“Not interested,” said the Estonian woman, sucking up the spaghetti with youthful vigor. “I want to laze around, savor fine wine, and roam,” she said, and her husband nodded his shaved head. “Emma Bovary, somewhere in the first chapter of the novel, says that for one’s honeymoon one should travel to countries with sonorous names. The country she has in mind is clearly Italy because right after that Emma mentions the sea shores and the scent of the lemon trees. And then she adds that in some places happiness flourishes like a plant peculiar to that place, which cannot thrive anywhere else. I’m certain Flaubert was thinking of Naples. Happiness blossoms in Naples like those red Neapolitan bougainvilleas. Nowhere but in Naples have I seen such a color . . . Jesus! As if it grows straight out of a blood vein instead of the ground!”
I was astonished. I hadn’t told the Estonian woman what I did for a living. The unexpected literary reference rang in the air like the ping of a crystal goblet. I looked at the slender, green-clothed creature with her big eyes shaded by the dark bags under them, like the ones actresses have in silent films, her lips the hue of Neapolitan bougainvillea, and I thought I had never seen anyone like her. Just then the bus driver appeared, going from table to table and shouting, “Amalfi, Amalfi coast, Amalfi . . .!” I rose, reached over to shake the hand of the husband with the shaved head and then hers.
“Ciao, bella,” I said foolishly because I didn’t know what else to say, and off I hurried to my bus.
4.
Hakuna Matata
The Italian academic institutions had their reasons for organizing a meeting on migration in Naples, of all places. The statisticians had been claiming that the number of refugees in Italy was within the “permissible” seven-percent range, but in southern Italy this had reached an “alarming” twelve percent. Italy and Greece are the “gateway to Europe.” Using any means available, people had been flocking to this gateway from Tunisia, Morocco, Somalia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Burundi, Burkina Faso, from the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China . . .
Almost every day, there was news reported in papers, on television, and online regarding “incidents”: scores of refugees suffocating below the decks of old fishing boats before they reached their destination; boats sinking, overloaded with refugees; refugees trampled by the unbridled behavior of the anguished human herd as it disembarked; cruel traffickers making their riches off the suffering of others; families selling everything they owned to pay the way for their sons and daughters to the promised lands; African gangs who, knowing the routes, kidnapped refugees and demanded ransom from their families, holding the young female refugees in sexual slavery; the small percentage of lucky ones who made it alive to the Italian shores; the despair they faced as they disembarked . . . Stories poured in daily from the news outlets about the shabby treatment refugees had received in Lampedusa and other Italian cities; they claimed they felt as if they were in an “open prison” in Italy, which was no lie because they could venture no farther. Other European countries were refusing to accept them, politicians were toying with the unfortunate people, nobody knew what to do with them. In Italian refugee ghettoes, people were identified by number, not name; this was, among other things, the dismal practice at the refugee centers. The mayor of Lampedusa allowed refugees to be accommodated in the city museum, thereby infuriating the local population. Documentary film scenes—of “anti-drug patrols” cruising on nocturnal forays through the small towns of southern Italy supposedly to help the police in their battle against criminals—were reminiscent of the not-so-distant fascist past and were stirring anxiety and dread at the prospect of its possible resurgence. On the other hand, in front of television cameras, Italians had been clamoring their agitation, their concern for their daughters, they called the migrants of color “ugly snouts,” speaking of them with scorn (What they really want is a BMW or a Mercedes!), and there had been calls for forming new units of the National Guard. The furious people of Lampedusa (where a large number of refugees fled after the “African Spring”) spoke of the “invasion” of migrants and demanded that they be stopped at all costs (Execute the invaders, every last one of them); the onslaught was interfering with tourism—their livelihood. And indeed, many tourists had canceled their plans to vacation in Lampedusa. The people who fled their homes found themselves in a “European hell”; nobody offered them an acceptable solution, or compassion, or a job, or anything. They’d embarked on a “journey of epic proportions” (in the words of poetically inclined journalists) and were met by what they had left behind at home: poverty, powerlessness, jail.
Language was the perfect gauge for the attitudes toward the refugees. The more delicate the wording, the worse the attitudes about the “newcomers.” The European bureaucracy wrestled with its terms—migrants, emigrants, immigrants, asylum seekers, exiles—until they finally settled on “migrant,” suggesting by doing so that this is a mobile work force, choosing of its own volition which destinations suits them best in terms of geography, culture, climate, and finance for temporary work in this globalized world, at their own risk, of course. The language of journalism could be viciously cynical (dehydrated migrants!), even as it claimed the opposite. Equally confusing was the language of the pundits (sociologists, historians, political scientists). That language had tagged me, as well, with categories such as hyphenated identities, hybrid selves, and so forth. The language that followed the strictures of supposed political correctness and courtesy, language that took a stand, at least declaratively, in opposition to the language of outright fascism, had only, in fact, broadened the linguistic repertoire of discrimination.
The conference panels were being held in several venues both in the center and on the outskirts of town, so participating required physical effort and the organizers were not inclined to trouble with the handful of us “colleagues,” to transport us from various discussions in one venue to those in another where our participation was not planned anyway. I was surprised when I saw in the program that I would be appearing in a discussion with the widow of the famous literary exile. Several colleagues were speaking before our turn came, and, full of good will and solidarity, I sat in the devastatingly empty hall at the exquisite complex of the IBC, the Instituto Benedetto Croce.
In Paradise: Love, a film by Ulrich Seidl, there’s a scene that takes place in the half-empty restaurant of a hotel at a vacation spot somewhere in Kenya. There are two or three middle-aged German women sitting at the tables with a man who is dozing, and they are being entertained by a listless musical group dressed in what was supposedly local attire: long robes and caps sewn of cloth with a black-and-white zebra design. The “Zebras” give a lackluster performance of the song “Hakuna Matata” from The Lion King. In the film, the local Kenyans use this phrase with aggressive frequency.
Many tourists, when they went home after vacationing in the former Yugoslavia, brought with them the phrase nema problema—no problem. I heard it countless times from Germans, English, Italians. Apparently nema problema was the only thing foreigners took away with them from Yugoslavia and about Yugoslavia. After hearing hakuna matata it occurred to me that kindred countries produce kindred phrases with which to gratify tourists, offering them services along the way that symbolize “the real thing” as opposed to the unreal thing, which is, of course, the life lived by those unimaginative foreigners.
Onto the stage stepped a young Chinese man; he had made his way to Italy and there published two collections of poems. Now he was serving as an example of the successful integration of Chinese emigrants into Italian society. An Albanian woman had been scheduled to appear, but she had recently received a major Italian literary award so she had, I assume, outgrown participation in such events. A pretty writer wearing a turban who looked as if she had tumbled out of an old-fashioned colonial advertisement for bananas was also here. She had flown to Naples from New York. There was also a Berlin Turk, an Amsterdam Iranian resembling an aging Omar Sharif, and a gray-haired A
frican. The African was showered with the most attention by the organizers simply because he symbolized the most pressing problem: the African refugees in Italy and Italians’ attitudes about them.
I chatted over breakfast with the African man, who came across as the most genial in our group. In the twenty years he had spent in western Europe, he had succeeded in schooling his four children; now they were employed and scattered around various European cities and he had returned to his country to wage local political battles. He had his moves down pat: all he had to do was put on his “robe,” don the little cap, and he immediately looked the part. In our lively conversation over breakfast he did not hide what I could have guessed: the older man had married a young woman when he moved home and with her had two very small children; the western European routes of exile were finished, the generosity of donors, no matter who they had been, had dried up, and all he could rely on any more was a pittance from domestic sources. True, the return was eased by the fact that his importance at home had skyrocketed. He had not received a Nobel prize, but his countrymen had begun, for some reason, to show him respect. While he had been merely one of thousands of people in exile “abroad,” here he was potentially the father of the African non-fiction narrative, or something like that. He was rattling his ethnic and racial rakatak, but I had to know that in his country many of the people were illiterate, so literature functioned in an altogether different way. And while we were on the subject, the rattle of the “ethnic and racial rakatak,” believe it or not, was the only sound everybody heard and understood, both those at home and the hosts here in Europe who’d invited him.
“The time of internationalism and cosmopolitanism is over and done with. Period,” declared the wry old man, and then, as if he were suddenly afraid of what he’d said, he went on with a mantra about the goodness of the European countries: “The Netherlands are good and France is good, England is good and Italy is good, Sweden is good, and Finland is good . . .”
All of us were like the characters in the Ulrich Seidl movie; we’d donned our robes, some brightly visible, others invisible, sporting what were supposedly ethnic and racial designs, and we were all offering a lackluster performance of the only routine we knew: Hakuna matata. Nema problema. It was too late for condolences. Human hearts had in the meanwhile turned to flab. Our boats had capsized, we were swimming as best we knew how, some with life jackets, others without, that being the only difference. This was our modernity—the age of survival. Life had become a luxury, literature all the more so, except that nobody had informed the conference participants accordingly. They were convinced that the empty hall was the exception, not the rule. They assumed there must be a major soccer match on. That is exactly what the organizers said, by way of apology.
5.
The Widow
So this was why the hall was now standing-room-only! The Widow and I first met on stage at the conference table where she warmly offered me her hand. The moderator introduced us and then gave us the floor.
The Widow breathed a genteel charm, as if she had just stepped out of a BBC adaptation of some great English classic, a more sensual version of Maggie Smith. She had thick, gray hair plaited in a short braid that she wore down her back like a bashful high-school girl. Curls poked out in all the right places around her ears, softening her face and making the wrinkles less pronounced. Yes, she had wrinkles, after all she was over eighty; her teeth were just slightly crooked, but they were still hers and they were all there. Her face was well put-together, the only trace of makeup the discreet strokes of eye shadow on her eyelids. Her hands were angular, wrinkled, scattered with liver spots, and tanned, as if she gardened. Her posture was elegant, her back was, age-wise, surprisingly straight. Her nose was slightly hooked, her eyes, the color of honey, were a little slanted. She was wearing a black linen dress and black espadrilles. Around her neck she wore a necklace of string and a pendant of black veneered wood, its symbol reminiscent of African amulets. She had a warm smile and she was generous with it.
She spoke first, in a pleasant voice, modestly, about quite ordinary things; how she and Levin had lived in Paris in the 1960s. The Widow was candid, at least she gave that impression. She did not treat her role in Levin’s life as significant, she said they’d lived together for only three years and had married, for practical reasons, not long before he died. She said she couldn’t speak about Levin’s earlier life because he had not been able to tell her much about whatever he hadn’t “processed through literature,” meaning that the so-called autobiographical fragments could be, and most often were, in terms of factuality, quite unreliable. Levin did not feel he deserved any particular credit for the fact that his life, unlike most, had cast him up on so many shores, though he saw his “geographic and cultural good fortune” as his lottery jackpot. He did, however, feel he deserved more acknowledgment for his writing than he’d been accorded. The Widow spoke about details from their shared life; the poverty, how she’d found two crates of canned food in the basement of the house where they were renting an apartment. The package was from Norway, who knows how it had ended up in the Paris basement, condensed milk and—reindeer meat! A genuine treasure trove, a windfall. Never before or since had she eaten reindeer meat. “I remember the years I spent with Levin as years of hunger,” she said. Levin himself had been too ill to go anywhere and she no longer had anywhere to go back to. She’d lost her parents in quick succession. Levin, whether he wanted to or not, had become her new “home.” Each exile longs for some form of home. Levin was at the core of her symbolic domicile, a home which, after his death, she built herself, said The Widow modestly.
When my turn came, I “expounded” on exile, which turned out to be embarrassingly stupid. I would have earned far more sympathy with a witty anecdote about passport-control officials than with my flimsy disquisition on the subject of the literary dynamic; the inclusivity and exclusivity of cultural environments (only great cultures are inclusive, which is what makes them great; only small cultures are exclusive, which is what keeps them small). Everything I said left the audience cold.
Never in my life have I felt more invisible than I did during my appearance with The Widow. After the panel, journalists and several television cameras thronged around The Widow: nobody bought a copy of my book, which had just come out in Italian, but they did buy Levin’s; nobody felt the need to come over and say a kind word, they were all waiting in line to speak with The Widow. My presence turned out to be superfluous.
The moderator and I went out into the garden of the IBC and waited for The Widow to finish talking with the journalists and members of the audience.
“Did I handle everything to your satisfaction?” asked the moderator, as if apologizing for my more than obvious defeat.
“Yes, you were top-notch,” I said.
“I’m a historian, you know, I study European migrations in the Middle Ages. I’m not big on literature . . .”
“Were there any then? Migrations, I mean?”
“There have always been,” said the historian. “The Neapolitans moved everywhere and people moved to Naples from everywhere else . . . the Romans, Goths, Lombards, Byzantines, the Normans, Saracens, Spanish, French, Austrians, Germans . . . This region was settled by Jews from the very earliest days, who were first brought as slaves. There are remnants of a synagogue in the catacombs of Naples. There were some cities, like Capua, that were ‘Jewish’ . . . The richer families later moved to the north of Italy . . . In the seventeenth century tens of thousands of slaves were shipped in from Africa. And there are Chinese communities today in the poorer neighborhoods of Naples,” she explained in a way as if she, herself, couldn’t quite believe what she’d just said.
The Widow stepped into the garden, bidding farewell to the charmed throngs who’d attended the event, and came over to us.
“Let’s go for a drink,” she said brightly.
The historian begged off, she was due at another panel, but, honored by the invitation, I agreed imm
ediately.
6.
Gran Caffè Gambrinus
The Widow and I strolled from the Instituta Benedeto Croce to Piazza del Gesu Nuovo.
“We’ll catch a cab here . . .” she said. “Do you remember the old De Sica movie Marriage Italian Style, with Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni? About Filumena and Dumbi?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because Filumena and Dumbi are married at last in this church, Gesu Nuovo, and the final scene is at their house, with its windows facing the church. There, and in front of the house today there is a cab stand . . .”
The Widow spoke in a confident tone, like a native. At her side I felt like a lazy tourist. The cab soon dropped us in front of the famous Gran Caffè Grambrinus, a haunt for Guy de Maupassant, Oscar Wilde, and many others, which meant that the coffee cost twice as much as it did anywhere else. I learned only later about the famous history of Caffè Gambrinus when I studied the fancy travel guide I bought only after coming home from Naples.
“How did you and Levin meet?” I asked, startled by my own audacity. Even as I asked I wasn’t so sure I was interested in the answer.
She brightened. Her vigor did not, I assume, spring from having the opportunity to tell for the thousandth time how she and Levin had met; who knows where it came from. Whatever the case, in no way did she indicate that the question irked her.
“To tell you the truth, I’ve almost forgotten everything. I have only the vaguest memory of details. From today’s perspective those seem to be precisely the details I resolved to remember at the time, and now, many years later, when I ‘reach’ for recollections, I’m appalled that they are all I can bring up, nothing else. The things one fixes in one’s memory later act like a police cordon, a human wall. Memory has, of course, a strong, built-in, conciliatory mechanism encouraging our secret impulse to forge myths about ourselves and others, and once a myth is launched seldom does anything come along to compel its revision. Levin had that impulse. A little episode with Nabokov illustrates this best. Whatever the case, I chose Levin, and I have a crystal clear memory of when . . .”
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