Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The silence that falls after Filippo and Gerry’s departure only intensifies my anxiety. So long as there was a Pacini in the room I felt nothing too terrible could happen, not even if Gerry was also there with his brainless capacity for putting his foot in it. Ironic how little they know about me and the sour forces that really shape my life. Now I’m left with Ljuka, quite alone and with the urgent sense that the world beyond these mountains is plotting our downfall. The carabinieri’s visit was a horrid near miss – at least, I think it was. It rather depends on the force of that maresciallo’s parting shot to Ljuka.

  ‘That was close,’ he now says. ‘I didn’t like that a bit. I’m afraid they’re on to us, Matti.’

  ‘Us?’ I hear myself say, somewhat bitterly. ‘I’m just a composer, Uki. All I’ve done these last few months is write music, hardly a reason to call the police out. If it hadn’t been for that muttonheaded dudi gossip Gerry they wouldn’t have come to see me at all. Thank God Filippo happened to drop in when he did. No, Uki, there’s no us about it. What do you think was behind what the maresciallo said to you about not hanging around?’

  ‘Maybe his colleagues heard something when they radioed in. They’ll have matched the chopper’s registration to our company in Trieste. Whether that name has become part of a Europe-wide alert yet I doubt, but it’s safer to assume it has. I think those carabinieri are dozy locals, while the maresciallo is an old jerk so terrified of this Pacini big cheese he’d do anything to avoid confrontation. I know the type: fawning, indolent and nearing retirement. I think they really did come up here to question you but unexpectedly found hints that they might be on the edge of something much bigger which the maresciallo can pretend not to know about, so he went away. He doesn’t want paperwork, he doesn’t want enquiries, which is what would happen if they’d been proper cops. He just wants us to vanish and leave him in peace. That’s why he as good as told me to go away fast, because the next lot they send up will be for real.’

  ‘You keep saying “we”, Uki.’ A surge of very un-familial resentment heaves itself into my words, a sense of injustice that all my efforts to make my own way are about to be tainted with my brother’s asinine behaviour, his pig-headed refusal to break with a sordid career all too obviously doomed to a violent end. The recalcitrant stupidity of Voyde males with their primitive notions of masculinity brings tears helplessly to my eyes. ‘Let’s be plain about this. Our father is a racketeer and you’re involved up to the hilt. People-smuggling, prostitutes, drugs, who knows? In Gerry’s own words, what do I care? But you’re in it up to your neck, you stupid idiot. Everything I was trying to warn you about last time you were here. And did you take a blind bit of notice? Of course you didn’t. You’re a Voyde: balls galore but not a bit of brain and less moral sense than an earwig.’

  Ljuka is white with anger and I imagine I have gone too far – far enough, in fact, for him to overcome his equally fatuous n code of chivalry and strike his elder sister. But he manages not to. Instead he says:

  ‘Well, listen to Miss Goody Two Shoes. I stand here being accused of involvement in organized crime by someone engaged in making porno movies. Terrific. This must be a definition of hypocrisy I missed in the dictionary.’

  This time I can’t help it and am overwhelmed by tears. A long moment passes, frozen by these angry words, before the air between us melts and my brother comes over, sits beside me on the sofa and puts his arm around me.

  ‘Oh Uki,’ I say when my sobs ease, ‘I didn’t know. Not really.’

  ‘Sure you knew,’ he says, but quite gently. ‘You knew Pacini’s reputation. When Father found out he went ballistic. And maybe my Italian’s not up to much but it’s good enough to discover for myself what Arrazzato means. I’m not blaming you, Matti. You saw Pacini’s name as a passport to better things. In your position I’d have done exactly the same. Get established and move on. Of course – why not? But for the purposes of this conversation we’d probably best skip the moral judgements. Right now we ought to be making plans. We really do have to get out of here.’

  I look around at my house, at the kitchen, at my beloved Petrof piano. Through the window come the confused, sporadic shouts and banging and grunts associated with men putting up a fence. It sounds purposeful and domestic. For the first time I notice the leaves on some of the trees are just beginning to turn. Autumn. I sigh. ‘You go, Uki. I’ll stay.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Matti. The next time they come they’ll take you in regardless. You’re my sister; you have the family name. They’ll be rounding us all up.’

  ‘Maybe. But anyway, someone’s got to stay here and wait for Marja. What happens when she arrives?’

  ‘God almighty, I keep forgetting she’s not at home. Damn her – why did she have to do this schoolgirl eloping lark at exactly the wrong moment?’

  ‘It’s not her fault it’s the wrong moment,’ I say hotly. ‘She, too, has a life to lead. I agree, though, it’s hardly conven –’

  But at this instant the telephone rings and, blessed relief, it’s Marja herself cheerfully announcing that she and Mekmek are at Viareggio station. I glance up and see Ljuka urgently mouthing ‘Taxi’. I nod and tell her to get a taxi here. Although she has the postal address of the house I give her some simple instructions to relay to the driver, tell her to hurry, and ring off without mentioning her brother’s presence. I’m becoming paranoid about telephones, evdently. While we’re waiting for them to arrive I ask: ‘And what then?’

  ‘We all go,’ Ljuka says decisively. Now he’s out of the messy emotional stuff and back into Action Man mode he sounds self-assured again. ‘Thank God we had big tanks fitted. Four of us –’ he looks into the middle distance while calculating and murmurs, ‘just about. Yes, what we’ll do is use the mountains to get good and low before we cross the coast north of Viareggio. With any luck we won’t be noticed because I doubt they’re co-ordinated enough to bother. I mean, there’s no war on and we’re not suspected terrorists. We’re just ordinary civilians they might like to question in connection with some arrests made by the police a thousand kilometres away in Voynovia. Hey, this is Italy. They’re laid-back, these guys. So we fly across the Gulf of Genova and, depending on fuel, hit the other side as close to the French border as we can get. We ditch the chopper somewhere not too inhabited up in the hills and get ourselves to Menton where we rent a car using my US passport and drive to Marseilles. Once we’re there, we’re safe, as I told you. I’ve got friends.’

  ‘It sounds hare-brained, Uki. Like a James Bond film. And what about this boyfriend of Marja’s, Mekmek?’

  ‘He comes too. At least, as far as the French border. After that it’s up to him. Don’t worry, Matti, it’s not at all like James Bond. We’re in the EU so frontiers aren’t what they were. Things are fabulously lax. We’ll just drift over to France to avoid getting picked up by officious Italians, that’s all. God, I could very easily murder that dudi of yours. But for him …’ Ljuka lets the thought trail bitterly away.

  ‘Gerry didn’t mean it. He was just cross with me for the disturbances, a large part of which was you flying right over his house at midnight, let’s not forget. He wasn’t to know that Benedetti would run to some police chief he wanted to butter up and spread imaginary rumours about me. And remember, it was Gerry owning up that made the carabinieri go away again.’

  ‘Rubbish. It was that obsequious old maresciallo’s fear of pissing off your famous director. Anyway, he’s still a little dudi and I’d still like to break his neck.’

  ‘Well, you’ll never have to see him again.’

  Shortly after this Marja and Mekmek arrive. A good deal of embracing goes on, none of which includes Mekmek, who stands on the outskirts of this family reunion looking on with a bewildered smile. I confess he’s hardly my idea of yummy. From the ecstatic description in her letter Marja had prepared me for something eager and boyish and her own age. Instead Mekmek is a bland, blobbish, thirtyish sort of creature with slightly receding sandy hai
r. His pale eyes somehow betray that they have never gazed on a horizon wider than that framed by a computer monitor. He must either be phenomenally kind or else a really demon lover. Still, I’ve long given up trying to match people I know with the partners they wind up with. I’m so naïve I very often don’t even get the gender right.

  Then in a surreal flurry in which I feel scarcely present I have to run upstairs, grab a few precious things and stuff them into a bag. Ljuka shouts up, ‘Keep it light! Make it quick!’ in a brittle, commanding voice which only makes me panic and scurry about in indecision, grabbing pointless things at random. What am I doing? Why am I allowing myself to be bullied into abandoning my own home? I can’t quite believe I shan’t return so when it’s time to go I deliberately don’t lock the house. Pacini’s workmen are still busy, making swift progress with the fence. We go out of the back, climb into the helicopter and take off. It is the least real thing I have ever done. Yet again I am in stupid tears. Below, my little house rears as though suddenly mounted on a wall: its lovely grey stone roof shines and so does the bright line of fresh wooden fence posts dotted beyond through the trees. This whole thing is absurd, disloyal And one disloyalty prompts another: Damn my bloody father.

  Gerald

  44

  The short flight down to Pisorno Studios with Filippo Pacini is exhilarating. The noise makes conversation difficult so I become lost in my own world, watching the approach of the matte blue carpet that is this morning’s Mediterranean on which breezes have left random marks like hoovering and assorted tiny craft are affixed with dabs of white glue. The tinted canopy overhead makes the sky look much darker than it is, strengthening the impression that we are approaching the earth not from Le Roccie but from outer space. Stranger still to look up at the whizzing blades that keep us aloft and realize they are revolving around a single axle at whose centre is an imaginary shaft thinner than a barely-turning needle. We are literally pinned to the sky by twirling molecules.

  Don’t worry – I’m given to these nervous fugues of fancy when in the air, even more so when flying Ryanair. I’m not, however, nervous at heart. On the contrary, I am filled with a sublime fatalism brought on by being in Filippo’s hands. If we do crash I couldn’t have wished to be flown into the ground by a handsomer pilot. This is oddly consoling. But we don’t crash, and come swinging in over the pines and the barely breaking waves that mark the Tuscan coast just north of Livorno, whose urban sprawl and industrial docks suddenly look very modern. As we sink below the treeline in the grounds of a gleaming white fascist villa, however, the twenty-first century vanishes from view and we settle in the nineteen thirties with a gentle bump. The helicopter has turned out to be a time machine. Certainly I feel about fourteen as I hop to the ground and thank Filippo.

  ‘Any time,’ he says, and I may well hold him to it. ‘Come on. Papa said he’s doing beach shoots all today and some of tonight. The forecasters say it’ll get cloudy in a couple of days’ time so we’ve got to take advantage of this weather for continuity. Unfortunately, summer’s over.’

  We walk through dusty oleanders down towards two tall cypress trees that seem to mark the end of the garden proper. Beyond, a sandy track leads through evergreen scrub to the shore. Unexpectedly, the beach is contained within a small cove that has obviously been constructed on what is otherwise a long, straight coast. There is a dilapidated low house with a sun-bleached dinghy propped upright against it. Heaps of nets, lengths of frayed rope and orange plastic fishing floats are scattered artistically about. A small tractor hitched to what looks like a steel mat is parked to one side. A generator thuds somewhere in the background. Black cables converge on the doorway of the house whose roof, I notice, is patched with scraps of sheet tin and plastic. The interior is lit brighter than the sunlight outside, to judge from the glimpses visible between the heads and bodies of cameramen, technicians and grips clustered around the entrance.

  But what really grabs my attention is the music. It is not very loud but extremely clear, giving the impression of large speakers with the gain level turned low. I recognize it at once as the same incompetent squalling idiot going ‘Uffa … buffa …’ that Marta was playing when I went over to remonstrate on the morning after Nanty’s UFO. But that’s not why it sounds familiar; it sounded familiar the first time, too. At that moment there comes the sensation of at last dumping a nameless heavy load, and I can hear what it really is. It gives me the same visceral shock as passing the window of one of those electronics shops on Tottenham Court Road and catching sight of a pervert slouching across the screen of the TV monitor displayed inside. This low-life, a worn looking creature of the streets, stops, backs up, shakes his head, finally sticks his tongue out, and yes! recognizes his image. That is you. That is your alter ego who lives in a CCTV world parallel to your own and lampoons the real you with pixel accuracy.

  Here on the beach of Pisorno Studios I am listening to a parody of my own singing. I now know what it sounds like to stand outside Samper’s house and hear him cheerfully at work in the kitchen. I can almost see some fabulous dish taking shape beneath my hands – as it might be Stuffed Udder with Butterscotch Sauce – while my spirits soar with an extemporization from Act 2 of La Tranca Vispa. Now it sinks in: the music score of Arrazzato is basically one long mockery of Gerald Samper, friendly neighbour, jobbing wordsmith and culinary genius.

  My first reaction is almost my last, such is the rush of dizzying rage. Out of it emerges one clear thought: this time Marta has really gone too far. This time the adipose hairy hag will pay. After all I’ve done for her: putting up fences, supplying her Fernet habit, freeing her from the clutches of the police. And how does she thank me? My peace is shattered, my life disrupted, my clients frightened away, my fences torn down and now my private voice is travestied and about to be exposed to the mockery of film audiences across the world. Right – go for it! (I tell myself in a steely inner voice that makes me tremble slightly, at least partly with pleasure). Go for it! Sue the bollocks off them! Pacini’ll be good for a decent sum. Marta too, with her shady mafia connections, whatever they are. I’ll reduce her to a sebaceous husk, a grovelling puddle of grease and hair. I’ll sue her to her last emetic inch of communist sausage. I’ll sue her out of that bloody hovel and then I’ll bulldoze it and the entire neighbour problem will be solved at a stroke. I’ll –

  Hang on.

  Just hang on a moment.

  Cool it, Samper. Is this not the very lever I need to ensure that Pacini consents to make me his latest and best biographer? Wouldn’t the heavy threat of legal action also be quite a nifty way of wringing out of him the sort of frank details he might otherwise withhold but which will practically guarantee newspaper serialization and an eager readership? Maybe after all, righteous petulance – no matter how excusable and enjoyable – is not the most canny way of ensuring Samper’s future.

  So with massive patience I bide my time, like a great heap of damp grass cuttings not visibly steaming except that inside it is already hot and turning yellow as it prepares to burst into flame at the least expected moment. Meanwhile the scene they are shooting is finished, Pacini appears in – I kid you not – a green eyeshade, catches sight of us and waves in a preoccupied fashion as he gives orders and directions with sweeps of his hands.

  ‘We’ll catch him at lunch,’ Filippo says. ‘Another hour if this goes OK.’

  The grips and technicians vacate the house and retreat to where we’re standing. The tractor starts up and drags the mat over the sand in front of the house, obliterating the marks and footprints before men turn hoses on it, the nozzles screwed down to a fine spray, wetting the sand to flatness. Soon it looks just as though the tide had recently gone out and inside the house a yawning motley of hippie boys and girls are finally getting up for lunch as they stagger sleepily to the door and gaze blearily out, presumably contemplating another day of clean Green living. I can’t imagine what this film’s about. It looks dire. Clapperboards snap, cameras roll, Pacini wave
s them all back inside again several times until he gets what he wants. He checks the rushes on a tiny monitor, approves what he sees, makes satisfied lunch-break gestures with both arms, shouts ‘Two o’clock!’

  I fall in with Filippo and his father as we walk back towards the house. Filippo explains the earlier dramatic events in Malta’s house in indignant tones as I coolly plot and scheme and wait for the moment juste to lob my little bomb.

  ‘Thank God you were there, Gerry,’ Pacini says at one point.

  ‘Thank God Filippo was,’ I echo piously. ‘With either one of us alone it mightn’t have worked. But both of us together were too much for the maresciallo.’

  ‘I shall settle his hash shortly, believe me,’ says the great director.

  ‘That’s just what Marta doesn’t want you to do,’ I tell him. ‘Things are maybe not quite so simple’ And on this enigmatic note we arrive at the villa and find our way into a splendid spacious morning room with a terrace. The décor is quite marvellous: Latin mottoes and tough little cherubs who would clearly give you a good kicking if you so much as patted them on the head. A huge table is laid with buffet dishes from which we begin spearing and spooning liberal portions of this and that before seating ourselves with a large glass of white wine apiece. Be honest, who would live in England?

  ‘I’m afraid the food isn’t right for the room,’ Pacini observes. ‘Your politically correct fascist went in for simple, traditional dishes like pastasciutta with plain tomato sauce. You almost never saw people eating in those telefoni bianchi films they shot in this very house. They could be seen sipping an occasional glass of wine or fruit juice, a cup of tea or coffee, that’s about all. There was a manic cult of fitness at the time, everyone cycling and running and hiking like crazy. Just to be fat was quite suspicious. Mussolini and the gerarchi were always being filmed stripped to the waist and pounding along a beach. A strange period. There are several things about it I don’t dislike,’ Pacini adds. ‘Modest amounts of simple food and plenty of exercise sound rather sensible to me.’