by Mary Morris
I was too hungry to sleep; the lack of food for sale en route had taken me unawares. I reproved myself for being so illogically inhibited by the peasants’ refusal to sell food to travellers—I often enough condemn the transfer to other societies of the standards and principles of our own. On the previous evening we should have sought hospitality instead of camping; we could then have eaten our fill and started the day with substantial breakfasts. Again, at the foot of the escarpment we should have explained that we were very hungry; no Malagasy peasant would have to go without to feed us. Yet my inhibition was not entirely based on a reluctance to cadge. Another factor was the extent to which, in rural Madagascar, daily life has a fixed and formal pattern governed by fady. It is a friendly and generous but not a relaxed or spontaneous society. And the complexity of local inhibitions about vazaha reinforces the vazaha’s own inhibitions.
To outsiders the Malagasy submission to ancestral decrees can seem absurd—even neurotic—yet that afternoon we had been impressed by some of its effects. If an old man is heavily laden, any young man catching up with him insists on carrying his load for some distance, though they may be total strangers. And young people ask permission before overtaking their elders on the track. Is it a measure of the uncouthness of the modern West that we marvelled so to observe these courtesies?
At that point in my ruminations a dog approached, sniffed curiously around us, then took fright at the vazaha smells (as anyone might have done, that evening) and ran away yelping shrilly. Otherwise nothing moved until 4:50 A.M. when two men passed, chuckling and chatting. They did not notice us. It rained lightly for a few hours: harmless straight-down rain—we were only dampened around the edges. I might have slept eventually but for the decibels of a corpse-turning party obviously intended to summon ancestors from Outer Space. This ceremony began at 8:45 P.M. and was still going loud and strong when we left the area. Luckily Malagasy music is pleasing to the ear, if a trifle monotonous.
An overcast dawn showed Ambohibary scarcely a mile away. Most windows were still tightly shuttered as we hastened towards the town centre, through lanes piled with morning-after-market refuse. Malagasy litter is ninety per cent edible and scores of truculent ganders, pompous geese and bumptious goslings were on garbage-disposal duty. Never have I seen so many geese in one place; at that hour they seemed to own the town.
A few café-stalls were open in the market-square and we devoured so many rice-buns so quickly that the attractive young woman who was serving us called her mother to watch. As we ate, other stall-holders began to light their charcoal-stoves and display rice-buns—to be bought in bulk and taken home for breakfast, a habit perhaps picked up from the French.
A short-cut over a eucalyptus-planted hill took us to the real Route Nationale No. 7 and we realised why Ambohibary’s market is so important. A link road that once was tarred is still capable of taking truck traffic to Ambohibary from Route Nationale No. 7, the Tana–Antsirabe highway. Our bizarre “road” of the previous evening is a continuation of this link, going to Arivonimamo via Manalalondo. But it is not, as we had seen, conducive to a free flow of goods throughout the Ankaratra.
The junction is marked—and marred—by a pretentious new “bar”-stall of pale varnished wood, designed to attract passing motorists. Sadly, the beer bottles lining its shelves were all empty. Here we relished a second breakfast of slightly sweet crisp fritters, fresh from the pan, while a plump gentle dog sat hopefully at our feet—his girth proving that his hopes were often fulfilled—and minuscule ducklings splashed ecstatically in a nearby puddle. Opposite the bar a barely legible kilometre-stone said “Antsirabe 33” and we decided to walk on but take the first available bus out of consideration for Rachel’s feet.
During the next four hours withdrawal symptoms afflicted me: inevitable on exchanging mountain-tracks for a motor-road, however light the traffic. I could not agree with our Air Mad guidebook—“The Tananarive–Antsirabe road is bituminized, and the trip very nice.” But that was sheer prejudice; by normal standards the trip is “very nice,” as Route Nationale No. 7 undulates through miles of mature pine-plantations or densely populated farmland. Our guidebook explains:
From the economic point of view, it must be stated that Antsirabe is at the centre of a rich agricultural region which produces: rice, beans, sweet potatoes, corn (maize), taro, soja, potatoes: all vegetables grow wonderfully. The vineyards give 350,000 to 400,000 litres of wine. Let us mention that the harvest of wheat has begun. Also to be found is a very wide range of european and exotic flowers. For stock farming let us mention: cattle, sheep, numerous pigs, also poultry and horses.
In the woods government foresters were manhandling trimmed trunks onto decrepit trucks. Private enterprise was also active. Youthful entrepreneurs had gathered small branches into neatly bound bundles for sale to passing city-dwellers. And larger branches were being loaded into motor-vans by Antsirabe fuel-merchants.
In the “rich agricultural region” traditional Merina dwellings were interspersed with colonial bungalows or dainty two-storey residences half-smothered in flowering shrubs. Yet even along this motor-road there were symptoms of economic collapse: rows of recently abandoned wayside market-stalls (the local equivalent of a supermarket), and derelict petrol-pump stations, and two colonial restaurants now used as vegetable depots.
Light showers refreshed us during the early forenoon but by midday the sky had cleared, the heat was brutal and Rachel was limping very badly. We sat in a wooden glen, overlooking a narrow river in a wide river-bed, and waited for a bus. From afar we could see a ludicrously sophisticated skyscraper flour-mill, to cater for the “harvest of wheat”; we later learned that it is having severe (though hardly surprising) problems to do with maintenance and fueling.
During the morning three buses had passed us, all preposterously overloaded. The fourth was no less so but two men gave up their seats to the vazaha. Large baskets of vegetables and small children standing on laps restricted our view of the approach to Antsirabe. Most of our fellow-passengers were well-groomed, wearing clean, brightly coloured lambas over neat shirts and pants or blouses and skirts. Their appearance did not match the state of their conveyance; I have never travelled in a more beat-up vehicle. As there was no door remaining, and not much floor, the dust-intake from the “bituminized” road was considerable and both conductor and driver wore scarves around their noses and mouths. The driver sat crouched and tense and frowning, using accelerator and brake equally violently. Every few hundred yards he swerved acrobatically to avoid either straying livestock or a mini-crater. Mere pot-holes he took as they came and each jolt jarred us breathless. At the end of the ten-mile journey Rachel mused, “What are we going to feel like when we’ve covered a few thousand miles in Malagasy vehicles?”
* A large cloak worn by natives of Madagascar.
* Foreigners.
† Ancestors.
‡ Witch doctor, sorcerer hostile to the European order.
BARBARA GRIZZUTI HARRISON
(1934–)
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison takes a place within a select group of sophisticated stylists—including Edith Wharton, Vita Sackville-West, and Mary Lee Settle—adeptly weaving personal vision—her thoughts and feelings—with anecdotes about history and place. Her book on the Jehovah’s Witnesses (Visions of Glory), of which she was a member for eleven years, shares the same conviction, ease with personal, political, and historical material, and open-mindedness that are hallmarks of her journalism and travel prose. Although her opinions and feminist politics inform her work, they don’t take it over. A child of Italian-Americans from Brooklyn, where she still lives, Harrison had long wanted to make the journey she writes about in Italian Days.
from ITALIAN DAYS
SAN GIMIGNANO: “City of Fine Towers”
There are places one comes home to that one has never been to: San Gimignano.
An English spinster, almost deaf, attaches herself to me on the bus to San Gimignano. She tells me
of her adventures and misadventures in Spain, Portugal, Italy—all having to do with trains nearly missed, roads not taken, the kindness of strangers. I am not feeling particularly generous or kindly, except toward the green hills and the fields of yellow flowers in which I wish to lose my thoughts. “Rape, I think those flowers are,” she says, “horrible name. I think they make oil of it.” I think it is saffron, perhaps crocus …
Butter-yellow flowers bloom from the medieval towers for which San Gimignano is famous. They are variously called wallflowers and violets (and said by townspeople to grow nowhere else on earth). The small and fragrant flowers sprang up on the coffin of St. Fina (among whose gifts was the ability to extinguish house fires) and on the town’s towers on the day of her death. (On that day bells tolled; they were rung by angels.) St. Fina is sometimes called the Saint of the Wallflowers. (Wallflower, in addition to its botanical meaning, in colloquial Italian means, as it does in English, a “girl who is not invited to dance”—ragazza che fa da tappezzeria.) She died when she was fifteen. She was loved for her goodness and beauty, she had butter-yellow hair, she once accepted an orange from a young man at a well, and she died on an oak plank in penance for what seems to have been an entirely blameless life. In paintings by Ghirlandaio in San Gimignano’s cathedral, she is so slender and delicate, so attenuated, as to cause one pain.
Modest St. Fina, a silent slip of a girl, might seem an odd choice for veneration in a walled city of military architecture—proud ramparts and aggressive towers built by suspicious patrician families to hide treasures and to assert the will for power. (Alberti railed against towers, regarding them as antisocial; in the sixteenth century Cosimo de’ Medici ordered a halt to the expansion of San Gimignano, forbidding the commune of Florence to allocate to it “even the slightest amount for any need, be it sacred or profane.”)
There is a wrinkle in time in San Gimignano. There is no such thing as a mellow or lovable skyscraper, but the towers of San Gimignano, glibly called the skyscrapers of Tuscany, seem to have been born old … or at least to have anticipated the day when gentle St. Fina would, like Rapunzel, who also lived in a tower and whose hair was also gold, seem the perfect anointing presence. One imagines her—one imagines both Rapunzel and St. Fina—at the top of a steep, narrow, spiraling stone stairway, breathing silently in a slender shaft of brief light from a narrow window … everything military has retreated from this fairy-tale place.
There are fourteen tall towers in San Gimignano; there were once seventy-two. They are surrounded, on the narrow city streets, by palazzi and modest houses, all higgledy-piggledy, with projecting Tuscan roofs. They stretch from earth to sky and are built on shifting soil; and they speak, as Georges Duby says, two languages: “on the one hand the unreal space of courtly myth, the vertical flight of mystic ascension, the linear curve carrying composition in to the scrolls of poetic reverie. And on the other, a rigorous marquetry offering the view of a compact universe, profound and solid.” They have one peculiar property: Their stones remain the same color—a gray-gold with a suggestion, a faint pentimento, of black—whether wet with rain or hot with sun. The little guidebook I bought in San Gimignano is quite lyrical and accurate about the walls and towers of San Gimignano, which embody, as its author says, the contradictions of the medieval mind, a mind “reserved and hospitable, bold and fearful. Fearful of enemies, of strangers, of night-time, of treasons.” The walls kept enemies out; they also kept people in; they imparted, to those within, a “sense of community, of common interests and ideals never denied.” San Gimignano is formidable in its beauty; every description of it I have ever read makes it sound both forbidding and delightful. Forbidding it once was, in the days of fratricidal warfare, when families threw collapsible wooden bridges from the window of one tower-fortress to that of another (the days when it traded with Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia and men vied for great wealth); now it is simply delightful. And sheltering. The walls cup and cradle (as, in Niccolò Gerini’s painting of St. Fina, she cradles the walled city in her slender young arms). The towers exist not to keep enemies—the Other—out, but to house the soul warmly; one has a sense of great bodily integrity in these spaces; one feels safe. When St. Fina drove the Devil out of San Gimignano with a gesture of her long and lovely hand, she did it for us.
Because one yields, in San Gimignano, to the fancy that the world is created anew each day, that time does not, in the way we ordinarily understand it, exist, it is exactly right, and so lovely, to find in a deserted piazza a small thirteenth-century church dedicated to St. Augustine, whose reflections on the nature and measurement of time so profoundly informed his love of God (and anticipated the existentialists):
But if the present were always present, and would not pass into the past, it would no longer be time, but eternity. Therefore, if the present, so as to be time, must be so constituted that it passes into the past, how can we say that it is, since the cause of its being is the fact that it will cease to be? Does it not follow that we can truly say that it is time, only because it tends towards non-being?… How, then, can … the past and the future be, when the past no longer is and the future as yet does not be?
On the chancel wall of the church are lively fifteenth-century frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli of the life of the great theologian. I am surprised to see St. Monica plump, peasant-sturdy, and careworn; I always imagined that one who prayed unceasingly, as she did, for the salvation of her son, would find one’s flesh melting in the process. (I think of a life of prayer as inimical to fat.) Of all the charming frescoes, the most charming is that of Augustine chatting with the infant Jesus about the Mystery of the Trinity (that which might be remote and austere Gozzoli rendered immediate and intimate); the Child attempts to empty the sea into a puddle—much as any child might at the seashore, with a pail, or a shell—the impossibility of which convinces Augustine that the Trinity cannot be comprehended by reason alone.
Everything You have made is beautiful, Augustine said to his God, but You are more beautiful than anything You have made. In the cloister of the Church of St. Augustine, that beauty is palpable; one feels one has entered the light and peace of God. The cloister is divided by box hedges into four quadrangular plots of land in which grow irises and tulips and palm trees and white and yellow dandelions and pink and blue wandering flowers.… How sweet, these enclosures within an enclosed opening: open/close, close/open; a cypress punctuates each of four corners. A loggia—pots of yellow flowers and geraniums—looks out over a central cistern; the scent of lilacs is pervasive, the lilacs swarm with bees. The fragrance of lilacs mingles with the fragrance of wood-smoke. I walk beneath a tree the leaves of which are the color of China tea; a cobweb brushes across my forehead. A jet plane streaks across the fragrance of lilacs; an orange-and-black cat mews piteously in the garden.
(Were mazes an outgrowth and elaboration of these enclosures within enclosures? Why would anyone wish to complicate and convolute so simple, satisfying, and sweet a design?)
The sacristan plucks tenacious thorns from my coat. He is listening to a popular love song on his transistor radio in the sacristy. I light a candle and the sacristan extinguishes the flame. Even God has a riposo in Italy at lunch hour.
My hotel, once a palazzo, is in the Piazza della Cisterna, in the middle of which is a thirteenth-century cistern. From this piazza, through the battlemented archway, I can reach the square of the cathedral with its seven towers. I like the feel of the herringbone-patterned bricks under my thin sandals. I wander up and down steep hills, arched alleys, passing old men and women with canes. I never want to leave. My terraced hilltop room looks out over roofs and towers and blessed hills to the Val d’Elsa. I am beginning to believe the Annunciation did take place here. Art plagiarizes nature. I want to fly, as Cellini wanted to fly, “on a pair of wings made of waxed linen.” And I want to stay here, rooted, forever.
At dinner a baby boy crawls through the tunneled legs of diners, to the cooing delight of waiters. A woman lights a cigarette,
over which a British man and woman make a great disapproving fuss. “There is no remedy for death,” the smoker says, coolly addressing the room at large. She says this in English and then in Italian.
After dinner, in a dim lounge, I watch Two Women, a movie with Sophia Loren. I am joined by the Italian woman who smokes. Out of an abundance of feeling I cry, not so much because this is the story of a rape, not because of the girl’s loss of innocence and the mother’s rage and grief, but because the injured girl is singing, her voice frail, a song my grandmother used to sing: “Vieni, c’è una strada nel bosco … I want you to know it, too … c’è una strada nel cuore … There’s a road in my heart.…” The woman who smokes is crying, too. I am thinking of my daughter. When she leaves, the woman kisses the crown of my head. We have exchanged no words. Men have stood on the threshold and not come in. I never see her again.
I cross the piazza to sit in a brightly lit outdoor café. It is late. I am the only woman in the café. I fend off three approaches. I won’t be denied the pleasure of seeing the light and shadows of the lovely square, the purple night sky. Inside, male voices are raised in a sentimental love song; they sing to the strings of a mandolin. Their singing is saccharine, their laughter is boisterous, and there are no women here. I wonder, with some little anger, what it would be like to be part of their sentimental, prideful, tough and tender world. I put on dark glasses. A little boy eating a gelato plays hide-and-seek, covering his eyes with sticky fingers (hide), waiting for me to smile (seek). A policeman strolls by apparently without purpose. I am an anomaly. I remove my glasses, thinking that if I can’t see men’s faces, they can’t see mine.
What pleasure does it give men to sing of the beauty of women when there are no women in the café?
I find myself thinking of the handsome guide at the Davanzati who held the elevator for me.
