After Hannibal (9 page)

Monti paused and waited. Among the students there was a reluctant stirring, not readiness to respond but awareness that some sort of response was required. These seminars of his had not been much marked by the free exchange of ideas, or by dialogue of any kind for that matter, and Monti knew that the blame for this was his. He had not encouraged it, he had put up barriers even here. Since Laura’s leaving he had wanted only to retreat within himself. When he could not avoid contact, as now, a quality of sardonic detachment came into his tone and the students felt it. They were shy of him and in one or two cases hostile. Perhaps my true nature, he thought now as he waited, the truth of me coming out under this stress, a desire to control, an unwillingness to share intellectual space, to admit the disorder that comes from free and equal converse. It is not because she left that I am like this, he thought. I was always like this and perhaps that is why she left.

“You will remember the name of Fortebraccio’s second-in-command?” he said. “A fateful name for Perugia.”

It was one of the girls who answered, the rather severe-looking one who took notes continuously and never smiled. “It was Malatesta Baglioni,” she said.

“Exactly. The real power of the family starts here and with it the beginning of the end for Perugia as a free republic. The Baglioni were just a squabbling faction before that, one among many. The first thing that Malatesta Baglioni did on his return from exile, rich from the blackmail of Bologna—the city paid a hundred thousand
florins to escape being pillaged and a good portion of that must have gone to Malatesta … What was the first thing he did?”

Monti waited again. “Establish the power of his family,” he heard someone say. “Right,” he said, “but how exactly? What was the first step?”

No one answered this and after some moments Monti supplied the answer himself. “He did it by acquiring a good part of the site on which the Guidalotti houses had been built. The houses had been destroyed, you will remember, eighteen years previously by the vengeful mob. He acquired the site and set about building his palace there, with towers and courtyards and terraces, all expensively furnished from the proceeds of plunder and rapine.”

Monti sat back and folded his arms. This business of the houses worked extremely well as a symbolic chain of power; he was pleased by the neatness of it. Some sense of this should have been registered by the students too, but he saw nothing much on their faces as they gathered themselves for departure. The young man in the corner, Millucci, was looking at him in a steady way that might have been a prelude to speech. Monti felt an impulse to circumvent this if possible. “Well,” he said, “if there are no further questions …”

“On what grounds do you say the Guidalotti looked back and saw their houses burning?” Millucci asked.

The question had been abrupt and Monti paused a moment before replying. On the face of the student he saw a certain complacent antagonism and he felt a gathering of dislike within himself, perhaps only for this youthful smoothness and imperviousness of expression: Millucci looked too young to be vulnerable, too young
to be betrayed. Only those could be truly betrayed who had made a gift of their weakness. “No grounds at all,” he said. “Sometimes we can use imagination, or fancy even, to help us make new associations, open up new lines of thought. I wanted to establish the connection between the transactions of power and the transactions of property.”

“In other words, you had no evidence at all for your statement.” On the student’s face, as he rose, there was an expression of triumph.

“Well, no, but it wasn’t exactly a statement, as I have just tried to explain,” Monti said. “I am sorry if my approach seems romantic to the severity of your youth.” He transferred his gaze rather pointedly from Millucci. “Next week,” he said, “we will be taking a further look at the fortunes of the Baglioni—and of their houses.”

When the last of the students had left, he sat quite still for some minutes at his desk, allowing the silence to settle around him. The annoyance he had felt faded quickly. He thought again about Malatesta Baglioni, true founder of the family’s power. Acquiring property on prime sites had not been his only way of marking his return from the years of exile. Among the prisoners taken at the capture of Assisi in October of 1419 was a certain Gragnuola of Porta San Pietro, who had been present at the killing of Malatesta’s brother, Pandolfo Baglioni, in 1393. For this, twenty-six years later, Malatesta Baglioni caused him to be tied to the tail of a horse and dragged from the Due Porte to the Piazza Maggiore of Perugia. He was dead before he reached San Domenico. Pompeo Pellini, in his monumental history of Perugia, declared that the whole of Gragnuola’s course was marked by blood. But to Monti, as he sat there in silence, it seemed unlikely that
any fresh stains could have shown on those stones, darkened already by so much slaughter.

In the afternoon he drove the twenty miles or so to Montone, birthplace of that Fortebraccio who had brought the Baglioni to Perugia in his train. The road wound up from the plain and followed a curving course below the ancient walls of the town, giving wide views over the valley of the Tiber. The cathedral of San Francesco was undergoing restoration and was closed to visitors; but it was the much smaller church, lower down the valley, deconsecrated now, that Monti was interested in.

He could see it from the broad terrace of the cathedral as he smoked in the sunshine and waited for Signor Rossi, a local antiquarian and guide, who kept the keys to the place. It was no more now than one of a jumble of outbuildings, seen thus from above, stone-built, with a ruined bell tower. But once it had been the principal church of Montone, then subsequently used as a lazar house for plague victims, run by the Franciscans. Among those victims—and it was why Monti had come—had been a son of that same vengeful Malatesta. Or so at least it was asserted in the chronicles of the time.

As he waited there, however, the sense of an immediate purpose faded from his mind. The terrace was sheltered and quiet and he was alone there, private and unassailable, with the flank of the church close behind and the ground plunging steeply away before him to the invisible river far below. A feeling of holiday came to him, illicit, unauthorized holiday, such as he had sometimes felt as a boy at school in periods of stillness or inactivity, accidental and always
brief—he had been too driven by study, too earnestly ambitious, to enjoy such lulls for long.

The ambition had not been native to him but instilled, he had known that now for many years. He came from generations of small farmers, scraping a living in the difficult mountainous country north of Turin. His father had wanted something more, had set up as an agent for machine tools, failed and ended bankrupt. All his frustration had gone into hopes for his son; and when that son turned out bookish the hopes had intensified.

These thoughts broke Monti’s precarious sense of sanctuary. He began to walk back and forth along the terrace, keeping close to the wall so as still to enjoy the sweep of the view. His father had been dead for twenty years. All that admonition, those constant reminders of the seriousness of life … Would he have felt rewarded, seeing me now, middle-aged, obscure and far from rich, author of one book and various papers on the history of the Central Italian States?

It had been Laura’s great gift, right from the beginning, right from the moment they had first looked at each other and she had smiled at him, in the library of the university they had both attended, to break through the seriousness of his nature, find the sensuous man within. She it was who had made him feel holidays need not be experienced as truancies. What comparable gift, he wondered, had he made to her?

He glanced at his watch, saw that Signor Rossi was some minutes late and fell immediately into a state of anxiety about the appointment. It had happened before, and not infrequently, that he
had mistaken things, turned up at the right time but on the wrong day, for example. Or the other way around. Once he had gone to deliver a lecture at the University of Urbino. He had got the right day of the week and the right hour, but had come a week too early. How indignant he had been, at first, to find no room arranged for him, no students waiting …

Rossi now arrived, however, and they went together in Monti’s car. This they had to leave at the roadside higher up and finish the journey on foot down a narrow track. The man who farmed the land lived in a single-story house nearby, which had once, Signor Rossi said, been part of the monastic precincts—there had been a community of Franciscans there from the time of the church’s foundation and they had stayed to nurse the sick when the plague came, converting both monastery and chapel into a hospice.

There was a coat of arms above the entrance, smoothed by time, indecipherable. Hens scratched in the dust of the doorway, scattered as they approached. The farmer went back into his house without offering to accompany them. Monti felt watched, though whether by this man or by the dead generations he did not know.

He did not know, not altogether, why he was here at all, what it was he hoped to find. The connection with the Baglioni was of highly doubtful authority; and even if Malatesta’s son had really died here, what trace could be discovered now? Why was he driven to make these investigations, knowing in advance they were fruitless? In the days of their power, the Baglioni had produced no artists, no patrons of art, no thinkers. None of them had ever said or written anything memorable. They had been men of blood, all of them, arrogant, violent and treacherous. It was not only the habit of research,
of leaving no stone unturned, that led him to follow up these dubious leads. There had grown in him a sort of superstition, a feeling that something would be vouchsafed to his senses or understanding, some clue, in the end, that would help him understand the present as well as the past, help him to see—and so accept—through links infinitely small, some vital connection with his own sense of violation and loss. If the history of Perugia was a record of crime—and it was—then the Baglioni were its true representatives, not a dark exception or an unusually virulent strain, but the quintessential stock.

Nothing much remained now, in this place that had seen so much suffering and sacrifice, but the splendid proportions of arches and vaults. His companion pointed out to him the traces of medieval frescoes in the apse, the decorative carving on the ruinous altar table, a small recess with human bones in it. The panes of the windows had long gone and the nets placed across them had broken and sagged. Sparrows and pigeons fluttered through the vaulted spaces high above. The whole cavernous interior had the quiet light, the air of hollowness and desolation, of buildings that the winds have long inhabited. The great slabs of pavement were thickly splashed with bird droppings, and tracks of rats went through the dust. Monti saw the perfect skeleton of a pigeon spread on the floor.

He was glad to emerge again into the sunlight. The church was a shell now and meaningless, even as a memorial. Disease had defined its function and limited its purposes. The Franciscans had attended the dying here. When the ravages of the plague subsided, or when there were no longer enough monks surviving, the place had
been abandoned. It had moldered away for half a millennium. There was no trace now of disease or devotion, only the evidence of decay.

They stood for a while at the gate talking to the farmer, who knew nothing of the place’s past, only that it was very old. Signor Rossi said that the tower, with its ruined belfry, which Monti had thought an integral part of the church, was in fact much older. It had been a watchtower, Rossi said. Centuries before there was a monastery on the site or any Franciscan Order or any thought of bubonic plague, the Etruscans had looked out from here across the valley of the Tiber.

On his way back, as the road descended, he saw another church, small and rather nondescript, baroque in style, set back on a level in the hillside. The doors were open and he glimpsed some movement of people, or the shadows of people, inside. On an impulse he stopped, pulled over onto the verge below the church and went up the stone steps to the entrance.

The people moving inside were young women wearing summer dresses in this warm May weather. They were sweeping the stone floors, cleaning and polishing the pews. Two young men were busy fitting up amplifying equipment below the altar. Monti asked the reason for these preparations. The sister of one of the women was getting married, he was told. The wedding would take place in this church. It was disused, no services were held in it these days, but the couple wanted to have their wedding here. “Just a fancy,” the woman said, smiling. “They both came to mass here when they were children.”

All the doors were wide open, letting in swathes of air and sunshine. Monti walked around but there was little to see; the place
was bare. Crests of families on the walls, stucco scrolls of blue and white, crudely fashioned marble angels with gilded wings. Nevertheless he lingered. After some time he went out again onto the pavement outside the entrance. In gardens below the walls he saw walnut trees and a cherry strung with ripening fruit. There were wide views across to the hills and the looming gray-blue shapes of the mountains beyond. Monti had a sense of openness, of unimpeded spaces.

Music came from within the church. The young men were musicians; they were trying out the amplifiers with a passage from the
St. Matthew Passion
, one playing a hand organ, the other a clarinet. The noble sounds swelled up without distortion, flooded out to Monti as he stood there at the porch. He had a feeling familiar from childhood, a sense that he must keep still. He wanted to keep everything as it was, in just this combination: the laughing woman, the broad shafts of sunshine, the sense he had of drinking space and distance, the marvelous celebration of the music.

On this afternoon, from which he had expected little, in the course of visiting two of God’s houses, he was pierced by a feeling that was both happiness and sorrow. And which of the two was stronger it was impossible to know.