The Viper’s Progeny

Picador new writing 4. Edited by Beth Yaph and Nicholas Jose 1997

It rains vipers at Pepita’s lover’s house. Aeroplanes from Yugoslavia fly low over the Tuscan hills and Hessian bags full of them are shaken out above the ilex woods. Most fall through the sky like potato peelings and land with a dead thwack on the paths below. There they lie stunned fro a moment or two before darting into the undergrowth. Some though, get tangled in the branches and for hours afterwards you can hear the sudden snapping of twigs as they fall to the ground. No birds sing. The hunters have shot them all. Silence. Except for the plip plop of dew sliding from leaves to dry composition below or maybe even landing on a dopey viper and then the sound of the frantic escape like clumsy fingers rifling through a cornflakes packet.

Yugoslavian vipers are nice little vipers. Nicer than their Italian cousins (a particularly virulent strain due to years of in-breeding and privilege), but they are not experienced at jumping out of aeroplanes. Many get stuck in the fork of a tree where they eventually dehydrate and can be found months later shrivelled and fluttering like forgotten Christmas streamers. It is hoped that the ones that survive will mate with their cousins on the ground and breed less unpleasant offspring.

Pepita and her lover have many dogs. Mutts they have found, discarded, skulking beside the autostrada or tied up beside a derelict farmhouse. Often a circular path (the radius of its chain) is worn so bare that Pepita cannot sleep for pity and has to return with pliers the next day to set it free. Thereafter it is fed on bullocks’ hearts and sleeps on her yellow four poster bed until it goes the way of most of their dogs: snake poisoning.

When the mutts fail to return home for tea Pepita will stand on the garden wall, calling, calling toward the hills, sometimes only to find them drowsy and half paralysed beneath the rosemary bush at her feet. Then she’ll pump them full of anti-venom and stay with them throughout the night, stroking their ears and offering water from her fingertips. But so strong is the venom that by morning Pepita will usually have to fetch her spade and dig yet another grave. Pepita is not so young and the ground is stubborn, only Pepita more so, and although the morning will be spoilt by her cries of effort and exhaustion she will get the job done. Then she will wrap them in an old blanket and, later, plant a rose bush. When you are staying overnight she will often tell you that the rose beside your bed is ‘con tante amore di Bruno o Flavio o Sambo’.

The men who hunt in the woods are so frightened of the vipers that one of them shoots his finger off after a viper has bitten it. But not Pepita’s lover. Even before the plane’s echo is lost, Pepita’s lover will lock up the dogs, fetching his gun, go into the woods to see the snakes. Sometimes he will reach up and rattle the branches with his gun to free one helpless and dangling. Or flip one over that’s landed, thick and pale as an amputated arm, prodding it until it regains its spirit and lunges back at the gun before sliding away.

Once a viper fell on him. He says it was lucky he wasn’t wearing a shirt of it might have slipped beneath his collar and bitten him. He came back to the house wiping away tears of laughter at the thought of Pepita having to dig such a big hole to bury him. ‘The effort may have killed you, my darling. How ironic. Just when you could have been free of me.” Pepita, unravelling a long green hose that had coiled itself around her feet, reminded him that vipers don’t usually bite their own kind and continued with her watering.

Pepita’s lover hates water. She has lived with him for over thirty years and had never once seen him take a bath or shower. He takes basin baths in the middle of the night, wiping himself with the softest sponges and drying off in a jasmine breeze. He doesn’t sleep much and he doesn’t smell. Except of cigars. He lights his first at breakfast and takes puffs in between mouthfuls of Coco-Pops.

In restaurants old ladies ask him politely if he’d mind putting out his cigar. He’s usually tipping back in his chair at the time with his dark glasses on. He’s as deaf as a snake and speaks very quietly, conspiratorially, behind his hand, often clasping a huge cotton hanky in front of his mouth to stop his false teeth from dropping out, which they do whenever he finds something amusing. He never leans forward if he can’t hear, he always makes people come to him, and they do. Sometimes he’ll whip his dark glasses off and yell at Pepita, ‘What’s she saying?’ and Pepita will enunciate, with a precision for accommodating imbeciles, ‘She’s asking if you would kindly put our your cigar.’ ‘Certainly not,’ he’ll hiss in the old lady’s face. ‘I don’t ask you not to masticate your food in front of me so I’ll be damned if I wont smoke my cigar.’

Outside, Pepita will slam the car door and when he asks what that was for, she’ll say, ‘You’re just so unpleasant, I can’t take you anywhere,” and her lover will stroke the back of her head and, sucking back his false teeth, will grin and say, ‘You’re still so beautiful when you’re angry, my darling.’

Pepita’s lover loves stories about other people’s misfortunes. He writes books about adultery, Nazi atrocities and gossip. ‘Can you imagine anything more ghastly?’ he cries, dabbing the tears away with his huge cotton hanky at the notion of being reborn as Camilla Parker Bowles’ tampon. His laughter is silent but it jerks his body forward and his head bobs up and down until his teeth drop out. Alone with Pepita he doesn’t bother wearing his teeth. Or his clothes. He stalks around the house in nothing but an old, sweat-stained panama, hissing at the teeth he’s mislaid somewhere between the garden and the telephone or lashing out at the dogs foolish enough to sleep in his path. Pepita complains of the time she wastes looking for them. The maid prays to St Anthony and usually finds them. She puts them on a silver tray like a pot of foie gras gras stamps loudly through the house to warn him of her coming. But he’s too deaf to hear her and although he might pick up her vibrations and cover his cock with his panama before she rounds the corner, there is still something so startling, so silent, so insidious about his presence that she always gets a terrible fright and the teeth will go chattering across the terracotta tiles.

Pepita says, ‘Can you imagine how handsome he once was?’ He looks handsome in the black and white photo beside her bed. His hair is black, swept back from Byronic brow, his lips are generous and his eyes stripped of their habitual dark glasses. Their searing colour seems quite benign. Nothing plays at the corners of his mouth. It doesn’t look like him. Pepita hates his glasses. ‘What’s the point of having such beautiful eyes if you never show them?’ she says. He takes them off to read the paper. They leave two anaemic patches like the grass under a tent at the end of a camping holiday. The rest of him is tanned. Working in the sun, weeding or building walls, his skin looks almost wet, it is so brown and shiny; but up close, and to touch, it is surprisingly dry and scaly. Now he is stooped and balding. Before, it is said his charm was so lethal that no woman was immune. There is still mischief and malice on his lips and Pepita still finds earrings that aren’t hers amongst his bedclothes, but she knows after years of untold jealousy and pain, she has nothing to fear. Without his teeth he is considerably less lethal. Quite harmless in fact.

Pepita’s lover was once married. He was unfaithful to his wife before the ink on the register had dried. After their first child was born, a daughter, he took no pains to hide his mistresses, even inviting them to stay in his home. Later slipping back to his wife’s bed smelling of sex and French perfume. Pepita was the exception. She smelt of horse manure. She had soil beneath her nails and she hugged trees. He watched her prepare a winter bed for another man’s roses and wanted her for his own. She did not love the man but she loved his roses and would not leave. So he sent her snowdrops every day, ‘to thaw her heart’, he said, until she ran out of vases and became so distressed by the waste that she consented, finally to take him as her lover.

Pepita’s lover left his wife with six small children and a title. He did not seek a divorce because after bearing six children he felt she had earned the privilege of remaining a Contessa for life. Pepita credits her lover’s ‘extraordinary generosity’ as the reason he will never be free to marry her. Those with greater understanding of alimony payments might be tempted to give a less charitable interpretation.

No one, however, could deny he was a generous father. When his five daughters were small he would don a bow tie and take them all out to Pepi’s Bar where they could order anything they wished. He would tell them how pretty they were and, when paying the bills, he would hand them all brand new thousand lire notes like he was dealing cards. When they were bigger girls and came to stay with him, he would lie waiting for them to come home from their parties, whispering their names through the crack in his door and pushing aside all the leather bound books that littered his bed so they could sit down. ‘Did you go to bed with him?’ he’d ask. ‘Was he any good? His father had a notoriously small cock, you know. How beautiful you look, you’ll soon break his heart. Here’s ten thousand lire, buy yourself another dress.’

The girls, now grown, are sleek as panthers with dark hair that shines and slides off their shoulders. They are witty with long alabaster limbs and have love songs written for them. Every hunting season the girls invite their lovers, usually poets, musicians or rug traders, to shoot in the ilex woods, but Pepita’s lover, who is reputed to be the best shot of the Porcini contrada, mocks them for their ineptitude and later, at the dinner table, for their sincerity.

The girls, respecting their father’s wisdom, soon disentangle their pale fingers from their lovers’ curls and, one by one, cast them out.

Pepita’s lover calls every morning to prise secrets from his daughters and to laugh at the inadequacies of their new lovers. He has warned his daughters that to marry outside their class will lead to great unhappiness so they give birth to fatherless children and, too beautiful to have required an education, are now idle and cannot pay bills. Pepita’s lover says he’d rather pay the bills than fill his table with bovine sons-in-law but every evening he kicks the dogs in frustration and rage.

His youngest though is beyond reproach, for it is the youngest whom he loves the most. At last a son. And heir. But the Contessa, having suffered the disappointment of bearing five girls in a row, also loves her son the most. Pepita understanding such matters as a woman’s hungry heart warned her lover of the consequences of such unchecked devotion. ‘He’ll only hate her for it in the end,’ she said.

Pepita’s lover begged his wife, the Contessa, not to spoil their only son. ‘He’ll only hate you for it in the end,’ he said. But she was bored and empty so she filled her days making spelling cards in three languages which she stuck on objects all over the house. By the age of four her son was reading fluently. By five he could read Tin-Tin in French and English. At six he could play bridge in three conventions. He travelled with his own personally monogrammed backgammon board and by the age of seven had been on more yachts than the Aga Khan. On his eighth birthday he ran over the Contessa in his new battery-operated car because she had not bought him a real one. Pepita, reading the writing on the wall and shaking her head with the weariness of Solomon, urged her love to drag his son from the Contessa’s bed and send him off to boarding school. This he did, but too late, too late, the boy never passed an exam and he never did a day’s work. ‘What’s the point’, he’d say, ‘I already have everything.’

The Contessa is an old woman now and will not wear her nappies. Pepita’s lover and his son begrudge the way she smells and laugh at the stories told about her peeing in the dining room of the Excelsior Hotel. ‘Put your nappy on, you stinky old hag,’ says her son when he needs money and goes to visit her. One day, in a bid for some attention, she refused to pay his parking fines so he ordered a removal van and sold her furniture. Another time, just to amuse himself, he filled her sandwiches with psilocybin goldtops and put her on a train to Rome. She got off before her destination and was found wandering the streets of Arezzo, unable to remember her name.

His son, now twenty-one, is tall and bored and stoned and wears dark glasses like his father.

Pepita’s lover buys him racehorses to try to coax him out of bed but he says horse hair gives him asthma and so he won’t go to the track. Sometimes though he watches his horse running on the television set, which encourages Pepita’s lover. ‘It’s a beginning,’ he says. Pepita looks heavenward but for the dog’s sake keeps her mouth shut. For his last birthday, he gave him his grandfather’s shotgun, hoping it might encourage him to visit once in a while. Sometimes now he comes to hunt in the ilex woods which pleases Pepita’s lover enormously.

‘At least he’s interested in something.’ He says. Sometimes he brings a blonde anorexic who sits forlornly on his knee, smoking Kents from her big bruised lips. Sometimes he doesn’t.

Always, he is cold. He lies in a hot bath all night and then stays in bed until the sun is hottest after lunch. Everyone tiptoes in the passage outside his room. Not Pepita. She stamps up and down, yelling for dogs or shouting for her lover to answer the bloody telephone until his son smashes the vase of roses ‘con tante amore di Burno o Flavio o Sambo’ against the door. Then he’ll turn the volume up on his ghetto blaster until Black Sabbath rattles the door handles. Pepita thought at first that the overlaying cries were merely some strange harmonising indulged by her lover’s son but lately she has decided that they are wails of fury, self-pity and hopelessness.

Then, in the siesta quiet, he will get up and slip outside to warm himself on the hot sandstone path that leads through to the ilex woods. His naked skin is as pale and still as the sandstone and his head as dark as the cypress shadows in which it lies. So it is easy for Pepita, dead-heading lavender along the path, almost to tread on him and get a terrible fright. But he will seem equally startled and, grabbing the shotgun that he so often now carries, will scuttle off down the path to the ilex woods. Returning at dusk, she imagines he will boast not of the birds he has killed but of all the fucking he has done.

Running lavender-scented fingers under her nose, Pepita watches the careless dance of pale butterflies and indulges her quiet daydreams – that it is raining girls, that Yugoslavian aeroplanes fly low over the Tuscan hills and that girls jump out above the ilex woods. Most, she muses, will fall through the sky like cocktail umbrellas and land with a dead thwack on the paths below. There they will lie stunned for a moment or two before wriggling out of their harnesses and darting into the undergrowth. Some, though, may get tangled up in the branches, and for hours afterward you will hear the sudden snapping of limbs as they fall to the ground. No birds sing. The hunters have shot them all. Silence. Except for the slither of girls through the dry decomposition or maybe even the tread of a naked hunter as he stumbles upon some dopey one.

Yugoslavian girls, Pepita imagines, are nice little girls, far nicer than their Italian cousins but they are probably not experienced at jumping out of aeroplanes. Their parachutes may get stuck in the foliage above. They may be weak from hunger and the ravages of war and can’t undo their harnesses. Then they’ll dehydrate and be found months later limp and swinging like forgotten puppets. Pepita hopes that the ones who survive will mate with their cousins on the ground and breed less unpleasant offspring.