In the same way she was a confusion of experience and naivete. Product of a one-room upbringing in a family of the bassi, survivor of war at Naples, yet she was favourably impressed by the fact that I did not smoke, and shocked that I treated animals as if they were Christians; and would fearfully cross the road, and herself, when approaching the church that housed the exorcized Devil of Mergellina.
Gianni complained a lot about Serafina, as if in engaging her I had been shortchanged on the Neapolitan character. ‘How did you manage to have the only maid in Naples with no personality ? Why don’t you get yourself some nice Concetta or Mafalda -’ he indicated with both hands what shape this replacement would take – ‘instead of this length of string? Women can be divided, more or less, into cows and shrews, and the shrews are to be avoided.’ I wondered if, on one of his trips to my kitchen for ice or soda, he had tried to kiss her and been repulsed.
No amount of female receptiveness could have propitiated Gianni, no revenge appeased him. The story of his mother, who had consigned him at the age of nineteen to a five-year term among the merchants, civil servants, and cannibals of Africa was told again and again, always as if for the first time as the sense of outrage sprang up freshly in his heart. ‘The diseases, then. The climate, the conditions – I am speaking of thirty years ago. When people say of such a life, “It was murder,” they are only speaking the truth. This was murder, she tried to kill me.’ His eyes would become bright with tears; and I thought of Rimbaud.
Gianni’s parents had separated when he was a baby, the mother remaining at Rome with two children, the father sailing for Argentina where he had inherited some property. After the war, his father returned to Italy for the first time, coming from New York to Palermo on a cruise ship, and Gianni went to Sicily to meet him.
‘It was damned queer, I can tell you – standing there on the dock thinking you were about to see your father for the first time. And then the odd thing of seeing him not as your father but as just another person – in a way that practically nobody ever does see their own parents – as if he were simply an acquaintance one might have made. Getting much the same impression as anyone might get meeting such a man. Thinking of him as somebody one might do business with, someone a woman might love. Oh it was queer, all right. Damned queer.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Good-looking. Bold. Debonair, you might say – courtly. He was over seventy, in marvellous shape. His clothes weren’t right – but that was America He was moved, coming back to Italy. Palermo was terrible then, a heap of rubble. I could tell he was horrified, not having seen war. We went to have lunch at that hotel on the sea, outside the town. It was March, trees were in leaf, flowers were blooming, the sea was blue. He put his napkin over his eyes and cried.’
Gianni’s father had spent some weeks in Italy and returned to Argentina, where he died the following year.
‘Having seen him only in old age, I can’t picture him any other way – if I imagine him as a student, or courting my mother, or at my christening, he is always seventy-five years old. I can’t help it.’
Gianni had one brother, much older than he. ‘A horror. I haven’t seen him in five years.’
Something extraordinary was that Gianni never mentioned his wife. Once in a while he would speak of his children, two adolescent boys and a little girl, and I knew from Gioconda that he saw them constantly. But of his wife there was never a word, not even an accidental reference to his former life with her. On the other hand, he often mentioned his mother-in-law, whom he fiercely hated, pointing out a harsh-faced woman in the street as resembling her, or telling me, if I gave a sharp response to one of his admonitions, ‘You’re getting to be like my mother-in-law.’ I came to wonder whether this mother-in-law were not in fact his own wife in disguise, and if he had transferred to her the character of his wife in order to speak of her so often and in such derogatory terms.
Never mentioning his wife made her seem, inevitably, more secret, more sacred.
Of his work, too, he would speak only indirectly. ‘This thing,’ he would say. ‘This thing that I do.’ During the war, for example, the air force had set him to making documentary films, ‘as I had already started, then, to do this thing’. Wildly authoritative on every other subject, about his profession he was almost diffident.
Gianni had a way of introducing his stories, setting the scene like a playwright or a poet – or a director of films. ‘Place des Temes. 1949. June, cold and wet.’ Or ‘Milan, high summer, a city deserted. Via Melzi d’Eril a boulevard whose trees disappeared in a single night of the war, cut down for fuel: the street now – too wide, too bare, you sense something missing, eliminated. A fourth-floor apartment, shuttered, silent, like all the Sundays of the world combined …’
Occasionally these stories led to something more – more, that is, than their foregone conclusion, which was the conquest of a woman or the exposing of some pretension; and one felt then precisely the same agreeable surprise one feels at an unexpected show of talent during a trite play.
‘1933. Rome on my return from Eritrea. Glorious, as if seen for the first time. Wherever I went, wanting to touch the buildings, their colours like flesh, their contours of civilization … Unforgettable, too good to last. My firm sent me to Munich to learn German, which they already foresaw as a useful language - looking ahead, you might say, though not quite far enough. I never could learn it, but that’s another story. I was boarded with a family in Munich, the wife half-Italian, the husband German. When I had been there a few days, utterly lost, bored to death, I went alone one evening to the theatre. I forget the play. In the interval, something happened. The lights went up more strongly, people got to their feet excitedly, began talking, gathered in groups in the aisles. Armfuls of newspapers were brought in and passed around. I saw the headline, right across the page: ‘ROEHM VERHAFTET.’ I hadn’t the remotest idea what it meant. ‘ROEHM VERHAFTET.’ It was Hitler’s coup, the beginning of a massacre. I couldn’t ask anyone, not speaking a word of German. I knew something terrible was taking place – it was an atmosphere of dread, the sense of vast calamity that makes itself felt like a chemical agent, even to those who are cheering it on.
‘Well, that was what the whole war was to me. An unnatural light, the performance suspended, and people milling about in an atmosphere of disaster uttering crucial words that I found incomprehensible. In 1940 I was called up, I went into the air force.’ Gianni shrugged at me, and added belligerently, ‘What else was I to do. Not being a hero, you might say, I had to go and fight. I didn’t have money to buy my way out, as some did, and you had to be a fascist to get yourself a protected occupation.’
‘Figlia mia,’ he would say, laying his hand on my arm or my knee. ‘I am not yet an old man, and in my time I have lived through —’ now raising his hand and striking his fingers one by one — ‘the war of Italy with Turkey; the First World War; the war of Italy with Ethiopia; Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War; and the Second World War. I have seen allies alternate with enemies, sometimes within the same war. Are you asking -’ (I was not) ‘that I should continue to take these events seriously?’
When Gianni dealt with matters of this kind – when he told his stories, or sang, or came to grips in any other way with human feeling – he wept. That is to say that his eyes filled, and tears sometimes appeared on his face. He was proud of these tears, making no attempt to conceal or remove them, even exhibiting a little this irrefutable evidence of his tender heart. It was as if he said to us, Well there you are: you think me callous and egotistical, yet here are the springs of compassion welling up before your very eyes.
But tears are not, like blood, shed by all involuntarily and according to the same determinants. And I had come to wonder, from the cauterized state of my own emotions then, whether those who have suppressed or diverted the course of strong feeling are sometimes left immune, with nothing more than just such superficial traces of what was once a great affliction. If, for insta
nce, at this time when all my faculties seemed blunted – not only by grief and change, but by the very effort of surviving them – if, as I say, I recalled a poem or a piece of music, a choking emotion might prevent me from completing the passage, even in my head; this happened automatically, as if the words or notes were some signal that drew up passionate response without reference to my own sensibilities. I would, uselessly, attempt to arouse the same reaction for a more immediate cause, for my own troubles or for sorrows witnessed : but I was like a person who has come down from a mountain or a long air journey, and is slightly deafened. Yet a line from a sonnet, a phrase from a sonata, drew tears, as involuntary as those caused by an onion passed under the nose. And I concluded that Gianni’s tears were the refined product of a conditioning that was similar, but self imposed and lifelong.
Gioconda, for instance, had an astonishing memory for verse – I have never heard anything like it; and would sometimes say lines to us, or whole poems, that were unknown to me: it was through her that the Italian poets entered my consciousness - or, rather, that I entered theirs. It was the one thing in which Gianni allowed her to shine, never interrupting unless to offer a word if she hesitated, sitting back with his hands locked under his head and one foot crossed over the opposite knee. And throughout these brief recitations of hers, he would always weep.
Afterwards, if we went late to dine together, perhaps, in one of the trattorie around Piazza Dante, he would – with his eyelids still reddened from crying – drive me crazy by abusing the waiter, sending back the carafe of wine, and criticizing Gioconda’s dress.
Like many men who are compulsively cruel to their womenfolk, he also shed tears at the cinema, and showed a disproportionate concern for insects.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I spent most of the war in England. That was the frightening part. It was a relief to get to safety when they sent me on active service – when I went to Mombasa in ’44. Up till then I was getting blitzed at a naval station in the south of England, at Hove. When I was called up I filled out a form. It asked me where I would like to be sent if I had a choice, and I put HOME’. Perhaps they mistook the handwriting, because I was sent straight to Hove and got stuck there for three years. Or perhaps some Johnny was having a joke of his own – there were still a few humorous types around in those days. It was the war wiped the smile off our faces once and for all.
‘At the very end of it, in ’45, they sent me to the Falkland Islands. That was the worst – though it was good for my work, as it turned out … There’s a freezing wind there that comes straight from the South Pole, and never stops blowing. The place has a demeaning kind of desolation, the flat, bleak kind, not dignified by drama. There was one single tree there, a stunted, heeling wretch of a tree, that had become the focus of attention — I think we had all transferred our identities to that tree, and its survival in such a place was bound up with our own. There were a few women, Englishwomen who had been stranded there throughout the whole war – war was like a great syphon that sprayed human beings all over the globe; as you know. These women were reduced to lining the perishing remnants of their clothes with newspaper … . Of course no one could get interested in these kinds of hardships, with what had been going on elsewhere in the world. And the worst hardship was exactly that – the knowledge that one’s sufferings were of no interest.’
When Justin spoke to me in this way I was ashamed to pass it off merely with a word or a look of agreement, and would have liked to recognize his wish of being, for once, serious with me. But he had so accustomed me to flippancy that I scarcely knew how to make the transition with him – and, having made it, might find him already reverted, no longer in earnest, so that my spontaneity was humiliated. More than that, I resented it – that it should be he, always, who set the tone of our relations.
I forget, on this occasion, what I said, but I remember his taking exception to it.
‘You tell me I must talk sense, and when I do you dismiss me.’
‘Having imposed the climate of non-sense, you can’t expect to be taken in earnest the moment you ring the bell. You treat me – things – us – lightly then expect us to reverse ourselves the one time you choose. You want us to be accessible, indefinitely, waiting for your moment of truth. And we can’t be.’
‘His jaw dropped,’ said Justin, at once relapsing into banter. ‘It is the price I pay, he said heavily.’
I said, ‘It is one of the prices he pays.’
We were walking down a dark street paved in uneven blocks, and had to keep our eyes on the ground – I think that Justin had come with me on one of my shopping expeditions, and we were going to see a church that was on our way home. It was often this way when we talked – we were driving or walking, instead of facing one another in a quiet room, or in a bed. Because of that, anything we had to say was transmitted with involuntary sidelong looks that heightened the glancing, facetious character of our friendship. It might have been different face to face, when expression would have counted, and less would have had to be spelled out, or evaded, in words.
In the church, unexpectedly, there were two or three tourists walking slowly back and forth, their heads prayerfully bowed over guide-books, like so many Hamlets on their way to encounter Polonius. This also was part of our fate, Justin’s and mine – just as we were often in motion during our conversations, so too we were bound to arrive at destinations and to part, or be otherwise distracted. The church itself, a veritable grotto of the rococo, mocked all indignation. I smiled to close the subject – though not quite for I remarked, ‘We are always at cross-purposes, then.’
Justin, looking around at the gilded and encrusted interior that was tipped inwards with its weight of decoration, remarked of it, ‘Hardly a case of “less is more” —would you say?’ Then turning to me, ‘Asyngamy, my dear Jenny,’ he said; and repeated it, ‘Asyngamy. The inability of two plants to achieve cross-pollination, owing to their unsynchronized development. That is our case – a matter of bad timing, nothing more. It need not worry us.’ Having reached the altar, we turned and slowly walked back down the aile. ‘Since, in spite of this nuptial march you and I are taking, neither of us appears to wish at this time to enter into any cross-pollinatory activities.’ We paused, looking about us, and he said, ‘These frescoes are by a painter whose nickname was “Quick-Work”, did you know that?’ and we left the church.
It was an evening of late winter, charged with the smell of wood-smoke, shiny with wet streets. Women came past us, covering their mouths against the mild air with the edge of a shawl or a coat lapel, hauling along short schoolboys with long bare legs. A man came by with his hands in the air, telling his companion, ‘She was so lovely, he so much in love …’ There was – as there often was, there – the sense of an earlier time: it was not merely the lack of modernity – the chaste black dresses, a momentary absence of cars, the buildings in their ancient places – but truly as if the city had not caught up, had no interest in catching up, was dawdling in some previous era, the turn of this century perhaps, or of any century.
In silence we climbed a straight street lined with cavelike little dwellings of single ground-floor rooms, each scarcely accommodating its vast bed; each marked by Mussolini twenty years before as unfit for habitation – his incontestable plaque now rotting, half-effaced, on the pitted outer wall. At the top of the street, Justin hailed a taxi.
When we had found our niche in a traffic jam, Justin asked me. ‘Am I right?’
‘About the frescoes?’
‘About the cross-pollination?’
‘Once again, the very way in which you speak about these things affects one’s reaction. How could one love -’ I saw that he did not like this bold word, and repeated it, ‘that is, fall in love with, such an exponent of the arm’s length technique?’ Infuriatingly, I fell yet again into his way of talking.
‘It would have to be, would it, straight from the heart? Someone who would bring you armfuls of flowers, and be cut in pieces fo
r you?’
‘That’s it.’
‘A modest enough requirement,’ he agreed. ‘You deserve nothing less, Jenny, a lass like you. And try to get that into your head.’
There was something about this that recalled Norah’s way of trying to undermine your confidence – ‘You must believe in yourself more,’ she would say; ‘If only you knew how interesting you are,’ exhortations with which, by imputing to me an ineptitude of manner, she assigned to herself as always the superior role. For a moment I forgot about Justin, and thought of Norah and how sometimes, when Edmund was away, she would come round in the evening to look over my life, running a metaphorical finger around the edges of my existence to examine it for dust.
‘It is in my head,’ I told him. ‘You forget that love does not come from the head. In fact, some of it gives the impression of being painstakingly mindless.’ But in saying this I was thinking not of Norah but of Gioconda. It was inconceivable to me that she, who might have commanded anything from life, should be glad of the sort of love that Gianni gave her. In telling me her story Gioconda had said of Gianni, ‘He saved my life.’ And there are debts of this kind – if debts they be, since Gianni’s intervention was not disinterested, nor was Gioconda’s feeling for him solely one of gratitude – that in a literal sense can never be paid; one may have performed a hundred services greater than the original one; yet the initial obligation, being spontaneous and unaccountable, will go perpetually, monstrously, undischarged. Thus the pain that Gianni caused Gioconda was, in her view at least, the sort of remedial destruction one can scarcely complain of – like damage done by the water used to put out a fire.
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