A Fool's Alphabet (11 page)

He had been doing business in the south and had been driving back to catch the ferry at Ostend when he decided
to pull off the motorway. Apparently he had fallen in with Wilfred in some bar. So they'd drunk a lot, and Wilfred had introduced him to Belgian beer. There's some stuff they pour in a glass bowl which is held up by a wooden stand. You have to grasp the wooden bit to drink it. It tastes like beer, but it's as strong as wine.

So the usual thing had happened. They'd drunk a lot of these, and then they'd met these two girls and Wilfred asked them back and so on. He told me all this in a very straightforward way. Then he asked me a lot about what I did, and about my family. He seemed fascinated that I spoke such good English. I explained all about the country and how people in the south spoke French and so on and he was very interested in all that.

‘Do you mean to say,' he said, ‘that people in the same country have different names for the same places?'

I said, ‘Yes, that's right.'

He seemed amazed, and I suppose it must seem peculiar to an outsider. It's something we were brought up with, though even so I suppose we are a bit sensitive about it. I explained how every political party had a Flemish-speaking and a French-speaking wing, how the whole place was split in two in every way, except Brussels which was more like an island. I said that when we were at school our teacher had told us that in Yugoslavia they were even worse off. Half of them wrote in Greek letters because they followed the Greek Orthodox Church and half of them wrote like us. So it wasn't just different names but different letters.

He asked about my education, and when I told him he said something like, ‘Belgian schoolgirls. Belgian schoolgirls on a bridge. My grandfather would have liked that.' I hadn't a clue what he meant.

I wanted to know about him. He told me all the jobs he'd had. Some of them were very strange. In America he'd worked as a garage mechanic and then he'd spent one summer on a chicken farm, catching them by their legs for vaccination. In Italy he said he'd worked a ski lift. He spent a whole winter
there. But then he'd discovered photography. He explained to me how you develop and print pictures; he sounded quite entranced by it. All the time he was telling me these stories I was wondering why he'd never really settled on one thing. He told me he was settled now, that he'd got a little company in London and this was what he was going to do. But I looked at him then, and there was something wild in him, it seemed to me. I don't know what it was – something that made him restless, that wouldn't let him be. I wanted it to be all right for him. I felt he could still be caught just in time, but this was the last chance. So I held his hand across the table. He was moved by this, and I couldn't believe he could be so soft after all the things he'd been telling me.

I let him kiss me that night. I let him kiss me as much as he wanted. He had a beautiful soft mouth. He stayed for days and days in Ghent, and I never let him do more than kiss me. But I think I knew from that first evening we spent together that I wanted to marry him.

PIETRO GAZED AT
his twenty-five-year-old face in the mirror of his small wood-lined room in the mountains. It was still the same wire-brush hair and his blue eyes looking rather sunk today, little lines of black beneath them. He had not shaved for three days and there was a spiky shadow on his upper lip and an irritation beneath his chin. His face was tanned a reddish, peasant brown, but the skin was tight back against the skull, and he was thin.

He pulled the cover over the bed and opened the window. The blast of Dolomite air tasted good. It was like the best detoxifying agent ever invented. He filled his sinuses with the rarefied icy gas and felt a shiver of health, despite himself. The fighter pilots training for the Mercury space programme used to cure their hangovers with draughts of oxygen in the morning as they stumbled to the plane. The trouble with the mountain air was that it was so effective Pietro was tempted to use it as a cure every day. He drank too much. After a day in the mountains he needed to warm himself though, and the people he had fallen in with – local men who worked with their hands – had big thirsts in the evening. Drinking as much as they did was the price he had to pay for their company.

He dressed and made himself some coffee. He always felt good in the mountains. People said one resort was where all the smart people went, another was only for barbarians, but in Pietro's experience this wasn't true. There were extreme examples, certainly. In Gstaad, for instance, no one seemed
to ski at all – perhaps because there was hardly any skiing to be done. He had stopped there in his car and seemed to be the only person who looked dressed for sport. People in fur coats with leather skin and vacant eyes stared at him curiously. Then again, he had been once to an Italian resort derided for being full of British trippers – the Blackpool of the slopes, they called it. If you put yourself in the Andy Capp bar at midnight then it was certainly true that you could tell you were not in Gstaad. But apart from these extremes, most mountain villages had more in common than they had apart. In all the resorts he had visited Pietro found he felt the same. His body felt clean and alert. His digestion changed on the day he arrived so that his saliva tasted different and he required different foods – dried ham, beef and cheese. Was it the drinking water that made this fundamental change, or was it the air?

He worked on a ski lift halfway up the mountain. It was a job that was in the gift of the German-speaking South Tyrolean businessman who ran the village. A vicious cartel was operated by a family whose roots in the village long pre-dated the rise of Italian nationalism and who had never therefore bothered to learn more than a few words of the language. Their loyalty was first to the Tyrol and second to Austria. This was another way places could be deceptive, Pietro thought. On the map it said the village was in Italy, but it had about as much in common with Milan as it had with Okayama, Japan, or with Green Bay, Wisconsin.

After three months working as a waiter in a big hotel he had fallen in one night in a bar with a man called Enrico, a muscular, battered forty-year-old with fingers like salamis. Enrico was the Italian face of the German-speaking cartel; he was in charge of the main cable car from the village and the subsidiary lifts on the slope above. He talked to Pietro about Italy and Austria and he seemed to like the stories Pietro told about England. Pietro spoke a slightly accented and incomplete Italian; but then so did Enrico. He was impressed by Pietro's knowledge of the mountain, which he
had gained by skiing every day for three months when he could escape from his waiter's duties. Now, towards the end of the season, Enrico had offered him a job looking after a sunless chair lift in a remote angle of the mountains. Pietro accepted at once. When he discovered how much the job paid he arranged to do some shifts as a barman at the hotel in the evenings as well.

He took the cable car up as soon as it opened and reached his workplace by a number of different drag lifts. The skiing he did between them was all he managed until the end of the day when he was required to ski down slowly, making sure the pistes were empty. He had a radio for speaking to Enrico, or someone in the office back in the village, and for contacting the men with the bloodwagon.

Once installed in his wooden cabin, he waited for the first skiers to arrive. His lift was not much used; it was a link into a system of three runs which were steep and often icy. He had a transistor radio in the cabin and a thermos of coffee. When skiers approached he slowed the mechanism of the lift. If he felt well disposed he held the seat so it wouldn't smack them too hard behind the knees. He looked at their passes and nodded them through. He hardly ever spoke, even when people said something friendly to him. He felt alone in the mountain, he felt close to the rock and earth beneath the snow. He wanted very much to feel part of it, to feel something solid beneath his feet. There had been times in the last year when he had doubted the existence of any solid earth at all.

The chairs gave soft, metallic bumps as the wheel at the end of the cable span them round and pointed them once more up the mountain. Apart from that, it was quiet. When Pietro felt the silence of the mountain coming on, he turned off the squawking transistor and tried to feel the massive peace of the world under his feet. The air was alive in the sunlight with tiny particles of ice. I am a poor boy, he thought, a wretched, ragged man with no significance. Let me find some security, some sense of what I am from these mountains and the tranquillity around me.

At midday one of the other lift operators brought him a loaf of bread with salami and a small bottle of local spirit. Pietro thanked him and ate hungrily in the greasy atmosphere of the cabin where the oil fire smoked and spluttered. People came and went in their brightly coloured clothes, laughing to one another, and Pietro drained the last of his drink in silence. He went out again into the air and nodded to the next skier. He felt good again; for a moment he felt fine.

When he had first gone skiing, eight years earlier in the small French resort of les Houches, the job of ski-lift attendant was not one he envisaged doing. The men who did it looked red-faced and inbred; they made jokes in impenetrable local dialects, and when they laughed you could see how many of their teeth were missing.

But some bitter determination had entered Pietro's mind in the course of his first trip to the mountains, as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy. This curious figure he now cut, lonely and silent as he tended the chair lift, was not the cheerful boy who had squeezed into the early-morning train to Gatwick. After the tearful farewell of Gloria Katz's mother (‘How many suitcases is Gloria
bringing
?' said Harry) there had been too much bustle at the airport and too little room on the plane for him to see who was there and what it was all going to be like. Then the coach took the damp motorway from Geneva. It was not until darkness fell and they began to climb that some of the children fell asleep. Pietro, his nerves sizzling from Harry Freeman's cigarettes, went down the swaying bus, clinging to the seats as he passed. Dave Snyder reluctantly offered him a pull from his duty-free bourbon. He was sitting with his new friend Kurt Boshof, a burly, fair-haired American who had apparently skied every mountain in the United States. The two boys had overseen the loading of their own skis on to the plane, causing Pietro a moment's panic. Was he the only person without skis? He had assumed dimly that you were given them when you got
there. An address on the coach microphone by the teacher in charge, Mr Maxwell, had reassured him.

Next to Kurt and Dave, across the gangway, Gloria sat plumply asleep, exhausted by the travel, by Dave's bourbon and her mother's solicitude. Her head lay on Laura Heasman's shoulder. Pietro had never seen Laura out of school before and he was at first slightly disappointed. Her legs were covered by long leather boots and a full denim skirt. She looked at him with her electrifying but ambiguous smile over Gloria's shoulder. As they climbed, it grew colder in the bus and Laura huddled up to Gloria for warmth. Pietro offered her his jacket as he stood in the gangway, watching the eddies of snow that fell from the trees by the black, onrushing road. She smiled sleepily as she took it.

There was a fight for rooms at the hotel, with Mr Maxwell, an Englishman in his late twenties, trying to keep the children at bay while he found the best room for himself and his colleague. It was too late. Dave Snyder was already on the first-floor landing, where he and Kurt had set up camp in the largest room, overlooking the mountain. There were screeches and recriminations as the others made their claims. Harry Freeman secured a cosy twin-bedder with its own bath at the back of the hotel, while Pietro brought up their baggage. Ten minutes later Laura came in to say that she and Gloria had been given a room with two fourteen-year-old Iranian boys, but they refused to move out, unless . . . By some logic, the only solution was for her and Gloria to have Harry and Pietro's room. Harry refused. Laura seemed upset; her lower lip trembled. Then she laughed and teased them. They still refused. Then she pleaded with all the power of her almost-womanhood, and five minutes later Pietro and Harry were bunked down with the two Iranian boys.

The next morning there was skiing. On Harry's advice Pietro had brought his own boots made by a company called Gauner. They were dark blue with red fastenings and gave a certain pain across the instep which Pietro assumed was normal. He and Harry were in the beginners'
group, where they spent most of the morning trying to get their skis on. A laconic Frenchman called Bernard gave instruction. ‘Knees,' he said to Pietro. ‘What does he mean, “knees”?' said Pietro as he unplugged the snow from his ears.

It was slow and tiring work. They sweated beneath their anoraks – a gardening jacket belonging to his father in Pietro's case, an Italian style bought at discount from the trade in Harry's. At lunch they took the cable car up the mountain and sat outside a café. There they could see the distant figures of people skiing at impossible speeds. One man came down with his skis glued together, making only the tiniest sway of his hips as he plunged over moguls, skirted a narrow icy patch and, scorning the prepared piste, finished the run in the virgin snow beneath the chair lift. It turned out to be Dave Snyder.

Released from Bernard's gnomic instruction, they were free in the afternoons to go where they chose. The only good thing, as Pietro remarked, was that they spent much more time coming down than going up. Dave Snyder and Kurt Boshof came down so fast each time that they spent most of their day queuing for lifts. Harry and Pietro only needed two short ascents in the whole of the afternoon. As they were clinging tight to a drag lift whose main purpose was apparently to cause bruising to the soft areas between the legs, Pietro saw an all-in-one pink ski suit coming slowly but gracefully down the mountain. He knew at once that it was Laura.