We ate our grouse slowly, slicing off one thin sliver of breast at a time, allowing it to melt on the tongue and following each mouthful with a sip of fragrant Volnay.
“Who’s next on the list?” Yasmin asked me.
I had been thinking about that myself, and now I said to her, “It was going to be Mr. James Joyce, but perhaps it would be nice if we took a short trip down to Switzerland for a change of scenery.”
“I’d like that,” she said. “Who’s in Switzerland?”
“Nijinsky.”
“I thought he was up here with that Diaghilev chap.”
“I wish he was,” I said. “But it seems he’s gone a bit dotty. He thinks he’s married to God, and he walks about with a big gold cross around his neck.”
“What rotten luck,” Yasmin said. “Does that mean his dancing days are over?”
“Nobody knows,” I said. “They say he was dancing at a hotel in St. Moritz only a few weeks ago. But that was just for fun, to amuse the guests.”
“Does he live in a hotel?”
“No, he’s got a villa above St. Moritz.”
“Alone?”
“Unfortunately not,” I said. “There’s a wife and a child and a whole bunch of servants. He’s a rich man. Fabulous sums he used to get. I know Diaghilev paid him twentyfive thousand francs for each performance.”
“Good Lord. Did you ever see him dance?”
“Only once,” I said. “The year the war broke out, 1914, at the old Palace Theatre in London. He did Les Sylphides. Stunning it was. He danced like a god.”
“I’m crazy to meet him,” Yasmin said. “When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “We have to keep moving.”
20
AT THIS POINT in my narrative, just as I was about to describe our trip to Switzerland to find Nijinsky, my pen suddenly came away from the paper and I found myself hesitating. Was I not perhaps getting into a rut? Becoming repetitious? Yasmin was going to be meeting an awful lot of fascinating people over the next twelve months, no doubt about that. But in nearly every case (there would of course be one or two exceptions) the action was going to be very much the same. There would be the giving of the Beetle powder, the ensuing cataclysm, the escape with the spoils, and all the rest of it, and that, however interesting the men themselves might be, was going to become pretty boring for the reader. Nothing would have been easier than for me to describe in great detail how the two of us met Nijinsky on a path through the pinewoods below his villa, as indeed we did, and how we gave him a chocolate, and how we held him in conversation for nine minutes until the powder hit him, and how he chased Yasmin into the dark wood, leaping from boulder to boulder and rising so high in the air with each leap he seemed to be flying. But if I did that, then it would be fitting also to describe the James Joyce encounter, Joyce in Paris, Joyce in a dark blue serge suit, a black felt hat, old tennis shoes on his feet, twirling an ashplant and talking obscenities. And after Joyce, it would be Monsieur Bonnard and Monsieur Braque and then a quick trip back to Cambridge to unload our precious spoils in The Semen’s Home. A very quick trip that was because Yasmin and I were in the rhythm of it now and we wanted to push on until it was finished.
A. R. Woresley was wildly excited when I showed him our haul. We now had King Alfonso, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Stravinsky, Proust, Nijinsky, Joyce, Bonnard, and Braque. “And you’ve done a fine job with the freezing,” he said to me as he carefully transferred the racks of straws with their labels on them from my suitcase freezer to the big freezer in Dunroamin, our headquarters house. “Keep going, children,” he said, rubbing his hands together like a grocer. “Keep going.”
We kept going. When Yasmin and I returned the next day to Paris, we collected Clemenceau, Foch, and Maurice Ravel, who was living alone out at Monfort-l’Amaury with a houseful of Siamese cats. After that, and it was the beginning of October now, we drove on south into Italy, looking for D. H. Lawrence. We found him living at the Palazzo Ferraro in Capri with Frieda, and on this occasion I had to distract fat Frieda for two hours out on the rocks while Yasmin went to work on Lawrence. We got a bit of a shock with Lawrence though. When I rushed his semen back to our Capri hotel and examined it under the microscope, I found that the spermatozoa were all stone dead. There was no movement there at all.
“Jesus,” I said to Yasmin. “The man’s sterile.”
“He didn’t act like it,” she said. “He was like a goat. Like a randy goat.”
“We’ll have to cross him off the list.”
“Who’s next?” she asked.
“Giacomo Puccini.”
21
“PUCCINI IS A BIG ONE,” I said. “A giant. We mustn’t fail.”
“Where does he live?” Yasmin asked.
“Near Lucca, about forty miles west of Florence.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Puccini is an enormously rich and famous man,” I said. “He has built himself a huge house, the Villa Puccini, on the edge of a lake beside the tiny village where he was born, which is called Torre del Lago. Now this is the man, Yasmin, who has written Manon, La Bohème, Tosca, Madame Butterfly, and The Girl of the Golden West. Classics every one of them. He is probably not a Mozart or a Wagner or even a Verdi, but he’s still a genius and a giant. He’s a bit of a lad, too.”
“In what way?”
“Terrific womanizer.”
“Super.”
“He is now sixty-one but that hasn’t stopped him,” I said. “He’s a roustabout, a drinker, a crazy car driver, a madkeen fisherman, and an even keener duck shooter. But above all, he’s a lecher. Someone once said of him that he hunts women, wild-fowl, and libretti in that order.”
“Sounds like a good chap.”
“Splendid fellow,” I said. “He’s got a wife, an old bag called Elvira, and believe it or not, this Elvira was once sentenced to five months in prison for causing the death of one of Puccini’s girl friends. The girl was a servant in the house, and the beastly Elvira caught Puccini out in the garden with her late one night. There was a tremendous scene, the girl was sacked, and thereafter Elvira hounded her to such an extent that the poor thing took poison and killed herself. Her family went to court and Elvira was given five months in the clink.”
“Did she go?”
“No,” I said. “Puccini got her off by paying twelve thousand lire to the girl’s family.”
“So what’s the plan?” Yasmin asked me. “Do I just knock on the door and walk in?”
“That won’t work,” I said. “He’s surrounded by faithful watchdogs and his bloody wife. You’d never get near him.”
“What do you suggest then?”
“Can you sing?” I asked her.
“I’m not Melba,” Yasmin said, “but I have quite a decent little voice.”
“Great,” I said. “Then that’s it. That’s what we’ll do.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you on the way up,” I said.
We had just returned to the mainland from Capri and we were in Sorrento now. It was warm October weather in this part of Italy and the sky was blue as we loaded up the trusty Citroën torpedo and headed north for Lucca. We had the hood down and it was a great pleasure to be driving along the lovely coastal road from Sorrento to Naples.
“First of all, let me tell you how Puccini met Caruso,” I said, “because this has a bearing on what you’re going to be doing. Puccini was world famous. Caruso was virtually unknown, but he desperately wanted to get the part of Rodolfo in a forthcoming production of La Bohème at Livorno. So one day he turned up at the Villa Puccini and asked to see the great man. Almost every day second-rate singers were trying to get in to see Puccini, and it was necessary that he be protected from these people or he would get no peace. ‘Tell him I’m busy,’ Puccini said. The servant told Puccini that the man absolutely refused to go. ‘He says he’ll camp in your garden for a year if necessary.’ ‘What does he look like?’ Puccini asked. ‘He’s a small stubby little chap with a moustache and a bowler hat on his head. He says he’s a Neapolitan.’ ‘What kind of a singer?’ Puccini asked. ‘He says he’s the best tenor in the world,’ the servant reported. ‘They all say that,’ Puccini said, but something prompted him, and to this day he doesn’t know what it was, to put down the book he was reading and to go into the hallway. The front door was open and little Caruso was standing just outside in the garden. ‘Who the hell are you?’ Puccini shouted. Caruso lifted up his full-throated magnificent voice and answered with the words of Rodolfo in La Bohème, ‘Chi son? Sono un poeta’ . . . ‘Who am I? I am a poet.’ Puccini was absolutely bowled over by the quality of the voice. He’d never heard a tenor like it before. He rushed up to Caruso and embraced him and cried out, ‘Rodolfo is yours!’ That’s a true story, Yasmin. Puccini himself loves to tell it. And now of course Caruso is the greatest tenor in the world, and he and Puccini are the closest of friends. Rather marvellous, don’t you agree?”