La Superba (15 page)

Don took a sip of his gin and tonic and asked the passing waitress for some extra ice and a
lacrima
.

“And now, of course, you'll ask whether I can still remember the limerick.

    
A math teacher from Calcutta,

    
was stuck with an incredible stutter.

    
But his girl smiled with glee,

    
for she found out that he

    
took more time than others to fu…fu…fu…

“Only the last line still rhymed, you know. But you got that already. When I read it out to my mother that evening, she laughed. She kissed my forehead. The next morning I took the bus to the barracks.

“A year later I was in Malaysia. For the so-called Emergency. You weren't allowed to call it a war, but it was one. It began in 1948 and didn't end until 1960 or 1961. I was in the parachute regiment. One day a grenade exploded a little too close by. All my guts were blown open. I'll show you the scars. Look. See that? I almost died. Because of a limerick. I almost died because of a fucking poem.”

5.

Quite frequently he'd emerge from his hotel in the afternoon with visible wounds from the night before. Scabs on his head or elbows or bloodstains on his shirt. When I asked him once what had happened, he spread his arms and replied triumphantly,
“I can't remember anymore.” And when I carried on asking, he said, “Normal people fall down the stairs, I fall up the stairs.” And when I carried on asking some more, he said, “There's a security camera next to the entrance to my hotel. I'd love to see a compilation of all my spectacular homecomings.”

Slowly something else began to dawn on me, something he kept carefully hidden behind his suits and ties, his impeccable appearance—a few bloodstains notwithstanding—his Oxbridge accent, his
lacrima
gin, and his residency in a hotel room from whose window he'd hung a Union Jack. He was totally broke.

It became clear to me one evening when he asked me to come up to his hotel room to fix his television. Repairing it wasn't the problem. That was a simple matter of putting the plug in the socket. But the socket! A kind of pre-war construction made of several cracked Bakelite components. There were bare wires. “Is this yours?” I asked. “No, it's the hotel's.” And then I took a closer look. There were patches of damp everywhere. The wallpaper was peeling from the walls. His bed was a yellowed mattress on top of an old door. I went to the bathroom, but I'd have been better off not going. There were empty gin bottles and the remains of kebabs all over the place.

“How much do you pay for this room, Don?”

“I've been here so long. The owner's an old friend of mine. I've known him since—”

“How much do you pay for this room, Don?”

“Two hundred.”

“And how often do they clean it?”

“Sometimes.”

“How often?”

“The problem is I have to clean it myself before the cleaner dares come in.”

We carried on our conversation out on the square. He took a sip of gin and tonic.

“Just before my father died,” he said, “he summoned me to his study. It was the first time we'd spoken to each other since he took me out of school. Well, to say ‘we spoke to each other' is an exaggeration. He gave me a file. It contained all the paperwork for his pension, his life insurance, my mother's, and my pension, all perfectly documented and ordered and all of them with one of the most traditional and reliable banks in England.”

A waitress went past so he ordered ice and a
lacrima
.

“Barings Bank.”

He paused for a moment.

“I don't know if it made the news in your country at the time. In England it was a drama. Ten thousand respectable, honest, hardworking people lost all their savings in one fell blow.”

His eyes filled with tears.

“Nick Leeson. I'll never forget his name. It was 1995. He was a trader for Barings Bank in Hong Kong. He had gambled away millions of their capital on the stock market and then billions more in an attempt to make good on his loss, then he fled to Thailand in his Ferrari. They got him in the end, tried him, and sent him to prison. He did his time. Then he wrote a book that became a bestseller and made him a multi-millionaire again. But Barings Bank was bankrupt. And do you know what it means when a bank goes bankrupt? I know you know what it means.

“If I add it all up, what with my time in the army, my work as a Cambridge professor, everything I did in Italy after that—not to mention the work I carried on doing for certain British contacts, but I can't tell you anything about that unfortunately—and then my father's money and a little from my mother on top—if you'd added it all up, I'd have received a pension of more than eight thousand pounds a month. How much is that in euros? But I lost the lot. I'm one of the Barings bankruptcy victims. I'm one of Nick Leeson's victims. And now I live on a small state pension of a few hundred euros. Just enough to pay for that shithole I live in. And the rest goes on drink and cigarettes. And every month I have to choose whether to take my shirts to the drycleaners or get my shoes resoled. That's how tight things are.”

He took a large sip of gin and tonic.

“That's how tight things are. But you can also look at it another way—imagine if I'd had eight thousand euros a month to drink, I'd have been long dead. Cheers, big ears. Here's to Nick Leeson.”

6.

We began to worry about Don. The crowds that filed past his table every evening to embrace him and kiss his ring couldn't see it. They saw the clown they hoped to see, and he delivered on cue. We were a handful of foreigners—a Scot, a Paddy, a couple of Brits, a Pole who'd married in, a Czech—who saw him most days on the square. It was a group of good friends, from whom I often distanced myself because the language of communication was English. And that wasn't even the real problem. It was the kind of small,
expat community that talked about the test match results, the Queen Mum, and the best place in Genoa to buy Marmite. The aftershocks of British colonialism. Speaking their language allowed you into the club—but let's see if you really are civilized and know the cricket scores. And in the meantime, have a laugh about the Italians who happen to have the privilege of temporarily welcoming you, with your superior culture and your superior irony, to their corrupt and endlessly inefficient country, at which you shake your head pityingly, because there is still scaffolding up that was there six months ago and your doorstep hasn't been repaired yet. I didn't come south to listen to superior shorts-wearing northerners cracking jokes about the south in their superior language, with all kinds of puns on the names of English cricketers and little else that was of importance that day in the Commonwealth. But they were friends of Don's. And they were nice people. So I couldn't and didn't want to keep ignoring them.

We had a crisis meeting in a place Don would never find us: the Mandragola. Rebecca, the owner of Caffè Letterario was there, too, because as manageress of his favorite haunt, she was best placed to pass judgment on Don's situation. The meeting was opened by our Scottish friend, who thanked us all for attending and emphasized that this meeting should never come to Don's attention. We all nodded obediently. Then he explained in a nutshell what our problems came down to by describing Don's skin color. He said it was “olive green.” At this, a lively discussion sprung up. The lobby for “moss green” seemed to gain the majority stake at first, but after a veto from the Eastern Bloc countries, a compromise was reached: “puke green.” The next item on the agenda was his physical health.
A small minority described him as “skinny.” But they were overruled by a majority who considered him “emaciated.” The debate finally moved on to his many injuries and their failure to heal properly and the cause of his strangely swollen stomach. Our Scottish chairman suggested a compromise: that Don, despite the differing interpretations the various parties might have, was looking unhealthier by the day. This motion was unanimously approved.

At that moment, Rebecca took the floor. “I love Don,” she said. “He's a living legend. I don't mind if he drinks himself to death on my terrace. He's an adult. It's his choice. And in some ways, I feel honored, although perhaps that's the wrong choice of words. I mean—”

We nodded understandingly. We knew exactly what she meant.

“What I mean is this. On an average evening, he easily drinks a whole bottle. Gin. A liter. That's forty euros, retail price. And he can't even pay the cost price. Sorry to be so prosaic. Don is a poem. But I still have to cash up at the end of the night.”

There was a silence. And suddenly all of Don's friends had places they needed to be. I stayed behind with Rebecca. “The most important thing,” I said, “is that Don never finds out that we met up to try and help him. He has his pride. It's the only thing he has left. He would never forgive us.”

Rebecca didn't say anything.

7.

“After Malaysia, I was posted to Japan and Korea. Japan was a doddle. It meant drinking G&Ts with the Japanese. I'll give you two guesses who won. And in Korea I had a kind of admin job. For
a month. And after that I was at a secret British naval base in Saudi Arabia for a while. It was so secret, even in the upper echelons of the British Army there weren't many people who knew of its existence. But the Israelis knew about it. And they demonstrated that by flying over on a weekly basis and bombarding the runways. Symbolically. With flowers. As a warning. To make it clear that they were keeping an eye on us and that nothing would stop them if they did decide to bomb us because we weren't keeping our heads down. Sometimes they'd come a day earlier or later. And once the Saudi pilots had just gone out to train when they came along. All the pilots were princes. Terribly spoiled. And terrified of the Israelis. And two of them were so terrified they used their ejector seats and let their expensive fighter planes crash in the desert. We laughed a lot about that.

“But Malaysia was tough. That was real. We were given a jungle survival training course in Kuala Lumpur. What was edible and not. How to make drinking water from your own piss. There were these plants with huge leaves. Really. This big. We called them elephant's ears. They're poisonous. If you eat them raw, you die. But if you soak them for a night in your own excrement, they become extremely nutritious. And in case of emergency, I always carried a bottle of gin in my rucksack.

“We were hunting CTs. Communist terrorists. These days I'd call them freedom fighters. Pitched our tents behind their lines. The stress. The stress was the worst thing. Four men keeping guard and after four hours being relieved by the other four. Taking turns to sleep in four-hour shifts. And never shooting. If only that was true. That would have made it a little more bearable. I have my doubts
those CTs existed. I never saw one.

“There were Frenchmen, though. On our rugby pitch. They came from Vietnam. Their base was surrounded and they were evacuated by helicopter. To our rugby pitch in Malaysia. They'd had a lot thrown at them, you could see that. Wounded. Torn uniforms. Lice, leeches, gunshot wounds, and no gin and tonic for weeks. So, us Brits, we started by giving those Frenchmen a good wash. A great heap of tattered uniforms on the rugby field, gasoline, and a lighter. And there they were, stark naked in a row in front of the showers. The officers, too. Their beer bellies gave them away.”

He ordered ice and a
lacrima
.

“We called them the FBBs. Fat beer bellies.”

8.

“In total, I spent eight years in the army. Eight fucking years of my life. It was a complete waste of time, all things considered. I learned nothing but skills I hoped I would never ever need—like shooting freedom fighters, cooking elephant's ears in my own excrement, and catching shrapnel in my stomach. It was finally time to do something useful with my life. Useful mainly in the sense of easier to combine with my thirst. I wanted to sit in bars like a civilized human being, not in submerged manholes in the jungle. I could put my talents to better use. And my illustrious career proved me right.

“I decided to study. English literature at Cambridge. But there was one problem. I'd never finished school. I didn't have any
A-levels. And you need A-levels to get in, don't you? I mean, that wasn't enough, you had to submit essays, too, take entrance exams, that kind of thing; but without A-levels, you didn't even get the chance to try. So I had to come up with a plan.

“I had a mate in the army, a simple lad from Birmingham. He couldn't write his own name, but he was brilliant at drawing. He made clever cartoons of our officers on the backs of bread packets or whatever he could lay his hands on. It was a wonder it never got him into trouble. They were so cruel, so accurate, so good. I thought: that's the man I need.

“I can't remember his name. Peter. Something like that. Or Brian. But that doesn't matter. He was brilliant at drawing. Or did I already say that? And he owed me a favor. Ha-ha! It still makes me laugh to think of it. That was in Japan. No! Korea! It was in Korea. I remember it well. He had a lady visitor—that was our euphemism at the time. A scarlet lady. They popped up fairly often on Her Majesty's Royal Army base. But of course it was strictly prohibited, you'll understand. To pluck the fruits. To consume, for a modest fee, the ripe fruits that had fallen on the ground in front of your very feet. We were British, weren't we? Ha-ha! And this Richard or Mark or whatever his name was had found one who screamed like a stuck pig. I still remember it well. I was standing in the corridor keeping a look out. And then one of those five star generals came along ‘to inspect the troops,' as it were. Can you imagine? No, listen. That Korean floozy lying there screaming like all the karaoke bars in Taipei put together and the general coming down the corridor. Do you know what I did? I faked a coughing fit. I coughed her out. I coughed a hysterical little Korean whore
all the way home. The general was worried. ‘Asthma, General. I suffer from terrible asthma. And being in the tropics doesn't make it any better. The medical examiner didn't want to pass me when I signed up. I got down on my knees and begged him to show some mercy. My greatest desire was to fight for England, the queen, and the free western democracy.' The general gave me a pat on the shoulder and walked on.