The Italian Affair (2 page)

“Because I’m running away,” she replied slowly avoiding eye contact.

“Si, si” said Gennaro in a way that signalled he was not surprised. “But you are beautiful, why you need to run? You lose the love, and er….. ,” (huge shrug of the shoulders) “you find the love non. Sometimes you find the better love.” (Big throaty laugh – probable cause – nicotine abuse).

Issy looked at Gennaro this time with a defiant look. “Why did he need to know her story and what had beauty got to do with it?” she thought. “She was a bloody feminist not one of his pieces of cured meat.”

As Issy swallowed her indignation at Gennaro’s assumptions about her love life she started to prepare a suitable reply but before she could utter another word, the deli van swerved at a bend in the road dislocating her internal feminist diatribe and simultaneously causing her to inhale sharply at the sight of what had just become visible in the distance.

There, standing majestically in front of them appeared the city’s brooding twin-peaked volcano – Mount Vesuvius – magnificent against an azure blue sky.

Despite the brightness of the day, it cast a half shadow across the sprawling pale yellow coloured conurbations that nestled trustingly in its’ lower reaches.

“My city is beautiful non?” said Gennaro proudly waving his hands in the general direction of Vesuvius before using one of them to help him draw heavily on his cigarette. He gesticulated towards the volcano and asked simply. “You like no?”

Issy nodded forgetting she was supposed to be angry with him. “Yes. Of course, it is magnificent. But Naples already feels like a land of many paradoxes,” said Issy forgetting she was not in a lecture at Balliol College Oxford but on a motorway in Naples with a crazy driver who spoke pigeon English who she’d only just met.

“What you say?” Gennaro said over the noise of the traffic.

“Sorry,” Issy said trying to simplify what she meant. “I mean the airport and the roads are chaotic and crazy but Vesuvius is well … it is simply breath taking.”

“Si,” Gennaro laughed as he revved his engine and swerved to avoid a car in front of them. “It eez the crazy city, but the beautiful city non?”

As Issy started to laugh at his turn of phrase, she turned her head to the left partly in an attempt to avoid letting him know he amused her but mostly because she was drawn by the twinkling reflections of a deep blue sea with vast stretches of turquoise that ebbed and flowed against a rugged shoreline.

As a gentle breeze caught her face, Issy leant out of the mobile deli window to get a better view. As Gennaro drove, Issy breathed in lungful after lungful of warm salty sea air.

Transfixed by the sight in front of her, tears pricked at her eyes as she took in the regal splendor of the Bay of Naples that appeared tantalizingly for a few seconds before disappearing from view.

“Gennaro, you are right. Your city is beautiful. This is spectacular,” Issy shouted back into the van trying to suppress the tears and emotions being stirred up by the beauty and suddenly feeling very alone.

She didn’t want Gennaro to see her cry. It’s not what feminists did and certainly not over a man who had abruptly left her. To try and maintain her dignity, Issy kept her face fixed firmly out of the window and bit her lower lip hard.

As she struggled to remain calm as they drove along, a cluster of tiny islands appeared in the middle of the resplendent blue sea like three priceless jewels in a tiara of exquisite diamonds.

As the true splendor of the coastline revealed itself tears started to fall silently. “How could she be witnessing this,” Issy thought “and not have him by her side?”

Despite now believing it to have been a relationship built on sand, that would have eventually washed away, Issy still could not accept she would never be with the man she’d loved so intently and so desperately for the past three years.

Theirs had been a love as strong and as powerful as Vesuvius and as deep and vast as the sea before her today.

As Issy watched golden threads of sunlight dance on the surface of the sea, she recalled the time early on in their relationship when the amazement of finding each other had possessed them both.

Memories of their love replayed themselves over and over in her head as the pain of what she had lost burned in her chest. Being next to water reminded her of that lazy summer afternoon in Oxford when Jeremy had punted them down the river in the first throes of heady passion. They had taken the boat out at dusk when the tourists had gone, the only sound their rhythmic breathing and the whispers of history that lived on within the old stone college walls.

Afterwards, as they had laid together under an oak-tree with an old picnic basket filled with the food of lovers, Jeremy had whispered in her ear in that clear, clipped English upper-class way which was his trademark.“I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue, one can’t love and do nothing.”

After a perfect few hours that had gone on long into the evening, they had claimed Graham Greene’s words greedily as their own giving them both a reason to continue, despite him being a married man.

Jeremy hadn’t told Issy this vital piece of information for several months after they’d met. But even when he’d told her that he belonged to someone else, she was powerless to pull back and stop loving him. She’d fallen in too deep too soon.

He had assured her over and over again it was a loveless marriage. “I love my wife,” he would say “but I am not in love with her. Does that make sense?”

“NO,” Issy had thought at the time “it bloody well did not.”

But oddly, despite her normal approach to life, which was to question everything and fight injustice on behalf of women, most of the time she ignored what he’d told her. She only ever once challenged Jeremy on what he meant by those paradoxical words.

But all it had done was to drive a wedge between them both. In those moments of questioning Jeremy assumed a different persona. The stuffy one that inhabited the privileged and protected world of academia and a world he had no intention of changing. Not for Issy. Not for anyone even the wife he loved but never seemed to touch.

“There is no question of me leaving my wife Issy” Jeremy had said eventually towards the end of their relationship in a slightly irritated way when she’d asked him how he could remain in a loveless marriage. “Being married does not stop me loving you and wanting you,” he continued. “But I cannot destroy my wife’s life. It may be difficult for you to understand, but my religion, my background my own personal moral code prevents me from doing that. I hope you can find it in your heart to understand.”

As Issy looked out at the Tyrrhenian Sea, she remembered Jeremy’s face as he’d said those words. It had darkened in sadness and looked haunted by the destiny he had already mapped out for himself. As she watched the ebb and flow of the sea, Issy remembered each syllable Jeremy had spoken with such finality – each one a shard of broken glass that had pierced her heart.

She’d wanted to ask him what kind of moral code and religion gave him such latitude to take a wife and a lover but she’d caught the look in his eyes. She knew that whatever the reason, it lay deep inside and that she didn’t have the key to unlock his heart or free his soul.

Looking back now nearly two months after their affair had ended Issy shook her head to stop her from remembering the desperate weeks that had followed the dark night of the soul when he had simply walked out and left her. As a slight breeze rustled her long blond curly hair on this hot steaming Neapolitan August day, it felt like her heart was being physically wrenched out of her body once more and laid out on a cold slab to die.

And yet somehow, by some miracle, warm blood still flowed through her veins and her life went on, albeit now in an increasingly bizarre way.

As the cars around them continued to honk, Issy allowed herself a wry smile. When she’d decided to escape Oxford, she’d envisaged her period of self-exile and personal reflection would be spent in a sparsely furnished apartment in an historic quarter of an Umbrian or Tuscan village not a heaving burning cauldron of humanity in various states of anarchy.

“Issy” (pronounced IZZZZY) Gennaro shouted excited by the buzz of the street theatre around them. “This eez my city and it eez the most beautiful city in the world non? But the people can sometimes be shits,” he laughed.

“Sorry” said Issy as her thoughts were transported back from Oxford to the world of pigeon English and general mania. “What did you say?”

“I say…” said Gennaro. “This eez my city and it ezz the most beautiful city in the world but the people eez shits sometimes.”

“Why are they are so bad?” Issy asked.

Gennaro’s eyes widened amazed that Issy didn’t know the answer.

“Because they are robbers non?” he replied taking both his hands off the steering wheel for a moment, and gesticulating with his fingers to communicate that they liked to steal things from under people’s noses. “There eez a story which says when God stand on top of Vesuvius he looked down and cry at how bad they are. We ‘ave a wine Christ’s tears called in this way because – the water fall on the ground making a fertile soil and a good wine.”

“God is it really that bad?” asked Issy kind of getting the gist of what Gennaro was saying. “I had no idea Naples had this kind of problem. I normally know everything about a place before I land but I left England somewhat abruptly and it was the only place I could find a teaching job.”

“Ah. But why you leave England in a hurry?” he winked before hurtling into a tunnel which scarily didn‘t cause him to slow down and if anything sped him up.

“Because I....,” shrieked Issy as everything went black. “......you’re going very fast. Can you slow down please? I don’t feel safe.”

Gennaro laughed out loud. “It is better to do the fast driving,” he said as he swerved out of the way of each car that looked like it was about to have a serious impact before shouting various profanities at the other drivers irrespective of whether it was their fault or not. His favourites were “go to hell” and “pieces of crap.”

Despite the fear, Issy had to admit Gennaro was really good at avoiding high speed pile-ups and she consoled herself with the thought that, after losing her father and without Jeremy, life might be better anyway if it just ended now.

As they torpedoed out of the other end of the tunnel Issy’s anxiety levels started to subside as they finally started to slow down. Not because Gennaro had hit the brakes, but because of a huge traffic jam to get into the city centre.

After remaining stationary for a few minutes, Gennaro jumped up and down in his seat and hit the horn with his fist whilst spewing out a litany of rude words as if being crude and blasphemous in a continuum would speed things up.

As Issy caught her breath and looked skywards she marvelled at the crumbling palazzo blocks that stood regally against the slightly fading sunlight.

The colours of the buildings were amazing. Eggshell yellow and Wedgewood blue. As Gennaro continued forwards, even grander looking buildings painted blood red with green wooden shutters tightly clamped against the afternoon sun disclosed themselves as the deli van wove through ancient streets filled with locals, food, debris and noise.

But despite the wonderful sense of antiquity, and slightly aristocratic feel to some of the architecture, Issy became fascinated by the total lack of regard for civic order and refuse collection.

“Does the rubbish not get collected round here at all?” Issy asked in amazement as they remained stationary by a huge pile of rotting garbage.

“Yes but….,” Gennaro said putting the deli van jerkily into second gear “it eez complicated to explain Issy.”

Surprised at why the collection of rubbish was so complicated, Issy decided to ask the obvious next question. “WHY on earth is it this difficult, is it the traffic?”

Gennaro’s answer to her second question was a HUGE shrug of the shoulders. A first clue to understanding some of the story that would unfold over the coming weeks – but on that first hot day in Naples she was too busy looking at the chaos to follow her inquisitive instincts.

And anyway new sights had sprung into view. In the midst of dusty old cars and scooters – which were parked in what looked like highly illegally places – Issy caught sight of wonderful pineapple shaped trees which lined the streets and fabulous cascading bougainvillea and geranium in shades of cherry, purple, deep pink and red tumbling in profusion over hundreds of ancient palazzo balconies.

With time on his hands, and hoarse from swearing at the traffic, Gennaro returned to the impertinence of his first question. “Who you running away from Issy”?

“God,” Issy thought. “Gennaro is bloody persistent. He’s like a pig looking for a rare truffle. He may only be driving a deli van, but he knows he’s onto something.”

Issy looked directly at him and decided to get the explanation over with. “I left England because….” Issy replied screwing her face up against the kaleidoscope of colour that streamed into the window on the crest of a sunbeam. “My heart was broken by a married man.”

“Why he leave you? He is the crazy man,” shouted Gennaro as he jumped up and down in the seat next to her.

“It doesn’t matter why he left me,” Issy said with a long sigh. “He just did. I really don’t know why. It’s a very long and complicated story and I doubt I will ever find out the truth of what really happened.”