Loving Monsters (35 page)

– The next morning she took me into Castiglion Fiorentino to meet the local grandees where she made the same introduction. Despite people politely telling me how honoured they were as they shook my hand I soon detected a certain ambivalence in the town towards the English. I learned that this was entirely due to a horrendous accident in December 1943 when an RAF aircraft trying to attack the railway station had released its bombs a couple of seconds too early or too late and had scored
a direct hit on a school, killing great numbers of children. In point of fact the pilot had returned to the town some time after the war ended and had apologised in person, which was a decent thing to have done. Everyone had been impressed by his gesture and had accepted that these sorts of accidents happen in war when aircraft are under ground fire and travelling at God knows how many miles per hour. Nonetheless it had happened; the children were dead and the noun ‘Englishman’ would have inescapable connotations for this little Etruscan town until enough time had elapsed.

– I understood all this perfectly as I chatted away. But while by association I had to share some of the blame for what my wretched countryman had done, nobody I met was offering to take the least responsibility for what their countrymen had done in North Africa or anywhere else. People referred delicately to the ‘mass insanity’ of the Fascist years, but even that made it sound like a nasty disease to which they had fallen victim rather than a political ideology that millions of Italians had enthusiastically supported. Here were people who had thrown in their lot with Hitler, lost their war, switched allegiance and emerged on the side of the victors as if that was where their hearts had been all along. I considered this required some admission at least. Maybe I’m too harsh. All this was half a century ago and in those days Castiglion Fiorentino was an impoverished agricultural backwater. The
con
tadini
were illiterate as well as deeply oppressed by the Church, which of course had supported Mussolini. Still, the people I met acted as if the Blackshirts had always been elsewhere, as if nobody in Castiglion Fiorentino had ever sung ‘La Giovinezza’, as if the
manganelli
ed
olio
di
ricino
had been a bit of bad behaviour on the part of a handful of zealots down in Rome … You know, clubs and castor oil? If the Fascists caught someone they thought was not enthusiastic enough about their cause they administered a good beating and forced them to drink quantities of castor oil … Add to that what everybody in Europe knew about General Graziani’s atrocious campaign against the Senussi in Libya in the twenties
and thirties, not to mention bombing tribespeople in Abyssinia, and I began to get quite cross with Mirella and her pals and their collective amnesia. Obviously one didn’t want apologies. Wars are not the fault of citizens. On the other hand there is such a thing as collective responsibility. I did think some acknowledgement of their part in what we had all been through would have been, well,
gracious.
No doubt I met the wrong people. Anyway, I suddenly realised that I had never quite liked her. Certainly I had once found her erotically attractive, but underneath there was something slippery in her character that I mistrusted.

– The day after that I went to find Adelio, who was after all the person I had really come to Italy to see. Our first meeting in four years took place in this very house, although in those days it was not called Il Ghibli. It was still a working farm then and all these ground-floor rooms were byres and stables with living quarters upstairs. His aunt and uncle had been as badly hit by the war as most and even then were still building their livestock back up to pre-war levels. I remember a lot of sheep milling about at milking time where this terrace now is. Adelio was in his early twenties and dressed like a farmer: heavy boots, muddy corduroys, collarless shirt with sleeves rolled up. But his physique was not that of a farmer. His forearms were thin and hairless, his clothes hung on him. He really hadn’t changed much except for looking a little older. His great hollow eyes filled with tears as we embraced and I don’t believe I was dry-eyed myself. I spent several days here with him. He wanted to talk but spoke with a slight effort as though he were out of practice. He was clearly overjoyed to see me, but behind that I sensed a troubled presence which felt all of a piece with the boy I remembered in Alexandria. He had fallen out with his mother and sister, I never knew exactly why, but it may have been at least partly to do with the war because he took a very different line from Mirella’s. He said he was ashamed for his country and told me how much he had always hated Fascism. This I’m sure was true. I remembered all too clearly the tearful child whose schooldays had been made hellish with his classmates’
bullying and militaristic braggadocio. It was an infection of the times that had permeated institutions from top to bottom and one would need to have been a much more physically robust and confident child than Adelio to have held out against it. Also, as he saw it, it was Fascism that had broken up his family by posting his father off to Libya.

– He took me on walks up the mountain here. In fact we passed your house several times, which is why I know it even though I have still never visited you up there and now never shall. In those days the land around it was cultivated terraces rather than the semi-jungle it now is. They grew a lot of maize for both animal and human fodder. Ah, polenta! Imagine – they were still ploughing that thin rocky soil with great white
chianino
oxen. Atrocious labour. No wonder all those houses were abandoned in the sixties. It’s funny to think I knew your house so many years before you did. I presume you’ve heard that an RAF pilot spent some months there in 1944 after his Spitfire was shot down? He had broken his leg and the partisans brought him there for safety. There were several families crammed into your house then, not just the farmer’s own but various relatives and friends too, refugees from the fighting down below. They put the pilot in one of the mangers so they could throw hay over him if ever the Germans came looking for him, but in the event no Germans ever went up Sant’ Egidio. They were too harried down at the bottom and in a few months the front had passed and there were no more Germans in the Val di Chiana until they began buying property thirty years later. –

I suddenly sensed how much more Jayjay knew about me and my life than I’d ever given him credit for. He had never before told me in as many words that he had known my house and its recent history years before I bought it and moved to this area. And on top of that there were those books of mine he’d read. How very much less of a stranger I must have felt to him than he had to me when we first met in the Co-op that afternoon, and how very unfortuitous that meeting now appeared! I wondered
how much else he knew. With a strange shock I realised that he most probably had heard about Frances and Emma, whom after all my local friends had known for nearly two years. My failure as a father was hardly a secret even though nobody alluded to it in my presence, and Jayjay’s own discretion meant that he would be unlikely to broach the subject himself. I had surely been right when I remarked on the way biographers and their subjects sniff each other out. With sublime egotism the writer assumes this is entirely a one-way process, that he alone is stripping the meat off the bones in front of him. It would certainly be all of a piece with Jayjay’s admiration for Mediterranean
savoir-vivre
that he could have acquired a little leverage over me as well, some knowledge of a squashy and tender area which I would prefer remained unprobed. Achilles was only known for one of his heels but both mine are vulnerable, as well as much else. I am glad this is not an autobiography.

– So Adelio and I walked and walked, and all the time we were walking I thought how companionable he was, except for an odd tension every so often. Then one day we were sitting eating bread and cheese for lunch and he suddenly produced this little celluloid case from which he took a photograph of me. I recognised it at once, of course: it was one of those he’d taken of me that day on the beach when we thought Alexandria would be invaded within days. –

*

‘I still have the ones I took of you, too,’ Jayjay tells him. ‘And what’s more, I’ve never shown them to a soul.’

Adelio is blushing, paring rind off a piece of cheese with a grimy pocketknife.

‘I’ve never forgotten that day,’ he says at last.

‘Nor I. I fully expected we would drive back to Alexandria and find fighting in the streets. I didn’t know what I would do. I felt so responsible for you.’

‘I didn’t mean the damned war.’

‘What, then?’

‘Can’t you see? Didn’t you realise? I wanted you to, I don’t know, comfort me or something. I was laughed at in school, my mother was busy with that mustachioed ape of hers, I was scared of all the talk about war. You were about the only person in my life who seemed to care whether I lived or died.’

‘Stupid, isn’t it? Oh, Adelio, if only you had known how much I wanted to hug you.’

He slants a look from those bruised and haunted eyes. ‘You really did?’

‘Of course. I longed to. But I was too shy.’

‘Per
l’amor
di
Dio!’

‘
Eh,
lo
so.
I’m sorry now. It’s miserable. But listen, you were stark naked. Be reasonable. There’s a limit to how much one can chastely embrace a naked teenager. It was … I didn’t want to scare or disgust you.’

‘
Porc
…
!
Disgust? If you want to know about disgust you should have tried being cornered by that man Bathory-Sopron.’

There is a short silence while Jayjay adjusts his view of this dead spy.

‘He didn’t?’

‘He most certainly did. Several times. I had to fight him off. The last time I told my mother and she refused to believe me. She just laughed and said I was being malicious because I disliked her friend. That’s why I think the greatest moment in my life was when you stuck a gun in his face and stole his car and drove us to Cairo. Disliked? I’ve never hated anyone as much as that man. From then on you were definitely my hero. But you were before, anyway. I would have done anything for you on that beach.’

Far below in the fields behind Montecchio castle on its little knoll the rows of mulberry trees are coming into leaf. Some way beyond them is the great expanse that was used not long ago as an Allied airfield when supplies were ferried in for the troops. Jayjay wonders if the mulberry groves will eventually expand to cover the airfield too, or whether the local silk industry will fall victim to the new passion for nylon and rayon. These days silk stockings sound
unbelievably dated and no longer even luxurious. All one ever hears about now are nylons, which have become a prime black-market commodity in Britain.

He reaches over and covers Adelio’s hand on the grass with his own. He can be quite clear-headed about things. That occasion out at Abu Qir, as well as many a similar afternoon, can now be viewed remorsefully as a lost opportunity. Yet he can’t bring himself to regret it as much as Adelio clearly does. Had Jayjay been as physically demonstrative as Adelio now claims he wanted him to be it is likely that they would indeed have become lovers on that hot, deserted beach as occasional warplanes patrolled out to sea. Maybe Adelio is imposing his twenty-three-year-old’s libido on that of his former fourteen-year-old self, but Jayjay is prepared to let that go and assume that he really had hoped for what he is hinting at. Not impossible. But it is not what Jayjay wanted, which had surprised him at the time seeing that by then he had come to regard himself as an erotic opportunist. It is true he has often been exactly that, and he has never had moral scruples about making love to a boy of fourteen if it is on offer, as it quite often has been. But in this instance it was Philip who got in the way. Jayjay’s absurd commitment to that beautiful figment had inhibited him from having an affair with this flesh-and-blood boy, as it still does. Apart from that, the blunt fact is that he had never found Adelio physically attractive enough. This was partly by corrosive comparison with Philip but mostly because he had spent so much time with Adelio over the previous three years that the boy had come to feel very like a surrogate son, and the incest taboo had fatally compromised most potential for erotic possibility. There is a limit to how often one can console a crying child, or stop the car to let him sick up an overdose of ice cream, or make sure he’s not going to get sunburned on the beach, without turning slightly into a parent. Jayjay is more than a little surprised that Adelio hadn’t felt the same way about him, actually. Now he suddenly realises that something erotic is still what Adelio wants: that in fact he is in love with Jayjay and always has been and only this can explain those peculiar letters of his swerving between confession and
concealment. Jayjay is astonished at his own denseness in not having perceived this years ago.

‘But I do love you, Adelio,’ he tells him, not untruthfully, and sees that mournful face light up all too briefly.

*

– I left Italy and drifted hither and yon, earning a good living as a consultant, an impostor, as much else besides. This went on for years. Adelio and I still wrote to one another and now and then I came to visit him in this house, which eventually his aunt and uncle left him. He promptly re-named it Il Ghibli. The
ghibli,
of course, is the harsh Saharan wind that blows up from the south in Libya. Adelio explained this choice of name by saying he remembered his father talking about it when on leave from Tripolitania. He said the wind was feared and hated by Europeans because it produced oven-hot, overcast and dust-laden conditions that often lasted several days. Evidently Adelio wanted a name for his house that would remind him of the force of nature that had made life hell for his father and others like him who had finally been driven out of North Africa altogether. He also liked the sound of the word and the way it looked when written as well as the touch of the exotic which it brought to a traditional farmhouse in the Valle di Chio’s provincial seclusion.