by Irwin Shaw
From Amalfi south the coast takes on a different character. There are no more great resorts whose names are known throughout the world, no more congregations of pleasure boats from whose decks float conversations in ten languages, no more crowds of tourists pouring out of buses to invade the beaches. The coast is rough and inhospitable, with ports few and far between, and the country is baked and forlorn and glorious and poor.
PAESTUM
Nobody, I had been told by travelers who had landed at Salerno with the 36th Division, should miss Paestum, the rediscovered city not far from the disputed beach. Our landing was peaceful, at a little town called Agropoli, (like everyplace else, of course, once a great naval power), which lies some miles south of Paestum. Paestum was founded by Greeks from Sybaris in the sixth century B.C., was originally called Poseidonia, and, considerate of its patron, had its feet fittingly in the sea. But by now the land has filled in and the city of Neptune is separated from the god’s element by several miles of waving coarse grass. Malaria and the Saracens did it in and it has been deserted for a thousand years. Its miraculously preserved temples loom huge and civilized against a wild, sunstricken landscape, one more stone witness to the impermanence of man and the transience of his gods.
The fluted columns stood against the blue sky, the sacrificial altar that had not known blood for a millennium lay intact, the wideflung walls protected only cicada and owls, and just under our feet, with a symbolism almost too pat to have been spontaneous, a large black snake hissed across the stones of Neptune’s temple after a scurrying, frightened lizard.
V
CALABRIA
The coast of Calabria is not rich in ports, and we ran along it at full speed, hoping the weather would hold. I had wanted to make as much of this part of the voyage as possible by night, but the Captain refused to hear of it. He was overworked enough as it was, he said, and if we sailed by night we would have to put in by day, so that he could sleep. This actually was not unreasonable, since he was the only one aboard who could be trusted to stand a watch at the wheel alone at night, and he was so busy by day helping his wife and daughter that he was often exhausted. On our previous trip, both the Spaniard and the English boy were trustworthy sailors and could spell the Captain in all safety. The Spaniard also would pad silently off the ship at five-thirty in the morning to do the shopping and would have all stores on board ready for breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper, soirées, or shipwreck, by the time I came up for breakfast at seven. Since the Captain’s wife spoke none of the Mediterranean languages and was not strong enough to carry anything heavy, the Captain went with her on her shopping expeditions. To make matters worse, she rose much later than the Spaniard and was much more concerned about how she fed her husband and daughter than about how she fed us. Our food bills would have done credit to the best restaurant in Paris, whether we ate on board or not, and there were daily feasts below while we munched our American salad on deck. The Captain, who seemed to be eating for the winter as well as the summer, rinsing down the roasts and stews and trifles generously with wine, would come up on deck after lunch four or five pounds heavier than when he had gone down below an hour before.
We had been told by the friend of ours who had introduced us to the joys of cruising that we should allow 1000 old francs (approximately two dollars) for each hand on board. Since this wouldn’t even have kept our crew in oranges for breakfast, I resigned myself early in the trip to the financial facts of deep sea life and wished all hands a hearty appetite at all meals. My wife, with years of thrifty handling of household accounts behind her, took a harsh view of what she considered my debonair attitude in the affair, and there were several acrimonious marital exchanges as the smells of soufflés cooking and the sound of huge roasts of beef disappearing rose from the galley.
My wife, who by this time had declared open warfare on the Captain, thought I was cowardly not to put my foot down. For awhile, every meal the Captain and his family ate diminished me more and more in my wife’s estimation. Perhaps I was cowardly. But the weapons of a poor charterer of a boat are few and pitiful. You have already paid for the full trip, including the Captain’s salary; you cannot clap him in irons; if you want him to do something he doesn’t want to do, an engine immediately breaks down or he has a feeling a storm is coming up and the safety of the ship, for which he has sole responsibility, cannot be risked. You can ask to be put off, but the idea of being landed with twenty valises and a cocktail shaker on the barren coast of Calabria in the middle of the summer, while your costly holiday sails out of sight on the blue sea, makes you hesitate before acting drastically. The trap is shut tight by the fact that in any court you might repair to for redress the Captain would have the appearance of justice completely on his side.
To complicate matters, I liked the old man and his daughter. I spent many enjoyable hours with him in the wheelhouse, glasses in hand (“Ah, thank you, Sir, I don’t mind a wee drap.”), listening to tales of the sea, the sailing vessels he had served on, the places he had seen, the rigors of the war, the ingratitude of the Royal Navy, which had kept him in service for seven years with a rank commensurate with his responsibility and then released him summarily, with no hope of a pension. He also taught my son how to handle small boats and assist on the bigger one and let him stand tricks at the wheel in open water, a position of heady power at the age of eleven. It is hard to dislike an expert at anything and the Captain was sure, quick, and completely knowledgeable both at the wheel and in the engine room. There was a danger of poisoning, bloodshed and bankruptcy aboard, on one side or another, but no danger of foundering, collision, or hitting a reef while the Captain was in command.
I didn’t either like or dislike his wife, since I rarely saw her except at a distance, on dry land, leading her husband back from the market, she carrying two or three tomatoes daintily in a shopping bag, the Captain uxoriously staggering under the weight of enough food to feed an infantry platoon for weeks. The sad truth is that virtue, in this case, as often happens, was an inconvenient nuisance. A worse husband and father would have made a much better skipper.
So it wasn’t a famously happy ship that sped south toward the toe of the Italian boot. The Calabrian coast was mountainous and pale straw colored, with only occasional small settlements here and there in folds in the hills. With our binoculars we could see a few shepherds scrambling with their goats over rocky pastures on the water’s edge, and tiny figures working in bleak terraced vineyards carved in sweat, poverty and desolation out of the vertiginous bluffs leading down to the sea.
Not being able to examine much of the countryside personally, I did the next best thing. While my son read Gone with the Wind in a French translation, roaring with laughter at the attempts to render Negro dialect into the language of Victor Hugo and Sainte-Beuve, I read Norman Douglas’ Old Calabria, which I had bought, along with South Wind, in Capri. Douglas was admirably equipped as a travel writer, and I envied him as we rolled past the land that he had traversed so conscientiously before the First World War. He knew the names of flowers, trees, birds and minerals, and as far as I could tell in reading his book so many years later, identified them all correctly. He made terrible trips on foot in July all over this scorching part of the world, at times when hotels were scarce, food bad, when it could be found, and malaria rife. He obviously knew Italian almost perfectly and loved the southern country and was furious with the mismanagement that had deforested it and deranged its climate and brought it to such a state of want and neglect. With the typical highhanded candor of the English traveler of pre-World War I vintage, he criticized everything freely—the Church, the venality of Italian law, the superstitious peasant belief in miracles, the emigration to America—with no foolishly delicate notions about being a guest in the country and not wounding his hosts’ susceptibilities. With all his love for Calabria, he was hard-headedly unromantic about it and full of juicy statistics, such as the fact that in one year at the time of Bourbon Restoration there were 7,000 murders
by bandits in Calabria alone. And, making no concessions to his readers, he blithely included long passages in Latin, Greek, Italian and French, without translation, with the aristocratic assumption that anybody who was sensible enough to want to read him would be well enough educated to handle these scraps of popular languages without difficulty.
MESSINA
Dolphins, those symbols of luck and fair weather, accompanied us as we approached Messina, and we saw our first sword-fishing boats, small vessels equipped with enormously long bowsprits with platforms on the tips for the harpoonist and extraordinarily tall masts for the lookout, who, when he sees a swordfish lying in the water, takes over the steering of the ship himself by means of lines that go down from the top of the mast to the rudder, very much as bombardiers take over the piloting of their planes as they go into their bombing run. For some reason, since antiquity, the Straits of Messina have swarmed with swordfish, and their succulent steaks, prepared in a dozen different ways, are the specialty of most Sicilian restaurants.
We passed through the whirlpool of Charybdis, now, on this calm day, merely going through a polite circling motion so as not to disappoint visitors, and tied up in the harbor of Messina in front of a railroad yard next to an American freighter discharging American wheat as a blocked lire gift to the Sicilians.
Messina, a bustling, raw city, is a kind of pre-atomic Hiroshima. As in the case of some human beings who are unkindly and wantonly marked for disaster from birth, everything that has happened to Messina through its history has been for the worst. Set in a land and seascape of luxuriant green and blue, the city has gone, through the years, like a pretty woman with deplorable taste in men, from one catastrophe to another. Aside from more than the usual share of plunderings, razings, massacres, and plagues to which the cities of the Mediterranean Basin were all periodically subjected, Messina was the victim in 1908 of an earthquake and tidal wave that killed 80,000 of its inhabitants and practically leveled the city. And in 1943, in the massive bombardments that accompanied the Allied campaign in Sicily, it was once more terribly reduced. The truth that the human race will continue to live anywhere has never been more clearly demonstrated than by the fact that at this moment Messina has 242,900 inhabitants. If I were forced to live there, I have the feeling that I would be testing the nearest walls for quivers twenty times a day and keeping a nervous eye peeled for sudden flashes in the sky.
TAORMINA
We had time for only one day in Sicily, and we used it to make an excursion by car to Taormina, which I had heard about mostly as a kind of private shoot for a body of Southern post-Faulkner American writers. Taormina has been used as a resort for a couple of thousand years, and even one glance suffices to explain its long popularity. Its solid villas and hotels are set in lush gardens on the mountainside; there are the well-preserved evidences of the work of Greek, Roman and medieval builders; the sun, even in winter, is theoretically constant; and on clear days, which are supposed to follow each other with monotonous regularity, untrammeled views of Etna are presented from every window. It looks rich, old and comfortable, and two thousand years of catering to the needs of vacationers has fined down the attitude of the natives to one of prescient efficiency. The Germans, naturally, fell under its spell, like everyone else—so much so that, in the polite understatement of the English guidebook I had with me, “the town attracted the attention of allied aircraft in July 1943 when it temporarily became Kesselring’s headquarters.” When I read that I hoped that none of the airmen whose attention was attracted by the town had been there before and had to remember the long, happy afternoons they had spent there as they dropped bombs on the antique candybox.
We went to look at the Greek Theatre, which is in such good repair that performances are given there regularly. The backdrop, I was assured, included an incomparable view of Mt. Etna, seen through pillars that had been erected about the time of Pericles, certainly a more inspiring setting for a theatre than Shubert Alley. But we had our usual luck with volcanoes. Mt. Etna was wrapped from top to bottom in cloud. We saw nothing and got drenched, besides, in the rain that suddenly poured down. The guardian of the theatre apologized to us for the rain and told us it was most unusual. These were the first drops, he said, that had fallen since February. Gently, to console us, he told us that it was good for the flowers and laid the dust.
In the restaurant in which we sheltered, dripping, for lunch, I garnered more bad news from the guidebook. That shapely semi-circle cut out of the rocky hill for the production of Orestes and Lysistrata and Oedipus Rex had been altered and used by the Romans for gladiatorial combats. Our belief in the progress of civilization takes a severe shaking each time we are confronted, in any specific place, by the fact that the Romans followed the Greeks.
Antique shops are numerous on the narrow streets, and all of them are crammed with carved wooden Byzantine angels and elaborately swirling candelabra. We stopped in one and bought a painted side panel taken from a donkey cart. Surrounded by a carved floral pattern and winged serpents and floating cherubs blowing long horns in faded blue and red, the panel has two scenes, one of them, as far as I could tell, depicting Ulysses, Telemachus and Penelope on the eve of Ulysses’ setting out for the War, and the other Aeneas carrying his father, with the walls of Troy burning in the background. This link that had bound some Sicilian peasant to his profoundest past cost 7000 lire ($11.67), and the dealer threw in a gilded tin puppet of a Norman knight, armed to defeat the Saracen, complete with sword and strings, for my son.
The road between Taormina and Messina is a bitter demonstration in poverty. It takes a philosopher or the most callous of tourists to travel it without a sense of shock, mixed with shame. The one-story houses line the road, with the stream of traffic sending gusts of dust and oil into the small dark rooms which seem to shelter whole families in cubbyholes. The men sit around, in conversational groups, facing the road with an air of permanent unemployment. The women, also outside their homes, to make the most of the free sunlight, sit in somewhat smaller groups, but most of them modestly face inward, their backs actually and symbolically to the world. All of them are busy working, embroidering napkins, tablecloths, anything, from dawn to dusk, and you have the feeling that all over the fertile but tragic island famine is only staved off by the pitiful, endless efforts of those swift dark fingers.
CROTONE
To reach Crotone, our next port, we had to sail around the toe of Italy and along the sole of the boot to the spot where the peninsula goes inward in the arch-like curve of the Gulf of Taranto. Crotone, or Croton, as it was called by the Greeks, was for a time the home of Pythagoras, whose philosophy was a curious mixture of religion, ethics, and arithmetic. He believed in the immortality and transmigration of souls, in vegetarianism, and in the reality of numbers, whatever that means. He also discovered the dependence of musical intervals on arithmetical ratios of lengths of string at the same tension. In the middle of town a rundown hotel that goes by the name of the Albergo Pytagora commemorates the philosopher’s connection with Crotone, but there is little else there to remind one that this was a center of learning. Huge sulphur refineries rear behind the harbor and an acrid smell is always in the air. However, to demonstrate that culture had not entirely fled from this distant end of Italy, a ship’s chandler greeted us as we tied up and announced that we could buy fuel or whisky from him and charge it to the Diners’ Club.
As in so many southern towns in the summertime, Crotone only really comes alive at night. The streets, which have been virtually deserted all afternoon long, are taken over by strollers, almost all male, the café tables are filled by groups of men and boys of varying ages who seem to have their allotted places in which they carry on conversations that endure for 365 nights a year. The women, who are in evidence during the day, seem to be locked away in a night-time, Calabrian version of purdah. At nine in the evening, the liveliest places are the barber shops. There the men regard themselves critically, but with great devotion, in the mirro
r, as the barbers, who, like most Italian barbers, are enormously skillful, work on their clients with an attention to detail that I have seen equalled only by hairdressers on Hollywood movie sets.
The young bloods vary the evening monotony by jumping onto gleaming Vespas or behind the wheels of small cars whose mufflers have been removed and roaring around the streets. My wife and I were taking a last breath of sulphuric air on the deck of our boat at midnight, when two carloads of young men, led by an albino with sinister dark glasses, thundered up and stopped near our gangplank. They got out and stood staring candidly at the boat and us. Then the albino asked, “Per vedere?” and led the group in a move toward the gangplank. When I said, no, they couldn’t take a look, they stopped, and talked grumblingly among themselves, making sure that I overheard the words, “non sono generosi,” which they repeated reproachfully several times. Then, to punish us, they got back into their cars and started the motors and turned on both radios, full blast. But after a few minutes of this, they tired of the sport, and roared off along the breakwater. The diversions in the womanless society of Crotone are meager.
We were to make for Corfu the next day, a long sail over the open waters of the Ionian Sea, but a north wind was blowing hard out of the Gulf of Taranto, whipping up a froth of whitecaps beyond the breakwater, and we stayed in harbor. Some fishermen who were mending their nets near us told us that the wind would die down around four o’clock and spring up again about midnight. To prepare for Greece I dug out a copy of Robert Graves’ new translation of The Iliad, in plain prose, broken here and there by simple, ballad-like passages in rhyme. I spent the day happily following the fortunes of the heroes, who made no bones about running away from a battle when the omens were bad, taking the unfavorable signs as indications that their particular protective gods weren’t working for them that day and wished them to remove themselves, like sensible men, from danger. Modern armies might be more bearable with a little of this kind of thinking. All during the war, I noticed, men saw unfavorable signs on all sides before battles, and it would have helped if they could have explained their subsequent departure from exposed positions to their commanding officers by describing a vision of Pallas Athene shaking her head or the appearance of an eagle on the left hand side of the line of battle.
