Neither Here Nor There (24 page)

I always end up trying to imagine the person who compiled the list. In this case it was obviously a pair of those imperious, middle-aged, lesbian Englishwomen with stout shoes and Buster Brown hair-cuts you often see at foreign hotels, banging the desk bell and demanding immediate attention. They despise all foreigners, assume that they are being cheated at every step and are forever barking out orders: ‘Take this to the cloakroom’, ‘Come in!’, ‘I want this dress washed (ironed)’, ‘Bring me soap, towels, iced water’, ‘How much, including all taxes?’ The evidence also clearly pointed to a secret drinking problem: ‘Is there a bar in the station?’, ‘Bring a bottle of good local wine’, ‘A glass (a bottle) of beer to take away’, ‘Twenty litres’.

The only phrase book I’ve ever come across that was of even the remotest use was a nineteenth-century volume for doctors, which I found years ago in the library of the county hospital in Des Moines. (I worked there part-time while I was in college and used to go into the library on my dinner break to see if I could find a medical condition that would get me excused from Phys. Ed.) In five languages the book offered such thoughtful expressions as ‘Your boils are septic. You should go to a hospital without delay’ and ‘How long has your penis been distended in this way?’ Knowing that I was about to summer in Europe, I committed several of them to memory, thinking they might come in handy with truculent waiters. At the very least I thought it might be useful, upon finding oneself on a crowded train or in a long queue, to be able to say in a variety of languages, ‘Can you kindly direct me to a leprosy clinic? My skin is beginning to slough.’ But I never found a use for any of them and sadly they are forgotten to me now.

Eventually, with the waiting-room empty and nothing happening, I presented myself at the nearest interrogation cubicle. The young policeman who was taking down details from a woman with a bruised face looked at me irritably for disturbing him twice in two hours. ‘Do you speak Italian?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Then come back tomorrow. There will be an English-speaking policeman here then.’ This rather overlooked the fact that his own English was accomplished.

‘Why didn’t you tell me this two hours ago?’ I enquired in the semi-shrill voice of someone challenging an armed person.

‘Come back tomorrow.’

I checked back into the Hotel Corallo and spent a festive afternoon dealing with the Italian telephone system and trying to get through to the claims office in London. I had two types of traveller’s cheques, Visa and American Express, which meant that I got to do everything twice. I spent the afternoon on telephone lines that sounded as if they were full of water reading out lists of serial numbers:

‘RH259—’

I would be interrupted by a tiny voice shouting at me from a foot locker at the bottom of a very deep lake, ‘Is that R A 2 9 9 ...?’

‘No, it’s
R H 2
five nine—’

‘Can you speak up, please?’

‘IT’S R H TWO FIVE NINE!!’

‘Hello? Are you still there, Mr Byerson? Hello? Hello?’

And so the afternoon went. American Express told me I could get my refund at their Florence office in the morning. Visa wanted to sleep on it.

‘Look, I’m destitute,’ I lied. They told me they would have to wire the details to an associate bank in Florence, or elsewhere in Europe, and I could have the money once the paperwork was sorted out at my end. I already knew from experience how byzantine Italian banks were – you could have a heart attack in an Italian bank and they wouldn’t call an ambulance until you had filled out a Customer Heart Attack Form and had it stamped at at least three windows – so I unhesitatingly told her to give me the name of a bank in Geneva. She did.

In the morning I returned to the Questura and after waiting an hour and a half was taken into a room called the Ufficio Denuncie. I just loved that. The Office of Denunciations! It made me feel like making sweeping charges: ‘I denounce Michael Heseltine’s barber! I denounce the guy who thought Hereford & Worcester would make a nifty name for a county! I denounce every sales assistant at every Dixons I’ve ever been in!’

I was introduced to a young lady in jeans who sat at a desk behind a massive and ancient manual typewriter. She had a kind, searching face and asked me lots and lots of questions – my name and address, where I came from, my passport number, what I did for a living, my ten favourite movies of all time, that sort of thing – and then typed each response with one finger and inordinate slowness, searching the half-acre keyboard for long minutes before tentatively striking a key, as if fearful of receiving an electric shock. After each question she had to loosen the typewriter platen and move the sheet of paper around to get the next answer in the vicinity of the blank space for it. (This was not her strongest skill.) The whole thing took ages. Finally, I was given a carbon copy of the report to use in securing a refund. The top copy, I have no doubt, went straight into a wastebasket.

I walked the couple of miles to the American Express office – I was now out of money – wondering if I would be lectured like a schoolboy who has lost his lunch money. There were seven or eight people, all Americans, in the single queue and it became evident as we chatted together that we had all had our pockets picked by children of roughly the same description, though at different places in the city. And this of course was just the American Express cheques. If you added in all the Visa and other kinds of traveller’s cheques that were taken, and all the cash, then it was obvious that the gypsies must clear at a minimum $25,000-$30,000 every Sunday afternoon. Presumably the cheques are then laundered through friendly exchange bureaux around the country. Why do the police care so little about this racket (unless of course they get a cut)? At all events, American Express replaced my cheques with commendable dispatch, and I was back on the street fifteen minutes later.

Outside a gypsy woman with a three-year-old on her lap asked me for money. ‘I gave already,’ I said, and walked on to the station.

I arrived in Milan in mid-afternoon, expecting great things. It is after all the richest city in Italy, the headquarters of many of the most famous names of Italian commerce: Campari, Benetton, Armani, Alfa-Romeo, the Memphis design group, and the disparate empires of Silvio Berlusconi and Franco Maria Ricci. But this, as I should have realized beforehand, is its problem. Cities that are dedicated to making money, and in Milan they appear to think about little else, seldom have much energy left for charm.

I got a room in an expensive but nondescript hotel across from the monumental white marble central railway station – like something built for Mussolini to give a strutting address to massed crowds – and embarked on a long, hot walk into town along the Via Pisani. This was a broad, modern boulevard, more American than European. It was lined with sleek glass and chrome office buildings, but the central grass strip was scrubby and uncared-for and the few benches where you could rest had syringes scattered beneath them. As I moved further into the city the buildings became older and rather more pleasing, but there was still something lacking. I paused to consult my map in a tiny park on a pleasant residential street near the cathedral square and it was depressingly squalid – grassless and muddy, with broken benches, and pigeons picking among hundreds of cigarette butts and disused tram tickets. I find that hard to excuse in a rich city.

Two blocks on and Milan blossomed. Clustered together were the city’s three glories: La Scala, the Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. I went first to the cathedral – cavernous and Gothic, the third-largest church in the world – begrimed on the outside and covered in scaffolding, and so gloomy within that it took me whole minutes to find the ceiling. It was quite splendid in a murky sort of way and entirely free of tourists, which was a happy novelty after Florence. Here it was just a constant stream of locals popping in to add a candle to the hundreds already burning and say a quick ‘Ave Maria’ before heading home for supper. I liked that. It is such an unusual sight to find a grand church being used for its intended purpose.

Afterwards I crossed the cathedral square to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and spent a happy hour wandering through it, hands behind my back, browsing in the windows and noting with unease the occasional splats from the pigeons that had managed to sneak in and were now leading a rewarding life gliding among the rafters and shitting on the people below. It is an imposing shopping arcade, four storeys high, built in the grandiose style of the 1860s and still probably the most handsome shopping mall in the world, with floors of neatly patterned tiles, a vaulted latticework roof of glass and steel, and a cupola rising 160 feet above a rotunda where the two interior avenues intersect. It has the loftiness and echoing hush, and even the shape, of a cathedral, but with something of the commercial grandness of a nineteenth-century railway station thrown in. Every shopping centre should be like this.

Needing my afternoon infusion of caffeine, I took a table outside one of the three or four rather elegant cafés scattered among the shops. It was one of those typically European places where they have seventy tables and one hopelessly overworked waiter, who dashes around trying to deliver orders, clear tables and take money all at the same time, and who has the cheerful, nothing’s-too-much-trouble attitude that you would expect of someone in such an interesting and remunerative line of work. You don’t get a second chance in these places. I was staring at nothing in particular, chin in hand, idly wondering if Ornella Muti had ever done any mud wrestling, when it filtered through to my consciousness that the waiter was making one of his rare visits to my vicinity and had actually said to me, ‘Prego?’

I looked up. ‘Oh, an espres—’ I said, but he was gone already and I realized that I was never going to get this close to him again unless I married his sister. So with a sigh of resignation I pulled myself up, moved sideways through the tiny gaps between the tables, grimacing apologetically as I caused a succession of unforgiving people to slop their coffee or plunge their noses into their gateaux, and returned unrefreshed to the streets.

I strolled along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, a wide pedestrian shopping street, looking for an alternative café and finding none. For a moment I thought I had died and been sent by mistake to yuppie heaven. Unlike the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where at least there were a couple of bookshops and an art gallery or two, here and on the neighbouring streets there was nothing to sustain the mind or soul, just boutiques selling expensive adornments for the body: shoes, handbags, leather goods, jewellery, designer clothing that hung on the body like sacking and cost a fortune. Things reached a kind of understated intensity on the Via Montenapoleone, an anonymous-looking side street but none the less the most exclusive shopping artery in the country, and lined with ritzy stores where the password was clearly ‘Money’s no object’. Apart from the old shopping arcade, Milan appeared to have no café life at all. There were a few establishments, but they were all hole-in-the-wall stand-up places, where people would order a small coffee, toss it back and return to the street all in five seconds. That wasn’t what I was looking for.

After southern Italy, Milan seemed hardly Italian at all. People walked quickly and purposefully, swinging shopping bags with names like Gucci and Ferragamo on them. They didn’t dawdle over espressos and tuck into mountainous plates of pasta, napkins bibbed into their collars. They didn’t engage in passionate arguments about trivialities. They took meetings. They made deals. They talked into car phones. They drove with restraint, mostly in BMWs and Porsches, and parked neatly. They all looked as if they had just stepped off the covers of
Vogue
or
GQ.
It was like an outpost of southern California in Italy. I don’t know about you, but I find southern California hard enough to take in southern California. This was Italy – I wanted pandemonium and street life, people in sleeveless vests on front stoops, washing hanging across the streets, guys selling things from pushcarts, Ornella Muti and Giancarlo Giannini zipping past on a Vespa. Most of all, I wanted a cup of coffee.

In the morning I went to the Brera Gallery, hidden away on a back street and reached through a courtyard in a scaffolding-covered palazzo. Big things were going on here: plaster dust hung in the air and there was a commotion of hammering and drilling. The gallery seemed to be only half open. Several of the rooms were closed off and even in the open rooms there were lots of rectangles of unfaded wallpaper where pictures had been lent out or sent away for restoration. But what remained was not only sensational but familiar – Mantegna’s foreshortened body of Christ, a Bellini madonna, two Canalettos recently and glowingly restored, and Piero della Francesca’s gorgeously rich but decidedly bizarre ‘Madonna with Christ Child, Angels, Saints and Federico da Montefeltro’ – our old friend the Duke of Urbino again.

I didn’t understand this picture at all. If it was painted after the Duke died and here he was now in heaven, why was Christ a baby again? On the other hand, were we to take it that the Duke had somehow managed to fly through the centuries in order to be present at Christ’s birth? Whatever the meaning, it was a nifty piece of work. One man liked it so much that he had brought his own folding chair and was just sitting there with arms crossed looking at it. The best thing about the Brera was that there was hardly anyone there, just a few locals and no foreign tourists but me. After Florence, it was bliss to be able to see the paintings without having to ask somebody to lift me up.

Afterwards I walked a long way across the city to see Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’ in the refectory beside the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. You pay a load of money at a ticket window and step into a bare, dim hall and there it is, this most famous of frescoes, covering the whole of the far wall. A railing keeps you from approaching any closer than about twenty-five feet, which seems unfair since it is so faint that you could barely see it from five feet and must strain to the utmost to see anything at all from twenty-five feet. It’s like a ghost image. If you hadn’t seen it reproduced a thousand times before, you probably wouldn’t be able to recognize it at all. One end was covered with scaffolding and a great deal of gleaming Dr Who-like restoration equipment. A lone technician was on a platform scratching away. They have been working on the ‘Last Supper’ for years, but I couldn’t see any sign that the thing was actually coming to life.