Three Stages in Learning to Fly

Read this, a short piece by Vanessa Gebbie. It’s wonderful.

Love tiff at Arcore

I’m not quite convinced by this story. Berlusconi’s wife has suffered in silence all these years, even putting up with her husband’s insinuations that she’s having an affair with Massimo Cacciari, philosopher and Mayor of Venice. Now she loses her marital rag because he’s been caught flirting with a starlet (employed, not surprisingly, by Mediaset, B.’s TV empire) on a programme broadcast by, you guessed it, Mediaset.

Given that all publicity is good, this won’t do Berlusconi any harm at all. It’s given him a chance to talk about the value of marriage, respect for the family, etc. at a time when these issues are front page. Some of his best wife jokes are already being recycled. He’s a comic, a little bit naughty, a devoted husband, a flirt. What’s not to vote?

Old Mother Benedict

Seen in a restaurant in Cologne, opposite the cathedral, during World Youth Day 2005. Would that Rome were Cologne!

FRIDGE POEM

This is a homage to Christopher Smart and to his “Cat Jeoffry/For he is the servant of the Living God”.

Click on the image to embiggen.

What’s civil about this?

The government is still arguing about exactly what to do with all these people who just don’t want to get married and breed. And not only the government. The Italian president, ex-communist Giorgio Napolitano, threw in his tuppenny-hapenny worth a couple of days ago, announcing that the Vatican’s views on PACS, or civil unions, should be taken into account. If this was a conciliatory gesture, it backfired. The episcopal council yesterday said that no compromise was possible, the traditional role of the family was sacred, marriage was an absolute value, etc. The usual position, in other words, and why not? Isn’t grunting what pigs do best, even exclusively?

With 56% of Italians now in favour of civil unions, the opinion of God’s ferret and his merry gang of sex-obsessed septuagenarians is daily less significant. The problem’s within the government itself. Mastella, Minister of Justice, refuses to endorse the bill as a matter, apparently, of conscience after a career based on the most shameless political expediency. An anti-abortionist called Paola Binetti whines on about family, family, family, as though marriages will crumble at the merest whiff of visiting rights in hospital. (Hey! Why go to all the fuss of getting married? I can watch you die without it!)

Meanwhile, the two women responsible for drawing up the bill, because of course it’s women’s work, are arguing about how long a civil union should last before one can inherit the pension of the other. They’re doing a Sugar and Spice routine, like police interrogators. Sugar says five years is long enough. Spice says fifteen, but may come down to ten. Will this be applied retroactively? I don’t think so. Great news to couples in their fifties or sixties, who may have been together for decades, like my friend Dan and his partner.

And how long do widows/widowers (I’m talking the real thing here, obviously, the genuinely ex-married) have to be together to qualify? Not one fucking day.

Tiny bitter-sweet unions

This sign has been put up at the entrance to the Jewish quarter of Fondi, where I live, as part of a council drive to attract international tourism to the town. The missing word in line three of the English translation (for want of a more precise word) is ghetto. I wonder who felt the need to deface it, and why.

But the real question is who on earth did this translation? Surely the nephew of someone in the council. This is low-level nepotism, but you can find the same kind of thing at Fiumicino. I’ll be keeping my eyes open.

Oh yes, the title of the post refers to an item on a Chinese restaurant menu in Rome. The Italian was cipolline in agrodolce, better translated as small onions in sweet and sour sauce.

The last time I saw Richard

…was Rome in 1984. He’d recycled himself as a tout for study holidays in England, with a windowless office in the basement of a travel agency near the station and a Battle of Britain style moustache (or maybe he’d always had that). He’d found the job through some family connection so plus ça change… He’d lost the haunted look he had on Capri and acquired a jaunty air that went with his new status as salesman.

He was living in an illegal structure on the roof of an abandoned new brutalist building that had once housed the Rome offices and showroom of Alfa Romeo (and is now the home of the Faculty of Letters of the university I work for). I remember dark blue carpets running up the walls, though that can’t have been the case, and one of the first home computers I’d ever seen, with a program for landing planes on it. It had the air of a fuck pad, though not much fucking went on in it as far as I could tell. The word I’m looking for, to describe both Richard and his flat, indeed his life style at that time, is louche, tinged with sadness. We had a drink one evening on what he called his terrace, an expanse of untreated concrete roof surrounded by derelict factories, raised dual carriageways, railway cuttings.

Richard wouldn’t believe I was gay, not really gay. I didn’t have what he called a ‘gay mouth’, the infallible test apparently, a pursed affair, like Charles Hawtrey saying Matron. I had a boyfriend called Ian at the time, whose surface sweetness concealed a worryingly anarchic streak, as though Andy Pandy had a belt of explosives under his pyjamas. He looked a few years younger than he was (23), and Richard disapproved. The fact that Ian didn’t have a gay mouth either only confirmed his feeling that I was being taken for a ride. (I wasn’t.)

He changed his mind one evening in an Irish pub called the Old Goldoni, behind Piazza Navona, when Ian and I, hopelessly drunk on a mixture of wine and Guinness, began to neck for all we were worth, rolling across the table and onto the floor. Despite being a converted theatre, the Old Goldoni wasn’t really the place for this kind of behaviour but the only person who seemed to mind was Richard, who’d bonded with the owner in a laddish way and felt we were disgracing him, as I suppose we were. We ended up in the Four Rivers fountain in Piazza Navona that night, narrowly escaping arrest. I don’t know what happened to Richard after that.

Richard on the run

I was on holiday in Amalfi with friends, over twenty years ago now. We’d taken the ferry to Capri for the day and were walking across the Piazzetta when I heard someone call my name. Richard was sitting alone at one of the tables, wearing a hat and large dark glasses. He looked like a flushed, down-at-heel Truman Capote. I only recognised him when he slid the glasses down his nose and beckoned us over. You look like you’re on the run, I said, laughing. I am, he said. Who from? The Mafia. Well, the Camorra actually. We didn’t believe him at first. This is what he told us.

He’d been invited out to dinner by his girlfriend’s father, a well-placed lawyer in Salerno, where Richard worked. The dinner was formal and Richard was seated, somewhat against his will, beside an over-dressed middle-aged woman. She asked him what he did and he told her that he taught at the university. He didn’t say that he was a lettore and it probably wouldn’t have made any difference if he had; she wasn’t the kind of woman who’d understand the niceties of academic hierarchies. She looked interested for the first time since they’d started talking (I admit to adding this detail myself) and started to ask him exactly what he did. Richard’s what my mother calls a bit of a romancer so I imagine he skipped the humbler aspects. Whatever he said he must have given her the impression that he had a certain clout. As they were leaving the table he kissed her hand and said, and I quote: Of course if there’s ever anything I can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask. Adding to us: As one does in these situations. Does one? I said. I don’t. You don’t live in Salerno, he said. You kissed her hand? I said. He nodded, hopelessly.

A few days later, she called him.
– I have a little favour to ask of you, she said.
– Of course, said Richard, sweating.
– It’s a trifling matter. Un niente. My son is enrolled in your university. In the faculty of law. He’s supposed to be taking an exam this month. Perhaps you could help him?
-Of course, said Richard, relieved. I’ll do everything I can. Ask him to come to my ricevimento. On Friday mornings.
There was a pause.
– That would be rather awkward, she said.
– Well, perhaps he can call me at home, said Richard, one evening. Any evening will do. If that’s easier. I can give him some tips to help him.
A longer pause.
– I don’t think you quite understand, she said. He’s a very busy young man. He really doesn’t have time to come back to Italy and take the exam.
– I’m sorry?
– He’s in New York. It’s out of the question that he should come back to Italy to take one small exam. I’m sure you’ll be able to help him. I’m sure you’ll find a way to help him solve this little problem.
– I’ll see what I can do,’ he said.
A much longer pause.
– You do know who I am, don’t you? she said.

Her husband was the chief lawyer of the Nuova Camorra boss, Raffaele Cutolo, serving a life sentence at that time in a carpeted cell in Poggioreale. Richard’s girlfriend asked him why he wanted to know. His eyes filled with tears when he described the way she pleaded and shouted and said that her father would kill her, and that Richard was pathetic, and that she never wanted to see him again. If he didn’t do this one little thing.

The thing is that he would have done it if he could. It wasn’t wrong. It was just not feasible. I think he was angry not because the woman had put him in such a position, but that he hadn’t had the power to give her what she wanted. Her little favour.

Thank you, Jane!

Thinking about Cologne

… made me think about an exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, entitled DC: Naked Drawings, a large white room full of drawings done directly on the walls by a Romanian artist called Dan Perjovschi. It was a great show, graffiti that didn’t congratulate or preen itself, that didn’t pretend to be both radical and desperate for gallery space; angry and amused and wry. The photograph (mine) isn’t great but it’s the idea that counts, and the sly simplicity of the execution. The catalogue talks about democratisation, but surely that misses the point. This kind of stuff, if it works, is as hard as drawing a perfect circle.

It was amusing to see how people reacted differently to the show. Some people walked in and glanced round for a moment, then left. Some stayed, and laughed, and thought. Others were entertained initially and then offended, and these seemed to fall into two categories; Americans, for whose government little respect was shown, and young Catholics in Cologne for World Youth Day. Jan wasn’t thrilled about them at all.

Because thinking about Cologne makes me think about Jan…