by Irwin Shaw
PORTO ERCOLE
Another place that is in the process of being discovered is Porto Ercole, where we put in next. We had arranged by telegram to meet an old friend of mine, Alan Moorehead, there for dinner. (In traveling around the Mediterranean these days you do not go from lighthouse to lighthouse, you go from writer to writer.) In the darkness, there was no evidence of the particular beauties that had caused Porto Ercole to be discovered. Aside from some fishing vessels, we were the only boat in the large harbor, and the buildings along the quays were new, utilitarian, and ugly. The old section, including the fort, on the north side of the harbor had been severely damaged in the war and could not have been terribly handsome even before that. A few desultory strips of neon showed where apathetic restaurants were serving a few gloomy-looking guests. And there was a strong smell of old fish from the packing house on the waterfront which mingled, when the wind blew, with the smell from a main sewer that emptied forthrightly into the harbor.
Still, over dinner, Moorehead assured me that Porto Ercole had been discovered: On the coast nearby Prince Bernhard and the Queen of Holland had built a house with its own private harbor, complete with a crane to pull a fairly large-sized ship out of the water in stormy weather; two well-known American writers had spent the previous summer there, plus two or three rich young men who were occasionally seen with typewriters and who were said, by their wives, to be electric with talent; and, to put the clincher on it, Sophia Loren and her husband were reputed to have bought a large piece of property in the vicinity.
Moorehead, who has a taste for solitude, and who built his house here before the place was discovered, spoke gloomily about Porto Ercole’s future and scanned the horizon with alarm, looking for the first signs of a Hilton Hotel. He was scheduled to go with his wife to Sardinia, to look at a desolate stretch of coast there, with a view to buying it as a hedge against the time when Porto Ercole was turned into another St. Tropez. He was saddened when I told him that I had heard Sardinia had also been discovered this year, that I knew a man in Paris who belonged to a syndicate which had bought up a huge tract of land there a year ago and that the syndicate had already been offered ten times what it had paid for the property. “Discovery” is a flexible, all-inclusive word on the shores of the Mediterranean. There are still people who feel the thrill of discovery when they enter Nice, and there are others who feel hemmed in and unbearably crowded because a family from Rome has just built a summer home on a hilltop three miles away. And with our age’s tropism toward sun and sea and the consequent flooding tide of estivants southward, all conversations along the borders of the sea, from Malaga to Mykonos, are bound to include, at one time or another, the words, “You came too late, this place has been discovered,” or, “This is the last year for this place. Next year it will be ruined. They have discovered it.”
Closer inspection in daylight did nothing to improve my night-time impression of Porto Ercole, and the smells remained constant. But the hills rolling back beyond the town were noble and wild and south of the town there was a long, uncluttered stretch of good beach that helped explain my friend’s fears. An afternoon’s perfect swimming in a cove of a nearby island inhabited only by a caretaker and his wife and child and a large population of nesting gulls also served to underline Porto Ercole’s attractions, as did the sunset from the terrace of the Moorehead house, which is set back on a hilltop that commands a view of rugged coast and limitless sea.
I had met Moorehead during the little Blitz in London in the Winter of 1944 and had had my first dinner in a restaurant on the Continent with him, in Bayeux, shortly after D-Day, when Bayeux was the only undestroyed city in Europe I had as yet seen. As we sat on the terrace of his house and ate the excellent starlit dinner and looked out over the dark sea, we talked of friends who had died, friends who had not lived up to their promise, generals who had made extraordinarily bad decisions when we were younger men, and the usual writers’ problems—insomnia, divorce, drink, critics, the income tax, and how to avoid saying the same thing in book after book without being told that your powers were waning.
Climate also came in for discussion. I have always mistrusted anything that has been written in hot weather (my mind closes like a tomb when the thermometer reaches eighty degrees) but Moorehead has made me reconsider. The hotter it is, the better he writes, and I was shaken to my foundations by his having written Gallipoli, that beautiful book, on a bare Greek island during a blazing summer. The only consolation I could offer myself came from a visit he and his wife made to us in the winter Alps, during which time I was as lively and productive as could be while he kept mournfully to his room, bedded down for almost his entire stay with influenza.
We ate the good meal, drank some wine, looked at the trail of the moon on the sea below us, and secretly congratulated ourselves that we were together in such a place so many years after the bombs, the land mines, the invasions, the generals.
But even for a lover of primitive haunts, a place like Porto Ercole has its disadvantages. The Moorehead house has no telephone, and the town boasts of no hotel, so he is the prey of uninvited guests and of people he must put up in his own house if he wants to see them at all. At the end of the summer he wrote me a gloomy letter to tell me that ten guests were staying in his house at the moment, mostly university friends of his son, drinking his gin and using his shaving cream, that it was too hot to work (Hah!), and that he was thinking of renting the house out in future summers and using the money to get an apartment in London in which to spend the months of July and August. The swimming wouldn’t be as good, but the atmosphere would be calmer and he could find the solitude there he has been searching for in all the odd corners of Europe.
ANZIO
On the way down to Anzio we had wanted to put in for an hour or two at Fregene, the fashionable beach just north of Rome that Fellini has celebrated in La Dolce Vita. But it has no harbor and there was a swell running and the amount of scandal we might have picked up there on a Sunday morning would not have been worth the discomfort of pitching and rolling anchored off an unprotected beach. So we steamed on down to find Anzio in the grip of a festa, with thousands of people crowding the waterfront to cheer swimming races and a contest in which young men tried to keep their balance on a greased spar long enough to grab a handkerchief tied to the end of the pole before falling off into the oily water. Other thousands of people were eating fish soup and fried octopus in the many restaurants built on piles above the harbor or eating cotton candy and raw mussels from huge wet piles on stands set up in the street. Later there was a concert by a popular singer in the large square in front of the church of Santi Pio e Antonio and dancing to the music of a loud band and fireworks at night. All kinds of small boats darted in and out, children were everywhere, and there were no signs either on the buildings or on the Sunday faces of the crowd that this was the place where not too long ago armies had fought for their lives.
The American military cemetery is some miles inland at Nettuno, and I decided to take my son there, feeling that at the age of eleven it was time for him to pay his respects to the dead in whose debt he lives. The cemetery is a sober but beautiful park now, and when we went there late in the afternoon the only other people to be seen were three young Italians, two boys and a girl, eating sandwiches in the shadow of the monument to the young men who were buried there.
We left Anzio the next morning and saw what looked like a limitless fleet of jellyfish, parachute-shaped and delicately fringed in purple, moving in thick formations, and in what looked like deadly purposefulness, toward the land. Luckily, they had come one day late. The festa was over, and there were many Romans normally at work that day who would have been having an uncomfortable time of it if that stinging armada had moved in on the crowded beaches the afternoon before.
PONZA
For the true island-lover, Ponza, a rocky dot of land a little north of Naples, is irresistible. The harbor is an almost perfect oval, hemmed in by a graceful bank of low bui
ldings of an African whiteness. With a boat one can sail in a few minutes to the foot of high chalky cliffs for superb swimming. Ponza used to serve as a prison for political offenders, and the volcanic beauty of the place should have had a calming influence on even the wildest of revolutionaries. Mussolini was held there for awhile after his fall, and while having an iced espresso in one of the bright cafés on the harbor front, one can reflect with satisfaction that here is evidence that not all the villains of history escape their just deserts.
Ours was the only pleasure craft in the harbor and the town seemed empty, but here, too, the word was that the island has been discovered and that everything will change soon for the worse. The next summer, I heard later, a writer rented an apartment there for three months.
ISCHIA
There is no doubt at all about Ischia, Capri’s island sister in the Bay of Naples. It has been discovered, and no mistake about it. A plush and very handsome hotel has just been erected there a few kilometers from the port, with the reputation, one of the natives told me proudly, of being the most expensive hotel in Europe. Huge signs advertise the curative properties of the waters, which are praised in large letters as being radioactive, a curious attraction in the age of Fallout. Other signs all over the port draw attention to nightclubs with such beguiling Italian propaganda as “El Rancho—Whisky, Spaghettis, Guitar,” and there is a row of low-ceilinged restaurants that go in heavily for atmosphere and are decorated, inevitably, with fish nets, glass buoys, driftwood and old wine barrels.
We approached Ischia by night on a glassy dark sea dotted, all the way to the horizon, with the carbide lamps which the fishermen in these waters use to lure their catch. We nearly ran over an unmarked net and only avoided it at the last moment with a sharp turn to starboard that got us safely past a little bobbing boat with two figures standing in it and waving warningly at us. We went on our way with the echoes of two husky, night-time, working-men’s voices calling reproachfully after us in incomprehensible Neapolitan Italian across the black silk water.
We moored, much to our Captain’s dissatisfaction, in front of a garden of great beauty. The next night, when we came in again after a cruise around the island, although our mooring was still open, he made up for his momentary lapse by tying up next to a dock which was being used to load scrap metal onto a rusty steamer.
We spent the day swimming and picnicking with friends who had transformed a building originally used for pressing olives into a cool, cloister-like retreat. The friends, for once, were non-literary, but artistic. They brought a handsome young married couple aboard with them to decorate our after-deck in proper yachting fashion. The young man was Spanish, but his family had been canning tuna in Genoa for half a century. He was in the family business, but the fact that he had been born in Italy and spent his days supervising the canning of fish had in no way diminished his Iberian sense of gallantry. His wife, who was the daughter of a Scandinavian diplomat, looked more Italian than any girl on the island, being dark, black-haired, and blessed with the smouldering kind of beauty we have come to associate with the heroines of Italian films since the war. They had met first at a diplomatic function one afternoon in London and ten minutes later the Spanish boy had demanded the girl’s hand in marriage. She had refused to believe he was serious and when he protested that he was in deadly earnest and that he was ready to prove it by passing any test she was of a mind to set him, she playfully said that if he could get two tickets for that evening’s performance of My Fair Lady, which was then in the full flush of success in London, she would be prepared to take him at his word. Tickets for My Fair Lady were absolutely unobtainable, since the theatre was sold out eight months in advance, but the Spaniard sallied forth, on foot but remembering armored steeds, lances, and chivalric dragons, and somehow was at his lady’s door, promptly at seven P.M., tickets in hand. The couple went to the Drury Lane Theatre and saw My Fair Lady with probably even greater pleasure than the play has given everybody else who has seen it during the course of its career. All dragons slain, they were married soon after, and at the time we met them were the parents of a six-week-old infant.
We went to dinner with them in one of the net and barrel places and drank large quantities of the good white wine grown on the slopes of Mount Epomeo, one of the volcanic peaks of the Ischian landscape.
Proof that Ischia had achieved full status as a chic and completely accredited international resort came later that evening. A pretty lady whom we knew from Paris met us as we were changing bars and consented to join us. Five minutes later she was slugged by her lover, a local gentleman of good family. She had dined with him and had rashly told him she was tired and was going home. He appeared at the door of the bar, and no doubt considerate of our feelings and perhaps also swayed by the fact that the three men at our table weighed, en masse, more than six hundred pounds, politely gestured to the lady to join him outside. When they were alone he got her against a stone wall and went after her much as Ray Robinson used to go after opponents when he got them in a corner during his good days. In the particular bar we were patronizing there were three guitars going at all times, and an attack could have been going on outside on a battalion front unnoticed by any of the patrons. The lady was saved by a slender waiter who went out for a breath of air, and when she came back, brave but a little teary, and wearing dark glasses to hide the damage, her story took us, naturally, as a complete surprise. We were all for going to present our compliments to the pugilist, but the lady told us he was in the hands of the police, who, with a nice Italian sense of balance between justice and scandal, were holding the gentleman on a charge of illegal parking.
I would have liked to stay another day to observe the sequel to this passionate encounter, but our Captain was chafing to get to Naples to get the refrigerator fixed. We had been getting warning bulletins on the refrigerator from the Captain all the way, more or less in the threatening manner of those newspaper advertisements that remind you there are only a certain number of days, always diminishing, till Christmas. The refrigerator was an obsolete model and, according to the Captain, the parts to repair it would finally be found in Naples. We had a large ice chest on deck, but the Captain said he refused to venture into the Adriatic with only the ice chest between us and warm whisky. He had not been in Yugoslavia since before World War II, and perhaps he felt that Communists do not make ice. At any rate, he had alerted a ship’s agent in Naples, who theoretically was to be waiting for us with the necessary parts.
I have seen Naples and I had no particular desire to see it again, especially if it meant lying in a crowded and broiling harbor for two or three days while workmen hammered on pipes in the galley. Still, the Captain was running the ship, and he was a wise and expert old sailor who had been sailing in these waters for forty years, and if he was this desperate about the machine I was ready to indulge him to the extent of a few hours of sight-seeing in Naples.
IV
NAPLES
The agent arrived, almost on time, at our berth in the harbor of San Gennaro, which is at the northern end of the town and is supposedly less objectionable than the other yacht harbor, which is in the same port used by the ocean liners and cargo vessels. Hoping that all would be well with the refrigerator and everything crisp and chilly when we got back, my wife, my son and I decided to improve our day by visiting Pompeii and after that going to the top of Vesuvius.
To get a car and a chauffeur we went to the office of the American Express, where, at a high price, we were presented with a large, shiny, but old Alfa Romeo limousine and a small, middle-aged man who wore a stiff-visored cap and spoke a kind of English. Since my wife and son speak Italian and I understand enough of it to get by, and since we could only understand one word out of ten that the guide spoke in English, we pleaded with him to communicate with us in his native tongue. But his pride forbade any such compromise, and as we sped down the autostrada in the direction of Pompeii, he kept pointing out various sights of interest to us and conducting a
long monologue, from which I culled only two intelligible sentences—“That is a pillbox,” and “General Mark Clark came on this road.”
When we got to Pompeii, although it was only eleven-thirty and we had all had hearty breakfasts, our guide immediately went to a large barn-like restaurant where two tourist buses were already parked and tried to convince us to have lunch. After a struggle we managed to make him understand that we were not hungry and that even if we were, nothing could make us eat in that particular restaurant. Sadly, he permitted us to go to the entrance in the wall which now encloses the excavations of Pompeii. But we were turned back. For the first time in several thousand years Pompeii was closed. The custodians had gone on strike that morning for higher pay and the public would have to seek its ruins elsewhere. When my son tried to climb on top of the fence to get a glimpse of the dead city, he was ordered down by two policemen armed with carbines.