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.’
