Losing Nelson Page 31

  I squinted across the vast square. The flat light of afternoon lay over everything—there were no shadows. I found myself longing for the cool of night, for the dark, as they must have done as they were led out to die. The agony would be over, they would have found their own darkness. The troops withdrew at nightfall; their only purpose was to ensure that the executions were carried out. The corpses were stripped by the hangman and left hanging, sport of the populace. If they were not citizens of Naples, no-one would claim them; they would remain there. The lazzaroni would push and pull them this way and that. Cruelty, like other motions of the heart, needs time to warm up. With time they went from jeers to knives, slashing at the bodies, cutting off the ears, the nose, the testicles, hacking through the ribs. After that came the feast. The livers were roasted, eaten, here on the square, perhaps just where I was standing. It is related that a passer-by who refused to partake of this meal was killed on the spot.

  You saw none of this, you saw none of the executions, you came nowhere near the contagion of the mob. You were … elsewhere. On board ship or in Sicily or dozing through the hot afternoons in the Palazzo Sessa. You heard it, you must have heard it—no-one in Naples could escape it, that great roar of jubilation as the victim was launched into space.

  The dome of the church opposite was clear in every detail. I had the impression of some quivering or disturbance in the air, like the single swing of an invisible pendulum. Then the square was blank again, drab, dusty, featureless, pressed down under the flat light. The garish beach goods, the occasional voices of the children, the squat little church … That great sum of terror and pain—I had somehow expected to find it reflected here, but there was only this bleakness and ugliness of the present.

  Turning away, quitting the square, was attended by a curious sense of effort. No more than tiredness, I suppose, but I felt I could have stayed there a long time without moving, one of the derelict props of the place. It was twenty past two; Sims was coming to the hotel at five-thirty; there would be time to see the other fort, Castel dell’Ovo, but I had omitted to find out whether it was open to visitors in the afternoon. Probably not, I thought. It was near the hotel, in any case. I was exhausted, but the thought of resting or stopping to eat something did not come into my mind. I did not want to take a taxi, shrinking from the human encounter it would involve. Only Sims I wanted to see; I had hopes of Sims.

  I was walking more slowly now; it took me more than an hour to get to the fort. I was relieved to find the gate open; but as I approached, I was astonished to see that the figure on the poster over the entrance, which I had observed at a distance from my hotel room and which had so much resembled Donald Duck, was in fact Donald Duck, complete with jaunty sailor’s cap and chortling beak and clumpy webbed feet. Above his head in bright red letters, Il Mondo dei Paperi. Ripples of light moved over the poster, cast up by the jiggling reflections of the harbour water. Mondo was world—the World of Donald Duck. After some moments of incredulity, I understood: there was a Donald Duck exhibition taking place inside this venerable building.

  It might be possible to bypass Donald, get a ticket for the fort only. I went through the vaulted tunnel of the entrance and spoke to the man inside the little glassed-in ticket office. I spoke carefully through the grid. Not Donald, please. But you couldn’t have one without the other. I didn’t like the man’s eyes, they were small and black, I didn’t like the way he stared through his glass wall, as if there were something wrong with me, something strange about wanting to give Donald a miss. It occurred to me now that I could ignore the exhibition altogether, go straight on past. I would walk past, make my way up to the sunlit bastions, inspect the cannon, still in their emplacements, look out from those heights over the water to where your ships lay at anchor.

  But at the entrance to the exhibition I came upon two young people, a boy and a girl; they were wearing Donald Duck T-shirts; they had spotted the brightly coloured ticket in my hand, it too bearing Donald’s image. They smiled in greeting; they held out catalogues; they thought I had come for him. I was too tired, too confused, the smiles and T-shirts were impossible to disappoint; I could not simply slink past, keeping my head down so as not to see their expressions change. I tried to smile, tried to assume the look of someone looking forward to a rare treat, and passed inside.

  Once in, there was no quick way out again. It was a one-way system, arrows pointed from room to room. The exhibition was enormous; it occupied three floors, all of them strangely resonant with voices. Voices and echoes of voices, in the cavernous rooms; but no faces of people, none that I can remember, so terrible was the impact of the faces on the walls. All Donald’s relatives were there, grotesquely blown up, staring down. Everywhere I looked I met their eyes, enormous, unshaded by lashes, horribly intent. The primary colours shrieked from the walls. The glands at the sides of my neck felt hot, I felt the run of sweat on my chest and back. Twice I tried to go back, to retrace my steps, but the way was barred by more young people in Donald Duck T-shirts. They smiled, they pointed at the arrows; I had to follow the arrows. The second floor was worse than the first, with the Scottish branch all represented and named in glaring capitals, Jack McDuck and Dirty Dingus and Sir Quackly, huge and terrifying in a top hat and spats. There was nowhere in the room to look, nowhere my eyes could take refuge from them. A moment came when I doubted my ability to walk across the room, expose myself to the barrage of those eyes, reach the stairs to the third and final floor, the only way out. I wanted to hide, to press back against the doorway. I was aware of my own noisy breathing. I made it to the slit of a window, peered out at a sudden, brilliant section of sea, the broken crest of Vesuvius, the mole of the fort along which the Jacobins made their way to be embarked. Here, finally, was the view I had wanted. Turning back, I encountered with an irrepressible leap of terror the enormous, baleful eyes of old Scrooge McDuck, the collective stare of a boatload of jowly dog-pirates in black masks.

  How long I stayed here, how I found the resolution to get out, I cannot clearly remember. In the end, keeping my eyes down, I forced myself to walk across to the foot of the stairs and mount upward. The third floor was better. There were no more monstrously enlarged and malignant ducks, only a few of Donald’s milder-eyed cousins, Molly Mallard, Cuthbert Coot, Luke Goose.

  The last gallery was quite different from the others, devoted to copies of well-known paintings, faithful in every particular except that the human subjects had been replaced by Disney characters. I stayed here some time, waiting for my breathing to come back to normal, for that flush of panic to subside—fear with me was a fever, not a chill; the chill came now as the sweat cooled on my body. There was the Arnolfini Betrothal by Jan Van Eyck, with the Happy Hippos, Horace and Clarabella, as the engaged couple, and Caravaggio’s celebrated Lute Player, with Minnie Mouse plucking the strings.

  As I stood before these travesties in the blankness of mind that followed upon fear, through my weariness, my headache, my strained sight, there came to me some dawning hope of revelation. These images imposed on images, this simpering Minnie, these toothy hippos—perhaps here, not outside on that sunlit sea, was the secret, the key I was looking for. This Vermeer, with a pinafored Snow White in the kitchen among hanging fowl and the utensils of an alien culture … If one could peel the layers away, find the truth below the image, before the original painter found it, before the first, deceiving brushstrokes … A memory came to me of the coloured stamps I had so loved as a small child—transfers, as they were called, about the size of a matchbox top, backed by some thin adhesive tissue. You peeled the tissue away, you pressed the stamp on a blank sheet, and there, clearly printed, was the image. Angelfish, flamingos, a boat on a blue sea, a huntsman in a red coat. It would work on your skin too, particularly where the skin was pale and hairless, like the inside of the forearm. A transfer could be used only once, but one could be superimposed on another, and this was always a temptation and always regretted, resulting in botched shapes, blurred colours.
Perhaps my earliest experience of sorrow, that remorse for the blighting of the pristine image, the knowledge that it could never be recovered.

  I was driven away by the arrival of a chattering group of children shepherded by an elderly lady—their teacher, as I supposed. Finally there was an escape route—stone stairs led down and away. Too late now to see more of the fort. I was due to meet Sims at half past five in the bar of my hotel. If I wanted to be there before him, there was time only to find my way out of this place, walk back past the little harbour, cross the broad road that ran along beside the bay.

  I reached the air-conditioned haven of the bar with six minutes to spare. I felt sticky and dishevelled, but there was no time for a shower if I wanted to be in place first. The bar was long and darkly shining. Pale lights were already on behind the counter, but shaded sunlight still lay over the wicker chairs and glass-topped tables at the nearer end. Hobnobbing on the bar stools was quite out of the question; I knew my disabilities, I did not want to sit too close to Sims, I would not have been able to talk to him or meet his eyes. I went to the bar and asked for red wine. I took my glass over to the corner table farthest from the bar and sat with my back to the wall so as to observe the approaches. At this early hour I was alone there, among the tables. I drank some of the wine, which was good, full-bodied, dark ruby in colour—from Sardinia, the barman had said. Almost at once, with the first taste of it, my headache receded, my weariness disappeared, and I felt entirely alert.

  He came at twenty-three minutes to six. I knew him at once, before he had reached the table, before he had broken into the smile, signal of uncertainty, apology in advance for possible mistake. I had never set eyes on him before, but I experienced a pang of delighted recognition. That large, loose-knit figure, the careless, slightly shambling gait, the light hair, tanned face, the lines round the eyes that came from scanning wide horizons—it was Mahan to the life.

  As he drew near and I stood up to answer his smile, the impression grew stronger and stronger. He corresponded in every detail. So much so that when he held out his hand and said, “Sims, Ernesto Sims,” I was momentarily at a loss for his meaning.

  “Charles Cleasby,” I said. “So kind of you to find the time for me.” Somewhere between the beginning of this sentence and the end of it, the incongruity, the foreignness of his first name struck me. He seated himself opposite my chair, at the farthest remove, and I was pleased by this, it seemed like a mark of tact. I asked him what he wanted to drink—a waiter had materialized at his elbow. He asked for something called carpano, which I had never heard of but took to be a sort of apéritif. This again seemed slightly incongruous—I had set Mahan down as a whisky-and-soda man, whether on foreign verandahs or by the hearth of home. I asked for another glass of the Sardinian wine. “Good of you to give up your time,” I said, shyness causing me to repeat myself.

  “Not at all. It is good to meet a fellow member of the Nelson Club.”

  There was something in the tone of this that made me glance quickly at him. Nothing showed on his face. Did he know I was no longer a member? Why had I thought his eyes were blue? They were dark, almost black. But his long legs were thrust out before him, carelessly sprawled, just as they had been that day in my study. He was wearing a linen jacket, rather crumpled. A dark blue handkerchief fell in loose folds from his breast pocket.

  “How are you liking Naples?” he said.

  An odd question, I thought it. How could I tell him that Horatio’s Naples and mine was a sticky trap, a smeared web? He lived in Naples. I could not risk giving him offence; he might withhold his help.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m not really here as a tourist, you know, I am here to try and pick up his traces.”

  “Excuse me, whose traces are we talking about?”

  “Why, his, you know. Nelson’s. I have rather drawn a blank so far.”

  I suspected nothing. In that first flush of confidence I began to tell him about my book, about the problem I had run into. “I wondered whether you might be able to put me on to something,” I said.

  I had spoken in a light tone, not wanting Mahan to think me stumped but merely casting around. He had leaned forward in his chair. The red-brown stuff in his glass was hardly touched.

  “A plaque?” he said. “Did you expect to find a plaque commemorating Nelson on the wall of the Palazzo Sessa? One of those blue ones that they put on houses in London?”

  This was not the tone I had expected; there was something harsh in it, something derisive, setting me on the defensive. “Perhaps not a plaque,” I said, “but something at least, something to mark his stay there.” Ernesto. And the eyes, dark, fathomless …

  He looked down for a moment, and his shoulders slumped in what seemed a long release of breath. “My dear man,” he said, “you have had a disappointing day, but you could walk round in this city every day for a year and you wouldn’t see the slightest sign of Nelson anywhere, neither hide nor hair of him. Not a syllable. The Palazzo Sessa looks down over the Piazza dei Martiri. Did you look at the monument there?”

  “No.”

  “The martyrs in question are the Neapolitan Jacobins who went to the scaffold in the name of liberty in 1799, sent there through the good offices of Lord Nelson. This hotel is on a street named after the republic that Nelson helped to bring down.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “And do you know that if you went out of here and turned right you would come before long to the Via Caracciolo, a broad and beautiful avenue that runs along beside the sea towards Vomero? Or that if you went a little way up Via Santa Lucia, which is just behind us here, you would arrive at the little church of Santa Maria in Catena, which contains Caracciolo’s tomb? That same Caracciolo, the Neapolitan admiral whom Nelson, on doubtful authority, had court martialled for treason and condemned and hanged in the course of a few hours—he was already hanging there from the yardarm when Nelson sat down to dinner. It was Caracciolo’s corpse that rode the waves, you remember? Yes, of course, you will have read Parsons’s account. The local fishermen recovered his body from the scrape in the sand where the English had left it, without even protection from the dogs. Now he lies there in state, one of Italy’s most honoured sons.”

  He paused here and took a sip of the syrupy-looking liquid in his glass. He had been careful otherwise, but ordering that drink had been a false move on his part. I knew now that he was not what he seemed. I knew I’d have to be very careful.

  “You have come for the wrong hero,” he said. “Caracciolo is the hero here. Heroes are always local.”

  I saw the sudden, ironic twist of his lips as he said this. Thin lips. It was clear that heroes meant little to him, whether English or Italian. Mahan would never have said a thing like that. This was a person without ideals. A change had come over him while he spoke. He seemed narrower somehow in his chair; even his face seemed narrower, and the hairline more receding. He was an impersonator, a dangerously clever one. But his disguise was slipping away.

  “After all,” he said, “they would not be likely to honour the memory of someone they consider responsible for the destruction of the one of the most cultivated societies in Europe. Between the July of Ferdinand’s return and the following March, a hundred and twenty were put to death in Naples and the islands and two hundred twenty-two were sentenced to life imprisonment. To say nothing of the hundreds given shorter sentences who died in Ferdinand’s filthy jails. Very few of these were men of the populace—perhaps two or three. All the rest were nobles, officers, lawyers, doctors, professors, and men of science and letters. In the exercise of his royal mercy, Ferdinand strangled or decapitated or shut away the whole of the Neapolitan intellectual class. Do you appreciate the gravity of a loss like that? They cut off the head and left the trunk to the mob and the church and the Bourbon tyranny. The whole south of Italy still feels the effect of that today.” He was shaking his head. “And you come here to look for Nelson.”

  “He was not responsible,” I said.
“How could he have known what would happen to them?”

  These words of mine served only to give the person opposite me more power, I knew that. I was afraid of him, but I could not prevent myself from inviting more harm, from putting my head on the block. It was why I had arranged the interview, I understood it now. I looked away from him, summoning resolution. There were more people at the bar, and three men in business suits were sitting at one of the tables, but too far away to hear us. People were passing through the swing doors that gave onto the street outside, people entering and leaving. Rapid shapes of light were made by the swinging of these doors, flexing, spiralling shapes, gone as soon as glimpsed. This light had a reddish tinge—the awning outside the hotel was red, I suddenly remembered. The reception area lay beyond the doors, beyond the passing people and the play of light. It seemed strangely distant, and the air looked thicker there, opaque and still, like cloudy water in a glass tank. It was suddenly quite clear to me that I had not come here to find Horatio at all: I had brought him here to be killed, and myself with him. “I intend to clear his name,” I said.

  “Clear his name?” Even the voice seemed different now, thinner, more nasal. I nerved myself to meet the dark eyes. He was smiling, that same uncertain smile he had worn as he approached me, as if not sure of my identity. “Have you read the Italian sources?”

  “Those that have been translated.”

  “But most of them haven’t. I work at the National Library here in Naples, you know. It is one of the best in Italy—we like to think it is the best. I am in charge of the European history department. It contains the most extensive collection of local materials—chronicles, journals, eyewitness accounts—anywhere to be found. They don’t leave you in any doubt as to what the rebels themselves believed. Even in early July, when they had been embarked for more than a week, they still believed they would be sailing for France. Gaetano Rodinò, in his Racconti Storici, tells us that Mario Pagano, who was subsequently executed, was still planning as late as the fifth to set up a fencing academy when he got to Toulouse. Rodinò, as you will know, was a fellow prisoner of his on board one of the transports.”