A Fool's Alphabet

  ITALY 1970

  THE ALBUM SLEEVE lay on the bed. It was of the drug-store surrealist school. Planets turned in Technicolor space adorned by fauns and muscular warriors with bearskin loincloths. Nymphs with low-cut bodices welcomed sunsets on purple seas.

  Pietro clamped the headphones tighter over his ears as the music swelled, electric organ rolling under the guitar, which screeched and rose in anguished progression, like some simulated ecstasy. The singer’s voice spewed words of torture and yearning which nevertheless, boosted by the volume of the music, seemed to Pietro to proclaim something vital. He felt inflamed by them; they aroused desires in him he could not name; they gave a shape to his frustration. At the same time, the riding cymbals, splashing over the repeating rhythm of the bass guitar, also gave some exhilarating vent to the feelings trapped in him by age and circumstance.

  The windows in his bedroom werelocked and the curtains drawn. Outside, the sun shone unregarded on the back wall of the mansion block; in the closed bedroom Pietro had begun to sweat into the scarlet T-shirt which he pulled from the waistband of his jeans.

  There was a knock on the door and his father stuck his head round the corner. Pietro peeled off the headphones with an embarrassed wrench. His father looked round the room and at the drawn curtains but made no comment. He said he had made a pot of tea and invited Pietro to come and have a cup in the sitting room. Pietro smiled his acceptance.

  Raymond Russell wanted to know what his son’s plans were. ‘The world is your oyster,’ he said. ‘I wish I was your age again.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Pietro lowered his head and smiled. He had never really understood the expression. Was the world fishy, expensive, or just small?

  ‘You don’t have to decide irrevocably,’ said his father, lighting one of the small cigars he had taken up in place of his pipe.

  ‘Well, I think I do really. Supposing I get a degree all right next year. I’ll have to get a job then, and I’ll have to find somewhere to live.’

  ‘Then you must decide what you want to do.’

  Pietro sighed. It was warm in the flat; the air was thick and undisturbed.

  ‘That should be a privilege,’ said Russell.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I envy you. I just don’t want you to get it wrong. And where are you going to go this summer?’

  ‘I’m going to Italy.’

  The word caused a small frisson between them.

  ‘I’m going to the north. Up to the lakes. I’ll have saved enough from working.’

  Raymond Russell was not listening. He was staring through Pietro. ‘Which lake?’

  ‘I thought I’d start at Como and then see what happened.’

  Pietro watched his father through the smoke of the cigar. The carriage clock on the mantelpiece ticked audibly. It had a glass base through which you could see its endlessly rotating mechanism.

  ‘Your mother and I went up to the lakes once. It must have been the year before you were born. It was the first time she had been back to Italy since we were married. She said she had always wanted to go up to the lakes for a holiday. A friend of her family lived in Milan and he lent us his car – a funny old thing. Very unreliable.’

  Pietro felt a twinge of embarrassment as his father attempted to touch on some personal memory.

  ‘We drove out of Milan, I remember. We had a little hotel booked in Como, but somehow we took the wrong turning. Your mother was not much of a navigator, I’m afraid. We ended up in Bergamo. It was getting dark and I didn’t like the sound of the engine at all. We asked someone the way. It can’t have been very difficult because Como was the next big town on the main road, as far as I remember. But your mother was cross with me because she thought I’d criticised her for not finding the way, so she didn’t listen properly when she was given the instructions. The long and the short of it was that we took the wrong road out of Bergamo. At about eight o’clock we ended up in a little village – I can’t remember what it was called – and the car was overheating. I said we ought to stop for the night, and your mother agreed. What was that village called? Wait a minute, I’m going to see if I can find it in the atlas.’

  Mr Russell crossed the sitting room to the shelf that held his reference books. He returned to his chair with a selection of atlases and opened an old blue book on his lap. Pietro watched as he hoisted his glasses further up his nose and stubbed his cigar out in the bronze ashtray, which habit enabled him to find without raising his eye from the page.

  ‘That’s it. Zanica. That’s what it was called.’ He closed the book and put it down by the chair.

  ‘And then what happened?’ said Pietro, more out of duty than curiosity.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I got the cases in from the car. We stayed the night. Whatever people do.’

  There was silence for a moment. Then Russell stood up quickly and gathered the books to return them to their shelf. Pietro saw that his eyes were wet.

  In the summer term at university the students in their final year prepared for the future. Some seemed happy to move directly into jobs that were chiefly done by people twice their age. Others tried to postpone decisions by applying for further courses, more degrees, or anything that would buy them time. Pietro wanted neither to bring on middle age, nor prolong his youth, but to live in a way that fitted what he was. This seemed to mean, for some reason he could not determine, that he would have to go abroad.

  It might be easier in America, he thought, though he had never been there. He pictured two different kinds of country: a brash place where children wore baseball caps and watched TV cartoons all day with sandwiches from the icebox; and somewhere eerily civilised where people like Laura and her family lived, where they read books and wore tweed jackets and behaved in a way that was like the English, only without the defeated element of Surrey lanes and south London streets. He could not imagine that they had the same crisis about work and career. He knew they made cars in Detroit, that people worked in factories and that labor unions were on strike; but from films he saw it seemed the kind of place where people of his age didn’t have to tie themselves to something, but just evolved. He was entranced by the thought of travel. He was so pleased by the surface of the world that already he had begun to be afraid of dying.

  Pietro lugged his backpack out of the terminal at Milan, Malpensa. It was a long walk from the compound to a suitable road. By the time he set his pack down and stuck out his thumb he was sweating. He had forgotten what hard work hitchhiking was. Once in Greece he had waited two days for a lift, twice watching the sun crawl slowly up in the sky and slowly sink as the cars ploughed on past him.

  He took a swig of water from his army surplus water bottle, which he had filled at the airport. Soon he would need to reacquire the scavenging habits of the hitchhiker, picking up spare bread rolls in the breakfast basket, saving a few sheets of paper in restaurant lavatories. He planned to stay in youth hostels or guesthouses in Lecco, Como and Bergamo. There would be other people there he could talk and have dinner with, but he preferred to travel on his own.

  He tried to meet the eyes of the drivers as their cars approached. Some looked embarrassed and fixed their gaze on the horizon, others looked indifferent or hostile. Several made a curious movement with their hand, pointing downwards to the ground beneath them. At first Pietro thought they were saying that they lived in Milan and were not going anywhere; later he guessed they were saying it was he who was staying put. After two hours a fruit lorry going to Bergamo pulled over and he ran up to it with his pack.

  Up in front he talked to the driver, a young man not much older than himself. Pietro gave him cigarettes and explained what he was doing. The driver nodded and smoked. He talked a little about football and the teams in Milan. After a while they settled into silence and Pietro watched the road unfolding through the dull plain of Lombardy. In Bergamo the driver set him down at the railway station; he himself was going on to a depot in the outskirts. Pietro thanked him and lug
ged his pack over to the buffet. He decided he could afford a cappuccino.

  He pulled out his maps and laid them on the café table. He had come slightly out of his way but it was a rule of hitchhiking never to refuse a lift. His father had lent him an old army map he had used during the advance from Rome, but unfortunately it did not come as far north as Bergamo. He had also bought a tourist map in London. As the waiter set down the coffee he took his bearings. He estimated that Lecco was no more than thirty miles away, so he would easily make it that evening, if he found a lift. There were plenty of other villages dotted around: Zogno, Seriate, Verdello, Zanica. Zanica. What was it his father had said about it?

  He paid the bill and walked up the viale Papa Giovanni XXIII towards the centre of town. It was a handsome, open city, bursting with muscular Lombard wealth. Two of the grandest buildings were the Credito Italiano and the Banca d’Italia. A large civic statue was not of Dante or Garibaldi but of someone called Gucchi. Ahead, visible on the hilltop, was the imposing upper city, reached by funicular railway or a winding road.

  My life is in front of me, Pietro thought: I can go anywhere. He had the thrill of release which the first day of travel brings. He saw a sign for the bus station and decided he would go and see when the next bus went to Lecco. Although Bergamo was impressive it also looked dauntingly expensive. From what he could make out from the bus schedule, he would have to wait for three hours. On the other hand, a battered vehicle destined for Crema, first stop Zanica, was already rocking backwards and forwards under the vibration of its engine. It was only about four miles. Why not? If the worst came to the worst he could walk back in the morning.

  Zanica was a village like a hundred others, small, unfavoured, an aggregation of houses and people on some economic principle now forgotten. It had an impressive town hall in the French style with a war monument to its fallen – ai sui caduti. The dates of the wars were principally from the nineteenth century. The main road to Crema ran through two right angles in the village, and the traffic was heavy. Some older buildings by the roadside were flaked and burned by fumes, but back through the Piazza 11 Febraio was a grandiose church with a bell-tower and a large clock. Around the outskirts of the village were signs of intensive agriculture. A lorry full of pigs caused Pietro to step quickly back on to the pavement as it rounded one of the sharp bends. On the southern side of the village was an enormous cemetery. The shops included a butcher, a bank, a chemist and a photography shop; but although there were two cafés there was no sign of a hotel or pensione.

  Pietro followed one of the streets westward out of Zanica. Just as it left the village there was a track leading off it called via Madonna dei Campi. It overlooked fields of fat, overgrown corn and red, turned earth bordered by clumps of trees. At the junction with the main road was a bar. Pietro left his pack outside the door, straightened his hair as much as he could with his fingers and went inside. Two men were sitting drinking at a table. There was no one behind the bar. He called out buon giorno, and sat down. He felt self-conscious under the men’s silent gaze.

  Eventually a large woman with reddish hair scraped back into a bun came up to his table.

  He asked for a beer and she disappeared behind the bar, which had several coloured pennants in a row above the bottles. There were half a dozen cheap sporting trophies and a framed colour photograph of an Italian footballer.

  What had his parents been doing here? Pietro could not imagine they would have come out of choice. Then he remembered. They had lost the way. His mother had been navigating. And then what? What had his father said? Nothing very much, except, it now came back to Pietro, he had seemed moved. What did they do? His father had said something about getting the cases from the car. It was the sort of detail he would think important. So they had brought the cases in. Where? Perhaps to this place. There could be nowhere else in the village.

  The woman said something in a strong accent to the two men at their table. She picked up a couple of glasses and put them on top of the bar. Pietro took his drink up to the bar and asked her if there was somewhere to stay in the village.

  ‘You want to go to Bergamo,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve just been there. Is there nowhere here?’

  ‘It’s just a little place. No hotels.’ She began to wash the glasses.

  Pietro felt determined. He said, ‘About twenty years ago my parents stayed the night somewhere in this village. Was there a pensione here in those days?’

  The woman looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘From England. But my mother was from Italy. And they were on holiday here.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘When my father had this place he sometimes used to have people to stay the night. There were two or three guest bedrooms. But we don’t get many people.’

  ‘And now?’

  She shrugged. ‘Now it’s a bar. And we have the shop.’

  Pietro said, ‘Can I stay the night?’

  The woman looked at him curiously. ‘No. It’s not possible now. You should go to Bergamo. There are plenty of places there.’

  ‘No. It must be here. I’ll pay you.’

  Suddenly she laughed. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘Come with me. I’ll speak to my husband.’

  She led him through the shop into a tiled hallway at the end of which was a bare wooden staircase. She disappeared into a ground-floor room. Pietro could hear the sound of voices. He did not understand why he was so determined to stay, but it was too late to change his mind now.

  The woman emerged, pushing back a greasy wisp of hair.

  ‘Come along.’ She led him up the stairs and on to a wooden landing with a single threadbare mat. He saw the muscles in her calves swell as she climbed in front of him. She opened a door. There was a room with a metal bedstead and an old wardrobe with carved doors.

  ‘You can sleep here for one night if you want to,’ she said.

  Pietro looked around. The room was reasonably clean. The window gave a view of indifferent fields. He said he would stay.

  He unpacked his clothes and took his sponge bag over to the basin. He could hear a dog barking with a strangled, howling sound. He brushed his teeth and splashed water on his face. He wondered if he should go for a walk around the village, but felt reluctant to leave his belongings unattended. There was no lock on the door. He opened the window and looked out over the cluttered yard at the back. There were some hens enclosed by wire mesh and a kennel with a chain attached but no dog visible. Beyond the fields was a horizon from which the light was beginning to drain.

  He took his book out and settled on the bed to read. He could see the grain of the wood in the paper, the varied density of ink in the printed words. He could hear a thin whistle of birdsong from outside, and a door turning slowly on its hinges in the hallway below. He was finding it difficult to concentrate on the book. He looked down at his hands and removed a tiny flake of dried skin with a fingernail. When he was dead, no one would know what those hands had looked like to him, how they had shaped everything he had done. When he was dead, the tiny hairs on the backs of his knuckles would go down into nothingness, as though they had never been.

  There was a cheap picture on the wall of the room that showed a house overlooking the sea. The pigmentation of the sky and the water was crude. Whoever had painted or copied or printed it had not looked at the coloured surfaces of the world.

  The book was an autobiography, the story of a man’s life told with emphasis on the facts. ‘My maternal grandfather, on the other hand,’ one chapter began. He laid down the book and took out his maps from the side pocket of his pack. His father’s army map was a small-scale and therefore huge affair, folded several times. Unfortunately it petered out just north of Bologna, but his father had been keen for him to have it. On a mountain just south of the city a private in his regiment had won the VC. The troops were at the time being supplied by mules.

  Pietro let
his mind wander, trying to imagine his father pushing north through the terrible winter, his efforts helped by the knowledge that there was a woman who loved him. But could he have been sure of her? He must have been an unlikely suitor, and the anguish of wondering if she was faithful must have made the struggle even grimmer.

  There was a knock on the door of his room. Pietro jumped and dropped the map on the counterpane. His heart thudding, he went over to open it.

  A girl of about eighteen in a pinafore stood staring at him. ‘My mother said you can come and have dinner with us if you want,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’ He found himself accepting instinctively. The girl vanished. She had had staring blue eyes and, more strangely, hair so fair it was almost white. It stood up around her head like a frizzy albino hedge. He stepped on to the landing and looked both ways, but there was no sign of her.

  When he got back into the room and closed the door, he found that his heart was still pounding. He felt certain that something had happened in this place and wished now that he could remember what his father had said about Zanica.

  We stayed the night . . . Your mother was not much of a navigator . . . the year before you were born.

  And yet it had been their summer holiday and his birthday was in May. Less than a year.

  This was the place they had stayed. He was certain of it. He tried to picture what had happened. It was night time. His mother would have climbed the stairs and come into the room first while his father talked to the owner about the luggage and the rate.

  They had some wine and some bread and salami downstairs in the room that was now the shop, but was then a restaurant. It was too late for dinner. Then Francesca said she was tired. She came up ahead of him. In this room she looked over the dim fields in the darkness. She opened the window and let in the warm night air and the sound of cicadas and a dog somewhere in the distance. She took off her dress and hung it in the old wardrobe by the basin. Then, in her slip, she sat down on the bed and went through the contents of the suitcase to take out her night things.