The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Trip Fiction is a brilliantly conceived site that puts together two of my passions: books and travel. Its strap line is “See a location through an author’s eyes”, and it works like this. You click on a city and up pops a list of books set in that city. You can refine your search by author and genre. Let me give you an example. Say you want to read something set in Rome. You click on Rome. You’re in the mood for a crime novel. You click on crime. (This is pure hypothesis, obviously.) In the time it takes your provider to do your bidding, you see a list of crime novels set in the Eternal City, the second of which just happens to be Any Human Face. (Which, incidentally, has 4.5 stars, 0.5 stars more than any other novel on the page. Just saying.)

I’m actually here to tell you that Trip Fiction very kindly invited me to review The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated by Alison Anderson). It’s set in what may be my favourite city, so how could I refuse? You can read my review of the novel here.

The Slave House

In 1978, I moved to Portugal to work as a teacher of English for a private language school in a coastal town south of Lisbon called Setúbal. It wasn’t an easy time for me. I was 24, single, unqualified apart from a degree in English that nobody seemed to think much of. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, nor where I might want to do it, and finding myself in the aftermath of an apparently peaceful revolution in a country of which I knew almost nothing turned out to compound my sense of general misplacement. With not very much to lose, it was a time for trying things out.

The Slave House is a novella that draws on some of my experiences during the five or six months I stayed there. It does not, I hasten to say, stick slavishly to the truth. In fact, most of it is made up, as we adults like to say. Still, I think you’ll like it. It’s a Kindle Single and currently priced at £1.49, which might have seemed a lot in Portugal in 1978, but will barely buy you a bica these days. And I promise you that The Slave House is also dark and strong as any espresso, Italian, Portuguese or otherwise, and should last a good while longer.

Poets on Pasolini

The British Film Institute has been running a season of films by Pier Paolo Pasolini recently. As a side-dish to the season, Simon Barraclough was asked to round up a bunch of poets and see what kind of work Pasolini’s cinema might inspire them to write.  Ten films, ten poets. I’m delighted to be one of the ten, and not only because I’ve written very little poetry these past few years. Pasolini’s a constant, nagging presence for anyone who lives and works in Italy, as I do, and it’s been a particular challenge to take on his hardest, least lyrical and most disturbing work, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and to see what I can do with it. 

The event is called Poets on Pasolini: A New Decameron and it’s on Saturday, 27 April. 

Finally, the news I promised…

I’m a shy type so I’ll let my fabulous agent, Isobel Dixon, say this for me. Here’s her press release:

Isobel Dixon of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency is pleased to announce two new deals with UK publishers for Charles Lambert. 

Emlyn Rees of Exhibit A, Angry Robot’s crime imprint, has acquired World English Language rights to two novels by Charles Lambert. The first to be published will be THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER, a gripping psychological thriller about friendship, love and betrayal, which begins with the killing of a high-level Italian civil servant when his wife is in a Rome hotel room with her lover, not far from the scene of the assassination. She must cut through the complex web of deceit that surrounds her in order to discover who is responsible. 

In the same week, Scott Pack of The Friday Project at HarperCollins acquired UK & BC rights excluding Canada in Lambert’s haunting and highly original WITH A ZERO AT ITS HEART, a sequence of short texts, each of exactly 120 words. Arranged by theme, including objects, clothes, sex, danger, travel, work, theft, animals, money, language, among others, these form striking glimpses – comic, tender, shocking, enigmatic – of one man’s life. 

Charles Lambert was born in England and educated at Cambridge, but has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. His short fiction has been shortlisted for the Willesden Short Story Prize and his story ‘The Scent of Cinnamon’ won him an O. Henry Prize. His most recent novel ANY HUMAN FACE was described by the Bookseller as ‘immensely impressive…holds you completely enthralled throughout’ and in The Telegraph Jake Kerridge described it as ‘a slow-burning, beautifully written crime story that brings to life the Rome that tourists don’t see – luckily for them.’ THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER and his next novel THE FOLDING WORLD will continue this suspenseful exploration of Rome’s dark side. 

Emlyn Rees says: ‘This is an exquisitely-crafted psychological thriller that combines the suspense and wide appeal of a William Boyd or Le Carré  novel with a plot that will ensnare readers right from the start and keep them feverishly turning the pages all night.” 

Scott Pack says: ‘I have been a fan of Charles Lambert’s work for some years and have secretly wanted to publish him for all that time. It is great to be doing so with what is such a mesmerising and ground-breaking book. It has stunned people here at HarperCollins and will, I am sure, enchant readers when our beautiful edition hits bookshelves next year.’ 

 Isobel Dixon says: ‘Charles Lambert is a master of many genres. I’m thrilled to have concluded deals with two such enthusiastic editors for these books that demonstrate his immense versatility and talent.’ 

THE VIEW FROM THE TOWER and WITH A ZERO AT ITS HEART will be published in early 2014. 

I couldn’t be more delighted.

News, but not yet

The year so far has been full of unexpected – and gratifying – surprises. Unfortunately, I can’t talk about them yet. But, believe me, I will…I will…

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse, and Cristoph Simon, Zbinden’s Progress

I seem to have been reading a lot about walking recently, but everything I read takes me back to a single text called In Praise of Walking. It was written by Thomas A Clark some years ago and, even though I once knew Tom, have eaten borscht made with beetroot from their garden at his and Laurie’s table and own precious copies of many of his earlier works, we’d fallen out of touch when In Praise of Walking was published and I only came across the poem in a Paladin anthology published in 1993 and entitled, in the then fashionable lower case, the tempers of hazard, where Tom was one of the three featured poets, alongside Barry MacSweeney and Chris Torrance. The poem was a revelation to me, although it shouldn’t have been. It seems to me a great work, to which all his other work leads, not in a linear way, but in the way – appropriately – of a walk during which to get lost can be ‘a good thing’. The accomplishment of the poem lies in its unwavering modesty and attention, both qualities that endear themselves naturally to walkers, and in the classical elegance of its expression. It has the quality of aphorism, but of aphorism that eschews the easy glitter of paradox, and of a larger, more ascetic renunciation that runs through all Tom’s work: that of remaining ‘responsive, adequate, to the consequences of the choice we have made.’ It’s a work that stays.

So Tom’s poem – alongside the idea of walking as both practice and occasion for metaphor – was on my mind as I read two recent novels. The first, published by Salt and shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, was Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse. It’s a short novel and, on the surface at least, is concerned with a man, Futh, who takes, or attempts to repeat, a walking holiday in Germany. The first time he was with his father; the second time he’s using the walk to escape from, or understand, his marriage coming to an end. It’s a circular walk, which is surely significant, and it’s also one of those walks in which you’re rendered free of your usual trappings simply because each morning they’re left in one hotel to be recovered in another hotel at the end of the day. Someone else, in other words, becomes responsible for moving the walker’s life on, the walk itself becoming an evasion, but a cosseted one, while the practicalities of that other life, to which the walker remains inextricably bound, are dealt with by others. There’s a passivity about walking like this, and a constriction that works against what might be considered the natural purpose of a walk, ‘the dislocation of a persistent self interest’, as Tom Clark puts it, particularly as Futh is tormented by the unpleasant physical side effects of the business, from blisters to sunburn to an almost constant hunger. But Moore’s novel is less about the walk itself – which finally seems no more than a chore or marking of time – than about the relentless self interest and self interrogation of its hero. Its an interrogation conducted through memory and anecdote and the light cast upon the past by a probing, anxious, ultimately thwarted present, as though the lighthouse of the title, and the various lighthouses within the novel, were as concerned with making sense of their own workings as with preserving others from hazard. Because what’s odd about the novel is that the actual purpose of a lighthouse – that of  illuminating and protecting – is less important than the rocky emotional shoals from which it so signally fails to protect the two protagonists – Futh and his stationary counterpart Ester, the landlady at the start and end of Futh’s journey. The world of the novel, from its low-key, intriguing outset to its shocking yet utterly fitting climax, is imbued with hazard.  The hotel run by Ester and her husband is in a place called Hellhaus, which, as others have noted, doesn’t just mean what it appears to mean but also has the sense of lighthouse (hell = light), and the light cast in the novel is unrelievedly harsh, just as the moments of humour – and there are some – are uneasily bleak and fleeting. If I have any doubts about the novel, which I greatly enjoyed, it’s the neatness of it and the sense that nothing is wasted. There’s a kind of surprise and exuberance, of apparent superfluousness if you like, about walking, and maybe about writing, that this novel seems to forego. It’s a novel in which, superbly, everything ties in with everything else, that resurrects symbolism as its essential practice and then takes this as far as it can, through multiplication and deflection. But maybe it reveals its procedures a little too openly. There are times when a walker becomes too absorbed by the map in his hand to be alert to surprises the landscape may be offering.

Zbinden’s Progress by Christoph Simon, published by And Other Stories, is perhaps even more concerned with walking than The Lighthouse, but takes a very different approach, already implicit in the title. While the movement of the latter novel is cyclic, inescapably so, Zbinden’s Progress is precisely that, a slow, and inexorable movement, from one place to another, both journey and recapitulation. As in Moore’s novel, the journey is fuelled by memory, but it’s also, and more powerfully, moved by affection and purpose. In fact, for all their apparent similarities – length, independent press, literariness – the two novels couldn’t be less alike. EM Forster, talking about the novels of a friend of his, Forrest Reid, said that they ‘have a tendency to make people feel better,’ and this is also true of Simon’s novel. Zbinden, its hero in a way that Futh is not nor is intended to be, not merely at the heart of the book but its actual heart, is an old man in a care home. He is being taken on his daily walk by a new carer, Kâzim. Because of his age, Zbinden moves slowly down through the building from floor to floor, in a progress that’s both halting, interrupted by encounters and the anecdotes and memories (once again, as though no walk would be complete without them) that they trigger, but also stately, as any progress should be. Descending the stairs, Zbinden talks about his life, his love for his dead wife Emilie, his difficulties with his son Markus, his job, his childhood, but what holds all these together, other than the inimitable voice of the narrator (masterfully translated by Donal McLaughlin), is the  theme of walking. Walkers, for Zbinden, are those who ‘think about themselves and their environment’; they are less concerned with being followed by others than with following the path before them, not as a task (‘I don’t think the purpose of being here is to fulfil a task’) but as an exploration, an opening to the world. As he says, in the passage that perhaps most explicitly reveals the heart of the book:

I knew many people who said, rightly, ‘I’m a grafter. And I’m exhausted.’With great fervour, they sought honorary posts, activities to be involved in; demonstrated their endurance levels without so much as a blink; rushed with import and export figures to meetings and conferences in the remotest of settlements, gasping like some creature in labour. And then death came along and they discovered: they’d spent the voyage across the sea in the ship’s hold. […] They didn’t know what they were so angry about, and didn’t know how to calm themselves. Nightmarish. Buried alive. But you don’t have to live like that. Going for a walk takes you up on deck.

As I said above, the two novels couldn’t be more different. The Lighthouse is Alison Moore’s first published novel and part of its considerable accomplishment may come from its narrow emotional register, as though certain areas of experience are too slippery, or ungraspable, to be dealt with, or too close to sentimentality to be risked. Zbinden’s Progress is Christoph Simon’s fourth novel (I haven’t read the other three) and it shows, for me, in the risk he takes, the risk of becoming twee, of trivial, of losing the sense of the walk for the details that punctuate it, a risk he triumphantly brushes to one side. Thomas A Clark says that ‘Walking is the human way of getting about’ and the keynote to the novel, underpinning the breeziness, and the poignancy, is its compassion. There’s a wonderful moment towards the end when Markus, as a child, is struggling to lift a heavy stone and his mother asks him if he’s doing all he can. When he tells her that he is, she says ‘I don’t believe you…because, so far, you haven’t asked me to help you.’

What the two novels share, of course, apart from their quality, is the fact that both have been published by independent presses. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream publisher risking either of these books – although it shouldn’t be, and wouldn’t have been a couple of decades ago – and it’s our good fortune that Salt and And Other Stories have taken the job on with such exceptional results.

Luciano Barca

Friday began with a funeral and ended with a suicide. The funeral was that of a friend’s father, and of a friend’s father-in-law, but also, and more simply, of a friend. His name was Luciano Barca. I first met him almost thirty years ago, when he was in his sixties. He had just returned from an intensive course in beginner’s English in Oxford, already an unusual thing for a man of his age to do, and didn’t want to forget what he’d learnt. Normally, I avoided private lessons if I could – there’s a forced intimacy about them that I don’t enjoy or, if I do enjoy it, an economic element that makes me feel uncomfortable –, but everything I’d heard about Luciano – partisan, journalist, communist senator, one of Berlinguer’s closest collaborators, acquiantance of Pasolini – made me keen to meet him. For our first lesson I went to his flat near Villa Ada, in one of those comfortable, slightly anonymous apartment blocks, with trees and cars and graffiti around it, that populate that side of Rome. The flat was large, but the only room I really saw must have been the living room, and it was the sort of living room one would expect people like Luciano and his wife to have. Lived in, comfortable, unlike so many middle-class homes in Italy, with too many books, and newspapers, and pictures on the walls. There must have been a television, but I don’t remember one, and music in some form. What I remember is starting the sort of lesson I would normally do with a person after a single crash course in English, some basic communication exercises – I think I’d taken along a course book just in case – and feeling Luciano’s frustration. In more than twenty years of teaching I’d never experienced such a will, not to learn, but to get beyond learning, the rote and routine of learning, to actually make sense in a way that mattered, to be understood and to understand. It’s a truism that teachers learn as much from their students as they teach, but Luciano showed me how that might be more than a truism – might actually be true. There was an urgency about his will to know, and a curiosity to discover what I might know, a curiosity that matched and stimulated my own. I don’t know how we did what we did with the English Luciano had, how we talked about politics and history and art and literature. I suspect I may have allowed more Italian than I should have done. But how could I not have done? To have deprived Luciano of the opportunity to communicate fully and myself of the chance to play a part in this, this extraordinary will to learn and to share, for some notion of professional correctness would have been madness; worse, it would have deprived me of the opportunity to know as fully as one can – in a series of one-hour lessons one summer more than two decades ago now – a man whose passion for the world has remained with me, marked me, changed me for the better. I remember our talking about the notion of a social wage and disagreeing about its usefulness – me for, he against – and thinking that this was how one should talk about issues, as though the issue was what mattered rather than some notion of who might be right, of who might ‘win’. Too often the word integrity is used as though it were a synonym of honesty rather than completeness. Luciano was certainly, and perhaps primarily, an honest man, but he was also a complete man, in his imperfect, incomplete, entirely human way, a man who enlivened the world with his attention and enthusiasm, who turned his gaze outwards and in doing so illuminated what lay around him. He will be missed, awfully, by those closest to him, but everyone who knew him will share, to a lesser degree, that loss.

***

The suicide, or probable suicide, occurred near Naples, in a place called Falciano. We wouldn’t have known about it if our train hadn’t been heading for Naples, and had to stop, for an indefinite period of time according to the announcement, while an investigation was conducted into the person’s death. We were lucky, a train heading south arrived soon after and we were able to finish our journey, but I had time while we were waiting to think about how different two lives, and deaths, might be. Luciano’s death was unexpected, cruelly so, but how rich his life had been and how strong his presence still, in the hearts of those who knew him, in the words he left us, in books and articles, the final ones written with the help of his grandson, Nicky. I don’t know what drove the man or woman who died on the railway lines outside Falciano to choose to die in such a way, but it’s hard to contemplate how different two lives, and deaths, can be, how fully – how integrally – Luciano lived and how empty this other person’s life must have seemed to the person who lived it. It’s a different, and worse, kind of sadness to think – as surely Luciano never did – that a human life means nothing.

Charlottenburg, Berlin

Our last full day in Berlin we decide to shop. All we’ve bought here so far, apart from food and drink, is a box of tea lights, a signed calendar from a painter called Andrea Sroke with a stall in the artists’ market on Museum Island and a postcard from a garrulous Australian who tells us he’s won a competition for the best international poster, Obama’s iconic Hope poster having been beaten into second place. The calendar is charming and has a painting, usually of a cat, for every month in 2013. The postcard shows a gay couple, Tommy (German) and Zandong (Chinese), the day before their wedding. They’re lying naked , side-by-side on their backs, Tommy’s hand round Zandong’s wrist, against a richly symbolic background, and have words or ideograms on their bodies as well, none of which I can read. It’s busy stuff and the winning poster is even busier, tattoos and tribal signs and heaven knows what else, as though the mere accumulation of meaning were enough to ensure its transmission. Even the artist’s patter is exhausting, and Giuseppe pulls me away from the stall before I have the chance to engage him in what I suspect would be less conversation than submission to monologue, with occasional prompts on my part. I hear him later, talking to other potential purchasers, this time in German, and the spiel sounds exactly the same, right down to the intonation and the gestures and a style of salesmanship that seems more appropriate to encyclopaedias or vacuum cleaners than works of art. Perhaps it’s a wilful parody, part of the show. It’s hard to tell sometimes what’s art and what merely surrounds it as business, and noise. Ten minutes later, sitting outside a café, we watch a professional clown at work, red nose in his pocket until he swings into action to shadow a passer-by, imitating his or her every gesture with just that touch of exaggeration that transforms the unknowing victim into caricature, red nose now firmly on real nose. They’re warm-hearted caricatures and most people, when they realise what’s happening, take them as such, but I find myself wondering how well the game would play in Italy, where the notion of bella figura runs counter to even the gentlest public ridicule. When it comes to humour, Germans, I suspect, are more robust.

Today, though, we head out for  Kurfürstendamm, where serious shoppers go to shop. After weighing up the various routes for getting there, we opt for the S-Bahn to Charlottenburg, somewhere else we want to see before we leave. Outside the station we head east, along the side of the railway towards a crossroads and a branch, already visible, of TK Maxx, then turn north into Wilmersdorfer Strasse. It’s like coming home, but better. Not only TK Maxx, Body Shop, MediaWorld, MacDonald’s, but Woolworths, C&A, shops from our past suddenly alive again and available to us. We’re looking for – and find – a leather shoulder bag for Giuseppe. I buy a pair of jeans from C&A, the same model (if that’s the word for something so basic) as two pairs I bought some years ago from their branch in Montparnasse. Clothes, like most things, are cheaper in Germany than in Italy, even though salaries for factory workers, say, can be three times as high. But shops, after an hour of so, begin to pall and we head back towards Stuttgarter Platz, pausing for coffee at a super-cheap self-service place, where everything I want seems to be priced at 99 cents, and I remember the word zucker at exactly the right moment. (It’s behind me, next to the coffee machine.) The place is called Back Factory, which has an unpleasantly orthopaedic ring in English, but no doubt rings differently in German. We sit outside to drink our coffee and think about lunch. Reading our guidebooks we discover that Berlin’s Asian community is not that far away from where we’re sitting, heading east along Kantstrasse, and that one of the two restaurants recommended in both our guides is a Chinese place called Good Friends on that very street. And so we head off to find it, our shopping trip suspended.

Good Friends is on a corner, with a number of other Asian restaurants nearby. It’s fairly Spartan inside, which is encouraging. The menu is long, which is less encouraging, and divided into Cantonese and non-Cantonese specialities. I choose a duck and noodle dish, Giuseppe goes for something containing pig belly – we assume this will be draught pork, as it’s politely termed in the UK, or maybe pancetta, but we’re wrong. The dish is studded with nuggets of pale, chewy bits of what must be pig’s intestine. It’s delicious and so is my duck, though rather less, well, intestinal. Both guides say this is the place to eat for Chinese residents of the city, but the other tables seem to be occupied by Germans or tourists, and people who are possibly both. In Rome, I’m sensitized to the presence of non-Roman Italians and the way they often find the city more challenging than people from outside the national borders, as though minimal differences were harder to deal with, but here, in a city that’s foreign also to me, I can’t tell. Either way, this lunchtime in mid-October, the only Chinese in the restaurant are in the kitchen or working at the tables. Satisfied, we pay and leave. Next stop, a furniture shop called Stilwerk.

But first we tack our way a little around the grid of residential streets that lie between Kantstrasse and Ku’damm, stopping for coffee outside a small bar with an Illy sign over the door. The more we walk, the more Charlottenburg strikes me as a model for unfussily achieved urban living. The streets are wide enough for traffic, and the pavements for people, but not so wide that the buildings along each side lose contact with one another; any further apart they’d no longer be within calling distance and you’d have that net curtained-off feel of English suburbia, any closer people could watch each other eat, and sleep, and shower. They’re four or five storeys high; the perfect rapport between their height and the shared space that both divides and unifies them. There are trees, and these soften and yet reinforce the linear nature of the city in which they find themselves. There are shops, and bars, and restaurants, but as serviceable adjuncts to the homes above them; they don’t define the tone. We’d both like to live here, and what’s no more than a ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ sort of feeling becomes considerably more urgent when we stumble on Savignyplatz, a lozenge-shaped tree-filled square that interrupts Kantstrasse as it heads towards the Berlin Zoo and that brings to mind, or to our minds anyway, one of our favourite squares in Paris, Place des Batignolles. Even better, it has the added frisson of a railway line running above a series of arches, some of which house a bookshop (excellent) and literary café, an institution, I admit, I’ve never quite understood the purpose of, unless it’s to be seen to be reading Benjamin, or Rimbaud, or Patti Smith, in public and yet not in public, in the splendid isolation of the act of reading. Still, I think, as we walk past on our way to Stilwerk, I’d like to read something here, but out loud, and to an audience of more than myself. And I have my usual itch to see if any book of mine is in stock, although I know it won’t be.

Stilwerk, in spirit and style, is everything Charlottenburg isn’t. A five-storey glass-and-steel affair, most of it devoted to the kind of furniture that would only sit comfortably in post-industrial New York lofts or the official residences of Mafiosi dons. Divans that would fill the average living room, tables the length of classic yachts, Hefner-dimensioned beds, complete with mirrored headboard, kitchens that would feed a legion if only anyone had the nerve to dirty their pristine surfaces. There’s something vulgar about furniture this size, however refined the materials and the design, and the effect the whole place has on me is in striking contrast to that produced earlier. The windows in the building look inwards, to the echoing atrium at the heart of it. The lifts inside the building are glass boxes and shimmy up and down, but each floor, finally, contains the same sort of showpiece stuff I find it hard to love or, indeed, remember. We leave the building, though, with a purchase. Two cute plastic rabbits that evacuate salt and pepper when their ears are squeezed.

An episode

I was editing an urgent report when the date on the toolbar caught my eye: 24/10/2012. The day after my birthday. That’s odd, I thought, we must have forgotten to celebrate. But how could that be? I went through to the bedroom, to Giuseppe. How come we didn’t do anything yesterday? I said. And then, pointing at a rack of drying clothes, What’s all this washing doing in here? Who did the washing? Giuseppe told me later that he didn’t recognize me, that I was someone else. We did do something yesterday, he said. It was your birthday, don’t you remember? And I said no, I don’t remember. I don’t remember what we did. My birthday? I felt confused, lost to myself, angry as though something had been snatched from me without my knowing what or how.

It took maybe twenty minutes for us to reconstruct the previous day together, to a point at which I could say that, yes, I remembered doing this or that. I remembered the roses and the cakes, and what we ate. We sat in the square, outside our usual bar, and pieced it together, until I could no longer say that I’d forgotten anything. But the impression I had was that the day we’d salvaged had been lived by someone else, and that I was helping this someone else remember. The more I regained the day, the more displaced it seemed. Looking back, I can’t imagine why this worried me so little. Despite Giuseppe’s obvious, and understandable, consternation, I felt that nothing needed to be done other than to see if anything similar happened again, and then to take action.

The following day, after a morning’s work in Rome, talking with colleagues, assisting students, I met a friend, Clarissa, for lunch. During the meal, I mentioned what I referred to as my ‘odd incident’. She listened and then said I should have a brain scan immediately. I was startled, and I think now that what had protected me from the potentially serious implications of what had happened the previous morning was precisely that sense of its not having happened to me, a dissociation that may have been symptomatic of the event, or a consequence of it. Do you think so? I said, actually concerned for the first time. It doesn’t hurt to check, Clarissa said wisely. I said I would.

My doctor’s surgery is open in the afternoon. I got there early and was second in the queue. He came round from his side of the desk and sat beside me while I told him why I was there, feeling foolish and a bit of a time-waster. He took my hand, and said I should have an urgent brain scan. How do I do that? I asked, foolish in a different, alerted-to-danger way, actually frightened for the first time. He explained what I had to do, and reassured me in his usual brusque but avuncular way that I shouldn’t worry, but that the sooner I had the scan the better.

***

By the time I get back home, I’m scared. So is Giuseppe when I tell him he needs to drive me to the local Pronto Soccorso (Italy’s ER) immediately. Ten minutes later we’re at Fondi hospital and an orderly is telling me they can’t do CAT scans on Friday afternoon because no one is there to interpret the results. Back in the car, a twenty minute drive to Terracina. We’re reassuring each other as we pass the lake where, according to Giuseppe, the spirit of Morgana le Fay still lives, so we salute her as the road turns away, following the coastline north. I’m concentrating on the road, on Giuseppe’s driving, his nervousness evident, or maybe it only seems that way. Maybe it’s my nervousness that makes the journey seem to have such hazardous potential. The sea’s rough, the sky dark grey with cloud; the almost uninterrupted good weather of the past month looks set to break, and I start to think about pathetic fallacy and how I might use it in my new novel, much of which is set beside various deathbeds. These thoughts, which I keep to myself, don’t help.

It isn’t the first time we’ve been to the hospital in Terracina, but we manage to mistake the road and find ourselves in a one-way system, wilfully deprived, I feel, of the place we need to get to. When we do arrive, the ramp leading up to the Pronto Soccorso is forbidden to everything except ambulances and we leave the car badly parked on a corner, and walk to the waiting room, where ten, maybe twelve people, are sitting on the rows of plastic chairs. There’s a window in one wall, with a desk behind it, unoccupied. Giuseppe and I stand there until someone tells us to ring the bell. The bell is a small button on the wall, at waist-height, some way from the window, unlabelled. I press it and a young woman appears from a door and asks me what the problem is. I show her my doctor’s prescription.

It doesn’t take long for me to be seen; the word urgente, underlined three times, has the required effect. I’m taken into a small room; a woman in a white coat is sitting behind a computer while various people in green and blue nurses’ outfits mill around. The woman looks at me and ask how long the left half of my face has been lower than the right. I’m rattled. I didn’t know it was, I say, not believing her. I’ve looked at myself in the mirror surely in the past two days. Giuseppe has looked at me a thousand times. She nods. Before I can say anything else, or think of anything that might usefully be said, I’m told to open my shirt and lie down on a stretcher. A blood sample is taken, the small plastic tap affair left taped in my arm, and then my ankles, wrists and chest are rubbed with alcohol and I’m wired up for an ECG.

Five minutes later. Another waiting room, large and bare, windowless, lit by six fluorescent tubes, pale wood seating attached to the walls. Italian hospitals, to their credit, are scrupulously clean but at the cost of anything that might render them pleasing, or give comfort. The only relief from the pastel walls, apart from the obligatory crucifix high on one wall, is an oil painting of one hand offering what might be a heart, or a bread roll, although it strictly looks like neither, to another hand. A plaque underneath says that the painting is a gift from the artist, which doesn’t surprise me. I turned my mobile off before my ECG and I suspect that I should leave it off, but the handful of people in the room with me are talking on theirs, or playing games, or looking at photographs, and so I turn mine on again and tell Giuseppe what’s happening, turning it off surreptitiously when someone calls my name.

I’ve never had a CAT scan before and I expected something longer, noisier, more claustrophobic. Lying there, my head as still as I can make it, I’m beginning almost to enjoy the double sense of being looked after and of having all decisions taken from me. I wonder if the scan can be affected by thought and if I should also be trying not to think. But I don’t have time to ask and it’s over. I’m back in the large bare room. Three young men opposite me, one in a wheelchair, are absorbed in their iPhones. People come and go. I call Giuseppe again; he’s still in the first room, or standing on the ramp to smoke. I can tell from his voice he’s worried sick, far more than I am. Before long, I’m alone in the room with a plump, disgruntled teenage boy. We glance at each other, but don’t talk.

An indefinite period of time later, we’re taken into another room and told to stay there ‘for a few minutes’. The boy’s mother arrives and begins to complain about having to wait all this time to a third patient, because I assume that’s what we are. She’d be complaining to me as well if I hadn’t decided to ignore her. It’s the fault of politicians, apparently, and I wonder who she voted for in the last elections. I know where I’d put my money. Time passes. When she runs out of things to say, or say again, or say in slightly different words, she begins to make a harrumph sort of noise and slap her hands on her cheeks. She is standing in the doorway, blocking my view of the room from which relief of some sort might come. Her son, slumped on a chair, is playing with his phone, oblivious to his mother’s whining, I imagine, after years of practice. When someone comes for him, I discover that he’s eighteen and that his mother can’t go in with him, which is comfort of a sort for me and a source of added anguish for her. She pulls out a mobile from her handbag and begins to complain to someone in the outside world. The use of cell phones, according to a sign above her head, is forbidden throughout the building.

It’s eight o’clock in the evening before I’m called back into the first room, where the doctor still sits behind her desk. I’ve been there for more than three hours, but that’s the  time it takes, she tells me, to assemble the results of the various tests, for none of which I’ve paid or will be expected to pay, and I believe her. She tells me the CAT scan is negative but that, despite this, she’d like to keep me in for observation. What happened to you isn’t normal, she says. I have a free bed, she says, but of course it’s up to you. I’m astonished. I don’t have any pyjamas, I say, the first thing that comes into my head. She smiles. I need to talk to my friend, I say.

He’s still outside, waiting. I bring him in. She asks me to grasp her hands in mine and squeeze as hard as I can. Harder, she says, you won’t hurt. She says my left hand is weaker. The three of us talk about my face and if it’s changed in any way, and Giuseppe confirms that he can see no change, but I can she isn’t convinced. All right, I say, I’ll take the bed. It’s a two-bed ward with a private bathroom. My bed is nearer the door. The other bed, beside the window, is occupied by an older man and surrounded by his family. It’s almost nine o’clock by this time, but they’re still there. When we walk in, a woman tells the man in the bed that he’ll have some company. My heart sinks. I sit on the bed. I’ve got nothing to wear; no soap or toothbrush or towel; even worse, nothing to read. I need my Kindle, I say, and Giuseppe says I might be able to find something to read in a TV room on the other side of Medicina Generale, which is where I’ve been put. I leave him for a moment in the room to go and look; at that moment, I can’t think of anything else. The fear of having nothing to read is the strongest of all the various fears I’ve experienced up to now, and I’m near panic as I search the department. I find a room with a television and a magazine rack beside a sofa. Inside the rack is a dog-eared copy of a magazine called Oggi, a homelier version of Hello, from last February. I pounce on it, like a starving man on bread. Back in the room, the other man’s family has gone, a doctor’s due to arrive, and the miserable weather outside has turned into a rainstorm.  You go home, I tell Giuseppe. I’ll be fine. Reluctantly, he goes. I take off my shoes and lie on the bed to read about the Sanremo Song Festival, lingering as long as I can manage on each detail. I’ve had nothing to eat since lunch, but don’t feel hungry. I have no pen or paper. I’m bereft.

A different doctor arrives. She’s older than the one downstairs and slightly sniffy about the eagerness with which Pronto Soccorso fills available beds, often without due cause, which reassures me. She takes my details. When she asks me how much I drink, I’m economical with the truth. I apologise for my socks, striped sky-blue and fluorescent green, mercifully without holes at the toes, and she tells me a little merriment is always welcome in a hospital. When I ask her how long she thinks I’ll have to stay, she tells me until Sunday. She measures my blood pressure, which is high, and prescribes an injection. Twenty minutes after she’s gone, by which time I could offer the 2012 Sanremo Song Festival as my special subject on Mastermind, a nurse who looks too young to have left school turns up with a syringe. I bare my arm. No, no, she says, and gestures down the bed. I lower my trousers and, for the first time in my life, get injected in my buttock. At this point, all excitement over, I decide to try and rest. I strip down to my underpants and get into bed, listening to the rain on the roof above my head. To my surprise, I feel tired and calm enough to sleep.

***

I’m woken at five for a blood sample to be taken, by six by someone leaving a pill I have to take after breakfast and taking my blood pressure, and at half past six by an orderly asking me what I’d like for breakfast. What is there? I ask. Tea, barley or milk, she tells me. Tea, I say, and I’m given a tray with a small plastic cup of tea, without milk or lemon, a packet containing two fette biscottate (see image), which I have never willingly eaten, and a tiny tub of peach jam, accompanied by a paper napkin and a plastic dessert spoon. The fette have already crumbled a little inside their packet and my attempts to use the spoon to spread the jam produce only a midge-like cloud of orange crumbs, so I eat the fette as they are, and spoon the jam into my mouth – fette, jam, fette, jam – until they’re both finished. The tea, unexpectedly, is rather good. Just after seven, Giuseppe calls and I give him the news that I should be home tomorrow and a list of the things I’ll need to keep me happy until then. My teeth feel rough to my tongue, and I need a shave. I’m convinced my mouth looked crooked because my moustache is over-long and unkempt. I stay in bed because I have nothing to wear, unless I get dressed again, and I’m worried that might not be allowed. I have no idea what hospital protocol is, and don’t want to be told off. My instinct to behave is strong in situations like this. And so, because I’ve finished reading Oggi, I lie back and wait to see what will happen next.

Giuseppe wakes me up. He has a honey-filled wholemeal croissant for me, and a rucksack containing a newspaper, my Kindle, pyjamas, a soap bag, my notebook and my favourite new pen, a transparent Fuji with a 0.38 nib. He’s telling me about the phone calls he’s made and received, and his dreadful drive home through the rainstorm the night before, when a third doctor arrives on her round of the ward and orders all relatives out of the room. Giuseppe goes and the doctor tells me that all the results they have so far are good, and that the next stage is a chest X-ray. This, she says, is standard practice and once again I think, I have paid for none of this, and I’m grateful to Italy, and to a health system that meets the needs of everyone, without exception; something that should never be taken for granted. She confirms that I can leave tomorrow and adds, at the latest, which gives me hope but also – incredibly – scares me a little, as though I’m already institutionalised. As soon as she leaves I get up, dress and wander around the hospital in my M&S pyjamas to find Giuseppe. Italian hospitals are fairly relaxed about visitors, not seeming unduly concerned about the number or relationship, only sending them out of the room when doctors arrive and not always then, but this morning, having left my ward to find him, I end up being locked out and, when I ring the bell to get back in, I’m not allowed to bring him with me. I tell him what the doctor said and send him home.

Lunch arrives at 11.30, by which time I’ve had my chest X-ray and a second ECG. I’ve noticed that the doctors treat me as though I were a reasoning human being, worthy of respect, capable of joined-up thought and able to use the only language we have in common – Italian – to communicate. All of which is, I hope, true. The nurses and orderlies, on the other hand, tend to use the familiar ‘tu’, call me by a variety of versions of my name, none of them correct, and look at me in an anxious way, as though I might not be following, and they will be held responsible. What makes it worse is that the more telegraphic the communication is, the harder it becomes to understand, which only confirms the suspicion that I am, in fact, not all there. (Otherwise, of course, I wouldn’t be here at all.) At which point, communication is reduced to a sort of primitive sign language and I have no idea what to do but follow the direction their gestures and brutally reduced language seem to indicate. Downstairs, for example, while waiting in an empty corridor for my X-ray, I wandered into a doctor’s private office because the nurse who’d taken me there began waving his arms towards the doctor’s door. The younger nurses, on the other hand, both male and female, are struck dumb or mutter in a worried, slightly affronted way, and all my attempts to relax them only make things worse. I’m just seen as odd, or feel I am. Which is why, when my lunch arrives, and I’m faced by three flimsy plastic plates covered by heat-sealed sheets of plastic that won’t be detached however hard I tug, I don’t ask for help. When I do, eventually, remove enough of the plastic to reach what’s beneath it – farfalle with sauce, a hamburger in a similar sauce, sliced carrots, all alas unsalted, utterly institutional – I’m hungry enough to eat the lot.

As soon as lunch is over, the ward doors are opened and relatives allowed in. My room-mate, who has been almost comatose apart from a brief episode in which he tried, unsuccessfully, to remove his catheter (I offered to call for a nurse, but he didn’t want that), is suddenly surrounded by the people I saw last night. There are six, then eight, then twelve; the room is filled with relatives, and relatives of relatives. Some of them hardly seem to know the man in the bed, who seems to be increasingly lost and uncommunicative. The leader of the gang is a woman who could be his daughter, or daughter-in-law, or even wife. She starts to interrogate him. Did you sleep? Have you eaten? Have you been to the toilet? Have they made your bed? The man doesn’t answer, or answers with a grunt that might be yes or no to my untutored ears. But the woman understands no more than I do. She greets every noise the man makes with a nasal Eh?, to which the man responds with the same indefinite grunt, to which the woman, etc. It’s hard to imagine a less affectionate exchange. She then turns to me. Did he sleep? Has he eaten? Has he been to the toilet? I’ve no idea, I say. I was asleep myself. I’m about to leave the room when the doctor comes in and tells me that, if I want to, I can be discharged as soon as I’ve picked up my medicines. Thank you, I say. So I’m clear?

***

Just under twenty-four hours after visiting my doctor I was back home. Twenty-four hours after that I’m writing this, at least in part as a wilful and conscious act of remembering. I am clear although I’m still not quite sure of what. I have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, neither of which are dangerously so  but I’ve been given (free, once again) medicines to bring both conditions under control. There is no sign of any damage to the brain, and my ECG and X-ray are both fine. My sister says what I had may have been a transient ischaemic attack, Clarissa’s talked about an ischaemic episode. Either way, it’s left no trace of itself. Unlike, fortunately, memory.

Oh yes, I had a wonderful birthday.

Schöneberg, Berlin

Our pocket-sized Lonely Planet guide book says Schöneberg is Berlin’s gay village so we take the S-Bahn from Alexanderplatz and head out there, leaving the train at Nollendorfplatz. This puts us in the middle of the itinerary suggested by the guide – we can go left or right. We decide to go right, along Motzstrasse, a quiet, tree-lined street, a few lights further down that might be bars or shops. It’s early evening, Saturday. Our other guide book, in Italian, claims that the area is quiet by day but livens up later when the locals, well, the Italian verb is folleggiare, which means something along the lines of ‘frolic.’ So we’re prepared for more or less anything. The buildings on each side of the street, five-six storeys high, are elegant and functional, early 20^th century I’d guess, the kind of place we’d like to live in if we lived here, as we’d like to, more and more each day.

The first signs of potential frolicking are a couple of sex shops, both specialising in leatherwear of various sorts, along with some implements one would need a reasonably sized garage, or dungeon, to store. One of them appears to be empty, we don’t go in; the other has a couple of youngish men outside it, dressed in stuff from the shop, but otherwise unremarkable; they might be filing clerks sharing a pint after a day in the office. It certainly isn’t the Castro, says Giuseppe, and it isn’t Old Compton St either.

A few yards down the road, we stop for a drink outside a place with tables on the pavement. A waiter brings us menus. After living with the slapdash truculence displayed by so many of Rome’s service providers, I love the way waiting on table is taken so seriously here in Berlin, the white shirts and waistcoats and long black aprons, the leather purses, the pert unrelenting attention. This waiter is young, early twenties at the most, attractive, professionally flirtatious. When I ask for a glass of Cynar, he repeats my order in an eyebrows-raised sort of way, as though I’ve done something wickedly inappropriate, then stops at the door to glance back, as if to make sure I know what I want. I wonder if I’ve stumbled on some arcane German code, like Polari, in which Cynar stands for something one does with waiters. Beyond the door is a restaurant and people walk past us to enter, which gives us the chance to see what kind of place it is from its clientele. They’re mostly in pairs, mostly male, not noticeably young, a higher proportion of mixed-race couples than I’ve noted elsewhere in the city. Everyone, it strikes me, is thin, well-dressed, sedate. It’s not, in other words, what we’re looking for this evening. We pay and leave.

At the first crossroads we come to, Giuseppe buys a packet of cigarettes from a shop on the corner and I go in with him to take a look round. Just inside the entrance, beside rows of magazines and fridges filled with milk and water, is a display rack of men’s underpants, designer scanties in luminous hues presumably made to be seen under strobe lights. This is a first for us both: a corner shop with fuck-me-quick underwear. Outside, a moment’s tension as two men’s pets almost collide is swiftly dispelled when the dogs – a poodle (yes, really) and a pit-bull – are tugged apart. The men exchange smiles. Children, their expressions say. A third man, with a limp and a damaged arm, walks past. We’ve noticed him before. He’s been walking up and down the street for as long as we have, but alone.

Our next stop is a smaller, more homely bar with high tables and stools outside. It isn’t really warm enough for al fresco drinking and I’m surprised and relieved when the owner – stockily built, bald, smiling, a boy-next-door feel to him – tells us Giuseppe can smoke inside. This time I order wine. I want something German rather than Italian and he insists the Soave is from Germany. I should have beer, I know, but I don’t feel like beer this evening and maybe the wine really is from Germany. In the end, it’s the idea that counts. There’s a TV screen with sport and the sound turned off, and a radio playing disco hits from the 70s and 80s, Weather Girls, George McCrae; I find it hard to sit still, perched on my high stool, my large glass of possibly German white wine in my hand. A net suspended from the ceiling contains balloons that look as though they’ve been there for some time. Two older men come in and chat to the owner in low affectionate voices. Embracing him, they leave and he calls someone on his cell phone, chats, laughs, blows a kiss. We’re the only customers, but it’s early, still before eight. If he weren’t on the phone he’d be chatting to us. It couldn’t be more different from the first place. Beside the till there’s a collection box with a red ribbon. Come again, says the owner as we leave.

We head back to Nollendorfplatz and the second half of the Lonely Planet itinerary, passing Tom’s Hotel, some other foreign tourists, maps in hand; the mood is warming up. Maassenstrasse is wider than Motzstrasse and appears to contain nothing but eating joints of one kind or another. We walk down one side until the road hits a square, then back along the other side. Not sure what we want to eat, we hope that something will suggest itself to us as we wander past currywurst stalls and take-away doner kebab shops, Indian restaurants, pizzerias, an almost dispiriting variety that leaves us less hungry than before. We pause outside a place that serves Italian food, more than anything to compare the prices with those at home, and someone rushes out to coax us in, which has the usual deterrent effect. In the end we opt for the idea of noodle soup of some kind and choose an Asian place. Asian restaurants here in Berlin appear to be precisely that, encompassing every national cuisine from South Korea to Indochina. Sushi is enormous. Before our noodle soup, we order a couple of appetisers based on my knowledge of Thai food in London but, when they arrive, what I hoped would be two of those little prawn-filled cases with the twisted tops, like miniature sacks of swag from Beano, turn out to be flabby, apparently uncooked spring rolls. We send them back and five minutes later a man comes across to the table, announces he’s the manager and asks us why. They were cold, we say, we expected something hot – we don’t add with flavour, not because we want to soften the blow, but because the man is rather intimidating. He’s in his thirties, shaven-headed, striking rather than sexy, though he’s that as well. If you want hot, he says, I am here. I am a hot Istanbul boy. This is so far from the reaction we expect that we sit there, silenced. I give you something hot, he says, and the ambiguity is merely formal at this point. The couple at the next table, a man and woman, are listening openly to this Cage aux Folles exchange, except that it’s veered from suggestive into something altogether more forward, as my mother might have said. We’re fine, thank you, I say primly, while Giuseppe glowers into the room. Istanbul boy goes away and the woman leans over. That’s their, how do you say, speciality, she tells us. I repeat, we expected something hot. A few minutes later, we know where they’re from and their (non-)marital status. He’s a marathon runner and is planning to compete in Rome. It has seven hills, I say, so be prepared. Then Istanbul boy comes back and sits on the padded bench between the woman and Giuseppe, resting his head for a moment on Giuseppe’s reluctant shoulder while our first waiter, also Turkish, it turns out later, brings us two steaming hot spring rolls. Which are very good indeed. As we’re leaving, Istanbul boy nips across and kisses us on both cheeks. Very Turkish, he says, although affectionate kisses from restaurant managers don’t chime with my experience of Turkey. Very Italian, I say, with my usual need to accommodate. Giuseppe murmurs very something, but I don’t catch the word, and don’t ask. I should say that the noodle soup was good, but a little less good than the one we had two nights before, in a café on Alexanderplatz, served in less elegant bowls and eaten from a table encased in yellow Formica.