HIGH IN THESE MOUNTAINS, THE APENNINES, THE SPINAL CORD of Italy, with its vertebræ of infant stone to which the tendons and the flesh of the old world are attached, there is a small cave high up a precipice. It is very difficult to reach. The narrow path is littered with loose stones and, in the spring when the thaw comes, it is a running stream, an angled gutter two hundred metres long, slicing across the sheer surface of the rock face, collecting melt-water as the scar incised in the bark of a rubber tree channels the sap.
Some years, the local people claim, the water runs crimson with the sacred blood of the saint who lived in the cave as a hermit, dined on lichen or moss, consumed the pine nuts fallen from the firs overhanging the precipice high above, and drank only the stony water seeping through the roof of his abode.
I have been there. It is not an outing for the faint-hearted or sufferers from vertigo. In parts, the path is no wider than a scaffolder’s plank and one is obliged to move upwards crab fashion, one’s back to the rock, facing down into the valley below, across to a purple haze of mountains jagged like the scales of a dragon’s back. This, they say, is a test of one’s faith, a trial to be taken on the route to salvation. They say you can see two hundred kilometres on a fine day.
There are scrubby pines growing at intervals along the path, the offspring of those far overhead. Each is festooned, as if for a religious festival, with clots of spiders’ webs hanging like the dense gossamer ghosts of Chinese lanterns. They say to touch one is to be burned, to be inculcated with original sin. The poison on the web is reported to restrict respiration, choke one to death as readily as if the spider was vulture-sized, its hairy legs locked about your throat. Lizards green as emeralds dart through the litter of dead needles, mountain succulents and wind-bent herbs. The reptiles have black beads for eyes and might be brooches of precious stones were it not for their lithe, impulsive movements.
The cave is about five metres deep and just high enough for an average man to stand. I do not have to bow my head in there. A ledge cut in the rock on one side served as the saint’s hard bed of contrition. At the cave-mouth, there is usually to be found the remnant of a campfire. Lovers use the place as a rendezvous, a spectacular place to couple, perhaps to ask the saint’s blessing be called upon their fornications. At the rear of the cave the devout, or those greedy for heavenly intervention in the petty disasters of their lives, have erected an altar of concrete blocks clumsily smeared with plaster. Upon this crude sacrarium stands a dusty wooden cross and a candlestick made of cheap metal painted gold. Wax has marked the stone table of the altar: no-one bothers to chip it off.
It is red wax. One day, someone will claim it to be the sacred flesh of the saint. Anything is possible where faith is concerned. The sinner searches forever after a sign to prove it is worth his while to recant. I should know: I have been a sinner, and a Catholic, too.
All men want to make their mark, know upon their deathbed the world has changed because of them, as a result of their actions or philosophies. They are arrogant enough to think, when they are dead, others will see their accomplishments and say, ‘Look. He made that—the man of vision, the man who got things done.’
Years ago, when I was living in an English village, I was surrounded by people trying in vain, tiny ways to stamp their signatures upon the course of time. Old Colonel Cedric—a major in the Pay Corps when he was discharged, without one day’s action in six years of war—paid for the fifth and six bells in a mediocre peal. A local estate agent, well-off from the proceeds of selling the village over and over, planted an avenue of beeches from the lane up to his renovated mansion, a one-time derelict tithe barn; caustic rain, village youths and a main sewer, all in their own way, put paid to the symmetry with which he hoped the fields of history would be bisected and his memory preserved. The local bus driver was the one who topped them all: Brian of the beer gut and greasy hair slicked forward to camouflage a balding pate. Brian was simultaneously a district councillor, Parish Council chairman, churchwarden, vice-chairman of the Village Hall Development Committee and co-president of the Village Association of Change-Ringers. The old Colonel was the other co-president. It stood to reason.
I shall not name the village. It would be unwise. I am not silent from a fear of litigation, you understand. Simply from the concern of wanting to retain my privacy. And my past. Privacy—which some might call secrecy—is of immense value to me.
One could not be private in a village. No matter how one kept to oneself, there were always those who pried, nosed, thrust sticks under my stone, flipped it over to see what lay beneath. These were the people who could not make the tiniest mark on history, could not affect their world—the village, the parish—no matter how they tried. The best they could hope for was to share vicariously in others’ petty achievements. Their ambition was to be able to say, ‘Him? I knew him when he bought The Glebe,’ or ‘Her? I was with her when it happened,’ or ‘I saw the car skid, you know. There’s still a hole in the hedge: a nasty corner: someone should do something about it.’ Yet they never did and if I were a betting man, prone to taking a gamble, I should wager tyres still squeal on the bend, doors dent of a frosty morning.
In those days, I was a jobbing silversmith, a pots-and-pans man, not a maker of rings and mounter of diamonds. I repaired teapots, soldered salvers, straightened spoons, polished or copied church plate. I did the rounds of the antique shops and the bazaars put on to snare the tourists. It was not a skilled job and I was not a skilled man. I had no training other than a basic tuition in metalwork picked up by chance in the workshops of my boarding school.
Occasionally, I fenced. The villagers had no idea of this nefarious activity, and the local bobby was a dullard bent more on snaring poachers of pheasants and scrumpers of apples than apprehending criminals. Such activity put him in the good books of the Colonel’s son, an ardent hunter and shooter who owned orchards under licence to the cider makers, raised the pheasants for his own guns or those of his cronies. The constable’s place in local history was thus assured: the Colonel was the repository of local records, being the landowner and, as he thought, the squire. For evermore, the constable would be remembered in anecdotes of petty arrests, for he served his masters well.
It was the fencing which gave me a notion to move away, diversify into other lines of business. The criminality added a certain spice to an otherwise stultifying existence in an utterly boring location. It was not for the money I took to it, I can assure you. I made little profit melting down or re-polishing the minor silver from insignificant country house robberies and the break-ins at provincial antique shops. I did it to fight the mundane. It gave me contacts, too, in the ethereal twilit world of the law-breaker, the milieu I have inhabited ever since.
Yet now I am back on a one-track existence, undiversified, all my eggs in one basket; but they are golden eggs.
I am getting old and have made my marks on history. Vicariously, perhaps. Secretively, certainly. Those who want to snuffle in the parish records of that village will discover who hung those two bells or who perhaps, by now, has put a ‘Slow’ sign at the icy corner. Few know what my contributions to history have been, and no-one shall, save the reader of these words. And that is good enough.
Father Benedetto drinks brandy. He likes cognac, prefers armagnac, yet is not too fussy. As a priest, he can ill afford to be: his small private income is subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Religious observance and church attendance are declining in Italy, less money falling in the offertory. Only old crones in black shawls smelling of mothballs attend his services, and old men in berets and musty jackets. The urchins in the streets catcall bagarozzo after him as he passes in his soutane on his way to Mass.
Today, as is customary for him, he is dressed in his commonplace uniform, the pastoral apparel of a Roman Catholic priest: a black suit of unstylish, outmoded tailoring with a few of his short, white hairs in evidence on his shoulders, a black silk stock and a deep Roman collar wearing at the edge. His priestly uniform has looked faintly shabby and old-fashioned since the moment it left the tailor’s bench, the last thread cut like an ecclesiastical umbilical cord tying it to the secular bolt of cloth. His socks and shoes are black, the latter polished by his soutane on his walk home from Mass.
So long as the quality of his brandy is good, the liquor smooth and the glass warmed by the sun, Father Benedetto is satisfied. He likes to sniff his drink before he sips it, like a bee hovering over a bloom, a butterfly pausing on a petal before taking the nectar.
‘The only thing good to come of the francesi,’ he declares. ‘Everything else…’
He raises one hand dismissively and grimaces. To him, the French are not worth thinking about: they are, he is fond of saying, intellectual vagabonds, usurpers of the True Faith—no good Pope, in his opinion, came of Avignon—and Europe’s troublemakers. He thinks it more than fitting that truancy is termed, in English, French leave and the hated preservativo called a French letter. French wine is too effete (as are Frenchmen) and French cheese too salty. By this, he implies, they are too given to the indulgence of sexual pleasures. This is not a new trait, recently discovered. Italians, Benedetto claims with the authority of having been there, have known this throughout history. When Rome called France the province of Gaul they were just the same. Heathen rabble. Only their brandy is worthy of attention.
The priest’s house is halfway along a twisting alley off the Via dell’ Orologio. It is a modest fifteenth-century edifice, reputed to have once been the home of the best of the clockmakers from whom the nearby street derived its name. The front door is of heavy oak blackened with age and studded with iron bolts. Within there is no courtyard but, at the rear, snuggles a walled garden, overlooked by other buildings yet remaining secluded. Being on the side of a hill, the garden catches more of the sun than one might expect. The buildings down the slope being lower, the sun lingers longer on the little patio.
We are sitting on this patio. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. Two-thirds of the garden is in shade. We are in lazy, soporific sunlight. The brandy bottle—today, we have armagnac—is globulous, made of green glass and bears a plain label in black printing on cream paper. It is called, simply, La Vie.
I like this man. Certainly, he is holy but I do not hold that against him. He is pious but acceptably so, a raconteur when he wants to be, an erudite conversationalist who is never dogmatic in his arguments or pedantic in the presentation of them. He is about my age, with short grey-white hair and quick, laughing eyes.
It was only a few days after I arrived in the town when we first met. I was wandering about with apparent nonchalance, taking in the sights, it would seem. In fact, I was studying the town, memorising the streets and the escape routes I should use should the necessity arise. He came up to me and addressed me in English: I must have looked more English than I hoped.
‘Can I help you?’ he offered.
‘I am just looking about,’ I said.
‘You are a tourist?’
‘I am newly resident here.’
‘Where are your lodgings?’
I avoided this inquisition and obliquely replied, ‘Not for long, I suspect. Until my work is done.’
This was the truth.
‘If you are to live here,’ he declared, ‘then you should share a glass of wine with me. As a welcome.’
It was then I visited, for the first time, the quiet house down the alley off the Via dell’ Orologio. I am almost certain, in retrospect, he saw me as a soul for potential redemption, a reclamation for Christ, even after but a few words.
Ever since the whole garden was in sunlight, we have been sipping, talking, sipping, eating peaches. We have been talking of history. It is a favoured argument we have. Father Benedetto believes history, by which he means the past, is the single most important influence upon a man’s life. This opinion has to be his standpoint. He is a priest who lives in the house of a long-deceased watchmaker. Without history, a priest can have no job, for religion feeds upon the past for its veracity. Besides, he lives in the house of a long-deceased watchmaker.
I disagree. History has no such grand influence. It is merely an occurrence which may or may not affect a man’s activities and attitudes. Foremost, I proclaim, the past is an irrelevancy, a jumble of dates and facts and heroes many of whom were impostors, sciolists, blagueurs, get-rich-quick merchants or men fortuitously present at the right moment in the timetable of fate. Father Benedetto, of course, cannot accept fate. Fate is a concept invented by men. God controls us all.
‘People are trapped in history, and history resides within them like the blood of Christ in the chalice,’ he says.
‘What is history? Certainly not a trap,’ I reply. ‘History does not affect me save, perhaps, materially. I wear polyester because of an historical event—the invention of nylon. I drive a car because of the invention of the internal combustion engine. But to say I behave as I do because history is in me and influencing me is wrong.’
‘History, Nietzsche states, is the enunciator of new truths. Every fact, every new event exercises an influence upon every age and every new generation of Man.’
‘Then Man is an idiot!’
I cut into a peach, the juice running like plasma onto the wooden boards of the table. I prise the stone out and flick it with the knife point into the flower bed. The pebble-like stones of our afternoon feasting litter the ground between the golden-headed marigolds.
Father Benedetto balks at my facetiousness. For him, to insult Mankind is to reproach God in whose image men were forged.
‘If man is so imbued with history, then he seems not to have taken much of it to heart,’ I continue. ‘All that history has taught us is that we are too stupid to learn anything from it. At the end of the day, what is history but the truth of reality twisted into convenient lies by those whom it suits to see a different record made? History is but the tool of man’s self-worship.’ I suck at the peach. ‘You, Father, should be ashamed!’
I grin, so he is assured I do not seek to slight him. He shrugs and reaches for a peach. There are five left in the wooden bowl.
He peels his peach. I eat mine in silence.
‘How can you live here in Italy,’ he asks as his peach stone hits the wall and drops to the marigolds, ‘with history around you, crowding in on you, and treat it with such disdain?’
I look around his private garden. The shutters on the building beyond the peach tree are like eyelids shut demurely in case they should see something embarrassing in the windows of Father Benedetto’s house—like the priest in his bathtub.
‘History? All around me? There are ruins and ancient buildings, yes. But history? With a capital H? History, I maintain, is a falsehood. Real history is the commonplace, unrecorded. We speak of the history of Rome with the eloquence of grandeur but most Romans did not know of it or want to know it. What did the slave or the shopkeeper know of Cicero, or Virgil, the Sabines or the magics of Sirmio? Nothing. History was for them half-registered fragments about geese saving a city or Caligula eating his unborn child. History was an old man mumbling in his cups. They had no time for history when a clipped coin was worth less by the week, their taxes rose by the month, the price of their flour rocketed and hot weather frayed their tempers.’
‘Men like to be remembered…’ Father Benedetto begins.
‘So legend might build them into someone grander,’ I interrupt.
‘Do you not want to make your mark, my son?’
He calls me that when he wants to annoy me. I am not his son, nor a child of his church. Not any longer.
‘Perhaps,’ I admit, smiling. ‘But whatever I do shall be irrefutable. Not open to misinterpretation.’
His glass is empty and he reaches for the bottle.
‘So you live for the future?’
‘Yes.’ I am emphatic. ‘I live for the future.’
‘And what is the future but History yet to arrive?’
His eyebrows rise questioningly and he gives my glass a wink.
‘No, no more. Thank you. I must be going. It is late and I have some preliminary sketches to complete.’
‘Art?’ Father Benedetto exclaims. ‘That is irrefutable. Your signature on a unique painting.’
‘One can put one’s signature on more than paper,’ I reply. ‘One can write in the sky.’
He laughs and I bid him farewell.
‘You should come to Mass,’ he says, quietly.
‘God is history. I have no use for him.’ This, I realise, may hurt the priest, so I add, ‘If he exists I am sure he has no use for me.’
‘There you are wrong. Our Lord has a use for everyone.’
Father Benedetto does not know me, though he thinks he does. If he did know me, he would most certainly readjust his judgment. But then, just maybe—it would be a supreme irony worthy of God—he is correct.
Signor Farfalla! Signore! La posta!’
Signora Prasca calls every morning from the fountain in the courtyard below. It is her ritual. It is a sign of being old, maintaining a routine. My routine, however, is temporary. I do not yet have the luxury afforded those of my age of being able to set my life to a series of conformities.
‘Thank you!’
Every weekday, when there is mail for me, is identical. She calls in Italian, I reply in English, she invariably responding, ‘Sulla balaustrata! La posta! Sulla balaustrata, signore!’
When I come down a storey to lean over the edge of the third floor balcony, and peer down into the gloom of the courtyard into which the sun only strikes for an hour and half in the middle of the day in the middle of the year, I can see the letters balancing on the stone pillar at the foot of the banisters. She always stacks them with the largest letter on the bottom of the pile, the smallest on top. As the smallest is usually a postcard or a letter in a small envelope, it is inevitably the brightest, glimmering in the half-light like a coin or a religious medal cast optimistically down a well.
Signor Farfalla, she calls me. So do the others in the neighbourhood. Luigi who owns the bar in the Piazza di S. Teresa. Alfonso in the garage. Clara the pretty one and Dindina the plain one. Galeazzo the bookshop owner. Father Benedetto. They do not know my real name, so they call me Mr. Butterfly. I like it.
To the confusion of Signora Prasca, letters come addressed to me either as Mr. A. Clarke, Mr. A.E. Clarke or Mr. E. Clark. These are all aliases. Some even come addressed to M. Leclerc, others to Mr. Giddings. She does not question this and her gossip causes no conjecture. No suspicion is aroused, for this is Italy and people mind their own business, accustomed to the Byzantine intrigues of men who live alone.
I send most of the mail: if I am away, I post an empty envelope or two to myself, or write out a postcard, disguising my hand, purporting to be from a relative. I have a fictitious favourite niece who addresses me as Uncle and signs herself Pet. I send off prepaid envelopes to life insurance companies, travel agents, time-share operators, trade magazines and other sources which generate junk mail: now I am bombarded with colourful trash informing me I may have won a cheap car, or a holiday in Florida, or a million lire per annum for life. To most people, this unsolicited garbage is a curse. To me it lends an air of perfection to the lie.
Why Mr. Butterfly? It is simple. I paint them. They think this is how I make my money, painting butterflies’ portraits.
It is a most efficient cover. The countryside around the town, as yet unadulterated by agro-chemicals, unharmed by the clumsy footsteps of men, abounds with butterflies. Some are the minuscule blues: to study them delights me, to paint their portraits enthrals me. They seldom have a wingspan further across than a penny. Their colours iridesce, fade from tone to tone, from bright summer sky blue to washed dawn blue in just a few millimetres. They have tiny dots upon them, black and white rims, and the trailing edges of their hind wings have near-microscopic tails pricking out like tiny thorns. To paint one of these creatures successfully is a major achievement, a triumph of detail. And I live by detail, by minute particulars. Without such ardent attention to detail, I would be dead.
To further the efficacy of my deceit, I have allayed any possible suspicion by explaining to Signora Prasca that Leclerc is French for Clark (with or without an e) and Giddings is the name under which I paint—a pseudonym to scrawl upon my pictures.
To aid this misconception, I once hinted that artists often use a fake name to protect their privacy: they cannot, I explain, be forever hampered by intrusion. It destroys the concentration, decelerates output, and galleries and printers, editors and authors, demand deadlines.
Since then, I am sometimes asked if I am working on a new book.
I shrug and say, ‘No, I am building up a stock of pictures. Against a rainy day. A few go to galleries,’ I say. They are bought, I suggest, by collectors of miniatures, or entomologists.
One day, I received a letter posted in a South American republic. It bore postage stamps of gaudy tropical butterflies, those flashy stamps so loved by dictators. The colours of the insects were too vivid to be real, too garish to be believable, bright as the rows of self-appointed medals which are part of every generalissimo’s costume.
‘Ha!’ exclaimed Signora Prasca, knowingly. She waved her hand in the air.
I smiled knowingly back at her and winked.
They think I design postage stamps for banana republics. I leave them with this convenient illusion.
For some men, France is the country of love, the women poutingly beautiful with eyes widely innocent with lust, lips which beg to kiss and press. The countryside is mellow—the rolling neolithic hills of the Dordogne, the rugged Pyrenees or the boggy marshes of the Camargue, it matters not where they travel. All are imbued with the aura of warm sun ripening the vine. The men see a vineyard and think only of lying in the sun with a bottle of Bordeaux and a girl who tastes of grapes. For women, French men are hand-kissers, the slight-bow-brigade, the charming conversationalists, the gentle seducers. How unlike the Italians, they say. The Italian women have hairy armpits, smell of garlic and grow quickly fat on pasta: Italian men pinch arse on the buses of Rome and thrust too hard when making love. Such are the cries of xenophobia.
For me, France is a country of provincial banality, a land where patriotism flowers only to hide the bloodied earth of revolution, where history was begun at the Bastille by a horde of peasants running amok with pitchforks, decapitating their betters because they were just that. Before the Revolution, the French insist in their clipped accent, with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders meant to disarm contradiction, there was only poverty and aristocracy. Now…the shoulders shrug again and a jutting chin points to the dubious grandeur of France. The truth is they have now a poverty of spirit and an aristocracy of politicians. Italy is different. Italy is romance.
I like it here. The wine is good, the sun hot, the people accept their past and do not crow about it. The women are soft, slow lovers—at least, Clara is; Dindina is more anxious—and the men enjoy a good life. There is no poverty of the soul. Everyone is rich of spirit. The civil servants keep the streets clean, keep the traffic moving, keep the trains running and the water flowing in the taps. The carabinieri and the polizia fight the criminals, after a fashion, and the polizia stradale keeps the speed on the autostrada down. Taxes are collected with only a modicum of thoroughness. In the meantime, the people live, drink wine, earn money, spend money and let the world turn.
Italy is the Land of Laissez-faire, a bucolic anarchy governed by wine and the connivances of various loves—of good food, of sex, of liberty, of devil-may-care, of take-it-or-leave-it—above all of a love of life. The national motto of Italy should be senza formalità or non interferenza.
Let me tell you a tale. The authorities in Rome wanted to catch tax dodgers—not as in England where they seek out the meanest evader of pennies, hounding him until his dues are settled. No, they wanted only the Caesars of the State Swindlers, the Emperors of Eludance. To catch them they set no paltry traps in banks, no covert studies of stocks and shares transactions. They sent a team of men around the marinas and harbours of Italy checking on the registration of every yacht over twenty metres. There was a wonderful Mediterranean logic at work: under twenty metres, and the yacht was a rich man’s plaything; over, and it was a super-indulgence of the truly rich. They found one hundred and sixty seven yachts the owners of which were utterly unknown to the authorities—no tax records, no state benefit records, in some cases no birth certificates. Not even in Sicily. Not even in Sardinia.
Did they find these men? Did they pay up the owed billions of illicit lire? Who can tell? It is just a fairy story.
For me, no better place could exist. I could stay here forever, quite possibly, undiscovered like an Etruscan tomb disguised as a culvert on the side of the Via Appia. So long as I don’t buy a yacht over twenty metres long and keep it at Capri. No chance of that now. Besides, had I wanted such a toy, I should have bought it long ago.
Today, the courtyard is as ever cool. It is like a vault the roof of which has caved in so the sky might peer down and bear witness to what little dramas are unfolding therein.
Some say a nobleman was murdered by the fountain in the centre, that every year on the anniversary of his assassination, the water flows pink. Others tell me the courtyard was the scene of the murder of a Socialist in the Mussolini years. Whether the water is pink from blood, from the nobleman’s reputation (so they say) of always dressing in the pink of fashion or because the Socialist was only moderately leftist, I cannot tell. Perhaps a saint lived here and they have all got it wrong. So much for history.
The flagstones are buff-coloured as if worn from centuries of scrubbing and stoning. The fountain, which dribbles cooly through a necklace of pendant moss and algæ, the drips resonant in the cavern of the yard, is of marble shot through with black veins. It is as if the ageing building has contracted varicose veins in its heart. For the fountain is the heart of the building. Within it stands the figure of a girl bedecked in a toga and holding a clam shell from which the water falls, delivered by a two-and-a-quarter-millimetre diameter pipe made of bronze. This girl is not fashioned of marble but of alabaster. Looking at her, I wonder if it is the water or her skin which cools our building.
Doorways face the fountain, slatted shutters look down upon it, balconies lean over it. On the hottest day, it keeps the building moist and cool, the drip-drip of water never ceasing, flowing through a nick cut in the marble on to the flags, disappearing down an iron grid from beneath which sprouts a frond of aquatic fern.
In winter, with the mountains capped with snow, the alleyways of the town icy underfoot, the fountain tries to freeze. Yet it cannot. No matter how still and cold the air, no matter how long the icicles suspended from the maiden’s shell, the water still drips, drips, drips.
No one turns the fountain on. There is no electric pump or similar device. The water seeps from deep in the earth as if the building were erected upon a wound in the soil.
Beyond the fountain is the heavy wooden door leading into the alley, the vialetto. It is a narrow passageway through the buildings with two right angled corners in it. Once, it was a garden walk. Or so Signora Prasca claims. She would have it on the authority of her grandmother that the house was surrounded by gardens in the seventeenth century and that the alleyway follows the line of the walk through the arbour. Hence vialetto rather than vicolo or passaggio. I say it is bunkum. The buildings around are contemporary with this one. There were never any gardens in the old quarter, only courtyards where noblemen and Socialists were stabbed in the shadows.
To one side of the fountain is the start of the steep stone steps which run up to the fourth floor where I live, one flight per side of the square court. They are worn in the centre. Signora Prasca walks at the sides, especially if it is raining and the steps are wet. A leaky gutter dribbles water on to the second flight. No one fixes it. I shall not. It is not my role to alter petty histories, to repair the guttering and cause the steps to last a hundred years more. That is what most Englishmen would do. I do not want them to think of me as necessarily English. I am concerned with greater affairs.
At each storey there is a landing, a balcony open to the courtyard, the square of sky, but otherwise unseen by anyone save the inhabitants and their respective gods.
The walls are painted the colour of café-au-lait, the finials of the columns of the balconies touched off in white distemper which is peeling. I am told the plaster cracks every winter with the first snow on the mountains, as reliable as the most expensive barometer. All the shutters are of varnished wood—beech, to judge by their colour. An unusual wood for shutters in Italy.
I like the building. I was attracted to it as soon as I heard the fountain trickle and was told of the assassinations. It was appropriate. I had no option but to rent the fourth floor apartment on a long lease, six months’ rental paid in advance. I have always believed in fate. There is no such thing as coincidence. My customers will confirm this opinion.
I have no truly close friends: such friends can be dangerous. They know too much, become too involved in one’s well-being, take too much of an interest in how one is, where one has been, where one is going. They are like wives but without the suspicion: still, they are curious, and curiosity I can do without. I cannot afford to take the risk. Instead, I have acquaintances. Some are closer than others and I allow them to look over the outer ramparts of my existence, yet none are what are generally termed close friends.
They know me: more exactly, they know of me. A few know in which quarter of the town I live but none have entered my eyrie: entrance to my present abode is reserved only for a very select group of professional visitors.
Several have approached to within a hundred metres and discovered me coming or going: I have greeted them with smiles and bonhomie, suggested it is time to quit work. The sun is high. A bottle of wine, perhaps? We have gone to the bar—the one in the Piazza di S. Teresa, or the other in the Piazza Conca d’Oro, say—and I have talked of Polyommatus bellargus, P. anteros and P. dorylas and the delicate blue of their wings, of the latest government scandal from Rome or Milan, of the chamois-like abilities of my little Citroën on the mountain roads. I call the car il camoscio, to everyone’s humour. Only a foreigner, probably an Englishman and an eccentric, would give his automobile a name.
Duilio is one of my acquaintances. He is, he announces with disarming modesty, a plumber: in truth, he is a wealthy entrepreneur of pipes and ducts. His company builds sewers, underground conduits, water catchment drains and, of late, has branched out into avalanche barriers. He is a merry man with a bacchanalian love of good wines. His wife, Francesca, is a jolly, rotund woman who never ceases to smile. She smiles in her sleep, Duilio claims and he winks obscenely to hint at the cause thereof.
We met when first he came to survey the gutter. As a friend of a friend of Signora Prasca. It was hoped one of his men would see to the job in an off day, for cash. We fell to talking—Duilio speaks some English but better French—and went to the bar. The gutter was not repaired but no one seemed to care. Friendship can be forged over a handyman’s task, not broken by it. Then, some weeks later, I was invited to his house to try his wine. It was an honour.
Duilio and Francesca have several homes: one by the sea, one in the mountains, an apartment in Rome for business and, perhaps, the dalliances with which Italian men fill their extramarital hours. Their mountain home is set in vineyards and apricot orchards about fifteen kilometres from the town, higher up the valley. It is just too high for olives, which is a shame: there are few greater luxuries in the world than lazing a long afternoon under the scant shade of an olive grove, the sunlight pricking through the branches and the roots of the trees digging into one’s daydreams like fingers into dough.
The house is a three storey modern building built on the site of a Roman cistern, appropriate for a man who constructs drainage systems: Duilio laughs at this irony.
He is, he states, keeping up with the tradition of the land, restoring the irrigation channels in the orchards. He, too, wants to leave his mark on history.
He makes his own wine: it is red, light red, the grapes Montepulciano. The house has no wine cellar. Instead a cavernous garage suffices, the rear as dark and musty as any cave, and as mysterious. Behind a breeze-block wall, behind shelves of small bore piping and pump spares, massive wrenches and tube-cutting machines, boxes of faucets and valves, is the wine. It is covered in cement dust, plaster and bat-shit. To reach a particular shelf, Duilio has to stand upon the hood of his brand-new Mercedes. Reaching over, he wheezes with the effort. He is not a well man. It is the wine.
‘Violà!’ he declaims, then relies upon his weak command of English in honour of his guest. ‘This is a fine wine.’ He is as proud as a father of his son, of a daughter wed above her station. ‘I make it.’
He slaps the bottle as if it were a whore’s buttocks. ‘She is good.’
He wipes the neck of the bottle in the cleft of his elbow, the grey dust staining his flesh. From between a box of washers and a crate of tins of machine oil he produces a corkscrew, the bottle opening with a tiny explosion like a high velocity round leaving a silencer. He pours the wine into two glasses on the table and we sit, waiting for it to warm in the sun. Lizards scuttle over the blinding white earth of the driveway, rustle in the dry thistles and grass beneath the swelling apricots.
‘Alla salute!’
Like a true connoisseur, he sips and washes the wine around his mouth, squeezing a drop between his lips and swallowing slowly.
‘She is good,’ he declares again. ‘You think?’
In Italy, anything worth having appears to be feminine: a good car, a good wine, a good salami, a good book and a good woman.
‘Yes,’ I agree.
If the wine were a woman, I say, she would be young and sexy. Her kisses would tear your heart out. Her hands would revive the limpest old man into a stud of Herculean proportions. Stallions would stampede with envy. Her eyes would beg for love.
‘Like blood,’ Duilio says. ‘Like Italian blood. Good red.’
I nod at the thought of blood and history. I should be back at my work. I take my leave and reluctantly accept a gift of a bottle of this unlabelled grape-blood. Receiving it places me at a disadvantage. A man who receives wine from an acquaintance risks the development of friendship and, as I say, I want no friendship for it brings with it perils.
Permit me to give you a word of advice, whoever you are. Do not attempt to find me.
I have hidden in the crowds all my life. Another face, as anonymous as a sparrow, as undistinguishable from the next man as a pebble on a beach. I may be standing next to you at the airport check-in, at the bus-stop, in the supermarket queue. I may be the old man sleeping rough under the railway bridge of any European city. I may be the old buffer propping up the bar in a rural English pub. I may be the pompous old bastard driving an open Roller—a white Corniche, say—down the autobahn with a girl a third of my age at my side, her breasts moulded under her T-shirt and her skirt hitched high up her tanned and endless thighs. I may be the corpse on the mortuary slab, the derelict without a name, without a home, without a single mourner at the maw of a pauper’s grave. You cannot know.
Ignore the apparent clues. Italy is a big country and ideal for hiding in.
But Piazza di S. Teresa, you think, where there is a bar owned by one Luigi. Signora Prasca, you think. Duilio the millionaire sewer-man and Francesca, you think. Clara and Dindina. A good sleuth could track these down, put one and two together and make four. Search the tax records for a spinster or widow Prasca, the police computers for two whores called Clara and Dindina in the same bordello, the lists of the Italian Sewer Manufacturers’ Directory. Look for every Piazza di S. Teresa with a bar in it close to an alleyway with two right angled bends and pretentiously called a vialetto.
Forget it. Do not waste your time. I may be old, but I am no fool. If I was, I should not be old, I should be dead.
The names are changed, the places changed, the people changed. There are a thousand Piazzas di S. Teresa, ten thousand alleys which have no names, exist on no maps save those in the heads of the occupants and the local postino who knows of it only as a dead end he has to walk down every morning, only to return to the Via Ceresio to continue his round.
You will not find me. I will not permit it and without my consent, you are lost. The British Anti-Terrorist Squad, MI5, the CIA and the FBI, Interpol, Russia’s KGB or GRU and Romania’s Securitate, even the Bulgarians, those expert trackers of men—they have all looked but never discovered me, although a few have drawn quite close. You have no chance.
The apartment is self-contained. No one can gain access except through the one main door; there are no rear stairs, no buildings overtowering it from which an intruder could be lowered, no fire escape. In case of need, I have an escape but you are not to know of it: such a disclosure would be extremely foolish on my part.
In truth, the apartment has three levels, the building being constructed on the slope of the hill upon which the town is built. Entering through the door from the fourth floor balcony, you would find the short hallway and the main sitting room. It is spacious, fully ten metres by seven. The floor is tiled in once red, now ochre, seventeenth century slabs and, in the center, is a fire grate raised on a twenty-centimetre dais over which hangs a copper hood and chimney. It can be cold here in the winter. Several modern settees surround the fireplace, the sort made from kits purchased in furniture warehouses. The chairs are canvas and wood, like those used by film directors on a movie set. The table, of heavy nineteenth-century oak, has only two chairs. That is one more than is essential.
Along one wall is a row of windows: like the fireplace, they are a modern addition. Opposite them are the bookshelves.
I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books. They contain the condensed experiences of humanity. To live fully, one has to read widely. I do not intend to face a man-eating lion in the African veldt, fall from an aircraft into the Arabian Sea, soar through outer space or march with the legions of Rome against Gaul or Carthage, yet books can take me to these places, to these predicaments. In a book, Salome can seduce me, I can fall in love with Marie Duplessis, have my own Lady of the Camellias, a private Monroe or exclusive Cleopatra. In a book I can rob a bank, spy on the enemy, kill a man. Kill any number of men. No, not that. One man at a time is enough for me. It always was. And I do not always seek experience second-hand.
Books are a drawback for, when I move on, they must be abandoned, jettisoned like bags of sand from a sinking balloon, ballast from a listing ship fighting the hurricane. Every new place, I have to start again, constructing a library. I am always tempted to have the books returned for storage but that necessitates an address, a fixed point and I cannot afford such an indulgence. Looking at these shelves, however, I consider that they may be more permanent than those in the past.
Music is also an enjoyment of mine, an indulgence, an escape from realities. On the shelves I have a compact disc player. There are fifty or so discs besides it. Mostly classical. I am not a lover of the modern musics. Some jazz. Yet that also is the classical of the genre—the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, the Original New Orleans Rhythm Kings, McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans. Music is also an excellent device for distorting or dampening other sounds.
On the end walls of the room I have paintings. They are not valuable. They were purchased from a market frequented by artists in front of the cathedral on Saturdays. Some are distinctly modernistic, cubes and triangles and worms of paint. Others are inept representations of the countryside around: a church with a poorly executed campanile, a water-mill surrounded by willows, a castle perched on a hilltop. There are many castles balanced on ridges in the province. The paintings are cheerful and merrily primitive in the way children’s art is attractive. They add colour and light.
I need light. In a dark world, light is essential.
At the end of the room is a small kitchen with a gas stove, fridge, sink and work surfaces of fake marble. Along a narrow and dark passage from this is a lavatory containing a water closet and, redundant in my abode, a bidet. At the facing end of the room is another door leading to five rising steps and another passageway, the whole side of which is a long window broken only by pillars. Once a balcony, this was glazed by the previous occupant.
Off this passageway are two large bedrooms and an adequately appointed bathroom—a bath, shower, lavatory, linen cupboard with hot water tank and another redundant bidet. The previous inhabitant, Signora Prasca informs me, was a prodigious amante. This she states with a smile of fond remembrance as if she, too, had been one of his conquests. When she recalls the inconvenience of his parties, the quickness of his temper and the loud moaning of a young mistress through an open summer’s night window and echoing in the courtyard, she speaks of him as seduttore. There is no pleasing old women.
The first bedroom is simply furnished with a double bed, a pine chest of drawers, cane-seated chair and wardrobe. I am not a man desirous of luxurious sleep. I sleep lightly. It is part of my business. A room full of satins, cushions and mirrors and scents lulls the mind as effectively as morphine. Besides, I bring no pretty girls up here. The bed may be double but that simply gives me space. In my business, one sometimes needs space, even in slumber. The mattress is firm, for soft foam and springs are another soporific, and the frame does not squeak. There is no—what is the current euphemism?—horizontal jogging done in this bed. A noisy bed-frame is the last sound many a man has heard. I do not intend to join the august company of deceased fools.
The bathroom, tastefully lined with white tiles upon which are printed, at random around the room, colourful depictions of mountain flowers, is between the bedrooms.
The second bedroom I shall leave for now.
At the end of the one-time balcony is another flight of stone steps as well worn as the main staircase. Until the building was sub-divided into apartments twenty years or so ago, whoever entered the front door was sure, unless he was a menial or tradesman, to make the pilgrimage to the top. For up these steps is the crowning glory of Italian architecture, an octagonal loggia.
I have furnished this with a wrought-iron chair and table, painted white. Nothing more. Not so much as a cushion. There is no electric light. A low wooden shelf under the parapet wall, holds an oil lamp.
Signora Prasca expresses occasional dismay that I have no guests to enjoy the loggia and its panoramic view, with whom to share the dawn and the twilight, the balmy summer breezes and the rising of a wintry, coruscating Venus down the valley.
The loggia is mine, more precious than any guest who could tread it. It is my utterly private place, more so than the remainder of my apartment. Up in the loggia, I survey the panorama of the valley and the mountains and I think of Ruskin and Byron, of Shelley and Walpole, of Keats and Beckford.
If I sit in the centre of the space, under the dome of the roof, I cannot be seen from below or from the buildings on either side. I can be seen from the roof or the parapet on the façade of the church up the hill, but it is locked at night and the walls are as impregnable as a penitentiary. There is no tower and it would take a most determined man to scale the building.
The interior of the dome is most curiously painted with a fresco I should guess to be at least three hundred years old. It depicts the horizon of the view, the tops of the mountains and the façade of the church, the outline unaltered by time. Above is painted the sky in royal azure, the stars pricked out in gold. In places, the paint has faded and peeled but, generally, the fresco is still in good condition. I cannot recognise the stars and assume they are either an invention of the artist’s imagination or hold some symbolic meaning I have not attempted to fathom. Time is too short to allow for my delving into history. It is enough to assist in the shaping of it in my own little way.
I do not often venture out at the height of the day. This is not a case of being deliberately non-expatriate. Noël Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ does not apply to me. I do not claim to be either English or French, German, Swiss, American, Canadian, South African. Nothing, in fact. Signora Prasca (and, indeed, all my acquaintances) assume I am English for I speak the language and receive mail in English. I listen—and they must hear it from time to time—to the BBC World Service on my transistor radio. I am also mildly, harmlessly eccentric for I paint butterflies, very rarely receive visitors, am a very private man. The English do not go out in the height of the day. I could be nothing but English in their eyes. I do not disabuse them of their assumptions.
My preference for remaining indoors, which I do when it suits me, is for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, it is more convenient for me to work during the day. Any noise I make can be camouflaged by the general hum of the town. Any smell which might emanate is lost in the odium of car fumes and cooking food. It is better for me to work by daylight than artificial light. I need to see, very exactly, what I am doing. The advantage of Italy is the number of sunlit hours it affords.
Secondly, the streets are crowded in the day time. Crowds are, I know it only too well, a superlative hiding place—yet not only for myself: there are those who would hide from me in order to watch me, to wonder at me, to try to assess what I am up to.
I do not like crowds unless they are to my advantage. A crowd is to me as a tropical forest is to a leopard. It can be a habitat of great safety or great danger depending on attitude, position, the innate senses. To move in crowds, I have to be ever alert, ever cautious. After a while, a constant state of watchfulness becomes tiring. This is the time of most danger, when the attention is weakened. It is then the hunter bags his leopard.
Thirdly, if someone were to wish to burgle the apartment, he would more likely do it under cover of day.
The inaccessibility of the apartment would make a night intrusion awkward at least, highly dangerous at best. No burglar, not even an idiot of an amateur apprentice, would be prepared to scale roofs of loose pantiles, haul up a seven-metre ladder, swing it over an open space fifteen metres above ground, clamber precariously over it and all for a few baubles, a wristwatch or two and a tv set.
No: any burglar would come by day, disguised as a meter-reader, census-counter, health official, building inspector. It would not be easy for him even then: he would have to gain entry through to the courtyard, bluff his way past the wily Signora Prasca, who has been a concierge since before the war and knows all the tricks, and open my apartment door. It is double deadlocked with two Chubbs, and the timber is over an inch thick. I have lined the inner side of the door with seven gauge steel plate.
The ordinary burglar’s time would anyway be wasted. I wear my one wristwatch and, with no desire to vegetate before inane quizzes and Milanese housewives’ breasts, I have no television, only the compact disc player and the transistor radio, which are not popular with the Italian Society of Fagins.
The more intelligent burglar, however, is the one I fear. What he would steal from me is not material wealth. It is knowledge, a knowledge which could be fenced more readily than a filched brooch or a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. Not everyone wants a hot watch but the whole world wants information.
Fourthly, I like the apartment in day. The windows let in the breeze, the sun moves inexorably across the floor, disappears, starts in through the opposite windows. The pantiles click in the heat and lizards scuttle along the sills. Martins nest in the eaves to chirp and cheep through the hot day, diving into their mud bowls like acrobats, as if being swung on trajectories of invisible wires. The countryside moves through phases of light: the mists of dawn, the harsh bright early sunlight, the haze of midday and afternoon, the purpling wash to dusk, the first sparks of lights coming on in the mountain villages.
There is a romantic side to me. I do not deny it. With my concern for intricacy, my adoration of exactitudes, my perception of detail and my awareness of nature, I should perhaps have been a poet, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Certainly, I am an unacknowledged legislator, but I have written not a jot of verse since I left school. I have even been acknowledged on several occasions, albeit under a pseudonym.
Finally, when in the apartment, I am in complete control of my destiny. I may be subjected to an earthquake, for this part of Italy is prone to such. I may be poisoned by the daytime car fumes. I may be struck by lightning during the summer storm—there is no finer spot in the world to watch the gods sport than in the loggia—or have a loose piece of aircraft fall on me. That is by the way. No one can avoid such unpredictabilities.
What I am safe from are the predictables, the risks which can be assessed, analysed and accounted for, the vagaries of men.
I walk out in the early morning. The vialetto holds the night for half an hour after dawn has broken. At the Via Ceresio I turn left and go to the corner with the Via de’ Bardi. Opposite is an old house, the oldest in the town according to Signora Prasca. Just below the roof line is a ten-centimetre crack caused by age, the shaking of distant volcanoes and the vibrations of lorries in the Viale Farnese. In this crack lives a colony of bats, thousands of them. Standing at the junction at dawn, I watch them returning for the day and think of D.H. Lawrence and his pipistrello. He was right. Bats do not so much fly as flicker-splash in neurasthenic parabolæ.
In the first light, I sometimes walk down the Via Bregno, cross the Viale Farnese and enter the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre. The pine trees and poplars hiss as the first breezes swell from the valley. Sparrows jig about searching for crumbs left by yesterday’s strollers. A few wayward bats take the last of the night’s insects. In the bushes rustle small rodents competing for the sparrows’ gleanings.
There is no one abroad so early. I could be a ghost wandering the streets, blind to the living. I usually have the park entirely to myself and that is best, is safe. If there should be other persons about, a janitor making his way to work, a pair of lovers entwined about each other after a night of what Signora Prasca would doubtless term l’amore all’aperto, a man taking exercise as myself, I can see them, determine their motives for being in the park with me, assert the threat they may pose and react accordingly.
Alternatively, I go out in the evenings. The town is alive then, but not too crowded. There are crowds, but there are also shadows into which to slip, archways and doorways in which to shelter, alleys down which to make good an escape. I can meld with the crowds, disappear into them silently like a ship into fog.
These are but sensible precautions. Outside those in the discreet fraternity of my profession, no one knows I am here or, if they do, not where exactly in the long leg of Italy I make my living. Yet I must be prepared.
I know this town, every street, alley and passageway. I have wandered them, learnt them, studied their curves and bends, their straights and their angles of ascent or descent. I can walk swiftly from the west to the east gate in fifteen minutes, not once deviating more than eight metres off a straight line drawn through the buildings. I doubt I have a fellow citizen who can do likewise.
As regards leaving the town, I can drive out of it at the height of rush-hour, even in the middle of the tourist season, in less than three minutes from where I keep my Citroën. In seven, I can be through the toll-gate, ticket clipped for convenience in the ashtray, and on the autostrada. In fifteen, I can be well into the mountains.
Let me tell you of the view from the loggia. Signora Prasca is correct when she chides me for not enjoying it with others, so I shall share it with you. It is a shame you cannot actually be here with me. I could now allow that, not knowing you. You must understand I may in any case be lying. Not falsifying the truth. Truth is an ineluctable absolute. I am merely readjusting it.
From the loggia, I have a panoramic view over the rooftops of the valley and mountains from the south-south-west round to the east-north-east. I can also see over the roofs of the town to the church and a long row of trees which line the Viale Nizza.
The rooftops are all pantiled, the chimneys squat with sloping pantiled covers like miniature roofs. Television aerials mounted on aluminium poles are the only concession to modernity. Remove these and the view would be like the one painted around the rim of the dome. The rooftops descend in steps as the hill goes towards the cliff which drops to the river and railway line below.
Beyond is the valley, running south-east to north-west for about thirty kilometres. On either flank are mountains rising to one thousand and fifty metres with foothills between the valley plain and the peaks which, despite their height and cragginess, are not overbearing and stand more like friendly sentinels than warders. In winter, the snowline comes down to just a hundred metres from the valley floor. In the distance, down the valley, are other hills rising from the plain. They are, like the mountains, wooded where there is no rock, the slope not too steep and the snow generally temporary. Across the valley are villages. Upon the hills, small communities cling to plateaux. The living is agricultural, harsh but rich with contentment.
In the town there are industries: electronics, service industries, pharmaceuticals—all high-tech and low pollution. The workforce live in anonymous suburbs to the north, sterile communities in cossetted houses surrounded by pine trees scarred by the construction companies’ bulldozers, or in blocks of low-rise condominiums. These are the homes of the people who want to shape no history at all.
Fortunately, I cannot see these disimmaculate conceptions, as Father Benedetto refers to them, the barren and effete developments, the pretentious enclaves of the borghesia Italiana. What I can see, with my pair of compact pocket Yashica binoculars, are five thousand years of history laid out before me as if it was a tapestry upon a cathedral wall, an altar-cloth to the god of time spread over the world.
On one ridge, jutting from the mountains like a cockerel’s spur of rock, is a castle. It is in ruins now, only the curtain walls remaining, surrounding a three hectare site of derelict barracks and stables, storage barns and noblemen’s quarters. There is only one entrance, sealed with a heavy iron grid and secured with three titanium steel chains and heavy duty padlocks. The chains bear the signs of ineffectual hacksawing: on the ground lie the remains of several saw blades, shattered by temper or poor usage. Someone, more ingenious than the hacksawers, has attempted to widen the gap between two of the bars with a hydraulic jack. He has been partially, but not completely, successful.
Except to me, it seems, the castle remains as impregnable as in the days of the Crusades. I have found an entrance, my head containing a similar mind to that of the fortress builders, a mind accustomed to the convolutions of intrigue, the diversity of necessity and the ever-present requirement of a bolthole, a rope out of the window or a ladder down the wall.
Not far from the castle stands the ruins of a monastery, the Convento di Vallingegno. It is a ghostly place. As with the castle, the walls stand firm. The buildings within, however, are in better condition. Not all the roofs have caved in. Spirits are said to be active here. Local witches, for there are still a good many in this part of Italy, rifle the tombs of the monks. The monastery was the scene of black magic ceremonies conducted by the area Gestapo hierarchy in 1942. It is said a Gestapo senior officer is buried there. The witches have searched zealously for this prize but as yet to no effect.
Around these ruins are little villages—San Doménico, Lettomanoppello, San Martino, Castiglione, Capo d’Acqua, Fossa. Tiny places, half abandoned by their populations who departed for Australia, America, Venezuela, eluding plague or drought or unemployment or the grinding rural, montane misery of the Twenties and Thirties.
I know all these places. And others, farther afield, over the mountain passes, along tracks only the chamois use, or the shepherds, or the wild boar or the courageously stupid cross-country skiers come the first heavy falls of snow.
The valley is history. The mountains are history. I cannot see it from the loggia, for the line of poplars in the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre blocks it, but there is a bridge over the river seventeen kilometres away which is buried by undergrowth, tangles of brambles and old-man’s beard. The road no longer uses it, has not for fifty years. A motor bridge bypasses it twenty metres downstream.
Thrusting through the snagging cover, I have stepped on this cobbled arch. I know, for I have read the local history, Otto and Conrad IV, Charles I of Anjou and both Henry III and Edward I of England have crossed it, not to mention Popes—the diplomatist Innocent III, the cunning crusader Gregory X, the mendacious Boniface VIII and the gullible miracle worker Celestino V. All were men of history, men of destiny, men who wanted to leave their marks upon time.
Being a romantic—not a poet, yet still a legislator: do not forget that—I imagine the drum and slip of hooves upon the cobbles, the banners furling from lances, the chink of bridle and clatter of armour, the shifting sound of chain mail and creak of leather. I can see, reflected in the river, the glint of sword-steel and the riot of colour from silks and flags.
History: the castle and the monastery, the villages, the bridge, the roads and the churches and the fields. I like it, this ordinary history of everyday things.
Today, upon the ridge, it is viciously hot. I have struggled up the rocky track for nearly twenty minutes. The hillside is bleak: wild thyme, sage, low brush and thistles to the stems of which cling white and brown striped snails, their shells sealed by hardened mucus against the heat of the sun, displayed like pearls upon the stalks, like globs of sap oozed out and baked by the day.
The rocks are loose and large, as blindingly white as bleached enamel, the track uneven. If the way was less stony, I should have driven a car up here, yet I cannot risk a punctured oil pan or cracked axle. I need reliable mobility.
At the top of the track, which hairpins to and fro up the hill, is a ruined tower and a small church, hardly more than a chapel, once confined within the walls of a small fort, but one of huge importance, for it surveys the southern end of the valley where the land starts to drop off steeply to the plains. From here, the winding route down the narrowing valley can be observed for ten kilometers. The road is little used now: there is a brand new motor road to the east. Yet it was down here the Crusaders passed and the tower and church belonged to the world’s first bankers, the Knights Templar.
I arrive at the top and find a convenient boulder upon which to sit beside the tumbled-down tower. The sun is merciless. I pull my water bottle out of my knapsack and guzzle the water. It is lukewarm, tastes tepid and smells of plastic.
I admire those knights. They took control of history. They fought. They changed destiny. They killed. They kept secrets. They were reticent men and, like all men of discretion, they made many enemies because of their diffidence, their engrossing fetish for privacy. As I have done. The tower against which I lean was theirs. From here destiny was controlled.
The grand destiny. Not the little tweaks to the line of time. The grand twists, the snaps in the whip of time which curl and flick and make thunder. Which hurt.
These were not men who built churches by which to be remembered, if not by God then at least by their fellows. These were not men who constructed towers by which the future might admire them. Indeed, few hereabouts in the valley or down the road they paved to the plains know of their work. Their churches are for the most part insignificant and austere, their towers heaps of rubble. They changed not the shape of the landscape but the shape of their own and my existences. Yours, too.
I am of their ilk. In my quiet way, I too play a role on the wide stage of time. I erect no towers, establish no monuments and yet, because of me and my actions, the cast of history is configured. Not the sort of history Father Benedetto refers to, the making and breaking of grand treaties, the forging of alliances, the exalted intermarriages of princes and peoples which only bear slightly upon the rest of humanity, but the kind which alters the air we breathe, the water in which we bathe, the soil upon which we tread our brief spans, which affect the way we think.
It is better to change the manner in which a man perceives the world than it is to change the world he perceives. Think upon this.
Rested, my breath back and my heart thumping less loudly from the exertions of the climb, I set about the reason for my trip out of the town. Reasons: there are two.
The first is quickly accomplished. It takes but a few minutes. With my binoculars, I survey the western hillside to the narrow valley. It is wooded, oaks and chestnuts, mountain ash. There is no discernible pathway up from the valley floor where the nearest village huddles like a group of travellers sheltering from an oncoming storm. Indeed, the houses are travellers, time’s travellers and the storm, time’s storm. I know the village, not a house newer than a hundred years and two erected in the twelfth century. One is the village bakery, as it has ever been, the other a moped garage and repair-shop.
Knowing the topography of these mountains, I can tell the ridge at the top of the woods hides an alpine meadowland beyond.
One cannot buy maps in Italy, not detailed ones such as the British foolishly sell in every bookstore and stationery shop. Ordnance Survey maps are unobtainable in Italy. Only the authorities keep them, the military or the water companies, the polizia, the provincial governments: Italy has had too many wars, too many bandits, too many politicians to risk such information getting out. Maps which show contours, mountain tracks, derelict and uninhabited mountain villages, disused roads are not publicly available. A 1:50,000 map of the region would be of immense value to me: for a 1:25,000 I should willingly pay three quarters of a million lire. Yet I dare not seek it. I am sure the map would be there for the asking, but he who asks is known. Instead, I have to rely upon my experience of the mountains and my knowledge tells me there is an alpine meadow over there, ideal for future requirements.
I make a few notes, decide to drive over the mountain and spy out the land as soon as there is an overcast day. On sunny days, a car window can flash like a heliograph in the mountains. From the loggia, I have seen the reflection of a vehicle twenty-seven kilometres off.
That done, I set to my next task, a portrait of Papilio machaon, the common swallowtail.
Anyone who has never seen this creature is much the poorer for the omission of such beauty from their lives. It is, to quote the 1889 edition of Kirby, a large, strong butterfly with broad triangular forewings and dentated hind-wings. The wings are sulphur-yellow, forewings black at the base, and with black veins. They also have black spots on the costa, and a broad black sub-marginal band dusted with yellow. The hind-wings are broadly black, dusted with blue, before the hind margin, and the eye-spot is red, bordered in front with black and cobalt blue. All the wings have yellow lunules before the hind margins. It expands to three or four inches in width, flying with a gracile speed, the wings beating rapidly. Suffice to say it is exquisite.
There is a warm updraught between the ruined tower and the little church, blowing from the valley floor, from the barley and lentil fields, from the patch of saffron, from the vineyards and the orchards. It wafts only here and the butterflies use it as a highway to cross the ridge from one part of the valley to the next, rising upon it as raptors ride thermals. I pour my trap upon the earth, a medicine bottle of honey and wine mixed with an eggcupful of my own urine. It soaks into the gravellous soil, leaving a dark, damp stain.
Art is only a matter of observing. The novelist examines life and recreates it as narrative; the painter scrutinises life and imitates it in colour; the sculptor pores over life and immortalises it in everlasting marble, or so he thinks; the musician listens to life and plays it on his violin; the actor pretends reality. I am no true artist, not one of these breeds. I am merely an observer, one who stands in the world’s wings to behold the action occurring. The prompter’s chair has always been my place: I whisper the words, the stage directions, and the plot unfolds.
How many books have I seen burned, how many paintings faded and grimed, how many sculptures smashed by weapons, chipped by frost or split by fire? How many millions of notes have I heard drift in the air to peter out like the smoke of an abandoned cigar?
I do not have long to await. By chance, the first arrival is P. machaon. The butterfly settles on the damp spot in the earth. It has smelt the trap. One of its eye-spots is missing. A gash has ripped the wing. The tear is the exact V shape of a bird’s beak. The butterfly uncoils its proboscis like a watch-spring losing tension. It lowers it to the ground and probes for the dampest area. Then it sucks.
I watch. This beautiful creature is drinking up a part of me. What I waste, it enjoys. I imagine my urine salty, the honey sickly sweet and the wine heady. It is not long before there are half a dozen of P. machaon supping at my drug accompanied by other species in which, today, I have no interest. The first swallowtail, with the torn wing, has had enough and stands in the scant shade of a thistle, opening and shutting its wings. It is drunk on my salt and the wine. This will not last long. In twenty minutes, it will be recovered to flit down the hillside in search of flowers, more wholesome yet less wonderful.
I do not understand how men can kill such beauty. There can be no joy, surely, in capturing such a masterpiece of evolution, gassing it with chloroform or squeezing its thorax until it is dead, setting it on a cork board until rigor mortis is advanced then pinning it, frozen by death, in a glass-topped case, hung over with a curtain to keep the light from fading the colours. To me, this is the height of frivolous insanity.
Nothing can be gained from killing a butterfly. Killing a man is a different matter.
The piazza in the village of Mopolino is triangular, eight trees standing in a row shading the western end, their trunks scarred and gouged by careless parking, their projecting roots stained by dog urine and fertilised by cigarette butts. They grow from beds of dirty gravel and are surrounded by kerbstones which afford them no protection. Kerbstones are not guiding marks but mere inconveniences to Italian drivers.
At the eastern apex of the piazza is the village post office, a tiny place no bigger than a small shop which smells of hessian, stale tobacco, cheap paper and glue. The counter is at least as old as the postmaster, who I should say is not under sixty-five. The wooden surface is highly polished by wax and the sleeves of jackets, but it is also cracked, the splits filled with an accumulation of the dust of years. The postmaster’s face is similarly polished and cracked.
The advantage of the piazza is that it contains two bars, one on either side. This is of great use to me for I can sit in one and cast an eye over not only the piazza but the other bar, too.
There is little likelihood of a watcher drinking in the same bar as myself. He would feel he had to move away if I was to enter, or go to sit at one of the tables outside. This would make him conspicuous. He would prefer to be across the piazza, observing me from a distance.
I took a long time finding the right post office.
In the town where I reside, the main post office is too big, too busy, too public. There is always a throng of people milling about it and the telephone company next door, many of them waiting to make a call from a kiosk, post a letter, send a telegram, meet a friend. They read newspapers, chat to each other or stand and survey the crowds. Some walk up and down impatiently. They are a perfect cover for a clandestine observer.
There is no bar in sight. If there were one there, it would bring its owner many riches, and it surprises me no wily entrepreneur has recognised the potential. It would also present to me a perfect vantage point from which I could inspect the crowds and assess any possible threat. Yet it is inconceivable that I could be entirely safe in such a place of teeming onlookers. What I required as soon as I came to live in this region was a spot I could approach cautiously, like a tiger returning to its kill, aware there may be a hunter in a machan in the trees who has been waiting, patiently.
And so, whenever I drive out to Mopolino, I always park my little Citroën 2CV by the end tree in the line, walking to the bar on the left of the piazza. I sit at the same table every time, order the same refreshment—an espresso and a glass of iced water. The patron, who is not quite as old as the postmaster, knows me by now and I am accepted as a regular, if taciturn, visitor.
I do not call always on the same day of the week, nor do I call always at the same hour: so rigid a timetable would invite problems.
For a while, I sip my coffee and behold the slow pace of village life unfolding. There is a farmer who arrives in a cart pulled by a tubby pony. The cart is made from the truck-bed of a Fiat pick-up, with wooden shafts from a gig many decades older. They are intricately carved with leaf designs, as much a work of aesthetic art as the rest of the cart is one of ingenuity. The wheels are adapted from those of a heavy lorry and have bald pneumatic Pirelli tyres, half inflated. There is a number of rowdy teenage boys who zoom into the piazza upon mopeds, their engines and voices echoing momentarily off the walls. There is a rich man with a Mercedes-Benz sedan who drives to the post office and leaves his vehicle in the centre of the thoroughfare while he does his business: he cares not a jot that he holds up the daily meat delivery to the butcher’s shop. There are also two very pretty young girls who drink coffee at the other bar, their laughter light yet simultaneously serious with the concerns of their youth.
I wait for up to an hour. If there is nothing to alarm me, I go smartly across to the post office.
‘Buon giorno,’ I say.
The postmaster grunts his reply, jutting his chin. It is his way of asking what I want although he is well aware. It is always the same. I buy no stamps and seldom post a letter.
‘Il fermo posta?’ I enquire.
He turns to a rack of pigeonholes behind a sack of mail hanging in a metal frame like an old person’s walking aid. I wonder if, when the day’s collection has been made, he borrows the framework to see himself home.
From one pigeonhole he draws a bundle of general delivery envelopes held together by an elastic band. Some have been there for weeks, months even. They are the relics of love affairs turned sour, petty crimes abandoned or long since carried out, deals reneged upon and tourists long since passed by on their restless itineraries. They are a sad comment upon the feckless, shifting, unfeeling character of human nature.
Deftly, like a teller counting through a thick wad of banknotes, he flicks through the mail. At the end, he stops and repeats the process until he comes to my letter. There is always only the one. This he extracts with thin, wasted fingers and tosses on to the counter with an incomprehensible grunt. He knows me well by now, no longer asking for identification. I put one hundred lire in change upon the counter by way of payment or gratuity. With his bony fingers, he scoops the coins across the counter and into the palm of his hand.
Leaving the post office, I do not go directly to my little car. I walk around the village first. The streets are so placid, so cool in the shade, the cobbles smooth and hard underfoot, the windows shuttered against the heat of the day. By some of the doorways sleeping dogs lie prone, too bushed by the heat to bother to growl at a stranger; or perhaps they too know me by now. Cats hide suspiciously in the deep shadows under steps or lintels, their alert eyes bright and devious like those of child pickpockets in Naples.
One doorway always has an old woman sitting within it. She makes lace, her gnarled fingers like the roots of the trees in the piazza but still nimble, flicking the bobbins over on the frame with a practised dexterity I admire. She sits in the shade but her hands and lace are in the brilliant sunlight, the skin over her knuckles tanned as leather.
Every time I pass her by I smile. Often I pause to appreciate her handiwork.
Her greeting is, regardless of the time, ‘Buona sera, signore,’ delivered in a high, squeaky voice like that of a cat mewing.
I wondered at first if she was blind, every hour being evening tinted, but soon realised it is because her eyes see everything in twilight, permanently dazzled by the sun on the white tracery of the lace.
I point at her lace and remark, ‘Molto bello, il merletto.’
This remark invariably prompts a wide and toothless smile and the same retort spoken through a porcine snort of comical derision.
‘Merletto. Si! I lacci. No!’
This is her reference to my first meeting with her when, in searching for the word, I assumed laccio was lace. It was: a shoe-lace.
Today, as I walk, I open my letter, read it and memorise the contents. I also watch out for someone following me. Before I return to the car, I stand and survey the piazza, pausing to tie my shoelace. During this time, I cast an eye over the vehicles in the piazza. Most I know to be owned by locals. Those I do not recognise I momentarily study, committing their details to mind. This way I can ensure one does not follow me back to the town.
Satisfied I am safe—or at least prepared—I leave. I take several other precautions as well, but you are not to know of these. I cannot afford to give away every detail. It would not be circumspect.
On the way back to the town—a distance of some thirty-five kilometres—I watch to see if I am being tailed and, bit by bit, I shred the letter into the tiniest confetti and let it blow, a pinch at a time, out of the window.
The second bedroom in my apartment is a workroom. It is quite large, almost too large, for I prefer to work in enclosed surroundings. This preference is not good for my health, not with the kind of work I do, but I have become accustomed to it and so am inured to small rooms.
In Marseilles, I had to operate from what had once been a wine cellar. There was no ventilation at all except a grid high in the wall and a sort of flue rising from one corner. There was no natural light, which was awful. I strained my eyes for weeks in there, on just one job. The results were superb, possibly my best ever, but it ruined my eyesight and scoured my lungs. For months, I suffered from bronchitis and sore throats and was obliged to wear sunglasses, gradually lessening the density of the lenses until I could once more face raw daylight. It was hell. I thought I was finished. But I was not.
In Hong Kong, I rented a two-room flat in Kwun Tong, an industrial area near Kai Tak airport. The pollution was atrocious. It lay upon the district like the strata of leaves collecting in a pond. At ground level was offal, waste food, strips of rattan scaffolding ties, Styrofoam fast-food containers, discarded plastic shoes, paper, filth. At first floor level—in the building in which I rented my temporary workshop this was ironically termed the mezzanine—up to third or fourth, the air stank of diesel and petrol fumes. From there on up, the smell was predominantly carbon tetrachloride delicately impinged upon, depending on the direction of the stifling breeze, by burning sugar, sewage, melting plastic, textile dyes and frying fat. The floors below my own were occupied variously by a dyeing works, a toy manufacturer, a fish-ball kitchen, a candy-maker, a dental laboratory making false teeth, a plastic spectacles frame company and a dry cleaning processor. The sewage came from a badly corroded twelve-inch pipe which leaked at the fifth floor level.
I hated the place. The ventilation to my flat, one of a dozen ‘residences’ on the top floors, the occupants of all of them engaged like myself in some manufacturing process, was adequate but, in removing the noxious gases produced by my processes, it merely imported the others. Down the centre of the street outside ran the underground railway system, supported on concrete piers like the New York subway only far more up-to-date and, astonishingly, spotlessly clean.
The place was indescribably noisy, too: the trains passing at three minute intervals, trucks, cars, machinery, human shouting, car horns, hammering and thumping and grinding and hissing. Every few minutes for most of the day, a jet aircraft roared momentarily.
I was there five weeks. I worked without ceasing. The job was quickly done for I wanted to get out. Delivery had to be made to Manila. After that, I took a long break in Fiji, lying in the shade like a retired pirate, living as a spendthrift on my loot.
In London, I rented a garage built into the archway of a railway viaduct south of the Thames. It was a grotty locality—grotty was an in-word then—yet it served me well. I could work with the door open, by daylight. The other archways were used as lock-up storage units, an auto body shop, a television repair works and a fire extinguisher recharging plant. No one intruded upon the others’ businesses. We all drank in the nearby pub at lunchtime, eating Scotch eggs and pickled herring with tough-crusted buns and drinking Bass. There was a camaraderie in that row of archways with its muddy, puddled approach, its grimy brickwork and dusty mortar, its rusting chain-link fencing and the strangely comforting rumble of commuter trains overhead making for Charing Cross or Waterloo.
The others thought I custom-made bicycle frames. I bought a racing cycle to further the deception. When I left, it was a close call. The cops were only hours behind me with their bullhorns and plain-clothes snipers. One of the auto body mechanics was an informer. He tipped them off I was stealing lead: he could smell it when I melted and recast the metal. It was a ridiculous accusation. The man was judging me by his standards, a bad error.
I went back two years later. I found the muddy approach had become a pedestrian precinct with pretty posts made of iron and painted with the crest of the council. The archways had become a trendy restaurant, a photographic studio and a unisex hair salon. I also found the mechanic living in a quiet, tree-lined square off the Old Kent Road. According to the tabloids, he and his young common-law wife committed suicide. A lovers’ pact, the articles suggested. I fixed it to look that way.
It was the only time I ever returned. Marseilles, Hong Kong…I never went back. Athens, Tucson, Livingstone. Fort Lauderdale, Adelaide, New Jersey, Madrid…I never saw them again.
Of all the workshops I have had, however, the second bedroom in this, my Italian refuge, is by far the best. It is airy. Even with the shutters closed on a hot day in high summer, there is a continuous, transient breeze passing through. Enough daylight enters through the door or the shutter slats for me to dispense with the spotlamps unless I am doing the most detailed of work. Any pernicious redolence I might cause from time to time, as a part of this or that stage in one or another process, blows away to be replaced with fresh air. Outside, it is quickly diluted in the sky. The floors being made of stone are strong and absorb a good deal of the sound.
The room contains no furniture as such. In the centre is a large workbench. Beside it stands a bank of metal shelves upon which I keep tools. Against the wall, to the right of the window, is a small lathe of the sort jewellers use. It is mounted upon iron legs which stand upon two blocks of wood between which is sandwiched a layer of solid rubber of the sort used in car engine mountings. Screwed onto the wall beside the lathe is the stereo speaker; across the room is another. I have installed a steel kitchen sink in the room and a cold water tap, connected to the water and outflow pipes in the bathroom next door. I have a stool upon which to sit and a square of carpet beneath it. By the workbench is an electric fan heater. To the left of the door is an architect’s drawing board and another stool. That is all.
The lathe was awkward. Signora Prasca understood the workbench. Artists use such tables, she thought. Besides, I made sure she noticed my easel and drawing board arrive at the same time. And the spotlamps. The workbench was therefore disguised as a part of the artist’s requirements. But the artistry of miniatures necessitates no lathe. This I kept in pieces in the rented van in which I had driven up from Rome, parked in the Largo Bradano. Bit by bit, over four days, I moved it to the apartment. The bed of the lathe was too heavy for me to lift. I obtained the help of one of Alfonso’s mechanics from his garage in the Piazza della Vanga. He believed he was carrying a printing press: after all, artists made prints of their work. He said so himself. Signora Prasca was out shopping in the market at the time.
Should the lathe be making too much noise, I turn on the stereo loudly. The speakers are wired to the compact disc player in the sitting room. If the metal tends to screech in the turning, I play one of three pieces: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 ‘Titan’, the second movement and, most appropriately, for I appreciate twists of irony, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A, the ‘Italian’. Perhaps, in order to complete the irony, I should add to my little repertoire of covering music the closing five minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (opus 49). The cannon fire would be a suitable accompaniment for the lathe.
Imbert. He was a quiet man, as I recall. Antonio Imbert. You will not have heard of him unless you are a specialist in Central American affairs, or an elderly official in the CIA. Nor will you know of his associates, his comrades-in-deed, his co-conspirators. They were important men in their world, in their history: Diaz was a brigadier-general, Guerrero a presidential aide, Tejeda and Pastoriza both engineers (I never knew of what). There were also Pimentel and Vasquez and Cedeno. And Imbert.
Of the assassination squad, I met only him and only on the one occasion, for about twenty minutes over a cocktail in a hotel in South Miami Beach. It was a most apt rendezvous. The hotel was a seedy joint once glorious in the days of bootlegging, Tommy-gun-toting gangsters. It was an art deco building, all rounded edges and curving lines like an old-fashioned American limousine, a Dodge say, or a Buick, a Great Gatsby automobile. It was said Al Capone had spent a holiday there, once: Lucky Luciano, too. I ordered, I remember, a manhattan whilst Antonio had a tequila, sipping it with salt and lemon.
It was reported he was the only one to escape the subsequent fusillade of bullets which chase after such men as him, just as angry wasps pursue him who kicks the hive. They were all hive-kickers. Their hive was the Dominican Republic and the wasps were the followers of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
He disappeared—Antonio, that is; Trujillo just died. I never knew where he went, though I have an inkling of a suspicion he went first to Panama. As agreed, on July 30, two months to the day after the event, I received a bank draft drawn on the First National City Bank mailed to me in Colon.
It was all so long ago, late February 1981, when we met. Trujillo’s assassination was that May.
It was a traditional killing. Al Capone would have been more than satisfied by it. It had all the hallmarks of a gangster-slaying, the same type of planning, the same type of execution. I am not given to flip-pant absurdity: it is no clumsy pun but a bald statement of irredeemable fact. Such a conception is rare nowadays: the grand assassinations are no more, gone with the eloquent, decadent age of the ocean liner, the flying boat and macabre dowagers in mink overcoats and thick cosmetics. Now it is just the bomb and the blitz, the spraying of bullets, the radio-controlled landmine, the random explosions of uncontrolled violence. There is no artistry left, no pride taken in the job, no assiduity, no coolly-collected, assimilated deliberation. No real nerve.
Trujillo was a man of habit. He visited his very elderly mother every night at San Cristóbal, thirty-two kilometres from Ciudad Trujillo. They, Antonio and his chums, blocked the road with two cars. Another followed on behind. As the Generalissimo’s vehicle slowed, the men in the car opened fire. From the roadside, the others let rip with machine-guns. Or so the report went. The Generalissimo fired back with his personal revolver. His chauffeur returned fire with the two submachine guns kept in the car. The chauffeur survived. The assailants were not aiming at the front seat. They were directing their fire exactly at the rear, at the wound down window, at the single spits of flame which were the target’s handgun.
Once they had felled their target, it was not enough to see him dead. They came out of the cover, kicking his body, smashing it with the butts of their guns, pulverising his left arm. They dumped his body in the trunk of one of the road block cars and drove off to abandon it, in the darkness, with a last look at the bruised, contorted face of the dictator.
What they did was wrong: not the killing, for death can always be justified. It was the mutilation that was wrong. They should have been satisfied with the end of their enemy. It is not a matter of aesthetics or moralities, of political expediency or humanity. It is simply a waste of time.
The dead feel nothing. For them, it is over. For the killers, there is nothing to gain from the beating of a corpse. I can see no pleasure in such actions, no self-justification, although I accept there must be some. It dehumanises the killers and they abase themselves by such actions. After all, the act of killing cleanly, exactly, quickly is such a human action that to bestialise it is to reduce it to mere carnality.
Yet I suppose I can appreciate their reasoning, the hatred which bubbled within them for Trujillo, for what he had done, to which they were opposed.
At least they left the chauffeur, injured and unconscious. They did not beat him, kill him. He was merely a bystander in history’s unfolding tapestry.
That, too, was a mistake. Never leave an involved onlooker. They should become a part of the history they witness. It is their right as much as their lot. To deprive them is to deprive history of another victim.
If you were to tell Europeans it was taboo to urinate against a kapok tree—that by doing so they would release the devil inhabiting the trunk and it would escape, climb up the stream of piss and enter the genitals, rendering them infertile—you would be ridiculed. Taboo is not a word considered with any seriousness in the Old World. It is the stuff of primitive tribes, of head-hunters and face-painters.
Yet, for every supposedly civilised man, death is a taboo. We fear it, abhor it, wonder superstitiously about it. Our religions warn us of it, of the brimstone and flames, of red-tailed demons armed with pitchforks, eager to ensnare us, press us into the pit. As I see it, there is no dybbuk in the kapok tree, nor is there a hell. Death is but a part of a process, inescapable and irrevocable. We live and we die. Once born, these are the only certainties, the only inevitabilities. The only true variable is the timing of the event of death.
It is as pointless to fear death as it is to fear life. We are presented with the facts of both and have to accept them. There is no Faustian avoidance on offer. All we can do is attempt to delay or accelerate the approach of death. Men strive to postpone it. They do this instinctively, for life, it seems, is preferable to death.
I admit that I too seek to put off the coming of the dark. I do not know why. There is nothing I can do about it. It will come, and only the manner of its coming can potentially be controlled.
Tomorrow, it is within my power to kill myself. The bottle of codeine is on the bathroom shelf, waiting. There is a through train to the south from Milano every day bar Sunday which does not stop at the station: it would take but a step forward there to end it all. The mountains too have cliffs as high as the sky, and there is always the gun, the clean quick way to die.
I may have the quotation wrong—my classical languages were never good—but I think it was Simonides who wrote ‘Somebody is happy because I, Theodorus, am dead; and someone else will be glad when that somebody dies as well, for we are, everyone of us, in arrears to death.’
Certainly, there will be those who shall celebrate my passing should they get to hear of it, for whom the dictum of Charles IX of France will ring so true: ‘Nothing smells so good as the body of a slain enemy.’ Just as sure is the fact there will be few mourners at my graveside. Perhaps, if I was to die today, Signora Prasca might weep. Clara and Dindina too. Father Benedetto would mutter a few words, be sorrowful he had not heard my last confession. Indeed, if he values my friendship as I think he does, he might pretend he heard a final, faint breath of contrition or catch the merest flicker of an eyelid in response to the last, great question. There would be no such thing, of course. Any twitch of the flesh would be caused by the nerves fading, the flesh discharging its electricity, the muscles relaxing and starting their genteel corruption into dust.
What name might be spoken in my eulogy or carved upon my tablet in the cemetery, I cannot say. ‘A.E. Clarke’, perhaps. I should prefer ‘il Signor Farfalla’. I have to accept, when death rears up before me, so too will arise the question of my identity. Whatever happens, the headstone will not bear my true name. I shall forever be an administrative error in the affairs of the graveyard.
I am not afraid of death nor of dying. I do not consider it where I am concerned. I just accept that it will arrive, in its own due time. I am of the opinion of Epicurus. Death, purportedly the most terrifying ill, is nothing to me. So long as I am alive, it does not exist for it is not here, has not occurred, is neither tangible nor foreseeable. When it arrives, it is nothing. It merely implies I no longer exist. It is of little concern therefore, for the living have it not and the dead, being no more in existence, similarly know nothing of it. It is no more than a swing-door between being and ceasing to be. It is not an event of living. It is not experienced as a part of life. It is an entity of its own. So long as I live, it is non-existent.
As I care little for death, it follows I care not that I create it for others. I am not an assassin. I have never killed a man by pulling a trigger and taking a pay-off. I wonder if you thought I had. If this is so, then you are wrong.
My job is the gift-wrapping of death. I am the salesman of death, the arbiter who can bring death into existence as easily as a fairground magician conjures a dove from a handkerchief. I do not cause it. I merely arrange for its delivery. I am death’s booking-clerk, death’s bell-hop. I am the guide on the path towards darkness. I am the one with his hand on the switch.
It is the case I support assassination. It is the best of deaths. Death should be noble, clean, final, exact, specific. Its beauty lies in its finality. It is the last brushstroke to the canvas of life, the final daub of colour which completes the picture, which rounds it to perfection. Life is ugly with uncertainties, its unsureness abhorrent. One can become bankrupt and beggared, lose love and respect, be hated and downcast by life. Death does none of these.
Death should be tidy, as precise as a surgeon’s cut. Life is a blunt instrument. Death is a scalpel, sharp as light and used but once then thrown away as dulled.
I cannot bear those who dole out death in ragged slovenliness, the hunters of fox and stag, for example. For those cruel and empty souls, death is not a mastery of beauty, though they claim it is, but a long-drawn-out journey of barbarity into an obscenity, into a degraded death. For them, death is fun. They should wish themselves to die quickly, avoid the deathbed scene and the agony of cancers, the slow deterioration of the flesh and the spirit: they would wish to die as if struck by lightning, one minute fully aware of the sun cutting its rays under broiling storm clouds, the next gone. Yet they want to issue death as slowly as they can, extort its every twist of fate, its every ounce of anguish.
I am not like them, the obscene men in their hunting uniforms, the colour of arterial blood. You see, they even fear to call their jackets crimson, vermilion or bloody red. They call them pink.
The dining room in Father Benedetto’s house is as sombre as an advocate’s office. No paintings hang in there save a dusty oil in a chipped, gold lacquer frame, of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Christ almost at arm’s length. It is as if the baby Jesus was not her own offspring: perhaps he smelled as babies always do, from a soiled diaper or the cloying stink of soured milk. The walls are panelled in dark wood stained by centuries of polish, smoke from the baronial fireplace and previous incumbents’ cigarettes and soot from paraffin lamps. Upon the sideboard stand two such lamps, their funnels of clear glass protruding from frosted orbs upon which are exquisitely engraved scenes from the life of Our Lord.
The room is mostly filled by the dining table, a massive edifice of oak, black as ebony and five inches thick, with six legs carved like the fluted pillars of a grotesque cathedral. Up these clamber fertile vines bearing little smirking demons.
The priest’s best crockery is antique, fine porcelain and china edged with maroon and gold, big dinner plates and neat finger bowls which ring to the flick of a fingernail, solid soup dishes and oval platters for fish. Each serving dish could hold an entire meal for a peasant family of four. The vegetable dishes and soup tureen could contain sufficient to feed a small hamlet in the mountains. In the centre of each piece is a crest, a coat of arms surrounded by three golden birds, each with its head thrown back and its beak open in song.
Father Benedetto comes from a well-to-do background. His father was a merchant in Genova, his mother a noted beauty of her time, courted by many and famously flirtatious but cautious: like all the wise women of her day, she guarded her virginity until she could trade it in wedlock to a wealthy man. I have never discovered in what line the priest’s father was a merchant. He has hinted at chemicals, which could be a euphemism for armaments, but I have heard rumours he made a fortune after the war by the illegal excavation and exportation of antiquities rifled by peasants from Etruscan tombs. He died before he could fully enjoy his riches, his eight children—Father Benedetto is quick to point out his father was a good Catholic—inheriting what the government allowed them after taxation.
Now, the wealth and opulence of Father Benedetto’s youth have faded into a shabby and dusty decay, like the cuffs of his canonicals.
When I first sat at this table, I admired the crockery.
‘The crest is that of the family of my father,’ he explained ‘The birds are Guazzo’s.’
‘Guazzo’s?’ I asked.
‘His Compendium Maleficarum,’ he replied as if I should know of it. ‘My family were Crusaders. A long time ago, you understand,’ he added, should I think this to be a recent calling, a contemporary crusade. ‘They fought for death and the remission of their sins. Guazzo wrote in his book of the wonders of the East, of the golden singing birds belonging to the Emperor Leo. My family owned one once, so it is said…’
He spoke with a sudden, deep sorrow.
Tonight, we are dining together, just the two of us. Father Benedetto has an old woman who keeps house for him, a crone from the town. She does not live in, and every Wednesday, unless it is a Feast Day in the Catholic calendar, he gives her the afternoon and evening off. It is then he cooks his meal.
Cooking is an art with him. He relishes it, enjoys the intricacies of transforming raw flesh into meat, dough into bread, hard earth nuggets into succulent vegetables. He spends the whole afternoon preparing the meal, humming operatic arias to himself in the high-ceilinged kitchen, hung about with tarnished copper pans and old-fashioned, redundant utensils which look more like instruments of torture than culinary tools.
I always arrive an hour early, talk to him as he busies himself at his play.
‘You only do this because it is an evilness you can allow yourself to indulge in,’ I tell him. ‘This is the nearest you can get to alchemical practices without jeopardising your soul.’
‘If only alchemy were possible,’ he muses. ‘If it were, I should change these copper pots to gold and sell them for the poor.’
‘You should not keep some for yourself?’
‘No,’ he answers emphatically. ‘But I should give some to Our Lord for his glorification. A new vestment for the cardinal, a gift to our Holy Father in Rome…’
He potters about the stove. It is wood-fired and he stokes the flames with a brass poker. The pans are simmering on the hot-plates.
‘Cooking is good. I sublimate my want for sex in here. Instead of stroking a woman, shaping her into an object of desire, I form food into…’
‘Objects of desire?’
‘Quite so!’
He pours another glass of wine and hands it to me. He has his own which he sips as he works between bouts of humming.
After some time, we go to the table. I sit at one side, he the other. He mutters a grace in Latin, speaking the words so quickly they form one long incantation, as if he is in a hurry to begin. This may be the case, for he does not want the main course to spoil.
His soups are always chilled. Tonight, we have carrot and sorrel soup. It is both sweet and tart and whets the palate. We do not talk during this first course. This is customary. As soon as his bowl is empty, he invites me to help myself to more from the tureen. He bustles out to the kitchen, humming once more.
The soup ladle is made of silver and is, I should guess, about three hundred years old. Decades of ardent polishing have all but erased the crest and three birds. The assay marks are invisible. The place cutlery comes from several sets: the forks are silver, the soup spoons silver-plated and the knives Sheffield steel with serrated blades and rounded ivory handles the colour of a corpse’s teeth.
‘Ecco!’ he exclaims, returning with a silver dish upon which sit two plump poultry carcasses covered in sauce and steaming into his face.
‘What is it?’
‘Fagiano—wild roast pheasant with oranges. The birds come from Umbria. A friend…’
He puts the dish carefully on the table and rushes out to return balancing three bowls upon his arms like an experienced waiter: one contains salsify soaked in garlic butter, another mange-tout peas and the third fried button mushrooms with shreds of truffle mixed with them. He pours a white wine into our glasses and serves each of us with a complete bird.
‘The sauce is orange juice, rind, garlic, chestnuts, Marsala and brodo di pollo. How do you say it in English?’ His hands supplicate and he looks up to the lofty ceiling for a translation: God gives him one. ‘Chicken broth, of bones.’
I help myself to vegetables and we eat. The meat is sweet yet gamey, the salsify soft and delicious. The wine is dry but bland and the bottle bears no label. He must have purchased it locally, from an acquaintance with a few hectares of vines on the sides of the valley.
‘This is sinful,’ I declare, indicating the food with my fork. ‘Decadent. Hedonistic. We should be living a thousand years ago to eat so.’
He nods but makes no answer.
‘At least,’ I continue, ‘we have the table for it. Laden with a repast fit for a Pope.’
‘The Holy Father eats better than this,’ Father Benedetto declares, swilling the wine around his mouth. ‘And this is the correct table. It is said it was once the property of Aldebert.’
He rightly interprets my silence as ignorance and goes on, laying down his knife and fork.
‘Aldebert was an antichrist. French.’ He shrugs as if to imply this was an inevitability. ‘He was a Frankish bishop who abandoned his see and preached to peasants near Soissons. San Bonifacio—the English one—had much trouble with him. Aldebert practised apostolic poverty, was able to cure the sick and claimed he was born of a virgin. He was born by the caesarean method. At a synod in the year of Our Lord 744, he was excommunicated. Yet he continued to preach and was never arrested.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He died,’ Father Benedetto says with finality. ‘Who knows how?’ He picks up his knife and fork again. ‘The French have never been good Catholics. Consider this recent schism, this…’ again he looks up for divine translation but this time without assistance ‘…buffone who wants to keep to the old ways. He is French. He causes much trouble for the Holy Father.’
‘But do you not adore history, my friend?’ I interject. ‘Is not such tradition the stuff of life, the blood of the continuity of the church? Did you not say a Latin grace before we ate?’
He sticks his fork into the breast of his pheasant as if it was a French priest of dubious piety and does not reply. He just grins.
After a few more mouthfuls, I ask, ‘How can you dine at the table of the Antichrist? And was he not a Frenchman…?’
He smiles and excuses himself, ‘He was a bishop when he owned the table. Also, he was not antichrist. I think this. He was a man of God. He cured the sick. Even today, there is the charismatic Catholic church. I do not…’ He lifts his fork, burdened with flesh. ‘But it exists. Often Jesuits.’
I cannot tell if he is in favour of the Society or against it.
We finish the meat and I help him clear the plates away. He produces nuts and cognac. We sit again at the table.
‘Did you never want to be other than a priest?’ I ask.
‘No.’
He splits an almond with the pair of silver-plated nutcrackers.
‘Not a doctor or teacher or something else you could do within the church?’
‘No. And how about you, Signor Farfalla?’
He almost smirks. He must know I receive mail in the name of Clarke, Clark, Leclerc and Giddings. He is certain to have asked Signora Prasca and she, a good and god-fearing woman, will have told him, for he is her priest and she an elderly lady with a devout faith in such men. I do not share this unquestioning trust.
‘Have you never wanted to be other than an artist?’ he enquires.
‘I have not considered it.’
‘You should do so. I am sure you have other talents. Other than with the brush and the paper, the aquatints and the pencil. Perhaps you should do something else also. You have the hands of a craftsman, not an artist.’
I do not show my unease. He is treading too close to my path.
‘Perhaps you should also make other things. Things of beauty…Things to bring you greater wealth than little pictures of insects. This cannot make you a rich man.’
‘No, it cannot.’
‘Perhaps you are rich already?’ he suggests.
‘As rich as you are, my friend.’
He laughs lightly.
‘I am very rich. I have God in my vaults.’
‘Then I am not so affluent as you,’ I allow, ‘for that is one valuable I do not possess.’
I sip my cognac.
‘You could…’ he begins, but then he stops. He knows better than to try and gain a convert over the pheasant and brandy.
‘What do you suggest I do or make?’
‘Fine jewellery. You should be a goldsmith. Make plenty of money. With your drawing skill…Maybe you should make banknotes.’
He is looking at me shrewdly. I imagine, should the mesh be removed from the wall of the confessional, this is how he would regard the sinners who come to him for release and a penance. Years of experience have given him the knack of looking through dissemblance.
‘That would indeed be sinful.’ I attempt to make light of his subtle probing. ‘Even more so than eating a sensualistic meal at the table of an antichrist.’
I sense he knows something is not right. He knows I have money. He knows I cannot subsist on the portraits of swallowtails. I must be careful.
‘I am not a young man. I have my savings. From past work.’
‘And what was your work?’
He is quite forthright with his question. There is no subterfuge in the man yet I do not feel I want to trust him. He would surely not betray me but it is still for the best he should not know, have so much as an inkling.
‘This and that. I owned a tailor’s shop for a while…’
I lie. He is fooled, for I have seemingly given in to him.
‘I knew this!’ He is triumphant at his skilful piece of detection. ‘You have the hands of a master needle-craftsman. Perhaps you should do this again. There is much prosperity in designing clothes.’
He smiles broadly and raises his cognac in a mute toast, either to my proficiency as a tailor or his as a detective. I cannot tell which and follow suit.
As I leave, bid him goodnight and walk through the shadows down the alleyway to the Via dell’ Orologio, I consider our conversation. I like this priest a good deal but I must keep him at bay. He must not uncover the truth.
There are almost as many saints in Italy as churches dedicated to them. At the birthplace of the Venerated One, at the site of his or her miracles, monastic home or hermit’s cave, the place of death or martyrdom, there is a church. Some are grandiose edifices with lofty bell towers, imposing façades and spacious quadrangles of flagstones before them: others are, as religious houses go, hovels of the meanest sort. Yet even the very rudest has at least a piazza.
If you go down the vialetto, turn left on the Via Ceresio and then left again at the Via de’ Bardi, you will come to the foot of a long flight of marble steps. They are but a metre or two wide at the base but, halfway up the hill, they widen until, at the piazza at the top, they are perhaps fifteen metres wide. The steps are worn smooth with age and the tread of pilgrims. Today, however, only shoppers struggle up or down them, lovers with their arms about each other’s waist, tourists with cameras and video camcorders. Sparse wisps of grass grow between the stones and litter blows over them. Of late, and in the early hours, the steps have become the haunt of addicts. Several times recently, I have noted discarded hypodermic needles lying against the side walls.
The marble is of poor quality, chosen for durability rather than colour. It is veined with dark, sooty stains like the forearms of the addicts.
Traffic zips by the top of the steps. The pavement is very wide there and a number of street entertainers and vendors gather at this spot in the tourist season. One is a flautist. He has his stand under an umbrella tied to a no-parking sign upon which a frustrated driver has spray painted a derisive non sempre.
The flautist is a tubercular young man, his skin pasty and his eyes hollow. I suspect he is one of the early hours crowd, the heroin fixers and dope smokers, the twentieth-century lost, the modern leper or plague victim. He carries no bell. Instead, he has a chipped and dirty flute.
Despite the condition of his instrument, he makes the most beautiful music. His speciality is the baroque. He has adapted several pieces for the flute and plays these with a detachment both moving and pathetic. He squats beneath his umbrella, a grubby cushion under his haunches, and his fingers run up and down his black flute with a rapid fluidity of which one would not expect him capable. He seems never to run short of breath and only takes a break between tunes in order to sip at a bottle of cheap, coarse wine. He takes his lunch in a nearby bar, if he has had a good morning’s custom, eating bread with a few anchovies and drinking Cerasuolo diluted with mineral water.
Sometimes, I can hear him in the evenings, his music drifting over the rooftops to the loggia, competing with the sundown chorus of cicadas. I sit quietly, the lantern glowing from the shelf under the parapet, and think of him as a part of my trade, my profession. I am the bringer of infinity, the harbinger of eternity and he is my minstrel, my Blondel playing up to me in my tower of death.
Another entertainer is a puppeteer. In the daytime, he stands behind a stage draped with candy-striped cloth like a Victorian Punch-and-Judy stall. His daytime puppets move to the pull of strings. They dance and cavort, a red-faced clown executes skilful somersaults without tangling his wires, and recount nursery rhymes or local legends in high, squeaky voices. Local school-children, tourists’ offspring and old folk make up the audience. They laugh together, the young and old infantiles, and throw small change or telephone tokens into a tin bowl placed beside the stall. Every so often, the puppeteer’s foot appears from beneath the cloth and toes the bowl out of sight. There is a rattle of coins and the bowl, almost empty, reappears. As with every busker the world over, the bowl is never seen totally void of generosity. Money begets more money as if pennies in the basin are an investment and the audience provide the interest.
At night, the puppeteer changes his show. The string puppets are folded into a case, and he dons glove puppets. These are not the ridiculous figures of the daytime performances, the clowns and policemen, the schoolteachers and dragons, old ladies and wizards. These are now monks and soldiers, ladies of fashion and gentlemen of leisure. The stories they tell do not centre upon legend but upon sex. The characters speak no longer in shrill voices but now sound like modern, real men and women. Every tale involves a seduction and at least one puppet has a rampant cock filled, no doubt, by the puppeteer’s little finger, which he thrusts up the skirts of one of the ladies in the narrative. For obvious reasons, the puppeteer not being double jointed and his stall being narrow, the puppets fuck standing up.
Local men watch these tales with hilarity. Lovers stand before the stall and giggle, later to disappear into the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre to try out the method for themselves. The tourists, usually with their children in tow, watch for a while, not understanding a word of the story and walking off hastily as the screwing begins. French tourists are the only group not to drag their children away when the pornography commences. Honeymooners, I have noticed, watch the longest.
Of the vendors at the steps, my favourite is toothless old Roberto, who always wears a pair of stained black trousers, a grey and filthy waistcoat, a collarless shirt and chain-smokes black tobacco. He also has a thumbnail fully three centimetres long. This is the only clean part of his anatomy. Roberto sells watermelons.
I buy my melons only from him. He is convenient, his barrow being comparatively close to my apartment: the way there is downhill and a melon can weigh over ten kilos. He also cuts open a melon for one to judge the quality of his wares. When a melon is chosen, he tests it for ripeness and solidity, tapping a tattoo upon the skin with his long nail. He listens to the echo. I have yet to buy unripe or over-ripe fruit from him.
The church across the piazza from the pornographic puppeteer, the dying flautist and the sounder of watermelons is dedicated to San Silvestro. Which Silvestro has his memory enshrined in this foundation I do not know. The townsfolk claim it is Silvestro I, the Roman pope who climbed on to the Throne of Christ in 314 and of whom little is known or supposed save that, in trying to establish his notch on history’s tree, he claimed the Emperor Constantine donated to him, and his successors in the see of Rome, primacy over all Italy. It was a shrewd move for a man destined to be one of the first saints who was not a martyr. However, it could equally well be Silvestro Gozzolini, a twelfth century lawyer who turned to the priesthood, criticised his bishop for loose living, went into self-imposed solitary confinement, came out to found a monastery near Fabriano and had a dozen monasteries named after him on his death, as a strict interpreter of the rule of Benedict. To this day, the Silvestrines are a Benedictine congregation: Gozzolini was therefore even shrewder than his namesake. Today the monasteries mostly reduced to rubble, there is still a nearby street named after his followers. But, there again, there are many other Silvestros, men who lived and died in tiny villages, divined a well or cured a sick cow and were seen as vessels of the Holy Spirit.
For whomever it exists, the building is impressive. It has a square front, such as is commonly found in these mountains, with a round window above the main door and sets of columns rising against the stonework. Within, the cavern of the church is as cool as the interior of one of Roberto’s watermelons.
The floor of the nave is tiled with black and white slabs of marble intended, no doubt, to imitate a fifteenth-century carpet without affording the worshippers the true touch of fabric on shoe or bare sole. So much of religion is an offering of the fake, of the representation rather than the reality.
The ceiling is a vast, ornately carved wooden monstrosity, painted entirely in gold and inset with panels of oil paintings depicting key events in the saint’s life. It is as tastelessly florid and ornate as the surround to a prewar cinema screen or the proscenium arch of a music hall. Well-aimed spotlights illuminate this rococo extravaganza and tourists bend their necks and ohh and ahh at the ghastly sight as if it was a static firework display, or a presentation of the entrance to heaven itself.
The saint’s tomb is no more restrained. It stands in a side aisle for all the world like a fairground organ. Fluted pillars, gold flecked black marble and embroidered cloth surround an evacuated glass box in which the corpse can be seen. It is a wizened thing, the face reconstituted in wax but the hands in view and looking like beachcombed driftwood. The chest appears to have collapsed under the robe draped around it. The feet are bedecked in a pair of elaborate slippers of the sort more usually seen dangling from the toes of whores in bordello windows in Amsterdam. So much glory, all for one man who was shrewd enough to see he was not forgotten: so much history encased in one building, in one grotesque funereal monument, in one pair of tart’s sandals.
Yet what has the man achieved, whoever he may be? Nothing. A feast day in the calendar (December 31 or November 26, or some other date depending on the identity of the wax face and sunken chest) and a paragraph in a hagiography no one reads. A few fat old women in black dresses and sombre shawls hover like carrion crows about the altar, lighting candles perhaps for an intercession on their behalf, or punishment on a daughter for running off with an actor, a son for marrying beneath him, a husband for enjoying the poking puppets across the piazza.
History is nothing unless you can actively shape it. Few men are afforded such an opportunity. Oppenheimer was lucky. He invented the atom bomb. Christ was lucky. He invented a religion. Mohammed was just as fortunate. He invented another religion. Karl Marx was lucky. He invented an anti-religion.
Note this: everyone who changes history does so by destroying his fellow man. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Crusades and the spoliation of millions of primitives in the name of Christ. Pizarro massacred the Incas, missionaries corrupted the Amazon Indians and the blacks of central Africa. During the Taiping Rebellion in China more died than in both World Wars put together: the leader of the Taipings thought he was the new-come Christ. Communism has killed millions in purges, by starvation, in ethnic wars.
To alter history, you have to kill your fellow man. Or cause them to be killed. I am no Hitler, no Stalin, no Churchill, no Johnson or Nixon, no Mao Tse-t’ung. I am no Christ, no Mohammed. Yet I am the hidden one who makes the changes possible, provides the means to the end. I too alter history.
The wine shop is owned by an elderly dwarf who serves behind the counter standing on two wooden boxes nailed one on top of the other. He does nothing but take the order and write it on a slip of onionskin, accept payment or enter the transaction in a ledger for settlement at the end of the month and then bawl out to the dark recesses of his store. From there appears a man almost two metres high who reads the order slip and disappears, returning in due course with the bottles in boxes on a trolley. He does not smile and the dwarf is sarcastic at his every turn: the wooden boxes are chipped, the bottles are rattling, the wine is being shaken, the wheel on the trolley squeaks. I wonder every time I visit the place how long it will be before the tall one, who must spent his life crouching in the cellars, murders the dwarf, who spends his life reaching for the till on a level with his head.
Yesterday, I went to the shop to purchase a dozen bottles of Frascati and an assortment of other wines. I drove there, through the narrow mediaeval streets, frequently sounding the horn and twisting the wheel to avoid jutting doorsteps, stubborn pedestrians and the door-mirrors of illegally parked cars, the Citroën bucking from side to side. Once at the shop, I had not long to wait. There were no other customers and the tall cellarman was behind the dwarf, restocking shelves high up by the ceiling.
I gave my order, the dwarf screamed at his assistant as if he was a hundred metres underground, and the wine, in two boxes, quickly arrived. The assistant pushed the trolley out to my car and loaded the boxes into the trunk. I tipped him two hundred lire. As usual, he did not smile. He has, I suspect, forgotten how; but I could tell from his eyes he was pleased. Not many of the customers tip him.
It was then, as I closed the trunk, twisted the handle and turned towards the driver’s door, I sensed him. A shadow-dweller.
I was not unduly alarmed. This may surprise you. The fact is that I was expecting him. I have a visitor coming soon, and my visitors often send a scout ahead to spy out the lie of the land, the look of the man, of me.
Cautiously, for I did not want to spook him, I cast glances about the street. He was four parked cars off, leaning against a Fiat 500 standing in front of a small pharmacy, his right hand on the roof. He was bending over as if speaking to the occupant. Twice he looked up, gazing along the street in both directions. This is a natural reaction with citizens of the town: standing so in a narrow street, one keeps an eye open for cars approaching over the cobbles.
I settled myself in the driving seat, pretending to fumble for my ignition key. All the while I played my little act, I studied him in the driving mirror.
He was in his mid-thirties with short, brown hair and a good tan, was of average height and slim, not muscular, more of an athlete. He wore sunglasses, a pair of stone-washed designer jeans, very neatly pressed with a sharp crease, a light blue shirt open at the neck and expensive buff suede shoes. It was these which gave him away and confirmed my suspicion: no one wears suedes in the summer in Italy.
I watched him for perhaps twenty seconds, taking in every detail, then started the Citroën and drove away. No sooner was I out of my parking space than he was walking after me. This was not difficult for him for I had to drive slowly in the narrow thoroughfare. He could easily have caught me up but chose to keep his distance. At the end of the street the traffic lights changed and the thoroughfare was suddenly busy, vehicular progress invariably slow.
A van came towards me. The driver gesticulated through the windscreen, signalling me to give him room to pass. I edged the Citroën into a doorway and halted. It was quite natural for me to look over my shoulder: I wanted to assure myself there was space for the van to get by. The shadow-dweller had stepped between two parked cars. He was looking my way, in the direction of the van which edged by the rear bumper of my vehicle.
By chance, there was no traffic queued behind the van. I quickly backed out of the doorway and drove smartly down the street. In the door-mirror, I saw the man nip out from between the cars but the van was stuck with its door-mirror snagged on that of a blue Peugeot 309 with Rome registration and a small yellow disc in the rear window, a rental car company logo. The mirror had twisted loose. Already a crowd of onlookers was gathering for the argument. Just as the lights changed again, I turned right and was gone.
Somewhere, someone is always waiting in the shadows, living there, patiently loitering pending the order to act, hidden like a disease biding its time to waste the muscles or poison the blood. This I accept unequivocally, just as the priest does the existence of a sinner in his congregation, the schoolmaster a miscreant in his class, or the general a coward in his army. It is a fact of the life I live, and my task is to keep a keen weather eye open, to avoid a confrontation, to give this vague presence of a man the slip.
Once, in Washington, DC, I had to dodge a shadow-dweller. There is no need for you to know why I was in Washington. Suffice to say it was to case the stage for which I was providing one of the scene-shifters’ tools. I was a novice in those days, but fortunately he was not a thorough expert: the really accomplished shadow-dweller is one who could blend into the spines of a cactus standing solitary in the desert.
In the heart of Washington, one of the most beautiful of America’s cities—if you ignore the black suburbs where the indispensable working classes who keep the white man’s metropolis going live—is the Mall. It is a green park of grass and trees a third of a mile wide and one and three quarters long, traversed by drives and bounded by avenues. At the east end, on its grand, arrogant little hillock, stands the US Capitol: it is like a wedding cake left on the table while the sweep cleaned the chimney. At the other end broods Lincoln in his white marble box, gruff as a judge and sternly gazing out at the corruption of the nation he vainly sought to unite. Halfway between the two stands the phallic needle of Washington’s Monument. To the north, set back behind the Ellipse, is the White House around which security is tight: too many presidents have been premature in their ride across the Potomac and up the rise to the Arlington National Cemetery.
Tourists are not always what they seem. I have seen at least a dozen, within fifty yards of the presidential mansion, packing heat, as the Americans say. Two were women. They mingle and they watch, and they listen as they eat ice creams or popcorn, suck at Cokes or Pepsis in the summer heat. These, too, are not the experts but the rank-and-file workers of my world, the expendables, the cannon-fodder.
It was here that it began, in the National Museum of Natural History. I was wandering the display rooms, cursorily gazing at dinosaur skeletons, when I sensed a shadow-dweller. I did not see him, yet I knew he was about. I looked for him, in reflections in the glass cases and around the groups of school children and tourists. I could not find him.
This was not a fancy on my part. I was, as I say, a novice, but I was already attuned to my seventh and eighth senses. The ninth and the tenth came in later years.
I went to the museum shop area and lingered to make a few purchases. Nothing valuable; a pyrite crystal glued to a magnet, a fossilised fish from Arizona, some postcards and an American flag made of nylon with a tiny label upon it reading ‘Made in Taiwan’.
To buy something, even a bagel or a hot dog at a street-side stall, gives one good cover from which to observe. The tail thinks the target is busy with his money or his conversation with the vendor. For those with practice, the purchase and observation can be mingled so any surreptitious glancing about is unnoticed.
He was there. Somewhere. I still could not see him. He might have been the man in the open-neck shirt and Daks with a camera hanging from his shoulder. He might have been the young husband with the plump wife. He might have been the schoolteacher with his class or the old man tagging along behind a group of senior citizens from Oklahoma. He might have been the fattish man wearing his holiday tour company lapel badge upside-down on his navy blue wind-breaker: this could have been a signal to a compatriot shadow-dweller. He could have been the party guide. He might even have been the Japanese tourist. I just could not tell.
I left the museum, turned right along Madison Drive, pausing at a van selling hot cookies. I could not discern him in the passers-by or those coming out of the museum, yet his reality was with me still. I bought two cookies in a waxed paper bag, walked past the National Museum of American History and across 14th Street.
There were a lot of people drifting my way along the sidewalks, over the grassy parkland. In the open air, in the wide space of the Mall, I stood a better chance of identifying the shadow-dweller.
I headed for the Washington Monument. Some boys of about ten, released momentarily from the strictures of their school party, were playing on the grass, throwing a softball to each other, catching it in cow-hide mitts. I could hear the thud of leather from some distance.
Nearing the monument, I suddenly stopped and turned. Others were doing likewise, to see the dramatic view down the centre of the Mall, towards the Capitol.
I saw no-one flinch, not even in the distance, not even for an instant. Yet I knew now who he was. He was a man with his wife and child, about thirty or thirty-five, six feet tall, 160 pounds, slimly built. He was dark-haired and wore a fawn jacket and brown trousers, a light blue shirt and a tie which he had loosened. His wife was auburn-haired, quite pretty in a flowery print dress with a leather shoulder-bag. Their child was a girl of about eight, incongruously blonde. She was holding the woman’s hand and it was this which gave them away. I could not exactly define what was wrong, what tiny cues told me this was not a family. The little girl’s hand just did not fit in the woman’s. The child did not walk, somehow, with the familiarity of a daughter with her mother.
I realised as I saw them that they had been in the museum shop. There, in the crush of museum visitors, the unnaturalness of the relationship between the mother and child had not been discernible. Now, in the open, it was obvious. I had to dodge these people.
The man, I reasoned, would be the one to follow me if I headed off at speed. He looked fit and athletic. I should not stand much of a chance over the open grass. The woman and the child would not follow: the former would contact other operatives in the field to head me off. The child would be a minor inconvenience.
I pretended not to notice them and carried on towards the monument. Just on the edge of its shadow, I stopped and sat on the grass to eat my cookies, now lukewarm. The pseudo-family continued towards me. They had not realised I had rumbled them.
Coming quite close to me, the woman reached inside her shoulder-bag for a Kleenex. I was sure I heard the minute click of a shutter snapping, but it did not matter. I was prepared, had my face half-covered by my hands and a large piece of cookie.
The man pointed to the top of the obelisk.
‘This, Charlene honey,’ he said in what I recognised as just marginally too loud a voice, ‘was built by the people of America to honour the great George Washington. He was the first President of our country.’
The little girl craned her head back and peered up, her blonde curls hanging loose.
‘My neck hurts,’ she complained. ‘Why did they have to make it so high?’
After a while, they moved away informing the child all about Washington and his monument. Most of the tourists walked all around the obelisk: they wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial reflected in the oblong pool made for the effect. Yet my little family did not. It was the final confirmation I required.
Casually, I set off the way I had come, against the drift of pedestrians. Most were, I guessed, following a city walk plan which dictated a stroll to see Lincoln after pausing by the Washington needle. My family dutifully followed me. I skirted the White House and Lafayette Square and started up Connecticut Avenue. I was booked into a hotel beyond Dupont Circle and assumed they knew this: they would be thinking I was going there.
I halted at a pedestrian crossing, waiting for the walk sign to light up. They halted some way back and the man pretended to re-tie the little girl’s shoe. This was a farce: I had noticed her white sandals were buckled. The mother busied herself with her shoulder-bag. I guessed she had a walkie-talkie in it and was reporting my position.
The light changed. A taxi drew along the street. I hailed it and got quickly in.
‘Patterson Street,’ I ordered. The taxi swung round in an illegal U and headed off eastward down K Street.
I looked back. The walkie-talkie was out of the shoulder-bag. The man was looking round frantically for another taxi, his right hand inside his jacket. The little girl stood against a scarlet fire hydrant looking perplexed.
At Mount Vernon Square, I changed my instruction to the driver, to his chagrin. He drove down 9th Street, over the Washington Channel and the Potomac to the airport. Within twenty minutes, I was on the next flight out of town. It did not matter to where.
There are always those who live in the shadows. I know them because I am one of them. We are brothers in the freemasonry of secrecy.
Yesterday, my visitor called. I shall not give you a name. It would be foolish, the height of professional indiscretion. Besides, I do not know it myself. I have only Boyd, for that is how the note was signed.
This person was of average height, quite thin but well-formed in a lean way with mousy brown hair which may have been dyed. A firm handshake. I like that: a person who grips you can be trusted within the established parameters of a relationship. A quietly spoken person, of few words, conservatively dressed in a well-cut suit.
We did not meet at the apartment but near the fountain in the Piazza del Duomo. The person was standing, as we arranged, by the cheese stall, wearing dark glasses and reading the day’s edition of Il Messaggero with the front page folded in half upon itself.
It was the agreed opening signal. I had to make mine. I went to the cheese stall.
‘Un po’ di formaggio,’ I ordered.
‘Quale?’ the old woman replied. ‘Pecorino, parmigiano?’
‘Questo,’ I answered, pointing. ‘Gorgonzola. E un po’ di pecorino.”
Gorgonzola, then pecorino: this was the formula, another cue in the game of recognition.
All the while, I was being watched. I paid with a five euro note. The page of the newspaper slipped to the ground. I picked it up.
‘Grazie.’
As the word was spoken, I saw the head tilt to one side. There was a smile. I could see lines form at the corner of the eyes, a young person’s eyes.
‘Prego,’ I answered, adding, ‘you are most welcome.’
The newspaper was folded, I collected my change and followed some paces behind through the market stalls to the gelateria-cum-bar outside of which stood some tables and chairs on the pavement. My contact sat beneath a Martini umbrella. I sat opposite across the metal table which rocked unevenly on the pavement.
‘It is hot.’
The sunglasses were removed and put down. The eyes were deeply hazel, but contact lenses can tint an iris and I guessed these were coloured.
The waiter came out, flicked a cloth over the table and emptied the tin ashtray down a draining grate in the gutter.
‘Buon giorno. Desidera?’
He spoke with a tired voice. It was nearly midday and the sun was hot.
I did not order. This was the final fail-safe, the final check. My visitor said, ‘Due spremute di limone. E due gelati alla fragola. Per favore.”
Again, there was a smile and I saw the skin by the eyes line once more. The waiter nodded. I noticed my visitor’s smile was devious, cunning: there was something sharp about it, acutely discerning. It was like the crafty, falsely subservient expression one sees in the eye of an artful dog which has just robbed the butcher’s shop.
We did not speak until the drinks and ice creams arrived.
‘It is hot. My car has no air conditioning. I asked for one but…’
The words trailed off. Thin, artistic fingers like a musician’s removed the plastic straw from the drink and sipped at it.
‘What car have you?’ I asked but received no reply. Instead, the hazel eyes moved quickly across the market crowd, from one passer-by to the other.
‘Do you live far off?’
The voice was subdued, more suited to an intimate tête-à-tête in a private cubicle in a cosy restaurant than conversation across a rickety street café table.
‘No. Five minutes walk at the most.’
‘Good! I’ve had enough in the sun for today.’
We ate our ice creams and drank our drinks. We did not speak again until it was time to leave. The waiter brought the bill.
‘Let me,’ I offered, reaching for the slip.
‘No. My shout.’
Such an English expression, I thought: British, at any rate.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Quite.’
It was if we were old friends sparring in a comradely fashion over a bill in a London restaurant. Business friends. In part, this is the case, for we are doing business.
‘You leave. I’ll get my change and come after you.’
We made our way to the vialetto. At all times, my visitor kept at least thirty metres back.
‘Very nice,’ was the comment as I let us in to the cool canyon of the courtyard, the fountain dripping gently in the quiet. ‘You’ve found a very nice spot. I do like fountains. They add such—such peace to a place.’
‘I like it,’ I replied.
It was at that moment, perhaps, for the first time, I felt a distinct affinity for the little town, the valley and the mountains, sensed their deep pacificity and wondered if, when it was all over, I should stay this time, eke out my leisure years here, not move on to another temporary abode and subterfuge.
We went up the stairs and into my apartment, my visitor sitting in one of the canvas chairs.
‘I wonder if I might beg a glass of water? It is so frightfully hot.’
Frightfully: another English phrase.
‘I have cold beer. Or wine. Capezzana Bianco. It is semi-sweet.’
‘A glass of wine. Please.’
I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The beer bottles clinked in the door rack. I could hear movement in the chair as the wood frame creaked. I knew what was going on: my room was being surveyed, searched for whatever that sort of person looked for in a strange place, something to offer reassurance, security.
I poured the wine into a tall stemmed glass, a tumbler of beer for myself, then carried the refreshments through on an olive-wood tray. I handed the wine glass over and watched as my guest sipped it.
‘Much better.’ The smile half-formed. ‘We should have arranged for wine in the bar, not lemon juice.’
I sat on another of the chairs, put the tray on the floor and raised my beer.
‘Cheers!’ I said.
‘I do not have long.’
‘Quite.’ I took a pull of my beer and set the tumbler back down on the tray. ‘What exactly are your requirements?’
The eyes moved across to the windows.
‘You have a fine view from here.’
I nodded.
‘You’re not overlooked. That is most important.’
‘Yes,’ I replied, unnecessarily.
‘The range will be about seventy-five metres. Certainly not over ninety. Possibly much closer. I shall have not more than five seconds. Possibly seven, at the most.’
‘How many…’ I paused. One never knows how to phrase it. I have had this discussion so many times over the last three decades and I still do not have it worked out to perfection ‘…targets?’
‘Just the one.’
‘Anything else?’
‘A rapid fire rate. A reasonably large magazine capacity. Preferably 9mm Parabellum.’
The wine glass twisted in those artistic fingers. I watched as the reflection of the windows spun round against the mellow yellow of the wine.
‘And it must be light. Fairly small. Compact. Possible to be broken down into its constituent parts.’
‘How small? Pocket-size?’
‘Bigger would be permissible. A small case. Say a briefcase. Or a lady’s vanity case.’
‘X-rays? Camouflage—transistor radio, tape cassette, camera? In amongst tins, aerosols, that sort of thing?’
‘Not necessary.’
‘Noise?’
‘It needs to be silenced. To be on the safe side.’
The wine glass chimed as the base touched the stone floor and my visitor stood up to leave.
‘Can you do it?’
I nodded again.
‘Most certainly.’
‘How long?’
‘A month. To a trial. Then, say, a week for any final touches.’
‘Today is the sixth. I shall need a trial on the thirtieth. Then four days to delivery.’
‘I do not deliver, not these days,’ I pointed out. I had said as much in my letter.
‘To collection, then. How much?’
‘One hundred thousand. Thirty now, twenty at the trial, fifty on completion.’
‘Dollars?’
‘Of course.’
The smile was less cautious now. There was an edge of relief to it, a hint of satisfaction such as one sees on the face of anyone who has what they want.
‘I shall need a ’scope. And a case.’
‘Of course.’ I smiled now. ‘I’ll also prepare…’
I left the rest unsaid. A pen is no use without ink, a plate without food, a book without words or a gun without ammunition.
‘Excellent, Mr…. Mr. Butterfly.’
The manilla envelope fell heavily on to the chair.
‘The first payment.’
The bills, judging by the thickness, must have been hundreds.
‘Until the end of the month, then.’
I rose to my feet.
‘Please don’t get up. I can let myself out.’
It is not good to be a man of habit. I hold in contempt those men who rule their lives by timetables, who run their existence with the efficiency of the German national railway network. There can be nothing more despicable than for a man to be able to declaim, without demur, that at 13.15 on Tuesday he will be seated at the eighth table on the right from the door in the pizzeria on Via Such-and-Such, a glass of Scansano by his plate and a pizza ai fungi before him.
Such a man is puerile, has never been able to escape the security of parental order, the insistent but safe sequence of the school timetable. What for many years was mathematics or geography is now the pizzeria or the barber-shop, the office coffee break or the morning sales meeting.
How one can determine one’s life seems obscure to me. I could not do this. I escaped from such a routine through fencing stolen knick-knacks and entering into my present life.
When I lived in that English village, hounded by Mrs. Ruffords from across the lane, whom I secretly called the Daily News, for she was an inveterate gossip, an enduring community snooper, the one person who had the longest stick to prise under my stone of solitude, my day was as compartmentalised as that of a schoolmaster. I rose at six, made coffee, emptied the night’s accumulation of slag from the coke burner, made toast and watched the milkman deliver the milk. At seven thirty, I entered the workshop and set about the day’s tasks, written on a sheet of paper the night before and pinned over the end of the bench. I switched on the radio, the volume low. I heard nothing. It was just a noise to break the tedium.
At noon, exactly, as the time pips bleeped the end of the morning, I downed tools, made a cup of soup and drank it at the table in the pokey sitting room of my cottage, peering out on a tiny, drab garden upon which the seasons seemed to make little impression.
At one o’clock, I returned to the workbench. I did not immediately recommence work. The morning’s toil had untidied the surface. I spent half an hour organising my tools. The saws hung from hooks over the bench, the chisels and gouges along the windowsill, the hammers in a rack at the end of the bench: that everything was into the original disorder within thirty minutes, and that I knew where everything was in any case, was immaterial. It was the routine I was serving, not the logicality of work.
At six o’clock, I stopped work, listening to the television news as I prepared my evening meal. Even this was routine. I had steak most nights, or lamb chops for variation. They required only grilling. I forced myself to cook a different vegetable each night, my concession to originality.
Saturday mornings I went to the supermarket. Wednesday afternoons I went to the antique fair and did a round of the dealers, buying and selling, accepting commissions for repair.
Now, I deliberately fight routine. Not only to stave off boredom but also, I admit, as an act of preservation. Not just the preservation of which a man in my line of business has to be constantly conscious, the stranger on the corner, the reader of a newspaper under a street lamp, the man who changes trains at the same station, but the preservation of the mind. I should go crazy if I had to follow the hours with the religious observance of a time-server.
So it is I never go to the bar every Monday, or every lunchtime, and I have several which I patronise. No one can say of me it is Thursday because I am in the Piazza Conca d’Oro, in the Bar Conca d’Oro, at the table by the counter.
Let me tell you of this bar. It is on the corner of the piazza, which is cobbled with those square stones so loved of Italian street pavers, set in patterns, shell patterns in this piazza, quite obviously. There are two islands in the piazza: one contains a fountain, the other three trees. The fountain does not work and has no water in it. Students from the university use it as a bicycle park. Where there should be the music of water there is a tangle of cycle frames, handlebars and pedals. Under the trees, the proprietor of the bar has set tables, monopolising the public space for the sake of his profit-margin and, he claims, the good of the residents. If he had no tables there the space would be filled with parked Fiats and mopeds, all leaking oil and fouling the air with fumes. In fact, few vehicles drive into the piazza which is a backwater of the town.
The interior of the bar is indistinguishable from that of any other throughout Italy. British pubs are all, in their own fashion, unique. They may have jukeboxes or one-armed bandits in common but there the similarities end. Bars are not like this: they all have a plastic curtain at the doorway, a shop-window to let in the light, plastic or wooden chairs around shaky tables, a bar and a hissing cappuccino maker, racks of fly-blown bottles of obscure liquors and tumblers with chipped rims and sides scratched from many thousands of washings. There is often a dusty radio hidden on a high shelf muttering pop music and on the bar one of those gambling machines into which one puts a coin and receives a coloured wooden bead in the centre of which is a hole drilled through, containing a paper slip with a national flag printed upon it. Get the correct flag and win a plastic digital wristwatch worth next to nothing.
I am known in the Bar Conca d’Oro as an irregular regular. Sometimes I sit at the tables in the piazza, sometimes in the bar. I may have a cup of cappuccino, or an espresso. If it is cold I order hot chocolate. I may, if it is early in the day, request a brioche to break my fast.
The other customers who frequent the place are slaves to timetables, are regular regulars. I know them all by name. I remember names. It is an important part of the preservation process.
They are a jolly crew: Visconti is a photographer with a tiny studio nearby in the Via S. Lucio, Armando is a cobbler, Emilio (whom everyone calls Milo for he has lived in Chicago and was so named over there) operates a watch-repairing stall in the Piazza del Duomo, Giuseppe is a street-sweeper, Gherardo owns a taxi. They are men of little future but huge and happy vision.
When I enter, they all look up. I may be a stranger and worth talking to, or about. They all say, ‘Ciao! Come stai? Signor Farfalla.’ It is a chorus.
‘Ciao!’ I reply. ‘Bene!’
My Italian is poor. We converse in a bastard esperanto of our own invention, the language changing as the mood changes, as the grappa is drunk or the wine uncorked.
They ask after my butterfly hunting. They have not seen me for a week or two, maybe longer, not since the feast day of San Bernadino di Siena: Gherardo remembers it was that day because it was when the taxi broke its rear shock absorber on the road to his mother’s house.
I say the butterfly-hunting is good, the paintings coming along. I say I have an exhibition coming off in a gallery in Munich. The German collectors are starting to take an interest in European wild-life. Milo, I suggest, should start painting the portraits of wild boars, not illegally shooting them in the mountains for salami. He should become green. Europe is turning green, I say.
They laugh. Milo is already green, they say: a ‘greenhorn’. It is one of his favourite Americanisms which he throws as an insult to anyone who questions his knowledge. Un pivello. Behind his back and without any spite they call him il nuovo immigrato although he returned home over twenty years ago and has lost much of his command of both English and American.
Yet this is a diversion. Soon they are discussing the green revolution. They are trying to save the world, these five working-class men in a bar in the middle of Italy, in the middle of the seventeenth century.
There is not a building in the Piazza Conca d’Oro newer than 1650. The iron balconies, the shuttered windows, have seen more of history than any professor. The fountain was reputedly built by a cousin of the Borgias. The cellar of a building opposite is said to have been a Templar lodge in the thirteenth century. Now it is a vaulted wine store rented by the bar owner. Up a little dead-end alley, the Vicolo dei Silvestrini, is a chapel incorporated into the basement of a house: it is said San Silvestro once prayed there. From the balcony over the pork butcher’s shop behind the fountain was once hanged a famous brigand, caught in flagrante delicto by a nobleman whose wife was bouncing on the brigand’s belly in the nobleman’s own bed. No one can agree on who the amorous culprit was, nor when he was lynched. It is one of the evening stories the puppeteer enacts.
Together, they come to a unanimous decision. To save the world, all cars must run on water. Visconti claims there exists the process whereby water can be split into its component hydrogen and oxygen, by solar-power electricity. The two gases are mixed in the cylinder head and ignited by a spark of electricity as with a petrol engine spark plug. Hydrogen explodes. Everyone knows that. The hydrogen bomb. His hands create a mushroom of destruction over the table. The explosion drives the piston down. And—he laughs ironically at the simplicity of the chemistry—what happens when you explode hydrogen with oxygen? You get water. No need for fuel top-ups. The exhaust pipe gets the burnt-off water and returns it to the fuel tank. A never-ending engine. All it needs is sunlight to charge the batteries.
Gherardo is most pleased. His taxi will run forever. Giuseppe is doubtful. He sees a fault in the logic. He has much time to think, he says, as he sweeps the streets: street-sweeping is, he suggests, an ideal occupation for a philospher, for one has to think of nothing except how to avoid getting hit from behind by a Roman driver.
‘Cosi! Problem—what?’ Visconti asks in our spurious tongue. His hands shake palm up in the air. His shoulders shrug with defiance.
If the idea is so good, Giuseppe suggests, why has it not yet been introduced? The hole in the ozone is big already. The petrol fumes still choke you in Rome.
Visconti looks from one to the other of us, seeking support for his disgust at Giuseppe’s ignorance. We all look glum. It is the way.
If the process were made public now, Visconti declares, the petrol companies would go bankrupt. They bought up the process years ago and are sitting on it to protect their profits.
The others shrug now. This they believe. Italy is a land of big business corruption. The conversation moves on to the fortunes of AC Milano.
I drink the last of my cappuccino and leave. They wave farewell. They will see me again, they say. Have good luck hunting butterflies.
At the very end of the cul-de-sac formed by the southern half of the Via Lampedusa there is a brothel. It is not a grand place. It has no maroon velvet curtains or plush settees, no red lights, either. Downstairs is a hair salon. Upstairs is a three storey whorehouse.
From time to time, I go: there I am not ashamed of this. It is my way. In my world, one cannot afford the luxury of a wife, or a steady companion. They would be a liability and wives can turn against you. At least lovers seldom do.
There are four full-time whores in the Via Lampedusa.
Maria is the oldest at about forty. She runs the establishment but she does not own it. The owner is an Italian American who lives in Sardinia. Or Sicily. Or Corsica. His actual whereabouts are unknown and subject to rumour. Some say he is in the government, which would not surprise anyone. His cut of the action is paid by direct credit into a bank in Madrid. Maria sends this to him fortnightly. She does not work a great deal, keeping only to three specific clients, men of about her own age who must have been visiting her for years.
Elena is about twenty-eight. She has brazen red hair and the complexion of a Pre-Raphaelite model. She never goes into direct sunlight and only leaves the building to shop or visit the doctor’s surgery in the Via Adriano, when the sun is low enough to cast a shadow across at least half of each street. She is the tallest of the whores at about six feet.
Marine and Rachele are both twenty-five. The former is a brunette, the latter a dark blonde. Both turn as many tricks as they can in a day, vying with each other for every occasional customer. It is their intention, for I am convinced they are lesbian lovers, to earn half a million euros and establish a dress-shop in Milan. Both have the dreams which sustain every whore the world over: that, one day, they will be able to sleep one full night uninterrupted in their own bed and be a respectable, if aloof, member of the community. As with their employer, rumours are spread about them: they were models in Milan, sacked from a top agency for scarring another girl’s breasts with a nail file; they are the illegitimate daughters of a Vatican cardinal; they were schoolteachers dismissed for seducing teenage boys, or girls, depending on the source. The truth, I suspect, is they are country girls out to make money as best they can in the way they know best.
In addition to the four full-timers, there are a number of part-timers: students at the university or the language school in need of extra funds; girls supporting a heroin habit, and who are screwed only by the most ignorant labourers or stupid tourists; and fresh-faced teenagers from the countryside who come into town of a Saturday afternoon to do a bit of shopping in the boutiques in the Corso, sit around with their friends in the bars and pay for their day out by taking their new clothes off in the presence of the young men of the town.
My two favourites are both students. Clara is twenty-one, Dindina nineteen.
Clara’s family lives in Brescia. Her father is an accountant, her mother a bank clerk. She has two brothers, both in school. She is studying English and enjoys our meetings for she has an opportunity to test her language skills out on me. Indeed, her standard has improved beyond all recognition since we first met. She is a pretty girl of five foot six, with auburn hair, dark brown eyes and long, tanned legs. Her back and shoulders are slim, her buttocks small but rounded. Her breasts are nothing to write home about and she often wears no bra. She has about her a veneer of sophistication, for she comes from the North.
An exact opposite is Dindina. She is five foot four, arrogant, as black-haired and black-eyed as a Moor, with firm breasts and a tight, smooth belly. Her legs seem to be longer than the rest of her body: Gherardo says she is one of those girls whose thighs start in their armpits. She is not as pretty as Clara nor as clever. She is studying sociology. She says Clara is a snob from the north. Clara says Dindina is a peasant from the south. Her family owns a small farm and a few hectares of olives between Bari and Matera.
They do not work every night. Like me, they do not obey a schedule.
If one of them is present, I may stay. If not, I drink a beer with Maria and leave. I have no interest in the others.
Sometimes, both are present and then I employ the two of them.
Understand, I am not a young man. I shall not give you my exact age: accept the fires are not yet out but they require a little stoking to get the water hot. Like the damn coke boiler I had in the cottage in England.
When we make a threesome, it can be fun. I book the biggest room in the house, on the top floor overlooking the narrow street. In the room there is a two-metre-wide four-poster bed, a dressing table, a full length mirror and several Windsor chairs. We undress each other slowly. Clara will not let Dindina undress her so I do it. Dindina is not so fussy. Perhaps Clara is a snob: perhaps she is jealous of Dindina’s fuller breasts. They both strip me.
‘You are getting fatter,’ Clara remarks every time.
I deny it.
I am not ashamed of my body. Over the years, by dint of necessity, I have kept myself in good trim. When travelling, I always stay in hotels which offer a sauna and gymnasium for guests. In Miami, I took a room with a gym of its own en suite. If there are no facilities, I run. Butterfly-hunting is good exercise in the mountains.
‘You eat too much pasta. You should marry and have a woman diet you. Perhaps…’, I detect a wistfulness, ‘…a young woman to look after you. Perhaps Italy is bad for you. You should move away where there is no pasta and wine is pricey.’
Dindina does not talk. She prefers to get down to business. We lie on the bed, with the window open and the light of the street lamp slicing through the closed shutters. Clara talks first, but Dindina is already busy, stroking my stomach or winding her fingers through the hairs of my chest. She kisses my nipples, sucking and nibbling at them like a mouse at a wafer.
Clara kisses my lips. She kisses very softly, even when at the height of passion. Her tongue does not force itself into my mouth as Dindina’s does but inveigles itself in. I hardly notice it until it touches my own.
Dindina gets on top first. She lies along me and transfers her nibbling from my chest to my ear lobes. Clara touches Dindina’s buttocks, slipping her fingers down between her thighs and rubbing my legs as well as Dindina’s. I think it is strange how Clara will not let Dindina undress her, yet she touches her up and allows her to reciprocate.
I cannot afford to be emotional, not in my way of life. If emotion gets involved then risks start to accumulate. Emotion prompts thought and thought elicits misgivings, doubts and dubieties. I have spent many hours controlling emotion and it pays off now. I do not allow myself to climax with Dindina. She knows this and does not feel cheated. She has her orgasm and slides off me as Clara takes her place.
With Clara, it is different. With Clara, I let myself go.
This, I readily admit, is a self-indulgence, one of my very few.
Afterwards, we lie to gain our breath then cavort some more, with less urgency. At ten o’clock or thereabouts—I will not clock-watch—we dress and I take them out to a pizzeria at the end of the Via Roviano. We have to buy two bottles of wine: Clara drinks Chiaretto di Cellatica because is it northern, from her native Lombardy, and Dindina demands Colatamburo because it hails from Bari. I take a glass of each. Dindina eats her pizza napoletana as she makes love, business-like, not wasting time on words. She is a girl of action. Clara has pizza margherita and talks a lot. In English. She speaks of nothing of importance but then, after sex, one does not want to discuss major issues of the day.
Our dining over, I pay the girls. They are quite open about taking money before we leave the pizzeria. As we part, Dindina kisses me as she would her uncle.
‘Buona sera,’ she whispers lightly, close to my ear.
I smile and return her kiss as an uncle might.
Clara kisses me too, but like a lover. She puts her arms around my neck and hugs me, her lips on mine. She tastes of oregano and garlic and sweet red wine. I think of Duillio’s bottled blood every time we kiss in the Via Roviano.
Clara always touches upon two subjects in the closing moments of our evening. The first is what she intends to do with her money. It is as if she has to justify her screwing in some material way.
‘I am going to buy a book—An Unofficial Rose by Iris Murdoch.’ Or she might declare, ‘I shall buy a new fountain pen. A Par-ker.’ She divides some words into the component syllables when the word is unfamiliar or she is not sure of it. Sometimes, she says, almost shame-facedly, ‘Now I can pay my rent.’
The second is always an attempt to discover where I live.
‘Take me to your home. We can do it some more. With no Dindina. For free! Just for love.’ Another tack is, ‘You should not live alone. You need your bed warm as flesh.’ This is an extension of the good-woman/eat-less-pasta ploy.
I always refuse, politely but emphatically. Sometimes she accuses me of having a wife already, a harridan who sleeps with her legs crossed. I deny this and she knows this to be the truth. Though she is no professional whore, she has the instincts. Possibly all women have. I am not one who can tell.
To be on the safe side, though I live to the east, only a few streets from the brothel, I walk north. Clara heads west to her digs near the barracks. I double back only when I know she is gone. Only once has she tried to follow me and giving her the slip was simplicity itself.
I look at my notes: 90 metres. It is a long way for some, but for a bullet it is a brief instant in which to restructure history. Yet how much of the past has been altered by just such a transient moment. How long did it take the 6.5 mm slug to travel from the top of the Texas School Book Depository to John F. Kennedy’s neck? How long the other shot to go through his skull? Infinitesimally short instances during which the world shook, the existence of men was threatened and the temple of politics altered for ever.
Often, as I sit in the loggia with the light coming down like the last rays of life itself, I think of the second man, the one under the trees on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, the ghost of death to Oswald’s spirit of assassination. He must have fired. All the reports indicate it. He seems not to have hit the target. Yet perhaps he did, and Oswald was a dupe and a lousy shot. Who knows? Someone does.
The weapon needs to be light, fairly small, easily assembled and broken down. It has to have a long range for what it is to do and a rapid fire rate. Five seconds indicates to me the possibility of a rapidly moving target. And it must be silenced.
I think about the problem for a whole day, perched on the stool before the drawing board, later sitting in the loggia as the sun goes down. It is not an easy task. Not in three weeks.
Eventually, I decide upon a modified Socimi 821. It has a silencer but I shall have to discard it. Another will have to be made. My customer is not a spray-it-and-see hit-and-misser, but a person who, like myself, lives by circumstantialities. Hence the requirement of a telescopic sight.
The Socimi is Italian made, by Società Costruzioni Industriali Milano. It is a new gun, first available in 1983 and based in design upon the Israeli Uzi sub-machine gun, the darling of the hijackers, the artless hit squads, the motorcycle passenger killer. It has the same form of telescoping bolt, the same safety mechanisms and the magazine in the hand grip. The receiver, which is rectangular, the barrel housing and pistol grip are made of light alloy not gunmetal or steel. It can take a laser sight. The barrel is short, not really intended for perfect aiming, not ideal for the distant target. The weapon is only 400 mm long, with the stock folded, and weighs only 2.45 kg. The barrel is six-grooved with a right-hand twist, 200mm long. The box magazine holds 32 rounds, 9 mm Parabellum. The fire rate is 600 rpm and the muzzle velocity 380 mps. The silencer, however, reduces this significantly, which is a problem I must overcome.
I can see only one way around this obstacle. The barrel has to be lengthened but instead of putting on a silencer which will reduce velocity, I shall fit a sound suppressor such as the Americans use on the Ingram Model 10. This muffles the sound of the discharge but does not seek to silence the report of the round. Muzzle velocity is thus unimpaired. The crack of the bullet can be heard but it is hard to trace the direction of the firing position.
I should like to give my client as near five full seconds of fire power as I am able. This means an extended magazine. Ten rounds a second for five seconds equals a fifty round box magazine. That should be all right: sixty might make it too large, upset the balance of the piece.
The longer barrel will require a good deal of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The rest should be fairly easy.
I have, in my time, had to build a complete weapon from scratch. Purchase the metal, forge it and shape it, drill it, sleeve and rifle the barrel, design the mechanism. It was just such a job that had me sweating and stinking in the back of beyond past Kai Tak airport. Not only had I to build the weapon, I also had to disguise it as a briefcase.
It was masterly, though I say so myself. The butt was the handle, the top frame the barrel. The magazine was in the spine and hinged open on what seemed the case hinges. The mechanism was mounted in a false combination lock in the centre of the front. It went through several customs checks. I took it through to Manila myself. The gun was used three times, each time successfully. Each time in a different country. I understand it is now in the FBI museum or somesuch. Of course, that was in the days before rigorous X-ray checks at airports. The hijackers have made my life so very much more difficult.
To this end, I am surprised my client is not bothered with such a risk. Clearly, this weapon is to be used on mainland. Europe or somewhere easily accessible without air travel.
As I sit at my workbench, carefully bending the sheet steel for the extra long magazine, I wonder who the target is. Such thoughts fill those long minutes when the hands are busy but do not need the brain.
The most likely hit is, I think, Arafat or Sharon. If he is the target, my client must be working for a government. I have prepared weapons for freelance agents of the Americans, French, and British before now. I am careful not to operate for government salaried staff.
If Qaddafi is not the contract, it could be any head of state in Europe, even a visiting head of state. The British Prime Minister would be a likely candidate: in many quarters, and not all of them foreign or anti-British by a long way, she is sufficiently hated to be a hit. There would be muted cheering in many streets at such an outcome. The German leader is another possibility. So is his entire cabinet. Andreas Baader may be dead but his ideals live on.
I met Baader just the once. He was introduced to me by a Briton, Iain MacLeod, in Stuttgart in the winter of 1971. He was a quiet man, very good looking in the way of popular revolutionaries. He had thick, bushy eyebrows and a trim moustache. His hair was cut short. He looked like a German Che Guevara. His eyes shone with the fire of conviction one sees in monks and mercenaries, the blaze of ideological certainty, the inner conflagration of the sure knowledge the course one follows is right.
So many of those for whom I work have this burning in their soul. It consumes them. It is their drug, their sex, the very air they breathe. You cannot poison them, or shoot them, or blow them up, or drown them, or toss them off a cliff. Even when their bodies are consigned to the earth, or the ash of their flesh spread on the wind, the forest fire of their belief lives on. The man can die but the ideals cannot. You cannot crush a concept.
I am a good gun-maker. One of the best in the world. Certainly in my world. I do not refer to myself as a gunsmith: it rings too much of artisanery. I am not an artisan. I am an artist. I fashion a weapon with as much care for form and attention to detail as a cabinet-maker does a fine piece of furniture. No painter lavishes more of himself on a picture than I do of myself on a gun.
How I came to develop this facility was purely by chance. I never sought to work in weaponry, did not anticipate armoury as a career. It started as a favour to one of the other petty criminals who lived in the village, that centre of all that is banal in the world. He was one of the few who spoke to me other than to pass the time of day or weather. Perhaps he knew, or innately felt, there was more to me than repairing silver teapots. In my world, one can sense a kindred spirit with an almost instinctive ability.
His name was Fer. He was about sixty. I never discovered the origins of his name: he might have been Fergus, or perhaps Ferguson. He may have been Farquarson, for all I know, born the wrong side of the sheets and condemned to life as a peasant. He resided in a derelict Bedford van in an orchard a mile from the village: the tyres were perished, grass and docks grew against the panels, the radiator and hood were missing as was half the engine. Where the gearbox should have been grew a sturdy ash sapling. By now, the trunk will have split the rusting hulk.
Fer was the neighbourhood poacher: he kept ferrets in the cab of the van and lived in the back with a black lurcher bitch called Molly. In winter, he was a ready source of pheasants, rabbits and, on occasion, hares or venison. In the summer, he supplied pigeons to the Chinese restaurants in the nearby towns. He was also able to provide summer trout and, if the waters ran well, autumn salmon. When the season was inappropriate, he worked as a woodsman, felling or thinning trees and taking the timber as payment, selling it by the sack-load in a lay-by on the main road. He had an axe one could shave with; he could work a two-man saw single-handed; he had a countryman’s eye for the main chance and a shotgun.
The weapon was a side-by-side twelve-bore. It was not a Purdey or a Churchill, nothing grand, no teak case chased in brass with a filigreed lock and velvet compartments. It was just a working gun. Fer kept it in pristine condition, oiled and cleaned and polished it with devotion. He lavished more attention upon it than he did upon Molly the dog, the ferrets, the van or himself. Yet even loved ones fall sick. The connector guide plate fractured one autumn evening and he came to me.
The excuse was that the gun was old, spare parts no longer available, but that the weapon was otherwise sound and he could not afford to replace it. The truth was that it was unlicensed and probably of dubious history. Fer could not risk taking it to a gun dealership.
I agreed, under the strictest of secrecy, to repair the fault. The broken part was easily duplicated. He offered me money but I suggested he pay me with a pheasant or two.
In my little workshop, I disassembled the shotgun. I was like a child being given a clockwork motor to dissect. The interlocking of the pieces, the neat order of metal upon metal, the chain reaction of finger muscle to explosive charge fascinated, captivated me. I effected the repair overnight. Fer paid me with fish and game for three months, always visiting after dark and always calling me ‘Sir.’
A year later, one of my acquaintances asked the same of me. His gun was similar to Fer’s except that the left hand firing pin was the part which had failed and the barrels were sawn short at twelve inches from the breech.
In such workmanship as mine, there are no adult education evening classes in the local secondary school. This is not clay-throwing and pot-making, not tapestry weaving. This is the choreography of cut steel. It is self-taught.
Consider a gun. Most people think of it only as an explosive device. There is a bang, something or someone drops dead. They know there is a bullet which zips through the air. They know there is a cartridge case either of brass, compressed card or plastic, which remains, empty and smoking. They know there is a trigger which does this. Otherwise they see it as do head-hunters in the jungle: the fire-stick which speaks with the voice of the gods, the thunder-pole, the spear-no-one-throws, the lightning-tube. They think the pull on the trigger is all that is required. Pull the trigger and the target is hit. They watch too many television gangster shows, believe all they see on the movies where no policeman or cowboy ever misses, where the bullets fly straight and true, according to the script.
Life and death are not scripted.
A gun is a beautiful thing. The trigger does not just click backwards and the cartridge go bang. It operates a series of levers, springs, catches which move with the precision of a Swiss watch. Each has to be machined to the finest of tolerances, cut and shaped with as much accuracy as is demanded of a neuro-surgeon cutting into a brain. Each has to relate exactly to the next. The smallest of deviations, the merest one hundredth of a millimetre, and the mechanism will not obey the order of the other parts, and it will jam.
Only once has a weapon of mine jammed. It was some time ago, some twenty years ago, in fact. The weapon was a rifle, not based upon another’s design but entirely upon my own. I made it in its entirety, even sleeving the barrel and rifling it. I was foolish, arrogant enough to think I could improve upon a design proven through half a century of wars, assassinations, murders, riots and civil unrest.
It was to be used upon one of the few non-political targets for which I have provided the weapon and one of the few I have known about beforehand.
In truth, the target was political in a manner of speaking: it was the motive which was not. The hit was the American multi-millionaire proprietor of several international companies—pharmaceuticals, newspapers and television networks, a chain of international hotels, an airline or two. He was also known as an important philanthropist, donating drug rehabilitation clinics to hard-pressed, under-funded American cities. I shall not give you his name. He is still alive and he has my fault to thank for this, although he does not know it.
I was staying on Long Island at the time and was asked to telephone a number in New Jersey, instructed by an American lawyer, a Manhattan attorney to the Mafia, for whom I had done some occasional work in the past. His letter of introduction was short. I remember it well Dear Joe, it began: he always addressed me as Joe—I was Joe Doe to him. It was best that way. Give a callow youth a call, will you? He’s only eighteen, but he’s no mug. Do not judge him until you have heard his whole spiel. I realize you may not like the job, but as a favor to me, will you consider it? The money is guaranteed. I have it on hold for you. Larry.
His name, of course, was not Lawrence, or Larry, or anything like it. That, too, was best.
A request from Larry was as good as Royal Command from the Queen of England. He had clout I could not refuse. So I rang the boy and listened to him out of courtesy to my lawyer friend and with misgivings about the job.
The boy wanted his father killed. This was not only his intention, it was also the express wish of his mother. The millionaire, I was informed, was as good at philandering as he was at running multinational corporations. His sexual conquests, which the boy told me his father referred to when amongst his cronies as asset-stripping, were various and many. In the course of his stripping asses, as it were, he had contracted syphilis and had passed this on to his wife.
The motive was understandable but I was still loath to take on such a commission, even for my friend. I did not want to become known merely as a murderer’s assistant. Nothing can be gained from that.
The boy, no doubt inheriting some of his father’s shrewdness, sensed my reluctance, even over the ’phone.
‘You don’t want to do it,’ he said.
He spoke in a very classy Bostonian accent. I wondered if he was to be a graduate at the Harvard Business School: he had the right voice.
‘It is not my usual line of work,’ I agreed.
‘Larry said you’d take that stance. But there is something more. I’ll send it round. You call me back.’
Within the hour, an envelope was delivered by courier. It contained several documents, photostats of US Government memos, all marked secret and all concerning Latin America. There were also three photographs. One showed the hit with a rebel leader known for his genocidal ideologies, another had him with a well-known cocaine baron and the third was a very compromising photograph of the hit humping a very pretty girl on the side of a swimming pool. I rang the number again.
‘The clinics are funded by the dope,’ the boy bluntly informed me. ‘And the girl’s the one that gave my mother the…’
He fell silent and the line hummed. I looked at the photographs lying on the desk beside the telephone. I thought I could hear him faintly sobbing and felt an immense sorrow for him.
‘Do you have someone in mind…?’ I began.
‘Larry has,’ he replied, a catch in his voice.
‘I see. And what exactly do you want of me?’
‘The piece,’ he said.
How strange it was to hear a Boston voice speak like a hoodlum in the cinema.
‘I can do that. But I shall need to meet the man who is to do it. I have to know the requirements.’
‘Rifle, long barrel, telescopic sight fitting—you don’t need to provide that—automatic.’
‘A good man only needs one bullet,’ I remarked.
‘We want the girl rubbed out, too.’
I nodded. It was human nature.
‘Very well,’ I agreed. ‘I shall give Larry a call and tell him I accept. He’ll have to contact me for collection and payment. But understand this: I am not doing this because I want to help your or your mother. I do not work for the simple motives of vengeance or petty retribution. It is my opinion that your mother should have been wiser in her choice of husband at the start.’
‘I undersand,’ he said. ‘Larry said this would be your attitude.’
‘Larry, no doubt,’ I went on, ‘also said that if you sent me the envelope the contents would clinch the deal.’
‘Yes. He did,’ he admitted and he hung up.
I made the gun. It was untraceable. No numbers, no patterning, no mass-produced or purchased parts. I tested it. It worked well. I fired twelve shots from it in six seconds, just the required fire rate.
Yet it jammed on the day. I cannot account for this malfunction but I accept, for I am a professional, that it was my sole responsibility.
The hit was not killed. He was winged, a slug in the shoulder and another in the liver. The assassin should have gone for two head shots. The problem was the swimming pool was close and the target rolled into it on the first shot. The second, in his side, was deflected by the water. The third and last struck the concrete pool surround and ricocheted. The girl was killed outright. The assassin, unable to defend himself, was gunned down by bodyguards. He had no back-up weapon and that was foolish.
Larry was upset but I was still paid. He did not believe the gun jamming was my fault. He assumed the hitman had done something to the weapon, dropped it, tried to adjust it. But I know better. I did the job in a rush, my heart was not in it and I took insufficient care. The failure was my fault, unequivocally. I have always regretted it.
Galeazzo’s secondhand bookshop smells of dust and dry biscuits. It is a crowded little place. Books stand in piles upon the floor, upon tables. Shelves are lined with books. Extra volumes lie on top of those standing upright. The wooden floorboards creak underfoot. If the beams of the cellar below were not made of thick blocks of mountain chestnut, 40 cms square, the shop would long since have collapsed. The first floor is also piled high with books, the back-stock. Galeazzo lives in a two-storey apartment above that.
He is a man of about my age, grey-haired and stooping as befits a book-dealer. He is a widower, jokes that his wife was crushed to death under a collapsing bookshelf. The truth—Giuseppe informed me: he saw it in a newspaper blowing in the street—is less amusing and just as bizarre. She was visiting relatives in Sulmona when an earth tremor struck. A third floor balcony broke and a motorcycle parked upon it fell on her as she ran to the centre of the street for safety. She was killed instantly. It was a neat, tidy, correct death, as it should be.
Remarkably, the bookshop stock is not restricted to books in Italian. Almost every European language is represented on Galeazzo’s shelves and in reasonable quantities. Just as remarkable is the shop itself: the Italians do not pride themselves in owning secondhand goods. Look about the Italian countryside at the buildings falling down, at the ruins of structures which could make solid, even superior homes if they were renovated. Instead, close by you see the concrete frame of a modern shanty going up. If the Italians prefer new houses to old, there is no way they will buy old books.
Yet Galeazzo makes a reasonable living. He sends out quarterly catalogues to professors on his mailing list, receives mail orders which he fulfils by return of post. He even has, he tells me, customers in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA. The Americans want only books about the Old Country. Here, of course, they are searching for their Italian roots. The British request books in English on Italy. The professors are on the look-out for folklore, mediaeval religious books and tomes on regional architecture.
With his good command of English, Galeazzo and I get along well. We sit in the Bar Conca d’Oro some days and talk about books. He keeps his eye open for volumes on butterflies and has sold me a number of valuable editions illustrated by artists far superior to myself. Several are nineteenth-century publications with exquisite hand-tinted steel engravings.
‘Why do you live in Italy?’
This is a question often upon his lips. I usually make no verbal response but shrug in the Italian manner, and grimace.
‘You should live in…’ Every time, he pauses to consider a new country, one not mentioned previously. ‘…Indonesia. They have many forests, many strange reptiles. Many butterflies. Why do you paint Italian butterflies? Everyone knows Italian butterflies.’
‘They do not,’ I remonstrate. ‘For example, the genus Charaxes—Charaxes jasius. Hardly known elsewhere in Europe, it has frequently been seen in the past on Mediterranean shores and in Italy, wherever the strawberry tree grows. Even the Danaidæ have been discovered in Italy. A hundred years ago, I grant you, but I may find another. The Monarch. The rare Danaus chrysippus.’
‘Meagre creatures. You should go to Java.’ He pronounces it Yarvah, like a Jewish festival. ‘There are butterflies as big as birds.’
‘I live in Italy,’ I confide in him, ‘because the wine is cheap, the women beautiful and the rent low. At my age such things are important. I have no pension.’
He pours more wine, Lacrima di Gallipoli. My glass balances unsteadily on an Everyman edition of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle which Galeazzo has read and knows intimately: his glass teeters on an edition of Ciano’s diary, also in English. He claims to be named after Count Ciano but I believe this to be romantic piffle. The wine he purchases on his book-buying forays to Apulia. Somewhere on the heel of Italy he knows of a library which he can raid from time to time. I try to suss out this seemingly endless supply of cosmopolitan editions. It gives me the opportunity to steer the conversation away from butterflies of which I have only enough knowledge to fool the casual listener. Put me in a room with even an amateur lepidopterist and he will see through my sham in minutes.
‘Where do you get your books from?’ I ask for the umpteenth time. ‘You never cease to amaze me with your range.’
He smirks secretively and taps his temple with his plastic ballpoint pen. The sound reminds me of Roberto testing a watermelon.
‘You would like to know! But does the man who owns the diamond mine tell his friends of its location? Of course not.’ He sips his wine. The base of the glass has made a ring upon the dust wrapper of the diary. ‘In the south. Far south. In the mountains there. An old lady, old as Methuselah’s mother-in-law and just as ugly. She has nothing. A few hectares of peach trees and some olives, just enough to press her own oil. Cloudy stuff her oil, and somehow gritty. She gave me some once: useless for salad, good only for preserving. Her peaches are stripped by caterpillars: if only you studied moths! So she has no harvest but books.’
‘How many hectares of books?’
‘Don’t be foolish! Drink your wine.’
I obey.
‘Her books are measured not in hectares but kilometres.’
‘So how many has she?’
‘No one can tell. I have yet to walk all her shelves.’
A few weeks ago, partly to allay any local gossip and strengthen my artistic credentials, I gave Galeazzo one of my paintings of P. machaon. He has, as I guessed he would, had it framed and hangs it prominently over the till where everyone can see it. This serves my purpose well. I am Signor Farfalla.
Signora Prasca has been very worried. She tells me so when I return. I said I would be away for two days and have been gone four. She has been most distressed in case her Signor Farfalla met with an accident on the autostrada, been mugged in Rome whither I told her I was going, been caught in the terrible thunderstorms whilst driving through the mountains. She fusses around me as I let myself into the courtyard and start up the stairs with my wooden box. In her hands she holds the four days’ accumulation of mail. It includes a postcard from Pet which I sent three days ago from Firenze.
I calm her fears. Rome was fine, I assure her. The storms did not reach the capital. The autostrada was free of water. Only tourists are mugged. I do not tell her I have been no nearer to Rome than the staircase I am mounting.
Do not attempt to guess where I have been. It is not for you to know and I shall give you no clues. Suffice to say I picked up a Socimi 821, a good quality German telescopic sight with Zeiss optics and an assortment of other bits and pieces for under eight thousand US dollars. The sight was a low-light model, too. Just in case. The profit margin on this job will be good.
The task at hand is not as difficult as I first imagined it might be. There will be little actual fabrication involved, less Bach. I was extremely lucky in being able to obtain a barrel. You need not know the details. No inventor or craftsman divulges his secrets.
When this job is done, I might sell you the information. If you want to enter the business. When I am gone there will be very few others to carry on the art. I know of only two freelance—how shall I put it?—specialist gun merchants. One of those may well be dead by now. I have not heard of him for several years.
Perhaps he has retired. As I shall, after this final job.
It is a pity, really. I had hoped my final project would be much harder than this is proving to be. Another briefcase rifle, perhaps a dart gun inside a typewriter. Miniaturisation is the name of the game these days: lap-top computers, digital watches, PDAs, heart pacemakers, mobile phones the size of a cigarette pack. Evolution will have to start shortening and thinning our fingers.
An umbrella gun would be a challenge. Of course, it has been done. The Bulgarians used one on a dissident, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978. A 1.52 mm pellet was fired by compressed gas into the target’s thigh. The pellet was a masterpiece of micro-engineering long before the super-chip was laser cut from a silicon sliver the thickness of a human hair, or whatever other miracle dimensions are involved. It was spherical and cast from an alloy of platinum and iridium. Two .35 mm holes drilled into it led to a minuscule central reservoir filled with ricin, a poison obtained from the castor oil plant and unconquered by the antidote-makers. Two weeks before, the Bulgarians had used the same weapon unsuccessfully upon another so-called undesirable, one Vladimir Kostov, in Paris. He survived.
The concept of the weapon was brilliant: perfect disguise, astonishing projectile, simplicity itself. Two seconds and it was all done. Two seconds to change the world and end it for the target. The sadness here was that the poison was slow. Markov took three days to die. That is not a beautiful death, that is a fox-hunter death.
The bullet is the better way.
There are some modifications to make to the Socimi. The longer barrel will have to be fitted. This is not too difficult. Merely a matter of milling and lathe-work. The barrel is simply attached with a nut and will allow easy dismantling and re-assembly. I shall have to adjust the connector, only a tiny amount, to make the trigger lighter. My customer, I suspect, has a light finger despite the firm grip.
The stock will need to be reshaped completely. The present one is too short. It is ideal for a spray-gun, but not for an exact weapon with a ’scope on top. I shall build another. I have to thread the muzzle for the sound suppressor, which will take a while. One has to turn the thread-cutter so carefully, so slowly.
The barrel I have obtained is already rifled: six lands. I have not fired it and shall have to bed it down, so to speak. It is a technical business. I do not intend to burden you with the jargon of gunsmithing. Just be assured the job will be done to the highest tolerances, to the most precise specifications, to the best standard to be found anywhere in the world.
I am a craftsman. It is a pity my craftsmanship will be used only the once, like a McDonald’s plastic foam hamburger box, but that is the lot of craftsmen these days. We are fast disappearing in a world of the throw-away. Perhaps that is why we experts tend to seek each other out—why I often look for what I need from Alfonso, why I go to him now.
Alfonso’s garage is in the Piazza della Vagna. It is a cavernous space beneath a seventeenth-century merchant’s house. Where he repairs Alfa Romeos, Fiats and Lancias there were once stored silks from China, cloves from Zanzibar, dried dates from Egypt, gemstones from India and gold from wherever there was gold to be stolen, bartered or murdered for. Now the place reeks of gearbox oil, the shelves lined with tools, boxes of nuts, bolts and spare parts, most of them secondhand and many retrieved from crashes attended with the breakdown truck. The lights are garish neon strips. In the corner, like a household shrine, blinks the computerised tuning machine. The blip on the oscilloscope screen zig-zags as if registering the death-wheeze of a dying engine block. It reminds me of sickness.
Alfonso calls his business a hospital. Ill cars arrive and leave healthy. He does not speak of a damaged Mercedes. For him, the vehicle is ‘wounded’ in a battle with a Regata. ‘Wounded’ sounds noble. The Regata on the other hand is merely ‘injured’. He holds Fiats in contempt, declaring them to be rust-buckets. A few weeks ago, he told me that he saw a ‘dead’ Lamborghini on the autostrada south of Florence. Nearby was a ‘slightly hurt’ articulated Scania lorry. Alfonso is the Christiaan Barnard of the BMW, the Fleming of the Fiat. For him, a socket spanner is a scalpel, a pair of pliers and a monkey wrench delicate instruments of surgery.
‘Ciao, Alfonso!’ I greet him. He looks sideways at me from beneath the hood of a Lancia.
‘She is lazy,’ he declares and thumps his hand against the inside of the wheel arch. ‘This old Roman woman…’ he nods in the direction of the license plate ‘…can’t climb hills no more. Time she had new blood.’
For Alfonso, blood is oil, food is fuel, plasma is hydraulic fluid, a coat of paint is a dress or a smart suit. Filler or undercoat is invariably panties or bra, depending on the positioning of the repair.
I require some pieces of iron. Steel, preferably. Alfonso keeps scrap lying all over the place. Nothing cannot be recycled by him. Once, I heard tell, he welded the burner rings of an old gas stove into the floor of a baby Fiat that had rotted through. The owner knew no different and the car went on burbling about the valley for years until the brakes failed on a bend. They say the car was a write-off but the burner rings did not so much as buckle.
He waves his hand in the general direction of the shelves. His gesture implies take what you want, help yourself, my garage is your garage, what are a few scraps of steel between friends.
Behind an oil pan with a jagged hole in it I discover several off-cuts of steel: then I find three gear wheels with the teeth sheared off. I hold the biggest up.
‘Bene?’ I ask.
‘Si! Si! Va bene!’
‘Quant’è?’
He growls at me and grins.
‘Niente!’
Nothing. We are friends. A gear wheel with no bite is useless to him. What do I want it for, he asks. A doorstop, I reply. He says it is heavy and should make a good one.
I wrap it in a sheet of oily newspaper and take it home. Signora Prasca is on the telephone. I can hear her chattering away like a parrot.
In my apartment, I put the Bach on loud. Then I take it off. I put on my latest purchase, the Tchaikovsky 1812 Overture. As the French artillery repulses the Russians, I smash the wheel into five pieces with a four pound mallet.
I am death’s telegram boy, death’s kissogram. And that is the beauty of it. In my line of business, everything I do flows uncompromisingly towards one tiny moment, a final destination of perfection. How many artists can claim as much?
The painter finishes his painting and steps back. It is done, the commission met. The picture goes to the framer and from him to the owner. Months later, the artist sees it hanging in his patron’s home and he notices a tiny error. A bee on a flower has only one antenna. Perhaps an oak leaf is the wrong shape. The perfection is imperfect.
Take a writer: for months, he strives upon a story, finishes it, sends it to his publisher. It is edited, re-written, copy-edited, set, proof-read, corrected, printed. A year later, it stands in the book-shops. The reviewers have praised it. The readers are buying it. The writer skips through his free copy. The gravel driveway to his hero’s Malibu beach-house in Chapter 2 has mysteriously been paved by Chapter 37. The whole is flawed.
Yet for me, this does not occur. Save just that once. There will come a time when my endeavours succeed. The chain of events which starts with the shattering of a steel gear will culminate in two seconds of action. The finger will tighten, the trigger will move, the connector will shift, the sear will rise, the slide will move, the bolt lock go up, the hammer will hit the firing pin, which will strike the cartridge, the explosion will happen and the bullet will travel to the heart or the head and the perfection be complete. Everything happens to a logical, preordained and flawless design.
Such a choreography and I am the dancing master of this ballet towards eternity. I am the accomplisher, the cause, the first step and the last step, the producer and director.
In collaboration with my client, I am the greatest impresario on earth, the Barnum of bullets, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of assassination, the D’Oyly Carte of death. Together, we choose the method and I make it possible. I write the libretto, I write the score. My client chooses the theatre but I dress the stage. I am the spotlights and the backdrop, I am the director. My client is half the cast. You can guess who the other player is in this drama.
My client is my puppet. I am no different from the puppeteer in front of the church of San Silvestro. I entertain. I put on perhaps the biggest show on earth. But my puppet does not have a precocious penis to pop up. It has an adapted Socimi 821 and a clip of 9 mm specials.
What I like so much about this play, this tragi-comedy of fate, is that I have a say in the method, the place, the moment. How many people can state unequivocally when they shall die, where and how? Only the suicide can be certain and he cannot be sure, not one hundred per cent, that someone will not come along and cut him down, or drag him from the water, or pump the pills out of his stomach or switch the gas off and open wide the windows. Let in the life again. How many know, are irrefutably certain, when and in what place another will die, shuffle off the mortal coil? The assassin knows. It is this that makes him God.
The ordinary murderer does not. He is an amateur. He acts on impulse or through panic. He does not think his actions through, does not see the authority he holds by an almost divine right. He blunders and wonders afterwards, as the cuffs lock on his wrists or the bullhorns demand he comes out with his hands up, what it was all about.
The assassin knows.
So do I.
This is the utter, phenomenal miracle of it all.
The newspaper stand close by Milo’s pitch in the Piazza del Duomo sometimes offers foreign journals and magazines, in the summer when the tourists are about. Today, there is Time, Newsweek and the English Daily Telegraph, as well as the International Herald Tribune and last Sunday’s New York Times. The front cover of Time portrays a revolutionary of indeterminate nationality wearing the international terrorist uniform of flak jacket and balaclava helmet with a Yasser Arafat scarf bunched at the throat, standing before a pile of burning car tyres and brandishing what is clearly, to my practised eye, a Chinese Type 68 automatic rifle.
I study the picture under the shade of the news-stand awning. It is an interesting rifle. I have not handled one for a number of years. It looks like the Russian Simonov SKS but the barrel is longer and the gas regulator different. The bolt locking is similar to the AK47, the magazine dissimilar. To use AK47 magazines on this rifle one has to file down the bolt stop: I had to do so once. I remember the statistics: a heavy-ish weapon at nearly four kilos loaded, a 15 round magazine—30 if the AK47 version is attached—cyclic rate 750 rounds per minute, muzzle velocity 730 metres per second. Fires a 7.62 mm round, Soviet M43 ball slug, 25 gr charge weight, 122 gr bullet weight. The title over the portrait, which is a half length photograph, reads ‘Men of Violence: the enemy in our midst.’
I thumb over the pages. The drift of the article is that we must root out these forces of brutality, these perpetrators of quick death and the transistor radio bomb. There is no place in the world for the priests of gunfire, the missionaries of pain.
I put the magazine down. I have no time for proselytising. Life is too short to spend it reading messages from presidential aids in political bunkers preaching peace from behind the stock of a legal weapon.
Men of violence. There is no such exclusive category. Everyone is a terrorist. Everyone carries a gun in his heart. Most do not fire simply because they have no cause to pursue. For want of a rationale, or courage, we are all assassins.
The propensity men have for causing terror is boundless. The British and, even here in the heart of civilisation, the Italians, hunt foxes and throw live cubs to the hounds for the pleasure of seeing the blood, hearing the pain, sensing the thrills of agony pulse in their own veins; the Swedish hamstring wolves; the Americans disembowel live rattlesnakes. Violence is an inherent characteristic of the species Homo. I should know. I am a man.
There is no difference between a Simonov look-alike in the fist of a freedom-fighter, my bastardised Socimi in a young person’s briefcase, and an M16 carbine in the hands of a US Marine.
People accept violence. On television, men die by the gun, by the fist of righteousness as if every film producer was a finger on the hand of his God. Death by violence is a commonplace. No-one crowds to see the drunk dead of booze in the gutter, the old man dead of cancer in the terminal ward of the old folks’ home. A few relatives mourn, cluck about like grateful hens, thankful the departed was not in pain long. A dignified death: that is what they want for him, want for themselves. Yet look at the rubber-necking drivers at a pile-up on the autostrada, the sightseeing hordes massing at the trackside of a railway crash, flocking to see where the plane came down, where the unfortunates were killed.
And the brutalities of law: people accept violence if it is legitimised by authority, accept it as a way of doling out justice. Certain people, certain classes of people, the niggers and the wops and the kafirs and the chinks and the trash, may be dealt violence rightfully, no matter who governs it, who dispenses it. It has always been like this. It always will be.
I am one of that class, one of those who may be gunned down in the name of peace. I am the bounty. I and my visitor whom I am to meet again in a few days.
Violence is the monopoly of the state, like the post office and the revenue department. We buy violence with our taxes, live under its protection.
Or most do. I do not. I pay no taxes. No-one knows me. I have no long, sleek yachts moored in the best marinas.
I live by the rule of Malcolm X: I am peaceful, I am courteous, I obey the law, I respect all the world. Yet if someone puts his hand on me, I send him to the cemetery.
I should expand this a little for you will otherwise label me a liar. The law I obey is that of natural justice. The peace to which I adhere is that of quietude.
As I sit in the second bedroom, the compact disc quietly playing, let us say, Pachelbel and work on the connectors, fashioning them from the smashed steel gear, I think of assassination and I think of poison, the coward’s way of killing, and I think of Italy, the home of poisoning.
It was the Romans who refined the poisoner’s prowess and the Church of Rome which perfected it. Livia, the Emperor Augustus’ wife, was an expert: she drugged and laid low half her family. In ancient Rome, there was a guild of poisoners, but it was popes and cardinals who were the real experts.
To bring death by the gun is noble. To bring it by poison is not: it is to corrupt. It is borne of a corruption, of the machinations of a malignant and ruthless soul. True assassination is impersonal yet the assassin takes an active part in the process. Poisoning involves hatred and envy and is, therefore, personal but the perpetrator merely applies the drug and runs, does not join in the meting out of death.
I always think it so ironic it was the Vatican which made so much use of toxins and venoms.
The first Pope to be murdered, John VIII, was done away with poison in the year 882: his followers did it but they were apprentices at the game and eventually had to club him to death. In this way, they were not true poisoners for they had an active, if reluctant, hand in the matter.
A decade later, Formosus was poisoned; then, in the worst act of brutality ever committed by a killer, his successor Stephen VII had the body exhumed, excommunicated, mangled and dragged through the streets of Rome before being tipped into the Tiber like a sack of household waste, a bucket of night soil. Draw your own conclusions: poisoners are driven by hatred, assassins by justice and a cause, by the tide of history.
It did not end there. John X was poisoned by his mistress’s daughter: similarly disposed of were John XIV, Benedict VI, Clement II and Silvester II. Benedict XI ate figs in sugar, save the sugar was adulterated with powdered glass. Paul II ate dosed watermelons. Alexander VI drank wine laced with white arsenic which was intended for his enemy. How sweet is right! His flesh turned black, his tongue darkened like Satan’s and swelled to fill his mouth. Gas frothed from every orifice and, it is said, they had to jump on his belly to compress him into his sarcophagus.
Such disgusting exhibitions those must have been. All committed by hatred and avarice. No true assassin would behave so. Death of this variety displays the nadir of human capability. This is not my business.
In preparation for my excursion into the mountains, I packed myself a picnic: a bottle of Frascati, chilled in the refrigerator and packed with ice inside a polystyrene cool box such as vintners use to mail their wares; a loaf of coarse bread; 50 gms of pecorino; 100 gms of prosciutto; a small jar of black olives; two oranges and a Thermos of black, sweet coffee. All these are stuffed into a large rucksack with my pocket binoculars, drawing pad and crayons and a magnifying glass. A second rucksack carries the rest of my equipment.
Signora Prasca asked me, as I left, if I was going to paint more butterflies: I replied I was not. This was an expedition to the high mountains to draw the flowers upon which the butterflies feed. A gallery in Luxembourg, I informed her, had requested a series of butterflies on blooms. The insects themselves I knew. The blossoms I did not.
‘Sta’ attento!’ were her last words, called as I closed the courtyard door.
I have every intention, my dear Signora Prasca, of taking care in every waking moment. Great care. I have always done so. It is why I am still here.
She envisages me crawling along the rims of precipices, leaning over precariously to focus my glass upon some obscure weed clinging to the rock, or jumping from boulder to boulder, chamois-like, at the foot of what in winter is a glacier of white death, the conception of the avalanches one sometimes hears rumbling in the February night. If this were winter, she would be afraid of my getting lost in the snowfields to be killed and eaten by wolves or the packs of feral dogs which prey upon loose horses and the wandering shepherds’ flocks.
The road climbs the escarpment of the valley cutting through steep, narrow gorges and meandering across near vertical hillsides. It passes meagre settlements, the houses stunted by the enormity of the mountains, the churches falling into a slow and senatorial decline for lack of congregations. Up here there are few trees: a few stunted walnuts and, in sheltered spots, copses of oak and sweet chestnut.
After half an hour’s continuous ascent, the Citroën—like ilcamoscio, the chamois, its namesake—gains the summit of the pass where the road levels onto the Piano di Campo Staffi. This plateau is a rich place of alfalfa, wheat and barley fields. Buffalo graze here and provide the town’s daily fresh supply of mozzarella, driven down the mountain road in a fleet of rattling vans and pick-up trucks, some sufficiently antiquated to have seen service in the Mussolini era.
A few kilometres from the pass is the village of Terranera, Black Earth. I decide to stop here, at the bar, and take a coffee. It is not a sunny day, and I am high in the mountains, yet it is still hot and I need the refreshment.
‘Sì?’
The woman behind the counter is young, perhaps twenty years of age. She has full lips and large breasts. Her eyes are dark, sullen with the boredom of village life. The fleeting thought occurs to me that it will not be long before she joins Maria’s ranks at the end of the Via Lampedusa.
‘Un caffè lungo.’
I do not want the strong stuff. She turns to pour the coffee into a small, thick cup which rattles on the saucer. I spoon sugar into it from a bowl by the till.
‘Fare caldo,’ I say as I pay her.
She nods dismissively.
There is an ice cream counter at the back of the bar. I drain my coffee and look at it. One of the delights of Italy is the ice cream.
‘E un gelato, per favore.’
She moves lazily to the counter and walks behind it, lifting the Perspex cover.
‘Abbiamo cioccolata, caffè, fragola, limone, pistacchio…’
‘Limone e cioccolata.’
She scoops the ice cream into a cone and I pay. The tariff is chalked on a child’s blackboard suspended from hooks in the ceiling by orange plastic baling string.
Standing in the doorway licking the ice cream, the lemon acidic and the chocolate cloying, I survey the fields through the buildings. The earth is truly black where the plough has turned it. Some people call this the Plain of the Fields of the Inquisition. The black earth is, it is suggested, the result of melted human flesh. Burn a body slowly and it chars then melts like rubber. I have seen it.
On the road once more, I drive for ten minutes then take a track off to the left. I halt the Citroën a hundred metres along it and get out, leaving the driver’s door open. Standing by the car, I piss into the bushes. I do not need to relieve myself for the coffee has not run through me yet. I am not so old. I am just checking that no one has seen the car turn off. There is not a soul in sight, not so far as I can see over the black earth and waving brown grass.
The track has not been used by a vehicle for a long while. I halt again, once I am into the trees, and study the blades of grass growing from the hump in the centre of the track: there is no oil, no sludge of a car belly upon it. There are sheep droppings here and there but even they are old. The cow dung is desiccated into patches of insect-masticated dust.
Setting the tripmeter to zero, I drive on, the Citroën bouncing on its soft springs like a toy boat in a rough pond. I do not halt again until I have counted off ten kilometres. For the penultimate three or four, the track has been just an elongated clearing through woodland, dropping some two hundred metres in altitude. The Citroën makes tracks in the grass, which is still green here under the trees, but it will spring back in a few hours and cover my presence.
Eventually, passing a ruined shepherd’s hut, turning a corner by a pile of boulders and descending a slope through the last of the woods, I arrive at what I had expected to find, an alpine meadow about a kilometre long and four hundred metres wide at the centre. At the far end is a small lake, the banks overrun with reeds. To the right is a heavily wooded ridge behind which tower steep grey cliffs, perhaps 700 metres high. To the left is another ridge upon which stands the ruined pagliara which I had also anticipated.
Paglia: straw. Many of the mountain villages have a pagliara, a second settlement still higher up the mountains to which the inhabitants used to migrate for the summer grazing. Today, these places are abandoned, the footpaths overgrown, the buildings roofless, the windows bereft of shutters and the chimneys of smoke. Occasionally, cross-country skiers may come upon these places but they seldom stop.
Locking my knapsacks in the car trunk, I walk across the meadows and make my way up to the ruined hamlet. The sun comes out but this is of no consequence now. No one can see the flash of a windscreen here.
The grass is long, the trees offer deep shade. Everywhere there is a profusion of wild meadow flowers. I have never seen anywhere so beautiful, so utterly uncorrupted: delicate yellows and mauves, brash whites, harsh and brilliant crimsons, exquisite blues. The field is as if an artistic god has spattered it with colour, shaken his dripping brush over the lush emerald of the valley. The ground is firm but there is water here and everything thrives. The air is humming with insects, bees fumble the long-stemmed mountain clover. Small butterflies of species I do not recognise dart up as my feet disturb them.
My ankle boots affording protection against vipers, I start to scramble up towards the houses. I cannot set about my business until I am certain no one comes here. Possibly, there is another, easier way to this valley from the south west and the houses are frequented by lovers seeking a remote, romantic spot.
Quickly, I pass from one ruin to the next. No signs of recent disturbance. No soot marks upon the stones, no campfire circles, no discarded tins and bottles, no condoms hanging in the bushes. From beside the end building, I survey the valley with the binoculars. There are no signs of recent human activity.
Assured I am sharing this place only with the insects, birds and wild boar—for there are trotter prints in a muddy rill leading to the lake—I return to the Citroën and drive down into the valley, swaying over stones hidden in the grass. I turn the car to face the way I have come and park it under the shade of a squat but ample walnut, laden with half-formed nuts, close to where I left the trees. I remove the knapsacks.
It takes approximately one hundred and fifty seconds to assemble the bastardised Socimi. I rest it on the driver’s seat and unroll the length of flannel in which I have forty rounds. I press ten into the magazine, slotting it into the base of the hand grip. I snuggle the butt into my shoulder, putting my eye to the rubber cup on the telescopic sight. Carefully, I survey the pond.
My hand is not as steady as it was. I am getting older. My muscles are too used to moving or, if they are immobile, to relaxing. To be still and tensed is no longer a skill over which I have complete mastery.
Being sure I am in the shade of the walnut, I rest the gun on the car roof and aim at a clump of reeds on the far side of the pond. Very gently, I hold my breath and squeeze the trigger as if it was one of Clara’s insignificant but supple breasts.
There is a brief put-put-put sound. Through the sight I watch the water churn at four o’clock to the reed clump and perhaps four metres off.
From the knapsack I take a watch-maker’s steel-handled screwdriver and adjust the sight. I load another ten rounds into the magazine. Put-put-put! The reeds are clipped, the bullets slapping into the bank behind. I can see the mud spurt tinily. I adjust again and reload. Put-put-put! The reed clump is shot to shit. Feathers drift upon the breeze. There must have been a water-bird’s nest there, deserted now for it is late in the summer and the breeding season is over, the chicks on the wing.
Satisfied, I dismantle the Socimi, returning it to the knapsack which I lock in the boot. There are a few modifications to be made yet, a few refinements to be considered. The sound suppressor must be made a little more efficient and the connector filed down further. The trigger still takes a little too much pressure. Yet, overall, I am smugly pleased with myself.
I spread a blanket upon the grass, lay out my picnic, open the Frascati and eat and drink. The meal over, I collect up the spent cartridge cases, put them in my pocket, walk down into the meadow and sketch and colour over two dozen different flowers. Signora Prasca will need to see the evidence of my excursion.
By the lake, I idly toss the used shell casings, one by one, into the lake. As the last hits the surface, a big fish rises to its brassy gleam.
Clara has given me a gift. It is nothing grand, a tie-pin made of base metal coated with fake gold. It is about four centimetres long with a spring-loaded clip on the back bearing little serrated teeth. In the centre of the gold-coloured bar is an enamel coat of arms. It is that of the town and contains features of the Visconti crest within it. The Viscontis, according to a printed slip in the presentation box, poorly printed in English, French, German and Italian, once held the town and most of the surrounding countryside. This makes it an appropriate present for me, although Clara cannot know this: the Viscontis were pastmasters of the arts of assassination, grand viziers of the game of killing. Indeed, for them, it was a way of life. Or death.
The manner of her giving me this memento was, to say the least, surreptitious although whether from shyness or the fear of a taunting from Dindina I cannot tell. She slipped it into the pocket of my jacket either when it lay over the back of the chair in our room in the Via Lampedusa or when we were in the pizzeria. I did not find it until after Dindina had left us, giving me her customary public peck on the cheek.
‘Look in your pocket,’ Clara instructed me.
I felt for the inner pocket of my jacket. This was a natural action for me. I never put anything in the outer for fear of pickpockets. Clara laughed scornfully.
‘Not inside. In your pocket.’
I tapped my jacket and felt the box.
‘What is this?’
I was genuinely surprised. I would never, under normal circumstances, have left myself so open. It is nothing to slip three ounces of Semtex and one of those minuscule detonators into a coat. I have known two people go to their maker in such a fashion: it is another of the skills accredited to the Bulgarians. Or was it Romanians? Maybe Albanians. All the Balkan-ians are alike when it comes down to it, devious bastards with an instinctive deceitfulness borne of centuries of invasion, inbreeding and survival subterfuge.
I took the box out and looked at it. If Clara had not been my mistress and standing close to me, if she had looked ready to bolt, I should have tossed the box as far as I could and thrown myself down on the cobbles. Or, perhaps, I would have thrown the box at her, at her feet. On reflection, that is probably what I would have done. Survival and retribution are not the property of the Balkan peoples alone.
‘Dono. Regalo. A—a pre-sent. For you.’
She was smiling at me, the light from a street lamp casting pretty shadows across her face and highlighting her cleavage. She was, I could see, also blushing.
‘This is not necessary.’
‘No. Of course. Not necessary. But it is from me. For you. Why do you not open it?’
I lifted the lid of the box which was hinged with a little spring. The historical explanation fluttered to the ground. My heart missed a beat, my every nerve taut. She bent and picked it up.
The tie-pin shone in the lamplight. I moved it to and fro to make it glisten.
‘It is just a small trinket.’
She must have been practising the words for she spoke them perfectly, not dividing the noun into its syllables.
‘This is very sweet of you, Clara,’ I smiled, ‘but you should not spend your money so. You need it.’
‘Yes. But also…’
I leaned forward and kissed her just as Dindina had kissed me. Clara put her hand on the nape of my neck and twisted her face into mine, her lips pressing against my own. She held me for a long moment, her lips not moving, not opening to let her tongue push into me.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said as she let me go.
‘For what?’
‘For this tie-pin and such a firm kiss.’
‘These are both because I love you, so much.’
I made no reply. There was nothing I could say. She looked into my eyes for a few seconds and I could tell she was pleading in her soul for me to return her love, to say the emotion was mutual, binding, wonderful. Yet I could not. It would not be fair to her.
She turned, not huffily but a little sadly, and walked away.
‘Clara,’ I called softly after her.
She stopped and looked over her shoulder. I held the box up.
‘I shall treasure this,’ I said, and that much was the truth.
She smiled and answered, ‘I shall see you again. Soon. Tomorrow?’
‘The day after. I must work tomorrow.’
‘Bene! The next day!’ she exclaimed and walked off with a light step.
Clara loves me. This is not a fallacy but a stark truth. She does not love me as Dindina does, for the lust and the experience and the pocket money, but for what I am, or what she thinks I am. And this is where the fallacy begins.
Her love is a complication. I cannot really allow it, cannot risk it. I do not want to bring her misery, nor do I want to deceive myself. Yet I have to admit to myself that I feel for her: if not love, then certainly a fondness. Her cheap tie-pin has increased this sentiment, this dangerous weakness getting into me and worrying me.
I watched her go and made my way home with feelings of anxiety.