He hesitated for a moment and his mind shifted. When he spoke again it was in a tone less dispassionate. “If Perugia had acted out of pure devotion to the papal cause, then her subjection by the Papacy would go beyond irony, it would amount to the tragedy of betrayal.”
It seemed to him that his voice had faltered on this last word and he wondered if something in his face had changed. He had the impression that the students were looking at him oddly. The silence that followed was broken by Millucci, and for once Monti was glad of the intervention, though it was motivated as usual by the desire to undermine the discussion rather than contribute anything.
“I think the whole question of irony is beside the point,” Millucci said in his slightly nasal voice with its Bolognese inflections. “After all, the people involved did not think in those terms; they were reacting to situations that we can only have an approximate idea of now. What is the point of using words that belong to us, not to them?”
“That is the great privilege of those that live after,” Monti said. “That is the vantage point that history confers on us. We lose immediacy but we gain perspective. We see connections not possible to see at the time. The sense of irony can only be cultivated in detachment.”
But Millucci was studying the wall again. “Take a look at Gibbon’s Decline and Fall sometime,” Monti said. “You will see the uses that irony can be put to.” To mitigate the sharpness of this, he added quickly, “An eighteenth-century English scholar writing about ancient Rome, a period as remote to him in its manners and morals as the time before the Flood. Detachment could not be more complete and Gibbon makes brilliant use of it.”
He waited awhile but no one spoke. “Good,” he said, “let us take a particular series of events. Arbitrary, I know, but it can be helpful to see patterns. In June of 1424 Fortebraccio, Lord of Perugia, dies beneath the walls of L’Aquila. The people of Perugia hail his bastard son as the new lord. But the Pope of the day, Martin V, has other ideas. He is eager to reestablish the authority of the Church in Perugia. In Malatesta Baglioni he finds an instrument ready to his hand. You will remember Malatesta, the great expropriator and refurbisher of houses, he who tied his enemy to the tail of a horse and had him dragged through the streets of the town. Malatesta is not in a very good bargaining position at the moment, being in a papal prison. He realizes that the way to gain his liberty and keep his family in power is to make a pact with the Pope. He persuades his fellow citizens to accept papal authority in exchange for the backing of the papal troops in case of trouble. And so it comes about. Perugia retains a nominal independence but she has lost her essential freedom and she will never regain it. From now on liberty under the Pope will be her highest ideal.
“Now let us jump seventy years or so. It is 1495. Malatesta is long dead but the Baglioni have gone from strength to strength, building their great houses on the Colle Landone, laying out orchards and gardens in their spacious grounds overlooking the pianura umbra. They were great people for houses, the Baglioni. I don’t know if any of you have thought further about the connections between houses and power in the history of the Baglioni family … No? Well, 1495 is a year of great triumph for them. They have succeeded in expelling their greatest rivals, the Oddi family. Their cause has been espoused by the Medici—there is work still to be done on the relations between the Medici and the Baglioni in the fifteenth century, perhaps a postgraduate thesis for somebody? The Medici use their influence with the Pope of the day, who confirms the outlawing of the Oddi by official decree. I wonder who took over their houses …”
He saw Millucci look toward him. “Yes,” he said, “I know it is speculation, there is no way now of unearthing these property deals. But speculation is one of the pleasures afforded us by the study of history. Like the exercise of irony, eh, Millucci?”
Quite unexpectedly, Millucci’s face broke into a smile, the first that Monti could remember seeing in any of these sessions. The others were smiling too, as if aware of some release of tension. Monti’s spirits rose. It mattered to him, as it always had, that he should succeed with his students, succeed in sharing his enthusiasms. And he had thought he was failing with these.
“Well,” he said, “let us go to the third event in the series. It is May 1540, a half century later. Fifty years of Baglioni misrule and civil disorder and incessant quarreling with the Papacy. But the Pope now is Paul III, a very different man from either of the two others we have mentioned today. He is far-seeing, relentless, constantly in need of funds. He wants total power in Perugia and he knows that this is not possible without first destroying the Baglioni. He is not really interested in doing deals with the family, though he may at first pretend to be. He is interested in getting rid of them altogether. He is helped in typical fashion by the family itself: six years earlier Ridolfo Baglioni and some of his people have waylaid the Papal Vice-Legate and stabbed him to death in the street.
“Paul III bides his time. Early in 1540 he publishes a bull increasing the price of salt by three quattrini a pound. The people of Perugia, suffering from a series of bad harvests, rise in revolt. Paul sends his troops in. The Baglioni attempt resistance but they are easily defeated. By the end of May it is all over; the city has capitulated.”
Monti paused a moment for dramatic effect, looking straight before him. “Three events then, and three popes. Covering a hundred and twenty years. There is a kind of pattern in it, or so it seems to me, and I would like you to think about this before our next meeting and try to decide how far it is a typical pattern, how far it expresses the nature of the period considered as a whole. Who lives by the sword perishes by the sword, so the saying goes. Certainly the Baglioni made good soldiers for generation after generation—it was perhaps their only virtue. But they lived by intrigue and extortion and these were the weapons Pope Paul III used to destroy them.”
In speaking he had felt some self-mockery at his own rhetoric; but he had caught the students’ interest, he could see it from the faces. Something had happened in the course of this session; there had been a shift toward sympathy, the recognition of shared endeavor, something difficult to define but definite, irreversible. “One last thing,” he said. “And it forms part of that symbolism of property we were discussing. Perugia surrendered to the papal forces at the beginning of June 1540. One of the first things their new master did was to appoint demolition experts. Within a month the towers and turrets of the Baglioni were falling, their splendid palaces were being razed to the ground. On this prime site, the finest in the city, a single gigantic building rose, the Pauline Fortress, named after the new Lord of Perugia. It was destined to hold the city in subjection for three centuries to come.”
When the students had filed out Monti lit a cigarette and went to the window. There was nothing to look out at but a flat roof with a low parapet on which disheveled pigeons sat. This time, he felt, the hour had gone well. Of course there were pitfalls in this game of patterns; one tended to lose the sense of their provisional nature, to believe they expressed a settled truth. Patterns were imposed on the flux of events, they were arbitrary and creative, they reordered the world. It was good if this reordering cast light, but vital that it should soon be discarded or modified or merged into something else. All the great pattern makers had held on too long—Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud. A rigid insistence on patterns was the mark of an arrested mind. I should have stressed that more, he thought.
He had not been free of the vice himself—perhaps no one was. And it did not apply only to views of history or human society. All relations sustained over long periods tended to fall into patterns of one kind or another. He thought again of Laura, what he had expected of her, what she had expected of him, the habitual demands, the selective vision, the ground shared and unshared. Patterns of behavior are formed by some law that may relate to love but they are not necessarily informed by love itself and they can harden into a framework strong as steel. Somehow the shape thus formed had been the wrong one for Laura. She had discovered
it to be wrong and she had gone away.
What we call betrayal, then, no more than the breaking of a pattern, the doing violence to settled assumptions … But what when it is betrayal itself that is the pattern? His mind moved to the Great Betrayal of the Baglioni, July 15 in the year 1500, the night of the Red Wedding, as it had been called, when the clan, not content with oppressing their fellow citizens and murdering members of rival families, had turned upon themselves.
In the principal branches of the family there were too many male children and all of them were given to violent quarrel. There was not space enough for all this squabbling brood. Most were scarcely literate. The only profession they knew was that of arms.
He fell to imagining that summer night five centuries ago, the sun setting, that last radiant visitation of light that he waited for himself in the evenings. A luminous deepening of color, the stubble fields below the city walls deep gold, the green of distant trees darkening and shining, the line of the mountains hazing violet. Then quite suddenly the fall of night, the fireflies on the slopes of the hillside below the grand houses on the Colle Landone, the chorus of crickets filling the spaces of the gardens, the splash of fountains.
The killers would have heard and seen these things as they made their way through the night. Grifonetto, the nephew of Braccio Baglioni, Filippo, a bastard of the Baglioni house, numerous others—there was no shortage of men hopeful for advancement or resentful of neglect.
Four of the chiefs of the clan were killed that night: Astorre, Guido, Simonetto, Gismondo. And all with the utmost ferocity. Filippo entered the bedchamber of Astorre Baglioni and killed him in full view of his young wife before he had time to seize a weapon. The chronicles were unanimous in asserting that his killer tore out the heart.
Before the eyes of his wife … It was like the killing of Biordo Michelotti a hundred years before, whose murder had brought the Baglioni back to Perugia and founded their power. There was a similarity here that went beyond coincidence: both the men had recently been married, Astorre only eighteen days before, both to women of illustrious families and both in circumstances of pomp and splendor and dazzling display. At the wedding of Astorre Baglioni triumphal arches were erected in the streets, there were processions, the wedding gifts were displayed to public view—gems, gold ornaments, rich brocades. At the wedding feast, held in the open in the Cathedral Square, Astorre’s brother, Simonetto Baglioni, who like the groom had only eighteen days to live, threw basketfuls of sugared almonds to the populace from a loaded cart.
A pattern here too, of a kind: in each case a display of wealth and good fortune had shortly preceded—and certainly provoked—the murders. And behind the pattern a raw truth: hatred there is always, it waits only for a goad.
True to their word, exactly seven days after delivering their ultimatum, the Checchetti drove short stakes into the surface of the road below their house at a precise distance apart of two meters. Harold Chapman had made a point of reconnoitering the ground daily and he saw the stakes himself. “Just below that wall of theirs,” he said. “They are about six inches high. We must phone immediately and order some wood. I’d do it myself but you know what my Italian is like.”
Cecilia’s usual response to this was the loyal assurance that he was making great strides. This time, however, as she took up the phone, she said nothing, obscurely repelled by her husband’s glee.
“They don’t know what they are doing,” he said. “Those who God wants to destroy he first makes blind.”
Cecilia paused, phone in hand. “Mad,” she said, “not blind.” But he didn’t seem to hear this or at least to take it in, and she did not repeat it. It came to her now, with a sort of muffled shock, that she did not really care whether Harold misquoted things or not. She spoke to someone at the other end and ordered the wood. “They say they will come later on today. Sometime late in the afternoon.”
Chapman rubbed the palms of his hands together. “I was afraid the Checchetti would think better of it.”
Mad they may well be, Cecilia thought. It was more than an attempt at extortion, more than mere stupid greed. Some passion had entered the business. The Checchetti seemed to have suspended their rational parts. They must know that various other people used this road, that whatever bylaws they had unearthed they could not simply block it by unilateral action. Probably they were hoping that the others would take their part against the newcomers. But this was mad too … It was hatred, or something like it, that had trapped the Checchetti in this blind alley. Hatred for foreigners, for people who came and went, who had a life beyond these hillsides with their steep terraces of olive and vine, who had a silver-gray BMW, who could afford to buy a house only for holidays. This hatred was waiting for us, she thought. It was there before we arrived. It was not lessened by our offer of help with the wall. What made it active and malignant was the simplest and most ordinary of requests: we wanted a receipt for the money, we wanted to do things in legal form.
“I must say Mancini is a brilliant chap,” Chapman said. “I had my doubts at first, I don’t mind admitting it. His manner is strange at times and he tends to wander a bit, but he came up trumps with this one. Late afternoon, the wood people say? I’ll take the binoculars out and go up the hillside behind the house a little way. There is a point up there from which you can see the turning at the corner where the lorry will come in.”
His eyes were bright and his whole being had become charged with joyous energy. With a dispassion that had some shadow of despair in it, Cecilia noted these signs in her husband and felt the beginning of that desolation we feel when what we have thought familiar betrays us by its strangeness. It was a stranger who stood there with his stretching smile and wrinkling nose, talking of binoculars and observation posts. It couldn’t be the money, it was a relatively small sum and they were quite well off these days. No, he wanted to punish these people, he wanted to give them the equivalent of a black eye or a bloody nose. She was tempted to ask him if he didn’t feel in some way, however slightly, sorry for the Checchetti; but she knew this was the wrong question, that he would think it sentimental. In a way it was presumptuous too: she had no job, no income, no particular abilities or skills; before getting married she had worked part-time in an art gallery run by a friend of her father. It was all Harold’s money, money he had worked and schemed to get. And now these people were trying to take some of it from him.
“How old do you think Mancini is?” she said.
Chapman stared. “No idea. I’ve never thought of it. Somewhere in his fifties, I suppose. Why?”
“I get this feeling about him that he isn’t any particular age at all.”
“Everybody is a particular age.”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“I thought I’d walk along and have a few words with the American couple. They are the only ones left who I haven’t explained the situation to. It doesn’t so much matter now of course, but for the sake of completeness, you know. I have always believed in finishing the job. It’s a moral question really. Once you have set your hand to the plow …”
He paused, looking for some sign of approval for these sentiments. None came, however. Cecilia was looking strained and tired, he thought, with the downward pull of her mouth more pronounced and that expression of sad steadiness that came into her eyes at times. He felt a rush of annoyance, which, however, he took care to conceal. Why could her mood never match his own? A man had a right to expect his partner in life to share in his moments of triumph or success. His new secretary, for instance, Miss Phelps, he felt sure she would have rejoiced. Cecilia was a death’s-head at the party, no other word for it. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got a couple of hours before the wood man can be expected. I thought you might like to come with me to see these people.”
“If you like.”
They walked the few hundred yards to the Greens’ house in silence. There were poppies along the verges of the road among long grasses burdened with flower and there was a profus
ion of vetch and chicory and wild geranium in the banks of the terraces above them. It was warm and still, with a hum of insects in the air, presaging summer.
The Greens’ house was between their own and Monti’s. As the road curved around toward it they came upon a scene of considerable desolation. It was not just the piles of sand and gravel and the litter of broken bricks in front of the house and the heaps of rubble along the edge of the road. These they had seen before in passing. But what was not evident unless you approached on foot was the trench running along two sides of the house, half filled in with concrete. And there was now a sizable hole in the roof where a section of tiles had been moved. This was covered only by a square of plastic held in place by stones.
“Good God,” Chapman said. “The place looks as if it has been blitzed. First good bit of wind and that plastic sheet will be lifted clear off the roof.”
Cecilia called up as they approached. “Anyone at ho-o-me?”
After a moment or two the Greens appeared side by side at the top of the external staircase. Silver-haired, small-boned, similar in appearance, they stood there for a brief while in unnatural silence. It was immediately clear to Cecilia that she and her husband had arrived at a moment of crisis. “I hope we are not intruding,” she said.
Mr. Green uttered a sound that might have been a laugh. “We have got beyond being intruded upon. You’d better come on up.”