Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  On the other hand he did want the money, he did want to learn Italian and he did want to go to bed with Mirella Boschetti. And when Mirella leaned with him out of her drawing-room window to show him a battered Fiat tourer parked outside and told him it was his, his mind was made up. Not that the car didn’t present certain problems, the main one being that he couldn’t drive. She explained it wasn’t hers, that someone at the legation had left it when he was posted back to Rome. It was a tenth-hand runabout, a flivver, but it ran and would enable Jayjay to get around. He and Adelio, she suggested, could now visit any of Alexandria’s beaches without being dependent on trams. The thought of having his own car was suddenly a distinct thrill, and not being able to drive repositioned itself as a minor inconvenience. Still, it did cross his mind that Mirella seemed keen to get her children out of the apartment on a regular basis. Little Anna could doubtless be parked with friends rather more easily than could her much older brother.

  Jayjay learned to drive in an afternoon on the acres of scrub behind town. There was no driving test as far as he could discover. He had been advised simply to take a bottle of Metaxa brandy and three Egyptian pounds to the department that issued licences. Within minutes he had been officially classed as ‘one hundred percent driver’ and waved on his way. Driving in Alexandria proved not as threatening as he had feared, partly because such traffic as there was moved slowly, often being obliged to keep pace with donkey-carts and gharries. It was also much simplified by there being no pressing obligation to keep to a particular side of the road or to give the slightest indication of one’s intentions. Furthermore, in the case of a collision a European driving a car was presumed by policemen to be always in the right, no matter what the crowd said, provided he survived the impact.

  Then began a series of strange outings with Adelio. He could feel the boy’s great hollow eyes on him as he fumbled with the Fiat’s gear lever, as if Adelio were comparing Jayjay’s driving with his mother’s. It was as if there was some kind of complicity between them, an alliance perhaps based on their youth (since there were only seven or eight years between them, whereas Signora Boschetti was a parent). It was also based on a tacit understanding that they had both been banished for several hours. (‘Don’t bring him back before five-thirty at the earliest,’ Mirella would tell Jayjay. ‘He needs all the English practice you can give him. He’s so lazy.’) They went swimming, they ate ice creams. They drove this way up the coast, then that. They made reed boats on Lake Maryut and observed the shipping in the harbour. They sat in Mirella’s beach hut in Stanley Bay and watched the gully-gully men wander the sands performing conjuring tricks. Very occasionally they would have a rather grand tea in Pastroudis, when Jayjay felt expansively as though he were taking his own son out for a treat. Bit by bit he came to understand Adelio’s moodiness as that of a highly intelligent person who withdraws and is guarded rather than of one who feels slighted or unappeased. His melancholy, too, was merely a part of his character, strange only if one expected all children to be unremittingly light-hearted and easily bought off. Both he and Jayjay were quick students and after some months were conversing with considerable fluency in both English and Italian. Still, Jayjay often found it a strain being responsible for chaperoning and entertaining a child thrice weekly, and the ever-present questions of ‘Where can we go? What shall we do?’ weighed heavily on him most mornings.

  One day when they had driven along the coast past Montazah to swim they sat on the rotted verandah of a wrecked beach hut that had apparently been swept out to sea in a winter gale and then stranded. It lay skewed on the otherwise deserted shore, and while a good deal of its back was missing it still afforded welcome patches of shade. Adelio had fallen silent after asking Jayjay careful questions about his family in England. Suddenly he burst out: ‘Promise me you won’t! Just promise me you won’t!’ And then, fiercely anxious, ‘You haven’t, have you?’

  Jayjay understood at once that Adelio was talking about his mother. Suddenly obliged to relinquish the small fantasy he had been nurturing, he said: ‘I haven’t and I never will, Adelio, I promise.’ And that was it. One of the futures he had been looking forward to, now sealed off. It was a novel sensation having to be responsible in a sexual matter, and by no means agreeable. Eyeing Adelio sideways he saw the boy staring seaward, clasping his thin knees as though they might tremble violently, a tear crawling down beside his nose. ‘I never will,’ Jayjay promised again, soberly meaning it and putting an arm around the bony shoulders. Fine hairs ran from the nape of Adelio’s neck between his shoulder blades, marked now as a whitish line where salt had dried. A deep shivering of unbearable tension like a small motor was transmitted through his arm. Jayjay was suddenly overwhelmed by the child’s vulnerability. It was the first time it had occurred to him that the social life these enclaves led might entail casualties. It was all very well for the gossips to meet in Alexandria’s clubs and cafés and regale each other with tales of who-whom, but it was a very different matter seeing one’s own mother gliding about town in a Delahaye driven by a mustachioed count.

  ‘I hate this country,’ Adelio said, hurling a mussel shell at an empty bottle. ‘It was all right at home. Everything was all right.’

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He was always with his regiment. Pordenone, Ustica, now Tripoli. I don’t think he cares about us. I just wish we could go home. Mamma, Anna and me.’

  ‘I know your mother would like to go home, too.’

  ‘Oh, yes. But she just says, she doesn’t do. It’s not good for us, this place. It’s dull and ugly and we don’t like the natives. You look up and they’re always there, like bundles of rags with their hands stuck out for baksheesh. I hate them.’

  Following the boy’s contemptuous gaze Jayjay glanced behind and saw through the missing back wall of the hut a distant figure in a galabeya sitting under a stunted mimosa tree not far from the car.

  ‘He’s just trying to earn a living by guarding our car for us.’

  ‘Protection racket, more like. If you don’t pay him he’ll smash your windows with his stick.’

  When it was time to go the sun had started to set and the Arab was still there beneath the mimosa, a Biblical figure somehow incomplete without a flock of sheep. As they passed Jayjay greeted him in Arabic and received a grave acknowledgement. The Egyptian had a grizzled beard and a cloth turban with a plum-coloured crown. It was safe to assume that he had done the pilgrimage to Mecca, so Jayjay addressed him as‘Ya hagg’ and passed a remark or two. The man removed thick brown peasant hands from the folds of his robe, entwined with a string of worn beads. Staring out to sea he said that he came to this place every evening when the weather was fine just to look at the ocean and to watch the setting sun. ‘For,’ he said, ‘only Allah knows how many more sunsets he will permit me to see. So while I still can, I come.’

  After a few exchanges of this sort Jayjay took his leave with various pious wishes and they started the car. On the way back into town Adelio said in amazement: ‘You can actually speak Arabic, can’t you? And you were very polite.’

  ‘Why not? He’s an old man who has been all the way to Mecca and back. He said he goes to that beach most days just to think and watch the sunset. He would have been deeply insulted to have been offered money. He would have been extremely angry if he could have heard you saying he was running a protection racket.’

  ‘All right, he’s the exception. But most of them aren’t like that.’

  ‘But Adelio, how would you know? You never speak to Egyptians except to give them orders, do you? And they’re always townspeople who expect a strange cold relationship with us haughty foreigners. That old man wasn’t from the city. Don’t forget it’s his country. We’re just foreigners. All our attitudes are wrong.’

  But Adelio only looked at him queerly with his shadowed gaze, as at a newcomer some years his junior.

  *

  – I don’t quite know what I thought I was doing. I had no plans. Time seem
s endless at that age. You drift as though becalmed in a great ocean of it. Provided you’re enjoying yourself you may as well do one thing as another. I still had my ambition to walk through important doors, though. I think by then we all knew there was going to be another war, but it was difficult to sense the implications. Hitler’s preliminary skirmishings in Europe were remote indeed from the perspective of a young person having the time of his life in Egypt. What did the Anschluß with Austria mean to me? What did it matter to a twenty-one-year-old eating ice cream in Pastroudis that the Germans had invaded the Czech Sudetenland or seized Bohemia and Moravia? Where was Moravia, come to that? I had just been on a quick visit to Cairo where I agreed a deal with Renzo whereby we would start exporting August’s photographs and films direct to Rome, using the Italian diplomatic bag which Renzo could arrange. He said that expanding our operations to metropolitan Italy would be lucrative. Well, it would; but I was thinking much more about how useful this little industry was proving to be in terms of names. I was compiling quite a list of people in high places with much to lose if their interest in Moll-Ziemcke’s private version of anthropology became public, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to add some Fascist grandees in Rome to this dossier. I have no wish to appear virtuous but it’s nonetheless true that I never intended blackmail in the ordinary sense of extracting money with threats of exposure. All I ever wanted was to establish a mutual understanding as I had with the luckless Richards in Suez, at the most being able to lean on people who could open doors for me. The very last thing I wanted was to expose any of my clients, who would simply drag me down with them. As yet I had no clear idea of which doors I might need to open but meanwhile I considered it would do no harm to discover what I could about the vulnerabilities of a wide selection of people of various nationalities. I just love that situation of two people having mutual dirt, when instead of trying to ruin each other they agree to make it work to their advantage. We’ve had this conversation before, but it’s one of the things I like best about Mediterranean sophistication. It’s not about morals. It’s all to do with the art, with knowing how to live.

  – Renzo, though, was not a schemer in that sense. He was in it for lucre. He loved the pictures too, of course, but what really interested him was the King’s money. I would give a lot to know what happened to the royal pornography collection when Neguib sent Faroukh into exile in 1952. It was presumably burnt by all those zealous young officers like Nasser who were so eager to purge Egypt of the decadence of a puppet monarchy and its corrupt foreign influences. If so, and a lot of soldiers full of Islamic ardour simply ransacked Faroukh’s palaces, it’s a great shame because I understood from Renzo that the collection was truly fabulous. In fact he compared it with the ancient Library of Alexandria which the Arabs burned in 696 AD. Very keen on burning things they disapprove of, the Moslems. Just like Christians. So one presumes a good deal of Moll-Ziemcke’s stuff went up in flames together with what Renzo said was pornography from all over the world, including priceless Persian miniatures as well as Greek pottery and Egyptian papyri. There was also reputed to be a set of Caracci’s original Lascivie and even some of Raimondi’s Sixteen Positions, the engravings of Giulio Romano’s drawings that were seized and destroyed by order of the Papal censor. I know he had a complete set of prints of Lemoine’s A Thousand Cocks of 1908 because Faroukh showed them to Renzo. They cost the King a fortune because Lemoine had only printed five sets before the Brussels police arrested him and destroyed all the plates or negatives or whatever they were. It was the first time anyone had done a comprehensive photographic study of the erect penis. It was Lemoine himself who called it Mille Queues or Duizend Pikken: a thousand different cocks in all shapes and sizes, from toddlers to greybeards. So who knows what happened to them? I can’t believe Faroukh managed to take the entire collection with him to Monaco. I still nurture a small hope based on my knowledge of human nature that there were some token burnings to satisfy the nationalist zealots while the bulk of the collection was spirited away into private hands.

  – Up in Alexandria I began living most comfortably on our pornography enterprise, and that was even after Moll-Ziemcke had been well paid for each of his instalments from Khartoum. In fact I was able to drop some of my private teaching, although I kept on with the Boschetti family. Maybe at the back of my mind I was still hoping that despite my solemn promise to poor Adelio I would be able to bed his mother. On the other hand maybe it was because I enjoyed being part of a family, no matter how tangentially. They were nice people, not snobby like so many of the British but warm and inclusive, and there had never been much of a family atmosphere in my own life. Since I had so much responsibility for Adelio I was actually drawn more and more into their circle, often fetching and carrying the children in my dented Fiat. The very fact that Mirella had found me the car was an indication of how much a part of the family I was invited to become. I even began to worry about what would happen if Tenente Boschetti should suddenly return from Tripoli, jingling his sword and spurs, although I would have been a lot more worried had I been Mirella. I never did discover what she did on those three afternoons a week when she had the apartment to herself, but I always assumed she entertained the real lover for whom Count Bathory-Sopron was surely a smokescreen.

  – Still, when I look back at Alexandria of that period it is Adelio I remember best, and not simply because it was him I saw most of. He increasingly came to feel like the younger brother I’d never had. His vulnerability touched me very much. I thought he had the sensibility of a young poet. One day when we were sitting on the same deserted beach at Montazah where we’d met the pious old Arab he told me that looking at the sea sometimes made him want to cry. He glanced sidelong at me to make sure I wasn’t laughing and explained that not only did it fill him with strange yearnings he couldn’t name, he could also feel it dissolving everything and everyone he knew. There was nothing the sea couldn’t swallow, including God himself. A very proper thought for an adolescent, and I told him so. It emerged that he was mocked at school by teachers and pupils alike for being odd and felt increasingly excluded from the company of boys his own age. It didn’t help that he was not fond of games and sports, either. You must remember that he was attending the Italian School in Alexandria at a time when Mussolini’s Fascism was at its most triumphalist. There was great pressure to conform, and boys like Adelio tried only at the cost of inner torment that was anyway wasted because it was an act the other children easily saw through. It was some time before he allowed me to learn that he was also teased on account of his ears, being called Il padellino, or Little Frying Pan.

  – Bit by bit I understood that he was mainly being scorned for having a mother who drove about town with an extravagantly absurd foreigner and a father who was an absentee cuckold, although everyone at school wanted a go in the Delahaye which was one of the most glamorous vehicles in Alexandria. I find it hard to explain why I was so affected by Adelio’s being made to feel humiliated by his own mother’s behaviour, but I was. To a Briton of that period it was also sympathetic that an Italian kid should be so indifferent to the propaganda they were being fed daily at school: all that stuff about Africa being their natural empire. He knew the songs, of course, and the slogans. But he said he just associated it all with the military and his father. And that was yet a further reason for his unpopularity at school: he had no real interest in joining the armed forces and fighting for Il Duce. His idea of being an Italian patriot was becoming a diplomat, as Mirella hoped he would. He liked making cases and was a good debater. But the notion of having to live in a barracks with more of the same sort of people he knew at school held no attraction for him. He certainly didn’t want to fight and possibly kill people, although he admitted he would cheerfully shoot his mother’s Hungarian Count given the opportunity. Now and then we would plot the Count’s assassination just for fun, idle flights of fancy while eating ice creams. We both knew it was a game and Bathory-Sopron was neither here nor there. The Count’s demi
se wouldn’t change anything for the Boschetti family since there was a rich supply of varyingly glamorous or preposterous representatives of European aristocracy in Egypt. But although it was a game, it was one founded on knowledge we shared of how distressed he actually was by Mirella’s behaviour and how deeply he hated the Count. It was then I realised that if I ever did break my promise to him and contrive to bed his mother it would smash him up utterly because I had become the one adult in his life he trusted and could talk to.

  – It might seem odd now that the most serious conversations I ever had about matters of personal loyalty and patriotism and fighting for one’s country should have been with a twelve-year-old Italian. Yet regardless of our difference in age it was a topic that was obviously going to have considerable significance for us both in the near future. If England went to war with Germany again, what was I planning to do? I didn’t feel the sort of patriotism that makes a warrior, but neither did quite a few Britons in Egypt who had no connection with the military. We just wanted to get on with living our lives, especially those of us who were enjoying ourselves. On the other hand we weren’t blind. We knew we were living in a country that had uneasy relations with its ruling foreign power and there was no plausible war scenario that wasn’t going to embroil Egypt in one way or another. Sooner or later I was going to have to take a decision and it probably wasn’t going to be easy, regardless of whether I came down on the side of duty, tactical disappearance, enlightened cowardice or whatever. Also, you have to remember that I had listened respectfully to Michael’s rhetoric at Eltham College about not fighting to save International Capitalism and Imperialism. I had found it easy to sympathise with the basic notions of Egyptian nationalism that were shared by all the young Egyptians I ever met. Why would I want to fight for my country when my country’s presence in Egypt was so transparently one of self-interest? Really, the sort of patriotism needed to fight a war is possible only if your country is invaded or when you have a captive and biddable population that hasn’t travelled much. Once your citizens have globe-trotted and intermarried and formed friendships with all manner of foreigners their loyalties are no longer so clear, and the primitive rhetoric of politicians and the gutter press is ineffective at best and contemptible at worst. –