Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Retrospectively, I deduce this is my last constructive thought for several minutes. According to next day’s newspapers the explosion is well audible in Viareggio and the ensuing pyrotechnic display visible from Massa, some say La Spezia. Like everyone else within a hundred metres of the house I’m knocked flat on the sand amid a total confusion of orange roaring. The sky is a burst kaleidoscope of whizzing red lights. My ears are made of felt and packed with wool. Slowly, slowly the thought ‘Samper has survived’ assembles itself like an unlikely word in the hands of a Scrabble player. I drag myself upright and find I’m naked from the waist up. Disaster. That was a very nice Cerruti shirt I’d slipped on in honour of Filippo this morning – I think it was this morning but things aren’t functioning properly, time included.

  The scene is lit by fire, most of it from the summer-dried undergrowth fringing the beach. The house itself is now roofless, its empty doorframe and window embrasures flickering with flames within. It looks as though we’ve been saved by superior bricklaying: the stout, low walls are mainly intact, suggesting most of the blast went straight up. People are everywhere struggling to their feet. The Madonna is ritually invoked; the Moroccan actor is appealing to – or maybe thanking – Allah. Somebody finds a mobile phone lying uninjured on the sand and has the presence of mind to call for ambulances and fire engines. There seem to be remarkably few serious injuries. Among the worst is Pacini himself, the back of whose head and shoulders are badly burned, his hair crisp and the remains of his plastic eyeshade welded to it. Filippo is kneeling beside him, tears streaming down his face and glinting in the firelight.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ I ask solicitously, but he just shakes his head.

  Soon most people have recovered enough to busy themselves with meaningless tasks such as stamping out embers that are harmlessly burning out in the sand and exchanging hysterical jokes when they meet. The first emergency vehicle to arrive is actually a police helicopter. It is quickly joined by a cacophony of fire engines and ambulances and the scene becomes still more frenetic and dishevelled. People in uniform sprint about, shouting. A stretcher appears, Pacini is loaded into the helicopter with Filippo in attendance and they disappear upwards into the night. So much for my lift home.

  As I’m sure this whole narrative has testified from the start, there is something in the Samper character that makes him shy away from fuss and drama. Having survived, I discover that all I really want is to trot away up the beach into the sheltering darkness and leave the arena to those whose profession it is to enjoy such things. There’s another good reason, too, which is that by some bizarre fluke Pacini’s sound system is still working and from behind the livid scene of disaster rises the awful travesty of my own voice going ‘Uffa … buffa …’ in a demented falsetto. Accordingly, I sidle over towards the bogus promontory, scramble up and over it, and slip away along the line of surf in the direction of Viareggio. For some reason my teeth won’t stop chattering. I have a brisk wash in the sea before resuming my walk. The eminently sane, salt taste restores my senses more than a little. When I turn back to the scene I’ve just left – which despite the fire brigade is still considerably ablaze – it’s just in time to see an extraordinary thing. The two tall cypress trees are standing up to their knees in incandescent scrub and brushwood. One is just beginning to catch fire, the flames running up it like a bright liquid under pressure. The other, though, simply begins to – and I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing – to bend very slowly from the waist, as if it were an elderly butler greeting a monarch. As I watch, the bend accelerates into a grovel and the cypress wilts like a dildo in a smithy, its crest coming to rest on the ground. Curious, I think as I trudge woozily away up the beach with my ears singing. Most curious.

  46

  By the time I was out of bed next day and vaguely dressed it was noon and I was hungry. I put together a sturdy luncheon which I ate on the terrace. Today the distant ocean was as flat and polished as waxed linoleum, impeccably laid and tacked neatly along the edge of Tuscany. With binoculars I tried to pick out the site of Pisorno Studios among the stain of pines down towards Livorno, but without success. It was too far away, the place itself too small. I suppose I’d thought a lingering wisp of smoke might still mark the spot, but there was nothing.

  I dipped a chunk of pecorino into honey and chewed luxuriously. Samper had made it home alive, that was the main thing. Last night I had gone on trudging up the beach, shirtless and dazed, until I came to a resort that was still open, despite summer season being over. It had one of those interchangeable marine-themed names that even in my confused condition made me ponder the mentality of both proprietors and their guests. There were still some lights and activity in the gardens of Blue Sea, Golden Sands, The Captain’s Compass or whichever it was, where a few late diners had probably been further delayed by rushing out to the beach halfway through their meal to gaze at the spectacle and excitement down the coast. Now that there were no further explosions and fireworks they had gone back to their coffees and brandies. I sidled in through the gate and found – the luck of the Sampers! – a white unlined mess jacket, presumably belonging to a waiter, thrown over a chair. I appropriated it and walked shamelessly up the sandy track to the road. This was deserted except for the guests’ parked cars and some fin de saison moths trying to mate with a street lamp. The waiter’s pockets were empty except for an unopened condom and a tin bottle opener but I found enough euros in my trousers for some phone calls. It took an hour to get a taxi and the driver needed a good deal of persuading to take me all the way into the hills above Camaiore. Actually, I had to promise him the emergency hundred-euro note I knew I had at home in the fridge. And so to bed, a bit trembly and still faintly deaf.

  After lunch I thought I ought to tell Marta about last night’s fiasco if she hadn’t already heard. True, I was definitely still sore about the unscrupulous way she had lampooned me. She had clearly thought long and worked hard to achieve that odious degree of musical realism, and she was not going to be able to wriggle out of it by pretending it was just a little affectionate private joke she’d impulsively worked into her score. Not a chance. Still, Samper’s way is subtle and his memory for slights legendary. He can bide his time. For the moment it would cost me nothing to play the good neighbour so I headed across to her hovel. The replacement fence was up, although to my practised eye there were plentiful signs of sloppiness and haste. In order to do the whole job in a day they would have had to use quick-setting concrete to sink the posts. Still, they had at least remembered to put a door in the middle so I went through to find the house unlocked as usual and a total absence of the hairy hag herself. In some way I couldn’t quite define, the place felt as though she had simply abandoned it rather than that her sister had finally arrived and they had just popped out to do some shopping for the weekend. I felt the coffee pot on the stove. Stone cold. Having come this far I thought the obligations of the good neighbour had to outweigh the diffidence of the trespasser so I ventured upstairs, preceded by loud cries of ‘Marta?’, to make sure she wasn’t in bed dying of alcohol poisoning. But the upstairs was empty, too. God, what a mess: the bed strewn with hairbrushes and incredible stout knickers. I hurried downstairs and out.

  It was the same the next day, and the day after that. As the immediacy of the drama at Pisorno Studios faded and the singing in my ears died away I began bit by bit to resume a normal life. I again took up my outline of Nanty’s story. The world retreated and went back to lying at my feet as I sat on the terrace. This was, I kept telling myself, my house as I’d always imagined it: silent, neighbourless, and not a helicopter within miles. The leaves slowly changing colour, autumn evenings drawing in, my next six months’ work assured and overpaid: these were the mellow reflections that accompanied my jottings. My more distant future was nothing like so clear. To my own amazement I soon discovered that in the limited time I had spent with Piero Pacini and his charming son I had never even thought to acquire so much as a phone number for ei
ther of them. Consequently I had no easy way of finding out how the great director was, whether he was recovering or what. However, the back pocket of my tragically scorched Homo Erectus jeans yielded a damp and creased copy of the agreement I’d signed with him. The headed paper of course had the lawyer’s address and number but for some reason I put it aside. If Pacini didn’t make it there wouldn’t be a book, obviously; but in my present strange mood it didn’t seem to matter very much. I wondered what would happen to his unfinished masterpiece, how much of it was already shot and safely in the can. To be honest, I could hardly imagine it was worth finishing a film that suggested a pornographic remake of Zabriskie Point.

  The days passed, work proceeded. I rang Nanty and left messages outlining what had happened to Pacini and telling him not to hold his breath where a guest appearance in Arrazzato was concerned. I cooked and sang and scribbled as usual. Yet all the while there was something missing. I remembered a story I’d heard about Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach’s eldest son, who as a boy had occasionally taken revenge on his father by practising the harpsichord at night in the room directly beneath his parents’ bedroom, winding up to a terrific cadence and stopping suddenly without playing the final chord. Invariably his father was forced to come clumping sleepily downstairs in order to play it. Probably apocryphal; but that’s how I felt, without being quite able to say what might do for the lost chord. I kept finding myself glancing towards the distant door in the fence which I’d propped open with a log. When upstairs I would go to the window and wonder if I ought to do anything about her house. Absolutely none of my business, of course. Still, the place was unlocked and she’d left a lot of stuff lying about: her Soviet-bloc piano, for instance; her computer and keyboard; even an unopened case of Fernet Branca hidden away beneath the stone sink. Not that I was remotely nosy but one didn’t wish to attract thieves up here at Le Roccie, and squatters least of all.

  Well, it was very nice at last to be free of a troublesome neighbour, I thought as I busied myself with my own affairs, such as baking an exquisite sponge cake topped with a mortadella icing to kill for. Still, the belated idea did occur to me that Marta could have been exactly the right person to advise or even partner Nanty on his project for a serious large-scale piece of music. She might even need the work. I still favoured my vulgar idea of an AIDS Requiem. Definitely headline-grabbing stuff for the leader of a boy band who needed to start being thought of as an artist in his own right. Good and solemn with lashings of tear-stained social conscience. I was relying on old Marta to come up with some appropriate wordless keening to set the tone. I had to hand it to her: the old bat certainly had a knack. That corrupt little tango of hers I’d heard on the beach that night kept coming back to me even now.

  And then quite suddenly she herself was back. I happened to be passing the window upstairs with a pair of binoculars when I caught sight of an unmistakable figure hanging out her laughably misnamed smalls on a washing line among the trees. The Iron Curtain’s Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, although she was actually wearing her voluminous beige shift that for some reason put me in mind of a Bedouin traffic warden. I could barely contain myself for half an hour before drifting ever so casually across.

  Marta

  47

  I couldn’t bear it – that’s the truth of the matter. It grew on me all the way to France and as far as a farmhouse thirty kilometres to the west of Marseilles. The others seemed to enjoy the adventure, which went impeccably according to Ljuka’s plan. We helicoptered, landed, walked, caught a bus, hung around sinister bars. But the longer it dragged on the more I told myself I was not cut out to be a fugitive. The farmhouse, which belonged to some desperado friend of Ljuka’s who might have been an Algerian prizefighter, was semi-derelict and reminded me fondly of my own house far away in Italy. I still couldn’t believe I had actually walked out and abandoned my beloved Petrof, to whom I yearned to return and make amends by playing my way back into his affections. First he had been usurped by a soulless electronic keyboard and now he had been orphaned in a moment of shameful panic. I made a promise to him and myself that when I got home I would write him my best-ever song.

  So the long and the short of it is that I’ve deserted my own family instead. I’ve left my darling brother and sister and her dreary boyfriend, wishing them Godspeed and all the rest of it. Feeling grown-up and apart, I said that no matter what anybody else had done, I was definitely not guilty of anything worthy of criminal charges and police pursuit. I was therefore going home to Italy. At that point there were tears galore but my mind was made up. It was only slightly dampening that Marja and Mekmek decided to throw their lot in with Ljuka. She had anyway burned her boats by eloping and would have to live with that however things turned out. It also looked as though none of us would be able to return to Voynovia for the foreseeable future so I guess it made more sense to throw her lot in with her little brother and go adventuring with him. He looked so alert and dashing and super-competent that I felt instinctively that Marja would be safe, that they would all fall on their feet somewhere. They had the ebullient flexibility of young people without careers. Beside them I felt old. Ljuka agreed that perhaps it was for the best if I went back. At least they’d know where I was and I could act as a contact and clearing house for information about the doings and whereabouts of our newly scattered clan. Tearfully we took our leave.

  All this took several days, but now I’m home I can’t imagine how I ever allowed myself to be stampeded into leaving in the first place. All those helicopters and sensational phone calls about arrests and visits from the carabinieri – I suppose I temporarily lost my head. So now I bustle happily about, setting things to rights, apologizing to Petrof with a reassuring arpeggio, rinsing the dried dregs of galasiya out of glasses, washing some underwear. I have the feeling that something nameless and awful has happened recently – something like death or surgery – but that with every hour it is receding further into the past.

  But what I really needed to make me feel I’d come home is the sight of Gerry, dudi as ever, trotting through the door in the new fence. Do I quite wish a few more days had gone by before I was strong enough to deal with this? Too bad; here he is. And incredibly, as he prances in, smiling, I actually feel pleased to see him. It shows how much he has become a part of the place, if not of my life. Almost beyond belief, though, is the way he comes straight up and gives me a sisterly hug. Well! He’s never risked being that demonstrative before! What can have come over him? Drink or news, I suspect. Probably both.

  ‘Ooh, I’m so glad you’re back, Marta,’ he cries.

  ‘Sweet of you, Gerry‚’ I say cautiously. I was right about the drink, anyway.

  ‘No, you see, your house, you know‚’ he babbles. ‘I was frightfully worried. The place all unlocked and you vanished. I hope you don’t mind but I’m afraid I came in to check if you were dead.’

  ‘Most kind of you.’

  ‘Well, I can see you’re not and I’m terribly glad about that. No, look, have you heard? Did you hear about your friend Piero Pacini? You haven’t? Oh, good –’

  And he launches into the most dramatic story imaginable about how the whole set of Arrazzato as well as Piero himself was blown up by a spent rocket falling into a dump of flares. I can’t quite follow some of it but he does make it riotously funny even though poor Piero is burned and the film has been badly put back or even ruined and my future with it.

  ‘And, Marta dearest, you’re such a wicked old thing and I’m not at all best pleased with you.’

  ‘With me, Gerry?’ I’m perplexed.

  ‘Well, let’s just say with whoever wrote a painstaking pastiche of my singing for Arrazzato’s musical score.’

  ‘Oh‚’ I hear myself say guiltily. ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Yes, that. It was too naughty of you, Marta.’

  Beneath the flippancy he is so obviously hurt that I fill with contrition.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gerry‚’ I say and take his hand. ‘Truly I am. It was wrong of
me. I never meant it to be hurtful, you know. You’ve no idea what an inspiration it was – what a gift, hearing you singing away like that. It was so right for the film. You were too perfect to ignore.’

  ‘I was?’ He perks up, vain creature. ‘Well, I guess if it was useful to you … Yes, yes, I suppose if it worked … Piero thinks it’s completely wonderful, you know. He thinks you’re a fabulous composer and he wants to work with you again, did you know?’

  ‘He really does? Honestly?’ This certainly is good news and my spirits do a little internal dance.

  ‘If he survives, of course‚’ Gerry characteristically adds. My spirits stop in mid-dance. ‘If he doesn’t, we’re both out of a job. But look, there’s always Plan B to fall back on. You remember my pop-musician client, Nanty Riah? The world-famous Brill who so impresses your friend Filippo? Well, he’s in the market for some professional musical help and he’s got oodles of dosh and I’m going to bring you two together the next time he’s over here. Call me matchmaker extraordinaire‚’ he says expansively.