The Last Supper (10 page)

I begin to feel a little outraged. It is they who seem heretical to me, these spiritual bureaucrats with their rules and regulations, their monotonous chanting, their punitive demeanour and their threats of expulsion. It is they who are insolent: so quick to damn and shame, and glorying so in the execution of it. As a child I was accustomed to the way adults seized on Christianity as a tool, a moralising weapon they had fashioned in their own subconscious: when they unsheathed it I would glimpse the strange, dark chasm of repression and subjectivity, a place that seemed like a crack in the safe surface of the world; and it did appear to me that judgement lay down there, flowing like a black river within the tributaries of personalities, from a nameless common source. But now I found the Christian story all human, like literature: it was a long time since it had been raised as a weapon over my head. It is perhaps for exactly this reason that the pilgrims object to the Giotto-lovers. The whole place, I now see, has set itself against art as against a rival religion. A group of teenagers with clipboards murmur in front of Lorenzetti’s
Madonna dei Tramonti
and are instantly shot down with a volley of glares like a firing squad’s fusillade. A child asks a question of its parent concerning Giotto’s
Flight into Egypt
and is bludgeoned from all sides with disapproval. They are enraged, these people queuing to worship at the strange, sealed hexagonal tomb. Like Jesus, Francis was a misfit who has become an orthodoxy. But the Pharisee, it seems, was well drawn as an eternal human type. Of what, precisely, are we meant to feel ashamed? Is their faith so fragile, so impacted, that the whole world must be silent while it is teased out? They seem to disapprove so instinctively, as a hand gropes in the darkness for a switch. A little light comes on in their eyes: it reveals something, a sacred space in
the brain that perhaps otherwise they would have had trouble finding their way to, with a bone lying in it on a little heap of dust.

St Francis
(fresco) by Cimabue

In the right wing of the transept there is a famous painting of St Francis by Cimabue. He is small, hunched, unsmiling. He wears a monk’s tonsure and brown cassock and clutches a Bible in his hands. His eyes are large, almond shaped, heavy
lidded, of a light brown colour: their expression is unutterably sad. It is not the sadness that shows in the rolling whites of a saint’s upturned, imploring gaze. It is a sadness that you see in the eyes of people who were unhappy children. His soft, full mouth trembles like a ripple in the surface of water. It is curious to see the paths of St Francis and Cimabue cross in this shadowy corner of the basilica. Cimabue painted a large number of frescoes in the upper and lower church alike, virtually none of which survive. He was reputed to be arrogant and perfectionistic, rejecting work that bore the slightest flaw in conception or technique. This was a new personality in the thirteenth-century world, this temperamental individualist. In those days a painter was a craftsman: the artist did not yet exist. The craftsman did not throw away work because it was less than perfect. He was the master of his materials, but he was not yet their author.

Cimabue couldn’t have cared less what his materials were worth, that much is clear. He could see something beyond himself and he made a path to it out of art. It was he who had to do it, for only he knew where his vision lay. And it had to be right, flawless, for what is the good of a path that doesn’t lead where it is meant to? In the painting of St Francis, the saint says, ‘I am nothing’; the artist says, ‘I am everything.’ Cimabue reinvented painting by reinventing the artist as visionary, as individualist, as risk-taker, as criminal and hero. And he restored to the painted human form its softness and mortality, its animal nature and the grandeur of its emotion. This was the old knowledge of the classical world, which the Christian story froze into a thousand-year hibernation. Now it was to be reborn as something new. Humanity had insisted that a link be forged between gods and mortals, but it was a long time before this new situation could be described: there were many rigid Madonnas to be painted, many stiff and gilded Annunciations, many primitive Nativities and stark Crucifixions before the connection could be made. Now the artist-individual could paint the subject-individual, the creature who contains everything
 – good and evil, truth and illusion, life and death – within himself. Now, at last, he could begin to capture reality.

There is a painting in the lower church by the unknown ‘Maestro di San Francesco’ of St Francis preaching to the birds. In its own way it is a masterpiece of characterisation, according the Franciscan vision the full measure of its eccentricity. It is as tragicomic as its subject, for what could better illustrate the analgesic nature of insanity than the belief that one is understood by birds? Virginia Woolf, in her bouts of madness, experienced this delusion, and there is a photograph by Cartier-Bresson of the painter Matisse in old age, sitting in a room full of empty birdcages. White doves have roosted on top of their open prison: Matisse holds one in his hands. He appears to be addressing it, for like Francis he cleaved to what was innocent and childlike, to the positivism of dumb nature. ‘I have always tried to hide my own efforts,’ he wrote, ‘and wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labours it has cost.’

The Preaching to the Birds by ‘Maestro di San Francesco’

Francis preaches to the birds and the birds listen respectfully, lined up in neat rows on the grass. Their little heads are attentive: their eyes are bright. Like children they look up, for Francis is much taller than they. Their tiny beaks are lifted and their wings are folded at their sides. And Francis, in his cassock, speaks on, a tutelary finger raised, like a gentle lunatic in a public park. Upstairs there is a frescoed image of the moment he returned his clothes to his father in front of the bishop. It occurs to me that it is not for his godliness alone that the pilgrims come to worship Francis. His story, born as it is out of human psychology, is emblematic of the same consciousness that was simultaneously struggling to express itself in art. I am nothing; I am everything. Perhaps, after all, the pilgrims shush and glare at us for the same reason that we roll our eyes at them. It is the rise of the personal we are reverencing, in its different forms. It is meaning we have come for, of one sort or another. But most of all it is sympathy, sympathy that we want and must have, only sympathy, from bones or from paint.

We go out into the grey, heavy afternoon. The basilica stands at the foot of the town, on a jutting peninsula of land where the earth falls away to all sides. Below it lies the plain, sinking into its own flat eternity like a separate element, so that from above there is the feeling of terminus, of the sea seen from the last cliffs that are the boundary of the habitable world. We walk away from it, up into the cobbled streets that twist and turn uphill. A small, hard rain begins to fall, dashed down in handfuls. Every now and then a monk passes by, impervious to the water. They wear immaculate cassocks and sandals with belts of rope swinging at their waists; they beam at everyone they see. They look like extras on a film set, walking the antique streets beneath the artificial rain in their unblemished costumes. We have lunch in a restaurant,
gnocchi
made by a chef who stands only a few feet away behind his little hatch
and beams at us too while we eat. The children want to buy a souvenir. We stand in a shop and look at nightlights made of moulded plastic, which show the virgin encased in a plastic grotto that lights up pink when it is switched on. There are T-shirts and table mats and baseball caps, aprons and napkin rings and plastic pens, figurines and frisbees and extravagant embroidered wall-hangings, all bearing an image of St Francis of Assisi. It is not Cimabue’s image: it is a computerised logo, a brand. There are expensive porcelain statues, too, about ten inches high, that depict him among the animals: birds have alighted on his hands, a deer rests at his feet, a lamb lies across his shoulders. The statues are entirely white: his monkish garment looks like a Grecian robe, falling in long milk-white folds to his feet.

I myself had exactly this statue as a child. I was given it on the occasion of my First Communion. It seems strange to me that they should still be producing it, all this time later, so closely did I identify it with a phase of my own life. For years it stood on the mantlepiece of my bedroom, along with a blue china plaque bearing a relief of the Virgin Mary in a wreath of china flowers. The plaque is also for sale in the souvenir shop in Assisi. After I had left home these things remained in my room in my parents’ house, but then several years ago my mother gave them back to me: I was grown up, and had a house of my own to put them in. I didn’t want them, for I never felt that they were actually mine, and their presence in this shop seems to prove it. There was something unsavoury about them, something threatening: a sterility or morbidity, like the funerary displays in an undertaker’s window. There they had stood on my childhood mantlepiece and though I never really looked at them their purity was dreadful and frightening to me, for it was clear that these were children’s ornaments and when I glimpsed them out of the corner of my eye I saw children’s graves. This was how the pill of religion was always forced down, with flavours too bitter and too sweet to mask one another. But I took the statue and the
plaque back anyway, feeling that I should. When I opened the box again, all those years later, that flavour rose out in all its potency. I remembered how deeply the feeling of sterility had impressed itself on me, the feeling of Sunday, of nuns in their habits, of old bones, of disapproval and shame and of everything that could have no further issue, no continuance, in this world or the next. It all seemed to be paving the way not to heaven, nor even to hell, but to absolute and final nothingness.

Later still I found the statue again and put it in my children’s bedroom. I don’t know why I did: again, I only felt that I should. It looked anomalous and out of place, next to the little glass dolphin from Venice, the shell collection, the glass dome that you shook to make the snow whirl over the miniature Manhattan skyline. But one day I was in their room and I knocked it over by accident and broke it. I put the broken pieces in a shoebox, and hid them at the back of a cupboard.

It is late May and the days are hot now: the blue tent of the sky is stretched taut from horizon to horizon. The corn and maize have thrust themselves out of the earth, eager and unripe. They stand a foot high, stiff and fresh and green in their young sheaths. From the arthritic old wood of the vines that cover the hillside sprays of fringed, delicate, pale green leaves have burst out, and little hard reluctant clusters of tiny green grapes. In the garden there are flowers, not the soft, drowsy blooms of summer but gaudy, extroverted things on simple spear-like stalks that are the first to complete themselves in this race towards fruition, as though they were less innocent than the roses that still remain tightly packed into their pale buds: yellow irises with wagging yellow labia, vampish dark-red gladioli, and a strange waxy cone-shaped flower of a volcanic orange colour that stands erect on its thick, dark-green stem. The bees drone ceaselessly among the purple cascades of wisteria. Sometimes snakes come out of the cornfield and ripple across the dirt track in the sun. Their emerald-green bodies swim through the dust, swift and silent. There are little scorpions too, with delicate pincers and tiny, probing tails. The geckos eat them, snatching them up and crunching through the crisp black shells with their narrow, reptilian jaws.

Jim drops by: he wants to know if we will play tennis. He says he can arrange doubles if we like. He has a friend in the vicinity who has a tennis court. He does not sit down: he perches on the wall of the terrace that faces the
castello
across the valley and smokes one cigarette after another, Marlboros
whose glowing stubs he tosses into the grass. He has brought things for the children, tourist trinkets,
Madonna del Parto
key rings, posters of the Arezzo frescoes, a calendar with photographs of the local landscape. We look at the photographs: they ought to seem familiar but they do not. Some of them show views that we see every day, but there is something fake about them, something unreal. They are like copies, or forgeries: they seem to impose a stricture, a fetter, on what they have set out to represent. The Sansepolcro street in the picture can never be walked down; the photographic vineyard will never ripen and bear fruit. There is even a picture of our own
castello
, but it is not the same place from whose ramparts we looked down and saw the oblivious earth. It is imprisoned in its day, its hour, from which nothing now can liberate it. Jim doesn’t want us to think he’s spent any money on these things: before he got his taxi he used to run a bed-and-breakfast in the village, where he kept supplies of them for visitors. He’s still got boxes of the stuff.

But the tennis: will we play? His friend, the one with the court, is keen to know. It is obvious that Jim himself is keen to know: he asks us how good we are, whether we play at home, and how often. Here at last is a subject capable of flushing Jim out of his habitual cover, out into the wide-open spaces of commitment. It seems that where tennis is concerned there is nothing compromised about him at all. He admits that he plays it: what’s more, he says he’s not bad. He’s got an eye for a ball: he always did. When he was younger he played on the junior squad of a Scottish football team. He likes all games, board games too, Scrabble and Monopoly, though he isn’t any good at chess. The world seems to interpose itself again when he speaks of chess. But he does like to knock a ball around. He always thought that that was what he would do with his life because it came so naturally to him. But there was a caesura, of what kind he does not say. He did not become a footballer. When he left school he went to Germany, to Bonn, and lived there for a
while. His mother is German and she had family there. Then he went to London, and for ten years he ran a flower stall in Holborn. This was the period of his misbehaviour, of his marriage and its subsequent failure, and of a whole host of dark occurrences of which he is not prepared to speak. It’s no life, he says, running a flower stall. He made a pile of money, but it was hard and promiscuous work.

His friend with the tennis court is English. Her name is Amanda. She and her husband Roger own a hotel. He points to it with his cigarette from the terrace wall. Dimly I can see a stone facade lurking on a hillside behind a camouflage of trees.

Roger is another one of Jim’s cronies. They play tennis together every morning. Roger, Jim says, is obsessed with tennis, though when he first came to the village he didn’t know the first thing about it: it was Jim who taught him to play. It was worth his while teaching him, to get a regular tennis partner. Before that, the only people Jim could find to play with were tourists passing through for the week. Now Roger’s quite good. And all he can think about is beating Jim. Every morning he faces him on the tennis court and is consumed by the desire to win. A devil takes hold of him: sometimes he gets so angry that he throws his racket around, and frequently he has stormed off the court. But the next day there he is again. He’s taken a set off me once or twice, says Jim. He adds that this only occurs if he has spent the previous evening at the
castello
with Alfredo.

It isn’t Roger, however, who wants to play doubles with us: it is Amanda. Amanda’s quite a good player, Jim says, and she’s been playing for far longer than Roger, but she hardly ever gets a game because Roger won’t play with her. It’s a complicated situation, Jim says, rubbing his eyes and throwing his cigarette into the grass. But they’re married people. Let them work it out.

The children catch a gecko, and keep it in the chest of drawers in their room for two days before I find out. I am angry with
them. It seems a cruel thing to do; the gecko has shed its tail in fright. They cry and say they meant no harm, that they meant to tell me, but I don’t believe them. I sense that this was their secret. I have retained my urban squeamishness about living creatures: they, on the other hand, have become denizens of the garden and the fields, intimates of the ants and snakes and scorpions. They see few other children. The gecko, I feel sure, was kidnapped and moved upstairs as a form of promotion: they wanted him for a friend.

Tiziana tells them that if they catch a firefly, they will find a coin beneath their pillows in the morning. One night we walk back from the village as darkness is falling, and find the garden full of white lights. Their motion is strange and beautiful: it is descriptive, choral, a kind of silent music. The children dart through the darkness with cupped hands. The fireflies scatter in drifts, like embers. Finally they catch one. For a moment it swims dreamily in the cave of my daughter’s fingers: she is lit up, electrified. Then it swims away. She gets another, stealthy as a leopard. I watch her swift body, knitted with the darkness. I watch her face in its enchantment. In our first week here I found her sobbing in her bed, missing her home and the girl she calls her best friend; and I was smitten
by guilt and a feeling of wrongdoing, a feeling that I was not, myself, sufficiently adult to have imposed my destiny on another. But she is my daughter: our destinies are better off intertwined. And I see, in this moment, that she has become more unified, more fully herself, that she will remember this time forever. It is a revelation by firefly-light, fragile and delicate, difficult to grasp. She runs inside and is out again in a flash. She has found a jar: in an instant she has caught a firefly and clamped down the lid. It twirls inside, trailing a pale path of light. She puts it beside her bed, but when I come up later I see that the light has gone out. She is fast asleep. I put a coin beneath her pillow.

The hotel is secretive, hiding in its deep screen of trees. There is no sign or entrance, just two stone gateposts buried under ivy in a glade of cedars. Beyond them lies a house, hidden lower down the hill at the bottom of a steep track. It is evident that its owners have no interest in attracting passing trade. Only from halfway down the track can you see that there is a house there at all. It stands facing its own courtyard, while the valley falls away behind it. It is a large, long, two-storey building, very faded in colour, delicate, with white shutters and a colonnaded stone porch. The massive panelled wooden door stands open. The two rows of windows are dark in the sun and the cavity of hall beyond the open door is dark too.

There are people around, mostly men, lying on white plastic loungers in the courtyard. Some of them are reading paperbacks or magazines. Their sunglasses give their faces a blank, annihilating expression. Yet they seem quite harmless, lying there in their baggy shorts and polo shirts and thick sandals. Most of them are middle-aged, fleshy and white-skinned, with hair that is a little threadbare on top. It is immediately obvious that they are not Italians: they are English. Only the English have those womanish, fleshy bodies which wear their masculinity like an ill-fitting suit. Nearby, a woman stands pushing a child on a swing. She is striking-looking, tall and very slim,
with long hair and a long gypsy skirt and enormous gold hoops in her ears. She pushes the child back and forth ecstatically, leaping on the up-swing so that her skirt swirls around her ankles. She tosses and strokes her own hair while she waits for the swing to return, and then leaps again, trilling and exclaiming, as though she were the child and the impassive creature in the swing were her toy.

Jim is wearing tennis whites, and carries a Fred Perry holdall with two rackets inside. The hotel’s clientele are a nice bunch, he says, families mostly. Some of them come back year after year. They pay a flat rate for the week that includes all their food and drink. They socialise together, and eat their meals at a communal table. Most of them never leave the precincts of the hotel.

Presently Amanda emerges from the dark interior. She moves slowly out into the light. She is wearing tracksuit bottoms and holds a tennis racket in her hand, but these accessories seem more symbolic than practical, like the objects that gods carry to represent their own attributes. Amanda could be a goddess of self-sacrifice, using the racket as a household implement. Immediately she is besieged from all sides, by women holding babies and men brandishing plastic beakers, by people with special dietary requirements and people with malfunctioning gadgets, by complaints and requests and urgent, intransigent needs, all of which she attends to, moving slowly through the crowd in her sunglasses, with her absent, goddess-like weariness, turning gently from side to side to scatter her wisdom upon the masses. The crowd moves along with her halfway across the courtyard and then they stop, like a herd that has reached a fence. She goes on alone, traversing the courtyard to where we stand waiting. A slender little dog with a narrow, sagacious face walks beside her. But even when she reaches us she doesn’t halt: she merely gathers us into her train as she passes. Automatically we follow, a procession steadily making its way out of the courtyard and down a flight of stone steps, down amidst lawns and trees, past children who call out greetings,
past little arbours where men and women sit, past rockeries and shady benches, following the soft, slow form of Amanda, as though we were disciples who must follow our guru to the ends of the earth.

At the tennis court she finally stops. She removes her sunglasses. Her blue eyes have a sort of fractured, antique appearance, as though they had been broken into tiny pieces and carefully glued back together again. She lights a cigarette. She shakes our hands and ties the little dog by his lead. She passes her eye professionally over the children and questions them briefly. Their answers appear to satisfy her: they are close in age to her own son. He will show them the treehouse, the rope-swing, the sandpit. She will send someone to find him. He will be pleased to have the company of English children: most of the guests’ children are babies. He has a nanny who keeps an eye on him. The children will be quite safe with her.

The tennis court lies exposed to the sun, on a shelf of land above the valley. We can see our house, the village on its mound, the far-off purple hills. The court, so big and bare, so open to the sky, reminds me of the sacred spaces of the ancient world, the vast raised altars of the Aztecs, the stone plinths of the Greeks. Amanda grinds her cigarette out on the asphalt. She is the goddess, the chief, come to the altar to accept her sacrifices, her offerings; and Jim is the priest who will eviscerate them and deliver them up. At first I am not cowed by Jim. He doesn’t hit the ball particularly hard: he doesn’t fly around the court, he doesn’t grunt or smash or spin. He barely seems to move at all, and Amanda only bestirs herself when the ball is laid directly at her feet. Yet game after game falls to them: they rake them in unimpeded, like a croupier soundlessly raking in the chips across the smooth baize gaming board. It only takes fifteen minutes for them to win the first set. They are slow, easy, abstracted. We are red-faced and hot and heaving for breath. The sun chisels into the tops of our heads. Tongues of fire lick our bare skin.
We strive and struggle but we are as powerless as those victims lashed to the altar in the glaring heat, from whom the satisfaction of supremacy must be exacted.