“Okay.”
“That’s it.” He was so close Oliver could feel the feather of his whispering on his ear. They had to be quiet.
The Luger had a well-tooled action. The magazine had chambers for eight rounds and slotted firmly into place in the handle. The two rounded steel knobs behind the breech had to be pulled up and then back for charging.
The gun was heavy, almost two pounds. Oliver needed to use both hands to keep it steady.
The vertical iron sight circled the rocking couple below. The pink of the man was blatant between his unfurled pants and the tail of his dark shirt. Oliver squeezed the trigger. Even without ammunition, the spring of the firing pin had a solid, satisfying release.
That Sunday was a final burst of autumn warmth. And the weather made the trails of the hillside exceptionally beautiful to the few who had ventured along them so late in the season.
The boys had spotted the couple below the ledge that they had established as their observation point that afternoon. The fact that the two boys had a single German handgun was explained by the difficulties that had followed their escape. It was a little-known fact of the Second World War that General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery had broken out of a POW camp together.
The steep wood of Hillside had once been the lip of a vast, ancient sea. It had been formed into a bluff as the softer layers of sandstone and shale eroded beneath the more durable layers of limestone. The grey ramparts on which the boys played looked upside down—more narrow in their bases than on their upper, bush-crested ledges. There were places where it looked like the roots of big old trees were all that held the bluffs from collapsing. The paths—through hart’s tongue, lady’s slipper, trillium, and wall rue—turned here and there, around large, fallen shards of stone. The terrain was uncertain. The brown slope was scattered with fragments of grey. The tumbled creek beds appeared as a torrent of stone even when their streams were dry. The woods always looked like the rock slide had just stopped.
The man on top and the woman underneath him were in a grove just off one of the trails. They had spread out their blanket quickly among alder and chokeberry. Her long, thin hands were digging for the bones in his back.
“Will wonders never cease,” said Christopher. The accent he used made him sound like Alfred Hitchcock.
“Will you look at that,” Oliver replied, hoping for the flat rumble of the Midwest and of Lucky Strikes in his voice.
Stumbling across Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun screwing in the bushes was quite a break for the Allies. The gyrating bum made the perfect target.
“Hold it still. But don’t hold your breath,” Christopher said. “Take it slow and easy.”
“Like them?”
The barrel went all over the place. Oliver lowered the gun.
Their laughter was louder than they thought.
Now the dark-haired man was kneeling. Now the woman was sitting, yanking down her top with one hand while hoisting her panties with the other. Now the man’s head was swivelling and he was looking up. His face was red. Now he was shouting.
But by then the two boys were gone—along the ledge and down an angled path that cut through the woods to the main trail.
The boys’ homes were under the wooded slope of what in Cathcart was always called the Hillside. Oliver could see Christopher’s house from his bedroom window. It was usually at night that he looked at it. The ugly brown turrets of Barton House were the last shapes of anything before blackness.
Sometimes Oliver sat on the side of his bed and pressed his head against the cool, metallic smell of the screen. Sometimes late-night laughter, sometimes singing, sometimes loud voices came over the gardens. Once, a tuba. For a time, the Bartons had parties. These were always referred to by the Hughsons as “a little wild.” More recently, there were fights: a woman’s voice, a man’s.
On the Sundays that followed a late Saturday-night party, Barton House was dark, and hushed. The quarter-filled highball glasses and full ashtrays were still on the side tables and windowsills. Christopher knew by the thick, still air that his parents would not come downstairs until much later.
Christopher lifted the Rothmans from his mother’s purse. As usual. And then the boys went down to the basement to get the gun. It was a souvenir of Mr. Barton’s from the war.
The stale space of gloom that opened off the bottom of the stairs had all the contemporary fixtures of a rec room—the muted plaids, the casually low-slung furniture, the dartboard, the television, the shelf full of regatta trophies, the bar. But there was something about the basement’s heavy drapery and unmoving air that never felt like fun to Oliver.
“That’s strange,” Christopher said. Normally, the gun was kept locked in the bottom drawer of a liquor cabinet. “The Luger’s not here.”
Oliver was the one who spied the angled black handle. He was looking right at it on the bar for some seconds before he realized what it was. It was unfamiliar because it was so out of place. It was beside a glass of brown liquid with a cigarette butt floating in it. Christopher slipped the pistol into his backpack.
They could never find any ammunition—and not for lack of trying. But the gun still had a heft and an action that made the daring escapes of General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery throughout the occupied European countryside feel the way they imagined the game of battle to be. The gun added immeasurably to the veracity of their Sundays: like the time they were running down the path, after Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had started yelling at them.
“You goddamn kids. If I ever catch sight …”
Christopher and Oliver were leaping from root to rock, their shoes skittering, their legs like flywheels. They’d begun with their feet sliding sideways, like skiers traversing a nasty-looking drop, but that hadn’t worked for long. Now they were racing as if trying to catch up to their own weight. Oliver hid the gun by holding it by the barrel, its handle tucked against the inside of his forearm.
HILLSIDE ISN’T A HILL AT ALL. It’s a ridge of sedimentary rock, a muscle of limestone underneath the soft floor of woods. It rises steeply, here and there, in grey, horizontal lines so clearly defined and stacked in such apparent regimen, it appears as if the fissures and planes have been carved into the face of stone. Archie Hughson was particularly knowledgeable about the process of formation. He led his classes on geography hikes along the same trail down which the two boys were racing.
Archie Hughson spoke plainly. It was a dialect, now almost lost, that blended a modest, rural tradition of language with the respect for Shakespeare and Milton and Dickens and Tennyson with which his generation had been brought up. Those students who did well on his famous final exam did so because they could remember that voice. They always would.
They would remember Mr. Hughson standing in a creek bed in the Hillside woods, his sample bag over his shoulder, the waxed paper of an egg-salad sandwich protruding from the right-hand double pocket of his tweed jacket. They would remember him bending down with surprising agility and picking up a rough grey chunk of stone. They could remember him holding it up, turning it slowly before them as if it were an enormous jewel to be admired. And they would remember his flat, unadorned accent: “Let us imagine that a rock with much the same origins as this was under an ocean. Indeed, let us imagine that this rock was created under an ocean.”
THE ROOTS OF THE BIGGEST TREES held the same horizontal as the ramparts of the rock face. The boys used them like secret stairways for speedy escapes. They took pride in knowing the details of the terrain.
Oliver was the better runner of the two, which wasn’t, actually, saying very much. He wasn’t the fastest boy on earth, but he had a quickness that often seemed—particularly in contrast to Christopher’s thudding strides—comic in its agility. He was a bit of a ham. And it was when they were on that path that day, racing down from the ledge after greatly diminishing the Führer’s quality of life, that Oliver gave into the temptation to let the pistol’s serious weight slip so that its handle was
in his palm. The two friends were laughing, hidden from pursuing storm troopers by the hedge of long grass. Oliver was running through the woods with a gun in his hand like a Hollywood movie star.
Suddenly, Oliver braked, his sneakers skidding. Christopher stopped behind him, arms whirling back as if encountering a sheer precipice at his toes.
Oliver crouched. He spun.
“Sniper,” he whispered to his friend. “Eleven o’clock.”
Oliver took fast, deadly aim at the German hiding behind the tree trunk on the cliff above them.
The recoil jumped like an electric shock in Oliver’s hand. The sharp, precise crack of the pistol scared them both to death.
They both stared, not believing their eyes, at the burst of grey dust, suspended in sunlight, drifting over the stone above them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ONE SUNDAY MORNING in the spring of 1968, about ten days after his arrival in Pietrabella, Oliver Hughson was taken by Anna Di Castello on a climb up into the Apuan mountains of the Carrara region of southwest Liguria and northwest Tuscany—what Boccaccio and Dante knew as the Lunae Montes, the “mountains of the moon.”
Charles Dickens passed through the Carrara area in 1846. He wrote a memoir of his journey through Italy. He called his journal Pictures from Italy. It is included in volume XVIII of the red, cloth-bound complete works that was left to Oliver—along with a house, a swimming pool, several Royal Doulton figurines, some gloomy furniture, a miniature replica of Michelangelo’s David, and an investment portfolio comfortably adequate for a bachelor to live on.
Oliver had no pictures of his time in Italy. His camera—not very good anyway—had ended up in several pieces on the kitchen floor of the little farmhouse in the countryside that for a summer he had shared with Anna. On that occasion, Anna had stood over it, glowering, knife in hand, as if watching for any sign of remaining life. Had the camera attempted one last, dying click of its shutter, she’d have run the blade of her paring knife—and the chopped garlic that still clung to it—through its Instamatic heart. Or that, at any rate, was what her expression conveyed to astonished Oliver.
As a result, Oliver’s souvenirs were idiosyncratic, to say the least. He had a copy of Rudolf Wittkower’s Slade lectures on sculpture, its binding long gone. He had a black and white picture of Bernini’s Santa Teresa and the Angel pinned above his desk in Cathcart. And he had the Dickens.
“They are four or five great glens …” Charles Dickens wrote. “The quarries, or ‘caves,’ as they call them there, are so many openings, high up in the hills, on either side of these passes, where they blast and excavate for marble …”
ANNA LOOKED AWFUL that Sunday morning. This was characteristic. Before she had her coffee, Anna looked like she’d bite your head off.
But her scowl wasn’t threatening. It was merely cautionary: a warning to anyone in her vicinity to steer clear until her second cup had been sipped in silence and her puffed eyes had sorted themselves out. And it was usually at her outdoor table, in T-shirt and underwear, that she eased herself through her disgruntlement at no longer being asleep.
Anna’s hair had the lustre of mahogany. So Oliver had by then decided—although he tried a dozen different descriptions of Anna’s hair in his journal that summer. None of them were quite right. Oliver thought her eyes indescribable. Literally. His notebook was filled with his self-rejected efforts: almond-shaped, jewel-like, deep. “Flashing” was crossed out heavily. These were approximations—and wrong, in some important way, for being so.
Anna’s eyes were brown. That was about as close as Oliver ever got to finding a word that worked. They were the visual equivalent of the vowels that, no matter how he applied himself to his copy of Italian for Beginners, he was never able to master. They were eyes that were unafraid of demonstration—whatever mood Anna was in the mood to demonstrate.
Anna’s resistance to etiquette was such that she withheld her smile until moments when she actually felt like smiling. As a result, it seemed not so much an expression as a change of weather—intensely gratifying to anyone who happened to be studying the sky at the moment the sun broke through.
But, if forced to name a favourite of Anna’s physical characteristics, Oliver would probably have first chosen her hair. He often let it spread through the rise of his fingers just for the pleasure of watching it fall.
Anna’s hair was at its best in the evenings when she sat at the centre of several tables full of singing, laughing stranieri at the Café David. It looked like it had been swept by her day—by the swings of her head when she was working, and by the breezes she’d ridden through on her rusty old bicycle—and not by a hairbrush at all.
It was at its worst when she just got out of bed. The storms that passed across her pillows in the night left a mess that would have included tangled power lines and unpassable roads had she been a landscape and not, as Oliver suggested to her one morning—from a safe distance—“a grumpy sleepyhead.”
Oliver had no photograph of Anna because Anna would never let Oliver take one—a prohibition that he did not fully appreciate until the day he snapped a picture of her chopping garlic on the counter beside the kitchen window. His camera was hurled against the wall as a result. She had wrested it from him with surprising, unstoppable fury. “I’m not going to be a fucking souvenir,” she shouted.
“Fucking” was a word Anna used a lot. It was the word “souvenir” that she spat so violently it sounded like profanity. Oliver had never before imagined that anger could achieve such sudden gale-force extremes. On the plus side: he had never guessed that lovemaking could be so ferocious.
Anna made a rosemary infusion that she used instead of commercial shampoo—simmering it on the stove for hours, before cooling it in her not entirely reliable kerosene refrigerator. The water pressure in the house was just as iffy, and Anna washed her hair on the hot days of that summer under the creaking hand pump at the bottom of the farmhouse garden. Oliver watched. He was always amazed that this scene—Anna turning, brown-skinned, wrapping a towel around her head, and smiling at him—was real. It seemed impossible. But then, all of Italy seemed impossible to Oliver.
He had arrived in Pietrabella, after his long, mostly tedious journey from Paris, in the evening. When he awoke in Richard Christian and Elena Conti’s spare bedroom, it was late in the morning. He had slept soundly. But the room was still dark.
Richard had gone to his studio early. Elena had already caught a train to Rome, where she had a share in an apartment and where she worked as a freelance translator.
There were high, heavy wooden shutters on the window of the guest room.
Oliver opened them. He only wanted some light to unpack his knapsack. He had not anticipated quite so panoramic a view. He felt as if he were in a movie.
There were the terraced olive groves and grapevines. There were the footpaths that bordered the fields. There were the dusty switchback roads and red-tiled roofs.
The sounds were these: a commotion of roosters, the distant horn of a bus coming round a sharp turn in the hills, the whirring of the pneumatic chisels of men working stone.
There was white dust in the air. There was the smell of brush fires. There was the quiet, oddly distinct sound of cutlery being set for lunch in the house next door.
And above all this—either close or far away, he couldn’t be sure—there were the foothills of the Apuans.
It felt like falling, almost like fainting. Dickens called it a “cheerful brightness.”
When he opened those thick wooden shutters for the first time, the light of Tuscany staggered him.
Oliver lost his balance that morning. It was the first time he could remember it happening. He fell backward, his small, bare feet suddenly uncertain on the cool terra-cotta floor.
THE ROSEMARY INFUSION gave Anna’s hair a distinct, woody scent—as exotic as the rosewood of jewellery boxes or the cedar lining of drawers filled with perfumed silk. Not that Oliver had any experience with either. And
not that he’d had any experience with someone like Anna. Her difficulties with mornings often had to do with being up late in the Café David with a group of foreign sculptors.
Dusk settled over Pietrabella’s central piazza. More wine was ordered. The surrounding hills darkened. The strings of lights on the square came on.
The stories began. And then the arguments. And then the singing. And then everyone decided to go to the little place on Via Piastrone that made such good grilled quail.
There was more wine. There were many courses. There was more singing. There was dancing.
These were the kind of nights that preceded the kind of mornings when Anna looked most awful. This was what Oliver discovered when he knocked at the door of her farmhouse. It was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning.
Anna’s invitation to Oliver to go up into the quarries on Sunday morning had been typically unadorned with small talk. The offer was made at the Café David.
They’d met once before—at Richard and Elena’s on Via Maddalena, on the evening Oliver had arrived in town.
At the Café David, Anna was sitting amid a group of sculptors. She’d caught Oliver looking at her a few times.
She had a directness to her that had as much to do with the absence of nuance in her English as with her temperament. She was ending a relationship with an American sculptor at the time. Anna did not end her relationships with great diplomacy. And it was in response to a remark from him that she got suddenly, if not steadily, to her feet.
She walked to the table where Oliver was sitting by himself. She did not bother with preamble. She spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear. “Come to my house tomorrow morning. Eight o’clock. We will go for a climb in the mountains.”
When she turned, she almost knocked over the empty chair opposite Oliver. “I live in the hills,” she said. “On the way to Castello.”
Anna gave a final glare in the direction of the table at which she had been seated. “Everyone knows where.”
It was an impressive exit—although not impressive enough for Anna to remember it. Oliver’s arrival at the farmhouse at eight o’clock the next morning was not something she was expecting. Apparently.
The Figures of Beauty Page 22