A Writer's World (40 page)

Is this, it now occurs to me, the source of that enigma? Does San Francisco know precisely
what
it is? Tourism has created a San Francisco, of course, of very pronounced identity – tourism, which turns even tourists themselves into pretend people, and drives whole cities, whole countries into pastiche. But behind the familiar images, Coit and cable car, Fisherman’s Wharf and Alcatraz, lies – what? Is this it, I often find myself asking in San Francisco. Is this all there is?

Perhaps I am demanding too much, and should be content with the charm and kindness of this most charming and kindly of cities, the happy disorientation of its hills and waters, the ever-surprising vistas at the ends of its streets, the bleached cleanness of everything, the fine old ladies, the celestial setting, the innocent pretence of it all, its sense of easygoing detachment from a harsh and greedy world.

Perhaps. Looking out my window the other morning over the cluttered tourism of the Wharf, it seemed to me that everything I saw was some kind of sham. A superannuated sailing ship lay at a pier no longer working. The flag of a defunct republic flew. A couple of sightseeing boats sailed out
towards a disused prison, and the cable cars that passed were not really cable cars at all, but buses in disguise. Synthetic grass surrounded the swimming pool below me. From restaurants around I could smell, if only in fancy, the odours of de-frozen swordfish and plastic-packaged clams. Is
nothing
real, I rudely wondered, in silly San Francisco?

But at that very moment there entered my field of view a submarine: a very black, very sinister, all too real and active submarine, on its way no doubt through the Golden Gate to missile patrol in the Pacific. Instantly my perceptions changed. All of a sudden the frivolous scene below my window acquired a new and grander meaning. A shame-faced sense of ingratitude overcame me, and watching that mean black warship sliding by, ‘Well,’ said I reproachfully to myself, ‘there goes reality, if that’s what you’d prefer …’

On the steps of the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro, a Dutch combo plays Dixieland jazz. It is an extremely white, blonde and stalwart combo, and on its flank four Dutch airline hostesses (for it is in the nature of an advertising session) oscillate to the music with a well-built air of carnival. I sit beside them on the steps, and between the lot of us, so blatantly northern European, so patently un-Dixie, we present a comically incongruous spectacle, in the heart of the great Brazilian city, at the height of the noonday rush.

But it does not matter in the least. The city effortlessly absorbs us anyway. Some thirty or forty people of all ages, all colours, are stomping, clapping and laughing with us at the foot of the steps, and very soon the occasion is more or less taken over by an elderly, half-crazed man who prances with rhythmic grace up the steps, singing the while and grinning inanely to universal applause.

The legendary fizz of Rio is not merely infectious, but actually possessive. It seizes one, sets one wriggling and jerking to the beat of things and often
leaves one laughing when one should really be crying. When that band went off, still trumpeting, to its next stand, pursued by its own poor Fool, I stood up myself and found the back of my shirt splodged with some chocolaty sticky substance. The crowd examined it with interested concern. Whether it had been sprayed on me by a disgruntled street hawker, or dropped upon me by some arcane Brazilian bird, they were unable to decide, but they took me off to a small ornamental pond where I might wash it off.

I dipped my handkerchief into the scummy water and found it to be alive with tadpoles: a thousand incipient Brazilian frogs there beside the Avenida Rio Branco, squirming indefatigably as I washed the stuff off my shirt, and the music of the Dutch sounded fainter and fainter across the effervescent city.

Wiping off the last of that muck, and a few tenacious tadpoles with it, I walked around the corner into the nineteenth century. Rio is not all travel-brochure glitz. It is an old merchant city, a seaport, and its downtown is venerable with offices, banks, warehouses, bars where the businessmen go for lunch, city alleys and squares with statues in them. In old photographs this busy commercial area
is
Rio de Janeiro, and a solid, sensible, businesslike place it looks.

A surviving glory of that era is the Colombo on Rua Gonçalves Dias, one of the best cafés in the world. Clad as grandiloquently in mirrors as Versailles itself, it is a very palace of refreshment. Its ceiling is of stained glass, its floors are tiled and it gleams with glass cabinets full of bottles, cakes, cookies and neatly stacked table linen. Clusters of old-fashioned lamps illuminate it, and fans laboriously keep it cool.

The multitudinous bow-tied waiters of the Colombo look as though they have spent their whole lives in its service, and at lunchtime they are all old-school professionalism, scurrying and skirting through the tables that jam the huge floor space, bowing here, waving a response there, pushing in and out of the kitchen doors or dimly to be glimpsed attending to the customers who sit, precariously it seems, at gilded tables on the high, narrow balcony above.

The noise is terrific, and the clientele ranges from the stately to the alternative, by way of many eccentric and atavistically made-up dowagers. Things have hardly changed here, I suspect, since the place opened in 1894. Rio, however, is Rio, and the atmosphere is peculiarly relaxed. When I finished my meal, I walked out past the cake cabinets, and there, leaning
against a counter, brushing crumbs from his black jacket, was the waiter who had just served me, taking time off to eat a cake himself. I wished him
bon
appétit
, but he could only smile and bow slightly in response, for he had his mouth full.

Youth, of course, is the thing in Rio. It is an old-young city – he was an old-young waiter – and on the beach at Copacabana, any weekend morning, the human ageing process seems mysteriously disrupted. Here I stroll along the famous beach, eating a banana, and all around me the laws of nature are defied.

It is clearly impossible, physically impossible, for that grand motherly lady to touch her toes so easily. It is positively unnatural for that group of aged gents to throw themselves about with such agility in their game of ball: their faces are wizened, their hair is white, but some weird Brazilian alchemy has kept their muscles iron-taut and their movements uncannily springy. Then what about these geriatric couples striding along the promenade? By what dispensation do they wear shoes, hats and swimsuits a couple of generations too young for them, yet get away with it so stylishly? There is an old dear on the beach who would surely be, in another society, confined if not to the back kitchen at least to the church flowers committee; here at Copacabana she is oiling herself sinuously on her sunbed, wearing a wide yellow hat and rhinestoned sunglasses, and now and then drinking from a can she has embedded in the sand like a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket.

The young, too, seem younger still upon this magic shore. They plunge more frantically into the surf. They scamper more merrily around the sunshades. They build big platforms of sand on which they sit cross-legged like gurus, playing cards or squabbling. They play ever more demanding games: for example, a ferocious kind of volleyball in which the ball may be touched by any part of the body except the head, requiring such excruciating leaps and contortions that it makes me breathless just to watch them.

Out at sea a haze of spray hangs over the breakers and half obscures the islands beyond. Through it a squadron of white-sailed yachts scuds and tacks, and presently a grey warship appears around the point and disappears into the Atlantic. It looks a wild southern sea out there. The sun goes slowly, very slowly down. The madcap rejuvenations of Copacabana continue apace. Crossing the street to one of the cafés behind, I order a
Brazilian drink of great potency that instantly restores me to youth myself.

There Fagin’s boys are hanging around, looking for likely victims, nice American tourists with watches to be snatched or handbags to leave lying around on the beach. They are all too obvious little rascals – like stage villains, making over-acted gestures to each other, whistling conspiratorially across street corners and posing only in the most perfunctory way as bootblacks or sellers of trinkets.

Alas, they are not in the least lovable. There is not an Oliver among them. They look perfectly horrid, and swarming around them I fancy always the flies and fleas of the slums they come from – whose greyish shambled precincts one can see from this very beach, like spills of garbage tumbling down the hillsides. Christ himself stands high above, arms outstretched on the summit of Corcovado, but the shanty-towns below, like those small thieves on the beach, look utterly beyond his benediction.

A streak of loveless abandonment runs through the life of Rio, and not least through its exhilaration – through the panache of the street crowds, through the disturbing hyperactivity of the beach, through all the luxuries of the Rio rich. The city is scrawled over with unsightly graffiti. Some proclaim political slogans, but most are senseless squiggles and scrawls, reaching to the second floors of houses sometimes, when daring nihilists have climbed up trellises or hung upside-down from balconies. This mindless mess suggests to me a message from the void, telling us always of the helplessness, amounting to a kind of communal exhaustion, that lies beneath the glitter of Rio de Janeiro.

I sit now in a motionless bus near the foot of the Sugar Loaf, at a place where a small park runs down to the sea. There are military offices near by, and in constant twos and threes colonels and captains walk by carrying briefcases. A few children are there with their mothers, too, and tourists come and go from the funicular station, but my eye is captured by a solitary middle-aged man hanging about at the edge of the park. He bears himself elegantly, slim and erect in a well-cut grey suit, but there is something wrong with him.

It seems to be partly physical, partly mental, and partly, perhaps, too much coffee. He can never get comfortable. If he sits on a bench, after a moment he gets up again. If he takes a turn around the grass, he abruptly stops. Sometimes he looks up at the hill above, but it seems only to disappoint him, as if he cannot see what he is looking for up there. He inspects the passing officers keenly (was he once a colonel or captain
himself?) but he recognizes none. He gazes longingly out to sea, but the sun gets in his eyes. When my bus starts, and we move away from the park, I wave at him through my window, and he waves abstractedly back – but not at me, I think, not at me.

‘Kev.
Kev!
Time you got going.’

‘Jeez, Sandra, it’s raining out there.’

‘TV says it’s fining up. You’re not crook are you, Kev? It’s all that booze you know, Kev, you know what the doctor said, cut down on the booze, he said, no wonder you’re crook in the mornings, the human body can take only so much …’

But Kev has slipped out by now, and with his office gear slung in his backpack is away, and up the steps, and half-way along the approach to the great bridge.

If he was crook, he is crook no more, for the TV was right, the rain clears as if by magic, and all the glory of the winter morning unfolds over the water as he breaks into his jog along the sidewalk. He is joining the stream of life itself! To his right the suburban trains clatter, the commuter cars lurch in fits and starts towards the city. To his left ferries bustle across the harbour, the first hydrofoil is streaking in a foamy curve towards the sea, the very first yacht is slipping from its moorings, and a tug is on its way, riding lights still burning, to meet the towering freighter just appearing around the headland.

On the harbour bridge there are already plenty of people about. He overtakes briskly walking businessmen with briefcases and identical moustaches. He is overtaken by huge athletes in sweatbands and sloganed shirts. Archetypal schoolboys loiter their way, satchels dangling, reluctantly towards their education. An elderly lady in a mackintosh cries ‘Grand to see the sun again!’ in an exaggeratedly Irish brogue. Another pack of giants comes panting and sweating past. Another covey of schoolboys kicks a pebble
here and there. Ahead of him, between the massive pylons of the bridge, the city towers are beginning to gleam in the sun, and there is a flashing of upper windows, and a fluttering of flags in and out of shadow, and a golden shine from the observation deck of the tallest tower of all.

It is as though the innocence of the morning has infected the whole scene, and made everything young. A pristine vigour is on the air, very fresh and good for you, like orange juice. By the time Kev reaches his office on the seventeenth floor, he feels he’s never drunk a tinny of Foster’s in his life: and looking back upon the scurrying ferries of the Circular Quay, the flying white roofs of the Opera House, the traffic still streaming across the bridge, the rising sun and the water and the green park-lands all around, silently he congratulates himself once more, as he does every morning as a matter of principle, upon his great good fortune in being born an Australian.

The city he surveys is a very concentrate of that condition. The whole matter of Australia, history, character, reputation, attitude, finds its best epitome in this particular corner of the great land mass, where Sydney stands beside its fjord-like harbour. When the world thinks of Australia, it thinks of that bridge, that Opera House, that wake-frothed and yacht-flecked harbour. When the world thinks of an Australian, it thinks, more or less, of Kev.

Australian society is overwhelmingly urban, and Sydney is Australia
urbanissima
. Canberra is the capital, Adelaide is a delight, Perth holds the America’s Cup, Melbourne people believe their city to be at least as mature, civilized and unutterably lovely, but only Sydney has the true metropolitan presence. An enormous spread of suburbia around an intensely packed downtown, it stands upon its marvellous haven in the stance of proper consequence. A glittering business quarter makes one feel it is keyed in to the Wall Street–London–Zurich–Hong Kong circuit of profit. The inescapable presence of virtually the whole Australian Navy, moored beside its dockyards or glamorously returning from sea with ensigns flying and radars twirling, gives it a front-line air. It is equipped with all the statutory metropolitan tokens – city marathon, revolving restaurant, supine veiled figure by Henry Moore, breakfast TV and Bahai temple.

Its stature really resides, though, not in its universality, not in its membership in the league of big cities, but for better or worse, like it or not, in its unchallengeable Australian-ness. It is a metropolis sui generis. Take its looks for a start. Architecturally Sydney is no great shakes. Its
suburbs are at best pleasantly ordinary, enlivened only, here and there, by wrought iron and engaging terracing. Its downtown is handsome but unexceptional, the usual cubes, cylinders, plazas and mirror-walls of contemporary urbanism surrounding the usual clumps of nineteenth-century florid. It has no elegant set pieces of civic planning, and has crudely degraded its waterfront on Sydney Cove, the site of its beginnings and still the focus of its life, by building an expressway slap across it.

Yet it is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, specifically because it is Australian. That winding, nooky, islanded, bosky harbour thrillingly reminds one always that Sydney stands on the shore of an island totally unlike anywhere else on earth. The pale pure light of the Sydney winter seems to come straight from the bergs and ice mountains of Antarctica. The foliage of Sydney’s parks and gardens is queerly drooped and tangled, apparently antediluvian fig trees overshadow suburban streets, and the perpetual passing of the ships through the very heart of the city gives everything a tingling sense of remoteness. The water goes down the plug-hole the other way in Australia, and it really is possible to imagine, if you are a fancifully minded visitor from the other hemisphere, that this metropolis is clinging upside-down to the bottom of the earth, so subtly antipodean, or perhaps marsupial, is the nature of the scene.

The supreme Sydney experience, for such a traveller, is a walk on a brisk sunny morning around the headland called Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, through a complex of park and garden beside the harbour. Except only for Stanley Park in Vancouver, this seems to me the loveliest of all city park-lands, but its loveliness is of a sly, deceptive kind. It is like a park in the mind. The grass is almost too vividly green, the trees look curiously artificial, parakeets squawk viciously at each other in the shrubbery. The shifting scene around you, as you walk the park’s perimeter, seems more ideal than actual – water everywhere, and those grey warships at their quays, and glimpses of Riviera-like settlements all around, and a sham castle in a garden, and the inescapable passing of the ferries.

And slyest of all is the prospect as you round the point itself, where the families are spreading their picnics on the grass, and a solitary ibis is burrowing for edibles in a rubbish can; for there suddenly like an aerie fantasy the Sydney Opera House, most peculiar of architectural masterpieces, spreads its white wings in the sunshine, light as some unsuspected water-bird, with the massive old harbour bridge, a beast to its insubstantial beauty, all brutal heft above.

Those two unforgettable structures, the one rooted so powerfully in the bedrock, the other aspiring to the state of levitation, represent the nature of this city more than aesthetically. Upon Sydney’s foundation of absolute British Australian-ness has been superimposed a prismatically ethnic super-structure, making this city, formerly one of the most homogeneous and stodgy in the world, a fascinating mix of the complacent and the tentative, the almost immovable and the practically irresistible. Once it used to suggest nowhere else. Now it is full of alien allusion. It reminds me often of Stockholm. As Sydney is to the South, Stockholm is to the North, and Sydney’s Australia is Stockholm’s Scandinavia – I am not surprised that the Danish architect of the Opera House clearly had in his memory, as he planned his prodigy, Stockholm’s Town Hall upon an inlet of another sea. The light of this southern fjord is not unlike the light of the Baltic; a pallid freshness is common to both cities; sitting snugly out of the sunlight in Sydney’s Strand Arcade, all fancy balustrades and tessellated paving, sometimes I almost expect to see the shoppers shaking the snow from their galoshes, breathing in their hands to restore the circulation, and ordering themselves a schnapps.

At other moments Sydney reminds me of somewhere in central Europe; any Saturday morning in the plush waterside suburb called Double Bay, for example, when the rich immigrants assemble in the street café of the Cosmopolitan, talking loudly in Ruritanian, or deep in the financial pages of the
Sydney
Morning
Herald
. Like the bourgeoisie of old Prague or Budapest they while the hours away in chat and exhibitionism – here four men with coats slung over their shoulders, smoking small cigars and passionately arguing about President Beneö –here a couple of leathery ladies, furred and proudly diamonded, sitting in lofty silence over aperitifs – a young poseur in a deer-stalker hat, smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder, a gaggle of Double Bay socialites in the swathed ragbag fashion, faintly Martial Arts in suggestion, rampant in Sydney at the moment.

Lebanese proliferate in Sydney, and Greeks, and Filipinos, and Indonesians. The Vietnamese, they tell me, are shifting out of the western suburbs towards East Sydney. Maori gays, gossip picturesquely maintains, are taking over Bondi. The Spanish Club advertises itself with a picture of Don Quixote and Sancho riding out of a golden Outback. Sydney’s Chinatown booms with investment from Hong Kong, and the Chinese taste for unexpectedly mixed foods seems to have infected the entire municipal cuisine, so that perfectly true-blue Aussie restaurants are likely to offer you hot buttered pumpkin and orange soup with peppercorns
floating in it, or quail in a sauce made of red wine and bacon. The Sydney Municipal Board sometimes likes to announce itself in all the languages of its tax-paying citizenry, and these arcane proclamations, attached to some lumpish municipal pile of mid-Victorian imperialism, pungently illustrate the state of things.

Still dominant nevertheless, as the bridge looms high over the Opera House, stand the likes of Kev. The flow of immigration has softened, eased and illuminated Sydney, but it came too late ever to displace the original bloodstream of this city. Half a century ago 98 per cent of Sydney people were of British descent, and it is they, the Old Australians, who still set the anthropological tone. Sit long enough among the Ruritanians at the Cosmopolitan, and some beefy young Ocker will arrive to steal the scene and drink his beer out of the bottle. Go to
La
Traviata
at the Opera House, and my, what an unexpectedly hearty and robust chorus of ladies and gentlemen will be attendant upon Violetta in the opening act, their crinolines and Parisian whiskers delightfully failing to disguise physiques born out of Australian surf and sunshine, and names like Higginson and O’Rourke – while even La Traviata herself, as she subsides to the last curtain, may seem to you the victim of some specifically Australian variety of tuberculosis, since she looks as though immediately after the curtain-call she will be off for a vigorous set of tennis with the conductor, or at least a grilled lobster with orange sauce and caramel.

Such is the strength of Kev’s sub-species, into which the children of all those immigrants, too, are inexorably mutated. Years ago, waiting for the Manly ferry, I caught the eye of a young Italian working at a coffee-stall, and I remember distinctly the wiry black Latinate quality of his person. I went down there again the other day to see if he was still about, and I found him not just aged and plumped, but altogether altered by the Kev Effect – his face pulled into a different shape, his sparkle replaced by something more wary or blunted, or perhaps dreamier. And when he spoke, the last traces of Neapolitanism were all but hidden beneath the virile twisted vowels of Australian English.

Language they say is the badge of nationality, and above all else it is the language of Sydney that binds this fissile society into a recondite unity. It is many years since the writer Monica Dickens, at a Sydney signing session, famously inscribed a volume to Emma Chissett, misunderstanding a lady who wanted to know the price of the book, but fundamentally the vernacular has not changed: ‘Emma Chissett?’ I make a point of asking now, when I want to buy something, and the shop assistants never give me a second
glance, taking my dinkum Aussiness for granted, and frequently confiding in me their grievances about the train service from Parramatta.

Or from Woop Woop perhaps, an imaginary township which has become a Sydney generic for the back of beyond. Sydney English is full of such fantasies and in-jokes, and consciously perpetuates itself in self-amusement, hardly a year passing without another new dictionary of the argot. Usages change constantly – out goes
she’ll be
apples
(‘it’ll be OK’), in comes
throwing a
mental
(losing one’s temper) – and there is almost nobody in Sydney, schoolboy to sage, who is not eager to discuss the present state of the vernacular. Why do Sydney women end all their sentences, even the most definite, with a rising interrogative inflection? Because they’re so put down they daren’t say anything for sure. What’s the true definition of an Ocker? ‘A man who watches the footy on TV with a terry-towel hat on his head and a tinny of Foster’s balanced on his belly.’

The language makes the man, and makes the city too. Without his language your Sydney citizen (he no longer calls himself a Sydneysider) might be taken for a Scandinavian, a Californian or even sometimes an Englishman: with it even a second-generation immigrant can be mistaken for nobody else, and the fizz and the fun of the tongue reflects Sydney’s particular strain of constancy. The pubs of this city are loud with jazz and rock music, deafening the packed saloons within, blaring over the sidewalks. Often the thump of it drives the customers into a frenzy, and the bars are full of strapping young Ockers throwing their hands above heir heads, whoopeeing and beating their enormous feet. They are not at all like roisterers of Europe or America, partly because they all seem to be, like that opera chorus, in a condition of exuberant physical well-being, partly because the tang of their language pervades everything they do, and for a time I thought their burly disco to be something altogether new out of Sydney, an Australization specifically of the 1980s.