Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  – Bombs were going off in the distance, the roads were a mass of refugees, carts, panicked horses and so on. It was a bit of a nightmare, really. And yet in the middle of it all I remember seeing a lemonade seller calmly sitting under a tree with his brass urn, offering refreshment to the people as they stampeded past him. Then there was a massive explosion right behind us and the car was kicked forward by the blast. There was a shriek from Adelio in the back to say that their house had been hit and the Morettis’ and the Lebanese restaurant and Mr Abbas’s laundry was on fire. Eventually we did get on to the Delta road and joined the general stream of traffic. At this point I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I wasn’t a proper combatant but oughtn’t I to stay in Alexandria and look after the warehouse? So powerful is the urge to join refugees streaming away from a skyline marked with boiling black clouds of smoke that I just glanced in the mirror and kept going. ‘Madonna santissima,’ Mirella kept on saying fatalistically. ‘Madonna cara. We’re as good as dead.’ ‘I don’t suppose you have any documenti on you?’ I asked. ‘No passport or anything?’ But of course none of them had a thing and presumably all their private belongings were now entombed in the inferno of their apartment block. I had no idea how I could explain myself and this carload if we ran into a military checkpoint, as we surely would outside Cairo if not in Damanhur or Tanta. By now I was assuming that the raid was a softening-up operation as a prelude to Rommel’s full-scale invasion, and there seemed no future in going back to Alexandria, not even for Mirella and her family. I told her I was heading all the way to Cairo where she and the children would just have to throw themselves on brother Renzo’s mercy.

  – And a strange drive we had of it, too. Mirella climbed into the back to comfort Anna, who was petrified. Adelio seemed not to need comforting and took her place in the front seat on my right. As a matter of fact he appeared to be enjoying himself, as I suppose you can when you’re fourteen, have just seen your mother’s detested lover left at gun-point in the middle of an air raid and are now speeding along in the man’s coveted roadster. He had always said he wanted to leave Alexandria and now he was. To my surprise we made it through Damanhur and Tanta without being stopped. I think the car impressed the Egyptian army. But we were stopped outside Cairo where we were diverted on to the Heliopolis road to make way for a stream of British army lorries heading for Alexandria. The road block was manned by the Egyptian army but staffed by British officers who couldn’t recognise any of the codes on my ID card and were downright difficult about the poor Boschettis. In my case SOE was supposed to be so secret that not even the military knew about it, and anyway at that time Egypt was full of irregular units of varying degrees of secrecy and known by a bewildering variety of codes and nicknames. I remember my warrant card meant nothing to these fellows, unfortunately. Much telephoning went on before I was put through to someone who could vouch for me. Actually he was the chap who had fixed my temporary secondment to Alexandria. I told him I was bringing in an Italian diplomatic family who had current knowledge vital to our interests or some such nonsense.

  – Finally they let us through and I took them straight to Renzo’s flat. He was in, and unfortunately for him so was his Greek boyfriend Kostas in a speedily donned Charvet dressing-gown. Renzo explained away this gorgeous apparition none too convincingly as a business associate who had been taken ill. I think only little Anna believed it but there were more important things to worry about. At least the Boschettis were reunited with Renzo and for the moment safe, if badly hampered by having no papers. I was anxious to get back to Alexandria and save what little I possessed, including a trunkful of pornography, before marauding Axis troops could loot the contents of my flat. But I didn’t succeed in leaving Renzo’s without hearing the beginning of fulsome accounts by Mirella and Adelio of how I had saved their lives. It’s funny, until then it hadn’t occurred to me that there was maybe some truth in this. Had I not gone to their apartment and virtually bundled them down the stairs at pistol-point they would no doubt still have been crouched in the kitchen when the flat was hit five minutes later. That part was sheer chance; yet it was a sheer chance that was to lead all the way to this very house in Tuscany. And in turn that was due to Adelio, who in some ways was the strangest child I ever met. At the time I was still trying to fathom his behaviour of the previous week, just before the raid on Alexandria. –

  *

  It is the last time they would drive together to a beach, although neither of them knows it. The tension in Alexandria is worth escaping if only for the afternoon. The powerful Italo-German forces are halted only fifty miles to the west. In the kitchens of Pastroudis and other fashionable patisseries pastry chefs with icing bags are writing Viva l’Italia and W Il Duce on the new batch of cakes in order to display them in time for the invaders’ arrival. They also spell out Sieg Heil! and, as though greeting tourists rather than troops, Willkommen in Ägypten in flowing blue and pink icing. Jayjay has wangled a free afternoon and he and Adelio are heading eastwards along the coast in the dented Fiat, away as if by instinct from the advancing front. This time, by the sort of mutual consent that is unspoken, they drive well past Faroukh’s palace at Montazah and out along Abu Qir bay. The road is deserted. Soon it shrinks to barely more than a dust track, a causeway between the sea on the left and Lake Idku on the right. On a small rocky promontory they come upon the remains of a tower. As he parks the car in its shade Jayjay explains this was a lighthouse that was struck by a stray salvo from one of Nelson’s ships in the battle of 1798. There is evidently something in the place and the moment that diverts Adelio’s attention away from the thermos flasks of ice cream wrapped in towels. The utter stillness, the empty churning of the sea, the singing heat and a jewelled lizard moving with jerky prehistoric tread over the scarred stonework: all conspire to produce a reflective melancholy. There is no need to mention the great army at present camped over the horizon. Instead Jayjay observes how often this piece of apparently deserted terrain has been the scene of battles; that only a year after Nelson defeated the French fleet in this very bay Napoleon won a land battle at Abu Qir when in turn he defeated an Ottoman Turkish force that outnumbered his men by more than two to one. Adelio gazes around at the empty landscape as it simmers and trembles in the heat.

  ‘But there’s nothing here.’

  ‘I know. Plenty of battles have been fought over territory nobody particularly wants.’

  ‘A bit silly, don’t you think?’

  At the foot of this lone promontory the sea has sculpted a series of hollows in the low sandstone bank, less caves than niches as though for a series of statues that have never been placed there. In one of these Jayjay and Adelio dump their clothes. They swim, and then hop back across the scalding beach. The sand in the shade of the little cliff feels deliciously cool to their feet. Adelio anoints his soles with chocolate ice cream and rolls his eyes in bliss in a gesture copied from the cinema. Half a mile offshore a twin-engined aircraft suddenly appears flying very low, heading westwards. It is just too far away for the markings to be visible. Adelio thinks it is a Caproni, Jayjay a Bristol Beaufort. It drones away towards Alexandria.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ Adelio asks.

  ‘I’ve no idea. Nobody knows. If the Italians and Germans invade Egypt I expect I shall be taken prisoner and interned in a camp.’

  ‘Won’t you fight?’

  ‘I don’t know. What with? I’m not a soldier.’

  ‘You’ve got a pistol in the car. I’ve seen it.’

  ‘It isn’t loaded.’

  ‘Don’t you care?’

  ‘About what? Egypt isn’t my country, after all. It’s not my war, either. I was just caught in it here, like everyone else.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re British, and the British sort of run Egypt, don’t they? But don’t you care?’ he asks again.

  ‘Only about what happens to the people I know. My friends.’

  ‘Including us?’

  ‘Of course i
ncluding you, caro. What do you think? Especially you. Your family has been wonderfully kind to me.’

  ‘But things happen in wartime, don’t they? I mean people get stuck, you know, on the wrong side and everything. You’re English, for instance, and I’m Italian.’

  ‘I know, it’s crazy. Wars are like that. But as I said, nobody knows what will happen. Just remember that whatever does, you and I are friends and we shall remain friends. When it’s all over in a few months’ time, or next year or whenever, we’ll simply go back to seeing each other. Back to normal again.’

  ‘I suppose. You make it sound easy.’

  Jayjay has to admit the truth of this. He is making it sound easy, as though he were the child trying to comfort himself and Adelio the adult obliged to be realistic. Not for the first time he feels Adelio to be much older than he actually is, maybe even older than Jayjay is himself. Absurd; yet the boy’s brand of melancholy, already so characteristic and defined, is quite grown-up, almost elderly. It is as if he felt it necessary to voice his gloomiest fears and challenge Jayjay to put up a convincing argument against them. Maybe playing this game, Jayjay hears himself say foolishly:

  ‘Why should I tell you lies, Adelio? Haven’t I been keeping my promise to you?’ Suddenly to his own ears he sounds like a wheedling child. Can he really be expecting this fourteen-year-old’s praise for not having screwed his mother? Hopelessly he tries to think of a way of retracting or re-casting this gauche ingot of rhetoric that thuds between them.

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ says Adelio loftily, in a tone that plainly says, ‘And I should think so too’, which also suggests he might have had a frank conversation with Mirella. ‘It’s all right, I do trust you. Honestly.’

  They go swimming again, largely to wash off the sticky patches of dripped ice cream to which the reddish sand adheres. When they are dry once more Adelio asks suddenly: ‘Can I take your picture?’

  ‘Oh. Yes, all right. Why not?’ Surprised, Jayjay hands him the second-hand Leica he has bought with the proceeds from selling August’s work to the crowned head of Egypt.

  Adelio snaps him twice. ‘Promise to give me them when you’ve developed them,’ he says. ‘It’ll prove what you’ve been saying. About us being friends, I mean.’

  ‘Then I shall do likewise and take your picture, too.’

  As Jayjay fiddles with the camera, re-setting the aperture stop, he is aware of surreptitious movement. When he glances up Adelio is egg-naked, looking vulnerable and slightly red.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he says with a touch of defiance.

  Jayjay is too surprised even to raise the camera; shocked, actually, by this unexpected provocation, this baring of more than flesh. His first thought is that Adelio must have found out about his commercial activity and is swept by acute embarrassment. That the boy should imagine this is the sort of picture he might want is humiliating. Yet the way Adelio now sits with his knees drawn up, meekly staring out to sea, suggests something quite different. There is nothing whatever salacious in his manner or pose; no knowingness, no trace of teasing. What there is, Jayjay decides as he lines up the picture, is an astonishing generosity. This is not pornography but a family snap. Adelio is letting him record his side of a friendship which Jayjay has so far only verbally and tritely asserted. It is a gesture of trust, all the more so since he is at an age when adolescents are usually modest about nudity, especially with adults.

  Is this, then, what August has felt in the early days of his camera-work down in that lonely village in the Sudan? The excitement at finding in sharp focus what was so long sought? A thudding of the heart and a breathlessness that make the camera hard to hold steady while the viewfinder blurs and swims? All in a rush Jayjay is ambushed by love. The vertical glare on the beach exposes the moment: the two of them alone in North Africa, nobody for miles, Jayjay’s own shadow puddled around his feet like clothes out of which he has just stepped. Did he have some idea that this picnic snatched from the world’s last moments of peace might end erotically? Not really. He has never mistaken Adelio for another of the flirty children he has so often dallied with at houseboat parties. Rather, he is more like the younger brother he never had, or something between a stepson and a ward, with potential lover hovering only indistinctly in the gaps. Certainly Jayjay has sometimes fantasised a moment when the boy might offer himself with an adolescent’s polymorphous guilelessness. Yet now the moment has arrived it is quite different, altogether more serious and fraught with consequence. In one leap Adelio has gone too far and in doing so has revealed himself as defenceless. His awkward bravery in demanding the right kind of love fills Jayjay with a hopeless tenderness.

  Adelio allows him to shoot an entire roll even as Jayjay begins to wonder whether after all there mightn’t also be a small component of exhibitionism in the boy’s demure willingness to be shot sitting, standing, lying, and finally knee-deep in the sea. Yet there is still no real hint of flaunting and nothing in the way he holds himself to suggest anything more than disclosure. As best he knows, he is giving himself. When the film is finished Jayjay slips an arm around his thin waist and hugs the hot body to him protectively, feeling the child subside against him and watching heartbeats flutter beneath the skin of his throat.

  ‘I’ll make you another promise, caro. I’ll never show these to anybody else. They’re just for us. Hey, you’re awfully hot. Hurry up and put some clothes on otherwise you’ll get sunburned. Besides, that Beaufort might come back.’

  ‘Caproni.’

  The moment has not quite passed. Standing there on the shore together Jayjay finds he still cannot tell Adelio he loves him as he wants to and as the boy clearly means him to. He is inhibited by the sundry chasms that divide families from outsiders, children from adolescents, adolescents from adults, males from males and Britons from Italians. Their mutual confusion depresses him by the way it aborts every useful impulse and kills the moment even as he feels oblivion’s endless ocean lapping just beyond the tips of their toes. It always would be too difficult, too late. Yet in this startling fashion an afternoon that had seemed foregone has now acquired new intimacy. If so, Jayjay thinks sadly as he starts the car, it is entirely because of Adelio’s initiative and not through anything I have said or done. He is moved to an intense feeling of protectiveness towards this peculiar boy, the ‘Little Frying Pan’ who made no effort to conceal his mocked ears from the camera’s lens. Indeed, as Jayjay soon discovers when he develops the pictures, no detail is hidden of the narrow, bony body with its tendons and kneecaps and elbows, the pointed chin and sticking-out ears. ‘This is who I am,’ the attitudes say uncompromisingly. ‘This is me.’ Only the eyes maintain their strange veiled gaze. Not even the brilliant sunlight can completely eradicate the faint shadows around them. Adelio looks out of the photographs with a glance that is bruised, already hopeless of finding a sight he can entirely trust, even one that will surprise or ravish him. His whole expression suggests an inwardness, an early friendship with desolation: a pact with the sound of a door closing, a school bell, the sigh of wind in tussocks. A week later when the first Ju 88s begin dropping bombs on the city it is the instant thought of Adelio that makes Jayjay desert his post and tear across Alexandria in the Fiat. As he goes pelting up the stairs to the apartment it is not Mirella’s name that he shouts. He is not looking for the woman he once planned to take to bed, but for her son.

  *

  – The Axis forces never did take Alexandria, as it turned out. We held them at bay although the air raids continued that summer and about seven hundred civilians were killed. I was suddenly kept busy and the Boschettis unfortunately had to be left to fend for themselves. I did lean on someone to ensure they received new diplomatic IDs that at least kept them from being interned.

  – It was a very interesting time politically and as 1941 went on relations became steadily worse between the Egyptian Palace, our embassy and the Egyptian nationalists. I was still stuck in Alexandria when Colonel Robert Laycock’s so-called ‘Layforc
e’ was plotting fantastic behind-the-lines operations that either fizzled out or turned into downright farce. Evelyn Waugh was one of his subalterns stationed in Sidi Bishr. He grew an appalling beard and became known as ‘the Ginger Runt’ or something, I forget what it was exactly, so he shaved it off. He once asked to see some of August’s pictures and I showed him a selection. He examined them half greedily, half disdainfully, as if he had seen a good deal of that sort of thing from an early age, and then pronounced them ‘rancid and doggy’, a phrase I’ve never forgotten. He and Randolph Churchill came to borrow radio sets from our warehouse as part of their doomed attempt to drive the Germans out of Crete. They lost the lot on that little caper and did well to get back to Egypt alive, full of quite justified rage about the crass incompetence of the military brass-hats.