Rancid Pansies (25 page)

Tonight I am once again behind the wheel of a Toyota Ass Vein: a ‘new second-hand’ copy of my original found for me by a minion of my insurance company, probably under a deal I should wish to know nothing about. What I do know is that it is a better bargain than if they had simply given me the cash value of my junked vehicle. I may perhaps now moderate the curses I’ve been requesting little St Bernard to call down on Dottoressa Strangolagalli. Perhaps after all boils, goitres and prolapses were a bit on the harsh side. Incurable rectal itch should do it; and I like to think of her having to squirm through meetings, business lunches and Sunday Mass with those blood-red talons unable to dig in for relief. People will think she’s harbouring widow’s mites or something.

If I gave you three guesses as to where I’m off to this evening I doubt if you would divine correctly, just as until very
recently
I myself would have been aghast at the idea. I am in fact going to dine at the weasel Benedetti’s own home; and what is more, his other guest is to be
il sindaco
himself, the mayor, which will show you the sort of circles Gerald Samper is obliged to move in these days. Not by choice, mind you. These things are about politics, and no doubt both Benedetti and the mayor would privately agree that if it weren’t for politics they themselves would have little enough incentive to fraternise with foreigners out of hours.

In idle moments over the years I have occasionally
wondered
what sort of house an estate agent like Benedetti would choose for himself, much as one wonders what the wife of a professional pornographer would look like. Probably quite ordinary in both cases, I have assumed. Certainly Benedetti’s house is attractive enough and not at all flamboyant. On the
edge of town with a good-sized garden and a splendid view of the mountains, it’s a typical square house in the local style with grey stonework interspersed with two or three horizontal courses of bricks, all beneath a tiled roof. Probably a hundred years old, it is a handsome, solid family house spoiled only (in my view, though not according to local taste) by being
surrounded
by stone walls set with railings and an immense pair of electrically operated wrought-iron entrance gates. Such are de rigueur in these parts; and the old saying about an
Englishman’s
home being his castle, when compared with the
imposing
ironwork and electronic security measures with which Italians surround quite ordinary houses, acquires a certain pathos by being exposed as purely metaphorical.

Unsurprisingly, Benedetti in his leisure hours is as sprucely turned out as when he’s in his office or disguised as an English prep-school master of yesteryear. Tonight he is in a beige pair of moleskin slacks by Carisma that can’t have set him back less than €300. His borrowed Asian plumage looks as though he has coiffed it with hot asphalt, so richly black it gleams.

‘Maestro!’ he greets me with a passable display of warmth. ‘I am honoured that you have stretched your precious time to include a visit to this humble house.’

‘Who could resist an opportunity to deepen a friendship hitherto regrettably confined to office hours?’ I riposte, reclaiming my hand which now smells agreeably aromatic: Lorenzo Villoresi’s ‘Piper Nigrum’ if I’m not mistaken,
revealing
that the weasel has better taste in eau de toilette than I would have given him credit for. I follow him into the
salotto
where there is a large black retriever lying on the floor that I suspect might have been acquired to go with the Range Rover. There is also a middle-aged lady with a kindly, shrewd face whom my host introduces as his wife Bettina in a resigned sort of tone that suggests she might have been acquired to go with the house. This is someone I’ve been looking forward to
meeting
for some years: the unseen person who sends her husband out into the world each morning as dapper as a beetle, his
shirts and handkerchiefs blindingly white and flawlessly ironed, his trousers pressed hard enough to squeeze the dye out of them, his shoes burnished. This polished man must have an equally polished partner, I thought. But Bettina is not at all in the mould I have invented for her.

‘I’ve heard such a lot about you,’ she says as we shake hands. ‘What with all the publicity I had no idea what to expect. I’ve never met a lightning conductor for sanctity before.’

‘And I’ve never been one before. The whole thing’s absurd. However, the good thing about lightning conductors is that whatever current passes through them leaves them quite unchanged.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Bettina says. ‘So I needn’t pretend to believe everything the newspapers are saying?’

With some pleasure I notice this good lady’s informal
outspokenness
is not going down too well with her husband. Benedetti is frowning in a way that betrays his wig’s independence from his scalp.

‘Nonetheless,
cara
, there are undoubtedly mysteries involved –’ he begins pompously but just then there are sounds of arrival outside and he bustles out almost at a run.

‘Have you met our mayor before?’ Bettina asks, her voice conspiratorially dropped.

‘Never. I’m just a foreign writer who until recently lived a long way out of town and spent his time quietly scribbling. What’s his name again? Orazio something?’

‘Giardini. To tell you frankly, I am not of his party and I pray daily for his arrest for the scandal of the cement at our public swimming pool. Remind me to tell you some time,’ adds this admirably indiscreet person hurriedly as male voices approach. I’m fast warming to Bettina, who seems very much my sort of gal.

The old-fashioned English phrase used to be ‘a gentleman of full habit’, but the modern epithet ‘obese’ at least starts off on the right foot when it comes to describing the man Benedetti is
ushering into the room. Had his habit been any fuller he would surely explode, showering us with tripes and trouser buttons. One could with accuracy describe Mayor Giardini as terminally fat, and with assonance as mortally portly. He has hooded eyes that make one think of a corrupt Renaissance
cardinal
. At once I begin to wonder quite how wise it is to be doing deals with a man like this, no matter how indirectly. With a familiar weasel like Benedetti it all seemed a bit of a game but seeing in the abundant flesh exactly where this town’s buck stops is sobering.

Novelists often describe very fat men as having dainty feet and small hands, which presumably just means these appendages appear small by contrast with the bulk they’re attached to. If Mayor Giardini’s feet look quite normally sized, his hands are actually rather large. The same novelists also claim that such men move ‘with surprising lightness and
delicacy
’ – again, one assumes, compared with the lumbering progress one would expect. Mayor Giardini unquestionably lumbers. I vaguely recall that his last election slogan was ‘A Big Man for a Big Job’. Having greeted Bettina he turns to me and envelops my hands with a strangler’s grip. He has the politician’s trick of making it seem as though we are old friends rather than a couple of complete strangers who, left to their own devices, would never have wished to meet.

‘It was a happy day for us when you decided to take up
residence
in this Comune,’ he announces while ensuring that no blood is still circulating in my fingers.

Never let it be said that signor Samper can’t do the
formalities
. ‘It is an honour to meet you, Mayor,’ I lie.

‘Orazio, Orazio,’ he corrects me. ‘We’re all friends here.’

Bettina, who vanished briefly, reappears and announces ‘
A
t
avola!
’ As we move into the dining room I automatically translate the mayor’s name as Horace Gardens and with a shock remember this as a quiet residential road near Kingston, Surrey, where an early boyfriend of mine used to live, lo! some thirty years ago. Thirty! It seems impossible. For a moment
pungent memories flood back and swamp the present so that I can’t think what I’m doing on this film set with its refectory table spread with enough food to stock a small supermarket. How did I get from Horace Gardens to Orazio Giardini? On what inscrutable, unforeseeable road? And is young Terry – well, middle-aged Terry now – at this very moment reduced by a similar social commitment to wondering whatever became of me? No, I guess not. Maybe I ought to track him down and invite him to the first performance of
Rancid Pa
—

– but Benedetti is graciously showing us into our baronial chairs, whose choice is wise if the alternative is the set of antique rosewood chairs ranged around the walls. Mayor Giardini’s voluminous rump would reduce any of them to matchwood. Golly, the Italians do like their dining tables
massive
! This one is typical: a gigantic polished slab of oak a good ten centimetres thick supported on legs the size of small tree trunks. The thing could seat twenty and must weigh half a tonne. It wouldn’t be out of place in a medieval banqueting hall where, according to Hollywood, troublesome knights were wont to ride their horses up and down the tables,
trampling
pewter platters and upsetting the ladies in their wimples. (For all I know this may still pass for table manners in
Southern
California.) But now, as the stout chair beneath the stouter mayor half stifles its well-bred moan of protest, I discover to my surprise and disappointment that only the three of us will be dining. Bettina has done her bit by spreading the table with food and withdraws to leave the menfolk to their important talk. I have encountered this before in Italy. It always seems more than merely old-fashioned and to hark back to a time when Arabs occupied Sicily and the Moslem ladies knew their place.

She has certainly done us proud. There are plates of
salumi
of every kind including blood pudding, a home-cured
prosciutto
from which Benedetti is carving wafer-thin slices to drape over oozing melon, bowls of delicatessen goodies, cheeses on wooden platters and a collection of bottles neatly
ranged at the end of the table like a set of tenpins awaiting someone’s triumphal strike. There is also a huge dish of
golden
panzarotti
so freshly fried I can hear the batter giving little squeaks and gasps as they cool. All very conventional, of course. Not a mouseburger in sight.

‘Gentlemen, you must forgive this scratch meal,’ our host says, heaping our plates with crumpled satiny rags of
prosciutto
. ‘But I thought we could all do with a change from
formality
and have a more down-to-earth evening with true peasant fare. All the meats here come from Bettina’s father,’ he explains to me, ‘who raises, butchers and cures his own
products
himself. You probably know him already. Nicòla the butcher, down by the fountain?’

‘The best in town,’ I say. ‘I’ve patronised him for years but I’d no idea he was Bettina’s father. This prosciutto is quite amazing.’

‘’
na favola
,’ says the mayor indistinctly, the compliment escaping wetly from a mouth stuffed and leaking. ‘Superlative.’

There follows some topical and local chit-chat which I recognise as the hors d’oeuvre to the main meat of the evening that is surely the reason for my invitation. I listen more or less curiously to the small talk of these small-town grandees. The mayor mentions the trouble a professor friend of his is having with an Islamic student at Pisa university. This triggers a
peculiar
and passionate outburst by Benedetti that reminds me of the claim he made to me of having once had priestly leanings. He suddenly puts down his fork and says, ‘It’s all wrong, Orazio, and everybody senses it. We Italians, we
Europeans
don’t want to be dragged back. We don’t
want
any more
Middle
East, thank you very much. It has taken us two thousand years to Europeanise our scripture: to blanch Christ a decent asparagus white and set him in Renaissance landscapes and have snow fall at his birth. We’ve had quite enough of deserts and camels and the sickening cruelties of Arabian tribalism. We’ll keep our bourgeois little Saviour and they can keep their scimitars and stonings and implacable deity baying for blood
and vengeance. But we don’t want them here. I don’t mean the people. I mean their quite alien cultural beliefs.’

‘Well of course,’ the fat mayor says placatingly. ‘I’ve got churchmen in my family who would whole-heartedly agree with you. But as you know, we have Moslems in this town and if they go on breeding like rabbits they’ll soon be asking the Comune to build them a mosque. And what then? Build it, obviously. If those
Testimoni
di Gèova
can have their “
Kingdom
Hall” or whatever the damn thing’s called up there by the cinema on the old Bartoli land, why shouldn’t the Moslems have their mosque? At least they’ll use it, which is more than you can say of our churches and the Catholics in this town. They’re still happily fornicating in bed while Mass is being said.’

Interesting. I had no idea such arguments raged in private in the world of Tuscan town councils. Giardini fixes me with his turtle-lidded eyes and asks me: ‘Well, Mr Samper? Are you a religious man?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. Eros here wasn’t so certain. But then he’s more attuned to mysteries than I am. Maybe it’s the failed priest in you, eh, Rosi?’

Eros
Benedetti? Incredible. Until this moment I’d no idea he even
had
a Christian name – not that Eros is remotely
Christian
. If I’m touched it must be the alcohol. This house – or I’m the proverbial Dutchman – is surely childless. No signs of toys anywhere; no rusting basketball hoop fixed to a tree outside or over the garage door; no indefinable feeling that in distant rooms upstairs small children are asleep or morose teenagers are playing computer games and doing their homework. Eros. The Greek version of Cupid. An old weasel disguised as the god of love in a gleaming black wig, pouring me yet another glass of a wonderful complex Chianti Classico (Castello di Ama’s Bellavista ’99 in case you’re interested, as you certainly should be).