It was that night, at Capodimonte, Brian’s dinner. That was the night when Camilla’s past came thundering back. As soon as she saw Pasquale’s eyes she recognized him, and a few discreet enquiries confirmed her suspicions. Or was it a mother’s intuition?
Her car pulls up in the porte-cochere of the hotel behind a line of shiny limousines. ‘Wait here. I won’t be long,’ she tells the driver.
For as long as she had known Umberto, he had frequented the health club in the hotel and then taken his coffee while he did his business. She walks through the foyer across polished parquet floors to the lift. She gets out at the roof garden and scans the terrace. Umberto, pink and pudgy after his massage, sits cross-legged on a large cane chair reading a folder on his lap.
‘Ah, Umberto, what a surprise to see you here.’ She falls into the chair next to his.
‘Don’t give me that bullshit. What do you want?’
‘As gracious as ever, I see.’
She looks around for a waiter. ‘Mineral water with lime.’
‘You’re looking pale. Are you sick?’
‘No, not at all. Just been working too hard. How have you been?’
‘Busy.’
‘The land development. How is that going?’
He looks at her suspiciously and puts the folder on the table in front of him. ‘Universities are your business. Construction and cement are mine.’
‘Except when people from my university get mixed up in your business, Mr Chairman.’
‘Meaning?’
Camilla laughs. ‘You have something that belongs to me, I believe.’
‘To you?’
‘To my university and therefore to me. What have you done with him, Umberto?’
He gazes out across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius. ‘You said yourself, that volcano may not blow for a couple of hundred years. Why do you let your people run around poking their noses in and alarming everybody? You said you’d stop them.’
‘And I also said that no one was to be harmed!’ she hisses. ‘Don’t forget, Umberto, deals can be undone!’
‘You’re not threatening me, are you, chancellor?’
She doesn’t reply. Her water arrives and she drinks it slowly. ‘No, of course I’m not threatening you, Umberto,’ she says soothingly. ‘But a deal is a deal. And you always say you’re a man of your word.’
Umberto laughs. ‘Ah Camilla, charming as ever. Of course, I don’t know whom you are talking about. But I’ll have a word to my associates.’
‘Thank you, Umberto. I knew I could rely on you.’
A young man is playing a piano in the corner of the garden restaurant. He smiles at her as she heads back towards the lift and she recognizes a jazzy version of ‘Santa Lucia’. It jogs her memory of the first time she heard Pasquale playing, busking across the road from the hotel. As she travels down in the lift she tries to hold on to that image of him. But the more she tries, the more it fades away until she can no longer picture him at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Do you believe in miracles?’ Poppaea whispers earnestly to Frances as they sit in a pew in front of a side altar of the vast cathedral of Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo in the ancient city. In front of them people queue to touch the outstretched hand of the statue of a bespectacled, middle-aged man, wearing a Nehru jacket. Vases of fresh roses and banks of candles light the shrine of Doctor Giuseppe Moscati, canonized for miracles he was said to have performed for the sick and the poor of the city one hundred and fifty years earlier. The casket of the saint is embedded beneath the altar, a frieze of his body with hands clasped adorning its side.
Frances witnesses the raw faith of the worshippers of ‘the Saint of Naples’. A teenage boy kisses the bronze hand, discoloured from countless thousands of other human contacts, then moves on. An elderly woman on a walking frame shuffles painfully into his place. She pauses, clutches the hand, and screws her eyes tightly shut. The procession continues; young, old, healthy, infirm, each praying for a personal miracle. A group stands to one side reciting the rosary quietly in unison, beads swinging in closed hands.
‘That’s the nature of miracles,’ Frances says, ‘the inexplicable. I truly hope they exist.’
Poppaea had insisted she come to the cathedral and after the gruelling weeks they had endured, she was happy to oblige. Spring is melting into summer and already the baking southern sun is taking a toll on all of their energies. The cool of the cathedral is a respite from the hot city streets and the suffocating hours spent in the hospital.
For a while, Frances began to feel she was living between two medical wards, constantly moving back and forth between Pasquale and Marcello.
After Marcello had been dumped in a dark alley like an abandoned animal, he had needed surgery on a broken arm and dislocated shoulder and treatment for a range of infected scratches and bruises. The break had occurred when his captors threw him out of the moving car. His other wounds had come from a week of rough treatment in the basement of a foul waterfront warehouse somewhere in the port. He told her he could hear the sea lapping against a wharf outside and the chatter of Chinese and Italian workers. He’d stopped crying out for help after one of the young hoods had punched his mouth and then gagged him. He had lost track of the time he was imprisoned but thought he had slept on and off for seven days and nights. One day he was blindfolded and led into a car. They had threatened to kill him, then, inexplicably, he was released, albeit violently.
It was nearly a week after Frances had spoken to Camilla that Marcello had phoned her. Maybe that’s when she started to believe miracles were possible. She had been sick with worry and had felt utterly powerless. Peppe had tried all his networks but came up with nothing. Riccardo had phoned many times a day but they had agreed there was no point him coming to Naples.
Marcello’s voice had sounded fractured and weak. After he was dumped, he had torn off his blindfold, stumbled to the end of the alley and recognized he was in the Spanish Quarter. He was ringing from the bar where he and Pasquale had sought information on Riccardo. Frances had just returned home from the observatory in the early evening. She had taken a taxi to the bar, where she found him filthy and in pain. When she got him to the hospital he was immediately put on a drip for hydration. But while Marcello was out of hospital and his body and spirit were healing, Pasquale’s were deteriorating.
The doctors could no longer conceal their concern. He had endured the maximum levels of chemotherapy, his body now wasted and his beautiful hair fallen out clump after clump until none was left. Poppaea had hidden her tears well. She had brought his black fedora and lovingly placed it on his head while he was awake, and it sat on the bedrail when he slept.
Poppaea edges past Frances, eyes glowing as brightly as the candles, jaw determined. She had been checked and cleared of the disease herself. The cancer had bypassed her and stolen into her brother.
Frances watches her join the queue. She has brought a bunch of red and white roses, symbolizing the blood cells that were fighting a losing battle in Pasquale’s body. When she reaches the head of the line, Poppaea kneels. She lays the flowers at the foot of the statue. Then she stands and stretches her arms, one hand grasping the statue, the other touching the hands on the casket. She stares into the face of the saint and then silently moves away.
CHAPTER FORTY
Pasquale knows he is dying. As he hovers in and out of consciousness he dreams, strange vivid dreams, like fairytales. Yesterday he dreamt he was in a jungle, swinging from vine to vine like Tarzan, skimming over wild beasts snapping at his heels below. He wasn’t frightened; on the contrary, he felt masterful, in control. The nurses had warned him the drugs could give him hallucinations. He was never sure if the dreams were drug-induced or simply his subconscious at work. It didn’t really matter either way. He liked the jungle dream; he’d always intended going to Africa and this had seemed so real it felt as if he had made the journey after all.
Now he is awake. There is no one else in his room,
and he likes it that way, some space to think, without a fuss. Everyone has been so kind. Beloved Poppaea was there every day, for hours at a time, pretending to be cheerful when he could see she was always so sad. She had always put him first. It wasn’t fair on her—since she was a tiny child she had been responsible for him, and now she also had to deal with the fact that they weren’t even related.
His ‘new’ mother had been there, spinning him out and making it hard for Poppaea as well. Camilla Corsi had concentrated three decades of motherhood into three months, just in time to catch his swansong. He liked that thought. ‘The Swan’ was his swansong; his first and last major public performance. Still, she was trying. And she read to him in her husky voice, quite entertaining in her own way. Stories he had never heard before of ancient Roman and Greek mythology. She had been reading Homer’s The Odyssey this week. He really liked that one, its poetic tales of the hero Ulysses blending with his dreams. There was no one to read him bedtime stories when he was small; his adoptive mother dead, his father always working and Poppaea too young. Life’s like that. You don’t always get to experience ordinary things in the usual order, if at all.
His eyes travel around the room. It’s large and his bed is more like one in a smart hotel than one in a hospital, with soft, white cotton sheets and large feather pillows. And there’s room for his things. His cello is propped in one corner, his books on a shelf in another. Camilla had organized it for him—there was no way he or Poppaea could have afforded such luxury. He was moved from the main hospital a couple of weeks earlier to the hospice, an elegant villa located high above the city in Vomera with views to die for. He liked that idea too—views to die for. Odd how so many words for death and dying had crept into use and yet it wasn’t until you were dying that you noticed. His eyesight wasn’t as sharp any more, but propped up in bed, he can see the deep blue of the sea and the lighter blue of the sky. He leans forward to drink it in.
He was glad when they stopped the chemotherapy; his veins were collapsing and he couldn’t take it any more. There had no longer been any point: his immune system was shot, his body was no longer responding and the leukaemia was unstoppable. It was spreading to his brain. The pain had been unbearable, and the nausea and headaches made him wretched. But here, in this place, it was all OK; they kept the morphine coming, just enough to erase the pain but not so much that he didn’t know what was going on.
He runs his hand over his head, where a soft stubble is growing back. Will it have time to grow before…before what? The thought keeps coming back. Before he dies and goes…where?
Frances had been there earlier. She told him she’d gone to the cathedral to pray with Poppaea for a miracle. Imagine! He wakes the next day and the leukaemia is gone without trace. He’s back with the orchestra, centre stage once more. No, he can’t believe that for a second, but if it comforts Poppaea he’s not going to say anything.
He loves the music soaring around his room—his mother had bought the best digital sound system on offer and it’s like having a band in your room. Mother? He can say the word now quite naturally. She had loaded all his favourites and he has the remote control right on the bed. Funny how he’d gone off Bach completely and if he had to hear ‘The Swan’ one more time, well, he would vomit. He had discovered jazz. Satore and Rufus had helped him choose: Miles Davis, Cleo Laine, Aretha Franklin and Count Basie. They had a lot of modern stuff too but he favoured the old greats. And then there was Chick Corea, in a class of his own. This one—Corea’s string trio—fills his head. He wants to play it himself. He stares at his cello. They could do this together. He’s memorized his part in his head, without actually playing one note. Satore would play violin and Rufus viola. What could they call themselves? Triple Caserta? No, sounds like an ice cream. The Toxic Trio? Sounds too much like his disintegrating body. Three Strings to a Bow? Yes, that works. So there’s the name, now they will have to practise. He just needs to find the strength.
He can hear footsteps. He wonders who it might be. Probably Poppaea coming back. He’ll run the name of the trio by her and see what she thinks. He wants so much to stay awake, but he feels so very, very tired.
The sea is looking bluer and bluer. He would love to swim in it, or sail across it like Ulysses. Oh, how strong he was to resist the Sirens and their beautiful songs, luring him to their island. That ancient trio—what were they called? The Slaying Sirens? They promised Ulysses, and all who sailed by their paradise, wisdom and life, but to succumb to their temptation was fatal.
Pasquale needs to sleep. He closes his eyes and a feeling of bliss envelops him; so restful, like floating in a warm bath with no pain. When he hears it, the most beautiful music he has ever heard in his life, he doesn’t want to resist.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The summer heat is stoking the city’s rage. Throughout the metropolis and into rural Campania, people are lighting fires, trying to burn the disgusting mountains of garbage choking their streets and destroying their health.
Frances can smell the anger, as potent as the stink rising from the trash. She is losing sight of Marcello and Satore. She edges around a pile of wrecked fridges, turned on their sides and sprouting bags of foul-smelling rubbish. She glimpses the tops of the men’s heads, marching ahead, shoulder to shoulder in a solid line of protesters. She tries to catch them but a crush of new protesters blocks her way.
Slipping sideways out of the pull of the crowd she rests against a wall. Dark is falling but the glow of the fires light the cobblestone streets. Sirens blare, dogs bark and she fears what the night will bring.
‘Frances!’ Poppaea is waving at her from across a sea of marchers as she steps into the melange of Naples humanity, unusually united against the lawlessness of Il Sistema, her blonde head bobbing towards her. Frances reaches out and pulls her to safety.
Since the funeral, the two had been swept up in a campaign fuelled by Pasquale’s death. The brilliant young musician had become a cause célèbre, a victim of all that was rotten in a society where greed ruled and the lives of ordinary people counted for nothing.
The city rallied. Students, musicians, academics, doctors and lawyers joined the inhabitants of Naples, Campi Flegrei and towns around Vesuvius and beyond to raise their voices. No one wanted the talented young man from Caserta to have died in vain. Against the odds, he had risen out of poverty and achieved his dream. Struck down on the cusp of greatness, he was like the martyrs of old whose images filled every church and art gallery. But Pasquale was murdered with a weapon far more pervasive than a single spear, an axe or a gun. The weapon his assailants used was deadlier: poisons dumped in his backyard by soldiers of greed led by corrupt generals. His cancer was one of thousands attributed to toxic waste—men, women and children were riddled with tumours at rates unseen before, spreading through the population like a modern plague.
On the day of Pasquale’s death, Frances had gone to visit him at the hospice twice. In the morning he had been lucid, cheerful and somewhat amused when she told him she had been praying for a miracle with Poppaea at the cathedral.
After a few hours’ work at the observatory, she had felt an urge to see him again. The day had been particularly clear and still when she had ridden her motorbike up to the villa. She had stopped on the way to buy him some flowers, a bunch of chianti-coloured calla lilies, long-stemmed beauties that somehow reminded her of him.
She had heard the music coming from his room as she walked along the polished wooden floors of the corridor, classical jazz played louder than usual. She recognized it as one of his new favourites and had heard it many times in the previous weeks. It wasn’t to her taste and she missed the classical music he had abandoned.
As she approached his room, she saw Pasquale was alone, propped up in his bed on cushions. When she called to him he hadn’t looked up. Her heart skipped a beat and she hoped he was sleeping, but as soon as she saw his face, she knew he was gone. His eyes were closed and his head was drooping. He was smiling, and held an o
pen copy of The Odyssey in his hand. She rested the flowers on his bedside table and had turned to look out through the open doors to where he would have been looking. The beckoning sea was bluer than she had ever seen it—vast, sparkling and azure.
She had turned back to him and touched his hand. It was still warm. She wanted to scoop him up, tell him everything would be fine. Instead, she lightly kissed his cheek, then ran out of the room to seek assistance, knowing he was beyond all help.
The cathedral was full for Pasquale’s funeral. The university emptied, staff and students packing the pews. Outside the church, grief had collided with anger. Some had brought banners with painted images of Pasquale as a medieval saint, wrapped in a loincloth with cans of poisons strapped to his bare torso with barbed wire.
They had carried banners: ‘Enough is Enough’, ‘Never Again’ and ‘Stop Killing Our Children’.
Frances had sat up the front with Poppaea, Satore and Rufus. Behind them was the Fogliano family, Luciana on Laura’s lap, and the twins silent and still.
Camilla had arrived alone, erect, her face covered dramatically with a black mantilla. She had slid in next to Frances and spent most of the service staring at the casket in front of the altar. At the end, she had walked over to it, bent and kissed it. When a group of cellists started playing ‘The Swan’, Frances noticed Camilla had slipped away, leaving the church ahead of the pallbearers.
The music had soared through the barrel-shaped interior of the sixteenth-century church. Frances had looked upwards at the ceiling, richly decorated with frescoes of the communion of saints. Perhaps Poppaea was right. They might well be waiting for him.
The marchers are now a block ahead, heading towards the Parliament, the sound of a mass of moving feet and shouting echoing through the streets. ‘I know a short cut,’ Poppaea tells Frances. ‘We’ll be able to catch them up.’
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