A Writer's World (55 page)

Worse still, as the literary capital of Germany, the repository of its immortal poetic spirit, a retreat of nature-worship and mythic dreams, Weimar became beloved of the Nazis, and it loved the Nazis in return, voting them into local power long before Hitler became chancellor. ‘The mixture of Hitlerism and Goethe,’ wrote Thomas Mann fastidiously in 1932, ‘is particularly disturbing.’ In the market square stands the Elephant Hotel, and all the waters of the Ilm cannot wash the taint from this unfortunate
hostelry. It is a handsome thirties building, but unfortunately redecorated inside in a glittery, chromy style that irresistibly suggests the imminent arrival of swaggering Gauleiters with blonde floozies out of big black Mercedes. This impression is all too true. Hitler and his crew were particularly fond of the hotel, and more than once the Führer spoke from its balcony to enthusiastic crowds in the square outside.

So enamoured were the Nazis of Weimar, in fact, that they erected there one of their most celebrated and characteristic monuments. The site they chose was on the lovely hill of Ettersberg, just outside the city, which Goethe himself had long before made famous – he loved to sit and meditate beneath an oak tree there. On my last evening in Weimar I paid a hasty and reluctant visit to this place, now a popular tourist site well publicized in the town. My taxi-driver, a gregarious soul, chatted cheerfully to me all the way. Had I enjoyed my stay in Weimar? Did I visit the Goethehaus? What did I think of the food? Did I know that Weimar was to be the European City of Culture in 1999, at the end of the millennium?

Congratulations, I said. Recognition once more for the City of Art and Music. ‘Exactly,’ said the taxi-driver, and just then we turned off the highway up to Buchenwald.

Thinking properly sententious thoughts about the turn of another year, I leant on a balustrade of the Pincio to watch the sunset behind St Peter’s. Unfortunately the sun never reached the horizon that evening, instead finding itself glaucously absorbed into the thick pall of smog which lay like a curse over Rome. I could almost hear the noise it made, I thought – not a fizzle, more a kind of glurp – and imagine the sulphurous smell of microwaved exhaust fumes as it disappeared into the murk.

Rome has always been the place for contemplating the passage of time, the rise and decline of certainties, and the departure of a year was no big deal in a city that has triumphed so often and suffered so much. Nevertheless, the symbolism of that sunset struck me as powerful. We had
endured a messy year of it, and the corrosive pollution of Rome seemed to me like an allegory of some more general decay. No doubt about it, Rome is in an awful mess. So fearful is the atmosphere, and so appalling the congestion, that they have been allowing cars to circulate in the city only on alternate days. Squalid litter lies everywhere, blown across glorious piazzas, festering in fountains, lining the Appian Way. Loveless and abandoned the poisoned Tiber flows between its concrete quays. Buildings that used to seem picturesque now seem dingy almost beyond redemption, pavements are cracked and potholed, all over the city restorations and excavations are in abeyance for lack of money.

For a time the conclusion I drew, as I wandered the city, was that our civilization, having here once reached so exquisite an epitome, was now running irrevocably down, so that the glittering shops of the Via Condotti, the gorgeous rituals of St Peter’s, were no more than cruel anachronisms. Gradually, though, this conviction was replaced by one more invigorating: that if the environment of Rome was invalid, by God, the inhabitants of Rome were robust as ever. Smog or no smog, they remain precisely as they have always been, displaying just the same mixture of swagger and simplicity, cunning and compassion, that visitors have discerned in them down the ages. Recession, pollution, crime and triple parking seem to pass them by; if the whole city were suddenly to be Scandinavianized, I came to think, all its buildings spick and span, all its traffic ordered, all its corruptions cleansed, the Romans would hardly notice.

Several times in the course of my stay I came across a couple of bucolic musicians, dressed in quaint hats and peculiar shoes, tootling on flute and bagpipe in public places. They were like substantial fauns, haunting the city out of its remote rural past. These medieval figures seemed to me wonderfully exotic, until late one night I encountered the pair of them anxiously consulting a bus timetable beneath a streetlight in the Corso. Then I realized that in fact they piquantly illustrated the matter-of-factness of the city. Nobody took the slightest notice of them, as they huddled there; they looked up and asked me for advice about the best way to get home, but when I told them I was a foreigner,
‘Ai
,
ai
,
ai
,’ they said theatrically, like Italians in movies.

Is this what they mean by the Eternal City, this timeless homeliness, which makes one feel that whatever happens to its history, its people remain impervious? Certainly more than ever Rome lives up to its cliché as the most essentially human of the great capitals, more ready than any to
muddle through, turn a blind eye, shrug things off, leave well alone. Surely no great historic site on earth is more easy-going than the Roman Forum, the old centre of the world, its paths agreeably overgrown and its ruins left so largely to themselves. The sentries at the Vittorio Emanuele memorial are not above a brief exchange of greetings with passers-by. The gypsy children only giggle when you thwart their transparent efforts to pick your pockets. The taxi driver soon gives in when you decline to pay him half your worldly wealth to drive you from St Peter’s to the Spanish Steps. The black boys do nothing worse than laugh and dance when motorists angrily decline to have their windscreens cleaned at traffic lights. OK, OK,
va
bene
, this city seems always to say: you win some, you lose some; no harm in trying.

In short, how particularly
real
Rome seems to be! How full of natural character its policewomen, some looking comical in white hats, some caped and capped like U-boat captains! How authentically pudgy its Swiss Guards, especially when bespectacled beneath their plumed and polished helmets! How amused and forgiving the waiter who came running after me in the Piazza del Pòpolo to point out that, owing to a misunderstanding about decimal points, I had left just a tenth of what I ought to have left upon the café table! I happened to enter Santa Maria in Trastevere when there was a charity lunch for the poor, and never did I see faces so unhomogenized – cool patrician faces of charity workers, serving wine along the trestle tables of the nave, spectacularly wrinkled faces of aged and respectable indigents, quick ingenious faces of the gypsy families cautiously segregated near the bottom of the church.

So at the start of another year, I finally decided, Rome’s lessons concern not only history’s majestic passage, but also the indomitable resilience of humanity, in murky sunsets just as in clear bright mornings. Not only humanity, either. No creature seems more certain to survive than the scrawny Roman cat, now as always living by its wits among the garbage. And one afternoon I noticed motionless upon a buttress of the Ponte Sant’Angelo a very small and curious-looking lizard. I examined it closely, thinking that it might have been mutated in some way by the stinks and chemicals perpetually swirling all about it: but no, it was just immensely old, inconceivably old, and tough.

On a spring afternoon we sailed into Naples from Ischia, out of the calm celestial gulf, to find the notorious traffic of the city magnified to the power
of hell by a protest march of the unemployed. The whole place seethed and fumed, and although the Hotel Excelsior was almost within sight of the ferry pier, and we never even set eyes on the unemployed, it took us an hour to get there. You might suppose this to have been a dispiriting experience, but in fact after a week of island peace it was a shot in the arm.

Our taxi-driver, an elderly enthusiast for his trade, treated the event as a challenge to his virtuoso skills, and so we progressed through a sequence of short cuts and private diversions, wildly the wrong way up one-way roads, heedlessly squeezing between the stalls of shopping alleys, sometimes obliged to reverse by the sheer pressure of public opinion, sometimes making desperate three-point turns in virtually impassable back streets. We laughed, we shuddered, we shut our eyes. Now and then the driver wiped his brow in a theatrical way, when we momentarily emerged into the relief of a piazza, before putting his foot down again and hurtling us through a line of flapping washing into yet another labyrinth of the slums.

Outside our windows – ‘Keep them closed!’ cried the driver, ‘Bad people here!’ – the Neapolitan legend was displayed as in a theme park, or perhaps an aquarium. Suddenly children’s faces would appear scowling an inch or two away. Bad people eyed our luggage with predatory sneers. Old ladies gave us what I took to be the evil eye as we scraped against their fruit stalls. On the Via Partenope we stood stagnant for a time in the traffic, but all around us motor scooters shot in and out between the cars, on to the sidewalk and far away, belching exhaust smoke demonically.

Beside the Castel Nuovo an assortment of men and dogs lay apparently dead upon the green, and police officers could sometimes be seen standing in unconcerned impotence amid the maelstrom. At first I saw them as emblems of defeat. In Naples, I thought, the internal combustion engine had won its first great victory in the fight against humanity, and the entire population lived in a condition of perpetual motorized cock-up.

As our journey proceeded, though, I began to doubt if the Neapolitans were beaten after all. It is true that the municipality has launched a series of measures to limit the number of cars at large in the city, but it did not seem to me that the citizenry itself, as it plotted and manoeuvred its way through the nightmare, was in the least despondent. Like our driver, many motorists appeared to be enjoying themselves, in a bitter-sweet Neapolitan way. Tempers did not seem to be fraying. Horns were seldom hooted. Whenever we caught the eye of an adjacent driver, in some evidently terminal gridlock, he seemed more amused than exasperated, and those
devilish motor scooters weaved their insouciant way between the traffic for all the world as though they were surfing.

No, if the motor car is going to win a decisive victory anywhere, it will not be here, if only because the Neapolitans are such willing collaborators. Naples would not be Naples without the automobile, and nobody on earth seems more at home behind its wheel than your average Neapolitan – perfectly adjusted to its culture, making the most of it in body and spirit. Besides, here the automobile has powerful friends at court. The endemic corruption of this city is on its side, and so is the brilliant vanity of the people: if the swagger, flattery and condescension of the
passeggiata
was the essential expression of civic self-esteem in previous generations, now its epitome is the dashing display of an Alfa, a Fiat Barchetta or, best of all, one of those lovely prodigies of Italian art and engineering, a Ferrari or a Maserati.

This was not like a traffic jam in London or New York. This had a paradoxical style to it. Experience it day after day, year after year, and it might indeed lose its allure, but to the stranger arriving from the seas it was a revelation of human vigour and adaptability. It seemed natural to the Neapolitans to be in this fix, and all their traditional characteristics of vivacity, opportunism, effrontery and panache, so familiar to travellers down the ages, seemed to qualify them absolutely for life in the age of the motor car. They are the masters of motorized disorder, wiping their brows not in despair, but in dramatic self-satisfaction.

I thought they were wonderful at it – what other city on earth could make a stranger actually enjoy an hour-long crawl through a traffic jam? – and it occurred to me that they were somehow ahead of us sober, sensible northerners in their attitudes. They were readier to accept the inevitable awfulness of modernity, and had already adjusted to it. They were not repelled by litter in the streets. They did not mind noise. They fished and skin-dived contentedly amid the foul pollution of the harbour. They had long been acclimatized to the government fiddle and the extortion of gangsters. They happily went the wrong way up one-way streets. When, losing my nerve for a moment during that manic excursion, I buried my head in the pages of
La
Repubblica
, I discovered that the big story of the day concerned several local figures of the Madonna allegedly weeping tears of blood. Surely this easy familiarity with the occult puts the Neapolitans well ahead of the Swedes, say, in the futuristic stakes – where do you suppose a UFO would choose to land, Naples or Gothenburg?

So that afternoon, in my sentimental way, I was quite seduced by the Neapolitans. Like many a wandering writer before me, I saw in them so much that I would like to see in myself, and in my people. But nobody could really be much less Neapolitan than I am, and when at last we reached the hotel, limp with excitement, amusement and exhaustion, and I had paid our driver his exorbitant but entirely justified fare, I remarked to the hotel receptionist that I wanted to go home. ‘Don’t say that,’ he replied. ‘Wait till you get up to your room, and everything will seem different.’

So it did. Dusk was falling by then, the harbour was speckled with small fishing boats, and in the distance Vesuvius loomed hazy in the half-light. The lights were coming up across the city. The docks were full of tall-funnelled white cruise liners, ferries and the light carrier
Vittorio
Veneto
, and even as I stood there the
QE2
, on a Mediterranean cruise, slipped away from the quay towards the open sea. For a long time I could see her lights, fainter and fainter to the west – treading her way over Palm Court gins-and-tonics, I liked to imagine, towards the realms of order.