We noticed that the truck drivers wore shirts, but then when they got out you saw that the only thing covering their hairy legs were their underpants, Y-fronts to be precise, all of them wore Y-fronts. We laughed quite a lot at this.
4.
It is quite clear that the problem of slums is mostly deeply ingrained – not only permitted but promoted by the authorities – in campsites. The only time we had ever set foot in one was in northern Italy, years earlier, having failed to find a hotel one time. We stayed for a night, and swore never to do so again.
So I was surprised when, having driven a little further, she suggested we stop at one. She didn’t go into her reasoning.
‘Look,’ she merely said, and pointed at the sign.
I hung an instinctive right. The fact that I didn’t object also seemed strange.
5.
The campsite conformed more or less to everyone’s idea of a campsite, thus demonstrating that thought and nature are one. There was a shower area, tree area, tent area, caravan area, reception and small shop.
A sketch I did at the time gives a clearer idea:
6.
We hired a caravan at the edge of the property (see sketch). It was beige and had a dining table that folded out into a bed.
There was a family staying in the caravan on our right, the son cried over the tiniest thing. On our left was a hippie couple with dreads – they had a couple of imitation-African drums and weren’t afraid to use them. Across from us was an empty caravan, and behind us a valley and then a stretch of arable farmland.
Days passed.
She would go down to the beach in the early morning and, when it started to fill up, come back for breakfast; I’d just be waking. After that I would sit in the caravan reading and jotting things down at the folding table, and she’d go outside to sunbathe and watch the clouds; later on she’d go to the shop for supplies, always coming back with a new batch of knickers too, fearing future shortages. We’d have a simple lunch, and after that she’d go inside for a lie-down while I, so as not to wake her, took a turn outside, writing and watching the clouds; I’d recently been having difficulty discerning any shapes in them. Meanwhile, the clean knickers continued to pile up under the bed-table.
The caravans were arranged on a grid that created an impressive concentration of private spaces; each caravan came to be a substance made of chemically pure solitude. A person’s solitude is an almost impossible thing to penetrate, and even more so that of a caravan with multiple people inside it. Tribes, pills of different colours.
Sometimes I’d also fall asleep, glass of wine in hand, as she snored away inside. She’d wake me when the sun was going down and we’d go for a swim together; by now the beach would be all but empty and anyone still down there became mere silhouettes, fragments of charcoal, not hot but not cold, either, products of the day’s conflagration.
We sometimes sat on the sand and had sandwiches for dinner, washing them down with wine from a flask she bought in the souvenir shop; other nights we’d go back to the caravan and light the barbecue. She’d go to bed early and I’d stay up with the little battery-powered TV, staring into the screen until the test card came on. There was a programme presented by Rafaella Carrà, the ever-youthful talkshow goddess, that I particularly liked.
On one of those nights I overheard a conversation in the adjacent caravan. The father was telling the mother and son something he’d heard about a writer who, having spent years trying to write a novel, was now in hospital, very gravely ill because he’d spent the previous 2 years gradually ingesting his computer, little by little. He broke off pieces and sprinkled them on salads, stewed the larger bits with lentils. The father said he’d been told that the writer had justified his behaviour by pointing out that, if the success of other writers lay inside the machine, in the PC, if those other writers extracted their raw material from those inner workings, which contained both complete lexicons and the mysterious mechanism of their combinations, perhaps this was a way for him to perform – inside himself – the miracle of a perfect recombination of words. I heard the mother and son laughing at the paterfamilias for being so gullible.
But I believed him.
7.
I was motivated to sit outside in the afternoons reading and writing by the prospect of not reading and not writing: the idea of having an intention and then changing course, a practice in deviation; of accessing something toy-like in scale.
I once read a line in a Thomas Bernhard book about a character lying in bed with his extremities ‘oriented towards infinity’. I thought about that a lot, sitting there in my chair. I shut my eyes and shifted my body around, with the idea that via this continual radar-like rotation of my limbs I would hit upon the orientation towards infinity; I was bound to feel a tug on my arms and legs when I did.
8.
One morning she spent longer down at the beach than usual. I grew tired of waiting and erected the plastic table outside. I sat down on one side. Not at the head of the table, not at its rear but, as I say, on one side which meant it was like this: the open caravan door, then the table, then me; a very good composition, in my view. I lit a Lucky Strike, took out the coffee pot, sat down again.
Purely for the game of it, I made myself focus on the sounds of the campsite and nothing else. I didn’t shut my eyes, but I did focus. Out of that mélange of noises, separate layers of sound began to emerge, horizontal layers, vertical strips of sound, weighty conglomerates of sounds, weightless sound bubbles, sound-stars that flared for 1 nanosecond and then fell dark, and I also heard the rustle or crackle of leaves though no leaves were being stepped on or burned, the sound of a fork being dropped onto a table a few caravans away, a bird pecking at a peach stone, a baby saying what sounded like ‘mamma’, the straining of the wire bearing the Italian flag outside reception, the rustle of a bag of maggots in the heat of the shop, that’s all I remember. I discerned the unique and singular cosmos comprised by the campsite; by any campsite.
I had an idea.
The idea was to go wandering among the tents, bungalows and caravans or into the shop with a camera, and to ask anyone I came across (chosen at random) what made them choose this campsite, what their favourite sound in the campsite was, what the source of the sound was, then get them to draw a map of how to get to this place from wherever we happened to have met, and suggest that we both go there, to the source of the sound, and ask if they’d let me take a photo of them there, a photo I’d then call, for example, ‘Photo of the sound of a tree,’ or ‘Photo of the sound of my window.’ I’d make a catalogue from the results: on the right-hand page, the photo, and on the left the map drawn by the kind volunteer, and at the bottom of both pages a description of the event, the person’s details and their reason for choosing this spot over all others. The result would be a ‘cartography of the sounds in a campsite’.
Sitting by the table, I turned the thought over. A campsite could really be full of marvels, from the vague symmetry of the squares on a tablecloth to a pineapple with inscriptions carved into it. Or the rubbish area, with its constantly evolving flora and fauna, which made for a continually altered panorama.
Really, the campsite was the ideal place to carry out this experiment: it had the optimum concentration of people per m2, each with their corresponding planets and satellites.
I took the camera out, put the battery on to charge, and went to the shop to buy some blank paper and a couple of pencils.
I never understand why people come up with ideas and then don’t follow through on them. It’s criminal.
It was 2 p.m. by the time she got back. She’d been held up in the shop because they didn’t have any knickers when she arrived, but the delivery van was on its way; she decided to wait rather than having to go back again later on.
Then we made an omelette. As I peeled the potatoes and beat the eggs, and she fried everything in the pan, I told her my sound-photo idea. She liked it. We dressed the salad.
9.
1) ‘Maybe the God we see, the God who calls the daily shots, is merely a subGod. Maybe there’s a God above this subGod who’s busy for a few God minutes with something else, and will be right back; and when he gets back will take the subGod by the ear and say: Now look. Look at that fat man. What did he ever do to you? Wasn’t he humble enough? Didn’t he endure enough abuse for a thousand men? Weren’t the simplest tasks hard? Didn’t you sense him craving affection? Were you unaware that his days unravelled as one long bad dream?’ (George Saunders, ‘The 400-Pound CEO’, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline)
2) ‘Dead-heading: the elimination of all branch-ends in order to rejuvenate the plant, prompting it to send out new shoots, which will later be cut too, following the usual procedure.’ (Fausta Mainardi, Illustrated Guide to Pruning)
3) ‘The following would be a sure recipe for a great Big Brother-like TV show: each week the contestants move to a different island on which the rules have been decided by the writings of a certain philosopher. In “Spinoza Week” they would have to find God in all things… In “Nietzsche Week” the contestants would be divided into children, lions and camels, and would have to learn to fly. In “Kierkegaard Week” they would learn to problem-solve through prayer.’ (Juan Bonilla, Chimera)
4) ‘Picture in your mind’s eye the sandpit divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other. We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the pit until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anticlockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy.’ (Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey)
5) ‘A driver 30 years ago could maintain a sense of orientation in space. At the simple crossroads a little sign with an arrow confirmed what was obvious. One knew where one was. When the crossroads becomes a cloverleaf, one must turn right to turn left… But the driver has no time to ponder paradoxical subtleties within a dangerous, sinuous maze. She or he relies on signs for guidance – enormous signs in vast spaces at high speeds.’ (Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas.)
Eventually, once the campsite had consumed almost one month of our lives, we left. The last was:
‘All rights reserved. Any reproduction of this campsite, or partial or complete allusion to it, is prohibited, whether by mechanical means, chemical, photo-mechanical or electronic, including life-size reproductions and smaller-scale reproductions. The campsite will not return to its guests used electricity and water, nor will it enter into correspondence. The campsite will not necessarily share the opinions, or the lifestyles, of its clients after their departure.’ (The Management.)
As for the sound-photo project, I didn’t do anything with it.
10.
In the days that followed, without straying far from the area we’d been exploring, we returned the car and hired another, a slightly larger Lancia. I can’t remember the model.
The weather stayed stormy, and once or twice we got caught out on beaches.
We carried on with our island excursions, quite haphazardly, and a couple of times had to sleep in the car again, but at no point, I’d like to stress, did we go very far from the main road. Most of the houses in the inhabited towns and villages were half-built, with the brickwork exposed. Any time a construction job was completed a tax was levied; this way they avoided it.
Other times we came across abandoned villages with their exact replicas built directly next to them. You would come by 2 signs welcoming you to 2 identical villages. Another kind of doubleness that we could not fathom.
We spent quite a lot of time eating Belgian chocolate ice cream in the petrol stations and laughing at the get-up of families on their way to the beach. We even bought a kind of Italian lottery ticket at one of the newspaper stands, a very basic scratch card with a limited number of combinations, which made your chances of winning relatively high. Using a €1 coin, she scratched out 3 castles and came up with 3 yellow bananas, which meant we’d won the €200 prize, which we decided to spend on a 1 July dinner – her birthday. We chose the best restaurant we could find in the guidebook. We rang ahead to reserve the table on the terrace, which was on the pavement itself. While she made the reservation, using a public phone in a shopping centre, I saw 2 one-armed men walk by.
11.
Doubtless we didn’t look very smart, and so the waiter did all he could throughout the meal to not look after us – small, subtle things at the very edge of acceptability. But the food: exquisite.
After dessert, she picked up her handbag and said:
‘I’m going to the bathroom.’
She was taking a while. I started to wonder. After all, she was the one with the money.
Then I saw her appear down the road, driving the car. She beckoned me, and when I went over she threw open the door and yanked me in by the shirt. We sped off.
‘They can fuck off,’ she said. ‘That so-called waiter can pay for us.’
I told her off. I was very annoyed. But not for long.
What joins couples together is not mutual affection, or the making of plans that turn out as hoped, or the sharing of a home each has partaken in the buying and decorating of, or the siring of children, or any of the things they talk about in novels or films. What unites couples is a shared sense of humour. However different 2 people may be, if they have the same sense of humour they’ll succeed as a couple.
It was strange but the thing I was writing, with no clear goal in mind, was starting to take form, like a living organism in my notebook. The pages in the notebook were squared, and it was spiral-bound. The squares were caravans and the spiral was the electric cable joining them together, providing them with power.
12.
One of the hotels we stayed in in one unremarkable town belonged to an elderly couple. Formerly someone’s home, it had been hastily converted into a hotel at some point, and the wallpaper was all loud colours and impossible patterns. The dining room still had traces of its former existence as a family living-dining room: books, big adventure-classics in a glass display cabinet that would once have been a drinks cabinet, a basket full of old sewing thread, a VHS player with a crochet cover on top, and I can’t remember what else.
The couple who owned it welcomed us when we arrived; they had previously lived in Naples before retiring to Sardinia. We found this out because the husband, as soon as he set eyes on us, began asking questions, which meant that after 4 days there, without becoming intimate, we had got to know each other a little.
Our room was small but had some nice touches, like the double-glazed window, 2 toilets instead of one, and a crucifix over the bed featuring a Jesus with a comical expression. I also liked the doorknobs, they were masterfully done. They looked like pears.
The owners were often there when we went down to eat, so from the first day they suggested we join them at their table. We were the only guests who, like them, ate supper late.
On our third day they told us a little about their life together, a fairly unremarkable life. They got the photo albums out. Many of the photos were of the two of them together. Photos of unexceptional beach outings, photos of family get-togethers, dancing at weddings, etc., but, in all of them, she had no head: it had been cut out, chopped off. Seeing our surprise, he explained that it wasn’t his current wife but his previous one, and that she had died of cervical cancer in 1993.
‘When we got married,’ the current wife hurried to point out, ‘I thought the most courteous thing would be to take a pair of scissors to the photos, and he actually went and got them for me from the stationers.’
They clasped hands, squeezing fingers together, and I had thoughts of two balled-up maps, and the routes they contained becoming intertwined, confused. I looked at one of the photos of the deceased headless lady dancing a waltz with the man who was at that moment beside me. The headless lad
y had a hand on his shoulder and the other aloft, holding his hand; their hands were also clasped, fingers intertwined. An action performed with such force that it made me feel the exact same feeling that someone would experience as they tried to come back to life through a photo.
In bed that night we talked about this until very late.
13.
Tired of eating pasta and sheep, we turned to the Cooking with your Car Compendium by Steve Hunt, an American chef who, according to the blurb, had a shack in Brooklyn called Steve’s Restaurant, so we found a supermarket and bought some chicken breasts and potatoes to cook on the Lancia’s engine as we drove around. We did the marinating in the hotel room.
Ditches are an excellent place to have a picnic, and one thing the island had a lot of was ditches.
I would step on the accelerator and she would sing along, in snatches, to the CDs we had playing constantly in the car. We saw a field, and that we had driven the requisite cooking distance, 120 kilometres, for the chicken and potatoes, according to the Cooking with your Car Compendium by Steve Hunt, so we pulled over and took the food off the engine, all of it securely wrapped in tinfoil. We also took a few tomatoes (uncooked) to nibble on.
Nocilla Lab Page 5