by Jan Morris
Passing through a gloomy gate tower, they return to the mazy dim-lit quarter of the city called Castello. instantly modern Europe is forgotten. In that dark jumble of alleys, tunnels and cramped courtyards the pressure of poverty is all around, and the hiss of superstition. It is a place for beggars and bandy legs, dwarfs, shibboleths, old wives’ tales, and it is full of babble – the rasping of crones, the wailing of tired children, the sibilance of gossip, raucous laughters, voices raised in shrill quarrel or reproach. Into this place those girls return, their footsteps growing slower and more laggardly the closer they get to home, until at last they reach their native alley. A scraggy cat gnaws an intestine outside their door. A baby is screaming somewhere. Their mother greets them with eldritch imprecations from the back quarters. There is a smell of cooking-fat, cats, tobacco, damp stone and bad drains. The girls take their shoes off, reassure their mother with a kiss and a chide, and return to – where shall I place them? – the fourteenth century, say. In some parts of Sardinia, in those days, they still talked a kind of Latin, and so tight-knit were the communities that in nine neighbouring villages the wagtail was called by nine different names. The Sardinians never thought of pruning their olive trees, until they were introduced to the practice after the Second World War, and I have been told that only just before the time of our walk through Cagliari, at the end of the 1950s, did they learn to accept the edibility of the carrot.
85 A gas in the air
Sometimes I have been inspired by the dogged Italian devotion to the old order of things, coming as I do from a kaleidoscopically shifting kingdom of the North, but sometimes there is something eerie and threatening to it, like a gas in the air. In Sicily especially I have felt this, and particularly in its dusty and blistered countryside – the ‘remote unchangeable landscape’ that simmered so oppressively in the background of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. In the 1960s I stayed for a time with friends outside the town of Partinico, south of Palermo. In the early mornings, when I strolled on my balcony, the prospect before me seemed altogether delightful – innocent, exotic, fresh. The mottled vineyard plain ran away to the distant metallic blue of the sea, and all around the villages sprang into pictorial clarity as the sun caught them. Farmers clattered down the lane beneath the house, their horses gay with feather tufts, their carts gaudily painted, and when they caught sight of me perched there above them they would give me a discreet flicker of the hand and the glimmer of a smile. But in the evenings, when I returned to my balcony at the end of the day, a very different sensation used to overcome me. Then a drear disquieting mood seemed to fall upon that landscape. The hills now seemed to crouch menacingly above the plain, and the villages, so charming in the morning sun, now looked huddled and forlorn. When the sun went down the whole place was silent, clamped and empty, for old legacies of fear and malaria sent the Sicilian country people home with the dusk.
These chill suggestions were not all fancy. It really was a countryside of ominous complexity, webbed and secretive and potentially dangerous. My hosts were active in a movement to give more economic independence to the local peasants, chiefly by building irrigation works, and they were genuinely under threat from the dark forces of Sicilian reaction, secular and sacred. In the very next year, I was later to learn, the Franciscan monks of a nearby monastery were found guilty of extortion, embezzlement, theft and murder. The holy work of the monastery had continued unaffected by their criminal activities, its abbot being the capo of the gang, and one brother admitted to having said a funeral mass, and preached a sermon, over the corpse of a man whose murder he had himself ordered.
86 So it is supposed
Throughout the subsequent decades, though much did change in the Mezzo-giorno, southern Italy was to remain for me a sinister and alarming place, tinged always with the macabre. ‘Are there Mafiosi in this village?’ I once asked a Sicilian. ‘So it is supposed,’ he said, and he said it in unmistakable italics. I remember with a shudder straying into a festival mass in one of the remoter and more introspective hamlets of Calabria, a place apparently discarded, like a pile of old rubble, high in the stony goat-chewed mountains. The church was packed. There were five priests in attendance, and two policemen by the door, and myriad thin and restless children, and beggars in tattered black cloaks, and withered men clearing the phlegm from their throats, and hundreds of arthritic rat-faced women. The church stank of incense and indigence; beside the altar the golden-robed priests moved purposefully to and fro; and so strangely trance-like did the atmosphere feel that day that I felt I had strayed into some alien plane of existence.
87 Futuristic
Once I sailed into Naples out of its 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 my hotel was almost within sight of the ferry pier, and I never even set eyes on the march, it took me an hour in a cab to get there. You might suppose this to have been a dispiriting experience, but in fact it was like a shot in the arm. The 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 backstreets. 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 runny-nosed 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 even we stood stagnant for a time in the helpless congestion of the traffic, but all around us, like howling imps, motor-scooters shot in and out between the cars, on to the pavement and far away, demonically belching exhaust smoke.
The people of Naples appeared to be living in a condition of perpetual motorized cock-up; but they were evidently far from defeated by it. 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 us all for all the world as though they were surfing, or playing with Frisbees. It seemed natural to the Neapolitans to be in this fix. They were the masters of motorized disorder. It occurred to me that they were ahead of sober, sensible Northerners in these attitudes. They were readier to accept the inevitable awfulness of modernity, had already adjusted to it, and this put them well ahead of the Swedes, say, in the futuristic stakes. Where do you suppose a UFO would choose to land, Naples or Gothenburg?
88 Old and very tough
Later I reached rather similar conclusions in Rome, for me the focus, summit and distillation of all things Italian. At the end of 1991, thinking properly sententious thoughts about the turn of another year, I leant on a Roman balustrade to watch the sun set behind St Peter’s. Unfortunately the sun never reached the horizon that evening, instead finding itself glaucously absorbed into the thick pall of smog which lay like a curse over the city. I could almost hear the noise it made, I thought – not a fizzle, more a kind of glurp – and imagine the sulphurous smell of micro waved exhaust fumes as it disappeared into the murk. The symbolism of that sunset struck me as powerful. It had been an unlovely year, and the corrosive pollution of Rome seemed to me like an allegory of some more general decay. The atmosphere was fearful, the congestion was appalling, squalid litter lay everywhere, blown across glorious piazzas, festering in fountains, lin
ing the Appian Way. Abandoned and unlovely the poisoned Tiber flowed between its concrete quays. Buildings that used to seem picturesque now seemed dingy almost beyond redemption, pavements were cracked and potholed, all over the city restorations and excavations were in abeyance for lack of money.
For a time the conclusion I drew, as I wandered the city, was that the European civilization, having once reached here so exquisite an epitome, was now running irrevocably down, so that the glittering shops of the Via dei Condotti, the gorgeous rituals of St Peter’s were no more than cruel anachronisms. Gradually, though, this notion was replaced by one more invigorating: that if the environment of Rome was invalid, by God, the inhabitants of Rome were robust as ever. Smog or no smog, they remained precisely as they had always been, displaying just the same mixture of swagger and simplicity, cunning and compassion, that visitors had discerned in them down the ages. The guard at the Vittorio Emanuele memorial was not above a brief exchange of greetings as I passed by. The Gypsy children only giggled when I thwarted their transparent efforts to rob me. The taxi-driver cheerfully gave in when I declined to pay him half my worldly wealth to drive me from St Peter’s to the Spanish Steps. The black boys did nothing worse than laugh and dance when motorists angrily declined to have their windscreens cleaned at traffic-lights. If the whole city were suddenly to be transformed, I came to think, all its buildings spick and span, all its traffic ordered, all its corruptions cleansed, the Romans would hardly notice. One afternoon I observed motionless upon a buttress of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo a very small and curious-looking lizard. I examined it closely, thinking 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.
89 ‘C’est moi!’
More insidiously seductive, I think, is the glory of France, perhaps because it has always struck me as being perfectly humourless. One cannot laugh at the swank and strut of it, just as it would have seemed unkind to snigger at the gaunt solemnity of General de Gaulle, to whom all life seemed so tragically in earnest, and to whom the idea of France not being a Power would have been preposterous. I was in Paris once when for festive reasons the Champs-Élysées was cleared of all traffic, allowing pedestrians to stroll the length of it from the Place de la Concorde to L’Étoile. I undertook the walk churlishly, for I have always disliked the pomp and monotony of Haussmann’s boulevards. As I walked the gentle slope of the great street, however, through the green parks, past the line of rich buildings, towards the Arc de Triomphe revealing itself at the end of it – as I strode up there along the very centre of the avenue, with thousands of Parisians in high proud spirits all around me, minute by minute I found myself falling into a genuine Sun King or Gaullist swagger. One can never be indifferent to France, Alexis de Tocqueville said. It was the most brilliant and dangerous country in Europe, he said. Besides, to my mind French glory is true glory.
90 The Hundred and One Days
After the Second World War glory soon became passé, though, and by the 1990s it seemed to me that for four decades France had been trying to drag it out – living, as it were, an illusory and unconvincingly stretched Hundred Days. In my lifetime French martial prowess had not, to be frank, been very notable. Shamefully defeated in the Second World War, thrown unceremoniously out of Indo-China, ignominiously obliged to leave Algeria after indulging in every kind of jingo claim and military brutalism, the French had had their military reputation redeemed only by the dash and bloody-mindedness of individual gallants, plus the Foreign Legion. Yet more than any other people in Europe the French clung to the forms and illusions of military power. Long after the age of the Dreadnoughts I remember seeing towering above the dockyards of Toulouse the great superstructure and peculiar funnel of the Jean Bart, the very last European battleship, extraordinarily expensive to maintain but still on the active list as an embodiment of French self-esteem. She was a magnificent-looking ship, one of the most powerful conventional weapons of war the Europeans had ever built, and I imagine French people still viewed her with patriotic complacency – it was public opinion that had compelled her completion after the war. To me she already looked forlorn, if not actually pathetic, a mere symbol of grandiosity: I could think of no circumstances in which the French Republic could ever put the Jean Bart to sensible use, and sure enough six or seven years later the French Republic reached the same conclusion, and she was scrapped.
I was spending the night once, in 1956, at a country inn near Chamonix, in Haute-Savoie, and heard sounds of revelry from the bar. I went down to investigate, and found that the local class of conscripts was having a celebratory reunion and binge before going off to the doomed colonial war in Algeria. They were extremely soldierly young soldiers, all in the camouflage gear which the French presently made de rigueur among armies throughout the world. Their heads were cropped, they were bursting with the vigour of a few months’ basic training, and their voices got louder, their songs bawdier, as the night wore on. They were like characters in a movie, les poilus playing it up before going off to Verdun, perhaps, and seemed to me to be consciously playing their parts. They seemed to have been born out of their time, enacting out-of-date heroics, seeking a glory nobody much cared about in a war that should not have been fought.
91 In character
But then the French are born character actors, and wonderfully fulfil their own stereotypes. I chanced to arrive in Paris in 1968 when the student rebellion of that year was reaching its climax, and was astonished to find myself in the middle not of an old newsreel but of a historical re-enactment. This, I thought, is just how the cinema of the twenty-first century will reconstruct European student demonstrations of the century before. Never were riot police more loaded down with helmets, truncheons, shields, hoses, gas canisters, goggles and guns. Never did their vans, lined up nose to tail along the quays, look more theatrically sinister. And the students, surging to and fro between their makeshift barricades, handkerchiefs over their mouths, throwing things now and then and shouting slogans – ah, the students! They were all that old people dream they were themselves when they look back to the days of their liberty, the days when they had causes to throw bricks for, when to be alive was grand enough, but Heaven itself was to be young, radical, brandishing a stick and shouting a slogan in Paris.
92 End of a grudge?
Before they completed the Channel Tunnel, when I was queuing at Dover once to board a hovercraft with my car, two young French people came around with a clipboard, conducting a poll or survey. Was I pleased at the prospect of a tunnel under the English Channel at last? I told them I was (for Welsh nationalist reasons, actually), and I remember still the delight with which they recorded a tick in the appropriate box. It was almost their first tick. In Dover they had experienced almost nothing but negatives, they told me, sometimes rudely expressed, and they had found this most disheartening, because they themselves believed passionately in the project.
Why? The building of the tunnel would affect France far less than it would affect Britain, and in theory at least might indeed be culturally harmful. The French are among the most nationalistic of all Europeans, but they suffer the disadvantage of sharing frontiers with eight other States, if you count Monaco and Andorra. Maintaining their Frenchness is a constant struggle. Their only modern Maginot Line is their language, and the spectacle of the immortals of the French Academy preserving it against all comers suggests to me some indomitable band of elders mustering with antique guns and pitchforks to resist invaders. Even so, they have been unable to prevent inroads: in a hundred yards of a Paris shopping arcade, in 1987, I jotted down the following shop signs: Paris Basket, Tie Break, New York New York, Scoop, Blue Way, Awards Academy, Yellow, Bubble-Gum and Lady, together with the nearby graffiti ‘Fuck Off Skinheads’, ‘Kill the Cops’ and ‘Crack Snack’.
The Channel Tunnel, one might think, would surely admit many more foreign vulgarisms under the water: yet the French in general we
re far keener on the idea of it than the British ever were. I think this was because they felt it would bring the ending of an old, old grudge. They thought it would mean that the British (or the English, as they would certainly say) no longer had the moral and psychological advantage of being different – not simply islanders, but different in other ways, a different kind of people, only twenty-five miles from France yet detached from the preoccupations common to all the rest of Europe, and saved from so many of the miseries that the continent had suffered. This was my own theory. What those pollsters said, when I asked them why they wanted the tunnel so badly, was, ‘All nations should come together.’
93 The Frenchest man
The Frenchest person I ever met was Yves Saint-Laurent, the couturier. He was utterly French. He told me that the only books he ever read were eleven volumes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, over and over again, but that the twelfth and last volume he had never read at all – saving it up, I supposed, for a last splurge of Frenchness on his deathbed chaise longue. Everything that was French seemed to be embodied in him, even a bit of the old gloire, for there was a distinctly grand manner lurking behind his melancholy shyness, and he lived in a grand style too. The student protests that had seemed to me so quintessentially French had fired his imagination as well. He had translated their images into a cult of unisex shirts and jeans, radical, cheap, which was to change the lives of women everywhere, and long afterwards, when his clothes had taken a classic turn again, he used to say that true elegance was ‘to forget what one was wearing’. Saint-Laurent liked to call himself an artisan, and the little world of craftspeople he had built up around him, the dedicated world of cutters, shoemakers, milliners and tailors, seemed to me a true ornament of French civilization, and a vindication of French pride. I asked him if he was consciously contributing to the splendour of France, and he smiled rather distantly. He was, he said, he was. When they called him up for the army, he had a nervous breakdown.
