The Lover of No Fixed Abode

ISBN-13: 9781913394905

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

Publication Date: 02-20-2024

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 7.70h x 5.10w x 1.20d

Authors: Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini were a well-known literary duo in Italy for several decades until Lucentini’s death (by suicide) in 2002. For forty years they co-wrote magazine articles, literary essays, and published six groundbreaking and best-selling mystery novels. The Lover of No Fixed Abode, first published in 1986, is the fourth of their novels. Translator: Gregory Dowling studied English Literature at Oxford. Gregory now teaches American literature at Ca’ Foscari Universityin Venice. He published four thrillers in the1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with Ascension and The Four Horsemen, novels set in 18th-century Venice.

Read an Excerpt

WHEN MR SILVERA AT LAST DECIDES

When Mr Silvera at last decides (look, look, Mr Silvera!) to loosen his seat belt and lean over his neighbours to get a view out of the window, Venice has already disappeared; all he sees is a distant fragment of aluminium-coloured sea and an immediate trapezoid of solid aluminium, the wing.

“The lagoon!” repeat the tourists in his and the other two parties that fill Flight Z114. “La lagune! A laguna!”

As ever, they find it indispensable to name rather than see the cities and temples and statues and frescoes and waterfalls and islands and all the lands and waters they are paying to visit. Look, look, the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, the Casbah, les Pyramides, la tour de Pise, the lagooon… They sound like invocations intended to arouse imaginary entities, to make them exist for a few seconds before they slip out of the magic circle. Five or six of them naturally try to retain the lagoon for ever with their cinecameras and Instamatics.

Indifferent to these illusions, Mr Silvera settles back in his seat, his long legs stretched out obliquely in the aisle and a benevolently automatic smile ready to spring to his lips. When seen in profile, he is a man of about forty, tall and thin, with the sharp-cut features of a head on a medallion, the slightly rounded shoulders of a sportsman – a keen tennis player, for example – who at some stage, for some reason, gave up the game completely; or perhaps those of a chess player, curved by long meditations over the bishop. His thin, delicate, nervous hands suggest poker or roulette, but also skilled contact with porcelain, parchments, musical instruments; and with female stockings, with silk and lace and tricky necklace clasps. An unusual man, who is blandly (stoically?) doing a job that seems a little incongruous for him, somewhat menial. A group leader. A tourist guide and escort. They usually choose younger people; the other two parties on Flight Z114 are led by a French girl who never stops laughing and a stocky peasant type with a blonde wisp of hair over his eyes.

Silvera took charge of his party this morning at 6.15, outside the headquarters of Imperial Tours, the London travel agency for which he has been working for some time now. The coach journey to Heathrow Airport was sufficient for him to become acquainted with these twenty-eight people, or at least to slot them into his memory, which is prodigious and accustomed to making instantaneous classifications. The usual types, the usual clientele of Imperial: pensioners, small-time shopkeepers, small-time office clerks and artisans, all of recurring nationalities; mostly English and French, but also South American and Canadian, a few Scandinavians, two Jamaicans, two Indians, one Portuguese with an adolescent daughter whose large nocturnal eyes never leave Mr Silvera. Even the names are always the same: Johnson, Torres, Pereira, Petersen, Singh, Durand…

Flight Z114 has stopped off twice, at Brussels and Geneva, and picked up the other parties. At Geneva it also took on board three passengers whose flight to Venice and Athens had been cancelled: two Greek businessmen and an Italian woman who is now sitting across the central aisle from Mr Silvera.

A wide-hipped hostess bustles her way down this corridor, looking for any last paper cups to collect, and Mr Silvera instantly pulls in his long legs and smiles at her. But she remains peevishly sulky, absorbed in amorous fantasies or, more likely, thoughts of trade union squabbles.

Silvera makes the tiniest motion of a shrug, adjusts his smile by a thread, and the Italian woman, on the other side of the aisle, returns it. Passengers are no longer treated with respect reminiscent of grand hotels, with nursery-school solicitude, their mischievous, resigned eyes say to each other; but then what can one expect with this kind of tourist rabble? They should be thankful to be taken as far as Venice, considering the fares they have paid.

The machine touches down, brakes with a great angry blast and rolls to a halt along the edge of the lagoon.

“Well,” murmurs Mr Silvera, getting to his feet, “well…” His height appears to give him a vague superiority, which is belied by his threadbare tweed jacket, by the little holes singed into the front of the raincoat he is now putting on. The girl who keeps laughing is already at work with her party; the blonde peasant is instructing his horde, the most numerous, to remain calm and disciplined. “Well,” sighs Mr Silvera, pulling down his bag. He notices that his Italian neighbour is trying to reach her small case, pulls it down and hands it to her chivalrously.

“Thank you,” says the woman.

“Ah,” says Mr Silvera, his eyes far away.

Then he is swallowed up by his group, please, please, Mr Silvera, there are overcoats and scarves to be collected, bags to be extracted from the overhead lockers, packages to be retrieved from under the seats, impatient passengers to be restrained, slow ones to be incited. The Portuguese girl follows him with her head bowed, her eyes gazing up at him from beneath beautiful black lashes, and she too is “counted” at the foot of the staircase, where Mr Silvera and the two other group leaders stand in the wind, dividing up their flocks. But it is not she who is offered Mr Silvera’s hand when descending the final step. This act of homage (performed with melancholy detachment and an indefinable air of complicity) is for the Italian lady. “Thank you,” she repeats, gravely.

“Ah,” murmurs Mr Silvera, without looking at her. He moves off towards the airport buildings at the head of his flock, who all walk with their heads turned towards the aluminium expanse of the lagoon, since not a single cent of their cheap package fare is to be wasted. The French girl’s party has beaten them to the passport checkout and customs, but from there everything proceeds smoothly, since nobody checks anything, and soon Mr Silvera is beyond the barriers, coagulating his twenty-eight, preventing them from dissolving amid the toilets and the bar. “No, no,” he says indulgently, “no cappuccino, please, no vino.”

They go out into the wind again, and a few coaches are waiting at the entrance. But they disband towards the lagoon, which begins a few yards to the left and fades into a fuzzy horizon. Five or six slim motorboats with little flags fluttering at the stern are bobbing up and down among the seagulls, by a jetty. “Taxi?” asks one of the sailors. “Venedig, taxi? Taxi Venise?” he repeats, indicating a distant point over the waters.

A few yards further on, the blonde peasant’s party are dropping into a plump cabined boat, amid laughter and screams. A protest ripples through the massed eyes of the twenty-eight: And what about us?

“No boat,” says Mr Silvera firmly, “no boat, no barco, sorry.” The prices charged by Imperial, he explains, do not permit the sea approach to Venice, across the grey lagoon. For Imperial there is instead a fine Italian coach, all in red, which will cross the famous bridge.

“A famous bridge?” the twenty-eight say, consoling themselves.

Yes, the longest in Europe, lies Mr Silvera, hustling them back to terra firma. He will stay here another moment or two to check that their luggage has been correctly stowed on the porters’ boat and correctly dispatched to its destination.

Now he is left alone on the jetty and he gazes at the lagoon like a prince, a condottiere finally taking possession of it; or perhaps like one bidding farewell to it, who has lost it for ever?

One of the motorboats moves away from the bank, traces an elegant parabola in the water and heads swiftly towards Venice amid the shrieking seagulls. Next to the flag at the stern, for the last time, the Italian woman from Flight Z114 is standing: I am standing.

“Ah,” murmurs Mr Silvera. And he does not respond to my wave, he does not raise his hand, while his raincoat flaps in the November wind like a frayed grey banner.

Thus did I meet him, thus did I see him for the first and (so I thought) last time.

2.

I had attached no importance to the fact that Mr Silvera was a group leader, a tourist guide, escort or whatever you call it. He had naturally struck me at first glance amid that airborne rabble, and I had recorded him and his ancient medallion profile with an almost professional interest but without puzzling over him any further, without pausing to wonder how he had ended up among those clods who never once stopped calling out “Mr Silvera, Mr Silvera!” to him. I had filed him away in an imaginary auction catalogue under the heading Traveller: unusual, even a little mysterious, and had then gone straight back to my own business.

Now, I cannot say what impression he would have made on me if I had first conflated him with his profession (let’s use this term). Which of course is a perfectly fine one – don’t get me wrong – for penniless students who want to see the world in the summer (Rosy’s son and a daughter of my cousins Macchi have done it for years), but which, in November, when practised by adults with parties of that kind, can only be defined as wretched. Signor Silvera would have probably lost all credit in my eyes. I would have written him off with some commiserative murmur along the lines of “Poor guy, what a thing to have to do at his age,” or maybe, given his surname, “Just think, a poor Sephardi reduced to that level to scrape a living.” A failure, a down-and-outer, a bum. No man ever manages to rise above first impressions of that kind. And so: afterwards, things would have gone differently; they would probably never have gone anywhere at all.

But instead, thanks to my fortuitous and rather sleepy inattention, here I am, reflecting on my own profession (let’s use this term again) and finding significant points of similarity with his. It’s no less vagabond a profession. A profession in which one must ingratiate oneself with one’s clients in exactly the same way, swallow affronts and humiliations, be constantly ready with flattery, with placatory remarks and soothing comments for perfectly horrible people. It’s a profession which causes one to live and work alongside beauty, to seek it out, to evaluate it and to illustrate it with utter indifference – indeed, without even seeing it any longer. Maybe I exaggerate, but it strikes me now that the only difference between a tourist escort and myself is this: he gets remunerated with a laughable salary and an occasional petty tip, while they pay me with crackling cheques from prestigious banks.

Hence our separation: he off with his herd on the vaporetto, I in a motorboat to my hotel on the Grand Canal and the fiction of an olde worlde welcome: how are you, back as a Venetian again, did the journey go well, what weather eh, there’s some post for you, shall I prepare a Manhattan, a pot of Chinese tea? That sort of thing, all trotted out with an air of professional familiarity designed to make me feel at home even after an interval of months. And the old valet Tommaso, who handles the elevator with the gravity and solemnity of a chamberlain assigned to Louis XVI’s hot-air balloon, declaring as if to himself, “More beautiful than ever.” He too is a professional; he comes out with a phrase like this but lets you know it’s the grand-hotel translation of the vernacular “phwoar” or of some cruder expression that rises from his worn-out loins (but are they as worn-out as all that?).

I checked with a fleeting glance in the generous, omnipresent gilded mirrors, noting that they were equally professional. I saw (and immediately catalogued, without forgetting the “fine frame in contemporary style”) a Portrait of a Young Woman attributable to “Tuscan or Umbrian master of the early sixteenth century”, with the influence of Botticelli or Lippi on the one hand, Perugino on the other. Raffaellino del Garbo? Apart from the ensemble de voyage of Franco–Japanese school (Issey Miyake), the subject presented definite affinities with various Madonnas by this artist, as it did with the blonde and fascinating Lady in Profile which Berenson (with the subsequent agreement of my friend Zeri) attributes to him in Baroness Rothschild’s collection in Paris. The portrait was even more satisfying as Raffaellino, or someone on his behalf, courteously omitted the “AETATIS SUAE XXIV” and the age could reasonably be brought down to XXX or even less.

On the thick carpets we crossed paths with a party of Japanese visitors proceeding in silence and in double file, like schoolgirls. All men, all dressed in black. “At least they don’t give any trouble,” Tommaso remarked condescendingly.

“Do you get many out of season?”

“More and more of them, all year round. I don’t know, they say they’re tourists, but I reckon they come here to copy Venice. You’ll see, one of these days they’ll get round to making one of their own, a perfect imitation.” But he at once repented of his joke, which he must have cracked successfully innumerable times. “Venice can’t be imitated,” he declared with pride.

And yet his is an impression I have sometimes had myself, in this over-scrutinized city: as if all those millions and millions of admiring eyeballs had the same imperceptible and perpetual power of erosion as the waves, each glance a tiny grain of Venice filched, sucked away…