But as always, the choice had not been easy. Each of the rooms on the upper floor of the villa was a scriptorium, and each quite differently designed and equipped. It was a question of selecting the right one for the assignment in hand, and Edgardo always had at least five on the go at any given time. For an article due to be published in the prestigious learned journal Recherches Sémiotiques, tentatively entitled ‘The Coherence of Incoherence’–a play on the celebrated treatise Tahafut al-Tahafut by the twelfth-century Muslim scholar known in the West as Averroes, whose Arab name Ibn Rushd opened up the possibility for the type of puns on the author of The Satanic Verses for which Ugo was justly celebrated–he was working at an IBM workstation linked by a fibre optic cable to the University of Bologna’s Unix mainframe. Meanwhile, substantial sections of his new metafiction, Work In Regress, were rapidly losing shape by being sent via his laptop to a primitive on-line translation site, where they were first mangled into Bulgarian or Welsh and then back again into Italian.
Composition of his contribution to a forthcoming academic seminar on the semiotics of text-messaging at the Université de Paris, on the other hand, took place standing atop a fifteenth-century carved stone pulpit removed from the private chapel of a now-demolished palazzo, the text being dictated in a sonorous voice into a Sony digital recorder. Yet another room was kept permanently shuttered, the only light being from a bare hundred-watt bulb dangling above the hardy, ravished desk. It was here, in shirt sleeves and wearing a green eyeshade, that Ugo banged out his weekly column for a glossy, mass-circulation news magazine on a manual upright Olivetti M44 dating from the year of his birth. It was almost impossible to find carbon paper nowadays, so from time to time he had a few dozen boxes flown in from India.
The column generated both money and publicity, but Edgardo already had plenty of both. Indeed, despite his eminent post-modernist credentials, his whole career was living proof that reports of the death of the author had been greatly exaggerated. As for the journalism, he did it for fun, to provide an outlet for his opinions and a way of showing off his versatility. Every writer is all writers, he liked to tell his students, mentioning that Jorge Luis Borges had already pointed out in the 1940s that to attribute the Imitatio Christi to Céline or Joyce would serve to renew the work’s faded spiritual aspirations, adding that this esempio was subversively enriched by the fact that Borges, a slipshod scholar, had probably been thinking of the much more influential De Imitatione Christi, and would in any case have attributed both titles to the now discredited Jean de Gerson rather than to Thomas à Kempis. Nevertheless, Borges’s idea provided a powerful tool for further deconstructionist analysis. Would not our view of Samuel Beckett’s work be both deepened and enriched if it were to be postulated that he had also written a humorous weekly column for the The Irish Times, styling himself Myles na Gopaleen and arranging for delivery and payment through an alcoholic Dublin novelist who went under a string of aliases ranging from Brian Ó Nualláin to Flann O’Brien?
They loved him, it went without saying. Ugo’s great insight had been that the way to people’s hearts was to flatter them. He did it in class, and even more so in the series of erudite fictions which had turned an obscure professor of semiotics at a provincial Italian university into one of the richest and most famous authors in the world. Impress the pants off them with your range of knowledge, then leave them feeling that they’re more intelligent and sophisticated than they ever suspected, and they’ll always come back for more. With his academic peers worldwide he adopted a subtly different approach, appealing not to their cleverness–they were in no doubt about that–but to their often non-existent charm, humanity and sense of humour. Even they, who didn’t much like themselves, let alone anyone else, loved Edgardo.
His phone rang. It was Guerrino Scheda, his lawyer.
‘Ciao Guerrino. Good news, I hope.’
‘I think so. It’s a little unusual, and I don’t as yet have anything in writing, but I’m reasonably hopeful that I’ll be able to pull it off. In which case it would be the perfect solution.’
‘Don’t be a tease. What’s happened?’
‘Well, at first I walked into a Berlin Wall of threats and menaces. I wasn’t able to speak to Rinaldi personally, but I was given to understand that he’s absolutely furious and wants to sue your balls off. He’s not interested in a settlement, he claims. Money’s not an issue, it’s a matter of pride and honour, etcetera. In other words, he wants his day in court and is prepared to pay whatever it costs to have it.’
When the original letter from the legal advisers of Lo Chef’s company arrived, threatening an action for ‘very substantial’ damages on the grounds of personal and professional defamation, Edgardo’s initial reaction had been one of disbelief. He had never intended anyone to take his throwaway comment about Rinaldi’s cooking skills literally. It was merely an illustration of his basic thesis in the article, namely that we now live not in a consumerist but a post-consumerist society. Our actual needs having been satisfied, we no longer consume products but process. Thus film footage–the photographic record of actual persons, places and times–is increasingly little more than crude raw material to be transformed by computerised post-production techniques.
Ugo had quoted Walter Pater’s remark that all art aspires to the condition of music, adding that nowadays all art, including music, aspired to the condition of video games. And in one of those knowing references to the vulgarities of contemporary media culture in which he specialised, he had gone on to point out that no one knew whether Romano Rinaldi, the star of the smash hit TV show Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta, could actually cook at all. Nor did it matter, he had hastened to add, any more than it had mattered when the President of the United States arrived in Iraq on Thanksgiving Day and was photographed in the troop canteen carrying to table what was actually a raw turkey whose skin had been scorched with a blowtorch. Ugo wasn’t sure how seriously he really took any of this, but of course the whole point was that in the cultura post-post-moderna taking things lightly was of the essence. But apparently Romano Rinaldi saw things differently.
‘Suppose you can’t pull it off,’ he asked the lawyer. ‘What are our chances?’
‘If it goes to court? Evens, I’d say. Maybe better. After all, you never stated that Rinaldi was a fraud, merely that there’s no actual evidence that he can even boil an egg. So we might win.’
‘I sense a “but” in the offing.’
‘Correct. The two problems with that scenario are that it’ll cost a fortune–we’re very unlikely to be awarded costs–and generate masses of really stinky publicity whatever the outcome. Rinaldi is certainly a pompous jerk, and for all I know a fraud too, but the fact of the matter is that he’s also a national superstar and icon. The people have taken him to their hearts. Particularly women, and you know what they’re like when roused. You don’t want the latter-day tricoteuses on your case. Lo Chef comes across as a cuddly, lovable rogue with a charming light tenor voice who makes the daily grind of cooking seem fun and sexy. You, on the other hand, are an arrogant intellectual who writes pretentious tomes on incomprehensible subjects and secretly despises his fellow men despite a shallow veneer of trendy leftist solidarity.’
‘Maybe I should sue you, Scheda.’
‘I’m just telling you how it’s going to look if we contest this action. We might–might–win the judgement, but Rinaldi will win the PR battle and you’ll come out of it, at considerable cost, looking like a mean-spirited shit.’
‘But you said that he’s insisting on going to court. What can I do about it?’
‘Show up at the Bologna exhibition centre two days from now.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘This is still at the negotiation stage, but I’ve already roughed it out with his personal assistant, a very intelligent woman called Delia Anselmi. She’s totally in agreement and seems to have a lot of influence over Rinaldi. Between the two of us I think we can swing it. But first I ne
ed your agreement.’
‘To what?’
‘Taking part in a cookery contest with Rinaldi during the Enogastexpo food fair that’s on there now.’
Edgardo Ugo laughed.
‘You must be mad. Or think I am.’
‘On the contrary, it’s a perfect arrangement for all concerned.’
‘But he’s bound to win!’
‘Of course he is. So you’re going to lose a cook-off with the leading celebrity chef in Italy. If you challenged Roger Federer to a game of tennis you’d lose too. How humiliating is that? There are plenty of other aspects of life where you’re an acknowledged world champion. All you need to do is show up, shake hands with Lo Chef on stage, maybe join him in a duet–can you sing?–and generally make it clear that the whole affair was just a ridiculous mistake that the media have blown up out of all proportion. In return, he will sign a document that I will prepare, renouncing any legal action whatsoever against you now or in the future. End of story.’
Ugo was silent.
‘Plus,’ Scheda added, ‘and this is the beauty part, the whole show will be broadcast live and as part of the deal I’ll arrange for you to have a few minutes solo to camera. There will be multiple repeats later in the day and throughout the weekend. Overall projected viewer numbers are around twenty million.’
‘I’ll do it.’
Ugo put down the phone. All this talk of food made him realise that he’d forgotten to have lunch. He walked downstairs to the gigantic kitchen and peered despondently into the fridge. There were the remains of the dinner to which he’d invited a group of friends and colleagues the previous weekend, all the dishes being prepared communally from Marinetti’s tract on Futurist cooking. As the generous quantity of leftovers indicated, the preparation had been more satisfying than the actual food, but it had all looked very striking and had been beautifully photographed for an article about the event in La Cucina Italiana–good publicity for everyone concerned.
He selected a few of the chunks of mortadella and cheese sculpted into letters that had formed part of the dish ‘Edible Words’, from which all the guests were supposed to eat their own names, then walked through to the former housekeeper’s office. This is where he paid his bills, kept his domestic files, and checked his emails. There were very few of the latter today, only twenty-eight new messages. He skimmed through the titles, opening some and deleting others unread. An offer for Lithuanian rights to two of his books, a request from the BBC for him to contribute to a documentary on the cultural significance of professional sport, an invitation to give a series of vapid but very highly-paid lectures in Japan, plus a selection of the usual academic tittle-tattle sent or forwarded by his friends and admirers all over the world.
He clicked open the last unopened email message. The subject header was blank and the ‘From’ box contained only a Hotmail address consisting of a string of apparently random numbers. As for the message itself, there was no text, just a line drawing–an engraving, rather–of a male hand, the thumb and index finger almost joined to form a circle.
Ugo gazed at it for some time, then walked through to his library, located in the former living and reception rooms of the villa, now knocked through to form one vast and tranquil space. Here he opened a drawer in a handsome rosewood cabinet and consulted the well-thumbed handwritten index cards inside. A minute or so later he had located the position of the volume and, having hauled over the wheeled ladder used for accessing the higher of the eight rows of shelves, was leafing through Andrea de Jorio’s classic 1832 text about southern Italian gestures and their origins in classical antiquity.
Yes, there it was: ‘Disprezzo’, contempt. Although the tactful Neapolitan cleric had no more than hinted at this, the root significance of the sign was of course blatantly sexual. It was the most powerful non-verbal insult that existed, what de Jorio had termed ‘the superlative form’ of other offensive gestures.
Basically, someone was telling him to fuck off.
9
Barefoot and wearing her raincoat as a dressing gown, Flavia was savouring a cigarette and stirring a pan of sauce when there came a pattern of heavy raps at the door. She went to squint at the caller through the fish-eye lens, getting only a general impression of a hat, dark glasses and a heavy overcoat.
‘Who is it?’
‘Police.’
She took another peek, then unbolted and opened the door. The man flashed a plastic card from his wallet. Flavia made out the word ‘Speranza’ but nothing more.
‘May I come in?’ he asked.
He looked more like a secret policeman than the regular sort, thought Flavia, although such men did not present identification or ask permission to come in. But there was only one reason why the police should be interested in her and the other girls living in those rooms, and that was to effect their immediate deportation under the new immigration laws that had been rushed through to satisfy the xenophobic electorate of various politicians whose support was essential to the survival of the governing coalition.
The intruder stood at the centre of the room, looking about him at the mattresses on the floor, the fruit crates used as cupboards, the pot of pasta sauce simmering on the hotplate, the length of blue nylon cord suspended between two bent nails and serving as a communal wardrobe. In an inversion of its normal function, Flavia wrapped the raincoat tightly about her body, still wet and cold from the primitive shower in the opposite corner.
‘Nice place,’ the man remarked.
This was too obvious a provocation to merit a reply.
‘You sharing?’
Flavia shook her head. There was just a chance of saving the other girls, if she could somehow get word to them before they came home. Didn’t they have to allow you a phone call here in Europe? The man was staring at their meagre possessions, in full view all around. There was still a chance, though, since these added up to less than a quarter of what the average Italian woman would have regarded as the basic minimum.
The policeman took a studio photograph from the inside pocket of his double-breasted coat and showed it to Flavia.
‘You know this person,’ he said.
She recognised Rodolfo’s flatmate immediately, although she had never seen him wearing a jacket and tie, but shook her head again. The intruder replaced the photograph and produced a shiny metal hip flask from which he took a long gurgling drink.
‘Sure you do,’ he said, wiping his lips. ‘Name’s Vincenzo. Vincenzo Amadori.’
He swapped the flask for a packet of cigarettes from yet another pocket of his capacious coat.
‘Mind if I smoke?’
She shook her head again.
‘Want one?’
Her instinct was to refuse–tell nothing, take nothing–but a much older superstition reminded her that three denials brought bad luck. The packet was labelled Camels and the cigarette the man lit for her had a pleasant toasty flavour. American imports, she thought inconsequentially. Definitely the secret police. She decided to call him Dragos.
‘Sure you know him,’ the intruder insisted. ‘Number seventy-four Via Marsala, second floor at the back.’
Flavia realised that further evasion was in vain. Clearly she had been followed.
‘I am see him there I think,’ she declared in a laborious chant.
‘Hey, it talks as well!’ Dragos remarked with a jocular leer. ‘Tell me you mix a mean martini, darling, and you’ve got yourself a date. Actually, all you need to do is sit down and cross your legs.’
He looked around hopefully, but chairs were among the many items of furniture the room lacked.
‘You go there to see him?’ Dragos continued. ‘Or is it the other kid?’
‘The other.’
Asharp nod.
‘Smart girl. Strictly between you, me and anyone who may be listening in behind these cardboard walls, our little Prince Vince is bad news.’
‘I already know these. But he is not a prince I think.’
The secret
policeman’s attention had seemingly wandered again, this time to the electric hotplate that was the household’s only cooking facility. He walked over and sniffed the simmering sauce appreciatively.
‘Have you ever met any of his friends?’ he remarked in a tone of studied indifference.
‘Of this Vincenzo?’
‘The very same.’
Drago sucked at his cigarette.
‘He’s fallen into bad company, you see. His parents are very worried.’
‘My friend he is not bad company.’
‘Mattioli? No, he’s okay, for a student. But there’s this crew that Amadori hangs out with at football matches. They’re a different story.’
‘These I never see.’
‘Never, eh?’
Dragos picked up a spoon, dipped it into the pasta sauce and slurped down the contents, turning to Flavia with a patronising smirk that was abruptly wiped from his face. He dropped the spoon and clutched his throat, then doubled over and began bawling incoherently.
Flavia ran to the washbasin and filled the toothglass with water, but the sufferer had already grabbed a beaker of colourless fluid from a nearby shelf and downed it in one. The result was a series of piercing shrieks which blasted openings into that wing of the palace which the Princess had ordered to be abandoned and sealed up years before.
‘Merda di merda di merda di merda di merda di merda di…’
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