A Writer's World

by Jan Morris

  *

  Is this what they mean by the Eternal City, this timeless homeliness, which makes one feel that whatever happens to its history, its people remain impervious? Certainly more than ever Rome lives up to its cliché as the most essentially human of the great capitals, more ready than any to muddle through, turn a blind eye, shrug things off, leave well alone. Surely no great historic site on earth is more easy-going than the Roman Forum, the old centre of the world, its paths agreeably overgrown and its ruins left so largely to themselves. The sentries at the Vittorio Emanuele memorial are not above a brief exchange of greetings with passers-by. The gypsy children only giggle when you thwart their transparent efforts to pick your pockets. The taxi driver soon gives in when you decline to pay him half your worldly wealth to drive you from St Peter’s to the Spanish Steps. The black boys do nothing worse than laugh and dance when motorists angrily decline to have their windscreens cleaned at traffic lights. OK, OK, va bene, this city seems always to say: you win some, you lose some; no harm in trying.

  In short, how particularly real Rome seems to be! How full of natural character its policewomen, some looking comical in white hats, some caped and capped like U-boat captains! How authentically pudgy its Swiss Guards, especially when bespectacled beneath their plumed and polished helmets! How amused and forgiving the waiter who came running after me in the Piazza del Pòpolo to point out that, owing to a misunderstanding about decimal points, I had left just a tenth of what I ought to have left upon the café table! I happened to enter Santa Maria in Trastevere when there was a charity lunch for the poor, and never did I see faces so unhomogenized – cool patrician faces of charity workers, serving wine along the trestle tables of the nave, spectacularly wrinkled faces of aged and respectable indigents, quick ingenious faces of the gypsy families cautiously segregated near the bottom of the church.

  So at the start of another year, I finally decided, Rome’s lessons concern not only history’s majestic passage, but also the indomitable resilience of humanity, in murky sunsets just as in clear bright mornings. Not only humanity, either. No creature seems more certain to survive than the scrawny Roman cat, now as always living by its wits among the garbage. And one afternoon I noticed motionless upon a buttress of the Ponte Sant’Angelo a very small and curious-looking lizard. I examined it closely, thinking that it might have been mutated in some way by the stinks and chemicals perpetually swirling all about it: but no, it was just immensely old, inconceivably old, and tough.

  On the other hand, where but Naples for everything new, noisy and adaptable?

  On a spring afternoon we sailed into Naples from Ischia, out of the calm celestial gulf, to find the notorious traffic of the city magnified to the power of hell by a protest march of the unemployed. The whole place seethed and fumed, and although the Hotel Excelsior was almost within sight of the ferry pier, and we never even set eyes on the unemployed, it took us an hour to get there. You might suppose this to have been a dispiriting experience, but in fact after a week of island peace it was a shot in the arm.

  Our taxi-driver, an elderly enthusiast for his trade, treated the event as a challenge to his virtuoso skills, and so we progressed through a sequence of short cuts and private diversions, wildly the wrong way up one-way roads, heedlessly squeezing between the stalls of shopping alleys, sometimes obliged to reverse by the sheer pressure of public opinion, sometimes making desperate three-point turns in virtually impassable back streets. We laughed, we shuddered, we shut our eyes. Now and then the driver wiped his brow in a theatrical way, when we momentarily emerged into the relief of a piazza, before putting his foot down again and hurtling us through a line of flapping washing into yet another labyrinth of the slums.

  Outside our windows – ‘Keep them closed!’ cried the driver, ‘Bad people here!’ – the Neapolitan legend was displayed as in a theme park, or perhaps an aquarium. Suddenly children’s faces would appear scowling an inch or two away. Bad people eyed our luggage with predatory sneers. Old ladies gave us what I took to be the evil eye as we scraped against their fruit stalls. On the Via Partenope we stood stagnant for a time in the traffic, but all around us motor scooters shot in and out between the cars, on to the sidewalk and far away, belching exhaust smoke demonically.

  Beside the Castel Nuovo an assortment of men and dogs lay apparently dead upon the green, and police officers could sometimes be seen standing in unconcerned impotence amid the maelstrom. At first I saw them as emblems of defeat. In Naples, I thought, the internal combustion engine had won its first great victory in the fight against humanity, and the entire population lived in a condition of perpetual motorized cock-up.

  *

  As our journey proceeded, though, I began to doubt if the Neapolitans were beaten after all. It is true that the municipality has launched a series of measures to limit the number of cars at large in the city, but it did not seem to me that the citizenry itself, as it plotted and manoeuvred its way through the nightmare, was in the least despondent. Like our driver, many motorists appeared to be enjoying themselves, in a bitter-sweet Neapolitan way. Tempers did not seem to be fraying. Horns were seldom hooted. Whenever we caught the eye of an adjacent driver, in some evidently terminal gridlock, he seemed more amused than exasperated, and those devilish motor scooters weaved their insouciant way between the traffic for all the world as though they were surfing.

  No, if the motor car is going to win a decisive victory anywhere, it will not be here, if only because the Neapolitans are such willing collaborators. Naples would not be Naples without the automobile, and nobody on earth seems more at home behind its wheel than your average Neapolitan – perfectly adjusted to its culture, making the most of it in body and spirit. Besides, here the automobile has powerful friends at court. The endemic corruption of this city is on its side, and so is the brilliant vanity of the people: if the swagger, flattery and condescension of the passeggiata was the essential expression of civic self-esteem in previous generations, now its epitome is the dashing display of an Alfa, a Fiat Barchetta or, best of all, one of those lovely prodigies of Italian art and engineering, a Ferrari or a Maserati.

  This was not like a traffic jam in London or New York. This had a paradoxical style to it. Experience it day after day, year after year, and it might indeed lose its allure, but to the stranger arriving from the seas it was a revelation of human vigour and adaptability. It seemed natural to the Neapolitans to be in this fix, and all their traditional characteristics of vivacity, opportunism, effrontery and panache, so familiar to travellers down the ages, seemed to qualify them absolutely for life in the age of the motor car. They are the masters of motorized disorder, wiping their brows not in despair, but in dramatic self-satisfaction.

  I thought they were wonderful at it – what other city on earth could make a stranger actually enjoy an hour-long crawl through a traffic jam? – and it occurred to me that they were somehow ahead of us sober, sensible northerners in their attitudes. They were readier to accept the inevitable awfulness of modernity, and had already adjusted to it. They were not repelled by litter in the streets. They did not mind noise. They fished and skin-dived contentedly amid the foul pollution of the harbour. They had long been acclimatized to the government fiddle and the extortion of gangsters. They happily went the wrong way up one-way streets. When, losing my nerve for a moment during that manic excursion, I buried my head in the pages of La Repubblica, I discovered that the big story of the day concerned several local figures of the Madonna allegedly weeping tears of blood. Surely this easy familiarity with the occult puts the Neapolitans well ahead of the Swedes, say, in the futuristic stakes – where do you suppose a UFO would choose to land, Naples or Gothenburg?

  * * *

  So that afternoon, in my sentimental way, I was quite seduced by the Neapolitans. Like many a wandering writer before me, I saw in them so much that I would like to see in myself, and in my people. But nobody could really be much less Neapolitan than I am, and when at last we reached the hote
l, limp with excitement, amusement and exhaustion, and I had paid our driver his exorbitant but entirely justified fare, I remarked to the hotel receptionist that I wanted to go home. ‘Don’t say that,’ he replied. ‘Wait till you get up to your room, and everything will seem different.’

  So it did. Dusk was falling by then, the harbour was speckled with small fishing boats, and in the distance Vesuvius loomed hazy in the half-light. The lights were coming up across the city. The docks were full of tall-funnelled white cruise liners, ferries and the light carrier Vittorio Veneto, and even as I stood there the QE2, on a Mediterranean cruise, slipped away from the quay towards the open sea. For a long time I could see her lights, fainter and fainter to the west – treading her way over Palm Court gins-and-tonics, I liked to imagine, towards the realms of order.

  But it did not make me in the least homesick. The receptionist was right. I rang for a bottle of wine, and we sat there on our balcony in perfect contentment, while hell’s traffic snarled convivially below.

  Bosnia

  Hell’s traffic snarled in a different way in the Balkans of the 1990s. Formerly a constituent republic of the Yugoslav federation, Bosnia-Herzegovina became the epicentre of the dreadful war between peoples, ideologies, religions and nationalities that followed its dissolution.

  I can think of few more suggestive situations than to be lurching through the winter night, half-way through the 1990s, in an inadequately heated minibus from Sarajevo to the Adriatic – the only way we could get out when its airport was closed and the evening plane from the north had flown in, had a look and gone back again.

  The snow in Bosnia-Herzegovina was deep that night, the road was unpredictable, every now and then we were stopped at road-blocks in the middle of nowhere and the awful gorges through the mountains loomed around us dark and dangerous. Sometimes we clattered across a temporary iron bridge beside a blown-up original. Sometimes, shadowy in the night, an armoured vehicle stood guard beside a road junction. The only other traffic on the road consisted of huge tanker trucks labouring up to Sarajevo from the coast, their headlights showing far, far away on mountain curves.

  Most disturbingly suggestive of all, sometimes I saw through my window scattered ruins passing dismally by – house after house gaping in the darkness, with no sign of life but a single dim light, perhaps, on a ground floor, or a melancholy fire burning in a brazier.

  *

  These were not the usual ruins of war. They were not compact villages knocked into general shambles by blanket bombing, street fighting or concentrated artillery bombardment like villages of France, Germany or Italy in the Second World War. They were generally strings of detached houses, well separated, each one of which had lately been individually and deliberately destroyed. In the same way, Sarajevo does not look in the least like those cities of Europe which were bombed in the world war. It is not a wasteland of burnt-out shells and skeletonic blocks. But there is hardly a building in the city centre which has not been specifically targeted, sometimes half-collapsed in a mess of beams and boulders, sometimes just pitted all over with snipers’ bullets.

  All this gave me an impression of particular and personal hatred. It seemed such a spiteful sort of destruction. Bosnia had been ravaged, it appeared, not by ignorant conscript armies clashing, but by groups of citizens expressing their true emotions – a display of viciousness different in kind from the campaigns of ‘Bomber’ Harris. A. J. P. Taylor once wrote that the Great War had begun as the most popular of all wars, but I have a feeling that the War of the Yugoslav Secession was undertaken even more genuinely from the human heart. And what did that say, I could not help wondering, about the human heart?

  I had spent the previous Sunday in Zagreb, a fervently Christian Croatian city, and was astonished by the congregations that packed its churches, passionately praying, singing, kneeling and receiving the Eucharist. Even market-men at their stalls, I noticed, crossed themselves when the Angelus sounded. In particular I was touched by a young couple I saw praying together before a miraculous Madonna within the stone gate that leads into the Upper Town, and falling into a sweet and grateful embrace when their devotions were done. Outside the gate a pair of beggar children, one on each side of the path, set up a wailful cry of mendicancy whenever somebody emerged from the shrine. When the young lovers walked out, arms entwined, faces shining, they stonily ignored the appeal: and a moment later I caught myself, too, rummaging for a coin insignificant enough to give the brats.

  I remembered the moment with a blush, as we lumbered towards the coast, for if we all behave equally shoddily in small things, might we not, if the occasion arose, be just as unpleasant in big?

  *

  The week before I had been in Mostar, with a Croatian acquaintance from Dubrovnik, and was taken aback to find the Christian side of the city, on the west bank of the River Neretva, in a condition of lively if dubious prosperity. Scores of cafés flourished. The streets were full of shoppers. Mercedes and BMWs abounded. Nothing seemed to have been damaged by the war, and nothing looked particularly shabby or deprived. But on the Muslim side, the east bank, all was drab misery – buildings toppled, shuttered shops, poorly dressed people scurrying along muddy pock-marked streets. And where the beautiful Turkish bridge over the river had been, the pride of Herzegovina’s Muslims, there was only a bouncy temporary suspension span, over which shoppers hurried with their eyes down.

  My companion was embarrassed by all this. Many bad people, he murmured, had done quite well out of the Yugoslav war. When I asked him who had destroyed the bridge, one of the supreme treasures of the old Yugoslavia, he prevaricated. It might have been Serbs, he said. It might just have been renegade Muslims, out to get foreign sympathy, perhaps. Could it not have been Croats? Well, yes, it could have been Croats, but not true Croats, not Croats like the Croats of Dubrovnik – not Croats like him, in short.

  Later I went with him to Medugorje, the hill-village where, since 1981, the Virgin Mary has been appearing to visionaries, and the sun has danced for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. My Croat was rather embarrassed here, too. He was a devout Catholic, but he could hardly help being slightly repelled by the tinsel opportunism of it all – glittery shops selling sacred souvenirs, pizza stalls, bed-and-breakfast signs everywhere. We went to the Hill of Visions, where a long line of pilgrims plodded beneath their black umbrellas up the track to the holy site, but the rain poured down in torrents, and even for the most credulous the sun did not dance that day. Did he really believe in it as a token of the divine mercy, I asked my friend? He wasn’t at all sure, he admitted; but he was frightened of God.

  Cynicism laces the air of this country now. The confused condition of the place, with its pockets and enclaves of Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Serbs, Croatian Bosnians and Muslims, all entangled with the multinational force whose slow convoys crawl this way and that across the shattered land – the condition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is virtually inexplicable to the outsider, lends itself to the profitable scams that are spawned by every war, and curdles the milk of human kindness. Would we be very different, I wondered, if it had all happened to us?

  *

  At home in Wales we have a bridge not unlike the one at Mostar. It is a single-arch, pack-horse bridge over the Taf at Pontypridd, an old favourite of water-colour artists. We have our ethnic prejudices too, and our mountain villages, and even our religious zealots. I had no difficulty in imagining, as we plodded on through the darkness that night, that the miseries of Yugoslavia had befallen Wales – the lovely old Taf bridge collapsed into the river below, the villages of Gwynedd and Meirionydd wrecked, all our old bigotries, so long suppressed, rampantly in the open. I know plenty of people who would be running BMWs upon the profits of villainy, and probably a few at least who would not have hesitated, if there were English settlers on the other side of the stream, to aim a mortar at them – but not real Welsh people, mind you, not the Welsh of Llanystumdwy, not Welsh like me …

  There
were four other passengers in the mini-bus that night – a Swede, a Finn, a Croat and an Englishman. Behind us a second busload was following us through the darkness. At about two in the morning we stopped, and our driver got out and peered rather helplessly into the black emptiness behind him, up the highway banked with snowdrifts. ‘What’s happening?’ said the Englishman in front of me. ‘What have we stopped for?’ The driver explained that the other bus seemed to be lost: there was no sign of its lights, and he was worried that it might have got into trouble back there. The Englishman stretched, pulled his coat more tightly around his shoulders, and settled down to sleep again. ‘Who cares?’ he said. But he may have been joking.

  Lithuania

  In eastern Europe a process of de-Russification was happening everywhere, as the communist ideology dissolved and the last remnants of the Soviet empire with it. In some countries the process was swifter and more absolute than in others. I was persuaded that an interesting de-Russianifying might be observed at the Lithuanian city of Siauliai (Schaulen to the Germans), because in Soviet times it had been forbidden to all foreigners as the site of a strategically important base of the Red Air Force.

  I checked in at the main hotel, a dowdy high-rise that was built in Soviet times, may well be still Soviet-owned (nobody seemed to know) and has doggedly stuck to the old ways: which is to say, streaked concrete, no heat, abandoned telephone booths, dismal food, receptionist muffled in greatcoats, a Moscow chat show on the television and a notice on the wall quoting different rates for Lithuanian citizens, citizens of the former USSR and the rest of us. Just what I wanted, said I to myself as the terrifyingly jerky lift carried me in spasms to my room.