Cooking With Fernet Branca (11 page)

On
that
note
I
shall
stop.
Keep
me
in
touch,
Mari
darling.
I
want
to
know
about
Timi
&
how
you’re
going
to
induce
Father
to
let
you
come
here
soonest.

Heaps
of
love

Marta

I can at least admit to myself what I can’t even to Marja –
viz
., that the script for Piero’s film has come as quite a shock. The basic story as he originally gave it me in his letters is still there after a fashion, I suppose; but what in my naïve former socialist way I had taken for a biting political satire on the eco-cant of the times seems to have slewed off sideways into something altogether more urban and an excuse for orgies and violence. The working title has changed significantly, too. Originally it was something harmless –
Mare
Verde
, I think Filippo said. Now, though, it is
Arrazzato
. That meant nothing until I asked Simone, the boy they sent up to help me install and use the computer equipment. He blushed prettily and prevaricated but I persevered until he explained it was dialect or slang for sexually aroused, apparently formed from
razzo
, which means rocket. You live and learn. It’s true the film is going to end with a huge display of distress rockets sent up by some Albanians trapped on a beach by crazed racist Greens, but even so, Simone said it’s not a commonly used expression and not everyone knows it, so perhaps the film will intentionally sound enigmatic.

That I should feel obscurely let down is an unwelcome reminder of the earnest bore I suppose I am at heart: the middle-European hayseed whom no doubt Gerry spotted at once and has been laughing at ever since. Still, I cling to my confidence in Piero Pacini that he knows what he’s doing. I believe he has yet to direct a bad film, although they have not necessarily all been winners at the box office. Given that in the last twenty years the Italian cinema has become more and more dependent on American money it may be that even Piero is obliged to compromise his artistic scruples in order to earn his crust. As I said before, we’ll see, even as I dread anew to think what would happen if Father could see too. A glance at virtually any page of this script would confirm his worst
suspicions. Opening it at random to prove to myself that I’m not just being rhetorical I find on page 63 that Carla, one of the young girls in the Green commune, is victimized by the others for being ‘saintly’. They force her – good God! I must have missed this the first time around – to put a cigarette in her, well, private part and learn muscular control in order to smoke it. Such are the bored games of spoiled youth in postmodern Europe, apparently. Father would simply not believe his own precious elder daughter was setting
that
little scene to music for a living.

Despite all this, I’m working well. Evidently my creative unconscious is relatively unaffected by my innate moralism. I have composed little tunes for three of the main characters and special sounds for the other two. I still hear it all in my head, of course, and write it down as a score in the traditional way. How else is an orchestra to perform it? But now I can play it on a keyboard connected to this computer they’ve sent me, thanks to something called MIDI. Simone tells me in heavily accented English that this stands for ‘Musical Instrument Digital Interface’. The information leaves me strangely unmoved, as do the various opaque phrases that litter the immense and unreadable user’s manual: ‘layer mode’, ‘split mode’, ‘voice selector’, ‘velocity curve’, ‘panel voice’ and the rest. They haunt the pages but not me. I simply told Simone I wanted to produce a disc of synthesized sounds that I could e-mail to Piero from time to time. But what about playback? he asked. What about experimenting with various combinations of sound, bringing out particular instruments, etc? I said I could do all that in my head, but I don’t think he believed me and loaded a computer program called Sibelius which he claims is what most professionals use. I learned what to press and wrote it all down so even I can understand it. This method has worked fine so far but I’m under strict orders to call him day or night if I get stuck. We’re both servants of the great Pacini and must allow nothing to stand in the way of my drafting the bulk of the score in the next three weeks. If
Schumann could compose and short-score his substantial Mass in C minor in only nine days, I think I can manage some repetitious film music in twenty-one.

The kitchen now presents an odd sight. It offers a bizarre juxtaposition of ancient and modern – or poet and peasant, come to that. I had to buy another table for the new electronic keyboard, which incidentally has a horrid spongy feel not a bit like the positive, alive feel of a real piano like my beloved Petrof. The two massive speakers have gradually concealed themselves shyly beneath laundry like hunted fauns trying to blend into a landscape. One can listen to this system through headphones, of course, but now and then I take pleasure in playing things aloud and must admit it’s quite fun experimenting with combinations of sound. The imagination is not infallible and welcomes an occasional rest, and even I was unprepared for the effect of playing the gigue from Bach’s G major French Suite on bagpipes and bongos. It’s a tribute to the world’s greatest composer that although it sounded frightful it still made musical sense. In some ways it’s a remarkable machine; and while I can see it will never supplant the way I have always worked, I should be sad never again to have one in the house. In the meantime poor Petrof is getting less of my attention. I’ve had him since childhood and he’s the only stick of furniture I bothered to bring with me from home, so I can’t believe he’s feeling seriously upstaged. He’s the sweetest-toned little instrument I’ve ever played and I swear he and I shall never be parted. I don’t know if all Czech pianos of his vintage were as good but I feel sure my Petrof is unique.

I’ve certainly had huge pleasure working on Gerry’s bogus Italian opera motif with the electronic keyboard. I spent most of a happy morning trying to reproduce the plangent querulousness of his voice, the yodelling effect he gets when he crosses registers into falsetto. (I had never really taken in before that this word is simply the diminutive of ‘false’. ‘The little fake’ or ‘Il Falsetto’ is how I shall think of him from now
on.) I’m afraid I reduced myself to helpless giggles the more nearly I approached the sound I wanted. Two can play the pastiche game and I’m a rather better musician than poor Gerry, so I soon had some most convincing
faux
Rossini-Bellini roulades laid down. I then monkeyed about with the scales, putting in split notes, missing out others, sharpening gruesomely here and flattening horribly there, until I was left with a short parody of an untalented amateur singing Rossi-,Belli- and all the other -inis of nineteenth-century Italian opera. As yet I had no words but found I could make this spoof voice sing it all on a single vowel or else with any vowel combination in turn. This was hilarious. I’m pretty sure a talented geek like Simone knows how to synthesize the sound of real words to go with the voice but it’s way beyond me. In any case, as far as I can tell Il Falsetto mostly pulls his fragments of text off tins and cartons and notice boards for some mad reason of his own, so textual fidelity is no problem. But for the film we won’t need any more than a wordless braying somewhere in the distance from time to time. A shame, really.

Undoubtedly this computer setup does offer some fine satirical possibilities. Perhaps when I’ve finished Piero’s score and have some spare time on my hands I may try writing a
scena
from an imaginary Italian opera with several strident voices and a thoroughly overwrought orchestra. One of those obligatory mad scenes, perhaps, but one in which
everybody
is barking, not just the prima donna. We’re deep in Ossian territory in a gloomy Scottish castle belonging to a mad baron, a near neighbour of Macbeth’s. He’s a bass. For a year now he has been keeping his younger brother – whom he suspects of trying to kill him in order to succeed to the barony – locked in the dungeons, a vile confinement that has driven the boy insane. That one’s a cracked tenor. Then there’s a demented soprano, the younger brother’s erstwhile lover, who is beside herself with anguish and is visiting the castle with her mother (contralto) to demand yet again what has become of her boyfriend. The
scena
takes place at midnight in the hall of the
castle. Gothic traceries, oak panelling, a fireplace the size of a garage, guttering candles. The baron can’t sleep because of his conscience and has had the gaoler, McTavish, bring his brother to him. Their demented duet wakes the household. The visiting mother comes down in her nightdress, crazed with worry about her daughter and her own lack of sleep and the duet becomes a trio. Finally the daughter herself appears and loses it completely when she realizes the decrepit creature hunched in gyves and shackles is her once-handsome lover … I see (and hear) it all, and am confident that with this malevolently star-crossed tartan quartet I shall be able to shatter all existing Italian records for over-the-top opera.

And yet … I’m now beginning to wonder whether, in the way its characters degenerate so spectacularly, Piero’s
Arraz
zato
may not easily eclipse anything I could do by way of a spoof. That’s the trouble with Italian
verismo
: it always goes just that little bit further.

A slightly worrying phone call from Marja last night. Apparently Father has been saying it’s ‘time to check on Marta’ to ‘make sure she’s all right’. Cannily, she offered to come out and report back to him but dear Father was wise to that. He said he wasn’t prepared to lose both daughters and quoted some hoary old Bunki hunting song about how, if you’ve lost a favourite hound, you don’t send out your next favourite dog to look for it. Charming. Father’s ability to be insulting in about ten different ways while wearing the disguise of a concerned parent is unique – or would be if it weren’t shared by practically all Voyde males of his generation. I keep thinking what a mercy it is for me that Father has this crippling phobia about telephoning. I think it may have to do with horrors in the past involving death sentences or something ghastly like that, but I don’t ever remember him making a call. In very
exceptional circumstances, though, he can be induced to receive one. So today I gritted my teeth and did what I ought to have done weeks ago, which was to call him myself and reassure him that I’m still his dutiful baby daughter.

‘And this Pacini fellow, is he courteous to you?’

‘What an odd question, Father. Yes, of course he is. After all, he wants good work out of me. Besides, he has perfect Italian manners.’

‘You mean he asks before pinching your bottom?’

‘For heaven’s sake! You’ve spent too much time cooped up there in the backwoods. Not every man behaves like that one-eyed henchman of yours, Kyril Whatsisname. Or Captain Panic.’

‘Hmpf.’

‘It’s true. All the men I’ve met here have been most polite and helpful.’

‘They’d better be. So what about this film of his? Pigeons in Venice, I think you said.’

‘Well, they still haven’t
absolutely
finalized the script yet. Still early days, you know. Things move quite slowly in the film world. It’s changed a little from the original, um, pigeons concept. It’s shaping up to being a pretty interesting sort of docudrama about a fishing commune and Green politics. What he’s tryi–’

‘Politics?’

‘No, no, not that sort of politics. More, you know, environmental concerns. They’re very big here in Western Europe.’

‘A fishing commune? That’s not political? What, pray, is a member of a commune if not a communist? Tell me that, Marta. Indulge your stupid old father living in the backwoods of Voynovia.’

‘Now you know I didn’t mean that, darling. You just goaded me with that joke about bottom-pinching.’

‘That was no joke, Marta.’

‘OK, but neither is this film. These are not
communists.
They’re just students – kids, really – who don’t like the way
commercial interests always override the well-being of the environment and who want to reinstate traditional, less harmful methods of fishing.’

‘Oh, you mean sentimentalists.’

‘If you like. Just so long as you don’t imagine Lenin appears at the end of the film, walking on the water.’

‘Are you able to get paprika there? And
pavlu?
’

These abrupt shifts of attention are entirely characteristic of Father and mean nothing other than that he’s bored with the previous topic. I was able to assure him that paprika is available, that Italians eat quite well really, despite a chronic absence of
pavlu
in every delicatessen I’ve tried so far, but that Marja is sending me regular Red Cross parcels of goodies to keep my Voyde body and soul together. Furthermore, I am working well and Pacini is pleased. There being no polite way of saying to one’s father ‘and would you for Christ’s sake calm down and leave me alone to make a life for myself’, I didn’t try, but anyway he had seized on Pacini’s name again.

‘Didn’t he do a film called
Nero’s
Birthday?
’

‘Er, I’m not absolutely –’

‘Take my word for it, Marta, he did. And I take Professor Varelius’s word for it – he’s at Voynograd University, in case you’ve forgotten. You do realize that until recently if a Voyde had made so much as a single metre of a film like that he would have been arrested, taken down to the basement at Stepanky Square, and shot. Not sent to Siberia, Marta. Not even tried. Just shot with a single nine-millimetre round his next of kin would have to pay for.’

‘Well, thank goodness those bad old days are dead,’ I heard myself saying cheerily.

‘I sometimes wonder if they really were so bad after all,’ came that familiar gravelly tone. ‘And don’t give me one of your impertinent little lectures about freedom and licence, Marta.’

‘No, Father.’

‘I’ve got my eye on Mr Pacini.’

‘Yes, Father.’

Eventually I managed to ring off; and it is a measure of how wrung-out I felt that I actually poured myself a small glass of Fernet Branca for medicinal purposes. I think by the end of our conversation I’d more or less managed to convince him that I was not in immediate moral or nutritional danger, but it wasn’t easy. Poor Father. The trouble about our mother having died when I was fourteen was that all the burden of bringing up two rather independent daughters fell on him. Of course various female retainers like old Mili did the day-to-day domestic stuff but he had immediately seen himself as responsible for our honour, which in turn is so inextricably mixed up with his own and that of the family. Ljuka has often told us how much worse it was for him as the only son, with all that pressure to become worthy of taking over the clan and its affairs one day, whereas all Marja and I need to do is make sure we’re both virgins when we become officially engaged.

‘You think that’s
easy?
’ I cried, pleased to make my brother blush and protest that I ought to watch it, that one shouldn’t make such jokes. ‘I don’t see why not,’ I countered. ‘It’s a funny business, sex. It was certainly very comic watching you trying to protect
your
virginity from that
dudi
schoolteacher until Captain Panic got on the case and he disappeared.’ Whereupon Ljuka chased me all over the house. Voyde society is no place for free thinkers, least of all for free-thinking girls.

Ordinarily speaking, you might think such a phone conversation with Father is drama enough for one day, but the surprises are not yet over. A minor one occurs at lunch-time when distant voices indicate that Gerry is not alone. Nothing of his private life is remotely my business, of course, and being the very reverse of a nosy neighbour I am indifferent as to whether it is a guest in the singular or guests in the plural. Still, I have discovered that from the window of the end room upstairs one can just glimpse a tiny bit of Gerry’s terrace between the leaves of the trees, and through binoculars it looks as though ‘singular’ is exactly the right word: a scrawny
creature with a polished head. Quite a knowing young man, I’d say, from that worldly little face. They seem to be laughing a lot but then I’m hardly surprised to see more than one bottle on the table. Some connection with work? Or a lover, perhaps? It does seem that Gerry’s been quieter recently, come to think of it. It’s some time since I consciously heard his singing but maybe I’m so used to it by now that I scarcely notice any longer. Well, well. No doubt all will be revealed in due course. Unless I’ve got him very wrong, Il Falsetto can keep a secret about as well as a wet paper bag can hold a carton of ice cream. I do hope it’s a lover: the poor dear badly needs someone to look after him and it’ll get him out of my hair.

But the real surprise comes much later this evening after I’ve had supper and am playing to myself at the electronic keyboard with headphones on. I’m trying out various combinations of sound and am quite pleased with the effect the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata makes when played on trombones. It’s stately and mournful and I’m just trying out the left-hand octaves with tubas when an alien sonority begins to creep in. Puzzled, I punch some buttons but it goes on becoming more obtrusive. On impulse I raise one earphone and realize it’s an external sound: a deep clattering hum getting louder and louder and then swirling deafeningly over the house. Obviously a helicopter. I leave the headphones around my neck and jerk out the jack plug. I’m quite distracted. By the time I’ve found a torch and gone outside it has landed at the back and is standing in a winking pool of its own lights, rotors freewheeling with the winding-down sound a switched-off turbine makes.

Even though I’m fairly sure who this is, I’m still gripped by alarm. The sudden noise and drama, as well as the torn-off leaves still floating to earth everywhere, seem aimed entirely at me. In our part of the world helicopters have always meant trouble. This one is particularly sinister, being of racy and futuristic design as well as finished in matt black without identification that I can see. The navigation and landing lights
go off. The door flips upwards and the pilot steps out, also black-clad and removing a silver helmet with night-vision visor. He reaches back into the cockpit for a flashlight, ducks perfunctorily beneath the slowly revolving blades and comes towards me in the starlight. Behind him a few green and red panel lights continue to twinkle eerily on the rakish canopy. I flash my own torch uncertainly.

‘Marta!’ he calls.

‘Ljuka!’ I reply in relief. ‘My God, you gave me a shock! I mean, how could you find this place in the dark?’

‘GPS,’ he says. ‘I set the co-ordinates when we bought the house, remember? When I waded out into this paddock and asked you to mow it?’

And my baby brother folds me in his flying suit, which smells sexily of kerosene, as the rotor blades of his magic chariot finally halt with a sigh. My forgotten headphones dig into my collarbone, the dangling jack plug knocks softly against my shins.