Chapter Twenty-Four.

ON THE TWENTIETH OF the month we were all awakened shortly after dawn by the most tremendous racket. It was the rattle of small arms, a battlefield sound of the kind to be heard when a fighting patrol has run into difficulties, its members have become separated, and are letting fly in a sporadic and unconcerted fashion, usually with little result, at anything that moves.

I got up and threw open the shutter of a rear window, with partial views of the fields to the left and the right and most of Veii below showing through the oaks and chestnuts across the river. In the distance I noticed, spread across this panorama, several small groups of two or three men carrying guns. At the bottom of the garden itself two men crouched in a kind of trench which had not been there the day before, while a third, hidden behind a shrub a few yards away, cranked a handle attached to a piece of apparatus like an adjustable lamp standard which flashed the sun's rays in all directions through mirrors fixed at its top. Guns were popping all over the landscape, some far off and some from concealed positions quite near me in the garden. The targets, I realized, were certainly birds, although minutes pa.s.sed before I spotted one under concentrated fire, and this was very small. There was no doubt about it that a large number of guns were involved, of which not a few had not hesitated to violate our privacy.

I went up through the house and crossed the road to the bar. The lantern-jawed and introspective owner, Primo, was filling tiny gla.s.ses with brandy to be served to customers kitted out in the most extraordinary sporting gear, one of them, with a markedly Italian cast of features, in a kilt. The owner gave me a dank look and said, 'Eh?' I held up a finger and he pa.s.sed over a gla.s.s. A daughter had been called in to help, and I managed to catch her eye. 'What's going on out there?' I asked. 'The season,' she said, 'starts today.'

The Count was off on his morning walk down the Via Baronale with his grizzled asthmatic Alsatian called Hannibal which he had imported from England and allowed no one to address except in English. 'It's purgatory,' he said. 'Lasts at least two weeks so you may as well get used to it. Better buy ear-plugs if you enjoy a morning lie-in.' He felt it necessary to warn me. 'These people are a law unto themselves. Of course they've taken over your garden. Your problem is to keep them from taking pot-shots through the windows of the house. The vineyards have to employ guards to keep them out. They not only shoot all the birds but eat the grapes. Better not complain. In this village they grin and bear it.'

For half the day the guns popped and crackled, shot pattered on the roof and occasionally tapped at a window. Someone brought my binoculars, and I saw a fat man throw down what looked like a modern a.s.sault weapon to chase after a tiny fluttering bird with some life still in it, and then lose part of his trousers on a wire fence. It is normal for partic.i.p.ants on such Roman occasions to shoot each other, and one of the guns went down as though poleaxed, although I was later to learn that he had only lost the top of a thumb.

Suddenly a silence that had hardly been disturbed in 2,500 years settled about us. It was midday when by immemorial custom shooting stopped until two hours before sundown, when birds would be prospecting among the surrounding trees for somewhere to roost. The second part of the day's entertainment awaited in the form of ritual spaghetti already cooking in cauldrons over fires stoked with wood confiscated by foraging parties in local gardens. The scarifying wine accompanying this was by tradition an early pressing of the year's vintage, its fermentation arrested by chemicals, and charged with raw grappa. The exaltation close to fury produced by a mug of this lasted for about half an hour, and was followed by sedation and often sleep. In the lucid interval the hunters dashed about reliving their recent experiences, boasting of triumphs, recalling the extraordinary rarity of birds who had narrowly survived their fusillades, and describing how others, equally rare, had fallen from the sky when outside what was accepted as effective range.

Besides binoculars I was carrying a camera and was implored by the hunters to photograph them holding up the little bundles of blood-splashed feathers, averaging, they said, 150 grammes in weight, which the morning's sport had yielded. The migrants which had chosen this precarious route to the safe havens of Africa were almost all small, speckled, unremarkable birds of the bunting family, although mixed in with them an occasional goldfinch or a warbler dangled from its tiny claws. Separate were the water wagtails shot from cunningly prepared ambush along the river bank, and the perquisite of a sporting syndicate having some affiliation with a charitable group known as 'The Drop of Milk'.

I was called away at about this time to deal with the first garbage collection from the house. This was remarkable for the livery worn by the two men employed on the job, and the grandeur of their vehicle. I took it at first to be a fire engine, except that it had an electrically raised and lowered top. Resplendent in scarlet paintwork, it was lettered in bold black initials SPQR, standing for the Senators and People of Rome, and was clearly some miles off course at this point. Annunziata, the maid we shared with the Count, who had arranged the collection, explained that the villagers themselves simply threw their rubbish and unwanted objects into the nearest field, and that this service was only available to the upper crust of La Storta and the castle of Isola Farnese. 'That's the way it is here, sir. The rich and the poor. If you're rich you do nothing. If you're poor you work for nothing. Take the case of the Count. With respect, what does he do? He grows parsley and when it's ready the priest's horse jumps over the wall and gobbles it up.'

At round about six in the evening the shooting started again, and although Annunziata warned me that most of the guns would still be drunk I wandered down the garden to see what was going on. There were fewer birds than in the early morning, but they were larger and more important by local standards, many of them being starlings whose small, mangled corpses would attract admiration and command a high price when they hung among the dishevelled bunches of sparrows on the stalls of the local markets in the days to come. The starlings foolishly congregated in the hope of roosting in the trees of the wooded ravine to the north-east of the house, and here the hunters blazed away at them as soon as they settled, but with little success. While studying this action through the binoculars I was suddenly aware of the presence of the Roman garbage lorry stationary in the road running along the ravine. It would shortly be dusk and the blatant scarlet of the munic.i.p.al lorry was dignified and enriched in the waning light. Now only rarely was the sound of a stray shot to be heard, and it was evident that the day's sport was at an end; cars' horns bleating impatiently summoned the last of the laggards from the slopes. With that, faintly, I heard the lorry's engine start up, watched it manoeuvre into position with its back to the ravine, saw a door lift and the following cataract of black sacks and broken furniture go over the edge.

Back in the Via Baronale I was lucky enough to witness an extraordinary ritual. A kingfisher had fallen to one of the guns, an event of extreme rarity likely to happen once in a season, and at the moment of my arrival a crumpled handful of feathers, still glistening in the half light, was being pa.s.sed from hand to hand amid cries of astonishment, congratulation and delight. The custom in such cases was for the successful sportsman to swallow the eyes, and this he did, washed down in a gla.s.s of brandy, to the sounding of car horns and shouts of applause.

The shooting party departed, watched in silence and with on the whole expressionless faces by the men of the village, whose only voiced criticism was that 300 lire could be spent on a single cartridge required to kill a sparrow offered for sale in the market for one sixth of the price.

Annunziata was on her way back to her house carrying the Countess's personal garments to be laundered at home where she could keep an eye on her children. Her wash-house was fitted with the laborious Victorian equipment her employer insisted be used in this case. She had been a beautiful girl, but was now greying, with a distraught expression, and over-muscular arms, and carried with her an inescapable odour of soap.

Staring after the departing cars, she said, 'Good riddance to the sods.'

'Don't you like them?'

'Well, who would? Did you hear them down by the river? They ran out of birds, so they shot all the frogs. Can you wonder we vote Communist?'

I brought up the matter of garbage being tipped into the ravine. She seemed surprised. 'Naturally,' she said. 'It's the easy way.'

'They'll fill up the ravine in the end,' I said.

'Not in our time.'

Chapter Twenty-Five.

IT CAME AS A RELIEF that bombardments did not follow on a strictly daily basis. The report was that bad weather sometimes held up the migrants in their pa.s.sage round the Western Alps, so there were peaceful mornings when scouts posted by the syndicates along the migrant routes telephoned in with the depressing news that no flights had been sighted making for Rome. When the weather lifted and the pa.s.sage cleared it was natural that a more than average number of birds was to be expected, and the shooting continued almost without pause throughout the day. Following these intervals of glut Di Stefano's, the smart restaurant at the end of the village, put out a placard announcing that ucellini were on the menu. Four of these per portion were served grilled on skewers and patrons were provided with pretty porcelain receptacles painted with pasque-flowers into which osseous remnants could be surrept.i.tiously spat. It was an expensive course; nevertheless, the rumour spread through the village that the ucellini were not buntings, skylarks or pipits that had fallen to the guns but in reality were no more than sparrows netted in the Pontine marshes.

The house was separated from the castle by a small but dense shrubbery. In this, inexplicably, scorpions congregated among the leaves in quant.i.ties I have never seen before or since. It was an attraction in consequence for weary and famished birds, in particular warblers, who seemed by some extraordinary instinct to detect the presence while in flight of the succulent morsels awaiting them below. Inevitably the birds caught the eye of the marksmen and a few days on in the season a close-quartered early morning fusillade awoke me once again. From the window overlooking the street I saw that two men had placed themselves behind the garden wall from which they fired into the bushes. Soon after, they moved off and another arrived in a car from which he alighted carrying a most elaborate and costly looking gun which he set up on a tripod. He adjusted the sights, took aim and fired just at the moment when the Count, followed by Hannibal, came through the castle gate. With that he dismantled the gun, climbed back into the car and drove off. The Count had stopped to watch these proceedings before joining me, while Hannibal limped away for his morning visit to a stone projecting from the base of the wall bearing an obliterated Etruscan inscription. 'Anything wrong?' he asked.

'I wish these people wouldn't shoot into the garden,' I said. 'I have children to think about.'

'All the same, it's better to grin and bear it,' he said. 'If you complain you're likely to make enemies, which is something to avoid. I'm off to my garden to collect some rather special parsley. Why don't you lock your family away in a safe place for an hour or two and come along?'

Chapter Twenty-Six.

LIFE FOR THE PUPILS OF St George's was pleasant. Relations with the teaching staff were informal and relaxed. The older children dressed as they or their parents pleased and in the top form first names for all concerned was the order of the day. The midday meal was something to look forward to - spaghetti in one of its innumerable forms, followed by meat or fish, then a sweet of an exciting and inventive kind, usually based upon some regional models. Students in the top form could ask for a gla.s.s of local wine if they wished, despite its tendency to produce a scaliness of the lips. In the afternoon juniors like Kiki and Gawaine dozed gently through readings of the poetry of Petrarca and Leopardi by which it was hoped to introduce them to the Italian language. At weekends they were offered sailing instruction on Lake Bracciano, and there was a promise of skiing in the Gran Sa.s.so D'Italia when the first snows fell.

The village satisfactions to which the children were returned by the school bus at the end of the scholastic day were of a solid but different kind. This was a community devoid of onward and upward pressures. The villagers saw themselves as guided by destiny into the paths they trod, and this they accepted with a sort of spirited calm. Take no thought for the morrow, the Bible adjured, and had they been able to read it they would have agreed. Apart from a short repertory of obscure oaths the expression most frequently in their mouth was 'pazienza' usually accompanied by a weary smile. An absence of ambition in childhood had its advantages. The young of Isola Farnese could live for the day, because there were no future summits to be climbed. Within reasonable limits they were left to their own devices, and the village school released them in the afternoon to something close to absolute freedom.

Boys and girls formed separate groups with little contact with each other. In the evenings the girls took over the doorsteps of the village, escaping to fairyland in little rustic soap operas of the imagination. The boys fought down their huge reserves of energy with endless activity in mock wars. Unlike the girls, who were companionable and democratic, the boys chose a leader who exercised stern discipline over the rank and file, and demolished the silences of Isola Farnese with their outcry that persisted long into the night. It was a scene the Count very much enjoyed, and to foster it he had installed powerful lighting throughout the village which was not switched off until midnight - or even later on demand. 'Let them play,' he said. 'Why shouldn't they? I like to see it, and how much I wish I could join in.' To complaints from village adults who were being kept awake, he would say, 'I have ear-plugs for you. Wear them as I do, and you will sleep well.'

Our arrival in Isola Farnese gave rise to a curious breach of custom among the children. After a few weeks a scattering of Italian words they had picked up provided the open sesame to the tribal life of the young. At this point Kiki would normally have taken her place among the little coteries of girls on the village doorsteps, but after a discussion among the leading boys it was decided that she was to become an honorary male. This may have been no more than the highest compliment that could have been paid, or it might have resulted from some local fallacy on the subject of Anglo-Saxon competence. Following a brief speech by the leader, nothing of which was understood, the boys pressed forward to congratulate her and shake her hand. 'Adesso sei uomo come noi altri (now you're a man like the rest of us),' she was told, and invited to take part in their energetic and sometimes dangerous games. Apart from simulated warfare from which Kiki was excused, the most popular game was nascondino - hide and seek, for which there was endless scope in a landscape full of Etruscan tombs.

This freedom of the streets granted to the children might have caused doubt in a similar environment in northern Europe but the Count a.s.sured us that the crime of mugging, so far, was unknown in these parts and that child molestation was exceedingly rare. We had heard through Annunziata a garbled account of an a.s.sault on a child said to have taken place in or near the town of Viterbo, some thirty miles to the north, and followed by a lynching of the culprit. 'I heard some mention of it,' the Count said, 'although it may be no more than a rumour. I'm afraid we suffer from a tendency to take the law into our own hands. In this case there was talk of the man being hung by a hook through his throat, but whether there's any truth in it I can't say. Such punishments can be barbarous.'

The juvenile military campaigns of Isola Farnese provided Kiki with a splendid opportunity for exploration of the countryside and the innumerable secret places in the fields and woods. At first it struck her friends as strange that their honorary boy would want to poke into dark and uninviting places that they had previously overlooked, but in the end she managed to enthuse them in the search for pottery collection, and while the craze lasted we were showered with coloured fragments, most of which lost all trace of decoration within days of disinterment. A special interest in my case when I was allowed to accompany some of these trips was the autumnal flora of the area which was remarkable. The country people stripped this landscape of everything that was edible, from the tiniest snail lodged in a crack in a wall down to the most insignificant nut. On fine days families streamed out from Rome and went over the fields yard by yard cutting out dandelion plants by the thousand for incorporation into salads. Flowers - apart from a few known to have edible bulbs - they seemed to regard almost with distrust. At most they bought chrysanthemums in the market, but the wild variety they left alone. It was through this indifference that all these fields in autumn were enamelled with countless cyclamens, colchic.u.ms and crocuses, some species being of great rarity elsewhere.

Our most exciting find in the matter of archaeology was quite accidental, arising from a quest, for once, not for fragments of Etruscan pottery but for rare flowers. The Count had suggested a location some three miles away and Kiki and I went there in the car. It was a field under a steep slope with flowers sprouting everywhere from among the rocks. Followed by a white cow full of amiable curiosity, prepared to wait while we botanized and then move on with us to the next outcrop of flowers, we began to explore the area, soon discovering a cave. Pushing through the ferns at its entrance we saw to our amazed delight a marble sarcophagus, in perfect condition and missing only its lid. It was empty apart from a deposit of the finest chalky dust.

On returning to the car and trying to drive away we promptly stuck in the mud and seeing that there was nothing to be done we left it and set out to walk back to Isola Farnese. The grocer's shop seemed the best place to enquire where to look for help. We went in and the grocer, Antonio, vacant-faced as ever looked up from a customer he was serving, 'Eh?'

I explained the predicament, asking if Antonio knew of a garage in La Storta where they would be prepared to come and pull the car out of the mud. 'There's a festa on, they're shut,' he said. I thanked him, turned round to go, and he called after me, 'Wait.'

He finished serving the woman, and then came to the door with us. A notice hung on the gla.s.s door panel facing the street. This said 'Open', and he turned it round so that despite the early hour he was now shut. 'Let's go,' he said.

He gestured to us to get into his Land-Rover parked outside, and we set off. I started protestations about putting him to trouble, and he said in a flat voice, 'This happens all the time. Where is it?'

We drove off in silence, leaving the road for the cart track I'd originally followed, and thence after crashing through numerous potholes, into the field.

'What sort of car is it?' he asked.

'Fiat 127,' I told him.

'For going to the beach in,' he said. 'For this road a car needs to have entrails. You're lucky. The garage at La Storta doesn't come out to a place like this.'

We ploughed into the field where, guarded by our white cow, the Fiat leaned over in the churned-up mud. 'Sticky,' the grocer said.

He hitched the tow-rope he had ready over the front b.u.mper and pulled us clear with a single jerk and I followed him back to Isola Farnese where a small collection of customers waited at the door of his shop. A little ironic cheering was silenced with a glance as he unlocked the door and turned the notice round. I stood at the back of the customers at the counter trying to mouth my grat.i.tude and he held up his hand in acknowledgement without raising his eyes from the rice he was weighing. A grumbler was put in her place by pazienza - a wry acceptance of the frustration of life in another village mouth, but in this case a stern command.

We were turning away to leave the shop when he called after us 'Buon giorno'. The incident brought us closer together. From this time on we became almost friends and for the important Feast of Befana, immediately following Christmas, he presented us with a bottle of Asti Spumante, a salami and a jar of excellent olives from his own trees and pickled by himself.

Chapter Twenty-Seven.

ONE OF THE ATTRACTIONS of Isola Farnese was that apart from our own intrusion and the conspicuous idleness of the Count and his family, this was a working village devoid of parasitism. The doctor came from La Storta, there was no policeman, a single shopkeeper, a taciturn couple who ran the bar, and a baker who turned out enough fresh bread every day to go round. The local wine came from a tiny triangle of vineyard on a hillside. It was doused with sprays from time to time, and when harvested the grapes still carried a bluish veneer from the spraying and were tossed into a vat without any attempt to remove this or sundry foliage s.n.a.t.c.hed up by the machine that did the picking, before the wine-making took place.

The thin and acidulous white wine of Isola Farnese was sold in the local bar, but bottled with an impressive label, featured also in the wine list of the Di Stefano restaurant, the sole enclave in the village of the outside world. Di Stefano remained a bit of a mystery to the locals, because only the village women who were called in to clean the place up after business was at an end on Sunday had ever been allowed to put their noses inside its inner rooms. Di Stefano's opened on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays only, and Sunday lunch was the great event of the week for middle-cla.s.s Italy, here as elsewhere. Every table for this meal was always booked, and occupied in the main by men in dark suits who arrived in black Alfa Romeos. These customers who travelled here from Rome and consumed enormous amounts of food in the hours between midday and four were supposed to be members of the Sicilian Mafia known to have established itself in the capital. They were highly popular with the staff for their courteous and considerate behaviour and the generosity of their tips.

The restaurant was splendidly sited on the far end of the enormous rock supporting the castle and offered an unequalled prospect of the slightly unearthly landscape I had viewed in part through the narrow windows of the castle itself. Bronzed and burnished autumn fields had been flung over the low hills in a way that identified this as Etruscan country. Sharp-edged black patches marked hollows in which chestnut groves grew. Most remarkable was some atmospheric trick by which for an hour or so around high noon a deep blue boundary divided the horizon from the sky where the salt wind blew in from the sea.

It was a setting that enchanted the Count, who had invited me to join him here for lunch on his saint's day. Much of his early life, he said, had been spent in an attempt to escape the flatness of Venice. 'This,' he said, 'is a landscape that takes wings.'

The waiters, silent, swift and starched into their outdated uniforms, transported us into the vanished kingdom of Victor Emmanuel III and its servilities that had survived in this environment. 'If I am not disturbing the gentlemen,' the head waiter said, 'may I present our menu of the day?' What was on offer, in its elaborations and absurdities, also recalled an exaggerated past. Cardollini prati di Lazio (goldfinches from the fields of Latium), four on a skewer, baby octopus no bigger than a large spider - of which a sample was produced - pig's snout Viterbo style, braised with a.s.sorted fungus; t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es of milk lamb in saffron rice. The Count swept the suggestions away with patrician contempt. 'A decadent imposture,' he said, in reference to the Di Stefano cuisine. 'I am a simple eater.' To the waiter he said, 'Give me a woodpigeon, if you can a.s.sure me that it is not from the deep-freeze.' The waiter returned a slight bow. 'It can be feathered in Sir's presence if Sir desires,' he said. 'At least the flesh is wholesome,' the Count a.s.sured me. 'At this time of the year the birds feed on nuts.' I agreed to follow his example.

Cautiously I watched the men in dark suits, who hardly raised their eyes, absorbed with food. They were stamped with a strange uniformity in clothing, facial expression and gesture. A few were accompanied by glamorous women from whom they seemed strangely aloof and who were on show here rather as part of the accepted setting of mafiosi lives. Surrept.i.tiously I studied the nearest couple as the man chewed thoughtfully on the tiny black carcase removed from a skewer before raising the little flower-painted bowl to his lips to dispose of the inedible aftermath. His friend displayed in profile the sweet emptiness of a Meissen shepherdess as she raked on a lobster sh.e.l.l with a silver claw. A musician in medieval trappings moved quietly into position behind them and began to sc.r.a.pe on his violin, and the man instantly dropped a 5,000-lire note on the table and dismissed him with a flick of the forefinger.

'He is eating a sparrow in the belief that it is a goldfinch,' said the Count, sotto voce, and almost without moving his lips. 'On the same principle he pays dearly for the kisses of a courtesan to convince himself they are those of love. You have heard of men of respect?' I told him I had. 'This is the Rome style. Even those who manipulate the rulers of our country can be deluded. Even they can be made fools of.'

Below us a boy and girl moved into sight on a short length of road visible beneath us skirting the rock as it unwound uphill. The girl was the Count's seventeen-year-old adopted daughter, Zo-Zo, and the boy her fourteen-year-old village admirer whose father followed the profession of wheelwright, still much in demand in an area where metalled surfaced roads were few, and farm carts still in use on the rough country tracks. The pair were inseparable, a situation which appeared to cause not the slightest surprise among our phlegmatic village neighbours. It was an imperturbability that appeared to be shared by the Count and his wife. 'There they go again,' he said on this occasion. 'I cannot understand where the attraction lies in long walks under the midday sun, especially with Zo-Zo's fair skin.'

'What's the news of her?' I asked. 'Will she be going to university?'

'We've given up the idea. She wants to stay here.'

'How do you feel about that?'

'Both Alice and I have decided she must do as she pleases. She's on drugs. We have to keep an eye on her. It's better she stays where she is.'

I was staggered. I shook my head. 'You amaze me. Zo-Zo - she seems such a quiet girl. I'd never have believed it. What a problem for you.'

'The top form at the school was full of junkies. I imagine it still is. A dolce vita while it lasted, but what comes next? Dr Pecorella broke the news to me, but we'd suspected something of the kind.'

'Wouldn't one of the small provincial universities be something to consider?'

'They wouldn't have her, and in any case she wouldn't stay. She'd take the first train back. I know her only too well.'

'So you put up with the attachment. It can't have been an easy decision for you and Alice to take.'

'It wasn't really difficult. The boy's good for her. He keeps her quiet. I should explain both Alice and I are followers of Epicurus and he always comes to the rescue in situations like this.'

'Didn't he favour a luxurious style of life?'

'Far from it,' the Count said. 'His doctrine was one of moderation. He recommends the pursuit of sensible satisfactions and a calm approach to emergency. Whenever it is possible, he says, take the easy way out, which is what we are doing in this case. Zo-Zo is home. She is here to stay, and we cannot rid ourselves of our responsibility, even if that were possible, by burying her in a university. This being the case, let her be as happy as she can.' He pointed to a verse in archaic and barely readable lettering fixed to the restaurant's wall. It was by Lorenzo II Magnifico, regarded by some as the great man's inevitable descent into triteness when he took time off from statesmanship to venture on the more difficult path of poetic composition.

Quanto e bella giovinezza - Che se fugge tuttavia, Chi vuol' essere lieto sia, De doman' non v'e certezza.*

At this moment the waiter appeared with a trolley with a covered dish over a low burner containing the pigeons. A junior followed at his heels with another, charged with a great variety of contorni, momentarily inspected by the Count who showed a trace of irritation before waving them away. 'Just the pigeons,' he said to the waiter. He turned to me. 'How extraordinary,' he said, 'that the Master's reputation in Italy should be as it is despite his complete indifference to food.'

* How beautiful is youth, As it escapes us, Take what joy you can of it.

Of the morrow there's no knowing.

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

THE SEASON OF THE shooting of birds came to an end and the sportsmen from Rome, having disposed of the only remaining targets in the way of stray dogs and cats, went their way. Such sport as the area now offered was on a depressed level, attracting a few enthusiasts to the sh.o.r.es of Lake Bracciano where they fished for a unique and primitive fish sheltering in its muddy depths, described as of repellent flavour, but beneficial in the treatment of genito-urinary complaints. We were now in the season when the pigs were killed and turned into fearsome-looking sausages gorged with chilies, fat and blood.

It was to the pig-killing that the superst.i.tious attributed the coming of the rains which were as violent here in their uninterrupted downpourings as anywhere else on earth. When the rains stopped with a sudden finality - as if by the turning off of a cosmic tap - the weak sunshine of the pre-Christmas lull illuminated the land, and in this period of decline of the year small dramas that might have been overlooked in the grand drama of high summer drew attention and excited comment. At Monte S. Vito one of those gentle, white bulls that despite their outward placidity were said to bear grudges, turned suddenly on the farmer who owned it and skewered him with a long, elegant horn. An epidemic of stomach trouble with several near fatalities was traced to a wine producer who added various chemical intoxicants as well as quant.i.ties of banana skins to his grapes. In Tarquinia a man, having been arrested on a charge of grave-robbing and selling Etruscan antiques to a friend of the Count, was able to prove that he had manufactured these himself. Fregene was the scene of a freak storm, quite unexpected at this time of the year, which picked up a small yacht and dumped it in a field, and then, with a switch round of the wind, floated a car out to sea. Pilgrims hastening to a hill village behind Tivoli where the Virgin was reported in a newspaper as having appeared to the locals on several occasions, found that these miracles were no more than part of a plot to sell land in the vicinity.

Isola Farnese was subjected to its own minor sensation. Bruno, Zo-Zo's young suitor, had been sent off to Rieti on a short course designed to prepare him for entry into his father's profession. This left Zo-Zo, otherwise without friends in the locality, very much at a loose end. One evening a loud outcry from the children playing outside sent us rushing into the street to be confronted with the sight of Zo-Zo promenading on top of the thirty-foot-high outer castle wall, flapping her arms in imitation of a bird in flight. This was shortly after an addiction to LSD had spread to Italy, and some of those who had experimented with its use, becoming victims of the delusion that they were able to fly, had jumped or fallen from high places to their death. It was a spectacle that brought the whole of the village's inhabitants into the open. Implored not to move she cavorted, pranced and flapped and laughed shrilly. The fire brigade in La Storta could not be reached on the phone in the bar, so a man was dispatched on a Lambretta to raise the alarm, but by the time the fire engine arrived it was all over, and with a final flap and a t.i.tter Zo-Zo had disappeared from sight.

Suddenly an ebullient and vociferous Christmas was upon us, blending under Roman influence the celebratory styles of all the Christian world. In the Piazza Navona the shepherds brought down from the Abruzzi wheezed their prehistoric bagpipe music against a tableau of Santa Claus drawn by reindeer on his sleigh and nativity cribs peopled by pseudo-Palestinians of the first century. The crib had been introduced from Byzantium. The masked dancers on stilts, most applauded of all the strolling players, had arrived via Venice, from their place of Saracenic origin. The Corriere reported that a hundred stalls selling sweets, toys and seasonal souvenirs had been counted in the Piazza. Visitors consumed ritual nuts, sugared almonds and torrone by the hundredweight. Most popular with the children was liquorice, hung in thin strips like long black bootlaces from many stalls, and those who overindulged were hurried away to a little vomitorium concealed in a corner of the square.

The Count and his wife spent much of the holiday in Rome in their penthouse flat, possessing from its windows over the Spanish Steps one of the most superb prospects of the urban world. Throwing open the shutters for us to look down upon the endless mult.i.tudes ascending and descending the steps the Count, as he frequently did, quoted Dante: I had not thought death had undone so many. At his back incunabula in antique bindings spilled from the bookshelves among the feet of statues deprived of noses, ears or toes. Alice looked forward to an orgy of shopping. The feast of the nativity and the great winter solstice was also that of consumerism, with the shop windows baited with seasonal extravagances of every kind. It was alleged by Annunziata that she hired a car with a driver for the period to be driven slowly backwards and forwards up and down the main shopping thoroughfares, exultantly studying through binoculars what was on offer behind the gla.s.s sprayed with plastic snow.

For their Christmas dinner itself, to which we were invited, the pair returned to Isola Farnese. What was extraordinary about this gathering was that most of the guests were from families employing Scottish nannies, and not only spoke perfect English, but appeared to prefer to converse with each other in this, rather than in Italian. Several of them had been reduced to dest.i.tution by the war and its aftermath, surviving now with considerable grace on less, probably, than one of our villager's income by doing odd jobs round the ministries in Rome, preparing well-written persuasive applications for government posts and correctly filling in the forms required in the case of foreign residents for even such prosaic operations as buying a new car. One of these, immaculate in his attire and with the presence of a functionary at the Papal Court, owned a castle within sight of Tarquinia which he offered to sell me, as he admitted with little more than a forlorn hope, for the equivalent of 5,000. His description of it was stunningly frank. 'Let me say that only one room is habitable,' he said. 'Even then not in winter. I am happy for my neighbours to keep chickens in the rest, for which they repay me with a dozen eggs from time to time.'

After dinner the Count and Alice went off in a hurry back to the excitements of Rome leaving Zo-Zo with Annunziata. This proved to be a mistake. For some reason Bruno was off the scene at this time, but Annunziata agreed to look after the girl, who preferred to stay in Isola Farnese, and to give her a bedroom in her house. For several days all was quiet, and then at about eight in the evening of the day before her parents were due back, the shrill and tocsin-like bell of the telephone the Count had just presented us with rang for the first time. It was a panic-stricken, hardly coherent aunt ringing from Rome. Zo-Zo had telephoned her from the castle of Isola Farnese to say that she was about to commit suicide. The woman had been unable to reach the parents whom she believed to have gone to the theatre. There was no reply from the police at La Storta, and I was the only person she could appeal to in the crisis.

The problem now arose of my complete ignorance of the geography of a vast building of which I had only seen an extremely small part. The ground-floor rooms were roughly rectangular and without complication. When first the possibility had existed of our occupying the princ.i.p.al wing the Count had taken me up to the first floor to point out the bedrooms that went with it, and I noted then that access to these along pa.s.sages and up and down sundry flights of stairs was dark and labyrinthine. These rooms in the upper storey were small but numerous and I remembered that there were two wings of the castle in which I had not set foot, and if it came to a search for the suicidal Zo-Zo it now occurred to me that this was an operation into which the whole village population would have to be enlisted.

The agonizing choice was whether to go for help in a case when a few minutes delay could have been fatal, or to drop everything and get to the scene of whatever was happening as fast as my legs could carry me. I chose the second alternative and rushed up to the castle where I found the small door protected by security devices giving access to the family's apartments significantly open, and the lights in the entrance hall switched on. Through this I plunged into the enormous princ.i.p.al room, a blaze of light and a distorted uproar of rock music belting out from loudspeakers suspended under the ceiling. At the far end of the room a wide staircase led to a landing where it divided to continue to the first floor. Lamps stood at each side of the foot of the staircase, and on the landing had been switched on as if in preparation for the arrival of guests for a splendid party. I ran up the staircase, down corridors, through a library, a billiard room, a chapel, bedrooms, a room where theatre props had been stacked, a laundry, through medieval nooks and crannies of every size and shape, lost and found my way again, always in the stark, shadowless illumination of innumerable lamps, and pursued by the moan and clamour of rock singers turned up to the maximum, and the hammering of drums.

There was nothing to be done in the end but to get help. Annunziata and her husband lived at the far end of the village. Our Fiat was parked outside the house a hundred yards away but refused to start. I called to the man who ran the bar, and who was standing in his doorway, 'Trouble with the Count's daughter.' He jerked back his head in a local gesture conveying sympathy without involvement, his hands held together before his chest as if to display an oracular inscription. 'Eh-eh,' he shouted.

I was gasping for breath by the time I reached Annunziata's house, where I found her husband, Ricardo, a notable idler, sipping coffee. I tried to make him understand the extreme urgency of the situation, but he remained immutably pa.s.sive. 'Not a moment to lose,' I shouted. He took a last gulp of coffee, shrugged his shoulders and said, 'You don't know her. I do.' We set off. 'For G.o.d's sake hurry,' I begged him. 'They won't let me,' he said, patting his rib cage in reference to some obscure complaint that kept him largely out of action.

I waited in the glare and the continuing hubbub of the big room for him to catch up and we went up the stairs together and found Zo-Zo in the only bedroom I'd managed to overlook. An empty pill bottle was tipped over on the bedside table, and under it had been placed a farewell note written in a firm hand on a sheet of paper scrawled otherwise with astromantic signs. Ricardo leaned over her, as I first supposed tenderly, curled back an eyelid, then lifting her with one arm round her shoulders, struck her with some force across the face with his open hand. He then let her drop back. 'You have to know what to do, that's all,' he said.

Ten minutes later the ambulance arrived, bringing with it Annunziata, two white-coated ambulance men carrying a machine sprouting tubes, and a doctor with a forked beard and a denunciatory stare. 'Members of the family?' he asked us. We shook our heads and he shoved us through the door.