Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  Propped up on his pillows, Morris thought what a precious and beautiful woman she was, so rich in sincere emotion. Paola could never have cried like this. It wouldn’t even have bothered Paola if he had been having an affair with somebody. Probably she would have been quite pleased. Without thinking he reached out across the bed and caressed her hair.

  ‘Don’t say never,’ Morris said softly. ‘Never is a long time. You’re such a lovely woman, Tonia.’

  His sister-in-law rubbed her knuckles all the more fiercely into her eyes. Her whole body trembled.

  ‘And don’t go away,’ Morris whispered. ‘Because I need you. Who’s going to help me run things if you go away? Paola never helps. I’ve been trying to phone her all day, but she’s never there. And I have all kinds of projects you could join in with, giving a hand to these poor extra-cotnunitari, I’d like to open a proper centre for them, you know. Not just make them slaves.’

  His fingers were stroking her hair very lightly. Then, as she still hid her face in her hands, though her body had stopped trembling now, he rather injudiciously said: ‘I think I’m in love with you, Tonia. I’ve been in love with you a long time. You remind me so much of Massimina.’

  She turned and looked sharply at him, her red eyes straining to focus. ‘Morrees.’ She shook her head, features brimming with confusion. ‘Morrees, set cost straw’ she whispered. ‘So very strange sometimes.’

  So that made her the third of three sisters to have said those exact same words. Morris nearly passed out. ‘Let’s read the Scriptures together,’ he muttered.

  He had already woken towards three and was vomiting copiously when the police arrived. In his dream they had been filling his mouth with filth and dead flesh: Paola, Kwame, Bobo, Forbes. He had been struggling, fighting, calling for Mimi, calling on God. Then suddenly he sat up sharply and ejected it all in a stream of vomit: the worms and wormwood, gall and dung, even bones. He was screaming for a priest. Then the ward was flooded with a light so brilliant that he imagined a vision, a splendid apparition of Mimi, or of Christ. His mind reeled after sight and focus, his stomach still retching, his skin shivering with cold and sweat. And as he raised his eyes it was to find, more nightmarish than his nightmare, the angular Fendtsteig approaching across the room, a nurse on one side, a carabiniere on the other. They had got him at last.

  The nurse broke into a run, found cloths and cleaning equipment. Morris continued to retch and was helped from his bed. ‘I had a dream,’ he gasped between convulsions. ‘My face. They were carving up my face.’ A junior doctor had arrived and was kindly explaining that this could well be a delayed reaction to the prolonged anaesthesia of the operation. Morris was helped into a dressing-gown and led off to a consulting room. Fendtsteig came with them, waiting, watching, though actually it was taking Morris some considerable effort to keep retching now. Finally, when he had calmed down and sipped a little water, he turned to the carabiniere with a wan smile. ‘Can I help?’

  Fendtsteig leaned over to the doctor and there was a muttered exchange. The doctor shrugged his shoulders. ‘How do you feel,’ he asked.

  ‘A bit weak,’ Morris admitted. ‘But if the colonnello has some questions, I suppose . . .’

  Then they sat him on the examining bed and broke the news. Quite brutally, Morris thought. Not the way he would have done it at all. Just told him straight. Wife dead. In arms of black lover. Gas. Racism. Not a scrap of sensibility. Allowing Morris to respond with the appropriate incredulity, head shaking, staring eyes. Then a barrage of questions, of disbelieving questions - when, where, why, who, how had they got in? -until suddenly he buried his ruined face in his hands, swaying gently from side to side. He waited perhaps a minute. Finally in a low voice he said: ‘I’m exhausted, it’s too much. It’s too much. Why does everything have to happen to me? Why do people die all around me?’ He shook his head. No, he couldn’t identify the body now. He just couldn’t. He wouldn’t. He refused! And he begged for tranquillisers and to be allowed to go to sleep. He stood up to go, stumbled, but at the same time saw in the mirror above the washbasin that Fendtsteig’s eyes following him to the door were cold and curious. The man was inhuman!

  Turning abruptly, Morris screamed: ‘Now that you’ve seen what kind of woman my wife was, maybe you’ll understand why I was spending my evenings moping over my dead girlfriend’s grave! But your sort never believe people until the truth Is rammed In your face. The next thing you know I’ll have to hear that I killed my own wife. And mother and first love and colleagues and everybody who’s ever died in the vicinity.’

  A flicker of guilty uncertainty crossed the carabiniere’s face. But stumbling back down the corridor, Morris suddenly wondered whether he had remembered to put away the bottle of Lexotan. Oh, for God’s sake! Had he? Or was It still sitting there tell-tale in Its little brown bottle on the draining board? No. No, please, Mimi! And at the same time as he found this new source of worry, he was immediately worried about worrying about it, about losing his nerve. For he was vulnerable on so many sides. If they were to search his locker during the night, for example, find the nail-parings, dry skin, pubic hairs. Or to ask people in the hospital where he had been yesterday when absent from the ward for upwards of five hours. Or to grill Forbes, who would doubtless break down, as he had broken down at the merest phone call from Morris. For how long was he going to have to rely on their total lack of imagination, on his being the artist, the conjurer and them the almost willingly, yes, willingly, deceived? Hadn’t that American In Milwaukee gone and killed twenty and more people because the police just refused to put two and two together and arrest him, even after seeing the murdered flesh In his fridge? It was appalling! May they rot at the very bottom of the bottom of hell. When the night nurse brought out the Diazepam, Morris begged for the maximum dose possible, begged for it and got it and so slept the sleep of the just.

  33

  Azedine and Farouk looked miserably abject as they were led into the Palazzo di Giustizia. The older man seemed at once hardened and resigned in the way the oppressed classes so often are. He wore jeans and a black smock. In a white shirt, the handsome young Farouk had an elegiac Pre-Raphaelite despondency about him, his hair long, his face olive thin. Passing them in the corridor, Morris wanted to catch them by the arm, tell them all was well. It was merely a question of time. God had sorted everything out, he would say. Allah, if they liked. Morris’s religion was in no way sectarian. They need have no fear. The guilty would be punished, had been punished already, the just would be freed. ‘Evil pursueth sinners: but to the just good shall be repaid.’ Antonella had read that to him only yesterday, shortly after the funeral. Her determination to comfort him for his loss, almost forgetting her own, seemed itself a confirmation of the sacred text. ‘Azedine!’ he called. ‘Comggio!’ But they were already disappearing into the courtroom, while Morris himself was ushered off to the room where the witnesses must wait to be called. Never mind, he reflected, a bit of tension wouldn’t do the two queers any harm, was chastening rather. God knows he had been chastened enough himself.

  Chastened was a nice word, he thought, allowing himself to be led through bustling corridors where journalists tried to catch his arm or stick a microphone in front of him. Its implications of a recovered virginity were refreshing. And such ideas seemed far more feasible now that Paola was gone. In fact one way you could see it all was that he had only undergone the awful degradation of that afternoon in order to be freed from such filth for ever, to be chastened. Certainly for a week now he had been chaste as white snow. And felt the better for it.

  Outside the witnesses’ room, somebody from some scandal mag was lying in wait with a tape-recorder and huge camera. They were after dirt on Paola and the Negro of course. The press had loved that. Morris made it abundantly clear he would neither talk nor pose for absolutely anyone. He would answer the questions he was asked in court and that was that. Covering his scarred face with both hands, he plunged into the guarded room.


  Forbes was already there, looking distinctly more nervous than he need be, Morris noticed, while three or four of the other immigrants were confabulating together on a low bench. Then there were the shop-floor foreman and two of the daytime bottling workers. With the press off his back and the door closed behind, Morris saluted them all affably. Out loud, to no one in particular, he mentioned that he was planning to expand the bottling hall to meet the new orders the company was getting, mainly from England. He tried to draw them in, black and white alike, to give them a feeling they were being consulted, they were part of a large family and he had their future at heart, but both immigrants and natives hung back, awkward and hostile, clustered in their little groups. Perhaps because of the armed policeman standing at the door, Morris thought. In any event he felt no qualms about despising them, their cautiousness and perverse lack of spirit. Even Forbes could manage nothing more than monosyllables when asked how the restoration work at Villa Catullus was getting on. ‘Or perhaps we should just call it II Collegio, what do you think?’

  Smiling his brightest smile, Morris sensed how his eyes must now shine all the more blue and bright in the sad field-hospital his face had become (perhaps it was his face that made the bottling staff so uneasy - he kept forgetting). Forbes’s own dull orbs fluttered uncertainly under the dusty pelmets of his eyelids. Morris winked at him and grinned, though frankly this flowery tie business was beginning to seem awfully mannered.

  The witnesses sat quietly in the waiting-room as Azedine and Farouk were tried for murder. The bottle-plant foreman was smoking, but Morris decided not to object. One by one the immigrants were called to testify. Then the factory workers. No more than ten minutes each. Forbes came over to complain that it was going so much more quickly than he had expected, that Azedine and Farouk would be condemned and sentenced in no time at all. Perhaps even today. Morris told him in no uncertain undertone to keep calm. Even if sentenced they would be let off later, when the truth came out. There would be an antnistia, That was what Italy was like. Nothing was definitivo. It was merely a question of putting up with a few months of prison while the bureaucracy ground to its inevitable conclusion. Nor could he and Forbes blame themselves if the police were so damn slow at finding the kind of evidence any other police force would have turned up before you could say life sentence. They’d done everything they could to get the boys off. In fact Forbes had done rather too much, Morris said, had complicated the situation unnecessarily out of mere infatuation for a handsome Arab who had anyway betrayed him. Rodolfo il rosso indeed! He must have been mad. At which the old man began to moan that he should never have got into this mess. He put his face in his hands and rubbed his fingers into his eyes. Morris felt distinctly superior. It was he who would have to face the most savage cross-questioning in the end, he who the defence lawyers in collusion with the carabinieri had doubtless identified as an alternative scapegoat. Glancing up at the poliziotto at the door, he reminded Forbes quite sharply that, far from being a mess, what he had in fact got himself into was an excellent situation where he could have all the stupid little boys his heart lusted for under the same splendidly restored roof and then teach them the things he was such an expert on. Before he met Morris he had been more or less on the street, with no more than Her Majesty’s state pension, n’est-ce-pas, and he better not forget it. The truth was that although Forbes could have destroyed him with the slightest disclosure, it somehow seemed to be Morris who had the knife by the handle. As soon as one knew the man was queer- and really Kwame and Paola had given him a fund of information before their decease - all feelings of respect or intimidation were quite lost. And what a hash he’d made of his letters!

  ‘Audentes fortuna juvat,’ Forbes muttered.

  That’s better,’ Morris said. Then he asked with a tone bound to remind the man of the relationship they had lost: ‘What does it mean exactly?’

  That you’re right,’ Forbes said, and he got up and asked the guard if he could use la toilette.

  After a break for lunch Antonella arrived. Morris hurried towards her with concern on his face and they embraced.

  ‘E allora?’ he asked. They came? The police got them?’

  ‘Nobody came,’ she explained. ‘Obviously. I waited an hour and a half.’

  ‘Perhaps they realised the police were coming.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how,’ Antonella said. ‘I mean, I was really the only person to know about the plan.’

  Forbes, on a bench at the other end of the room, had his face in his hands again. He hadn’t even had the decency to greet the woman,

  The way I see it,’ Morris said, ‘it was never anything but a hoax to try to switch attention away from these immigrants. They never had Bobo at all or they would have given some proof.’

  Rather encouragingly, if somewhat less sensitively than Morris had expected of her, Antonella said: ‘Frankly, with everything that’s come out about Bobo, I’m not unhappy about that.’ There was something desperately bitter in the way she spoke, something that was going to require a lot of kindness and proven goodwill to heal.

  Then the poliziotto called the name Morrees Duckworrth.

  Morris got up from the bench and was led through stone-paved corridors into a large bare room with high-vaulted ceiling where memories of a fresco survived in scattered fragments, faces and feathers in the grainy stucco, bellies and buttocks looming at random like some wittily appropriate testimony to the difficulty of reconstructing any comprehensive vision of things. Squalid plastic chairs scraped on a marble floor and there was the clack of a keyboard from a desk in the corner. Modern culture had apparently taken up residence in here like a miserable little hermit crab in some noble old shell. Three judges - an elderly man presiding and two disturbingly young women accompanying - sat in their robes behind the dais, while, on the wall above their heads, beside a broken light fitting and plastic crucifix, the words la legge È uguale per tutti were in need of a touch-up.

  Morris was ushered to what might have been a mere kitchen chair with microphone stand beside. But he made up for this mortifying lack of ceremony by announcing ‘I swear’ with great sonority and solemnity when the judge proposed the oath. As soon as he had sat down he directed his eyes to all the various protagonists one by one, and found no difficulty in conveying both confidence and comprehension: he had nothing to fear, and nothing against these two poor boys who sat paper-white but for their dark faces behind a table, each with his defence lawyer beside him.

  Yes, he admitted, he was Morris Albert Duckworth, born in Acton, London, Regno Unito, 19/12/60. Yes, he was resident at Are Zovo io, Quinzano, Provincia di Verona. Yes, he did recognise the two accused though he only knew their first names. Farouk and Azedine. Both were casual workers in the factory of which he was presently the joint owner. Both had been resident in the hostel that he himself had set up as part of a charitable attempt to help the many extra-comunitari living on the streets with no hope of either work or shelter. As an immigrant himself in a way, he had always felt close to those trying to make a new life in an alien community.

  This was true. There was a murmur of hypocritical approval in the typically Catholic audience, none of whom, doubtless, had ever done anything to help a miserable immigrant.

  So much for the preamble. Now the pubblico ministero, the prosecution, began to ask about the morning of the crime, the supposed crime. What time had Morris gone to the office, what had he found, how much money had been missing from the safe? Morris replied efficiently and factually. He reconstructed the scene in the office exactly as it had been: the upturned chairs, the scraping of skin and blood on the floor, the broken telephone. He told of Forbes’s phone call earlier that morning explaining that the immigrants had been sacked. He admitted that he had only connected the two facts sometime later, he was so bewildered by the situation, especially coming as it had so soon after his mother-in-law’s death. His mind had been in a daze.

  Not a word of this in any way broke his oath. Except perh
aps his mention now of the strong smell of cheroots.

  Had there been, the lawyer asked, any previous conflict between Roberto Posenato and the immigrants in question? Anything that might have created a feeling of resentment on the part of the immigrants. Morris hesitated, he bit his lip for a moment as someone obliged to say something damaging where loyalty would have been more congenial. He made sure that for the moment his eyes crossed no one’s. Then he explained the business about the use of the lavatories, how they had been locked during the night shift. There was a certain amount of racism,’ he said, ‘amongst members of staff, and unfortunately Bobo, Roberto Posenato, did nothing to combat it. The night shift, all of whom were extra-comunitari, were only allowed to use the toilet facilities after my determined intervention. At the time, I must admit, I had no idea that any of the workers were engaged in homosexual practices, otherwise my own prejudices might have been awakened.’

  ‘You are prejudiced against homosexuals?’ the prosecution asked.

  The witness appeared to think about this seriously. Tut it like this,’ he finally said, ‘I can perfectly well understand Bobo deciding to fire two men found to be having anal sex in his office when they should have been working. On the other hand I can well imagine that they had developed the kind of victim mentality, due to their earlier treatment at the hands of whites in general, which might have led them to believe they were being unfairly treated.’

  ‘You believe they reacted by killing him?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Morris said, determined to sail as close to the wind as logistics would allow. ‘I think nothing at all. One just has to recognise that such things are possible. The two are fired, they go away and talk to the others, as they did. They pack their bags and say they are leaving the area immediately. Then maybe they decide they will have one last try to change Bobo’s mind. They go back, an argument begins and . . .’ Morris shrugged his shoulders, making it clear he found the whole thing most unpleasant. But feasible.