John Steinbeck at Positano
I first heard of Positano from Alberto Moravia. It was very hot in Rome. He said,
"Why don't you go down to Positano on the Amalfi Coast? It is one of the
fine places of Italy". Later John McKnight of United States Information
Service told me the same thing. He had spent a year there working on a book.
Half a dozen people echoed this. Positano kind of moved in on us and we found
ourselves driving down to Naples on our way.
To an
American, Italian traffic is at first just down-right nonsense. It seems hysterical,
it follows no rule. You cannot figure what the driver ahead or behind or beside
you is going to do next and he usually does it. But there are other hazards
besides the driving technique.
There are
the motor scooters, thousands of them, which buzz at you like mosquitoes. There
is a tiny little automobile called "topolino" or "mouse"
which hides in front of larger cars; there are gigantic trucks and tanks in
which most of Italy's goods are moved; and finally there are assorted livestock,
hay wagons, bicycles, lone horses and mules out for a stroll, and to top it all
there are the pedestrians who walk blissfully on the highways never looking
about. To give this madness more color, everyone blows the horn all the time.
This deafening, screaming, milling, tire-screeching mess is ordinary Italian
highway traffic. My drive from Venice to Rome had given me a horror of it
amounting to cowardice.
I hired a
driver to take me to Positano. He was a registered driver in good standing. His
card reads: "Signor Bassani Bassano, Experienced Guide - all Italy - and
Throt Europe". It was the "Throt Europe" that won me.
Well, we
had accomplished one thing. We had imported a little piece of Italian traffic
right into our own front seat. Signor Bassani was a remarkable man. He was
capable of driving at a hundred kilometers an hour, blowing the horn,
screeching the brakes, driving mules up trees, and at the same time turning
around in the seat and using both hands to gesture, describing in loud tones
the beauties and antiquities of Italy and Throt Europe. It was amazing. It damn
near killed us. And in spite of that he never hit anybody or anything. The only
casualties were our quivering, bleeding nerves. I want to recommend Signor
Bassani to travellers. You may not hear much of what he tells you but you will
not be bored.
We squirmed
and twisted through Naples, past Pompeii, whirled and flashed into the
mountains behind Sorrento. We hummed "Come back to Sorrento"
dismally. We did not believe we could get back to Sorrento. Flaming like a
meteor we hit the coast, a road, high, high above the blue sea, that hooked and
corkscrewed on the edge of nothing, a road carefully designed to be a little
narrower than two cars side by side. And on this road, the buses, the trucks,
the motor scooters and the assorted livestock. We didn't see much of the road.
In the back seat my wife and I lay clutched in each other's arms, weeping
hysterically, while in the front seat Signor Bassano gestured with both hands
and happily instructed us: "Ina dda terd sieglo da Hamperor Hamgousternos
coming tru wit Leegeceons". (Our car hit and killed a chicken.) "Izz
molto lot old heestory here. I know. I tall. "Thus he whiled us
"Throt Italy". And below us, and it seemed sometimes under us, a
thousand feet below lay the blue Tyrrhenian licking its lips for us.
Once during
the war I came up this same lovely coast in the American destroyer Knight. We
came fast. Germans threw shells at us from the hills and aircraft splashed
bombs at us and submarines unknown tried to lay torpedoes on us. I swear I
think it was much safer than that drive with Signor Bassano. And yet he brought
us at last, safe but limp, to Positano.
Positano
bites deep. It is a dream place that isn't quite real when you are there and
becomes beckoningly real after you have gone. Its houses climb a hill so steep
it would be a cliff except that stairs are cut in it. I believe that whereas
most house foundation are vertical, in Positano they are horizontal. The small
curving hay of unbelievably blue and green water lips gently on a beach of
small pebbles. There is only one narrow street and it does not come down to the
water. Everything else is stairs, some of them as steep as ladders. You do not
walk to visit a friend, you either climb or slide.
Nearly always
when you find a place as beautiful as Positano, your impulse is to conceal it.
You think, "If I tell, it will be crowded with tourists and they will ruin
it, turn it into a honky-tonk and then the local people will get touristy and
there's your lovely place gone to hell". There isn't the slightest chance
of this in Positano. In the first place there is no rooms. There about two
thousand inhabitants in Positano and there is room for about five hundred
visitors, no more. The cliffs are all taken. Except for the half ruinous houses
very high up, all space is utilized.
And the
Positanese invariably refuse to sell. They are curious people. I will go into
that later.
Again,
Positano is never likely to attract the organdie-and-white linen tourist. It
would be impossible to dress as a languid tourist-lady-crisp, cool white dress,
sandals as white and light as little clouds, picture hat of arrogant nonsense,
and one red rose held in a listless white-gloved pinky. I dare any dame to
dress like this and climb the Positano stairs for a cocktails. She will arrive
looking like a washcloth at a boys' camp. There is no way for her to get
anywhere except by climbing. The third deterrent to a great influx of tourists
lies in the nature of the Positanese themselves. They just don't give a damn.
They have been living here since before recorded history and they don't intend
to change now. They don't have much but they like have and will not move over
for a buck.
We went to
the Sirenuse, an old family house converted into a first class hotel, spot less
and cool, with grape arbors over its outside dining rooms. Every room has its
little balcony and looks out over the blue sea to the islands of the sirens
from which those ladies sang so sweetly. The owner of the Hotel Sirenuse is an
Italian nobleman, Marquis Paolo Sersale. He is also the mayor of Positano, a
strong handsome man of about fifty who dresses mostly like a beachcomber and
works very hard at his job as mayor. How he got the job is an amusing story.
Positano
elects a town council of fifteen members. The council then elects one of its
members mayor. The people of Positano are almost to a man royalist in their
politics. This is largely true of much of the south of Italy but it is vastly
true of Positano. The fishermen and shoemakers, the carpenters and truck
drivers favor a king and particularly a king from the house of Savoy. This was
true when the present mayor was elected. The Marquis Paolo Sersale was elected
because he was a Communist, the only one in town. It was his distinction in a
whole electorate of royalists. One of Sersale's ancestors commanded a gallery
of war at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 when the power of the Moslem was
finally broken and Christian control of Europe assured. He does not say why he
became a Communist. But he does say that he left the party in 1947 not in anger
but in a kind of disgust. The township was a little sad about his losing his
distinction, but they have elected him ever since, in spite of that.
The mayor
of Positano is an archaeologist, a philosopher and an administrator. He has one
policeman to keep order and there isn't much for his force to do. He says,
"Nearly all Positanese are related. If there is any trouble it is like a
family fight and I never knew any good to come of interfering in a family
quarrel". The mayor wanders about the town upstairs and downstairs. He
dresses in tired slacks, a sweat shirt and sandals. He holds court anywhere he
is, sitting on a stonewall overlooking the sea, leaning against the edge of a
bar, swimming in the sea or curled up on the beach. Very little business gets
done in the City Hall. The police force has so much time free that he takes odd
jobs to make a little extra money.
The history
of Positano is rich, long and little crazy. But one thing is certain: it has
been around a long time. When the Emperor Tiberius moved to Capri because he
was detested in Rome, he didn't trust anyone. He would not eat bread made with
the flour of his part of the country. His galley instead crept down the coast
to Positano and got flour from a mill which still stands against the mountain
side. This mill has been improved and kept up, of course, but it still grinds
flour for the Positanese.
This little
town of Positano has had a remarkable past. As part of the Republic of Amalfi
in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, it helped to write the first
maritime laws we know in which the rights of sailors were set down. In the
tenth century it was one of the most important mercantile cities of the world,
rivaling Venice. Having no harbor, its great galleys were pulled bodily up on
the beach by the townspeople.
There is a
story that on one Holy Saturday when no church bell was allowed to ring in all
Christendom, a Positano ship was in trouble from a great storm. The bishop who
was officiating at the altar declared the rule off, rang the bell himself and
then joined the population on the beach and in his vestments helped to pull the
crippled ship ashore. Like most Italian towns Positano has its miraculous
picture. It is a Byzantine representation of the Virgin Mary. Once log ago, the
story goes, the Saracenic pirates raided the town and among other things
carried away this picture. But they had no sooner put to sea when a vision came
to them which so stunned them that they returned the picture. Every year on
August 15, this incident is re-enacted with great fury and some bloodshed. In
the night the half-naked pirates attack the town which is defended by
Positanese men-at-arms dressed in armor. Some of this fighting gets pretty serious.
The pirates then go to the church and carry the holy picture off into the
night. Now comes the big moment. As soon as they have disappeared into the
darkness, a bright and flaming image of an angel appears in the sky. At present
General Mark Clark is the sponsor of this miracle. He gave the town a surplus
Air Force barrage balloon. Then very soon the pirates return in their boats and
restore the picture to the church and everybody marches and sings and has a
good time.
In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Positano became very rich. Its ships went
everywhere, trading in the Near and Middle East, carrying the spices and
precious wood the Western world craved. Then the large and beautiful baroque
houses that stand against the mountain were built and decorated with the looft
of the world.
About a
hundred years ago a tragedy came to the town. Steamships began to ply the
ocean. Positano could not compete; year by year it grew poorer and more
desperate. At that time there were about eight thousand citizens. Between 1860
and 1870 about six thousand of the townsmen emigrated to America and great
houses stood vacant and their walls crumbled and the painted designs paled out
and the roofs fell in. the population has never got much above two thousand
since.
If Positano
bites deeply into a stranger, it is branded on the Positanese. The bulk of the
émigrés went to New York and most of them settled on Columbus
Avenue. They made a little Positano of it, they celebrate the same festivals as
the mother town, they talk Positano and live Positano. In New York there are
over five thousand people who where born in Positano - twice as many as live in
the mother city. Besides these there are many thousands of descendants and all
of them are tied very closely to the Italian city.
One of the
hardest duties of the major is trying to find graveyard space for the New York
Positanese who want their bodies returned to their native town. The graveyard
is as big as it can be. There is no room to extend it without blazing away the
mountain. Just about every available inch is taken, but the major must edge the
old-timers in some way.
About ten
years ago a Moslem came to Positano, liked it and settled. For a time he was
self-supporting but gradually he ran out of assets and still he stayed. The
town supported him and took care of him. Just as the mayor was their only
Communist, this was their only Moslem. They felt that he belonged to them.
Finally he died and his only request was that he might be buried with his feet
toward Mecca. And this, so Positano thought, was done. The Moslem had been
buried by dead reckoning and either the compass was off or the map was faulty.
He had been buried 28 degrees off course. This was outrageous to a seafaring
town. The whole population gathered, dug the Moslem up, put him on course and
covered him up again.
Positano
does not have much of any industry. At night the finishing boats put out with
powerful lights on their bows. They fish all night for anchovies and squids,
and the bow lights of the boats litter the sea to sight's edge. But in
finishing, Positano has a rival -the little town of Praiano, a few miles down
the coast. The rivalry has been so great that a fishing code has been long
established. When a school of fish is sighted the lampara boats run for it. He
first boat to reach it puts net and make its circling run. Meanwhile other
boats from the other town have raced for the school. If the first boat
completes its circle before the others arrive, the school belongs to it. If
not, both the towns share in the catch. This is important in light of a story
that comes later.
On shore
there is a little shoemaking, some carpentry and a few arts and crafts. It
would be difficult to consider tourists an industry because there are not
enough of them. They do, however, provide a bit of luxury for the villagers.
Far up the
mountain a convent looks down on the sea and here little girls are taught the
delicate and dying art of lacemaking by the sites. The girls are paid and the
lace sold to support the school and incidentally the children. The flying
fingers of the little girls working with the hundreds of bobbins make the eye
dizzy, and the children look up and laugh and talk as though they were of magic
of their flashing fingers. Some of the work is unbelievable. We saw a great
tablecloth, a spider web intricate as a though. It was the work of fifty for
one year.
In a few
days we became aware of Positano' s greatest commodity - characters. Maybe they
aren't marketable, but Positano has them above every community I have ever
seen. There are the men who have lived in America and have come again to bask
in the moral. Physical, political and sartorial freedoms which flourish in
their birth town. Clothing is as harum-scarum as a man's mind can wish, but it
must be comfortable. The postman who climbs all stairs every day wears his
official postman's cap, and corduroy trousers with braces but has left off a
shirt if the day is warm. An other man finds pajama pants, a loose vest and a
flat straw hat the perfect costume. He carries sandals but in the same way a
well dressed man who hates gloves carries gloves. Even the lightest open sandal
is a stricture on his happy feet.
In a bar or
on the beach you may see an incredibly old man with the bright eyes of a wise
bird or an innocent snake. He is a witch. He learned his craft from a witch .
He treats the ills of the whole town. His method lies in his hands, small,
white, weak-looking hands. When a patient has pain, these hands slowly creep
over the area while the eyes of the wizard look off into space and he seems to
be listening. The hands seems to be separate from him. The fingers find the
area of pain and then gently walk about it, feeling and soothing and massaging
but very gently. And his patients say that the pains go away. I don't know. I
didn't have any pain.
Yes,
Positano flourishes with characters. On the beach there is a famous shoemaker.
He builds sandals and shoes for the whole town, but this is only his part-time
job. He believes that Ferragamo, the great Italian shoe designer, steals his
ideas and he is a little angry about it, but then he realizes his true role. He
is the friend and confident of great men. Once a number of years ago, he was
the eyes and, some say, the conscience of Dino Grandi, the Italian general. When
Grandi came to Positano to rest he sometimes sat and talked with the shoemaker.
And after the general had left, the shoemaker would not talk to common mortals
for several days. He tapped and thought and sewed and thought and he remarked
once: "I do not feel it fitting that I should discuss anything with
outsiders after I have been admitted to the secrets of government and
diplomacy". He got to talking like Grandi and standing with his head back
and his chin out the way Grandi did.
After the
war, General Mark Clark came to Positano and he too talked with the shoemaker.
And again the shoemaker would not speak for several days, but it was noticed
that he stood with his shoulders forward and his head bent studying the ground
- the normal posture of General Clark. The shoemaker told me in some
confidence:
"He
put his hand right here, right here, the General did," and he pointed to a
place on his shoulder, and his eyes looked off into grandeur.
Mark Clark
has left his mark on the town. In an older time he would wear the halo of a
saint instead of the stars of a general. He is the town's patron and he rose to
this position rather simply. Positano has always had a temperamental and highly
undependable water system. There is plenty of water in the mountain but the means
to get it to the gardens and the kitchens of the town were primitive or
nonexistent. Mark Clark gave the town a few thousand meters of scrap water
pipe, left over from the Italian campaign. The townsmen installed it
themselves. Now the water goes inevitably to the gardens and the kitchens and
the public fountains of Positano, so that many times a day every Positanese
thinks of the General Mark Clark, pronounced Clock.
A number of
writers have gone to Positano to do their work. Some of these are Americans and
some are British. Nothings in the little town is designed to disturb your
thoughts provided you have a thought. Such a recluse was John McKnight, now of
the United States Foreign Service, but then in process of writing The Papacy, a
long and careful study of the history of the Vatican and its position in the
present-day world.
He and his
wife lived for a year in a little house with a garden right over the water in
the southern part of the town. The McKnights come from North Carolina and they
settled into the life of Positano as naturally as they had settled into Chapel
Hill. Then the year turned and Thanksgiving began looming.
Now an
American living long abroad may become completely expatriate. He may speak
foreign, think foreign, eat foreign, but let Christmas or Fourth of July or
Thanksgiving come around and something begins to squirm inside him and he finds
he has to do something about it.
Johnny and
Liz McKnight speak Italian fluently, read , eat and live Italian. But when
Thanksgiving came near in Positano, the McKnights found themselves dreaming of
roast turkey and dressing of cranberry sauce and plum pudding, of mint juleps.
They got to waking up in the night and thinking about it.
The turkey
arrived in a crate tied to the top of a bus. It was a fine vigorous but
slightly hysterical bird and for a week it gobbled and strutted in the one bird
turkey yard built for it in the garden until gradually its nerves got back to
normal. It didn't know that the looks of its new friends were not friendly.
Johnny remembered
a bit of wisdom imparted to him by his grandfather, in North Carolina. Violent
death, his grandfather said, be it to man or to turkey, is a nervous and
discouraging experience. The muscles are likely to go hard and certain unhappy
juices are released into the system. His grandfather did not know how that
affected the flavor of man but in a turkey it had a tendency to make the meat
tough and a little bitter. But there was a way to avoid that. If about two
hours before the execution, the turkey is given a couple of slugs of good
brandy, the nervous tension relaxed, the turkey's state of mind is clear and
healthy and he goes to the block happy and even grateful. Then when he is
served, instead of bitter juices of fear and shock, there is likely to be a
delicious hint of cognac in the meat.
Johnny
decided to follow the custom of North Carolina. Then he found that he did not
the seem right and the only other thing he has was a bottle of Grand Marnier.
It was better than brandy. It would give not solace to the turkey but an
orangey flavor to the meat.
The turkey
fought the idea at first. But finally Johnny got him held firmly under his arm
and held the beak open while Liz put four or five eyedroppers of Grand Marnier
down the bird's throat. At first the turkey gagged a little but in a moment or
two its head dropped, a sweet but wild look came in its eyes and it waved its
head in rhythm with some gentle but not quite sober thought that went through
its head. Johnny carried it gently to the pen. It wobbled a bit and settled
down comfortably and went to sleep.
"I'll
do for it in its sleep", Johnny thought. "That turkey will never know
what happened". And he went to the refrigerator to see how the mint juleps
were doing.
There were
doing fine. He brought two of them back to the garden, and he and Liz sat down
to begin the Thanksgiving.
The
McKnights do not know what happened. Johnny thinks the turkey may have had a
bad dream. They heard a hiccupping gobble. The turkey rose straight up in the
air, and screaming triumphantly flew out to the sea.
Now we must
go back to the sea laws of the Amalfi Coast. In the hills above the towns of
Positano and its rival Praiano, watchers are usually posted. They not only keep
watch for school of fish but for anything which may be considered flotsam,
jetsam or selvage. These watchers saw the McKnights' seagoing turkey fly to sea
and they also saw it crash into the water a couple of miles off shore.
Immediately
boats put off from both Positano and Praiano. The race was on and they arrived
at about the same time. But the turkey, alas, had drowned. The fishermen
brought it tenderly back, arguing softly about whether it was a matter for
salvage court. The turkey was obviously out of command. Johnny McKnight easily
settled the problem with the rest of the bottle of Grand Marnier.
They cooked
the turkey that afternoon and sat down to dinner about eight in the evening.
And they say that not even an extra dose of sage in the dressing completely
removed the taste of sea water from the white meat.
(From
Harper's Bazaar, May 1953)
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