Michele never moved out. We shared the flat on and off for the next six years. He was an explosive, authoritarian mad guy. A crazy, backward-looking romantic with right-wing views and left-wing friends. A believer in the past. A past which hung like a tapestry of noble lords and dignified peasants, of which he was neither. It was the kind of society, ordered and static, that would have had a man like himself clapped in irons. The stones of the city sang to him. To stand with him on a night upon a floodlit ruin was to espouse religion. Wrapped in a sheet first thing in the morning he looked like Hadrian. But that can be one of the delights of Rome, that in one morning’s shopping you see five senators, two Michelangelos and enough quattrocento to nourish John Millet for a decade. Everywhere you go nature is imitating art. In spite of our proximity to Leone Bernard, the contact ceased. Michele, after having been the subject often minutes of that lady’s attention, dismissed her as ‘the English whore’ and that was the end of the matter. He always gave the orders.
I ought perhaps to be more decently apologetic before announcing that I co-habited with a fascist. I cannot imagine that I would ever have done so in England. In my first few years in Italy I had certainly ventured upon a greater ideological range than I would have done at home. It wasn’t my country. The issues were not mine and I hadn’t sorted them out. I was quite as happy bowling down the autostrada in the back of a lorry singing the ‘Bandiera Rossa’ with communist university students as I was comfortable, metaphorically speaking, in Michele’s fascistic armchairs. The only factor informing the varied ideologies of all the men I knew, was anti-clericalism. There was not one among them who would not pull from out of his hat – whichever one he wore – at least a dozen foul anecdotes pertaining to the Pope’s prick and the Pope’s nephews. The violence and cynicism of this was at first quite extraordinary to me, given that in England religion is no more to people than the daily school assembly, thick with hymns which roll God around in anthropomorphic euphemism. Religion is a fringe activity which doesn’t impinge. Nobody tells you jokes about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s deranged sexual habits, or brings the house down by fantasising about male prostitutes behind the door of the lav in Lambeth Palace. Superstition is older, after all, more universal, more seductive than Christianity. Michele couldn’t throw away bread, because it was unlucky. We hoarded it in mouldering sacks in the vestibule and referred to it politely as ‘the bread for the ducks’.
My mother, when I told her about this years later, couldn’t believe her ears.
‘Fancy a man being afraid of a bit of bread,’ she said. Proper men, north of Calais, are never afraid, are they? The presence of a black cat among them never causes a jam of Fiats.
Michele didn’t drive a Fiat. He drove an open-topped MG. This was not because he was an Anglophile – far from it – but because he was an oddball who liked to be different. It was a piece of understated showing-off which I found most appealing. He gave me to understand, from time to time, that it was the cross he had to bear, to have an English girlfriend. A barbarous Anglo-Saxon, who had yens for Marmite and sponge pudding in tins which we bought at the English supermarket. A woman from a race only partially subdued by the Roman conquest who did her hand-washing in the bidet. He would stand over me and make me douche before he took me to bed. The English didn’t bathe, he said. Coal in the bath. Knickers in the bidet. He behaved, in his small English motor car, in a most un-English manner, bawling ‘Cretin’ and ‘Whore’ to anyone, regardless of sex, who crossed his path. When he finally sold that little car, he did so in the dark to a gullible young English tourist and refused to give him his money back when the thing fell apart the next day, as Michele knew it would. Michele, though he looked like a Roman emperor, was in truth a Venetian. Like most typical types, he was misleading. He was, as I have mentioned, married. He didn’t like watching women turning into mothers, he said. Mothers were interested only in cough syrup and pasta and illness and baby-talk. Never in Dante. Not that Michele ever read Dante, which was of course much too saturated with religious implication for his taste, but he liked a proper deference for national sacred cows. One could not live with a woman who talked only about pasta and babies, he said. Michele was a man of diminished responsibility. That was part of his charm for me. I could recall a time when I had stood beside my mother in the kitchen watching her peeling potatoes and haranguing her the while on the poetry of Wilfred Owen. I remembered reciting ‘Move him into the Sun’ while she muttered discouragingly about the bad bits in the spuds. Admittedly, Michele was about to turn forty. He was no schoolboy. But a part of me was still in tune with his frustration. I do not myself feel comfortable with the statuesque proportions women assume as they ladle out soup, as if they are making huge complacent statements about the sanctity of their limiting female offices. A part of me, out of sexual loyalty, wanted to scream at Michele that if he had spent more time on the pasta and baby-talk himself, his wife might have had more time for Dante; that with her husband, her mother-in-law and the two children, she had not, as it were, felt the need of it. But I didn’t. Michele was not much fun in disputation. He did not care for the finesse of debate. If one said, for instance, making polite conversation over the newspaper, ‘It says here, Michele, that red wine is wine made from grapes with the skins left on, and white wine from grapes without,’ he would give the idea no quarter. He would not offer one polite, tentative doubts. ‘Red wine, red grapes,’ he would say with devastating finality. ‘White wine, white grapes. Imbecille.’
He treated his children in a way which at times made me feel ill. They had developed a reflex to duck whenever he made a flamboyant gesture in their direction. We collected them, on the occasional Sunday, from their apartment in the gentle suburb. Two little boys in ties, with their hair combed down with water. Michele would receive them, of course, in sloppy shorts and Japanese flip-flops. He would exchange brief words with his wife on the doorstep, slouching and scratching rudely at his arse. He would make no effort at all to entertain his little boys, and on one occasion gave them a football but couldn’t be prevailed upon to take them out to play with it. When the younger child resorted, tentatively, to kicking it indoors, Michele hit him on the temple with the back of his hand and caused him to stumble painfully upon the Meccano which was strewn upon the floor.
‘Basta!’ he said. The Meccano had been bought by me, Papa’s Inglese fancy woman, to give them something to do. ‘Have you said thank you to Caterina for this thing she has bought for you?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you play with it?’ Play boy play, thy father plays. I found the episode an obscenity. He would make them do sums in the car. Aritmetica to exercise the brain. It brought me out in a sweat. He had the habit, regrettably common in Italy, of loving babies – other people’s babies. He would babble like a demented crone over an infant in the piazza and volunteer to have the barman warm its bottle. He had no time for anyone between the ages of eighteen months and sixteen.