Michele was convinced that I was having affairs with every man I spoke to, regardless of age, nationality or presentability. The male teachers in the language school were his prime suspects and were treated in consequence to inexplicable displays of insulting, silent hostility. I learned, thanks to Michele, that there is no need ever to embrace one’s man’s quarrels, that there is no need ever to apologise for somebody else by virtue of one’s co-habiting with that person. If I had not learned this I would have crossed swords with half the planet.
He went so far as to suspect me with women too. He came to pluck me out one evening from my friend Janice’s flat, where we were sewing together using her machine. I was very fond of Janice, who taught with me. She was a plain, rather mouse-coloured woman of middle age who was cursed with a bad, acne-marked skin and was not altogether happy.
‘Why,’ Michele said in the car, ‘why are so many English women lesbian?’ I assumed this to relate to some item he had absorbed from the gutter press, because Michele had a remarkable, innocent susceptibility when it came to the gutter press.
‘Name me five,’ I said. Sometimes I considered myself a lot brainier than Michele.
‘You spend your evening with Janice,’ he said. ‘How does it feel to go to bed with a woman?’ I thought he was, quite simply, out of his mind.
‘Is it because the woman is too ugly to find a man that you do this for her? Or do you want to be a man, my Caterina?’ he said, pityingly. ‘You are lacking in important respects.’ I found this so absurd, not to say distasteful, that I could not take it seriously. I thought he was soliciting for praise. Praise for his maleness. Thank you, Michele, for your male crotch which no Meccano can simulate. Remembering Jake, I said that we used spanners, Janice and I. This was a mistake, because he believed me, I think.
Once, only once, Jonathan Goldman came to see me, en route for Greece. Unhappily, I missed him. A grown-up Jonathan, who had sat resolutely in the flat for an hour, weathering Michele’s hostility. And who was this Goldman? Michele demanded. This Goldman who saw fit to wait a whole hour in the flat? I got quite wild with excitement, thinking Roger had come to see me. Roger Goldman in Rome and coming to see me.
‘Where?’ I said, with undisguised fervour. ‘Where is he? I have to see him.’ Michele, delighted to be vindicated in his suspicions, presented me with a note. A note scribbled by Jonathan under Michele’s searching eye. It gave an address and telephone number in Athens and went as follows:
Kath,
I came to leave you a million pounds but sadly you were out. Now you ask me how I found you in this town where all the streets appear to be called Senso Unico? I crossed the Tiber by the Ponte Garibaldi and asked in French for a gorgeous Inglese. Your man thinks I’m here to steal the silver and looks as if he means to throw me to the lions.
‘Phone me in Athens sometime.
‘And who is this Goldman?’ Michele said again. ‘This big English Jew who waits for you a whole hour in my apartment, and wants to be telephoned in Athens?’
‘He’s the younger son of my philosophy professor,’ I said. Michele looked infinitely sceptical.
‘Credo,’ he said, nastily. It had ceased to bother me that Michele didn’t believe a word that I said. It gave me the liberty to lie whenever I chose.
For all this I never felt that Michele was crushing me. He didn’t attempt to warp my soul or manipulate me the way Roger had done. I make an analogy, I hope not unforgivably, with The Taming of the Shrew. It has always seemed to me about that play that it is not the terrible, delightful Petruchio (unscrupulous chancer that he is) who warps and crushes the girl, but the dreadful combination of that goody-goody sister, who warps her with feminine wiles, and that hidebound, favouritising father, who tells her to go ply her needle and grovel for a husband. They are the ones who knock her about. After them, life with Petruchio is a day out from a sadistic nunnery. He and she are equal in high spirits. And how does he tame her? He makes her kiss him in the street. He makes her enact the hilarious burlesque of embracing a strange old man and calling him a sweet young virgin. Tame girls don’t kiss in public and embrace strange men. He gives her scope for a comic talent, he is no more a respecter of orthodox behaviour than she is. At the end of the play she is not tame, she is the wench with the wit to win her old man’s bet for him. They leave Padua a few hundred crowns richer, thanks to her. I do not wish to whitewash the issues. The play is about wife-beating. The colour it comes only half offends me. Michele played Petruchio-style mating-games with me all the time. It only half offended me. The rest was terrific fun.
There was the time he drove in the wrong direction to a lunch date. I told him. I said the Thingummies didn’t live there any more. Michele, inevitably, approached the challenge in the spirit of who is driving, him or me? I answered provokingly, in English, because Michele, thanks to me, had by then the crudest rudiments of that tongue.
‘Michele’, I said between my teeth, ‘you make meestake. Beeg meestake.’
‘No meestake,’ he said. ‘Caterina, you meestake.’
‘I say you meestake, you big slob,’ I said.
‘Allora. Meestake, eh?’ he said, challengingly. He stopped the car without warning, in the middle of the road. Around us a crescendo of blasting horns. ‘Meestake?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. He got out of the car and sauntered to the sidewalk, where he made as if to enter a pizza shop. I couldn’t drive the thing to the side of the road, so I got out and joined him on the sidewalk where we fell laughing with delight into each other’s arms.
‘Andiamo,’ he said. We jumped back into the vehicle and drove like hell, before the carabinieri descended upon us.
‘Meestake?’ he said.
We never got to our lunch party because the sex was better at home.