I like to talk to Silvio about football, il calcio. I have found that this subject lends itself to the amateur linguist, being both primitive and impersonal and revolving around a small number of stable themes. Silvio is more than usually reserved when the conversation takes this turn, though I talk about it anyway. I attribute his reticence to a spiritual source. He seems like the kind of man whose distinctness from the masculine norm would express itself in an indifference to competitive sport. But one day I mention the news that Italy’s top team have been relegated as a punishment for corruption, and observe an expression of blenched severity on Silvio’s face. He digs with cold precision at the flower beds. It is good, he says finally. Perhaps now the game will be cleansed.
According to Silvio, corruption is a national affliction. The ordinary Italian can have no dignity, no pleasure in life. Everything around him is corrupt, from politics to the postal service. In things that intimately affect him, the Italian has no rights. Take the plans for the motorway: corruption, double-dyed. It is a case of waiting to see which form of corruption outdoes the others. And yet Italy is so beautifuclass="underline" its art, its churches, its monuments. Have we been to Perugia, to Assisi? He loves these places but he can no longer visit them. To live in a land that is so beautiful and so diseased is a form of torture. That is why Silvio lives on top of a mountain. In his garden there is a special place for meditation. It is necessary, to have such a place. Otherwise your own anger would consume you.
One day Silvio invites us to visit his house. The road winds out of the village and quickly leaves it behind, climbing steeply among forests and turning through vistas of wooded peaks. It is more than ten kilometers from the village to Silvio’s house, and all of it is empty wilderness, a silent world of mountains that stand shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye can see. Once or twice we stop and get out. The sun is close overhead; beneath us there are wisps of cloud. The last section of road is so steep and potholed that it is nearly impossible to ascend. We come out on the very summit, where the wind blows and the light is brilliant. There are two houses there. One looks south, over the mountains toward Cortona. The other faces north, toward Arezzo. They are perhaps twenty meters apart. They sit there back to back on their summit, like refuges for two gods, each with its portion of the hemisphere. Silvio’s house is the one that faces north. He tells us that for many years the other house belonged to an English writer, a man who became Silvio’s dearest friend. At first he came only in the summer, to write his books, but over time he stayed for longer and longer periods, until he was almost always here. His wife ceased to accompany him: at the beginning she liked the house, but after a while she came to hate it. She found the isolation, particularly in the winter, unbearable. And perhaps she feared that she would lose her husband up here, for he was drawn to it by some private compulsion of his own that she felt inclined to challenge by her absences. He and Silvio spent much of their time together, particularly in the evenings, talking. They developed many things in common. Then, last year, the house was sold. The writer went away, back to his wife, and Silvio was left alone.
Silvio’s house feels empty. It is sparsely furnished. There is a photograph on the mantelpiece, of a woman and two children, but he does not say whether they are his family. The decorations are plain. His kitchen table is small, with a single chair. He hunts around for more chairs: he opens a box of biscuits that have obviously been bought for the occasion and arranges them on a plate for the children. He tells us about the ghost village that lies nearby, with its forgotten market; and about his grandmother’s night walks all across these mountains. Now there is another ghost here, the ghost of his English friend. Later he shows us his garden, which falls away at the end into nothingness. His place of meditation is just there, on the threshold of a great declivity with the purple peaks ranged around it in the distance. Meditation has become fundamental to his way of life. He has conquered many enemies through discipline alone. Six months ago he overcame the last and most stubborn, which was his addiction to cigarettes.
In another part of the garden I am surprised to see a cage with two dogs in it. They bark wildly when they see us and strain at the doors of their enclosure: they are big, vicious-looking animals, but Silvio assures us they would do us no harm. They know who my friends are, he says. They don’t attack unless they are provoked. He fondles their rough heads through the bars. It is necessary to have some kind of protection up here, he says. If someone tried to hurt me, they would kill him. He seems to set great store by this idea, yet he has been wounded to the quick by things of whose scent these animals would not have caught the merest trace. All the same, at night he lets them out into the garden and they patrol the boundaries until dawn.
I AM NOTHING, I AM EVERYTHING
Assisi lies an hour away to the southeast. The day is overcast: clouds sag over the plain. Now and again there is a motiveless gust of wind like an outburst of temper across the flat fields that subsides as suddenly as it came. It is Sunday. The great gray drifting sky, so deep overhead and unalleviated, recalls the Sundays of my childhood with their strange double nature of privation and feasting, a character impassable and final in its duality. The week was dead: it passed away somewhere between Mass and Sunday lunch, which between them finished it off, knocked the living daylights out of it with the sacerdotal rod and the Sunday roast. There was no hope given out for Monday, or for Tuesday either. Week after week they led back to the same impasse, the same nullifying conclusion. I still have a Sunday feeling, even now; a feeling that is like a bruise or mark on the skin, that is tender when it is touched.
From far away, the Basilica di San Francesco can be seen, standing on its hill in a tent of cloud. At the front there is a buttress wall, blank and pagan-looking, frightening in its enormity. The building’s long, forbidding colonnaded walkway extends from its side, like the huge dark wing of a bird of prey. I am familiar with the giantism of Catholic architecture. At the pilgrim center of Lourdes in France the main square and basilica are so large that they harmonize unexpectedly with the iconography of late capitalism, with the airport terminal and the runway and the shopping mall. And indeed both are determinedly global in their perspective: visitors surrender their separateness at the sheer scale of the enterprise, without protest. It must be imagined that people are pleased to be relieved of their individuality, though that doesn’t seem to be the case when disaster strikes. Then it is the impersonal they fear more than anything else.