La Superba (16 page)

“So that John or Edwin or whatever he was called owed me a favor. He was a simple lad. But what you need to know is that he was really damn good at drawing. Or did I say that already? So I gave him a copy of my brother's exam certificate. Don't ask me how I managed that. It's a long story. And Michael or Steve or whatever he was called copied it. He faked my exam certificate. I could apply for university. My essays on James Joyce and the English metaphysical poets went down brilliantly. That's how I ended up at Cambridge.”

Don took a big sip of his gin and tonic. “Cheers, big ears.” He fell into a coughing fit. When he'd finished coughing, he said, “I can still do it. I'm one of the great coughers of my generation. Didn't Oscar Wilde have a clever quip about that? Anyway, it was a close call.”

A group of teenagers walked by. They found it important to greet Don, one by one. To ask his opinion about Sampdoria, which had been on a losing streak for weeks. He stood up and hugged them all, while getting all their names wrong, which he made up for by singing the Sampdoria club song. That was the way it always went.

“What was a close call?”

“Almost getting kicked out in my first year.”

“Tell me.”

“No, Ilja. I'll tell you tomorrow. Otherwise you'll put it all in the same chapter.”

“Since when have you worried about my novel's structure? You're a character, try to remember that!”

“And what a character! Ha-ha! Let's drink to that. But I do want a bit of space for my story. I can't write it all down myself anymore. So I'm using you for that. And make sure you don't make stuff up. I'm much better at that than you. Ha-ha! We all live in a yellow submarine.”

9.

When I bumped into Don the next day on the Piazza delle Erbe he looked radiant. He was glowing. I was almost worried. “Don, what happened?” He removed a newspaper from his inside pocket with a triumphant gesture. It was the Sampdoria club paper. “Page eight,” he said. There he was. A full-page photograph. With the caption:
Don, one of Sampdoria's biggest supporters
. I congratulated him on this corroboration of his fame. He dismissed the compliment, beaming. “Oh, well, Ilja. I've been in this city for so long. I know them all. Vialli and the rest. I've given them all English lessons. Gullit, too. But to be honest I thought he was an arrogant bastard. I don't go to the stadium these days. I'm too old. And I suffer from dizzy spells. But I used to go to every home match. The last time was on my birthday. Four or five years ago, or maybe even six. And they knew. At a certain point the entire stadium was singing, ‘Happy Birthday to Don.' It was moving. The referee held
a two-minute silence. All the players came to the
gradinata sud
where I always sat and applauded me. It was the nicest birthday present I ever had.

“All my friends are
Doriani
. You know, there are three sounds I cannot bear: breaking glass, the sound of shutters going down in the bars at closing time, and ‘
Forza Genoa.
' You are a Genoano, I know. Even though you seem like an intelligent man. But there are other things about you I don't understand, either. For example, why you carry on drinking those disgusting cocktails instead of becoming a member of the Gordon's Club, whose chairman, secretary, and treasurer you have before you.

“I was there at Wembley, too, when Sampdoria played in the Champions League final against Barcelona. Simon arranged it, a friend of mine who was working at the aquarium as a dolphin trainer at the time. He called me a few days before the match. ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I've found cheap flights. The bad news is that we're flying via Amsterdam with a four-hour transfer.' Yippee! We went to a coffee shop and got as high as a kite. After the match, they gently broke the news to me that Sampdoria had lost. The entire match had passed me by.

“And on the return journey, too—the same coffee shop. Or another, I wouldn't be able to say. They all look terribly similar, don't you think? When it was time to go to Schiphol to catch our flight back to Genoa, we still had a big chunk of hashish left. ‘Don't take it with you, Simon. Think about it. Give it to those two boys at that table.' ‘You're right, Don, that would be a better idea. But I've just flushed it down the loo.'

“At Genoa airport, the sniffer dogs lunged at us. They jumped
all over Simon. ‘Fuck, Simon,' I said, ‘you didn't…?' But they couldn't find anything. ‘It's on our clothes,' we said. ‘We've spent the entire afternoon in a coffee shop in Amsterdam. The smoke's on our clothes. That's what the dogs can smell.' And they let us go because they couldn't find anything.

“In the taxi from the airport to Piazza delle Erbe, Simon said, ‘Do you fancy a joint, Don?' He had shoved the hash up his arse. In a condom. He'd gone to the loo in the coffee shop in Amsterdam to get a condom out of the machine and put the hash up his arse. Can you imagine? And that's without even mentioning whether I still felt like smoking it once I knew where it had been for the entire flight.

“And this brings me to something completely different. Do you remember accusing me of meddling with the structure of your novel last night? You might have forgotten it, you drunkard, but I haven't. Because what do I still have to tell you? Well? Exactly. Why I almost got sent down from Cambridge in my first year. And that didn't have anything to do with hashish. But everything to do with a condom.

“Back in those days we still had servants in college. Kind of butlers for the students who made their beds in the mornings. We called them ‘bedders.' One of the bedders found a used condom in my bed, something which didn't surprise me at all, by the way. I was summoned by the dean. He pulled a face and got it out of an envelope with the tip of a pencil. He dangled it in front of my nose. ‘Is this yours, Perrygrove Sinclair?' I put on my glasses to get a better look. I studied the condom carefully. And do you know what I said? The dean laughed so much he had to let me off. You
should be able to guess. I just said it. If I'm interfering with the structure of your novel, I'm doing a good job.”

He took a formidable sip of gin and tonic and gave me a triumphant look.

“They all look terribly similar, don't you think?”

10.

Don could be irresistible at times. He had a talent for making himself lovable and used this to gain personal favors, which he then considered his right and a legal basis for further favors. Catering staff were his main victims. He used his charm to take advantage of them. What began as an extra ice cube would imperceptibly morph over the space of a few weeks into his own glass of maximum volume, a personal chair, permission to stay on after closing time, and liters of free gin. And whenever a bar owner was brave enough to move Don's process of appropriating the bar back a step, he'd explode. When a self-created privilege was taken away from him, he could be unusually unpleasant. Like a spoiled child not getting its own way.

And he lost control completely when his drink supply was stopped; for example, when the barman concluded, after he'd fallen over three times, that he'd had enough. Even if he didn't have any money left to pay for his next gin and tonic, he'd consider it a universal human right to be allowed to drink one more, and anyone disagreeing was a fascist or much worse.

A lack of attention was also catastrophic. He could have an angry outburst when a group had collected at his table and didn't
consider him the cornerstone of the company—for example when no English was spoken or when English was being spoken, but he was being ignored because he was too drunk to say anything sensible. During an angry moment, he'd wake up out of his stupor and call them every name under the sun.

But worst of all was when he felt his pride had been injured. He disgraced himself on a daily basis, but when he got the impression that someone else was trying to do that, the piazza was too small for the both of them.
He
cracked the jokes, including the jokes about himself, and anyone getting it into his head to make him the butt of one became an arch enemy, at least for as long as he remembered, and that was never very long, and in any case never longer than until the next morning.

But outbursts like this were relatively uncommon. I began to worry about something else. There was also a quiet, dejected, melancholic Don, and I began to see him more and more often. The expat friends we had in common noticed it, too. When we asked after the cause, he'd just say he was thinking. And if we carried on asking, he'd say even less. But we could guess what he was thinking about. A lack of money put a recurring damper on the party mood. His depressions almost always overcame him during the last week of the month. As soon as he'd been to the bank to collect his pension he'd drown himself in happiness again. But it went deeper than that. Sometimes he'd get a card or a letter from his sister in Birmingham. He would carry it with him in his inside pocket for days and tell us night after night that he'd gotten a card or a letter from his sister in Birmingham. He seemed just as surprised as we were that he had a sister and it made him melancholic, like
someone taken unawares by a realization of lost time.

Don's family was a concept no one could get their head round. He was one of those rare characters who, like Athena, must have sprouted fully armed out of someone's head. Don was born with a gin and tonic in his hand; it was the only possibility, because without a gin and tonic in his hand, Don wouldn't be Don. It was inconceivable that he'd ever been a normal toddler with anything as banal as a sister. Even more unimaginable, if that was possible, was the thought that he'd had ever had children himself. He was much too happy with his own cocky independence and his role as a maverick singleton at the heart of the crowd and much too faithful to his glass, his only mistress. And yet he had them. He had a daughter, who lived in Greece, and a son whose stage name was “Dicko” and had made a fortune in Australia playing a malevolent judge in TV talent contests. We found this out by chance. Don never talked about them. All contact had been cut off. And there must have been a wife involved, or in any case a mother to his children, but we never found anything out about her, not even by chance. He was in denial about his hidden past and trying to forget it, but its ghosts haunted his mind more and more often when he didn't have enough money for the gin he needed to deny or forget.

He was getting old, that was it. He began to grow older than he'd ever imagined possible. He no longer had the strength for his forward flight every evening. He was being sucked back into his own past, which he wouldn't share with anyone whatever bottle you plied him with. He resembled a wounded animal, hiding away under the roots of a tree to die out of sight of the cameras that continued to play for as long as he could see them.

11.

“I really can't talk about it, but I know I can trust you. I'll tell you on the condition that you don't write it down. It was just before I graduated from Cambridge. My thesis on the metaphysical poets had been approved. Better still, I'd been given the highest possible grade. I'd been celebrating that in my own way for a few days. And one evening I came home and found an official letter from the dean on my desk. One of the bedders must have put it there. This was highly irregular. The college post was always delivered to the pigeon holes in the main hall, just next to the entrance. The next morning, when I'd sobered up, I opened the letter. The dean had invited me for tea at his home. This was highly, highly irregular.

“I was received in the drawing room. The dean's wife served tea with a wide assortment of sandwiches, cakes, and petits fours. The dean joined us in the drawing room and began a very amicable conversation about a series of amusing trivialities. He told me stories about his time as a student and the short period during which he had been politically active. He seemed exaggeratedly interested in my thesis's conclusions and my other views on English literature. He nodded and smiled friendlily at everything I said. His wife kept on topping up the teacups and proffering new delicacies. Meanwhile I felt more uncomfortable by the minute. Something was fishy about this. It was highly, highly, highly irregular. What was going on? What did he want from me?

“‘I know you have a great fondness for orchids,' he said, ‘Come. I want to show you something.' Where on earth had he gotten that from? I didn't like orchids at all. But I went with him. We went
outside through the back door, and right at the back of his large garden there was a greenhouse in which he cultivated orchids. He gave me a tour and at a certain point, while he was clipping away a couple of superfluous leaves with a small pair of shears, he casually asked, ‘By the way, have you ever considered joining the Service?'

“I didn't have the foggiest what he meant. He carried on coolly trimming his orchids. It was a very finicky task. He leaned in close to scrutinize his work and said, ‘We have selected you as a potential candidate. You aspire to an academic career, don't you?' I nodded. ‘That can be arranged. It won't get in the way of your work for the Service in any way. On the contrary, it would be an advantage because an academic career is a most suitable cover. You'd have to attend a lot of conferences abroad, but you wouldn't have to worry yourself about that. We'd organize that for you.' I still didn't understand where this was heading. He said, ‘What I mean is this: if you cooperate, the Service would guarantee the preconditions, like a lectureship and, in time, a chair. That goes without saying.'

“I couldn't believe my ears. ‘Why me?' I asked. ‘Because you are one of the few here with a military background. Besides, there are certain facets of your personality that make you a very suitable candidate—you seem to value a varied social life and you are very credible in places where a lot of alcohol is drunk and people tend to be rather more loose-lipped than usual. That's a characteristic that might come in useful. What's more, you don't clam up under pressure. I noticed that when I put you to the test with that condom that ostensibly had been found in your bed. And if you are still not convinced, I'll give you one final argument.'