The Bay of Noon Read online

  One week-end of that New Year I came into Gioconda’s hallway carrying my Castelli saucer, or jug of Montelupo wrapped in newspaper. The weather had turned cold again and I had walked down slippery streets through a bleak drizzle. Gioconda had a fire in her little room and a streaked saucepan of coffee stood on the tiles in front of it. She had on an old polo-necked pullover blotched with paint; her hair was uncombed, and she kept lifting wisps of it out of the neck of the sweater with her forefinger.

  ‘Gianni isn’t coming this week-end,’ she told me. ‘He has a big wheel there from America.’ She briefly described this pezzo grosso, whom she had met once or twice when she travelled with Gianni to California — ‘sentimental, efficient, a cultured man who makes an affectation of crassness’.

  I said, ‘To think of you in America.’

  ‘I liked it,’ she said. ‘Though less than Gianni did.’

  ‘Gianni’s always saying he hated it.’

  ‘Well … you know.’ Gioconda obviously considered it a lapse of taste on my part, this holding of Gianni to his words. She said, ‘I liked the monuments.’ I thought she must mean the sights, the landmarks – redwoods, Chrysler building – but she went on, ‘The statues, I mean, of the national heroes. In Italy they’re usually riding chargers and brandishing swords. There, they are often in armchairs.’

  I thought this outrageous from a woman who had given herself to a man of action.

  She lifted her chin towards the window, indicating her own street. ‘In New York the buildings are silver, or white, or yellow, so smooth, so glossy, as if they were made of wax.’

  ‘All the same, I don’t see you living there.’

  ‘I don’t see myself living anywhere but here. That’s it – what we quarrel about,’ she added, acknowledging my presence on that previous evening. ‘It’s too late for me to live in those countries, away from the discomforts of home … But I like the humour, the common sense. And there are so many harmless people: Italians are seldom harmless. And when they are at ease, those northern people, it means more than it does with us, it’s so pleasant that one wants to encourage them, to say “smile, be natural” – the way one does taking a photograph, urging as natural the rarest expression of all.’

  She fingered a loose stitch on her sleeve, drawing it out until it started to shred. ‘Gianni wants me to live in Rome.’ Now she began to work the thread back into its place. ‘It’s logical,’ she went on, as usual defending Gianni’s point of view. ‘If we could be married for instance, it would be automatic, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘And since you can’t be married, this is what you have. Being here is all you have.’

  ‘There you are.’ She raised her eyes to mine. She smiled. ‘One stays here out of self-preservation.’

  She had expressed it precisely, for only by some extreme instinct of self-defence could she have resisted the natural wish for a common life with her lover. Apparent in their conversation – in the simplest inquiry, ‘Do you take mushrooms?’ or ‘Are these your gloves?’ – was the lack of a shared domestic life that all their greater intimacy could not replace.

  ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘who would not wish, at times, to leave this place of poverty, to live where a street is not a corridor of want and filth and suffering? Of course I would like to change, to get away: I too.’

  ‘You would miss it, then.’

  ‘Yes. But that’s a way to go on loving — a place, or a person. To miss it. In fact, to go away, to put yourself in the state of missing, is sometimes the simplest way to preserve love.’

  ‘It seems to me something that Gianni would understand, your staying here.’

  ‘He does understand it.’

  ‘Then why does he make a quarrel of it?’

  Gioconda looked at me. ‘You see, I am the one who quarrels. Because in Rome there are other women … There are other women … And he says that would stop if I came to Rome and lived with him.’ She went on at once, to check her own distress, ‘Let’s have our coffee.’

  I brought over the tray that stood on her desk, and she poured coffee from the battered saucepan. The cups were veined, like my finds in Via Costantinópoli, but heavy with Victorian roses. Along Gioconda’s cheek, as she leant to fill them, a single escaped hair lay, itself like a fine fracture in porcelain.

  ‘Luciana – my sister – lives at Nice in one of those flats, glassed-in crow’s nest, that were the latest thing in the thirties, modern by my standards, with heating and faultless plumbing, and a machine that does the washing … Her son attends the lycée, she has the day to herself. In the morning, walks to the esplanade, reads the paper in the café; stops in, on the way home, at a lending library behind the Hotel Ruhl. In the afternoon, plays cards with a friend; in the evening, watches television. Incredible as it may seem, none of this causes her to miss Naples. When she comes here, one sight of San Biagio is enough to have her longing for the shiny shop fronts of Nice, one day in this house has her yearning after her well-fitting windows and fuses that do not blow. Growing up here, and the war, have been too much for her. Just being comfortable will keep her contented for the rest of her life.’

  After a moment she said, ‘That’s all wrong. I make it sound like nothing.’ She sighed, as though remonstrating with, as though patiently correcting someone other than herself. She handed me my cup, and held the pot poised above her own. ‘Luciana’s husband belonged to a Resistance group that was formed in 1940, at the fall of France. They called themselves “Les Quarantes”. In ’43 he was taken by the Germans. She went to the prisons, trying to find where he was, if he was alive, if he was still in France. She did find him, at the prison in the Boulevard Raspail. They wouldn’t let her see him, but she could take his washing and bring it back. She opened the seam of a shirt and put in the lead of a pencil and a slip of paper. The paper came back to her in another shirt: he had written on it “J‘ai faim” … One day she went there bringing back his washing, and the guards laughed and told her, “He won’t need those any more.” She fainted away on the floor, and they put her in the street.’

  She said, ‘Forgive me, it’s terrible. But I made it sound trivial before – the way she lives, and why. Sometimes it seems easier to cheapen things than to remember them.’

  We were quiet. She poured her coffee, exactly as though the gesture had been arrested while she spoke and might now continue. I held my cup in both hands and sat back on the divan with my legs beneath me. I looked up at the opposite wall. ‘Gioconda,’ I asked her, ‘who painted those white flowers?’

  Gioconda stared up at the picture, as if she sought the information from it. She sat back on the divan alongside me, and let the cat climb on to her knees. She drank, and each time she lowered her cup the cat peered short-sightedly into it.

  ‘My father,’ she said, ‘was walking in a street in Rome, centuries ago, long before the war. And he saw that painting through a doorway, it was inside a gallery. At first he thought it might be by De Pisis, but as he looked at it through the open door he could see it was not, and he went in to ask who the artist was. The dealer told him it was a young painter, very poor, who had a studio in a slum out near Porta Portese. My father wrote to the artist but there was no reply. He then went and called on him.’

  Gioconda began to stroke the cat, softly, downward, until it purred, as if it were a stringed instrument from which she could draw responses. ‘He found a young man, twenty-two, solitary as a scarecrow, with the speech of a poor Roman … He was entering a new phase of work, he said, and when my father told him he had bought the painting in the shop – this painting – he replied that he wished he had destroyed it. He showed my father some drawings, and a few canvases that were on stretchers against the wall, but he would part with nothing. He had a reason for keeping everything – this was from a series, that was unfinished, and so on. When my father left he seemed glad to see the last of him.’

  Gioconda tipped her head back against the wall, and went on, slowly strumming the cat. ‘The foll
owing day he came to the hotel where my father was staying and asked him to sell the picture back. My father took him to lunch in a restaurant, where they spent most of that afternoon. The picture was not mentioned again, and soon after that the painter came and spent some weeks here, at Naples. My parents made a studio for him in another part of this house. After a while he disappeared back to Rome, but always came again, turning up without a word, installing himself in the studio, seeing little of the rest of us but once in a while talking with my father all through the night. On the stairs or in the courtyard he would pass us, my sister and me, without a glance. Not proudly, you know, or humbly, but absorbed and apart. He was like a character from Turgenev, without postures, with no sense of role.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  She pursed her lips as if trying to remember. ‘Tall, for an Italian, particularly a poor one. Dark hair, even then receding. Clean shaven. Dark eyes – dark, that is, and bright at the same time. He wore workman’s clothes, anything at all, and in winter a coat he had salvaged off some rubbish dump. Again, there was no pose in it, only poverty; later on, when he began to have money, he ate more, bought himself warm clothes … Gradually he became less separate from us, using our names, occasionally letting me run an errand for him – to buy a tube of zinc-white or bring a bundle of rags. He used to borrow my father’s books, and that brought him into these rooms. He had two exhibitions after a while, in Rome; he was written about a bit in magazines. His became a name – not famous, but one of those names that people mention to show they are a la page; that sort of thing, that world, was not so obvious then as it is now, at least to us, but he knew what it was and he kept clear of it. With those people, even one’s indifference to them has cachet; for them, integrity itself must be a pose.

  ‘Eventually he was able to buy part of a fisherman’s house, south of Rome, at the tip of a long peninsula, and he went there to live. He still came here once in a while, and my father occasionally went to see him, sometimes taking me along. Now they are building a road to that peninsula, I’m told it’s all spoilt. But then we could only go with difficulty, doing the last part of the journey by foot or on a donkey, or hiring a boat and going round the coast. You wouldn’t believe how wild it was — isolated, beautiful. A warren of white houses, the sea in front, the hills behind, on either side a long empty shore of white sand, cactus, rocks, and Roman ruins.

  ‘My father and he were friends, in an outdated, an antiquated sense. They had a friendship of the kind men can no longer have. It would be too simple to introduce complexities, to say he was the son my father did not have, or the artist my father could not be, or to dwell in other ways on his attraction for my father. When I try to describe now, to you, their affection for each other, the only phrase I find is brotherly love.’

  She had ceased to accompany herself on the cat, which gathered itself up with its paws together on her kneecap, sprang down with a delicate thud, and stalked to the fire. Gioconda picked a few white hairs off her lap, lit a cigarette, and sat up cross-legged on the sofa, balancing her elbow on her knee and her cheek on her left hand.

  ‘He lived there at the sea in four great rooms like caverns, with rough, white-washed walls, domed roof, stone floor. With no comforts, with luxuries of silence and time. The rooms were damp, bad for the pictures – and for him, since he had a history of tuberculosis. He had a stove in one room, and high up round the wall a sort of wooden gallery where the canvases were stacked. A worktable, a bed, a lamp, a chair.’

  Gioconda bent forward to shake her cigarette in an ashtray. ‘It came to me that my father would like us to marry. That is, he hoped I would fall in love. He encouraged it – not crudely, but in ways that were evident to me, young as I was, sixteen, and therefore thinking only of such things – and I resented it. It put me off, as it must, always, as a matter of course. I wouldn’t go with my father any more on those excursions that he made.’

  ‘And did he, the painter, did he care about you?’

  ‘Those things aren’t orderly, or precipitate, like stories. It all took time, too much time, to come about and then to reveal itself. I still saw him when he visited us, but I was distant with him. Ridiculous, I dare say.’

  How had she looked, that Gioconda of fifteen years before – a reserved girl with a dark, tender beauty, fatter or thinner than now, pensive or gay? Looking at her, hunched forward at my side with the cigarette between her fingers, I dressed her in the fashion of the period, spreading her hair in wide little curls about her shoulders, squaring her sleeves and bodice, trying to divest her face and person of the impressions that had made it adult.

  ‘Mussolini had declared war in the spring of 1940. My father was dismissed from the university. Having detested the regime for years, he now became obsessed with it, it was his only subject. If we went to the cinema to divert him, there would be a newsreel, my father would be convulsed with rage, calling out in the theatre, “Cafone! Cafone!” The sight of me in school uniform - on which I had to wear, like other children, the fascist insignia – made him desperate. You will imagine the result of this. Anything might have happened. He was warned once or twice. Then his property was confiscated and we were sent into exile – one of those domestic exiles that were popular then, a species of detention in a remote part of Italy. What they were doing a century ago in Russia under the Tsars – and are doing still; what Mussolini called going forward … We were sent to a village in the Abruzzi, a place where the contorted shapes of mountains and valleys seemed to have been intended as background for the convulsed lives we were living. We had a shanty at one end of the town, and helped on the land. Even such a place as that had its representatives of the secret police.’

  Gioconda was silent, and then began again almost loudly, as if reverting to a central theme from which she had strayed. ‘It was before this that they quarrelled, my father and the painter of this picture. Throughout the thirties, during the time when they had perpetually discussed the prospect of horrors that were now coming to pass, they had conceived themselves, I suppose, to be in agreement. If he had told my father that he was un obiettore di coscienza - what’s the English expression, opposed to taking arms?’

  ‘Same. Conscientious objector.’

  ‘Yes. If he had said that before, as he probably did, many times, then my father had not taken it seriously – at least, he must have believed that when the time came it would be different. When war broke out, he – the painter – was in any case exempt from military service because of having had tuberculosis ; at that time there were not these new drugs, of course, and he had never been completely cured. He stayed on at the sea working, perhaps more troubled even than my father by what was taking place. He turned to himself again and became more as he was when we knew him first. Still he visited us while we remained at Naples, and now that was because of me. Are you cold?’

  Gioconda got up and added a log to the fire, rasping it into position with jabs of the poker. She dusted her palms together and came back to me. A car started up in the courtyard, failed, and began again.

  ‘My father and he began to disagree. To my father it was indecent, in those circumstances, to shut oneself in a room. Any resistance, organized or futile, seemed better to him than that. To the painter, it was the only course – to stay in one’s room and go on painting. He said, “I am in the resistance” … Then we were sent to the mountains, and we didn’t see him for over a year. Not until my mother’s death.’

  The cat sat up on his haunches, showing its long, tufted underside, and sharpened its claws on an upholstered chair – plucking away as delicately and accurately at each of the upraised threads as if it were now, in its turn, pursuing the musical theme.

  ‘When my mother died, in our shack in the mountains, he somehow got word of it. He had been in Naples and heard of it through Tosca’s brother, whom he met in the street. He came to our village there – a fearful journey at that time, what with the war and the winter, and he did most of it on foot.’ Gio
conda lit another cigarette, and over it looked directly at me to divert her mind’s eye from what she was describing. ‘We saw him coming from far off, like a pilgrim – truly like a pilgrim, for the word means one who approaches across the fields … We knew it was he. No one else ever walked like that, without the need to make any impression on the world, not even for the worse.’

  I thought of Gianni – his lordly strut, his straddling stance. ‘Of course it was reported. That he came. By then the authorities had more to think about and he got off with a waming, although when he returned to the house at the sea his studio had been torn to pieces. All through that year, while the war was changing, we had no word of him. When it became obvious that Italy would be invaded, my father tried to negotiate secretly, with a bribe, a passage for me through Italy into Switzerland, but that autumn the Germans closed the frontier. They put great nets there, against which the fugitives were caught like birds … When the Allied invasion came in the south, everything was confusion, at first we had to stay put. But the bombardment of Naples was unbearable. When we heard Salerno had fallen, we escaped from that village and made the journey, a hideous journey, home.

  ‘How could your father bring you back here – my God, at that moment? Wasn’t he afraid?’

  ‘He was afraid of leaving me behind, afraid of what might happen if we stayed. I was older by then, and wouldn’t have remained without him anyway. When we reached Naples the worst was over – that is to say, the bombardment itself, for every other worst was to come. The city had been through all forms of privation, battered from both sides. Degradation, wretchedness – you won’t want to hear it again: for our generation, yours and mine, it is commonplace. Not only what was suffered, but what suffering brought people to. The terrible details, that have always been the speciality of Naples, the terrible ironies. While the city was under blackout, you know that the Vesuvius was in eruption, the entire region irradiated with a red glow that could be seen for a hundred miles … It was real hell we were in, bathed in red, overhung by a sky of ash, smelling of fire and brimstone. The mountain was weird, wonderful, the slopes flickering with the sparks thrown up by molten lava. Oh Jenny, while all this was going on, thousands of the poor got into little boats and rowed out to Capri. There was nothing for them there, no way to keep themselves, nothing to eat, they had to come back. It was just an instinct, immemorial, useless, as an animal might step to a mound of higher ground in a tidal wave.