Anthony Aikman.Co.Uk

Jim Tully Anthony Aikman “The stranger and the enemy, we see them in the mirror …” - Plato Paris and Rome—1968-69 He rescued me in one riot and saved me from another over twenty years later—1968 Paris, 1992 Bangkok. In between, Hilly's career, such as it was, blazed like a shooting star, doomed to burn itself out. He had been confronting barricades long before he ever dragged me to safety in the boulevard San Michele, as riot police baton-charged the students waving their red flags and throwing cobble-stones in futile defiance. Twenty years on his sudden punch in my face stunned me just as the Bangkok mob followed Chamlong out of the Sanaam Luang Park that sultry Sunday evening in May. Racing in their thousands towards the coils of razor wire and the armed troops waiting impassively behind. "Stay out of it!" he shouted, pushing me away. "I owe this to someone. Get back to the glossy New York magazine where you belong." The fist was unexpected. As I came to the shooting started. I panicked in the confusion and ran for safety. It was three days before I made my way to the Lumpini Hotel. I hoped Dee would come to tell me. Just as all those years before it had been Yasmin. His fellow conspirators, playmates, proteges. Never girlfriends in the expected sense. Yasmin with those bewitching amethyst blue eyes. They outfaced anyone. Dee who led him through the minefields along the Cambodian border, tamed wild tiger cubs, or laughing swam the rapids of the Mooei River into Burma when Tully tried to reach the Karen rebels besieged in Mannerplaw. Summer 1968, I was fresh out of college journalism en route to pick up my new assignment in Rome. First stop Paris. The Berkeley riots came later. In those heady times students saw themselves as the conscience of the world. A world gone astray, its idealism lost. They wanted to remind it, reclaim it, redeem it. 1 was only an onlooker scribbling from the safety of the street cafes. The battles along the boulevards reminded me of Hemingway's running of the bulls at Pamplona. It was a spectacle. Until it suddenly caught up with me. Hurled me by the seat of my pants. The riot police I had been so prosily describing as Roman legionaries behind their riot shields showed no mercy on my Macy's suit, their truncheons lashing out as I knelt weeping with tear gas in a gutter where boots that had marched out of Dien Bien Phu and Algiers had little regard for restraint. A girl nearby clutching a torn hammer and sickle flag vanished in the melee. A hand dragged me back across the sidewalk into a cafe—the only one where doorway shutters hadn't been hauled down. I slumped trembling in a chair. Dusting myself and trying to brush away the indignity of those truncheons. Tully only chuckled, handing me a glass of Pernod to steady my nerves. Obliged as 1 was to my rescuer, 1 didn't care for his laugh. To him was it no more than a game? The girl who had been waving the flag joined us. Yasmin. Later Tully told me how from their cheap hotel room in Rue St. Jacques, they could hear the car horns honking da- da-da- dah, da-dah all night long as they made love, fired as much by the demonstrations as by desire. 1 expect everyone has known a Tully or two in their time, brightening up their lives for a brief spell and then moving on. Someone remarked once he had the habit of turning a trip into an adventure. Tully was not a person anyone would ever really know. Made up of bits; ambitions, hopes, noble failures, and ignoble ones. I suppose there is a part of him in all of us, although about him everything was insubstantial. As if perhaps he had never actually existed. Someone lifted from a traveller's tale told to pass the time, a story heard so often you believe it however bizarre the twists and turns, changing like Chinese whispers as the tale passes around. But I wonder if it wasn't society doing the adapting while all along Tully's cry to be recognized for what he was sang out like a schoolboy's appeal, ignored. I was hiding in Ayudhaya, an hour upstream from Bangkok, where I had prudently escaped the riots sweeping the capital listening with only half my mind to an English traveller chatting on, as we sat eating under a hissing paraffin lamp in the night market by the riverside. Below the steep bank the dark Chao Phraya pared its sinuous course. A lone boatman waited among the reeds to ferry the intrepid across to whatever awaited them on the unlit other side. I had heard someone describe Tully as Lawrence of Arabia—but probably from the film, not the fact. Tully himself would have liked to be Byron. The legend of Byron. That statue in the Bhorghese gardens he so admired—the only one the students never defaced—the noble cherubic face peering dreamily across distant stanzas. Inscribed with the lines Tully liked to quote. "And there is that within me..." Was it that something we didn't want to recognize in ourselves? The hunter, romantic, gambler, failure. Certainly Tully was a loser. He knew it, and he hated it. And then with that ability he had to laugh in moments of crisis, added, "The bonus is it's such a nice surprise when things turn out well for once." Add to that he was a loner and loners always stand out. They have an invisible shield around them. "You send out these conflicting signals," I had told him in Rome. "On the one hand you ask us in, on the other you hoist a sign up saying 'Keep Out'." A sudden monsoon downpour put a lid on my speculations. Hurried farewells to my companion and a dash for my room. Next morning I was up before dawn. The river pale and misty between wooded banks. 1 caught the 6.05 train into Bangkok. Sitting in the crowded third class compartment crossing the flat river plains, I remembered the three of us, Tully, Yasmin and I, travelling back to Rome together on the Palatine Express. Shunting out of the Gare de Lyon one summer evening, and arriving in Stazione Termini at nine next morning. Tully had a room—his garret he called it—in Vicolo San Simone, off Via Coronari, while I rented an attic apartment nearby in Via del Corollo with a rooftop view, as Tully graciously put it, of bell towers and television aerials. Tully had gone to Paris on behalf of the Rome Review, a magazine he had founded only a few weeks earlier, after being sacked from Italviews—a small English-language journal. The woman editor had already warned him for his one-word sentences. "Tolstoy can write them. You can't!" My sympathies lay with the editor. My college tutors would have consigned Tully's mistreatment of English straight into the trash bin. His reckless misspellings assumed a defiance one almost admired. Was that why he did it? The readers, like the victims of his ideals, were of no consequence. Tully's battle cry might well have echoed 'no prisoners' as sword unsheathed he dug in his spurs and charged headlong down the slope. So, in the summer of 1968 he went off to Paris on his first crusade with Yasmin as his fellow knight. Yasmin had gone to the inaugural meeting of the Rome Review. A meeting attended by South American revolutionaries, a busker for whom Marxist-Leninism was too bourgeois by half, an Italian count who insisted on interviews with the animals of the Rome zoo for their political opinions, and a renegade Jesuit priest from Scots college who took Tully aside to whisper, "If I want a good old fashioned mass I always go to the Anglican church.” In addition came a 'spy' from the British Council—Jolly Jack Buckley—who decided for motives unknown to take Tully under his cultural wing for a while. And finally Carlo, an American painter with a studio above the butcher's stall in Via della Pace. A palette hung out of an open window, if he was in. Carlo assumed the title of 'Carlo Pittore' with 'Pittore Euforico' as an added sobriquet. He was constantly followed like the Pied Piper by a stream of small boys crying, "Carlo, disegna mi. Disegna mi,"—while the older more sophisticated youths hanging around outside Cafe Columbo in Piazza Navona called out, "Hey, Van Gogh," as he passed. At which Carlo, already burdened by easel, canvasses, paints, bread, wine, cheese, salami and onions, with difficulty clapped his hands to his ears and cried back, "No souvenirs yet!" That first magazine meeting ended in enthusiastic disarray and, assuming the title of Foreign Correspondent, Tully set off for Paris. And Yasmin? More street-wise in the way of revolutions than Tully, it was difficult to accept she was only a schoolgirl. She had gained her revolutionary credits chipping off the noses from the haughty busts of senators and philosophers lining the horse-chestnut avenues of the Bhorghese gardens. "But never Byron!" Tully declared, as if to absolve her. Yasmin streaked dripping trails of political graffiti wherever her nightly rambles took her. From somewhere she had acquired a favourite. "11 mito vince sempre (the myth always wins)." Tully adopted this as his banner for life! Fresh from the idealism of the French student riots, Tully and Yasmin lost no time in complacent reflection of their spirited exploits.

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