The Last Supper (7 page)

‘Cha-cha’ it is: Jim is our hero; I am unanimously overruled. It transpires that it is
ciaccia
, not a dance but a food, the traditional Sunday-night repast of Italian families. The bar is far up a steep hillside, on the road that leads from Jim’s village into the mountains. Everyone is indoors because of the cold. Outside, big puddles make dark shapes on the concrete floor of the deserted terrace. Inside it is brilliant yellow with electric light. Jim is sitting at a long crowded table like the tables you see in paintings of the Last Supper. He knows everyone. He stops and talks with the old toothless men in their berets, with the round women in their gold earrings and dainty shoes, with the witty
padrone
and with his proud daughter who works behind the bar. Men with Giotto faces clap him on the shoulder as they pass. I see that he looks more than a little Italian himself, with his brown eyes and small, well-modelled head, his dapper tucked-in shirt. The anorak was deceiving. And as for all this talk, it does not pour forth in the argot of the Highland Glens, though I can see why Jim resiled from giving a true account of his Italian. A true account of it would be hard to give. There are only two things to be said about it: that it is mechanically sound; and that in no part or article of it is his Dundee brogue compromised.

We are introduced to everyone at the table. They are an assortment, of foreigners and locals and people from Sansepulcro, Piero’s home town. There are the couple who
live in the castle and the gay antiques dealer and the man from Milan who makes classical guitars by hand. There is Tiziana, the village beauty. There is a woman from Florida who has emigrated to Italy with her two children, and the woman’s sister, who lives in Chicago and has a holiday house in the valley. The two Americans are called Laurie and Suzanne. Laurie is small and neat and slim. Her sister is fat, with beautiful milk-white skin like a baby’s that sits in folds at her neck and her wrists. She wears her dark hair in curls, and is abundantly groomed and perfumed and painted. Laurie is a little wizened and anxious-looking. Her children, two girls of eight and thirteen, sit beside her and glance at her frequently. She tells me that she is divorced from their father, who did not oppose their move to Italy at first, but has now begun to say that he wants them back. At home he never saw them from one month to the next. Now that they are here, he has a certain power. She seems more afraid of him for being far away. Laurie and Suzanne are Jewish. They say they are the only Jews in the area. They shot the rest, Laurie says drily. They did it in the field right opposite my house. I can see the place from my kitchen window. Together they laugh. Suzanne says people here are always asking her if she knows about the Jewish cemetery. There is a Jewish cemetery in the village. She supposes they are just trying to be friendly, but it happens two or three times a week.

The
ciaccia
comes: it is two triangular slices of pizza sandwiched together. Laurie’s daughters have theirs with Nutella inside. The younger one takes two delicate bites and pushes it away. Laurie rolls her eyes.
Mangia come un uccello
, she tells the table. Her Italian is a Jewish-American hybrid of Jim’s. The girl nods sadly. I eat like a bird, she says. She reveals that her name is Harley. Her father named her, after his motorbike. I notice that Laurie and Suzanne are exchanging significant looks. You’re doing it again, Suzanne says to her,
sotto voce
. Laurie opens her eyes wide. Am I? she mouths. Suzanne nods. You’re doing it again, she repeats. We talked about this earlier
and now you’re doing it again. Laurie gives a little anxious placatory grimace and turns brightly away to talk to someone else.

Jim admits that Tiziana is his girlfriend. They have been together for three years. She is down at the other end of the table, tossing her mane like a restless filly, flashing her eyes at him. He tells us that she is forty-three. She wants to move in with him. She wants to put an end to the tennis-watching, to the Brit-minding. She wants to marry him and have children. Jim sits with his hands clasped prayerfully around his glass. I’m not having any of that, he says. He shakes his head. Our relationship, he says ponderously, is as stale as an old piece of Tuscan bread.

It rains for ten days. Jim procures the key to the room under the house where the firewood is kept. He tells us that there were three Irish couples staying here just before we came. They were cold too. It seems they only stayed a week. They were hugely fat, he says, each pair bigger than the last. At the end of the week the cleaners found empty bottles everywhere, boxes of them to be taken away. I suppose they kept themselves warm that way, he says.

The Italians, apparently, are distraught about the weather. They have never known its like before. It isn’t their tourists they’re worried about: it is their vineyards and their harvests. In the fields around our house, whole families work together on their land, hoeing their rows of green shoots. I see a bent old woman on a hillside in a headscarf and apron, furiously digging at the flinty earth with a trowel in her hand. I see old men driving ancient tractors, holding umbrellas over their heads. It is curious to see these sights, so foreign to the English countryside. I grew up in East Anglia, where combine harvesters roll like tanks over denuded fields as vast and flat as oceans, and the elderly watch television in well-heated retirement homes. These activities in the fields bear a distinct cast of ambition. I have already noticed that the Italians are unusually enterprising in
the uses they make of their lot. There’s a metal-worker in the village who Jim tells us has just been given the contract to make the doors for the new Wembley stadium.

We go to Sansepulcro in the rain. It lies in the direction of the strange purple hills, across the plain where factories and supermarkets and car showrooms line the road, for Sansepulcro is no longer the one-horse town that Aldous Huxley discovered in its dusty obscurity as an early pilgrim on the Piero della Francesca Trail. Like other places, it has elected to keep its beautiful heart beating with an ersatz modern apparatus of hideous ugliness. We shelter from the rain in the Museo Civico. There are people in here, tourists, though of a superior kind. They pass through the rooms quietly, in groups. They are mostly of late middle-age, and well turned-out: there are no giant khaki shorts and tennis socks here, no baseball caps or long lenses. These people have expensive jewellery and leather handbags and polished shoes. They stand in front of one painting after another while their guide lectures them in dispassionate global English. They like to be lectured, it is clear. Their bright eyes pay attention; their lipsticked mouths do not move. They have a look of health about them, as though they were receiving some rigorous but beneficent cure. They are art lovers: it is culture that is purifying their blood and keeping their spines so straight.

When Huxley finally made it to Sansepulcro, after ten hours on a potholed dirt road, he found Piero’s Resurrection and announced it to be the world’s greatest painting. Perhaps, after his long and difficult journey, he felt a little as though he had painted it himself. The Resurrection hangs here, in the Museo Civico. I have been reading Vasari’s
Lives of the Artists
and have learned something of Piero’s obscurity, his lost works and lost reputation, his mathematical theories of perception and the blindness in which he passed the last twenty years of his life. ‘Admittedly,’ Vasari says, ‘time is said to be the father of truth, and sooner or later it reveals the truth; nevertheless, it can happen that for some while the one who has done the work is cheated of the honour due to him.’ That is true enough, in life as well as art; but in life, which in general leaves no trace behind it, no object through which the reassessment can be made and the belated honour granted, the one who has done the work must sometimes be satisfied with the work itself. And that, perhaps, is what Piero did. He did not move to Florence or to Rome, like other artists: he stayed here and was an officer on the town council. His house, apparently, was decorated from floor to ceiling in every room with wondrous frescoes painted by his own hand. But after his death it was destroyed, like so much of his work, for it seems that when people destroy things they do not always know what it is they are destroying. And
perhaps it was Piero’s fault that he lacked the vanity to defend his own creations. There is something in his paintings that is not entirely of this world. He wrote a great many mathematical books, of which the paintings might be said to be the workings-out. A fragment from Piero’s house still survives, an image of Hercules clad in the lion’s skin, the lion’s tail dangling between his legs. It is a little piece of paganism in the Renaissance ocean of Christian iconography. It is said to be a self-portrait. The lion’s paws are neatly tied over Hercules’ groin. His face is full of solitude and separation. In his hand he holds a thick stick, his weapon against the world, against its irrationality, its dangers both real and imaginary.

Hercules
,
c.
1475 (fresco) by Piero della Francesca

I can see the Resurrection over the heads of the art lovers. Even from this distance it is surprising: it is startling as the violation of spatial laws by a human body is always startling. When a person stands too close to you, you can feel fear, intimacy, oppression, deep forms of love. This is what Piero’s Christ does. The painting can barely hold him in. He is barefoot, emerging from his tomb. The art lovers move away a little and the lower half of the painting is disclosed. I see that he is not quite as peremptory as I thought. There are people in front of him, men, lolling against the tomb. They are asleep: he is awake. He is fenced in behind them. He is the victim, after all. He looks straight ahead. He wears a disquieting expression of terrible knowledge. The art lovers murmur and move next door. The rain falls outside the windows of the Museo Civico.

Along the road to Arezzo, prostitutes stand in the lay-bys and wait for the lorries to pull over. There is no motorway crossing Tuscany from east to west and so all the freight traffic comes along the single-carriage road that winds down from the hills towards Siena and the plain. At the Arezzo turnoff we pass the Hotel Piero della Francesca, a forlornly hideous roadside edifice, and a little later, towards the centre of town, the multi-storey concrete Parking Piero della Francesca.

The sky is bright and clear and blue. The sun is strong: it makes sharp, dark wedges of shadow in the narrow streets. In the parks the trees cast their filigree shapes on the grass. The stone piazzas and the churches bask in light. We make our way through busy avenues of smart shops and restaurants. We do not linger: we are on the Piero della Francesca Trail, which does not cross the portals of boutiques and
pizzerias and souvenir shops. Up a narrow little alleyway there is a small quiet square with a small plain church in it. This church is nothing like as grand as others we’ve passed along the way. It is hard to believe that we are in the right place. We open the door and go into its cold and gloom-filled interior. A man immediately asks us for our tickets. We have no tickets: we must go and purchase them at the office next door. At the office it seems that we must make an appointment. The frescoes are not to be approached casually: it has to be arranged. Fortunately there is a space an hour hence. We buy our tickets and leave.

Out in the little square we sit on the fountain and eat ice creams. After an hour has passed we go back into the church. We show our tickets and are permitted to go inside. It is much larger than it looks from the outside, and so dark that the walls lie in deep tents of shadow. They are covered with dim forms. Are these our frescoes? We go closer: they are so strange and faded and damaged that they can barely be seen. It is disappointing. An official approaches us: we are not meant to stop here. We are to go there, down towards the altar at the far end of the church. There is a roped-off enclosure there and a large curtain and another official who studies our tickets and looks at his watch. At the appointed moment he lets us in.