After Hannibal

  Underlying the statements of corporate philosophy and the statistics of corporate growth there was always the suffering of the helpless. To pay for these suits and briefcases and shiny shoes people had labored in remote places, in appalling conditions. Life expectancy among them would not be an item in the balance sheets. But then, he had always known that.

  He had done his spell and handed over to a colleague, a woman, and stayed to listen and help if necessary, a procedure quite customary. A young woman, pretty. He tried to remember her face now and couldn’t. What he did remember was watching her mouth moving and hearing the words continue, the same dirty stream. He had been gripped then by a kind of dread: the two of them in the booth there, all differences canceled out, as interchangeable as sewage pipes.

  Now and then a pipe gets clogged, needs flushing out. For years alcohol had seemed to do this for Ritter. But there had come a time of fear that drinking only made worse, fear of the words that came with only momentary pauses through his earphones, the panic knowledge that he would drown in sewage if he could not keep up. He would feel the sweat run on his body and hear the loud beat of his heart.

  This had ended in fear of all encounters, fear of daylight even—he had stayed alone in his Vienna apartment with the curtains drawn and the phone disconnected. Only a chance visit from his former wife had rescued him from this. She had bullied him into seeking help. And so with time he had emerged from the nightmare, with a certain hesitancy of articulation and an abiding distaste for telephones as main marks of it. But his career as an interpreter was over. He had felt a compulsion to return to Italy, where he had been as a boy, during the war, with his parents—his father had been attached to German Military Intelligence in Rome. With the last of his capital he had bought this ruined house and its five acres of overgrown and neglected land. He had a disability pension and a small income from money left in trust. For a man with few needs it was enough.

  Ritter stayed where he was for some moments longer, looking across to the folds of the hills that rose beyond the plain of Val Lupetto. These days of early April began misty, brightening as the sun pierced through, a process very beautiful in its contrasts, seen thus from above, with the plain still partly muffled in silver drifts and the tawny upper slopes already in warm light. From where he was standing he could see the line of poplars marking the narrow stream that formed the boundary of his land. They were in first leaf now, a haze of green more delicate-seeming than the mist.

  He began to walk back toward the grass cutter, which waited there for him, red and expectant. The terraces fell steeply, curving in a shallow arc. At the farthest point below him, beyond where the road ended, was the tangled gully where the stream plunged down through a mesh of bramble and thorn and festooned willows. Dark green canes, twice the height of a man, leaned out of this at strange, listless angles. An ancient cherry tree, half submerged by creepers, raised limbs full of flowers to the light.

  Once again it occurred to Ritter to wonder why this little wooded gully had been abandoned so. The cherry tree might be an accident, a bird could have dropped the stone; but the canes and the willows had been planted there by someone, the canes for supports, the willows for their whippy twigs that were used to tie back the vine shoots after pruning.

  A certain degree of neglect was understandable. The old man from whom he had bought the place had been ailing for years past. To live off five acres means unremitting toil and Adelio had drunk too much wine as he got older, to take the ache from his limbs. His wife was dead, neither of his sons had wanted to work the land. For four or five years he had struggled on. Then God had sent him a crazy German to buy the dilapidated property. But these canes and willows must have been planted in some much earlier time. Adelio had clearly not set foot in there for many years. No one had. No one could now—the gully was impassable, closed off.

  Reaching the machine, he stood still again and listened intently. He thought he had heard a faint sweep of wind below, among the drowned trees, although the leaves of the canes were stiff and motionless. And then he knew it for the sound of water; it had been there all the time, a voice that he was used to now and so no longer noticed. Water from the winter snows was still flowing through the stream bed, moving invisible among the close-growing vegetation.

  As he bent to take the starter handle, he had a brief glimpse of a small white car traveling in the same direction the tractor had taken, toward the road that led up to the village. He knew the car. Passing on foot he had seen it sometimes, parked near one of the houses on the road they all shared.

  Monti drove carefully. The road was terrible in places. The recent heavy rains had softened the edges and washed away seams of gravel and small stones, making ruts and craters everywhere. He did not like cars but suffered at the thought of inflicting damage on helpless springs.

  As he rounded the bend in the road and negotiated the rutted dip beyond it, still puddled from the rain, he glanced up and saw Fabio and Arturo working together on the vine pergola below their house. For some moments, before the slope of the road cut off his view, he could see the weathered tiles of their roof and the descending rows of vines and their two figures raising a long cane, green-gold in this early sunshine. They did not look toward him and in a second more he was past.

  He thought about the two as he drove along. For years they had lived together in that house, a devoted couple to all appearance. He knew what he knew of them because of his wife, Laura, who had stopped to speak to Fabio one day and admired the wisteria and been promised a root. When had this been? He sought to fix the time with a kind of troubled intensity, as if there might be evidence in it. But evidence of what he did not know; her leaving could not have depended on such things as this. In October it must have been, soon after their arrival. They had rented the house from September but had not come to live in it until the start of the university term. Laura had stayed less than a month …

  Laura got on with everyone. It was she who had always determined their social relations as far as these lay outside his immediate colleagues at the university. Fabio and Arturo had asked them to supper not long after this first meeting, perhaps a week or ten days later.

  He still remembered the elegance and the attention to detail of this supper, the careful shapes of the salad. They had served their own wine and there had been a vase of flowers on the table, mixed dahlias and chrysanthemums, red and bronze and white. All the elements of the evening were burnished in his mind by Laura’s desertion, coming so soon after. The tall, rather severe-looking Fabio had shown himself pedantic in culinary matters and was perhaps so in other ways also—he had described in close detail every step in the making of the parmigiana. Monti had glanced during this at the younger man, whose hair was cut close to show his beautiful head and whose lips were everted in a constant slight pout, giving him a look of humorous reproof. There was no way of telling whether he found the account wearisome. What had come over most strongly was the closeness of the two, in this creation of an atmosphere, this occasion they had contrived together. The solemn, courteous Tuscan and the graceful, small-boned Neapolitan had seemed to be celebrating their life together. An improbable life, in a way, for a homosexual couple, here in the Umbrian countryside among people of traditional prejudices.

  It was practically the last time that he and Laura had gone out together before she left. All the events of those days, not events even but particular moments, had the quality of a time before loss. He had twice since refused invitations from Fabio and Arturo to come on his own, pleading pressure of work. He suffered at the thought of their completeness, shrank from the idea of being a solitary witness to it.

  He thought of his wife as she had been that evening. She had worn a dark green dress of some shiny material. She had carried a cardigan but it was warm enough inside the house for her not to need it. The color of the cardigan he couldn’t remember. She had been animated, full of laughter, perhaps stimulated by a sense of rivalry with the younger one, Arturo, perhaps
by some teasing interest in the nature of the men’s love. Perhaps only, he thought suddenly, by the excitement of her intention. Already there, the intention of dealing him this blow, returning to Turin and the lover whose existence he did not then suspect, the plan already formed inside her head, behind the bright eyes … He experienced the customary nausea, the customary craven desire to restore the time before, the time of being deceived.

  As he approached the final stretch of the road, before it joined the broader one that led up to the village, he saw that the garden wall of the house on the corner had collapsed, scattering a rubble of broken cement blocks over the edge of the road. This was the house of the Checchetti, whom people in the village spoke of as a family notorious for quarrelsomeness and avarice and whose bawling converse often sounded across the valley. The man he knew for the son-in-law was standing at the corner, wearing the sheepish half-smile that seemed permanent with him. As Monti was about to emerge onto the broader road, he met a red car just turning in. He pulled over and stopped to allow this car to pass and the youngish man inside it smiled broadly and gave him an elaborate wave of acknowledgment.

  As always, he went by way of Lake Trasimeno. The road climbed and then dropped; one came upon the lake quite suddenly and it was always a surprise, always different, obedient to imperatives of light and shadow far more subtle than the eye could register. Today it was vaporish and melancholy, a luminous milk color beyond the dark green of the reed beds.

  He glanced across the water as he drove, past the wooded slopes of the Isola Maggiore, still partly shrouded in mist, to the pale shapes of the hills on the northern shore of the lake, scene of perhaps the most crushing defeat ever suffered by Roman arms. It stirred his mind again now to think of that long-ago ambush, Hannibal and his Carthaginians lying in wait up there, the legions marching into the trap. Though an academic historian and now in early middle age, Monti had retained the excited sense of locality, the antiquarian passion for tracking the past from its surviving traces, which had first led him to the study of history. All his best work had been done on the history of the Central Italian States, ground he knew well and visited often. In the dealings of the long dead and the marks that remained, he had been able to find solace and refuge, even now.

  Once again his mind was taken by thoughts of that ancient, murderous encounter by the northern shore of the lake. They had waited up there, on that June morning twenty-two centuries ago, hidden by the early mists, had watched the Roman army under the consul Gaius Flaminius blundering too close to the marshy verges of the lake, where the footing was soft. What an opportunity for a commander who had always had the eye of a hawk for it. The legionaries caught in a narrow defile between lake and hills, confused by the sun-shot mist that rose from the surface of the water, straying toward the treacherous quicksands. The sudden appearance of the Iberian infantry, looming out of the mist, blocking the way ahead. Then the lightning flank attack of the Libyan light cavalry, descending from Monte Gualandro and the heights around Tuoro, the rout, the floundering troops, the butchery. The place-names still testified to that slaughter, in spite of the recent attempts by Susini to explain them away on etymological grounds. A waste of time this, there were too many for that, too many for coincidence. Sepoltaglia, burial ground, Sanguineto, where the blood ran, Ossaia, place of bones. He could have drawn a map, if asked, accurate in every detail: the configuration of the hills, the ancient shoreline of the lake, the disposition of the Carthaginian forces, the line of march of the Romans. But he could not have told you the registration number of his car, nor could he have indicated the position of his present house in relation to the five others on the strada vicinale which they all shared.

  The road left the lake, veered eastward toward Perugia. As he drove through the lower city and up toward the university, Monti began to brace himself, prepare an attitude that would get him through the day. He had told no one of Laura’s going but in his state of inflamed sensitivity he suspected that somehow the story had got about, that it was known by colleagues and students alike that his wife had left him after only a week or two, returned to Turin and the embraces of her lover. He felt like a wrongdoer; and when he came near to anger it was at the thought of this injustice, that he should feel culpable when the wrong was hers.

  Fabio and Arturo had heard the car passing below them but they had not looked toward the sound because at that moment there was a tension of feeling between them and they were both taken up with it. Fabio had just reproached Arturo for his failure to clean a spade before returning it to the rack; it had been returned with clay on the blade and shaft, and the clay had dried and crusted. Fabio had noticed it earlier that day, when he went to the shed for some of last year’s onions still hanging up there. Any tool they used should always be replaced in good condition, he had said severely to Arturo. In saying this he had before him a mental picture of the clean, swept shed, the rack with the shining forks and spades, expensive English ones, bought from a firm in Brescia, the smaller rack alongside this with the trowels and hand forks and clippers. It was a microcosm of what he felt their world to be, his and Arturo’s, orderly and harmonious and sufficient unto itself. These tools were part of the ritual of their lives, they belonged in the anteroom of the temple they had built together. It had hurt him to see the encrusted spade, like a desecration, and he had felt compelled to speak to Arturo about it.

  But Arturo had not accepted the correction, had not acknowledged the justice of it. He had frowned and shrugged and turned his face away. Such a small thing. How can one be expected to remember everything? He did not see the sheds as the precincts of a temple but merely as places where things were kept; and growing daily stronger in him, though not expressed to Fabio, was a distaste for the things that were kept there, things that meant blisters and sweat.

  He had felt resentment too, and not for the first time, at the way the other spoke to him. As if I were a child or a servant, he thought. Fabio behaved like a cross between father and employer when he was neither. When Arturo looked at his partner, at the thick brows and stern, rather melancholy eyes and the slight scar on his forehead, mark of the accident that had nearly killed him and put an end forever to his career as a racing driver, he could not easily remember the time when he had thought him such a glamorous person, such a splendid protector, so exciting and masterful a lover. I was only nineteen, after all, he thought. Fifteen years of my life I have given this man. How could I have known he would have to give up racing, that we would end by living like peasants? Looking out across the browns and greens of the valley to the long line of the hills, he longed for the lights of Naples again.

  They were replacing some of the crosspieces on the pergola with new canes, good thick straight ones that Arturo had cut the day before. Together they lifted the long trailing stems of the vines, one holding them in place, the other tying. It was delicate work: new shoots were pricking from the stems and care was needed not to bruise the sharp, pinkish buds.

  When the work was finished, they went in to have their mid-morning coffee. Nothing further was said between them concerning the spade. Fabio already felt regret—his tone had been too harsh. Arturo was sensitive, easily daunted, easily hurt. He was as vulnerable now, to Fabio’s mind, and as exotic, as when they had first met fifteen years before in a Naples bar. Arturo had been no more than a ragazzo di vita then, a boy for hire. I took him away from that, Fabio thought. He would go himself and clean the spade. It would be a penance for his harshness—and it might serve to drive the message home.

  With this resolve he felt that harmony between them was restored. And in fact he saw that Arturo’s face showed resentment no longer; he was smiling in the way Fabio knew and loved, at once dreamy and humorous. Nothing in his expression indicated that the words of reproach and self-defense just exchanged between them had been momentous, that they would be kept alive in Arturo’s mind quite deliberately, as an active principle, a yeast for his grievances, necessary to a certain kind of plan which h
e had been meditating for quite a long time now.

  Fabio suspected nothing of this. Sitting there at the kitchen table they talked together about the future. Things were getting better. For the past three summers they had had paying guests in the season and this had brought in extra money, though of course involving more work. With their twenty acres of land they were self-sufficient in vegetables and olive oil and wine. If things went well, in two or three years more they could hope to have a swimming pool installed.

  Fabio was contented as he sat there drinking his coffee, eating a slice of the delicious crostata that Arturo had made. Their future, their life together, seemed full of promise.

  The man who had saluted in so courteous and friendly a manner when Monti gave way to him was an Englishman named Stan Blemish and he was on his way to visit an elderly American couple called Green, who also lived on this road, having bought an old farmhouse some way up the hillside with a view to having it converted.

  Blemish noticed the car as by long habit he noticed anything indicative of wealth or status. One never knew what might be useful. A Fiat Uno, pretty basic, with a Turin registration. A man living in Turin, or any sizable Italian city, would normally not run a big car unless he needed to make an effect, not in that sort of traffic; but there were small cars on the market with more dash than this one. Poverty, indifference? Bespectacled, mild-faced man behind the wheel.