Loving Monsters (23 page)

In the semi-dark I find myself wondering about Jayjay. I am more than ever certain he is concealing something from me. In the aftermath of an evening’s talk about military events and the unblinking necessities of battle it crosses my mind that he, too, might well have been caught up in some specific horror during the Second World War. Indeed, the more I think of this urbane man as an ex-officer, the more probable it seems that he may have
been party to something squalid and unheroic that the times had made obligatory. He is very much of a generation that knew how to keep quiet, that had the strength to live daily with past deeds and old loyalties without the public confessions, self-flagellations, claims of post-traumatic stress disorder and similar modern modes of bleating. As soon as this idea comes to me a new Jayjay takes convincing shape. Not necessarily a torturer, but maybe a man who took some painful decisions wherever it was he served. (And it shows how little I really know of him that I can see him equally in flying gear bombing a Gestapo HQ in France in which there were known to be Allied prisoners, or in naval uniform ordering a surfaced U-boat to be rammed despite survivors in the water, or doing nasty things ‘out East’ with Orde Wingate’s Chindits.)

Trying to skirt a private abyss of my own, I sense a strange congruence that links together tonight’s interrogator, Jayjay and myself. The interrogator’s national identity must surely be muddled from so many years training with Americans and abetting their policies, while his son Henry is himself virtually an American. And both Jayjay and I have lived almost everywhere but in the land of our birth. This compromising of our respective roots maybe gives us all a more panoramic moral view, or at least one in which being condemnatory is no longer an option. Maybe it was the abolition of Judgement Day that led the internationally righteous to set up their war crimes tribunals as though the crimes of peace were already well accounted for. I have long lost all interest in issues of public guilt, with the whole fake-dignified panoply of robes and editorials. These days I am only ever gripped by the skewed inheritance of our common lot, by private pacts and secret expediencies, by the unassuaged greeds and griefs that precede court and clinic.

The karaokes wail, the sweat trickles down. My own past keeps me from sleep. In turning and turning on this vile bed I sense the hooks off which I am trying to wriggle. Only one hook, really, when it comes down to it. Lucky the man who is not haunted by a vignette from a far-off war in this selfsame part of the world, an
episode burned into the brain. The main protagonists are all dead. But the journalist-adventurer-witness tosses and sweats and is forever condemned to re-live the scene. He was young then, but so were the dead who might yet be alive (the tireless conscience insists) had it not been for his crucial failure of nerve at the one moment when they might still have stood a chance. Unlikely, it’s true, but there’s never any telling. And now there is nothing
but
telling, the private nag of blame. Over and over again his courage fails, ducking for cover, and over and over again they die. It is all far in the past, one lost incident among uncounted such, and no-one else cares or even knows any more. But it concerns memory as much as it does conscience. Jayjay was right when he alluded disparagingly to that Buddhist amnesia necessary in order to live eternally in the present. By disenfranchising the past it involves damage to the moral self. Besides, I think, why privilege the ever-skidding moment when
now
is no more real than
then,
and certainly not to Jayjay and myself? Our pasts float ever before our eyes like retinal debris or the hair in the gate of an old cine projector, fluttering to betray as film the scene one is thinking so real.

Well, whatever old Jayjay may eventually confess to he is safe from my judgement. Not only do I have a secret of my own from time of war but he did much of his best living before I was even born, when the world was another place. The past really
is
a different country, with its own language and customs. One blunders about in it with fading maps and dog-eared phrasebooks, baffled by dialect and rates of exchange, all censure suspended …

The sky outside seems lighter. I wonder how my bees are getting on.

*

Two months went by. Every so often I would quit the roaring Asian capital for the provinces with the urgency of an underwater swimmer coming up for air and bursting into sunlight. Being down among the denizens unquestionably had its fascination. Being made privy to things about which most people remain
mercifully ignorant was gripping, but you held your breath. At such depths you were among essentials. You cleared your mind of cultural baggage and moral outrage. You acknowledged the muscles and teeth of survival. Sharks, too, were beautiful. But it was still airless down there, a place for quick visits, not for lingering in. When I could stand it no longer I would surface and take the familiar series of buses and ferries until once again I was pushing open my creaking bamboo door and dumping my bag on the unswept earth floor. Within minutes a row of eyes would show above the powdery windowsill and on the sill itself a row of little white fingernails. Had I brought presents back with me? Candy? (for this was a culture where returning travellers are expected to bring gifts for unfortunate stay-at-homes). The sheer relief of innocent normality was itself a kind of gift.

Here beneath the mango tree I worked up my notes, savouring the ambient smells that drifted through the hut’s glassless window and permeable walls. Cooking fires, tropical rot; the smoke of a fire for roasting piles of halved coconuts so that the meat shrinks away from the shell like curls of brown oily leather to be further dried as copra. The smell of the muddy track drying in the midday sun; the scent of afternoon rains remoistening dried earth. The world of air-conditioned condominiums and gas log fires was centuries away. Cultural baggage and moral outrage remained clutter. The day-care-centre roof stayed unrepaired. The yielding obduracy, the social complexity, the ripple effects of any action taken in a community this small led to a familiar resigned inertia. I went fishing instead, split and salted the catch, laid it on the edge of the thatched roof to dry in the sun.

I used to wonder how I knew when my time was up in my various bunk-holes. Was it because I suddenly felt apprehensive about my bees? Was it because I worried that my house in Italy might have fallen victim to storm damage or thieves, all alone up there among the forests? Not really. Things
that
far away can take care of themselves. No, the moment for leaving was determined quite arbitrarily by the return flight stipulated as part of a
cut-price ticket. In a corner of the hut I found my shoes, now a pretty blue-green with mould. I shook bulbous spiders out of my trouserlegs and brushed worm dust from a shirt. The very casualness of farewells to friends and neighbours, as though we were saying goodbye before going to town for the day, were earnests of return. The bamboo door (through which a determined child could force an entry, let alone a determined adult) was padlocked, the backward glance resisted. The hut, the mango tree, the village itself dwindled to a dot beside the sea, which became ocean, which in due course turned into the Mediterranean and after a while led to my standing on another of my doorsteps fumbling with a key that felt strange.

It was nearly a fortnight before I had the time and inclination to contact Jayjay once more. There was the usual alp of mail to deal with, the normal week’s adjustment to a different daily regime and sundry chores. Above all there were the bees to see to. It was a bad time to have been away because some of them would have swarmed in late April and I was resigned to finding a diminished community. After so many weeks wearing my investigative writer’s disguise it was a great relief to slip on a beekeeper’s mask. I stuffed some smouldering sacking into the smoker and went into each of the hives, softly removing the roof and crown board and slowly peeling back the polythene quilt, puffing a little smoke under the corner and giving an additional small puff here and there as more of the bee-laden frames were exposed. As usual I had the quick image of a brain surgeon lifting off a portion of skull. One by one I raised, inspected and gently replaced the frames, revelling in their smell, their orderly packed cells, the bees moving across the surface. Then back went the quilt and the crown board with great care lest any bees be crushed beneath its edge. This was not just because I felt tenderly towards my bees but also for reasons of self-interest. Squashing a bee breaks its venom sac and the smell of venom stimulates attack, which is why it is a mistake to kill an annoying bee. And once you do get stung, other bees will home in on exactly the same place to plant their stings. So your movements
are slow and deliberate and bees that settle on your hands can simply be shaken off into the hive before you put the lid back on.

In this way I worked through the hives, finding nothing amiss. The piece of sacking in the smoker lasted just long enough, a reward for sparingness. Smoke is a blessing and one could hardly work without it, but it should be used minimally. Until I began keeping bees I had assumed it was used as an anaesthetic to stun and subdue the wretched animals, but that is not the principle at all. A whiff of smoke acts as an alarm to which the bees respond instinctively by staying on the comb to fill themselves with a three-day emergency supply of honey. What one is aiming for is placid, gorged bees too good-tempered to go flying around looking for an intruder to sting. It is panicky and inelegant beekeeping to use too much smoke. It does the bees no good and can even taint the honey.

I stripped off the mask and walked up to the house thinking how odd it was to be back here, so far from the sound of the sea and from those air-conditioned apartments where one tiptoed forever warily across the eggshells of past crimes. It struck me that the sort of writing I had been doing over there had something in common with beekeeping. Both were delicate, faintly dangerous operations, exposing secret workings that went on in the dark and were capable of defending themselves to the death. Neither activity felt accidental, each was a solace. A little smoke was essential. Certainly bees and their fastidious rhythms were a marvellous antidote to the messiness of shifting around pieces of paper and ideas. On the other hand tough and worldly affairs could in their turn be a profound relief after a surfeit of loony apiarism. Anyway, for now the bucolics were taken care of. The next job was to go down and see Jayjay.

*

Il Ghibli looks astonishingly beautiful in its early summer setting. Were it not in order to see friends, why would I ever swap Tuscany’s graceful, crafted pastoral for the monotony of coconut palms and the undifferentiated landscape of Southeast Asia?
Claudio, who is standing on the lawn, raises a billhook over his head in salutation like an executioner gravely acknowledging the crowd’s praise for a clean cut. Jayjay greets me at the door. I think he looks a little thinner.

‘Welcome back, stranger,’ he says, and I wonder if there is not a slight edge to the familiar jocular tone. ‘How goes the Empah? Come in and tell us homebodies wondrous tales of foreign parts. Did you see the Yxtiloi, whose faces are in their hinder parts? And what of the famed Ligno bird that hatches from pods on a tree and has been hunted almost to extinction by the cuckoo-clock industry?’ There
is
a slight edge.

‘Your garden looks stupendous,’ I say emolliently.

‘Doesn’t it? We must thank Claudio’s rough genius. Also, of course, the Great Landscaper, who disposed these hills so artistically. Come, we shall admire his handiwork from the terrace as usual, our receptiveness further enhanced by strong coffee.’

‘You’ve not been well, Jayjay?’ I ask with concern as the light falls on him sitting at the table with its familiar tiles. There seems to be a faintly yellowed look to him, although perhaps it is the early stages of a seasonal tan.

‘A passing malaise,’ he says. ‘Like life itself. You, on the other hand, have that tropicalised look. Bronzed and fit, as the cliché has it. Well, tell me how it went.’

I oblige as he listens with his head cocked, gazing up at the top of Sant’ Egidio outlined against summer’s blue. At length he says:

‘How invigorating difference is, isn’t it? How stale to remain all the time in one place. Never having to negotiate with another set of moral rules makes one flabby. I can’t help suspecting people who shy away. I always thought that phrase of Hannah Arendt’s about the banality of evil oddly unsatisfactory. To me there was always something defensive in it, something evasive.
Banal.
It reminds me of the way middle-class Brits dismiss anything that disturbs them, like pornography or modern art, by calling it “boring”. Monsters are us, only a bit more so. They’re often a good deal more interesting than the virtuous. Thank goodness
we’ll both be safely dead before the entire planet is brought to heel beneath some hideous Judaeo-Christian concept of order and rectitude. I’m thankful to have been born in time to have pranced in pagan sunlight as an unfettered being.’

‘Enter Pan, left, cavorting wickedly on a heap of ravished wood sprites. Do I now have to view you as the goatfoot god of Arcady, Jayjay? A cross between Norman Douglas and the Piper at the Gates of Dawn?’

‘Damn you …’ He puts his dripping cup down abruptly and dabs at his mouth with a handkerchief. ‘If I laugh, it’s chiefly because I’m so glad to see you back, James. There haven’t been many laughs here of late. Is it too impetuous of me to hope that we can sooner rather than later take up where we left off all those months ago?’

‘I’m ready to start when you are. Are you in a hurry?’

‘I’m not, but my body may be.’

On my way to the downstairs lavatory I manage to corner Marcella. ‘How ill is he?’

‘They won’t say. He was in Arezzo hospital last month for four days of tests. He’s not a young man any longer, is he?’ This was said with faint surprise, as if she had never considered it before. ‘Have you seen any difference in him?’