AMALFI

When we anchored in the port of Amalfi for the night, we were approached by two rowboats, each of which contained several members of the Mafia who seemed between the ages of eleven and thirteen. Having been apprised, perhaps by telephone from Naples, about our refrigerator problems, they asked us immediately if we wanted any ice. I said we could use two cakes and demanded the price. “Three hundred lire,” said the helmsman of one boat. “Idiot,” a boy in the other boat snarled at him. “For a yacht it is at least four hundred lire.”

Since I had grown up during the Depression, when soaking the rich had seemed a most reasonable economic policy, and since I have never quite outgrown this influence, I gave the boys the four hundred lire when they delivered the ice. But still they hung on sullenly, and the only way I could get them to move off was to give them a cigarette apiece, which they smoked with sinful expertness, inhaling deeply, blowing rings, and letting the smoke come out through their nostrils. Using the coward’s usual excuse, I told myself that if I hadn’t given them the cigarettes somebody else would and hoped they would not all have spotty lungs by the time they were twenty.

If I had reflected a little, I would have given those poor half-starved young thugs twice four hundred lire rather than one cigarette apiece. Cigarettes are the coin of beggary, as all of us in the army discovered during and just after the war. There is almost no way you can avoid an unpleasant feeling of superiority when, either out of pity or for services rendered, you use them as legal tender. Connected with this is the widespread complaint heard all over the world that Americans ruin the natives wherever they go by over-tipping. In almost every work of travel literature one is warned against this vice. I heard it in its most virulent form in Cairo during the war, where a British base-wallah major, who incidentally was the most objectionable man I have ever met, bitterly insisted that Cairo, which according to him had been a Paradise to live in from the time of the German attack on Danzig, had become practically uninhabitable since the entrance of the United States into the war and the subsequent appearance in the city of Americans who gave as much as a dollar a day in salary to native servants and workmen. This was in a city in which servants habitually slept on the floor outside their master’s bedrooms and were beaten in the name of discipline, where a frightening proportion of the children were on a starvation diet and suffering from ophthalmia for lack of the simplest medical care, and where the average life expectancy of the working classes was about thirty years.

It is one thing to give a large tip to the concierge of a luxury hotel; he is probably wealthier than you are and your gift is merely a bribe, cynically offered and cynically accepted, to ensure services which are already noted on your bill but which you won’t receive if you neglect the concierge’s outstretched palm. It is quite another thing to give a gaunt porter a dollar for carrying two huge valises for a mile in the hot sun instead of tossing him the base-wallah major’s contemptuous one piastre, which at that time was worth four cents.

If, as the major said, the Americans are ruining the backward countries of the world for the likes of him, let us consider it a proud achievement and one of the most agreeable manifestations of our national character.

Amalfi, which now numbers 6,250 inhabitants, was once wealthy and powerful and had a population of 70,000. But it was subdued by King Roger of Naples in 1131 and twice soon after that by the Pisans, and, since then, in the words of the guide book, its decline has been continuous. The entire Mediterranean basin, with its fretwork of once-great cities, its relics of vanished glories, its built-over ruins, is a kind of translation into stone of Ecclesiastes. Vanity, vanity, the crumbling columns announce to the merciless pure blue sky, all is vanity. Everybody has had his day here, everybody won for awhile, everybody lost for a much longer time, the Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, the Turks, the Genoese, the Venetians, the Sicilians, the Saracens, the French, the English. Everybody took what he could, killed according to his custom, put kings on thrones and laws in the lawbooks, king and laws enduring until the next fleet was seen rounding the next headland. On almost every hilltop facing this sunny sea there is a watchtower or the ruins of a watchtower, whose garrisons, it now seems, must always have had the same news to report—“We are lost.”