The Afterlife by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-41677-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-17T14:00:00+00:00

Sirmione, even in early May, was full of other tourists. “The kids are here,” the couple said, continuing a joke that had developed in Venice and continued into Ravenna, where every basilica and baptistry seemed crammed, beneath the palely shimmering Byzantine mosaics, with packs of sight-sated, noisily interacting schoolchildren. Even the vast Piazza San Marco wasn’t big enough to hold the boisterous offspring of an ever more mobile and prosperous Europe.

The small fortress at Sirmione offered views of the lake and, most fascinatingly, of the process of laying roof tiles. Three men labored gingerly on a roofed pitch beneath the fort’s parapets. The oldest stood on a dizzying scaffold and guided onto his platform each wheelbarrow-load of tiles and cement hoisted by a crane in the courtyard; the youngest slapped mortar along the edge where roof met parapet; the middle-aged man crouched lovingly to the main task, of seating each row of tiles on gobs of mortar and tapping them, by eye, into regularity. “Doesn’t that seem,” Allenson asked his wife, “a tedious way to make a roof? What’s wrong with good old American asphalt shingles?”

“They’re ugly,” Vivian said, “and these roofs are beautiful.”

“Yeah, but acres of them, everywhere you look. How much beauty do you need? The cement must dry up and then everything slips and slides and cracks. I wonder when this roof last had to be done like this. Probably last summer.”

Catullus had summered here, a monument down by the dock informed them. A hydrofoil from Riva hove splashily into view, and they ate two toasted panini con salami at an outdoor café. When Allenson closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sun he had a dizzying sensation of being on the old workman’s scaffold, suspended at a killing height, thousands of miles from home, on a small blue planet, and soon to be dead, as dead as Catullus, his consciousness ceasing, his awareness of sun and of shade, of the voices of the excited kids around them. His brief life was quite pointless and his companion no comfort. She was a kid herself. He opened his eyes and the tidily trashy, overused scenic charm of the lakeside washed in, displacing his dread.

“What are you thinking?” Vivian asked him, her voice on edge, as if they were already back in the car.

“How nice it is here,” he answered. He added, “And what a dreamboat you are.”

“Why do you lie?” she asked.

He felt no need to answer. People lie to be merciful.

They drove west to Decenzano, then north to Salo and along a road that twisted high above the lake. “Do you have to accelerate around the corners?” she asked.

“There’s a guy pushing me behind.”

“Let him pass.”

“There’s no place to pass.”

“Then let him go a little slower. He can see you’re not Italian.”

“How?”

“From the haircut. Why do you feel you have to pretend you’re an Italian driver?”

“No comprendo,” he said. “Sono italiano. Sono un ragazzo.” In a lavatory in Venice he had studied a graffito that read HO FATTO L’AMORE CON UN RAGAZZO VENEZIANO E STATO BELLISSIMA.

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