by Tony White
JJ could do little more than nod. Maybe it was time to change the subject. ‘I was thinking earlier—’
Victor cut him off: ‘Anyway, it is true what Élise say, that these towns were so depopulated after the war. But do you know what they really did? How they really rebuild? These towns are prisons!’
‘Ah,’ said Milo, laughing, ‘now you will hear something that is not in the tourist guidebooks. It has nothing to do with the bombing of railways, but—’
Victor reached for his glass, but knocked it over. ‘Ah, fuck you all,’ he said as he got unsteadily to his feet. ‘It can wait. I have to piss.’
A fan of light was briefly unfurled across the cobbled square, then disappeared as Sylvie pulled her front door shut behind her. As she walked over to join them, JJ thought that she looked like a film star. He remembered a story that Milo had told him on their travels: how Sylvie and Victor had met, perhaps six years earlier. She and her girlfriends were down from Paris. They were young and beautiful, and they had been hanging out with some rich sailors, round-the-world racers on these incredible boats – trimaran, catamaran – state-of-the-art ocean-goers that had just done 30,000 miles in the most difficult waters, but were now simply hopping from port to port along the Riviera, from one victory party to another.
Sailing from Saint-Tropez to Nice, Sylvie and her friends had been sunbathing on the deck when a sudden mistral had caught the team unawares. Everything was fine, except that all of Sylvie’s clothes, which had been rolled up on the deck beside her, were suddenly plucked up by the wind to festoon the rigging for a second or two, before blowing away entirely. Stopping off in Antibes, she had had no alternative but to walk around the town like this – practically bursting out of her tiny primrose-yellow bikini – much to the amusement of the sailor friends who may have been enjoying her humiliation rather too much. In any case, the story went, none of them had thought to help.
Victor, who had been sitting on the corner outside Chez Félix drinking a pastis when this group had walked through the city gate, had heard and seen enough to clock this power play, and without a word – instead of joining the rest of the male population of Antibes, it seemed, in leering at the beautiful young woman – he had simply stood up, undone his belt, taken off his Levi’s, unbuttoned his shirt, and given the clothes to Sylvie. So that it was he who was standing there in very skimpy swimwear instead of her.
One of the sailors had apparently made the mistake of laughing at the sight of the hairy, barrel-chested potter standing outside Chez Félix in a tiny pair of Speedos, but he hadn’t laughed for long.
If the insouciant Sylvie had been surprised by this glorious act of chivalry, she hadn’t shown it. Instead she had just turned up the legs of his jeans, pulled the belt tight, rolled up the shirtsleeves and knotted the tails around her midriff. Then, sitting down at Victor’s table as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she had turned to order ‘Un grand café crème, s’il vous plaît’, taken one of his cigarettes out of the packet, and before it was lit, or so they used to say, Victor and Sylvie had fallen in love.
20: PLATANE (PLANE TREE)
In a gesture of faith in the longevity and security of Il Duce and of the grand Italian imperial project that only weeks later would seem laughable if it were not so tragic, Oreste Bonomi – the short-lived Minister for Trade and Foreign Currency in Mussolini’s final cabinet – had called, upon his appointment in February 1943, for the establishment of an annual trade fair that could, in a fraternal spirit of international exchange and in the most convivial surroundings, demonstrate to the world the industrial and scientific advances that had been made possible by Italian fascism, and to emphasise Italian superiority. Inspired by his own superficial understanding and vicarious, picture-postcard impressions of the New York World’s Fair of 1939 in Flushing Meadows, Bonomi called for an Esposizione La Prima Internazionale di Eccellenza Tecnologica e Architettonica Italiana to be held in Nizza’s stunning Palais de la Jetée and environs throughout August of that year.
Designed by certain Niçois Anglophiles as a belle-époque tribute both to Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace and the Brighton Pavilion, and in an attempt to emulate the then current British craze for pleasure piers, the Palais de la Jetée had opened to the public in the early 1880s, and now at last its great crystal domes had been restored to their former glory, the building having spent much of the Great War doing service as an army hospital.
It would not have been facetious or too far wide of the mark to suggest that career fascist Bonomi – proud veteran of the Milanese Squads (that tight-knit band!) and the March on Rome, the Founding President of the Fascist Merchants’ Syndicate and a former Director of Propaganda at the Ministry of Popular Culture under both Alessandro Pavolini and Gaetano Polverelli, who had just replaced the rather more suave and worldly Raffaello Riccardi at the Trade Ministry in Mussolini’s eighth cabinet reshuffle – needed to make a bravura gesture to cement his position, one that owed more to his long acquaintance with Il Duce, perhaps, than to his expertise in matters of national or international commerce. A grand technological trade fair in that most Italian of occasionally French cities seemed an opportunity to do just that. The picture that surviving records tell us Bonomi painted to that cabinet – of jazz-playing military bands and flying boats, of a motor racing circuit weaving between the plane trees and the palms on the Promenade des Anglais – the intoxication of petroleum and victor’s wreath! – of la bella gente e titani dell’industria, each Cinecittà starlet and every giant of Italian commerce, drinking champagne and flirting before the sparkling azure waters of the Côte – was perhaps at least an appealing enough fantasy and a distraction from the political and military realities of those last days that it was simply waved through. Where the naive but powerful Bonomi might have seen strategic development and further opportunities for flag-waving and, no doubt, for personal aggrandisement, others merely conceded the possibility of a last hurrah.
Of course, it is a matter of historical record that Bonomi’s lavish vision never came to pass. Before July was out, the decades-long dream that had been Italian fascism would be over. Total defeat in North Africa would be followed by the Allies’ invasion of Sicily. Il Duce himself would be arrested and imprisoned. Sure, only to be freed – briefly – by the Germans, but still, the jig was up! That was all in the future, however, and no international trade fair can spring up overnight, much less an event of the prestige and calibre of the Esposizione La Prima Internazionale di Eccellenza Tecnologica e Architettonica Italiana, and understandably certain preparations were already well underway. Contemporary photographs show the Promenade and the public gardens littered with half-built pavilions and grandstands, as well as Fiat L6/40 light tanks, and requisitioned French 75mm guns in their improvised sandbag emplacements. Torino’s finest had begun work on the motor racing circuit, while other manufacturers and enterprises had of necessity been ‘setting out their stalls’ from at least the end of May, even if the backdrop against which they were doing so was one of Allied bombings, deportations and the ever bolder assassinations of Italian soldiers, rather than the pop of corks and the ringing of crystal glasses and laughter. It was an increasingly unsafe atmosphere in which the troops of the ragtag occupying army could not know whether even the nanny or the pedicab rider might suddenly turn and kill them!
So it was that the engineers of the Conforti group – celebrated safe-makers of Verona – had found themselves among the first wave of exhibitors, and they had quickly set to work crowbarring open and unpacking their numerous crates, and assembling their prototype within the opulent surroundings of the Palais de la Jetée itself. But the engineers from Porta Palio were not exhibiting their finest walnut-cased and silk-lined, two-lock, multi-compartment, free-standing domestic safes, nor the usual exhibition cutaway model of one of the 12,000kg monsters they had made for the Bank of Italy. In fact, Conforti was planning to use the Esposizione to launch a new line entirely. The company was branching out from
its usual security-based repertoire, and it was another species of behemoth that was being painstakingly assembled and tested there in the Palais. Some young Turk in the engineering department – it is not recorded who, or perhaps those papers were destroyed in the bombing raids of the time – had evidently realised that there was perhaps not so much difference between a metal box designed to safeguard its contents and one designed to cook them. Moreover, they might have reasoned, if Conforti’s skill in the production of luxuriously designed high-end safes could be brought to bear on what had hitherto been thought of by most commercial oven manufacturers as a purely functional device, then it might result in a bread oven that looked more like the ballroom of an ocean liner, let’s say, than the engine room of a tramp steamer. The prototipo Conforti MkI was the result, heralding a new concept in bakery ovens, and sporting sleek art-deco stylings that included a marble-effect enamel shell with chromium detailing and cast-aluminium switch gear. The MkI was one hundred per cent electrically powered, rather than the more usual steam-tube-based hybrid (a design that had been little updated since the 1850s), and was capable of processing fifty kilograms of dough per load.
The plan had been that, once this beauty was installed – a painstaking process in itself – the Conforti engineers would be joined by a team of Italian master bakers who would begin around-the-clock production in an attempt to fulfil if not all then a respectable portion of the not inconsiderable appetites of the Esposizione. Instead, stranded and increasingly desperate, the engineers had resorted to selling their valuable stocks of sugar and government-grade high-quality flours and semolinas to the black market in order to buy cheap liquor.
It was not only Mussolini’s government and military leaders who needed some distraction. The food shortages in both Italy and the occupied zone, the activities of both the Resistance and organised crime, and the erratic use of sanctions against the civilian population were taking their toll on morale even away from the combat zones near coast and border. But for the baker Monsieur Anselm Juneau it had not been a need for distraction that had seen him rising early on that July morning in order to walk down the mountain to Vence and buy a return ticket to Nice, but a genuine spirit of scientific enquiry. He had been looking forward to the Esposizione since he had first read about it – and Conforti’s technological breakthrough – in a copy of Nice rag L’Éclaireur back in the spring. And even if Bonomi’s ill-fated fête – his Esposizione La PIETA Italiana – was no longer happening, Monsieur Juneau had already gone to such great lengths to get the necessary travel papers signed by the relevant authorities that, when he had heard from André his ‘insurance man’ and black-market flour supplier that the great electric bread oven and its accompanying team of increasingly anxious engineers were somehow still resident in the Palais, he had determined to continue as planned and to go and see it for himself, little realising, of course, what he might be letting himself in for. But go he did, and it was there, beneath the great crystal dome of the Palais de la Jetée, that Monsieur Juneau, avuncular owner of the Boulangerie Juno in La Fontaine-en-Forêt, had first caught sight of the great prototipo Conforti MkI.
Juneau had been working all his life with a traditional open-fronted and stone-built wood-fired oven that had almost certainly changed but little since before the Revolution. The heat distribution was poor, it was hard to clean, and even by setting the fire long before midnight and starting to bake at 3 a.m. he would be lucky if his daily production exceeded a single sack’s worth of bread. A keen reader, when he had the time, and a devotee of science and industrialisation despite the scant schooling he had received during his childhood in fin-de-siècle Vence, Juneau had been particularly interested in those developments in baking technology that had seemed to emanate from what he considered the industrial source and well-spring of the world: the city of Manchester, England. Being possessed of a modest inheritance, and wanting to keep up with such advances, he had been able to subscribe – in those far-off, pre-war years – to Manchester’s Bakery Journal, and from a small ad in that organ had even obtained a rare copy – in English – of Claude Dumbleton’s autobiographical gem The Oven Game, of which he had been an avid, if necessarily slow, reader. For a while he had entertained correspondences with other bakers and bakery enthusiasts around the world. There was the Walton bakery in Stoke-on-Trent, England, and a Welsh couple whose family-run Newport factory supplied a chain of bakery shops across South Wales, although he had not heard from Mervyn or Morag since the outbreak of war. Not to mention the nationalist in Ankara, Turkey, who wrote long letters arguing for – or was it against – the supposed Ottoman origins and inspirations of that very symbol of French baking, the croissant.
Inspiring though they were, the industrial advances that were described in the pages of The Bakery Journal were as far removed from Anselm Juneau’s own craft – his mechanical dough-mixer and wood-fired oven, his great, square, stone kneading block – as the life of an Antibois urchin fisherman might be from the submarine adventures of Captain Nemo in one of Jules Verne’s scientific romances. But that didn’t stop him dreaming of Swinging Tray Simplex Ovens, flour-improvers and biscuit-cutting machines; of ‘tin bread’, cyclotherms and oil-fired uniflows! Twelve-sack combined oven and prover plants! Twelve sacks! Oh, but what he could do with such wonders! By the same token, he had read of Baker and Newby’s experiments with electrically heated band ovens, so was familiar with the principles of their system, in which wires of varying resistance would be wound on to cylindrical ceramic cores, these being contained in steel tubes that were then clustered – much in the manner of the closed-end steam-tube ovens – in such a way as to offer a range of controllable heating zones. As he swept out the ash each night and built another fire, as he scraped the oven deck clear of crumbs each week with the long wooden peel, such matters were never far from Monsieur Juneau’s mind. If there wasn’t quite such a thing as an avant-garde of international baking, here – in the collective pursuit and furthering of the engineering and the bread-making arts that were gathered within the pages of The Bakery Journal – was the likeness of one!
The great city of Nice, as he still called it, was as beautiful as ever in the glorious July sunshine, despite the abandoned pavilions on the Promenade, the gun emplacements and the scruffy and ill-disciplined Italian troops, most of whom were barely in uniform, but when he arrived at the Palais de la Jetée he was not prepared for the wretched scene that greeted him. It was as if a valuable racehorse had been entrusted to the clumsy care of random, disinterested vagrants. For there, like a great streamlined locomotive, stranded, was what could only be the Conforti MkI. While milling around it, some sitting on upturned crates to play cards, was a dishevelled and filthy bunch of miscreants, mostly tramps, it would appear, who stank of cooking brandy and rancid saucisson.
Juneau reached forward to stroke the marble-effect enamel panelling, patting the oven’s flank, awestruck at the cleanness of the lines, then stepping back to admire the nameplate – Conforti MkI – which was spelled out in stylish art-deco chromium. He marvelled at the simple three-levered switching array – well understanding the numerous heat combinations that could be thus controlled – at the elegantly counterweighted peel doors and the broad expanse of baking deck within. Looking more closely, he could see that the smooth enamelled flanks of the machine concealed drawers and doors, means of storage or of access to the cavernous chambers around the oven itself, to the machinery and workings – the transformers and the heating elements – for cleaning and repair. Everything had been thought of! It was as if the wildest of his Bakery Journal-inspired dreams had suddenly come to life. Being in the presence of the great machine was a profoundly moving experience for Anselm Juneau. He felt awed by the human achievement that was represented by the future of beauty and plenty that the prototipo seemed to betoken. More than merely an oven, it seemed to represent – no, to embody – a new bond, a statement of faith in humanity’s quest for survival and betterment that was diametrically opposed
to the terrible and murderous urges of the time, this never-ending war. Transported, Juneau felt that he was in the presence of some great maternal principle. These perfectly counterweighted peel doors opened into a baking chamber that was as mystically charged as the life-giving womb, and which stood in opposition to war’s gaping maw, the jaws of hell into which were being shovelled the bodies of the countless millions of dead. And yet – he looked at the ruffians, who had now stopped their card game and were looking back at him – how could the high ideals that were represented by Signore Conforti’s great prototipo have fallen so low, so quickly?
‘Gentlemen,’ he offered, without condescension. ‘An amazing feat of engineering. Thank you for your time. I am most grateful. But now I must bid you good day, and I suppose you will be needing to take her back to Italy tout de suite?’
‘Il mio cappello, ci sarà!’ – ‘My hat, we will!’ – said one of the Italians. ‘Abbiamo appena avuto un telegramma dal capo ci dice di restare. Anche se ad essere onesti, non mi dispiacerebbe uscire di qui!’*
‘On leur a dit de rester ici,’ translated one of the Niçois, a smooth-talking chap, but with the weather-beaten face of a street drinker. ‘Mais il veut retourner en Italie.’† This Frenchman then gestured to a doorway leading off the exhibition hall into a service area or corridor. ‘We have more materials back here, if you would like to see. Manuals and so forth, some specialist tools and spare parts, which I think Sir may find of interest.’