Your mother used to maintain that she had seen me falling in love on the evening I arrived in Pietrabella—but not with her brown eyes, and her rumpled white shirt, and her wild hair. She said she could see me falling in love with the air.
“That was the beginning for you,” she said. “That was where your changes started. You felt everything first. The details came later.”
“You are the details?”
“Love is the details.”
“I think you’re getting a little carried away.”
“Your big problem,” she replied, “is you don’t get carried away enough.”
That was true—although much less true by the end of August than in May. Your mother was very good at getting us carried away.
Our presence in Rome could not have been unknown to the other guests of the poorly soundproofed pensione we had chosen near the Campo de’ Fiori. We didn’t make it to the breakfast room in the morning. And when, that afternoon, we stood together in the Cornaro Chapel, it occurred to me that the tragedy of art appreciation was that it could not always be taught by Anna on the afternoon after a morning of making love.
“Imagine her body,” she said to me. Her husky whisper made it clear there was very little innocence in the instruction. We’d been staring at Bernini’s Santa Teresa for almost ten minutes without speaking. “Can you picture her body under all that luscious garment?”
Anna looked directly at me at that moment. Her eyes are exceptionally beautiful. Then she returned to Saint Teresa.
“Do you see? Bernini catches her when she is just starting. You do not know this feeling. So let me tell you. Don’t bother trying. You cannot imagine how delicious this feeling is.”
She kissed me quickly, as if in commiseration for this unfairness.
“Bernini catches her when her climax is just starting. To rise. She is just starting to lift herself to meet the angel’s arrow.”
Anna swept her hair away from her eyes. “Everything about her is saying the same thing. Do you see?”
Anna’s hand moved through the air as if caressing the form she was describing.
“Even the folds of her cloak are like waves of …”
Anna’s head was cocked slightly to her left side. T-shirt. Red bandana. White coveralls. Old tennis shoes. No socks. Her hair was in its usual disarray. There she was, Anna: Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Her English sometimes deserted her.
“Pleasure?” I suggested.
“Exactly,” she answered. “Waves of pleasure. Coming right from the centre of the stone.”
I’ve always felt lucky to be able to remember something like that …
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE GOATHERD CAME RUNNING to the village on feet like little hoofs. It was August 1944. The men had gone away.
O partigiano portami via / O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao!
The goatherd moved uncertainly. His legs were bad. He moved with stiff, awkward difficulty. He looked much older than thirty-three.
When he was small, Italo Cavatore watched his older brother Lino play in the square of the little hillside town. Lino was cunning in his feints and in the unpredictable dance of his slight body as he ran. But even though the two brothers were entirely dissimilar in movement, they bore a resemblance to each other that went beyond their lean faces. It was as if a pathology cast specifically over Italo’s stringy legs and curled-in feet had been visited more generally and less severely on his older brother. Lino was one of those taut, wiry boys in whose sharp features can be seen exactly what age will do. He had never looked youthful, exactly. But he was very quick.
Italo liked to imagine that he was the one who was racing and leaping with the other children. Dusk fell and the blackbirds circled and the old bells from the villages across the valleys rang flat. And he ran and he ran in the daydream he liked to have.
He smelled the capers on the stone of the old wall that he leaned against. His legs were splayed and his feet tucked under his pale thighs, and when dinner was ready their mother called the two boys.
Lino. Italo.
Sometimes he still thought he heard his mother’s voice. Leeeeno. Eeeeetalo.
When he was minding his goats when it was dry, the wind had a long, familiar sound. When he sat still, he could hear it. And in the sound of the dry summer heat he could hear: Lino. Italo.
He had dreams of visiting his brother one day. Lino lived in a house with electric lights, and hot water pouring from silver taps, and carpet on every floor.
Lino had been away for thirteen years. A long time. A long time for their mother not to see one of her sons. Lino had sent money to their mother every month until the war.
Italo felt special to have such a brother. The olive trees and the mountain crags and the birds and the butterflies and the little wasps treated him with respect when he hobbled along the goat trails with his herd. “That’s Lino Cavatore’s brother,” he liked to think they were saying when they saw him sitting motionless on a hillside in the shade of an old tree.
Lino Cavatore brought young men out from the hillside villages to work for him as apprentices. “I was given a chance,” Lino explained, “and now I can make the same offer.”
But the war had interrupted. The war was interrupting everything.
Italo kept careful track of his herd, but not by turning his head to watch them. He didn’t move a muscle. He listened to the shifting proximity of their tinkling bells. Butterflies landed on him.
He had dreams of girls. They were like clouds.
He was sitting in the shade on the hillside trail that day. His eyes were closed. His dreams were drifting around him. That was when he heard the noises: far below.
Ears like hawks’ eyes, people said of Italo.
He knew at once. He could hear danger coming up the trail.
So he ran. He ran as quickly as he could. He made his stiff, clumsy way under the grey wall of Castello and the stone foundations of the church.
He hurried up through the olive grove. He climbed the dusty path. He came up through a hedge of bramble and into the cobbled street.
The goatherd was running on his strange-looking hoof-like feet. They had no feeling.
“They have no feeling,” he always said. When he laughed, his face wrinkled with his years in the wind and the sun. And when, as the children always did, they asked Italo if this could really be true, he amazed them. He took off a worn old boot. He pulled down his darned sock. He sat. He lit a match. He held it there. Their eyes went wide.
And now he was running on feet that had no feeling. He was running as best he could. And he was pounding on the heavy wooden doors and he was shouting.
He had heard a commotion of motors from the valley. Tires on gravel. The opening of truck-backs. The clanking of straps and boots and cartridges.
Italo was hurrying through the narrow streets. Tedeschi. He was shouting in his strained voice as he went from door to door. Germans.
Soon the word outpaced him. Soon his warning was racing ahead of him in the village of Castello, leaping nimbly from house to house.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NO ONE IS EVER SURE WHERE PIETRABELLA IS. This is the professional challenge Clara and I confront at the Agency of Regional Tourism every day. This was something my father and I had in common. Nobody knew where he was from either. Nobody had heard of Cathcart.
He’d been found there in 1948. He was in a cardboard box by an antique-looking pool. The box was beside a marble statue.
The fountain’s grouping included two other nudes. They were smaller, less precise in their carving, and, by a trick of perspective, apparently in the distance of the tableau. They were approaching the pool behind the larger central figure with their urns on their shoulders. There were a dozen other stone figures—some more weather-worn—around the grounds. But it was the partly naked water-bearers that prompted the joke Michael Barton made when he first proposed that Archie Hughson buy his swimming pool.
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br /> MICHAEL INHERITED BARTON HOUSE and the extensive grounds when his father, Argue Barton, collapsed on the sidewalk outside the offices of the Cathcart Chronicle on August 15, 1945. The Barton papers were among the few in the world that didn’t lead that day with Japan’s surrender.
The pool had been so rarely visited by Michael Barton and his young, generally pregnant, English bride, that the Hughsons came to think of it in the years after the war as a kind of forgotten conservation area at the end of their own garden—a blank plot of snow in winter and an empty space of crickets and heat-buzzers in summer. In the spring of ‘46 the pool’s never-very-efficient filter system broke down entirely. Frogs became part of the soundscape.
It was the first of several lots of the Barton property to go. But the truth was, Michael had never cared for the grounds. His mother had died when he was eight, and this was a well of sadness so deep and unexpressed he never spent a day without peering down into it. When, three months after her death, the tomb his father had commissioned was finished, Michael had been terrified by it. It was white and cold and not like his mother at all.
His father’s need to sustain his wife’s memory—honoured in her mausoleum, honoured in the gardens and pool, honoured in the establishment of the Grace P. Barton Memorial Travel Bursary—always reminded Michael of the honoured gloom in which he had grown up.
He’d had the pool area surveyed. He’d gone to Herkimer’s and had it divided from the estate. But before it was officially put up for sale, Michael telephoned Mr. Hughson.
Michael was no longer wealthy. But the habit of appearing so never left him. His voice had the jovial ring of condescension used, almost always, by the well-to-do in conversation with their former teachers.
“Mr. Hughson, sir. I have a business proposition I’d like to make,” he said. “Neighbour to neighbour.”
Archie walked around the block to the front door of Barton House. They spoke for a while there, and then made their way down the paths past terraced flower beds and rock garden to the pool. It was while they slowly strolled around it that Michael Barton made the joke that Archie would, for some reason, always remember.
Michael Barton said he feared that townhouses might go in. The land could even accommodate a small three- or four-storey apartment building. The zoning regulations were alarmingly flexible. He did not want the Hughsons to be disadvantaged by his decision to sell a portion of land for which he had little use.
The long summer evenings that the Hughsons spent in their garden were not pleasures they were willing to sacrifice to what The Chronicle referred to—a little giddily, Archie Hughson thought—as the “Cathcart economic miracle.” Cathcart was a long way from becoming anything like a major metropolis, but it prospered in the postwar years. It wasn’t far from the American border. That didn’t hurt.
Energy and enterprise were in the air, and one didn’t want to get in the way of such robust civic ambition. But the Hughsons were thankful to have a retreat from the exhaust and billboards of this progress, and their retreat was their secluded back garden. Their quince tree and blackcurrant bushes produced the fruit for their excellent jam. The Hughsons worked together boiling and canning. Their carefully labelled Mason jars were much sought after at Montrose United’s annual bazaar. They made excellent hostess gifts.
Their rose bushes bloomed profusely and the pink flowers were often the centrepiece to their simple dinners. At dusk especially, their garden often seemed as quiet as a country glen. Often, on warm summer evenings, they ate cherries in the garden swing while Mr. Hughson read aloud to his wife from one of the red-bound volumes of the set of Charles Dickens they kept, along with a few Royal Doulton figurines, on the shelves of their living room.
Hillside Avenue marks the point at which the lower, older town and its newer, upper tracts are interrupted by woods and rock ledges too steep to develop. The Hughsons were grateful for this rough geography. When it became too dark for Mr. Hughson to continue his reading, they often sat together in silence. The deep volume of trees rose up beyond the old pool at the end of their garden.
But the world was changing quickly. This was clear to Mr. Hughson. Were he not to buy the property from Michael Barton, someone else would—and that would not have been at all satisfactory.
“Can we afford it?” Mrs. Hughson asked when her husband relayed to her the startling proposal Michael had made. Her face was open and alert.
“We can’t expect the royalties to last forever,” her husband replied, “but at the moment the purchase is possible. I could take a small loan, I suppose, but I don’t think it will be necessary.”
This was a rare departure from the fiscal certainty by which they liked to conduct their lives. It was a risk that, under the circumstances, they wondered if they might do well to take. They’d always admired the property. It had never occurred to them that someday they would own it.
There was nothing about the pool that admitted to imitation—the statues were worn with an age that seemed well beyond anything to do with Cathcart. The stone bathing pavilion at the deep end, the cracked tiled perimeter of the water, the thick marble flagstones outlined with thyme, the still, green reflection of the surrounding trees—everything about the pool was entirely convincing. It was as if a grotto had been transported from a Tuscan villa, complete with its moss-covered, ivy-shouldered proof of age. It was a secret place that backed onto the Hughsons’ ordinary bridal wreath, and everyday wisteria, and their staked, practical rows of tamatas.
This was a pool that looked nothing like swimming pools in North America would soon come to look. This was no turquoise rectangle around which people sunbathed and drank soda pop and listened to transistor radios. This was from a much older world.
My father was never sure if the central stone figure—the one gently pouring her jug into the pool—was intended to be Mary Magdalene about to wash Christ’s feet, or Rebecca providing water to the strangers sent by Abraham, or just an unnamed woman at an unnamed well.
These details are all answers to questions I put to my father. His letters tended to be answers to my questions. And when they weren’t, they were usually reports of his day-to-day activity in Cathcart. “I’m just in from watering the garden” was more his letter-writing style. “The mosaic tile at the edge of the pool is chipping badly.” Only his last letter—the one he didn’t expect to be read for years—told stories I would not have known to ask him about. More usually he began his letters by telling me he was too tired to write much of a letter. The weather was a popular subject. “I can’t remember a colder February.” This was the written equivalent of the small talk that drove my mother crazy.
“NICE JUGS,” Michael Barton said to Archibald Hughson, gesturing toward the fountain.
There was a moment of silence in which Michael waited for Archie to respond. It passed awkwardly. Michael was so accustomed to being amusing that his voice sounded unresolved when it was not followed by, at the very least, a chuckle. But Archie didn’t chuckle. He didn’t do anything. He was waiting on the marble flagstones of the old swimming pool, politely puzzled, for Michael to continue.
Michael cleared his throat—a nervously jovial habit. Recently this harrumph had been turning into a prolonged, two-pack-a-day rumble. The hack was, at first, a bit of a joke. Like his famous hangovers, it emphasized his reputation for partying. He’d always been too young and too good-looking to have a smoker’s cough. But that was a while ago. Things were not quite so amusing anymore. His eyes were tired.
It might seem a strange thing to say, but he was someone who had been very good at having summer holidays. He excelled at them, and as he grew older he made the mistake of thinking that he could turn his skill for docks and boats and girlfriends to commerce. But he wasn’t a businessman. His commercial objectives, like his skills of serious communication, were rarely directed with any single-mindedness.
But Archie Hughson was good at deciphering things. He was a teacher. He was accustomed to finding good answers, l
ike good students, deep in the midst of distracting detail. And the first cogent point he retrieved from Michael’s confusing explanation was this: the pool lot had been legally severed from the grounds of the Barton estate. The second concerned some unpleasant possibilities: townhouses, or garages, or even a small apartment building.
“You follow?” Michael asked. He spoke as if it were Archie’s hearing, and not Michael’s explanation, that might give rise to misunderstanding.
“Oh, yes,” Archie replied. “I do. Perfectly well, thank you. And I am quite interested in what you seem to be saying.”
When, a few days later, Archie informed Michael Barton of his and his wife’s decision to purchase the pool, Michael marked the occasion by presenting Archie with a miniature replica of Michelangelo’s David. It was a souvenir of his parents’ trip to Italy, the summer before he was born.
ARCHIE HUGHSON’S STATUS in the community was largely based on his occupation, on his old-fashioned manners, and on the calm dignity he brought to his duties as an elder at Montrose United Church every Sunday. He was a beloved figure—a public persona that in no way differed from the more private view of him held by his adopted son or his wife. He was a shy man. He had a kind and quiet heart.
He met Winifred when he was at the Cathcart Teachers’ College. She really was five-foot-two with eyes of blue. On their first date he took her to the beach. They parked their bicycles under a willow tree, beyond the purple-shadowed spans of the high-level bridge. It was only a short walk to the lakeshore. Just past the railroad tracks, with the water gleaming through the dune grass like the Côte d’Azur, he took Winifred’s hand to help her over the deep, hot sand. And, as he was always proud to say, “I never let go.”
But the respect he enjoyed in Cathcart had also to do with the fact that he was “quite well-off.” The description seemed never to vary in Cathcart conversations.
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