Back to Bologna

8

‘Mattioli, would you remain here?’ the professor remarked casually as the rest of the class left the seminar room.

He caught the flash of anxiety in the young man’s eyes. He had intended that it should be there. It was part of the charm and style of Edgardo Ugo’s post-1968 faded leftist persona that he always addressed his graduate students in the familiar tu verbal form, and insisted that they do the same to him. This time, however, he had used the impersonal, distancing lei. That, and the use of Rodolfo’s surname, made the message quite clear.

‘Sit down, please.’

Ugo gathered up his belongings and then proceeded to take some considerable time arranging them in his evidently expensive, but of course artisanal rather than designer, briefcase before paying any further attention to the student.

‘You’re a bright lad, Mattioli, so I’m sure you’ll understand that after that last outburst I can no longer admit you to my seminars. There’s nothing personal about this. Indeed, I find it painful in many ways. But to do otherwise would be a dereliction of my duty to the other members of the class. They have understood and accepted the principles of the course, and are attending these classes, often at considerable personal or familial financial sacrifice, in the hopes of bettering themselves and making a serious contribution to this academic discipline. They are certainly not here to listen to cheap jokes and mocking asides from someone who, despite his evident intellectual capacities, is at heart nothing but a farceur.’

The boy stared back with his unblinking black eyes, as expressionless as the muzzles of a double-barrelled shotgun, but said nothing. Typically southern, thought Ugo. He knows that there’s been a war, that he lost, and that there’s nothing to talk about. Later he might come round with a knife and cut my throat, but he’s not going to humiliate himself further by pointless protests and weak entreaties.

‘Should you so wish, you may of course continue to attend my lectures,’ Ugo continued. ‘Under the rules and regulations of the University of Bologna, you are also entitled to sit your final exams and present a thesis, but to avoid wasting everyone’s time I feel obliged to tell you now that I very much doubt whether this would result in your receiving a degree. Besides, the only career possibilities open to a graduate in semiotics are in the academic field. I would naturally be contacted as a referee and I should find it impossible, as a matter of professional principle, to recommend you. I further doubt whether you would prove suited to such a career, in the unlikely event that one were offered you. There are so many talented and excellently qualified applicants these days, and so few vacancies. Quite often the decision comes down to a question of whom the other members of the faculty care to have to meet and deal with on a daily basis, and prickly, rebarbative individuals who like to show off their supposed wit and spirit of independence by making mock of their superiors are, to be honest, rarely anyone’s first choice. In short, I suggest that you look into the possibility of an alternative line of study more adapted to your temperament and mentality. Engineering, perhaps. Or dentistry.’

With which he walked out, leaving the young man sitting there in silence. On Via de’Castagnoli Ugo called a taxi, which he directed to his country retreat. His original intention had been to cycle back to the nearby townhouse that he used as a place of refuge during the day and an occasional overnight bolthole, but now he felt an urge to get out of the city. Why this feeling of unease? His decision had been correct and correctly executed, excepting perhaps those last two phrases. But Mattioli had had it coming for some time. The little bastard had been provocative from the very start.

One of Edgardo Ugo’s seminarial chestnuts was that, in our post-meaning culture, to move from the sublime to the ridiculous and vice versa no longer required even a single step, merely an alternative selection from an infinite interpretational menu. When he’d brought this line up in the opening seminar of the semester, Rodolfo had replied, ‘Excuse me, professore. Are you saying that if a recording of the slow movement of Mozart’s K364 is being played in the cell where a political prisoner is undergoing torture, his or her resulting experience is simply a function of consumer choice?’ Ugo had sensed that Mattioli was trouble right then and there. Knowing the Kochel catalogue number of the Sinfonia Concertante, for example. That was a leaf straight out of Ugo’s own book: awe them with your command of arcane documented minutiae, and they’ll swallow your big contentious thesis without a murmur.

But today Mattioli had gone too far, not only proclaiming that words had meanings, but that the relationship between language and reality, although labile and demanding constant and close attention, was by its nature (!) both authentic and verifiable. ‘The fact remains that there is a real world which exists independently of any possible representation of it, and which in turn conditions any such representation,’ he had concluded, with the air of the young Luther nailing his theses to the church door.

Edgardo had handled this arrant nonsense with his usual urbane charm, even getting a round of appreciative laughter from the other students for his learned humour when he suggested sarcastically that to invoke Giambattista Vico’s ‘ sensus communis generis humani ’ was hardly Scienza Nuova -more laughter-at this late date. Nevertheless, enough was enough. Standards had to be maintained and essential truths upheld. As he had told Rodolfo, it would have been dereliction of duty for him to have acted otherwise. So why did he have this slight sense of uncleanliness, as when you get a bit of meat or spinach stuck between your teeth and can’t quite remove it with your tongue?

Twenty minutes later he was back in the spacious landscaping and clear air of his villa, set back from a secluded lane winding through the spine of hills above Monte Donato between the Reno and Savena rivers; a mere five kilometres from the city laid out beneath like a map, yet to all intents and purposes another world. For some reason the confrontation with Rodolfo Mattioli was still troubling him, though, so he decided to dismiss it by getting to work.

Two hours passed, and the dusk was curdling beyond the window, before Edgardo laid down his Mont Blanc 4810 Series Limited Edition fountain pen, as thick as a stumpy but fully erect cock, on the sheet of heavy, deckle-edged Fabriano paper, rich in linen and made by hand using methods essentially unchanged since the thirteenth century, then thoughtfully replaced the solid black sculpted cap over its rhodinised 18-carat gold glans. He had chosen these writing tools as appropriate to the task he had just completed, a piece of cheap journalistic fluff designed to promote the recently-released film-very loosely based on a misreading of the superficial plot level of his best-known novel-in some American celebrity gossip rag sold to semi-literate sadsacks at supermarket checkouts.

But as always, the choice had not been easy. Each of the rooms on the upper floor of the villa was a scriptorium, and each quite differently designed and equipped. It was a question of selecting the right one for the assignment in hand, and Edgardo always had at least five on the go at any given time. For an article due to be published in the prestigious learned journal Recherches Semiotiques, tentatively entitled ‘The Coherence of Incoherence’-a play on the celebrated treatise Tahafut al-Tahafut by the twelfth-century Muslim scholar known in the West as Averroes, whose Arab name Ibn Rushd opened up the possibility for the type of puns on the author of The Satanic Verses for which Ugo was justly celebrated-he was working at an IBM workstation linked by a fibre optic cable to the University of Bologna’s Unix mainframe. Meanwhile, substantial sections of his new metafiction, Work In Regress, were rapidly losing shape by being sent via his laptop to a primitive on-line translation site, where they were first mangled into Bulgarian or Welsh and then back again into Italian.

Composition of his contribution to a forthcoming academic seminar on the semiotics of text-messaging at the Universite de Paris, on the other hand, took place standing atop a fifteenth-century carved stone pulpit removed from the private chapel of a now-demolished palazzo, the text being dictated in a sonorous voice into a Sony digital recorder. Yet another room was kept permanently shuttered, the only light being from a bare hundred-watt bulb dangling above the hardy, ravished desk. It was here, in shirt sleeves and wearing a green eyeshade, that Ugo banged out his weekly column for a glossy, mass-circulation news magazine on a manual upright Olivetti M44 dating from the year of his birth. It was almost impossible to find carbon paper nowadays, so from time to time he had a few dozen boxes flown in from India.

The column generated both money and publicity, but Edgardo already had plenty of both. Indeed, despite his eminent post-modernist credentials, his whole career was living proof that reports of the death of the author had been greatly exaggerated. As for the journalism, he did it for fun, to provide an outlet for his opinions and a way of showing off his versatility. Every writer is all writers, he liked to tell his students, mentioning that Jorge Luis Borges had already pointed out in the 1940s that to attribute the Imitatio Christi to Celine or Joyce would serve to renew the work’s faded spiritual aspirations, adding that this esempio was subversively enriched by the fact that Borges, a slipshod scholar, had probably been thinking of the much more influential De Imitatione Christi, and would in any case have attributed both titles to the now discredited Jean de Gerson rather than to Thomas a Kempis. Nevertheless, Borges’s idea provided a powerful tool for further deconstructionist analysis. Would not our view of Samuel Beckett’s work be both deepened and enriched if it were to be postulated that he had also written a humorous weekly column for the The Irish Times, styling himself Myles na Gopaleen and arranging for delivery and payment through an alcoholic Dublin novelist who went under a string of aliases ranging from Brian O Nuallain to Flann O’Brien?

They loved him, it went without saying. Ugo’s great insight had been that the way to people’s hearts was to flatter them. He did it in class, and even more so in the series of erudite fictions which had turned an obscure professor of semiotics at a provincial Italian university into one of the richest and most famous authors in the world. Impress the pants off them with your range of knowledge, then leave them feeling that they’re more intelligent and sophisticated than they ever suspected, and they’ll always come back for more. With his academic peers worldwide he adopted a subtly different approach, appealing not to their cleverness-they were in no doubt about that-but to their often non-existent charm, humanity and sense of humour. Even they, who didn’t much like themselves, let alone anyone else, loved Edgardo.

His phone rang. It was Guerrino Scheda, his lawyer.

‘ Ciao Guerrino. Good news, I hope.’

‘I think so. It’s a little unusual, and I don’t as yet have anything in writing, but I’m reasonably hopeful that I’ll be able to pull it off. In which case it would be the perfect solution.’

‘Don’t be a tease. What’s happened?’

‘Well, at first I walked into a Berlin Wall of threats and menaces. I wasn’t able to speak to Rinaldi personally, but I was given to understand that he’s absolutely furious and wants to sue your balls off. He’s not interested in a settlement, he claims. Money’s not an issue, it’s a matter of pride and honour, etcetera. In other words, he wants his day in court and is prepared to pay whatever it costs to have it.’

When the original letter from the legal advisers of Lo Chef’s company arrived, threatening an action for ‘very substantial’ damages on the grounds of personal and professional defamation, Edgardo’s initial reaction had been one of disbelief. He had never intended anyone to take his throwaway comment about Rinaldi’s cooking skills literally. It was merely an illustration of his basic thesis in the article, namely that we now live not in a consumerist but a post-consumerist society. Our actual needs having been satisfied, we no longer consume products but process. Thus film footage-the photographic record of actual persons, places and times-is increasingly little more than crude raw material to be transformed by computerised post-production techniques.

Ugo had quoted Walter Pater’s remark that all art aspires to the condition of music, adding that nowadays all art, including music, aspired to the condition of video games. And in one of those knowing references to the vulgarities of contemporary media culture in which he specialised, he had gone on to point out that no one knew whether Romano Rinaldi, the star of the smash hit TV show Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta, could actually cook at all. Nor did it matter, he had hastened to add, any more than it had mattered when the President of the United States arrived in Iraq on Thanksgiving Day and was photographed in the troop canteen carrying to table what was actually a raw turkey whose skin had been scorched with a blowtorch. Ugo wasn’t sure how seriously he really took any of this, but of course the whole point was that in the cultura post-post-moderna taking things lightly was of the essence. But apparently Romano Rinaldi saw things differently.

‘Suppose you can’t pull it off,’ he asked the lawyer. ‘What are our chances?’

‘If it goes to court? Evens, I’d say. Maybe better. After all, you never stated that Rinaldi was a fraud, merely that there’s no actual evidence that he can even boil an egg. So we might win.’

‘I sense a “but” in the offing.’

‘Correct. The two problems with that scenario are that it’ll cost a fortune-we’re very unlikely to be awarded costs-and generate masses of really stinky publicity whatever the outcome. Rinaldi is certainly a pompous jerk, and for all I know a fraud too, but the fact of the matter is that he’s also a national superstar and icon. The people have taken him to their hearts. Particularly women, and you know what they’re like when roused. You don’t want the latter-day tricoteuses on your case. Lo Chef comes across as a cuddly, lovable rogue with a charming light tenor voice who makes the daily grind of cooking seem fun and sexy. You, on the other hand, are an arrogant intellectual who writes pretentious tomes on incomprehensible subjects and secretly despises his fellow men despite a shallow veneer of trendy leftist solidarity.’

‘Maybe I should sue you, Scheda.’

‘I’m just telling you how it’s going to look if we contest this action. We might- might -win the judgement, but Rinaldi will win the PR battle and you’ll come out of it, at considerable cost, looking like a mean-spirited shit.’

‘But you said that he’s insisting on going to court. What can I do about it?’

‘Show up at the Bologna exhibition centre two days from now.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘This is still at the negotiation stage, but I’ve already roughed it out with his personal assistant, a very intelligent woman called Delia Anselmi. She’s totally in agreement and seems to have a lot of influence over Rinaldi. Between the two of us I think we can swing it. But first I need your agreement.’

‘To what?’

‘Taking part in a cookery contest with Rinaldi during the Enogastexpo food fair that’s on there now.’

Edgardo Ugo laughed.

‘You must be mad. Or think I am.’

‘On the contrary, it’s a perfect arrangement for all concerned.’

‘But he’s bound to win!’

‘Of course he is. So you’re going to lose a cook-off with the leading celebrity chef in Italy. If you challenged Roger Federer to a game of tennis you’d lose too. How humiliating is that? There are plenty of other aspects of life where you’re an acknowledged world champion. All you need to do is show up, shake hands with Lo Chef on stage, maybe join him in a duet-can you sing?-and generally make it clear that the whole affair was just a ridiculous mistake that the media have blown up out of all proportion. In return, he will sign a document that I will prepare, renouncing any legal action whatsoever against you now or in the future. End of story.’

Ugo was silent.

‘Plus,’ Scheda added, ‘and this is the beauty part, the whole show will be broadcast live and as part of the deal I’ll arrange for you to have a few minutes solo to camera. There will be multiple repeats later in the day and throughout the weekend. Overall projected viewer numbers are around twenty million.’

‘I’ll do it.’

Ugo put down the phone. All this talk of food made him realise that he’d forgotten to have lunch. He walked downstairs to the gigantic kitchen and peered despondently into the fridge. There were the remains of the dinner to which he’d invited a group of friends and colleagues the previous weekend, all the dishes being prepared communally from Marinetti’s tract on Futurist cooking. As the generous quantity of leftovers indicated, the preparation had been more satisfying than the actual food, but it had all looked very striking and had been beautifully photographed for an article about the event in La Cucina Italiana -good publicity for everyone concerned.

He selected a few of the chunks of mortadella and cheese sculpted into letters that had formed part of the dish ‘Edible Words’, from which all the guests were supposed to eat their own names, then walked through to the former housekeeper’s office. This is where he paid his bills, kept his domestic files, and checked his emails. There were very few of the latter today, only twenty-eight new messages. He skimmed through the titles, opening some and deleting others unread. An offer for Lithuanian rights to two of his books, a request from the BBC for him to contribute to a documentary on the cultural significance of professional sport, an invitation to give a series of vapid but very highly-paid lectures in Japan, plus a selection of the usual academic tittle-tattle sent or forwarded by his friends and admirers all over the world.

He clicked open the last unopened email message. The subject header was blank and the ‘From’ box contained only a Hotmail address consisting of a string of apparently random numbers. As for the message itself, there was no text, just a line drawing-an engraving, rather-of a male hand, the thumb and index finger almost joined to form a circle.

Ugo gazed at it for some time, then walked through to his library, located in the former living and reception rooms of the villa, now knocked through to form one vast and tranquil space. Here he opened a drawer in a handsome rosewood cabinet and consulted the well-thumbed handwritten index cards inside. A minute or so later he had located the position of the volume and, having hauled over the wheeled ladder used for accessing the higher of the eight rows of shelves, was leafing through Andrea de Jorio’s classic 1832 text about southern Italian gestures and their origins in classical antiquity.

Yes, there it was: ‘ Disprezzo ’, contempt. Although the tactful Neapolitan cleric had no more than hinted at this, the root significance of the sign was of course blatantly sexual. It was the most powerful non-verbal insult that existed, what de Jorio had termed ‘the superlative form’ of other offensive gestures.

Basically, someone was telling him to fuck off.