I don’t suppose she could have read the papers she sent on. They must have represented a time of life when he had suffered some kind of breakdown. The first was a facetious essay, attacking the modern toilet seat and claiming that the crouched position it enforced was disadvantageous to those muscles and organs that were called into use. This was followed by a passionate prayer for cleanliness of heart. The prayer seemed to have gone unanswered, because the next piece was a very dirty essay on sexual control, followed by a long ballad called The Ups and Downs of Jeremy Funicular. This was a disgusting account of Jeremy’s erotic adventures, describing many married and unmarried ladies and also one garage mechanic, one wresder, and one lighthouse keeper. The ballad was long, and each stanza ended with a reprise lamenting the fact that Jeremy had never experienced remorse—excepting when he was mean to children, foolish with money, or overate of bread and meat at table. The last manuscript was the remains or fragments of a journal. “Gratissimo Signore,” he wrote, “for the creaking shutter, the love of Mrs. Pigott, the smells of rain, the candor of friends, the fish in the sea, and especially for the smell of bread and coffee, since they mean mornings and newness of life.” It went on, pious and lewd, but I read no more.
My wife is lovely, lovely were my children, and lovely that scene, and how dead he and his dirty words seemed in the summer light. I was glad of the news, and his death seemed to have removed the perplexity that he had represented. I could remember with some sadness that he had been able to convey a feeling that the exuberance and the pain of life was a glass against which his nose was pressed: that he seemed able to dramatize the sense of its urgency and its deadly seriousness. I remembered the fineness of his hands, the light voice, and the cast in his eye that made the pupil seem like a goat’s; but I wondered why he had failed, and by my lights he had failed horribly. Which one of us is not suspended by a thread above carnal anarchy, and what is that thread but the light of day? The difference between life and death seemed no more than the difference between going up to see the landfall at Lisbon and remaining in bed with Mme. Troyan. I could remember the landfall—the pleasant, brackish smell of inshore water like my grandfather’s bathing shoes—distant voices on a beach, villas, sea bells, and Sanctus bells, and the singing of the priest and the faces of the passengers all raised, all smiling in wonder at the sight of land as if nothing like it had ever been seen before.
BUT I WAS WRONG, and set the discovery of my mistake in any place where you can find an old copy of Europa or Epoca. It is a Monday and I am spearfishing with my son off the rocks near Porto San Stefano. My son and I are not good friends, and it is at our best that we seem to be in disagreement with one another. We seem to want the same place in the sun. But we are great friends under water. I am delighted to see him there like a figure in a movie, head down, feet up, armed with a fishing spear, air streaming from his snorkel—and the rilled sand, where he stirs it, turning up like smoke. Here, in the deep water among the rocks, we seem to escape the tensions that make our relationships in other places vexatious. It is lovely here. With a little chop on the surface, the sun falls to the bottom of the sea in a great net of light. There are starfish in the colors of lipstick, and all the rocks are covered with white flowers. And after a festa, a Sunday when the beaches have been crowded, there are other things so many fathoms down—bits of sandwich paper, the crossword-puzzle page from Il Messaggero, and water-logged copies of Epoca. It is out of the back pages of one of these that Brimmer looks up to me from the bottom of the sea. He is not dead. He has just married an Italian movie actress. He has his left arm around her slender waist, his right foot crossed in front of his left and in his right hand the full glass. He looks no better and no worse, and I don’t know if he has sold his lights and vitals to the devil or only discovered himself. I go up to the surface, shake the water out of my hair, and think that I am worlds away from home.
The Golden Age
OUR IDEAS of castles, formed in childhood, are inflexible, and why try to reform them? Why point out that in a real castle thistles grow in the courtyard, and the threshold of the ruined throne room is guarded by a nest of green adders? Here are the keep, the drawbridge, the battlements and towers that we took with our lead soldiers when we were down with the chicken pox. The first castle was English, and this one was built by the King of Spain during an occupation of Tuscany, but the sense of imaginative supremacy—the heightened mystery of nobility—is the same. Nothing is inconsequential here. It is thrilling to drink Martinis on the battlements, it is thrilling to bathe in the fountain, it is even thrilling to climb down the stairs into the village after supper and buy a box of matches. The drawbridge is down, the double doors are open, and early one morning we see a family crossing the moat, carrying the paraphernalia of a picnic.
They are Americans. Nothing they can do will quite conceal the touching ridiculousness, the clumsiness of the traveler. The father is a tall young man, a little stooped, with curly hair and fine white teeth. His wife is pretty, and they have two sons. Both boys are armed with plastic machine guns, which were recently mailed to them by their grandparents. It is Sunday, bells are ringing, and who ever brought the bells into Italy? Not the vaca in Florence but the harsh country bells that bing and bang over the olive groves and the cypress alleys in such an alien discord that they might have come in the carts of Attila the Hun. This urgent jangling sounds over the last of the antique fishing villages—really one of the last things of its kind. The stairs of the castle wind down into a place that is lovely and remote. There are no bus or train connections to this place, no pensioni or hotels, no art schools, no tourists or souvenirs; there is not even a postcard for sale. The natives wear picturesque costumes, sing at their work, and haul up Greek vases in their fishing nets. It is one of the last places in the world where you can hear shepherds’ pipes, where beautiful girls with loose bodices go unphotographed as they carry baskets of fish on their heads, and where serenades are sung after dark. Down the stairs come the Americans into the village.
The women in black, on their way to church, nod and wish them good morning. “Il poeta,” they say, to each other. Good morning to the poet, the wife of the poet, and the poet’s sons. Their courtesy seems to embarrass the stranger. “Why do they call you a poet?” his older son asks, but Father doesn’t reply. In the piazza there is some evidence of the fact that the village is not quite perfect. What has been kept out by its rough roads has come in on the air. The village boys roosting around the fountain have their straw hats canted over their foreheads, and matchsticks in their teeth, and when they walk they swagger as if they had been born in a saddle, although there is not a saddle horse in the place. The blue-green beam of the television set in the café has begun to transform them from sailors into cowboys, from fishermen into gangsters, from shepherds into juvenile delinquents and masters of ceremonies, their bladders awash with Coca-Cola, and this seems very sad to the Americans. E colpa mia, thinks Seton, the so-called poet, as he leads his family through the piazza to the quays where their rowboat is moored.