Johnny and Liz McKnight speak Italian fluently, read, eat and live Italian. But when Thanksgiving came near in Positano, the McKnights found themselves dreaming of roast turkey and dressing, of cranberry sauce and plum pudding, of mint juleps. They got to waking up in the night and thinking about it.
The turkey arrived in a crate tied to the top of a bus. It was a fine, vigorous but slightly hysterical bird and for a week it gobbled and strutted in the one-bird turkey yard built for it in the garden until gradually its nerves got back to normal.
Johnny remembered a bit of wisdom imparted to him by his grandfather, in North Carolina. Violent death, his grandfather said, be it to man or to turkey, is a nervous and discouraging experience. The muscles are likely to go hard and certain unhappy juices are released into the system. His grandfather did not know how that affected the flavor of man but in a turkey it had a tendency to make the meat tough and a little bitter. But there was a way to avoid that. If about two hours before the execution, the turkey is given a couple of shots of good brandy, the nervous tension relaxes, the turkey’s state of mind is clear and healthy and he goes to the block happy and even gratefully. Then when he is served, instead of bitter juices of fear and shock, there is likely to be a delicious hint of cognac in the meat.
Johnny decided to follow the custom of North Carolina. Then he found that he did not have any brandy; the only thing he had was a bottle of Grand Marnier. It was better than brandy. It would give not only solace to the turkey but an orangey flavor to the meat.
The turkey fought the idea at first. But finally Johnny got him held firmly under his arm and held the beak open while Liz put four or five eyedroppers of Grand Marnier down the bird’s throat. At first the turkey gagged a little, but in a moment or two its head dropped, a sweet but wild look came in its eyes and it waved its head in rhythm with some gentle but not quite sober thought that went through its head. Johnny carried it gently to the pen. It wobbled a bit and then settled down comfortably and went to sleep.
“I’ll do for it in its sleep,” Johnny thought. “That turkey will never know what happened.” And he went to the refrigerator to see how the mint juleps were doing.
They were doing fine. He brought two of them back to the garden, and he and Liz sat down to begin the Thanksgiving.
The McKnights do not know what happened. Johnny thinks the turkey may have had a bad dream. They heard a hiccuping gobble. The turkey rose straight up in the air, and screaming triumphantly flew out to sea.
Now we must go back to the sea laws of the Amalfi coast. In the hills above the towns of Positano and its rival Praiano, watchers are usually posted. They not only keep watch for schools of fish but for anything which may be considered flotsam, jetsam or salvage. These watchers saw the McKnights’ seagoing turkey fly to sea and they also saw it crash into the water a couple of miles offshore.
Immediately boats put off from both Positano and Praiano. The race was on and they arrived at about the same time. But the turkey, alas, had drowned. The fishermen brought it tenderly back, arguing softly about whether it was a matter for salvage court. The turkey was obviously out of command. Johnny McKnight easily settled the problem with the rest of the bottle of Grand Marnier.
They cooked the turkey that afternoon and sat down to dinner about eight in the evening. And they say that not even an extra dose of sage in the dressing completely removed the taste of seawater.
Florence: The Explosion of the Chariot
THEY DO Easter week big in Florence; and now that it is over, it leaves a strange and exotic memory. Everything here breathes of the past, not a general past—a Florentine past, which means that it is really part of the present. History seeps out like groundwater, and the Middle Ages merge with the now.
All week there were services almost continuously in the old churches. We walked from one to another in a growing hypnosis of color—the chanting of great choirs, the magnificent robes of the clergy, the medieval costumes of the city and the thousands of boys in white surplices, with the voices of angels and the faces of street urchins; the music, the Gregorian chanting climbed like vines up the tall Gothic columns and mushroomed back from the vaults of the domes. It is a haunting experience.
It was a week of gift giving; small, thoughtful presents, baskets of gold-wrapped chocolate eggs and many flowers. We went nowhere without carrying some small gift, an embroidered handkerchief or a potted flowering shrub. And our apartment is overflowing with the gifts our friends have brought to us. It is a gentle, pleasant custom.
The high point of the week as every Florentine knows is the Scopio del Carro, the explosion of the chariot. I had never seen it before. Once it took place at midday of Saturday before Easter, but now it is at nine in the evening and the country people for miles around come in to see it.
At seven in the evening, the carro is brought out, a huge wooden tower on wheels. It is about three stories high, painted with crosses and coats of arms, and on its top a golden crown supported on the tails of four gold dolphins.
Furthermore, this tower is loaded down with fireworks. It is drawn through the streets by four pure-white oxen, their horns and hooves gilded and garlands of flowers on their heads. People by the thousands follow it until it arrives in the space between the Duomo, the great cathedral of Arnolfo and Brunelleschi, and the domed sacristy near by.
The carro is escorted by a troop of men in the clothing and armor of the Middle Ages, shining steel breastplates and helmets and the red-and-white cloaks of old Florence. The guard is armed with swords and long, steel-tipped spears.
Once in the square, the oxen are unyoked, and a wire is attached to the tower, thence stretched through the open doors of the cathedral and up the long nave to the high altar. At the altar, an artificial dove hangs from the wire, but such a dove as you can’t imagine—a jet-propelled dove.
Meanwhile, the square fills with people, but filled does not describe it. It is jam-packed with people. We watched it from a window over the square and saw this mass of people get to swaying and weaving like wheat under a strong wind. The cathedral is packed, too, and the streets as far as you can see, a field of swaying faces and the mood is happy and excited.
In the cathedral, the service continues, moving toward its climax at nine o’clock. Then the archbishop takes the holy fire from an ancient urn and ignites the fuse of the dove.
Actually, the dove is a kind of rocket. It whooshes along the wire, giving off smoke and flame; darts out the great doors, and strikes the tower, which erupts with fireworks exploding upward until finally they ignite a large Catherine wheel on the very top, which whirls with a screaming sound, spinning colored fire centrifugally in a great circle.
If all goes well, the dove is supposed to strike the tower and then by a second explosion to be propelled back to the high altar. If he gets there, good crops will result. If he does not, everyone forgets the whole thing. Our dove didn’t make it, but the crops look great so far.
As the tower erupts with fireworks, the cathedral erupts with music, a thousand voices singing triumphantly the Gloria in Excelsis. It is an exciting and beautiful thing, and it occurs only in Florence.
As in all such ceremonies there is a story, a legend, a history—take your pick. And the story of this is as follows:
At the time of the first Crusade, one of the greatest and most noble houses of Florence was that of the Pazzi family. A member of this family, one Pazzolino Pazzi, led the Florentine forces to the Crusade, and he was the first man to plant the flag of the Cross on the walls of Jerusalem.
He was rewarded with three pieces of flint stone from the Holy Sepulcher and the right to add five crosses to the family crest. On his return to Florence, he was given a triumphal welcome, and his family received the honor of distributing the new holy fire of Easter to all of the hearths and candles of the city.
The new fire was and is struck from the three flint stones from the Holy Sepulcher. The Pazzi family built the painted tower with its arms and crown,
and maintained it, and got a good deal of honor from the whole thing until they got into political trouble with Lorenzo di Medici.
Political trouble at that time included assassination, and the Pazzi lost both the bout and the privilege, as well as a considerable number of their kinsmen. But to this day, their arms are on the exploding tower. This is not the original tower, however. Several others have burned, and one exploded in the streets, killing quite a few people. The present tower was built in 1725, which in this country is considered yesterday.
I like this legend, and I intend to believe it. I won’t go along with the spoilsport historians who write that Pazzolino Pazzi died a hundred years before the first Crusade, and that the Holy Sepulcher is of calcareous stone with no vestige of flint in it.
They even say that the relighting of the holy fire at Easter is a direct steal from the Roman custom of relighting the fires from the Temple of the Vestal Virgins. But to me, the explosion of the chariot is a pure and vital and moving spectacle.
I Go Back to Ireland
THERE MUST BE a kind of apprehension in the sleepy little villages of Italy, Germany, England and Ireland in the summer, when the descendant of the native comes back to discover the seat of his culture. I suppose Ireland suffers more from this than any other land. Every Irishman—and that means anyone with one drop of Irish blood—sooner or later makes a pilgrimage to the home of his ancestors. There he crows and squeals over the wee cot or the houseen, pats mossy rocks, goes into ecstasies over the quaint furniture, and finds it charming that the livestock lives with the family.
He wouldn’t live there if you gave him the place. And the locals don’t think they’re quaint—they think they’re perfectly normal. To them, it’s the American descendant whose speech sounds outlandish, particularly when he puts on a nostalgic brogue, which he usually does. The natives must think the pilgrims are crazy.
I have just made such a pilgrimage. I am half Irish, the rest of my blood being watered down with German and Massachusetts English. But Irish blood doesn’t water down very well; the strain must be very strong.
I guess the people of my family thought of Ireland as a green paradise, mother of heroes, where golden people sprang full-flowered from the sod. I don’t remember my mother actually telling me these things, but she must have given me such an impression of delight. Only kings and heroes came from this Holy Island, and at the very top of the glittering pyramid was our family, the Hamiltons.
My grandfather, who had come from there carrying the sacred name, was really a great man, a man of sweet speech and sweet courtesy. He died when I was quite young, but it is remarkable how much I remember about him. His little bog-trotting wife, I am told, put out milk for the leprechauns in the hills behind King City, California, and when a groundling neighbor suggested the cats drank it, she gave that neighbor a look that burned off his nose.
Anyway, we grew up feeling singularly favored because of even our demi-Irishness. There was very little running back to Ireland for a look; there was none, in fact. My grandparents never went home to visit. I can recall only two relatives who did. One was a cousin of my mother’s who was a judge of the Supreme Court in California. He went back, I guess, mostly to impress the Irish relatives with the importance of the American branch. They must have cut him down to size, because he rarely spoke of his visit.
Later, one of my uncles made the trip. He reported that he had wept out of pure sentiment the whole time. He also reported that the family was just about played out; there remained two sisters and a brother—Katherine, Elizabeth and Thomas—children of my grandfather’s brother, all old and all unmarried. They lived in the “new house” (the old house had burned down several hundred years ago).
After my uncle’s return, we had an occasional letter from Elizabeth. She wrote a thin, elegant hand, and her English had an exquisite quality, reminiscent of the eighteenth-century writers. We felt good about that; we didn’t really believe any dull or illiterate Irish existed—in Ireland, at least. We knew plenty of that kind in this country, but perhaps we thought they had degenerated here.
I should have gone to visit long ago, but I didn’t. During the war, I landed at various Irish airports and could have gone, but some curious, powerful reluctance always came over me when I got close to the home place. Meanwhile, the letters had stopped and we heard nothing more.
Last summer, my wife and I finally went there.
It’s green, all right—but so is Scotland. It seemed to me a different green, but I wouldn’t submit the two greens to a color test. We rented an automobile to cross from Belfast to Londonderry—an extravagance which outraged even the man who owned the car, a Rolls-Royce of sneering gentility, a little younger than Stonehenge and in a little better condition. Summer was full-blown in Ireland and the grain was bowing golden-headed, ready for the cutting.
Then we crossed and came to Derry, and it’s a dour, cold city to an outsider—dark, angular buildings and uncrowded streets, waiting for something—a city of protest against the rolling green of County Derry and the lovely hills of Donegal across Lough Foyle.
There was no home feeling in the bleak hotel, that carried its own darkness with it. The girl behind the desk would not smile nor pass a cordial word, no matter how much we tried to trap her. In the bar there was no gaiety. I don’t know whether laughter was there before we went in for a drink or after we left, but none was offered for us to share, and curtains of rules brushed against us.
A drink in our room? Not permitted. Two minutes late to the dining room? Not permitted to serve after hours. A London paper, then. All taken. There was a hush on the people like the hush on the city, and the feeling that eyes brushed over you and dropped when you looked up. We were strangers.
The porter—not the real porter, he hastened to tell us, the real porter was away—said he would get us a man to drive us into the country the next day, a man who knew the countryside.
This not-the-real-porter was nice to us. He was sorry he couldn’t have some clothes pressed for us; it was after hours. He wanted to bring a drink to us. He looked sadly at the bribe in his hand. He would try.
In a while he came back. The liquor was locked up, the manager had the key, and the manager was gone. A sandwich? The pantry was locked up. I don’t know who had that key. A copy of the London Times in the morning? They were all ordered and it was too late to order another one. He looked as though he wanted to return the bribe; he was a young, dark, sad-looking man. I found myself trying to explain to him.
“Does the young lady at the desk never smile?” I asked.
“Rarely,” he said.
“Is no rule ever broken at all?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Look,” I said, “my people came from hereabouts. They were law-abiding people, but there was a filament of illegality in them. My mother wasn’t above putting too much catsup on her plate and sopping it up with a piece of bread in a restaurant.”
“Catsup?” he asked.
I said, “One of my uncles had a major difficulty in college for stealing chickens. Another of my uncles had to be disarmed when he had murder in his heart, and I, myself . . .”
I stopped, because the not-the-real-porter was looking at me helplessly, trying to make out my meaning. My voice was rising against a wall of frustration.
“What I am trying to say is this,” I said. “Has all illegality gone out of this rebellious island in three generations?”
“Sir?” he asked.
“I mean, if I should give you in your hand more than enough—twice more than enough—to buy a bottle of whisky, a loaf of bread and a sausage, couldn’t you find some lawbreaker to sell them to you?”
“The rules are very strict,” he said, “I’m sorry. I wish I could help you.”
My heart broke for him.
“I’m not the real porter,” he said. “Good night, sir, I’m sorry.”
We sat in the window, looking across the street at the angry stone bui
ldings and the small, locked-up shops. The street was deserted and a desolation came over us. I told my wife how brave and open my ancestors were, how full of lust and courtesy and fine laughter. I lied about them some—I guess I had to. The Sunday dark fell on that city which is somber even on weekdays and in sunlight.
Now my reluctance came on me tenfold and I wanted to give up the pilgrimage and go away quickly and forget it, because reality was violating every inherited memory and I was saying to myself that if the old folks went away from here, maybe they had good reason.
I put on a bathrobe and took the long, deserted, green-carpeted hall to the bathroom. From a room on the corridor came an old woman carrying a broom and a long-handled dustpan. I said good evening to her and her face wrinkled up into a smile that lighted the dark corners of that desolate corridor.
“Good evening, sir,” she said.
I stopped in front of her, because this was a tone I had not heard. “I know before I ask that the irons are locked up,” I said, “but can you steal an iron and take the wrinkles out of a pair of pants for me?”
“What room?” she asked, and then, “You’ll have smooth pants.”
The front was broken. In an hour she had the trousers back, still steaming a little, and I tipped her until she begged for mercy. We slept better because of her.
In the morning, we had our driver, all right—he who knew the countryside—a rakish man in a torn cap, who assured us that he knew every nubbin of a hill in all directions. He didn’t, but he was willing. His car was so old that it churned and clattered, and a blue, suffocating smoke came from it. We were looking for a place called Mulkeraugh. You can spell it half a dozen ways and it isn’t on any map. I knew from half-memory that it was near to Ballykelly, which is near to Limavady, and I knew that from Mulkeraugh you could look across the lough to the hills of Donegal.
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