Living As a Moon (9 page)

Perugia, hill fortress of the Etruscans. Antony's brother was besieged there by Octavian in 41 BC, and after the capitulation Octavian executed the senate of the city. In the bowels of a building close to the square, is a well two and a half thousand years old, ringed with small, dark bricks and emerald mosses.

The city's university is famous, and I did a four-month course of study there soon after graduation. I spent a good deal of time at the archaeological museum on the Corso Cavour with Dr Germano Lattanzi, and wrote a paper on funeral rituals which was later referred to by several others working in the field. Such work I find fascinating, not at all morbid. We understand people through the manner of their death as well as their life.

I've been invited back several times recently, but it's not the same at all. It's a different city because after twenty-five years I'm not the same person. Proust said you can never truly go back, because you are looking for a time past, not just a place.

I was lonely in my first weeks in the old city. I didn't speak Italian apart from tourist phrases, and there were few overseas postgraduate students sharing my studies. I was daunted by the exuberant confidence of the Italians and my subdued insignificance.

Somewhat surprisingly however, I acquired a lover. Crocetta Tenaglia was a thirty-nine-year old woman soon to be married to a much older relative. She was one of three tutors with responsibility for foreign students. Her English was good and her temperament completely at odds with the conventional expectation of Latin volatility. Nor was she a beauty. She was small and thin, had a large nose. Kindness, though, is very attractive when you're alone in a strange country, and so is intelligence. So is availability. All that said, I believe I did fall in love, and she was part of it.

Crocetta helped me to choose classes, find a three-roomed, low-ceilinged apartment close to the Etruscan Gate, and not only arranged my introduction to Dr Lattanzi, but accompanied me and made that introduction personally. ‘Admit at once that you don't speak Italian, and that your Latin is very bad. He is a sympathetic man and will feel sorrow for you,' she advised. And so he was; so he did. Crocetta wasn't a classics scholar, but spoke four languages, and had written quite a lot on the novelists Umberto Eco and Italo Calvino. ‘Realism is only one portal to the depth of life,' she said.

During my first weeks, amid the bureaucratic difficulty that seemed to follow everything I attempted, I went several times to her office, and her helpful, open manner was always the same. ‘Something can be done about it,' she would say. ‘Let me be strategic with it.' And she would give me a time to come back, and when I did, she had been strategic with my trivial problem and found a solution. My lack of Italian made me often feel foolish and ineffectual, but with Crocetta my confidence would return.

She took me and two other English-speaking students to a restaurant off Via 14 Settembre, on the old fortress walls, from which the green, closely cultivated valley fell away, and gradually disappeared as darkness fell. She ordered no pasta, but pork, fresh beans and some other green vegetables. We had no dessert, but a plate of hand-made chocolates for which Perugia is famous. We drank wine from the shores of Lake Trasimeno, where Crocetta said she would live when she married. She was proud of the long academic tradition of the city and its history.

The other students were an engaged couple from the University of Alabama. Their accents and company were pleasant, but they were interested mainly in each other, and when we had finished the meal, they walked into the inviting night hand in hand. ‘It is a happy time for them here,' said Crocetta, ‘but they are not serious in their studies. They have no fervour for any particular subjects, and just want to be together in Italy. So it should be.'

We stood for a moment watching the Americans padding away in their jeans and heavy sneakers — big people with the gait of amiable bears. The light from the restaurant was hachured on the street surface because of the cobbles, and there was a faint smell of vegetables — not those we'd eaten, but fresh produce from the market, which was set up most mornings close to the Via Viola. The sun was long gone, but all was still warm. ‘I should see your rooms,' said Crocetta matter–of-factly, and so we went back through the main square, still busy with happy people, to the alley close to the Etruscan Gate, to my small apartment.

The only wine I had was very cheap, but she made no comparison between it and what we'd drunk earlier. My second-floor apartment had no balcony, and we sat close to the one window, on kitchen chairs. Crocetta made no pretence of interest in my housekeeping. We talked for a while of my courses and work at the archaeological museum. ‘This is an important part of the beginning of your career,' she said. ‘From now on you live the life of an adult scholar.'

She was right. The time of living in university hostels and flats, always in a company of fellow students, always in reach of family, was over. The time of irresponsibility, and people's toleration of that, was over too. I told Crocetta of my ambitions for an academic position, and she was both realistic and encouraging in response. In a lighted window opposite to my own, an elderly man was having his hair cut by a much younger guy. Both of them were intent on the task, and the old man held his head almost nobly to receive the attention. It was a tableau like an illuminated postage stamp in the surrounding darkness. The two Italian men were distinct in my view, and yet I would never know anything of their lives.

‘This time for you sets a path for the future,' Crocetta said. ‘If you do well then opportunities continue to come, each building to the next. Study now is an investment in your future.' I told her that one reason I'd come to Italy was to leave the group I'd been with at home and take work more seriously. I told her I was determined to make a go of it despite my inability to speak much Italian and my weakness in Latin. ‘No, the obstacle for you here is loneliness,' she said. ‘I see it in foreign students all the time.' She talked of the isolation you feel in a strange country, and how debilitating that is. She herself had spent time at the Sorbonne, and knew that bewilderment, even though she spoke French.

‘You have made no girlfriend here, have you?' Crocetta asked me at last.

‘No.'

‘If you wish we could spend time together. That way you can relax and do well in your studies. In three months you will go home, and in five months I will be the faithful wife. For a time it is quite reasonable for us to have private things between us. We are free to make choices. Maybe only once, maybe I don't want to after it, or you don't want to then. We don't know.' The tone of her voice was just the same as that she used to talk of the university, and she showed no awkwardness as she offered to go to bed with me.

That I was an unimportant and transient foreigner, and she not at all beautiful and almost forty, made it of sensible and mutual benefit. She took her clothes off by the bed quite rapidly, but still folded each garment and put the soft heap on the floor. Her body was almost asexual: breasts like small suction cups on her ribs, which showed front and side. Her thighs were thin and didn't come together at the pelvis, so that light could be seen between them. Her long nose pressed into my cheek when I kissed her. I enjoyed the sex, partly because she did, but physically there didn't seem enough of her and I was aware of my height and weight as I bore her down.

She often spoke rapidly in Italian, or French, as we made love, but would never translate for me, and she would always close her eyes until the climax was past. It was her habit to caress my head and smooth my hair as we lay side by side. ‘I wish you to let your hair grow,' she once asked. We spent several hours together that first night, but she said she couldn't come again because it would be noticed. ‘What we do isn't happening. You understand?' she said. ‘We are free to make choices, yes, but we must be private people. If you want to, I can find a place that is safe.'

Crocetta had the key to a small document filing room in the university library, and we met there by arrangement two or three times a week for the next month or so. I would wait by the shelves of catalogued scientific magazines until I saw her go in and leave the door ajar. Sometimes she couldn't keep our assignations, the door remained shut and I would leave without any gain in scientific knowledge, or physical satisfaction.

The small room was lined with box files, and had an untreated wooden table at its centre. A high window showed only sky. Worlds can be separated by the wooden inch of a locked door. While people studied and browsed in the wider library, Crocetta and I would lie entwined on the mushroom carpet, or, that imperative spent, sit talking at the table. It was a lesson to me that a woman so lacking in physical abundance had such a sexual nature. So much of her body was like that of a stripling, even her short, dark hair. We never talked about our lovemaking despite the power of it. Its necessity was tacit between us. ‘We are free to choose,' she said several times to me. ‘No one suffers.'

She liked me to talk about the landscapes of New Zealand, its Maori people, and in return to tell me of places and happenings in her own country and in France, where she had worked. After her marriage she was to live in the village of Tuoro close to Lake Trasimeno. It was the site of a great victory over the Romans by Hannibal, and interested me because of that, but she and I would never go there together. She said it was very peaceful, unlike her birthplace of Assisi, which was overrun with tourists. I asked her if she would miss the university, but she said that her intended husband was moderately wealthy, and she would be able to concentrate on her academic writing. ‘I would like to come back as an appointment in Italian literature and teach here sometimes, instead of the administrative position I have now,' she said.

Apart from my occasional formal visits to the university office, in which she worked with other staff, and the restaurant off Via 14 Settembre, we met only twice outside the file room. Both times late at night, a rendezvous at her request at the Palazzo dei Priori, and then a long walk arm in arm in the small, cobbled alleys beyond Via Pinturicchio. Each time the same enduring warmth in the night air, the same easy conversation and easy silences between us, the same sense of a layered past shimmering behind the darkened present. In recollection the two sorties became one, with emotion and frisson redoubled.

Crocetta's friendship made all the difference. I didn't know why she had chosen me from among all the forlorn young guys who were strangers in her city, and over men of her own nationality. She gave me the sexual release necessary to be able to do well at other things. Free of loneliness and crushing frustration, I found my studies a pleasure, and the old city welcoming. All you really need, wherever you are, is one other person close to you.

On a Tuesday afternoon towards the end of my third month in the city, Crocetta told me she didn't wish to make love any more. I had come into the filing room and was already taking off my shoes. She told me quietly, but without explanation apart from the comment that her marriage was coming closer. There was nothing for me to be angry about, and I had no great opinion of myself as a lover. I hoped, of course, that she would change her mind, but she never did. ‘Don't think it is because of anything you have done,' she said. ‘I like you much.'

We continued to meet as before, but I kept my shoes on after that, and the carpet burns on my knees and elbows gradually disappeared. Secrecy was maintained, though for the rest of my visits nothing occurred that was at all of interest to gossips. Crocetta began bringing in espresso coffee, and often ate her late lunch as we talked: something she'd never done before. I missed the bravado of sex, but our conversations remained high points for me. She was intelligent and knowledgeable but, more important, she was the only person with whom I could talk intimately, the only person in a foreign country I was truly familiar with. She encouraged the studious regime I'd developed. One thing I noticed was that we laughed together a lot more after we stopped making love. I've thought since that maybe the intensity of sex is at the expense of humour.

When my time in Perugia was almost over I told Crocetta I wanted to buy her a gift. She refused, but said that she wished for a farewell meal. It would be seen as quite appropriate, she said, that we would go to a restaurant on the day before I left with my studies completed. We went to the same restaurant close to the ancient wall. Two public appearances, two late nights wandering the hilltop streets, and nothing visible of our many meetings in the narrow library room.

We sat at a table without a view, without the two post-grad students from Alabama, but we had much the same meal: pork and vegetables, the light, red wine from Lake Trasimeno, close to where Crocetta would be living. Cheeses, not chocolates, however. We tried not to be sad, for we'd known all along of the exact time and agreed finality of our parting. Our friendship had never been stronger, but it was easier that it wasn't as lovers we said goodbye. Crocetta told me that Dr Lattanzi's report to the university had commended me for diligence and enthusiasm, and been lenient on my deficiencies in Latin. ‘You made it all so special here,' I said. ‘I don't know why you bothered with me. Jesus, I don't even speak your language.'

‘You were special,' she said after a pause.

‘Why?'

‘I am honest to tell you because you look like my husband. That's why I needed to be with you at first.'

‘You said the guy's old.' I was sure she was meaning some joke.

‘No, you remind me of my first husband. We lived in one of the apartments that you and I walked past on those nights together.'

‘You never said anything about being married. What happened to him?' I imagined some tragic death, and Crocetta struggling to come to terms with it. Some ecstatic bond destroyed by envious fate.