The American Read Free Page A

send off prepaid envelopes to life insurance companies, travel agents, time-share operators, trade magazines and other sources which generate junk mail: now I am bombarded with colourful trash informing me I may have won a cheap car, or a holiday in Florida, or a million lire per annum for life. To most people, this unsolicited garbage is a curse. To me it lends an air of perfection to the lie.
    Why Mr Butterfly? It is simple. I paint them. They think this is how I make my money, painting butterflies’ portraits.
    It is a most efficient cover. The countryside around the town, as yet unadulterated by agrochemicals, unharmed by the clumsy footsteps of men, abounds with butterflies. Some are the minuscule blues: to study them delights me, to paint their portraits enthrals me. They seldom have a wingspan further across than a penny. Their colours iridesce, fade from tone to tone, from bright summer-sky blue to washed-dawn blue in just a few millimetres. They have tiny dots upon them, black and white rims, and the trailing edges of their hind wings have near-microscopic tails pricking out like tiny thorns. To paint one of these creatures successfully is a major achievement, a triumph of detail. And I live by detail, by minute particulars. Without such ardent attention to detail, I would be dead.
    To further the efficacy of my deceit, I have allayed any possible suspicion by explaining to Signora Prasca that Leclerc is French for Clark (with or without an e ) and Giddings is the name under which I paint – a pseudonym to scrawl upon my pictures.
    To aid this misconception, I once hinted that artists often use a fake name to protect their privacy: they cannot, I explain, be forever hampered by intrusion. It destroys the concentration, decelerates output, and galleries and printers, editors and authors, demand deadlines.
    Since then, I am sometimes asked if I am working on a new book.
    I shrug and say, ‘No, I am building up a stock of pictures. Against a rainy day. A few go to galleries.’ They are bought, I suggest, by collectors of miniatures, or entomologists.
    One day, I received a letter posted in a South American republic. It bore postage stamps of gaudy tropical butterflies, those flashy stamps so loved by dictators. The colours of the insects were too vivid to be real, too garish to be believable, bright as the rows of self-appointed medals which are part of every generalissimo’s costume.
    ‘Ha!’ exclaimed Signora Prasca, knowingly. She waved her hand in the air.
    I smiled knowingly back at her and winked.
    They think I design postage stamps for banana republics. I leave them with this convenient illusion.
    For some men, France is the country of love, the women poutingly beautiful with eyes widely innocent with lust, lips which beg to kiss and press. The countryside is mellow – the rolling Neolithic hills of the Dordogne, the rugged Pyrenees or the boggy marshes of the Camargue, it matters not where they travel. All are imbued with the aura of warm sun ripening the vine. The men see a vineyard and think only of lying in the sun with a bottle of Bordeaux and a girl who tastes of grapes. For women, French men are hand-kissers, the slight-bow brigade, the charming conversationalists, the gentle seducers. How unlike the Italians, they say. The Italian women have hairy armpits, smell of garlic and grow quickly fat on pasta: Italian men pinch arse on the buses of Rome and thrust too hard when making love. Such are the cries of xenophobia.
    For me, France is a country of provincial banality, a land where patriotism flowers only to hide the bloodied earth of revolution, where history was begun at the Bastille by a horde of peasants running amok with pitchforks, decapitating their betters because they were just that. Before the Revolution, the French insist in their clipped accent, with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders meant to disarm contradiction, there was only poverty and aristocracy. Now . . . the shoulders shrug again