Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I stripped off the mask and walked up to the house thinking how odd it was to be back here, so far from the sound of the sea and from those air-conditioned apartments where one tiptoed forever warily across the eggshells of past crimes. It struck me that the sort of writing I had been doing over there had something in common with beekeeping. Both were delicate, faintly dangerous operations, exposing secret workings that went on in the dark and were capable of defending themselves to the death. Neither activity felt accidental, each was a solace. A little smoke was essential. Certainly bees and their fastidious rhythms were a marvellous antidote to the messiness of shifting around pieces of paper and ideas. On the other hand tough and worldly affairs could in their turn be a profound relief after a surfeit of loony apiarism. Anyway, for now the bucolics were taken care of. The next job was to go down and see Jayjay.

  *

  Il Ghibli looks astonishingly beautiful in its early summer setting. Were it not in order to see friends, why would I ever swap Tuscany’s graceful, crafted pastoral for the monotony of coconut palms and the undifferentiated landscape of Southeast Asia? Claudio, who is standing on the lawn, raises a billhook over his head in salutation like an executioner gravely acknowledging the crowd’s praise for a clean cut. Jayjay greets me at the door. I think he looks a little thinner.

  ‘Welcome back, stranger,’ he says, and I wonder if there is not a slight edge to the familiar jocular tone. ‘How goes the Empah? Come in and tell us homebodies wondrous tales of foreign parts. Did you see the Yxtiloi, whose faces are in their hinder parts? And what of the famed Ligno bird that hatches from pods on a tree and has been hunted almost to extinction by the cuckoo-clock industry?’ There is a slight edge.

  ‘Your garden looks stupendous,’ I say emolliently.

  ‘Doesn’t it? We must thank Claudio’s rough genius. Also, of course, the Great Landscaper, who disposed these hills so artistically. Come, we shall admire his handiwork from the terrace as usual, our receptiveness further enhanced by strong coffee.’

  ‘You’ve not been well, Jayjay?’ I ask with concern as the light falls on him sitting at the table with its familiar tiles. There seems to be a faintly yellowed look to him, although perhaps it is the early stages of a seasonal tan.

  ‘A passing malaise,’ he says. ‘Like life itself. You, on the other hand, have that tropicalised look. Bronzed and fit, as the cliché has it. Well, tell me how it went.’

  I oblige as he listens with his head cocked, gazing up at the top of Sant’ Egidio outlined against summer’s blue. At length he says:

  ‘How invigorating difference is, isn’t it? How stale to remain all the time in one place. Never having to negotiate with another set of moral rules makes one flabby. I can’t help suspecting people who shy away. I always thought that phrase of Hannah Arendt’s about the banality of evil oddly unsatisfactory. To me there was always something defensive in it, something evasive. Banal. It reminds me of the way middle-class Brits dismiss anything that disturbs them, like pornography or modern art, by calling it “boring”. Monsters are us, only a bit more so. They’re often a good deal more interesting than the virtuous. Thank goodness we’ll both be safely dead before the entire planet is brought to heel beneath some hideous Judaeo-Christian concept of order and rectitude. I’m thankful to have been born in time to have pranced in pagan sunlight as an unfettered being.’

  ‘Enter Pan, left, cavorting wickedly on a heap of ravished wood sprites. Do I now have to view you as the goatfoot god of Arcady, Jayjay? A cross between Norman Douglas and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn?’

  ‘Damn you …’ He puts his dripping cup down abruptly and dabs at his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘If I laugh, it’s chiefly because I’m so glad to see you back, James. There haven’t been many laughs here of late. Is it too impetuous of me to hope that we can sooner rather than later take up where we left off all those months ago?’

  ‘I’m ready to start when you are. Are you in a hurry?’

  ‘I’m not, but my body may be.’

  On my way to the downstairs lavatory I manage to corner Marcella. ‘How ill is he?’

  ‘They won’t say. He was in Arezzo hospital last month for four days of tests. He’s not a young man any longer, is he?’ This was said with faint surprise, as if she had never considered it before. ‘Have you seen any difference in him?’

  ‘Not really,’ I say reassuringly. ‘A bit thinner, perhaps.’

  In the lavatory I notice Henry Kissinger is missing from his place behind the guest towels. The Vietnam era floats up irresistibly to remind me of my sleepless speculations one night a few weeks ago and my plausible fantasy that Jayjay might be hiding something from his own war a quarter-century before Vietnam.

  11

  Some time in 1938 Jayjay moved to Alexandria. He couldn’t now remember exactly why, beyond saying he needed a change from Cairo and wanted to live by the sea. If his life in Cairo was anything like as complex and compartmentalised as he implied, it may be that something had gone wrong and he made a judicious departure. Perhaps a couple of his casual, oddly affectless affairs with women had tangled, involving him in threats and recriminations? Once again he said he couldn’t recall, but that he wouldn’t be surprised if it had been something like that.

  If Cairo was part of the Islamic world, Alexandria was essentially a Mediterranean city. Greeks, Jews, Italians, French, Lebanese, Turks, Syrians: there were substantial communities of these and many other nationalities, including British. It was a city to which wealthy Cairenes moved to avoid the heat although in the hottest months they generally left Egypt altogether, heading for Paris and London. Their boys went to Victoria College in Alexandria and there was always the family’s villa, complete with retainers, otherwise standing empty until one or other member of the family chose to visit. Despite the British-style education French was still widely spoken among the older Egyptian élite. This was not without significance in a country so heavily under British control. The British had bombarded Alexandria during their takeover in 1882, an event unlikely to have endeared them to the Alexandrians, whereas the days under Napoleon at the beginning of that century had left an enduring cultural legacy.

  When he was fifteen Egypt’s new young King, Faroukh, had spent less than a year in England while supposedly studying at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. He had thus been practically in sight of Eltham College even as Jayjay was completing his own final year at school. Faroukh was abruptly summoned back to Cairo in April 1936 when his father, Fuad, died. He had only just turned sixteen, an inconvenient age at which to inherit a kingdom, especially one effectively commanded by foreigners with whom he had never felt any personal empathy. The British Ambassador in Cairo, the mountainous Sir Miles Lampson, had already sent the boy a telegram of condolence whose official tone was unlikely to touch the bereaved Faroukh’s heart. Had the youth been privy to the penny-pinching bureaucratic niceties that in fact surrounded the telegram’s dispatch he might have felt that the British Government’s expression of grief was grudging, to say the least. The draft of Sir Miles’s telegram from the Cairo Embassy, in his Napoleonic scrawl, read:

  ‘I beg your Majesty to accept my deepest sympathy and most sincere condolences on the death of your August father His Majesty King Fuad and to accept my most fervent wishes for the continued prosperity of Egypt under your Majesty’s reign. Miles Lampson.’

  Beside this draft another hand had scribbled querulously, ‘Mr Monypenny: Who will pay for this? F.O. ruling is that telegrams of condolences cannot be charged to them. Can No. 3 account help?’*

  Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway; King Faroukh’s emotional alliances would never have been with the British. As a young man his father Fuad had spent happy years at the Military Academy in Turin and had kept with him a core of Italian servants. These in turn became warm, racy company for his son Faroukh as he was growing up in Abdin Palace. King Faroukh’s Italian sympathies impinged fortuitously on Jayjay’s life because one of his Cairo conta
cts with an intense interest in Moll-Ziemcke’s Sudanese photographs was an Italian who worked at the Palace. Renzo was perhaps a fixer rather than a full-blown courtier, in the sense that he acted as a liaison between the Palace and the Italian legation for such things as washbasins in Carrara marble and the medallions Mussolini was minting, which the King wanted for his Palace collection. Faroukh was an obsessive and spendthrift collector of just about anything, especially gold objects and pornography. Here Renzo was soon acting as middleman in a private trade route that stretched via Jayjay all the way down to August Moll-Ziemcke in the Sudan. This ensured that Renzo’s relations with the Palace were excellent, as also with Jayjay himself. One of the things Jayjay had acquired from him, other than a useful smattering of Italian and a good deal of money, was the name and address of Renzo’s sister Mirella who was living in Alexandria. She was connected with the Italian legation there and according to Renzo was a fund of information. If ever Jayjay were in that city he should be sure to look her up.

  Once arrived in Alexandria, Jayjay betrayed a consistent pattern of behaviour by finding a place to live outside the European community. He rented rooms on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, on the Lake Maryut side of the main station. He had come with a list of contacts both social and professional (for he now thought of himself as a professional English tutor when he wasn’t being a professional pornographer). At some stage he presented his compliments to Mirella Boschetti, Renzo’s sister, and told her he had brought a letter from her brother in Cairo. She turned out to be a vivacious lady in her early thirties whose position at the legation was broadly described as Cultural Liaison Officer. To some extent she was a counterpart of her brother at Faroukh’s palace in that her duties included a certain amount of fixing, although ostensibly only in the field of the arts. Among other things she was responsible for ensuring that Italian cultural concerns were as well represented in Alexandria as those of the French. This was a challenge, seeing that the works of Anatole France and Saint-Exupéry commanded a far wider readership than did the poems of d’Annunzio and the speeches of Il Duce.

  *

  Mirella Boschetti has invited Jayjay to lunch in her apartment on Saad Zaghlul, explaining that as a mother she likes to be home when her children come back for the midday meal. Mirella reads her brother’s letter of introduction as the servants haphazardly lay the table, glimpsed through the open door of the dining-room. Over the meal she suggests in a mixture of Italian and shaky English that Jayjay comes with the reputation of being disreputable and dashing. Does she know about her brother’s tastes? he wonders.

  Also at table are Adelio and Anna, rising twelve and eight respectively. They strike the Jayjay of 1938 as ‘very Italian’, meaning they are chatty and constantly interrupt their mother’s halting attempts to make conversation with her English guest in order to tell her about their morning at school. Adelio has a few simple English phrases, Anna none. Both know the sort of kitchen Arabic they would have picked up from nurses and maids and servants. Jayjay notices they use the Alexandrian word for ‘table’, tarabeza, instead of the more classical towla, tarabeza being simply the Arabised Greek word trapeza. He muses on such Mediterranean linguistic trivia while waiting for the children to eat up and go. Over half a century later he will record his early conversations with Mirella as though they both had an easy language in common, whereas in those days when his Italian was sparse communication was too slow and difficult to be worth reproducing. When the children at last scamper off she says ‘My brother tells me everything, of course. We have no secrets from each other.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Jayjay says. He has no idea whether she is being devious, maybe fishing for indiscreet confidences from a position of ignorance. ‘Such as what?’

  ‘I know what he does at the Palace, of course. The King relies on him a good deal for private matters. Renzo says you are very helpful in satisfying certain of the royal interests. Don’t we live in an interesting country and at interesting times?’ She laughs sarcastically. ‘Had I been told when I was Adelio’s age that one day Renzo and I would be earning our living in such strange ways, and in Egypt into the bargain, I would never have believed it. We’re from Tuscany; we naturally assumed we would be spending our lives in Tuscany.’

  ‘And your husband? Is he here in Alexandria?’

  ‘No. He and I are incompatible in all sorts of ways these days. He’s in Tripolitania, a military man. One can’t possibly live there. Inconceivable. It’s just desert and barbarians. They hold motor races in Tripoli and the coast is full of Sicilians trying to grow oranges. I married young, you see, when I was not yet nineteen. At once I was pregnant with Adelio. I was so naïve, so ignorant. I never took politics into account. I never thought we were going to build an empire in places like Tripolitania and Abyssinia, or that it would have anything to do with my own family. But military men go where they are sent. Tripoli! Oh God, you should see it. A provincial town where the natives eat live locusts. Can you imagine that? They strip off the wings and legs and burst the bodies between their teeth. Really, it’s more like living in the Old Testament than the twentieth century.’

  Once again Jayjay is unclear about Mirella’s intentions. On the face of it her remarks about Libya amount practically to treason, especially when aired to a foreigner. He knows, of course, that plenty of metropolitan Italians are less than keen on Mussolini’s empire-building, while most would do anything rather than find themselves in Libya in the company of a lot of Sicilian peasants. Her brother, for instance, dramatically claimed he would take his own life before being banished to either Libya or Abyssinia. Renzo couldn’t imagine life without King Faroukh, to say nothing of Groppi’s and houseboats. Jayjay decides to be gently provocative and see if Mirella can be drawn further.

  ‘But I thought Italians were proud of having colonised Libya and cultivated so much of the coastal strip? I thought it provided jobs for landless Italian peasants who are busy turning it into the Garden of Italy? I always imagined it as one of Fascism’s showcases.’

  ‘It is, of course. Certainly when I’m in public it is. But here in my own apartment, having lunch with a disreputable and dashing young English friend of my brother’s, Libya is a boring hell-hole of ungrateful Bedouin who are good for nothing. But really! Well, perhaps they’re good for hanging. You should see the things we’ve done for that country. We’ve put in roads and hospitals and schools even when Italy herself goes without. But it’s still not enough to make the place civilised and nor is it enough to stop the migrants grumbling. Half of them are indolent Sicilians who aren’t proper Italians anyway, not as we Tuscans are Italian. They’re practically Arabs themselves. Certainly first cousins. Alexandria’s much better than Tripoli, believe me. Even so, if it weren’t for my job here and the children with their schoolfriends I would go home tomorrow. I know Adelio doesn’t really like it here. He was nearly seven when we came and he still remembers our house in Pieve di Rigutino, the cypresses and the olives and the vines. And look at this.’ She waves a hand to indicate the apartment, the dusty city outside, the vast hopelessness of Egypt.

  *

  Over the next month it seemed that Signora Boschetti had plans for Jayjay, for she regularly invited him to lunch or to cultural functions she had helped arrange. To his disappointment it transpired she already had a lover, a Hungarian count named Bathory-Sopron who used to call for her in a flamboyant Delahaye with three spare tyres strapped behind as though he were about to set off for a distant oasis rather than the beach at Sidi Bishr. He looked exactly as one would expect a Hungarian count in his forties to look: like a character in an operetta by Franz Lehár, complete with mustachios and ramrod gallantry. Surely, thought Jayjay, this dinosaur was too farcical to be anything other than an alibi for Mirella, or maybe a gesture; at any rate something more for public than for private consumption? By then Jayjay knew many of the town’s more accomplished gossips and fully expected to learn that Count Bathory-Sopron was better known to his intimates as
‘Daisy’ and liked being thrashed by policemen in his villa on the Bourg-el-Arab road. But no-one could discover anything more detrimental to his reputation than the mustachios, so they simply assumed he was one of the many spies in town who were the life and soul of beach parties with their capacious cars, silver picnic sets and wind-up gramophones.

  Mirella’s plan for Jayjay was that he should become something like a private tutor for Adelio. She was nursing a dream that her son might one day become a diplomat and she knew that fluent English would give him an advantage when applying for the Italian foreign service. Her idea was that Jayjay should spend at least three afternoons a week with him, speaking only English and taking him around. At first Jayjay didn’t know whether to feel sorrier for Adelio or for himself. By this time he had become better acquainted with the boy, who seemed not quite as lively as he had first appeared at the lunch table. He was moody, not in the usual pettish manner of children when thwarted but more with a kind of melancholy. With his pointed chin and prominent ears he was by no means a handsome child, although his eyes demanded one reserve final judgement. They were large and dark with curved lashes so long they seemed to cast a shadow. Without actually being any different in colour from the rest of his face the skin around his eyes appeared a shade darker, even sunken. Really, they were romantic eyes in a tubercular sort of way. Sometimes the boy let his face slip into an expression so wistful Jayjay wanted to comfort him, to extract whatever dark secret lay behind his look and erase it with an adult’s power. But he was reluctant to devote three afternoons a week to the company of a child.