The Veiled Woman, or La Donna Velata, c. 1516 (oil on canvas), by Raphael
We take the train back to Arezzo. It is late afternoon and the carriages are crowded. We sit with the children on our laps, and I listen to the conversation of four Englishwomen who are sitting across the aisle. Their own laps are full of purchases from Florence boutiques: they are returning to their rental villa in the hills. They are in their early sixties, I suppose, smartly dressed, with hair cut short and firmly styled. They seem to have outlived the world of men, of marriage and motherhood and children. They laugh hilariously at anything any one of them says. They are a third sex, these happy materialists. They have outlived it all, the mystery of men and women: it has passed, like the day’s heat has passed and left behind its warm, tolerable aftermath of evening. The children have gone to sleep. I close my eyes and find that the Donna Velata is there. I think of the cold stones on the white skin of her throat. I think of the stiff gold piping of her dress, and of the single pearl, hanging in her hair like a droplet of ice.
VOLCANOS AND THIEVES
South: we are going south. It is time to pack up the house and say goodbye to the green valley and the castello and the proprietario’s library. It is time to forswear ciaccia and Gianfranco’s store and the flowers in the garden whose little arc of life we have known so intimately. What is the significance of this knowledge? In the afternoon, the light falls in slanting golden panels through the windows of the silent rooms. The track winds blindly down the hill to the valley floor. The hills simplify themselves into primitive, mysterious forms as evening comes. The fields and woods and villages merge into their blue mounded distances. And in the morning their detail is born again, the fresh patchwork of hills and houses and trees, the close-textured countryside, the slender leaves with their dainty, tentative veins, the many-petaled flowers, the flossy white spiders’ webs knitted among the roadside weeds, the armies of ants trickling in the dust, the blades and tresses of corn and wheat that separate and separate until they seem to disclose the last blond grain of infinity itself. I know the silken strands of the spider’s web, and the muffled white form of the sac that hangs at its center. I know the froth that foams like spittle on the fibrous stalks of the weeds. I know the black bead of the gecko’s eye and its darting tongue. What else is there to know?
One day I hear a sound like the sound of rushing water, coming from the side of the house. I go out to look, and see a swarm of bees standing in a great black column on the path. They have escaped from a nearby honey farm. A man comes with a little wooden box to collect them. Inside the box there is a queen. The man sits in his car with his wife, eating sandwiches and waiting for the bees to go in. Then he drives away again, with the great black column folded into the little box, like a magician.
There is a farewell dinner at a restaurant not far away, and afterward, in the darkness of the car park, Jim puts a letter into my hand. It is a kind of love letter, except that the love is mostly too damaged to be recognizable. But in one place Jim says that he almost wishes we had never come to the village. It would have been easier for him. It would have been easier, he says, not to have known us, than to know us and us not be there. I am struck by this. I think about it often. Is knowledge by itself a form of pain? Is it redundant, when it is not underwritten by possession? We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge, and it is this, I suppose, that Jim dislikes. Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.
South: is it possible that, having come all this way down, we are to go still further? When the children swim, they sometimes throw coins into the water, and I watch as they dive to the floor of the pool to retrieve them. There is always a transition, when the momentum of the dive gives way to the resistance of the water, and they must swim to descend the last few feet to the bottom. I see the change in the movement of their bodies: there is a second of panic and then a kind of liberation, a struggling free from the world of the surface. Down they go, with no air left in their lungs, down into the underlying silence where there is nothing further to remind them of life. It is as though they are entering a place they know but had forgotten. I watch them reach out with green-white fingers, their hair suspended in the water like mermaids’. They are so unhurried, so free of need. They seem, briefly, immortal. Then their little hands close around the coins and they shoot straight upward, all urgency, as though fearful that their brief forgetting of the world above might have made it cease to exist.
We put our things in the car and we put the car in a garage in Arezzo and we board the noon train. We are to voyage among thieves and volcanos: we are traveling light. Outside, the world lies in a trance of heat. The temperature clock at the station reads thirty-eight degrees. The suburbs of Arezzo glide by, stunned in the dust. Then there is a brown vista of the pitiless plain, fringed by indifferent hills. The children are somewhat shocked to discover that we have left the house in the valley for good. They wish to know why we have done this. They loved that house: they were under the impression that as no one had said otherwise it had become, quietly, our permanent home. Though we have explained our plans to them many times, it is clear that for them an explanation remains an entirely theoretical experience. It offers not the slightest protection from their feelings, which hit them with the force of hammer blows. Now the feeling of loss is upon them: they look for some way of defending themselves. Did we sell the house? they ask suspiciously, as though we were known for doing this behind their backs. No, we explain, we never owned it. It belongs to someone else. They mull this over. They remember the house in England — they hadn’t wanted to leave that either. It upsets them to remember that house, where they lived for three years. Their feelings about the house in Italy are really their feelings about the house in England in disguise. They realize that they had begun to forget it, and forgetting is the deepest loss of all. The real wound has been uncovered. They become tearful. Why did we leave the house in England? Why?