Rancid Pansies (8 page)

My flight is, of course, delayed (the evergreen excuse, ‘due to lateness of the incoming flight’, is trotted out by uniformed drudges too bored to care whether we think they’re lying). The upshot is that, disembarking in Pisa at twenty minutes to
midnight
, I have no option but to take a taxi into town and spend the night in one of the hotels near the station. A wintry rain is falling and I’m not choosy. I check into one where I know just by looking at it that the crimson-carpeted marble staircase will go up from the foyer only to where it becomes invisible behind the lift shaft, whereupon it will revert to being a cement
emergency
stairwell signposted with icons of a running figure
pursued
by flames. I surrender my
carta d’identità
and the night clerk returns to his under-the-counter DVD.

Old and jaundiced – that’s what Samper is in danger of becoming, I think when I resume consciousness at six-thirty the next morning, blinking woozily at the ceiling. Time was, when waking early in a foreign hotel would fill me with the excitement of possibility. These days I know too much about probability. Still, I’m back in Italy, and that alone is cause for rejoicing. I switch on the TV and find the BBCNN channel, which in itself shows how addled I’ve become. It immediately reminds me that what I dislike is not so much my native land but Anglo-Saxon culture in general. Between them, American and British TV broadcasters somehow manage to imply that they have a semi-divine right to interpret and mediate the world for the rest of its six billion inhabitants. This cocky assumption is immediately implicit in the familiar (not to say over-familiar) mateyness that now booms from the TV set.

As though to share some cosmic in-joke exclusive to
themselves
, BBCNN newsreaders are specially trained to grin and
speak at the same time, which is how they introduce their weather seers and prophets who are also grinning insanely while waving vague hands towards a map of Africa in gestures that, by the time they are half completed, cross China while a farrago of pop meteorology comes
sweep
in in there from the Atlantic an
push
in those rain shahs ere over towards the west coaster Denmark which spells a largely sunny dye ere in Ukraine but over in Sarf America well, still a few otspots left from that depression centred on norfeast Brazil over the last few dyes … Hectic blank smiles, spastic gesturings, maps, images and symbols blinking and collapsing one after the other in wild cascade. The screen is a loony chaos of dizzying junk masquerading as information. Running straps top and bottom about sports, stock exchanges, President Bush shoots himself in the foot while hunting terrorists on his Texas ranch, while in the middle of the screen two presenters made of
high-impact
plastic carry on their grinning knockabout act while their mouths babble about a baby polar bear born in a zoo, Guantánamo Bay, a car that runs on Coca-Cola, a small
earthquake
in Chile, a White House aide who fucks penguins for charity, torture, car bombs etcetera, and now it’s exactly seven o’clock Southern Pacific time and time for the News but just to keep up BBCNN’s famous irritation quotient here instead is a stream of advertisements aimed at drumming up visitors to countries no one has ever wished to visit and that thousands have died trying to escape – like
Voynovia
! Whirling images of travelogue guff, national costumes, sun-tanned cleavages,
all-purpose
Zorba
-esque music, ecoparks (formerly the hunting preserves of the late dictator-for-life Bashir Mohammedov) and hotels … God, how many hotels! … those vile
caravanserais
of the jet set that resemble an architect’s idea of what Nero would have liked, all pools and palms and mother-
of-pearl
-inlaid foyers exclusively sited on yet another piece of the world’s previously unspoiled coastline, now forever ruined, the images syruped together with words supposed to convey pitiless luxury:
pampered, beyond, paradise, dreams, palace,
deserve, exquisite
– but abruptly the screen dissolves into share prices and a Chinese-looking Dax-hound in shirtsleeves and glinting horn-rims is reading some supremely resistible
information
about the equities market in Bonn off the autocue and strings of figures spool across the screen in arbitrary directions and so it all rolls on and around in a great flashing blather of interglobal garrulous garbage brought to you by BBCNN 24/7 and don’t forget it’s all there too on our website and also beamed direct to your mobile phone and hearing aid and equally accessible on your prosthetic limb or electric
toothbrush
thanks to instantaneous XP Vista chip satellite
technology
because we know how important you are and how vital time is to you and how as a top executive you absolutely need up-to-the-minute information about White House aides
pleasuring
flightless birds because otherwise some beady-eyed
bastard
who’s leaner and meaner and has the world’s biggest bladder will steal a march on you while you’re away from your desk taking a leak. And yes – see what you missed when you took your eye off the ball there as that high-pressure area came
push
in in from Mongolia where the Genghis Khan
Nirvana
Palisades Mansion awaits your exclusive and demanding custom, the first and cutest ten-star hotel ever born in
captivity
while nuclear crisis talks loom grinning and grinning all over your kaleidoscopic, epilepsy-inducing flickering screens, faster and faster until we whimper prayers for the failure of the global power grid and entertain fantasies of the
pampering
, pitiless luxury of solitary confinement and total sensory deprivation. And all we ever actually wanted, of course, was footage of the White House aide lying back in his double bed, arguing with the penguin about whose turn it is to make the coffee. That would have set us up nicely for the day.

A lot of this drivel is visible, reversed out in the bathroom mirror, as I shave. If this is how millions of people begin their day it’s small wonder they’re full of stress and ill informed. I leave the hotel without breakfast, knowing too well what awaits me. Amazing to think that in my lifetime we’ve sunk so
low that even in supposedly good hotels guests are now expected to fetch their own breakfast, not to mention put up with a miniature dustbin in the middle of the table for all the nasty little plastic pots, butter wrappers and pieces of foil – and, what is more, join a conspiracy to pretend that this is
gracious
living. I cross to the station and in the bar have a blissful espresso (why
is
Italian coffee so distinctively good?) that sends a glow through me and makes me feel I’m home at last. I salute a stalwart group of dungaree-clad workmen beginning their day with croissants and Fernet-Branca and commandeer a taxi to drive me to where I belong. The driver, relieved at not having to do the five-minute run to the airport that he could do – or give a realistic imitation of doing – with his eyes closed, warns me that he expects the trip to cost €90,
depending
on whether I want him to go via the autostrada where I will also have to pay the toll, or the old Aurelia coast road, which is slower but free. I tell him airily that since I’m an eccentric millionaire I don’t care which way he goes. I then slump back in silence to contemplate exactly what I need to do. First, find a suitable local hotel as a base to work from, then set about discovering what the position of a homeowner is whose house has been reduced to rubble – rubble that I increasingly feel I should search to see what of my former life has survived. There is also the pressing question of insurance. Suddenly having abundant money seems to be making me less fatalistic about Le Roccie. From time to time I glance up from my reverie and finally notice that whenever I have done so I have seen the Leaning Tower, now on our left and later on our right, sometimes leaning towards us and sometimes away.

‘Had you maybe thought to
leave
Pisa at some point this morning?’ I ask with amiable restraint.

‘It’s the one-way traffic system.’ The driver unwraps a stick of gum and places it on an extended grey-coated tongue the colour and texture of mouldy bread. We watch one another in the mirror. ‘Also, I’m an eccentric taxi driver.’

Touché, I suppose. Normally this would provoke Samper to
stinging repartee but I am still fighting the influence of BBCNN’s breakfast television. I very much want to be calm. The rest of the world may, if it wishes, dissolve into
schizophrenia
, frantically whirling to confront a madcap slurry of voices and images. But this is not Samper’s way, especially not after a spell in the cool backwaters of East Anglica where, as we know, feeling you’re whole is deeply refreshing and the Rev. Daphne Pitt-Bull is quietly auditioning her Pontius Pilates. I therefore renounce all contentiousness with taxi drivers and concentrate instead on my silent plans, which may yet turn out to encompass a certain amount of mayhem and revenge.

As we approach familiar terrain the air becomes hazier until it is almost foggy. The town itself is shrouded in a muffling grey sea mist. Or mountain mist? Adrian would know. But it is familiar enough at this time of the year to be nostalgic. I
experience
a pang of pleasure immediately swamped by
melancholy
. It is three months since I was last here and the sheer familiarity of the wet mountain smell coming through the
driver’s
window feels like homecoming. Ordinarily, I would stop here and lay in provisions suitable for some astounding and inventive dishes before heading out past Mosciano and up to Greppone, beyond which is my private eyrie. But today I view the place through a grey lens of sorrow, brimming with the irony of a homecoming without a home to come to.
Unavoidably
adding to my rue, I have the taxi stop outside a hotel. Nothing feels quite so wrong as checking into a hotel in one’s home town. Owing to a bizarre set of circumstances I once had to stay overnight in a hotel at Liverpool Street station and couldn’t rid myself of the idea that, because I was a Briton
living
and working in London, I ought to have been able to stay there for free, or at least pay a fraction of what it was costing foreigners and outsiders. As I disembark on the pavement the taximeter shows exactly €90, strangely enough, and I wonder if my gum-chewing chauffeur hasn’t fixed it somehow.
However
, I derive a certain bleak pleasure from staying within my role. Many years ago Nubar Gulbenkian, on a whim,
commissioned 
Rolls Royce to build him a London taxi. ‘I’m told,’ he famously observed, ‘that it will turn on a sixpence. Whatever that may be.’ In this same spirit I now hand my driver €120, saying ‘Do keep the change. You might find a use for it.’
Everyone
ought to allow himself a little vulgarity now and then, and the driver’s expression makes it all worthwhile.

Once checked in and my bag dumped, I head off along the Corso to my favourite bar. It feels both inevitable and right that before I can reach it I nearly collide with a misty figure briskly rounding the corner and suddenly I’m face to face with my old Moriarty, signor Benedetti, the dapper, shifty little estate agent who sold me my house some years ago. Because he had assured me that my sole neighbour was almost never there and was anyway mouse-quiet, I bought the house from him without a qualm. More fool I. When I tell you that the neighbour turned out to be a piano-bashing Voynovian in
permanent
residence – to wit, the egregious Marta – you will understand why relations between Samper and Benedetti have at best been distantly civil over the years. It turned out that the unscrupulous little rodent had told Marta exactly the same thing about me and it was not long before she was countering my polite remonstrations about her piano playing with
gratuitous
remarks about my singing: an impasse that led to all sorts of unpleasantness. Ever after, the difficult civility that Benedetti and I have maintained has been based on a kind of parody of elaborate Renaissance manners such as Castiglione’s ideal courtier would have approved. On my side it has also been inspired by the enjoyment I get from watching his losing battle with male pattern baldness, a field on which
noblesse
and chivalry are sadly powerless. Benedetti’s startling new
tactics
in his trichological campaign are, in fact, the first thing I notice as we courteously side-step before recognising one another as old foes. Gone is the old hair-weaving ploy. In its place, exactly as I predicted, is a glossy, shameless rug. It’s a very good rug, and must have cost him a lot of money. It reminds me that this man ought really to be cherished for the
gaiety he brings to our lives. I had similar feelings about Jerry Falwell, the late American evangelist. Anyone who can accuse one of the Teletubbies of being homosexual, and do it with a straight face, is a priceless asset to the human race. Benedetti’s rug is perfect in that it is very slightly wrong: just a shade too black, just a little too full, and only barely avoiding the
pompadour
look of Elvis Presley or President Marcos, which makes me think he hoped to add a much-needed inch to his stature. The sight of it gives me immediate strength.

‘Signor Benedetti!’ I cry. ‘Dottore! How is it that the
pleasure
of running into you always exceeds my liveliest
anticipation
? And how young you’re looking! Truly, you must allow me to say there is something almost uncanny about your refusal to age like the rest of us. Sometimes it crosses my mind that you may have sold your soul to Satan in exchange for eternal youth. If you have, I would be much in your debt for an introduction to His Infernal Majesty.’

‘Signor Samper! Maestro! How greatly I have missed that wicked English humour of yours – so piquant, yet so urbanely expressed! As you know, we do have a few other English
residents
here, including a couple with a blind daughter who arrived last year. But where the art of conversation is
concerned
they’re simply not in your league. As an honest man I tell you, this winter has been all the drearier for your absence, and no less so for knowing its cause. I have been counting the days until at last I would be able to commiserate with you on the loss of your beautiful home. Believe me, even when I heard you were safe I felt a shaft pierce my heart in sympathy.’