My flight is, of course, delayed (the evergreen excuse, ‘due to lateness of the incoming flight’, is trotted out by uniformed drudges too bored to care whether we think they’re lying). The upshot is that, disembarking in Pisa at twenty minutes to midnight, I have no option but to take a taxi into town and spend the night in one of the hotels near the station. A wintry rain is falling and I’m not choosy. I check into one where I know just by looking at it that the crimson-carpeted marble staircase will go up from the foyer only to where it becomes invisible behind the lift shaft, whereupon it will revert to being a cement emergency stairwell signposted with icons of a running figure pursued by flames. I surrender my carta d’identità and the night clerk returns to his under-the-counter DVD.
Old and jaundiced – that’s what Samper is in danger of becoming, I think when I resume consciousness at six-thirty the next morning, blinking woozily at the ceiling. Time was, when waking early in a foreign hotel would fill me with the excitement of possibility. These days I know too much about probability. Still, I’m back in Italy, and that alone is cause for rejoicing. I switch on the TV and find the BBCNN channel, which in itself shows how addled I’ve become. It immediately reminds me that what I dislike is not so much my native land but Anglo-Saxon culture in general. Between them, American and British TV broadcasters somehow manage to imply that they have a semi-divine right to interpret and mediate the world for the rest of its six billion inhabitants. This cocky assumption is immediately implicit in the familiar (not to say over-familiar) mateyness that now booms from the TV set.
As though to share some cosmic in-joke exclusive to themselves, BBCNN newsreaders are specially trained to grin and speak at the same time, which is how they introduce their weather seers and prophets who are also grinning insanely while waving vague hands towards a map of Africa in gestures that, by the time they are half completed, cross China while a farrago of pop meteorology comes sweepin in there from the Atlantic an pushin those rain shahs ere over towards the west coaster Denmark which spells a largely sunny dye ere in Ukraine but over in Sarf America well, still a few otspots left from that depression centred on norfeast Brazil over the last few dyes … Hectic blank smiles, spastic gesturings, maps, images and symbols blinking and collapsing one after the other in wild cascade. The screen is a loony chaos of dizzying junk masquerading as information. Running straps top and bottom about sports, stock exchanges, President Bush shoots himself in the foot while hunting terrorists on his Texas ranch, while in the middle of the screen two presenters made of high-impact plastic carry on their grinning knockabout act while their mouths babble about a baby polar bear born in a zoo, Guantánamo Bay, a car that runs on Coca-Cola, a small earthquake in Chile, a White House aide who fucks penguins for charity, torture, car bombs etcetera, and now it’s exactly seven o’clock Southern Pacific time and time for the News but just to keep up BBCNN’s famous irritation quotient here instead is a stream of advertisements aimed at drumming up visitors to countries no one has ever wished to visit and that thousands have died trying to escape – like Voynovia! Whirling images of travelogue guff, national costumes, sun-tanned cleavages, all-purpose Zorba-esque music, ecoparks (formerly the hunting preserves of the late dictator-for-life Bashir Mohammedov) and hotels … God, how many hotels! … those vile caravanserais of the jet set that resemble an architect’s idea of what Nero would have liked, all pools and palms and mother-of-pearl-inlaid foyers exclusively sited on yet another piece of the world’s previously unspoiled coastline, now forever ruined, the images syruped together with words supposed to convey pitiless luxury: pampered, beyond, paradise, dreams, palace, deserve, exquisite – but abruptly the screen dissolves into share prices and a Chinese-looking Dax-hound in shirtsleeves and glinting horn-rims is reading some supremely resistible information about the equities market in Bonn off the autocue and strings of figures spool across the screen in arbitrary directions and so it all rolls on and around in a great flashing blather of interglobal garrulous garbage brought to you by BBCNN 24/7 and don’t forget it’s all there too on our website and also beamed direct to your mobile phone and hearing aid and equally accessible on your prosthetic limb or electric toothbrush thanks to instantaneous XP Vista chip satellite technology because we know how important you are and how vital time is to you and how as a top executive you absolutely need up-to-the-minute information about White House aides pleasuring flightless birds because otherwise some beady-eyed bastard who’s leaner and meaner and has the world’s biggest bladder will steal a march on you while you’re away from your desk taking a leak. And yes – see what you missed when you took your eye off the ball there as that high-pressure area came pushin in from Mongolia where the Genghis Khan Nirvana Palisades Mansion awaits your exclusive and demanding custom, the first and cutest ten-star hotel ever born in captivity while nuclear crisis talks loom grinning and grinning all over your kaleidoscopic, epilepsy-inducing flickering screens, faster and faster until we whimper prayers for the failure of the global power grid and entertain fantasies of the pampering, pitiless luxury of solitary confinement and total sensory deprivation. And all we ever actually wanted, of course, was footage of the White House aide lying back in his double bed, arguing with the penguin about whose turn it is to make the coffee. That would have set us up nicely for the day.
A lot of this drivel is visible, reversed out in the bathroom mirror, as I shave. If this is how millions of people begin their day it’s small wonder they’re full of stress and ill informed. I leave the hotel without breakfast, knowing too well what awaits me. Amazing to think that in my lifetime we’ve sunk so low that even in supposedly good hotels guests are now expected to fetch their own breakfast, not to mention put up with a miniature dustbin in the middle of the table for all the nasty little plastic pots, butter wrappers and pieces of foil – and, what is more, join a conspiracy to pretend that this is gracious living. I cross to the station and in the bar have a blissful espresso (why is Italian coffee so distinctively good?) that sends a glow through me and makes me feel I’m home at last. I salute a stalwart group of dungaree-clad workmen beginning their day with croissants and Fernet-Branca and commandeer a taxi to drive me to where I belong. The driver, relieved at not having to do the five-minute run to the airport that he could do – or give a realistic imitation of doing – with his eyes closed, warns me that he expects the trip to cost €90, depending on whether I want him to go via the autostrada where I will also have to pay the toll, or the old Aurelia coast road, which is slower but free. I tell him airily that since I’m an eccentric millionaire I don’t care which way he goes. I then slump back in silence to contemplate exactly what I need to do. First, find a suitable local hotel as a base to work from, then set about discovering what the position of a homeowner is whose house has been reduced to rubble – rubble that I increasingly feel I should search to see what of my former life has survived. There is also the pressing question of insurance. Suddenly having abundant money seems to be making me less fatalistic about Le Roccie. From time to time I glance up from my reverie and finally notice that whenever I have done so I have seen the Leaning Tower, now on our left and later on our right, sometimes leaning towards us and sometimes away.
‘Had you maybe thought to leave Pisa at some point this morning?’ I ask with amiable restraint.
‘It’s the one-way traffic system.’ The driver unwraps a stick of gum and places it on an extended grey-coated tongue the colour and texture of mouldy bread. We watch one another in the mirror. ‘Also, I’m an eccentric taxi driver.’
Touché, I suppose. Normally this would provoke Samper to stinging repartee but I am still fighting the influence of BBCNN’s breakfast television. I very much want to be calm. The rest of the world may, if it wishes, dissolve into schizophrenia, frantically whirling to confront a madcap slurry of voices and images. But this is not Samper’s way, especially not after a spell in the cool backwaters of East Anglica where, as we know, feeling you’re whole is deeply refreshing and the Rev. Daphne Pitt-Bull is quietly auditioning her Pontius Pilates. I therefore renounce all contentiousness with taxi drivers and concentrate instead on my silent plans, which may yet turn out to encompass a certain amount of mayhem and revenge.
As we approach familiar terrain the air becomes hazier until it is almost foggy. The town itself is shrouded in a muffling grey sea mist. Or mountain mist? Adrian would know. But it is familiar enough at this time of the year to be nostalgic. I experience a pang of pleasure immediately swamped by melancholy. It is three months since I was last here and the sheer familiarity of the wet mountain smell coming through the driver’s window feels like homecoming. Ordinarily, I would stop here and lay in provisions suitable for some astounding and inventive dishes before heading out past Mosciano and up to Greppone, beyond which is my private eyrie. But today I view the place through a grey lens of sorrow, brimming with the irony of a homecoming without a home to come to. Unavoidably adding to my rue, I have the taxi stop outside a hotel. Nothing feels quite so wrong as checking into a hotel in one’s home town. Owing to a bizarre set of circumstances I once had to stay overnight in a hotel at Liverpool Street station and couldn’t rid myself of the idea that, because I was a Briton living and working in London, I ought to have been able to stay there for free, or at least pay a fraction of what it was costing foreigners and outsiders. As I disembark on the pavement the taximeter shows exactly €90, strangely enough, and I wonder if my gum-chewing chauffeur hasn’t fixed it somehow. However, I derive a certain bleak pleasure from staying within my role. Many years ago Nubar Gulbenkian, on a whim, commissioned Rolls Royce to build him a London taxi. ‘I’m told,’ he famously observed, ‘that it will turn on a sixpence. Whatever that may be.’ In this same spirit I now hand my driver €120, saying ‘Do keep the change. You might find a use for it.’ Everyone ought to allow himself a little vulgarity now and then, and the driver’s expression makes it all worthwhile.
Once checked in and my bag dumped, I head off along the Corso to my favourite bar. It feels both inevitable and right that before I can reach it I nearly collide with a misty figure briskly rounding the corner and suddenly I’m face to face with my old Moriarty, signor Benedetti, the dapper, shifty little estate agent who sold me my house some years ago. Because he had assured me that my sole neighbour was almost never there and was anyway mouse-quiet, I bought the house from him without a qualm. More fool I. When I tell you that the neighbour turned out to be a piano-bashing Voynovian in permanent residence – to wit, the egregious Marta – you will understand why relations between Samper and Benedetti have at best been distantly civil over the years. It turned out that the unscrupulous little rodent had told Marta exactly the same thing about me and it was not long before she was countering my polite remonstrations about her piano playing with gratuitous remarks about my singing: an impasse that led to all sorts of unpleasantness. Ever after, the difficult civility that Benedetti and I have maintained has been based on a kind of parody of elaborate Renaissance manners such as Castiglione’s ideal courtier would have approved. On my side it has also been inspired by the enjoyment I get from watching his losing battle with male pattern baldness, a field on which noblesse and chivalry are sadly powerless. Benedetti’s startling new tactics in his trichological campaign are, in fact, the first thing I notice as we courteously side-step before recognising one another as old foes. Gone is the old hair-weaving ploy. In its place, exactly as I predicted, is a glossy, shameless rug. It’s a very good rug, and must have cost him a lot of money. It reminds me that this man ought really to be cherished for the gaiety he brings to our lives. I had similar feelings about Jerry Falwell, the late American evangelist. Anyone who can accuse one of the Teletubbies of being homosexual, and do it with a straight face, is a priceless asset to the human race. Benedetti’s rug is perfect in that it is very slightly wrong: just a shade too black, just a little too full, and only barely avoiding the pompadour look of Elvis Presley or President Marcos, which makes me think he hoped to add a much-needed inch to his stature. The sight of it gives me immediate strength.
‘Signor Benedetti!’ I cry. ‘Dottore! How is it that the pleasure of running into you always exceeds my liveliest anticipation? And how young you’re looking! Truly, you must allow me to say there is something almost uncanny about your refusal to age like the rest of us. Sometimes it crosses my mind that you may have sold your soul to Satan in exchange for eternal youth. If you have, I would be much in your debt for an introduction to His Infernal Majesty.’
‘Signor Samper! Maestro! How greatly I have missed that wicked English humour of yours – so piquant, yet so urbanely expressed! As you know, we do have a few other English residents here, including a couple with a blind daughter who arrived last year. But where the art of conversation is concerned they’re simply not in your league. As an honest man I tell you, this winter has been all the drearier for your absence, and no less so for knowing its cause. I have been counting the days until at last I would be able to commiserate with you on the loss of your beautiful home. Believe me, even when I heard you were safe I felt a shaft pierce my heart in sympathy.’
Brilliant! Well up to the little weasel’s usual standard of florid insincerity. He has even managed to suggest the image of the statue in a church only a few hundred metres away of the Virgin with her heart transfixed by a ring of gilded tin swords representing seven distinct dolours, any one of which would have been enough to spare her the other six: the Baroque version of overkill. We both smile at the same moment, happy to be sparring partners once again.
‘In confidence, I was hard hit myself,’ I admit. ‘As a gentleman of your exquisite sensibility may imagine, the shock was life-threatening.’ (I use the word micidiale, which can cover anything from the unwelcome attentions of a mosquito to assault by a knife-wielding maniac.) ‘To lose one’s entire house and very nearly several dear friends with it – not to mention one’s own life – in a whiff of brimstone, how can mere words do it justice? The incident provoked in me the gravest medical repercussions. I was prostrated for many weeks.’ That’s enough dramatic pathos. Time now to give him a taste of Samper redivivus. ‘For endless hours I lay and contemplated the dire event. Yet do you know, in all that time it never crossed my mind that even so brilliantly qualified and experienced a property surveyor as yourself could have guessed that the site at Le Roccie hid a fundamental geological weakness.’
Benedetti gets the point at once. His raven plumage may be borrowed but his mind is still very much his own. ‘Naturally not, maestro. There was, of course, a meeting in the Comune only days after the tragedy because the tremors were also felt down here, although thanks to the Blessed Virgin we were spared damage. As a courtesy you were invited to attend this meeting yourself, but we gathered that you never received the invitation, being by then back in England. It was our loss. But the region’s geological assessor gave evidence, recorded in the minutes, stating clearly that any suggestion that such a weakness could have been suspected in advance would amount to slander and misprision. The truth is we were all taken completely by surprise, and new geological surveys are now urgently in progress. There is of course concern for Greppone. As you know, there have been several landslides up there in the past, although in general these were caused by heavy rain rather than seismic tremors. But, signore, if I may presume to enquire: what are your plans now?’
‘I was going to a bar for coffee.’
‘But what a coincidence! So was I. I pray you would not think it presumptuous if I joined you and had the privilege of offering you the coffee? I feel there are still matters we might profitably discuss.’
Obviously the crafty bastard wants something from me. He has certainly been quick to soften me up. To find out if there actually was a previous geological survey of the area that he could have known about I shall probably have to go to the central records in Lucca and dig them out. He must also know I could never be bothered. Meanwhile, I badly need coffee.
The surprised barman gives me a welcome reassuringly free of hyperbole. Indeed, he manages to make me feel something of a local celebrity. I suppose I am, really, but it’s nice to know at least one of the tradespeople is pleased to see me. Benedetti elects to sit at a table instead of standing at the bar, and the barman duly brings us our coffees and chocolate-filled croissants.
‘You must forgive me for harping on it, maestro,’ Benedetti dabs at his lips with a tiny square of tissue paper, ‘but I feel myself privileged to be sitting here not merely with an esteemed client and valued friend but with the authentic beneficiary of a miracle. I remember in one of our previous conversations you were, dare I say it?, somewhat Protestant in your scepticism about the powers of Our Lady. But I understand that the ex voto intercession of the Blessed Diana was your salvation. It is my firm belief that she is simply another aspect of the maternal principle embodied by Our Lady who watches over this sad world of ours. At some level they are surely indivisible.’
Huh? What nonsense is this? I have come prepared for coffee, not for a theological discussion. ‘You must forgive me, dottore. I hadn’t taken you for so profoundly religious a person.’
‘Oh, I am, signor Samper, I truly am. For a while as a student I even wondered whether I might have a calling. But as scripture soberingly points out, many are called but few are chosen. I, alas, was not chosen.’
I resist saying this showed a novel fastidiousness on the deity’s part. ‘My stepmother assures me that anyone may serve, regardless of profession. Even a humble prostitute or estate agent or’ – I add hurriedly, for I like to be fair – ‘a mere writer can, I gather, be an instrument of glory. But I’m puzzled by your mention of a Blessed Diana. I’m afraid I’m not very well up on your Catholic saints. Is this to do with hunting? The Roman goddess?’
‘Oh, but surely?’ Benedetti raises his eyebrows and I am intrigued to see how his rug almost (but not quite) imperceptibly floats like a dark continent above shifting tectonic plates. ‘The newspapers here were full of it. A police helicopter pilot reported you as saying that you and your friends were saved by an apparition of the Blessed Diana, the late British princess, the wife of il Principe Carlo. It was all in Il Tirreno and other newspapers. Did you not see it? You told the pilot she appeared in your kitchen surrounded by a halo of light and warned you to leave the house at once. Already, I believe, her followers are visiting the place, and not all of them British, either. Many Italians are –’
‘What? Signor Benedetti, this is utter nonsense! This is truly the first I’ve ever heard of it. No such thing happened and I assure you I said nothing of the kind. I’m afraid the entire incident is a complete invention by the pilot and the press. A total fabrication. What I think I said was –’ But although I’m in full expostulatory mode I now can’t remember exactly what I did say at the time. It had hardly been a moment for great coherence, dangling underslept and overwrought above the ruins of my house. ‘Whatever I said, I most certainly didn’t claim we saw an apparition. I’ve never heard such rubbish. And I’m quite sure that if I were going to see an apparition it wouldn’t be of a public figure I never met and who, at best, moved me to utter indifference. In any case you can’t possibly describe her as “Blessed” as though she were a candidate for sainthood. She was a Protestant and certainly no saint.’
It’s infuriating how difficult it is to deny something vehemently without incurring the suspicion of over-protesting. I hope that in these chronicles I have painted a self-portrait of Samper the inflexible rationalist. Quirky and passionate on occasion, maybe, as befits an artist; but someone who has no truck with the sordid cop-outs and infantile comforts of religious belief and similar superstitions. I generally treat transcendental assertions with pained impatience, hoping to get back quickly to a subject worthy of intelligent conversation. But this tactic can also be overplayed and appear too casual by half, just a little too studiedly indifferent. Here and now, back in my favourite home-town bar and hearing outrageous lies imputed to me by a weasel in a wig, I can’t stop myself from lapsing into furious denial.
Meanwhile, the bewigged weasel is looking rather shocked. He collects himself enough to begin blustering, ‘Of course, signore, these are matters for the individual, and I’m sure in the confusion of that terrible night …’ But then he changes gear as though he has suddenly thought of something. ‘Might I humbly suggest it would be to your advantage if you didn’t express such views too widely?’
‘You think it might put me on the Vatican’s hit list? Papal assassins stalking me and lacing my coffee with polonium?’
Benedetti turns around and with a graceful gesture indicates to the barman that he should bring us fresh supplies. Turning back, he says in a suddenly businesslike tone, ‘Rompo il discorso. To change the subject ever so slightly, my friends at the post office tell me there are a good many letters waiting for you that they were unable to deliver. I would expect some of them to be the usual tiresome bills from ENEL and Telecom Italia since here one still pays for services like electricity and the telephone even if the cables are snapped off and dangling in space. One has a vision of volts and voices just dribbling out into the void,’ he adds with a surprising flight of whimsy. ‘You know how it is with these companies: if you wish to discontinue a service you are required to give suitable notice in advance. They are relentless.’
‘I’m sure a good lawyer will sort that out in thirty seconds.’
‘Oh, then there’s nothing for you to worry about. An agent of your insurance company has also been trying to find you quite urgently. In her frustration she was even reduced to calling on me to see if I could give her your address. But alas! Still, I’m sure a man of your astuteness will long since have had such matters in hand and I have no business even mentioning them. No doubt your good lawyer will easily be able to cancel whatever financial penalties accrue from a failure to notify a loss as soon as it has occurred. I am impertinent even to mention it.’
‘No, no,’ I say magnanimously, while sipping hot espresso cautiously. I don’t suppose polonium has any taste. ‘These are all things I shall be attending to now that I’m back.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it. As one familiar with your house as well as someone who esteems you greatly, I naturally have only the well-being of your affairs at heart. So I need not allude to other concerned parties such as the carabinieri, the Forestale, and the Comune itself.’
‘You may set your mind at rest, dottore. La signora Marta has already apprised me of them.’
‘Ah, you have seen her?’
‘In England. And only last week.’
‘What an estimable person! I believe she is destined to be a great artist.’
‘So does she.’ Estimable, my foot. Not long ago, Benedetti was spreading the implausible canard that Marta was either a call girl or a madam, a calumny for which he was later obliged to apologise. There is craftiness in the wind here but I can’t yet make out its direction.
‘Because you and I are such old friends’ – Benedetti’s eyes guilelessly take in the flyblown ceiling overhead that still bears signs of the exuberance surrounding Italy’s last World Cup win – ‘I will tell you something you will not have heard me say once I’ve said it. It is that gossip in our small world suggests la signora Marta has already made enquiries about the status of your remaining land at Le Roccie.’
‘Ahh.’ Not to me, she hasn’t. Devious bitch. Wants to expand her little empire, I suppose.
‘Yes indeed. I expect you are wondering about property values and so on.’
‘Suppose I were. What would you say my remaining land is currently worth? In round figures?’
‘In round figures? Precisely zero, I’m afraid. The roundest figure of all.’ Benedetti darts me an intense glance as if daring me to protest that only a few years ago he had promised me its value could only ever go up in leaps and bounds. ‘How could it be otherwise, signore? You would never get planning permission to rebuild a house up there even if you wanted to. And if by some miracle you did, no one would insure it for you.’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Definitely not. As terreno it is valueless. It is not agricultural land, nor is it proper forest. At best it is merely sottobosco. And blighted sottobosco at that.’
It’s dreadfully upsetting to hear my treasured patch of Eden so described. ‘You mean I might as well give it to Marta?’ I exclaim bitterly.
‘Ah, but would the signora want it? Don’t forget that from the moment of the earthquake, the value of her own house halved.’
‘Really?’ I perk up a bit.
‘Of course. Who else would want to live there when one day a slightly bigger tremor might drop her house into the gulf as well? I fully understand your predicament, maestro, and I am overwhelmed by sympathy. Both you and la signora are artists. You must have silence and solitude. However, I promise you need not search out wildernesses above the snow line in order to find an ideal house for yourself in this area.’
Good God, I do believe he’s going to try and sell me another house! The nerve of the man! One really has to admire his chutzpah. ‘No doubt you have somewhere in mind?’
Again Benedetti scans the ceiling. Some of the adhering flecks may be the dried toppings of ice creams that were hurled heavenwards at the moment of Italy’s winning goal: peppermint and chocolate sprinkles and the like. For the first time I notice that the little round grey marks are actually dimples in the plaster, no doubt impacts from the metal-topped corks of shaken spumante bottles. ‘But when I say your property is valueless,’ he says as though I hadn’t asked the question, ‘that is true only in terms of the terreno.’
‘Oh? So what else is there? Don’t tell me the landslip has exposed an Etruscan hypogeum full of treasures? Or an unexpected vein of gold, perhaps?’
‘I’m afraid not. No, I am still thinking of your Princess Diana.’
And suddenly I get it. Of course. How dumb I’ve been! So fixated have I become on the demise of my beautiful home that I have been blind to alternative possibilities. Seeing my expression Benedetti nods, the lights gleaming in his jet black thatch where only a few months ago they would have glistened pinkly on his scalp. Does he take it off at night and put it on a stand? I wonder. Or does Mrs Weasel like to run her fingers through it when hormonally urged? And why does this make me feel marginally more softly disposed towards him?
‘You see?’ he says with a smile. ‘But it will need quite careful management. How much need I tell you, maestro, of all people: a local resident of such exquisite knowledge and perceptiveness? It has long been a cause for regret that our little town, though richly historic, lacks the somewhat obvious attractions that cause tourists to flock to our neighbours. Viareggio is an important town with excellent beaches and a major yacht-building industry. Lido di Camaiore and Forte dei Marmi have even more perfect beaches. Pietrasanta has its grand piazza and an international community of sculptors taking advantage of the proximity of the marble quarries of Carrara, where the immortal Michelangelo himself chose his stone. But we, tucked away as we are among the splendours of the Apuan Alps, need to work a little harder to entice visitors. All these things we can acknowledge without for a moment undervaluing our beloved town.’
‘But.’
‘But I have no doubt as to the possibilities opened up by your recent experiences. They could be, shall we say, a way of turning misfortune into fortune? Porto un’ esempio. A little while ago you were perhaps toying with the possibility of buying or even building another house. You might, for example, discover a plot of land that is ideal for your purposes but that turns out to be classified as non-residential or has some other regulatory impediment. So let’s just say I feel sure you would find your path made remarkably smoother provided that … But I hardly need labour the point to a man of your exceptional intelligence.’
True, my intelligence is rather exceptional, although I think by now anybody who didn’t live in a hollow tree and grunt would have got the idea. It’s not polonium I need fear as the wages of indiscretion so much as penury and homelessness.
‘Rompo anch’io il discorso,’ I say, it now being my turn to change the subject. ‘It occurs to me that a little earlier when we were discussing your religious beliefs I may have given offence by implying that my own position is one of intransigent scepticism. No, no’ – I hold up a hand although Benedetti hasn’t moved a muscle – ‘it has been preying on my conscience this last half hour. You must remember that my memory, which you yourself were once generous enough to call “a gem”, was badly affected by my experiences, as my doctors will testify. Yet do you know, in the last few minutes the block caused by the trauma has miraculously begun to lift? I think this superlative coffee may have helped. At last I’m beginning to remember what I told that helicopter pilot about the apparition of the Princess that we all so clearly saw.’
Now the weasel is nodding. ‘I knew you would,’ he says, exposing his canines in a rapacious smile. Then in a surprising gesture he reaches a manicured paw across the table to me. Recklessly – and is there any other way for a Samper to do something momentous? – I take it. As we leave the bar we step into brilliant sunshine. While we have been murkily plotting inside, the mist has vanished. The familiar towers and fountains and archways glitter in Mediterranean light. Greedily I drink it in. Suffolk is a merciful million miles away. My adoptive home town is laid out before me with the air one of those trays full of objects one has to memorise quickly before a cloth is dropped back over it. My co-conspirator gives a little bow and twinkles away towards his office, sunlight gleaming off his mirror-finish shoes and striking pomaded highlights from his Stygian wig. Whoever would have thought a fastidious artist like Gerald Samper would find himself further thrust into the company of his erstwhile estate agent, a scheming tradesman of high polish and low cunning? My life is at present dogged by menials and functionaries (with a shudder I recall the recent quizzing of police persons) and this must definitely stop. Somehow, I must regain my creative solitude where only the muses are fit company. And I now realise that means right here. It is another of those decisions that take themselves.
*
After this encouraging start to the day, the rest of the morning unfolds in layers of bureaucratic monotony. I need hardly say that Benedetti proves to have been perfectly informed about my affairs. There are bills waiting for me at the post office, faithfully promising escalating fines the longer I postpone paying them. The companies behind them are not to know that their final sanction, the threat to cut off their services, merely makes me laugh. And in the offices of Assicurazioni San Bernardino da Siena, the agency that unwisely insured both my house and my car, I encounter the expected thicket of small print and unread clauses designed to let the company slither out of any obligations it once implied it would honour. A horrid glued-on fingernail gleaming with crimson lacquer draws my eyes to the clause, in print a bacterium would need a magnifying glass to read, stating the company’s grudging preparedness to reimburse me the current value of the house as it presently stands.
‘Unfortunately, signore, it no longer stands, does it? Regrettably, therefore, it has no current value.’ The creature raps her claws on the policy as though the whole matter were settled. She has a lot to learn about Gerald Samper. A wedge-shaped piece of wood on her desk announces her as Dottoressa Paola Strangolagalli, a name that gives you some idea of her family’s antecedents. They probably had to make their own furniture.
‘Preposterous,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t be bothered to argue here and now. I shall have my solicitor handle the entire business. This is a perfectly standard Act of God for which I am covered and indemnified. Houses are always falling down, often on their owners’ cars. You agreed to insure mine sight unseen, and that was your own look-out. Do you really think the saint whose name this company has adopted would have tried to wriggle out of such a moral commitment? I notice your letter-head presumptuously includes San Bernardino’s famous IHS plaque, which he devised so that the crowds who heard him preach would venerate the Holy Name of Jesus. Undoubtedly you know that this native of Massa was celebrated all over Italy for restoring stolen or defrauded property? I rest my case.’ It really pays to do your homework. These proliferating Catholic saints often have considerable ironic value. I doubt if I know a single Maria who is a virgin.
‘I shall need to confer with our head office.’
‘As opposed to your conscience?’ On this tetchy note I leave. But there’s nothing to lose. My solicitor will do the donkey work, after which I shall not again be putting my custom into the hands of Assicurazioni S. Bernardino da Siena, especially not when they wear glued-on talons the colour of fresh blood. I spend the rest of the day visiting old acquaintances, not least of whom being my solicitor. I also hire a car.
The next morning, having avoided switching on BBCNN, I am drawn irresistibly back to the scene of my tragedy. I drive up through Greppone along the winding mountain road that eventually peters out in a realm of crags and buzzards. Just before it does there is a short track leading slightly downwards to the left. I bump along it. The view of Le Roccie is at once warmly familiar and painfully strange. The immediate trees seem unchanged but the expected roofs beyond them are gone. Someone has closed my barrier with a bright new chain, wound it with police-style dayglo tape and hung a medley of notices on it: Proprietà Privata. Attenti ai Cani. Zona Proibita Senza Esclusione. Via Interdetta, Sia per Veicoli o Pedonali. Pericolo di Morte! In addition, panels of rusty builder’s mesh have been secured across the track. The effect of all this drama is spoiled by a clearly trodden path off to one side that simply avoids the whole caboodle and gives easy access to what is left of my property. With misgivings I note a car cavalierly parked halfway down the track leading to Marta’s house. I prepare to deal mercilessly with intruders.
Feeling almost like an intruder myself, I pick my way between the trees and in past the barricade. It really is very strange, the huge gulf that now yawns to the left: a pit of sky and blue panorama where until so recently stood my beautifully refurbished garage apartment and my house. Now someone has officiously – and probably officially – erected a lengthy chicken wire fence along the raw edge of the precipice plus further notices: Zona Frana! Si Avvicina a Pericolo di Morte! More skulls and crossbones. On the right, the copse that once acted as a cordon sanitaire between my house and Marta’s now seems much too close, and the fence I put up beyond it as a cordial expression of legal demarcation is a bare twenty paces away. Behind that, Marta’s house glows in the morning light and seems deceptively less like the hovel I know it to be. As the sole surviving residence at Le Roccie it has taken on an impertinent air of being lord of all it surveys. Given its newfound solitude, it even looks faintly desirable. Only I know its fungoid interior will be concealing heaps of unironed laundry and quantities of lethal Voynovian delicacies such as shonka, a sausage that induces paralysis, as well as its owner’s flea market cosmetics with names like Randy Minx. Still, to the unaware passer-by the house would suggest the estate agent’s adjective ‘unspoilt’, which means something marginally better than a ruin. I’m not surprised the lady of the manor has been making discreet enquiries behind my back about the status of my surviving land. I just hope she has discovered that her manor has recently halved in value.
I am distracted from these tooth-grinding reflections by movement at the edge of the copse roughly where my patio once ended and the washing line began. A strange alien structure has been erected there, around which two figures are moving. They are badly dressed in bulky fleeces and look like the sort of people who haunt shopping centres in Britain muttering ‘Gotny spare change?’ As I approach they seem faintly familiar although I can’t place them. Suddenly the anger I have been suppressing at the way fate has trashed my lovely house and allowed Marta to gaze placidly out over the remains bubbles up. What the hell are these ragamuffins doing on my land, in complete contempt of fences and notices? I hail them in steely Italian from ten paces.
‘Good morning. I trust you are aware that you’re trespassing on private property? I need only to whistle for my Dober-mans.’
The two figures turn with a start. They now look even more familiar.
‘Oh, bon jawno,’ says the woman. British and no mistake, even had their clothes and dentistry not given them away. ‘But surely we know you?’ she continues in English. ‘Aren’t you … Good heavens! You’re the owner of the lovely house that fell over the precipice! You used to live here. We met last summer. You’re the one saved by the miracle!’
And now I place them: a couple of prospective buyers whom Benedetti had shamelessly shown over Marta’s house one day during her absence last year. I see them now as I did then, as Baggy and Dumpy. I can’t remember their surnames. Barton? Ringworm? They were sniffing about for out-of-the-way properties, aided by a collection of keys that Benedetti had thoughtfully held on to after his agency had sold the houses.
‘Ah yes, I remember now. Mr and Mrs – ?’
‘Barrington,’ says Baggy. ‘Chris and Deirdre. Well, this is an honour. You’re a truly celebrated survivor.’
‘Gerald Samper,’ I say, not much moderating my steely tone. ‘Survivor or not, miracle or not, this is still my private property, you know. And what in God’s name is that?’
‘We mean no harm,’ says Dumpy soothingly. ‘We just came to put fresh flowers on the shrine.’
It is an affair about shoulder height, cobbled together out of dressed stones – my dressed stones – into a solid plinth with a large recess. Inside the recess are coloured stalagmites of candle wax, sundry burnt matches, a chipped vase, faded bunches of flowers and a photograph of the late Princess of Wales protected by a crinkled sheet of plastic.
‘Who built this?’ I demand in a tone that goes with a riding crop being slapped against twill trousers.
‘We don’t know,’ says Baggy. ‘I think it sort of grew spontaneously round about Christmastime when all the stories came out. You mean you didn’t know about it?’
‘This is the first time I’ve been back since the night of the earthquake,’ I admit, easing my tone somewhat. This is a test, Samper. Can you go along with the fiction as rashly agreed yesterday with the crafty Benedetti? Or to put it another way, can you afford not to? I’m beginning to be aware of the sheer horror I’ve let myself in for: the awful strain of maintaining a lie that goes against every principle I hold. Not that I hold many, of course; but feigning a belief in apparitions is right up there with the taboo against humping the help and giving cash to beggars.
It is a classic dilemma; and like just about every other human dilemma there is a precedent for it in Italian opera. Those of you who sensibly resisted Glyndebourne’s production last season of Handel’s four hundred and fifty-second opera Muzio could have attended the revival in Cremona of Dario Maringiotti’s brilliant Il confessionale. This minor masterpiece, produced in 1887, was banned after its first scandalous night and both librettist and composer were threatened with excommunication unless they recanted and promised never again to stage the work. This was still a big deal in 1887 but in the twenty-first century the Cremonesi had no such hang-ups.
The story of Il confessionale concerns a young, idealistic priest named Gioachino who is posted to a backward rural parish in Calabria. Shortly after he arrives a young girl, Tiziana, claims to have seen a vision of the Virgin sitting, as virgins will, in one of her father’s olive trees. The priest visits the spot and declares he can sense the lingering presence of this blessed visitation. Both Tiziana and the olive tree become locally famous. But one day she comes to the confessional in a fit of contrition and admits to the priest that she made up the whole story for a bit of celebrity and to attract Valdemaro, one of the few lads in the village without acne, whose romantic interest is apparently fixed elsewhere.
Gioachino is horrified by this deception but feels he can’t now repudiate his own validation of the olive tree as a sacred site without risking both his and the Church’s credibility, and nor can he explain his change of heart without betraying the secrets of the confessional. So even as Tiziana penitently goes about the village denying her vision, Gioachino continues to encourage the pilgrims with tales of the apparition until he almost comes to believe he saw the vision himself. Yet he knows in his heart it is a lie, even though one whose revenue is swelling his church’s coffers. There are some good subplots of rural cunning, rivalries and superstition. The climax of the story approaches with a terrific aria by Gioachino actually in the confessional with Tiziana. In a fit of remorse the tormented priest is revolted by his deception and condemns Tiziana for her fictitious vision and for impiously using the Virgin herself as a cloak for her own sordid romance. Tiziana then turns the aria into a duet by confessing that she also invented the tale of her affair with Valdemaro: it is the young priest himself whom she loves so passionately, and has done since he first arrived in the village. (It was at this point that the original production began to be booed on the grounds that for an audience to overhear a confession, even a staged one, implied a de facto breach of sacred confidentiality.)
By now young Gioachino is completely out of his depth although with compassion he recognises that Tiziana is the least-favoured girl in the village, being bandy-legged and lightly moustached, which is motive enough for her intrigue. Feeling pity but threatened by her advances, he begins to panic and tries to drown out her shouted declarations of love with stern Latin reprimands and exhortations to say innumerable rosaries in penance. Meanwhile, hearing raised voices, the village elders gather in the church just in time to see Tiziana emerge stark naked from the confessional with a beatific smile of satisfaction. Is this her brutal attempt to incriminate the lover she cannot have, or are the villagers’ coarse peasant suspicions justified that Gioachino has finally yielded to carnal temptation?
From this point on the melodrama admittedly becomes a little crude, although Maringiotti’s score is sensationally accomplished. The solo oboe weaving around moments of spiritual tension is especially adroit in its vulgarity, suggesting the Holy Spirit’s Tinkerbell-like habit of alighting mysteriously here and there amid the hurly-burly of human affairs. Whatever you thought of the score, if you were in the audience of Il confessionale in Cremona last year you could not possibly have emerged afterwards feeling you had been short-changed dramatically. On the other hand had you been nearly a thousand miles away in Sussex you would have discovered that Handel’s Muzio concerned Mucius Scaevola, the Roman hero who penetrates the Etruscan camp but is captured while failing to kill the enemy king, Lars Porsenna. Porsenna condemns him to be burnt in a furnace but when he hears the sentence Mucius merely laughs, boasting that no Roman fears death. To show his contempt he holds his right hand unflinchingly in the flames until it is reduced to a blackened stump. Impressed, Porsenna frees him and Mucius is henceforth known as Scaevola or ‘Lefty’. This is the only dramatic scene in the opera, and needless to say it takes place off-stage. Better luck at Glyndebourne next year, you may think, when they are staging Handel’s four hundred and fifty-third opera, Physippides in Tartary, whose plot can be viewed as an early experiment in anaesthesia. Spies tell me the production will be set in Wall Street, complete with stretch limos and mobile phones: the essential furniture of twenty-first-century ennui.
In any case, you will readily understand Samper’s predicament here as he stands before this ad hoc shrine with Baggy and Dumpy expecting him to attribute his miraculous survival to the direct intercession of Barbara Cartland’s step-granddaughter. Taking a leaf out of Gioachino’s book I assume a rapt, far-away expression.
‘I’m sure you can imagine how impossible I find it all to talk about. It’s just … you know … one of those intensely private things.’
‘But she really did warn you to leave the house and it collapsed immediately you were all out?’
‘We certainly got out in the nick of time.’ From their expressions of awe and devotion these two mugs are ready to believe anything I say. Despite the tragic outcome I find it hard not to smile as I recall the very unspiritual atmosphere that night last December when Adrian and I, considerably the worse for drink and hallucinogenic mushrooms, had tried to stop giggling long enough to convince our guests to forsake the warm kitchen with its log fire and hurry outside for their lives into freezing mist and pitch darkness. The only unexpected appearance that evening had been Marta, much too solid (and probably sullied) in her flesh to be anything as ethereal as an apparition, who had suddenly returned after the best part of a year in America. Even then, once we were all standing outside shivering we kept remembering essential emergency articles such as passports and overcoats that were worth dashing back indoors for in an elaborate game of ‘chicken’, daring ourselves to get in and safely out again before the steadily crumbling ground at the front of the house carried away the entire building. The effects of the mushrooms, cunningly incorporated into my award-winning badger Wellington, persisted for hours and surrounded objects with shimmering haloes. They cast a dreamy, surreal air over the entire night so that even the eventual vanishing of my house – weirdly, in near silence – seemed phantasmic and illusory. Equally so are the present activities of Baggy and Dumpy, who strike me as implausible acolytes in this particular sect. ‘But I still don’t understand what you’re doing here,’ I put to them in the tones of a magistrate still far from won over to their case.
‘Long story,’ says Dumpy.
‘Oh, we live here,’ says Baggy.
Why is this so unwelcome? ‘You mean you live in Italy?’
‘Yes – right here, down the road in Greppone. Last year Deirdre and I bought a house just this side of the town. We’d been looking to move for ages. I mean, Britain has changed rather a lot, hasn’t it?’
For the better, I should imagine, since they moved. To think: but for the providential destruction of my house I would have had this ineffable couple as neighbours a mere five kilometres away. It turns out I even know their house, down past the path leading to the cemetery. It gets very little sun after noon, especially in winter, and has an unrelieved view of a menacing mountainside opposite that looks as though it might topple forward across the dark gorge and obliterate everything. It is indeed a peculiar sensibility that could have stood on their terrace and said ‘Darling – we’re never going to do better than this.’ But then, they probably thought the same thing on the altar steps some fifteen years ago in an equally self-fulfilling prophecy.
‘When there were all those articles in the newspapers last year about the earthquake – which, by the way, we also felt down in Greppone – we read about how the Princess had saved your lives and we just knew, didn’t we, darling? It was meant that we should have moved to almost the exact spot where she manifested her love for her subjects. But that was Diana all over. Ridiculed and outcast in her homeland, she chose to appear abroad to rescue distressed Britons.’
I can’t help making an exasperated inventory here. ‘Three of us weren’t Britons at all. A Voynovian composer, a Russian pianist and Max Christ himself, who is Bavarian.’
‘Diana spread her light equally around the world, as I’m sure you remember, Mr Samper. She was oblivious to nationality.’
I am about to ask tartly why, in that case, Dumpy had singled my houseguests out as distressed Britons but caught myself in time. Never argue with the devout: another in my short list of axioms. After more conversation – desultory and resigned on my part, intractably fervent on theirs – I gather these two exiles are leading members of a Diana cult that is rapidly spreading among British expatriates and local Italians. The Italians always were sentimental about her, of course. On the day of her death my barber observed how tragic it was. ‘She had adorable legs,’ he said soulfully as he wound crêpe paper around my neck. But more than that, Diana was really a figure straight out of … straight out of Italian opera. Of course! Romantic, melodramatic, tragic … What a perfect, camp … No! What a perfect, tragic theme! The simple, English-rose step-granddaughter of a serial romance writer, unhappily married to a prince, cold-shouldered by her husband’s family, alternately pilloried and fawned on by the British press, adored by the afflicted and downtrodden of the rest of the world, driven for affection into the dusky arms of a foreign tradesman’s son, immolated in a Paris underpass with her lover to incredible rumours of Secret Service assassination plots … Forget the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is surely the only possible operatic subject for Gerald Samper, mischievous tragedian! Send ’em away with a tear in their eye and a faint, indefinable feeling that creeps up on them later that they may have been sent up.
‘You find it amusing?’ Baggy is asking, faintly aggrieved and defensive.
‘Absolutely not,’ I tell him. ‘Far from it. No, just an idea I’ve had. Not funny at all. In fact, I want to know more.’ An inner voice of caution is warning me that once again I’m putting my head into a noose of pure hokum. Too bad: this is an operatic gift. But right now I need to get back to town and organise a bulldozer because I want to see how much can be saved from the rubble of my former home. I leave Baggy and Dumpy unwrapping sheaves of gladioli and preparing to dress their shrine. I suddenly feel rather cheerful. It has occurred to me that the presence of hordes of pilgrims on my land ought to remove the last vestiges of peace and quiet from Marta’s property. Truly, it’s an ill wind.