The Last Supper (9 page)

Beside me, Suzanne is conferring with Gianni on the narrow walkway. She is telling him about the plans for the motorway: she attended the meeting in the village, where the details were made known. She shows him exactly where the road will go, where the tunnels will be drilled. It is a tragedy, she says. She is sure corruption has played its part. She speaks slowly: Gianni is perhaps a little deaf. She pantomimes her outrage with angry gesticulating arms. Gianni stands mutely beside her. I see that tears are dropping down his frail cheeks.

Silvio comes once a week to tend the
proprietario
’s garden. He arrives at dawn: we hear him opening the shed where the tools are kept. The light is pink; there is the sound of birdsong. Silvio’s rummagings harmonise with the first stirrings of the earth. Later we hear a car passing along the valley, a dog barking, a tractor starting its engine. We hear the clipping sound of secateurs beneath our window, and the hiss of running water.

Silvio is forty or so, light-haired and wiry, with fair freckled
skin that turns red in the sun. He has a bald pate, like a monk: it glows, round and red, in the distances of the garden where he stoops at his work. There is something monkish in his demeanour too, a kind of bodily discipline that gives him a hallmark of solitude. When spoken to he is perfectly still and silent, as though measuring his response. One day one of the children falls out of the cherry tree that grows on a ledge over the steep hillside. Silvio appears at the kitchen door, holding her in his arms.
E caduta
, he says.

Jim says that Silvio used to be something of a tearaway. He doesn’t really know him, he says, a statement that arouses my interest, for Jim’s knowledge tends to encompass everything that is human and compromised and to leave out that which must be approached dispassionately. It is in this same spirit that Jim claims not to know Italian. Jim not knowing Silvio suggests that Silvio knows himself.

Silvio is as hard to corner as the hare that I sometimes see standing proud and alert in the empty garden, that bounds away at the slightest noise. But one day I offer him coffee, and though he looks at me gravely he does not refuse. He takes it
espresso
, in a tiny cup that stands cooling beside him while he works. I watch him deferring his acceptance of my libation, but finally he picks it up and stands drinking it in little sips, looking out over the valley. After that, Silvio and I are friends. There is something about him, an atmosphere of fracture and recovery, an inward knowledge of failure and of resurrection, that emboldens me to practise my Italian. Silvio’s talk is easy to understand; his listening, so quiet and spacious, accommodates my clumsy sentences. He tells me that he works for most of the
stranieri
in the area, watering their gardens, cleaning their swimming pools. Their houses are generally empty, or let out. He drives around in his little car, going from one house to another. He cuts the grass and waters the flowers to stop them dying. I imagine these houses, so civilised and deserted, so strenuously maintained in their untenanted perfection. It is curious that Silvio, who has lived here all his life, should be
their caretaker. But he is happy to do the work: it allows him to be free. Otherwise he would have to move to the city. I ask him where he lives, and he points to the top of the highest mountain behind the village. It is smoky with cloud, though the valley lies in sun.

I like to talk to Silvio about football,
il calcio
. I have found that this subject lends itself to the amateur linguist, being both primitive and impersonal and revolving around a small number of stable themes. Silvio is more than usually reserved when the conversation takes this turn, though I talk about it anyway. I attribute his reticence to a spiritual source. He seems like the kind of man whose distinctness from the masculine norm would express itself in an indifference to competitive sport. But one day I mention the news that Italy’s top team have been relegated as a punishment for corruption, and observe an expression of blenched severity on Silvio’s face. He digs with cold precision at the flowerbeds. It is good, he says finally. Perhaps now the game will be cleansed.

According to Silvio, corruption is a national affliction. The ordinary Italian can have no dignity, no pleasure in life. Everything around him is corrupt, from politics to the postal service. In things that intimately affect him, the Italian has no rights. Take the plans for the motorway: corruption, double-dyed. It is a case of waiting to see which form of corruption outdoes the others. And yet Italy is so beautiful: its art, its churches, its monuments. Have we been to Perugia, to Assisi? He loves these places but he can no longer visit them. To live in a land that is so beautiful and so diseased is a form of torture. That is why Silvio lives on top of a mountain. In his garden there is a special place for meditation. It is necessary, to have such a place. Otherwise your own anger would consume you.

One day Silvio invites us to visit his house. The road winds out of the village and quickly leaves it behind, climbing steeply among forests and turning through vistas of wooded peaks. It is more than ten kilometres from the village to Silvio’s house, and all of it is empty wilderness, a silent world of mountains
that stand shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye can see. Once or twice we stop and get out. The sun is close overhead; beneath us there are wisps of cloud. The last section of road is so steep and potholed that it is nearly impossible to ascend. We come out on the very summit, where the wind blows and the light is brilliant. There are two houses there. One looks south, over the mountains towards Cortona. The other faces north, towards Arezzo. They are perhaps twenty metres apart. They sit there back to back on their summit, like refuges for two gods, each with their portion of the hemisphere. Silvio’s house is the one that faces north. He tells us that for many years the other house belonged to an English writer, a man who became Silvio’s dearest friend. At first he came only in the summer, to write his books, but over time he stayed for longer and longer periods, until he was almost always here. His wife ceased to accompany him: at the beginning she liked the house, but after a while she came to hate it. She found the isolation, particularly in the winter, unbearable. And perhaps she feared that she would lose her husband up here, for he was drawn to it by some private compulsion of his own that she felt inclined to challenge by her absences. He and Silvio spent much of their time together, particularly in the evenings, talking. They developed many things in common. Then, last year, the house was sold. The writer went away, back to his wife, and Silvio was left alone.

Silvio’s house feels empty. It is sparsely furnished. There is a photograph on the mantlepiece, of a woman and two children, but he does not say whether they are his family. The decorations are plain. His kitchen table is small, with a single chair. He hunts around for more chairs: he opens a box of biscuits that have obviously been bought for the occasion and arranges them on a plate for the children. He tells us about the ghost village that lies nearby, with its forgotten market; and about his grandmother’s night walks all across these mountains. Now there is another ghost here, the ghost of his English friend. Later he shows us his garden, which falls away at the end into
nothingness. His place of meditation is just there, on the threshold of a great declivity with the purple peaks ranged around it in the distance. Meditation has become fundamental to his way of life. He has conquered many enemies through discipline alone. Six months ago he overcame the last and most stubborn, which was his addiction to cigarettes.

In another part of the garden I am surprised to see a cage with two dogs in it. They bark wildly when they see us and strain at the doors of their enclosure: they are big, vicious-looking animals, but Silvio assures us they would do us no harm. They know who my friends are, he says. They don’t attack unless they are provoked. He fondles their rough heads through the bars. It is necessary to have some kind of protection up here, he says. If someone tried to hurt me, they would kill him. He seems to set great store by this idea, yet he has been wounded to the quick by things of whose scent these animals would not have caught the merest trace. All the same, at night he lets them out into the garden and they patrol the boundaries until dawn.

Assisi lies an hour away to the south-east. The day is overcast: clouds sag over the plain. Now and again there is a motiveless gust of wind like an outburst of temper across the flat fields that subsides as suddenly as it came. It is Sunday. The great grey drifting sky, so deep overhead and unalleviated, recalls the Sundays of my childhood with their strange double nature of privation and feasting, a character impassable and final in its duality. The week was dead: it passed away somewhere between Mass and Sunday lunch, which between them finished it off, knocked the living daylights out of it with the sacerdotal rod and the Sunday roast. There was no hope given out for Monday, or for Tuesday either. Week after week they led back to the same impasse, the same nullifying conclusion. I still have a Sunday feeling, even now; a feeling that is like a bruise or mark on the skin, that is tender when it is touched.

From far away, the Basilica di San Francesco can be seen, standing on its hill in a tent of cloud. At the front there is a buttress wall, blank and pagan-looking, frightening in its enormity. The building’s long, forbidding colonnaded walkway extends from its side, like the huge dark wing of a bird of prey. I am familiar with the giantism of Catholic architecture. At the pilgrim centre of Lourdes in France the main square and basilica are so large that they harmonise unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism, with the airport terminal and the runway and the shopping mall. And indeed both are determinedly global in their perspective: visitors surrender their separateness at the sheer scale of the enterprise, without protest. It
must be imagined that people are pleased to be relieved of their individuality, though that doesn’t seem to be the case when disaster strikes. Then it is the impersonal they fear more than anything else.

As we draw near, the Sunday feeling grows stronger, the atmosphere of Catholicism more unmistakable. There are coach parks, scores of them, for it is in the spectacle of mass transportation that these large-scale beliefs like to show their might. We are controlled and directed by traffic police, by zoning, by different coloured signs with numbered boxes. The traffic police wear white gloves. They point and prohibit and occasionally permit. We wait a long time. At last we are given a zone and a number and allowed through. These precautions have not been put in place to marshal admirers of the early frescoes of Giotto, beautiful though they are reputed to be. It is St Francis who is causing the crush. All that remains of him are the bones that lie in the basilica’s cold heart, but it is the bones the coach parties have come for. The mania for the tangible is the predictable consequence of the intangibility of religious belief, though it has always bewildered me that it should be among the relics of the actual that the missing link between faith and reality is sought. At the Catholic convent school I attended, the nuns were forever debating the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, or the scrolls of Fatima, or the splinters of the true cross that were in ever-increasing circulation around the Catholic world and that put together could have made a hundred crosses. Such things roused their interest as individuals and, I suppose, alleviated the dreary impersonality of their beliefs. They were a form of attention, of love, for these women had given their lives to Jesus and had nothing whatever to show for it. Their love had no object, and in the end any bone or bit of cloth would do, just as a baby needs a blanket or a teddy bear to soothe him in his mother’s absences. Once, our class was taken to see the hand of Margaret Clitheroe, which the Order kept preserved in fluid at their convent in York, and those girls who screamed were immediately given detention.

I have been reading about St Francis. He was not always the poor anti-materialist who befriended the birds: he came from a family of rich Assisi cloth merchants. He was born in 1182, to doting parents who freighted him with their care and their ambition. His mother named him Giovanni, after John the Baptist, for she desired him to be a religious leader; but his father, who was away on business at the time of the birth, changed the name when he returned, furiously asserting that he did not want the child to be signed over to God. He intended him to work in the family business and drove him hard at his studies of Latin and mathematics, but no doubt he approved of his son’s popularity and vigorous social appetites too, for these were suitably ungodly pastimes, and besides, ambition is gratified wherever its object finds approval in the world. Francis danced and feasted and passed his nights in riotous style with his aristocratic friends, while by day he studied and worked in his father’s shop. One day a beggar came in to ask for money and Francis threw him out, but a feeling of compunction made him go after the man with a bag of coins and beg his forgiveness. Francis’s father disapproved of such spiritual melodrama, and his friends ridiculed it.

Some time later Assisi declared war against neighbouring Perugia and Francis immediately enlisted. He was ambitious for knightly glory and prestige: and for escape, too, it would seem, from his parents and their conflicting desires for him. Later this need would take desperate forms, but as yet Francis perhaps believed that he could free himself by a worldly route. Almost as soon as he set off he was captured, and was imprisoned for a year. When he returned to Assisi he was ill and took to his bed. There a change took place. It expressed itself in a need to give away his own possessions, a form of behaviour that was also the deepest challenge he could offer to his father’s authority.

Francis began to spend his days alone, forlornly wandering in the countryside around the town. One day he came across a small church that lay in ruins and believed that he heard a voice
telling him to repair it. More precisely, the voice is said to have ordered him to ‘repair my house which has fallen into ruin’. Another man might have acted on this injunction in the grand manner for which it appears to legislate, but Francis responded by selling some of his father’s cloth without permission and beginning restoration work on the little church with the proceeds. It is rare for the voice of God to initiate a direct attack on the property of the human father. It is as though Francis’s God were a projection of himself, a kind of universal victim ravaged by the world’s misunderstanding and neglect. Perhaps his spirit had been crushed after all, for like a child his sympathies ever after lay with dumb creatures, with the birds and bees whose patron saint he became. His father, Pietro, accused Francis of theft and led him before the bishop. Pietro explained the whole case, the wealth and education from which his son had profited, the ingratitude his increasingly strange behaviour evinced and the crime in which it had culminated, a crime the more outrageous for being perpetrated against his own father, to whom he owed everything, down to the clothes on his back. At this, Francis committed his final act of rejection: in front of the bishop he removed all of his clothes and gave them back to his father. What lengths he went to, both to goad and to free himself from his oppressive parent! To hand back your own clothes is the prelude to immolation itself, to the giving back of the body that has struggled to be free and failed. And Francis did go on to lead a life of great privation and denial, in which his interest in his new father and patriarch – God – seems to have been more than a little abstracted. His was a pure brand of nihilism that sought only to shield its most abject and defenceless victims from the evil of humankind. At the end of his life he instructed his followers to bury him at a place called Hell’s Hill, a bleak tract of land where executions were customarily held. His sufferings from tuberculosis were extreme, and it was during this final illness that he wrote the ‘Canticle to the Creatures’, a love poem to the unpopulated earth, to the sun and wind and water, to a dumb and beautiful Mother
Nature whom he idolised for her impartiality, her lack of motive, her generosity that did not enslave, her abundance that was without cause or consequence.

Two years after Francis’s death in 1226, the cult of his celebrity was born. He was canonised, and the Pope laid the foundation stone for the basilica on his grave. He who had suffered so bitterly from the tyranny of identity, whose psyche found relief only in the dissolution of ownership and the casting off of material things, whose eyes dwelt for consolation on what was small and beneath notice, was to be pinioned for ever beneath the weight of a giant edifice of unparalleled splendour, in a place he had chosen for its lack of prestige, but which was henceforth to invoke the very origins of human aspiration itself and bear the name of Paradise Hill.

Reading Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists
, one begins to notice a minor consistency of an unexpected sort. The artists of the Renaissance, almost without exception, profited early in life from their fathers’ help in the recognition and exercise of their talents. Michelangelo, it is true, was occasionally beaten for spending his time drawing when he should have been studying, but by the time he was fourteen his father had changed his tune and apprenticed him at a living wage to the painter Ghirlandaio. But it is mostly the case that the child-artist, who in other eras was grudgingly received as a delinquent or an idiot, was in this time and place favoured and forwarded, soldered to the world by the paternalistic hand. And perhaps the psychic health of the art of the Renaissance, its confidence and sociability and insatiable love of humankind, issues from this prosaic and fundamental source.

Cimabue, born in 1240, whose works adorn the Basilica of St Francis, is credited by Vasari with being the artist who initiated the great restoration of the art of painting in Italy. At school he would cover his books with drawings instead of reading them: his parents congratulated him on his originality. When a group of Greek craftsmen was brought to Florence to
decorate the Gondi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Cimabue truanted school altogether and spent whole days watching them work. His father approached these craftsmen and elicited their agreement to take Cimabue on as an apprentice, for according to Vasari he had a great respect for his son and believed that his inclinations ought to be trusted. How different from poor St Francis, who only had to show an inclination for his father to move to crush it! And how different the pursuit of truth that followed, the one so punitive and painful and the other so vigorous and beautiful. Cimabue quickly became famous, so famous that when he painted a large new Madonna for Santa Maria Novella the painting was processed through the streets to the sound of trumpets and a cheering crowd. One day, he was walking in the countryside when he came across a young shepherd boy sitting in a field, drawing one of his own sheep with a pointed stone on a smooth piece of rock. This was Giotto. Cimabue was so astonished by his talent that he asked the boy to come and live with him, and the boy replied that if his father agreed then he would. The father was delighted, and Giotto went back with Cimabue to Florence, where, as Vasari admits, he rapidly diminished Cimabue’s glory by becoming one of the greatest painters the world has ever known. Dante summed up the situation in the
Divine Comedy
:

It was in the Basilica di San Francesco that these first artists of the Renaissance evolved their artistic vision, for the edifice quickly grew so large that a certain blankness adhered to it, and adheres to it still. It is easy to enlarge the scale of a human construction: what is hard is to amplify its brain. The basilica was a dinosaur that needed to be rendered articulate. That was what the artists were for, to fill in its blankness, to programme it with
meaning and significance. The modest spirit of St Francis alone could not fill its barn-like spaces: it required the seasoning of art to flavour the bland atmosphere of pilgrimage.

Yet the modern-day pilgrims like their blandness, their plain fare. The basilica is full of them, passing the painted walls with barely a glance. The specifics of art are too strong for their palates. It is bones they have come for in their air-conditioned coaches; bones, and the experience of their own coming, their massing: the basic unit of life, entire unto itself, moving and massing together like polyps on the ocean bed. Held as they are in the unblinking stare of existence, interpretation and art do not concern them. The painted walls of the basilica are no more to them than the texture of the rock on which their colony has massed itself. Those walls are now faded and damaged with time: they have their own fame, their own divinity, but the pilgrims dislike people looking at paintings. They hiss and shush and send over angry stares. Now and then a message is broadcast over the sound system, reminding those who are not in the basilica to attend mass that absolute silence is required or they will be asked to leave. Then the voice of the priest singing the liturgy issues from the crackling speakers once more, a sound that is both automatic and animal, like the loud call of some primitive creature whose interminable cadences now and again invite the unanimous caterwauling of his neighbours.

In the upper basilica there are a large number of frescoes depicting the life of St Francis. Until recently it was believed that Giotto had painted them, but my researches in the
propri
etario
’s library have informed me that it is now known that he did not. Nevertheless, his name remains there, in an engraved perspex rectangle on the basilica wall. Elsewhere in the basilica there are works by Cimabue, Simone Martini, Lorenzetti, and the real Giotto, and none of them are labelled at all. They are difficult to find: they lie in sepulchral darkness among the vaults of the lower church, like prisoners in a dungeon. The customary modern appurtenances of the art lover are nowhere to be found. There are no lights, no silken tasselled ropes, no
information. One is obstructed and put off the scent at every opportunity. The broadcast warnings intensify: the shushing and the hostile stares come thick and fast through the gloom, for it is in the lower church that the bones lie, and the closer we get to them the more vigorously art is derided.