The principle of our boat – to outstrip the elements rather than adapt to them – made itself felt at once, outstripping thought and sensation, causing one to feel involuntarily propelled to the island, as if this weird vessel were the visible form of forces beyond our control. It mocked, with its frenzied velocity, the constancy of the two points within which we moved – the city rising astern of us and ahead of us the island in darkness.
At first we followed the shelter of the Posillipo too fast for any house to be distinguished, for now it was all houses, the cape itself was like a single house and the rest but windows in it. Everything familiar roared and spun by, drained of significance by our pace, our noise. Evidence boiled about meaninglessly, as in the moment before a swoon.
Of the few other passengers I could see only a businessman doing his crossword puzzle on a plunging table, a chic young couple in turtle necks and trousers, and a tawny matron in leopard skin who pitilessly smoked at us, lifting up a wrist from which the charm bracelet shook as violently as if she were in shock. No homing Caprese would have taken this costly boat when there was the earlier habitual boat, the vaporetto: this was the barque of Pucci, Gucci, and Ferragamo, no question.
Now everything was tinged with agitation. The vessel induced panic, one could only think of what might go wrong. It came to me that Gioconda might be shockingly aged, might be ill, fat, thin – might bear any unforeseeable mark of the intervening years. It occurred to me, for instance, that she might have cut off her hair: this idea was dreadful — as if cropped hair had carried some implication, such as her having been a nun or a convict. It caused the same spasm of horror that had seized me at San Biagio over the streaked face of the cat. I tried out all these impressions on myself, seeking to exorcize them, to make them less likely by anticipating them. It was no use, and it was going to be unimaginable like everything else — like Tosca, like the aliscafo, like the mutual torture of streets and cars, like the immense chimney of a new skyscraper that, central as a maypole, made nonsense of the city’s dimensions.
Overwhelmed in false perspective I wondered if she would remember me. Like an actor’s loss of confidence, rupturing the filament of performance, was the question, why have I come?
For it was impossible now to give this journey its intended, official seal of past revisited. All these passing moments moved towards some future whole, some time fulfilled: it would be long before they became part of any foreseeable past. ‘FLY TO TURKEY’ said the Alitalia advertisement on the businessman’s newspaper. Although I wished I hadn’t come, it did not occur to me to go back. In matters of importance there is no such thing as ‘best avoided’ — avoidance is only a vacuum that something else must fill. Everything is the inevitable.
(Five years after I sailed from Genoa, and some years before this ride on the aliscafo, a film appeared over Gianni’s name, made from a screenplay by Gioconda. It was the story of a man who has managed to divert the course of his existence so often and so successfully that in middle age he is no more than a set of tributaries of indefinite origin and negligible momentum. As a child he evades, by fostering a minor illness, the boarding school that has maltreated his brother; as a youth, by buying himself into a protected occupation, he remains behind when his contemporaries depart to be slaughtered on the Russian front. The pattern becomes less rational, more obsessive – is repeated in a convenient marriage, in the repudiation of a pleasurable but unspectacular talent, in successive adaptations to popular causes. As the film ends, the man is building a house in a country which bores him but where he can live out his life without paying taxes.
This film was called, in English, Cause for Congratulation, and I saw it one afternoon at a theatre on Upper Broadway together with a Swedish film about schizophrenia. When it first appeared it was unfavourably compared with the earlier collaboration, Del Tempo Felice; but that equivocal reception was the prelude to its acquiring a particular reputation, being revived in art cinemas, and cited as an outstanding example – of some technique or other – by the same experts who initially disparaged it. I am told this is the natural sequence in such affairs, and that in fact it could not have happened otherwise.)
I wished Gioconda might have been forewarned. In this my arrival was like our first meeting, unapprehended by her. That we were to meet in public – for I did not doubt that I would find her sitting in the café — must restrict our show of reunion, perhaps reduce us to an exchange of platitudes: ‘You are just the same’, or ‘It seems like yesterday’.
It does not seem like yesterday. Surviving such change, such accelerations of change, with continuity – if continuity still exists – moving beyond the speed of cognisance, it is more as if we had been reincarnated centuries later than had lived through such dispersals and invalidations, such desuetude. That epoch, our time at Naples, seems historic now. It doesn’t seem like modern life. But it didn’t seem like modern life then either, it was more like life than modern life, more lifelike, livelier, likelier. Relics are not the less obsolete for their superior vitality – like the vineyard that has been left to flourish intact on the Vomero, among the deadly apartment buildings, not so much showing how it was as what has happened to it.
I remember how Gianni cautioned us about the great eruption and I wonder if we will go on talking and joking, eating and taking baths, until we are found petrified, with our stone hands before our faces, warding off the inevitable.
The engine subsiding, we re-enter the elements. It is dark, the boat comes splashing quite tamely into port and the journey recedes, throbbing, like a toothache. There are lights, colours, large-eyed faces of pale people on the breakwater and the soundless up and down movements of their feet stamping with cold. The vessel submits to a few superficial ministrations – is tied up with rope like any other vessel and has a gangplank fastened to her side. The leopard bends her cigarette into a tin ashtray; she stands ahead of me in the line to disembark, her tawny head bound with a speckled scarf, tilted by the backward stance with which she clasps her square dressing-case – both hands clenched around its central handle as urgently as if she were getting into a lifeboat. We shuffle, we descend.
The outcome of such a crossing is immaterial. One can only discover what has already come into existence. Equipped to search, we justify ourselves by ranging as far afield as possible, in order to render a plausible account, to be able to say, ‘I looked everywhere’. But it is not by such journeys as these that one approaches home. Rather, they are, like Gioconda’s trip to Madison Avenue, a garland laid upon experience. At most, they serve to establish that the object of search is not this, is elsewhere; to eliminate natural but unfounded suppositions. We are like those early explorers of Australia who died of thirst on expeditions to the dead centre of a continent, always thinking they must come ultimately to water – to an inland sea, to a lake, a river, a cascade. Deceived by salt deposits, by rivers that flow inland, by the fossils of seashells, they were driven on by incredulity as well – by disbelief that one could come so far without drawing nearer to what one sought.
So with these other explorations. There is much digression, despite improved techniques. We take our bearings from the wrong landmark, wish that when young we had studied the stars; name the flowers for ourselves and the deserts after others. When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a whole – a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace us; not to fix our positions, but to show us how we came.
Also by Shirley Hazzard
FICTION The Great Fire
The Transit of Venus
People in Glass Houses
The Evening of the Holiday
Cliffs of Fall
NONFICTION Greene on Capri
Countenance of Truth
Defeat of an Ideal
THE BAY OF NOON. Copyright © 1970 by Shirley Hazzard. All
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The Bay of Noon Page 18