The William Trevor Reader: “The Smoke Trees of San Pietro”

On its face, this is such a typical, even archetypical, William Trevor story that a reader might know it for a very long time—since he was an undergrad, say—without taking in the full measure of its strangeness.

There’s a deftly drawn European setting, a general hush about the proceedings, and a close focus on a small set of characters maintaining veneers of dignity on lives of quiet desperation. There is sexual mischief glimpsed sidelong. A retrospective frame places the story in the middle-distant past and exploits the gap between child and adult knowledge, setting up some minor-key revelations about lost innocence. This is all Trevor SOP, indeed Trevor 101.

So what’s strange? For one thing, “The Smoke Trees of San Pietro” is told in the first person. Trevor’s strongest and most common mode is a closely attentive third person that uses perspectival restriction to define the emotional contours of the given story. He reserves the right to go omniscient but exercises said right sparingly, usually for the sake of a late-breaking dramatic irony. Stranger still, our narrator is from Northern Europe (Denmark, I think), brought south by his mother on doctor’s orders to summer at the Italian coast. Italy isn’t unprecedented in Trevor (see also, for example, the novel My House in Umbria) but the granting of protagonist status to a Scandinavian feels truly exotic for this most English of the major Irish writers. Finally, there is the structure of the story itself, a monologue which unfolds with the fluid unreality of a dream, unbroken for 12 of its 14 pages. The first section break occurs near the bottom of page twelve (that’s p. 1045 in the 1993 Collected Stories), and then two more breaks follow closely on its heels, turning the last three movements of the story into a staccato triplicate of confession.

As mentioned, the narrator and his mother spend their summers in Italy for the sake of his health. This is more for comfort than cure, as his doctor has told his parents that he is doomed to die in childhood. His parents have tried to withhold this fact from him, and encourage him to look forward to a future they themselves do not believe in. He has overheard them share the truth with his grandmother, but keeps this knowledge to himself, allowing them to keep believing that he believes the lies they’ve told him.

The Italy tradition began when the narrator was eight years old. At the time of the main action of the story he is eleven, well established as a regular at the Villa Parco spa resort in San Pietro. When he and his mother aren’t strolling the grounds or taking the waters, the narrator is often out on the lawn with his sketchbook, trying fruitlessly to draw a passable likeness of the smoke trees that give the story its name.

This summer they become acquainted with one Monsieur Paillez, who comes in from Lille to be near his wife, who is “under the care of nuns” in nearby Triora. Monsieur Paillez and the narrator’s mother take a shine to each other and before long it is intimated—and soon enough after that, confirmed—that the two have become lovers. When the reader first begins to suspect the affair, her or she may think that this is the revelation toward which the story is tilting. That is, the adult narrator understands in retrospect certain signs that as a child he failed to interpret, and the reckoning of accounts has occasioned his telling this story.

In fact, the narrator figures out what is going on fairly quickly that summer. One night, after a bad dream involving his father, he wakes up frightened and calls for his mother to come from the next room. She offers to leave open the door that joins their rooms, but he wants to be brave and so says this is not necessary. After she leaves, he falls back asleep and then has another bad dream and awakens again. This time he does not call for her, but focuses on the crack of light beneath the closed door, beyond which he can hear her talking to someone. A while later she comes in to check on him and he pretends to be asleep. Monsieur Paillez is with her.

The episode echoes the overhearing of the death sentence from earlier in the story, right down to the narrator’s decision to fake his own innocence for the sake of his mother’s comfort. The next day, Paillez takes them both to Triora for lunch; that night the narrator once again wakes up to the now expected sound of voices in the next room.

It is at the moment of the second occurrence of this second act of overhearing that the story takes the first of its section breaks. The next scene takes place on the train back home: the mother asks the narrator not to mention Monsieur Paillez to his father. She offers a ludicrous reason, which the narrator (yet again) faux-credulously accepts, though the stakes are higher now. In consenting to the omission of Paillez from their account of the trip, he has shifted from a passive to an active collaborator in the affair, a decision he underscores with the story’s second section break. On the other side of it he informs us—in a declaration so blunt I still can’t believe it didn’t break the entire story—“That was the moment my childhood ended.”

He goes on to tell us that his parents had long since “ceased to love each other” and that they only stayed together because of his illness. Their intention was to divorce after his death—which  of course never comes to pass because otherwise he wouldn’t be here in the narrative present telling us this story. His miraculous survival has doomed his parents to each other, and it seems to be on this account that he facilitates his mother’s affair with Monsieur Paillez, which continues every summer for the rest of his adolescence: “Long after it was necessary to do so we continued to make the journey, our roles reversed, I now being the one inspired by compassion.”

There’s a third section break in as many pages, and then the final section opens: “In Linvik my father had other women. […] Slow years of wondering washed the magic from my childhood recollections and left them ordinary, like pallid photographs that gracelessly record the facts.” The narrator, in his restrained way, tries to resist this destructive ordinariness by recalling the adulation he had for both of his parents in his earliest memories. The opening lines of the story are recapitulated here, but the attempt to resurrect the past falters, and the story ends on a note of utter deflation: “In my borrowed time I take from an ebony box my smudged attempts to draw the smoke trees of San Pietro and reflect that my talent did not amount to so much. Silly, it seems now, to have tried so hard to capture the elusive character of that extraordinary foliage.”

It is, to borrow Trevor’s word, an extraordinary ending to a shatteringly sad story. And if you are inclined, as I was, to turn from p. 1047 directly back to p. 1034 and start reading it again, it will register as even sadder and more extraordinary on the second pass, as well as a marvel of composition and control. The first paragraph paints a prelapsarian portrait of the parents so vivid and brightly burnished that it feels like a glimpse over the locked back gate of Eden. It is almost certainly a composite fantasy—a screen memory, to use Freud’s term—and the next few memories may be as well. (Trevor is never far from Freud; and by the way, if you’ve never read the essay “Screen Memories,” do yourself a favor and go track it down right now.) The narrator recalls the visit to the doctor where the false diagnosis was first made, the first time he ever ate in a restaurant, and the first time he and his mother made the journey to San Pietro. Each memory seems a bit more real than the one before it, because the story is shifting us from the half-fantastical plane of early childhood into the noumenal realm of muted miseries and fugitive-compromised pleasures where the story takes place, where all of our stories take place. The smoke trees make their first appearance in the sixth paragraph, toward the bottom of p. 1035, at the moment that the story seems to transition out of its overture and into its plot proper. There is something uncanny and irrecuperable about these trees, like the inchoate dregs of a dream lingering on into the waking day, or a secret that you keep forever because there’s only one person to whom you would tell it and you know it would break their heart if they knew that you knew.