The American Read online

  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.

  ‘Violà!’ 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 sewer-man 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.

  Forget it. Do not waste your time. I may be old, but I am no fool. If I was, I should not be old, I should be dead.

  The names are changed, the places changed, the people changed. There are a thousand Piazzas di S. Teresa, ten thousand alleys which have no names, exist on no maps save those in the heads of the occupants and the local postino who knows of it only as a dead end he has to walk down every morning, only to return to the Via Ceresio to continue his round.

  You will not find me. I will not permit it and without my consent, you are lost. The British Anti-Terrorist Squad, MI5, the CIA and the FBI, Interpol, Russia’s KGB or GRU and Romania’s Securitate, even the Bulgarians, those expert trackers of men—they have all looked but never discovered me, although a few have drawn quite close. You have no chance.

  The apartment is self-contained. No one can gain access except through the one main door; there are no rear stairs, no buildings overtowering it from which an intruder could be lowered, no fire escape. In case of need, I have an escape but you are not to know of it: such a disclosure would be extremely foolish on my part.

  In truth, the apartment has three levels, the building being constructed on the slope of the hill upon which the town is built. Entering through the door from the fourth floor balcony, you would find the short hallway and the main sitting room. It is spacious, fully ten metres by seven. The floor is tiled in once red, now ochre, seventeenth century slabs and, in the center, is a fire grate raised on a twenty-centimetre dais over which hangs a copper hood and chimney. It can be cold here in the winter. Several modern settees surround the fireplace, the sort made from kits purchased in furniture warehouses. The chairs are canvas and wood, like those used by film directors on a movie set. The table, of heavy nineteenth-century oak, has only two chairs. That is one more than is essential.

  Along one wall is a row of windows: like the fireplace, they are a modern addition. Opposite them are the bookshelves.

  I enjoy books. No room is fit for occupation without a lining of books. They contain the condensed experiences of humanity. To live fully, one has to read widely. I do not intend to face a man-eating lion in the African veldt, fall from an aircraft into the Arabian Sea, soar through outer space or march with the legions of Rome against Gaul or Carthage, yet books can take me to these places, to these predicaments. In a book, Salome can seduce me, I can fall in love with Marie Duplessis, have my own Lady of the Camellias, a private Monroe or exclusive Cleopatra. In a book I can rob a bank, spy on the enemy, kill a man. Kill any number of men. No, not that. One man at a time is enough for me. It always was. And I do not always seek experience second-hand.

  Books are a drawback for, when I move on, they must be abandoned, jettisoned like bags of sand from a sinking balloon, ballast from a listing ship fighting the hurricane. Every new place, I have to start again, constructing a library. I am always tempted to have the books returned for storage but that necessitates an address, a fixed point and I cannot afford such an indulgence. Looking at these shelves, however, I consider that they may be more permanent than those in the past.

  Music is also an enjoyment of mine, an indulgence, an escape from realities. On the shelves I have a compact disc player. There are fifty or so discs besides it. Mostly classical. I am not a lover of the modern musics. Some jazz. Yet that also is the classical of the genre—the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, the Original New Orleans Rhythm Kings, McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans. Music is also an excellent device for distorting or dampening other sounds.

  On the end walls of the room I have paintings. They are not valuable. They were purchased from a market frequented by artists in front of the cathedral on Saturdays. Some are distinctly modernistic, cubes and triangles and worms of paint. Others are inept representations of the countryside around: a church with a poorly executed campanile, a water-mill surrounded by willows, a castle perched on a hilltop. There are many castles balanced on ridges in the province. The paintings are cheerful and merrily primitive in the way children’s art is attractive. They add colour and ligh
t.

  I need light. In a dark world, light is essential.

  At the end of the room is a small kitchen with a gas stove, fridge, sink and work surfaces of fake marble. Along a narrow and dark passage from this is a lavatory containing a water closet and, redundant in my abode, a bidet. At the facing end of the room is another door leading to five rising steps and another passageway, the whole side of which is a long window broken only by pillars. Once a balcony, this was glazed by the previous occupant.

  Off this passageway are two large bedrooms and an adequately appointed bathroom—a bath, shower, lavatory, linen cupboard with hot water tank and another redundant bidet. The previous inhabitant, Signora Prasca informs me, was a prodigious amante. This she states with a smile of fond remembrance as if she, too, had been one of his conquests. When she recalls the inconvenience of his parties, the quickness of his temper and the loud moaning of a young mistress through an open summer’s night window and echoing in the courtyard, she speaks of him as seduttore. There is no pleasing old women.

  The first bedroom is simply furnished with a double bed, a pine chest of drawers, cane-seated chair and wardrobe. I am not a man desirous of luxurious sleep. I sleep lightly. It is part of my business. A room full of satins, cushions and mirrors and scents lulls the mind as effectively as morphine. Besides, I bring no pretty girls up here. The bed may be double but that simply gives me space. In my business, one sometimes needs space, even in slumber. The mattress is firm, for soft foam and springs are another soporific, and the frame does not squeak. There is no—what is the current euphemism?—horizontal jogging done in this bed. A noisy bed-frame is the last sound many a man has heard. I do not intend to join the august company of deceased fools.

  The bathroom, tastefully lined with white tiles upon which are printed, at random around the room, colourful depictions of mountain flowers, is between the bedrooms.

  The second bedroom I shall leave for now.

  At the end of the one-time balcony is another flight of stone steps as well worn as the main staircase. Until the building was sub-divided into apartments twenty years or so ago, whoever entered the front door was sure, unless he was a menial or tradesman, to make the pilgrimage to the top. For up these steps is the crowning glory of Italian architecture, an octagonal loggia.

  I have furnished this with a wrought-iron chair and table, painted white. Nothing more. Not so much as a cushion. There is no electric light. A low wooden shelf under the parapet wall, holds an oil lamp.

  Signora Prasca expresses occasional dismay that I have no guests to enjoy the loggia and its panoramic view, with whom to share the dawn and the twilight, the balmy summer breezes and the rising of a wintry, coruscating Venus down the valley.

  The loggia is mine, more precious than any guest who could tread it. It is my utterly private place, more so than the remainder of my apartment. Up in the loggia, I survey the panorama of the valley and the mountains and I think of Ruskin and Byron, of Shelley and Walpole, of Keats and Beckford.

  If I sit in the centre of the space, under the dome of the roof, I cannot be seen from below or from the buildings on either side. I can be seen from the roof or the parapet on the façade of the church up the hill, but it is locked at night and the walls are as impregnable as a penitentiary. There is no tower and it would take a most determined man to scale the building.

  The interior of the dome is most curiously painted with a fresco I should guess to be at least three hundred years old. It depicts the horizon of the view, the tops of the mountains and the façade of the church, the outline unaltered by time. Above is painted the sky in royal azure, the stars pricked out in gold. In places, the paint has faded and peeled but, generally, the fresco is still in good condition. I cannot recognise the stars and assume they are either an invention of the artist’s imagination or hold some symbolic meaning I have not attempted to fathom. Time is too short to allow for my delving into history. It is enough to assist in the shaping of it in my own little way.

  I do not often venture out at the height of the day. This is not a case of being deliberately non-expatriate. Noël Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ does not apply to me. I do not claim to be either English or French, German, Swiss, American, Canadian, South African. Nothing, in fact. Signora Prasca (and, indeed, all my acquaintances) assume I am English for I speak the language and receive mail in English. I listen—and they must hear it from time to time—to the BBC World Service on my transistor radio. I am also mildly, harmlessly eccentric for I paint butterflies, very rarely receive visitors, am a very private man. The English do not go out in the height of the day. I could be nothing but English in their eyes. I do not disabuse them of their assumptions.

  My preference for remaining indoors, which I do when it suits me, is for a variety of reasons.

  Firstly, it is more convenient for me to work during the day. Any noise I make can be camouflaged by the general hum of the town. Any smell which might emanate is lost in the odium of car fumes and cooking food. It is better for me to work by daylight than artificial light. I need to see, very exactly, what I am doing. The advantage of Italy is the number of sunlit hours it affords.

  Secondly, the streets are crowded in the day time. Crowds are, I know it only too well, a superlative hiding place—yet not only for myself: there are those who would hide from me in order to watch me, to wonder at me, to try to assess what I am up to.

  I do not like crowds unless they are to my advantage. A crowd is to me as a tropical forest is to a leopard. It can be a habitat of great safety or great danger depending on attitude, position, the innate senses. To move in crowds, I have to be ever alert, ever cautious. After a while, a constant state of watchfulness becomes tiring. This is the time of most danger, when the attention is weakened. It is then the hunter bags his leopard.

  Thirdly, if someone were to wish to burgle the apartment, he would more likely do it under cover of day.

  The inaccessibility of the apartment would make a night intrusion awkward at least, highly dangerous at best. No burglar, not even an idiot of an amateur apprentice, would be prepared to scale roofs of loose pantiles, haul up a seven-metre ladder, swing it over an open space fifteen metres above ground, clamber precariously over it and all for a few baubles, a wristwatch or two and a tv set.

  No: any burglar would come by day, disguised as a meter-reader, census-counter, health official, building inspector. It would not be easy for him even then: he would have to gain entry through to the courtyard, bluff his way past the wily Signora Prasca, who has been a concierge since before the war and knows all the tricks, and open my apartment door. It is double deadlocked with two Chubbs, and the timber is over an inch thick. I have lined the inner side of the door with seven gauge steel plate.

  The ordinary burglar’s time would anyway be wasted. I wear my one wristwatch and, with no desire to vegetate before inane quizzes and Milanese housewives’ breasts, I have no television, only the compact disc player and the transistor radio, which are not popular with the Italian Society of Fagins.

  The more intelligent burglar, however, is the one I fear. What he would steal from me is not material wealth. It is knowledge, a knowledge which could be fenced more readily than a filched brooch or a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. Not everyone wants a hot watch but the whole world wants information.

  Fourthly, I like the apartment in day. The windows let in the breeze, the sun moves inexorably across the floor, disappears, starts in through the opposite windows. The pantiles click in the heat and lizards scuttle along the sills. Martins nest in the eaves to chirp and cheep through the hot day, diving into their mud bowls like acrobats, as if being swung on trajectories of invisible wires. The countryside moves through phases of light: the mists of dawn, the harsh bright early sunlight, the haze of midday and afternoon, the purpling wash to dusk, the first sparks of lights coming on in the mountain villages.

  There is a romantic side to me. I do not deny it. With my concern for intricacy, my adoration of exac
titudes, my perception of detail and my awareness of nature, I should perhaps have been a poet, one of the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Certainly, I am an unacknowledged legislator, but I have written not a jot of verse since I left school. I have even been acknowledged on several occasions, albeit under a pseudonym.

  Finally, when in the apartment, I am in complete control of my destiny. I may be subjected to an earthquake, for this part of Italy is prone to such. I may be poisoned by the daytime car fumes. I may be struck by lightning during the summer storm—there is no finer spot in the world to watch the gods sport than in the loggia—or have a loose piece of aircraft fall on me. That is by the way. No one can avoid such unpredictabilities.

  What I am safe from are the predictables, the risks which can be assessed, analysed and accounted for, the vagaries of men.

  I walk out in the early morning. The vialetto holds the night for half an hour after dawn has broken. At the Via Ceresio I turn left and go to the corner with the Via de’ Bardi. Opposite is an old house, the oldest in the town according to Signora Prasca. Just below the roof line is a ten-centimetre crack caused by age, the shaking of distant volcanoes and the vibrations of lorries in the Viale Farnese. In this crack lives a colony of bats, thousands of them. Standing at the junction at dawn, I watch them returning for the day and think of D.H. Lawrence and his pipistrello. He was right. Bats do not so much fly as flicker-splash in neurasthenic parabolæ.

  In the first light, I sometimes walk down the Via Bregno, cross the Viale Farnese and enter the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre. The pine trees and poplars hiss as the first breezes swell from the valley. Sparrows jig about searching for crumbs left by yesterday’s strollers. A few wayward bats take the last of the night’s insects. In the bushes rustle small rodents competing for the sparrows’ gleanings.

  There is no one abroad so early. I could be a ghost wandering the streets, blind to the living. I usually have the park entirely to myself and that is best, is safe. If there should be other persons about, a janitor making his way to work, a pair of lovers entwined about each other after a night of what Signora Prasca would doubtless term l’amore all’aperto, a man taking exercise as myself, I can see them, determine their motives for being in the park with me, assert the threat they may pose and react accordingly.