The Laughter of Carthage (32 page)

‘Where’s the army going?’ It was rare for Esmé to ask a direct question.

‘Going?’ Santucci pretended astonishment. ‘Why, to a war, of course, pretty dove! The details aren’t important, I assure you. They are soldiers. They know only fighting. One provides a service - in this case a war - which will satisfy their blood lust and keep them from doing much harm to honest civilians. But it is all a question of telegrams and the telephone. By now I have a good commission waiting for me in Benghazi. The secret is to have pockets of credit all over the world, then travel towards them. Spread the money as far as you can. Have people pay it into banks in London or Lahore. It gives you an incentive to visit places you might otherwise never go to. Once there, why a fresh opportunity usually presents itself. If someone is looking for a stockbroker, I am a stockbroker. If they want to buy corn, I become a corn merchant. It’s easy enough to be a middleman. One relies on the impatience, the greed, the uncertainty of one’s fellows. People would rather deal with a jack-of-all-trades who is personally attractive and willing to talk the dirty business of money and transportation, than with an expert who is aloof. Since the goods rarely pass through my hands, I remain innocent of any misuse or minor breach of the law. I’ll never have the massive fortune of a real entrepreneur, but I live well and, most important,’ he winked at Esmé, ‘I have girls in every port.’

‘I can’t think why more people don’t do what you do.’ She was honestly puzzled. His matter-of-fact tone had convinced her. She had missed his irony.

He stroked his perfect waistcoat then broke wind behind his hand. ‘Because they are not Annibale Santucci, little dove.’ He expressed sober regret. He was profoundly sympathetic of everyone else in the world. ‘I’ll take you back to the hotel. I have some personal business now. You’ll forgive me if I don’t invite you.’

The bill was paid in banknotes of intricate beauty.

We saw our friend briefly the following morning, when he kissed us both farewell and whispered to Esmé that the hotel bill was settled for the next two weeks. ‘By then you’ll be on your way to London.’ He turned to me. ‘I wish you luck with your inventions, professor. Write me a postcard. Invite me to stay with you when you have a place. There must be business I can do in London. It is after all a city of thieves - a nation of thieves, by God!’

Laughing, I told him I did not have his address in Milan. Where could I write to him?

‘To Mendoza’s in Rome. He’ll always find me. To
The Wasp.
Any of those regular cafés.’ He paused by the door to draw a piece of hotel notepaper from his inside pocket. ‘I have written down the address of some friends. Wonderful people. You’ll fall in love with them. They’re exiles here. I’ve written a note. Visit them if you can.’

We watched the gigantic green automobile move into the traffic of the Boulevard du Temple. She was like a ceremonial barge negotiating a fast flowing river. Her horn sounded. Her engine began to rage like a million demons as Santucci accelerated towards the animated statuary of the Place de la République. It was a beautiful morning. We did not go back into the hotel but, hand in hand as always, we turned down the Rue du Turenne in the general direction of the Hotel de Ville. A light rain was falling through the early autumn sunshine. Everyone had umbrellas except us and we did not want one; we welcomed this gorgeous rain as enthusiastically as we welcomed everything Paris offered. Most leaves were still green, but here and there they were golden or brown. There was a strange atmosphere, a mixture of sweet melancholy and a hectic, celebratory air. In Paris, since November 1918, a huge party had been taking place, twenty-four hours a day.

Before long we should be invited to join that party. We would unhesitatingly accept. For us at least the Jazz Age had its beginnings in Paris.

* * * *

ELEVEN

PARIS IS NO COMMON HARLOT. She is still a queen-whore, disdaining pimps, dismissing suitors with careless flattery, knowing that if her beauty fades a little year by year, she still remains elegantly attractive, for what nature takes away, cosmetics can easily replace. Paris of course has no heart of gold. She is a cold, mercenary goddess, pricing sexuality as precisely as she weighs confectionery; and she can be surprisingly prim, because fundamentally she remains a provincial matron. She sets high store by appearances. She knows the exact value of every pretty sentiment and she retails Romance by the gram. She is lace starched into stone. She is a corset braced with bone. She is a lure, a fly, a scent; a whiff of delight designed to part you from your cash with a girlish wink. The wink alone is worth a hundred francs. Charm has its commodity price; it would be quoted on the Bourse if someone ever dared reveal the truth. But no one ever will, or will ever be listened to, at any rate: for Paris, more than any other city, is dedicated to obfuscation, disguise, misleading decoration, since where there is ambiguity, as everyone knows, there is always money to be made. Few Parisians would ever accept the truism that the more one finds talk of love, flirtation, declarations of undying sentiment, the more one will discover rapacity, venality and hard cruelty. Soft words often exist in direct ratio to the greed they disguise.

Paris has been a grand courtesan for hundreds of years. She has suffered indignities (what harlot has not?) and even known periods of enforced virtue, domestic dullness, of half-hearted remorse; but she has recovered herself soon enough, flashed her scarlet petticoats, put on her most ravishing hat, displayed herself in all her well cut coquetry with its tiny betraying touch of vulgarity, the suggestion of a bawdy pout; but how outraged she is when her virtue is questioned! How she shrieks and threatens the Law. Moreover, if she fails to receive satisfaction by this means, she will forget her ladylike pretensions altogether. She will rush to attack. Yet possibly the person she threatens refuses to be frightened by her: whereupon she becomes her soft-voiced, placatory, eyelash-fluttering, melting professional self, full of crooned apologies and endearments, offering comforting luxury in her arms. Later, if she feels she can succeed without detection, she will murder her supposed conqueror while he sleeps, strip him naked and toss his body from her carriage into the river.

Paris is a wistful, acquisitive lullaby. She is able to pretend to good manners with all the skill of the truly arrogant. She preserves her looks at any cost, whether to friend or foe. When she has fallen to an enemy it has been with a glance over her shoulder, to make a virtue of surrender: it is hard, but what else can I do? I am helpless to defend myself. This harlot is a screen upon which men project their supreme fantasies, invest her with qualities she does not actually possess, which no city could ever possess, but which their imagination demands
should
exist. And women are defeated by her, too. She takes them by the arm, she shows them the secrets of her beauty, she pretends to make them confidantes while plotting their profound destruction. Occasionally, if her plans all fail, she will let herself go. Her hair falls prettily out of place. She slumps. Her little dress speaks of impoverished courage, she sings with hopeless, sardonic determination of betrayal, death and the end of romance. And so again, with this affectation of vulnerability, she wins sentimental allies, makes new conquests, until it is safe to be her old, jaunty, grasping self again. She knows how much to drink and exactly what she should eat. She is dedicated to appearances above principle, graciously applauding the appropriate lie while impatiently frowning upon inexpert honesty. And how she loves to entertain soldiers; preferably her own, but any soldier will do. She has a relish for gold braid and silver medals; the sniff of wounds and gunpowder from a safe distance is sufficient to excite her without alarming her; the brave sound of a marching band, the curl of an unblooded banner, the prance of the parade-ground stallion are as good as cash in hand, for she knows the weakness of soldiers and can price them out to the last sou. She loves fame. She pursues lions. And if no lions exist, she will manufacture some out of whole cloth. Where there are inflated egos, there are wallets to maintain them. And equally she worships intrigue; the more secrets there are, the more golden louis there are to buy silence. So her politics are conducted in hidden chambers, in bedrooms, in alleys and well guarded houses, while the rhetoric of her deputies is excessive in its glorious idealism, its talk of honour, glory and morality. Paris does not possess the shallow cynicism of the wounded young; frequently she will feign a horror of cynicism, make a huge protest in favour of the virtues of sentiment and humanity, but by her actions, like any very successful harlot, she is actually cynical to the core, and the only value she places on affection is what she can store in her private safe. Paris will rob the stranger more prettily, if she has to, than any other city. She begins by taking your money and then, if she finds it is worth something to her, your heart, your talent, finally your life. In contrast to Paris, all other cities are peopled with amateurs. She looks upon rivals with contempt or loathing. If they are brash or obvious or crude, she is offended, fearing their bad name might attach itself to her. She does not wish the game to be given away. She has been called an aristocrat, a madonna, an angel. She believes one day she will wake to discover she no longer need maintain a pose and will overnight have become a genuine gentlewoman, a dignified dowager like Vienna or Prague, able at long last to age gracefully, her power gained not by means of blackmail and flattery, but from the world’s respect. It is impossible. She knows it is impossible, but she clings to the hope as another might cling to her religion.

In Paris rather than in Rome one discovers the final expression of refined Catholicism. The Italians are notoriously careless of their history; they once ruled the world and know they could do so again if they cared enough; but are too easily bored with power. Even Mussolini began handing over the reins of his nation almost as soon as he gained them. His death was a tragedy. He had already shrugged and walked away. He might have wound up living a happy life, running a shop next door to mine, perhaps a little restaurant or a dry cleaner’s. And Rome is a fierce mother. When she tries to sell her favours she stands on a broken monument lifting her skirts and shouting for customers, just as if she were hawking hot chestnuts or ice cream. She has neither the patience nor the ambition for suggestive pouts or coy glances. She would rather get it over with and have something approaching a good time while she did it. She is and always has been more pagan than Catholic. To her, religion is worthless unless full-blooded and passionate. French priests, famous for their intellects, their cunning manipulations, their calculating and controlled ferocity, are symbolised best by Cardinal Richelieu who foreshadowed Lenin, a fanatic willing to destroy any individual who, by his very individuality, threatened the abstract idea of the State, his actual religion: himself. By definition a dedicated Catholic seeks power: every law his Church maintains speaks of it. The demand of women to multiply has the twofold effect of subjugating wives and increasing the numbers of children over whom power can be exercised. How beautifully the French have shaped their religion to their needs. It is a religion which makes no real demands upon its followers, save that they maintain appearances. There are certain prices to pay for the continuation of the proper façade: the occasional discreet penance. But God, to them, is an eighteenth-century Grand Seigneur, turning a blind eye to any crime so long as His own convenience is undisturbed. He possesses the practical rationality of the merchant, like so many French philosophers, and keeps neat accounts. And He would rather cathedrals be restored and decorated and organs not play out of tune, than have vulgar people throw themselves upon the floors of His houses in a flurry of unseemly hysteria. The French have refined their religion to its highest possible point. The Italians have left theirs alone in all its half-pagan incongruity, while the Spanish, who never quite lost the habit of human sacrifice, are barely restrained from soaking His altars in the blood of bulls and goats.

With what chill and lofty dedication did Richelieu destroy the Huguenots! Probably not a single expression of emotion ever passed his lips. He understood their point of view. But the Spanish Inquisition pursued its butchery with genuine lust, with hatred and hot cruelty, glad of the opportunity to fulfil its love for ritual murder; honouring its dark God with the screams of a million souls in the extremes of anguish; sending the stench of burning flesh to grace His quivering, bovine nostrils, for it is Moloch Himself who hides behind the mask of the Spanish Jehovah. Here lurks Carthage and all the sons of Shem, the descendants of Babylon, Assyria, Canaan, Aramea, Arabia, Ethiopia and Israel. The bull-gods grumble and prowl through the streets of Barcelona still.

The knives of the French are needles to prick a man’s life out of him, inch by tiny inch. They pretend friendship. They made me the toast of the town. I was one of their lions for a while. But Parisians only pretend to accept the manifestations of progress; to them these things are toys. One has to make bright, noisy, colourful things to impress them. Paris has a whore’s taste in trinkets. Santos-Dumont became their idol because his balloons and airships were gaudy and buzzed and because his attempts at powered flight were spectacular, highly publicised, conducted in machines of multicoloured silk! Much the same can be said of all their flyers, who had dash and filigree and well cut uniforms, but were rather poor at application, like the show cavalry of the nineteenth century. They were interested, as always, in appearances rather than pure science. To prove myself to them I was forced to become something of a Barnum (one of their favourite Americans). I was very quickly a darling of the Left Bank. I met every artist and intellectual worthy of the name. I was courted and proposed to by both men and women. I smoked opium in the houses of fashionable hostesses and sniffed ‘coco’ in Lesbian garrets. They took me up. I was their Monsieur ‘P’, their ‘Professeur Russe’, their ‘Petit Colonel’. Esmé and I were Hansel and Gretel wandering into the Palace of Versailles. We were overwhelmed. From Santucci’s friends, the exiled anarchists called Peronini, both of whom sported dyed red hair and masculine evening dress at all hours of the day, we moved into the company of criminals and radicals. I shook hands with Lamont himself. I shared a table with Antoinette Ferraud and Wanda Sylvano at Laperousse. The great astronomer Lalande would lunch regularly with us at the Café Royal and there I met his cousin Apollinaire, just returned from four years in the Foreign Legion. But for all they protested undying friendship and admiration of my creative genius, not one could help us in our efforts to reach England.