Cooking With Fernet Branca (23 page)

But as I march across to Marta’s sty prepared to do battle I catch sight of the scarlet sports car discreetly tucked around the side among the trees. Oho, I think, that’s awkward. The last thing one wants when reading the riot act to a neighbour
is for her young and probably muscular boyfriend to be present. Still, a glance across at the twenty piled corpses of my lovely and expensive beechwood panels is enough to remind me that life in this idyllic mountain eyrie is now seriously threatened and something unpleasantly firm is going to have to be said. Accordingly I give her back door a good pounding.

She flings it open and reveals the usual squalid scene within. ‘Oh Gerree!’ she cries, ‘you are home! How happy to see you,’ and before I can recoil she gives me a hug. I can feel her bangles pressing into the small of my back. Trashy stuff. Pure Benares. ‘Where are you went?’

‘Munich,’ I say briefly. ‘Now, as regards –’

‘Munich very interesting, Gerree. We have in Voynovia town is call Mjonkus. Is same name like Monaco also. It means –’

‘Fence,’ I say sternly. ‘Right now, everything to me means “fence”. What happened to it? Go on, tell me there’s been a hurricane.’

‘Oh the fence, Gerree. Is most saddest,’ and blow me if her eyes aren’t watering a little, although since she is thrusting a conciliatory glass of Fernet at me I have a shrewd idea about the likely wellsprings of her emotion. ‘Sitting please.’ And now the unscrupulous witch is pressing on me a chocolate kiss from a box of Perugina
Baci
.

Well, a Samper is not to be caught the same way twice so this time I feel around carefully beneath me before sitting down on her sofa. You wouldn’t believe how invasive the tip of a metronome can be.

‘What happens, Gerree: you know I am making music for film? So Piero Pacini he come one day here and say “I want to filming here but fence no good for filming so please take down now.” I say is not possible. I say is asking Gerree first because he make fence. Is his fence. But Signor Pacini is not hear me and is order to his men, “Take down this fence” and promise put up fence after filming. And after filming …’

It has happened before. There is something about Marta’s pidgin explanations that make my attention wander even though it’s a story of some consequence for me. I’m afraid things that are important to know need to be particularly well phrased to get my attention. I am also wondering where lover-boy is hiding. Probably sprawled across the bed upstairs, equally poleaxed by the effort of penetrating Marta’s tangled syntax.

‘I see,’ I say at length. ‘Let’s just get this straight, shall we? You are making a film with a world-famous film director. A few days ago he demolished my fence to improve the shot and now has failed to put it back up again. Have I got that right?’

Marta is nodding so violently she splashes her dress with Fernet. ‘Exact!’ she exclaims behind the threshing hair. What
does
she do to it to get it in that state? Anoint it with goose grease? ‘Oh, Gerree, I really so sorry. I am e-mail to Signor Pacini. He will come and fix. He promise me.’

‘You think Piero Pacini is going to come and re-erect my fence, Marta? The genius who made
Mille
Piselli
and
Nero’s
Birthday
is, of course, also a partner in that well-known firm of landscape gardeners Visconti, Bertolucci & Pacini SpA: “We Give It Our Best Shot”.’

‘He promise,’ she repeats sadly and a tear rolls down beside her nose. Good old Fernet, I think. In another moment she’s going to start one of those scenes protesting her innocence, full of Slavic keening and hair-tearing. Hysteria is to girls as barking is to dogs, take Samper’s word for it. To head her off I try a new tack.

‘I see you’ve got a new car. Congratulations.’

She looks blank.

‘The red one,’ I prompt.

‘Ah yes. Ah no. That is of Filippo, the son of Signor Pacini.’

‘He’s here now?’ I glance at the ceiling.

‘No, is in Rome. They come back soon.’

‘That’s good. We can discuss the little matter of legal action.’

But I admit this does make me think a bit. A hi-glam car like that is just what one would expect an Italian film director’s son to drive. Or, come to that, the leader of a boy band. Can it be possible I’ve been doing her an injustice all this time and she’s not quite the drunken fantasist I’ve been taking her for? Can my imagined charcoal-burner’s son actually be Filippo Pacini? But then I have another glance around and note the loudspeaker half buried beneath an avalanche of limp sheets and the electronic keyboard with a three-quarters empty bottle of Fernet Branca leaning back against the music stand like a drunk against a lamp post. Be honest, Samper: is this the workshop of a fellow professional? If we flick open Occam’s razor and give it a good whetting, would it not pare away the probability of her story to nothing? For hardly the first time in Marta’s presence I am seized with a weariness that saps my resolve to confront her. It even makes my knees limp, as I discover when I put down my glass and get to my feet. To hell with her. Do I really care what the truth is? (As the late, great Pontius Pilate might have said, thinking of a quiet beer on his terrace well away from his wife wittering on about her nightmares.)

Marta is now unsteadily on her own feet. She ferrets beneath the ambient laundry and emerges with a slip of paper. It is, incredibly, a cheque made out in euros for a sum of money representing exactly half what I’d told her the fence cost. I can feel the last of my righteous anger shrivel.

‘You see, I promise, Gerree,’ she says, kissing me with tears in her eyes before I can get out of the door.

It’s so bloody unfair, I think as I walk over to my house. The woman blames a famous film director for the destruction of my fence and now she pays me her own share of its cost so the fence is no longer mine but
ours
.
Yet the damned thing’s still down and all my labour wasted, and where’s the justice in that? I linger mournfully by the heap of shattered panels and cement-caked posts. It’s too bad. How like Marta to
muddy the water with her blarney and cheques – not to mention her Fernet and chocs.

The next morning I am down in Camaiore buying stationery when I catch sight of a vaguely familiar figure. Of all people it is the egregious Benedetti, the weaselly house agent who lied to me about my neighbour. A sprauncy little turd in a dove-grey suit, he is trotting along looking executive and carrying one of those fetishistic Italian briefcases made of cassowary leather or albatross skin, complete with gold fittings and monogram. I hail him squarely in the middle of the pedestrian thoroughfare.

‘Ingegnere!
Buon
giorno.’
He stops and pretends to be flipping through the dogeared Filofax that passes for his mind. ‘Gerald Samper,’ I help him out. ‘The Englishman who bought the house up at Le Roccie.’ His eyes flicker sideways. I’d never buy a used car from this man, I think to myself in amazement. How come I bought a used house from him?

‘Signor Samper!’ he exclaims, recovering. ‘What an unexpected delight to see you. And looking so well, too.
Sempre
in
forma
. Your wife too is well?’

‘I have no wife.’

‘Ah, wise, wise man. Blessed bachelordom! I always say it’s the sign of a superior sensibility, that’s what I always say. I also say “
Donne
e
motori:
gioia
e
dolore
”, but I’m inclined to change that to “
sempre
dolore
.” Haha.’

‘You always did have a way with words,
ingegnere
. Like when you told me my neighbour’s house up at Le Roccie was lived in for one month of the year by a mouse-quiet foreigner. Your exact phrase, I remember.’

‘Ah, that memory of yours, Signor Samper. It is a jewel. And now –’ Benedetti glances at a preposterous watch that will tell him the time in Vancouver when he is a hundred metres under water ‘– I’m afraid I’m already late for my appointment. Mustn’t keep the Chief of Police waiting.’

‘Policemen are famously never on time,’ I say, taking a tiny but significant step to one side to block his escape. ‘This won’t
take long, Benedetti. I just want to know why you misrepresented the situation to me.’ Better not use a word as blunt as ‘lied’ at this stage.

‘Misrepresented,
signore
? Oh, I trust not. The lady in question –’

‘You know her, then? Marta?’

‘Only most vaguely. But I was assured she is scarcely ever there. She is of Russian origin, I think.’

‘I wouldn’t tell her that if I were you. She has rather strong views on Russia. All I know is she’s not at all quiet and mouselike. In fact, and between ourselves, over the last three months she has proved to be a damned nuisance in all sorts of ways. Being visited by helicopters is one of them.’

‘Helicopters?’ The weasel perks up.

‘Helicopters. Blew my pergola to shreds. Is that how you define a quiet neighbour?’

‘Not,’ he begins cautiously, ‘as such, perhaps. Not altogether.’

‘Well, I’m none too happy about it. To be honest, I’m beginning to feel you sold me that house under false pretences. I explained to you several times that being a writer I need extreme quiet for my work. But a neighbour who plays weird music at all hours and has visitors who drop by in helicopters hardly fits your description of her.’

‘O
Dio
.’ Benedetti makes a pout with his lips to indicate deep concern. ‘What can she be up to?’

‘Who knows?’ I ask rhetorically, suddenly finding the pent-up frustrations of the last few months venting themselves with agreeable passion. This fence business has definitely been the last straw. ‘Who knows?
Che
ne
so
io
? What do I care if she’s an East European call girl? The point is you promised me peace and quiet and I have neither.’

‘Maybe there is an element of exaggeration …?’ he begins, but catches my eye. He shifts his briefcase to his left hand and with the right takes out a crisply laundered handkerchief with which he carefully mops his receding forehead. Hair
weaving, I note with satisfaction. And it’s all very well to moan about women but someone irons your shirts and handkerchiefs beautifully and I bet it’s not you.

‘Allow me to observe,
ingegnere
, that in future you could be a lot more scrupulous about what you say when trying to induce someone to buy one of your houses. Especially a foreigner. We may be a minority but I think you will find that as a community we are not entirely without significance. Word gets around,’ I add meaningfully.

Benedetti draws himself up, plump weasel provoked. ‘I sell all my houses in the best of faith, Signor Samper. Unfortunately I cannot be held responsible for my buyers’ eventual lack of breeding. I don’t believe I gave you a written guarantee of your prospective neighbour’s hermit-like qualities?’

‘True,’ I concede, beginning to enjoy this sword-crossing as Camaiore’s citizens eddy around us with curious glances. ‘But you did give me verbal assurances whose validity a gentleman like yourself will readily recognize as scarcely less binding. At this late stage, though, I can’t see how reparations can easily be made, can you? Things are as they regrettably are. I merely thought I would inform you that Le Roccie is very far from being the nexus of bucolic harmony you painted it to me last year. Well, as I say, word has a habit of getting around. And now I believe I’m delaying you.’

We take formal leave of one another and Benedetti scurries off, plying his handkerchief once more. I take myself into a handy bar for a well-deserved mid-morning reward. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in ages. Being able to dump on the weasel has been a pleasure I hadn’t anticipated when I drove down this morning. It won’t have done him any harm at all to feel the edge of the Samper tongue and it has done the Samper spirits a power of good. I can return home
purged
.

A couple of days now go by most agreeably. I make good progress with roughing out the outline of Nanty’s book. Left in peace by myself I always work well. This was, after all, the whole point of choosing to come and live up here among the crags and gulfs. How was I to have known that the casual lie of a greedy house agent would have put me at the mercy of an eccentric floozy like Marta?

The floozy, however, is unusually quiet. By positioning myself at the extreme corner of an upstairs window I’ve been able to catch a glimpse of crimson between the trees surrounding her house, meaning the mysterious sports car is still there. So who really is the owner? This, like many other questions about Marta, is unanswerable and hence rapidly becoming a bore. Just as long as I’m left to get on with earning a living she can do what she likes. It might even turn out to be her own car, an unlikely example of impulse buying that makes me wonder whether she mightn’t be well off after all. In that case one is certainly allowed to speculate about the source of her wealth. The East European provenance, the black helicopter: it isn’t difficult to drift off into tabloid day-dreams of those mafias allegedly always busy smuggling drugs or plutonium or illegal immigrants. Now I come to think of it there are also those unsavoury rackets one associates with governments in the Balkans, wherever the Balkans are. Isn’t there supposed to be a trade in indentured prostitutes being infiltrated into the EU? One never pays quite enough attention to these stories. They seem a permanent part of existence and doubtless always have been. I think one or two of the girls – and maybe even some of the boys – who filled out Luc’s heaps on the floor in Klosters were rumoured to be from Zagreb or Sarajevo. Somewhere like that. Is that Poland? It sounds sort of Polish to me. I ought to buy an atlas but I’m loath to lose my illusions.

Still, the idea of old Marta being involved in anything like that is too absurd. She’s far too drunken and slatternly to be a ruthless madam even if Le Roccie were the ideal site for a bawdy-house. And as for her being on the game herself … But I have no wish to be ungallant, still less downright cruel.

In the evening I toy with a little creation of mine while sitting out beneath my pergola. There is no denying it: summer is over the hump. The days are marginally less stifling now, the evenings appreciably cooler. In another week or two I shall have to wear a cardigan as I sit out and watch the sun languorously extinguishing itself in the sea somewhere behind Sardinia. Already one can begin looking forward to lighting the first fires of autumn when the fragrant woodsmoke rises from hissing hearths to drift slantingly through the baring branches outside. I am at peace. The distant ocean is at peace. The surrounding cliffs and forests are at peace. Far away down there among that coastal sprawl of lights people are doing frightful things to each other as usual, often casually but sometimes with such berserk attention to detail I can only assume it has been genetically coded by evolution as necessary for the race’s survival. Down there is the world as run by a handful of corporations, an army of lawyers and millions of religious zealots. It is not a place that has a niche for Gerald Samper. Up here, thank goodness, I needn’t pretend to be a member of the human race at all and can remain minimally contaminated by its germy lies. (Yes! You recognized it! Another anagram of Lyme Regis.) I can enjoy my cold trifle of sweetbreads – tripe and blueberries were made for each other – and a glass or three of Barolo while thinking peacefully anarchic thoughts.

You may be wondering, impertinently, why I have no wife, or at least no partner. Please feel free to keep right on wondering. Your impertinence is your own affair. About
my
affairs – and there have been many – I can but make the obvious point that marriage has nothing to do with sex. Of course not: it’s a social pact entered into by two people who
miraculously find they can bear each other’s company at breakfast over an indefinite period. Personally, I have never met anyone who fits that description and doubt I ever shall. Besides, wives are famously and massively expensive. Even that witty old fag-hag Jane Austen started one of her incomparable novels – was it
Donna
? – with the telling sentence ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a good man in possession of a wife must be in want of a tidy fortune.’ And there you have it, memorably expressed. So far as I’m concerned the whole marriage business is not something to lose sleep over. All I require is regular work, occasional louche gossip, Rossini and a well-supplied kitchen. And after many years, when the pleasure quotient has sunk irretrievably low, one can follow the sun’s example in the sea somewhere behind Sardinia.

In the morning I breakfast on the terrace bright and early. The sun rising behind our mountains throws their chain of shadows far below almost to the coast. I enjoy watching this dark blotch shrink back from Viareggio towards the foothills, allowing the fresh day’s sunlight to wink once more on the greenhouse roofs. When the penumbra has retreated across Camaiore’s football stadium I shall know it is time for me to start my own day’s work on the story of Nanty Riah’s life. When we parted at Munich airport he had rather shamefacedly thrust a fat envelope into my hands.

‘Dunno if your bloke ever mentioned it,’ he said, ‘but I sort of once began, you know, putting some stuff together about my life. It’s no good, of course, I can’t write for nuts. A professional like yourself, well, I guess it’ll give you a laugh. But who knows, for Chrissake, you might find
something
to help you.’

His self-deprecations had been reassuring. It was still hard to believe this suddenly shy, hairless man of almost thirty-one was the same person as the triumphant teenager I had watched whip thousands of adoring fans into screaming hysteria only a couple of nights previously. A streak of modesty was probably
the one thing that, if he were ever to transcend his status as a mere celebrity, was crucial. It was certainly a great recommendation to his biographer because it made him likeable. Once back home and able to read through his scattered notes and scribbles I liked him even more. Nanty was quite correct: he was no writer. But he was frank and seemed not to care what impression he made. His papers included a poem addressed to his afflicted sister Julie. As poetry it was toe-curling. As a revelation of love and protectiveness, though, it was wholly convincing, and to such an extent that for once I shall resist the temptation to quote an extract. Well, maybe I might later. It all depends on how Nanty behaves himself.

I am becoming aware that a familiar
whup-whup
sound is growing in volume somewhere below me. I glance over the tops of my basil plants that fragrantly edge the verandah and finally spot the helicopter. It is difficult to see at first because it is rising steadily, head on, bringing with it a pungent sense of déjà vu. Surely not
again
? And me with my pergola’s vines as painstakingly re-woven as that weasel Benedetti’s thinning hair. In amazement I watch its approach and am soon able to see it is not the same sinister black craft that so terrified Nanty some weeks ago. It is painted blue and white and has reassuringly civilian contours rather than those of an attack gunship. What is more it is evidently not going to overfly my pergola, for it banks a hundred metres away to make a circle around my house. Inside the bulbous canopy I can see three figures. I follow the glittering arc of the tail rotor behind the trees. This is unbelievable: another airborne visitor for my neighbour. Who
is
this bloody Marta woman? Implausible alternatives race through my mind. She is Mother Teresa’s illegitimate daughter, paid handsomely by the Sisters of Charity to keep out of the public eye. She is the last living member of Voynovia’s deposed and exiled royal family, awaiting the call by her loyal citizenry to return and rule again from her shattered palace. She is … But this time, goddamn it, I’m
going to find out. What do you mean, none of my business? The suspense is affecting my entire life. Even as the helicopter settles invisibly but very audibly in Marta’s paddock I am on the way over to her house.

The question is, do I need an excuse? Surely a helicopter landing eighty yards away is unusual enough to give the average householder a reason for being inquisitive? What role should I play, though: eager young planespotter or irate literary gent whose peace and quiet has once again been disturbed? Fortunately the matter is taken out of my hands. By the time I arrive Marta and two strangers are standing beside the red sports car in conversation. The younger man, though, is not quite a stranger. I recognize him at once as the handsome boy I saw driving her on the Viareggio road in this very car. And handsome he most certainly is. Many, many plainer boys than he have snorted a line of coke in Klosters and taken their clothes off presuming they look as rosy to others as their private world now does to them.

Marta spots my tentative approach and calls me over.