Evangelista's Fan (3 page)

He put some pomade on his thinning hair. His scalp felt frozen, but he found that, under this ice, new thoughts were beginning to surface in his exhausted mind. The successful man, he decided, the man capable of a happy life, defies the random by his ability to
foresee
what is going to happen. He doesn't – as I have tried to do – feebly repair the past; his mind is attuned to what will
become
necessary. He acts in advance to prevent (as far as is humanly possible) the random from occurring. Such a man would have foreseen the possibility of the rediscovery of his beloved's winder key and asked discreetly for her name and address long before that possibility became a fact. Such a man, aware of the vanity of princes, would have predicted that the King of Piedmont was likely to attempt some wanton comedy with time and schooled himself as to how best to come to terms with it, so that he didn't have to feel as if his life had been cancelled. The random will still, of course, occur, but the damage caused to a life by the unforeseen will be less severe.

If only, if only, thought Salvatore, I were descended from a line of such men – men who possessed some cunning, not merely with the moment-by-moment measurement of the present, but also with the computation of the future – then I wouldn't be lying in this room in mourning for my lost love; I would be holding in my hands a Dutch clock. I would be working every hour of the day and night to make myself worthy of the woman I've chosen as my bride and who would one day be a bridge to Piedmont and the past. I would be happy.

The clarity of these thoughts consoled Salvatore for a time and then began to torment him. For why hadn't he had them sooner? They were no use to him now. They could only tantalise him with what might have been and now never would be.

He moved his bed. He put it under the window, so that he had a view of the street. He thought it would cheer him to watch the people hurrying by, each to his or her personal labyrinth of the unforeseen. He stared at the faces, so intent upon some destination, so certain of arrival. But instead of being cheered, Salvatore felt more and more sorrowful and ill. He experienced spasms of violent hiccups that hurt and exhausted him. After one of these, he had a vision of a fiery balloon floating down on London and so enthralled by this was he (was it there? was it not there except in his mind?) that he stopped looking at the street and began the habit of watching the sky.

The sky in England, he soon realised, was the most changeful and unpredictable thing of all. In Piedmont, a day that began fair stayed fair, or, if it didn't, the clouds gathered slowly in an orderly mass like an army and then marched in line towards the sun. Here, a morning could be fine for half an hour and then the sky could darken to night and a drenching rain start to fall and the temperature drop by several degrees. The poor English, thought Salvatore, they never know what's going to happen next in the sky. No wonder they're a brawling nation. They're venting a national rage against the utterly unfaithful seasons.

He became preoccupied with the weather. It was autumn now – two months since he had found and lost his beloved – and the sky was in a state of perpetual movement. He remembered sunny October evenings in Piedmont, sitting under a mulberry tree in Magnifica's garden when not a leaf moved and the day proceeded so calmly towards the night that it disturbed no one and no one noticed it go until it was gone. Here, the October dusk came flying in like a poltergeist, setting the shop signs swinging, rustling the leaves, sending smoke billowing back down the chimney in Salvatore's room, where he still lay in an enfeebled and pitiful state, his pillow darkened by his falling hair. With his mind swinging like a pendulum between the distant past in Piedmont (a past of long duration until it was obliterated by an external hand) and the recent past of his meeting with the only woman in his life who had ever truly moved him (a past of fleeting duration and obliterated by his own inadequacy), he felt himself begin to lose hold of earthly things. It was as if the air itself were snatching at him and wouldn't rest until it had whirled him up into the sky.

Some part of him, however, resisted. It refuted insanity, rebelled at the idea. It forced him to get out of bed, to shave his face, to comb his thinning hair. It dressed him in a black coat and sent him downstairs into the shop, where the dust was thick on every surface and now clogged the workings of the unfinished watches that still sat in the window.

Salvatore stared at all this. Pushed under his door were notes from customers demanding the return of their unmended goods, the notes themselves curled and discoloured already by the passage of all the days since they'd been delivered.

Everything Salvatore could see appeared futile to him. He wanted nothing more to do with the reparation of time. His sign (he'd been so pleased with the wording on the sign, so proud of the little conceit!) now seemed to him a particularly stupid thing. He wished the wind had blown it down. Time could not be repaired. A sublime moment came and went and that was all. He was in a useless profession.

He ate a little food. He thought that to eat might help anchor him to the earth. All he had were some dried plums, but the taste of them was sweet and reviving.

To still his mind, he now fought to glimpse some small particle of his future. What in this world, he asked himself, can I do that will console me with its usefulness? What is there that is not futile?

He took his box of plums and went and sat by the mantel and looked up at Galileo. He tried to remember what the great man had done in
his
hours of adversity, in the last years of his life, when he was being overtaken by a terrible event beyond his control – his blindness. He had worked, with his son Vincenzo, on the pendulum-drive escapement. Salvatore imagined drawings discarded, half finished, covering his desk and Galileo's milky eyes so near the paper that he could use his long nose as a paperweight. He had fought his blindness to the last day and just three months before his death had been experimenting with mercury – a substance as volatile as time itself.

Salvatore ate another plum. He could feel his warm blood flowing in and out of his heart. Why mercury? What was Galileo doing – at terrible risk to himself because of his eyesight – with mercury?

The plums (a gift from a lawyer with a broken travelling clock) had some magical property. They seemed to revive in Salvatore a worm of optimism. They and Galileo's example. He sat there smiling, his mind tuned once more to answer its own questions.

He said out loud to the dusty shop: ‘Galileo was working, in his mercury experiments, with Evangelista Torricelli. Three years later, Evangelista Torricelli designed the first barometer. The barometer remains one of the few scientific devices man has perfected that tell what is
going
to happen, not what is or what has been.'

At this point, Salvatore got up and took the engraving of Galileo from the wall and held it against his thin chest. ‘This,' he said, ‘is where a possible future might lie, then – with the barometer.'

IV

After his eating of the plums, Salvatore decided that, as soon as he was strong enough, he would go and talk to one of the numerous barometer-makers, whose premises he had often passed in his neighbourhood. Most of them had Italian names, but, afraid perhaps to discover that he had not been uniquely bold in coming to London, that London was in fact quite densely populated by refugees from Napoleon's wars, he had never visited any of them.

He eventually chose a shop in High Holborn. In the small window hung several wheel barometers. They were well-made pieces, but they were not the finest examples he'd seen. They demonstrated good craftsmanship rather than artistic delicacy and therefore mirrored Salvatore's assessment of his own skills. The name engraved on these instruments and over the door of the shop was FANTINO, E.

Salvatore entered the premises nervously. He hadn't worked out quite what he was going to say and he still looked pale and thin. He feared he would be mistaken for a student or a poet.

The interior of FANTINO, E. was dark. It smelled consolingly of resin and was warm. Salvatore felt as if he'd arrived in a place that he'd known long ago but had never had the words to describe.

A small, wiry man, wearing very thick spectacles, came out of an inner room. He stood at a tilted angle, peering at Salvatore. He said: ‘I was about to say “good morning”, sir, but I realise it may already be afternoon. When one is hard at work, one is apt to lose all sense of time.'

Salvatore nodded and gave the man an awkward smile. ‘E vero, Signore,' he said. ‘Si. E molto vero.'

‘Ah!' said the tilted man, ‘Italian! You are Italian!' And Salvatore noticed that a look of inexpressible joy passed over his small face.

‘Si,' said Salvatore. ‘And I have the honour, perhaps, to talk to Signor Fantino?'

‘Oh no. No, I'm afraid not. I am Signor Fantino's partner in business, Mr Edwin Sydney. Signor Fantino is at present away, in Switzerland. But how may I be of assistance to you? We are always very glad to welcome your countrymen in our premises.'

The darkness and warmth of the shop, together with the friendly manner of Mr Sydney, gave Salvatore courage. He began at once to reconstruct, for the English partner of FANTINO, E., the tortuous excursions with time that had brought him to the barometer-maker's door. And the story, though long, seemed to enrapture the little Englishman. He stood with his eyes fixed on Salvatore's face, nodding, clasping his hands at intervals, as if filled with excitement. The tilt of his body became more and more profound and, at the point in Salvatore's narrative where he described the sudden entry into his memory of the name Evangelista Torricelli, Salvatore was afraid Mr Sydney was going to fall sideways onto the floor, just as the Tower of Pisa would one day.

When Salvatore reached the end of his story, with the words, ‘and so, Mr Sydney, here I am,' Edwin Sydney said: ‘If I were a religious man, Signor Cavalli, I would believe you had been sent to us by Divine Providence. Please step into our workroom and accept a glass of tea and I will call my cousin Mr Benedict Simpkins, who also works with me. We shall close the shop for the afternoon – it
is
afternoon, I now believe – and together we will discuss your apprenticeship to this firm.'

It was night when Salvatore returned to Percy Street. He made up a fire and sat in front of it, staring at the coals. The coals flared and burned and fell, burned and fell. And Salvatore's ability to reach a decision about his future followed a similar, repeating sequence. By morning, he was asleep in his chair, his mind still not made up.

Mr Sydney and Mr Simpkins had given him one month in which to accept or refuse their invitation. They told him that they would teach him everything they knew about the manufacture of barometers. (‘Interest in weather forecasting began in prehistoric times, Signor Cavalli. Primitive man became aware of the concept of past and future and understood that his ability to ensure survival depended upon a sympathetic combination of sunshine, wind and rain.') They would house him and feed him and nurture him back to his full strength. They would provide him with wine and tobacco and good paper for his letters to Piedmont. They would send out to a Piccadilly grocer for his favourite brand of dried plums. They would explain to him the ins and outs of bills of lading and all the paraphernalia of exportation. They would employ a teacher to improve his English. They would care for him, in short, like a son. But on one condition.

It was with his exhausted mind on this condition that Salvatore fell asleep in front of his fire. When he woke, cold and with an ache in his ear, he wondered whether he'd dreamed it up, so strange and unforeseen did it appear to him.

Sydney and Simpkins wanted him to disappear.

‘Only for a short time, Signore,' they said, ‘for as long as it takes you to become skilled with mercury, so that you can begin to follow in the footsteps of your countryman, Evangelista Torricelli. A year, say, or possibly nine months only. That will be up to you.'

The disappearance had to be absolute. No trace must remain of Salvatore, or of his watches, his repairs or his name at Percy Street. ‘Your customers,' said Edwin Sydney, ‘must be informed that you have returned to Piedmont. We will pay your landlord and close the lease. You must become absolutely invisible until you are forgotten.'

And then, when he had learned his new craft, when sufficient time had elapsed, he would be allowed back into the world. But not as Cavalli, S. As Cavalli, S. he would no longer exist. He was going to become Fantino, E.

‘You mustn't think us mad,' said Benedict Simpkins, who was a larger man than Edwin Sydney, but with a slight facial resemblance to him. ‘Necessity has made us act as we do. We've been looking for Fantino, E. ever since we began to trade in London.'

‘But,' said Salvatore, ‘where is he?'

‘Ah,' said Simpkins, ‘he is nowhere, Signor Cavalli. He had never existed. We invented him.'

Salvatore thought his comprehension of English must be failing him. He gaped at Simpkins.

‘Yes, yes,' said Sydney, coming in quickly, ‘we knew you would be surprised, but there you are. We made him up. We created him. And why? Because the Italians are the best barometer-makers in the world. They are
sans pareil
. That is an undisputed fact. Their reputation is paramount. So we invented the name Fantino. As you know, “fantino” is the Italian word for “jockey”. And this was my first attempt at a livelihood, in the world of racing silks. You've noted my stature, no doubt? But I was always a man fond of precision and the racecourse was, in the end, too uncertain a place for me. My cousin, Mr Simpkins, was at that time apprenticed to the firm of H. Hughes in Fenchurch Street and I joined him there. But we knew that when the time came to set up on our own, we would take an Italian name. We thought a mere name would suffice. But then we realised that we would feel more certain of our future if we had the man. And there you have it. Fantino, E. is trickery. It's a device. But why not? It's men's
devices
that shape the world. Don't you agree?'