I admitted that I had not. I had little time for sensation tales, I said.
‘It is by Mussolini himself,’ she said. ‘I read it before I ever met him. He already displayed in that work everything Italy needed to restore herself to her old pre-eminence. He is a romantic with a strong sense of discipline.’
Save for Fiorelli, I hesitated to speak of friends in Rome. Several had been early converts to the Fascist cause. But I would have to explain too much. I had become fascinated with the character she and I between us had created for me, to our mutual benefit. Kara ben Nesi was my model, I suppose, the great German scholar-adventurer of Karl May’s Durch die Wüste. I had read these as a child, in Kiev, in about 1912. May was one of the few novelists my teacher, Herr Lustgarten, approved. He was properly philosophisch, he said.
The irony only became clear years later. The British claim everything for themselves. They claim universal myths as their personal experience. Is it any wonder Europe became impatient with them? One can accept so much self-proclaimed piety.
To my astonishment, Rosie von Bek had no experience of the benefits and enjoyments of cocaine and I had the privilege of introducing her to this wonderful fruit of nature. She was astonished - Simply flabbergasted! - as she put it, by the way the drug amplified her imagination while it sharpened her senses. Now the subtlety of our intimacies became deeply intricate; we created arabesques of sensation and emotion, of peculiar and intellectual invention, almost abstract. While I gasped in Goethe’s German, she breathed the earth of Florentine Italy, of barbarous peaks moulding the fierce beliefs and desires of Albanian brigand chieftains, warmed me with the flame of limitless passion, driven to greater spiritual and sometimes physical risks by the coolness of my own responses. At least I did not fear flesh any longer. In our different ways we both experienced the same extraordinary spiritual union. We were a single, all-destroying creature - heat and cold, male and female, good and evil. New Homo sapiens, androgynous, omnipotent, eternal.
It was an impossible union and yet a natural one. Bismarck had known the beauty of such equilibrium, the balancing of masculine against feminine. Adolf Hitler, representing proud masculinity, and Benito Mussolini, representing the spiritual, feminine side of the fascist discipline. Left alone, I think they would have made perfection: German practicality married to Italian flair. Had they not been set, one upon the other, by petty rivalries the great dream would have flourished. There were certain personality problems between the two charismatic leaders, I will admit. But this is true of all brilliant marriages. They were on the move - too busy to make virtues of their differences. I think, perhaps, it was the same with me and Rosie von Bek. We were almost too strong for one another. In nature, such forces, such grand and noble opposites, sometimes need only a whisker’s touch to send both spinning helplessly from their orbits. While we remained aloft, without responsibilities or fears, we had our perfect universe. But eventually, the dreamer must look to the commonplace for his sustenance. If he resists his conscience’s demands he resists experience; he resists reality. He loses his grip. I was determined that this would never happen to me. Of course, I blame the Jews. It is in their interests to involve the world in abstractions.
Yet that blissful episode remains forever exquisite.
Many women have loved me. I have made love to many more. But there are only three women who are to me what my organs and my flesh are to me. What my own heart is to me. The first is Esmé, the innocent, wondering Esmé, my sweet sister, my little girl; the second is Mrs Cornelius, whom I loved for her sanity and her deep relish for ordinary life; the third is Rosie von Bek.
The light fell through the bars of the cattle-truck and made a pattern of black and white against the walls which stank of disinfectant. I am not the only human being alive today who cannot smell disinfectant without immediately fearing for his mortal existence.
Others flinch at the aeroplane’s whine or the car’s backfire. For me it is a public toilet at five in the morning. These stripes pursued me. Even in the basket they fell through ropes and guidelines to form bars across the yellow weave and trace Zion’s stars upon the Moorish carpets she had heaped there; a lattice of portent, it began to seem to me. Sometimes during the long, drifting days, I sat and read her Sexton Blake stories. These taught me about the politics of the Middle East as well as English domestic life. They introduced me to imperial complexities and gave me a quiet respect for those citizens of the Empire who shouldered their moral burdens. Here were the new Knights of the Round Table bringing enlightenment and Christian ethics to the dark places of the world. Rosie also had some old Italian film magazines, one of which showed myself and Gloria Cornish in Ace Among Aces and, in the same issue, advertised The Lost Buckaroo, but of course it was not then in my interest to point the films out. Sometimes I put down my Case of the Roumanian Envoy and merely stared at the patterns made by the sun through a net of lines and basket-work. Sometimes she and I would discuss their meaning. She insisted that I introduce her to the more doubtful pleasures of hashish and morphine. Happily, she did not respond well to the morphine and indulged only occasionally in the hashish, usually with tobacco after a meal. It was extraordinary to lean against the gondola’s brass rail with the sky and the desert at my back, to watch that beautiful woman, softly naked, cooking a delicious Albanian snack over the muttering engine, careless of any danger. I had never known a woman like her. Neither Esmé nor Mrs Cornelius were as careless of their comfort. I can close my eyes and smell the desert now. There is no comparison for that smell; almost sweet, almost alive. The heat of the African beast, the patient monster. I can smell her perfumed sweat, rose and cunt and garlic on her mouth, and I can smell my own cool manhood. I regained my skills and they were now informed with a subtler knowledge. I handled her as a musician his instrument, to celebrate its beauty and its sensual potentiality. Here I became again what I had always been but which I had been made to forget at Bi’r Tefawi. I was Ace Peters, star of the screen; Maxim Pyatnitski, inventor of the Dynamite Automobile, the Flying Wing, the Television. And I was al Sakhr, the Hawk of the Sahara. I was whatever I would wish to be or had ever desired to be. My vision and my future were restored. I saw again my cities, gold and silver, white and ebony, thrusting into the blue pallor of a Saharan evening. I saw an orderly future, where justice and equality were the common expectation. I saw escape from the grey ruins of my Russian homeland, from the squalor of the Constantinople alleys, from the wretched poverty of an Alabama shanty-town or a Cairene slum. I described some of my ideas to Rose and she responded with enthusiasm. I must certainly come back with her to Italy. Her absolute faith was invested in Il Duce. He was a man of the people, a great-hearted poet-politician like his friend D’Annunzio, who had put his own army at the Leader’s disposal. He was also a sensitive, moved only by a hatred of poverty and misery. But he was finally a great realist. He understood that the Italians would never improve on their own initiative. They needed strong, but humane, leadership. She told me of an Italy encouraging the arts and sciences. ‘II Duce calls us all to the service of his noble social experiment - everyone! The greatest writers, engineers, scientists and painters of our day are shoulder to shoulder in modern Rome.’ This was very like the opinion of the only clear-sighted American I ever met. When I knew him he was a journalist, then got a reputation as a poet. I understood nothing of that world. His championing of his fellow-poets was enough to put him in prison. I myself enjoyed the horrors of the Isle of Man. It does no good to speak for fairness and proper credit in this world.