His apartment was on the Corso Cavour, on the south-east side of the old city. He was quite close to the archaeological museum and the garden of the San Pietro church, from which pale Assisi could be seen on the flank of hills across the broad valley. The view from the upstairs apartment, though, was of the street, and the noises were of the street and kept him awake at night until he became accustomed to them.
Dr Luca Matteotti had met him at the station and taken him to the offices of the department responsible for water and power in Perugia. Rather than any personal welcome at the station, Matteotti outlined the hierarchy within the reservoir project organisation and stressed his own overall supervision and responsibility. The director’s manner was distant, but on that first day Paul thought it just the effect of formal English as a second language.
Both the station and the offices were in the new part of the city, and nondescript in a way that made them interchangeable with the station and offices of a hundred other cities. But after the coffee and fruit, the introductions to strangers who would become familiar enough, the director drove him up the hill to the old city with its great walls and serenity. ‘The gryphon is the symbol of Perugia,’ he said, as they passed through one of the gates with that strange hybrid carved above it. Paul was to see stone gryphons many times again. They were on the main buildings of the square, but also reduced and more roughly carved, sometimes mutilated, above low doors in narrow streets and on some of the oldest tombs. They carried, despite absurdity, vestiges of ancient and superstitious power.
‘This was an Etruscan city,’ said Matteotti, and Paul didn’t reply because he knew nothing of the Etruscans except that they were superseded by the Romans. ‘There is a great well beneath the city which is nearly two and a half thousand years old. Hydrologists are not new in Perugia, Mr Saville.’ The director was smiling, but obviously enjoyed the put-down.
‘That’s interesting,’ Paul said.
It was several days before he first saw the woman from apartment four. As he came up the stairs he heard the loud noise of one of the double turn locks on the apartment doors, and she passed him with a slight smile as a reply to his greeting at the bend in the stairs. Light brown hair she had and pale skin. ‘Buongiorno,’ he’d said, and she had smiled and glanced at him without much interest. She’d be nearly forty, he thought, and that was all that occurred to him. Three mornings later he saw her in the bread shop when he was earlier than usual for his breakfast panini. She was supple in movement and spoke quietly to the shopkeeper. ‘Buongiorno,’ Paul said, and she gave him the same impersonal glance, as if she had never seen him before.
She lived in the apartment one down from him, and always when he saw, or heard, she went in and out alone. Perhaps because there were boisterous families in the other sets of rooms on that floor, and he and the woman lived alone, he wondered about her sometimes.
In the early weeks, though, he was preoccupied with work. Luca Matteotti proved to be an unpleasant and difficult man who saw no reason for Paul and Jeremy to be on the project team for the new reservoir, and accepted them as consultants only because the joint venture British company insisted. Within the first few days he had queried the need for a full series of bore samples to determine if material to be excavated from the site could be used as fill in the earth dam. ‘What else would we do with it,’ he exclaimed. He had the habit of looking out of the window of his office as he talked, as if Paul’s face was repugnant to him, and he accepted outside calls during their discussions, and kept Paul waiting while he did so.
‘He hates us both,’ said Jeremy.
‘Yes, but you he hates just because you’re English. Me he hates personally.’
‘He hates us both because we know our job and we’re here,’ said Jeremy. Yet Paul knew Matteotti disliked him not just on the grounds of profession, or nationality, but because their personalities repelled each other. Nothing would alter that; nothing would mitigate it. There was some incompatibility which crackled like electricity between them whenever they were together, and which sometimes surprised the two themselves with its nakedness. Some atavistic emotions were at stake which careful formality could not completely cover. Paul disliked the habitual hauteur of the director’s expression, his considered and false laugh, refined dress sense, assumption of cultural superiority, laziness, and his habit of observing the outside world instead of looking at the person he was addressing. He was something of a prick, Paul decided.
Jeremy he liked a lot, but the Englishman had his family with him, and although they were hospitable, Paul didn’t want to push that hospitality too far, and he spent most nights working in his apartment, or in the many restaurants of the old city, sometimes with Italian members of the project team. He enjoyed their company, but his lack of Italian made it difficult for him to develop such friendships.
As he spent much time in the apartment, Paul took an interest in people coming and going around him: The Arcottis and Sarzanos were families who seemed similar in their noisy and happy concentration on children, yet they had little to do with each other. They had no time perhaps for anyone beyond the breathless confusion of their own lives. The woman from number four was apart from all that, as Paul was himself. She seemed to have only a fleeting engagement with the world, though outside the apartments must have lain a more substantial life. He grew to know her balanced step in the hall when he was in his own room, and to recognise her from a distance outside by her walk, the cut of her hair and its light brown lustre.
In his mind she was alone always, because he’d never seen her with others, and in that unquestioned, almost unacknowledged, male way he saw little distinction between being alone and being available. So he was surprised, disappointed even, when he came past her door one evening and heard the laughter of a man and a woman in her room. The woman’s laughter was quick and unrestrained, at variance with the demeanour he’d witnessed in public; the male laugh was relaxed. Though Paul hadn’t paused in the hallway, he felt a moment of aural voyeurism and quickened his pace to his own apartment. Once afterwards he heard the two voices, but never in laughter again, and he never saw anyone coming or going there except the woman. Maybe it was just a visitor, a married lover, or a brother from the other side of the city. A woman like that should have more than a brother’s company; should have someone close in the long evenings when Paul himself sat on his balcony, which was little more than a window ledge, and looked over the jumble of orange tiled roofs. They were the gutter-shaped tiles, alternately convex, concave, which Paul was told were originally made by women moulding the clay over their thighs. He had his plans and memos, but often instead of working he would observe the street beneath him, the local people cheerfully walking out to the restaurants, the lift of their voices louder and less guarded than the conversation of New Zealanders. Sometimes he would take the short walk to the high garden of San Pietro church and watch pale Assisi gradually fade behind the dusk that filled the valley. The great stone wall of old Perugia bounded the formal garden, and below it the cars and scooters contested the steep road, becoming visible when night fell, only as white and yellow firefly lights, although the noise remained the same.
By the second month, the feasibility study involved over twenty men at the reservoir site, and Paul worked among them in jeans and an open-necked shirt. Only one or two had any English, but he joked with them using his few words of Italian, mime and laughter. The Italians loved laughter. He wasn’t their immediate superior so he relaxed with them. Sometimes, instead of using his cellphone to call for a car, he would ride back to the city with the men in a van. Matteotti was against such blurring of status. He told Paul that he should have a jacket and tie when on site, and that by fraternising with the men he made it more difficult for the overseer.
Matteotti gave him a ticking off about these things during a routine meeting with Jeremy and several other planners. It was such bad management etiquette that Paul went to his office afterwards and complained. ‘You could have asked me to come in and raised these things personally,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it should be in the first instance anyway, not an official blast. I don’t appreciate being criticised in front of my colleagues, and in any case all that stuff about clothes and status is incidental to what we’re trying to achieve here.’
‘It is incidental in your opinion, but not in mine,’ said Matteotti. ‘On-site relationships have a performance outcome sooner or later.’ He was looking at Paul, which was surprising in itself.
‘I’ve no argument with that. It’s the nature of the relationship we seem to disagree about.’
‘And I told you at the meeting what I expected. That’s the whole point, so there will be no further misunderstanding,’ said the director. He drew papers towards him as a sign he considered the conversation over. Paul thought it likely that he felt satisfaction in such disagreement, that he saw himself as the bulwark against foreign technocrats who would usurp a legitimate Italian endeavour, and encourage a vulgar popularism. Paul looked at the smooth, dark head of the director bent over his papers, and was tempted to say something about their antagonism, and how they might deal with that in the time they would work together, but he knew that Matteotti would see such openness as an attack, and went out without saying more.
Paul had half agreed to meet a group in the evening at a family restaurant near the Etruscan gate, but after the row he didn’t feel like company. He sat on his ledge with a bottle of Trasimeno wine and took less pleasure than usual in the Italians passing beneath him. Because of his own mood, the happiness and laughter of others seemed vacuous and banal, and he wondered why he’d come to work among people so different from his own.
His isolation was broken by knocking on his door, and he went inside and opened it. The woman from number four was there. ‘Mi puo aiutare, per favore?’ she said. ‘Ho bisogno d’aiuto.’ Paul didn’t understand. ‘Help,’ she said in English, and beckoned with her hand palm uppermost.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘Help,’ she said again, and went down the hall to her own door, pausing there to gesture to him. When he went in he recognised that the floor plan of her apartment was the same as his, but congested with an abnormal mode of living. The first room had sofas and chairs, but also wood and aluminium contraptions that reminded him of a gymnasium, and a bedroom into which the woman quickly led him had a pipe frame over the special bed, with suspended handgrip and dangling straps.
On the floor was the reason his assistance was needed, and the explanation for his never having heard any man entering, or leaving, the apartment: a naked man of two halves in a twisted sheet. His upper body was well developed in a fleshy way, and his lower half pitifully wasted. ‘Did he fall out?’ asked Paul, surprised into such a obvious remark.
‘Maria doesn’t have any English,’ the man said. His pronunciation was good, his voice calm. Lying naked and deformed before a stranger, he retained a curious dignity and self-respect. ‘Maria was giving me a bed bath and we turned suddenly,’ he said.
Even with two of them to lift, it was difficult to get him back onto the bed, and when he was there, Paul noticed the sweat on his face and surmised that he must have felt some pain in the fall, or in being lifted, despite the paralysis. Paul had regained enough composure to address him directly rather than Maria when he spoke next. ‘Can I do anything else?’
‘I’ll be fine now. I’m all right in the bed, or my chair, but if I ever get stranded, as I did now, I’m too heavy for Maria. Pacciale Sarzano would help, but the family is not there tonight.’
They both looked at Maria, and she smiled, hearing her name and seeing them turn to her. For the first time she met Paul’s eyes directly.
‘My name’s Giancarlo,’ the man said, and Paul turned and took his outstretched hand while Maria quickly laid the sheet over her partner’s hips to cover his cock in its thicket of dark hair.
Giancarlo’s clasp was quite strong, and Paul could feel calluses on the underside of the fingers from the handgrip suspended above the bed. The folded sheet emphasised the physical dichotomy: the heavy, white upper body, and the emaciated legs, the shin bones without flesh so that the flat surfaces showed, and the feet permanently curled in and with contorted toes. Maybe Maria shaved his torso, for it was almost hairless, yet on his wasted legs the hair was darkly vigorous as if it benefited from nourishment there which was useful in no other way.
‘What is your name?’ asked Giancarlo. He had an intelligent, handsome face, though slightly puffy and with unusual creases at the jaw line because of his posture. ‘We’ve been meaning to make contact as good neighbours, and now our laziness has found us out, and we’ve had to ask your help before introducing ourselves.’
Maria brought another chair through from the other room, and Paul accepted Giancarlo’s invitation to have red wine. She helped her partner put on a loose top and covered his legs with a yellow blanket. She took away the large plastic bowl which she’d been using for his bed bath. With her foot she pushed the clean bedpan out of sight. Paul expected her to sit down once she felt the room and Giancarlo were ready for a visitor, but after bringing wine and glasses, she left the room.
‘What work are you doing here?’ asked the Italian. He seemed eager to hear of anything happening outside the apartment, and yet was to prove well informed also. ‘I read everything,’ he said, ‘but see very little. It’s so difficult for me to go outside.’
Of course it was: an apartment on the second floor, for God’s sake, when he was wheelchair-bound. It seemed an absurd situation to Paul, but he was a stranger and didn’t like to ask why they weren’t somewhere more convenient. Giancarlo knew about the reservoir project from the papers, and encouraged Paul to talk about it. When Paul complimented him on his English, he said he’d taken it as a subject for his degree, and he’d taught economics at the university where English was used a lot. He said he still did assignment marking, and Paul was again puzzled for there seemed no reason why he couldn’t continue to give lectures. There were vans with devices to load wheelchairs, and there was Maria to wheel him about campus. And this time Paul did ask. ‘It’s difficult for us as a couple,’ said Giancarlo a little vaguely. ‘That outside world’s not for us.’
Paul didn’t stay long despite Giancarlo’s friendly interest. He’d entered their apartment as a stranger appealed to in emergency, rather than someone whose company had been sought by choice. Giancarlo thanked him, and called out in Italian to Maria, who came from one of the other rooms to take Paul to the door.
‘Grazie,’ she said, and held out a box of the local chocolates, which Paul refused to take. They had been closer when lifting the naked Giancarlo onto the bed, but there at the door they were two, not three. She didn’t smile: she seemed to look for something in his face, and Paul found in hers sadness, apprehension even, rather than gratitude, or interest. The box sank with her hand; she held it as if she was holding the neck of a goose. ‘Grazie,’ she said again. As she closed the door he saw Giancarlo’s wheelchair at the far end of the room, and the equipment which had surprised him. He supposed Giancarlo worked on it to keep upper-body strength. He remembered the one time he had heard them laughing. How wrong he’d been in his interpretation of it.
Four days later there was a note from Giancarlo under his door when he came back in the evening. He was invited for a meal on the next Friday. Although he spent many nights alone, Paul at first thought he wouldn’t go. The reaction was more clear-cut than any reasons he could give for it. Maybe it was because he knew Maria had a partner, maybe it was Giancarlo’s disability and the packed paraphernalia that bore witness to it, maybe it was just the possibility that the invitation came only because he had been of use to them. But he went. He went because he was personally unhappy at his work and had not much to do with his nights; he went because Giancarlo was intelligent and spoke good English; he went because there was something about Maria that drew him.
They ate in the small room opening to the balcony. Paul hadn’t seen it on his first visit. It was familiar, however, in being structurally exactly the same as the balcony room in his own apartment — and surprising in its décor. In that room there was nothing at all to hint at Giancarlo’s condition except the wheelchair he sat in. The floor had light blue tiles and one wall was crowded with spread book covers. They were not highly pictorial, and all Paul could make out of the titles was that they were scientific.
‘It’s Maria’s job,’ said Giancarlo. ‘She’s a book designer for the university publishers. That’s where I met her. It’s good because she can work from home most of the time. She uses this table,’ and he tapped on the white tablecloth in which fold creases were sharp. He wore a blue shirt not much darker than the tiles, and he gesticulated with his strong, pale hands when he talked. Above the table he was powerful and handsome, and it was easy to forget those useless, clenched, hidden legs.
Giancarlo was a skilful conversationalist. He talked engagingly about himself and his country, but also drew Paul out with genuine warmth and curiosity. Every now and then he’d break off to give Maria a rapid resumé in Italian of what was being said, and she would smile at them both, and make quick comments of which Giancarlo approved. Sometimes she would cheerfully interrupt to offer more food, or wine, then listen again. Late in the evening, when Paul had been enjoying himself by exaggerating Dr Matteotti’s faults, and paused to join in laughter with Giancarlo, he realised that he had been talking for a long time and that nothing he had been saying was intelligible to Maria.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s very rude of me to be going on in English all night.’
Giancarlo translated and Maria held up her hands, shrugged.
‘She’s glad there’s someone for me to talk to,’ said Giancarlo. ‘She grows tired of all my stories over and over.’
‘I’m embarrassed that I don’t know Italian,’ Paul said. ‘I should be going to classes, or at least listening to the tapes the company gave me, but all I know are the names of the things I like most in the restaurants, and enough words to buy a ticket.’
‘Well, your firm could send you to Turkey next, and you would be back where you started without the local language again. Italy can be breathed, tasted, heard, seen and caressed without an understanding of the language. Maybe, however, I’ll teach you just a few special insults to use for your Director Matteotti when next you’re in argument.’
The balcony wasn’t big enough for Giancarlo’s wheelchair, but after the meal Maria and Paul sat close together there, and Giancarlo ran his chair half through the balcony door and was almost with them. While the conversation continued between the two men, and Paul enjoyed it, he was conscious too of Maria’s physical presence although she said little. The light from the blue tiled room behind Giancarlo caught the line of her bare shoulder, lit one cheek and made the red wine in her drooping glass glow softly. People were coming past on their way home from the restaurants. As always they didn’t think to look up, and so were unaware of being overlooked and overheard. They talked loudly and candidly. Paul thought of the many nights he had sat on his own balcony in such a way, while, unknown to him, Maria would have been on theirs, and Giancarlo as far into the night as his wheelchair would allow.
‘People are happy now that they’ve forgotten work and had good food and wine,’ Giancarlo said. ‘After the patrons there’s a lull and then the restaurant workers come past too: the waiters, cashiers and cooks. They come quietly, singly, because they’re tired and it’s just been work for them.’
Paul hadn’t seen them, and realised that Giancarlo, maybe Maria too, stayed up much later than he did. What did they talk about, he wondered, when even the night workers were going home to bed.
‘And I must be on my way, or I’ll still be here when they come past tonight,’ he said.
Giancarlo wanted him to stay longer, but Paul asked him to thank Maria for more than his ‘Grazie, grazie’ could convey, and she went with Paul to see him out. Giancarlo had wheeled back to allow them from the balcony, but he didn’t follow from the blue-tiled room with book covers and white tablecloth. ‘We want you to come again,’ he called. Paul and Maria went through the room with Giancarlo’s equipment, and Paul thought of all the drudgery associated with that and the specially adapted bed he had seen on his first visit. How often did she have to leave her own room to tend Giancarlo; wash him, prise those twining legs apart, turn and toilet him, dress the pressure points, help him grapple with the exercise machinery they were passing. As he thanked her at the hall door, she looked down so that he saw the sweep of her smooth hair rather than her expression. What sort of a life for her, but then Giancarlo seemed a man worth devotion.
Giancarlo and Luca Matteotti — what poles they represented in the reaches of the Italian character, and increasingly Paul sought the company of the former as a compensation for the perpetual guerilla warfare of his job. Matteotti instigated an audit of Paul’s expenses. He held a party, at his house in the countryside outside the walls, to which Paul was expressly not invited, and then spent much of the project managers’ meeting talking about it. He sent criticism of the consultants to their London office. None of that seriously threatened Paul’s position in the firm, especially as Jeremy and even some Italian scientists were supportive, but it diminished the satisfaction the job otherwise gave him. If you reacted to the director’s animosity as a victim you were increasingly treated like one. Paul didn’t have a victim mentality: he could cope with Matteotti’s dislike as long as he was left alone to do his work.
‘Threaten to pack it in,’ said Jeremy, who’d talked of doing it himself, even though he was less in the firing line. ‘That might smarten him up. Consultants are part of the deal and he can’t get the work approved without us.’
‘Maybe, but I’m thinking that a crude Kiwi response might be more effective. Something that affects his pride and shows him up in front of others. That’s what would hurt him most and make him think twice about knocking me all the time.’
‘What, a truckload of sheep shit delivered to his door?’
‘Not quite that crude,’ said Paul.
‘You know, I like to watch his face at meetings,’ Jeremy said. ‘Each expression is so calculated I think he must practise before a mirror. Don’t you think?’
‘I bet he does, yes.’
He was in Jeremy’s office where they had been assessing computer-generated graphics of water pressure distortion on various natural fills. The view from Jeremy’s window was of new Perugia on the flat. It was much the same view as Paul had from his own office, and always if he looked out he thought of the old part on the hill where he had his apartment: the massive gates and walls which had been fortifications in ancient times, the nonsensical alleys, the whisper of the past, and the pigeons resting in the niches of decaying plaster, lizards basking in the morning sun on perpendicular surfaces. The stepped streets which in an afternoon might be crowded with temporary market stalls, and at night cleared again, with just the scents of vegetables, cheeses and cured meats in the warm, lingering air, and leaves and torn ribbon on the cobbles. The orange tiles once moulded on the thighs of women perhaps, and the beaked stone gryphons both worn and fierce. And often he thought of Maria and Giancarlo, citizens of the old city yet rarely venturing into it, the only Italian people whose real life was gradually opening to him.
He invited them for drinks and they accepted. On that Sunday he set out fruit and three cheeses with the wine, all spread on a white tablecloth not unlike Maria’s, which he had sought out in the shops, and in the duplicate balcony room too, although there were no lovely blue tiles, just floorboards, and no design work on the walls, just one speckled print of Venice. The difference between an apartment owned and one of casual, transient occupation.
An hour or so before they were to come, Paul found a note pushed under the door. Giancarlo wrote that they were very sorry, but illness prevented them coming, and he hoped Paul would forgive the late notice. Paul noted the wording, which gave no indication which of them was unwell. He surprised himself with the disappointment he felt. He ate the cheeses by himself over a week of evenings, but it was only the Tuesday when Giancarlo came to his door. Paul hadn’t seen him out of his own rooms before. He wore a red top promoting the Perugian soccer team. It was close fitting and accentuated the purposeful development of his upper body; his legs were covered by a pale blanket tucked at his waist. The chair seemed all stainless steel and plastic handles; very modern, but without a motor.
‘We’re embarrassed about Sunday,’ he said. ‘It was something we looked forward to, but health is a fragile thing in our home.’
‘That’s okay. We’ll arrange it again sometime soon.’
‘Maria and I want you to come to dinner again.’
‘It’s my turn.’
‘It was your turn and we let you down, so now it’s our turn again. Maria likes me to have company. The only thing is, we hope you won’t mind if she works after the meal while we talk. I don’t know why she hasn’t picked up more English, but she’s selective that way.’
‘So am I,’ said Paul.
He went at least once a week after that. He got used to postponements, assuming Giancarlo had some complication that made it difficult for him, maybe some procedure that depended on the irregular visits of a nurse. Giancarlo liked being seated in the blue-tiled room with the book covers on the wall and the door to the balcony open to the warm, slow-moving air. After the meal Maria would often clear the table and work there, while Paul sat on the balcony and his friend ran his wheelchair into the opening, or, less often, both of them would go into the room Paul didn’t like, the one with the special equipment, and he would help Giancarlo into a chest rest with his legs in a sling so that pressure points were relieved.
And always they would talk: about their countries and their lives, about food and wine, about their work and the things they would rather do. They would talk about things quite commonplace to one, but strange to the other. In their conversation they became not only friends, but equals. Paul hardly noticed the wheelchair any more, and was accustomed to Giancarlo suspended in the other room to free him from sitting, the stalks of his legs in loose trousers swaying a little. Sometimes he would do arm and shoulder exercises as they spoke, flexing and swaying while discussing the prevalence of cheating at the university, or asking Paul about time spent in New Mexico and Australia. Often, before he left, Paul would help his friend into his bed, because Maria found the task difficult. Giancarlo would grip the stirrup hanging above his bed and heave himself up, the muscles flexing on arm and shoulder, but someone was needed to assist and guide his useless legs.
Giancarlo had come from a poor family in Rimini. Hardship had sapped the love the family members had for each other and driven them apart. Although he had won through to a university education by talent and application, the early days had scarred him. ‘Most people are comfortable to live with comparative failure,’ he said, ‘but for people like me there is the spectre of absolute failure, dying alone in a dilapidated rat hole behind the shunting sheds.’ Because he came from a fortunate country and along an easy path to a professional career, Paul found such a fear hard to imagine. ‘My worst dreams are of poverty,’ said Giancarlo, ‘not my legs.’
‘You don’t walk in your dreams?’ asked Paul.
‘Everybody walks in their dreams, or flies. And I’m this way because of an accident, not from birth.’
‘What was the accident?’ Paul felt able to ask when he’d become a friend, but Giancarlo was vague.
‘I was hit by a car,’ he said, ‘and have little recollection of it.’
Maria was more difficult to get close to. It wasn’t just their inability to talk the same language, or that after the meal she often worked at her book design. Usually she seemed glad to see him, and welcoming in her own way. She would laugh when they laughed, and listen when Paul spoke, with a smile on her face, eagerly take the translation from Giancarlo and quickly make some reply for him to pass on. They were the best times, and Giancarlo was never more relaxed and witty than those evenings when the three of them were on song together.
But occasionally there were evenings in which Maria was different, when Paul observed, without her being aware of it, the blank sadness of her expression, and there was unaccountably sometimes an absence in her manner which subtly rebuffed him.
Only once did Paul and Maria go out into the city together.
He had developed nagging toothache, and needed to see a dentist. Giancarlo arranged an appointment with their own dentist who spoke no English, and Maria walked with Paul up the steep, cobbled walkway from Corso Cavour to Corso Vannucci and the cathedral of San Lorenzo. It was mid-morning, warm and still. Perugia was not a prime tourist target, and large enough to absorb those that came without any threat to its identity. Local people maintained their ascendency and their ways without self-conscious display. Paul enjoyed that. He enjoyed, too, walking with Maria in the streets where he was usually alone, and never before with a woman. Despite the ache in his jaw he was conscious of her attractiveness, and the subtle alteration in the way he himself was regarded as a consequence of assumed partnership: such is the Italian way. He allowed himself to imagine that they were going to a café lunch with wine and confidential conversation, rather than he as patient and she as guide, heading to an appointment with the dentist.
The surgery rooms were not far beyond the square, towards the university buildings on the slope, above a chocolate shop in a narrow, uneven street. Atop the entrance were carved crossed keys, an elephant with an improbably long trunk, and a gryphon — all with the detail worn away by the centuries. The waiting room was small, and most of the close-set chairs already occupied.
Paul and Maria sat side by side without being able to carry on a conversation. She read a magazine, and he leant his head back to relax in the heat, conscious of the throbbing of his lower jaw and the flow of Italian from both a mother and son whose knees were close to his own. Any language incomprehensible to him always seemed to be spoken with excessive rapidity.
When it was his turn for treatment, he and Maria went down a long bare hallway and into a surgery, the one window of which looked into a shadowed and confined courtyard packed with dustbins and motor scooters. Above them household washing hung absolutely without movement. The dentist was a young man who listened as Maria passed on to him in turn the description of Paul’s toothache which Giancarlo had given her after he had received it from Paul himself. The young dentist and Maria talked a lot as he worked on Paul’s tooth, and nothing was asked of Paul except to open his mouth, or rinse. The dentist mimed each of these actions when required, and showed his enjoyment of the little drama by exaggerating the actions, and laughing after each rendition.
On their walk home, Maria took a slightly different route when they were near the square, pointing and saying, ‘Il Pozzo Etrusco.’ It was the well Luca Matteotti had talked about on the day of Paul’s arrival in Perugia. In Maria’s company it had much greater attraction for him. The well was hidden in the depths of a building old in itself, yet much younger than the well. Maria and Paul went carefully down the spiral steps until they stood to look down into the ancient pit. Electric bulbs above them cast enough light to show gleaming moss on the curving and chinked brick sides, and scores of coins which had stuck there freakishly, representative of thousands more tossed by tourists, and lost far below in the unseen water. The air was cool: Paul could feel it on his teeth made more sensitive by the recent treatment. The place was a testimony to continuity, and Paul imagined the Etruscan women hauling up their buckets there hundreds of years before Christ. And he was struck with the notion that Maria, whose family had been in Umbria as long as they could trace, may well be related to those women.
‘Bellissimo,’ he said inadequately, but couldn’t understand Maria’s reply. They were standing close together on the little platform, and he took her hand as an attempt to thank her for bringing him. Her hand was cool and passive, but she smiled at him, realising he liked the place. There was nothing flirtatious in her smile or manner, yet Paul had to resist a wish to put his arms around her shoulders. More than at any time before he wished he had some command of her language. He felt then no physical encounter was possible without some expression of its origins in talk between them. The moment passed without awkwardness, and Maria and Paul climbed back to the modern level of the city, out into the warm sun, and returned to the apartments.
He continued to feel attracted to Maria, but because of the language thing, her sometimes diffident manner and his deepening friendship with Giancarlo, he only once gave any unequivocal physical signal. And even that was on an impulse more of emotional concern. It happened during one of his many evenings in their apartment. He had left Giancarlo to get more wine, and passing through the short passage to the blue room found Maria’s bedroom open to him for the first time. It was a strict little room barely lit by the hall light from behind him, and Maria wasn’t there. The white cover on the single bed was tight and bare. As he paused and glanced in, he heard Giancarlo still talking from the equipment room, and he turned his head into the light of the hall and made a flippant reply, but he found the sight of that narrow bed, and the thought of Maria nightly there without a husband, powerfully erotic.
Maria was at the table with no work spread out before her.
Her back was towards him and he saw the sheen on her brown hair. She had been withdrawn during the meal, and almost without thinking he put his hand on her shoulder and let it slide a little. ‘Are you okay?’ he said, yet knowing she wouldn’t understand. She gave no reaction to his touch, and then she turned and looked at him briefly with an utter lack of interest; not as any sort of message, but as if he were a stranger a long way off.
Giancarlo was still talking, raising his voice a little to carry down the hall into the balcony room. Paul took away his hand. He went back to the other room, and closed the door of Maria’s bedroom as he passed.
‘I said you should ask for a car to be assigned to you, so you can drive to places in the weekends. I could make a list of places you would enjoy,’ Giancarlo was saying.
‘Is Maria all right?’ Paul said. ‘She’s just sitting there at the table without doing anything.’
‘She gets overtired sometimes and emotionally not good. Is she crying? If you help me back into the chair, I’ll go through to her.’
‘Then I’ll push off,’ said Paul.
‘Push off?’
‘I’ll go, and let you see to Maria,’ Paul said. He wondered if it was his fault, if loneliness in Perugia was making him a nuisance to these neighbours, and he wished he hadn’t seen into Maria’s room; regretted touching her as he had.
Matteotti became attracted by the idea of an economic overview of the project, convinced that politicians and business people weren’t able to understand the mass of statistical and scientific information that Paul, Jeremy and the others produced, and therefore there was a place for a more general document in plain language. ‘A project manifesto is what we need,’ he told them. ‘Something soundly reasoned, but not technical, and with artist’s impressions showing what the reservoir would look like when completed. People like a picture.’ He had a sample at the first meeting on the manifesto, and he brought it up on his PowerPoint screen — the storage lake sparkling, but inaccurately drawn, and attractive parkland developed on the valley sides. Matteotti was enthusiastic, perhaps partly because it was an enterprise in which he would be largely free of the narrow technical dominance exercised by the practical engineers. He sat by the screen and pointed out obvious things to the others. How well he chooses and wears a suit, Paul thought with grudging admiration, and the director’s dark shoes shone like obsidian. He was a man of surfaces, and even his considerable intelligence was so often devoted to image and appearance of one sort or another.
The booklet was a surprisingly big budget item, and the contract for it went to a firm in which the director’s brother-in-law was a partner, though nothing was said of that. When it was completed, the project managers were given preliminary copies. Paul regarded it as a glossy public relations product and only glanced through it, but Giancarlo noticed it on the table when he and Maria came for drinks. ‘Oh, take it away if you like,’ said Paul. ‘The economic guff in it should make good reading for you.’ Giancarlo did take it away and read it with interest, criticising the economic sections with growing delight at their inadequacy. He chronicled the most glaring inconsistencies and falsehoods, and found on the internet original data that had been quite wrongly used in the manifesto.
He knew of the firm to which Matteotti’s brother-in-law belonged, he said, and their research and findings were not respected at the university. It was an opportunity to ambush the director in a way to which he might find official retaliation difficult. Giancarlo schooled Paul carefully in each area of weakness in the report and provided him with sources and reasoning. He made a game of the preparation: pretending to be Matteotti, or the representative of the brother-in-law’s firm, and making Paul respond to their counter-arguments. In the week before the presentation of the manifesto, Giancarlo had the flu, but his mischievous enthusiasm continued, and Paul sat by his bed for several evenings while his friend went over it all again, twisting his hand in the overhead grip as he damned the most telling examples of confusion of actual with projected figures, or glib assumptions not economically sound. He passed on also criticisms of the booklet’s design, which were Maria’s contribution to the analysis.
How Giancarlo would have enjoyed that meeting. The director’s pride in his initiative encouraged him to invite several journalists and councillors to the function, foreseeing no criticism. He grandly introduced the manifesto and praised its colour illustrations and bullet-point summaries. He was unprepared for Paul’s deceptively casual but informed criticism. At first he tried to bluff his way out, but when he realised the accuracy of Paul’s points, and that he was insufficiently prepared to cope with them, he turned the questions to the representative of the public relations firm and said little. It all had a calm professionalism about it, and the PR rep thanked Paul for his comments, saying they would be helpful in the revision of what all of them realised was still a draft document. Yet Luca Matteotti’s face had a rigidity of anger and affront which Paul allowed himself to savour as some recompense for the many times the man had given him a hard time. For the remaining weeks they had together on the project, the director continued his animosity, but considerably tempered by his realisation that Paul was capable of striking back. He had no inkling of what part Giancarlo had played in it all.
Paul wanted to thank his friend for that help, and remembered his idle comment about a car for weekends: he would offer to take Maria and Giancarlo away for a day. The outside world’s not for us, Giancarlo had said at their first meeting, but Paul thought they were cooped up in the upstairs apartment too much. Perhaps that was a reason for Maria’s mood swings.
Paul went to their door and proposed the trip. ‘I’m going to take you both up to the reservoir site, and you can see where the lake will be,’ he said. ‘All the times I’ve been going on about my work and the place, and you’ve no idea of it. We’ll take lunch and find a spot somewhere with a good view.’
‘I don’t know about the chair. The stairs, then getting it in the car,’ said Giancarlo, then quickly spoke to Maria in Italian.
‘I’ll get one of the vans,’ said Paul. He didn’t care if the trip provided an opportunity for Matteotti to criticise him.
‘These stairs aren’t easy,’ said Giancarlo.
‘You’d like to see the site, though?’
‘I would like that.’
‘Why are you living on the second floor with a wheelchair anyway?’ Paul knew him better now.
‘We own the apartment. We’ve been here a long time, since before the accident. And there’s no balcony on any of the lower apartments. Maria must have a balcony.’ Paul could understand that: how many times she must have finished tending to Giancarlo, even with the best will in the world, and then had time on the balcony to which his wheelchair denied him access. No doubt she and Paul often sat out of sight of each other on separate balconies and watched the roof tiles lose their colour, the locals drift into the street, and the pigeons crouch in nooks in the stone or plaster walls like blue-grey apostrophes.
On the Friday evening before the planned trip to the project site, Paul went to the vehicle yard and signed out a modern van with both a sliding side door and a back hatch, so that Giancarlo’s chair would be bound to fit in one way or another. He drove very little while in Italy, because he had a fear that in an emergency he might instinctively pull over to the wrong side of the road. Once clear of the city, however, he knew there would be little traffic on the way to the reservoir valley, and he wanted his friends for one day at least to be freed from the apartment and be in the sun, in fresh moving air, and among trees and grasses and gardens, and the hills beyond Assisi. It was something he could do before leaving: a token repayment for the many nights of hospitality in the room of blue tiles, and the talk and comradeship.
The weather was promising that Saturday morning, but when Paul went to Giancarlo’s apartment, his friend seemed slightly apprehensive. He opened the door himself, which was in itself unusual. ‘We had a bad night. Sometimes I get stomach problems and it means a difficult night for us both,’ he said. ‘She’s resting now.’
‘Maybe we should call it off?’ said Paul.
‘Could we just leave it for another hour and see how she feels? Both of us have been looking forward to it.’ Giancarlo hadn’t shaved, although it was the time at which they’d agreed to leave. Paul had never before seen him in the morning, or unshaven, and his large, handsome face seemed raffish, but older.
Giancarlo was clean-shaven an hour later, and wore a leather jacket of quality and appeal. Paul wondered for a moment what other things he would discover about his friends merely by moving with them beyond the rooms of his apartment, or theirs. Maria was ready to leave too, although the fatigue of the night showed in the passivity Paul had noticed at other times. She made an effort, however, to match Giancarlo’s deliberately up-beat tone, and replied to Paul’s greeting. They had a small ritual which mocked their mutual language deficiency. Paul would wish her good morning and ask about her work, in Italian, always with the words by rote, and she would reply equally briefly in English with the same enquiry. Giancarlo had almost given up the struggle to interest them in acquiring each other’s language.
Giancarlo had predicted difficulty in getting him down the stairs to street level. Paul found he was right. His friend was heavy, the chair awkward and the stairs steep and cramped. Paul placed himself below, and Maria was behind to control the descent. Giancarlo had his own powerful hands on the wheels, yet Paul at times had almost the full weight of both man and wheelchair, and he was relieved when they reached the lower hallway. ‘There, nothing to it,’ he said reassuringly, and tried to keep his breathing steady. The next challenge was to get Giancarlo from chair to a seat in the van. They chose the front passenger seat for him: although access was more difficult, the seat gave him more support and he could see ahead clearly. As Paul closed the door and stepped back, he thought how handsome Giancarlo was framed in the van window. His longish, black hair was combed straight back in the Italian way, the leather jacket emphasised the bulk of his powerful shoulders, and his face had a calm intelligence. No one would know that he was physically half a man, that he was so dependent on Maria.
They drove through the narrow streets, past the civic buildings with their guardian gryphons — those winged lions with fierce heads of eagles. Paul remarked on them again, and Giancarlo said they were one of the most ancient of all the monsters of antiquity, even appearing on the frescos of Knossos. ‘A combination of the greatest power and pride in nature,’ he said, ‘but even the gryphons couldn’t save Perugia from the Romans in the end.’ Giancarlo, the underprivileged boy from Rimini, had developed a great sympathy for his adopted city. He said again proudly that Maria came of an old family in Perugia with so long a history that she might well have Etruscan blood.
He loved the fertile countryside of Umbria too, pointing out the various crops to Paul, the maize, beans, tomatoes, gourds and vines, and tilting his head often to say something to Maria, who said little in reply. There were the old rural homes, a few quite grand, most functional and undecorated, with no gardens. There were new homes too, testimony to the growing prosperity of Euro-currency Italy. The new homes were not farmhouses, nor were they gracious mansions. They drew attention to themselves with a spurious exaggeration of the traditional architecture. ‘No doubt your favourite, Dr Matteotti, lives in one of those,’ said Giancarlo. He had accepted Paul’s enemy without question as his own, as friends do. Paul knew, though, that Matteotti, with all his faults, had a genuine sense of his own culture.
As they drew out of the broad valley and into the hills, there were more vineyards and then olives. The olive groves were grey-green, in some lights almost pewter, and the catching nets were spread beneath many of the trees. Some of the ancient stone walls of the terraces had broken down. In small gullies that had no evidence of water flow, grasses and lavenders grew. In one, resting pigs were roughly fenced.
A bluff overlooked the narrow valley in which the reservoir was to be built. Paul had been there often with members of his team, with visiting politicians, or dignitaries, to point out what was proposed for the scheme. From a coarsely grassed parking place a track of fifty or so metres, which Giancarlo’s chair should cope with, led upwards. Paul and Maria pushed him, and he kept talking about the fragrances in the country air which had become strange to him because he spent all his time in the apartment. From the lookout Paul could show them where the earth dam would be built, where the lake level would rise to along the hillsides, and where there was an especially porous stratum that was a worry to him.
‘What gets flooded?’ asked Giancarlo.
‘Mainly farmland which has already been bought and the houses removed, but at the top end of the valley are olives which will be cut down after this last harvest, and other full-grown trees around what used to be a small monastery. That was the big argument, really. It’s the only building of any historical importance. In the end, though, it was realised that if the lake level were to be kept below the monastery then the whole project wasn’t worthwhile.’
They made an odd group there on the bluff. Paul keen to have his friends understand the work he did; Giancarlo responsive not just to the explanation, but to the rare experience of being on a hill in the open air; Maria standing back a pace or two and working with her fingers at the fabric of a small bag she carried, rather than interacting with the other two. Giancarlo relayed to her much of what Paul said, and she nodded almost as a child nods in expected obedience to adults. Paul asked him if she was feeling unwell, and Giancarlo said it was just tiredness and not having the language to join in their conversation. Normally Maria moved gracefully and held herself well, but she stood there a little hunched and downcast, seeming reduced, almost cowed by the reaching country, the drop to the valley floor and the exposed expanse of the sky, hazy at its extremes. When Paul tried his talisman Italian in an attempt at contact, she replied with her rote English and a forced smile.
The two of them guided the wheelchair back down the dirt track. Paul opened the hatch and set out their picnic there on the carpeted floor of the van — bread with salami and tomatoes, cheeses and olives, individual fruit tarts of different flavours, wine in plastic tumblers. The stainless steel surfaces of Giancarlo’s chair flashed in the sun; high in the blue sky lengthened the vapour plumes of invisible planes, the moderate wind brought summer scents and summer insects, but no noise from the small valley where the farms had all been sold. The two men began to talk of Matteotti, with Paul telling of the latest test of wills, and Giancarlo offering the most preposterous solutions to the feud.
Neither of them noticed that Maria had left the picnic and wandered away, until Giancarlo suddenly stopped laughing, and looked urgently around for her. She wasn’t at the van, and they saw her at the lookout, close to the wooden rail that guarded the edge. She was in an odd pose, almost, Paul thought, like some Titanic movie burlesque, and he started to laugh. But Giancarlo gave a gasp as if struck heavily, and lifted his body from the wheelchair by his arms, in sudden, futile urgency. He then fell back. ‘Quickly, quickly,’ he implored, and without a word Paul took off up the track.
Maria had climbed beyond the rail when Paul reached the lookout. He stopped running, and moved tentatively towards her. ‘Hey, Maria, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Don’t go any further out there.’ Surely the urgency of the situation would enable her to understand English just this once.
She stood on the lip of the bluff, and as Paul stepped over the rail and edged towards her, he was aware that there was an odd wind coming straight up the cliff which held the long grass of the edge in a fluttering free fall. Maria seemed to lean into it, to be held up on its steady insistent breath. ‘No, no, Maria,’ he said, and he took her left upper arm in his hand and steadied them both on the fluttering edge in the whine of upward wind. He could see her face, and it was the face she had shown him on the night he had passed her open bedroom. It was a face of absence and desolation, of some deep separation from the world. ‘Hey, careful now,’ he said. As she leant forward, he leant back, neither of them in any struggle, but rather a momentary ballet. Paul’s greater weight and strength began to tell and he drew her back from the edge until he could feel the rail behind them. Maria gave a little sigh, and said something in Italian in a low voice. She allowed herself to be drawn back onto the path, and to walk down to the van, with Paul holding her arm as if nothing had occurred.
Giancarlo hugged her waist and talked in Italian soothingly, but she said little. ‘We shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘I knew she wasn’t well and we shouldn’t have come.’
‘What is it that she suffers from?’ asked Paul.
He had for the first time some understanding of the true relationship and dependence the two of them had — the complexity of it, the fragility and the fearful possibility. His friend looked up at him from the wheelchair, his face close to Maria’s side. He was about to speak when his large eyes brimmed with tears, and he looked wordlessly at Paul for a few seconds and then said, ‘I can’t talk about it. I cannot manage to talk about it now.’
What had begun that morning, at least on the part of the two men, with pleasurable anticipation, ended as a grim ride back to Perugia, though the sun still shone. Giancarlo was strapped in the back so he could hold Maria, who leant on him with a sort of dull fatigue, and said nothing of what had happened at the lookout. Had life become for her a grey monotony, or worse, and a descent against the wind of no more significance than the trailing threads she picked at on her bag?
She was little help back at the apartments in getting Giancarlo up the stairs, and try as he might, Paul was unable to do it safely himself. He went to the door of the Arcottis, and because Signor Arcotti was away, his wife and a woman visitor from Rome came somewhat apprehensively to help. With that assistance the three finally made the upstairs hall — powerful Giancarlo distraught by his concern for his partner and unable to take command, Paul without the language and afraid worse things might yet happen, Maria listless and sad, seeming always half turned away.
They went through to the blue-tiled room, dim because the shutter doors to the balcony were closed, and Maria sat by the table spread with her work, while Giancarlo first gave her two white pills with water, then made coffee.
‘I shouldn’t have suggested the trip,’ said Paul. ‘I didn’t realise it might be too much for her.’
‘No, no. It’s a cyclic thing,’ said Giancarlo, ‘but irregular, and I should have seen the signs, but it seemed a chance for once to be back in the world.’ He expertly manoeuvred the chair to put himself as close to her as possible, and put his strong, large hand quite over both of hers on the table. ‘She’ll be all right. It’s part of our life together,’ he said simply. He spoke to her in their language, but she made no reply, just put a weary shoulder against his.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ asked Paul.
‘Yes, what we’d like is for you not to be afraid of what happened; not to be afraid of any of this; to come and see us again just as before.’
They sat in an easing silence for a time while Paul and Giancarlo drank coffee, while Maria had her head half bowed and rested on her partner, and the afternoon light bloomed softly through the full-length shutter doors of the balcony. As Paul rose to leave, Giancarlo lifted his hand with one of Maria’s within it and touched his friend’s arm briefly. ‘I’m glad I saw the site before it was flooded for the reservoir,’ he said. ‘Something will be gained and something gone forever perhaps.’
‘I hope Maria feels okay soon.’
Giancarlo spoke to her, and she made the effort to glance up at Paul and spoke in reply. Giancarlo nodded vigorously and clasped her around the shoulder. ‘She said not to blame yourself. She will feel better again and again, and worse not so often,’ he said.
On the way back to his own apartment, Paul stopped at the Arcotti’s door to thank Signora Arcotti. She came out a little warily, but relaxed when she saw he was alone. Her English was adequate to say she was happy to help, but that Giancarlo never went out and perhaps it was better that way. ‘She sick,’ said Signora Arcotti shaking her head and switching the subject to Maria. ‘She run across him in a car, you know that? Yes so. The big, handsome man and she run across him.’
‘I didn’t know.’ Yet somehow it was news of a kind he felt he had been awaiting from one source or another. Signora Arcotti clasped her hands to her breast, gave a shrug and held the pose quite unselfconsciously to express her pity, and the powerlessness of us all, then she went back inside to her visitor from Rome.
During the final weeks of his stay, Paul went often to his friends’ apartment in the evenings, and there were no more postponements, or misunderstandings on his part of how it was between the couple. When Maria was feeling well, he would stay later, there would be more wine and laughter, and he would often put Giancarlo to bed before leaving. On the bad days he would drop in a paper, talk briefly with Giancarlo over strong coffee while Maria sat lost within herself, and then go.
She was well on the day he left, and kissed him for the first and last time as she and Giancarlo farewelled him at their door. ‘Buongiorno Maria, il lavoro, come va?’ he said, playing their game to the last, and she replied with her English. He thought of her on the cliff above the reservoir site, and how she had begun to lean into the rising wind. He wondered what terrible world she had to journey through, and how fortunate Giancarlo and she were to have each other, how connected they had become through affliction. ‘I’ll miss you both,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope we’ll all be happy.’
‘Happiness is the absence of pain,’ replied Giancarlo, and his strong hand tightened on Paul’s.
‘In bocca al lupo,’ said Maria. Paul asked Giancarlo what that meant.
‘It’s a good luck wish between friends,’ he said. ‘Being in the mouth of the wolf, and yet unharmed.’
There had been wind and rain in the night. When the taxi paused by the old wall, Paul saw liquidambar leaves stuck to the pavement, their stalks insolently up, small scarlet swans on the dark road. The taxi wound down the hill from the old city, past the gryphons of stone who had witnessed so much pain and so much happiness. Luca Matteotti had first mentioned the gryphons, but he was nothing to Paul, who remembered rather Giancarlo telling him of those fabulous, threatening creatures that had never existed, yet been powerful in the human imagination for thousands of years. We all have things we cannot do, and sometimes life makes us do them, his friend had said. Maybe in Maria’s Etruscan dreams the gryphons still take protective flight against her demons.