Goodbye Again (20 page)

‘And the meal?’ I said eagerly. ‘Let me cook us the meal I asked you to cook. Let me do it. There’s a Tesco beyond Stow, on the Fosseway: they’ve got everything. Even good meat, not the
wrapped stuff, but cut for you off the carcass at the butchery. Fillet steak. Or I could even do that Irish stew.’

‘Dear Ben, stop wittering!’ She drew back, looking at me, still holding my hand. ‘Just get us a hunk of warm bread, with olives and anchovies. And a half-litre of white.’

‘Right – we’ll do that.’

She looked at me intently. ‘You know, don’t you?’ Still holding my hand. ‘What I feel for you. I can’t quite say it, but I do.’

‘Don’t have to say it. I do too.’

She got up and poured us both a glass of the Italian fizz. I raised my glass. ‘Thank you.’ And then I raised my glass to the Modi nude. ‘And to you, too, Emelia. “Emelia-Amedeo-Amore”.’ And then I told Elsa what the chief had said to me that morning, about an elderly lady who lived in an old people’s home on top of the hill just outside town. Signora Emelia Battaglia.

She tried to hide her sudden unease. ‘You really think she’s …’

‘I don’t know, but the bone structure of a face doesn’t change much, and the eyes never do. I think I could tell if I saw her.’

‘Well, you go ahead. No point in my coming.’

Elsa was retreating once more. She feared something in this unknown woman. I was tempted by her.

They dressed my wound again next morning, and the day after, and said it was beginning to heal. I sent innocent picture postcards home, to my family and the Phillips’ at the end of my lane, and Elsa and I found quiet things to do in our room, reading, or talking of things that didn’t matter, and eating one-handed at the Roma. I was fitter and thought it better not to talk of the future with Elsa, and not to warn Emelia. I’d take my chances. Next morning I took a taxi up the hill. The Modi nude was the other passenger.

Past the covered market, over the frothy river, across a piazza and through an arched gateway – ‘
Domus Deo Fecit
’ inscribed in heavy black letters on the arch. A winding drive up the steep hill,
thickly wooded with ilex, cypress and laurel. Clearly a large private estate years before, with the expected ox-blood baroque palazzo on top of the hill. But there wasn’t. It was a rambling, run-down late-nineteenth-century villa, white-stuccoed, red-tiled, paint peeling.

The taxi left and I turned on the steps of a porch, shading my eyes with my one good hand – a huge view south and west over the old town and the sea in the distance, but veiled in the morning heat haze. The glass hall doors were open. A thin tabby cat appeared at the doorway, tail aloft when it saw me, coming down the steps, rubbing itself against my legs, purring.

The long hall was empty. Cool white marble tiles, terracotta pots of rubber plants, a large urn filled with sticks and umbrellas, old prints of popes and other divines along the walls, a plaster statue of a dolorous virgin at the far end. A smell of pomodoro cooking somewhere, wafting through the still hallway. I went to the end, two corridors leading away to either side. An elderly nun in a white habit walked towards me along one of them.

‘Good morning, Sister.’ I gave my name and asked if it might see Signora Battaglia.

‘Are you family?’ A low voice, meek, hands clasped together.

‘No. My father, Signor Luchino Contini knew Signora Battaglia years ago here. I’m just visiting Carrara.’

‘She will be pleased to see you. She has few visitors.’

‘She must be old.’

‘Yes, she is ninety-five – so she says.’

‘You don’t believe her?’

‘Sometimes we wonder.’

‘Not right in her mind, you mean?’

‘Oh, no. Just … we think she likes to tell stories.’

‘Imaginative?’

‘Yes, imaginative.’

The cat had followed us in, rubbing its flank against my legs
again. She looked down at it. ‘Hungry,’ she said. ‘And she knows we eat early, at midday. There are so few of us here now, and the cook has to get away early. Soon we will all have to leave. Even you, little White Paws.’ She bent down and stroked the cat. ‘We don’t own the villa or the land, you see. They are going to sell it, develop it. Apartment blocks.’ She looked at my bandaged arm. ‘You have been hurt, I see.’

‘No, it was nothing. I was careless. I slipped up in the mountains.’ She looked at the parcel under my other arm, and curiosity getting the better of her, she said ‘You have brought something for the Signora?’

‘Yes, a painting.’

‘She will like that, I’m sure. I will take you to her. She is out on the terrace.’

I followed her back along the corridor. We passed an open doorway to a large gloomy room. Elderly people were slumped in old leather chairs, asleep, or vacant-eyed, one tapping her stick repeatedly on the floor.

‘Signora Battaglia prefers to be outdoors.’

We went out onto a wide marble terrace with a balustrade, vines growing wild, looking over the steep hill and the cypress trees to the distant sea. Some cracked marble tables, chairs, but only one person, a small white-haired woman, in dark glasses, sitting in a wheelchair beneath a parasol.

The nun introduced me. ‘A Signor Contini has come to see you, Signora.’

The nun left. I introduced myself. ‘I’m Benjamin Contini. Just visiting Carrara, so I thought I’d come and see you, since I believe you knew my father, Signor Luchino Contini?’

The old woman looked up. At once an impression of sharpness, the tracings of a bohemian girl. Wearing a shift of layered cheesecloth, slippers, delicate feet propped up on the leg rest. A thin,
wasted figure, but still perfect in its proportions. The face deeply lined, angular, the high brow running down past high cheekbones to a pointed chin. White sparse hair pulled back tightly over her head and held with a tortoiseshell comb at the back. Decay was making its final advances in the tightly stretched skin, the dappled brown age marks, the drooping ear lobes, the thin bloodless lips.

‘Benjamin Contini?’ She took off her dark glasses as if to confirm this. ‘Indeed you are.’ Now I saw her eyes, which were astonishing – large, oval, young and blue. And the look of alarm in them now was that of youth, the fear of a young woman confronted by a lover who had long abandoned her but had suddenly returned. And I knew at once that this was the Emelia of the painting. The same woman, seventy-five years older.

‘Why have you come here? To tell the police about Luchino?’ she went on. Her voice was dry, but firm.

‘No, why …?’

She cleared her throat, turned and took a sip of something from a glass beside her. Then she said, in precisely enunciated Italian, ‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Silence.

‘What doesn’t matter?’

‘My son Luchino is dead. He wrote to me, last year, just before he died, from Ireland.’

‘My son? You mean my father.’

‘Both. My son and your father. You are indeed Benjamin Contini. If I didn’t know about you, I could see it clearly in your face. You are my grandson.’

Standing over her, outside the shade of her tattered parasol, I blinked in the bright light, beads of sweat trickling down my brow. ‘I see,’ I said casually. This must be one of her fictions the nun had spoken about. ‘The only problem is that my grandmother died in Auschwitz, along with my grandfather, uncles, aunts and cousins. All my family in Italy are dead.’

‘I’m not exactly your family though – but you are my grandson, I assure you.’

‘Yes,’ I said, to humour her. Then I thought – well, there’s one certain thing – the woman in the Modi nude and this old woman, they were the same person. I was sure of that. I could establish something firm about her with the portrait. I unwrapped it, propped it up on a chair in front of her. She looked at it, surprise and alarm in her face. With the same certainty as she had told me I was her grandson, I said, ‘This is you.’

Silence. She gazed at it, frowning. ‘Yes, your father always kept that with him in Ireland. Never with all the other paintings.’

‘The other paintings?’

‘All the other paintings …’ She stopped. ‘But that was special to him. Of me, his mother.’

‘A wonderful painting. Modigliani. You must have known him.’ I showed her the inscription behind the canvas. “Emelia-Amedeo-Amore”,’ I said. ‘You must have known him well.’

‘Yes, I did.’ Her face was quite still as she looked at the inscription.

I said, ‘Well, if you’re my grandmother, one of my Contini family, my grandfather I suppose, must have … you and he must have produced my father, but without being married?’

‘Oh, no, nothing like that. Amedeo and I produced your father.’

This surely was a fiction. I said, ‘But that would make me Modigliani’s grandson.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I was seventeen when I met him,’ she told me later, ‘when he came back to Livorno, briefly during the war, summer of 1915. My family in Livorno, the Montecchios, a big shipping family were as bourgeois as his, except his were Jewish. I was an innocent and he wasn’t. He was sketching at the Café Metropole early one evening, I was there with my brother at the next table. He started sketching me,
came over with the drawing, and that was how it began. We met secretly in Livorno that summer. I fell in love with him. First love, mad love, all that – so I followed him to Paris that autumn, lived with him at the Bateau Lavoir, a tumbledown atelier he and Soutine and some other crazy painters shared up in Montmartre. And he painted me and we loved each other, and he painted me again, and nothing mattered for several months, until winter came and it was cold, no heat and no money and little food in the war, and the rows started – other girls, models, when he was out every night with them, or sketching for his supper, and always drinking with his friends, and coming back drunk next morning. It became impossible. I went back to Livorno carrying that picture – and your father.’

‘Born in Livorno?’

‘No. In Pisa. My parents were horrified – a good bourgeois family with a pregnant unmarried daughter. My God! – a fate worse than death. They disowned me and farmed me out with the Contini family in Pisa. My father knew the boss, Mario Contini, very well. He shipped his marble out from the Contini quarries in Pisa and Carrara. And Mario had a younger son, Marcello Contini – late thirties, but still unmarried. A marriage was arranged with him, with a handsome financial settlement from my father. Or rather it was forced on me. It was marrying Marcello or being out on the street. So I became a Contini, and your father was born in Pisa, Marcello pretending he was our child.’

‘All that must have been very difficult for you.’

‘Could have been worse. Marcello was a dull but kind man who wanted a quiet life. We had our own house in Pisa, down by the river. We didn’t have any children ourselves. Couldn’t face him that way after the first few times. Marcello didn’t mind, went to the local brothels quite happily.’

‘I knew Marcello was my grandfather, and that my grandmother was a local girl, another Jewish family in Pisa – my father
told me, and how he and his parents and all the other Continis had been rounded up by the fascist militia in 1943 and taken to Auschwitz. But why didn’t they take you as well?’

‘I wasn’t Jewish, and the chief of the fascist militia in Pisa knew that I was a daughter of the Montecchios in Livorno, a rich fascist shipping family, with whom the chief needed to keep on good terms. So he wouldn’t take me. I was left behind.’

‘My father told me nothing of all that, and nothing about you being a Montecchio.’

‘He had good reasons for not telling you the truth.’

‘What was the truth?’

‘When he finally got back from Auschwitz, some years after the war – he knew I was the only person in his family left alive – he came back to our house in Pisa. But I wasn’t living there any more. Thinking Luchino and all the other Continis, including Marcello, were dead, I’d married Roberto Battaglia, the manager of the Contini quarries in Carrara, and was living here. Luchino soon found out where I was and came to live with us. Later he told me what he’d done in that camp.’

‘What did he do there?’

‘He’d collaborated with the SS.’

‘As I thought.’

‘How did you come to think that?’

‘A list in his handwriting, an inventory I found in our Dublin house, of paintings: one by Raphael, and other Renaissance masterpieces. I found that they had been looted in Poland and elsewhere during the war.’

‘Exactly. But that’s not how he survived.’

‘How?’

‘Luchino was a civil engineer, remember. So at the selection when they arrived at Auschwitz, he wasn’t sent to the gas chambers, like the rest of the Continis. He was put to work on construction projects
outside the camp. Factories being built where they needed qualified men as slave labour. Well, there was a young German architect in charge of his work group. Luchino got to know him. This man, with another senior architect in Berlin, had been commissioned to build a house, not in Germany, but in Poland, outside Krakow, for one of the big SS men there, a major called Helmuth Pfaffenroth, deputy to Dr Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of Poland.’

‘Yes, I know about them.’

‘Well, Luchino told this architect he could get him the finest white Carrara Cremo marble for Pfaffenroth’s house, from his family quarries in Carrara. A glittering white marble palazzo. Pfaffenroth was thrilled with the idea. The architect got Luchino out of the camp and took him up to Krakow, to work on the plans with Pfaffenroth. Luchino – that charm of his – he played on Pfaffenroth. They became friends. Luchino never went back to Auschwitz.’

‘What happened?’

‘Luchino made himself indispensable to Pfaffenroth – and Dr Frank. But early in 1945, with the Russians coming in from the east, the war was going to be over soon. Frank had looted paintings and other priceless objects and needed to move them all out, somewhere safe, and where he and Pfaffenroth could get at them after the war. But where to? Luchino told Pfaffenroth how he could get all this looted art out to a really safe place, where they could get at it easily after the war as well.’

‘Exactly. Hidden in the Contini Carrara quarries up there in the mountains.’ I said. She nodded. ‘And where the paintings could be shipped out later to Dublin, hidden in crated slabs of marble.’