by Irwin Shaw
There are camps like this in Italy, Sicily, Yugoslavia, and Israel, cleverly run and growing more popular every year. The prices are most reasonable. For a Parisian, two weeks at the camp in Corfu, with round trip passage by train and boat and all the wine he can drink included, is to be had for one hundred and twelve dollars. Additional time can be had for nineteen dollars and sixty cents a week. For a young man or woman who wanted to learn French and get a glimpse of Greece in the same summer, the camp on Corfu would seem almost irresistible. It would take a taste for gregarious living, and the sightseeing, which is arranged by the camp, would cost a little extra, and you would have to be careful about repeating some of the phrases you picked up if you happened to be invited later to a reception at the Élysée, but the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages, and at the very least you would return with a great tan and the ability to understand the dirtier scenes in almost all the new French movies.
BRINDISI
We were heading for Dubrovnik, in Yugoslavia, and if the world were more rationally run, we would have gone up the coast of Albania to get there. But since Albania was tabu and we could not run the risk of the complications that might arise if we were driven into an Albanian port by bad weather or engine failure, we had to make our way across the mouth of the Adriatic to Brindisi, on the East Coast of Italy, and make the crossing of the Adriatic from there.
We came into Brindisi on a quickening sea, with a strong following wind which seemed to lift us gently, like a giant hand, from one wave to the next. But once we were in port, the wind began to blow for fair, a scorching, nerve-jangling sirocco that kept us in Brindisi for three days.
The charms of Brindisi are quickly exhausted, especially when the sirocco is blowing. There is a massive, elaborately carved column to be admired on a little piazza facing the harbor at the top of a fine flight of steps put there by the Romans to mark the southern terminus of the Appian Way. Originally there were two columns, but in the course of the years the second one was removed to Lecce to serve as a pedestal for the statue of St. Orontius, who has his back turned hopelessely on the Roman amphitheatre, which was used for the usual Roman diversions.
In Brindisi, if you are searching for amusement, you can turn away from its remaining column to a nearby wall and read, if your Latin is good enough, a plaque in praise of Virgil, who died in the town. You can visit two or three churches of moderate interest. You can sit at a café and watch the stream of cars, with license plates from two dozen countries, that pours, with tidal regularity, along the waterfront to and from the car ferries down from Venice or up from Greece. You can take one of the boats with triangular sails which sail you out of the inner harbor to one of the crowded and not quite clean beaches. On the beach you have to be spry to avoid being hit by people who jump around hitting a rubber ball to each other, using a kind of noiseless tambourine as racquets. This activity is carried on in a brawl of young men practising tumbling, family groups eating large lunches, mothers nursing their children, and everybody listening to different programs on transistor radios.
You can also visit a high, sallow-brick monument to Italy’s sailors, which dominates the harbor in silent evidence that Mussolini’s ideas about art were infected with the same ugliness as his ideas about politics. From its crown, though, there is a fine view of the sea and the city, and we watched a squadron of jet fighters practising landings and takeoffs all morning.
There is a small American airbase at Brindisi, and we became friendly with a twenty-three-year-old Negro staff sergeant who had been there for about eight months and thought yearningly of his previous snug post in England. He planned to stay in the army until he was eligible for a pension, which would be at the age of thirty-eight, after which he intended to go back to his home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and live comfortably on his two hundred dollars a month.
Two hundred dollars a month is more than the salary of a captain in the Italian army on active service, and I hoped, in the interests of amity between us and our allies in NATO, that whoever overheard this conversation on this impoverished coast could not understand English. It also occurred to me that I had been working steadily at my trade for nearly thirty years and, if my health held out, would still be at my typewriter when the sergeant, his life’s work done, would be lolling on the beach in North Carolina.
The sergeant ate dinner with us, the first meal, he said, that he had eaten off the base since his posting there. The food on the base, he said, was so good that it was ridiculous to go to a restaurant. While we were speaking about food, he talked nostalgically of picnics on the beach near his home town and of a restaurant there that made his favorite dish—clam fritters. He strongly advised me to try them the next time I was in Wilmington, North Carolina.
When the monotony of Brindisi got him down, he took his leave in Athens, a good town but expensive. In the night spots there, he told me, if you wished to take one of the ladies out to a more private place, you had to pay the proprietor the equivalent of one bottle of champagne or seven whiskies. The sergeant was so security conscious that when I asked him how far out of town the base was, a crafty look came into his eye and he said, vaguely, “Oh, a pretty far way,” even though Alitalia lands civilian planes there every day and anybody who has a mind to can survey the entire base from the top of the Sailors’ Monument on the harbor.
LECCE
Since the wind prevented us from traveling by sea, we rented a car and traveled by land. We drove to the city of Lecce through miles of vineyards from which comes a wine that I found too heavy for my taste. The towns on the way are terribly poor, and we passed a large market spread out on a bare hot street, which seemed to be devoted almost exclusively to secondhand clothes, mostly from America. The road approaching Lecce is lined for mile after mile with carefully spaced oleander bushes, in alternating pink and white, and the avenue of blossoms made a fitting introduction to the city, which, not without justice, has been called the Baroque Florence. It is a city that gives the impression of having been scrubbed by the sun, with narrow clean streets from which you get glimpses of cool, tree-shaded courtyards where a good deal of the daytime living of the surrounding households, including washing, ironing and baby-sitting, takes place.
In the center of the city is the Duomo, a soaring, creamy church, lavishly decorated and gilt, facing a wide paved square, one side of which is taken up by an almost equally pleasing building that houses a seminary. Young priests and scholars slip in and out, their soutanes deep black and dramatically ascetic against the sunny walls.
Inside, the church was wonderfully cool and dark. It was empty except for the one usual old lady praying near a side altar. It was filled with the sound of the organ, as the organist practised Bach, unmindful, perhaps, of the scene in Fellini’s picture in which one of the characters plays Bach just that way in an empty church and subsequently commits suicide, after murdering his children.
It was here that my son revolted, announcing that he had seen enough churches. He had the authority of Samuel Johnson behind him, who wrote, some time before, apropos of Paris, “… though the churches, palaces and some private houses are very magnificent, there is no very great pleasure after having seen many, in seeing more …”
In the vestibule, as we left the Duomo, I saw a list of the movies playing that week in Lecce, with recommendations to the faithful about which films were acceptable for the entire family, which were acceptable only for adults, and which were acceptable for no Christian. When one thinks of some of the statements that have been fixed in other ages on church doors, this list of judgments on such works of art as Pillow Talk and The Vikings seems to reflect a considerable decadence in church-door literature.
Lecce looks and feels like a rich town, with a northern bustle to it and a northern tendency to disfigure beautiful city landscapes with large, ugly business buildings. We left it to go to the nearby beach of San Cataldo along a fine new highway on which we saw that commonest of sights on fine new highways—an overtu
rned car in a glitter of broken glass and a dazed driver wiping the blood off his forehead as he explained how it happened to two policemen.
The wind was still howling along the coast and the bathers were enjoying the unaccustomed breakers. The narrow beach was thronged with children, all dark brown and with gleaming white teeth and as quick as fawns. It is a curious fact that when you see large crowds of children on the streets of Italian cities you are immediately set to worrying about the overpopulation that has caused so much misery on the peninsula. But when you see battalions of swift infants swarming on a beach you cannot repress a smile at this evidence of Italian fecundity or feel anything but hope in the face of this tumbling human abundance.
The sirocco had affected the Captain’s nerves along with everybody else’s, and when we got back to the boat we had a silly squabble with him about opening or closing or looking into the cursed refrigerator, an act he regarded as ill-bred, like opening someone else’s mail. In a burst of pessimism I was sure that the wind wouldn’t die down for months and that we had extracted as much pleasure as possible from the voyage. I went across the quay to the hotel there, and asked the concierge, a brilliantly efficient young man with one arm, to arrange to get us out of Brindisi, by any means, immediately. But it turned out that there were no boats leaving for the North for two days, the last seat on the plane to Rome had just been sold, and the Italian railroads were to go on strike at midnight.
Baffled, I went into the bar and taught the sixteen-year-old bartender how to make a martini. Then I taught him how to make two martinis. Then three. At that point the concierge came into the bar to tell me that the Captain of the Port had just called to say that the wind was due to fall by the next day. With the fourth martini, I decided to continue on to Yugoslavia.
VII
DUBROVNIK
We set out at sunset the next day, sliding across the satiny pale green sea which still had enough swell left from the wind to bring out the bottle of Bonamine for my son. A shark’s fin off our port side kept us company in the luminous twilight while we dined on deck. We did not swim that evening.
Early next morning we entered the small fiord-like harbor of Gruz, which serves as a port for the city of Dubrovnik. The Captain of the Port, who came down in person to inspect our papers, was a ruggedly handsome man who had been the master of his own vessel and who had put into New York many times. When he opened my passport, he stood up and shook my hand, and told me that he was a reader of my books and would have had the town band to greet us as we docked, if he had known in advance of our arrival. Since the only greeting I usually get when I arrive in my native New York is a suspiciously thorough examination of my bags by the customs inspector and a close questioning about where I bought my wristwatch, this Yugoslav devotion to literature naturally influenced my subsequent reactions to the rest of the country.
My memories of Dubrovnik are somewhat confused, due to the fact that we met a group of our friends there (three writers this time) who insisted upon celebrating our reunion all the four days we remained there. We moved into the Hotel Argentina, in which they were staying. This is a pre-war establishment, beautifully appointed and situated on a cliff above the sea, with a view of the walls and towers of Dubrovnik from its terraces and from the rocks below the hotel, from which we swam in deep, cold water. The food was superb, the service perfect, and my friends had discovered, as writers will, a faultless white Yugoslavian wine called Zsalevska, to which, as un-ugly Americans, we paid generous homage.
Aside from its other attractions, the hotel boasted of a tennis court. It was not regulation size, the alleys being at least a foot narrower than they should have been, perhaps to remind the local population that even under communism the world was not perfect and that there were still future goals to be striven for.
While we were playing tennis one day a friend of ours arrived and said, in a loud voice, “Dammit, more Americans!” My son, with the blind patriotism of his eleven years, was all for hitting the man immediately, although he was considerably outweighed and would have had to give away at least six inches in reach. When I explained to him that the man who had said the offending phrase was a friend and an American and was joking, my son refused to be reconciled. “I don’t care who he is,” my son said. “He shouldn’t say things like that in Yugoslavia.”
When we were not playing tennis, we swam or took huge hampers of food aboard the boat and visited along the coast and watched one of our friends fish in the clear waters with aqualung and speargun above the sunken ruins of the lost city of Epidaurus. Since this particular friend was preparing a piece on underwater fishing and exploration for a magazine, he made me promise not to write anything about these expeditions, and I shall honor my word. I do not imagine his editors will complain if I reveal that we had fish chowder due to his efforts and feasts of grouper steaks and moray eel, and that a few years before arriving in Dubrovnik he had written a book called From Here to Eternity.
He made his underwater excursions in company with one of the champions of Yugoslavia and a young Serb college teacher. The champion, who like a good many athletes had a moral sense not quite as finely developed as his muscles, had been denied permission to represent his country in the world competitions that summer because he had been caught on a previous trip trying to smuggle watches across the border. His case had not as yet been settled, and it looked as though, as further punishment, he was going to be inducted into the army. He took all this like a sportsman, as part of the game, with the stoicism of an offensive tackle caught flagrantly holding on the line, philosophically watching the referee pace off the fifteen yard penalty.
The college teacher had been head of his department but had given up the position, since, not being a member of the Communist Party, he was excluded from the weekly meetings of the three or four communists in his department. Quite rightly, he refused to be responsible for the functioning of the department if he couldn’t know what was going on in it. He was not penalized for his resignation-nor for the fact that he had recently been married in church. There is no law against being married in church, but he had discreetly gone to another town for the ceremony and had kept all celebration down to a quiet minimum.
We dined together every night, and the party was likely to continue on a lower terrace, where a small band, composed mostly of personable young men who for the rest of the year were students at the University in Belgrade, played good American jazz. The music and our voices often combined in lively harmony that no doubt could be heard through the balmy midnight air out on Lokum, the island a half mile or so off the coast where Richard the Lion Hearted had once built a shrine and on which Prince Maximilian and Carlotta had summered happily before being called to the New World and the Mexican firing squad. Neither Richard the Lion Hearted nor Maximilian was in any condition to be bothered by the band’s version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” or by the shouted literary opinions emanating from our table, but a surly American voice from the hotel occasionally told us to go to sleep, and we heard later from the maître d’hotel that one of the guests had called the nearest American consul and had complained about us. We supposed it was all neatly entered in all our dossiers in Washington, and we made a pact that if, at some time in the future, we were called up before some congressional investigating committee (it has happened before and it can happen again), we would all denounce each other by name and inform the committee that everybody mentioned was indeed in Yugoslavia between such and such dates and that everybody was quite certain that Yugoslavia was under communist domination at the time.
Dubrovnik, which was called Ragusa before it was incorporated into Yugoslavia, is a city where the Latin and Slav civilizations met, the line of juncture being a marshy channel which divided the Latin island of Ragusa from the forested mainland. The channel has now been paved over, but it is easy to follow its old course down the Stradone, the main street of the city. Dubrovnik is a city that manages to be all of one piece, despite the ups and downs of h
istory, which have been particularly violent here, and despite the different styles and periods of architecture that are incorporated within its thick, protective walls. The grayish white stone that is used for all its buildings as well as its walls almost gives you the impression that the city, with its palaces, ramparts, statues, shops and dwellings, was built all at one time by a single intelligence. Architecturally, all is in order in the city, and the sense of ancient beauty it gives off is preserved by the immaculateness of its streets and the complete absence of advertising signs and motor traffic.
A festival is given each summer of dance, drama, and music. The ramparts and sculptured courts are put to good use for productions of plays, Hamlet being the star attraction, as backgrounds to folk dances from the different racial divisions of Yugoslavia, and for excellent concerts. The one jarring note in the entire town is a modern nightclub, set near the moat, where, incomprehensibly, a fat German woman in black performed a clumsy striptease twice nightly. The local girls, none of whom could be imagined going through this particular kind of public performance, have an almost austere, unflirtatious, dark-eyed dignity about them, and you are a long way here from the summery cuddlesomeness of the French Riviera. Many of the girls are strikingly beautiful, and one has the feeling watching them stride proudly and unsmilingly through the sunshine of their hard stone city that they would make the best of wives for a lifetime, but rather awe-inspiring dates for an evening.