Tales of Persuasion

by Philip Hensher

  Silvia’s attic at the Quincys’ was an island of lucid clarity in that stormy household: a neat bed, two handsome chairs, some pretty pictures against a colour she’d chosen herself, and a small bookcase carrying her fifty favourite books. So it was not a surprise to discover the airy, even elegant quality of her flat in Florence. It was at the top of a modern building, with terraces the size of half a tennis court, crowded with pelargoniums, bright as a seaside landlady’s garden. Inside, in pockets of air-conditioned cool, austere long chairs of chrome and leather treacherously invited the act of reclining. It was on the outskirts of the city, at the foot of one of the hills that rise and surround it. The geography of Florence, as I soon discovered, kept the worst of its weather unchanging and building, stiflingly, from one week to the next all summer. There were other things about the flat to be discovered. The building was at the very end of a long-buried and nearly mythical river, the Affrica; and if there was no way of our detecting it, the river was clearly an object of fascination to millions of mosquitoes, which had an ancestral habit of following its course all the way from the Arno to Silvia’s building, then staying exactly where they were for the whole summer. I became familiar with great generations of mosquitoes as the weeks passed, thwacking at my own head in the middle of the night, sometimes in Silvia’s spare room, sometimes not.

  ‘And of course there’s Paulina next door,’ Silvia said. ‘But I expect you know everything about her.’

  Quickly, we settled into a sulky routine. Silvia had, in the past, spent a good deal of time playing the guide, she said. (She meant: pushing visitors around Florence with an out-of-date guide book.) So the first day, she came out with me, showed me the crucial bus, and took me briskly to four asterisked treasures.

  ‘Duomo,’ she said.

  ‘David of Michelangelo, great masterpiece of Italian art,’ she said.

  ‘Out here in the rain?’ I said. ‘When it rains?’ (It was actually oppressively hot.)

  ‘In Florence, it never rains,’ she said. ‘Look, beautiful sunshine. Englishman, wanting his rain. Where’s your umbrella and your bowler hat, Englishman? No, it’s not real, anyway. The real one it’s inside Accademia, up that street. We don’t have time.’

  ‘Uffizi,’ she said. ‘Look at the queue!’

  ‘And Ponte Vecchio,’ she said, the unopened guide book firmly in her hand.

  ‘I see,’ I said. That evening, she phoned up all her Florentine friends at length, and complained with great gusto about me. She spoke in Italian; I understood quite well enough. After the first day, I left the flat in the morning and dutifully visited churches, palazzos, museums – more museums; I started with the postcard sights and steadily worked my way downwards. In time, I surprised the attendants of museums named after nineteenth-century Englishwomen, residents of Fiesole, with an unaccustomed ring on their doorbell. How Silvia passed her time, I don’t quite know. I returned to the flat after an invariably unsuccessful sort of tourist lunch, often a sandwich at a bar by the bus station, a one-armed bandit’s electric fanfares in my ear. The afternoons, she was incommunicado, and I read. We met at six each day.

  ‘You know a funny thing,’ she said, when we were settled in a bar the third night. ‘I asked an English boy to stay here last year, and at the end I said to him, “What do you like most in Florence?” Because, of course, I think maybe he’s going to the Duomo, the Uffizi, the Ponte Vecchio, maybe. But he says, “Most of all, I like the bars, where you go, you buy a drink, there’s nice little bits of food there you can eat, it’s all free.” You English! Crazy for something free, always, always.’

  I laughed politely, but I rather agreed with last summer’s Englishman. The bar was laid out with such substantial nibbles, as Margaret would have called them, I was rather wondering in my impoverished way whether we could get away with not having dinner. Not the least of the issues that had arisen was that Silvia, considering the fact that I was saving on hotel bills, clearly thought that I ought to buy her dinner every night at a restaurant of her choice.

  But that night I finally met Paulina. Silvia, I divined, had decided to keep her from me: enough of my friendship with the Quincys, or any potential one with their sister’s second husband’s stepmother’s half-nieces. The door to the flat next door was open when we got home, though inside there were no lights. It was a stifling evening. A languid wail came out of the open door, followed by a middle-aged woman emerging from the darkness in aquamarine kaftan and turban.

  ‘Oh, not again,’ Silvia said.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘Be an angel. You know how hopeless I am. And I’d ask Paolo, honest to God, but—’

  ‘It’s not very difficult,’ Silvia said.

  ‘You say that, but— Well, hello there, I’m Paulina, how do you do – you remember, honey, the last time I somehow managed to put everybody’s lights out, it was simply a disaster,’ Paulina said. She had a curious voice, emphatic on each word, and with an accent not quite American, not obviously Australian. She could have been the product of a thorough elocutionist in any one of a dozen colonies. ‘You see,’ she explained confidentially, as if I were alone, ‘the lights here, they sometimes go out for no reason at all, and I know there’s something terribly simple you need to do in the basement …’

  ‘There’s just a switch, that’s all, and you pull, no – what is it you do with switches? You turn, you flick – is that right? You flick it and then it’s all OK, it’s simple,’ Silvia said, almost jumping up and down with rage.

  ‘Thank you a cartload, honey,’ Paulina said. ‘I know you don’t mind one bit when I need you to help me out.’

  ‘You, come with me,’ Silvia said. ‘Then you know what you need to do in case it happens again.’

  It was as simple as Silvia had said. Paulina must have been some kind of genius to make a mess of it.

  ‘So that’s Paulina,’ I said, down in the basement.

  ‘Yes,’ Silvia said. She was decisive on the subject. And when we got back upstairs, Paulina’s light was restored.

  ‘I can’t imagine what I’d do without you,’ she said effusively, looking me up and down openly. ‘Come in and have a drink. I’ve got …’ her voice sank seductively ‘… I’ve got some Campari.’

  ‘Perhaps some other night,’ Silvia said.

  It seemed to me, as the days went on, that the only understanding I had had of Silvia disappeared in her proper context. If in England she possessed a vivid and fascinating character, in Italy it was clear that I had not got much beyond discovering her to be Italian. In Italy, her reality dissolved, like a glass full of water in the ocean. I had no access to her real character, not having had the practice at reading it. It was partly my fault, for being satisfied with an exoticism that, after all, was banal even in Yorkshire. But partly, I think, it was hers, since in Yorkshire, in the Quincys’ house above all, she defined herself so entirely by what she was not as to appear nothing but an embodied foreign culture. In Italy, having nothing much in her repertory to fall back on, she settled for being sulky. So it was, inevitably, that at a loose end in Florence, I found someone who was conspicuous in her culture, like a photographic negative of Silvia clacking noisily down the aisle of a concert hall in England.

  The next morning, as I was leaving Silvia’s flat, I saw that Paulina’s door was open again. Round the door unfurled a long white arm, like the frond of a fern, followed by Paulina’s head, the hair braided and twisted. Inside, the curtains were still drawn; she was in her peignoir.

  ‘Honey,’ she said huskily, her voice lowered for the sake – I guessed – of Silvia, ‘you couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you so much, darling,’ she said. I noted the upgrade in the category, from honey to darling. ‘I’m all out of bread and milk. You couldn’t just pop down to Andrea’s by the bus-stop and get me – I don’t know – a loaf and some of that vile Italian milk? Otherwise I’ll have to get dressed and I loathe getting dr
essed before breakfast, you know how it is. It wouldn’t take you a moment, I swear.’

  ‘No trouble,’ I said, and did as she asked, coming back up the stairs rather than in the lift. The wheezy comings and goings of the lift echoed in Silvia’s empty flat, generally awakening her curiosity.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Paulina said. ‘Now come inside while I find some money for you. How much was it?’

  ‘Four euros,’ I said, determined not to let it go. Paulina had drawn the curtains, and her flat was heavy with plush and stuffing, the marble floors covered with neatly tessellated red-and-purple rugs, the windows hung with yellow velvet curtains. On the available surfaces, dolls, stuffed animals, signed photographs in rococo silver from some previous age of splendour and café royalty. Paulina’s face, when she turned to me, was broadly painted, an old wrinkled apple with brash blue eyeshadow, asymmetrical pools of rose-pink blusher, a tremblingly applied gash of bloody lipstick. She was agonizingly thin, a blotched skeleton splashed with Rimmel colour here and there.

  ‘I can’t seem to find it, not just at this exact moment,’ she said. ‘You’re not in a great hurry, are you?’

  ‘I’ve got a church to go and see,’ I said. ‘That’s it.’ Then it seemed rude not to tell a Florentine resident where you were going, and I added ‘Santa Maria del … del something. Anyway. Don’t you have someone to do this stuff for you? Paolo, is it?’

  ‘Paolo?’ Paulina said. ‘How d’you hear about Paolo?’

  ‘I thought I heard you mention him last night,’ I said. ‘I thought he was your—’

  ‘You thought he was my lover?’ Paulina said, though I hadn’t been about to say that. ‘That is the world’s biggest laugh. I’ll tell you about Paolo, the rat fink. Well, when I moved here, I didn’t know anything, not one thing. I didn’t know how to get anything done. I had no idea – this was the first thing that started off the whole Paolo thing – I had no idea how to get one of those darling little brass plates engraved, you know, and put on your front door once you’ve moved in. Not a single solitary clue. Of course I could care less but the only thing I had succeeded in achieving, though Heaven knows how I did that, darling, was to find me an apartment to live in. Well, I can tell you, after a few days, I had gotten myself into a terrible state and a business over this silly little brass plate and so I went straight back to the realtor to throw myself on her mercy, try to found out how the hell these things are done.

  ‘Well, the realtor, she turned out to have Paolo on her Rolodex, and she suggested that he was the world’s most useful human being, and I should make a looooooooong list of things in the apartment that needed his attention. Because there’s always a million and one things when you first move into a place. No, honey, Paolo’s certainly not my lover. He’s my factotum, you might say, if we were in an eighteenth-century opera, which we aren’t. He turned up the next day. He’s a funny little man – you’d like him. He’s like a jockey, five feet tall, with a big nose and knobby old arms. That’s from all the cycling he does at weekends. It’s just so bad for anyone of his age but I gave him the list and he did everything on it. He is a fink and a rat fink and a liar, but, honey, I give him this credit. When I gave him the list to do, he did that list.

  ‘So, about a week later – I wish I knew where my purse was, do put the coffee on – I thought, That’s a nice terrace out there, but it would be so much nicer with a few plants on it. But I have no idea whatsoever how on earth you would find someplace that sells plants, and how you would arrive there, and how you might transport all your plants from there, wherever there might be, to here. So again I telephone to Paolo, and he says, right away. Pistoia. And he took me to Pistoia where every plant under the sun grows, and we loaded up that funny little van with plants, with lemon trees and orange trees and lilies and ’erbs, which he practically insisted I buy, and this immensely costly watering system, which didn’t seem to do much good, because the only things that grow out there are olive trees and lavender, which is too depressing. Everything else died. Don’t ask me why, darling.

  ‘But at the time I was grateful,’ she went on, following me into the kitchen like a lapdog, her pug in turn following her, ‘even when he gave me an enormous bill, charging me by the hour, which, you know, hadn’t been mentioned at all, and I was even grateful when, out of the blue, a lady turned up at my door with a bucket and a mop saying – I’ve got to tell you, Silvia had to come in and work out what the hell she was saying, because I was just reduced to smiling – that Paolo had arranged for me to have a cleaner because, you know, he’d worked out for himself that I’m really quite a slut and would need one. That was Nicoletta, who it turned out months later was Paolo’s daughter and the most costly cleaner in the whole of Italy, I guess. Well, Paolo turned up the next weekend, and you know, that was kind of a surprise because I hadn’t asked him to, and he looked at the plants on the terrace and, my God, he just yelled at me. I’ve never seen anything like it since I made my farewell to the stage—’

  ‘You were on the stage?’ I said, even though I knew this. I carried the coffee in from the kitchen.

  ‘All in good time. Somehow, according to Paolo, I’d planted the plants all wrong – putting different plants in the same big pot so that they’d grow over each other. That’s all wrong, according to Paolo. You should have one big pot here’ – massive downwards gesture – ‘and another one here’ – second massive downwards gesture. ‘And all my flowers were white or mauve, very tasteful, and naturally, Paolo just hates hates hates that. So, anyway, he set about all sorts of different household tasks. Another enormous sum of money! And later that morning, bing-bong, it’s the door. And now it’s Paolo’s wife Luciana, and you know what, he knew she was coming, I didn’t. I guess she was jealous or something like that – it’s crazy, I know, Paolo spending all his time with this famous old foreign actress. She wanted to come over and see for herself there was nothing to be concerned about. Well, within the hour, that fink Luciana, she was sitting down and writing out in her own hand half a dozen recipes for me to make and promising that she was going to take me grocery shopping next week. I could see what it was. It had started with an apartment and no obligations anywhere. And three weeks later I was supporting Paolo and his entire fink-like family out of my tiny resources. I was having to dip into capital to keep going. Whatever they decide I need, I end up paying for. Look! You think I wanted to have my salone this shade of yellow? I can tell you, when I was growing up, I never thought I would end up – well, let me tell you about the goddamn place I grew up, and you’ll understand …’

  I stayed for three hours, entranced, and by the time I tiptoed out and down the stairs again, it was nearly lunchtime. I walked to the next bus-stop into town, in case Silvia should see me and wonder how I had spent the morning. My hands were buzzing after many cups of strong coffee. I had planned to visit two churches that morning, but there was time only for the first, the nearest. I had half an hour. It was some kind of monastery. There was nothing going on; they were all long transported, the monks. In the line of cells, a holy painting in each one, some pink and green and blessed, with girls standing weeping below the cross. But some were stranger: a floating eye and hand in a pale green fog, and what that meant I did not know. At the top of the stairs, a sign pointed to the cell of Savonarola. The name of Savonarola was somehow familiar to me, a name from history. I knew nothing whatever about it or him or her. I wished I did. But the monastery was closing.

  I didn’t have much to tell Silvia about my day, half a monastery and a terrible lunch off a menu turistico. She only half listened, though, and was nearly as vague about Savonarola, when appealed to, as I was.

  ‘Beautiful, San Marco,’ she said. I doubted she had ever been there, and felt as glossily invulnerable as an adulterer in possession of a good alibi. Our unspoken hostility to each other, without any kind of obvious cause, was making the evenings terribly long. Silvia had taken to improving them, for herself at least, by importing various monoglot
Italian friends to entertain her and make me feel foolish. If there had been any obvious topic of disruption between us, we could have raised it; there seemed so little, however. Just the fact that I had mildly lost interest in Silvia. You could not blame her for being irritated at this. It was what anyone might be It was no surprise to me at all when I found myself the next morning walking downstairs, as if to the bus but instead going into the dusty grocer’s and buying bread again, and returning quietly to Paulina’s as, indeed, she had asked me to the day before.

  ‘I must give you the key to the mailbox,’ she said vaguely, letting me in. ‘And then I wouldn’t have the awful bother of going down to pick up letters myself.’

  After that, there was no more nonsense about churches and monasteries. In the evenings, I made up my expeditions from the pages of the guide book. Silvia seemed satisfied. Afterwards, when people said to me, ‘Did you enjoy your time in Florence?’ I would say, ‘Oh, yes,’ rather than ‘Actually, I spent most of it in an old actress’s flat, drinking cups of coffee.’

  It didn’t take long for Paulina to get onto the subject of West Side Story.

  ‘Well, I was in New York City, and I was making my way as a dancer. You know, the old five six seven eight. I’d done ballet classes at home and some stage work as a cute kid before I’d run away and talked myself into the lead in an off-Broadway show where their standards weren’t any too high. It’s like being in the army – you learn the moves, and when the run finishes, you find yourself another job if you haven’t dropped the baton. Well, I don’t say it was because the producer, a weasel named Wollheim, didn’t have an eye for my talents to the point where some of the other girls just hated the ground I five-six-seven-eighted on. I say some and there were only four of us girls so – imagine. But the next show I knew a little more what was expected of me and I’d dropped Wollheim and I guess I didn’t drop the baton.