Juggling the Stars (6 page)

If only life really were decided by exams!

He went and stood under a vine whose trunk climbed to the second floor near the sitting room window of the Ferronis. He trampled the little patch of open earth where the thing sprouted and then shinned up a few feet breaking off leaves and branches. A fine mess. He dropped down and considered the windows. The hole would need to be big enough for an arm to go through to give the impression someone had reached in and opened the thing from inside.

He took the largest of the stones from his pocket and aimed carefully. In the narrow courtyard his throw would have to be steep, near vertical. He heaved up the stone and missed. The thing struck the wall a yard or so to the right and clattered down through a sea of vine leaves. The noise was appalling, a fearfully loud rustling with sharp echoing cracks as the stone bounced on branches and finally struck the flagstones of the courtyard like a gunshot. Morris dashed through the arch to the outer door and had it half open before he paused to listen. Despite the coolness he suddenly found himself bathed in sweat. Why on earth had he got involved in this crazy business for the sake of that stupid little statue? God! But there must be some sign of a break-in or he was finished. It wouldn't take them ten minutes to work out who had done it.

After a few moments he crept back into the courtyard to discover that no lights were on. Nobody had woken it seemed. Amazing. He found his stone behind the fountain took up exactly the same position as before and this time threw with a slight bias to the left. Dead on. The window must have been made of the cheapest glass because it flew into fragments which fell in a shower through the vines. But before they could hit the ground, Morris was already out on the street. He thrust his hands in his pockets, pursed his lips to whistle and, given that the last bus was long gone, set out briskly on the long walk home. What he whistled was, ‘When the Saints'.

Morris had the statue boldly placed on his coffee table beside the photo of his mother and glanced up at it from time to time above the pages of his book. He would have to wait till Monday's or Tuesday's papers to hear how much it was worth. But it was not urgent. In fact, he wasn't sure he really cared, or whether he would make any attempt to sell the little lady whatever she would fetch. It was nice just to have her there, a smooth, bronze, upward lift of form; knees, thighs, breasts, arms and tilted face, all swinging from right to left and exuberantly upwards. He would keep the thing, damn it, unless he was desperate. Perhaps he would even buy a pedestal.

The difference, Dad,' he remarked into a dictaphone humming with new batteries, ‘if you must know, between stealing and exploitation, is this: that with exploitation the victim knows he is getting fucked, like you at the factory, and has to accept it, to put bread in his mouth as you say, and so is humiliated. But stealing is a more generous transaction. The victim isn't obliged to assent to his own ruin and therefore remains proud and free. Hence stealing would appear to be the more honest and morally superior of the two.'

It was the first of June they turned off the gas. This was quite reasonable, seeing as Morris hadn't as yet paid any of the bills for the expensive winter months. He had been expecting it even. Nevertheless the event plunged him into a grand depression, the kind of gloom that sent him scuttling out after other people's company, his students and neighbours mostly, but even the English community on occasions with their bangers-and-mash and Valpolicella parties. He dressed carefully, not wanting to wear out anything valuable, yet at the same time determined to distinguish himself from the jeans and T-shirt brigade. Once arrived, he skulked in the corners of their shabby living rooms in Dietro Duomo, trying to pick up from their boozy cackle and chat whether anybody had any idea how to make money through the summer months.

The schools closed the second week of June and most of the private students would probably give up around the same time, thus condemning the expatriate teaching community to three months of penury. During this period most of the teachers gave up their rooms and flats to save themselves the rent and disappeared on hitch-hiking holidays to the cheapest possible destinations, or cheaper still, back home to regroup again the following autumn when the schools re-opened and the same squalid rooms would be as readily available as most squalid and undesirable things generally are.

The prospect of this summer, looming as an interminable scorching hot hazy blank, nothing to do and no money to spend, had Morris floundering in the very depths of self pity. He was a waif and a stray was the truth. An orphan, in the true spiritual sense of the word. He was a nobody, without dignity or recognition. Without repose. He thought how the noble Italian upper classes would pass the summer season, strutting through the shaded squares, parading along the sun-drenched lakeshore with their godlike bodies and stylish clothes.

Poverty was endurable in England, Morris explained to Pamela Pinnington, a slim, limpish girl from East Croydon, because it had been institutionalized; the whole country wore a façade of poverty and the rich were guilty of their money and kept it well hidden while the poor were proud of their tribulations and flaunted them like banners or battle scars.

‘But in Italy only fools are poor,' Morris said.
'
And everybody can see how marvellous life is with cash.'

Pamela asked, did he really think so? She thought the most wonderful thing about Italy was that if you had a lot of friends and shared your flat, you really didn't need too much money at all. Morris watched her as she spoke, nervous middle-class fingers twisting round a beer mug full of wine, and immediately regretted the rashness of having said what he had, exposing himself like that. The girl had huge, brown, blinking eyes and wore a dirty T-shirt with no bra so that you had to feel sorry for her breasts which were no more than nipples.

'Perhaps you're right,' he said politely, trying to extricate himself. He wasn't in any way lascivious about women, but he did like them to be beautiful.

‘You could have a go at getting a job as a travel guide,' Marion Roberts interrupted. Marion was a tall bleached blonde who wore the same kind of electric lollipop make-up so common in places like Camden Market or the Portobello Road. One of the many who hung around the awful Stan. ‘Give them some bull about having been to university and knowing the city backwards and they're bound to give you some work.'

But the idea of dragging groups of pensioners from Great Yarmouth around the streets and squares of ancient Verona to have them snapshot each other with hankies knotted over their heads under Juliet's balcony, complaining there was nowhere public to spend a penny and giggling over the name Piazza Bra, was more than Morris could even begin to imagine. Not his cup of tea, he said.

Stan came to join them. He wore jeans and a goldish Indian smock and his beard was speckled with crumbs. Simonetta, another girlfriend, Italian, hung mouselike behind him. Marion's inked eyelashes flickered.

'Poor Morris has a problem with the summer,' she said. ‘He's stony broke.'

Morris had actually said nothing of the kind, but didn't protest. He was long since used to being made fun of. If fun you could call it.

‘No shit man!' Stan scratched in his beard under a broad Jewish smile. He seemed as pleased to see Morris, Morris thought, as a priest who has found a new sheep in his flock. Stan, the community leader.

Morris shouldn't have taken such an expensive apartment, he said. He was paying the price now for not having shared a place earlier and saved on the rent. Still, if he wanted to come and live with them for the last couple of weeks and then maybe join them on their microbus trip out to Turkey, he was most welcome. There was an island off Izmir where you could guarantee to live for less than a dollar a day. Stan linked his arm into Morris's as he said this and Morris felt suddenly so completely disorientated by the desultory, inferior conversation that he said, yes, he might do that, and then was furious with himself, of course, for not having immediately burnt a boat that was so patently unseaworthy.

But what grated most of all - as he had told Massimina's family at that fateful party when he had invented a fiancée for the American - what grated most of all was that Stan actually was rich! His mother really was sitting on a whole string of motels back there in California. And what did the boy do? He played hippy dippy poor man in Italy, where to live well certainly didn't cost the earth, squatting in a pigsty with five others (‘us immigrants have to stick together') secure in the knowledge that he could step out of his muck any moment he chose and take the first plane home to Sunset Strip.

At least I'm not a hypocrite, Morris thought. At least I can say
that
of myself, and he left without a word of goodbye.

At home, he stood up from his bread and parmesan to pull out a drawer from the cabinet behind him. Amongst the stacks of dictaphone tapes there was a bundle of papers which he took out and spread on the kitchen counter.

AGILE THIEF DOESN'T KNOW WHAT HE'S AFTER, the back page headline of the
Arena
had announced; with typically facile journalistic amusement the article went on to describe how some poor idiot had gone to the risk of climbing six metres up a wistaria and smashing a window to take nothing more than a cheap bronze reproduction barely worth the metal it was made from.

Morris went through the other papers. There was the letter from Signora Trevisan, letters from the gas company, two laboriously penned postcards from his father (‘You're only putting off the evil day, lad.' Why on earth did they bother to stay in touch., insist on reminding each other of their respective existences?), various rejections for jobs he'd written off for in Milan, a long sob note from Massimina, to which he hadn't as yet found time to reply, and finally, all the Gucci brochures and the diary of Signor Cartuccio with the exclamation marks by the names of Luigina and Monica.

Munching the cheese, Morris reread everything with great care. The tedium of another exhausted empty evening was before him. When he was at university, he had noticed how everybody, himself more or less included, had a sense of prestige and of belonging quite by right to a great mutual admiration society which bore you up and gave you a constant relation to others and to the world. And the same must be true, Morris thought, if you were involved in some kind of religion, or part of a family, or married even; you shared hopes and fears, hate and trust, and developed communal callouses against the stings and treadmills of the world. Common illusions was the correct description.

But on your own, and in a foreign country …on your own you had to find self-esteem all by yourself; you were turning to the mirror for company, clutching at straws - a terrible, virtuoso affair. In short, the real thing. It was incredible how an evening, a weekend, a whole summer, could simply open before you like a chasm, uncrossable, unfillable, paralysing. One was even tempted to start writing books or painting pictures or something, like half the rest of the immigrant community (Pamela Pinnington of all people - 'I'm a bit of an artist actually'). Or to play the libertine and gather your trophies that way. (Dear bi-sexual Stan with all his tribe around him, like some lascivious latter-day mormon.)

Yet Morris was determined to steer well clear of such desperate remedies as these. No, he was damned if he was going to play the sucker who logged himself over canvas or manuscript from dark dawn till dusk only to have his creations condescendingly brushed aside by the nincompoops who doubtless commanded in that zone (could you imagine anyone ever publishing Stan's ‘New World Immigrant Zaps the Old'?). Anyway, he had too much respect for great art to dabble himself. And the idea of playing Don Juan had never appealed, the details of such a life would be so untidy; it was the wholeness of his own body, his own image, he was interested in, not the possession of others.

‘Every man is an island,' he informed his dictaphone. ‘Entire unto himself. Click. Or God help him.'

Yet he had to do something! Anything, absolutely. However reckless. Or this life would simply trickle and trickle away, with all the talent and taste and energy he had gone completely to waste. He turned back to the drawer, fiddled through the heaps of tapes and used train tickets and pulled out his writing pad. There were only four or five sheets left. So he practised first on the back of the gas bills.

(What was life for, exactly? Where, in particular, if anywhere, was Morris Duckworth going?)

EGREGIO SIGNOR CARTUCCIO
;
he went for the most fiercely childish block capitals, not simply because he would have to disguise his handwriting, but because he knew there was nothing more threatening than childishness,
REMEMBER ME?

THE AMERICAN DIPLOMAT. HA HA. I STILL HAVE YOUR DOCUMENT CASE AND DIARY, AND NOW I HAVE FINISHED MY RESEARCH. IF YOU DON'T WANT YOUR SIGNORA WIFE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR DISGUSTING ADVENTURES WITH SIGNORINAS LUIGINA AND MONICA, THEN WILL YOU PLEASE BE SO KIND AS TO LEAVE THE, I THINK, MODEST SUM OF FIVE MILLION LIRE …

Where? Obviously there was no question of him mailing the cash to this address. On the other hand, Cartuccio lived in Trieste and Morris was damned if he was travelling nearly two hundred miles on the off chance that the chap would be fool enough to pay (if he ever sent the letter at all). But then it wasn't really such an awful lot of money. Cartuccio probably earned that every month. Maybe every week. (Heartbreaking to think how many people earned in a week what would do Morris for a year.) What to do?

He picked up the diary and licked through the pages for the month to come. Cartuccio was in Rome this week it seemed, returning via Florence, Bologna and Vicenza on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth of June. Vicenza was just twenty miles away from Verona so Morris might stretch to that, he thought. The problem being that he didn't know the place at all. So where could he arrange for him to leave the money? This was an interesting question and weighing it up Morris at last began to enjoy himself. It would be quite a tour de force if he pulled it off. A challenge equal to his imagination. If the man paid he would give half away to charity, just to show he wasn't the common criminal. Or at least a million anyway. Some orphans' charity.