Anatomy of Restlessness Read Online Free PDF

for the Tower of her particular fantasy was another ‘lost domain’, lying somewhere on the shores of the Bosporus. This part of the story goes back to the mid-20s when Beatrice’s father, an aristocrat and expert in heraldry with a great knowledge of history and the fine arts, went to Rome for the winter season and married a fragile Armenian girl who, since the massacres, had been living in Italy.
    She died seven years later. Yet the memory of her, of a person unbelievably beautiful and exotic, gave Beatrice an idea to which she has clung all her life: that glamour—real glamour, not the fake Western substitute – is a product of the Ottoman world. Once the rooms of the Tower were plastered, she employed a fresco painter, an old rogue called Barbacci, the last of the locals who could paint a trompe - l’oeil cornice or an angel on the ceiling of a church. But when he came to paint the pink ‘Ottoman’ stripes of the room I write in, he was forever peering from the window at the baronessa in the swimming pool, and some of the stripes have gone awry.
    I have never known Beatrice to buy anything but a bargain, even if she has to travel halfway across the world to get it. She bought dhurrie carpets in the Kabul carpet bazaar. Nearer to home, she bought chairs from the Castello di Sammezzano, a fake Moorish palace on a nearby hill. She had, in addition, an assortment of strange objects, of the kind that refugees pack in their trunks: a gilded incense burner; engravings of odalisques; or a portrait of her grandfather, the pasha, who was once Christian governor of Lebanon—objects which needed a home and which, with a bit of imagination, could conjure echoes of lazy summer afternoons in summerhouses by the water.
    Whenever I have been in residence, the place becomes a sea of books and papers and unmade beds and clothes thrown this way and that. But the Tower is a place where I have always worked, clearheadedly and well, in winter and summer, by day or night—and the places you work well in are the places you love the most.
    Â 
    1987

GONE TO TIMBUCTOO
    Timbuctoo, Tumbuto, Tombouctou, Tumbyktu, Tumbuktu or Tembuch? It doesn’t matter how you spell it. The word is a slogan, a ritual formula, once heard never forgotten. At eleven I knew of Timbuctoo as a mysterious city in the heart of Africa where they ate mice – and served them to visitors. A blurred photograph, in a traveller’s account of Timbuctoo, of a bowl of muddy broth with little pink feet rising to the surface excited me greatly. Naturally, I wrote an unprintable limerick about it. The words ‘mice in the stew’ rhymed with Timbuctoo and for me both are still inextricably associated.
    There are two Tiinbuctoos. One is the administrative centre of the Sixth Region of the Republic of Mali, once French Sudan – the tired caravan city where the Niger bends into the Sahara, ‘the meeting place of all who travel by camel or canoe’, though the meeting was rarely amicable; the shadeless Timbuctoo that blisters in the sun, cut off by grey-green waterways for much of the year, and accessible by river, desert caravan or the Russian airplane that comes three times a week from Bamako.
    And then there is the Timbuctoo of the mind-a mythical city in a Never-Never Land, an antipodean mirage, a symbol for the back of beyond or a flat joke. ‘He has gone to Timbuctoo,’ they say, meaning ‘He is out of his mind’ (or drugged); ‘He has left his wife’ (or his creditors); ‘He has gone away indefinitely and will probably not return’; or ‘He can’t think of anywhere better to go than Timbuctoo. I thought only American tourists went there.’
    â€˜Was it lovely?’ asked a friend on my return. No. It is far from lovely; unless you find mud walls crumbling to dust lovely – walls of a spectral grey, as if all the colour has been sucked out by the sun.
    To the passing