ALSO BY BARRY UNSWORTH
The Partnership
The Greeks Have a Word for It
The Hide
Mooncranker’s Gift
The Big Day
Pascali’s Island
(published in the United States under the title The Idol Hunter)
The Rage of the Vulture
Stone Virgin
Sugar and Rum
Sacred Hunger
Morality Play
After Hannibal
Losing Nelson
The Songs of the Kings
The Ruby in Her Navel
Land of Marvels
The Quality of Mercy
after hannibal
barry unsworth
ANCHOR BOOKS
A Division of Random House, Inc. | New York
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, January 2012
Copyright © 1996 by Barry Unsworth
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-94842-7
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
for Aira
When earth breaks up and heaven expands,
How will the change strike me and you
In the house not made with hands?
—ROBERT BROWNING, By the Fireside
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
First Page
About the Author
They are called strade vicinali, neighborhood roads. They are not intended to join places, only to give access to scattered houses. Dusty in summer, muddy in winter, there are thousands of miles of them wandering over the face of rural Italy. When such a road has reached your door it has no necessary further existence; it may straggle along somewhere else or it may not. You can trace their courses on the survey maps kept in the offices of the local comune; but no map will tell you what you most need to know about them: whether they are passable or ruinous or have ceased altogether to exist in any sense but the notional. Their upkeep falls to those who depend on them, a fact that often leads to quarrels. The important thing, really, about roads like this, is not where they end but the lives they touch on the way.
From their landing window, broad and deep-silled, the Chapmans had a view which included a piece of the road, a narrow, yellowish ribbon rising and curving between terraced olives and a field of young maize. They had stopped on the way downstairs to look out.
“Oh, to be in England, now that Spring is there,” Harold Chapman declaimed. He was at his most exuberant in the mornings. “Not bally likely,” he added after a moment; “it was nine degrees centigrade in London when we left, and outlook variable. Seventeen here.” Figures had a talismanic importance for him; who commanded them commanded the world. One of the first things he had done on arrival was to hang his outdoor thermometer on the wall outside the kitchen. “Look at that sky,” he said. “Not a cloud in it.” He glanced at his wife Cecilia and smiled his usual tight smile, wrinkling his broad nose a little in the doggy kind of way she had always found attractive.
“It’s April,” she said.
Harold stared. “So it is. A shrewd observation, sweetheart. April 12, 1995.” He glanced at his watch. “Local time eight forty-three.”
“I was talking about the poem you just quoted from. It’s ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.’ Not Spring.”
Harold thought briefly of disputing this. It was not that he believed Cecilia might be wrong; in matters of this sort she never was. Like all intensely competitive people he had learned to cede land that lay beyond hope of conquest and he had assigned the marginal territories of literature and art to his wife from the early days of their marriage. Indeed he was proud to have a wife who possessed such exotic knowledge and expressed it in the accents of the privileged. Apart from anything else, it impressed the people he did business with. But to be caught out, to be corrected, that was a different matter. He glanced quickly at his wife’s face. Small-boned, softly molded, rather squeamish about the mouth, it bore the loving expression it always did when she felt she was making him a gift. She said, “Browning, the poet’s name.”
“Well, I know that much,” Harold lied, and smiled his tight smile again. “Spring, April, what the hell?”
They were dressed and ready for breakfast, but Harold had paused to admire the view, thus naturally requiring that Cecilia should pause too. He was given to the counting of blessings, which in practice meant the listing of assets, natural enough in one who had made quite a lot of money buying and selling them in the form of residential and office properties in Dockland London.
The view from their holiday villa in Umbria, recently acquired, came under the heading of asset, without a doubt, since a man in some measure possesses what he can see from his house and also of course it has a bearing on the market value of the property considered as a whole. Harold, partly to assuage the chagrin his blunder had occasioned him, found himself making—yet again—an inventory: there were the curve of the road, the ancient olives, the stiff green shoots of the half-grown maize. Above this the land rose in terraces of vines, bare still between their tall posts. Then the beautiful dipping line of the hills, half melted in the pale blue haze of morning, with the walls and towers of little towns nestling here and there among them, places whose names Harold did not know yet, but he knew that some of them had been old already when the Romans came. Immediately below them there was a peach tree in first flower, the buds a deep rose color. The plot of ground marked out by Cecilia for her kitchen garden had been turned over for them by a man with a tractor from the nearby village. He had not asked for money yet; Harold was waiting to see if his charges were reasonable before asking him to do anything more. He had already ascertained the going rate for tractor work.
“My God, the peace of it,” he said.
“Heavenly, isn’t it?” Cecilia turned to him a face delicately glowing. “Darling, look at that patch the man turned over for us. It has dried from the deep brown it was at first. It is a reddish ocher now, the true Umbria color.” She suddenly felt the moment to be a prophetic one. “It is like us,” she said. “We will settle into our true colors here.”
These remarks seemed to Harold entirely typical of Cecilia, in that they composed a series, each approaching nearer to the top, the last going over it. Her enthusiasm had always impressed him and roused his irony and restored his sense of authority in more or less equal measure. “Well, we are not likely to dry out,” he said. “Not with all this wine around. I should have thought that the true color of Umbria was umber.”
“Umber is a pigment, not an earth color. It is just brown really, it has no—”
At this point the peace of the morning was disturbed by the sound of an engine no longer young, a clogged, catarrhal chugging. While they still watched, a tractor of antique design rounded the bend, came into view. Sitting up on it, stiffly heraldic, were an old man in a woolen hat of Phrygian shape, a scowling younger woman of large proportions and a round-faced man in a cap, who appeared to be smiling slightly. They drew to a halt before the house and sat for some moments together while the tractor panted dark breaths from a sort of small chimney.
“It is the Checchetti family,”
Cecilia said. “The ones who helped us with some of our things when we first came here. They are very … archetypal, aren’t they?”
Harold grunted. It was not the word he would have used himself. “They charged us plenty for the help,” he said. “We’d better go down and see what they want. I’d go on my own, but—” He had not learned much Italian as yet, though it was at the top of his list. Cecilia, on the other hand, spoke the language quite well. As a girl she had spent two years at a finishing school in Florence and before her marriage had often come back to visit friends made then.
The Checchetti got down from the tractor in order of authority, the father first, the son-in-law bringing up the rear. The old man was unkempt, his long-sleeved vest stained a rancid buttery color from the sweats of many summers, his woolen hat stuck through with bits of straw. The daughter, on the other hand, was got up for visiting, in a dress with a pattern of large red poppies, earrings in the form of copper hoops and hair frizzed out round her large head. The husband continued with his hapless smile, which was not really a smile at all but a sort of permanent relaxation of the features. His name was Bruno, Cecilia now remembered. She was on the point of asking them inside but for obscure reasons decided against it at the last moment.
The daughter began the conversation from some yards away, speaking volubly and with rapid gestures of the hands.
“What does she say?” Harold was impatient. He had been looking forward to his breakfast coffee.
“I don’t get it all—the accent is rather tricky. She is saying that life is difficult, money is short, the cost of everything keeps going up all the time, the olives have been damaged by these heavy rains.”
“Same thing in Britain.” Harold smiled his tight smile at the Checchetti daughter. “Anche in Inghilterra. Not the olives of course. Surely,” he said to Cecilia, “they can’t have come at this hour of the day just to talk about the cost of living.”
The old man muttered a few words, looking away from them toward the horizon.
“They are upset about something,” Cecilia said. “The father is saying that what Italy needs is a strong government so as to weed out all the crooks and perverts.”
The daughter made a gesture which might have signified impatience or agreement with her father’s words. She began speaking again, with more visible emotion now. Her bosom rose and fell, an alternation which her amplitude of form and the low cut of her dress rendered dramatic. Cecilia listened intently, trying at the same time to suppress her feeling that the Checchetti father and daughter were rather awful people, he with that foxy, feverish look, she with her beefy arms and heavy, ill-humored face. Bruno seemed less malignant but he was obviously far from bright. She felt guilty at feeling like this about them, as they were contadini, peasants, and therefore very authentic people and by definition admirable.
“What does she say?” It galled Harold to be left out of the conversation like this.
“The gist of it is that their garden wall has fallen down.”
“That is tough luck.” Harold nodded his head and compressed his lips to show sympathy. Relations with neighbors had to be put on a sound footing right from the start. “Tell them we are extremely sorry to hear this and hope that they will soon have their wall back in place again.”
But this was not well received. The daughter bridled. The father turned farther away and spoke passionately toward the sky. Even Bruno looked resolute for a moment or two.
“It is the section of the wall that borders the road,” Cecilia said. “Pieces from it have fallen across the road. They seem to be suggesting that it is our—”
“That is awkward,” Harold said. “Typical example of Murphy’s Law. The wall falls down, that’s bad enough, but it has to fall just in the wrong place.” He paused, a thought having occurred to him. “That is our road too, isn’t it? They are on the corner where it joins the public road. They have come down here to tell us that the road we share is partly blocked and it may take them some time to clear it. That is really very considerate. Tell them we appreciate it.”
“No, that’s not it.” She felt a sudden surge of irritation with Harold. Did he really think that this demeanor of the Checchetti indicated a mission of good will? He was so terribly prone to interpret things to his own advantage. Then he would feel aggrieved because he had been wrong, and get aggressive. “No,” she said, “it seems they are blaming us.”
Harold’s expression changed instantly and a heavy frown settled on his face. “Blaming us? What on earth has it got to do with us?”
Cecilia spoke to the Checchetti again and father and daughter answered at the same time, each speaking loudly in what seemed an attempt to drown out the other.
“They are saying that the lorries from our building work—the work we had done when we bought the house—were overloaded and caused heavy vibrations and this made the wall collapse. The Signora says that these lorries, constantly passing back and forth, were a nightmare at the time and now they have caused the wall to collapse. When she protested to the drivers they laughed in her face.”
“And well they might,” Harold said. “I’ve never heard such a load of poppycock in my life.”
The Checchetti, understanding that the man of the house was now in full possession of the facts, were looking intently at him. In the silence that descended, he heard the sound of a motor lawn mower somewhere above them: that German fellow up there again, cutting the grass on his olive terraces. He seemed to start at first light—Harold had been meditating a complaint for some time now. “Vibrations, is it?” he said. “That building work was done six months ago. Why should it take their bloody wall six months to register the effect of the vibrations? Ask them that, will you?”
“I’ll try.” Harold’s swearing always frightened Cecilia a little. She was aware again, as she spoke to the averted faces, of the ugliness and pathos of their visitors. The old man’s breath was atrocious, even at this distance. He had a look at once brutish and febrile, as if he might be subject to some disorder of the nerves. The daughter, with her billowing fatness and frizzy hair and bright dress, looked like a sulky troll dressed up for a party. She did not bear the marks of physical toil on her as the men did, and Cecilia wondered if she had some other work. Narrow lives, mean and sordid and grasping. Now they had come here seeking some small advantage. She felt a kind of pity for them as well as repugnance. She glanced at Harold in the hope of finding some similar response but saw nothing on his face except the same look of frowning displeasure.
The Checchetti spoke together again, even more loudly than before. Bruno joined in this time, his voice surprisingly high-pitched. They were addressing their surroundings and one another, like a chorus in a tragedy. The fury that had lain below the surface from the beginning was evident now and there was a new, more threatening tone to their voices.
“What do they say?”
“I don’t know. I can’t make it out. They are going to turn on us and start shouting any minute now.” She felt helpless. As always, she clutched at her husband’s displeasure, his combativeness, as a shield. He was never divided—it was his great strength. “What shall we do?” she said.
Harold considered. It was something of a facer. Going to see the collapsed wall would not commit them to anything, of course; but it might be taken as acknowledging a degree of responsibility. Not going, on the other hand, might have repercussions he couldn’t at present foresee. It would be wiser not to make enemies of these people if it could be avoided. “Tell them we’ll come and have a look later on this morning,” he said.
It was the way that the Checchetti greeted this concession that gave Harold his first real intimation of their tactical cunning and formidable unity of purpose. None of them said a word. In silence they turned away, in silence climbed back up onto the tractor. For a few moments the drone of the German’s grass cutter was audible once more to the Chapmans. Then all other sounds were overlaid by the throaty coughing of the tractor. After this had rounded the ben
d it was visible for some seconds more in a space between the poplars that grew along the roadside; and in these seconds it seemed to Cecilia strangely like a war chariot, with the Checchetti daughter resembling a bright-robed, snake-haired goddess, urging the men forward into battle.
Ritter, turning off the motor of his grass cutter in order to clear the back axle, heard the shouting of the Checchetti and the quieter voices of the English people quite clearly. He was high above, on the highest of the olive terraces that rose behind his ruinous house; but the hills made a deep inward curve here, half the shape of a bowl, a natural amphitheater, and sounds carried for miles—the barking of a dog, a gate closing, songs of small birds.
He knew the English couple were called Chapman because he had once been given their mail by mistake when he called at the post office in the village to collect his own. But he was profoundly incurious about his neighbors, would have preferred it in fact if there had not been any. His was the last house, the road ended with him. Beyond there was no way through, except into scrub country, uncultivated, home to the fox and viper and boar.
He had crouched to clear the twisted grasses from the axle. The grass was long, slightly wet, thickened with alfalfa and chicory and dock. Too much for the machine really; it choked on the thick mush and needed constant clearing. But he persisted. It had started here, on these neglected terraces, with old vine shoots and sprays of wild roses growing up into the branches of the olives, his rage to clear the ground, to bring order.
The grass cutter, bright red and quite new, stood waiting for him on the terrace a dozen yards off. He must have walked away from it. He could not remember doing this nor had he any idea what might have caused him to do it. Standing quite still, listening to the chugging of the tractor as it slowly receded, he tried to recollect. Some association of ideas. Something to do with the voices, the sense that though unmistakably human they were interchangeable with any other sound of the morning, something troubling in this, a memory … Then he had it: an incident during his life as an interpreter shortly before his breakdown, some Scandinavian city—Stockholm, Oslo? Conference rooms look the same whatever the city. An international conference of industrialists, the usual self-promotion in the guise of productivity reports. He had been working from Italian into German. Screened off in the glass booth, free from any responsibility, any authorship, for what his mouth was transmitting. A mouthpiece … A conduit for sewage.