The American Page 5

  And so, whenever I drive out to Mopolino, I always park my little Citroën 2CV by the end tree in the line, walking to the bar on the left of the piazza. I sit at the same table every time, order the same refreshment—an espresso and a glass of iced water. The patron, who is not quite as old as the postmaster, knows me by now and I am accepted as a regular, if taciturn, visitor.

  I do not call always on the same day of the week, nor do I call always at the same hour: so rigid a timetable would invite problems.

  For a while, I sip my coffee and behold the slow pace of village life unfolding. There is a farmer who arrives in a cart pulled by a tubby pony. The cart is made from the truck-bed of a Fiat pick-up, with wooden shafts from a gig many decades older. They are intricately carved with leaf designs, as much a work of aesthetic art as the rest of the cart is one of ingenuity. The wheels are adapted from those of a heavy lorry and have bald pneumatic Pirelli tyres, half inflated. There is a number of rowdy teenage boys who zoom into the piazza upon mopeds, their engines and voices echoing momentarily off the walls. There is a rich man with a Mercedes-Benz sedan who drives to the post office and leaves his vehicle in the centre of the thoroughfare while he does his business: he cares not a jot that he holds up the daily meat delivery to the butcher’s shop. There are also two very pretty young girls who drink coffee at the other bar, their laughter light yet simultaneously serious with the concerns of their youth.

  I wait for up to an hour. If there is nothing to alarm me, I go smartly across to the post office.

  ‘Buon giorno,’ I say.

  The postmaster grunts his reply, jutting his chin. It is his way of asking what I want although he is well aware. It is always the same. I buy no stamps and seldom post a letter.

  ‘Il fermo posta?’ I enquire.

  He turns to a rack of pigeonholes behind a sack of mail hanging in a metal frame like an old person’s walking aid. I wonder if, when the day’s collection has been made, he borrows the framework to see himself home.

  From one pigeonhole he draws a bundle of general delivery envelopes held together by an elastic band. Some have been there for weeks, months even. They are the relics of love affairs turned sour, petty crimes abandoned or long since carried out, deals reneged upon and tourists long since passed by on their restless itineraries. They are a sad comment upon the feckless, shifting, unfeeling character of human nature.

  Deftly, like a teller counting through a thick wad of banknotes, he flicks through the mail. At the end, he stops and repeats the process until he comes to my letter. There is always only the one. This he extracts with thin, wasted fingers and tosses on to the counter with an incomprehensible grunt. He knows me well by now, no longer asking for identification. I put one hundred lire in change upon the counter by way of payment or gratuity. With his bony fingers, he scoops the coins across the counter and into the palm of his hand.

  Leaving the post office, I do not go directly to my little car. I walk around the village first. The streets are so placid, so cool in the shade, the cobbles smooth and hard underfoot, the windows shuttered against the heat of the day. By some of the doorways sleeping dogs lie prone, too bushed by the heat to bother to growl at a stranger; or perhaps they too know me by now. Cats hide suspiciously in the deep shadows under steps or lintels, their alert eyes bright and devious like those of child pickpockets in Naples.

  One doorway always has an old woman sitting within it. She makes lace, her gnarled fingers like the roots of the trees in the piazza but still nimble, flicking the bobbins over on the frame with a practised dexterity I admire. She sits in the shade but her hands and lace are in the brilliant sunlight, the skin over her knuckles tanned as leather.

  Every time I pass her by I smile. Often I pause to appreciate her handiwork.

  Her greeting is, regardless of the time, ‘Buona sera, signore,’ delivered in a high, squeaky voice like that of a cat mewing.

  I wondered at first if she was blind, every hour being evening tinted, but soon realised it is because her eyes see everything in twilight, permanently dazzled by the sun on the white tracery of the lace.

  I point at her lace and remark, ‘Molto bello, il merletto.’

  This remark invariably prompts a wide and toothless smile and the same retort spoken through a porcine snort of comical derision.

  ‘Merletto. Si! I lacci. No!’

  This is her reference to my first meeting with her when, in searching for the word, I assumed laccio was lace. It was: a shoe-lace.

  Today, as I walk, I open my letter, read it and memorise the contents. I also watch out for someone following me. Before I return to the car, I stand and survey the piazza, pausing to tie my shoelace. During this time, I cast an eye over the vehicles in the piazza. Most I know to be owned by locals. Those I do not recognise I momentarily study, committing their details to mind. This way I can ensure one does not follow me back to the town.

  Satisfied I am safe—or at least prepared—I leave. I take several other precautions as well, but you are not to know of these. I cannot afford to give away every detail. It would not be circumspect.

  On the way back to the town—a distance of some thirty-five kilometres—I watch to see if I am being tailed and, bit by bit, I shred the letter into the tiniest confetti and let it blow, a pinch at a time, out of the window.

  The second bedroom in my apartment is a workroom. It is quite large, almost too large, for I prefer to work in enclosed surroundings. This preference is not good for my health, not with the kind of work I do, but I have become accustomed to it and so am inured to small rooms.

  In Marseilles, I had to operate from what had once been a wine cellar. There was no ventilation at all except a grid high in the wall and a sort of flue rising from one corner. There was no natural light, which was awful. I strained my eyes for weeks in there, on just one job. The results were superb, possibly my best ever, but it ruined my eyesight and scoured my lungs. For months, I suffered from bronchitis and sore throats and was obliged to wear sunglasses, gradually lessening the density of the lenses until I could once more face raw daylight. It was hell. I thought I was finished. But I was not.

  In Hong Kong, I rented a two-room flat in Kwun Tong, an industrial area near Kai Tak airport. The pollution was atrocious. It lay upon the district like the strata of leaves collecting in a pond. At ground level was offal, waste food, strips of rattan scaffolding ties, Styrofoam fast-food containers, discarded plastic shoes, paper, filth. At first floor level—in the building in which I rented my temporary workshop this was ironically termed the mezzanine—up to third or fourth, the air stank of diesel and petrol fumes. From there on up, the smell was predominantly carbon tetrachloride delicately impinged upon, depending on the direction of the stifling breeze, by burning sugar, sewage, melting plastic, textile dyes and frying fat. The floors below my own were occupied variously by a dyeing works, a toy manufacturer, a fish-ball kitchen, a candy-maker, a dental laboratory making false teeth, a plastic spectacles frame company and a dry cleaning processor. The sewage came from a badly corroded twelve-inch pipe which leaked at the fifth floor level.

  I hated the place. The ventilation to my flat, one of a dozen ‘residences’ on the top floors, the occupants of all of them engaged like myself in some manufacturing process, was adequate but, in removing the noxious gases produced by my processes, it merely imported the others. Down the centre of the street outside ran the underground railway system, supported on concrete piers like the New York subway only far more up-to-date and, astonishingly, spotlessly clean.

  The place was indescribably noisy, too: the trains passing at three minute intervals, trucks, cars, machinery, human shouting, car horns, hammering and thumping and grinding and hissing. Every few minutes for most of the day, a jet aircraft roared momentarily.

  I was there five weeks. I worked without ceasing. The job was quickly done for I wanted to get out. Delivery had to be made to Manila. After that, I took a long break in Fiji, lying in the shade like a retired pi
rate, living as a spendthrift on my loot.

  In London, I rented a garage built into the archway of a railway viaduct south of the Thames. It was a grotty locality—grotty was an in-word then—yet it served me well. I could work with the door open, by daylight. The other archways were used as lock-up storage units, an auto body shop, a television repair works and a fire extinguisher recharging plant. No one intruded upon the others’ businesses. We all drank in the nearby pub at lunchtime, eating Scotch eggs and pickled herring with tough-crusted buns and drinking Bass. There was a camaraderie in that row of archways with its muddy, puddled approach, its grimy brickwork and dusty mortar, its rusting chain-link fencing and the strangely comforting rumble of commuter trains overhead making for Charing Cross or Waterloo.

  The others thought I custom-made bicycle frames. I bought a racing cycle to further the deception. When I left, it was a close call. The cops were only hours behind me with their bullhorns and plain-clothes snipers. One of the auto body mechanics was an informer. He tipped them off I was stealing lead: he could smell it when I melted and recast the metal. It was a ridiculous accusation. The man was judging me by his standards, a bad error.

  I went back two years later. I found the muddy approach had become a pedestrian precinct with pretty posts made of iron and painted with the crest of the council. The archways had become a trendy restaurant, a photographic studio and a unisex hair salon. I also found the mechanic living in a quiet, tree-lined square off the Old Kent Road. According to the tabloids, he and his young common-law wife committed suicide. A lovers’ pact, the articles suggested. I fixed it to look that way.

  It was the only time I ever returned. Marseilles, Hong Kong . . . I never went back. Athens, Tucson, Livingstone. Fort Lauderdale, Adelaide, New Jersey, Madrid . . . I never saw them again.

  Of all the workshops I have had, however, the second bedroom in this, my Italian refuge, is by far the best. It is airy. Even with the shutters closed on a hot day in high summer, there is a continuous, transient breeze passing through. Enough daylight enters through the door or the shutter slats for me to dispense with the spotlamps unless I am doing the most detailed of work. Any pernicious redolence I might cause from time to time, as a part of this or that stage in one or another process, blows away to be replaced with fresh air. Outside, it is quickly diluted in the sky. The floors being made of stone are strong and absorb a good deal of the sound.

  The room contains no furniture as such. In the centre is a large workbench. Beside it stands a bank of metal shelves upon which I keep tools. Against the wall, to the right of the window, is a small lathe of the sort jewellers use. It is mounted upon iron legs which stand upon two blocks of wood between which is sandwiched a layer of solid rubber of the sort used in car engine mountings. Screwed onto the wall beside the lathe is the stereo speaker; across the room is another. I have installed a steel kitchen sink in the room and a cold water tap, connected to the water and outflow pipes in the bathroom next door. I have a stool upon which to sit and a square of carpet beneath it. By the workbench is an electric fan heater. To the left of the door is an architect’s drawing board and another stool. That is all.

  The lathe was awkward. Signora Prasca understood the workbench. Artists use such tables, she thought. Besides, I made sure she noticed my easel and drawing board arrive at the same time. And the spotlamps. The workbench was therefore disguised as a part of the artist’s requirements. But the artistry of miniatures necessitates no lathe. This I kept in pieces in the rented van in which I had driven up from Rome, parked in the Largo Bradano. Bit by bit, over four days, I moved it to the apartment. The bed of the lathe was too heavy for me to lift. I obtained the help of one of Alfonso’s mechanics from his garage in the Piazza della Vanga. He believed he was carrying a printing press: after all, artists made prints of their work. He said so himself. Signora Prasca was out shopping in the market at the time.

  Should the lathe be making too much noise, I turn on the stereo loudly. The speakers are wired to the compact disc player in the sitting room. If the metal tends to screech in the turning, I play one of three pieces: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 ‘Titan’, the second movement and, most appropriately, for I appreciate twists of irony, Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 in A, the ‘Italian’. Perhaps, in order to complete the irony, I should add to my little repertoire of covering music the closing five minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (opus 49). The cannon fire would be a suitable accompaniment for the lathe.

  Imbert. He was a quiet man, as I recall. Antonio Imbert. You will not have heard of him unless you are a specialist in Central American affairs, or an elderly official in the CIA. Nor will you know of his associates, his comrades-in-deed, his co-conspirators. They were important men in their world, in their history: Diaz was a brigadier-general, Guerrero a presidential aide, Tejeda and Pastoriza both engineers (I never knew of what). There were also Pimentel and Vasquez and Cedeno. And Imbert.

  Of the assassination squad, I met only him and only on the one occasion, for about twenty minutes over a cocktail in a hotel in South Miami Beach. It was a most apt rendezvous. The hotel was a seedy joint once glorious in the days of bootlegging, Tommy-gun-toting gangsters. It was an art deco building, all rounded edges and curving lines like an old-fashioned American limousine, a Dodge say, or a Buick, a Great Gatsby automobile. It was said Al Capone had spent a holiday there, once: Lucky Luciano, too. I ordered, I remember, a manhattan whilst Antonio had a tequila, sipping it with salt and lemon.

  It was reported he was the only one to escape the subsequent fusillade of bullets which chase after such men as him, just as angry wasps pursue him who kicks the hive. They were all hive-kickers. Their hive was the Dominican Republic and the wasps were the followers of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.

  He disappeared—Antonio, that is; Trujillo just died. I never knew where he went, though I have an inkling of a suspicion he went first to Panama. As agreed, on July 30, two months to the day after the event, I received a bank draft drawn on the First National City Bank mailed to me in Colon.

  It was all so long ago, late February 1981, when we met. Trujillo’s assassination was that May.

  It was a traditional killing. Al Capone would have been more than satisfied by it. It had all the hallmarks of a gangster-slaying, the same type of planning, the same type of execution. I am not given to flippant absurdity: it is no clumsy pun but a bald statement of irredeemable fact. Such a conception is rare nowadays: the grand assassinations are no more, gone with the eloquent, decadent age of the ocean liner, the flying boat and macabre dowagers in mink overcoats and thick cosmetics. Now it is just the bomb and the blitz, the spraying of bullets, the radio-controlled landmine, the random explosions of uncontrolled violence. There is no artistry left, no pride taken in the job, no assiduity, no coolly-collected, assimilated deliberation. No real nerve.

  Trujillo was a man of habit. He visited his very elderly mother every night at San Cristóbal, thirty-two kilometres from Ciudad Trujillo. They, Antonio and his chums, blocked the road with two cars. Another followed on behind. As the Generalissimo’s vehicle slowed, the men in the car opened fire. From the roadside, the others let rip with machine-guns. Or so the report went. The Generalissimo fired back with his personal revolver. His chauffeur returned fire with the two submachine guns kept in the car. The chauffeur survived. The assailants were not aiming at the front seat. They were directing their fire exactly at the rear, at the wound down window, at the single spits of flame which were the target’s handgun.

  Once they had felled their target, it was not enough to see him dead. They came out of the cover, kicking his body, smashing it with the butts of their guns, pulverising his left arm. They dumped his body in the trunk of one of the road block cars and drove off to abandon it, in the darkness, with a last look at the bruised, contorted face of the dictator.

  What they did was wrong: not the killing, for death can always be justified. It was the mutilati
on that was wrong. They should have been satisfied with the end of their enemy. It is not a matter of aesthetics or moralities, of political expediency or humanity. It is simply a waste of time.

  The dead feel nothing. For them, it is over. For the killers, there is nothing to gain from the beating of a corpse. I can see no pleasure in such actions, no self-justification, although I accept there must be some. It dehumanises the killers and they abase themselves by such actions. After all, the act of killing cleanly, exactly, quickly is such a human action that to bestialise it is to reduce it to mere carnality.

  Yet I suppose I can appreciate their reasoning, the hatred which bubbled within them for Trujillo, for what he had done, to which they were opposed.

  At least they left the chauffeur, injured and unconscious. They did not beat him, kill him. He was merely a bystander in history’s unfolding tapestry.

  That, too, was a mistake. Never leave an involved onlooker. They should become a part of the history they witness. It is their right as much as their lot. To deprive them is to deprive history of another victim.

  If you were to tell Europeans it was taboo to urinate against a kapok tree—that by doing so they would release the devil inhabiting the trunk and it would escape, climb up the stream of piss and enter the genitals, rendering them infertile—you would be ridiculed. Taboo is not a word considered with any seriousness in the Old World. It is the stuff of primitive tribes, of head-hunters and face-painters.

  Yet, for every supposedly civilised man, death is a taboo. We fear it, abhor it, wonder superstitiously about it. Our religions warn us of it, of the brimstone and flames, of red-tailed demons armed with pitchforks, eager to ensnare us, press us into the pit. As I see it, there is no dybbuk in the kapok tree, nor is there a hell. Death is but a part of a process, inescapable and irrevocable. We live and we die. Once born, these are the only certainties, the only inevitabilities. The only true variable is the timing of the event of death.