Juggling the Stars by Tim Parks Read Free Book Online Page B

God! But there must be some sign of a break-in or he was finished. It wouldn’t take them ten minutes to work out who had done it.
    After a few moments he crept back into the courtyard to discover that no lights were on. Nobody had woken it seemed. Amazing. He found his stone behind the fountain took up exactly the same position as before and this time threw with a slight bias to the left. Dead on. The window must have been made of the cheapest glass because it flew into fragments which fell in a shower through the vines. But before they could hit the ground, Morris was already out on the street. He thrust his hands in his pockets, pursed his lips to whistle and, given that the last bus was long gone, set out briskly on the long walk home. What he whistled was, ‘When the Saints’.
    Morris had the statue boldly placed on his coffee table beside the photo of his mother and glanced up at it from time to time above the pages of his book. He would have to wait till Monday’s or Tuesday’s papers to hear how much it was worth. But it was not urgent. In fact, he wasn’t sure he really cared, or whether he would make any attempt to sell the little lady whatever she would fetch. It was nice just to have her there, a smooth, bronze, upward lift of form; knees, thighs, breasts, arms and tilted face, all swinging from right to left and exuberantly upwards. He would keep the thing, damn it, unless he was desperate. Perhaps he would even buy a pedestal.
    The difference, Dad,’ he remarked into a dictaphone humming with new batteries, ‘if you must know, between stealing and exploitation, is this: that with exploitation the victim knows he is getting fucked, like you at the factory, and has to accept it, to put bread in his mouth as you say, and so is humiliated. But stealing is a more generous transaction. The victim isn’t obliged to assent to his own ruin and therefore remains proud and free. Hence stealing would appear to be the more honest and morally superior of the two.’

6
    It was the first of June they turned off the gas. This was quite reasonable, seeing as Morris hadn’t as yet paid any of the bills for the expensive winter months. He had been expecting it even. Nevertheless the event plunged him into a grand depression, the kind of gloom that sent him scuttling out after other people’s company, his students and neighbours mostly, but even the English community on occasions with their bangers-and-mash and Valpolicella parties. He dressed carefully, not wanting to wear out anything valuable, yet at the same time determined to distinguish himself from the jeans and T-shirt brigade. Once arrived, he skulked in the corners of their shabby living rooms in Dietro Duomo, trying to pick up from their boozy cackle and chat whether anybody had any idea how to make money through the summer months.
    The schools closed the second week of June and most of the private students would probably give up around the same time, thus condemning the expatriate teaching community to three months of penury. During this period most of the teachers gave up their rooms and flats to save themselves the rent and disappeared on hitch-hiking holidays to the cheapest possible destinations, or cheaper still, back home to regroup again the following autumn when the schools re-opened and the same squalid rooms would be as readily available as most squalid and undesirable things generally are.
    The prospect of this summer, looming as an interminable scorching hot hazy blank, nothing to do and no money to spend, had Morris floundering in the very depths of self pity. He was a waif and a stray was the truth. An orphan, in the true spiritual sense of the word. He was a nobody, without dignity or recognition. Without repose. He thought how the noble Italian upper classes would pass the summer season, strutting through the shaded squares, parading along the sun-drenched lakeshore with their godlike bodies and stylish