Amore and Amaretti (10 page)

In this state of buzzy hyperreality I find myself floating into a fantasy in which I am seducing this waiter to whom I have barely spoken. The following evening at work, after my ten o'clock beer (I slip so easily back into routines), I hear myself saying to Ignazio, who has come up to the kitchen window bearing empty plates, how much I would love to seduce him. He smiles his exquisite cherubic smile and departs, leaving me both terrified and excited by my impulse. I clear up the kitchen in a sort of trance, barely conscious of my actions, pondering consequences of crazy notions. When he returns a little later, I say, as calmly as I can manage, ‘So, what do you think?' and he tells me he had not heard what I had said. Now I am in a position of great embarrassment; the only recourse is to plough on, and so I repeat my original sentence, and am gratified by a blush that suffuses his entire face and down his neck. ‘All right,' is what he says, as if I had suggested we go for a
gelato
! He is seventeen years old to my thirty-one.

Two years living in Italy have, in a sense, merely perpetuated the pattern of my entire life, a reactive progression from one set of circumstances or opportunities to the next. No five-year plans, no long-term projects, no real ambitions unless you counted the cloudy, inchoate one of writing – for which a full, colourful and even accidental life has always seemed imperative. Ours was not an ambitious family. Ambition was never a particular value, unlike season tickets to the opera and ballet and book vouchers when we excelled at school. Nor were we a family to whom property and things mattered, doubtless explaining the ease with which all my adult life I had moved from one rental accommodation to another, from city to city, my one asset a superior stereo system. I had first come to this country to study the language, and then I fell in love. When that ended I found myself somehow engaged with the community and people around me; jobs were offered and the minutiae of ordinary, diurnal life distracted me from the larger questions. Now love had struck again.

A tavola non si invecchia

At the table, one does not age

Ignazio and I are a secret for a long time. What begins as a game, a joke, a fantasy, transforms into a real affair. He is my Botticelli angel – he is the most beautiful person I have ever known. Back in Via de' Barbadori he squashes in beside me in my box-like bedroom; the following morning I wrap my arms around his waist as we putter off to work on his silver-blue Vespa. I take photographs of him naked, his dark-brown eyes like the liquid centres of the chocolates he is eating. It seems to me that I have captured on film the essence of sensuality.

We are discreet: I especially dread Gianfranco finding out, fearful of being laughed at in general. I am too old, he is too young – facts which, when we are together exploring minds and bodies, are of no interest or issue. Besides, this is no great passion like the Gianfranco affair. I am cosy, serene and secure with Ignazio, re-establishing vast tracts of self-confidence in my unfamiliar role as teacher.

Raimondo is the first to find out, dropping around unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon at the precise moment that Ignazio, shrouded in my bathrobe, is leaving the bedroom. He is shocked, of course, but adjusts with some amusement to the situation once the three of us are sitting at I' Che C'è C'è eating
fettuccine alla boscaiola
over lots of celebratory wine. After a while, I cease to care about the opinions of others.

One day, urbane Lorenzo, owner of Antica Toscana and devoted family man, pokes his head through the kitchen window and calls me over. He tells me that he has a proposition to put to me, but it is private. Would we be able to meet to discuss it the following evening? I am intrigued, flattered, a little discomfited, but we agree to meet outside I' Che C'è C'è at nine o'clock. I have always adored Lorenzo, his avuncular nature and his kind eyes behind thick glasses and his paternal fondness for Gianfranco. I was enchanted when he returned from a trip to Peru, bringing me back an exquisite alpaca jumper. What can he possibly be proposing to me, which is to be kept from Gianfranco and presumably the other partners of the restaurant? I am eternally grateful to him for having financially enabled me to join the partnership, even if I have no understanding of why they want me as a partner or of the formalities (the sitting through important meetings in the solemn offices of solicitors and accountants pretending to comprehend, placing my signature confidently at the bottom of indecipherable documents, with absolute faith that Gianfranco would always look after me). My final guess is that Lorenzo wishes to set up another restaurant, would like me to work there but wants to hear my thoughts before telling the others. Ignazio and I discuss this at great length, and the following evening we dine quite early at I' Che C'è C'è before he heads back to the flat to await my return.

At nine o'clock, I step outside the restaurant and in a matter of minutes Lorenzo's sleek car pulls up. We drive for a long time until we reach the outskirts of Florence, where Lorenzo parks outside a nondescript restaurant. I am a little bewildered by the hushed formality of the interior as we are led to a table. A trolley appears with a smoked salmon on it. One elderly waiter thinly slices it as another one dribbles spumante into two flutes. I am too embarrassed to tell Lorenzo that I have already dined, that I have no room to eat anything more. I eat and drink politely and slowly, and we talk about generalities. It is only towards the end of an hour that I summon the courage to ask Lorenzo what it is he wishes to propose to me. His eyes magnify behind his spectacles; he looks almost sad. He would like to take me away sometime soon, to Sardinia perhaps or down to Capri, just a weekend he can arrange off for me. Then he would like to find me a nice little apartment somewhere in central Florence where I can be my own person and not have to share with university students.

I am listening to this in a state of horror, which politeness prevents me from betraying. How can I have misunderstood a situation quite so spectacularly? Have I missed little signs that may have been leading to this? Suddenly his financial backing and the glorious alpaca jumper are no longer the well-meaning gestures of a kindly uncle figure at all. I murmur platitudes of gratitude, then explain, carefully, that I am involved with someone and therefore not in the position to accept his kind offers. The evening ends abruptly. We leave shortly afterwards, driving the long way back in shrieking silence, and when Lorenzo drops me by the Ponte Vecchio there is none of the urbane door-opening which prefixed our evening. I feel literally dropped off, and as his car spins off into the night I run as fast as I can over the bridge and up Via de' Barbadori and into the lift and through the door of the apartment. In my bedroom, Ignazio lies asleep in the single bed. I sit down beside him and look at him. I seem to be looking at all the innocence, sweetness and uncorruptedness in the world, and when I touch the softness of his arm his long, spiky eyelashes separate and his beautiful brown eyes are looking at me with adoration. I have never loved him more.

Ignazio and I move into an apartment in Via Ghibellina, behind the Duomo and a few doors up from the Michelangelo Institute. That summer I climb up through the ceiling and onto the roof, where I spread a towel and sunbake in a landscape of shimmering spires and terracotta. Ignazio and I lie in bed eating Vivoli
gelato
out of big tubs; we play Scrabble in Italian and I teach him English. When the restaurant closes for renovations, we fly to Egypt for a holiday, sailing on feluccas, staying at the hotel in Aswan, where
Death on the Nile
was filmed, visiting tombs in the Valley of the Dead, buying perfumed oils in tiny stoppered bottles.

We began in Cairo with a slap-up night at the Nile Hilton. Before setting off to explore the city the following morning, flushed with the extravagance that characterises the beginnings of vacations, we order the Sultan's Breakfast – a banquet wheeled in on a trolley.

Cairo is a cacophony of cars, donkeys and goats competing for space on illogical road systems. We visit the Museum of National Antiquities and later lurch off on camels through smoky sunshine on the city's outskirts towards the Pyramids of Giza. The guide tells us that Napoleon calculated there would be enough stones in the three main pyramids alone to build a three-metre-high wall around the whole of France. I nearly faint on the narrow circular staircase winding up inside the Great Pyramid of Cheops, pressed sweatily between large German bottoms and vigorous American thighs. We gaze at the sprawling splendour of the Sphinx and purchase little scrolls of printed papyrus from the Papyrus Institute.