After Hannibal (18 page)

There had of course been another kind of knowledge in his father’s mind at the time and this too Ritter had not realized until years later. It was the knowledge possessed by the German military command in that March of 1944. Even while the mouth moved and the words came and the almond blossom stirred on the desk, his father must have known that the war was as good as lost. The breakout from Anzio was only a few weeks away. In little more than two months Kesselring had abandoned Rome without a fight. The German headquarters staff, including his father, had been transferred north to Milan and he and his mother, together with other dependents of serving officers, had been sent back home to Germany.

Within a year Germany had surrendered, the war in Europe was over. The family moved to Argentina, where his father had connections. Here Ritter had continued with his Italian and added Spanish to it. He showed an unusual aptitude for languages, not merely an understanding of grammar and syntax but an ear for pitch
and intonation and a natural mimetic faculty; even while still a schoolboy, he had understood that the way to knowledge of a language is through imitation of those whose native tongue it is, the gestures and modes of thought, that complex of habit and assumption that distinguishes one people from another.

They had not returned to Germany until 1953, when things had settled down. By then he was nineteen and virtually trilingual. It was this that had determined his choice of career, sent him to a school for interpreters at Heidelberg. A fortuitous accomplishment, seeming so natural to him as not to be much valued, except that it won praise. Certainly it had never been accompanied by any sense of esteem on his part for the profession itself, any sense that it was useful or contributed much to the well-being of his fellows. How could he have felt this, who had no belief even then in the power of words to convey truth? There had been the glamour of travel about it, that was all. He had taken what seemed the easy way but it had got harder and harder, until in the end it was no way at all.

He took refuge from this in a renewed sense of his father’s duplicity. Those resounding words had been no more than a cover for the rage of the defeated.
You must have known
, Ritter said to his father’s second face, the one where death showed already beneath the skin.

Blame and pity blended and became diffused among the stems of the canes, the beauty of their colors. These formed a subtle register of age, going from green through paling yellow to dark ivory and bone-white. To several were still attached the dead vine tendrils of some old cultivation, pale brown in color with a faint purplish tinge, hue of their death. They had curled around and clung and
died in this clinging, the ultimate expression of their being. Now they were hard and brittle, like thin bone, impossible to separate from the stem.

He continued to hack and clip at the tangle of growths that bound the canes. Many were beyond saving, they had rotted in this long embrace; others were permanently disabled, twisted out of shape. But the younger shoots, freed from the cables that held them, swayed upright with slow rustling sounds that seemed like gratitude or relief.

They were bordered lower down by a dense and ancient screen of bramble with stems in some cases thicker than their own, spiked with dark red thorns an inch long and needle-sharp. The stems had to be clipped away close to the ground and pulled out, difficult work this as they were meshed with other vegetation and interlaced among themselves. Ritter persisted, despite his aching back and the numbers of small black flies that came with evening and showed a persistent interest in the exposed parts of his skin. The sun had already set when he was brought up short by a sudden falling away of the ground, a hollow running almost at right angles into the slope of the ravine. It was still partly obscured by the last of the brambles; but when these were cleared away he found himself looking down into the sides of a cave with a narrow ledge at the entrance. There had been some fall of earth farther inside, but the roof, roughly a meter in height, was held up by the arching roots of a tree stump and these, smoothed and polished by age, had kept the opening free.

The cavity was natural but it had been enlarged. Walls had been hollowed out into the bankside. There was a small, square-shaped recess some way in, with a litter of fire-blackened stones. If
the fallen earth were cleared there would be a good two meters of sleeping space. It was clear to Ritter that he was looking at what had once been the den of a man.

“There is an irony in it,” Monti said, glancing around at the students assembled in his room. None of them looked as if they cared one way or another. The faces were turned to him, except that of the young man from Bologna, Millucci, who always kept his face turned away, as if reserving judgment; but they were quite unexpectant. “Yes, a strong element of irony,” he repeated.

At this one of the girls, Rosa Bellafante, made a brief entry in her notebook. Monti thought it probable that she had written just that one word, “irony.” “When you consider,” he said, “that Perugia throughout almost her entire history as an independent state, and particularly in the years of her greatness in the fourteenth century, was faithful to the Papacy, she was a consistently Guelph city, through all political vicissitudes, and this was the more remarkable in a period when warring factions and shifting alliances were the order of the day in the Central Italian States, when you consider this it seems ironical that she was to fall at last under a papal tyranny even more unjust and oppressive than the rule of the Baglioni family that had gone before.”

He paused on this, in the hope that some response not directly solicited by a question might be forthcoming. None came immediately and he was about to resume when the pale, quiet girl with beautiful legs, whose name he thought was Maria and who spoke
rather seldom, said, “I think it is only ironical, I mean it can only be called ironical, if the Republic of Perugia kept faith with the Papacy out of principle and not for selfish reasons.”

“Selfish reasons?” It was touching to Monti, this childlike phrase applied to a period characterized by the extremest forms of arrogance and self-seeking and ambition. All the same, there was a point there. “Yes,” he said, “I see what you mean. If it was purely a matter of expediency that kept Perugia on the papal side, she was simply paid back in her own coin when the time came. But I think it is a mistake to consider the matter on a moral plane. The policy of states then as now is dictated by considerations of power and commercial advantage. The language of morality is used to conceal this, but when we go into things we will generally find self-interest to be the determining factor.”

He hesitated for a moment and his mind shifted. When he spoke again it was in a tone less dispassionate. “If Perugia had acted out of pure devotion to the papal cause, then her subjection by the Papacy would go beyond irony, it would amount to the tragedy of betrayal.”

It seemed to him that his voice had faltered on this last word and he wondered if something in his face had changed. He had the impression that the students were looking at him oddly. The silence that followed was broken by Millucci, and for once Monti was glad of the intervention, though it was motivated as usual by the desire to undermine the discussion rather than contribute anything.

“I think the whole question of irony is beside the point,” Millucci said in his slightly nasal voice with its Bolognese inflections. “After all, the people involved did not think in those terms; they
were reacting to situations that we can only have an approximate idea of now. What is the point of using words that belong to us, not to them?”

“That is the great privilege of those that live after,” Monti said. “That is the vantage point that history confers on us. We lose immediacy but we gain perspective. We see connections not possible to see at the time. The sense of irony can only be cultivated in detachment.”

But Millucci was studying the wall again. “Take a look at Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
sometime,” Monti said. “You will see the uses that irony can be put to.” To mitigate the sharpness of this, he added quickly, “An eighteenth-century English scholar writing about ancient Rome, a period as remote to him in its manners and morals as the time before the Flood. Detachment could not be more complete and Gibbon makes brilliant use of it.”

He waited awhile but no one spoke. “Good,” he said, “let us take a particular series of events. Arbitrary, I know, but it can be helpful to see patterns. In June of 1424 Fortebraccio, Lord of Perugia, dies beneath the walls of L’Aquila. The people of Perugia hail his bastard son as the new lord. But the Pope of the day, Martin V, has other ideas. He is eager to reestablish the authority of the Church in Perugia. In Malatesta Baglioni he finds an instrument ready to his hand. You will remember Malatesta, the great expropriator and refurbisher of houses, he who tied his enemy to the tail of a horse and had him dragged through the streets of the town. Malatesta is not in a very good bargaining position at the moment, being in a papal prison. He realizes that the way to gain his liberty and keep his family in power is to make a pact with the Pope. He
persuades his fellow citizens to accept papal authority in exchange for the backing of the papal troops in case of trouble. And so it comes about. Perugia retains a nominal independence but she has lost her essential freedom and she will never regain it. From now on liberty under the Pope will be her highest ideal.

“Now let us jump seventy years or so. It is 1495. Malatesta is long dead but the Baglioni have gone from strength to strength, building their great houses on the Colle Landone, laying out orchards and gardens in their spacious grounds overlooking the
pianura umbra
. They were great people for houses, the Baglioni. I don’t know if any of you have thought further about the connections between houses and power in the history of the Baglioni family … No? Well, 1495 is a year of great triumph for them. They have succeeded in expelling their greatest rivals, the Oddi family. Their cause has been espoused by the Medici—there is work still to be done on the relations between the Medici and the Baglioni in the fifteenth century, perhaps a postgraduate thesis for somebody? The Medici use their influence with the Pope of the day, who confirms the outlawing of the Oddi by official decree. I wonder who took over their houses …”

He saw Millucci look toward him. “Yes,” he said, “I know it is speculation, there is no way now of unearthing these property deals. But speculation is one of the pleasures afforded us by the study of history. Like the exercise of irony, eh, Millucci?”

Quite unexpectedly, Millucci’s face broke into a smile, the first that Monti could remember seeing in any of these sessions. The others were smiling too, as if aware of some release of tension. Monti’s spirits rose. It mattered to him, as it always had, that he
should succeed with his students, succeed in sharing his enthusiasms. And he had thought he was failing with these.

“Well,” he said, “let us go to the third event in the series. It is May 1540, a half century later. Fifty years of Baglioni misrule and civil disorder and incessant quarreling with the Papacy. But the Pope now is Paul III, a very different man from either of the two others we have mentioned today. He is far-seeing, relentless, constantly in need of funds. He wants total power in Perugia and he knows that this is not possible without first destroying the Baglioni. He is not really interested in doing deals with the family, though he may at first pretend to be. He is interested in getting rid of them altogether. He is helped in typical fashion by the family itself: six years earlier Ridolfo Baglioni and some of his people have waylaid the Papal Vice-Legate and stabbed him to death in the street.

“Paul III bides his time. Early in 1540 he publishes a bull increasing the price of salt by three quattrini a pound. The people of Perugia, suffering from a series of bad harvests, rise in revolt. Paul sends his troops in. The Baglioni attempt resistance but they are easily defeated. By the end of May it is all over; the city has capitulated.”

Monti paused a moment for dramatic effect, looking straight before him. “Three events then, and three popes. Covering a hundred and twenty years. There is a kind of pattern in it, or so it seems to me, and I would like you to think about this before our next meeting and try to decide how far it is a typical pattern, how far it expresses the nature of the period considered as a whole. Who lives by the sword perishes by the sword, so the saying goes. Certainly the Baglioni made good soldiers for generation after generation—it was
perhaps their only virtue. But they lived by intrigue and extortion and these were the weapons Pope Paul III used to destroy them.”

In speaking he had felt some self-mockery at his own rhetoric; but he had caught the students’ interest, he could see it from the faces. Something had happened in the course of this session; there had been a shift toward sympathy, the recognition of shared endeavor, something difficult to define but definite, irreversible. “One last thing,” he said. “And it forms part of that symbolism of property we were discussing. Perugia surrendered to the papal forces at the beginning of June 1540. One of the first things their new master did was to appoint demolition experts. Within a month the towers and turrets of the Baglioni were falling, their splendid palaces were being razed to the ground. On this prime site, the finest in the city, a single gigantic building rose, the Pauline Fortress, named after the new Lord of Perugia. It was destined to hold the city in subjection for three centuries to come.”