Cooking With Fernet Branca (5 page)

I
can
hear
you
chiding
me.
But
you
know
me,
Mari:
I’m
more
mischievous
than
cruel.
All
the
same,
these
are
passages
you’d
do
well
to
spare
Father
if
ever
you
read
him
bits
of
this
letter.
So
what
else
about
the
estimable
Mr
Samper?
Inevitably,
he’s
a
cookery
queen
as
well
as
an
opera
queen
and
a
DIY
queen.
In
keeping
with
that
grand
old
maxim
of
ours,
‘Beneath
kindness
a
fortress
will
crumble’,
I
invited
him
to
dinner.
He
put
up
some
token
resistance
but
dutifully
turned
up
with
a
huge
bowl
of
ice
cream
he’d
made
for
the
occasion.
Rather
sweet
of
him.
He’d
put
himself
out
so
I
felt
well
disposed
towards
him,
even
a
bit
touched,
&
resolved
to
be
on
my
best
behaviour
throughout
the
evening,
not
to
scare
him
with
sudden
provocative
gestures
etc.
My
one
oversight
was
to
have
forgotten
that
I’d
run
out
of
wine
&
hastily
had
to
open
some
more
Fernet
Branca.
Luckily
I’d
been
given
an
entire
case
by
the
bank
manager
who
came
up
to
give
me
my
cheque
book,
did
I
tell
you?
I
now
wonder
if
Ljuka
had
a 
hand
in
that.
Anyway,
what
could
I
give
my
visitor
to
eat
but
your
shonka
&
pavlu?
An
authentically
Voyde
meal,
a
little
European
gastronomy
lesson.
But
oh,
it
so
reminded
me
of
home
I
had
tears
in
my
eyes 
–
dear
Mari,
 
I’d
have
known
that
shonka
anywhere
in
the
world,
it
was
so
unmistakably
from
our
estate.

Poor
Gerald
started
by
being
nervous
&
I
suppose
that’s
why
he
ate
&
drank
too
much.
I
haven’t
met
enough
Englishmen
to
know
whether
this
is
a
national
trait
or
not,
their
being
unable
to
leave
half-filled
plates
and
bottles
on
a
dinner
table
without
feeling
com
pelled
to
empty
them
as
though
they
were
a
reproach
to
their
man
hood.
Gerald’s
manhood
became
steadily
more
&
more
like
those
Potemkin
suburbs
the
Soviets
put
up
in
Voynograd:
a
rickety
façade
against
which
a
dog
dared
not
lift
its
leg
for
fear
of
collapse.
He
giggled.
He
became
shrill.
Eventually
he
ceremoniously
brought
on
his
bowl
of
ice
cream
&
burst
into
song.
As
a
matter
of
fact
the
ice
cream
wasn’t
at
all
bad,
though
a
bit
bland.
A
sort
of
mild
herbal
flavour.
But
by
then
he
was
so
drunk
he
simply
went
on
eating
it
until
he’d
finished
that,
too.

At
length
I
became
alarmed
he
might
pass
out
in
my
kitchen
so
I
took
him
for
a
walk
ostensibly
to
look
at
the
night
sky
(which
was
indeed
magnificent
&
rimmed
on
all
sides
with
mountain
outlines).
I
craftily
edged
him
back
towards
his
own
house
where
he
stared
at
the
sky,
winced,
belched,
apologized,
laughed
uproariously
&
said
‘Next
time
you’re
my
guest.’
Then
he
added
in
a
puzzled
voice: ‘I
didn’t
really
say
“breast”,
did
I?’
& fell
to
the
ground
like
a
stunned
peewit
(as
the
Bunki
say).
So
I
left
him
there.
But
I
know
he
survived
because
I’ve
since
heard
him
bawling
arias
in
his
kitchen.
Really,
he’s
so
awful
I’m
growing
quite
fond
of
him
except
that
it
may
be
difficult
to
work
against
the
noise.

Now
I
shall
stop,
Marja
dearest,
with
all
sorts
of
messages
to
the
family
&
a
fervent
prayer
that
Mt
Sluszic
will
indeed
continue
to
stand
guard
over
our
clan
&
lands.

Much
love

Marta

This morning I go down to Viareggio to meet Sasi Vlas, who has come over from Florence for the day to act as interpreter for me. She’s married to a local lawyer and acts as consul, cultural attaché and general representative of Voyde affairs in that city. A handsome lady with the narrow forehead so characteristic of the Bun region – a first impression confirmed as soon as she opens her mouth (a showcase of Soviet-era dentistry). Oh, that Bunki accent we Voyde mock so much at home! Yet on the concourse of an Italian station it’s a welcome and nostalgic sound. Here we are, all alone in a foreign world, allies under the skin, holders of the same shit-brown Voynovian passports as well as of
permessi
di
soggiorno
… Actually that is not quite how Sasi sees it, as soon becomes clear. Married to an Italian, fully fluent and acculturated with two small children, she probably has to overcome an instant’s irritation – even
embarrassment 
– at this hick from her homeland before remembering who Father is and that I’m doing the music for a Piero Pacini film. She better had remember, too; so she’s pleasant and helpful. In due course we meet up with a couple of Pacini’s step’n’fetchits and drive out as arranged to view the prospective set.

The coast road from Viareggio heading south towards Tirrenia and Livorno is scrubby and piney and agri to the left. On the right, once the estuary’s boatyards and marinas have thinned out, are beach resorts. These are faintly hysterical in their downmarket but pretentious rivalry, their walls of shrubbery and grandiose gateways and names in lightbulbs reading ‘Eden’ and ‘Nirvana’. It is the first time this landlocked girl from middle Europe has actually set foot on one of these golden rivieras, but I can’t say it’s much different from the beaches near Danzig where Marja and I were once taken. I suppose the sun’s hotter here but the dockyard cranes in the distance look the same. However, I’m expected to gaze seaward with due awe.
According to Sasi we have only stopped ‘to give me my bearings’, but I suspect it was more to teach me my place.

On we go for several more kilometres of resort architecture. It must be bleak here in winter. The shops and restaurants and awnings – even the very pavements – seem designed to echo to the slip-slopping of beach sandals and the inanities of holiday conversation. The signposts suggest we are nearly in Tirrenia when the contemporary beach lots suddenly stop and semi-jungle takes their place behind chain-link fencing. This is dotted with decaying white fascist villas: immense concrete ruins through whose drunken shutters and windowless embrasures come glimpses of sweeping Hollywoodian staircases. It is at one of these villas that we fetch up. The rusty padlocked gates are already open and inside, among the rioting shrubs that have taken over the driveway, is parked a bright red racing car. Beside this stands a handsome young man wearing dark glasses on the top of his head, every inch a
fils
à
papa.
He is introduced to me as Filippo, Pacini’s son. He is courteous and apologizes with plausible sincerity for his father’s absence. The great Piero is in America, receiving a prize. One of those unavoidable things in the life of a film director. Fame has its tiresome obligations.

So there we all stand in the shade of a holm oak like time-travellers dumped in the nineteen thirties while Filippo explains in English far better than mine something of the history of this jungled lot. Apparently these shattered villas once formed part of Pisorno Studios (the mixture of Pisa and Livorno was probably always a bad omen, he adds with a smile that implies a famous historic rivalry). Pisorno was an earlier, Tuscan version of Rome’s Cinecittà where in the days of Mussolini a good many films were shot. Most of these fell into the category known as ‘white telephone’ films, so called because they inhabited a fascist fantasy world of good living peopled by haut-bourgeois layabouts. After the war Cinecittà pretty much took over the Italian film industry and since the sixties no one has been able to agree what to do with
Pisorno’s remains. The hundreds of acres of abandoned real estate by the sea are periodically earmarked for a projected cultural centre, a commercial centre, a theme park, even a nature reserve, but the plans have always fallen through. Maybe only fascism ever had the power to make Pisans and Livornese agree to anything and in its absence there is only indecision, stalemate and a golf course. Now where the white telephones once stood on gold-trimmed tables beside canopied double beds are the discarded condoms, cracked syringes, cigarette butts and other leavings of intruders.

‘But see for yourself,’ Filippo ends, taking my arm and leading us through vertical glare across a terrace rumpled with rotting concrete. The salt air of seventy years has penetrated to its reinforcing rods, puffing them up with rust.

Oh, perfect! Scabrous! Fabulously derelict! ‘What a place to shoot a film in,’ I say appreciatively to Filippo. ‘All those decadent fascist ghosts undermined by real decay.’ At least that’s what I try to say and I think he gets the gist. Sasi has a disapproving air, perhaps at being linguistically sidestepped or to make it clear that these ballroom and dining room floors crunching with broken glass and dried turds (animal? human?) are very far from her own natural habitat. I’m taking bets that the phones in her Florence apartment are white. Filippo meanwhile is clearly pleased I’m responsive to the place. It all feels like a good omen and the almost undreamable dream of writing the score for a Piero Pacini film suddenly begins to be a practical proposition. We wander about the house, each in her or his own world, pleased by the generations of graffiti and prompted to speculation by incongruities. Why would anyone ever have used one of these rooms for storing bales of cardboard egg racks, hundredweights of them, soggy and rotting?

When by sheer fortune Piero Pacini had seen
Vauli
Mitronovsk
after it won Voynovia’s Gold Stoat in 1999, he had liked my score enough to write asking if I would care to do the music for a film he was going to make. I stared unbelievingly
at the letter, then ran from room to room of the castle showing it to everyone I met, except of course to Mili who is illiterate. Father had never heard of Piero Pacini, predictably. Bringing him around took weeks of cajoling and careful work by both Marja and myself. He said the modern Western cinema is notoriously decadent, full of bad language and gross indecency and run by drug-addict
dudis.
It would be a completely unacceptable occupation for one of his stable-boys, let alone for his own daughter. Meanwhile Pacini wrote me more letters outlining a proposed plot I made sure Father never got wind of. It was about a group of left-wing liberals full of Green zeal who start a fishing commune. They are united by their loathing for the corruption of Italy’s Christian Democrats and a determination not to let the environmentally friendly way of life they are pioneering become contaminated by deep-frozen convenience foods and high-tech fishing practices. This struggle is made the more piquant because the father of one of them is a fervent
democristiano,
a great friend of the former prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. He owns fleets of trawlers and factory ships which have made him a multi-millionaire as well as notorious for having wiped out a particular pod of dolphins that were being observed by a nearby oceanographical institute. Gradually the communards entice back to the sea some of the local fishermen who have been driven by industrial competition to hang up their crude little nets and hand lines … It all goes wrong, of course. Industrialization and city life lurk nearby. Something spoiling seems to leach out of the very sand on which the commune is founded (and here I see Pisorno’s ruined lots with the utmost clarity). Some virulent fascist germ that has been lying dormant in the damp concrete and blown plaster infects the commune. Bit by bit the Greenery turns nasty. In one character it becomes outright racism directed at an Albanian fisherman, fuelled by bitter assertions that no immigrant ever has the least respect for the environment in his adopted country because he never really believes it’s his … There are
meetings, struttings, fights. Couples break apart. Later there are orgies in the abandoned villas. I got the idea. The only important thing was to stop Father also getting it.

Well, the simple fact of my now living in my own house high above Casoli hides the incredible effort and upheaval –  not to say downright lies – it took to achieve my autonomy and independence. For the moment Father thinks Pacini makes documentary films for the Italian tourist industry, full of jaunty footloose music and heartwarming images of Benetton-clad toddlers trying to catch pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. May God help this famous director if he ever discovers otherwise. After all, Pasolini was stabbed to death by a seventeen-year-old. I dread to think what might happen to Piero Pacini if Father calls out the clan to avenge his elder daughter’s lost innocence.

Anyway, standing here in late-June heat in the overgrown garden of the villa Pacini has apparently chosen as his main set, the whole project becomes very vivid to me. Between the acacia branches the blue sea twinkles noisily. Behind me the house glowers as if waiting for redress from the awful wrongs of history. It wants its white telephones back. The place is perfect and sinister and I can feel all sorts of suitable music elbowing out a space for itself inside me. I take some Polaroid snapshots as atmospheric aides-memoire so that when I’m back up the mountain in my kitchen trying not to be distracted by my neighbour’s singing I shall be sure to hear once again what I can hear now. That’s how it works with me. First impressions always bring music with them. Unreadable credits and titles flow upwards in my mind’s eye while my mind’s ear fills with an appropriate score.

At last Filippo insists on driving me back to Viareggio station where I’ve left my own car. Sasi is now quite grumpy and mutters a Voyde saying about stoats of the non-golden sort. I make an attempt to take my place nonchalantly in the scarlet car but this boy-racer’s toy is not designed for nonchalance. It is like inserting oneself into a shoebox lined with
cream leather. The car is called a De Tomaso Panther and is so low my bottom puckers each time we go over a bump, expecting to be abraded raw by hot tarmac. We arrive at the station with a bellow and everyone stares so hard at the car and its driver they hardly notice my struggle to get out, still less my anonymous but cheerful trudge through the heat towards my own nondescript vehicle.