A Dog's Life (12 page)

Why did she hate him so? Perhaps it was because his life had not been as hard as hers. Yet both survived the Nazi occupation, as had her son and Il Nonno’s daughter, Noris. Filial duty ensured that the domineering Nonna and the quiet, ineffectual Nonno – who was occupied for hours each day with those books of puzzles the Italians enjoy so much – should have to put up with one another’s company.

I happened to be in Florence, staying in the apartment, when La Nonna was dying. I was ushered briefly into her presence. The forceful woman of two years earlier was frail now and worn out, but she smiled on recognizing me and called me ‘Paulo’.

In the summer of 1986, Vanni and I often talked of those early years of our friendship as we exercised Circe in the park. I reminded him of that time, shortly after my arrival in Florence, when my feet were blistered from walking on cobbled streets. I asked him if there was an Italian equivalent of the liquid antiseptic TCP (which my mother ‘swore by’, as they say) and, looking puzzled, he replied ‘TBC’. I was unaware that TBC is shorthand for tuberculosis. Thus it was that I entered a pharmacy and told the man behind the counter that I wanted a bottle of TBC.

‘What for?’ He grinned as he spoke.

‘For my sore feet, naturally.’

He laughed, and then explained what TBC meant, and produced a cream which he said would heal my blisters.

This was the most lunatic of the lunatic conversations I had in Italy in the autumn of 1968.

We talked of La Nonna and how, when it was raining – it rains a lot in Florence – she would smile at me and observe
Come Londra
. She had never visited London, but was convinced it was a city above which the skies were perpetually opening when it wasn’t shrouded in fog. The wetness and fogginess of my birthplace were incontrovertible facts, carved out in the stone of centuries. It was useless to argue with her.

Vanni was teaching in the Italian department in the prestigious University of California at Berkeley while I was helping the freshmen (and women) at North Dakota State University unravel the mysteries of English grammar. I visited him twice in California. I had gone there to interview the novelist Christopher Isherwood for BBC Radio, and Christopher had picked me up at Los Angeles airport and driven me in his tiny Volkswagen to Santa Monica, where he lived with his partner, the artist Don Bachardy. We recorded our discussion about his life and work in a nearby studio that afternoon. The engineer in charge was a huge man who greeted us warmly as ‘Chris’ and ‘Paul’. He was friendly before the conversation started, but Christopher’s answer to my first question caused him to be distinctly unfriendly when we were due to leave.

Me: Christopher Isherwood, why did you go to Berlin in the early 1930s?

CI: For the boys.

I persevered with my next question, even as I sensed a certain frostiness from the other side of the glass partition. The redneck didn’t like what he was hearing. Christopher went on chirping happily about his career, and I tried not to look at the man who was recording the programme. We were not addressed as ‘Chris’ and ‘Paul’ as we walked out to the car park. An hour earlier we had been ‘regular guys’, but not any more. We were a pair of English faggots now. His expression said as much.

In those days, San Francisco was the gay capital of America, if not the world. I found the city exhilarating and beautiful, especially after the fearful cold of Fargo and the endless flatness of the snow-covered plains. Although it was December, the weather was mild and walking in the sunlit streets and riding on the cable cars were rare but simple pleasures. Vanni showed me the sights, and the two of us spent an afternoon in the Castro district, which was predominantly gay. I found the atmosphere of the place as curious as it was depressing. I had never seen quite so many men with cropped hair and neat moustaches, who appeared to have nothing to do but cruise the bars in search of their lookalikes. This was a new, and strange, kind of narcissism. We were in a self-styled ghetto, I realized, and I couldn’t wait to get out of it. I was happy in the multi-cultured city itself, with its limitless choice of fine restaurants. In Tommaso’s we ate the best pizza to be had outside Naples.

I went to Berkeley with Vanni and met the Italian faculty. At a party there, a bearded man wearing a kaftan and an assortment of beads informed me confidently that he was going to write the greatest of all great American novels. Had he started it? ‘Not yet.’ He put a finger to his forehead. ‘It’s still up here.’ I remarked, as tactfully as I could, that he didn’t look
that
young, and that when you have embarked on a novel, great or otherwise, time was important. Life is an accidental business, and illness and death are out there, ready to do their worst. He gave me a pitying smile. ‘Are you some kind of a pessimist? I just
know
when my book is going to come out. It’s still…’ He searched for the apt word. ‘…
marinating
.’

A real writer had graced the campus earlier that year, in the form of Giorgio Bassani, author of
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
. I love Bassani’s fictions, autobiographical in essence, of Jewish – and other – life in Ferrara in the years preceding the Second World War. Vanni admired them too, but the man turned out to be snobbish and charmless to an extraordinary degree. He refused to drink Californian wine, and had his own vintages sent over from Italy. He was in his fifties, but continued to play accomplished tennis. He sulked whenever he was in danger of losing a match. He was rude to both staff and students, some of whom he deemed stupid. He had been hired for two years as writer-in-residence. When he had completed his first year, he was paid another year’s salary to go home. It had been a bitter experience for everyone. Yet his elegant, mournful books endure, and we have him to thank for discovering and publishing Lampedusa’s
Il Gattopardo
(literally The Cheetah, but famously translated as
The Leopard
). And no one deserves the fate of his last decades, when he was afflicted with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

On a second trip to California, during the spring vacation, Vanni and I hired a car from a firm called Rent-a-Dent in Los Angeles and we set off to visit the original Forest Lawn Memorial Park, the setting of Evelyn Waugh’s novel
The Loved One
. Our journey along the freeway was hindered by the driver of a large truck who kept overtaking our battered saloon with a glee that bordered on the murderous. We wondered if we would ever reach the famous cemetery alive, so determined seemed the truck driver to force us off the road. There had been three crashes that morning, we learned, and we didn’t want to be involved in the fourth. It was with huge relief that we spotted the exit for Glendale.

The cemetery more than lived up to (if that’s the appropriate term) our anticipation of the comic possibilities ahead. The first thing we discovered was that words like ‘undertaker’ and ‘mortician’ had been replaced with ‘before need counselor’. The founder of Forest Lawn, Dr Hubert Eaton, had paid for the acres of barren land in 1917 by selling plots on a hire purchase system. Hence those ‘before need counselors’. We parked the car, and began our tour by visiting the Little Church of the Flowers, modelled on the church in Stoke Poges that inspired Thomas Gray to write his ‘Elegy’. From there, we went on to the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather (that o’ was cause for a smile), a replica of the kirk in Glencairn where Annie Laurie worshipped. We entered, and left, to the accompaniment of bagpipes. We gave the Church of the Recessional (a reproduction of St Margaret’s in Rottingdean, which Rudyard Kipling attended) a miss and made our way to God’s Garden, in which is enshrined another replica – that of a statue of Christ by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. We were in the Court of the Christus within God’s Garden, staring at the bearded Christ, when a recorded voice came out of a tree. ‘You are standing before the Son of God’ it boomed. ‘If you wish to look into his eyes, you must go down on your knees.’ We did as instructed, and duly caught His bland expression.

‘You are standing in the Westminster Abbey of the New World’ another booming voice announced as we stepped into the Memorial Court of Honor. That same sepulchral voice instructed us – there was one other person present, a woman with a nervous tic – to take our seats if we wished to see, and learn the history of, the
Last Supper
Window. The lights dimmed and a pair of curtains parted to the strains of the waltz from
The Merry Widow
. On the screen was Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
in its frail state of preservation. Then the voice explained that Dr Hubert Eaton had visited Milan in the 1920s and had been awestruck by the sight of the painting. It grieved Dr Hubert Eaton that Leonardo’s masterwork was so faint, due to the ravages of time. The doctor had an inspiration. He contacted ‘famed artist’ Rosa Moretti and asked what she would give to make a stained-glass replica of the
Last Supper
. ‘I would give my life, Dr Eaton,’ she replied.

We began to laugh, Vanni and I, as the voice droned on, imparting the news that Rosa Moretti produced her stained-glass window only to have it crack. And where did it crack? With the figure of Judas. She telephoned Dr Hubert Eaton, who encouraged her to try again. She finished a second window and a crack appeared in exactly the same place. A third window cracked, and so did the fourth and fifth. It was as though Judas, the betrayer of Our Lord, had put a curse on it. Rosa Moretti was very unhappy. Dr Hubert Eaton telephoned ‘famed artist’ (hearing that phrase once more, we collapsed with laughter) Rosa Moretti and advised her to pray. He would pray, too, for the window he had commissioned. Their joint prayers might save the day. So Dr Hubert Eaton in California and Rosa Moretti in Perugia offered up their prayers for a perfect window. Their prayers were answered, and Dr Hubert Eaton and Rosa Moretti were overjoyed. They had won their battle with the wicked spirit of Judas Iscariot.

The brightly coloured
Last Supper
Window was revealed to us, to the accompaniment of the
Blue Danube
.

‘Do you guys come here just to break up?’ the woman asked, as we were overcome with giggling. ‘Have either of you been to Italy?’ she enquired, pointing to a copy of Michelangelo’s
Pietà
in St Peter’s.

I said that my friend was Italian.

‘Have you seen the original
Pietà
(she pronounced it pee-
ay
-ter) in Rome?’

We both answered that we had.

‘Doesn’t the Virgin Mary have a sort of strip across her body?’

‘Yes, she does,’ we replied.

‘It’s not here,’ she shrieked. ‘Look.’ We looked. The strip wasn’t there. ‘It’s a fake. This is not a real replica. I shall write to the
Los Angeles Times
. I shall write to the Pope.’ And thus shrieking, she stormed out of the Westminster Abbey of the New World.

We were on the verge of hysteria. The
Blue Danube
faded away. There was a moment’s silence before
The Ride of the Valkyries
began.
The Ride of the Valkyries
? Was there a humourist lurking in the recesses of the Memorial Court of Honor?

Later that day, we inspected the replica of Ghiberti’s bronze doors from the Baptistery of San Giovanni, saw Michelangelo’s newly fig-leafed David, and took in Jan Styka’s huge painting
The Crucifixion
(complete with recorded comments from the hecklers in the crowd) and
The Resurrection
by Robert Clark, which is almost as huge and just as dire. We chanced on a sculpture depicting several generations of men, women and children entitled
The Mystery of Life
and were hysterical once more when the song

Ah, sweet mystery of life
At last I’ve found you,
Ah, sweet mystery of life
At last you’re mine

started to be sung by an unseen choir nearby.

We got back into the car and drove slowly through Lullaby Land, the section of Forest Lawn in which the very young are buried. Recorded birdsong was coming out of every bush, and childish voices were singing or reciting nursery rhymes. We were beyond laughter now. We had to escape the sound of those innocents telling us of Jack and Jill, and Humpty Dumpty, and the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.

*

Vanni had some news that he didn’t want to break over the phone. Could he spend a few days with me? That, I said, was an unnecessary question.

Circe, tail wagging in delight, rushed to greet her friend as soon as he arrived.
Carissima
he called her, and allowed her to lick his face. We went into the kitchen and I opened a bottle of white wine. He needed a drink before he could tell me what he had come to say face to face. The dog wrapped herself about his feet.

‘It’s the worst. It’s what I’ve been afraid of for years.’

I was silent, waiting for the revelation I had somehow already anticipated.

‘I am HIV positive.’

We shared a long embrace.

Vanni would entrust himself to the care of Dario, the youngest of his two younger brothers. Dario would soon become what he is now, the leading AIDS specialist in Florence. Since Dario had access to every new drug the moment it was patented, it was possible for him to give Vanni the best treatment available. Vanni was already taking pills when he turned up that day with his upsetting news. He stayed well, and sane, and active in his job as a tour guide for over five years.

He came to London in 1996, but did not stay with me and my partner, Jeremy. To my surprise, he had booked himself into an expensive hotel in Curzon Street. The idea of Vanni living it up in Mayfair struck me as preposterous, and indeed it was. On what would turn out to be his last holiday, Vanni indulged himself in a bizarre shopping spree. He bought eighty-two pairs of Armani underpants (
Perché ottanta-due
? became something of a family joke), ten cashmere sweaters, a dozen identical overcoats and six suitcases to contain them. He was washing down his medication with an excess of red wine. Jeremy and I spent an evening with him, bearing him back to the hotel after a meal in a Chinese restaurant. He insisted on a goodnight drink, but we – and the courteous hotel staff – insisted otherwise.