Again, I don’t want to give away too much but at the start of my final Act, following Diana’s death and just before the scenes of her dramatic apotheosis in the Vatican and beyond, the stage will be completely dark except for a single spot. A voice with piano accompaniment will sing an old ballad that she loved, the nineteenth-century folk prototype of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ called ‘Dilated Wench Inn’. This is a very moving moment and I worry about the sort of smartarses who might think it funny to make anagrams of this classic song’s title such as ‘Wild, thinned acne’, ‘Dent-chinned wail’ and things involving candles. In order to remove the temptation I have re-titled it ‘Much adieu about nothing’:
Goodbye English flower
Deep-rooted in our soil
You blossomed in fabulous dresses
While gossip came to a boil
You appealed on our newsreels
And tattled in interviews
Now you belong to Althorp Park
With nothing more to lose
And it seems to me your life was like
A condom in a gale
Puffed rigid by publicity’s wind
And shrivelling when it failed
Yet even before the day fate spilled
A career so short in years
Its reservoir of love was filled
By all your people’s tears
‘Bad taste’ do I hear? The tutting of the petits bourgeois? At the risk of sounding immodest by implied comparison, I remind myself that Beethoven was shocked by Mozart’s choosing to set the libretto of Così fan tutte. The deaf prude from Bonn thought it in execrable taste. Reaching a friendly hand across the centuries to little, farting, periwigged Mozart I can reassure him that there are worse things than being accused of bad taste. Being praised for good taste, for one. And writing lyrics full of grammatical howlers for another (the Brown Dirt Cowboy please note). Oh – and as a final note for now, I’ve written a quite spare speaking role for the Duke of Edinburgh who appears in several scenes. He acts as an irascible, pithy version of a Greek chorus and is often silently onstage in one corner, cleaning a 12-bore shotgun. I confess I’ve shamelessly tailored this part for myself. As many people will know, my singing voice is rather exceptional but, alas, not professionally trained and I don’t think Donizetti-like roulades would fit well with Marta’s music, which to me sounds like an idyllic marriage between Prokoviev and Jonathan Dove. So I’ve written myself a largely silent but always expressive part in my own opera. Sometimes I think my whole life has been nothing but an overture to being onstage at last.
And prematurely onstage I already am these days, though it is causing me nothing but chagrin. L’affaire Darcie Barrington has produced world-class hysteria. Led by the Italians, the whole of Europe’s media have converged on Le Roccie these last weeks. Leo Wolstenholme’s footage of the child discovering she can see has been shown and re-shown until, like the Twin Towers standing and falling and standing and falling over and over again, it no longer feels like before-and-after so much as a permanent state of indecision. Like the pornographic freeze-frame it has become emptily iconic of nothing but itself, although for Leo and Co. it must surely be iconic of a large sum of money. Things have eased a bit now but at its worst, when the town was practically besieged by newshounds wearing some of the most abominable deodorants you ever smelt, I dared hardly stir out of the Belgian’s flat for fear of being buttonholed by complete strangers demanding I cure symptoms so disgusting I marvelled they could still be alive. For the first time ever I began to feel a sneaking degree of sympathy for the late Jesus Christ, who must have encountered similar problems – and he was operating in pre-Judaean National Health Service days. I had become so easily recognisable because Il Tirreno’s stills of me examining that Diana statuette were syndicated everywhere over absurd and lying copy claiming that the late Princess was ‘channelling’ through me which, like tunnelling through Paris, must equally be a doomed activity for her. Still, the nuns in my building drop creakily to their knees when I pass them on the stairs, and sheer embarrassment as well as noblesse obliges me to raise a hand in vague benediction.
Up at Le Roccie it became such pandemonium I put on a large pair of dark glasses and went and fetched Marta and Joan, bringing them back to the Belgian’s spare bedroom where they crammed together for a night before I found them the last hotel room in town. They stayed there a week until the worst was over. Despite all the upset and subterfuge Marta seemed oddly unperturbed. I don’t know what’s got into her: I’ve never known her so sunny. Resignation? Love? The days go by and Joan is still very much in residence with her. At least they accept their love nest has now been terminally squatted on by the huge smelly vulture of cult religiosity and are resigned to leaving for good. This has privately cheered me, as you may imagine: Marta’s reign as Queen of Le Roccie has been amusingly brief. Complete strangers with vile diseases knock at her door demanding to use the lavatory or to be healed. What they get is Joan’s tattooed, muscular forearm barring the way and some rich English naval expletives.
Yet despite all this disruption Marta’s mood remains defiantly merry. She has spent her time down here in exile reading my nearly completed libretto and now tells me it is ‘brilliant’. To be strictly accurate, what she said was ‘Gerree, never I have laughed so much. It is brilliant satjriski, yes?’ This is no less gratifying, of course, since she told me a long time ago that because of their post-war history of Soviet occupation Voynovians take satire extremely seriously as an art form. For them it always floats as a wafer-thin layer over great tragic depths, like an iridescent film of tanning oil on a fathomless ocean. I am completely certain that she recognises my opera’s fundamental high seriousness. She is, after all, a serious artist herself and would hardly waste her talents on setting anything but the best texts. And if I needed further assurance, the great Max Christ himself says that if she finishes the score in time he will première the opera next year in his own prestigious Haysel Festival. If it succeeds there it will naturally become squabbled over by Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and the Met. I draw the line at Garsington.
I should explain the origins of this festival. Some time in the past I alluded to Max and Jennifer’s early days in Crendlesham Hall when they were still in the throes of renovation. One of the reasons they chose the house was because of its immense and ancient barn about a hundred yards away known as ‘the Haysel’, one of those daft Suffolk dialect words dating from the days when the peasantry couldn’t pronounce ‘haymaking’, which is what I’m told it means. Apparently, when haymaking was finished the sunburned swains used to occupy as much of this barn as wasn’t stuffed with hay for the sort of drunken revelry that kept the local birth rate soaring. In 1521, only the other day by Suffolk standards, the bawdiness became so unbridled that Crendlesham’s rector was himself erroneously inseminated in the prickly depths of the mow. For many years thereafter an effort was made to conduct the haymaking festivities with a little more sobriety although it was noticed that the rector himself never missed a haysel, presumably in order to quell any immorality as soon as he saw it. But eventually he died and the annual celebrations in the great barn returned to their former licentiousness and according to parish records continued pretty much unchanged until twentieth-century prudery, the mechanisation of farming and the diminishing need for hay brought this venerable tradition to an end. After that the barn became little more than a shelter for rats and decaying tractors and fell into an advanced stage of decrepitude. Max’s ambition had always been to restore the huge old building with its oak timbers salvaged from tall ships down the ages. He planned it as a concert hall where he could hold a summer festival to showcase his now-famous Colchester Symphony Orchestra and introduce young composers and instrumentalists. Thus the Haysel Festival, which after a bare couple of seasons in the beautifully refurbished hall has already become a fixture in the diary of anyone who fancies themselves in touch with music. So Max’s promise to première Rancid Pansies (memo:
find a proper title!) at the Haysel will ensure it the best possible launch for an international career.
*
Tonight I am once again behind the wheel of a Toyota Ass Vein: a ‘new second-hand’ copy of my original found for me by a minion of my insurance company, probably under a deal I should wish to know nothing about. What I do know is that it is a better bargain than if they had simply given me the cash value of my junked vehicle. I may perhaps now moderate the curses I’ve been requesting little St Bernard to call down on Dottoressa Strangolagalli. Perhaps after all boils, goitres and prolapses were a bit on the harsh side. Incurable rectal itch should do it; and I like to think of her having to squirm through meetings, business lunches and Sunday Mass with those blood-red talons unable to dig in for relief. People will think she’s harbouring widow’s mites or something.
If I gave you three guesses as to where I’m off to this evening I doubt if you would divine correctly, just as until very recently I myself would have been aghast at the idea. I am in fact going to dine at the weasel Benedetti’s own home; and what is more, his other guest is to be il sindaco himself, the mayor, which will show you the sort of circles Gerald Samper is obliged to move in these days. Not by choice, mind you. These things are about politics, and no doubt both Benedetti and the mayor would privately agree that if it weren’t for politics they themselves would have little enough incentive to fraternise with foreigners out of hours.
In idle moments over the years I have occasionally wondered what sort of house an estate agent like Benedetti would choose for himself, much as one wonders what the wife of a professional pornographer would look like. Probably quite ordinary in both cases, I have assumed. Certainly Benedetti’s house is attractive enough and not at all flamboyant. On the edge of town with a good-sized garden and a splendid view of the mountains, it’s a typical square house in the local style with grey stonework interspersed with two or three horizontal courses of bricks, all beneath a tiled roof. Probably a hundred years old, it is a handsome, solid family house spoiled only (in my view, though not according to local taste) by being surrounded by stone walls set with railings and an immense pair of electrically operated wrought-iron entrance gates. Such are de rigueur in these parts; and the old saying about an Englishman’s home being his castle, when compared with the imposing ironwork and electronic security measures with which Italians surround quite ordinary houses, acquires a certain pathos by being exposed as purely metaphorical.
Unsurprisingly, Benedetti in his leisure hours is as sprucely turned out as when he’s in his office or disguised as an English prep-school master of yesteryear. Tonight he is in a beige pair of moleskin slacks by Carisma that can’t have set him back less than €300. His borrowed Asian plumage looks as though he has coiffed it with hot asphalt, so richly black it gleams.
‘Maestro!’ he greets me with a passable display of warmth. ‘I am honoured that you have stretched your precious time to include a visit to this humble house.’
‘Who could resist an opportunity to deepen a friendship hitherto regrettably confined to office hours?’ I riposte, reclaiming my hand which now smells agreeably aromatic: Lorenzo Villoresi’s ‘Piper Nigrum’ if I’m not mistaken, revealing that the weasel has better taste in eau de toilette than I would have given him credit for. I follow him into the salotto where there is a large black retriever lying on the floor that I suspect might have been acquired to go with the Range Rover. There is also a middle-aged lady with a kindly, shrewd face whom my host introduces as his wife Bettina in a resigned sort of tone that suggests she might have been acquired to go with the house. This is someone I’ve been looking forward to meeting for some years: the unseen person who sends her husband out into the world each morning as dapper as a beetle, his shirts and handkerchiefs blindingly white and flawlessly ironed, his trousers pressed hard enough to squeeze the dye out of them, his shoes burnished. This polished man must have an equally polished partner, I thought. But Bettina is not at all in the mould I have invented for her.
‘I’ve heard such a lot about you,’ she says as we shake hands. ‘What with all the publicity I had no idea what to expect. I’ve never met a lightning conductor for sanctity before.’
‘And I’ve never been one before. The whole thing’s absurd. However, the good thing about lightning conductors is that whatever current passes through them leaves them quite unchanged.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Bettina says. ‘So I needn’t pretend to believe everything the newspapers are saying?’
With some pleasure I notice this good lady’s informal outspokenness is not going down too well with her husband. Benedetti is frowning in a way that betrays his wig’s independence from his scalp.
‘Nonetheless, cara, there are undoubtedly mysteries involved –’ he begins pompously but just then there are sounds of arrival outside and he bustles out almost at a run.
‘Have you met our mayor before?’ Bettina asks, her voice conspiratorially dropped.
‘Never. I’m just a foreign writer who until recently lived a long way out of town and spent his time quietly scribbling. What’s his name again? Orazio something?’
‘Giardini. To tell you frankly, I am not of his party and I pray daily for his arrest for the scandal of the cement at our public swimming pool. Remind me to tell you some time,’ adds this admirably indiscreet person hurriedly as male voices approach. I’m fast warming to Bettina, who seems very much my sort of gal.
The old-fashioned English phrase used to be ‘a gentleman of full habit’, but the modern epithet ‘obese’ at least starts off on the right foot when it comes to describing the man Benedetti is ushering into the room. Had his habit been any fuller he would surely explode, showering us with tripes and trouser buttons. One could with accuracy describe Mayor Giardini as terminally fat, and with assonance as mortally portly. He has hooded eyes that make one think of a corrupt Renaissance cardinal. At once I begin to wonder quite how wise it is to be doing deals with a man like this, no matter how indirectly. With a familiar weasel like Benedetti it all seemed a bit of a game but seeing in the abundant flesh exactly where this town’s buck stops is sobering.
Novelists often describe very fat men as having dainty feet and small hands, which presumably just means these appendages appear small by contrast with the bulk they’re attached to. If Mayor Giardini’s feet look quite normally sized, his hands are actually rather large. The same novelists also claim that such men move ‘with surprising lightness and delicacy’ – again, one assumes, compared with the lumbering progress one would expect. Mayor Giardini unquestionably lumbers. I vaguely recall that his last election slogan was ‘A Big Man for a Big Job’. Having greeted Bettina he turns to me and envelops my hands with a strangler’s grip. He has the politician’s trick of making it seem as though we are old friends rather than a couple of complete strangers who, left to their own devices, would never have wished to meet.
‘It was a happy day for us when you decided to take up residence in this Comune,’ he announces while ensuring that no blood is still circulating in my fingers.
Never let it be said that signor Samper can’t do the formalities. ‘It is an honour to meet you, Mayor,’ I lie.
‘Orazio, Orazio,’ he corrects me. ‘We’re all friends here.’
Bettina, who vanished briefly, reappears and announces ‘A tavola!’ As we move into the dining room I automatically translate the mayor’s name as Horace Gardens and with a shock remember this as a quiet residential road near Kingston, Surrey, where an early boyfriend of mine used to live, lo! some thirty years ago. Thirty! It seems impossible. For a moment pungent memories flood back and swamp the present so that I can’t think what I’m doing on this film set with its refectory table spread with enough food to stock a small supermarket. How did I get from Horace Gardens to Orazio Giardini? On what inscrutable, unforeseeable road? And is young Terry – well, middle-aged Terry now – at this very moment reduced by a similar social commitment to wondering whatever became of
me? No, I guess not. Maybe I ought to track him down and invite him to the first performance of Rancid Pa—
– but Benedetti is graciously showing us into our baronial chairs, whose choice is wise if the alternative is the set of antique rosewood chairs ranged around the walls. Mayor Giardini’s voluminous rump would reduce any of them to matchwood. Golly, the Italians do like their dining tables massive! This one is typical: a gigantic polished slab of oak a good ten centimetres thick supported on legs the size of small tree trunks. The thing could seat twenty and must weigh half a tonne. It wouldn’t be out of place in a medieval banqueting hall where, according to Hollywood, troublesome knights were wont to ride their horses up and down the tables, trampling pewter platters and upsetting the ladies in their wimples. (For all I know this may still pass for table manners in Southern California.) But now, as the stout chair beneath the stouter mayor half stifles its well-bred moan of protest, I discover to my surprise and disappointment that only the three of us will be dining. Bettina has done her bit by spreading the table with food and withdraws to leave the menfolk to their important talk. I have encountered this before in Italy. It always seems more than merely old-fashioned and to hark back to a time when Arabs occupied Sicily and the Moslem ladies knew their place.
She has certainly done us proud. There are plates of salumi of every kind including blood pudding, a home-cured prosciutto from which Benedetti is carving wafer-thin slices to drape over oozing melon, bowls of delicatessen goodies, cheeses on wooden platters and a collection of bottles neatly ranged at the end of the table like a set of tenpins awaiting someone’s triumphal strike. There is also a huge dish of golden panzarotti so freshly fried I can hear the batter giving little squeaks and gasps as they cool. All very conventional, of course. Not a mouseburger in sight.
‘Gentlemen, you must forgive this scratch meal,’ our host says, heaping our plates with crumpled satiny rags of prosciutto. ‘But I thought we could all do with a change from formality and have a more down-to-earth evening with true peasant fare. All the meats here come from Bettina’s father,’ he explains to me, ‘who raises, butchers and cures his own products himself. You probably know him already. Nicòla the butcher, down by the fountain?’
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