A Fool's Alphabet

  When he left England to die in 1819 Keats hadn’t the strength to write. He did revise a poem, however, as he lay in his bunk on the boat bound for the south. It was a sonnet beginning ‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art’. The poem, the last he completed, doesn’t dwell on the sadness of exile, although it does take a detached view of the world, seeing it from above, from a star’s point of view.

  What Keats was concerned with at that point was not a place but a person. He would like to be as steadfast as the bright star, he said, but not alone, not a ‘sleepless Eremite’. No; while sharing that fixity with the star, he wanted to be with another – to lie with his head pillowed for ever on his ‘fair love’s ripening breast’. The star may watch above as the waters of the earth wash the shores of the continents: the poet must be with his love – ‘and so live ever – or else swoon to death’.

  In the faces of Italian people Pietro saw the features of his mother. She had seemed exotic and unique to him as a child with her black hair and slightly accented English. He didn’t like seeing all these people who were recognisably of the same kind; they seemed to threaten her uniqueness. Many had similar colouring, reminiscent gestures, or the same agile movement and sudden laughter. Yet he found also in this country, from Milan with its fashion-conscious women to the rough surliness of the south, that he was on a quest. If one woman should turn her face and prove to be Francesca, or her double, he might forgive her the trickery and the anguish it would cause him because it would show that in some way she was alive, or that she had lived. The beauty of Italian women was held by experts – Italian men in other words – to be a recent phenomenon. After the war the men had eyes only for the young American women who arrived by the boatload to study or sightsee in Perugia, Rome and Florence. Then suddenly, in the late 1950s, a spectacular change came over Italian women: their legs grew longer, their brows lost the last trace of autochthonous heaviness; they bloomed and flourished and became the most beautiful women in the world. So the story went.

  Pietro’s affection for Italy had not wavered since his first discovery of its actual position on the map. He succeeded in continuing to see it in double vision: the way it was and the way he had pictured it from his mother’s description to him as a child. He liked the affability and flaring honesty of the people; and he liked the way the Moto Guzzis roared round the walled towns of Tuscany, the way hot modern engineering could coexist with the cool civilisations of Rome and the Renaissance. He could converse with the people who, unlike the French, seemed anxious to make comprehension as easy as possible. He had spoken Italian for too long still to be charmed by quixotically musical words like ragazza, but was still pleasantly surprised to find that the bat that kept him awake in an Umbrian farmhouse one night was a pipistrello. When he notified the police of his three-month visit, as the law obliged him, he saw the sloth and dishonesty of the public institutions. It took him three days with visits to four different departments to acquire the single document. He was obliged to produce eight passport photographs, the officer denying the existence of the first four. He was charged twice the regulation sum but was glad to end the procedure at any price.

  In Keats’s death room Pietro was trapped by his ignorance of the poet and thus of what he wanted to photograph. The whitewashed house in Hampstead had been easy enough, but this was different. There was something threatening in the air, the feeling generated by a man whose work had been dedicated to making time stand still at a particular moment and had succeeded in an unforeseen way, by dying.

  The picture he eventually took could have been of any young Englishman’s lodgings in a hot foreign capital, circa 1820. Perhaps because of this ordinariness, it was considered successful.

  SORRENTO

  ITALY 1958

  FRANCESCA’S HAND LAY flat on the table and the sun illuminated the lateral folds on the knuckles, the white half-moons at the base of the nails, even the minute diamond webs that make up the surface of the skin. Pietro reached out his hand to hers and twisted the gold ring on her finger. She smiled at him and laid her right hand on top of his.

  The tablecloth was white linen. Between them was a glass jar of olive oil and one of vinegar in a silver holder with a curlicued grip. All of the table was in the light, a bright, even sunshine that washed over the red tiled floor and lay on the idle surface of the Mediterranean sea below them.

  ‘Are you too hot?’ said Francesca.

  Pietro shook his head.

  ‘What do you want to eat? Look, you can have spaghetti or soup and they’ve got fish and chicken and all sorts of things.’

  ‘Macaroni cheese.’

  ‘I don’t think they have that. But you could have risotto.’

  Pietro took his hand from his mother’s to look at the scrolled print on the menu. It opened up like a book. There were two or three pages, and then a list of wines. It was hard to read some of the longer words; they hadn’t featured in his Italian conversations with Francesca.

  There was an old couple sitting by the cash desk, well inside the restaurant, in the shade. No one else was there. Perhaps it was still a little early, but Pietro had had that pallor only food could take away. The waiter, a tall, grey-haired man of resolute dignity, stood beside the table.

  ‘Now what do you think?’ said Francesca. ‘The risotto? Then maybe chicken? You like chicken, don’t you?’

  Pietro nodded and smiled, an uncertain lifting of half his mouth, which, as Francesca described the roast chicken and how good it would taste, developed into a full and trusting illumination of his face. She asked the waiter to tell him what the food would be like.

  He explained how they would make the risotto specially. He transferred the poised pen from his left hand to the right, where he clasped it against his pad. With his other hand he was then free to imitate the ladling in of the stock and to make his fingers explode like a star at the moment he mimed the first taste of the risotto. Pietro watched with puzzled eyes.

  ‘And what would you like with the chicken?’ the waiter asked. ‘You like some salad?’

  Pietro shook his head from side to side.

  Francesca said, ‘I think some potatoes. Some fried potatoes. Can you do that? And maybe some peas?’

  Francesca ordered for herself and the waiter swept the menus away from them.

  Pietro said, ‘When you were young did you come to a place like this every day for lunch?’

  ‘Oh no. We used to take something to school. Bread and ham, usually. On Sundays we often used to go out to a restaurant. Nonno would take all the family.’

  ‘Every Sunday?’

  ‘Not every Sunday, but very often.’

  ‘And what did you have then?’

  ‘Oh, lots of things. We often had fish. And I used to like veal. That was delicious. There was one restaurant we would go to where they made osso bucco, which is a bone of veal, which has jelly in the middle.’

  ‘Jelly! That sounds horrible.’

  ‘Not that kind of jelly. It’s the jelly from the bone itself. It was a special treat.’

  Pietro put his hand out to Francesca again and began to twist the ring. ‘Mummy,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What was it like being in Italy?’

  Francesca smiled. ‘I don’t know where to begin. It was lovely. I didn’t think of it as anything special, it was just where we lived.’

  The waiter brought some bean soup for Francesca and the risotto for Pietro. He put down a white bowl first, then took the lid from a steaming dish. There was a daunting mound of rice, which was disappointingly uniform in colour. He transferred some into Pietro’s bowl, and webs of cheese clung to the spoon as he raised it once more to the dish.

  Francesca poured some white wine from a small jug into Pietro’s glass, then filled it with water. Another two tables in the restaurant were now taken, but it was still peaceful in their corner, overlooking the sea.

  ‘What did you think of Daddy when you first met him?’

&nbs
p; Francesca laughed. ‘All these questions, mister. I thought he was a kind man. And he was very brave.’

  ‘Because he’d been fighting in the war?’

  ‘That’s right. And he’d been hurt, but he didn’t say anything about it.’

  ‘And did you like him straight away?’

  ‘I think so, yes. I was only nineteen. My aunt asked me to take up a tray of coffee to the English soldier. I was a bit frightened. I thought he might be like an animal that’s been hurt when it’s caught in a trap. But he was so gentle. He didn’t want me to go, he wanted me to stay and teach him Italian.’

  ‘You weren’t frightened any more?’

  ‘Not after that, no.’

  ‘If you hadn’t met Daddy would you have married an Italian man?’

  ‘I suppose so. I don’t know. Now leave some room for the chicken, won’t you?’

  Pietro nodded and put down his spoon. He refused to take extra cushions on his chair, so his head was always close to the table. He looked up at his mother’s face, which had its customary expression of smiling solicitude. Her black hair was pulled back a little from her face, so he could see the corner of her jaw, beneath her white ear.

  The waiter brought the chicken, ready served on to a plate. The peas came threaded with onion and had pieces of bacon at intervals among the green. Francesca had a grilled mullet, which let off a burst of vapour as she folded the white flesh back off the bone. Pietro began to saw at the chicken.

  ‘Is that nice?’ she said. ‘Have some peas with it if it’s too dry.’

  He watched as Francesca took the vinegar bottle and plugged the end with her thumb so that only a few drops escaped when she shook it over her salad. Then she took the oil and poured three or four concentric circles gently over the leaves. She looked up in the act of rubbing salt and pepper between her fingers and saw his eyes on her. She laughed. ‘This is how you make a salad dressing here.’

  Pietro drank from the wine and water in his glass and looked out over the terrace and out to the sea beyond.

  He began to dream of how he would one day come back to live here. He would be rich, he would probably be famous too, though it wouldn’t matter how or what for. He would be married himself by then and his wife would be Italian. He would have a red sports car, an Alfa Romeo, and he would let his parents come and live here too.

  Francesca watched him as he stared out of the window, the chicken now left abandoned. She rested her chin on her hand so that her mouth was concealed as she smiled indulgently at the boy. Anyone watching would therefore have seen only the subsequent expression of her eyes, which was one of fear, as though she doubted her ability to protect him.

  The tall waiter took away their plates, scraping the backbone of Francesca’s mullet on to the remains of Pietro’s chicken.

  ‘What would you like now?’ he asked. He offered them ice cream or fruit or tiramisu.

  While he was fetching some chocolate ice cream, Pietro said, ‘When are we going back to Nonno and Nonna’s?’

  ‘Not for three days. They have some people coming to see them so we’re going to spend the time here, just the two of us.’

  ‘And what are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to go swimming and play on the beach. We’re going to go out in a boat and sail. Maybe we’ll do some fishing. And then we’ll take a bus somewhere. And you can come and look in the shops with me. And if you’re very good you can stay up late enough to have dinner too. Would you like that?’

  ‘Oh yes. And are we going to stay with someone here?’

  ‘No. We’ll be in a little hotel, something called a pensione. It’s a nice one which Nonna’s friend recommended.’

  The waiter reappeared and laid down a glass bowl with two globes of ice cream in front of Pietro. It had a dry, dark taste which took a spoonful or two to get used to. Francesca drank coffee from a tiny white cup.

  The room was nearly full. There was a table of young girls with bright voices who called out to a waiter with a moustache, telling him to hurry along with their food. There were some elderly people, the men in suits, the women in dark floral dresses as though they were all afraid of the sunlight. And there were more tourists, a table of English and some Americans.

  A long-established resort, Sorrento had not suffered too badly in the aftermath of war. The hotels had begun to fill again, though the town had not yet had its first experiences of large-scale tourism from the United States and northern Europe.

  The waiter attending the table of six Americans ran through a brief but obvious sequence of emotions. He began by being sympathetic and interested in their enquiries. They wanted to know what spaghetti alle vongole consisted of, and he was happy to explain. Then, as they discussed among themselves what they would like, his interest turned to boredom. When they began to describe how they wanted to drink not wine, but large cups of coffee with milk, his face showed only contempt.

  They looked around them when he had gone back to the kitchen. They seemed irritated by the town.

  One woman said, ‘I feel like we’re living in a place that’s not the real world.’ She did not sound enchanted. She went on, ‘It ought to be more like the real world.’

  Pietro, who had overheard, said, ‘What does she mean, it’s not the real world?’

  ‘She means it’s not like the place where she lives,’ said Francesca.

  ‘But it’s real though, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s real,’ said Francesca. ‘Listen, when we’ve finished we’ll go and find our pensione and we’ll leave the suitcase. Then you can have a little sleep if you like. Then you’ll be able to stay up for dinner tonight. Or if you’re not sleepy we can go to the beach.’

  The tall waiter brought them a bill. He laid his hand on Pietro’s shoulder as Francesca sorted through a pile of banknotes.

  ‘You liked it?’ said the waiter. ‘It was good. The chicken and the risotto. It was like I said?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Pietro. The waiter ruffled his hair and smiled at Francesca as he gestured the way to the door.

  They were struck by the heat outside. Francesca put down the suitcase and pulled an address from her handbag. She went into a shop to ask the way, leaving Pietro to guard the bags. She emerged with a stick of chocolate which she gave him. ‘All right, my little boy, it’s up this way. It’s not far.’ She hoisted her bag over her shoulder and picked up the case. She held out her other hand to Pietro, who took hold of it.

  They walked up a narrow street over large, pocked paving stones, away from the sea. Francesca asked an old man the way to their pensione. He told them to turn right in the Piazza Lauro.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s so steep,’ said Francesca, as Pietro dragged his feet.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘Piazza Lauro.’

  As they continued uphill they passed a magnificent sign in which the iron was wrought like arthritic fingers to read ‘Pasticceria’ and hammered into a peeling pink wall on the corner of a street. Under their feet the pavements were damp and cool where the cleaning lorry had passed.

  TERMINAL 5

  1988

  THERE WAS A stagy delay when he pressed the plastic switch in the armrest before the overhead light came on. It had been some time since he had flown and he had forgotten the details of the half-world he had entered. On the back of the seat in front was a hard plastic tray, secured with a rotating clip. The pocket beneath it had a concertinaed elastic top; inside were vinyl-covered safety instructions and an inflight magazine with an article called ‘The Magic of Malaya’ by Robert Morley. The engine noise began to mount as the fuel tankers pulled away. The aircraft lurched briefly backwards as the wheels were freed. Reaching up, he twisted the ventilator nozzle and pointed it at his face. Some chemical researchers claim that the sweat of schizophrenic patients is distinguished by the fact that it contains trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid, and that this substance, unscientifically described, is the smell of madness. By the same token, the smell of reconditioned air and
jet fuel that filled the cabin from the ventilator was for him and a few others as they strapped themselves in, the distillation of fear.

  From that moment on he had lost any connection with the wider, autonomous world and had become an item in transit. The process began in the terminal with the checking-in of the bag with all the personal connections it contained: clothes given as presents at various times that would fit no one else, a framed photograph, a sponge bag with prescribed ointments and pills. Feeling the marble floor of the building beneath his shoes, he walked over to the gate marked Departures and showed his ticket. He had half an hour before the flight was called, but once through the passport control he was already stateless. The only way he could re-establish his identity then was by surrendering to the prescribed journey, and emerging, some hours later, a foreigner.

  He drank beer beneath an indoor parasol and looked at the people who worked in this place that was nowhere. At first he felt sorry for them, as he might have felt for people who lived in towns that had become famous to the world for some tragedy, like Aberfan, or Chernobyl. He had to admit, however, that the fat Spanish-looking barman and the cleaner with her turbaned hair and red lips seemed quite happy in their work. Day after day they caught the bus or train from a real street, a proper house, to come and work here. For them it was a particular location, it was work, the office. Presumably this suspended world of clattering departure boards and scarf shops was not an unmapped plain of hell but a place they knew, whose corridors and back entrances they could refind, and pass, and name.

  Business, always business, as Paul Coleman had sighed with fake ennui to hide his excitement when they had met three years earlier. On his own now, without Coleman, Pietro echoed the words with genuine remorse.