‘In the -’ I remembered Gioconda’s letter in the drawer by the bed. ‘On the desk in the living-room.’
I heard him on the telephone, using the precise, practised language that Italians have developed for making arrangements. I could see him reflected in the open glass door, lying back on my unmade bed, making ironic gestures of exasperation or inquiry with his free hand, which he then placed over the mouthpiece. ‘Which class?’
‘First class,’ I called back. ‘They’ll send me first class.’
‘Oh the good old taxpayer.’ In saying this he sounded quite like Justin. He sat up and started scribbling on the piece of paper. I could hear him repeating dates, rejecting them, getting others, reciting ports and prices. Finally he hung up and came back to me on the terrace.
‘All right.’ He sat down and flattened the paper on his knee. ‘From Genoa, let’s say, beginning of November. The others are too soon or too late.’ He reeled them off to me, each complete with its complications.
‘Gianni, it’s insane to go from here to Genoa. To go away from Naples in order to take a ship?’
‘I will take you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. I will take you there, and I’ll go on to Nice.’ He waited for me to speak, then continued. ‘It’s a bit odd – it’s extremely odd – but the whole thing’s been odd. Unless that seems too odd to you.’
I shook my head. I thought of Justin saying, ‘That is love. You must believe me, Jenny.’ Mainly I was struck by the luxury of having things taken out of my hands. I said again, ‘Genoa, though. When I’m here, at Naples.’
‘It’s much better. Listen — leaving here, after all that has happened to you – you’ll feel it less this way. Oh Jenny, a ship from Naples for America – have you ever seen that? These people, so sentimental that they cry when a train is going fifty kilometres, can you imagine?- Oh God, all those cheap green trunks. Even if you could stand it, I couldn’t.’ Tears of the old kind rushed to Gianni’s eyes. ‘No, just take it from me. Genoa will be best. Unless you want to sail from England.’ I shook my head again. ‘What about your family? Don’t they interest themselves in the form your life takes? Aren’t they worried about you?’
‘They worry about themselves. That is their thing, you see; what they do best.’
‘It’s not really something that can be done well,’ Gianni said. ‘The other possibility would be – you could stay on here. They would give you something else to do, other work.’
‘Gianni,’ said I. ‘I will tell you something about my family.’ He thought we had disposed of my relatives, and his face recast itself for boredom. ‘Which will explain why I don’t stay on here.’ I paused, at some mental intersection where many routes converged. ‘There was a time when I undertook to supply what was lacking in my brother’s marriage. Though his wife did not know she was encouraging me to do this, it was something that, with a little thought, she might have known. Even after discovering it there too I might have stayed on, shifting the position a little, doing the same things differently, but for her intention to use me further – as a foil for her magnanimity. I was to be an object of forgiveness and understanding for the term of my natural life. Again, she did not know that she was doing this; again, she should have known it.’ Gianni made a face, as if this were asking for the moon. ‘I’m telling you this so you will know why I don’t stay here and wait for Gioconda. Here too, some things have been the same. The difference is that I care about Gioconda, and could not bear the rest of our friendship to be a mutual demonstration of largeness of heart. It’s too soon for us to be together again. What with one thing and another.’
Gianni smiled. ‘Am I the one thing or the other?’ But he nodded. It was all obvious to him, and I think the only thing that baffled him was why anyone should have wasted words on it. After a while he said, ‘America. That’s a fascinating country,’ as if he had never uttered a word against it. He talked about the trip to Genoa, about my lease, about my luggage. He went inside again and telephoned to Bindi, and came back to me. If we went by train he could have the car waiting for him when we got to Genoa. We might stop at Florence, since he had business to do there, and I had never seen it.
I wondered what Bindi was making of all this. To him, no doubt, it took its place at once among other, not outwardly dissimilar incidents. Viewing it from experience, he quite possibly foresaw the course and conclusion of it all; was already in possession of knowledge that we would only acquire in retrospect. Trapped in the events, we must live through them in order to learn the outcome.
When I began to gather the dishes together on the tray Gianni patted me and said, ‘There. You must admit old John does have a good idea once in a while.’
‘I love old John,’ I said, and laughed, and stuffed into my mouth the last piece of bread, which I had kept my eye on all this time.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As you go north from Naples on the train you pass for a mile or two through lines of poplars that have been netted together by screens of vines. The spaces between the trees are closed by broad, sagging spans of the vineleaves, thick as a wall, interrupted only where the train passes among them as if through a series of parted curtains. The trees are so tall, the vines so dense, they look as if they have been cultivated for centuries. Going to Rome I had always watched for them after the stop at Pozzuoli; and, returning, they were the true outskirts of Naples. Now I pointed them out to Gianni as we sat opposite one another in a new fast train. The poplars were losing lemon-coloured leaves that drifted about them in the wind of that grey day, and the fabric of vines admitted light like a worn cloth.
‘I forgot they would be bare.’
‘They’re almost lovelier this way. A web, an anatomy. You can see how it all works.’
I didn’t like it so much though – the garlands slipping from the trees and the cord-like branches of the vines exposed – and regretted the fantastic barriers of green.
‘This train,’ said Gianni as we swished and swayed. ‘It’s acting so efficient that I’m afraid it’s going to break down.’ But the train was supposed to take us to Florence in record time, and ultimately did so. Gianni was to see a colleague at Florence; and we were to stay there overnight and go on to Genoa by rail. I had let myself be consigned and re-consigned, agreeing to all his proposals, relieved to have proposals made. As Gioconda had said of him, ‘He thought of everything.’ It was even Gianni’s idea that Serafina should take on the Colonel — who was remaining at Naples to hold, inevitably, the fort.
On our last evening in Naples, Gianni, who had come from Rome to fetch me, had found me sticking labels on my luggage, and he took one from me and pretended to paste it across my forehead.
‘That’s exactly how I feel,’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t for you,’ I told him now, in the train. He looked anxious. ‘I mean, you’ve done everything. You’ve thought of everything.’
‘Oh – women are hopeless at arranging journeys.’ I thought of Gioconda missing the plane at Malta, and knew he was thinking of it too. ‘Paresse mental,’ he said.
At first, in the train, he kept talking to diminish the sense of departure. When we had gone some miles, had passed the fields of poplars, he sat back looking pleased with himself and with me, in the way that a doctor attending to a wound will keep you diverted until the moment when he can surprise you by saying, ‘There now, it’s all over,’ and show you the sealed or bound cicatrice, or the thorn he has extracted. So did Gianni try to distract my attention from the city that was now to have part of my attention always.
Grief would not quicken in me: I was indolent, replete. There was too much to take in, too many items to accommodate from a future that already suggested itself and impinged on the present. From too few clues I had to imagine another setting. The city of Washington was an enigma when seen on a map. It had been far easier to picture oneself, even if inaccurately, in Naples before leaving England: ‘H’ Street is more difficult to conjure
up in fancy than San Biagio dei Librai.
I said, ‘I remembered that I do know someone in Washington. There’s a cousin of my sister-in-law’s stationed there – a minor diplomat.’
Gianni said, ‘All diplomats are minor.’
I took up a newspaper that Gianni had bought at the station. There was a broad headline: Russia had put a dog into space. ‘Good lord,’ I said to Gianni. ‘Have you seen the news?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I meant to tell you. Bergman is divorcing Rossellini at last.’
I watched the strip of the south being drawn past our window, but its atmosphere was elusive now, so pressing was the intrusion of future into all my thoughts – the new world with its resourcefulness, its rectangles, its sexless news from outer space. I pictured the map of North America and sought to make a country of it, hewing out state after state. The train rushed along the foot of a stony hill, and on its other side we glimpsed ruins, a castle, white walls, and the sea.
I stood up to look. ‘A moulder’d citadel on the coast. An olive-hoary cape in ocean.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s Tennyson.’ I thought, It will be something to get my language back.
‘You’ll miss poetry. There’s not much of that in America.’ Gianni stroked my arm, looking up at me, then out of the window. ‘It won’t be like this, over there.’
‘I have so many reasons to go there.’
He nodded. ‘There are also the reasons you don’t yet know about.’
At Rome, the only stop, a middle-aged woman got into our compartment. She was short, sturdy, a spinster, and dying to talk. Leaning forward, she alertly held herself in readiness to participate in whatever conversation Gianni and I might have between ourselves, her bright eyes darting from one of us to the other in the hope of a break in our silence – for, after initial civilities, we were quiet. When we flashed through a station she would tell us encouragingly, ‘Orte’, or ‘Orvieto’, and I would smile and thank her and feel more than ever disinclined to talk. Somewhere near Chiusi her disappointment in us became conclusive, and she left us for another compartment – Gianni lifting down her suitcase from the rack and both of us, so to speak, wishing her better luck with our smiles and our farewells.
Gianni put his feet up again on the seat opposite, alongside the folds of my dress. ‘That woman was like a tinder box. One careless spark, and we’d have had a conflagration.’
I said. ‘We’ve been so private together. We’re not used to being out and about.’ Everything between Gianni and me, until that morning, had taken place within my few rooms. Even the limitless prospect from those rooms opening on to the life of the bay had nurtured our apartness, as if we had been in a box at the opera.
I said this to Gianni, who agreed. ‘Italy’s all a bit like that – one is always looking at something, surveying the scene, you know. The fact is, it’s one of the last places left with a scene to be surveyed.’
We were silent again until, confirming what he had just said, he raised a hand to the window. ‘Now if you look — no, there, right there, keep watching, that’s it - – you’ll see the Duomo of Florence. We’re about to arrive.’
On a cold, brilliant November day, Gianni and I sat having lunch in the restaurant of our hotel at Florence. Over his fettuccine Gianni ground the pepper mill as if he were wringing someone’s neck. He had been doing business that morning at a villa out near San Casciano, and had come back full of fight. All the same, during those days the fight emptied out of him quickly: it was as if he allowed it an occasional token appearance to prove it hadn’t been sham before, or to show that he hadn’t faithlessly turned his back on all that. After a while he talked to me quite sensibly about his morning’s work, dramatizing nothing; and about the villa he had seen, with its great view of the Val di Pesa. His predicament had compelled him to some point of perspective, after all, and in a wild way I felt I had been good for him.
Gianni leant his elbow on the table and smoked. ‘It was in this room that I first saw my wife. Sitting over there, against that wall.’
I looked across to where a blonde girl sat with a crewcut boy on a banquette. It was the first time Gianni had spoken of his wife.
‘I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was with two men – her brother and a friend. She said later she had noticed me too — but I think that was just to be polite.’
How tortuous, these strands of love – winding about us, entangling, strangling, wiggling their way across the crimson carpet of a restaurant, climbing the very walls.
Because his marriage was indissoluble, I had got into the habit of imagining Gianni as being always married, married forever, and had never thought of a time when he and Gioconda were unattached; free, conceivably, had they met, to have married.
‘Gianni, what are they like, your children?’
‘Beautiful.’ It was the only completely secure utterance I ever heard from Gianni. It put him apart from the rest of us – Gioconda, Justin, me. It put us quite irrationally, to shame.
I said to him, ‘I don’t know why your having children should put us to shame, but it does. Why should it make such a difference? It’s nothing, after all, having a child – there’s no virtue in it, sometimes quite the contrary. Anyone can do it.’
Gianni nodded. ‘In my case,’ he observed, ‘I may truly say as the English do, that it was as easy as falling on to a log.’
Here was another piece of country Gioconda had traversed – these alien configurations of Gianni’s existence which had given her pain, to which she had all but reconciled herself.
Our thoughts were the same, for after a while Gianni remarked to me, ‘You know that I once met Gioconda’s father’ — saying ‘you know’ in the tone of one who is perfectly aware that you know nothing of the sort. ‘Rome,’ he went on, ‘the autumn of ’45. Piazza Campitelli. I ran into some friends, they were on their way to a restaurant and asked me to come along. They were dining with this man … I very nearly refused, history professors weren’t in my line. In fact history itself was none too popular with me at that moment. But he was quite a figure then — because of the war, you see – and I was at a loose end. So I went.’
Gioconda’s father had taken on such legendary quality for me that it was reassuring to find someone had actually set eyes on him.
‘Well I have to admit,’ said Gianni, acknowledging with those words his true rival, ‘that he was pretty impressive. A great head of white hair, a brown face all seamed by worrying about the right things. A splendid use of language, something one finds in certain Neapolitans, single words forming entire narrations, phrases deployed like colour in a painting …’ Gianni paused. ‘There was one thing, though.’ He waited for me to ask, then continued. ‘He had a set – it sounds unimportant - a whole set of medicines, little glass cylinders that he laid in a row by his plate, cutting them open one by one with a metal file he carried on him for the purpose. He made a ceremony of them, one felt one was being required to watch, it was an imposition. As I say, he was really rather terrific. I liked what he said, and the way he handled himself. But I couldn’t help thinking – someone who does that in public, all those bottles – there must be something wrong.’
‘Gioconda knows that you met him?’
‘It was how I first got in touch with her. I’d been told she didn’t answer letters, no telephone, all that. So I wrote to her saying I had known her father — I stretched it a bit, for it was only that once we’d met. When she replied I went to see her, and I told her how it was. Naturally,’ added Gianni, lowering his voice, ‘I didn’t say all that about the medicines.’ He paused again, struck by the novelty of his having spared Gioconda anything. ‘By then, he had got ill, had died, so the medicines were indicative in another way, sacrosanct.’
‘She never mentioned it to me – that you’d met him.’
Gianni made a face. ‘It was one of those things – you know that bothered her. Of course it does seem odd in retrospect, but she made too much of it,
wondering this, wondering that, until I made her drop it. It’s the South,’ said Gianni, as if Gioconda were no more to us than an example of regional idiosyncrasy. ‘They go in for that sort of thing.’
‘Jenny my dear,’ he said, touching my hand on the tablecloth. ‘It is all so long ago.’ But by this he meant to signify not the distance of these events, but the bond they had created.
The hotel concierge was getting us tickets for an early train to Genoa the following morning. One lunched on the train, which would reach Genoa that afternoon, and my ship sailed the same evening. It worried me, cutting things so fine.
‘What if something went wrong?’
‘What could possibly go wrong?’ Gianni looked at me wonderingly, as if nothing in his experience had ever given him cause to doubt the orderly progression of events, or the accomplishing of any projected undertaking.
We were in the train again, Gianni and I, waiting to leave Florence. This time it was I who had my feet up, and in Gianni’s lap, as he tried to warm them between his palms. The train had stood in the station yard all night, the coldest night of that year. The heating operated in conjunction with the engine, which had not yet started up. We huddled in our corners, I with my gloved hands thrust in my sleeves and my icy shoes discarded; Gianni with his blue scarf rising around his ears. From time to time one of us would lower a hand to the gelid radiator vents below the seats, hoping to intercept a first tremor of warmth. Gianni was silent, his eyes on the platform, his hands slowly kneading my frozen toes.
Eventually he took off his scarf and wrapped it round my feet. I shook my head at him, and with a grimace he reassured me – it was as though we feared that speaking might make us colder. The gesture with which he drew the scarf from his throat brought Gioconda again to my mind, and a day when I had come into the courtyard at San Biagio and found her kneeling over her cat, which lay stunned there having jumped from an upper window after a moth. Gioconda, as I watched, pulled off her cardigan to cover the animal, making a soft place for its head with a folded sleeve. This pelican-like instinct – for the cat had no need of covering that warm day – to tear something from oneself in order to palliate the emergency of another creature is so strong as to be a primitive manifestation, rather than a refinement, of human sympathy. Perhaps that is why Saint Martin only offered half of his cloak to the beggar.
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