Then the dreams are just images, no narrative, the tribal symbols of birds and stars rise up, and they must mean holiness, hope, and luck. The dreams give me again glimpses of carved stones. The thousand patterns that I saw, I see again, as though I am walking over them, which, I suppose, I am and always will. The muezzin cry splits the sky.
An Armful of
Bougainvillea
Capri
But is it really we who are approaching the island,
or is the island, having broken loose from its granite
moorings, moving toward us?
—ALBERTO SAVINIO
“The kingdom of Capri,” I say to Ed. He’s leaning on the ferry rail, taking in the first close glimpses of the mythic island’s sheer cliffs.
“I’m listening for the Sirens’ song.”
“You have to be a poet to imagine that,” I answer, looking around at the crude churning bucket we’re on, with its load of fellow travellers. I point to white villas with domed roofs and bright boats along the coast.
“Water is probably scarce. The domes channel it to a cistern.”
With the others, we thunder off the ferry from Ischia, where we have spent three sybaritic days soaking in the volcanic thermal pools and eating grilled fish with lemon. I approach Capri with some apprehension. The island’s reputation does not entice—posing glitterati flashing megawatt smiles as flashbulbs pop, international lounge lizards sipping prosecco in the piazza, and yacht owners parading their nubile companions through shops that sell only about ten items, size zero, all priced to impress. Then, worse, the disturbing sequence of northern European pederasts who preyed on local boys. Some of these decadents’ actions are affectionately recorded in local writing, which just illustrates the Italian ability to isolate and ignore the elephant in the living room, preferring to focus on the view and what’s served at the table. Maybe this talent contributes to their quality of being the most flexible people on earth.
The early history, too, is blotted by the sway of Tiberius, one of the ugliest of the Romans, who built a splendid villa. Some say the whole island was his villa. He often flung those who displeased him from the cliffs. And of course, the Sirens. Easy to see how a ship could crack up on the rocks, song or no song. “I wish I didn’t know anything about that pedophiliac revel that went on for years. I wish I could approach Capri as an earthly paradise.”
“Paradise will always be full of fools, my love.”
“But that’s my most unfavorite kind of kinky. And Norman Douglas—one of the grossest—was a superb travel writer. Remember I took his Old Calabria when we went there? He looked for the heart of a place. Civilized, erudite, curious . . .”
“Just think of him as an old pagan. The gods always sported with anything that took their fancy.”
I am offered a paper cone of green grapes at the marina. As always in Italy, the disconcerting touch of the personal, even in unlikely moments. The waiting taxis set a mood—white convertibles, low and slinky, ready to whisk you off to the upper echelon of the island, the tiny village of Anacapri. “They’re Fiat Mareas,” Ed says, “built especially for Capri. So nice! Marea means ‘tide.’ ”
We are staying in the village below, where no cars are allowed. A man with a handcart takes away our luggage and sets off at a canter toward the hotel. We walk behind our porter and see no Jackie O, no Gina L., no latter-day sirens at all in the piazza. Soon we’re following him along the swerves of a winding flowery path with glimpses of the divine sea. No wonder we all swarm off the ferries. No wonder the most glamorous seek this place. No wonder Shirley Hazzard and Graham Greene and Arshile Gorky secluded themselves here for years. For working on a creative project, to be buoyed by the blissful climate must impart a godlike joy. Waking to the scent of orange blossoms on the air and the temperature that says, You’re mine, don’t worry, I always will caress you like this—the book or the painting must thrive. The air alone immediately makes me feel rocked in the cradle. I have come to explore this little kingdom, to escape the intricacies of house restoration, and to seek as many shades of blue as the sky and sea can offer. Ed wants to reread Homer, continue his eternal study of the past remote tense in Italian, and write poems. What a luxury. Capri, a place to hide.
We have spent, not enough, but a lot of time in the South of Italy in recent years. The constant presence of the sea, the Greek profiles and eyes, the robust cuisine, and the brink-of-chaos atmosphere appeal to me deeply. Even the refined and educated people have time to give you, not just those you encounter on daily rounds. Days in the South seem long. Nights seem longer. In the South I begin to feel that eternity takes place in one lifetime.
Last May we sailed from Naples to Sicily, then around the boot and up to Venice, with stops in Sorrento, Taromina, Gallipoli, Lecce, Brindisi, Pescara, and Ravenna, disembarking in Venice during a high-water siege. Naples has become a spiritual home. Our first trip south was in the company of our friend from Cortona, Ann Cornelisen, whose Torregreca and Women of the Shadows I consider classics. What better person to introduce her loved Tricarico (the town she called Torregreca in her writing), the conical houses of Puglia, the castles of Frederick I, and the austere, time-broken villages of the countryside? During her years of living in the South, Ann absorbed the austerity, or more likely, she took that trait with her when she settled there and found herself profoundly at home. Her move north was a mistake. She thought she wanted a comfortable place to write, but she never identified with the more gentrified Tuscan country life. One side of her austerity was a scrupulous splitting of expenses, down to cups of coffee. She also refused to cotton to the heat. Her car was not air-conditioned, and the summer days were brutal. In awe of her self-denial, I didn’t murmur a single complaint. Ed drove; Ann navigated. I was wedged into the backseat with the hot wind from the front seat’s windows blasting into my face. For days. Still, the nights were cool and the stories were good.
If I were young, I’d probably up and move to the less-charted, more raucous South. As I am, though, I keep the place as a dream and drop into the reality as often as I can. In less than an hour I already am thinking: Capri may be where dream and reality anneal.
As soon as we check in and leave the bags, we’re out in the early October morning. It’s seventy-five degrees and cloudless. The shining dome of sky over us resembles an inverted glazed, cobalt, china teacup. On the island’s maze of cunning paths, soon we’re on not a walk but a hike, down, down, down. We reach a precipice—I can see that precipice is a word I am going to be saying over and over—overlooking a cove that lures you to take a big dive. On a sailboat anchored near rocks, people are clinking glasses and propping up their tanned legs. The striated blues bring my loyalty for blue back to Italy from Greece. The colors of the water remind me of some of my favorite flowers—lobelia, delphinium, and a particular pansy the color of the sky on a starry night.
The upward return completely takes my breath—over and over I have to pause. My Achilles tendons feel like the beef jerky bones that dogs love to chew. I may wheeze. “We’re climbing Mont Blanc ten times.” My lungs are little hot-air balloons about to burst against my ribs. Going down did not seem so vertical; going up I am suddenly a hundred years old. Ed’s long-ago summers spent hiking and camping in the Rockies give him stamina I never had. He ascends like a mountain goat.
On Capri they actually serve caprese, that simple marvel of basil, mozzarella, and tomatoes. And the three textures set the bar because the basil is pungent, the mozzarella fresh from Naples, and the tomatoes grow in the magic soil on the volcanic slope of Vesuvius, which gives them a voluptuous taste. We have lunch by the hotel pool: good bread, caprese, a plate of prosciutto and melon. Basta! Our room at the Scalinatella opens to a terrace overlooking the sea. The room is cool with marble floors, icy colors, glass tables, and a grand sense of space. I remember a hotel room in New York where I stayed on a book tour. The bed barely fit within the four walls, and I left with a scraped shin from scuttling crab-style
around it and my luggage. Here we could dance. I should be wearing silver lamé to dinner. Instead, I am soaking my poor feet in the bidet with a vial of bath gel.
Ed has opened a sweetly sharp white wine and pours a taste of the crags and minerals of this terra into a glass. We’re wrapped in the hotel robes, for a little chill has come in with the evening. A seagull lands on the terrace, eyeing our wine and maybe us. I read that the sea is seriously overfished and gulls get vicious when they come up empty from their dives. For one with a bird phobia—me, for example—a vicious gull is equivalent to a normal person’s mugger. Ed waves his arms and says, “Shoo,” but the bird only glares and flaps his—my god—considerable wings. Don’t mess with me, it croaks. “Weren’t the Sirens half birds?” I ask with a shudder.
“Yes, bottom half.”
The sunset tunes high notes of tangerine and rose, followed by throaty bass notes of indigo and grapey purple. Where shall we dine? My favorite question. We unpack completely in order to more easily pretend that we are living here. Two bathrooms, I like that. I paint my toenails a color called Your Villa or Mine and let them dry while I have another splash of the wine and the sea turns the splotched purple of a fresh bruise. My pomegranate silk pants and shirt are not too wrinkled. We go off in search of pasta with clams.
Early morning, out the door. How simple life is. Houses offering views of the ideal life—long walks with silence, with mesmerizing scents of flowers, swims in a transparent sea layered with emerald, lapis, turquoise water. A house with a terrace over this sea must be the ideal dwelling. Axel Munthe, a Swedish doctor whose villa and garden are open to visitors, wrote about coming to Capri:
What daring dream had made my heart beat so violently a moment ago when Mastro Vincenzo had told me that he was getting old and tired, and that his son wanted him to sell his house? What wild thoughts had flashed through my boisterous brain when he had said that the chapel belonged to nobody? Why not to me? Why should I not buy Mastro Vincenzo’s house and join the chapel and the house with garlands of vines and cypresses and columns supporting white loggias.
I recognize the impulse. Why not, indeed.
Capri must be the most captivating, stupendously beautiful, felicitous place on the planet—but also the most haunted. The plumb-line cliffs inspire vertigo in the happiest person; for the disturbed or depressed, they must lure with a promise of oblivion into beauty. And the history of locals and visitors who simply disappear one day adds to the mysterious magnetic pull of the edge. Of the many, many edges. I am surprised to feel that Capri retains some whiff of ancient mythological origins. Hidden coves, grottoes, dramatic landscape, ruins—all these suggest primal spirits, gods, omens. At the Grotta delle Felci, locals swear they hear the breath of a buried prehistoric creature, ghosts of Saracens who raided the coast for centuries, or perhaps souls still tormented by suicide or execution. In Capri and No Longer Capri, Raffaele La Capria describes groups going at night to listen to an anguished sigh emanating from the earth. From his terrace nearby, he senses “the bewitched atmosphere that at times the nights of Capri exhale . . . and I await the arrival of the great sigh that the people call il fiatone, the big breath.”
Other places have secret grottoes and ravines and tormentors in their pasts, but only here have I actually felt a strange presence of forces. Any sense of place, sense of home on Capri, must have a taproot reaching back to the Sirens’ song. But pushing farther, why were the Sirens singing on these rocks? Why here?
Lentisk, prickly pear, pine, asphodel, myrtle. Perhaps they were planted by the gods. On Capri, by fortunate fluke, you’re out in the Tyrrhenian Sea, riding a rocky fortress, away, lost, in a chosen paradiso but one that—surprise!—gives you the melancholy perspective of the outsider. Islands do that. With the mainland in view—Naples and the Sorrento peninsula—you see daily the fact of isolation. I think six months here would change me completely. I might emerge, finally, as a disciplined writer. I would certainly emerge with iron calf muscles. The outsider’s solitude and loneliness breed fantasy. Could not a sea monster arise from the waves, the ghosts of all those women abducted by pirates not cry out from the rocks? Maybe I would finish my abandoned long poem.
With the designer shops—che bella that cashmere blanket—and the luxuries of the Quisisana (Here One Heals) Hotel, the twilight Campari in the piazza, you can drift right through. A glass of limoncello at midnight and off to dreamland. But if you stay away from the centro and walk all over the island, the complexity and deeper beauty reveal themselves.
Mornings settle into a pattern—an early walk followed by a cornetto and cappuccino in the piazza. I’m surprised at how few tourists are here. I know that in summer this piazza pulsates with the northern nationalities. Americans don’t come as much anymore, scared off by the island’s reputation for being spoiled by the likes of us. When the first ferry empties a group of bare-chested men, women in shorts that cannot cover the subject, and a bewildered group of ancients in identical baseball caps, we flee before they reach the piazza. If they are American, I do not want to know it. I think of an English friend’s remark, “The human on holiday is a sad affair.”
We walk. Of all the books and articles I’ve read, not one has said that Capri is stupendous for those who like to see on foot. We’re walking all over the island. The tiny lanes must be former donkey paths. Palm, mimosa, olive, dried fennel stalks, laurel. We meet few others, and of course no cars. Like Venice, Capri is jammed only in the center; strike out, and the place offers solitude. We spend hours in the library at the Certosa di San Giacomo, the Carthusian monastery. The young man who works there brings out ancient books bound in vellum and first editions of Norman Douglas’s Siren Land, long out of print. He shows us watercolors by artists who’ve visited the island.
In the bookstore in town, we talk to a woman who has lived all her life on Capri. She says Tiberius has been refurbished; he had good traits after all, and that Krupp—of the bomb and coffeepot family—definitely was misjudged. There is no proof at all that he diddled little boys, not her words, and his suicide over the accusations was a tragedy because he loved the local people. We’d noticed a vicolo with his name. But Fersen, the Frenchman—well, that is another story; yes, he lived with a fifteen-year-old Roman boy. The opium parlor at his house . . . She moves on to the Scottish writer Compton MacKenzie, also ahead of his time in kiddie porn, and I tune out. Ed switches the subject by asking, “What are your favorite restaurants?” Since I’ve been here, I have come to realize that the decadence of these men had more to do with who they were in the repressive countries they were escaping than with Capri itself. The tragic slant, to me, is that island families sometimes encouraged their boys to make liaisons with the sugar daddies. And that speaks more to the poverty of their expectations for their sons than to their approval of sex with old roosters. The writer I admire, Norman Douglas, at eighty, with his thirteen-year-old boyfriend. How titillating. The knowledge taints, when really these perverts are no more than small gargoyles on the rocky cathedral Capri.
I reread instead Greene on Capri, less for what Shirley Hazzard has to say about her friend Graham Greene than to learn what kind of writer she is, and how she quietly goes about crafting her fine novels. Her intense sense of Capri, the enchanting place, comes clearly through.
Afternoons, we retreat to our serene chamber above the sea. Ed reads about the flora of the island and the small blue lizards found only on the Faraglioni, the prominent offshore rocks where the surf perpetually fizzes.
Another walk, out to the ruins of the mean Tiberius’s villa, scattered over a vast area of primo real estate. How can the paths be so endless, when the island measures only four miles long and two miles wide? One of Capri’s primordial appeals must be the scale. In a lifetime you could know the island as well as you know the loved one’s body. Know each carob, every stone wall with dangling capers, all outbreaks of yellow broom, all caves and coves.
The Italian custom of naming their homes has a myste
rious aspect. A house named becomes more of an entity. The name becomes its fate and charm. All over the island owners have designed individual name tiles for the gates of their houses. I take photos of the tiles of Casa Mandorla (Almond House), La Veronica with a spray of flowers, Casa Amore e Musica (House of Love and Music), La Falconetta (The Little Falcon Roost), L’Aranceto (The Little Orange Grove), La Raffica (The Squall) with its boat, La Primavera with birds, L’Agrumeto di Gigi (Gigi’s Citrus Grove), Casa Serena with facing dolphins, La Melagrana surrounded by pomegranates, and Casa Solatia (Sunny House). We glimpse columned pergolas tangled with roses and wisteria, kitchen gardens, and shady terraces where cats sleep among geranium pots. Simplicity shines from these essential island homes. Move in, and soon you would be painting the walls blue, setting a pot of basil by the door to keep out the bugs, and napping away the hot hours under a grape arbor.
Along the walk we meet a group of six women holding paper plates piled with red rose petals. A bride is expected soon, and they are out to strew her path. They joke that we are the bride and groom. They have vibrant faces. I would like to stay with them all day.
Something ugly becomes apparent at this divine hotel. On the stairs to our room, I look and look again at a bronze bust. “Is that, it can’t be, Mussolini?” We look more closely. Benito, why yes. Then when we’re asking at the desk about the boats to the Blue Grotto, we spot a large print of his potato face again on the wall. In the peaceful garden we find a marble monument to Il Duce. What arrogance and gall. The hotel may be splendid, but this offends me. I would never again stay here or at the Quisisana, owned by the same people. If they love the fascist, fine—but please don’t subject me to his mug.
A Year in the World Page 39