Our invitation to the castello comes. The signorina meets us on the driveway, in severe riding habit and boots. She shows us her pet tortoises, who stumble around a fenced enclosure on the front lawn. Their wrinkled gray necks and blindly searching heads seem so vulnerable, protruding from their indestructible shells. She has other pets too, donkeys and goats and sheep she has rescued over the years. She keeps them in the stables, where the carriages used to be.
Other people arrive: Suzanne, the rotund American, and a couple from Milan. A car careers at breakneck speed into the driveway and Tiziana springs forth from its front seat, teeth bared and mane flying. The old man, Gianni, comes slowly toward us along a gravel path. His shoulders are bent; his head is fragile-looking, the skin a thin tissue threaded with veins, the eyes watery and depthless like a new baby’s. Yet his bones are large: they stand like the posts and beams of a ruined house amid its decaying walls and roof. We are led inside, into a great hall as cold and bare as a monastery. The signorina talks: we follow her up a grand stone staircase, through empty rooms where the light slants undisturbed across the flagstones. In one room there is a pigeon. The signorina explains that it lives there. It is one of her protégés: it had a broken wing. Shortly afterward we come to the frescoes: they decorate another empty room, to whose old varnished boards they impart a haunted atmosphere, for they remain bright and florid in the desolation, their scenes and figures unfaded. The signorina tells us they have been restored, lavishly so. No expense was spared. They have, themselves, no great distinction: the distinction lies in what they are, for in Italy art is no longer permitted to die a natural death. People would say it was a shame if the castello did not take care of its frescoes.
On the next floor, things change: this is the domain of Alfredo. We enter an elegant room with a great window and a lordly marble fireplace. The window has a view of the mountains behind the village. We went up there one day, and found a whole ghost settlement at the top, a place that no road leads to any longer. We walked in the overgrown cemetery and along the hollowed-out main street. The gardener at Fontemaggio tells us that his grandmother used to go every week to the market there. She lived in Arezzo, and would walk all night across the mountains with her cows and her produce to buy and sell. The distance was twenty kilometers. She left in the early evening and arrived at dawn.
In front of the window stands Alfredo’s desk. This is his study. He is an architect: there is a framed certificate hanging on the wall. This room was created for him, in the hope that it might inspire him to work. The desk is made of polished engraved wood. It is a whole hand thick, and as big as a bed. Its surface is beautifully laid out, with fountain pens and compasses and drawing materials, all new. There is a block of unmarked paper and an empty leather chair, with its back facing the window. We pass into a sort of modern apartment, a vast room that extends the whole width of the castle, with leather sofas and low glass tables, sculptures in metal and wood, canvases and expensive lamps and books, and a whole glass wall that overlooks the valley. Jim regards this spectacle with a jaded air: this is where his evenings with Alfredo usually commence. There is an opulent bathroom next door, lined with marble from floor to ceiling like a tomb, and a bedroom with a black leather bed. Alfredo is apparently willing to rent this apartment to tourists. Suzanne says he has asked her to recruit victims from among her American acquaintances, but the rent is so high that nobody she knows can afford it.
Alfredo’s kingdom comes to an end: we go up, up a steep staircase and then up an even steeper one, and then up another, narrow and made of wood. Gianni follows all the way, arthritic but resolute. Tiziana holds the children’s hands, clutching at them with her long painted fingernails, shrieking concerned injunctions against falling, and flashing triumphant looks at Jim’s impervious back when she succeeds in getting them to the top unharmed. Finally, we come to a tiny door that lets us out onto the castle parapets. There is a narrow walkway all the way round. On one side is the castle roof; on the other is empty air. We file out. There below are the wavelike undulating hills, the village on its mound, the pale road that lies on the valley floor like a length of ribbon. There, opposite, is Fontemaggio, and around it one or two other houses that on the ground are far away, separate and distinct in their own folds of hillside. The view from the top of the castello is not larger or more sweeping than the view from the village itself. It is the sudden effect of height that is unexpected. From above, the dimension of experience is lost, the feeling of involvement shrugged away. The earth goes about its own eternal business, rising and falling, growing or decaying; the late sun slants across it, the trees and houses correspond with their own little shadows. It is difficult from here to imagine time passing in minutes, in hours, to discern the intricacy of life, to distinguish one house from another, one day from another, one existence from any other. From here, only epochs are visible. We look down on it, as children believe people do from heaven. I do not like this feeling, of being separated from the earth. The soles of my feet prickle: I press myself back against the slant of the roof. I imagine the building tipping and throwing me out over the side into nothingness.
Beside me, Suzanne is conferring with Gianni on the narrow walkway. She is telling him about the plans for the motorway: she attended the meeting in the village, where the details were made known. She shows him exactly where the road will go, where the tunnels will be drilled. It is a tragedy, she says. She is sure corruption has played its part. She speaks slowly: Gianni is perhaps a little deaf. She pantomimes her outrage with angry gesticulating arms. Gianni stands mutely beside her. I see that tears are dropping down his frail cheeks.
Silvio comes once a week to tend the proprietario’s garden. He arrives at dawn: we hear him opening the shed where the tools are kept. The light is pink; there is the sound of birdsong. Silvio’s rummagings harmonize with the first stirrings of the earth. Later we hear a car passing along the valley, a dog barking, a tractor starting its engine. We hear the clipping sound of secateurs beneath our window, and the hiss of running water.
Silvio is forty or so, light-haired and wiry, with fair freckled skin that turns red in the sun. He has a bald pate, like a monk: it glows, round and red, in the distances of the garden where he stoops at his work. There is something monkish in his demeanor too, a kind of bodily discipline that gives him a hallmark of solitude. When spoken to he is perfectly still and silent, as though measuring his response. One day one of the children falls out of the cherry tree that grows on a ledge over the steep hillside. Silvio appears at the kitchen door, holding her in his arms. E caduta, he says.
Jim says that Silvio used to be something of a tearaway. He doesn’t really know him, he says, a statement that arouses my interest, for Jim’s knowledge tends to encompass everything that is human and compromised and to leave out that which must be approached dispassionately. It is in this same spirit that Jim claims not to know Italian. Jim not knowing Silvio suggests that Silvio knows himself.
Silvio is as hard to corner as the hare that I sometimes see standing proud and alert in the empty garden, that bounds away at the slightest noise. But one day I offer him coffee, and though he looks at me gravely he does not refuse. He takes it espresso, in a tiny cup that stands cooling beside him while he works. I watch him deferring his acceptance of my libation, but finally he picks it up and stands drinking it in little sips, looking out over the valley. After that, Silvio and I are friends. There is something about him, an atmosphere of fracture and recovery, an inward knowledge of failure and of resurrection, that emboldens me to practice my Italian. Silvio’s talk is easy to understand; his listening, so quiet and spacious, accommodates my clumsy sentences. He tells me that he works for most of the stranieri in the area, watering their gardens, cleaning their swimming pools. Their houses are generally empty, or let out. He drives around in his little car, going from one house to another. He cuts the grass and waters the flowers to stop them dying. I imagine these houses, so civilized and deserted, so strenuously maintained in their untenanted perfection. It is curious that Silvio, who has lived here all his life, should be their caretaker. But he is happy to do the work: it allows him to be free. Otherwise he would have to move to the city. I ask him where he lives, and he points to the top of the highest mountain behind the village. It is smoky with cloud, though the valley lies in sun.