Cooking With Fernet Branca (28 page)

The short flight down to Pisorno Studios with Filippo Pacini is exhilarating. The noise makes conversation difficult so I become lost in my own world, watching the approach of the matte blue carpet that is this morning’s Mediterranean on which breezes have left random marks like hoovering and assorted tiny craft are affixed with dabs of white glue. The tinted canopy overhead makes the sky look much darker than it is, strengthening the impression that we are approaching the earth not from Le Roccie but from outer space. Stranger still to look up at the whizzing blades that keep us aloft and realize they are revolving around a single axle at whose centre is an imaginary shaft thinner than a barely-turning needle. We are literally pinned to the sky by twirling molecules.

Don’t worry – I’m given to these nervous fugues of fancy when in the air, even more so when flying Ryanair. I’m not, however, nervous at heart. On the contrary, I am filled with a sublime fatalism brought on by being in Filippo’s hands. If we do crash I couldn’t have wished to be flown into the ground by a handsomer pilot. This is oddly consoling. But we don’t crash, and come swinging in over the pines and the barely breaking waves that mark the Tuscan coast just north of Livorno, whose urban sprawl and industrial docks suddenly look very modern. As we sink below the treeline in the grounds of a gleaming white fascist villa, however, the twenty-first century vanishes from view and we settle in the nineteen thirties with a gentle bump. The helicopter has turned out to be a time machine. Certainly I feel about fourteen as I hop to the ground and thank Filippo.

‘Any time,’ he says, and I may well hold him to it. ‘Come on. Papa said he’s doing beach shoots all today and some of
tonight. The forecasters say it’ll get cloudy in a couple of days’ time so we’ve got to take advantage of this weather for continuity. Unfortunately, summer’s over.’

We walk through dusty oleanders down towards two tall cypress trees that seem to mark the end of the garden proper. Beyond, a sandy track leads through evergreen scrub to the shore. Unexpectedly, the beach is contained within a small cove that has obviously been constructed on what is otherwise a long, straight coast. There is a dilapidated low house with a sun-bleached dinghy propped upright against it. Heaps of nets, lengths of frayed rope and orange plastic fishing floats are scattered artistically about. A small tractor hitched to what looks like a steel mat is parked to one side. A generator thuds somewhere in the background. Black cables converge on the doorway of the house whose roof, I notice, is patched with scraps of sheet tin and plastic. The interior is lit brighter than the sunlight outside, to judge from the glimpses visible between the heads and bodies of cameramen, technicians and grips clustered around the entrance.

But what really grabs my attention is the music. It is not very loud but extremely clear, giving the impression of large speakers with the gain level turned low. I recognize it at once as the same incompetent squalling idiot going ‘
Uffa
…
buff
a
…’ that Marta was playing when I went over to remonstrate on the morning after Nanty’s UFO. But that’s not why it sounds familiar; it sounded familiar the first time, too. At that moment there comes the sensation of at last dumping a nameless heavy load, and I can hear what it really is. It gives me the same visceral shock as passing the window of one of those electronics shops on Tottenham Court Road and catching sight of a pervert slouching across the screen of the TV monitor displayed inside. This low-life, a worn looking creature of the streets, stops, backs up, shakes his head, finally sticks his tongue out, and yes! recognizes his image.
That
is
you
. That is your alter ego who lives in a CCTV world parallel to your own and lampoons the real you with pixel accuracy.

Here on the beach of Pisorno Studios I am listening to a parody of my own singing. I now know what it sounds like to stand outside Samper’s house and hear him cheerfully at work in the kitchen. I can almost see some fabulous dish taking shape beneath my hands – as it might be Stuffed Udder with Butterscotch Sauce – while my spirits soar with an extemporization from Act 2 of
La
Tranca
Vispa
. Now it sinks in: the music score of
Arrazzato
is basically one long mockery of Gerald Samper, friendly neighbour, jobbing wordsmith and culinary genius.

My first reaction is almost my last, such is the rush of dizzying rage. Out of it emerges one clear thought: this time Marta has
really
gone too far. This time the adipose hairy hag will pay. After all I’ve done for her: putting up fences, supplying her Fernet habit, freeing her from the clutches of the police. And how does she thank me? My peace is shattered, my life disrupted, my clients frightened away, my fences torn down and now my private voice is travestied and about to be exposed to the mockery of film audiences across the world. Right – go for it! (I tell myself in a steely inner voice that makes me tremble slightly, at least partly with pleasure). Go for it! Sue the bollocks off them! Pacini’ll be good for a decent sum. Marta too, with her shady mafia connections, whatever they are. I’ll reduce her to a sebaceous husk, a grovelling puddle of grease and hair. I’ll sue her to her last emetic inch of communist sausage. I’ll sue her out of that bloody hovel and then I’ll bulldoze it and the entire neighbour problem will be solved at a stroke. I’ll –

Hang on.

Just hang on a moment.

Cool it, Samper. Is this not the very lever I need to ensure that Pacini consents to make me his latest and best biographer? Wouldn’t the heavy threat of legal action also be quite a nifty way of wringing out of him the sort of frank details he might otherwise withhold but which will practically guarantee newspaper serialization and an eager readership? Maybe after all, righteous petulance – no matter how excusable and enjoyable
– is not the most canny way of ensuring Samper’s future.

So with massive patience I bide my time, like a great heap of damp grass cuttings not visibly steaming except that inside it is already hot and turning yellow as it prepares to burst into flame at the least expected moment. Meanwhile the scene they are shooting is finished, Pacini appears in – I kid you not – a green eyeshade, catches sight of us and waves in a preoccupied fashion as he gives orders and directions with sweeps of his hands.

‘We’ll catch him at lunch,’ Filippo says. ‘Another hour if this goes OK.’

The grips and technicians vacate the house and retreat to where we’re standing. The tractor starts up and drags the mat over the sand in front of the house, obliterating the marks and footprints before men turn hoses on it, the nozzles screwed down to a fine spray, wetting the sand to flatness. Soon it looks just as though the tide had recently gone out and inside the house a yawning motley of hippie boys and girls are finally getting up for lunch as they stagger sleepily to the door and gaze blearily out, presumably contemplating another day of clean Green living. I can’t imagine what this film’s about. It looks dire. Clapperboards snap, cameras roll, Pacini waves them all back inside again several times until he gets what he wants. He checks the rushes on a tiny monitor, approves what he sees, makes satisfied lunch-break gestures with both arms, shouts ‘Two o’clock!’

I fall in with Filippo and his father as we walk back towards the house. Filippo explains the earlier dramatic events in Malta’s house in indignant tones as I coolly plot and scheme and wait for the
moment
juste
to lob my little bomb.

‘Thank God you were there, Gerry,’ Pacini says at one point.

‘Thank God Filippo was,’ I echo piously. ‘With either one of us alone it mightn’t have worked. But both of us together were too much for the
maresciallo
.’

‘I shall settle
his
hash shortly, believe me,’ says the great director.

‘That’s just what Marta doesn’t want you to do,’ I tell him. ‘Things are maybe not quite so simple’ And on this enigmatic note we arrive at the villa and find our way into a splendid spacious morning room with a terrace. The décor is quite marvellous: Latin mottoes and tough little cherubs who would clearly give you a good kicking if you so much as patted them on the head. A huge table is laid with buffet dishes from which we begin spearing and spooning liberal portions of this and that before seating ourselves with a large glass of white wine apiece. Be honest, who would live in England?

‘I’m afraid the food isn’t right for the room,’ Pacini observes. ‘Your politically correct fascist went in for simple, traditional dishes like
pastasciutta
with plain tomato sauce. You almost never saw people eating in those
telefoni
bianchi
films they shot in this very house. They could be seen sipping an occasional glass of wine or fruit juice, a cup of tea or coffee, that’s about all. There was a manic cult of fitness at the time, everyone cycling and running and hiking like crazy. Just to be fat was quite suspicious. Mussolini and the
gerarchi
were always being filmed stripped to the waist and pounding along a beach. A strange period. There are several things about it I don’t dislike,’ Pacini adds. ‘Modest amounts of simple food and plenty of exercise sound rather sensible to me.’

I’m taken up with an interior vision of 10 Downing Street stripped for action with a succession of doughy ministers sprinting across the PM’s office. I see power-dressing women teetering on high heels, ricking an ankle, collapsing aspraw1 on the burgundy carpet, State papers scattered from an out-flung hand. I see a puce-faced Chancellor of the Exchequer jogging on the spot before the desk, hairy breasts bouncing beneath his Savile Row jacket, trousers inching their way downwards over a white jelly bottom too restless to hold them up. I see a rabbit nose nodding frantically inside voluminous boxer shorts dotted with little space rockets. The lecture on the fiscal implications of the Third Way goes on and on … I see all this and think Bring back fascism!

This puts me squarely into the mood to make my play.

‘You were talking about Marta just now,’ I say to Pacini.

‘Brilliant lady, isn’t she? The more I hear her music the more I feel inspired.’

‘Me too. I’m inspired to sue her.’

Pacini laughs, probably reckoning he has misheard this foreigner.
You
wish
.

‘To sue her,’ I repeat with as much bell-like clarity as one can manage around a mouthful of cold seafood salad. His smile fades a little.

‘Sue
?’

‘Sue. I don’t suppose you realize it, but that score of hers for your film contains a deliberate pastiche of my singing. Not only is it theft of my intellectual property but defamatory, calculated to make me a laughing-stock.’

Immediately I can tell by his expression he knows it’s true. Filippo does, too. There is a difficult silence.

‘Surely not,’ Pacini says without conviction.

‘Your doubts can be easily settled. I have only to bring over some friends of mine from England who will testify to my habit of singing as I work. All you’d have to do is play them those bits of Marta’s score. They would identify it at once. The resemblance is beyond question. Indeed, a former friend of mine named Dennis once made a tape recording of me without my knowledge which you can bet he has kept.’

Pacini has stopped eating and now replaces his plate on the table. I know exactly what’s going on behind that noble, Oscared brow as if it were made of glass and I could see for myself the glittering fizz of electrical activity. Marta is taken to court on such a charge and what happens to
Arrazzato
without the music? What of his own part in this? This is the moment to start drawing the outlines of an escape route for him.

‘I’m really sorry about this, Piero. I know it has absolutely nothing to do with you. Even I only realized what was happening when I heard the music out there on the beach an hour
ago. I didn’t at first recognize myself – one doesn’t. But once I had, it was unmistakable. Pretty wounding, too, I may say. I’m still upset about it. I hadn’t expected this – what can one call it? “Betrayal” sounds too self-dramatizing and “malicious” too intentional. But I definitely think Marta has taken a terrible liberty.’

Having thus adroitly inserted the cat into the midst of the pigeons I leave them to it. Father and son engage in a flurry of alarmed exchanges out of which fly words like ‘plagiarism’ and ‘pasquinade’. I go back to my seafood salad. Since we’re on the subject I might point out that Cat among Pigeons is a great Samper dish, one of a series in which I was inspired by English figures of speech. The two different meats, feline and avian, happen to go extraordinarily well together. Pigs in Clover are excellent, too, when rationalized as loin chops done in a bed of clover so that a succulent sweetness pervades the pork. More exquisite still is Dog-in-the-Manger, when interpreted as a version of haybox cookery. I once released the smiling ghost from a neighbour’s snarling dachshund by means of a dough-sealed Le Creuset casserole packed away piping hot in hay for eighteen hours. It was this dish that made me speculate that Aesop, too, may have been an experimental cook at heart and I’m planning a cookbook in his honour, provisionally entitled
Aesop’s
Foibles
. I can’t wait to try Fox and Grapes. I know it will be sensational. But Pacini is addressing me.

‘This is disastrous‚’ he is saying. ‘Can I ask what your intentions are?’

‘I’ve certainly no wish to cause unnecessary trouble and disruption‚’ I lie virtuously. ‘The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Marta didn’t act with genuine malice. It seems to me we all of us have to give some thought to our respective futures: she, me, even such a distinguished person as yourself.’

‘I’ve got there‚’ says Pacini with a touch of sourness. ‘How much?’ I think he looks relieved at being able to see, amid my froth of delicacy, the gleaming heads of brass tacks.

I make an effort to look horrified. ‘I hope you don’t think I’d stoop to blackmail?’ I cry. ‘What a dreadful idea.’ I take a large gulp of wine to emphasize how badly I need a restorative after such a thought.