Tossed and turned, hauled out of sleep by lust like an angle through the flesh of the mind’s eye, cast ashore on the low-maintenance linoleum of the landing, spilled into the toilet, unbattened the hatch, upped periscope, clung to the jaundiced enamel for a bout of volcanic spewing, until my bilge was emptied out, flat as the silver bladder from a Cellarcask claret. Becalmed suddenly, with my sea legs folded under me, focused on the manufacturer’s name traced in letters as delicate as veins in the throat of the bowl: SHANKS. Has my skinny digestive tract grown so unused to landlubberly food?
Picturing the scene,
And what might have been,
I lay in bed with my heavy head primed and lolling in the catapult of my hands, until the manservant Pietro knocked and entered with bucket and spade. His sour face told me that my eruption of the night before had already been remarked and, indeed, he sniffed around in the four corners of the bedroom and looked relieved that they had escaped my attentions.
I tried to discuss my itinerary with him – shopping for souvenirs (better to get that over and done with), lunch and writing postcards at a cafe in the Piazza Umberto (ditto for postcards), the Blue Grotto in the afternoon. Would there be time for the other grottoes too, I wanted to know. “The lovers of marine grottoes will do well not to confine their visits to the Blue Grotto,” according to my guidebook. “There are others, just as beautiful and not so sought after, that the island boatmen know about and enjoy showing to those who are capable of appreciating them…He who has not ‘dreamed in the grotto where the mermaid bathes,’ as Gérard de Nerval said – whether it be the Red Grotto, with its porphyry reflections, the Green Grotto, resembling an enormous liquid emerald, the Yellow Grotto, all of gold and topaz, the Pink Grotto, the colour of coral and flowers, the White Grotto, even more secret and mysterious – does not know the major spells of Capri.” I strung together a couple of very inventive improvisations from the list of useful phrases to convey the gist of this to Pietro, addressing him amiably as Facchino Mio ~ Porter Mine, but he refused to be drawn. Instead he took some coins from the bedside table and performed an elaborate mime with them, which I misinterpreted at first as a request for a tip, but finally understood as a warning against pickpockets.
I found it hard to focus on his performance, being constantly distracted by the pads of gnarled leather which he wore strapped to his knees, the likes of which I had come across only once before in my travels – on the gold-fields of the Witwatersrand – and which gave his robust figure an air of intolerable servility.
I rummaged in my list and found: “È un piccolo albergo eccellente, tranquillo e pulito. ~ It is an excellent little hotel, clean and quiet. Vorrei delle cartoline illustrate. ~ I want some picture postcards.” But he had already sneaked away.
I had to find my own way then to the Via delle Botteghe. My guidebook renders this as The Shops Street. No ring to that at all. I would have said: The Street of Shops, by analogy with La Rue des Boutiques and Strasse der Kaufladen, also given, which show some respect for the Italian. The Street of Shops seems to be the centre of attraction here. The most common item of merchandise is the straw basket shaped like a toadstool hung in clusters from the fascias, closely followed by the T-shirt with a motto safety-pinned to wooden trellis-work. I picked up a basket and a couple of T-shirts that say “My master went to the Beautiful Isle of Capri and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” Also a wineskin with the Castello di Barbarossa painted on it. The shopkeeper wouldn’t take my dinars, but he fawned over the krugerrand which I fished from my shoe. Then the little money-grubber gummed it in his cheek and stuck it on his forehead, right between the eyes. My change, which I bore away in the basket, included dollars, pounds and other sensible currencies, but also a mass of coins and banknotes I did not recognize at all. Some of the coppers were square, and others were round but had holes through them.
To the Piazza Umberto for lunch, a pizza I imagined, a Napolitano of course (cheese, tomatoes, olives, anchovies). But the smell of fish in the air turned my stomach, so I ordered espresso instead and sat back to observe. The coffee hadn’t even come yet when some fracas brewed up over a backgammon board at a table in the corner. Couldn’t tell what it was all about, language too strong for the guidebook no doubt, just a flurry of men flinging up their palms and striking their thighs with the hairy backs of their hands. A man I took to be the manager of the cafe went over, but instead of restoring order, as I anticipated, produced a pistol as slick as liquorice and shot one of the players dead. Three thuds, like a monk beating a carpet, tango time. More gesticulating. Then two men picked up the leaking corpse and carried it inside. The manager, if that’s what he was, chewed the silencer off the end of the barrel, pocketed the pistol, strolled away across the square, took a flight of stairs one at a time and disappeared down an alley.
I was alarmed. No one else blinked. They just kept their bruised Neapolitan eyelids drooped over the windows of their souls like weather-beaten awnings.
When the waiter arrived I fired off a salvo of useful phrases, like persistent echoes – “Si porti soccorso, subito! ~ Bring help, immediately! Chiami un medico! ~ Call a doctor! Ho male al petto. ~ I have a pain in my chest. Non mi piace vivere pericolosamente. ~ I don’t like to live dangerously. Prepotenti! ~ Tyrants! Birboni! ~ Rascals! Non voglio vedere più, sono stanco ~ I don’t want to see any more, I’m tired. Ha un dizionario italiano-inglese? ~ Have you an English-Italian dictionary? Cameriere, il conto! ~ Waiter, the bill!”
But he just grinned and said, “Cinema! Cinema!” He kept boggling his eyes and revolving his fist next to his head, which I took to mean that he thought I was mad. Then I realized he was representing a camera. Can’t say I noticed any cameras rolling during the murder. When in Rome is all very well, but I wish I could speak the language.
But it’s in vain that I’m yearning,
especially now that I’ve muddled my brain with a bottle of plonk de blanc on the terrace at the Ristorante la Grotta Azzurra, where I repaired to settle my empty stomach after the killing in the piazza. Gianni – I think it is he – brings me a ballast of olives and grissini. I feel safe there in the fog. But I can’t find my way home. All the streets look the same. All the houses look the same. They all have the same little outdoor pizza-ovens and braai-spots, the same myopic judases in the front doors, the same flagged porches and loggias overhung by the same personalized bougainvilleas. I had hoped that each little dwelling would have a character all its own, but you can’t have everything, I suppose. In the end I have to bray like a donkey to attract attention – and it works. Pietro comes out in his birthday suit to find me, and takes me under the elbow familiarly, as if I am his venerable grandfather. This suffices as far as the foot of the stairs, where less respectful measures become imperative and he up-ends me in a fireman’s lift. As we mount the stairs I try to get to the bottom of this inexplicable sameness of things, but he says nothing. I have a feeling though that he understands English, and simply pretends not to, in order to avoid complications. I notice, from my upside-down position, that he is wearing the knee-pads. I wish I could confront him about it. He deposits me on my bed and withdraws quietly.
Somewhat sobered, I turn to the salutary history of the Grotta Oscura recorded in my guidebook and it sends me to sleep with a tear on my cheek: this grotto, more beautiful by far than the blue one, was engulfed quite suddenly one day in 1808 by a rockslide, which also carried away two donkeys grazing overhead and a stout Martello tower. “Fate changed it all,” the guidebook says, “with a capricious roll of her hips.” Then my mind reels again, and the words avalanche down the page and seal off the magnificent past, rendering it permanently closed on account of the weather.
Fate changed it all,
And I’m left to recall
the taciturnity of servants and the prolixity of guidebooks as I eat my breakfast. Today the Grotta Azzurra would seem like second best, so I bend my steps towards the Parco
Augusto instead. Flanked by two marble lions I look down on the Faraglione Rocks. These lions are plump fellows, with manes as smooth and fat as plaited mozzarella, crouching like bulldogs on a leash. Nothing like lions at all, really. The beast on a box of Lion matches bears more resemblance to the real thing. A passing stranger pats one of the pets on the rump and says, “Good boy,” in perfect English. I try to strike up a conversation, but he just points to his ear and hurries off.
I find a bench under a walnut tree and do a bit of reading on the area. I must start planning ahead. Tiberius’s Villa Jovis is a must, the guidebook says. “You will climb, if you are stout-hearted enough, the old stone steps to the Villa of Jupiter, where Tiberius frolicked with his little fish – or so they say.” Then there’s a statue of the poet Tasso in the piazza at Sorrento it might be interesting to view. He had a house on this coast too, I’m told, but it fell into the sea. Things keep collapsing around here. The whole region must be geologically unstable. The house of Tasso’s sister Cornelia is still standing, but I can’t see what good that would be.
Then voices greased by the sea’s long windpipe probe beneath my skin, insinuate themselves and screw up the tourniquet between hand and eye.
I look high and low, but of course I cannot find the source.
’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I found her,
Beneath the shade of an old walnut tree,
Oh! I can still see the flowers blooming round her,
Where we met on the Isle of Capri,
I sang as I tramped home all alone in the dusk, in the dark.
Soft Italian eyes,
Dark as midnight skies,
the tourguide-cum-boatman had, and a wispy black moustache that he tried to starch with saltwater drawn up in his hand, just to pass the time of day, as we queued at the entrance to the Blue Grotto. “Desiderei una guida che parla inglese. ~ I should like a guide who speaks English.” “Che? Che?” A score of boats captained by a spectrum of quadroons and octoroons bobbed in the calm under the cliffs. The boats bearing parties rafted along in twos or threes, grapnelled together by loud talk and barbed laughter, whereas the singletons like me sat in the bows in attitudes of stiff repose, signalling their ease with solitude by the smoke from their pipes, dangling their hands in the water, humming an air, while the oarsmen plied the furry tongues of the waves with their salt-bleached spatulas.
“Desidero un rimedio contra il mal d’aria. ~ I want a remedy against seasickness.”
There was something palpably ridiculous about queuing in row-boats and it curdled my stomach. The awestruck expressions on the faces of the initiates as they issued from the arch in the cliff-face back into the light of day I found cumulatively pathetic and by the time I reached the front of the queue and was propelled into the grotto – Olà! – I had resolved not to look. There was a principle involved, a principle of resistance. I kept my eyes screwed shut, although I tilted my head from side to side and oohed and aahed as the guide droned on behind me through his moustache, magnifico this and bellissimo that, and dabbled me in circles.
In the end his babbling exasperated me so, that in a moment of spite, without even opening my eyes, I took my guidebook with its list of useful phrases from my pocket and committed it to the dark water. I imagine that it sank like a stone.
When my pilot thrust me back into the outside world the regulation five minutes later I had fixed upon my face a look so utterly dull, like the death-mask of a man who died of boredom, say, that the sightseers peering avidly over the bows of the waiting craft fell back in fright into bilge-water.
So I have done the Grotta Azzurra, though I honestly cannot say I have seen it; whereas I have seen the Grotta Oscura, though no human has drawn breath in it for nearly two hundred years.
By the time we bumped against the landing-stage at Blue Grotto Tours I had developed a healthy antipathy for my mustachioed friend. Tipped him a brass farthing and a plugged nickel, damned him, left.
Strolling back to my lodgings in Marina Grande, lost in thought, I became aware that a car was idling along beside me. It was the first motor vehicle I had seen since my arrival. Shadowy figures sat motionless behind the smoked glass windows, men I would say, from the hunch of shoulder and neck. I stopped. The driver’s window slid smoothly down and a monkey-suited arm tossed out a ball of paper. While I stooped to retrieve it from the gutter, the car drew slowly away and turned down a side-street.
I sat down on a bench and spread the crumpled sheet flat on my knee. I had high hopes of finding some intriguing message in Italian, and was already regretting the impulse that had cost me my guidebook – but the note was in English.
Reconstructing the episode afterwards, it struck me forcibly that the car was a Ford Capri. Can’t help thinking that it means something.
Sleeping or waking they haunt me,
the shadowy men, eyeless behind their dark glasses. I dream that they kill me. I dream that they are the men who do all of the killing, everywhere. They killed the backgammon player in the Piazza Umberto. They slew the stone lions in the Parco Augusto with the jawbone of a quagga. They pushed Tasso’s house into the sea because they thought he was asleep inside it, dreaming.
Their magic thrill
Holds a spell on me still
as I return to the piazza to seek out my waiter, the cameraman. I find him easily enough, and he remembers me too. In the burnished skin of his face the eye seen in profile is as dark and luscious as a Sorrento sloe. He informs me with a syrupy wink that his name is Tiberio. Not Tiberius, please.
Should I give him my name? It seems the obvious riposte, yet I decide against it, and silently hand him the assassins’ note, now neatly folded into a cocked hat. Instead of opening the note as I anticipate he extracts a pen from the ring-binding of the menu and prints his name on the paper lining: Tiberio, and then a three-digit telephone number.
This is tiresome.
Then Tiberio presents me with a wine bottle wrapped up in linen. The usual Lacrima Christi. The swaddling-clothes smell of dishwater. Something prods me through the grey folds. I accept it: his ballpoint pen. He winks again, waves the napkin with a magician’s flourish and sits down at the chair opposite to uncork the wine. He clamps the bottle between his knees and drives the corkscrew into it.
I peep at the pen under the edge of the tablecloth: it is an ordinary BIC, a hexagonal yellow plastic tube with a coppery cone sticking out of one end and a red plastic plug in the other. I glance at Tiberio’s handwriting to confirm that the ink is red. It is. In the middle of the shaft, midway between warhead and tampion, is a little hole, a fistula that a pinhead could seal, of indeterminate purpose.
Tiberio has broken the cork in half. He speaks to me in sign language: makes a hoop of the index finger and thumb of his left hand and thrusts the middle finger of his right hand into it. He means to push the broken cork into the bottle. I hand him the pen, it does the trick.
The wine has bits of cork floating in it, but I grit my teeth and decide not to let it bother me.
Tiberio hands me the pen again. What is the significance of these multiple exchanges, I ask myself, as he balances the tray on the peduncle of his left hand, loads it swiftly with glasses holding melting ice-cubes, mangled paper umbrellas and the dregs of bloody sunsets, and exits towards the kitchen. First he gives me the pen, then he reclaims it, then he gives it back again. Does he mean me to have it? Whose pen is it anyway? Is it really his to dispose of or does it belong to the establishment?
I consider these questions at length while I quaff the corky wine. Does it taste of ink or is it my imagination?
When I want to pay the bill a yen spills from my hands, and in retrieving it I make a discovery that drives the pen from my thoughts altogether. The old cobblestones of the piazza are not stones at all, but solid concrete embossed with a labyrinthine design to make it resemble individual cobbles. By hand signals I am a
ble to convey my astonishment to Tiberio. In reply he takes me by the arm and leads me to a corner of the square, tactfully skirting the ketchupy bloodstains from the shooting, shifts aside a wrought-iron table and shows me a metal plaque embedded there: BOSS-CRETE, PO BOX 9372, Alberton 1450. Is this a clue? Another five-letter island beginning with a “C”?
I find my room – which I must remember to describe in more detail – ransacked when I get back, and me in no condition to cope with another mystery. Feathers all over the place, you’d think someone had been plucking chickens. By chance a chicken is roasting in Vincenzo’s oven downstairs, and the aroma of crisp skin basted in lemon juice with garlic and a hint of oregano floats up to make my mouth water.
In the privacy of my hunger I examine the pen closely. It is sticky and smells tipsy. A BIC, as I’ve said, an Orange Fine Point. The trade name is printed on it. In front of the name, in a frame shaped like a TV set, the letters S, A, B and S are arranged like points of the compass around a lozenge. I recognize the symbol from my travels: the stamp of approval of the South African Bureau of Standards.
After the name, another symbol: a person armed with a pen. I recognize him too. Although he has no primary sexual characteristics, I feel sure this little person is a man, a dragoman, a logoman, with his pen slung over his shoulder like a bazooka. A foot soldier bearing a gigantic pen, tattooed on the plastic skin of an even mightier pen, which I in turn hold in my hand. I extract the plastic plug from the end of the pen with my teeth: it looks like a bullet, but it tastes of ink. I suck the air out of its hollow point so that it sticks to the tip of my tongue.
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