The American Page 28

  ‘But it has not been dull with you, Clara.’

  Her shoulders shrug. The sweat starts its journey down her spine.

  ‘If love is dangerous for you, then you are afraid. Danger makes afraid.’

  I sit up next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. Her skin is hot.

  ‘Clara. This has nothing to do with you. I promise. You are sweet and very pretty and innocent . . .’

  ‘Innocent!’ She laughs ironically. ‘I am a lady of the Via Lampedusa.’

  ‘You are but a traveller through there. You are not Elena or Marine or Rachele. You are not Dindina just waiting for a better time to come along. You are there because . . .’

  ‘I know why. I need money for my studies.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Also, I need love.’

  For a moment, I think she means sex but then know this is not the case. She is a young woman who wants a man to love, to love her. The cruelty of fate has given her to me, an old man with a price upon his head and a shadow-dweller pacing in his footsteps.

  ‘You have love.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I love you, Clara.’

  I have not admitted this before: not to Ingrid, not to anyone, not even in order to get what I may have wanted. She is correct. I am afraid of love not only because it is a lowering of the defences, a risk to my security, but also because it places a certain moral obligation upon me, and I have never been one to accept any responsibility save that for myself and the efficiency of my work. I have, sitting in this paradise, to agree there is a point to Father Benedetto’s diatribe on love. He, too, is right. I need it after years of telling myself it was irrelevant. The irony of finding it now, when life is so uncertain, stabs into me.

  ‘And I love you, Edmundo.’

  I am aware that I have been manoeuvred on to heavy matters, and stand up, stretching. The sun seems to have shrunk me. As I flex myself, I feel my skin tighten like a jacket grown too small.

  From the back of the Citroën, I remove the rattan basket.

  ‘We can eat.’

  She tugs the blanket into the shade and I open the basket. There is not a lot of food within: some prosciutto, bread, olives. In the polystyrene vintner’s cool box is a bottle of Moët et Chandon and two dozen strawberries in an aluminium container. Beneath it is a small package wrapped in a plastic bag.

  ‘You have champagne!’

  I think of what Father Benedetto might say if he saw me sitting, stark naked by a beautiful young nude in the woods, with a French sparkling wine.

  She takes the bottle and peels the foil off, tossing it into the basket. Deftly, she untwists the wire and thumbs the cork out. It pops and soars away into the grass. The champagne runs out of the bottle and she holds it so the spillage trickles over her breasts. She sucks her breath in as the chill runs down her.

  I hand her the package. It is cold from resting next to the champagne and ice.

  ‘This is for you.’

  ‘What is this?’ she asks, intrigued and unfolding the plastic.

  ‘Your escape. No more Via Lampedusa.’

  She takes out the money and looks fixedly at it in her hand. It is the proceeds of the bank draft, a bundle of American bills tied round with rubber bands.

  ‘Twenty-five thousand US dollars. In hundreds.’

  Tears begin to form on her eyelashes. She places the money on the blanket, very carefully as if it were fragile, and turns to face me.

  ‘How can you have so much?’ she asks. ‘You are a poor man, a painter . . .’

  She needs an explanation but I do not feel I require to give her one.

  ‘Do not ask.’

  ‘Have you . . . ?’

  Her question is unformed, yet I know what she thinks.

  ‘No. It is not stolen. I have not robbed a bank. It was earned.’

  ‘But so much . . .’

  ‘Tell no one,’ I advise her. ‘If you put it in a bank, you will be taxed. People will know. Better to be silent and use it.’

  She nods. She is Italian. Such advice is a reminder, not an instruction. For her, this sum of money is a yacht over twenty metres long.

  The tears are slipping down her cheeks and her breath is coming in small jerks as if she has just run up from the lake. I realise she wears no make-up, is naturally quite exquisitely beautiful, and I am embarrassed by her beauty and crying.

  ‘There is no need for this.’

  I wipe away her tears with my finger, smudging them. Very slowly, she puts her hand to my face and cradles my jaw in her fingers. Her eyes are wet with more tears but her breathing is steadier. She leans forward and kisses me so lightly I hardly feel it. There is nothing she has to say to me and, besides, she has no words.

  Pouring the champagne into two plastic glasses, I give one to her, adding a strawberry to it. She sips it and the tears stop coming.

  ‘No more talk of love,’ I demand, quietly. ‘Just drink and enjoy the valley.’

  I wave my glass in the air and cover the whole of the valley with the motion. She looks down the meadow of flowers to the lake. The heron has returned to angle for the tiny fish, and the shadows under the trees are deepening as the afternoon progresses. I follow her gaze but my attention is taken by the pile of stones covered in ground creepers. I can visualise upon it the silhouette of the target. The butterflies dancing in the air are shards of cardboard.

  I open the door to the courtyard. Signora Prasca has left a dim bulb glowing at the foot of the stairs. The water in the fountain drips noisily in the night.

  I hold Clara’s hand and press my finger to my lips. Barefoot, we climb the stairs, the stone steps almost painfully cold under our soles where water has leaked from the broken gutter: it must have rained in the valley while we were in the mountains. I unlock the door to my apartment and lead her in, quietly closing the door behind me and switching on a table lamp.

  ‘So! You are here. This is my home. Will you have a drink? There is wine or beer.’

  She does not respond to my invitation but gazes about her. I think of my customer who was studying the room for safety’s sake. Clara observes it with curiosity. She looks at the paintings on the wall.

  ‘Did you paint these?’ she inquires incredulously.

  ‘No. I bought them.’

  ‘That is good. You are much better than this.’

  She crosses to the bookshelves and tips her head slightly to one side to read the titles.

  ‘You may take—borrow—any you wish. I do not read a great deal.’

  She moves to the table, looking at the paintings lying there, mostly those of the swallowtail. She bends to look more closely at them.

  ‘This is best. You should not have ugly pictures on your wall. Only more beautiful.’

  I step to her side, pick the paintings up and tap them into a neat pile. There are perhaps two dozen.

  ‘These I want you to have. They are not for sale or to be sent away. They are for you. To put in your place. To remind you of the valley.’

  I push the pictures carefully into a large envelope and she takes them and looks at them much as she did the wad of dollar bills.

  ‘Grazie,’ she murmurs, ‘molto grazie, tesoro mio,’ and puts the envelope delicately on the table. She goes to the window where she stands with her back towards me, looking out across the valley now bathed in the thin, miserly light of a new moon.

  After watching her for some moments, I go out to the kitchen and return with two glasses of Frascati, one of which I give her and, once again, take hold of her hand.

  ‘Salute! Clara.’

  ‘Evviva!’ she replies, almost solemnly and, letting go of my hand, returns to the table.

  ‘I wish to live here. With you,’ she states bluntly. ‘I wish to live here, and care for you.’

  I do not reply. It is too painful, suddenly. Her wish is now my wish and I dearly want this to be the future, she a part of it.

  Yet the damn shadow-dweller, who will not act, prevents it.
If only he would say his piece, make his move, matters might be ironed out. If he wants to blackmail me, let him: I will pay. Then I shall follow him and kill him. It will look like an accident, like a suicide.

  I cannot, at this moment, take Clara across the border between the present and the future, regardless of how much I want to. I have chosen the game and have set the rules by which I have lived and I cannot bend them, cannot deviate from them, have nothing with which to bribe the fates. I am caught like Faustus in a snare of my own device.

  ‘Come with me,’ I say at length.

  She motions to put her glass on the table.

  ‘Bring your glass.’

  Perhaps Signora Prasca was right. I should share the loggia with someone. I guide Clara along the passageway, past the first bedroom. She glances in and stops me, taking me backwards.

  ‘No. Not now. There will be time . . .’

  It is a lie. I am trapped by circumstance and there is, I realise as I look at her face in the moonlight, no alternative to the future. It is as immutable as the past, as fixed and predictable as the sunrise.

  ‘You live very . . . Vita spartana.”

  I look at the roughly-made bed, the cane-seated chair and the pine chest of drawers. The room is somehow ominous in the sparse moonlight filtering through the shutter slats.

  ‘Yes. I am not a man for frills.’

  ‘But the bed is big for us. Just two now.’

  ‘Come with me,’ I repeat and together we go up the short flight of steps to the loggia.

  She stands by the wrought-iron table and looks about her. The town is still a little noisy. It is not yet eleven o’clock and cars are moving in the chasms of the narrow streets, lights still on in some of the distant houses. Yet there is no sound of music, or human voices.

  ‘You can view all the valley from here. When it has rained in the morning and the sun is going down, there is nothing you cannot see—the castle, the foothills and the mountains, the villages. Almost as far as,’ I pause but it cannot be avoided now: the sentence is made in my head and she knows how it will go, ‘our valley.’

  She looks up at the painted sky inside the dome, faintly illuminated, with the gold stars glinting.

  ‘Did you draw the sky?’

  ‘No. It is hundreds of years old.’

  ‘Here,’ she replies, ‘we are hundreds of years old.’

  Then, through the night comes the liquid strains of the flautist’s instrument from up the hill by the church, at the head of the marble steps. The melancholy of his music drifts not as if it comes from the piazza before the church of S. Silvestro, but from the bleak caverns of a long-forgotten past. He is not a street musician now but a minstrel playing in the courts of time, a magician whose melody can weave spells of curiosity and stop the clock.

  Clara kisses me and whispers she wants to make love, but I deter her. It is late, my back is sunburned, I say. We have made love twice today, I go on, once in the water and again after the champagne, her breasts sticky with wine. I warn her tomorrow she has classes to attend. Another time. And so she sips her wine and leaves her glass upon the iron table. We go down the steps, along the passageway, through the sitting room and out of the door. She almost forgets her paintings and I have to remind her. She is reluctant. She can always see them here, she says, but I insist. I walk her as far as the Piazza del Duomo, her carrier bag swinging in her hand and holding my pictures and her future.

  ‘When shall I see you?’

  ‘Saturday.’

  ‘How will you call . . . ?’

  ‘Can you find your way to my apartment?’

  Her smile is radiant. She believes she has broken down my door, entered my defences, bridged the moat of my privacy.

  ‘Yes,’ she answers emphatically.

  ‘Good. Ten o’clock.’

  She kisses me very lightly on my lips.

  ‘Buona notte, il Signor Edmund Farfalla.’

  ‘Good night, Clara, my dear,’ I say, and I watch as she walks away, her step light and young and carefree. At the corner of the Via Roviano, she turns left, waving once as she disappears.

  The sunlight was shining in the window as I was wakened by Signora Prasca tapping politely upon the door and gently calling my name. I struggled to sit upright for my back ached and my eyes were sore from tiredness. I had nodded off on one of the settles in the living room and had slept uneasily, twisting this way and that and cricking my spine. My head was clear, however: I am careful never to imbibe too much. I looked at my wrist-watch. It was just after nine o’clock. I had not slept in this late for many years and wondered if this was the pattern of retired folk.

  ‘Un momenta, signora!’ I called and straightened my clothes, running my fingers through my hair and using the glass on one of the paintings as a mirror to make myself look less tousled, more respectable. Signora Prasca knew I was an artist but even bohemians have to maintain standards: she told me so, once. I unlatched the door.

  She was standing with her back to the door as if expecting me to appear in my pyjamas or, worse, all but naked. No doubt she had had a similar experience with the previous occupant, the Lothario.

  ‘Buon giorno, signora,’ I greeted her.

  Half-turning with a coyness more suited to an innocent girl, she noticed I was fully dressed and faced me, holding out her hand in which she grasped an envelope.

  ‘La posta?’ I enquired. ‘So soon?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘No! La posta . . .’

  Her empty hand vibrated slightly in the air, dismissing my question. The post did not usually arrive until after ten in the morning. What was more, she never brought the mail to my door.

  ‘Un appunto.’

  ‘Grazie, signora,’ I thanked her, curious she should have come all the way up the building. She bobbed her head as a maid might and scuttled off towards the stairs.

  The envelope was unstamped and bore no address, just one line in cursive, neat script—‘Signor E. Farfalla.’ I did not recognise the hand: the initial E threw me. It might be from Clara. It might be from the shadow-dweller.

  At the thought of him, my mind filled once more with the uneasiness of my night’s slouched sleep. I tore the envelope open with disregard for the contents. The letter was written on heavy, cream laid paper of almost book weight. There was an elaborate watermark in the single sheet which had been folded crisply in two.

  My Dear Friend, I read, I am returned to the town, my relative now recovered somewhat from her ailing, and have received your beautiful painting and most moving letter. Come and see me. We should talk, as man to man. Or maybe as man to priest. But let this not ‘put you off’. I am in the church until noon. It was signed Fr. Ben.

  Re-folding the letter, I let it drop to the settle where I had spent the night. I stretched and looked out of the windows, across the valley. The sun was well up, swifts or martins soaring in the air, the shadows beginning to shorten. Over the edge of the town I could see a raptor of indefinable species riding a thermal thrown up by the mediaeval wall which remained standing in that quarter. As the bird turned, I could just note the upturn of the tips of the wings and could imagine the individual feathers spread out like fingers, gripping the up-drafting currents.

  Going to my bedroom, I stripped off my rumpled clothes and took a long, soothing shower, the warm water sluicing over me and wiping away not only the sweat of the restless hours but also the dull pain in my back. I lathered myself thoroughly with shower gel and shampooed my hair, towelling it dry. Then I dressed in fresh clothes and slipped on a comfortable linen jacket. Before I left the apartment, I checked the Walther. It was clean and shiny, looking like a toy gun rather than a deadly weapon. I smelled it, the sweet perfume of the oil lingering in my nostrils as I closed the door and tested the handle.

  The streets were busy as I made my way towards the long flight of steps leading up to the church. As I walked, keeping an eye open for the shadow-dweller, I pondered upon what he was packing, what piece the
movies or the television or the gun catalogues had recommended to him. It did not matter to me: I was only curious in a professional way. I had had years of practice with the Walther, knew it as well as a journalist of old knew his old battered Olympia, its every quirk, its metallic foibles, its impetuosities and its limitations.

  At the bottom of the marble steps, I paused and gazed up. From the angle of the hill, it looked as if the facade of the church was leaning backwards into the sky, reclining like a tired old man resting on a bench in the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre.

  The steps were strewn with the usual litter of central Italy: Kodak and Fuji film packets, the rind of a section of melon, cigarette butts and a few soft drinks cartons. I saw no hypodermic needles, but there was a cracked and filthy plastic syringe lying jammed between two marble paving slabs.

  At the top, I halted and looked along the row of cars parked at the kerb. So far as I could see, there was no blue Peugeot 309.

  The morning’s activity before the church was in full swing. The puppeteer was giving his show to a group of about a dozen children behind whom stood adults. All were tourists. The puppet in mid-stage as I stopped was a brigand with a tricorn hat upon his head and a cutlass sewn into his hand. He was chattering in high-pitched Italian. Another puppet popped up from below. He was the hero, come to slay the brigand and he also had a cutlass. The two puppets duelled, the puppeteer cleverly interspersing his dialogue with steely clicks and clashes from his tongue. The children stood spellbound by the action.

  The flautist was nowhere to be seen but the juggler was commencing his act with three eggs one of which he pretended every so often to drop. His companion was halfway through a chalk sketch on one of the paving stones. I stood over it and gazed down: she had done the outlines of what was virtually the view from the loggia and was now colouring in the sky.

  On the steps of the church was a party of tourists with a guide who was pointing out the architectural merits of the building. As I watched them, they started to file in through the door. I crossed the street and was about to follow them when a strident voice called out behind me.

  The time had come. I knew it would and was, deep in my mind, annoyed it had arrived in such a public place. It did not bring any emotion to the surface of my being. Emotion ruins everything and makes the wits slow.