Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “Il cherche le nez,” François had murmured, watching the American stare at each face in turn.

  “Hey!” Mike had retorted. “Vous avez tort, mon garçon. J’aime les juifs. I’m not Jewish, but my wife is. Aren’t you, darling?” The children had burst into giggles. They loved to tease Mike, because he was good-humored, said “vous” to them, and was exactly like their idea of an American. Even Catherine had asked him gravely whether all Americans ate with their feet on the table—she had seen it in the films. So that now, when Catherine and her cronies passed him eating breakfast at the café, he would quickly put his feet on the table and, for good measure, his spoon in his coffee cup, to the amazement of the waiters, whom he tried to include in the joke with a series of broad winks. The result of this charade was that Elisabeth, another American, who lived above the Buonsantis, was asked by the innkeeper whether all Americans ate with their feet on the table.

  Mike’s wife failed to find the story amusing. She was irritated by these nonchalant and observant children, whom she had overheard chiming “Don’t you think so, darling?” in what she uncomfortably recognized as her husband’s voice. It was obvious, she told Mike, that these European children had been indoctrinated with anti-Americanism. Their good manners offended her too—always “Bonjour, Monsieur,” “Bonjour, Madame,” instead of “Hi, Mike,” “Hi, Irene,” the way she was used to in America. She was touchy about being American and touchy about being Jewish. She had a rather large nose, which she was touchy about too. “That little boy,” she said, “was making fun of my beak.” She could speak quite coarsely when she wished to. “ ‘Il cherche le nez.’ ”

  Mike shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “He was riding me. As a matter of fact, honey, when he caught me I was looking for the nose. I have to admit it.”

  Irene resented Porto Quaglia. She was sorry she had ever saved that clipping from Harper’s Bazaar. It was not a real fishing village; there were no real intellectuals, like Sartre or Françoise Sagan; there was nothing to buy; and though they had been here only a short time, she was pressing Mike to go to Ischia. “I like it here,” Mike kept repeating, but Irene’s dissatisfaction was slowly convincing him; like an echo, he too began to criticize the pensione at the inn: spaghetti twice a day and fish with too many bones in it.

  “Vous n’aimez pas la nourriture italienne,” Hélène Buonsanti said kindly to Irene. She meant, Irene retorted, that Americans only liked steak and fried potatoes. “Mais non,” Hélène protested, determined to make peace. “Le steak et les frites sont tout à fait français.”

  Mike interposed that no one liked Italian cooking better than he and Irene, but why couldn’t they get real filet of sole at the inn? “Without bones,” he emphasized. Hélène had had her cook fillet the soles for lunch, over the objections of Arturo, who said that they would be flavorless. Mike was a popular figure, and everyone saw regretfully what was happening. To please his wife, he would soon have to leave Porto Quaglia, and he was foxily seeking a reason for leaving without regrets. Yet no one at the table was prepared for the undercurrent of antagonism that had made itself felt, like a sudden cold tug, just now, at the end of lunch, when he began playing with the notion that Porto Quaglia’s days were numbered. “Yes, Hélène,” he went on easily, “it’s just a question of time, I’m afraid. Une question de temps. Irene and I went exploring this morning. We got a boy to row us across to that big beach on the other side of the river.”

  A look of understanding passed along the table. “Lo spiaggione,” whispered a pretty girl to a young architect from Turin. “Parla dello spiaggione.” “La grande plage, grand-papa,” said Laure to Dr. Bernheim. “Oui, mon enfant. J’ai compris,” said the doctor, nodding sadly.

  “Quelle horreur!” said Mike. “Wasn’t it, darling? Ruinée, eh, Arturo? Kaput!”

  The host, who resembled a sage because of his prematurely bald head, knitted his brows and agreed. “J’ai raison, eh?” said Mike, looking around him. No one dissented. Until the previous year they had been in the habit of going across the Quaglia and walking half a mile down a path through a thicket of bamboo to lo spiaggione—a big wild sandy beach on the other side, on the open Mediterranean, where there were rollers to ride and where the children could build sand castles. This had been a regular alternate to the White Rock. But the tide of humanity coming up the coast from Viareggio, with its flotsam of night clubs, cheap hotels, neon-lit seafood restaurants, had finally overtaken Punta Sabbia, as the settlement across the river was called, and a Camping that had been planted there two years ago was literally the last straw. The grande plage was now covered with straw huts, bamboo huts, loose straw, tents, candy wrappers, ice-cream cartons, rusty cans, broken bottles, old automobile tires, watermelon rinds, not to mention the lengthening row of cabine and rented umbrellas; to reach the water in many places it was necessary to pick one’s way through refuse and human bodies as in a game of stepping stones. The advent of the campers, moreover, had created a serious sanitary problem, and the refuse had bred flies and mosquitoes. This summer only the children had been across to the big beach; the grownups did not speak of it any more, as if it were someone who had died in a horrible way or lived on upstairs in a special room like an insane relation in the last century. The grande plage, which had been an essential feature of the Porto Quaglia agenda, like the yearly boat trip to Portovenere or the climb up Monte Morello, was steadfastly ignored. No one cared even to remember the indignant meetings of the summer before last, when they had tried to save lo spiaggione: the open letter to the mayor of Acquafredda protesting the sanitary conditions on the other side of the river, the manifesto to the Belle Arti at La Spezia calling attention to the despoilment of the bamboo and the pineta, the photographs of Before and After they had sent to Il Mondo and Italia Nostra. The ruin of the spiaggione was accepted, and there were those who, last summer, had claimed to see a virtue in the necessity, pointing out that what had happened on the other side would be a lesson to the elements in Porto Quaglia that wanted to see it “developed.” Mass tourism, they declared, could not be stopped; the hope was to divert it, and Punta Sabbia ought to be welcomed as a human garbage dump, where all the undesirables collected in one place, without any compulsion being exercised but according to a kind of natural zoning law. This summer, though, these arguments, once half persuasive, had been put away regretfully, like last year’s faded bathing suits and rusted bathing caps; they did not seem to fit any more.

  “Mais c’est tout à fait différent!” said the Roman editor sharply, breaking the gloomy silence that had fallen on the table. “The spiaggione is sand, good for pitching tents. Here we are on rock and stones.”

  “ ‘It can’t happen here,’ eh?” said Mike.

  “But, Francesco, what about the new Camping at the bivio?” gently put in the editor’s wife. This was a very small Camping, of only a few tents, at the fork two miles away where the road from Sarzana divided, the main branch going south toward Carrara and a long spur following the river to Porto Quaglia, where it ended.

  “It is at the bivio,” her husband said impatiently. “They do not come here to swim; they go to Punta Sabbia.” And he went on to reiterate his theory that Porto Quaglia could not be “developed” because it was not on a through road. “People looking for pleasure don’t like to be at a dead end. They are afraid of being bottled up. They are restless. Everyone today is restless—especially the Italians.” This theory, which he had been propounding for five years with increasing conviction, served as usual to pacify the doubters; his disgust with the tendency of modern life, familiar to readers of his editorials, made him all the more credible as a forecaster—an optimist they would not have relied on. In the same way, the whole community, including the children, trusted him as a weather prophet because he distrusted the weather.

  Just then, down the marble walk under the grape arbor, came the Irish poet Frank O’Hare. He was a big pale deep-chested man with a fringe of gray hair, the night owl of Porto Q
uaglia; he rented a house from a fisherman, never swam or sunned, and was seldom seen in daylight, though he was generally dressed only in bathing trunks, as he was now. To see him saunter down the walk in broad afternoon was a sign of trouble, as though an evening bat had flitted across the palm trees; if he came by day, it was to “have a word” with Dr. Bernheim, and everyone now jumped to the conclusion that his pregnant wife or one of his five children must be “under the weather” again. But he wore a large smile and carried a chessboard. “I’ve come for a game with Arturo,” he explained, shaking hands all around and accepting a glass of whiskey, which Hélène had run into the house to procure. O’Hare was the chess champion of Porto Quaglia—a title he held from having beaten Hélène’s father three out of five at the end of the previous summer. This was only his second year at Porto Quaglia; he spoke no French and hardly a word of Italian, but he was extremely sociable and knew all the gossip of the village, which he picked up at the “pub” over a glass of beer (he did not drink wine) and from his private sources among the fishermen and maids. “Have ye heard the news?” he said now, and at once everyone guessed that this was the reason for his visit. “The Germans have discovered Porto Quaglia.”

  A long cry of dismay went up in the garden. O’Hare raised a hand to hush it. This morning, he went on, folding his arms, he had gone into Sarzana to get some medicine for Sean, whose foot was infected again (“I’d like a word with you later, if I may, Doctor.” “Papa—” “Oui, ma fille, j’ai compris”), and while he was there he had stopped in at the travel agency, where they sold the bus tickets, to pass the time of day. There he had found a young German pair inquiring for a purse the girl had left on a bus from La Spezia; the long and short of it was that he had acted as translator for them (the boy had a little English) and had asked them, by the bye, what they were doing in Sarzana. They told him that a tourist bureau in Frankfurt had recommended Porto Quaglia.

  “Oh, là là!” said Arturo Buonsanti. “Oh, là là!” said the engineer. “Oh, là là!” cried all the children.

  “Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” called a woman’s voice with an American accent from the balcony above.

  “C’est les Allemands, Elisabeth!” shouted the children. “Ils sont à Sarzana. Ils ont découvert Porto Quaglia.” A shriek answered.

  The Buonsantis’ cook, Anna, rushed out from the kitchen. “Cosa, signora? Cosa?”

  “I tedeschi, Anna,” said Hélène. “Son arrivati qui.”

  Anna shielded her eyes and peered out to the street, along the green tunnel of the arbor. “Dove? Dove sono, professore?” She turned to Arturo. “All’ albergo?”

  Arturo reassured her. “Non è vero, Anna. Almeno è un po’ esagerato.” But he too, behind his smile, was very much taken aback. “Oh, là là!” he repeated to himself.

  Down the outside staircase trooped the families who rented the second-story apartments—Mme. Brée, wakened from her after-lunch nap, was wearing a frilly cotton dressing gown, and her children’s hair was tousled. Fat Margherita from the house next door, who took boarders, appeared in a parting of the hedge; from the house behind, young Dr. Livio, from Rome, came buttoning his white shirt. Little Anne, the engineer’s youngest, hopped on a bicycle to go tell her friend Suzanne down the street. O’Hare stood clasping an oar and embroidering the tale for the group clustered around him while Hélène and Elisabeth, the American, acted as interpreters.

  “You’d think it was an air-raid alarm,” said Mike, guffawing.

  “They were here in these hills,” replied the professor of history, chidingly. He nodded his head at the green hills behind the house. “In ’44. Fighting the Partisans, who were hiding in the woods on Monte Morello. Anna remembers.”

  “That was a tragedy,” said the Roman editor. “This is farce.”

  Mike’s wife interrupted. “Those people in Sarzana—were they West Germans or East Germans?” “West, of course,” said the editor irritably. “They are from Frankfurt.” “I don’t think we should be prejudiced against the West Germans,” declared Irene in a virtuous tone.

  “I quite agree,” said the British lawyer. “I bear no prejudice against the present generation of Germans—West or East. I loathe prejudice of any kind. As I loathe blood sports. That’s the thing I hold against your lamented compatriot, Hemingway—” “Sh-h-h,” Mike said to him. “I want to hear this.”

  “They won’t be coming here after all,” O’Hare was saying. “They’ll wait for the purse to turn up and then go on to Pisa.”

  The lawyer frowned suspiciously, hearing a note of mischief in the poet’s bland tone. “What did you tell them about Porto Quaglia?”

  O’Hare grinned. “Well, I painted the picture a bit black, you might say. They asked about the bathing, and of course I was bound to tell them that I’d been here a month and hadn’t had a bathe yet. Not so much as a sunbathe.” A gleeful laugh rang out. The Irishman’s white torso and limbs were not a testimonial to Porto Quaglia as a summer resort, and the others began to joke about posting him at the bivio as a deterrent, like a quarantine sign.

  “Very funny,” said the editor tartly. “It would be very amusing no doubt to see O’Hare turning back the Huns. A Ste.-Geneviève at the gates of Paris—perhaps our poet can be canonized. But it is not a joke, what he has told us. Porto Quaglia is on a tourist map of Italy published in Germany as a vacation guide!”

  The poet nodded. “I saw it. With my own two eyes. Porto Quaglia is there, big as life, with a star.”

  “But how?” cried the pretty girl, who was the daughter of the history professor. “It is not even on the Esso map. How did the Germans find out about it?”

  “They have their ways,” said her father darkly, at which everyone burst out laughing.

  “Ils ont leurs espions!” cried the children delightedly.

  And now it was remembered that a pair of fat middle-aged blond strangers had been seen one day the previous summer on the marble rocks at Rocca Bianca, but though they had been heard to speak German, they had been given the benefit of the doubt, for they might have been refugees. And only a few weeks before, Anna the cook had brought the news that Germans had been reported in the new Camping at the bivio. But two possible Germans on the rocks, two more in a Camping had not been seen as significant; now these isolated cases suddenly “made sense,” like the first seemingly unrelated deaths in what would prove to be the outbreak of an epidemic. There had always (that is, for several years) been Germans across the river, which the poet had one night fancifully compared to the Rhine, with the Germans on one side and the French on the other. But now, it seemed, scouts had crossed the frontier, and an invasion was beginning against which Porto Quaglia was defenseless. The French would be mowed down as by a Panzer division. The local inconveniences that had protected Porto Quaglia from prosperous Italians and Americans would make no difference to the Germans, who never seemed to take baths while travelling and were not particular about iced drinks. Porto Quaglia, in fact, would yield without a murmur to the German soul, which vacationed with quotation marks in its rucksack ready to fasten around “ein kleines Fischerdorf.”

  “Ja, ja, wunderschön!” savagely mimicked François in his cracking voice, hoarse as a crow’s from the onset of puberty.

  The grownups nodded. They agreed that it was just a question of time till the dread signs “Zimmer” would be posted outside the homes of the simple fisherfolk of Porto Quaglia. “Zimmer und Frühstück,” “Lebensmittel”—they had seen these signs move up the coast, as though the Angel of Death had passed by marking the villages, one by one, for liquidation.

  Mike’s wife spoke up. “I think you’re setting your kids a very bad example. You should teach them to judge Germans as individuals.” Hélène whirled around. “Do they come here as individuals or as a mass? With a map from headquarters like an army? Do you meet German tourists as individuals or in busloads?”

  “Écoute, Hélène,” chided her husband. “Frank vient de rencontrer deux individus à Sar
zana.”

  “The first swallows, though,” observed O’Hare. “We’ve got them in Killarney—all the old Nazi boyos. The new landed gentry. Hitler’s chief of protocol. They’ve closed off the beaches to the Irish poor.”

  “Tu vois?” exclaimed Hélène.

  “Franchement, je les déteste,” said the engineer’s wife calmly. “If Germans come here, I will not come back.”

  “Do you mean that seriously?” asked Mike. “You mean if one German comes here you won’t come back? Supposing Mayor Brandt comes here next year for his vacation?”

  “Soyez sérieux, Mike,” interposed Arturo. “Mayor Brandt is not the question. Vous le savez bien. Nous parlons du touriste moyen. The ordinary tourist.”

  “Let them go to Pisa!” burst out Hélène. “Let them go to Florence! Là il y a l’histoire, les monuments! L’histoire, les monuments appartiennent à tout le monde. To everybody. Mais Porto Quaglia nous appartient à nous.”

  “So it belongs to you. How interesting,” said the British lawyer in a courtroom manner. “I should think it belonged to the fishing people.”

  “It belongs to the fishing people first,” said Hélène. “Next it belongs to us.” “By what right?” said the lawyer. “By the right of use,” said Hélène. “Is that not a right in English law? We have been coming here now for ten years; our children have grown up here. We have rights here; we belong here. Why should Germans come and push us aside? As they do always in queues. I have seen them in Paris. Because I am small, they try to push me aside.”