At this ‘you can imagine’, with its first reference to my own idea of Gianni, its first suggestion of complicity, I felt the compunction one feels when one has ultimately converted – corrupted – another to one’s point of view at the expense of some deep conviction of their own. With this phrase Gioconda acknowledged not only my reservations about Gianni, but their validity as well: there was no gratification in getting my own way; only, much graver, more crucial, the pang at her surrender.
‘I was this, I was that, it was the temperament of the Mezzogiorno, undisciplined thinking, no thinking at all … We drove to town in an open car, and people looked at us – you know, Gianni shaking his fist into the air and roaring “Paresse mentale! Paresse mentale!”’
We had both ceased to laugh.
‘After that, it never righted itself. He had committed himself to being exasperated, and I to apologizing. I could think only of boring things to say, I looked wrong, felt I had brought the wrong clothes – how infantile it sounds – the things we did turned out badly and I felt responsible, even for the heat … Everything I did seemed to be the last straw for Gianni. One day he said to me, “You would understand me better if I spoke Chinese to you.” I thought it would never end.’ Turned from me in the dying light, her profile was regal, uplifted, oddly matched to what she was saying. But she suddenly looked round at me with eyes of grief. ‘Oh Jenny,’ she said in a lower voice. ‘For the first time I had to wonder — I mean, to fear – what it might be like if I were to marry him.’
She rested her head back on the cushion and closed her eyes to suppress tears. She added, ‘Some of it was my fault.’ She dealt herself a swift, punishing blow on the temple and said, ‘Mosquito.’ Then, ‘Maybe Gianni is right,’ allowing him the last word. ‘I’m becoming the sort of woman who misses aeroplanes, and recounts her grievances.’
I lit the insect-repelling candle and put it on the table. Gioconda lay with her arms by her sides, not opening her eyes, her body relapsed as an animal’s. Over the end of the wicker chaise-longue her sunburnt feet were extended in delicate blue sandals, the toenails painted pink. These well-tended feet looked – as she lay there in pain – pathetic, irrelevant, furbished for pleasures from which she had been drastically diverted; as they might have looked had she been lying on a stretcher after an accident.
Music came up to us from a cockle-shell strung with coloured lights and headed out to Marechiaro. The accordionist was squashed in the stern among lovers, cousins, and aunties who rocked out and in with the rhythm of his arms in a form of collective respiration, and sang whatever was played. As soon as the song was finished they sent up their shouts for others.
‘It is so good to be home,’ Gioconda said. She sat up. ‘Let’s drive to Marechiaro and have dinner. If the car’s still there, that is, for I parked it in a forbidden place – in conformity, I suppose, with the new role of female nitwit.’
While I was carrying the tray to the kitchen I heard her come inside. When I returned I found her seated at the dressing-table fixing the tortoiseshell comb into the coil of her hair and singing the song that had come up to us from the boat –
‘Those who are right,
Let’s admit they’re right;
As for those who are wrong-
Let’s admit they’re right too …’
As I watched she rested her fingertips on the table’s edge and sat looking into the mirror. I saw in the poise of her head something I had not noticed before — that she had come to hold herself steady, in the way that long-suffering women do, so that you can practically see the blows that have been rained on them, to which they have not bowed, that they have disciplined themselves to withstand. This staunch, dedicated attitude saddened me the more for having about it the expectation and acceptance of future suffering.
When she saw my reflection, however, she sprang up and came over, skating across the tiles like a child. ‘What a good floor for sliding on. It’s the glaze. It looks like a quilt.’ It was true – the tiles were diamond-shaped, and slightly convex as if they had bubbled in the baking, and the effect was a lustrous, copper-coloured eiderdown. In a few places a tile had cracked, from something dropped or from the pressure of heavy furniture, giving more of a patchwork impression than ever.
Gioconda laughed and, with her hand on the doorpost, skidded past me into the hallway, the air of mute stoicism now unimaginable in her. She stood at the front door swinging her hat by its brim as I put my keys in my handbag and switched off a light or two. ‘Such a risk to say, “What would I do without you,” but I offer you the words all the same, Jenny.’ When I opened the door she flapped her hat with a silencing motion at the thudding of drums that came from the kraal of the nightclub on the hillside. ‘If, as Gianni says, only an unworthy friend tells troubles, then I am the most unworthy friend you ever had.’
Again the incongruity of words and bearing – as she stepped out over my threshold lightly, proudly proclaiming herself ‘l’amica più indegna che tu abbia mai avuto’.
‘I do nothing for you. I wish I could.’ I slammed the door behind us. ‘Why a risk?’
‘Why, the evil eye, my dear. It’s the sort of thing that gets said before …’ As we went down into the dark tunnel, Gioconda made the gesture of exorcism.
‘And the evil eye,’ I asked of her white shape as it drew ahead of me along the corridor. ‘Does that exist for you?’
She tilted her head as if she were truly considering, and then we were in darkness until I pressed the next button. ‘You know what Croce said about it.’
‘Of course I don’t.’
‘That it doesn’t exist. And that it is a most terrible thing.’
When Gianni came back from Tripoli, Gioconda gave a party. At her house from time to time I had met those friends of hers – the relatives who lived near Sorrento, the plump twin sisters, and two or three couples, youngish, quietish, who dropped in to leave a message or borrow a book. One could not say that her life was solitary; yet it lacked any current of companionship, other than Gianni’s.
Once, in talking to Justin about Gioconda, I spoke of this absence, in her life, of close attachments, blaming Gianni for draining away from her the time and impetus to make the very associations that would have freed her from him. I said, ‘She should be meeting others.’
‘Granted,’ said Justin, ‘that he’s the prize bounder of all time, just as you say – a howling cad. Still, consider a little the life here of such a woman, if she’s as you describe her.’ Justin always put in phrases like ‘if she’s all you say’ or ‘according to you’, to indicate to me that I was over-enthusiastic about Gioconda, the victim of a schoolgirl crush. ‘A city like this — that has never had a middle class till now, and now that they do exist the middle class are precisely the people who wish to preserve the myth of their own non-existence and perpetuate the gulf between rich and poor. Assuming she needs a little human society – this friend of yours is free to choose companions from bigots, fascists, provincials, reactionaries of all kinds; portly youths calling themselves Marchese and displaying on the mantelshelf in July the Christmas card signed “Umberto”. She can hearken indefinitely to matrons on the subject of silverware and pelmets, and in the evenings she can go out to play bridge and hear the local scandal about someone who spoke in favour of divorce … If you and I are refugees from the nit-picking and name-dropping of our native land, think what the comparable tuft-hunting circles must be round here. The fact is that life as a permanent fixture of a town like this can be a pretty lonely business. And you are the best thing that’s happened to La Gioconda in years.’
Justin liked to be sceptical about Gioconda, and after a while I stopped talking to him about her, for I felt that my admiration generated antagonism in him. Now and then, when Justin and I discussed our war wounds, compared our respective theatres of service, I would think that he might have this bond, at least – the horrors of war – in common with Gioconda, and was tempted to bring them together in something
of the way that old campaigners are got together at a regimental dinner. Ultimately, however, it had pleased me to know them separately. Yet it was odd that they had never met, not even by chance. Several times Gioconda asked me to bring Justin to dinner or to tea, or on some drive we were taking, but at first these invitations coincided with Justin’s trips or appointments; and later I did not even relay them to him, for I felt that he was prejudiced against her.
In other matters, too, Justin made a habit of pitting reason against my enthusiasms, somewhat after the fashion of Serafina. Though he urged me to remain artless he would invariably point out flaws in my spontaneous judgements: it made him feel sound, judicious. I too wished to be governed by reason – to a reasonable extent – but not to be used as a foil for someone else’s rationality. One cannot wish to be a sort of flint off which reasonable observations are struck like matches.
‘Of course you’ll bring him,’ Gioconda said, when she told me of the party she was giving, and I agreed of course I would. I did ask Justin if he would come, but he was flying to Rome that same day for the opening of an international conference on fisheries. ‘We’re fated, he and I,’ said Gioconda, when I told her. But she went on, ‘Perhaps it’s for the best. You don’t want to give all your time to one. You should be meeting others.’
Gioconda hung lanterns from the pergola at one end of her terrace, and at the other end she installed a group of musicians - two youths and a dark, lovely girl — whom she had hired for the evening. Inside, her study was almost untouched, but the salotto had been rearranged to allow for a long table where the supper was served – ‘a lavish supper’, as I shamelessly described it to Norah in a letter, with so many dishes of rice and lobster and chicken, of shrimp and octopus, eggplant and squash, and above all of sweets: zuppa inglese in a white dish, tiny cakes sugared in green or pink; and ices in the form of fruits delivered that afternoon by Caflisch in a tub of dry ice, each with its strong or delicate colouring, its bloom of frost that dissolved to a gloss at soon as the platter was set on the table.
The women were all like that – like smooth, cool fruit – that evening. Dresses then were full-skirted and came below the knee, but the impression was all of lightly drawn forms and clear colours. I remember the shining hair, drawn back or falling forward over summer-coloured skin, the slender shoulders and wrists, and slim brown legs; and the cat crouching rodent-like under a sofa, fiercely watching. Of the men, all were personable, confident, in the way of Italian men; each one interesting to himself. None was of Gianni’s age, though none was very young. Several couples – the majority perhaps – were married; but the atmosphere was one of courtship.
Gioconda, a little nervous, came among us in a dress the colour of poppies, with a narrow crimson ribbon threading the coils of her hair. The summer night, the house, the antiquated music, all increased the untopicality that attended the events of Naples – the sense that this might be any year, any era, and that only the season was essential.
One particular thing remains with me of that evening. Late, we went outside to dance. The terrace was cleared of its usual furniture, but along the sides a few low tables and rattan chairs had been set. The orchestra, which until then had played ‘airs’ — the music of old songs, most of them Neapolitan – as a background to our talking and eating, changed character. The beautiful girl with the guitar had been to Brazil, it turned out, and had brought back music to dance to; and over Gioconda’s terrace the couples circled and parted, then drew together, sprang forward or retreated, with steps of such calculated vitality, such urgent hesitation, that the wild music seemed at times almost formal and part of some ritual long-determined, much rehearsed.
What I particularly remember is this. Many of the women had taken off their sandals, kicking them away to the edge of the terrace, and were dancing on bare brown feet — this and the savage reverberations of the music contrasting violently with the smooth lips and elegant dresses, arched eyebrows and immaculate hair. As we danced, a glass was swept from one of the little tables, by the swirl of a skirt or a shawl, and smashed on the tiles, the fragments going everywhere, indistinguishable from the coloured tesselations. No one stopped. No one even looked down. The dancers spun back and forth under the lanterns and the bare feet went flying in and out among the spikes of glass. It was only when the musicians paused that Tosca came out with a brush and swept the pieces away. I don’t think that anyone was hurt; yet the incident, with its sensation, though unexperienced, of glass biting through flesh, in retrospect dominates that party of Gioconda’s; and the memory is tinged with horror.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
One last time we met by chance, Justin and I, on a hot Saturday afternoon of July, when I was on my way up Via Duomo. Justin was coming down, on foot, but he turned back to walk with me. And I was going to see Gioconda.
‘I’ve been in a museum. This place here.’ He took my arm, but released it because of the heat. ‘Armaments and porcelain, the bull-and-china shop. Dreary, as a matter of fact – everything good was lost in the war or has gone somewhere else. Even the palazzo is a reconstruction.’ In passing he thumped his fist on the cliff of rusticated stone as if to expose its essential flimsiness.
We strolled up the hot street, he in no hurry because he was at a loose end, morose, and glad to have run into me. I hanging back because I was undecided whether or not to take him with me to see Gioconda. We passed shop after little shop of wedding dresses, the mannequins with their over-optimistic post-war faces and their bodies tautly glazed in cheap satin, stiffly winged with tulle, attended by trappings for bridesmaids, mountainous hats for mothers-in-law.
Justin was enchanted with the windows. ‘This is a plot. You lured me here.’ He began to sing – getting approval from the passers-by. ‘Jenny me dear,’ he said. ‘Let’s buy you an outfit and marry you off. But to whom?’
‘Why am I always the bridesmaid,
Never the blushing bride?
Ding, dong, wedding bells
Only ring for other girls —’
‘Look,’ I said.
‘Always ordering me to look or listen. Influence of the Italian language – “Guarda”, “senti” — assuming you’d address me familiarly, which is doubtful.’
‘Look. Listen. Come with me. I’m turning in here, at San Biagio.’
‘Oh. Your friend.’ He looked into another wedding window. ‘These shops – it’s all like a photograph by Man Ray.’
Now that he hesitated, I pressed him. ‘Come on.’
‘All right,’ he said, and we entered San Biagio dei Librai. ‘But I preferred her as a legend.’
It went as badly as it was bound to do, I was too anxious that they should get on with one another, I wanted them to show to advantage for my sake. But Gioconda was having one of her untidy days, with her hair straggling down uncombed; she was wearing an unbecoming striped dress, and sandals with broken straps. She lit cigarette after cigarette, narrowing her eyes against the smoke in a fiendish grimace I had never seen before. Justin was colourless, incurious, monosyllabic – the very picture of scepticism fully confirmed. I wanted to prompt them, to say to her, ‘Go on, be beautiful, be original, as I described you’, or to him, ‘Be witty, be charming’, as they sat being disobligingly dull. The apartment had never looked so decrepit to me, and as Justin’s eyes passed over threadbare rugs and cushions, and rested on the water-colour of Prcida in 1902, everything temporarily lost colour and character, even Gaetano’s marguerites. When at last we came out of the palazzo and set off in the direction of the Gesù Nuovo, the street itself seemed excruciatingly squalid, and nothing more.
‘Oh my God,’ said Justin, glancing into a soiled courtyard.
I told him, ‘It’s not all neglect. Some of it’s the war, still. The bombardment.’
He smiled. ‘Naples always looks as if it had just been under bombardment.’
We walked on, not speaking, just as on the winter evening when we had gone together to San Gregorio Armeno; and I thought
how little these passing months had added to our intimacy. It was as if we had known each other since childhood and had nothing left to disclose. Carried along in the early evening crowd, or pushing our way against it, we reached an opening in the street, near the church of Sant’ Angelo a Nilo, where there was, opposite the monument to the Alexandrians, a stand that sold cool drinks. The stand, like a thousand others in Naples, was decorated with swags of immense lemons and oranges, and with the tapering fronds of their leaves. On its counter, crescents of coconut floated in bowls of water, and around its base stood classical amphorae of terracotta, some of them unmarked, some of them inscribed with serpentine designs in red or black – amphorae that in the past carried miraculous, ironbearing ‘acqua ferrata’, and now hold mere water for the drinks pressed from the overhanging fruit.
‘Jenny.’ Justin took my hand and led me across in front of a fast car. ‘Have some lemonade.’ We lent on the counter. ‘Why all these amphorae, I wonder? Why not a tank of some kind?’ He asked the plump girl who was squeezing the lemons, and she told him, There’s nothing like it, the way it keeps the water cool.
She said, ‘We call them “e’mmummarelle”.’
‘Think of that,’ said Justin to me. ‘Reflect a little, Jenny, on the origins of such a word.’
The girl was rosy, dressed in pink – immaculate, she appeared to me, after slatternly Gioconda – and her arm, as it rose lightly up and moved powerfully down to crush the fruit on the small machine she used, was itself like some fascinating piece of equipment, smooth, unerring, its manipulations perfectly meshed: something that might have won an award for functional design.
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