The Bay of Noon

by Shirley Hazzard

  ‘A woman like that,’ said Justin.

  I looked back from the girl to him.

  He set down his glass. ‘I’m saying – a woman like that. Superb, phenomenal.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Your friend, I’m saying. Gioconda.’

  It’s annoying, when you are putting things together in this way and have made them fit, to come upon a piece or two you can’t accommodate. For instance, I recall now that Gianni and Justin actually met – they did meet once, for a few minutes, a week or two after that, when Justin and I called one evening on Gioconda.

  As we were leaving, Gianni came in. I had not seen him since the night of Gioconda’s party. He was suntanned and looking well – looking fit, the expression would be, athletic and resilient. He was in a good mood, too — I remember dreading that he would talk his inane English to Justin, or come out with jokes about kilts and sporrans; I was apprehensive of Justin’s opinion of him, once more as if I were responsible. Instead it went well — the very reverse of the uneasy afternoon when I introduced Justin and Gioconda. They were civil with one another, and even exchanged some marine observations connected with Gianni’s fishing expeditions off Libya. It turned out, too, that Justin had spent some weeks of war in a part of Africa once familiar to Gianni.

  ‘There were three white men there in my time,’ Gianni declared. ‘Three only. A German, a Dane, and me. We spoke Swahili with one another.’

  What a lie, thought I.

  Justin, laughing, came out with some throaty words, and added in English, ‘It’s all I remember – all I ever knew, in fact.’ Gianni at once responded with what must, from his attitude, have been some little speech of compliments or greeting. And I felt, at this unexpected, authentic accomplishment, the same unwilling astonishment I had felt on first seeing Gianni’s apartment in Rome.

  Nothing more than that. They shook hands, and parted. It is only the fact that they met that surprises, cropping out in retrospect. It is one of those little dependencies of memory that suddenly demand self-government. One is unreasonably angered with such a fact for existing, for making one wonder, as it does, what else has been forgotten. It spoils everything, and ought to be abolished. Was there not a follower of Pythagoras who was put to death because he pointed out an unaccountable flaw in the mathematical theory of universal harmony?

  Another missing item is the report – the one I was at work on all this time. The report is missing not for any reason that alarms or touches me, but because it is not interesting enough to mention. The shifts of season I have described, the moods and incidents that shaded or illumined our four lives, occupied a tiny fraction, only, of the many hours and days given over to my work on that report – hours and days during which I, along with others, converted sheaves and rolls and heavy piles of paper from a foreign language into a form of English that was in its way more alien to us. Yet, while I know exactly where, in Via Calabritto, I bought a pink silk shirt I sometimes wore to work, or can recall at will the jingle chanted by my portiere’s child when he brought me my letters, not a phrase of that report comes back to me, not a single fragment of the sections and subsections and indented appendices on which, with technical dictionaries spread open under paperweights and annotated pages overflowing on to window-sills and chairs, I expended the greater part of my energies and days.

  The importance of our work was constantly brought home to us. That was one reason why we doubted it. But mainly it was the level of its presentation – in the narrowest, the most belligerent context – that repelled our confidence; and the pathos of our superiors, their self-laudatory defending of the world from perils into which just such mentalities as theirs had plunged it. Lacking human reference, they reduced the most imperative matters to boredom: they might kill us, but they could never engage our interest.

  That summer the city was less of a daily distraction than it had been at the start, for I had come to accept its apartness and its continuity – in the way that, in the course of a frightening dream, one comforts oneself, without waking, with the knowledge of reality and the certainty of returning to it. Because of this I could be, in the office, more as they wished me to be; never speaking now of the city or of my life in it, except to grumble companionably once in a while about a dishonest taxi-driver or a disastrous dry-cleaner; standing drinks at the Officers’ Club on the Queen’s Birthday and helping decorate the corridor for the Fourth of July. As a show of good faith one might work up indignation over a telephone breakdown, or because some folder of statistics arrived with a page missing. It was by the signs of dissatisfaction that we were bound together.

  When our mission first came to Naples there had been continual talk about the necessity of adjusting to the area – the word adjusting reiterated as if we were nothing more than a set of short-wave radios that could, with a bit of fiddling, be tuned in to foreign programmes. The desirability of bearing up, or at least of not breaking down, had been impressed on us. It had never for a moment been intended that we should come to like the place.

  It was at Bagnoli that I discovered the inertia of military men. As it was the habit of those warriors to deride as ineffectual the pleasures of the mind, a dynamism was implied in the conduct of their own unspeculative lives. Yet I would pass them, those men of action, huddled over milk shakes in the American restaurant in Santa Lucia as I set out for Spaccanápoli, or would see them gloomily slumped there at the bar on my return from an expedition to the islands. The pastel girls might take a bus to Amalfi or Ravello, Germani would escort his children into the crater of Vesuvius, ‘for an outing’ as he said, but the timid activists seldom ventured far from the base. They spoke of food, and of losing weight; some took photographs, some followed the stock market. Their clubs, their PX, and a flat in a streamlined building within striking distance of these – that was, ideally, the pattern of the life of adventure: supine, incurious, complaining, they awaited the command that would animate them.

  There were exceptions – which were made, if mild, the subject of taunts; and, if pronounced, the subject of a dossier.

  Even the locally recruited clerks and couriers preferred, I think, the unexceptional, rather than have confusing elements in so consistent an establishment. By that summer I had given up using their real names of Gennaro or Carlo or Luigi, and was calling them Gerry and Louie and Charley just as everyone else did, and making them presents of cartons of Lucky Strikes bought at the PX for the purpose.

  ‘You must do something very secret out there,’ Gioconda remarked once, and Gianni agreed, ‘God knows what she’s up to. She never says a word about it.’

  ‘If you knew,’ I told them. ‘If you only knew how boring it is.’ It was again the contrast between their lives and mine. They, who spent their days freely using their intelligence, could never conceive of work such as mine. ‘You couldn’t even imagine it.’

  Gianni groaned. ‘God almighty, when I think what I was doing at your age.’

  And Gioconda said, ‘Will she never understand?’

  Of all the Mezzogiorno, only the report did not recognize the summer that year. As July came to a close, everything else slackened and changed. Those who could leave the city did so – the hot, dry, dirty streets were inhabited now only by the poor. The poor took the city over, appearing in big families or small battalions on Via Caracciolo or in Piazza dei Martiri – places where in winter they seldom showed themselves, or came as single spies. Along the seafront, any polluted point of access was alive with bathers, and a horde of near-naked children flapped and thrashed around the walls of Lucullus’ castle.

  The heart of the city became an interior, a dark centre of discomfort. Progress, in ripping out tracts of vineyard or vegetable garden, had only sealed that congested labyrinth more completely with concrete and bitumen, only made it the more unfit to bear its breathless summer. A portion of Spaccanápoli was still spoken of, without irony, as ‘the Gardens of San Gennaro’, though street was laid on street there, and house on house,
as if they had been tangled together in an earthquake.

  Still they had their seasons, the pavements of Naples, those square stones of Via Tribunali or San Biagio dei Librai. In winter, nespole ripened there, pale spheres like unyielding apricots; in summer figs, green or magenta; later there would be walnuts, and the fruit of the cactus. In cartons or baskets, spread on newspaper or simply on the ground, they burgeoned alongside piles of second-hand clothes and underclothes, beside mounds of threadbare blouses and discoloured corsets and all the other doubtful merchandise that bloomed there perennially.

  Near Gioconda’s house, in summer, a man in a wheelchair used to sell goldfish, which were displayed swimming about in a blue plastic baby-bath. And once in a while near the Porta Capuana, I would come across a salesman of ordinary sparrows, fifty lire each, squatting on the steps of Santa Caterina and passionately calling attention to the fluttering contents of his wicker cage.

  Gioconda was away a lot, spending the week-days in the islands when the crowds were less. She made arrangements to visit her sister in Nice, then postponed them. ‘I can’t face travelling at this time of year. At least not till after Ferragosto. At Nice, too, it’s frightful — crowds, you can imagine. Even Luciana writes me that I should wait.’ The truth was that she was unwilling to go so far from Gianni, and that she disliked leaving home. When I asked her what she would do in the summer if she could freely choose, she laughed. ‘Perhaps in our old age, who knows, Gianni and I will be able to take trips to Assisi or Viareggio — come le coppie cafoni.’

  Gianni himself had been in Zurich on business, and at Venice; had spent a fortnight at Portofino with his children. Returning, he had an accident – not a serious one, though he hurt his head and his knee, but the car was towed to a garage at Genoa and would be out of commission for a couple of months.

  ‘It must be a wreck, then,’ I exclaimed, when Gioconda told me.

  ‘Not at all. It’s August – that’s the thing. Nobody works, nothing can be done.’

  Some days later, arriving at Naples in a rented car, Gianni joined Gioconda on Capri.

  Justin was to fly to Gibraltar at the end of the summer, and go on to Spain. From there he might go home to see his parents. In the autumn, he said, he would be back at Naples to finish his work with the Aquarium. I wondered whether, once away, he would return so soon, or ever.

  It pleased me to hear their plans, to think of them all going in different directions. It made me feel stable, settled, at peace, at home; in a place, for the first time, that was not a preparation for another setting or a wider experience, and which I had no wish or reason to leave. I was immune to the mid-August holiday and its shifting guises of calamity and release; and to the endless repetition, ‘Before Ferragosto’, ‘After Ferragosto’ …

  Only the report went on accreting, piling up, it seemed, more pages than we produced, being carried away in teetering loaves to be mimeographed into innumerable copies all marked TOP SECRET. When we had dealt with displacement and dredging and docking, there was refuelling and provisioning and logistics, and when those had been cleared up there was always security to fall back on, for there was never enough of that.

  The Colonel, who had got hold of a small sailing boat and a Swedish girl friend, was genial these days and even went so far as to praise my industry, remarking that I seemed to be getting adjusted to Naples at last.

  Just before Ferragosto I fell ill. That morning Serafina went up to the street in my place and told the Colonel to go on to Bagnoli by himself. Finding Justin there with his car, she delivered the message to them both. During his solitary drive the Colonel must have reflected on the coincidence of my illness with the approaching holiday, for he telephoned from the office to say that he was sending Germani back with the car to take me to the doctor. Although it meant getting dressed and making a winding journey up to the American Naval Hospital behind Naples, I was feeling sick enough to be glad of going there. A young officer took my temperature and diagnosed the Asian flu.

  ‘What’s your superior’s name?’

  I had learnt to recognize the Colonel in this description. From his office the doctor telephoned the Colonel and told him I must stay in bed until after the holidays. The Colonel having planted the seed of deception, I felt as grateful to this young man as if I had been malingering and he had abetted me. Even Germani, helping me back into the car, assured me I didn’t look well, as if there were some doubt about the validity of my case.

  On the descent from Via Manzoni towards the Posillipo, we came in full sight of the gulf of Naples. That high, open part of the city, the top tier of its arena, is a suburb, now, of identical modern blocks in pastel colours; hypocrite officialdom, seeking to minimize its guilt by implicating others, has named for the poets the avenues that spawn these parti-coloured cubes (‘Like all those Piazza Mussolinis,’ Gioconda used to say, ‘that became Piazza Matteottis overnight, and could change back some other night just as fast; convenient, even to the number of letters’). But then it was still a countryside that looked to Naples on the one hand, and on the other across Pozzuoli to Cape Misenum.

  It was a fierce day, clear, hotly coloured, every rise and declivity of the city dryly distinct. Slums, fields, churches, mountains and sea unfurled themselves around the volcano as on the plan of some extravagant place that could exist only in fancy. Germani drove more and more slowly, he leaning forward in his seat and I in mine just as if we expected some climax to this great scene, might see it seized by some vast convulsion.

  We came down to the shore at Mergellina, into streets already decorated for the festival of Piedigrotta, lankly strung with coloured bulbs as separate as ill-strung beads, melancholy in the midday sun. A hundred summer cafés had flowered around the tiny port, and stalls decorated with shells were selling oysters and mussels and the mossy, shapeless seafood called ‘carnùmmola’. Red and purple, strung with floats of cork, the nets were spread there across the footpath and the road, and over it all the children scrambled and darted with no sign of belonging, except to the city itself.

  At home, Justin called me. I told him, ‘I’m ghastly sick. They say it’s Asian flu.’ I told him about going to the hospital. ‘I really do feel seedy.’

  ‘Shall I come? Can I do something?’

  ‘Thanks, no, absolutely nothing. I’m going to sleep. But I won’t be able to come tomorrow.’ It was an appointment we had, to go to a concert in the amphitheatre at Pompeii.

  ‘Oh – the concert, that’s nothing. I’ll give the tickets to somebody or other. Only sorry you’re feeling seeders.’

  ‘No, don’t be silly. Of course you should go … Take someone else.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘Well — I don’t know – there must be someone. A female colleague.’

  ‘They’re all married. Or unmarried.’

  ‘Someone from Bagnoli, then.’ I was like a mother urging an unsociable child.

  ‘Your friend,’ he said. ‘Shall I ask your friend?’

  ‘My …? Well of course. A good idea.’

  ‘I’m only joking.’

  ‘But of course you could call her. Just the job.’

  ‘You think so? Just the job? Won’t Don Giovanni put his stiletto in my back?’

  ‘Certainly. But be fearless.’

  ‘Bloody, bold and resolute. That’s me.’ We were silent, then he laughed.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘At the bare idea. Do you think that expression means bare in the sense of mere, or that the idea is being exposed to us, naked and undisguised?’

  ‘Good-bye,’ I said.

  ‘Look, I will come over this evening. See how you are. About seven, say.’

  I asked him, ‘Are you trying to redress the balance?’

  ‘No. I am redressing the bare idea.’

  Justin came that evening to see me, and stayed for an hour or so. He made a jug of orange juice, and we sat in the living-room and drank it in the half-light because it was still too
hot to open the shutters. Gioconda’s name was not mentioned between us – then, or ever again.

  Gioconda herself came to visit me a few days later. By then the holiday had passed. The city, as she told me, was empty; while the sea, as I saw, was teeming with life. I had got up for her visit, and she begged me to go back to bed.

  ‘It’s too hot,’ I told her. ‘Because I had to raise the shutters. I can’t lie all day in a dark room.’

  She remarked, ‘I suppose in America we would have air conditioning.’

  ‘In Africa we had ceiling fans.’ It was the first time we had talked about the weather with one another. I turned my head to say this to her, but found her staring at me. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You look so sick. You told me it was only the flu.’

  ‘So it is. There’s an epidemic. I’ll be better in a few days.’

  ‘In a few days I’ll be gone, to Nice. It’s all arranged … Look after yourself then, while I’m away.’

  ‘So you’re really going?’

  ‘Yes, I must. It’s time. I’ll be back soon – three weeks or so.’

  I wondered about Gianni, whether he would visit her there, whether he had come to Naples over the holiday; but for once she had not mentioned him. When she got up to go I put my hand on her arm, and said, ‘How different from when you were leaving Naples last time, for Tripoli.’ But the recollection hurt her, for she covered my hand with hers and did not smile, and I was sorry to have spoken of it. She leant forward to embrace me, but I told her, ‘Keep away,’ and she drew back instantly. ‘I don’t want you to come down with anything.’

  After she had gone I realized I had been expecting Justin, who sometimes came by at that time of day, and was glad that he had not come – because, illogically, I grudged the impression that Gioconda had made on him after all. But when he did arrive, late and in a hurry, then perversely I wished I might have seen them together; as it would not be the same another time, afterwards, when the summer was over.