Island of Demons (3 page)

We were to spend long open-windowed evenings here, struggling through an ancient, dog-eared almanac whose runic dictates ordered the affairs of the house, the women knitting, or me deciphering an occasional newspaper with a dictionary or talking to one of the rare hikers who stayed overnight, till last thing, usually before nine, the Widow would brew us all a cup of citronella as a nightcap.

Upstairs were three plain bedrooms, one shared by the ladies and two for guests. At the back lay the stables where Luigi plied his trade. The Widow was more than glad to have me, a rare permanent guest, unfussy, grateful and out most of the time, ranging the hills and valleys with my friend Luigi and his other mounts. One evening I drew her and her daughter in a hasty, slipshod charcoal that she received with cries of ecstasy and set up over the mantlepiece, behind the holy almanac, with much joyful handclasping. If only all audiences were so easy to please.

And so that hot summer passed in slow content. On my daily excursions, I sketched and looted the area for the picturesque, to be worked up later in oils. Even the women were pretty and I captured their bursting bosoms with bold manly strokes of pencil and charcoal, just as readily as the sculpted torsos and pert buttocks of the local men. I made my first attempts at the local tongue, words, simple sentences. Luigi sometimes schooled me but was incapable of sustained effort and his attention flickered. Mostly I simply talked at him in Dutch, as I did the kitchen cats, with exaggerated assumptions of his comprehension. For his part, he occasionally sang in a lusty, inaccurate tenor – local songs that may have had some religious burthen but, judging from the thrusting gestures of his fists and leering grin, were probably all happily about wine and women. I tried to probe him on the family history of the Traversi. He informed me by rotating his finger rapidly at the temple and whistling, that the Widow was a little crazy, by pinching his fingers together against his chest that Gabriella's tits were too small and by triggering his thumb against his head and letting it loll, that Signor Traverso had been shot – or perhaps shot himself at least an extended hand ago. Then he gestured down to his balls, clenched a fist and laughed. That, I took to mean that, as a great stallion, he had nothing to fear from their female powers.

Our journeys were punctuated with “interludes”. Luigi and I rutted like Arcadian woodnymphs on rocks and in sylvan glades fragrant with rosemary, thyme and the cliches of Poussin as we tore ravenously at the ham, cheese and bread provided by the Widow, washed down with pitiless black wine. A sort of tradition of the afternoon siesta imposed itself, where, fuddled by drink, we bathed or sunned ourselves or slept muskily intertwined in the undergrowth. The world buzzed happily like crickets in my ears. I had never done such good work.

And then the season began to change in Lansoprazole as summer gave way to autumn, the leaves of the few deciduous trees turned to gold and my portfolio bulged with harvest scenes, the benison of nature's foison, in heaped up grapes, olives and sheaves of wheat. A cold wind howled from the north, blowing up the dust. It was now too cold to swim and, when it came to the much anticipated “interludes”, Luigi was suddenly all pouting reluctance. It was too windy, people might see, he was tired. I sighed and accepted that a point had been passed in our relationship – saddened it is true – but impressed by my own emotional sophistication. I sought refuge in the imagery of nature. The grape had given its first juice but there were still second pressings and these were often the sweetest. I took to working in the empty guest room, painting, pasting, shaping what I had gleaned, getting it all down on canvas as my breath steamed in the icy air – with occasional, and increasingly rare, furtive assignations in the stable to still my appetite and fire my inspiration. The room was so cold, the paint would not dry so I paved the boards with canvases, like so many paving slabs and then worried about the padding cats.

Then, as I lay sleeping one night, he was suddenly there, hard and urgent, garlicky breath in my ear, hands strong round my waist, panting in anticipation. I was glad that I had taken the end room. Emptiness lay between us and the women. We filled it with groans and gasps.

The next morning, I was as one beguiled. Had it really happened? The happy soreness of my body confirmed that it had. After that, he came a couple of nights a week, unannounced, like some hot, desirable succubus, threading in and out of my fantasies. And on those nights when he did not come, my sleep was of a dreamless depth I had never known before. I was … fulfilled.

It ended, one mid-morning, as I was waiting for Luigi to arrive for one of our promenades. He had been three days without coming. There was blown snow outside, the gleam of icicles to be captured, the chilled huddling of peasant and livestock. In a dream, I had seen him enter my room silently in the night and leave with just a chaste kiss and a grinned “Ciao”. A ghost. I was worried. The superstition of the house was infectious. He had never disappeared like this before. The Widow shrugged. He was a man. Regularity was not to be expected of men. I was different, perhaps, being an artist, but possibly not. Maybe he had gone to the city to look for work. He would return when he was ready. In the meantime, Gabriella would look after the donkeys.

First came the scream that sounded like the heart being torn from the chest of a living person. Then a low, agonised moan: “I
l tessore. Il tessore
.”

I was in the kitchen, cold, trying to stroke a little heat from one of the resentful cats, coaxed aboard my boney knees. The scream came from above. Then feet pounding up the stairs. Mine, I realised. The door of the Widow's room stood wide open. I had never been inside this female space before. It was much as I had imagined – bare floor, hard, wooden furniture and, in the middle, the great, wallowing bed that was the centre of the house. Here had been enacted her marriage, the conception and birth of Gabriella, perhaps the death of her husband killed by his own thumb – hand. Beneath the bed was stowed every valuable thing of the household, now strewn in all directions – an ancient shotgun, a motheaten fur coat, deeds to the land, a clutch of sepia wedding pictures, powerful herbal specifics, a vast Bible fit to beat demons to death and – clearly – the economies of the household.

“
Per la nozze di Gabriella
,” sobbed, red-eyed Widow Traverso. Her wedding costs or – more likely – her dowry, then. She crouched there, wailing, skirts immodestly pulled up to display despair in woolly knickers. Between her legs lay the biscuit tin that had held the “treasure” whose disappearance she was currently grieving, clutching her hands to her twisted mouth. Was I suspected? I could not tell. And then she lifted her eyes and looked at me with a terrible hatred and pain that seemed to distill the suffering of all betrayed mothers. As I began to stammer denials and protest my innocence she extended a grim hand and I saw that all this was not for me but for Gabriella, standing terrified behind me and a fearful truth dawned on all three of us.

“Luigi!” I still don't know which of us spoke the name. It evoked a further eruption of female wailing and shouting from which I hastily withdrew to my room, not venturing out until driven by evening hunger into a silent, brooding house.

The next few days were intensely difficult. Only slowly did I piece the whole the truth together from the Widow's cursing into her cooking pots, or shouting after Gabriella words to be found in no dictionary. It seemed that, on the evenings when he did not come to me, Luigi had visited Gabriella. And the sleeping Widow danced sympathetically as he enjoyed her daughter's too-small charms there in the great bed. The lacing of our citronella with verbena or some other somniferant explained our depth of sleep. I was agog at the idea of Luigi plunging into Gabriella as the slumbering basilisk lay inches away snoring through her moustache and then extracting the dowry, as the daughter – mission accomplished – lay, in turn, smiling in sated sleep. Yet, in a way, I understood. For Luigi, after his own fashion, was an artist too. He had done this, I knew, not just for the money but to take his art to a higher plane. Wherever he was, he would not starve – at least not until pasta and grappa had done their work to sap and sag that splendid facade. And, if my dream was to be believed, he had at least said goodbye.

But it was time for me, too, to say goodbye. Blame could not be laid at my door. I had not, after all, introduced Luigi into the household. But our friendship associated me in his guilt. Not only was the house poisoned by slow-burning rage, even to my innocent eye, Gabriella was beginning to swell and bloat. Luigi would naturally be bursting with a quite unnecessary fecundity and it was only a matter of time before the shotgun and the wedding pictures under the bed coalesced into a single idea, bringing the Widow's eye to rest on me as the one way to save both the honour and fortune of the Traversi by a swift marriage. I hastily packed my traps, quick with a more artistic fertility and returned to grey, rain-sodden Amsterdam.

Mynheer Vorderman had laid out the canvases all round the living room as in the spare room in Lansoprazole. My father appraised him pince-nezed as he, in turn, appraised my work. Women had been banished since this was considered a matter for men. He held up a delicate study of a mother and daughter, based on the charcoal of the Traversi, crackled his feet and nodded.

“Breasts,” he puffed happily. I had somewhat idealised Gabriella, lending her the bosom of Luigi's dreams. It positively exploded. “The lad does good breasts and in Amsterdam people like a nice solid pair of breasts from elsewhere over the sideboard. Not Dutch breasts mind. That's another thing entirely. Get you in a lot of trouble Dutch breasts.” He cast his gaze over the other paintings in nodding content. “Peasants, ruins …” he looked down again “… breasts. Not my taste of course. Scarcely
avant garde
as you'd be the first to admit but there's a market for these. The art of small houses and tidy minds. We'll do an exhibition – one of those little places down by the canal – a few bottles of wine, some Italian cheese, the stuff with the grape pips on the rind. I'll cover costs and framing. We split the take 50–50. You get rid of that moustache.” He meant mine not the Widow Traverso's. “What do you say?”

“He's delighted,” said my father, stepping forward to shake his hand and accept one of the poisonous cheroots. And so I became a professional artist, standing on my own feet, making my own decisions.

***

My Italian pictures, it was quite generally agreed, were a commercial triumph. At first I thought I was unlucky with the weather, one of those misty evenings lit only by the gleam of rain-slicked cobblestones, whose chill discourages nocturnal outings. But that made the glow of the warm south, in which my pictures were steeped, irresistible to these pale northerners. The air was heavy with mothballs and compensating cologne, the smell of a middle-class crowd. Jacob Vorderman had combed his little black book to entice them out and here they were, good solid people with money in their pockets, the dentured classes, who might be interested in a picture of something they could recognise by an artist on the way up. There were a few expensive and elaborate oils to tempt the extravagant but these were heavily padded out with bargain-price pastels and gouaches that held out the hope of turning into a good investment.

In one corner was the mayor, his eyes dancing round the crowd, identifying, annotating; in another, the doyenne of female society, Mrs van Damm – each surrounded by their court with Jacob firedancing back and forth. And already more than half the pictures were decorated with the red dot of success, signifying that they had been sold. It is always a shock for a painter to see his pictures, for the first time, mounted and framed, closed and complete. Hung on a wall, they now have to hold their own against all the other works in the world that could stand in their place. They are no longer a work in progress. They define you.

My parents were there, glowing. The exhibition had somehow defined them too. Father was finally a successful businessman among his peers, talking money, banks and investments to those not too proud to listen. Mother was in something towering and black that set off her eyes, with matching gloves buttoned to the armpits. She was, above all, relieved by the bosoms – on the walls not in the room. Blatantly heterosexual, they swelled and throbbed from every corner, but always constrained and tightly bodiced, the obvious face of thwarted schoolboy lust. This was not, she was thinking quite rightly, the archive of a sated satyr. This was what Dr Freud was teaching us to call “repression”. Lust, yes, but still safely unslaked. I was glad to duck behind them like a rampart.

Jacob led me over to be presented to Mrs van Damm. We still kissed hands in those days after the First World War. It took a second war to stop the handkissing. This one, presented with coyly bent wrist, was sallow, blue- veined and liver-spotted, the skin almost transparent beneath the rings.

“So young!” She cooed cupping my newly unmoustached face. “I want you to know I have bought one of your pictures – that adorable little one in pastiche over there.” She pointed.

I frowned in incomprehension. Then the penny dropped. “Oh, I see. Not ‘pastiche'. You mean in pastel.” Her mouth set hard. Clearly, she was unused to contradiction.

Jacob intervened. “I think you misunderstand,” he hissed, footcrackling. “Not the other one. Mrs Vorderman means that one
in pastiche
.”

“Oh right.”

She resumed. “What I loved about it was that sweet little doggie in the shadows.”

“Oh that's not a dog. That's … oh I see. The dog … right. How clever of you to spot it.”

“But it has no title.” She looked piqued. “Every painting has to have a title.”

“It's not strictly a painting. Oh, right. Well … it's ‘Doggie in Pastiche'.” I glared at Vorderman who oleaginated back.