Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘Can I help you?’ the priest said.

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.’ Then, surprising myself, I added, ‘I thought you were the priest from my hometown. I haven’t seen him for years.’

‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He smiled.

‘Oh, it’s not a disappointment. If anything, it’s a relief.’

The priest’s smile became uncertain. ‘Are you in trouble?’ Hands clasped, he moved a step closer.

‘There’s no need to concern yourself.’

I saw that he was tempted to probe further. In the end, though, he chose not to.

‘Go in peace,’ he said.

It was two or three weeks before my mother would talk about what had happened.

‘I was buried in the rubble,’ she said. ‘I could hardly breathe.’

I held her hand. Its swollen knuckles, its thin black veins. ‘You’re safe now.’

Her eyes veered round the room, as if the walls might tumble at any moment.

I had put her on the ground floor. I had covered the cold tiles with bright wool rugs and installed a stove made of white majolica. The first days had been difficult, though. She ate very little, and could not sleep. Unfamiliar sounds upset her — and almost every sound was unfamiliar. My sleep was broken too. When I woke I would often hear her talking to Lapa, her voice subdued and tremulous. Once, towards dawn, I heard the front door slam, and found her on the street-corner, warning a passerby not to go home, but to stay outside, in the open.

There had been several earthquakes, she told me later, occurring over a period of three days. The one that had frightened her most had come during the night. She remembered a rumbling that sounded like thunder, but in the ground rather than the sky, and a wind that was like no wind she had ever heard before. She was shaken from her bed. Plates and glasses smashed, and a wardrobe toppled over, landing on its face. She ran out on to Via Dione. There was no moon. In the darkness people’s screams were silver. She couldn’t explain what she meant by that. A neighbour knelt in the middle of the street. He was crushed by falling masonry. The bell rang in the steeple opposite, even though there was no one pulling on the rope. She watched a woman run past with a bird-cage, its tiny wire door flapping, nothing inside. She remembered her sister, and hurried back into the house. It was then that the ceiling collapsed. They were trapped in what remained of the hallway, not far from the front door. Luckily, it rained. They took turns drinking the black water that dripped down the walls. Later, after they had been dug out, they heard the ground had opened like a mouth. Modica, Ragusa and Scichilo were swallowed. Nothing but stinking, brackish pools where they had been. The sea had risen up; shoals of fish were found miles inland. She had seen a dead donkey in an orange tree.

Her jaw shifted, as if her teeth hurt. ‘All our family documents were lost. The record of who we are, and what we own. All gone. And people too — so many people …’

‘Flaminia’s all right, though?’

‘She’s in Palermo.’

‘Father Paone?’

‘Gone.’

There was nothing left of the house that Jacopo had built, she went on. Not a single stone. She had told him not to live out there. She had said it was dangerous. He wouldn’t listen, though. He never listened.

‘It was so brutal — so thorough .’ A shiver shook her. ‘But that isn’t what stays with me. What stays with me is that bird-cage, with its wire door flapping …’ She looked at me; her pupils had shrunk, and white showed above and below her irises. ‘I can see it now.’

Two months after my mother’s arrival in Florence, Jack Towne invited me to his villa near the Fortezza da Basso. On a hot, late August night I was shown into a parlour and asked to wait. With its muted furnishings and its padded walls, the room had the deep, airless silence of a mausoleum. Though I barely knew the man, somehow this seemed in character.

A quarter of an hour passed, and still Towne did not appear. I opened the door to the adjoining room and stepped inside. The silence intensified. There were three sofas upholstered in dark velvet — chocolate, damson, aubergine — and fixed to the ceiling was a large round mirror. The tapestry at the far end of the room depicted a scene of such complex debauchery that I had to turn myself almost upside-down to make out what was going on. In the corner, on a pedestal, stood a life-size sculpture of a goat. The burnt vermilion glaze told me it was Marvuglia’s work.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

I swung round.

Towne came forwards, smiling. ‘You went to see Marvuglia, didn’t you? He told me.’ One hand on my shoulder, he guided me back into the other room. ‘What did you think?’

I spoke about Marvuglia’s colours, and how they conveyed injury and torment.

‘And the man himself?’ Towne said.

‘I imagine he’s got enemies.’

Towne nodded.

Our conversation turned to the prints and drawings that were his stock-in-trade. I was curious to know what sort of work the Grand Duke had bought from him. Towne looked at me steadily. A two-headed calf, he said. A dwarf. Anything deformed or freakish. I remembered the armless German and fell silent, wondering what place I occupied in the Grand Duke’s collection, but when Towne produced a folio of drawings of people who had contracted syphilis I was suddenly glad that I had come. I had been planning a series of pieces based on pleasure and its consequences, and the drawings would be invaluable as reference. Towne was a hard bargainer. At last, though, we agreed on a price.

To celebrate our transaction — the first of many, he hoped — he insisted that I dine with him. In my opinion, we had less in common than he supposed, and I was eager to get away, but he wouldn’t listen to my excuses. He took me to the Eagle, an eating-house near Via Tornabuoni. To my dismay, the first person I saw when I walked in was Stufa. He was sitting at a table with Bassetti. Before I could suggest a change of venue, though, Towne had called out a greeting. It appeared he knew them both.

After the initial courtesies, during which Stufa acted as if I wasn’t there, Bassetti turned to me. ‘I hope your mother’s settling in.’

‘She is. Thank you.’ I hadn’t told the Grand Duke about my mother’s arrival, let alone Bassetti, but this was his way of reminding me that nothing escaped his attention.

‘She was lucky to survive,’ he said.

‘Yes, she was.’

‘And lucky to have someone to turn to, someone to take her in.’

‘I’ll do my best for her.’

‘Apparently,’ Stufa said, his eyes still lowered, ‘she’s a bit unhinged.’

I faced him. ‘I would like to apologize for what happened in the gardens.’

Though Bassetti was still eating, the angle of his head had altered.

‘I shouldn’t have threatened you,’ I said.

‘You were upset by the news of the earthquake.’ Stufa’s delivery was unconvincing, flat; he might appear to be making allowances for my behaviour, but he was keeping his true feelings hidden.

‘All the same,’ I said.

Stufa studied me. ‘I don’t think you’re being entirely honest with me.’

‘No?’

‘You haven’t forgiven me for what I did.’

‘What did he do?’ Bassetti’s voice was mild, almost uninterested.

I looked at the red silk curtains that hung against the windows. When I told Signora de la Mar what had happened, the blood had rushed to her usually pallid face. You should have slit the bastard’s throat right there and then . Fiore’s father hit her when she was little, she said later. Fiore was never quite the same after that. I had promised her that Stufa would answer for his actions. As yet, I had no idea how to keep that promise.