A Dog's Life (18 page)

In Oradea, near the Hungarian border, the mayor welcomed the British and Romanian writers who had come to take part in a three-day seminar. Among those writers was the novelist Jonathan Coe. The mayor had no trouble with ‘Jonathan’, but ‘Coe’ confused him. He hesitated, and then pronounced it ‘Coaie’, to hoots of laughter from all the Romanians. ‘Coaie’ means ‘balls’.

On that trip, my publisher, Denisa, gave me a copy of the complete works of Bacovia. It’s a treasured book. On those mornings when I was alone in the park with Circe I would mutter his poems under my breath as I threw the ball for her.

Cleo went back to Bucharest, where she found a job with an American company. She is married now, and hopes to emigrate to Canada with her husband. She sees no future in Romania, which Bacovia encompasses in the exquisite line
O
,
ţ
ar
ă
trist
ă
,
plin
ă
de humor
. ‘O, sad country, full of humour.’

I called him Raskolnikov, after the would-be Superman turned repentant murderer in Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
. He was tall and pale, with lank hair and a black beard. He wore a long black overcoat with black trousers and black shoes that had flapping soles. His white shirt was collarless, in the Russian style.

From a short distance, he looked anguished, his burning dark eyes signalling pain fiercely borne. ‘It’s Raskolnikov to the life,’ I caught myself muttering the first time I saw him coming towards me on Uxbridge Road. I knew I stared at him in amazement. Then, as he passed me and the dog, he began to sing, in a very loud and effeminate voice:

Step inside, love,
Let me find you a place

and stopped abruptly, his frail body shaking with laughter.

I passed him often that year. He seemed to live on the streets of west London, this vision of blackness and spiritual torment with a passion for a song by Paul McCartney. I sighted him once in the park as he walked determinedly across the grass, laughing fiendishly.

On those many occasions when our paths crossed, he sang the opening bars of ‘Step Inside, Love’ before the terrible hilarity of his predicament took hold of him. Did he sing only for me, I wondered? Had he detected a kindred, appreciative spirit in the blatantly staring man with the friendly dog? Our lives are composed in part each day of questions that can never be answered.

The singing Raskolnikov became more and more wasted, lost inside the overcoat he wrapped around him tightly when he burst into song. I noticed him one hot afternoon biting into a hamburger with the ferocity of a wild animal. The meat was spilling out of his mouth and on to his glistening beard.

His truncated rendering of ‘Step Inside, Love’ on the last morning we passed one another was as manic as ever. His eyes, I imagined, were fixed on the death that was obviously awaiting him, just as the inevitable braying laugh was meant for the Grim Reaper. London’s bustling Uxbridge Road – with its population of Serbs, Croats, Poles, Turks, Indians, Arabs and Armenians – was now his Styx, and his expected Charon was around the corner, ready to ferry him across. He was openly dying, with a forced, final energy.

Raskolnikov had been a pretty youth, I learned, but when I encountered him he was already suffering from an AIDS-related illness. Other people, I discovered, thought he resembled Jesus Christ. Yet I was in the habit of calling him Raskolnikov, and so he remains for me.

Some years ago I was invited to review a book by the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende about the aphrodisiac qualities of everyday food. The mistress of hothouse prose was writing from personal experience – every recipe had been kitchen-tested, so to speak – when she informed her panting readership that even the humblest vegetable has powers to excite the jaded or worn-out libido. The potency of the potato – the prime source of vodka – was no surprise to me, and I could accept that the guava and the avocado pear have properties that might lead the unwary up otherwise ignored garden paths. But it was her gushing recommendation of the globe artichoke that disconcerted me, and called to mind an unforgettable evening in Rome – a windy evening, with a windier night to follow.

I had been commissioned to write and present a radio documentary about the life and work of Leonardo Sciascia, the great Sicilian writer who had died the previous year. Just before leaving for Palermo, via Rome, I had broken my tibia (a bone above the ankle) while running alongside Circe in the park. As a consequence, my right leg was in plaster and I could walk only with the aid of crutches. Jeremy accompanied me. We were making our way to the taxi rank at Rome airport when two nuns passed us at a gallop, one of them stopping briefly to trip me up with her black-booted right foot. I fell to the ground, shouting ‘
Fica
’ after her. Roman nuns are a curiously charmless bunch, but I had never anticipated that they would stoop to injuring a cripple. Perhaps, I wondered later, the loathsome duo were
mafiosi
in drag. It’s hard to tell what sex they are at times, since nuns in the Italian south are very circumspect when it comes to taking a razor to their facial hair. The husband of these brides of Christ is full of advice on other, more spiritual, concerns, but he seldom counsels them to have a shave.

We were in Rome for a couple of days, during which I interviewed Francesco Rosi, whose fine, intelligent movies –
Salvatore Giuliano
, which deals with the doomed life of the legendary Sicilian bandit, and
La Tregua
(The Truce), based on Primo Levi’s account of his flight from Auschwitz – are little known outside his own country. We spent a day in Ravello, where I talked to Gore Vidal in the garden of his luxurious villa. Seeing me hobbling towards him, he exclaimed, ‘Don’t tell me. You gave Joyce Carol Oates a bad review, and she threw the full weight of her a hundred and ten pounds on to you.’ He talked lyrically about Sciascia for more than an hour, without remembering a single title of his many books. Earlier that autumn afternoon, Jeremy and I and the producer of the programme, Noah Richler, had lunch at the wonderful little restaurant Cumpa Cosima, owned and managed by the enchanting Signora Netta, whom I had met some years before when Vanni and I had dined at Cumpa Cosima every night for a week. On returning to London, I wrote an article for the
Daily Telegraph
in which I described the food – the succulent roast lamb; the exquisite
crespellini
, which are pancakes filled with spinach – and lauded the unbelievably modest cost of everything on the carefully balanced menu. As a result, well-heeled British tourists, resident for the summer in places like Positano, negotiated the dangerously narrow roads leading up to Ravello from Amalfi in their hired cars in order to eat well and save money. And now, serving us lunch, Netta thanked me profusely and pointed to my article, which was on the wall, behind glass and framed. The meal was on the house, and we left in a glow, promising to return.

Our time in Palermo was memorable for three things. On the first evening, Jeremy, Noah and I went by taxi to dine at a restaurant a knowledgeable Italian friend had recommended. The driver seemed loath to enter the
piazza
I had asked him to take us to, and we soon learned the reason for his apprehensiveness. As he drove into the square, the door of the restaurant flew open and a man rushed out, followed by another who shot him at close range. The taxi driver backed his vehicle out of danger with astonishing speed, and the three of us enjoyed ourselves at a quieter establishment.

It was while Noah and I were wandering around the Public Record Office – a favourite haunt of Sciascia’s – that I noticed a cat making a path through the piles of yellowed ledgers that were scattered over the floor. (The shelves had been groaningly full for decades.) ‘What’s the cat for?’ I enquired of the curator, who replied, matter-of-factly, ‘To kill the mice and rats who destroy these precious documents.’ The history of Palermo, I realized, is there for rodents to devour, and future historians of the city would have to thank a scraggy tabby (and his successors) for preserving it from their nibbling molars.

A visit to the Catacombs proved too discomfiting for Noah, who retreated in horror from the sight of so many skulls and bones. Jeremy and I revelled in this macabre spectacle of human vanity, with its foolish desire to outwit death. The skeletons were arranged in different sections, each relating to their owners’ lifetime occupations: an old sailor, in the cellar devoted to naval and military heroes, was still wearing his three-cornered hat, while a soldier – whose uniform had all but evaporated – had a skeletal hand on a fellow soldier’s skeletal knee. By design, or accident? We strolled past doctors, lawyers, politicians, actors and actresses, opera singers and erstwhile courtesans. Their clothes – some of them dating back to the early eighteenth century – were in various stages of decay and mildew. The one truly grisly corpse was, in fact, the most recent – that of a child who had been deposited in the Catacombs in the 1920s. She was the last resident, kept in a glass case. She had obviously been pumped up with embalming fluid, given the redness of her cheeks. Among the dead on display, she alone looked
living
.

Jeremy and I returned to Rome, to the beautiful Hotel Forum, in which we had stayed after my mugging by the nun. We were offered the bridal suite at a reduced price. The staff took my crippled state into consideration, for they treated us with charming solicitousness. That evening we decided to eat at a nearby
trattoria
, where the head waiter persuaded us to try the chicken breasts with artichokes. We expressed our delight with his recommendation.

In the vast double bed in the bridal suite, we settled down to sleep. Who was the first to break wind? I can’t recall, but a duet of farts began at around midnight and kept us awake for hours. They were loud and cacophonous, and the odours they emanated caused us to lift the top sheet and employ it as a fan. They would stop for a while, only to recommence. We turned up the volume on the television, to drown the noises the delicious globe artichokes had induced.

It was the memory of that happy experience – for each new fart had us convulsed with incredulous laughter – that made me doubt the authenticity of Isabel Allende’s treatise. Was this one recipe the dedicated researcher had overlooked? Or does she know of people for whom the mutual breaking of wind is a required accompaniment to sexual satisfaction? These questions continue to worry me, for unless I encounter Allende and confront her with them, they seem fated to remain unanswered.

Trixie – or was it Tricksy? – was one of Circe’s frequent companions. She was two-thirds lurcher and, in her active youth, sprang rather than ran across the park. She belonged to Deidre and her older sister Violet, who was known solely as Sissy. The women owned a fruit-and-vegetable shop which they had inherited from their parents. When I first arrived in Shepherd’s Bush in the early 1970s, their mother, Winifred, was still alive. Indifferent to the twentieth century, she drove to the market twice a week by horse and cart. She wore a broad-brimmed hat with a large pin stuck through it at all times, and looked the most forbidding of matriarchs as she urged the faithful old dobbin along or ordered her doting daughters to serve the customers.

After the horse’s demise, a van was bought for Sissy to drive. Winifred ‘passed over’ – to use, as Sissy and Deidre used, that common euphemism for ‘died’. Deidre was now in charge of the shop, while Sissy pottered about in the kitchen behind it. (There was a perpetual smell of fried onions.) Only at weekends, when custom was brisk, did they work together. I had to grow accustomed to Deidre’s brusque manner whenever I requested a fruit or vegetable that wasn’t in stock: ‘No,’ she’d respond with a glower. ‘Certainly not.’ The milder-tempered Sissy would reply to the effect that the desired item was too expensive at the moment or not to be found in the market.

I was walking in the park with Deidre one morning when she revealed that the builders were working in, and redecorating, the large house above the shop. I asked, in all innocence, if she and Sissy were having a new bathroom fitted. The very word ‘bathroom’ sent her into an immediate rage. ‘Bathroom? Bathroom? We’ve never had a bathroom, and we’re not getting one now. No, we’re
not
having a bathroom fitted. I should think not.’

I had obviously caused offence, for she said nothing more, but fumed loudly instead. I, too, had grown up in a house without a bathroom, and remembered the complete bliss of taking a long, hot bath when I stayed with my mother’s friends – the elderly couple who cared for me on those days my mother was working late.

We followed the dogs, who were happily sniffing every tree, before I ventured another question.

‘Forgive my asking, Deidre, but where do you wash?’

‘At the kitchen sink, of course.’

Of course. It was at the kitchen sink in Battersea that I washed and scrubbed myself to my mother’s detailed instructions – ‘Back as well as front,’ she exhorted. We called it a ‘strip wash’ for you took off your clothing one piece at a time, washing each part of the body in turn, ending up with the feet, which you placed – one foot, then the other – in the now-scummy water. Of course.