Of true homesickness – the longing for the habitual – I suf fered little, for I had never acquired or been provided with familiar things; mine, from childhood, had been an existence improvised among the unfamiliar. Nothing, in those first weeks at Naples, could seem as deeply alien as that life of indignation and Sunday roasts that I had left behind. For my brother, however, and our lost companionship, our lost intimacy of thought and look and word, I suffered what one does for love, assailed – in a shop or at my desk, while continuing to talk of other things – by anguish, as by the pang of some mortal but concealed infirmity. A postcard from Edmund, sent to me from Stockholm where he had briefly gone on business, moved me to desolate tears – so separate did we seem from one another then, each in a place unimaginable to the other, each irrevocably set on his tangential course, the dividing ocean once more between us … Seigneur, que tant de mers me séparent de vous.
Nonetheless I knew, hating to know it, that our condition was not the worst, since one of us wished it that way. It is when both desire it otherwise that logic is violated, and the course of events seems uselessly, fatally, distinguished from the will.
CHAPTER FOUR
Gianni sang. He sang rather well, and quite a lot. When very young he had the idea of becoming a professional singer, but abandoned it because of the battles one had to fight. There were the teachers, the impresarios who did not recognize talent, or were jealous of it; there was the now celebrated cellist who, auditioning together with the youthful Gianni, had talked throughout Gianni’s performance.
‘Dunque – “Maestro”, I asked him. “What would you think of someone who talked while you performed?” And, giving me that smile – with his mouthful of white teeth which were not then exclusively false – he said, “Ah, but you see, when I perform, no one talks.” “Then,” said I, “the difference is that your audience is composed only of civilized persons.”’
Gianni sang as he drove us to Herculaneum in his new car. He could sing arias, and knew Neapolitan songs by the dozens – ‘Libero Bovio, Salvatore di Giacomo, those are the names to learn at Naples. Never mind about King Ladislas, or Joachim Murat.’ When we approached the royal palace at Portici he slowed down. ‘Look at this. Who but a Neapolitan would have a country retreat with the road going right through the house? And at the foot of an active volcano.’ He laughed, and thumped his hand on the wheel, highly satisfied with the folly of the Bourbons.
Gianni was something of a patriot. That is to say that all foreigners, and particularly anglo-saxons, came in for a mauling. ‘The names these people have,’ he remarked, although my name was practically the same as his. ‘Where do they get them from. I had an actress once – I mean, in a film I directed – a skinny – looking thing like you, English, called Sally. Imagine, salt. A fine name for a girl.’
I leant forward, my elbows along the back of their seat, my chin bumping on my enlaced knuckles. The nape of Gioconda’s neck, rising out of a crimson coat, was whiter than her throat, as if in summer her hair had hung down over it; above this whiteness, twisted glossy ropes of hair were secured by a comb of curved tortoise-shell.
‘Your comb. I never saw anything like it.’
Her fingers came up to touch it. ‘How old is it, do you think? Or an old copy of something old? Here – and here – there must have been stones; diamonds, even, for the rest of the work is so fine. I found it on a barrow in San Biagio – one of those barrows, you must have seen them, where they sell, or try to sell, cracked saucers and broken keyrings, rubbish scavenged from here and there. I took it home and cleaned it. And Gianni liked it.’ Here Gianni gave a possessive, endorsing nod. ‘I’ve worn it for years.’
It was a pale, cold day, quiet as a weekday. We were almost alone on the road. At Resina, with the Vesuvius rising over us, we came into a country market where a dozen stunted donkeys, each dragging its own teetering Vesuvius of ill-corded bales, applied their muzzles humidly to the Maserati as it inched among them. Not long afterwards this little town founded on the lava was submerged under the eruption of skyscrapers flung up by a housing project.
At Herculaneum we were the only visitors, wandering unaccompanied through vacant Roman rooms, like guests who have arrived on the wrong day and can take stock of things without having to be polite. Gianni loved my pleasure in the ruins, proud as if the town were his own creation, explaining the arrangement of the houses, the changes of situation caused by volcanic action -‘Here was the sea, then, with gardens and cypress alleys leading down to it. All that land down there came much later.’ Every so often he would tell us, ‘It was a marvellous life,’ as if he himself had been plucked out of it.
‘Look at this, for instance.’ Gianni led me away to the foot of one of the corridor-like streets and into an ornate room that had served, possibly, as a private theatre – one end giving a sense of proscenium, decorated with a stone mask set above mosaics of animals and garlands. ‘What could be more charming.’ He followed me up the room to examine the decorations and, taking me by the shoulders, stood me in the niche intended for some statue. He then kissed me – or attempted to, his mouth roughly glancing over my chin and throat as I spun my head away, dodging his caress like a blow. He dropped his hands from my shoulders but still stood blocking the way, looking at me and smiling, and repeating in a normal voice, ‘What could be more charming.’
I stood in the niche where he had placed me. Even to push him away seemed too much like a response. In an undertone he complained to me, ‘Why the fuss. I am only, so to speak, observing the conventions.’
‘Damn you,’ I said in English, furious that Gioconda’s proximity somewhere in this labyrinth obliged me to lower my voice to him like an accomplice. ‘Damn you and your conventions.’
Gianni walked away. Having stepped down through the narrow doorway he turned back, one hand raised and resting on the outer wall, to look at me with the same bright eyes and hard, humorous compression of the lips.
‘Just one moment,’ said Gioconda, out of sight. Gianni stood quite still. In the street beyond there was a tiny sound, and Gioconda appeared beside him winding her camera. ‘It was so natural,’ she said. ‘So like you.’
Gioconda later gave me this photograph, along with one or two others she took that day. I have it still, and there is Gianni, smiling ironically out of the picture at something that has momentarily taken his fancy.
I remained some minutes more in that small Roman theatre that had, I dare say, seen a lot of this kind of thing played out in various costumes.
Gianni made, I thought, a reference to this incident, in the car as we drove on around the gulf of Sorrento – observing to Gioconda that he found me young for my age. ‘Strange to think,’ he said, as if I were not present, ‘that there are only six or seven years between you two. You seem like my contemporary, while she -’ tipping his head back in my direction, ‘might just be leaving school. Or entering it.’
Over his shoulder he gave me, too – again as if the matter were crucial and personal to him – accounts of the great eruption, quoting Pliny to us as though to back up his own testimony; citing like fresh evidence the letters of the poet Statius. ‘You see how it is with us,’ he said — meaning Italians, or perhaps the human race. ‘The ships were waiting to take them off. Ash and lava were streaming down on them. But they had dinner, they talked, they went to the baths, they slept. And then it was too late.’
I could see that he thought well of them for this, just as he had commended the impracticality of the Bourbons; and quite expected him to add, as he did, ‘There is something to be said, for it, after all.’ And when I, still sulking, made no reply, he most unfairly shrugged at Gioconda as if to give me up as a bad job.
Of that journey, with Vesuvius slowly turning us on its flanks, then releasing us for the long arc of the bay, there remains a childhood sensation of disappointment: my outing had been spoilt, the expedition had shifted character in an unlooked-for way. In memory there is a blur of cold sea and silver fields
, and then we are at Sorrento and I am cheerful again, having had my lunch and being excited by the pretty restaurant, the romance of the slopes above and cliffs below, and the great view out to Capri. It is as Gianni has just said, I am as easily diverted as a schoolgirl.
The restaurant supplied the usual pair of musicians, small elderly wielders of accordion and fiddle, one of whom – the one with the wall eye – sang in a voice reedily tender, shaken with infirmity. There was also a fortune-teller, who had little to do in the winter months when the clientele were off seeking their fortunes by other means. She fell on us the moment we entered. Gianni purchased our freedom with a few coins, and we watched her go to work – her gypsy costume topped by a worn grey cardigan – on the only other patrons of the restaurant, a ravishing blonde girl and her white-haired escort, who interrupted the process with bursts of delighted laughter in which the fortune-teller joined herself from time to time, the gold hoops in her ears bouncing joyfully on the neck of her cardigan.
‘That’s the kind of future to have,’ Gioconda said to us. ‘It’s got them laughing already, just the idea of it.’
‘It’s not difficult to imagine what she’s telling them.’ Gianni drew his fingers lightly along Gioconda’s arm resting on the tablecloth.
Gioconda and I watched the other table. The affair grew more serious, the couple drawing together as they listened, sometimes glancing at one another and half-smiling to assure themselves that it was fantasy.
Gianni was bored. ‘It’s utterly transparent. They pick out a few things that happened to everybody, and make a revelation of it.’
‘Psychologists too,’ Gioconda agreed, ‘will often explain the most obvious things to you as if they were professional discoveries. What’s alluring is the illusion, not even of power, but of authority. Isn’t that what we want, from gods, priests, poets, even from those columns in the newspaper that answer letters? The possibility that someone really knows, and has got the upper hand of it all.’
I said, ‘Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere, knows the whole thing.’
‘Neapolitans know a lot,’said Gianni. ‘But they know it collectively. Break them up, take them away, and they’re hopeless, just as stupid as anyone else. It’s the city, the phenomenon of Naples itself, that knows something. It’s like an important picture, or a book – once you’ve taken it in, you can’t believe there was a time when you didn’t know it.’ He turned to me. ‘This will change everything for you, being here. Naples is a leap. It’s through the looking-glass.’ And I looked out at the oval mirror of the bay.
There was no more laughter from our companions. In the end their fortunes proved sobering. They parted from the seer in low voices, and a few more coins changed hands. When they got up to go, the man put his arm around the girl, and drew her to him and kissed her cheek – in consolation, perhaps, or with a premonition of loss.
Shortly after these meetings with Gioconda, I moved out of the hotel and took an apartment on the sea, along the foot of the Posillipo. In the sea, one might have said, since the apartment was in one of the villas that stand out in the bay all along the northern arc of Naples, and have a water life of their own. Beginning at Mergellina with a crumbling seventeenth-century colossus, they end at Gaiola with a Roman ruin; their names alone are an inventory of the eccentric. These buildings look on to the gulf of Naples, and are interspersed with grottoes and declivities of the pale gold stone of which that shore is composed, and even with shreds of a disappearing countryside and surviving groups of umbrella pines. Above them rises the headland of the Posillipo – already then encumbered with a ridge of the modern blocks that were to deface it completely over the next few years.
An open-air nightclub, wedged into the tufa near my building, lay in wait for its season; and a bedraggled restaurant or two commanded, from scruffy terraces, the incomparable, lake-like prospect of the bay.
In order to reach the apartment one entered quite a different building, that stood higher on the hillside, above and behind. From this one went down, in a tiny bathysphere of an elevator, through rock, and arrived at one end of a long corridor roughly tunnelled from solid stone, painted and tiled dark red. The corridor could be lit by a series of electric buttons whose sequence, timed for a loping run, provided a certain claustrophobic excitement. This deep crossing passed under Via Posillipo and through the tiny promontory of which my villa formed the prow. It ended in a flight of steep steps and a grilled door, beyond which were light, sky, and the sea. A glassed-in catwalk had been attached to the villa’s side, leading past the doors of the many apartments into which the house had been divided.
Nothing could have been more canny, more uncanny, more Neapolitan, than this means of access. ‘Romantic,’ I wrote of it to Norah – and it did have something of the sinister that is an authentic element of romance.
There was another approach, by water, disembarking at a landing stage of stone steps glossy with moss, being admitted to the house through another green-grilled door. The building itself was red stucco, lifted clear of the water on foundations of grey stone; seen from a distance it floated forward in air like a rusty boat in the slips.
I had two big rooms there, and they were the most beautiful rooms, by far, that I had lived in. Like most missionaries, we lived better than those we had come to save; immunities and allowances broke our fall into this new ambience, we had cars to drive us and maids to keep us clean. My rooms gave on to a narrow terrace that, in turn, looked directly across the sea to the volcano: the rooms, the terrace, were like antechambers to the spectacle, their purpose was to disclose it. That view of the Bay of Naples has passed the point where it can ever find its master, its Guardi or its Canaletto; has become virtually a comic sight in art, its configurations too intimately known, even to those who have never seen them, now to be revealed. It gives an impression of indifference to the role humanly assigned to it – as if it will go on, now, lending itself to posters, to chocolate boxes, without ever giving itself away; just as Vesuvius goes on absorbing the tributes of those it clearly intends to exterminate.
There was another floor of apartments, then the water. One might have fished from the terrace. At the rear, where the apartment was entered from the glass walk, there was a wide hallway, and an inner room lined with immense wardrobes and camphor-saturated chests. The whole place was densely, darkly furnished, with great bed and mighty chairs, long table, carved sofa; a flimsier note occasionally struck, like the triangle in an orchestra, by a black tripod plant stand from UPIM or a gilt magazine holder, like an outsize toast rack, from the Rinascente. In the kitchen, small stove and smaller sink flanked a huge old splay-footed refrigerator; while beneath this triptych were predellas of endless cabinets and drawers containing here a cheese-grater, there a corroded colander, or a corkscrew still impaling its wine-dark cork. On the bathtub, an imported fitting hailed you in your own language: ‘WASTE’.
Of the heavy dark chests and chairs, several were subsequently stacked in a boxroom beyond the kitchen, while others were dragged away at my request and made their way into various unprotesting flats in the building. There was a long stairway like a stone ladder, without turns or landings, leading from the sea right up to the road, and any object too large for the elevator was heaved up or down this cliffway. So that one might at any time observe a packing case or a bureau coming painfully down on somebody’s hooped back; and once, looking from the kitchen window, I saw a great rubber tree in a pot, moving in this way, among the pines, to Dunsinane.
Gianni and Gioconda came to see my flat one evening, bringing with them a tub of narcissus. Since Gianni had never been known to carry anything, the pot was held by a small boy who arrived behind them with his face buried in the suffocating flowers. To my surprise Gianni praised everything – he was delighted with the house and with the strangeness of the approach to it. ‘You’re beginning to get the idea,’ he said, as if I had shown myself an apt pupil.
The sight of this unmanned, woman’s enterprise moved Gianni at once to take command. ‘You could have the chimney altered to make it work,’ he said. ‘But that takes brains. In Rome it might be worth doing, even though it’s not your own place, but here … When it comes to building, Neapolitans have good ideas about form and colour, and there it stops. They can’t hang a picture without knocking the wall down.’
After they had gone I put the lamps out and looked through the flawed, icy glass of the terrace doors at the lighted city to the left. Behind my back the radiator put out its ineffectual red tonguetips. The window returned my breath, slightly steamy with PX whisky and merged with the smell of narcissus and the charred fire that Gianni could not light. It was in this confusion of the ignominious and grandiose that I experienced the first moments of pure happiness.
CHAPTER FIVE
The mission I had accompanied from England was composed, for the most part, of military men. When I joined it I knew nothing of the professional soldier in modern times. Seething is the word I find for them: so many of those people, particularly the officers, were perpetually seething – with fury, with fear, and with the daily necessity of striking out before they could be felled by inapprehensible foes. Of this seething, their profession was but the logical extension. (In fact, their attitude to their authorized enemies – Soviets, socialists, and agitators of all breeds – was tinged with a wistful worship. ‘Catch them putting up with a mess like this,’ or ‘They wouldn’t tolerate this set-up for a second.’) My London life, deficient as it had been, had not included those who perceived solutions in the violent deaths of numberless others, and who passionately advocated this view.
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