The Last Supper (19 page)

I do not want to relocate, to stay, to settle down. I want to roam, like the writers and artists of an earlier age with their fashionable selfishness. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, lived everywhere, at least for the time it took him to come to hate the place. In
Sea and Sardinia
he describes an ocean voyage and two-week visit to Sardinia that he and his wife Frieda made one winter from Sicily, where they lived at the time. Sardinia is cold, austere, beautiful but a little cheerless, and their stay there is relatively brief. Nevertheless, Lawrence is constantly exhorting himself and his disconsolate companion to decide one way or the other: could they live there? It seems he could go nowhere without ascertaining its fitness to sustain life, like a scientist scanning distant planets for signs of water and oxygen. Frieda, who had left her three young children in order to live with Lawrence, and caused such a scandal thereby that she was forbidden from ever seeing or contacting them, must truly have felt herself to be far inside the labyrinth of separation, every new move cutting her ties with England, though Sardinia was no further away than Sicily. Lawrence, perhaps, wanted to sever Frieda from her past, with its rival mother-love, but in every new place they went, her longing for her children was there. How many places would you have to move before you forgot who you were?

Lawrence himself tired of Italy, its little garden-like landscapes, its art that he began to see as a substitute for life, its soppiness, what he called its ‘macaroni love’. He claimed to appreciate Sardinia for its lack of culture: how pleasant, he wrote, to come to a place where there were no Peruginos you had to go and look at. There was a time when he had needed to look at Peruginos, and also to enter the Roman past, the Hellenic. He had needed to furnish his soul with classicism,
but he had outlived that need. Now what he required was life itself, living humanity. In
The Rainbow
Lawrence writes of the operation of culture as a form of grace in human evolution. People discover books, art, music; they inch forward in consciousness, pass on their discoveries to their children, who inch forward a little more. In
The Rainbow
, Will Brangwen is a frustrated aesthete who believes he will create art, but who ends up a bitter, violent man, teaching carpentry at adult-education classes in the new socially inclusive England of the early twentieth century. It is his daughter, Gudrun, who becomes the artist and thereby escapes her regional, working-class roots. Will, as the father of young children, would sit in the Nottinghamshire evenings leafing through his precious art books with their reproductions of Fra Angelico, but it was his daughter who would consummate his desire for these images. Will is able to comprehend beauty but not to bear its caste. As a man he is cruel, and fettered by upbringing. In the end the Fra Angelicos fail to refine his nature.

I am half-shocked by Lawrence’s remarks about art, but I sympathise with them too. He did not, after all, know how physically ugly the world would become. For me, it is necessary to look at Perugino, in order to digest the supermarkets and shopping malls, the litter and landfill sites, the pylons and traffic jams and motorway service stations that otherwise fill the eye. Without beauty, the human sensibility becomes discouraged. One could look at a flower, of course, or a child; but to look at a painting is to feel looked at, comprehended, yourself. It is to experience empathy, for what is art but the struggle to acknowledge the fact that we ourselves were created? Over time the morality of art has become clear and distinct: we don’t ask it to be correct, or selfless, or didactic, or judgemental. We don’t blame it for the uses to which it is put. We don’t expect it to intervene, to determine, to make peace or war, to end poverty or greed, to abate suffering. We ask only that it be beautiful and true. We turn to it to dignify our experience of the world; to find a
reply to the question of consciousness.

But I, too, have a qualm about the Fra Angelicos, the Peruginos. It is that they belong to the past. Their reality is so remote from our own: I fear that to look at them is a form of nostalgia. I fear the feeling of sadness they cause me, sadness that our own world is not more beautiful. I wonder whether the others feel that too, queuing down the streets in their thousands, thronging at the ropes of museums.

It is our last day in Rome: we are going to Vatican City. We have left it a little late to scale this peak, the Vatican museums with their seven kilometres of exhibits, the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Stanze, the Borgia apartments, the Etruscan galleries. We have let time slip away from us, as sleep slips away from those who dwell too much on what the day will bring. We have begun to worry about the future, and the present has strayed from our clutches.

It is very hot, and I have hurt my foot. The pain is in the arch, a strange, screw-like agony that radiates a secondary numbness, so that my leg feels like a block of wood. It has been there for several days, though I have tried to deny it. My pace of walking has merely got slower and slower: the others stop and look round, finding that I am not there. For a while there was a mute adaptation to these new circumstances, as though we had been unexpectedly joined on holiday by an invalid great-aunt, who limped stoically in the rear. The children have started wincing and apologising when they step by accident on my foot, causing me to shriek. When we sit down at a cafe, they automatically drag over an extra chair, for me to put my leg on. But on our last day in Rome, the veil of denial is torn down. It is ridiculous. I can barely walk. We must do something: we must act.

I refuse the doctor and the hospital point-blank. I will see the Raphael Stanze, no matter how much it hurts. To go to the doctor would take all day. Instead we will go to the pharmacy. But the pharmacy near the hotel is shut. We ask a passerby the
reason: it is Sunday. She thinks it will open for a short while at eleven. We sit on a bench and wait. It is pleasant to sit down in the shade. It is all I can think about, how pleasant it is. This is not because I am tired: it is because the pain, when I stand, is unbearable. When I look down at my foot I notice it is swollen. I worry, vaguely, about the time: our Vatican hours are being steadily consumed. If only I could stay on the bench, all would be well. I imagine the others pushing me on it around the museum, while I lie on my back and gaze upwards at the Sistine Chapel.

At last the pharmacy opens. The pharmacist touches my foot and I shriek. She gives me pain killers, and a tube bandage like a thick white sock. She does not involve herself in what the matter might be: she’s only a pharmacist. She does not have the doctor’s duty, to bring the crimes of the body to justice. I intend to get away with it, and she is my accessory. For a while, on the bus, I am buoyant. The bandage has a placebo effect: when I held it in my hands in the pharmacy, my foot seemed to speak. It affirmed that the bandage was what it needed. It throbbed with belief. But the truth is that the bandage makes no difference at all. When I put it on, it was like putting on a sweater to address a stomach ache. There was a moment of disjointure, of failure to connect, before the pain thrummed on, resuming its separate journey. It has a mask-like virtue, at least. It makes what lies beneath it more horrible to me, but more bearable for everyone else.

The bus arrives at Vatican City. There is a walk, short enough, but deep in its dimension of agony. When we reach the Piazza San Pietro I look up, and in my vulnerable state its blinding white vastness seems awful and ominous. It is as huge and cold and hostile as a glacier. These are the pilgrim spaces, these gigantic man-made voids – the Piazza is said to be able to hold 300,000 people with ease – but to me they are inhuman and terrifying. The Piazza is rounded at its open end. It is meant to be shaped like a shell. But there is nothing shell-like about it at all. A shell is small and delicate. If a shell were the
size of the Piazza San Pietro it would belong in a horror film, a monstrous bivalve that rampaged around the world, shovelling 300,000 people at a time into its scalloped jaws.

I limp across the white, diamond-hard expanse, trailing after the others. It is midday, and the sun is ferocious. With my limp and my bandage I could be a true pilgrim, come to St Peter’s to be healed. I have always been somewhat afraid of the pilgrim character. When I was fourteen, I went to Lourdes with my convent school to assist the pilgrimage of sick people from England. We took the boat and then the overnight train. I shared a carriage with a man whose wife was dying from cancer. She lay in her bunk, a swollen woman with terrible coarse threads of hair trailing from her bald scalp. The train rocked, and pulsed continually with shuttered yellow light. Her face was grotesquely enlarged: she groaned, and sometimes flailed helplessly in her sheet. It was as though she had discovered something awful, on the very edge of life. Her husband thought she might not survive the journey to Lourdes and back. He said so, repeatedly. The train was so pell-mell, so indifferent. It sped through the night, rocking, as though it would stop for nothing. I tended numerous women during that week in the Lourdes hospital. Their bodies were so contorted, so satirised. It made death seem like an unpleasant kind of joke. There was mockery, as though of the sincerity with which they had lived in their own flesh. One of them had gangrene in her leg. We became friendly: I had to clip her blackened toenails, both of us shaking with laughter. On the boat on the way home there was a storm in the English Channel, and I remember empty wheelchairs pitching up and down the corridors, and the sound of groaning that came and went as the cabin doors swung back and forth on their hinges.

We pass in front of St Peter’s, where Mass is being said, and people are queuing to have their bags examined by the security guards. Then we sheer off into a narrow street that runs beneath the high Vatican walls to the museums. It is shady here and the children run ahead, leaping up in the coolness like
water leaps in a fountain. The walk is long. My foot aches, but I don’t care quite so much. It is enough, to be in this quiet, shady street away from the blinding white tundra of the pilgrim square; to be alone, ourselves, in Italy, with no God to beg from or placate, with the Raphael Stanze and the Sistine Chapel before us. The children run ahead and come back, run ahead and come back. Tomorrow we are leaving, going north. But we will still be together.

I sit down on the kerbstone, underneath the high wall. It seems that I can go no further. The others stand and look down at me. I perceive their consternation in vague, shadowy blocks with the sun behind like a halo. Then they say that they will go on to ascertain the length of the queue, while I rest here. They go, and a short time later they return. There is no queue. The museums are closed on Sundays. We should have checked: we are losing our touch. We have missed our chance.

For a while we stay where we are, idling on the pavement in the shade. I think of Alberto Moravia’s stories, the
Roman
Tales
, where disappointment is always the springboard to some kind of truth, a truth that lies beyond desire and motivation. The others sit on a bench. I remain on the kerbstone. Presently my daughter takes a photograph of me. I look at it sometimes, back in England. I am a woman of thirty-nine, casually dressed, with a white bandage on her foot. The place where I sit, in the right angle of the kerb and the wall, is so old that the stones have been worn into rounded shapes. In a minute I am going to get up: I won’t be there any more. It is almost as though I am not there at all. It is the stones that are really there, not me. Maybe one day I’ll go back and sit in the same place, to prove something. But all the same, I look happy. I am smiling.

We have a tent. It is Tiziana’s: she lent it to us. Before we left to go south, she erected it for us on the grassy slope of her garden, beside the wooden hut. It is a small tent, dome-shaped, faded blue on the outside, with a faded pink interior. The bleached colours are intimate: it is Tiziana’s use that has faded them. We all get inside, while Tiziana’s huge black dogs lie down on the hot grass at the flap. It is like sitting in a shell, or a teacup. The brilliant afternoon disappears: the tent is filled with a diffuse, rose-coloured light, and the unbodied sounds of outside, of the dogs panting softly in the heat. Tiziana strokes the worn material, recalling her travels. She has been happy in this tent. She has taken it with her everywhere. She wishes to bequeath it to us, this frail shelter that can simply be unfolded and become a place, as familiar as a room, then cease to exist again. She doesn’t like the thought of it ceasing to exist. We promise to send it when we get back to England, but Tiziana shrugs. She doesn’t think she’ll be camping any time soon, dug in as she is on Jim’s doorstep, awaiting an opportunity to strike.

It is July, and the summer lies heavy on the landscape; the heat extends everywhere, across night and day, unbroken. We pick up the car in Arezzo and drive to the coast, past the port of Piombino with its ships and steel foundries and boats to Elba, out across the deserted countryside of the headland, and north to remote Populonia and the Gulf of Baratti. The light is dry, ancient, on the earth-coloured shoreline. The sea is a sheet of glitter. The tufted green headland, the grassy dunes with
their crescent of pine trees, the brown-hillocked mystery of the Etruscan necropolis that stands beside the water, the fortified village on its hill above the bay: it is like a secret fold in the earth, inviolate. We pitch Tiziana’s tent in a big, dry glade with straw-coloured fields all around its perimeter, a kilometre from the sea. The pine needles and brown, brittle eucalyptus leaves are soft underfoot. We tie a length of rope between two trees as a washing line. We spread a sheet on the floor of the tent to sleep on. There is a shower block, and a little cafe that sells
cappuccino
and
cornetti
for a euro.

The pine trees in the dunes have umbrella-shaped tops with dark, spur-like branches: their trunks are as thick and tall and fantastical as giants’ legs. Pliny, from his naval vessel in the Bay of Naples, observed that the cloud given off by Vesuvius at its eruption was precisely the shape of an umbrella pine. These trees are ubiquitous in Italy: it is strange that the volcano should mirror their shape, as though a country could have a family of forms, just as it has a distinct language and race of people. The floor of the pine wood is soft and springy: it is undulating, mounded, primitive in appearance. There are people here. They walk soundlessly through the shade with its intricate stencils of light. They tread the narrow paths down to the beach and the sea. The water beats and heaves softly beyond the screen of trees. We follow a path that winds among the giant trunks. We are barefoot, brown-skinned, unburdened. The children carry their swimming towels in a roll under the arm. We have water, and a small second-hand hardback edition of Shakespeare’s plays. We have a home six feet wide made of faded blue cloth, and a washing line. There seems to be no need for anything else. The bay is so warm, so soft, so simple: it releases us from need, like sleep. Is it better to sleep than to need? What was its purpose, all that need, the machine-like complexity of our life at home, the desire for escape that was its dark emission? A warm wind soughs through the pine wood and stirs the high-up branches of the trees. In the distance we can see the humped brown shapes of
the Etruscan tombs. Then we come out into the blinding light of the beach, the sand strewn with matted foliage, the water rolling in its frill of surf. The countryside is rough, carefree, running down to the edge of the sand. There are people dotted about. They seem small, indistinct, both vague and multifarious, like forms etched by centuries of tides.

Our copy of Shakespeare has illustrations. They are highly coloured, artificial, like stills from an old Hollywood movie. There is a drawing of Julius Caesar in his toga and laurel wreath, craggy and superstitious-looking, his eyes sliding to the side. There is Hamlet, black-clad and thin as a spider, with fair foppish hair. They are realities become characters become
realities again. I brought the book to the beach with the intention of reading it myself, but the others want to read it too. The children do not run to the rolling water, nor play in the earthy sand. Instead they sit one on either side of me, their mouths by my ears, trying to see over my shoulder. They want to know about Shakespeare. They want to know the plot of
Othello
, of
Antony and Cleopatra
. They point to things and ask what they mean. Every time I turn the page, they complain. After a while I surrender and read aloud. I read them Hamlet’s soliloquies and Antony’s love-speeches and Macbeth’s unsettling remarks on the death of his wife. I do all three witches in different voices. I do
The Tempest
, explaining as I go along.

The afternoon passes. A man comes up the beach selling slabs of frozen pineapple. Later he comes back again, selling lemon
granite
. People come and go through the heat-haze, in and out of the silent pine woods. The sun begins to dip; slowly light leaves the bay. The sea is milky, thick, mineral-coloured. Evening approaches, a blue-grey aura that stands on the hills and fields, as though it has risen from the earth. The tombs cast shadows across the grass. The sun sinks, bloodying the sky. It leaves behind it a feeling of weightlessness, of consciousness desisting. Everything is still, trance-like. The water laps faintly at the shore. There are no lights around the bay; the human day is barely marked. A month might have passed, or a century. We roll up our towels and return to our tent. There are other tents in our glade; people are rinsing out their swimming costumes, heating things on little stoves, reorganising their pots and pans. They do not relinquish their grip on time. They are standing up for civilisation. In the tent next door there is a young German couple, fair and big-boned, who have prepared a hot meal for themselves and are sitting eating it at their folding table, where the glasses and cutlery and pepper pot have been nicely laid out. The girl serves the food to the boy, who sits upright and expectant in his chair. They are so young and yet so proper: I
don’t know whether to admire them or feel concerned on their behalf. How rigid and upright they are, how thoroughly disciplined, in this wild bay with its fields of ancient tombs, its giant primeval trees, its centuries that pass in an afternoon. They haven’t turned up here with a volume of Shakespeare, a sheet, and a two-man tent that must somehow accommodate four. They have inflatable mattresses, which I watch the boy pump up after supper.

The children are playing ‘Hamlet’. One of them is Ophelia; the other is the prince. They have wrapped themselves in swimming towels tied at the shoulder, like togas. Come here Ophelia! commands the prince. Ophelia declines. I don’t like you any more, she says. Hamlet says that he’s going to tell his mother. Fine, says Ophelia, disgustedly. Later Ophelia is discovered lying flat on her back in the pine needles. Help! she says, I can’t swim! Hamlet is beside himself. He claws the floor of the glade in despair. Afterwards he decorates her recumbent form with dead eucalyptus leaves.

We go to a little restaurant in the dark fields near the bay, where they give us
frito misto
in paper cones and Greco di Tufo wine, pale and chilled as an icicle. We walk on the beach in the spectral silver light of the sea. We cram into Tiziana’s tent. It isn’t so bad. Its insubstantiality is strangely gratifying, for it makes manifest our determination to economise. The pitch costs fifteen euros a night. Our boat back to England is booked for nine days hence. I wonder whether we could stay here until the day before, and then drive non-stop to Dieppe. I make pillows for the children out of folded-up clothes. They put on their pyjamas in the dark. It is so hot that they don’t want any covers. We have no torch: there will be no reading. Instead I tell them the story of
Twelfth Night
.

The next day we walk to the end of the bay, where there is a little settlement of low white cottages, and a jetty with a handful of fishing boats tethered along its side. In the shallows, a group of old women sit playing cards. Their chairs
and card-table stand in six inches of water, and they swirl their veined, swollen feet abstractedly in the clear sea while they play. The waves are just ripples here, long, fine curves of silver that peal soundlessly one after another on to the sand, but sometimes a bigger wave comes, and the women lift up their skirts and laugh.

We walk past the cottages and along a path that leads around the rocks at the head of the bay. The rocks are flat and white: the sea is turquoise-coloured here, and so clear that the bottom of the deep, shelving white valley of rock with its darting fish and fine, fern-like plants can be seen from the edge. The water in the bay is warm, and brown with leaves and matted balls of
needles from the pine woods, but here there are sea urchins, blood-coloured, like rubies on the white rocks. The underwater valley looks as cool and mysterious as if it were made of glass. Sunlight hangs in liquid shapes above its crenellated ledges. It is hot, out here on the headland. There is nothing here. There is no shade. We scrutinise the rocks where they meet the water, trying to establish a way in. We would have to jump, right over the sea urchins that encrust the shore and into the deeper section, where the fish move far below, winding through clear columns of shadow and light.

The children are nervous. They do not want to jump. The sea urchins frighten them. They have an instinctive terror of nacreous bodies that wait, unseen, in the water; of stings administered silently and without warning. It has taken them so long to establish that the world is predictable, that its elements are fixed, that its properties inter-relate reliably: they will not easily forget their fear of the unknown.

I take a few steps back, and then run forward and hurl myself into the water. It was easy: I am in the deep part, swimming with the fish in regions of exquisite turquoise coolness. I tread water and look back to shore. Ophelia is having none of it. She has withdrawn from the waterside, and is sitting on a rock with her chin in her hands. But Hamlet is tempted. She stands on the brink, in an agony of indecision. She is a daredevil: she cannot bear to feel afraid, and so she is inexorably drawn to do the things she fears the most. I admire her for this trait, which I conspicuously lack, but I have failed to understand its significance, which is that she experiences more than the common portion of terror, not less. She is more frightened than Ophelia of jumping into the water, and for this reason she will force herself to do it, while Ophelia sits calmly on her rock. Her father tells her not to try: he thinks it is too dangerous after all. It was easy enough jumping in, but it is unclear how we are going to get out. But it is too late; Hamlet comes flying through the air, her fists clenched into balls at her sides, and thuds into the water
beside me. She springs up again, victorious. For a while we swim around, but there is nowhere to put our feet. The water is deep here. I begin to see the difficulty. We swim towards the rocks and through the crystalline water Hamlet sees the sea urchins, plump and glossy as blood clots, as if through a magnifying glass. The game is up: there in the water she flings her arms around my neck and sticks there like a limpet. She is heavy and I thrash about, trying to stay afloat. I ask her to let go and she shrieks and tightens her grip. On her rock, Ophelia begins to cry. I realise that one way or another I am going to have to get us out. I reach the rocks with Hamlet around my neck. Ophelia’s crying is getting on my nerves. There is only one way back to the shore, which is to clamber up the shelving rock among the sea urchins. From a distance the rock looks smooth but close up it is chaotic and sharp. I cut my hands and feet, and so does Hamlet. We stagger out into the dry afternoon with its high white sun. Hamlet and Ophelia cry uncontrollably. I am angry. I don’t know why, but I am angrier than I have ever been. I shout at them while blood runs down my legs. There are one or two Italians nearby, sunning themselves on the rocks. They look at us in consternation. They look at me. They know that the whole thing was entirely my fault. I am ashamed. I try to stop shouting but I can’t. I can’t.