Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Luckily she still has a functioning gas stove because it’s fed by cylinders. With a box of matches I light all the rings on the hob which throw out enough light for me to find a packet of peculiar fluted candles in a distant cupboard. At least I assume they’re candles; one can never tell in this house. The writing on the box is unhelpfully in Cyrillic script but they look like candles and smell like candles. Still, I know from experience that this doesn’t mean they mightn’t be a Voynovian delicacy to be served after dinner with coffee. They might equally well turn out to be particularly punitive suppositories. However, they burn, and in a minute or two Marta’s chaotic kitchen is lit with a kindly orange glow that reveals swags of cobwebs. Hoping she might have left something drinkable in the fridge I open it and immediately reel back, hastily slamming the door again. It must be months since her power was cut off, ample time for whatever she left in it to have unfrozen and brewed up. I retain the impression of a miniature landscape within: rolling hills of mould with one enormous nodding fungus gathering itself to spring. Enough of the stench has made good its escape to make one think of those crime scenes on television where a floater has been retrieved after many weeks in a river and detectives stand around upwind with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses while a team of medics tries to revive a police frogman with sal volatile. Whatever else, Marta is going to need a new fridge if and when she returns. Then in another cupboard I find my booby prize: two unopened bottles of Fernet-Branca, Marta’s favourite tipple. The kitchen having become uninhabitable, I retreat upstairs with a bottle and a glass together with the box of matches and a couple of spare candles and prepare myself for a long and cheerless vigil.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed I stare glumly at the black pane of the window, seeing nothing but my own reflection and that of the candle flame. It is quite bad enough to be condemned to pass the night on Marta’s bed, as effectively walled up as l’uomo magro was in the opera, without knowing that my own house, by contrast, is open to the four winds, standing there with doors and windows gaping like a hilltop Mary Celeste. I pour myself a stiff tot of Fernet. It must be over a year since I last tasted the stuff and I’m clearly out of training since it comes as a shock. Never mind: be thankful there’s anything at all. A snatch of tune is running through my head and I recognize it as an irritating hymn my stepmother Laura used to sing around the house as she swept and dusted. Even some of the words come back: ‘Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, / Makes that and th’action fine.’ Huh. I haven’t swept a room but I have put a new lock on Marta’s back door and what’s more it was done as for His laws because one of them, if you remember, involves loving thy neighbour as thyself. Th’action might have been made fine but I have to admit th’outcome is something of a bugger’s muddle. Yet the more I think about it while pouring myself another glass of masochistic balm, the less I’m willing to accept it as my fault. Really, the whole thing is squarely down to Marta. From the moment she arrived up here she has been nothing but trouble. Benedetti misled me from the outset, of course, when he lyingly described her to me as a mouse-quiet foreigner who was hardly ever here. In my experience, limited though it is, mice do not often play the piano outside a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Neither do they viciously lampoon one’s private singing and turn it into a musical score for a film. Mice infrequently fly helicopters in and out at all times of day and night, destroying people’s carefully nurtured pergolas as they pass overhead. Come to that, they seldom demolish entire fences without permission; and when they go away for arbitrary periods mice do not leave incandescent coffee pots on gas stoves and back doors swinging in the breeze. In such circumstances what is the good neighbour supposed to do as for Thy laws? Reach for the warfarin?

  As I pour myself another liberal glassful I can feel the gratifying rush of righteous anger. After all, the entire point of my coming to live up here in majestic isolation was that I would be spared the world of suburban disruption and could get on with some work. Instead of which, although miles from anywhere, I have found myself living in a crazed soap opera, trapped in a version of Neighbours that has clearly been scripted by one of those writers with a ponytail, trembling fingers and pupils like wormholes. It’s the time this blasted woman has caused me to waste. Most irritating of all is to have wasted it doing DIY jobs on her behalf when she might never return to benefit from them. For all I know her bleached bones may even now be emerging from a shallow desert grave as the thin wind strips the sand away, and serve her right. If there’s a passionate conviction that never fails to overtake one in the middle of a DIY job it is surely that one was made for better things. Was it for this? the internal cry goes up. Was it for this that I bothered to learn about the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) at school? Does a working knowledge of the ablative absolute help one fit a lock to a door? Do Wordsworth’s daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze in their ineffably cretinous fashion? Does it even help to know that the very form of these questions constitutes a rhetorical trope whose name I have forgotten? No: none of it is of the slightest use. All the knowledge I laboriously acquired at those expensive schools my father sent me to (thereby excusing himself all parental duty for two-thirds of the year) has proved irrelevant and superfluous. In order to get by these days one needs a stretch in an establishment with its fingers firmly on the pulse – or better, the carotid artery – of the world. Somewhere like the Joseph Stalin School of Deportment and Manners in Lausanne, for instance. I have heard this establishment is very hard to get into, with a longer waiting list than either Eton or Harrow, and by no means every pupil who enters graduates. Some are never seen again. But those who emerge with the coveted ruban noir are assured of being more than equal to any task or situation that life has to offer. It is absolutely certain that no alumnus of the École Joseph Stalin de Maintien et des Manières would ever lock himself by mistake into his Voynovian neighbour’s rural slum and have to spend the night there without supper, drinking Fernet-Branca by the light of a guttering candle. Come to that, nor would he find himself condemned to a career on a sub-literary treadmill that entails writing about nautical haemorrhoids like Millie Cleat.

  There are times when the genteelly educated who didn’t go to school in Lausanne fall prey to black thoughts in the night hours. We are overtaken by darkness of the brain as images of pointlessness and defeat crowd in and all too accurately represent the teeming emptiness of being alive. We think of our dead. We think of our own inexorably approaching death. We think of the paltry and arbitrary work we are obliged in the interim to perform in order briefly to feed ourselves: work that makes an ox plodding in a circle to draw water seem rewardingly purposeful. And then we think of the Fernet-Branca bottle beside the bed and discover to our surprise that it is now barely a quarter full. We pour ourselves another glass and try to pretend that we didn’t blot our copybook with Max Christ; we convince ourselves that even now he is deciding – regretfully, maybe, but deciding (Muß es sein? Es muß sein!) that since a biography is inevitable sooner or later it may as well be written by Gerald Samper. At least that way it will be literate and unconventional. Maybe in the rush of professional and domestic life at Crendlesham Hall no adult has yet noticed the stillmoist solecism lurking in the junk room next to the bathroom. Maybe if they have they will have taken it as prima faeces evidence of a bolshie builder making his feelings known at not being paid double overtime. Maybe pretty Adrian will be able to get his equally pretty sister to lean on Max and …? But I don’t really believe any of it. People either want their biographies written or they don’t. When they’re as famous and distinguished as Max Christ they neither need nor wish for extra publicity. And now the thought of Adrian contrives to lower my spirits even further. Why isn’t the rat here lending me succour and support instead of messing about on the high seas? I don’t wish to remind myself that this is the sort of contract expected of lovers and partners rather than of just good friends. Ah well. Memo: find out tomorrow when he’s due home.

  I must have fallen asle
ep because something overcomes the Fernet in my bloodstream and wakes me. The candle has expired. I badly need to pee and remember that as the water’s off it would be better not to use Marta’s lavatory. I therefore resort to the time-honoured practice of rural areas and pee out of the window. No sooner have I started than there’s an anguished bellow from underneath, ‘Dio boia!’, a crashing noise and then a brilliant light is flashed into my eyes. This is the end. Maybe I’m still asleep? It’s pure nightmare, whatever it is.

  ‘You come down out of there!’ orders a crisp voice in Italian.

  ‘Who are you?’ I ask, not much less brusquely.

  ‘Carabinieri. We are armed and this house is surrounded! How many are there of you?’

  ‘For heaven’s sake! Just me.’

  ‘Do you have a gun?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s you that’s armed, not me.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ I hear an unseen companion say. ‘Watch out, Albé, he’s wearing a holster.’

  A dull orange flash below is accompanied by a shocking bang. ‘See?’ the voice shouts up as a bullet screams off into the night. ‘Next time it’ll be you unless you throw your weapon down. Do it now!’

  My fuddled brain is doing its best but it’s like stirring porridge. I’m scared, all right, but I think the slight insulation from reality provided by residual sleep and Fernet prevents that little internal sac of terror hormone from bursting as it did during the raid on Millie’s Hilton suite. It’s all just a little too unreal. ‘It’s not a proper holster,’ I call down reasonably. ‘It’s for a power drill. I fell asleep wearing it. I’m Gerald Samper from the other house. I’ve been fixing a lock on this lady’s back door.’

  A pause. ‘Well, come out at once with your hands up and we’ll see. No tricks, mind. This is a lonely place and you don’t want to cause an accident.’

  There is no mistaking the menace in this trigger-happy goon’s voice. He keeps aiming the light at me and I keep aiming for a tone of sweet reason.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t come out. I know it sounds silly, well, it is silly, but I’m afraid I’m locked in.’

  ‘If you got into the house you can get out again, can’t you? Who locked you in?’

  ‘Um, it was sort of … I, uh, locked myself in, actually. I’ve just fitted a new lock to the back door, you see, and it locked itself and there’s no knob on the inside to let myself out, and …’ I hear my voice tailing off dismally. It’s bad enough to have been caught peeing out of a window by the person you’ve peed on; if you’ve also locked yourself into someone else’s house you inevitably look a complete prat into the bargain. Will these humiliations brought on me by my absent neighbour never end? How does this Voynovian witch manage to exercise her malevolent power at such a distance? Even, possibly, from beyond the grave?

  ‘I think it’s time we radioed for reinforcements,’ I overhear one of the men below saying, and I catch the word ‘brigatista’. This is dire. If they really suspect I’m a member of the Brigate rosse, the Red Brigades, they are probably scared too, which means there’s a serious possibility I will be shot somewhere painful and incapacitating, possibly through the buttocks, while ‘resisting arrest’ or ‘evading capture’ before being dragged down in handcuffs for interrogation by the local agents of DIGOS.

  ‘Look,’ I say with my hands still up, framed by the window embrasure in the blinding torchlight, ‘I’m an English writer. Un artista, not un’ brigatista. I live in the house over there on the other side of that fence. The thing to do is to let me out of this house and we can go over there and I will show you all my documenti and we’ll call up Lucchese Virgilio. He will identify me.’

  There is another silence. ‘You know the tenente?’

  ‘I do. Not well, but Virgilio has been up here before and he knows that this neighbour of mine is away. It was I who asked him to have the carabinieri drop by occasionally.’ Even as I say it the irony is not lost on me. It would be tonight of all nights they chose to patrol.

  Muttering rises from the darkness beneath. The torch beam is still trained on me but it’s obvious these men have been thrown off balance by my mention of their senior colleague.

  ‘The thing to do,’ I go on, feeling that at last Samper is beginning to take charge, ‘is for one of you to trot across to my house, which you’ll find open, and fetch the ladder hanging in the garage. I’ll have to climb out of this window. Once I’m down we can sort all this out in five minutes.’

  And this is pretty much what happens. Once I’m on the ground and they’re finally convinced I’m just some harmless foreign nutter without a revolutionary thought in his head the whole situation eases. They’re obviously as relieved as I am. It turns out there are only two of them after all, just a couple of young patrolmen who were checking on Marta’s house as an excuse for goofing off for forty minutes instead of tangling with the denizens of the night down in Camaiore. We go back to my house and I offer the fellow I peed on the use of my distinctive white-and-biscuit ground-floor bathroom while his colleague checks my passport and permesso di soggiorno.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry about that,’ I say with a rueful nod in the direction of the closed door, from behind which come vigorous splashing sounds.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about Alberto,’ says his partner with a disarmingly merry smile. ‘Does him good to get pissed on occasionally. The joke is that he’d gone round the back of the house to do the same thing. He was standing there enjoying una ricca pisciata of his own when you opened up overhead. We won’t let him forget this in a hurry. But he can sit in the back of the car until he changes his uniform.’

  Later, after the sound of their Alfa Romeo has died away and I am belatedly lying in my own bed and wondering if I shall ever be able to get to sleep again, I work out that it must have been the noise the luckless patrolman made clumping around beneath the open window that had woken me. The episode ended amiably enough, and the two carabinieri could hardly have been more civil in the circumstances, given that one had had a drenching and both a bad scare. But it has all been at the cost to Gerald Samper of a great burden of indignity and nervous strain which, I can assure the bulging bint of Voynovia, has been faithfully entered on the debit side of her ledger. I’m still incredulous that my voluntary display of neighbourly goodwill should have led to such humiliating farce. I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not even now under police guard in the new hospital in Lido di Camaiore, face down as a surgeon repairs a bullet hole in my bottom, trying not to laugh behind his green mask. My stepmother Laura’s charming habit in my boyhood was to stand over me after some painful accident involving a bicycle or a new sheath knife and, even before blood or tears were staunched, to say, ‘And what lesson do we learn from this, h’m?’ Rotten baggage. I don’t know that there’s a lesson to be drawn from tonight’s débâcle, other than that urinating on policemen is one of those things best done sparingly. You might pass this bit of hard-won Samper wisdom on to your own son if you have one.

  13

  It takes me several days to recover my equanimity after this distressing episode. The worst of it all is that, in my own mind at least, Le Roccie is fast losing its aura of unspoilt wildness that first attracted me to it. More and more it is becoming tainted by association with the most brutal kind of worldliness, principally helicopters and policemen. The following day I rang my friend Virgilio in the carabinieri to apologize for the night’s events. He laughed it off, kindly but quite briskly; and if any good has come of the whole affair it is the distinct impression I have that as far as the police are concerned Le Roccie is going to be allowed to drop off their map. It must seem to them that each time they come they run the risk of tangling with completely loopy foreigners, visits that always end in their having to retreat in disarray or humiliation. Nothing short of the assassination up here of the Mayor of Lucca or the apparition of the late Pope Wojtyla robed in glory will readily bring the local cops to Le Roccie again. Fortunately, I can’t see either of these horrid events hap
pening in or around the Samper residence which, as we all know, is a haven of non-violence as well as of profound scepticism.