Somewhere between Amalfi and Capri, the sea turned indigo, depth piling on depth. The transition startled, and I imagined myself falling overboard, losing myself in the inky swirl. It seemed I had lost so much already, and what I had to gain was uncertain: the faint amber glow of an island in the distance, a possible mentor, a sense of myself as a writer, and some agency in a world where I was unable to control what happened to me. But these ambitions were hazy, clear only in the retrospective lens of three decades. What I really felt was a vague tingle in my stomach, a generalized fear of the unknown that mingled with a greedy anticipation, a feeling of windows flung open to experience.
I spoke Italian poorly, the little I knew having been gleaned from conversations with my paternal grandparents, and they spoke with such a thick Neapolitan accent that I could hardly make myself understood in Rome, where I’d spent my first two weeks upon arrival. But I was a quick study, and with Latin spread beneath me like a safety net, I could fall only so far. My vocabulary grew with extravagant speed, spreading vines along an invisible trellis of syntax buried deep in my psyche. I listened intently to fellow passengers on the train from Rome to Salerno, and spoke in isolated bursts of colloquial phrases to fellow passengers on the bus to Amalfi, which I always wanted to see. By the time I boarded the ferry in Amalfi, I could—if I limited myself to occasional phrases—pass myself off as a young, if somewhat laconic, Italian.
The Capri ferry in 1970 (unlike the current hydrofoil) was a bulky trawler, its straking painted bright Mediterranean blue, with red trim on windows and rails. Each morning it began its journey in the glaucous port city of Salerno, where my father had landed with General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army during the invasion of Italy in 1943. For reasons of his own, he rarely discussed the war, though it had consumed five years of his life. The Battle of Salerno, a famously bloody conflict in which he had been among the first to come ashore, was even less frequently mentioned, although once, on a camping trip in the Poconos long ago, I’d managed to pry loose a fair account of this experience. It was as though he’d been waiting for years to tell someone about Salerno. Oddly enough, he almost never mentioned it again after that. “I don’t remember more than I told you already,” he would say, when prodded, shutting the door to that conversation.
I had hoped to spend time in Salerno, walking the beach where my father had landed and trying to imagine my way back into his boots. As a child, I often thought of it, and considered him a hero. But some impediment blocked the pursuit now; I found myself averting my eyes from the waterfront as I hurried from the train station to a bus stop. That war was over, with its anguish and euphoria and mixed allegiances. I could not visualize it, except for the endless sentimental films seen mostly on late-night TV. One day I might face that beach in Salerno, but not at this time. I refused to become a tourist in my father’s past, resetting my compass for Capri, whose vivid, light-drenched image beckoned—a war-free zone if one ever existed. (Even my father had no will to revisit Salerno, rejecting an offer that once came from the VFW—a package tour for veterans of the Italian campaign. “Once in Salerno was enough,” he said, with unusual passion, “and I don’t care if the beach is lined with dancing girls. They can have it.”)
It seemed that, somehow, I shared his disinclination to face Salerno. It might have been painful to stand there, where he had landed and (I assumed) lost so many friends. It would certainly have brought feelings about Nicky to the surface, and I was trying hard to get over them. I wanted to push the past year out of my head. To forget Nicky, the war in Vietnam, and the turmoil of my last few months at Columbia, when every assignment had seemed irrelevant, an abrasion. I wanted the freedom to read only what I felt compelled to read, and to write what absorbed me. I didn’t want anyone judging me, grading me, wondering if “everything was all right.” Everything was not all right, and I was here in Italy to shift the stage. To begin again, free of that past, discarding old selves.
Eager to see the Amalfi Drive, I had taken a bus northward along the zigzag road, with its steep western slope to the sea. The pinkish tile roofs of villas were barely visible from the road, although glimpses of their opulence fed my imagination. An elderly man beside me on the bus—a retired postal worker, as I quickly learned—served as de facto guide, explaining that the Mafia liked this coast above all others, and had pumped lots of money into those villas. “You should see their boats,” he said. “The worse the criminal, the bigger the boat.”
There was barely room for one small vehicle on the road, but the massive blue SITA bus hurtled forward, swaying, the driver blasting his two-tone horn before each hairpin curve to warn oncoming drivers that certain death lay ahead if they didn’t immediately scuttle into any available space. The drop on the left, over sharp amethyst-toothed rocks or steep lemon groves, was brutal, but I reassured myself that the driver had traveled countless times along this road before. It reassured me that everyone else on the bus was unconcerned; indeed, the man in the seat in front of me had fallen asleep, his head limply attached to his neck, rolling left and right as we rounded bends.
In Amalfi itself, a town that climbed on its knees from the harbor and busy centro to a ruined monastery whose Greekish columns lent to the whole scene a classical touch, I splurged, spending the night at the Luna, a white-washed hotel with a cloistered courtyard and fine views of the coast. As I learned from a guidebook, Richard Wagner had lived at the Luna for a period, writing Parsifal on its sun-bleached terrace, so I could not resist the allure. (That Ibsen had spent some dismal winter months writing A Doll’s House in the same hotel interested me less. I was too young to appreciate Ibsen.)
Though not wealthy, I had enough in my reserves to tide me over rather comfortably. My grandfather was bankrolling me to the hilt. Nonno and I had always been close, and when he heard I wanted to live in Italy, he opened his substantial wallet like an accordian. “Alessandro,” he said, lowering his voice to an ethnic rumble, “I’m behind you all the way. You’re smarter than Nicky ever was, il povero. Brains like you got don’t come on a platter.” He put four thousand into an account for me, saying another four would be lodged there whenever I signaled. “After that,” he warned, with a kiss on my forehead, “you are on your own, figlio mio.”
What he said was only partially true. I was smarter than Nicky in one way: I hadn’t got myself killed in Vietnam. Apart from that, I wasn’t sure what smart meant, apart from an ability to suck up to teachers and get the necessary grades. But I took Nonno’s money. If this was what “family” meant to an Italian-American grandfather, so be it. I was indeed part of the family, and partook of its good fortune. The arrangement suited me fine. Had his name been Jones or Smith instead of Massolini, I’d have probably gotten a fond farewell shake and a kick in my skinny ass.
I promised Nonno that when I became a successful writer I would pay him back, but he just waved his hand, a familiar gesture that had waved off endless attempts at gratitude over the years. “I don’t want your money,” he said. “You can sign your book for me, basta.” Then he said, “And it better be a good book if it’s got my name on the cover.” We shared a name, more or less: Alessandro Massolini. But I was Alex Massolini. More American than Italian—that had been the intention of my parents. “You can’t get ahead in this country with a handle like Alessandro,” my father said. “Even DiMaggio was Joe, not Giuseppe. Marilyn Monroe would never have married a guy called Giuseppe.” But Alex Massolini was close enough for Nonno. So the book had better be a good one.
I sat in the ship’s bar, reading one of the handful of books I carried with me, an English translation of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. An English teacher of mine at Columbia had recommended it, and I’d been grazing contentedly in its pages for the past week. In his third letter to his correspondent, written near Pisa on April 23, 1903, Rilke had warned against reading literary criticism. “Such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite.” In contrast, “works of art are of an infinite loneliness.” He recommended solitude. “Everything is gestation,” he said, “and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity.” I wanted to achieve these clarities, and to learn the patience to let them gather. Only then would I write something worthy of my grandfather’s name.
Since arriving in Italy, I had seen countless replicas of Nonno—wizened old men with faces like baked mud flats, and white hair sprouting from their ears and noses. A small army of dozing nonni could be found in piazzas from Calabria to Trieste, an empty glass of wine on the table beside them. They slumped in buses or strolled the tortuous streets of villages they knew well enough to sleepwalk without fear of getting lost. Indeed, the ferry to Capri boasted several exact replicas of the type, including one of the waiters in the ship’s bar: a grizzly, humpbacked Amalfitano called Andrea (virtually every male in Amalfi is called Andrea, after the patron saint of sailors). He served me a frothy cappuccino, his hand shaking so badly that much of it spilled into the saucer.
“Where are you going, ragazz’?”
“Capri,” I said, pouring the spilled milk from the saucer back into the cup. I was a little offended by his assuming I was un ragazzo.
“We also stop at Positano.”
“Well, I’m going to Capri,” I said, feeling good about my Italian, which held up decently so long as I didn’t venture beyond the simplest of conversations.
“You are a tourist?”
“Not exactly.”
“But what will you do there?” he wondered, his nostrils opening with the interrogation.
I considered explaining to him about my secretarial job on Capri, but I guessed it would lead me into linguistic corners I could not easily back out of. I tried to pretend that the notebook on the table was drawing my attention. But this only inflamed his curiosity.
“What are you writing, signore?”
“A poem,” I said.
“Ah, we have many fine poets in Italy. You know Dante—La Divina Commedia?” He launched into an incomprehensible but highly dramatic recitation from the epic, clipping off the final syllables (thus ruining the rhymes) in the manner of most southern Italians. His performance brought much of the activity around us to a halt, and when he was finished, a birdlike woman in a black dress began to clap.
I listened with a distracted amazement. Would anyone but a college professor in America be able to recite verbatim from a similar text? Did we have a similar text? Song of Myself, perhaps?
The recitation finished, he said, “So, tell me. Do you know Capri? The Blue Grotto? The Matromania Cave?” His bushy white eyebrows lifted, and they would not settle into place again until I answered.
I shook my head. The only Blue Grotto I knew was a cheap spaghetti joint near the Columbia campus.
“This is paradise, Capri. They come from all over the world to see it, even China. It is what we call a legend.” While he extolled the virtues of Capri—the pure air, the remorselessly brilliant sunshine, the intriguing people—I finished the cappuccino, feigning interest in his monologue. I had been in this situation with my grandfather many times, so it felt familiar. One had to appear attentive enough not to hurt the speaker’s feelings, but not so attentive that elaboration was provoked.
“You will excuse me,” I said, when he paused to light a cigarette. I left him shifting from foot to foot as I gathered my things, joining a cluster of tourists, mostly Germans and Swedes, on the foredeck. How else to escape his conversation?
The sight of the breaking coastline was enough to silence idle chatter as a fine mist dampened our faces but didn’t obscure our vision. Cove upon cove opened for us, with whole towns wedged precariously into the cliffs. It was the season for lemons, like bright bulbs in trees that were wrapped in black mesh to keep the fruit from spilling. Occasionally, a villa of substantial size and opulence appeared, clinging like a swallow’s nest to the cliff. Based on what I gleaned from overheard conversations, the coast teemed with famous movie producers, industrial magnates, and Mafiosi. “Carlo Ponti lives there, the film producer,” one of them said, pointing to a sculpted mansion on a jut of land between clashing rocks. I had never heard of Carlo Ponti, but I was still impressed.
On the other side of the ferry, in the open sea that bent to the earth’s curve, fishing boats could be seen in the distance, trolling with nets designed to catch the cascades of dime-size clams that were popular on the coast, usually cooked in olive oil and garlic and served with spaghetti. Toward the northwest, a bank of dark clouds appeared without warning, a fierce line marking off blue sky from black. The sea, as if newly alert to a shift in atmosphere, became choppier, the bow parsing the waves more severely. Loud squawking gulls that had trailed us all the way from Amalfi like an elaborate kite continued to buck and weave, devouring whatever morsels were churned up by the ferry’s wake. (I thought of a gorgeous phrase from Yeats: “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” But what on earth was a gong-tormented sea?)
At first, I wasn’t aware that somebody was talking to me. My own thoughts were just too loud, and the voice beside me found it difficult to compete. (This had often been a problem: the outside world failing to compete with my own highly nuanced, occasionally overwrought, inner voice.)
“You haven’t heard me!”
“What was that?”
A slender young man stood beside me, spitting into my face as he spoke. “I said, where are you from in America? Am I to presume?”
He was fair, with milky skin and a face like an ax-blade that poked from the hood of a wine-red sweatshirt. A thickly accented English nested in that thin, rather nasal, voice. His eyes were large and compelling, and they invaded my foggy presense like search lamps.
“Are you Italian?” I asked.
“French is my original,” he said, confidently. “I am born near Lyon.”
“Ah, Lyon,” I said, nodding as if I knew it. “I’m an American, yes. How could you tell?”
“Your shoes,” he said, his fingers tugging at a cornsilk beard. His long hair was dirty blond and unwashed, tucked into the hood but just visible. He smelled of dirty jeans, travel, and cheap pensione.
I was self-conscious about my leather hiking boots. One did not see Italians in hiking boots, it was true. Not, I suppose, unless they were actually hiking.
“I am oppose to Vietnam War,” the Frenchman declared, though nothing prior in our conversation could possibly have drawn the remark. “I am disliking to this colonial war. We were there, you comprehend. My uncle, he was fighting there—an officer in Indochine. A very long and bad war we had, and now you are repeating our misfortune.”
Ever so briefly, I had pushed Vietnam from my head, and it upset me to have it unexpectedly invoked. I steadied myself by holding the railing. “It’s a very bad war,” I said. “I agree with you.” I said nothing about Nicky, of course. Since coming to Italy, I had not mentioned Nicky to anyone, although the subject of Vietnam had arisen several times in Rome, and I’d had an unpleasant argument on the train to Salerno with an American businessman, a veteran of Korea, who argued (without a trace of irony) that if we didn’t fight what he called “the Marxist-Leninist rampage” in Southeast Asia, “on their own ground,” we’d soon be fighting them in California. (I coyly suggested that Berkeley already had more Marxist-Leninists per capita than any city in Southeast Asia.)
In the weeks that had passed since I left New York, I’d done a lot of quiet thinking about Nicky and me. I wasn’t exactly sure what part his death played in my dropping out of Columbia, but it had amplified feelings already in abundance. Alienation—as a concept that I sometimes used to explain myself to myself—seemed hackneyed and false; but I had certainly lost interest in “achievement,” as such; performing in the theater of my parents’ imagination no longer felt compelling. What I wanted seemed more urgent than ratification by some abstract institution. The world as I found it sickened me with its cruelty, its shameless inhumanity and lack of compassion.
After a long silence, during which the Frenchman appeared to think about what I’d just said, he spoke again. “Now I’m going to Capri, for tourism. Maybe more. Who can say? You will be long there, I wonder?”
“I plan to stay,” I said, savoring the oddity of such a statement.
His mouse-colored eyebrows, like a drawbridge, lifted. “This is surprising, that you will stay there. You are a student, no? I see you with your books in the bar.”
“Not any longer.” I explained that I had dropped out of Columbia. One day, I said, I would collect a few credits somewhere and get my diploma. (At my mother’s insistence, I had gotten a note from the dean of students saying I had left in good standing and could resume my studies whenever it suited me. Yet it amazed me how little I cared about the actual degree—though I would have been the first person in my family to acquire one, as my mother frequently noted. “You just wanna be a working man, like your father?” she would say, often in his presence. “I don’t think so, Alex. You’re gonna work with your brains, not your hands.”)
He studied me as though I were a painting. “You are like me,” he intoned, at last. “I am without discipline, a student at the Sorbonne. We have had many riots there, before last year. A small revolution in the streets. You have heard something of this, I’m not to doubt.”
I had. The student revolt had furnished world headlines, inspiring many in the States and elsewhere. Though Columbia had had its own, highly publicized, rioting, it had always seemed to me parochial by comparison, vaguely parodic. It’s one thing to take over a university administration building, quite another to shut down the Latin Quarter. Moreover, the French workers had apparently been sympathetic to the student revolt, joining forces with them at the barricades; our protests were, if anything, despised by the men in hard hats. Certainly my father—like most of the men who worked for him at Massolini Construction—had been deeply upset by the protests. I had kept from him my own lame participation in several marches and “teach-ins.”
“My name is Patrice LaRue,” the Frenchman said. “I am philosophy.”
“A student of philosophy?”
He offered a sidelong smile that reminded me shockingly of Nicky, who grinned like that whenever he said something ridiculous. “And you, mister? What do you study?”
“I majored in classics—Latin, mostly. A little Greek.”
“Ah, Virgil and Homer. I have read these, but in French.” He seemed to drift briefly into reveries of ancient times. “And what do you make in Italy?”
“I have a job on Capri,” I said, hoping that answered his question. “I’ll be working as secretary for a writer who lives there, Rupert Grant.” Because English was not his language, I found myself hitting every syllable like a tambourine, letting it resonate.
“I have heard of Rupert,” he said. “A Scottishman, no?”
“That’s right.”
“He is very popular in France. I have read only one book of Rupert, about Ulysses. You know this story?”
“Siren Call,” I said. “It’s probably his best known work.”
“His best work?”
“Best known.” I preferred at least half a dozen of his other novels, and thought even more highly of his poetry and essays, although I doubted Patrice would know about these. “I’ll answer letters for him, type manuscripts, that sort of thing. I’m not quite sure what the job entails.”
“You are so lucky man,” said Patrice. “I have dreamed to have such a position. In France, the writer wants to do everything himself and he trusts no one.”
Patrice must have been twenty or more, but he appeared younger, a hipless adolescent. The shoulder-length hair, which he parted in the middle, gave him a feminine aspect. He pulled a cigarette from the pocket in his sweatshirt and offered me one. “I will stay for as long as possible on Capri,” he explained. “But I do not have so much money. If I may find a job, I will be so lucky as well.”
“Are you dropping out of the Sorbonne?”
“Drop in, drop out. We are not so strict in France. We come and go.” He explained that after having enrolled in the university, one simply attended lectures. They were given in vast halls, and nobody took attendance or monitored your progress. “When you are ready to take the exams, you do it,” he said. “In France, the result is everything, the process…” He made a derisive, slicing gesture with his right hand.
“And how is readiness for exams determined?”
“By the mind,” he said, putting a finger to his temple and twisting it, somewhat ominously. “It is self-knowledge. I will know when I am ready for this.”
I envied his Gallic self-confidence. There was a firmness about the French that seemed part of their heritage. They assumed a certain greatness in the world, as the heirs of Napoleon, Hugo, and Sartre. (I had recently come upon a lovely remark by Jean Cocteau: “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.”) One could hardly imagine culturally dominant figures like Hugo or Jean-Paul Sartre in England or the United States; they would make no sense in either place.
In 1970, to be young and French seemed the ideal combination of attributes. By comparison, young Italians—at least those I’d met in Rome—appeared feckless and groping, overly tied to familial expectations and obligations.
“So, please tell me,” said Patrice, “where you will stay in Capri? With the Scottishman?”
“On his property,” I said, as vaguely as possible, suspecting that Patrice might want to throw himself upon my hospitality. Grant had written that I would “have use of a small cottage at the bottom of the garden,” but he would probably not appreciate it if I arrived with an entourage.
“Ah, this will be so interesting, to live with a man of creativity.” Patrice looked at me longingly. “Moi, I will find a pensione. They are not so expensive there, I am said, but in Paris…” He clucked his tongue and shook his head.
I remembered the loaf of bread and slab of gorgonzola I had bought in Amalfi that morning and stuffed into my knapsack. “Have you eaten, Patrice?”
His baleful look amused me.
“So please,” I said, speaking English as though I were translating from another tongue, “you must join me. I have bread and cheese.”
We climbed the narrow, metal steps to the top deck, near the bow, and sat on a bench together to share my little parcel of food. The crennelations of the shoreline on the starboard side of the ferry held our gaze as we ate: a gorgeous spectacle that seemed to defeat verbalization. In the distance, one could see the russet outline of Li Galli, a series of rocks that lay just off Positano. The largest of these, Isola Lunga, amounted to an island, with a few houses carved into its stony shoulders.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“Yes, but too much beautiful,” Patrice responded. “They should make a law against it, this…abundance.” He smeared the soft gorgonzola on his bread with a thin, greasy finger. “When you see something like this, it steals from you the possibility to imagine for yourself.”
I objected, but said nothing, not wishing to involve myself in a discussion of aesthetics. I had observed seductive views before, but this was different, and would take time to absorb.
Luckily, for me, I had time. If I lived frugally, I had enough money to sustain me comfortably for a year or two. And I had this job, which I’d magically summoned by writing a letter to Grant on a whim. Having read a recent volume of his essays on poetics, I sent a few of my own feeble efforts, a handful of sonnets, vaguely reminiscent of Wordsworth, in care of the Villa Clio, Capri, having noted this address at the end of his preface. I mentioned, in passing, that I had decided to drop out of Columbia and planned to visit Italy, where I hoped to scout for work. He replied at once, praising my poems and, to my amazement, offering a job. “There is not much in the way of financial gain to be had,” he said, “but we have accommodation that might suit a young man in your situation, and there is plenty of bread and wine at our table.” I wrote quickly to accept the offer, suggesting an arrival date at the end of April. Neither of us ever mentioned how long the appointment might last, but this didn’t worry me. Life, at twenty-two, was infinite, open-ended, and beyond such petty calculation.
“We are bobbing like the cork,” said Patrice, licking the gorgonzola from his fingers as a shadow suddenly fell across the deck. The winds had suddenly picked up so fiercely that the ferry began to dip and roll. Others on deck rushed for the most convenient railings, while Patrice and I held to our seats. “I don’t like a storm at sea,” he added. “You are often struck with lightning in these circumstance.” He had barely finished the sentence when the rain, in lukewarm horizontal sheets, swept over the port railing, chasing us inside.
Patrice and I settled at a small table bolted to the floor near the door. Next to us, an obese Arab woman in a caftan was puking into a brown bag while her tiny husband, unshaven, massaged her shoulders and whispered comforting words. The beautiful, almond-eyed children of an Italian couple pointed at her, imitating the puking noises and giggling. Loudly, their mother scolded them, explaining that to tease sick people was to make una brutta figura. A man in a brown linen suit and Borsalino stood by the bar, singing an unfamiliar aria in a deep baritone.
“It is the carnival of life, this boat,” Patrice said, gesturing pompously. “Do you like Puccini, by the way?”
“I’ve never really listened to him,” I said.
Patrice appeared wounded by my admission. “You must acquaint him,” he said, as neutrally as possible. It would not have done to scold someone who had recently provided bread and gorgonzola. “Opera is the height of art, mixing the elements of literature with music and visuality.”
I nodded, suppressing a smile and making a mental note to remember visuality. Patrice redeemed himself, however, when he went to the bar and reappeared at my elbow with a glass of grappa. “This will prevent you from getting sick,” he said. “The more you drink, the more you will prevent.”
Grappa is a pure form of alcohol, best drunk late at night, after a bottle of wine and lots of food. Nevertheless, its medicinal effects in the current situation were easy to anticipate. One might still get sick, but it wouldn’t matter. I downed the glass, as instructed by Patrice, in one throat-inflaming gulp. My spirits, as if summoned from backstage to the proscenium, brightened.
“Now you are well,” he said, waving his hand over my head. “Everything will improve, believe it so.”
He had barely spoken when the sun came pillaring through the clouds. The rain, as if switched off at the source like a shower, ceased, and the sea fell calm—and darker than before. We hurried back on deck in time to see, in the near distance, the sheer limestone cliffs on the northeast tip of Capri, a geographical feature made ominous by the Roman emperor Tiberius, who had those who disagreed with him tossed from the heights of Il Salto (“The Leap”) onto the boulder-broken shingle below. Soon the Faraglioni could be seen, too: a series of vertical rocks thrusting upward like ancient ruins.
“You see, Tiberio enjoyed to live in exile here, on Capri, because there is no hidden harbor. The enemy, they can’t approach without being seen. Very nice and safe, if you are crazy dictator.”
As I knew from a course on Roman history, the man who inherited the empire from Augustus had perhaps the hardest act in history to follow. Born in the fourth decade before Christ, he died in A.D. 37, nearly eighty years old. By this time he ruled most of the known world from a tiny island in the Mediterranean—a dazzling feat of political ventriloquism. The survivor of endless plots and conspiracies, he had even managed to outwit and subdue the powerful and popular Sejanus, his younger rival and most obvious successor.
Tiberius baffled everyone when he abandoned Rome, the center of the empire, for a self-imposed exile on Capri, in A.D. 26. As recounted by Tacitus and Suetonius—both suspect as historians but excellent as storytellers—he lapsed into a life of sybaritic madness. He was egomaniacal, sexually twisted as well as omnivorous, riven by fits of jealousy that maddened those around him, including one of his closest friends, the renowned jurist Cocceius Nerva, who committed suicide by slowly starving himself to death before the emperor’s eyes simply to protest his extravagance and moral degeneracy. I thought this would make a wonderful novella, or perhaps a play, and determined to write it one day.
Although I hadn’t written much prose yet, the idea of historical fiction appealed to me, and I looked forward to discussing the subject with Grant, who had already written a dozen historical novels that had changed the nature of a genre once dismissed by critics as the domain of second-rate writers. Fearless and wildly erudite, Grant had roamed the corridors of history from ancient Greece to Elizabethan England and, most recently, had published Dying Above His Means, a novel about the twilight years of Oscar Wilde, that period when (after the prison years in Reading) he retreated to the Continent with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, his impossible young lover (and the original cause of his imprisonment).
“There are two harbors, but only one really,” Patrice explained as we rounded the Punta del Capo, heading straight into the wide-flung arms of the Marina Grande, whose docks were crammed with sailing yachts and cruisers. “This is the big harbor,” he announced, gesturing to signify bigness. “She is the north side. The small harbor is on the other side. Nobody ever arrives there, in Marina Piccola, though Lenin did, when he visited Capri—before the revolution, of course. In 1908, I think. He came to see his friend, Maxim Gorky, another revolutionist. Lenin was used to arriving in unexpected ways.”
When I asked Patrice how he happened to know so much about Capri, he waved dismissively. “I have read the guidebooks. You understand, my memory is wonderful. She is my chief asset.” He sighed, as if suddenly recalling something, then added: “I have suffered much pain from this asset, I admit to you. One must forget to be happy. I have too much inside that is unforgotten, and the load feels so heavy on me.”
It was easier to trust Patrice than to question what he said, so I put myself temporarily into his hands. He rhapsodized in fractured English about the heights of Anacapri, the windswept, dolomitic presence of Mount Solaro, the haunting aura of the Matromania Cave, and the peculiar light show known as the Blue Grotto. “You will see this for yourself,” he said, “these things I describe.” That he had never actually been to Capri himself was passed over lightly.
My pulse quickened as the ferry approached the Marina Grande, with its winter forest of sailboat masts visible in the docks on one side. A dozen or so smaller vessels crossed our path like water-spiders, and there was a general din of seagulls, who flocked and fed lustily on scraps that seemed to pour from a range of vessels. Our ferry struck the concrete landing forcibly, then settled into an eerie stillness, followed by cries of Ecco! Finalmente!
Patrice hugged me, as though by arrival in Capri we’d accomplished something. “I am so happy here,” he said.
“Me, too,” I replied. And it was true. For the first time in what felt like months of unease, despair, and disaffection, I felt something akin to happiness.