The Evening of the Holiday Page 5

The festival takes the form of a procession, through the streets and into the piazza, of the members of the city’s ancient guilds. The trades that the guilds represent have mostly become obsolete and the guilds have long since been translated into associations comprising various factions of the town. These factions command a fanatical loyalty within their own ranks and maintain bitter opposition towards one another. The Halberd Makers are so irrevocably set against the Embroiderers and Weavers, and so on throughout twenty guilds, that marriage into another guild is unthinkable to a truly staunch member. At the time of the festival, when feeling is at its peak, it becomes dangerous for the members of one society to appear in the domain of another.

  The procession takes several hours to pass through the city to the main square. It moves in solemn silence except for an occasional flourish of silver trumpets or a roll of drums, and the steady, portentous tolling of the bell in the campanile. The members of the guilds wear rich medieval costume, silks and velvets heavily embroidered in clear, flashing colours; a few dignitaries appear in helmet and breastplate and on horseback, the horses also hooded and heavily accoutred. Arriving in the square, the guilds present their banners to the assembled nobles of the town - a collection of tremulous elderly gentlemen bearing certain of the proudest and most infamous names in European history. In the evening the guilds disperse through the town in order to work off their heightened animosities. Feuding families reaffirm mutual antagonism, duels are fought, blows exchanged, and occasionally a life taken.

  The festival is one of the most splendid sights in Italy. It may also be said to reproduce in miniature all the rancour and intolerance of the world.

  The preparations for this festival had completely disrupted the simple routine of Sophie’s day. The courteous, fatalistic character of the town was now transfigured into something clamorous and obsessive. She was continually being offered, at the hairdresser or the money-changer, even in the hotel, a ticket for a window along the route of the procession, or a knot of coloured ribbon which would indicate her sympathies for a particular guild. The central piazza had been filled with rickety wooden stands that would seat leading citizens of the town during the ceremony of the banners, and it could scarcely be entered, much less crossed. The main streets, though empty of traffic, were filled with little men carrying large planks or trestles and were sometimes barricaded for a rehearsal. In the churches there were special services to bless the respective guilds. Sophie, who loathed public spectacles but thought it priggish to say so, was drawn along in this meaningless drama like someone who, lacking the strength of will to become a conscientious objector, reluctantly participates in a war.

  Tancredi, himself something of a deserter in this annual conflict, had gone to the coast again to visit his children. This year he would willingly have stayed in the town because of Sophie; instead, because of her, he found himself at the sea.

  Sophie in these past two weeks had been both submissive and withdrawn - greeting him, when he came to see her each afternoon, with an intense, confiding pleasure, then relapsing into apprehensive silence or listening too attentively to his idlest remark. He understood, or thought he understood, that she felt herself in some way committed and that this was for her a means merely of gaining time. He patiently came to her every day and on weekends took her for long drives during which he talked a great deal or - what was to him more alien - sat for long intervals in silence, her wrist beneath his unavoided hand. He drove her all over the surrounding countryside. They admired the natural beauty of the landscape and the architecture of the towns; they climbed the towers, stared at the pictures, criticized the dim light in the churches and the steepness of the ubiquitous steps. He was pleased to be in these beautiful places, which he had known all his adult life, with someone who gave them a new sense of being enjoyed. It was only in the car, alone with him, that she became subdued and melancholy. Once, after a particularly pleasant afternoon at Cortona, she burst into tears. His forthright Italian sensuality found her behaviour neurotic and absurd. Nevertheless he accepted it, and was surprised by his own forbearance. He saw that she was apprehensive, not of what she must prevent but of what she knew must occur. And for this reason, when she urged him to go to the sea as he had planned to do, he at last agreed.

  Sophie herself thought that she desperately wanted him to go. Now, in his company, she was like a traveller who stands one morning on the deck of a ship in a strange harbour, studying the country where she is to live; who wonders which of these grouped houses is to grow familiar, which of these streets most travelled, whether those parks, so attractive in the early sunshine, will become perhaps sinister by night. She did not even ask herself: Where will it lead? - assuming that she could only come, as it were, to grief. His awareness of this, his disarming, undemanding kindness, could not reassure her. Such reassurance is not within anyone’s power. Someone who says ‘Trust me’ must always hope in his heart that you will keep something in reserve; ‘Never leave me’ can only represent an inquiry into present intentions.

  And so Tancredi went for a week to the sea and Sophie stayed for the festival.

  On the morning of the actual day a ceremony was held in the Duomo. On the floor of the cathedral a famous series of Biblical scenes in marble inlay was annually uncovered for the occasion - it was protected by wooden boards during the rest of the year. Sophie, who had never seen this floor, found it impossible to get into the church, and waited outside in the hot sun for the crowd to disperse after the ceremony. Even so, when she eventually got inside she had only glimpses of the inlaid scenes; the most fragile areas were roped off with twists of scarlet silk and the remainder lost beneath her own feet and other people’s. The crowd - of townspeople, children, and tourists - was so dense in the cathedral that she could not get back to the main door and finally found her way into the baptistery and out through a small domestic door there. This led on to a flight of long marble steps, which in turn descended into one of the busiest streets of the town.

  Sophie sat down on one of the worn steps, solitary, above the street, and watched the crowd. Everyone wore their best clothes - the girls in crisp cottons, the women in demure silk or linen suits. The men also wore light colours, their white shirts open at the neck, their jackets thrown across one shoulder. There were children everywhere, only slightly cowed by their best clothes and their mothers’ constant injunctions. The little men of the trestles and the barricades still pressed through the crowd. Of much greater consequence were occasional figures in gold or scarlet - members of the procession already in costume. These were mostly young men wearing dark fringed wigs and exalted expressions, and they made their way through the crowd easily enough, since it fell back respectfully before them. They were impressive, these young men, in the magnificence of their regalia, the centuries of interbreeding reflected in their lean, haughty faces. And for the style, the very conviction that they brought to their nonsensical rites.

  Except for these melodramatic interruptions, the crowd passed steadily back and forth. From time to time someone, glancing upward, stared curiously at an unexpected detail - the foreign-looking woman in print dress, sunglasses, and sandals, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands - on the otherwise deserted steps of the baptistery. The curiosity, however, was brief; the crowd, engrossed, had no real interest in her judgement.

  When she could stand the sun no longer, she got to her feet and went down into the crowd. By now the press of people was sorting itself out, going home for an early lunch in order to be in time for the procession, which started at three. The young men in costume had all disappeared. Sophie wound her way slowly among families and around lovers and reached the main street and her hotel.

  ‘You’ll be going out to the procession?’ said the lame young man who gave her her key. His certainty made it unnecessary for her to do more than smile. There was a note from Luisa: ‘If you want a refuge from the festival, come out to the house whenever you like.’

  She went to her room. The
shutters had been closed, and she lay down on her bed in the dark. She would not see the procession. She would not go to her aunt’s villa. She would lie on her bed in the dark. She missed Tancredi.

  She was awakened by the slow tolling of a bell. It was the great bell in the campanile announcing the opening of the festival. It would toll all afternoon while the guilds made their way through the streets of the town. Now the whole city was crammed along sidewalks, into doorways, on to balconies and ledges, even on top of roofs, to watch the spectacle. The silver trumpets were blown, and blown again. The drums rolled. The procession must now be appearing in the main street. No one would applaud or speak; no one (and this in Italy!) would call out: ‘There’s our Giuseppe!’ or ‘Bravo, Tonino!’ First would come the trumpeters, and small boys with kettledrums; then, at some distance, the officers of the guild, on horseback; and on foot the lesser representatives, all magnificent in array, austere in expression, unshakeable in purposelessness. A cross would be carried, and a likeness - if such it may be called - of the Virgin. And ancient weapons such as one sees in the Tower of London, here glittering as if they went in constant expectation of use.

  Sophie got up and stood by the window. Her room at the hotel looked down a hillside, over the city walls and on the countryside. She had no reason to suppose that the festival would have made a change in the scene - and there was none. Only, as she opened the shutters, the bell boomed louder, widening into the room. She leaned her head against the window frame. One may not in the least want to see a festival; one may think it foolish, infantile, a great nuisance. Nevertheless, one may not wish to be the only person in the world not attending it.

  How can a telephone bell, even when it rings, miraculously, from a distance of one hundred kilometres, compete with the tolling of a colossal ceremonial bell that has been rung at measured intervals, for momentous occasions, during the last eight centuries? The telephone, a device of wires and plastic, cannot hope to sound other than ephemeral, bleating into the bronze face of history. And this being the case, why should such a negligible sound have excited a greater response than the inexorable voice proclaiming from the campanile? For Sophie even closed the shutters, hastily, to muffle the tolling of the bell before she crossed the room; even pressed her hand to her exposed ear, to shut out the voice of authority as she picked up the receiver and spoke.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  She sat down on the bed. She smiled. ‘Only just. There’s this blasted bell. Where are you?’

  ‘At Port Santo Stefano.’

  ‘Whatever are you doing there?’

  ‘I’m on the way to Florence to see my lawyer.’ There was a long silence, eventually interrupted by the operator, who thought the call was finished. ‘We are talking,’ said Tancredi inaccurately. They were silent again.

  He said: ‘I have to tell you something. Don’t be horrified.’ She still said nothing and he went straight on. ‘I’m in love with you.’

  There was another long pause. At last she said: ‘You have a funny idea of what’s horrifying.’

  ‘I could reach you by this evening. Would you come to Florence with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘That damned festival - I won’t be able to come into the city.’ He paused again, calculating. ‘I can be there, outside the main gate, by eight o’clock. Can you get to the railway station? I’ll pick you up outside the station.’

  ‘But we’d never reach Florence tonight.’

  ‘No. We’d have to stop somewhere along the way and go on tomorrow.’

  She pressed her free hand more closely to her ear, but he said nothing more. ‘Be careful on the road,’ she said.

  When she replaced the receiver (the telephone gave a few shattering terminal cries), she lay down again on the bed. The apprehension of these last weeks with him resolved itself into a series of practical concerns, and she occupied herself with these as though there were nothing else to be considered. Money, her passport, clothes she would need for a day or two, a sweater for the drive; nothing heavy, since she must cross the town on foot this evening to get to the gate. She would allow herself half an hour for the walk - a little more perhaps. The procession would be over at seven, the participants and the crowd dispersed. Half an hour would be plenty…. She felt not as if she had taken a decision but as though she had now relinquished any possibility of doing so. She slept.

  She walked out of the hotel in the evening carrying one small bag. At first the streets were almost empty, although a scattering of papers testified to the passing of the crowd. A few straggling spectators, mostly in family groups, were making their way home. But when she approached the piazza, the crowd became suddenly thicker until, in the main street, she could scarcely move against it. She was, as far as she could see, the only person in the entire town going in this particular direction. The press of people surged upon her with a frantic disregard, shouting, jostling, careering along - one would almost have thought, in flight. Sophie, frightened, drew back against the wall to let the commotion pass by. Strained, excited faces flashed into hers, insistent cries deafened her; a woman or a child was screaming, caught in the irresistible advance.

  There came an interruption in the rush of people - who, Sophie realized, were only now dispersing from the piazza. Abruptly, terrifyingly, the way ahead was filled with the blue-and-crimson costumes of one of the guilds, and the young men of the procession strode into the wake of the retreating crowd. They were not now in the perfect order of the procession but pushed one another, shoulder to shoulder in a close group, like a clan of marauding youths. The coarse hair of their wigs, black and sometimes auburn, squarely swept their shoulders. Some had taken off the cushion-like velvet caps they wore and carried them in their hands, the long plumes reaching the ground. Others rested their hands on wooden swords or daggers fixed at their sides. They spoke - not hysterically like the crowd but tersely, among themselves, savouring the awe of the spectators but detached from it.

  Pushing her way along beside the wall, Sophie managed to get to a corner and turn down another street. This was the street she had come through that morning from the Duomo, and she reached the foot of the litter-strewn but empty steps leading up to the baptistery. The crowd here seemed penetrable, and she was about to pass the foot of the steps when there was a sharp roll of drums and another of the guilds, this time in gold and black, appeared in the street before her. In this group there were horsemen. The horses pranced nervously and reared at the drums. The crowd, shrieking, began to run. Sophie climbed up two or three steps. Standing there above the crowd, she could see that the street ahead was completely blocked.

  Panic now rose into her own throat. It was after seven-thirty. She thought in despair: I will never get through this. Never. I’ll have to walk right round the walls - it will take me hours.

  She remembered then the side door into the baptistery. It was getting dark, and she went up the steps unnoticed and put her hand against the little wooden door. It was open, perhaps through an oversight, and she went inside, into the dim, cold marble silence of the baptistery, and passed through to the transept of the cathedral.

  Intimidated, she stopped. She stood resting one hand against the fluting of a huge column and looked down the dark empty church. The nave, cleared for the ceremony that morning, was marked only by its double row of colossal pillars and by the banners that projected from them on thick gilt rods. The fading daylight came, greatly diminished, through high and very narrow windows and from a circular window above the altar. The smell of incense and age, the smell of religion itself, was lightless. She began to walk down the centre aisle. Her sandalled feet, on the precious paving that had been obscured from her view that morning and was now once more almost indistinguishable, made a light ringing sound that echoed up into the roof of the cathedral - a sound as superficial and profane as it might have seemed in a tomb. In the half-dark she walked into one of the silk ropes protecting a section of the floor and further down she stumbled over th
e raised edge of a commemorative plaque.

  When she reached the end of the nave she stopped again. The cathedral was normally entered by two ordinary doors set at each side of the portico. On the morning of this day, however, the ornate bronze doors, panelled with reliefs of Old Testament scenes, had been opened for the hours of the ceremony and the small doors were barred from the inside and padlocked. She went to a side door that led out beside one of the chapels, but this had been locked with a key. With a moan of alarm, she twisted the handle, then turned back helplessly into the church. From the shadowed walls, the agonies, the depositions, the Pietàs looked down - but not at her. There is nothing to be done, they said - not addressing her.

  There was a rustle in the transept, and quick footsteps. Someone had come in, through yet another door. There was now almost no light in the church and Sophie stood still by the wall while the unhesitating steps drew nearer - circumnavigating the silken rope, rising over the ridge of the plaque. The figure did not speak but came straight towards her. She herself could not utter a word. When they were face to face she saw that it was one of the domestics of the church - not a priest but a small elderly man in a black apron-like overall who sometimes admitted visitors to secluded chapels or, if they had obtained special permission, showed them into a room behind the altar to see the treasure of the church displayed behind glass.

  He nodded to her politely, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find her there that evening. He smelled like the church, of marble and incense and worn cloth. She began to explain, to apologize, her voice wavering, high-pitched, up the nave. He did not reply, but while she was talking drew a bunch of keys out of the square pocket of his overall. He sorted these expertly, without hurrying, and they dangled from his hand with a metallic rustle, being too large and too numerous to jingle. He fitted into the lock of the little door a key that might have opened the great gate of a city. The door swung back, letting in faint daylight and a rush of warm air.