Brother of the More Famous Jack (15 page)

Only once did I think, absurdly, that I saw Roger Goldman. I pursued the illusion feverishly through the streets, clutching to myself my sturdy brown paper bag full of grapes and wine and buffalo milk cheese, until I shook with exhaustion and went home shattered and tearful knowing that I would, at a nod from that snooty bastard, yield up the whole seductive edifice. All that booze and cheese and crumbling sepia. All that unwonted credit one got for being blonde. All those times when, flitting by in my brassy tart's earrings and my high-heeled shoes I had caught, without desert, the reverent accolade, ‘Madonna'.

My mother came to see me twice. She came by air and stayed with me in the cubby-hole on the way to the shower cubicle which passed for my bedroom. She insistently begged me to come home. She could see no reason for my feelings for the place. And no more could I, in my youthful ignorance, see why she was less than euphoric at the prospect of dossing in my cubby-hole for two weeks on end, in a flat above a bar, in a town where the natives never go to bed. She saw no reason why the food came as it did. She saw no reason at all, she said once over a plateful of squid, why the locals couldn't eat ‘ordinary' food like people in England. You couldn't drink the coffee and you couldn't toast the bread. It was stale by lunchtime and it had no insides. Only crusts.

Then she wrote to me suddenly from Hendon to say that she was getting married. Her letter was both extraordinary and revealing to me. She was planning to marry an assistant bank manager from Dorset, she said, and she hoped that I wouldn't mind. I wondered by what right I ought to mind. She felt free to do so, she said, since I had grown up and left home and appeared not to need her any more. She had only once before considered marrying again but, as I might remember, I had taken against the gentleman and she had felt that she ought to put me first. I was stunned to discover that I had wielded this kind of power over her. I recalled that when I was twelve there had been a man
who had called at the house a good bit, whom I had vocally disliked for the profound reasons that he had blown his nose over-politely at table, almost burying his head under the cloth, that he had worn bow ties, and that he had made a point of carving meat with a formidable show of expertise. That my mother had decided against remarrying on the basis of these youthful aversions filled me with horror. With what contained resentment had she thereafter washed my clothes and brought me my cocoa and custard creams in bed? And what kind of reciprocal sacrifices were, in consequence, required of me? Pish, I thought, as I went my way, stamping firmly on guilt.

I went to her wedding and played out, for an hour or two, my mother's fantasy: her desire to see me as a reflection of the best of herself. I enacted a charade in a tasteless navy two-piece with yellow saddle-stitching and a yellow shirt which tied at the neck, feeling like a perfume lady in John Barnes. I bore the castrated smut which emanated from the best man's speech. I gave her my love and hopped it, an extravagant and wheeling stranger, belonging nowhere. I was, in addition, about to lose my rights to the cubby-hole over the bar. My flat-mate's boyfriend had designs upon it.

There is the whiff of low cliche about airport romance, but let me confess to it. I fell in love with a man at the airport after my cheap return flight.

The aeroplane was crowded with Italian boys returning from a summer camp in England. They fell into the arms of their parents at the arrivals lounge – all but two of them, who appended themselves to me. Two well-brought-up little boys, clutching duty-free perfume for mother and looking in vain for a welcoming parent. I waited with them on the steps outside in the sunlight. The disinherited among the blessed. All around us lovely, smothering mothers were asking their offspring concernedly how often they had changed their socks.

Enter Michele, half an hour late, swearing wonderfully, built like a cart-horse. Somebody had stolen his wallet and his keys, he said. He couldn't drive home. The police would, as usual, do nothing, he said. He had not a kind word for the children, whom he ignored, other than to abuse them impatiently for wasting the
signorina's
time. I volunteered the money for the bus into the city. We took the bus to the Cinecittà, where we took the underground to the Termini, where we took a taxi to his one-time wife's apartment to unload the children. Then we took a taxi to his apartment to collect his spare keys. He lived not a million miles from Leone Bernard, and the black-market cigarette lady was visible from his window. He had, upon the marble floor, a sparse
collection of stark, punitive wire chairs, chairs that Marinetti might have dreamed up in a futurist vision. Then we took the bus to the Termini, where we took the underground to the Cinecittà, where we took the bus to the airport, where we found that whoever stole Michele's car keys had now stolen the whole car. Michele, who, like most Italians, expected nothing from the police except ignorance and brutality, cast injudicious doubt upon the fidelity of the policeman's wife. It raised the level of aggro to a pitch where the fuzz went off in rage. Then we took the bus to the Cinecittà, where we took the underground to the Termini, where we took a taxi to his apartment and made love in his unmade bed.

Afterwards we sat in the wire chairs and drank red wine till the restaurants opened. Michele was an engineer. He was also that very wicked thing, a landlord. He could just possibly have a flat for me, he said. Like this one, for example. But this one, I said, is where he happens to live.
Non è vero?
He could move out, he said, and about time too. The Communist Party posters across the street disturbed his peace of mind. Michele was that doubly wicked thing, a landlord and a middle-aged black-shirt. Jacob would, doubtless, have had a niche for him somewhere among the rungs of decadent capitalism. The apartment, I said, would be too expensive for me. I was a badly paid teacher of English.
Non importa,
Michele said. He would halve the rent. In return I could teach him English. Michele never, of course, had the slightest intention of learning English. He was merely concerned to involve me in a relationship of feudal obligation with regard to his property. The first and last lesson took place that evening in the
ristorante
in the neighbouring piazza, where Michele showed his white teeth and asked me how you said in English
stracciatella.
I told him that on the whole one didn't. One said Heinz Cream of Tomato. Twiddled egg soup, perhaps?

Michele never moved out. We shared the flat on and off for the next six years. He was an explosive, authoritarian mad guy. A crazy, backward-looking romantic with right-wing views and left-wing friends. A believer in the past. A past which hung like a tapestry of noble lords and dignified peasants, of which he was neither. It was the kind of society, ordered and static, that would have had a man like himself clapped in irons. The stones of the city sang to him. To stand with him on a night upon a floodlit ruin was to espouse religion. Wrapped in a sheet first thing in the morning he looked like Hadrian. But that can be one of the delights of Rome, that in one morning's shopping you see five senators, two Michelangelos and enough quattrocento to nourish John Millet for a decade. Everywhere you go nature is imitating art. In spite of our proximity to Leone Bernard, the contact ceased. Michele, after having been the subject often minutes of that lady's attention, dismissed her as ‘the English whore' and that was the end of the matter. He always gave the orders.

I ought perhaps to be more decently apologetic before announcing that I co-habited with a fascist. I cannot imagine that I would ever have done so in England. In my first few years in Italy I had certainly ventured upon a greater ideological range than I would have done at home. It wasn't my country. The issues were not mine and I hadn't sorted them out. I was quite as happy bowling down the autostrada in the back of a lorry singing the
‘Bandiera Rossa'
with communist university students as I was comfortable, metaphorically speaking, in Michele's fascistic armchairs. The only factor informing the varied ideologies of all the men I knew, was anti-clericalism. There was not one among them who would not pull from out of his hat – whichever one he wore – at least a dozen foul anecdotes pertaining to the Pope's prick and the Pope's nephews. The violence and cynicism of this was at first quite extraordinary to me, given that in England religion is no more to people than the daily school assembly, thick with hymns which roll God around in anthropomorphic euphemism. Religion is a fringe activity which doesn't impinge. Nobody tells you jokes about the Archbishop of Canterbury's deranged sexual habits, or brings the house down by fantasising about male prostitutes behind the door of the lav in Lambeth Palace. Superstition is older, after all, more universal, more seductive than Christianity. Michele couldn't throw away bread, because it was unlucky. We hoarded it in mouldering sacks in the vestibule and referred to it politely as ‘the bread for the ducks'.

My mother, when I told her about this years later, couldn't believe her ears.

‘Fancy a man being afraid of a bit of bread,' she said. Proper men, north of Calais, are never afraid, are they? The presence of a black cat among them never causes a jam of Fiats.

Michele didn't drive a Fiat. He drove an open-topped MG. This was not because he was an Anglophile – far from it – but because he was an oddball who liked to be different. It was a piece of understated showing-off which I found most appealing. He gave me to understand, from time to time, that it was the cross he had to bear, to have an English girlfriend. A barbarous Anglo-Saxon, who had yens for Marmite and sponge pudding in tins which we bought at the English supermarket. A woman from a race only partially subdued by the Roman conquest who did her hand-washing in the bidet. He would stand over me and make me douche before he took me to bed. The English didn't bathe, he said. Coal in the bath. Knickers in the bidet. He
behaved, in his small English motor car, in a most un-English manner, bawling ‘Cretin' and ‘Whore' to anyone, regardless of sex, who crossed his path. When he finally sold that little car, he did so in the dark to a gullible young English tourist and refused to give him his money back when the thing fell apart the next day, as Michele knew it would. Michele, though he looked like a Roman emperor, was in truth a Venetian. Like most typical types, he was misleading. He was, as I have mentioned, married. He didn't like watching women turning into mothers, he said. Mothers were interested only in cough syrup and pasta and illness and baby-talk. Never in Dante. Not that Michele ever read Dante, which was of course much too saturated with religious implication for his taste, but he liked a proper deference for national sacred cows. One could not live with a woman who talked only about pasta and babies, he said. Michele was a man of diminished responsibility. That was part of his charm for me. I could recall a time when I had stood beside my mother in the kitchen watching her peeling potatoes and haranguing her the while on the poetry of Wilfred Owen. I remembered reciting ‘Move him into the Sun' while she muttered discouragingly about the bad bits in the spuds. Admittedly, Michele was about to turn forty. He was no schoolboy. But a part of me was still in tune with his frustration. I do not myself feel comfortable with the statuesque proportions women assume as they ladle out soup, as if they are making huge complacent statements about the sanctity of their limiting female offices. A part of me, out of sexual loyalty, wanted to scream at Michele that if he had spent more time on the pasta and baby-talk himself, his wife might have had more time for Dante; that with her husband, her mother-in-law and the two children, she had not, as it were, felt the need of it. But I didn't. Michele was not much fun in disputation. He did not care for the finesse of debate. If one said, for instance, making polite conversation over the newspaper, ‘It says here, Michele, that red wine is wine made from grapes with the skins left on, and white wine from grapes without,' he would give the idea no
quarter. He would not offer one polite, tentative doubts. ‘Red wine, red grapes,' he would say with devastating finality. ‘White wine, white grapes.
Imbecille.'

He treated his children in a way which at times made me feel ill. They had developed a reflex to duck whenever he made a flamboyant gesture in their direction. We collected them, on the occasional Sunday, from their apartment in the gentle suburb. Two little boys in ties, with their hair combed down with water. Michele would receive them, of course, in sloppy shorts and Japanese flip-flops. He would exchange brief words with his wife on the doorstep, slouching and scratching rudely at his arse. He would make no effort at all to entertain his little boys, and on one occasion gave them a football but couldn't be prevailed upon to take them out to play with it. When the younger child resorted, tentatively, to kicking it indoors, Michele hit him on the temple with the back of his hand and caused him to stumble painfully upon the Meccano which was strewn upon the floor.

‘Basta!'
he said. The Meccano had been bought by me, Papa's
Inglese
fancy woman, to give them something to do. ‘Have you said thank you to Caterina for this thing she has bought for you?' he said. ‘Why don't you play with it?' Play boy play, thy father plays. I found the episode an obscenity. He would make them do sums in the car.
Aritmetica
to exercise the brain. It brought me out in a sweat. He had the habit, regrettably common in Italy, of loving babies – other people's babies. He would babble like a demented crone over an infant in the piazza and volunteer to have the barman warm its bottle. He had no time for anyone between the ages of eighteen months and sixteen.

Michele was convinced that I was having affairs with every man I spoke to, regardless of age, nationality or presentability. The male teachers in the language school were his prime suspects and were treated in consequence to inexplicable displays of insulting, silent hostility. I learned, thanks to Michele, that there is no need ever to embrace one's man's quarrels, that there is no need ever to apologise for somebody else by virtue of one's co-habiting with that person. If I had not learned this I would have crossed swords with half the planet.