After Hannibal (7 page)

In the afternoon the Chapmans drove into Perugia. Harold had made an appointment to see their lawyer, Dottor Mancini, who had been recommended to them through the foreign department of Harold’s bank and had helped them through the various hazards of buying their house. Dottor Mancini spoke English and was visibly prosperous and had shown himself to be wily and wise in the business of the house, and for these reasons Harold had confidence in him.

They were early and so took the opportunity of visiting the Church of San Severo, or rather the fifteenth-century chapel adjoining the church, which they were both keen to see as it contained the only certain work by Raphael to remain in the city. It was still early in the year, there were not many visitors yet, and Harold and Cecilia were alone there. They stood together in the chilly little place and gazed up at the fresco.

“Interesting,” Cecilia said, “the way it is divided horizontally like that into two sections. It is the upper one that is by Raffaello of
course and the lower by Perugino.” She always adopted the same tone when talking to Harold about anything to do with art, not lecturing exactly—her nature was too mild and diffident for that—but gently pedagogic. “You can see the influences at work though, can’t you, when you look at them both together? Perugino was Raffaello’s teacher at one stage, you know.”

Harold nodded. He had read this in his book about the masterpieces of Italian art. “Pietro Vannucci,” he said, “known as il Perugino. His date of birth is disputed.”

“It must be quite unique,” Cecilia said with a little rush of enthusiasm, “to see the work of these two masters side by side.”

“One above the other, to be exact.” Harold narrowed his eyes at the fresco. He could not see much similarity between the two, try as he might. “The colors are similar, aren’t they?” he said. “He was either seventy-three when he died or seventy-eight—Perugino, I mean. Depending on which authority you follow. A good innings either way, considering the times.”

“It is there in the treatment of the draperies,” Cecilia said. “It is there in the idealizing tendency, which you will see if you look at the faces and the postures. Compare the expression of St. Placido in the upper part with that of St. Gregory Magno in the lower. Perugino’s precise age when he died is really neither here nor there, Harold.”

Harold scanned the paintings anew, the seated figure of Christ in the upper one, hand raised in blessing, white dove with outstretched wings above his head, flanking angels, seated saints on either side. There was nothing much going on in the lower painting, just a row of standing saints, large-eyed and sorrowful-looking, with gold plates suspended over their heads, divided into
two groups by a niche containing a statue of Madonna and Child in painted terra-cotta. He felt resentful with these paintings for their failure to arouse any feeling in him. He wanted to ask Cecilia why she was so interested in the postures of saints when she never even went to church, but he was inhibited because this was art and she knew about it.

He wanted to know about it too. He was eager to see the respective merits of Raphael and Perugino—it was the kind of thing that went with the house. Otherwise they might as well have bought a place in Eastbourne. He was fond of making a kind of litany out of the historic cities of Umbria when talking to people back in Britain. We are in easy reach, he would say, of Assisi, Spoleto, Orvieto, Terni, Todi. Treasure-houses of art and history. He felt as he spoke that by achieving such proximity to these treasures he had come into possession of them. People traveled thousands of miles and spent thousands of pounds to see these things, and here they were on his doorstep. He worked doggedly to profit from the situation but so far had not had much success. However, as a step in the right direction he studied guidebooks and collected as much as he could in the way of facts.

Cecilia understood these aspirations and they made her feel loving, in the way a missionary might feel loving on encountering an amenable pagan. She was given to questioning herself about most things but had not so far made much distinction between loving Harold and wanting to instruct and help him. “It is not just this Raphael,” she said, “it is the others one has seen, they sort of reinforce one another. The more of his work you see, Harold, the more you will get to like it. We’ll go to the Palazzo Pitti in Florence,
they’ve got quite a few Raphaels there, they’ve got the
Madonna del Granduca
and some wonderful portraits.”

She looked up at the frescoes again. The rush of happiness that had accompanied this project seemed to have sensitized her anew. The colors worked on her like a familiar incantation, olive, faded purple, gold, rose-pink … “We’ll go to the Vatican and see the Raphael frescoes there,” she said, turning eagerly toward him. “Of course the Perugino is weaker, he is a lesser artist. But you can see the tendency to rhetoric which was so—”

“He was well over the hill when he painted that. It was painted in 1521, so he would have been either seventy-one or seventy-six.”

“So utterly characteristic of the High—”

“Depending on which set of dates you accept. On the other hand, Raphael died young. He was only thirty-seven.” Harold looked back at the fresco and something of wonder finally touched him. “Just my age,” he said. “He might have gone on to do great things if he had lived.”

At five to six they were in Mancini’s outer office, gazing at the prints of Old Perugia that adorned the walls. The extremely attractive, rather sulky-looking young woman Harold remembered from former visits came to conduct them into the lawyer’s presence. Seated there in the spacious and expensively appointed office, they explained the difficult situation that had arisen with the Checchetti.

The lawyer listened quite impassively, looking sometimes at their faces, more often fixing his eyes on the far wall or down on his immaculate desk. When Harold had finished, he nodded slowly but without speaking. He was holding a pencil and he tapped softly with this upon the desk, causing quick reflections in its polished surface.

“It is only a small thing, I know,” Harold said, a little disconcerted by the silence. “But I thought it best to do whatever is to be done in legal form.”

“That is very wise.” Mancini smiled suddenly. “Legal form resembles other virtues: when you have it, you don’t always need to apply it. Without it there is no form at all, none whatever.”

The smile had been directed at Cecilia and she felt obliged to reply. “Nothing but a chaos of feelings,” she said. She thought of the hate-filled faces of the Checchetti and of Harold’s anger when he thought she was going to admit liability. On his face a certain look. She had wanted to set it down to impatience; like many bouncy people, Harold lacked patience. But it had been dislike really. And not for them, not for the Checchetti …

“Exactly, very well said, only a chaos of feelings,” Mancini said. “Besides, to put it bluntly, big things, small things, these days it is all the same to me.”

It was strangely difficult to form an idea of Dottor Mancini’s age. The indications seemed to cancel one another out. The hands that played with the pencil were clear-skinned, quite without freckles or mottles; yet there was an elderly prominence of vein and sharpness of knuckle in them. The evidence of the wrinkles around the eyes and the loose folds of skin at the corners of the mouth was contradicted by the firmness of the mouth itself, the thick dark hair, the humorous shrewdness of the gaze. It was as if he had somehow aged unevenly; or as if certain of his features were periodically renewed. Or, Cecilia thought, remembering Harold’s pedantry of shortly before, as if the date of the lawyer’s birth were in dispute.

“They live on the corner, did you say?” Mancini asked now.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So they have access to the public road directly from their house; they do not depend on this road of yours, this
strada vicinale
, for deliveries and so on?”

“No, I suppose not.”

Mancini nodded. He was smiling still. “There is a certain odor of blackmail in this,” he said. “It was something they thought worth trying with a foreigner. If you had laughed at them, perhaps they would have given up the idea. But you listened, you seemed to be considering the matter. Now you have given their cause life, you have made it real to them.”

“But we promised them nothing.”

“Mr. Chapman, these are primitive people. They do not think about all this fair play and good neighbor business. Those are concepts with no meaning for them. They think you are only concerned to keep the road open.”

“If they try to close the road, I will take them to court in double quick time,” Harold said belligerently.

“Double quick time? In Italy?” Mancini raised the hand holding the pencil and made a sweeping gesture round the room. “Look at those sofas and armchairs. Look at those rugs on the floor, they are Afghan. This office is in the part of town where the rents are highest. I have a house in Umbertide and a large villa in Apulia. All this has been paid for by people taking other people to court in double slow time. When I was younger I was glad of this constant and quite useless quarreling, because it was making me rich. These days I am bored with it and I try to find other ways.” Mancini
smiled and gestured again with the pencil. “Of course, if you want to buy me some new suits, that is all right, I do not refuse. But it would be money thrown away, because these Checchetti will not litigate, they will not pay lawyer’s fees, they will wait for a little time then start again, looking for ways, how do you say it … Ways to do you bad turns.”

“What is there to do then?” Harold spoke brusquely. He had been shocked by Mancini’s explicitness about his assets. A man’s assets were sacred and not to be spoken of before relative strangers. “I am prepared to go some way toward helping these people,” he said.

“If you were to offer them one million lire toward the cost of materials, I think it would meet the case. That is about four hundred pounds at the present rate of exchange.”

“We are leaving in three days’ time for England. I have things to attend to there—we’ll be away about a month.”

“I will make out a form of agreement. It is important to make it clear that this sum is the limit of your contribution. If you can call in, shall we say the day after tomorrow, you can sign the paper and leave a check for the money. I will get the Checchetti here, they will sign the agreement and take the check and give me a receipt for it.” Mancini looked from one to the other of the Chapmans. “And that will be that,” he said.

That evening Arturo cooked for Fabio things he particularly liked: a soup made with lentils and
farro
, a spinach risotto. Both men
were rather weary but pleasantly so, having worked out-of-doors most of the day. It was still cold in the evenings and they had a good fire of logs burning. At supper they drank between them a liter of their last year’s red wine. After watching the news and a game show on television they were sitting now companionably together, one on either side of the fireplace, talking in a desultory way of things that concerned them.

Light from the fire played over the delicate bones at Arturo’s temple and cheek and the taut line of his nape as he lowered his head to look at the flames. The right side of Fabio’s face was in the light, the slight marks where the skin had been drawn down a little by the surgery needed after his injury. The marks had not disfigured him but they had given a more saturnine cast to the essential melancholy of his face.

He looked across the space between them and even after all these years he felt his heart contract at the beauty of Arturo’s lowered head, the graceful line of his neck, the straight, slender shoulders under his close-fitting dark blue pullover. All Arturo’s movements, all the reclmations of his body, had a grace about them that seemed almost stealthy. His dark eyes gleamed in the firelight, rather oddly—he was slightly astigmatic and this lent a sort of dreamy indirectness to his gaze.

Though sitting there together in apparent harmony, the two men were occupied by quite different kinds of thoughts. Fabio was all contentment, glad that the slight quarrel of earlier that day had left no trace behind, happy to make plans. They could charge their guests more when they had the swimming pool, they would be able
to take holidays together, something which for years now they had only very rarely been able to afford.

Arturo, while appearing to take a close interest in all this, had been waiting for a moment that seemed opportune and he saw now that it had arrived, here in the warmth and contentment of the fireside. He had a proposal to make, one that he had pondered long and earnestly. The whole property, house and land, was in Fabio’s name, which was natural enough as it had been bought with Fabio’s money. Arturo had put no money at all into it, which also was natural since he didn’t possess any. However, because Fabio was living on a pension and he himself had no income, they would save a lot of money if the property was in his, Arturo’s, name because then he could register as a
coltivatore diretto
and so they would receive considerable tax concessions. Not only that, they would be able to get subsidies of various kinds, discounted prices for petrol and for the fertilizers they used on the land. They would be so much better off, they would be able to pay for occasional help, they might even be able to buy a truck and transport their own olives to the communal press at Passignano. Even, someday, they might have their own press.