Far South Read online

  ‘Ready?’ she said. ‘I have to pick up a friend of mine from church. We’re late but we’ll catch some of it. The monks do Gregorian chant for the midday mass.’

  The church of San Tommaso stands out in the flat of the valley in a kind of natural amphitheater. The sun was slanting in under a few high clouds and the rays lit up the vineyards on the south facing slopes. It was like the bearded God up above was gazing down on his perfect creation. It was pure magic. Liliana parked the car in the gravel lane outside the church. We were in this basin below the walled town; open fields next to the church; the air was dry. And it was already unbearably hot. The church is a single round tower and below it are the straight walls of the presbytery. Bizarre gargoyles stare down from just below the roofline: lions with double serpents’ tails; horned dogs; interlaced crosses. It’s like something out of Umberto Eco. I wanted to come down here and draw this place for my comic book diary. The monks’ cells are off in an adjacent building: stone, like a longhouse with cloisters. Some kind of Christian paradise.

  ‘It’s beyond real,’ I said, ‘so beautiful.’

  ‘Would you like to be a monk?’ Liliana said.

  Something in my expression made her roar with laughter.

  We went through the portal and into the shade of the ancient church. It was a relief to be out of the sun. On the altar, the mass was already going on. The priest was up there with a couple of monastic servers in black cassocks and white surplices. A few people in the back turned around to look at us as we come in and then turned to look at the altar again. The stone walls echoed with the chants of the monks in the choir stalls. A huge wooden cross hung over the priest, Christ suspended, chiseled out of raw wood and the painted features all faded by the sunlight: pre-Renaissance without a doubt. Stark.

  About four rows in front of us was a woman in her mid to late twenties. My age. She had ash blonde hair that set off her tan. She was wearing a white cotton dress. She was a little on the plump side to tell the truth, but not fat… just the way that Latin women are happy to fill out their clothes, you know? This woman was serious, you could tell, about the mass, I mean. She was mouthing the words as the monks chanted them. She was following the lines. Liliana leaned over and whispered.

  ‘That’s Francesca, my friend from Rome.’

  I nodded. I just knew it. I kept looking down the rows toward Francesca. At this point, I assumed she was Italian. She looked Italian. I wasn’t really thinking that anything romantic might happen between us at that point. Not consciously anyway. The Gregorian mass is hardly erotic. And then we were at the offertory… and the consecration. Francesca kept her eyes on the host as the priest raised it and the server shook the bell; and she had the same beatific look on her face when the priest raised the chalice. I imagined how I was going to draw this in a set of panels in the comic book: no story yet, just the idea, the image of her rapture and the raised host and chalice. Like Bernini’s Saint Theresa in Ecstasy.

  Francesca was one of the first to go down to the altar rails to take communion. I sat back in my seat. Liliana did, too. I’ve got to admit, part of me wanted to join in with the ritual, to go down there and take the communion wafer in my mouth just like Francesca with her lips open and tongue out in front of the priest. Feel the host melting in my mouth. That state of grace I felt as a child, even if I don’t believe in the Catholic faith any more. I wondered if that was what Francesca was feeling at this moment: one with God? Something like that.

  I must be a bit like Martin Luther with the real presence, you know? Something like that. You know the history? I studied it in school… never forgot it… Luther couldn’t bring himself to say that the host was Christ’s body, which is what Catholics believe. But Luther said Christ is present in the host ‘like fire in red hot metal.’ And I was like that watching Francesca. I thought that to take communion I would have to be in an official state of grace, abiding by all the rules for taking the sacraments. And I really wasn’t up for that at all any more. I’d have to go to confession. And how could I confess to some repressed celibate?

  But here was Francesca, her eyes cast down, making her way back to her seat. And I wondered: how can a sexy woman like that be into the Catholic faith? Is she married? I assumed she wasn’t. But I couldn’t imagine that she didn’t have a sex life. I mean the Church has rules. No sex before marriage. How could anyone abide by that? But this woman was taking communion. And Liliana would introduce me to her. So I wanted to observe her: Francesca that is, to see if I could get any clues to her, what she believed. I wanted to find out.

  The mass ended, and the priest led the servers and the Gregorian choir off the altar and they went back into the sacristy. The congregation started to file out. Francesca still knelt there and prayed for a while. She really was devout. So in the aisle of the church, Liliana and I stepped aside to let the faithful and the tourists go by us. Then Francesca got up. She saw Liliana. She seemed genuinely surprised to see her so close. Francesca had been completely oblivious to us while the mass was going on. But that didn’t put me off for some reason. Even if, when I think about it, perhaps it should have, now that I was definitely on the lapsed side of the religious equation.

  ‘This is Damien Kennedy,’ Liliana said to her in English: for my sake, I supposed. ‘He’s a friend of mine from England.’

  I didn’t correct her.

  ‘I’m Francesca,’ she said.

  ‘Liliana told me,’ I said.

  Francesca leaned forward so we could kiss on each cheek.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said.

  She had such a high-pitched voice I was a bit shocked. I thought that her English accent had the minimum of Italian inflection as if she’d studied or lived abroad for some time.

  ‘Me, too,’ I said, ‘pleased to meet you.’

  ‘You’re coming to lunch?’ Francesca asked.

  ‘Liliana invited me,’ I said.

  We were out on the gravel road where the car was parked. I remember my black boots were covered with a thin film of white dust. I was fantasizing that we were in some film, maybe something by Michelangelo Antonioni, one of his early films maybe… L’Avventura… L’Eclisse… something like that…

  ‘Are you going to a play tonight?’ Liliana asked me.

  I looked out across the vineyards toward the walled town.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The only thing that caught my eye so far was a version of Medea. But it’s not on until Friday.’

  ‘That’s our company,’ Francesca said.

  ‘O Berimbao?’

  ‘Yes, that’s us,’ she said in that high voice of hers, proud of herself, like a little girl.

  ‘But that’s Portuguese,’ I said. ‘O Berimbao.’

  ‘Yes, Brazilian,’ she said.

  ‘Are you Brazilian?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’m from Argentina. Tucumán province,’ she said.

  We were silent for a minute. I thought that we were both dealing with images from newspapers and television. Even Liliana stayed quiet. A headline from a tabloid sprung to my mind when a British submarine sank the Argentine battleship Belgrano. The disgust I felt… It was not the incident itself so much… this was a war… but the crowing in the newspapers over more than three hundred Argentine dead. British troops had already landed on the islands. People were fighting and dying and being bombed and shot and burned to death while we were here in Italy about to have lunch together in the sunshine at an experimental theater festival. This stupid war about a few small islands in the South Atlantic, which Margaret Thatcher in London was milking for all the political capital she could squeeze from it. At the same time, I wouldn’t want General Galtieri’s dictatorship taking over any island that I was living on. I mean, would you?

  If the Argentine military made their own people disappear, why wouldn’t they waft away a thousand or so Falkland Islanders?

  ‘What does it mean?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ Francesca said.

  ‘O Berim
bao,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s a musical instrument… made with one string and a gourd. The Indios use them. Our productions… they’re very minimalist.’

  ‘I can’t wait to see the play,’ I said.

  ‘If you don’t go to another play tonight, you can come to our rehearsal. Unless you want to wait until Friday to see it as it should be seen.’

  ‘Where are you rehearsing?’ I asked.

  ‘In the basement of the Teatro Ramicelli,’ Francesca said.

  ‘You can come with me, if you want,’ Liliana said.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to see a rehearsal: standing around watching exercises and endless repetitions of parts of scenes. And standing there with these two women in the driveway of the church, I was all sweated up from the blazing heat. It was close to one o’clock. By three, it would be suffocating. My t-shirt was soaked through and my jeans were damp and stiff. I could feel the sun’s heat through my hair and the skin on my face was tingling. I might be looking like a boiled lobster already. I couldn’t imagine that I’d be very attractive to Latin women.

  Liliana opened the car doors and we got in. The seat was burning and the car was like an oven. We drove up to the yellow-walled farmhouse where Liliana and Francesca were staying. We turned into the small courtyard. The ground floor of the stone building had been converted into living space. The lintels and jambs of the old stables had been filled in with stone and there were heavy double-doors of varnished chestnut.

  ‘The owner lives downstairs,’ Liliana said.

  Liliana, Francesca and I climbed the steps on the outside of the building. The door to the upstairs apartment was open. I was glad to get into the cool corridor. Francesca’s flat leather sandals slapped against the tiles. Liliana was ahead of us. I followed her and Francesca down the corridor and then I was in the kitchen. The window was open and Francesca went over to it and perched on the edge of the windowsill.

  At the far end of the table was a tanned man, the crown of his head shiny and bald, the hair above his ears and the back of his head – prematurely white, I thought – was cropped close to his skull. He was clean-shaven, his eyes behind his glasses with a slight squint. He stood up and reached out a hand.

  ‘Gerardo,’ he said, ‘piacere.’

  It was not quite an Italian accent. It was rich and baritone like the voice of an actor. It would be, I supposed. We were here for a theater festival.

  ‘Gerardo is our director,’ Francesca said. ‘We met in Buenos Aires.’

  ‘You’re Argentine, too,’ I said.

  ‘I’m Uruguayan,’ Gerardo said. ‘From Montevideo. But my theater company used to be based in Buenos Aires.’

  ‘Now he’s working with us in Rome,’ Francesca said.

  ‘I teach drama at the university,’ he said.

  Liliana took the lid off one of two flat white boxes on the marble countertop next to the cook stove: fat pillows of tortelloni dusted with grainy semolina flour.

  ‘Che belli,’ Liliana said.

  ‘L’insalata la faccio io,’ Francesca said.

  She had a little girlish tone, that high voice. She came around the table toward the fridge and held onto my upper arm as she went around me. It was a deliberate touch. A woman in London or Dublin wouldn’t touch you like that unless she was flirting with you, but this is Italy, I thought, people touch each other all the time. It’s normal. She touched Gerardo on the shoulder. The affection was obvious. The white hair made him look a lot older than he was. She was in her late twenties. He seemed to me to be around forty or more.

  ‘How long have you been in Italy?’ I said.

  ‘Five years,’ he said. ‘We had to get out… like a lot of people.’

  ‘I still have relatives here,’ Francesca said.

  ‘Francesca helped me get set up here,’ Gerardo said. ‘I’d been living in Venezuela.’

  They all spoke English incredibly well and they were speaking it for my benefit. I didn’t speak Spanish and my Italian was beginner level, no more.

  ‘So many people from South America living here,’ Liliana said. ‘Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil.’

  ‘I’m lucky,’ Gerardo said. ‘I have a job. I can still make theater. A lot of people have no work.’

  ‘So it’s okay for you to stay in Italy?’ I said.

  ‘It’s safer than staying in Buenos Aires,’ Gerardo said, ‘or Montevideo.’

  ‘We both have Italian grandparents,’ Francesca said. ‘We can get Italian citizenship. But there are people in Italy with connections, connections with the dictatorships. We still have to be careful.’

  ‘Argentinians?’ I said.

  ‘And Italians,’ Liliana said.

  ‘Fascisti,’ Francesca said. ‘MSI. P2. Ordine Nuovo… the people behind the Bologna bombings.’

  I had a vague memory of the Bologna bombings. A couple of years previously, 1980, a lot of people had been killed when a bomb went off in a waiting room at the Bologna railway station. MSI I knew were fascists. Ordine Nuovo sounded fascist. But P2. I’d never heard of it.

  ‘The fascists have connections with the South American secret services who target political activists,’ Francesca said.

  I could see the fear in her face; as if she could sense someone behind her in the shadows; or out in the garden, hidden among the trees. Was this just paranoia? I’d no idea what it was like to be on the run like these people, though people in the North of Ireland knew what it meant to have a midnight knock on the door. So many families in Belfast and Derry had lost relatives to the British Army, the SAS death squads, or the paramilitaries on both sides. So I wasn’t completely naive about it.

  ‘No one’s been prosecuted for the bombing,’ Liliana said. ‘A Fascist group claimed responsibility but there are all sorts of rumors connecting it to the P2 lodge and its leader Licio Gelli. The carabinieri arrested a fascist called Roberto Fiore, but Fiore claims he’s being chased to divert attention from Licio Gelli.’

  ‘The P2 lodge?’ I said.

  This was getting Byzantine.

  ‘Freemasons,’ Francesca said. ‘Half the government and the Mafia belong to it. They have connections in the Vatican and with the CIA. There are even rumors that some P2 members sell arms to the Red Brigades as well as the Fascists and bring heroin into Italy through Bulgaria. Licio Gelli is well known. He provided the plane for Perón to get back to Argentina from Spain.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ I said. ‘This is all a big conspiracy theory. How can you know?’

  ‘Just read the newspapers. The government is investigating P2,’ Liliana said.

  ‘I thought the government had members in this P2,’ I said.

  ‘Some are,’ Francesca said. ‘Some aren’t.’

  ‘Bit by bit it’s coming out,’ Liliana said.

  ‘In leftist newspapers,’ I said.

  ‘You can read it in La Repubblica Il Messagero,’ Liliana said.

  From the look on her face I could see that my skepticism wasn’t appreciated.

  ‘Hey, I’m out of my depth,’ I said.

  ‘Italy is a very complicated country,’ Gerardo said.

  He had the look on his face of someone in pain, personal pain; which I suppose it would be if you were in exile because you were afraid of being tortured or murdered back home; and even where you were in Italy, you were worried that some Fascist sympathizer might put a bullet in the back of your head.

  I was twenty-five, and I knew that I couldn’t fathom the depths of terror that these people were on the edge of… a terror I could sense in the way that Francesca held her body: the contortion of her spine, the slight twitch under her eye, the way her hand was held palm up, fingers tense, as if to ward off some evil. In the North of Ireland, we had the Special Branch and the Special Patrol Group; and I’d heard that the SAS in Ireland picked up people and tortured and murdered them; but, even then, I suspected it was nowhere near the scale that was going on all through Latin America. Later we found out that tens of th
ousands of people were being arrested and disappeared: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil.

  Liliana turned her head away. She knew more about this but didn’t want to say anything else.

  How did our discussion in Nepal on Buddhist philosophy fit in with all this? I thought. I suspected at this point that Liliana and her friends were all hard left. I was a bit uncomfortable. Only a few years previously, Aldo Moro had been killed by the Brigate Rosse. And I thought that I could do without problems from the law when I’d only just arrived in Italy. Were these people connected with the Red Brigades?

  I’d come to Italy to escape the madness of Thatcher’s Britain and I was already connected with a group of people who were involved in a political mess connected with Italian fascists and South Americans on the run, and a global conspiracy of the CIA and the Italian secret services and Pinochet and Galtieri. Or that’s how they see the world, I thought. I felt like we were living in two separate dimensions. I didn’t want to talk about politics any more. I was out of my depth with these people so I tried to connect to Francesca and Liliana and Gerardo with the one thing that I knew we had in common… even if they might see it as a clumsy attempt to change the subject.

  ‘So how did you get involved with theater?’ I said.

  ‘We’ve always been involved in theater,’ Francesca said. She turned to look at Gerardo. I was afraid for a second that they were all angry with me for being an insensitive representative of British imperialism even if I was Irish.

  Francesca broke up the green leaves for the salad. Just green leaves, some of which I didn’t recognize. She put the porcelain bowl down in the middle of the table. Liliana let the tortelloni slide into the boiling water.