Bowl of Fruit Read online

  ‘Pardon?’

  The man with the Dali moustache is guffawing like a horse. His theatrical familiarity has been grating on me for some time, but I manage to keep my cool. And I’m not too bad either at thinking on my feet.

  ‘Ah, you must’ve overheard Luigi. That was just a silly mix-up at the door.’

  Bush

  I am staring at a plateful of garden.

  The signature sprinkle is not just decoration. It’s more like a deliberately obfuscating bush. In front of me is a verdant unintelligible dish.

  ‘Is not okay?’ The eyebrows are rotating in reproof.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I say. ‘And very very green.’

  But platitudes won’t do for Federico.

  ‘Luigi make it specially, you not enjoy the egg?’

  ‘I haven’t found it yet,’ I quip, and already my tentative smile dissolves as it falls on deaf eyebrows. ‘But I’m sure that when I do it’ll be perfect. Please say thank you to Luigi for me.’

  ‘You can say yourself, is not a big place.’

  When I summon up the courage to dig into the greenery at last, a translucent deliciousness erupts that defies absolutely table manners (which in any case I lack). I use knife-fork-and-fingers in an equal tripartite alliance. I carve out helter-skelter the crusty ciabatta; I layer it inversely with rocket and then scrambled egg; I semi-successfully manoeuvre it into my mouth. While occasionally licking knife-fork-fingers-and-lips, I am torn between the fear, on the one hand, that the ghost might arrive at any moment and catch me dirty-handed, and on the other hand a burning desire to savour this one luscious “scramble-egg-on-toas-ciabatta” for as long as I can…

  ‘So what you think, you like my scramble egg?’

  Surely a rhetorical question. It must be obvious that the licking has included and concluded with the plate.

  ‘Luigi, what can I say? I mean, look!’

  When I hold up the plate for Luigi to see – any trace of self-consciousness has evaporated with my food - the sparkle of china seems to hold him transfixed, washing all expression off his face.

  ‘Hey, Luigi, what’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Is beautiful. You see what you do?’

  ‘What? What have I done?’

  ‘You make Sicilian man cry.’

  Literally. Luigi clutches at his face with both hands, gaping at the plate, which I’m still holding up, and tears no sooner have welled in his eyes than they roll in a stream down his cheeks. Has the coruscating crockery seduced him with his own reflection? Has some distant echo from his past reverberated on the glimmer of its surface and struck poor Luigi with heart-rending homesickness pangs?

  ‘Mio dio, what you do to my brother?’

  ‘Federico, is so beautiful, look!’

  ‘Is not beautiful, is just empty plate.’

  ‘Is love, Federico, not just empty plate. My friend Leon, I like to kiss you. You give love to Luigi, and Luigi want to give love to you.’

  ‘It’s really not necessary,’ I say.

  ‘Is necessary for Luigi,’ Luigi insists.

  My abated self-consciousness is making a comeback, but the sooner this is over the better, so I’m standing up limply while Luigi plants several explosions on each of my reddening cheeks.

  ‘Luigi love everyone today, I like to kiss you all!’

  The mar-ket-ing has gone a little haywire, and with typical English reserve the breakfast clientele scrunch themselves more tightly around their tables. A stray toddler obliviously stumbles towards us, and deftly Federico sweeps him up into the air off his faltering feet. The little boy howls with satisfaction at discovering the Latin nose, which evidently he mistakes for a lump of plasticine, and with eager tiny hands he sets about attempting to remould it, into something more familiar perhaps. It’s uncanny: spontaneously the double act has burst into raptures, and Federico has regressed into gaga childhood. His head rocks from side to side, and he’s twittering sweet-sounding gurgling noises.

  It seems to take an age for the mother to discover she’s missing a child. When she does, with her latest offspring asleep in a makeshift contraption hanging over her unfortunate breast (exactly how unfortunate I am not yet aware), sheepishly she hobbles to her son. But trying to detach him from his malleable plaything is not an easy task, and her gasping effort wakes the baby up. The woman is all fingers and thumbs, and eventually she yells at her husband to come over and help. He gets up from where he’s sitting, cradling two more children in his arms, plants them both willy-nilly on his chair, instructs them with threats that reduce them to sobs to stay put, and then he bounces over to the other scene of mayhem, where everyone is wailing too, including Federico and the mother.

  Notwithstanding the sublime scrambled egg and the permanent theatre, I wonder why the ghost has not yet arrived - it’s now twenty minutes past. It was the ghost who made contact with me, and punctuality is the least I should be entitled to expect. Unless the ghost is not a ghost after all: the terrible thought has just occurred to me that I may have fallen prey to a sinister practical joke.

  ‘Leon?’

  I jump.

  ‘Anna?’

  I get up and we’re shaking hands.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late, but I bumped into someone I know outside the station, and he was impossible to get away from…’

  ‘No, no, it really doesn’t matter at all,’ I say. ‘Honestly, I’ve had a lovely time waiting.’

  The ghost that has arrived is a true apparition.

  2

  The Room with a Telephone

  It just so happens

  When the telephone rang at eleven o’clock on Saturday night I was already in bed, and I almost didn’t answer.

  The telephone is on the chest of drawers beside my bed. A telephone is a necessity, and I am neither a lunatic nor a fanatic. My bedroom is an affectation, not a delusion.

  I made a lot of money, painting Picassos, and I live in a very large house, semi-detached. My bedroom, or the room where I sleep and write, is a room I had constructed specially, a room within a room, as it were. I live alone and I never entertain, so I certainly did not have any need for a double front room, which in any case got very cold in winter, whereas I did feel urgently the need for this special room. Built as you go in from the hallway to the right and at the back, slightly higher than the frame of the single back window - and somewhat narrower inside than it looks on the outside, in order to accommodate a third wooden door that doesn’t open (behind it runs the wall of the house) - it is a temporary structure, easily dismantled. Although the room it is within now does look rather odd, none of its original features have been damaged; all the cornicing is perfectly intact, if partially hidden from eye-level view.

  When I first described in detail what I wanted him to do - out of thick pieces of cardboard I had even put together a makeshift maquette - the master builder who eventually agreed to do the job was a little too aggressively bemused. The house, he pointed out, had several bedrooms already, so why on earth, for the sake of a measly eyesore, was I so bent on vandalizing almost the entire ground floor, most particularly my exceptionally beautiful lounge, so incredibly spacious and bright… And, anyhow, what kind of bedroom was this – with a backhand slap he swept my maquette off the table – a pokey little box room with not just one or two, but three doors, one of them double to boot, not to mention that the third one was actually fake…

  ‘Chief! Chief!’ his mortified apprentice had repeatedly mumbled, but not to any discernible avail.

  And now, eyes still agoggle in beleaguered disbelief, the towering, bright-looking youth had already collapsed himself down onto his knees, and he reverently lifted the miniature edifice back onto the table, where he laid it down gently as if it were a sleeping princess - I was half-expecting him to kiss it. Instead, like an army of coordinated centipedes, ten elongated fingers set about manipulating all the crumples and creases sustained in its fall, and in no time had impressively restored t
he miniature bedroom to better than its rickety original condition.

  ‘You know what?’ said the Chief, when finally the dexterous youth stood wilfully erect beside the model of my pokey little box room - I was afraid he was about to get the sack. ‘If Mr Leon wants a folly in his lounge, then a folly he shall have! Eh, Billy, what do you say?’

  ‘I say deffo, Chief,’ said Billy. ‘Always cool to be radical, right?’

  ‘Yes it is,’ I said. ‘Always!’

  ‘What’s this, you two ganging up on me already? Best friends now, are we? Serves me right, I suppose, for getting so het up. But trust my boy Billy, he can always calm me down when it’s needed…’

  ‘Which is often,’ said Billy.

  ‘Doesn’t even need to say a word, my double dose of Valium I call him - my sedative gift from the Gods. Cures me from my migraines and all. You saw how he is with his hands; they work miracles, those fingers, they’re so special we should get them insured. Billy’s wasted in this job and that’s the truth.’

  ‘Can’t be wasted if I like it.’

  ‘I still say you deserve something better. All them books you bring home, all that reading you do, it has to count for something, it has to get you somewhere in this world.’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘Ay, you’re here, and this isn’t the time or the place. So come on then, let’s be measuring up. But first I need to ask Mr Leon a question.’

  ‘Please, fire away,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not some pervy dungeon you’re having us build here, now is it? I mean, no offence, but you can’t be too careful these days.’

  ‘No, Chief, what we’re building is a replica of a room in a book. Ain’t that right, Mr Leon?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘Kafka,’ said Billy. ‘The Metamorphosis. Most pukka book I ever read. Phenomenal book.’

  ‘It is a great book,’ I said.

  ‘Timeless,’ said Billy.

  ‘But how did you know?’

  ‘What gave it away? Well, you for one thing. Bit peculiar in the head, if you don’t mind my saying. In a nice way, I mean.’

  ‘I suppose I am a bit peculiar in the head. In a nice way, I hope.’

  ‘What with wanting a shed in your lounge,’ Billy’s father put in.

  ‘It’s not a shed. It’s Gregor Samsa’s bedroom,’ Billy correctly corrected his father. Then to me, ‘Why else would you want three doors?’

  ‘And who’s this Gregor Samsa?’ the Chief liked to know, aglow at this impressive exhibition of his son’s erudition.

  ‘He’s just an ordinary traveling salesman, hard working and very conscientious. Goes to bed one night and wakes up in the morning not human no more.’

  ‘Get away! What is he then?’

  ‘Some kind of bug,’ said Billy.

  ‘You mean like a virus?’

  ‘No, Chief, it’s not that kind of book.’

  ‘A giant insect,’ I said.

  ‘Vermin,’ said Billy. ‘And Gregor’s not too happy about it, obviously. Because he still has human feelings. He just looks like a bug. Only he doesn’t really know how to be a bug, so he gets frustrated.’

  ‘And injured,’ I said.

  ‘As if it wasn’t bad enough that none of them can bear the sight of him no more, all these years he’s worked bloody hard to support them and now his family resent him for changing their lives, like they think he’s to blame for what’s happened to him. So they’re not very nice to him, especially the father.’

  ‘And that’s an understatement,’ I said.

  ‘The sister tries a bit in the beginning, but she soon gives up.’

  ‘Gregor’s become a nuisance,’ I said.

  ‘He’s worse than a nuisance,’ said Billy. ‘He’s a reflection of everything that’s bad about them.’

  ‘So what happens in the end?’

  ‘He kind of rots away.’

  ‘And finally everyone’s happy,’ I said.

  ‘He doesn’t become human again?’

  ‘No, Chief, he doesn’t.’

  ‘And he dies?’

  ‘He dies and his family go on a trip,’ I said. ‘That’s how the story ends.’

  ‘And you want this man’s room in your house?’

  ‘I do, but not because I want to be a bug,’ I said, making light of his inevitable question.

  ‘Well, that’s something at least,’ sighed the Chief with relief.

  ‘I just really like the story, I said. ‘And it’ll make me think how it might feel to not be ordinary.’

  ‘To not be normal,’ said Billy. ‘Or what other people think of as “normal”.’

  ‘That’s an even better way of putting it,’ I said.

  The Chief seemed to be mulling it over, as though steering his thoughts towards the only logical conclusion. And when he thought he had at last succeeded, with the bold naivety of an innocent he just blurted it out:

  ‘But people are broad-minded these days, no one really cares if you’re queer. Is that it, Mr Leon? Are you queer? I mean, it’s alright if you are, there’s no need to feel embarrassed.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s no need at all to feel embarrassed. It just so happens that I’m not. Gay, I mean.’

  ‘And it just so happens that I am,’ said Billy.

  Inside Kafka’s head

  Billy and the Chief did a first-rate job; after scouring several salvage yards, which he did in his own time and without being asked, Billy even managed to find for me the perfect mahogany doors, two single and one double-leafed, and I enjoyed our long conversations about how accurate the furniture should be. I said I needed a chest of drawers, a table and chair, a clock, a picture to go above the table, an armchair and a small leather sofa. Oh, and a bed, of course.

  ‘Will you be sleeping in it?’ Billy asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It has to be single,’ said Billy.

  ‘It will be,’ I said. ‘Single with a comfortable modern mattress.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Billy.

  On the matter of verisimilitude, Billy was more anxious than I was. I tried to explain that the room his father and he were so scrupulously building for me was by necessity a mere approximation: that it aspired not to something real but rather to an impression. There had, after all, never actually been an original room, and it was therefore impossible to produce an identical copy. And Kafka had only been interested in describing the room in general terms, to the extent that the description would contribute in some way to the mood of his story.

  ‘And The Metamorphosis is not a story about a room,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not a story about a room but the room is important,’ said Billy. ‘It’s one more catalyst for Gregor’s alienation. Now that he’s a bug, it’s become his whole world, but even in this prison cell, which is really what his room is, he only feels comfortable under the bed.’

  In our tête-à-têtes, there were no more double negatives from Billy, whose articulate debating skills impressed me. I suspected that his evenings were being spent researching the meaning of The Metamorphosis from every possible angle, most probably including from under Gregor Samsa’s bed! I have never been a fan of this perennial analytical need to interpret almost everything to death. Some things defy interpretation; others are best “understood” on a more metaphysical level, or can only be “felt” as a physical experience in itself.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m not Gregor, I don’t want to be Gregor, or a bug, and I’m certainly not sleeping under the bed.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Billy. ‘But you want to get inside Kafka’s head.’

  To a certain degree this was true.

  ‘The room is just a metaphor,’ I said.

  I had often been tempted to share my past with Billy, but I had always held back. In the end I judged it wiser not to mention Picasso, and this made it more difficult to justify the room, although even in my own mind it had never been conceived of as a room with a
radical view. Just as I had never been Picasso, I knew that I would never be Franz Kafka. Just as I had never wanted to become Picasso or to paint Picasso paintings, I did not want to become Franz Kafka or to write Franz Kafka stories. But if alchemy was possible, as I knew from past experience that it was, I wanted to test the degree to which I might be able to control it. I had hoped for something loose and metaphorical, not a literal alchemy that mirrored what had happened while I painted Picassos.

  ‘But we’re building it, right?’

  ‘That doesn’t make it rational,’ I said. ‘I don’t want it to be rational, in fact.’

  To a certain degree this was also true.

  ‘You said you’d like to know how it might feel to not be what other people think of as normal. But you need other people for that, not just a room.’

  ‘We’re going round in circles,’ I said. ‘Forget what I said the other day. I just want the room. Why? Because I want the room. And that’s enough for me for now.’

  ‘I think…’

  ‘I think you’re thinking too much.’

  ‘I think you’re not telling me something.’

  ‘Maybe when you’re done cross-examining the boss,’ a voice then boomed from within the metaphorical room (after just one week it was missing little more than a ceiling), ‘you can come and hold this door up so I can screw in the hinges. A catalyst, huh? I’ll say it again if it kills me: you’re wasted in this job, Billy boy.’

  Billy was a clever lad and very pleasant, but at times he was much too intense, which I thought made him a little too old for his age – he was twenty-two and he looked even younger. Since his coming out to his father their relationship had changed: whereas before they were mates first and foremost, now they were explicitly more father and son. For the Chief it was now always “my Billy”, as though asserting possession inevitably excluded reproach. But there was a residual impression of walking on eggshells and of minding one’s words, which to my mind wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Billy, on the other hand, deeply disliked this unnatural display of restraint by his father, and made too constant an effort to the opposite effect. Under the slightest pretext he would make unwarranted allusions to everything gay, and the use of every synonym of “queer” in his father’s presence became de rigueur.