by Tim Parks
In a stupefying steam of wine, the bottles jerking on the conveyor, the cheap plastic tops snapping rhythmically down, Morris had to shout to tell them they should be ashamed of themselves. Hadn’t one of the three kings been black? Yet Christ had accepted his gift. Hadn’t he told Paul to eat the gentiles’ food? Everybody had to be accepted: red and yellow black and white. He could almost hear his mother’s voice teaching him the Sunday school chorus now. His mind was buzzing, boiling. Father had been a miserable racist. Of course they knew to do it in the bowl and leave the seat clean. They weren’t animals. The continuity of your jobs,’ he wound up, suddenly determined to punish, ‘to a great extent depends on the money we are making from the night shift. These are hard times, and don’t you forget it. Other companies are collapsing all around us.’
Then, in his eagerness for her approval, he ran back out to the car to talk to Massimina. Surely she would back him up. He may have been a monster on occasion, he might despise bad taste and obscenity, sometimes he had been guilty of unpleasantness and certainly of rashness, but he had never, never, never sunk to this kind of moral squalor.
He poured his heart out into the phone. Massimina was her usual silent self, yet Morris was not discouraged. He sensed that when the time came she would give him her seal of approval. He was not a man whose affection waned merely because not immediately requited.
On arrival back at Villa Caritas, as Forbes had now christened it, a fat figure in his late fifties, dressed in battered hunting jacket and leggings, was using a pickaxe to pull up the paving. He scratched at the bristles on a square head. He could remember, he said, at least within a yard or two, where they had put the septic tank, though why it should have got blocked, he couldn’t imagine. The system had been planned for a family of a dozen and more. It was a big house.
They stood around in a circle, watching the man heave and grunt as he pulled up flagstones. Insects fled like refugees in some aerial photograph. Finally the cement top of the septic tank was uncovered. Kwame and another Ghanaian helped the man to prise it up. They got a plank underneath and slid it away, revealing, in the round hole, along with an amazing and quite overpowering stench, a curious surface of shiny bubble-gum pink, scores of bloated rosy swellings in a brown scum. Everybody stared. Azedine and Farouk exchanged glances. Then the young Ramiz burst out laughing. But the mason was shaking his head. ‘You don’t,’ he said, ‘put those rubber things down the toilet. Va bene!’ Looking up, it was clear his gaze was directed at the two blacks present, as if only they could have been so lascivious and so ignorant. ‘Not in the toilet!’ he said louder, as though volume might help them understand his fierce Italian. ‘Not those rubber things in the toilet!’
’ You’re joking,’ Paola said later when Morris told her this and she laughed loudly. Those old peasant guys are so Catholic! I bet he’s been crossing himself ever since, thinking of all that sin.’
Well, it certainly seemed to be getting her excited, Morris thought, and he remembered noticing a sort of faint awe on her face the day he had got Kwame to help him up the stairs with a rather attractive eighteenth-century dresser he had bought. ‘Bel ragazzo, she had said, ‘bello grande!’
They were watching television. The lira was falling, the government debt blossoming, a minor politician had been decapitated in a butcher’s shop somewhere down south, a major politician arrested up north. Now the announcer was reading out the names of the referees for next Sunday’s first-division games. Apparently, some of the choices were controversial. But Morris was still back there with the devaluation and the public debt. Perhaps he should be getting what personal funds he had into Deutschmarks as soon as possible?
‘So?’ Paola asked. ‘Did anyone own up?’
‘What?’
‘To the condoms.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t presume on their privacy.’
She put an arm round him and kissed a blond cheek. ‘I do love the way you talk, Mo.’
Morris found this irritating. Watching an advert now for a local purveyor of talismans (but how could people be so ingenuous?), he told her that what he found gratifying was that in just a short space of time they had obviously found local girls who had fallen in love with them, who didn’t disdain them, the way that unpleasant bunch of cripples and morons at the factory did. The younger generation, he said, seemed more willing to accept diversity, indeed welcome it.
‘Mo!’
‘What?’
‘Mo, you’ve got to be kidding. No, you’re wonderful.’
He was perplexed.
‘Mo, those immigrants would never find a girl in a place like Quinto. The country girls never even touch a southerner, never mind a Negro.’
Morris stared. In the flickering light of the TV there was something fearfully will-o’-the-wispish about her. At once sexy and frightening.
They’re doing it with each other, Mo. I thought you’d realised that. The only thing that amazes me is that they have the good sense to use condoms.’
Seeing his bewilderment, she began to giggle hysterically - at his expense, he felt. Then to top it all there was suddenly pornography on the television. Colpo Grosso had begun. The strippers’ game show. A girl on a red couch was rubbing saliva into her nipples. Morris stood up abruptly.
‘Oh, come on, Mo, let’s watch, we can compare notes.’
But this wasn’t, he said angrily, how he planned to spend his evenings. He’d rather read a book. And he retired to bed with the Divina Commedia, which Forbes had ordered him to read. Slow going, but the kind of background one couldn’t do without if one wished to be thought cultured in Italy. Closing his eyes half an hour later, the brash music of Colpo Grosso still swooning and swanking through poor insulation, Morris wondered what punishment the great poet could possibly have invented that would be bad enough for the likes of Paola and Bobo and . . . and . . . but he was already being raised up into the paradise of sleep. Mimi was Beatrice of course, arms open, beatific, cream-freckled smile.
Of course his boys weren’t doing it with each other.
Part Two
12
It was typical of Morris that he would find around midday or mid-afternoon that he was in a different mood from the one he had imagined he was in, certainly a different mood from the one he had begun the day in, and then he would have to spend a great deal of precious mental effort trying to work out how he had come to be there, inexplicably happy or hopelessly suicidal as he might be. Today, it was while sorting out the little library in his own small office in the town centre, putting the art and photography books in order of period and movement, and then the poetry and novels in order of author (because he thought of the place less and less as an office and more and more as a studio), that he suddenly appreciated that he was feeling immensely cheerful, and this despite the mess he had been reflecting his marriage was, and the not inconsiderable difficulty over the phone with Doorways earlier on about some exploded cases of Superiore. The English were concerned about a suspiciously high alcohol content, but Morris had been able to assure them that it was merely a question of a machine having left too little air space at the top of the bottle. Yes, notwithstanding both the deeper structural problems and the average day’s little frictions, he was feeling positively optimistic, and he couldn’t for the life of him think why. The morning’s conversation with Antonella, perhaps, about whether or not they should insist on the immigrants having a medical check-up every now and then. Her voice had a way of soothing him, he’d noticed that. But hardly to the extent of his jumping for joy. Or the business with the parking ticket he’d avoided by telling the vigilessa how much better Italy was than England and how he admired people like herself who did a difficult and generally frowned-upon job seriously. That had been fun. A little exercise of the side of his character he liked best: his charm, his powers of persuasion.
But Morris didn’t feel that these things, pleasant as they had been, could account for this sense of what, on inspection, was almost elation. Or if
they could, then they shouldn’t and there was something wrong with him. Grinning, he filed a copy of Leopardi (doubtless he’d get down to reading all the greats one day) and hoped that when he arrived at the truth he wouldn’t feel let down. Like the day he’d caught himself feeling cheerful merely because he’d received a birthday card from his father.
In the event, it wasn’t until late afternoon, when he was thinking he might pick up a bottle of something halfway decent for the dinner that evening - otherwise Bobo would be saving pennies by having them drink the company plonk, something Morris had more or less vowed he would never do again (and particularly after this news of the exploding cases) - it wasn’t until late afternoon that it occurred to him that what had set his mental weather so fair, was precisely this unexpected dinner with the in-laws. Of course! For although he’d hardly registered the fact during his chat with Antonella, the truth was that this invitation marked a very considerable turning-point. Morris was being invited to a casual family gathering. Not to a formal event planned some weeks ahead and from which he could hardly be excluded, but to a simple informal everyday dinner, the invitation having come in the most relaxed of conversations and at the shortest possible notice. So Morris was being accepted as family and friend, his age-old aspiration and indeed the thing that had attracted him to Massimina in the first place.
The fog early February had lifted. There was an extraordinary crystalline quality to the air now. Everything was sharp horizon, serrated: the pointed cypresses, churches and water-towers in the plain to the south, the splendidly bared teeth of the mountains rising above hills to the north. Then when night fell it was the cut and thrust of bright neon through icy silhouettes and scores of white and yellow holes punched at random in the thick black paper of a winter dark. On his way to Residence La Speranza, Morris stopped at the most expensive florist’s Verona could afford.
He thus had a huge bouquet of flowers in his hands when he arrived some fifteen minutes later at the video-controlled gate. That would show them who knew how to be gracious. Plus a bottle of Grigolino and another of Trebbiano, and his face was a wreath of the pleasantest, end-of-the-day, time-for-a-chummy-talk smiles. As he climbed the stairs to their apartment, he decided that when the maid opened the door he must ask her in an undertone to put the flowers in water and say not a word to Antonella - surprise them with his shyness. Since she would mention it of course. Yes.
He knocked. ‘Può metter’ questi in aequo?’ his lips had already begun to form the request, a delicious candour in his wide-open eyes, when he realised that the face suddenly appearing behind the door was not the maid’s at all, no, but a ludicrous photofit combination of goatee beard, hooked nose, and balding pate framed in frizzled curls. A burst balloon could not have deflated more quickly than Morris Duckworth’s optimism.
‘Hi, kid, how you doin’? Long time no see, hey, pal?’
It was Stan. Stan Albertini. Antonella, apparently, had thought how nice it would be for Morris to have someone ‘English’ to talk to. As if Morris’s Italian wasn’t perfectly good enough. As if a Jewish Italian-American could in any way remind him of home. Unless it was that he, Morris, had been invited merely to keep Stan company.
‘You must get nostalgic sometimes.’ Antonella was smiling at both of them, making no comment on the splendid flowers.
To which Morris could hardly say that the only nostalgia he felt was for the time when he had been in a position to wring the stupid Californian’s neck.
And at dinner, with the glass tabletop spangling the candelight, and the waxed stucco walls flickering back their moneyed pinkness over a white porcelain dinner service, Paola actually flirted with the fool. With Stan! Leaning over so that he could see inside her dress! While Bobo talked politics and economics to him, nodding and shaking his head, taking him seriously even, despite the American’s execrable Italian and extraordinary table manners, eating with immense rapidity and asking for seconds of everything in an accent that screamed only-child-in-San-Diego. What did he think about Bush, Bobo asked, about the situation in the Gulf? Could it have commercial repercussions? Questions he never asked Morris. Stan spoke with his mouth full, scratching at obviously abundant chest hair beneath a tattered shirt. His jeans were patched and his wispy hair drifted around his bald spot like weeds in water. Meanwhile Antonella asked the maid to get him some more lasagne since he seemed so hungry, while Bobo thoughtfully poured him another glass of the expensive wine Morris had bought that nobody had as yet said thank you for. Then of course Paola had to join in again and say how much she would like to visit the USA - she had never been, she was sure it must be more fun than England - and Stan, almost spitting pasta as he spoke, started to sing the praises of California and to wave a fork in the air to suggest the various beach activities that could only happen in San Francisco. Paola giggled.
So much, Morris thought grimly, for his arrival into the cosy inner circle of the Trevisan family. So much for his triumph, his initiation! No sooner did he arrive in the sanctum - the expensive antiques tastefully laid out in a sharp geometry of modern surfaces; the intimacy of the family, in the sense at once of commercial venture and the wholesome expression of traditional socio-cultural values - than with a carelessness indistinguishable from cruelty, they allowed that sanctum to be violated by, of all people, stupid Stan, hippy-dippy, bisexual, deep-as-ice-cream Stan. Stan, who had seen him with Mimi, first at the bus-stop in Verona, then at Roma Termini the day he picked up the cash.
Mimi! Suddenly all Morris wanted was to be out of there, to be back home on his own - in the bath perhaps - with his memories. His body flooded with a heat that could find no outlet. His wrists were tense as tense hawsers, holding up some tottering edifice. With a clatter of fork and spoon he pushed away the inevitable tiramisu. Faces that had been politely agog at Stan’s description of sunset-lit barbecues by the Pacific surf turned toward him in alarm, Morris hesitated. Glowing with an anger that he hoped would pass as embarrassment he said he didn’t feel well.
‘Hey, man!’ Stan exclaimed, as if only now remembering he was there. ‘You look pretty rough, kid.’
Paola raised wry eyebrows and clearly had no intention of going early. Bobo was stiffly silent in a candlelight that turned his bad skin to polished board. Only Antonella showed signs of genuine concern, wondered whether it mightn’t be the pigeons they had eaten, invited him to lie on the sofa. Flustered, Morris refused. He’d just have a glass of water. Because he had thought of a better method of escape. He tried to catch his wife’s eye.
But they were talking of holidays now. Antonella, Bobo said, had been thinking of going to Turkey, but perhaps it might be more fun, even though a bit more expensive, to go to California.
Unable to get Paola’s attention, Morris reached a foot under the table and managed to bring his ankle into contact with the inside of her calf. This could have been a little risky under a glass table with no cloth, except that the light above had turned the surface to a mirror on their well-fed chatter. He moved his leg up and down. In the space of a second Paola’s features froze in surprise, thawed into puzzlement, then were soft with indulgence. For Morris had managed to manoeuvre a little higher so that the ankle was on the inside of the thigh now.
‘Povero piccolo,’ Paola immediately said, ‘if you’re really not feeling well, Mo, perhaps we had better go home, after all. I don’t want to be selfish.’
At the very same moment, Antonella leaned across from the conversation they were having with Stan, and said: ‘Oh, of course, you went there too that year, didn’t you, Morris?’ In the rather unfashionable green dress she was wearing, her big breasts were ample and maternal, reminding him again of Mimi.
‘Scusa,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t following. I was thinking perhaps I’d better go.’
’ Yes, I just remembered, you went to Turkey, didn’t you, the summer that poor . . .’
Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t say it, though Morris was still numbed with shock that she had said so muc
h.
Turkey?’ he almost demanded, in sudden and total confusion. ‘Which summer?’
Stan laughed. ‘No, he was going to come with me, weren’t you, but he backed out at the very last moment.’ Smiling through his silly beard across the table, the American said: ‘I guess Morris is a bit of an English aristocrat; he isn’t the kind to travel in a microbus.’
‘But didn’t . . .’ Bobo had begun to object. Quick as thought, Morris was giving him one of those narrowed gazes that mean: I have something to explain to you that I can’t say in front of Stan. At the same time he realised he could barely breathe.
‘Lucky for you you didn’t come.’ Stan was laughing. ‘Because of course we crashed the damn thing. Remember, Mo, kiddo, when we met at Roma Termini, and I had the plaster up to my thighs?’
‘Come on, Mo.’ Paola had stood up. ‘You’re looking quite white.’ Her face bore that inquisitive admiration of one amazed at another’s ability to feign something on behalf of a shared complicity. Presumably she imagined he was going to get his colour back and have his hand in her pants the moment they were out of there.
Morris opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Stan was greedily shoving more tiramisu into his. Bobo was staring. Antonella said lightly: ‘Oh, but I was sure you’d been to Turkey, Morris. I remember thinking how kind of you it was to phone from Ankara about . . .’
Again she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it.
‘Yes,’ Bobo agreed. ‘I distinctly remember you calling from Ankara, when Mimi was missing.’