We had arrived on the morning of a mass march through central Rome. Traffic crawled. Men in overalls waved mysterious banners and women in red shawls shook their fists and shouted, stepping in time to the music of rough-and-ready bands which played loudly and in conflict. When I came to ring the service bell in our room I found that it was the manager’s wife who answered it. She apologised. The restaurant waiters had gone on strike and the hotel staff had joined them. She said she could bring us sandwiches and mineral water, that she was hoping to prepare a meal of some kind in the evening. She advised us, however, to look for family-owned restaurants which would still, with luck, be open. Strikes were so frequent that people took them for granted. Normally I would have been furious at the inconvenience, but I was deeply glad to be in a Western city. I found myself shrugging and smiling, whereupon she began to cackle and made several jokes in Italian which I could not follow but at which I laughed anyway.
Thus Esmé and I spent our first day in Rome looking for somewhere to eat. That was how we discovered Via Catalana where many restaurants did, in fact, remain open. We were delighted with the novelty of everything and would probably not have noticed if we were starving. We marvelled at the sights and sounds of that civilised, ancient city; even the political rhetoric, so alarming in Russia, was here merely part of the vibrant air. Esmé breathed it in and became more wonderfully alive than ever. Rome in the summer of her most chaotic year, with workers occupying factories and ultimately D’Annunzio being expelled from Fiume, was a haven of sanity and order compared to what we had put behind us. For this was, if nothing else, the capital of a free nation. The debate was not whether one should live to see the next morning, or how one might escape the brutality of self-appointed militiamen, or what movements had arisen overnight radically to change our fate, but what kind of elected government could best rule. The old artistic and intellectual vitality of St Petersburg, before Kerenski ruined everything, was here reproduced in even more vivid colours. People discussed ideas with an easy gaiety which suggested all politics was fantasy, worthless unless it was outrageous enough to entertain the population for at least one Roman evening.
Esmé, when we went to bed that night, was astonishingly passionate, making sexual demands on me which I found at first surprising, for I had no idea she harboured such secret desires. Nonetheless I flung myself into this new experience with a will and all but exhausted our remaining cocaine in the process. Next morning, aching but utterly relaxed, having slept hardly at all, I told her we would start having to make friends rapidly, if I was to discover fresh supplies of our drug. She pinched my cheeks and told me that I was too prone to ‘stewing’: everything was bound to turn out for the best. She lived for the moment, my Esmé. She was the eternal present and that was possibly the reason I loved her so much.
I have always been a man of many worlds, able to move easily from one social ambience to another. Remembering the bohemian character of the district near the Tiber’s left bank more or less between the Capitol and Isola Tiberina, a stone’s throw from the Orsini Palace, I returned there with Esmé that same afternoon. We were in such a pleasant state of euphoria we soon selected a café, sitting outside under its red and white awning, swatting at mosquitoes, and drinking citrons presses from trumpet-shaped glasses. Half an hour later we were in conversation with a dark and attractively ugly little man who mistook us at first for English. Learning we were Russians, he became extravagantly delighted. He hardly needed to tell us he was an artist, with his wide-brimmed slouch hat and his scarlet silky cloak. He introduced himself as Fiorello da Bazzanno, painter. His monstrously wide mouth, full of yellow uneven teeth, made him grotesque; half-man half-horse in the head alone. His puny, underfed body, which twitched perpetually, completely contradicted the animalistic, pagan quality of his face. Yet the combination was magnetic. Moreover he revealed a facility for language which matched my own. To us he spoke a bizarre patois of Russian, German, Italian, French and English. He had been born in Trieste where most of those cultures meet. He insisted we drink a bottle of Tuscan wine with him. After an hour or so he had revealed he had been a petty thief, a street arab. Then in the trenches he had met his hero, the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, and discovered broader horizons. I told him of my own life in Petersburg, my engineering achievements, my flying exploits. He was quick to see similarities in our lives. Drawing a great, gold watch from within his rather dirty white shirt he told us we were to be his guests for supper. He paid the bill at the café and led us down the street towards Mendoza’s Café in the Via Catalana, which was distinguished by its black and yellow striped umbrellas, and thus known locally as ‘The Wasp’.
‘You’ll have the fried artichoke to begin.’ Fiorello was grave for a moment, ‘It’s Mendoza’s speciality and creates more spiritual uplift than a dozen Papal audiences.’
A woman was waiting for him at one of the outside tables. She was dressed entirely in black and was almost twice his size. She had dark bobbed hair, a black smock, black stockings, black shoes. The only contrast was in her rather pale skin and the scarlet cord tied around her waist. This was Laura Fischetti. She wrote, said Fiorello almost apologetically, for the socialist press. We shook hands. A plump, motherly, good-humoured woman, she was forever picking and patting at her tiny lover. While he talked she leaned back from him, her hand on his chair, and smiled at us, the proud parent of a spoiled but clever child. Occasionally she would bend her head towards Esmé and ask her a question. My Esmé opened up to Laura, telling her the version of her life story I had said would be most acceptable in Europe; how she had been orphaned, raised by Turks, was about to be sold to a Syrian merchant when I found her, recognising her as my long-lost cousin. If Laura found the story fantastic, she was too well mannered to pursue it. Instead she confined herself to enquiring about life in Constantinople where her father had been attached to the consulate before the war, but which she had never visited.
The artichoke was as delicious as Fiorello had promised but the various pastas and meats which followed were better still. During the course of this wonderful meal, various friends arrived and seated themselves around us. When the table proved too small, they drew up another and placed it at an angle to the first until half the area belonged to one large group, all of them talking, drinking, eating and gesticulating with such energy and pleasure I should not have cared a second if I understood a word of what they said. Two or three of them had visited Russia before the war. They said they were poets. I suspected them of anarchist affiliations. It was Italians who so affected Petersburg’s bohemians on every political and artistic level. I did not mind. They were not the savage, primitive anarchists I knew. To them anarchism was the logical persuasion for an artist, any artist, and particularly Italian artists. The Italians are the great individualists of Europe and anarchy is merely a formal description of the country’s fundamental attitudes. (That was why so few people properly understood Benito Mussolini, his philosophy and his specific problems.) Meanwhile a tone-deaf guitarist wandered in and out of the restaurant singing popular sentimental songs for an indulgent lira or two while Fiorello remembered another item on the menu we must try and ordered innumerable bottles of wine. It was heavenly for me, to sit there eating grilled fish and macaroni and enjoying the fabulous luxury of unchecked conversation. It was Laura, that night, who found us good cocaine (‘the drug of all true Futurists’) and Fiorello who insisted on paying for it (‘pay me when your first aerial liner sails for Buenos Aires’).