by Jan Morris
And coming down from Sonoma in the evening light, as in a resplendent dream I see the City.
At such revelatory moments, warranting the opening not just of a sentence, but of an entire essay with a conjunction – at such moments the city of San Francisco deserves the capital letter its citizens, I notice, like to give it. I have been experiencing that mystic initiation intermittently for thirty years, and it never fails to exalt me – so full of hope does the City look, so incomparably felicitous on its hills above the sea, like the city of all desires in the closing pages of an allegory.
All the more puzzling, then, that when I actually enter the streets of San Francisco, this time as always I find my responses peculiarly ambivalent. The vision lets me down. There is nothing illusory to the loveliness of the place, but at closer quarters the allegory fades, and something soft, something pallid seems to muffle the excitement. Whenever I come here – more so every time – San Francisco strikes me as being at once the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful and the most tantalizing of all the great cities of the world.
*
Ah, but is it a great city? Certainly the streets look properly metropolitan – boulevards lined with banks, posh stores and hotels where Sinatras stay, neighbourhoods authentically equipped with ethnic eateries and adult bookstores, back alleys urbanely nooky, flowered and burglar-alarmed. But the buildings themselves, however imposing, strike me as oddly tentative or temporary of feel, buildings without foundations, buildings not made to last. In some obscure and perhaps seismically related way, San Francisco feels too flimsy to be a metropolis.
Besides, where have all the people gone? Half the city seems uninhabited, as though some impending new catastrophe has emptied it of its residents, leaving only disposable strangers to be swallowed up or incinerated. Even in Union Square on a Saturday evening, about the loudest noise is the clanking of the cable-car cables in their grooves. Even the financial quarter at high noon seems eminently chattable, strollable and ready for lunch. Like city people everywhere, San Franciscans love to boast of their traffic problems and crime rates, but to a visitor the pressures of this city seem, if not actually small-town, at least decidedly provincial.
The colours of San Francisco are gentle pastel colours, not the golds and crimsons of capital consequence. The light is a washed sea light, filtered always, one feels, through early morning mists. Even the local ocean never seems to me a proper whole-hog, titanic ocean, but is more like a vaster Great Lake, so that surveying its surf-fringed rocks from the heights above, I often catch myself wondering if it really is salt water down there.
They call all this laid-back, and so it is. For my tastes, though, it is a kind aesthetic betrayal. The City of my dreams, that half-imaginary shining city of the Sonoma road, is anything but laid-back, but blazes always with fires of aspiration. Think of Rio, or Sydney, or Hong Kong, or Manhattan – all cities of glorious visual impact too, but cities as thrilling at intermission as they are when the curtain goes up. Of all the supremely handsome cities I know, only San Francisco greets you, after the dazzle of its first impression, not with urge, but with relaxation …
San Francisco has its thrills, too, and once it was among the most vital and thrusting of all cities. But not even its fondest citizens could call it that now, and when I ventured to suggest to one of them that his beloved town might benefit from having a couple of thousand more people in it, he answered with a fine San Franciscan retort. ‘Might it not possibly be,’ he almost solicitously answered, ‘that you are by temperament an LA person?’
*
But so lovely, so essentially decent, so exquisitely mannered! Even as I write these incivilities I bite my tongue, for the values that are traditional to San Francisco are the very values that I most admire: tolerance, individuality, courage, a graceful sense of fun. And yet, and yet …
I went one day to an anniversary party for the venerable survivors of the 1906 earthquake, on a sunny morning in Union Square. Nothing could have been jollier. Jazz bands played, free champagne was distributed by white-gloved waiters to one and all, a Clark Gable look-alike entertained the somewhat baffled veterans from the stage. (‘Isn’t he just great?’ cried the compère. ‘Yeah,’ dazedly murmured the survivors in response.)
Around the flanks of this celebration two senior citizens of independent instincts separately cavorted to the music – one a lithe but cadaverous old gent in a baseball cap, the other a plump matron wearing pink slacks and sneakers. He was energetically hamming it up for the audience, waving a flag, stepping high; she was dancing all for herself, privately, singing under her breath; and so the pair of them, oblivious to each other, shimmied and trucked in the sunshine while the band played on.
At first I thought, how charming! How San Francisco! But the longer I watched those aged jitterbugs, the more they began to seem to me like death’s heads grinning there, grotesquely prancing parodies of youth, in a danse macabre of Union Square. Once again the City had disenchanted me, and what had seemed to be eternal joy turned out to be mere senility.
*
But then San Francisco often trivializes what it touches. There was a time, twenty years ago, when this city seemed to be leading us all into a new age of idealism – remember the Age of Aquarius? To watchers far away it seemed that in San Francisco a truly historical moment of liberation and enlightenment was occurring, but for most of its activists, it now appears, it was only a game after all, just a frolic with history, fuelled by drugs and rock and roll, superseded as the years passed by careers in computers or associate professorships.
There is no dismissing San Francisco’s regard for human variety in all its manifestations. This really is the city of few rebuffs! Where else do elderly ladies bear themselves with such sprightly confidence, sure of their place in society? (At the theatre the other night the usher was so elderly that she had to use a magnifying glass to check my seat number.) Where else would a young woman walk into a bookshop and ask with such blithe and loud aplomb, as I recently heard one ask, ‘D’ya have any books like How to Enjoy Sex Successfully?’ Compassion really does seem to be a San Francisco characteristic, and nothing in the contemporary scene is nobler than the loving care with which, as I understand it, this city’s gay community cares for its Aids victims.
Yet even among the fringe people, the people I generally like the best, I am nagged by San Francisco’s fatal element of sham. Your true eccentric is totally unaware of any oddity in himself, but here eccentricity is all too often debased into exhibitionism – the strutting of show-off dandies, the posturing of self-conscious weirdos. Worse still, I am disturbed by San Francisco’s undeserved propensity for tragedy. It will end in tears, as all our mothers used to say. Today it is Aids, and from the once festive coffee shops of Castro Street one sees only pale and anxious faces looking out. Yesterday it was drugs, and when, sitting on a San Francisco bench, I see another ruined and ravaged victim of the ’60s shambling by, I think: O City, City, I can sometimes hear, your siren song of Haight and Ashbury!
Then the sunshine comes, that particular pure sea-sun through my curtains! It holds me here, as it holds everyone else, and just a glimpse of it in the morning, just the idea of San Francisco awaiting me out there, is enough to make me cancel my flight and keep the room another day. It is not, of course, Malibu or Waikiki sun. Like the city itself, it is much more subtle and evasive than that. The palm trees in Union Square are fraudulent – this is anything but a tropic city. I think of it indeed as the southernmost city of the North – the westernmost eastern city, too, and the most Atlantic of the cities of the Pacific.
Is this, it now occurs to me, the source of that enigma? Does San Francisco know precisely what it is? Tourism has created a San Francisco, of course, of very pronounced identity – tourism, which turns even tourists themselves into pretend people, and drives whole cities, whole countries into pastiche. But behind the familiar images, Coit and cable car, Fisherman’s Wharf and Alcatraz, lies – what? Is this it, I often fin
d myself asking in San Francisco. Is this all there is?
*
Perhaps I am demanding too much, and should be content with the charm and kindness of this most charming and kindly of cities, the happy disorientation of its hills and waters, the ever-surprising vistas at the ends of its streets, the bleached cleanness of everything, the fine old ladies, the celestial setting, the innocent pretence of it all, its sense of easygoing detachment from a harsh and greedy world.
Perhaps. Looking out my window the other morning over the cluttered tourism of the Wharf, it seemed to me that everything I saw was some kind of sham. A superannuated sailing ship lay at a pier no longer working. The flag of a defunct republic flew. A couple of sightseeing boats sailed out towards a disused prison, and the cable cars that passed were not really cable cars at all, but buses in disguise. Synthetic grass surrounded the swimming pool below me. From restaurants around I could smell, if only in fancy, the odours of de-frozen swordfish and plastic-packaged clams. Is nothing real, I rudely wondered, in silly San Francisco?
But at that very moment there entered my field of view a submarine: a very black, very sinister, all too real and active submarine, on its way no doubt through the Golden Gate to missile patrol in the Pacific. Instantly my perceptions changed. All of a sudden the frivolous scene below my window acquired a new and grander meaning. A shame-faced sense of ingratitude overcame me, and watching that mean black warship sliding by, ‘Well,’ said I reproachfully to myself, ‘there goes reality, if that’s what you’d prefer …’
Rio de Janeiro
My third virtual city was, I suppose, real enough. Not everything about Rio de Janeiro is idyllic, but as I had written thirty years before, on my first acquaintance with the city, ‘Great God! I will swap you a dozen prim and thrifty boroughs for one such lovely greatheart!’ I went back to see how the seduction had lasted.
On the steps of the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, a Dutch combo plays Dixieland jazz. It is an extremely white, blonde and stalwart combo, and on its flank four Dutch airline hostesses (for it is in the nature of an advertising session) oscillate to the music with a well-built air of carnival. I sit beside them on the steps, and between the lot of us, so blatantly northern European, so patently un-Dixie, we present a comically incongruous spectacle, in the heart of the great Brazilian city, at the height of the noonday rush.
But it does not matter in the least. The city effortlessly absorbs us anyway. Some thirty or forty people of all ages, all colours, are stomping, clapping and laughing with us at the foot of the steps, and very soon the occasion is more or less taken over by an elderly, half-crazed man who prances with rhythmic grace up the steps, singing the while and grinning inanely to universal applause.
The legendary fizz of Rio is not merely infectious, but actually possessive. It seizes one, sets one wriggling and jerking to the beat of things and often leaves one laughing when one should really be crying. When that band went off, still trumpeting, to its next stand, pursued by its own poor Fool, I stood up myself and found the back of my shirt splodged with some chocolaty sticky substance. The crowd examined it with interested concern. Whether it had been sprayed on me by a disgruntled street hawker, or dropped upon me by some arcane Brazilian bird, they were unable to decide, but they took me off to a small ornamental pond where I might wash it off.
I dipped my handkerchief into the scummy water and found it to be alive with tadpoles: a thousand incipient Brazilian frogs there beside the Avenida Rio Branco, squirming indefatigably as I washed the stuff off my shirt, and the music of the Dutch sounded fainter and fainter across the effervescent city.
*
Wiping off the last of that muck, and a few tenacious tadpoles with it, I walked around the corner into the nineteenth century. Rio is not all travel-brochure glitz. It is an old merchant city, a seaport, and its downtown is venerable with offices, banks, warehouses, bars where the businessmen go for lunch, city alleys and squares with statues in them. In old photographs this busy commercial area is Rio de Janeiro, and a solid, sensible, businesslike place it looks.
A surviving glory of that era is the Colombo on Rua Gonçalves Dias, one of the best cafés in the world. Clad as grandiloquently in mirrors as Versailles itself, it is a very palace of refreshment. Its ceiling is of stained glass, its floors are tiled and it gleams with glass cabinets full of bottles, cakes, cookies and neatly stacked table linen. Clusters of old-fashioned lamps illuminate it, and fans laboriously keep it cool.
The multitudinous bow-tied waiters of the Colombo look as though they have spent their whole lives in its service, and at lunchtime they are all old-school professionalism, scurrying and skirting through the tables that jam the huge floor space, bowing here, waving a response there, pushing in and out of the kitchen doors or dimly to be glimpsed attending to the customers who sit, precariously it seems, at gilded tables on the high, narrow balcony above.
The noise is terrific, and the clientele ranges from the stately to the alternative, by way of many eccentric and atavistically made-up dowagers. Things have hardly changed here, I suspect, since the place opened in 1894. Rio, however, is Rio, and the atmosphere is peculiarly relaxed. When I finished my meal, I walked out past the cake cabinets, and there, leaning against a counter, brushing crumbs from his black jacket, was the waiter who had just served me, taking time off to eat a cake himself. I wished him bon appétit, but he could only smile and bow slightly in response, for he had his mouth full.
*
Youth, of course, is the thing in Rio. It is an old-young city – he was an old-young waiter – and on the beach at Copacabana, any weekend morning, the human ageing process seems mysteriously disrupted. Here I stroll along the famous beach, eating a banana, and all around me the laws of nature are defied.
It is clearly impossible, physically impossible, for that grand motherly lady to touch her toes so easily. It is positively unnatural for that group of aged gents to throw themselves about with such agility in their game of ball: their faces are wizened, their hair is white, but some weird Brazilian alchemy has kept their muscles iron-taut and their movements uncannily springy. Then what about these geriatric couples striding along the promenade? By what dispensation do they wear shoes, hats and swimsuits a couple of generations too young for them, yet get away with it so stylishly? There is an old dear on the beach who would surely be, in another society, confined if not to the back kitchen at least to the church flowers committee; here at Copacabana she is oiling herself sinuously on her sunbed, wearing a wide yellow hat and rhinestoned sunglasses, and now and then drinking from a can she has embedded in the sand like a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket.
The young, too, seem younger still upon this magic shore. They plunge more frantically into the surf. They scamper more merrily around the sunshades. They build big platforms of sand on which they sit cross-legged like gurus, playing cards or squabbling. They play ever more demanding games: for example, a ferocious kind of volleyball in which the ball may be touched by any part of the body except the head, requiring such excruciating leaps and contortions that it makes me breathless just to watch them.
*
Out at sea a haze of spray hangs over the breakers and half obscures the islands beyond. Through it a squadron of white-sailed yachts scuds and tacks, and presently a grey warship appears around the point and disappears into the Atlantic. It looks a wild southern sea out there. The sun goes slowly, very slowly down. The madcap rejuvenations of Copacabana continue apace. Crossing the street to one of the cafés behind, I order a Brazilian drink of great potency that instantly restores me to youth myself.
There Fagin’s boys are hanging around, looking for likely victims, nice American tourists with watches to be snatched or handbags to leave lying around on the beach. They are all too obvious little rascals – like stage villains, making over-acted gestures to each other, whistling conspiratorially across street corners and posing only in the most perfunctory way as bootblacks or sellers of trinkets.
Alas, they are not in the least lovable. There is not an Oliver among them. They look perfectly horrid, and swarming around them I fancy always the flies and fleas of the slums they come from – whose greyish shambled precincts one can see from this very beach, like spills of garbage tumbling down the hillsides. Christ himself stands high above, arms outstretched on the summit of Corcovado, but the shanty-towns below, like those small thieves on the beach, look utterly beyond his benediction.
A streak of loveless abandonment runs through the life of Rio, and not least through its exhilaration – through the panache of the street crowds, through the disturbing hyperactivity of the beach, through all the luxuries of the Rio rich. The city is scrawled over with unsightly graffiti. Some proclaim political slogans, but most are senseless squiggles and scrawls, reaching to the second floors of houses sometimes, when daring nihilists have climbed up trellises or hung upside-down from balconies. This mindless mess suggests to me a message from the void, telling us always of the helplessness, amounting to a kind of communal exhaustion, that lies beneath the glitter of Rio de Janeiro.
*
I sit now in a motionless bus near the foot of the Sugar Loaf, at a place where a small park runs down to the sea. There are military offices near by, and in constant twos and threes colonels and captains walk by carrying briefcases. A few children are there with their mothers, too, and tourists come and go from the funicular station, but my eye is captured by a solitary middle-aged man hanging about at the edge of the park. He bears himself elegantly, slim and erect in a well-cut grey suit, but there is something wrong with him.
It seems to be partly physical, partly mental, and partly, perhaps, too much coffee. He can never get comfortable. If he sits on a bench, after a moment he gets up again. If he takes a turn around the grass, he abruptly stops. Sometimes he looks up at the hill above, but it seems only to disappoint him, as if he cannot see what he is looking for up there. He inspects the passing officers keenly (was he once a colonel or captain himself?) but he recognizes none. He gazes longingly out to sea, but the sun gets in his eyes. When my bus starts, and we move away from the park, I wave at him through my window, and he waves abstractedly back – but not at me, I think, not at me.
