The Last Supper (5 page)

Our hotel room has a blue tiled floor and no blankets on the beds. It is clear that winter does not exist here, merely something that I imagine to be like a brief coma, an interlude of unknowing when the houses close their shutters and the gardens stop growing, when the pink light is switched off and the sea is drained like a swimming pool out of season. But now it is awakening: there are people in the cafes; one or two houses have opened their eyes. We change into different clothes, summer clothes that make us look white-skinned and startled in the mirror. We do not yet look as we feel, or feel as we look. We are in some perilous state of pre-existence; like unchristened babies, we are not yet saved. The baptism must commence; there is no time to lose: we run down, down to the milk-white waters and the pinkish bay, past the deserted hotel terrace with its empty tables, past the mysterious shuttered houses, the pulsing gardens, down to the little crescent of coarse sand, the waiting waters.

One after another we plunge in and swim out, sending long folds across the silken surface. We cry out; we bellow, and shoot sprays of water into the air like whales. The sea is cold; a wedge of wintry shadow stands across the beach. At the far end a rhombus of sun remains. There are some wooden slatted loungers there and I see a stirring of bodies amidst them. People are sitting up, apparently to observe our maiden voyage into the unseasonal waters of the Mediterranean. They seem astonished, almost affronted; they shade their eyes with brown wrinkled hands glittering with rings, for most of them are elderly ladies, as thin as lizards, with creased skins the colour of tobacco. They stir their dark-brown limbs and adjust their bikinis and suck the last of the sun from the sky. Occasionally they raise a skinny arm to shade their eyes and look. They are strange, stirring like lizards in their crevice of sun. But to them we are stranger still, with our white skins, our worship of a cold and contradictory element, our dysfunctional joy.

We will not always, I think, be so out of place. We will blend in; eventually we will gain some foliage, some camouflage. But
not tonight, crossing and re-crossing from shadow into light as evening advances over the motionless waters. Tonight we are migratory creatures, washed in by a powerful current, traversing the bay and pondering the intricate mystery of land.

I have taken up with a new textbook:
Italian in Three Months
. This one is a little more personal in its drive towards socialisation, though no less prescriptive.
Forgive me, but I’m too tired
to play tennis just now
. And indeed, there is no time for tennis, nor any other trivial pursuit: the three months are flying on wings of fire, passing over great continents of vocabulary, mountain ranges of irregular verbs, oceans of tenses and subjunctives where indirect object pronouns swim, sharp-toothed and voracious, awaiting a victim. We are expected to have gained a knowledge of these landmarks merely by gazing at them from a great height. Almost as soon as they come they are gone, into the linguistic past, a place of fundamental risk and confusion where things become unlearned and ungrasped, where pitiful reserves of knowledge are swept away like a pensioner’s savings in a financial crash. Unlike the historic past, the linguistic past is subject to incessant change: whole land masses sink overnight, settlements are razed to the ground, insecure structures are swept away. It matters not that yesterday I knew the central modal verbs and demonstrative adjectives: today they are nowhere to be found. I begin to see that the principle of acceleration is the solitary scientific tenet to be found in
Italian in Three Months
. They have merely removed from language-learning the impediment of time. I might as well be reading
Living in Three Months
, and get the whole thing over and done with.

It is in the area of vocabulary that I feel my resources can be most securely invested. An identifiable object has a kind of
neutrality, like Switzerland: it is a place that seems to offer the possibility of agreement. I have no difficulty with an armchair being
una poltrona
or a rug
il tappeto
; indeed, I almost prefer calling a mirror
uno specchio
, for it seems to suit it better. These things, so fixed, make a little circuit of language, as simple as a child’s toy. They go and come back punctually along their single track; not heading off into wilderness, among mist-shrouded peaks where meaning mislays itself. I can collect them, solid nouns with a face value, like fat gold coins; I can store them up and exchange them for goods. I ask for
formag
gio
and I get it; I request
burro
,
zucchero
,
mele
, and they fall into my lap. But sometimes I cannot escape the feeling that the coin in my hand is counterfeit money, for there are other words that have no ring of truth about them at all. They are false somehow; I can’t believe they’ll work. How could a
scarpa
, for instance, be the same thing as a shoe? If I went into a shop and asked for a pair of
scarpe
, I would surely be handed a brace of woodland fowl, or two fish with particularly bony spines. I am unwilling, moreover, to relinquish the serviceable properties, the reliable shoe-ness, of my native word. What will become of these qualities when they pass through the dark tunnel of translation? They will be lost, as so much else is lost between languages: nuances and puns and rhymes, all gone astray in the general disorder, like the bags and umbrellas and knitted scarves that accumulate in the Lost Property office at Clapham Junction. I feel a new respect for that go-between, the translator: this, I now see, is a person opposed to waste, to chaos, to the easy-come, easy-go disposability of the modern world. Patiently the translator reunites those bags and umbrellas with their owners, or finds some other use for them, for just as language can lose its raiment so it can accept some borrowed finery. There is a way, I don’t doubt, of doing justice to the shoe; the
scarpa
itself probably has some special qualities, though I can’t yet imagine them. The Spanish for shoe is
zapato
, which I think of as a very pointed kind of dancing-shoe, while the French
chaussure
is a
sombre gentleman’s slipper made of brown leather. The
scarpa
is as yet indistinct. I suspect it has very high sharp heels, and is the sort of thing that might be used as the murder weapon in an Agatha Christie novel.

Italian in Three Months
has the usual cast of characters, with the addition of a number of travelling businessmen who are generally to be found propping up the hotel bar in Bologna or Rome, engaging passing females in witless conversation. These men are mostly Americans: they urge alcohol on their gentle companions and loudly insist on paying. Occasionally they are glimpsed at large, on the streets, defending their rights as citizens and refusing to be hoodwinked by dishonest Italian shopkeepers.
No, it is your fault.
You gave me the wrong change. Please call the owner
. The Italians, meanwhile, pass the time in melodious flights of cultural self-satisfaction, purchasing buffalo mozzarella from the delicatessen, ordering
gnocchi
at Mamma Rosa’s restaurant, taking their coffee
espresso,
with a shot of spirits if they’re in the mood. They are brisk but not impolite towards Hugh O’Sullivan, who wants to buy a
casa di campagna
, and remain quite calm with Jeff and Bill, who present themselves almost daily at the doctor’s surgery in a condition of mild hysteria. Peter, a solitary Englishman, is glimpsed every now and then hopelessly trying to make his way to an assignation with an Italian woman called Luisa. He wanders the streets asking directions; later he is seen at a bus stop, importuning passers-by: when he finally locates Luisa as agreed on the Piazza Navona, he blurts out that he has just witnessed an acquaintance being run over by a scooter. I sense the hand of E. M. Forster somewhere deep in Peter’s past: this is the type of Englishman whom the Luisas of this world will forever try to understand but fail, whom they will follow diligently around the hospitals of Rome, searching for his injured ‘friend’, whom he seems to care for so profoundly.

I learn the word for boring, which is
noioso
, and for fear, which is
paura
. I learn the words for hunger, truth, kindness,
passion, tragedy, success. I learn to say
I am in a hurry
. I learn to say
I am a shop assistant
.

The Garfagnana is cloaked in cloud; the melancholy hills of Barga make giant shapes that vanish upwards into mist. There is a whole community of Scots that originated here: within the steep, narrow streets of the town a Scottish museum occupies two floors of a
palazzo
with pitted pale plaster like a bad complexion. Apparently, a delegation from Prestwick makes its way to Barga every year. The new direct flight from Prestwick to nearby Pisa has been a cause for celebration, in this place where tiny three-wheeled Piaggios buzz like hornets along the ancient alleyways and people hang their washing out of high windows; where the cathedral stands on its lonely hilltop, a vision of travertine austerity, and gazes out of its weathered face at the Apennines.

We came here over the white Apuan mountains, leaving behind the rose-coloured light of the coast, the belle-époque charm of Santa Margherita and Portofino; up and up into regions of dazzling ferocity where we wound among deathly white peaks scarred with marble quarries, along glittering chasms where the road fell away into nothingness and we clung to our seats in terror. The Italians, we have learned, are supreme artists in what I had thought to be a humdrum science, that of road building. When we crossed the border at Ventimiglia we were immediately initiated into these arts: there was, it seemed, to be no more tedious snaking around, no timid twisting and turning, no quarter given to the lush mountainous terrain that tumbled down towards the sea. The Italians do not drive around a mountain, no, no: they go straight through it. We must have driven through forty or fifty of them in our first two hours in the country. We have become blasé: that is why the road to Garfagnana is so unnerving. Clearly we have done something incorrect by coming up here, something an Italian would never do, unless he was driving one of the giant dusty lorries heaped with rough chunks of rock that we encounter at hairpin bends on their way from the quarries down to the coast. Each time we find one there, we scream like people in a horror film. The road ravels on and on, through vertiginous passes like the eye of a needle, through desert-like valleys, creeping along a shelf high over a vast drop where a moonscape of peaks extends to the horizon, the white marble glinting like death in its fastnesses of rock. Consulting the map, we see that there was a businesslike road from the coast that skirted the mountains and would have delivered us in an hour or so to our destination. We ought to have taken it; and yet it seems strange, the thought that we might have remained ignorant of this cold and savage place, might never have
known the real truth, in our somnambulant treading of well-worn paths. Instead we are having a thorough and passionate encounter with fear. During the nights that follow, I wake up several times dreaming that I am still on that road, for I am certain that one day I will see its like again. Amidst its voids and vacuums I have discerned a detailed image of my own mortality.

We are staying for a few days in a little house on the side of a hill, where at night it rains and rains and the clouds hang all day in the valley. It is a
casa di campagna
of a rather hemmed-in variety: there is a chicken farm next door, and houses where dogs bark incessantly at the wire fences, and down in the damp of the valley floor we find an English couple who came here on holiday and never left. They were in their early twenties at the time: now they must be more than forty. They too have dogs, big ones with wolfish pelts and pricked-up ears who gallop far ahead of them as they walk up the hill past our house. Once or twice I look up and there they are, two giant animals that have landed in the shaggy garden with a great bound to announce the imminent arrival of their masters. They have mournful faces, this couple, and are constantly to be seen in elaborate wet-weather gear, which contributes to their air of pessimism. They roam the fields and lanes like unquiet souls whom a twenty-year curse has locked out of their native land.

It is strange to be in a house again, to cook our own food, to make a fire in the little terracotta woodburner which emits great puffs of smoke when the wind blows the wrong way down the chimney. The children play on a long roped swing in the garden. They sit one on top of the other and go back and forth, back and forth like a pendulum. Sometimes we go to the local town, whose fortifications and loggia and graceful squares are all exactly as they should be. The children say
buongiorno
and
grazie
. We buy pecorino and prosciutto and olives from the delicatessen. We buy pasta in the shape of scrolls and butterflies and shells. The man in the delicatessen conforms startlingly to the character of Luigi the shopkeeper
in
Italian in Three Months
. He says
Desidera?
and
Basta cosi?
He hands us our purchases in paper bags. Then we return to the little house, where great ragged grey clouds drift slowly along the valley and accumulate around the hills.

It is not, somehow, as we expected it to be. It is as if we have entered a cul-de-sac at great speed. Things have ground abruptly, a little jarringly, to a halt. Time has started to back up around us: there is a sense of things thickening, congealing, of familiar atmospheres re-forming. After the exhilaration of escape, we find that we are all still here, unaltered. But we did not come here to find ourselves: we came for something we are able to identify only by its absence. We grow bad-tempered. When we go to the local town the children shove each other and cry, or run away from us, laughing shrilly. They no longer say
buongiorno
: they are not one-trick ponies. We have lost the thread a little. Did we come all the way here to behave exactly as we do at home, while dogs bark at the wire fences and the mist hangs sodden on the hills, and the chickens in the chicken farm scream inside their metal sheds? What exactly are we meant to
do
? The English couple pass by in the rain and talk about the renovations to their house, which are still in progress twenty years on.

We have arranged to stay a whole week in the
casa di cam
p
agna
. We go for walks; we go to Barga, though I draw a line at the Scottish museum. On the fourth day we decide to go to Lucca. Lucca is an hour away by train, but it is apparent that no one is enjoying the sensation of the Garfagnanan grass growing under their feet. Above the train station the sky is a pale grey blank; the station is deserted. After a while there are a few people on the platform. They sit and read newspapers or talk on their mobile phones. They seem a little more connected to the world, a little more current, than Luigi the shopkeeper or our English neighbours. My spirits begin to revive. A smart, slender woman is standing nearby, talking into her phone. First she has a long conversation in Italian. Then she has a long conversation in English. She is American,
though she has the groomed look of a native. Her conversation concerns her studies in Art History, her frenetic social calendar, her retinue of Italian friends whose demands on her she is hard put to satisfy. She mentions her apartment in Lucca: she is on her way there now. I listen to her admiringly; I look at her immaculate clothes, her delicate
scarpe
, her polished fingernails tapping on the casing of her telephone. I am glad that she has got herself so beautifully organised, for sometimes it seems to me that human beings are only chaotic and blind, are all fettered unconsciousness, struggling in their self-imposed chains as I feel myself in that moment to be.