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Massimo Solini
PITHECUSAE
WHITE
AND
THE
ANEMONE
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Chapter 1
May 1949
The big room was stocked with portraits and sketch pads, on
the table were boxes of paints and pencils. A strong smell of
linseed oil and spirit overlaid the natural aroma of old books in
the room.
Robert leafed through a stack of canvasses and lifted one
onto the easel. He sat thoughtfully for a few seconds before he
glanced round for brush and palette. There was a problem but
he could not figure out what was actually wrong. Maybe the
colour?
He felt she must not appear too seductive, he ought to
paint her as she was.
Perhaps her colouring needed to be more definite, her
vivacity more pronounced, her features less visible. He leaned
forward and for several minutes worked furiously at the
painting, blocking in the face, shading the contours of the
cheeks, modelling eyes and lips, his anger increasing as he saw
that the result was not to his satisfaction. The portrait bothered
him. She was too sad, too mysterious evocations of mood
rather than of feature, of beauty by implication rather than by
definition. Somehow he had to get Lady Anna out of the
normal patterns of contemporary painting, projecting her onto
the paths of the past, forgotten images, or perhaps unknown
ones.
He stood back with narrowed eyes and stared at his
handiwork. Outside, the evening light stretched level across
the land, turning the big window of the house to flame. It
offered the bewitching alternatives of a vast Mediterranean
expanse or the isolated beauty of one of the loveliest places in
the world. In the mild breezes from the west and the east, the
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big trees waved here and there their early foliage, their boles
dull silver in that light, the new buds like clouds of green
butterflies that had not yet dried their wings. A pleasant land
situated on a plateau overlooking the sea.
Robert had never seen another soul there. His home was
the only house within several miles, a fantastic residence not
far from ancient Roman ruins. Dust carried on the winds had
buried most of the ruins, but there still remained great
megaliths of stone, marking a temple built two thousand years
before. A few stone columns still rose to the sky, while others
had toppled into a confused jumble.
Robert often wondered when they would start the work to
recover all these wonders; there were still subterranean
chambers and innumerable places to discover. He had explored
much of it, crawling through openings and burrowing beneath
slabs, discovering new passageways and rooms merely by
moving rubble and digging a little.
It was near Baiae, an old Roman seaside resort on the Bay
of Naples. It was said that the old town had been named after
Baius, who was supposedly buried there. According to some
historians, Baiae had been for several hundreds of years a
fashionable resort, even more popular than Pompeii,
particularly notorious for rumours of scandal, corruption and
repeated accounts of strange things going on there.
A few years after the war, Robert had purchased the
residence conscious of an intense feeling of excitement. It
was all a man could want, a fantastic house with stunning
views, and besides, he was driven by the need to find
somewhere he could afford to live, to lick his wounded selfesteem, to paint. It had not taken him long to decide that this
house would be an opportunity to renew his concentration, his
money and his commitment to find new ideas, new stimulus to
create new jewels in his art as a painter.
Robert was the only son of Michael Jamison, a key figure
as a poet and writer in contemporary culture. Robert was born
in 1920 in Liverpool and he never knew his mother who died a
few months later from breast cancer. Right from the very
beginning of his life, he possessed a particular talent for art,
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Chapter 2
13 A.D.
The morning opened up like any other in May: clear, with
promise of heat to come. Overhead arched the great cloudless
sky of the coming summer.
Alexandria and Cato were milking the fat teats of a goat
that they had received as a present a few months before. The
animal had pendulous ears and big luminous eyes. The two
children liked the goats much better than sheep; they were
meek and intelligent, curious about everything, terribly
independent and sensitive. On his arrival, the goat was very
undernourished and the two children took turns nursing her.
Every day they filled baskets with tender green shoots of
alfalfa grass, which grew along the shore, and by the end of the
first week she had fattened considerably.
Very soon Alexandria and Cato experimented with making
cheese. The first few batches were inedible, but they improved
with practice and now they were able to make hard cheese to
conserve because of the perfect storage facilities of the stable.
Inside the refuge, over their heads, a sparrow couldnt find
the window to get out and played with its shadow on the
ceiling. The flapping of wings echoed in the dark little stable.
On the nearby shore a dog ambled about a bank of
dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. At the edge of
the tide he halted with stiff front paws and attentive ears. His
nose lifted as he barked at the noise of the waves and the
shoals of little wormlike fish. They swam towards his feet,
curling, unfurling many crests, breaking, plashing, from farther
out, wave on wave of them. The dog yelped running towards
them, reared up and pawed them, his red, panting tongue
hanging out.
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This part of the beach was a thin strip of sand that ran
along the alien coast. Nearby, thick foliage clustered right up
to the edge of it as far as the eye could see.
The island of Pithecusae was small with gentle slopes that
ran from sea cliffs in the north and east to the bays and
harbours of the south and west. Both land and water near the
main harbour teemed with activity. Boats of all sizes crossed
from Naples carrying men and supplies. Donkeys made their
way along rocky trails around the harbour, hauling panniers
loaded with material. Slaves and convicts imported from many
different countries were to be seen, digging great ditches,
breaking rocks, cutting stones; men shouted orders in different
tongues.
The people of Pithecusae were a volatile mix of North
Africans, Arabs, Greeks, Germans, Celts and Silicians. By the
beginning of the 1st century A.D., the Sicilian pirates roamed
across the entire Mediterranean and began to attack the towns
of the continent thus becoming the only considerable naval
power in the eastern Mediterranean. Their main trade was
slavery as a great number of Roman families bought slaves to
work in large plantations particularly in Sicily.
In the following years, for Rome and Pompeii an
extraordinary concession was granted to eliminate the Sicilian
pirates by keeping vigilance over all the sea and fighting their
bases across the entire Mediterranean. As a result, the pirates
became consolidated and well-organized and in the early years
even Roman communities unable to fend off the pirate
incursions were forced to come to an agreement with them.
On the island of Pithecusae, Alexandria and Catos parents
lived, like other families, by agriculture and sheep and cattle
rearing. Augustus had a bull neck and a ruddy weather-beaten
face the result of a life of hardship: Clelia was a tiny woman
but with a strong temper and great determination. Their house
was just a simple refuge surrounded by a large courtyard
overgrown with weeds and enclosed by a stone wall.
On the seaward side, the wall had two openings, one for a
window and one for a door. Their only hope for escape in the
event of a pirate attack was to work their way around the
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turned sour with shock and fear. Cato saw the sickness in
Alexandrias eyes and followed her gaze. Five scrawny darkskinned men were arriving.
Its all right, Alexandria said quietly to her little brother,
for his sake feigning a calm she did not feel. She knew Catos
heart was as not as sturdy as hers, and even her own insides
was twisted in fear and terror, but she had to be strong for
them both.
As the children watched, the group came near, so close
they could sense the smell of their bodies, the smell of sweat in
their putrid clothes. Alexandria felt certain the pounding of her
heart must give them away.
She embraced Cato strongly; he was trembling like a
frightened rabbit, like a windswept leaf.
One of the pirates, sword in hand, looked at them with big
speculative eyes. He squinted, not certain what he was seeing;
his eyes were like hot coals burning into the childrens bellies.
Behind them they heard the heavy thudding of other mens
footsteps arriving.
There was silence.
Look, what a nice surprise! said the man in charge. A
succulent goat just to get started, this means being lucky.
Without giving the slightest attention to the children he raised
the sword end and with a rapid and precise movement slit the
throat of the poor animal. A fountain of blood spurted on
Alexandrias face. The sight made Cato erupt in a scream of
terror; he sank to his feet, gasping for air between great ragged
sobs.
Alexandria jumped up, embracing Cato and wiping her
face with one hand said:
What do you want?
She could see the hardness of his eyes, beneath the fold of
his dirty turban, gleaming, mocking; they squeezed even closer
together.
Shut up brat! Where are your parents?
They are at the port. We have nothing! What do you
want? she said again feeling a grip from Cato she thought
would crush her bones.
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odour that seemed to soak into her clothes and skin, the smell
of the sea, the soft perfume of the flowers caressed by the
wind, in a world that laughed and shouted all its splendour to
her and to her younger brother.
Wed better get going, Clelia said to Augustus, a hint of
concern on her face. She did not know why but she knew that
the best thing was to get home as soon as possible.
They started walking by the edge of the clearing. To the
left, the sun was half-way up the sky.
As they went along, it seemed that all the men had walked
off into another world, leaving them alone; they didnt like the
silence. Each tree was watching them, listening to the sounds
they made, each step was deepening into fear. It was not the
sort of fear they knew, this was a worse fear, unrelenting, and
conscious.
In the long silence, the sound of the leaves moved by the
wind filled the air as if each of them, properly apprehended,
might carry some kind of a revelation, and you could hear the
prolonged, sweet morning trill of a warbler, who flew singing
his melody then flipped out of sight.
Augustus felt, many times, like a stone beneath the cold
waves of his wifes great concern, as if in spite of all he knew,
there could be something else his wife knew that eluded him.
As they walked, a breeze lifted around, but when they
went down from a slight slope the mist swirled and evaporated
in a few seconds, revealing the plain below. Clelia froze in fear
as she saw a pirate ship not far from the coast and five or six
small canoes with about twenty men waiting in silence. As
always, the pirates had roamed the island in search of a weak
spot into which they could pour their violence without being
noticed.
Her heart thudded painfully under the muscles of her chest.
The pirates heads came up almost like dogs sniffing a smell,
knowing the effect the sight of them would have on Clelia and
Augustus. As they neared the cove Clelia yelled and began to
run.
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Chapter 3
September 1949
Robert Jamison couldnt believe his eyes. She couldnt be for
real, certainly she was one of the most beautiful women he had
ever seen, and he was accustomed to beautiful women when
painting. And instead of wearing all those things that had come
into fashion, this one just let her hair loose, natural, and it was
that light red colour that looked real. It was her eyes that really
rattled him. They were green, light green and glacial.
Why did you move here? Miss Morgan asked Robert.
For some reason he felt nervous. Damn it! He was too
curiousShe was dressed simply and there was no sign of
jewellery except a single earring in her left ear.
I wanted to live near the sea, was his response.
Why did it make him feel like he was snooping? This was
crazy. Why was he trying to make a favourable impression on
her? Shouldnt it be the contrary?
Then it did not take him long to realize that it was time to
remove the Secretary wanted sign from the caf of his best
friend Agostino.
What am I supposed to do? she had asked, looking
Robert straight in the eye and smiling slightly.
Oh yeswhat kind of job? Sureof courseyou have to
help, he answered, taken by surprise.
To help? she asked again curiously.
Yes, to help in many ways.
Many ways?
To be more than a simple secretary
I dont think I understand.
Dammit! He hadnt meant anything like that. He ground
his cigarette in the tray and lit another one.
Look, Miss Morgan, Im a painter, mainly portraits of
women, and I have to put my appointments in order, there are
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