The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04]

by Michael Moorcock

  Thus on that little cobbled street in a Majorcan fishing village I found myself embracing as a brother a friend I had not seen for ten years. ‘Fiorello!’ — laughing and shaking his hand as heartily as he shook mine. He was older, of course, but retained the long, comical face of a pantomime horse, his enormous lips drawn back from massive yellow teeth, his huge brown eyes sparkling with the flames of his generous, eternally ebullient soul. He still wore the wide-brimmed white hat, the lilac cape and gloves, the patent-leather shoes with their lavender spats, the perfect linen suit, a cream silk shirt and canary cravat. Flourishing his ivory-headed cane, he indicated his companions. Glancing at us with some curiosity, they remained seated demurely outside the bakery.

  ‘My dear fellow! I heard you became an actor and made a name for yourself in American politics? You must tell me everything!’

  Remembering his manners, he turned, a graceful grotesque, to introduce us. ’Sweet ladies! My apologies! Bazzanno is an oaf! Ladies, may I introduce my dear friend, my mentor, my inspiration, His Excellency Prince Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, late of the Imperial Russian Court, a philosopher and engineer of genius — one of the greatest Russians of modern times!’

  The two beautiful women were Signora Margherita Sarfatti and Miss Miranda Butter. The first was his mistress. La Sarfatti was a brunette in her mid-forties, of aristocratic felinity and an arrogant, comradely disposition, whom I took to at once. The second woman was a young American redhead with a rather prim nose and lips who had travelled from Paris to see the new Italy with which, she said, she was in love. She loved Spain, too, she added, or at least this island. She was a journalist on the staff of the Houston Chronicle; she smiled a little uncertainly at me.

  No stranger to genius, as I would discover, Signora Sarfatti had an air of easy power as she lazed across two rattan chairs. Keeping her cool, slitted Atlantic-green gaze on me, she listened with an amused air to the younger woman’s gushing praise of the country she thought was my own. Mrs Sarfatti was delighted to make my acquaintance, she said. I removed my hat and bowed. I kissed their hands.

  My old friend from Rome, Fiorello da Bazzanno, was now the editor of Il Gruppo art magazine, distinguished member of the Italian Academy and a leading figure in Mussolini’s court. He and his friends had set off from Naples. On their way to Algiers they had developed engine trouble and put in to Majorca to make repairs. They were enjoying the pleasures of Andratx but had been gone too long already and by the following week must return to Venice where Sarfatti and da Bazzanno were to open an exhibition of new Fascist art.

  ‘That function is the only justification for my enormous salary, dear comrade.’ He winked. ‘I am rich. But I am no longer my own man!’

  ‘Surely you haven’t given up your painting?’ I asked him.

  He was, he admitted, not painting much these days.

  ‘I always argued how politics was the century’s only valid art form and here I am proving it. It’s our millennium, dear Max, the triumph of the human imagination over the mundane world! At last the illusion becomes reality! What keeps you up so late?’ He assumed that I, like himself and his companions, had not yet gone to bed. When I told him the truth he was enormously amused. As we sat down, he continued to sing my praises to the ladies, telling them how I had been a hero of the Russian Civil War, a daring cavalry officer, a flyer and an inventor whose genius, had it not been for Bolshevik treachery, would have turned the tide in the Whites’ favour. ‘The perfect hero of the new Renaissance!’

  I enjoyed all this, of course, and blossomed under the admiring attentions of the women. It made a pleasant change from Shura’s amiable disrespect. I had forgotten how much I relished recognition when it was properly earned. Da Bazzanno asked me what I was doing in Majorca.

  Rather than disappoint him, I told him that I had come on Stavisky’s yacht and hinted that I was here on special business. He received this with another of his enormous knowing winks. He informed the women that I was in the confidence of more than one national government and we must therefore be discreet. I waved such a suggestion aside. ‘It’s simply not conversation for the public square.’ Recalling his duty to his companions, Fiorello suggested that I dine aboard their vessel that evening. I saw no new boats in the harbour. He explained that they had had to anchor on the other side of the headland.

  ‘She’s called La Farfalla Nera.’ He would send his launch for me to Les Bon’ Temps. I told him that I was not certain of my movements. I had companions, a cousin. Then naturally I must bring him too, said da Bazzanno. ‘But you must warn him that we shall monopolise the conversation. We have years to catch up on, you and I, old comrade!’

  He spoke of the dozens of mutual acquaintances from the old Rome days. How was Laura, for instance? I asked. I did not mention that she had been his fiancée. His face clouded and he shrugged. ‘Oh, we’re no longer in touch. She’s so hard-headed. You know what these unregenerate communists are like.’ He was clearly unwilling to say more. I accepted this and left with a promise to see him shortly after sunset.

  I returned to Les Bon’ Temps with my good news. Yet even as I rowed the short distance from shore to boat, I began to wonder if my two worlds were wholly compatible. Shura and Stavisky saw me as one of their own, a kind of poor relation of high-class criminals, whereas da Bazzanno, generous as always, had painted me in quite a different light, considerably closer to the truth.

  As it happened, Shura had no interest in the artistic small talk he expected to hear at such a gathering, so he declined, energetically encouraging me to go. ‘Exactly what you need, dear Dimka,’ he assured me. ‘You will be able to relax with your own kind. Let your hair down, say what you like without causing offence. Holding back can be a strain no matter how good the company.’

  I told him I knew exactly what he meant. That evening I donned my dinner jacket with a clear conscience and a light heart.

  I had forgotten how thoroughly happy I had been in Rome. With Esmé at my side I was secure in the company of good friends. I had enjoyed the pleasure of talk for its own sake, the wild eloquence which seemed to come over us all. The best that was ever said in those days was never recorded. In comparison, Mr ‘Greene’, Mr Hemingway, or Prince Nabokov-Serin and their kind produce gibberish. But these were the years before tape recorders made us all cautious.

  Fiorello’s launch called for me at seven. With a little too much rouge on lips and cheeks and too much powder on her fresh, oval face, Miranda Butter, her bobbed hair covered by one of her host’s lilac scarves, wore a wonderfully fashionable evening dress in green and pink silk. Standing unsteadily beside the seaman at the wheel, she waved to me with an empty martini glass as the other sailor helped me aboard. I had already noted her evident interest in me and hoped she had left behind that irritating habit Americans share with Moslems, of drinking for the illicit thrill of it.

  I joined her under the launch’s awning. ‘I needed a few minutes with you alone,’ she said in that direct American manner. To my relief, she seemed perfectly sober. ‘Your story sounds so wonderful! I know that a lot of what you do is secret, but I’d guess there’s more than enough for an article. Or even a series.’

  Assuming she sought a useful rationale for a liaison, I paid little attention to this at first. Since Americans were so ignorant of the realities of Europe and the Middle East, I hinted it might be possible for me to say a few words and illustrate them with an anecdote or two, but I must first consider the wisdom of such a decision.

  She interpreted this as cautious acquiescence to her approaches and we were both for the moment satisfied.

  The launch rounded the point. Even though I had been prepared for something reflecting Fiorello’s demanding modernist taste, I had not expected to see a magnificent long-distance flying boat built on the very latest lines, large enough to accommodate a substantial number of passengers and crew. I was impressed. We drew alongside La Farfalla Nera. She was a breathing mass of dark glowing paint and red brass straini
ng at her anchor like a captured bird. She represented the aggressive, arrogant, triumphant spirit of what even the provincial ras referred to as mussolinismo. Some of these ras grumbled that the cult of Il Duce conspired to diminish Fascism, but for most of us Mussolini was Fascism, was Italy, was the living embodiment of our faith in a glorious future. He was the voice, the strength, the will of all those millions of us who had been disinherited in the Great War.

  For young people grubbing among the dresses and shawls I sell in Portobello Road, the twenties was a Golden Age of flappers and jazz, but for those of us who lived through them they were an Age of Assassination and Chaos in which year in and year out we heard of the death of this nationalist intellectual or that left-wing premier almost always by pistol, sometimes by bomb, by one rival political group or another. It is fashionable, these days, to blame the fascists for everything. But before them the German parliamentarians were murdering one another willy-nilly and the same was true in France, Greece, Italy and Spain. The Great War had familiarised them with the smell of death. Even in England Winston Churchill called out the troops to fire upon revolutionists. In mainland Europe, our future was non-existent until Mussolini and Hitler came along.

  At dinner that evening, surrounded by the elegant appointments of the marvellous flying boat, all ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays and polished chrome, I was the centre of attention. Everyone wanted to know about my experiences in Egypt and North Africa and while I had to dress the facts in a less alarming and even less dramatic way in order to make them convincing, I regaled them with tales of the Dar-al-Habashiya, the Thieves’ Road across the Sahara, of the powerful Berber kingdoms no outsider had ever penetrated, of the lost oases and the bizarre mirages, the character and disposition of native chieftains, and so on. Their own interest, of course, was in Libya where Italy, some thought, was spending far too much money. ’Those natives live like pampered house pets while Italians at home are having to tighten their belts,’ declared Margherita Sarfatti suddenly and then laughed. ‘But Il Duce knows best. The investment will benefit us eventually. You said you met some rebel Senussi, Prince Max? They’re good-looking savages, I hear.’

  That was her description of the great Saharan lawmakers. The Senussi were revered by Arab and Berber alike. While following the caravan to Khufra I had heard them spoken of with hatred, with admiration, but always with respect. I said as much to the other guests. The Senussi leader Omar was known as a scholar and a statesman of impeccable probity. One fellow, a bucolic ras from Tuscany with some pretensions as a folk poet, violently objected to my description, insisting the Senussi were ignorant zealots sworn to destroy all Christians and drive our Faith out of Africa, restoring the old Moorish Empire and extending it as far as the Baltic. He had a brother, he said, who was a personal friend of Cesare de Vecchi, Governor of Somalia. De Vecchi had earned the Moslems’ respect by riding his horse into their mosques and pissing on their shrines. It was only ‘What they would do to us if they could. Raw power is what they respect. The Senussi were a spent force the moment we hanged that monster Omar.’

  With my usual social graces, I was able to turn the conversation to less controversial subjects, such as the success of the Nazi Party and its chances of bringing Germany under the fascist umbrella. Could fascism create the united Europe of which Mussolini would be both the chief architect and first premier? Ultimately it would take more than one member of a select company to shoulder the responsibilities of leadership. I told my fellow guests of my dream — to see a company of Carolingian knights — a court, attracting the paladins of the Christian nations — ruling Europe and perhaps America. A great wall of Western chivalry against the Eastern barbarian, ensuring that Constantinople would never fall again. But in those days it was unfashionable to speak positively of Christianity. Many of the best fascists felt the role of the Church to be over in modern life. Consequently, I clothed my remarks in the most general language.

  ‘I’d agree we need good men for the job.’ Margherita Sarfatti held a long cigarette holder of polished marble and smoked foul-smelling Turkish ovals. As she drank, she seemed to become a little more angry, a little more cutting, a little more bored. She found most of the company irritating and it was clear she did not much care for da Bazzanno’s diplomatic invitation to the gentleman from Tuscany who was now repeating some gossip he swore he had from the lips of Il Duce himself, to the effect that the German National Socialists were ‘a bunch of limp-wristed interior decorators and ballet-masters to a creature!’ which, presumably, was how he would also have dismissed the Spartan Hundred. This bumpkin asserted with hearty prurience that the would-be German Duce actually wore rouge in public. The only gentleman among them, the only heterosexual with any kind of war record, was the ex-flyer Hermann Göring, who was a great fan of Mussolini’s and who got on famously with him.

  ‘His are the kind who should lead the new Germany,’ said the ras’s cow-faced wife, continuing the speech for him while he took a breath, ‘people of the old stock but with new ideas. Hitler and the others are illiterate, mannerless dullards. Not one knows a fork from a dinner knife or a dinner knife from a dagger. They are typical lower-class Huns. They have no style. The Germans could never take such people seriously. They worship the Old Prussian order. They want the Kaiser back. They certainly don’t want to be represented by the worst examples of their own kind!’

  ‘Which is why Prince August, the Kaiser’s son, is now a Nazi, perhaps,’ I said. ‘Who better to lead them?’

  Whereupon the folk poet, revived by wine and a puff on his cigar, ignored my pointed remark and continued his lecture on the fundamental discipline of the Germans and how they loved a leader, on the arrogant insouciance of the British and how they believed themselves and their nation unquestionably superior to all others, merely because of the voracious greed and cunning cupidity of those who had almost accidentally acquired their empire. This was, he supposed, the source of their strength and why they had no nationalist party and why they were so decadent. On almost every issue I found myself in irritable disagreement with that provincial bigwig. Most Italians were pro-British and dismissive of the Germans, who they feared would threaten Italy from Austria if they had the chance. They did not wish to fight another war.

  The ras seemed utterly unworthy of his leader’s trust or of the honour bestowed upon him. His manners and opinions would have shocked a Chicago gangster. I began to make this comparison when da Bazzanno, perhaps conscious of his duties towards the rest of us, gracefully changed the subject and suggested that we all go to the observation deck on the roof of the aircraft. A full moon had risen over the bay and would be worth seeing. Miranda Butter took my arm as we went up. On three sides were steep wooded limestone terraces sharply defined by the light of a large yellow moon which made a silvery causeway across the lapping water to the dark, glinting metal of our little observation deck, bathing us all in its cold light.

  Though I had grown used to women again, Miranda Butter’s healthy young American body stirred a certain memory in my blood. I was reminded a little of Rosie von Bek. Even her perfume lacked ambiguity. She radiated energy and enthusiasm, frequently absent in modern European women. Most women I had met in those days preferred the languid life of a pampered poule du chambre to any active engagement in the world’s affairs.

  Ideally one should have two women: a comrade to stand side by side with you in the struggle against Chaos and a compliant sexual partner, always eager to serve your needs. My inability to choose between these equally attractive types has left me the companion-less old man I am today, though Mrs Cornelius was of course a considerable comfort. When she died, there was no one.

  Miranda Butter had the same frank sexuality. Like Mrs Cornelius she was largely unconscious of it. Though she was only twenty-two years old, her naivety and directness had evidently opened doors for her in Europe, giving unusual access to the famous people she interviewed for her paper. Another advantage was the sheer romanticism of her origins. Every
one had heard of Texas. Everyone felt a certain romantic yearning for the land of Zane Grey and Karl May whose worlds had been brought to life in thousands of picture-plays, even before the drawling accents of their cowboy heroes were heard and imitated anywhere that a projector could be linked to sound. By addressing Texans through her pages, Europeans knew they were reaching the ‘true’ Americans — the great, open-hearted, idealistic frontiers-men and -women who typified all that was bravest and best in the old race, yet was untainted by Yankee-dollar madness or Albany politics. I often yearned for that American vivacity during my years abroad. The chance to experience it again was a marvellous treat.

  I remember my magical evening aboard La Farfalla Nera with great nostalgia. I did not return to Les Bon’ Temps but, at her request, accompanied Miranda Butter to her cabin to discuss a series of interviews in which I would give Houston’s readers the benefit of my predictions about the Future of Europe.

  This first act of our charade opened on the settee of her little cabin. We would begin, she said, with some background. She opened her reporter’s notebook and brandished a pencil. Her readers would want to know if I was married.

  Sadly, I told her, I am a widower.