The Last Supper Read Free

which admittance must be gained in or out. The canteen isn’t open yet, but a queue of people is waiting at the shuttered hatches. We go and sit at the front, in the chilly air-conditioned salon with its wood veneer and hard grey-upholstered arrangements of chairs fixed to the floor. When the boat begins to move we hardly notice. The land slides noiselessly away past the windows. The grey-blue water churns mildly in front. A few gulls hover and circle our bulk and eventually drift back to shore.
    For a while the two children are excited. They run up and down the half-empty boat, past people who are sitting silently or reading newspapers or breaking open packets of food, people who are conversing brightly despite the early hour, people who are already fathomlessly asleep amidst their bags and coats and jackets. For each of these groups they reserve a measure of interest as they pass and re-pass them: they cast out looks as fishermen cast out lines; they give them an opportunity, an opening. I see that it is, for them, the central mystery of life, how a course of events forms itself. They tiptoe around the closed bar with its fruit machines pulsing in the shadows. They keep us abreast of developments in the canteen, which to their satisfaction eventually opens, though this represents no particular change in their circumstances. For a while they haunt a corner of the salon where a family, all very pale and soft and large and all clad in black, are handing round biscuits and packets of crisps and colourless fizzy lemonade from a plastic litre bottle. The children clearly feel that this is a transaction of which they might at last entertain some hopes. They stay within this family’s rustling and torpid aura while the mother glances at them expressionlessly. Finally, they trail back to our table and sit down. They have exhausted every avenue andcome back empty-handed. The boat having been found to be a place of no opportunity, they wish to know when we will arrive.
    I am studying Italian verbs and phrases. I have a little book in which I write everything down. Faccio, fai, fa, facciamo, fate, fanno . I have not yet spoken any of these words: they are a form of trousseau, a virgin’s drawerful of unblemished linen. I like them in their spotless condition and cannot quite imagine the congress that is their destiny. Vengo, vieni, viene, veniamo, venite, vengono . I also have an Italian textbook, called Contatti! . There are various recurring characters in Contatti! , Italian men consecrated in the national customs of eating and drinking, earnest young Italian women who ask for directions to public landmarks, and even an English couple called the Robinsons. It is full of human situations that are both stilted and consoling, as though through this gauze of language everything impure and uncertain has been filtered away. The signora arrives with her daughters . The American students work hard . Did you sleep badly at Capodanno?
    It strikes me that Contatti! has something about it of Debrett’s book of social etiquette, in its insistence on the correct forms of expression within the randomness of the human plight. But there is even more of the atmosphere of the afterlife amidst its pages, of an unprogressing limbo where Tony and Mario are forever ordering the appropriate coffee for the time of day at the bar and Marcella, in her loop of eternity, stands on a street corner in Verona asking Fabrizio for directions to the railway station. People are helpful and kind in Contatti! , but they are untouched by passion or by failure: they do not scream or cry or love, or try to thwart Peter and Mary Robinson in their ambition to purchase a house in the Italian countryside. L’agenzia puo fissare una visita al mattino . The Robinsons seem to have an awful lot of Italian friends for a dull middle-class English couple. They crop up in nearly every chapter, lunching with the Pacianos at their Roman apartment, meeting up for drinks with their old