by Norman Lewis
When I mentioned an interest in Italian cars the Count was instantly interested and sympathetic. Italians in general like to make themselves useful where they can. As a matter of course — of national tradition — the Count would have helped me when he could, establishing a small balance of favour here and there, some which he would cash in, and others he would not. If calculation came into this at all, it may have been that it would have been useful to get off on the right foot with Ernesto in whatever dealings he might have with him. Whatever the motive, he immediately found me an Alfa Romeo that had won a 24-hour race at Le Mans, which I bought at an absurdly low price and drove back to England a few days later. When I eventually resold it, it was out of necessity and with great reluctance, at a large profit.
Two weeks after the encounter in Milan, Giordano arrived in England, bringing the beauty queen wife with him, who — while a little jaded perhaps after the fifteen years that had passed since the crown had been placed on her head — was certainly one of the most charming women I had ever met.
An Italian-style banquet, in the tremendous refulgence of Ernesto’s dining room, took place, during which the Count told Ernesto all about the ramifications of his business empire, the Longobards with their small penises, the two Doges of Venice in his later family history, his recent dinner with Marshal Badoglio and his audience with the diminutive but intelligent King Vittorio Emmanuele, who had probably listened to his outpourings, as did Ernesto at this moment, with an occasional sickly grin and a nod of the head. It was hard to believe that these two men, one so passionately absorbed in the vanity of prestige and the vanity of material possessions, the other so devoid of such considerations, could be the product of the same nation.
Giordano stayed three days in London, spending part of each evening with his wife watching all-in wrestling at Blackfriars. The sport, recently introduced, was enjoying something of a vogue, although it was banned in Italy as a degenerate spectacle that clearly awoke some of the spirit that the Count must have shown in his old days as a squadrista for, on the occasion I accompanied them, he leaped to his feet galvanized with excitement, shouting curses and threats at one of the wrestlers, and finally took off one of his shoes and threw it at him. This was not returned, but what did it matter? he said. He had brought a dozen pairs with him; and possessed sixty in all.
The wife, Celestina, had a suggestion to put to Ernestina which seemed startling in England in those days. When Italians of their class and age-group went on holiday, she said, they were always on the look-out for a possible exchange of mates, not necessarily because they were libidinosi but because a holiday was not a holiday without all the new vistas and experiences that were to be had. Whether or not you were inclined to promiscuity, said Celestina, you embraced an unknown body, just as you took the waters (which might even taste dreadful) or went for long health-giving walks. What did Ernestina think of the idea? Reporting back to me, Ernestina said that as a person of avant-garde ideas she had felt a loss of inner face in having to turn the offer down. ‘But just imagine Aldo Giordano. …’
Whatever the object of the Count’s visit had been, it was, at least in large part, successful, for within a few days of the Giordanos’ departure we saw Ernesto and Maria off on the train to Rome. They returned from what sounded like an almost triumphant visit to all the old haunts of Ernesto’s youth to a state of near chaos at home.
Maria’s brother, Franco, a man Ernesto could never abide, with his indiscreet wife Florence had moved into the house while the Corvajas had been away, and as ever disaster had followed on their heels. With Maria’s outstanding exception, the Darbellays sounded an ill-starred race. The males of the family were depressives who turned easily to the bottle, and one of Franco’s younger brothers had recently committed suicide with some difficulty, by drowning himself in a three-foot-deep fountain in the centre of Berne in broad daylight.
Franco, too, was a depressive, weak, ineffective and defeated, who suffered the additional disadvantage of having a sickly, complaining wife, suffering among other ailments from an irreparable prolapse of the womb, causing her frequently to drop whatever she was doing and wander off, taking a hand-mirror, to the lavatory to check whether her cervix was visible.
At normal times, with Ernesto’s cold and disapproving eye upon him, Franco vegetated calmly enough, a background presence hardly noticed in the house by the other members of the family, but left to himself — since Florence spent much of her time in bed — he was liable to be seized and transfigured by mischievous and destructive energy.
The Corvajas returned to a double row of milk bottles on the front doorstep, finger-painted graffiti in black boot polish on the gild doors, Florence’s uterine ring in disinfectant in an antique Chinese bowl on a sideboard, a faint smell of vinous vomit that penetrated to every corner of the house, and Franco asleep in a firmament of broken glass on a once superb Aubusson carpet now irretrievably stained with the dark wine of Sicily.
Next day it was explained to Franco that he would have to go into hospital for treatment. This he accepted without demur, dressing himself with extreme care when the time came, with a new shirt, a dark well-knotted tie, and a smear of brilliantine on the tightly curled fair hair that was only beginning to turn grey. There followed a firm parting handshake for everyone, and Maria took him to the French Hospital in Charing Cross Road, where she waited until he was in bed, embraced him and then went off. Walking out into Shaftesbury Avenue she saw a small, excited crowd that had gathered on the pavement nearby. People were running. Looking up, she saw one of the hospital windows was open, with faces at it, and that part of the balcony had broken away. Even before she had pushed through to the front of the crowd, she knew that it would be Franco. He was dead.
A few days later I was called by my mother to Enfield to reason with my father. He had ceased to dispense his elixir, sold his pharmacy, and now, reasonably, feeling the life drain from him, appealed, like Simeon, to God to be allowed to depart in peace. My mother, a woman of hard and resolute fibre, but on unsure ground where my father was concerned, must have suspected that God might hear him, and my mission was to appeal to my father to change his mind.
It was too late, he said. He had devoted fifteen years as a Spiritualist medium to proclaiming and providing proof of the survival of the human personality beyond the grave, with little desire to investigate its quality and attraction. Yet even this infinitely shadowy territory, to which the Spiritualists had done no more than add a dimension of triviality, seemed preferable to him than continued existence on earth as an old man confined with his memories among the vanishing cherry orchards of Forty Hill.
It was too late, he explained, and with a kind of quiet triumph he took my hand and placed it over a swelling in his stomach. This, he said, was cancer. The only thing that gave him any pleasure now was the sight of flowers in bloom. Winter was upon us. He might survive, he thought, until next spring, but then he would surely die. He felt no pain of any kind.
Although he refused at first to see a doctor, one was fetched. Next day he was taken to hospital. The day after he was operated upon, and that same night he died in a most tranquil fashion.
My father’s death was followed in quick succession by the deaths of two of my aunts, Annie fading rapidly from some unknown cause, and Polly, inevitably, of multiple burns after falling in the fire in the nursing home where she had been placed by the Reverend Emrys Davies, who had decided that it was no longer safe to leave her without proper supervision in the house. Surprises were to follow, as I learned through my cousin Dai Owen, who lived within a hundred yards of the house in Wellfield Road and, attuned to all the currents of gossip in this town where a part of religion was to know one’s neighbour’s business, was well placed to keep track of what went on.
Everyone in Carmarthen had assumed that the Baptist minister would inherit the two aunts’ worldly possessions, but to the general astonishment this proved not to be the case, for all Annie’s and Polly’s property
passed to Li. The Reverend had obtained power of attorney in the two senior aunts’ case, but mysteriously enough, Li had held out. The emergency had suddenly uncovered in this confused and vulnerable little old neurotic a core of lucidity and determination. Like a Threspotian goat-herd called by oracle to be priestess, Li was transformed. The minister was shown the door. Li straightened herself, dressed in new clothes to appear in the streets of Carmarthen and paid a visit to her solicitor where, according to confidential information supplied by the clerk, she showed a clear grasp of the situation in which she found herself. Her next call was on a firm of builders and decorators whom she employed to smarten up the house before it went on the market. Li cleared the dismal thickets in the garden, packed off the furniture to the King’s Street salerooms, and ordered a holocaust of the books, including a collection of every issue of the Christian Herald since its first publication, and — alas — the painstaking eye-witness record of all the public hangings at Llangunnor which as a child I had so longed to possess. In some way Dai Owen had learned that Li — whom I found it hard to believe had ever put pen to paper — had kept in touch with her sister living in exile in Canada, sent there after the birth of an illegitimate child to marry a settler who advertised for a bride. The sister was long since dead, but her son now invited Li to come to Canada to live with his family, and to Canada in a matter of weeks Li departed, to be seen and heard of no more.
In Forty Hill the Spiritualists, deprived of my father, managed to carry on much as before, employing visiting mediums in his stead. My mother’s fame as a healer continued to spread, and a custom had sprung up, based on a tradition established at Lourdes, of leaving behind, after a successful visit to her, the appliances and vessels of orthodox medicine for which the patient no longer had any need. These trophies festooned the equivalent of the vestry in my mother’s church, the Beacon of Light. My mother’s cures were not of a spectacular kind, so there were no discarded crutches, but there were a pair of reinforced boots employed for weak ankles which had strengthened under the healing touch, a brace of trusses, several iodine lockets, and even a Wonder Worker, and many empty bottles that had held once indispensable medicaments — Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodine, Parr’s Sovereign Expectorant, Ashton and Parsons’ Phosforine, and the like — that were no longer required.
Chapter Eleven
MUCH OF 1938 WAS spent in travelling, journeys financed by occasional windfalls from my incursions into the world of trade, added to a little money Ernestina had of her own. A peregrination took us through Central Europe into the Balkans, through Rumania and Bulgaria to the Black Sea, and back through Yugoslavia and Hungary. It was done on the cheap in an elderly Ford V8 costing £31, bought expressly for the journey and thrown away at the end. Discarding comfort, we chose the seediest of accommodation, and when no inn existed in a village when we decided to stay the night, there was never a problem about finding a room in a peasant’s home. In this way our outlay was hardly greater than if we had stayed at home.
That spring I had met Ladislas Farago, a Hungarian Jew, and the author of a successful book, Abyssinia on the Eve. Many years later Farago was to create the Bormann legend, publishing a book that purported to describe his meeting in South America with Martin Bormann, Hitler’s vanished deputy. This was said to have netted him a million pounds. It was a minor spoof and of slight importance. What was of disastrous consequence for the American people was that Farago should have become one of President Nixon’s evil geniuses and an inspirer of his policy in Vietnam. Ladislas, who was considerably older than myself, was the possessor of irresistible charm, fatally allied with the power to carry conviction in all his utterances. I found him in those days also a kind man and it was hard to believe that he could have perpetrated the cruel deceptions (for he knew and cared nothing for the Far East) by which the sufferings of the war were prolonged.
I listened to Ladislas’ pronouncements as to an oracle, accepting without question all he told me. His new project was a journey to the North Yemen, about which he would write a book for which his publishers had already paid an enormous advance. He suggested that I should go with him to take the photographs, and I instantly agreed, being at all times, both before and since, the ready prey of any Pied Piper.
In those days the North Yemen remained a terra incognita to Europeans, previously visited by two or possibly three Englishmen, and Ladislas painted pictures of the marvels it contained. It was ruled over by an all-powerful despot, the Imam Yahya, who daily administered the ferocious Koranic justice seated under a tree at the gates of his palace, and entrance to the country could only be granted by him in person after application through his envoy in Aden. The application had to be sent by sea — carried in a dhow — to the port of Hodeida, thereafter by despatch rider to Sana’a, the Imam’s mountain capital. It took up to two months to receive a reply.
In the event we spent seven weeks in Aden and the enormous area of the Protectorate — much of it, with its medieval desert cities and their mud skyscrapers, of great fascination — before word arrived through Imam’s emissary that we might travel to Yemen, but only as far as Hodeida, where we should receive further instructions.
We bought a chestful of Maria Theresa silver thalers, the only currency acceptable in the Yemen, provisions for a week and boarded the first dhow bound for the Red Sea. Every aspect of the voyage was attended by uncertainty, and at the back of the mind there was always the nagging statistic that ten per cent per annum of such ships depart on voyages from which they never return. The captain, establishing his viewpoint with the remark that only God could be sure of anything, said that according to the winds, it could take anything between three days and three weeks to reach Hodeida, and warned us that he would not sail on Fridays and holy days. He insisted that we should accompany him if at any time he decided to interrupt the voyage to take part in some local pilgrimage. Having carried all our gear aboard and settled where we could find space to await the hoisting of the single lateen sail, we found ourselves suddenly, with all the rest of the passengers, ordered ashore again. A canoe coming alongside had brought an invitation to the captain, and all who voyaged on the ship, to attend a wedding in the family of an old friend from the Hadramaut to the east of Southern Arabia, now settled in Aden. ‘You must go with us, too,’ the captain said to us. ‘Now you are my brothers. We shall eat together, and then we shall dance until dawn. Tomorrow it is my intention to set sail, and if not tomorrow, the day after that.’
There was nothing for it. We disembarked and were conducted to a great tent that had been put up on the town’s outskirts, there at an all-male party — the bride and her friends being elsewhere — to feast and dance the night away. The food was varied and exquisite, but above all strange: great saffron-flavoured lucky dips of rice and meat to be searched with the fingers, camel’s-hump fat, lamb’s testicles, delectable innards in batter, lurid fish from the coral reefs, locusts en brochette, great bustards as big as turkeys baked in clay, skewered ortolans. All-pervasive was the suggestive aroma of ras el hanut, compounded of dried rose-buds, pepper and Spanish fly, supposedly aphrodisiac, and certain if consumed to excess to provoke severe irritation of the urinary tract. After the inflammatory food, plenty of good healthy exercise, leaping and cavorting to fife and drum, while a flying fugleman brandishing a stick rushed up and down the lines of the dancers to whack out at the evil spirits attracted to such festivities, with an occasional shout of triumph whenever he managed to flatten one that had settled with predatory interest upon some part of a guest’s anatomy. Prudently such parties ended, as this one did, with communal chewing of large quantities of qat leaves containing a mild narcotic which instantly quenched the fires lit by the ras el hanut, exorcized improper visions, and turned the mind to spiritual themes.
At daybreak we went down to the dhow, and with this demonstration of the righteousness of patience the voyage began, and in this spirit of tolerance and resignation it continued. There were thirty-two passengers on this sma
ll ship, Arabs of every condition plus a trio of Yemeni Jews, and for the purpose of this journey we were all to become members of a united family. In a moment of emergency when the main sail was torn to shreds in a brief squall, able-bodied males gave a hand to the crew. When we were becalmed for days on end and food began to run short, there was a voluntary distribution of private provisions, shared out in the most scrupulous fashion, although sometimes with difficulty, for how in compliance with this desert protocol did we set about the division of a fruit into thirty-two pieces?
Nothing could have been more gracious, more diverting or more generous than the company with whom we travelled on the dhow; and the considerable drawbacks to the voyage, unsuspected when we set out from Aden, would have been brushed aside by any seasoned traveller. The dhow carried, like some receptacle filled to the brim, an ancient odour investing its timbers with the cargoes of decades, many of them of hides and of dried fish. Harder to endure were the assaults by innumerable mosquitoes, forcing us at night — despite the great heat — to cover ourselves completely by blankets. When the breeze fell away we lay motionless in the dark in a sea glittering with a great hoar-frost of phosphorescence, and for days on end the sun showed us a slow heave of oiled water clogged with the opened umbrellas of millions of jellyfish. The presence of familiar landmarks on the Yemen coastline, a rocky outcrop, a tower, reminded us that our position on the map had remained unchanged. Every day the ship’s baker baked unleavened bread. This we washed down with kishr, a greenish, pungent-flavoured concoction boiled up from coffee husks, preferred in Southern Arabia to coffee itself. It was a combination which produced unappeasable indigestion.
