A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  Liberal though you may be, and broad-minded, and looking for the best in everybody, nevertheless leaving the grey purlieus of communism constitutes a festivity: an airy, lacy celebration, like having your first swim of the season, or falling in love. They check your baggage very carefully in Leningrad, and thumb laboriously through your manuscripts, and visibly brighten when they come across a chart of the Seven-Year Plan, and send you off to your aircraft feeling obscurely chastened, as though the headmaster is not precisely angry with you, only just a little disappointed. But a brief hour in a bumbling Ilyushin, alone with the wistful stewardess (wearing her brown fur-collared coat over her uniform), and at Helsinki you tumble into the other half of the world. The man at the desk merely says ‘Passport, please’: but bells ring, birds sing, and somewhere a bottle pops.

  Here are the things that overjoyed me most, when that kindly man, with a barely perceptible examination of my passport, sent me whistling into Finland, guided by an exquisite airline hostess: Finnish airline hostesses first, for their reviving breath of elegance; clean, glistening architecture second, for its whisper of liberty; nice little houses in a row; Esso and International Harvester, for their welcoming gleam of profit; cars of all nations, driven at a proper pace (in Russia they never seem to exceed thirty, even in the howling spaces); the rosy cheeks of plump burghers, and children playing in their own gardens; shop windows gracefully dressed, well-cut suits, a quayside that anyone can walk along, a jolly polished steam train beside the docks, Simplicity patterns, My Fair Lady in Swedish, coffee-pots whose lids, you may be confident, will not fall off with a dismal splash into the coffee-cup.

  Even after Leningrad, that loveliest wraith among cities, Helsinki feels marvellously free, easy and undaunted, and down its comfortable streets all the breezes of the West sweep like a cocktail of elixirs. A visit to the city’s most famous bookshop, which claims to be the largest in Europe and is bursting with the books of a dozen languages, is like a shot in the arm and a sniff of salts after the drab, dutiful, brownish bookshelves of the Soviet Union. A stroll beside the harbour, where the patient ice-breakers (when they are not on strike) potter stolidly backwards and forwards down the shipping lanes, is wonderfully exhilarating: the wind off a Russian sea feels like a death in the family, but when it blows out of the Gulf of Finland it is only a tingle in the cheek. An hour in a sauna, the Finnish steam bath, where you are slapped periodically with birch and twigs and plunged deliciously from agonizingly hot to shivering cold, is enough to scour the very miasma of Russia from your person and leave you as clean, brisk, and spanking as a magazine advertisement.

  After the stocky, buttoned Russians the people of Helsinki seem marvellously lithe and light-footed, big but agile, jovial at smorgasbords or loping and sloping across their snow-fields like Tibetan holy men. Their children, slithering about with ice-hockey sticks, give the heartening impression that they came into the world on skis and have not just put them on in the interests of some ideological demonstration. Their wives are as neat as pins, and gossip sharply in expensive coffee-shops. Their hotels are either delectably modern, all pale wood and sliding glass, or fragrantly Edwardian, with murals and cigar-smoked panelling. Their suburbs are posh with provincial snobbery, and they are a people that nobody in the world, not even the heart-throb marching progressive, could possibly feel sorry for. They are as tough as nails, and twice as spiky.

  In Helsinki, only an hour from the Winter Palace, you can do exactly what you like. You can take a ride in a sleigh across the frozen harbour, unimpeded by suspicious policemen and pulled by a bleary kind of pony. You can build yourself a little hut on the ice and fish for your dinner through a hole. You can drink mystical liqueurs from the forests, made of berries, pine cones and Arctic brambles. You can eat, stifling a sentimental tear, smoked reindeer tongue with salad, or guzzle your way through a fish cock – pork stuffed with fresh-water herring, and baked peculiarly into a loaf. You can go to a French film or an American play, and read the English papers with a flourish outside the Presidential Palace (a pleasant minor mansion of the kind described by estate agents as being ‘suitable for conversion’).

  All these many pleasures and stimulants greet you as your taxi skids genially into Helsinki; and all the fun and freedom of the West welcomes you, and all the vitamins and calories are there to bolster your wasted stamina. Most people, when they leave the potato world behind the Curtain, seem to pine for some fresh or virile victual, a lettuce or a pineapple, a cucumber or a pickled egg. My own craving, when I flew into Finland out of eastern Europe, was for raw carrots, and when I arrived in Helsinki I went straight to a grocer, ordered half a pound, washed them in my hotel bathroom, and ate them luxuriously with a glass of schnapps.

  But here is an odd and provoking fact: I ate those rich red vegetables with delight, and I wallowed like an emperor in all the milky pleasure of capitalism; but when, later that day, I wanted something to read with my dinner some unexpected instinct guided my choice, a kind of reluctant nostalgia, a niggling trace of respect and affection, and when I sat down to my pig’s trotters I found myself dining with Turgenev. (And all that well-dressed little capital, I felt, all that brave and courteous citizenry, could not offer me quite such company.)

  Trieste

  Another anomaly of the Cold War was the Adriatic seaport of Trieste, disputed by Italy and Yugoslavia after the Second World War, and defined by Churchill as the southern end of the Iron Curtain. By the time I wrote this piece its status had been finally determined, but it remained nevertheless neither quite one thing nor another. It was the first essay I published about a city which was to become part of my personal, my professional and my literary life, and the subject of my final book (not counting this …).

  ‘What’s become of Waring?’ asked Browning’s poem about the vanished man-about-town. You may well ask of Trieste (where, in fact, Waring was), for never a city slipped so adroitly out of the world’s headlines, or vanished so utterly into the limbo of forgotten crises. Sometimes a traveller returns with a glimpse of the place – a forlorn and demoralized city, he says, without a purpose in life. Sometimes a wandering diplomatist, passing through from Egypt or the East, thinks he recognizes a demarcation line or hears the echo of a Slovene demonstration. For the rest of us, Trieste has simply faded from our acquaintance, and most of us have even forgotten what all the fuss was about.

  For fuss there was, for several years after the Second World War, when both Italy and Yugoslavia laid claim to this port, and squabbled so fiercely over it that time and again some sort of half-cock conflict seemed imminent. The dispute fizzled out gradually, inconclusively, point by point, and the de facto result is that, while the neighbouring peninsula of Istria has dropped into the maw of Yugoslavia, Trieste is now, in an anonymous and muffled sort of way, part of Italy again. There is still a testy Slovene minority in the city, and there are Slovene schools and cultural centres, but in effect this is an Italian port. Bright little Fiats scurry along the waterfront, smart Italian liners laze beside the quays, and the girls who stroll by arm-in-arm, high-bosomed and languid-eyed, look like so many aspirant Sophia Lorens. The flavour of Trieste today is unmistakably Italianate, and high in the grand old Governor’s Palace sits the Commissioner-General, every inch a Roman consul.

  There is a slight legal haziness to it all, though, owing to the fact that the United Nations never really made up its mind what to do with the place, and this blurred status perhaps contributes to the torpor of Trieste. It is a dissatisfied, rather petulant city. It is nearly half a century since it lost its old function as the chief outlet of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but to this day it is always looking over its shoulder to the palmy days of old, the lavish imperial days, when the floodtide of the Empire’s prosperity poured into its coffers, and all the urbanity of Vienna spilled over into its salons. Trieste is now the easternmost protrusion of Italy, but it looks central European still, four-square and brooding, and suggests to me one of those impoverished gentl
ewomen, addicted to piquet and von Hofmannsthal, who are still to be found in stuffy drawing-rooms bewailing the decline of the Habsburgs. ‘Of course,’ this city seems to say, ‘we were used to better things, but there, ha! the world has changed! And how’s your poor dear mother?’

  For those few years of contention, after the war, Trieste was, if not happy, at least alive and crossly kicking. Its hinterland had been lost, and its position as a great entrepôt centre: but the eyes of the world were upon it, boosting its ego, and the powers argued over its future, gently buttressing its id. Perhaps it was only whistling in the dark, but there was foreign money about in those days, and a well-paid occupying soldiery. They were effervescent, speculative, exciting times, with a riot on Saturday night and a hey-ho for Tito! Today, however, Trieste has subsided into lassitude. By slow stages the Italian government has integrated the port into the affairs of the Republic, and there is nothing special about it any more. It has been domesticated, and lost its fizz. Once it was the seventh port of the world. Now it is only the third port of Italy.

  Of course, chance and history have dealt harshly with Trieste. ‘Our city is built in a very uncomfortable position,’ a Trieste lawyer once remarked to me: and so it undeniably is. Those bleak hills over the ridge are in communist territory. Those waters beyond the headland are the Adriatic, bounded by Marxist shores. Most of the hinterland that should cherish these wharves has been bundled behind the Iron Curtain, and it is many a long uneconomic mile to the factories and markets of Italy. Look at the map of Europe, even so, and you will see why nobody wants to invest capital or enthusiasm in Trieste, poised so precariously between the ideologies.

  To be sure, it is still the seaport of Austria – the trains that clank industriously along the promenade have usually come from Graz or Vienna. A reasonable amount of traffic still flows through Trieste. The shipbuilding yards are, when they are not on strike, fairly busy. There are several new local industries. Unemployment is no worse here than it is anywhere else in Italy. The tourists still come in season. People are quite well dressed, and adequately fed. This is still an important insurance centre, and the name of Lloyd Triestino is still familiar on the high seas. Nothing very tragic is happening to Trieste. It is simply pottering. ‘Look at Genoa,’ say the Triestinos angrily, ‘and Bologna, and all the Italian boom-towns! Look at Fiume! Look what the Italians promised us! Look at this bumble-head bureaucracy they’ve given us! I’ll tell you, my friend,’ – here a flick of cigarette ash, a drooping of eyelids, an intricate change of inflection – ‘there are times, loyal Italian though I am, when I wish our problems had never been solved!’

  For it is lack of gusto that mostly strikes you in Trieste today. Neither time nor toil, said Browning’s eye-witness, could mar the features of Waring; but Trieste has not been so resilient in its exile from celebrity. Its talented young people are leaving, its old liberal tradition is neglected, its brave commercial instincts are blunted or frustrated. Depressed and halfhearted, it meanders on in disillusionment: not drunk, indeed, or crippled by war, or oppressed, even destitute; just bored, that’s all, just bored.

  11

  South American Frissons

  The Guardian sent me for some months to South America, a sub-continent about which, like most Europeans then, I was appallingly ignorant. The assignment offered me a break from the complexities of the Cold War, and gave me many and varied frissons. I saw a dead body floating disregarded down a river in Colombia, I ate urchins straight from the sea in Chile, I was homesick in Buenos Aires and ravished in Rio. The Guardian reprinted my reports in a booklet, and here are three of its city evocations.

  La Paz

  Bolivia, as the consequence of a revolution, had recently given social and political equality to every one of its citizens, at least in theory. Nobody knew how long it would last, but for the moment it made La Paz, the political capital of the republic, feel fascinatingly animated.

  Southwards from the glistening steel-blue Titicaca runs the highway through the Bolivian Altiplano. To the east stand the splendours of the Andean cordillera, rank upon rank of noble snow-peak, but the road passes through a landscape more lunar than celestial, an arid, drear, friendless kind of country, 14,000 feet above the sea. It is littered with the poor mud huts of the Aymara Indians, and the piles of stones they have scraped and scrabbled from their miserable soil, and sometimes you meet a peasant with his donkeys or his llamas, and sometimes you set the dust flying in an adobe village, and sometimes you see far away across the wilderness some solitary Indian woman, like a huddled witch on a moor, hastening bent-back across the rubble.

  For sixty miles the road plods on through this monotony, and then it falls over a precipice. Suddenly it crosses the lip of the high plateau and tumbles helter-skelter, lickety-spit into a chasm: and as you slither down the horse-shoe bends you see in the ravine below you, secreted in a fold of the massif, the city of La Paz. Its red roofs and mud huts pile up against the canyon walls and spill away into the river valley below. All around is the immensity of the Altiplano, and high above it to the south meditates the lovely white mountain called Illimani, where the royal condor of Inca legend folded its great wings in sleep.

  La Paz is the highest of the world’s big cities, at 12,000 feet. It is a tumultuous, feverish, often maddening, generally harum-scarum kind of place, but nobody with an eye to country or a taste for drama could fail to respond to its excitements, or resist the superb improbability of its situation. After such an approach, in such an environment, you might reasonably expect to find, like the old voyagers, men with three eyes, or heads slung beneath their shoulders. Well, La Paz does her best. Consider a few simple facts about the city:

  The atmosphere of La Paz is so rarefied that virtually the only function of the single municipal fire engine is squirting indelibly coloured water at political demonstrators.

  One of the liveliest institutions of La Paz is a smugglers’ trade union, the Syndicate of Frontier Merchants, and by far its best shopping centre is the Mercado Negro, a vast open-air emporium of illegally imported goods in which I recently ran into a Customs official buying himself some illicit gramophone records.

  Half the women of La Paz wear bowler hats, reverently removing them when they enter a church, and among the old-fashioned cottage remedies readily available are foetus of llama, skin of cat and horn of armadillo.

  La Paz has known 179 coups and revolutions in the 135 years of Bolivian independence, and its currency is such that when I emptied my pockets the other day I found myself in possession of 683,700 Bolivianos (I needed a million odd to pay my hotel bill, plus a few thousand, of course, for the bellboy).

  There, I am laughing at the place, but only with wry affection, for I have seldom found a city more enthralling. It is anything but comical beneath the veneer. It is pathetic, tragic, stimulating and menacing, and it still retains some of the savage glare and breathless glitter that the Spaniards brought when they founded it four centuries ago. It is not in itself a beautiful place. Its few old buildings are swamped in halfhearted modernism, and all around it in the bowl of its canyon the Indians have built their terraced streets of mud and corrugated iron. It possesses nevertheless, to an almost eccentric degree, the quality of individualism. There is nowhere else much like La Paz on the face of the earth, but if I had to find an analogy I would suggest some quivering desert city, Damascus, say, or Kairouan, miraculously transplanted to a declivity in the Tibetan plateau.

  This is a city of the Andes, and it is the swarming Aymara Indians of the Andes who nowadays set its style. The men are sometimes striking enough, with their ear-flapped woollen hats and Inca faces, but the Andean women are fascinating beyond description. With their rakishly cocked bowler hats, their blinding blouses and skirts, their foaming flounces of petticoats, the babies like tumultuous infant potentates upon their backs and the sandals made of old tyres upon their feet – gorgeously accoutred and endlessly industrious, plumed often with a handsome dignity and assurance, t
hey give to La Paz a flavour part gypsy, part coster and all pungency.

  An Indian, highland turbulence keeps this city tense and wary, and makes the midnight curfew more the rule than exception. In the halls of the National Congress, beneath the painted scrutiny of Bolívar, they are mostly Spanish faces, declaiming Latin polemics, but high in the balcony above the debate, peering silently over the railing, are the dark, attentive, enigmatic eyes of the Aymaras. In La Paz you feel everywhere the rising awareness of the Indian people, together with the smouldering of latent violence. It is a city of rumours and echoes. Sometimes the miners of Catavi are about to march upon the capital, dragging their hostages behind them. Sometimes, before daybreak, you may hear the tread of marching feet and the singing of slogans outside your window. Sometimes masked carabinieri, slung about with tommy guns, ransack your car for arms, and sometimes you find a chain slung across the city gate on the hill-top, and a civilian with a rifle vigilantly beside it. Fifteen years ago the mob of La Paz hung the mutilated body of their president from a lamppost in the Plaza Murillo, and today the old square is stiff with soldiers, in German steel helmets and thick high-collared jackets, self-consciously ceremonious on little platforms outside the Presidency, unobtrusively watchful upon the roof of the cathedral.

  All this passion, all this energy, thumps through the city night and day, sharpened into something knifelike and tremulous by the breathless clarity of the altitude. You can feel it on the promenade at weekends, when the wide-eyed girls and men with small moustaches chatter with a kind of gay intensity at the tables of the Copacabana. You can feel it in the conversations of the place, dark with plots but humorous with tall stories, cynical but often secretive. You can sense it in the myriad slogans daubed on almost every wall, with their baffling permutations of political initials and the paint that drips down in frenzied blobs from their exhortations. You can even see it reflected in the smiling, bustling, and wagging of the city’s enchanting Carpaccio dogs. The marvellous glacial air of La Paz, which sends the tourists puffing and dizzy to their beds, makes for fizz, bounce and heady enthusiasm, and the isolation of this queer city, mountain metropolis of a land-locked state, gives it a striking sense of introvert obsession.