Losing Nelson (41 page)

Even later, setting forth, fortified by coffee and various pastries, the question still exercised me. I knew the way, of course. I had traced it in imagination a hundred times: your triumphant coach ride up from the waterfront, after the salutes of the guns; the swooning of Emma; the welcoming speech of King Ferdinand, sweating in his velvet suit.

Every detail of my walk that day has stayed with me. The glittering sweep of the bay, Vesuvius mild-looking in the early sunshine, the cindery tracks of its eruptions clearly visible, a group of policemen with gleaming revolver-holsters laughing and joking together at a streetcorner. Across the broad Via Marina, up to Largo di Castello, then steeply up again into the side of the Pizzofalcone hill. I was out of condition and had to take it slowly. The streets were narrow, paved with dark stone, the houses tall and close together. Full daylight had not arrived here yet; some residue of darkness still grained the air between the houses. There was a short alley ending in a cobbled yard with on one side a small church and on the other a vaulted passage opening onto the courtyard of the palazzo.

There it stood before me, Palazzo Sessa, official residence of the British ambassador, rented by him from the Marchese di Sessa for £150 a year, a high rent for the time; before that, home to monastic orders for something like seven centuries. Here Emma arrived on her twenty-first birthday, in the full flower of her beauty, cast off by Sir William’s nephew, though not yet knowing it, soon to be the mistress, then the wife, of the elderly uncle. Here exhausted Horatio was
brought after his great victory at the Nile, to be tended by Emma, to lie and watch her as she moved about the room, her full figure under the loose drapes. Here began their celebrated love.

I scanned the façade, every inch of it. I looked carefully at the arched entranceway. It was incredible: there was nothing whatever to record or commemorate the fact that the greatest hero in our national history had spent months of his life here at a time of crucial importance, when the fate of the city was hanging in the balance. Standing there on the dark cobbles of the courtyard, I looked up to the first floor, where your room was. A line of washing obscured the tall windows. Another went across from one side of the courtyard to the other. Somewhere inside the place a baby was crying with a blind, persistent woe, hardly pausing for breath. Across from me, at the foot of the stone steps that you must have mounted to reach your apartment, two women were standing together. They had been talking but fell silent when I appeared and looked closely at me. The place was a tenement, in multiple occupation. There was no way it could be entered, no way of finding that room of your fever and dawning desire, the room I had shared with you, as I had shared thoughts of Emma’s body. With a sensation of bewilderment, I raised my head to the clear blue of the day above me, clouds moving slowly in it, swifts wheeling high up. There was a sudden silence, or so it seemed. I thought I could hear the thin shrieks of the swifts, distant as they were, some message contained in them important for me to know. But it was the sound of mourning, it fell on my upturned face, it touched my face like rain. His words printed on my mind, his courage that supplied my lack … The sky was blank, the birds were silent. I became aware again of the wailing baby, the glances of the women, the lines of washing. From somewhere behind me came music from a radio, thin notes, slightly distorted.

I turned away, went back through the vaulted passageway, past
the church, back down towards the water. Everything I looked at seemed improbable, insubstantial. You saved their Bourbon majesties, you delivered Naples from the cursed French … Perhaps in the two forts where the Jacobins held out against you I might discover something that would save the day.

Castel Nuovo was the nearer, just across from the Royal Palace, on the seaward side. It took me not quite half an hour to walk there. Round, crenellated towers in dark stone, an incongruous triumphal arch in white marble, celebrating the taking of the city by Alfonso I of Aragon. I got my ticket from the small office adjoining the courtyard. Somewhere here, in a corner, royalist hostages were shot by the rebels, panicking as their time ran out. Perhaps over against the steps the killing was done, where now a group of schoolchildren clustered and chatted. Or against the wall, below the chapel—mass shootings generally seemed to take place up against something. Was this the deed of blood that determined you to deal harshly with the rebels, to regard them as beyond the pale, people to whom promises need not be kept? You see, I was still trying to find reasons. But the outrage was small compared to what the royalist mob was doing in the streets of the city. No, you were against them from the start, you loathed their libertarian rhetoric, all that claptrap, that parroting of the bombastic, bloody French.

It was a question of getting up to the top of the castle, up to the ramparts, so I could look down over the sea gates that the rebels came out of, see the view towards Sorrento as they must have seen it on that last day of their liberty, as they were embarked on the transports that became their floating prisons.

A flight of stone steps led upwards. I mounted quickly, a sort of excitement possessing me, a sense of possible revelation up there on the heights. I would see where the rebels came out along the mole; I would see them, by a stretch of imagination, as he would have seen
them, waiting in his anchored flagship out in the bay, telescope to his eye, noting with approval that they were not being accorded honours of war. Perhaps in this violation of the parallels, in this splicing of viewpoints, some essential clue might be vouchsafed me …

But on the broad stone landing of the second floor my way was barred by two attendants, who pressed with their palms at the air between us and uttered words I did not understand. I heard the slam of heavy doors closing. It seemed I was required to go down to the courtyard again. What had happened? It couldn’t be closing time, it wasn’t eleven yet. The attendants were shouting among themselves. A different sort of shouting came from the street outside, a heavy, reiterated chant. And from some invisible source high above, other voices, thinned by distance.

The man behind the counter at the ticket office knew some English. Things were finally explained to me. A mass demonstration by the unemployed of Naples was going on outside; some of the demonstrators had infiltrated the fort, occupied the battlements. Theirs were the voices I had heard shouting down. They were armed with clubs, the man said—he gestured with his hands to show the formidable nature of these. His face took on a look of painful sincerity. They were very bad people, he said, not genuine unemployed at all. There was fear of some violent assault on the picture gallery, the frescoes in the chapel. Everything had to be locked and barred.

There didn’t seem much point in hanging about waiting. It might take a long time to expel these intruders. I thought it likely that the riot police would have to be brought in. I made for the exit gates but found these barred too. Two attendants in hot blue suits, one on either side. Please open this gate. I made gestures of unbarring and opening. The attendants shook their heads, miming in their turn: more people with clubs just outside, waiting for a chance to break in. How long will this go on? Tapping my watch, raising my eyebrows.
Shrugs all round; nobody knew. I was caught there, trapped between occupied battlements and barred gates.

It was hot, even in the shade of the courtyard wall. The remote harangues from the men on the battlements still came floating down. Straining my eyes against the glare, I made out two gesturing figures. One of them raised and waved what looked like a staff or short pole, thicker at one end than on the other. Besiegers or besieged? Beyond them, the sky was glazed white, painful to look at. A moment of giddiness came to me and I felt in danger of falling. I stepped back, groped for the support of the wall, remembering as my vision cleared how Miss Lily had supported me the evening I had staggered, remembering the warmth of her hand under my arm.

There were other visitors, drifting round the courtyard or standing in the ticket office. A gaunt American couple; an Italian family, man and wife and two small, fractious girls; a mixed group of young people, probably students. Hostages all, fellow victims of circumstance, we avoided one another’s eyes. After something more than an hour the gate was unbarred, we were allowed to leave. There were no demonstrators in the street outside, but a number of helmeted policemen waited there, standing in silent groups near the vans that had brought them.

It was quarter past twelve when I emerged. The sun swooped down as if it had been waiting in ambush just for me. Nothing looked the same. The street seemed wider than before, it was a river flowing with cars; looking across it was like straining to see a far shore. It was too far, there was too much glare. I felt the eyes of the police on me.

Lunchtime was approaching, but I felt no smallest desire to eat. I set off walking, keeping the water on my right, stopping every now and again to consult my map. It took me nearly forty minutes to get within sight of the Carmine church. I had to cross the road—a hazardous business, this, as there were side lanes as well as the main ones
and no-one took any notice of the traffic lights. I had to make a dash and only narrowly avoided being run over. This made my temples throb and I felt the beginning of a headache, a dull, persistent pain along the ridges of the brows. But it was cool and dim inside the church, all a harmony of variously coloured marbles. There was no-one else there. I stood still for some moments absorbing the peace and silence of the place, the inlaid pilasters at their exact intervals, the stone heads of seraphim decorating the arches. Nothing much had changed since Ruffo’s time, since that morning of June 27, 1799, when the cardinal had come here in state to celebrate a mass of thanksgiving for the fortunate outcome of the treaty negotiations.

He was happy that day—or so he gave it out.
Full of contentment that the English had not only recognized but themselves executed the treaty
. Sacchinelli again, the diligent secretary, writing after his employer’s death. The words sounded now like an echo in the cavern of my mind, in this sumptuous, cavernous church. What was in the cardinal’s mind as he intoned the
Te Deum
, raised the host that day? The rebels were already out of the forts; they had been jostled to their transports by Horatio’s marines. How much did Ruffo know, how much did Ruffo suspect? Did he really think the Jacobins would be allowed to sail for France? Or was that mass a piece of ornate and solemn hypocrisy, designed to exculpate him, throw the odium of betrayal on the British?

The same questions. I was no nearer the answers here than I had been in my basement in Belsize Park. Standing there with that dull band of pain along my brows, I felt the same sorrow, the same helplessness that I had so often felt at home in my study. Whatever one made of the documents, the truth of the past was beyond grasping—it lay in the looks exchanged, the tones used, and the eyes and voices had left no trace.

Out again, into the blinding sun. A walk of five minutes took me
from the scene of thanksgiving, whether genuine or not, to the site of the indisputably genuine hangings that shortly followed. Piazza del Mercato, where the executions were carried out, where public executions had been carried out for many hundreds of years. A vast and desolate square between the dock area and the district of Forcella, with a few nondescript stalls round the edges. Along the eastern side an open-air market for cheap leisure goods—plastic garden chairs, inflatable dinghies and ducks and paddling pools, brightly coloured beach umbrellas, all set out on the cobbles. Some small boys listlessly kicking a ball around in a far corner. A Baroque church with a leadcoloured dome and eroded saints on the façade.

Somewhere here, in the middle … Whatever the rights and wrongs, the promises kept or broken, this is where it ended for the leaders of that short-lived republic. Day after day through those summer months of 1799, they were brought here in batches to combine with hangman and pull-feet and make that triple-headed, dangling beast that had so haunted my imagination.

I squinted across the vast square. The flat light of afternoon lay over everything—there were no shadows. I found myself longing for the cool of night, for the dark, as they must have done as they were led out to die. The agony would be over, they would have found their own darkness. The troops withdrew at nightfall; their only purpose was to ensure that the executions were carried out. The corpses were stripped by the hangman and left hanging, sport of the populace. If they were not citizens of Naples, no-one would claim them; they would remain there. The
lazzaroni
would push and pull them this way and that. Cruelty, like other motions of the heart, needs time to warm up. With time they went from jeers to knives, slashing at the bodies, cutting off the ears, the nose, the testicles, hacking through the ribs. After that came the feast. The livers were roasted, eaten, here on
the square, perhaps just where I was standing. It is related that a passer-by who refused to partake of this meal was killed on the spot.

You saw none of this, you saw none of the executions, you came nowhere near the contagion of the mob. You were … elsewhere. On board ship or in Sicily or dozing through the hot afternoons in the Palazzo Sessa. You heard it, you must have heard it—no-one in Naples could escape it, that great roar of jubilation as the victim was launched into space.

The dome of the church opposite was clear in every detail. I had the impression of some quivering or disturbance in the air, like the single swing of an invisible pendulum. Then the square was blank again, drab, dusty, featureless, pressed down under the flat light. The garish beach goods, the occasional voices of the children, the squat little church … That great sum of terror and pain—I had somehow expected to find it reflected here, but there was only this bleakness and ugliness of the present.

Turning away, quitting the square, was attended by a curious sense of effort. No more than tiredness, I suppose, but I felt I could have stayed there a long time without moving, one of the derelict props of the place. It was twenty past two; Sims was coming to the hotel at five-thirty; there would be time to see the other fort, Castel dell’Ovo, but I had omitted to find out whether it was open to visitors in the afternoon. Probably not, I thought. It was near the hotel, in any case. I was exhausted, but the thought of resting or stopping to eat something did not come into my mind. I did not want to take a taxi, shrinking from the human encounter it would involve. Only Sims I wanted to see; I had hopes of Sims.