Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – He took me on walks up the mountain here. In fact we passed your house several times, which is why I know it even though I have still never visited you up there and now never shall. In those days the land around it was cultivated terraces rather than the semi-jungle it now is. They grew a lot of maize for both animal and human fodder. Ah, polenta! Imagine – they were still ploughing that thin rocky soil with great white chianino oxen. Atrocious labour. No wonder all those houses were abandoned in the sixties. It’s funny to think I knew your house so many years before you did. I presume you’ve heard that an RAF pilot spent some months there in 1944 after his Spitfire was shot down? He had broken his leg and the partisans brought him there for safety. There were several families crammed into your house then, not just the farmer’s own but various relatives and friends too, refugees from the fighting down below. They put the pilot in one of the mangers so they could throw hay over him if ever the Germans came looking for him, but in the event no Germans ever went up Sant’ Egidio. They were too harried down at the bottom and in a few months the front had passed and there were no more Germans in the Val di Chiana until they began buying property thirty years later. –

  I suddenly sensed how much more Jayjay knew about me and my life than I’d ever given him credit for. He had never before told me in as many words that he had known my house and its recent history years before I bought it and moved to this area. And on top of that there were those books of mine he’d read. How very much less of a stranger I must have felt to him than he had to me when we first met in the Co-op that afternoon, and how very unfortuitous that meeting now appeared! I wondered how much else he knew. With a strange shock I realised that he most probably had heard about Frances and Emma, whom after all my local friends had known for nearly two years. My failure as a father was hardly a secret even though nobody alluded to it in my presence, and Jayjay’s own discretion meant that he would be unlikely to broach the subject himself. I had surely been right when I remarked on the way biographers and their subjects sniff each other out. With sublime egotism the writer assumes this is entirely a one-way process, that he alone is stripping the meat off the bones in front of him. It would certainly be all of a piece with Jayjay’s admiration for Mediterranean savoir-vivre that he could have acquired a little leverage over me as well, some knowledge of a squashy and tender area which I would prefer remained unprobed. Achilles was only known for one of his heels but both mine are vulnerable, as well as much else. I am glad this is not an autobiography.

  – So Adelio and I walked and walked, and all the time we were walking I thought how companionable he was, except for an odd tension every so often. Then one day we were sitting eating bread and cheese for lunch and he suddenly produced this little celluloid case from which he took a photograph of me. I recognised it at once, of course: it was one of those he’d taken of me that day on the beach when we thought Alexandria would be invaded within days. –

  *

  ‘I still have the ones I took of you, too,’ Jayjay tells him. ‘And what’s more, I’ve never shown them to a soul.’

  Adelio is blushing, paring rind off a piece of cheese with a grimy pocketknife.

  ‘I’ve never forgotten that day,’ he says at last.

  ‘Nor I. I fully expected we would drive back to Alexandria and find fighting in the streets. I didn’t know what I would do. I felt so responsible for you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the damned war.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Can’t you see? Didn’t you realise? I wanted you to, I don’t know, comfort me or something. I was laughed at in school, my mother was busy with that mustachioed ape of hers, I was scared of all the talk about war. You were about the only person in my life who seemed to care whether I lived or died.’

  ‘Stupid, isn’t it? Oh, Adelio, if only you had known how much I wanted to hug you.’

  He slants a look from those bruised and haunted eyes. ‘You really did?’

  ‘Of course. I longed to. But I was too shy.’

  ‘Per l’amor di Dio!’

  ‘Eh, lo so. I’m sorry now. It’s miserable. But listen, you were stark naked. Be reasonable. There’s a limit to how much one can chastely embrace a naked teenager. It was … I didn’t want to scare or disgust you.’

  ‘Porc …! Disgust? If you want to know about disgust you should have tried being cornered by that man Bathory-Sopron.’

  There is a short silence while Jayjay adjusts his view of this dead spy.

  ‘He didn’t?’

  ‘He most certainly did. Several times. I had to fight him off. The last time I told my mother and she refused to believe me. She just laughed and said I was being malicious because I disliked her friend. That’s why I think the greatest moment in my life was when you stuck a gun in his face and stole his car and drove us to Cairo. Disliked? I’ve never hated anyone as much as that man. From then on you were definitely my hero. But you were before, anyway. I would have done anything for you on that beach.’

  Far below in the fields behind Montecchio castle on its little knoll the rows of mulberry trees are coming into leaf. Some way beyond them is the great expanse that was used not long ago as an Allied airfield when supplies were ferried in for the troops. Jayjay wonders if the mulberry groves will eventually expand to cover the airfield too, or whether the local silk industry will fall victim to the new passion for nylon and rayon. These days silk stockings sound unbelievably dated and no longer even luxurious. All one ever hears about now are nylons, which have become a prime black-market commodity in Britain.

  He reaches over and covers Adelio’s hand on the grass with his own. He can be quite clear-headed about things. That occasion out at Abu Qir, as well as many a similar afternoon, can now be viewed remorsefully as a lost opportunity. Yet he can’t bring himself to regret it as much as Adelio clearly does. Had Jayjay been as physically demonstrative as Adelio now claims he wanted him to be it is likely that they would indeed have become lovers on that hot, deserted beach as occasional warplanes patrolled out to sea. Maybe Adelio is imposing his twenty-three-year-old’s libido on that of his former fourteen-year-old self, but Jayjay is prepared to let that go and assume that he really had hoped for what he is hinting at. Not impossible. But it is not what Jayjay wanted, which had surprised him at the time seeing that by then he had come to regard himself as an erotic opportunist. It is true he has often been exactly that, and he has never had moral scruples about making love to a boy of fourteen if it is on offer, as it quite often has been. But in this instance it was Philip who got in the way. Jayjay’s absurd commitment to that beautiful figment had inhibited him from having an affair with this flesh-and-blood boy, as it still does. Apart from that, the blunt fact is that he had never found Adelio physically attractive enough. This was partly by corrosive comparison with Philip but mostly because he had spent so much time with Adelio over the previous three years that the boy had come to feel very like a surrogate son, and the incest taboo had fatally compromised most potential for erotic possibility. There is a limit to how often one can console a crying child, or stop the car to let him sick up an overdose of ice cream, or make sure he’s not going to get sunburned on the beach, without turning slightly into a parent. Jayjay is more than a little surprised that Adelio hadn’t felt the same way about him, actually. Now he suddenly realises that something erotic is still what Adelio wants: that in fact he is in love with Jayjay and always has been and only this can explain those peculiar letters of his swerving between confession and concealment. Jayjay is astonished at his own denseness in not having perceived this years ago.

  ‘But I do love you, Adelio,’ he tells him, not untruthfully, and sees that mournful face light up all too briefly.

  *

  – I left Italy and drifted hither and yon, earning a good living as a consultant, an impostor, as much else besides. This went on for years. Adelio and I still wrote to one another and now and then I came to visit him in this house, which eventually his aunt and uncle left
him. He promptly re-named it Il Ghibli. The ghibli, of course, is the harsh Saharan wind that blows up from the south in Libya. Adelio explained this choice of name by saying he remembered his father talking about it when on leave from Tripolitania. He said the wind was feared and hated by Europeans because it produced oven-hot, overcast and dust-laden conditions that often lasted several days. Evidently Adelio wanted a name for his house that would remind him of the force of nature that had made life hell for his father and others like him who had finally been driven out of North Africa altogether. He also liked the sound of the word and the way it looked when written as well as the touch of the exotic which it brought to a traditional farmhouse in the Valle di Chio’s provincial seclusion.

  – As for Adelio himself, he became more and more reclusive and bookish. I don’t know that he ever earned what you would call a living, but in those days you could just about survive if you were a signore. Thanks to Claudio’s managing the farm, as well as to the system of mezzadria, Adelio could subsist quite nicely on half the produce. He had a local reputation for being abstemious and bone-thin but it never extended to his being considered mean. People around here still speak of him as having been very polite and vague and sad, saying little but gazing long and earnestly at things with those wounded, shadowed eyes. The inspector of schools for the region, a Castiglionese who knew him well, once told me Adelio reminded him of the poet Leopardi. Not a hunchback, of course, but having a mind sunk in melancholia that verged on anguish. He read as he walked, which in these parts is guaranteed to get you noticed as both eccentric and intellectual. Nobody who met him, said the inspector, came away without speculating on the origins of such pain and what it might take to alleviate it. The gossip went that Adelio showed no particular inclination towards women or men, so anything in the line of domestic contentment seemed unlikely. He seldom saw his mother and appeared to rely on her for nothing, not even money. I can admit now that I used to give him money whenever I came here and would send it if ever he asked for it, which happened only two or three times.

  – And then one day in 1977 the news came that he was dead. Not suicide, which I think everybody had half expected, but a heart attack. He was fifty-one. Claudio found him sitting in a cane chair in a little summerhouse that fell down years ago, stone dead. Strangely enough he was reading Leopardi’s Zibaldone, which was open on his lap. I would love to know which of the poet’s jottings accompanied him out of this world but of course the book got closed and Claudio has no idea. It was a great shock but an even greater one to discover that Adelio had left Il Ghibli to me. And that is how I came to inherit this house, together with Claudio and Marcella. It had never occurred to me that Adelio had anything to leave, let alone that he might leave it to me. I had even forgotten he owned the house. There was no explanation, no letter. His death was too sudden.

  – I’m afraid Mirella never forgave me. She outlived him and died only about ten years ago having made it quite clear that I really had every moral obligation to pass the house straight on to her. By then I wasn’t badly off and since I hadn’t budgeted on getting Il Ghibli I could easily have afforded to do without it, especially at the time when the entire place probably wouldn’t have fetched fifteen thousand pounds. Had Adelio’s sister Anna been on her beam ends I might well have given it to her, but she had long since married a Florentine industrialist and had absolutely no need for yet another house. And if Renzo had still been around I might even have considered passing it on to him. But he had followed his beloved King Faroukh into exile in 1952 and had completely vanished. So I admit it was with a certain malicious pleasure that I left Mirella stewing in Rigutino and moved into Il Ghibli myself. She, incidentally, clung to her old allegiances to the end. In the sixties and seventies she used to meet Giorgio Almirante, the boss of MSI, the Fascist party, whenever he came to Montecchio for reunions with the local faithful. I suppose they brought out the party regalia and sang all the old songs together. But as I think I told you, her politics were not why I disliked Mirella.

  – And now there’s only Anna left, and I haven’t seen her in years. Poor Adelio! I’ve found myself dwelling on him a lot recently, what with having to tell you about him. I used to think his was a tragic, wasted life, but on the threshold of my own death I no longer think in such terms. I am sorry for his unhappiness but I don’t believe I could have done much to lighten it even had I moved in with him. Not that those days were the ideal time, nor the Valle di Chio the ideal place for a ménage of that sort, though doubtless we would have got by. There are much odder domestic arrangements around here hidden away behind tall fields of sunflowers. But I think by then he was beyond being assuaged like that and it wasn’t what I wanted anyway so it could never have succeeded. And there you have it. –

  You were happy to move here?

  – Yes. I’d reached the stage of having travelled enough and began to hanker for somewhere fairly permanent. –

  Somewhere to hang your hat and display Lady Amelia’s dildo?

  – Exactly. I knew I couldn’t live in England. I was living in Morocco at the time and suddenly Il Ghibli was presented to me on a plate, as it were. Since I already spoke Italian and knew the house it seemed the natural thing to do. –

  *

  This was the last coherent session I ever had with Jayjay. His condition worsened rapidly within a matter of days and with it came a degree of weakness that from then on confined him to bed. There remain the notes I made after visiting him at Il Ghibli and thereafter in Arezzo hospital on his last morning. I am particularly glad I took them; for although by then he had lost interest in his biography as such, several of his observations and phrases were vintage Jayjay and showed that he was never less than his old sharp self right up to the instant of dissolution. He only once made any further reference to Margaret Thatcher, for example: a throwaway observation that she, like many politicians who acquired convictions, had committed intellectual suicide by lying down directly in the path of a train of thought that was travelling on a branch line.

  Certain other questions remained glaringly unanswered, such as the circumstances surrounding his apparent familiarity with various protagonists of the Vietnam peace talks in the late 1960s, notably Henry Kissinger. It turned out that Kissinger’s framed portrait had vanished from Il Ghibli’s downstairs washroom for no more sinister reason than that Marcella had smashed it while dusting and not for any Soviet-style editing by Jayjay of his own past. Henry had not fallen from favour, merely from a lavatory shelf, and was waiting to have his glass replaced. Piecing together assorted references from several of our previous sessions, it seems to me likeliest that Jayjay’s connection would have come via an old friend of his from SOE days in Cairo. By then this man was a member of the British Advisory Commission to Vietnam whose head, the counter-insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, was adviser to Presidents Diem, Thieu, Johnson and Nixon. Thompson’s advice was sought and heeded since he had been credited with much of the British success in handling the Communist insurgency in Malaya in the late forties and early fifties. It now seems clear that the Far East had become one of Jayjay’s stamping-grounds in the sixties although he never got around to talking about it – and this despite knowing of my own researches there. Crafty old thing. Or just discreet. However, he did once give a very funny description of crashing some high-level talks in South America, and he may well have employed a similar technique to get into the Manila Summit in October 1966. (It may be recalled that it was Jayjay’s early account of that Summit which had bored me into accusing him of name-dropping).

  In the case of the Rio Accords his participation seems to have involved nothing more calculated than his happening to walk past the British Embassy just as a diplomat chum was driving out in the second-best Rolls. The friend automatically assumed that Jayjay was on his way to the same talks in some advisory capacity or other and offered him a lift. Quick-thinking as usual, Jayjay promptly ditched his meeting with the Bank of London and South America and simply stro
lled into the talks with his diplomat friend on the grounds that it would be more interesting than a bunch of bankers. To an impostor of his brass face it would have been a simple matter to have dropped a few names, deftly fudged his exact capacity and eased himself into the proceedings. Like his boyhood mentor at the Lloyds funeral wake he knew that at certain functions nobody is asked for their invitation, nobody knows absolutely everybody else, and everyone assumes those they don’t recognise must be there for bona fide reasons. Besides, he had a distinguished air of exactly the right kind. No security guard was ever going to stop and question a man looking like Jayjay who emerged from a Rolls-Royce with CD plates in amiable conversation with a delegate, certainly not in those days.

  The plausibility (as well as absurdity) of this was further strengthened for me by a memory of my own of having once seen a newspaper report of just such an impostor who was a regular attender at diplomatic functions and parties without having the remotest business to be there. Like Jayjay he had neatly brushed greying hair and impeccable clothes and manners and had already gatecrashed so many of these affairs around the world that several presidents knew him by sight and greeted him, although they seemed a little hazy about his name and exact status. It now occurs to me that this person may very well have been Jayjay himself. It was precisely these activities that Jayjay never enlarged on, having instead accorded undue attention to his life up to the age of thirty. It is too late now to remedy this lack but not at all too late for regrets. Personally, I would have preferred a vignette of Jayjay being introduced to Henry Kissinger to one of an orgy on a houseboat in Cairo, but there we are. An account of Jayjay hurriedly improvising theories of counter-insurgency would surely have been entertaining, while the picture of the boy from Eltham telling Lyndon Johnson or Harold Holt or Ferdinand Marcos that the Strategic Hamlets Program was just what South Vietnam needed is irresistible. Alas, he chose not to tell the story, put off no doubt by my assumption that he was trying to impress me: another black mark for the biographer. On the other hand I will admit that a description of any one such incident would suffice for us to get the general picture. A lengthy series of stories of how he had bamboozled his way around the diplomatic world for thirty years would soon become wearisome, its only interest lying in the names he dropped. Maybe after all he did well to stick to what he thought was important and leave us to fill in the blanks imaginatively. And maybe after all his biographer can be excused this particular blot. Many a famous portrait painter has painted only his subject’s most suggestive and revealing features while leaving the rest sketchy or entirely blank.