Brother of the More Famous Jack

by Barbara Trapido

  Afterwards we sat in the wire chairs and drank red wine till the restaurants opened. Michele was an engineer. He was also that very wicked thing, a landlord. He could just possibly have a flat for me, he said. Like this one, for example. But this one, I said, is where he happens to live. Non è vero? He could move out, he said, and about time too. The Communist Party posters across the street disturbed his peace of mind. Michele was that doubly wicked thing, a landlord and a middle-aged black-shirt. Jacob would, doubtless, have had a niche for him somewhere among the rungs of decadent capitalism. The apartment, I said, would be too expensive for me. I was a badly paid teacher of English. Non importa, Michele said. He would halve the rent. In return I could teach him English. Michele never, of course, had the slightest intention of learning English. He was merely concerned to involve me in a relationship of feudal obligation with regard to his property. The first and last lesson took place that evening in the ristorante in the neighbouring piazza, where Michele showed his white teeth and asked me how you said in English stracciatella. I told him that on the whole one didn’t. One said Heinz Cream of Tomato. Twiddled egg soup, perhaps?

  Thirty-Three

  Michele never moved out. We shared the flat on and off for the next six years. He was an explosive, authoritarian mad guy. A crazy, backward-looking romantic with right-wing views and left-wing friends. A believer in the past. A past which hung like a tapestry of noble lords and dignified peasants, of which he was neither. It was the kind of society, ordered and static, that would have had a man like himself clapped in irons. The stones of the city sang to him. To stand with him on a night upon a floodlit ruin was to espouse religion. Wrapped in a sheet first thing in the morning he looked like Hadrian. But that can be one of the delights of Rome, that in one morning’s shopping you see five senators, two Michelangelos and enough quattrocento to nourish John Millet for a decade. Everywhere you go nature is imitating art. In spite of our proximity to Leone Bernard, the contact ceased. Michele, after having been the subject often minutes of that lady’s attention, dismissed her as ‘the English whore’ and that was the end of the matter. He always gave the orders.

  I ought perhaps to be more decently apologetic before announcing that I co-habited with a fascist. I cannot imagine that I would ever have done so in England. In my first few years in Italy I had certainly ventured upon a greater ideological range than I would have done at home. It wasn’t my country. The issues were not mine and I hadn’t sorted them out. I was quite as happy bowling down the autostrada in the back of a lorry singing the ‘Bandiera Rossa’ with communist university students as I was comfortable, metaphorically speaking, in Michele’s fascistic armchairs. The only factor informing the varied ideologies of all the men I knew, was anti-clericalism. There was not one among them who would not pull from out of his hat – whichever one he wore – at least a dozen foul anecdotes pertaining to the Pope’s prick and the Pope’s nephews. The violence and cynicism of this was at first quite extraordinary to me, given that in England religion is no more to people than the daily school assembly, thick with hymns which roll God around in anthropomorphic euphemism. Religion is a fringe activity which doesn’t impinge. Nobody tells you jokes about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s deranged sexual habits, or brings the house down by fantasising about male prostitutes behind the door of the lav in Lambeth Palace. Superstition is older, after all, more universal, more seductive than Christianity. Michele couldn’t throw away bread, because it was unlucky. We hoarded it in mouldering sacks in the vestibule and referred to it politely as ‘the bread for the ducks’.

  My mother, when I told her about this years later, couldn’t believe her ears.

  ‘Fancy a man being afraid of a bit of bread,’ she said. Proper men, north of Calais, are never afraid, are they? The presence of a black cat among them never causes a jam of Fiats.

  Michele didn’t drive a Fiat. He drove an open-topped MG. This was not because he was an Anglophile – far from it – but because he was an oddball who liked to be different. It was a piece of understated showing-off which I found most appealing. He gave me to understand, from time to time, that it was the cross he had to bear, to have an English girlfriend. A barbarous Anglo-Saxon, who had yens for Marmite and sponge pudding in tins which we bought at the English supermarket. A woman from a race only partially subdued by the Roman conquest who did her hand-washing in the bidet. He would stand over me and make me douche before he took me to bed. The English didn’t bathe, he said. Coal in the bath. Knickers in the bidet. He behaved, in his small English motor car, in a most un-English manner, bawling ‘Cretin’ and ‘Whore’ to anyone, regardless of sex, who crossed his path. When he finally sold that little car, he did so in the dark to a gullible young English tourist and refused to give him his money back when the thing fell apart the next day, as Michele knew it would. Michele, though he looked like a Roman emperor, was in truth a Venetian. Like most typical types, he was misleading. He was, as I have mentioned, married. He didn’t like watching women turning into mothers, he said. Mothers were interested only in cough syrup and pasta and illness and baby-talk. Never in Dante. Not that Michele ever read Dante, which was of course much too saturated with religious implication for his taste, but he liked a proper deference for national sacred cows. One could not live with a woman who talked only about pasta and babies, he said. Michele was a man of diminished responsibility. That was part of his charm for me. I could recall a time when I had stood beside my mother in the kitchen watching her peeling potatoes and haranguing her the while on the poetry of Wilfred Owen. I remembered reciting ‘Move him into the Sun’ while she muttered discouragingly about the bad bits in the spuds. Admittedly, Michele was about to turn forty. He was no schoolboy. But a part of me was still in tune with his frustration. I do not myself feel comfortable with the statuesque proportions women assume as they ladle out soup, as if they are making huge complacent statements about the sanctity of their limiting female offices. A part of me, out of sexual loyalty, wanted to scream at Michele that if he had spent more time on the pasta and baby-talk himself, his wife might have had more time for Dante; that with her husband, her mother-in-law and the two children, she had not, as it were, felt the need of it. But I didn’t. Michele was not much fun in disputation. He did not care for the finesse of debate. If one said, for instance, making polite conversation over the newspaper, ‘It says here, Michele, that red wine is wine made from grapes with the skins left on, and white wine from grapes without,’ he would give the idea no quarter. He would not offer one polite, tentative doubts. ‘Red wine, red grapes,’ he would say with devastating finality. ‘White wine, white grapes. Imbecille.’

  He treated his children in a way which at times made me feel ill. They had developed a reflex to duck whenever he made a flamboyant gesture in their direction. We collected them, on the occasional Sunday, from their apartment in the gentle suburb. Two little boys in ties, with their hair combed down with water. Michele would receive them, of course, in sloppy shorts and Japanese flip-flops. He would exchange brief words with his wife on the doorstep, slouching and scratching rudely at his arse. He would make no effort at all to entertain his little boys, and on one occasion gave them a football but couldn’t be prevailed upon to take them out to play with it. When the younger child resorted, tentatively, to kicking it indoors, Michele hit him on the temple with the back of his hand and caused him to stumble painfully upon the Meccano which was strewn upon the floor.

  ‘Basta!’ he said. The Meccano had been bought by me, Papa’s Inglese fancy woman, to give them something to do. ‘Have you said thank you to Caterina for this thing she has bought for you?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you play with it?’ Play boy play, thy father plays. I found the episode an obscenity. He would make them do sums in the car. Aritmetica to exercise the brain. It brought me out in a sweat. He had the habit, regrettably common in Italy, of loving babies – other people’s babies. He would babble like a demented crone over an infant in the piazza and volunteer to hav
e the barman warm its bottle. He had no time for anyone between the ages of eighteen months and sixteen.

  Thirty-Four

  Michele was convinced that I was having affairs with every man I spoke to, regardless of age, nationality or presentability. The male teachers in the language school were his prime suspects and were treated in consequence to inexplicable displays of insulting, silent hostility. I learned, thanks to Michele, that there is no need ever to embrace one’s man’s quarrels, that there is no need ever to apologise for somebody else by virtue of one’s co-habiting with that person. If I had not learned this I would have crossed swords with half the planet.

  He went so far as to suspect me with women too. He came to pluck me out one evening from my friend Janice’s flat, where we were sewing together using her machine. I was very fond of Janice, who taught with me. She was a plain, rather mouse-coloured woman of middle age who was cursed with a bad, acne-marked skin and was not altogether happy.

  ‘Why,’ Michele said in the car, ‘why are so many English women lesbian?’ I assumed this to relate to some item he had absorbed from the gutter press, because Michele had a remarkable, innocent susceptibility when it came to the gutter press.

  ‘Name me five,’ I said. Sometimes I considered myself a lot brainier than Michele.

  ‘You spend your evening with Janice,’ he said. ‘How does it feel to go to bed with a woman?’ I thought he was, quite simply, out of his mind.

  ‘You should know,’ I said.

  ‘Is it because the woman is too ugly to find a man that you do this for her? Or do you want to be a man, my Caterina?’ he said, pityingly. ‘You are lacking in important respects.’ I found this so absurd, not to say distasteful, that I could not take it seriously. I thought he was soliciting for praise. Praise for his maleness. Thank you, Michele, for your male crotch which no Meccano can simulate. Remembering Jake, I said that we used spanners, Janice and I. This was a mistake, because he believed me, I think.

  Once, only once, Jonathan Goldman came to see me, en route for Greece. Unhappily, I missed him. A grown-up Jonathan, who had sat resolutely in the flat for an hour, weathering Michele’s hostility. And who was this Goldman? Michele demanded. This Goldman who saw fit to wait a whole hour in the flat? I got quite wild with excitement, thinking Roger had come to see me. Roger Goldman in Rome and coming to see me.

  ‘Where?’ I said, with undisguised fervour. ‘Where is he? I have to see him.’ Michele, delighted to be vindicated in his suspicions, presented me with a note. A note scribbled by Jonathan under Michele’s searching eye. It gave an address and telephone number in Athens and went as follows:

  Kath,

  I came to leave you a million pounds but sadly you were out. Now you ask me how I found you in this town where all the streets appear to be called Senso Unico? I crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Garibaldi and asked in French for a gorgeous Inglese. Your man thinks I’m here to steal the silver and looks as if he means to throw me to the lions.

  ‘Phone me in Athens sometime.

  Jonathan G.

  ‘And who is this Goldman?’ Michele said again. ‘This big English Jew who waits for you a whole hour in my apartment, and wants to be telephoned in Athens?’

  ‘He’s the younger son of my philosophy professor,’ I said. Michele looked infinitely sceptical.

  ‘Credo,’ he said, nastily. It had ceased to bother me that Michele didn’t believe a word that I said. It gave me the liberty to lie whenever I chose.

  For all this I never felt that Michele was crushing me. He didn’t attempt to warp my soul or manipulate me the way Roger had done. I make an analogy, I hope not unforgivably, with The Taming of the Shrew. It has always seemed to me about that play that it is not the terrible, delightful Petruchio (unscrupulous chancer that he is) who warps and crushes the girl, but the dreadful combination of that goody-goody sister, who warps her with feminine wiles, and that hidebound, favouritising father, who tells her to go ply her needle and grovel for a husband. They are the ones who knock her about. After them, life with Petruchio is a day out from a sadistic nunnery. He and she are equal in high spirits. And how does he tame her? He makes her kiss him in the street. He makes her enact the hilarious burlesque of embracing a strange old man and calling him a sweet young virgin. Tame girls don’t kiss in public and embrace strange men. He gives her scope for a comic talent, he is no more a respecter of orthodox behaviour than she is. At the end of the play she is not tame, she is the wench with the wit to win her old man’s bet for him. They leave Padua a few hundred crowns richer, thanks to her. I do not wish to whitewash the issues. The play is about wife-beating. The colour it comes only half offends me. Michele played Petruchio-style mating-games with me all the time. It only half offended me. The rest was terrific fun.

  There was the time he drove in the wrong direction to a lunch date. I told him. I said the Thingummies didn’t live there any more. Michele, inevitably, approached the challenge in the spirit of who is driving, him or me? I answered provokingly, in English, because Michele, thanks to me, had by then the crudest rudiments of that tongue.

  ‘Michele’, I said between my teeth, ‘you make meestake. Beeg meestake.’

  ‘No meestake,’ he said. ‘Caterina, you meestake.’

  ‘I say you meestake, you big slob,’ I said.

  ‘Allora. Meestake, eh?’ he said, challengingly. He stopped the car without warning, in the middle of the road. Around us a crescendo of blasting horns. ‘Meestake?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. He got out of the car and sauntered to the sidewalk, where he made as if to enter a pizza shop. I couldn’t drive the thing to the side of the road, so I got out and joined him on the sidewalk where we fell laughing with delight into each other’s arms.

  ‘Andiamo,’ he said. We jumped back into the vehicle and drove like hell, before the carabinieri descended upon us.

  ‘Meestake?’ he said.

  We never got to our lunch party because the sex was better at home.

  Thirty-Five

  The year I turned thirty I got pregnant. I forgot to take a contraceptive pill. We are all of us so well acquainted with this kind of error in the post-Freudian era that I might as well confess to it immediately and save myself the trouble of constructing my defence. I am indeed an only child who never had anything to cuddle. I had a cat, I say, feebly. I even accept that much of the sleeping around I did, when it wasn’t directly to spite Roger Goldman, had to do with the urge to nurture and be nurtured and not all that much to do with the pleasure I got from the act. It was not until I met Michele that I discovered sex as something seriously worth staying at home for. It took me over half a decade to discover what Jane Goldman had obviously found out in one night. That, to quote her, sex was ‘unexpectedly jolly’. Jonathan Goldman once told me a terrible schoolboy joke about the rabbi and the priest in the train compartment exchanging confidences. They both confess to having broken the taboos of their religion. The rabbi has eaten pork. The priest has had sex with a woman. The punch line is perfectly obvious, and thanks to Michele I discovered, as the rabbi observes, that sex is better than pork. This discovery was so delightful to me that we were almost never out of bed.

  But I digress. I got pregnant. I had no hope of hiding the fact since Michele was wont to watch my ovulation like a hawk. I told him as soon as I suspected it. Michele had a habit of downing nasty eggnog stuff for breakfast in the belief that this was beneficial to his health. It was in effect raw zabaglione. He choked on it. Having recovered, he bawled wonderfully colourful oaths at me. He had a way of rolling composite insults which involved casting doubt on the virtue, not only of one’s female relations but upon the holy Mother of God and the Pope’s great-grandmother. In short, he was not pleased. He added his only English insult to the rest and called me a ‘beetch’. I began to giggle nervously when he said ‘beetch’, because it made me think of the seaside. Then I hopped it before he resorted to physical violence. He was very nice to me when I came home that eveni
ng, which I ought to have known was suspect. He embraced me very sweetly and kissed my hair.

  ‘Come stai?’ he said solicitously. I said I was, frankly, bloody scared of him, that’s how I was. He made some sweet gentle love to me, after which he went so far as to quote me some old Tuscan poetry and to tell me I was the most pure and beautiful of women. He had a present for me, he said. He got up and brought it to me in an enormous bag from the Via Lombardia. Jesus. It was a mink coat. There was something inept in this, I couldn’t help thinking. I couldn’t say to him that nothing could be calculated to make one feel less pure and more like the proverbial kept woman, more like the landlord’s moll. The coat was, of course, a bribe. I said thank you very much. Michele had a plan. We would take a week off from work, he said, and go to London, where we would have the foetus aborted in a good private clinic. These things were easy in London, not so? Then I would show him London. Nice for me, eh? To see London again. And to show it to him, as he had shown me Venice. He got quite spritely on the idea. He could be as phoney as plastic daffodils at times. London was beautiful, was it not? he said. What he knew about London was Buckingham Palazzo and the Horse Guards. He combined this with his own belief that the women in the British royal family rode horses all the time to give themselves orgasms. (Their blokes couldn’t, of course, being without chins and other attributes. Unlike himself. Michele, with his imperial jaw and his well-bedded English girlfriend.)