In the Company of Dolphins

by Irwin Shaw

  SPLIT

  The Yugoslavs have a saying that when God was through with creating the world, he had some rocks left over and tossed them away at random. When the rocks stopped rolling, that was Dalmatia. In the event, it turned out, from an esthetic point of view, at least, to be a highly satisfactory manner of creation. To travel along that magnificent coast and between the hundreds of islands in the hot Adriatic summer weather is to taste to the full the pleasures of sun, solitude, and the constantly varying splendor of the natural world. Humanity has lived up to its surroundings here, too. The builders who have worked here have worked with love and dignity and imagination and have left a legacy in stone that has survived a history as tumultuous as any in Europe. Towns like Korcula, Hvar, Trogir, and Rab shine like gems next to the blue sea, and a city like Split, surrounding the monumental fantasy of Diocletian’s palace, manages to combine the influences of two thousand years and the genius of many races into one harmonious image.

  This coast has always attracted visitors and vacationers, and the present government has made traveling there as attractive as possible. The towns look as though they have been scrubbed daily by fanatically hygienic Dutch housewives, and the officials are friendly, intelligent and uniformly helpful. Here and there an unfortunately modern hotel strikes a jarring note, but in other places new restaurants and hotels are blended skillfully into old walls and leafy gardens. A program of summer festivals of all kinds enlivens even the most modest of the coastal towns, and musicians from Belgrade and Zagreb are to be seen everywhere, disembarking from boats and hurrying along the quays with their cased violins, cellos and horns to play Beethoven and Debussy in a Roman amphitheatre to an audience in which ladies in Paris gowns and men in shirtsleeves sit side by side.

  In Split, among the columns of Diocletian’s mausoleum, we went to a performance of Samson and Delilah, where the sartorial range extended down to the bare wiry torsos of a group of eight-year-old music-lovers in shorts who had sneaked past the ushers and seated themselves under the stone sphinx Diocletian had set up, vainly, to guard his remains. To demonstrate that classes have not yet been completely abolished in this theoretically classless society, the musicians all wore white shirts, without coats, while the conductor, a young man with a silky blond moustache and that petulant, dissatisfied, boy-wonder expression so often to be found on the faces of young conductors, wore a thoroughly bourgeois white dinner jacket and black tie.

  On the opposite side of the great courtyard, the people who lived in the apartments of the Venetian palace there sat on the balconies and showed their enjoyment of the opera by throwing roses down at the singers. In a gesture of communist egalitarianism, the bass who played Samson bent down, with some difficulty (he had the traditional bass figure), picked up three of the roses and gave one to Delilah, one to the other principal, who was taking his bows at the same time, and with no false modesty, kept one for himself.

  The finale, when Samson destroys the temple and himself by pulling down the columns, must have presented problems to the director. He did the best he could with a magnesium flare, a dramatic dimming of lights, and the collapse of two papier-maché columns, but the effects on the stage suffered, I’m afraid, from the rooted mass of Diocletian’s columns looming over the audience and the sculptured immobility of the sphinx and the carved marble lions.

  Considering how the modern world uses the relics of other times as a stage for its amusements, it is interesting to speculate on a possible perfromance of Guys and Dolls, say, in the ruins of the left field stands of Yankee Stadium in the year 2500.

  RAB

  The Captain of the Port in Dubrovnik had told us to make sure not to miss the island of Rab, and as soon as we came into the harbor we saw why he had been so insistent. Here again the combination of white stone walls, palm trees, blue sea, numerous bays, and wooded low hills seemed to have been put together to intensify and round out all the possible joys of summer. Even a funeral procession, which we saw issuing from a fortress-like church to the music of a band, seemed to lose some of its customary dreadfulness against this background, and the white sails of the little boats to be seen on the surrounding sea did not seem callously misplaced within the same visual framework as the coffin and the dark clothes of the mourners.

  We wandered around the town, stopping to buy ice cream cones, lemonade, embroidered wallets, and bowls carved out of hard wood and shaped in the form of a duck. We walked through narrow, fresh-smelling streets and looked into tiny courtyards where tables were laid for dinner under awnings. Lush little gardens of dwarf trees and shrubs and flowers, all in pots on the paved floors, filled the air with their fragrance.

  Rab has been known as a resort for a long time, and before the war its hotels attracted vacationers from Italy and all over the Balkans and Middle Europe. Now it has been taken over almost entirely by Germans, and in the shops the salespeople talk automatically in German to you as soon as they see that you are a foreigner. At night we went up to have a drink at the biggest hotel, which is set in a huge park, but were driven back by the sight of what looked like two thousand solid German burghers and their wives sitting out on the immense terrace drinking beer or dancing to the music of jolly old-fashioned waltzes and turning the place, for me at least, into a giant rathskeller.

  The next day, as we sailed out of the harbor and past other islands, my wife picked out at least five places, pine-shaded and protected, that she would have gladly bought, on the spot, as sites for a summer house.

  My wife’s enthusiasm made me examine what I thought about the whole matter of Americans abroad and why it is that I can live happily in countries such as France and Switzerland but can only bring myself to visit others, Spain or Portugal or Yugoslavia, for short periods at a time. It came down to two questions—the nature of the regime and the disparity in living conditions between the rich and the poor. Spain, Yugoslavia and Portugal, with all their differences, have one thing in common—they are ruled by tyrants who can only be replaced by force. There is considerable private freedom in Spain, much more so than in Yugoslavia, and Spaniards can come and go much as they please, but there is no blinking away the fact that a tyrant sits in Madrid, just as a tyrant sits in Belgrade. The richness of the rich in Spain and the agonizing poverty of the poor (Greece, too, suffers from the same gulf between the classes) must nag at your conscience and make you uneasy about profiting from a tragic condition that you, as a foreigner, can do nothing to ameliorate. So you move as a transient in those countries and are prevented from settling in any one of them, even for the length of one summer, regardless of the beauty of the towns and countryside and your admiration of the people themselves.

  A tourist’s reaction to the physical aspects of the towns and cities and natural beauties of Dalmatia are easier to arrange than his reaction to the people and the regime. After Italy and the easy Italian smile, there is a sobriety, almost a dour quality, about the inhabitants of the coast that is immediately remarked. Whether this is due to the leftover bitterness of the war, which was waged here with a ferocity and a cost in blood not equalled in Italy, or an unwilling submission to the present system of government, or merely a historical quality of the people, I do not know. I heard complaints, of course, about the regime, but the complaints were actually no more vehement than the complaints one hears in America about the party in office, and certainly less bitter than the complaints one hears in France about de Gaulle.

  Perhaps the impression I had of a brooding, subsurface sense of gravity, of sorrow, can be traced to a photograph in a French guidebook I had with me in Yugoslavia. It was of a young Yugoslav peasant girl, who could not have been more than nineteen or twenty, in a shapeless smock and heavy boots, with a noose around her neck, standing under the tree on which she was to be hanged, as her executioners, in the uniforms of the German Army, pushed her, in a calm, businesslike way, into position. The girl stared out of the photograph with a haunting look of loss, disbelief, and anger that another human being could
at that moment be inhuman enough to stand three feet away from her and record her agony. I could not free myself of that image, and when I looked at the faces of the living people around me in this sunny land, which was devoted for that season to harvests and holidays, I could not keep the shadow of tragedy out of what I saw.

  PULA

  The last port we came to in Yugoslavia was Pula, which was Italian until the end of World War II, and which had been the chief naval port for the Austro-Hungarian Empire up to the Treaty of Versailles. Three spick-and-span destroyers were tied up on the other side of our dock, and the waterfront was bustling with dashing-looking young naval officers. Pula is a thriving shipbuilding center, and large freighters in various stages of construction stood on the ways around the harbor.

  In a park on the waterfront there is a large, once-grand hotel that was built to make Pula bearable to the officers of Franz Joseph’s fleet and their ladies. It still serves dinner from an impressively French menu on its flowered terrace facing the harbor, but the ghosts of old flirtations are swamped and the echoes of golden Viennese gossip silenced by the voices of English ladies who have come a long way on conducted bus tours that start in London and make heroic leaps across the continent and who sit at the tables of the vanished admirals and ask each other, “Do you think this fish is really haddock?”

  Tito’s private island of Brijoni lies a little to the north, but it is unapproachable. His picture, however, is everywhere, in banks, shops, customs offices, in the windows of photographers’ shops and in newspaper kiosks. After being subjected to the same phenomenon in Spain, with Franco’s bland, retouched features taking the place of Tito’s heavy, fatherly glance, it occurred to me that if I were the dictator of a country, I would put a severe limit on the number of photographs of myself in public places. Because it is there all the time, overlooking almost all the activities and petty annoyances of daily life, the photograph and the man behind it become inevitably the focus of all the boredom and discontent going. It soon loses its intended quasi-religious function as an ikon and degenerates into a convenient target and incitement to rebellion.

  In Pula I met a young man who went to the University in the winter and worked in Pula in the summertime. He was bitter about his wages, which were too low to maintain life for any prolonged period of time, and bitter about the regime, not because it was communist, but because it was not communist enough. He echoed, in difficult, school-English, the criticisms of Djilas, who is still in prison for his books attacking the formation of a sheltered and pampered managerial élite in the goverment.

  The young man was also bitter on the subject of the Italians, who were given Pula after World War I by the Allies and were only driven out during World War II. In the time they were there, they went to excessive lengths to Italianize the city, including forcing Slavic families to take Italian names and forbidding the teaching of Serbo-Croat in the schools.

  There are still many Italian families in Pula and the bitter young man proudly pointed out the comparison in treatment accorded them by their one-time victims now that the tables were turned. Nobody asked the Italians to change their names, and they have a large building which is devoted to Italian culture in one of the main streets of the city.

  Still, there are incidents, demonstrations, broken windows, all of which would have been sternly suppressed under Mussolini.

  VIII

  TRIESTE

  It had been part of my dream to sail into Venice on the bridge of my own ship and anchor grandly off the Grand Canal. I had visions of myself sitting on deck with a drink in my hand, amid Italian friends, identifying landmarks that had become familiar to me in childhood from prints and pictures. But our relations with our Captain were still in the sirocco stage, and when he balked at sailing the next morning, my patience gave out and we hired a taxi to take us up the Istrian peninsula to Trieste. From there we could get an aliscafo, a fast passenger motor boat to Venice. Weather permitting, the Captain would meet us with the boat in Venice a day or two later.

  Not far from the border, at a crossroads which was probably the scene of some critical partisan action during the war, there is a memorial of the most shocking violence. It is a realistic statue of a partisan bayoneting a German soldier who is lying at his feet. On the pedestal below the contorted figures there is a swastika cracking apart, like brittle stone under the force of a giant sledge-hammer. The whole thing is covered with incongruous gold paint. All Europe is sown with war monuments, which are usually quietly elegaic or abstractly triumphant. But this one, on land that had been wrested from the enemy less than twenty years ago, with its overall effect of undying hatred and passionate revenge, is savagely unique, and perhaps tells us more about the character of the people than they would really wish us to know. As I passed it, I remembered the crowd of Germans, dressed for a warm summer night, drinking beer and dancing to thumping waltzes on the terrace of the hotel in Rab, and wondered how many of them had come this way on their trip South, and what they felt as they drove past this grim memorial.

  When we reached the border we had to get out of the taxi and carry our bags across the line to the Italian customs house, as the taxi was not permitted to leave the country. The Yugoslav customs men were courteous, unsmiling and quick. The Italian customs officers were welcoming, dawdling and talkative, and they regretted that the two ladies in our party did not intend to stay in Trieste overnight, as they would have loved to entertain them and show them the city. They called for a taxi for us from Trieste, and when the car drove up, one of the border guards, a handsome boy with a blond moustache, made a smiling, operatic plea to one of the ladies to put him in her valise and smuggle him into America with her.

  In Trieste, I had a vague notion that I would like to try to find the building in which Joyce had taught English for the Berlitz school, but I betrayed the Master for a festive lunch in the melodiously named Ristorante Dante, to celebrate our return to Italian soil. It took longer than I expected, and we just had time for a quick look around the city before we boarded the aliscafo for Venice. These are the hydrofoils that skim at fifty miles an hour over the surface of the sea. As we settled back with all the newspapers we had not been able to find in Yugoslavia, we looked out the windows and noticed with pleasure how fast the water foamed by. The desire for flight from the too-great velocity of modern life that I had experienced on the platform of Le Train Bleu in Paris had been satisfied. After traveling for almost six weeks at the rate of eight and a half miles an hour, the sensation of speed was refreshing.

  VENICE

  In two hours, with the sun low over the domes and towers of the city, we saw Venice on the horizon, and a few minutes later we disembarked on the quay a few steps from the Doges’ Palace.

  Venice is never disappointing and its splendors are almost inexhaustible, no matter how many times one returns to the city. But to enjoy sightseeing there in the midsummer heat and in the midsummer crowds takes a character more tolerant than mine. So, reserving a serious visit for a later season, I spent my time on the Lido, preserving my tan, diving into the Adriatic seven or eight times a day, and being beaten in tennis by a novelist who was just recovering from an attack of hepatitis and a grave operation of the spine.

  The people who have villas or palazzi in Venice have a hospitable custom of entertaining at lunch in front of their cabanas on the beach of the Lido. I was invited to just such a multi-lingual occasion by the mother of a friend of mine. The lunch was a glittering small feast under the cabana awning, with the Adriatic as a shifting, milky-green mural in front of us, and the conversation swung from the relations of the Italians to the Yugoslavs, the failings of a recent book on Venice, the virtues of Visconti and the vices of several authors who shall be nameless, to a discussion of China today and a criticism of American foreign policy by a knowing and handsome young British diplomat who had just served several years in Peking. On my right was a bright-eyed and pretty woman who struck me as being one of the sharpest conversationalists I ha
d ever met. Due to the Italian custom of merely mumbling introductions, if introductions are made at all, I did not catch the lady’s name and only found out a month later that the lady on my right during that lunch had been Nancy Mitford, a writer for whom I hold the deepest admiration. Luckily, the talk never swung around to the one book of Miss Mitford’s that I find less than perfect and I was saved from making a gaffe that would have barred me from the Lido forever.

  I kept my franchise as a tourist by going into Venice at hours when the crowds slacked off and riding from one end of the city to the other in a vaporetto and by visiting, three days in a row, a majestic exhibition of the works of Carlo Crivelli, the Venetian master whose paintings and altar pieces filled room after room of the Doges’ Palace. I also took a ride around the silent canals at midnight with friends in a gondola, but it began to rain, and the gondolier whipped the tarpaulin off a hidden outboard motor and raced us back, all of us a little ashamed of him and ourselves, to the dock in front of the Danieli Hotel. Since then, due to anguished protests on all sides, the two or three gondoliers who had equipped their craft with these treacherous un-Venetian machines have promised to sell them and use them no more.

  I also looked into Harry’s Bar and saw a large group of fresh-faced American boys and girls, aged between eighteen and twenty-two, who seemed to have come to Europe this summer with the single purpose of seeing how many consecutive hours each day they could spend in Harry’s Bar. To American eyes the lanky, self-possessed boys were handsome and the girls heart-breakingly appealing. I looked at them with envy and apprehension—envy because at their age I had never seen Venice or Europe or Harry’s Bar or drunk a glass of whisky, and apprehension because in a few years a later traveler might come into this same place and see my son looking very much like these young men and drinking as much and as naturally as they.