Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may take away all at one swoop,’ wrote John Webster in The White Devil. I find it hard to disagree. I know fortune and luck are not quite the same thing, but I don’t believe the standard rebuke of the smug and the successful to those less fortunate: ‘You make your own luck in life.’
So it was that by a strange quirk of fate, King Charles III and Queen Camilla chose Ravenna rather than somewhere more touristically famous as the only place outside Rome they would go on their state visit to Italy the other day. It was as if somehow they knew that I lived here. Or else that some higher force wanted us to meet. What’s more, my friend Paolo the poet, who knows everyone who’s anyone in Ravenna, said he was pretty sure he could affect an introduction.
But it did not happen. Instead I was in hospital being treated for complications arising from the artery bypass I had in my left leg in 2019 after years of smoking 60 a day. My lower left leg had become badly infected for reasons related to the bypass but which I still do not properly understand. Petrified by what it might mean, I had let the situation continue for three months, vainly hoping it would get better on its own. During this time, I had drunk copious amounts of Sangiovese which, like Sister Morphine, had acted as both painkiller and shroud hiding reality.
Badgered by my wife, Carla, and our six children, I finally went over the top to check into A&E one evening earlier this month. I spent the next 19 hours in a state of quiet desperation, lying on a trolley which was too short and as hard as rocks. Towards dawn, an A&E doctor did a preliminary examination, and the next day, at midday, I was wheeled up via a lift to the cardiovascular ward, where a surgeon saw me for nearly an hour which was nice of him.
I was terrified I would have to undergo another bypass operation or, worse, that they would have to cut off my lower left leg. But the surgeon said, as if it were neither here nor there, that no operation was necessary as blood was reaching the foot. At about 6 p.m., I was finally taken to the A&E observation ward, where I spent the next four days. The treatment consisted mainly of super-strong blood thinners and antibiotics.
I was in a room with only an old man whose bed was about three yards away and who spent his time seemingly asleep. At night, he would yell ‘Mamma!’ every hour or so, followed by a series of primeval howls which sounded like ‘A!’ ‘O!’ and ‘E!’.
The doctors avoided me at all costs. I don’t think it was personal. On the few occasions one did speak to me for a few minutes what they said was so ambiguous it left me unable to understand anything much. My discharge report, written in impenetrable medical jargon, did not really help either.
After so long in bed, I could not walk and on my last day I had to use a walker to get mobile again. The nurse insisted she hold it at the front as we set off on a weird waltz around the ward with her just a few feet in front of me, moving backwards.
‘Look me in the eyes,’ she said. ‘I can’t, they’re too beautiful,’ I replied. But she was only worried I would pass out. Thanks to our circumnavigations of the ward, though, I managed to get out of the hospital and into the Land Rover Defender, using the walker.
Charles and Camilla, meanwhile, had been and gone. Paolo, a monarchist in a city run by ex-communists, had hoped at best to shake the King’s hand. But thanks to fortune, he ended up being the King’s guide for a large chunk of the 20 minutes the monarch spent marvelling at the spectacular 6th-century mosaics in the Basilica di San Vitale.
The doctors avoided me at all costs. I don’t think it was personal
Last year, I wrote about attending Paolo’s degree thesis presentation at Ravenna’s Accademia di Belle Arti on L’Estetica di Lucifero in which he expounded with slides his big idea that since the French Revolution artists have been, if not possessed, piloted by the Devil. He was awarded a starred first on the spot and has since been taken on as a lecturer.
The Belle Arti had the honour of showing the King around San Vitale. But aside from Paolo, none of them, neither the director nor senior staff present, let alone the bishop, could speak English.
‘So it fell to me to be the King’s guide!’ said Paolo. ‘It was perhaps the strongest emotion I’ve felt my entire life. I so envy you that you’re British.’
Outside San Vitale there were tables at which students were making mosaics. One, given as a gift to the King and Queen, depicts them praying beneath a large golden star in a midnight-blue sky.
‘The King was so passionate about the mosaics and so full of questions. He said he must introduce me to his academy,’ said Paolo. ‘Later, when he was joined by Camilla and went off to greet her he called me over to introduce me to her!’
Fortune had smiled on Paolo that day, and perhaps on me too. For at least, I suppose, I have stopped drinking, again. And my lower left leg has not been cut off.
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