Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  The whole morning passed in an expectant silence that the vessel seemed to know all about, but that was new to us. We slipped by the cliffs, and came in sight of others far to the right, a lower line, with more yellow in the gray, and we slid between the two and

  came to the narrows

  where Hercules set up his warning markers

  for men, to tell them they should sail no farther . . .

  as Dante had written of the Pillars of Hercules. We had entered the Strait of Gibraltar, which he had never seen. That passage of the Inferno, when I had first read the poem, had gripped me more fiercely than anything I had read in the Commedia before, and it had remained in my head from then on, though my pronunciation must have been far from the sound of the words as Dante had known them. He was writing of Ulysses, his own image and fiction of Ulysses rather than Homer’s. As far as anyone knows he never read Homer at all, but knew about him and about his Ulysses only at second hand, from Latin writers. His Ulysses was later, in every sense. Later than Homer, of course, but later than the homecoming to Ithaca, the point at which Homer ended the story in the Odyssey. Dante was seeing it from much later in another sense also, from an age after Paul the sailmaker and his resurrectionist legend and missionary voyages had transformed the Mediterranean world. Dante shows us his Ulysses on his last voyage out through the Pillars of Hercules into what Dante conceived of as the forbidden sea where Ulysses becomes the first (imagined) human to behold, on the other side of the earth, Mount Purgatory. The imaginary protagonist of Dante’s poem would be the second. His Ulysses’ late speech of exhortation to his remnant of imaginary followers was what had gripped my own mind when I was setting out, at eighteen.

  I and my companions were old and near

  the end . . .

  he had said, and the word tarde, for “late” in the sense of “near the end,” was one of the words that first caught and held me, more than seven centuries after he had written it.

  On the one hand I left Seville behind

  on the other I had already left Ceuta . . .

  As they passed through the straits he spoke to them:

  “Oh brothers,” I said, “who through a hundred

  thousand perils have arrived at the west,

  do not deny to the little waking

  time that remains to your senses knowing

  for yourselves the world on the far side

  of the sun, that has no people in it . . .

  Dante represented this very speech as an epitome of the forbidden enterprise, of human pride defying divine measure, of human ambition aspiring to unlimited knowledge. But he himself, in the figure of his protagonist, Dante the pilgrim through the world of the dead, felt so deeply tempted by the apparition of Ulysses’ spirit drifting in an unattached flame through the heavenless void that it nearly drew him over the edge into the abyss.

  The passage kept echoing in my mind as we came through the narrows where Dante had imagined Ulysses exhorting his companions to sail toward what was, indeed, our own birthplace. I—we—were returning much, much later still from that bourne that he invoked with such warning. We were coming back when the impetus of history, and whatever temptations had led Europeans to “the far side of the sun,” had found another west, another tenuous hope, a different purgatory, and had caused, and been transformed by, devastations and deaths on a scale that even Dante never dreamed of. I watched the daylight on the yellow cliffs in Africa, and then Gibraltar far to the left, until we entered the Mediterranean and the shores receded again on either side.

  It was late on another day that we approached the Italian coast, and Genoa, birthplace of Columbus, who had made the westward voyage that would transform both hemispheres beyond recognition. Even if we had not known it, we could see at once that we were arriving in the aftermath of a war. The blaze of the long summer afternoon was behind us, magnified near the horizon, where the glaring white sky was flushing with the first orange and red of sunset, the deepening colors reflected onto the sea around us and onto the coast and the harbor and shoreline far ahead. We moved in more and more slowly, drawing almost to a halt far out at sea, and were met by a dark, dingy pilot vessel that communicated in some way with the bridge of the Nyhorn, and then turned back and led us toward the shore.

  We were not being towed. The small boat the color of an old truck tire guided us very slowly while the light over the harbor and in the clouds and haze and westering light behind us filled with shades of pink and deepening mauve. We began to see some of the reasons why the approach was so cautious. Outside the harbor there was a long high breakwater, a stone and cement wall, broken in places like ancient ruins, and brushed with the same colors as the port behind it. And between us and the breached wall were the masts and superstructures of other vessels that had been sunk outside the seawall and were resting on the bottom, facing in all directions. As we came nearer we could see that some of them had capsized and were lying with their dark hulls half out of the swells. By then we were all lining the rail. The Italian merchant seaman told us that some of the vessels had been hit by bombs and some had been sunk deliberately by the Germans to block the harbor during the Allies’ Italian campaign. Beyond the seawall, which was painted here and there with Cinzano advertisements in huge letters, we could see the tops of other vessels sunk inside the harbor, their rusty bridges and funnels glowing in the west light. The waves lashed the gaps in the wall that was the edge of Europe.

  The Italian seaman told us that there were also mines still unexploded in the harbor, and the pilot vessel was leading us past the danger points. He said all the harbors along the coast had been mined, and boats of all kinds and sizes had been lost, coming and going. It took a long time to sweep the approaches clean. It may have been true, but the regular channel markers were in place as we came in, suggesting that the main channel was back in routine use. An old tug came out to us, and both vessels guided us slowly around the breakwater and then edged with us along the inside of it, with the port revolving around us. The Nyhorn was inched toward a row of towering cranes, and warped to an empty wharf as the last colors drained from the aging surfaces around us. There were a few figures down on the long wharf with railroad tracks running the whole length of it. Our own voices sounded distant, as though we were just waking, and the words called up from the wharf to our crew seemed to come from far away, incomprehensible syllables echoing in the dusk.

  The steward gave me a message that had come from Alan. He was on his way. We would sleep on board that night, and he would meet us in the morning. Our last dinner was served with valedictory flourishes by the steward, and then we walked back along the yellow corridors, with their sudden, disturbing stillness, to pack our trunks, hearing the stunned sounds of the moored freighter, and already feeling like strangers in our own place. After the cabin lights were out, the light outside on the wharf shone in, with bat shadows wheeling around in it, and sounds of clanking from the railroad lines, and cranes groaning and humming along their tracks. They blocked the light as they rumbled by. Then more voices, the booming echoes of hatch covers being opened, trucks outside on the wharf. I went on deck and watched the hooks swinging over the hatches in the night full of cables and circling lights and shouts ricocheting back and forth. Finally I went back down to the cabin to lie listening to Genoa, Columbus’s Genoa.

  22

  In the morning Alan arrived not long after breakfast. There was the Jeep station wagon parked down on the wharf. He had already spoken with the harbor officials, and he came on board with a couple of them. We went through most of the arrival formalities on the table in the dining room where we had just had breakfast. Then our trunks were taken down the gangplank and packed into the car, the last arrival procedures were taken care of at an office along the wharf, and Alan drove us through the high gates at the end of it, into Italy.

  It was (I remember happily) long before the days of autoroutes, overpasses, underpasses, and of much mechanized traffic. Ours was one of the few cars. E
ven around the wharves there were mule carts, and more of them as we made our way through back streets to the edge of town, into thoroughfares, turning at corners between small stuccoed houses with vegetable gardens fitting tightly around them, vines deep on their walls. We edged out of town, westward, to a small road along the coast, all of us chattering, excited to be there.

  The road led past beaches and followed the tops of bluffs overlooking long, inviting bays: the Riviera di Ponente. As the day warmed, Peter wanted to stop for a swim, and Alan pulled over to a level space on the ocean side of the road, where we looked down a bank to a stretch of sand and a few clusters of people bathing or lying in the sun. We got out and started rummaging in our belongings for bathing suits.

  Since his first appearance on the freighter that morning, I had sensed an aspect of Alan that I had not glimpsed before. It seemed to be a recollection of pleasure and freedom, a reassured confidence, a savored return to a world he had missed, to a kind of ease and indulgence that he may have recalled, or imagined that he recalled, from childhood. It appeared in the way he waved aside overconcern about modesty in getting into our bathing suits, pointing out people down on the beach changing under the token screening of their towels. His manner suggested that he had returned to, and was introducing us to, a liberated Old-Worldliness that had always been part of his birthright. We changed behind the open car doors, and as Alan and the boys and I stepped naked from clothes into swimming trunks, we saw three young Italian women watching us with unabashed interest from the beach below. Alan waved, and they waved back, laughing, and it confirmed something he felt about being there. But he locked the car carefully before we left it.

  After the swim in the Mediterranean we went on along the coast for a few hours, pausing at a beach with fishing boats and a restaurant for a lunch of fish and shellfish just brought in, and then at Portofino to sip mineral water and eat ices, looking down to the masts and slender decks of yachts in the protected basin below. Alan telephoned ahead to a restaurant he knew on the cliff above San Remo and made a reservation for dinner, and when we got there we were shown in to a long table beside windows open onto a wide terrace and a view of the coast and the shaded sequence of headlands below us. He had thought to order us, in advance, a risotto, gray with squid ink, and again we took our time, as Alan said we were supposed to.

  The days are long in July, and after sunset the twilight seemed reluctant to darken. It was still light when we drove on toward Ventimiglia, and then the French border, the passport inspections and customs, where they waved us through. The memory of the war was still fresh, and cars were few. Americans were welcomed, and the Jeep station wagon was admired, detail by detail, as it had been wherever we stopped on the way from the wharf in Genoa.

  The lights were on beyond the corniche and on the coast below as we made our way into France, winding around the contours of the cliffs, down to the edge of Monte Carlo and the Riviera. They were glittering around Monte Carlo, and on around the bay above Beaulieu, and were reflected in the water like banks of chandeliers. One of the major galaxies of the rich.

  From Beaulieu the main road led on to Nice, but we turned sharply to the left down a narrower way that wound into St. Jean Cap-Ferrat. The café was open on the narrow place facing the fishing boats and moored sailboats riding the shimmering surface. We drove out onto the cape. It extends from the far side of the boat harbor like a thumb from a hand. To the right of the road an unlit, tree-shadowed hill was the Pine Wood, the Pinède, and to the left were the terraces and awnings of a hotel, and then a succession of large villas, one with a tower. We came to a high, pink, stuccoed wall that led to a roofed main doorway, where we stopped. Alan rang the bell, and the dark red double door swung open almost at once. They had been waiting for us. Two couples, an older pair and another a generation younger, stood on the gravel of the courtyard as we drove in, and then the men closed the doors behind us.

  They welcomed Alan with a reserved, distant warmth. The tall, thin, dignified older couple expressed a weathered attachment, a commemorative affection. To him they were Joseph and Josephine, the gardener and housekeeper, who had been there since before Alan was born, but to them, as to the young man, André, and his wife, Marie-Claire, he was Monsieur. After the ceremonious greeting Alan introduced Dorothy and me, and Andrew, telling them who we were and what we were doing there. They inquired politely about the trip, and Alan opened the back of the car. Joseph produced a garden dolly, and he and André loaded our luggage onto it. Alan walked ahead of us to the steps before the terrace and the front door, talking with Josephine, and we followed, gazing around us. Somewhere not far away a dance band was playing La Vie en Rose.

  The stuccoed walls behind us, around the garden, were the same dark raspberry pink that we had first seen along the road. It was the color of the Villa Cucia Noya, which rose to a tower in front of us from a wide terrace with balconies above it. Each level was edged with overhanging, dark Roman tiles. The windows and the doors were tall, relatively slender, elegant. On the far side of the villa, past the graveled paths of the garden, we could see a low wall, and beyond it the lights glittering on the bay, and beyond them the lit-up hotels of Beaulieu on the other side.

  We entered a wide hall with a dark red tiled floor that ran straight through the villa onto another terrace overlooking the bay. Another suit of armor, a relative perhaps of the one in the Deer Park mansion, stood near the foot of a broad curving flight of stairs that swept upward. As we stood in the hall while Alan told André where the luggage was to be taken, we could see into the big sitting room to the left, facing the garden. The low lights in there showed tapestries on the walls. Beyond the stairs to the right, we could see the end of a dining room, along its terrace.

  Alan led us out there and Josephine followed to ask whether we would like anything. She and Alan conferred and she was back in a minute with a bottle of rosé and one of seltzer, and mineral water for the boys. La Vie en Rose wafted up from below in waves, over and over. Alan told us that it came from a small bar and nightclub that had been sneaked in on a tiny shelf of shorefront at the foot of the cliff, in a corner below the two neighboring villas on the side toward town, one of which belonged to the Singer (sewing machine) heirs, and the other to a scion of the Vanderbilts. The bar’s entrepreneurs had managed to acquire a lease, no doubt by bribery, during the winter when all the owners were away, and of course the owners were outraged when they returned and found it in full swing. It was louder, Alan said, and worse for the Vanderbilt villa. It was right down beneath them, and it went on quite late. The villa’s present owner had tried to get an injunction, but it had not come through yet, and now the lease was being contested in the courts, but a decision might take years, and in the meantime the pedal boats and noise were there in the daytime and the dance music went on to all hours at night. La Vie en Rose was the signature music of the place, recurring among tunes made familiar by Edith Piaff, and music from the twenties and thirties that Alan must have heard on wind-up Victrolas at the villa in his youth.

  The terrace led along the villa to a covered arcade around the end of another, smaller, formal garden that might have been hidden in a cloister, and on the far side of that a low wall marked the top of the cliff. Beyond the wall were the sequins of light on the water, and Beaulieu. We talked quietly about the trip, in the moored daze of arrival. I was trying to imagine being where we were, and at the same time to imagine the moments, the edited, retouched, unsatisfactory glimpses that Alan was giving us, speaking with something that sounded like contentment about the villa in the scandalous but now legendary past. He alluded to his mother’s drunken bouts as a fact of history, but with no details or features of the rest of her behavior, no image of what she wore or said or cared about. Nothing about his father. Nothing, either, about his brother, Peter’s father, here in the villa. Alan was talking about somewhere that was his alone now, as only he remembered it.

  After a while he led Peter and Andrew back in and up the stai
rs to their rooms in the tower. We watched his familiar flat-footed, knock-kneed tread, his American shoes with their woven tops and thick rubber soles, receding over the dark red tiles into the low light at the foot of the broad flight of stairs, and for a moment he looked homespun, awkward, someone out of our own past. We sat saying little, looking out over the bay, breathing it all, and he came down and sat with us for a moment like an old friend, and then led us up to our own room, made sure everything was there, and said good night.

  He had given us a big room above the sitting room, with dark green flock wallpaper, towering mirrors, tall windows facing the bay and the far glittering shoreline. The dance music rose from below. To us who had never known the world there without it, La Vie en Rose and its thirties woodwinds seemed to be the sound of the place, the score that accompanied the theatrical setting and the lights across the water.

  23

  There was no planned order to our days, for I was no longer expected to be teaching Peter anything, though we talked, as before, about what we were reading. We passed the Norse sagas back and forth—though there was some aspect of them that Peter seemed to hold to himself like a secret, a high card—and their characters and events recurred in our conversation. Alan stayed up in his room on the telephone part of the day. Joseph was preoccupied with the garden routine, raking the paths, clearing dead leaves from the beds, trimming and pruning. He answered our questions but did not go on talking. Alan had brought a small yellow inflatable boat, military surplus, which Joseph inflated and presented to Peter and me. He showed us where he thought it should be kept: in a closed cupboard along the side of the garden toolshed. Beside the cupboard there was a stone cupola like a miniature tower, with a door in it opening to the top of a corkscrew flight of stairs. They led down through their stony smells to another door, padlocked, at the foot of the cliff. That was our way out onto the rocks of the shore, to go swimming.