Vanni had told his mother he was homosexual. She was distressed to begin with, but eventually came to terms with the fact, especially when he became involved in a relationship. Poor Paolo could not afford, literally, to be as honest. He lived in fear that his parents would discover the truth about him. He was the youngest son in a large family – I seem to recall that he had innumerable siblings, most of them sisters. His father, who was then in his late seventies, was threatening to deprive Paolo of his inheritance if he didn’t marry. The old man repeated the threat whenever he was ill, which was often. I still don’t know if it was the thought of losing a considerable legacy that caused Paolo to become engaged to the attractive and highly intelligent Parisienne he later married. I met the newlyweds in London, and the cagey Paolo gave the impression – a very understandable impression, given his wife’s beauty and intellect – that he was much in love.
I was living in Fargo, North Dakota, in the late 1970s when Vanni rang me from Oakland in California with the terrible news that Paolo had died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-two. This was bad enough, but not quite as awful as the reality, which I would learn about in Florence in 1980. The heart-attack story had been concocted by Paolo’s widow to ease the pain his parents were suffering. It transpired that she had undergone an abortion, and that Paolo – ever the devout, if once wayward, Catholic – had been upset and horrified. Was this the reason for his suicide? It is hard, and perhaps impertinent, to speculate. The truth is that on a summer afternoon, when his wife was out working – she was a skilled translator and interpreter – Paolo leapt from the balcony of their fifth-floor apartment in Paris. It was an ugly and brutal death for my sweet friend, l’uomo raffinato.
His body was transported to Siena. A traditional Catholic funeral was held in a parish church. After the burial, Paolo’s widow returned to France and disappeared from the lives of her husband’s friends and relatives. I assume she wanted no more reminders of him. That seems the likeliest explanation.
*
In the late 1960s, Vanni’s family was in thrall to his paternal grandmother. La Nonna had been widowed early in her marriage and had raised her only son, Piero, single-handedly. She was a formidable presence, especially in the kitchen, from which everyone was banned when she was cooking in earnest. Once, trying to thank her for the delicious polpettone she had served us, I got my words mixed up and praised her ciondolone (meaning idler or drifter) instead. Her normally stern features cracked into a smile, and then she joined in the laughter round the table.
She loved, and was loved by, the entire family, even when her temper was at its most severe. She had but one enemy as far as I could see, and she certainly made her loathing of him evident. The object of her antipathy was Il Nonno, Vanni’s maternal grandfather, who also lived in the large apartment. La Nonna and Il Nonno rarely communicated, and then only in grunts. She had to cook separate dishes for him, because the old man had problems with his digestion. He supped on various kinds of brodo, bowls of which she set before him with scarcely disguised contempt.
Why did she hate him so? Perhaps it was because his life had not been as hard as hers. Yet both survived the Nazi occupation, as had her son and Il Nonno’s daughter, Noris. Filial duty ensured that the domineering Nonna and the quiet, ineffectual Nonno – who was occupied for hours each day with those books of puzzles the Italians enjoy so much – should have to put up with one another’s company.
I happened to be in Florence, staying in the apartment, when La Nonna was dying. I was ushered briefly into her presence. The forceful woman of two years earlier was frail now and worn out, but she smiled on recognizing me and called me ‘Paulo’.
In the summer of 1986, Vanni and I often talked of those early years of our friendship as we exercised Circe in the park. I reminded him of that time, shortly after my arrival in Florence, when my feet were blistered from walking on cobbled streets. I asked him if there was an Italian equivalent of the liquid antiseptic TCP (which my mother ‘swore by’, as they say) and, looking puzzled, he replied ‘TBC’. I was unaware that TBC is shorthand for tuberculosis. Thus it was that I entered a pharmacy and told the man behind the counter that I wanted a bottle of TBC.
‘What for?’ He grinned as he spoke.
‘For my sore feet, naturally.’
He laughed, and then explained what TBC meant, and produced a cream which he said would heal my blisters.
This was the most lunatic of the lunatic conversations I had in Italy in the autumn of 1968.
We talked of La Nonna and how, when it was raining – it rains a lot in Florence – she would smile at me and observe Come Londra. She had never visited London, but was convinced it was a city above which the skies were perpetually opening when it wasn’t shrouded in fog. The wetness and fogginess of my birthplace were incontrovertible facts, carved out in the stone of centuries. It was useless to argue with her.