The Apprentice Lover (23 page)

R
ains swept the island from the north one night in early August, with a rumbling of thunder that broke over the slopes of Mount Solaro and seemed to collect in the inlet below the Villa Clio. My cottage was damp and uncomfortable, the walls sweating, caught in the occasional gleam of lightning. I felt ill from having drunk too much wine the night before with Patrice, who'd been having a bad few weeks because Giovanni was under pressure from his family to marry the daughter of Capri's longtime
sindaco
, Luigi Mancini, who governed in the usual haphazard way of Italian politicians. “It is only the marriage of convenience,” said Patrice, with mournful disgust. “There would be no sex here, and no love.”

I was about to crawl into bed when I heard footsteps outside the door. I guessed it was Marisa by the urgency of her approach.

“Lorenzo! Is raining!” She rapped at the screen, her voice strained. “I am wet!”

That she waited for my invitation to enter surprised me. It was not like her.

“You are welcome,” she said, incongruously, stepping into the room. Her T-shirt was soaked through, and the cotton material clung to her breasts like skin. “It is thunder, too,” she added.

I had pleaded with her not to visit me again. While I enjoyed the sex, I found the relationship unsatisfying. It was, I believed, good for neither
of us. Plucking up my courage, I explained in the gentlest terms that I didn't love her, so there was no point in continuing to sleep together. I said, without conviction, that I hoped we could remain friends.

We hunched at opposite sides of my three-legged table, like poker players, keeping our hands to ourselves. Her dark hair was tangled and damp.

“He is awful, your Rupert Grant,” she said, with anger in her voice.

“So what's happened?”

“He told me I am stupid.
Stupido!
”

I couldn't imagine what Grant might have said to her, but it seemed unlikely that he'd called her stupid. His insults were usually indirect.

“I'm feeling too bad,” she said. “I feel like killing myself.”

Her melodramatic turn annoyed me, seeming operatic in a southern Italian way. “I'm sure he doesn't think you're stupid,” I said, as thunder rumbled in the middle distance.

“Let me stay with you tonight. I have made nice love to you, Lorenzo. What is wrong with me?”

“I don't want that, Marisa,” I said.

“You think I am stupid, too.”

“I don't. You're very intelligent.”

“You say so?”

“I do. But you should go home. To Naples. There is no point in hanging on.”

“My father, he is worst than Rupert.”

This was, from what I'd learned, an understatement. Vera had told me that her father had broken her jaw when she was eighteen—because she had spent the night with a boyfriend. I didn't even want to think about what that meant.

“There must be somewhere else you could go? Some relative? A friend?”

“I am nowhere,” she said, her English dissolving fast.

“You will go nowhere?”

“My days are not so happy anymore. I was glad here, but that isn't true.” I didn't like her expression, so lost, wild, and sad at the same time.

“You're going to be fine,” I said, without confidence.

“I say good-bye to you, Lorenzo.”

“We can talk tomorrow,” I said. “You need some sleep.”

“Maybe I will kill Rupert Grant.”

I touched her forearm. “You shouldn't say things like that, Marisa.”

“He doesn't deserve it.”

I didn't know what “it” referred to, but I let the statement pass. The rain began to fall heavily outside my cottage, and I closed the big window overlooking the sea.

“You will give me a drink, no?”

I could hardly refuse her, and pulled a fresh bottle of grappa from the cupboard.

“I am always like your grappa,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She gulped her drink, then helped herself to a second. That, too, disappeared quickly. I told her to steady herself. “Your nerves are bad,” I said, “I can tell.”

“I am leaving you now,” she said, rising on wobbly knees. She moved around the table and kissed me on the forehead. “I have like you so much. You are not the same as Rupert.”

I heard her footsteps on the path, and the rain falling. For some reason, I kept thinking about her comment. I was certainly not like Rupert Grant. Nor did I want to be like him, not any longer.

I
took Nigel with me one afternoon in early August to visit the house of Axel Munthe, the famous Swedish physician and author, who had made his presence felt on Capri for six decades, until his death in 1949. For much of his life, Munthe had a fashionable medical practice in Rome, where he lived in the Piazza di Spagna, in a house where Keats had once lived. But he had fallen in love with Capri in 1885, while recovering from exhaustion that was the result of his work in Naples during a devastating cholera epidemic. In 1890, he bought San Michele, a ruin built on the remains of a Roman villa in Anacapri. He restored it gradually, furnishing it with local antiques and ancient artifacts, among them a gleaming mask of white marble that was the handiwork of Phidias himself, the famous Athenian sculptor.

I loved San Michele, having been there twice before, once with Vera and another time with Toni Bonano. It was a memorable spot, still haunted by Dr. Munthe, who had left a print on every surface. His garden was a fine spot for a picnic, with steep views of the northern side of the island and Mount Solaro. As expected, Nigel was unimpressed.

“I don't see the point about San Michele,” he said, shaking his head as he spoke, sweeping his hair into place. He was a beautiful boy, for sure. Patrice had found him “so ravishing” that he could hardly speak.

“It's a lovely house,” I argued, “with lots of artwork inside. There's nothing like it on Capri.”

“Our house is nicer.”

“By modern standards,” I said.

“Why bother with other standards?”

Once again, he stumped me. I found conversations with Nigel oddly disconcerting. He maintained an elegantly gloomy cool, despite the glittering life that fate had served on a platter before him.

“Munthe was a tedious old boffer,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Pater told me. A neurotic old boffer.”

“But he had energy,” I said.

“Americans admire energy, don't they?” He could barely conceal his contempt.

“Yes,” I said.

“I find it boring, this cult of energy.”

“Really?”

“Joie de vivre, that sort of thing. Tedious.”

I had heard this line before, from Grant himself. He often made derisive remarks about joie de vivre, and never failed to disparage Picasso, whom he considered its leading avatar. “That little fool who wants everyone to think he's a genius,” Grant said. “I used to see him clowning around the Riviera, playing the Great Man. Hurling bits of pottery across the room. Revolting.”

“You were going to show me some of your poems,” I said.

“I've changed my mind. They're rubbish.”

“Don't be hard on yourself.”

He looked at me with a kind of detached curiosity. “Do you always offer advice?”

I didn't want to patronize him, just because I was seven years his senior. In many ways, he'd experienced more of the world than I had. And he was obviously intelligent and articulate. Too articulate.

“I'm going to write a novel,” Nigel told me. “A large and difficult novel.”

“Good,” I said, tentatively. Another budding novelist was just what the world required. “I hope to write one myself.”

“Have you got a plot?”

“Nothing specific.”

“I see,” he said, turning sad eyes on me.

“Plot is important, you're right,” I said. “The main thing is, you've got to tell a story.”

“Stories are rubbish,” he said. “For second-raters.”

Once again, I could hear the echoes of his father. I came to him once with Dominick Bonano's line about telling stories, and he squashed my notion as though it were a cockroach. “Stories are nonsense,” he said. “No good novelist depends on them. Narrative is the thing. It has to build in ways that ‘story' doesn't take into consideration.
Death in Venice
, for example. That's it, what? The slow accretion of detail. The layered approach.” He warned me about Bonano's theorizing, detecting at once the origin of my remark. “He's got something invested in stories because he has nothing else. He doesn't, for example, know much about language. Have you actually
read
him?”

At that point, I hadn't. But I soon dipped into
The Last Limo on Staten Island
. That it was not good was apparent from the first sentence: “A short, powerfully built man with metallic gray hair, Don Vincenzo was a man of character whose passionate nature led him alternately to perform acts of great generosity and terrible violence.” What sort of character was that? Events in the narrative succeeded each other rapidly, but were undeveloped. The characters were thin, all well-defined types, and they rarely just spoke to each other; they “croaked” or “groaned” or “barked.” The language suffered from countless clichés or near-misses. The sun was always “sparkling,” and night often “fell with a thud.” Bonano's Mafia thugs uniformly possessed a “grip of iron.” Their women were “buxom,” and they wore skirts that revealed “long, shapely legs.” There were oddities of diction, too, as in: “Tony Bruticozzi always felt sad after coition.”

“Are you still bonking Marisa?” Nigel asked.

“No,” I said. I didn't elaborate. It would only have been used against me.

“She's a moody bitch,” he said.

I tried not to respond in a way that he might interpret as approval for his remark. “She's been having a difficult time,” I said. “I'm worried about her.”

“Balls,” he said. “Pater is giving her the boot.”

“I know,” I said.

“Last night, he told her to clear out.”

I felt a peculiar chill in the pit of my stomach. “Last night?”

“I heard him telling Mater. He said, ‘I've sent the bitch packing.'”

I was somehow not surprised. When I got back, I would go to comfort her. My own recent coolness toward her haunted me now. I listened to Nigel's chatter without really hearing him, feeling oddly disembodied, as though I could not keep my heart and head in the same physical space.

Nigel and I found a shady seat in one corner of the garden: white-walled, covered with morning glory and plumbago. The garden dropped northeastward in terraces, with a pergola above several water cisterns. We were protected from the sun by a great stone pine, which rustled in a throaty way in the slightest sea breeze. Maria Pia had packed a lunch for us—a loaf of bread with cheese and fruit. Nigel had subtly snagged a bottle of wine from his father's cellar, a mature Barolo that had probably been sequestered for a better occasion, and he uncorked it with guilty relish.

There were lots of visitors around us, mostly Germans and Americans, who seemed incapable of normal speech volumes. An oblong man in Bermuda shorts complained that Italy was “hotter than Cleveland, and without the air conditioning.”

“Bloody day-trippers,” said Nigel. “They ought to be shot.”

“Dr. Munthe had them in mind when he rebuilt San Michele,” I said. “He wanted a museum, with visitors.” Vera had told me that Munthe had lived in a nearby tower, not in the villa itself. “He was an old fraud,” she suggested, “a charlatan of a type that has always found Capri attractive. A lonely man, they say, and terribly insecure. He invented a character for himself—the eccentric, the lover of animals and birds, the connoisseur of ancient art and architecture. But look at San Michele. It's a monstrosity. A tourist attraction. It has nothing to do with the real beauty or architecture of the island.”

I had read Dr. Munthe's well-known autobiography,
The Story of San Michele,
which in its day sold millions and made its author a wealthy man. Its author was charming, but shallow, determined to please the reader at
every turn. Truth was not important to him, only beauty. Reading it, I felt I understood Munthe only too well, and that if I were not careful, I could easily fall into that trap. I could turn myself into a “character,” presenting a falsely buoyant self to the world. I could all too easily sacrifice truth to beauty.

“You've been bonking Toni Bonano,” said Nigel. “I know all about it, not that it matters. I rather like it. She's quite pretty, in that hard American way.”

“You're wrong, old man,” I said. “Toni and I are friends. Nothing more.”

“A pity,” he said. “What about Holly? Mater says you pine in her presence. Are you a piner?”

“I hope not.”

“I don't pine. I don't like anyone well enough to pine for them.”

“Have you got a girlfriend.”

“Charterhouse is all boys, and mostly buggers,” he said. “But I'm not a bugger.”

“No,” I said. “I can see that.”

“Nicola has a boyfriend.”

“So I've heard.”

“She's not a virgin, but I am.”

“There will be plenty of time to remedy that.”

“Pater's mad about girls. Mater calls it his ‘little hobby.' I find it rather disgusting.”

I refrained from comment, hoping the remark would float away and pop like a soapy bubble.

“It's not a secret,” Nigel continued. “I realized quite a long time ago that my father was corrupt in that way. A bit too lecherous for his own good. But I've forgiven him. Mater doesn't mind. Super girl, don't you think?”

“Your mother?”

“The estimable Vera.”

“I like her.”

“She says you're queer. Are you queer?”

“I don't think so.”

“I told her that,” he said. “You can always tell. They mince about, don't they. Mince, mince, mince.”

“I try not to mince.”

“You're very manly.”

“Thank you.”

I sighed, lying back in the grass. I found Nigel's conversation totally exhausting. He had no tact whatsoever, adopting a worldly tone at odds with his age and callowness. “He just chunters,” his mother warned me. “Pay no attention to Nigel. Just nod agreeably. He will eventually stop.”

“I heard about your brother,” Nigel said.

I tried not to flinch.

“The Mater can't keep a secret.”

“It's not a secret. My brother was killed in Vietnam.”

“Bloody savages.”

“Who?”

“The Americans.”

It was not worth pursuing that line of argument with an English schoolboy whose grand pronouncements were like huge plants in thin soil. They could be toppled by the slightest winds of argument.

“Will you stay long, Lorenzo?”

“On Capri? I don't know,” I said. “I have no plans.”

“That's bang on,” Nigel said. “Plans are evil.”

After a blessed pause, he went on the offensive again. “Whatever attracts you to Holly? I don't get it. She has no breasts, no hips. I can't fathom her. There is something hugely missing.”

“It's not about breasts and hips,” I said.

“Pater adores her, too.”

“I know.”

“She's rather fill-in-the-blank. You have to guess what's there. Probably nothing is there.”

“I do like her.”

He clucked his disapproval. “I'd tread carefully there. Pater doesn't believe she has any romantic interest in you, or he'd be rotten. He would kill you, in fact.”

“Your father?”

“He's frightfully erratic.”

“Your father isn't erratic,” I said.

“Oh, he is. But I don't mind. I really don't.”

I could see he minded a great deal, as would any son. Indeed, I'd watched him vying with Holly for his father's attention, and failing. He'd been provoked into saying outrageous things at meals, simply to draw his father's wrath. (Angry attention was apparently better than none at all.)

Nigel swilled the rest of the wine straight from the bottle. “I don't like Italian wines,” he said. “They're undistinguished.”

“Really?”

“French wines are nicer.”

“I'm not an expert,” I said, hoping to wake a modicum of self-consciousness in Nigel, who plunged down any conversational road with abandon.

“I drink quite a lot at school,” he said.

“Don't they mind?”

“They never find out. I can be quite discreet.”

“Really?”

He looked as though I were speaking a language with no similarities to English. “When we get back,” he said, in a vaguely conspiratorial tone, “I'll show you a couple of recent poems. They're rather disreputable.”

“I don't object to that.”

“Love poems, that sort of thing. You'll think I'm a wanker.”

“I doubt it.”

“Point is, I don't care what you think,” he said. “I really don't.”

I merely smiled. He seemed vulnerable now, so young and foolish. I wished I could do something to make him feel better, but that was beyond me, having all I could do to attend to myself at this point.