Jed is Dead

Jed lay on his hotel bed, listening to the sound of children's footsteps echo through the village. He barely needed to raise his head to see the hard blue band of the Mediterranean beyond the jumble of slate-roofed houses. He had been for a long swim earlier that morning and his skin still tingled with sun and salt. Afterwards he had eaten a delicious ice-cream on the lungomare — fruits of the forest and stracciatella — and managed to not only place his order in Italian, but to hold a brief conversation with the vendor about the weather and the sea.

He rolled over, struggled briefly with the idea of getting out of bed, then reached for the newspaper he had brought up from the lobby the evening before.

The headline was easy to translate: "Jed è Morto," it screamed, in inch high letters, above an old photograph of a fey young man in a leather jacket. The rest of the front page article was harder to follow. He tried to navigate by the cognate roots — numero uno, miliardario, pedofilo, suicidio — and the words imported directly from English — popstar, snuff film, and so on — but soon found himself adrift on an open sea of unknown vocabulary. When the effort of translating had tired him out he fell asleep with the newspaper open on his chest.

That afternoon, after the inevitable espresso and seaside stroll, he decided to visit the famous chapel of St. John a few miles down the coast. The taxi driver did not think it strange that he paid for the trip with a thousand euro note; nor that he seemed to have so many such notes in his wallet. That part of the Riveria was popular with rich tourists, and more than once a face from the big screen had appeared in the small frame of his rear view mirror. But there was something uncanny about the puffy, middle-aged foreigner in the back seat. His features were so blank, so void of the warfare of human emotion — its casualties and its spoils — that the taxi driver found himself wondering if a pair of empty sockets lay behind his sunglasses.

The chapel had been built in the thirteenth century, destroyed by fire in the fourteenth, rebuilt fifty years later, then destroyed again, this time by swindled and vengeful soldiers, before its final reconstruction in 1632 by Duke Vincenzo III. Jed drifted around the vaulted, gilt interior, holding his comprehensive guide to the region's churches open in front of him.

As much as the artworks themselves, he was fascinated by the currents of history that had shaped them. It intrigued him to learn, for example, that the sculptor of the imposing statue of Neptune had had his eyes put out by his own patron to stop him producing a rival masterpiece, or that the blood of a dozen monks had once flowed down the altar steps, while the nuns who had pleaded for their safety were systematically violated by the very penitents their supplications had spared. Lives and deaths seemed to echo around the old stones; and if some were louder and more brutal than others, they did not drown out the murmur of baptisms, weddings and funerals, any more than the soloist drowns out the choir. Though of course, no-one would have seen that at the time. It was only in death that life assumed its true perspective.

As he was leaving a bus pulled up outside the church and disgorged scores of Italian schoolchildren. They raced around, giggling and shouting, until their teachers came out and herded them into line. Jed stepped aside from the chapel door and watched them file by in the sharp sunshine, tiny and brown. Each child held the hand of the one in front and the one behind. A teacher glanced at him on her way past. He crossed the piazza towards the shaded awnings of a café.