Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!

by Harry Harrison

  The next day we took the train to Naples, then a cab to the ferry that would take us to Capri. The short time we had been in Italy had been very heartening. No one we met spoke English—but they were happy to listen to our Spanish. And maybe we could find some Esperantists. It was a bright day and almost warm this far south. Some of the London chill was seeping from our bones. The island of Capri appeared out of the sea haze ahead, an incredible sight that we had not expected. It rose out of the water, sheer limestone cliffs with seabirds circling above the breaking waves. Our ferry pulled into the tiny seaport of Marina Grande and we disembarked with the others. What would we find here?

  Our ancient Fiat cab ground up the hill in low gear, to the village of Capri on the hill above, driving through the narrow streets, growing ever narrower, until we stopped at a dead end. Apparently our pensione was not approachable by road. The driver picked up the footlocker that I had retrieved at the Naples station, and led us down a paved path between the small rocky fields, to a low building very much like a converted barn. Which is exactly what it was. Interior walls had been erected, fascinating plumbing and cooking apparatus installed, furniture put into place. Garry Davis was not there, but there was a message to see Violet Rawnsley, who was staying right next door. She was English, ninety-five years old, a vegan, and confirmed world citizen. She made us welcome. She had corresponded with Garry but had never met him, and was more than happy to be of help to him and his friends. She talked to us about the island.

  It was roughly a mile wide and two miles long. The village of Capri, world famous, was situated in a saddle above the marina. Further along the island was the other village of Anacapri, where she had her home. Apparently the sun caught the Capri part of the island better and she was spending some days here for the warmth. She would be going home in a few days and we must visit her.

  When there were no more messages from Garry—and he didn’t appear—we took her up on her offer. A dinky little bus took us down the hill, to the Piazzetta in Anacapri. While Capri was all glitz, hotels, and expensive restaurants, Anacapri did not have a tourist feel to it at all. Here is where the locals lived who worked in the hotels in Capri, as well as fishermen—and there were still even a few farmers. Violet made us welcome and introduced us to Michele Ferraro. She had the word circulated that we were interested in a rental. Good news indeed for the locals in midwinter since all the tourists had been long gone. Michele was the owner of the pasticceria where he baked all the cakes and sweets that the Italians—and the tourists—love. He also owned a house where his newly married daughter lived—and it had a vacant ground-floor apartment.

  We looked at it and instantly said yes. There was a large bedroom, bathroom, and living room, with a kitchen built into one wall. There was even a small patio at the entrance. It was just a matter of settling the price and moving into Il Nido—the Bird Nest—as the hand-painted tile by the door proclaimed. Within a week our little nest almost killed us.

  * * *

  Like all of the island’s houses, Il Nido was made with stone walls two feet thick, built to a design that must have been a thousand years old. In the older houses in the village you could easily recognize a Roman course of triangular stone sitting on an Etruscan foundation. We later watched one of these solid structures being built and understood more about our new home. First a deep cellar-like hole was chipped and blasted into the volcanic rock that formed this part of the island; it is just a few feet under the surface wherever you start to dig. This large hole in the rock was then lined with cement and became the water cistern. The boulders that had been pried out of the hole were reduced to fist-size chunks of stone in a portable motorized grinder that made an ear-destroying noise, then mixed with concrete to build the floor and walls. The roof, plaster over concrete, was flat, with a drain at one end. During the rainy season the water from the roof filled the cistern below—and had to last the entire year. The windows were metal framed, as were the doors.

  The thick walls kept the house delightfully cool in summer—but brutally frigid in the winter. There was not only no central heating, but no heating at all, we soon discovered. During the winter months in the south of Italy you put on a lot of clothes and looked forward to spring. Some homes had a charcoal brazier that produced a trickle of warmth, but that was certainly not enough for us. The three of us spent our first freezing night with all the blankets, and most of our clothes, piled on the bed on top of us. The next day I sought out our landlord. With a great amount of effort and rushing about, a small and ancient gas heater was produced. This was connected by a yard length of rubber hose to a portable tank of gas. We were used to this arrangement because our stove in Cuautla had worked the same way.

  With one important exception—the Mexican tank had been outside the house. A copper tube for the gas had been brought into the kitchen through a hole in the wall. But in Italy the tank was comfortably accessible inside the house. I turned the gas on at the tank, turned the handle on the gas heater, and lit the fire. We basked in the warmth. Of course I was very careful to turn it off before we retired, but not careful enough. I was still a creature of American civilization, so I had turned the gas off with the valve on the appliance—and never noticed that the rubber hose connecting the heater to the tank was so ancient that there were cracks in it. With the valve on the tank still turned on, the faulty hose was kept filled with gas.

  With all the windows and doors closed Il Nido was practically airtight. The leak must have been a small one or Joan would have smelled it. Not me, of course—after a lifetime of hay fever I have almost no sense of smell at all. Comfortable and warm, we fell asleep.

  Sometime during the night I was awoken by a sound. It couldn’t have come from outside the house—with two-foot stone walls and sealed windows nothing could be heard. It was a smacking sound, not loud, almost barely audible in fact. Then I realized it was the baby smacking his lips. Why? I couldn’t understand it, had difficulty working it out. Difficulty in thinking for some reason. At least I could wake Joan. She stirred and sat up.

  “I smell gas!” she said. The stove was leaking! I had enough working brain left to understand that. I also knew that I had carbon monoxide poisoning and had to do something very quickly. Air, oxygen, that came first. I pulled on the handle of the bedroom window, opened it, and found myself lying on the floor. I had blacked out. My thinking was fuzzy, confused, but I knew one thing—I had to go on.

  I did. It seemed to take forever, although Joan told me later that it had been less than a minute from beginning to end. I could not stand very well but could do a shuffle on hands and knees. Struggled the bedroom door open, managed to close it behind me. Fumbled with the gas heater and tank, could not figure out what to do. Had just enough sense left to know I had to get rid of it. Dragged it to the front door, unlocked the door, pushed it through and fell down again. Joan managed to get me back to bed and that was the end of that.

  The doctor came next morning and took my pulse, looked at the color of the inside of my eyelid, and advised me to drink lots of black coffee and left. A realist, that doctor. Since I wasn’t dead I would eventually recover. That’s the thing about carbon monoxide poisoning. The CO molecules lock on to the hemoglobin molecules in your blood—preventing oxygen from reaching the brain and body. Too much and you can’t absorb oxygen and you die. If you are still alive after the gassing all that you can do is take it very easy. If you are not dead then it means that at least the minimum oxygen for life is reaching the body. Taking it very easy is very much in order. Very slowly, new blood platelets will replace the old ones and eventually all will be well.

  I was glad that I had written so many men’s adventures, written about so many guys holding on and surviving in extreme situations, cutting off their own arms, going down with their ships. It was a question of life imitating art for a change. When I found myself on the floor I knew—since I had written the scene many times—that I had to get up again and carry on, no matter how I felt. So I did. My
knees were bruised and bloody from falling; I had felt nothing at the time. Even now I don’t think there was anything very noble or heroic about what I did. I just stumbled along as best I could to keep myself and my family alive. We also never bothered mentioning it to any of our parents. Cowardice perhaps—we could easily imagine the recriminations without experiencing them. After Todd’s malaria in Mexico, now this! Maybe they had been right about our leaving New York. Instant guilt—and instant anger. No! Joan and I had made a decision and we would stick to it. When I mentioned my doubts to her she dismissed them. Accidents, not to mention muggings, could happen in New York just as well. We had made this decision for very good reasons. We would stick with it and soldier on.

  It would take a good bit of soldiering. Things were not going that smoothly. I recovered quickly enough. Just in time to face the eternal menace of the freelancer: money. There just wasn’t any. My agent never answered my letters. And the cash was—all too quickly, really—running out. I was physically well by this time, but emotionally coming to bits. Since I was worried about money I couldn’t write. The process of writing intelligent prose requires a certain stability in life and a modicum of peace of mind. I had neither. Since I couldn’t write I could not earn any more money. Since I worried constantly about money I could not write. There was temporary salvation at least. A trip to Napoli to the hock shop with the gold bracelet and the camera once again kept the wolf at bay for a bit.

  A word of sage advice for any young writers or artists who are in this position: hock the bourgeois gear. Art comes first. If you are not committed completely you do not deserve to succeed. Harsh but true. But don’t lose your precious assets. Not only for emotional reasons—you may be down on your luck again and need to visit the pop shop just one more time. So if you have a five-hundred-dollar camera, never hock it for full value. You will never raise enough to retrieve it. Hock it for twenty-five or fifty dollars. Then retrieve it when the first check comes in. He who hocks and gets it back, hocks again when things get black.

  We now reached the very bottom moment, the blackest night that we had ever experienced. This moment came when we were down to exactly sixteen cents—one hundred lire. The price of one more airmail stamp to my agent or a liter of milk for Todd. These are the kind of moments in life that one really does not need, but we had walked into it with our eyes wide open. Making this decision had been much harder for Joan than me. I had known that I wanted to write, needed to write, had stories and books that needed doing. I hoped that I would succeed. Joan did not hope. She felt very secure in her knowledge that I would do these things, create art, create literature—and support our family with earned income. I had no such assurance: she was rock-steady in her belief. She had put everything on the line and she would not waver. So she solved this one as well. Since I wasn’t doing too well as a good provider she realized that she had to go out and do it herself. She talked to the two brothers who ran the grocery store. In Spanish-Italian she convinced them that it would be a wise thing to extend us credit. An acknowledgment to her tenacity, and their kindliness. This was done.

  I sit back and look at these words, written fifty years later, and marvel. That I could have got my small family into this desperate state on an island in the Mediterranean in midwinter was no small feat. That Joan could approach the grocers with such determination was a marvel of an equal and opposite dimension. No credit to me for getting us into this dreadful situation; all credit to Joan, the most wonderful woman that ever existed, and of course the grocery brothers as well. They were really on our side, as was their culture. Before we left Anacapri we began to understand more about these hardworking and very independent people.

  It must be realized that, for the most part, Anacapri was a peasant village, which meant that cash money was incredibly tight. A workingman earned about two thousand lire a day—$3.20. A ten-thousand-lire note, $16.00, was referred to as a pezzo grosso, a big thing. Our maid, Anna, who earned seven hundred lire a day, had never even seen one before and marveled at its size when I finally got my hands on this formidable sum of money. But it was the locals’ attitude toward the arts—and toward the middle class—that I found most reassuring. One they loved, the other they loathed. Opera was a part of their lives. When they were in the trees, picking olives, they would sing arias back and forth to each other. One feast day a small opera company from Sicily performed highlights from Tosca in the town square. The performance was wonderful and greatly enjoyed. The applause went on and on, rising to a crescendo when the singers received their fees while still on stage. Payment must not only be done—but it must be seen to be done. It was a very poor world they inhabited, but some things are worth paying for.

  A little of that Italian pleasure and respect of the arts and artists had even rubbed off on me. The grocery brothers always called me by the honorific of dottore or professore, doctor or professor. Not wanting to fly under false colors I used my dictionary and worked out what I wanted to say before going to buy that day’s ration of grated Parmesan.

  “Grazie, professore,” the avuncular and financial-supporting grocery brother said. I was ready with my prepared Italian speech. “You must understand that I am not a professor.” He raised querying Latin eyebrows. “But you are a writer, are you not?” The village was small and gossip constant; everyone knew who we were. “Yes, I am. But I write fiction, articles.…”

  “You write—and your writing is sold and appears in books?”

  “Magazines, really.”

  “You write and your words are read by millions?”

  “Yes. Though thousands might be a closer figure.”

  “Si, capito, professore.” Yes, I understand, Professor.

  Very nice people. But we were still broke and we now owed the brothers in excess of thirty thousand lire. While forty-eight dollars may be a laughable sum now, remember it then represented three weeks’ hard labor for a workingman. In desperation I turned again to Hans Stefan Santesson. Swedish born, he had lived in the States for years, but still knew his way around Europe. I outlined for him another story entitled “War With the Robots” to go with the other robot stories I had sold him, the standard five thousand words in length. Although the story was not yet written, I asked him if he could see his way clear to extending a small advance as he had with the other stories.

  He did better than that. Being a European he understood the frailties of international financial transactions now that we had left the Anglo-Saxon civilization of England. A few weeks later I received a letter from him, ordinary airmail. In addition to his letter the envelope contained part of a sheet of carbon paper cut to size. So that if the envelope was held up to the light its contents could not be seen. Its other contents were a U.S. fifty-dollar bill.

  An advance on my story at one cent a word. Thank you, Hans, wherever you are now, in some Viking Valhalla hopefully, thank you for coming through in a very pressing hour of need.

  Cash in hand, some of our grocery debt paid off, food in stomach, wineglass filled, I could relax and write the story. (Local wine was cheaper than bottled water at this time—sixteen cents a liter.) I wrote not only this story but a dozen more for Hans, all on the robot theme. Most of them paid for in advance. Eventually I gathered all these stories together into a collection titled after the first of the stories, War with the Robots. The collection is still alive, although, unhappily, Hans is not.

  At last we had word from Garry Davis. He was still on the way to Italy—but there had been problems. For the moment he was staying with American comic artist Dan Barry, who at that time lived in France. Serendipity. I had never met Dan—but his reputation went before him. He had been the top artist in comics, drawing the top rate per page. His name was apocryphal among the other comic artists. He had been known to tear up a thousand-dollar check because the rate per page was less than he had been promised. Now he was working for King Features, drawing the syndicated science fiction comic strip Flash Gordon. I knew about this because an old friend
in New York, Larry Shaw, had written scripts for Dan for a while. Since Larry was no longer doing this I felt free to apply for the job.

  I wrote to Dan. I was still not entranced with comics and had absolutely no desire to stay in the comic business forever—but my family had to eat. I pointed out the fact that I was an ex-comic artist who had not only drawn the stuff but had written a mountain of scripts. I was also a selling SF author. And where else would he find this combination in Europe?

  Dan’s reply was instant and firm: write some scripts. This was the beginning of a mutually profitable relationship that continued for ten years. For all those long years I wrote all the daily and Sunday scripts for Flash Gordon. The payment wasn’t much, but it was tax free and enough to pay most of our daily living expenses.

  I was just getting started on my first scripts for Dan when one wet and rainy night there was a knock at the door: there at last was Garry Davis, carrying a folding rubber boat.

  Joan made coffee, I poured some wine, and he told us the latest chapter in his war against the evils of nationalism. The French would not honor his World Passport and French authorities had kicked him out of the country, pushed him onto the bridge on the Côte d’Azur that connects France to Italy. The only problem was that, without a passport they recognized, the Italians would not let him in. So, for some days, he had camped on the bridge in no-man’s-land, a modern-day man without a country. Sympathizers brought him food, but this was a no-win situation. It persisted until a more practical world citizen brought him a folding rubber boat and a bicycle pump. In the dark of night they had launched Garry into the ocean and he had paddled to Italy. He had deflated the boat, boarded the train, gone on to Naples. There he had taken the ferry, found out where we were staying, then arrived at our door.

  But not for long—there were no secrets in Anacapri. He had visited Violet Rawnsley and the word was soon out. A few days later we were visited by the marshall of the police, a polite but very firm man. We translated his ultimatum. Garry had a few days to rest up, but at the end of that time he would be arrested and taken to the prison camp in Frascati just north of Rome. There was no choice. We thanked the maresciallo and very soon said good-bye to Garry yet another time. The rubber boat was confiscated.