Читать книгу Innocence - Julian Barnes - Страница 9

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In 1955 Giancarlo Ridolfi, at the age of sixty-five, had made a serious decision to outface the last part of his life, and indeed of his character, by not minding about anything very much. But his resolution was shaken not only by his love for his daughter Chiara, but by concern for his elder sister, Maddalena. This was at the time when Chiara, having just turned eighteen, told them that she wanted to marry a doctor, Doctor Salvatore Rossi. He was young, not so very young, thirtyish, a specialist at the S. Agostino Hospital, clever, very hard-working. ‘Hard-working, I suppose that means he’s from the South,’ said Maddalena.

Giancarlo had been born in 1890, by which time the Italian nobility had been put in their place, and no longer held important public office. His father had brought him up quietly on the small family farm of Valsassina, thirty kilometres to the east of Florence. All of them lived quietly, in reduced circumstances (the Ridolfi were never, at any time, successful with money). The old Count had his clothes made by a country tailor, and went down in the evening to drink wine, the wine from his own estate, at the village cantina, where jokes improved every time they were repeated. Until the 1900s the family had never been to the seaside and had no idea that it might be a place to go to, instead of the mountains, for holidays. In 1904 they suddenly all went to Milan, about which they had known nothing either, to hear the first performance of Madam Butterfly. It was as if the clouds had opened, then they went back to Valsassina. When the cinema came to the village they were allowed to go to the tattered old Terza Visione movies which were projected onto the whitewashed yard wall of the cantina. If anyone got up to go to the urinal their shadows crossed the screen in giant’s form. The one other concession which the old Count made was to buy his son a new kind of toy, a wristwatch: this was in 1910, not long after the first wristwatch was created for the aviator Santos-Dumont. After that he liked to ask the small boy, whenever occasion arose — Well, tell us the time! — but the occasions weren’t so frequent in a place like Valsassina where the hour of the day was obvious enough from the length of the shadows. All the same the tenants in the fields and the servants who joined in the conversation as they handed round the dishes couldn’t resist asking the child to take another look — Tell us the time!

When he was eleven, the father died. The younger brother stayed on at the farm. Relatives took Maddalena and Giancarlo in hand, but they were separated. Giancarlo was sent first to England, and then to Switzerland, to learn business, but could make nothing of it, and not much more of the philosophy of Benedetto Croce, which he studied at university. He fought through the First World War in the cavalry, and was employed afterwards in the Remounts department. In 1931 his old philosophy teacher became one of the handful of professors who protested against Fascism. He was dismissed, and appealed for help. Giancarlo remembered that Croce had taught that politics were a mere passion, not the right occupation for a thinking man, but did not like to let his teacher down. As a result he found himself under house-arrest at the cliff-like family palazzo in Florence. Most of the rooms were let out, but only very low rents, if any, are paid to a man in disgrace. He was obliged to tell Annunziata, the cook, that he had no ready money, by which he really meant that he seemed to have no money of any kind. Annunziata knew this, and told him that he ought to take good advice.

His younger brother was an uncommunicative man, with a wife who was not encouraged to talk either, and a silent little son. But there was a brother-in-law, a Monsignor Gondi who was at the Curia and knew everyone in Rome. Giancarlo consulted him, and Giuseppe Gondi went so far in compromising himself as to answer by post, though in general terms. ‘So far you have not been well advised. Pray and meditate constantly, and follow the traditions of your country and of the ancient nobility.’ Giancarlo thought over these words and their unspecified meaning for some months, and then followed the strongest tradition of nobility he could think of by marrying a wealthy American. But he had no acquisitive sense, and when war broke out once more she left him, an ageing father with a two-year-old daughter, and in the same precarious state as before.

How unfortunate that Maddalena, violently opposed to Mussolini and living in England, should have married a man who quite mistakenly thought she was a wealthy foreigner, and whose main interest lay in watching waterfowl and wading birds! However much thought one took, how could such a man be made happy? The turn their marriages took brought Giancarlo and his sister together again, or at least brought both of them to the apartment in the Piazza Limbo.

In appearance Maddalena had a meagreness which suggested that she might not be long for this world, although this was contradicted by her persistent good health. Her firmness Giancarlo would have appreciated if there had been any way of telling what she would be firm about next. Take the matter of the third and fourth fingers of her right hand. They were missing, having been taken off with a pair of sharp poultry-nippers by a thief sitting behind her on the 33 bus coming back from Bagno a Ripoli. The diamond ring given her by her English husband in their happier days was of course the object. The incident was not at all an unusual one, and the strong-minded Maddalena refused to make any kind of official complaint. She regarded the loss, she said, as a tax which all those who have something to be stolen must expect to pay. ‘Calculate in any given year to pay out one-fiftieth of your movable possessions,’ she said. On that principle, Giancarlo told her, she would lose one finger every five years. ‘How long do you intend to live?’

Chiara, coming and going from an English convent school, was distressed by her Aunt Mad. There was the matter of the Refuge for the Unwanted. The failure of old people to be happy tormented Auntie Mad. The rest of the population endures their company only on sufferance. No-one, even under religious obedience, enjoys being with the old for long periods — with one exception, however, babies, who are prepared to smile at anything even roughly in human shape. Why not, therefore, a Refuge where the old folk could wear out their days looking after homeless infants? The toothless would comfortably co-exist with the toothless. ‘But these ancients won’t be competent, they’ll forget which child is which.’ ‘At times, possibly.’ ‘They’ll drop them.’ ‘One child or two, perhaps, but what a sense of usefulness!’ In the confusion of the postwar, during the quarrelsome rebuilding of Florence, it was easy to do unusual things, even bribery was scarcely necessary. Pretty well all that she had left Maddalena spent on her foundation. It was in via Sansepolcro, and fortunately cost very little to run. The old women were all from the country. They were used to washing clothes in cold water, and scrubbing the floor with sand.

Giancarlo couldn’t remember what his sister had been like in their childhood. Remote though it was, she must, surely, have been like something, but never, he thought, like me.

Perhaps, at the moment, sitting in the second floor flat of the decrepit palazzo, in a salon full of marble statuary, as yellow as old teeth, but with a freshness in the light from the river only a street away, they were doing no more than talking things over, as others do. What distinguished them was their optimism. Even disagreements between them produced hope.

If Chiara was to marry this Doctor Rossi, where was the wedding lunch to be? They had thought, of course, of the Ricordanza. It was true that at any celebration there Annunziata would be an absolute nuisance. Insanely cautious, she insisted that any guests from Rome (with the exception of the Monsignore), or indeed from anywhere south of the Umbrian border, were likely to need watching. Before and after they left she counted the spoons in a raucous whisper. That had happened, for instance, when Giancarlo, with the idea of raising money on the property, had given a lunch party at the villa for some Roman bankers. But the scheme had been likely to fail in any case. Giancarlo was not the kind of person who ever made money. He should have applied himself harder to his business studies in Switzerland.

But then it turned out that Chiara didn’t, while deeply anxious not to distress anyone, want her wedding to be at the Ricordanza. ‘Where she used to play all morning!’ Mad exclaimed, ‘in the shadows of the lemon trees.’ It seemed, however, that Dr Rossi wasn’t in favour of it. But surely Chiara had a will of her own?

‘Of course she has,’ said Giancarlo. ‘That is why she is able to change her mind.’ And it became clear to them that Chiara wanted a country wedding. ‘That means the farm. I shall go out to Valsassina and talk to Cesare about it myself. He won’t know what’s going on, it won’t have occurred to him to ask. I shall go to Valsassina tomorrow.’