Can I speak with the bullet stuck to my tongue? Yes I can. I go onto the landing and call down into the stairwell for Pietro to rise and restore order. I miss my guidebook more than ever. The bullet dances on the tip of my tongue and rattles against my teeth.
BIC. A coded message no doubt. What on earth could it mean?
In the middle of the night I awake with an acronym speeding to the surface of my mind like a cork popped on the seabed. BIC: Beautiful Isle of Capri.
Now all the pieces should fall into place; but they lightly resist the demands of gravity.
Tho’ I know for me
This love may not be
are strange terms in which to couch a death-threat, I thought, studying the note yet again as I caught my breath in the shade of a bluegum tree on the haul up to the Villa Jovis. Then I folded the note precisely to frame the bloody echo of an infamous name. The red letters and double-jointed digits of Tiberi o ’s name and number had been smudged by my sweaty palms. I put the note away, and guzzled the mentholated air.
From the picturesque ruins of the villa I made an unpleasant discovery: I am not on an island at all, but in a walled city. The ocean rubs its belly against our northern shore, where the Marina Grande sprawls, suckling a litter of yachts, dories and rubber dinghies, among them the redoubtable West Wind. In every other direction the city is encompassed by high walls, and beyond them are rolling hills covered with seas of sugar cane as far as the eye can see. It is easy to imagine how a misunderstanding might have arisen, when swells roll through the cane and spend themselves against our walls. These walls are crenellated, as thick as a donkey, topped with broken glass embedded in cement, superseded in places by specially manufactured and easy to install strips of metal spikes, supplanted in turn by staves of electrified wire upon which a musical death might be arranged.
To the east and west our walls seem to run right into the sea, jaywalking across streets and beaches and plunging directly into the water.
You would think, to look at it, that this is not the Isle of Capri at all, but a time-share resort in some subtropical holiday destination; or a maximum-security retirement village in a province ravaged by civil war. Somehow such possibilities have eluded me until now. This failing has implications for these eyewitness accounts of mine, these reports from abroad.
Why does a sweet voice still taunt me
as I wend my way home, bearing on my shoulders a head stuffed with second thoughts.
On a path near the Street of Shops I am accosted by bandits armed with cowhide shields, wooden spears and canvas bags emblazoned with the names of banks and building societies. They threaten to cut my heart out chop-chop unless I surrender to them everything of value, which I do. It comes down to the BIC pen and the ransom note with Tiberio’s name and number on it, which items I was keeping for sentimental reasons; some chicken feathers; a coaster from the cafe in the Piazza Umberto; the last of the zlotys; and a Mastercard slip from the Ristorante, which I’d kept for tax purposes. The bandits hold open the hungry mouths of the bags and swallow everything.
They’re disappointed with their haul. They insist on taking all my clothes, and we almost come to blows over the velskoene. In the end they let me keep my shoes. In this lucky way I also get to keep my Mastercard, which is sitting snugly against the instep of my left foot.
She was as sweet as a rose at the dawning,
But somehow Fate hadn’t meant her for me,
And though I sail’d with the tide in the morning,
Still my heart’s on the Isle of Capri,
I sang as I tramped home all alone and footsore, covering my nakedness with a loincloth of eucalyptus leaves, in the dusk, in the dawn.
Pietro was outraged. He summoned Vincenzo, whom I hadn’t seen since the night of my arrival, ages ago, so that he could give me a dressing down in my own language. They say it’s all my own fault, I should have been more careful.
Summertime was nearly over,
Blue Italian sky above
the Campanile, from which it had become so fashionable to fling oneself in recent years that a permanent guard had to be mounted at the little door, the diners and coffee-drinkers at the cafe having not unnaturally wearied of the spectacle and complained to the management. I couldn’t sit still. I was absolutely broiling in my dinner-jacket, feeling like a fish out of water and attracting too much attention. The eyes of the onlookers told me that they thought I was a madman dressed up for my own funeral, overdressed in fact, probably just casing the Campanile to plan my plummet. Tiberio was nowhere to be seen; his locum was a blond Adonis called Barend, but before he’d brought the stiff whisky I’d ordered, I made tracks.
In a street west of the piazza, which I would have sworn I had traversed without hindrance a few days before, I came to the wall I’d spotted from the Villa Jovis, and decided to follow it down to the sea. A no-man’s-land two metres wide had been carved out of the town beside the wall, and it was in this space that I walked, stepping over bricks and potholes, crunching through drifts of broken glass, marvelling at the innards of buildings laid bare in cross-section, the heartwood of dissected arbours and split loggias. I came to a quadrangle surrounded by cloisters, cleaved open to the outside world as grimly as a carcass, and a little further crossed a road onto a pebbled beach. The wall extended out into the water, with such a gentle declivity that it finally slid beneath the surface a hundred metres or more from land. There at the vanishing-point some people were gathered with the sea swirling around their ankles.
At the water’s edge a wooden ladder rested against the wall and I used it to mount to the top. A wavy line of beige sand stretched away into the distance, the border between a sea of greenery and an ocean of aquamarine. Beneath the roar of the surf the drowned guidebook burbled away about the intense and multiform harmonies of sea and sky, a ruined civilization, a world outside time.
A butcher’s dozen of men wearing I♥CAPRI T-shirts and clutching beaded spears twelve inches long were lined up on the wall with their backs to the water. I had seen the T-shirts and the spears on sale in the Street of Shops, prices slashed, everything must go, and I concluded that these men were tourists, and very probably Zulus. A second row of men, a reciprocal team of locals, Italians to a man, conceivably soccer players, faced the Zulus at arm’s length, which was the greatest distance the wall allowed. The Zulus kept glancing over their shoulders into the deep water at their backs, and I looked too and saw my old friend from Blue Grotto Tours bobbing there in his row-boat.
As I drew closer the Zulus began to sing. I recognized the song at once: “Arrivederci Roma.” One of my favourites. Their voices were magnificent, a regal drapery of sound, like bolts of maroon velvet and purple satin tumbled down from under thatched eaves and spilling out swaths over ochre walls. But their phrasing was disgraceful. They couldn’t get their tongues around the r’s at all.
Allibadezi Loma, they carolled, Goebaai, Goebaai, Goebaai.
This made the Italians irritable. They threw up their hands and eyebrows and slapped their foreheads. The Zulus sang on heartily. When they got to
I’m sorry I must leave you
the Italians reached out as one man and pushed them into the sea.
Apparently none of the Zulus could swim. My friend from Blue Grotto Tours rowed closer and beat the drowning men with his paddle, battering their hands to pulp against the gunwales, shoving them under like dirty laundry, bundles of overalls and limp gloves, while the men on the wall called out encouragement and advice.
The sea boiled up into a red froth of shibboleths.
I said, “Lady I’m a rover,
Can you spare a sweet word of love?”
an old geezer was singing on the Terrazza della Funicolare, and going through the languid motions of a tango. Someone should tell him it takes two.
I myself was reduced to beggary. Say, mister, can you please spare me a d
ollar? Coins, buttons, bottle-tops, washers, medals, pebbles, curtain-rings and peppermints rattled into the panama.
When I had built up a little stake, Pietro was kind enough to ferry my souvenirs and provisions down to the Marina in the basket of his bicycle – I think they’re all pleased to be seeing the back of me, actually. I toted my duffel bag myself. Time to cruise pleasurably away, to greener waters.
* * *
—
Men without substance, you may have your Island and do there what you please. I personally shall carry your memory in my heart and in a charming little folder of picture postcards called Ricordo di Capri (32 Vedute) with the Blue Grotto on its cover, which Vincenzo has given me as a going-away present, accompanied by a stern injunction to keep in touch.
I sail for the mainland tomorrow. Across the bay I expect to find not Bloubergstrand or Umgababa, but Sorrento. I have faith. I hope to visit the statue of Tasso, to pay my respects. Also the spot where his house used to stand. I imagine some scar on the landscape might still be visible, perhaps some rubble in a gully will yield up a memento, if only a pebble shaped like an eye to store in the cheek, to ward off thirst.
Then, all going well, it’s onwards, onwards to the Galli rocks, if some well-disposed local will give me directions, where I hope the Sirens will sing for me an inconsequential love-song, worth more than a thousand learned disquisitions on the subject, as I turn the West Wind’s head to open water:
She whisper’d softly, “It’s best not to linger,”
And then as I kissed her hand I could see,
She wore a plain golden ring on her finger,
’Twas goodbye to the Isle of Capri.
“Kidnapped”
This notice was in the Star today, in the People in Crisis column, between the Johannesburg Parent and Child Counselling Centre (484-1734) and Lifeline (728-1347). It’s easy to imagine how it landed up there: counselling services are listed in the entertainment section, on the same page as the theatre and titbits from the world of books.
KIDNAPPED SHORT STORY COMPETITION –
To celebrate the centenary of the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, one of Scotland’s best-loved storytellers, the David Thomas Charitable Trust is offering £1 000 in prize money in a unique short story competition. To enter you must write a story with the title “Kidnapped,” which is, of course, the title of the novel Stevenson published in 1886. Write to Competition Department (Kidnapped), DT Charitable Trust, c/o Writers News Limited, PO Box 4, Nairn IV12 4HU, Scotland for competition rules and entry forms.
I’m opposed to literary competitions on principle, especially when they require one to play the bespoke author and make the goods to measure. But it’s almost a shame to scruple when I have a soft spot for old RLS and a special affinity for his work, if I say so myself.
* * *
—
I dreamt last night that Louis and I were camped out in the Magaliesberg (“Louis” is familiar, but then we were comrades in my dream, as close as shipmates). After a day’s march over the veld I was nodding off with a mug of chocolate in my hand, while he was reading by firelight, Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey.”
“This is so good,” he remarked suddenly, as if to himself, “that a tax should be levied on everyone who hasn’t read it.”
The observation made him smile, and he wrote it down in his notebook. Then he put the notebook and Hazlitt away in a pocket of his velvet jacket, which he folded into a pillow, crept into his sleeping-sack and lay down curled to the fire. In a minute he was asleep.
He will say too, I speculated, when he comes to write about the subject, that a walking tour, to be properly enjoyed, must be gone upon alone. We’d argued about it earlier, as we clambered out of Kiepersol Kloof, and every point I made on the side of companionship seemed only to support his claims for the joys of silence and surrender to the world around.
The face sticking out of the sheepskin was pale as paper, its gaunt angles hardly softened by sleep. Wrapping myself in my plaid, I stepped away from the fire and looked down into the valley, where I could see lights in the windows of the self-catering chalets at the Utopia Holiday Resort. And with that I felt myself dispersed like a wisp of smoke, like a figment of his imagination.
Strangely enough, the dream left me feeling tenderly protective of RLS and his legacy. I decided to write off for an entry form. Surely it can’t harm.
* * *
—
The possibilities are endless. I could write something about Stevenson writing Kidnapped. Or I could dramatize an incident from his youth which casts an interesting light on the book; a glance at the biographies suggests that his visit to Earraid in 1870, when his father was building the Dhu Heartach lighthouse, is the obvious choice. He wrote about it himself in “Memoirs of an Islet,” which would make my task easier. But perhaps I should leave the author in peace and concentrate on the work. Say: someone is reading Kidnapped. A political prisoner? A prison warder? An assassin in a dentist’s waiting room? Or: a country boy takes the book out of the travelling library and sees himself reflected there. Where should I set my story, or rather my tale? In the Highlands or on the Highveld? When? If I want Stevenson himself to show his face, and not just in dreams, the period defines itself neatly. But if the book is my protagonist, I have more than a century to play with.
On the other hand, I could write a story called “Kidnapped” that has nothing whatsoever to do with Stevenson or his book. Or with kidnapping, for the matter of that.
In any case, there’s no point in starting until I’ve seen the rules, which might set limits to my creative licence. I should use this time to reread the book. I remember that David Balfour was carried off on the Covenant and afterwards shipwrecked – but all that fuss about Jacobites and the Campbells…I suppose the DT Charitable Trust plumped for Kidnapped because Stevenson himself thought it his best book, but I would have preferred Treasure Island or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I wonder who they are exactly, these charitable trustees? It doesn’t bode well that they have an entire department devoted to competitions.
* * *
—
Idea: Louis and Fanny Stevenson are living in a boarding-house in Bournemouth. It is February 1885. Until recently Louis has been working on an adventure story called “The Great North Road,” but now he has given it up. The following month, when he and Fanny move to Skerryvore, their new home in the town, he will begin to write Kidnapped. A little romance might cling like ivy to the Stevensons’ new house, which has fruit trees in the garden and a model of the Skerryvore lighthouse at the door; but the boarding-house is emblematically dingy. Louis is all but bedridden. When he looks back on this time he remembers living “like a weevil in a biscuit.” The Great North Road! He says in “A Gossip on Romance” that the very words sound in his ear like poetry. Why does he cast the story aside then? The household bills need paying, we are told. But there must be more to it than that. How can he be sure that Kidnapped will fill the coffers? What does the sea story satisfy that the landfast adventure cannot?
My story is set in the interval between “The Great North Road” and Kidnapped. The scene shifts between Dorset and the Highlands, between the author and his hero, as half-formed fragments of the new book, which has been brewing in his mind for ten years or more, come to him in fevered dreams. Stevenson is not quite himself, and neither yet is David Balfour. Scotland I think I can manage, with the help of Fodor and back numbers of The Scots Magazine. As for Bournemouth, it will be merely rumoured, a smudge behind grimy panes.
* * *
—
I have begun to read Kidnapped. To tell the truth, it was the Introduction to the book that gave me the idea for the Bournemouth story. I am keeping a list of aromatic phrases, not just the obvious “muckle” and “mair” and “wouldnae,” but things like “rowans in the kirkyard” and “prodigious wild and dreadful prospects” and �
�bogs and hags and peaty pools,” which one can toss into the brew like fistfuls of peppercorns. And another list of syntactical principles. Why should “said I” have been put to rout by “I said” in English prose? What could such a reversal represent if not egotism?
* * *
—
“And here I must explain,” Stevenson writes at the beginning of Chapter XII, “and the reader would do well to look at a map.”
I took his advice, and mair’s the peety.
At first it was pleasant enough, identifying Little Minch and the Isle of Tiree and the Sound of Mull. I put my finger on the spot where the Covenant lay becalmed on the morning after the battle of the roundhouse, in which David and Alan Breck bested their attackers. Then my eye began to wander. I called in at the Isles of Muck and Eigg and Rhum and Canna, and then beat hastily back to the mainland. I still hadn’t got my bearings. I headed inland and meandered down the Tweed. There was quite a romance to the place-names. My hero – I mean Proto-Balfour, the boy Stevenson sends out from his sickbed in Bournemouth – could pass this way on his travels. My eye picked out a route for him: Dundee, Blairgowrie, the Forest of Atholl. It was easy going.
But then a peculiar sensation came over me; for a terrifying moment I recalled the apoplexy that carried RLS off in the end. I was choking. There was something too rich in the nomenclature, something that made it stick in the craw like drammach (shall we say): Pitlochry, Strath Spey, Cromarty, Dornoch, Lairg, Tongue, John o’ Groats. As for the topography, it was improbably intricate, like crumbling parchment. Who could memorize the shape of such a country?
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