We are staying for a few days in a little house on the side of a hill, where at night it rains and rains and the clouds hang all day in the valley. It is a casa di campagna of a rather hemmed-in variety: there is a chicken farm next door, and houses where dogs bark incessantly at the wire fences, and down in the damp of the valley floor we find an English couple who came here on holiday and never left. They were in their early twenties at the time: now they must be more than forty. They too have dogs, big ones with wolfish pelts and pricked-up ears who gallop far ahead of them as they walk up the hill past our house. Once or twice I look up and there they are, two giant animals that have landed in the shaggy garden with a great bound to announce the imminent arrival of their masters. They have mournful faces, this couple, and are constantly to be seen in elaborate wet-weather gear, which contributes to their air of pessimism. They roam the fields and lanes like unquiet souls whom a twenty-year curse has locked out of their native land.
It is strange to be in a house again, to cook our own food, to make a fire in the little terracotta woodburner which emits great puffs of smoke when the wind blows the wrong way down the chimney. The children play on a long roped swing in the garden. They sit one on top of the other and go back and forth, back and forth like a pendulum. Sometimes we go to the local town, whose fortifications and loggia and graceful squares are all exactly as they should be. The children say buongiorno and grazie. We buy pecorino and prosciutto and olives from the delicatessen. We buy pasta in the shape of scrolls and butterflies and shells. The man in the delicatessen conforms startlingly to the character of Luigi the shopkeeper in Italian in Three Months. He says Desidera? and Basta cosi? He hands us our purchases in paper bags. Then we return to the little house, where great ragged gray clouds drift slowly along the valley and accumulate around the hills.
It is not, somehow, as we expected it to be. It is as if we have entered a cul-de-sac at great speed. Things have ground abruptly, a little jarringly, to a halt. Time has started to back up around us: there is a sense of things thickening, congealing, of familiar atmospheres re-forming. After the exhilaration of escape, we find that we are all still here, unaltered. But we did not come here to find ourselves: we came for something we are able to identify only by its absence. We grow bad-tempered. When we go to the local town the children shove each other and cry, or run away from us, laughing shrilly. They no longer say buongiorno: they are not one-trick ponies. We have lost the thread a little. Did we come all the way here to behave exactly as we do at home, while dogs bark at the wire fences and the mist hangs sodden on the hills, and the chickens in the chicken farm scream inside their metal sheds? What exactly are we meant to do? The English couple pass by in the rain and talk about the renovations to their house, which are still in progress twenty years on.
We have arranged to stay a whole week in the casa di campagna. We go for walks; we go to Barga, though I draw a line at the Scottish museum. On the fourth day we decide to go to Lucca. Lucca is an hour away by train, but it is apparent that no one is enjoying the sensation of the Garfagnanan grass growing under their feet. Above the train station the sky is a pale gray blank; the station is deserted. After a while there are a few people on the platform. They sit and read newspapers or talk on their mobile phones. They seem a little more connected to the world, a little more current, than Luigi the shopkeeper or our English neighbors. My spirits begin to revive. A smart, slender woman is standing nearby, talking into her phone. First she has a long conversation in Italian. Then she has a long conversation in English. She is American, though she has the groomed look of a native. Her conversation concerns her studies in art history, her frenetic social calendar, her retinue of Italian friends whose demands on her she is hard put to satisfy. She mentions her apartment in Lucca: she is on her way there now. I listen to her admiringly; I look at her immaculate clothes, her delicate scarpe, her polished fingernails tapping on the casing of her telephone. I am glad that she has got herself so beautifully organized, for sometimes it seems to me that human beings are only chaotic and blind, are all fettered unconsciousness, struggling in their self-imposed chains as I feel myself in that moment to be.
We board the train and pass along the Serchio valley, among gentle green perspectives of hills and distant mountains, past melancholy Barga, swaying serenely over grassy plains and stopping sometimes at deserted stations that seem to stand in the middle of nowhere. There are weeds flowering on their platforms, and clumps of grass between the rails, and after a while we slowly pull away again. I feel that something new is disclosing itself, something to do with time. We are free: no one is expecting us. We look out of the windows. We listen to the tranquil hum of the engine. We watch the valley in the mild morning light.
Lucca stands in an unbroken circle of gigantic walls. They are forty or fifty feet high, dark, and so thick that over time they have become a land formation, a strange circular isthmus with lawns and trees and paths on the top. They were built in the sixteenth century to keep out the Tuscans, those gentle Chianti-quaffing folk, and now, in their retirement, with their neat paths and barbered lawns, they provide tourists with a circular bicycle ride and a view of the plains and mountains from their colossal shoulders. Outside them the city has spread its clutter, its traffic and car parks and residential suburbs, its strings of shops: within, in the old town, an atmosphere of unusual refinement prevails. Every infelicitous speck of modernity has been sieved out. When those walls were built, it was in ignorance of what they would be called on over time to repeclass="underline" Tuscans or car parks, it’s all the same to them. Of course, these beautiful islands of the past in their turbid oceans of modernity are to be found all over Europe, in England too. At the heart of every hideous human settlement we find an image of our predeceased ancestor, aestheticism. It is our lot to defend that image, lifeless as it may seem. But the forbidding walls of Lucca do a more thorough job of it than most.