After Tivoli the roads were frequently bumpy and often very dusty, but some were the best I had ever known. It was Italy, after all, which was the first country to build a specific autostrada. We made astonishing time. The Cunningham could touch over eighty miles an hour and Santucci pushed it to the limit whenever the chance arose. He talked constantly for the first two or three hours, as warm, yellow villages and vast tawny fields went by; then he cocked his head, listening to me with an expression of grave concentration as I replied. We were talking mostly about cars and transport in general, a subject of abiding interest to both. Esmé did not seem to mind. She stared ahead, tranquil and happy, enjoying the sights of the countryside, the sensation of movement. At around noon Santucci asked us to get the basket which sat on the seats behind us. From it we dragged chickens, sausages, bread, wine, sliced meats and bottles of Zucco from Palermo, a wine to match that of the best French vineyards. The warm Italian wind in our faces acted with the alcohol to relax us further. Our silk scarves kept most of the dust from our mouths and the goggles Santucci had given us protected our eyes. ‘These are the ultimate cars!’ said our host, peering forward because he thought he had seen a policeman (the speed limit in Italy was then 30 mph). ‘The best the War produced, eh?’ He shared some of Bazzanno’s notions. He too had been a friend of Boccioni. He had been at the painter’s side when he was wounded. ‘Boccioni needn’t have died. It was a stupid business.’ He would not elaborate. Although he appeared to dramatise everything in his life and make some kind of verbal capital from it, he in fact had a strong sense of discretion which I would call ‘gentlemanly’. Later I came to recognise this trait in people of his type, but then it was fairly new to me. I am still uncertain why he chose to take us to Paris with him. No matter how often I think of it I usually conclude he was moved by amiable generosity, by altruism and by a simple wish to enjoy our company on a long journey. I grew to like him very much, though I was still not used to people who saw virtue in War.
Perhaps because Italy had experienced comparatively little fighting on her own soil, her ex-soldiers looked at things differently. Certainly Bazzanno and Santucci were not the only Italian to return from the front invigorated, anxious to find fresh worlds to conquer, fresh stimuli for their creative impulses. Italy gained impetus while other nations sank into exhaustion. Something in the Italian blood will make the most of any grim situation. They kept their idealism; they deserved to press on, to conquer Africa and destroy the threat of Carthage, which they, better than any, knew so much about. Their Achilles heel would be the Roman Catholic church. Without it, they could have owned an Empire from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The Son is the Son of Light, but the Father is the Father of Ignorance, wiping spittle from his chin with an ornamental crook, his mitre falling over his eyes to blind him, while his limbs tremble with senile palsy. This is the way the old suck life from the young. They deny us our power; and they are jealous of our vigorous movement, the quickness of our brains, the joy of our bodies. The Curse of the Latin countries is unreasoning loyalty to outmoded papal institutions and a marked willingness to compromise with Judaism. You do not hear of such compromises from the Patriarch of Constantinople.
The country was a thousand shades of gold, amber, old ivory, sprawling like a lazy lion beneath the sun; our nostrils were filled with the scent of petrol and wild poppies, of lemons, mustard and honey, our hearts with an innocent relish for simple freedom. Nobody pursued us. Brodmann was a ghost invented by my overtired brain, as was Hakir. Turks and Reds could be a million miles away, fighting in a different universe. Europe’s complacency in those days seemed more like genuine optimism, an apparent willingness to reject past vices and favour modern virtues. I was even heartened when, just outside Milan, I saw the decorated caravans of a Gypsy tribe beside the road and was reminded of Zoyea, my first love. These gypsies symbolised the continuation of Romance, an element of the past which did not threaten, which spoke to me of permanence without decay. They were camped beneath a wall of thick hedges, their horses cropping the grass of the verge and their thin dogs running back and forth looking for scraps. This nomad people had survived a thousand European wars. They spoke a language older than Sanskrit and had come from the East not as conquerors, or as merchants craving power, not as a proselytisers for a dark religion, but as natural wanderers full of ancient, simple wisdom. I have never understood the prejudice expressed towards this people. The so-called gypsies, the travellers of the motorway camps, are merely a shiftless, thieving riff-raff, too lazy to work, too slovenly to seek the responsibility of permanent housing. These degenerates have merely failed to meet the ordinary challenges of urban living. The true Romany, with his dark curls and his gold earring, his violin and his sixth sense, has always attracted me. The women, with their bold eyes and aggressive stance, are amongst the most beautiful on Earth. I was glad to see them. I waved at them as we raced by and wished they had waved back. In my view Hitler went too far when he extended his War against nomad invaders to the harmless gypsy.
Santucci had already apologised for Milan, which he said had nothing to match Rome, but to me the city, when we arrived, was a revelation: factories and massive office-buildings, a sprawl of general industry which took my breath away. Vast numbers of trams running smoothly on intricate track. We had nothing so huge in Russia, not even Kharkov. Milan stank of chemicals and hot steel, of smouldering rubber and blazing coal; her streets were a jangle of metal, of roaring machines, of gloriously energetic people. So much of the architecture was modern, Milan might have sprung up overnight. I had been told the city was ugly; instead I found it magical in its dirty, productive splendour. Here an engineer could work and create, taking his materials from close at hand, drawing on abundant expertise. To me Milan represented a twentieth-century land of plenty, a Garden of Eden with infinite possibilities. It is no wonder this city was the true birthplace of Mussolini’s dynamic new movement. It was the pulsing core of a splendidly impatient nation; a dynamo to power a mighty dream which would become the concrete expression of a true Industrial Revolution. As in Rome, I could have remained longer, breathing in smoke as another breathed ozone, filling my lungs with the essence of metal and oil. But Esmé hated it. She said it left dirt on her skin. It was frightening and too grey. It was noisy. I laughed at her: ‘You must get used to it, little beauty. It’s your future as much as mine.’ She sank back into her trance until the evening, when Santucci took the road again. We spent the night at a tiny pension just short of the Swiss border. We could see the Alps rising before us. Santucci said they were the battlements of a fortress: a fortress of bland certainty, of neutrality, of bourgeois safety. ‘The most magnificent mountains in the world protect the world’s dullest human beings. It is a paradox which captures my imagination. If it’s cleanliness and peace you prize, Signorina Esmé, you should not have to look anywhere else. In Switzerland people complain if a cowbell clanks above the legal level or the tulips grow an inch too tall. It is the very essence of bovine egalitarianism, of the middle-class desire for comfort at any cost. And it is the death knell to Art. In no other country is boredom so thoroughly identified with virtue!’
We crossed the border next morning and were treated to disapproving civility. With innocent efficiency they studied our papers not for clues to our criminality or radicalism but for evidence of penury. Presumably they found us rich enough to be admitted for a day or so to their mountain fastness. To be poor in Switzerland is regarded as the gravest breach of taste. We drove along smooth, well kept roads. Esmé admired the neatness of the flowerbeds, the spotless lack of character in each of the orderly towns, the freshness of the paint on chalets and precisely thatched farmsteads. I half expected to see men outside their barns with brushes in their hands, washing their cows as today the suburb-dweller washes his car. It was strange how in Switzerland three dominant and vital cultures could come together to form, as it were, a vacuum. Possessing neither tension nor vision, Switzerland was the symbol of one particular fu
ture; the future desired by those same small minds who eventually sought to diminish my own achievements and thus preserve the status quo. When, that evening at sunset, we crossed into France at a little town called Sainte-Croix, Esmé yearningly looked behind her; Lot’s wife expelled from some sanitary Sodom.
Santucci seemed as relieved as I to leave the oppressive orderliness of Switzerland. He began to sing some popular song in a loud, unmelodic voice. Like most Italians he believed he was naturally musical, just as negroes labour under the delusion they are all naturally rhythmic. The wind was cool in our faces now and the white lamps of the car outlined massive oaks on both sides of the road. There were no obvious signs of the recent War, but since my geography was so vague I was unsure if the conflict had reached this part of France or not. The sweet air and the silent little towns contradicted the impression I had of Ypres or Verdun: here things looked unchanged and unchallenged for centuries. The smoked goggles we all three wore had the effect of mellowing the landscape further.
With the confidence of familiarity, Santucci swung the car along narrow roads and round sudden bends, singing all the while. As we swept through the villages he would call out names dimly familiar from the newspapers. He knew France well, he said. ‘This is where I received my business education.’ He had been attached to an aerodrome while on duty here in 1916 and had made himself an indispensable supplier of whisky and gin to Allies and Axis alike, ‘I’m no narrow nationalist but a practising international anarchist!’ He laughed and passed Esmé the wine bottle from which he was drinking. She seemed to have forgotten her regret at leaving Switzerland and drank deeply, wiping her mouth on the back of a lovely little hand. Santucci winked at her. She attempted to wink back. She squeezed my arm. He asked me to put a cigarette into his holder for him. I did so and lit the fresh ‘Hareem Lady’, the brand he favoured. ‘Why are you going to England, Signor Cornelius? You seem to prefer, like me, to travel. Are you visiting your family?’
‘I have a wife there. And business, too. I wish to register a number of patents. Everyone has told me it is best to do that in England.’
‘You should go to America instead. Most of my brothers and cousins are there. But it’s much harder now, I suppose. You can’t get in officially. Not if you’re Italian. They think we’re all arsonists!’
I smiled, ‘I’d heard you were.’
‘By nature, certainly. But by training we are very law-abiding. Our loyalties are to the church and to our families. People frequently don’t understand.’
We stopped that evening in Dijon where he insisted on buying us a dozen different pots of mustard. He was dressing a shade more conservatively now, perhaps out of respect for the French. ‘One should always buy mustard in Dijon and sausage in Lyon.’ He was evidently well-known to the little woman who ran the pension. She welcomed us through her low doorway into a hall of white plaster and black beams; Villon himself might have sprawled, pen in one hand, grog-pot in the other, upon her polished wooden floor. When we were seated at a carved elm table near the ingle-nook she brought us our first real taste of French food. Even France’s worst critics forgive her arrogance and uncalled-for attitude of superiority when they taste her cuisine. Esmé smacked red lips and filled her tiny stomach until it was round and hard. Her eyes became dreamy. She was in heaven again. Our hostess smiled like a benign conqueror as she cleaned away the dishes. Santucci exchanged a few polite sentences with her and then we all went slowly up the narrow stairs to our chambers.
In the secure confines of our timbered room Esmé prepared herself for bed. I laughed at her. With her papers and creams she was like a child playing at being a woman. ‘This magic goes on forever,’ she said as she climbed into the four-poster, ‘but isn’t there a price, Simka?’
It was unlike her to indulge in such considerations and I was unreasoningly surprised, almost angry. Her remark seemed like ingratitude, though I was by no means sure why, and I found that I was disturbed, impatient with her. Surely this was misplaced pessimism? I curbed my bad temper, however. ‘I think the price has already been paid. By you. By me.’ The bed was white and soft in the warm darkness of the little, low-ceilinged apartment. I enjoyed an infantile sense of safety. ‘All of it is my reward for my sufferings. And you are sharing in it. You, too, have suffered.’ I fell back on my pillows with a grunt of pleasure. They were edged in intricate lace. She grinned and leaned against me, her mood untroubled again. I appeared to have reassured her easily enough and consequently reassured myself. Esmé had no business voicing uncomfortable notions. With her firmly in my arms, I went to sleep.
Santucci at breakfast was eager to get on the road. He had a friend to meet in Paris. ‘An eminent soldier with a small army for sale. I shall need a larger car on the way back.’ It was a joke, we realised. He was wearing his formal suit of wheat-coloured silk. I envied him his elegance, for my own clothes were rather inappropriate to this part of the world. I decided to equip myself and Esmé with a new wardrobe as soon as we settled in England. I had grown self-conscious about my Russian clothing which had seemed so modish in Odessa and rather ahead of the fashion in Constantinople. Here, however, it felt heavy, shapeless and dowdy. Again I was tempted to put on a uniform, but realised it might look inappropriate worn by a man travelling with a British passport. Some of my existing luggage could be sold and what it fetched invested in one decent suit. Such details I would decide in Paris. I planned to return to my Russian identity and acquire papers for Esmé establishing her as my sister from Kiev.
When I considered the difficulties, the amount of work I should have to do, I became almost reluctant to reach Paris. I consoled myself that I should be in London within a week or two. I still found it almost impossible to believe only a couple of hundred miles separated me from Mrs Cornelius and her beloved Whitechapel. London, of all those great cities, had seemed remote, legendary: as abstract as my unrealised dreams. Now Rome and Paris took substance, but Odessa and Constantinople became merely a hazy fantasy from which I had emerged into reality. I had conserved our cocaine as we travelled, not wishing to risk famine in Paris. I had used no more than a pinch or two in the morning after waking. Cocaine has always had the effect of bringing me down to earth, forcing me to examine the realities of life. I determined to apply myself to these problems as soon as we were established in the city. I would seek out Kolya, in the hope he had not yet left. Kolya would help solve everything. I also tried to imagine what life would be like in Whitechapel. I knew a quick thrill of excitement mixed with some trepidation. I remembered my last unfortunate meeting with Mrs Cornelius, her expressed disapproval of my liaison with Esmé. My friend was bound to change her mind when she met my little girl.
As we went out into a beautiful, soft morning of pine-filtered sunlight, driving through Dijon’s picturesque streets, a cheerful Santucci described the new car he meant to buy as soon as it came on the market. An electric racer, he said. Citroën were developing it. We drove now through thinly forested hills, vivid yellow crops of mustard. Occasionally we passed an old château, a distant brown stone village, a farm. Passive livestock grazed in the fields, adding to that sense of timeless permanence so characteristic of rural Ukraine before the Revolution. Might my Ukraine one day return to her former perfection? Surely, I thought, the corpses and the broken gun carriages must soon sink into the cornfields and be forgotten. How could I know? How could I anticipate Stalin’s capacity for cruelty and hatred? He placed a sentence of death upon an entire country. The Bolsheviks starved the granary of Russia! They mined meadows, forests, whole villages to blow up the population, together with any invader. As I have observed many times, people grow so used to conflict and terror and death they cling to them as certainties, in the way the more fortunate cling to old, peaceful rituals. Why do most human beings resist any change, when change usually means their continuing survival? Santucci asked me my opinion of the Citroën Electric. I told him some of my own ideas for cars. These, too, would not be dependent upon benzene. They
might be powered by rockets or beam wireless. I even had plans in my case for a car driven by tiny charges of dynamite.
Naturally, he liked this notion best. ‘Dynamite! There’s your answer, Signor Cornelius. From dynamite our New Europe will arise like a phoenix. All this’—He waved a magnificently gauntleted hand at the little hills and streams—‘must be blown away. The job was only half done when they called it off to arrange that miserable Armistice.’
I could see little reason for such destruction. ‘There’s room for everything in my future.’ I was somewhat pious.
‘To produce a genuinely different world one must wipe out every memory, every sign, every clue to the past. History must go!’ He was laughing. We took a humpbacked bridge and flew for a few seconds before returning to the road. The long bonnet of the Cunningham glittered in the sun like the barrel of a Krupps cannon. He even pointed the machine as if it were a gun. He took joy from his control.
‘You’re a Bolshevik, then!’ I shouted over the engine. ‘You should visit Russia. Go soon. They’re already putting your theories into action!’
He took this in good part, shaking his head and grinning. ‘But with so little style, my friend. If a thing is to be done properly, it must be done with grace! Any Frenchman would tell you that much.’
I had met such dandified nihilists in Peter. Most of them had died or been imprisoned in the first days of Lenin’s triumph. Not only did I refuse to take Santucci seriously, I felt a certain pity for him. If he ever experienced real revolution he must surely become an early victim. He was far more a bad poet than a bad politician, however, and one can always forgive bad poets. Power is the last thing they want. They are usually too frightened by the responsibility involved. Sometimes this does not happen: then a ferocious combination is achieved. Our good-humoured driver however was in every way amusing and entertaining. His charm remained as potent as ever. I wished he would decide to go on to London or Berlin. While one moves one does not ‘stew’. The Escape of Motoring is best when one has no true idea of one’s destination.
The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (Colonel Pyat Quartet Series Book 2) Page 36