Portraits and Observations

  We settled for the winter in Rome, first at a hotel (the management of which expelled us after five days, and it was not even a first-class establishment), then in an apartment at 33 Via Margutta, a narrow street often painted by bad painters and renowned for the number of cats who dwell there, unowned cats sheltering in the overgrown patios and existing on the charity of half-mad elderly women, crones who every day tour the cat jungles with sacks of scrap food.

  Our apartment was a penthouse: to reach it one climbed six flights of steep dark stairs. We had three rooms and a balcony. It was because of the balcony that I rented it; after the vastness of the view from the Sicilian terrace, the balcony offered, in contrast, a miniature scene tranquil and perfect as firelight: several Roman rooftops, faded orange, faded ocher, and a few across-the-way windows (behind which episodes of family life could be observed). Lola loved the balcony. She was scarcely ever off it. She liked to sit perched on the edge of the stone balustrade and study the traffic on the cobbled street below: the old ladies feeding the Margutta cats; a street musician who came each afternoon and played bagpipes, until, feeling thoroughly blackmailed, one tossed him a coin; a handsome knife-grinder advertising his services with a song sung in the most bull-like of baritones (housewives hurried!).

  When the sun was out Lola always took her bath on the balcony balustrade. Her tub was a silver soup dish; after a moment of sprightly immersion in the shallow water, she would spring up and out, and as though casting off a crystal cloak, shake herself, swell her feathers; later, for long, bliss-saturated hours, she drowsed in the sun, her head tilted back, her beak ajar, her eyes shut. To watch her was a soothing experience.

  Signor Fioli seemed to think so. He sat at his window, which was exactly opposite the balcony, and played attentive audience to Lola as long as she was visible. Signor Fioli interested me. I had taken the trouble to learn his name and something of his story. He was ninety-three years old, and in his ninetieth year he had lost the ability to speak: whenever he wished to attract the attention of his family (a widowed granddaughter and five grown great-grandsons), he rang a small supper bell. Otherwise, and even though he never left his bedroom, he appeared to be in complete command of himself. His eyesight was excellent: he saw everything Lola did, and if she did anything especially foolish or lovely, a smile sweetened his sour, very virile old face. He had been a cabinetmaker, and the business he had founded still operated on the ground floor of the building in which he lived; three of his great-grandchildren worked there.

  One morning—it was the week before Christmas, almost a year to the day that Lola had entered my life—I filled Lola’s soup bowl with mineral water (she preferred to bathe in mineral water, the bubblier the better), carried it out to her on the balcony, waved at Signor Fioli (who, as usual, was settled at his window waiting to attend Lola’s toilette), then went inside, sat down at my desk and started to write letters.

  Presently I heard the summoning tinkle of Signor Fioli’s supper bell: a well-known noise, one heard it twenty times a day; but it had never sounded just like this: a ringing rapid as the beat of an excited heart. I wondered why, and went to see, and saw: Lola, a stupefied sun worshiper squatting on the balustrade—and behind her an immense ginger cat, a cat that had crept across the rooftops and was now crawling on its belly along the balustrade, green eyes aglitter.

  Signor Fioli shook his bell. I shouted. The cat leaped, claws unfurled. But it was as if at the last moment Lola sensed her peril. She jumped off the balustrade, fell outward into space. The disgruntled cat, Signor Fioli and I watched her extraordinary descent.

  “Lola! Fly, Lola, fly!”

  Her wings, though spread, remained motionless. Slowly, gravely, as though attached to a parachute, she drifted downward; down and down.

  A small pickup truck was passing in the street below. At first I thought Lola would fall in front of it: that seemed dangerous enough. But what happened was worse, was eerie and awful: she landed on top of some sacks stacked on the back of the truck. And stayed there. And the truck kept going: turned the corner and drove out of the Via Margutta.

  “Come back, Lola! Lola!”

  I ran after her; skidded down the six flights of slippery stone stairs; fell; skinned my knees; lost my glasses (they flew off and smashed against a wall). Outside, I ran to the corner where the truck had turned. Far off, through a haze compounded of myopia plus tears of pain, I saw the little truck stopped at a traffic light. But before I could reach it, long before, the light changed and the truck, bearing Lola away, taking her forever from me, blurred into the traffic swirling about the Piazza di Spagna.

  Not many minutes had elapsed since the cat had lunged, only four or five. Yet it took an hour to retrace my route, climb the stairs, pick up and pocket the broken glasses. And all the while Signor Fioli had been sitting at his window, waiting there with an expression of grieved astonishment. When he saw that I had returned he rang his bell, calling me to the balcony.

  I told him, “She thought she was something else.”

  He frowned.

  “A dog.”

  The frown thickened. “She’s gone.”

  That he understood. He bowed his head. We both did.

  JANE BOWLES

  (1966)

  It must be seven or eight years since I last saw the modern legend named Jane Bowles; nor have I heard from her, at least not directly. Yet I am sure she is unchanged; indeed, I am told by recent travelers to North Africa, who have been or sat with her in some dim Casbah café, that this is true, and that Jane, with her dahlia-head of cropped, curly hair, her tilted nose and mischief-shiny, just a trifle mad eyes, her very original voice (a husky soprano), her boyish clothes and schoolgirl’s figure and slightly limping walk, is more or less the same as when I first knew her more than twenty years ago: even then she had seemed the eternal urchin, appealing as the most appealing of nonadults, yet with some substance cooler than blood invading her veins and with a wit, an eccentric wisdom no child, not the strangest Wunderkind, ever possessed.

  When I first met Mrs. Bowles (1944? 1945?), she was already, within certain worlds, a celebrated figure: though only in her twenties, she had published a most individual and much remarked novel, Two Serious Ladies; she had married the gifted composer and writer Paul Bowles, and was, together with her husband, a tenant in a glamorous boardinghouse established on Brooklyn Heights by the late George Davis. Among the Bowleses’ fellow boarders were Richard and Ellen Wright, W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Oliver Smith, Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee and (I seem to remember) a trainer of chimpanzees who lived there with one of his star performers. Anyway, it was one hell of a household. But even amid such a forceful assembly, Mrs. Bowles, by virtue of her talent and the strange visions it enclosed, and because of her personality’s startling blend of playful-puppy candor and feline sophistication, remained an imposing, stage-front presence.

  Jane Bowles is an authoritative linguist; she speaks, with the greatest precision, French and Spanish and Arabic—perhaps this is why the dialogue of her stories sounds, or sounds to me, as though it has been translated into English from some delightful combination of other tongues. Moreover, these languages are self-learned, the product of Mrs. Bowles’s nomadic nature: from New York she wandered on to and all over Europe, traveled away from there and the impending war to Central America and Mexico, then alighted awhile in the historic ménage on Brooklyn Heights. Since 1947 she has been almost continuously resident abroad: in Paris or Ceylon, but largely in Tangier—in fact, both Jane and Paul Bowles may now safely be described as permanent Tangerinos, so total has their adherence become to that steep, shadowy-white seaport. Tangier is composed of two mismatching parts, one of them a dull, modern area stuffed with office buildings and tall, gloomy dwellings, and the other a Casbah descending through a medieval puzzlement of alleys and alcoves and kif-odored, mint-scented piazzas down to the crawling-with-sailors, ship-horn-hollering port. The Bowleses have established themselves in both sectors—have
a sterilized, tout confort apartment in the new quarter and also a refuge hidden away in the darker Arab neighborhood: a native house that must be one of the city’s tiniest habitations—ceilings so low that one had almost literally to move on hands and knees from room to room; but the rooms themselves are like a charming series of postcard-sized Vuillards—Moorish cushions spilling over Moorish-patterned carpets, all cozy as a raspberry tart and illuminated by intricate lanterns and windows that allow the light of sea-skies and views that encompass minarets and ships and the blue-washed rooftops of native tenements, receding like a ghostly staircase to the clamorous shoreline. Or that is how I remember it on the occasion of a single visit made at sunset on an evening, oh, fifteen years ago.

  A line from Edith Sitwell: Jane, Jane, the morning light creaks down again—This from a poem I’ve always liked without, as so often with the particular author, altogether understanding it. Unless “morning light” is an image signifying memory(?). My own most satisfying memories of Jane Bowles revolve around a month spent in side-by-side rooms in a pleasantly shabby hotel on the rue du Bac during an icy Paris winter—January, 1951. Many a cold evening was spent in Jane’s snug room (fat with books and papers and foodstuffs, and a snappy white Pekingese puppy bought from a Spanish sailor); long evenings spent listening to a phonograph and drinking warm applejack while Jane built sloppy, marvelous stews atop an electric burner: she is a good cook, yessir, and kind of a glutton, as one might suspect from her stories, which abound in accounts of eating and its artifacts. Cooking is but one of her extracurricular gifts; she is also a spooky accurate mimic, and can re-create with nostalgic admiration the voices of certain singers—Helen Morgan, for example, and her close friend Libby Holman. Years afterward I wrote a story called Among the Paths to Eden, in which, without realizing it, I attributed to the heroine several of Jane Bowles’s characteristics: the stiff-legged limp, her spectacles, her brilliant and poignant abilities as a mimic. (“She waited, as though listening for music to cue her; then, ‘Don’t ever leave me, now that you’re here! Here is where you belong. Everything seems so right when you’re near. When you’re away it’s all wrong.’ And Mr. Belli was shocked, for what he was hearing was exactly Helen Morgan’s voice, and the voice, with its vulnerable sweetness, refinement, its tender quaver toppling high notes, seemed not to be borrowed, but Mary O’Meaghan’s own, a natural expression of some secluded identity.”) I did not have Mrs. Bowles in mind when I invented Mary O’Meaghan—a character she in no essential way resembles; but it is a measure of the potent impression Jane has always made on me that some fragment of her should emerge in this manner.

  That winter Jane was working on In the Summer House, the play that was later so sensitively produced in New York.

  I’m not all that keen on the theater: cannot sit through most plays once; nevertheless, I saw In the Summer House three times, and not out of loyalty to the author, but because it had a thorny wit, the flavor of a newly tasted, refreshingly bitter beverage—the same qualities that had initially attracted me to Mrs. Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies.

  My only complaint against Mrs. Bowles is not that her work lacks quality, merely quantity. The volume in hand constitutes her entire shelf, so to say. And grateful as we are to have it, one could wish that there was more. Once, while discussing a colleague, someone more facile than either of us, Jane said, “But it’s so easy for him. He has only to turn his hand. Just turn his hand.” Actually, writing is never easy: in case anyone doesn’t know, it’s the hardest work around, and for Jane, I think it is difficult to the point of true pain. And why not?—when both her language and her themes are sought after along tortured paths and in stony quarries: the never-realized relationships between her people, the mental and physical discomforts with which she surrounds and saturates them—every room an atrocity, every urban landscape a creation of neon-dourness. And yet, though the tragic view is central to her vision, Jane Bowles is a very funny writer, a humorist of sorts—but not, by the way, of the Black School. Black Comedy, as its perpetrators label it, is, when successful, all lovely artifice and lacking any hint of compassion. Her subtle comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness as revealed in her work requires us to accord Jane Bowles high esteem as an artist.

  EXTREME MAGIC

  (1967)

  August, 1966! Aboard the Tritona. Others aboard: Gianni and Marella Agnelli (hosts), Stash and Lee Radziwill, Luciana Pignatelli, Eric Nielsen, Sandro Durso, Adolfo Caracciolo, his daughter Allegra and his nephew Carlo. Seven Italians, one Dane, one Pole, and two of us (Lee et moi). Hmm.

  Point of departure: Brindisi, a rather sexy seaport on the Italian Adriatic. Destination: the islands and coast of Yugoslavia, a twenty-day cruise ending in Venice.

  It is now eleven P.M., and we had hoped to sail at midnight, but the captain, a no-nonsense gentleman from Germany, complains of a rising wind and thinks it unsafe to risk the sea before sunrise. Never mind!—the quay alongside the yacht is awash with café lights and piano sounds and Negro and Norwegian sailors browsing among brigades of pretty little purse-swinging tarts (one a really speedy baby with pimiento-colored hair).

  Groan. Moan. Oh oh oh hold on to the wall. And crawl, Jesus, please. Please, Jesus. Slowly, slowly, one at a time: Yes, I am crawling up the stairs from my cabin (where green waves are smashing against the portholes), crawling toward the presumed safety of the salon.

  The Tritona is a luxurious craft constructed on a wide-bottomed principle of a Grecian caïque. The property of Conte Theo Rossi, who lent it to the Agnellis for their cruise, it is furnished throughout like the apartment of an elegantly humorous art collector: The salon is a greenhouse of flowering plants—a huge Rubens dominates the wall above an arrangement of brown velvet couches.

  But on this particular morning, the first day of the voyage, as we crossed the swelling seas between Italy and Yugoslavia, the salon, when at last I’ve crawled my way to it, is a rocking wreck. A television set is overturned. Bottles from the bar are rolling on the floor. Bodies are strewn all over like the aftermath of an Indian massacre. One of the choicest belongs to Lee (Radziwill). As I crawl past her, she opens a seasick eye and, in a hospital whisper, says: “Oh, it’s you. What time is it?”

  “Nine. Thereabouts.”

  Moan. “Only nine? And this is going to last the whole day. Oh I wish I’d listened to Stash. He said we shouldn’t have come. How do you feel?”

  “Maybe I’ll live.”

  “You look incredible. Yellow. Have you taken a pill? They help. A little.”

  Eric Nielsen, lying face-down and somewhat askew, as though he’d been felled from behind by an ax murderer, says: “Shut up. I’m worse off than either of you.”

  “The trouble,” says Lee, “the trouble with the pills is they make you so thirsty. And then you’re dying for water. But if you drink water, that only makes you sicker.”

  How true—as I learned after swallowing two pills. Thirst is not the word; it was as if one had been a prisoner in the Sahara half a year or more.

  A steward had arranged a buffet breakfast, but no one has gone near it—until presently Luciana (Pignatelli) appears. Luciana, looking impossibly serene and lovely—her slacks immaculate, every strand of golden hair just so, and her face, the eyes particularly, a triumph of precise maquillage.

  “Oh, Luciana,” says Lee in a grieving, drowning tone, “how ever did you do it?”

  And Luciana, buttering a slice of toast and spreading it with apricot jam, says: “Do what, darling?”

  “Put on your face. I’m trembling so—I can’t hold a lipstick. If I’d tried to do what you’ve done to your eyes—all those Egyptian lines—I would have blinded myself.”

  “Trembling?” says Luciana, crunching her toast. “Oh I see. You are troubled by the motion of the boat. But really it is not so bad, no?”

  Eric says: “Shut up, girl. I’ve been on hundreds of boats, and I’ve never been seasick before.”

  Luciana shrugs. “As you lik
e.” Then she calls for the steward, who arrives careening to and fro. “May I have an egg, please?”

  Lee says: “Oh, Luciana. How can you?”

  At dusk this day the sea calmed as the Tritona approached the stony Montenegro coast. Everyone, feeling vastly better, is on deck staring down at the green-crystal depths skidding below. Suddenly a trio of sailors, standing in the ship’s prow, start to shout and gesture: An immense porpoise is racing along beside us.

  The porpoise leaps, arcs, gleefully descends out of sight, leaps like laughter materialized, plunges again, and this time disappears. Then the sailors, leaning over the rail, begin to whistle a curious intense whistle-chant, and the whistling is some Ondine melody the seamen know will lure the creature back. Back it comes!—soaring heavenward wreathed in water-spark.

  The porpoise guides us along the coast as far as a cave, then turns and seeks the deeper, now darkening outer sea.

  Village lamps light the distance; but only Gianni (Agnelli), ever the questing spirit, wants to go ashore. The rest of us have more sense. And anyway, it’s my policy to leave heavy sightseeing to others—I’ve never cared to burden myself with churches and such relics. I like people, cafés and the stuff in shop windows. Unfortunately Yugoslavia, much as it happily differs from most socialist states, nonetheless is afflicted by that same tristesse, that same atmosphere of empty vistas, of nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get there, that starts just the other side of the Berlin Wall.

  As usual in these countries, the store shelves are crammed with merchandise, but none of it is anything you would care to buy, not even as a gift for a cruel stepmother. Occasionally one encounters a street peddler selling pretty-enough native rugs; and if you like liqueurs, the best Maraschino in the world, a masterpiece of the distilling art, is a Yugoslavian creation. Otherwise zero, a shopper’s hell.