The Vengeance of Rome (10 page)

In the doorway an old man appeared. His back was curved with scoliosis but his huge head beamed up at us, his vast mouth displaying a few brownish teeth. His amiable, short-sighted eyes were bloodshot mahogany, his jowls were covered in white stubble. Dressed in a coarse, brown monk's robe, he appeared to be a priest. His resemblance to Fiorello was striking. If he lived long enough my friend would one day exactly resemble his sire.

Hugging the old man tightly, Fiorello introduced us to his father. Servants appeared, greeting us all with the same nods and grins before carrying our luggage into the house. With warm thanks and ample tips, da Bazzanno dismissed our guard of honour, informed the deputy mayor that he would call at the town hall as soon as he was settled, shook hands and closed the door on the street.

The
palazzo
was like the backstage of a theatre. I half expected to find dressing rooms leading off the main passages of what was, in fact, a typical old Venetian house, built around an interior courtyard completely inaccessible and invisible from outside.

The high-ceilinged passages were lit by candles and oil lamps. They threw long shadows upon walls, staircases and old black beams. Our shadows continued to dance and shudder as we followed the two Bazzannos, deep in happy conversation, through a house smelling strongly of the canals outside and for which, over his shoulder, Fiorello periodically apologised. His whole attention was focused on his father. I have rarely known two male relatives take such tremendous joy in each other's company. I experienced a pang of loss for my own father, whose foolish radicalism had separated us. I assumed them to have been apart for months, but a fondly indulgent Margherita Sarfatti told me it had been only a couple of weeks since da Bazzanno had departed. ‘It is a love affair that has been going on since he was born.' She shrugged and offered me a droll wink. ‘How can I compete?'

Not by nature a discourteous soul, da Bazzanno remembered himself soon enough to tell us how he had wanted the house to be ready for guests. ‘But we have almost a hundred and fifty years of neglect to cope with. They did nothing. They didn't spend a penny on the place.'

‘A Jewish family,' said old da Bazzanno by way of explanation. He shrugged. ‘Very pleasant people. Nothing wrong with them. But you know how they hate to part with cash.'

‘We're having electricity, gas, water—everything piped in. And new sewers. And walls have to be repointed. Plastering …' Fiorello returned his attention to his father.

Old da Bazzanno added: ‘They were not real Jews. They went to the same church as my aunt. Everyone liked them. They were generous to the church, she said. But not to themselves. Or the house.' His shrug was a distorted echo of his son's.

‘What happened to them?' I asked Margherita, as we continued to penetrate the warren of tiny passages and rooms. She shook her head. She had heard something, she said, but she wasn't sure if it was true. She had an idea they had moved to Austria where they had a son. She sauntered ahead of us to inspect a faded tapestry.

‘They weren't Jews at all, then,' interposed Maddy Butter almost aggressively. ‘Were they? I mean, they were Christians.'

‘Once a Jew always a Jew,' I told her kindly. ‘In America you have not had quite our experience of the Children of Abraham.'

I would remember those words some years later and only then understand their full significance. At that time I did not pursue the subject as Margherita had rejoined us with a murmured apology and an enthusiastic diversion on the subject of fourteenth-century Norman tapestry.

Eventually the passages opened out on to a gallery. Here the smell of mould was strongest. We were on the first floor, looking down into a large hall where a table was being laid and a fire made. Clearly the servants had not known when da Bazzanno
fils
would return. We crossed the gallery into another wide corridor. We discovered our bedrooms, our bags already there.

Again I felt I had wandered into some Hollywood historical extravaganza. The rooms had huge four-poster beds. Their iron-hard oak was carved with dark animals and plants tinted with faded gold leafing. The heavy hangings were filthy with age. The furniture was preserved by candle wax and cooking fats, the grease and grime of centuries. Mysterious pictures, so blackened it was impossible to tell the subject, clung to the walls. A small fire had managed to take hold in my grate, and fat copper lamps guttered in iron sticks mottled with oil and verdigris. My evening clothes had been unpacked and laid out for me. My few other clothes were put away in a massive armoire. The rest of my possessions—my films and my plans—had not been touched, but I leafed through my rather dog-eared blueprints and notes to make sure no enterprising trainee spy had removed anything. I also checked that my cache of cocaine was in order. Here I made a happy discovery. With a rush of gratitude I found my cousin Shura, as a parting gift, had
left me with ten large packets, sealed neatly in waxed paper like grocer's sugar, of the very finest
sneg
. A year's supply, even if used with irresponsible abandon! To celebrate I called Signora Sarfatti and Maddy Butter to my room, and we indulged a small line or two before dinner, chopped out by Margherita Sarfatti under the gaze of an admiring Miss Butter. She had only with our acquaintance become an enthusiast for the life-enhancing powder. Da Bazzanno had, at least for the moment, renounced cocaine. I had every sympathy for him. From time to time a little fasting is good for the soul as well as the blood. But he did not like to be reminded of what he had given up, so Signora Sarfatti was delighted to join us in this innocent secret.

Later, we enjoyed a simple meal of tripe soup and fried shellfish while da Bazzanno the Younger, in graphic gestures and with wild laughter, retailed the problems they had had with the flying boat. Da Bazzanno the Elder, devoting himself to his dinner in the manner of the aged, occasionally interjected a polite exclamation. I was again reminded of two trick horses from the old
Funabile
enjoying a gossipy manger of hay together. At one moment they might break into the mock-philosophical patter for which Ah-Ee and Ee-Ah were famous when I was a boy in Kiev. The candle flames graced the faces of our female companions with new angles and secrets. The servants all had that prematurely wizened appearance of a people with blood so ancient, so little diluted, that they could be representatives of a different and earlier race altogether.

The Venetians, Signora Sarfatti, a native of the city, would tell me, not only looked different and spoke differently, they also thought differently. They had, she said, antique minds, full of sophistications and experience unknown to the rest of us, full of strange, uncommon assumptions about matters of health, morality, politics and even literature.

‘What they value is not always what the rest of us value,' she said. ‘The Venetians built their first houses on stilts above the swampy delta islets which in those days were already inhabited by a race whose skills and appearance were not wholly human. The two species interbred. Some believe the Venetians are the only survivors of Atlantis. Their inhuman ancestors escaped the deluge which drowned that extraordinarily advanced civilisation. Venice is full of great cathedrals and churches, yet she is still as profoundly pagan as she is practical. Venice will survive any disaster and adapt herself to any changing conditions. She is a city whose principal trade is in illusion. For her, deception really is an art! And a saleable art, at that!'

Fiorello was familiar with her arguments. He dismissed them with good humour. ‘My darling Margherita, the only art Venetians have learned is the
art of good living. Everything else is imported. They will trade with anyone. I offer you the real secret of their enduring supremacy. They honestly believe that making money is a moral pursuit, that gold has an ethical and spiritual value, that a man without profit is a man without honour. These aren't the survivors of Atlantis, dear friends, but of Ur! They are the ancestors of all usurers and merchants. And good luck to them.' He signed for her glass to be replenished.

‘Fiorello,' she crooned, ‘you tolerate everything and everyone.' Her brunette waves tumbled fetchingly across her face.

‘That's our great Italian virtue, my dear.'

‘The disease for which Fascism is the remedy.' She was sardonic. Her lips pretended sternness she could not feel towards her lover. ‘At least, that's what I hear you saying in public.'

‘One has to employ stronger, simpler language in public than one favours in private, Margherita. Fascism balances and moderates our natural tolerance. It binds all our qualities of manliness and femininity together in one strong bundle.' I heard an equally obvious note of self-mockery in his voice when he made such pronouncements.

‘There does not,' observed Signora Sarfatti drily, ‘appear to be a very strong element of femininity bound into our Duce's bundle of faggots.'

‘You'd be surprised.' That was all da Bazzanno would give us.

‘These things surely are all a matter of interpretation.' Miss Butter's Italian was not as good as her French but it was better than mine. We had agreed to use French as our common tongue. ‘What, after all, do the words “masculine” and “feminine” mean?'

Such abstractions were too much for us, so we changed to a different subject. We had Miss Butter inform us of her native Texas, its cowboys and wild Kiowa. She had little direct experience of either, she said, having been educated in Atlanta and raised in Galveston, on the coast. ‘Which has rather more to do with commerce and shipping.'

I thought it inappropriate to mention my old political connections in Houston. Miss Butter was at a naive stage in her own political development, full of generalised sentimentality towards lame ducks. Sometimes in private I laughed at her, telling her she could not nurse the whole world's walking wounded. But I had no wish to revive arguments on subjects which still aroused my own passions. I wanted to put all my conflicts behind me and begin my career where the Bolshevists had cut it off some ten years earlier.

I reminded myself that I was not a politician but a scientist. Not an actor, but an inventor. In future my contribution to the human race would be
thoroughly practical. I would no longer talk of ‘lifting the masses'—I would lift them through my deeds, by example. I understood where my own idealism belonged. I think Miss Butter recognised this. Indeed, it was these qualities in me rather than my political opinions which she found attractive. Aside from my admiration of Mussolini, my fear that civil war must soon break out in France and Germany, a sense of the general causes of our European malaise and a notion of who the chief villains were, I expressed few opinions. What my friends wanted to hear from me was not what they already knew. They wanted my vision of tomorrow where flying cities and vast engineering works brought peace and prosperity to all. I described my notion of a huge airliner which was entirely comprised of wing—a massive flying wing, some thousand yards wide! My steam-car, I told Fiorello, on his enquiring, was now a reality in California. My light aircraft were flying in the air force of Marrakech's Caïd. In France, at a secret hangar near St-Denis, my airship strained to be airborne but was grounded by the squabbling greed of her investors. I had built flying infantry for the Turks and designed a secret weapon for Petlyura in Ukraine. Other ideas of mine, such as the autogyro and ocean-based aeroplane staging platforms, were realities. My intention was never to get rich from these ideas. My first goal was to ease the human burden. Any profit I made was incidental. Again and again Fiorello and Margherita assured me that I was just the type Mussolini wished to recruit for his great army of scholars, scientists, soldiers and engineers. His willingness to give such men as myself a chance was what made him so great.

My earlier sense of urgency, which had enabled me to sustain myself in Morocco and given me a persuasive motive for returning to Europe, had been replaced by a quieter and, I believe, stronger emotion. I wished to take stock of myself as well as the country before I presented myself to Il Duce. What was more, I had fallen in love a little with the delicious Miss Butter. Soon I would be infatuated, head over heels, with the City of St Mark!

Together Miss Butter and I visited Venice's museums and magnificent public buildings, gasping at her astonishing wonders and riches which we came upon often unexpectedly when rounding a corner of an alley and finding, for instance, the white marble church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. We entered her relatively austere portals to discover a wealth of gold, a feast of murals and pictures and a towering altar which seemed to draw you directly up to heaven. Every square had a character of its own, every bridge opened on to a picture, every garden displayed the orderly beauty of centuries of cultivation, nurtured and shaped to gladden the eye and the heart.

Da Bazzanno had been right. In the daylight, with her bustling business
life, her babble of voices, her washing lines and murmuring touts, Venice was nothing but reality. Along the Grand Canal, where building after building spoke of a magnificent history, where Baroque and Gothic and Romanesque, Moorish and Byzantine styles stood shoulder to shoulder against any easy definition, there was a domestic ordinariness to the city. People came and went on a thousand different missions, crossing the bridges, taking the gondolas as others might take buses and taxis, striking bargains, chatting, quarrelling. Few bothered to sit in the little boats which plied constantly between the quays. To stand marked you as a Venetian. In my bones, I knew how at night these people transformed themselves into creatures resembling their inhuman ancestors. These same buildings and canals would be touched by Titania's wand to become scenes from fairyland where sorcery and magic were concrete realities.

Sometimes I felt I crossed from one version of our world into another. I was discovering myself at the nativity of a modern Renaissance. I was privileged to live in the first years of a Golden Age. Then something went wrong. I could not in those days have predicted how the envious, venal and most banal forces of our century would force the world into a prolonged nightmare, a nightmare from which there now seems no chance of awakening. Perhaps Venice was actually a gateway from one potential reality to another? Perhaps unconsciously I stepped through that gateway and became a prisoner, longing for the just, safe and orderly world I had lost? But in those early weeks I had no such gloomy ideas. My infatuation with Miss Butter and with Venice remains among my happiest memories.