After Hannibal (14 page)

“You have misquoted. ‘A little
learning
is a dangerous thing,’ that is what your poet says.”

Chapman’s grin vanished abruptly. To be corrected by a foreigner on a point of English literature was really too much. “Just a minute now,” he said.

“Mr. Mancini is right, Harold,” Cecilia said. “It is a line from Alexander Pope.”

“Well, of course, I knew that.”

“So we wait for them to do what they have threatened to do.” Cecilia spoke mainly in order to give her husband time to recover from his discomfort. “Then we call the police and report them.”

“That would be one way, yes,” the lawyer said. “But it would be better to order something, some wood for example. Have you a chimney?”

The Chapmans looked blankly at him for some moments without speaking.

“Not chimney, that is wrong, I mean fireplace. Have you a fireplace or stoves that burn wood?”

“Why, yes,” Chapman said. “Both, as a matter of fact.”

“And a woodshed?”

“Yes.”

“Good, then you can order a load of wood.”

“But it is nearly the end of May.”

“Never mind, it will be well dried out for the winter. As soon as these Checchetti put in the stakes you order a load of wood. At this time of the year the wood people, they are not busy, they will deliver maybe the same day or the one after. With luck the driver will be prevented by these stakes from passing. It might even be that the Checchetti will threaten to report him if he tries to pass—they are people who easily use threats. He will listen to them, probably, since lorry drivers try to avoid close inspection by the authorities. It is ingrained in them, whether their papers and vehicles are in good order or not.”

Mancini sat back and folded his arms. His face had been impassive hitherto, but now he allowed himself a discreet smile. “Obstructing the road, using threats, illegally depriving you of your wood. The driver could be called as a witness.”

Cecilia had a renewed sense of something ageless in Mancini, something that had never been young and would never be old. “Then we have them,” she heard her husband say.

“Then we have them, shrewd observation,” Mancini said. “They will think at first that the law is on their side, but they will discover their mistake and then they will be frightened. We will generously forbear to press charges, but in view of the inconvenience caused by the delay in the delivery of the wood we will have to reconsider our offer of financial help.”

The lawyer’s smile had gone now. His face had returned to its usual impassivity. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “More beautiful
than going to the police. These days I am interested in beauty more and more.”

Monti was working at home. He had brought his small table up against the window so as to make the most of the remaining daylight; too much use of the table lamp troubled his eyes, causing them to smart painfully and run with thin tears.

He glanced up frequently as he worked. It was the time of day that he liked best, the time between sunset and dusk, when for a brief while colors were deepened and the slopes of the hills were visited by a light uniquely radiant and soft. It was this light that he waited for. He had seen it nowhere else but in Umbria. It came suddenly, shortly before the onset of darkness, like a gentle assertion of some value in danger of being forgotten. What was it? he wondered. Certitude, peace, the light of reason? An illusion in any case. What we call beauty or morality no more than the sense of shape, an illusion of design …

With some reluctance he lowered his head once more to the page. He was reading among the early chronicles of the city and
contado
of Perugia in an endeavor to trace the course of events which had made the leading members of the Baglioni family, for some half-century or so, before they were finally crushed by Pope Paul III in 1540, the princes of the city. In this mesh of shifting loyalties and incessant intrigue design was difficult to establish. One constant thread was the fertility of the family, the tendency to produce large numbers of male children. Another was the regularity with which
these murdered one another, a process culminating on a warm July night in the year 1500, when several of the chief members of the clan had been butchered in their sleeping quarters by a band of conspirators recruited and led by their own relatives. Night of the Great Betrayal, it was called in the chronicles, a phrase that lingered strangely in Monti’s mind.

Order he still sought, however, a principle that might seem to give meaning to this bloody welter, something that would work on the past as the evening light did when it visited the landscape. It had come to him increasingly of late that it was some sort of escape route he was looking for; he wanted to be detached from history, rescued.

The earliest reference he had so far found was to one Lodovico Baglioni, who had come to Perugia in 1162 as an obscure knight in the train of the Emperor Barbarossa and stayed on and founded his line, no different then or later, no more endowed with qualities of mind or character than the other great families of Perugia, the degli Oddi, the Ranieri, the Arcipreti. All these had fought for preeminence in the centuries following. Then the two most powerful, the Baglioni and the degli Oddi, had become locked in a blood feud that lasted a hundred and fifty years, following upon the treacherous murder of Messer degli Oddi by members of the Baglioni family in December of 1331. That killing had been of a type by now familiar to Monti: five or six had lain in wait for Messer degli Oddi and cut him down before he had time to draw a weapon.

The light he had been waiting for came now, falling across the land at a time when there was no longer a visible source of illumination in the sky, so that it seemed like a property of the landscape
itself, fulfilling some ancient contract between earth and rock and plant. Tentative at first, it strengthened slowly, falling with a soft blaze of yellow on the flowering broom that lay in swathes on the hillside opposite the house.

He sighed to himself and shifted back in his chair so that he could see higher up, to the crests of the nearer hills. The beauty of the light was in the sense it gave of a visitation. The experience of it was like the experience of understanding something. He thought of Laura, of the words they had said at different times, their quarrels, their lovemaking. Like a kind of landscape. Their marriage, the years together, his present loneliness, formed a single aspect and this aspect needed a unifying light. Light there must be, he insisted to himself, some key, some guiding principle. Otherwise I am thrashing about in the same blind ditch as the Baglioni, and so is Laura too.

It was with an obscure sense of rescuing them both from such dreadful wallowing that he began now to think of his wife in some of her particular physical expressions, her walk with the toes turning slightly inward, her habit when puzzled or perplexed of brushing the back of her hand across her brow, beginning at the temple, like a cat washing itself. Laughter came easily to her but her face when unguarded had lines of sadness about the mouth, more than sadness, something like pain; and because of this her laughter seemed like a conquest continually renewed …

He sat thus while the radiance faded from the landscape and the accustomed sense of loss grew with the beginnings of the dark. He was roused by a tapping at his door. When he went to open it he found his neighbor Fabio on the doorstep, standing rather close to the wall, as if sheltering there or listening for sounds from inside.
Monti was struck by the pallor of his face in the half-light and by what seemed an unnatural stillness about him, a quality of containment. It was unusual that he should visit without a phone call or any warning—they were not on such close terms. However, apart from bidding him good evening Fabio said nothing at all, merely stood there in silence. After a moment Monti asked him in, leading the way into the living room, where he had been working. At the sight of the papers and books on the table, Fabio began to apologize for the disturbance he was causing, accompanying this with an odd little gesture, almost of helplessness as it seemed to Monti. The bookish recognize the presence or absence of this quality in others quite soon and Monti saw at once from Fabio’s manner that he was not a man much given to reading or studying.

“You do not disturb me. I am glad to be given a reason for pausing in my work,” Monti said in the tone of grave courtesy usual with him. He felt the awkwardness of the situation, which was increased by the fact that Fabio said nothing further for the moment, simply stood there tensely, as if containing the desire to break into violent gesture. Monti asked him to sit but with them both seated at opposite sides of the fireplace the sense of awkwardness seemed to grow. Laura would have known what to say, Monti thought. She would have known how to set this man at his ease. His visitor was smartly dressed, he noticed, in a linen jacket and a pale green shirt and a carefully knotted tie. “Can I offer you some coffee?” he said. “Or a glass of wine?”

“Wine, yes, thank you.”

“I have some of the local Trasimeno wine, which is not bad.” He went through into the kitchen, returned with the opened bottle
and two glasses, poured out the wine. In the face of Fabio’s continuing silence he began to talk about his work, to explain why he had been glad, in a certain sense, to be interrupted. Reading Perugian history was cumulatively depressing, often seeming to be no more than a chronicle of crimes. “Of course,” he said, “any study of history can seem like that at times, but in Perugia you get it in a concentrated form. Not a concentration of incidents or events, I don’t mean that exactly, but it is the constant repetition of a single pattern, power gained by conspiracy and crime, maintained for a certain time by oppression, bloodily yielded in the end to some new gang.”

He raised his glass with a murmured salutation and drank. He watched Fabio taste the wine, watched him move his head very slightly from side to side in the manner of one uncertain about the quality. It was a small gesture and probably habitual but it seemed graceless to Monti, after his recommendation. For a man still relatively young, Fabio seemed too set in his ways, too obtrusive with judgment, even in his present disturbance—that he was disturbed about something was clear enough. There was nothing for it but to go on talking, give him time. “Some new gang,” he repeated. “It is the cyclic effect that is depressing. Centuries and centuries of it. Fashions change and modes of speech and styles of architecture, but the murder factor remains constant. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of redeeming features. Perhaps I have been more sensitive to it lately. It makes one feel, you know, pretty hopeless about our human prospects.”

“It is not much different today,” Fabio said. “Look at Italy. Is this a democracy?” He paused for a moment and his eyes widened
under their thick brows. “Arturo has gone,” he said, “he has left me, he is in Naples.”

“I see.” Monti rose to fill Fabio’s glass. This was it then. He was rather at a loss to know what to say, also troubled by a certain sense of surprise—the two men had seemed so close. But that is how Laura and I would have struck people, right up to the moment she went … “When did it happen?” he asked, an odd query, as he at once realized, inappropriate; desertion was not an event in itself, merely the culmination of an obscure process—his own experience had taught him this.

“I had a phone call from him this morning. He went to Rome two days ago. He said he wanted to go alone, he was tired, he needed a break.” Fabio’s lips twisted at the falsehood of this. “I let him go. Then he rings me from Naples to say that everything is over, he is not coming back.”

“I see, yes.” Monti nodded, putting as much comprehension as he could into it. A bare understanding of the words was all he could offer, at least for the moment; he did not know enough to attempt more. He had noted the phrase about granting permission. It had seemed authoritarian to him, rather disagreeably so; but then, he was an outsider.

“We had a little quarrel before he left,” Fabio said. “Nothing much, a few words. He went to buy some chicken breasts for supper and instead of going to Ellera he went to the little shop here. We always go to Ellera to buy our meat. I had told him never to buy anything in that shop.”