After Hannibal

  Words have terrible power—he had learned it then. A few stumbling words of his and these two had vanished as though they had never been. The worst had always seemed to him the most probable. They had fallen into the hands of the SS and been taken to the cellars in the Via Tasso for interrogation. They had been shot in the back of the neck like the other hostages and the earth exploded over them to cover the traces.

  It was possible of course that they had lived on, in the chaos following the German withdrawal from Rome. He sometimes imagined them as part of the vengeful crowd that hunted out fascists after the occupying troops had gone. The main culprits had already decamped, or most of them. Trials there were, however. In September of 1944 Carlo Sforza, newly appointed Commissioner of Sanctions Against Fascism, reported that two thousand persons accused of fascist crimes were in prison and that seven hundred and fifty trials were scheduled.

  One of the first to come up for trial was Pietro Caruso, Rome’s chief of police during the occupation. He was accused of having turned over to the Germans more than fifty of the hostages subsequently killed at the Fosse Ardeatine. The day before his trial was due to begin, relatives of the victims, joined by an angry mob, tried to wrest him from the authorities and hang him. Foiled in this, they turned upon a man called Caretta, who was not only completely innocent of any hand in the business but had actually helped Italian political prisoners to escape from Regina Coeli prison, where he had been Vice-Director. In front of the Palace of Justice, in full view of two hundred policemen, they beat him half to death, then took him and drowned him in the Tiber.

  Symbolic sacrifice, Ritter thought—there had been many such. Caretta’s only guilt had been his association with a hated prison. Relatives of the victims … Once again he wondered if Giuseppe had been part of that mob, taken part in that senseless murder. The victims making new victims while the guilty enjoyed lawful protection …

  At this moment he felt a strange shifting motion, very brief, below his feet. The earth seemed to stagger for a second as if burdened too heavily. He felt an impulse to clutch for balance, then it was over and he was standing still and the sounds of the world came back, but the hush had not been one of peace but of something terrible, casual too, the nature of it receding already from memory like the recognition of an accident narrowly avoided, something that might have killed. He stood quite still for a while, breathing deeply, no longer sure whether the earth had moved or only himself. In this moment of doubt, glancing down, he saw a dull gleam, something metallic bedded in the bankside just above the level of the stream, where the earth and stones were darkened with wet—it was water on the metal that had caught the light. He bent down and prised the object out with his fingers. It was a cigarette lighter, much dented and scratched, made from a cartridge case, of the kind he remembered seeing Italian soldiers use during his time as a child in Rome. Turning with this in his hands, he looked back at the slope, through the screen of the poplar trunks and the pale foliage of the willows, at the dark opening where the cave went into the bankside. From there one would be able to see the whole course of the stream as it ran between the trees. Something had happened here, Ritter felt suddenly certain of it, with a certainty that made the morning, for these few moments, seem darker and colder. Something had happened here, something had been witnessed.

  The letter had reposed in Monti’s pocket all that morning. There was no hint of appeal or apology in it but he knew his wife, knew the importance of dignity for her, knew that in her way and at some considerable cost, she had acknowledged a mistake, even made a kind of offer. Without some response from him she would be slow to do so again. But he could not decide what the response should be. His own sense of dignity, more fitful than his wife’s, was nevertheless strong when there was a sense of injury to support it. To be too accommodating would make light of his wounds. He had suffered her leaving with a passivity that he felt to be shameful; was he to be similarly supine now that she hinted at return? Always to be acted upon, never acting. In this indecision moralism came to his aid: Laura should not be encouraged to think that for forgiveness it was only necessary to dash off a note.

  In the stress of these feelings he had not slept well and he felt strained and restless, unable to settle down to work. He decided to drive to Perugia and revisit—yet again—the Rocca Paolina, have another look at the subterranean chambers and passages that were all that remained now of the vast fortress built by Pope Paul III on the ruins of the Baglioni houses.

  He left his car in Piazza Partigiani and went up by the series of internal escalators, a triumph of civic planning, that take one steeply to the summit of the Colle Landone and the historic heart of the city. Piped music sounded faintly as he ascended—Mozart’s clarinet concerto. He always enjoyed the ease and incongruity of it, this effortless passage upward on the moving stairs through the bowels of one of the greatest monuments to tyranny and terror ever constructed.

  Looking at the people passing on their way down, he was struck by the mystery of common humanity, the strange composure of the faces, each glimpsed briefly, then gone, sliding away out of sight and memory. His own face too would reveal nothing, in spite of the nagging pain of his indecision. There would be pains far worse behind some of these sleepy-looking faces. And terrible, unavowable thoughts …

  He did not take the final flight of stairs, that which emerged on Piazza. Italia and the open air, but turned aside, spent some time walking through the twisting, high-vaulted passages, where the poor remains of the Baglioni houses had lain buried since Paul’s conquest of the city in 1540. There were not many people down here; some few occasional wanderers like himself had passed in the gloom of the place. From somewhere not far he could hear the droning voice of a tourist guide. His steps struck echoes from the stone.

  Tracing the arches of bricked-up windows, the line of masonry where the stump of a tower had been left to stand, incorporated in the massive walls, peering into the narrow recesses where gateways had been blocked off, he wondered again why the Pope had allowed these last traces of the hated family to survive in this limbo beneath the buttresses and battlements of his enormous stronghold. Perhaps he had merely wanted space for dungeons and storerooms. But for Monti the symbolic had always held a strong appeal and he preferred to think that Pope Paul had ordered his architect, Sangallo, to leave these last traces of Baglioni power and wealth as a reminder of his dominion, and of the fate awaiting all who opposed his will.

  His wanderings ended where they always ended, before the marble portrait of the Pope himself, the Grand Proprietor, on the wall of the square chamber, perhaps originally a guardroom, which adjoined a steep passage leading down to the lower levels, the fearsome belly of the place, where dungeons were built into the walls, designed so that a man could neither sit nor stand in them.

  Paul’s cold profile hung on the wall just above eye level, carved in low relief on a disc of stone. Though life-size, it resembled a face stamped on a coin, austere, imperial, with a kind of harsh sagacity about the lines of the mouth. An official face, not really a portrait. But even a true likeness could hardly offer an answer to the question uppermost in Monti’s mind. Had it been this pontiff’s long-standing plan to destroy the Baglioni or had they themselves, by their own heedlessness and arrogance presented him with an opportunity he was quick to take?

  The true likeness he had seen in the Farnese Collection in Naples, the Pope’s true face, in all its lineaments of cruelty and greed, rendered with the force of genius in Titian’s 1543 portrait of him. Five years after the destruction of the Baglioni and the demolition of their houses, he sits hunched forward in his scarlet cap and mantle, looking sidelong at the spectator, thin-jawed and evil-eyed, like an old ferret.

  Plotter or opportunist? Two main types of humanity. Sometimes, of course, there was an intimate mingling. He thought suddenly of the letter in his pocket, requiring from him too the forming of a plan or the seizing of an opportunity. He distrusted himself as a man of action, knew he wa
s not resolute, distrusted even his impulses. Perhaps this Pope had distrusted his. In the welter of blood and treachery that was the history of Perugia and the history of the world, the successful ones, those who came out on top, were always people with a consistent policy …

  This one too, he thought, looking at the frozen nobility of the face in its medallion of stone. There seemed to him now some faint suggestion of sardonic humor about the lips. Nothing if not politic, this son of the Church. Once again he ran through the events. In September of 1534 Pope Clement VII dies. Within a week of this the teenage Ridolfo Baglioni, with some choice associates, murders the Papal Vice-Legate, Cinzio Filonardi, and some other members of the papal party, by the usual method of multiple stabbings. The bodies, still warm and bleeding, are thrown by the gang into the carnaio, the common pit where the corpses of the destitute from the hospitals are thrown.

  An affront not to be overlooked. Filonardi represented the Pope’s authority in Perugia; effectively he was the governor of the city. But the new Pope, elected to the throne of St. Peter in the name of Paul III, shows no immediate reaction. He waits a year, then comes on a visit to Perugia accompanied by a thousand troops and fourteen cardinals. A show of power and pomp then, but the apparent purpose is to forgive the city this murder of his legate. True, the delinquent Ridolfo is sent away; but Paul makes the municipality a gift in perpetuity of one thousand five hundred packloads of wheat a year, thus leading the people of Perugia to believe that in spite of everything they are his favored sons.

  After this he bides his time. He sounds out opinion, takes the measure of things. Then in 1540, when the city has suffered a series of bad harvests and poverty is widespread and acute, he publishes a bull increasing the price of salt. Since the purchase of a certain amount of salt was compulsory, this amounted to a tax.

  Did he do it by express design, to bring the city to revolt and give him a pretext for full-scale invasion? Was it true, as he said, that he needed the money to combat the Lutheran heresy and provide for the defense of Christendom against the Turks? Or was it, as the Perugians believed and later chronicles hinted, that it was for the upkeep of his court and the advancement of his bastards? These were questions to which history afforded no complete answer and even less the face before him, which he scanned again now with a sort of obstinate attentiveness, as if the stone might soften into meaning if stared at long enough.

  But there was nothing much to be learned from faces, even living ones. He thought again of the faces that had passed by him on the escalator. Laura’s face would be unreadable when they met again, it would not be possible to know whether her leaving had been the maturing of a plan or the seizing of an opportunity. Which would I rather it was? he wondered, with a faint feeling of sickness. A plan was less impulsive, made the need for the lover seem somehow less urgent.

  Paul’s scheme, if that was what it was, had worked well. The people of Perugia rose in desperate revolt, the papal troops advanced on the town. Ridolfo, returned from exile, made a brief resistance with what force he could muster but he was easily defeated. In a matter of days it was all over, the city was in the hands of the Pope. He sent his relative, the Duke of Castro, to choose a site for the fortress and the work of demolition began at once. The pleasure palaces, the scented gardens, the costly furnishings of damask and cloth-of-gold …

  Not that it had been only the Baglioni mansions. The whole of the Borgo San Giuliano had been swept away. Church after church fell beneath the assault of crowbar and pickax, the tombs were violated and the remains of the dead flung out and scattered. As the years passed and the Pope’s paranoia kept pace with the number of his enemies, more and more buildings were destroyed. In 1543 Santa Maria dei Servi was pulled down because it was too near. Two years later the tower of San Domenico suffered the same fate because it overlooked the papal fortress.

  Monti felt again the impact of fatality in this chain of events. Buildings demolished, new ones built. Human relations not much different, structures of affections. In the foundations there were always flaws, seeds of subsidence and decay, faults that needed attention if the house was to stand.

  Sometimes, of course, collapse was preferable to repair; but this was something not easy to decide. The destruction of the Baglioni houses had signaled the end of the oppressive rule of that lawless and arrogant brood; but the government of priests that followed had been a tyranny crueler, more systematic, far worse. Forced labor, crippling taxes, torture as a customary practice, people shut away for the slightest offense, for no more than a wrong word, in the horrific cells below him, fashioned within the thickness of the massive walls, cavities hardly big enough to admit a crawling figure. The iron railings surrounding the Great Fountain in the Cathedral Square had been garnished continuously with decomposing heads.

  For three centuries the Vicars of Christ in due succession ruled this once proud city-state; and the symbol of this rule had been the colossal building in whose entrails he was standing. Symbols again, he thought—without proper attention to symbol there is no true history. No wonder the final demolition of the place had been greeted with such jubilation by the watching crowd. They had to wait for two years even after the city was taken by the troops of Victor Emmanuel and became part of United Italy. It was not until 1862 that the last of the walls were brought down and the great slabs of stone broken up to be transported. And so the rule of the popes came to its symbolic end. Who lives by the bulldozer dies by the bulldozer, Monti thought—he would offer this for the consideration of his students when next they met.

  He was looking at Paul’s face still, though no longer in hope of finding clues in it. In the light of day above his head, where once had stood the towers of the Baglioni and then the ramparts of the fortress, civil servants parked their cars outside the offices of the provincial municipality in Piazza Italia. There was the little square with its palm trees and fountain and bus stops around the perimeter and across from this the imposing fronts of the Bank of Italy, the Palazzo Calderini, the Hotel Brufani. Someday all this too would be leveled to the ground. That was perhaps the condition we are all ultimately destined to, razed, blank, at peace—the peace of demolition with no walls left standing to shelter our illusions. Through the cloth of his shirt Monti touched the letter folded in the breast pocket. He was not ready for that state yet, though knowing that someday he might be.

  This recognition of abiding need seemed like a sort of decision. He was in the act of turning away when he felt a sort of shuddering or wincing of things, so brief that he could not tell whether the tremor was within him or above or below but lasting long enough for him to sketch a gesture toward the wall for support. The floor had seemed to shift under his feet but it was from above that the evidence came: a fall of white dust, mixed with some larger flakes, floating down from a corner of the ceiling and making a brief mist in the room.

  As the morning wore on without incident, Cecilia began to think that the Checchetti might after all have summoned pride to their aid. She found herself quite fervently hoping that this was so, that in spite of the difficult and disadvantageous position they had got themselves into, in the teeth of threats of legal action and loss of cash, they would find within themselves the stern nobility to resist Mancini’s ultimatum. Backs to the wall, fighting against the odds their folly had accumulated against them, the Checchetti might thus be redeemed, might rise above their own ugliness and meanness and petty malignancy.

  It was not, she admitted to herself, on the face of things a very likely scenario. Nevertheless, as time passed and nothing happened, the hope grew. But it was not until she was making the mid-morning cup of tea for Harold and herself that she realized the true nature of this hope. She was standing at the rather primitive gas stove, which they were intending to change for something more up-to-date. It was fed by a cylinder below and Cecilia kept this closed when not in use, fearing an escape of gas. Sunlight was streaming through the kitchen window and when Cecilia bent to loosen the cap at the head of
the cylinder she moved into this shaft of sunlight.

  She remained where she was for some time, leaning down into this sun-filled space, her hand resting on the neck of the cylinder. As she slowly straightened up again she was visited by one of those rare moments of pure knowledge, undiluted, untrammeled, a shaft of insight straight and unfaltering. And in this moment she knew that it was not for the Checchetti that she cared so much, nor even for the symbolical redeeming, through them, of all those who toil and whose lives are of narrow scope but noble in simplicity. This was what she wanted to feel, what she liked to think she felt; but it was not the truth. She did not want Harold to win, that was the truth. Filling the kettle with water, setting it on the gas, she acknowledged it to herself: she wanted Harold to be thwarted in his expectations.

  She was at first, and typically, possessed by guilt at this visitation of knowledge. She was accustomed to think of herself as a guide to Harold, a kind of arbiter of the refinements of life. There were gaps in his education through no fault of his own—he had been obliged to leave school early and make his own way in life, unlike herself, who had had every privilege, whose parents had paid for private schools and extra lessons in music and art, and sent her to Italy to study.

  Harold had been rescued from a toilsome life by discovering in himself a talent for buying things and selling them at a profit. He had started in a small way as a dealer in secondhand furniture and the scourings of obscure auction sales, then gone into property speculation in the eighties, when the going was good. They were fairly prosperous now but she had always thought of her husband as somehow underprivileged—like the Checchetti, in a way. His dogged resolve to better himself, to acquire more knowledge and culture, had touched her from the beginning and appealed to the spirit of philanthropy, which was strong in her and which she tended to confuse with love.