After Hannibal (15 page)

“You mean the butcher in the village? I always get my meat there.”

“You are making a bad mistake. I wouldn’t put my nose in there; they don’t keep the place clean.”

“Well,” Monti said mildly, “I haven’t noticed any dirt there, but I often don’t notice things.” He paused for a moment and some sense of the other man’s intolerance had sharpened his tone when he spoke again. “I’ve been going there for four months now and no symptoms of poisoning so far.”

“Stop while you are in time,” Fabio said. “You think it is nothing but for me everything has to be done in the right way, it has always been so. Besides, we had agreed together not to go to that shop. And still he went. I have been at home all day, working outside. When it began to get dark I could not stay there alone. I came here.” He hesitated for a moment, then went on, in a tone of deeper feeling, “There is no one else living nearby, no one who would understand … I remembered your visit to us with your wife, how well we got on together.”

“That was a very pleasant evening.” He was relieved that Fabio had not yet remarked on Laura’s absence. Tact perhaps—or perhaps he was too stricken to notice. Monti reached for the bottle. “Some more wine?”

“I do not want to intrude.”

“No, you were right to come here.” Fabio had not been able to bear the thought of night falling and himself alone in the house. He had come to seek company. An impulse quite contrary to mine, Monti thought. Since she left I have avoided everyone, turned in upon myself. Nothing so much marks people out as these reactions. Fabio had dressed for this visit to a stranger, changed out of his working clothes into pale green shirt and dark red tie and linen
jacket and stone-colored jeans. This punctilio in the midst of distress was touching to Monti, disturbing too, indicating a mind that ran in grooves. “We are in the same situation,” he said. “My wife left me last November, not long after that evening when we came to you. She went back to Turin.”

It was the first time he had made this admission to any living soul. He had expected to feel, and in the moment or two before speaking had actually felt, a sort of preliminary shrinking and shame; but the words when they came brought an immediate feeling of liberation. “She has somebody there,” he said, going a stage further.

“I am sorry.” Some color had come back into Fabio’s face, either from the wine or the kindling of these confessions. From something in his tone and look, Monti had the impression that his visitor was rather put out by this intrusion of a rival sorrow and he felt an obscure resentment at the injustice of this. Unhappiness strengthens our prejudices, including those we are not always aware of or willing to admit. Monti could not say what he privately felt, which was that wives counted more in the scale than homosexual companions. “Laura and I have been married for twelve years,” he said in a tone of slight reproof.

“Arturo and I have been together for fifteen.” Fabio paused a moment, then turned his head aside. “There is more than just the leaving.” He swallowed with a pronounced movement of the throat. “He has taken the house.”

“Taken the house?” In the competition of loss that had been developing between them, Monti was compelled to recognize this as a winning move. “Just a minute,” he said. The bottle was now empty
and he went into the kitchen to get another. “How could he take the house?” he asked on his return. “Isn’t it owned jointly?”

Fabio shook his head. “It was in my name. It was my money that bought it. But I signed it over to Arturo; we made a deed of sale, a legal document signed and witnessed.”

“But why?”

“It was a way to save money, or so I thought.”

Monti listened while his visitor explained the matter. Various concessions would have become available to them … Reduced taxes, increased subsidies. He went on at some length, describing the advantages, perhaps in an effort not to seem too much duped. But no hoped-for gain could cover the error of judgment, only make it seem grosser. Perhaps becoming aware of this, Fabio said, “It was a blunder, yes, but I trusted him. Now he phones me and says he has already been to a lawyer and started proceedings to gain possession of the house.”

The habitual severity and melancholy of his face had softened with hurt as he spoke. Monti listened aghast. Arturo must have planned the whole thing in advance, not just to desert Fabio, not just to secure his own share, but to rob his partner of his home, to take everything from him, all the years of work, all the security of the future. It was hard to think of a worse treachery, taking someone’s love and using it against him.

“It denies the time we had together,” Fabio said. “If he could do that, it is hard to think he could ever have cared for me. That is what hurts so much, this poisoning of the past.”

They were well into the second bottle now. Wine and sorrow were combining to make Fabio less guarded than he would have
normally been in talking to a man who was not gay. And now, for the first time, he showed a closeness to tears. “I gave him everything,” he said. “He had no future, a low-life character, hanging around the bars, part-time waiter, part-time whore. I took him away from all that, I brought him to live with me, and this is how he repays me; he schemes to take the roof from over my head.”

Gifts are two-edged, Monti reflected, as he looked at the other’s face, so convinced of betrayal. He had brought this youth from the bars of Naples to the rural depths of Umbria. In making gifts we think that we cancel all that is negative. Everything is irradiated by the simple act of giving, like the light he had just waited for and watched, all-enveloping, as beautiful on the barren hillside as on terraces and orchards. We think—as Fabio obviously thought—that it is a light renewed every day. But how had Arturo experienced it, this gift? From day to day, how had he felt it? The scheming to take the house was treacherous and base; but the leaving Monti thought he could understand. Fabio did not seem to him very flexible or imaginative; it might become intolerable to be trapped in such a man’s vision of things. Perhaps Laura too had felt some way imprisoned … “My work was perhaps too important to me,” he said. “I am obsessive about work, I always have been so. Perhaps I did the same, made what I thought were gifts into a form of oppression.”

“The same?” Fabio frowned slightly, as if puzzled. “I did not make him many gifts; I bought him occasionally something, a silk scarf, a tiepin, little things.”

“I was speaking figuratively,” Monti said. “Have some more wine.”

“Take a beautiful car,” Fabio said. “Everything perfect, the
engineering, the bodywork. I always loved cars, I loved racing. When I heard that I could not race any longer because of the damage to my hand, I wept.”

This recalling of another loss brought tears to his eyes now. He paused and swallowed, then after a moment went on again. “As time goes by you get scratches, the paintwork dulls, the undercarriage suffers from corrosion. You do not feel the same about the car, there is not that sense of perfection any longer. It becomes a different relationship. What I want to say is that with Arturo this never happened.”

“Bodywork still perfect,” Monti said rather vaguely—he cared nothing for cars and could not imagine having a relationship with one. He thought of Laura’s body, past its youth now, the dearer to him for that. The comparison was somehow typical of Fabio; but it was through a house, not a car, that he had been cheated and betrayed, the house he and Arturo had lived in together, a thing of stone and mortar, yes, but also an abode of spirit, a shelter from the world in a sense more than physical. Even this rented house where I am sitting now, he thought, drably furnished, still unfamiliar. While she was here with me it was a dwelling place, when she walked out she left it gaping open.

“I am not so interested in cars,” he said. “People who live together, it is not in a car that they live. People who live together build a house around them day by day. But the house—”

“I will kill him,” Fabio said. “He will not take everything from me and live to laugh at me with someone else.”

He uttered this threat quietly but with complete seriousness and Monti felt sure he meant it. The eyes of Fabio had a hunter’s
steadiness about them; they were the eyes of a risk-taker. His own were mild and evasive, eyes of one who submits. Why do I always slide away into speculation? he wondered. I want to tell this man that I look at the things she left behind, a belt, an evening bag, a piece of jewelry, I take these things and look at them and want her back. The reason I don’t speak of it is that I am afraid of his contempt …

The wine was working on him now. He was on the point of braving this imagined contempt by telling Fabio that there had been times since her going when he had taken articles of Laura’s clothing and held them closely pressed against him. He was saved from the confession—a rescue for which afterward he was profoundly grateful—by a tapping at the door. The windows were unshuttered still and when he glanced up he saw wavering arcs of torchlight in the darkness outside.

He opened the door to find the figures of a man and woman, both vaguely familiar, standing at the threshold. “Chapman, Harold Chapman,” the man said extending his hand. “This is my wife, Cecilia.”

“Ah, yes, we are neighbors.” Monti read English easily but spoke it badly, with a strong Italian accent. “Please come in.”

Inside, the Chapmans were introduced to Fabio, who, by contrast, did not read English and had no idea of grammar but spoke with a passable accent, picked up during his years on the motor-racing circuit.

“I hope we are not intruding,” Chapman said.

“But no, not at all. You will take a glass of wine?”

This involved opening a third bottle. Chapman, without being
very sensitive to others, was observant in certain ways. He had noted the empty bottles, the vinous atmosphere, the sense of close colloquy, the absence of women. Had he stumbled on a pair of poofs? His attempts to enlist support for his battle with the Checchetti had been marked by difficulty from the start. First the demented German and now these two. “Well, here’s how,” he said, raising his glass. “
Salute
. I am making a point of going around and seeing everyone. Everyone that depends on this road, I mean. So far I’ve only been able to see the German chap at the end, Ritter. Now the situation has been complicated by the fact that the Checchetti are threatening to put these stakes in and narrow it down to two meters.”

This would not have been very clear to his listeners, even in Italian. Chapman always assumed more knowledge than those he spoke to could possibly have. Cecilia had to spend some time explaining things, which she did quietly, with a faint, defensive smile. She was wishing she had found the resolution to refuse to accompany Harold on this outing.

She was not feeling well disposed toward Harold in any case. They had been that day on a visit to Città di Castello, an ancient and beautiful Umbrian town set among green hills above the valley of the Tiber. They had lunched in a small trattoria, spent an hour in the medieval maze of streets and squares enclosed within the city walls and afterward gone to see the collection of paintings in the municipal gallery.

It was here that Harold had shown a side of himself not at all attractive. Up to then things had been all right, more or less. Harold had studied the guidebook and was well fortified with facts. He knew the town went back to remote antiquity, had been a center of
the Umbri and then of the Etruscans, that it had been a Roman municipality, that Pliny the Younger had owned a villa in the region, that the ruling family in the fifteenth century had been the Vitelli, that the city had come under the control of Cesare Borgia and thence passed into the hands of the Church.

All this he knew and a good deal more. But when they went to visit the gallery, which—as Cecilia informed him—housed the most important collection in the region after the National Gallery in Perugia, something got into him, some spirit of perverse resistance. He showed himself unwilling to accept Cecilia’s judgments about the paintings. He made disparaging remarks about paintings she loved. When they stood before the huge painting of
The Madonna and Child with Six Angels
by the anonymous Maestro di Città di Castello, instead of seeing the otherworldliness of it, the way all the faces seemed dazed and stricken with the power of spirit, he scoffed at the diminutive monk kneeling in prayer in one corner. “The whole thing is completely out of proportion,” he said. When they looked at the painting by Giorgio di Andrea di Bartolo which shows the Madonna giving suck to the Infant Christ, Harold sniggered at the total roundness of Mary’s left breast and the way it was detached from the rest of her clothed and composed body, like a pale, round fruit which the Child holds up between them in both hands. “Good catch!” Harold said. “Well held, sir!” At that ribald moment the missionary in Cecilia had understood that Harold was hardening his heart against her, that he wanted to hurt her with his unbelief.

But it was as they were about to leave the gallery that the real offense was caused. They were in the last room, which was rather small, with a long, curtained window and some paintings of the late
sixteenth century on the walls, classical themes, not very distinguished. As they were turning to go, an attractive young woman, one of the gallery attendants, had come toward them and begun to relate in English a legend associated with this room.

The gallery, she said, was originally a mansion belonging to the ruling Vitelli family, lords of the city in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One Alessandro Vitelli had owned it but had lived there hardly at all. He had been a soldier of fortune and followed the wars, leaving the vast house empty save for a few servants and a former mistress, a courtesan, past her first youth. The window of the room looked down over the street, which was just inside the city walls—the attendant raised the curtain to show them. Left alone here, the woman had enticed young men of the town, lowering ropes of silk so they could climb up to her chamber. When they had pleasured her she killed them. There had been a secret door—the attendant showed them the outline of it in the wall. Through this the slain lovers had been bundled, landing by means of some kind of chute outside the city walls. “So she escapes the bad fame,” the attendant said, smiling. Her English was not perfect but it was fluent enough—Cecilia could see that the girl had told this story to visitors quite often before, that she was trying to add something to their visit, to make it more memorable.