know how Eleanora is about these things.’ Then her aunt came out from Italy and there were lunches and dinners to which only Italian-speaking people were invited because the signora couldn’t speak English. I remember going there one Sunday – sent by my mother with a contribution of her special ice cream. They were all sitting round in the heat on the veranda, the women in one group with the children crawling over them, and Marco with the men in another, his tie loose at the neck of his shirt (Eleanora had made him put on a suit), gesturing with a toothpick, talking and throwing cigar butts into Eleanora’s flower-trough of snake cactus.
And yet that evening in the caravan he said again, ‘Oh good God, I don’t want to wake up . . . I was in a dream.’ He had appeared out of the dark at our meeting-place, barefoot in espadrilles and tight thin jeans, like a beautiful fisherman.
I had never been to Europe. Marco said, ‘I want to drive with you through Piemonte, and take you to the village where my father came from. We’ll climb up to the walls from the church and when you get to the top – only then – I’ll turn you round and you’ll see Monte Bianco far away. You’ve heard nightingales, eh – never heard them? We’ll listen to them in the pear orchard, it’s my uncle’s place, there.’
I was getting older every day. I said, ‘What about Eleanora?’ It was the nearest I could get to what I always wanted to ask him: ‘Would you still become mad?’
Would you still become mad?
And now?
And now – two months, a week, six weeks later?
Now would you still become mad?
‘Eleanora will spend some time in Pisa after we go back to Italy, with her mother and the aunts,’ he was saying.
Yes, I knew why, too; knew from my mother that Eleanora was going to Pisa because there was an old family doctor there who was sure, despite everything the doctors in Milan and Rome had said, that poor Eleanora might still one day have a child.
I said, ‘How would you feel if Alan came here?’
But Marco looked at me with such sensual confidence of understanding that we laughed.
I began to plan a love affair for Eleanora. I chose Per as victim not only because he was the only presentable unattached man in our circle, but also because I had the feeling that it might just be possible to attract her to a man younger than herself, whom she could mother. And Per, with no woman at all (except the pretty Congolese prostitutes good for an hour in the rain, I suppose) could consider himself lucky if he succeeded with Eleanora. I studied her afresh. Soft white gooseflesh above her stocking-tops, breasts that rose when she sighed – that sort of woman. But Eleanora did not even seem to understand that Per was being put in her way (at our house, at the Au Relais) and Per seemed equally unaware of or uninterested in his opportunities.
And so there was never any way to ask my question. Marco and I continued to lie making love in the caravan while the roof made buckling noises as it contracted after the heat of the day, and the rain. Tshombe fled and returned; there were soldiers in the square before the post office, and all sorts of difficulties arose over the building of the road. Marco was determined, excitable, harassed and energetic – he sprawled on the bed in the caravan at the end of the day like a runner who has just breasted the tape. My father was nervous and didn’t know whether to finish the road. Eleanora was nervous and wanted to go back to Italy. We made love and when Marco opened his eyes to consciousness of the road, my father, Eleanora, he said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, why . . . it’s like a dream . . .’
I became nervous too. I goaded my mother: ‘The Gattis are a bore. That female Buddha.’
I developed a dread that Eleanora would come to me with her sighs and her soft-squeezing hand and say, ‘It always happens with Marco, little Jillie, you mustn’t worry. I know all about it.’
And Marco and I continued to lie together in that state of pleasure in which nothing exists but the two who make it. Neither roads, nor mercenary wars, nor marriage, nor the claims and suffering of other people entered