The American (3 page)

For me, France is a country of provincial banality, a land where patriotism flowers only to hide the bloodied earth of revolution, where history was begun at the Bastille by a horde of peasants running amok with pitchforks, decapitating their betters because they were just that. Before the Revolution, the French insist in their clipped accent, with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders meant to disarm contradiction, there was only poverty and aristocracy. Now . . . the shoulders shrug again and a jutting chin points to the dubious grandeur of France. The truth is they have now a poverty of spirit and an aristocracy of politicians. Italy is different. Italy is romance.

I like it here. The wine is good, the sun hot, the people accept their past and do not crow about it. The women are soft, slow lovers – at least, Clara is; Dindina is more anxious – and the men enjoy a good life. There is no poverty of the soul. Everyone is rich of spirit. The civil servants keep the streets clean, keep the traffic moving, keep the trains running and the water flowing in the taps. The
carabinieri
and the
polizia
fight the criminals, after a fashion, and the
polizia stradale
keeps the speed on the autostrada down. Taxes are collected with only a modicum of thoroughness. In the meantime, the people live, drink wine, earn money, spend money and let the world turn.

Italy is the Land of Laissez-faire, a bucolic anarchy governed by wine and the connivances of various loves – of good food, of sex, of liberty, of devil-may-care, of take-it-or-leave-it – above all, of a love of life. The national motto of Italy should be
senza formalità
or
non interferenza
.

Let me tell you a tale. The authorities in Rome wanted to catch tax dodgers – not as in England where they seek out the meanest evader of pennies, hounding him until his dues are settled. No, they wanted only the Caesars of the State Swindlers, the Emperors of Elusion. To catch them they set no paltry traps in banks, no covert studies of stocks and shares transactions. They sent a team of men around the marinas and harbours of Italy checking on the registration of every yacht over twenty metres. There was a wonderful Mediterranean logic at work: under twenty metres, and the yacht was a rich man’s plaything; over, and it was a super-indulgence of the truly rich. They found one hundred and sixty-seven yachts the owners of which were utterly unknown to the authorities – no tax records, no state benefit records, in some cases no birth certificates. Not even in Sicily. Not even in Sardinia.

Did they find these men? Did they pay up the owed billions of illicit lire? Who can tell? It is just a fairy story.

For me, no better place could exist. I could stay here for ever, quite possibly, undiscovered like an Etruscan tomb disguised as a culvert on the side of the Via Appia. So long as I don’t buy a yacht over twenty metres long and keep it at Capri. No chance of that now. Besides, had I wanted such a toy, I should have bought it long ago.

Today, the courtyard is as ever cool. It is like a vault the roof of which has caved in, so the sky might peer down and bear witness to what little dramas are unfolding therein.

Some say a nobleman was murdered by the fountain in the centre, that every year on the anniversary of his assassination, the water flows pink. Others tell me the courtyard was the scene of the murder of a Socialist in the Mussolini years. Whether the water is pink from blood, from the nobleman’s reputation (so they say) of always dressing in the pink of fashion or because the Socialist was only moderately leftist, I cannot tell. Perhaps a saint lived here and they have all got it wrong. So much for history.

The flagstones are buff-coloured, as if worn from centuries of scrubbing and stoning. The fountain, which dribbles coolly through a necklace of pendant moss and algæ, the drips resonant in the cavern of the yard, is of marble shot through with black veins. It is as if the ageing building has contracted varicose veins in its heart. For the fountain is the heart of the building. Within it stands the figure of a girl bedecked in a toga and holding a clam shell from which the water falls, delivered by a two-and-a-quarter-millimetre-diameter pipe made of bronze. This girl is not fashioned of marble but of alabaster. Looking at her, I wonder if it is the water or her skin which cools our building.

Doorways face the fountain, slatted shutters look down upon it, balconies lean over it. On the hottest day, it keeps the building moist and cool, the drip-drip of water never ceasing, flowing through a nick cut in the marble on to the flags, disappearing down an iron grid from beneath which sprouts a frond of aquatic fern.

In winter, with the mountains capped with snow, the alleyways of the town icy underfoot, the fountain tries to freeze. Yet it cannot. No matter how still and cold the air, no matter how long the icicles suspended from the maiden’s shell, the water still drips, drips, drips.

No one turns the fountain on. There is no electric pump or similar device. The water seeps from deep in the earth, as if the building were erected upon a wound in the soil.

Beyond the fountain is the heavy wooden door leading into the alley, the
vialetto
. It is a narrow passageway through the buildings with two right-angled corners in it. Once, it was a garden walk. Or so Signora Prasca claims. She would have it on the authority of her grandmother that the house was surrounded by gardens in the seventeenth century and that the alleyway follows the line of the walk through the arbour. Hence
vialetto
rather than
vicolo
or
passaggio
. I say it is bunkum. The buildings around are contemporary with this one. There were never any gardens in the old quarter, only courtyards where noblemen and Socialists were stabbed in the shadows.

To one side of the fountain is the start of the steep stone steps which run up to the fourth floor where I live, one flight per side of the square court. They are worn in the centre. Signora Prasca walks at the sides, especially if it is raining and the steps are wet. A leaky gutter dribbles water on to the second flight. No one fixes it. I shall not. It is not my role to alter petty histories, to repair the guttering and cause the steps to last a hundred years more. That is what most Englishmen would do. I do not want them to think of me as necessarily English. I am concerned with greater affairs.

At each storey there is a landing, a balcony open to the courtyard, the square of sky, but otherwise unseen by anyone save the inhabitants and their respective gods.

The walls are painted the colour of
café au lait
, the finials of the columns of the balconies touched off in white distemper which is peeling. I am told the plaster cracks every winter with the first snow on the mountains, as reliable as the most expensive barometer. All the shutters are of varnished wood – beech, to judge by their colour. An unusual wood for shutters in Italy.

I like the building. I was attracted to it as soon as I heard the fountain trickle and was told of the assassinations. It was appropriate. I had no option but to rent the fourth-floor apartment on a long lease, six months’ rental paid in advance. I have always believed in fate. There is no such thing as coincidence. My customers will confirm this opinion.

I have no truly close friends: such friends can be dangerous. They know too much, become too involved in one’s well-being, take too much of an interest in how one is, where one has been, where one is going. They are like wives but without the suspicion: still, they are curious, and curiosity I can do without. I cannot afford to take the risk. Instead, I have acquaintances. Some are closer than others and I allow them to look over the outer ramparts of my existence, yet none are what are generally termed close friends.

They know me: more exactly, they know of me. A few know in which quarter of the town I live but none have entered my eyrie: entrance to my present abode is reserved only for a very select group of professional visitors.

Several have approached to within a hundred metres and discovered me coming or going: I have greeted them with smiles and bonhomie, suggested it is time to quit work. The sun is high. A bottle of wine, perhaps? We have gone to the bar – the one in the Piazza di S Teresa, or the other in the Piazza Conca d’Oro, say – and I have talked of
Polyommatus bellargus, P. anteros
and
P. dorylas
and the delicate blue of their wings, of the latest government scandal from Rome or Milan, of the chamois-like abilities of my little Citroën on the mountain roads. I call the car
il camoscio
, to everyone’s humour. Only a foreigner, probably an Englishman and an eccentric, would give his automobile a name.

Duilio is one of my acquaintances. He is, he announces with disarming modesty, a plumber: in truth, he is a wealthy entrepreneur of pipes and ducts. His company builds sewers, underground conduits, water-catchment drains and, of late, has branched out into avalanche barriers. He is a merry man with a bacchanalian love of good wines. His wife, Francesca, is a jolly, rotund woman who never ceases to smile. She smiles in her sleep, Duilio claims, and he winks obscenely to hint at the cause thereof.

We met when first he came to survey the gutter, as a friend of a friend of Signora Prasca. It was hoped one of his men would see to the job in an off day, for cash. We fell to talking – Duilio speaks some English but better French – and went to the bar. The gutter was not repaired but no one seemed to care. Friendship can be forged over a handyman’s task, not broken by it. Then, some weeks later, I was invited to his house to try his wine. It was an honour.

Duilio and Francesca have several homes: one by the sea, one in the mountains, an apartment in Rome for business and, perhaps, the dalliances with which Italian men fill their extramarital hours. Their mountain home is set in vineyards and apricot orchards about fifteen kilometres from the town, higher up the valley. It is just too high for olives, which is a shame: there are few greater luxuries in the world than lazing a long afternoon under the scant shade of an olive grove, the sunlight pricking through the branches and the roots of the trees digging into one’s daydreams like fingers into dough.

The house is a three-storey modern building on the site of a Roman cistern, appropriate for a man who constructs drainage systems: Duilio laughs at this irony.

He is, he states, keeping up with the tradition of the land, restoring the irrigation channels in the orchards. He, too, wants to leave his mark on history.

He makes his own wine: it is red, light red, the grapes Montepulciano. The house has no wine cellar. Instead a cavernous garage suffices, the rear as dark and musty as any cave, and as mysterious. Behind a breeze-block wall, behind shelves of small-bore piping and pump spares, massive wrenches and tube-cutting machines, boxes of faucets and valves, is the wine. It is covered in cement dust, plaster and bat shit. To reach a particular shelf, Duilio has to stand upon the hood of his brand-new Mercedes. Reaching over, he wheezes with the effort. He is not a well man. It is the wine.

‘
Voilà!
’ he declaims, then relies upon his weak command of English in honour of his guest. ‘This is a fine wine.’ He is as proud as a father of his son, of a daughter wed above her station. ‘I make it.’

He slaps the bottle as if it were a whore’s buttocks. ‘She is good.’

He wipes the neck of the bottle in the cleft of his elbow, the grey dust staining his flesh. From between a box of washers and a crate of tins of machine oil he produces a corkscrew, the bottle opening with a tiny explosion like a high-velocity round leaving a silencer. He pours the wine into two glasses on the table and we sit, waiting for it to warm in the sun. Lizards scuttle over the blinding white earth of the driveway, rustle in the dry thistles and grass beneath the swelling apricots.

‘
Alla salute!
’

Like a true connoisseur, he sips and washes the wine around his mouth, squeezing a drop between his lips and swallowing slowly.

‘She is good,’ he declares again. ‘You think?’

In Italy, anything worth having appears to be feminine: a good car, a good wine, a good salami, a good book and a good woman.

‘Yes,’ I agree.

If the wine were a woman, I say, she would be young and sexy. Her kisses would tear your heart out. Her hands would revive the limpest old man into a stud of Herculean proportions. Stallions would stampede with envy. Her eyes would beg for love.

‘Like blood,’ Duilio says. ‘Like Italian blood. Good red.’

I nod at the thought of blood and history. I should be back at my work. I take my leave and reluctantly accept a gift of a bottle of this unlabelled grape blood. Receiving it places me at a disadvantage. A man who receives wine from an acquaintance risks the development of friendship and, as I say, I want no friendship for it brings with it perils.

*

Permit me to give you a word of advice, whoever you are. Do not attempt to find me.

I have hidden in the crowds all my life. Another face, as anonymous as a sparrow, as undistinguishable from the next man as a pebble on a beach. I may be standing next to you at the airport check-in, at the bus stop, in the supermarket queue. I may be the old man sleeping rough under the railway bridge of any European city. I may be the old buffer propping up the bar in a rural English pub. I may be the pompous old bastard driving an open Roller – a white Corniche, say – down the autobahn with a girl a third of my age at my side, her breasts moulded under her T-shirt and her skirt hitched high up her tanned and endless thighs. I may be the corpse on the mortuary slab, the derelict without a name, without a home, without a single mourner at the maw of a pauper’s grave. You cannot know.

Ignore the apparent clues. Italy is a big country and ideal for hiding in.

But Piazza di S Teresa, you think, where there is a bar owned by one Luigi. Signora Prasca, you think. Duilio the millionaire sewerman and Francesca, you think. Clara and Dindina. A good sleuth could track these down, put one and two together and make four. Search the tax records for a spinster or widow Prasca, the police computers for two whores called Clara and Dindina in the same bordello, the lists of the Italian Sewer Manufacturers’ Directory. Look for every Piazza di S Teresa with a bar in it close to an alleyway with two right-angled bends and pretentiously called a
vialetto
.