Rancid Pansies (10 page)

‘You see?’ he says with a smile. ‘But it will need quite
careful
management. How much need I tell
you
, maestro, of all people: a local resident of such exquisite knowledge and
perceptiveness
? It has long been a cause for regret that our little town, though richly historic, lacks the somewhat obvious attractions that cause tourists to flock to our neighbours. Viareggio is an important town with excellent beaches and a major yacht-building industry. Lido di Camaiore and Forte dei Marmi have even more perfect beaches. Pietrasanta has its grand piazza and an international community of sculptors
taking
advantage of the proximity of the marble quarries of
Carrara
, where the immortal Michelangelo himself chose his stone. But we, tucked away as we are among the splendours of the Apuan Alps, need to work a little harder to entice visitors. All these things we can acknowledge without for a moment undervaluing our beloved town.’

‘But.’

‘But I have no doubt as to the possibilities opened up by your recent experiences. They could be, shall we say, a way of turning misfortune into fortune?
Porto un’ esempio
. A little while ago you were perhaps toying with the possibility of
buying
or even building another house. You might, for example, discover a plot of land that is ideal for your purposes but that turns out to be classified as non-residential or has some other regulatory impediment. So let’s just say I feel sure you would find your path made remarkably smoother provided that … But I hardly need labour the point to a man of your exceptional intelligence.’

True, my intelligence is rather exceptional, although I think by now anybody who didn’t live in a hollow tree and grunt would have got the idea. It’s not polonium I need fear as the wages of indiscretion so much as penury and homelessness.

‘
Rompo anch’io il discorso
,’ I say, it now being my turn to change the subject. ‘It occurs to me that a little earlier when we were discussing your religious beliefs I may have given offence by implying that my own position is one of intransigent
scepticism
. No, no’ – I hold up a hand although Benedetti hasn’t moved a muscle – ‘it has been preying on my conscience this last half hour. You must remember that my memory, which you yourself were once generous enough to call “a gem”, was badly affected by my experiences, as my doctors will testify. Yet do you know, in the last few minutes the block caused by the trauma has miraculously begun to lift? I think this
superlative
coffee may have helped. At last I’m beginning to
remember
what I told that helicopter pilot about the apparition of the Princess that we all so clearly saw.’

Now the weasel is nodding. ‘I knew you would,’ he says, exposing his canines in a rapacious smile. Then in a surprising gesture he reaches a manicured paw across the table to me. Recklessly – and is there any other way for a Samper to do something momentous? – I take it. As we leave the bar we step into brilliant sunshine. While we have been murkily plotting inside, the mist has vanished. The familiar towers and fountains
and archways glitter in Mediterranean light. Greedily I drink it in. Suffolk is a merciful million miles away. My
adoptive
home town is laid out before me with the air one of those trays full of objects one has to memorise quickly before a cloth is dropped back over it. My co-conspirator gives a little bow and twinkles away towards his office, sunlight gleaming off his mirror-finish shoes and striking pomaded highlights from his Stygian wig. Whoever would have thought a fastidious artist like Gerald Samper would find himself further thrust into the company of his erstwhile estate agent, a scheming tradesman of high polish and low cunning? My life is at present dogged by menials and functionaries (with a shudder I recall the recent quizzing of police persons) and this must definitely stop. Somehow, I must regain my creative solitude where only the muses are fit company. And I now realise that means right
here
. It is another of those decisions that take themselves.

After this encouraging start to the day, the rest of the morning unfolds in layers of bureaucratic monotony. I need hardly say that Benedetti proves to have been perfectly informed about my affairs. There are bills waiting for me at the post office, faithfully promising escalating fines the longer I postpone
paying
them. The companies behind them are not to know that their final sanction, the threat to cut off their services, merely makes me laugh. And in the offices of Assicurazioni San Bernardino da Siena, the agency that unwisely insured both my house and my car, I encounter the expected thicket of small print and unread clauses designed to let the company slither out of any obligations it once implied it would honour. A
horrid
glued-on fingernail gleaming with crimson lacquer draws my eyes to the clause, in print a bacterium would need a
magnifying
glass to read, stating the company’s grudging
preparedness
to reimburse me the current value of the house as it presently stands.

‘Unfortunately, signore, it no longer stands, does it?
Regrettably
, therefore, it has no current value.’ The creature raps
her claws on the policy as though the whole matter were
settled
. She has a lot to learn about Gerald Samper. A
wedge-shaped
piece of wood on her desk announces her as Dottoressa Paola Strangolagalli, a name that gives you some idea of her family’s antecedents. They probably had to make their own furniture.

‘Preposterous,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t be bothered to argue here and now. I shall have my solicitor handle the entire business. This is a perfectly standard Act of God for which I am covered and indemnified. Houses are always falling down, often on their owners’ cars. You agreed to insure mine sight unseen, and that was your own look-out. Do you really think the saint whose name this company has adopted would have tried to wriggle out of such a moral commitment? I notice your
letter-head
presumptuously includes San Bernardino’s famous IHS plaque, which he devised so that the crowds who heard him preach would venerate the Holy Name of Jesus. Undoubtedly you know that this native of Massa was celebrated all over Italy for restoring stolen or defrauded property? I rest my case.’ It really pays to do your homework. These proliferating Catholic saints often have considerable ironic value. I doubt if I know a single Maria who is a virgin.

‘I shall need to confer with our head office.’

‘As opposed to your conscience?’ On this tetchy note I leave. But there’s nothing to lose. My solicitor will do the donkey work, after which I shall not again be putting my custom into the hands of Assicurazioni S. Bernardino da Siena, especially not when they wear glued-on talons the colour of fresh blood. I spend the rest of the day visiting old acquaintances, not least of whom being my solicitor. I also hire a car.

The next morning, having avoided switching on BBCNN, I am drawn irresistibly back to the scene of my tragedy. I drive up through Greppone along the winding mountain road that eventually peters out in a realm of crags and buzzards. Just before it does there is a short track leading slightly downwards to the left. I bump along it. The view of Le Roccie is at once
warmly familiar and painfully strange. The immediate trees seem unchanged but the expected roofs beyond them are gone. Someone has closed my barrier with a bright new chain, wound it with police-style dayglo tape and hung a medley of notices on it:
Proprietà Privata. Attenti ai Cani. Zona Proibita Senza Esclusione. Via Interdetta, Sia per Veicoli o Pedonali. Pericolo di Morte!
In addition, panels of rusty builder’s mesh have been secured across the track. The effect of all this drama is spoiled by a clearly trodden path off to one side that simply avoids the whole caboodle and gives easy access to what is left of my property. With misgivings I note a car cavalierly parked halfway down the track leading to Marta’s house. I prepare to deal mercilessly with intruders.

Feeling almost like an intruder myself, I pick my way between the trees and in past the barricade. It really is very strange, the huge gulf that now yawns to the left: a pit of sky and blue panorama where until so recently stood my
beautifully
refurbished garage apartment and my house. Now
someone
has officiously – and probably officially – erected a lengthy chicken wire fence along the raw edge of the precipice plus
further
notices:
Zona Frana! Si Avvicina a Pericolo di Morte!
More skulls and crossbones. On the right, the copse that once acted as a cordon sanitaire between my house and Marta’s now seems much too close, and the fence I put up beyond it as a cordial expression of legal demarcation is a bare twenty paces away. Behind that, Marta’s house glows in the morning light and seems deceptively less like the hovel I know it to be. As the sole surviving residence at Le Roccie it has taken on an impertinent air of being lord of all it surveys. Given its
newfound
solitude, it even looks faintly desirable. Only I know its fungoid interior will be concealing heaps of unironed laundry and quantities of lethal Voynovian delicacies such as
shonka
, a sausage that induces paralysis, as well as its owner’s flea
market
cosmetics with names like Randy Minx. Still, to the unaware passer-by the house would suggest the estate agent’s adjective ‘unspoilt’, which means something marginally better
than a ruin. I’m not surprised the lady of the manor has been making discreet enquiries behind my back about the status of my surviving land. I just hope she has discovered that her manor has recently halved in value.

I am distracted from these tooth-grinding reflections by movement at the edge of the copse roughly where my patio once ended and the washing line began. A strange alien
structure
has been erected there, around which two figures are moving. They are badly dressed in bulky fleeces and look like the sort of people who haunt shopping centres in Britain
muttering
‘Gotny spare change?’ As I approach they seem faintly familiar although I can’t place them. Suddenly the anger I have been suppressing at the way fate has trashed my lovely house and allowed Marta to gaze placidly out over the remains
bubbles
up. What the hell are these ragamuffins doing on my land, in complete contempt of fences and notices? I hail them in steely Italian from ten paces.

‘Good morning. I trust you are aware that you’re
trespassing
on private property? I need only to whistle for my
Dober-mans
.’

The two figures turn with a start. They now look even more familiar.

‘Oh, bon jawno,’ says the woman. British and no mistake, even had their clothes and dentistry not given them away. ‘But surely we know you?’ she continues in English. ‘Aren’t you … Good heavens! You’re the owner of the lovely house that fell over the precipice! You used to live here. We met last summer.
You’re
the one saved by the miracle!’

And now I place them: a couple of prospective buyers whom Benedetti had shamelessly shown over Marta’s house one day during her absence last year. I see them now as I did then, as Baggy and Dumpy. I can’t remember their surnames. Barton? Ringworm? They were sniffing about for out-of-the-way
properties
, aided by a collection of keys that Benedetti had thoughtfully held on to after his agency had sold the houses.

‘Ah yes, I remember now. Mr and Mrs – ?’

‘Barrington,’ says Baggy. ‘Chris and Deirdre. Well, this is an honour. You’re a truly celebrated survivor.’

‘Gerald Samper,’ I say, not much moderating my steely tone. ‘Survivor or not, miracle or not, this is still my private
property
, you know. And what in God’s name is that?’

‘We mean no harm,’ says Dumpy soothingly. ‘We just came to put fresh flowers on the shrine.’

It is an affair about shoulder height, cobbled together out of dressed stones –
my
dressed stones – into a solid plinth with a large recess. Inside the recess are coloured stalagmites of
candle
wax, sundry burnt matches, a chipped vase, faded bunches of flowers and a photograph of the late Princess of Wales
protected
by a crinkled sheet of plastic.

‘Who built this?’ I demand in a tone that goes with a riding crop being slapped against twill trousers.

‘We don’t know,’ says Baggy. ‘I think it sort of grew
spontaneously
round about Christmastime when all the stories came out. You mean you didn’t know about it?’

‘This is the first time I’ve been back since the night of the earthquake,’ I admit, easing my tone somewhat. This is a test, Samper. Can you go along with the fiction as rashly agreed yesterday with the crafty Benedetti? Or to put it another way, can you afford not to? I’m beginning to be aware of the sheer horror I’ve let myself in for: the awful strain of maintaining a lie that goes against every principle I hold. Not that I hold many, of course; but feigning a belief in apparitions is right up there with the taboo against humping the help and giving cash to beggars.

It is a classic dilemma; and like just about every other human dilemma there is a precedent for it in Italian opera. Those of you who sensibly resisted Glyndebourne’s
production
last season of Handel’s four hundred and fifty-second opera
Muzio
could have attended the revival in Cremona of Dario Maringiotti’s brilliant
Il confessionale
. This minor
masterpiece
, produced in 1887, was banned after its first
scandalous
night and both librettist and composer were threatened
with excommunication unless they recanted and promised never again to stage the work. This was still a big deal in 1887 but in the twenty-first century the Cremonesi had no such hang-ups.

The story of
Il confessionale
concerns a young, idealistic priest named Gioachino who is posted to a backward rural parish in Calabria. Shortly after he arrives a young girl, Tiziana, claims to have seen a vision of the Virgin sitting, as virgins will, in one of her father’s olive trees. The priest visits the spot and declares he can sense the lingering presence of this blessed visitation. Both Tiziana and the olive tree become locally famous. But one day she comes to the confessional in a fit of contrition and admits to the priest that she made up the whole story for a bit of celebrity and to attract Valdemaro, one of the few lads in the village without acne, whose romantic interest is apparently fixed elsewhere.