CAPRI

Since the time when Tiberius built his seven villas on the island and swam in the Blue Grotto with his favorites, Capri has probably lost some of its chic; but in good weather, just a little before the full season begins with its overwhelming crowds, it is a fine place for a short holiday. Although the eccentrics who once made it celebrated have been swamped by the bourgeoisie of five continents, the newcomers loyally try to seem eccentric, quite often with considerable success.

To add to the attractions of climate, landscape and architecture, there are no automobiles in the town proper, which is half-way up the side of the dominating mountain. It is surprising with what deep, subconscious gratitude the modern man responds to a place where he knows he cannot be run down, honked at, or poisoned by gasoline fumes. The streets are narrow, up and down, and gay with life. A variety of shamefully young and provocatively dressed olive-skinned girls seem to spend their time, out of pure public-spiritedness, merely walking back and forth all day long through the little square filled with people drinking at the café tables, or past the shops that offer brilliantly colored tight-fitting pants, bolero jackets, pink denim shirts, espadrilles, fresh-pressed orange juice, antiques, Pucci blouses, pizza pies, scanty bathing suits, and bottles of Capri wine from dawn to midnight.

In a gesture of literary nostalgia I bought Norman Douglas’ South Wind, which I had thought, when I read it at the age of fifteen, was one of the greatest and truest books that had ever been written. In re-reading it on the spot, I must confess I had to tone down my judgment somewhat. I think that Douglas, who plumped, in lapidary prose, for what he considered the healthy and forthright Mediterranean paganism of the island as opposed to the Victorian, northern puritanism in which he had been reared, would rewrite several passages today, if he could, upon studying some of the chromed and bikinied paganism now on view on his beloved island.

The swank crowd bathes and lunches at Gracie Field’s establishment, spread like a set for an old MGM musical on the rocks of the Piccola Marina. The really swank crowd owns boats, and languid ladies and surfeited bronzed Roman gentlemen, well in the tradition of Tiberius, are to be seen at about noon, which is the hour of their reveille, roaring off in Riva speed boats to distant watery rendezvous with other speed boats and similar ladies and equal Romans. In their aristocratic flotillas they while away the hours before the first cocktail of the evening in swimming, waterskiing, and competitive character assassination, out of sight of lesser folk who are content with plebian public immersion.

Still, there was a Gabor in a ruffly white bathing suit at the pool when we were there, and a liberty party of American sailors from Naples who spent the afternoon diving into the pool, led by a chief petty officer with a chief petty officer’s solid paunch, who asked for and received the Gabor autograph and a pearly Hungarian smile before catching the boat back to the mainland and the sober realities of the Sixth Fleet.

Two days later, the Captain appeared, lugubrious, the refrigerator unrepaired. Neapolitan sharp-trading had prevailed against him. The firm with which he had been dealing had, after warm promises of help, finally offered him the needed parts—but only on condition that he buy a whole refrigerator, which they had kindly offered to store for him in their warehouse, as there was no room on board for two refrigerators, one of which, of course, would not function. The Captain’s Scotch sense of economy revolted at this, and he had let the whole thing drop. Now here he was, ready to brave the rest of the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the Ionian and the Adriatic, lukewarm from beginning to end.

To prove to our friends on Capri that we had not been lying when we said we had a boat at our disposal, we invited them all for a day’s sail around the island and dutifully explored the Blue Grotto, which you can enter only in one of the rowboats stationed off its mouth, and for which you have to buy tickets from a launch moored more or less permanently there.

Our trip through the grotto was disturbed somewhat by the irate cries of other boatmen who, oblivious to the beauty and historic associations of the cave, followed our boatman around, shouting complaints and insults at him because, they said, he had broken the line and picked up fares out of turn. Having heard these exchanges for so many years between taxi drivers in Manhattan, it gave me something of a sense of déjà-vu as we trailed our fingers in the magic waters.

In our circumnavigation of the island we passed a cliff on top of which was perched a huge red building with a matchless view, the home of the writer Curzio Malaparte, who died several years ago. No one lives there now, we were told, except a caretaker, because Malaparte left it in his will to a doctor who tended him during his final illness in China. Since there are no diplomatic relations between Italy and Communist China, there is a fair chance that the building will fall into ruin before the poor Red doctor ever gets to set foot on his magnificent property.

It occurred to me that there must be, at this moment, in the city of Peking, a certain lung specialist with a clear title to one of the most spectacular properties in Europe, who deep in his heart is just a little politically disaffected and who must be nursing some rather severe criticisms of the policies of the regime under which he lives.