Innocence. Julian Barnes

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СКАЧАТЬ who was not dead, but preferred to live in Chicago, and Maddalena’s husband, who was not dead either, though he was sometimes thought to be, but preferred to live in East Suffolk, must both receive invitations to the wedding, but would not accept them. On the other hand the Monsignore must be asked to officiate, and would officiate, though this would have to be by courtesy of the parish priest at Valsassina. The country, as the Count drove on, the gentle inclines, the olives, vines, and vegetables, suggested that the earth here was still friendly and even protective to human beings, but it had been rewarded in every vineyard with forty-five thousand white concrete posts to the hectare. This did not disturb Giancarlo, who forgave the land its changing appearance as he forgave himself his own.

      That year they had a cold autumn. At Valsassina there was a bitter smell from the straw fires which had been lit at night to keep the earth warm. Two of Cesare’s little motocultivators were rolling in procession back and forth across the ridge. The Count marvelled, not for the first time, at how much of the agricultural day consists of moving things from one place to another. He passed the little stone building, once a chapel, which the farmworkers used for their mid-day break. The ragged roof steamed like a kettle, they were boiling something up in there. Higher up, a stone cross marked the place where Cesare’s father had been shot during the German retreat, or possibly during the Allied advance, there was no chance now of ever knowing which, or what he had been trying to protest against.

      At the top of the rising ground Giancarlo parked in the front courtyard, where it was always supposed to be warmer (but this was a fiction) and as he got out of the car the autumn wind was waiting for him. A lizard which had emerged, as wrinkled as an old man’s hand, into what looked like warm sunshine had retreated instantly. The whole of the right-hand wall was covered with a climbing viburnum, spreading upwards and outwards as it always had done within living memory, as far as it could reach. This plant had had the sense to begin shedding its leaves early.

      Valsassina itself was somewhere between a farmhouse and a casa signorile and was sometimes admired for its original plan, but in fact it had been put up almost at random on the site of an old watchtower. Once inside, you always had the same sensation of no-one being there, a cavernous emptiness, with a faint sound of something dripping, and darkness, not pitch darkness but a reddish dark between the brick floors and the terracotta tiles of the ceilings. Immediately to the right as you went in was the fermentation room for the house wine. The powerful odour of saturated wood travelled from one end of the house to the other. From here, also, came the sound of dripping. Straight ahead was the dining-room, with a massive fireplace of pietra serena.

      ‘Cesare!’ shouted Giancarlo. Then he remembered that his nephew kept Wednesdays for office work.

      The dining-room was as dark as the hall, the shutters were up against the sudden cold. But the outlines of knives and forks could be made out, and two substantial white napkins on the old immovable dining-table. The napkins meant that he hadn’t telephoned in vain, he was expected. A door at the farther end opened, letting in the clear autumn light, and an old man appeared, making some kind of complaint, interrupted by an old woman who asked the Count decisively what kind of pasta he wanted her to cook. ‘I can’t hear both of you at once,’ said Giancarlo. The man, Bernadino Mattioli, was, he knew, subject to mild delusions of grandeur. Cesare might well be glad to be rid of him, but as Bernadino had nowhere else to go that would be impossible. How can my nephew live here like this, he thought, a young man on his own? They say that every man in his heart wants to die in the place where he was born. While he was considering this — he had been born in the bedroom directly above the room where he was sitting now — Bernadino approached him.

      ‘I have something to say which Your Excellency will find strangely interesting.’ The old woman interposed again. It turned out that there were only two possibilities for mid-day lunch, green tagliatelle or plain.

      ‘Any decision must be in the nature of a gamble,’ said the Count, ‘we will have green.’ She retreated towards the kitchen and her voice could be heard calling out to what had seemed to be a deserted house. ‘They want the green!’ Giancarlo thought, I have to be back in Florence by half-past four for a committee meeting of the Touring Club.

      At the back the two wings of the house lost their pretensions, and turned into not much more than a series of sheds. Beyond the back courtyard were deep and ancient ditches, planted with fig trees and vegetables, all cut back this year by the wind. The last shed to the left looked, from the pulley above the loft, as though it had once been a small granary. This was the office. There Cesare could be seen, sitting absolutely motionless and solid in front of two piles of papers. When a shadow fell across him and he looked up and saw who was there he rose to his feet, and fetched the only other chair, stirring up a smell of poultry and old dust. The Count lowered himself onto it, exaggerating his fragility, as a kind of insurance against ill-chance. Cesare sat down again, turning away from the desk towards his uncle.

      The desk, an old walnut piece, looked abandoned and pitiful, as furniture always does once it has been put out of the house. The brass keyplates were missing and the handles had been replaced by pieces of string through the screw-holes. ‘That desk wasn’t out here in your father’s day,’ said the Count, almost as though he had forgotten this until now. But since in fact he had mentioned it a number of times, Cesare made no reply. He never said anything unless the situation absolutely required it. Conversation, as one of life’s arts, or amusements, was not understood by him, unless silence can be counted as part of it.

      For a good many years the Valsassina estate had been engaged in a legal petition to decide the exact location of its vineyards. When Cesare or his late father mentioned the tragedy of 1932, they were not thinking of the fate of the eleven university professors who refused in that year to take the Fascist oath. They meant that in 1932 the authorities had declared Valsassina to be just outside the boundary line of the Chianti area. This meant that none of the Ridolfi wines could be labelled or sold as classic, and their market value was reduced by a quarter. The calculations, however, had been made from the position of the house itself, whereas some of the outlying vineyards fell inside the boundary. They had deteriorated, it was true, and could possibly be described as abandoned, but Cesare was doggedly negotiating for a low interest loan to buy a new digger, which would make replanting with sangiovese grapes possible in a short time. Those borderline fields might then be readmitted as classic. It was a letter from the local Consorzio on this subject, and another one from the bank, that were planted on the desk in front of him now.

      ‘It’s cold in here,’ Cesare said.

      Unquestionably it was. The high windows had been designed so that the sun would never strike through them, and there was no heating in the room except a small charcoal stove. The Count was glad that he was wearing his old military greatcoat, which still fitted him very well. In a few months’ time, under the Baistrocchi army reforms, the Italian cavalry would be gone for ever. When he had heard this he had silently resolved to be buried in his coat. Cesare, however, spoke as though he had only noticed the cold for the first time. His uncle stretched himself out towards the stove and as he grew a little warmer his breath became visible.

      ‘Cesare, I’ve come to talk to you about Chiara’s wedding. You know, of course, that she’s going to marry this doctor.’ The ‘this’ wasn’t quite right, he corrected himself to ‘marry Dr Salvatore Rossi’.

      There was a pause, which gave him the feeling of having spoken too quickly. Cesare then said, ‘Chiara came out here a month or so ago. She didn’t stay long.’ The Count wondered if this was a complaint, although it hardly sounded like one. Chiara ought to come as often as possible, if only because a twelfth of the estate had been left to her by her uncle, Cesare’s father. It wasn’t that the estate business didn’t interest her, it did, and she was very quick at getting the hang of the accounts.

      ‘Life seems an eternity to a girl at school,’ he said.

      ‘How do you know СКАЧАТЬ