Medusa

IX

Claudia called for the car at eleven. The sun had come out, and the air flowing in through the opened windows of the apartment seemed to be starting to warm up. Not actually hot, of course, not at this time of year, but still possible.

The traffic, on the other hand, was impossible, as usual. Where had all these people come from? What were they doing there? Where were they going, and why? There were just too many of them, that was the problem. Other people were like food or drink, or lovers for that matter. What you needed was ‘an adequate sufficiency’, as her father used to say. Anything more was not only superfluous, but potentially noxious.

When her parents were still alive, there had been no need for cars. They would just walk from their town house to Porta San Giorgio, take the chuffing train that went out into the Valpolicella and on to the shores of Lake Garda, and then alight in the straggly village where the villa stood almost opposite the station. But now the train had gone, like her parents, like the villa itself. Like Leonardo.

Lost in her memories, Claudia was a second or two late noticing that the traffic light had changed. Some sharply- dressed teenage whippersnapper promptly recalled her to her duties as a responsible road user with three aggressive blasts on the horn, and then, while she was still groping for the gear lever, cut in front of her with insolent ease, as if to say ‘Time to check into the nursing home, Grandma!’ Bastards. It wasn’t just that there were so many of them, and the majority so young and contemptuous, but that all sense of decorum had been lost. Everyone was out for what they could get, like a brood of contadini snatching the only drinking mug in the house from each other’s hands.

It suddenly occurred to her that the reason why she had such happy memories of the villa was that her parents had always seemed happy there. Well, one of the reasons. But perhaps that explained the Leonardo business as well. Like any child, she had desperately wanted her parents to be happy, but she didn’t know how to help them and they didn’t seem able to help themselves. Adults were supposed to know how to do things, but Claudia had realized very early on that her parents were utterly useless when it came to happiness. They didn’t have the first clue. Except at the villa. Which was presumably why, in her mind, it had become a magic place, with limitless and beneficent powers.

The vanished railway had run alongside the road, so once the gridlock of the city fell behind Claudia was able to follow her childhood journeys in her mind, marking the stops that the train had made and the things which had happened there. That was where the terrifying lady had complimented her on her gloves. One wore gloves then, of course. ‘ La contessa Ardigo,’ her mother had whispered, once the fearful apparition had alighted. And that other time, much later, in her teens, when a young contadino had taken something from his trousers and sprayed her with it like a water-pistol. It had smelt alkaline; strong, but not disgusting.

On this occasion her mother had made no comment, since the incident had happened while Claudia was standing alone on the vestibule at the rear of the train, admiring the view, and she hadn’t felt it necessary to share the experience with her parents. She was already aware that there were many matters in their own lives that they did not share with her, so she had just been returning the compliment really, proving what a well-brought-up young woman she was, thanks to their constant and ‘ruinously expensive’ — her father — provisions for her. There were certain things that a lady did not discuss, even with her parents.

Thirty minutes after leaving Verona, Claudia reached the outskirts of the village, now even more straggly than before. She turned right past a garish concrete block of apartments into what was still a country road, then left into the lane behind the former property and parked in the shadow of the high wall whose every stone had seemed to her, as a child, to be formed from the compacted essence of those blessed souls dwelling in paradise of which the priests spoke.

None of the new houses on the other side of the lane — infill from the boom years of the economic miracle that had given the Veneto a higher per capita GPA than Switzerland — showed any sign of life at all. It took her a tremendous effort to acknowledge that they were really there, let alone inhabited. In Claudia’s mind, that space would always be a bare upward slope of farmland lined with vines strung on wires.

She got out of the car and walked over to the green wooden door in the wall. All this stuff about her parents! She had made an agreement with herself not to think about that. And especially not about Leonardo or the later consequences. But it hadn’t seemed to work. Whatever one was not supposed to think about ended up occupying more brain room than the things you were supposed to think about. It was like a tax that had to be paid on oblivion. Sometimes she wondered if it was worth it.

She unlocked the garden door, went through and locked it behind her. Then, eyes closed, she turned around and leant back against its wooden boards. At least a minute passed before she opened her eyes again. It was all right. Everything was just as it ought to be, just as she had left it. The principal joy of the garden was that she had absolute control over it. So she did theoretically over the apartment in Verona, of course, but people came and went there, even if by invitation only, and left unmistakable traces of their presence behind. The garden was a pristine zone. No one ever came here except her. And Naldino, once. That had been only fair and natural. Here, after all, he had been conceived.

Her destination was to her left, but she didn’t glance that way, preferring as always to proceed by indirection. She walked along the gravel path winding beneath the tall sycamores and holm oaks, nodding in a familiar, slightly bored manner to the mould-stained bust on its plinth, as one did to a servant, before moving on towards the pond where obese carp glided past below the screen of water lilies.

Ahead of her now was the line of cypresses that she had planted to prevent the garden being overlooked from the new apartment block beyond. They were ugly beasts, but had grown out fast over the years, just as the nurseryman had promised, shooting up and filling in so as to completely conceal the high wall that she had insisted that the developers build to seal off her remaining parcel of property. Such had been her idea, and it had worked perfectly. The line of trees served its purpose, but in another sense it didn’t really exist at all, any more than the backdrop at the theatre that everyone is aware of but which no one looks at. What counted was what lay in front of it, not the painted curtain or the strident barricade of bare concrete behind. Only the stage mattered, and that was set, lit and glowing with atmosphere.

Now it was time to turn back, crossing the grassy sward to reach another path strewn with a thin layer of blackened gravel. The two branches had originally met, further up the property, and had led to the double glass doors of the villa which gave out on to the garden. Her destination was in sight now, but she still didn’t look at it, keeping her eyes on the ground before her or the trees above. Every step she took, each move she made, was strictly choreographed, a ritual dance. For this was sacred ground. The usual rules were suspended here, supplanted by a much more rigid set.

Once she had passed the huge elm tree that dominated this corner of the garden, it was permissible to look up and take in the miniature house with its green door and shutters. One rationale for this ritual was that she was always irrationally convinced that the house wouldn’t be there. The villa had gone, as had so many other things, and all of the people concerned. Why shouldn’t this, in many ways the most unreal of all, prove to have been just another of the false memories that her imagination was throwing up with increasing frequency these days, in its vain attempts to explain the inexplicable?

She got the key out of her pocket with her right hand, then transferred it to her left. This too was part of the ritual, for when the little house had magically appeared, on her seventh birthday, she had been mancina. It had taken a lot of time, and much pain, for her parents and teachers to cure her of her perverse left-handedness, with its implication of being one of the sinister, of having been touched by the Adversary.

But her parents had also given her this house, perhaps in part as recompense. Many of her memories might have been falsified, but not those of that birthday. The work had been done secretly, over the winter, and her parents had played their part to the hilt. When the day came, they had tied a length of muslin across her eyes and then led her down the garden of the villa amid a banter of jokes and teasing phrases, before placing her just right and then removing the blindfold. And she literally had not been able to believe her eyes. Nothing in the rest of her life — not even Leonardo — had been as magical and as sweet as that moment.

As the front door creaked open, the odours leapt up and assailed her. She stooped to pass under the lintel, then straightened up as much as she could, her hair brushing against the ceiling. The first time she had taken him there, Leonardo had immediately banged his head on a beam and fallen against her, perhaps in surprise. They were wearing only their swimming costumes, and both had laughed excessively at this bizarre accident befalling two adults in a house made for a child. A light sprinkle of plaster dust had coated Claudia’s bare shoulders and the upper slopes of her breasts. Leonardo had solicitously brushed it away, with many apologies for his clumsiness.

Against the wall to her left, between the windows, hung a blank banner of black satin. Her mother had not permitted mirrors in the family apartment in Verona, except in the bathroom, claiming in her sometimes slightly creepy Sudtirolisch way that they stole your soul. But in the case of Claudia’s playhouse her father had prevailed, arguing that it would make the main room seem lighter and bigger. After Leonardo’s death, she had not been able to bring herself to remove or destroy this mirror which had witnessed so much, but neither could she bear to meet its implacable gaze, so she had covered it over with a layer of cloth.

Below it stood a tiny dresser, a perfectly proportioned miniature replica of the one in the living room of the apartment, and indeed by the same manufacturer. She opened the cupboard and retrieved one of the bottles of Cinzano Rosso she kept stacked there, then took a glass from the shelf above. The sweet red liquid, tinged with bitterness at the edges, flowed down her throat and brought a summery glow to her body. The light glowing through the squat four-paned windows was thin and weak, but with the help of the alcohol it created the right effect. The angle of the sun around the equinox was of course identical at either end of the year, but autumn had all the momentum of summer behind it, while winter’s exhaustion held spring back.

Now she moved across the room, past the fireplace, the table and chairs, and the pretend stove on which she had lovingly cooked pretend meals for her dolls. The door at the end led to the bedroom where she had taken a nap after lunch every summer day as a child. The rules had been clear. Nights had to be spent in her room at the villa, but this house was hers during the day. Her parents were not permitted to intrude, although Claudia had contrived to invite some of her schoolfriends. She had made the most of that privacy and freedom then, and even more later.

She closed the door behind her and hung her coat on the peg behind it, despite the fact that the lower half trailed on the tiled floor, then lay down in a foetal crouch on the tiny wooden bed. The pillow absorbed her head and released its own hoarded scents in return. This bedding had never been washed since the first time that she and Leonardo had lain there. She could still smell the hair lotion he had used, and more, the very scent of him. Curiously, her own she could not distinguish, although it must profusely have been there.

But how had it all begun?

Her glib memories, when she consulted them, tended to unreel the affair like a film or a play, where every action and phrase is foreknown and inevitable, but they were false. It hadn’t been like that. It couldn’t have been. On the contrary, not the least of the thrills involved had been that they were both finding their way all the time, each of them anticipating an excruciatingly embarrassing rebuff at any moment.

The very fact that Leonardo had come out from his barracks in Verona to the villa, one weekend when he must have known that Gaetano was away at a NATO conference in Brussels, ‘in order to return some books on military history that Colonel Comai was kind enough to lend me’, incurred a slight risk in itself.

Claudia had received him on the patio behind the villa. She had been swimming in the small pool that had now been buried beneath the concrete parking lot of the new apartment block, and was wearing her bikini with a towelling robe over it. It was an August afternoon, a still, massy heat that threatened thunder.

He had apologized profusely for disturbing her and kept rather distractedly insisting that he should leave at once. Claudia had invited him to stay for tea, and had succeeded in making him feel that it would be impolite to refuse. She had then removed the towelling robe, with the excuse that it felt clammy, and clad only in the bikini had basked in the sun for some time, prompting the tongue-tied young lieutenant with a series of questions about his family, background and aspirations. She had not looked at him, but had felt very strongly his eyes upon her. When tea was brought, she had slipped back up to her room in the villa and returned wearing a silk wrap that she allowed to fall open from time to time, particularly when she leaned forward to pour the tea. When he finally left, she had told him that he was most welcome to return at any suitable time.

‘You don’t need to invent excuses,’ she’d told him. ‘I get quite lonely and bored here when Gaetano’s away. I would welcome some company.’

No, that couldn’t be right. She would never have been so forward, so obvious. Not the first time, anyway. And even if she had, he would never have taken her up on it, fearing some disgrace that could ruin his career for ever. So how had it all begun?

Of one thing she was sure. Their initial meeting, outwardly unexceptionable, had been at the regiment’s annual dinner and ball, an occasion that could hardly have been more public. The colonel had naturally introduced some of his ‘stable’, as he called them, to his much younger wife, and then encouraged them — under the circumstances, practically ordered them — to dance with her. His legs were already giving him hell, the merest intimations of the torment to come later, when they’d had to have the chair lift installed at the villa. At that stage Gaetano could still stand, walk and, when required, march without undue difficulty, but he couldn’t have danced with any pleasure, even if he’d wanted to. As it happened he didn’t, but neither did he want Claudia to be left seated with him, a sad wallflower, while the other wives tripped the light fantastic and engaged in a bit of mild and utterly harmless flirtation.

Lieutenant Ferrero had taken up his duties with an alacrity which Claudia had initially ascribed to the young man’s desire to ingratiate himself with his commanding officer. They had performed a polka, a gavotte and a foxtrot together before Leonardo relinquished her to one of his fellow officers. She had wanted him immediately, of course, and equally immediately dismissed the thought. Quite apart from anything else, she was well aware of being about ten years his senior. As a military city of long standing, Verona had more than its share of ‘barracks blowflies’, as they were known. Lieutenant Ferrero would have had no difficulty in getting his needs attended to quickly, safely and cheaply.

But at the end of the evening he had returned, and in a subtly different manner requested Claudia’s company for the last dance, a slow waltz. She had been wearing a silk shawl, but the hall was so hot and stuffy now that she removed it, making the full effect of her very low-cut dress visible for the first time.

As soon as the music started, she became aware that something was wrong. Earlier, Leonardo had been an exemplary partner, moving gracefully, always dead on the beat, never leading aggressively nor hanging behind. Now he seemed to have turned slightly spastic. His body was bent at an odd angle, and his movements seemed gauche and inhibited. He might almost have been Gaetano, on the few occasions when she had managed to tempt him on to the dance floor.

When she tightened her arm on her partner’s back, pulling him towards her, trying to straighten him up, the reason for his awkwardness became apparent: a massive erection that even his military-issue underpants were barely able to restrain. Their eyes met and locked. Das Blick, her mother had told her once. That was where love began. All it took was that unfakeable, petrifying look, and you were lost.

Nevertheless, as yet nothing had in fact been lost. They remained the only people present who were aware of what had happened. At the conclusion of the dance, Leonardo, now making no attempt to conceal his predicament from her, had very correctly returned her to her husband’s side without a word spoken, bidden them both goodnight and left with his fellow officers. Then, ten days later, he had appeared uninvited at the villa, supposedly to return some books. Nothing illicit had occurred at that meeting either. Gaetano had been abroad, but the servants were very much in evidence and Claudia was expecting a woman friend for dinner that evening.

So how had the affair itself begun? Another meeting at the villa had been arranged, that much was certain. And it must have been done in person, face to face, before Leonardo caught the train back to Verona that first time. There were no mobile phones in those days. All calls to the barracks went through the switchboard, and as desperate as she had been, Claudia would never have risked putting anything in writing. The most insistent of the versions that presented themselves to her now had it that she had invited him — on the front step of the villa, completely out of the blue, dismayed by the imminent prospect of his physical absence — to return the following Wednesday. She might have told him that she was having some friends over for the day, an interesting and influential couple who might well prove helpful to his career. She had certainly known that her husband would be attending a two- day meeting at the Defence Ministry in Rome to report on the NATO conference.

She had given the servants those two days off, explaining that in her husband’s absence she would be returning to Verona. There was still the risk of snooping neighbours, of chance encounters in the village, even of Gaetano’s unannounced return due to illness or a cancellation. In short, she had gone slightly mad, deranged not so much by the sexual prospects in store, although that was a powerful drug, as by an irresistible sensation that the contingent chaos of everyday life was finally cohering into a meaningful narrative that she had to follow, no matter where it might lead.

Yes, but how had it all begun?

However the invitation had been phrased, Leonardo had come, and to the tradesmen’s entrance at the side of the villa, which Claudia had left open. She explained this by saying that it was the servants’ day off and that she would be entertaining her guests by the pool in the garden and might not hear the doorbell. In reality it had been to minimize the possibility of his being seen by prying eyes.

She had been swimming topless in the pool when he arrived, and for a moment she thought she had been too brazen and ruined everything. Confused by her nudity and the absence of any other people, Leonardo looked as though he was about to bolt at any moment. When she picked up the towel she had left at the edge of the pool, wrapped it around her torso and climbed out, he had accepted with a brief nod her story about how the other couple had cancelled at the last moment for family reasons. She had calmed him down by putting her top back on and then producing a man’s swimsuit from the wicker chest where the towels were kept and insisting that he go into the house and put it on. She kept a variety of spare suits for visitors, she said, in case they had neglected to bring their own. In reality, the suit was Gaetano’s.

Leonardo had obeyed her instructions, like the polite young man he was. When he emerged from the villa, Claudia had to fight very hard against her instinct to stare shamelessly at the swimsuit, so very much more interesting did it appear than when worn by her husband. They both went into the water and swam energetically for some time, pretending to each other and to themselves that this was the point of the exercise. Then they emerged, rubbed themselves roughly dry, and lay down side by side on the large beach towels spread out in the sun.

After a while, Claudia had sat up and started applying Ambre Solaire to all the bits of her that she could reach, chattering on the whole time about the extreme sensitivity of her skin and the potentially disastrous effects of the August sun. She had then turned over and asked Leonardo to spread some of the fragrant bronze oil on her back, please. Oh, and just undo the strap of my top, would you, so as not to leave a white strip on the tan. She might even have told him to rub her harder to make sure that the oil penetrated the skin deeply, or some such nonsense. It had been like revisiting her adolescence, but with all the knowledge and authority of her current position. Which she had used quite mercilessly. She wouldn’t have put anything past her.

He’d complied with her instructions without a word, but stopped when he came to her buttocks, but she’d asked him to keep going, yes, and her thighs as well please, all the way up to the costume, because the skin was so sensitive there and even a minor burn could be agonizingly painful. He knelt close above her to do this work, straddling one of her legs with his, and from time to time their bodies had touched.

Once it was over, he lay down beside her again. They didn’t speak — the heat permitted that — but she knew that he was looking at her and lifted herself up on her elbows to reach for her cigarettes, her breasts just clearing the reclining bikini top so that her nipples showed a few centimetres from his fingers. But still he made no move.

When he finally announced, in his oh-so-well-brought-up voice, that he really should be getting back, thank you so much for inviting me, it’s been a great pleasure, she thought that she’d lost. And if she lost that day, she would have lost everything. Her pride would not have permitted her to make a similar demonstration again without an appropriate response from him.

Then she’d had her great insight, her stroke of genius.

‘Very well,’ she’d said, getting to her feet, ‘but before you go you must come and look at the little house down at the bottom of the garden. My parents had it built for me when I turned seven and I’ve kept everything just the way it was. It’s a quite extraordinary place, like something in a fairy tale. In fact I think it must be unique. You feel as though you’ve left the real world behind from the moment you cross the threshold.’

He had of course agreed, like the polite young man he was, and pronounced himself duly impressed with the exterior, which she told him had been faced by real craftsmen, the kind you couldn’t find any longer, using the best stone from the quarries at San Giorgio di Valpolicella. They went inside, giggling and joking about the diminutive size of the entrance, and Claudia closed the door.

Straightening up instinctively, Leonardo had knocked his head on the ceiling, sprinkling her with plaster which he apologetically brushed off. But the movements of his fingers continued long after the last traces of white dust had vanished, becoming slower and slower even as his breathing became ever more rapid. Their eyes met, exactly as they had that first time. Only now they could do something about it. Claudia placed one hand on his back, just where it had been during the waltz, and pulled him urgently towards her, her other hand at the nape of his neck, dragging his open mouth down on hers. And then…

That was how she remembered it, most of the time at least. But she also knew that memories change a little each time you revisit them, and she had revisited these memories just about every day and night of her life since Leonardo died. By now she had no clear idea how much was original and how much a replica, more strongly engineered in order to support the weight of the significance the whole event now had for her. Perhaps the literal truth had been erased by the version that had now supplanted it. Perhaps it had been too humdrum and confused, a documentary patched together from faded photographs and old newsreels where everyone walks too fast, rather than a Hollywood movie with glamorous stars, perfectly realized production values and a sense of knowing exactly where it is going.

She rose from the bed, brushing off her clothes. The playhouse was filthy, but she couldn’t bring herself to clean anything here. The only real evidence was the fading prints they had taken later with the new instant camera that Polaroid had brought out at about that time. She eyed the drawer in the chest beside the bed where she kept The Book, but left it closed. The last time she had looked at the photographs she had been sickened. She looked puffy and unhappy, Leonardo gawky and awkward, and everything was so matter of fact. No, there was nothing to be gained from that. The material had to be lovingly preserved but it didn’t need to be viewed, any more than one would wish to view the remains of some dear departed beneath his immaculately tended grave.

This was the house of memory, the house of remembrance, sealed off from the ravages of time. Gaetano had set foot in it just once, immediately after Claudia had inherited the villa on her mother’s death, only to declare that it should be demolished and replaced by a vegetable garden. But Claudia, as custodian, had prevailed, pointing out that the expense of demolishing such a substantial structure would be far more than the resulting plot was worth, and also discreetly suggesting that their children could play there just as she once had. She had wanted that, she had wanted them. She had not known that there would be no children with Gaetano, that his sperm was no good.

Gaetano had never raised the matter again, and Claudia had curated the little house with loving care for over a quarter of a century, even renouncing a sizeable sum of money to retain it when she had sold the rest of the property to the development company that had demolished the villa to build that block of condominiums. It had often occurred to her that she must have been mad so to do, so pointless could it seem on her bad days, but now she was vindicated. It all made sense!

She had of course never thought that Leonardo would ever die, let alone before her. And even if he had, his parents would have been given the body, had there been one. But according to Danilo that beloved body had miraculously resurfaced somewhere, somehow, in conditions of the greatest secrecy. Perhaps Leonardo’s parents did not know. As far as they were concerned, their son had died in that plane crash. For that matter, they might well be dead themselves by now. The outcome was clear: the body must be brought back here. This was where it belonged, not in some alien cemetery.

She poured herself one more glass of Cinzano Rosso before replacing the bottle. But what about the Ferrero family? The parents might be dead, but hadn’t he had siblings? Two sisters, she seemed to recall. And even if they made no legal claim to the remains, how could she possibly do so? It would mean disclosing everything, and that might well prove fatal. The law didn’t care about love, but it cared very much about murder. It would be sheer insanity for her to take any kind of initiative in the matter.

She finished her drink and went back outside, locking the door of the miniature house behind her. What a beautiful dream, though, to be able to scatter Leonardo’s ashes amongst these trees! That would close the circle, and ease the pain that had gnawed at her ever since his death. It would be a very private ceremony, just her and her lover, on a day like this at the end of summer, with all nature stooping for renewal beneath the burden of its own weariness.

And Naldino, of course. She’d have to invite him, although with any luck he wouldn’t bother coming all the way up from his foodie cooperative just to show some respect to a father he had never met. Even his mother got little enough these days. Still, if he refused, that was his business. At least she would have given him the opportunity.

It was only once she reached the garden door, having duly followed the long winding circular path through the grounds, that the solution to all her problems struck her. The insight was so overwhelmingly powerful that she gasped very much as she must have done that day thirty years ago when the man in Leonardo finally overcame the boy, and he took her.

Naldino! The authorities might refuse to let her have the body, but they couldn’t refuse him.