Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
It is raining at last, thank God, and the sound of thunder cascades across the heavens like some kind of conversation. This infernally hot summer is drawing to a close. The swallows left last week for sub-Saharan Africa, the bee-eaters the week before. Even the nudists – well, most of them – are going away, back to Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Bologna and Milan.
Yet I dread, as we slide inexorably once more towards winter, not the ghost-town reality of a tourist village out of season, but the deep cold and the dense fog to come like the ghost of the sea. I always wonder at this time of year: will I be granted one more summer?
How did it ever happen that I ended up here in Italy like a gypsy or an imam as the father of six children? The story began when after graduation I went to Puglia in the deep south to teach English and fell in love for the first time in my life, with a girl called Anna, whose father was dead but whose uncle asked me over Sunday lunch: ‘What are your intentions?’ She was not allowed out after 11 p.m. and had rows with her mother.
We split up after a year or so, thanks largely to my morbid jealousy because she was beautiful and much sought after and I could not cope. I went back to Britain in a desolate mood and left behind my MV Agusta 350 motorbike with drop handlebars. But then, because we loved each other, we decided to try again. I used to call her from the phone box outside the Carpenter’s Arms at Limpsfield Chart in Surrey near my father’s house. ‘Can you see the moon?’ I once asked her as I pumped coins into the phone box. ‘Yes, Nico, yes I see it,’ she replied.
So we met up again on the tiny, magical island of San Nicola in the Isole Tremiti off the coast of Puglia – in those days still wild and untouched by mass tourism and where she knew its charismatically insane de facto king Roberto. We stayed in his house by the church in which there was the grinning skeleton of a tiny priest in his robes inside a glass case. This former fisherman’s house was built into the walls of the fortress-like village, from which there was a sheer drop down to the sea, and it had a huge arch-shaped window with the most perfect view,
The sound of the gulls outside – Scopoli’s shearwaters – was like the chatter of suffering humans. They are said to be the soldiers of Diomedes, who fought with Odysseus at the Siege of Troy, transformed into birds by Aphrodite to punish him because he had wounded her in a battle.
Anna became pregnant. ‘I want it,’ she said, placing both hands on her stomach and swaying from side to side, ‘I want it.’ I, it shames me to say, did not.
I was 24. It is probably the worst thing I have done in my life. Anna aborted our child behind her mother’s back. Our relationship never recovered. In fact, I fear, the abortion ruined her life, and I was to blame.
Women may retort: oh come off it, abortion is nothing. Well, yeah, but is that what you really, honestly think deep down?
Back in London, a few years later, I fell for a striking Scouse-Persian girl called Mandana who ran Andrew Edmunds wine bar in Soho. We got married but had no children in the decade or so we were together. I assumed that, as a result of divine retribution, or something, I had become incapable. Anyway, Mandana didn’t want children, she used to say, for all the obvious reasons. Her dog Heathcliff, who shared our matrimonial bed in the Balls Pond Road, was her child.
My belief that I was no longer able to produce children was reinforced in spades when I returned to Italy aged 39 and fell in love with Carla, a raven-haired beauty, who I had met in the bar next to Mussolini’s abandoned castle above Predappio in the Apennines.
Carla, who is much younger than me, forced me to take a fertility test. It involved ‘producing’ in a toilet at a clinic, but without even the help of a porn mag let alone what Auberon Waugh used to call a Thai sandwich. Try doing that in the morning as a man who smoked 60 a day at the time and drank up to two litres of red. In desperation, I summoned Carla. That did the trick.
Up to a point.
The female gynaecologist looked at the results of the test and tossed the sheet of paper down on the table in front of us with ill-disguised contempt.
‘Nothing, nothing moves!’ she said. And yet, miraculously, we have six children aged 11 to 23. And, as it is sometimes said, they look like me. Poor things.
The rain has stopped and the sun has returned but it is far cooler.
I can hear Francesco-Winston, our eldest son, who is 21, shouting about something at our youngest child, Giuseppe, 11, and from the window of my ‘study’ see Giovanni-Maria, 14, tinkering away under the bonnet of the recently acquired 1989 ‘Champagne Metallic’ Mercedes 200. Magdalena, 19, is practising her viola and Rita, 17, has just come back on her little scooter from the bar in the village where she’ll work for a few more days before school starts. Caterina, the eldest, has just driven off in her Fiat Panda with little Giuseppe in tow and the incredible Carla who made it all happen.
But I can never forget the child conceived on San Nicola who was never born because I decided to kill it.
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