A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth

Author:Martin Booth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2004-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

It is warm tonight, the air balmy as a tropical island, the breeze the temperature of blood. In the morning, it rained: after noon, the clouds blew away over the mountains and the sun beat down from a sky laundered of impurities. Here, that does not imply the diesel soot of Rome, the factory grime of Turin and Milan, the concrete dust of Naples. The mountain rain has cleansed the atmosphere of the pollen of a million flowers, washed out the dust of slow moving horse carts and lazy tractors dragging shallow ploughs through the stony soil, neutralised the dull electricity of heavy heat to replace it with the sharp sparks of taintless warmth.

When the rain came it did so with a Mediterranean vengeance. Here, rain is an Italian man who does not kiss hands and fawn like a Frenchman, or bow discreetly like an Englishman, keeping sex at bay, or get brazen like an American sailor on shore leave. Here, the rain is passionate. It does not fall in sheets like the tropic downpour or drizzle miserably like an English complaint, snivelling like a man with a blocked nose. It slants down in spears, iron rods of grey water which strike the earth and pockmark the dust, spread out like damp stars upon the dry cobblestones of the streets and the flagstones of the Piazza del Duomo. The earth, far from succumbing to the assault, rejoices in it. After a brief shower, one can hear the earth click and pop as it sucks its drink.

Within minutes, leaves which were hanging drab in the haze of seething air are erect, their green hands held out, supplicating for more.

After rain, there is a joy in the world. I share it. So much is rotten, is corruption, is fated to destruction. The rain seems to be a benediction, as if some law of nature had decided it is time for a baptism into reality.

I sit in the loggia. The oil lamp remains unlit. I need no light, as you shall understand. Upon the table is a bottle of Moscato Rosa. One bottle and one tall, thin glass. In an English house, a woman would keep a single stemmed bloom in it. Beside it is a small earthenware pot and three thick slices of bread smeared with salted butter. For later.

A dog begins to bark, somewhere outside the town, lost in the vineyards which approach the fragments of the fourteenth-century defensive wall still standing. It is a plaintive sound, rich in canine melancholy. Another dog, farther away, takes up the offer of conversation and they shout to each other like men calling across a valley. A third, in a courtyard of one of the buildings adjacent to my own, joins the night chorus with a hoarse, gruff woof which echoes and sounds less like a dog and more like an abusive drunk struggling to make a point of intellectual import in a bar-room argument.

There is something timeless about their barking as if they

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