The Little Virtues Page 4

  Nevertheless the English are obsessed with the idea of food. Walking along the most remote country road, on the edge of a deep wood or of some desolate gorse­covered slope, we come across a little notice on which is written ‘Teas, Luncheons, Snacks’*. We look around asking ourselves how, and by whom, such an enticing promise could be fulfilled. There is not a soul in sight. But yes, over there, a few steps further on, a caravan is waiting for us where we can actually have a cup of tea, or the usual sweet, tepid coffee, and ham sandwiches. Near the cash register there is also a large glass globe half full of bubbling orange juice on which—perhaps in order to convey a more intimate idea of freshness—someone has set one or two rubber oranges afloat.

  Sometimes, instead of a caravan, we come across a little half-timbered house in the open countryside with the notice ‘Farm’* on it, and the usual promise of ‘Snacks’*. As we enter we imagine that we shall eat something local and unusual. The ‘Farm’* is crowded with daytrippers from London who—at four in the afternoon—are eating cod and chips. There is the usual globe of orange juice, and lined up next to the cash­register are the paper cups for Fresko (‘Fresko is delicious!’)* milk. The ‘snacks’* are sandwiches. Those of the ‘Farm* are made with the usual pre-sliced flabby bread that is sold in Lyons and in every·English grocer’s shop. As far as the eye can see the countryside stretches—beautiful, green, rustling and damp, wild and at the same time gentle like no other in the world, silent, inedible and odourless. We are not aware of any smell of manure, animals, ploughed-up earth or straw, we do not hear the noises that we are used to hearing in the country—the creaking of carts or the trampling of hoofs. Clean, odourless cows are grazing in an enclosure. No one is looking after them; we see no herdsman, no dogs, no farm-workers. Sometimes it is possible to find a pub deep in the country; inside it is sumptuously decorated with red velvet and gilded cornices. It is identical to the pubs in central London, there is no difference. In one corner there is a little grate in which a fake coal fire or a fake log fire is burning; fake, but expertly done. The beer is drunk from big, heavy tankards of clouded glass. They bring the beer up from the cellars in barrels made of tin or zinc, and these inevitably make you think of sewage. But sometimes this happens in London too. Why don’t they use a different kind of container? There is no why. The English are insensitive to certain mental associations. And perhaps those barrels are a sign of that deep distaste, that secret hatred which the English feel for food and drink. To me it seems that even some of the words they use to indicate food and drink have an unpleasant sound and reveal hatred and distaste: ‘Snacks, Squash, Poultry’*. Don’t such words sound like insults?

  Perhaps the English hatred for food is the sole cause of that obscure sadness which pervades every place where food is sold or served. If you disregard the showy fittings their cafés and restaurants are alarmingly like canteens for the poor. And on certain nights of every week in the doorways of even the most elegant restaurants in central London, in front of the most mysterious nightclubs with the strangest names, even in front of the mysterious Maison Volpé, you see huge, overflowing grey dustbins. Dustbins are not the prettiest things anywhere in the world. But I don’t think that in any country in the world are they as large, grey, obvious and overflowing as they are here, giving off their grey stink and weighed down with desolate melancholy.

  *[Note]An asterisk indicates phrases in English in the original.

  He and I

  He always feels hot, I always feel cold. In the summer when it really is hot he does nothing but complain about how hot he feels. He is irritated if he sees me put a jumper on in the evening.

  He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well. He manages—in his own way—to speak even the languages that he doesn’t know.

  He has an excellent sense of direction, I have none at all. After one day in a foreign city he can move about in it as thoughtlessly as a butterfly. I get lost in my own city; I have to ask directions so that I can get back home again. He hates asking directions; when we go by car to a town we don’t know he doesn’t want to ask directions and tells me to look at the map. I don’t know how to read maps and I get confused by all the little red circles and he loses his temper.

  He loves the theatre, painting, music, especially music. I do not understand music at all, painting doesn’t mean much to me and I get bored at the theatre. I love and understand one thing in the world and that is poetry.

  He loves museums, and I will go if I am forced to but with an unpleasant sense of effort and duty. He loves libraries and I hate them.

  He loves travelling, unfamiliar foreign cities, restaurants. I would like to stay at home all the time and never move.

  All the same I follow him on his many journeys. I follow him to museums, to churches, to the opera. I even follow him to concerts, where I fall asleep. Because he knows the conductors and the singers, after the performance is over he likes to go and congratulate them. I follow him down long corridors lined with the singers’ dressing-rooms and listen to him talking to people dressed as cardinals and kings.

  He is not shy; I am shy. Occasionally however I have seen him be shy. With the police when they come over to the car armed with a notebook and pencil. Then he is shy, thinking he is in the wrong.

  And even when he doesn’t think he is in the wrong. I think he has a respect for established authority. I am afraid of established authority, but he isn’t. He respects it. There is a difference. When I see a policeman coming to fine me I immediately think he is going to haul me off to prison. He doesn’t think about prison; but, out of respect, he becomes shy and polite.

  During the Montesi trial, because of his respect for established authority, we had very violent arguments.

  He likes tagliatelle, lamb, cherries, red wine. I like minestrone, bread soup, omelettes, green vegetables.

  He often says I don’t understand anything about food, that I am like a great strong fat friar—one of those friars who devour soup made from greens in the darkness of their monasteries; but he, oh he is refined and has a sensitive palate. In restaurants he makes long inquiries about the wines; he has them bring two or three bottles then looks at them and considers the matter, and slowly strokes his beard.

  There are certain restaurants in England where the waiter goes through a little ritual: he pours some wine into a glass so that the customer can test whether he likes it or not. He used to hate this ritual and always prevented the waiter from carrying it out by taking the bottle from him. I used to argue with him about this and say that you should let people carry out their prescribed tasks.

  And in the same way he never lets the usherette at the cinema direct him to his seat. He immediately gives her a tip but dashes off to a completely different place from the one she shows him with her torch.

  At the cinema he likes to sit very close to the screen. If we go with friends and they look for seats a long way from the screen, as most people do, he sits by himself in the front row. I can see well whether I am close to the screen or far away from it, but when we are with friends I stay with them out of politeness; all the same it upsets me because I could be next to him two inches from the screen, and when I don’t sit next to him he gets annoyed with me.

  We both love the cinema, and we are ready to see almost any kind of film at almost any time of day. But he knows the history of the cinema in great detail; he remembers old directors and actors who have disappeared and been forgotten long ago, and he is ready to travel miles into the most distant suburbs in search of some ancient silent film in which an actor appears—perhaps just for a few seconds—whom he affectionately associates with memories of his early childhood. I remember one Sunday afternoon in London; somewhere in the distant suburbs on the edge of the countryside they were showing a film from the 1930s, about the French Revolution, which he had seen as a child, and in which a famous actress of that time appeared for a moment or two. We set off by car in search of the street, which was a very long way off; it was rain
ing, there was a fog, and we drove for hour after hour through identical suburbs, between rows of little grey houses, gutters and railings; I had the map on my knees and I couldn’t read it and he lost his temper; at last, we found the cinema and sat in the completely deserted auditorium. But after a quarter of an hour, immediately after the brief appearance of the actress who was so important to him, he already wanted to go; I on the other hand, after seeing so many streets, wanted to see how the film finished. I don’t remember whether we did what he wanted or what I wanted; probably what he wanted, so that we left after a quarter of an hour, also because it was late—though we had set off early in the afternoon it was already time for dinner. But when I begged him to tell me how the film ended I didn’t get a very satisfactory answer; because, he said, the story wasn’t at all important, the only thing that mattered was those few moments, that actress’s curls, gestures, profile.

  I never remember actors’ names, and as I am not good at remembering faces it is often difficult for me to recognize even the most famous of them. This infuriates him; his scorn increases as I ask him whether it was this one or that one; ‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ he says, ‘You don’t mean to tell me that you didn’t recognize William Holden!’

  And in fact I didn’t recognize William Holden. All the same, I love the cinema too; but although I have been seeing films for years I haven’t been able to provide myself with any sort of cinematic education. But he has made an education of it for himself and he does this with whatever attracts his curiosity; I don’t know how to make myself an education out of anything, even those things that I love best in life; they stay with me as scattered images, nourishing my life with memories and emotions but without filling the void, the desert of my education.

  He tells me I have no curiosity, but this is not true. I am curious about a few, a very few, things. And when I have got to know them I retain scattered impressions of them, or the cadence of phrase, or a word. But my world, in which these completely unrelated (unless in some secret fashion unbeknown to me) impressions and cadences rise to the surface, is a sad, barren place. His world, on the other hand, is green and populous and richly cultivated; it is a fertile, well-watered countryside in which woods, meadows, orchards and villages flourish.

  Everything I do is done laboriously, with great difficulty and uncertainty. I am very lazy, and if l want to finish anything it is absolutely essential that I spend hours stretched out on the sofa. He is never idle, and is always doing something; when he goes to lie down in the afternoons he takes proofs to correct or a book full of notes; he wants us to go to the cinema, then to a reception, then to the theatre—all on the same day. In one day he succeeds in doing, and in making me do, a mass of different things, and in meeting extremely diverse kinds of people. If I am alone and try to act as he does I get nothing at all done, because. I get stuck all afternoon somewhere I had meant to stay for half an hour, or because I get lost and cannot find the right street, or because the most boring person and the one I least wanted to meet drags me off to the place I least wanted to go to.

  If l tell him how my afternoon has turned out he says it is a completely wasted afternoon and is amused and makes fun of me and loses his temper; and he says that without him I am good for nothing.

  I don’t know how to manage my time; he does.

  He likes receptions. He dresses casually, when everyone is dressed formally; the idea of changing his clothes in order to go to a reception never enters his head. He even goes in his old raincoat and crumpled hat; a woollen hat which he bought in London and which he wears pulled down over his eyes. He only stays for half an hour; he enjoys chatting with a glass in his hand for half an hour; he eats lots of hors d’oeuvres, and I eat almost none because when I see him eating so many I feel that I at least must be well-mannered and show some self-control·and not eat too much; after half an hour, just as I am beginning to feel at ease and to enjoy myself, he gets impatient and drags me away.

  I don’t know how to dance and he does.

  I don’t know how to type and he does.

  I don’t know how to drive. If I suggest that I should get a license too he disagrees. He says I would never manage it. I think he likes me to be dependent on him for some things.

  I don’t know how to sing and he does. He is a baritone. Perhaps he would have been a famous singer if he had studied singing.

  Perhaps he would have been a conductor if he had studied music. When he listens to records he conducts the orchestra with a pencil. And he types and answers the telephone at the same time. He is a man who is able to do many things at once.

  He is a professor and I think he is a good one.

  He could have been many things. But he has no regrets about those professions he did not take up. I could only ever have followed one profession—the one I chose and which I have followed almost since childhood. And I don’t have any regrets either about the professions I did not take up, but then I couldn’t have succeeded at any of them.

  I write stories, and for many years I have worked for a publishing house.

  I don’t work badly, or particularly well. All the same I am well aware of the fact that I would have been unable to work anywhere else. I get on well with my colleagues and my boss. I think that if I did not have the support of their friendship I would soon have become worn out and unable to work any longer.

  For a long time I thought that one day I would be able to write screenplays for the cinema. But I never had the opportunity, or I did not know how to find it. Now I have lost all hope of writing screenplays. He wrote screenplays for a while, when he was younger. And he has worked in a publishing house. He has written stories. He has done all the things that I have done and many others too.

  He is a good mimic, and does an old countess especially well. Perhaps he could also have been an actor.

  Once, in London, he sang in a theatre. He was Job. He had to hire evening clothes; and there he was, in his evening clothes, in front of a kind of lectern; and he sang. He sang the words of Job; the piece called for something between speaking and singing. And I, in my box, was dying of fright. I was afraid he would get flustered, or that the trousers of his evening clothes would fall down.

  He was surrounded by men in evening clothes and women in long dresses, who were the angels and devils and other characters in Job.

  It was a great success, and they said that he was very good.

  If I loved music I would love it passionately. But I don’t understand it, and when he persuades me to go to concerts with him my mind wanders off and I think of my own affairs. Or I fall sound asleep.

  I like to sing. I don’t know how to sing and I sing completely out of tune; but I sing all the same—occasionally, very quietly, when I am alone. I know that I sing out of tune because others have told me so; my voice must be like the yowling of a cat: But I am not—in myself—aware of this, and singing gives me real pleasure. If he hears me he mimics me; he says that my singing is something quite separate from music, something invented by me.

  When I was a child I used to yowl tunes I had made up. It was a long wailing kind of melody that brought tears to my eyes.

  It doesn’t matter to me that I don’t understand painting or the figurative arts, but it hurts me that I don’t love music, and I feel that my mind suffers from the absence of this love. But there is nothing I can do about it, I will never understand or love music. If I occasionally hear a piece of music that I like I don’t know how to remember it; and how can I love something that I can’t remember?

  It is the words of a song that I remember. I can repeat words that I love over and over again. I repeat the tune that accompanies them too, in my own yowling fashion, and I experience a kind of happiness as I yowl.

  When I am writing it seems to me that I follow a musical cadence or rhythm. Perhaps music was very close to my world, and my world could not, for whatever reason, make contact with it.

  In our house there is music all day long. He keeps the radio o
n all day. Or plays records. Every now and again I protest a little and ask for a little silence in which to work; but he says that such beautiful music is certainly conducive to any kind of work.

  He has bought an incredible number of records. He says that he owns one of the finest collections in the world.

  In the morning when he is still in his dressing gown and dripping water from his bath, he turns the radio on, sits down at the typewriter and begins his strenuous, noisy, stormy day. He is superabundant in everything; he fills the bath to overflowing, and the same with the teapot and his cup of tea. He has an enormous number of shirts and ties. On the other hand he rarely buys shoes.

  His mother says that as a child he was a model of order and precision; apparently once, on a rainy day, he was wearing white boots and white clothes and had to cross some muddy streams in the country at the end of his walk he was immaculate and his clothes and boots had not one spot of mud on them. There is no trace in him of that former immaculate little boy. His clothes are always covered in stains. He has become extremely untidy.

  But he scrupulously keeps all the gas bills. In drawers I find old gas bills, which he refuses to throw away, from houses we left long ago.

  I also find old, shrivelled Tuscan cigars, and cigarette holders made from cherry wood.

  I smoke a brand of king-size, filterless cigarettes called Stop, and he smokes his Tuscan cigars.

  I am very untidy. But as I have got older I have come to miss tidiness, and I sometimes furiously tidy up all the cupboards. I think this is because I remember my mother’s tidiness. I rearrange the linen and blanket cupboards and in the summer I reline every drawer with strips of white cloth. I rarely rearrange my papers because my mother didn’t write and had no papers. My tidiness and untidiness are full of complicated feelings of regret and sadness. His untidiness is triumphant. He has decided that it is proper and legitimate for a studious person like himself to have an untidy desk.