I have always been a man of many worlds, able to move easily from one social ambience to another. Remembering the bohemian character of the district near the Tiber’s left bank more or less between the Capitol and Isola Tiberina, a stone’s throw from the Orsini Palace, I returned there with Esmé that same afternoon. We were in such a pleasant state of euphoria we soon selected a café, sitting outside under its red and white awning, swatting at mosquitoes, and drinking citrons presses from trumpet-shaped glasses. Half an hour later we were in conversation with a dark and attractively ugly little man who mistook us at first for English. Learning we were Russians, he became extravagantly delighted. He hardly needed to tell us he was an artist, with his wide-brimmed slouch hat and his scarlet silky cloak. He introduced himself as Fiorello da Bazzanno, painter. His monstrously wide mouth, full of yellow uneven teeth, made him grotesque; half-man half-horse in the head alone. His puny, underfed body, which twitched perpetually, completely contradicted the animalistic, pagan quality of his face. Yet the combination was magnetic. Moreover he revealed a facility for language which matched my own. To us he spoke a bizarre patois of Russian, German, Italian, French and English. He had been born in Trieste where most of those cultures meet. He insisted we drink a bottle of Tuscan wine with him. After an hour or so he had revealed he had been a petty thief, a street arab. Then in the trenches he had met his hero, the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and discovered broader horizons. I told him of my own life in Petersburg, my engineering achievements, my flying exploits. He was quick to see similarities in our lives. Drawing a great, gold watch from within his rather dirty white shirt he told us we were to be his guests for supper. He paid the bill at the café and led us down the street towards Mendoza’s Café in the Via Catalana, which was distinguished by its black and yellow striped umbrellas, and thus known locally as ‘The Wasp’.
‘You’ll have the fried artichoke to begin.’ Fiorello was grave for a moment. ‘It’s Mendoza’s speciality and creates more spiritual uplift than a dozen Papal audiences.’
A woman was waiting for him at one of the outside tables. She was dressed entirely in black and was almost twice his size. She had dark bobbed hair, a black smock, black stockings, black shoes. The only contrast was in her rather pale skin and the scarlet cord tied around her waist. This was Laura Fischetti. She wrote, said Fiorello almost apologetically, for the socialist press. We shook hands. A plump, motherly, good-humoured woman, she was forever picking and patting at her tiny lover. While he talked she leaned back from him, her hand on his chair, and smiled at us, the proud parent of a spoiled but clever child. Occasionally she would bend her head towards Esmé and ask her a question. My Esmé opened up to Laura, telling her the version of her life story I had said would be most acceptable in Europe; how she had been orphaned, raised by Turks, was about to be sold to a Syrian merchant when I found her, recognising her as my long-lost cousin. If Laura found the story fantastic, she was too well mannered to pursue it. Instead she confined herself to enquiring about life in Constantinople where her father had been attached to the consulate before the War, but which she had never visited.
The artichoke was as delicious as Fiorello had promised but the various pastas and meats which followed were better still. During the course of this wonderful meal, various friends arrived and seated themselves around us. When the table proved too small, they drew up another and placed it at an angle to the first until half the area belonged to one large group, all of them talking, drinking, eating and gesticulating with such energy and pleasure I should not have cared a second if I understood a word of what they said. Two or three of them had visited Russia before the War. They said they were poets. I suspected them of anarchist affiliations. It was Italians who so affected Petersburg’s bohemians on every political and artistic level. I did not mind. They were not the savage, primitive anarchists I knew. To them anarchism was the logical persuasion for an artist, any artist, and particularly Italian artists. The Italians are the great individualists of Europe and anarchy is merely a formal description of the country’s fundamental attitudes. (That was why so few people properly understood Benito Mussolini, his philosophy and his specific problems.) Meanwhile a tone-deaf guitarist wandered in and out of the restaurant singing popular sentimental songs for an indulgent lira or two while Fiorello remembered another item on the menu we must try and ordered innumerable bottles of wine. It was heavenly for me, to sit there eating grilled fish and macaroni and enjoying the fabulous luxury of unchecked conversation. It was Laura, that night, who found us good cocaine (‘the drug of all true Futurists’) and Fiorello who insisted on paying for it (‘pay me when your first aerial liner sails for Buenos Aires’).
Their friends were equally generous. For the first week of our stay in Rome virtually our only expense was the hotel. We went every day to the Via Catalana and from there would be taken on to restaurants, nightclubs, private parties. The Roman bohemians were eager to hear my tales of the Civil War, of the Turkish nationalists and life in Constantinople. With these stories, sometimes just a little embroidered, I paid for our suppers and wine. If I had too much to drink, I might also draw on Mrs Cornelius’s first-hand knowledge of the leading Bolsheviks. I continued to borrow her name, since it was on our forged British passports. I did not wish to risk confusing the authorities and I still could not be sure, in that company, who might be a police spy. There was always bound to be at least one in any group.
Our new companions, for all their apparent carelessness, did not take the fate of their country lightly; they could become furious, near hysterical, aggressive, violent with one another over the most obscure points. Every shade of anarchism, monarchism, socialism and nationalism was represented. Few Romans were fascists. Fascisti in those days meant merely ‘a bundle’ or ‘a bunch of flowers’; that is to say it was slang for a group. It was left to the Bolshevik press to give the word its sinister connotation. Many of Fiorello da Bazzanno’s friends, like Kolya, possessed an obsession with the future which mirrored my own; they gave words and pictures to my ideas. My scientific rationalism and their poetry formed a perfectly balanced combination.
Fiorello insisted, one warm evening beneath burning strings of coloured electric bulbs on Mendoza’s terrace, that the old warring families, the Borgia and the Orsini, had their contemporary equivalents in the makers of motor-cars. ‘Soon it might be necessary to declare one’s loyalties, my dear Max, and if necessary fight for them.’ He jumped up, pushing his hat away from his thin, dark hair, striking a pose with his cane. ‘Avanti! I am Count Fiorello da Bazzanno, henchman to the Ferrari!’ This amused him so much that, his lips curling back over his yellow teeth as he laughed helplessly, he had to sit down again.
‘And who will be the next Pope?’ Laura patted his back. She spoke in her usual quietly sardonic tone. ‘A Lancia? A Fiat?’ Fiorello gasped at this, shaking his head violently, controlling himself long enough to get to his feet and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘He could be a foreigner. There’s already a movement in the Vatican to elect a Ford. But the French support the Peugeot Cardinal.’ He leaned forward in mock-seriousness. ‘For my part I’m behind the dark horse. The Infant Cardinal.’
‘Who’s that?’ We all bent our heads towards him.
‘Why? None other than the Baby Rolls-Royce, my friends. Mark my words, you’ll hear more of him in a year or two. He has stolen your plans, Max. He means to lift St Peter’s closer to heaven. The whole papal city is to be seated on a massive dirigible, floating free of the Earth, no longer bound by temporal ties, removed from all petty politics. And when the Pope flushes his toilet, his piss will fall on Catholic and Protestant alike!’
‘And Turks,’ I begged. ‘Let it fall on Turks as well.’
He was generous. ‘They shall have the entire Vatican sewer. And with their land covered in such holy shit, they’ll perforce grow nothing but Christian food. Thus they’ll be converted, as our own ancestors were converted, through their bellies.’
When she was d
runk, Laura was inclined to become a little sombre. ‘I think Ford and Austin are already sufficiently powerful to do as they please.’ She also tended, in this condition, to take a disapproving view of Fiorello’s flights of fancy. ‘It’s cash in the end which impresses people. Buy their oil and so give them enough money to buy our cars.’
‘The triumph of trade!’ I, too, responded perhaps more earnestly than was necessary. ‘Trade makes all men friends. A wealthy world is a peaceful world.’
Laura began to scowl. ‘But who’ll have the greatest share?’
‘That issue’s being decided in Russia at the moment.’ The little man did not want to be brought down to earth. ‘When the result is announced, we’ll all know how to proceed. What a sublime clarifier is Lenin. Perhaps we should ask him to be Pope? Then everyone will feel much easier about him.’
I, too, became anxious to counter Laura’s socialistic pieties. ‘We’ll simply move the flying Vatican City to Moscow!’
‘But what about the Patriarch of Constantinople?’ asked one of their friends from over Fiorello’s shoulder. ‘Where will the poor old fellow go?’
Fiorello raised his cane. ‘I have the answer. A triumvirate: Pope Henry Ford, Patriarch of the Greeks and Romans Vladimir Lenin, and Dictator d’Annunzio. 1st es gut so? All shades of authoritarianism represented. A holy compromise.’
Esmé was utterly fascinated by his strange little face, his animated movements. From time to time she would burst into giggles at completely inappropriate moments; or she would sit staring at him, her face a combination of uncertain expressions, her eyes wide, like a child at the play. She loved his comic poses, his melodramatic gestures, his trilling eloquence; applauding his braggadocio for its own sake. I felt no jealousy. He was a natural clown and I wanted nothing more than for Esmé to be happy. This company and its attendant ambience had consolidated her good health, I knew, and I was grateful. I prayed we would find similar friends in Paris and London, for this was my natural habitat and, ideally, Esmé’s as well. Here ideas and money, politics and art, science and poetry all mingled. Amongst such people I must inevitably find those who would appreciate my inventions and help me make them reality, just as Kolya would have done if he had been allowed more time in government. (This is why I am convinced Lenin was personally responsible for my frustration and misery, because Kolya fell when Kerenski was overthrown.) Now, however, in Rome and elsewhere I foresaw a future where these young men could truly build Utopia. They would plead with me to be its architect. Fiorello’s rhetoric further inspired me. He spoke of ‘the violence which powers the engine’. Society would have to accept violence if it wanted progress. ‘Can a train run without the flaming energy in the boiler of the locomotive? Can steel be forged without a furnace? Can the aeroplane fly without consuming oil? Ich glaube es nicht! And, by the same reasoning, a nation cannot be hammered into perfection without blood and bayonets. Out of violence comes forth order! That wonderful tranquillity which falls on us after the battle. My Russian friends, I give you “Peace Through War!” and “Order Through Struggle!”‘
As we cheered his histrionics we could not know he was the genuine herald of a vigorous and realistic new age. That glorious reawakening of Italy’s pride would be marked only two years later by Mussolini’s March on Rome. ‘You must stay with us, my dear Cornelius!’ With one hand Fiorello lifted his wine bottle, with the other his hat. ‘Stay with us and help us create—’ He fell back again, giggling. ‘Excusez-moi, Der Motor ist uberhitz!’ And he put his head into Laura’s tolerant lap, falling into sleep with a series of immense snores. Delighted as I was, I did not really take him seriously, yet his poetic vision was to prove splendidly accurate. Under the guiding hand of her remarkable Duce Italy began her glorious celebration of all that was vital, noble and modern. Mussolini’s only failing was his willingness to believe in the worth of turncoat friends. I would eventually identify with him even more than with d’Annunzio. The engineer of a brilliantly reborn nation, his dream was uncannily close to mine. I am the first to criticise the excesses of Hitlerism. The tragic injustice was that Benito Mussolini came to be tarred with the same brush. Sometimes the blackjack and the bottle of castor oil must be displayed, as a dog is shown the stick. He was martyred because he could not see the evil in his allies, in men who called him Master while plotting his downfall. It heartens me in England today when many people at last begin to realise the virtues of those leaders. Even the thankless defender of his nation’s pride, Sir Oswald Mosley, is finally accepted for the honourable patriot he always was: a man whose intellectual powers and imaginative instincts rivalled my own. But he must feel horribly bitter, sitting out his lonely exile in that rural French château, seeing all he warned against coming to pass. I was able to shake his hand only once, at a dinner given for Pan-Europeans in the late forties. It struck me then that a simple physical factor might have turned his destiny. As he thanked me for my support there were tears in his eyes; but what I noticed most, to my eternal discredit, was his hideously bad breath. I wondered if anyone had ever pointed it out to him. I spoke to his loyal lieutenant, Jeffrey Hamm, suggesting that an ordinary commercial mouthwash, if used daily, might seriously enhance his leader’s fortunes. I was misinterpreted. Hamm ordered me thrown from the room. He told me if I ever returned he would see me beaten black and blue. So much for good intentions. Together, Mosley and myself might have saved Britain from her steady slide into socialistic fantasy. Mussolini did not have a breath problem, or if he did I did not notice it, since the heavy use of garlic and olive oil in the Italian cuisine (not to mention tomato paste and so forth) makes everyone smell the same. Hamm’s anger did not stop me voting for Mosley in 1959 when he stood for this district as Member of Parliament, but by then the rot had set in. The negro vote won the day.
The twentieth century is a graveyard of well-intentioned heroes and unrealised dreams. When they talk about their mythical Six Million they never consider the real victims of Socialistic Reductionism: the magnificent, golden visionaries, the clear-eyed fighters for Order and Justice, the tireless, selfless Knights of Christendom who, from Denikin to Rockwell, took up the sword against Bolshevism only to be cut down by cowards, deceived by traitors, betrayed by followers who lost their nerve at the crucial moment. They dragged poor Mussolini to a black tree and hanged him. The mob, the very men and women who had worshipped him, tore at his body, ripped him to pieces, and years later they sold scraps of his clothing to tourists in the Via Veneto and St Peter’s Square. Mussolini should not have trusted the Pope and his Cardinals. They pretended to support him, then as soon as the British and Americans began to win the War, they turned against him. Mussolini’s nation was ironically the ultimate Roman Catholic state, more a product of its Church than any passing political fad.
If it had not been for Hitler, who took everything too far, Italy would now be the world’s most advanced nation. But Hitler went mad. He turned against the Church. His hatred of Bolshevism, worthy of itself, clouded his judgement. His attempts to compromise with Stalin lost him those of us who had up to then supported his policies. The forces which conspired against him also conspired against me. Benito Mussolini was one of the many who recognised me for what I was. It was little, jealous, creeping people, whispering together, laying despicable petty traps, making miserable plots, who undermined the very rock on which our visions were founded. Those are Bolshevism’s heroes: pale, mean faces with squinting eyes which never saw the light of the sun. I hear them whining outside the shop on Saturday mornings and I drive them off. They scatter and squeal like the cowardly vermin they are. I hear them sniffing round my windows at dead of night, scuffling behind my doors, scratching on my walls. They melt away when I challenge them to display themselves. Would Mussolini or Horthy, Mosley or Hitler melt at my challenge?
It was important to leave Rome and get to Paris as soon as possible, before Kolya went on his way to America or Berlin, but the city was like a possessive mother. Every time I gathered up the w
illpower to go, she found something new to astonish me, to distract me from my purpose. One morning, for instance, after we had spent half the night discussing how best to reach Paris, we were making our way from the Hotel Ambrosiana to the Cafe Montenero just across the river in the Trastevere quarter where we had arranged to meet Laura, who lived there. Along the main street and heading for the bridge came a great double-decker tram of the old ‘Imperiale’ class, with two more single-deckers connected behind her, rolling smoothly and very slowly in the direction of the eastern suburbs. A triple-coach tram was not a particularly unusual sight in Rome, though the double-deckers were more characteristic, I was to learn, of Milan and London, but these were painted a jet, shining black, the only colour on them being their brasswork which was polished to gleam like gold. The sides and the rims of the following cars were rich with multicoloured flowers, forming wreaths, vines, loops, while inside, dimly seen behind half-open black curtains, were the weeping mourners, also in black. I had never seen anything like it, but I realised it was a modern funeral procession, with the coffin, also covered in great masses of flowers, clearly seen on the upper deck of the leading vehicle. The trolley pole hummed and crackled in a rather light-hearted way, considering the gravity of the occasion. The driver sat, in a special black uniform, stiff and sombre at the front (the ‘Imperiales’ had only one driving seat and one set of stairs, at the back). I was virtually mesmerised by the sight, removing my hat and paying homage rather to the miracle of up to date technology than to the poor corpse within. How readily, with so little fuss, did Italians adapt themselves to and advance the course of twentieth-century thinking! When I told Laura and her friends about the procession they were amused by my excitement. Apparently the funeral trams were a regular service in many parts of Italy and elsewhere. I was realising how drastically cut off from genuine culture I had been during the Civil War and my sojourn in Turkey. In my enthusiasm for Rome’s forward-thinking transport system I did not this time forget to mention our urgent need to reach Paris. I asked Laura if there was work I could do. I still had some money, but I should feel happier if I had earned what I needed for our first-class train fares. She told me she would consider the problem. That little square in Trastevere, just off the Piazza di Santa Maria, was an oddly quiet corner of the city, away from the crash and clamour filling Rome’s main streets. The houses were like those one found in the country. Their walls were painted a faded, peeling pink or blue or green. The awnings of the cafés were like ancient parchment; they might have been there since the reign of Caesar Augustus. On many roofs were gardens so unkempt they appeared totally wild, while the faces of the inhabitants were faun-like. One felt one had been removed in time to a pagan past. Almost the whole of Rome had something of that same mellowed, sun-bleached quality, particularly in the early morning sunshine, or at twilight. When one was able to see the surrounding hills one could easily imagine oneself protected forever from all mundane problems obsessing the rest of Europe. From Trastevere it was possible to wander across a crumbling bridge to the Tiberina Island. On that tiny strip of land in the green-brown waters of the river stood a building (I think it was a monastery) apparently built up over the centuries. It contained fragments of the architecture of the past thousand years. Here Romans fished, tied up their boats and simply lounged on weedy slabs of stone, smoking and regarding those rooftops, like the dome of St Peter’s, which could be seen beyond the trees. A few wild cats lived here, and presumably the monks (though I never saw them). Even the cats had a subtly different appearance to those which stretched their muscular little bodies in the sun falling on the ruins of the Circus Maximus. If Constantinople were a city of dogs, then Rome was a city of cats. You might easily have expected to find a Temple to Bubastes somewhere nearby. One rarely saw a building without a cat on a step or window. Orange, black, grey, brown, white, marmalade and ginger, they washed themselves, slept, made love, utterly uninterested in the swarming human beings, merely watching with neutral eyes those which came close, displaying wary curiosity if there was a chance of someone feeding them. They prowled over marble which had been flooded with the blood of martyred Christians; they defecated on granite carved to the satisfaction of the Imperial ego; they copulated beneath columns erected to the glory of Gods and Goddesses, and in some ways they symbolised the enduring spirit of the city and her population. Esmé found them fascinating. There were days when she would spend most of her time watching them with much the same expression as they watched others. Her eyes fixed, her little chin in her perfect hands, she breathed slowly, languorously, with unfathomable contentment. It was not only I who noticed. Laura would often look at her and frown, at once understanding and mystified. Even Fiorello the Futurist, full of his own eloquence and self-absorption, would sometimes spare her a curious glance and smile at me in bafflement at the ways of femininity. Yet I was not myself baffled; I felt I knew what she experienced. Perhaps I merely imposed my own imagination onto her, believing her capable of profundity of feeling which was in fact non-existent. She was, I admit now (though I would have denied it vehemently then) at least in part my creation: the apparent fulfilment of my deepest desires. A little of this occurred to me then, when she would look up suddenly and brighten with a smile as if in response to my unspoken command. But I refused to consider such implications. They were extremely distasteful to me. They remain distasteful, but I am not one to avoid the truth for long.
The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (Colonel Pyat Quartet Series Book 2) Page 34
