Loving Monsters (15 page)

Yet for all the difference between us, I could not dismiss the sense I had of something being not quite right in Jayjay’s account. I am often not very bright about people’s motives which others manage to see through with cynical ease, so maybe I was missing an obvious inconsistency in his early life story that any intelligent person might seize on. But so far was I from identifying it that I did not even know where – if at all – it lay, or what question to ask to elicit the illuminating reply. After all, two people who have known each other only a matter of months confront one another with two unspoken lifetimes and a good deal of catching-up to do – or as much as will be allowed. There are bound to be gaps and opacities. All the same, I did wonder why he had waited until now to find a biographer, to regurgitate the semblance of a life, an authorised version:
plop!,
a
Life in three hundred pages. This man of whom I was becoming both wary and fond gave off an intermittent bleakness not at all that of a mere blithe nihilist such as anyone might affect to be these days, what with millennial scenarios of germ warfare and environmental catastrophe mustering over the horizon. His was no empty cynicism reliably ringing its hollow note when struck by an idea. Nor was he the retired diplomat I had initially taken him for, comfortably recapitulating a felicitous career in genteel surroundings. He felt to me unmistakably (and this was where I might be mistaken) like a man who had been deeply enough wounded not to bother with pretensions, whether of the material kind or else through a picaresque re-jigging of his own history.
I kept noticing that soldierly habit of his of tucking his handkerchief into his cuff.

The palimpsest of the Tuscan/Far Eastern landscape at my feet acquired another layer: a vaguely Middle Eastern, thirties blur, lacking borders but full of individual details. In the afternoons up on my hillside I might be sawing up next winter’s fuel or splitting baulks of scrub oak with an axe whose blows echoed from the woods. I could stop with the flashing blade arrested overhead like Excalibur, suddenly struck by the oddness of the stranger whose house lay so nearly visible below and whose unsimilar yet vaguely congruent life gave back something (but what?) of my own that threatened to be painful. How best to live that wisp of time … How best to live it so that it would least resemble a soap opera full of episodic whirlings of activity, metropolitan frenzies, relationships melding and falling apart with gusts of stagy emotion and the pervading lie – or perhaps the pervading truth – that this,
this
is social realism. This is reality as lived by the majority of the Western world.

– Do, do, do – said Jayjay once, disgustedly. – Only a juvenile wants to
do
all the time. The astute adult wants to
be
:
to live his imagination instead of forcing it into abeyance under a top dressing of mere busyness. How to live one’s life is a deeper matter than just stuffing available time with random doings. As has recently been forgotten, living is an art, and like all art requires talent and diligence. Stylishness and pleasure are both a part of it; but they, too, must be a little rationed if we are not to become poseurs or blunted. Remain sharp: that’s the aim. Sharp sadness, sharp enjoyment, sharp hunger. Sharp attention or nothing. No slumping while the days scamper past in an undifferentiated blur. There’ll be time enough for rotting: the only thing everyone makes an equally good job of. –

After the short silence due this gem I told him sadly that it was all too obvious he’d reached the age when intelligence is ousted by mere wisdom. Still (I said) you could probably scratch a geriatric living thinking up mottoes for Christmas crackers. He was impressively ribald in return, but Japanese technology does not
lie. That was what he’d said, those the words Jayjay had actually spoken, shorn only of pauses and ers and laughs. Sharp sadness: that was how he’d chosen to head his list and it is up to the biographer not to smooth it out into something lesser like ‘an accurate melancholy’. Sharp sadness, I now think as I bring the bright axe down into too green a chunk of wood where it buries itself immovably, sap welling around it. Meanwhile I see from the cassette’s date Japanese technology also captured a remark he made at much the same time as he recounted the loss of so many of his virginities in Egypt.

– Sex is an economical fuel. A good tankful before the age of twenty enables a man to coast through the rest of his life, if he has to, with an occasional eking-out. As with food, a lean diet does wonders for pleasure and longevity. –

This is surprisingly stern, very far removed from the guzzling fleshpottery of present times. It hints at a later abstemiousness either chosen or forced upon him, although of course it may be pure blarney. From time to time I allude to his initiation, calling it ‘Suez’ as a shorthand and a euphemism. ‘Suez’ soon became buried beneath a growing heap of other experiences and elsewheres; but, as he more than once said: ‘Whatever else, I never forgot the blessed damozel.’

*

In the meantime, though, this mountainside I had unknowingly been sharing with the impostor
lorde
Jayjay seems to be trying to expel him from my attention. As I said, the Far East of my other life keeps surfacing its coconut palms through the chestnut forests below my doorstep. The deciduous and cypress greens of Europe darken imperceptibly to the colour of jungle fatigues. In place of the flat agricultural expanse of the Val di Chiana at the foot of the hills I see the South China Sea lapping around the promontories of Cortona and Castiglion Fiorentino. The buzzards revolving opportunistically above my house take on the plumage of fish eagles and in the terraced slopes beneath Etruscan hill towns my inward eye sees terraced paddies eight
thousand miles away with their narrow silver panes, their piled slivers of water and rice. Sonic ghosts lurk beyond these blurred horizons as the whop of rotor blades and the sputter of M-16s. Arcadia and munitions: Southeast Asia’s Siamese twins, joined at the heart.

This other life will not let me go. Utterly familiar yet constantly surprising, it draws me back over and over again for business I now know will remain for ever unfinished. Business of the heart and head as much as business to live by, although that too is beginning to press. My projected book on dictators and assorted monsters is now demanding attention, which I imagine is why that distant landscape pushes up so insistently through Tuscany each time I look up from chopping wood, just as it increasingly surfaces in my thoughts to distract me from Jayjay and his doings. As I have made clear to him more than once, it is a prior commitment that at intervals will have to take precedence over his tale. It is a job of work requiring no less attention than his and for me has twenty years’ longer history behind it.

It is a curious sensation to be tugged between two places although it must be a commonplace in these days of mobility and migration. The image of divided attention is wrong, though, because it implies attention halved. Instead, something expands to make a full world of each. Now I start drawing up lists, looking through address books and sending messages off to that other world, trying to fix the interviews I shall need to conduct with its former satraps. I am fascinated by the deposed. It is endlessly gripping to watch their deft manoeuvrings to tear off some choice little lumps of power from the now rotting carcase of the regime they formerly served. In the way they smoothly accommodate themselves to the new status quo, no less than the way they are in turn accommodated, one visualises the hydrodynamics of a shark. It is a nearly aesthetic pleasure to watch them in action. With luck I shall be able to do so in person in a few months’ time. One needs patience to set up interviews in Asia. My quarries scoot about the globe. Letters take for ever.

The businesslike mornings spent down at Il Ghibli had now shed their last suggestion of formal interviews. Our arrangement began slipping imperceptibly towards the latter part of the day. It was not long before Jayjay was suggesting I stayed for dinner, and I wondered once more whether he might be lonely. And then, having accepted, I had to consider whether I might be as well.

By having asserted on our first meeting that how one chose to live one’s paltry allotment of years was the only interesting question, Jayjay inevitably brought my inquisitive scrutiny down upon himself. Maybe it was unfair to expect a man on the doorstep of his eighties still to be narrowly watching each passing minute the better to cram it with edification or pleasure. Yet from what of his everyday domestic life I observed – and by the end I believe I saw pretty much all there was to see – he certainly didn’t waste time. By this I mean he read a good deal and watched old films from an extensive video library. He would occasionally glance at the news on television, but never for more than a few minutes. ‘That’s enough of
that
,’ he would say decisively, turning it off. ‘An
inherently trashy medium, don’t you think?’ He enjoyed planning his garden and would think hard before having this or that planted, imagining how things would look four months or even years later. He would conduct detailed conversations with Claudio about aphids and copper sulphate solution. Claudio, who smelt agreeably of fresh garlic and leaf-mould, would stand there with a sickle worn thin by sharpening hanging from a thick hand, listening in a silence that was neither deferential nor blank. His forte was disease and bonfires. It was almost with pleasure that he surveyed the local landscape and noted how many of the cypresses were dying. ‘C’è la malattia in giro‚’ he would announce. ‘They’ll all have to come down sooner or later.’Jayjay called him the Grim Reaper.

Sometimes I would catch Jayjay just sitting, though not with that puffy, absent expression of the truly sedentary. I never had the impression that his mind was idling in neutral but that he was considering or else watching inner clips from a long life. I now think I never met anyone who gave such clear evidence of a constantly active mind.

He would hardly ever allow me to take him out for dinner, preferring to cook it himself at home which he did skilfully and without fuss. I would occupy a corner of the kitchen table and keep him supplied with gin and tonic while being given the occasional task such as preparing Brussels sprouts or peeling potatoes. He was quite particular about food, in the sense that he hardly minded what he ate so long as it was cooked with care and imagination. He wouldn’t eat anything in the nature of fast food. He had once eaten a hamburger, he said, leaving me waiting for an amusing anecdote that never came. That
was
the punchline: he had once eaten a hamburger. There was nothing else to add.

As he chopped and sliced and stirred he would tell me gleefully how everything he was doing was, in fact,
wrong
;
that according to the sacred lore of Tuscan cuisine it was tantamount to blasphemy sautéing this or that in butter or adding capers to that particular sauce. Eventually I discovered he was really carrying on a jocular
feud with the absent Marcella, taking as much pleasure in cooking against her as in cooking for us. The feud was obviously long-standing, a rivalry that must have grown over the years, giving equal pleasure to both parties.

‘Dear Marcella, now, I think I’ve more or less got her tamed, but every so often she catches sight of something I’m cooking and gets that Tuscan know-all tone in her voice. You remember that
arista
we had the other evening? She caught me preparing to marinade it overnight in oil, wine and herbs. What was I thinking of? And anyway, didn’t I know that one always put garlic slivers
into
the meat and never directly in the marinade? Then when I was cooking it she made a great fuss about its not having been salted. I told her I would do it after I’d sautéed it, just before I added the liquid, or else it would draw all the juices out of the meat. You could see she took it personally as well as considering it an offence against centuries of hallowed tradition. Quite. Centuries of hallowed but dry
arista.’

A definite congeniality attached to these expostulatory conversations of ours in Jayjay’s beamed kitchen. Italy might have been a country we both loved, but all foreigners everywhere enjoy an occasional grouse about their foster home. It reminds them that they belong to the planet and not just to a particular spot on it. In any case our exchanges reinforced something between us: a shared uprootedness, perhaps. Nor was it simply a matter of our nationality, either, since unlike many foreigners we never grumbled about perennial Italian targets such as bureaucracy or corruption. Both of us were widely travelled and had spent years of our adult lives in lands whose bureaucracies and corruption were worse than Italy’s by a factor of ten. Besides, we had long since come to appreciate the convenience of being able to solve little legal contretemps at a civilised personal level. On a visit to London a few years ago I was stopped by a policeman in Knightsbridge traffic for making an illegal turn and came within an ace of handing him a fiver out of a lifetime’s sheer habit before remembering that this was England and we British did things differently. In short,
greasing the wheels of life was nothing to jib at, whereas not being able to cook something without a Tuscan housewife saying you were doing it all wrong was a serious issue for complaint.

I liked overhearing the running battle that Jayjay and Marcella kept up when she was in the house: it was so obviously based on deep affection on both sides. So far as I was able to judge his Italian was flawless, and when she became mischievously bossy over his cooking or other domestic habits he would lapse into local dialect to remonstrate with her. ‘Ddio boia, o che fè?’ he would ask, peering disdainfully into the saucepan into which she was stirring some ingredient. He perfectly produced the slight goatlike bleating of
Ddio,
that thick peasant sound which made her collapse with laughter to hear in the mouth of a foreigner even though it was the language her father Claudio, and therefore she herself, had spoken from birth. Or he would eye the huge bowl of salad she had prepared for lunch and exclaim in mock disgust ‘Mmadonna sbudellèta, erba, erba! Un sò’ mica un bòe! O un cunìgglio …!’ Marcella would pretend to be shocked by the muscular Tuscan blasphemies but it was obvious she found them as reassuring as she found Jayjay precisely because he understood the old ways of which they had been part and which had only recently been thrust below the surface of received Italian life, down into abeyance beneath the flavourless lingua franca of television and demotic culture. One could see the flirtatiousness of this eighty-year-old man and forty-year-old woman as they worked on each other’s sense of humour, and not for the first time I was struck by the sheer attractiveness of the man if he wished to charm.

It seemed he had inherited Claudio and Marcella, father and daughter, together with the house nearly a quarter of a century previously. They lived in an adjacent farmhouse a little further up the valley from Il Ghibli, surrounded by terraces of olives which effectively ran unbroken into Jayjay’s own. The year before Jayjay had taken the house in 1978 Claudio had been almost the last small farmer in the region still to be tied to the ancient system of
mezzadria,
or
métayer,
whereby as tenant he gave his landlord half
of everything he produced. When the landlord died in 1977 Claudio’s house and land became entirely his own property and he was a free man (‘Oggi siamo tutti signori’, people took pleasure in saying as they bought their wives cheap furs and went off to Africa on safari). In those days Claudio still kept a flock of sheep that grazed the terraces. Now he bought his mutton in the Co-op and owned a tractor with which he ploughed meticulously around the olives to bring air and nutrients to their roots.

I soon learned that Marcella was in and out of Jayjay’s house most days: that far from being the thrice-weekly charlady I had initially taken her for she filled a role in both their lives that combined something of a wife, something of a sister and something of a daughter, as well as a watchful family friend keeping an eye on an elderly relative. If she herself was not around, her father very likely was, foraging purposefully nearby, blue with Bordeaux mixture or looking for something to chop down. But Marcella generally contrived to be there each day for at least half an hour and it was a surprise to learn that she had three children of her own to look after as well. Her young husband Eugenio had been killed in a horrendous and unnecessary accident seven years ago when employed as an engineer by the state railway. One Sunday morning he and a maintenance crew had been working on a stretch of the overhead power line between Arezzo and Florence when somehow the current for that section had been switched back on without warning. Eugenio and three others on the wheeled gantry were killed instantly. I never formed any very clear idea about Eugenio’s emotional legacy. I seldom heard him mentioned and the children, two teenaged girls and a ten-year-old boy, seemed not obviously fatherless. His financial legacy, though, was much better defined. Since the FS was a state industry the union had very properly extracted some decent sums by way of compensation and at forty Marcella was also drawing a widow’s pension.

It became clear to me how wrong I had been – betraying, no doubt, the sentimental indulgence we impose on the elderly – to
suppose Jayjay might be short of company. A less lonely person I never met, at least in the superficial sense of his apparently having as much affection and companionship as he wanted. (It was necessary to qualify this by saying that his desire for company had distinct limits and to observe that he was a man used to being a loner who had built up the strength of those who expect no help.) Marcella’s children treated him like a grandfather, as one of the family; and it was obvious that the little boy Dario, in particular, adored him unreservedly. Equally plainly Jayjay adored him in return, and the two indulged in a sort of pre-erotic version of the flirtatiousness Jayjay and Marcella shared. One is reduced to calling it flirtatiousness because there seems no other adequate word. It was more piquant than teasing, though kinder, while never edging too close to suggestiveness. Dario would listen spellbound to Jayjay’s stories of other times and distant places: of a haunted oasis south of El Kharga lived in by werewolves who went loping off across the desert after sunset; of the gold death-mask Jayjay had watched being made for a Greek shipping magnate of his lover who had fallen from a trapeze; of a maze designed by a stranger for the botanical gardens in Samarkand which had had to be ploughed up in the nineteenth century because nobody who entered it ever came out again. Jayjay, supreme ghoul himself, understood the essential ghoulishness of boys and delighted Dario with accounts of horrid recipes he had eaten around the world. The sheep’s eyes and tenderised puppies led naturally to a description of General Idi Amin’s famous fridge full of his enemies’ body parts. Yet in more dangerous matters he was obviously quite scrupulous. I encountered an example of Jayjay’s tastefulness towards Dario when the boy once showed me Lady Amelia’s squashed dildo and gave me a version of the story Jayjay must have told him. In this slightly edited account the object was simply a model of her dead husband’s cock which she had carried about with her as a sentimental keepsake, like a lock of his hair. Pretty weird, huh? said Dario. But listen: Lady Amelia was nothing compared to her sister, Agatha.
La
Agata
had kept a plaster cast of
every pet she ever owned and lived in a palace whose floors were strewn with plaster Pomeranians, whose sofas sagged beneath the weight of plaster pussy-cats and whose ceilings were hung with cages of plaster bullfinches. Even the bath was full of plaster goldfish. And when she died …? No, said Dario, firmly shaking his head, ‘they didn’t make her into a plaster cast. But when they cut her open to see why she had died they discovered her heart was made of plaster … Hee-hee, got you there! Just for a minute you believed that, didn’t you? (passing on with glee the very narrative prank with which Jayjay must have caught him).

The first time I had seen Jayjay and Dario together they were playing with a rocket kit that involved filling a plastic Schweppes tonic bottle with water and pumping it up with a bicycle pump. The bottle, poised on three red fins, suddenly took off with a great drench of water, flying to an extraordinary height before twirling down. It disappeared with a faint crash among Claudio’s vegetables with Dario in hot pursuit, whooping with pleasure.

‘The critical thing,’ explained Jayjay when he caught sight of me, ‘is the amount of water. You need the mass, of course, but too much water means not enough room for the compressed air. We think about a third full gives the best results,
giusto
?
’
He turned to Dario, switching back to Italian as the boy trotted up with the rocket, his blue T-shirt blotched with water. Suddenly shy in the presence of a stranger, Dario turned towards me with a smile, leaning confidently back against Jayjay. For a moment I had almost forgotten Jayjay was so much older than Dario, their easy intimacy being that of boys at play. But the old man’s hands were gravemarked and shockingly large against Dario’s chest as he stood with the child’s fists clenched around his middle fingers. Thus might any boy face the world, a parent at his back, I thought with an unseemly pang of something like envy.

If after hearing a session of the tall tales with which Jayjay captivated Dario I sometimes set the nose of my pickup truck almost grimly on the homeward track up to my empty house, calling Jayjay a pinchbeck Munchausen or Walter Mitty under my breath,
it was nothing but private pain speaking. This merits a brief, parenthetical explanation simply because it has a bearing on my relationship with Jayjay. For reasons into which I will not go, it was not until I was forty that I met the only person with whom I have ever been capable of sharing a house. Frances, thirteen years my junior, was uncomplainingly bohemian, so we never much addressed (certainly not enough, as it turned out) questions of relative comfort or relative security but simply assumed an amicable permanence. Our daughter Emma was the result; and I could not have imagined that becoming a father in middle age would so ensnare me in pleasure. Emma’s finding speech inside herself and rapidly building up a vocabulary – partly overheard, partly invented – was so enthralling to me that it was as though she might have been the human race’s last child and I entrusted with the handing-on of the entire language, the whole culture, everything known and unknown. The egotism of unqualified love, you will say. I will allow ‘self-importance’; it felt nothing to do with the ego and far more to do with some absurdly grandiose sacrament that at the very least required as great attention to the details of Emma’s upbringing as to those of her bodily welfare. (The first time I properly examined her tiny fingernails a few hours after her birth I had found myself on the verge of tears.)