The American (6 page)

Art is only a matter of observing. The novelist examines life and recreates it as narrative; the painter scrutinizes life and imitates it in colour; the sculptor pores over life and immortalizes it in everlasting marble, or so he thinks; the musician listens to life and plays it on his violin; the actor pretends reality. I am no true artist, not one of these breeds. I am merely an observer, one who stands in the world’s wings to behold the action occurring. The prompter’s chair has always been my place: I whisper the words, the stage directions, and the plot unfolds.

How many books have I seen burned, how many paintings faded and grimed, how many sculptures smashed by weapons, chipped by frost or split by fire? How many millions of notes have I heard drift in the air to peter out like the smoke of an abandoned cigar?

I do not have long to await. By chance, the first arrival is
P. machaon
. The butterfly settles on the damp spot in the earth. It has smelt the trap. One of its eye-spots is missing. A gash has ripped the wing. The tear is the exact V shape of a bird’s beak. The butterfly uncoils its proboscis like a watch spring losing tension. It lowers it to the ground and probes for the dampest area. Then it sucks.

I watch. This beautiful creature is drinking up a part of me. What I waste, it enjoys. I imagine my urine salty, the honey sickly sweet and the wine heady. It is not long before there are half a dozen of
P. machaon
supping at my drug, accompanied by other species in which, today, I have no interest. The first swallowtail, with the torn wing, has had enough and stands in the scant shade of a thistle, opening and shutting its wings. It is drunk on my salt and the wine. This will not last long. In twenty minutes it will be recovered to flit down the hillside in search of flowers, more wholesome yet less wonderful.

I do not understand how men can kill such beauty. There can be no joy, surely, in capturing such a masterpiece of evolution, gassing it with chloroform or squeezing its thorax until it is dead, setting it on a cork board until rigor mortis is advanced then pinning it, frozen by death, in a glass-topped case, hung over with a curtain to keep the light from fading the colours. To me, this is the height of frivolous insanity.

Nothing can be gained from killing a butterfly. Killing a man is a different matter.

The piazza in the village of Mopolino is triangular, eight trees standing in a row shading the western end, their trunks scarred and gouged by careless parking, their projecting roots stained by dog urine and fertilized by cigarette butts. They grow from beds of dirty gravel and are surrounded by kerbstones which afford them no protection. Kerbstones are not guiding marks but mere inconveniences to Italian drivers.

At the eastern apex of the piazza is the village post office, a tiny place no bigger than a small shop, which smells of hessian, stale tobacco, cheap paper and glue. The counter is at least as old as the postmaster, who I should say is not under sixty-five. The wooden surface is highly polished by wax and the sleeves of jackets, but it is also cracked, the splits filled with an accumulation of the dust of years. The postmaster’s face is similarly polished and cracked.

The advantage of the piazza is that it contains two bars, one on either side. This is of great use to me, for I can sit in one and cast an eye over not only the piazza but the other bar, too.

There is little likelihood of a watcher drinking in the same bar as myself. He would feel he had to move away if I was to enter, or go to sit at one of the tables outside. This would make him conspicuous. He would prefer to be across the piazza, observing me from a distance.

I took a long time finding the right post office.

In the town where I reside, the main post office is too big, too busy, too public. There is always a throng of people milling about it and the telephone company next door, many of them waiting to make a call from a kiosk, post a letter, send a telegram, meet a friend. They read newspapers, chat to each other or stand and survey the crowds. Some walk up and down impatiently. They are a perfect cover for a clandestine observer.

There is no bar in sight. If there were one there, it would bring its owner many riches, and it surprises me no wily entrepreneur has recognized the potential. It would also present to me a perfect vantage point from which I could inspect the crowds and assess any possible threat. Yet it is inconceivable that I could be entirely safe in such a place of teeming onlookers. What I required as soon as I came to live in this region was a spot I could approach cautiously, like a tiger returning to its kill, aware there may be a hunter in a
machan
in the trees who has been waiting, patiently.

And so, whenever I drive out to Mopolino, I always park my little Citroën 2CV by the end tree in the line, walking to the bar on the left of the piazza. I sit at the same table every time, order the same refreshment – an espresso and a glass of iced water. The patron, who is not quite as old as the postmaster, knows me by now and I am accepted as a regular, if taciturn, visitor.

I do not call always on the same day of the week, nor do I call always at the same hour: so rigid a timetable would invite problems.

For a while, I sip my coffee and behold the slow pace of village life unfolding. There is a farmer who arrives in a cart pulled by a tubby pony. The cart is made from the truck-bed of a Fiat pickup, with wooden shafts from a gig many decades older. They are intricately carved with leaf designs, as much a work of aesthetic art as the rest of the cart is one of ingenuity. The wheels are adapted from those of a heavy lorry and have bald pneumatic Pirelli tyres, half inflated. There are a number of rowdy teenage boys who zoom into the piazza upon mopeds, their engines and voices echoing momentarily off the walls. There is a rich man with a Mercedes-Benz sedan who drives to the post office and leaves his vehicle in the centre of the thoroughfare while he does his business: he cares not a jot that he holds up the daily meat delivery to the butcher’s shop. There are also two very pretty young girls who drink coffee at the other bar, their laughter light yet simultaneously serious with the concerns of their youth.

I wait for up to an hour. If there is nothing to alarm me, I go smartly across to the post office.

‘
Buon giorno
,’ I say.

The postmaster grunts his reply, jutting his chin. It is his way of asking what I want, although he is well aware. It is always the same. I buy no stamps and seldom post a letter.

‘
Il fermo posta?
’ I enquire.

He turns to a rack of pigeonholes behind a sack of mail hanging in a metal frame like an old person’s walking aid. I wonder if, when the day’s collection has been made, he borrows the framework to see himself home.

From one pigeonhole he draws a bundle of general delivery envelopes held together by an elastic band. Some have been there for weeks, months even. They are the relics of love affairs turned sour, petty crimes abandoned or long since carried out, deals reneged upon and tourists long since passed by on their restless itineraries. They are a sad comment upon the feckless, shifting, unfeeling character of human nature.

Deftly, like a teller counting through a thick wad of banknotes, he flicks through the mail. At the end, he stops and repeats the process until he comes to my letter. There is always only the one. This he extracts with thin, wasted fingers and tosses on to the counter with an incomprehensible grunt. He knows me well by now, no longer asking for identification. I put one hundred lire in change upon the counter by way of payment or gratuity. With his bony fingers he scoops the coins across the counter and into the palm of his hand.

Leaving the post office, I do not go directly to my little car. I walk around the village first. The streets are so placid, so cool in the shade, the cobbles smooth and hard underfoot, the windows shuttered against the heat of the day. By some of the doorways sleeping dogs lie prone, too bushed by the heat to bother to growl at a stranger; or perhaps they too know me by now. Cats hide suspiciously in the deep shadows under steps or lintels, their alert eyes bright and devious like those of child pickpockets in Naples.

One doorway always has an old woman sitting within it. She makes lace, her gnarled fingers like the roots of the trees in the piazza but still nimble, flicking the bobbins over on the frame with a practised dexterity I admire. She sits in the shade but her hands and lace are in the brilliant sunlight, the skin over her knuckles tanned as leather.

Every time I pass her by I smile. Often I pause to appreciate her handiwork.

Her greeting is, regardless of the time, ‘
Buona sera, signore
,’ delivered in a high, squeaky voice like that of a cat mewing.

I wondered at first if she was blind, every hour being evening-tinted, but soon realized it is because her eyes see everything in twilight, permanently dazzled by the sun on the white tracery of the lace.

I point at her lace and remark, ‘
Molto bello, il merletto
.’

This remark invariably prompts a wide and toothless smile and the same retort spoken through a porcine snort of comical derision.

‘
Merletto. Si! I lacci. No!
’

This is her reference to my first meeting with her when, in searching for the word, I assumed
laccio
was lace. It was: a shoelace.

Today, as I walk, I open my letter, read it and memorize the contents. I also watch out for someone following me. Before I return to the car, I stand and survey the piazza, pausing to tie my shoelace. During this time, I cast an eye over the vehicles in the piazza. Most I know to be owned by locals. Those I do not recognize I momentarily study, committing their details to mind. This way I can ensure one does not follow me back to the town.

Satisfied I am safe – or at least prepared – I leave. I take several other precautions as well, but you are not to know of these. I cannot afford to give away every detail. It would not be circumspect.

On the way back to the town – a distance of some thirty-five kilometres – I watch to see if I am being tailed and, bit by bit, I shred the letter into the tiniest confetti and let it blow, a pinch at a time, out of the window.

The second bedroom in my apartment is a workroom. It is quite large, almost too large, for I prefer to work in enclosed surroundings. This preference is not good for my health, not with the kind of work I do, but I have become accustomed to it and so am inured to small rooms.

In Marseilles, I had to operate from what had once been a wine cellar. There was no ventilation at all except a grid high in the wall and a sort of flue rising from one corner. There was no natural light, which was awful. I strained my eyes for weeks in there, on just one job. The results were superb, possibly my best ever, but it ruined my eyesight and scoured my lungs. For months, I suffered from bronchitis and sore throats and was obliged to wear sunglasses, gradually lessening the density of the lenses until I could once more face raw daylight. It was hell. I thought I was finished. But I was not.

In Hong Kong, I rented a two-room flat in Kwun Tong, an industrial area near Kai Tak airport. The pollution was atrocious. It lay upon the district like the strata of leaves collecting in a pond. At ground level was offal, waste food, strips of rattan scaffolding ties, styrofoam fast-food containers, discarded plastic shoes, paper, filth. At first-floor level – in the building in which I rented my temporary workshop this was ironically termed the mezzanine – up to third or fourth, the air stank of diesel and petrol fumes. From there on up, the smell was predominantly carbon tetrachloride delicately impinged upon, depending on the direction of the stifling breeze, by burning sugar, sewage, melting plastic, textile dyes and frying fat. The floors below my own were occupied variously by a dyeing works, a toy manufacturer, a fish-ball kitchen, a candy-maker, a dental laboratory making false teeth, a plastic-spectacles-frame company and a dry-cleaning processor. The sewage came from a badly corroded twelve-inch pipe which leaked at the fifth-floor level.

I hated the place. The ventilation to my flat, one of a dozen ‘residences’ on the top floors, the occupants of all of them engaged like myself in some manufacturing process, was adequate but, in removing the noxious gases produced by my processes, it merely imported the others. Down the centre of the street outside ran the underground railway system, supported on concrete piers like the New York subway only far more up to date and, astonishingly, spotlessly clean.

The place was indescribably noisy, too: the trains passing at three-minute intervals, trucks, cars, machinery, human shouting, car horns, hammering and thumping and grinding and hissing. Every few minutes for most of the day, a jet aircraft roared momentarily.

I was there five weeks. I worked without ceasing. The job was quickly done for I wanted to get out. Delivery had to be made to Manila. After that, I took a long break in Fiji, lying in the shade like a retired pirate, living as a spendthrift on my loot.

In London, I rented a garage built into the archway of a railway viaduct south of the Thames. It was a grotty locality – grotty was an in word then – yet it served me well. I could work with the door open, by daylight. The other archways were used as lock-up storage units, an auto-body shop, a television repair works and a fire-extinguisher recharging plant. No one intruded upon the others’ businesses. We all drank in the nearby pub at lunchtime, eating Scotch eggs and pickled herring with tough-crusted buns and drinking Bass. There was a camaraderie in that row of archways with its muddy, puddled approach, its grimy brickwork and dusty mortar, its rusting chain-link fencing and the strangely comforting rumble of commuter trains overhead making for Charing Cross or Waterloo.

The others thought I custom-made bicycle frames. I bought a racing cycle to further the deception. When I left, it was a close call. The cops were only hours behind me with their megaphones and plain-clothes snipers. One of the auto-body mechanics was an informer. He tipped them off I was stealing lead: he could smell it when I melted and recast the metal. It was a ridiculous accusation. The man was judging me by his standards, a bad error.