Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  Mr. Small shook his head reproachfully. Advertising his purpose would defeat it. Unobtrusive, in his drop-out disguise, he hoped to be accepted by the kids in Piazza di Spagna and gain their total confidence. “It’s like any anthropological field trip. You have to talk to them in their own language and respect their value system. Some of them are extraordinarily attractive, as human beings. Last night, I smoked grass with a diversified group and collected their stories.” Peter grinned, thinking of Sherlock Holmes in the opium den. “Weren’t you afraid of getting stoned, Mr. Small?” “It’s fairly simple to simulate inhalation. What’s meaningful for them is the communion-rite. Sharing the ‘joint.’ The feeling of brotherhood. ‘Man.’ Isn’t that beautiful? Not ‘Mister.’ ‘Man.’ ” “Did you tape them?” “Not yet. We just sat around and got acquainted. Later they’ll feel more comfortable, and I can use my machine. I want to be introduced to the pads where they live. They have this idea of community, both sexes intermingled, few or no possessions. I’d like to get that on film. In Paris, I found them camera-shy, like many primitive peoples. My little Minox created the suspicion that I might be the ‘fuzz.’ ”

  Actually Mr. Small’s findings were not devoid of interest. Peter saw that he was going to have to give up on the spandrels. He looked at his watch. It was too late even to catch a sustaining bite in the priests’ bar in St. Peter’s, which was one of his favorite refuges. Sergio had steered him to it. You went through a corridor to the left of the transept, as if you were going to the Treasury; then you came to a room all paneled in intarsia, with stars and flowers, and you opened a small door on the right, just like in Alice in Wonderland—if nobody had told you, you would never suspect there was a door in that wall. Inside, there were always a lot of priests, the trousered type, drinking beer, but they also served sandwiches and Campari-sodas. Around noon, though, they closed. He knew another secret passage, which he had found on his own, in the Stanze di Raffaello. You walked through a little door marked “Leo X” (the password) beneath the “Incendio del Borgo” and discovered nice clean toilets. On Mr. Small’s expressing a desire for the men’s room, Peter was now able to conduct him there. For once, he had impressed his adviser. “Why, it’s a regular labyrinth,” he commented. “Goodness me, how do you get your bearings?” Then he wanted to eat, and Peter, feeling hungry, consented. He had blown the day anyhow. They ransomed the tape-recorder and camera and took a taxi to a trattoria in Trastevere Mr. Small had been told about. As might have been predicted, it was full of American tourists, which did not bother Peter but put Mr. Small slightly out of countenance. “I don’t see anything ‘typical’ about this,” he said fretfully, as they waited in line. “I suppose it’s been discovered.” “Who told you about it?” “The cultural attaché.” Peter shrugged. “Well! Anyway, you can tape them.” “Too noisy.” “Go on about the Beats,” Peter urged, when they were finally shown to a table. It amused him that his adviser had been studying the migrations of the Beats as though they were salmon or birds. He had even picked up some of the lingo you came across in bird books and Nature Study columns.

  The way he put it, few of the Beats were sedentary; they moved on, usually with the onset of winter to warmer climes, and always driven by the need of drugs, which were the same to them as the food supply. There was a whole colony of them, for instance, now established in Nepal, and yet nobody could explain how word passed between them as to where they should forgather next. They appeared to respond to a common “urge” which had a destination coded into it, like an airplane ticket.

  Peter laughed. “You mean they have flyways.” Mr. Small nodded. What he expected to learn from his research was that tourists in general had flyways. If these could be charted and shifts in schedule and direction predicted, it would be extremely interesting. Already data were being collected at unexpected posts of observation; for instance, Breton peasants made an annual note of the first spring tourists as they did of the return of the swallows—in due course such data would be stored in computers for analysis. The Beatniks were the clearest example of the post-industrial wanderlust and the easiest to investigate, because of their manner of dress, which made them conspicuous, their herding habits, and their dependence on narcotics. Any change in the narcotics laws, any slight relaxation or stiffening in enforcement, produced immediate population shifts among them: an exodus or an invasion.

  Something similar could be observed with homosexuals, who were also readily identifiable by their dress, voice, and so on. They too had a herding habit and could be found at certain familiar stations at certain times of the year. They were sedentary, Mr. Small understood, in Capri, Venice, Tangiers, Athens, Taormina. “Amsterdam,” supplied Peter. “Oh?” “From what I’ve heard, anyway.” Mr. Small made a note. “I wasn’t aware that they congregated so far north. One might be able to look into that during tulip-time.” Many of them were nest-builders and, unlike the Beats, they generally traveled in pairs. They were gregarious at their meeting-places, but while in transit each individual pair tended to eschew the company of other pairs. You would not find them banding together, like heterosexual similars, to charter an airplane or a bus. Their migrations too could be understood in terms of the food supply, if that was interpreted in a broad sense to mean readily available adolescent boys. And again, as with the Beats, the food supply was dependent on police attitudes, reflecting of course the attitudes of the community.

  The behavior of these deviant minorities, scientifically probed, ought to throw considerable light on the whole tourist phenomenon. A striking parallel could be detected between hostile community reactions to Beatnik or homosexual colonies and hostile community reactions to campers, trailer aggregates, and the like. Commonly one fraction of local opinion encouraged the influx of the outsiders, for evident commercial motives, while another fraction sought to expel them, often on the pretext of sanitation. Moreover, among the so-called invaders themselves, you found a most interesting tendency to identify with the host community and its xenophobic prejudices, to the extent that individuals and even whole groups in the tourist population manifested anger at the presence of other tourists.

  “That’s it!” cried Peter, looking up from some noodles al burro he was winding around his fork. “You’ve got it in a nutshell, Mr. Small. There’s a logical contradiction in the whole tourist routine. The dragon swallowing its own tail. Or maybe I mean a paradox. ‘Oh God, tourists!’ you hear them moan when they look around some restaurant and see a bunch of compatriots with Diners Club cards who might as well be their duplicates. Sort of a blanket rejection that, if they sat down and analyzed it, would have to include themselves. Only nobody does. They can’t. Instead, in the Sistine Chapel, you start thinking of reasons why you have the right to be there and all the rest don’t. The only tourists you don’t look on as gate-crashers are solitary art-lovers you can put in the same class as yourself. Like that Dutch or German girl we saw. But if she was multiplied, I’d start to hate her, I guess.”

  It came back to Peter that Mr. Small himself had not been too pleased just now to find other Americans here. Nor would he put it past him to have a Diners Club card. But when he dared glance across the table, the professor was fiddling with the tape-recorder, which he had quietly moved into position. His head was cocked over it, and he was listening to Peter with an encouraging smile. “Beautiful!” he said, patting Peter’s arm. “Just give me that bit about the Diners Club again.” The crowd in the restaurant had thinned out. “Oh, I forget,” said Peter. “You hear the same stuff all over the place. Like this morning in American Express, there were these women talking to the clerk. ‘Pompeii, isn’t that awfully touristy?’ We saw them again in the Sistine Chapel, with a guide. You know what they decided about the ceiling? Too ‘busy.’ ”

  Mr. Small put his ear to the machine again. “Lovely! Just go right ahead. Don’t be diffident. Forget about the machine. Pretend you’re talking to me directly.” “OK. Can’t you see that it’s to the interest of everybody, including
tourists, to discourage tourism? Not counting travel agents, naturally, and other parasites. But to the interest of tourists most of all. The inhabitants, so far as I can see, mind tourists less than other tourists do. I don’t mean because they make a profit on them. The inhabitants sort of enjoy tourists, up to a point. They lend a little variety.”

  “Go on.” “Well, the nice thing about travel is the chance to be by yourself in an unspoiled, pristine setting. Or with one person you like a lot. Isn’t that the principle behind honeymoons? In English freshman year we read some of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and it told about how Milton traveled through Italy in the company of a hermit. That must have been just about ideal.” Mr. Small smiled. “You mean, have I considered the drawbacks? Lousy inns and bedbugs? Would I really want to go back to that? I guess maybe I couldn’t, on account of my conditioning. But people can take more than they think. Look at the Army. If a guy can accept hardship because he’s drafted, he ought to be able to stand a little inconvenience to go some place for fun. I mean, I sat up all night on the train to get here, and it was a lot more rewarding than being strapped in on a plane. In comparison, you could say it was an adventure.”

  “Air travel was once considered an adventure.” “Maybe I would have liked it in those days. Now the only adventure you can have in a plane is when it crashes into a mountain. Everything’s all upside down. To have a novel experience today, you wouldn’t hop in some jet just off the drawing-board, would you? No. You’d ride on a mule or a camel or go up in a balloon. Being in one of these old crumbling cities on your own is like being the first white man or whatever to walk in a virgin forest. Or like coming out of your house in the morning after a big snowfall and almost hating to make the first human footprint. My generation doesn’t have experiences like that very often, which is why we come abroad, I guess. There isn’t much unspoiled Nature around any more, and the places where people like poets used to look for it—the mountains and the seashore—are all jammed up with humanity and bottle-caps. So arriving in a strange town by yourself, with just your guidebook for a compass, is the nearest equivalent we can find to being alone with Nature, the way travelers used to be in the Age of Discovery.”

  Peter paused and chewed a mouthful of salad. He did not want to sound like a misanthrope in front of the tape-recorder. “You can’t blame the multitudes for wanting sun and swimming and fresh air. Nobody should have a monopoly of that. If office- and factory-workers get vacations, they have to have some place to go. Beaches and resorts should belong to the public, even if it mucks them up. But there has to be something left to explore. To give you the illusion that you’re blazing a trail, although you know that thousands of others have been there before you.”

  “Have you ever thought of camping in the north woods? If you want real Nature, that’s it. Absolutely untouched. The rangers in the park see to that. No hunting or fishing, no swimming, no dumping, put out your campfires, bring your own firewood and your grub. My wife and I used to do it every summer with the kids. Our only contact with civilization was the chief ranger’s radio.” Peter made a noncommittal noise. To him, this sounded more like an al fresco meeting with Big Brother than like communing with the infinite. “Is your wife in Paris?” “We’re divorced. One of those things. She envied me my relationship with my students. She’s basically a cold person, and I’m a warm person.” “Oh. Well, I guess those pack trips can be fun. I’ve never tried. But I went bird-watching once on the Appalachian Trail. I remember the scary feeling when night started coming on fast. I thought I could hear it stalking me in the woods. To me, Nature has a scary side even in the day-time, with twigs and branches snapping at you. Sort of an underlying menace. I suppose, out camping, you can sense that pretty often.” Mr. Small misunderstood. “Nothing to be afraid of. The trails are well marked; no fear of getting lost. And if you come down with an appendicitis, a plane will take you out. Sometimes at night you hear bear, but there are always other campers in the next cabins. All you have to do is holler.”

  Peter returned to his theme. “If you love someone, you want to be alone with them. The same with art. There ought to be churches and museums where you don’t have to meet gangs of tourists, where you can just sit and contemplate. You can’t do that any more unless you’re on the track of some nut like Borromini that the average person hasn’t heard of. If I follow up on the logic of that, I’d decide never to see any of the famous masterpieces, because it’s so horribly frustrating to get there and not see them.”

  “Still, you seem to have managed.” Peter shook his head, thinking with bitterness of the spandrels, not to mention the lunettes. “Only a little, really. And only by being tricky. Listen, I heard about this rich studioso who gets driven by his chauffeur every morning to the Sistine Chapel at nine o’clock and leaves at nine-fifteen. That way he outwits the crowds. I wouldn’t want to be him. Yet maybe in time I’ll be like that—studying all the angles, to get my cut of the available art. That’s what the modern world leads you to.” He sighed. “Mr. Small, how can a person be for peace if he’s never experienced a feeling of peacefulness? For that you need to be alone and enclosed in something vast like the ocean. An element bigger than you are that will still be there when you’re gone.” “The stars in those north woods. Remote universes, yet you feel you can reach out and touch them.” Peter could not deny that the stars communicated the feeling he had described. Or had at any rate before il pallone americano had muscled in on the firmament. “I was thinking of Rome. In Rome, the inhabitants don’t intrude on your thoughts, any more than the fish in the ocean. They’re part of the element. But mobs of tourists are just garbage dumped here by planes and sightseeing buses, with the guides and storekeepers diving for them like scavenger gulls!”

  The Recording Angel in the black box was taking note of his words, he recalled. “If you want me to say I’m part of the garbage, OK, I agree. I’m fouling up the element. When I’m in the Sistine Chapel, I hate my fellow-man. There’s something basically wrong with a situation like that. If a guy is in the presence of beauty, he should be having noble thoughts. That’s what finally made me get the ear-plugs. Not just to tune out on those ghoulish guided tours but to keep from having evil thoughts about them. ‘Avoid the occasions of sin’ is one of my father’s recipes. He got it from the Jesuits.”

  “Do you accept democracy, Levy?” Mr. Small shot out the question like a district attorney moving in for the kill. One minute he was giving those encouraging little pats and ingratiating hugs, and the next he had you in the box, as though he was his own stool pigeon. Peter essayed a soft answer. “I always thought I did. But there are some things you can’t slice up evenly, like that baby in the Judgment of Solomon. I’m coming to the conclusion that the rules of democracy work better when there isn’t too much cash around. The way it used to be in Athens. If we could only get back to that …”

  “ ‘Barefoot in Athens.’ ” His adviser’s pale foxy eyes regarded him with pity. Peter read his thought. He began to get angry. “All right, so they had slaves. Jefferson had slaves. Don’t you think I know that? But just the same, democracy, the way I see it, is something civic, involving a little free space. There’s nothing democratic about huge herds of travelers stampeding for the same point. If it’s a herd instinct that tells them to converge on the Sistine Chapel, that instinct ought to be redirected to something more appropriate, like a football stadium!”

  “Appropriate to whom? What makes you so sure that the Sistine Chapel is appropriate as an end for you and not for the masses?” “It’s obvious,” said Peter, no longer caring that he had shifted his ground. “You saw that mob scene this morning. They don’t even listen to their stupid guides, who half the time tell them everything wrong anyway. Mostly they’re bored stiff and yawning, because they had to get up early to join their tour. Instead of looking at the frescoes, they’re peeking at their watches. This professor I know says it’s the same at the Uffizi in Florence in the summertime. You know what I think? A
tourist ought to have to pass an entrance exam to get to see the ‘Mona Lisa’ or the ‘Last Supper’ or the Sistine Chapel. It’s the only way.”

  “The ‘only’ way?” Mr. Small appeared amused. “Honestly,” said Peter. “I’ve given a lot of thought to it. Prohibiting tours would help, at least in the winter, which is when most of the old folks come, because they get the off-season rate. Or you could restrict tours to certain hours of the day, but the trouble is there aren’t so many hours when the light is good. Or you could have one day a week when only tours would be admitted. That might be more fair. But I realize that even a measly half-measure like that wouldn’t have a chance under the present set-up. Under capitalism, you can’t have the mildest reforms, because art gets milked for profit like everything else.”

  “Would it be better under Communism?” “Well, at least there wouldn’t be any American Express.” “What about Intourist?” “Actually I was thinking more of socialism. You’d make more museums for the people and distribute the art around more in the provinces. But still you’d have a problem. So you’d educate the public to see the rationality of an entrance exam. If a person passed, he’d get a card that would admit him to all the three-star attractions, like the ‘Mona Lisa’ and so on. And if he didn’t, there’d still be a lot of art to look at. Then, so as not to weight the scales in favor of intellectual people who were good at passing tests, you could have a lottery too. Prizes would be books of tickets entitling the winners to see, for instance, twelve masterpieces of their choice. Like rationing during the war; a guy might want to use up most of his tickets on the Sistine Chapel and skip the ‘School of Athens’ or whatever interested him less. I forgot to say that under my system school-children could get in without taking any test. The little kids that come to the Sistine Chapel with their priest or teacher always have a ball. I love to watch them, looking up at the ceiling with big round black eyes and twirling around like tops till they’re dizzy. They point and ask questions. ‘Una sibilla, cos’è?’ If the priest is any good, he shows them the putti playing, and they wonder if they’re angels. ‘No. Sono fanciulli, come voi. Giocano.’ ”