After Hannibal (2 page)

“The gist of it is that their garden wall has fallen down.”

“That is tough luck.” Harold nodded his head and compressed his lips to show sympathy. Relations with neighbors had to be put on a sound footing right from the start. “Tell them we are extremely sorry to hear this and hope that they will soon have their wall back in place again.”

But this was not well received. The daughter bridled. The father turned farther away and spoke passionately toward the sky. Even Bruno looked resolute for a moment or two.

“It is the section of the wall that borders the road,” Cecilia said. “Pieces from it have fallen across the road. They seem to be suggesting that it is our—”

“That is awkward,” Harold said. “Typical example of Murphy’s Law. The wall falls down, that’s bad enough, but it has to fall just in the wrong place.” He paused, a thought having occurred to him. “That is our road too, isn’t it? They are on the corner where it joins the public road. They have come down here to tell us that the road we share is partly blocked and it may take them some time to clear it. That is really very considerate. Tell them we appreciate it.”

“No, that’s not it.” She felt a sudden surge of irritation with Harold. Did he really think that this demeanor of the Checchetti indicated a mission of good will? He was so terribly prone to interpret things to his own advantage. Then he would feel aggrieved because he had been wrong, and get aggressive. “No,” she said, “it seems they are blaming us.”

Harold’s expression changed instantly and a heavy frown settled on his face. “Blaming us? What on earth has it got to do with us?”

Cecilia spoke to the Checchetti again and father and daughter
answered at the same time, each speaking loudly in what seemed an attempt to drown out the other.

“They are saying that the lorries from our building work—the work we had done when we bought the house—were overloaded and caused heavy vibrations and this made the wall collapse. The Signora says that these lorries, constantly passing back and forth, were a nightmare at the time and now they have caused the wall to collapse. When she protested to the drivers they laughed in her face.”

“And well they might,” Harold said. “I’ve never heard such a load of poppycock in my life.”

The Checchetti, understanding that the man of the house was now in full possession of the facts, were looking intently at him. In the silence that descended, he heard the sound of a motor lawn mower somewhere above them: that German fellow up there again, cutting the grass on his olive terraces. He seemed to start at first light—Harold had been meditating a complaint for some time now. “Vibrations, is it?” he said. “That building work was done six months ago. Why should it take their bloody wall six months to register the effect of the vibrations? Ask them that, will you?”

“I’ll try.” Harold’s swearing always frightened Cecilia a little. She was aware again, as she spoke to the averted faces, of the ugliness and pathos of their visitors. The old man’s breath was atrocious, even at this distance. He had a look at once brutish and febrile, as if he might be subject to some disorder of the nerves. The daughter, with her billowing fatness and frizzy hair and bright dress, looked
like a sulky troll dressed up for a party. She did not bear the marks of physical toil on her as the men did, and Cecilia wondered if she had some other work. Narrow lives, mean and sordid and grasping. Now they had come here seeking some small advantage. She felt a kind of pity for them as well as repugnance. She glanced at Harold in the hope of finding some similar response but saw nothing on his face except the same look of frowning displeasure.

The Checchetti spoke together again, even more loudly than before. Bruno joined in this time, his voice surprisingly high-pitched. They were addressing their surroundings and one another, like a chorus in a tragedy. The fury that had lain below the surface from the beginning was evident now and there was a new, more threatening tone to their voices.

“What do they say?”

“I don’t know. I can’t make it out. They are going to turn on us and start shouting any minute now.” She felt helpless. As always, she clutched at her husband’s displeasure, his combativeness, as a shield. He was never divided—it was his great strength. “What shall we do?” she said.

Harold considered. It was something of a facer. Going to see the collapsed wall would not commit them to anything, of course; but it might be taken as acknowledging a degree of responsibility. Not going, on the other hand, might have repercussions he couldn’t at present foresee. It would be wiser not to make enemies of these people if it could be avoided. “Tell them we’ll come and have a look later on this morning,” he said.

It was the way that the Checchetti greeted this concession that gave Harold his first real intimation of their tactical cunning and
formidable unity of purpose. None of them said a word. In silence they turned away, in silence climbed back up onto the tractor. For a few moments the drone of the German’s grass cutter was audible once more to the Chapmans. Then all other sounds were overlaid by the throaty coughing of the tractor. After this had rounded the bend it was visible for some seconds more in a space between the poplars that grew along the roadside; and in these seconds it seemed to Cecilia strangely like a war chariot, with the Checchetti daughter resembling a bright-robed, snake-haired goddess, urging the men forward into battle.

Ritter, turning off the motor of his grass cutter in order to clear the back axle, heard the shouting of the Checchetti and the quieter voices of the English people quite clearly. He was high above, on the highest of the olive terraces that rose behind his ruinous house; but the hills made a deep inward curve here, half the shape of a bowl, a natural amphitheater, and sounds carried for miles—the barking of a dog, a gate closing, songs of small birds.

He knew the English couple were called Chapman because he had once been given their mail by mistake when he called at the post office in the village to collect his own. But he was profoundly incurious about his neighbors, would have preferred it in fact if there had not been any. His was the last house, the road ended with him. Beyond there was no way through, except into scrub country, uncultivated, home to the fox and viper and boar.

He had crouched to clear the twisted grasses from the axle.
The grass was long, slightly wet, thickened with alfalfa and chicory and dock. Too much for the machine really; it choked on the thick mush and needed constant clearing. But he persisted. It had started here, on these neglected terraces, with old vine shoots and sprays of wild roses growing up into the branches of the olives, his rage to clear the ground, to bring order.

The grass cutter, bright red and quite new, stood waiting for him on the terrace a dozen yards off. He must have walked away from it. He could not remember doing this nor had he any idea what might have caused him to do it. Standing quite still, listening to the chugging of the tractor as it slowly receded, he tried to recollect. Some association of ideas. Something to do with the voices, the sense that though unmistakably human they were interchangeable with any other sound of the morning, something troubling in this, a memory … Then he had it: an incident during his life as an interpreter shortly before his breakdown, some Scandinavian city—Stockholm, Oslo? Conference rooms look the same whatever the city. An international conference of industrialists, the usual self-promotion in the guise of productivity reports. He had been working from Italian into German. Screened off in the glass booth, free from any responsibility, any authorship, for what his mouth was transmitting. A mouthpiece … A conduit for sewage.

Underlying the statements of corporate philosophy and the statistics of corporate growth there was always the suffering of the helpless. To pay for these suits and briefcases and shiny shoes people had labored in remote places, in appalling conditions. Life expectancy among them would not be an item in the balance sheets. But then, he had always known that.

He had done his spell and handed over to a colleague, a woman, and stayed to listen and help if necessary, a procedure quite customary. A young woman, pretty. He tried to remember her face now and couldn’t. What he did remember was watching her mouth moving and hearing the words continue, the same dirty stream. He had been gripped then by a kind of dread: the two of them in the booth there, all differences canceled out, as interchangeable as sewage pipes.

Now and then a pipe gets clogged, needs flushing out. For years alcohol had seemed to do this for Ritter. But there had come a time of fear that drinking only made worse, fear of the words that came with only momentary pauses through his earphones, the panic knowledge that he would drown in sewage if he could not keep up. He would feel the sweat run on his body and hear the loud beat of his heart.

This had ended in fear of all encounters, fear of daylight even—he had stayed alone in his Vienna apartment with the curtains drawn and the phone disconnected. Only a chance visit from his former wife had rescued him from this. She had bullied him into seeking help. And so with time he had emerged from the nightmare, with a certain hesitancy of articulation and an abiding distaste for telephones as main marks of it. But his career as an interpreter was over. He had felt a compulsion to return to Italy, where he had been as a boy, during the war, with his parents—his father had been attached to German Military Intelligence in Rome. With the last of his capital he had bought this ruined house and its five acres of overgrown and neglected land. He had a disability pension and a
small income from money left in trust. For a man with few needs it was enough.

Ritter stayed where he was for some moments longer, looking across to the folds of the hills that rose beyond the plain of Val Lupetto. These days of early April began misty, brightening as the sun pierced through, a process very beautiful in its contrasts, seen thus from above, with the plain still partly muffled in silver drifts and the tawny upper slopes already in warm light. From where he was standing he could see the line of poplars marking the narrow stream that formed the boundary of his land. They were in first leaf now, a haze of green more delicate-seeming than the mist.

He began to walk back toward the grass cutter, which waited there for him, red and expectant. The terraces fell steeply, curving in a shallow arc. At the farthest point below him, beyond where the road ended, was the tangled gully where the stream plunged down through a mesh of bramble and thorn and festooned willows. Dark green canes, twice the height of a man, leaned out of this at strange, listless angles. An ancient cherry tree, half submerged by creepers, raised limbs full of flowers to the light.

Once again it occurred to Ritter to wonder why this little wooded gully had been abandoned so. The cherry tree might be an accident, a bird could have dropped the stone; but the canes and the willows had been planted there by someone, the canes for supports, the willows for their whippy twigs that were used to tie back the vine shoots after pruning.

A certain degree of neglect was understandable. The old man from whom he had bought the place had been ailing for years past.
To live off five acres means unremitting toil and Adelio had drunk too much wine as he got older, to take the ache from his limbs. His wife was dead, neither of his sons had wanted to work the land. For four or five years he had struggled on. Then God had sent him a crazy German to buy the dilapidated property. But these canes and willows must have been planted in some much earlier time. Adelio had clearly not set foot in there for many years. No one had. No one could now—the gully was impassable, closed off.

Reaching the machine, he stood still again and listened intently. He thought he had heard a faint sweep of wind below, among the drowned trees, although the leaves of the canes were stiff and motionless. And then he knew it for the sound of water; it had been there all the time, a voice that he was used to now and so no longer noticed. Water from the winter snows was still flowing through the stream bed, moving invisible among the close-growing vegetation.