Chapter Twelve – Art
It was morning. The city awoke. Red roofs, cream stucco buildings. A bell chimed from a tall campinale – it was an old world sound, reassuring, familiar. In the narrow streets market stall holders pushed barrows of fruit and vegetables. Young men with slicked back hair noised by on Vespas. Outside a café the owner washed the pavement down with a hose. A fat middle-aged woman in black went by and they exchanged a greeting. In the dining room of the Hotel Alfonso, Marco looking only a little more presentable than he had done last night, and wearing a white waiter's apron, laid out cutlery.
Shizuku was asleep on her front. She turned onto one side, mumbling. She lay still for a moment then turned onto her back. She opened her eyes,
"Uhhrrr…"
The balcony doors were closed, the shutters angled slightly open allowing sunlight to enter in narrow slices between the slats.
She sat up and slid her legs out of bed. She rested her elbows on her knees and put her forehead in her hands. With an effort she stood up. She wore a mans pyjama jacket but no trousers. She'd been wearing this type of shirt to bed for a while now, three or four months. She'd decided in the spring that she was too old now for kids pyjamas and she'd looked around for something to replace them. The frilly girlie night dresses didn't appeal, but she found these one day when out shopping with her friends. There was something grown up about them, and she liked the statement that wearing them made about herself. The too-long sleeves were rolled back up her forearms. The jacket was a bit short, it just covered her - but only just. She turned and went towards the shutters. She was a mess, there were dark marks under her eyes and her hair was all over the place. She walked sleepily to the shuttered window and pulled a small metal lever at one side, the shutter slats opened like a large blind and sunlight streamed into the room. She shut her eyes,
"Nnnnnn…"
She pushed the shutter doors open and stepped onto the balcony. The sunlight was bright, too bright, oh, no much too bright. She opened her eyes again and looked at the scene without reaction, squinting against the light. Red rooftops were just below her room, more distant buildings, trees and a brown slow moving river in the distance. Farmland beyond the river. To the right a couple of miles upstream she noticed the girders of the railway bridge. She leaned on the metal railing and let the warmth of the sun wake her. Mmmmm, this was no good, the warmth was making her sleepy again… she breathed in deeply.
"Yo! Shizuku! Good morning!"
She looked to her right. A little lower down than her room and in an upper window of the gable end wall of the academy across the courtyard Seiji looked out of a tiny window. She could only see his head, one arm and part of his chest through the tiny window, it must have only been eighteen inches square. He didn't seem to be wearing anything. He waved. She waved back.
"Hi!", she called
"Hey, I got the honeymoon suite!"
"Great balcony!"
"Sleep well?"
"No, not really! You?"
"Oh, not bad. Hey, see you in a while!"
His head and arm disappeared. Shizuku went back inside. She walked slowly across the room between the end of the bed and the wooden banisters that protected the stairs, unbuttoning her pyjama jacket as she went. She entered the bathroom and turned on the shower. A moment later a bare arm appeared across the doorway and pushed the door shut.
The stairs that led up to the attic room were concealed behind a door. It was to this door that Shizuku held a key. She came down the ships stair and the click of her key in the door unlocked it. She stepped out into the upstairs corridor of the hotel, carrying her pink bag. She turned, locked the door, tried the handle to make sure it was locked and walked away down the corridor that led to the stairs down to reception.
Outside in the courtyard Seiji was leaning against the school building wall. The hotel door opened and Shizuku came down the steps. He came forward and they met by the horse trough. They held hands, left in right, right in left.
"Morning!" she seemed to have finally woken up
"Hey, you look amazing, where's the party?"
"Thanks," she was wearing a short vest-top dress. She spun round for him.
"How's your room?"
"Room's fine. I love it, it's all wiggly and secret up at the top of the building right under the roof. I'll show you later. I don't feel great though, I still feel a bit spaced out actually, maybe I slept too hard."
"Me too. Can you believe that Signore Guarnieri left some study work in the room? I hope all the other students had it as well."
"When does school start?"
Seiji looked at his watch, "Uh, about now actually. Sorry," then his face brightened, "But we have only a morning today, a sort of start up session, so I'll be free from about two o'clock."
"OK."
"So meet me here again at two, right?"
"Sure. See you later."
A narrow cobbled street. Shizuku walked slowly, glancing in windows. A young man went past her on a moped. The youth gave her a long look in the way that young men do. She arrived in a small piazza, a church was to one side and she went to stand in front of it. She looked up. The wall of the church was pale grey stone bleached by the hot sun to a colour close to cream. She looked carefully at the windows, the leaded panes, the small niches containing stone statues of saints. Everything about the church was tired and dull, dusty and dying. She tried the door but it was locked. How can no-one not want to be in such a beautiful old building? She turned and walked on. She came to a park, railings bordered the road, and stone pillars stood either side of an entry way. She went in, following dusty paths under pine trees to a wooden bench where she sat in the shade. She waved a hand in front of her face,
"Whew, hot."
She got a book out of her bag and began to read. A dark grey cat walked up to her small, bony and thin.
"Hello cat."
She reached out a hand toward it but the grey tabby shied away and ran off.
"Hm. Must be a stray."
She continued to read. During that morning she walked and walked, she walked everywhere, she soaked up Cremona: every building seemed to weep history; every face she saw spoke it's story to her heart; every sun baked piazza or park gave itself up to her feet, the place welcomed her and she felt at once both so at home as though in a familiar town and also as though an explorer in a hidden land to which no-one before her had come. She ended the morning only wanting more. She made her way back to the hotel.
If you go into the reception area of the Hotel Alfonso and turn right you enter the dining room. You can eat in the cool of that room or, if you wish, you can pass through the open French windows that lead you outside to an enchanting little garden. It's not a large space – between the gable end wall of the hotel and the next building is only about thirty feet or ten metres. Half this width is taken up with a patio of stone flags, the other half with a flower garden that contains two little old twisted olive trees. The wall of the hotel is covered by the most wonderful climbing bougainvillaea, its glorious pink blooms shout at you and you can't help but feel happy. It's out here that Tony places another half-dozen tables. If you sit at one of them and look up, you'll see a small balcony right up at the top of the hotel. I know you can see it from there because I've sat down there myself and checked. This was Shizuku's balcony, facing south toward the river. You can come here at any time of the day but my favourite is breakfast time before the sun climbs around to pour its heat down into this space. At that time of day when it is still cool and shady and the air is fresh, it's a wonderful place to breathe in and start the day with an espresso and a copy of La Stampa. During the afternoon Tony will get out his big sunshades and stand one through the hole in the centre of each table. He serves snacks and drinks here and it was here that Shizuku took Seiji on that first afternoon to eat a light lunch.
"Not what you expected then?" she enquired of him,
"Signore Guarnieri is dropping us in the deep end. It's sink or swim. Can you believe this morning we had to write a history of the Cremona violin making industry without referring to any books. I think he's testing us, seeing which of us is suitable to invest more of his time in," he put a hand to his forehead, "My head hurts."
He sipped his drink, "I don't know how much of me you're going to see in the next three weeks. It's going to be pretty intensive. I'm sorry, maybe you shouldn't have come."
"No way! I love it here, the town is wonderful. Tony the hotel owner is really nice and I'd much rather sit in a park here and study than in the library back home."
"And another thing. The class is mixed; there's four Italian guys, a Frenchman, a German, an American and me. The signore teaches in a mixture of Italian and English so as well as learning, I'm having to translate as well… Urrrggnnn…"
She put her hand over his, "Oh, my poor Seiji. Well after school each day I'll look after you, we'll do whatever you want. I have all day to study or write or explore so the evenings will be your time, OK?"
"Thanks, appreciate it."
Tony came to their table. How he fitted between the other tables without knocking them aside was something of a mystery.
"Buongiorno She-zoo-koo."
"Mr. Tony! Hello. This is my friend Seiji Amasawa."
"Buongiorno signorino."
"Sir," Seiji bowed.
"So, how are the tagliatelli, eh?"
"Very good. It reminds me of noodles a little bit. It's very creamy though, I don't want to get fat."
Tony laughed, sweat running down his face, "Get fat? On my tagliatelli, ha ha ha, impossible!"
He slapped his huge middle and walked off still laughing.
Later that afternoon Shizuku and Seiji were walking along a fairly busy and narrow road where traffic rattled by. Seiji saw a side street that went uphill to their left. It had shops along it and he suggested they explore. There was no traffic in the smaller street and the droning of cars on the main road at the bottom of the hill was soon left behind. They stopped from time to time to window shop. The street seemed to be mostly antique shops, but full of expensive art. One shop had something large and red low down in the window. They had almost walked past it when Seiji stopped and turned back to look. In the display there were a couple of stone cherubs, a big vase, a painting on an easel, a violin on a stand. In the centre of the window though was a large model of a red aeroplane mounted on a polished wooden stand. It was a single seat red seaplane with a large motor mounted above the wing in front of the pilot. The tail carried the red white and green stripes of the Italian air force. A polished brass plate mounted on the wooden stand read: SAVOIA S.21, 1929.
"What a funny thing to have in an antique shop," observed Shizuku
"What?"
"That toy plane."
"That's not a toy, I expect some devoted model maker spent hours and hours building that."
In close up the aeroplane was clearly indeed a beautiful model, fully rigged and with intricate details inside the cockpit, the wingspan was about three feet or a metre.
"But it's hardly art. Like those statues."
"Why can't it be art?"
The couple no longer looked at the aeroplane but faced each other, the plane between them visible through the glass.
"Well art is things like painting, statues, even that vase maybe."
"Sure a craftsman can spend hundreds of hours on a painting or a sculpture. Then some craftsmen make violins… and some make model planes. It's the same thing. Maybe the man who made that was an old pilot, maybe it was the plane he flew in the war, and he wanted to preserve his memories by building a model of it. We can't know anything about the motivations of craftsmen. Just because it looks like a toy doesn't mean it is."
Shizuku bent down and looked carefully at the plane again. Then she stood up.
"Mmmm, maybe."
"It's more art than my violins are."
She took out her notebook and wrote in it. He rolled his eyes,
"Here we go again."
"Ssshh, I'm doing art."
"Fine," he laughed.
They discovered the small piazza – the Piazza San Giorgio - quite by accident. After their disagreement outside the art shop they found that they had stumbled into something of an artisan's quarter, or at least an area of the old city where art and antiques were restored and sold. Two or three streets full of shops and galleries whose livelihood seemed to revolve around trading in interesting old things. Seiji felt that some of the shops were a little like his grandpa's shop except that here the prices appeared to be from another planet. Presumably there were a lot of rich art lovers in the area, or perhaps these dealers did as grandpa did and traded at shows, possibly in Milan, Venice or Rome. As they threaded their way up one of these interesting, sloping streets they found themselves, at the top, in an open space, a square, not very large, with three or four cafés around the perimeter. Awnings were extended and customers sat in the shade out of the fierce afternoon sun. In the centre was a fountain. Three fat stone cherubs cavorted around a unicorn. Water jets squirted up from the edge of the stone basin. The water splashed and gurgled down over the stone figures and the sound filled the square, cooling it and refreshing the senses. They stopped on the threshold of the piazza.
"Hey, this is nice," observed Seiji,
"Mmm."
"Let's have a drink."
"Sure."
Pure chance led them to the nearest café; how different things may have been if they'd gone to another, or turned round and gone somewhere else. It's these possible alternatives that, if you think about them too much, will hurt your head. The café they chose had a red and white striped awning and a sign proclaimed it to be the Café Volpi. A boy named Adamo worked here in the summer as a waiter although today they wouldn't learn his name. But later, in the coming days, the long dog-days of her stay, Shizuku would spend a lot of time here at one of these tables and she and Adamo would get to know each other. Adamo, of course, being a hot blooded typical Italian youth would try his luck with her; he had never dated a Japanese girl and he later told her that he found her flat face, her small dark eyes and her whole quiet demeanour captivating. She of course, although she found his interest flattering, declined gently.
In time, she, Seiji and he would become good friends, a friendship that would last years. I'm reminded that they are still friends today, and Adamo, in the traditions of the best fairy tales, did eventually find his true love but that's a story I'll tell you another time. For today that was all a foreign country, an unknown land and this day Adamo was quite busy so he merely served them and smiled, particularly at the cute Japanese girl.
The Volpi became in time Shizuku's base of operations for exploring the city and, on those hot afternoons around five or six, if he didn't meet her outside the school or in the Hotel Alfonso, Seiji would meet her here. The Piazza San Giorgio was a strange place. There was a small church which never seemed to be open, those three or four cafes and above the cafés, the townhouses. And little else. Few tourists found it and it was like a small world of its own, known only to locals and the students of the nearby Academia Grafica. Oh, and of course, there was the fountain. The fountain that on the last day the boy and the girl each dropped a coin in, making a wish, and wondering if they would one day return, although on that last morning things were very different and neither of them for their different reasons, could really believe they would.
They found a table under the shade of the awning. They sat and sipped milkshakes. After a while a cat came near and sat close by watching them. It was another small scrawny one, ginger this time. Shizuku noticed it first,
"Here, kitty, kitty."
She called the cat with a kissing noise. It came a little closer and stopped again. Despite her best efforts and the enticement of a dollop of strawberry milkshake foam on the end of her finger, the scruffy ginger cat refused to come closer.
"Lots of cats round here, but they all look really wild."
"Maybe they are."
"Why don't people look after them, like your grandpa does with Moon?"
"Maybe they keep the mice and rats down. If people fed them too much they'd all get fat. I can't ever remember seeing Moon catch a mouse, he's useless."
"Mmm," she looked around, "I love it here. Thanks for inviting me Seiji."
"Well, we'll see if you still like it in a weeks' time after you've hardly seen anything of me."
"Don't worry about it. I'm going to explore, walk everywhere. The buildings are great aren't they, they look centuries old!"
"I think lots of the city is sixteenth and seventeenth century."
"Wow. I feel like I can walk up to them and touch them and feel the stories they have to tell: wars and princes, weddings and plagues. Ideas for books are all around here. I just have to pick them like fruit off trees."
"You're doing it again."
"What?"
Seiji spoke in a comical robotic voice, "Warning! Warning! Shizuku weirdness alert!"
She did her booming all powerful evil witch voice, "You can mock me, O small insignificant violin apprentice! But be prepared to bow down to the Great Storyteller of the East!" She stood, pointing a rolled up napkin at him like a wizard about to smite him with a spell from her wand.
"Yeah, right."