The American Read online

  I grin, so he is assured I do not seek to slight him. He shrugs and reaches for a peach. There are five left in the wooden bowl.

  He peels his peach. I eat mine in silence.

  ‘How can you live here in Italy,’ he asks as his peach stone hits the wall and drops to the marigolds, ‘with history around you, crowding in on you, and treat it with such disdain?’

  I look around his private garden. The shutters on the building beyond the peach tree are like eyelids shut demurely in case they should see something embarrassing in the windows of Father Benedetto’s house—like the priest in his bathtub.

  ‘History? All around me? There are ruins and ancient buildings, yes. But history? With a capital H? History, I maintain, is a falsehood. Real history is the commonplace, unrecorded. We speak of the history of Rome with the eloquence of grandeur but most Romans did not know of it or want to know it. What did the slave or the shopkeeper know of Cicero, or Virgil, the Sabines or the magics of Sirmio? Nothing. History was for them half-registered fragments about geese saving a city or Caligula eating his unborn child. History was an old man mumbling in his cups. They had no time for history when a clipped coin was worth less by the week, their taxes rose by the month, the price of their flour rocketed and hot weather frayed their tempers.’

  ‘Men like to be remembered . . .’ Father Benedetto begins.

  ‘So legend might build them into someone grander,’ I interrupt.

  ‘Do you not want to make your mark, my son?’

  He calls me that when he wants to annoy me. I am not his son, nor a child of his church. Not any longer.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I admit, smiling. ‘But whatever I do shall be irrefutable. Not open to misinterpretation.’

  His glass is empty and he reaches for the bottle.

  ‘So you live for the future?’

  ‘Yes.’ I am emphatic. ‘I live for the future.’

  ‘And what is the future but History yet to arrive?’

  His eyebrows rise questioningly and he gives my glass a wink.

  ‘No, no more. Thank you. I must be going. It is late and I have some preliminary sketches to complete.’

  ‘Art?’ Father Benedetto exclaims. ‘That is irrefutable. Your signature on a unique painting.’

  ‘One can put one’s signature on more than paper,’ I reply. ‘One can write in the sky.’

  He laughs and I bid him farewell.

  ‘You should come to Mass,’ he says, quietly.

  ‘God is history. I have no use for him.’ This, I realise, may hurt the priest, so I add, ‘If he exists I am sure he has no use for me.’

  ‘There you are wrong. Our Lord has a use for everyone.’

  Father Benedetto does not know me, though he thinks he does. If he did know me, he would most certainly readjust his judgment. But then, just maybe—it would be a supreme irony worthy of God—he is correct.

  “Signor Farfalla! Signore! La posta!”

  Signora Prasca calls every morning from the fountain in the courtyard below. It is her ritual. It is a sign of being old, maintaining a routine. My routine, however, is temporary. I do not yet have the luxury afforded those of my age of being able to set my life to a series of conformities.

  ‘Thank you!’

  Every weekday, when there is mail for me, is identical. She calls in Italian, I reply in English, she invariably responding, ‘Sulla balaustrata! La posta! Sulla balaustrata, signore!’

  When I come down a storey to lean over the edge of the third floor balcony, and peer down into the gloom of the courtyard into which the sun only strikes for an hour and half in the middle of the day in the middle of the year, I can see the letters balancing on the stone pillar at the foot of the banisters. She always stacks them with the largest letter on the bottom of the pile, the smallest on top. As the smallest is usually a postcard or a letter in a small envelope, it is inevitably the brightest, glimmering in the half-light like a coin or a religious medal cast optimistically down a well.

  Signor Farfalla, she calls me. So do the others in the neighbourhood. Luigi who owns the bar in the Piazza di S. Teresa. Alfonso in the garage. Clara the pretty one and Dindina the plain one. Galeazzo the bookshop owner. Father Benedetto. They do not know my real name, so they call me Mr. Butterfly. I like it.

  To the confusion of Signora Prasca, letters come addressed to me either as Mr. A. Clarke, Mr. A.E. Clarke or Mr. E. Clark. These are all aliases. Some even come addressed to M. Leclerc, others to Mr. Giddings. She does not question this and her gossip causes no conjecture. No suspicion is aroused, for this is Italy and people mind their own business, accustomed to the Byzantine intrigues of men who live alone.

  I send most of the mail: if I am away, I post an empty envelope or two to myself, or write out a postcard, disguising my hand, purporting to be from a relative. I have a fictitious favourite niece who addresses me as Uncle and signs herself Pet. I send off prepaid envelopes to life insurance companies, travel agents, time-share operators, trade magazines and other sources which generate junk mail: now I am bombarded with colourful trash informing me I may have won a cheap car, or a holiday in Florida, or a million lire per annum for life. To most people, this unsolicited garbage is a curse. To me it lends an air of perfection to the lie.

  Why Mr. Butterfly? It is simple. I paint them. They think this is how I make my money, painting butterflies’ portraits.

  It is a most efficient cover. The countryside around the town, as yet unadulterated by agro-chemicals, unharmed by the clumsy footsteps of men, abounds with butterflies. Some are the minuscule blues: to study them delights me, to paint their portraits enthrals me. They seldom have a wingspan further across than a penny. Their colours iridesce, fade from tone to tone, from bright summer sky blue to washed dawn blue in just a few millimetres. They have tiny dots upon them, black and white rims, and the trailing edges of their hind wings have near-microscopic tails pricking out like tiny thorns. To paint one of these creatures successfully is a major achievement, a triumph of detail. And I live by detail, by minute particulars. Without such ardent attention to detail, I would be dead.

  To further the efficacy of my deceit, I have allayed any possible suspicion by explaining to Signora Prasca that Leclerc is French for Clark (with or without an e) and Giddings is the name under which I paint—a pseudonym to scrawl upon my pictures.

  To aid this misconception, I once hinted that artists often use a fake name to protect their privacy: they cannot, I explain, be forever hampered by intrusion. It destroys the concentration, decelerates output, and galleries and printers, editors and authors, demand deadlines.

  Since then, I am sometimes asked if I am working on a new book.

  I shrug and say, ‘No, I am building up a stock of pictures. Against a rainy day. A few go to galleries,’ I say. They are bought, I suggest, by collectors of miniatures, or entomologists.

  One day, I received a letter posted in a South American republic. It bore postage stamps of gaudy tropical butterflies, those flashy stamps so loved by dictators. The colours of the insects were too vivid to be real, too garish to be believable, bright as the rows of self-appointed medals which are part of every generalissimo’s costume.

  ‘Ha!’ exclaimed Signora Prasca, knowingly. She waved her hand in the air.

  I smiled knowingly back at her and winked.

  They think I design postage stamps for banana republics. I leave them with this convenient illusion.

  For some men, France is the country of love, the women poutingly beautiful with eyes widely innocent with lust, lips which beg to kiss and press. The countryside is mellow—the rolling neolithic hills of the Dordogne, the rugged Pyrenees or the boggy marshes of the Camargue, it matters not where they travel. All are imbued with the aura of warm sun ripening the vine. The men see a vineyard and think only of lying in the sun with a bottle of Bordeaux and a girl who tastes of grapes. For women, French men are hand-kissers, the slight-bow-brigade, the charming conversationalists, the gentle seducers. How unlike
the Italians, they say. The Italian women have hairy armpits, smell of garlic and grow quickly fat on pasta: Italian men pinch arse on the buses of Rome and thrust too hard when making love. Such are the cries of xenophobia.

  For me, France is a country of provincial banality, a land where patriotism flowers only to hide the bloodied earth of revolution, where history was begun at the Bastille by a horde of peasants running amok with pitchforks, decapitating their betters because they were just that. Before the Revolution, the French insist in their clipped accent, with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders meant to disarm contradiction, there was only poverty and aristocracy. Now . . . the shoulders shrug again and a jutting chin points to the dubious grandeur of France. The truth is they have now a poverty of spirit and an aristocracy of politicians. Italy is different. Italy is romance.

  I like it here. The wine is good, the sun hot, the people accept their past and do not crow about it. The women are soft, slow lovers—at least, Clara is; Dindina is more anxious—and the men enjoy a good life. There is no poverty of the soul. Everyone is rich of spirit. The civil servants keep the streets clean, keep the traffic moving, keep the trains running and the water flowing in the taps. The carabinieri and the polizia fight the criminals, after a fashion, and the polizia stradale keeps the speed on the autostrada down. Taxes are collected with only a modicum of thoroughness. In the meantime, the people live, drink wine, earn money, spend money and let the world turn.

  Italy is the Land of Laissez-faire, a bucolic anarchy governed by wine and the connivances of various loves—of good food, of sex, of liberty, of devil-may-care, of take-it-or-leave-it—above all of a love of life. The national motto of Italy should be senza formalità or non interferenza.

  Let me tell you a tale. The authorities in Rome wanted to catch tax dodgers—not as in England where they seek out the meanest evader of pennies, hounding him until his dues are settled. No, they wanted only the Caesars of the State Swindlers, the Emperors of Eludance. To catch them they set no paltry traps in banks, no covert studies of stocks and shares transactions. They sent a team of men around the marinas and harbours of Italy checking on the registration of every yacht over twenty metres. There was a wonderful Mediterranean logic at work: under twenty metres, and the yacht was a rich man’s plaything; over, and it was a super-indulgence of the truly rich. They found one hundred and sixty seven yachts the owners of which were utterly unknown to the authorities—no tax records, no state benefit records, in some cases no birth certificates. Not even in Sicily. Not even in Sardinia.

  Did they find these men? Did they pay up the owed billions of illicit lire? Who can tell? It is just a fairy story.

  For me, no better place could exist. I could stay here forever, quite possibly, undiscovered like an Etruscan tomb disguised as a culvert on the side of the Via Appia. So long as I don’t buy a yacht over twenty metres long and keep it at Capri. No chance of that now. Besides, had I wanted such a toy, I should have bought it long ago.

  Today, the courtyard is as ever cool. It is like a vault the roof of which has caved in so the sky might peer down and bear witness to what little dramas are unfolding therein.

  Some say a nobleman was murdered by the fountain in the centre, that every year on the anniversary of his assassination, the water flows pink. Others tell me the courtyard was the scene of the murder of a Socialist in the Mussolini years. Whether the water is pink from blood, from the nobleman’s reputation (so they say) of always dressing in the pink of fashion or because the Socialist was only moderately leftist, I cannot tell. Perhaps a saint lived here and they have all got it wrong. So much for history.

  The flagstones are buff-coloured as if worn from centuries of scrubbing and stoning. The fountain, which dribbles cooly through a necklace of pendant moss and algæ, the drips resonant in the cavern of the yard, is of marble shot through with black veins. It is as if the ageing building has contracted varicose veins in its heart. For the fountain is the heart of the building. Within it stands the figure of a girl bedecked in a toga and holding a clam shell from which the water falls, delivered by a two-and-a-quarter-millimetre diameter pipe made of bronze. This girl is not fashioned of marble but of alabaster. Looking at her, I wonder if it is the water or her skin which cools our building.

  Doorways face the fountain, slatted shutters look down upon it, balconies lean over it. On the hottest day, it keeps the building moist and cool, the drip-drip of water never ceasing, flowing through a nick cut in the marble on to the flags, disappearing down an iron grid from beneath which sprouts a frond of aquatic fern.

  In winter, with the mountains capped with snow, the alleyways of the town icy underfoot, the fountain tries to freeze. Yet it cannot. No matter how still and cold the air, no matter how long the icicles suspended from the maiden’s shell, the water still drips, drips, drips.

  No one turns the fountain on. There is no electric pump or similar device. The water seeps from deep in the earth as if the building were erected upon a wound in the soil.

  Beyond the fountain is the heavy wooden door leading into the alley, the vialetto. It is a narrow passageway through the buildings with two right angled corners in it. Once, it was a garden walk. Or so Signora Prasca claims. She would have it on the authority of her grandmother that the house was surrounded by gardens in the seventeenth century and that the alleyway follows the line of the walk through the arbour. Hence vialetto rather than vicolo or passaggio. I say it is bunkum. The buildings around are contemporary with this one. There were never any gardens in the old quarter, only courtyards where noblemen and Socialists were stabbed in the shadows.

  To one side of the fountain is the start of the steep stone steps which run up to the fourth floor where I live, one flight per side of the square court. They are worn in the centre. Signora Prasca walks at the sides, especially if it is raining and the steps are wet. A leaky gutter dribbles water on to the second flight. No one fixes it. I shall not. It is not my role to alter petty histories, to repair the guttering and cause the steps to last a hundred years more. That is what most Englishmen would do. I do not want them to think of me as necessarily English. I am concerned with greater affairs.

  At each storey there is a landing, a balcony open to the courtyard, the square of sky, but otherwise unseen by anyone save the inhabitants and their respective gods.

  The walls are painted the colour of café-au-lait, the finials of the columns of the balconies touched off in white distemper which is peeling. I am told the plaster cracks every winter with the first snow on the mountains, as reliable as the most expensive barometer. All the shutters are of varnished wood—beech, to judge by their colour. An unusual wood for shutters in Italy.

  I like the building. I was attracted to it as soon as I heard the fountain trickle and was told of the assassinations. It was appropriate. I had no option but to rent the fourth floor apartment on a long lease, six months’ rental paid in advance. I have always believed in fate. There is no such thing as coincidence. My customers will confirm this opinion.

  I have no truly close friends: such friends can be dangerous. They know too much, become too involved in one’s well-being, take too much of an interest in how one is, where one has been, where one is going. They are like wives but without the suspicion: still, they are curious, and curiosity I can do without. I cannot afford to take the risk. Instead, I have acquaintances. Some are closer than others and I allow them to look over the outer ramparts of my existence, yet none are what are generally termed close friends.

  They know me: more exactly, they know of me. A few know in which quarter of the town I live but none have entered my eyrie: entrance to my present abode is reserved only for a very select group of professional visitors.

  Several have approached to within a hundred metres and discovered me coming or going: I have greeted them with smiles and bonhomie, suggested it is time to quit work. The sun is high. A bottle of wine, perhaps? We have gone to the bar—the one in the Piazza di S. Teresa, or the other in the Piazza
Conca d’Oro, say—and I have talked of Polyommatus bellargus, P. anteros and P. dorylas and the delicate blue of their wings, of the latest government scandal from Rome or Milan, of the chamois-like abilities of my little Citroën on the mountain roads. I call the car il camoscio, to everyone’s humour. Only a foreigner, probably an Englishman and an eccentric, would give his automobile a name.

  Duilio is one of my acquaintances. He is, he announces with disarming modesty, a plumber: in truth, he is a wealthy entrepreneur of pipes and ducts. His company builds sewers, underground conduits, water catchment drains and, of late, has branched out into avalanche barriers. He is a merry man with a bacchanalian love of good wines. His wife, Francesca, is a jolly, rotund woman who never ceases to smile. She smiles in her sleep, Duilio claims and he winks obscenely to hint at the cause thereof.

  We met when first he came to survey the gutter. As a friend of a friend of Signora Prasca. It was hoped one of his men would see to the job in an off day, for cash. We fell to talking—Duilio speaks some English but better French—and went to the bar. The gutter was not repaired but no one seemed to care. Friendship can be forged over a handyman’s task, not broken by it. Then, some weeks later, I was invited to his house to try his wine. It was an honour.

  Duilio and Francesca have several homes: one by the sea, one in the mountains, an apartment in Rome for business and, perhaps, the dalliances with which Italian men fill their extramarital hours. Their mountain home is set in vineyards and apricot orchards about fifteen kilometres from the town, higher up the valley. It is just too high for olives, which is a shame: there are few greater luxuries in the world than lazing a long afternoon under the scant shade of an olive grove, the sunlight pricking through the branches and the roots of the trees digging into one’s daydreams like fingers into dough.

  The house is a three storey modern building built on the site of a Roman cistern, appropriate for a man who constructs drainage systems: Duilio laughs at this irony.