The American Page 4

  Alternatively, I go out in the evenings. The town is alive then, but not too crowded. There are crowds, but there are also shadows into which to slip, archways and doorways in which to shelter, alleys down which to make good an escape. I can meld with the crowds, disappear into them silently like a ship into fog.

  These are but sensible precautions. Outside those in the discreet fraternity of my profession, no one knows I am here or, if they do, not where exactly in the long leg of Italy I make my living. Yet I must be prepared.

  I know this town, every street, alley and passageway. I have wandered them, learnt them, studied their curves and bends, their straights and their angles of ascent or descent. I can walk swiftly from the west to the east gate in fifteen minutes, not once deviating more than eight metres off a straight line drawn through the buildings. I doubt I have a fellow citizen who can do likewise.

  As regards leaving the town, I can drive out of it at the height of rush-hour, even in the middle of the tourist season, in less than three minutes from where I keep my Citroën. In seven, I can be through the toll-gate, ticket clipped for convenience in the ashtray, and on the autostrada. In fifteen, I can be well into the mountains.

  Let me tell you of the view from the loggia. Signora Prasca is correct when she chides me for not enjoying it with others, so I shall share it with you. It is a shame you cannot actually be here with me. I could now allow that, not knowing you. You must understand I may in any case be lying. Not falsifying the truth. Truth is an ineluctable absolute. I am merely readjusting it.

  From the loggia, I have a panoramic view over the rooftops of the valley and mountains from the south-south-west round to the east-north-east. I can also see over the roofs of the town to the church and a long row of trees which line the Viale Nizza.

  The rooftops are all pantiled, the chimneys squat with sloping pantiled covers like miniature roofs. Television aerials mounted on aluminium poles are the only concession to modernity. Remove these and the view would be like the one painted around the rim of the dome. The rooftops descend in steps as the hill goes towards the cliff which drops to the river and railway line below.

  Beyond is the valley, running south-east to north-west for about thirty kilometres. On either flank are mountains rising to one thousand and fifty metres with foothills between the valley plain and the peaks which, despite their height and cragginess, are not overbearing and stand more like friendly sentinels than warders. In winter, the snowline comes down to just a hundred metres from the valley floor. In the distance, down the valley, are other hills rising from the plain. They are, like the mountains, wooded where there is no rock, the slope not too steep and the snow generally temporary. Across the valley are villages. Upon the hills, small communities cling to plateaux. The living is agricultural, harsh but rich with contentment.

  In the town there are industries: electronics, service industries, pharmaceuticals—all high-tech and low pollution. The workforce live in anonymous suburbs to the north, sterile communities in cossetted houses surrounded by pine trees scarred by the construction companies’ bulldozers, or in blocks of low-rise condominiums. These are the homes of the people who want to shape no history at all.

  Fortunately, I cannot see these disimmaculate conceptions, as Father Benedetto refers to them, the barren and effete developments, the pretentious enclaves of the borghesia Italiana. What I can see, with my pair of compact pocket Yashica binoculars, are five thousand years of history laid out before me as if it was a tapestry upon a cathedral wall, an altar-cloth to the god of time spread over the world.

  On one ridge, jutting from the mountains like a cockerel’s spur of rock, is a castle. It is in ruins now, only the curtain walls remaining, surrounding a three hectare site of derelict barracks and stables, storage barns and noblemen’s quarters. There is only one entrance, sealed with a heavy iron grid and secured with three titanium steel chains and heavy duty padlocks. The chains bear the signs of ineffectual hacksawing: on the ground lie the remains of several saw blades, shattered by temper or poor usage. Someone, more ingenious than the hacksawers, has attempted to widen the gap between two of the bars with a hydraulic jack. He has been partially, but not completely, successful.

  Except to me, it seems, the castle remains as impregnable as in the days of the Crusades. I have found an entrance, my head containing a similar mind to that of the fortress builders, a mind accustomed to the convolutions of intrigue, the diversity of necessity and the ever-present requirement of a bolthole, a rope out of the window or a ladder down the wall.

  Not far from the castle stands the ruins of a monastery, the Convento di Vallingegno. It is a ghostly place. As with the castle, the walls stand firm. The buildings within, however, are in better condition. Not all the roofs have caved in. Spirits are said to be active here. Local witches, for there are still a good many in this part of Italy, rifle the tombs of the monks. The monastery was the scene of black magic ceremonies conducted by the area Gestapo hierarchy in 1942. It is said a Gestapo senior officer is buried there. The witches have searched zealously for this prize but as yet to no effect.

  Around these ruins are little villages—San Doménico, Lettomanoppello, San Martino, Castiglione, Capo d’Acqua, Fossa. Tiny places, half abandoned by their populations who departed for Australia, America, Venezuela, eluding plague or drought or unemployment or the grinding rural, montane misery of the Twenties and Thirties.

  I know all these places. And others, farther afield, over the mountain passes, along tracks only the chamois use, or the shepherds, or the wild boar or the courageously stupid cross-country skiers come the first heavy falls of snow.

  The valley is history. The mountains are history. I cannot see it from the loggia, for the line of poplars in the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre blocks it, but there is a bridge over the river seventeen kilometres away which is buried by undergrowth, tangles of brambles and old-man’s beard. The road no longer uses it, has not for fifty years. A motor bridge bypasses it twenty metres downstream.

  Thrusting through the snagging cover, I have stepped on this cobbled arch. I know, for I have read the local history, Otto and Conrad IV, Charles I of Anjou and both Henry III and Edward I of England have crossed it, not to mention Popes—the diplomatist Innocent III, the cunning crusader Gregory X, the mendacious Boniface VIII and the gullible miracle worker Celestino V. All were men of history, men of destiny, men who wanted to leave their marks upon time.

  Being a romantic—not a poet, yet still a legislator: do not forget that—I imagine the drum and slip of hooves upon the cobbles, the banners furling from lances, the chink of bridle and clatter of armour, the shifting sound of chain mail and creak of leather. I can see, reflected in the river, the glint of sword-steel and the riot of colour from silks and flags.

  History: the castle and the monastery, the villages, the bridge, the roads and the churches and the fields. I like it, this ordinary history of everyday things.

  Today, upon the ridge, it is viciously hot. I have struggled up the rocky track for nearly twenty minutes. The hillside is bleak: wild thyme, sage, low brush and thistles to the stems of which cling white and brown striped snails, their shells sealed by hardened mucus against the heat of the sun, displayed like pearls upon the stalks, like globs of sap oozed out and baked by the day.

  The rocks are loose and large, as blindingly white as bleached enamel, the track uneven. If the way was less stony, I should have driven a car up here, yet I cannot risk a punctured oil pan or cracked axle. I need reliable mobility.

  At the top of the track, which hairpins to and fro up the hill, is a ruined tower and a small church, hardly more than a chapel, once confined within the walls of a small fort, but one of huge importance, for it surveys the southern end of the valley where the land starts to drop off steeply to the plains. From here, the winding route down the narrowing valley can be observed for ten kilometers. The road is little used now: there is a brand new motor road to the east. Yet it was down here the
Crusaders passed and the tower and church belonged to the world’s first bankers, the Knights Templar.

  I arrive at the top and find a convenient boulder upon which to sit beside the tumbled-down tower. The sun is merciless. I pull my water bottle out of my knapsack and guzzle the water. It is lukewarm, tastes tepid and smells of plastic.

  I admire those knights. They took control of history. They fought. They changed destiny. They killed. They kept secrets. They were reticent men and, like all men of discretion, they made many enemies because of their diffidence, their engrossing fetish for privacy. As I have done. The tower against which I lean was theirs. From here destiny was controlled.

  The grand destiny. Not the little tweaks to the line of time. The grand twists, the snaps in the whip of time which curl and flick and make thunder. Which hurt.

  These were not men who built churches by which to be remembered, if not by God then at least by their fellows. These were not men who constructed towers by which the future might admire them. Indeed, few hereabouts in the valley or down the road they paved to the plains know of their work. Their churches are for the most part insignificant and austere, their towers heaps of rubble. They changed not the shape of the landscape but the shape of their own and my existences. Yours, too.

  I am of their ilk. In my quiet way, I too play a role on the wide stage of time. I erect no towers, establish no monuments and yet, because of me and my actions, the cast of history is configured. Not the sort of history Father Benedetto refers to, the making and breaking of grand treaties, the forging of alliances, the exalted intermarriages of princes and peoples which only bear slightly upon the rest of humanity, but the kind which alters the air we breathe, the water in which we bathe, the soil upon which we tread our brief spans, which affect the way we think.

  It is better to change the manner in which a man perceives the world than it is to change the world he perceives. Think upon this.

  Rested, my breath back and my heart thumping less loudly from the exertions of the climb, I set about the reason for my trip out of the town. Reasons: there are two.

  The first is quickly accomplished. It takes but a few minutes. With my binoculars, I survey the western hillside to the narrow valley. It is wooded, oaks and chestnuts, mountain ash. There is no discernible pathway up from the valley floor where the nearest village huddles like a group of travellers sheltering from an oncoming storm. Indeed, the houses are travellers, time’s travellers and the storm, time’s storm. I know the village, not a house newer than a hundred years and two erected in the twelfth century. One is the village bakery, as it has ever been, the other a moped garage and repair-shop.

  Knowing the topography of these mountains, I can tell the ridge at the top of the woods hides an alpine meadowland beyond.

  One cannot buy maps in Italy, not detailed ones such as the British foolishly sell in every bookstore and stationery shop. Ordnance Survey maps are unobtainable in Italy. Only the authorities keep them, the military or the water companies, the polizia, the provincial governments: Italy has had too many wars, too many bandits, too many politicians to risk such information getting out. Maps which show contours, mountain tracks, derelict and uninhabited mountain villages, disused roads are not publicly available. A 1:50,000 map of the region would be of immense value to me: for a 1:25,000 I should willingly pay three quarters of a million lire. Yet I dare not seek it. I am sure the map would be there for the asking, but he who asks is known. Instead, I have to rely upon my experience of the mountains and my knowledge tells me there is an alpine meadow over there, ideal for future requirements.

  I make a few notes, decide to drive over the mountain and spy out the land as soon as there is an overcast day. On sunny days, a car window can flash like a heliograph in the mountains. From the loggia, I have seen the reflection of a vehicle twenty-seven kilometres off.

  That done, I set to my next task, a portrait of Papilio machaon, the common swallowtail.

  Anyone who has never seen this creature is much the poorer for the omission of such beauty from their lives. It is, to quote the 1889 edition of Kirby, a large, strong butterfly with broad triangular forewings and dentated hind-wings. The wings are sulphur-yellow, forewings black at the base, and with black veins. They also have black spots on the costa, and a broad black sub-marginal band dusted with yellow. The hind-wings are broadly black, dusted with blue, before the hind margin, and the eye-spot is red, bordered in front with black and cobalt blue. All the wings have yellow lunules before the hind margins. It expands to three or four inches in width, flying with a gracile speed, the wings beating rapidly. Suffice to say it is exquisite.

  There is a warm updraught between the ruined tower and the little church, blowing from the valley floor, from the barley and lentil fields, from the patch of saffron, from the vineyards and the orchards. It wafts only here and the butterflies use it as a highway to cross the ridge from one part of the valley to the next, rising upon it as raptors ride thermals. I pour my trap upon the earth, a medicine bottle of honey and wine mixed with an eggcupful of my own urine. It soaks into the gravellous soil, leaving a dark, damp stain.

  Art is only a matter of observing. The novelist examines life and recreates it as narrative; the painter scrutinises life and imitates it in colour; the sculptor pores over life and immortalises it in everlasting marble, or so he thinks; the musician listens to life and plays it on his violin; the actor pretends reality. I am no true artist, not one of these breeds. I am merely an observer, one who stands in the world’s wings to behold the action occurring. The prompter’s chair has always been my place: I whisper the words, the stage directions, and the plot unfolds.

  How many books have I seen burned, how many paintings faded and grimed, how many sculptures smashed by weapons, chipped by frost or split by fire? How many millions of notes have I heard drift in the air to peter out like the smoke of an abandoned cigar?

  I do not have long to await. By chance, the first arrival is P. machaon. The butterfly settles on the damp spot in the earth. It has smelt the trap. One of its eye-spots is missing. A gash has ripped the wing. The tear is the exact V shape of a bird’s beak. The butterfly uncoils its proboscis like a watch-spring losing tension. It lowers it to the ground and probes for the dampest area. Then it sucks.

  I watch. This beautiful creature is drinking up a part of me. What I waste, it enjoys. I imagine my urine salty, the honey sickly sweet and the wine heady. It is not long before there are half a dozen of P. machaon supping at my drug accompanied by other species in which, today, I have no interest. The first swallowtail, with the torn wing, has had enough and stands in the scant shade of a thistle, opening and shutting its wings. It is drunk on my salt and the wine. This will not last long. In twenty minutes, it will be recovered to flit down the hillside in search of flowers, more wholesome yet less wonderful.

  I do not understand how men can kill such beauty. There can be no joy, surely, in capturing such a masterpiece of evolution, gassing it with chloroform or squeezing its thorax until it is dead, setting it on a cork board until rigor mortis is advanced then pinning it, frozen by death, in a glass-topped case, hung over with a curtain to keep the light from fading the colours. To me, this is the height of frivolous insanity.

  Nothing can be gained from killing a butterfly. Killing a man is a different matter.

  The piazza in the village of Mopolino is triangular, eight trees standing in a row shading the western end, their trunks scarred and gouged by careless parking, their projecting roots stained by dog urine and fertilised by cigarette butts. They grow from beds of dirty gravel and are surrounded by kerbstones which afford them no protection. Kerbstones are not guiding marks but mere inconveniences to Italian drivers.

  At the eastern apex of the piazza is the village post office, a tiny place no bigger than a small shop which smells of hessian, stale tobacco, cheap paper and glue. The counter is at least as old as the postmaster, who I should say is not under sixty-five. The wooden surface is highly po
lished by wax and the sleeves of jackets, but it is also cracked, the splits filled with an accumulation of the dust of years. The postmaster’s face is similarly polished and cracked.

  The advantage of the piazza is that it contains two bars, one on either side. This is of great use to me for I can sit in one and cast an eye over not only the piazza but the other bar, too.

  There is little likelihood of a watcher drinking in the same bar as myself. He would feel he had to move away if I was to enter, or go to sit at one of the tables outside. This would make him conspicuous. He would prefer to be across the piazza, observing me from a distance.

  I took a long time finding the right post office.

  In the town where I reside, the main post office is too big, too busy, too public. There is always a throng of people milling about it and the telephone company next door, many of them waiting to make a call from a kiosk, post a letter, send a telegram, meet a friend. They read newspapers, chat to each other or stand and survey the crowds. Some walk up and down impatiently. They are a perfect cover for a clandestine observer.

  There is no bar in sight. If there were one there, it would bring its owner many riches, and it surprises me no wily entrepreneur has recognised the potential. It would also present to me a perfect vantage point from which I could inspect the crowds and assess any possible threat. Yet it is inconceivable that I could be entirely safe in such a place of teeming onlookers. What I required as soon as I came to live in this region was a spot I could approach cautiously, like a tiger returning to its kill, aware there may be a hunter in a machan in the trees who has been waiting, patiently.