After Hannibal

  “It must be quite unique,” Cecilia said with a little rush of enthusiasm, “to see the work of these two masters side by side.”

  “One above the other, to be exact.” Harold narrowed his eyes at the fresco. He could not see much similarity between the two, try as he might. “The colors are similar, aren’t they?” he said. “He was either seventy-three when he died or seventy-eight—Perugino, I mean. Depending on which authority you follow. A good innings either way, considering the times.”

  “It is there in the treatment of the draperies,” Cecilia said. “It is there in the idealizing tendency, which you will see if you look at the faces and the postures. Compare the expression of St. Placido in the upper part with that of St. Gregory Magno in the lower. Perugino’s precise age when he died is really neither here nor there, Harold.”

  Harold scanned the paintings anew, the seated figure of Christ in the upper one, hand raised in blessing, white dove with outstretched wings above his head, flanking angels, seated saints on either side. There was nothing much going on in the lower painting, just a row of standing saints, large-eyed and sorrowful-looking, with gold plates suspended over their heads, divided into two groups by a niche containing a statue of Madonna and Child in painted terra-cotta. He felt resentful with these paintings for their failure to arouse any feeling in him. He wanted to ask Cecilia why she was so interested in the postures of saints when she never even went to church, but he was inhibited because this was art and she knew about it.

  He wanted to know about it too. He was eager to see the respective merits of Raphael and Perugino—it was the kind of thing that went with the house. Otherwise they might as well have bought a place in Eastbourne. He was fond of making a kind of litany out of the historic cities of Umbria when talking to people back in Britain. We are in easy reach, he would say, of Assisi, Spoleto, Orvieto, Terni, Todi. Treasure-houses of art and history. He felt as he spoke that by achieving such proximity to these treasures he had come into possession of them. People traveled thousands of miles and spent thousands of pounds to see these things, and here they were on his doorstep. He worked doggedly to profit from the situation but so far had not had much success. However, as a step in the right direction he studied guidebooks and collected as much as he could in the way of facts.

  Cecilia understood these aspirations and they made her feel loving, in the way a missionary might feel loving on encountering an amenable pagan. She was given to questioning herself about most things but had not so far made much distinction between loving Harold and wanting to instruct and help him. “It is not just this Raphael,” she said, “it is the others one has seen, they sort of reinforce one another. The more of his work you see, Harold, the more you will get to like it. We’ll go to the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, they’ve got quite a few Raphaels there, they’ve got the Madonna del Granduca and some wonderful portraits.”

  She looked up at the frescoes again. The rush of happiness that had accompanied this project seemed to have sensitized her anew. The colors worked on her like a familiar incantation, olive, faded purple, gold, rose-pink … “We’ll go to the Vatican and see the Raphael frescoes there,” she said, turning eagerly toward him. “Of course the Perugino is weaker, he is a lesser artist. But you can see the tendency to rhetoric which was so—”

  “He was well over the hill when he painted that. It was painted in 1521, so he would have been either seventy-one or seventy-six.”

  “So utterly characteristic of the High—”

  “Depending on which set of dates you accept. On the other hand, Raphael died young. He was only thirty-seven.” Harold looked back at the fresco and something of wonder finally touched him. “Just my age,” he said. “He might have gone on to do great things if he had lived.”

  At five to six they were in Mancini’s outer office, gazing at the prints of Old Perugia that adorned the walls. The extremely attractive, rather sulky-looking young woman Harold remembered from former visits came to conduct them into the lawyer’s presence. Seated there in the spacious and expensively appointed office, they explained the difficult situation that had arisen with the Checchetti.

  The lawyer listened quite impassively, looking sometimes at their faces, more often fixing his eyes on the far wall or down on his immaculate desk. When Harold had finished, he nodded slowly but without speaking. He was holding a pencil and he tapped softly with this upon the desk, causing quick reflections in its polished surface.

  “It is only a small thing, I know,” Harold said, a little disconcerted by the silence. “But I thought it best to do whatever is to be done in legal form.”

  “That is very wise.” Mancini smiled suddenly. “Legal form resembles other virtues: when you have it, you don’t always need to apply it. Without it there is no form at all, none whatever.”

  The smile had been directed at Cecilia and she felt obliged to reply. “Nothing but a chaos of feelings,” she said. She thought of the hate-filled faces of the Checchetti and of Harold’s anger when he thought she was going to admit liability. On his face a certain look. She had wanted to set it down to impatience; like many bouncy people, Harold lacked patience. But it had been dislike really. And not for them, not for the Checchetti …

  “Exactly, very well said, only a chaos of feelings,” Mancini said. “Besides, to put it bluntly, big things, small things, these days it is all the same to me.”

  It was strangely difficult to form an idea of Dottor Mancini’s age. The indications seemed to cancel one another out. The hands that played with the pencil were clear-skinned, quite without freckles or mottles; yet there was an elderly prominence of vein and sharpness of knuckle in them. The evidence of the wrinkles around the eyes and the loose folds of skin at the corners of the mouth was contradicted by the firmness of the mouth itself, the thick dark hair, the humorous shrewdness of the gaze. It was as if he had somehow aged unevenly; or as if certain of his features were periodically renewed. Or, Cecilia thought, remembering Harold’s pedantry of shortly before, as if the date of the lawyer’s birth were in dispute.

  “They live on the corner, did you say?” Mancini asked now.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So they have access to the public road directly from their house; they do not depend on this road of yours, this strada vicinale, for deliveries and so on?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  Mancini nodded. He was smiling still. “There is a certain odor of blackmail in this,” he said. “It was something they thought worth trying with a foreigner. If you had laughed at them, perhaps they would have given up the idea. But you listened, you seemed to be considering the matter. Now you have given their cause life, you have made it real to them.”

  “But we promised them nothing.”

  “Mr. Chapman, these are primitive people. They do not think about all this fair play and good neighbor business. Those are concepts with no meaning for them. They think you are only concerned to keep the road open.”

  “If they try to close the road, I will take them to court in double quick time,” Harold said belligerently.

  “Double quick time? In Italy?” Mancini raised the hand holding the pencil and made a sweeping gesture round the room. “Look at those sofas and armchairs. Look at those rugs on the floor, they are Afghan. This office is in the part of town where the rents are highest. I have a house in Umbertide and a large villa in Apulia. All this has been paid for by people taking other people to court in double slow time. When I was younger I was glad of this constant and quite useless quarreling, because it was making me rich. These days I am bored with it and I try to find other ways.” Mancini smiled and gestured again with the pencil. “Of course, if you want to buy me some new suits, that is all right, I do not refuse. But it would be money thrown away, because these Checchetti will not litigate, they will not pay lawyer’s fees, they will wait for a little time then start again, looking for ways, how do you say it … Ways to do you bad turns.”

  “What is there to do th
en?” Harold spoke brusquely. He had been shocked by Mancini’s explicitness about his assets. A man’s assets were sacred and not to be spoken of before relative strangers. “I am prepared to go some way toward helping these people,” he said.

  “If you were to offer them one million lire toward the cost of materials, I think it would meet the case. That is about four hundred pounds at the present rate of exchange.”

  “We are leaving in three days’ time for England. I have things to attend to there—we’ll be away about a month.”

  “I will make out a form of agreement. It is important to make it clear that this sum is the limit of your contribution. If you can call in, shall we say the day after tomorrow, you can sign the paper and leave a check for the money. I will get the Checchetti here, they will sign the agreement and take the check and give me a receipt for it.” Mancini looked from one to the other of the Chapmans. “And that will be that,” he said.

  That evening Arturo cooked for Fabio things he particularly liked: a soup made with lentils and farro, a spinach risotto. Both men were rather weary but pleasantly so, having worked out-of-doors most of the day. It was still cold in the evenings and they had a good fire of logs burning. At supper they drank between them a liter of their last year’s red wine. After watching the news and a game show on television they were sitting now companionably together, one on either side of the fireplace, talking in a desultory way of things that concerned them.

  Light from the fire played over the delicate bones at Arturo’s temple and cheek and the taut line of his nape as he lowered his head to look at the flames. The right side of Fabio’s face was in the light, the slight marks where the skin had been drawn down a little by the surgery needed after his injury. The marks had not disfigured him but they had given a more saturnine cast to the essential melancholy of his face.

  He looked across the space between them and even after all these years he felt his heart contract at the beauty of Arturo’s lowered head, the graceful line of his neck, the straight, slender shoulders under his close-fitting dark blue pullover. All Arturo’s movements, all the reclmations of his body, had a grace about them that seemed almost stealthy. His dark eyes gleamed in the firelight, rather oddly—he was slightly astigmatic and this lent a sort of dreamy indirectness to his gaze.

  Though sitting there together in apparent harmony, the two men were occupied by quite different kinds of thoughts. Fabio was all contentment, glad that the slight quarrel of earlier that day had left no trace behind, happy to make plans. They could charge their guests more when they had the swimming pool, they would be able to take holidays together, something which for years now they had only very rarely been able to afford.

  Arturo, while appearing to take a close interest in all this, had been waiting for a moment that seemed opportune and he saw now that it had arrived, here in the warmth and contentment of the fireside. He had a proposal to make, one that he had pondered long and earnestly. The whole property, house and land, was in Fabio’s name, which was natural enough as it had been bought with Fabio’s money. Arturo had put no money at all into it, which also was natural since he didn’t possess any. However, because Fabio was living on a pension and he himself had no income, they would save a lot of money if the property was in his, Arturo’s, name because then he could register as a coltivatore diretto and so they would receive considerable tax concessions. Not only that, they would be able to get subsidies of various kinds, discounted prices for petrol and for the fertilizers they used on the land. They would be so much better off, they would be able to pay for occasional help, they might even be able to buy a truck and transport their own olives to the communal press at Passignano. Even, someday, they might have their own press.

  So much better off, Arturo pointed out, his slightly indirect, dreamy gaze on Fabio, his mouth in the pauses between speech set in that humorous, rather self-deprecating pout. There would have to be a bill of sale of course, witnessed by a notary, but that was the merest formality. He took care not to be too pressing, not to seem too insistent. Fabio liked to mull things over, to take ideas and shape them into his own. Please let him swallow this, Arturo thought. Let him digest it well.

  The financial advantages were undeniable. Certainly it was something to think about, and before they went to bed that night Fabio had promised to think about it.

  There now began a period of anxiety and discomfort for the Greens. Their new project manager presented them with his first bill and it seemed a lot in view of the fact that nothing but damage had been done to their house since he had undertaken to manage the project. They phoned to express their discontent and Blemish called on them to explain matters. He sat at their kitchen table, chair pushed back, long legs crossed to show his paisley socks and trust-worthy brogues. His soft brown eyes moved from one Green to another. He had the details of his bill typed neatly on a sheet of paper which he took from his briefcase. He had spent time with the builder, Esposito, and the geometra, Signorini. He had been on several occasions, as they themselves knew, to have a look at things.

  “It is not that we question the hours spent,” Mr. Green said. “It is that there is nothing much to show for it.”

  “Nothing but a leaking roof and this hole in the wall.” Mrs. Green pointed to a raggedly gaping hole below the window. “We had to stuff it with newspaper to keep out the draft. I have taken it all out now, so you can see.”

  “A man came about ten days ago, armed with a drill,” Mr. Green said. “He was an immigrant—North African, I think. He spoke very little Italian and no English of course and so communication was difficult.”

  “Communication was impossible,” Mrs. Green said. “He came and drilled this hole in the wall.”

  “He just came,” Mr. Green said, “and made this hole in the wall and went away again.”

  “That is for the wiring,” Blemish said. “An essential first step.”

  “Then there is the roof. Two men came and walked about on the roof. They said they were checking what tiles needed replacing. However, since they came the roof has been a whole lot worse. The water comes through now, onto the floor, here in the kitchen and in our bedroom.”

  “We have had to move the bed,” Mrs. Green said.

  “When it rains we have to run with buckets.” Mr. Green felt incredulous himself at this, even as he spoke the words. Indeed, a kind of incredulity had been his main feeling since they had engaged Blemish as their project manager. During the night he would wake and would go to make sure the buckets were positioned correctly in case of rain and he would be possessed by a painful wonder. What were they doing here? Had they come all the way from Michigan only to listen to the wind moving over their broken roof tiles? At odd times during the day he and his wife would look at each other without words and in their glances there was a kind of fear.

  “We have a feeling of disconnection,” Mrs. Green said.

  “Well of course the wiring will need a thorough—”

  “My wife is not talking about the wiring, Mr. Blemish. She means that the steps that should accompany things are somehow missing. The hole remains there, just a hole. No one comes to do anything further. You get to feel that the hole could stay there forever, that the roof will go on leaking through all eternity.”

  “Nothing much can be done as yet to the roof as such,” Blemish said.

  “The roof as such?”

  “We are still waiting for the report of our geometra, who is the prince among—”

  “Yes, you have told us his virtues.” Mr. Green’s voice held a tone of impatience very unusual in him.

  Blemish looked at Mr. Green, at the ash-gray, slightly curly hair, the childlike eyes in the thin face, and he felt a gathering of vengeful dislike. He would make them pay for this lack of respect. “It has only been a month or so,” he said. “As Americans that may seem a long time to you, but the scale is different here, the concept of time is different. As I told you, one of our most important functions here is mediating between
cultures, bridging the gap.” Even as he spoke, he knew that the moment had come to offer the Greens the security of a written agreement. The timing of this always required a nice judgment: it did not do to seem in too much of a hurry; on the other hand, it was much better to do it before being asked. He sat forward, a slow inclination of the body at odds with his usual rapidity of movement. “Well,” he said, blinking softly, “if it will set your minds at rest, I can ask Esposito to give you a contract.”

  Not much later, in the cavernous and echoing kitchen of their house, he was telling Mildred about this coup. “I knew at once from their faces that my instinct had been right. Of course, you need more than instinct. You need psychology, you need shrewd judgment, you need experience. The client’s insecurity has to be fostered—that is standard practice. There is nothing that makes people grasp at a contract more eagerly than being left for a week or two with holes in their roof and walls, though the hole in the Greens’ wall may well have been a happy accident. Esposito employs illegal immigrants in order to save on wages. So far so good; on one level it makes sense, but the snag of it is that they don’t speak much Italian usually and so they get mixed up. For all I know, this fellow should have gone to some quite different house to make a hole in the wall. Still, never mind, it’s all grist to the mill.”

  “You are so clever, Stan.” Mildred spoke through the steam of her cooking. She was standing at the stove with head lowered, slowly stirring the contents of a pan with a long-handled wooden spoon. It was to be Giant’s Eyeballs that evening, a dish Blemish was particularly fond of. He was lovely to cook for, he enjoyed his food so much.

  “So we offer them a contract,” Blemish said. “A casual offer, as if it were the most normal thing in the world, just arising naturally out of the conversation. It will contain the estimate for the conversion and the date by which the work must be finished.”