Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – So I went back to the Caramanli that afternoon feeling pretty satisfied even though residually caddish about having cut Richards down to size. He was a pompous toad who needed deflating, but the humiliation I had inflicted on him was unfortunately overkill. Anyway, I felt I now understood a few things about him: that perhaps he was pompous out of self-defence; that he had probably acquired his Arabic more for the pursuit of pleasure than as a career move; that it was doubtless no mystery why he’d elected to stay on in Suez when he could have moved up in A & G and gone back home. In short, one way and another I had learned quite a lot recently: at least enough to ensure that whatever happened now I would never be able to return to Eltham a virgin.

  – Thereafter Richards fades. We kept each other’s smutty little secret and within a few months he’d been posted elsewhere. But when I was in Cairo years later I discovered he’d served with distinction as a Desert Rat and was decorated for bravery not long before he was killed at Bir Hakeim. Summer 1942, that would have been. I expect he’s buried at Tobruk. Poor Richards. He may have been dive-bombed by a Stuka but I think he died of shadows.

  – Yet that still wasn’t quite the end of that momentous evening’s voyeurism. A week or two afterwards in Shari‘ Ataqa I idly noticed some schoolkids coming towards me along the pavement, all wearing English-style striped cotton blazers. And there in the middle was the boy I’d seen through a hole in a wall reading Rossetti. I was absolutely amazed. It was unmistakably him (how could I be mistaken?) but he looked so much smaller. Judging by the way his ankles showed below his trouser-cuffs he was just beginning his growth spurt, but even so he seemed to have shrunk. I must have been staring as they came level, their heads so much lower than my own, for he broke off a lively conversation with his friends to glance a bit frowningly at me as they passed. Haughty? Not exactly; but I was sadly aware of being no part of his universe, shut out of his circle. I couldn’t match the reality of what I’d seen in that room with what I was meeting on the street. I was left feeling slightly injured: that he ought at least to have greeted me with a blush or some other bashful acknowledgement of how well I knew him. Technically, of course, we were total strangers. Yet I would quite truthfully have been able to tell him: ‘I know what your cock looks like. I know the expression on your face when you come: something even you don’t know.’ But how can one say that to a stranger, let alone to a child?

  – Ah, intimate knowledge gained without the requisite intimacy. Is that what it feels like to be a spy? A doctor? A priest? Privacy invaded in the pursuit of knowledge. Part of a voyeur’s armoury. Part of a poet’s, too, as well as an impostor’s. –

  *

  For some time now I had been aware of becoming drawn into Jayjay’s history at a level which occasionally disturbed me: faint but clear evidence that someone else’s narrative can set up tensions as it meshes with one’s own. I suppose this is inevitable when engaging with a living subject. (The dead can generally be dealt with by means of a comfortable tone that treats them indulgently or humorously or with more or less admiration.) The living have all sorts of juts and barbs on which one’s pride may snag and be wounded. Or else, as in Jayjay’s case, they confront one too forcibly with the less satisfactory aspects of one’s own character. Also, there are no coincidences. Biographers and their subjects sniff one another out as much subliminally as by conscious design. He had read my books, I was intrigued by him. Our psyches had caught wind of each other’s pheromones, and knowing this was both piquant and a source of unease.

  I now felt I knew exactly the sort of young man he had been. It was a type I myself would have found intimidating, even something of a reproach, had I met him then. No matter how sensitive and impressionable he might have been, with how good an eye and ear for childhood’s scenery (if rather less so for Eltham’s human inhabitants), I do not believe Jayjay was subtly reinventing his teenaged persona to make him sound maturer, more decisive, less insecure than he actually had been. I think he really was that self-confident at eighteen and a half, away for the first time in his life from family and friends, walking the streets of Suez with a worldly eye open to the main chance and greedy for details, precocious with a certain brisk beadiness. Some of us remain children longer than others. Compared to Jayjay I had been a baby at that age, drifting somnolently from one safe haven of hallowed walls, which was my public school, into another afforded by an Oxford college. There was no real break between these venerable institutions. They were simply stages in a seamless process claiming to bestow a manly independence of mind even as it infantilised us into conformity. At eighteen and a half I had never been to a public political meeting and flirted with socialism, still less had I ever watched a Greek prostitute turning tricks in a Suez flop-house. I would have found those tropical positionings and glum transactions threatening. And the difference between us extended beyond matters of passive experience into resourcefulness of behaviour. Even had I acquired the sort of hold over someone that Jayjay had over the luckless Richards, I would never have dared capitalise on it in a way that so adroitly served the interests of both parties, any more than I would have had the nerve to court the company of brigands running illegal rackets in the Middle East. And as for paying the price he claimed to have paid (and I’m quite sure did pay) for entrance into their seamy world, I do not believe I would have been capable of his unruffled mixture of abandon and pragmatism. What for me would have been an ordeal seemed to have been a transient event for Jayjay, one to which he alluded almost casually. But there again, a gulf of sixty years might so divorce a distant trauma from the present as to endow his remembered self with the urbane disguise of a lifelong sophisticate.

  Yet for all the difference between us, I could not dismiss the sense I had of something being not quite right in Jayjay’s account. I am often not very bright about people’s motives which others manage to see through with cynical ease, so maybe I was missing an obvious inconsistency in his early life story that any intelligent person might seize on. But so far was I from identifying it that I did not even know where – if at all – it lay, or what question to ask to elicit the illuminating reply. After all, two people who have known each other only a matter of months confront one another with two unspoken lifetimes and a good deal of catching-up to do – or as much as will be allowed. There are bound to be gaps and opacities. All the same, I did wonder why he had waited until now to find a biographer, to regurgitate the semblance of a life, an authorised version: plop!, a Life in three hundred pages. This man of whom I was becoming both wary and fond gave off an intermittent bleakness not at all that of a mere blithe nihilist such as anyone might affect to be these days, what with millennial scenarios of germ warfare and environmental catastrophe mustering over the horizon. His was no empty cynicism reliably ringing its hollow note when struck by an idea. Nor was he the retired diplomat I had initially taken him for, comfortably recapitulating a felicitous career in genteel surroundings. He felt to me unmistakably (and this was where I might be mistaken) like a man who had been deeply enough wounded not to bother with pretensions, whether of the material kind or else through a picaresque re-jigging of his own history. I kept noticing that soldierly habit of his of tucking his handkerchief into his cuff.

  The palimpsest of the Tuscan/Far Eastern landscape at my feet acquired another layer: a vaguely Middle Eastern, thirties blur, lacking borders but full of individual details. In the afternoons up on my hillside I might be sawing up next winter’s fuel or splitting baulks of scrub oak with an axe whose blows echoed from the woods. I could stop with the flashing blade arrested overhead like Excalibur, suddenly struck by the oddness of the stranger whose house lay so nearly visible below and whose unsimilar yet vaguely congruent life gave back something (but what?) of my own that threatened to be painful. How best to live that wisp of time … How best to live it so that it would least resemble a soap opera full of episodic whirlings of activity, metropolitan frenzies, relationships melding and falling apart with gusts of stagy emotion
and the pervading lie – or perhaps the pervading truth – that this, this is social realism. This is reality as lived by the majority of the Western world.

  – Do, do, do – said Jayjay once, disgustedly. – Only a juvenile wants to do all the time. The astute adult wants to be: to live his imagination instead of forcing it into abeyance under a top dressing of mere busyness. How to live one’s life is a deeper matter than just stuffing available time with random doings. As has recently been forgotten, living is an art, and like all art requires talent and diligence. Stylishness and pleasure are both a part of it; but they, too, must be a little rationed if we are not to become poseurs or blunted. Remain sharp: that’s the aim. Sharp sadness, sharp enjoyment, sharp hunger. Sharp attention or nothing. No slumping while the days scamper past in an undifferentiated blur. There’ll be time enough for rotting: the only thing everyone makes an equally good job of. –

  After the short silence due this gem I told him sadly that it was all too obvious he’d reached the age when intelligence is ousted by mere wisdom. Still (I said) you could probably scratch a geriatric living thinking up mottoes for Christmas crackers. He was impressively ribald in return, but Japanese technology does not lie. That was what he’d said, those the words Jayjay had actually spoken, shorn only of pauses and ers and laughs. Sharp sadness: that was how he’d chosen to head his list and it is up to the biographer not to smooth it out into something lesser like ‘an accurate melancholy’. Sharp sadness, I now think as I bring the bright axe down into too green a chunk of wood where it buries itself immovably, sap welling around it. Meanwhile I see from the cassette’s date Japanese technology also captured a remark he made at much the same time as he recounted the loss of so many of his virginities in Egypt.

  – Sex is an economical fuel. A good tankful before the age of twenty enables a man to coast through the rest of his life, if he has to, with an occasional eking-out. As with food, a lean diet does wonders for pleasure and longevity. –

  This is surprisingly stern, very far removed from the guzzling fleshpottery of present times. It hints at a later abstemiousness either chosen or forced upon him, although of course it may be pure blarney. From time to time I allude to his initiation, calling it ‘Suez’ as a shorthand and a euphemism. ‘Suez’ soon became buried beneath a growing heap of other experiences and elsewheres; but, as he more than once said: ‘Whatever else, I never forgot the blessed damozel.’

  *

  In the meantime, though, this mountainside I had unknowingly been sharing with the impostor lorde Jayjay seems to be trying to expel him from my attention. As I said, the Far East of my other life keeps surfacing its coconut palms through the chestnut forests below my doorstep. The deciduous and cypress greens of Europe darken imperceptibly to the colour of jungle fatigues. In place of the flat agricultural expanse of the Val di Chiana at the foot of the hills I see the South China Sea lapping around the promontories of Cortona and Castiglion Fiorentino. The buzzards revolving opportunistically above my house take on the plumage of fish eagles and in the terraced slopes beneath Etruscan hill towns my inward eye sees terraced paddies eight thousand miles away with their narrow silver panes, their piled slivers of water and rice. Sonic ghosts lurk beyond these blurred horizons as the whop of rotor blades and the sputter of M-16s. Arcadia and munitions: Southeast Asia’s Siamese twins, joined at the heart.

  This other life will not let me go. Utterly familiar yet constantly surprising, it draws me back over and over again for business I now know will remain for ever unfinished. Business of the heart and head as much as business to live by, although that too is beginning to press. My projected book on dictators and assorted monsters is now demanding attention, which I imagine is why that distant landscape pushes up so insistently through Tuscany each time I look up from chopping wood, just as it increasingly surfaces in my thoughts to distract me from Jayjay and his doings. As I have made clear to him more than once, it is a prior commitment that at intervals will have to take precedence over his tale. It is a job of work requiring no less attention than his and for me has twenty years’ longer history behind it.

  It is a curious sensation to be tugged between two places although it must be a commonplace in these days of mobility and migration. The image of divided attention is wrong, though, because it implies attention halved. Instead, something expands to make a full world of each. Now I start drawing up lists, looking through address books and sending messages off to that other world, trying to fix the interviews I shall need to conduct with its former satraps. I am fascinated by the deposed. It is endlessly gripping to watch their deft manoeuvrings to tear off some choice little lumps of power from the now rotting carcase of the regime they formerly served. In the way they smoothly accommodate themselves to the new status quo, no less than the way they are in turn accommodated, one visualises the hydrodynamics of a shark. It is a nearly aesthetic pleasure to watch them in action. With luck I shall be able to do so in person in a few months’ time. One needs patience to set up interviews in Asia. My quarries scoot about the globe. Letters take for ever.

  8

  The businesslike mornings spent down at Il Ghibli had now shed their last suggestion of formal interviews. Our arrangement began slipping imperceptibly towards the latter part of the day. It was not long before Jayjay was suggesting I stayed for dinner, and I wondered once more whether he might be lonely. And then, having accepted, I had to consider whether I might be as well.

  By having asserted on our first meeting that how one chose to live one’s paltry allotment of years was the only interesting question, Jayjay inevitably brought my inquisitive scrutiny down upon himself. Maybe it was unfair to expect a man on the doorstep of his eighties still to be narrowly watching each passing minute the better to cram it with edification or pleasure. Yet from what of his everyday domestic life I observed – and by the end I believe I saw pretty much all there was to see – he certainly didn’t waste time. By this I mean he read a good deal and watched old films from an extensive video library. He would occasionally glance at the news on television, but never for more than a few minutes. ‘That’s enough of that,’ he would say decisively, turning it off. ‘An inherently trashy medium, don’t you think?’ He enjoyed planning his garden and would think hard before having this or that planted, imagining how things would look four months or even years later. He would conduct detailed conversations with Claudio about aphids and copper sulphate solution. Claudio, who smelt agreeably of fresh garlic and leaf-mould, would stand there with a sickle worn thin by sharpening hanging from a thick hand, listening in a silence that was neither deferential nor blank. His forte was disease and bonfires. It was almost with pleasure that he surveyed the local landscape and noted how many of the cypresses were dying. ‘C’è la malattia in giro‚’ he would announce. ‘They’ll all have to come down sooner or later.’Jayjay called him the Grim Reaper.

  Sometimes I would catch Jayjay just sitting, though not with that puffy, absent expression of the truly sedentary. I never had the impression that his mind was idling in neutral but that he was considering or else watching inner clips from a long life. I now think I never met anyone who gave such clear evidence of a constantly active mind.

  He would hardly ever allow me to take him out for dinner, preferring to cook it himself at home which he did skilfully and without fuss. I would occupy a corner of the kitchen table and keep him supplied with gin and tonic while being given the occasional task such as preparing Brussels sprouts or peeling potatoes. He was quite particular about food, in the sense that he hardly minded what he ate so long as it was cooked with care and imagination. He wouldn’t eat anything in the nature of fast food. He had once eaten a hamburger, he said, leaving me waiting for an amusing anecdote that never came. That was the punchline: he had once eaten a hamburger. There was nothing else to add.

  As he chopped and sliced and stirred he would tell me gleefully how everything he was doing was, in fact, wrong; that according to the sacred lore of Tuscan cuisine
it was tantamount to blasphemy sautéing this or that in butter or adding capers to that particular sauce. Eventually I discovered he was really carrying on a jocular feud with the absent Marcella, taking as much pleasure in cooking against her as in cooking for us. The feud was obviously long-standing, a rivalry that must have grown over the years, giving equal pleasure to both parties.

  ‘Dear Marcella, now, I think I’ve more or less got her tamed, but every so often she catches sight of something I’m cooking and gets that Tuscan know-all tone in her voice. You remember that arista we had the other evening? She caught me preparing to marinade it overnight in oil, wine and herbs. What was I thinking of? And anyway, didn’t I know that one always put garlic slivers into the meat and never directly in the marinade? Then when I was cooking it she made a great fuss about its not having been salted. I told her I would do it after I’d sautéed it, just before I added the liquid, or else it would draw all the juices out of the meat. You could see she took it personally as well as considering it an offence against centuries of hallowed tradition. Quite. Centuries of hallowed but dry arista.’