‘Yes, a clinic,’ the old doctor repeated.
‘You speak as though I had some kind of influence over my sister. No-one has. Where does she want to go?’
‘She spoke of staying here for some time.’
‘If she wants to do that she must be in a bad way. She never wants to stay for long anywhere.’
Manzoni accepted a vermouth, and recalled how he had first seen the Contessa Maddalena as a bride, that would have been, wouldn’t it, about 1920, after the Socialist Front collapsed, yes, well, as a young bride on the terrace of the Ricordanza, a radiant sight. He’s becoming idiotic, the Count reflected.
After the doctor had taken his leave he got slowly to his feet. He went up the stairs, pausing where they changed, above the piano nobile, from marble to stone to look out at the glimpse of the Arno. The river, beginning to sink low in spite of the earlier rains, reflected the yellowish light in its yellowish water and threw over the nearby buildings a curious transparency, like a painting on glass. Giancarlo had seen this so often that he no longer noticed it, just as he no longer pretended to himself that he wasn’t pausing for breath.
His sister was already up, and getting ready to go out. He tried to adjust himself to what he had just heard, and was no more successful than anyone else has ever been. Without so much as putting it into words they agreed not to talk about the matter to Annunziata, otherwise there might be no way of warding off Sister Death. No need either, as yet, to say anything to Chiara. They both suffered at the idea of practising a deception on her, but deception, to a quite unexpected extent, gets easier with practice.
Maddalena dragged the pain about with her like a tiresome guest, bearing with it when it showed signs of getting out of hand, but counting on its going away. There was no chance that it would do so permanently. At the moment it made itself known as a violent headache in the early morning and again in the evening. She saw that she must accommodate it into whatever remained of her life.
26
For some reason she felt a little better at the Ricordanza. The opening of the villa to the public had been a success, the Turismo had congratulated the Count, who had not been congratulated on anything (except for his daughter’s beauty on her wedding day) for many years. Visitors were now allowed to stay rather longer and could buy a glass of Valsassina or a gasosa at a bar in the salone. This was the perquisite of the gardener, and so was the sale of lemons. Almost overnight he had transformed himself into a character, inviting the company (in a mixture of broken English and German) to tap the vast old thermometers and iron stoves in the limonaia, and telling them that there were more than forty different kinds of lemon and that the juice was unrivalled as a stomach remedy. ‘Cannibals, signori, use lemon juice, without it they could not digest human flesh.’ Unlike Bernadino at Valsassina he had grown not odder but increasingly shrewd. His instinct to restore some of the horrors which the Turismo had tried to get rid of was a sound one. He had copies of the brochure but had never troubled to read it. ‘Picture yourself, signori, cut off just here, at the knees.’ His truce with Annunziata had become strained. But the Ricordanza was not her proper territory and she could enter it only by invitation.
As part of the process of getting above himself, as defined by Annunziata, the gardener had been allowed to attend the meetings of the local association of Custodians of Public Monuments. There he had learned, among other things, that Englishwomen, and possibly Englishmen, above a certain age were liable on a short visit to steal plant cuttings. So he was careful to explain, on a more sober note, that lemons, if they were to stand a cold winter, must be grafted on to a sour orange stock, anything else would mean certain failure. As to the famous thickets of roses, they looked more likely to take cuttings from the tourists than the other way about. Apart from that there was nothing else to steal. Any disappointment on that account would disappear when they looked northwards from the terrace at the view of the opposing hills. They were requested, for their own safety, not to lean on the balustrade.
Maddalena had an idea that at the Ricordanza her pain seemed less, or she was successful in thinking about it less. She had a working arrangement with the gardener that as long as she was there he must talk sensibly. Towards the end of an afternoon she was idling down a path between two neglected box hedges, at a distance from the paying customers. An elderly man, whom she had noticed earlier on, straying away from the others, came up to her and said:
‘Are you the mother of the dottoressa Rossi?’
He sounded like an old-fashioned schoolmaster, setting for the hundred thousandth time an example of correct pronunciation.
‘I’m nobody’s mother,’ Aunt Mad replied. ‘Look at me closely and you’ll see that I couldn’t be.’
She saw that he was sober, but trembling slightly.
‘I’m the Contessina’s aunt,’ she said. ‘This is our family home. Did you come out here with the others?’
‘No, I took the bus from Piazza Ferucci and walked the last part.’
He must have come in unnoticed, she thought, at the end of the coach-load. Like a man under a spell, he must have assumed that he could walk in, and had walked in.
‘I came from Mazzata yesterday,’ he said. ‘They gave me three addresses, and one of them was the address of the hospital. I was unsuccessful there and that was what caused the delay. Now under the terms of my return ticket I must take the long distance bus again this evening.’
‘Did you want to speak to Dr Rossi?’
‘I spoke to him once before, but it was useless, to be honest, worse than useless.’
‘Have you telephoned him?’ She added with more attention, ‘Are you ill?’
‘I don’t want to speak to him on the telephone. I was his father’s friend. It’s a matter that has to be discussed face to face.’
What can Salvatore’s father have been like? she thought. Surely not like this. The old man glanced at her from time to time, as politeness required, but it could be seen that he was totally preoccupied. Meanwhile the last of the tourists had left the Ricordanza, and the dark green gardens, which had been grossly overcrowded for the last hour or so, stood ready to sink into their own recollections. The gardener, before locking up, was searching the limonaia and even the rose-bushes, in case of lingerers.
‘What’s your name?’ Maddalena asked.
‘Pericle Sannazzaro.’
‘Well, I shall be driving back to Florence as soon as they’ve shut up here. Come with me, and I’ll find Dr Rossi for you in one place or another. By the way, did you get something to drink with the others?’
‘No, I took nothing.’
‘You should have said you were a friend of the house.’ But, pressed on by his overwhelming anxieties he burst out, ‘Excuse me, Eccellenza, but I haven’t the time now to look for my friend’s son. If you are driving, I must ask to be put down at the long distance bus stop in via Caterina di Siena. I should like to have spoken at length, nothing less would have satisfied me. As it is, I shall have to ask you to take a message.’
‘At least we might sit down for a few minutes.’
‘I am not tired.’
‘But I am.’
He apologized, and they took their places side by side on a stone bench whose arms, carved with grotesques, were anything but comfortable. Now, disconcertingly, he looked directly at her. In his very much worn black suit he looked pale and battered, almost on the farthest edge of respectability. ‘Try to understand me,’ he said. ‘Follow me carefully.’
Although he was quite sane, he was evidently past the point of estimating the importance of what he was saying to anyone other than himself. In this way Maddalena heard for the first time, and in rather more detail than she could take in, about Salvatore’s piece of land at Mazzata.
‘There’s a chance of recovering the land. That is what I have come here to say. The brothers and the sister-in-law would sell at once if the money was available. Quite possibly they would take what they gave for it. All they want
is to lay their hands on capital. They don’t see themselves as farmers any longer, they’ve been induced to invest in the building of a hotel. A second category hotel, in Mazzata!’
Maddalena saw that she was supposed to smile.
‘A hotel in Mazzata! Treasure that up, Signora Contessa, to laugh at on winter evenings, or in the bad times which, politically and economically, are in store for all of us.’
‘Good, but surely Dr Rossi must know all this already? You say you don’t want to telephone him, but I shouldn’t have thought his brothers would have had any objection.’
‘If they did, Salvatore would not be interested.’
‘In that case, I don’t see . . .’
‘He ought never to have sold the sixty hectares in the first place.’
‘Then why did he?’
‘To afford to marry, Signora Contessa. He thinks quite differently from the rest of the world. You can’t judge him by other people.’
His empty jaws moved with a slight chewing motion. Maddalena, meanwhile, was not judging, but, as she usually did, allowing certain pictures to form and dissolve in her memory. In 1911 the great liberal, Gaetano Salvemini, had sold his little bit of land in Molfetta to finance a new weekly paper. As a young woman, a young radical, she had helped to pack and distribute the paper from a cellar in Lungo Il Mugnone. After Salvemini, she saw in her imagination the white cloths of the wedding tables and Salvatore on his feet, saying that he would give his life for Chiara.
‘He did quite right,’ she said.
‘Of course. Nino Gramsci told us that all that Italian men look for in a marriage is a hen, a hen with something substantial in the Post Office Savings. It’s not a fault in my friend’s son that he is determined to be the opposite of everyone and everything.’
Mad half-shut her eyes.
‘I can’t follow you. What has Gramsci got to do with it? Does Dr Rossi want this property or doesn’t he?’
‘He believes that he doesn’t. He needs it, rather than wants it. He has a duty towards the community of Mazzata.’
‘Well, he can’t go back and practise there. He’s a specialist.’
‘He is an intellectual.’
‘I suppose so. One would hope so.’
‘Therefore he has the duties of an intellectual.’
‘I don’t know what those are. I suppose they’re the same in Florence as anywhere else.’
Sannazzaro, watching her minutely, said, ‘He has to make his career in Florence, that’s not in dispute. But there’s a sickness and craziness about him because he has cut himself off from the place where he was born. In reality, although he’s not able to admit it, he can’t be happy without his piece of land in Mazzata. You don’t think that’s possible?’
‘Of course it’s possible. It happens every day. But I still think he must know what he wants.’
‘Don’t you think that on some occasions we have to judge for others, I mean as to what is really best for them?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If we’re competent to do so.’
‘Perhaps, Signora Contessa, I don’t look quite competent.’
‘No, frankly, I don’t think you do.’
Not disconcerted, he repeated: ‘Whether he admits it or not, Salvatore will not be happy without his piece of earth.’
‘Is this what you want me to tell my niece?’ Maddalena asked.
‘I believe that would be the best course. You see, I have tried to persuade Salvatore — I’m speaking of the time shortly before his marriage — and I was not successful. He must have known that what I was saying was true, but he couldn’t listen.’
‘Why couldn’t he listen?’
‘Because he is unable to diagnose himself.’
Because she was struggling with her own queasiness and at the same time with her impatience with Doctor Manzoni, Maddalena was struck by this remark. This Sannazzaro can’t have come more than six hundred kilometres and then spent a day and a half looking for Salvatore, she thought. What he’s been doing is to spend a day and a half avoiding him and finding someone else to talk to him. That makes one think better of his intelligence.
‘Tell me, what is your profession?’
‘I like to think of myself as the follower of a great man,’ replied Sannazzaro.
The gardener watched them, uncertain as to what to do and whether to start the evening watering or stand by to lock up. He would not have gone so far at this point as to jangle his keys, but they were in his hand.
‘When I spoke to you just now of the bad times coming,’ Sannazzaro went on, ‘I didn’t mean that they won’t be succeeded by good, only that you and I can hardly expect to live until then. And by “good” I’m not referring, you understand, to the improvements brought about by science. Science has to take its proper place, it mustn’t try to take over from witchcraft. “Good sense is dead, its child, Science, killed it one day to find out how it was made.” Who wrote that, Signora Contessa?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Maddalena.
‘Neither do I, but Nino quoted it often. But what is damaged, and what even may seem dead, can be brought to life again. There is infinite good sense in the working people of Italy. All that is needed is patience.’
‘There I can’t agree with you. I don’t put much value on patience. I find it’s best to act on impulse.’
Sannazzaro looked at her in surprise. Then he asked for the lavatory. She called to the gardener, who had to reopen one of the side doors of the house. Levering himself off the comfortless seat, Sannazzaro followed, walking in a distinctive manner, as though it required some thought to synchronize the different parts of his body. Maddalena saw that he might be even older than she had imagined. Well, we all are, she thought.
Those who refuse to give way to disappointment are able to accept almost any improbability. From this point of view, there was not much to choose between Maddalena and Sannazzaro. When he came back from the house he took a notebook out of his inner pocket, and out of the notebook a piece of paper.
‘It’s time for me to go back now. You understand the message with which I have charged you. I hope it won’t be too much for you. Here is my address, it is on this letter from my former employers. You will let me know what you have done.’
‘I’ll let you know,’ she said.
There was no parking near the long distance bus station in via S. Caterina. She put him off at the corner. If she had been liable to doubt, this would have been the moment for it. Sannazzaro looked, under the street lamps which had just come on, dishevelled by life. But he said goodbye, gallantly mentioning that he had seven minutes to wait and would perhaps take a cup of coffee.
Then as though it had just occurred to him, he put his head in again through the open car window.
‘I can’t wait here,’ said Maddalena.
‘One more word, Contessa, one more question. Tell me this. Is Salvatore happy with his present home? Does it seem to you that, wherever he’s living at the moment, he is satisfied with it?’
He disappeared into the lighted jaws of the bus company’s café-ristorante.
27
While Aunt Mad was discussing him at the Ricordanza with a stranger, Salvatore was discussing Aunt Mad. Only, however, because there seemed no way to get out of it.
It was some time since he had come across the lawyer Andrea Nieve. Nieve had never quite given up hope of enlisting Rossi as a party member, but was now inclined to admire him for having married a Ridolfi. True, the via Limbo place was mortgaged and the villa was in total decadenza. If he himself had been dealing in Ridolfi property on behalf of a client he would have recommended forcibly against it. But the fact that Salvatore, apparently without calculation, had got an interest in it appeared to him as the lucky stroke of a lucky man. How had it happened? It was Nieve’s theory that all women were obsessively interested in their own bodies, that was why they found doctors attractive and why doctors were so much more fortunate than lawyers.
Salvatore agreed t
o meet him provided that the situation in Hungary was not discussed, or the disagreements within the Italian Popular Front.
‘No, no, it is an entirely private matter.’
‘There’s nothing private between us, nothing that we couldn’t shout aloud in the street.’
‘It will be easier to explain when you come.’
The place, it turned out, for all this privacy was Nieve’s place of work, no longer just an office, for he’d gone up in the world, but a Legal, Technical and Commercial Studio above a marble-fronted bank on via Lamarmora, not far from the law courts. No desks here, but large inconveniently low armchairs for client and consultant alike. One might have been in Milan. The technical and commercial colleagues, whoever they were, seemed to have been got rid of for the morning, but there was another man whom Salvatore didn’t know, and who was introduced as a junior colleague, Gattai. Gattai was young, and his slight frown gave him a look of not quite being able to catch up. Why he was needed at this delicate and private conference Salvatore couldn’t see, unless, as was quite likely, Nieve wanted a witness of what was said.
Nieve began by asking after his wife, hadn’t he heard that she was away?
‘She hasn’t been well, she is spending a few weeks by the sea,’ said Salvatore, ‘she was quite all right when I rang up yesterday evening.’ At once he was seized with a violent compulsion to call up again and to hear Chiara’s voice and to ask her whether she felt the same as she had done yesterday. He checked the impulse. Nieve meanwhile was saying that he was occasionally asked to advise the child welfare service, the Opera Nazionale Maternità ed Infanzia.
‘Perhaps you knew that I did some work for them?’
‘Frankly, I’ve no idea who you work for,’ said Salvatore. Nieve and Gattai both smiled, as though at a compliment. Nieve’s remarks, precise but apparently reluctant and almost wistful, came round to the subject of hospices and asili, and then, gradually, to Maddalena di Ridolfi. By the shadow of a hint of a gesture he suggested that the Contessa might be considered not quite like the rest of us.
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