Island of Demons Read online

  My father had sold a ramshackle property on the Jodenbreetstraat for an unexpectedly high price and, in an equally unexpected response, resolved to carry off the whole family to Italy. A rambling villa, the country property of a line of dilapidated noble pretension, complete with well, chestnut trees and squabbling retainers, was hired in the mountain village of Lansoprazole and we all set off – children, grandchildren, sons- and daughters-in-law – like a caricature of an Italian extended family, for six weeks of dolce far niente. I hated the idea. I had work to do. But my mother shouted and then whispered. I gave way.

  Predictably, as we travelled, first by train and then by cart into sunshine and – yes – light, it was as if sudden electricity began to course through me, as if eyes and ears and nose, sealed for so many years, abruptly unthawed and popped. I discovered a world of softened forms, bevelled by time, grown organically and not in accordance with civic ordinances. Everywhere the picturesque lay in ambush, ready to be made back into pictures. Every wall and path exuded a symbolism of passing time, the cycle of the seasons, the mutability of human endeavour. Even my father felt it and slipped off his jacket to parade around in shirtsleeves and braces. As I looked from my window into the trees that tumbled down the broken slopes into purple heat haze, I was not the first northerner to be seduced by a fiery southern orange, each one a miniature sun nestling in deepest green. Nor, come to think of it, by Luigi, the stableboy.

  I am shy of the depiction of the sexual act in my work. Its shadow is to be found there, by the observant, in the cast of a glance or the tilt of a shoulder. But with black, flying locks, olive skin and muscled thighs, it seemed to me that Luigi was the perfect model to pose for me in emulation of David and – it was revealed – had been more blessed by God in one aspect than David by niggardly Michelangelo. Moreover, it became apparent that his duty or privilege had always included the matter-of-fact servicing of tenants who might require it. He immediately understood my unarticulated needs better than myself and I was astonished to be swiftly mounted with the smiling uncomplicated complaisance with which he would have greeted a similar desire in my sister or – I was almost sure – the donkeys that he cared for out of season. I shall draw a veil of discretion over the long, sultry afternoons spent amidst the smell of horses and tumbled straw as I explored his endlessly affable body with my sketching charcoal and trembling fingers. Language played little part in our relationship as we worked our way through the poses of the entire classical canon and the worship of his flesh flowed into the worship of my art as I hotly deployed all the devices I had so coldly mastered in the north. Luigi presented and preened and laughed and disdainfully kicked my own body into poses for his own pleasure as he saw fit. At the end of an afternoon, he would yawn and pout and – in an eloquent gesture – swipe his palm across his chest to flick the sweat and such other of our fluids as had accumulated there to the ground, before silently holding it out, still damp, for his fee. Then he would stalk away with a not-unfriendly tweak to my nose as I gaped at the departing – almost Florentine – buttocks. So, little by little, my unknown senses were coaxed into life and stretched their stiff muscles as my scrawny, white body hardened and blossomed in the reflected sunlight. I grew a moustache.

  “When you all return home,” I informed my mother with careful casualness at breakfast one morning, “I think I shall stay on for a bit. I’m getting a lot out of Italy. ” Several teaspoons clattered simultaneously onto the tabletop. My father paused in the slicing of ham.

  “Impossible!” She breathed sceptical cologne into the coffee smell. “How could you possibly keep on a house like this on your own?”

  My brothers and sisters, sensing an approaching storm, seized bread, fruit, slices of ham and sidled away from the table to the bright sunlight of the garden.

  I smiled reasonably. “I didn’t mean to stay on here, mother. There is a boarding house for hikers just up the hill where I can get a room very cheaply out of season – the place where Luigi takes care of the donkeys.” I blushed. “It is my chance to build up a portfolio of my own work. I can travel around the hills, the villages, record the daily life.” I addressed my father. “That is the business capital of an artist,” I hazarded. “The development of an artist’s career must follow a certain logical progression.”

  He pursed his lips and pared cheese with the folding knife he carried always in his pocket.

  I took a deep breath and drew a piece of paper from my own. “It will save money. It is so much cheaper for me to live here than Amsterdam. I have all the figures.” I passed them across and my father dug out pince-nez and ran a doubting finger down the columns. I had naturally omitted certain items, such as Luigi’s … fees.

  My mother returned to the chase. “But what of your commitments at the school? Your professors? You have not yet received your diploma.”

  “There is nothing here for laundry,” observed my father, papertapping.

  “I have submitted all the necessary course work, mother. My diploma can be mailed to me. I am completely free.” As I said it, I knew it was true and felt a sudden fear grip my heart. There is nothing more terrifying than absolute freedom. I have hidden from it all my life.

  “Surely this figure is inadequate for painting materials. Are they cheaper or more expensive here, so far from the city? Have you even checked?”

  “You are too young to live alone, my son.”

  “I am twenty-three, mother. Most of my contemporaries already have their own place.”

  “What about footwear? If you are trekking through the hills you will need a lot of boots.”

  “So that is it. You want to be alone to do as you wish, to live the wild life of an artist. It is not, I think, drink. You have only taken the wine here in moderation. Do you have some model?” She looked at me coldly and her mouth shaped with distaste. “Some woman?” Only another woman could put so much contempt into the word.

  “No woman,” I said carefully but the words caught in my throat. I coughed and tried again. “I can assure you there is no woman, mother.” How little we really deceive our mothers. “I wish only to work undisturbed.”

  “That I do not believe. It is something else,” she said, fumbling at her bosom for a handkerchief. Her voice dropped to a hiss. She was whispering again, this time not for my father’s ears. “Something much worse. Something I don’t want to even think about. I have read about such things with artists. The other day, I happened to look in your portfolio and did not greatly like what I saw. Too many naked bodies, men’s bodies.”

  I was stung. “Mother, you had no right … That is to say …” I smirked condescendingly. “Those are not naked bodies. They are nudes, part of the tradition of Western art. Where bodies are concerned, the artist is like a doctor. He is above the excitement of … of …”

  “Socks!” shouted my father, waving the page at us like holy writ. We both turned open-mouthed, having heard something much worse that we did not want to think about. He took off his glasses and stared into our astonishment. “Socks,” he urged. “You will get through six pairs or more a month. You know what Italian men’s socks are like. Cheap, yes, but wear them for three days on the trot and they go all in holes. And, say what you like, you can’t go without socks for long. No man can. Not even an artist.”

  And so I won the argument, by default, by putting in my mother’s hands a weapon so devastating she dare not pick it up.

  I settled in comfortably with the Widow Traverso and her hollow-eyed daughter, Gabriella. There was a vast and cosy kitchen, with bubbling stockpots, strung-up hams and sausages and a great fireplace haunted by cats. Its flanks were lined with pots of dried herbs and fruits and from it emerged big, heavy dishes involving dumplings, beef bones, offal in a hundred forms. She and Gabriella were the local wise women, midwives, herbalists, bone-setters and, like all people credited with special powers, they were at the margins of the social and had a whiff of witchcraft about them. Local boys walked past with their hands thrust deep
in their trouser pockets to protect the glory of their manhood with propitiatory gestures of clenched fists and horns made with fingers. But Western medicine had yet to reach this remote valley and was anyway too costly for the local farmers, so they were tolerated and the fact of their not going to church was never mentioned in Lansoprazole.

  We were to spend long open-windowed evenings here, struggling through an ancient, dog-eared almanac whose runic dictates ordered the affairs of the house, the women knitting, or me deciphering an occasional newspaper with a dictionary or talking to one of the rare hikers who stayed overnight, till last thing, usually before nine, the Widow would brew us all a cup of citronella as a nightcap.

  Upstairs were three plain bedrooms, one shared by the ladies and two for guests. At the back lay the stables where Luigi plied his trade. The Widow was more than glad to have me, a rare permanent guest, unfussy, grateful and out most of the time, ranging the hills and valleys with my friend Luigi and his other mounts. One evening I drew her and her daughter in a hasty, slipshod charcoal that she received with cries of ecstasy and set up over the mantlepiece, behind the holy almanac, with much joyful handclasping. If only all audiences were so easy to please.

  And so that hot summer passed in slow content. On my daily excursions, I sketched and looted the area for the picturesque, to be worked up later in oils. Even the women were pretty and I captured their bursting bosoms with bold manly strokes of pencil and charcoal, just as readily as the sculpted torsos and pert buttocks of the local men. I made my first attempts at the local tongue, words, simple sentences. Luigi sometimes schooled me but was incapable of sustained effort and his attention flickered. Mostly I simply talked at him in Dutch, as I did the kitchen cats, with exaggerated assumptions of his comprehension. For his part, he occasionally sang in a lusty, inaccurate tenor – local songs that may have had some religious burthen but, judging from the thrusting gestures of his fists and leering grin, were probably all happily about wine and women. I tried to probe him on the family history of the Traversi. He informed me by rotating his finger rapidly at the temple and whistling, that the Widow was a little crazy, by pinching his fingers together against his chest that Gabriella’s tits were too small and by triggering his thumb against his head and letting it loll, that Signor Traverso had been shot – or perhaps shot himself at least an extended hand ago. Then he gestured down to his balls, clenched a fist and laughed. That, I took to mean that, as a great stallion, he had nothing to fear from their female powers.

  Our journeys were punctuated with “interludes”. Luigi and I rutted like Arcadian woodnymphs on rocks and in sylvan glades fragrant with rosemary, thyme and the cliches of Poussin as we tore ravenously at the ham, cheese and bread provided by the Widow, washed down with pitiless black wine. A sort of tradition of the afternoon siesta imposed itself, where, fuddled by drink, we bathed or sunned ourselves or slept muskily intertwined in the undergrowth. The world buzzed happily like crickets in my ears. I had never done such good work.

  And then the season began to change in Lansoprazole as summer gave way to autumn, the leaves of the few deciduous trees turned to gold and my portfolio bulged with harvest scenes, the benison of nature’s foison, in heaped up grapes, olives and sheaves of wheat. A cold wind howled from the north, blowing up the dust. It was now too cold to swim and, when it came to the much anticipated “interludes”, Luigi was suddenly all pouting reluctance. It was too windy, people might see, he was tired. I sighed and accepted that a point had been passed in our relationship – saddened it is true – but impressed by my own emotional sophistication. I sought refuge in the imagery of nature. The grape had given its first juice but there were still second pressings and these were often the sweetest. I took to working in the empty guest room, painting, pasting, shaping what I had gleaned, getting it all down on canvas as my breath steamed in the icy air – with occasional, and increasingly rare, furtive assignations in the stable to still my appetite and fire my inspiration. The room was so cold, the paint would not dry so I paved the boards with canvases, like so many paving slabs and then worried about the padding cats.

  Then, as I lay sleeping one night, he was suddenly there, hard and urgent, garlicky breath in my ear, hands strong round my waist, panting in anticipation. I was glad that I had taken the end room. Emptiness lay between us and the women. We filled it with groans and gasps.

  The next morning, I was as one beguiled. Had it really happened? The happy soreness of my body confirmed that it had. After that, he came a couple of nights a week, unannounced, like some hot, desirable succubus, threading in and out of my fantasies. And on those nights when he did not come, my sleep was of a dreamless depth I had never known before. I was … fulfilled.

  It ended, one mid-morning, as I was waiting for Luigi to arrive for one of our promenades. He had been three days without coming. There was blown snow outside, the gleam of icicles to be captured, the chilled huddling of peasant and livestock. In a dream, I had seen him enter my room silently in the night and leave with just a chaste kiss and a grinned “Ciao”. A ghost. I was worried. The superstition of the house was infectious. He had never disappeared like this before. The Widow shrugged. He was a man. Regularity was not to be expected of men. I was different, perhaps, being an artist, but possibly not. Maybe he had gone to the city to look for work. He would return when he was ready. In the meantime, Gabriella would look after the donkeys.

  First came the scream that sounded like the heart being torn from the chest of a living person. Then a low, agonised moan: “Il tessore. Il tessore.”

  I was in the kitchen, cold, trying to stroke a little heat from one of the resentful cats, coaxed aboard my boney knees. The scream came from above. Then feet pounding up the stairs. Mine, I realised. The door of the Widow’s room stood wide open. I had never been inside this female space before. It was much as I had imagined – bare floor, hard, wooden furniture and, in the middle, the great, wallowing bed that was the centre of the house. Here had been enacted her marriage, the conception and birth of Gabriella, perhaps the death of her husband killed by his own thumb – hand. Beneath the bed was stowed every valuable thing of the household, now strewn in all directions – an ancient shotgun, a motheaten fur coat, deeds to the land, a clutch of sepia wedding pictures, powerful herbal specifics, a vast Bible fit to beat demons to death and – clearly – the economies of the household.

  “Per la nozze di Gabriella,” sobbed, red-eyed Widow Traverso. Her wedding costs or – more likely – her dowry, then. She crouched there, wailing, skirts immodestly pulled up to display despair in woolly knickers. Between her legs lay the biscuit tin that had held the “treasure” whose disappearance she was currently grieving, clutching her hands to her twisted mouth. Was I suspected? I could not tell. And then she lifted her eyes and looked at me with a terrible hatred and pain that seemed to distill the suffering of all betrayed mothers. As I began to stammer denials and protest my innocence she extended a grim hand and I saw that all this was not for me but for Gabriella, standing terrified behind me and a fearful truth dawned on all three of us.

  “Luigi!” I still don’t know which of us spoke the name. It evoked a further eruption of female wailing and shouting from which I hastily withdrew to my room, not venturing out until driven by evening hunger into a silent, brooding house.

  The next few days were intensely difficult. Only slowly did I piece the whole the truth together from the Widow’s cursing into her cooking pots, or shouting after Gabriella words to be found in no dictionary. It seemed that, on the evenings when he did not come to me, Luigi had visited Gabriella. And the sleeping Widow danced sympathetically as he enjoyed her daughter’s too-small charms there in the great bed. The lacing of our citronella with verbena or some other somniferant explained our depth of sleep. I was agog at the idea of Luigi plunging into Gabriella as the slumbering basilisk lay inches away snoring through her moustache and then extracting the dowry, as the daughter – mission accomplished – lay, in turn, smiling in sat
ed sleep. Yet, in a way, I understood. For Luigi, after his own fashion, was an artist too. He had done this, I knew, not just for the money but to take his art to a higher plane. Wherever he was, he would not starve – at least not until pasta and grappa had done their work to sap and sag that splendid facade. And, if my dream was to be believed, he had at least said goodbye.

  But it was time for me, too, to say goodbye. Blame could not be laid at my door. I had not, after all, introduced Luigi into the household. But our friendship associated me in his guilt. Not only was the house poisoned by slow-burning rage, even to my innocent eye, Gabriella was beginning to swell and bloat. Luigi would naturally be bursting with a quite unnecessary fecundity and it was only a matter of time before the shotgun and the wedding pictures under the bed coalesced into a single idea, bringing the Widow’s eye to rest on me as the one way to save both the honour and fortune of the Traversi by a swift marriage. I hastily packed my traps, quick with a more artistic fertility and returned to grey, rain-sodden Amsterdam.

  Mynheer Vorderman had laid out the canvases all round the living room as in the spare room in Lansoprazole. My father appraised him pince-nezed as he, in turn, appraised my work. Women had been banished since this was considered a matter for men. He held up a delicate study of a mother and daughter, based on the charcoal of the Traversi, crackled his feet and nodded.

  “Breasts,” he puffed happily. I had somewhat idealised Gabriella, lending her the bosom of Luigi’s dreams. It positively exploded. “The lad does good breasts and in Amsterdam people like a nice solid pair of breasts from elsewhere over the sideboard. Not Dutch breasts mind. That’s another thing entirely. Get you in a lot of trouble Dutch breasts.” He cast his gaze over the other paintings in nodding content. “Peasants, ruins …” he looked down again “… breasts. Not my taste of course. Scarcely avant garde as you’d be the first to admit but there’s a market for these. The art of small houses and tidy minds. We’ll do an exhibition – one of those little places down by the canal – a few bottles of wine, some Italian cheese, the stuff with the grape pips on the rind. I’ll cover costs and framing. We split the take 50–50. You get rid of that moustache.” He meant mine not the Widow Traverso’s. “What do you say?”