The Thief of Time (8 page)

There was silence for some minutes before Dominique and I came shivering towards his corpse, looking down on the mouth which was leaking a thin line of blood and staring up at us in a finished rage. My body shook and, without meaning to, I vomited on him, my empty stomach somehow finding something new for me to deliver upon his face, covering those awful eyes for good. I stood back up in horror and looked towards Dominique.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, idiotically.

I received an extraordinary letter some weeks before my 104th birthday in 1847, which saw me leave my then home in Paris – where I had returned for a couple of years after a brief spell in the Scandinavian countries – and travel to Rome, a city I had never ventured into before. I was going through a particularly peaceful time in my life. Carla had finally died of the consumption, ridding me of the plague which our torturously enduring marriage had created for me. My nephew Thomas (IV) had joined me in my lodgings a few weeks after her funeral – a happy affair at which I got drunk on brandy and sang the praises of Thackeray's
Vanity Fair,
which was being published in monthly editions at the time – and I had agreed to let him stay on afterwards as his apprenticeship as a stagehand with a local theatre paid him very little and the hovel he was renting was unfit for human habitation. He was not an unpleasant lad to have around; at nineteen years old he was the first of the Thomases to have blond hair, a characteristic he had inherited from his mother's side of the family. He would sometimes bring friends home late at night to discuss the latest plays. They would help themselves to my supply of liquor and, although I could tell that he was more than popular with one or two of the actresses who came by, it seemed to me that the young men used him more for the wealth of his acquaintance than the pleasure of his company.

I had been gainfully employed myself for several years as an administrator of local government funding. There had been a plan to erect some new theatres in the environs of the city and I was responsible for selecting suitable locations and producing reasonable costings and timeframes for their construction. Only two of my eight detailed proposals were ever actually constructed, but they were popular successes both of them, and my name was being spoken of in society with great admiration. I was living a profligate lifestyle and socialising most evenings, my single status allowing me once again to mingle with the ladies of the city without any hint of a scandal.

Somehow news of my Parisian administrative abilities reached Rome, and I was invited to accept a new position as administrator of the arts within that city. The original letter, which was sent by a high-ranking official in their local government, was vague and hinted of enormous plans for the future while making few concrete statements about the nature of those schemes. However I was intrigued by the proposal – not to mention the amount of money which was on offer, not just for budgeting purposes but also for my own salary – and wanting to leave Paris anyway, I decided that I would accept. I spoke to Thomas one evening and made it clear that, while he was perfectly entitled to stay in Paris on his own, he was also welcome to come with me to Rome. The fact that he would be obliged to find suitable lodgings after my departure for Italy probably swung his decision – and sealed for him the natural fate of his ancestry – and he decided to pack up his few belongings and join me on my voyage.

Unlike the first time I had left Paris, some ninety years before, I was now a man of some success and wealth and hired a private coach to take us on the five day trip from capital to capital. It was money well spent, for the alternatives to such private travel were too hideous even to contemplate, but the journey itself was none the less miserable, involving bad weather, bumpy roads and a rude, arrogant driver who appeared to resent the fact that he was employed to drive anyone anywhere. By the time we arrived in Rome, I was ready to swear that I would make the city my home for ever – even if I should live to be a thousand – as I could not bear the idea of another journey as awful as that one had been.

An apartment had been rented for us in the heart of the city and we travelled there directly. I was pleased to see that it had been furnished with some taste and was delighted by the view that my bedroom gave over a picturesque market square, one not dissimilar to the haunt of my Dover youth, where I had robbed from stall to stall and from person to person in my necessary attempts to feed myself and my family.

I have never known such heat,' said Thomas, collapsing in a wicker chair in the living room. ‘I thought Paris was hot in the summer, but this ... This is intolerable.'

‘Well, what choice do we have?' I asked with a shrug, unwilling to be quite as negative as him so early into our Roman life, particularly if the object of criticism was something as uncontrollable as the weather. ‘We cannot dictate the climate. You spend too much time indoors as it is and are as white as chalk. A little sun will be good for your complexion.'

‘That's the fashion, Uncle Matthieu,' he said childishly. ‘Honestly, don't you know anything?'

‘What is the fashion in Paris may not be the fashion in Rome,' I told him. ‘Go out. Discover the city. See the people. Find
work,'
I urged him.

‘I will, I will.'

‘We're here now and there are many opportunities to be had and I can't be expected to support you for ever.'

‘We've just
got
here! We've just walked in the
door\'

‘Well, walk out of it again. Find
work,'
I repeated with a smile. I wasn't trying to irritate him – I was fond of the lad after all – but I did not want to see him sitting in our apartment day after day, relying on me to bring him his dinner and his ale, watching as his youth and beauty passed him by. Sometimes I think I have been too generous with the Thomases. Maybe if I had been a little less charitable, a little less willing to be the person who caught them whenever they fell over, at least one of them might have made it past their mid-twenties. ‘Discover the joys of self-reliance,' I begged him, seven years after Emerson.

The following day, I ventured towards the central offices of the local government agency to meet Signor Alfredo Carlati, the gentleman who had written to me in Paris and had invited me to bring to Italy whatever expertise to which I could lay claim. With some difficulty I located the building in which Signor Carlati was based and was a little nervous to find that it was a somewhat dilapidated structure on the less prosperous side of central Rome. The door on the ground floor was hanging wide open – something to do with the fact that the upper hinge which might have held it in place had no screws attached on one side – and as I stepped inside I could distinctly hear, from an office to my right, the sound of a man and woman screaming at each other in what was to me an almost untranslatable babble. Naturally I am fluent in French, but my Italian was poor and it was to be some months before I felt confident. The natural inclination of the natives to speak at high speed did not help matters either. I stepped closer to the door and looked for any sign as to what the office might contain before placing an ear against the wood and listening to the din from within. Whatever was taking place inside, it appeared that the woman was getting the better of the argument for, while she continued to shriek and scream at what can only have been a rate of one hundred words per minute, the man's tone had shrunk audibly and all he could manage was a defeated
'si'
whenever she paused for breath. Her voice grew clearer and clearer as she shouted until I realised that she had obviously approached the door from the inside and was now standing directly on the other side, only a few feet away from me. I jumped back as she swung it open and her screaming stopped in mid-sentence as she saw me there, smiling inanely at her.

‘Excuse me,' I said quickly.

‘Who are you?' she asked, reaching down and scratching herself in a most unladylike way as I held my hat humbly before her. ‘Are you Ricardo?'

‘I am not,' I admitted.

‘Petro then?'

I shrugged and looked over her shoulder towards her companion, who was small and round with dark hair greased to his head from a sharp centre parting, and who scurried towards me excitedly as I acknowledged his existence.

‘Cara, please,' he said, pushing her slightly aside as he came into the doorway, and it surprised me a little how she deferred to him now that there was a stranger present. She shrunk back a few steps in her bright red dress and allowed him to do the talking. ‘How may I help you?' he asked, his face sporting a broad smile, delighted no doubt that someone had appeared who had stopped the shrieking woman from continuing with her tirade against him.

‘I'm sorry to intrude -' I began, before he cut me off by waving his arms in the air dramatically.

‘No intrusion!' he shouted, clapping them together now. ‘We are delighted to see you. You are Ricardo of course.'

‘Neither Ricardo nor Petro,' I admitted with a shrug of my shoulders. ‘I am looking for -'

‘You are sent by one of them then,' he asked and I shook my head.

‘I am new to the city,' I replied. ‘I'm looking for the offices of a Signor Alfredo Carlati. Are you him?' I hoped he was not.

‘There is no Carlati here,' he said dismissively, the smile leaving his face completely now that I was neither Ricardo nor Petro, his missing associates. ‘You are wrong.'

‘But this is the address, surely,' I said, extending my letter to him and he glanced at it briefly before pointing towards the stairs.

‘Those offices are the next flight up. I know no Carlati but he may well be up there.'

‘Thank you,' I said, edging away as he closed the door sharply and the woman took up her screaming chorus once again from within. Already, I disliked Rome.

The next floor up had a brass plaque outside the door with the word Officialdom inscribed on it beside a neat, silver bell, which I pulled once as I smoothed my hair with my left hand. This time, a tall, thin man, with grey hair and a beak for a nose, opened the door and stared at me with nothing short of pure distress on his face. The effort which it took for him to say ‘Can I help you?' seemed almost too much for a moment and I feared that he would collapse under the strain of speaking.

‘Signor Carlati?' I inquired, forcing my voice to be at its most polite and sincere.

‘That is me,' he sighed, his eyes filling with tears as he stroked his temples.

‘I am Matthieu Zéla,' I said. ‘We have communicated through letter regarding -'

‘Why, Signor Zéla,' he said, his face lighting up now as he clasped my arms and hugged me to his body, kissing first my left cheek and then my right, and then my left again with his dry, chapped lips, ‘of course it is you. I am so pleased you are here.'

‘You were difficult to locate,' I said, stepping inside as he ushered me through to his office. ‘I didn't expect such -' I wanted to say ‘squalor' but settled instead on the phrase ‘an informal setting'.

‘You mean you expected a lavish government building, replete with servants and wine and beautiful music being played by a string orchestra chained together in one corner?' he asked bitterly.

‘Well, no,' I began. ‘That's not -'

‘For all that the world appears to think of us, Signor Zéla, Rome is not a wealthy city. What funds the government has within its control to disperse it chooses not to waste on ridiculous ornamentation for its public servants. Most of the government buildings are currently situated in small dwellings such as this one around the city. It is not perfect but our minds are more concentrated on our work than on our surroundings.'

‘Quite so,' I said, feeling suitably humbled by the philanthropy of his sentiment. ‘I meant no offence, you understand.'

‘You will have a glass of wine?' he inquired, clearly ready to move on from his diatribe as I settled in an easy chair opposite his desk, where a Tower of Pisa in paperwork stood ominously before me. I indicated that I would have whatever he was having and he poured me a glass with a shaky hand, more than a few dropfuls landing on the tray upon which the bottle stood. I accepted the glass with a smile and he sat opposite me, putting his glasses on and off as he peered at me, clearly unsure whether he liked what he saw or not.

‘Strange,' he said eventually, settling back with a shake of his head.
^T
expected someone older.'

‘I'm older than I look,' I admitted.

‘From what I heard of your work, you sounded like a most distinguished man.' I moved to protest but he shook his hand in the air dismissively. ‘I don't mean that in an offensive way,' he said. ‘I just meant that your reputation suggested a man who had spent a lifetime learning about the arts. How old are you anyway, forty? Forty-one?'

‘I wish,' I said with a smile. ‘But I've crammed a lot of experience into my life, I promise you that.'

‘I think you should know', said Signor Carlati, ‘that it was not my idea to invite you to Rome.'

‘Right ...' I said slowly, nodding my head.

‘Personally I am of the belief that the administration of the arts within Italy should be undertaken by Italians and that the disbursement of government funding within Rome should be overseen by a Roman.'

‘Such as yourself?' I asked politely.

‘Actually, I am from Geneva,' he said, sitting up straight and pulling his jacket down slightly.

‘Not even Italian then?'

‘That does not mean I cannot believe in a principle. I would feel the same way about a foreigner making government decisions within my own country as I feel about this one. Have you read Borsieri?'

I shook my head. ‘Not really,' I said. ‘Maybe a little here and there, nothing substantial.'

‘Borsieri suggests that the Italians should put aside their own artistic bents and look to the literature and artistic creations of other nations and adapt them for this country.'

‘I'm not sure that's exactly it,' I said doubtfully, considering that Carlati was simplifying Borsieri's statements significantly.

‘He seeks to make us a nation of translators, Signor Zéla,' continued Carlati with a look of pure disbelief. ‘Italy. The country which produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, the great Renaissance writers and artists. He seeks that we should put aside all our national characteristics and look to simply import ideas from the rest of the world. Madame de Stael too,' he added, spitting on the floor as he said her name, an action which made me jump back in surprise.
‘L'Avventure Letterarie di un Giorno,'
he shouted. ‘You, signor, are the natural embodiment of that piece. That is why you are here. To deprive us of our culture and introduce your own. It is part of a continuing process to denigrate the Italian and rid him of his self-confidence and natural talents. Rome is to be a little Paris.'