Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I’m taken up with an interior vision of 10 Downing Street stripped for action with a succession of doughy ministers sprinting across the PM’s office. I see power-dressing women teetering on high heels, ricking an ankle, collapsing aspraw1 on the burgundy carpet, State papers scattered from an out-flung hand. I see a puce-faced Chancellor of the Exchequer jogging on the spot before the desk, hairy breasts bouncing beneath his Savile Row jacket, trousers inching their way downwards over a white jelly bottom too restless to hold them up. I see a rabbit nose nodding frantically inside voluminous boxer shorts dotted with little space rockets. The lecture on the fiscal implications of the Third Way goes on and on … I see all this and think Bring back fascism!

  This puts me squarely into the mood to make my play.

  ‘You were talking about Marta just now,’ I say to Pacini.

  ‘Brilliant lady, isn’t she? The more I hear her music the more I feel inspired.’

  ‘Me too. I’m inspired to sue her.’

  Pacini laughs, probably reckoning he has misheard this foreigner. You wish.

  ‘To sue her,’ I repeat with as much bell-like clarity as one can manage around a mouthful of cold seafood salad. His smile fades a little.

  ‘Sue?’

  ‘Sue. I don’t suppose you realize it, but that score of hers for your film contains a deliberate pastiche of my singing. Not only is it theft of my intellectual property but defamatory, calculated to make me a laughing-stock.’

  Immediately I can tell by his expression he knows it’s true. Filippo does, too. There is a difficult silence.

  ‘Surely not,’ Pacini says without conviction.

  ‘Your doubts can be easily settled. I have only to bring over some friends of mine from England who will testify to my habit of singing as I work. All you’d have to do is play them those bits of Marta’s score. They would identify it at once. The resemblance is beyond question. Indeed, a former friend of mine named Dennis once made a tape recording of me without my knowledge which you can bet he has kept.’

  Pacini has stopped eating and now replaces his plate on the table. I know exactly what’s going on behind that noble, Oscared brow as if it were made of glass and I could see for myself the glittering fizz of electrical activity. Marta is taken to court on such a charge and what happens to Arrazzato without the music? What of his own part in this? This is the moment to start drawing the outlines of an escape route for him.

  ‘I’m really sorry about this, Piero. I know it has absolutely nothing to do with you. Even I only realized what was happening when I heard the music out there on the beach an hour ago. I didn’t at first recognize myself – one doesn’t. But once I had, it was unmistakable. Pretty wounding, too, I may say. I’m still upset about it. I hadn’t expected this – what can one call it? “Betrayal” sounds too self-dramatizing and “malicious” too intentional. But I definitely think Marta has taken a terrible liberty.’

  Having thus adroitly inserted the cat into the midst of the pigeons I leave them to it. Father and son engage in a flurry of alarmed exchanges out of which fly words like ‘plagiarism’ and ‘pasquinade’. I go back to my seafood salad. Since we’re on the subject I might point out that Cat among Pigeons is a great Samper dish, one of a series in which I was inspired by English figures of speech. The two different meats, feline and avian, happen to go extraordinarily well together. Pigs in Clover are excellent, too, when rationalized as loin chops done in a bed of clover so that a succulent sweetness pervades the pork. More exquisite still is Dog-in-the-Manger, when interpreted as a version of haybox cookery. I once released the smiling ghost from a neighbour’s snarling dachshund by means of a dough-sealed Le Creuset casserole packed away piping hot in hay for eighteen hours. It was this dish that made me speculate that Aesop, too, may have been an experimental cook at heart and I’m planning a cookbook in his honour, provisionally entitled Aesop’s Foibles. I can’t wait to try Fox and Grapes. I know it will be sensational. But Pacini is addressing me.

  ‘This is disastrous‚’ he is saying. ‘Can I ask what your intentions are?’

  ‘I’ve certainly no wish to cause unnecessary trouble and disruption‚’ I lie virtuously. ‘The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Marta didn’t act with genuine malice. It seems to me we all of us have to give some thought to our respective futures: she, me, even such a distinguished person as yourself.’

  ‘I’ve got there‚’ says Pacini with a touch of sourness. ‘How much?’ I think he looks relieved at being able to see, amid my froth of delicacy, the gleaming heads of brass tacks.

  I make an effort to look horrified. ‘I hope you don’t think I’d stoop to blackmail?’ I cry. ‘What a dreadful idea.’ I take a large gulp of wine to emphasize how badly I need a restorative after such a thought.

  Pacini may be a smooth number but he doesn’t need things spelt out. ‘Have you ever thought of writing a film?’ he asks ingenuously.

  ‘Often, now you mention it. Though not long ago I happened to read a biography of you and ever since then I’ve been thinking more about that, to tell the truth. If you don’t mind my saying, the book hardly does you justice.’

  ‘No. My family would certainly agree. Especially Filo here. He didn’t recognize his father at all. I’m quite sure you could do better, Gerry.’

  ‘Immodestly, I think so too.’

  ‘I’ll have a contract drawn up right now. I can’t possibly go on working on Arrazzato with the constant threat of legal action hanging over the production.’

  ‘As I said, my quarrel is with Marta and not with you.’

  ‘But nor could I hire your valuable talents if I believed you still had an outstanding dispute with my composer. I may as well tell you, Gerry, that although she doesn’t yet know it I fully intend using Marta again.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Obviously if she and I are to be colleagues at some time in the future I would make quite sure that any little misunderstandings were behind us. Really, I’m well on the way to forgiving her right now.’

  ‘Excellent. After all, don’t forget this film might easily make your voice famous, even a potential source of income, like the gentleman who did the whistling for Morricone’s spaghetti western scores.’

  ‘Or Florence Foster Jenkins massacring the Queen of the Night’s big aria? Terrific.’

  Pacini nods unhappily, takes out his mobile phone, punches a number, gets to his feet and goes out onto the balcony, speaking rapidly. Filippo smiles another of those collectable smiles.

  ‘I think you’re a generous person, Gerry. My father’s very grateful, you know. This could have been a crisis for us.’

  ‘Nonsense, just a passing awkwardness. These things happen.’ I glance up at the wall above his head and catch the eye of a fascist putto who I swear winks at me as his little rosebud mouth lisps the words ‘Kick ass!’

  ‘The lawyer will be here in an hour with a draft agreement‚’ Pacini announces as he comes back in, tucking his telefonino away. ‘Filo, will you please go and tell Mario to have everything ready for two-thirty on the dot instead of two? We can delay the shooting schedule long enough to settle this.’

  And so it was. Within fifty minutes I had signed a document agreeing that Piero Pacini would assign me exclusive rights to a biography with an option on writing a script for a forthcoming film as yet untitled, this agreement to be dependent on the complete renunciation of any legal action intended or actual in connection with the musical score of Arrazzato and its composer. (Or many florid paragraphs to that effect.) In short, Samper has won. Thank you, Marta, you malevolent old baggage. Things have turned out quite well for me despite the worst you could do. But golly, what a day! It started with me being grilled by a maresciallo of the carabinieri and has now turned into something of a triumph. A good example, though I say so myself, of the advantages of preserving a cool head and a firm purpose.

  What I don’t know, of course, is how this day is going to end.

  45

  Wi
th the agreement signed I feel more relaxed about things and am determined to enjoy myself. I mosey around the villa, eye the kitchens and the cellar, wander through the grounds and watch some more shooting on the beach. The film remains a complete enigma to me. Putting these few scenes together with what little I have gleaned from Marta and Pacini I can’t begin to work out what it’s about, nor how it might be ‘lifted’ by Nanty’s guest spot with Alien Pie. But there, I’m not a famous director, just his future biographer.

  Whether or not Pacini and his crew know where they’re going with Arrazzato they certainly set about it with terrific enthusiasm and conviction, which is very Italian of them. This prompts me to rueful reflection of how very un-English enthusiasm and conviction are: possibly the two things most notably absent from my own poor land, utterly lost as it has been these last fifty years. We’ve had our day and simply can’t think how to enjoy the evening … Ah! You can’t beat home thoughts from abroad, especially not after a good lunch by the ageless Mediterranean. Take heart, Samper (I tell myself sternly). Don’t get feebly Carlylean; make me laugh instead. Cheer me, slobby git! The past is but an anagram: only rearrange it. How? Experiment, how else? Do something new with dull old ingredients.

  For example, Stuffed Udder might equally well be Stuffed Adder: the good cook is as flexible as his raw materials are available. My udder recipe is basically something I borrowed during that Per Snoilsson trip to Senegal I mentioned earlier. There, it is de rigueur for First Communion, when they use camel. The Samper version uses cow with – as Nanty might say in business-speak – bells and whistles. The butterscotch sauce is its crowning glory. It’s all a matter of being on the qui-vive for amusing possibilities, for making interesting tracks that cross the well-beaten paths of stuffy cuisine at right angles.

  Towards seven o’clock Pacini asks if I would like to stay to watch them do a night shoot. He explains they’re going to film the scene where the Albanian fisherman is rounded on and attacked by the Green commune. The principled youngsters have become wildly racist as the result of fascist contamination by the genius loci, by the strident anti-immigrant propaganda of the downmarket Italian media, and by the dumbing effects of going to a deafening Alien Pie gig. It all sounds like stupendous tosh to me but Filippo says it could be interesting and besides, he can’t anyway fly me back until the shoot’s over. I therefore agree, and later find myself peaceably watching the sunset on the beach with a muscular technician named Baldo who has sprained his wrist and has been given time off. We share a bottle of Fernet Branca – oddly enough – that he has liberated from somewhere. As it grows dark I find my natural British reserve becoming seriously compromised. I feel the urge to bestow on the deepening twilight, the lilting sea and Livorno’s distant floodlit docks Sergio’s lovely farewell to Marilena from the end of Act 1 of I Testimoni di Genova. The wicked Arabian magician Tazio, who lusts after Marilena himself, has told Sergio that the only way to be certain her love for him was predestined is to go to the Great Pyramid of Giza and take the measurements of the burial chamber, all of which are a sure prediction of the future. Reluctant but tragically dim, Sergio buys an expensive tape measure and sets sail for Cairo, though not before he has given Marilena his portrait. From the deck of the departing ship he sings his celebrated warning against loving a portrait more than its subject: ‘Le immagini sono a puro scopo illustrativo’.

  When I finish this moving aria Baldo wipes his eyes on his sleeve and becomes most flattering. He says I must have a truly wonderful musical ear because I’m able to produce such a hilarious pastiche of the score of Arrazzato: an astonishing feat for someone who has only been on the set for a day. Others, too, have heard it and run up to collapse around us on the sand, rolling and laughing. The trouble is, when people are practically overcome with mirth, slapping you on the back and saying what a dazzling send-up it is, you have little option but to agree, no matter that the fervour of your own performance has brought tears to your eyes. It turns out that young Filippo Pacini is one of those who has overheard my performance. Although it’s now too dark to see much of his expression I gather from the way he’s nodding his head that he realizes I really did have Marta over a barrel, as the saying is. There can be no further question where her inspiration came from, fraudulent old toper and plagiarist that she is.

  But Filippo has been sent by his father to reclaim my admirers. They are needed to ready the sets for the sequence about to be shot. The Fernet seems to have melted away so I also get to my feet and wander across to the fake cove, although not with much hope of diversion. I’m assuming that night filming is going to be remarkably like filming by day, only darker. Pacini, who in deference to the night is now wearing his eyeshade backwards on his head, gesticulates at the centre of a group that includes a swarthy fellow wearing cut-offs, flip-flops and a threadbare T-shirt. He, I take it, is the Albanian: an illegal immigrant who began by teaching the eager Green communards how to fish by handlining but who is now about to fall victim to their racist ire. My muscular new friend Baldo, whose sprained wrist is most affectingly strapped up in dramatic swathes of pink plaster, informs me that the script calls for the Albanian to arrive running along the beach, looking over his shoulder at his invisible but audible pursuers. He stops and does a stag-at-bay in front of his house before making to escape inland towards the villa, but lights and voices appear from this direction, too. He dashes down to the water where his boat is drawn up, obviously hoping to push off and get away to sea, but the boat is stove in. Now in a panic, he runs into the house and emerges with an armful of distress flares, races to the very end of the artificial promontory and begins setting them off in desperate profusion. This is heavily ironic because it’s all too late, nobody is going to respond in time, the State is anyway seen to be indifferent and incompetent (cutaway of local coastguards sprawled in their offices, drinking wine and commenting languidly on the money people spend nowadays on firework displays).

  Eventually the Albanian is cornered by his pursuers at the end of the spit, ritually hacked to death and his torso raped for no obvious reason other than that of cinematography. There follows a general orgy to be backed by Alien Pie’s soundtrack and intercut with Mussolini-era newsreel footage. The girls are driven to erotic frenzy by the violence, using rockets in a most improper fashion (see the film’s title). A dead seagull is found and spitted on someone’s erect cock, its wings held out on either side to simulate flying.

  Well, really. You might think Albanians get quite enough of this sort of primitive violence in their own country, with their blood feuds and whatnot. And anyway, you don’t have to kill illegal immigrants. Why not punish them instead by taking them on compulsory tours of the Uffizi, obliging them to attend interminable courses on the iconography of Renaissance art, making their permessi di soggiorno contingent on a thoughtful essay about the Etruscans? Pretty soon there would be hardly any illegal immigrants in Italy. They would all have stampeded elsewhere, principally to Britain where there isn’t enough culture left to constitute a threat to them.

  But as for the great Piero Pacini, what can he be up to? I’m beginning to wonder if I want to write this fellow’s biography after all. It will obviously involve wading through some pretty murky depths, very different from the skittering shallows in which my sporting heroes posture and prance. Indeed, short of having been Pasolini’s psychiatrist I can hardly imagine more specialized employment. Oh, well. Samper will find a way; he always does.

  I’ll say one thing for Pacini: he knows his job and likes to get a move on. I gather he prefers to get as much as he can in a single take. Marta’s score starts up, a sort of sinister tango. The chased and bayed Albanian sprints about on the sand, looking over one shoulder, cameras tight on his terrified face, other cameras panning over the scene. The whole area is lit with great floods covered in a sort of pink cheesecloth which, together with the right filters on the camera lenses, apparently gives the effect of moonlight. Eventually, after much to-ing and fro-ing, the moment ar
rives for the scene with the distress flares. For this Pacini will need close-ups of fingers fumbling with a cheap disposable lighter, the thin T-shirt trembling to his thudding heart and gasping breaths, the fuse igniting, then pull back for the fiery whoosh of the rocket and its burst of starshells against the night sky. A large polythene bin is carried into the fisherman’s dilapidated house. The bin is covered with stencils saying ‘Explosives’, ‘Danger’ and so on, as well as being criss-crossed with adhesive red and yellow warning tape. I’m glad to say they’re being careful, keeping their store of flares safely under cover and removing only enough for each shot. Before sending up the first flare Pacini makes what are obviously pre-arranged calls on his mobile phone, presumably to the local police and coastguards, warning them that whatever they may shortly see is a false alarm: genuine filming of fake distress.

  There is no question, these rockets are terrific. They scoot up with blazing orange trails and burst silently into brilliant red flares that sink slowly earthwards on little parachutes, winking out before they reach the ground. But try as he may, Pacini can’t seem to get exactly the shot he wants of the Albanian’s face when he lights the fuse. The rockets go up and the flares come down and soon everyone loses interest in them and concentrates instead on the Albanian. Between shots he is instructed to run on the spot so as to be suitably breathless while Pacini towers over him giving him instructions in a gravelly voice. The man nods, the lighter flicks, the rocket goes up, the flares come down and still it’s not right.

  It is after one of these failures I notice something mildly interesting. I’ve been spending much of the time watching the display instead of the actor because the flares against the night sky produce an agreeably psychedelic effect that may well have something to do with Fernet Branca. Indeed, the gorgeous red hanging in the night sky for thirty seconds is a good deal more interesting than the Albanian, a dull-looking fellow who has anyway turned out to be Moroccan. I’ve been watching the moment when each flare goes out and noticing that often there is still a spark left glowing dully as it drifts the last fifty metres to earth. Some fizz into the sea, most vanish into the night. But I’m watching one that has landed on the roof of the fisherman’s house and suddenly glows a little brighter. That’s interesting, I think: that’s not what you’d expect with tiles. I suppose it must have landed on one of those sheets of plastic that have been so stylishly deployed to cover holes in the roof and simulate threadbare poverty. In which case, surely it could melt its way through and even perhaps fall into –