Loving Monsters (37 page)

From time to time I still kick myself for not having guessed the true nature of the man’s secret, for having been so beguiled by my own ghosts. Not failed derring-do, then, but
love.
He had as good as told me when he recounted the story of Captain W. E. Johns’s ‘secret love’ (Jayjay’s own words) for the lifelong partner to whom he was not married. At the time, of course, I was naively thinking in terms of a woman: a failed marriage about which Jayjay would tell me in due course. Yet with hindsight his inclinations had been obvious from the beginning. The only physical presences he ever described with any sort of precision or tenderness were those of boys. This was true even of the sex scenes he voyeuristically watched or took part in. Yet I had missed these things and tell myself most others would as well. Too straight? Too stupid? As Jayjay astutely knew, it was enough to scatter women with erotic promise about the narrative and no-one would look any further. I am sure he took a malicious pleasure in watching me painstakingly throwing myself off the scent time and time again. Nor can I take much reassurance from a farther reflection. If it was not on account of my war experience that he had felt kinship with me, what exactly was it that made him say I was the only possible writer he could have worked with?
Frère
or
semblable
?

Well. Maybe a biographer’s summing-up, no matter how inept, acts for him like some form of exorcism. I have begun to feel freer of my former subject. At least now I can return to my own life. I can go back to my Asian shore and pursue my investigations there without the sense of having left a project unfinished, of time running out. But it is a scant consolation that it took the death of my friend to make this possible. I was (and am) surprised that writing Jayjay’s life, a literary chore that had started so casually in Castiglion Fiorentino’s Co-op, should have turned out to be no chore at all but an experience that constantly made me stop in the middle of everyday tasks and reflect. Such moments occurred while brushing my teeth or as I watched my bees at the end of their gallant flight paths
wearily batting the air currents, laden with nectar, coming home. Our true affections, inscrutably hidden away, work and work, moved by an ordering and conventions not ours, responding as though to smells and sounds and light which arrive at an oblique angle to those of common day. It is no use hoping these uncommon loves will obey proprieties, still less the law. Outside, all sorts of miserable weathers may prevail. Inside, there is the slow build-up of a kind of sweetness. This, according to Jayjay, is part of the art. It is vital to say little and to know how little there is to say. Explanations are for those who think it matters to explain things. The only recourse is to live the one life, scrupulously dissembled, to which greater freedom accrues the more constrained it becomes. I realised that failed fathers, too, may live by this maxim.

I laid a hand on his warm headstone as I stood up and the Red Admiral that was still hanging from the letters of his name clapped its wings noiselessly and was gone in a flash of crimson and velvet. An old rogue, I heard myself think affectionately before at once correcting the thought. No, old rogues are a purely literary trope: colourful sinners we indulgently forgive in order to avoid the difficult commitment of actual love. And actual love was what I felt for Jayjay.

Since that afternoon I have twice been back to the cemetery. Perhaps after all he was right about my having been overcharged for the stone, and the quality was indeed slightly shoddy. Already I think I can detect a softening of the letters, a blunting of incised edges.

*

The weather has changed once more, the bitter wind has dropped and a general dampness rises as from the ghost of the huge marsh that in the days of the Renaissance still extended across the plain. Seen from above the whole valley is done up in creamy billows of mist. Alas, there is no longer need for me to go down. I still miss the morning sessions at Il Ghibli although I do visit Marcella and Claudio fairly regularly. In his will Jayjay behaved impeccably, leaving the house to Marcella. She and her family are considering moving into it and letting their old farm for
agriturismo,
a nice
potential source of income. La Valle may yet echo to the fractious sounds of foreigners on holiday. He also left decent sums of money in trust for Dario and his sisters. Everyone speaks of Jayjay with affection and respect, although when I concur I do so with a certain tinge of irony I have no doubt he fully intended. For what did he leave me but the remains of his old pornographic archive: two hundred and seventeen photographs ranging in subject from Nubian toddlers to the donkey trick (‘Our Donkey Is Changed Every Week For Reasons Of Fatigue!’) They are all of them quite unprintable. In addition there are seven brittle-looking reels of what I take to be August Moll-Ziemcke’s silent films. Two of them are 16 mm and the rest seem to be 9.5 mm. God knows how one could find a projector to take that size of stock these days but I have little incentive to view them anyway. I am in the awkward position that Jayjay undoubtedly calculated to a malicious nicety: the inheritor of a trove of material which is of historical, anthropological and erotic interest whose very ownership makes me liable to criminal proceedings of the most embarrassing kind. By the time this book is published I trust I shall have found a safe home for his dubious legacy.