Cooking With Fernet Branca (24 page)

‘Gerree! This you meet
il
maestro
Piero Pacini. And this his son Filippo.’

You could knock me down with a buzzard feather. There is now no doubt about it: I recognize those world-weary and distinguished features from a thousand press photographs. Here before me on Marta’s patch is the genius who gave us
Nero’s
Birthday
. Numbly I extend a hand.

‘
Piacere.
Piacere
.’

‘And this gentleman,’ Marta goes on to explain in serviceàble Italian, ‘is Mr Samper, my English neighbour. Mr Samper, alas, is not very pleased with us because we took down his fence the other day. In fact, he was talking of legal action the last time we met.’ She smiles sweetly at me.

Bitch!
I never said anything about – oh well, maybe I might have dropped a rhetorical sort of hint, but only as a gesture to indicate how peeved I was. I hardly expected her to pass it on to Piero Pacini himself, for heaven’s sake, if only because I never really believed her story of knowing this celebrated man. I naturally assumed she’d had the fence destroyed for her own arcane reasons. And anyway,
can
this be Marta speaking such fluent Italian?

‘Well,’ I begin with what I hope is a disarmingly humorous note of protest in my voice, ‘I think the lady’s exaggerating slightly –’ but at that moment the helicopter pilot guns his engine and the thing rises from the paddock in the background, tilts nose down for forward speed and clatters away with a battering of echoes thrown back from the cliff face. When we can hear ourselves think Marta has offered us all coffee. Most fervently I trust she has run out of those
mavlisi
things of hers. Somehow I can’t see spearmint-flavoured pigeon’s eggs striking her grandee visitors as a delicious new alternative to boring old florentines. We follow her into the house where Pacini and son seat themselves among the laundry with a courteous show of unconcern. The father opens a small leather grip. I notice he is wearing a silver Old Florence watch. None of your tacky Rolexes for a man of his distinction.

‘Marta,
cara
, I’ve brought you a disc of the rushes we did here.’ His hostess is banging away with tins and cupboards and percolators. When it comes to anything involving kitchens and cuisine she has the dexterity and unobtrusiveness of a stevedore. Already I am looking forward to inviting these people to my own house for some proper Samper hospitality. I fancy they will be well able to discern the difference. Pacini is meanwhile waving a DVD in Marta’s direction. ‘You have a DVD player, of course?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t, no,’ she says. ‘Nor a video machine. Not even a television. You know how backward I am, Piero. But it was a sweet thought.’

As you may imagine, my mind is turning over in high gear. By suppressing a mental choking reflex I can with effort swallow the idea that Marta is on chummy terms with debatably the world’s greatest living film director, that footage has been shot in this very hovel, even that when she told me she was writing music for a film there might have been an element of truth in it. All this is amazing enough. Yet the real revelation is that she evidently speaks quite passable Italian. I’m absolutely certain she never used to. Somehow in the last few months she has managed to acquire a fluency that will make it possible to have an actual conversation with her in a language other than pidgin. The old bag has been playing that one pretty close to her ample chest, I think with resentment. All this time we could have been having civilized social relations. Or at least I would have been able to make my grievances unmistakably clear to her. But Piero Pacini is addressing me.

‘I understand from Marta that it was you who put up that magnificent fence, Signor Samper? I most deeply regret my apparent vandalism in having it taken down. But you see, the scene in my new film depends so much on the view here. I shall of course put it back up at once to your specifications and reimburse you financially. If it’s any consolation, it took my workmen no little labour to remove. The foreman told me that it was “a devil of a job because it had been put up by an expert”. Those were his very words, weren’t they, Filo?’ He turns to his son.

‘Perfectly correct,
papà
,’ says this vision, flashing me a smile I want to lay away in lavender in a dark drawer for the rocky years ahead.

‘
Ma
scherza?
’ I make a gesture of dismissal. ‘You can’t be serious. It is perhaps true that carpentry is something of a hobby of mine – just an amateur’s
passatempo
, you understand. As for the fence itself, it’s really of no importance. Marta and I had decided it would be a good thing to mark our properties’ boundary, that’s all.’

‘It shall be restored this week,’ the film director promised. ‘You have Pacini’s word. Now, as regards this legal action of yours, which I willingly concede you have every right to undertake: may I ask, sir, how far it has proceeded?’

‘Oh, it hasn’t,’ I assure him. ‘No, no. I’m afraid dear Marta has got hold of the wrong end of the stick. She sometimes does.’

Dear Marta gives me a look from behind her hair that I can’t interpret before she is distracted by the
caffettiera
’s strident bubbling – to my ears one of the great civilized sounds, along with that of corks being withdrawn. Pacini meanwhile has produced from his bag a beautifully wrapped package tied with a springy yellow ribbon.

‘A little nothing from Rome, Marta, for having looked after Filo’s car for him.’ He hands it to her. ‘They ought to go well with your coffee.’

With her familiar piggy squeal of pleasure Marta tears the wrapping off an assortment of florentines from one of Rome’s most exclusive
pasticcerie
. Saved by the bell. The dread spectre of
mavlisi
fades. We sip our coffee and sample the florentines which are exquisitely nutty and chocolatey. Little do these two goofs know what so nearly might have been.

‘And could I ask, sir, what it is you do?’ Pacini enquires.

‘Gerry’s a famous writer,’ says Marta.

‘Hardly famous,’ I protest, ‘but undeniably I write, yes.’

‘Wonderful. And what sort of books?’

‘Having been a journalist I’ve so far stuck to journalistic things. No blockbuster novels yet, I’m afraid. Recently I’ve been writing biographies of, well, sporting figures.’

‘Lucrative?’ Pacini asks keenly.

‘Very,’ I lie, equally so.

‘And who are you currently writing about, if I might ask? Please don’t feel you have to answer,’ he adds. ‘I quite understand the necessity for discretion.’

‘No, it’s no secret, just a departure from my norm. I’ve been approached by a pop star, of all people. We can’t always choose
exactly the client we would ideally like, can we? Actually, that’s what I was doing in Munich last week while you were filming here. I went to see Freewayz’ last public appearance.’

‘What?’ The gorgeous Filippo looks startled. ‘Are they disbanding?’

‘No, no,’ I reassure him. ‘They’re merely re-branding themselves. From now on they’ll be known as Alien Pie. Why, are you a fan?’

‘Not so much of the group,’ Filippo admits. ‘It’s just kid stuff, though they’re pretty good. Better than those boy bands whose members are chosen by TV polls on the basis of what they look like rather than their talent. Freewayz has always been way ahead of Take That or Westlife. No, it’s Brill himself I admire. There’s some musical muscle under there somewhere, don’t you think? He’s much more than just a pretty face like Justin Timberlake or Aaron Carter or those other all-American kids.’

Aaron
Who
? This hunk’s a lot better informed than I am. ‘It’s Brill I’m writing for,’ I tell him, offhand purveyor of trade secrets.

‘You’re not! You actually know him?’ Filippo suddenly looks still younger.

‘Sure. As a matter of fact he’s even been here. He was staying over in my house some weeks ago. Would you like to meet him? It could easily be arranged.’

I’m satisfied to note that throughout this exchange Marta has been looking at me in amazement. I can see her putting things together in her fuddled, Voynovian way. Was this pop star perhaps the client her helicopter had driven away? And is she not obliged to view her neighbour in a rather new light?

‘It didn’t take you long to find Filo’s weakness,’ Pacini is telling me with a father’s indulgence. ‘From now on he’ll be eating out of your hand. Meanwhile, Signor Samper –’

‘Gerry, please.’

‘– Gerry, you might be interested to drop down to Pisorno Studi one day when you have a spare moment and watch us
do some filming. Marta has written a completely brilliant score for my new film and most of the sets we’ll be using are there. It’s just down the coast. Filo often collects Marta in that absurd car of his. I’m sure if you didn’t mind curling up in the back somehow he would happily bring you too. Failing that, there’s always our helicopter. Filo can bring you in that. He’s a fully qualified pilot, you know. They say he’s a natural,’ he adds fondly. ‘And now, Marta, our thanks for the delicious coffee. Filo and I ought to be getting down to the studios. We’ve got a heavy shooting schedule as from tomorrow. Oh, and Gerry, how long was that fence of yours?’

‘Forty metres. With a door in the middle. But –’

‘I shall attend to it immediately. The men will be up within a day or two. You’ll only have to show them where it runs and they’ll do the rest. Come along, Filo.’

As the great man shakes my hand again I recognize his discreet, unusual cologne that somehow suggests damp prayer books. It really
is
Messe de Minuit. Etro and Old Florence! I wonder Marta’s shack doesn’t slump to the ground in the face of this sophistication. But it doesn’t, and within minutes the Pacinis have roared off in the red car with Filippo at the wheel. I stare after them wondering who cuts the boy’s hair. Someone in Rome, probably. There’s no one around here, except maybe Severino in Pisa on a good day. Marta and I are left standing there listening to the Panther’s exhaust burping its way down the curves below.

‘Well!’ I say at last. ‘A morning of revelations.’

‘Yes, Gerry. Not the least being that you speak such good Italian.’

‘And the same for you, Marta. I at least have been living in Italy some time. From now on it seems we have a language in common. I wonder if we’ll be the same people?’

‘I do hope not,’ she says, unfazed by my philosophical pleasantry. And with that familiar sinking feeling I glimpse the edges of a leer behind her dun curtain of hair, like one of those hunting spiders of dark design that lurk beneath leaf mould.

It is sometimes hard not to succumb to banality and reflect a little on life’s ironies. Had I not deliberately bought this charming house on the lip of a precipice as a retreat from the world? Was the scenery not well stocked with sighing forests, mewing buzzards, the occasional clatter of rocks? Weren’t the nearest shops two miles below in Casoli and wasn’t that idle slob of a
postino
reluctant to bring me letters on his motor scooter all the way at road’s end? In short, everything about living up here stands successfully in opposition to the turmoil of towns, office hours, parking spaces and the importunings of double-glazing salesmen.

And yet ever since I’d taken up residence and finally got the place looking as I wanted it (the mushroom and eau de Nil kitchen gives me frissons of pleasure still), my life up here had been nothing but punctuated uproar. An insane neighbour who looked like a bag lady, a daily stream of helicopters and sports cars: I might as well have gone to live in the short-term car park at Heathrow. Oh well, no one ever accused me of not being fair minded. Given that the uproar had occurred, I admit this latest development did offer interesting possibilities. As you will appreciate by now, Samper’s ways are ways of wiliness and all his paths are peace, to improve a favourite saying of stepmother Laura’s.

I spent the rest of the morning wandering from room to room addressing remarks variously to a sugar sifter, a patch of sunlight on the floor, a row of very unimaginative cookbooks and finally to Gazzbear. He was the only one who replied, responding to a probing thumb with his usual expression of wisdom. ‘Piero
Pacini
?!’ I kept exclaiming. ‘
Marta
?! A 
film
?!’ And each time Gazzbear made brief acknowledgement. After a meditative sandwich lunch (home made bread, pecorino cheese and a fabulous rhubarb & sardine chutney of my own – who else’s? – devising), I had spotted
the silver lining. I reflected on the curious coincidence that not so many weeks ago I had actually thought of Piero Pacini myself as a possible subject for a biography. At least, his was one of the names I had come up with as someone who could lift me out of my ‘sporting heroes’ rut and get my intellectual pleasure centres working again. That, of course, had been before Nanty Riah entered my life. I could now see it was altogether less of a coincidence that, when I had idly proposed Pacini’s name to Marta as an example of the sort of subject I should ideally like, she pretended she’d barely heard of the man and then flattered me with all that stuff about how someone of my musical talents would be better off writing about a musician like that alleged pianist friend of hers, Pavel Taneyev. With calculated meanness she had obviously been trying to keep Pacini to herself, though for what purpose I could not imagine.

However, now that the truth was out and we had all been introduced to each other I could take steps to ensure there would be life after Brill, so far as my own career was concerned. It struck me that once I had finished helping Nanty get to Base Camp on his ascent of Parnassus, a biography of Piero Pacini would be the perfect next project. Certainly that would be the averagely smart thing to try for. The extra ingredient of Samper wiliness would surely guarantee it happened, but for the moment I had no idea how to bring it about. What I needed was leverage, and I could think of no suitable lever. I knew these Oscar-winning celebrities. One needed to persuade them that no extant biography did them justice, that everything written about them so far was pitifully inadequate, lightweight and sensational; that the story must be right for posterity’s sake. Step one, therefore, would be to find out if there already was a Pacini biography. Step two was to rubbish it. Step three was to suggest the promising young author Gerald Samper as the ideal person to undertake
the
biography. This proposal would be made with bewitching modesty; the crucial lever would clinch the deal. Step four was to find that lever.

As always when faced with a puzzle I turned to cooking as therapy, flicking through that sadly unpublished compilation of culinary and even erotic wisdom,
The
Boys’
Reformatory
Cookbook
. Budgies in Overcoats? Popular, of course, since children are unused to food that makes them laugh. Unfortunately I didn’t have the ingredients to hand. Tripe & Meringue Pie? This was not an unqualified success when I invented it; afterwards I had learned either to leave all the sugar out of the meringue mix or else to cut it with a little Fernet Branca. If one is to reform boys one needs to begin with their expectations and modify those with a touch of sternness. Tripe & Meringue Pie is quite stem, especially in its Fernet version. At other times, of course, a little cajolery is helpful and one turns to something more seductive like Kidneys in Toffee. This bears no relation to that coarse concoction known as ‘banoffee pie’, as irresistible to popular taste as urban legends are to a journalist. ‘Banoffee pie’ was invented by a Sussex publican in the seventies, I think, and anyway the ‘toffee’ in it is – and I shudder to relate this – condensed milk boiled in the can until it becomes brown and rubbery. In my far more adventurous dish the kidneys provide the protein the boys need after an afternoon spent breaking rocks. Mere bananas and condensed milk never built muscles. And to answer a question from the Mirabelle in Curzon Street, the toffee in my dish is nearer to fudge.

I spent several happy hours emptying my mind of mundane affairs and filling it instead with dishes: dishes sublime, dishes disgusting; classics and near-misses and even (a gastronomic category I have myself invented) non-starters. I would rather experiment and fail than slavishly follow someone else’s recipe and produce someone else’s dish. And there, in that single sentence, you have the Samper philosophy of life. So what about Marta’s cuisine? What about her admirably dire
shonka
and
mavlisi
, that
kasha
dumpling of hers with the gravitational field of a dead star? Don’t those also qualify as essays in culinary imagination? Don’t they
speak eloquently of a cracked but original mind? No, I’m afraid not. Marta, like the food she serves, isn’t cracked but merely foreign. Her food is traditional. That it tastes to you and me like a deliberate assault on our most intimate membranes is incidental. That is simply the way they are in Voynovia, a testament to historical harshness: generations of their peasant bodies being lashed by landowners and their various orifices scarified with red pepper.

The trouble with thinking about food, and especially with thinking about Marta’s food, is that it left me nearly without an appetite. A snack, then. But what? My listless eye fell on the last recipe for the boys’ reformatory and was immediately rekindled:

Lychees on Toast

Ingredients

Lychees
(tinned)
Olive
oil
Peanut
butter
Hard
cheese
Toast
Anchovies
Tabasco
sauce

♦

This was specifically designed to cheer them up after a hard day being reformed: a bedtime snack to tickle their palates and give them energy for whatever rigours lay ahead in the long hours of dormitory darkness. Do you remember, years ago, the slogan an advertising agency came up with to sell some massively calorific slop or other? It involved the concept of ‘night starvation’, a brilliant idea that suggested life-threatening affinities between a suburbanite’s slumber and the months-long hibernation of a bear in its cave. ‘Night starvation’ implied a portly man retiring to bed and waking up eight
hours later with the physique of a famine victim, a mere collection of bones and hanging skin barely able to totter down to breakfast. The underlying message was clear: each moment spent
not
putting something into your mouth is a step nearer starvation. Ah, spin! They were not about to say that each moment spent
not
putting something into your mouth is a step nearer to losing weight. Lychees on Toast was designed to render it unnecessary from the nutritional point of view for the boys to put anything in their mouths until breakfast next morning.

A simpler dish there never was. I planned it with institution cooks in mind in the hope that they, too, might have reformed since my day. The tinned lychees should be drained and their scented syrup put aside, possibly for my Quails in Sponge
bonne
bouche
. The anchovies and peanut butter should be mashed together to a smooth consistency and enlivened with a few drops of Tabasco. Then the lychees should be gently, sympathetically stuffed with the compound and arranged in beguiling patterns on slices of lightly toasted bread that have been sprinkled with finely grated hard cheese or (better) spread sparingly with Gorgonzola. Drizzle olive oil over them and pop them under the grill. If the boys’ reformation is still at an early stage a gram or two of a good proprietary benzodiazepine makes a sensible addition to the lychees’ stuffing.

I had finished preparing several slices of this tempting snack and had just put them under the grill when, with the punctuality of the inevitable, the phone rang. It turned out to be Filippo Pacini, owner of the best haircut in Tuscany, the nicest profile, the most absurd car. I was at once all ears. He said that, quite independently of our ‘fascinating’ meeting at Marta’s house that morning (
‘affascinante
’, eh? Doubters of the Samper charisma please note), his father had been considering a small addition to the film. Towards the end of
Arrazzato
there was apparently a scene where some young members of a hippie commune or something go to town for a night out
and then return to their beach, whereupon the film reaches its climax of dissent and mayhem. I hadn’t the faintest idea what Filippo was talking about, I just liked listening to him saying it. It seemed that the hippies’ night out on the town was supposed to provide an ironic contrast between their comfortable bourgeois roots and the radical discomforts of their beach-squatting Greenery, something I would scarcely have thought needed emphasis. But Piero Pacini had now decided to add a further twist by having them briefly attend some sort of pop concert. The idea of this was to show the brainless seduceability of modern youth. More specifically to the film, it would illustrate the ubiquitous siren song of postmodern capitalism undermining whatever idealism has been left in some young minds already worked on by insidious fascist influences. Crikey. At this moment my lychees burst quietly into flame beneath the grill and I had to dash over and extinguish them in the sink, where they floated on a series of charred rafts. Too sad.

‘And?’ I prompted, returning breathless and apologetic to the phone.

‘And my father wonders whether your friend Brill would consent to have the band make a brief appearance in this scene. Well, to be honest, it was my suggestion that it might be Brill. You sort of put it into my head this morning. We’d been thinking of an Italian group but Alien Pie would be better. Just a guest appearance, you know. Of course they’ll be booked up for months ahead but we thought there would be no harm in asking. We could make do with very few shots just so long as we get a good chunk of their soundtrack to lay underneath. What do you think, Gerry?’

Suddenly flattered to be ‘Gerry’ after all that respectful
‘Lei
’ stuff, I assured him I would put it to my friend Brill and sound him out. We ended the call with mutual expressions of goodwill, mine being more sincere than his, I suspect, but there we are. I was left feeling strangely excited in a kitchen it was hard to see across, thanks to the black fallout of my
supper. In every other respect the lychee moment had passed, so I made myself more toast and spread it thickly with a terrine I’d long kept sealed in the larder and which seemed not to have suffered for it. I well remembered making it. Jack Russells are absolute buggers to bone, notoriously so, but yield a delicate, almost silky pâté that seems to welcome the careworn diner with both paws on the edge of the table, as it were. A scratch meal, but delicious. As I ate I mulled over the implications of Filippo’s call. Might this not be the very lever I had been looking for? Being able to arrange the right band at short notice would surely put me in Pacini’s debt and make it that much more likely he would agree to my becoming his biographer. For the moment I had to pigeonhole the disturbing incidental thought that to judge from the scene Filippo had just been sketching out
Arrazzato
sounded like being a real clunker. Could this be the man who brought us
Mille
Piselli
?
Green communes and politics in the twenty-first century, for pity’s sake? What was he doing? Have faith, I told myself, removing lead shot from my mouth. One never gets them all out.

As for what would be in it for Nanty, that was easy. An appearance in a film by Piero Pacini would afford exactly the right association with high art he needed so badly to foster. I tried to phone him there and then but got only a recording of his voice suggesting in impeccable Califockney: ‘Like, leave yer number an’ that.’