The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  The antiquity of the land where he was born gave Davide intense pleasure, it expanded the stretch of his memory far beyond the circumscribed round of his life. As a boy, he had liked to scrape around in the fields; he had eavesdropped when the whereabouts of discoveries were discussed, and walked with the farmers when they ploughed an old olive grove to turn it over to fruit trees. He and Tommaso had stumped and foraged, lit upon the occasional coin, too worn to be of value, the odd shard, or metallic fragment, until with experience they learned that not all finds were booty. But the dealers were alert to new traces, if only because a single coin – the bronze ears of barley on the local currency of Rubi, with Demeter’s garlanded head on the obverse – might lead, like a broken twig, a crackle of a dry leaf, to greater treasure; the boys could earn a lustrous fizzy drink from the new carbonator, or a cigarette in the café, with a promise to show the location of the trivial find.

  Davide had turned up a coin, one afternoon, when he was mooning around; it was a common enough type, the professor told him in the museum at Riba, where he took it for an opinion. ‘Keep it,’ he said, ‘it’s nice, but it’s not rare. It’ll remind you that Ninfania wasn’t always like this’ – and he waved at the window to the town outside, beyond his closed shutters. He came from the Po valley, but he had caught malaria during his stint in the south and had the southern malaria victim’s sallowness. His gaze took in nothing of the scene in the street below; it spoke only of the generic, accumulated ills of the Noonday of Italy, of violence and crime, poverty, disease, ignorance, and superstition. Davide was disappointed: he’d hoped to sell the coin for a lira or so. The professor, noting the youth’s failure to appreciate his find, told him with impatience to look at it more carefully. ‘You peasants understand nothing.’ He tutted, irritably, his dry tongue against his palate.

  ‘I am not a peasant,’ said Davide.

  The professor shrugged, casting an eye over Davide’s good jacket, to inform him that his information was unnecessary. Davide paused. ‘I’m a Greek,’ he said. ‘Unlike Your Excellency. Men from the north do not share our ancestry.’

  The older man chuckled. ‘Good,’ he said. And he held his palm over Davide’s hand for a fraction as he returned the coin.

  ‘My name is Pittagora,’ Davide continued; always quick to redden, he felt the blood surge in his face.

  ‘And would you believe me, young man, if I told you I descended from the Emperor Carlo Quinto?’ The tone was teasing, and his head, with its odd parchment look, the hair dull from living under a fedora, the skin dun from fever and staying within walls to keep cool, nodded at Davide, to humour him. ‘Charles the Fifth, who was born less than a thousand years ago? … Come now, it’s improbable, isn’t it?’

  Davide drooped his head, looked at the coin, insisted. ‘That is our name, and has always been our name.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  On one side of the coin, there was an image of an ear of barley, plump kernels sprouting whiskers, each one finely raised in relief-Ninfania had been arable before, not pastureland and orchards only, as today, but covered in fields of grain, a cereal basket of the ancient world, an Egypt. But Hannibal’s wars with Rome brought down the devastating armies of the empire, and what war had not spoiled, the mosquito finished off. For centuries, there had not been enough grain in the province to feed its people; then the speculators from the north and the west had overrun the plains and seized the common pastureland to make their profits in cereals; the great erratic storms of the Ninfanian hinterland burst over the thin fields and washed away the soil, turning the sheep runs of centuries into enclosed wasteland.

  Davide ran his finger over the knubbled ear, and it began to seem to him a charm to bring good luck, prosperity, the ease he hoped to find, if only he could leave for America. He turned the coin over. The other side showed the same ear of barley, in reverse, a template to cast the image; if you pressed candle wax into this side of the coin, you would get an impression of the other face.

  The coin looked as if the minter struck it on a single die, punching the image in the metal in repoussé, so hard that the inverted ear on the reverse would appear on the other side, and could be read the right way round in shallow relief when the coin was turned over. But the professor showed Davide that the coin was too thick to receive the impress all the way through as goldleaf does, that the engravers had struck both sides independently, with two different dies. Why, he could not say. The method was called inchuse, enclosed, sealed. The coin was both medal and seal. ‘It’s unusual, rather than beautiful,’ he said. ‘An enigma.’

  The museum man placed his fingertips together and nodded at Davide as he took trouble to explain, and the colour flowed back from Davide’s cheeks and he slipped the coin into his pocket, with its two faces that were neither mirror images of one another, nor replicas, but a false double, an inexact repeat.

  Corn once grew here, he thought, but all we have left is the memory of it, and we cast an image from that memory. But this can only ever be an after-image, a look-alike, inside out.

  He kept it for a talisman, taking it with him in his pocket when he married Maria Filippa, and on the boat when they crossed the ocean to New York.

  It was hard to recognise Ninfania’s antique greatness now. How deep the corruption had travelled since then, Davide thought, and sighed. Yet, when one of the local farmers, grinding the bony soil of a resisting field, felt the earth give way and drop him into a narrow grave, and discovered there a store of gravegoods disposed around the human remains, the interval of the centuries seemed to close. The seed corn left to accompany the dead could sprout again – as a boy, he had heard reports of successful experiments on damp rags in the dark – the coins for the ferryman, fallen among the collapsed lips and tongueless jawbones of the discovered dead, could be buffed and brightened until the curls in the hair of Demeter, caught up in rich ropes under a garland of corn floating with ribbons, gleamed glossily again, and the Cupid on Riba’s emblematic ship, facing out to sea with his drawn bow over the whorl of the prow, stood out in silver against the duller ground. When a vase emerged unbroken – especially the tall storage amphorae for oil and water–when its millennia-old husk of mud and chalk was scraped away, it appeared to Davide like a living body released from the torpor of an unnatural sleep, from a kind of illness, its rounded shape tender, pointing a foot, like an absorbed peg-doll, its intactness a triumphant resurrection.

  The matrons with their marked brows, hooped earrings and prominent noses had hardly altered, though the scarlet and mulberry cloaks painted in the tombs had vanished from all but the youngest and luckiest women among Davide’s kin, for a single death in the family charred them all, turning young and old into sable-winged crow-women – in churches, at the threshing, at the well, as if flocking in the turned field. Davide recognised his own people in the mourners of the tomb wall-paintings, women who strode forward in sandals, arms linked in a chorus line to send off the dead with exuberant and noisy rites. Keening by the side of the corpse, the professional nacarena still howled her tale of the deceased, spinning it out from scraps of information the family had told her, and then delivering it bound and knotted into a customary warp of praise and lamentation with the reassuring catch-phrases that were always used, to level the pleasant and the unpleasant, the cherished and the despised into a democracy of death, making each death absolutely regrettable, knitting up into the web of the dirge the separate individuals of the community. The mourner’s story patterned the life of the deceased so that grudges and shortcomings were obliterated by the larger, traditional design. This sound, tautening to the pitch of a screech, interrupted Davide’s growing up; it had frightened children like him as they played in the streets, but sent a shiver through them that also excited them. ‘A death! A death!’ Or rather, in the preferred euphemism, ‘A vanishing! A vanishing!’ they exclaimed, hearing the nacarena’s voice pour through the pulled blinds from the house marked with black crosses and hung with newly dyed banners of
death; women’s voices, giving birth to the eternal soul, were louder than the priest’s obsequies, the relatives’ rosaries, and the lullabies they sang after the first birth, the entry into the mortal transit.

  Still men did not know what women did when they were alone together. The villa with its ceremonial painted chamber, uncovered by chance a quarter of a century ago on the Marchese’s lands, had been walled up again. It had made the Marchese a small fortune when he sold it to the deputy of the English connoisseur in Naples who was going to ship it away in boxes; it was being stripped from the walls when the Government heard of it and came and sealed up the villa again, but not before one of the intermediaries had sliced enough off the top of the deal to pay his passage to America, promising to send after him for his family. He sent word, but never sent for them.

  This was a land where the pursuit of illusion possessed the artists; where awkward tries at perspective were made, and revellers in scenes of feasting were shown sitting up on one elbow, on daybeds with legs disposed for the first time in recession. Zeuxis’s painted vine provoked the wonder and the applause of all his audience when it attracted birds to peck at the plump fruit. His colleagues struggled to outdo him in lifelikeness, in art that was a pure conjuring trick on the sense of sight. How generous he was to acknowledge his own defeat, when he asked one of his rivals – Parrhasius – to draw back the curtain and unveil the portrait underneath, and was told by the artist that the curtain itself was painted.

  With such Daedalian skills, Davide’s forebears committed themselves to fabrication. In Crotone, the former Croton, one of the many rich colonies on the coast to the south, on the Ionian sea to the south of Rupe, Zeuxis painted his most famous commission, for the sanctuary of Hera on the promontory. He made a likeness of Helen of Troy which convinced all who came to sacrifice there that the Trojan War had been well fought; and for this famous portrait, Zeuxis had lined up the young women of Croton, and taking an ear from one, the set of chin from another, the legs, the arms and stomach and so forth of others, he had assembled his divine beauty. Though he deceived the beholder into taking his artifice for reality, Zeuxis practised an idealist art. Not for him the cynical moralities of Pauson, who presented humanity worse than it is, or the fidelity of the painter Dionysus to observable particularity: he was beauty’s slave, and beauty is made, he knew, not found. Beauty does not lie in our path, thought Davide, as he walked on; it is up to us to make it, to find the harmonious balance, and the pleasant story. And it is hard work. An aria should sound exactly as the word describes, as light and inevitable as the air itself; but to achieve that! No, happenstance will never make for beauty. He shook his head and resolved, reality will never do.

  Although the story of Croton’s lost Helen admitted that no single girl of the southern peninsula in those days was entirely beautiful enough, it was still recalled by the attending spectators at the Sunday promenade, by the old men and women no longer in the marriage stakes, by the servants whom custom forbade from parading – as if the cost of new or spruced-up clothes did not make it impossible for them to take part anyway. The story was an ancient warrant that the girls of those parts were the beauties of their day, that there’d been no break with the proud Greek tradition. ‘Ah! Caterina! As beautiful as Crotone’s Helen!’ the old men nodded in the summers, when his youngest sister would pass by the terrace of the circolo, the club, on her way to fetch something Nunzia was having cooked at the baker’s oven.

  But Davide, as he grew up, saw the break as irreparable, and struggled not to see it. It wasn’t to do with the women, they still resembled their ancestors well enough. No, he knew the loss was deeper.

  As he got older, his impatience, with Rupe and its littleness, its brutality, its poverty, could not be appeased; you could see for miles around from its position, and you could see nothing. Even the heyday of tomb-robbing was over; his scavenging couldn’t be called by such a piratical name and the local labourers could not be inspired to sift the soil scrupulously when they could break it with a pickaxe so much faster, and the mounted overseers might take a crack at them with a rifle butt if they dawdled. Besides, hearing of cases brought by the state against thieves who passed their finds to dealers on the black market and failed to report to the Commission on Antiquities ended his youthful enthusiasm for archaeology: Davide was law-abiding by temperament. The hunters had forfeited their title to the past, and now they were bringing to its remains less care than their wives and mothers took with rinsing, smoothing, and conserving for re-use scraps of brown paper or lengths of string.

  He had grown to loathe the laying waste of his homeland, the ruffians of the Work and Freedom brigades, the landowners in their carriages, the tenant farmers on short leases, and the dayworkers they beat and drove likewise. The beasts were beaten too, the soil was drained. The violence droned in the air, like an airborne illness, its eruptions did not produce conclusions, only more sickness. He had longed to get away.

  He left for America in 1913. He had studied law at the university in Riba, but did not wait to take his degree; he had no money except Maria Filippa’s dowry. He wanted to set up a new enterprise in New York, a law firm advising immigrants. But Davide was not made of the stuff of American uncles. The headaches, which in Italy had been tolerable when eased by a siesta or a day or two’s absence from the office, or the circolo, where he picked up most of his cases, had become unbearable in New York. The city’s manners were too fast, its rhythm too syncopated. The swelter in summer squeezed on the planes of his skull like a knight’s helmet overheating in the sun, before the Saracens taught the Christians to wear veils, and the winds of winter bit into his brows like braces screwed onto scaffolding to keep it rigid, and set pain skirling through his body. For long bouts he had lain in the dark, stuffing his mouth to prevent himself screaming. He had longed to come back.

  Once home again in Ninfania, his health improved. The family moved to Riba, to an apartment in the palazzo Papà San had bought in the new town, the building Davide now looked after for him. In Riba, the law was keeping pace with the increasing size and gradually growing prosperity of the town. The blue vein in Davide’s temple beside the scar where the bullet had entered throbbed and swelled to give warning when one of his bone crunchers was on its way; lying quietly stretched out in the shuttered bedroom of their apartment, he was able to defend himself, as it readied to pounce, testing its grip on his nerves as a cat tests its claws on the obliging furniture; he could slip under the velvet cloth of numb unconsciousness, without plunging his family into squalor and even starvation and illness as he had risked doing – as he had done – on Crosby Street near the Bend in Little Italy.

  9

  From The Duel

  RUPE, 1912

  IT WAS NOT until the following Pentecost, in early summer, that Rosalba heard Tommaso Talvi had at last come back. That Saturday evening she joined the passeggiata, with her hair pulled flat against her skull to smooth its crinkles and bring out its sheen, and the gold medallion of the Madonna she had received for her first communion hanging bright against the new pale shawl she had crocheted herself. But as she perambulated the piazza under the eyes of the card-players and the widows in the shadowy doorways of the houses bordering the conventional route at this hour, she caught no sight of him. She tried to see if he were concealed among the group hanging around near the circolo, but without lifting her eyes to scan them like a strumpet. Keeping her glance averted, her smile modest, she practised the art of scrutinising without seeming to look. Twice, with a thump, she spotted him, in the set of a man’s shoulders, the tilt of a head, a patch of uniform, then found it was someone else. She began to be uncertain whether she would be able to recognise him; she tried out her set of mental snapshots, but they were dim and amorphous, as if they’d rubbed in the wallet of her fantasy for too long. Her step, which had begun in unaccustomed buoyancy, began to shrink; soon, she was trudging round and round with dispirited tread, and her hanging head became so weary that her neighbou
r, Elisabetta, holding her by the arm, dug her elbow into Rosalba’s ribs to bring her to.

  Rosalba tried to respond, turning to her friend and patting down a curl or two round her face; then she adjusted the combs which held her friend’s hair behind her ears, where she wore small gold hoops. Like Rosalba’s medallion, they formed part of her dowry.

  When Rosa had completed her gentle grooming, they resumed their circling of the square, hand in hand; and Tommaso came out of the café where he had bought Caterina and Franco ice cream, and lit a cigarette and puffed smoke into the evening sunlight.

  She had never seen anything so accomplished as the movements he made, or so perfect as the oval of his lips as he exhaled. Her fingers tightened in Elisabetta’s hand. Elisabetta was asking her something; it was about the fireworks last year in the city, off the old harbour wall where they had reflected in the sea. Would they be able to go this year again, as she hoped? She had liked especially the tableau of the Assumption, when the rockets launched the Madonna into heaven. On Elisabetta’s other side, another friend interrupted with some news about the church funds. Rosalba paid no attention; she looked at Tommaso, and her gait grew sprightly again, and she began organising her projected future, laying her plans.