Читать книгу The Affair - Gill Paul - Страница 10

‘Hey, Scott, how’s it going?’ his editor’s voice boomed down the phone. ‘I’ve got a commission for you: fifteen hundred words on the Italian Communist Party. How does it differ from the style of Communism in the Soviet Bloc? What are its aims, and how much influence does it have in Italy? Think you can handle that?’

‘Sure! When do you need it?’

‘Is a week enough time? Or are you too busy chasing Italian chicks?’ The editor saw Scott as an international playboy type and Scott didn’t like to disillusion him by admitting he hadn’t had so much as a kiss since he arrived in Europe.

‘A week it is,’ he replied. At last he could demonstrate what he was capable of. Those booze-sodden hacks in the Eden Hotel bar would have to take him more seriously once he’d had an intelligent opinion piece published.

He needed some direct quotes from Roman politicians so his secretary told him about a translator called Angelo who could set up the interviews and assist when his very basic Italian would not suffice. It would be his foot in the door of Italian politics, and it was just a shame that the first politicians he would meet were Communists. Scott knew very strongly how he felt about that. In fact he had begun to write the piece before meeting them.

Some trade unionists here in Rome condemned the brutal Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising, but the party leadership kept quiet because they know where their bread is buttered, he wrote. Moscow holds the purse strings on which their power base rests and even if they use more moderate language than Señor Fidel Castro, they still believe that the working classes should unite to overturn capitalism. Some 4 percent of Italian workers are members of the Communist Party but you can bet that these are not the forward-thinking textile workers who are making Milan such a modern center of clothing manufacture, and not the directors in charge of protecting the famous antiquities of Rome, Venice and Florence, because Communism would abandon those to dust. It is the politically ignorant peasant who believes all those fine words about sharing wealth, little realising that under Communism there would be no wealth, along with no freedom of speech or action.

He interviewed the politicians but used their quotes in such a way as to make them sound naïve at best and self-serving at worst:

Corruption is a way of life in Italy, he opined, and no one is exempt, but those of the far left with their moral posturing about the good of the many are by far the greatest hypocrites. Look how quickly Señor Castro rushed to abandon democratic elections in Cuba earlier this year. Given half a chance, Italian Communists would do so even faster.

It was what his readers in the Midwest, smarting from American defeat in the Bay of Pigs just four months earlier, wanted to hear, and it happened to be what Scott believed. He and his classmates at Harvard had been aghast when the CIA-trained band of counter-revolutionaries were defeated by Castro’s forces, with their Soviet-designed tank destroyers and fighter-bombers. Now it seemed Americans must resign themselves to Reds on the doorstep, just 90 miles across the water from the Florida Keys, unless John F. Kennedy had some other plan up his sleeve. Surely he must.

Scott’s editor ran the piece across a double page, with photos of Italian workers in the fields alongside a textile loom in Milan, and Scott was thrilled when he got his copy by special courier. His byline was directly beneath the headline: ‘by Scott Morgan, our Rome correspondent’.

A day later, though, he received a phone call from Angelo, the translator. ‘I hope you never want to interview any Italian politicians again,’ he said, ‘because, to use an English phrase, you have burned all your boats.’

‘Nobody will read it here in Rome, will they?’ Scott asked. The thought simply hadn’t occurred to him.

‘Of course they will. They gave the interviews and their press advisors will have obtained copies to see how they were portrayed in your article. You can be sure they will not be pleased with your patronising attitude and lack of any attempt to understand the issues.’

‘You’re kidding. Why didn’t you warn me?’

‘My mistake. I gave you credit for a little intelligence.’

That evening, Scott went to the Eden Hotel to see what his compatriots thought, and he was greeted with much hooting and clapping on the back. ‘Aw heck, you didn’t want to be a political journalist anyway, did you, Spike?’

‘You’ve all read it?’

‘How could we miss your print debut, especially when it refers to Communist Party members as politically ignorant peasants?’

Joe bought him a large whisky and Scott downed it quickly.

‘Shall I tell you my secret?’ Joe slurred, his evening’s drinking obviously well advanced. ‘I read the Italian press and adapt stories from that. My editor never knows any better. Grab a dictionary and spend the morning going through Corriere della Sera and La Stampa and you’ll do just fine here.’

The next morning, Scott decided to do just that, but the only stories of international interest were about Elizabeth Taylor and her entourage arriving in Rome to make a Cleopatra film at Cinecittà. There were descriptions of her seven-bedroom villa on Via Appia Antica, her children, her dogs, her recent near-death illness, and a rehash of the scandal when she ‘stole’ her current husband Eddie Fisher from her rival Debbie Reynolds. Scott was scornful of this kind of gutter-press journalism and determined not to lower himself. His heroes were Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, serious men who wrote in an innovative style that read like fiction but contained hard facts. Neither of them would sink so low as to comment on Elizabeth Taylor’s dogs. He felt gloomy.

The clock read twenty past ten and he realised he just had time to catch his beautiful Italian girl leaving her house. She had begun smiling at him when he greeted her and once she had even returned his ‘Buongiorno’ so he felt it was important to keep up the momentum.

He jumped on the Vespa and scooted through the traffic, arriving in Piazza Navona with minutes to spare. He popped into a tobacconist’s to buy some Camels and through the window he saw her emerge from her house and cross the street. Throwing the money over the counter, he was able to step out of the shop straight into her path.

‘Ah, buongiorno, signorina bellissima,’ he grinned. ‘We meet finalmente!’

She blushed and looked down modestly. He was directly in front of her so she couldn’t walk on and there was a moment’s hesitation while she tried to decide what to do.

‘That’s a pretty dress,’ he said in Italian.

‘Grazie, signore,’ she said, then side-stepped neatly and continued down the road.

Scott stood and watched and when she reached the corner she turned back to see if he was still there.

‘Thank you!’ he whispered, and clenched his fists in delight.