My Italian Bulldozer

  “It can be fixed. They can fix these things.”

  She seemed to take no comfort in his words. “I don’t know what to do.” Her voice was unsteady. Paul thought she was about to cry; he saw that characteristic moistening of the eyes, the subtle changes that came with the motility of the face.

  “Look,” he said. “I’ll move the car to the side of the road. We can leave it there quite safely. Then you can ride with me into Montalcino—I know where the garage is. We can get them to bring their tow truck out here and pick it up.”

  Her voice became steadier. “You make it sound so simple.”

  “Well, it is.” He gestured to the back of the car. “Shall I help you with your things? There’s plenty of room for your stuff in the cab up there.”

  After they had cleared the car of her possessions, Paul used the bulldozer to push the car gently to the side of the road. Once it was positioned safely, and with Anna beside him in the cab, he resumed the journey back to Montalcino. On the way, she told him why she was there. “I’ve come to spend a month here,” she said. “It’s a complicated story, but I’m writing a book.”

  “Me too,” he exclaimed, and then laughed. “It’s a great place to write a book. What’s yours about?”

  It seemed that she thought he was laughing at her—that he thought her pretentious. She looked away, embarrassed. “Some paintings.”

  Paul frowned. “I’m sorry—I wasn’t being flippant. I’m doing exactly the same thing. I’m writing a book. So when I asked you about yours…”

  She looked back at him. “It’s just that it sounds a bit boastful to tell somebody you’re writing a book.”

  “Books have to be written by somebody. And anyway, tell me about these paintings. I don’t think there are many in Montalcino.”

  “No, I know that. I need to use a library in Siena. But I couldn’t face the prospect of a whole month down there. You know how hot it gets. And crowded too.”

  “So you decided to stay in the hills?”

  “Yes.”

  “And go down there from time to time to the library?”

  She smiled. “Yes, that’s the plan. Siena for a few days, then back here.”

  “A good plan, if you ask me.”

  She became more expansive. “There’s an institute in Siena. It’s part of the university. They have a collection of materials I’m interested in.” She looked at him inquisitively. “But what about you?”

  “I’m finishing off some work. It’s a book too.”

  “I really only need a week or so to get through my work,” she confessed. “But I’m taking a whole month.” She paused. “You haven’t told me what you do.”

  What do I do? thought Paul. He found that he wanted to describe himself in such a way as to impress her, but calling himself a cookery writer made him feel…well, less impressive than somebody who wrote on art history.

  “I write about food and wine,” he said. It sounded so prosaic.

  She turned and looked at him with admiration. “Really?”

  Paul felt his confidence return. “Yes. I’m writing a book about Tuscan wine and cuisine.”

  “Oh my God!”

  He looked at her in alarm. “What? Something wrong?”

  “I know who you are,” she said. “I’ve seen one of your books. Tables in Bordeaux, right?”

  He felt a flush of pride as he gave the title. “Paul Stuart’s Bordeaux Table.”

  “Yes, that’s it. I was in Oxford, you see, for two summers. I saw your books in Blackwell’s—you know that place. You were there on the tables. I used to see them. I saw your photograph and I thought…” She broke off. She had said too much. “You’re famous.”

  Paul smiled. “Hardly.”

  “But you are.”

  “No, I’m not. You only get really famous doing the sort of thing I do when you have a television series. I’ve never had that.” He wanted to change the subject, to steer the conversation away from himself.

  “What were you doing in Oxford?” he asked.

  “I had a visiting fellowship at a college.” She seemed embarrassed to be telling him this. Privilege, he thought; it was just too privileged. He had noticed that academics often apologised for their life, for its freedom, for the tenure they enjoyed. And what could be more suggestive of all that than a fellowship of an Oxford college?

  “It was a modern one,” she said. “It wasn’t All Souls, or anything like that. I had a very ordinary office.”

  He smiled. “I wasn’t imagining otherwise.”

  “It’s just that sometimes people think…well, they think that if you work in a university you have a better deal than everybody else.”

  “Don’t you?”

  Her dismay, written on her face, made him regret his remark. “I’m sorry…I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.”

  She hesitated, but then went on: “My job, you see, is in Massachusetts. I teach at a college there. But they like us to participate in the college’s study-abroad scheme. We teach our students during the summer when they’re over in places like Oxford and Cambridge. We’ve also run a summer school in Rome, and Vienna, although I’ve never been there. I go to the other places regularly because all the students want to do my subject—history of art.”

  “Hence Siena?”

  “Yes. Florentine and Sienese art are my specialties.”

  “Nice job.” He knew, as soon as he said this, that his remark sounded trite, but she appeared not to notice, or at least to mind. She was gazing out of the window. Montalcino could be seen quite clearly now.

  “That’s it?” she asked.

  He felt an almost proprietary satisfaction; the pride of one who, though every bit as much an outsider as those who come later, was there first. “That’s the place.”

  “I love it already.”

  He stopped the bulldozer so that they could take in the view. From where they were, they could see the Rocca, the pentagonal castle, with its protruding towers. It was too squat to be beautiful, but it acted nonetheless as a fitting backdrop to a stand of Italian stone pines, old and hence large enough to be like great green lollipops planted in the ground. And then, in the curve of the town, there was the wall, describing a lazy parabola around the cluster of buildings that made up the old Montalcino.

  “That tower?” she asked.

  “The bell tower of the Palazzo dei Priori. It’s right in the middle of town. It’s a narrow building, as if it were sandwiched between two sets of broader shoulders.”

  “With bells?”

  “With bells. And a clock.”

  He pointed out the roofs. “You mostly see roofs. The streets are very narrow—so the houses are hidden away. It’s a place you only discover once you get into it.”

  He noticed her expression of delight.

  “Happy?” he asked. “The right place?”

  “Ecstatic.” She looked up at the sky. “It’s the same sky as ours, isn’t it?”

  “In what sense?”

  “In the sense that there are no boundaries in the sky. Only air lies between one place in the sky and another place—no matter how far away. Just air.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He wondered what that meant. That we were joined in more ways than we imagined?

  “And yet it’s so different,” she continued. “Our sky where I live is criss-crossed by vapour trails. It has these great white lines drawn across it—as if somebody were parcelling it out. Here…well, I don’t see a single vapour trail. Just blue.”

  He looked up. He had heard a plane earlier that day—a distant but insistent droning—but it must have been something smaller, too insignificant to leave a trail.

  “Poussin,” she said. “You know his skies?”

  He tried to remember what Poussins he knew. There was Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake; there was A Dance to the Music of Time. That one was full of the cloud on which Time’s Chariot was borne. He vaguely remembered the skies; the blue dotted with puffed white
cumulus. “I think I can see them,” he said.

  “These skies are like that. It’s the same blue.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  She looked back at him. “And those trees over there, in front of the castle; they look as if they’ve been placed there by an artist. An artist must have looked at the scene and said, Trees are needed to complete the picture: here, here and here.”

  He told her that he knew what she meant. The Italian landscape had been inspired by the artistic imagination—not just inspired it.

  He asked her where she was staying.

  “I’ve rented a flat for the four weeks I’m here. It’s part of somebody’s house, I think, but it has a separate kitchen and so on. Just a few rooms. It’s not cheap.”

  He nodded. “It wouldn’t be. Brunello has made this place fashionable.”

  “Such a pity.”

  He thought about this. “I suppose we have to be careful not to want the places we like to be…well, to stay as they were.”

  He could see that she was expecting him to say more.

  “Prosperity changes places—and people too. We can’t expect them to stay unspoiled.”

  “Can’t we? Even if they’re going to be no happier when they have money?”

  “Even then.” He had not articulated his ideas on this subject before, but he was sure that he was right. “You can’t expect people to choose poverty because it’s picturesque.” Before Brunello, the people of Montalcino had scratched a living; had they been happier? No. Until recently land had been held at the whim of landlords who kept their tenantry in poverty. That had gone, and the contadini no longer had to work for the benefit of rapacious landowners.

  She looked chastened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I said. People who have enough to eat shouldn’t say that other people looked better when they were thinner.”

  “That’s a neat way of putting it,” he said. And as he said this, he thought, Why did Becky never say anything half as interesting as that? The thought made him feel guilty: you should not disparage the intellectual ability of your former girlfriends, even if they went off with their personal trainers.

  She gave him an enquiring glance. “What are you smiling at?”

  “Something I was thinking.”

  “Something I said?”

  He shook his head. “No, I was thinking of one of those odd rules of life—you know, things you shouldn’t do.”

  “And did you ever do it—this thing you shouldn’t do?”

  “I did it just then,” he said. “But then I realised I shouldn’t and I thought of something else.” He changed the subject. “See that church?” he said. “It’s called the Chiesa della Madonna del Soccorso.”

  She looked up. “Do you believe in her?” she asked.

  “The Virgin Mary?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all. She’s a Mediterranean goddess, don’t you think? Absorbed lock, stock, and barrel into Christianity.”

  “Maybe. But aren’t you being a bit harsh? Shouldn’t people be allowed their scraps of comfort?”

  “Am I being harsh? Yes, perhaps I am.” He paused. “Do you believe in her?”

  “I like the thought of her. She’s Mother, isn’t she? And I quite like the idea of Mother.”

  “Your scrap of comfort?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Dried Leaves, Blown Seeds, the Charity of the Winds

  The garage was just inside the town walls. The road on which it stood was barely wide enough to accommodate the bulldozer, and so Paul returned it to the car park; they would seek out the mechanic on foot. The notice was still in its new location, and nobody had attempted to park in the bulldozer’s place. Of the attendant there was no sign; she spent most of her time, he had noticed, at the car park up near the Rocca, where she could talk to her friends and, he imagined, do a brisker trade in parking fines.

  Anna had managed to cram most of her possessions salvaged from the car into two cases. A few books, though, would not fit in, and Paul suggested that these could be left in the bulldozer, even if the cab did not lock securely.

  He picked up a dark-covered paperback and read the title. “I don’t think anybody is going to steal Caravaggio: A Life,” he said. He put it down and picked up another one. “Or Il Rinascimento a Mantova, for that matter.”

  She laughed. “I would.”

  He looked askance. “Steal from a bulldozer?”

  “No, not really. It was a joke.”

  “They’ll be quite safe. I’ll fetch them for you later.” He began to tuck the books away in the compartment where he had found the tow rope, but lingered over Caravaggio.

  “Do you like his work?” asked Anna.

  “Caravaggio?”

  She was watching him, and he felt that he was being assessed. But she was a teacher, after all, he told himself, and teachers assessed…

  He flicked through the book once more, which fell open at a sumptuous picture of four young musicians.

  “I’ve seen that,” he said. “Not in the original, but a print of it.”

  She looked over his shoulder. “He painted that for a patron. For Cardinal del Monte. He spent some time in the Cardinal’s house in Rome. He painted several pictures for him.”

  Paul remembered something about Caravaggio. “But wasn’t Caravaggio a bit…a bit wild? Was he a good guest at the Cardinal’s?”

  She thought for a moment. “The Cardinal liked a party. He had day-long concerts. Banquets too.”

  “Ah.”

  “But you’re right about Caravaggio’s bad behaviour. You probably know he had to flee Rome because he’d killed somebody.” She paused, and looked at him. He noticed, for the first time, the colour of her eyes—a flecked green. “People said that it was an argument over a game of tennis. But there’s a theory now that it was an argument with a rival over a woman. Or a boy. It could have been either with Caravaggio, I suspect.”

  His eyes went to the picture once more. The musicians were young men, and there was an erotic charge in their gaze from the canvas. They were dangerous.

  Anna stepped down from the bulldozer and Paul passed her the cases. “It’s not all that far,” he said. “But if you like, I can go and find the village taxi. You could wait here with the cases.”

  She shook her head. “I’ll manage.” And then she added, “I’ve ruined your day, you know. There you were, driving along on your…”

  “My bulldozer.”

  “Yes, on your lovely Italian bulldozer and you meet me. And I make you carry a suitcase all over the place, and all the time you should be doing whatever it is you have to do.”

  “Eat. Drink.”

  “Well, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

  He laughed, and picked up both cases. “I can carry both—I’ll be balanced that way. Yes, it is my job, but I don’t do it all the time. I’m also a driver and a porter, as it happens. So let’s go.”

  It did not take long to reach the garage, where the mechanic, a short man in blue overalls and with grey, frizzy hair, emerged from under a car to hear Paul’s account of what had happened. Anna remained silent, but followed the conversation with interest. From time to time the mechanic looked at her, as if to obtain confirmation. As he listened he wiped his hands on a piece of blue cloth.

  “That’s an issue with that make of car,” he pronounced at last. “The steering…” He made a dismissive sound with his lips.

  “You’ll be able to fix it?” asked Paul.

  The mechanic sighed. He gestured to a cluster of cars parked untidily behind his garage. “I’ve got to deal with all of those,” he said. “And my assistant has had to go into hospital in Siena. He’s having an operation. Here.” He pointed to his stomach. “He’s going to be off work for a month—during which I’m going to have to pay him, of course.”

  Anna looked anxiously at Paul. “Tell him it’s borrowed from a friend. I have to fix it.”

  Paul explai
ned, and the mechanic looked sympathetically at Anna. “I can only do what I can do,” he said. “And I’ll try. I can fetch it this evening. I can get hold of a truck that will…you know, pick it up and bring it in.” He made a lifting gesture. “But then…” He shrugged. “Maybe two or three weeks. It depends on getting the parts. You know how these people are. They have to get them from Turin or somewhere, and then they lose them and you have to reorder them. It can take a long time. You’re in their hands, you see.”

  Paul understood. He had encountered this in Italy on occasion: the conviction that you were at the mercy of somebody else, somewhere distant—in Rome as often as not—who had power over you and who did not have to explain or justify how it was exercised.

  “But I’m sure you’ll do your best.”

  The mechanic nodded, and Paul handed over the key. “This lady is very grateful,” he said. “It’s been a bad day for her.”

  The mechanic looked at Anna. He managed a smile. “Bad days sometimes end well,” he said. “Sometimes.” He hesitated, looking at his watch. He asked where they were headed, and Anna gave an address. Paul recognised that this was not far from the hotel.

  “I could run you there,” said the mechanic. “I have to go that way.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  The mechanic shrugged. “You’ve been unfortunate. This is how Italy sometimes welcomes people—with misfortune.”

  —

  The small apartment that Anna had rented was a few yards down the hill from the Fiore, so close to the hotel that its windows looked up and into the hotel’s dining room. The two buildings were separated only by a strip of garden and an ancient, half-collapsed wall.

  “It seems that we’re neighbours,” said Paul, as he helped Anna with her suitcases. “I’m staying up there—in the Fiore.”

  They thanked the mechanic, who promised that he would attend to her car as soon as he could, but would phone her, anyway, the following week to let her know of progress. Then together they carried her cases to the door of the house in which she had been told she would find her apartment. A ring of the doorbell produced the landlord, a small, rotund man who beamed a welcome. Yes, he had been expecting her, and yes, the Professoressa was very welcome to leave her suitcases in the hall while he showed her to her accommodation, and yes, he thought that she would be very comfortable and would want for nothing.