BRINDISI

We were heading for Dubrovnik, in Yugoslavia, and if the world were more rationally run, we would have gone up the coast of Albania to get there. But since Albania was tabu and we could not run the risk of the complications that might arise if we were driven into an Albanian port by bad weather or engine failure, we had to make our way across the mouth of the Adriatic to Brindisi, on the East Coast of Italy, and make the crossing of the Adriatic from there.

We came into Brindisi on a quickening sea, with a strong following wind which seemed to lift us gently, like a giant hand, from one wave to the next. But once we were in port, the wind began to blow for fair, a scorching, nerve-jangling sirocco that kept us in Brindisi for three days.

The charms of Brindisi are quickly exhausted, especially when the sirocco is blowing. There is a massive, elaborately carved column to be admired on a little piazza facing the harbor at the top of a fine flight of steps put there by the Romans to mark the southern terminus of the Appian Way. Originally there were two columns, but in the course of the years the second one was removed to Lecce to serve as a pedestal for the statue of St. Orontius, who has his back turned hopelessely on the Roman amphitheatre, which was used for the usual Roman diversions.

In Brindisi, if you are searching for amusement, you can turn away from its remaining column to a nearby wall and read, if your Latin is good enough, a plaque in praise of Virgil, who died in the town. You can visit two or three churches of moderate interest. You can sit at a café and watch the stream of cars, with license plates from two dozen countries, that pours, with tidal regularity, along the waterfront to and from the car ferries down from Venice or up from Greece. You can take one of the boats with triangular sails which sail you out of the inner harbor to one of the crowded and not quite clean beaches. On the beach you have to be spry to avoid being hit by people who jump around hitting a rubber ball to each other, using a kind of noiseless tambourine as racquets. This activity is carried on in a brawl of young men practising tumbling, family groups eating large lunches, mothers nursing their children, and everybody listening to different programs on transistor radios.

You can also visit a high, sallow-brick monument to Italy’s sailors, which dominates the harbor in silent evidence that Mussolini’s ideas about art were infected with the same ugliness as his ideas about politics. From its crown, though, there is a fine view of the sea and the city, and we watched a squadron of jet fighters practising landings and takeoffs all morning.

There is a small American airbase at Brindisi, and we became friendly with a twenty-three-year-old Negro staff sergeant who had been there for about eight months and thought yearningly of his previous snug post in England. He planned to stay in the army until he was eligible for a pension, which would be at the age of thirty-eight, after which he intended to go back to his home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and live comfortably on his two hundred dollars a month.

Two hundred dollars a month is more than the salary of a captain in the Italian army on active service, and I hoped, in the interests of amity between us and our allies in NATO, that whoever overheard this conversation on this impoverished coast could not understand English. It also occurred to me that I had been working steadily at my trade for nearly thirty years and, if my health held out, would still be at my typewriter when the sergeant, his life’s work done, would be lolling on the beach in North Carolina.

The sergeant ate dinner with us, the first meal, he said, that he had eaten off the base since his posting there. The food on the base, he said, was so good that it was ridiculous to go to a restaurant. While we were speaking about food, he talked nostalgically of picnics on the beach near his home town and of a restaurant there that made his favorite dish—clam fritters. He strongly advised me to try them the next time I was in Wilmington, North Carolina.

When the monotony of Brindisi got him down, he took his leave in Athens, a good town but expensive. In the night spots there, he told me, if you wished to take one of the ladies out to a more private place, you had to pay the proprietor the equivalent of one bottle of champagne or seven whiskies. The sergeant was so security conscious that when I asked him how far out of town the base was, a crafty look came into his eye and he said, vaguely, “Oh, a pretty far way,” even though Alitalia lands civilian planes there every day and anybody who has a mind to can survey the entire base from the top of the Sailors’ Monument on the harbor.