Peter Cowlam: Faustina, Tour Guide, Regrets

Peter Cowlam

Peter Cowlam is the author of literary fiction, plays and poetry, and has travelled extensively. His last major research trek — a few years ago — was halfway round the world, to Auckland, New Zealand. Here he took the opportunity to track down the first writer and scholar to be granted unlimited access to the Nabokov archives, VN’s biographer Brian Boyd. A mildly epiphanic moment arrived at a reading in the Dead Poets Bookshop on the Karangahape Road, where one of Brian’s ex-students, a fixer and bibliophile, was able, he said, to arrange a meeting. What was sought was a seat at a café table, where Brian would drink his latte and indicate whether, in his opinion, The Original of Laura, the novel VN was working on at his death, would ever be published. Nabokov died in 1977, having issued strict instructions that the manuscript be destroyed. For reasons too complex to elaborate on here that latte was never drunk, and Peter returned to his life in the UK, where for its two and a half issues he edited The Finger, a journal of politics, literature and culture. He has two novels in print, and more recently a novella, Marisa. His latest play, Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize?, is published by New Theatre Publications. He is, incidentally, very happy to learn that after its thirty years in storage in a Swiss bank vault, The Original of Laura will be published by Penguin later this year.

NB: An audio recording of this poem, read by the author, can be found under the Listen with Horizon section

Faustina, Tour Guide, Regrets

So, here in Lombardy, in December,
In buttoning up against the freezing
Rain, I have grudgingly done as instructed,
Re-treading young Faustina’s public route
Through the city’s streets and piazzas, all
With a catalogue of dusted monuments.

I found her at last, solemnly ensconced
At a table she was obliged to share
With strangers — a bizarre English couple
Irresolutely consulting a map —
The three thrown together in a café
Named after Vittorio II.

Insanely bored, Faustina put them right,
With an index finger tracing out
Their best first choice, from the five bronze doors
Of Il Duomo — ‘Here!’ — to the threshold
Of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
‘That’s over there!’ ‘Ah. Grazie mille.’

So the pair went, back to all beginnings
Here with the cathedral, so giving
Up to me their palely lamp-lit window space.
I cradled my cup of cappuccino,
Now under Faustina’s penetrating gaze,
She re-gloved and scarfed, and ready to go.

She remains as defiant as you warned,
If unwilling to malign her employers,
Whose patronage is at once liberal
And patrician, in a weird conflation
Of public duty and strictly private
Living — an assertion I can’t argue with.

I am just a phlegmatic northerner,
Brought to reflect on the extravagance
Of urban existence, but bound to say
Her argument is not with you — not yet.
She deals in generalities, in questions —
Centred on the fabric of our living here.

Her exception is, you do not understand
Youthful rebellions, in a metropolis
Whose founding generals and financiers
Sit astride the pavements everywhere,
Sculpted and statuesque — a living amber
Weathered over centuries of strife.

All is abstracted by that legacy,
Men’s ambitions sanified by art
And architecture, or dramatised
By operatic plots and arias —
Yet, the tabernacles of our tourist trade
Are also a lifelong sarcophagus.