'What's he got on his head, a mantilla?' asked Manoia, openly scornful now. 'Is he thinking of going to early-morning mass?' 'Oh, you know what young people are like nowadays, when they go out they love to get themselves up in strange outfits, they like to be original, to look different.' It was a cruel irony that I should find myself obliged to justify both his fakery and his foolishness. 'It's a very ancient piece of headgear, but very Spanish; bullfighters used to wear it; it dates from the eighteenth century, I believe, or possibly earlier.' I gazed rancorously at Rafita. From a distance, he reminded me of Luis Melendez's self-portrait in the Louvre, albeit in degraded and debauched form; and what the painter is wearing on his head is hardly comparable: a knotted scarf if I remember rightly, like a crown of laurels or intended to achieve the same effect. Rafita was talking loudly and animatedly, he was pontificating or telling jokes (one or the other), Mrs Manoia wouldn't understand half of it, but he was addressing the others at the table too, especially a blondish young woman with a look on her face of permanent disgust, it's an expression you often find on the faces of certain rather dim and unappealing Spanish women from wealthy families; a Spanish man requires a strong stomach if he is to many a Spanish woman purely for money. I imagined that Rafita was destined for just such a marriage; he wouldn't be in a hurry, though: he was still impatient, inexpert, acquisitive, he would still have to pass through many terrible beds occupied by incontinent, female lookalikes of that unforgettable actor Robert Morley or by women who resembled Peter Lorre's dissolute twin, whom he would have desired in a drunken, nocturnal moment of surrender only to awake to crapulous morning satiety, horrified at himself and at them. 'In short,' I added, weary of all this pussyfooting around, 'he's a good lad, but a bit of a numbskull, a mameluco.' The Spanish word had been circling around in my head; I tried it out to see if it existed in Italian as well, with sister languages everything is possible and you never can tell.
'Un po'? Eh. Mammalucco totale. Eh. Questo si vede, eh,' Manoia said, correcting me, and I had to agree: Rafita was a total, utter, complete numbskull. Although what actually emerged from Manoia's lips was 'Mammalugo dodale', he seemed incapable of emending his blurred, abbreviated vowels or his invariably voiced consonants, I wondered if he would speak in the same drawl to the delicate members of the Roman Curia, I had got it into my head that the couple were both citizens of the Vatican, there must be some who were not cardinals or bishops or chaplains, or acolytes or nephews of the Pope. 'Is not so very young for such foolishness,' he said, shifting into his slightly undigested English so as not to exclude Reresby from our comments. 'This idiot must be thirty at least, no, Reresby?' 'Thirty-one,' replied Tupra, as if he knew this for a fact. And he added, to dissociate or detach himself from what I had implied: 'I've never actually spoken to the man, I only know him by sight, from that supper at Oxford. He gets overexcited when there are women about, that much I've gleaned.' I wasn't sure whether he was warning me with this remark, so that I would remain alert, or warning the husband so that he could rescue Flavia at once and not expose her to whatever this retarded adolescent might do, things tend to turn nasty in the wee hours.
Then Tupra once more claimed Manoia's attention. He again pressed his fleshy lips to the latter's ear and continued explaining or persuading or pleading or urging. I didn't bother to listen, I kept one watchful eye on the Spanish table, and kept glancing with the other at Manoia and Tupra in case they should need me, now and then I caught scraps of their conversation, whenever the music abated slightly or when one or other of them spoke more loudly, occasional words and the odd name. I had no doubt that Tupra would end up getting out of Manoia whatever it was he wanted from him, a commitment, a promise of help, an alliance, a secret, a purchase, a sale, a privilege, a plan, a denunciation, or some work, be it dirty or clean. I always saw him as the most persuasive person in the world and had had experience of this myself, and personal experience always has an excessive influence on the formation of our beliefs. But beyond my own partial impressions, it was clear that his postponed vehemence, that flattering and permanent state of alert, the sense of intelligence and warmth which, when it suited him, he transmitted to those he spoke to, the sense that not a single word you said was ever ignored or wasted and was, therefore, never spent or spoken in vain; that strange reserve of tension, which never got in the way socially (one always felt very comfortable with him, very much at ease if you like) but which was always there beneath the surface of his minor vanities and his quiet, gentle ironies, more like a promise of intensity and significance than any kind of threat of conflict or turbulence; it was clear that all his effervescence, kept in a chamber in a state of endless waiting, or perhaps subterranean or captive, managed to infect even the most reluctant and suspicious, and persuaded them if not to come over to his side, at least to put themselves in his shoes, to see things from his perspective, or perhaps simply on his level, which was that of the man himself. Which is the proper and inescapable level. So there he was, murmuring away in the midst of the hubbub, minute by minute earning the ear of his guest, like an argumentative, diaphanous Yago or Iago, one whose good word would remain safe until the curtain fell and even after that, in the echo of his speeches when he returned home (good words and bad faith can go hand in hand and be perfectly compatible, the former takes care of resources and the latter of the objective, or the means and the end, if you prefer more political terms); it was as if he did not have much need for subterfuges and tricks nor even for simple deceptions, or for the surreptitious infusion of poisons and germs to divert or direct minds and to obtain oaths, surrenders, renunciations and near-unconditional support. Tupra would never have to think or say or propose to himself the very ugly words spoken by the Moor's standard-bearer: ‘I’ll pour this pestilence in his ear', because he persuaded purely by dint of persuasion and would rarely hatch any plot based on false information or lies, or so it seemed to me: his reasonings reasoned, his enthusiasms enthused and his dissuasions really did dissuade, and he needed nothing more, apart from, very occasionally, his silence, which doubtless silenced those with whom he kept silent. But, on the other hand, he might often have to think or say to himself those other troubling words of Iago's: 'I am not what I am.' For me it was difficult to know what he was, despite the supposed gift that I shared with him, or despite the undoubted curse which was perhaps mine alone. Nor would it be easy to know what he was not.
'The Sismi', that was one of the names which, on more than one occasion, left his mouth or Manoia's, and when it was the latter, it sounded, in that predominantly English context, like 'the sea's me', too unlikely a name even for a boat or a racehorse (although I remembered myself on that feverish night of reading at Wheeler's house beside the River Cherwell, when I thought as I went to bed: 'I am the river'), which is why I assumed it must be an acronym, that of some organisation or institution or order, of a Vatican faction or fraternity (like the 'ndrangheta or the Camorra in the South). I also caught five surnames, at least they were the ones I remembered, because they were repeated during that part of the conversation and because I have an excellent memory that files away any names that my eyes see or my ears hear: Pollari, Martini, Letta, Saltamerenda, Navarro, especially the first three. (They went well with Incompara, the false Italian and semi-false Briton of whom young Perez Nuix had spoken to me on the night of her rain-drenched visit and whom she wanted us to protect and to favour, selfishly and without anyone noticing.) Partly to combat the habitual inconstancy or slackness of my curiosity and partly because I found the fourth name extremely funny, I decided that I would look them up later in a recent edition of Who's Who in Italy, although such catalogues tend to feature only people of a certain public merit, such as Sir Peter Wheeler in the United Kingdom, and there was no reason to think that these individuals were anything other than obscure private citizens, like Tupra and like me; but who knows. (It was perhaps more likely that they would appear in the old files in the building with no name; as would Manoia too, along with his good lady wife.) I was getting more and more worried, with De la Garza on the verbal hunt for Flavia (he had not as yet, I trusted, embarked upon a tactile or fingertip search), and with Flavia defenceless against any darts which that great, mannered, vulgar brute might spit at her: at the moment, she was laughing (a good or a bad sign depending on who was doing the looking), I did my best not to lose sight of them for more than a few seconds at a time, when I should really have been listening and looking at my companions at table. Tupra had been quite right when he prevented me from leaving them, because my support was needed again, this time by Manoia to help with a few words or phrases in English, I remember he asked me about invaghirsi, about sfregio, and about bazza, all three of which put me in a tight spot. I didn't know the first at all, and so, after trying to gain time by pretending to check that he hadn't said invanirsi, I translated it intuitively in two different ways, as 'to inebriate' and 'to swoon" or 'faint' (this was the fault partly of the Italian word's phonetic proximity to the Spanish word vahido, meaning a dizzy spell), which while they were not, of course, synonyms could at least happen consecutively, and were therefore not, in that order, impossible. Anyway, I didn't think my infidelity would be that important or give rise to any grave misunderstandings, the gentleman had a liking for unusual words I realised (even regional ones), or perhaps he was simply testing me in order to make me look stupid. I didn't know the second word either, this was terrible, nor could I connect it with any other words I knew; Manoia grew impatient with my vacillations, and started rudely badgering me ('Uno sfregio! Sfregio, dai! Uno sfregio!), at the same time running one thumbnail down his cheek from top to bottom; but since it didn't occur to me that the word could possibly mean scar or cicatriz, after all, Italian has the word cicatrice, I foolishly opted for something halfway between sound and gesture, that is, for the Spanish estrago, which I converted into the English 'damage' or 'havoc'. Later on, when I consulted a dictionary, I wondered if Manoia had threatened to make just such a scar on the face of some fellow human being tomorrow, and then my translation would not have been entirely absurd, or did it, I wondered, form part of a description of some mafioso or monsignor, for example, and in that case I would have excelled myself, given that the term corresponded more or less to 'scratch' or 'mark'. As for the third word, that put me in an even worse predicament, because I knew that it had two very different meanings, I had read it or heard it during a stay in Tuscany years before, and my sharp memory had stored it away. I hesitated again, paralysed, because one of its meanings was 'long chin' or 'prominent jaw', precisely the feature that Manoia could not conceal and which, during his childhood in Italy, would doubtless have led to him being dubbed a bazzone: I had heard that mocking augmentative in an old film starring Alberto Sordi (who, of course, I best remembered in the buck-toothed role of a dentone), or, more likely, applied to that marvellous comic actor, the great Toto, because, all things considered, no one could possibly have beaten him in the bazzone stakes. The other meanings, related etymologically to the Spanish baza or 'trick' in card games, were 'a stroke of luck' and 'a bargain'. Since I was not in on the conversation and since it was, anyway, barely audible, when Manoia asked me that question ('Come si dice bazza?', or, rather, 'Gome si dishe?', the ch sound became sh in that irrepressible accent of his), I hadn't the faintest idea what they were talking about: I didn't know if he was still describing a hitman or a prelate – whoever it was would certainly be a sight to behold with scars on his cheeks and huge mandibles – or was merely hoping for good luck in their shared projects, or if he was trying to persuade Reresby that the price of his services or of his consent constituted a real bargain. If bazza referred to the latter and I translated it only as 'pointed chin', I risked Manoia thinking that I was making some irrelevant and scornful allusion to his most striking feature, and I had realised, right from the start, that the size of his jawbone had clearly played its part in the shaping of his character, which was at best suspicious, at worst vengeful, no, not at worst, for I sensed in him the potentiality for far worse things. If it was the other way round, my translation would make no sense at all, but it would at least not offend him, unless he attributed my avoidance of the correct word to the presence at the table of that chin of his which was, after all, far from prognathous, even under the shifting coloured lights that distorted it and made him look a little like Fagin. Perhaps I was being excessively punctilious, perhaps I hesitated too long, and that made him grow still more impatient: 'Ma gosa sushede, eh. Non gabishi bene l'idaliano?' - He had from the outset addressed me as 'tu' and had clearly not even considered doing otherwise, and he had unhesitatingly called me Jack, following Tupra's example, as if he knew me as well as Tupra did, or as if he had instantaneously inherited that same familiarity (the prerogative of equals or of those who give the orders). His tone now was one of implicit attack, by which I mean that it sounded like one of those demands that you fail to meet at your peril. 'Bazza, bazza, gome si dishe in inglese bazza, eh? No lo sai?' And so, without further delay, I opted for 'bargain', all in all, it seemed to me more likely that in a conversation about politics or money, or about benefits or even indulgences, he would be talking about money.