Jim drops by: he wants to know if we will play tennis. He says he can arrange doubles if we like. He has a friend in the vicinity who has a tennis court. He does not sit down: he perches on the wall of the terrace that faces the castello across the valley and smokes one cigarette after another, Marlboros whose glowing stubs he tosses into the grass. He has brought things for the children, tourist trinkets, Madonna del Parto key rings, posters of the Arezzo frescoes, a calendar with photographs of the local landscape. We look at the photographs: they ought to seem familiar but they do not. Some of them show views that we see every day, but there is something fake about them, something unreal. They are like copies, or forgeries: they seem to impose a stricture, a fetter, on what they have set out to represent. The Sansepolcro street in the picture can never be walked down; the photographic vineyard will never ripen and bear fruit. There is even a picture of our own castello, but it is not the same place from whose ramparts we looked down and saw the oblivious earth. It is imprisoned in its day, its hour, from which nothing now can liberate it. Jim doesn’t want us to think he’s spent any money on these things: before he got his taxi he used to run a bed-and-breakfast in the village, where he kept supplies of them for visitors. He’s still got boxes of the stuff.
But the tennis: will we play? His friend, the one with the court, is keen to know. It is obvious that Jim himself is keen to know: he asks us how good we are, whether we play at home, and how often. Here at last is a subject capable of flushing Jim out of his habitual cover, out into the wide-open spaces of commitment. It seems that where tennis is concerned there is nothing compromised about him at all. He admits that he plays it: what’s more, he says he’s not bad. He’s got an eye for a balclass="underline" he always did. When he was younger he played on the junior squad of a Scottish football team. He likes all games, board games too, Scrabble and Monopoly, though he isn’t any good at chess. The world seems to interpose itself again when he speaks of chess. But he does like to knock a ball around. He always thought that that was what he would do with his life because it came so naturally to him. But there was a caesura, of what kind he does not say. He did not become a footballer. When he left school he went to Germany, to Bonn, and lived there for a while. His mother is German and she had family there. Then he went to London, and for ten years he ran a flower stall in Holborn. This was the period of his misbehavior, of his marriage and its subsequent failure, and of a whole host of dark occurrences of which he is not prepared to speak. It’s no life, he says, running a flower stall. He made a pile of money, but it was hard and promiscuous work.
His friend with the tennis court is English. Her name is Amanda. She and her husband Roger own a hotel. He points to it with his cigarette from the terrace wall. Dimly I can see a stone façade lurking on a hillside behind a camouflage of trees.
Roger is another one of Jim’s cronies. They play tennis together every morning. Roger, Jim says, is obsessed with tennis, though when he first came to the village he didn’t know the first thing about it: it was Jim who taught him to play. It was worth his while teaching him, to get a regular tennis partner. Before that, the only people Jim could find to play with were tourists passing through for the week. Now Roger’s quite good. And all he can think about is beating Jim. Every morning he faces him on the tennis court and is consumed by the desire to win. A devil takes hold of him: sometimes he gets so angry that he throws his racket around, and frequently he has stormed off the court. But the next day there he is again. He’s taken a set off me once or twice, says Jim. He adds that this only occurs if he has spent the previous evening at the castello with Alfredo.
It isn’t Roger, however, who wants to play doubles with us: it is Amanda. Amanda’s quite a good player, Jim says, and she’s been playing for far longer than Roger, but she hardly ever gets a game because Roger won’t play with her. It’s a complicated situation, Jim says, rubbing his eyes and throwing his cigarette into the grass. But they’re married people. Let them work it out.
The children catch a gecko, and keep it in the chest of drawers in their room for two days before I find out. I am angry with them. It seems a cruel thing to do; the gecko has shed its tail in fright. They cry and say they meant no harm, that they meant to tell me, but I don’t believe them. I sense that this was their secret. I have retained my urban squeamishness about living creatures: they, on the other hand, have become denizens of the garden and the fields, intimates of the ants and snakes and scorpions. They see few other children. The gecko, I feel sure, was kidnapped and moved upstairs as a form of promotion: they wanted him for a friend.
Tiziana tells them that if they catch a firefly, they will find a coin beneath their pillows in the morning. One night we walk back from the village as darkness is falling, and find the garden full of white lights. Their motion is strange and beautifuclass="underline" it is descriptive, choral, a kind of silent music. The children dart through the darkness with cupped hands. The fireflies scatter in drifts, like embers. Finally they catch one. For a moment it swims dreamily in the cave of my daughter’s fingers: she is lit up, electrified. Then it swims away. She gets another, stealthy as a leopard. I watch her swift body, knitted with the darkness. I watch her face in its enchantment. In our first week here I found her sobbing in her bed, missing her home and the girl she calls her best friend; and I was smitten by guilt and a feeling of wrongdoing, a feeling that I was not, myself, sufficiently adult to have imposed my destiny on another. But she is my daughter: our destinies are better off intertwined. And I see, in this moment, that she has become more unified, more fully herself, that she will remember this time forever. It is a revelation by firefly-light, fragile and delicate, difficult to grasp. She runs inside and is out again in a flash. She has found a jar: in an instant she has caught a firefly and clamped down the lid. It twirls inside, trailing a pale path of light. She puts it beside her bed, but when I come up later I see that the light has gone out. She is fast asleep. I put a coin beneath her pillow.
The hotel is secretive, hiding in its deep screen of trees. There is no sign or entrance, just two stone gateposts buried under ivy in a glade of cedars. Beyond them lies a house, hidden lower down the hill at the bottom of a steep track. It is evident that its owners have no interest in attracting passing trade. Only from halfway down the track can you see that there is a house there at all. It stands facing its own courtyard, while the valley falls away behind it. It is a large, long, two-story building, very faded in color, delicate, with white shutters and a colonnaded stone porch. The massive paneled wooden door stands open. The two rows of windows are dark in the sun and the cavity of hall beyond the open door is dark too.