The Vengeance of Rome

She is an animal. A wonderful cat. Her curiosity is never still, fixing on you for just a moment, long enough for you to yearn for her to look at you again. Her attention is forever on the next thing, the next person, the next scene. She is greedy for everything life offers as if she knows her time on earth will be short.

She is a flirt but she flirts without knowing what it is she promises. I do not let those glances mislead me. It is my heart that longs for her again, not my loins. I have lived with such disgusting allegations for most of my adult life. If a man cannot love the innocence and sweetness of little girls, he has no soul, no feeling. Of course I would have wanted a wife, children of my own. She said she had found my mother. Esmé betrayed me. She took my children. Her companions were the ghosts of the unborn. How their voices fill the high, stone arches, mingling with the roiling smoke, the heavy scents, and I can see something again of the heaven I lost when I was driven from my native land. White, green and gold. Sharp. From within it slices gently into the lining of my stomach. Slices a long scar on the inside of my belly. A piece of metal swings in my stomach like a pendulum, and I wonder if I am not entirely artificial now, kin to the mechanical woman of Metropolis.

I saw that film and several others at the same time in a very good cinema not far from the Viktualienmarkt. While it showed new films during the week, the theatre had a bill of older, silent films for Sundays. They offered a single price in the afternoons, so it presented the best bargain. To be honest, I was in a mood for musicals and comedies rather than the gloomy fare I received via Messrs Murnau, Lang and Pabst. I slept through most of the second part of Doctor Mabuse, though I had enjoyed the original stories. They lacked the texture of the best Sexton Blake adventures and were far more fantastic, but they passed the time. Blake’s exploits are based, of course, on the real life of the famous military spy and counter-espionage agent Sir Seaton Begg, for so long in command of the now disbanded MI7. For a while he was my friend Major Nye’s immediate boss, though he never directly admitted it!

Lilian Harvey became a great favourite of mine. The English actress was Germany’s biggest popular star. Her performance in the rather whimsical Three from a Filling Station was not quite as good as in Der Kongress tanzt. But her talkies were a little more expensive. Leni Riefenstahl was an athletic actress who appeared at her best in fur against a background of snow. I saw her in several of these ski and climbing epics, shallow things, depending mostly on the German audience’s appetite for endless snow and ice. Perhaps the German race really did long for its distant Teutonic homeland? Die Weisse Hölle von Piz-Palü was one of her last. A white hell indeed. These pictures were chiefly interesting when they concentrated on the aeroplane-rescue sequences. While they were hugely popular in countries with Alpine areas, they were virtually unknown elsewhere, a very specific genre, like the English Carry On film, where a deep knowledge of the culture is required to understand the nuances which are the true stories underlying apparently superficial nonsense. Having been starved for so long of the popular cinema, I must admit I became something of an addict. I still did not feel very secure on the street. In the darkness of the afternoon Kino, I was safe.

I went to the cinema almost every day, making sure I left and returned via the Viktualienmarkt. I longed for a companion, someone delicate and tender, to care for.

They came back as the traders had predicted. The entire little troupe looked rested and alert, as if they had been on holiday somewhere. They had probably been eating rather better than usual. A few coins in the boy’s clattering box and I was soon chatting with Signor Frau, who came originally from Genoa and was a great enthusiast for Mussolini. Rather than return to Genoa, Signor Frau had eventually decided it made more sense to rent a little house in one of the older parts of the city, near what he called ‘the sheds’, where a number of barrel organs were stored, rather like taxis, and rented to individuals who found it irksome or expensive to maintain their own instruments. He had prospered during the festival. That money would be put aside for the lean months. His barrel organ was beginning to fail him, and the old bastard of a mechanic would charge him a fortune for repairing it. Things were going badly for him as just the other day his monkey had caught cold. He feared it might die.

The monkey recovered. A rapport developed between Frau and myself. He cultivated the moustache and rather long hair, the bright shirts, the hat, jacket and knickerbockers of his calling, which, he explained, the Germans expected of him. At home, however, he wore the same clothes as everyone else. As far as I could tell, he had lived in Munich so long his German was without accent. He admitted, laughing, that most of his Italian was now in his singing. He scarcely even spoke it at home. His wife was German but had been killed in an explosion at the fireworks factory where she worked. Flares. Three days before the armistice, he said. Their baby had just been born, and his boy was two. His wife’s sister had looked after them. Then she got married and moved back to Hanover. Heckie, the girl, was old enough to look after the house. He patted her shoulder. ‘She’s been my little wife.’