by Mavis Cheek
Once you start thinking about honesty in life, everything seems to connect and everything that connects seems to undo your presumptions. Maybe the oldest profession was the most honest? Claudia had used the words onesto, integro, probo many times in the course of the interview and they had never seemed artificial. Truly, truly the world had turned upside down.
‘Quite right,’ she said. Then she looked at my hand, at my wedding ring, and smiled – not entirely sweetly. ‘You are married?’
I nodded.
‘Happily married?’
I nodded again.
She clapped her wizened mouth shut with a snap, puckering her chin, and looked at me sourly, and then Brando, and then back to me again. ‘How long?’
I told her.
‘Marriage,’ she said vehemently, ‘is the least truthful state of all.’
‘What does she say?’ asked Brando, responding to the emphasis.
I told him, still thinking about it myself.
‘Do you want me to explain?’ she asked.
I said I thought I understood.
Brando gave a chuckle of sardonic pleasure. She turned to him and said firmly that she expected there had been many a young man who had not, quite, told him the truth of his actions. And had he, Brando, really taken pleasure on every occasion he had found himself in bed with a lover? His cazzo? Had it always performed properly? Did he think the colour pink was suitable on him, a man with such florid cheeks? Brando understood about a quarter of it all. I made sure, by translating for him very carefully, that he understood the rest. It shut him up nicely.
Now we both sat there in that hot, dry and shadowy loggia trying to put a good face on it. But she was saying no more. She stood up, either the chair or her joints creaking, and walked along the deeply shadowed walls of the building – indicating each carved panel. ‘It is all here,’ she said. ‘You do not need me to describe our skills. There are and always have been only seven orifices. They are all there in their various ways. I hope your photography is a success.’ And with that she returned to her chair, closed her eyes, nodded and said no more. Brando placed another note into the woman’s hand which, like its sister, with remarkable deftness, was hidden within those black folds immediately.
The heat was intense now, well past midday, and even though it was April there was nothing cool on the slight breeze. She sat, eyes still closed, and flicked her hand at us dismissively.
We thanked her, to which she nodded again but did not open her eyes, so we wished her good luck, and left.
‘I need a stiff drink,’ said Brando.
‘I wondered what you were going to say.’
‘Don’t be so vulgar,’ he said.
And then, as we walked back towards the Schiavoni in the chequered heat, he kept repeating with admiring wonder in his voice, ‘A satyr – with a wine cup?’
‘Trust you to remember that. You should be so lucky.’
‘So should you. And your new Italian friend? I wonder – how is his cazzo?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Nor do I intend to find out.’
‘That’s not the way it looked last night.’
‘That was just the Campari.’
‘He was attractive – in a straight up-and-down way. And highly respectable – a director of that most prestigious museum – and anyway, he thinks you’ve flown already. You are safe from temptation. If that’s what you want?’
‘Stop stirring, Brando. It was merely the Campari and I’m back to being a respectable married woman today. And a truthful one.’
To which he, much amused, said that I’d have made a very poor whore if all I could do was tell the truth to the hopefuls who had the misfortune to come to me for a bit of fun. And that anyway, I seemed to have lost my capacity for fun, or what capacity I once had. In fact, Brando said, I was dull and respectable nowadays. Just as well that I was going home. He was better enjoying the city without miserable me. The old woman’s words had obviously stung him. That, and fear of age perhaps. And, despite my telling myself that he therefore wanted to sting me, his words went in. Very definitely went in. Indeed, truth hurt. I was dull. I had no spirit of adventure. I should have gone to Florida, it was the kind of safe place suited to a dullard like me.
‘I wonder who the owner of the building is,’ I said.
Brando looked at me in a kind of baffled wonderment. ‘Well, your Italian of course.’
We walked until we found a little bar in a nice shady square. I had gin and tonic. Campari was not, yet, to be tolerated. I felt absolutely wiped out, though whether it was from the heat of the sun, or whether it was from the heat of the experience, I couldn’t say. Suddenly, as I looked about me at the beautiful old facades of this little square with its ochre and terracotta walls, its elevated windows and the rush of the crowds passing through, and across at the light playing on the buildings and the glistening of Salute’s golden dome in the distance – it all looked so picturesque and delightful. Telling small lies was hardly significant when there was so much else going on that was cruel or unjust or misery-making. Venice knew very well that when banks fail, the city fails. When cities fail, the world begins to crumble. She had suffered a slump all those hundreds of years ago, and now look at her – a shell of her former glory but functioning, certainly functioning. So he was the owner, that wily old Italian Casanova, that foxy Volpone. It made me feel strange all over. I didn’t like it. Suddenly I really wanted to be home so badly it felt like a pain. Safe, I wanted to be safe. Dullard, dullard, dullard. But in the secret places of my thoughts …? Perhaps not. Perhaps we all have a fantasy about what we could be like – and it’s best kept that way, just a fantasy. It is certainly not a truth that has to be told. How right the old woman was about that.
The heat was enervating, the place was enervating, sucking the common sense out of anyone who dared to dally. I just wanted to be back where I felt secure and unchallenged by old crones with too much wisdom and too much experience and too little ordinary happiness to assault the senses. And my hand, particularly my wedding finger, throbbed. And I was getting superstitious – which was reason enough to embark for home and quickly. Nothing like the carefully tidy front gardens and little brick paths of a London suburb to make you rational again.
‘I think my life is too easy,’ I said out loud. ‘Even all this financial stuff isn’t going to affect me very much. I am immune to difficulty. And I shouldn’t be.’
‘You have said some stupid things in your life, Nina,’ said Brando, ‘but that takes the biscuit. The whole point about life is to make it as easy as possible, for you and – without putting yourself out too much – for everyone else.’ He paused, and looked up at the pure blue sky. ‘I wonder why we say “takes the biscuit”?’
‘Almost certainly nautical,’ I said. ‘We’re an island race. The sea is in our blood’s vocabulary. Nautical. It’ll be nautical.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘that is why I employ you.’
Brando bought himself another grappa and a Times and settled down to read. I settled down to think. And when Brando’s phone beeped and he answered, he gave me a look as if to ask if I was here or not – at which I emphatically shook my head. I guessed it was our Italian friend. But I had much to think about, much, and I didn’t want any further craziness entering what was already a state of confusion. Brando walked off chatting to him for a while. I heard him thank the man for the interesting excursion – and suggest they meet for an after-dinner drink. ‘No, no, she was absolutely fine. Yes. She’s flying out about –’ He looked at me. I flapped my arms. ‘About now, I think. But I’d love to meet for that drink later. And talk a bit more about –’
Good. He could go on his own. While I flew home to my beloved suburbia. As I watched the people of Venice come and go and thought about infidelity and onesta, etc., in all its many guises, I remembered those salient lines from Dorothy Parker –
Helen of Troy had a wandering glance;
Sappho’s restriction was only the sky;
/>
Ninon was ever the chatter of France;
But oh, what a good girl am I!
How well our old woman knew the fires of desire and suggestion. I had a sudden, unpleasant image of Robert visiting a house of ill repute in Florida (Did they have such things? Of course they did), which left me wondering – how idle is the idle brain – if that wouldn’t be preferable to his meeting someone in a bar and actually liking them. At least if he had to cough up some dosh he might feel less inclined to fall in love. I heard Brando say, ‘Yes – pity she had to go – her husband … all a bit difficult at the moment for them. But I shall see you later and look forward to it. Goodbye.’ He put the phone on the table and picked up The Times again.
‘Brando,’ I said suddenly, ‘have you ever paid for sex?’
‘Every day of my life, sweetheart,’ he said cheerfully, and went back to reading the paper.
Fourteen
Ambiloquy: the use of indeterminate expressions; discourse of doubtful meaning.
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755
IT WAS THE middle of the afternoon and I was packing slowly, longing to be gone. As I folded and smoothed I thought about truth generally. It was a such a hydra, it really was. And not one I could imagine taming – for long. And at least I had tried, and would go on trying. Only another few days to go. But maybe just for this one week I could square up to some of the great names? After all, George Washington might be known for his truthfulness but, frankly, the cherry tree was – or rather was not – there – the axe was in his hand – what else could he do but own up? He couldn’t very well say the tree fell over and the fairies took it away. Well, possibly he could if he were my son – in fact it’s a racing certainty he could if he were Johnno. But George? He had to own up. There was the felled tree. So he’s scarcely a decent example of taking the hard road to honesty. Literature does better than fact in the matter of truth’s dark side. Fiction may be one big lie but Hardy’s Tess is much more of a warning because she finds out that truth-telling comes with its scourges. Poor, poor Tess. She tells the truth to that moralising, dewy-eyed fool Angel and eventually hangs for it … Hardy’s message? Keep shtum.
Even in the greatest of all literature – the Sophoclean model whence all drama derives – there is no advertisement for the better side of veracity – none at all. Oedipus is certainly no incentive for the digging out of truth. Or the joys of having your own, tame Oracle. Oedipus. Polluted outcast. Destroyed with the guilt that the truth provided. Poor old swollen foot. A man beset by the gods, advocator of truth and finally blinded by it. It’s not my fault cuts no ice with truth. I should remember that, I thought, rather than parading all my new-found transparency. Personally I have always thought that the great flaw in this Grecian tale is that Oedipus, having solved the riddle of the Sphinx for Thebes, then gets married. If he knows he’s destined to marry his mother you’d have thought he’d steer clear of that union altogether, just in case. I know I would. But that’s those boys for you, they just won’t be told. Lust, I suppose, lust and the desire for power. Marry Jocasta and you will be King. So maybe he deserved his exile. Any right-minded person would have steered clear of tying the marital knot on the grounds that you can’t be too careful. But not in old Greece. Marriage, I thought, looking down at my poor bruised finger all puffed up around my wedding ring, it always seems to come back to that. And the room was getting hotter despite the open windows.
Robert and I liked Jack Nicholson. Robert, I imagine, liked him because he could fantasise that – had things been a little different – his life could have been just like that. Women dropping at his feet, wonderful set of teeth and happy hedonism. Whereas I just drooled, mostly, and if pushed might manage to say that I also thought him a fine actor in fine films but, really, this was, largely untruthful. About as onesta as I imagine it is to look at Marilyn Monroe on the screen if you are of a male heterosexual persuasion and to declare that you only think of her in the same light as Sybil Thorndike. Anyway, there I was in a heap on the bed, thinking about a Jack Nicholson film, A Few Good Men, and remembering his lines and the way he delivers them and thinking that they sum up the dichotomy perfectly. ‘You can’t handle the truth,’ he says to his interlocutor, who happens to be Tom Cruise, but never mind, ‘because you sleep under that blanket of protection which I provide and you’d rather not know how I provide it …’ He pauses. Tom Cruise tries his little best to act a response and fails but Jack is acting for both of them here. ‘…You can’t handle the truth: because somewhere, deep down inside yourself, in that place you don’t talk about at parties, you know you need the bad stuff to protect the good stuff.’ Tom Cruise grips his little fists, clenches his tiny jaw and turns on his little high-stacked bootees. Jack wins.
It was while I was dwelling on the additional struggle of truth with honour, and how badly I had misjudged the Italian in thinking he had any honour to him at all, that my stomach gave me a little tickle. Most improper of it. It happened again when I could not stop thinking that, compared to Jack Nicholson, physically the Italian was chocolate chip. How strange, when there were older men who looked like the Italian, that so many perfectly wise and excellent women found a balding Lothario with little piggy eyes and absolutely no regard for delicacy where the pursuit of sex was concerned entirely seductive, to wit one Mr Nicholson. I had no doubt that the Italian would have more finesse. Much more finesse. It was around that point that my stomach suffered the tickle and the telephone in my room rang. It was the concierge. I had a visitor. It would be Brando, I thought, and I said she should send him up. A little while later there was a knock on the door. It was not Brando. It was the Italian. With a small posy of lilies of the valley and an expression of tender concern.
At the sight of him and the realisation that a) it wasn’t Brando and b) I was supposed to be on a plane and c) I wasn’t wearing very much – quite a small T-shirt over unpretentious knickers – I did the only thing possible under the circumstances and squeaked. The Italian put up his free hand, palm outwards, as if to say that I should not be anxious. And then gave me the quickest and undoubtedly most calculated look of approval – true or not – before turning away. Irritatingly, I was pleased. I wanted to ask him to wait downstairs but not much came out except another squeak or two which may or may not have been the question ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ as I scrabbled in my half-filled case for a skirt. He might have had the decency to turn away, but not, I noticed as I did up the zip, to offer to leave the room. ‘You may turn round,’ I said, with as much dignity as possible. He did so. He was smiling. I couldn’t help admiring his teeth all over again, all the better to eat you with, my dear … Or rather, at first he smiled and then he shrugged with that look of the little boy who has done something wrong and then he moved towards me with the flowers held out. They smelled exquisite. He said, ‘I am here to say that I am sorry. And I was told it was all right to come up …?’ I tried to look casual and at ease. ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘But I thought you were Brando.’
I took the flowers. Their scent was sweet and fresh in that hot little room. By then, and despite the open window, the air had grown even heavier – and I pointed to the chair set against the far wall. ‘Would you like to sit down?’ How formal. The whole thing was quite mad. And what was he doing here? He removed the papers and books from the seat, took off his jacket – which he hung over the back of the chair – and sat down. His shirt was open at the neck. He crossed his legs, folded his arms and looked convincingly relaxed.
‘I am so sorry for what happened last night,’ he said. ‘I feel it was my fault. And it spoiled our – our new acquaintance, which is a great pity. I wanted to take you for lunch today but your friend said you had flown home.’ He gave me a candid look. ‘I knew that not to be true since there are no flights in the early afternoon and I knew you were at Casa Giovanni in the morning. So I came to apologise after all.’ He did not look particularly contrite, I thought. He raised an eyebrow. ‘I also knew that you m
ust be very angry, or very upset, to have told me such a lie.’ I flushed, or blushed, and I could not be sure if he was teasing me or not. I decided to ignore the remark. I also decided not to look at him.
‘Oh well,’ I said, staring at the wall above his head, ‘I expect Brando got muddled.’ And then I thought about truth. ‘No. I expect he thought he was protecting me.’ The Italian nodded. He did not seem surprised at the notion that he was someone from whom I needed protecting; indeed, he seemed to think it was a perfectly fair comment. I felt a small and pleasing flutter in my stomach.
I tried to do the reverse of good therapy and think up an anti-gratitude list – he has thinning hair, he has definite jowls, he is nearer sixty than fifty and he is a playboy, without the boy bit. A playgrandpa then. But none of it helped. He was wearing all the right clothes again – the Italian linen, pale biscuit-coloured suit, impeccably sky-blue shirt, soft pale leather loafers. You just knew he could quote from Dante if asked. It was hell. And then he smiled and with his head on one side, asked, ‘And how did you enjoy meeting with Mama Giovanni?’
‘She’s your mother?’ More squeaks.