The Blue Cat

by Roland Graeme

  Therefore, I began my wanderings.

  First, I took the Eurostar through the Chunnel. Two hours and thirty minutes later, I was in Paris. I spent several days there. It was pleasant to make the rounds of the museums and the galleries and to get back in touch with some old friends who lived in the city. I stayed in a small room in a small hotel. This was fine for the time being, because I used the room only to catch a few hours’ sleep each night.

  With the intention of extending my stay in Paris, I began looking for a studio space to rent. I was soon frustrated. All of the good locations seemed to be taken. I knew that studios were every bit as difficult to find in Paris as in London, because in one city as in the other many of the suitable rental spaces were occupied by foreigners. These tended to be people who were not artists, but who found the simplicity of studio living not only economical, but also fashionably bohemian. I hadn’t anticipated such a scarcity of available quarters.

  Furthermore, in the short time that had elapsed since my previous visit to France, a virtual cottage industry seemed to have sprung up, one dedicated to fleecing artists, art students and would-be artists. They were charging the most inflated rents for studios, which back in England one would scarcely consider as decent temporary storage spaces for one’s household junk.

  I heard of an address near St. Germain des Prés. It was supposedly a real studio, with a skylight. The approach was through a courtyard, then up a rickety outside wooden staircase. The bell did not work, but a knock on the door summoned a bored-looking man. This was the concierge.

  Yes, he said, the artist’s studio was for let. He emphasized the word studio with a gesture toward the glass roof. Every artist needed to work in natural light. That was the most important thing, n’est-ce pas?

  It was a small space, and years of leaks through the framework of the skylight had stained corresponding dark mouldy lines across the floor. I asked the concierge if the rain still came through.

  “Only on wet days,” he said. This I was prepared to believe. “But,” he added, “as you can see, there is enough room to fit an easel in between the drips.” Of that, I was not so sure.

  There was a gas ring for cooking, along with a mattress with some blankets, which he said made a comfortable bed when unrolled. Because the rent that he asked for this hovel was enormous, I postponed a decision and said that I would let him know. He escorted me to the top of the staircase and I sat down forcibly as the fourth step gave way under my weight and nearly sent me hurtling down onto the courtyard’s pavement. I decided not to take the artist’s studio.

  Next, I investigated what the advertisement described as a large studio in the Rue de Vaugirard, but when I got there, I found that the old lady who owned it was a collector of antiques and the place was more of a dusty museum than a potential workspace. She did not want anything to be moved, except for a black poodle bitch who with her three pups was bedded down in a large open trunk—a vintage Louis Vuitton, by the way. The landlady expected her tenant to share the living quarters with these animals and to exercise them twice each day in the garden nearby. Now, I like dogs, as long as they’re the responsibility of someone else and my own contact with them is fleeting. Once again, it was no sale.

  I sought sympathy and advice from a few of my Parisian acquaintances.

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” I told two of these friends, over coffee at our favourite café, “but I have to get out of Paris. I can’t seem to find anywhere to work here.”

  “But I understand perfectly. Nobody can do any real painting here in Paris anymore,” said Gregoire, a gallery owner. “All of the artists I represent live and work in the countryside. They have gone native, as you English say.”

  Pascal, a graphics designer, agreed. “You should go south. To Marseilles, maybe.”

  “No, farther south than that,” Gregoire insisted. “Nobody can do any real painting anywhere in France, either. Go to Italy.”

  “Wait a minute,” I protested. “Are you telling me the artists you represent aren’t real painters?”

  Gregoire shrugged. “Of course they aren’t. They dabble. They imitate. But their work sells.”

  I reflected for a moment. “Yes, I’d like to go to Italy again. Southern Italy, this time, since I’ve never travelled farther south than Rome…I should go to Naples and Sicily.”

  We discussed possible itineraries.

  “I’m told that Positano is beautiful, but that it’s overrun with tourists and it’s impossible to find a place to stay at that doesn’t cost the earth,” I said.

  “But you don’t have to stay in Positano,” Pascal suggested. “You can find a place near it, for a fraction of the cost, assuming you don’t mind roughing it a bit. There’s San Floriano, for instance.”

  I didn’t recognize this place name. “San Floriano?”

  I learned that San Floriano was only a few miles down the coast from Positano. Located on a cove deep enough to accommodate only small boats, San Floriano also had no more than a narrow strip of rock-strewn beach. These factors limited its appeal for most tourists. Two decades ago, a developer had made ambitious plans to build a breakwater, deepen the harbour by dredging and import tons of sand to create a more impressive beach—all to attract more tourist trade, to a luxury hotel, which they wanted to build on the waterfront. These schemes had fallen through and as a result, San Floriano remained a quiet working fishing village, which did draw its share of adventurous day-trippers. It also supported a small artists’ colony, consisting mostly of foreigners.

  Pascal had spent a week in the town, on a gay friend’s recommendation and had enjoyed his stay immensely. He wanted to go back the next time he planned a vacation.

  “If you’re lucky, you might be able to reserve a room at The Blue Cat. And even if you end up staying somewhere else, you’ll find yourself dropping into The Blue Cat on a regular basis. Everybody in San Floriano hangs out there. Trust me. It’ll be your home away from home.”

  The name of this establishment intrigued me and I quickly found out more about it. Il Gato Blu, to give the establishment its proper Italian title, was a small hotel located on San Floriano’s waterfront, with a bar and a restaurant in its ground floor. It was a popular place not only with tourists, but also with the locals.

  “It’s run by an American couple, isn’t it, Pascal?” Gregoire asked.

  “A male couple,” the other Frenchman specified.

  “Oh?” I couldn’t help exclaiming. This information piqued my curiosity.

  “They were charming. But I’ve heard that they’ve split up and one of them has gone back to the States.”

  “Pity,” Gregoire said.

  Pascal assured me that it wouldn’t cost too much to stay in San Floriano, even for an extended length of time. “There are only two places there you’ll really need to patronize besides The Blue Cat. One’s the art supply shop, which is within walking distance of it. The other’s The Neptune Baths.”

  “There’s a bathhouse in San Floriano? A gay bathhouse?”

  “Certainly. It caters to the tourists, mostly, which is only natural, but some of the locals patronize it, as well. I had a couple of wonderful evenings there.”

  Gregoire spoke up. “According to what Pascal’s told me, San Floriano isn’t the next gay hotspot yet, but it soon will be. So you might as well check it out before it’s overrun and ruined.”

  I had to laugh. “You make us gay travellers sound like marauding barbarian hordes.”

  “Aren’t you?” Gregoire teased me.

  “Um, I have to admit I can’t come up with a defence against that accusation. Not on such short notice, at least.”

  Suddenly, on impulse, I decided to go to San Floriano.

  I had been to Italy once before, but on that trip I’d concentrated on the major cities in the northern half of the peninsula—Milan, Venice, Rome—and my primary objective had been to see as much famous art as possible. Now I planned a
working vacation and there was no reason why I could not make it a leisurely one, without adhering too much to a fixed schedule.

  I looked up The Blue Cat’s website on my laptop and I liked what I saw. The website was multilingual, offering a choice of Italian, English, French, German and Spanish text. It also included some nice photos of the town, the hotel and sample guest rooms. Based on Pascal’s recommendation, I made a reservation. I booked a room for a two-week stay. I reasoned that, even in the unlikely event that I didn’t like the town or the accommodations, I could stick it out for that long and use San Floriano as a home base for day trips throughout the immediate area.

  Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to travel by train. It takes longer than flying, but you get to see more, and if you aren’t in a hurry to reach your destination, then the process of changing trains or stopping overnight between connections is a good way to break up the monotony of a journey.

  I took a night train from Paris, headed south.

  The scene at the station was typically chaotic.

  Standing on the platform, I could look through the carriage windows and see passengers in the third class preparing to sit up for the night, with no more than a rolled-up coat or a hired pillow for comfort. Across one of these compartments, from one of the overhead luggage racks to another, a young father was slinging a hammock for his infant, while his fellow passengers watched good-humouredly. In the first and second classes, travellers were contemplating the narrow beds on which they hoped to sleep away a part of their journey.

  Vendors pushed their way through the crowd of passengers still milling about on the platform, their trolleys laden with racks of mineral water and pyramids of cigarettes. Women clutched hatboxes and handbags, coats, and parcels as they followed in the wake of heavily laden porters. There was much embracing, amidst seemingly endless goodbyes. I seemed to be the only person there who had no one to see him off. At last, the train moved out, silently and without signal.

  That was the only silent part of the journey. My compartment was near the engine and as the night wore on, I wondered why it they called it a sleeper. There were times, too, when the swaying of the car from side to side as it took a sharp turn made me wonder if we were on or off the rails. I awoke finally to a morning grey with mist. All I could see from my window was field after field of wheat. At intervals, we passed a village or a town where there would be a church spire and houses with low-pitched tiled roofs, but these glimpses of human habitation were soon replaced by the monotony of more wheat fields.

  I went into the restaurant car for coffee. I drank it, looking out the windows of the compartment as each revolution of the train’s wheels brought us nearer to the south of France.

  I spent two days in Marseilles and one day and night in Cassis, the town my uncle had visited. I moved on to Genoa, a city that had not been on my itinerary during my previous trip to Italy. I enjoyed these side trips, but I was eager to reach my true goal. That was the fishing village of San Floriano and the hotel, which for some reason they called The Blue Cat. I’d forgotten to ask Pascal the significance of the name. Nor had it occurred to me to bring up the subject, during the exchange of polite, formal emails in which I’d made my reservation. Soon, though, I would find out for myself.

  Chapter Four

  Il Gato Blu

  Naples is a city that feels no need to apologize for itself. It is crowded, noisy and dirty. The Neapolitans take all of these things for granted and indeed seem to revel in them. The open-minded foreign visitor can learn to embrace the city’s idiosyncrasies as well—then he, too, is in danger of succumbing to the place’s quirky charms.

  I had arranged to spend only two days and nights in Naples, at a cheap hotel, because on the third day I wanted to catch the first bus headed south in the morning.

  According to a gay guidebook I consulted, there were plenty of cruising spots in Naples. Cruising spots where a gay man can pick up a male prostitute or hook up with a sex partner for free. Nevertheless, I behaved myself—which I will be the first to admit, was unusual for me.

  As a result of my abstinence, I felt virtuous and smugly pleased with myself as I enjoyed my continental breakfast, then boarded my bus. We proceeded down the Amalfi coast, along a highway that never strayed far from the sea.

  This drive passed through some of the most spectacular scenery in all of the Mediterranean, and it looked especially beautiful in the soft morning light.

  The road soon abandoned the level plain to pierce its way through hills with ravines and narrow valleys filled with what looked like a haze of smoke from a distance. Closer up, the haze revealed itself to have been created by dense groves of olive trees with their leaves, which are silver grey on their undersides. There were orange groves, too, in which the fruit glowed like hundreds of little round lanterns through the masses of dark emerald leaves. At length we emerged onto a coastline of wild gorges and precipitous cliffs whose summits were lost in the clouds. We travelled suspended midway between sea and sky under vast overhanging rock faces, with only a low and broken wall on the ocean side. The road seemed scarcely wide enough to accommodate traffic going in one direction. The driver sounded his horn continually to warn vehicles coming toward us of our approach.

  When the bus stopped at Positano, I felt smugly superior to the eager tourists who got off there. I wasn’t going to settle for a commercialized travel experience. I was an explorer, headed for San Floriano and its more modest delights, which only a man of my artistic temperament could fully appreciate.

  The sun beat down hotly as the bus neared the town. The sea gleamed brightly with reflected light, as did every other surface exposed to the unrelenting glare.

  The narrow roadway threaded through steep slopes, tumbling down toward the ocean on our right, rising high against the sky on our left. Houses clustered against the hillsides of San Floriano’s small horseshoe-shaped bay, their plastered exterior walls cream coloured, white, pale yellow or rose pink, with precipitous flights of steps descending at every angle among them. Tiny gardens seemed to straddle the narrow gaps between rooftops and trees gave the illusion of being rooted in roof tiles or chimneys.

  I saw that the town, like so many seaside communities in Italy, consisted of clusters of flat-roofed houses set precariously one on top of another, like stacks of children’s blocks. The builders had taken advantage of every available square foot of space, and some of their constructions seemed to defy gravity. Plastered and coated with lime wash in a variety of pastel colours, the stone and brick walls of the houses sparkled in the sunlight and glowed softly and mysteriously when shadows fell upon them. The townspeople painted their doors and windows more flamboyantly, in primary reds, blues, greens and yellows. Everywhere I looked, I saw window boxes and terracotta pots overflowing with flowers that spilled over the rims of the containers and dangled downward.

  In a flash, I had an insight into what that writer had meant, when he’d remarked upon the change in my uncle’s style. It might be possible to reproduce what I saw in front of me in an impressionistic blur. However, I felt that, in some fundamental sense, such an approach would be cheating. The sky and sea, the rugged landscape and the structures erected upon it by man, cried out for crisp delineation and the most strongly contrasted colours. In that moment, I knew I was right to come to this place. Here was subject matter well worth the painting, provided the painter was up to the challenge.

  This was a working harbour, where sailors and fishermen could anchor their boats within a few steps of a row of shops and cafés ready to tend to their needs. Among the businesses lined up on the quay, Il Gato Blu occupied a prominent position. In response to my inquiry, the driver pointed it out to me as I collected my luggage and stepped down from the bus. He waved to me and saluted me with a blast of his horn, as he drove off.

  I walked toward The Blue Cat.

  At first glance, there was nothing to distinguish the building from its neighbours. It had old, scarred walls, rust
icated stone on the ground level, brick on the four upper stories, and pierced by small windows positioned with scant concern for symmetry. The brick walls were lime washed, appropriately enough, in a particularly lustrous soft pale blue. The window shutters were a contrasting more intense sky blue. The terracotta roof tiles, however, were in the traditional rusty red. The ground floor of The Blue Cat had large archways opening directly onto the quay. Even at this early hour of the morning, the French doors under these arches were propped open, revealing a large shadowy interior space, in which I could glimpse tables and chairs.

  Many of the houses and shops had old decorative glazed tiles installed on their exterior walls. This is a common practice in Italy, but it seemed particularly popular here. I subsequently learned that a centuries-old tile factory was still in operation on the outskirts of the town.

  The Blue Cat took its name from a particularly bold tile display, set into the brickwork over its entrance. Nine large square tiles arranged in three rows of three to form one big image measuring over a yard each way. The picture, rendered in a restrained palette of off white, soft greys and blues, showed a rowboat on a pond in the middle of a stylized landscape. In a touch of whimsy, the oarsman was an alert-looking little mouse that was barely big enough to wield the oars. Standing upright in the boat was the blue cat himself. His fur was indeed a startling electric blue. When the sunlight fell on the tiles, as it did now, that blue glowed almost like neon. The cat wore the clothes of a seventeenth-century gentleman—ruffed shirt, doublet, hose, boots, hat with plume—all painted by the tile maker in various shades of more subdued blue, with the occasional black, grey or white highlight. This well-dressed Puss in Boots stared out at the viewer with wide-open, impassive eyes, which I found a bit unnerving. In one of his paws, he held a fishing pole and in the other, he displayed his catch, a limp and presumably quite recently deceased fish.