Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

“Luca, when I came walking along the road I saw her husband coming out of the alleyway.”

“Oh, dear God.”

“You have to get up; we have to go to a magistrate and stop it.”

The full impact of the danger he was in suddenly swept over the Italian. If de Fréjus could calmly kill his own wife, what would he do to the man who cuckolded him?

“Oh, my God,” he repeated, sinking back onto his pillow. “Oh, my God.”

“Come on, then. Get up. Luca . . . ?”

“Do you think I’m mad?” he said, recovering himself enough to answer, then getting out of bed and fumbling for his clothes in the shuttered darkness.

He began walking around the room, collecting clothes and equipment and stuffing them into a large canvas bag as fast as he could, panic obvious in his every movement.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you think I’m doing? I’m getting out of here.”

“You can’t do that. You have to go to the magistrate, say what happened.”

“Are you mad now? Stand up and say, ‘Please, sir, that countess, that woman married to the Comte de Fréjus, wasn’t killed by the Jews. She was murdered by her husband because she was committing adultery with me just before?’ I wouldn’t even have time to sign a statement, he’d kill me so fast.”

“But unless you say what happened . . .”

Pisano shrugged. “What? De Fréjus goes free? He will anyway. All the Jews are killed? They will be anyway, the way things are going.”

“You can’t just run away.”

“Watch me.”

He was being coarse, brutal, unfeeling. Deliberately so, wanting to push aside all memory of what had occurred the previous night. In his mind he was halfway there. She had never come to the house; he had never given Olivier a beseeching look to go and spend a couple of hours walking the streets. She had never walked over, kissed him, given him no choice about what happened next. He had not fallen asleep, thinking that in all the time she’d been there, they had not exchanged more than six words. She had come, and gone, and now the whole encounter was merely a fantasy, a dream that had never taken place. As long as he was not confronted with the gossip and the details, that was how he could keep her. If he could leave immediately.

His bag was packed. All he had to do was walk out of the house, hire a donkey, and go.

“You’re really running away?”

He grunted, then turned around. “Olivier, my friend, believe me. I may have been wrong not to make sure she got home safely, I may have been wrong to let her stay here in the first place, but I’m not going to get killed for it. Promise me you will say nothing. Nothing will be gained by it.”

Olivier hesitated, then promised.

Pisano turned and ran down the stairs, the door crashing as it slammed shut. His world was collapsing all around him, and like many another, he felt the need to go home, to see the hills and fields and people who had given him life. He never reached them. The nausea began four days later, even before he reached the coast road that led down into Genoese territory; the sweating began an hour afterward and the black, stinking pustules erupted in his armpits and then all over his face that night. He was traveling alone, wanting no company out of fear, and would have been able to find none even had he so wished. The roads were empty, and those who were on the move were going in the opposite direction, away from the sickness and carrying it, all unknowingly, farther and farther into the heartland of Europe.

He died alone, without comfort or sacrament, with only his mule for company, it as indifferent to his suffering as he had been to its distress at the weight of baggage he had loaded onto its back. After he died his whole body erupted into a mass of black pus, creating such a stench that the mule slowly wandered off, into cleaner, fresher air. Even the rats refused to chew on his carcass. He did not win his place as one of the great founders of Italian painting, as he believed he deserved. The pages of Vasari do not mention him even as a pupil of anyone; he won no great commissions from church or town or noble patron; nor did he ever have the chance at fixing his immortality onto the walls of his beloved Siena.

THEY HAD lived in a dream of their own imagining, believing that they had barricaded themselves from reality, shut out the world, created a place of perfect safety by their own efforts and the strength of their emotions. It was the shock of realizing how much of an illusion that had been that so numbed him that he spoke automatically to Marcel’s questioning and probing.

But, crushed though he was, capable really of thinking only of her, he still responded with a flicker of calculation, enough to win himself time; and with time came hope, for the two are really aspects of the same thing.

No, he said, he did not know where Bernard was. He had been given a means of contacting him, that was all. A message to be relayed through who knew how many intermediaries. And only two messages to send; that was his entire purpose. He could say he had some of Julia’s pictures ready, or that Marcel wished to discuss matters with him. That was all; anything else would be ignored. He had to deliver the message on his own, with no supervision, otherwise Bernard would not come. He needed a car as well, for the message had to be delivered in a town some way from Avignon, and time was short.

He would, he said, tell Bernard that Marcel would meet him, at his house in Roaix. Tomorrow. At four o’clock. Marcel could make whatever arrangements he thought necessary.

“One condition, though. I deliver this message, Julia goes free. Once I’ve done it, I will go straight to the prison and collect her. I will telephone when I get there, and you will give the orders that she is to be released. I will take her away, and you will promise she will not be troubled in any way again. If you do not agree, I will not leave this office.”

Marcel agreed. He was glad to do so, genuinely glad. “Believe me, I wish her no harm, Julien,” he said. “Even you will scarcely be as happy as I when she walks through those gates.”

Julien did not answer. He walked out of the office, with the keys to Marcel’s car in his pocket.

WHEN THE POLICE came for Julia, driving out of Vaison in their car, they were angry at the assignment, not least because they had been told to take her into Avignon and they barely had enough fuel to get there. They had been husbanding their limited supplies for weeks now, and considered that to use it all up on such an errand was an absurd waste.

She answered the door on their knock, and looked more surprised than worried to see them there. “What’s up, gentlemen? Lost your way?”

She was still dressed in the dirty ink-stained shirt, the arms rolled up, her hair pinned back loosely, falling around her neck. Her hands were dirty; she had been working.

The policemen were uncomfortable; none truly believed they should do jobs like this; the government had set up a special department for rounding up Jews, and they disliked having to do the dirty work for others. One of them, indeed, was ready to tell her that they would come back, that she had half an hour to disappear into the hills. All would have been quite happy had she not been there. These were not cruel men; in a few months’ time one would abandon his uniform and join the Resistance himself; another would risk trouble for giving a young man and his family precisely the opportunity he was not quite ready to give to Julia. Only the third disliked troublemakers and communists more than he did the Germans, yet even he acted with no zeal when it came to rounding up people for deportations. He did his duty, as did the others, hoping that a higher authority—the préfet perhaps—would intervene and prevent this matter getting out of hand.