A Dog's Life (13 page)

I had to leave for Germany the next day. Jeremy dined with him again. Vanni was copiously and uncontrollably sick at the table, but the staff in the restaurant were considerate, kind and diplomatic, swiftly clearing up the mess while Jeremy helped him to wash and clean himself in the lavatory.

Some while before this, Jeremy and I had spent Christmas with the family in Florence, and – accompanied by Jeremy’s mother – travelled from Rome to have lunch with them the following December. On both occasions, Vanni had appeared alert and relatively happy, joining in the conversation, swapping anecdotes, and commenting intelligently on the always-parlous state of Italian politics. But the desperate Vanni we saw in London was a different man. He was confident to the point of boastfulness, and we assumed that the combination of drink and drugs accounted for his erratic behaviour. We could not know that his decline into dementia had just begun.

Vanni had been given a credit card by his father, and in Amsterdam, the next stop on his travels, he went over the agreed limit – which was pretty generous, anyway. His brother Geri drove to Holland and took the untypical spendthrift home. He was not to be released again.

In the autumn of 1998, Jeremy and I had a weekend holiday in Florence, staying in a beautiful hotel (a former villa of Mussolini’s) in the hills above Piazzale Michelangelo. We called in on the family. Wine had been banished from the apartment, because even the scent of it caused Vanni irritated temptation. He was confined to his room, where we sat with him. His whole body was wasted, and his naturally large eyes loomed ever larger in his sunken face. He was watching an idiotic game show on the television, laughing at the crass jokes. He had lost all memory of his crazy last outing. It was impossible to talk of serious matters with him. Here was a man who had once recited whole passages of Dante and entire sonnets by Petrarch from memory reduced to a merrily gibbering wreck. At one point, the game show was interrupted by a news bulletin, giving details of a train crash. Vanni averted his eyes from the screen. Death was not to be contemplated.

Vanni phoned me at intervals, saying that he would be coming to London to stay with us. The first time he called, I wondered if Dario had effected a miracle. I rang Dario, who confirmed that no miracle had taken place. It was his brother’s happy delusion that he could travel. His last call was in 2001, some weeks before his death.

I was in Padua in June 2001, intent on visiting the family in Vada, the seaside town where they have an apartment. I should have booked a train ticket in advance, because there was no possibility of a connection on the Sunday I had chosen for my visit. Every Eurostar train was full. So my last sight of my beloved friend of thirty years was in his room, with the game show in the background.

‘
Ha lasciato
,’ said Noris, his mother, when I phoned in December to ask how he was faring. ‘He’s left’ – it’s a touching euphemism for ‘dead’.

In January 2002, I was in Rome for a week, meeting up with two Romanian friends. I went to Florence, and bought twelve gladioli – Noris’s favourite flowers – before going to the familiar apartment. Noris took four of the gladioli and put them in a separate vase. They were for Vanni’s room, she said. Would I take them in? Vanni’s books were on the shelves, and on his desk was a framed photograph of him at the age of thirty or so, when he had the world before him.

I chatted with Noris as she prepared lunch. I was offered a glass of wine. There was a
grande vuoto
(a great emptiness) in their lives, Noris said. Noris and Piero had cared for their demanding first-born – with some necessary assistance from nurses – for five loving years.

I sat down to lunch with Noris, Piero, Dario and Dario’s daughter, Martina. We reminisced and smiled at happy, and indeed silly (the dish of
ciondolone
) memories. Dario speaks with a thick Florentine accent, and Noris interrupted him once, requesting him to translate what he was saying into Italian for my benefit.

After lunch, I sat with Piero, while Noris – who had been a teacher of Italian, Latin and Greek in
liceo
– helped Martina with her studies in the dining room. Martina was required to learn a passage of Dante by heart, and Noris was now correcting her mistakes and prompting her when she faltered. Piero and I stopped talking, only to hear the sixteen-year-old reciting the heartbreaking words of the doomed Francesca from the fifth canto of
Inferno
:

Nessun maggior dolore

che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria
…

(There is no greater sorrow than to remember in misery the happy time…)

As we listened to her bright voice, I looked up to see Piero weeping softly. He was remembering, he said, Vanni the brilliant schoolboy learning those very lines at the same table where Martina was sitting.

Circe was not afraid of other dogs, even those who were obviously untrained or vicious. A snarling Staffordshire bull terrier was less terrifying than its belligerent owner, who threatened to knife me for releasing her into the Dogs Only area while his pet was exercising. I explained, temperately, that I hadn’t seen either him or his dog when I had opened the gate. (I refrained from adding that I had not anticipated meeting two such ferocious beasts in my local park.) I withdrew Circe from the area, as the latterday Bill Sikes, whose beefy arms were lavishly tattooed, continued to abuse me in brutally basic language.

Only Giovanna’s cat had the power to instil terror in the otherwise fearless Circe. This mountainous tabby, whose name was Marshal Tito, first startled her when she was a few months old by suddenly dashing out of Giovanna’s front garden, arching his back, exposing his claws and hissing loudly. Circe let out a yelp and immediately backed away from the angry Tito, who seemed to be defying us to pass. From that day onwards, Circe always came to a determined halt some yards ahead of Tito’s home. I had to lead her across the road – she led me, actually – to the pavement opposite, where the tom cat seldom lurked.

Tito’s life was charmed, as his size testified. He was the most pampered animal in the neighbourhood, often to be seen spread out on the central windowsill, sleeping the sleep of the glutted. Giovanna fed her beloved tabby whenever he indicated that a meal would be welcome, his raucous miaowing silenced with offerings of freshly cooked fish or chicken. Marshal Tito was a gourmand, thanks to her tender solicitations.

I came to know Giovanna in a curious manner. A friend, who lived two doors along from her, told her of my interest in Italy, which I visited as often as I could, and that I spoke Italian. I was putting the rubbish out one morning just as Giovanna was turning the corner, walking stick in hand. ‘
Buon giorno
,’ she called out to me, and I replied in kind. Then she stopped at the gate and said something truly alarming to me, a stranger. ‘
Mio marito non mi chiava adesso
,’ she confided. Had I heard correctly? I stared at her in astonishment. ‘
Davvero
?’ I asked. ‘
Si
,
davvero
,’ she responded. ‘
Certo
.’ She was telling me what I didn’t wish to hear – that her husband no longer fucked her. She had chosen the verb
chiavare
rather than the more sedate
fare l’amore
, which would have suggested a falling out of love instead of a refusal to satisfy her physical needs. I was embarrassed by this revelation, though I did not say so. In the years of our friendship, she never repeated it. We talked of different, infinitely sadder, things.

Giovanna ruled, or tried to rule, over a troubled household. Her sexually inadequate husband’s face was set in a permanent scowl. He spent his days in the streets, out of the sight and sound of the wife he loathed. He spoke solely to himself at all times, in a mixture of Ukrainian and English. When he came home at night, he slumped in his chair, Giovanna informed me, and slept. He wasted none of his precious words on his sons, Andrea and Enrico, except to shout at them occasionally, when they presumed to address him.

Ivan was born and raised in Kiev. He arrived in England as a young man in the late 1930s. He worked for a considerable period as a sous chef in one of the grand London hotels, but was sacked after his excessive drinking became problematic. He met Giovanna, who came from a small town in the Veneto, and whose first job in England was as a maid at Eton College. Their house in the west London street where I still live has four storeys, so they must have been doing reasonably well when they moved in during the 1950s. It is hard for me to imagine the desiccated Ivan and the grossly fat Giovanna, her legs swollen from rheumatism, as ever being youthful and attractive, so cruelly had circumstances treated them.

Why did they never separate? Giovanna was staunchly Catholic, and the idea of divorce was not countenanced. In a peculiar sense, they were separate in each other’s unacknowledged company, as they sat night after night – she staring at the television; he snoozing, or remaining stubbornly silent, in his chair – like two characters out of Strindberg performing in dumbshow. I learned of this bizarre domestic routine from Giovanna, as she stooped to stroke Circe, whom she called
la bella cagna
. I learned, too, of her younger son’s drug addiction and his battles with the police, and that her eldest boy, who had once been happily married, was now back with his doting mother. He was the only member of the family, apart from Tito, who really appreciated her cooking. His English wife had murdered the pasta he loved.

Giovanna introduced me to Andrea, her
bello ragazzo
, who instantly turned ‘Paul’ into ‘Paolo’. I was Paolo thereafter. He was invariably cheerful as he jabbered in Italian or English of banal concerns, yet I quickly detected that behind his sunniness was someone seriously disturbed. He had a slight hold on reality, I discovered – the cause, perhaps, of the failure of his brief marriage. He reminded me, and continues to do so, of those unworldly, childlike grown-ups in Dickens’s novels – Mr Dick in
David Copperfield
; Fanny Cleaver, alias ‘Jenny Wren’ in
Our Mutual Friend
; even the pathetic Smike in
Nicholas Nickleby
. He had lost certain essential bearings, and needed Giovanna’s protection, as much as she – it transpired – needed his. He was a beaming outcast in that world in which most of us function. He probably still is.

There was nothing sunny about Enrico, who was known as Rico to the addicts and drunks who were his frequent companions. He was surly and short-tempered, given to sudden rages when he was not brooding on whatever was obsessing him – his next heroin fix, more likely than not. He would disappear for months at a stretch and then return to torment his mother, now almost wholly reliant on the support of Andrea. The police, to Giovanna’s understandable distress, were regular visitors to the house, especially when Rico was missing. Giovanna was not at all happy when her renegade son brought Alison, an ex-prostitute, home with him. He took her to his bedroom, which she occupied when she wasn’t in detention or prison. Alison’s command of language was severely limited, like that of the owner of the Staffordshire bull terrier, to one or two oft-repeated expletives.

Silent and sullen misery was now replaced by high drama. Alison and Rico screamed at each other with such ferocity that Ivan felt compelled to join in. Once, during yet another of Rico’s mysterious absences, Giovanna bolted the front door against Alison, who eventually availed herself of a brick which she hurled through a window. The police carted her off, to the echoing cries of her favourite word, which were aimed at the sick and increasingly desperate woman who lived in dread of becoming her mother-in-law.

With Rico on his travels and Alison locked up, peace of a kind descended on the house again. Giovanna prepared delicious meals for Andrea and Marshal Tito, and the single annoyance to cope with, by way of ignoring him, was her moody husband, who returned every night to sulk or sleep. The former chef ate in a workmen’s café in Shepherd’s Bush when he felt like eating, but he was generally sustained by the gin he consumed in amazing quantities, to judge by the empty bottles he deposited in the litter bins in Ravenscourt Park, where I exercised Circe each morning and afternoon.

I was in the park on one particular afternoon, chatting to quite the most elegant of the Bone People (as we dog lovers described ourselves) when our conversation was interrupted by something stirring in a nearby bush. Thelma, the wife of a QC and the daughter of an officer in the Indian army, went over to investigate. It was then that Ivan emerged, with his ancient raincoat (so ancient that the original brown material had turned green in places) completely unbuttoned. Thelma, casting a cold eye on that part of his body Ivan had denied Giovanna for decades, remarked calmly, ‘Oh, do put that beastly thing away. It’s not a pretty sight’, and walked back to me with the question – ‘What were we discussing? A rather wholesome subject, wasn’t it?’

Rico came home, and was joined by Alison. ‘My son with a
puttana
’, Giovanna spat out in the course of our last meeting. Between them, Rico and his blonde, loud-mouthed lover now contrived to upset the old woman in as nasty a fashion as can be conceived. The friend, Kitty, who had told Giovanna of my interest in Italian culture, offered to help Rico who was, as usual, unemployed. Kitty invited him to paint the walls of her sitting room, and a generous fee was agreed on. Rico, aided by Alison, took on the job. While Kitty and her husband, Rupert, were out, Rico stole some money from Kitty’s purse and Alison picked up a silver bowl, which she carried round to the antique-cum-junk shop run by Dennis, a smiling Jamaican with a glistening gold tooth. Dennis gave her £30 for it, realizing it was worth more. He sold it to a stranger for £300 that same afternoon. The bowl had been given to Kitty by an aunt who had had the forethought to insure it. As a consequence, Kitty collected thousands of pounds and bought a new car. But Giovanna was mortified.

Worse was to ensue. Rico, Alison and a trio of drunks were having a Special Brew party in an upstairs room. It was decided that they would play poker. One of the men said he would prefer to watch, and duly sat on a sofa, clutching his can. The poker players were not suspicious of his sustained silence and later assumed he had fallen asleep. As morning approached, Rico started to shake him and then realized he was dead, though he maintained a firm grip on the can. The corpse was removed, and Giovanna asked her God what He was thinking of to bring such pain and suffering and shame into her life.