With some reluctance he lowered his head once more to the page. He was reading among the early chronicles of the city and contado of Perugia in an endeavor to trace the course of events which had made the leading members of the Baglioni family, for some half-century or so, before they were finally crushed by Pope Paul III in 1540, the princes of the city. In this mesh of shifting loyalties and incessant intrigue design was difficult to establish. One constant thread was the fertility of the family, the tendency to produce large numbers of male children. Another was the regularity with which these murdered one another, a process culminating on a warm July night in the year 1500, when several of the chief members of the clan had been butchered in their sleeping quarters by a band of conspirators recruited and led by their own relatives. Night of the Great Betrayal, it was called in the chronicles, a phrase that lingered strangely in Monti’s mind.
Order he still sought, however, a principle that might seem to give meaning to this bloody welter, something that would work on the past as the evening light did when it visited the landscape. It had come to him increasingly of late that it was some sort of escape route he was looking for; he wanted to be detached from history, rescued.
The earliest reference he had so far found was to one Lodovico Baglioni, who had come to Perugia in 1162 as an obscure knight in the train of the Emperor Barbarossa and stayed on and founded his line, no different then or later, no more endowed with qualities of mind or character than the other great families of Perugia, the degli Oddi, the Ranieri, the Arcipreti. All these had fought for preeminence in the centuries following. Then the two most powerful, the Baglioni and the degli Oddi, had become locked in a blood feud that lasted a hundred and fifty years, following upon the treacherous murder of Messer degli Oddi by members of the Baglioni family in December of 1331. That killing had been of a type by now familiar to Monti: five or six had lain in wait for Messer degli Oddi and cut him down before he had time to draw a weapon.
The light he had been waiting for came now, falling across the land at a time when there was no longer a visible source of illumination in the sky, so that it seemed like a property of the landscape itself, fulfilling some ancient contract between earth and rock and plant. Tentative at first, it strengthened slowly, falling with a soft blaze of yellow on the flowering broom that lay in swathes on the hillside opposite the house.
He sighed to himself and shifted back in his chair so that he could see higher up, to the crests of the nearer hills. The beauty of the light was in the sense it gave of a visitation. The experience of it was like the experience of understanding something. He thought of Laura, of the words they had said at different times, their quarrels, their lovemaking. Like a kind of landscape. Their marriage, the years together, his present loneliness, formed a single aspect and this aspect needed a unifying light. Light there must be, he insisted to himself, some key, some guiding principle. Otherwise I am thrashing about in the same blind ditch as the Baglioni, and so is Laura too.
It was with an obscure sense of rescuing them both from such dreadful wallowing that he began now to think of his wife in some of her particular physical expressions, her walk with the toes turning slightly inward, her habit when puzzled or perplexed of brushing the back of her hand across her brow, beginning at the temple, like a cat washing itself. Laughter came easily to her but her face when unguarded had lines of sadness about the mouth, more than sadness, something like pain; and because of this her laughter seemed like a conquest continually renewed …
He sat thus while the radiance faded from the landscape and the accustomed sense of loss grew with the beginnings of the dark. He was roused by a tapping at his door. When he went to open it he found his neighbor Fabio on the doorstep, standing rather close to the wall, as if sheltering there or listening for sounds from inside. Monti was struck by the pallor of his face in the half-light and by what seemed an unnatural stillness about him, a quality of containment. It was unusual that he should visit without a phone call or any warning—they were not on such close terms. However, apart from bidding him good evening Fabio said nothing at all, merely stood there in silence. After a moment Monti asked him in, leading the way into the living room, where he had been working. At the sight of the papers and books on the table, Fabio began to apologize for the disturbance he was causing, accompanying this with an odd little gesture, almost of helplessness as it seemed to Monti. The bookish recognize the presence or absence of this quality in others quite soon and Monti saw at once from Fabio’s manner that he was not a man much given to reading or studying.
“You do not disturb me. I am glad to be given a reason for pausing in my work,” Monti said in the tone of grave courtesy usual with him. He felt the awkwardness of the situation, which was increased by the fact that Fabio said nothing further for the moment, simply stood there tensely, as if containing the desire to break into violent gesture. Monti asked him to sit but with them both seated at opposite sides of the fireplace the sense of awkwardness seemed to grow. Laura would have known what to say, Monti thought. She would have known how to set this man at his ease. His visitor was smartly dressed, he noticed, in a linen jacket and a pale green shirt and a carefully knotted tie. “Can I offer you some coffee?” he said. “Or a glass of wine?”
“Wine, yes, thank you.”
“I have some of the local Trasimeno wine, which is not bad.” He went through into the kitchen, returned with the opened bottle and two glasses, poured out the wine. In the face of Fabio’s continuing silence he began to talk about his work, to explain why he had been glad, in a certain sense, to be interrupted. Reading Perugian history was cumulatively depressing, often seeming to be no more than a chronicle of crimes. “Of course,” he said, “any study of history can seem like that at times, but in Perugia you get it in a concentrated form. Not a concentration of incidents or events, I don’t mean that exactly, but it is the constant repetition of a single pattern, power gained by conspiracy and crime, maintained for a certain time by oppression, bloodily yielded in the end to some new gang.”
He raised his glass with a murmured salutation and drank. He watched Fabio taste the wine, watched him move his head very slightly from side to side in the manner of one uncertain about the quality. It was a small gesture and probably habitual but it seemed graceless to Monti, after his recommendation. For a man still relatively young, Fabio seemed too set in his ways, too obtrusive with judgment, even in his present disturbance—that he was disturbed about something was clear enough. There was nothing for it but to go on talking, give him time. “Some new gang,” he repeated. “It is the cyclic effect that is depressing. Centuries and centuries of it. Fashions change and modes of speech and styles of architecture, but the murder factor remains constant. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of redeeming features. Perhaps I have been more sensitive to it lately. It makes one feel, you know, pretty hopeless about our human prospects.”
“It is not much different today,” Fabio said. “Look at Italy. Is this a democracy?” He paused for a moment and his eyes widened under their thick brows. “Arturo has gone,” he said, “he has left me, he is in Naples.”
“I see.” Monti rose to fill Fabio’s glass. This was it then. He was rather at a loss to know what to say, also troubled by a certain sense of surprise—the two men had seemed so close. But that is how Laura and I would have struck people, right up to the moment she went … “When did it happen?” he asked, an odd query, as he at once realized, inappropriate; desertion was not an event in itself, merely the culmination of an obscure process—his own experience had taught him this.
“I had a phone call from him this morning. He went to Rome two days ago. He said he wanted to go alone, he was tired, he needed a break.” Fabio’s lips twisted at the falsehood of this. “I let him go. Then he rings me from Naples to say that everything is over, he is not coming back.”
“I see, yes.” Monti nodded, putting as much comprehension as he could into it. A bare understanding of the words was all he
could offer, at least for the moment; he did not know enough to attempt more. He had noted the phrase about granting permission. It had seemed authoritarian to him, rather disagreeably so; but then, he was an outsider.
“We had a little quarrel before he left,” Fabio said. “Nothing much, a few words. He went to buy some chicken breasts for supper and instead of going to Ellera he went to the little shop here. We always go to Ellera to buy our meat. I had told him never to buy anything in that shop.”
“You mean the butcher in the village? I always get my meat there.”
“You are making a bad mistake. I wouldn’t put my nose in there; they don’t keep the place clean.”
“Well,” Monti said mildly, “I haven’t noticed any dirt there, but I often don’t notice things.” He paused for a moment and some sense of the other man’s intolerance had sharpened his tone when he spoke again. “I’ve been going there for four months now and no symptoms of poisoning so far.”
“Stop while you are in time,” Fabio said. “You think it is nothing but for me everything has to be done in the right way, it has always been so. Besides, we had agreed together not to go to that shop. And still he went. I have been at home all day, working outside. When it began to get dark I could not stay there alone. I came here.” He hesitated for a moment, then went on, in a tone of deeper feeling, “There is no one else living nearby, no one who would understand … I remembered your visit to us with your wife, how well we got on together.”
“That was a very pleasant evening.” He was relieved that Fabio had not yet remarked on Laura’s absence. Tact perhaps—or perhaps he was too stricken to notice. Monti reached for the bottle. “Some more wine?”
“I do not want to intrude.”
“No, you were right to come here.” Fabio had not been able to bear the thought of night falling and himself alone in the house. He had come to seek company. An impulse quite contrary to mine, Monti thought. Since she left I have avoided everyone, turned in upon myself. Nothing so much marks people out as these reactions. Fabio had dressed for this visit to a stranger, changed out of his working clothes into pale green shirt and dark red tie and linen jacket and stone-colored jeans. This punctilio in the midst of distress was touching to Monti, disturbing too, indicating a mind that ran in grooves. “We are in the same situation,” he said. “My wife left me last November, not long after that evening when we came to you. She went back to Turin.”
It was the first time he had made this admission to any living soul. He had expected to feel, and in the moment or two before speaking had actually felt, a sort of preliminary shrinking and shame; but the words when they came brought an immediate feeling of liberation. “She has somebody there,” he said, going a stage further.
“I am sorry.” Some color had come back into Fabio’s face, either from the wine or the kindling of these confessions. From something in his tone and look, Monti had the impression that his visitor was rather put out by this intrusion of a rival sorrow and he felt an obscure resentment at the injustice of this. Unhappiness strengthens our prejudices, including those we are not always aware of or willing to admit. Monti could not say what he privately felt, which was that wives counted more in the scale than homosexual companions. “Laura and I have been married for twelve years,” he said in a tone of slight reproof.
“Arturo and I have been together for fifteen.” Fabio paused a moment, then turned his head aside. “There is more than just the leaving.” He swallowed with a pronounced movement of the throat. “He has taken the house.”
“Taken the house?” In the competition of loss that had been developing between them, Monti was compelled to recognize this as a winning move. “Just a minute,” he said. The bottle was now empty and he went into the kitchen to get another. “How could he take the house?” he asked on his return. “Isn’t it owned jointly?”
Fabio shook his head. “It was in my name. It was my money that bought it. But I signed it over to Arturo; we made a deed of sale, a legal document signed and witnessed.”
“But why?”
“It was a way to save money, or so I thought.”
Monti listened while his visitor explained the matter. Various concessions would have become available to them … Reduced taxes, increased subsidies. He went on at some length, describing the advantages, perhaps in an effort not to seem too much duped. But no hoped-for gain could cover the error of judgment, only make it seem grosser. Perhaps becoming aware of this, Fabio said, “It was a blunder, yes, but I trusted him. Now he phones me and says he has already been to a lawyer and started proceedings to gain possession of the house.”
The habitual severity and melancholy of his face had softened with hurt as he spoke. Monti listened aghast. Arturo must have planned the whole thing in advance, not just to desert Fabio, not just to secure his own share, but to rob his partner of his home, to take everything from him, all the years of work, all the security of the future. It was hard to think of a worse treachery, taking someone’s love and using it against him.
“It denies the time we had together,” Fabio said. “If he could do that, it is hard to think he could ever have cared for me. That is what hurts so much, this poisoning of the past.”
They were well into the second bottle now. Wine and sorrow were combining to make Fabio less guarded than he would have normally been in talking to a man who was not gay. And now, for the first time, he showed a closeness to tears. “I gave him everything,” he said. “He had no future, a low-life character, hanging around the bars, part-time waiter, part-time whore. I took him away from all that, I brought him to live with me, and this is how he repays me; he schemes to take the roof from over my head.”
Gifts are two-edged, Monti reflected, as he looked at the other’s face, so convinced of betrayal. He had brought this youth from the bars of Naples to the rural depths of Umbria. In making gifts we think that we cancel all that is negative. Everything is irradiated by the simple act of giving, like the light he had just waited for and watched, all-enveloping, as beautiful on the barren hillside as on terraces and orchards. We think—as Fabio obviously thought—that it is a light renewed every day. But how had Arturo experienced it, this gift? From day to day, how had he felt it? The scheming to take the house was treacherous and base; but the leaving Monti thought he could understand. Fabio did not seem to him very flexible or imaginative; it might become intolerable to be trapped in such a man’s vision of things. Perhaps Laura too had felt some way imprisoned … “My work was perhaps too important to me,” he said. “I am obsessive about work, I always have been so. Perhaps I did the same, made what I thought were gifts into a form of oppression.”
“The same?” Fabio frowned slightly, as if puzzled. “I did not make him many gifts; I bought him occasionally something, a silk scarf, a tiepin, little things.”
“I was speaking figuratively,” Monti said. “Have some more wine.”
“Take a beautiful car,” Fabio said. “Everything perfect, the engineering, the bodywork. I always loved cars, I loved racing. When I heard that I could not race any longer because of the damage to my hand, I wept.”
This recalling of another loss brought tears to his eyes now. He paused and swallowed, then after a moment went on again. “As time goes by you get scratches, the paintwork dulls, the undercarriage suffers from corrosion. You do not feel the same about the car, there is not that sense of perfection any longer. It becomes a different relationship. What I want to say is that with Arturo this never happened.”
“Bodywork still perfect,” Monti said rather vaguely—he cared nothing for cars and could not imagine having a relationship with one. He thought of Laura’s body, past its youth now, the dearer to him for that. The comparison was somehow typical of Fabio; but it was through a house, not a car, that he had been cheated and betrayed, the house he and Arturo had lived in together, a thing of stone and mortar, yes, but also an abode of spirit, a shelter from the world in a sense more than physical. Even this rented house where I am
sitting now, he thought, drably furnished, still unfamiliar. While she was here with me it was a dwelling place, when she walked out she left it gaping open.
“I am not so interested in cars,” he said. “People who live together, it is not in a car that they live. People who live together build a house around them day by day. But the house—”
“I will kill him,” Fabio said. “He will not take everything from me and live to laugh at me with someone else.”
He uttered this threat quietly but with complete seriousness and Monti felt sure he meant it. The eyes of Fabio had a hunter’s steadiness about them; they were the eyes of a risk-taker. His own were mild and evasive, eyes of one who submits. Why do I always slide away into speculation? he wondered. I want to tell this man that I look at the things she left behind, a belt, an evening bag, a piece of jewelry, I take these things and look at them and want her back. The reason I don’t speak of it is that I am afraid of his contempt …
The wine was working on him now. He was on the point of braving this imagined contempt by telling Fabio that there had been times since her going when he had taken articles of Laura’s clothing and held them closely pressed against him. He was saved from the confession—a rescue for which afterward he was profoundly grateful—by a tapping at the door. The windows were unshuttered still and when he glanced up he saw wavering arcs of torchlight in the darkness outside.