— I don't think anything, said Pfeffer. Well maybe. I think it's easy living with the woman you love.
But no, said Haffner. Pfeffer, with his utter confidence, could never understand the problems of living with such a woman as Livia. The endless problems of self-worth. Think about it, he urged Pfeffer. You woke up every day with this noble profile. You looked across at the elegance of her face and it destroyed you. It was no way to treat a man: to emphasise the bags under his eyes, the marbled skin. It wasn't a sexual success. It was a crisis.
Pfeffer raised a philosophic eyebrow.
He wasn't blaming him, Pfeffer had said, but it didn't look good. That was all he was saying.
Only Pfeffer had tried to disabuse him of his guilt, only Pfeffer — with his retractable gold Biros and pots made for him by his children — pots of beaten bronze with enamel detailing, and mahogany lids. And maybe this was a surprise. Only Pfeffer, the family man, tried to persuade Haffner that his guilt remained unproven.
They had been to school together, at prep school. Pfeffer was the man Haffner's father wanted him to be, or as close to it as possible — ever since Haffner betrayed his family by refusing to enter the family law firm. Pfeffer was a libel lawyer. He knew the secrets of showbiz. Which meant, thought Haffner, that he knew the secrets of everything, since everything was showbiz. Pfeffer lived in St John's Wood, in the largest apartment known to Haffner, with drawing rooms, and living rooms, and multiple bathrooms with multiple basins. A redundant triumph of the plural. It had always amazed Haffner, the sleek animal adaptability of these humans he grew up with: how Pfeffer, the kid he had known since prep school, who was so docile, who wore grey flannel shorts when everyone else had understood the only cool thing was trousers, could morph into this maven of luxury, silken in his deskchair. A chair in which he wallowed, his small hands neat and hairless on his blotter — whose corners were curtailed by leather bands, into an octagon.
But I don't feel like sketching Pfeffer's form. He can remain there, an outline in black, transparent against all the background colours — like some minor figure in a painting by Dufy.
Haffner was unshaven; he was in a summer suit. Beside him was a plate of biscuits brought to him by Pfeffer's secretary, a secretary whom Haffner always suspected of harbouring designs on Pfeffer. He was wearing the panama which Livia hated. It came rolled up in a metal tube. He liked to think it made him rakish.
But hey, Pfeffer added. He was the last person to be advising anyone on a marriage. What was he meant to do? His wife was in therapy. His daughter was in love with some Greek entrepreneur. Or possibly a Turk. How was Pfeffer an expert in the family? He was as much a natural family man as Artie Shaw. Or Goebbels.
And Haffner had to admit, at that moment, that he loved Pfeffer, whose idea of fun was crossword puzzles, Scrabble, memory games. The man who saw the world as a perpetual acrostic. He spent his conversations, Haffner remembered, reconfiguring each sentence backwards. Otherwise, he told Haffner, it could become boring for him. This produced no obvious vacancy in his expression, or concentration. Sometimes, just backwards was not enough. Sometimes, he had to reverse according to gaps of two or three. He was toying with implementing logarithms.
He just thought, he said, that Haffner should explain what was going on.
But what could anyone else know about the marriage of Haffner and Livia? It was a world with only two inhabitants.
When the time was coming for war, but they didn't know when, Haffner and Livia had a code — for Haffner, like every soldier, was banned from giving any prior information about his movements. He had a rich and rather unpleasant uncle, called Uncle Jonas. And the code was that if Uncle Jonas were very fit and well, everything was fine. If the prospects for Haffner to be mobilised were doubtful, then his health was not too good: and then the time came when Haffner knew he was to go abroad, and he said that he was sorry to tell her, darling, but Uncle Jonas had passed away. He was at Basingstoke at this time, in a telephone booth. It was April, and curiously cold. They had embarked from the docks in the west of Scotland. He didn't quite know where. He didn't really know what a dock was, if he were honest.
A marriage, thought Haffner, was the invention of a code.
No one knew the secrets of a marriage: maybe this was true. Just as Haffner didn't know the secrets of his grandson, the conundrum of his grandson, standing there in front of him: confused, like his grandfather, by the monstrous state of love.
Haffner Banished
The villa which belonged to Livia's family was out on the outskirts of the town, above a slope which ran down to the river. Across from its veranda was the range of snowy mountains.
In 1929, the universal crash had meant that her father took a loan from his cousin's bank in Trieste. Seven years later, his talent for money had been so adroitly employed that he had earned enough to buy this villa.
Here, Livia used to argue with her father: a nationalist when considering the Italian state, an anti-nationalist when considering the Zionist cause. He was a businessman who imported coal from Britain. Through the quiet rise of wealth, the steady progress of business, he wanted his nation to be great again.
Her father had become a Fascist after fighting in the Great War. Then, in 1922, leaving behind his daughter in her blankets and her cradle, leaving behind his pregnant wife, her father had taken part in Mussolini's March on Rome: his pedestrian coup. Her mother had cut out clippings from the newspapers. They featured grand vocative apostrophes (O Rome!) written in a rhetoric which even then seemed obscure (O ship launched toward World Empire that emerges from the flux of time!). She kept them in an album for her husband. He believed in Italy. It was a refuge — his family's final escape from the misery of politics.
Even if this escape was a politics too.
Cesare was duly made to join the youth movements. He wore the uniform, scowling. In retaliation, he decided that when he grew up he would be a Communist. If, that is, he ever grew up. As for Livia, she also wore her black pleated skirts, white pique blouse, long white stockings, her black cape and beret. This was her Fascist youth.
Her father believed in discipline. Neither Cesare nor Livia was allowed to rest a wrist on the table when they were eating. She was told to hold two napkins under her armpits, so that she might achieve the correct deportment. His ideas of order were immutable.
She was too melancholic, her father told her, when they argued. Always on the dark side of the moon. She didn't have a positive concept of the reality of life. In reply, she would quote the Romantics to him. What else was this life but a failure? It lacked beauty. She looked forward to the one radiant light, bathed in which humanity would come together in perfect union.
In the cafe in the main square, Livia, when she was sixteen, had been asked to dance by a man whose eyebrows and teeth she distrusted. She had looked at Mama. And Mama had nodded her head. Her mother had never done this before. Normally, every dance was forbidden to Livia. And when she asked her mother, afterwards, why she had made her dance with that horrible man, Mama had simply said that it was because she had to: the man was a director of the secret police.
When Livia told Haffner this story, one day in 1953, he smiled at her. And did she, he wanted to know, tread on the man's toes?
— Naturalmente, said Livia. And she kissed him, her mischievous boy.