by Mary Morris
The bed linen smells of lilacs. The air vibrates with the aftersound of bells.
In San Gimignano the birds sing all night long.
In the morning I drink my coffee from a mug bearing the words OLD TIME TEA.
In the Piazza della Cisterna there is a sala di giochi—video games. Is it possible that the children who grow up here—young men with studied, languid poses—think they are living in a hick town?
On the Via San Martino, away from the cathedral and the Cisterna, there is a café peopled entirely by old men. The café is part billiard parlor; newspapers are bought and read in common. I am accepted here in the morning light of day; I would not have been accepted here last night. I am served my morning coffee with old-fashioned gallantry by a man in a shiny black suit. With great difficulty he recites something he has been taught by an English-speaking cousin: “ ‘We shall sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings.’ Is sad?” he asks.
* * *
To leave a walled city is to feel evicted, cast out—cast out of paradise; no matter that the countryside outside the walls is paradisiacal.
The bus, full of high-spirited schoolchildren, that stopped at Porta San Giovanni was the wrong bus, but the driver took me on anyway, avuncularly advised the children to be more calm in the presence of la bella signora, and deposited me at the right bus stop. We went by back roads, and I had the sensation, for the first time in Tuscany, not of passing but of being in the countryside, part of (not merely an observer of) a gorgeous (and calm) crazy quilt of silver-green olive trees and flowering peach and cherry trees; the yellow-and-red bus wound its way through the intricate sensual folds of hills dignified by cypress trees: “And you, O God, saw all the things that you had made, and behold, ‘they were very good.’ For we also see them and behold, they are all very good.”*
The bus went slowly, like a swimmer who loves the water too much to race and challenge it, and the world unfolded like a child’s picture book: gardeners turning over soil with gnarled, patient hands; bronzed youths of Etruscan beauty casually strolling by the roadside as if here were just anywhere and everywhere was beautiful; showers of wisteria framing old women shelling peas in doorways; lovers picnicking in a vineyard; laughing nuns pushing children on orange swings, their heavy habits flowing on magnolia-scented air: “Your works praise you.”†
* Confessions of St. Augustine 13/28; 13/33
† ibid.
MARY LEE SETTLE
(1918–)
Place is integral to the writing of Mary Lee Settle. When she began the work of fiction that would become the Beulah Quintet, she left New York to live in her home state of West Virginia, where the novels were set, so that they would be “written not out of adolescent reaction but adult experience.” As in the writings of Freya Stark, Settle’s travel writing evokes the hope and magic of a tale in Arabian Nights. In the following excerpt she trusts in her silent Turkish guide, as he mimes and ushers her through a house overlooking the ruins of an ancient city. Swiftly, effortlessly, she breaks barriers between East and West. Settle has written several novels and plays and won the National Book Award for fiction in 1978 for the novel, Blood Tie. She now lives in Norfolk, Virginia.
from TURKISH REFLECTIONS
I thought that, instead of going by the main road, I would try to find and follow the path that Wood had discovered from the Artemision to the theater, if any trace of the sacred road still existed. I decided to search for it and, if I could find a trace, follow it around the mountain to the place where archaeologists think the Corresian Gate entered the city walls, although the gate itself has never been found.
So I, a foreign lady dressed in a large sun hat and sensible Reeboks, started one morning in the early sun, at the single standing column that is all that is left above ground of the hundreds of columns that were once the great temple. I set out on the main road until I saw that there was a dirt road, more direct, that ran at an angle through farm fields and up the mountainside.
I dodged invaders in tour buses and private cars on their busy ways, and in a few minutes I had found a path through country silence, headed toward the mountain that is on the north side of the ruins.
I walked past orchards and farmhouses. The little path grew faint beyond the last farmhouse. I began to climb the hill, watching the shadow of my hat on the ground. Nobody had climbed there for so long that weeds had grown high in the middle of it, but it was still marked if only by the slight dip in the otherwise weedy cover and tangled vines. I began to thrust my way through them.
In the middle of what had become a ghost path, I saw the bones and a little of the torn pelt of a large animal—a cow, a deer—eaten there by wild things, and I knew that I had found something of what that world was like when there was no civilized modern overlay. I told myself that whatever beast it was, wolf or wild dog, it was asleep. At least I hoped it was well-fed and asleep.
I went on climbing in the sun that was getting heavier, searching the ground and the undergrowth. At the crest of one of the lower foothills, I looked, and looked again, afraid of being fooled. There it was, a fragment of marble that had been exposed by years of weather, and beyond it, a long straight edge of white marble that glistened in the light.
I had played at being Wood and I had found it, the sacred road. I went all blithe and brave in the morning, a nice lady in a big hat. I parted weeds, and struggled through vines, and when I parted two small saplings I found that I had walked to what I first thought was a cliff. It was not.
Down below me, still far away from the ruins of the ancient city within its fence and with its guides and crowds, was the small marble atrium of a lost suburban house. Weeds grew in an empty shallow pool. On either side of marble steps, there were still two dolphins that had once been fountains that poured water from their mouths into the pool. I slid down the hill to the level of the floor, and I walked a short path of marble to its door, where the two truncated columns on either side still showed the grooves where, at night, they would have closed the house to marauders.
But one night the marauders had come to this house, and it had been so long abandoned that nothing of any world was left there but a Roman atrium, a little pool, two dolphins, a threshold, and silence in the sun.
I went on past it, up along the crest of the hill again. I slipped and slid and felt a fool, and at one point thought, if I break an ankle or my leg on this hill, I won’t be found until I am a lady skeleton in a big hat, picked clean. I parted the underbrush and looked down upon another atrium, this one large and complete, with a fountain base in the center, and roofless rooms beyond it. The wall looked about ten feet high, and I skirted the top of it, holding onto small trees for balance, to look for a way down.
I hadn’t heard anything move, yet he stood there in front of me, smiling, quite silent, a large strong Turkish man, holding in his hand a small bunch of sweet wild thyme. He held it toward me, saying nothing, still smiling. There was something so gentle about him that I could not be afraid. I took the wild thyme, and I thanked him, in Turkish. He smiled again and touched his mouth and his ear. He was deaf and dumb. I still have the wild thyme, pressed and dried, kept like a Victorian lady’s souvenir of the Holy Land.
Dumb was the wrong word for him. There was no need for speech. He was an actor, an eloquent mime. I pointed to the atrium below and held my hands apart to show I didn’t know how to get down into it. He took my arm, and carefully, slowly, led me down a steep pile of rubble.
He mimed the opening of a nonexistent door and ushered me through it. He showed me roofless room after roofless room as if he had discovered them. He dug and threw imaginary earth over his shoulder to show that it had been dug up.
I think that he had scared people before, and he was happy that there was someone who would let him show his house, for it was his house. Maybe he did sleep there. I don’t know. I only know that he treated me as a guest in a ruin ten feet below the level of the ground, and that he took me from room to room
where once there had been marble walls and now there was only stone, where he was host and owner for a little while.
He showed me a small pool, held out his hand the height of a small child, and then swam across the air. All the time he smiled. He took me to a larger pool and swam again. Then he grabbed my arm and led me through a dark corridor toward what I thought at first was a cave. It was not. He sat down in a niche in the corridor, and strained until his face was pink, to show me it was the toilet. Then he took me into the kitchen where there were two ovens. They were almost complete, except that the iron doors were gone. The arches of narrow Byzantine bricks were graceful over them, and the ovens were large as if there had been a large family there.
For the first one he rolled dough for bread, kneaded it in air, slapped it, and put it in the oven. Then he took it out, broke it, and shared it with me. I ate the air with him. The other was the main oven, and he picked vegetables from the floor of the cave kitchen, hit air to kill an animal, made a stew, and placed it in the stone and brick niche. We ate it and then we walked out into the sun of the larger atrium. Behind it, in the hill, he gestured that it had not yet been dug up, and then he pointed to a marble votive herma, whose head was missing, and knelt behind it, grinning, and set his own head there, to show me what it was. The grin was ancient, a satyr’s grin.
We stood beyond his house on the edge of the hill, looking down on the buses and the crowd in the distance. Across and behind the noise and crowds, in a field, looking abandoned too, was the church of the Virgin Mary. The house where we stood had looked out over that and the harbor, and although it has not been found, I knew that it was near where the Corresian Gate had been.
When I gave my friend, my arkadaş, some money, he kissed my hand and held it to his forehead, and then, pleased with the sun and me, and the fact that someone had not run away from him who lived like Caliban in a ruin, he put his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. Then I went down the hill to Ephesus. When I looked back to wave he had disappeared.
What was the place? I’ve tried to find it in the books that tell what digging has been done at Ephesus, but this was outside the walls and not important enough to document, except for one obscure mention, that someone had dug there in 1926 and that there had been suburban mansions on the mountainside, and I already knew that. It exists across the tradition of a road, near a lost gate, near the stadium where Porphyrios the Mime was martyred as a Christian. Or maybe it was another Porphyrios; it was so long ago and there were so many martyrs.
JOAN DIDION
(1934–)
If Margaret Mead is the philosopher queen of observers, Joan Didion is the shaman, with a vision that projects the underlying meaning of things. In the following excerpt from her second collection of essays, The White Album, she says that Bogotá seems “a mirage, a delusion on the high savannah, its gold and its emeralds unattainable, inaccessible, its isolation so splendid and unthinkable that the very existence of a city astonishes.” For the past twenty years, Didion has been one of the foremost chroniclers of the impact of American popular culture on foreign places, particularly Latin America. Didion says she is “not so much interested in spontaneity. What concerns me is total control.” Didion has been criticized by feminists for being too tolerant of the condition of women and, indeed, says she does not believe in political solutions. “I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in mans soul.” Among her nine volumes of fiction and nonfiction are Salvador, based on an extended visit to El Salvador in 1982, and several collections of essays—including Slouching Towards Bethlehem and After Henry—many of which first appeared in publications such as Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. She lives in New York.
from THE WHITE ALBUM
On the Colombian Coast it was hot, fevered, eleven degrees off the equator with evening trades that did not relieve but blew hot and dusty. The sky was white, the casino idle. I had never meant to leave the coast but after a week of it I began to think exclusively of Bogotá, floating on the Andes an hour away by air. In Bogotá it would be cool. In Bogotá one could get The New York Times only two days late and the Miami Herald only one day late and also emeralds, and bottled water. In Bogotá there would be fresh roses in the bathrooms at the Hotel Tequendama and hot water twenty-four hours a day and numbers to be dialed for chicken sandwiches from room service and Xerox rápido and long-distance operators who could get Los Angeles in ten minutes. In my room in Cartagena I would wake to the bleached coastal morning and find myself repeating certain words and phrases under my breath, an incantation: Bogotá, Bacatá. El Dorado. Emeralds. Hot water. Madeira consommé in cool dining rooms. Santa Fé de Bogotá del Nuevo Reino de Granada de las Indias del Mar Océano. The Avianca flight to Bogotá left Cartagena every morning at ten-forty, but such was the slowed motion of the coast that it took me another four days to get on it.
Maybe that is the one true way to see Bogotá, to have it float in the mind until the need for it is visceral, for the whole history of the place has been to seem a mirage, a delusion on the high savannah, its gold and its emeralds unattainable, inaccessible, its isolation so splendid and unthinkable that the very existence of a city astonishes. There on the very spine of the Andes gardeners espalier roses on embassy walls. Swarms of little girls in proper navy-blue school blazers line up to enter the faded tent of a tatty traveling circus: the elephant, the strong man, the tattooed man from Maracaibo. I arrived in Bogotá on a day in 1973 when the streets seemed bathed in mist and thin brilliant light and in the amplified pop voice of Nelson Ned, a Brazilian dwarf whose records played in every disco storefront. Outside the sixteenth-century Church of San Francisco, where the Spanish viceroys took office when the country was Nueva Granada and where Simón Bolívar assumed the presidency of the doomed republic called Gran Colombia, small children and old women hawked Cuban cigars and cartons of American cigarettes and newspapers with the headline “JACKIE Y ARI.” I lit a candle for my daughter and bought a paper to read about Jackie and Ari, how the princess de los norteamericanos ruled the king of the Greek sea by demanding of him pink champagne every night and medialunas every morning, a story a child might invent. Later, in the Gold Museum of the Banco de la República, I looked at the gold the Spaniards opened the Americas to get, the vision of El Dorado which was to animate a century and is believed to have begun here, outside Bogotá, at Lake Guatavita. “Many golden offerings were cast into the lake,” wrote the anthropologist Olivia Vlahos of the nights when the Chibcha Indians lit bonfires on the Andes and confirmed their rulers at Guatavita.
Many more were heaped on a raft.… Then into the firelight stepped the ruler-to-be, his nakedness coated with a sticky resin. Onto the resin his priests applied gold dust and more gold dust until he gleamed like a golden statue. He stepped onto the raft, which was cut loose to drift into the middle of the lake. Suddenly he dived into the black water. When he emerged, the gold was gone, washed clean from his body. And he was king.
Until the Spaniards heard the story, and came to find El Dorado for themselves. “One thing you must understand,” a young Colombian said to me at dinner that night. We were at Eduardo’s out in the Chico district and the piano player was playing “Love Is Blue” and we were drinking an indifferent bottle of Château Léoville-Poyferré which cost $20 American. “Spain sent all its highest aristocracy to South America.” In fact I had heard variations on this hallucination before, on the coast: when Colombians spoke about the past I often had the sense of being in a place where history tended to sink, even as it happened, into the traceless solitude of autosuggestion. The princess was drinking pink champagne. High in the mountains the men were made of gold. Spain sent its highest aristocracy to South America. They were all stories a child might invent.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
—The opening line of One
Hundred Y
ears of Solitude,
by the Colombian novelist
Gabriel García Márquez.
At the big movie theaters in Bogotá in the spring of 1973 The Professionals was playing, and It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, two American pictures released in, respectively, 1967 and 1964. The English-language racks of paperback stands were packed with Edmund Wilson’s The Cold War and the Income Tax, the 1964 Signet edition. This slight but definite dislocation of time fixed on the mind the awesome isolation of the place, as did dislocations of other kinds. On the fourth floor of the glossy new Bogotá Hilton one could lunch in an orchid-filled gallery that overlooked the indoor swimming pool, and also overlooked a shantytown of packing-crate and tin-can shacks where a small boy, his body hideously scarred and his face obscured by a knitted mask, played listlessly with a yo-yo. In the lobby of the Hotel Tequendama two Braniff stewardesses in turquoise-blue Pucci pantsuits flirted desultorily with a German waiting for the airport limousine; a third ignored the German and stood before a relief map on which buttons could be pressed to light up the major cities of Colombia, Santa Marta, on the coast; Barranquilla, Cartagena. Medellín, on the Central Cordillera. Cali, on the Cauca River, San Agustín on the Magdalena. Leticia, on the Amazon.
I watched her press the buttons one by one, transfixed by the vast darkness each tiny bulb illumined. The light for Bogotá blinked twice and went out. The girl in the Pucci pantsuit traced the Andes with her index finger. Alto arrecife de la aurora humana, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called the Andes. High reef of the human dawn. It cost the conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada two years and the health of most of his men to reach Bogotá from the coast. It cost me $26.
“I knew they were your bags,” the man at the airport said, producing them triumphantly from a moraine of baggage and cartons and rubble from the construction that seemed all over Bogotá a chronic condition. “They smelled American.” Parece una turista norteamericana, I read about myself in El Espectador a few mornings later. She resembles an American tourist. In fact I was aware of being an American in Colombia in a way I had not been in other places. I kept running into Americans, compatriots for whom the emotional center of Bogotá was the massive concrete embassy on Carrera 10, members of a phantom colony called “the American presence” which politesse prevented them from naming out loud. Several times I met a young American who ran an “information” office, which he urged me to visit; he had extremely formal manners, appeared for the most desultory evening in black tie, and was, according to the Colombian I asked, CIA. I recall talking at a party to a USIS man who spoke in a low mellifluous voice of fevers he had known, fevers in Sierra Leone, fevers in Monrovia, fevers on the Colombian coast. Our host interrupted this litany, demanded to know why the ambassador had not come to the party. “Little situation in Cali,” the USIS man said, and smiled professionally. He seemed very concerned that no breach of American manners be inferred, and so, absurdly, did I. We had nothing in common except the eagles on our passports, but those eagles made us, in some way I did not entirely understand, co-conspirators, two strangers heavy with responsibility for seeing that the eagle should not offend. We would prefer the sweet local Roman-Cola to the Coca-Cola the Colombians liked. We would think of Standard Oil as Esso Colombiano. We would not speak of fever except to one another. Later I met an American actor who had spent two weeks taking cold showers in Bogotá before he discovered that the hot and cold taps in the room assigned him were simply reversed: he had never asked, he said, because he did not want to be considered an arrogant gringo.
