In his padded lasso, Haffner began to talk to his masseur. His name, it turned out, was Viko. It was really Viktor, he said: but everyone called him Viko.
— Niko? said Haffner.
— Viko, said Viko.
As if he were Niko's twin.
— Your name, it is like you are Hugh Hefner! said the masseur, delighted.
— You think you're the first person to make that joke? said Haffner, grimly.
— You know him? asked the masseur, undeterred. Relation?
It had been an exhausting morning, a very stressful morning, said Haffner. He could feel it, said Viko. There was much tension in him. But Haffner, as he always did, chose to turn the conversation away from his internal tensions.
He supposed, Haffner therefore observed, that it was a very difficult thing, to live in this country after the Communists had wrecked everything. And before Viko could reply, Haffner began to tell him a story about the Communists, which was a story about his brother-in-law: Cesare.
But maybe this was still a way of Haffner talking about Haffner.
Cesare, after the war, and his degree at Cambridge, had eventually decided to return to Italy, where he worked for the next two decades as a professor in sociology. The anecdote might interest Viko, said Haffner — raising himself up, patted back down. He was a Communist, Cesare: a Party man. But to understand this story, one also had to understand, said Haffner — talking into his lasso, to Viko's bright new trainers — that this man had a cold streak. He was hard. But there it was. In Italy, he began an affair with a girl whose name, Haffner tended to think, was Simonetta. Perhaps Simonetta. When it began, she was twenty-five. So Cesare must have been in his forties, in his fifties.
And Haffner suddenly noticed how this disparity in age, which had always struck him as tinged with a Hollywood seediness, was nothing when compared to the disparity between his age and Zinka's.
For Cesare, he said to Viko, it was everything he wanted. This girl of his wore leather; she rode a Honda bike. She was an assistant lecturer at the university. Could anything be more alluring? At the time, Cesare was editing a journal of revolutionary sociology. He made Simonetta his deputy editor. Cesare was a man of the world, said Haffner. A Communist, yes: but a Communist who loved the shops in the Quadrilatero d'Oro. A Communist who bought himself handstitched shirts, or shoes made from a single piece of leather. He loved his life. He was happy.
Then this girl wanted a baby. It made Cesare pause.
— I would love one, he said, absolutely love one. But first I must divorce my wife.
Dutifully, Viko chuckled.
In revenge, continued Haffner, unbeknown to Cesare, she stopped taking the Pill, and got pregnant. But Cesare didn't care about this difficulty. He simply got her sacked from her deputy editorship of the journal; and also from her job at the university. But then, a year later, when Cesare was in the process of manoeuvring for the university rectorship, the Italian Communist Party issued a list of approved yet not affiliated intellectuals. These were the kosher ones, though not confirmed. Cesare was duly admitted as being ideologically pure. But Simonetta campaigned. Using her contacts in the women's section of the Communist Party, she held meetings, she published denouncements.
Of all the intellectuals duly nominated by the Communists, said Haffner, only Cesare failed in his bid for election.
But the greatest moment of all, he concluded, was when Cesare told this story to his mentor at the university in Rome — who, on being told by a mournful Cesare the full dossier of the facts over a lavish dinner at a restaurant in a side street off the Spanish Steps, asked him if this was really how it would be from now on. Were they, said his mentor, to be ruled now by their mistresses?
Haffner! So sure that he was charming! So intent on making conversation — even though, of course, Viko was not interested in his anecdotes about Communism. He didn't care about Haffner's urbane distaste for all the politics.
The anecdote, therefore, did not receive the applause which Haffner thought it was due. A little shocked, perhaps, he tried another conclusion.
That, said Haffner, was the best he could say for Communism. But before Haffner could gratify himself with a murmured smile — as he remembered Cesare ruefully saying that the whole adventure had at least produced one benefit, because his wife, having found out, had finally made him a free man — Haffner felt a moment of alarm. It felt to Haffner's worried senses that Viko might be going too far.
The range of Haffner's body available to massage seemed to be becoming more expansive.
Haffner was lying on his stomach: a warm towel over his back. He was naked. At first, he had toyed with the idea of wearing the briefs he usually swam in. But then had thought that really he should not care. They were hardly the most comfortable of items. The important thing, he always thought, was a comprehensive massage. As if he needed to be worried about his modesty! No, not here, not with a man.
But now, he felt Viko let his hands splay and drift with the oil further up his thighs. At first, as Haffner chatted, he had interpreted this as invigorating. Then he began to wonder. But he was too confused to make a sign, to tense his thigh muscles in the ordinary mute gesture of irritation. He could not be sure how European this was — how much to do with the health spa, and how much to do with something else entirely.
His penis was trapped there, under his thigh, its squashed head protruding under his testicles.
And then he felt the man's hand flicker on to the head of his penis. He really could not be sure if this were still an accident. These accidents, felt Haffner, were becoming so much less accidental than he had first imagined.
He was rarely successful in his active search for what he considered to be bohemian. Whenever Haffer metamorphosed into the bohemian, it tended to be the result of someone else's choice. He strayed into it. He had understood the streets in Soho — but he had never felt quite at home on Wardour Street, or Frith Street. He went to the French House sometimes. But not the Colony Room, not the Gargoyle Club. Never had the wisecracking hostess Muriel Belcher eyed him from behind the bar, admiringly, as he went promiscuous with a male prostitute who came from the satellite towns around Glasgow. Nor had he drunk with Francis Bacon, vomiting into the gutter, each supporting the other's bent body, wildly applauding.
No, thought Haffner: bohemia, when it came to Haffner, always came in such strangely bourgeois costumes: a moustached man in a tracksuit, say, surrounded by candles.
This confusion was one instinct which he had inherited from Papa. Early on in Haffner's career, in Haffner's marriage, they had sat in the rose garden, in the pale sunshine, a police siren tumescing and detumescing in the background, and Papa had expounded on life. The thing was, a man could either waste his life or live his life. And in the end it was better to live it than to waste it. Did he understand this? Haffner answered that he thought he did. But what was wasting, and what was living? Was it Livia, or not Livia? A marriage, or not a marriage? It was hardly as if Papa had been an expert in distinguishing the living from the wasting — in knowing what was a place of safety, and what was a place of harm. In Haffner's opinion, these terms had a habit of turning themselves upside down. He seemed isolated in this uncertainty. The only other person who shared his bewilderment, in the end, was Livia herself. More often, it led to arguments like the one which had occurred the day of Livia's funeraclass="underline" sitting in his kitchen with his daughter and her husband, Esmond.
He was, Esther told him, simply impossible. Haffner tried to disagree. She interrupted him. He was impossible. Like an infant. Haffner did not try to disagree.