After Hannibal

  “Also these people is furba, cunning,” the professor said.

  “Well,” Cecilia said, “we are not furbi, but we are not so stupid that we don’t know a viper’s nest of blackmailers when we see one.”

  This was the first time she had intervened directly in the discussion. She had spoken in English and Harold felt cheered and encouraged. “Yes, by Jove,” he said. “Blackmail. Tell them that word in Italian, sweetheart, make sure they understand it.”

  “Ricatto.”

  “No, no,” Lorenzetti said. “Ricatto, no, it is not a question of money. The Checchetti are unhappy and also perplessi …”

  “Perplexed,” Cecilia said.

  “Perplexed, yes. So naturally they ask protection to la legge, the law. And la legge says two meters.”

  “Naturally, eh?” Chapman was silent for some moments. The suggestion was that the Checchetti, being weak and defenseless, were right to protect themselves from the oppression of the powerful in the only way known to them. He looked at Lorenzetti’s face, close-shaven, beaky, smiling still with that hypocritical sympathy for the underdog. And as he did so he experienced a fierce joy: for the first time in all this business he had found someone he understood. “Not a question of money, eh?” he said.

  Mrs. Lorenzetti, perhaps sensing an increase of tension in the atmosphere, now spoke at some length in Italian, smiling and turning her head coquettishly as she did so.

  “What does she say?”

  Cecilia’s mouth, which tended naturally to turn down at the corners, showed now a marked increase in this tendency. “She says you have to fall in with their ways. She says she is a teacher but when she comes out here she plays the country girl and they love her.”

  “Good God.”

  “I know these people,” Lorenzetti said. “It is not about money, it is about pride. Self-respecting, dignity.”

  “So what do you suggest we should do?” Cecilia asked.

  Lorenzetti’s answer was prompt. “Do? Give them the money.”

  Harold uttered a laugh of genuine amusement. “So it is not the money that matters to them, it is pride. So we give them the money.” He paused, looked again at Lorenzetti’s face, saw the self-interest written there, understood it perfectly, shared it completely. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You are obviously concerned to protect the feelings of these people, these sturdy peasants and so forth, and obviously of course it is not the loss of your rent that concerns you, or fear of losing your tenant, but the principle of the whole thing which makes you come here as an ambassador and sacrifice your time and so on, trying to pour oil on troubled waters, etc.…”

  The professor had not been able to follow this rather elaborate phrasing and Cecilia translated it as best she could, at once alarmed and exhilarated by the broad sarcasm and by the gleam that had come to her husband’s eye.

  “And since you don’t think receipts are all that important and so on,” Harold said, “here is what I suggest. With the Checchetti it is not money but pride, with you it is not money but principle. So why don’t you give them the money and satisfy their pride and your principle both at the same time.”

  He saw this register with Lorenzetti, saw the look of incomprehension quickly assumed. The blighter was not going to get away with pretending he had not understood. “You’d better translate,” he said to Cecilia.

  She did so, and as she saw the tightness of rage come to the man’s face—the first genuine expression it had shown—she felt a rush of gladness and release. This insolence of Harold’s was far beyond her own resources but as interpreter she felt she had shared in it. And it was absolutely right. Harold had cut through hypocrisy to the heart of the matter. These people had been answered as they deserved. She barely glanced at the Lorenzetti as they made their offended farewells. Hers was a nature that needed to admire in proportion as she loved. And for quite some time now—longer, in fact, than she liked to think—she had not been finding it very easy to admire Harold. Occasions therefore had to be seized. “Oh, Harold,” she said, “you were really good there, with those awful people.”

  But Harold’s satisfaction had faded quickly. As he watched their visitors walk away he knew that yet another prop had collapsed in his policy of good neighbor relations.

  Ritter worked steadily, with saw and billhook and clippers, clearing the bramble and ivy that lay along the crest of the slope. The work was more difficult, more laborious than he had thought. He wanted to clear the whole of the gully on his side of the stream. But the ground was steep, footing was difficult, there were thickets of thorn and scrub oak which had to be sawn off close to the roots. He had to crouch in awkward positions with his short-bladed saw and the thin branches whipped back sometimes and struck him painfully across the face. He could hear the unchanging voice of the water below him, like a message that would be repeated with endless patience until he could understand it. Coded language this too, like the songs of birds around him, the whirring of insects, the dry rustle of last year’s thistle and chicory.

  A passion for order grew in him as he hacked and sawed and sliced, a rage to clear this stupid and barbaric tangle, to reclaim the land, to offer it again to air and light. This feeling grew as he worked, carrying him beyond his strength, beyond the clear message of his body. Only with the fading of the light did he stop the work and by then he was exhausted. The solitude, the dulling effects of labor, were like a drug to him. Each night he slept for nine or ten hours without moving.

  As he scrambled and sweated in the May sunshine, memories came to him, unbidden at first, afterward sought for with a slow persistence in keeping with the dogged nature of his work. The memories went back to his earlier childhood, before the days in Rome. But they were scattered and wordless. Words began with his father and the white flashes on the collar of his father’s uniform. Posted to Rome as Intelligence Liaison Officer almost as soon as Italy came into the war, Captain Ritter had brought wife and child to live with him early in 1941. If he had not brought me to Italy, Ritter thought, I would probably not have become an interpreter at all, my life would have taken a different course altogether. It was contact with another language at this early age. If you knew words you could earn approval, make friends. And both his father and his mother had encouraged him to make friends with Giuseppe.

  Ritter paused and sat back on his heels. This cramped work and the difficult footing on the slope made him sweat freely and he felt the prickle of it on his brow and neck where the sun touched him. Yes, he thought, my father encouraged it. He wanted me to learn Italian, he had the sincerest respect for Italian art and culture. He hated no one, no race or people. He was an idealist. Not even the Jews. He simply saw no place for them in the New European Order.

  My parents then that gave me this multiple gift—the Italian language, the friendship with Giuseppe, the direction of a career. But the words that poisoned the gift were in German. A return to the true values of catbolic tradition, German energy and spirituality informing a new begemony … A dream long dead—nobody talked like that anymore. But the poison was potent still, the grip of it had accompanied him ever since. It was not a question of hypocrisy, still less of lying—that was the stuff of every day. It was a terrible reclothing of reality, something that seemed like madness now to him. His father had believed himself to be explaining important matters to his son when he said that three hundred and thirty-five had to be taken and shot in the back of the neck in order to safeguard Germany’s high purposes. Not once, not even by implication, had he conveyed any sense that this killing had been done out of panic and revenge.

  Which of them, Ritter wondered again, had been the one Giuseppe called uncle? Doctors, lawyers, priests, army officers, a hundred or so Jews, a dozen foreigners, a boy of fourteen. Taken from the German section of Regina Coeli prison or the cellars of the SS command in the Via Tasso, where they had been held for reasons described as racial or political-military. All completely innocent of any involvement in the attentato of the day
before.

  Almost certainly not his real uncle at all. If there had been a family connection the authorities would have known it. Giuseppe would have never been allowed to come up and play, his mother would not have had the place as concierge. A friend who visited discreetly. Perhaps someone who had lived in the building before it was requisitioned by the military. Someone, in any case, whom Giuseppe loved, who had been kind to him. It had been a well-guarded secret until that afternoon. Ritter himself had had his first knowledge of it from the tears on his friend’s face. “They have killed him,” Giuseppe had said, “l’banno ammazzato”—this first announcement of a death ever made to him had kept the cadence of Italian in Ritter’s mind. Then the pause, the tear-stained face, the mouth drawn with weeping and the beginnings of hate. “It was you who killed him, l’avete ammazzato voi.”

  It was in the same terms that he had blurted the accusation later, in the room his father used as a study. The desk had papers on it and a vase with a spray of almond blossom; some of the petals had fallen on the polished surface of the desk. White walls, white petals, the white flashes on the collar of the uniform …

  “Giuseppe says we have killed his uncle.” With the words his eyes had filled with tears, Giuseppe’s tears, because he had felt no loss or sorrow himself, only the shock of being accused and the wish to hear his father laugh the thing away and say it was nonsense. Instead there had come this rhetoric of high aspirations and noble aims, this first dim sense of words somehow slithering and twisting away.

  Ritter sighed and leaned forward to grasp with gloved hand at the stem of a bramble. Where the earth was loose he was able sometimes to pull old brambles out by the roots and he had made it a habit to try this before cutting them. This one resisted and he searched around for the clippers, which he was constantly mislaying. It had taken him years to realize that his father had known nothing whatever about this uncle. It had not been possible to understand this at the time because his father had made no sign; not a syllable, not a flicker of expression, at least none that a child could recognize. His father’s combination of speech and silence that afternoon had been Ritter’s first experience of betrayal but the hurt of it had been long delayed. It had seemed then that the only treachery was his own: if he had not spoken, Giuseppe and his mother would not have been sent away.

  He had never seen either of them again. That same afternoon they had disappeared from the building. He was told they had gone away—it was all the explanation he ever had. The basement remained empty and the glass cubicle was occupied by a uniformed orderly, who had little to do because all visitors were checked by the armed guard at the door. Kurt was this orderly’s name. He was very clever with his hands. Kurt had made him a model Stuka bomber out of matchsticks.

  With the passing of the years the interest Mancini took in the psychology of his clients had increased as his belief in the wisdom of the law had declined. As he regarded Harold and Cecilia Chapman, who were sitting on the other side of his large and opulent desk, he thought that he had rarely seen a couple so contrasting in temperament and style. There was the tenacious, terrier-like man, with his stretched smile and his occasional dry laugh, like a cough, and his conflicting appetites for victory and virtue; and the faint-voiced, sensitive woman, with her manner of shrinking kindness and her mouth set in an expression of slight repugnance or distaste. There was a coolness in her gaze, a quality of perception. If I were the husband, Mancini thought, I would be wary of that. But of course he thinks it only exists to support him. “So they are threatening to narrow the road to two meters,” he said, “and to mark the width by using picchetti, stakes.”

  “That is correct,” Chapman said. “That is what this Bruno, the son-in-law, said at any rate.”

  “Well, well.” Mancini joined the fingers of his hands to form a bridge and looked benignly over it at the Chapmans. “Let us hope they do it.”

  For some moments Harold Chapman could not believe that he had heard this properly. He looked at the lawyer’s pale broad face with its luxuriant eyebrows and wide-open, curiously impassive eyes. “What on earth do you mean?”

  Mancini sat forward and lowered his hands to the desk. “Mr. and Mrs. Chapman,” he said, “I will confess to you that at the beginning I was not so much interested in your problem with these Checchetti. A little story of a wall that falls down, an offer of compensation in proper form … You are my clients, I serve your interests, all the same it is boring, no? But when they refused to sign for the money, everything changes.” He paused, looking from one to the other of the Chapmans. “From that moment they are in another category. They become criminals, Mrs. Chapman.”

  As usual when he looked directly at her, Cecilia felt obliged to respond. “They must always have been like that; they could not have changed overnight.”

  “No, of course, you are right, they are the same always, but I did not understand it before. After all, a little blackmail, what is that? People see a prospect of gain, they use what means they can. That is the way of the world. But these Checchetti had already succeeded, they had the offer of a reasonable sum. All they had to do was sign for the money, agree to make no further claim. This they have refused to do. I can only conclude that they are intending to use you as a milk-cow.”

  With his eyes still upon her, Cecilia felt—ridiculously—that she was beginning to blush. “Such a mean thing,” she said.

  “Yes,” Chapman said, “they are hardly big-timers.”

  Mancini shrugged. “The scale is not so important, the mentality is always the same. These are not usual country people; they risk something for the sake of something more.”

  “What is to be done then?” Chapman said. “Get the police onto them?”

  Mancini sighed. “Always this haste for police in the Anglo-Saxon people. The Checchetti are ignorant and they have got two things wrong. The first of these concerns the width of the road. The daughter, I have learned, she works as a cleaning woman in the offices of the town hall; she will have seen something, perhaps some old regulations governing the width of the road.”

  “That is what Bruno meant by their important contacts in the Comune,” Cecilia said.

  “The width of the road is established by usage. The law accepts the argument of de facto and the present width is two and a half meters. The second thing they seem not to know is that while it is legal to put markers on the road under certain circumstances, these must not be raised above the level of the road itself, so these picchetti they are threatening you with are entirely contrary to regulations.”

  To Chapman’s face there had come a broad grin, a thing fortunately rare, as it was not attractive. “By Jove,” he said, “hoist with their own petard. It is true what the Bard says, ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ ”

  “ ‘Learning,’ ” Mancini said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You have misquoted. ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing,’ that is what your poet says.”

  Chapman’s grin vanished abruptly. To be corrected by a foreigner on a point of English literature was really too much. “Just a minute now,” he said.

  “Mr. Mancini is right, Harold,” Cecilia said. “It is a line from Alexander Pope.”

  “Well, of course, I knew that.”

  “So we wait for them to do what they have threatened to do.” Cecilia spoke mainly in order to give her husband time to recover from his discomfort. “Then we call the police and report them.”

  “That would be one way, yes,” the lawyer said. “But it would be better to order something, some wood for example. Have you a chimney?”

  The Chapmans looked blankly at him for some moments without speaking.

  “Not chimney, that is wrong, I mean fireplace. Have you a fireplace or stoves that burn wood?”

  “Why, yes,” Chapman said. “Both, as a matter of fact.”

  “And a woodshed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, then you can order a load of wood.”
br />   “But it is nearly the end of May.”

  “Never mind, it will be well dried out for the winter. As soon as these Checchetti put in the stakes you order a load of wood. At this time of the year the wood people, they are not busy, they will deliver maybe the same day or the one after. With luck the driver will be prevented by these stakes from passing. It might even be that the Checchetti will threaten to report him if he tries to pass—they are people who easily use threats. He will listen to them, probably, since lorry drivers try to avoid close inspection by the authorities. It is ingrained in them, whether their papers and vehicles are in good order or not.”

  Mancini sat back and folded his arms. His face had been impassive hitherto, but now he allowed himself a discreet smile. “Obstructing the road, using threats, illegally depriving you of your wood. The driver could be called as a witness.”

  Cecilia had a renewed sense of something ageless in Mancini, something that had never been young and would never be old. “Then we have them,” she heard her husband say.

  “Then we have them, shrewd observation,” Mancini said. “They will think at first that the law is on their side, but they will discover their mistake and then they will be frightened. We will generously forbear to press charges, but in view of the inconvenience caused by the delay in the delivery of the wood we will have to reconsider our offer of financial help.”

  The lawyer’s smile had gone now. His face had returned to its usual impassivity. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “More beautiful than going to the police. These days I am interested in beauty more and more.”

  Monti was working at home. He had brought his small table up against the window so as to make the most of the remaining daylight; too much use of the table lamp troubled his eyes, causing them to smart painfully and run with thin tears.

  He glanced up frequently as he worked. It was the time of day that he liked best, the time between sunset and dusk, when for a brief while colors were deepened and the slopes of the hills were visited by a light uniquely radiant and soft. It was this light that he waited for. He had seen it nowhere else but in Umbria. It came suddenly, shortly before the onset of darkness, like a gentle assertion of some value in danger of being forgotten. What was it? he wondered. Certitude, peace, the light of reason? An illusion in any case. What we call beauty or morality no more than the sense of shape, an illusion of design …