The Bay of Noon Read online

  The taxi had passed through Piazza Municipio, and reached the rise behind the Royal Palace – an intersection which, with the combination of castle, palace, opera house, and arcade, is as close as Naples ever comes to the civic and historic coherence of other large cities: a relief to tourists, and an anomaly to the inhabitants who feel themselves exposed there on that tract of open ground, and tend to avoid it. Justin asked, ‘Is there a possible restaurant round here? Let’s hop out.’

  ‘You know they’re all terrible.’ We stopped the car and made our way through the traffic and into the Galleria. Couples milled about us, arm in arm. Justin’s hand at my elbow was lifeless, worse than dutiful.

  We were early – first, in fact – in the little place where we went to dine. The owner scraped out our chairs for us, crying ‘Buona sera, buona sé,’as if he had hardly expected the pleasure of having customers; as if we were a good omen. Justin shamelessly reproduced the greeting in return.

  ‘Now come Jenny,’ he said. ‘Even Shakespeare made fun of the Neapolitan accent.’ Pouring purple wine into thick, clouded tumblers, he remarked, ‘The thing is, Jenny. The thing is. Much of what we discuss is currently meaningless to me. Not human affairs alone, but other matters as well. The seasons, for instance – even the seasons bore me … And the very word Love which just now you so brashly used – that word is the greatest bore of all to me. At this moment, as one might say, women delight not me.’

  I thought of his hand on my arm and wondered, was he passionless, perhaps; or effeminate.

  ‘Nor men either, though by your smiling you seem to say so.’

  The menu came, a limp paper elaborately illegible in mauve ink, enclosed in soiled plastic. We shared it, leaning across our tiny table and Justin touched his head companionably to mine.

  I said, ‘Certainly what one sees around is not encouraging. The doomed attractions, impossible unions. Though I don’t really call those love.’

  ‘Then you do wrong, Jenny.’ For the moment abandoning his quotations, he said, ‘You are mistaken. All that which you deplore – the blind obsession, the unequal sacrifice, the punishment invited and inflicted – that is love. Believe me. It’s pointless to call upon perfect harmonies and deathless romance. For love, you must look closer to home.’

  We ordered our meal. Justin broke a hunk of bread and gave me half of it. ‘Those in love – do they ever talk about it in this way – as we are doing, as if it were susceptible of logic? Of course not. It is like the exemplary treaties on whaling – ratified by everyone who is not involved. Those concerned are not signatories, and the whale will be exterminated as a matter of course. I believe the Japanese will knowingly harpoon the last blue whale. Many lovers have given their partners a less merciful end, though all manner of laws and arguments be ranged round to prevent it.’

  His plate arrived, a dish of rubbery seafood becalmed in red sauce.

  I said, ‘You’re too much influenced by your own experience.’

  ‘Not the whole story, eh?’

  ‘By no means.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ He smiled, but it was an unworthy answer. He wished to conclude, now, this talk of love. He took up his fork and probed the contents of his plate. ‘Good stuff, this. I most willingly partake of it.’

  ‘You try to make me partake of your disillusionment,’ I said. ‘However, I don’t hold it against you.’

  ‘His brow – as they say – cleared.’

  But when we came out of that place, and started to walk past the palace in the direction of the seafront, Justin reverted to the nature of our friendship. ‘We are both, to be explicit, at a loss. Isn’t that it? Have been deprived of something and are in a state of abeyance. Can afford to be fastidious, having insufficient courage, at present, to be otherwise.’

  I agreed. Though he was more like someone who has had an operation and waits to see whether the disease is cured, or mortal. And love not being, as he had just pointed out, rational, might he not at any time have become its victim over again, the more unguardedly for all this interim rationalization?

  Turning into Via Santa Lucia we stopped on the slope to watch the passage of a truck stacked high with refuse, from the summit of which a pair of seated urchins pontifically saluted us.

  ‘Oh Jenny, how will we explain it to anyone, when we get out of here?’

  ‘We never will. No one ever has.’ We walked on, our shoulders touching.

  ‘I was brought up to think of Naples, if at all, as superstition, sentiment, glee. Yet the other view – that it is all cynicism, gloom, amorality – is just as much a myth, only a more pretentious one. The sort of platitude that calls itself a theory. Simply to know the worst about a place is not to know it. What is it then? Civilization, curiosity completely satisfied, style, irony, magnanimity … Being able to greet the world like a king from the top of a dunghill.’ We stopped again, at the kerb, and looked back up the street, and Justin laughed. ‘The tourist who comes and sees this shambles, has his camera swiped, is swindled by the taxi drivers and persecuted by old codgers flogging cameos, how can he know all that is just, so to speak, a show of civilities? – the surface pleasantries of a reality which is infinitely worse, unanswerably better?’ He put his arm around me suddenly and squeezed me. ‘Why Jenny,’ he said, seeing my eyes full of tears. ‘You old bubblyjock.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Only pleasure.’

  ‘Call that nothing, do you?’ Justin let me go. ‘So there you are, there is something that moves you. Said he cannily. This place.’

  ‘Even that is muted.’

  ‘Places take more time than people. There is no real love at first s-i-t-e.’ He spelt it. ‘Yet with people I do believe in it – instant attraction.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘We can’t have our way so much with places.’

  What kept our odd acquaintance going, Justin’s and mine, was something more than the state of suspension that he claimed we shared. It mattered to us both to have some point of reference in that strange place, some means of attesting to the effect it had on us. We used each other as the army wives used the PX – not only as a convenient source of supply, but as a source of the totally and reliably familiar. Between our separations and encounters, the city worked on us; and when we met it was as if to measure, against the supposedly fixed point of the other, the distance it had brought us; to compare, without discussing them, our unwritten notes.

  I seldom spoke, for instance, to Gioconda, of my brother and his wife. When I did mention them it was usually to Justin. In the first place, Gioconda would have understood too quickly instinctively, without absorbing the circumstances. An incestuous passion, consummated or otherwise, was an everyday affair at Naples, and she would never quite grasp what recognition of it in myself had meant to me. While Justin saw it against the tweed-and-cretonne background of post-war England and did not discount my distress, even for purposes of giving comfort.

  Something else that inhibited me in talking of these matters with Gioconda was the scope and drama of her own tragedies. Whereas the excavations of Gioconda’s past brought to light temples, palaces and tombs, with ornate interiors worthy of grand gestures and heroic renunciations, my own archaeology seemed by comparison like a mere scouring of some minor site – a hilltop encampment of the Hittites, say, or some beehive village of the Picts – yielding nothing more than a heap of domestic utensils and a handful of weapons, few intact and none beautiful.

  Gioconda herself, however, could not bear any suggestion of drama in her past. It was one of the few things that discomposed her. ‘No, no, no, you can’t conceive the dreariness of it, the indignity, the crushing daily items of an unhappy life, how endless time is when one wishes it past for no object, when one is continually afraid. I can hardly believe now that the war lasted only five years. One didn’t know then how any of it might end, if it would ever end. Now it appears to have had a beginning and a conclusion, but we could not know then the form it would take and
assumed only the worst … And the physical hardship – hunger, cold, being dirty, the time wasted searching for food, trying to be clean. Suffering, and the sight of suffering, and the knowledge of the worse suffering that is unseen.’ And she would spring up and walk about her room.

  Gioconda showed anger rarely. But the way in which she avoided certain subjects – government, religion, world events – and made light of other ones suggested the control of strong feeling rather than the absence of it; even, that there was violence in her which she recognized and disciplined, and that whenever this got the better of her, as it occasionally did, she was ashamed. Once, when we drove to Rome in her little car, I remember that we crossed a narrow river-bed, mostly stones; and I, seeing the sign on the bridge, cried out with the memory of the war, ‘The Voltumo — but it’s such a little river!’ And Gioconda turned to me – turned on me, you might say – and almost shouted, ‘They were all little rivers, all of them, always. Can’t you see that?’ When we had driven on she gave an apologetic laugh and glanced at me, and said, ‘Wait until you see the Rubicon.’ But for the rest of the journey she was subdued and defensive, as if she had exposed herself and regretted it.

  She gave, in talking, a number of these clues to passions that, had she not contended with them, might have ruled her – as when she had described herself writing at her father’s deathbed, or when she said to me ‘Italians are seldom harmless.’ But I, having established my own idea of her was unwilling to let her extend herself into complexities, and disregarded these promptings.

  ‘People resort to violence,’ she said to us, one evening when Gianni had taken us to dinner, ‘not to relieve their feelings but their thoughts. The demand for comprehension becomes too great, one would rather strike somebody than have to go on wondering about them.’

  I noted the transition from ‘people’ to ‘one’. I could not say I had ever felt the need of striking Norah; but then she was not a person one was required to wonder about.

  ‘In my youth,’ said Gianni, ‘I did some amateur boxing. But I would never have made a real pugilatore. My guard was too high. I had conceived some idea – mistakenly, no doubt — of my good looks, and I tried to protect my face. Yes, my guard was rather high; and that kept me from being really good.’

  ‘What I mean is, in anger. Or in some culmination of resentment.’

  On the other hand she could not be roused, as almost any anglo-saxon can be, to vocal indignation; she sensed its falsity and would have no part of it.

  In the warm early spring of that year the garbage collectors of Naples went on strike; their wages had not been paid, due to a disappearance of departmental funds. Rubbish piled up on pavements that were coated with grit, drains were blocked, refuse blew back and forth across littered streets, and one day at high noon I spotted a great ginger rat with prominent teeth hanging about behind the Hotel Excelsior.

  ‘Una zoccola,’ Gioconda said, when I described it. ‘That’s what they call a rat like that in Neapolitan.’

  ‘Well, it’s disgraceful.’

  ‘The word also means a prostitute – in fact, the saying here is that the last straw for a cat would be to lie in the arms of its mistress without realizing that she was una zoccola.’ Gioconda giggled. ‘The rat’s nest, that’s what Leopardi called Naples, La Topaia.’

  ‘It’s a scandal.’

  But these matters went too deep with her, she would not be drawn into them casually and merely shrugged to summarize twenty centuries of civic disillusionment.

  ‘What will happen?’

  ‘Oh – they say the mayor will have to pay the garbagemen, the old devil, out of his own pocket. He’s rich, he owns a shipping line. Whoever took the money kept that in mind, I dare say.

  ‘But Gioconda, what a state of affairs.’

  ‘The scogliere are full of them – those white rocks, you know, piled up along the shore.’

  ‘Full of what?’

  ‘Of zoccole.’

  The mayor, who was off in Sardinia, flew home and paid the garbage collectors from his private fortune; and Naples was cleaned up in time to hold a series of huge official receptions, in full dress, for a congress of the International Chamber of Commerce.

  Conversely Gioconda would puzzle, unpredictably, over matters that I easily absorbed or dismissed. Once in a while she reverted to the manner of our meeting, as if it continued to exercise her. I had written to the young man from Ealing, and forgotten him. But every so often Gioconda would pay him tribute for bringing us together – saying ‘Think of it’, or ‘How unlikely’, as if there were something there to be unravelled. She called him ‘The Pharmacist’, after an episode in a poem of Gozzano in which a great attachment is formed through a chance meeting in a chemist’s shop. It was as though she dwelt on these freakish, unresolved influences of our existence, wondering if they were coincidental or supernatural.

  Gioconda, moreover, had substance and territory of her own, while I earned a weekly living and was without even those resources that continuity of place and persons might have given me. When she told me how her book had enabled her to pay off the accumulated taxes on her flat, the fact of having a flat to be taxed on, and access to such a solution, made her, for me, a person of means and set her at liberty.

  These aspects of independence created passivity in me. The conviction from which she expressed herself was too pleasing — too reassuring — for me to challenge it: I took note of her affinities and opinions in a way I had done with no one else.

  When she said one day, in talking of my family, ‘They will recede,’ I felt assured, from her saying it, that it would be so. ‘Even your brother. You will think less about him, not seeing him, seeing others.’

  ‘My love,’ I primly answered her, ‘is not conditional.’

  She was standing on a chair putting a book back, and did not look down. ‘Love is the most conditional thing there is. A word, a tone of voice, a moment’s silence can change it irrevocably. I didn’t mean your feeling for your brother would completely dissolve. But it will lose its prominence and become a more and more distant landmark.’

  When she spoke this way I felt more than simply the truth of what she said. It was all natural to me, just as the sounds of Italian had seemed natural when I first began to learn them, and I wished I might always have been with people who thought and spoke like this.

  It did not occur to me to remind her of the contradiction in her own case. And what of your love, I might have said, subjected to so many words and actions and silences that might have changed it, and yet apparently immutable?

  CHAPTER NINE

  Gioconda spent the month of April on Capri. At Easter I saw her there when, for the long week-end, I too crossed to the islands. She was thinner – or seemed so, in grey trousers and a crimson pullover. The collar of a white shirt rising round her throat made her look at once younger and more womanly.

  Gianni was coming down from Rome, reaching the island by the last boat on Good Friday. ‘Ii vaporetto dei cornuti,’ Gioconda remarked of it, as we watched the boat approaching from Naples. ‘The boat of the cuckolds. That’s what they call it in summer when the rich take houses here – this last boat on Friday that brings the husbands over to join their wives for the week-end.’

  ‘With us it would be the other way round. In the summer it’s assumed the husbands have been having adventures all week in town.’

  ‘That too.’ Gioconda pleated her ticket, then unfolded it. She was on her way to the port to meet Gianni, and we were waiting for the funicular to take her down. She was often nervous, now, when Gianni was coming; once he was there she became calm, imperturbably so. ‘But that’s of course. It’s the other way round that’s significant, humiliating, frightful.’

  ‘I don’t see it,’ I said; and she laughed and flicked at me with her ticket, and said, ‘If you don’t see that, you don’t see any’ thing.’

  ‘Truly, it always seems to me,’ I said, although I had not considered the matter before, ‘t
hat women are rather more faithful than men wish them to be.’

  ‘You mean that a man will call a woman neurotic if she is faithful one moment beyond the time when he desires her love. When he himself has ceased to love.’

  I had not meant this, and wondered if she were thinking of Gianni’s wife.

  ‘But there again he retains what matters to him – the initiative.’

  After Gioconda had gone down to the port, I sat at one of the cafés in the piazza, rejoicing in liberty as I had done that December afternoon outside the Hotel Royal. I dwelt with almost physical pleasure on the evening that lay ahead to spend as I wished, with no need to be up early next day to meet the Colonel at the car. As I was enjoying these thoughts, the Colonel came out of the post office in a sports jacket and sat down at my table.

  ‘Enjoying the Isle of Capri, I see.’ He said it ‘Ca-pree’, as in the song. After a while he said, ‘You had better have dinner with me.’ He had this way of expressing himself in unfinished threats.

  I submitted to everything, having, as I thought, no excuse for doing otherwise, and not at that time realizing that my own preference was a justification. I went to dinner with the Colonel, in a restaurant near the piazza. He talked at length, savagely – and stupidly, for it is stupidity that makes people cruel — about Naples, about Italians, about our colleagues, and about a wider state of human affairs that he identified as ‘this mess’. When he went into the kitchen of the restaurant to complain about his fish, I dropped into his white wine a small sleeping pill I had put in a box in my handbag to be sure of sleeping long on my holiday. And by the time the wild strawberries arrived the Colonel had begun to doze.