A Year in the World (46 page)

Again
we board the bus for two hours to the port city Kusadasi, where we check into a 1970s hotel. Our suite is shades of turquoise and blue, all of which have seen brighter days. The place is truly dreary, after the freedom of the boat with always the exquisite water and fresh coastal view. We have dinner outside, the only bad meal we’ve had in Turkey.
Buffet
is a bad word anyway, and here, partly because we are eating late, everything oversimmered in the stainless-steel bain-marie has toughened and saddened. The only consolation is that the hotel garden faces the harbor in front, with the lights of the town stretching beyond.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10: KUSADASI AND EPHESUS

But we sleep. A real bed. And wake at ten. Out the window the leafy tropical garden and the sea resemble a Matisse painting. To Ephesus this afternoon!

The site we’d seen before on a sizzling August day with mobs. Spoiled we are now by hiking to remote ruins. Even with few tourists at Ephesus this time, the experience is so vastly different. Of course, this is one of the most interesting and arresting of the ancient sites, but the sense of discovery feels missing. All has been laid out, pointed out, explicated. The effect of “main street,” a marble street lined with astonishing houses and temples, even a public toilet room, cannot be overstated. The grandeur of the ancient world lies beneath our feet. Still, no shard to turn over with your toe, no torso in the weeds. And the end of the trip.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11: KUSADASI/ISTANBUL

Seeing that we are rug mad, Enver takes us to the workshop of his friend, Dr. Ögül Orhan. We’re given tea and a show of antique kelims, as well as the process of making silk thread from cocoons. Women are weaving under an open-walled room. This is a school that preserves the traditional dying techniques and provides training for village women. The owner is also a motorcycle collector, and Armand would like to take off on a vintage Moto Guzzi. We find a few primitive weavings and have them shipped to California. “World very small. The rugs will be home before you will,” Dr. Orhan tells us.

We have lunch outside a Greek village, which looks as if it landed from some Aegean island. We have a stewed seaweed, and hot crispy spinach filo with feta, and a wheat gruel with onions, something you have to have acquired a taste for in early childhood. My favorite bread of the trip is their sesame pan bread made with garbanzo flour.

From Izmir, old Smyrna, we fly back to our little hotel in Istanbul. After much confabulation about the best kebab restaurant, we take an insufferably long taxi through traffic to a strictly local but enormous restaurant. It is mediocre, after all the trouble.

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12: ISTANBUL

Enver goes off to see friends, and a young guide takes us to the Blue Mosque, the Byzantine Cistern, and Hagia Sophia. We did not see the cistern when we were here before. How dangerous, our assumptions. I’d thought,
Oh, a cistern; we have one at Bramasole
. This cistern is up there with the wonders of the world—a columned temple of water underground, formerly the city’s drinking water. There are fish and low lights and a feeling of being in the afterlife. Many of the 336 columns were recycled from other places. Some are Doric, some Corinthian. One is based on an enormous head placed sideways for the right column height. “This must be the ultimate in improvisation,” Bernice remarks. I see Greek writing all over one, and a teardrop design on another.

Topkapi is half the size of Monaco, six kilometers around the walls. As I child I collected postcards and Viewmasters. Although I’d been nowhere farther than Atlanta, I was a traveller in training. The first book I remember reading on my own was
Sally Goes Travelling Alone
. The moral of the story was,
Don’t forget your belongings
. Sally had four items and compulsively counted them. The lesson did not take; I frequently leave voice recorders, underwear, even jewelry behind. One of my Viewmasters—you inserted a disk of tiny slides in a viewer and clicked from scene to scene—was of Topkapi. I wonder now where I acquired such exotic sights in my shoebox full of treasures. I would like to whisper to the child way down in rural Georgia,
Someday you will see Topkapi
.

Sometimes you get a new glimpse of a friend just from a throwaway remark. Aurora walking in the garden at Topkapi says, “In my neighborhood in Torino I walked to school down a street lined with sycamores.” And suddenly I have a vision of her, a small blond girl with long legs, shy and beautiful, the drying scent of the leaves, and the gold light of a Torino autumn. The day to day of childhood, how long it lasts, then how it turns to a few memories that stay. How we wish we could reclaim memory. And now so many years later she’s a lovely mother chasing her boy around the big trees on this first autumn day at Topkapi. I see hundreds of faces in the white hydrangea.

If I could choose one gift from the Topkapi trove, it would not be a big emerald that the sultans were so fond of, or the mirror of twisted gold wire, or even the blackamoor the size of a votive with his pearl pantaloons, turban and jacket of rubies, anklets of diamonds, and his foot on a diamond pillow. I wouldn’t take a rose-water sprinkler—my goodness, they are divine—or the little trees of pearl, or even the eighty-six-carat diamond found in a rubbish dump and sold for three spoons. But I would take one of the gold writing boxes all bejeweled. Hidden inside, there must be precious indigo and bloodroot inks and sheets of vellum large enough for a love letter or a poem. To open it and write—what would be the words? Maybe only the essential ones,
salt, star, stone.

While we were on the boat, the season changed in Istanbul: mid-September. Today a light rain falls off and on. We have lunch in the greenhouse of a historic Ottoman-style hotel. This is my third visit to the city, and a sense of being in place begins. Sitting here in the watery light with friends, through the glass roof I can see minarets against the gray sky. The music piped in takes me back to high school, “Stranger in Paradise,” augmented by a trickling fountain.
Take my hand, I’m a stranger in paradise
. True. The waiters are touchingly attentive as they serve pasta stuffed with veal and a cream sauce of dill and pepper oil. A kitten pounces around and sweeps her body around my legs. A place, and a place like no other.

Briefly I get to see Guven, whom we met on our first visit here. He has been to California twice since then. He’s handsome in an Armani-style suit, his black curls long over the collar. He takes us and our friends to look at some rugs, but we are rugged out. With true Turkish fierceness, he has adopted us as friends. When he came to California, Guven hid something in the house to protect us. He worried about us in violent America and asked if he should send an uncle to guard us.

As a farewell, Enver arranges for a boat to take us up the Bosporus to a restaurant. After all the hikes in T-shirts and big shoes, we look fresh in nice clothes. I take pictures of houses along the shore. Like everything in Turkey, they are a mix of charm, interest, decay, and improvisation. Some dark wooden restored houses look as if they could be on a lake in the Adirondacks. Some look as if Tolstoy or Chekhov is inside writing something immortal, a distinctly eastern, dacha cast. Others have a gingerbread Victorian trim, but one frame off, the way nineteenth-century houses look in New Zealand. Others are simply on the verge of collapse. This must be one of the most fabulous places to live in the world. The architecture reflects what a crossroads these waters always have been. They face the choppy Bosporus always hacking at the shore, and the long history of those who have passed this way.

We pull up to a seafood restaurant and are all surprisingly subdued for our gala goodbye. We want to arrange to meet later with Guven, to sip a little tea somewhere, but our phone does not connect with his. We all give Enver notes of thanks and books and little gifts. He is an inspired guide and gave us great joy by revealing his country to us.

Back in the bridal chamber, I dream of walking down steps in ruined Greek theatres, and then before the early call of the muezzin, which I am awaiting, there are other dreams of watery colors and patterns—hooks, snakes, scorpions, ram’s horns, and
göz
, the eye, a rug motif based on the belief that the human eye is the best protection against the evil eye. Especially if the eye is blue. I think of Willie’s clear, clear gaze and hope it always protects him against evil. He has the lucky darker ring around the iris. When I said to him, “You have my mother Frankye’s eyes,” he looked surprised and said, “Why?” And I whispered to him, “Because she told me to pass them on to you.” At two he understands. If my mother and Atatürk had married, I still would have inherited blue eyes. Her gene for them was stronger than his black eyes. I wish my mother had sailed in the afternoon on his caïque, admiring the lacy Crimean houses over his shoulder. That they had laughed when she told him her grandmother’s name, Sarah America Gray. No, impossible. Sarah America Gray was my father’s grandmother, and my father has not yet entered this picture. For now, it’s only Frankye in shorts and a white sailor top, and Mustafa Kemal who whispers to her, “America, America.” He smells of the carnations of Iznik, his lips are wet with salt water, and the sun rains down a silver sheen over the mosques . . .

Then the dreams are just images, no narrative, the tribal symbols of birds and stars rise up, and they must mean holiness, hope, and luck. The dreams give me again glimpses of carved stones. The thousand patterns that I saw, I see again, as though I am walking over them, which, I suppose, I am and always will. The muezzin cry splits the sky.

An Armful of
Bougainvillea

Capri

But is it really we who are approaching the island,

or is the island, having broken loose from its granite

moorings, moving toward us?

—A
LBERTO
S
AVINIO

“The kingdom of Capri,” I say to Ed. He’s leaning on the ferry rail, taking in the first close glimpses of the mythic island’s sheer cliffs.

“I’m listening for the Sirens’ song.”

“You
have
to be a poet to imagine that,” I answer, looking around at the crude churning bucket we’re on, with its load of fellow travellers. I point to white villas with domed roofs and bright boats along the coast.

“Water is probably scarce. The domes channel it to a cistern.”

With the others, we thunder off the ferry from Ischia, where we have spent three sybaritic days soaking in the volcanic thermal pools and eating grilled fish with lemon. I approach Capri with some apprehension. The island’s reputation does not entice—posing glitterati flashing megawatt smiles as flashbulbs pop, international lounge lizards sipping prosecco in the piazza, and yacht owners parading their nubile companions through shops that sell only about ten items, size zero, all priced to impress. Then, worse, the disturbing sequence of northern European pederasts who preyed on local boys. Some of these decadents’ actions are affectionately recorded in local writing, which just illustrates the Italian ability to isolate and ignore the elephant in the living room, preferring to focus on the view and what’s served at the table. Maybe this talent contributes to their quality of being the most flexible people on earth.

The early history, too, is blotted by the sway of Tiberius, one of the ugliest of the Romans, who built a splendid villa. Some say the whole island was his villa. He often flung those who displeased him from the cliffs. And of course, the Sirens. Easy to see how a ship could crack up on the rocks, song or no song. “I wish I didn’t know anything about that pedophiliac revel that went on for years. I wish I could approach Capri as an earthly paradise.”

“Paradise will always be full of fools, my love.”

“But that’s my most unfavorite kind of kinky. And Norman Douglas—one of the grossest—was a superb travel writer. Remember I took his
Old Calabria
when we went there? He looked for the heart of a place. Civilized, erudite, curious . . .”

“Just think of him as an old pagan. The gods always sported with anything that took their fancy.”

I am offered a paper cone of green grapes at the marina. As always in Italy, the disconcerting touch of the personal, even in unlikely moments. The waiting taxis set a mood—white convertibles, low and slinky, ready to whisk you off to the upper echelon of the island, the tiny village of Anacapri. “They’re Fiat Mareas,” Ed says, “built especially for Capri. So nice!
Marea
means ‘tide.’ ”

We are staying in the village below, where no cars are allowed. A man with a handcart takes away our luggage and sets off at a canter toward the hotel. We walk behind our porter and see no Jackie O, no Gina L., no latter-day sirens at all in the piazza. Soon we’re following him along the swerves of a winding flowery path with glimpses of the divine sea. No wonder we all swarm off the ferries. No wonder the most glamorous seek this place. No wonder Shirley Hazzard and Graham Greene and Arshile Gorky secluded themselves here for years. For working on a creative project, to be
buoyed
by the blissful climate must impart a godlike joy. Waking to the scent of orange blossoms on the air and the temperature that says,
You’re mine, don’t worry, I always will caress you like this
—the book or the painting must thrive. The air alone immediately makes me feel rocked in the cradle. I have come to explore this little kingdom, to escape the intricacies of house restoration, and to seek as many shades of blue as the sky and sea can offer. Ed wants to reread Homer, continue his eternal study of the past remote tense in Italian, and write poems. What a luxury. Capri, a place to hide.

We have spent, not enough, but a lot of time in the South of Italy in recent years. The constant presence of the sea, the Greek profiles and eyes, the robust cuisine, and the brink-of-chaos atmosphere appeal to me deeply. Even the refined and educated people have time to give you, not just those you encounter on daily rounds. Days in the South seem long. Nights seem longer. In the South I begin to feel that eternity takes place in one lifetime.

Last May we sailed from Naples to Sicily, then around the boot and up to Venice, with stops in Sorrento, Taromina, Gallipoli, Lecce, Brindisi, Pescara, and Ravenna, disembarking in Venice during a high-water siege. Naples has become a spiritual home. Our first trip south was in the company of our friend from Cortona, Ann Cornelisen, whose
Torregreca
and
Women of the Shadows
I consider classics. What better person to introduce her loved Tricarico (the town she called Torregreca in her writing), the conical houses of Puglia, the castles of Frederick I, and the austere, time-broken villages of the countryside? During her years of living in the South, Ann absorbed the austerity, or more likely, she took that trait with her when she settled there and found herself profoundly at home. Her move north was a mistake. She thought she wanted a comfortable place to write, but she never identified with the more gentrified Tuscan country life. One side of her austerity was a scrupulous splitting of expenses, down to cups of coffee. She also refused to cotton to the heat. Her car was not air-conditioned, and the summer days were brutal. In awe of her self-denial, I didn’t murmur a single complaint. Ed drove; Ann navigated. I was wedged into the backseat with the hot wind from the front seat’s windows blasting into my face. For days. Still, the nights were cool and the stories were good.

If I were young, I’d probably up and move to the less-charted, more raucous South. As I am, though, I keep the place as a dream and drop into the reality as often as I can. In less than an hour I already am thinking: Capri may be where dream and reality anneal.

As
soon as we check in and leave the bags, we’re out in the early October morning. It’s seventy-five degrees and cloudless. The shining dome of sky over us resembles an inverted glazed, cobalt, china teacup. On the island’s maze of cunning paths, soon we’re on not a walk but a hike, down, down, down. We reach a precipice—I can see that
precipice
is a word I am going to be saying over and over—overlooking a cove that lures you to take a big dive. On a sailboat anchored near rocks, people are clinking glasses and propping up their tanned legs. The striated blues bring my loyalty for blue back to Italy from Greece. The colors of the water remind me of some of my favorite flowers—lobelia, delphinium, and a particular pansy the color of the sky on a starry night.

The upward return completely takes my breath—over and over I have to pause. My Achilles tendons feel like the beef jerky bones that dogs love to chew. I may wheeze. “We’re climbing Mont Blanc ten times.” My lungs are little hot-air balloons about to burst against my ribs. Going down did not seem so vertical; going up I am suddenly a hundred years old. Ed’s long-ago summers spent hiking and camping in the Rockies give him stamina I never had. He ascends like a mountain goat.

On Capri they actually serve
caprese
, that simple marvel of basil, mozzarella, and tomatoes. And the three textures set the bar because the basil is pungent, the mozzarella fresh from Naples, and the tomatoes grow in the magic soil on the volcanic slope of Vesuvius, which gives them a voluptuous taste. We have lunch by the hotel pool: good bread,
caprese
, a plate of prosciutto and melon.
Basta!
Our room at the Scalinatella opens to a terrace overlooking the sea. The room is cool with marble floors, icy colors, glass tables, and a grand sense of space. I remember a hotel room in New York where I stayed on a book tour. The bed barely fit within the four walls, and I left with a scraped shin from scuttling crab-style around it and my luggage. Here we could dance. I should be wearing silver lamé to dinner. Instead, I am soaking my poor feet in the bidet with a vial of bath gel.

Ed has opened a sweetly sharp white wine and pours a taste of the crags and minerals of this
terra
into a glass. We’re wrapped in the hotel robes, for a little chill has come in with the evening. A seagull lands on the terrace, eyeing our wine and maybe us. I read that the sea is seriously overfished and gulls get vicious when they come up empty from their dives. For one with a bird phobia—me, for example—a vicious gull is equivalent to a normal person’s mugger. Ed waves his arms and says, “Shoo,” but the bird only glares and flaps his—my god—considerable wings.
Don’t mess with me
, it croaks. “Weren’t the Sirens half birds?” I ask with a shudder.

“Yes, bottom half.”

The sunset tunes high notes of tangerine and rose, followed by throaty bass notes of indigo and grapey purple. Where shall we dine? My favorite question. We unpack completely in order to more easily pretend that we are living here. Two bathrooms, I like that. I paint my toenails a color called Your Villa or Mine and let them dry while I have another splash of the wine and the sea turns the splotched purple of a fresh bruise. My pomegranate silk pants and shirt are not too wrinkled. We go off in search of pasta with clams.

Early
morning, out the door. How simple life is. Houses offering views of the ideal life—long walks with silence, with mesmerizing scents of flowers, swims in a transparent sea layered with emerald, lapis, turquoise water. A house with a terrace over this sea must be the ideal dwelling. Axel Munthe, a Swedish doctor whose villa and garden are open to visitors, wrote about coming to Capri:

What daring dream had made my heart beat so violently a moment ago when Mastro Vincenzo had told me that he was getting old and tired, and that his son wanted him to sell his house? What wild thoughts had flashed through my boisterous brain when he had said that the chapel belonged to nobody? Why not to me? Why should I not buy Mastro Vincenzo’s house and join the chapel and the house with garlands of vines and cypresses and columns supporting white loggias.

I recognize the impulse. Why not, indeed.

Capri must be the most captivating, stupendously beautiful, felicitous place on the planet—but also the most haunted. The plumb-line cliffs inspire vertigo in the happiest person; for the disturbed or depressed, they must lure with a promise of oblivion into beauty. And the history of locals and visitors who simply disappear one day adds to the mysterious magnetic pull of the edge. Of the many, many edges. I am surprised to feel that Capri retains some whiff of ancient mythological origins. Hidden coves, grottoes, dramatic landscape, ruins—all these
suggest
primal spirits, gods, omens. At the Grotta delle Felci, locals swear they hear the breath of a buried prehistoric creature, ghosts of Saracens who raided the coast for centuries, or perhaps souls still tormented by suicide or execution. In
Capri and No Longer Capri
, Raffaele La Capria describes groups going at night to listen to an anguished sigh emanating from the earth. From his terrace nearby, he senses “the bewitched atmosphere that at times the nights of Capri exhale . . . and I await the arrival of the great sigh that the people call
il fiatone
, the big breath.”

Other places have secret grottoes and ravines and tormentors in their pasts, but only here have I actually
felt
a strange presence of forces. Any sense of place, sense of home on Capri, must have a taproot reaching back to the Sirens’ song. But pushing farther, why were the Sirens singing on these rocks? Why
here
?

Lentisk, prickly pear, pine, asphodel, myrtle. Perhaps they were planted by the gods. On Capri, by fortunate fluke, you’re out in the Tyrrhenian Sea, riding a rocky fortress, away, lost, in a chosen
paradiso
but one that—surprise!—gives you the melancholy perspective of the outsider. Islands do that. With the mainland in view—Naples and the Sorrento peninsula—you see daily the fact of isolation. I think six months here would change me completely. I might emerge, finally, as a disciplined writer. I would certainly emerge with iron calf muscles. The outsider’s solitude and loneliness breed fantasy. Could not a sea monster arise from the waves, the ghosts of all those women abducted by pirates not cry out from the rocks? Maybe I would finish my abandoned long poem.

With the designer shops—
che bella
that cashmere blanket—and the luxuries of the Quisisana (Here One Heals) Hotel, the twilight Campari in the piazza, you can drift right through. A glass of limoncello at midnight and off to dreamland. But if you stay away from the
centro
and walk all over the island, the complexity and deeper beauty reveal themselves.

Mornings settle into a pattern—an early walk followed by a
cornetto
and cappuccino in the piazza. I’m surprised at how few tourists are here. I know that in summer this piazza pulsates with the northern nationalities. Americans don’t come as much anymore, scared off by the island’s reputation for being spoiled by the likes of us. When the first ferry empties a group of bare-chested men, women in shorts that cannot cover the subject, and a bewildered group of ancients in identical baseball caps, we flee before they reach the piazza. If they are American, I do not want to know it. I think of an English friend’s remark, “The human on holiday is a sad affair.”

We walk. Of all the books and articles I’ve read, not one has said that Capri is stupendous for those who like to see on foot. We’re walking all over the island. The tiny lanes must be former donkey paths. Palm, mimosa, olive, dried fennel stalks, laurel. We meet few others, and of course no cars. Like Venice, Capri is jammed only in the center; strike out, and the place offers solitude. We spend hours in the library at the Certosa di San Giacomo, the Carthusian monastery. The young man who works there brings out ancient books bound in vellum and first editions of Norman Douglas’s
Siren Land
, long out of print. He shows us watercolors by artists who’ve visited the island.