‘Would you?’ he growled. ‘How much money have you got in your pockets?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Empty them, stupid!’
I handed him about $250—and he handed me back $10 with an equally grumpy ‘I suppose you eat lunch.’ He then called his assistant to unroll the textile onto the floor.
‘Lucky sod!’ he called out, as I walked away with it under my arm.
I also have a sheet of Islamic Kufic calligraphy, from the eighthcentury Koran—which has a certain talismanic value for a writer, in that Allah first cut a reed pen and with it he wrote the world. There is an Indian painting of a banana tree; a Sienese fifteenthcentury cross in tempera and gold; and a gilt-bronze roundel from a Japanese Buddhist temple. Other than that, I have a small collection of Japanese negoro lacquers, which once belonged to a German called Ernst Grosse.
Grosse was the Keeper of Japanese Art in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin before the war. Before that, I believe, he lived in the Daitoku—ji in Kyoto. With his friend Eugen Herrigel, the author of Zen and the Art of Archery, he was one of the few westerners to appreciate what the Japanese call wabi; that is to say ‘poverty’ in art. My favourite possession is a round box, which surely represents the rising sun, dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century, and has belonged to a succession of famous tea masters. The story goes that the monks, who made this lacquer, would paint it in a boat moored out on a lake, for fear the dust would spoil the final coat.
Lastly, I have one contemporary sculpture: a fibreglass wallpiece the colour of watermelon, by John Duff. Three times I had gone into houses full of works by famous names; and each time the only work that really grabbed me was by a ‘strange man called Duff. He had once been a surfer and was a student of Zen.
‘I have to see this Duff,’ I said, and when, finally, I walked into his studio in Chinatown, I knew, for certain, that this was the ‘real thing’.
I don’t do much writing in my room. For that, I need other conditions and other places. But I can think there, listen to music, read in bed, and take notes. I can feed four friends; and it is, when all is said, a place to hang one’s hat.
1984
A TOWER IN TUSCANY
Those of us who presume to write books would appear to fall into two categories: the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move. There are writers who can only function ‘at home’, with the right chair, the shelves of dictionaries and encyclopaedias, and now perhaps the word processor. And there are those, like myself, who are paralysed by ‘home’, for whom home is synonymous with the proverbial writer’s block, and who believe naively that all would be well if only they were somewhere else. Even among the very great you find the same dichotomy: Flaubert and Tolstoy labouring in their libraries; Zola with a suit of armour alongside his desk; Poe in his cottage; Proust in the cork-lined room. On the other hand, among the ‘movers’ you have Melville, who was’undone’ by his gentlemanly establishment in Massachusetts, or Hemingway, Gogol or Dostoevsky whose lives, whether from choice or necessity, were a headlong round of hotels and rented rooms—and, in the case of the last, a Siberian prison.
As for myself (for what that’s worth), I have tried to write in such places as an African mud hut (with a wet towel tied around my head), an Athonite monastery, a writers’ colony, a moorland cottage, even a tent. But whenever the dust storms come, the rainy season sets in, or a pneumatic drill destroys all hope of concentration, I curse myself and ask, ‘What am I doing here? Why am I not at the Tower?’
There are, in fact, two towers in my life. Both are mediaeval.
Both have thick walls, which make them warm in winter and cool in summer. Both have views of mountains, contained by very small windows that prevent you from getting distracted. One tower is on the Welsh border, in the water meadows of the River Usk. The other is Beatrice von Rezzori’s signalling tower—in her idiomatic English she calls it a ‘signallation tower’ – built in the days of Guelph and Ghibelline and standing on a hillside of oak and chestnut woods, about twenty-five kilometres east of Florence.
For years I had to admire Beatrice Monti della Corte (as she then was) from afar. She had been a golden girl of the postwar generation on Capri. When she was twenty-three, long before big money clamped its leaden and rapacious hand on the art market, she had opened a gallery in Milan, the Galleria dell‘Ariete, one of the first in Europe to show the new New York School of painting. She had bought a sixteenth-century ‘captain’s house’ in Lindos (long before the days of deafening discotheques). Next I heard she had married the Austrian novelist Gregor von Rezzori (or was he Romanian?) and had settled in a Tuscan farmhouse.
One summer evening in England, this couple, whom my imagination had inflated into figures of mythology, were brought to our house. Within minutes we were all old friends: within months I was a regular visitor to Donnini.
The house is a casa colonica: the colonists in question being settlers from the Arno Valley who fanned out in waves over the Tuscan countryside from the fourteenth century onwards. Its solid architecture, of stone and tile, is unchanged since that of classical antiquity. Indeed, until about thirty years ago, what Horace had to say of his Tuscan farm could also be said of the life in any casa colonica.
At nights the thirty-odd members of an extended family would curl up to sleep under the rafters. By day they would tend their sheep or their beehives, vines and olives. They ploughed the narrow terraced fields with white oxen and lived, austerely, on a diet of bread and beans, cakes of chestnut flour, and meat or pigeon maybe once a month. Then, in the postwar industrial boom, the farmers went to work in the factories, leaving thousands of farms untenanted.
Grisha Rezzori, by temperament and upbringing, is a ‘mover’: it would be impossible for any biographer to trace his zigzagging course through Europe and America. The Rezzoris were Sicilian noblemen who Austrianised themselves and ended up in the Bukovina, the farthest-flung province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now swallowed into the Soviet Union.
A marginal man, cast adrift as a civilian in wartime Germany, he fastened his ironic stare on the fall of the Nazis and its aftermath, and with his prodigious gift for storytelling settled down (more or less!) at Donnini and wove these stories into his monumental novel The Death of My Brother Abel.
In summer he would work in a converted hay barn; in winter in a cavernous and book-stacked library where, among his rescued souvenirs, there is a faded sepia photo of the rambling manor, now presumably a collective farm, which was once his family house. Yet to watch Il Barone (as his Tuscan neighbours call him) reemerging from a snowstorm in a greatcoat after a night walk alone in the woods or to see him strolling through the olive groves with his dogs (or the two tame wild boars Inky and Pinkie) was to realise that he had recovered, or reinvented, the ‘lost domain’ of his boyhood.
I associate visits to Donnini with hoots of belly laughter. The Rezzoris have a knack of attracting farcical situations. Their immediate neighbours are a well-known German film director and his wife. This couple had friends among the European Far Left. Their guests included Daniel Cohn-Bendit, better known as Danny le Rouge; and somehow the Italian carabinieri got it into its collective head that they might be harbouring Brigate Rosse. They also got the wrong house and with helicopters and Jeeps staged an ‘attack’ on the Rezzoris, calling them with loudhailers to come out, unarmed, with their hands up.
The Tower stands a short way from the house on a spur of land overlooking the Arno Valley. When I first went to Donnini, it was lived in by a peasant family and still belonged to the Guicciardini family, whose forebear was the patron of Dante’s friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti. And although Beatrice used to say, with a slightly predatory glint, ‘I have a fantasy to buy that Tower,’ I confess to having had designs on it myself As a boy, on a walking tour of Périgord, I had spent hours in Montaigne’s famous tower, with the Greek and Latin inscriptions on the rafters, and now I, too, had a fantasy – the fantasy of a compulsive mover ??
? that I would settle down in the smiling Tuscan landscape and take up scholarly pursuits. Beatrice’s fantasy, however, was a lot stronger than mine. Besides, I have noticed in her a flair for putting fantasies into action. The tenants left the Tower. She bought it and began the work of restoration. Her friend the Milanese architect Marco Zanuso designed the outside staircase that leads to the upper room. Inside, it became a ‘turquerie’; for the Tower of her particular fantasy was another ‘lost domain’, lying somewhere on the shores of the Bosporus. This part of the story goes back to the mid-20s when Beatrice’s father, an aristocrat and expert in heraldry with a great knowledge of history and the fine arts, went to Rome for the winter season and married a fragile Armenian girl who, since the massacres, had been living in Italy.
She died seven years later. Yet the memory of her, of a person unbelievably beautiful and exotic, gave Beatrice an idea to which she has clung all her life: that glamour—real glamour, not the fake Western substitute – is a product of the Ottoman world. Once the rooms of the Tower were plastered, she employed a fresco painter, an old rogue called Barbacci, the last of the locals who could paint a trompe-l’oeil cornice or an angel on the ceiling of a church. But when he came to paint the pink ‘Ottoman’ stripes of the room I write in, he was forever peering from the window at the baronessa in the swimming pool, and some of the stripes have gone awry.
I have never known Beatrice to buy anything but a bargain, even if she has to travel halfway across the world to get it. She bought dhurrie carpets in the Kabul carpet bazaar. Nearer to home, she bought chairs from the Castello di Sammezzano, a fake Moorish palace on a nearby hill. She had, in addition, an assortment of strange objects, of the kind that refugees pack in their trunks: a gilded incense burner; engravings of odalisques; or a portrait of her grandfather, the pasha, who was once Christian governor of Lebanon—objects which needed a home and which, with a bit of imagination, could conjure echoes of lazy summer afternoons in summerhouses by the water.
Whenever I have been in residence, the place becomes a sea of books and papers and unmade beds and clothes thrown this way and that. But the Tower is a place where I have always worked, clearheadedly and well, in winter and summer, by day or night—and the places you work well in are the places you love the most.
1987
GONE TO TIMBUCTOO
Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, Tumbuktu or Tembuch? It doesn’t matter how you spell it. The word is a slogan, a ritual formula, once heard never forgotten. At eleven I knew of Timbuctoo as a mysterious city in the heart of Africa where they ate mice – and served them to visitors. A blurred photograph, in a traveller’s account of Timbuctoo, of a bowl of muddy broth with little pink feet rising to the surface excited me greatly. Naturally, I wrote an unprintable limerick about it. The words ‘mice in the stew’ rhymed with Timbuctoo and for me both are still inextricably associated.
There are two Tiinbuctoos. One is the administrative centre of the Sixth Region of the Republic of Mali, once French Sudan – the tired caravan city where the Niger bends into the Sahara, ‘the meeting place of all who travel by camel or canoe’, though the meeting was rarely amicable; the shadeless Timbuctoo that blisters in the sun, cut off by grey-green waterways for much of the year, and accessible by river, desert caravan or the Russian airplane that comes three times a week from Bamako.
And then there is the Timbuctoo of the mind-a mythical city in a Never-Never Land, an antipodean mirage, a symbol for the back of beyond or a flat joke. ‘He has gone to Timbuctoo,’ they say, meaning ‘He is out of his mind’ (or drugged); ‘He has left his wife’ (or his creditors); ‘He has gone away indefinitely and will probably not return’; or ‘He can’t think of anywhere better to go than Timbuctoo. I thought only American tourists went there.’
‘Was it lovely?’ asked a friend on my return. No. It is far from lovely; unless you find mud walls crumbling to dust lovely – walls of a spectral grey, as if all the colour has been sucked out by the sun.
To the passing visitor there are only two questions. ‘Where is my next drink coming from?’ and ‘Why am I here at all?’ And yet, as I write, I remember the desert wind whipping up the green waters; the thin hard blue of the sky; enormous women rolling round the town in pale indigo cotton boubous; the shutters on the houses the same hard blue against mud-grey walls; orange bowerbirds that weave their basket nests in feathery acacias; gleaming black gardeners sluicing water from leather skins, lovingly, on rows of blue-green onions; lean aristocratic Touaregs, of supernatural appearance, with coloured leather shields and shining spears, their faces encased in indigo veils, which, like carbon paper, dye their skin a thunder-cloud blue; wild Moors with corkscrew curls; firm-breasted Bela girls of the old slave caste, stripped to the waist, pounding at their mortars and keeping time with monotonous tunes; and monumental Songhai ladies with great basketshaped earrings like those worn by the Queen of Ur over four thousand years ago.
And at night the half-calabash moon reflected in the river of oxidised silver, rippled with the activity of insects; white egrets roosting in the acacias; the thumping of a tam-tam in town; the sound of spontaneous laughter welling up like clear water; the bull frogs, whining mosquitoes that prevented sleep, and on the desert side the far-off howls of jackals or the guard-dogs of nomad camps. Perhaps the Timbuctoo of the mind is more potent than one suspects.
It has been claiming European victims, and luring many to their deaths, since it first appeared (as Tembuch) on a Catalan map of the fourteenth century. Rumours had filtered to Europe of an African Kingdom where children of the sun ran about in naked innocence ruled by a wise black monarch called Rex Melly. He was often confused with Prester John, the mysterious Christian king who, they prophesied, would rise up out of his country at the head of countless multitudes. He would smite the Infidel, reunite Christendom, and the world would settle down to an everlasting peace. Rex Melly’s kingdom was also known to the commercially minded as the inexhaustible source of red African gold. Visions of a New Jerusalem beyond the desert were more than tinged with thoughts of commercial enterprise.
But Mansa Mussa, the King of Mali, who gave rise to the legend, was a devout Muslim. Far from smiting the Infidel, the founder of Timbuctoo gave his Arab friends so many golden handshakes on his visit to Cairo in 1324 that the price of gold took a sudden dip on the Cairo exchange. His entourage caused such a stir that a stream of merchants, artisans, scholars and architects, including an Andalucian called Es Saheli, followed him back. A great mosque, and the first black university in the world, rose up from the sand dunes.
The gold of Timbuctoo came from a nearby country. It grew in the ground in nuggets as large as carrots. The men who brought it to market were cannibals and insisted on slave-girls for dinner. But this was a small price to pay in a barter system where gold might be exchanged for its own weight of salt.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Earthly Paradises were in short supply. Most had evaporated under the critical gaze of geographers. The African Association was founded, and was determined that a Britisher should be the first European to set foot in Timbuctoo. And so he did. He did not return. Major Gordon Laing arrived in Timbuctoo in 1826. He wore his uniform throughout, talked grandly of his master, the King of England, and ostentatiously made notes and plans of the city. He was murdered by his escort on leaving the city after refusing conversion to Islam (and probably slavery thereafter).
Two years later the French announced that a Monsieur René Caillié had reached the lost city, dressed as a poor Arab, and returned alive. ‘I had formed a totally different idea of the grandeur and wealth of Timbuctoo,’ he wrote. ‘The city presented, at first sight, nothing but a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth. Nothing was to be seen in all directions, but immense quicksands of a yellowish white colour ... the most profound silence prevailed.’
The myth of Timbuctoo the Golden had been punctured. Where Chapman could write ...Deep in that lion-haunted inland lies
A my
stic city, goal of high enterprise
the young Tennyson only questioned ... Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo
A dream as frail as those of ancient time?
Apart from the two French forts, the hotel, the lycée and the tactfully hidden quarter for the colons, the appearance of Timbuctoo cannot have changed much since Caillié’s time. It still presents ‘a mass of ill-looking houses, built of earth’. Some, it is true, are built of blocks of white chalk, but the pale alluvial dust works its way into the pores very quickly. Some doorframes are painted a strawberry red incised with green scrolls, the only concession to decoration, and sole legacy of Moroccan conquest.
They still bring in slabs of salt from the dreaded Taodeni mines in the Sahara – a favourite target for anti-slavery societies. The Touareg still prance like storks around the town, on their best behaviour now, for they have little say in the government. They still buy their spears, stone arm bracelets and the indigo veil called the litham, for their mouths must never be seen in public. But next door to the Touaregi market booth, a salesman specialises in pots of macaw-coloured brilliantine, black lace brassières, Thermogene Medicated Rub and ‘Moon Rabbit Brand Nylon Stockings Made in China’. Such are the changing patterns of trade.
The market women hover over the most unlikely messes. Ochre-coloured calabashes contain a favourite drink – of sour milk, crushed millet and honey. Fricassé of crocodile is also quite common.
The streets are bare and dusty, but if you peer into the courtyards of the richer houses you can see obese women lying on the ground or on low couches. To sit up is thought to ruin the shape of the posterior. Obesity in women is admired, as a symbol of wealth. To maintain such girth in a desiccating desert climate requires mountains of food – all the time. Only the very rich can afford the luxury of a wife so large that she has to be carried by servant girls.