Howard Jacobson - The Act of Love

As was proved by the Rumble in the Jungle, however, this kind of tactic can make things tough on the person doing all the punching. I never doubted that it was harder on Marisa than on me. A husband on the ropes is not every wife ’s ideal, no matter what the usual literature of cuckoldry proclaims. This is where the horn-mad Elizabethans had it wrong — a wife who will make a public fool of her husband is hard to find, because to have a fool of a husband is to be half a fool yourself. In facing that one out in public, Marisa showed herself to be a wife in a million.

But I was a husband in a million too, no matter that millions would have put themselves in my position had they been men enough.

Friday, the night Marisa manned the phones for the Samaritans, was the night I began to dine alone again at Vico’s. On no other night of those first months they went out together could I be sure I wouldn’t run into her on Marius’s arm.

Because Fridays were busy, they were not the best evenings to get the attention of Rafaele, but in the shine of his officious, scandal-mongering face as he went scuttling by my table I saw everything I hoped to see. Pity was what he had decided to feel for me once it became obvious I intended to do nothing Italian (or Polish, come to that) to put an end to Marisa’s affair, neither take a knife to her lover, nor throw Marisa herself out into the street. From the far end of the restaurant, even as he was dealing with other customers, he would shake his head in a dumb show of profound compassion, not unmixed with profound contempt. Once, when I made one of those skywriting squiggles in the air requesting the bill, he made one back to me. CUCU, I believe he wrote. And, if I wasn’t mistaken, on those mornings when I called in for a coffee-fix on the way to work, something very like CUCU began to appear in chocolate on my cappuccino.

Then, after a particularly frantic evening, against all protocol he joined me at my table. He was sweating hard.

‘I have come to the end of the line, Signor Quinn,’ he said. ‘I can take no more.’

I didn’t know what to say to him. You forget when you are engrossed in the deviancy of your own desires what a profound effect your moral vagrancy might be having on other people. I reached out and put my hand on his. Mine cool and dry, his moist and fervid. ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘In fact I’m more than all right. Everything is as I wish it. Here, drink some Brunello with me.’

Refusing the wine with a twist of his bear-like shoulder, he stared disbelievingly at me, then decided to go on as though I hadn’t spoken. ‘I have been waiter man and boy for forty years,’ he said. ‘It’s enough. It’s time to hang my hat. My legs are tired. Next week I go back to Umbria to be with my family.’ He made a globe with his hands as though to suggest that though the world was now his oyster, the only world he cared about was Umbria. ‘Sunshine, wine, salami,’ he said.

No mention, I noted, of Polish sausage. But I was relieved not to be the reason he was hanging up his hat.

I shook his hand and told him I would miss him. He insisted that we kiss, as men, and then, perhaps as an association with men kissing as men, he said, ‘Signor Quinn, in my country we have a saying — Jestem czlowiekiem i nic, co ludzkie, nie jest mi obce .’

‘That doesn’t sound Italian to me, Rafaele.’

‘It’s Umbrian dialect. I come from a very remote village. But do you know what that saying means? “I’m human and nothing that is human is to me strange.”’

‘That’s good,’ I said.

‘Good but not true. Some things are too strange for me to understand.’

‘We are all made differently,’ I said.

‘And you are not unhappy, Signor Quinn?’

‘I could skip out of my skin with happiness, Rafaele. I am alive to the tips of my fingers — feel! I only wish for you to be as happy in your native Umbria.’

He leaped to his feet. ‘ Dio ce ne scampi e liberi! ’ he said. ‘You know what that means?’

‘“I should be so lucky”?’

He made a horror face and did something Polish with his thumbs, as though pointing pistols at his temple. ‘It means, “God forbid!”’

I was sorry when he left. I missed the chocolate CUCU on my cappuccino.

But if I feared I’d lost my lifeline to the lovebirds, I was soon to get a better. You know when the gods of demented love are pleased with you: they shower you with gifts.

After Rafaele, Ernesto.

A real Italian this time, Ernesto was a tailor who had recently suffered a great tragedy and was looking for a change of scene. I had known him for many years from the small alterations business he ran above a shoe shop in Marylebone Lane, shortening trousers and moving buttons for Versace and Armani and whoever else happened to be passing. But he had lost his wife to a sudden heart attack, right there in the sewing rooms he had occupied for decades, and he couldn’t bear to return to them. He wasn’t looking for a new career. Just something to keep him busy and take his mind off what had happened. Really and truly he was waiting for a heart attack himself, so it didn’t matter what he did.

He was a diminutive Roman with courtly manners and a kind, upsetting, crestfallen smile. I had always thought of him as a vigorous man, muscular in a compact way and delicately browned by the sun. But after the death of his wife the strength seemed to leave his body. He turned yellow.

I explained all this to the manager of Vico’s, another old friend, adding that I thought Ernesto would recover his spirits after a while in their employment, that he wasn’t looking for much money anyway, and would be happy just to go around pouring the San Pellegrino. I wasn’t suggesting him as a replacement for Rafaele, simply a body who was willing to start at the bottom while everybody else moved up.

In fact, Ernesto never did get much beyond pouring the San Pellegrino, but he was grateful to me for the change of scenery. A gratitude on which I did not scruple to capitalise. To Ernesto, as a way of repaying the favour I had done him, I gave the Iago task of telling me what I was unable to see with my own eyes.

I didn’t spare him. I’d meet him after he ’d finished in the restaurant, order a taxi to take him home, and travel with him, sometimes keeping the taxi waiting an hour or more outside his wife-vacated house in Maida Vale while I squeezed out the last drop of information. Initially his answers to my questions were the same: he had seen nothing really, he had only poured them water, his observations were not worth anything; but eventually he learned that his evasions hurt me more than his confidences. It’s possible he made things up. It’s possible Marisa wasn’t even in the restaurant on some of the evenings he told me he had seen her holding hands across the table with a man who wasn’t me. None of this mattered. It was an impression I was after in those early days. A sense of them, of how they were perceived as a couple, by a man who had been near them, leaned across them, refilled their glasses, and who therefore bore the warm impress of them on his person.

Had Mephistopheles himself appeared and offered me the opportunity to be at their table with them while they canoodled — not as an invisible presence but as an unwanted and ignored third party, a no one before whom they felt free to kiss without compunction — I’d have dared damnation for it. But in the absence of such a deal — and neither Marisa nor Marius was going to invite me to break bread with them of their own accord — I had to turn Ernesto into my eyes and ears and even lungs.

‘Breathe them in,’ I told him once, ‘and then hold your breath until you can breathe them out again on me.’