And we shouldn’t forget that Garibaldi had a second wife (also a third – though we may ignore her). His ten years of marriage to Anita Riberas were followed by ten years of widowhood. Then, in the summer of 1859, during his Alpine campaign, he was fighting near Varese when a message was brought to him through the Austrian lines by a seventeen-year-old girl driving alone in a gig. She was Giuseppina Raimondi, the illegitimate daughter of Count Raimondi. Garibaldi was immediately smitten, wrote her a passionate letter, declared his love on bended knee. He admitted the difficulties to any union between them: he was nearly three times her age, already had another child by a peasant woman, and feared that Giuseppina’s aristocratic background might not play well with his political image. But he convinced himself (and her), to the extent that on 3rd December 1859, as a later historian than Trevelyan worded it, ‘She put aside her doubts and entered his room. The deed was done!’ Like Anita, she was evidently dashing and brave; on 24th January 1860, they were married – in this instance, with the full dogma of the Catholic Church.
Tennyson met Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight four years later. The poet greatly admired the liberator, but also noted that he had ‘the divine stupidity of a hero’. This second marriage – or rather, Garibaldi’s illusions about it – lasted (according to which authority you believe) either a few hours or a few days, the time it took for the bridegroom to receive a letter detailing his new wife’s past. Giuseppina, it turned out, had begun taking lovers at the age of eleven; she had married Garibaldi only at the insistence of her father; she had spent the night before her wedding with her most recent lover, by whom she was pregnant; and she had precipitated sexual events with her husband-to-be so that she could write to him on 1st January and claim to be carrying his child.
Garibaldi demanded not just an immediate separation but an annulment. The romantic hero’s deeply unromantic reasoning was that since he had slept with Giuseppina only before the wedding and not after, the marriage had technically not been consummated. The law was unimpressed by such sophistry, and Garibaldi’s appeal to higher influences, including the king, also failed. The liberator found himself shackled to Giuseppina for the next twenty years.
In the end, the law is only ever defeated by lawyers; in place of the romantic telescope, the legal microscope. The freeing argument, when it was eventually found, ran like this: since Garibaldi’s marriage had been solemnised in territory nominally under Austrian control, the law governing it might therefore be construed as the Austrian civil code, under which an annulment was (and perhaps always had been) possible. So the hero-lover was saved by the very nation against whose rule he had been fighting at the time. The distinguished lawyer who proposed this ingenious solution had, back in 1860, prepared the legislative unification of Italy; now, he achieved the marital disunification of the nation’s unifier. Let us salute the name of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini.
Pulse
MY PARENTS WERE walking down a farm track in Italy about three years ago. I often imagine myself watching them, always from behind. My mother, greying hair pulled back in a bunch, would be wearing a loose-cut patterned blouse over slacks and open-toed sandals; my father has a short-sleeved shirt, khaki trousers and polished brown shoes. His shirt is properly ironed, with twin buttoned pockets and turn-ups, if that’s the word, on the sleeves. He owns half a dozen shirts like this; they proclaim him a man on holiday. Nor do they give the least hint of athleticism; at best, they might look appropriate on a bowling green.
The two of them could be holding hands; this was something they did unselfconsciously, whether I was behind them, watching, or not. They are walking down this track somewhere in Umbria because they are investigating a roughly chalked sign offering vino novello. And they are on foot because they have looked at the depth of the hard clay ruts and decided not to risk their hire car. I would have argued that this was the point of renting a car; but my parents were a cautious couple in many ways.
The track runs between vineyards. As it makes a bend to the left, a rusting, hangar-like barn comes into view. In front of it is a concrete structure like an oversized compost bin: about six feet high and nine across, with no roof or front to it. When they are about thirty yards away, my mother turns to my father and pulls a face. She may even say, ‘Yuck’, or something similar. My father frowns and doesn’t reply. This was the first time it happened; or rather, to be exact, the first time he noticed it.
We live in what used to be a market town some thirty miles north-west of London. Mum works in hospital administration; Dad has been a solicitor in a local practice all his adult life. He says the work will see him out, but that his type of solicitor – not just a technician who understands documents, but a general giver of advice – won’t exist in the future. The doctor, the vicar, the lawyer, perhaps the schoolmaster – in the old days, these were figures everyone turned to for more than just their professional competency. Nowadays, my father says, people do their own conveyancing, write their own wills, agree the terms of their divorce beforehand, and take their own advice. If they want a second opinion, they prefer an agony aunt to a solicitor, and the internet to both. My father takes this all philosophically, even when people imagine they’re capable of pleading their own cases. He just smiles, and repeats the old legal saying: the man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.
Dad advised me against following him into the law, so I did a BEd and now teach in a sixth-form college about fifteen miles away. But I didn’t see any reason to leave the town where I grew up. I go to the local gym, and on Fridays run with a group led by my friend Jake; that’s how I met Janice. She was always going to stand out in a place like this, because she has that London edge to her. I think she hoped I’d want to move to the big city, and was disappointed when I didn’t. No, I don’t think that; I know it.
Mum… who can describe their mother? It’s like when interviewers ask one of the royals what it’s like to be royal, and they laugh and say they don’t know what it’s like not to be royal. I don’t know what it would be like for my mum not to be my mum. Because if she wasn’t, then I wouldn’t, I couldn’t, be me, could I?
Apparently I had a difficult birth. Perhaps that’s why there’s only me; though I’ve never asked. We don’t do gynaecology in our family. Or religion, because we don’t have any. We do politics a bit, but rarely argue, since we think the parties are as bad as one another. Dad may be a bit more right wing than Mum, but essentially we believe in self-reliance, helping others, and not expecting the state to look after us from cradle to grave. We pay our taxes and our pension contributions and have life assurance; we use the National Health Service and give to charity when we can. We’re ordinary, sensible middle-class people.
And without Mum we wouldn’t be any of it. Dad had a bit of a drink problem when I was little, but Mum sorted him out and turned him into a purely social drinker. I was classified as ‘disruptive’ at school, but Mum sorted me out with patience and love, while making it clear exactly which lines I couldn’t cross. I expect she did the same with Dad. She organises us. She still has a bit of her Lancashire accent left, but we don’t do that silly north-south stuff in our family, not even as a joke. I also think it’s different when there’s only one child, because there aren’t two natural teams, kids and adults. There are just the three of you, and though I might have been more coddled, I also learnt from an earlier age to live in an adult world, because that’s the only game in town. I may be wrong about this. If you asked Janice if she thought I was fully grown up, I can imagine the answer.