Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 31

That trip to Italy in the spring of 1987 began innocuously enough. Andrea and I would take turns at the wheel of his white Audi as we cruised along the Côte d’Azur, while he talked with gusto about sex. He described the positions he favoured for fucking his wife, pausing every now and then to enquire unsuccessfully as to my own proclivities. ‘Tu es bien,’ he remarked with sorrow.

Andrea’s concupiscence extended to food. He recommended consuming not just the flesh but also the eyes of grilled fish, and sucked the whitened discs from a sea bream. At another restaurant, he returned to his seat having already settled the bill for our five courses – antipasti, pasta, primi, secondi, dolce – so that he could enjoy a second dessert from the trolley, an oozing millefeuille which he had failed to spot the first time round. He also taught me his method for eating pizza: cut into triangles, roll a triangle up starting with the tip, stab with a fork, then eat from one end, like a wrap.

So far, so good. My doubts on agreeing to the road trip had climbed out of the front seat of my mind and into the back. But they were still in the car. I would describe these doubts as the ‘red voice’ in my head. If doubt is proactive uncertainty, that is what the red voice was. It said, ‘Danger! You are out of your depth!’ However, the red voice had competition in the form of a green voice. The green voice was saying, ‘It will be fine. Don’t be a wimp. It could be an adventure. You’ve never been to Italy before. What’s the worst that could happen?’

Whenever we strike a deal or make an agreement with somebody, we hear these competing red and green voices. The problem arises when we allow the red voice to become stifled. Nearly all difficulties in human affairs stem from poor contracting, that is, when expectations are not surfaced at the outset of whatever the joint effort might be. To take an everyday example that would later happen to me:

Two couples go out for dinner together for the first time. Couple A declare that they are not drinking alcohol that night, and order tap water. During the course of the evening Couple B consume two bottles of wine. The bill arrives and Couple B pay half the total amount. Couple A pay their half, but they resent doing so. Couple A thought that in announcing that they wouldn’t have wine, they had implicitly entered into a verbal contract with Couple B over the division of the bill. But in the social nervousness at the beginning of the meal, that contract wasn’t made explicit. The two couples do not go out for dinner again.

In other words, the red voice warns us that the contract has residual ambiguities in it, like undissolved stones that sink to the bottom of a liquid. To mix my metaphors, these stones become the eggs from which poor decisions hatch.

What made me turn the volume down on my red voice was that lack of meaningful work, and a corresponding need to fill it. The mental picture of life in Perpignan that I had painted before leaving Croydon did not feature me as a house husband. A sojourn in the aftershave-drenched company of Andrea’s machismo would help to chase away any perceived effeminacy on my part.

In other words, my self-esteem had dropped to a point at which I was more likely to agree to things that I might otherwise have rejected. That’s the real danger with low self-esteem: it can draw us into making bad decisions. That sense of my life’s arbitrariness, of my being able to slide in any direction, wasn’t just about autonomy. It indicated that my life wasn’t worth securing.

It was when Andrea and I reached Parma that the atmosphere soured. There had been an intimation of trouble when we crossed the border. Before waving us on, the Italian police had taken a long look at our Palermo licence plates. On our way to the Bologna shoe fair, Andrea and I had checked into a hotel for the night; we shared a room with two single beds. Barely a minute later, the bedroom door was busted open by the cops. They must have been following us all the way from Ventimiglia. It was my second raid in a month. The Armani-wearing carabinieri went through our suitcases. They frogmarched us down to the Audi where Andrea was forced to display his wares. There were just the shoes, as he had protested. That didn’t satisfy the police. They lifted the carpets, unscrewed the radio and removed the door panels, questioning Andrea all the while.

They had questions for me too. I was an English student dropout working without a visa in France on a business trip to Italy with a person of interest from Sicily. If those weren’t quite grounds for arrest, they were certainly cause for suspicion. My Italian wasn’t up to following him, but somehow Andrea managed to blarney his way out of it. The police grudgingly withdrew.

The next day, it all came out. Andrea didn’t fess up as such, but he did let me ask questions to which he would supply yes or no answers. Was he laundering money through shoe sales? He nodded. Was it for the Mob? Another nod. The Bologna shoe fair would enable him to close a number of deals, after which he was to report back to his bosses in Milan. Personally, he wanted out. His own brother had been shot down in a helicopter by his mafiosi friends, and Andrea had lost his stomach for it.

A part of Andrea’s befriending me, it seemed, was a genuine desire to live a more reputable life. Perhaps that is what he had associated with the Oxford brand. Where I was innocent enough to believe that all experience was good, he, the figure of experience, was hankering after some innocence. He would use this innocence like a cleaning product for wiping his slate: Innocence™. Like the good Catholic that he was, he had an overdeveloped faculty of guilt along with an exaggerated longing for atonement.

We stopped in Milan on the way back, as ordered. Andrea went for his meeting in an anonymous office block, leaving me in the car. Knowing what I by then knew, my wait was tense. What if one of them saw me? Andrea came back half an hour later with new instructions. He was to move his family back to Sicily. After the return drive to Perpignan, I never saw him again.

I arrived home to find Simone in a state. We had been burgled. They took everything, even jeans. My beloved cassette player was gone. In order to unlock the front door from the inside, the bastard had punched a hole through the glass panel next to it, cutting his hand. There was blood everywhere. We were now in 1987, at the high tide of the hysteria around HIV. Would we get infected?

The robbery had a further disquieting aspect. Our apartment was locked and on the first floor. Accessing it required the main door of the building to be breached, as well as that of the apartment itself. Simone herself had been away while I was with Andrea, visiting friends in Provence. We couldn’t help wondering whether our Moroccan neighbours were the culprits. Maybe we were being as racist as the immigration police, but who else would have known that we were both away? Apart from Andrea, that is.