Innocence. Julian Barnes
constantly, and follow the traditions of your country and of the ancient nobility.’ Giancarlo thought over these words and their unspecified meaning for some months, and then followed the strongest tradition of nobility he could think of by marrying a wealthy American. But he had no acquisitive sense, and when war broke out once more she left him, an ageing father with a two-year-old daughter, and in the same precarious state as before.
How unfortunate that Maddalena, violently opposed to Mussolini and living in England, should have married a man who quite mistakenly thought she was a wealthy foreigner, and whose main interest lay in watching waterfowl and wading birds! However much thought one took, how could such a man be made happy? The turn their marriages took brought Giancarlo and his sister together again, or at least brought both of them to the apartment in the Piazza Limbo.
In appearance Maddalena had a meagreness which suggested that she might not be long for this world, although this was contradicted by her persistent good health. Her firmness Giancarlo would have appreciated if there had been any way of telling what she would be firm about next. Take the matter of the third and fourth fingers of her right hand. They were missing, having been taken off with a pair of sharp poultry-nippers by a thief sitting behind her on the 33 bus coming back from Bagno a Ripoli. The diamond ring given her by her English husband in their happier days was of course the object. The incident was not at all an unusual one, and the strong-minded Maddalena refused to make any kind of official complaint. She regarded the loss, she said, as a tax which all those who have something to be stolen must expect to pay. ‘Calculate in any given year to pay out one-fiftieth of your movable possessions,’ she said. On that principle, Giancarlo told her, she would lose one finger every five years. ‘How long do you intend to live?’
Chiara, coming and going from an English convent school, was distressed by her Aunt Mad. There was the matter of the Refuge for the Unwanted. The failure of old people to be happy tormented Auntie Mad. The rest of the population endures their company only on sufferance. No-one, even under religious obedience, enjoys being with the old for long periods — with one exception, however, babies, who are prepared to smile at anything even roughly in human shape. Why not, therefore, a Refuge where the old folk could wear out their days looking after homeless infants? The toothless would comfortably co-exist with the toothless. ‘But these ancients won’t be competent, they’ll forget which child is which.’ ‘At times, possibly.’ ‘They’ll drop them.’ ‘One child or two, perhaps, but what a sense of usefulness!’ In the confusion of the postwar, during the quarrelsome rebuilding of Florence, it was easy to do unusual things, even bribery was scarcely necessary. Pretty well all that she had left Maddalena spent on her foundation. It was in via Sansepolcro, and fortunately cost very little to run. The old women were all from the country. They were used to washing clothes in cold water, and scrubbing the floor with sand.
Giancarlo couldn’t remember what his sister had been like in their childhood. Remote though it was, she must, surely, have been like something, but never, he thought, like me.
Perhaps, at the moment, sitting in the second floor flat of the decrepit palazzo, in a salon full of marble statuary, as yellow as old teeth, but with a freshness in the light from the river only a street away, they were doing no more than talking things over, as others do. What distinguished them was their optimism. Even disagreements between them produced hope.
If Chiara was to marry this Doctor Rossi, where was the wedding lunch to be? They had thought, of course, of the Ricordanza. It was true that at any celebration there Annunziata would be an absolute nuisance. Insanely cautious, she insisted that any guests from Rome (with the exception of the Monsignore), or indeed from anywhere south of the Umbrian border, were likely to need watching. Before and after they left she counted the spoons in a raucous whisper. That had happened, for instance, when Giancarlo, with the idea of raising money on the property, had given a lunch party at the villa for some Roman bankers. But the scheme had been likely to fail in any case. Giancarlo was not the kind of person who ever made money. He should have applied himself harder to his business studies in Switzerland.
But then it turned out that Chiara didn’t, while deeply anxious not to distress anyone, want her wedding to be at the Ricordanza. ‘Where she used to play all morning!’ Mad exclaimed, ‘in the shadows of the lemon trees.’ It seemed, however, that Dr Rossi wasn’t in favour of it. But surely Chiara had a will of her own?
‘Of course she has,’ said Giancarlo. ‘That is why she is able to change her mind.’ And it became clear to them that Chiara wanted a country wedding. ‘That means the farm. I shall go out to Valsassina and talk to Cesare about it myself. He won’t know what’s going on, it won’t have occurred to him to ask. I shall go to Valsassina tomorrow.’
The Count, holding himself well but stiffly, walked down to the palazzo’s courtyard. The ground floor was let out to shops (one of them a hairdresser’s) and small offices. The cortile was thronged with parked cars and scooters. Bicycles were always carried indoors and upstairs for safety’s sake by their owners. Two horses belonging to the mounted police stood patiently, for long stretches, tethered to iron stanchions let into a marble pillar. In the fourteenth century the whole area had been a graveyard for unbaptized infants, whose salvation was doubtful.
With relief the Count got into his solid old Fiat 1500 sedan. The hollowed leather of the driver’s seat fitted his sharp joints. Reluctance to start, small items out of alignment, a rattle which might or might not be something to do with the ashtrays, were no trouble, rather a consolation to a driver who recognized them all.
He drove out of the city on the via Chiantigiana. In tune to the persistent rattling, he reflected that his wife, who was not dead, but preferred to live in Chicago, and Maddalena’s husband, who was not dead either, though he was sometimes thought to be, but preferred to live in East Suffolk, must both receive invitations to the wedding, but would not accept them. On the other hand the Monsignore must be asked to officiate, and would officiate, though this would have to be by courtesy of the parish priest at Valsassina. The country, as the Count drove on, the gentle inclines, the olives, vines, and vegetables, suggested that the earth here was still friendly and even protective to human beings, but it had been rewarded in every vineyard with forty-five thousand white concrete posts to the hectare. This did not disturb Giancarlo, who forgave the land its changing appearance as he forgave himself his own.
That year they had a cold autumn. At Valsassina there was a bitter smell from the straw fires which had been lit at night to keep the earth warm. Two of Cesare’s little motocultivators were rolling in procession back and forth across the ridge. The Count marvelled, not for the first time, at how much of the agricultural day consists of moving things from one place to another. He passed the little stone building, once a chapel, which the farmworkers used for their mid-day break. The ragged roof steamed like a kettle, they were boiling something up in there. Higher up, a stone cross marked the place where Cesare’s father had been shot during the German retreat, or possibly during the Allied advance, there was no chance now of ever knowing which, or what he had been trying to protest against.
At the top of the rising ground Giancarlo parked in the front courtyard, where it was always supposed to be warmer (but this was a fiction) and as he got out of the car the autumn wind was waiting for him. A lizard which had emerged, as wrinkled as an old man’s hand, into what looked like warm sunshine had retreated instantly. The whole of the right-hand wall was covered with a climbing viburnum, spreading upwards and outwards as it always had done within living memory, as far as it could reach. This plant had had the sense to begin shedding its leaves early.
Valsassina itself was somewhere between a farmhouse and a casa signorile and was sometimes admired for its original plan, but in fact it had been put up almost at random on the site of an old watchtower. Once inside, you always had the same sensation of no-one being there, a cavernous emptiness, with a faint sound of something dripping, and darkness, not pitch darkness but a reddish dark between the brick floors and the terracotta tiles of the ceilings. Immediately to the right as you went in was the fermentation room for the house wine. The powerful odour of saturated wood travelled from one end of the house to the other.