The American (19 page)

We do not speak again until we reach the bushes.

‘I will tell you this much,’ I offer. ‘I am what some would regard as a criminal. Perhaps even as an international criminal. I exist in police and government files in more than thirty countries, I should say. I do not rob banks, print banknotes, break into computers or sell explosives to terrorists, or governments, so they may shoot down jet airliners. I am not a spy, not a James Bond: I have only one pretty girl in my life.’ I smile at him but he is frowning. ‘I do not steal art treasures or peddle heroin and cocaine. I am not. . .’

‘
Basta!
Enough!’

He raises his hand and, for a moment, I think he is going to bless me, make the sign of the cross over me as if I was some demon he was going to exorcize. I fall silent.

‘Say no more. I know now what your work is.’

‘Some would say it is the work of god.’

He nods. ‘Yes, some would say so. But. . .’

We reach the gates of the Parco della Resistenza dell’ 8 Settembre. The traffic is now quite busy, the shadows of the vehicles halted at the junction lights long and hard.

‘What do you do now?’ I ask him.

He looks at his cheap steel watch.

‘I go to the church. And you?’

‘I go to work. Painting butterflies.’

We shake hands as priest and parishioner do when they meet or part in a public place. He goes off up the hill towards the church of San Silvestro and I make my way through the narrow streets towards my home.

As I walk, I worry I may have told him too much. I somehow doubt it, but it may indeed be the case he has divined my true employment. If that is so, I must be very wary of him and those who may approach him.

I have already mentioned to you the Convento di Vallingegno, a ghostly spot where spirits roam and local sorcerers rifle the monastic graves, where is reputed to be buried a Gestapo necromancer. It is a mysterious and malignant place, yet it is also quite beautiful. It has a placidity many a holy place has lost. No tourists wander the collapsing cloisters, no lovers couple in the courtyard.

This part of Italy, for all the television aerials and telephone lines, the ski lifts, autostradas and proliferation of
supermercati
on the outskirts of every town, still exists in the Middle Ages. In the Yellow Pages is a section, admittedly small, for witches, wizards, and magicians. These wise folk can remove warts, abort unwanted pregnancies without surgery or gin or drugs, cure broken limbs without splints, restore fertility and maidenheads, exorcize spectres and cast ingenious spells upon perfidious husbands, wayward wives, lovers and loose daughters.

I have no interest in mumbo-jumbo. My life is clear-cut. There are no frayed edges where reality shrouds into myth. I am no longer a Roman Catholic.

Yet the Convento di Vallingegno has an attraction for me. I enjoy the quietude of its interior, the timelessness of the ruins, the proximity of the grave. The inaccessibility of the monastery is pleasing to me also: I can be fairly sure of not being disturbed there, for anyone seeing my presence would keep away, fearing I might be one of the authorities. Or a wizard. Only those with clandestine lives go there.

In the ruined wall of the chapel, there is a delicacy I am fond of hunting when the chance offers itself: wild honey.

I first tasted it in Africa. The late sixties and seventies were a turbulent time for the dark continent: wars raged, petty politicians struggled for power in the postcolonial years. It was a time for making money, those dog years of war. I was paid my highest rate ever for a job by— well, let that be as it may: he is still alive and I wish to remain so, too. Suffice to say, I was compensated fifteen thousand dollars in cash and what proved to be over forty thousand in raw diamonds and emeralds just for removing and replacing a rifle barrel. And destroying the original.

I was not told why, but could guess when I was handed the weapon. It was a one-off, a fabulously wrought stock, all filigree silver, gold inlay and ivory. The rifle had to remain in the public eye. It had been used in an attempt, I reasoned, on the life of Idi Amin Dada, madman and baby-eater, sheep-seducer and sergeant major-cum-major general: never believe the rantings of journalists and headline writers bent on improving circulation figures. The rifle would be carefully checked by his cronies. The rifling of a gun barrel is as identifiable as a fingerprint. If you cannot change the print, change the finger.

I was holed up in a banda in the grounds of the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. A nondescript black man delivered the gun to me. Room service delivered the food. I worked for nine hours. It had to look good, look as if the rifle had been untampered with and the new barrel was the original. It was not difficult. I even distressed the metal to match the scratches.

The same man drove me in a Jeep out into the bush beyond the Ngong Hills. I fired the rifle, checked the scoring on the bullets did not match the original and showed this to my companion. He nodded his approval. He was taciturn, silent and austere, but he knew what was required. The removed barrel we then propped on some stones, sealing the breech with a rubber cork. I poured hydrochloric acid down the muzzle and we waited for fifteen minutes. When it was poured out, the rifling was almost invisible. We repeated the process. Satisfied, he propped the barrel against a rock and ran over it with the vehicle. Then, as black men do when they want to make damn sure not even the ju-ju can do anything by way of revenge, he rammed the buckled barrel down an ant-bear hole.

I was in Kenya for just sixty-one hours. The job worked out at a fraction under a thousand dollars an hour for the whole stay. In those days, that was very good money. All my expenses, including my air fare, were also met without demur.

And I tasted wild honey.

Whilst we were waiting for the acid to burn out the barrel, my companion – I never knew his name: he called himself Kamau, which is to Nairobi what Dai Evans is to Newport – tipped his head to one side.

‘Listen!’ he exclaimed.

I listened. I did not know for what: a snapping twig, perhaps, a diesel engine, a cocking lever?

‘You hear that?’ he murmured.

‘What?’ I hissed.

I was growing alarmed. Dying is one thing: I have faced up to the inevitability all my life. Almost all of it. Yet I did not want to wind up in the hands of some African freedom fighters. They have a penchant for cutting personal bits off their victims before finally slashing the throat or poking a Kalashnikov into the nape of the neck and letting loose a short burst – short because ammunition was always precious in those guerrilla forces. Though I would not have any future use for any of the protuberances from which I should be divorced, I should like not to be parted from them whilst still sentient.

‘Honey guide. Is a bird who shows you the way to honey. He likes the baby bees but he can’t break the bee nest. A man has to do it for him. Or honey badger.’

It was the longest communication my companion had uttered.

When the smashed and burned-out barrel was safely down the ant-bear hole, we set off through the bush following a distinctive ‘witpurr, witpurr, witpurr’ call. The bird, when we caught up with it, was about the size of an English mistle thrush, buff brown with a flash of yellow on its wings.

‘What is the bird’s name?’ I enquired, expecting a Swahili word.

‘Victor,’ replied the African. ‘Listen. He call his name now we are near the bee nest.’

Sure enough, the call was now a curt ‘victor, victor’, interspersed with a sound like a man rattling a box of matches.

The nest was in a stunted tree, about eight feet from the ground. The African took from his pocket a Ronson gas cigarette lighter and, turning the flame up high, scorched the underside of the nest. It smouldered and smoke wafted upwards. The bees began to swarm. I kept well back. Buzzing lead is one thing, bees another.

After a few minutes, the African threw several handfuls of dust at the nest and smashed it to the ground with a stick. He grabbed at it, shook it violently, tore a section off and walked swiftly away. The bees hovered in a cloud around the tree and the remnants of the nest on the ground. By the time my companion was back at my side, the bees were dispersing.

‘Stick your finger.’

He thrust his forefinger into the comb and wiggled it about. He extracted it and sucked on it like a child with a lollipop. I did likewise.

The honey was sweet, thick and smoky. It tasted of bush fires and the dust of the veld. I dipped my finger again. It was so very good, so very original a flavour. I looked over my shoulder. The bird was ravaging the remains of the nest underneath the tree, oblivious of the bees which were now regrouping, its beak darting again and again into the comb.

As we drove over the pitted, rock-strewn road, the African and I kept dipping into the nest. Within two hours, I was on a BOAC flight bound for— well, out of Kenya, anyway.

So I go periodically to the Convento di Vallingegno. I brave the witches’ covens and the ghosts of the Gestapo. I brave also the climb up the walls to a first-floor window. Once there, entry is simple: the windows are without frames, have never known wood or glass. To go in is to enter the fourteenth century.

Once through the window, I am in a chamber beside which a balcony runs the length of this side of the monastery. The view is stupendous – twenty-five kilometres down the valley, down the way the Knights Templar went carrying gold and fame. And history. Much of it forgotten.

The stairs down are stone, old and firm. The stillness is broken only by the breeze. Below is a chapel. It is here the witches come. The altar is made of loose blocks of stone jointed with weak lime mortar mixed with fragments of human bone. I found a finger bone protruding from a crack upon my first visit.

Behind the altar is a tall fresco, painted on the plaster. The weather, the succession of winter cold and summer heat over the centuries, has failed to bring it down. This might be a miracle. Who can tell?

The fresco shows Mary Magdalene standing between a row of cypress trees on her left and palms on her right. The perspective is cock-eyed. Instead of diminishing in the distance, it narrows towards the foreground. Above is God. He is an old man with a crown upon his head. His arms are raised in benediction. From the back of the chapel, in the half-light, the fresco looks like the head of a goat. This is why the witches come, why the Gestapo came, why the monastic courtyard, overgrown with thistles and briars, is a maze of excavations.

There is not an unpilfered tomb in the place. A tiny room in the cellar, into which I ventured once, squeezing through a narrow slit, is full of bones: the bones of monks dead of the plague, or old age, or piety, or sickness, or at the hands of the Inquisition. Leg bones, arm bones, ribs, vertebræ, hips, fingers, toes, some lower jaws and teeth – but no skulls: the room is devoid of skulls. They have been stolen by the magic ones.

I am not here to steal from the dead. Only from the living. The wild honey.

The mortar in the walls has crumbled and the stones lie upon each other like a vertical cliff of gap teeth. I watch the bees making for three or four cavities. The lowest is within reach. I push through the brush, thorns snatching at my jeans like tentacles of the dead. At the mouth of the nest is a smooth yellow stalactite of beeswax.

The bees ignore me. They do not know what is coming. I smear the wax with gunpowder, stuff some in the holes around the entrance to the nest. I step back and set a match to it. It hisses and spits like a damp firework. Clouds of dense blue smoke are given off. The bees come winging from the nest at speed, angry, confused, bewildered. Quickly, like an enemy pressing home the advantage, I tear a stone or two from the wall. Others tumble free. There, in the cavity, is the wedge of the comb. I pull at it. It snaps off the stone, breaks in half. I thrust it into a plastic bag and beat a retreat.

In the Citroën, I transfer the comb to a large jar. Later, without giving the source thereof, I present a small section to Signora Prasca. She believes the beeswax will cure her rheumatism.

Every midday, for an hour or two, the people of the town parade in the Corso Federico II. The colonnades are crowded with window-shoppers, tourists taking coffee and cakes, old women selling newspapers, office girls walking hand in hand and chattering like songbirds, old men discussing politics, young men discussing sex and rock music, couples discussing nothingnesses.

In the centre of the Corso, forbidden to all traffic except buses and taxis, of which there are few at this hour, men walk, arm in arm, sometimes holding hands. This is not a town of queers, a den of queens, a goldmine for the quack with a cure for Aids made of compounded apricot stones and quinine. This is Italy, where men hold hands as they talk about their wives, mistresses, business successes and the failures of the government.

I like to sit, sometimes, in one of the little coffee shops under the colonnades, a cappuccino and a pasta on the table, a newspaper in hand, and watch this world pass by. This is the show of the warm-up acts, the small performers upon the stage of life, the people for whom now is everything, for whom good wine is like a woman. I think of Duilio. They have no part to play other than that of building the atmosphere. They are the chorus, they are the crowd scene, they are the servants and grooms and soldiers who fill out the action by the wings. Meanwhile, mid-stage, the leading actors unravel the story. I am, I suppose, one of them. A minor one. I have a few lines to read, a few actions to make. They are slight, but they alter the course of the drama. Very soon, for instance, my visitor will return. Act Four must be drawing to a close. Act Five will soon begin.

Clara is walking along the Corso. She is with a girl I have not seen before. A student, from the look of her, with long legs, long hair, long sleeves to her blouse, which pushes open as a bus slides by. They are hand in hand. The girl carries a black calfskin document case under her arm. Clara clutches three or four books, tied round with a leather strap. She might be a schoolgirl on her way to class. To look at her, one would not think she was screwing her way through college and with an old man who spends his hours clandestinely reshaping a Socimi 821.