Jonathan Buckley - The Great Concert of the Night

‘I detect a theme,’ I commented, displaying a picture of Rachel smiling thinly next to a bearded giant, whose left hand was on her hip, while the right flourished a cleaver.

‘Everywhere we go,’ said April, rolling her eyes. ‘Even if the wife is there, they’ve got to have a Rachel hug.’

‘It’s kind of irritating,’ said Rachel. ‘There’s this assumption that you’re going to want to get hugged.’

‘If you’re cute,’ said Audrey.

‘Or small,’ April mock-lamented. ‘But I’ve heard they like them big down south. I’m hoping. I take your point – it’s kind of irritating. OK. But once in a while. A hug. A little hug. I could live with that.’

April’s divorce had been finalised last month, Audrey informed me.

‘A younger woman,’ explained April. ‘Slimmer, younger, dumber. His secretary.’

‘Original,’ Audrey commented sympathetically.

‘No, but it’s love,’ sighed April. ‘It has nothing to do with her tits. Except he paid for them. But it’s OK. I’ve got the house. And my friends. And my freedom. Free at last, Lord. So we’re celebrating,’ sang April, with a chink of glasses. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, what brings you here? What’s your line of work?’

I told them.

Rachel wanted information. She had many questions, and with every question I became more convinced that she was a lawyer. At one point, I winced at my own voice; it seemed that I was flirting.

‘This place must be heaven for you,’ April ventured. She had to admit, though, that she didn’t get much of a buzz out of the museums. ‘Too much stuff. And too many people like me,’ she explained. ‘And it’s like you’re under pressure to be amazed. That just doesn’t work for me. I can’t just turn it on.’ They had been to the Vatican. With hundreds of other people, like a crowd for a ball game, they had trudged down that never-ending corridor, for their appointment with Michelangelo. By the time they reached the chapel, she was not in a receptive frame of mind. ‘Yes, I can see that this is really something,’ was April’s reaction. ‘It’s totally spectacular. I can see that. I appreciate that it’s incredible. But I’m just not feeling it.’

Audrey concurred: the Vatican had exhausted her. Audrey was often exhausted, I sensed.

‘But I’m not an artistic person,’ April confessed. The people and the atmosphere were what she loved about Italy. ‘And the food, of course. I do love my food. I love my food so much. I’ll diet when I’m dead.’ On invitation, she removed a forkload of pasta from Rachel’s plate. ‘Rachel’s the cultured one,’ she confided loudly. ‘Her partner’s an architect. They have a wonderful house.’ Rachel was instructed to show me some pictures of the wonderful house.

After a little persuasion, Rachel produced her phone. A reel of images was called up. The house was modern, a single-storey building with huge windows and a lot of raw stone on show.

‘Show him the kitchen,’ urged April. ‘It’s amazing,’ she assured me.

The kitchen could have accommodated half a dozen cars. In the sink and cooker areas it looked like some sort of operating theatre, and the fridge was a hi-tech monolith. At the seventh or eighth photo, a woman who was not Rachel appeared, stirring the contents of a bright copper pan. In another, she raised a glass in the direction of the photographer. She had the look of someone who was at home.

Having seen a man apparently beseeching the image of a saint, Imogen remarked that this was perhaps not an irrational action: all the evidence suggests that God is arbitrary in the distribution of his favours, so why should he not, once in a while, accede to a request from a random member of the public? The image was the comely figure of half-naked Saint Sebastian, reclining like an odalisque, his limbs adorned with three golden arrows. This is not Saint Sebastian dead. He survived the arrows, and on his recovery took it upon himself to berate the emperor Diocletian for his persecution of the Christians. Taking exception at being upbraided in this way, and by a person who by rights should have been dead, Diocletian had the young man beaten to death with cudgels, a scene that is rarely depicted. In the chapel on the other side of the church from Sebastian’s tomb are displayed one of the near-fatal arrows and a segment of the column to which the archers tied the saint. Also on show are a piece of the Crown of Thorns, a tooth and some bones of Saint Peter, an arm of Saint Andrew, a tooth of Saint Paul, an arm of Saint Roch, relics of Saint Fabian, the skulls of the canonised popes Callixtus I and Stephen I, fragments of the skulls of the martyred saints Nereus, Achilleus, Avenistus, Valentine and Lucina, and a stone indented with what one is asked to believe are the footprints of Christ.

In the church dedicated to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr: dozens of inspiring deaths, unflinchingly depicted. Saints boiled and skewered, flayed with spiked brushes, roasted, dismembered with blades, stretched, sawn in half (vertically, through the brain), pulled apart by horses, crushed, decapitated, and so forth. Hands and tongues and breasts are chopped off. Every mutilation is suffered with good grace, as if submitting to a haircut. There are no grimaces or howls of pain; screams would only have flattered the pagan butchers. Sacred hardcore.

Strange scene on the tram. In front of me, facing each other from opposite seats, sat a large soft woman and her male companion, perhaps forty years of age to her fifty, and considerably smaller, in all dimensions. He appeared to be a man of fretful disposition, raised to a greater anxiety by current circumstances. Their relationship, I felt, was in its early stages; he was on probation; it seemed likely that they had become acquainted online. The man sat straight-backed, knees and feet together, with a small backpack on his lap; a sheet of paper rested on a guidebook, on the backpack – a list of sights, with what appeared to be times for arrival and departure, plus entrance charges. A lot depended on the outcome of this trip, I felt. No sense of pleasure was transmitted by the woman’s gaze; her eyes seemed to acknowledge, rather, that the city had not let her down, so far. One intuited that she had often been let down. Several times the man leaned forward to lightly seize her arm. ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’, he whispered, every time, pointing at a building, then at the corresponding photo in his guidebook; he might add a comment, at which she would concede a small smile, as if he had to be humoured. Again and again: ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’, urgently, always repeating the endearment. Her smile was always the same. It did not appear that they had argued; there was no annoyance in her demeanour, just an affectionate condescension. He must have said ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart’ ten times in as many minutes. Only once did she speak. He made some reference to their plans for the afternoon, I think, at which she responded, sharply, with something that began with: ‘We are doing it because…’ He acquiesced immediately; sitting straight, looking directly ahead, he did not say another word. At the stop before mine she rose and moved to the door, as if alone; the little lover followed. On the pavement, she took the timetable from him, checked it, then strode off. As they entered a side street she turned, smiled, and brought her lips down onto his mouth, quickly, for a semi-second, as if stamping his face with a mark of her approval.