The Last Supper (15 page)

In the Uffizi there is a late painting by Raphael, of Pope Leo
with two of his cardinals. Leo is a big, heavy, fleshy-faced man, padded with garments of velvet and embroidery. He is powerful, ugly in his power. His embroidered robe is more beautiful than he. In his hand he holds a small magnifying glass, with which he has just been scrutinising the great gilded book that lies on a table in front of him. Now he gazes forward, his brow faintly crinkled, his eyes calculating: clearly he is pondering some problem of state. Of the two cardinals attending him, one looks straight ahead, like the guards outside Buckingham Palace. The other looks out, askance, at us. He is in young middle age, a little unshaven, with dark eyes that are half-innocent, half-knowing. With both hands he grips the back of the papal chair, where Leo sits immersed in his trance of male authority. It is those clutching hands that suggest to me that this is a portrait of Raphael himself. And he has taken such care to describe the signs of age that are encroaching on those childlike eyes, the receding hairline, the lines around brow and mouth, the tired pouches that hang under the lower lids. With his steady gaze, this man is asking a question. Who am I?

Across the river, in the Pitti Palace, there is a portrait of a lady. It is by Raphael. Its title is
Donna Velata
, veiled woman. Her veil is rather spectral: it has been pushed back from her face, but it seems that it might close around her again, like a shroud. How fine she is, though, in her moment of life! Later, in the
propri
etario
’s library, I read that this woman is believed also to have been the model for the
Sistine Madonna
. Here, she is permitted her own reality, her necklace of amber-coloured stones, her lovely dress with its gold piping, her white undergarment with its delicate gathered neckline and little ribbons tied in bows. In her hair, just where the veil has been folded back, she wears a single pearl. Her hand rests on the stiff material of her dress where it covers her breasts. It seems to be a gesture of invitation, but it hints, too, at a feeling of separation from her own finery. This is the woman who holds her child so willingly, so generously, in the
Sistine Madonna
. I wonder whether the veil is, at last, the symbol of Raphael’s self-knowledge. It is he who veils her, for
her body is the drama of his subconscious. The veil is the psychic rift which separates one image of her from another. Is she to wither in her casket of gold piping and amber-coloured stones? Is she to remain alone, like the pearl in her hair? When she fingers her cloth-covered breast, what vision of love rises in her large, dark, heavy-lidded eyes?

The Veiled Woman
, or
La Donna Velata
,
c
.
1516 (oil on canvas) by Raphael

We take the train back to Arezzo. It is late afternoon and the
carriages are crowded. We sit with the children on our laps, and I listen to the conversation of four English women who are sitting across the aisle. Their own laps are full of purchases from Florence boutiques: they are returning to their rental villa in the hills. They are in their early sixties, I suppose, smartly dressed, with hair cut short and firmly styled. They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists. They have outlived it all, the mystery of men and women: it has passed, like the day’s heat has passed and left behind its warm, tolerable aftermath of evening. The children have gone to sleep. I close my eyes and find that the
Donna Velata
is there. I think of the cold stones on the white skin of her throat. I think of the stiff gold piping of her dress, and of the single pearl, hanging in her hair like a droplet of ice.

South: we are going south. It is time to pack up the house and say goodbye to the green valley and the
castello
and the
pro
prietario
’s library. It is time to forswear
ciaccia
and Gianfranco’s store and the flowers in the garden whose little arc of life we have known so intimately. What is the significance of this knowledge? In the afternoon, the light falls in slanting golden panels through the windows of the silent rooms. The track winds blindly down the hill to the valley floor. The hills simplify themselves into primitive, mysterious forms as evening comes. The fields and woods and villages merge into their blue mounded distances. And in the morning their detail is born again, the fresh patchwork of hills and houses and trees, the close-textured countryside, the slender leaves with their dainty, tentative veins, the many-petalled flowers, the flossy white spiders’ webs knitted among the roadside weeds, the armies of ants trickling in the dust, the blades and tresses of corn and wheat that separate and separate until they seem to disclose the last blonde grain of infinity itself. I know the silken strands of the spider’s web, and the muffled white form of the sac that hangs at its centre. I know the froth that foams like spittle on the fibrous stalks of the weeds. I know the black bead of the gecko’s eye and its darting tongue. What else is there to know?

One day I hear a sound like the sound of rushing water, coming from the side of the house. I go out to look, and see a swarm of bees standing in a great black column on the path. They have escaped from a nearby honey farm. A man comes
with a little wooden box to collect them. Inside the box there is a queen. The man sits in his car with his wife, eating sandwiches and waiting for the bees to go in. Then he drives away again, with the great black column folded into the little box, like a magician.

There is a farewell dinner at a restaurant not far away, and afterwards, in the darkness of the car park, Jim puts a letter into my hand. It is a kind of love letter, except that the love is mostly too damaged to be recognisable. But in one place Jim says that he almost wishes we had never come to the village. It would have been easier for him. It would have been easier, he says, not to have known us, than to know us and us not be there. I am struck by this. I think about it often. Is knowledge by itself a form of pain? Is it redundant, when it is not underwritten by possession? We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge, and it is this, I suppose, that Jim dislikes. Knowledge is what remains to the human mind
once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.

South: is it possible that, having come all this way down, we are to go still further? When the children swim, they sometimes throw coins into the water, and I watch as they dive to the floor of the pool to retrieve them. There is always a transition, when the momentum of the dive gives way to the resistance of the water, and they must swim to descend the last few feet to the bottom. I see the change in the movement of their bodies: there is a second of panic and then a kind of liberation, a struggling free from the world of the surface. Down they go, with no air left in their lungs, down into the underlying silence where there is nothing further to remind them of life. It is as though they are entering a place they know but had forgotten. I watch them reach out with green-white fingers, their hair suspended in the water like mermaids’. They are so unhurried, so free of need. They seem, briefly, immortal. Then their little hands close around the coins and they shoot straight upwards, all urgency, as though fearful that their brief forgetting of the world above might have made it cease to exist.

We put our things in the car and we put the car in a garage in Arezzo and we board the noon train. We are to voyage among thieves and volcanoes: we are travelling light. Outside, the world lies in a trance of heat. The temperature clock at the station reads thirty-eight degrees. The suburbs of Arezzo glide by, stunned in the dust. Then there is a brown vista of the pitiless plain, fringed by indifferent hills. The children are somewhat shocked to discover that we have left the house in the valley for good. They wish to know why we have done this. They loved that house: they were under the impression that as no one had said otherwise it had become, quietly, our permanent home. Though we have explained our plans to them many times, it is clear that for them an explanation remains an entirely theoretical experience. It offers not the slightest
protection from their feelings, which hit them with the force of hammer blows. Now the feeling of loss is upon them: they look for some way of defending themselves. Did we sell the house? they ask suspiciously, as though we were known for doing this behind their backs. No, we explain, we never owned it. It belongs to someone else. They mull this over. They remember the house in England – they hadn’t wanted to leave that either. It upsets them to remember that house, where they lived for three years. Their feelings about the house in Italy are really their feelings about the house in England in disguise. They realise that they had begun to forget it, and forgetting is the deepest loss of all. The real wound has been uncovered. They become tearful. Why did we leave the house in England? Why?

The hot, heartless world meanders past the windows: the train stupidly follows its monotonous southern impulse. There is a nun sitting quietly in the corner of our carriage. She is small and plump in her dove-grey habit. Her tiny feet are crossed neatly at the ankle beneath her long skirts. She has a broad, flat face and a high, rounded forehead like the forehead of an elderly china doll, with the close-fitting band of her veil at the top. She seems so distant from the experience of pain, so dry and plump and spotless, so indefatigably neutral, with her wooden crucifix as chunky as a child’s toy: she sits like a mannequin in her corner, old and virginal, looking out of the window with small, pale-blue eyes. What does she know of loss? What does she know of the skin that must be shed, the pound of flesh exacted in order to do and dare in this world? She opens her bag and takes out a little packet of wafer biscuits. They remind me of communion wafers, pale and refined and textureless. She offers the biscuits to the children, with a tiny crescent smile. They take one each. They are dry, these biscuits, weightless and so dry that they make a crisp, brittle sound when they are eaten, but their religious dryness is itself a form of consolation: the children eat them as I once ate the communion wafer, with its feeling of a dressing on the tongue,
a gauze, as though emotion itself were being blotted up. Every few minutes she opens her bag and offers them another. They eat them peacefully. I wish to tell her that it is my fear of separation that has resulted in our presence on this train. I wish to explain to her my belief that it is better to lose houses and friends than to be excluded from your parents’ desires. I would say, if we spoke a common language, that it is better to feel pain than not to confront the possibility that you will be hurt; that it is better to commit yourself to the life of knowledge than to cling on to the world of possession.

In the hot afternoon we enter Rome. The train sits there among other trains: the nun gets off. Presently we pull away again. The great city elapses and falls behind. Then we are in green fields that slope down towards the sea. The shoulder of land with its dense green vegetation obscures the probing silvery surf: the blue ancient water makes a simple shape beside the green shape of the fields, and sometimes there are old pink-coloured villas standing in a furze of trees that look down on the mystery of the shoreline. Is it possible that Rome is only an hour behind us? We seem so far from anywhere, so remote. This electric-green land hunched around the mineral-coloured water: it appears dateless, older than the oldest artefact, older than mountains. A mountain is prolix compared with this place that seems to stand in the dawn of the world’s consciousness. The train goes slowly, in ebbing fits of movement. Then finally it stops altogether, and for first one hour, then two, we are stranded in the heat until it seems that we will never move again. The carriage grows hotter. People move up and down the aisles and hang out of the windows. We hear that there has been an accident further up the line. We have no water left. We will disintegrate: we will be broken down here, slowly erased by the sun and turned to mute and unrecorded dust, while the sea watches us out of its old blue unblinking eye.

The train starts to move again. The carriage is so hot that our clothes are soaked with sweat. We gaze silently out of the
windows. We have forgotten the house in the valley, and England, and the panic of loss: they have been wrung from our minds as the sweat has been wrung from our bodies. I am glad now that the train stopped, for I have come to recognise the process of adjustment as a discipline, whose strictures become more binding the longer they are deferred. And it is clear that while we suffered we passed into a different world: the faces in the train are different, the smell and texture of the air, the soft, heavy, vitreous light. Just as the children diving for coins find a place of liberation at the bottom of the pool, so we have discovered a strange freedom at the very root of our intentions.

The air is too hot to breathe. We close our lips and fold up our lungs, and prepare to swim.

Naples is a city that has the appearance of living among its own ruins. The great pitted half-derelict terraces crawl with brilliant life like coral reefs. There are streets like crevasses, dark and resinous, and streets like canyons that are filthy and beautiful and grandiose, ravaged across their faces where the walls have here and there collapsed into rubble. Everywhere there is a feeling of moisture, the humidity of the life-cycle, of birth and decay: the pavements are heaped with rotting food and rubbish, and the roads are crammed with traffic whose fumes impart their grey, oily cast to the foetid air. Sinuous, lustrous-hair boys and girls fly past like nereids on mopeds; beautiful, tragic women pick their way through the refuse in slender, murderous shoes. And the men, so dark and pagan-looking, so powerful and savagely polite! The men of Naples strike one as absolutely mysterious. They are like little gods, with their air of personal legitimacy, and their fatalistic courtesy that seems to recognise no authority beyond themselves.

I imagine that all cities were once like Naples, in the sense of being alive; an interior sort of life that is beyond the reach of rationality, like that of a bodily organ presiding over its own world of waste and renewal. A bodily organ has no conception of civilisation. It is merely programmed to favour life. The virtuous
and the malign circulate around its secret ventricles, forever enacting the struggle that is the struggle of all organic things. It is almost shocking to see it, coming from the neutered north. And indeed, even the Italians have warned us about Naples. We have been advised to remove our jewellery, to stuff our money into our underwear. The nereids on mopeds, we have been told, will snatch your purse from your hands as they skim past. They will cheerfully yank the jewels from around your throat and the gold from your ears.

Our
pensione
stands in a dark, moist crease in the innards of a building off the Via Toledo. The black walls are ribbed with narrow iron stairways; far above, the early evening sky lowers a last pale finger of light into the well of gloom. We change our filthy clothes and go out again. It is nearly dark: people are coming out in their finery, their gowns and their glitter, their fancy shoes. Limousines nose through the chaotic streets. The bars are full, the theatre is opening its doors. The Piazza Bellini is strung with lights. We walk for a while through the vertiginous, chasm-like streets, where people converse high up from one side to the other through the gloaming. I have noticed something, but it has taken me a while to establish what it is: there are no tourists. There are a few foreigners, like ourselves, but a foreigner is not the same thing as a tourist. A foreigner is isolated, observant, displaced. A foreigner lies low, and takes stock. But a tourist feels at home when he is not.

At last night falls. The darkness is thick and hot and very black. The World Cup is on, and the restaurants have brought out their television sets and rigged them up on the pavements. We eat a pizza and watch the game with the waiters. The children have
gelati
. It grows late, but the thick, hot darkness makes it difficult to think of going to bed. There is a feeling of pause, of stasis. How can time pass through this thick, resistant matter? The streets are still full of people. There are tiny children running in the alleyways. The darkness has no quality of intermission. It is like a blockage. I can’t imagine it ever clearing itself to make way for the dawn. At eleven o’clock we go in,
and though I think that I will never sleep in the gloomy well that has to tunnel up and up before it can disclose the sky, we wake to find that it is day, that time was permitted to pass after all and the sun allowed to rise, and that the smell of
espresso
is creeping like a thief through our open window.