A definite congeniality attached to these expostulatory conversations of ours in Jayjay’s beamed kitchen. Italy might have been a country we both loved, but all foreigners everywhere enjoy an occasional grouse about their foster home. It reminds them that they belong to the planet and not just to a particular spot on it. In any case our exchanges reinforced something between us: a shared uprootedness, perhaps. Nor was it simply a matter of our nationality, either, since unlike many foreigners we never grumbled about perennial Italian targets such as bureaucracy or corruption. Both of us were widely travelled and had spent years of our adult lives in lands whose bureaucracies and corruption were worse than Italy’s by a factor of ten. Besides, we had long since come to appreciate the convenience of being able to solve little legal contretemps at a civilised personal level. On a visit to London a few years ago I was stopped by a policeman in Knightsbridge traffic for making an illegal turn and came within an ace of handing him a fiver out of a lifetime’s sheer habit before remembering that this was England and we British did things differently. In short, greasing the wheels of life was nothing to jib at, whereas not being able to cook something without a Tuscan housewife saying you were doing it all wrong was a serious issue for complaint.
I liked overhearing the running battle that Jayjay and Marcella kept up when she was in the house: it was so obviously based on deep affection on both sides. So far as I was able to judge his Italian was flawless, and when she became mischievously bossy over his cooking or other domestic habits he would lapse into local dialect to remonstrate with her. ‘Ddio boia, o che fè?’ he would ask, peering disdainfully into the saucepan into which she was stirring some ingredient. He perfectly produced the slight goatlike bleating of Ddio, that thick peasant sound which made her collapse with laughter to hear in the mouth of a foreigner even though it was the language her father Claudio, and therefore she herself, had spoken from birth. Or he would eye the huge bowl of salad she had prepared for lunch and exclaim in mock disgust ‘Mmadonna sbudellèta, erba, erba! Un sò’ mica un bòe! O un cunìgglio …!’ Marcella would pretend to be shocked by the muscular Tuscan blasphemies but it was obvious she found them as reassuring as she found Jayjay precisely because he understood the old ways of which they had been part and which had only recently been thrust below the surface of received Italian life, down into abeyance beneath the flavourless lingua franca of television and demotic culture. One could see the flirtatiousness of this eighty-year-old man and forty-year-old woman as they worked on each other’s sense of humour, and not for the first time I was struck by the sheer attractiveness of the man if he wished to charm.
It seemed he had inherited Claudio and Marcella, father and daughter, together with the house nearly a quarter of a century previously. They lived in an adjacent farmhouse a little further up the valley from Il Ghibli, surrounded by terraces of olives which effectively ran unbroken into Jayjay’s own. The year before Jayjay had taken the house in 1978 Claudio had been almost the last small farmer in the region still to be tied to the ancient system of mezzadria, or métayer, whereby as tenant he gave his landlord half of everything he produced. When the landlord died in 1977 Claudio’s house and land became entirely his own property and he was a free man (‘Oggi siamo tutti signori’, people took pleasure in saying as they bought their wives cheap furs and went off to Africa on safari). In those days Claudio still kept a flock of sheep that grazed the terraces. Now he bought his mutton in the Co-op and owned a tractor with which he ploughed meticulously around the olives to bring air and nutrients to their roots.
I soon learned that Marcella was in and out of Jayjay’s house most days: that far from being the thrice-weekly charlady I had initially taken her for she filled a role in both their lives that combined something of a wife, something of a sister and something of a daughter, as well as a watchful family friend keeping an eye on an elderly relative. If she herself was not around, her father very likely was, foraging purposefully nearby, blue with Bordeaux mixture or looking for something to chop down. But Marcella generally contrived to be there each day for at least half an hour and it was a surprise to learn that she had three children of her own to look after as well. Her young husband Eugenio had been killed in a horrendous and unnecessary accident seven years ago when employed as an engineer by the state railway. One Sunday morning he and a maintenance crew had been working on a stretch of the overhead power line between Arezzo and Florence when somehow the current for that section had been switched back on without warning. Eugenio and three others on the wheeled gantry were killed instantly. I never formed any very clear idea about Eugenio’s emotional legacy. I seldom heard him mentioned and the children, two teenaged girls and a ten-year-old boy, seemed not obviously fatherless. His financial legacy, though, was much better defined. Since the FS was a state industry the union had very properly extracted some decent sums by way of compensation and at forty Marcella was also drawing a widow’s pension.
It became clear to me how wrong I had been – betraying, no doubt, the sentimental indulgence we impose on the elderly – to suppose Jayjay might be short of company. A less lonely person I never met, at least in the superficial sense of his apparently having as much affection and companionship as he wanted. (It was necessary to qualify this by saying that his desire for company had distinct limits and to observe that he was a man used to being a loner who had built up the strength of those who expect no help.) Marcella’s children treated him like a grandfather, as one of the family; and it was obvious that the little boy Dario, in particular, adored him unreservedly. Equally plainly Jayjay adored him in return, and the two indulged in a sort of pre-erotic version of the flirtatiousness Jayjay and Marcella shared. One is reduced to calling it flirtatiousness because there seems no other adequate word. It was more piquant than teasing, though kinder, while never edging too close to suggestiveness. Dario would listen spellbound to Jayjay’s stories of other times and distant places: of a haunted oasis south of El Kharga lived in by werewolves who went loping off across the desert after sunset; of the gold death-mask Jayjay had watched being made for a Greek shipping magnate of his lover who had fallen from a trapeze; of a maze designed by a stranger for the botanical gardens in Samarkand which had had to be ploughed up in the nineteenth century because nobody who entered it ever came out again. Jayjay, supreme ghoul himself, understood the essential ghoulishness of boys and delighted Dario with accounts of horrid recipes he had eaten around the world. The sheep’s eyes and tenderised puppies led naturally to a description of General Idi Amin’s famous fridge full of his enemies’ body parts. Yet in more dangerous matters he was obviously quite scrupulous. I encountered an example of Jayjay’s tastefulness towards Dario when the boy once showed me Lady Amelia’s squashed dildo and gave me a version of the story Jayjay must have told him. In this slightly edited account the object was simply a model of her dead husband’s cock which she had carried about with her as a sentimental keepsake, like a lock of his hair. Pretty weird, huh? said Dario. But listen: Lady Amelia was nothing compared to her sister, Agatha. La Agata had kept a plaster cast of every pet she ever owned and lived in a palace whose floors were strewn with plaster Pomeranians, whose sofas sagged beneath the weight of plaster pussy-cats and whose ceilings were hung with cages of plaster bullfinches. Even the bath was full of plaster goldfish. And when she died …? No, said Dario, firmly shaking his head, ‘they didn’t make her into a plaster cast. But when they cut her open to see why she had died they discovered her heart was made of plaster … Hee-hee, got you there! Just for a minute you believed that, didn’t you? (passing on with glee the very narrative prank with which Jayjay must have caught him).
The first time I had seen Jayjay and Dario together they were playing with a rocket kit that involved filling a plastic Schweppes tonic bottle with water and pumping it up with a bicycle pump. The bottle, poised on three red fins, suddenly took off with a great drench of water, flying to an extraordinary height before twirling down. It disappeared with a faint cra
sh among Claudio’s vegetables with Dario in hot pursuit, whooping with pleasure.
‘The critical thing,’ explained Jayjay when he caught sight of me, ‘is the amount of water. You need the mass, of course, but too much water means not enough room for the compressed air. We think about a third full gives the best results, giusto?’ He turned to Dario, switching back to Italian as the boy trotted up with the rocket, his blue T-shirt blotched with water. Suddenly shy in the presence of a stranger, Dario turned towards me with a smile, leaning confidently back against Jayjay. For a moment I had almost forgotten Jayjay was so much older than Dario, their easy intimacy being that of boys at play. But the old man’s hands were gravemarked and shockingly large against Dario’s chest as he stood with the child’s fists clenched around his middle fingers. Thus might any boy face the world, a parent at his back, I thought with an unseemly pang of something like envy.
If after hearing a session of the tall tales with which Jayjay captivated Dario I sometimes set the nose of my pickup truck almost grimly on the homeward track up to my empty house, calling Jayjay a pinchbeck Munchausen or Walter Mitty under my breath, it was nothing but private pain speaking. This merits a brief, parenthetical explanation simply because it has a bearing on my relationship with Jayjay. For reasons into which I will not go, it was not until I was forty that I met the only person with whom I have ever been capable of sharing a house. Frances, thirteen years my junior, was uncomplainingly bohemian, so we never much addressed (certainly not enough, as it turned out) questions of relative comfort or relative security but simply assumed an amicable permanence. Our daughter Emma was the result; and I could not have imagined that becoming a father in middle age would so ensnare me in pleasure. Emma’s finding speech inside herself and rapidly building up a vocabulary – partly overheard, partly invented – was so enthralling to me that it was as though she might have been the human race’s last child and I entrusted with the handing-on of the entire language, the whole culture, everything known and unknown. The egotism of unqualified love, you will say. I will allow ‘self-importance’; it felt nothing to do with the ego and far more to do with some absurdly grandiose sacrament that at the very least required as great attention to the details of Emma’s upbringing as to those of her bodily welfare. (The first time I properly examined her tiny fingernails a few hours after her birth I had found myself on the verge of tears.)
For the purposes of this book, at any rate, this is a story soon ended. Middle-aged men who have lived mostly as wanderers cannot easily re-invent themselves just because they become fathers. In theory the idea of ‘settling down at last’ ought to imply a degree of relief: no more returning to an empty house, no more roaming the cruddier parts of the globe with a frayed nylon bag and sour trousers. I’m afraid for me it has overtones of scuttling for refuge. I began to yearn to find the house empty, while the cruddier parts of the globe increasingly returned to me in dreams positively aglow with the ache of association. I adored Emma; but then I have adored quite a few people over the decades. Can one construct a life around adoration unless one is religious? The truth is I am no good at exclusive relationships. I never have been and never will be. Deep down I lack the interest as well as the requisite skill. It took me years to discover this plain fact and longer still before I could admit to it. So powerful is my native culture’s propaganda I grew up accepting that to fail in one’s relationships was to fail in life itself. Even in university days we would bandy about words like ‘inadequate’ and ‘immature’ with the confident earnestness that meant they applied only to others. The ready equation was drawn: unloving, unloved. But no, that was not me at all. I like easygoing, rather masculine friendships such as Victorian men favoured and many cultures still do. They have entirely sufficed and I have never wished for more. (Sex, of course, is an unrelated matter.) So for most of my adult life I have been content to leave ‘relationships’ to the majority of people who clearly think they’re good at them. I know my limits. Or thought I did. How on earth, it will be wondered, could I ever have imagined I might enter a committed domestic relationship and become a father at the age of forty? How indeed. There probably is an answer; but teasing apart the various layers of self-delusion, contingency and the nearing rumble of the damned Chariot’s wheels would be wearisome.
Enough to say that less than two years went by before Frances left to marry a dullard who owned a sound studio in Ladbroke Grove. I might have imagined for her a man from the shires nearer her own age and background, someone more solid, less verbal than me. What she chose was a decaying hipster of fifty who kept up an unwitty patter about the famous pop stars and voice-overs who had recently been in his studio, his voice made even louder by a lifetime’s talking while wearing headphones. I hope he reads this, but I don’t believe he’s read a book in his life other than the odd technical manual: thus do the sublimely ignorant protect themselves from thought. In any case Frances took our daughter with her to join his own vague and extended family who apparently spent much of the time lying around in a haze of cannabis fumes or worse. So what was the missing ingredient? I would ask the walls of our empty house, still marked with odd streaks of crayon, and receive no satisfactory answer. Me, I presume. I also presumed money (of which this man had a good deal more than me) but without ever completely believing it. These things are opaque, mysterious. What was not mysterious was the sheer pain of missing Emma, who will be sixteen next April. I still cannot quite believe it was all snatched away through my own fault; but it was, and it can never be restored or caught again. Children slough off so many skins so fast, together with former fathers.
So now when I watch Jayjay playing doting grandfather to Dario’s equally doting grandson and note with a pang the boy’s own grubby little fingernails, it can mobilise something within me that comes perilously close to jealousy. For a while I bought myself off by imagining that by the time I was in my sixties Emma might have presented me with an honorary grandchild. This, I pretended, would sop up the love which had once begun to well but which was never permitted to flow for long enough to become part of the main stream of someone else’s private history. These days, at the moment of arriving home when the pickup’s headlights crest the last slope and cut the silent house out from the edge of black space on which it stands, I no longer rely on its ever happening. We make our own luck, and isolation often seems like a refuge from far worse.
Such, then, was Jayjay’s domestic ménage, and such my own. And if I was secretly surprised at finding his so rich, I was correspondingly downcast by the unintended reminder that my own lacked by comparison. It seemed like another reason for feeling slightly inferior to the person whose life I was supposed to be writing, a very bad state of affairs indeed. Even if his subject is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart a biographer still holds in reserve one final incontrovertible superiority: that he is not at this moment lying somewhere beneath the foundations of a launderette in Vienna but alive in living air, making himself cups of coffee, tripping over the cat and whistling about the house as if immortal. Shorn of such an advantage over Jayjay I resolved to discover in him either something I could openly admire or else something I could secretly despise, either of which may serve as the basis of a workable alliance.
*
– Suez was my nursery, and I wasn’t ready to leave it until nearly six months were up. By then Richards had left and there was no-one to cover for me so I took a week’s wages and walked out on Anderson & Green, a mutually unregretted move. I had also seen and heard the last of my involuntary room-mate Simpkins and his cavernous farts. I was whizzing, picking up the language, learning the rackets, discovering Mansur’s limits as a fixer. His limits as a lover were quickly reached, thank goodness, although I did grow quite fond of him. At least, it seems to me I did; but then the whole of that era in my life when I was shaking out my new plumage in the Middle Eastern sun seems to glow. Nostalgia, you know. Lost youth, all that. No doubt things were a bit more equivocal at the time.
– It was now
1937 and I had already made a few useful contacts in Cairo and elsewhere. The time had come to say goodbye to Milo, whose rackets had afforded me some modest savings, and start travelling. I decided to go up the Nile, partly because I really needed to get out of Suez and partly because I very much wanted to see this mythical river. A further reason was that Milo had given me an introduction to a German anthropologist named August Moll-Ziemcke who was working in what in those days was the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. I think his village was called Hamir, but maybe that was the name of the district. It’s so long ago. It was somewhere past the Fifth Cataract, on the east bank of the Nile near Atbara. More Nubian than desert Arab. I knew he was planning to spend a couple of months in Khartoum, possibly to get the manuscript of a book* finished, so I arranged to meet him there. I took a train to Cairo and set off in a series of river steamers, allowing myself a leisurely eight weeks for the journey.
– And what a journey! You must remember that with the exception of river steamers taking Cook’s tourists up to Luxor that part of the world was still little touched by the twentieth century. Well before one reached Upper Egypt one could imagine that the view from the Nile was essentially unchanged from what it had been a thousand years ago, maybe even two or three thousand. And once one had passed Wadi Halfa it was like being lost in time. Both sides of the river were pretty much nomad territory, the tribes moving about seasonally with their flocks. It would in theory have been possible to set off due west across the Sahara and not to see a living soul until one reached the Atlantic ocean 2,500-odd miles later. The winter rains had only just ended and there were some lush savannahs still visible with great carpets of wildflowers and misty green acacia trees. Egrets, hornbills, kites, and those kingfisher-blue Abyssinian Rollers: it was unbelievably beautiful and primordial. One could easily believe in the Garden of Eden. I gather it’s virtually gone now because the climate has changed and there have been ten-year droughts recently that have decimated the vegetation. The wretched nomads have mostly been driven south to fill the slums of places like Omdurman and Khartoum or else north to work in Libya. A millennia-old culture and way of life broken up and destroyed in only a few decades. The longer I live, the less I enjoy talking about those pre-war days of travel, of places and people which are either all changed beyond recognition or vanished entirely. It isn’t the same planet today. It feels as though a different sun rolls from an exhausted sea to light up lands that bear little relation to those I knew. My exact roads are effaced for ever; they can’t be wandered again. Nor should one try, of course. But it’s not true that it was ever thus. The degree of change has never before been so huge or so swift, and it will never now be reversed.
Loving Monsters Page 14