A Dog's Life (11 page)

The stallholder shook his head. ‘It’s not going to happen, is it?’

‘Probably not.’

By this time a couple of other dogs, both very interested in Circe’s exertions and contortions, had arrived. They were shooed off and collected by their embarrassed owners before harm was done.

So the mating game wasn’t played. The stallholder and I shook hands on our failed pact and parted. I took Circe to the conservation area, where she had a cooling swim in the pond.

When she was her normal self again, I had her spayed. Yet lustful notions continued to assail her. Their object was a docile Alsatian, owned by Tony and Andy, two brothers who lived in the street. Whenever she saw him she would lie on her back and open her back legs invitingly, to the great amusement of the boys. She often tried to fellate him, and Circe and Max had to be pulled back on their leads. She remained faithful to Max until the end, rubbing her nose against his to assure him he was the only dog in the world for her.

There were many grand funerals in London in 1823, but one of the grandest – certainly the most unusual – was given in honour of a beggar named Billy Walters. Billy had one leg and played the violin. He was also black. It is indicative of his charm, his musical skills and his courteous demeanour, that the city streets were crammed with mourners, the overwhelming majority of whom were white.

Billy was the envy of London’s regular vagrants, who were either moved on by the police or carted off to the workhouse. The more inventive and resourceful among them blackened their hands and faces and whatever parts of the body that were visible in order to attract some of his sympathetic custom. Hair must have been problematical for them, and blue or green eyes. These pretend-Negroes, it is safe to assume, lacked Billy’s panache, his talent on the fiddle, as well as his missing limb. They could not match his success, hard as they tried. He was genuine, and they were fakes.

Another black mendicant who is remembered, if only faintly, in works of social history is Joseph Johnson. He was almost as celebrated in the capital as Billy, and is credited as being the first known beggar to make use of a dog. Joseph’s canine accessory was called Toby and the inseparable couple stirred hearts to pity. Two pairs of dark, sad eyes proved more financially rewarding than one.

‘Toby’, in fact, became one of two generic names for a begging dog. The other was ‘Jumbo’, which was given to plumper, healthier-looking beasts. A skinny black beggar, with his bones showing through his flesh, would keep Jumbo by his side to show his compassionate patrons that he had neglected his own welfare in his pet’s interests. Apprentice beggars could choose between a Toby or a Jumbo before they decided to earn their living in the great outdoors.

London’s beggars are still emulating the wily Joseph Johnson today. You can see them with their dogs in doorways, outside and inside Underground railway stations, and most of the animals look pitiful. Each time I notice one I think of Circe and the melancholy expression she assumed when she was temporarily deprived of a sock or ball. Perhaps we could have amassed a tidy fortune together, similar to that enjoyed by Billy Walters or by Joseph Johnson and his succession of faithful Tobys.

‘Circe understands Italian,’ Vanni remarked with a grin. He had been caring for her while I had taken a week’s holiday in Egypt. ‘She’s a dumb linguist, thanks to me.’

It was true, after a fashion. In seven days she had learnt that
Vieni qui
, spoken with authority, was the same as ‘Come here’, and that
Giù
meant ‘Get down’. She understood, too, that when Vanni said
Cattiva
it was to indicate that she was behaving badly, and
Tu sei bella
, accompanied by a gentle pat, could only mean that she was beautiful and on her best behaviour. She was now, perhaps, the only bilingual dog in the park.

Vanni attended David’s funeral and stayed with me for some weeks afterwards. We had been friends, the three of us, since the spring of 1968. Earlier that year, I had been given an award for my first novel, and one of the conditions of the prize was – and still is – that the money be spent abroad. (I had planned to go to Rome, and was taking Italian lessons from an elderly man who lived in a gloomy basement flat near Baker Street. He only once spoke to me in English during the six-week course. ‘Hullo,’ he said as he opened the door when I arrived for my first lesson. ‘This is the last English you will hear.
Buon giorno
.’) But Vanni persuaded me to stay in Florence, his native city. I would meet his family and friends, and improve my Italian.

I flew to Pisa, and waited an eternity for my luggage. It was not forthcoming. An airline official told me, with a calmness I found exasperating, that the flight had gone on to Singapore, with my suitcase in the hold. I could collect it, he assured me, in three days, when the next Singapore–Pisa–London trip was scheduled. Accompanied by Vanni and another new friend, Paolo, I travelled by train to Florence, where Paolo had found me a wonderful room at the very top of the Hotel Paris on Via dei Banchi, a minute’s walk from the railway station. I stayed there for three happy months, paying a pittance for my eyrie.

I needed a change of shirt, some socks and underwear. To my amazement, the underpants cost almost as much as the shirt and socks combined. I had told the shop assistant that I required
mutande
, but did not realize until I opened the box that the
mutande
he had sold me were made of
seta
. I had bought four pairs of silk slips, all of which disintegrated in the hotel’s washing machine.

Paolo happened to be with me when the man from Alitalia phoned to say that my luggage was in Pisa, awaiting collection. Paolo seized the phone and reminded the man that it was because of his company’s inefficiency that my case had ended up in Singapore. The case was delivered to the hotel later that afternoon.

It was thanks to Vanni, who was to become an expert in Medieval French and Italian literature, and Paolo, an art historian, that I saw so many marvellous paintings, frescoes and sculptures during that first stay. They were the most informative, the most lucid, of guides. It was Vanni who introduced me to that remarkable hillside church, San Miniato al Monte, with its quasi-oriental decorations on the inlaid pavement in the nave and on the walls of the monks’ choir. The mosaics of various beasts and of the signs of the zodiac reached Florence from Byzantium at the time of the Crusades.

One unforgettable September morning Paolo took me to see the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. So dark was it in the chapel that coins had to be fed constantly into a machine to ensure a few moments of light in which to gawp at the marvels before us. The paintings by Masolini and Lippi are graceful and exquisitely composed, but those by Masaccio are on an altogether more exalted plane. The apostles in
Tribute Money
have a sculptured gravity and seem to be in possession of a rich inner life. Masolino’s
Temptation
of Adam and Eve is beautiful enough, but the couple in Masaccio’s
Expulsion from the Garden
on the opposite wall are human beings racked with unendurable pain and grief. They are raw in their misery. In 1968, Adam’s genitals were hidden behind a fig leaf some prude had painted on in the eighteenth century. After the detailed and precise work of restoration of the frescoes that was financed by the Olivetti corporation throughout the 1980s, Adam’s cock and balls are visible at last. The
Expulsion
is one of the greatest artistic manifestations of the perils in store for suffering humanity. Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni) was a working-class boy.
Accio
is a suffix meaning rude, rough or dirty. Perhaps this colossal genius, who died at the age of twenty-six, merited the sobriquet ‘rough trade’.

Vanni and Paolo came from very different backgrounds. Vanni, whose nose resembled that of Federigo da Montefeltro, Count of Urbino, in the portrait by Piero della Francesca in the Uffizi, came from artisan stock, whilst Paolo could boast that he was born into one of Siena’s oldest aristocratic families. (There is a vault in the Duomo bearing the family name.) Everyone remarked that Paolo’s way of speaking was
raffinato
. It certainly sounded posher, to my untrained ears, than the other voices I was listening to, with their Florentine habit of converting a hard ‘c’ into an ‘h’ of the Spanish kind. (‘Coca-Cola’ becomes, almost, ‘hoha-hola’.) Paolo’s vowels and consonants had none of these local impurities.

Some evenings we would meet for a drink in Florence’s one openly gay bar, which was cast in the form of an English pub called the George and Dragon. A blond American, much sought after by the more obvious queens, pretended not to notice the surrounding campery as he served beer and spirits. He may have been an innocent, that farmer’s son from Wisconsin, working his way through Europe. He looked at the swishing and mincing young Italians imperviously, neither smiling nor frowning at their antics. By this time, Vanni, Paolo and I were talking an idiotic cod Italian. We invented newly discovered operas –
Emilia di Wisconsin
by Donizetti and
La pudenda abbandonata
by Cimarosa – and ludicrous verbs such as
swishare
and
minciare
. As Vanni and I were leaving the unlikely pub one evening, Paolo entered with an American girl he was teaching Italian and the history of art. Inspired by a glass too many, I greeted him with the question ‘
Hai swishato stasera
?’ (‘Have you swished this evening?’) The eager New Yorker, keen to learn the language as best she could, shrieked at Paolo, ‘
Swishato
?
Swishato
? What kind of word is that?’ Paolo blushed – he was a natural blusher – and muttered something about
uno scherzo
, a joke. Vanni and I exited smiling.

Vanni had told his mother he was homosexual. She was distressed to begin with, but eventually came to terms with the fact, especially when he became involved in a relationship. Poor Paolo could not afford, literally, to be as honest. He lived in fear that his parents would discover the truth about him. He was the youngest son in a large family – I seem to recall that he had innumerable siblings, most of them sisters. His father, who was then in his late seventies, was threatening to deprive Paolo of his inheritance if he didn’t marry. The old man repeated the threat whenever he was ill, which was often. I still don’t know if it was the thought of losing a considerable legacy that caused Paolo to become engaged to the attractive and highly intelligent Parisienne he later married. I met the newlyweds in London, and the cagey Paolo gave the impression – a very understandable impression, given his wife’s beauty and intellect – that he was much in love.

I was living in Fargo, North Dakota, in the late 1970s when Vanni rang me from Oakland in California with the terrible news that Paolo had died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-two. This was bad enough, but not quite as awful as the reality, which I would learn about in Florence in 1980. The heart-attack story had been concocted by Paolo’s widow to ease the pain his parents were suffering. It transpired that she had undergone an abortion, and that Paolo – ever the devout, if once wayward, Catholic – had been upset and horrified. Was this the reason for his suicide? It is hard, and perhaps impertinent, to speculate. The truth is that on a summer afternoon, when his wife was out working – she was a skilled translator and interpreter – Paolo leapt from the balcony of their fifth-floor apartment in Paris. It was an ugly and brutal death for my sweet friend,
l’uomo raffinato
.

His body was transported to Siena. A traditional Catholic funeral was held in a parish church. After the burial, Paolo’s widow returned to France and disappeared from the lives of her husband’s friends and relatives. I assume she wanted no more reminders of him. That seems the likeliest explanation.

*

In the late 1960s, Vanni’s family was in thrall to his paternal grandmother. La Nonna had been widowed early in her marriage and had raised her only son, Piero, single-handedly. She was a formidable presence, especially in the kitchen, from which everyone was banned when she was cooking in earnest. Once, trying to thank her for the delicious
polpettone
she had served us, I got my words mixed up and praised her
ciondolone
(meaning idler or drifter) instead. Her normally stern features cracked into a smile, and then she joined in the laughter round the table.

She loved, and was loved by, the entire family, even when her temper was at its most severe. She had but one enemy as far as I could see, and she certainly made her loathing of him evident. The object of her antipathy was Il Nonno, Vanni’s maternal grandfather, who also lived in the large apartment. La Nonna and Il Nonno rarely communicated, and then only in grunts. She had to cook separate dishes for him, because the old man had problems with his digestion. He supped on various kinds of
brodo
, bowls of which she set before him with scarcely disguised contempt.