The castle is tall and thick and square: it is how I imagine Fabrizio’s tower to have been in Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. During his escape Fabrizio encountered certain problems caused by natural characteristics the building had acquired over time. Forests of gorse grew from its sides; it bulged and fell away unpredictably, had patches that were slippery as ice and others that were rough and so jagged they would cut the skin. Originally the production of man, the tower was reverting to nature, or acquiring a nature of its own. And indeed the village castello has something not human about it, despite its driveway and flower beds and swimming pool. A narrow road runs all the way around its perimeter, abutting the walls. From our house across the valley the walls look beautiful and soft, but close up they are as sheer and merciless as cliffs.
Jim, of course, is on terms of the utmost familiarity with the castello’s inhabitants. He comes and goes beneath those precipitous walls as blithely as he might cross the threshold of an overheated bungalow in suburban Dundee. He is keen for us to have a look inside. He’s got us down as the sightseeing type. He mentions a room in the castello where there are frescoes, and then looks at us out of the corner of his eye, as though half expecting us to land on him in a body and tear him limb from limb in our excitement. For several days this visit is uppermost in Jim’s mind. Every time he sees us he mentions it, with increasing testiness, for having decided we ought to be given a tour of the castello it is not apparent to him why this should not occur immediately. The family agreed to a time, he says, and then phoned to cancel it. He suggested another time and they haven’t yet got back to him. He doesn’t know what the problem is. He refers to personal difficulties for which it is clear his reserves of patience have run dry. Such human entanglements contravene the laws of Jim’s obliging universe, where the smoothing of paths and the offer of a helping hand are as inviolate as the sun and moon, or ought to be. I have noticed that Jim has quite a grand manner in the prosecution of this system. Its values are entirely sociaclass="underline" their notions of right and wrong have no moral basis at all. His codes of conduct all grow from a single root, which is the protection of interests. For reasons which are unclear to me, the standoff at the castello is running directly counter to the interests of all concerned, not least those of the owners themselves.
In Italy, gossiping, even of a scandalous kind, is a morally neutral activity; emotions, except as they force the hand of politics, are a public spectacle, like the opera. And like the opera they can engage our pity, our humor, our love of beauty and truth: they are greatly respected, but theirs is not the deciding vote in the judgment of human activities. Interests, and what advances or impairs them, are all. Jim is always willing to make an example of Tiziana, and he does so now. Tiziana’s interests and his own are fundamentally opposed. Three years ago she returned to the village after a period away. She had married, but the marriage quickly failed; she had lived in Spain for a while, worked as a teacher, moved here and there, but nothing had come of it. So she came back, and moved in with her mother, who lived alone. Tiziana has built a wooden hut in the garden and that is where she resides. Nothing could better symbolize how temporary she intends her solitary state to be than this frail wooden hut; and nothing could better express the pent-up force of frustration that rages in her breast than the two giant, lavishly furred black dogs she keeps there, smothering them with a strange, suggestive care and kissing their snapping, sharp-toothed muzzles.
Jim, on the other hand, married very young and had a child. His wife was Italian, from Rome. Jim is half-Italian himself, which accounts both for his looks and for his sense of social intrigue. His grandparents came to Dundee as immigrants from a village in Liguria, and built an ice cream factory which his father and now his brother continue to manage. Jim does not say much about the success or otherwise of this enterprise, but one day, in his apartment, he bashfully shows us a photograph of the family seat in Scotland, a vast aristocratic dwelling of considerable beauty and grandeur in whose vicinity for one reason or another Jim does not choose to live. Jim’s young wife moved to London with him; their son was born; Jim, by his own account, did not treat her well. She was homesick and lonely, and he was restless and disloyal. Eventually she left him and brought up the child alone. She has earned his respect over the years. He regrets the way he treated her. It was a great mistake. His son has been well educated and is now grown up. He is a good lad, good-looking and intelligent, and devoted to his mother. Jim, when he sees him, is reminded of some incapacity in his own nature that has been the chief source of pain in his experience of life. He doesn’t know what it is, only that it is there. And that his bachelor existence is both the expiation of it and the unique form of its relief. His top-floor flat is his sanctuary; and his retirement from the battlefield of married life, injured but not fatally so, is the piece of good luck on which he intends to last out his days.
It might be said that Jim is harming Tiziana’s interests by allowing her to cherish her hopes of him. He should let her go, and God knows he’s tried to get rid of her. They have often separated, but they always seem to drift back together again.
As for the denizens of the castello, well, they are the last in a line that extends unbroken across two centuries, though this epoch is now well advanced into twilight. The old man, Gianni, is on his last legs: his two daughters, both in their late forties, are childless. They are both married, but they continue to live in the castello with their father. The elder daughter lives a life of solitary, aristocratic dignity, doing good works in the village, riding her horses, and advancing her studies of literature. She has the upright, un-self-pitying demeanor of a nun. I often see her striding about in jodhpurs and long leather riding boots and once or twice she has accosted me, wanting to talk about poetry, or an English novel she is trying to translate into Italian.
Her sister’s husband is Alfredo, a close associate of Jim’s. Their friendship is the perfect expression of Jim’s theories of social practice. Alfredo is a corpulent, slow-moving individual with a large, rough-skinned, pitted face of quite exceptional malevolence and dissipation. His small eyes look out of it with an expression of mingled torpor and amusement, like that of a boa constrictor who has just swallowed something large, and whose pleasant recollections of the event give way now and then to the sleepiness of a full stomach. He is often to be seen behind the tinted windows of a new silver Audi, slowly cruising the lanes and byways of the village, before disappearing back to Pistoia, where, according to Jim, he has a house. His visits to the village are territorial, like those of a shark cruising its habitual waterways. Once, we are walking along the unfrequented road back to Fontemaggio when the silver Audi glides quietly past and then draws to a halt just ahead with the engine running. The electric window slides down: there is Alfredo, leering at us from inside. He salutes us vaguely with his fat hand, on which he wears several heavy rings. Va bene? he says. Tutto bene? He looks us up and down. He grins. So, he says, you are coming to see my house. Casa mia. We realize he is referring to the castello. We say that we don’t know, that Jim mentioned something, that everyone is very busy. He shrugs and grins again lazily and the darkened glass slides up in front of his face. Jim lives in fear of a summons to spend the evening with Alfredo: these are frequent, and put him out of action for a week afterward.