The Flood

Friday, 4 November 1966

Monsters and demons. Wild beasts and crazed animals.

When he came to, they were leering at him, frozen in the walls of the cave. Dead eyes, grinning mouths. Laughing, taunting, mocking.

He knew why, too.

They saw.

His name was Aldo Pontecorvo and he was seventeen years old; tall but skinny, half naked, his long, dank hair ruffled and greasy, face smeared with lipstick.

Belongings.

He had a bag, a woman’s leather purse, and found himself clutching for it, scrabbling across the floor even though he hated the thing, couldn’t understand why he’d gone along with this at all. Hard rock bit at his bare limbs. The ground was strewn with food and discarded wine bottles. The mush stuck to his hands and knees as he crawled across the damp, freezing stone.

This was what the world looked like once the party was over. Shattered glasses, spilled wine.

Some of these dishes he’d helped prepare, carefully, to recipes handed down, generation to generation. It was not food for commoners like him. A servant. A slave, there to do the bidding of grand and imperious hosts.

But all this happened before. The food was why he came. The rest…

Memories came creeping back. Some of the chaos around him was part of the ceremony. And so was he.

Drink this now, boy, and everything will be fine.

Seventeen and never been with a woman. Never had a father to take him to one of the whores who hung around the station of Santa Maria Novella or with the bums in the square of Santo Spirito. Never had the courage or the money to do it himself. The other kids at school laughed at him constantly. He was tall enough to punch them out if he wanted. But Aldo Pontecorvo was different; had been so long he wanted to stay that way.

And now his virginity, his precious innocence, had been snatched from him. Roughly, in the midst of a riot he only half understood.

His mouth felt dry, his head hurt. He got the bag, scrambled to his feet and tried to walk straight, think straight.

He was in a cave somewhere in a hill behind the Pitti Palace, the vast grey rusticated hulk from which the Medici once ruled Florence, meting out justice from a distance, never reaching down to touch the common, stinking humanity in the streets.

People like him.

‘Like me!’ the boy cried in a sudden, bold burst of angry despair.

His shrill voice echoed off the strange, fantastic walls around him. The fountain at the end of the chamber made a noise, as if disgusted by his outburst. He stared at the thing. Four demons set around a marble bowl, evil leers on their faces, spouts between their teeth. Above them a woman was trapped in the arms of a creature that was half-man, half-goat. The satyr’s bearded face rose up to laugh at her fear and pain. The two were joined, him inside her, in a way that was more brutal, more physical than the young Pontecorvo had ever seen in any of the many statues and paintings that ornamented his native city.

Naked things were bad.

They were there in the Brancacci Chapel of his parish church of Santa Maria del Carmine in the quiet, local neighbourhood of Oltrarno where he lived. Adam and Eve, before and after the Fall. Happy figures on one wall, tragic on the opposing column.

He wondered: have I crossed the Brancacci now? From one wall to the other?

The satyrs answered with a chorus of belches. As he watched they spat brown, muddy water out of their mouths into the beautiful bowl. It came with a force that stained the naked ankles of the woman in the clutches of the lascivious beast who raped her.

‘What are you doing, boy?’ a brusque, coarse voice barked at him from the back of the room.

He turned and clutched the bag to his chest. No words.

It was Bertorelli, the man who organized the food. His employer, after a fashion. The only one who’d give him a job. A hard, brutal butcher from Scandicci, an old man with a violent temper and no time for fools. In spite of his crude character, he had a business catering for the aristocracy and the upper classes who owned and ruled the city of Florence as if they were natural heirs to the Medici themselves. Weddings and funerals. Civic gatherings in the Palazzo Vecchio and private functions on the Accademia. Bertorelli had provided for them all, and hired Aldo Pontecorvo when no one else would. The old farmer was a good cook, using ancient techniques and recipes that he was sometimes willing to share. Pontecorvo was grateful to him. And frightened of him too.

Then, the day before, he had taken Pontecorvo to one side and told him there would be a special occasion. A privileged one. The first Thursday of the month, every month. Be a success, Bertorelli said, and this is yours forever.

‘If they like you,’ he’d added with a wink.

‘They like me?’

‘One of them does already,’ Bertorelli had muttered, then ordered him back to the stoves.

Now it was Friday, the early hours of the morning, and Aldo Pontecorvo was standing stupid, drugged, in a cold, damp underground cavern, watching four stone demons spew muddy water at a semi-naked nymph who was being raped by a man who was half goat.

The night was over. The deed done.

‘Get your clothes on,’ Bertorelli barked. ‘For God’s sake.’

He looked a little put out by something, the boy thought. Which was odd because all the shame was surely his.

The stone demons vomited up more brown bile.

‘Jesus,’ Bertorelli cried. ‘It’s pissing it down out there.’

The brute butcher glowered at him, his face contorted with disgust. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘I feel sick just looking at you.’

Fifteen minutes later, Aldo Pontecorvo ventured out into the cold night. He’d never known weather like this. The rain had been falling on Florence for days. It felt as if it might never stop. Torrents of muddy water ran down the hill, flooded the steps and walkways of the Boboli Gardens, roaring in a muddy spate out into the Via dei Guicciardini as it led towards the Ponte Vecchio and the Arno river itself.

Home was a hovel on the sprawling Boboli estate.

How did he face that? How did he face her? Not now.

There was a place near Santo Spirito. Stayed open all night. Illegal, naturally. The kids at school had told him about it. They dared go there. He didn’t, couldn’t. But now he was different, and it was this new Aldo Pontecorvo who stumbled through the drenching rain trying not to cry. He still had the woman’s purse they’d given him. There were things in it. Lipstick. A tube of cream. Some lire bills. A way of saying… what? Thanks? Sorry? Know your place, little boy?

All the other kids had fathers. Men who played football with them in the streets. All he had was her. The woman with the belt and boot. A severe, judgemental mother, who dragged him to Santa Maria del Carmine three times a week, threw him in the confessional booth just for catching a glint in his eye.

Two weeks before she’d caught him in his tiny room.

‘Touch your cock and you’ll burn in hell!’ she’d screamed, and then came the belt and a trip to see the sour old priest.

Hell was everywhere in Florence, staring at him from the walls of the Duomo, inside and out.

Hell was here, with him on this cold, soaking night, a vile soreness that got worse as he walked, awkwardly, like an infant who’d peed his pants. He wondered if that pain would ever go away. If he was destined forever to be the chattel of the people who’d used him that night.

Men with polished, aristocratic accents. Sleazy women in shiny silk dresses and garish make-up.

Drink this now, boy, and everything will be fine.

And so he had. Because you did what these people told you. That’s why you were born.

Head hurting, lost for where to turn, Aldo stumbled on, full of grief and guilt and shame, though he’d done nothing to deserve it. Except obey.

There was a light in the square of Santo Spirito, a group of men outside the bar. More than there should have been, but this was no ordinary night, not for anyone. The rain seemed so persistent it might have been a punishment, like the flood God sent to cleanse the world. Not that there was a Noah in Florence that night. Just a new Aldo Pontecorvo, born somewhere beneath the dank, soaked earth of the Boboli Gardens, locked in the embrace of a man… more than one… a gang of them…

He stopped, choking at the memory, stumbled against a rusting Fiat 500, bent down and gagged, the sour acid bile rising in his mouth. Then, like the stone demons beneath the ravished nymph, he began to retch in forced and painful gasps.

The sky seemed to resonate to the rhythm of his agony, sending showers of gusting rain to wash away his spewing on the black, shining cobblestones of Santo Spirito. After a while there was nothing more to vomit, no dregs of the strange, rich meal they’d let him taste in the cave before the cup of tainted wine came his way.

He stayed in the gutter, drenched and mindless, wishing the downpour might wash away his agony, knowing in himself this was the daydream of a child, a creature he could never be again.

Five, ten, thirty minutes later, with the street now turning into a river, he splashed and staggered towards the light ahead.

The voices made him stop in sudden dread.

There was someone here he knew. A shape, happy and drunk, sated with wine and victory. Tall and erect in the clothes of a gentleman. No, two of them he saw, sheltering under an umbrella.

They walked down the street, towards Santa Maria della Carmine.

He took the woman’s purse out of his jacket and looked at the lire notes. More money there than he could earn with Bertorelli in a month. The price of his acquiescence. The cost of his silence.

Drink this, boy, and everything will be fine.

But it wasn’t and never would be. So he followed them, like the peasant he was, into the narrow lanes of Oltrarno. Watched, blood frozen, as they came upon her. Watched and knew he was lost.