Loving Monsters (36 page)

– As for Adelio himself, he became more and more reclusive and bookish. I don’t know that he ever earned what you would call a living, but in those days you could just about survive if you were a
signore.
Thanks to Claudio’s managing the farm, as well as to the system of
mezzadria
,
Adelio could subsist quite nicely on half the produce. He had a local reputation for being abstemious and bone-thin but it never extended to his being considered mean. People around here still speak of him as having been very polite and vague and sad, saying little but gazing long and earnestly at things with those wounded, shadowed eyes. The inspector of schools for the region, a Castiglionese who knew him well, once told me Adelio reminded him of the poet Leopardi. Not a hunchback, of course, but having a mind sunk in melancholia that verged on anguish. He
read as he walked, which in these parts is guaranteed to get you noticed as both eccentric and intellectual. Nobody who met him, said the inspector, came away without speculating on the origins of such pain and what it might take to alleviate it. The gossip went that Adelio showed no particular inclination towards women or men, so anything in the line of domestic contentment seemed unlikely. He seldom saw his mother and appeared to rely on her for nothing, not even money. I can admit now that I used to give him money whenever I came here and would send it if ever he asked for it, which happened only two or three times.

– And then one day in 1977 the news came that he was dead. Not suicide, which I think everybody had half expected, but a heart attack. He was fifty-one. Claudio found him sitting in a cane chair in a little summerhouse that fell down years ago, stone dead. Strangely enough he was reading Leopardi’s
Zibaldone,
which was open on his lap. I would love to know which of the poet’s jottings accompanied him out of this world but of course the book got closed and Claudio has no idea. It was a great shock but an even greater one to discover that Adelio had left Il Ghibli to me. And that is how I came to inherit this house, together with Claudio and Marcella. It had never occurred to me that Adelio had anything to leave, let alone that he might leave it to me. I had even forgotten he owned the house. There was no explanation, no letter. His death was too sudden.

– I’m afraid Mirella never forgave me. She outlived him and died only about ten years ago having made it quite clear that I really had every moral obligation to pass the house straight on to her. By then I wasn’t badly off and since I hadn’t budgeted on getting Il Ghibli I could easily have afforded to do without it, especially at the time when the entire place probably wouldn’t have fetched fifteen thousand pounds. Had Adelio’s sister Anna been on her beam ends I might well have given it to her, but she had long since married a Florentine industrialist and had absolutely no need for yet another house. And if Renzo had still been around I might even have considered passing it on to him.
But he had followed his beloved King Faroukh into exile in 1952 and had completely vanished. So I admit it was with a certain malicious pleasure that I left Mirella stewing in Rigutino and moved into Il Ghibli myself. She, incidentally, clung to her old allegiances to the end. In the sixties and seventies she used to meet Giorgio Almirante, the boss of MSI, the Fascist party, whenever he came to Montecchio for reunions with the local faithful. I suppose they brought out the party regalia and sang all the old songs together. But as I think I told you, her politics were not why I disliked Mirella.

– And now there’s only Anna left, and I haven’t seen her in years. Poor Adelio! I’ve found myself dwelling on him a lot recently, what with having to tell you about him. I used to think his was a tragic, wasted life, but on the threshold of my own death I no longer think in such terms. I am sorry for his unhappiness but I don’t believe I could have done much to lighten it even had I moved in with him. Not that those days were the ideal time, nor the Valle di Chio the ideal place for a ménage of that sort, though doubtless we would have got by. There are much odder domestic arrangements around here hidden away behind tall fields of sunflowers. But I think by then he was beyond being assuaged like that and it wasn’t what I wanted anyway so it could never have succeeded. And there you have it. –

You were happy to move here?

– Yes. I’d reached the stage of having travelled enough and began to hanker for somewhere fairly permanent. –

Somewhere to hang your hat and display Lady Amelia’s dildo?

– Exactly. I knew I couldn’t live in England. I was living in Morocco at the time and suddenly Il Ghibli was presented to me on a plate, as it were. Since I already spoke Italian and knew the house it seemed the natural thing to do. –

*

This was the last coherent session I ever had with Jayjay. His condition worsened rapidly within a matter of days and with it came a degree of weakness that from then on confined him to bed.
There remain the notes I made after visiting him at Il Ghibli and thereafter in Arezzo hospital on his last morning. I am particularly glad I took them; for although by then he had lost interest in his biography as such, several of his observations and phrases were vintage Jayjay and showed that he was never less than his old sharp self right up to the instant of dissolution. He only once made any further reference to Margaret Thatcher, for example: a throwaway observation that she, like many politicians who acquired convictions, had committed intellectual suicide by lying down directly in the path of a train of thought that was travelling on a branch line.

Certain other questions remained glaringly unanswered, such as the circumstances surrounding his apparent familiarity with various protagonists of the Vietnam peace talks in the late 1960s, notably Henry Kissinger. It turned out that Kissinger’s framed portrait had vanished from Il Ghibli’s downstairs washroom for no more sinister reason than that Marcella had smashed it while dusting and not for any Soviet-style editing by Jayjay of his own past. Henry had not fallen from favour, merely from a lavatory shelf, and was waiting to have his glass replaced. Piecing together assorted references from several of our previous sessions, it seems to me likeliest that Jayjay’s connection would have come via an old friend of his from SOE days in Cairo. By then this man was a member of the British Advisory Commission to Vietnam whose head, the counter-insurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson, was adviser to Presidents Diem, Thieu, Johnson and Nixon. Thompson’s advice was sought and heeded since he had been credited with much of the British success in handling the Communist insurgency in Malaya in the late forties and early fifties. It now seems clear that the Far East had become one of Jayjay’s stamping-grounds in the sixties although he never got around to talking about it – and this despite knowing of my own researches there. Crafty old thing. Or just discreet. However, he did once give a very funny description of crashing some high-level talks in South America, and he may well have employed a
similar technique to get into the Manila Summit in October 1966. (It may be recalled that it was Jayjay’s early account of that Summit which had bored me into accusing him of name-dropping).

In the case of the Rio Accords his participation seems to have involved nothing more calculated than his happening to walk past the British Embassy just as a diplomat chum was driving out in the second-best Rolls. The friend automatically assumed that Jayjay was on his way to the same talks in some advisory capacity or other and offered him a lift. Quick-thinking as usual, Jayjay promptly ditched his meeting with the Bank of London and South America and simply strolled into the talks with his diplomat friend on the grounds that it would be more interesting than a bunch of bankers. To an impostor of his brass face it would have been a simple matter to have dropped a few names, deftly fudged his exact capacity and eased himself into the proceedings. Like his boyhood mentor at the Lloyds funeral wake he knew that at certain functions nobody is asked for their invitation, nobody knows absolutely everybody else, and everyone assumes those they don’t recognise must be there for bona fide reasons. Besides, he had a distinguished air of exactly the right kind. No security guard was ever going to stop and question a man looking like Jayjay who emerged from a Rolls-Royce with CD plates in amiable conversation with a delegate, certainly not in those days.

The plausibility (as well as absurdity) of this was further strengthened for me by a memory of my own of having once seen a newspaper report of just such an impostor who was a regular attender at diplomatic functions and parties without having the remotest business to be there. Like Jayjay he had neatly brushed greying hair and impeccable clothes and manners and had already gatecrashed so many of these affairs around the world that several presidents knew him by sight and greeted him, although they seemed a little hazy about his name and exact status. It now occurs to me that this person may very well have been Jayjay himself. It was precisely these activities that Jayjay never enlarged on, having instead accorded undue attention to his life up to the age of thirty.
It is too late now to remedy this lack but not at all too late for regrets. Personally, I would have preferred a vignette of Jayjay being introduced to Henry Kissinger to one of an orgy on a houseboat in Cairo, but there we are. An account of Jayjay hurriedly improvising theories of counter-insurgency would surely have been entertaining, while the picture of the boy from Eltham telling Lyndon Johnson or Harold Holt or Ferdinand Marcos that the Strategic Hamlets Program was just what South Vietnam needed is irresistible. Alas, he chose not to tell the story, put off no doubt by my assumption that he was trying to impress me: another black mark for the biographer. On the other hand I will admit that a description of any one such incident would suffice for us to get the general picture. A lengthy series of stories of how he had bamboozled his way around the diplomatic world for thirty years would soon become wearisome, its only interest lying in the names he dropped. Maybe after all he did well to stick to what he thought was important and leave us to fill in the blanks imaginatively. And maybe after all his biographer can be excused this particular blot. Many a famous portrait painter has painted only his subject’s most suggestive and revealing features while leaving the rest sketchy or entirely blank.

My remaining visits to Il Ghibli before he was finally hospitalised were marked with that haunted fortitude that Jayjay, with his loathing of the mawkish, managed to infuse into the terminal scene. I can see him now, lying in his bed, very gaunt and with his eyes closed, listening to a matronly friend of Marcella’s urging him that he had only to say the word and she would send a priest straight round: ‘not the usual
tronnecone
but a good man with no cant to him. It’s never too early for the sacraments.’ Jayjay elected not to betray by the flicker of an eyelid that he had heard but as soon as the door had closed behind her he snapped both eyes open and said ‘There are no sacraments, there are only contracts. And I’ve never signed. Perhaps you’d better tell her that, James.’ It was reassuring that even when he was waning fast the secular was still dancing doggedly within him.

The last memory I have of him in that house is of coming into his bedroom and finding Marcella’s boy Dario sitting on his bed, laughing. Heaven knows what remains of strength it required for Jayjay to be propped up on his pillows, talking animatedly to him while wearing Dario’s bright orange baseball cap. It was many sizes too small for him and its bill jutted up at the raftered ceiling with jaunty defiance while in its shadow the dinosaur-chick eyes sparkled with flirtatious energy. Perhaps death in its camouflage of children’s clothing was not wholly disagreeable.

I suppose I don’t regret the tone with which this book opens quite enough to modify it. After all, it duly reflects the change in a relationship that had begun with a polite conversation in a Co-op and developed into that invasive intimacy which takes the place of friendship between biographer and subject. By the end the brittle, even harsh, jocularity between us had become a game: a defence against too obvious a display of affection and concern, as well as for me a way of defusing Jayjay’s undoubted ability to irritate me. How often had he pounced at an unguarded moment of mine when I let slip an unwonted sentimentality, and I had bided my time before being able to retaliate! And then at the end: how was I to have guessed the instant his mortal darkening had had its onset? Unknowing that this was to be the deathbed scene, we took our last leave of each other in Arezzo hospital through the tears of a coughing fit, my stupid bouquet of glandular great blooms no longer a sharp little jab at his snobbishness but the blunt instrument of his demise. Maybe.

Seven months passed. Something about today’s January scud
past the window (crinkled brown oak leaves driven horizontally by a freezing
tramontana
)
makes it easier to admit to having gone back to Jayjay’s grave a scant fortnight after his funeral last year. Is how we visit a friend’s grave the only permissible way nowadays of visualising ourselves buried? Of allowing that this last tableau of a one and only existence ought to express something of private weight? I suspect this ancient urge is becoming a matter for stealth, almost for shame, in Protestant England.

There had been a surprising attendance at the funeral service in Montecchio, given that it was a May morning of such aching beauty that to waste it on church and death seemed downright perverse. Yet the turnout showed that although Jayjay had been a foreigner with no family of his own he was well loved in the locality. According to everyone I spoke to he had been a
gentiluomo
in a world where the type is an increasing rarity. Most remarked on his warmth and sunniness, and maybe it was this quality that made the weather less inappropriate after all. Claudio and Marcella were there, of course, together with Dario and his two sisters. I would have thought that at not quite twelve the boy could easily have begged off, but according to his mother he had insisted on going. Of us all it was Dario who showed the most signs of grief, and he was now and then overcome with fits of the weeping that nearly exhausts itself for a minute’s respite until it discovers with a fresh shock the permanent reality of loss. I knew very well that out of the mourners that day it was Dario’s presence that would most have touched Jayjay, the one he would have valued above all.

I am not quite sure what made me visit his grave a couple of weeks afterwards. For all that the funeral service was decently conducted there had been a certain perfunctoriness about the proceedings, as so often these days when basically secular people find themselves obliged to attend a religious rite. They are at once impatient, over-solemn and lost; and sensing their restiveness the priest becomes anxious to hurry things along. And so it went with Jayjay. No grand Latin cadences with their two thousand years of
echoes, of course – not since Vatican II and Roncalli’s policy of
aggiornamento,
of being up-to-date. My friend was hustled into the earth with a brisk rattle of Italian, the priest on autopilot.

What did it matter, you ask, seeing that Jayjay and I were both godless? But it had less to do with God than with the having-been-human, with the shortly-to-cease. Something was left unsatisfied. The peculiar dignity he had possessed, sitting at the table on Il Ghibli’s terrace and talking to the smoke pouring up from Claudio’s prunings or else addressing the summit of Sant’ Egidio – this demanded better acknowledgement now he was himself less than smoke. No doubt it would have been even worse had we lived in Britain. He once remarked that the land that had given both of us birth and which until so recently had prided itself on the restrained gravity of its great public obsequies could no longer understand or bear the idea of dignity, mistaking it for pompousness or else for depression, something to be either mocked or counselled away. So I duly found myself there on a blue May afternoon, an atheist foreigner in the cemetery at Montecchio standing by the grave of another atheist foreigner. I had chosen the moment with some thought. At two o’clock in the afternoon the Montecchese would still be chatting in their kitchens or dozing. I would have the place to myself. No-one would come to replace flowers or votive candles for at least another two hours.

Jayjay’s new stone was glaring brash and nude. At that moment a Red Admiral alighted on it, hooked its feet into the incised ‘Jebb’, let the hot sunshine fall on its enamelled wings and began stropping its antennae. Jayjay would have liked that, too. There were several early butterflies around, attracted by the sprays of fresh flowers tucked into the rows of marble niches. From behind these flowers peered oval photographs of the dear departed, smiling as though still claiming the right to be undead. To my intense surprise I began hearing in my head passages from the Order for the Burial of the Dead from the 1662 English Prayer Book. Stuff heard and learned in childhood, of course, back in the days before
well-meaning philistines had bowdlerised the Church’s central texts: part of my generation’s cultural heritage, a generation that was probably the last to have grown up with it and its robust cadences as part of their basic education. (I recalled Jayjay lamenting this once. ‘Never mind the bloody meaning,’ he had said. ‘It’s the
sound
that matters. If you can make something sound weighty and beautiful, it becomes so.’ At that moment I’d felt close to him.) And now here I was beside his grave, hearing phrases I had scarcely thought about in thirty years as if reading them from tablets. The preening butterfly glowed and sopped up the sun. The words took on a magnificence divorced from mere meaning. It was the measured sonorousness of spells, where the careful sequence of sound and cadence conjures solemnity until the day stands still and the voice becomes small and the awesome strangeness of living and dying bulks huge in the air all around. Nothing else exists. It eclipses castles and cypresses and blue horizons. It freezes the snake of dusty road on the distant valley floor with its trembling flare of sunlight off a car’s chrome or windscreen. It silences the doves in their spring rut. Gradually meaning distils back out of sounds. This meaning has no connection with modern reassurance. It brushes aside sympathy and counselling. There is no truck with the consolations of ghosts or cryogenics. The meaning is flinty, uncomfortable. The sonorities are not after all a gorgeous diversion. They are a stern seventeenth-century confrontation with the irreducible. You are scarcely more alive than him you mourn, they say. He is now permanent, you are still temporary. You are here by the skin of your teeth, by the grace of God. You have no rights, you have only your wrongs. Prepare
now
to follow, because if you can stop your silly capering for a moment you will perceive there is no alternative and certainly nothing of greater importance. (Bury your head in your hands. Feel the skull, how it yearns to emerge.)

Beware, I tell myself with a start. Don’t become too carried away by all this eschatology, these solemnities. You should heed Jayjay’s own warning which he once expressed in his usual forceful manner:
‘Just remember, behind all dignity something ignominious is forever capering, flashing its balls.’ Very well, then, I will think more about my friend than about his being dead. I will ponder certain aspects of his character that I still need to clarify, in particular the two words he so often used to describe himself: impostor and lover. In his case they are intricately connected. At one level, of course, there was nothing of the impostor about Jayjay, who was at all times every inch himself. He knew very well who he was. Even when mischievously affecting a role he was still the same person using the same old wit and charm to try on the part for size. I admit his repeated assertion of being an impostor used to irritate me if only (as I said earlier) because it had the same effect as the Cretan asserting that all Cretans were liars. Finally, though, he was not claiming to be an impostor in order to deceive other people. It was not to do with deception but with
concealment.
He did it to hide himself, to dissemble, and it had congealed into a lifetime’s habit. What he had concealed almost until the end, even from his own biographer, was of course the true nature of his love. (Neither pathetic nor predatory, he had cheerfully observed of himself not long before he died: ‘Instead of being a raving sociopath I am merely a harmless pervert with charming manners.
That’s
the advantage of a decent upbringing.’) Oh how I miss that sardonic accuracy!

And suddenly, standing there in the little
camposanto,
I am struck belatedly with one of those insights whose sheer force guarantees their correctness. I had just been writing up the account of Jayjay’s death in Arezzo hospital and had duly noted down the last words I ever heard him speak. In the midst of racking coughs he had seemed to gesture weakly at his nurse with an empty beaker, croaking ‘Fill it. Oh,
fill
it!
’ Yet he had spoken in English, a language the bilingual Jayjay would never have used to an Italian nurse, especially one from whom he urgently needed something. I now had no doubt that my friend’s last thought and cry had been for Philip, for the real but imaginary lover who had looked at a notice board one long-lost autumn day and who in some sense had been living with him ever since.

The beloveds who elude us; the beloveds who were, and are not; the beloveds who never were. What are these else but great works of the imagination, a lifetime’s solid stonework? We build them like lighthouses on our eroding headlands: solid, reassuring, futile, sending out the same message over and over in all weathers to which no answer comes or is any longer expected. Sometimes they even coexist with flesh-and-blood partners, standing behind and occasionally outshining them until the ordinarily loved are reduced to mere silhouettes. That secret love of Jayjay’s which endured for almost seventy years and went unknown to all but him: what was it? A possible answer came to me one afternoon while idly watching the bees fly back from the fields of sunflowers far below. They were labouring up from a storm zone into bright sunlight. Behind them in the distance the fields they had left were being thrashed by dark-grey columns of rain under a purple sky and a dilute rainbow was struggling to emerge. It reminded me banally of how Wordsworth’s heart had famously leapt up when as a child he beheld a rainbow, and he had trusted it would still leap when he was old. At once I wondered if that was not exactly what Jayjay had meant when he spoke of Philip’s bolt of lightning and the ‘poetry’ of his enduring presence it had sparked in him. Once the rainbow had done its work Wordsworth need never have seen another. Thereafter it suffused every landscape he surveyed. Likewise, once Jayjay had bidden farewell to Philip on a ship’s deck in Suez the boy might as well have died. Whatever had flashed so marvellously in him had gone on shining for Jayjay with the lingering voltage of the original
coup
de
foudre.

What was this if not a case of the commonplace transfigured? We have entered the terrain of burning bushes. Those who have never known a similar angel alight and scald a lifetime’s sensibility should hold their tongue. In their easy philistinism they cry, ‘A
rainbow
? How limp! How conventional!’ or ‘A
boy
?
How creepy!’, seeing only the outward guise in which an arrested instant chooses to robe itself. Rainbows and boys are simply items on the endless list of agents which for somebody somewhere have been for a heart-stopping
moment inhabited by a power not their own. The transcendence blazed briefly and was gone without ever leaving the mind, and thereafter everything appeared differently lit, fractionally duller of shade. And those who suffer this can do nothing but look back as Wordsworth and Jayjay did with the sad certainty that it will never again happen with such intensity. Angels come but once in a single guise. Their residues are ruin and devotion and sometimes poetry of varying merit. Nothing for it but to make do.

Maybe poets can cope with it better. Maybe they can use their skill to spread scented fragments of that original vision throughout a lifetime’s work as sparingly as a cook shaves a truffle. But when it happens to the life of the affections it leaves behind the ashes of dissatisfaction. The ghost can never be completely exorcised. Surely this was why Berlioz had to track down Estelle, his
stella
montis,
when she was fifty-one, and also why Jayjay put private detectives on to tracing Philip when he, too, was in his mid-fifties. It was as if by forcibly dressing their obsessions in the ageing flesh of physical reality they might finally relegate them to the past. But in Jayjay’s case, at least, it didn’t work. Maybe for those struck young there never can be complete recovery, and a life grows around its wound like an oak around a lightning-sear. In that sense it was not an old man they had screwed up in Jayjay’s Italian coffin but an adolescent who had lately been roaming the streets of the pre-war Eltham he so vividly recalled. It must have been this that made it seem as though Jayjay, no matter his wanderings, had always been concentrated on his sixteenth year. By contrast I felt my own lifetime spread thinly and ineffectually over the entire planet.

Yet to describe him as scarred but stoical is too sentimental. Jayjay’s was, after all, only one more of the countless ways of being briefly alive, and my memories are overwhelmingly of a man who turned things to advantage and contrived to live with energy and gusto. He may never have loved certain people as they would have wished, and the one person may never have returned his devotion, but these are commonplaces of human existence. Other
pleasures still extend on all sides like branches heavy with summer fruit, and these Jayjay had abundantly plucked.