The American (2 page)

So long as the quality of his brandy is good, the liquor smooth and the glass warmed by the sun, Father Benedetto is satisfied. He likes to sniff his drink before he sips it, like a bee hovering over a bloom, a butterfly pausing on a petal before taking the nectar.

‘The only thing good to come of the
francesi
,’ he declares. ‘Everything else . . .’

He raises one hand dismissively and grimaces. To him, the French are not worth thinking about: they are, he is fond of saying, intellectual vagabonds, usurpers of the True Faith – no good Pope, in his opinion, came of Avignon – and Europe’s troublemakers. He thinks it more than fitting that truancy is termed, in English, French leave, and the hated
preservativo
called a French letter. French wine is too effete (as are Frenchmen) and French cheese too salty. By this, he implies, they are too given to the indulgence of sexual pleasures. This is not a new trait, recently discovered. Italians, Benedetto claims with the authority of having been there, have known this throughout history. When Rome called France the province of Gaul they were just the same. Heathen rabble. Only their brandy is worthy of attention.

The priest’s house is halfway along a twisting alley off the Via dell’ Orologio. It is a modest fifteenth-century edifice, reputed to have once been the home of the best of the clockmakers from whom the nearby street derived its name. The front door is of heavy oak blackened with age and studded with iron bolts. Within there is no courtyard but, at the rear, snuggles a walled garden, overlooked by other buildings yet remaining secluded. Being on the side of a hill, the garden catches more of the sun than one might expect. The buildings down the slope being lower, the sun lingers longer on the little patio.

We are sitting on this patio. It is four o’clock in the afternoon. Two-thirds of the garden is in shade. We are in lazy, soporific sunlight. The brandy bottle – today, we have armagnac – is globulous, made of green glass and bears a plain label in black printing on cream paper. It is called, simply,
La Vie
.

I like this man. Certainly, he is holy but I do not hold that against him. He is pious but acceptably so, a raconteur when he wants to be, an erudite conversationalist who is never dogmatic in his arguments or pedantic in the presentation of them. He is about my age, with short grey-white hair and quick, laughing eyes.

It was only a few days after I arrived in the town when we first met. I was wandering about with apparent nonchalance, taking in the sights, it would seem. In fact, I was studying the town, memorizing the streets and the escape routes I should use should the necessity arise. He came up to me and addressed me in English: I must have looked more English than I hoped.

‘Can I help you?’ he offered.

‘I am just looking about,’ I said.

‘You are a tourist?’

‘I am newly resident here.’

‘Where are your lodgings?’

I avoided this inquisition and obliquely replied, ‘Not for long, I suspect. Until my work is done.’

This was the truth.

‘If you are to live here,’ he declared, ‘then you should share a glass of wine with me. As a welcome.’

It was then I visited, for the first time, the quiet house down the alley off the Via dell’ Orologio. I am almost certain, in retrospect, he saw me as a soul for potential redemption, a reclamation for Christ, even after but a few words.

Ever since the whole garden was in sunlight, we have been sipping, talking, sipping, eating peaches. We have been talking of history. It is a favoured argument we have. Father Benedetto believes history, by which he means the past, is the single most important influence upon a man’s life. This opinion has to be his standpoint. He is a priest who lives in the house of a long-deceased watchmaker. Without history, a priest can have no job, for religion feeds upon the past for its veracity. Besides, he lives in the house of a long-deceased watchmaker.

I disagree. History has no such grand influence. It is merely an occurrence which may or may not affect a man’s activities and attitudes. Foremost, I proclaim, the past is an irrelevancy, a jumble of dates and facts and heroes many of whom were impostors, sciolists,
blagueurs
, get-rich-quick merchants or men fortuitously present at the right moment in the timetable of fate. Father Benedetto, of course, cannot accept fate. Fate is a concept invented by men. God controls us all.

‘People are trapped in history, and history resides within them like the blood of Christ in the chalice,’ he says.

‘What is history? Certainly not a trap,’ I reply. ‘History does not affect me save, perhaps, materially. I wear polyester because of an historical event – the invention of nylon. I drive a car because of the invention of the internal combustion engine. But to say I behave as I do because history is in me and influencing me is wrong.’

‘History, Nietzsche states, is the enunciator of new truths. Every fact, every new event exercises an influence upon every age and every new generation of man.’

‘Then man is an idiot!’

I cut into a peach, the juice running like plasma on to the wooden boards of the table. I prise the stone out and flick it with the knife point into the flower bed. The pebble-like stones of our afternoon feasting litter the ground between the golden-headed marigolds.

Father Benedetto baulks at my facetiousness. For him, to insult mankind is to reproach God in whose image men were forged.

‘If man is so imbued with history, then he seems not to have taken much of it to heart,’ I continue. ‘All that history has taught us is that we are too stupid to learn anything from it. At the end of the day, what is history but the truth of reality twisted into convenient lies by those whom it suits to see a different record made? History is but the tool of man’s self-worship.’ I suck at the peach. ‘You, Father, should be ashamed!’

I grin, so he is assured I do not seek to slight him. He shrugs and reaches for a peach. There are five left in the wooden bowl.

He peels his peach. I eat mine in silence.

‘How can you live here in Italy,’ he asks as his peach stone hits the wall and drops to the marigolds, ‘with history around you, crowding in on you, and treat it with such disdain?’

I look around his private garden. The shutters on the building beyond the peach tree are like eyelids shut demurely in case they should see something embarrassing in the windows of Father Benedetto’s house – like the priest in his bathtub.

‘History? All around me? There are ruins and ancient buildings, yes. But history? With a capital H? History, I maintain, is a falsehood. Real history is the commonplace, unrecorded. We speak of the history of Rome with the eloquence of grandeur, but most Romans did not know of it or want to know it. What did the slave or the shopkeeper know of Cicero, or Virgil, the Sabines or the magic of Sirmio? Nothing. History was for them half-registered fragments about geese saving a city or Caligula eating his unborn child. History was an old man mumbling in his cups. They had no time for history when a clipped coin was worth less by the week, their taxes rose by the month, the price of their flour rocketed and hot weather frayed their tempers.’

‘Men like to be remembered—’ Father Benedetto begins.

‘So legend might build them into someone grander,’ I interrupt.

‘Do you not want to make your mark, my son?’

He calls me that when he wants to annoy me. I am not his son, nor a child of his church. Not any longer.

‘Perhaps,’ I admit, smiling. ‘But whatever I do shall be irrefutable. Not open to misinterpretation.’

His glass is empty and he reaches for the bottle.

‘So you live for the future?’

‘Yes.’ I am emphatic. ‘I live for the future.’

‘And what is the future but history yet to arrive?’

His eyebrows rise questioningly and he gives my glass a wink.

‘No, no more. Thank you. I must be going. It is late and I have some preliminary sketches to complete.’

‘Art?’ Father Benedetto exclaims. ‘That is irrefutable. Your signature on a unique painting.’

‘One can put one’s signature on more than paper,’ I reply. ‘One can write in the sky.’

He laughs and I bid him farewell.

‘You should come to Mass,’ he says, quietly.

‘God is history. I have no use for him.’ This, I realize, may hurt the priest, so I add, ‘If he exists I am sure he has no use for me.’

‘There you are wrong. Our Lord has a use for everyone.’

Father Benedetto does not know me, though he thinks he does. If he did know me, he would most certainly readjust his judgement. But then, just maybe – it would be a supreme irony worthy of God – he is correct.

‘
Signor Farfalla! Signore! La posta!
’

Signora Prasca calls every morning from the fountain in the courtyard below. It is her ritual. It is a sign of being old, maintaining a routine. My routine, however, is temporary. I do not yet have the luxury afforded those of my age of being able to set my life to a series of conformities.

‘Thank you!’

Every weekday, when there is mail for me, is identical. She calls in Italian, I reply in English, she invariably responding, ‘
Sulla balaustrata! La posta! Sulla balaustrata, signore!
’

When I come down a storey to lean over the edge of the third-floor balcony, and peer down into the gloom of the courtyard into which the sun only strikes for an hour and half in the middle of the day in the middle of the year, I can see the letters balancing on the stone pillar at the foot of the banisters. She always stacks them with the largest letter on the bottom of the pile, the smallest on top. As the smallest is usually a postcard or a letter in a small envelope, it is inevitably the brightest, glimmering in the half-light like a coin or a religious medal cast optimistically down a well.

Signor Farfalla, she calls me. So do the others in the neighbourhood. Luigi who owns the bar in the Piazza di S Teresa. Alfonso in the garage. Clara the pretty one and Dindina the plain one. Galeazzo the bookshop owner. Father Benedetto. They do not know my real name, so they call me Mr Butterfly. I like it.

To the confusion of Signora Prasca, letters come addressed to me either as Mr A. Clarke, Mr A.E. Clarke or Mr E. Clark. These are all aliases. Some even come addressed to M Leclerc, others to Mr Giddings. She does not question this and her gossip causes no conjecture. No suspicion is aroused, for this is Italy and people mind their own business, accustomed to the Byzantine intrigues of men who live alone.

I send most of the mail: if I am away, I post an empty envelope or two to myself, or write out a postcard, disguising my hand, purporting to be from a relative. I have a fictitious favourite niece who addresses me as Uncle and signs herself Pet. I send off prepaid envelopes to life insurance companies, travel agents, time-share operators, trade magazines and other sources which generate junk mail: now I am bombarded with colourful trash informing me I may have won a cheap car, or a holiday in Florida, or a million lire per annum for life. To most people, this unsolicited garbage is a curse. To me it lends an air of perfection to the lie.

Why Mr Butterfly? It is simple. I paint them. They think this is how I make my money, painting butterflies’ portraits.

It is a most efficient cover. The countryside around the town, as yet unadulterated by agrochemicals, unharmed by the clumsy footsteps of men, abounds with butterflies. Some are the minuscule blues: to study them delights me, to paint their portraits enthrals me. They seldom have a wingspan further across than a penny. Their colours iridesce, fade from tone to tone, from bright summer-sky blue to washed-dawn blue in just a few millimetres. They have tiny dots upon them, black and white rims, and the trailing edges of their hind wings have near-microscopic tails pricking out like tiny thorns. To paint one of these creatures successfully is a major achievement, a triumph of detail. And I live by detail, by minute particulars. Without such ardent attention to detail, I would be dead.

To further the efficacy of my deceit, I have allayed any possible suspicion by explaining to Signora Prasca that Leclerc is French for Clark (with or without an
e
) and Giddings is the name under which I paint – a pseudonym to scrawl upon my pictures.

To aid this misconception, I once hinted that artists often use a fake name to protect their privacy: they cannot, I explain, be forever hampered by intrusion. It destroys the concentration, decelerates output, and galleries and printers, editors and authors, demand deadlines.

Since then, I am sometimes asked if I am working on a new book.

I shrug and say, ‘No, I am building up a stock of pictures. Against a rainy day. A few go to galleries.’ They are bought, I suggest, by collectors of miniatures, or entomologists.

One day, I received a letter posted in a South American republic. It bore postage stamps of gaudy tropical butterflies, those flashy stamps so loved by dictators. The colours of the insects were too vivid to be real, too garish to be believable, bright as the rows of self-appointed medals which are part of every generalissimo’s costume.

‘Ha!’ exclaimed Signora Prasca, knowingly. She waved her hand in the air.

I smiled knowingly back at her and winked.

They think I design postage stamps for banana republics. I leave them with this convenient illusion.

For some men, France is the country of love, the women poutingly beautiful with eyes widely innocent with lust, lips which beg to kiss and press. The countryside is mellow – the rolling Neolithic hills of the Dordogne, the rugged Pyrenees or the boggy marshes of the Camargue, it matters not where they travel. All are imbued with the aura of warm sun ripening the vine. The men see a vineyard and think only of lying in the sun with a bottle of Bordeaux and a girl who tastes of grapes. For women, French men are hand-kissers, the slight-bow brigade, the charming conversationalists, the gentle seducers. How unlike the Italians, they say. The Italian women have hairy armpits, smell of garlic and grow quickly fat on pasta: Italian men pinch arse on the buses of Rome and thrust too hard when making love. Such are the cries of xenophobia.