The Dream of Scipio (11 page)

Read The Dream of Scipio Online

Authors: Iain Pears

“And what will you do there, Monsieur?” the father asked. “Become dissipated and steep yourself in idleness? Or waste your time in honest labor?”
He had this way, which his daughter inherited, of turning remarks upside down and presenting them in a humorous fashion that, if analyzed properly, spoke volumes. Was Julien a mere bookworm? Or was he sensitive to the outside world, could he absorb time and place, feel history in the stones and use this to make his work more sensitive and more subtle? Are you a mere pedant, Monsieur? Or do you have the spark of vitality inside you? Will you do something with your life? Answer my question with all the wit at your disposal and let us see.
“If I do not labor, I cannot be idle,” Julien replied. “There are constant supervisions and I would be sent back if I didn’t perform well. After nine months we are allowed to live in the city and begin to work more on our own—or not, as the case may be. But I may not have much encouragement in corruption. Everyone at the École, who will be my comrades, will be people like myself.”
“Which means?”
“Earnest, hardworking, and dull,” he said. “We cannot help it. Dissipation is not on the curriculum.”
“In that case,” the father said, “you will miss what is most charming and educational about Rome. We must come and rescue you. I have to come to Italy at least once a year, and I offer you an exchange. You show me Rome, which you will no doubt know better than I in a short while, and I will show you the Romans. They, at least, I know well.”
“I accept with great pleasure,” Julien replied happily. “And you must keep your word. I shall now be looking forward to your arrival and will be greatly disappointed if I don’t hear from you. Might I ask why you come to Italy?”
After near an hour of conversation, this was the first initiative he had taken, the first time he ventured to move the conversation away from himself, partly aware that he must be seeming terribly self-centered, but more because the two people were making him relax in their company.
But the father waved his hand. “Neither important nor interesting,” he said. “But merely work. It will take a generation to replace what was destroyed in a few years. Perhaps longer, as the politicians seem determined to waste as much time and money as possible. It is my job to make sure they have no excuse but their own lassitude. But it is not exciting, not in comparison to what you do.”
Was that a joke at his expense? Julien thought so, but Julia translated for him. “Father is a scholar
manqué,
” she said gently. “He always wanted to write books. But he became rich instead, so is not allowed.”
“And you, Mademoiselle?”
“She is an artist,” Bronsen said, smiling at him.
“Are you really?” He addressed his question back to her, and noted that she was scrutinizing him carefully as he spoke. False admiration? Disdain for the rich hobbyist of no talent? Incomprehension and slight disapproval of the possible bohemian? “What sort of artist?”
“A painter,” she said, but gave no more away.
“A good one?” He persisted.
Again, her father answered for her. “Yes, she is. She is exceptional.”
Julien’s smile, understanding but with too much insight, prompted her to respond a little more fully. “No, I am not,” she said. “Not yet.” She said it with such care that Julien, who could easily have changed the subject then to pursue matters less obviously sensitive, was minded to probe further.
“I sense a little divergence of opinion here.”
“Father speaks from hope. I speak from knowledge. I am not being self-deprecating. I have the ability to be a good painter. More than that, perhaps. But I am a long way from that point yet.”
“And what is required? What is missing?”
“Work,” she said. “Labor. The sweat of my brow. A great painting is not genius with a paintbrush. It’s years of concentrated effort. A journey without maps, with only a faint idea where you are heading.”
“She is being disingenuous,” Bronsen put in with a smile, patting her affectionately on the shoulder. “You should not be fooled by her modesty. She has none, in fact. She is perfectly aware of her abilities. As are the committee at the Salon d’Automne, which chose three of her pictures for hanging last year.”
“Now it is my turn to congratulate you. Although without seeing something for myself, I will have to suspend judgment,” Julien said. “I would like to see what you do. If you have no objection. Although I warn you in advance that my opinions are worthless.”
Julia gazed at him carefully. “We’ll see. Perhaps.”
ABOUT HALF WAY through the cruise, Julien began talking amiably and purposelessly to a middle-aged man—a jovial, good-natured, kindly fellow, the sort who is instantly likeable. They had just left Athens and were heading for Palestine; the weather was beautiful, all had relaxed into complete pleasure in their shared experience.
“I am surprised to see you spending so much time with those two Jews,” came the remark. “If you’re not careful, people will think you’re one, too. Personally, I think it spoils the atmosphere, having them on the ship.”
A pointless, casual remark, made even without malice. For the flickering of a second the comment nestled in Julien’s mind, and made him anxious, but the brilliant, hypnotic glittering of the water was too magnificent for him to worry too much and he soon forgot it. He said nothing in reply to either justify himself or praise his companions’ qualities. Rather, he shrugged with feigned indifference and looked out over the sea; he understood the comment. It was a moment, he realized later, that summed up his whole existence in a tiny moment, like the world reflected in a tiny bead of water as it falls to earth.
 
 
 
 
JULIA WAS sitting cross-legged on the ground, sketching, in the hills above Jerusalem, where they had gone for an overnight stop. Brown arms and a concentration so perfect even a wasp—the one thing that made her genuinely terrified—could walk up her leg unnoticed. Julien watched, enamored of her self-possession, recognizing something in her, a faintly stirring unease about him as he did so.
This image lodged in his mind like a photograph, and stayed with him until his death. Such things happen; the entire voyage, the wonderful things he saw—cities and towns, ruins and pyramids, temples and churches—were slowly effaced from his memory, or became the sort of memory that can be summoned when necessary but, for the most part, rests undisturbed. This one vignette had a life of its own. It nagged him, called him, imposed itself on him. As he went to sleep, sometimes when he was buying a newspaper or walking in the street or sitting reading by a warm fire and his mind drifted off, it would take him back to that precise moment—always unvarying, never changing.
Everyone has a glimpse of paradise in their lives; this was Julien’s. All he had to do was reach out.
Later, he decided he had been constrained by the morality and timorousness of the provincial bourgeois; the man who returned from Rome in 1927 would have been subject to no such doubts and hesitations; he would have become Julia’s lover then and there, and given the magical moment a fleshly guise. He knew, however, that the explanation was a false one, designed only to disguise and reassure. He was not afraid of being rejected but rather was afraid of being accepted. He knew that she was the one person he would never manage to let go. He was afraid of falling in love with her.
A few moments later she sighed and began packing her paper back into her bag. She didn’t know why she sighed, she did not do it often. Perhaps she, too, realized something had been missed at that moment.
And Julien came away with his shard of memory, forever glinting in the hot Mediterranean sunlight, as a reminder of something offered but turned down. It stayed with him until he had learned more and was ready. Until then he had that moment instead, that look on her face as their eyes met.
 
 
HETRAVELED around the Mediterranean to see and 
learn, an idea that would never have occurred to people of Olivier de Noyen’s age; they had little energy, or money, or time to spare for any type of luxury, and the wasteful use of all three simply never crossed their minds. Nor did they find nature so wonderful; they knew it all too well already, and had no soft illusions about its benevolence. Occasionally, in lyric verse, we catch a slight hint of appreciation, when the light breeze awakens the lover’s heart, or falling leaves indicate a love that is dying, but in general the works of the age are quiet about nature’s beauty except as metaphor.
Even Olivier thought he traveled for a purpose on his endless criss-crossing voyages across what is now Southern France, Italy, and Switzerland. There is even a hint that he once visited England in the retinue of the Bishop of Winchester in 1344, although there is no solid evidence and, indeed, it seems unlikely. Ostensibly, he voyaged either on those little missions of informal diplomacy and administration at which he proved adept and useful—delivering a message, paying a compliment, finding information—or he was in search of those manuscripts with which he became ever more obsessed.
And yet Julien did not entirely impose his own values and opinions when he fancied that Olivier took pleasure from the journey as well as the destination, and that he often took a less than direct route and dallied unnecessarily in places with no other interest except their charm. Much, again, was supposition: The poet was only known for certain to have taken two trips, one to Dijon, which produced his great allegorical letter on Saint Sophia, the other to Bordeaux. Nonetheless, others must have been made, for the list of manuscripts he acquired implies considerable travel.
Certainly Olivier saw the world in a novel and strange fashion. Manlius contemplated the landscape and forced it into the conventions of the Vergilian eclogue, making it a confirmation of a literary tradition that was by his time almost dead and imbuing it with the melancholy of a nostalgic futility. Julien responded with all the orthodoxy of a man brought up on Rousseau, but Olivier’s response was more wayward and indeed more original. For he felt he was tasting a private, personal pleasure; the fact that no one else could—or wanted to—share his delight was the essence of his happiness.
Some casual comment led to the detour after his trip to the Burgundian court in 1346. Refreshing himself at a household obliged to the cardinal about two days outside Avignon, he heard someone mention the Chapel of Saint Sophia, which lay a good walk to the east.
“A very holy place,” said his host, “with great powers, thanks to the intercession of the blessed saint. Women in particular go there to ask help when faced with difficult decisions. There is also a little hermitage, I believe, of very great antiquity, occupied by a few people who look after the shrine.”
Olivier was intrigued immediately, and the mere name of the saint almost guaranteed that he would cancel all his plans the next day, leave his small band of servants and friends—much to the irritation of his host, who was faced with the prospect of feeding them for an extra two days—and set off the next morning. That the chapel lay only a short while from his hometown, and he had not seen his family for nearly two years, perhaps also aided his decision. Besides, it was well known, he said to justify himself, for such places to contain all sorts of treasures.
And all that was part of the reason; the other part, which he scarcely even recognized himself, was the delight of walking through the fresh country air, entirely on his own, never knowing what might be around the next bend. To sit halfway up a warm hill in the sunshine, listening to the birds and eating some bread and an onion, to doze off in the shade, then wake up to the sight of the light glittering through the thick trees above him. And to be quiet, to hear no man’s voice, make no conversation, to let his thought flit hither and thither.
What a paradise it was, as well. For if that region of France delighted Julien Barneuve’s heart, and made him rush to return there whenever he was in need of solace, it was still more so for Olivier, before building works and deforestation had cut into the landscape and robbed the hills of their trees and soil. Although settled for two thousand years already, mankind had yet made only a small impact on the landscape; most was still untouched and uncaring of his presence.
At the end of his journey lay the little chapel; a tiny thing on top of the hillside looking down the valley of the Ouvèze, only partially cultivated and the rest given over to woodlands; by Julien’s day the trees on the western side would be cleared and replaced with vines and olive trees, as they had been during Manlius’s lifetime. The chapel itself was stone, and a more educated eye than Olivier’s would have categorized it as Romanesque, built on an earlier foundation. A semicircular archway framed the door, with a space for a bas-relief that was never executed. The roof also had an unfinished air to it, despite the small shrubs and treelets growing up between the stone tiles, but its lack of completion did not bother Olivier at all; he was more transfixed by the way the trees had grown around it, giving it shelter from the sun and the winds of autumn, the way it nestled in the landscape. He felt joyous the moment he saw it, and it was this feeling that he tried to capture and turn into first prose and then poetry.
The walk took two days and—because even poets tend to reduce their experiences to a conventional and often literary form—became in retrospect a pilgrimage. Julien knew of it because Olivier wrote a letter to his patron on the tour that was also filed away by the clerical bureaucracy. The letter was partly an excuse, to explain why a simple expedition to deliver a letter had in fact taken five months and cost a small fortune—but also one of those occasions where an attentive reader could discern the first glimmerings of something new. He used the allegory, describing the long journey as the journey of his soul, the ascent of the hill as the climb toward God, the arrival at the chapel as the embrace of truth. Within this form—not novel—was a realism of description without parallel either in Dante or Petrarch, a feel for nature that the others reduced to conventionality. The confusion then very much present in Olivier’s mind produced a remarkable effect, a mixture of pilgrimage and tourism, spiritual yearnings and physical desire, all expressed in a form that was part troubadour, part a revival of classical form, and as a result entirely novel. Julien translated and published it as an appendix to his
Histoire,
although the troubles of the times meant that it received little attention.

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