“And he will start when he says?”
“Certainly. He can’t afford not to, that is the beauty of this document. If you look over the page you will see that the builder is liable to penalties for any delay in starting and finishing. A hundred thousand lire for every day he goes over.” Blemish craned his neck and blinked softly. The Greens were going to buy it, he could tell. “Quite punitive,” he said, “but that is the way we operate, our clients’ interests come first. We will deploy all our resources in the management of your project. This property will be a bijou residence of striking originality and period flavor.”
Before Blemish left, the Greens had signified their assent and he had made an appointment with the notary on his portable telephone. He hummed and sang to himself as he drove along. The estimate was for a hundred and sixty million lire, about sixty-five thousand pounds at the present rate of exchange—a sum exactly gauged to the limits of the Greens’ disposable capital. Genuine costs of labor and materials for that minimum of work they intended to do might amount to a fifth of this. He would have to keep an eye on Esposito to make sure he didn’t exaggerate his costs. How much could be extracted from the Greens before they understood matters was purely conjectural of course, but with any luck it could be as much as forty thousand. He would get his share of this from Esposito. Quite a bit of cotto there. Then there was his forty thousand lire an hour while all this was dragging on. And drag on it would, for quite a while yet. And the whole thing was legal. In the exuberance of these thoughts he raised his voice in song as he drove homeward, promising to be like the ivy on the old garden wall, faithful and true forever.
The Greens too felt that there was something to celebrate, a prospect of some action at last. To mark the occasion they made a trip to Assisi to look again at the frescoes in the Basilica di San Francesco.
Assisi was a very special place for both of them, a place of pilgrimage. It had been one of the first Umbrian towns they visited on that winter honeymoon of theirs which they had spoken about to Blemish, a visit of undimmed wonder through all the years between. Their love for Italy had been sealed that day and it had become part of their love for each other.
They had borrowed a car and driven from their hotel in Perugia on a morning in early January, a morning of mingled sunshine and mist. They had left the car below the walls and entered the town by the Porta Nuova, passing the Basilica di Santa Chiara on their left, with its great rose window and arched buttresses and patterning of bleached white and pale pink stone. On an impulse, instead of going on to the main square, which had been their original intention, they had turned aside and begun to ascend the steep streets toward the upper part of the town. They had followed a series of stepped alleyways, with houses abutting closely on either side, come out finally high above the town at the remains of the fortress known as the Rocca Maggiore, site of the twelfth-century stronghold of Barbarossa.
They had climbed the ruined tower and from there had looked back down over Assisi. It was past noon but mist and sunshine contended still and they saw the town in zones of varying distinctness: the lower part and the plain beyond were a lake of mist with buildings and trees and the lines of streets half glimpsed and half surmised below the surface as if below clouded water; then a muffled borderland of pale roofs and dark pinnacles of cypress trees; then, immediately above this, clear sunshine, bell towers and bay trees and the blaze of winter jasmine, the cathedral with its leaded dome and Gothic tympanum, the great Basilica di San Francesco lying on its spur of rock, lapped by the mist, freighted with its tomb of the saint. To the east rose the sheer slopes of Mount Subasio thrusting up into sunlight from the obliterated valley below. There was a slight graining of mist still, even so high as this, and the cool scent of the night’s distillations still lingered in the air.
That was an experience in the nature of things impossible to repeat. Today they went directly to the Basilica di San Francesco, to the lower church, built as a crypt to house the mortal remains of the saint. By another of those gently conspiratorial pacts which were so much a feature of their life together, they did not enter through the splendid Gothic doorway on the west side but went round to the smaller entrance adjoining the cloister. This way, passing from daylight to the devotional gloom of the interior, one was abruptly, dazingly presented, at eye level and very close, with the Giotto Crucifixion and the Cimabue Madonna Enthroned side by side on the wall of the facing transept.
There was a special place where they were accustomed to sit and they made for it now—habits like this were established easily between them, and kept to with a sort of devotion, a repeated affirmation of the fact of sharing. It was almost directly below the cross vault of the transept, slightly south of the apse. It was a marvelous point of vantage because from there you could look upward at the celebrated allegorical paintings in the broad webs of the vaulting; or straight before you at the Giotto frescoes running along the wall—great dramatic images of persecution: The Flight into Egypt, The Massacre of the Innocents; or—easily seen by turning the head—the Lorenzetti Crucifixion with its cloudburst of weeping angels. Masterpiece on masterpiece, Sienese and Florentine in unique competition, arguably the greatest concentration of genius under one roof anywhere to be found. Sistine Chapel notwithstanding, as Mr. Green was fond of saying.
As people do under the assault of beauty, after a while he generalized his feelings, became aware of the minglings of light, shaft of white daylight from the narrow entrance, filterings of ruby and blue from the stained-glass windows, pallid electric light from bulbs slung high above. From somewhere along the nave, out of sight, a guide was speaking in steady monologue, but he could not distinguish the language. Everywhere one looked this extraordinary proliferation of images, ceiling and walls covered with them, haloed saints, cloaked mortals, white angels with rose-tinted wings, meekly inclined heads of martyrs and mourners.
From time to time his attention sharpened, he saw in clear focus the dune-like landscape of The Flight into Egypt, blue-robed Mary on the ass, a palm tree bending in worship at her passing, the Gothic sprawl of the bled Christ in the Lorenzetti Deposition, St. Francis holding up his hands to be pierced with the stigmata. Nothing in the homely piety of his upbringing had prepared him for the awe he experienced in places like this. He felt the mortal struggle that underlay all this devotion. Fear was just below the surface. Something more than fear …
“The dread of faith,” he murmured to his wife. “Look at those faces, those long brows and narrow eyes swept back toward the temples. You wonder whether they are looking at heaven or hell.”
“Why, Sammy,” she said, “you know as well as I do that the faces are stylized; there was a convention for brows and eyes.”
But technical explanations never seemed sufficient to Mr. Green. He saw cruelty and strife in these looks, both the knowledge of it and the practice. Such faces derived from a time when the weak had small protection in law or custom. Is our time so different? he wondered as they emerged into the sunlight. Our faces are different, certainly, the stare is masked. There came suddenly into his mind a memory of Mr. Blemish’s face, blinking softly as he explained the terms of the contract.
His wife had seemed to enjoy the visit to the church in the usual way and Mr. Green said nothing to her of his feelings, of how oppressive and even frightening he had found the paintings this time. It was a lapse from the full confidence they enjoyed together, almost like a mild form of betrayal—or so at least he felt it; but he judged it worse to spoil her mood with his doubts and glooms.
On the way back they visited the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli on the plain below Assisi, not so much for the sake of the church itself—it was too enormous, too grandiose, too lavishly baroque for their taste—but for the little cluster of much older buildings within it, associated with the life of St. Francis and his companions, including the little cell where the saint died. The Greens stood immediately below the vast dome in the very center of the great echoing basilica and looke
d at the tiny low-roofed house known as the Porziuncola, improbably preserved among the swirling splendors all around.
“I can never come to terms with it somehow,” Mrs. Green said. “When St. Francis was alive this was all there was, this little place, not much more than a hut, with nothing but forest all around, and wolves and bears prowling about. It’s not that easy to imagine in these surroundings, is it?”
It had been there more than two hundred years already when St. Francis came upon it in 1208, ruinous and long abandoned, a small oratory dedicated to St. Mary of the Angels. Attracted by the seclusion and tranquillity of the place, the saint had rebuilt it with his own hands, living a life of poverty and prayer here with a handful of devoted companions.
Before leaving through the west gate they turned and looked down the full length of the interior, a hundred and fifteen meters, their guidebook informed them. From here it could be seen how the little oratory so lovingly restored by St. Francis had, by a paradox of history, been both preserved and abandoned within the huge and pompous hangar that had grown up around it, built to accommodate the thousands of pilgrims who came in early August for the Festa del Perdono. This elaborate carapace had drained the oratory of meaning—the meaning was all in the opulent decoration of the surroundings: the marble madonnas and gilded scrolls and trumpeting angels—a display of wealth and power that Francis had sought through the example of his life to oppose. The humble oratory, like the poverty of the saint, was no more now than a quaint survival, reminder of some former, outmoded perversity or eccentricity. “St. Francis’s house,” Mrs. Green said and sighed. “Better if they had left it to the wolves again once he had gone.”
In the evening they went over the money again. They had bought the house on an impulse, immediately drawn to the peace of the place, the warm colors of the landscape and the way the house itself had settled into the hillside and seemed so securely to belong there. It was rather larger than they needed but family and friends would come to stay. The estimate for the conversion was at the limit of what they could afford but when it was done, they told each other, they would live cheaply—they were not materialistic, their needs were simple. They made another of their innumerable planning expeditions around the house. Here they would have the fireplace, set in an angle of the walls so as not to take up too much room; here they would have their bookshelves. There was enough space for them both to have a separate studio and they had already planned the way they would arrange these and the things they would have there.
Later they went out to admire their three rows of vines below the house. The plants had not been pruned while the house stood empty and it was too late in the year to cut them now. They had trailing outgrowths, low to the ground, and thin unproductive shoots growing vertically upward—it would be a poor crop this year. But Mr. Green had bought a book on viticulture—in Italian, so he could improve his knowledge of the language and learn about cultivating vines at the same time. These slopes above Lake Trasimeno produced light, agreeable wines and Mr. Green was keen to go into things properly and make his own wine and keep his own cellar.
They stood there for quite some time, admiring the small gushes of new leaf that were breaking out all along the length of the vines. Miraculous to see the stems, bare and dead-seeming for so long, begin to produce these fountains of green, the pinkish rosettes of the buds opening from day to day and spreading outward from the heart in bursts of leaf, as if there were some inexhaustible source of life and renewal in the brown, fibrous trunks.
“Nothing could look newer than these leaves, could it?” Mrs. Green reached out and touched gently the soft, slightly spongy leaves.
The light was fading now and it grew cooler. A nightingale began to sing from somewhere not far away. They listened to the first tuning notes, the sudden loud release of song. Another bird joined in, then another. Any lingering anxiety the Greens might have felt was dissolved in that lyrical nightfall. As they turned to go back indoors they felt quite certain that they had done the right thing to come here and buy this house.
The following day the Chapmans had two visits, about an hour apart. The first was from Bruno, the Checchetti son-in-law, who had been dispatched with an ultimatum. His round face fixed in its faint, mindless, embarrassed-seeming smile, he delivered his message in the manner of one repeating a lesson—Cecilia felt sure he had been schooled in it. His wife had learned, he said, through her important contacts in the town hall, that the minimum legal width of a neighborhood road was two meters. At present, throughout the kilometer or so of its length, it was two meters and a half wide. It was slightly less than this below the Checchetti wall because of the rubble along the edge. But not much less, Bruno said. The Chapmans had a week in which to reconsider their position. If at the end of that time they had not paid over in cash, without any interference from a lawyer, the million lire they had promised toward the building of the new wall, they, the Checchetti, would put stakes in the road outside their house at an exact distance of two meters. This would still allow the passage of a car; but vans and lorries would not be able to get through.
There was not much point, both the Chapmans saw, in expostulating with Bruno. He was merely doing what he had been told to do. “We will not give in to blackmail,” Harold Chapman said, and heard with habitual impatience his firm tones transmuted to the gentle, wavering ones of his wife, which seemed to thin out in the air and drift away. Cecilia was doing her best, he knew, but she did not sound like a woman who would not give in to blackmail.
“We must be firm with these people,” he said as they sat together afterward over coffee in the kitchen. “We are coming to a crucial point in this business; it is fatal to show weakness.”
Without quite knowing how she had offended, Cecilia knew that this was an indirect reproach to her. She knew too that any attempt to answer directly, even if in firm agreement, was liable to make him crosser. “I wonder who Signora Checchetti’s important contacts in the town hall are,” she said. “It is difficult to imagine that a woman like that …” Under Harold’s indignant gaze she heard her voice falter and trail away.
“I don’t know how it is, Cecilia,” he said, “but you always seem to get led away into inessentials. What matters is not who she knows at the town hall, but whether this two meters business is true or not. I shouldn’t have thought that I needed to point that out.”
“It’s no good taking it out on me, Harold,” she said with sudden spirit. “The real point is, what are we going to do about it?”
He thought for a moment, his face settling into the dogged and slightly suffering look which had always made Cecilia feel pity for him, though recently much less. “I will phone the lawyer,” he said. “I will phone Mancini and make another appointment. Presumably Italy is a country subject to the rule of law.”
“That’s not quite the impression Mancini gives, is it?”
The phone call was no sooner made and the appointment fixed with Mancini’s secretary than they had their second visit of the afternoon. This was from a middle-aged couple who introduced themselves as Professor and Mrs. Lorenzetti. Cecilia asked them in but they declined. There was a certain stateliness about their behavior, not unfriendly exactly, but suggestive of grave matters. They had come about the road, they said. The wife seemed not to speak any English but the professor knew a little. He was a stiff-faced, beaky-looking man with small, round eyes like a bird’s. She was rosy and plump and her face creased in soft folds when she smiled.
It was soon clear that they had talked to the Checchetti already, because they began by merely repeating the Checchetti view of things. “You tell this family you will give them money for their wall, then you say you will give them nothing, then you set the lawyer onto them.” The professor spoke as if the lawyer were a dangerous hound that the Chapmans had unleashed.
Chapman looked from one to the other for a moment or two. They were both heavy-bodied and seemed very solid, standing there side by side, united in disapproval. He felt t
he welcome beginnings of anger.
“They are simple people, not like you and me,” the professor said.
“You and me? How do you come into it? You don’t live on the road.”
“Professor Monti, he is my, how do you say it, my inquilino.”
“Tenant,” Cecilia said.
“I see,” Chapman said. “That is your house, the one down the road from us. You are worried about your rent, I suppose. Well, let me explain the true situation.”
He went through it slowly and carefully, as he had done with Ritter. He was word perfect in it now—it was like a lesson he had learned by heart. They were still prepared to pay the money, though patience with the Checchetti was running out. Under no circumstances would they pay anything without proper legal form.
But their visitors were not really listening, Cecilia saw that at once, neither to Harold nor to her when she translated the main points for the sake of Mrs. Lorenzetti. She could see it from the air of patience the professor had assumed, from the wreathed smiles of his wife. They had already formed their ideas about the situation, the first and main one being that as foreigners the Chapmans did not understand the mentality of Italian peasants in general and the Checchetti in particular. This was confirmed when the professor interrupted Harold’s story with a short, disagreeably barking laugh. “These people is very strong,” he said. “Strong-headed. You do not know them.”
“He means strong-minded,” Cecilia said. She was developing a feeling of dislike for this couple quite at odds with the usual gentle forbearance of her nature. The reverse side of our ignorance, she thought, is their knowledge. The more the first can be stressed, the more the second will come glowing through. They, of course, while superior in rank and worldly endowment, do thoroughly understand the mentality of the contadini. The pair of them were positively oozing with self-congratulation.