After Hannibal

  A good deal of this feeling still remained as a habitual response but the heart had gone out of it over the years as she realized that Harold was not really seeking her help to unlock the door to finer perceptions and more elevated thoughts but was looking for enhanced status among the people he did business with. More credibility, as he would probably have put it.

  She had known all this for quite a long time now. But somehow, since this business of the wall and the entry of Mancini into their lives, it had come home to her with starker clarity. Lately she had not felt able to talk much to Harold about feelings or impressions. She had even given up correcting his misquotations, a congenital tendency, she had always thought, like a form of dyslexia. It had aroused her sympathy once …

  It was true, she thought, as she poured hot water into the teapot, Mancini had inaugurated a new phase, he had brought something out in both of them. She thought of the lawyer again now. The gestures of his hands, his manner at once pontifical and humorous, her strange difficulty in imagining any time of life for him previous to this, any childhood or youth. It was as if he had, since time began, been seated behind that vast and shiny desk of his. Harold had become a disciple, there was no other way of putting it: hardly an hour went by without his uttering some words of praise, some reference to the lawyer’s phenomenal powers. Perhaps he addressed Mancini in his prayers … This was a sour thought, of a kind unusual with her, and she felt at once ashamed of it. All the same, it was as if Harold had been looking for a master and now had found one.

  The tea made, she went outside, to the area behind the house, and called up to Harold. He came down from the hillside, his binoculars slung round his neck. “No sign of activity yet and it’s not far from eleven.” He looked downcast.

  Cecilia handed him his tea. “Does it matter, Harold?” she said. “Does it really matter? If they don’t come they won’t be able to claim the money and we can use some of it to have the wood brought down and stacked by someone else.”

  “Someone else?” Chapman set his cup down very carefully, always a sign of strong feeling with him. “Someone else? You don’t understand anything, Cecilia. This whole thing has been worked out by Mancini, it has a dynamic shape. It is not a question of money, it is a question of justice. If I had to pay someone else, it would mean I had come off worse.” A sort of baffled rage began to rise in him at this further evidence of his wife’s lack of understanding. He looked with hostility at her sun-freckled face—she was too fair-skinned to tan deeply—and her unbecoming summer dress with its overall pattern of strawberries or raspberries. “They tried to blackmail us,” he said. “You who are so high-minded, don’t you see there is a moral principle involved here?”

  It was almost a sneer and Cecilia felt wounded by it, by the dislike she felt in the words. She was a little frightened too. She lacked aggression, had always been alarmed by Harold’s promptness to it, by the harshness that sometimes came out in him, though in earlier days when it had come in the form of desire for her and protectiveness, it had not seemed unattractive. She made a conscious effort now to overcome her faintheartedness and return his gaze. “Now it is us blackmailing them,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I don’t know what else you would call it. And let me tell you this, Harold, you talk about justice but it seems to me that all you want to do is humiliate these people.”

  “Humiliate them? For Christ’s sake, Cecilia—”

  At this moment they both clearly heard the chugging of an ancient engine. This ceased and in the silence that followed, from somewhere at the front of the house, a voice was raised in a shout.

  “It’s them; they have come after all.” Chapman spoke these words very quietly, as if afraid of being overheard. “We’d better go and talk to them,” he added in a louder voice.

  Cecilia hesitated for a moment. It was going to be embarrassing, dreadfully so. She would have liked to refuse, to dodge the issue altogether, but the habit of falling in with Harold’s wishes was too strong. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose we’d better.”

  The Checchetti were standing together in the front of the house in rough arrowhead formation, the father in the lead. They had left the tractor fifty yards off. This, and the presence of the daughter, was proof enough that they had heeded Chapman’s terms as relayed by Mancini.

  After some moments of total immobility the father took a few paces forward and spoke. “Where do you want us to put the wood, Signora?”

  The amazing thing to Cecilia was the complete matter-of-factness of this question. The Checchetti were behaving as they would have behaved in any ordinary circumstance of the day. Looking at their faces as they waited there, Cecilia felt hot with shame for them. She glanced at her husband and saw that he was smiling broadly, openly. “Tell them where the woodshed is,” he said. “Tell them we want it stacked neatly or they’ll have to come back and do it again.”

  Cecilia was to remember this moment, the sunshine, the waiting figures of the Checchetti, Harold’s vulgar display of triumph. All her life she had found it difficult to go against what was expected of her. There was a dizzying sense of release in doing so now. “No,” she said. “No, Harold, you tell them. Or better still, go with them and show them the place, show them exactly how you want the logs stacked. Watch them grovel. Then you can enjoy their humiliation to the utmost.”

  Chapman turned toward her a face divided between anger and surprise. “You are talking absolute rubbish. All they want is the money. They don’t feel humiliated at all; it isn’t in their range.”

  He was perfectly right, of course, she recognized that; these people had no idea of dignity, none at all. But his rightness told against him more than the grossest blunder could have done. “Harold,” she said, “this dreadful abjectness after all their bluster and threats … don’t you feel some shame for them, or some embarrassment at least?”

  But he didn’t, she could tell, not a scrap. If he felt uneasy now it was because she was behaving emotionally in public view. “You don’t feel anything for them because you can’t,” she said. “And the reason you can’t is because you are just like them.” She was aware that her voice had begun to quiver and she made an effort to control it. “You are made of the same stuff.”

  “For God’s sake, woman, get a grip on yourself.”

  This exhortation set her in real danger of weeping. “You tell them,” she said, and she turned away from him and went back to the house.

  She went back through to the kitchen and out by the door that led to the area behind the house. Her vision was blurred now. Without much noticing where she was going she began to walk up the hillside, following the rutted track that bordered the terraces of olives. She passed the place where shortly before her husband had kept watch with his binoculars and went on higher, walking steadily, looking straight ahead, until she had left the cultivated land behind and was in the wilder country beyond it, a region of thorn and aromatic shrub, bare rock everywhere thrusting through the surface.

  Here she stopped and turned to look back the way she had come. The sun was high overhead. She was aware of the heat of it on her face and the blaze of the flowering broom all around her and the strong, sweet scent of it. A sense of the fierceness of this place came to her, dispelling her tears. The day was cloudless and the air very clear; she could see the roof of their house below her and the road and the broad valley with its fields of sunflowers and maize. Beyond this, the gentle wooded hills and the blue shapes of mountains behind them.

  She had loved the landscape of Umbria ever since first seeing it as a young girl. It was she who had wanted to have their house here. Warm in color, at once fertile and spare, old in its connection with man, it had always seemed to her a place where she could be happy. Now, on one of the nearer hills, she could make out the walls and bell towers of Corciano, with its thirteenth-century castle at the summit. She imagined making her way up there, as she and Harold had once done together, up the winding
road, through the great stone gates, into the main square. There was a church just off the square, built on the remains of an Etruscan temple, and a little museum alongside with scraps of frescoes by Umbrian artists of the trecento; and another church, lower down, Santa Maria, with a painted standard by Benedetto Bonfigli and an altarpiece by Perugino. When they came out of the church the whole town had been glowing with light, the radiant Umbrian light that came in early evening, and the sky had been full of swifts, wheeling and shrieking.

  A small hill town, a place of human resort since time immemorial. There were scores of them within twenty or thirty miles of where she was standing. The names of some passed through her mind now, like a litany: Bevagna, Montefalco, Cortona, Bettona, Spoleto, Spello. The ancient stones of their houses and streets, the sense they gave you of having an eagle’s view, with great sweeps of landscape falling away below—and even in the smallest, sleepiest place at least one wonderful building or sculpture or painting that by itself made the trip worthwhile. Where else in the world could you have a combination like this as a common fact of experience?

  She had thought that she and Harold would visit all these places together. Now, dry-eyed and curiously dispassionate, she faced the fact that their house in Umbria, designed to bring them closer, had in fact brought them too close for their resources of mutual tolerance.

  At this moment, in the midst of these sadly ironic thoughts, Cecilia felt the ground suddenly pitch under her feet like the deck of a ship struck by a cross-wave, staggering and righting itself all in a second. There seemed to be some accompaniment of sound, something like a single note from a massed choir or a snatch of prefabricated studio laughter.

  She stood still for some moments, then took a few steps to the side as if in search of a safer spot. That had been an earth tremor, no doubt about it. She was still looking at the hills. All was as before, land and sky unchanged. No running figures, no apocalyptic flames. Corciano was still there, raising its pale towers in the sunshine. She saw herself mounting stone stairs to some church or sanctuary or ruined citadel, scent of wild thyme and summer dust in her nostrils, hat on head, sensible shoes, guidebook and sketchbook ready to hand, full of expectation. And quite alone.

  “Mr. Green, Mrs. Green, on no account must you give these people any more money,” Mancini said. “Money once paid is extremely difficult to recover. This is true anywhere of course, in some degree, but in Italy particularly so because here the means of claiming, the legal means, are either atrophied or they do not exist. No, that is not quite true, the means exist in the same way that speed limits exist or the Italian Constitution, but like them they do not produce the desired results. There are procedures open to you. You can make your complaint, you can claim reimbursement for losses suffered at the hands of either the state or private individuals. But in the overwhelming majority of cases you will receive no reply. Italians know this, they have known it for a very long time now, they have no belief that the law or the police or the public administration exists to serve them. These institutions do not themselves believe that they exist to serve anybody. People avoid official dealings when they can. When they can’t they become easily frightened. ‘My God,’ you will hear someone say when he has become involved with officialdom, ‘Hannibal at the gates!’ So people try to find unofficial ways of dealing with their problems, they develop furbizia, cunning, and this is more admired among us than honesty. It is a climate of feeling that works against you in your present situation—the fact that you have paid will be taken to mean that you were fully satisfied with the work. No, please take my advice, withhold all further payments and ignore any threats that might come your way.”

  The Greens sat side by side facing him across the large and darkly shining desk, and Mancini was struck, as Blemish had earlier been, by the almost heraldic symmetry and similarity of these two elderly Americans, with their clear blue eyes and silver hair and delicacy of bone. Their expressions were closely similar too at this moment, not so much anxious as guarded, as if they were struggling to stay in a bad dream for fear of a worse awakening.

  “Threats there have been already, of a certain kind,” Mrs. Green said, and she went on to tell the lawyer what Blemish had foretold. “He said it would cost us a fortune in compensation, he said the work would be suspended for years while the thing went through the courts and we would not be able to sell the house or live in it or anything.”

  “That is a standard type of intimidation. It is not to be taken seriously. Do you think a man like Esposito would wait so long for a judgment that might not go his way? He will want a new car or a speedboat or a platinum watch that lights up and tells you what time it is in Bangkok. Men like Esposito always want a lot of things and they always want them now. Esposito will take what he can get. This other one, this Blemish, he knows it perfectly well.” Mancini paused, tapping softly with a pencil on the desk before him. “This Blemish will almost certainly be operating without a license,” he said. “He will be receiving payments of one sort or another, commissions and so on. I would be surprised to find that he was declaring these sums for tax purposes. It is also possible that he has no current residence permit. A word in the ear of an acquaintance of mine in the questura may cause this Blemish some embarrassment.”

  Mrs. Green watched the lawyer’s hand as it tapped with the pencil. The fingers were broad and well shaped, but rather wax-like in appearance. The nails were immaculate, brittle-looking, a uniform shade of dark pink. Mancini’s hands looked as if they had been made by some skillful artisan and then attached. He caught her eye and smiled and nodded slightly as if he had registered this impression of hers. “It will not put a stop to his games of course,” he said. “Only time will do that. Even wickedness runs out of steam in the end. In individuals, I mean, not as a force in the world. Besides, he will have been careful to put nothing in writing.”

  “There is the contract,” Mr. Green said.

  “The contract is with the builder, not the agent. Besides, it is quite legal.”

  “Legal?” Mr. Green sat forward and pressed with thin fingers at the edge of the desk. “How can it be legal? My wife and I have talked it over and we think now that they set out to rob us from the start.”

  “Quite so. That is more or less what I meant. Without a legal document, it would have been much more difficult for them. You have been the victims of a kind of confidence trick. This Blemish knew or guessed how much you were prepared to spend and that was the figure he advised Esposito to give as the estimate. Then they make the house difficult to live in, impossible to sell, cutting down your options. You go on paying in the hope that all will be set right in the end. But they have no intention of finishing the work. Why should they? Instead they make you into a kind of money factory.”

  Mancini made the gesture of someone playing a barrel organ. “Turn the wheel and money comes out.”

  “They have made these great cracks everywhere,” Mr. Green said, speaking at a tangent in pure self-defense. “New ones keep opening up all the time.” Mancini’s office overlooked the Corso Vannucci and from where he was sitting he could see a corner of the Cathedral Square, a section of the splendid marble fountain made by Nicola and Giovanni Pisano in the thirteenth century and part of the great curving facade of the Priors’ Palace, built in the days of the city’s greatness, when she was still a free republic. This partial view of famous beauty seemed to symbolize all they had been hoping for from Italy, all they seemed likely now to lose. He glanced briefly at his wife. She met his eyes and smiled a little and he knew that she understood what he was thinking and shared his feelings. “A money factory?” he said. “How do you mean? We knew we would have to pay extra for the imprevisti, anything unforeseen that came up in the course of the work.”

  “My dear Mr. Green, who can say what is foreseen? In the courts, in the absence of anything in writing, how could we establish what was agreed beforehand? No, you see, anything, anything at all, can be an imprevisto.” Mancini laid down the p
encil and made a wide, spreading motion with his hands. “Anything in the wide world,” he said, and smiled as if in pleasure at this universality of application. “All the details of the work must be specified in the contract. Anything not specified can be an imprevisto, you understand? And in your case nothing was specified, nothing at all. That is what I meant by saying that they made you into a money factory.” He made the motion of turning the wheel again. “Whenever they want some money they find an imprevisto.”

  “And of course it always has to be paid right away, before the work can go on.” The bitterness of the cheated was in Mr. Green’s voice now.

  “Of course, yes.” Mancini’s smile faded as he watched the Greens struggling with this concept. They were people who would always find it difficult to absorb the idea of dishonesty. Just as the man Blemish would always be a fraudster, so these two would always be trustful, always believe. Two aspects of the human story that had never changed and never would. “The drama of deceit and belief goes back to the Garden of Eden, and lawyers have been living on it ever since,” he said. “The first great advocate was Satan. My main pleasure these days is in patterns. When I was younger I saw things singly—single threads to follow. Now it is … What is the word? Ragnatele. The things that spiders make.”

  “Webs.”

  “Thank you, yes. Now it is webs. I do not mean as traps so much, but more as structures.”

  The two Greens regarded him for some moments with a complete absence of expression. Then Mrs. Green, with a visible effort of politeness, said, “I can see that might be interesting, Mr. Mancini, but it is kind of abstract for us just at the moment.” She wasn’t sure she liked this lawyer very much. He sat philosophizing there in the wreckage of their hopes. But he didn’t give an impression of not caring. He didn’t seem quite real to her, as if he were occupying some other kind of space. She was a mild woman and well disposed, but it was annoying, in their misfortune, to be regarded as simply illustrations of the human condition. “What we would like to know,” she said rather tartly, “is how to get ourselves out of this interesting web.”