M- had died nine years previously, at the age of eighty-one, his intellectual powers and musical enthusiasm both undiminished. As he lay dying at Meersburg, on the shores of Lake Constance, he sent for his young friend F-, a seminarist, to play for him on the glass armonica which had accompanied him through all his travels since he left 261 Landstrasse. According to one account, the pangs of his dying were soothed by listening a final time to the music of the spheres. According to another, the young seminarist was delayed, and M- died before F- could touch his chalky fingers to the rotating glass.
Carcassonne
IN THE SUMMER of 1839, a man puts a telescope to his eye and inspects the Brazilian coastal town of Laguna. He is a foreign guerrilla leader whose recent success has brought the surrender of the imperial fleet. The liberator is on board its captured flagship, a seven-gun topsail schooner called the Itaparica, now at anchor in the lagoon from which the town gets its name. The telescope offers a view of a hilly quarter known as the Barra, containing a few simple but picturesque buildings. Outside one of them sits a woman. At the sight of her, the man, as he later put it, ‘forthwith gave orders for the boat to be got out, as I wished to go ashore’.
Anita Riberas was eighteen, of mixed Portuguese and Indian descent, with dark hair, large breasts, ‘a virile carriage and determined face’. She would have known the guerrilla’s name, since he had helped free her native town. But his search for both the young woman and her house was in vain, until he chanced upon a shopkeeper of his acquaintance who invited him in for coffee. And there, as if waiting for him, she was. ‘We both remained enraptured and silent, gazing on one another like two people who meet not for the first time, and seek in each other’s faces something which makes it easier to recall the forgotten past.’ That’s how he put it, many years later, in his autobiography, where he mentions an additional reason for their enraptured silence: he had very little Portuguese, and she no Italian. So he spoke his eventual greeting in his own language: ‘Tu devi esser mia.’ You must be mine. His words transcended the problem of immediate understanding: ‘I had formed a tie, pronounced a decree, which death alone can annul.’
Is there a more romantic encounter than this? And since Garibaldi was one of the last romantic heroes of European history, let’s not quibble over circumstantial detail. For instance, he must have been able to speak passable Portuguese, since he’d been fighting in Brazil for years; for instance, Anita, despite her age, was no shy maiden but a woman already married for several years to a local cobbler. Let’s also forget about a husband’s heart and a family’s honour, about whether violence occurred or money was exchanged when, a few nights later, Garibaldi came ashore and carried Anita off. Instead, let’s just agree that it was what both parties deeply and instantly desired, and that in places and times where justice is approximate, possession is usually nine points of the law.
They were married in Montevideo three years later, having heard reports that the cobbler might be dead. According to the historian G. M. Trevelyan, they ‘spent their honeymoon in amphibious warfare along the coast and in the lagoon, fighting at close quarters against desperate odds’. As good on a horse as he, and as brave, she was his companion in war and marriage for ten years; to his troops she was mascot, invigorator, nurse. The birth of four children did not impede her devotion to the republican cause, first in Brazil, then Uruguay, and, finally, Europe. She was with Garibaldi in the defence of the Roman Republic, and, after its defeat, in his retreat across the Papal States to the Adriatic coast. During their flight she fell mortally ill. Garibaldi, though urged to flee by himself, stayed with his wife; together they dodged the Austrian white-coats in the marshes around Ravenna. In her final days, Anita held resolutely to ‘the undogmatic religion of her husband’, a fact which draws from Trevelyan a tremendous romantic flourish: ‘Dying on the breast of Garibaldi, she needed no priest.’
Some years ago, at a booksellers conference in Glasgow, I found myself talking to two Australian women, a novelist and a cook. Or rather, listening, since they were discussing the effect of different foods on the taste of a man’s sperm. ‘Cinnamon,’ said the novelist knowingly. ‘No, not just by itself,’ replied the cook. ‘You need strawberries, blackberries and cinnamon, that’s the best.’ She added that she could always tell a meat-eater. ‘Believe me, I know. I did a blind tasting once.’ Hesitant about contributing to the conversation, I mentioned asparagus. ‘Yes,’ replied the cook. ‘It shows in the urine but it also shows in the ejaculate.’ If I hadn’t written the exchange down shortly afterwards, I might think I was remembering part of some hot dream.
A psychiatrist friend of mine maintains that there is a direct correlation between interest in food and interest in sex. The lustful gourmand is almost a cliché; while aversion to food is often accompanied by erotic indifference. As for the normal, middle part of the spectrum: I can think of people who, because of the circles in which they move, exaggerate their interest in food; often, they are the same sort of people who (again, because of peer pressure) might claim more of an interest in sex than they actually feel. Counter-examples come to mind: couples whose appetite for food, and cooking, and eating out, has come to supplant the appetite for sex, and for whom bed, after a meal, is a place of repose not activity. But on the whole, I’d say there’s something to this theory.
The expectation of an experience governs and distorts the experience itself. I may not know anything about sperm tasting, but I know about wine tasting. If someone puts a glass of wine in front of you, it is impossible to approach it without preconceptions. To begin with, you might not actually like the stuff. But allowing that you do, then many subliminal factors come into play before you’ve even taken a sip. What colour the wine is, what it smells like, what glass it is in, how much it costs, who’s paying for it, where you are, what your mood is, whether or not you’ve had this wine before. It is impossible to factor out such pre-knowledge. The only way to get round it is an extreme one. If you are blindfolded, and someone puts a clothes peg on your nose, and hands you a glass of wine, then, even if you are the greatest expert in the world, you will be unable to tell the most basic things about it. Not even whether it is red or white.
Of all our senses, it is the one with the broadest application, from a brief impression on the tongue to a learned aesthetic response to a painting. It is also the one that most describes us. We may be better or worse people, happy or miserable, successful or failing, but what we are, within these wider categories, how we define ourselves, as opposed to how we are genetically defined, is what we call ‘taste’. Yet the word – perhaps because of its broad catchment area – easily misleads. ‘Taste’ can imply calm reflection; while its derivatives – tasteful, tastefulness, tasteless, tastelessness – lead us into a world of minute differentiations, of snobbery, social values and soft furnishings. True taste, essential taste, is much more instinctual and unreflecting. It says, Me, here, now, this, you. It says, Lower the boat and row me ashore. Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, says of Nancy Rufford: ‘I just wanted to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne.’ Falling in love is the most violent expression of taste known to us.
And yet our language doesn’t seem to represent that moment very well. We have no equivalent for ‘coup de foudre’, the lightning strike and thunderclap of love. We talk about there being ‘electricity’ between a couple – but this is a domestic not cosmic image, as if the pair should be practical and wear rubber soles to their shoes. We talk of ‘love at first sight’, and indeed it happens, even in England, but the phrase makes it sound rather a polite business. We say that their eyes met across a crowded room. Again, how social it sounds. Across a crowded room. Across a crowded harbour.