The American Read online

  I am known in the Bar Conca d’Oro as an irregular regular. Sometimes I sit at the tables in the piazza, sometimes in the bar. I may have a cup of cappuccino, or an espresso. If it is cold I order hot chocolate. I may, if it is early in the day, request a brioche to break my fast.

  The other customers who frequent the place are slaves to timetables, are regular regulars. I know them all by name. I remember names. It is an important part of the preservation process.

  They are a jolly crew: Visconti is a photographer with a tiny studio nearby in the Via S. Lucio, Armando is a cobbler, Emilio (whom everyone calls Milo for he has lived in Chicago and was so named over there) operates a watch-repairing stall in the Piazza del Duomo, Giuseppe is a street-sweeper, Gherardo owns a taxi. They are men of little future but huge and happy vision.

  When I enter, they all look up. I may be a stranger and worth talking to, or about. They all say, ‘Ciao! Come stai? Signor Farfalla.’ It is a chorus.

  ‘Ciao!’ I reply. ‘Bene!’

  My Italian is poor. We converse in a bastard esperanto of our own invention, the language changing as the mood changes, as the grappa is drunk or the wine uncorked.

  They ask after my butterfly hunting. They have not seen me for a week or two, maybe longer, not since the feast day of San Bernadino di Siena: Gherardo remembers it was that day because it was when the taxi broke its rear shock absorber on the road to his mother’s house.

  I say the butterfly-hunting is good, the paintings coming along. I say I have an exhibition coming off in a gallery in Munich. The German collectors are starting to take an interest in European wildlife. Milo, I suggest, should start painting the portraits of wild boars, not illegally shooting them in the mountains for salami. He should become green. Europe is turning green, I say.

  They laugh. Milo is already green, they say: a ‘greenhorn’. It is one of his favourite Americanisms which he throws as an insult to anyone who questions his knowledge. Un pivello. Behind his back and without any spite they call him il nuovo immigrato although he returned home over twenty years ago and has lost much of his command of both English and American.

  Yet this is a diversion. Soon they are discussing the green revolution. They are trying to save the world, these five working-class men in a bar in the middle of Italy, in the middle of the seventeenth century.

  There is not a building in the Piazza Conca d’Oro newer than 1650. The iron balconies, the shuttered windows, have seen more of history than any professor. The fountain was reputedly built by a cousin of the Borgias. The cellar of a building opposite is said to have been a Templar lodge in the thirteenth century. Now it is a vaulted wine store rented by the bar owner. Up a little dead-end alley, the Vicolo dei Silvestrini, is a chapel incorporated into the basement of a house: it is said San Silvestro once prayed there. From the balcony over the pork butcher’s shop behind the fountain was once hanged a famous brigand, caught in flagrante delicto by a nobleman whose wife was bouncing on the brigand’s belly in the nobleman’s own bed. No one can agree on who the amorous culprit was, nor when he was lynched. It is one of the evening stories the puppeteer enacts.

  Together, they come to a unanimous decision. To save the world, all cars must run on water. Visconti claims there exists the process whereby water can be split into its component hydrogen and oxygen, by solar-power electricity. The two gases are mixed in the cylinder head and ignited by a spark of electricity as with a petrol engine spark plug. Hydrogen explodes. Everyone knows that. The hydrogen bomb. His hands create a mushroom of destruction over the table. The explosion drives the piston down. And—he laughs ironically at the simplicity of the chemistry—what happens when you explode hydrogen with oxygen? You get water. No need for fuel top-ups. The exhaust pipe gets the burnt-off water and returns it to the fuel tank. A never-ending engine. All it needs is sunlight to charge the batteries.

  Gherardo is most pleased. His taxi will run forever. Giuseppe is doubtful. He sees a fault in the logic. He has much time to think, he says, as he sweeps the streets: street-sweeping is, he suggests, an ideal occupation for a philospher, for one has to think of nothing except how to avoid getting hit from behind by a Roman driver.

  ‘Cosi! Problem—what?’ Visconti asks in our spurious tongue. His hands shake palm up in the air. His shoulders shrug with defiance.

  If the idea is so good, Giuseppe suggests, why has it not yet been introduced? The hole in the ozone is big already. The petrol fumes still choke you in Rome.

  Visconti looks from one to the other of us, seeking support for his disgust at Giuseppe’s ignorance. We all look glum. It is the way.

  If the process were made public now, Visconti declares, the petrol companies would go bankrupt. They bought up the process years ago and are sitting on it to protect their profits.

  The others shrug now. This they believe. Italy is a land of big business corruption. The conversation moves on to the fortunes of AC Milano.

  I drink the last of my cappuccino and leave. They wave farewell. They will see me again, they say. Have good luck hunting butterflies.

  At the very end of the cul-de-sac formed by the southern half of the Via Lampedusa there is a brothel. It is not a grand place. It has no maroon velvet curtains or plush settees, no red lights, either. Downstairs is a hair salon. Upstairs is a three storey whorehouse.

  From time to time, I go: there I am not ashamed of this. It is my way. In my world, one cannot afford the luxury of a wife, or a steady companion. They would be a liability and wives can turn against you. At least lovers seldom do.

  There are four full-time whores in the Via Lampedusa.

  Maria is the oldest at about forty. She runs the establishment but she does not own it. The owner is an Italian American who lives in Sardinia. Or Sicily. Or Corsica. His actual whereabouts are unknown and subject to rumour. Some say he is in the government, which would not surprise anyone. His cut of the action is paid by direct credit into a bank in Madrid. Maria sends this to him fortnightly. She does not work a great deal, keeping only to three specific clients, men of about her own age who must have been visiting her for years.

  Elena is about twenty-eight. She has brazen red hair and the complexion of a Pre-Raphaelite model. She never goes into direct sunlight and only leaves the building to shop or visit the doctor’s surgery in the Via Adriano, when the sun is low enough to cast a shadow across at least half of each street. She is the tallest of the whores at about six feet.

  Marine and Rachele are both twenty-five. The former is a brunette, the latter a dark blonde. Both turn as many tricks as they can in a day, vying with each other for every occasional customer. It is their intention, for I am convinced they are lesbian lovers, to earn half a million euros and establish a dress-shop in Milan. Both have the dreams which sustain every whore the world over: that, one day, they will be able to sleep one full night uninterrupted in their own bed and be a respectable, if aloof, member of the community. As with their employer, rumours are spread about them: they were models in Milan, sacked from a top agency for scarring another girl’s breasts with a nail file; they are the illegitimate daughters of a Vatican cardinal; they were schoolteachers dismissed for seducing teenage boys, or girls, depending on the source. The truth, I suspect, is they are country girls out to make money as best they can in the way they know best.

  In addition to the four full-timers, there are a number of part-timers: students at the university or the language school in need of extra funds; girls supporting a heroin habit, and who are screwed only by the most ignorant labourers or stupid tourists; and fresh-faced teenagers from the countryside who come into town of a Saturday afternoon to do a bit of shopping in the boutiques in the Corso, sit around with their friends in the bars and pay for their day out by taking their new clothes off in the presence of the young men of the town.

  My two favourites are both students. Clara is twenty-one, Dindina nineteen.

  Clara’s family lives in Brescia. Her father is an accountant, her mother a bank clerk.
She has two brothers, both in school. She is studying English and enjoys our meetings for she has an opportunity to test her language skills out on me. Indeed, her standard has improved beyond all recognition since we first met. She is a pretty girl of five foot six, with auburn hair, dark brown eyes and long, tanned legs. Her back and shoulders are slim, her buttocks small but rounded. Her breasts are nothing to write home about and she often wears no bra. She has about her a veneer of sophistication, for she comes from the North.

  An exact opposite is Dindina. She is five foot four, arrogant, as black-haired and black-eyed as a Moor, with firm breasts and a tight, smooth belly. Her legs seem to be longer than the rest of her body: Gherardo says she is one of those girls whose thighs start in their armpits. She is not as pretty as Clara nor as clever. She is studying sociology. She says Clara is a snob from the north. Clara says Dindina is a peasant from the south. Her family owns a small farm and a few hectares of olives between Bari and Matera.

  They do not work every night. Like me, they do not obey a schedule.

  If one of them is present, I may stay. If not, I drink a beer with Maria and leave. I have no interest in the others.

  Sometimes, both are present and then I employ the two of them.

  Understand, I am not a young man. I shall not give you my exact age: accept the fires are not yet out but they require a little stoking to get the water hot. Like the damn coke boiler I had in the cottage in England.

  When we make a threesome, it can be fun. I book the biggest room in the house, on the top floor overlooking the narrow street. In the room there is a two-metre-wide four-poster bed, a dressing table, a full length mirror and several Windsor chairs. We undress each other slowly. Clara will not let Dindina undress her so I do it. Dindina is not so fussy. Perhaps Clara is a snob: perhaps she is jealous of Dindina’s fuller breasts. They both strip me.

  ‘You are getting fatter,’ Clara remarks every time.

  I deny it.

  I am not ashamed of my body. Over the years, by dint of necessity, I have kept myself in good trim. When travelling, I always stay in hotels which offer a sauna and gymnasium for guests. In Miami, I took a room with a gym of its own en suite. If there are no facilities, I run. Butterfly-hunting is good exercise in the mountains.

  ‘You eat too much pasta. You should marry and have a woman diet you. Perhaps . . .’, I detect a wistfulness, ‘. . . a young woman to look after you. Perhaps Italy is bad for you. You should move away where there is no pasta and wine is pricey.’

  Dindina does not talk. She prefers to get down to business. We lie on the bed, with the window open and the light of the street lamp slicing through the closed shutters. Clara talks first, but Dindina is already busy, stroking my stomach or winding her fingers through the hairs of my chest. She kisses my nipples, sucking and nibbling at them like a mouse at a wafer.

  Clara kisses my lips. She kisses very softly, even when at the height of passion. Her tongue does not force itself into my mouth as Dindina’s does but inveigles itself in. I hardly notice it until it touches my own.

  Dindina gets on top first. She lies along me and transfers her nibbling from my chest to my ear lobes. Clara touches Dindina’s buttocks, slipping her fingers down between her thighs and rubbing my legs as well as Dindina’s. I think it is strange how Clara will not let Dindina undress her, yet she touches her up and allows her to reciprocate.

  I cannot afford to be emotional, not in my way of life. If emotion gets involved then risks start to accumulate. Emotion prompts thought and thought elicits misgivings, doubts and dubieties. I have spent many hours controlling emotion and it pays off now. I do not allow myself to climax with Dindina. She knows this and does not feel cheated. She has her orgasm and slides off me as Clara takes her place.

  With Clara, it is different. With Clara, I let myself go.

  This, I readily admit, is a self-indulgence, one of my very few.

  Afterwards, we lie to gain our breath then cavort some more, with less urgency. At ten o’clock or thereabouts—I will not clock-watch—we dress and I take them out to a pizzeria at the end of the Via Roviano. We have to buy two bottles of wine: Clara drinks Chiaretto di Cellatica because is it northern, from her native Lombardy, and Dindina demands Colatamburo because it hails from Bari. I take a glass of each. Dindina eats her pizza napoletana as she makes love, business-like, not wasting time on words. She is a girl of action. Clara has pizza margherita and talks a lot. In English. She speaks of nothing of importance but then, after sex, one does not want to discuss major issues of the day.

  Our dining over, I pay the girls. They are quite open about taking money before we leave the pizzeria. As we part, Dindina kisses me as she would her uncle.

  ‘Buona sera,’ she whispers lightly, close to my ear.

  I smile and return her kiss as an uncle might.

  Clara kisses me too, but like a lover. She puts her arms around my neck and hugs me, her lips on mine. She tastes of oregano and garlic and sweet red wine. I think of Duillio’s bottled blood every time we kiss in the Via Roviano.

  Clara always touches upon two subjects in the closing moments of our evening. The first is what she intends to do with her money. It is as if she has to justify her screwing in some material way.

  ‘I am going to buy a book—An Unofficial Rose by Iris Murdoch.’ Or she might declare, ‘I shall buy a new fountain pen. A Par-ker.’ She divides some words into the component syllables when the word is unfamiliar or she is not sure of it. Sometimes, she says, almost shamefacedly, ‘Now I can pay my rent.’

  The second is always an attempt to discover where I live.

  ‘Take me to your home. We can do it some more. With no Dindina. For free! Just for love.’ Another tack is, ‘You should not live alone. You need your bed warm as flesh.’ This is an extension of the good-woman/eat-less-pasta ploy.

  I always refuse, politely but emphatically. Sometimes she accuses me of having a wife already, a harridan who sleeps with her legs crossed. I deny this and she knows this to be the truth. Though she is no professional whore, she has the instincts. Possibly all women have. I am not one who can tell.

  To be on the safe side, though I live to the east, only a few streets from the brothel, I walk north. Clara heads west to her digs near the barracks. I double back only when I know she is gone. Only once has she tried to follow me and giving her the slip was simplicity itself.

  I look at my notes: 90 metres. It is a long way for some, but for a bullet it is a brief instant in which to restructure history. Yet how much of the past has been altered by just such a transient moment. How long did it take the 6.5 mm slug to travel from the top of the Texas School Book Depository to John F. Kennedy’s neck? How long the other shot to go through his skull? Infinitesimally short instances during which the world shook, the existence of men was threatened and the temple of politics altered for ever.

  Often, as I sit in the loggia with the light coming down like the last rays of life itself, I think of the second man, the one under the trees on the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, the ghost of death to Oswald’s spirit of assassination. He must have fired. All the reports indicate it. He seems not to have hit the target. Yet perhaps he did, and Oswald was a dupe and a lousy shot. Who knows? Someone does.

  The weapon needs to be light, fairly small, easily assembled and broken down. It has to have a long range for what it is to do and a rapid fire rate. Five seconds indicates to me the possibility of a rapidly moving target. And it must be silenced.

  I think about the problem for a whole day, perched on the stool before the drawing board, later sitting in the loggia as the sun goes down. It is not an easy task. Not in three weeks.

  Eventually, I decide upon a modified Socimi 821. It has a silencer but I shall have to discard it. Another will have to be made. My customer is not a spray-it-and-see hit-and-misser, but a person who, like myself, lives by circumstantialities. Hence the requirement of a telescopic sight.

  The Socimi is Italian made, by Socie
tà Costruzioni Industriali Milano. It is a new gun, first available in 1983 and based in design upon the Israeli Uzi sub-machine gun, the darling of the hijackers, the artless hit squads, the motorcycle passenger killer. It has the same form of telescoping bolt, the same safety mechanisms and the magazine in the hand grip. The receiver, which is rectangular, the barrel housing and pistol grip are made of light alloy not gunmetal or steel. It can take a laser sight. The barrel is short, not really intended for perfect aiming, not ideal for the distant target. The weapon is only 400mm long, with the stock folded, and weighs only 2.45 kg. The barrel is six-grooved with a right-hand twist, 200mm long. The box magazine holds 32 rounds, 9mm Parabellum. The fire rate is 600 rpm and the muzzle velocity 380 mps. The silencer, however, reduces this significantly, which is a problem I must overcome.

  I can see only one way around this obstacle. The barrel has to be lengthened but instead of putting on a silencer which will reduce velocity, I shall fit a sound suppressor such as the Americans use on the Ingram Model 10. This muffles the sound of the discharge but does not seek to silence the report of the round. Muzzle velocity is thus unimpaired. The crack of the bullet can be heard but it is hard to trace the direction of the firing position.

  I should like to give my client as near five full seconds of fire power as I am able. This means an extended magazine. Ten rounds a second for five seconds equals a fifty round box magazine. That should be all right: sixty might make it too large, upset the balance of the piece.

  The longer barrel will require a good deal of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The rest should be fairly easy.