The American Read online

  I was holed up in a banda in the grounds of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. A nondescript black man delivered the gun to me. Room service delivered the food. I worked for nine hours. It had to look good, look as if the rifle had been untampered with and the new barrel was the original. It was not difficult. I even distressed the metal to match the scratches.

  The same man drove me in a Jeep out into the bush beyond the Ngong Hills. I fired the rifle, checked the scoring on the bullets did not match the original and showed this to my companion. He nodded his approval. He was taciturn, silent and austere, but he knew what was required. The removed barrel we then propped on some stones, sealing the breach with a rubber cork. I poured hydrochloric acid down the muzzle and we waited for fifteen minutes. When it was poured out, the rifling was almost invisible. We repeated the process. Satisfied, he propped the barrel against a rock and ran over it with the vehicle. Then, as black men do when they want to make damn sure not even the ju-ju can do anything by way of revenge, he rammed the buckled barrel down an ant-bear hole.

  I was in Kenya for just sixty-one hours. The job worked out at a fraction under a thousand dollars an hour for the whole stay. In those days, that was very good money. All my expenses, including my air fare, were also met without demur.

  And I tasted wild honey.

  Whilst we were waiting for the acid to burn out the barrel, my companion—I never knew his name: he called himself Kamau which is to Nairobi what Dai Evans is to Newport—tipped his head to one side.

  ‘Listen!’ he exclaimed.

  I listened. I did not know for what: a snapping twig, perhaps, a diesel engine, a cocking lever?

  ‘You hear that?’ he murmured.

  ‘What?’ I hissed.

  I was growing alarmed. Dying is one thing: I have faced up to the inevitability all my life. Almost all of it. Yet I did not want to wind up in the hands of some African freedom fighters. They have a penchant for cutting personal bits off their victims before finally slashing the throat or poking a Kalashnikov into the nape of the neck and letting loose a short burst—short because ammunition was always precious in those guerrilla forces. Though I would not have any future use for any of the protuberances from which I should be divorced, I should like not to be parted from them whilst still sentient.

  ‘Honey guide. Is a bird who shows you the way to honey. He likes the baby bees but he can’t break the bee nest. A man has to do it for him. Or honey badger.’

  It was the longest communication my companion had uttered.

  When the smashed and burned-out barrel was safely down the ant-bear hole, we set off through the bush following a distinctive ‘witpurr, witpurr, witpurr’ call. The bird, when we caught up with it, was about the size of an English mistlethrush, buff brown with a flash of yellow on its wings.

  ‘What is the bird’s name?’ I enquired, expecting a Swahili word.

  ‘Victor,’ replied the African. ‘Listen. He call his name now we are near the bee nest.’

  Sure enough, the call was now a curt ‘victor, victor’, interspersed with a sound like a man rattling a box of matches.

  The hive was in a stunted tree, about eight feet from the ground. The African took from his pocket a Ronson gas cigarette lighter and, turning the flame up high, scorched the underside of the nest. It smouldered and smoke wafted upwards. The bees began to swarm. I kept well back. Buzzing lead is one thing, bees another.

  After a few minutes, the African threw several handfuls of dust at the nest and smashed it to the ground with a stick. He grabbed at it, shook it violently, tore a section off and walked swiftly away. The bees hovered in a cloud around the tree and the remnants of the nest on the ground. By the time my companion was back at my side, the bees were dispersing.

  ‘Stick your finger.’

  He thrust his forefinger into the comb and wiggled it about. He extracted it and sucked on it like a child with a lollipop. I did likewise.

  The honey was sweet, thick and smoky. It tasted of bush fires and the dust of the veldt. I dipped my finger again. It was so very good, so very original a flavour. I looked over my shoulder. The bird was ravaging the remains of the nest underneath the tree, oblivious of the bees which were now regrouping, its beak darting again and again into the hive.

  As we drove over the pitted, rock-strewn road, the African and I kept dipping into the nest. Within two hours, I was on a BOAC flight bound for—well, out of Kenya, anyway.

  So I go periodically to the Convento di Vallingegno. I brave the witches’ covens and the ghosts of the Gestapo. I brave also the climb up the walls to a first floor window. Once there, entry is simple: the windows are without frames, have never known wood or glass. To go in is to enter the fourteenth century.

  Once through the window, I am in a chamber beside which a balcony runs the length of this side of the monastery. The view is stupendous—twenty-five kilometres down the valley, down the way the Knights Templar went carrying gold and fame. And history. Much of it forgotten.

  The stairs down are stone, old and firm. The stillness is broken only by the breeze. Below is a chapel. It is here the witches come. The altar is made of loose blocks of stone jointed with weak lime mortar mixed with fragments of human bone. I found a finger-bone protruding from a crack upon my first visit.

  Behind the altar is a tall fresco, painted on the plaster. The weather, the succession of winter cold and summer heat over the centuries, has failed to bring it down. This might be a miracle. Who can tell?

  The fresco shows Mary Magdalene standing between a row of cypress trees on her left and palms on her right. The perspective is cock-eyed. Instead of diminishing in the distance, it narrows towards the foreground. Above is God. He is an old man with a crown upon his head. His arms are raised in benediction. From the back of the chapel, in the half-light, the fresco looks like the head of a goat. This is why the witches come, why the Gestapo came, why the monastic courtyard, overgrown with thistles and briars, is a maze of excavations.

  There is not an unpilfered tomb in the place. A tiny room in the cellar, into which I ventured once, squeezing through a narrow slit, is full of bones: the bones of monks dead of the plague, or old age, or piety, or sickness, or at the hands of the Inquisition. Leg-bones, arm-bones, ribs, vertebræ, hips, fingers, toes, some lower jaws and teeth—but no skulls: the room is devoid of skulls. They have been stolen by the magic ones.

  I am not here to steal from the dead. Only from the living. The wild honey.

  The mortar in the walls has crumbled and the stones lie upon each other like a vertical cliff of gap teeth. I watch the bees making for three or four cavities. The lowest is within reach. I push through the brush, thorns snatching at my jeans like tentacles of the dead. At the mouth of the nest is a smooth, yellow stalactite of beeswax.

  The bees ignore me. They do not know what is coming. I smear the wax with gunpowder, stuff some in the holes around the entrance to the hive. I step back and set a match to it. It hisses and spits like a damp firework. Clouds of dense blue smoke are given off. The bees come winging from the hive at speed, angry, confused, bewildered. Quickly, like an enemy pressing home the advantage, I tear a stone or two from the wall. Others tumble free. There, in the cavity, is the wedge of the comb. I pull at it. It snaps off the stone, breaks in half. I thrust it into a plastic bag and beat a retreat.

  In the Citroën, I transfer the comb to a large jar. Later, without giving the source thereof, I present a small section to Signora Prasca. She believes the beeswax will cure her rheumatism.

  Every midday, for an hour or two, the people of the town parade in the Corso Federico II. The colonnades are crowded with window-shoppers, tourists taking coffee and cakes, old women selling newspapers, office girls walking hand-in-hand and chattering like songbirds, old men discussing politics, young men discussing sex and rock music, couples discussing nothingnesses.

  In the centre of the Corso, forbidden to all traffic except buses and taxis, of which there are few at this hour, men walk, a
rm-in-arm, sometimes holding hands. This is not a town of queers, a den of queens, a goldmine for the quack with a cure for AIDS made of compounded apricot stones and quinine. This is Italy where men hold hands as they talk about their wives, mistresses, business successes and the failures of the government.

  I like to sit, sometimes, in one of the little coffee shops under the colonnades, a cappuccino and a pasta on the table, a newspaper in hand, and watch this world pass by. This is the show of the warm-up acts, the small performers upon the stage of life, the people for whom now is everything, for whom good wine is like a woman. I think of Duilio. They have no part to play other than that of building the atmosphere. They are the chorus, they are the crowd scene, they are the servants and grooms and soldiers who fill out the action by the wings. Meanwhile, mid-stage, the leading actors unravel the story. I am, I suppose, one of them. A minor one. I have a few lines to read, a few actions to make. They are slight, but they alter the course of the drama. Very soon, for instance, my visitor will return. Act Four must be drawing to a close. Act Five will soon begin.

  Clara is walking along the Corso. She is with a girl I have not seen before. A student, from the look of her, with long legs, long hair, long sleeves to her blouse, which pushes open as a bus slides by. They are hand in hand. The girl carries a black calfskin document case under her arm. Clara clutches three or four books, tied round with a leather strap. She might be a schoolgirl on her way to class. To look at her, one would not think she was screwing her way through college and with an old man who spends his hours clandestinely re-shaping a Socimi 821.

  She sees me, nods to her friend and they cross through the throng of boulevardiers.

  ‘My friend, Anna,’ she says. ‘This is my friend, Signor Farfalla.’

  They cease to hold hands and the girl offers hers to me. I half rise, fold my newspaper and accept her greeting.

  ‘How do you do?’

  ‘I am very well, thank you.’

  Anna speaks English. I am to be an impromptu English lesson, a practice session with the real thing. I do not mind. A man drinking coffee with two girls is less conspicuous than a man drinking coffee on his own, half-reading a newspaper.

  ‘Will you take a coffee with me?’ I invite them. ‘Prego.’ I indicate the empty chairs.

  ‘That would be very good,’ Clara says.

  She moves her chair to sit closer to me. Under the table, her knee presses against mine. Anna also moves her chair nearer to me, but to shift it out of the sun. There is no competition going on here.

  ‘Anna is learning English also,’ Clara says.

  ‘Have you been to England?’ I enquire.

  ‘No. I have not been to England,’ she replies, ‘only to France and then only to Monaco. But my father has a Rover car and I have a Burberry coat.’

  She is wealthy, this Anna. There is an air of well-being about her. She wears a Hermes wristwatch, the strap made of steel with interlinking H sections in rolled gold. Upon the little finger of her left hand she wears a gold ring set with a ruby. It matches her lipstick. She does not screw for the money, just for the fun.

  The waiter comes over. My cup is empty.

  ‘Due cappuccini e un caffè corretto,’ I order. I do not want wine but the grappa would revive me.

  He takes my empty cup and disappears into the interior of the shop.

  ‘See!’ Clara exclaims. ‘The book I have. I said so to you.’

  She turns her pile of books around upon the table and taps the topmost volume: it is the Penguin edition of An Unofficial Rose by Iris Murdoch.

  ‘Very good,’ I reply. ‘You will be very well-read. That is excellent.’

  I am genuinely pleased: it is good to see her using her money—my money—in positive ways, not injecting it in the alleys of the night or frittering it away on raucous music. She notices my pleasure and her smile is warm, almost loving.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ I ask of Anna.

  She is perplexed.

  ‘I am sorry . . .’

  It is time for me to play the teacher.

  ‘Dove abita?’ I help her.

  ‘Ah, yes!’ She smiles and her teeth are straight and white: even her mouth looks like money. ‘I live in the Via dell’ Argilla. Nearby to Clara.’

  I momentarily think of what else I might teach this girl should the chance arise. But it will not and, looking from one to the other, I believe Clara is the prettier of the two. Rich girls are a pain in the arse in the sack: Larry once told me so. He knew. A client of his was killed by one.

  ‘I see. But where do you come from? Where is your family home?’

  ‘My home? My home is in Milano,’ she replies, as if answering a question posed by a disconnected voice on a language cassette.

  The coffees arrive and Anna insists on paying for them. She takes a crocodile purse from her document case and pays with a high denomination note. We talk of inconsequentialities for fifteen minutes: the weather—I am British she assumes and therefore wish this to be a topic of intercourse—the town and what I think of it, the use of learning English. I understand her father is a millionaire leather dealer in Milan, a man in the world of fashion and women. Anna states she wishes to be a model in London: this is why she is here, in a two-bit university, studying the language.

  At last, they stand to go. Clara winks at me.

  ‘Perhaps we might have a drink together soon?’ she suggests. ‘I am free . . .’ she considers the crowded timetable of her life ‘. . . on Monday.’

  ‘Yes. I think that would be good. I shall see you then.’

  I, too, rise.

  ‘It was a delight to meet you, Anna. Arrivederci!’

  ‘Arrivederci, Signor Farfalla,’ Anna says.

  There is an unmistakable twinkle in her eye. Clara must have told her.

  It is warm tonight, the air balmy as a tropical island, the breeze the temperature of blood. In the morning, it rained: after noon, the clouds blew away over the mountains and the sun beat down from a sky laundered of impurities. Here, that does not imply the diesel soot of Rome, the factory grime of Turin and Milan, the concrete dust of Naples. The mountain rain has cleansed the atmosphere of the pollen of a million flowers, washed out the dust of slow moving horse carts and lazy tractors dragging shallow ploughs through the stony soil, neutralised the dull electricity of heavy heat to replace it with the sharp sparks of taintless warmth.

  When the rain came it did so with a Mediterranean vengeance. Here, rain is an Italian man who does not kiss hands and fawn like a Frenchman, or bow discreetly like an Englishman, keeping sex at bay, or get brazen like an American sailor on shore leave. Here, the rain is passionate. It does not fall in sheets like the tropic downpour or drizzle miserably like an English complaint, snivelling like a man with a blocked nose. It slants down in spears, iron rods of grey water which strike the earth and pockmark the dust, spread out like damp stars upon the dry cobblestones of the streets and the flagstones of the Piazza del Duomo. The earth, far from succumbing to the assault, rejoices in it. After a brief shower, one can hear the earth click and pop as it sucks its drink.

  Within minutes, leaves which were hanging drab in the haze of seething air are erect, their green hands held out, supplicating for more.

  After rain, there is a joy in the world. I share it. So much is rotten, is corruption, is fated to destruction. The rain seems to be a benediction, as if some law of nature had decided it is time for a baptism into reality.

  I sit in the loggia. The oil lamp remains unlit. I need no light, as you shall understand. Upon the table is a bottle of Moscato Rosa. One bottle and one tall, thin glass. In an English house, a woman would keep a single stemmed bloom in it. Beside it is a small earthenware pot and three thick slices of bread smeared with salted butter. For later.

  A dog begins to bark, somewhere outside the town, lost in the vineyards which approach the fragments of the fourteenth-century defensive wall still standing. It is a plaintive sound, rich in canine melancholy. A
nother dog, farther away, takes up the offer of conversation and they shout to each other like men calling across a valley. A third, in a courtyard of one of the buildings adjacent to my own, joins the night chorus with a hoarse, gruff woof which echoes and sounds less like a dog and more like an abusive drunk struggling to make a point of intellectual import in a bar-room argument.

  There is something timeless about their barking as if they were revenants of all the pooches ever to have yapped, fought and scrounged in the valley, guarded farmsteads, taunted bears in the forests and bayed at the constancy of the moon.

  From somewhere in the night drifts the scent of orange blossom. Someone has a tree growing in a pot upon a balcony or verandah. It is flowering late and will produce no fruit: a harvest of oranges is not the intention. The idea of the tree is to provide this scent after a summer rainstorm.

  The storms are not passed. Far away over the mountains, lightning flickers every few minutes but it is far away, lost in the high world of the peaks and the valleys, the cliffs of rock where bears still live. Or so they say. It will be several hours before the storm arrives over the town. By then, I shall be sleeping and careless of its clamour.

  The wine is unique. The grape comes from the countryside around Trieste. The wine comes from Bolzano, where the grape was introduced before the war. It is cherry red and smells of roses, a dessert wine as sweet as sucked cane. I prefer this rosé above all others: Lagarina is too prickly, Cerasuolo too dry and sharp for a nightcap after such rian, Vesuvio Rosato too common—Lacrima Christi, they call it, the Tears of Christ. Galeazzo declares it is an apt name: Christ drank it at the Last Supper, he suggested, and it brought tears to his eyes. Christ, it seems, was an Italian, a connoisseur of good wines who knew a poor one when it crossed his lips.

  The small pot was a gift from Galeazzo. He said an artist should enjoy the contents, especially one who studied butterflies and had recently wandered in the mountains painting flowers.

  The contents are a jam made of rose petals.