Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!

by Harry Harrison

  This adventure had an interesting finale, which we heard about some months later when Garry wrote to us from New York. It appears that the prison of Frascati was a former German concentration camp—scarcely changed since its Nazi days. The rusting barbed wire was still in place, the accommodation miserable and unheated, the food slop. It was filled with displaced people, passportless men from all over Europe. These poor creatures had to suffer this imprisonment, unable to appeal, their sentences unending. They had no hope, no future, their world bleak, uncomfortable, and hopeless.

  For six days a week, that is. The Italians, with very Italian logic, allowed them out for the day every Sunday. The result was obvious. As soon as a prisoner had enough of the camp, enough of Italy, he would escape and cross the Italian border and would become somebody else’s problem, a very Italian answer to a solutionless problem. Garry wrote to his father, who was very rich. Meyer Davis controlled all the East Coast society dance bands. Meyer sent Garry a ticket for a ship bound from Naples to New York. Garry made a daring escape from the concentration camp and went home.

  * * *

  I was now writing the Flash Gordon scripts and Dan himself had rented the vacant apartment above us in Il Nido. After an almost vegetarian six months, meat was beginning to sneak back into our diet. Once a week, before Dan arrived, we would buy an etto of hamburger meat, one hundred grams—about three ounces—and Joan would make spaghetti bolognese with it. Dan enjoyed her home cooking and grew nostalgic for the food we had all left behind. Europe had never heard of the hamburger then—though an incredibly greasy and disgusting burger called a Wimpy was on sale in Britain. Why didn’t we have a big American hamburger fest! Dan would pay for the meat if Joan would cook it. Right on! Next day I bought quatro etti, four hundred grams of hamburger meat, almost a pound in all. The butcher was most cheerful as he wrapped it. “You must be happy to be entertaining,” he said, suddenly seeing me as possibly a big-time spender. “Family or friends? They surely must be a dozen at least.”

  He had never heard of a hamburger. All he saw was an even bigger bowl of pasta with bolognese sauce.

  Friends had been so easy to make. Like Franco, who worked at the customer window in the post office. We talked a great deal while he was leisurely putting stamps on my mail. He was from the Abruzzi, as alien to me as my New York origins were to him. We talked home and family. Then tragedy loomed. An uncle was visiting from America, a bishop no less, who had to be entertained—but no one in his Anacaprese family spoke English. So Joan and I were drafted as translators and were quite happy to join the family for a meal at Gracie Fields’s restaurant in Capri. A pleasant hostess, a pleasant meal, a pleasant bishop who enjoyed meeting his relatives, though unhappily, none spoke English. Not your usual evening with your friendly post office clerk.

  I’m happy to report that the evening went very well—and Uncle Bishop proved to be a most charming and interesting man. He was kind enough to thank us for our aid; this was the first time that he’d had a chance to talk to his Italian relatives.

  Since there was no private place in Il Nido for me to write I had rented a room above a shoe shop on the zocalo, the town square. The shop belonged to Ernesto, a most genial man, who quietly ignored his bad leg that gave him a severe limp. We grew into the habit of lunching together in front of his shop. I usually bought a piece of Edam cheese, formaggio holandesa, from the salumeria; I had that and a handful of olives. We sat in the sun and discussed the new pope, the American Seventh Fleet, and other topics of current interest. This did wonders for my Italian. When I told Joan about my growing friendship she instantly invited Ernesto to dinner. Instead of flowers he most graciously brought her a pair of his handmade shoes.

  We even made friends with the chef in the local pizzeria, though I doubt if we ate there a half dozen times in the year. Todd’s blond hair always broke the ice; there were of course no Anacaprese blondes. The chef’s wife appeared from the kitchen, complete with young daughter; she and Joan talked family while I talked pizza with the chef. He had some dried red chili peppers hanging beside the oven, mostly for show. Since American pizza is always accompanied by crushed red pepper he cheerfully diced one for me. On all future visits he waved when we entered, and reached for a hot pepper.

  Even in the summer of 1958 when the restaurant was filled with tourists, the red pepper was chopped even before we had sat down and opened the menu to discover that prices had trebled for the short tourist season. We smiled boldly, but a glimpse of worry on Joan’s face echoed mine. I hoped I had enough money with me to pay the bill. We ate well as always, enjoyed the gossip—and I tried to smile when the waiter brought the bill. Then I really did smile. “Family prices—not tourist!” I told Joan. My pizza was one hundred lira, sixteen cents, the winter rate. With all of the other dishes priced to match. It would be hard to leave this island, yet it had to be done.

  10

  Despite all the pleasures of Capri it was time to leave, but leaving would not be easy. Yes, we had very good reasons to return to New York, but leaving the life we had built up in Anacapri would be difficult—since we had no idea when, if ever, we would return. It had been a very good year—well, not really. It had been a year with some horrendous ups and downs. Too many downs at times, but it had all worked out in the end. Would we have stayed in Italy? Perhaps if things had been different; certainly we were quite happy there. It is hard to say—since other pressures were building.

  First, health. Joan was pregnant, which was a good and happy thing, but she had some health problems that the Italian doctor could not track down, which meant we needed a better doctor, which in turn meant either going to Switzerland—or back to the States. Neither of us had any particular desire to return to New York at this time, but there was another factor

  My agent. He had been a good enough agent in New York, handling my submissions and sales—which was really not the world’s toughest assignment. Apparently it was for him now. He never answered letters and never sent checks. I was sitting at the very end of a long, thin branch that stretched from New York to Anacapri and he was sawing the branch off. Outside of Flash Gordon I was writing for only two specific markets, SF and men’s adventures.

  Most important to me was science fiction. Any story that I wrote was submitted first to John W. Campbell and Astounding, which by this time paid a massive three cents a word. If John didn’t buy the story and returned it—then the agent had only to consult a submission list that I had prepared for him, with all the SF magazines listed in descending order of price per word. Any returned story should have been submitted to the next market on the list. Apparently said agent could not rise to the challenge of submitting stories in this manner. There was no news—and no money. While SF was important to me personally, as a writer, just as important—or more so—was staying alive. Before anything else I had to see that the family was fed and clothed. To do this I had relied quite heavily on the men’s adventure magazines. I was not thrilled to write these bits of fiction parading as fact but they were easy enough to grind out and they did pay the rent. I had prepared for my agent a similar submitting schedule for this market. Best-paying ones at the top were up to $250 or even $500 in some cases (rare cases). What I really counted on were the salvage markets, which averaged around $75. These were dreary, badly printed magazines that nevertheless had to fill each issue. My copy was far better than most of the articles they contained so I could count on, eventually, selling everything that I wrote.

  One would think that this kind of agenting was not very hard to do. You put the story in the envelope with a covering note, slip in a stamped return envelope, seal it, then drop it into the mailbox. Either the story or article would come back—to be submitted to the next magazine on the list—or in case of a sale a check would arrive. Deduct 10 percent and mail a check for the balance to the happy author. The sort of thing that anyone with an IQ over fifty-five could do; hard to screw up. My then-agent did. With my life, future, and career in his hands he m
anaged to get everything wrong. He did not answer letters. He sold nothing that I knew of, for no money was arriving. So this became the deciding factor. Get to New York and find a doctor for Joan and fire the agent while resisting the impulse to beat him to death.

  So it was across the Atlantic for a second time, but now there was no friendly Dave Kyle or cheaper-than-cheap fan flight. So how were we to get back to New York from the middle of Italy? Plane travel was still a novel—and very expensive—form of travel.

  “We go by ship,” Joan said. “There must be ocean liners that sail between Italy and New York. After all—Garry went back that way.” I nodded agreement, although neither of us had ever traveled on anything bigger than the Staten Island Ferry. This meant a trip into Naples, which was a full day’s adventure in itself. I had to rise at dawn, shave quietly, then sneak out without waking Joan or Todd. Then the two-kilometer walk up the hill to the bus stop in Anacapri. Over the hill to Capri and another bus—or walk if there were time—down the hill to the harbor of Marina Grande where the ferry left for Naples, an ancient diesel that putt-putted majestically across the bay. It took all of an hour and a half to sail the eighteen miles. I had done the trip before, going to American Express to cash checks or more often to the Monte de Piedad, the religious hock shop, to pop my camera or Joan’s gold bracelet.

  This time I hoofed it around the city looking for a travel agent, stopping only when hunger struck, to dine at one of the outdoor stalls near the American embassy. They served an incredibly delicious bowl of pasta e fagiolli, a peasant soup of vegetables, beans, and macaroni, thick enough to walk on, with crusty brown bread and a glass of red wine. It was 150 lire for everything; twenty-four cents American. There were still some compensations in life.

  Selection of a ship would be determined by the price of the tickets; at this time money was basically our main consideration. There was little cash available—it was now a year since we had flown the Atlantic and my total income had been three thousand dollars for the entire period since we arrived in Europe. When I read this I realize how faulty my literary research had been before we left New York. I had read with relish Hemingway’s memoirs, his and those of all the other authors and artists who had moved to Paris after the Great War. What joy! What freedom! Even my painting teacher, John Blomshield, had told us stories about the glorious days in France. But he, like the others who wrote about the period, never supplied much detail about how they found the money to stay alive on some alien shore. I knew they had done it, but did not know how they had done it. So I had to improvise, as I have written here.

  Much time would pass before I discovered the truth; perhaps it was better that I had not known it at the time or I would not have put myself and my family at such risk. I got by, barely, on my own terms. It was years later that I found out why the American expatriates in Paris had not worried about money—they had brought it with them.

  But now it was time to return to the States. I did a quick survey of the prices and it was a very easy decision to take the cheapest crossing on offer. We were to travel with the Home Line—which had a lot going for it. It was a Greek company, which meant that they were well crewed and prices were well squeezed by the owners, and it had an Italian kitchen, really Neapolitan, which meant we would eat happily in a manner to which we had quickly become accustomed. The ship itself had been American, originally the Matsonia, so there was a good chance we wouldn’t sink.

  I booked passage for three, two and a half really, on the next sailing, which would be in October. The first ferry of the day from Capri would not reach Naples until our ship had sailed. This meant an overnight stay in an inexpensive hotel. We said good-bye to our Italian friends, with some tearful farewells, and I promised Dan that I would write more scripts soon, and we were off. The hotel in Naples was old but clean. We had a meal out, and retired early. Everything went very smoothly until after we had checked out and I put our bags into the cab in the morning. I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket for the wallet that held our tickets and passport. It was gone. Naples, city of thieves, they had done it. This was it, the end, finito. This was undoubtedly the lowest moment that I had ever experienced in a life that, face it, had contained some really low moments. I was barely aware that Joan was talking. “The room. Maybe you left it in the room?” A chance, anything. It took some furious and heated argument to get the key back from the front desk. I hurried to the room, looked in all of the drawers, behind the bed, nothing. My jacket had been on the back of the armchair—could the wallet have dropped out? I bent and looked—and saw it lying in the shadows behind the chair. The sense of relief drained the tension and energy from me and I collapsed, sprawled full length on the rug. I stretched my fingers out and retrieved it. Everything was there; it was all going to be okay.

  The ride to the dock, the boarding, finding the cabin, all of this passed in a haze of relief. We left the bags on the bed and hurried on deck because she would sail soon and Todd certainly had to see the entire technical process of getting under way. It was only when we made our way to the rail that we realized that we were living in the middle of a scene from a real-life Italian opera. A band was on deck playing off-key and lachrymose Italian songs. People were struggling up the gangway, holding on to each other, reaching out, crying openly.

  What was happening in front of us must be placed correctly in time. Remember, this all took place in the days before travel became commonplace and cheap. It was certainly an extraordinary once-in-a-lifetime occasion for our fellow passengers. It was obvious by their clothes that the people boarding were working-class Italians, not very young, gray-haired for the most part. There were even grayer, older people in the crowd below.

  This was Italian reality, the raw material for an Italian opera. Those boarding the ship must be immigrants who had left for the New World well before the war. They had worked hard, saved what they could, and had returned for a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the families and relatives they had left behind. But the joy of their visit had now turned to sadness, even despair. It would be years before they could return again—if ever. They were looking at aunts, uncles, cousins, whom they would probably never see again. This was a final parting, an anguished and permanent separation. Some of the black-garbed women on the shore clung desperately to parting relatives. They had to be physically separated from their loved ones. Oh, how they wept. No wonder they were weeping. The band played tender, sad songs and I realized that Joan was crying as well. Who could blame her if she found it impossible to stay dry-eyed at this moment? I blinked at my own tears. Only Todd unreservedly enjoyed the scene.

  People waved and called out as the gangway was pulled up, the moorings cast off, the ship pulled slowly away from the dock. And as the ship slowly moved along the length of the dock the people below ran alongside, waving and crying, until they had reached the very end, where they massed together, plump, elderly women in dark dresses for the most part. It was almost too painful to bear, the dock getting smaller and smaller behind us and the waving crowded mass slowly vanishing from sight. Joan went below to unpack and I stayed on deck for a time with Todd, who was greatly enjoying the mechanics of our seagoing adventure.

  Our departure may have been an unhappy one for many of the passengers, but it was a holiday for us. It proved to be a delightful voyage—as long as we were in the Mediterranean. We had glimpses of the first-class dining room as we passed and we were not impressed. Our second-class one was far superior, with a carafe each of white and red wine on every table, part of the meal of course, and a real Neapolitan kitchen. The food was varied and wonderful, our eight Italian companions at the large round table friendly and talkative. Once the tragic parting was behind them they remembered the joys of their visit and we did as well.

  We stopped for a few hours in Barcelona. I found a post office, where I took the Flash Gordon scripts that I had written since we had sailed and mailed them to Dan in Capri, with just enough time to gawk at the mad Chirraresque cathedral, then b
ack to the ship. We left behind the calm Med at Gibraltar and sailed on into the overwhelming discomforts of the stormy autumn Atlantic.

  We were seven days crossing from Barcelona, the storms and heavy seas bringing misery right up until the very last day. Seasickness struck down our table companions, one by one, until we had the table almost to ourselves at meals. Todd and I were zonked on Dramamine so we could function; Joan has never been seasick in her life and one can only admire that with awe. Our one surviving tablemate was an Italian seaman who was totally indifferent to the rough seas.

  Not so his wife, who stayed below in her bunk until the storm had blown itself out. Finally, days later when the rolling had almost stopped, wan and pale and wrapped in her dressing gown, she appeared and took her chair. The waiters, happy at last to see their customers returning, loaded the table with food. She grew paler—nor was her husband, the hearty sailor, of any help in her misery.

  “Mangia!” he said enthusiastically, reaching for the heaped bowl of spaghetti. “Eat!”

  “Una mele,” she begged. An apple, just an apple.

  “Mangia!” was his hearty response as he heaped pasta on her plate. “Mangia!” She stared with saucer eyes, and as every dollop of spaghetti hit the plate her skin grew paler and cold sweat broke out. With a weak cry she fled and her husband stared uncomprehendingly after her. We put our attention on our plates and made no attempt to explain to our friendly co-passenger what he had done. Since then, with good reason, the cry of “Mangia!” has become a family password.