by Tim Parks
‘The difference, Dad,’ he remarked into a dictaphone humming with new batteries, ‘if you must know, between stealing and exploitation, is this: that with exploitation the victim knows he is getting fucked, like you at the factory, and has to accept it, to put bread in his mouth as you say, and so is humiliated. But stealing is a more generous transaction. The victim isn’t obliged to assent to his own ruin and therefore remains proud and free. Hence stealing would appear to be the more honest and morally superior of the two.’
6
It was the first of June they turned off the gas. This was quite reasonable, seeing as Morris hadn’t as yet paid any of the bills for the expensive winter months. He had been expecting it even. Nevertheless the event plunged him into a grand depression, the kind of gloom that sent him scuttling out after other people’s company, his students and neighbours mostly, but even the English community on occasions with their bangers-and-mash and Valpolicella parties. He dressed carefully, not wanting to wear out anything valuable, yet at the same time determined to distinguish himself from the jeans and T-shirt brigade. Once arrived, he skulked in the corners of their shabby living rooms in Dietro Duomo, trying to pick up from their boozy cackle and chat whether anybody had any idea how to make money through the summer months.
The schools closed the second week of June and most of the private students would probably give up around the same time, thus condemning the expatriate teaching community to three months of penury. During this period most of the teachers gave up their rooms and flats to save themselves the rent and disappeared on hitch-hiking holidays to the cheapest possible destinations, or cheaper still, back home to regroup again the following autumn when the schools re-opened and the same squalid rooms would be as readily available as most squalid and undesirable things generally are.
The prospect of this summer, looming as an interminable scorching hot hazy blank, nothing to do and no money to spend, had Morris floundering in the very depths of self-pity. He was a waif and a stray was the truth. An orphan, in the true spiritual sense of the word. He was a nobody, without dignity or recognition. Without repose. He thought how the noble Italian upper classes would pass the summer season, strutting through the shaded squares, parading along the sun-drenched lakeshore with their godlike bodies and stylish clothes.
Poverty was endurable in England, Morris explained to Pamela Pinnington, a slim, limpish girl from East Croydon, because it had been institutionalized; the whole country wore a façade of poverty and the rich were guilty of their money and kept it well hidden while the poor were proud of their tribulations and flaunted them like banners or battle scars.
‘But in Italy only fools are poor,’ Morris said. ‘And everybody can see how marvellous life is with cash.’
Pamela asked, did he really think so? She thought the most wonderful thing about Italy was that if you had a lot of friends and shared your flat, you really didn’t need too much money at all. Morris watched her as she spoke, nervous middle-class fingers twisting round a beer mug full of wine, and immediately regretted the rashness of having said what he had, exposing himself like that. The girl had huge, brown, blinking eyes and wore a dirty T-shirt with no bra so that you had to feel sorry for her breasts which were no more than nipples.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said politely, trying to extricate himself. He wasn’t in any way lascivious about women, but he did like them to be beautiful.
‘You could have a go at getting a job as a travel guide,’ Marion Roberts interrupted. Marion was a tall bleached blonde who wore the same kind of electric lollipop make-up so common in places like Camden Market or the Portobello Road. One of the many who hung around the awful Stan. ‘Give them some bull about having been to university and knowing the city backwards and they’re bound to give you some work.’
But the idea of dragging groups of pensioners from Great Yarmouth around the streets and squares of ancient Verona to have them snapshot each other with hankies knotted over their heads under Juliet’s balcony, complaining there was nowhere public to spend a penny and giggling over the name Piazza Bra, was more than Morris could even begin to imagine. Not his cup of tea, he said.
Stan came to join them. He wore jeans and a goldish Indian smock and his beard was speckled with crumbs. Simonetta, another girlfriend, Italian, hung mouselike behind him. Marion’s inked eyelashes flickered.
‘Poor Morris has a problem with the summer,’ she said. ‘He’s stony broke.’
Morris had actually said nothing of the kind, but didn’t protest. He was long since used to being made fun of. If fun you could call it.
‘No shit man!’ Stan scratched in his beard under a broad Jewish smile. He seemed as pleased to see Morris, Morris thought, as a priest who has found a new sheep in his flock. Stan, the community leader.
Morris shouldn’t have taken such an expensive apartment, he said. He was paying the price now for not having shared a place earlier and saved on the rent. Still, if he wanted to come and live with them for the last couple of weeks and then maybe join them on their microbus trip out to Turkey, he was most welcome. There was an island off Izmir where you could guarantee to live for less than a dollar a day. Stan linked his arm into Morris’s as he said this and Morris felt suddenly so completely disorientated by the desultory, inferior conversation that he said, yes, he might do that, and then was furious with himself, of course, for not having immediately burnt a boat that was so patently unseaworthy.
But what grated most of all—as he had told Massimina’s family at that fateful party when he had invented a fiancée for the American—what grated most of all was that Stan actually was rich! His mother really was sitting on a whole string of motels back there in California. And what did the boy do? He played hippie dippy poor man in Italy, where to live well certainly didn’t cost the earth, squatting in a pigsty with five others (‘us immigrants have to stick together’) secure in the knowledge that he could step out of his muck any moment he chose and take the first plane home to Sunset Strip.
At least I’m not a hypocrite, Morris thought. At least I can say that of myself, and he left without a word of goodbye.
At home, he stood up from his bread and parmesan to pull out a drawer from the cabinet behind him. Amongst the stacks of dictaphone tapes there was a bundle of papers which he took out and spread on the kitchen counter.
AGILE THIEF DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S AFTER, the back page headline of the Arena had announced; with typically facile journalistic amusement the article went on to describe how some poor idiot had gone to the risk of climbing six metres up a wistaria and smashing a window to take nothing more than a cheap bronze reproduction barely worth the metal it was made from.
Morris went through the other papers. There was the letter from Signora Trevisan, letters from the gas company, two laboriously penned postcards from his father (‘You’re only putting off the evil day, lad.’ Why on earth did they bother to stay in touch, insist on reminding each other of their respective existences?), various rejections for jobs he’d written off for in Milan, a long sob note from Massimina, to which he hadn’t as yet found time to reply, and finally, all the Gucci brochures and the diary of Signor Cartuccio with the exclamation marks by the names of Luigina and Monica.
Munching the cheese, Morris reread everything with great care. The tedium of another exhausted empty evening was before him. When he was at university, he had noticed how everybody, himself more or less included, had a sense of prestige and of belonging quite by right to a great mutual admiration society which bore you up and gave you a constant relation to others and to the world. And the same must be true, Morris thought, if you were involved in some kind of religion, or part of a family, or married even; you shared hopes and fears, hate and trust, and developed communal callouses against the stings and treadmills of the world. Common illusions was the correct description.
But on your own, and in a foreign country . . . on your own you had to find self-esteem all by yourself; you were turning t
o the mirror for company, clutching at straws—a terrible, virtuoso affair. In short, the real thing. It was incredible how an evening, a weekend, a whole summer, could simply open before you like a chasm, uncrossable, unfillable, paralysing. One was even tempted to start writing books or painting pictures or something, like half the rest of the immigrant community (Pamela Pinnington of all people—‘I’m a bit of an artist actually’). Or to play the libertine and gather your trophies that way. (Dear bisexual Stan with all his tribe around him, like some lascivious latter-day Mormon.)
Yet Morris was determined to steer well clear of such desperate remedies as these. No, he was damned if he was going to play the sucker who flogged himself over canvas or manuscript from dark dawn till dusk only to have his creations condescendingly brushed aside by the nincompoops who doubtless commanded in that zone (could you imagine anyone ever publishing Stan’s ‘New World Immigrant Zaps the Old’?). Anyway, he had too much respect for great art to dabble himself. And the idea of playing Don Juan had never appealed, the details of such a life would be so untidy; it was the wholeness of his own body, his own image, he was interested in, not the possession of others.
‘Every man is an island,’ he informed his dictaphone. ‘Entire unto himself. Click. Or God help him.’
Yet he had to do something! Anything, absolutely. However reckless. Or this life would simply trickle and trickle away, with all the talent and taste and energy he had gone completely to waste. He turned back to the drawer, fiddled through the heaps of tapes and used train tickets and pulled out his writing pad. There were only four or five sheets left. So he practised first on the back of the gas bills.
(What was life for, exactly? Where, in particular, if anywhere, was Morris Duckworth going?)
EGREGIO SIGNOR CARTUCCIO; he went for the most fiercely childish block capitals, not simply because he would have to disguise his handwriting, but because he knew there was nothing more threatening than childishness. REMEMBER ME? THE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT. HA HA. I STILL HAVE YOUR DOCUMENT CASE AND DIARY, AND NOW I HAVE FINISHED MY RESEARCH. IF YOU DON’T WANT YOUR SIGNORA WIFE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR DISGUSTING ADVENTURES WITH SIGNORINAS LUIGINA AND MONICA, THEN WILL YOU PLEASE BE SO KIND AS TO LEAVE THE, I THINK, MODEST SUM OF FIVE MILLION LIRE . . .
Where? Obviously there was no question of him mailing the cash to this address. On the other hand, Cartuccio lived in Trieste and Morris was damned if he was travelling nearly two hundred miles on the off chance that the chap would be fool enough to pay (if he ever sent the letter at all). But then it wasn’t really such an awful lot of money. Cartuccio probably earned that every month. Maybe every week. (Heartbreaking to think how many people earned in a week what would do Morris for a year.) What to do?
He picked up the diary and flicked through the pages for the month to come. Cartuccio was in Rome this week it seemed, returning via Florence, Bologna and Vicenza on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth of June. Vicenza was just twenty miles away from Verona so Morris might stretch to that, he thought. The problem being that he didn’t know the place at all. So where could he arrange for him to leave the money? This was an interesting question and weighing it up Morris at last began to enjoy himself. It would be quite a tour de force if he pulled it off. A challenge equal to his imagination. If the man paid he would give half away to charity, just to show he wasn’t the common criminal. Or at least a million anyway. Some orphans’ charity.
He went to his bedroom, pulled down an old suitcase from off the wardrobe and dug out a Michelin guide from the bric-à-brac inside.
VICENZA. Principal Sites (visit, 1 to 1½ hours): Piazza dei Signori—like St Mark’s Square in Venice, this is an open meeting place for all . . . No, nothing there. Bissara Tower—this occupies one entire side of the . . . No, no accurate description. The Basilica then? Too crowded by the sound of it. Minor Sites. Yes, here was what he was after. The Church of the Holy Crown—This magnificent edifice was constructed in the mid-to-late thirteenth century in honour of the Holy Crown of Thorns donated by St Louis, King of France. Two signed paintings are to be admired within: a Baptism of Christ by Giovanni Bellini (fifth altar on the left), and an Admiration of the Magi by Paolo Veronese . . .
Morris tried to picture the church. A string of altars up the left-hand side with candles burning here and there in the gloom, probably a little machine at the fifth altar where you could slip in fifty lire to illuminate Bellini’s Baptism and hear a description of the thing’s history in two hundred foreign languages. There would be a little group there most of the time, but hardly a stampede.
FIVE MILLION LIRE—No, make it six, may as well get enough to survive the summer at least. In style. Especially if he was supposed to give one away. SIX MILLION LIRE IN THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY CROWN, VICENZA, ON JUNE 12. THE MONEY MUST BE IN BILLS OF ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND IN A REGULAR ENVELOPE. GO TO THE FOURTH ALTAR ON THE LEFT. SIT ON THE NEAREST CHAIR WITH HEAD BOWED AND TAPE THE ENVELOPE UNDER THE CHAIR WITH SIMPLE SELLOTAPE. NO TRICKS OR MISTAKES OR YOUR MARRIAGE IS FINISHED.
Morris could see the scene perfectly and was delighted. It was pretty well foolproof, damn it. Cartuccio would put the stuff there on the twelfth and he himself would pop in the following day to pick it up. If Cartuccio didn’t oblige, okay, then at least he got a look at the paintings by Bellini and the Veronese. Which had to be better than the old waste-bin-at-the-bus-terminus trick.
Morris went over the letter, rewriting it on the back of another gas bill and changing a few details. It was important to sound more threatening and a bit crazy, he thought. If you weren’t crazy, nobody would believe you’d ever really do anything. Begin something like, EGREGIO SIGNOR CARTUCCIO, YOU STINK, YOU KNOW THAT, STINK, YOU AND ALL YOUR FILTHY RICH LEATHER GOODS BOYS WITH YOUR COPIES OF PENTHOUSE AND A SLUT IN EVERY TOWN. REMEMBER ME?
He checked up a few words in the dictionary and a couple of points in his grammar book to make sure he had the Italian just so and then copied out the final thing in an uneven, disturbed-looking hand, making the low quality Biro smear sticky blotches all over the place.
When he had finished and popped the thing into an envelope, he felt so hugely entertained (he’d never mail it anyway) that he started another one directly, and this time straight onto letter paper.
Gentile Signora Trevisan, he used his own handwriting now, at its most sloping and lyrical, occasionally wiping the Biro on his handkerchief. Beside his left hand he kept Massimina’s letter with its long sob sentences like, ‘Oh Morris, if only we could arrange to meet somewhere, if only I had your phone number, I miss you so—’ and then the cries of desperation—‘Mamma’s saying I must do nothing but study because I’m so behind at school and I have no time for silly crushes on older men, but Morris, truly, I do love you and . . .’
Gentile Signora Trevisan, Many thanks for your communication of last month. I do appreciate the care you are determined to take of your beautiful youngest daughter. I also realize that you must be aware of what I now confess to my shame, that I lied to you all about my work and prospects, though I insist I did so simply for fear that had you known my real and modest situation you would have severed any relationship between myself and Massimina immediately. After receiving your letter I felt I had lost everything and I decided to try and accept it. But now I have received a letter from your daughter telling me her feelings for me are as strong as ever, and with this to give me courage I find I simply can’t and won’t let go. I love Massimina, Signora Trevisan, and wish more than anything else to be beside her. What I now beg you to do is to let me see her sometimes, albeit in the presence of others, and to give me two or three years to prove myself as a prospective husband. I swear, on whatever scrap of honour remains to me, that I will never take advantage of any affection Massimina may have in my regard and that I will do my utmost to make up for my disgraceful behaviour as a guest in your house.
Most sincerely, MORRIS DUCKWORTH
It was awfully overblown, Morris thought. But that was the Italian style (don’t think a single
word in English was the secret). And at least it saved him having to come up with any less conventional expressions of emotion. The following morning then outside the post office in Verona, Morris tossed a coin to decide whether to send the letters. Heads yes, tails no. Both times the coin came down tails. He tossed it again and still tails. The hell with it. Morris mailed the letters anyway. They could do no harm.
‘But it does seem amazing to me they managed to drag themselves up to the second floor on just that bare wistaria.’
Morris was speaking to Gregorio between lessons. It was a chance meeting in a café that spread its tables out onto the stylish esplanade of Piazza Bra; and Gregorio said yes, the police thought it must have been a teenager, or even a young child, because whoever it was hadn’t broken a single branch near the top. And then it would explain his taking something so basically valueless.
‘Good job they didn’t spot the little silver Neptune though, the one on the mantelpiece, you know. My father would have gone crazy. It’s worth a fortune.’
A gesture of the hand, as if brushing away a fly from his face, hid Morris’s wince. He was teaching Chapter Four of Simply English this week, which was all about where people keep things (‘in the kitchen, second cupboard on the right, top shelf, behind the sugar’), and just for fun, to add some spice to the thing, he made a point of asking people if they had any sculptures in the house and where they kept them. ‘In the lounge. A Renaissance piece with Jupiter as a bull carrying off Europa.’ ‘And what’s it made of?’ (Chapter Three, materials, legitimate revision.) ‘Of silver.’ Incredible how ingenuous people could be. Maria Grazia said her grandfather had picked the thing up in a junk shop and later discovered it was worth a lot of money. Morris would be going into arrears on his rent, he calculated, around the end of June.