Relief. We put on our most neat and despised clothes and actually went about the public gardens of Merano collecting for this bogus charity. We made nice money and were levitating with the sense of our wickedness and peril.
My mother came back alone and we moved into a pensione (there seems to have been a small cloud of money trouble looming), pending, she said, a suitable nunnery that would take in both of us. There followed a rather listless time. Shall I send you to school? Should I keep you with me? Either will entail complications. Oh, I’ve burnt my boats so! Perhaps not all my boats. Will you bear with me a little longer?
* * *
It had become winter, my mother spoke of going South. (At last!) She also spoke of the problems besetting Alessandro’s future – he wanted to be an architect but had to interrupt his studies, he was one of a large family, his mother the widow of an academic, and Italy facing hard times. One brother was trying to farm, several still at school, another about to marry money … You know how tight knit those families are, or rather you don’t, but I am beginning to. And how would I fit in? After more delays (my mother’s own movements were curbed by a couple of bogeymen, her trustees – always heard of, never met), we set off for Naples. At Verona we were joined on the train by Alessandro. It was the first time we had been travelling à trois and when we got to the hotel and I heard him ask for two rooms only my heart sank: so I was to have a room of my own no longer. When this turned out not to be the case I was as surprised as I was relieved; for all my standing by as it were when men and women fell in love, I was entirely ignorant and incurious.
I can still see, smell, hear what was offered that first night at Naples: the Bay, Vesuvio, dinner on the waterfront – frittura, melanzane, mozzarella – the beggars, the songs; the tourist banalities of the Italian South were piercingly new to me; this, I told myself, is where I want to be: I was swept off my feet. (I had also had a round amount of wine.) Next day we went on to Sorrento where we stayed at a cold, clean, whitewashed pensione while my mother was looking for a house. There seemed to be some difficulty and it certainly had to do with money. I was never quite clear about my mother’s finances except that hers, too, were going downhill. From having been well-off she appeared to have reached a point where she had to be very careful (this was not in her nature). She had never owned any money, she had the use of money (in trust long before I was born and to come to me ultimately; in point of fact it never did: when the time came it had evaporated, but that is another story). The present stringencies – they increased over the years and, unlike my father, she tried to ignore them – may have had something to do with all those boats she said she had burnt and there was also the fact that she had been allowed to use a chunk of capital to buy the Feldkirch estate for my father at the time of their marriage, and had simply let him keep it after the divorce. Generosity? Fatalism? A sense of having done for good with that part of her life? Possibly all of these.
It was during our stay at the Pensione Emilio that the news came of my father’s sudden death. My mother was much affected. She, who had been so full of ridicule, who had been dining out on my lessons and my wardrobe and the tales of rural life … She talked about him, torrents of talk: about the old times, the good times, when he was in pursuit, a winged pursuit, in Paris, not much longer ago, she said, think of it! than a dozen years. I listened, trying to blend what I was told with what I had known. Death, the disappearance of a being who had lived, I shut out from thought and feeling. What I did express to myself was that now I would never go back, would not have to go back, did not want to go back . That part of my life, that country, was over.
My mother captivated by
My mother came back alone and we moved into a pensione (there seems to have been a small cloud of money trouble looming), pending, she said, a suitable nunnery that would take in both of us. There followed a rather listless time. Shall I send you to school? Should I keep you with me? Either will entail complications. Oh, I’ve burnt my boats so! Perhaps not all my boats. Will you bear with me a little longer?
* * *
It had become winter, my mother spoke of going South. (At last!) She also spoke of the problems besetting Alessandro’s future – he wanted to be an architect but had to interrupt his studies, he was one of a large family, his mother the widow of an academic, and Italy facing hard times. One brother was trying to farm, several still at school, another about to marry money … You know how tight knit those families are, or rather you don’t, but I am beginning to. And how would I fit in? After more delays (my mother’s own movements were curbed by a couple of bogeymen, her trustees – always heard of, never met), we set off for Naples. At Verona we were joined on the train by Alessandro. It was the first time we had been travelling à trois and when we got to the hotel and I heard him ask for two rooms only my heart sank: so I was to have a room of my own no longer. When this turned out not to be the case I was as surprised as I was relieved; for all my standing by as it were when men and women fell in love, I was entirely ignorant and incurious.
I can still see, smell, hear what was offered that first night at Naples: the Bay, Vesuvio, dinner on the waterfront – frittura, melanzane, mozzarella – the beggars, the songs; the tourist banalities of the Italian South were piercingly new to me; this, I told myself, is where I want to be: I was swept off my feet. (I had also had a round amount of wine.) Next day we went on to Sorrento where we stayed at a cold, clean, whitewashed pensione while my mother was looking for a house. There seemed to be some difficulty and it certainly had to do with money. I was never quite clear about my mother’s finances except that hers, too, were going downhill. From having been well-off she appeared to have reached a point where she had to be very careful (this was not in her nature). She had never owned any money, she had the use of money (in trust long before I was born and to come to me ultimately; in point of fact it never did: when the time came it had evaporated, but that is another story). The present stringencies – they increased over the years and, unlike my father, she tried to ignore them – may have had something to do with all those boats she said she had burnt and there was also the fact that she had been allowed to use a chunk of capital to buy the Feldkirch estate for my father at the time of their marriage, and had simply let him keep it after the divorce. Generosity? Fatalism? A sense of having done for good with that part of her life? Possibly all of these.
It was during our stay at the Pensione Emilio that the news came of my father’s sudden death. My mother was much affected. She, who had been so full of ridicule, who had been dining out on my lessons and my wardrobe and the tales of rural life … She talked about him, torrents of talk: about the old times, the good times, when he was in pursuit, a winged pursuit, in Paris, not much longer ago, she said, think of it! than a dozen years. I listened, trying to blend what I was told with what I had known. Death, the disappearance of a being who had lived, I shut out from thought and feeling. What I did express to myself was that now I would never go back, would not have to go back, did not want to go back . That part of my life, that country, was over.
My mother captivated by
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