The American (36 page)

Yet I am not so easily fooled. I am more experienced in the protection of self, of privacy.

‘I am not afraid.’

‘You are brave, yes. But you are afraid. To be afraid is not bad. You can still be like a hero as well as afraid.’

I do not open my eyes. To do so would be to give credence to her accusation, her astute observation.

‘I assure you I have nothing to be afraid of.’

She raises herself from the blanket and leans upon her elbow, her head resting in her hand. With her other hand she traces the lines of perspiration on my back.

‘You are. I know it. You are like the butterfly they call you. Always afraid. Moving from one flower to another flower.’

‘I have only one flower in my garden,’ I declare and immediately regret it.

‘Maybe this is so, but you are afraid.’

She speaks with finality, as if she knows the truth.

‘Of what am I afraid?’

She does not know: she makes no answer. Instead she lies back on the blanket and closes her eyes, the sun making tiny shadows of her breasts.

‘Of love,’ she says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are afraid of love.’

I consider her accusation.

‘Love is complicated, Clara. I am not a young, romantic buck in the Corso Federico II, eyeing the girls, a marriage and a mistress on the horizon. I am an old man getting older, drawing towards death slowly, like a caterpillar to the end of its leaf.’

‘You will live long yet. And the caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Love can do this.’

‘I have lived many years without love,’ I tell her. ‘All of my life. I have had relationships with women, but not ones of love. Love is dangerous. Without love, life is tranquil and safe.’

‘And dull-ard!’

‘Perhaps.’

She sits up now, hunching her knees to her chin and hugging her legs. I turn over, open my eyes and watch as the sweat on her shoulders forms into droplets. I should like to kiss them from her.

‘But it has not been dull with you, Clara.’

Her shoulders shrug. The sweat starts its journey down her spine.

‘If love is dangerous for you, then you are afraid. Danger makes afraid.’

I sit up next to her and put my hand on her shoulder. Her skin is hot.

‘Clara. This has nothing to do with you. I promise. You are sweet and very pretty and innocent . . .’

‘Innocent!’ She laughs ironically. ‘I am a lady of the Via Lampedusa.’

‘You are but a traveller through there. You are not Elena or Marine or Rachele. You are not Dindina just waiting for a better time to come along. You are there because . . .’

‘I know why. I need money for my studies.’

‘Exactly!’

‘Also, I need love.’

For a moment I think she means sex, but then know this is not the case. She is a young woman who wants a man to love, to love her. The cruelty of fate has given her to me, an old man with a price upon his head and a shadow-dweller pacing in his footsteps.

‘You have love.’

‘Yes?’

‘I love you, Clara.’

I have not admitted this before: not to Ingrid, not to anyone, not even in order to get what I may have wanted. She is correct. I am afraid of love not only because it is a lowering of the defences, a risk to my security, but also because it places a certain moral obligation upon me, and I have never been one to accept any responsibility save that for myself and the efficiency of my work. I have, sitting in this paradise, to agree there is a point to Father Benedetto’s diatribe on love. He, too, is right. I need it after years of telling myself it was irrelevant. The irony of finding it now, when life is so uncertain, stabs into me.

‘And I love you, Edmundo.’

I am aware that I have been manoeuvred on to heavy matters, and stand up, stretching. The sun seems to have shrunk me. As I flex myself, I feel my skin tighten like a jacket grown too small.

From the back of the Citroën, I remove the rattan basket.

‘We can eat.’

She tugs the blanket into the shade and I open the basket. There is not a lot of food within: some prosciutto, bread, olives. In the polystyrene vintner’s cool box is a bottle of Moët et Chandon and two dozen strawberries in an aluminium container. Beneath it is a small package wrapped in a plastic bag.

‘You have champagne!’

I think of what Father Benedetto might say if he saw me sitting stark naked by a beautiful young nude in the woods, with a French sparkling wine.

She takes the bottle and peels the foil off, tossing it into the basket. Deftly, she untwists the wire and thumbs the cork out. It pops and soars away into the grass. The champagne runs out of the bottle and she holds it so the spillage trickles over her breasts. She sucks her breath in as the chill runs down her.

I hand her the package. It is cold from resting next to the champagne and ice.

‘This is for you.’

‘What is this?’ she asks, intrigued and unfolding the plastic.

‘Your escape. No more Via Lampedusa.’

She takes out the money and looks fixedly at it in her hand. It is the proceeds of the bank draft, a bundle of American bills tied round with rubber bands.

‘Twenty-five thousand US dollars. In hundreds.’

Tears begin to form on her eyelashes. She places the money on the blanket, very carefully as if it were fragile, and turns to face me.

‘How can you have so much?’ she asks. ‘You are a poor man, a painter . . .’

She needs an explanation but I do not feel I require to give her one.

‘Do not ask.’

‘Have you . . . ?’

Her question is unformed, yet I know what she thinks.

‘No. It is not stolen. I have not robbed a bank. It was earned.’

‘But so much . . .’

‘Tell no one,’ I advise her. ‘If you put it in a bank, you will be taxed. People will know. Better to be silent and use it.’

She nods. She is Italian. Such advice is a reminder, not an instruction. For her, this sum of money is a yacht over twenty metres long.

The tears are slipping down her cheeks and her breath is coming in small jerks, as if she has just run up from the lake. I realize she wears no make-up, is naturally quite exquisitely beautiful, and I am embarrassed by her beauty and crying.

‘There is no need for this.’

I wipe away her tears with my finger, smudging them. Very slowly, she puts her hand to my face and cradles my jaw in her fingers. Her eyes are wet with more tears but her breathing is steadier. She leans forward and kisses me so lightly I hardly feel it. There is nothing she has to say to me and, besides, she has no words.

Pouring the champagne into two plastic glasses, I give one to her, adding a strawberry to it. She sips it and the tears stop coming.

‘No more talk of love,’ I demand quietly. ‘Just drink and enjoy the valley.’

I wave my glass in the air and cover the whole of the valley with the motion. She looks down the meadow of flowers to the lake. The heron has returned to angle for the tiny fish, and the shadows under the trees are deepening as the afternoon progresses. I follow her gaze, but my attention is taken by the pile of stones covered in ground creeper. I can visualize upon it the silhouette of the target. The butterflies dancing in the air are shards of cardboard.

I open the door to the courtyard. Signora Prasca has left a dim bulb glowing at the foot of the stairs. The water in the fountain drips noisily in the night.

I hold Clara’s hand and press my finger to my lips. Barefoot, we climb the stairs, the stone steps almost painfully cold under our soles where water has leaked from the broken gutter: it must have rained in the valley while we were in the mountains. I unlock the door to my apartment and lead her in, quietly closing the door behind me and switching on a table lamp.

‘So! You are here. This is my home. Will you have a drink? There is wine or beer.’

She does not respond to my invitation but gazes about her. I think of my customer who was studying the room for safety’s sake. Clara observes it with curiosity. She looks at the paintings on the wall.

‘Did you paint these?’ she enquires incredulously.

‘No. I bought them.’

‘That is good. You are much better than this.’

She crosses to the bookshelves and tips her head slightly to one side to read the titles.

‘You may take – borrow – any you wish. I do not read a great deal.’

She moves to the table, looking at the paintings lying there, mostly those of the swallowtail. She bends to look more closely at them.

‘This is best. You should not have ugly pictures on your wall. Only more beautiful.’

I step to her side, pick the paintings up and tap them into a neat pile. There are perhaps two dozen.

‘These I want you to have. They are not for sale or to be sent away. They are for you. To put in your place. To remind you of the valley.’

I push the pictures carefully into a large envelope and she takes them and looks at them much as she did at the wad of dollar bills.

‘
Grazie
,’ she murmurs, ‘
molto grazie, tesoro mio
,’ and puts the envelope delicately on the table. She goes to the window where she stands with her back towards me, looking out across the valley now bathed in the thin, miserly light of a new moon.

After watching her for some moments I go out to the kitchen and return with two glasses of Frascati, one of which I give her and, once again, take hold of her hand.

‘
Salute
, Clara.’

‘
Evviva!
’ she replies, almost solemnly, and, letting go of my hand, returns to the table.

‘I wish to live here. With you,’ she states bluntly. ‘I wish to live here, and care for you.’

I do not reply. It is too painful, suddenly. Her wish is now my wish and I dearly want this to be the future, she a part of it.

Yet the damn shadow-dweller, who will not act, prevents it. If only he would say his piece, make his move, matters might be ironed out. If he wants to blackmail me, let him: I will pay. Then I shall follow him and kill him. It will look like an accident, like a suicide.

I cannot, at this moment, take Clara across the border between the present and the future, regardless of how much I want to. I have chosen the game and have set the rules by which I have lived and I cannot bend them, cannot deviate from them, have nothing with which to bribe the Fates. I am caught like Faustus in a snare of my own device.

‘Come with me,’ I say at length.

She motions to put her glass on the table.

‘Bring your glass.’

Perhaps Signora Prasca was right. I should share the loggia with someone. I guide Clara along the passageway, past the first bedroom. She glances in and stops me, taking me backwards.

‘No. Not now. There will be time . . .’

It is a lie. I am trapped by circumstance and there is, I realize as I look at her face in the moonlight, no alternative to the future. It is as immutable as the past, as fixed and predictable as the sunrise.

‘You live very . . .
Vita spartana
.’

I look at the roughly made bed, the cane-seated chair and the pine chest of drawers. The room is somehow ominous in the sparse moonlight filtering through the shutter slats.

‘Yes. I am not a man for frills.’

‘But the bed is big for us. Just two now.’

‘Come with me,’ I repeat and together we go up the short flight of steps to the loggia.

She stands by the wrought-iron table and looks about her. The town is still a little noisy. It is not yet eleven o’clock and cars are moving in the chasms of the narrow streets, lights still on in some of the distant houses. Yet there is no sound of music, or human voices.

‘You can view all the valley from here. When it has rained in the morning and the sun is going down, there is nothing you cannot see – the castle, the foothills and the mountains, the villages. Almost as far as,’ I pause but it cannot be avoided now: the sentence is made in my head and she knows how it will go, ‘our valley.’

She looks up at the painted sky inside the dome, faintly illuminated, with the gold stars glinting.

‘Did you draw the sky?’

‘No. It is hundreds of years old.’

‘Here,’ she replies, ‘we are hundreds of years old.’

Then through the night come the liquid strains of the flautist’s instrument from up the hill by the church, at the head of the marble steps. The melancholy of his music drifts not as if it comes from the piazza before the church of S Silvestro, but from the bleak caverns of a long-forgotten past. He is not a street musician now but a minstrel playing in the courts of time, a magician whose melody can weave spells of curiosity and stop the clock.

Clara kisses me and whispers she wants to make love, but I deter her. It is late, my back is sunburned, I say. We have made love twice today, I go on, once in the water and again after the champagne, her breasts sticky with wine. I warn her tomorrow she has classes to attend. Another time. And so she sips her wine and leaves her glass upon the iron table. We go down the steps, along the passageway, through the sitting room and out of the door. She almost forgets her paintings and I have to remind her. She is reluctant. She can always see them here, she says, but I insist. I walk her as far as the Piazza del Duomo, her carrier bag swinging in her hand and holding my pictures and her future.

‘When shall I see you?’

‘Saturday.’

‘How will you call . . . ?’

‘Can you find your way to my apartment?’

Her smile is radiant. She believes she has broken down my door, entered my defences, bridged the moat of my privacy.

‘Yes,’ she answers emphatically.

‘Good. Ten o’clock.’

She kisses me very lightly on my lips.

‘
Buona notte, il Signor Edmund Farfalla
.’

‘Good night, Clara, my dear,’ I say, and I watch as she walks away, her step light and young and carefree. At the corner of the Via Roviano she turns left, waving once as she disappears.

*

The sunlight was shining in the window as I was wakened by Signora Prasca tapping politely upon the door and gently calling my name. I struggled to sit upright, for my back ached and my eyes were sore from tiredness. I had nodded off on one of the settles in the living room and had slept uneasily, twisting this way and that and cricking my spine. My head was clear, however: I am careful never to imbibe too much. I looked at my wristwatch. It was just after nine o’clock. I had not slept in this late for many years and wondered if this was the pattern of retired folk.