by Jay Parini
“What are you writing, signore?”
“A poem,” I said.
“Ah, we have many fine poets in Italy. You know Dante—La Divina Commedia?” He launched into an incomprehensible but highly dramatic recitation from the epic, clipping off the final syllables (thus ruining the rhymes) in the manner of most southern Italians. His performance brought much of the activity around us to a halt, and when he was finished, a birdlike woman in a black dress began to clap.
I listened with a distracted amazement. Would anyone but a college professor in America be able to recite verbatim from a similar text? Did we have a similar text? Song of Myself, perhaps?
The recitation finished, he said, “So, tell me. Do you know Capri? The Blue Grotto? The Matromania Cave?” His bushy white eyebrows lifted, and they would not settle into place again until I answered.
I shook my head. The only Blue Grotto I knew was a cheap spaghetti joint near the Columbia campus.
“This is paradise, Capri. They come from all over the world to see it, even China. It is what we call a legend.” While he extolled the virtues of Capri—the pure air, the remorselessly brilliant sunshine, the intriguing people—I finished the cappuccino, feigning interest in his monologue. I had been in this situation with my grandfather many times, so it felt familiar. One had to appear attentive enough not to hurt the speaker’s feelings, but not so attentive that elaboration was provoked.
“You will excuse me,” I said, when he paused to light a cigarette. I left him shifting from foot to foot as I gathered my things, joining a cluster of tourists, mostly Germans and Swedes, on the foredeck. How else to escape his conversation?
The sight of the breaking coastline was enough to silence idle chatter as a fine mist dampened our faces but didn’t obscure our vision. Cove upon cove opened for us, with whole towns wedged precariously into the cliffs. It was the season for lemons, like bright bulbs in trees that were wrapped in black mesh to keep the fruit from spilling. Occasionally, a villa of substantial size and opulence appeared, clinging like a swallow’s nest to the cliff. Based on what I gleaned from overheard conversations, the coast teemed with famous movie producers, industrial magnates, and Mafiosi. “Carlo Ponti lives there, the film producer,” one of them said, pointing to a sculpted mansion on a jut of land between clashing rocks. I had never heard of Carlo Ponti, but I was still impressed.
On the other side of the ferry, in the open sea that bent to the earth’s curve, fishing boats could be seen in the distance, trolling with nets designed to catch the cascades of dime-size clams that were popular on the coast, usually cooked in olive oil and garlic and served with spaghetti. Toward the northwest, a bank of dark clouds appeared without warning, a fierce line marking off blue sky from black. The sea, as if newly alert to a shift in atmosphere, became choppier, the bow parsing the waves more severely. Loud squawking gulls that had trailed us all the way from Amalfi like an elaborate kite continued to buck and weave, devouring whatever morsels were churned up by the ferry’s wake. (I thought of a gorgeous phrase from Yeats: “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” But what on earth was a gong-tormented sea?)
At first, I wasn’t aware that somebody was talking to me. My own thoughts were just too loud, and the voice beside me found it difficult to compete. (This had often been a problem: the outside world failing to compete with my own highly nuanced, occasionally overwrought, inner voice.)
“You haven’t heard me!”
“What was that?”
A slender young man stood beside me, spitting into my face as he spoke. “I said, where are you from in America? Am I to presume?”
He was fair, with milky skin and a face like an ax-blade that poked from the hood of a wine-red sweatshirt. A thickly accented English nested in that thin, rather nasal, voice. His eyes were large and compelling, and they invaded my foggy presense like search lamps.
“Are you Italian?” I asked.
“French is my original,” he said, confidently. “I am born near Lyon.”
“Ah, Lyon,” I said, nodding as if I knew it. “I’m an American, yes. How could you tell?”
“Your shoes,” he said, his fingers tugging at a cornsilk beard. His long hair was dirty blond and unwashed, tucked into the hood but just visible. He smelled of dirty jeans, travel, and cheap pensione.
I was self-conscious about my leather hiking boots. One did not see Italians in hiking boots, it was true. Not, I suppose, unless they were actually hiking.
“I am oppose to Vietnam War,” the Frenchman declared, though nothing prior in our conversation could possibly have drawn the remark. “I am disliking to this colonial war. We were there, you comprehend. My uncle, he was fighting there—an officer in Indochine. A very long and bad war we had, and now you are repeating our misfortune.”
Ever so briefly, I had pushed Vietnam from my head, and it upset me to have it unexpectedly invoked. I steadied myself by holding the railing. “It’s a very bad war,” I said. “I agree with you.” I said nothing about Nicky, of course. Since coming to Italy, I had not mentioned Nicky to anyone, although the subject of Vietnam had arisen several times in Rome, and I’d had an unpleasant argument on the train to Salerno with an American businessman, a veteran of Korea, who argued (without a trace of irony) that if we didn’t fight what he called “the Marxist-Leninist rampage” in Southeast Asia, “on their own ground,” we’d soon be fighting them in California. (I coyly suggested that Berkeley already had more Marxist-Leninists per capita than any city in Southeast Asia.)
In the weeks that had passed since I left New York, I’d done a lot of quiet thinking about Nicky and me. I wasn’t exactly sure what part his death played in my dropping out of Columbia, but it had amplified feelings already in abundance. Alienation—as a concept that I sometimes used to explain myself to myself—seemed hackneyed and false; but I had certainly lost interest in “achievement,” as such; performing in the theater of my parents’ imagination no longer felt compelling. What I wanted seemed more urgent than ratification by some abstract institution. The world as I found it sickened me with its cruelty, its shameless inhumanity and lack of compassion.
After a long silence, during which the Frenchman appeared to think about what I’d just said, he spoke again. “Now I’m going to Capri, for tourism. Maybe more. Who can say? You will be long there, I wonder?”
“I plan to stay,” I said, savoring the oddity of such a statement.
His mouse-colored eyebrows, like a drawbridge, lifted. “This is surprising, that you will stay there. You are a student, no? I see you with your books in the bar.”
“Not any longer.” I explained that I had dropped out of Columbia. One day, I said, I would collect a few credits somewhere and get my diploma. (At my mother’s insistence, I had gotten a note from the dean of students saying I had left in good standing and could resume my studies whenever it suited me. Yet it amazed me how little I cared about the actual degree—though I would have been the first person in my family to acquire one, as my mother frequently noted. “You just wanna be a working man, like your father?” she would say, often in his presence. “I don’t think so, Alex. You’re gonna work with your brains, not your hands.”)
He studied me as though I were a painting. “You are like me,” he intoned, at last. “I am without discipline, a student at the Sorbonne. We have had many riots there, before last year. A small revolution in the streets. You have heard something of this, I’m not to doubt.”
I had. The student revolt had furnished world headlines, inspiring many in the States and elsewhere. Though Columbia had had its own, highly publicized, rioting, it had always seemed to me parochial by comparison, vaguely parodic. It’s one thing to take over a university administration building, quite another to shut down the Latin Quarter. Moreover, the French workers had apparently been sympathetic to the student revolt, joining forces with them at the barricades; our protests were, if anything, despised by the men in hard hats. Certainly my father—like most of the men wh
o worked for him at Massolini Construction—had been deeply upset by the protests. I had kept from him my own lame participation in several marches and “teach-ins.”
“My name is Patrice LaRue,” the Frenchman said. “I am philosophy.”
“A student of philosophy?”
He offered a sidelong smile that reminded me shockingly of Nicky, who grinned like that whenever he said something ridiculous. “And you, mister? What do you study?”
“I majored in classics—Latin, mostly. A little Greek.”
“Ah, Virgil and Homer. I have read these, but in French.” He seemed to drift briefly into reveries of ancient times. “And what do you make in Italy?”
“I have a job on Capri,” I said, hoping that answered his question. “I’ll be working as secretary for a writer who lives there, Rupert Grant.” Because English was not his language, I found myself hitting every syllable like a tambourine, letting it resonate.
“I have heard of Rupert,” he said. “A Scottishman, no?”
“That’s right.”
“He is very popular in France. I have read only one book of Rupert, about Ulysses. You know this story?”
“Siren Call,” I said. “It’s probably his best known work.”
“His best work?”
“Best known.” I preferred at least half a dozen of his other novels, and thought even more highly of his poetry and essays, although I doubted Patrice would know about these. “I’ll answer letters for him, type manuscripts, that sort of thing. I’m not quite sure what the job entails.”
“You are so lucky man,” said Patrice. “I have dreamed to have such a position. In France, the writer wants to do everything himself and he trusts no one.”
Patrice must have been twenty or more, but he appeared younger, a hipless adolescent. The shoulder-length hair, which he parted in the middle, gave him a feminine aspect. He pulled a cigarette from the pocket in his sweatshirt and offered me one. “I will stay for as long as possible on Capri,” he explained. “But I do not have so much money. If I may find a job, I will be so lucky as well.”
“Are you dropping out of the Sorbonne?”
“Drop in, drop out. We are not so strict in France. We come and go.” He explained that after having enrolled in the university, one simply attended lectures. They were given in vast halls, and nobody took attendance or monitored your progress. “When you are ready to take the exams, you do it,” he said. “In France, the result is everything, the process…” He made a derisive, slicing gesture with his right hand.
“And how is readiness for exams determined?”
“By the mind,” he said, putting a finger to his temple and twisting it, somewhat ominously. “It is self-knowledge. I will know when I am ready for this.”
I envied his Gallic self-confidence. There was a firmness about the French that seemed part of their heritage. They assumed a certain greatness in the world, as the heirs of Napoleon, Hugo, and Sartre. (I had recently come upon a lovely remark by Jean Cocteau: “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”) One could hardly imagine culturally dominant figures like Hugo or Jean-Paul Sartre in England or the United States; they would make no sense in either place.
In 1970, to be young and French seemed the ideal combination of attributes. By comparison, young Italians—at least those I’d met in Rome—appeared feckless and groping, overly tied to familial expectations and obligations.
“So, please tell me,” said Patrice, “where you will stay in Capri? With the Scottishman?”
“On his property,” I said, as vaguely as possible, suspecting that Patrice might want to throw himself upon my hospitality. Grant had written that I would “have use of a small cottage at the bottom of the garden,” but he would probably not appreciate it if I arrived with an entourage.
“Ah, this will be so interesting, to live with a man of creativity.” Patrice looked at me longingly. “Moi, I will find a pensione. They are not so expensive there, I am said, but in Paris…” He clucked his tongue and shook his head.
I remembered the loaf of bread and slab of gorgonzola I had bought in Amalfi that morning and stuffed into my knapsack. “Have you eaten, Patrice?”
His baleful look amused me.
“So please,” I said, speaking English as though I were translating from another tongue, “you must join me. I have bread and cheese.”
We climbed the narrow, metal steps to the top deck, near the bow, and sat on a bench together to share my little parcel of food. The crennelations of the shoreline on the starboard side of the ferry held our gaze as we ate: a gorgeous spectacle that seemed to defeat verbalization. In the distance, one could see the russet outline of Li Galli, a series of rocks that lay just off Positano. The largest of these, Isola Lunga, amounted to an island, with a few houses carved into its stony shoulders.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Yes, but too much beautiful,” Patrice responded. “They should make a law against it, this…abundance.” He smeared the soft gorgonzola on his bread with a thin, greasy finger. “When you see something like this, it steals from you the possibility to imagine for yourself.”
I objected, but said nothing, not wishing to involve myself in a discussion of aesthetics. I had observed seductive views before, but this was different, and would take time to absorb.
Luckily, for me, I had time. If I lived frugally, I had enough money to sustain me comfortably for a year or two. And I had this job, which I’d magically summoned by writing a letter to Grant on a whim. Having read a recent volume of his essays on poetics, I sent a few of my own feeble efforts, a handful of sonnets, vaguely reminiscent of Wordsworth, in care of the Villa Clio, Capri, having noted this address at the end of his preface. I mentioned, in passing, that I had decided to drop out of Columbia and planned to visit Italy, where I hoped to scout for work. He replied at once, praising my poems and, to my amazement, offering a job. “There is not much in the way of financial gain to be had,” he said, “but we have accommodation that might suit a young man in your situation, and there is plenty of bread and wine at our table.” I wrote quickly to accept the offer, suggesting an arrival date at the end of April. Neither of us ever mentioned how long the appointment might last, but this didn’t worry me. Life, at twenty-two, was infinite, open-ended, and beyond such petty calculation.
“We are bobbing like the cork,” said Patrice, licking the gorgonzola from his fingers as a shadow suddenly fell across the deck. The winds had suddenly picked up so fiercely that the ferry began to dip and roll. Others on deck rushed for the most convenient railings, while Patrice and I held to our seats. “I don’t like a storm at sea,” he added. “You are often struck with lightning in these circumstance.” He had barely finished the sentence when the rain, in lukewarm horizontal sheets, swept over the port railing, chasing us inside.
Patrice and I settled at a small table bolted to the floor near the door. Next to us, an obese Arab woman in a caftan was puking into a brown bag while her tiny husband, unshaven, massaged her shoulders and whispered comforting words. The beautiful, almond-eyed children of an Italian couple pointed at her, imitating the puking noises and giggling. Loudly, their mother scolded them, explaining that to tease sick people was to make una brutta figura. A man in a brown linen suit and Borsalino stood by the bar, singing an unfamiliar aria in a deep baritone.
“It is the carnival of life, this boat,” Patrice said, gesturing pompously. “Do you like Puccini, by the way?”
“I’ve never really listened to him,” I said.
Patrice appeared wounded by my admission. “You must acquaint him,” he said, as neutrally as possible. It would not have done to scold someone who had recently provided bread and gorgonzola. “Opera is the height of art, mixing the elements of literature with music and visuality.”
I nodded, suppressing a smile and making a mental note to remember visuality. Patrice redeemed himself, however, when he went to the bar and reappeared at my elbow with a glass of grappa
. “This will prevent you from getting sick,” he said. “The more you drink, the more you will prevent.”
Grappa is a pure form of alcohol, best drunk late at night, after a bottle of wine and lots of food. Nevertheless, its medicinal effects in the current situation were easy to anticipate. One might still get sick, but it wouldn’t matter. I downed the glass, as instructed by Patrice, in one throat-inflaming gulp. My spirits, as if summoned from backstage to the proscenium, brightened.
“Now you are well,” he said, waving his hand over my head. “Everything will improve, believe it so.”
He had barely spoken when the sun came pillaring through the clouds. The rain, as if switched off at the source like a shower, ceased, and the sea fell calm—and darker than before. We hurried back on deck in time to see, in the near distance, the sheer limestone cliffs on the northeast tip of Capri, a geographical feature made ominous by the Roman emperor Tiberius, who had those who disagreed with him tossed from the heights of Il Salto (“The Leap”) onto the boulder-broken shingle below. Soon the Faraglioni could be seen, too: a series of vertical rocks thrusting upward like ancient ruins.
“You see, Tiberio enjoyed to live in exile here, on Capri, because there is no hidden harbor. The enemy, they can’t approach without being seen. Very nice and safe, if you are crazy dictator.”
As I knew from a course on Roman history, the man who inherited the empire from Augustus had perhaps the hardest act in history to follow. Born in the fourth decade before Christ, he died in A.D. 37, nearly eighty years old. By this time he ruled most of the known world from a tiny island in the Mediterranean—a dazzling feat of political ventriloquism. The survivor of endless plots and conspiracies, he had even managed to outwit and subdue the powerful and popular Sejanus, his younger rival and most obvious successor.
Tiberius baffled everyone when he abandoned Rome, the center of the empire, for a self-imposed exile on Capri, in A.D. 26. As recounted by Tacitus and Suetonius—both suspect as historians but excellent as storytellers—he lapsed into a life of sybaritic madness. He was egomaniacal, sexually twisted as well as omnivorous, riven by fits of jealousy that maddened those around him, including one of his closest friends, the renowned jurist Cocceius Nerva, who committed suicide by slowly starving himself to death before the emperor’s eyes simply to protest his extravagance and moral degeneracy. I thought this would make a wonderful novella, or perhaps a play, and determined to write it one day.