On Loving Josiah (26 page)

‘But we need another bed!’ insisted the signora, looking at Thomas accusingly.

‘I just had a bit of rush matting when I was here last. Simplicity suits me, Signora, don’t mind me.’

‘But you are happier now,’ observed the signora, as though luxury was a thing that happier people required.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your marriage was finished, no? You were a sad man.’

Thomas laughed, or tried to, at least. ‘Yes, I suppose I was,’ he said.

If Thomas was supposedly happier, the signora was sadder than he remembered. Six years ago there had been a houseful of children in their early teens; there would have been a great cauldron of soup
on the stove and a smell of home-made bread. But the children had grown and found work elsewhere, and the signora was older and fatter and yes, sadder. The first time Thomas had been to this house the signora had been singing over her sink, washing lettuces; a glass of wine and a bowl of olives had been his within moments. But now there was an awkwardness between them, as if they were made of different stuff.

When Signor Scroppo walked in a few minutes later, Josiah thought him quite ridiculous. He had a large moustachioed pink face, and black, greased-back hair; in fact, a good deal blacker than the last time Thomas had seen him, and his braces were decorated with cartoon characters, which is what he seemed to have become. How many times had they spent the evening together, was it twice? In his mind’s eye there were a thousand such evenings, there was food and wine in abundance, they were the refuge from the world; they were, above all, the people who had happily lent him their chapel for a couple of months after coming across it on a solitary walk. But today, who were they, these people?

If the Signora had ignored Josiah, Signor Scroppo more than
compensated
for her. In fact, for the hour and a half they were together, Signor Scroppo’s eyes rarely left him. While they ate home-made pate and bread, a tomato and onion salad and a plate of sliced pears, his wife introduced the boy as ‘Mr Thomas’s friend’, and when the sensitive Thomas reiterated, ‘My nephew, Josiah’, Signor Scroppo laughed and said, ‘Let us call the boy Guiseppe, shall we? He is a fine-looking boy, Thomas.’ And Signor Scroppo had shot him a look as if to say, ‘Well done!’

Josiah said not a word throughout the meal; Thomas’ interjections were limited to ‘Not for me!’ ‘Please don’t bother on my behalf!’ and several ‘No thank you’s – for where is an appetite to come from when your host and hostess are bickering, in Italian, about whether one bed will be sufficient for the pair of them? By the end, Thomas and
Josiah were more than happy to accept their gift of a bag of pears and a bottle of wine and be sent on their way.

The weight of their bags and the heat of the sun dried up
whatever
conversation they might have had. Thomas would have said, because he kept thinking it, that the landscape was as perfect as the backdrop for a Madonna and child: tall dark poplars on the hill ridge, winding streams falling downward amidst outcrops of rock, pale blue in the early evening light; and the grass so green, so untrodden, so fed by the water running through it. But Thomas kept his thoughts to himself, conscious that the sudden sound of his voice would seem harsh and unnecessary when he so wanted Josiah to hear every murmur that the valley could offer him.

‘We’ve arrived,’ said Thomas.

‘It’s good,’ said Josiah.

‘Simple, but lovely in its way.’

‘It’s how I imagined it.’

‘It would have had a bell once.’

‘Perhaps the Scroppos took it.’

Thomas laughed. ‘You know you might be right. Make yourself at home, Josiah. There’s no lock on the door. Or never used to be.’

The chapel consisted of a single, rectangular room. Its walls were newly whitewashed with lime, and the paint smelt faintly
sulphurous
; its floor was made of large slabs of stone, surprisingly worn,
suggesting
that at one time the chapel was well-used. At the head of it, underneath its only window, was a small painting of the Virgin Mary dressed in blue, her eyes questioning, and her head bent slightly to one side as if she were listening to their answers.

The bed was unremittingly single.

‘That’s where you’re sleeping,’ said Thomas.

‘And you?’ There was no matting. There weren’t even any extra blankets.

‘Don’t worry about me, Josiah.’

And Josiah didn’t, because he knew there’d be no need.

‘Let’s unpack,’ said Thomas.

Josiah laughed. ‘Where do we put our clothes, Tom?’

‘I suppose we’ll just keep them in our bags. Here look, I’ve brought our first supper. Light, but nutritious.’ Thomas unzipped his rucksack and laid out on the bed a few provisions from
Sainsbury
’s: biscuits, tea-bags, ready-sliced cheese, marmite and a pack of Knorr’s vegetable soup.

Josiah was neither surprised nor grateful. ‘Isn’t it about time we opened that bottle of wine?’ he said.

‘Unfortunately we don’t have a corkscrew,’ said Thomas, oddly relieved.

‘And fortunately, it has a screw top.’

‘Well then, I have tin mugs. We must celebrate!’ But Thomas’s voice was half-hearted, and tired, too. He couldn’t deny a
fifteen-year
-old boy a glass of wine. Thomas delved once more into his rucksack and found the tin mugs, and a small gas stove, too, and said, ‘I hope you’re impressed. There’s a whole kitchen in here you know.’ And while he proceeded to take out tin plates, bowls, cutlery and even a saucepan, Josiah opened the bottle of wine and poured it into the mugs, taking a swig from one of them more or less immediately.

‘To the holiday!’ toasted Josiah.

‘To the holiday!’ attempted Thomas, anxiously.

By now it was six in the evening, and the heat of the day had finally receded. They sat with their backs against the still warm chapel walls, watching the reddening sun and aware, at last, of a cooler breeze. A herd of goats with bells round their necks grazed nearby; the rushing of a hill stream broke the silence.

‘
Fortunatus est ille deos qui novit agrestis
,’ said Thomas. Josiah wasn’t interested, so Thomas translated. ‘Happy is he who knows the gods of the country.’

‘I’m too tired for Latin,’ confessed Josiah unapologetically. He was holding his empty cup between his knees.

‘Did you notice the green earthenware jug?’ asked Thomas.

‘No,’ said Josiah, ‘Should I have?’

‘It was here last time I came here. I used it to get water. I imagine we’ll be using it again.’

‘Well get it, then. And bring out the wine, too,’ said Josiah.

Thomas did as he was told, and he filled Josiah’s cup half way. Josiah shot him an angry glance. ‘More,’ he said.

‘Do I sound like an uncle if I recommend diluting that wine?’

‘Yes, you do,’ said Josiah seriously. ‘Listen, I’ve had wine before. I like it, it’s good.’

‘Well, all right. But then we put the rest away till tomorrow, right?’

‘Uncle, I don’t like your tone.’ Josiah was merciless, and he downed the wine in one.

‘I don’t like yours,’ said Thomas, taking the empty cup from him.

For a minute or two they both sat shocked and silent, backs against the chapel wall, eyes locked on some distant vista.

Then Thomas said, ‘It’s getting dark. I’m going to get water.’ He picked up the jug and set off purposefully down the hill. Josiah ran after him.

‘You were going off without me,’ he said.

‘I was,’ said Thomas, without looking back.

‘I want to swim.’

‘You can’t. The water’s not deep enough.’

‘Surely you found a pool when you were here.’

‘It’s a mile away.’

‘So what’s stopping us? I need to be purified. It’s still the first of August, Tom. It’s still the beginning. That’s what rites are for, the shedding of an old skin, living again in a new.’

That was as good an apology as Thomas had ever heard, so he fell into the trap.

Thomas filled the jug at the stream and left it on the bank. Without saying a word, they both walked on upstream into the sunset. Neither even exclaimed at the strange noises in the valley, the scratchings and moans of night animals beginning to stir. Josiah was plotting his performance: or rather, devising his very own
purification
ceremony. He was going to invite Thomas to join him; but of course Thomas would say no, because he was far too virtuous. And anyway, if they were to swim together, any purification ritual would be made a mockery of. So Josiah was smiling to himself, calm and happy, ready for his nakedness. So ready that he was taking off his clothes before Thomas could say something like ‘We’ve arrived!’ or ‘Watch out, the water’s cold!’

Thomas pretended, even to himself, that he didn’t notice. What is a body, after all? A body can be analysed away in a trice: this one was regular, slender and smooth; this one was healthy and young. That’s all!

Josiah stood there naked on the shore, with his arms above his head as though he were about to dive in; but no, the pleasure would be over too soon. So he looked back over his shoulder and called out, ‘So aren’t you going to purify me? Isn’t there a god you’d like to dedicate me to?’

‘Whom would you like to be dedicated to?’

‘To my Uncle Zeus, what do you think?’

‘And you are?’

‘I’m Ganymede, of course, I’m your cup bearer. And I shall be a better cup bearer than you turned out to be.’

Thomas laughed nervously.

‘The gods are all here tonight, can’t you feel them, Thomas? Can’t you feel them watching us? What should I say to them?’

‘You could say,
Euoi
!
Euoi!
That was how they would summon Dionysus.
Euoi
!
Euoi
!’ And those words began to sweep Thomas along.

So Josiah thrust his arms over his head and looked up into the darkening sky and shouted out, ‘
Euoi
!
Euoi
!’ Then he put his arms back by his sides and said, seriously, ‘Now, I want to make a sacrifice.’

‘A sacrifice?’

‘Yes, my noble Lord. Because to sacrifice means to give, doesn’t it? No, it’s more than that. I want to make amends, I want to balance things again, I want everything to be
right.
So I’m going to make a sacrifice.’

‘But what of? There are no rams lurking in the thicket, dear Josiah.’

‘I’m sacrificing my own body, Uncle Zeus, it’s all I have.’

And with those words the water welcomed Josiah into it, all the way up to his chest, rising up to meet his arms splayed over its surface. Then all at once Josiah’s body seemed to give way, and he sank down into its cleanness and let it wash him, running over his body and his hair and forcing his eyes shut.

Thomas began calling him from the bank: twenty seconds seemed an eternity as he watched the boy’s shadow in the water, looking for movement or evidence of struggle, or some sign which would tell him how to act. Perhaps the cold and the wine had made him pass out. He seemed so serene, so still, it crossed Thomas’ mind that he was already dead.

Josiah was no fool, he knew what he was doing. They talk about relief being ‘palpable’ – which means, literally, ‘that which can be explored by touch’: and the relief which Thomas felt when he saw Josiah’s head emerging from the water lasted well into the night. For the shivering body walking back to the chapel needed an arm about him, there were no two ways about it, and once inside the chapel an arm wasn’t enough, by any stretch. They slept, wrapped up in each other, in a bed made for one.

THE NEXT MORNING
the fact that the two had slept in one
another
’s arms was never referred to by either of them; both knew better than to turn into language something as innocent and loving, as giving and as needy, as the embrace they fell into that night. And to those of you that wonder, were they naked? Did they touch each other in
that
way – because that’s all any of you are interested in; the answer is no on both counts. Nonetheless, touch reigned absolute, touch was what it was all about, skin on skin mattered like two stray souls becoming one.

Thomas was the first to get up; he felt no shame. He pulled the blankets back over Josiah and watched the sunlight flickering over his eyelids, incorporating itself into a dream. A dream of angels, he thought, tenderly.

Once outside, Thomas set to business. The air was cool,
invigorating
: it was still only seven o’clock; six, English time. He went down to the stream to fetch the jug of water, set up his little camping stove and aluminium kettle on a rock nearby, and found the
teabags
. They hadn’t eaten the night before, and Thomas found himself ravenously hungry, wolfing down slices of cheese and two or three pears to boot. After all, there was no point in waiting for Josiah to wake up – didn’t teenagers sleep all morning? There was no hurry! For what pleasure there was to be had in maps, in drinking tea in a sweet-smelling valley in Tuscany with a spread-out large-scale map in front of you, and every square inch brimming with promise?

Josiah was to sleep till eleven that morning; if he hadn’t, the
country gods might have won, and a rural idyll worthy of Virgilian shepherd-boys might have been the theme of their month together. But after a couple of hours with his map, Thomas sought his Blue Guide to Florence and Siena, and a different kind of excitement overwhelmed him. For yes, in the beginning there was Nature, but what Man does with that beginning is surely even more awe-
inspiring
, and it was his duty, yes, as his teacher, to lead his pupil into the realms of Culture.

So by the time Josiah was awake, Thomas’ mind was made up. That first day they would walk to the nearest village, pick up a bus timetable and shop for food; they might even spend the afternoon swimming in the pool together – for how happy Thomas was, in every aspect of their friendship! – and then, early the next morning, Josiah’s cultural education would begin.

That day, Thomas dutifully roused Josiah’s interest; on their walk to and from the village, while Josiah kicked rocks and skimmed flat stones across the surface of the widening stream, Thomas told him how Siena had prospered in medieval times, and had more or less ignored the Renaissance altogether.

‘I should think,’ said Thomas, ‘that it’s probably the most perfect medieval city on this earth.’

‘What’s the Renaissance?’ asked Josiah.

‘Haven’t you learnt about the Renaissance at school?’

‘Nope,’ said Josiah. He was watching a dragon-fly come into land on a rock in the middle of the stream, and was wondering what on earth could have induced it to have landed
there
, in such a
precarious
place, its wiry legs struggling to attach themselves to the slimy greenness. He told Thomas to hold on a minute while he took the role of rescuer, but it all took more than a minute, and the
charming
sight of Josiah balancing on rocks in the spray to save a
beleaguered
dragon-fly, who would probably have managed perfectly well without him, irritated rather than enchanted his educator.

‘Now, the Renaissance! This was the period when Western Europe said
yes
! to Civilization.’

‘I wish no one had ever said ‘yes’ to civilization. I don’t want to be civilized. I want to stretch out my arms for all I’m worth and have no one tell me
ever
that they’re stretched too far. Anyway, luckily Siena was built before civilization got a grip, is that right?’

‘Four large volumes could be written on that little speech, Josiah. Human beings are complicated. Man does not live on bread alone. First we are the animal, responding to nature; but we have large brains, and we make life easier for ourselves – we farm, we build houses, we live in communities – and that’s why we have to make rules for ourselves, and we have to obey them, for the good of
everyone
. Socrates was sentenced to death, accused of corrupting youth. His friends begged him to escape, but no, he drank his hemlock. The laws were bigger than he was. He never said, “Hey! I’ve been unjustly treated, I’m getting out of here!” And even now we’re struck by what he did, there’s a nobility about it, don’t you think?’

‘Not really. Some laws are good, some bad. I don’t think we should obey bad laws.’

‘There is a justice above justice, Josiah, and that justice would have us obey laws which were not perfectly just. I think Socrates was right. What if a poor man stole from a rich man and his defence in court was that he was obeying “a higher justice than the justice of the land?” He might even be right, in an absolute sense, but that’s irrelevant. Josiah, there’d be anarchy. Imagine in a court of law: was this man acting out of greed? Or because he had intuited an absolute of right? No one can see inside us, no one knows our motives, quite often we don’t even know our own.’

‘Do you believe in justice, then?’

‘Even you will, after your visit to Siena. Siena believed in justice, Josiah. What’s remarkable about Siena is that it seemed to spring from the very souls of the Siennese. In Florence you have a classical idea
let loose upon it. It was the vision of an elite, those who had money and power. Siena is more like classical Athens, essentially democratic, whose true ruler was Virtue enthroned, and recognized by all.’

‘I’m hot. I’m going to lie down in the stream,’ Josiah announced suddenly.

‘What, here?’

‘Yes, right here. Don’t worry, it’s only six inches deep here, I won’t drown.’ Josiah took off his trainers and lay down fully clothed on the sandy bed of the stream. He closed his eyes and felt the cold water gliding over him.

‘That feels so good. Come and lie next to me, Thomas.’

And Thomas thought, ‘Why the hell shouldn’t I?’ And he did.

Their clothes were still damp when they reached the village of Buonconto. It was three in the afternoon, hot and dry, the old pale stone dazzling in contrast to the rich dark green of the valleys which surrounded it. Its one shop was still shut, so they sat at a table in the square with the sun on their backs and Thomas ordered two bottles of beer from the local trattoria.

‘Due birre per favore,
’ he said in his best Italian to the squat old lady in a black dress and shawl.

‘
Bene,
’ she muttered and went to fetch them.

They drank their beers; Josiah said he wasn’t surprised that there wasn’t a god of beer because it was bitter stuff. He, like the, gods preferred wine. Thomas said that when he was fifteen he wouldn’t have been seen dead with a glass of wine, it was considered bourgeois and wet. Then a bus on its way to Siena stopped right by them and Thomas found out from its driver that the only other daily bus left at nine in the morning.

‘We’re going to be getting up early this week,’ he said.

The shop was tiny but half of it was devoted to fresh cheeses and dried hams; and the two sat on its steps eating large wedges of gorgonzola before setting off home with two large bags of supplies.
In the evening, which was to become a regular fixture of their day, Thomas read Josiah passages from Dante’s
Inferno
, or they translated
The Aeneid
together. Their desire was stilled, even somehow satisfied. They were tired, fulfilled, happy, and they both thought there were no more questions to be asked, now they knew how to share a bed.

By the time they were on the bus the following day Josiah knew these things about Siena: that it was built on three hills, and that farmland still came right up to the city walls, and that its geography was so integral to it that walking down one street you might just glimpse another a half a mile away running up another hill. He knew about the Council of Nine Good Men, men chosen to be ‘
Defenders
of the Commune and the People of Siena’ in the fourteenth century, and men chosen, quite literally, on account of their
goodness
– proved first and foremost by their having been fair and kind employers, whether they were bankers, spice-dealers or goldsmiths. If you were from the nobility or were a judge, you had no chance, too many vested interests, you couldn’t even put your name forward as a candidate. Siena’s rulers must come
del
mezzo
– from the common people – they must be
ordinary
: and with an extraordinary level of trust invested in them, the Nine Good Men were able to transform Siena. They had ideals, they had passion, they really believed they could make things better. They broadened the main streets, they gave instructions to the citizens on how they should build their houses, and above all they commissioned artists, not just for the pleasure of the elite, but for everyone. They built the Palazzo Publico in the main square, and its bell tower, the Torre del Mangia, perhaps the most famous landmark of Siena, and from the top of which the beauty of the city can be held in the palm of a hand.

Thomas proved a good guide, Josiah a good and curious tourist. On that first morning they walked up to the Duomo, the cathedral on the summit of the Castelvecchio, resplendent in dark green, pink and white marble.

‘It took nearly two hundred years to build,’ said Thomas, ‘and every Sienese artist and craftsman of any distinction worked on it. The citizens themselves oversaw the project at first, but when the Nine Good Men were in power, their plans for it grew even more ambitious – the whole of the Duomo would be a mere transept of a cathedral which would outdo in magnificence Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence, which funnily enough had been built to rival this Duomo – there was no end of these Tuscans vying with each other. But the Black Death put a stop to those plans, probably rightly so, in my opinion. I’ve never asked you if you’re religious at all?’

Josiah said, ‘My mother baptized me in Polish vodka. I was about three when she told me. She told me it was very special stuff for special boys. Of course I didn’t have a clue what vodka was, I thought it was a Polish word, I thought it was something very mysterious you could only find far away.’

‘How old were you when you knew the truth?’

‘I was quite old, eleven or twelve, the residents of
The
Hollies don’t go in for vodka much. Even so many years on, I felt hugely betrayed by her, like I was a butt of her joke. My father was the good, consistent, reliable one, he was the grown-up.’ Josiah paused. ‘You wouldn’t think that now, would you? How could they let him get so fat in there? He was never fat like that.’

‘He’s ill, Josiah.’

‘No he’s not. He’s just sad. Sometimes I think I make him even sadder. Perhaps he felt better when he had forgotten all about me.’

‘He wouldn’t have forgotten you, ever.’

‘Probably not,’ mused Josiah.

‘Do you know what happened to your mother?’

Josiah shook his head.

‘She’s not dead then.’

‘She might be.’

‘Perhaps one day she’ll just turn up.’

Josiah shrugged, as though it didn’t matter whether she did or not.

On the road up to the Duomo they passed the strange,
separate
inhabitants of the late twentieth century world. There were middle-aged women in shorts with bulging stomachs under white tee-shirts; there were babies in sunglasses lolling in their high-tech, fat-wheeled pushchairs; whining children complaining in a half a dozen languages; sullen, sweating fathers cajoling them, present in body, and absent in mind. There were Americans buying postcards, photo-shoots when faces momentarily lit up; Siennese shop-
keepers
looking anxiously for trade. A particular eager one approached Josiah and Thomas with a basketful of flags, and on every one a
different
animal, perhaps a goose, dragon or giraffe.

‘Go on,’ said Thomas, ‘I’ll buy you one.’

‘Palio, Palio,’ said the shopkeeper.

‘Si, si, Palio,’ said Thomas wisely, and looking to Josiah, he said, ‘On the sixteenth of August we’ll be coming to the Palio, the greatest and the oldest horserace in Western Europe.’

‘Is there a racecourse round here?’

‘The racecourse is the town. Siena is everything,’ said Thomas proudly, as though he’d been born there.

Josiah had chosen a flag with a black eagle splayed across it. He was waving it as happily as if he were a boy of six.

‘Now,’ said Thomas, ‘there are, and always have been, seventeen
contradas
in Siena. Think of them as electoral wards. No, don’t think of them as something so banal! Each has a different animal and a different colour, and in the Palio every horse is decked out in its
contrada’s
insignia, and ridden bareback round the Campo. We can’t miss it, Josiah. You’ll remember the sight forever.’

‘I’m sure I will,’ said Josiah absent-mindedly.

They’d nearly reached the Duomo, and they squinted in the
sunlight
to admire it in its entirety.

‘Do you think the people who built this amazing thing were building it for God?’ asked Josiah.

‘They all believed in God in those days, and they took it as a given that everyone they met would be a fellow-Christian. There was no soul-searching, no new-age stuff, no pick-and-mix religion. When the great Siennese artist Duccio completed his
Maesta,
which means ‘majesty’, Josiah, and always depicts the Virgin Mary and her worshippers, there was no one who questioned that its rightful place was above the high altar in the Duomo. And the night they carried it there, every single inhabitant of Siena, every man, woman and child carried burning tapers and processed around the Campo, and all the bells of Siena pealed the
Gloria.
They would have walked right up this street, as we are, and they’d be carrying the insignia of their
contrade
, perhaps they would have been waving flags like yours, and all the while they would be offering prayers and giving alms to the poor. Why did we ever have to become
individuals
, Josiah? Did we ever realise it would be such a curse?’