Vanished Years (22 page)

‘This Aids,’ asked one of them. ‘Is it very easy to catch?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I think so.’

‘Then you must be very careful.’

I began to sob again.

She took my hand and looked into my eyes. ‘I’m sure you’ll be all right. As for your friend, why don’t you come with us to the basilica and say a rosary for him. You could even make a novena!’

‘A
novena
?’ For the uninitiated that’s nine rosaries a day for nine days.

‘Yes. I think that would be very beautiful.’

I did say a novena for Alfo. But praying can be sidestepping and is not always really religious. It gave me a sense that I was doing something, but Alfo needed support, an actual shoulder to lean on, not the distant buzz of a thousand ‘Ave Marias’ said in a village church three hundred miles away. In reality, I had stolen his tragedy for myself.

My test came back negative. Of course it would. My paranoia had run amok and I had more or less destroyed poor Alfo under the weight of it. He had been careful and responsible, while I had behaved like a ‘rich tourist witch’, Tom said, out of my depth, not tough enough to play the game.

During our late-night calls from the station in Turin I began to disengage. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, deal with the very real problems Alfo had. Finally he cracked one night as a train to Viareggio was delayed, and shouted at me down the line. He accused me of playing with him, of being utterly selfish, and finally of being a typical Catholic, all noise and no compassion.

He was right.

T
welve years later, I was walking down a rainy street in Amsterdam with my friend Rifat from Turkey. It was a freezing New Year’s Eve at the beginning of the new century, and Christmas trees swayed in the wind outside the big hotels. Their lights and tinsel were wavy blurs in the rain. The potheads looked out dreamily from the warmth of the coffee shops, and freezing tourists hurried through the streets, wrapped in scarves and hats.

‘Mum, look at that number in the window,’ said Rifat.

I looked around and there was Alfo. Older, tougher, no boyishness left; a marine, in fact, with short-cropped hair, wearing army fatigues He sat with a thin blond Dutchman at a table behind a large window.

I banged on the pane and he looked round. His brain’s machinery flew through a series of images before matching up the ghoul in the window with that uppity lover from the last century. Then his eyes bulged and a huge smile cracked his unshaven face in half. He bounded from the bar, and there we were again, the same but completely different, weathered and harder, but amazed and thrilled at
the universe throwing us together. We exchanged numbers and party plans. Later that night, as midnight struck in some dungeon dance hall, and klaxons blasted, and streamers and glitter fell through the air, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was him. We hugged as the chimes banged out. My Turkish friend arrived with some other friends. I turned around to introduce them, but Alfo was gone.

A couple of evenings later, as the festivities wound down, I was lying, toxic, in my room when there was a knock on my door. It was him. On closer inspection he had a haunted look about him. He produced a huge bag of cocaine and chopped out lines as he told me all that had happened since that faraway morning in Turin.

He no longer worked in a bank. Obviously. He had fled Italy, first to America, where he met a man, and things were OK for a while. But then the disease kicked in and he nearly died. Only for the fact that he had been a body-builder, and was massive, had he survived the onslaught of Kaposi’s sarcoma, which had grown over his entire body and eaten him away. In a sense he had been lucky, because his immune system had held on just long enough for the miraculous anti-retroviral drugs to become available. He was saved, but as soon as he was in a fit state was forced to leave America. He was too proud to go back to Italy. So now he was on the high seas, waiting for something to happen. In the meantime he had become a dealer. Soon, he said, he would try escorting.

He was matter-of-fact, light-hearted, still a graceful colossus, but Aids had hollowed him out. He had survived it but it had marginalised him, exiling him to a life of muddling through and moving on. He wanted to go back to the States, but that was pretty much impossible, considering his condition, so for the time being he was stuck, roaming Europe.

‘Just think,’ he said, ‘what a normal life I had. And now this!’

We stayed up until dawn, talking. I could speak Italian now, and many things were clarified that had been lost in translation. As he was leaving we promised to meet again.

‘I’m sorry for everything,’ I blurted out as we hugged goodbye.

He laughed, and his eyes glittered. ‘Everything ended well. That’s the main thing. Do you want some valium?’

It was still raining outside, and I watched him through the window, hunched against the cold, hands dug deep into his pockets, as he walked across a bridge over the canal and disappeared in the deep blue darkness. I never saw him again.

‘I
am feeling very holy,’ said my father as we left the grotto. ‘I think I shall make a substantial donation to charity.’

Charity?
Now it was my turn to feign deafness.

I
t is five o’clock in the morning deep in the Cambodian jungle. A twelfth-century temple called Bayon with fifty-four towers looms black against the purple sky. A full watery moon glides through space above us, outlining the vast temple in silver and throwing long shadows from the forest onto the clearing upon which it stands. It is like a day-for-night scene in a movie from the fifties. The woods behind us are silent, shredded with moonbeams and fragrant with weird Cambodian night flowers. The air is still and warm, and the beauty is so intense that for a moment our anxious lives – with their situation comedies and dramas – briefly stand back and dissolve into the night.

We are not alone. A few other tourists grope their way, beetles in the half-light, up the steep, ruined stairways. Banyan trees weave through the walls, across the balustrades, sucking this forgotten civilisation back into the earth. Huge porticos balance precariously on teetering columns and vaulted ceilings are caught in the branches’ embrace, as they fall in ghostly freeze-frames like broken card houses. It’s probably quite dangerous, and it won’t be long before someone is buried alive, and there are signs and barriers and officious tour guides
with megaphones, but for the moment we are watched by a few young Buddhist monks – just kids, really – who are the keepers of these temples of Angkor.

I’m soon separated from the rest of the group in a maze of black stone corridors deep in the temple. A little girl beckons me to follow her. We enter a small room where sits an enormous Buddha and a tiny old nun. There are offerings at the feet of the statue including a packet of Lays crisps, and the nun is arranging things as I come in. She has no teeth, a shaved head and unwavering blue eyes. She sits on her haunches, proffers some sticks of incense, which I light from a candle on the floor. She motions for me to kneel beside her and pray. I gaze up at the huge face of the Buddha; his smile is inscrutable through the wisps of smoke that billow and curl my prayers to the heavens. I’m transfixed. He seems to be looking straight at me. The nun nudges me in the ribs, and motions for me to bow. I do.

‘One,’ she says in English.

‘Two.’ She’s bowing with me this time, showing me the way.

‘Three,’ we say in unison. And then:

‘
Peace
!’ she explains, as if it were that simple.

Charity may begin at home, but it ends in Cambodia. I am here in my new capacity as ambassador for the Global Fund, a G8 invention to combat Aids, malaria and TB in the third world. They have pledged $59 million to this country and I am here to see how it is being spent. I have in my entourage this moonlit night: a TV crew from the BBC, a photographer from
Vanity Fair
– a German prince, no less – and an extraordinary woman from Geneva (that mountain spring from whence all rivers of charity coil) called Mariangela Bavicchi. My Sancho Panza on this escapade is David from Miami, without whom I cannot take one charity step. He is standing right next to me this morning, looking like Frankenstein’s monster in the moonlight.

We have become an unusual double act on the scene. Our previous field trips include Haiti, India and Africa. We have lobbied in
Washington and Moscow, and even headlined the disastrous Aids Walk in Miami where no one showed up, but I got the keys of the city anyway. (Where are those keys, by the way?) David helps me write my speeches and is a world expert on Aids, when he is not larking around.

This morning we are going to take a moody dawn shot of me for the Vanity Fair article I shall write about the situation. We have been driven to the forest by a rabble of gorgeous Cambodian boys on scooters and I have even done some jaunty shots riding side-saddle, whizzing past a monk taking a shit. Dawn arrives and I am standing on a parapet surveying the jungle. The German prince is shooting me from below – not my favourite angle. He has nicknamed me Frosty.

‘Frosty, stop worrying. You are looking marvellous. Just like a lesbian explorer.’

‘Good,’ I reply. ‘I don’t want to set a frivolous tone.’

The view from up here is better than
The Jungle
Book. The abandoned towers of a thousand other temples reach out from the swaying forest. They are drowning in it. Their sharp black silhouettes flail against the green ocean, which is now screeching and squawking with life. Mist swirls from the ground and curls into the morning air. The smell of woodsmoke chases off the subtle fragrance of night as we jump back onto our scooters and drive all the way to the Tonle Sap River where a boat is waiting to take us back to the capital, fifteen hours away.

‘If today’s newspaper is anything to go by,’ I lazily observe over breakfast the next morning, ‘it seems as if there’s a coup brewing.’

The government here in Phnom Penh is at a standstill, and the king, Norodom Sihanouk, has fled (as usual) to his chum Kim Il-Sung’s state-of-the-art hospital in North Korea. There goes my introduction from Nicky Haslam!

But the really big story in the local morning paper is that Angelina Jolie has been offered Cambodian citizenship. She’s in Phnom Penh with her adopted Cambodian baby to lobby against the building of a
dam, and they are staying in our hotel. On page three of this remarkable, bumper edition, we learn that Gary Glitter is appealing his extradition. All in all, it’s a very show-business week. No sooner do I arrive in my room than a smart manila envelope slides under the door, inviting me to a cocktail party, given by the actress Ashley Judd, in the American Embassy. I look out of my window and there’s Kirsten Dunst, poolside with a couple of Kampucheans. I swear.

We are staying in the Raffles Hotel, abandoned for many years, but recently restored to its no-nonsense, colonial, custard-coloured comfort. Long cloisters with the most polished black and white floors I have ever seen stretch along the back of the entire building on six storeys, flanked by rows of identical doors. Dim lanterns like street lights thread along their ceilings into the distance and wooden balustrades look over the gardens at the back of the hotel. They are the corridors we run down in troubled dreams, never reaching the end.

At night the heat and the scent from the garden are claustrophobic. There is no movement in the air, just the faintest rustling in the atmosphere – a vibrational trace perhaps, or maybe my newly diagnosed tinnitus is playing me up – but I am hearing silent screams everywhere and hardly have to close my eyes to see the bloodstained bodies being dragged down these halls, not so long ago, by the monstrous hit men of the Khmer Rouge who used the deserted hotel during the terror for private torture parties. Inside my room the sweltering heat is sharply reduced by the efforts of the grinding air-conditioning machine, which freezes the place to the temperature of Regan’s bedroom in
The Exorcist
or Michael Jackson’s oxygen coffin. I wake up the next morning with the beginnings of third-world, third-degree flu.

Looking at our breakfast table in the opulent old dining room, we could be a group of big game hunters off to shoot some tigers as we lounge around, sipping from beautiful pink and white china cups and listening to Mariangela Bavicchi, our man in Geneva, as she tells us about the day’s work ahead. She is the person who must
nurture and control our vision of what is going on here in Cambodia. We must see it through her eyes, the eyes of the fund, and we must wear our special rose-coloured 3-D specs, provided by the G8, when communicating the nightmare to the outside world. It is her responsibility that we never go off piste, or see things we are not meant to see.

Mariangela is one of charity’s top handlers. Watching her now, sipping an espresso, I wonder if she is CIA. She is certainly as inscrutable as a James Bond girl. Tall, blonde, attractive but not pretty, laid back and yet irrepressible, shaken not stirred. Her voice vibrates from somewhere behind her nose, making her sound at times like a duck, at others like a German, although she is in fact Italian – and the only one I ever met who rolls her Rs. But that’s the UN for you. They are unfathomable folk with untraceable accents, and they all seem to possess three passports. MA has humorous, slightly droopy eyes and the thing that makes her more than just pretty is that when she talks she always seems to be on the verge of laughing. She dresses simply but well in jeans and shirts and expensive shoes, like a Roman lesbian. In fact she is married to a Swiss banker, but we never meet him in the course of our three-year friendship.

If I have conjured up a picture of Marie Antoinette in drainpipes, then I am getting it wrong. MA is committed to her job and extremely good at it, but she is a different animal to the charity girls from Oxfam with whom I have previously rattled the begging bowl. Their faces were blotchy with compassion and panic. MA is poised with a creamy complexion and she never hurries, except perhaps when she nips off to the spa, should we be charioteering at a good hotel and there is a break in the schedule. Between the UN in Geneva and Oxfam on the Banbury Road, there is obviously a wide gap. It’s five stars all the way for the bearer of the baby-blue passport, even if the rest of us have to pay our way. Luckily
Vanity Fair
is underwriting our entire trip.