by Paul Bailey
We talked of La Nonna and how, when it was raining – it rains a lot in Florence – she would smile at me and observe Come Londra. She had never visited London, but was convinced it was a city above which the skies were perpetually opening when it wasn’t shrouded in fog. The wetness and fogginess of my birthplace were incontrovertible facts, carved out in the stone of centuries. It was useless to argue with her.
Vanni was teaching in the Italian department in the prestigious University of California at Berkeley while I was helping the freshmen (and women) at North Dakota State University unravel the mysteries of English grammar. I visited him twice in California. I had gone there to interview the novelist Christopher Isherwood for BBC Radio, and Christopher had picked me up at Los Angeles airport and driven me in his tiny Volkswagen to Santa Monica, where he lived with his partner, the artist Don Bachardy. We recorded our discussion about his life and work in a nearby studio that afternoon. The engineer in charge was a huge man who greeted us warmly as ‘Chris’ and ‘Paul’. He was friendly before the conversation started, but Christopher’s answer to my first question caused him to be distinctly unfriendly when we were due to leave.
Me: Christopher Isherwood, why did you go to Berlin in the early 1930s?
CI: For the boys.
I persevered with my next question, even as I sensed a certain frostiness from the other side of the glass partition. The redneck didn’t like what he was hearing. Christopher went on chirping happily about his career, and I tried not to look at the man who was recording the programme. We were not addressed as ‘Chris’ and ‘Paul’ as we walked out to the car park. An hour earlier we had been ‘regular guys’, but not any more. We were a pair of English faggots now. His expression said as much.
In those days, San Francisco was the gay capital of America, if not the world. I found the city exhilarating and beautiful, especially after the fearful cold of Fargo and the endless flatness of the snow-covered plains. Although it was December, the weather was mild and walking in the sunlit streets and riding on the cable cars were rare but simple pleasures. Vanni showed me the sights, and the two of us spent an afternoon in the Castro district, which was predominantly gay. I found the atmosphere of the place as curious as it was depressing. I had never seen quite so many men with cropped hair and neat moustaches, who appeared to have nothing to do but cruise the bars in search of their lookalikes. This was a new, and strange, kind of narcissism. We were in a self-styled ghetto, I realized, and I couldn’t wait to get out of it. I was happy in the multi-cultured city itself, with its limitless choice of fine restaurants. In Tommaso’s we ate the best pizza to be had outside Naples.
I went to Berkeley with Vanni and met the Italian faculty. At a party there, a bearded man wearing a kaftan and an assortment of beads informed me confidently that he was going to write the greatest of all great American novels. Had he started it? ‘Not yet.’ He put a finger to his forehead. ‘It’s still up here.’ I remarked, as tactfully as I could, that he didn’t look that young, and that when you have embarked on a novel, great or otherwise, time was important. Life is an accidental business, and illness and death are out there, ready to do their worst. He gave me a pitying smile. ‘Are you some kind of a pessimist? I just know when my book is going to come out. It’s still…’ He searched for the apt word. ‘…marinating.’
A real writer had graced the campus earlier that year, in the form of Giorgio Bassani, author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. I love Bassani’s fictions, autobiographical in essence, of Jewish – and other – life in Ferrara in the years preceding the Second World War. Vanni admired them too, but the man turned out to be snobbish and charmless to an extraordinary degree. He refused to drink Californian wine, and had his own vintages sent over from Italy. He was in his fifties, but continued to play accomplished tennis. He sulked whenever he was in danger of losing a match. He was rude to both staff and students, some of whom he deemed stupid. He had been hired for two years as writer-in-residence. When he had completed his first year, he was paid another year’s salary to go home. It had been a bitter experience for everyone. Yet his elegant, mournful books endure, and we have him to thank for discovering and publishing Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (literally The Cheetah, but famously translated as The Leopard). And no one deserves the fate of his last decades, when he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.
On a second trip to California, during the spring vacation, Vanni and I hired a car from a firm called Rent-a-Dent in Los Angeles and we set off to visit the original Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the setting of Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One. Our journey along the freeway was hindered by the driver of a large truck who kept overtaking our battered saloon with a glee that bordered on the murderous. We wondered if we would ever reach the famous cemetery alive, so determined seemed the truck driver to force us off the road. There had been three crashes that morning, we learned, and we didn’t want to be involved in the fourth. It was with huge relief that we spotted the exit for Glendale.
The cemetery more than lived up to (if that’s the appropriate term) our anticipation of the comic possibilities ahead. The first thing we discovered was that words like ‘undertaker’ and ‘mortician’ had been replaced with ‘before need counselor’. The founder of Forest Lawn, Dr Hubert Eaton, had paid for the acres of barren land in 1917 by selling plots on a hire purchase system. Hence those ‘before need counselors’. We parked the car, and began our tour by visiting the Little Church of the Flowers, modelled on the church in Stoke Poges that inspired Thomas Gray to write his ‘Elegy’. From there, we went on to the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather (that o’ was cause for a smile), a replica of the kirk in Glencairn where Annie Laurie worshipped. We entered, and left, to the accompaniment of bagpipes. We gave the Church of the Recessional (a reproduction of St Margaret’s in Rottingdean, which Rudyard Kipling attended) a miss and made our way to God’s Garden, in which is enshrined another replica – that of a statue of Christ by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. We were in the Court of the Christus within God’s Garden, staring at the bearded Christ, when a recorded voice came out of a tree. ‘You are standing before the Son of God’ it boomed. ‘If you wish to look into his eyes, you must go down on your knees.’ We did as instructed, and duly caught His bland expression.
‘You are standing in the Westminster Abbey of the New World’ another booming voice announced as we stepped into the Memorial Court of Honor. That same sepulchral voice instructed us – there was one other person present, a woman with a nervous tic – to take our seats if we wished to see, and learn the history of, the Last Supper Window. The lights dimmed and a pair of curtains parted to the strains of the waltz from The Merry Widow. On the screen was Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in its frail state of preservation. Then the voice explained that Dr Hubert Eaton had visited Milan in the 1920s and had been awestruck by the sight of the painting. It grieved Dr Hubert Eaton that Leonardo’s masterwork was so faint, due to the ravages of time. The doctor had an inspiration. He contacted ‘famed artist’ Rosa Moretti and asked what she would give to make a stained-glass replica of the Last Supper. ‘I would give my life, Dr Eaton,’ she replied.
We began to laugh, Vanni and I, as the voice droned on, imparting the news that Rosa Moretti produced her stained-glass window only to have it crack. And where did it crack? With the figure of Judas. She telephoned Dr Hubert Eaton, who encouraged her to try again. She finished a second window and a crack appeared in exactly the same place. A third window cracked, and so did the fourth and fifth. It was as though Judas, the betrayer of Our Lord, had put a curse on it. Rosa Moretti was very unhappy. Dr Hubert Eaton telephoned ‘famed artist’ (hearing that phrase once more, we collapsed with laughter) Rosa Moretti and advised her to pray. He would pray, too, for the window he had commissioned. Their joint prayers might save the day. So Dr Hubert Eaton in California and Rosa Moretti in Perugia offered up their prayers for a perfect window. Their prayers were answered, and Dr Hubert Eaton and Rosa
Moretti were overjoyed. They had won their battle with the wicked spirit of Judas Iscariot.
The brightly coloured Last Supper Window was revealed to us, to the accompaniment of the Blue Danube.
‘Do you guys come here just to break up?’ the woman asked, as we were overcome with giggling. ‘Have either of you been to Italy?’ she enquired, pointing to a copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà in St Peter’s.
I said that my friend was Italian.
‘Have you seen the original Pietà (she pronounced it pee-ay-ter) in Rome?’
We both answered that we had.
‘Doesn’t the Virgin Mary have a sort of strip across her body?’
‘Yes, she does,’ we replied.
‘It’s not here,’ she shrieked. ‘Look.’ We looked. The strip wasn’t there. ‘It’s a fake. This is not a real replica. I shall write to the Los Angeles Times. I shall write to the Pope.’ And thus shrieking, she stormed out of the Westminster Abbey of the New World.
We were on the verge of hysteria. The Blue Danube faded away. There was a moment’s silence before The Ride of the Valkyries began. The Ride of the Valkyries? Was there a humourist lurking in the recesses of the Memorial Court of Honor?
Later that day, we inspected the replica of Ghiberti’s bronze doors from the Baptistery of San Giovanni, saw Michelangelo’s newly fig-leafed David, and took in Jan Styka’s huge painting The Crucifixion (complete with recorded comments from the hecklers in the crowd) and The Resurrection by Robert Clark, which is almost as huge and just as dire. We chanced on a sculpture depicting several generations of men, women and children entitled The Mystery of Life and were hysterical once more when the song
Ah, sweet mystery of life
At last I’ve found you,
Ah, sweet mystery of life
At last you’re mine
started to be sung by an unseen choir nearby.
We got back into the car and drove slowly through Lullaby Land, the section of Forest Lawn in which the very young are buried. Recorded birdsong was coming out of every bush, and childish voices were singing or reciting nursery rhymes. We were beyond laughter now. We had to escape the sound of those innocents telling us of Jack and Jill, and Humpty Dumpty, and the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.
*
Vanni had some news that he didn’t want to break over the phone. Could he spend a few days with me? That, I said, was an unnecessary question.
Circe, tail wagging in delight, rushed to greet her friend as soon as he arrived. Carissima he called her, and allowed her to lick his face. We went into the kitchen and I opened a bottle of white wine. He needed a drink before he could tell me what he had come to say face to face. The dog wrapped herself about his feet.
‘It’s the worst. It’s what I’ve been afraid of for years.’
I was silent, waiting for the revelation I had somehow already anticipated.
‘I am HIV positive.’
We shared a long embrace.
Vanni would entrust himself to the care of Dario, the youngest of his two younger brothers. Dario would soon become what he is now, the leading AIDS specialist in Florence. Since Dario had access to every new drug the moment it was patented, it was possible for him to give Vanni the best treatment available. Vanni was already taking pills when he turned up that day with his upsetting news. He stayed well, and sane, and active in his job as a tour guide for over five years.
He came to London in 1996, but did not stay with me and my partner, Jeremy. To my surprise, he had booked himself into an expensive hotel in Curzon Street. The idea of Vanni living it up in Mayfair struck me as preposterous, and indeed it was. On what would turn out to be his last holiday, Vanni indulged himself in a bizarre shopping spree. He bought eighty-two pairs of Armani underpants (Perché ottanta-due? became something of a family joke), ten cashmere sweaters, a dozen identical overcoats and six suitcases to contain them. He was washing down his medication with an excess of red wine. Jeremy and I spent an evening with him, bearing him back to the hotel after a meal in a Chinese restaurant. He insisted on a goodnight drink, but we – and the courteous hotel staff – insisted otherwise.
I had to leave for Germany the next day. Jeremy dined with him again. Vanni was copiously and uncontrollably sick at the table, but the staff in the restaurant were considerate, kind and diplomatic, swiftly clearing up the mess while Jeremy helped him to wash and clean himself in the lavatory.
Some while before this, Jeremy and I had spent Christmas with the family in Florence, and – accompanied by Jeremy’s mother – travelled from Rome to have lunch with them the following December. On both occasions, Vanni had appeared alert and relatively happy, joining in the conversation, swapping anecdotes, and commenting intelligently on the always-parlous state of Italian politics. But the desperate Vanni we saw in London was a different man. He was confident to the point of boastfulness, and we assumed that the combination of drink and drugs accounted for his erratic behaviour. We could not know that his decline into dementia had just begun.
Vanni had been given a credit card by his father, and in Amsterdam, the next stop on his travels, he went over the agreed limit – which was pretty generous, anyway. His brother Geri drove to Holland and took the untypical spendthrift home. He was not to be released again.
In the autumn of 1998, Jeremy and I had a weekend holiday in Florence, staying in a beautiful hotel (a former villa of Mussolini’s) in the hills above Piazzale Michelangelo. We called in on the family. Wine had been banished from the apartment, because even the scent of it caused Vanni irritated temptation. He was confined to his room, where we sat with him. His whole body was wasted, and his naturally large eyes loomed ever larger in his sunken face. He was watching an idiotic game show on the television, laughing at the crass jokes. He had lost all memory of his crazy last outing. It was impossible to talk of serious matters with him. Here was a man who had once recited whole passages of Dante and entire sonnets by Petrarch from memory reduced to a merrily gibbering wreck. At one point, the game show was interrupted by a news bulletin, giving details of a train crash. Vanni averted his eyes from the screen. Death was not to be contemplated.
Vanni phoned me at intervals, saying that he would be coming to London to stay with us. The first time he called, I wondered if Dario had effected a miracle. I rang Dario, who confirmed that no miracle had taken place. It was his brother’s happy delusion that he could travel. His last call was in 2001, some weeks before his death.
I was in Padua in June 2001, intent on visiting the family in Vada, the seaside town where they have an apartment. I should have booked a train ticket in advance, because there was no possibility of a connection on the Sunday I had chosen for my visit. Every Eurostar train was full. So my last sight of my beloved friend of thirty years was in his room, with the game show in the background.
‘Ha lasciato,’ said Noris, his mother, when I phoned in December to ask how he was faring. ‘He’s left’ – it’s a touching euphemism for ‘dead’.
In January 2002, I was in Rome for a week, meeting up with two Romanian friends. I went to Florence, and bought twelve gladioli – Noris’s favourite flowers – before going to the familiar apartment. Noris took four of the gladioli and put them in a separate vase. They were for Vanni’s room, she said. Would I take them in? Vanni’s books were on the shelves, and on his desk was a framed photograph of him at the age of thirty or so, when he had the world before him.
I chatted with Noris as she prepared lunch. I was offered a glass of wine. There was a grande vuoto (a great emptiness) in their lives, Noris said. Noris and Piero had cared for their demanding first-born – with some necessary assistance from nurses – for five loving years.
I sat down to lunch with Noris, Piero, Dario and Dario’s daughter, Martina. We reminisced and smiled at happy, and indeed silly (the dish of ciondolone) memories. Dario speaks with a thick Florentine accent, and Noris interrupted him once, requesting him to translate what he was saying into Italian for my benefit.
Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria…
(There is no greater sorrow than to remember in misery the happy time…)
As we listened to her bright voice, I looked up to see Piero weeping softly. He was remembering, he said, Vanni the brilliant schoolboy learning those very lines at the same table where Martina was sitting.
Giovanna’s Marshal Tito
Circe was not afraid of other dogs, even those who were obviously untrained or vicious. A snarling Staffordshire bull terrier was less terrifying than its belligerent owner, who threatened to knife me for releasing her into the Dogs Only area while his pet was exercising. I explained, temperately, that I hadn’t seen either him or his dog when I had opened the gate. (I refrained from adding that I had not anticipated meeting two such ferocious beasts in my local park.) I withdrew Circe from the area, as the latterday Bill Sikes, whose beefy arms were lavishly tattooed, continued to abuse me in brutally basic language.
Only Giovanna’s cat had the power to instil terror in the otherwise fearless Circe. This mountainous tabby, whose name was Marshal Tito, first startled her when she was a few months old by suddenly dashing out of Giovanna’s front garden, arching his back, exposing his claws and hissing loudly. Circe let out a yelp and immediately backed away from the angry Tito, who seemed to be defying us to pass. From that day onwards, Circe always came to a determined halt some yards ahead of Tito’s home. I had to lead her across the road – she led me, actually – to the pavement opposite, where the tom cat seldom lurked.