means free discussion on every subject, and particularly, I should have thought, about where you were going to live.’

  ‘You understand that Chiara mustn’t be limited in any way, she’s still very young, she may quite likely want to study, and I of course should have no objection, none whatever, she might enrol at the University this autumn.’

  ‘As it happens, Giulia herself is a state registered nurse. It’s simply that until the children are older she hasn’t time for anything outside the home.’

  They walked on in silence (they still went to the Caffé Voltaire) and then Salvatore said: ‘Did you think, just now, that I was criticizing your way of living, and possibly your wife?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Gentilini.

  15

  Chiara and Salvatore quarrelled, but not so successfully as they made love. Chiara had no gift for quarrelling at all and could scarcely understand how it was done, nor, really, had Salvatore, since his argument was with himself, and he was therefore bound to lose. When they ha
d torn up the grey dress together in the hotel they had hardly known whether they were for or against each other. When Salvatore’s temper rose Chiara became not frightened but reckless, as when driving through the city’s traffic. They knew each other, to be honest, so little, and had so few memories in common (the concert, the limonaia, the wedding) that they had to use them both for attack and defence. They loved each other to the point of pain and could hardly bear to separate each morning. The bed was on the narrow side so that it was impossible to lie for very long either back to back or six inches of hostility apart. This led to truces or reconciliations of a kind, rather too easily made. The bed had come from Valsassina. It was made of walnut, an old country piece of furniture. Chiara had remembered that it was in one of the upstairs rooms, and, determined to be practical, had asked if she could have it sent to Florence. Cesare had said that she was welcome to it. She could take anything she liked.

  Salvatore and Chiara never quarrelled twice on the same subject. Each battle, as it closed, was recorded in their memories, as in an elementary history book. In these books you usually get three or four causes of hostilities given, and afterwards three or four results, which have to be learned by heart. It must have been eight weeks or more before there was any kind of dispute between them in public.

  16

  That spring Professor Pulci gave a dinner party. He did this only because he happened to have alighted for a season in a villa up at Bellosguardo, belonging to the Istituto Hodgkiss. The Hodgkiss Foundation for Fine Arts had built the house two years earlier for its course directors, the Institute itself being in the city, onto which the Professor descended daily, changing buses at Porto Romano. The Hodgkiss congratulated themselves on securing Pulci, who had been elusive, and was now old enough to be referred to as mythical.

  Although the Professor, when he took the trouble to think about it, was a hospitable man, the dinner party was entirely dictated by the situation. Finding himself temporarily in a large house with someone to do the cooking, he allowed the idea of guests to enter his mind. ‘You will act as my hostess,’ he said to Maddalena, of whom, as her brother’s sister, he was genuinely fond, and then there was nothing further for him to worry about. He told her to invite Giancarlo, Chiara and her husband, Cesare if it was possible to drag him away from Valsassina, and then a young English historian, Burton Murray, or it might be Murray Burton, who had come with a letter of introduction from the Institute.