The American (20 page)

She sees me, nods to her friend and they cross through the throng of boulevardiers.

‘My friend, Anna,’ she says. ‘This is my friend, Signor Farfalla.’

They cease to hold hands and the girl offers hers to me. I half rise, fold my newspaper and accept her greeting.

‘How do you do?’

‘I am very well, thank you.’

Anna speaks English. I am to be an impromptu English lesson, a practice session with the real thing. I do not mind. A man drinking coffee with two girls is less conspicuous than a man drinking coffee on his own, half reading a newspaper.

‘Will you take a coffee with me?’ I invite them. ‘
Prego
.’ I indicate the empty chairs.

‘That would be very good,’ Clara says.

She moves her chair to sit closer to me. Under the table, her knee presses against mine. Anna also moves her chair nearer to me, but to shift it out of the sun. There is no competition going on here.

‘Anna is learning English also,’ Clara says.

‘Have you been to England?’ I enquire.

‘No. I have not been to England,’ she replies, ‘only to France and then only to Monaco. But my father has a Rover car and I have a Burberry coat.’

She is wealthy, this Anna. There is an air of well-being about her. She wears a Hermes wristwatch, the strap made of steel with interlinking H sections in rolled gold. Upon the little finger of her left hand she wears a gold ring set with a ruby. It matches her lipstick. She does not screw for the money, just for the fun.

The waiter comes over. My cup is empty.

‘
Due cappuccini e un caffè corretto
,’ I order. I do not want wine but the grappa would revive me.

He takes my empty cup and disappears into the interior of the shop.

‘See!’ Clara exclaims. ‘The book I have. I said so to you.’

She turns her pile of books around upon the table and taps the topmost volume: it is the Penguin edition of
An Unofficial Rose
by Iris Murdoch.

‘Very good,’ I reply. ‘You will be very well read. That is excellent.’

I am genuinely pleased: it is good to see her using her money – my money – in positive ways, not injecting it in the alleys of the night or frittering it away on raucous music. She notices my pleasure and her smile is warm, almost loving.

‘Where do you come from?’ I ask of Anna.

She is perplexed.

‘I am sorry . . .’

It is time for me to play the teacher.

‘
Dove abita?
’ I help her.

‘Ah, yes!’ She smiles and her teeth are straight and white: even her mouth looks like money. ‘I live in the Via dell’ Argilla. Nearby to Clara.’

I momentarily think of what else I might teach this girl, should the chance arise. But it will not and, looking from one to the other, I believe Clara is the prettier of the two. Rich girls are a pain in the arse in the sack: Larry once told me so. He knew. A client of his was killed by one.

‘I see. But where do you come from? Where is your family home?’

‘My home? My home is in Milano,’ she replies, as if answering a question posed by a disconnected voice on a language cassette.

The coffees arrive and Anna insists on paying for them. She takes a crocodile purse from her document case and pays with a high denomination note. We talk of inconsequentialities for fifteen minutes: the weather – I am British, she assumes, and therefore wish this to be a topic of intercourse – the town and what I think of it, the use of learning English. I understand her father is a millionaire leather dealer in Milan, a man in the world of fashion and women. Anna states she wishes to be a model in London: this is why she is here, in a two-bit university, studying the language.

At last they stand to go. Clara winks at me.

‘Perhaps we might have a drink together soon?’ she suggests. ‘I am free . . .’ she considers the crowded timetable of her life, ‘. . . on Monday.’

‘Yes. I think that would be good. I shall see you then.’

I, too, rise.

‘It was a delight to meet you, Anna.
Arrivederci!
’

‘
Arrivederci
, Signor Farfalla,’ Anna says.

There is an unmistakable twinkle in her eye. Clara must have told her.

It is warm tonight, the air balmy as a tropical island, the breeze the temperature of blood. In the morning, it rained: after noon, the clouds blew away over the mountains and the sun beat down from a sky laundered of impurities. Here, that does not imply the diesel soot of Rome, the factory grime of Turin and Milan, the concrete dust of Naples. The mountain rain has cleansed the atmosphere of the pollen of a million flowers, washed out the dust of slow-moving horse carts and lazy tractors dragging shallow ploughs through the stony soil, neutralized the dull electricity of heavy heat to replace it with the sharp sparks of taintless warmth.

When the rain came it did so with a Mediterranean vengeance. Here, rain is an Italian man who does not kiss hands and fawn like a Frenchman, or bow discreetly like an Englishman, keeping sex at bay, or get brazen like an American sailor on shore leave. Here, the rain is passionate. It does not fall in sheets like the tropic downpour or drizzle miserably like an English complaint, snivelling like a man with a blocked nose. It slants down in spears, iron rods of grey water which strike the earth and pockmark the dust, spread out like damp stars upon the dry cobblestones of the streets and the flagstones of the Piazza del Duomo. The earth, far from succumbing to the assault, rejoices in it. After a brief shower, one can hear the soil click and pop as it sucks its drink.

Within minutes, leaves which were hanging drab in the haze of seething air are erect, their green hands held out, supplicating for more.

After rain, there is a joy in the world. I share it. So much is rotten, is corruption, is fated to destruction. The rain seems to be a benediction, as if some law of nature had decided it is time for a baptism into reality.

I sit in the loggia. The oil lamp remains unlit. I need no light, as you shall understand. Upon the table is a bottle of Moscato Rosa. One bottle and one tall, thin glass. In an English house, a woman would keep a single stemmed bloom in it. Beside it is a small earthenware pot and three thick slices of bread smeared with salted butter. For later.

A dog begins to bark, somewhere outside the town, lost in the vineyards which approach the fragments of the fourteenth-century defensive wall still standing. It is a plaintive sound, rich in canine melancholy. Another dog, farther away, takes up the offer of conversation and they shout to each other like men calling across a valley. A third, in a courtyard of one of the buildings adjacent to my own, joins the night chorus with a hoarse, gruff woof which echoes and sounds less like a dog and more like an abusive drunk struggling to make a point of intellectual import in a barroom argument.

There is something timeless about their barking, as if they were revenants of all the pooches ever to have yapped, fought and scrounged in the valley, guarded farmsteads, taunted bears in the forests and bayed at the constancy of the moon.

From somewhere in the night drifts the scent of orange blossom. Someone has a tree growing in a pot upon a balcony or veranda. It is flowering late and will produce no fruit: a harvest of oranges is not the intention. The idea of the tree is to provide this scent after a summer rainstorm.

The storms are not past. Far away over the mountains, lightning flickers every few minutes, but it is lost in the high world of the peaks and the valleys, the cliffs of rock where bears still live. Or so they say. It will be several hours before the storm arrives over the town. By then, I shall be sleeping and careless of its clamour.

The wine is unique. The grape comes from the countryside around Trieste. The wine comes from Bolzano, where the grape was introduced before the war. It is cherry red and smells of roses, a dessert wine as sweet as sucked cane. I prefer this rosé above all others: Lagarina is too prickly, Cerasuolo too dry and sharp for a nightcap after such rain, Vesuvio Rosato too common – Lacrima Christi, they call it, the Tears of Christ. Galeazzo declares it is an apt name: Christ drank it at the Last Supper, he suggested, and it brought tears to his eyes. Christ, it seems, was an Italian, a connoisseur of good wines who knew a poor one when it crossed his lips.

The small pot was a gift from Galeazzo. He said an artist should enjoy the contents, especially one who studied butterflies and had recently wandered in the mountains painting flowers.

The contents are a jam made of rose petals.

There are no words available to describe the taste of this heavenly conserve. It is the quiddity of an overgrown garden in the deepest of sultry summers, distilled into its primal juices, dulcified with nectar and stirred with ambrosia. Spread upon the bland bread, to bite into it is to eat of a purification of all the perfumes of nature, all the essences and moods that have invoked every line of pastoral poetry since Virgil.

So. I am here, alone, in the half-darkness of the Italian night, drinking rosy wine and dining on rose blossom. The world is good. Time has stopped. The moon is hidden by the distant storm. The streets are quiet for it is just before one o’clock, even the addicts gone, curled into their puzzle of fallacious dreams, the ground too wet in the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre for the lovers. The stars no longer move.

Yet, around the loggia, my princely tower high above the struggles of men, my own stars are moving. They flash on and off like meteors spending themselves in the stratosphere. They are tiny lightnings close to. They are will-o’-the-wisps. If I was a superstitious man, I should say they were the souls of those I have assisted into eternity and, for a lucky few, immortality amongst men, or all the bullets I have ever made, ever caused to be fired, returning to haunt me.

They are fireflies, here in the centre of the town, above the rooftops, the rows of pantiles and the chasms of the courtyards and narrow, ancient streets.

Curiously, they do not settle. The stone may be too cold for them, too devoid of life. Fire has no use for stone. I quickly leave the loggia, go below to the sitting room. There is a vase of flowers there. I snatch up a few and return to the loggia. I prop them against one of the pillars. Still, these animate flames, these tiny phosphorescences do not land. They ignore the blossoms.

I pick up the wine and sip it. It is so sweet. I think of the honey gathered from the Convento do Vallingegno. I lean back in my chair to gaze out at the mountains. The peaks to the south-east are suddenly, briefly, silhouetted against dark clouds spun with lightning. The storm is coming nearer.

In the town, a clock chimes once. This alone reminds me that time passes unavoidably onwards.

The glass is drained. I refill it. The bottle is empty now. I press the wide cork into the mouth of the rose-petal jam. Enough of that for tonight. I must save some. It is my intention to take the remnants of the preserve to Clara and Dindina, to make them eat it before we bed each other. Augustus, Nero, Caligula: they will, I am sure, have pressed such a taste upon their women before having them. Such a jam cannot be the invention of modernity. It is too delicious.

Once more I lean back in my chair and, by chance, look up into the dome above the loggia. The painted horizon I now see is, in the fresco, also bedevilled by a thunderstorm. The azure sky is pricked by gold stars. Yet they are moving now. The meteors have left the heavens and are playing on my ceiling. They are shifting in crazy patterns.

The fireflies know the storm is coming. They have no time for flowers. They need shelter before the big drops start to pummel them to the ground, knock them from their flimsy shelters under drooping leaves, flood them out of the sanctuary beneath the stones.

They dart and flicker then, gradually, as if a general in their army has given orders, commissioned billets for his infantry amidst my stars, they settle and wink on and off. Outside the loggia, on the mountains, the scanty lights of the high village also wink in the warm night. Over the hills, the electricity of the storm competes.

I sit, the wine finished, until the first fat drops of rain strike the parapet. By now the thunder is loud, the lightning coarse and cruel. It would be foolish to remain here, the highest man in the town. I go below, undress slowly and lie beneath the sheet on my bed as the rain pelts down and the storm swings over the town and up the valley like an angry wife, abandoned by her cuckold husband and looking for her treacherous lover.

As I drift into sleep, not caring for the storm, for fate will do as it will, three thoughts linger: the first is I must have the gun ready within the next two days and the second is I hope the fireflies are safe in their umbrella of private heaven. The third is less a thought than a realization: this is an agreeable and wonderful place and I should like to settle down in it.

He is back. The shadow-dweller, the man from the street outside the wine shop. Just an hour ago, as I approached the Citroën, he was sitting at a table outside a bar. He had before him a glass of grappa, nothing more. He was doing the crossword in a copy of the English
Daily Telegraph
, poring over the clues, but I could tell he was using it only as a pretence, to kill time that he might wait all the longer without being pestered by the waiter.

I saw him, mercifully, before he saw me. I sidestepped into a butcher’s shop. Within, there was a line of women waiting to be served. I joined the end of the queue, giving myself good time in which to study the man over the slabs of meat and tripe, of offal and joints. Two old women entered and stood behind me. I stepped aside.

‘
Prego
,’ I said, offering my place with a gesture. They smiled at me, one as toothless as an old dog, and shuffled in front of me.

I thanked my luck that I kept the car parked well away from the house, some ten minutes’ walk from the
vialetto
.

He was dressed casually, not as a tourist but not quite as a local, either. He wore a dark pair of trousers, quite smart but not of Italian cut. His shirt was open-necked and striped with faint blue lines. He wore dark glasses – the morning sun was brilliant – but no hat. In the pocket of his brown jacket he sported a pale blue handkerchief.