Painting Death

by Tim Parks

  So it was mildly irritating, having reached the inner sanctum, to find that the mayor hadn’t bothered with a tie. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to get moving,’ the younger man said, hurrying between elegant chairs to give Morris his hand and then immediately withdraw it. He wore a white shirt, open at the neck, black blazer and denim jeans, so that if it weren’t for the red and green mayoral sash across his chest it would have been hard to imagine why he was in such solemn surroundings at all. A delegation of Arab businessmen was expected for eleven o’clock, he explained. One couldn’t be late for the Arabs. ‘Our new masters, alas!’

  Morris had always despised the Northern League and chided himself for having expected anything better of Verona’s local hero, first separatist mayor of this exquisitely Italian town.

  ‘We were waiting for my son,’ Morris said frostily. ‘I’m afraid his flight’s been delayed.’

  They took seats behind a polished table while a crowd of seventy or so settled in rows beneath Paolo Farinati’s huge Victory of the Veronese over Barbarossa covering half the wall to the left, a great oil-brushed tumble of bodies, blood and heraldry with some fine fabrics and polished armour tossed in for good measure among neighing horses and silken banners. Oh to have a palazzo big enough to house such splendour, Morris thought. A whole war in your front room! But with undue haste the mayor was already jumping to his feet and plucking one of the microphones from its stand.

  ‘Buon giorno a tutti!’ he began, even before people had had time to take their seats. ‘We are here as you know to honour a man who has been among us for many years, indeed who arrived in this town the very season our beloved Hellas Verona won the Scudetto. You brought good luck, Meester Dackvert!’ the mayor smiled down on his guest. ‘We are extremely grateful.’

  This shameless crowd-pleaser of an opening, which immediately raised a shout of applause—even Antonella and Massimina clapped enthusiastically—wasn’t actually true, since Morris had arrived in Verona in 1983, not ’85. But the Northern League people, he remembered, were invariably Hellas fans, theatrically rough and tough, the town’s would-be bad boys. Mauro surely wasn’t messing with the league, Morris hoped. Even the Communists dressed better.

  ‘Not, alas, a success we are likely to see repeated in the near future,’ the mayor added with pantomime gloom, ‘or not if last night’s abject performance is anything to go by.’

  The public sighed.

  ‘Though the disturbances after Brescia’s late goal, if I may say so in parenthesis, and I know because I was there, were certainly not initiated by Hellas fans.’

  ‘Verissimo! ’ a voice called from the back.

  What on earth, Morris wondered, did all this have to do with honouring Cittadino Duckworth?

  ‘Actually,’ the young mayor laughed, ‘for a while the terraces looked rather like our old painting here.’ He gestured to the raised swords, rearing horses and trampled corpses in Farinati’s Victory. ‘Though I personally was unarmed of course.’

  Another laugh. This was infuriating. But Morris had learned over the years to keep calm, if not exactly cool, especially when in full public view. Sitting tight, his body steaming with angry heat, he consoled himself with the reflection that he was very likely the only one in this room who had ever had the courage to raise a weapon in anger and kill a man, or woman for that matter (on the very weekend Verona had won the championship if he was not mistaken), hence the only one here who could really understand the heat, horror and wild elation experienced in Farinati’s magnificent painting. What was a scuffle at a vulgar football match compared to real killing? His knowledge went deeper than theirs, Morris told himself, inches of steel deeper, though come to think of it he’d never used a knife. Reaching to pour himself a glass of water, Morris noticed his wife in the front row trying to catch his eye and shaking her head slightly. Was he doing something wrong? He hadn’t opened his mouth yet. And who was the man on her right who looked so oddly familiar?

  ‘Aside from that magnificent achievement,’ the mayor paused—he had a thrusting jaw and close-set, merry eyes in pasty skin—‘Verona having been, as I shall never tire of repeating, the last provincial team ever to be CHAMPIONS OF ITALY’—again he waited for the obedient applause to die down—‘aside, as I said, from that alas unrepeatable exploit’—he pronounced the word à la française and turned to grin complacently at his guest—‘Meester Dackvert’s first years in Verona were not entirely happy, peripherally involved as he so sadly was in the murderous tragedies that beset two of the town’s finest old families, the Trevisans of Quinzano, and the Posenatos of San Felice.’

  Again there was applause, but subdued this time, as many present would remember the violent deaths of three prominent citizens, unaware of course that these were precisely the occasions when Morris had been obliged to learn the lethal skills celebrated by Paolo Farinati on the magnificent canvas beside them. Sipping his glass of water, the Englishman began to wonder whether it had really been wise to accept this invitation and, glancing towards Antonella, saw that she had lowered her face, perhaps to shed a tear over her dead sisters, or even, however misguidedly, her first husband, while the man sitting to her right patted her shoulder with surprising familiarity. Suddenly Morris found himself alert. It couldn’t be Stan Albertini, could it? Stan had left Verona decades back.

  ‘There was also, as friends of the family will recall, an unfortunate incident with a German shepherd, which, er, rearranged, as they say, our English guest’s rosy-cheeked physiognomy, obliging him to rely henceforth on brain rather than beauty!’

  How inexcusably clumsy and insensitive these remarks were! But since Morris’s old scars had at that very moment begun to sing and burn in cheeks and temples, the English guest (guest, after thirty years!) was grateful for any supposed embarrassment that offered cover. If there was one person who possessed the facts to bury him, if only it ever occurred to the halfwit to string them all together, it was Stan.

  ‘But the English are a resilient race,’ the mayor continued, ‘as we Italians know to our cost.’ Speaking without notes, he raised and lowered the microphone, swinging his shoulders from side to side with the panache of a stand-up comedian. Clearly his audience loved him, for they never failed to titter. ‘In short there are many reasons for our decision to honour Meester Dackvert today.’ Again he looked indulgently down on his guest as if the fifty-five-year-old multiple murderer had just been born in a stable under a sparkling comet. ‘Having married the beautiful Antonella Trevisan, surely an indication of the best possible taste’—the tasteless remark raised a storm of cheers; if there was one quality Antonella did not have, Morris thought, and had never remotely claimed to have, it was beauty; unless of course you considered a sort of exemplary piety beautiful—‘Meester Dackvert single-handedly turned the family’s traditional old wine company into one of the dominant economic forces in our town, offering employment to scores of Veronese and even larger numbers of African and Slav immigrants, who, it has to be said, without the precious resource of paid work, might well have become a danger to our community.’

  The mayor paused, apparently unaware of anything offensive in this reflection. This time there was no applause. ‘He very astutely developed the older vineyards to build a fine new luxury housing estate on the hills above Parona—Villaggio Casa Mia—offering a chance to many of our youngsters to buy their first properties. And, together with his splendid and most Veronese wife, he has been over many years a generous sponsor of the university, the arts and the Church, always ready to help out when some worthy project runs into rough financial waters.’

  Again the mayor paused, again there was no response from the crowd. But now the man seemed to relish the silence, as if it was exactly what he intended. He hadn’t mentioned, Morris noted, that Fratelli Trevisan SRL also made regular contributions to all political parties that polled more than five per cent in local elections, not to mention a wide range of minor and indeed major officials in the customs and tax offices. Onl
y now, however, did it occur to Morris that what he really should have sponsored was Hellas Verona Football Club.

  ‘But the immediate reason for our decision to extend this honour to Meester Dackvert’—suddenly the mayor’s voice slowed to something pondered and solemn, as if all the preamble about championships, murder mysteries and Morris’s astonishing entrepreneurial skills were the merest patter to settle the public’s mood—‘is his generous and completely unsolicited response to the vicious media attack that has been launched on our town and on this administration in particular.’

  There was much muttering and scraping of chairs. Nothing, as Morris well understood, was taken more seriously in Verona than the town’s national and international reputation. Far more important than any concrete reality, was the business of what people thought of you.

  ‘As you know the attempt to paint our fair city as a den of backwardness and brutal authoritarianism has been going on since the time of the Second War and the Republic of Salò. Entirely unfounded, it forms part of a squalid game of political conditioning by which our envious rivals—and I need not tell you who they are—seek to cut us off from what very little funding is available for urban development in these hard times.’

  The murmurs of assent now began again.

  ‘But if this propaganda war was bad before, it has become even more aggressive since the Northern League took over the governance of the town and brought some order to the chaos and cronyism that had been going on for far too long. It is clear that even our supposed political allies in Rome, not to mention the hopeless band of ex-Communists who occupied and abused these same public offices not so long ago, have been running a smear campaign that now extends beyond the national to the international press, culminating in the libellous article that appeared in a British newspaper a few months ago. I shall not repeat the gross accusations that were made there. They shall never sully my lips.’

  At this point there was such a roar of applause that the mayor, who was checking his watch with embarrassing frequency, had to raise his arms to quieten the crowd and hurry on. ‘What I intend to do instead, as sole and sufficient motivation for our conferring on Morrees Dackvert THE FREEDOM OF OUR CITY’—and here the mayor picked up from the tabletop, and quickly put down again, a parchment scroll and open, navy blue gift box containing a large silver key—‘is to read out the letter that our excellent friend wrote in reply to those accusations in the same newspaper. And I shall read it, amici miei,’ he raised his solid jaw and grinned, ‘in Eengleesh, yes, to remind our envious neighbours—their names shall never be mentioned—of the level that education has reached in this proud province.’

  Morris was startled. The man was going to read his letter to the Telegraph. In English! When he couldn’t even pronounce Duckworth properly! Morris wanted to grab the mike from his hand and read the thing himself, if read it had to be, though at his point he began to wonder whether the double-barrelled snob who had carried out his hack’s hatchet job on the ancient town—the offensive article to which Morris had responded—didn’t perhaps have a point after all. For at last it dawned on him that this whole ceremony had been organised, not to reward Morris Duckworth for being a fine citizen at all, but as the merest PR for the Northern League. The separatists had a British intellectual on their side!

  ‘Unlaiykk,’ the mayor waved a scrap of newsprint, ‘yor mendaayshuuus correespondent who publeeshed VERONA: CAAPEETAL OF KIIITSCH . . .’

  It had all begun some months ago at Samira’s place. She and Morris had made love in the usual lavish fashion on the mattress under the ochre tapestry, then, while she was preparing one of her excellent herb teas—and there was still frankincense smoking in the corner—her brother had come out of his room and started talking about wanting to do a Masters in economics in London. Tarik was a very respectful young man and showed none of the disapproval one might have feared from a jealous brother raised in a backward Moslem community, though that might have been, of course, because Morris was paying the siblings’ not insignificant rent. But what was to be gained from being cynical? There was nothing bunga-bungaish about what went on between Morris and Samira, it was genuine affection, and of course now that he had found the girl a six-month work-experience in the local council’s Heritage Department she would be more than worth the price of her two-bedroom flat in San Zeno. If nothing else she had access to the files of all paintings possessed by churches in the province.

  Always ready to help, and save a friend a costly mistake, Morris had pulled his MacBook Air from his Armani attaché case and sat down at the glass table with the two young Libyans on each side of him. They had browsed a few university sites, compared curriculums and requirements, and considered whether it would be wiser to apply now, before Tarik had finished at Verona, or wait till he had the Italian degree in the bag, at the expense of having to take a gap year. ‘I could find something for you to do,’ Morris had smiled, ‘if it’s a question of filling the time. I can always use a smart young man.’ It seemed important to have Tarik understand that Morris’s affection for Samira extended, overflowed rather, to her nearest and dearest. Tarik frowned, asking his sister’s benefactor to explain again—his Italian was excellent but his English still shaky—the mysterious workings of UCAS, and as Morris clicked back and forth, enjoying his expertise these days with all things bureaucratic, he suddenly became intensely aware of their three pairs of legs side by side under the stylish glass tabletop: Samira’s, to his left, wonderfully young and vulnerable as she distractedly opened and closed honey thighs in a black bathrobe; his own solid and steady in sober grey flannel, and, to his right, in tattered jeans, casually crossed at the bare brown ankles, this fine young Arab’s. ‘I love them both.’ Morris suddenly found himself saying these words inside his head. ‘I love sister and brother both!’ and he felt a surge of energy and excitement such as he had not experienced these twenty years and more.

  Then, intending to show Tarik where to read the economic news in the English press, Morris opened the Telegraph’s home page, and there it was. ‘Verona: Capital of Kitsch,’ by Boris Anderton-Dodds. Who the hell was he? So extraordinary did it seem to open an English national newspaper and find an article on the small Italian town they lived in, that the threesome read it at once. Nicolas Sarkozy was planning to take his pregnant Carla on holiday to the town of Romeo and Juliet. It was typical of the French president’s abysmal taste. Over recent years the once elegant Veneto town had seen no better way to solve its self-inflicted economic problems than to become Italy’s dumb Disneyland of romantic slush and sleaze. Tourists were met at airport and railway station by pesky guides pressuring them into Love Tours of Romeo’s house and Juliet’s balcony where cohorts of Korean businessmen had themselves photographed with hands cupping the bare breast of a bronze nymphet before being hauled off to karaoke evenings where they learned ‘O sole mio’ and ‘Santa Lucia’, hardly Veronese tunes. The Renaissance palazzo housing Juliet’s tomb—though of course no one knew whether it had really been Juliet’s tomb, as no one knew whether it had really been Juliet’s balcony—had become an upmarket registrar’s office luring sentimental suckers from five continents to empty their wallets for overpriced ceremonies and third-rate costume jewellery. It was the globalisation of vulgarity; everywhere you looked the city was choked with cheesy cliché, the hotels advertising ‘consummation’ suites (and sheets!) for honeymooning couples and the mayor himself offering his services as registrar at a special price to milk the cash cow to the last drop. This was the same xenophobic Northern League mayor who pursued a racist policy against kebab outlets, denied Moslems a place to build a mosque and introduced fascist regulations that prevented people from sleeping on park benches or eating sandwiches on the steps of public monuments, and all in a town where the Church pretended to be charitable but in fact kept hundreds of apartments empty (without paying any property tax) rather than rent them to poor Africans. Every year, towards Valentine’s Day, lovers all over the world were invited
to write a Letter to Juliet, alias the town council, with a prize for those who managed the best homage to love. A prize judged by whom? Boris Anderton-Dodds demanded. What did the city’s administrators know about love? If they had any respect at all for the myth of romantic love they would return the town to its ancient dignity and remember that the quality most alien to romance was greed, the quality most akin, charity. A modern Romeo and Juliet would not be about the Montagues and Capulets, let alone the Sarkozys and Brunis; it would be the thwarted love between the son of a Northern League official and the chadored daughter of a dusky kebab vendor.