Between completing my score and trips down to the set I haven’t seen anything of Gerry this last week. Seen, no; heard, definitely. From time to time I’ve been aware of noises off: truck engines, bangings, hammerings, and floating over all the hysterical falsetto arias that seem to accompany my eccentric neighbour’s every endeavour. Since this voice of his is the one sound my life up in these hills and the film have in common, the two seem ever more associated. To that extent, though quite unknown to him, Gerry is already part of Pisorno Studios and Arrazzato.
It’s curious how abstracted one can become. These last few days I must occasionally have glanced unseeingly out of the kitchen window; but not until a sudden burst of riveting am I now moved to look out and notice for the first time a large fence that has appeared surprisingly close to my house. At this moment Gerry’s head and shoulders appear above the end panel. He is in his steel erector’s kit: I recognize the yellow helmet. For some reason he is holding an obviously weighty machine gun in both hands. He reaches far over the top of the fence with it and turns it to take aim awkwardly at the wood on my side. Suddenly there is a distant sound of collapse and he lurches, hanging half over. His helmet falls off. Simultaneously the machine gun fires, rather to his surprise, I should say, and he drops it with a yell. It crashes to the ground, trailing behind it a cable. Meanwhile Gerry has become remarkably red in the face and is thrashing about as he hangs. I fling open the back door in alarm.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask with neighbourly concern. ‘Can I help?’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ he says, struggling some more. There is banging on the far side of the fence as from a flailing boot. ‘I, er, things are pretty much under control, thanks. I seem to have dropped the nail gun, though. Have it up in a jiffy.’ He tugs one-handedly at the cable. The gun on the ground twitches. ‘Better stand back, Marta,’ he warns. ‘It goes off very easily. Incredibly easily.’
‘Why don’t you just come over this side and fetch it? You look as though you need a rest, anyway. Come and have some delicacies from Voynovia.’
More banging. ‘Most kind,’ he gasps. He seems preoccupied and his face is congested with effort. I can’t think why he goes on hanging over the fence until I realize he must have kicked his step ladder over and can’t reach the ground. Really, he must be extraordinarily unfit if he can’t lower himself back down. The fence is barely two metres high.
‘Er, I’m sort of stuck, Marta. My boot won’t, well, I think I might have shot myself in the foot.’
‘In the foot, Gerry?’
‘Damn silly thing.’
I walk around the end of the fence. There is a step ladder lying on its side on the grass and Gerry’s left boot is indeed fixed to the panel halfway up.
‘The bloody ladder slipped,’ he explains muffledly from the other side. ‘And these damned nail guns have hair triggers. Criminally dangerous. I shall most certainly have something to say to the maggot-brained Japanese who made it.’
‘But not until you’ve got down.’ I examine his boot. ‘You’re very lucky, you know. I think all the nails went into the heel.’
‘Well, can’t you get something and lever it off? Look, go down to my toolbox – toolbox, for heaven’s sake – and bring that wrecking bar. Oh God, that iron thing.’
Luckily he can’t see me. I lean against the fence quite helplessly for a moment as he hangs above me, his meagre bum catching the morning sun as it glances through the trees. When I can speak I suggest it might be easier for the moment if I simply unlace his boot so he can slip out of it. This I do, raise the fallen steps, and he returns to earth leaving his boot nailed halfway up the fence. He fetches the bar and eventually, after much hefty levering, the boot is freed.
‘Bloody thing,’ Gerry says to no one in particular. ‘Could happen to anybody, a thing like that.’
Once inside the kitchen I reach down the sacred bottle but this time he forestalls me firmly and calls for plain water.
‘Thirsty work,’ he says, draining a glass from the well that Signor Benedetti claims we share.
I sit him down and congratulate him on his work. Actually, the fence is quite hideous in its newness. The panels must have been painted in the factory with some sort of anti-rot treatment which has left them a chemical shade of green so unnatural it stands out like a turd in a teacup, as our huntsmen so graphically put it.
‘How hard you’ve been working, Gerry, and all because of my helicopter.’
‘Well, perhaps not entirely.’ He is stuffing greedily from the plate of mavlisi I have given him, the last of the ones Ljuka brought me from home. I suppose you might say they are the Voynovian equivalent of florentines, although that scarcely does them justice. These are the very best, from Mrszowski’s in Voynograd. He selects the one we call ‘acorn’: a pigeon’s egg pickled in spearmint water, its base nestled in a delicate pastry cup, and pops it into his mouth whole.
‘The only thing that surprises me, Gerry,’ I say when I can regain his attention, ‘is how very close your fence seems.’
‘It’s where the surveyor’s pegs in the ground run, Marta. Feel free to go and check for yourself. The last thing I want to do is encroach on your property. Your house doesn’t have much land this side, as far as I can see. It’s all on the other side where you carry out your, um, aeronautical activities.’
I suppose he must be right. I’m afraid I wasn’t paying much attention when Benedetti was explaining such things, partly because my Italian was more rudimentary then but mostly because I didn’t really care. I loved the house and just wanted to get on with my work.
‘Don’t worry. It’ll be reasonably aesthetic when I’ve finished, running artlessly through the trees. Now what I need to know is, should I put a door in the middle?’
‘But of course, Gerry. We’re neighbours. We need to have communication between us. Otherwise it will look as though we’re quarantined from each other.’
‘Mm. Well, no problem. They’ve got doors down at the yard. It just means a couple more posts. Simple job. I’d better be getting on with it. I couldn’t have another glass of water, could I? Those little doughnut thingies pack quite a punch.’
‘One day, Gerry, when we’re both of us not so busy, I will explain to you the full theory of mavlisi. You are supposed to eat them in the proper order. Each kind has a special significance and represents a particular event in Voynovian history which all true patriots know. So when you eat them in the right way you are eating the story of our nation. It makes us feel so close. During the time of the Russians we could do that while sitting in cafés all over Voynovia and they never realized that each day we were making nationalist statements. They just saw little cakes and wolfed them down by the handful in any old order with vodka chasers. Ignorant pigs.’
‘Absolutely,’ says Gerry, collecting his yellow helmet and going to the door. ‘Funny chap, your Russky. I’ll be off, then.’
He is utterly preposterous. And yet, impossibly, there is something almost touching about him. How can this be? It’s not the first time I have noticed it, while everything in me resists the very thought. He is so vulnerable, somehow, not to say fabulously incompetent. Who but Gerry in his bustling, DIY mode could have nailed himself to his own fence? And nor did I believe a word of all that nonsense he spun me some time ago about Ljuka having scared off his potential client. A try-on if ever I heard one. Obviously he and his one-night stand had fallen out, or it hadn’t worked or something, and he decided to save face by blaming me. Well, of course, if he will go picking up bald strangers on the seafront in Viareggio at his age what does he expect? It’s partly being able to see through him so easily that makes him touching. I wonder what he really did for a living before he moved here? I suppose he might have been writing people’s life stories as he claims, though I wouldn’t have said he had the necessary concentration to write a book. But here he is so obviously a gentleman of leisure just filling up his days with cookery and arias and bungled carpentry. A very nice life too, no doubt, but scarcely serious in any professional sense. That’s a side of the West I’m still not used to: the idea of people just killing time yet comfortably managing to survive.
But if Gerry were only that I should merely despise him. I do despise him, of course, in a mild sort of way. Underneath, though, there’s a bleakness, an abandonment. If he’s at all close to Piero Pacini’s notions of nihilism he oughtn’t to be touching, either. To be made uncaring through injury – no, sad but not very attractive. So what is it about him?
Nothing important, anyway. And unquestionably none of my business. Piero’s starting shooting next week and for reasons of his own wants me to be on hand. I can feel my career gathering steam. Sooner or later I shall need to think about the next job. I am not going back to Voynovia as a lady of leisure.