Mimi's Ghost

by Tim Parks

  ‘I’ve made a fool of myself,’ he announced on walking back into the flat. Paola was tummy down on the sofa in just the kind of underwear he found at once exciting and in awful taste. She beckoned with a finger. Morris almost shouted: Tor Christ’s sake, I’ve been a complete and utter prick!’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said.

  ‘I hate myself.’ He began to tear at the Sellotape around the package with its photo of a Sony Videomaster. ‘I meant it as a present for you and instead I just wasted a hundred and fifty thousand lire. A hundred and fifty thousand!’

  Suddenly, but not entirely unexpectedly, he could feel the tears coming to his eyes, such a welling of conflicting emotions: self-abasement, anger, forgiveness, humiliation. His nails finally tore open the package, allowing a brick in a polythene bag to slither out and crash down on the tiled floor.

  Paola burst out laughing. ‘Oh, Mo, you idiot. You didn’t buy it from a marocchino, did you? Everybody knows they’re all fakes.’

  The tinkling of her voice seemed to coincide with a sort of bubbling behind his eyes as if blood were flooding to the boil. For a moment even his pyjamas and dressing-gown felt tight around a swelling body. He was so full of rage. He could have picked that brick right up from the floor and smashed it straight down on her sneering, sluttish head. Massimina would never have behaved like this.

  ‘I bought it for you!’ he screamed. To film ourselves. I was kind to the guy and he let me down!’

  Paola got up and came to hold him, trapping his arms in hers. Irritated, he pushed her away, but she came right back and repeated the gesture, arms folding tightly round him, pushing her face into his neck. ‘Mo, take me,’ she whispered, ‘take me. I love it when you’re angry. You’re so naive and sweet and strong and violent all together.’

  He made a half-hearted attempt to resist, not unaware of the gratifying intensity of these emotions, the pornographic aspect of her sheeny underwear on the dark petite body.

  ‘I love it, I love it,’ she insisted, and pulling open his dressing-gown began to tug him by the two lapels.

  Later, when she was quietly sleeping, Morris lay awake in a sort of massacred consciousness where every element of his humiliation was kaleidoscopically alive and vivid. Until it occurred to him to get up and go back into the sitting-room. He switched on the light, picked up the brick in its polythene bag and set it down carefully on a rug by the sofa. Then, examining the floor, he found that there was indeed a severe chip in one of the tiles, an ugly, grainy white patch in what was a Bertelli design of delicate geometric greens. So that now the scenario was even worse. Not only had he been fool enough to give money to a man who, due to the way society had treated him, was bound to be a fraud, but then in his foolish hothead anger on realising his mistake, he had allowed himself to damage a tile that had cost in the region of forty thousand lire and would now cost at least twice that to remove and replace.

  Returning to bed, it was to find that Paola had invaded his space as she so often would. There was something childish about her luxurious slantwise sprawl under the heavy quilt. The kind of spoilt child who is used to having and taking everything. Morris put on his dressing-gown and sat in the room’s one armchair. For about an hour he stared into the dark. Once again he allowed vivid images of his humiliation to pass before his mind’s eye: the Moroccan’s practised scowl as he squatted down by the car window; his own foolish flush of triumph as he ‘brought the man down’ to one hundred and fifty thousand; Massimina’s painted wryness later on in the gallery, as though looking down on a poor, flailing enmired Morris from the great height of redeemed martyrdom; and then his wife’s pealing laughter, her animal grunts and satisfactions, as if her husband were no more than a source of pleasure, something to be enjoyed rather than understood and comforted. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ Morris remembered from his Moralist Paper Tripos Part Two, and repeated it to himself over and over for much of the night. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’ He almost envied his mother-in-law, so close to the blissful threshold.

  7

  Precariously perched on the hill above Marzana, it had three stories and a leaky roof with four statues, which Forbes, after standing discreetly in a corner of the terrace for a few moments, promptly pronounced of no aesthetic value, though Morris thought them, if nothing else, picturesque. Apparently they represented San Zeno, San Rocco, Sant’ Anna and Sant’ Agata, minor local saints of miscellaneous and implausible miracles. But this was the best part of Italian culture, Morris often felt: its fantastical superfluity. Who would ever believe that Mimi winked at him from photographs or called from old paintings? There was a way, he was discovering, in which his mentality was firmly grounded in the Italian religious tradition, and thus in a very profound way legitimised. He belonged here.

  Forbes also objected that the place would be desperately cold or desperately expensive to heat. He tapped at a loose pane of glass.

  The former, Morris explained, since there was no central heating and the chimneys needed extensive work before a fire could safely be lit. ‘Just the right look for a brochure though,’ he insisted: ‘the hill, the vines, the cypresses, the noble façade with the statues.’

  ‘Rudis indigestaque moles,’ Forbes commented.

  Which meant?

  That I’d hoped for something better, but quod bonum felix, faustumque sit, I’ll move in tonight.’

  It appeared that Forbes’s rent was in considerable arrears due to the difficulty of maintaining two separate households on a miserable pension that didn’t always arrive. His wife back in Cambridge was being unreasonable, forever writing about the cost of heating oil, public transport, theatre tickets, etc. Obviously she still hadn’t accepted their separation. He was grateful to Morris, he explained, for giving him this chance to regain his dignity, for saving him from an ignominious return.

  Yes, he was genuinely grateful, Forbes repeated, turning to take Morris’s hand and looking him straight in the eye, his own watery between dusty folds of skin. There was a kind of schoolmasterly nobility about him. Morris smiled warmly. Not to mention it. He was glad to be in a position to help someone so worthy. He enjoyed the curious glance the older man shot him as he said this.

  They looked the place over. The stucco was coming away in great chunks and the shutters seemed to be held together by nothing more than thick old coats of paint. A cold stone staircase gave way to the rickety floorboards of underfurnished bedrooms: a sagging mattress between gothic headboards, a dresser with marble top (cracked), a painting of St Peter crucified upside down, ruined by damp. In the penumbra of the top landing a young woman knelt weeping by an extravagant tomb, her eyes glinting in canvas candlelight. Forbes shook his head and muttered something in Latin.

  But Morris felt supremely confident. Wasn’t it just the kind of culture-saturated location they had been looking for? It was going to look splendid on the leaflets they’d be mailing off to Eton and Harrow in a year or so. Meanwhile, to pay rent and renovation, the immigrants would be arriving in the next couple of days. Say thirty per cent of their wages for bed and board? That was hardly unreasonable. He turned on a tap that delivered a trickle of rusty water followed by a long groan. ‘Fiat experimentum in corpore vili,’ was all Forbes would comment, and this time he refused to translate.

  But no, the real reason he was feeling so buoyant, Morris thought, driving faster than he should back down the Valpantena, the real reason he could be so confident, was precisely because he was so ruthlessly hard on himself when things went wrong. Emotionally, he earned these highs, and of course when, as now, you had everything planned to a tee for once, it was difficult not to be elated and rather impressed with oneself. Life was a game in the end, and Morris was staying ahead of it. Way, way ahead. ‘Isn’t that right, Mimi, cam?’ He picked up the phone, then promptly put it down again. There were moments when he felt he should steer well clear of that oddball stuff and keep life as simple and practical as possible. Mimi would be in touch just as soon as sh
e needed to be.

  He found Kwame by the main traffic lights outside the cemetery, cleaning windows for small change. The big black knew Morris was a soft touch and immediately came towards his Mercedes, bucket in hand. Despite his eagerness to be up and doing, Morris let the boy sluice the windscreen and then attack it with his sponge. The light turned green. The cars ahead and in the left-hand lane began to move. Kwame worked on conscientiously, scrubbing at encrusted flies. A car behind hit its horn. Morris sat tight. The horns began to chorus. That extraordinary Italian impatience! Kwame looked up to catch Morris’s eye through the now glistening windscreen. As on two previous occasions when this had happened, there was a definite hint of complicity in the polished black face, Morris was quite sure of it. He buzzed down the window and instead of offering the customary thousand lire invited Kwame to get in, then waited perhaps thirty more seconds till the light turned to amber, before releasing the clutch and accelerating away. There was simply no need for people to be so aggressive.

  Morris had learnt the black’s name, or perhaps surname, when he had helped him with his application for a permesso di soggiomo at the police station. Then there had been these meetings on the busy circular road by the cemetery, where Kwame and a dozen others apparently slept in the empty grave niches in the walls. Now, as Morris made his gesture of invitation, the black simply left his bucket on the pavement and climbed into the car with a great beaming smile on his face and no questions asked, not a word. As Peter had once dropped his nets when Jesus beckoned, Morris thought; and he was impressed and deeply touched by this demonstration of trust, intrigued too by the other man’s simple life. Because for all his love of elegance and class, if there was one thing Morris was not, it was a snob. Indeed, his genius was to recognise class in a boy like Kwame, the way he recognised culture in a penny-pinching fellow like Forbes, and had found such a potent cocktail of virtue, beauty and sensuality in a total non-entity like Massimina.

  Silent in city traffic, they inched their way to the centre. Morris found, as somehow he knew he would, the last available parking meter in the approach to Piazza Bra, and again he couldn’t help wondering whether there wasn’t some kind of destiny guiding his actions. It was the way, whenever he began something, everything seemed to conspire to make events turn out as they must. There was a Forbes to keep the hostel for you. There was a crumbling old house to be cheaply rented. There were Kwame and his boys at the cemetery. There was the mammoth order from Doorways. So often, it seemed, he was nothing more than an agent weaving together threads that had clearly been made for each other. It was a topic he might do well to explore with Massimina. Perhaps from beyond the grave the pattern would be clear to her. Perhaps she might even explain to him what seemed at the moment the rift in that pattern, his great mistake in life: his humiliating marriage to Paola. A form of penance perhaps? A constant and mocking reminder of the great wrong he had done? He took the black into a department store and bought him new shoes, new jeans, new sweater, new down jacket.

  Kwame was neither overwhelmed nor ungrateful. Tall and remarkably healthy, Morris thought, for his hours collecting small change in the freezing exhaust fumes and his nights wrapped in a blanket in a hole in the wall, he stood easily in his new clothes at the polished granite bar of one of the spiffier cafés in the piazza, and accepted a beer.

  ‘How many of you are there?’ Morris asked, speaking English. He rather enjoyed the truculent glances of a clientele unused to having blacks in their bar.

  Ten, eleven, twelve.’ Kwame shrugged his shoulders, still smiling broadly. ‘Depends on the day, the polizia.’

  ‘And all good boys?’

  The thick, black lower lip pouted out in an eloquent expression of ‘How should I know?’

  ‘But reliable?’ Morris insisted, scooping up a handful of peanuts.

  Again the pouting lower lip, quickly followed by the beaming smile, the bright black eyes with their fascinating mixture of complicity and reticence. The boy must be a good twenty centimetres taller than Morris. And so very black.

  ‘Because I want to offer you all a job,’ Morris said. ‘And a place to live.’

  It was more than anybody had done for him when he first arrived here! Driving the boy across town a few minutes later, he picked up the phone, pretended to dial, and immediately started to tell Mimi about his weaving metaphor. He experienced a curious frisson in doing this in front of somebody else. Like letting someone overhear you flirting without their knowing who with. Though it was cheating a little, choosing somebody as insignificant as Kwame for one’s audience. The point being, he explained, that for a successful design one would require a good variety of colours combining together in ways at once surprising and harmonious. Which meant you needed an artist. Only an artist would see as self-evident the congruity between apparently disparate elements, the way for example even Polio Bobo’s hostility and refusal to get involved was now to become part of the pattern, to galvanise it, give it tension, make it more fun, more of an achievement. So that if he had never felt that he really had the talent, and more critically the contacts, to become a writer or painter, perhaps in the end the truth was that he was an artist of life. He knew how to make things happen between people. ‘As they did between us, Mimi,’ he finished rather huskily. ‘As they did between us. How I miss you and miss you!’ Then he had to fight back the inevitable gnawing emotion these phone calls always prompted.

  On putting down the receiver, he turned to glance at Kwame. The boy smiled warmly and began to slap his knees in a slow, even rhythm. Pleasant company, Morris thought. Dumb, no doubt, but curiously understandings and deeply deserving of the help Morris was going to offer.

  8

  It was a sort of village for the rich. Two older but completely renovated villas split up into flats, then four new palazzine with extravagant terrace balconies, expensive window fittings and copper drains. There was a swimming pool and tennis courts. But the most important feature, and one that Morris finally decided was a rather sad comment, was that the whole thing was surrounded by a tall, wire-topped wall, the entrance being guarded by an electronic gate and two video-cameras. As if one could simply cut oneself off from the whole of the world and wallow in one’s money! He felt these people deserved the sight of Kwame in their midst, a sort of visual expression of Morris’s own spiritual alienation. He rang one of forty bells.

  ‘Sono to, Morris.’ He looked straight into the camera to the right of the gate and did not say he had come for Bobo.

  The maid said she would have to ask, thus allowing Morris to note that he was not among the privileged group of people whom the girl presumably knew to let in at any time of the day or night. A short, but telling wait, then the gate buzzed. Morris turned and only now beckoned to Kwame to get out of the car.

  The tiles were polished Sardinian granite, the walls a new kind of waxed stucco very much in vogue, the furniture predominantly antique, but with a curiously modern feel to it, perhaps because the chests and dressers had been so perfectly restored, stood out so cleanly against glossy floor and wall. Rather than suggesting some anchoring in history, the rich composure of an awareness of time, it was more as if everything had been snipped from the sheeny pages of Casa Bella,

  Yet Morris could not help admiring the environment. There was nothing gauche about it, none of Paola’s depressing predilection for pastel silks and soft low sofas, her vision of home as some kind of high-class brothel; nor was it the ad hoc muddle of the English homes he remembered. Yet one still felt there was something missing. The old family home in the outlying village of Quinzano, where Massimina had first taken him to meet her mother and sisters, had had some magical extra element, something that transformed provincial conservatism into richness and culture: a place that had been tastefully lived in! That was the goal. Well, he was only thirty. There was still time.

  Kwame hovered by the door. Morris beckoned for him to come in. The small southern maid did not think to hide her alarm, which Morris studiously
ignored. Kwame cut such a fine and Moorish figure against the abrupt surfaces of granite and waxed stucco, as if he, like the antiques, had been cut out of a page. One certainly felt more powerful having him around.

  ‘I’d like to see Bobo,’ Morris announced at his most casual. Before the maid could tell him the head of the house wasn’t in, Antonella appeared, descending a spiral staircase at the far end of the room, where travertine steps rested on an elegant scaffolding of brushed tubular steel.

  The dark-trousered legs coming down behind her gradually revealed themselves as those of a small, bespectacled, elderly priest carrying two bulging plastic bags.

  ‘Don Carlo,’ she introduced him, ‘my brother-in-law, Morris Duckworth.’

  ‘Piacere, They shook hands. The cleric smiled and moved toward the door. ‘I’ll presume no longer,’ he said with the air of one for whom humility has become a profession.

  ‘We were sorting out clothes,’ Antonella explained superfluously, ‘for the poor.’

  But Morris intervened: ‘Allow me to introduce Kwame.’

  The priest, though taken aback, turned graciously, as if relieved to have been forced to do his duty.

  Kwame muttered something incomprehensible, big black face beaming. But a sidelong glance at Morris carried an exciting mixture of trust, inquisitiveness, concern.

  ‘He doesn’t speak much Italian yet,’ Morris explained, ‘only English.’ As the priest left, he added: ‘He’s one of our new workers in the packaging department. I hoped Bobo would be here. I phoned him at the office but he was out.’