Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn’t matter. The journey must be made.
open it
Night. The search engines are quiet.
I keep throwing the stories overboard, like a message in a bottle, hoping you’ll read them, hoping you’ll respond.
You don’t respond.
I warned you that the story might change under my hands. I forgot that the storyteller changes too. I was under your hands.
Later, much later, there’s a plane ticket on the screen—destination Naples.
Maybe you want an opera not a story.
Maybe, but the story has already gone on ahead. There it is, competing in the waves with the hydrofoils and rich men’s yachts. It looks like a plastic bottle but there’s something inside.
You thought, didn’t you, that you could start something and stop it when you pleased? Pick it up, put it down. A little light reading. A bedtime story.
Freedom just for one night.
The story is reading you now, line by line.
Do you know what happens next?
Go on, open it.
Open it …
VIEW
An island of rocks. Sea-bound. Roofed with birds.
The island is like an idea lifted out of the sea’s brooding.
The island is an idea of itself—an imaginary island and a real one—real and imaginary reflecting together in the mirror of the water.
Look in the mirror. What can you see?
There’s Tiberius hiding from the plots of Empire. There he is, ruler of the ancient world, rowed from Naples in a hundred-oared galley, each stroke of the wood to the stroke of the drum, while flutes soothe him to sleep.
He called Capri a sacred place and decorated its wooded slopes with villas and temples and nymphaea and shrines. Nowadays, underneath the tourist trade are the remains of the professional gods. The mosaic of the past is a fragment—a bit of coloured glass, a corner of tile—but the present is no more complete. The paint is fresher, that’s all.
From an open boat the tourists crane back their necks to stare at the Villa Jovis. The rock face is sheer and unclimbable. Far up, the dot of a human appears.
‘Èccola!’ says the guide. ‘From that spot Tiberio flung his victims to death. Morte! Morte! Morte!’
He spreads his hands expressively, and the party shades its shaded eyes to better imagine the tumbling body twisted through time.
‘Women too,’ says the guide. ‘Tiberio cattivo,’ and he spits.
Of course, it may well be that spiteful Suetonius was a slandermonger. Perhaps Tiberius never did hurl his enemies into space-time. An imaginary island invents itself. It takes part in its own myth. There is something about this place that suggests more than it reveals. Capri has been thoroughly plundered—its woods, its treasures, its stories. It has been well known for more than two thousand years. Yet it slips through the net of knowing as easily as the small fishes in the harbour.
The Marina Grande was built in the nineteenth century to accommodate the smart steamboats bringing the smart English to the smart hotels. Aquatints of the harbour show luggage being piled onto handcarts, much as it is today, and horse and donkey landaus jostling for custom where the taxi rank is.
The funicular railway, completed in 1906, connects the harbour to the main square, and its sheer, vertiginous ascent is a kind of Tiberio-strategy in miniature. If the tension between the upward car and the downward car were to relax, both cars would crash through the red pantile roofs of the side-by-side houses and, collecting olive trees and grapevines as a memorial, the train and its passengers would career into the sea, nose first, broken backed, to join the other wrecks never recovered.
This does not happen. The upward car brakes the downward car, while the downward car powers the upward car. The passengers are aboard. A bell rings, like the start of an exam. The driver, who was lounging Italian-wise drinking a thimble of coffee, flings it aside, dives into his cab and releases the brake.
It is the moment of action for which there is no preparation.
As I stand in the front car, holding on to the rail, and feeling the train move down through the sunlight towards the tunnel, I feel like I am being born. I find myself gripping the bar, unable to take my eyes off the point where the single track divides as it enters the tunnel. It divides into a curved diamond, a vulva, a dark mouth—one of the many caves on the island where a rite of passage is observed.
Then we are out again, into the sunshine, into the bustle of the harbour, with one glance back at the slow car of souls leaving this life.
Then, as now, the pleasantest way from the Marina Grande to the square is to be driven privately, round and round the impossible bends, the driver with one hand on the wheel, the other glued to the horn. He would sooner let go of the wheel than give up hooting.
Everyone prefers the open-top cars, and those drivers not fortunate enough to own a factory model customise their own. They saw off the roof, sometimes leaving the window pillars, sometimes not. Then they rig up an awning out of bamboo, and fasten it to the windscreen at one end and the boot lid at the other with rusty crocodile clips. The kind you use to jump-start a flat battery.
These bamboo cars will carry anything for you—children, dogs, bags, bikes, boats. I saw a driver strap a dinghy to his bonnet. Off he went, round and round the bends, prow first, both hands on the horn this time. As a safety measure, he said.
The smart hotels are very smart. The oldest, La Palma, reclines in its own tropical garden and offers its guests secluded, shaded tables, from which they may watch the throng of expensive shoppers, glint-eyed over their Cartier and Vuitton.
These shops have always traded expensively. The Medicis used to come here for cameos in the fifteenth century. In the eighteenth century it was antiquities for the English. In the nineteenth century dandies, widows and homosexuals bought silver-backed brushes and gold cigarette cases, stacked beside souvenirs of Pompeii.
Now, day-trippers from Sorrento, on package-holiday outings, clog up the smooth flow of money and goods from trader to shopper. The beautiful ageless women and their slightly sinister iron-haired men have to compete at the luxury windows with red legs and bad haircuts, as the migrant shorts population wonders out loud how much everything costs before moving on to another ice cream.
At night, Capri partly reclaimed by the rich, the paparazzi hang about the entrance to the Quisisana, waiting to snap a film star or a scandal or, better still, both together.
A young hopeful stands in her evening wear in the doorway. She carries a silk handbag and her hair is dark as the sea. She’s nobody. The cameras look the other way.
The Quisisana. The hotel where Oscar Wilde came after his release from prison. Signing himself as Sebastian Melmoth, he sat down wearily to eat his dinner, only to be asked by the manager to leave.
Those waiters in their white coats, those managers in their dark suits, the traders in linen dresses and hand-sewn shirts, know how much everyone is worth, and what something is worth to everyone. The balance between deference and manipulation is as timed to the second as the release brake on the funicular railway. Such tensions allow the system to run smoothly. The island itself is a tension between land and sea, height and depth. Poverty and riches have always lived on either side of the olive tree. The paradox of innocence and knowingness is in the faces of the young boys and the laughter of the girls. For Capri, the secret of success has been found in maintaining these tensions.
Not too slack, not too tight, that’s Capri.
I was sitting at a bar in the square. Actually I was sitting in the square itself, so far had the bar extended its territory of bamboo chairs tucked beneath bamboo tables the size of saucers.
I had my laptop on my knee—there was nowhere else to put it—and I was drinking espresso wi
th a slice of torta Caprese, when I saw you, just beyond the reach of the bar, crossing the square.
You were wearing a sleeveless dress and sandals, and I realised that you were one of those beautiful ageless women, and that the man with you, slightly sinister, has iron-grey hair. I know what I am—small, disappearing, an outsider—nobody would look at me twice even if they noticed me once. You were used to being looked at, I could see that.
You paused outside a shop selling heavy amethyst jewellery. The assistant appeared like a genie and soon had you bottled inside. That gave me the time I needed to pay my bill, pack my laptop and observe your husband. If it was your husband.
He had his hands in his pockets. Then he checked his watch. Then he put on his sunglasses. Then he went to look down over the harbour. Then he came back and paced outside the shop. Then he went and put a coin in the telescope. I guessed this was a man who went through life with remote control, constantly flicking the channels. Finding nothing to interest him, he switched off and stared into space.
You came out of the shop and smiled like a movie star. You had a package. You took his arm. You talked all the time, pointing out this and that, and he nodded briefly, saw for a second, remembered consciously to enjoy himself.
I followed you both, not far, down to the Quisisana, and hid myself behind a gang of Americans and their tour leader. You were waiting at the lift, when suddenly you turned back and went towards the front desk. This was my chance—not to speak to you but to find out your room number. I got into the lift with your husband, got out with him on the third floor, and walked purposefully past him as he let himself into Room 29.
All right.
Now all I had to do was wait.
It was evening. The air like a kiss.
I was sitting on a low wall opposite the Quisisana. The paparazzi were joking with one another. A man with an accordion was playing on a balcony to a party of Japanese. I had been sitting for a couple of hours, carefully concealed behind my Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses, frames thin as the slit in a burka. I had not intended to be fashionable, merely I had bought my sunglasses in Italy, which amounts to the same thing.
I was typing on my laptop, trying to move this story on, trying to avoid endings, trying to collide the real and the imaginary worlds, trying to be sure which is which.
The more I write, the more I discover that the partition between real and invented is as thin as a wall in a cheap hotel room. I can hear voices on the other side, running water, the clink of bottles, the sound of a door opening and closing. When I get up and go out into the corridor, everything is silent, no one is there. Then, as soon as I reckon I know the geography of what isn’t and what is, a chair scrapes in the room beyond the wall and a woman’s voice says, ‘You don’t understand do you?’
When I sit at my computer, I accept that the virtual worlds I find there parallel my own. I talk to people whose identity I cannot prove. I disappear into a web of co-ordinates that we say will change the world. What world? Which world?
It used to be that the real and the invented were parallel lines that never met. Then we discovered that space is curved, and in curved space parallel lines always meet.
The mind is a curved space. What we experience, what we invent, track by track running together, then running into one, the brake lever released. Atom and dream.
It was night.
He sauntered onto the terrace and was shown to a table by a waiter. Yes, I knew what she would be doing. I had seen it before.
I went quickly into the hotel, up to the third floor and along the corridor to Room 29. She was just coming out in a little black dress, scanning her face for the last time, before she snapped the silver mirror shut and slipped it back into her bag.
I stood still, waiting for her to finish.
She suddenly looked up, her face total surprise.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’
‘Yes. No, listen, I’m busy tonight.’
‘I saw.’
‘You’ve been spying on me.’
‘Only a little. Is he your husband?’
She nodded.
‘How about tomorrow then—lunch?’
She shook her head.
‘You choose a time then.’
‘How about the Middle Ages?’
‘The food isn’t that good.’
She started walking down the corridor towards the lift. I kept up with her, though I didn’t put out my hand. She was frowning and she didn’t speak as we sped silently down in the moving hall of mirrors. When we got out into the lobby, she paused.
‘This isn’t a good idea.’
‘You told me you’d be here.’
‘I didn’t think you’d come after me.’
‘Think of it as a coincidence.’
‘I have to go now. Walk out with me and say goodbye.’
‘Goodbye?’
‘I don’t want to get into explanations.’
‘With me or with him?’
‘With either of you.’
‘So you’ll just say I was someone you met in the lobby.’
‘If he notices.’
‘Depends what channel he’s on.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Don’t make a scene, will you?’
‘I’m not a playwright.’
‘Ali?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry.’
She squeezed my hand and went over to her table. He stood up. There was a glass of champagne waiting.
‘Deux coupes de champagne.’ She had said in Paris. Now I suppose it was ‘Du coppeta de champagne.’ Champagne, like English, is an international language. She spoke it fluently.
I hesitated, watching them, and then I decided to leave a note at the front desk. I wrote—‘Pizza Materita—Anacapri—until 10.30 p.m.’
I don’t stay in Capri. It’s too crowded, too expensive and too noisy for me. I rent a little place in Anacapri, high up on the hillside overlooking the sea. I read, swim, work and feed the stray cats on mince.
When I first came here, I realised from the pitying looks on the faces of the butchers that they thought of me as the Inglesa who only eats mince. This compounded the humiliation of asking every day for ‘Half a pound of coffee-pot’, as I seemed to have been doing. I had mixed up my macchinetta and my macinato. One is mince, the other is one of those steel coffee-pots they heat on the stove.
Anacapri is a small village high on the island. It has a busy square where the bus stops, and where the tourists go to get a chairlift up Monte Solano, followed by ‘English Toast’, as the sign encouragingly offers.
There are some smart shops leading off the square and the usual jostle of tourist stalls, but there is something else too, which I can’t quite explain …
About halfway down the Via Orlandini, and for no reason at all that I can tell, an invisible fence rebuffs the tourists. They turn back. Yes, that is exactly what happens, they turn back.
If you continue, you will come to the true heart of Anacapri. There is the church. There is the square in front of it. There are greengrocers and a fishmongers and a bakery and market shops and a bookshop and a chemist and everything you could want. And no tourists.
So why am I not a tourist?
A tourist could be anywhere. The place doesn’t matter. It’s just another TV channel.
I went to the bus stop in Capri and took my turn with the matrons and off-shift waiters to stand in the tiny, throaty diesel bullet of a bus that fires on all cylinders up the ladder-like road. The cliff face is netted to check falling rocks, and here and there a Madonna cut into the cliff face smiles down under her blue light.
I always cross myself as we reach a particular bend. So does the rest of the bus.
At the Piazza Monumentale out we get, and the women disappear with their string bags, and the men stand together for a moment, jackets slung over their shoulders, lighting cigarettes. I walk
down towards the invisible fence and feel a slight tingle as I cross through it. Then I have been admitted. Then I am on the other side.
I know the people at the Pizza Materita, and they always find a table for me on their terrace, which overlooks the church and the square. I don’t ask for anything straight away, but still somebody brings a jug of vino rosso and a breadbasket.
I can see Papa, with his long-handled paddle, ladling the pizzas in and out of the wood-fired oven. Nearby, Mama sits at the cash register, her glasses on a string round her neck. The daughter and the son-in-law deal with the customers. She is dark and gorgeous. He is young and good-looking, with his hair tied back like a pirate’s.
The food is very good—all done to a secret recipe they say—and they are pleased with their cooking and each other and the new baby. You can taste the pleasure, strong as basil.
And then it happened as I thought it would. You came.
You had taken off the little black dress and you were wearing combat trousers and a hooded sweatshirt. That is, a hooded cashmere sweatshirt. Your hair was in a ponytail and the rings and the jewellery were gone.
You saw me, you came and sat down, your head in your hands for a second, then smiling.
‘You bastard.’
‘They only speak Italian here.’
‘Very funny.’
‘So why did you come?’
‘Why do you think I came?’
‘You are a Gemini and you have to be in two places at once.’
‘Thanks for the cod astrology.’
‘All right, here’s some cod psychology—you had a row and stormed off.’
‘I did, as it happens, that’s how I’m free to be here, but not why.’
‘OK. You tell me.’
‘For this reason.’
She kissed me.
While we talked, our food was set before us. We both had bresaola with rocket and transparent slices of parmesan. Then for her there was a fresh fish wrapped in paper and baked in the wood oven. I had a pizza with a base as crisp as lava, bubbled here and there with a black crust and spread with buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes new off the vine.