Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

‘You could call it Funfair for the Common Man.’

  ‘Right, and the band could do the music for it.’

  I looked at him regretfully. ‘Nanty, I have to tell you that if your Freewayz gig was representative you’re badly in need of creative talent, musically speaking. Your aim is to become lovable, don’t forget. You need to be enshrined in the nation’s heart. You won’t do that with Alien Pie numbers, not if they’re like the ones I heard in Munich.’

  ‘The kids go for it,’ he said defensively.

  ‘Sure, and it’s brilliant in its way, Nanty, don’t get me wrong.’ Ghost applying butter. ‘But for you to become establishment the same kids’ll have to go on going for it when they’re forty. Classics are what you’re aiming to record. Stuff that’ll be coming out of the loudspeakers in Harrods’ lifts in twenty years’ time. And for that, Nanty, you need a real composer. Even McCartney did his Liverpool Oratorio thing with Carl Davis.’

  By the time he had jetted off somewhere in his private Gulfstream he was in excited mood, looking forward to Alien Pie’s launch and pleased that the first steps were being taken to orchestrate his future. Now as I drive up through Casoli I’m also quite cheered by this challenging and fabulously well-paid project which will keep me nicely occupied for the next six months. Thanks to our conversations in Munich, not only am I reconciled to doing his book but I now have more than enough background info on him for an outline treatment. That’s always a good start.

  Now then, enough of the humdrum. What treat shall I contrive for myself tonight in honour of my homecoming? Just a wee snacklet to take out onto the terrace with a celebratory cold beer. After which, of course, the uneaten half of the cold alien pie waiting in the fridge followed by an experiment I put in the freezer weeks ago and still haven’t tried: liver sorbet. When I come to write (or ghost-write?) my own autobiography – and I rather fancy Under a Tuscan’s Son as a title, don’t you? – I shall stress and re-stress the huge importance of novelty. I simply can’t resist trying new things, and neither should you. Right this moment I can feel a theory trying to emerge that concerns the culinary possibilities of combinations of foods that are euphonious. If they sound good together they may turn out to be good together. This has a mediaeval ring to it, something like Paracelsus’s ‘doctrine of signatures’ for matching ailment with cure. On the plane just now I was toying with the idea of Poodles in Noodles. Who knows, its consonance may be more promising than the actuality and I’ll have to consult a Filipino friend of mine about it first. The same goes for Pekes in Leeks. Meanwhile I’m a little surprised that grand old campaigner Maj.-Gen. Sir Aubrey Lutterworth never came up with Savage and Cabbage, although he did invent a most nutritious Moth Broth that ought to be commercially exploited by some enterprising outfit – presumably the Covent Garden Soup Company. There are plenty of other things to try: Horse Sauce, Bustard in Custard and – most hopeful of all – Parrots ‘n’ Carrots. And while we’re on the subject of how food sounds, even dear old double entendre might serve to inspire an unusual dish or two. There would be a certain ice-breaking quality about a majestic head waiter bending behind a matronly diner and intoning ‘I can recommend the Dill Dough, madam. It comes with our Thrush Marmalade. Very warming on a night like this.’

  And now at last the familiar bend, the familiar crags aglow with Tuscan summer sun, my familiar roof poking between the trees … but … But something’s wrong. What on earth’s that damned great heap of firewood doing there? And where … Sacred sperm banks! She’s actually done it! The fat bat’s torn down my beautiful fence! Can you believe this? I brake violently, leap from the car and go over to kick incredulously at the pile of splintered beech that was so recently a necessary bulwark against neighbourliness, to say nothing of a work of art in its own right. So OK. Fine. If that’s the way she wants it. This time she really has gone too far. No more Mr Nice Guy. It’s a long worm that has no turning but this worm has definitely turned. Marta’s about to find out that Samper’s way with euroslag vandals is pretty damned harsh. I shall enjoy this. Hate is a many-splendour’d thing.

  36

  But as I march across to Marta’s sty prepared to do battle I catch sight of the scarlet sports car discreetly tucked around the side among the trees. Oho, I think, that’s awkward. The last thing one wants when reading the riot act to a neighbour is for her young and probably muscular boyfriend to be present. Still, a glance across at the twenty piled corpses of my lovely and expensive beechwood panels is enough to remind me that life in this idyllic mountain eyrie is now seriously threatened and something unpleasantly firm is going to have to be said. Accordingly I give her back door a good pounding.

  She flings it open and reveals the usual squalid scene within. ‘Oh Gerree!’ she cries, ‘you are home! How happy to see you,’ and before I can recoil she gives me a hug. I can feel her bangles pressing into the small of my back. Trashy stuff. Pure Benares. ‘Where are you went?’

  ‘Munich,’ I say briefly. ‘Now, as regards –’

  ‘Munich very interesting, Gerree. We have in Voynovia town is call Mjonkus. Is same name like Monaco also. It means –’

  ‘Fence,’ I say sternly. ‘Right now, everything to me means “fence”. What happened to it? Go on, tell me there’s been a hurricane.’

  ‘Oh the fence, Gerree. Is most saddest,’ and blow me if her eyes aren’t watering a little, although since she is thrusting a conciliatory glass of Fernet at me I have a shrewd idea about the likely wellsprings of her emotion. ‘Sitting please.’ And now the unscrupulous witch is pressing on me a chocolate kiss from a box of Perugina Baci.

  Well, a Samper is not to be caught the same way twice so this time I feel around carefully beneath me before sitting down on her sofa. You wouldn’t believe how invasive the tip of a metronome can be.

  ‘What happens, Gerree: you know I am making music for film? So Piero Pacini he come one day here and say “I want to filming here but fence no good for filming so please take down now.” I say is not possible. I say is asking Gerree first because he make fence. Is his fence. But Signor Pacini is not hear me and is order to his men, “Take down this fence” and promise put up fence after filming. And after filming …’

  It has happened before. There is something about Marta’s pidgin explanations that make my attention wander even though it’s a story of some consequence for me. I’m afraid things that are important to know need to be particularly well phrased to get my attention. I am also wondering where lover-boy is hiding. Probably sprawled across the bed upstairs, equally poleaxed by the effort of penetrating Marta’s tangled syntax.

  ‘I see,’ I say at length. ‘Let’s just get this straight, shall we? You are making a film with a world-famous film director. A few days ago he demolished my fence to improve the shot and now has failed to put it back up again. Have I got that right?’

  Marta is nodding so violently she splashes her dress with Fernet. ‘Exact!’ she exclaims behind the threshing hair. What does she do to it to get it in that state? Anoint it with goose grease? ‘Oh, Gerree, I really so sorry. I am e-mail to Signor Pacini. He will come and fix. He promise me.’

  ‘You think Piero Pacini is going to come and re-erect my fence, Marta? The genius who made Mille Piselli and Nero’s Birthday is, of course, also a partner in that well-known firm of landscape gardeners Visconti, Bertolucci & Pacini SpA: “We Give It Our Best Shot”.’

  ‘He promise,’ she repeats sadly and a tear rolls down beside her nose. Good old Fernet, I think. In another moment she’s going to start one of those scenes protesting her innocence, full of Slavic keening and hair-tearing. Hysteria is to girls as barking is to dogs, take Samper’s word for it. To head her off I try a new tack.

  ‘I see you’ve got a new car. Congratulations.’

  She looks blank.

  ‘The red one,’ I prompt.

  ‘Ah yes. Ah no. That is of Filippo, the son of Signor Pacini.’

  ‘He’s here now?’ I glance at the ceiling.

  ‘N
o, is in Rome. They come back soon.’

  ‘That’s good. We can discuss the little matter of legal action.’

  But I admit this does make me think a bit. A hi-glam car like that is just what one would expect an Italian film director’s son to drive. Or, come to that, the leader of a boy band. Can it be possible I’ve been doing her an injustice all this time and she’s not quite the drunken fantasist I’ve been taking her for? Can my imagined charcoal-burner’s son actually be Filippo Pacini? But then I have another glance around and note the loudspeaker half buried beneath an avalanche of limp sheets and the electronic keyboard with a three-quarters empty bottle of Fernet Branca leaning back against the music stand like a drunk against a lamp post. Be honest, Samper: is this the workshop of a fellow professional? If we flick open Occam’s razor and give it a good whetting, would it not pare away the probability of her story to nothing? For hardly the first time in Marta’s presence I am seized with a weariness that saps my resolve to confront her. It even makes my knees limp, as I discover when I put down my glass and get to my feet. To hell with her. Do I really care what the truth is? (As the late, great Pontius Pilate might have said, thinking of a quiet beer on his terrace well away from his wife wittering on about her nightmares.)

  Marta is now unsteadily on her own feet. She ferrets beneath the ambient laundry and emerges with a slip of paper. It is, incredibly, a cheque made out in euros for a sum of money representing exactly half what I’d told her the fence cost. I can feel the last of my righteous anger shrivel.

  ‘You see, I promise, Gerree,’ she says, kissing me with tears in her eyes before I can get out of the door.

  It’s so bloody unfair, I think as I walk over to my house. The woman blames a famous film director for the destruction of my fence and now she pays me her own share of its cost so the fence is no longer mine but ours. Yet the damned thing’s still down and all my labour wasted, and where’s the justice in that? I linger mournfully by the heap of shattered panels and cement-caked posts. It’s too bad. How like Marta to muddy the water with her blarney and cheques – not to mention her Fernet and chocs.

  *

  The next morning I am down in Camaiore buying stationery when I catch sight of a vaguely familiar figure. Of all people it is the egregious Benedetti, the weaselly house agent who lied to me about my neighbour. A sprauncy little turd in a dove-grey suit, he is trotting along looking executive and carrying one of those fetishistic Italian briefcases made of cassowary leather or albatross skin, complete with gold fittings and monogram. I hail him squarely in the middle of the pedestrian thoroughfare.

  ‘Ingegnere! Buon giorno.’ He stops and pretends to be flipping through the dogeared Filofax that passes for his mind. ‘Gerald Samper,’ I help him out. ‘The Englishman who bought the house up at Le Roccie.’ His eyes flicker sideways. I’d never buy a used car from this man, I think to myself in amazement. How come I bought a used house from him?

  ‘Signor Samper!’ he exclaims, recovering. ‘What an unexpected delight to see you. And looking so well, too. Sempre in forma. Your wife too is well?’

  ‘I have no wife.’

  ‘Ah, wise, wise man. Blessed bachelordom! I always say it’s the sign of a superior sensibility, that’s what I always say. I also say “Donne e motori: gioia e dolore”, but I’m inclined to change that to “sempre dolore.” Haha.’

  ‘You always did have a way with words, ingegnere. Like when you told me my neighbour’s house up at Le Roccie was lived in for one month of the year by a mouse-quiet foreigner. Your exact phrase, I remember.’

  ‘Ah, that memory of yours, Signor Samper. It is a jewel. And now –’ Benedetti glances at a preposterous watch that will tell him the time in Vancouver when he is a hundred metres under water ‘– I’m afraid I’m already late for my appointment. Mustn’t keep the Chief of Police waiting.’

  ‘Policemen are famously never on time,’ I say, taking a tiny but significant step to one side to block his escape. ‘This won’t take long, Benedetti. I just want to know why you misrepresented the situation to me.’ Better not use a word as blunt as ‘lied’ at this stage.

  ‘Misrepresented, signore? Oh, I trust not. The lady in question –’

  ‘You know her, then? Marta?’

  ‘Only most vaguely. But I was assured she is scarcely ever there. She is of Russian origin, I think.’

  ‘I wouldn’t tell her that if I were you. She has rather strong views on Russia. All I know is she’s not at all quiet and mouselike. In fact, and between ourselves, over the last three months she has proved to be a damned nuisance in all sorts of ways. Being visited by helicopters is one of them.’

  ‘Helicopters?’ The weasel perks up.

  ‘Helicopters. Blew my pergola to shreds. Is that how you define a quiet neighbour?’

  ‘Not,’ he begins cautiously, ‘as such, perhaps. Not altogether.’

  ‘Well, I’m none too happy about it. To be honest, I’m beginning to feel you sold me that house under false pretences. I explained to you several times that being a writer I need extreme quiet for my work. But a neighbour who plays weird music at all hours and has visitors who drop by in helicopters hardly fits your description of her.’

  ‘O Dio.’ Benedetti makes a pout with his lips to indicate deep concern. ‘What can she be up to?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I ask rhetorically, suddenly finding the pent-up frustrations of the last few months venting themselves with agreeable passion. This fence business has definitely been the last straw. ‘Who knows? Che ne so io? What do I care if she’s an East European call girl? The point is you promised me peace and quiet and I have neither.’

  ‘Maybe there is an element of exaggeration …?’ he begins, but catches my eye. He shifts his briefcase to his left hand and with the right takes out a crisply laundered handkerchief with which he carefully mops his receding forehead. Hair weaving, I note with satisfaction. And it’s all very well to moan about women but someone irons your shirts and handkerchiefs beautifully and I bet it’s not you.

  ‘Allow me to observe, ingegnere, that in future you could be a lot more scrupulous about what you say when trying to induce someone to buy one of your houses. Especially a foreigner. We may be a minority but I think you will find that as a community we are not entirely without significance. Word gets around,’ I add meaningfully.

  Benedetti draws himself up, plump weasel provoked. ‘I sell all my houses in the best of faith, Signor Samper. Unfortunately I cannot be held responsible for my buyers’ eventual lack of breeding. I don’t believe I gave you a written guarantee of your prospective neighbour’s hermit-like qualities?’

  ‘True,’ I concede, beginning to enjoy this sword-crossing as Camaiore’s citizens eddy around us with curious glances. ‘But you did give me verbal assurances whose validity a gentleman like yourself will readily recognize as scarcely less binding. At this late stage, though, I can’t see how reparations can easily be made, can you? Things are as they regrettably are. I merely thought I would inform you that Le Roccie is very far from being the nexus of bucolic harmony you painted it to me last year. Well, as I say, word has a habit of getting around. And now I believe I’m delaying you.’

  We take formal leave of one another and Benedetti scurries off, plying his handkerchief once more. I take myself into a handy bar for a well-deserved mid-morning reward. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in ages. Being able to dump on the weasel has been a pleasure I hadn’t anticipated when I drove down this morning. It won’t have done him any harm at all to feel the edge of the Samper tongue and it has done the Samper spirits a power of good. I can return home purged.

  37

  A couple of days now go by most agreeably. I make good progress with roughing out the outline of Nanty’s book. Left in peace by myself I always work well. This was, after all, the whole point of choosing to come and live up here among the crags and gulfs. How was I to have known that the casual lie of a greedy house agent would have put me at the mercy of an eccentric flo
ozy like Marta?

  The floozy, however, is unusually quiet. By positioning myself at the extreme corner of an upstairs window I’ve been able to catch a glimpse of crimson between the trees surrounding her house, meaning the mysterious sports car is still there. So who really is the owner? This, like many other questions about Marta, is unanswerable and hence rapidly becoming a bore. Just as long as I’m left to get on with earning a living she can do what she likes. It might even turn out to be her own car, an unlikely example of impulse buying that makes me wonder whether she mightn’t be well off after all. In that case one is certainly allowed to speculate about the source of her wealth. The East European provenance, the black helicopter: it isn’t difficult to drift off into tabloid day-dreams of those mafias allegedly always busy smuggling drugs or plutonium or illegal immigrants. Now I come to think of it there are also those unsavoury rackets one associates with governments in the Balkans, wherever the Balkans are. Isn’t there supposed to be a trade in indentured prostitutes being infiltrated into the EU? One never pays quite enough attention to these stories. They seem a permanent part of existence and doubtless always have been. I think one or two of the girls – and maybe even some of the boys – who filled out Luc’s heaps on the floor in Klosters were rumoured to be from Zagreb or Sarajevo. Somewhere like that. Is that Poland? It sounds sort of Polish to me. I ought to buy an atlas but I’m loath to lose my illusions.

  Still, the idea of old Marta being involved in anything like that is too absurd. She’s far too drunken and slatternly to be a ruthless madam even if Le Roccie were the ideal site for a bawdy-house. And as for her being on the game herself … But I have no wish to be ungallant, still less downright cruel.

  In the evening I toy with a little creation of mine while sitting out beneath my pergola. There is no denying it: summer is over the hump. The days are marginally less stifling now, the evenings appreciably cooler. In another week or two I shall have to wear a cardigan as I sit out and watch the sun languorously extinguishing itself in the sea somewhere behind Sardinia. Already one can begin looking forward to lighting the first fires of autumn when the fragrant woodsmoke rises from hissing hearths to drift slantingly through the baring branches outside. I am at peace. The distant ocean is at peace. The surrounding cliffs and forests are at peace. Far away down there among that coastal sprawl of lights people are doing frightful things to each other as usual, often casually but sometimes with such berserk attention to detail I can only assume it has been genetically coded by evolution as necessary for the race’s survival. Down there is the world as run by a handful of corporations, an army of lawyers and millions of religious zealots. It is not a place that has a niche for Gerald Samper. Up here, thank goodness, I needn’t pretend to be a member of the human race at all and can remain minimally contaminated by its germy lies. (Yes! You recognized it! Another anagram of Lyme Regis.) I can enjoy my cold trifle of sweetbreads – tripe and blueberries were made for each other – and a glass or three of Barolo while thinking peacefully anarchic thoughts.