On those many occasions when our paths crossed, he sang the opening bars of ‘Step Inside, Love’ before the terrible hilarity of his predicament took hold of him. Did he sing only for me, I wondered? Had he detected a kindred, appreciative spirit in the blatantly staring man with the friendly dog? Our lives are composed in part each day of questions that can never be answered.
The singing Raskolnikov became more and more wasted, lost inside the overcoat he wrapped around him tightly when he burst into song. I noticed him one hot afternoon biting into a hamburger with the ferocity of a wild animal. The meat was spilling out of his mouth and on to his glistening beard.
His truncated rendering of ‘Step Inside, Love’ on the last morning we passed one another was as manic as ever. His eyes, I imagined, were fixed on the death that was obviously awaiting him, just as the inevitable braying laugh was meant for the Grim Reaper. London’s bustling Uxbridge Road – with its population of Serbs, Croats, Poles, Turks, Indians, Arabs and Armenians – was now his Styx, and his expected Charon was around the corner, ready to ferry him across. He was openly dying, with a forced, final energy.
Raskolnikov had been a pretty youth, I learned, but when I encountered him he was already suffering from an AIDS-related illness. Other people, I discovered, thought he resembled Jesus Christ. Yet I was in the habit of calling him Raskolnikov, and so he remains for me.
Roman Artichokes
Some years ago I was invited to review a book by the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende about the aphrodisiac qualities of everyday food. The mistress of hothouse prose was writing from personal experience – every recipe had been kitchen-tested, so to speak – when she informed her panting readership that even the humblest vegetable has powers to excite the jaded or worn-out libido. The potency of the potato – the prime source of vodka – was no surprise to me, and I could accept that the guava and the avocado pear have properties that might lead the unwary up otherwise ignored garden paths. But it was her gushing recommendation of the globe artichoke that disconcerted me, and called to mind an unforgettable evening in Rome – a windy evening, with a windier night to follow.
I had been commissioned to write and present a radio documentary about the life and work of Leonardo Sciascia, the great Sicilian writer who had died the previous year. Just before leaving for Palermo, via Rome, I had broken my tibia (a bone above the ankle) while running alongside Circe in the park. As a consequence, my right leg was in plaster and I could walk only with the aid of crutches. Jeremy accompanied me. We were making our way to the taxi rank at Rome airport when two nuns passed us at a gallop, one of them stopping briefly to trip me up with her black-booted right foot. I fell to the ground, shouting ‘Fica ’ after her. Roman nuns are a curiously charmless bunch, but I had never anticipated that they would stoop to injuring a cripple. Perhaps, I wondered later, the loathsome duo were mafiosi in drag. It’s hard to tell what sex they are at times, since nuns in the Italian south are very circumspect when it comes to taking a razor to their facial hair. The husband of these brides of Christ is full of advice on other, more spiritual, concerns, but he seldom counsels them to have a shave.
We were in Rome for a couple of days, during which I interviewed Francesco Rosi, whose fine, intelligent movies – Salvatore Giuliano, which deals with the doomed life of the legendary Sicilian bandit, and La Tregua (The Truce), based on Primo Levi’s account of his flight from Auschwitz – are little known outside his own country. We spent a day in Ravello, where I talked to Gore Vidal in the garden of his luxurious villa. Seeing me hobbling towards him, he exclaimed, ‘Don’t tell me. You gave Joyce Carol Oates a bad review, and she threw the full weight of her a hundred and ten pounds on to you.’ He talked lyrically about Sciascia for more than an hour, without remembering a single title of his many books. Earlier that autumn afternoon, Jeremy and I and the producer of the programme, Noah Richler, had lunch at the wonderful little restaurant Cumpa Cosima, owned and managed by the enchanting Signora Netta, whom I had met some years before when Vanni and I had dined at Cumpa Cosima every night for a week. On returning to London, I wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph in which I described the food – the succulent roast lamb; the exquisite crespellini, which are pancakes filled with spinach – and lauded the unbelievably modest cost of everything on the carefully balanced menu. As a result, well-heeled British tourists, resident for the summer in places like Positano, negotiated the dangerously narrow roads leading up to Ravello from Amalfi in their hired cars in order to eat well and save money. And now, serving us lunch, Netta thanked me profusely and pointed to my article, which was on the wall, behind glass and framed. The meal was on the house, and we left in a glow, promising to return.