Jigsaw (9 page)

Perversely the sole items that were treasured, kept, passed from hand to hand, were compromising, not to say dangerous, possessions, not openly come by; I am speaking of copies of the
New Statesman
(eventually they included even certain copies of
The Times
). It was I who was charged with circulating the latest issue – children assumed to be politically innocent in the eyes of the strolling Carabinieri – to the dissident’s grocery shop or the suspended professor’s villa.

When did this begin? At first it was more an undercurrent, a concern shared by some we knew, a distaste rather than a menace, if never quite out of sight and mind; even in my earliest memories of Italy I cannot detach the country from the ubiquitous images of Fascism. Each time I returned there were more black-shirts in the streets, more marching and strutting, more boasts and lies in the newspapers, more posters on the walls. I saw what was to be seen, my mother interpreted and briefed me. What was being put over (by Musso & Co.) was, she was never in doubt, based on trickery and false values, sanctified aggression, pandered to false pride; it made ignorant youth feel important, gave foolish people spurious hopes – it was dangerous stuff. Alessandro, 
informed by an old, old patience, was more inclined to shrug it off: it was bad, there was little in politics that was not … Hadn’t they seen it all before, Invasion, Defeat, Occupation; Attila, Buonaparte, the Austrians … They come, they go, we survive, it will pass. Everything does, my mother would say, but
when
? And
meanwhile
…? Oh, Italians have no talent for public life, they may be for it – justice, disinterested administration – but they don’t know how to get it: they
accept
corruption. (Crack jokes about it as you do, Alessandro.) When their rulers are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion
and
honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and show-offs, clever when they ought to be
straightforward
, rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery. (She would turn to me, Oh how lucky you are being brought up in England, I’m so glad you are getting a liberal education.) It won’t stick, Alessandro said, Musso’s dream: playing lions, days without pasta, little boys carrying daggers, it’s too silly, we’re not cut out for regimentation.

Not individually. But what about the yelling in Piazza Venezia? Crowds are vulnerable to a harangue, to torches and lit-up façades and the prospects of glamour, even sham glamour – and not only Italian crowds, are there many people who have learnt to be consistently human
en masse
?

As it happened I had just been sent for again so I was there in the summer of 1924 – we had taken a house on the Sorrentine peninsula – when Matteotti, the leader of the opposition as it were, was kidnapped and murdered.
1
We were out at sea in an open fishing boat that August
day when another boat hove to and men shouted the news that Matteotti was dead – his body had been found in a hole. How shocked we were then and how hopeful. In the ensuing weeks people came to us, buoyed, euphoric, counting straws in the wind – the regime would not be able to weather such outrage, Mussolini was going to fall. Too soon it became clear that it had indeed been a turning point, that the deed, the criminal deed, the big enough deed had paid off (as nine years on, the burning of the Reichstag paid off): Matteotti gone, opposition suppressed,
il Fascismo
acclaimed, getting the upper hand. And so more tales – only they were
not
tales – of official chicanery, neighbours and relatives sacked from university posts or refused renewal of their annual patent to practise as doctors and lawyers because they had failed to become party members or to vote
sì
at the plebiscites, house searches next door (always for papers, books, not drugs nor arms), purges, disappearances, nocturnal arrests became part of our daily experience. It was early and at first hand that I learnt what life can be like when there is no freedom of thought, and rule by decree, not law.

One of Alessandro’s brothers went off to live in Ireland with an Englishwoman he had met, another decided to continue his studies in Vienna; Alessandro himself suspended all thought of qualifying as an architect. We trundled along day by day: we swam, we walked, we played games, we listened to my mother; often there were stimulating guests. Cousins, too, strayed in, stayed on, a good-looking lot they were, every boy of them. And at the centre of it all was my mother’s marriage. What appeared of it, the surface of it was low-key, curiously ordinary as if they were both resolved to ignore their great disparity of age. (In actual years, he was nearer to me than to her.) His feeling for her showed mainly in a kind of watchfulness: whatever she was doing, whomever she was talking to, he was alert, aware of her in the room, in the next room, tense to be off and by her side even before the summons; yet his actual manner was bantering, light, smoothing out the recurrent crises – she was always late, always losing the essential objects, ticket, key, at the stage that mattered. His humorous, protective ease did not tally with the sombre despair of the very young man, the melancholy aloof young man of our first encounters. Was it 
being married that changed people so? And what of her? It was she who puzzled me. She seemed … well, content, complacent one might say, taking his attendance casually (as she did mine): it was well, it was daylight, settled,
domestic
. Had I dreamt it all? The wind of passion, the heart-piercing isolation, the sense of foreboding in the days when we were fugitives at Agrigento?

And then it would be time for me to go. The summer or the span of winter weeks was over; back to England then by another of my devious little journeys. Did I mind? Yes and no. Sad to leave Italy; looking forward to I didn’t know quite what (a notion that some day there might be other fish for me to fry in England?). I felt more free there in my detached existence with Susan and Jack, if not without a twinge of guilt about the misconceptions my mother appeared to accumulate about its nature and which I was wary to dispel.

Thus Italy and England as I grew older, as I grew up, were home base. Strictly speaking I had no home in either: I
lived
there, in those two countries – as I would in later life, intermittently, not definitely – lived, felt at home, at home on a visit. Italy I loved. At the beginning, in childhood, the love was romantic: I was carried away by a warmth of life and by the recognition, yet unformulated, that there among those artefacts and landscapes I stood on the ground of an intense and relevant European civilisation (the conscious taking in of the visual experience came later). My attachment to England was instinctive, a bid for, if not roots, a kind of self-preservation. From early on I had the absolute if shadowy conviction that I would become a writer and nothing else; I held on to the English language as the rope to save me from drifting awash in the fluidities of multilingualism that surrounded me. My German beginnings I discounted, sought to obliterate. In this I succeeded for a number of years until the force of circumstances became too great. 

B
Y 1926 THE ANGLO-ITALIAN pattern was disrupted: less than two years after the murder of Matteotti, the Italian base was whisked from under my feet. A summons to join my mother came in an envelope that bore a French stamp with over-printed legend
Sanary-sur-mer-ses-sites-son-climat
. When I had managed to separate place from travel slogan, I went to look for it on a map: Sanary-sur-Mer in small print on the south coast of France between the great ports of Toulon and Marseille.

‘One autumn in the late nineteen-twenties for no particular reason at all, as it would seem, we began to live in France.’ So I wrote
elsewhere
. It is true, except that it was spring and in the mid-, not the late nineteen-twenties, and that the decision, my mother’s and
Alessandro
’s, to leave Italy was a reasoned and possibly a wise one. Without being substantially active as resistants, their views were evident to all who liked to pry. A
New Statesman
once too often under my pinafore. They were compromised. They neither fled nor were they exiled; they left discreetly. They were able to retain their passports – Europe was entering an epoch where having documents was vital – and became officially described as members of the Italian colony in France. So far so rational. It was the choice of their destination that was fortuitous. They were on a train, it was evening, they had crossed the border: they were out of Italy, bowling along the French coast encumbered with much luggage and their three Japanese spaniels, one of them a bitch and near her time. It was a slow train – they had muffed the better connections – stopping every few minutes. I have forgotten where
they were originally bound for, Aix-en-Provence? Saint-Jean-de-Luz? They
had
laid some plans. What happened was that after a few hours my mother got tired, and tired of the train. She said they might as well call it a day and get off at the next stop whatever that might be. This they did. It was late, the station was a shed and dimly lit; there was a little country bus outside and it took them and their belongings to the nearest available hotel on a nocturnal waterfront. The Hôtel de la Tour. (Still standing.) Next morning they were able to take their bearings – a radiant day, a view on a small fishing port – and liked what they saw. Alessandro was for pushing on to where they had meant to go, my mother became reluctant to budge. Did it matter
when
one started a new life? And by now there were Chumi’s puppies: a hint from the gods to remain? Poor Alessandro, he must have been used by then to her superstitions and the fatalism that so easily served her tendency – alas inherited by me – to settle for the line of least resistance. Within a week they had moved into a furnished bungalow at Port Issol, one of Sanary’s small beaches.

That house, the first of many, was rented by the month, and when some time later I too was catapulted into the Département du Var, I saw my summer there as another transitory episode. I was fifteen. As it turned out I remained there for the best part of the next fourteen years. In this manner France became the nearest thing I’d ever known as home.

What was it like that French Mediterranean coast between Marseille and Toulon, Toulon and Fréjus, in the nineteen-twenties? Le Petit Littoral, the unfashionable part of the Côte d’Azur (
not
the Riviera) with its string of fishing ports and modest resorts – Cassis, La Ciotat, Saint-Cyr, Bandol, Sanary, Le Lavandou, Cavalaire, Saint-Tropez? The sea and sky were clear; living was cheap; there were few motor cars,
there were few people.
During the holiday months, cafés and beaches filled with visitors, families mostly from French southern towns, Nîmes, Marseille, Montélimar. Neither tourists nor rich went to the South of France in summer, and no Frenchman born north of Valence 
would have dreamt of exposing his womenfolk and children to the heat. Some of this changed soon. In that very 1926 Colette discovered the aestival Midi, the clarity of the mornings, the stillness of the
sun-struck
monochrome noons, the magic of the scented nights. She bought a summer house at Saint-Tropez, La Treille Muscate; clans of artists and writers followed with their entourages. From then on visitors became more cosmopolitan and varied: flamboyant or monastic of habit, famous or notorious, as the case might be. They were still not noticeably more numerous.

Sanary in 1926, like Cassis, like Bandol, had about half a dozen small hotels, some pensions, a score or two of (unheatable) villas for summer letting – were there a hundred who came for the
quatorze juillet
and August? a hundred and fifty? The permanent
local
population was about two thousand according to the Michelin of the time; it
has
gone up since though not horrendously so, while the transient summer population has swollen to fifty thousand by the 1980s – need one spell it out in terms of housing estates, car parks? In the decades of innocence the inhabitants lived mostly off each other and the export of vegetables, flowers and fine fish. They were
cultivateurs
, fishermen, shopkeepers, a doctor or two, the
notaire
, the
pharmacien
, the postmistresses, the schoolmistress, the retired naval officer sustained by opium and his books, the stray Scandinavian artist. The fishermen caught sardines, langoustes, red mullet, rockfish, loup de mer, their wives mended the nets – in public on the quai, in winter in the sun, in summer seeking shade – their children collected oursins and mussels. Inland the
cultivateurs
tended their greenhouses, olives and vines. The wine, some honest, some not so honest, red vin du Var was for regional consumption. A family of Swiss
vignerons
, called Roethlisberger, produced a reputable white wine along with their good red, a forerunner of the big, complex post-war wines that achieved the
Appellation Bandol
. Mimosa and carnations, some of the olive oil, the best of the fish and the first of the vegetables were shipped at dawn, the fresh pick or catch of them, to Paris, London, Brussels. Shipped, if we chose to get up early, under our eyes. Every morning except Monday there was a
criée
, an auction sale held in the square at 
first light – a display, straight from orchards and steep fields of apricots, narcissi, green almonds, artichokes in their leaves, young peas, slim haricots verts curled in flat baskets. It was long before the nouveau franc, or the new pence for that matter: in England a dozen of claret were still sold in shillings, here in Provence the bidding was not just in old francs but in
sous
, five centimes (small is cheap). I have
quinzé sous, quinzé sous
, fifteen
sous
, the auctioneer would sing out in that nasal meridional tone, accenting every syllable, a gnarled little man as crooked as they come,
trenté
, I’ve thirty
sous … quaranté – à vous la jolie petite dame
…
cinquanté sous – à toi, Jo-Jo.
And Jo-Jo in his
bleu
, his singlet and his espadrilles would sling the crate of artichokes into his Peugeot
camionnette
…

That square, the Place de Sanary, was the meeting point, the stage of social and commercial life. Its backcloth was the Mairie fluttering the Tricolor from an absurd little tower like a fattened minaret, flanked by the church, a pharmacy, a bakery, the Café de la Marine, the Café de Lyon, and two
bars tabacs
. The front of the square opened on the palm walk across the road and the small harbour, where fishing craft and sail boats lay at anchor, and on the sea beyond.

The rest of Sanary proper, Sanary-ville, consisted of a network of a few narrow streets, cleft by the sun only at noon, inhabited by families of
commerçants
and their shops, butchers and bakers,
épiceries, laiteries, cordonneries, quincailleries
, a couple of
bonneteries
where one bought thread, beach hats and canvas shoes. The houses were modestly urban, late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, with bead curtains over the doorways, here and there a stone arch, shutters on every window. Outer Sanary was pine groves and palms to eastward, small hotels, most of them new, bathing huts spread thinly between a flat road and the
plage
of Six-Fours; to westward there were hills, pine was relieved by ilex; villas with gardens of a sort (incipient suburbia) followed the contours of rock-bound bays, Port Issol, La Cride, La Gorguette – which became Huxley territory – Bandol. Inland all this vanished.

Inland lay the back country, sun-baked, cicada-loud, the ageless country of scrub and terraced hills where the peasants lived in their 
sparse stone-built
mas
, the archetypal Mediterranean landscape of rock and olive, wild thyme, vineyards, light.

This I had known in Italy; here there was a difference, a dichotomy: the timelessness of land and sea, and the indelible Frenchness of so much else; if the Midi was Arcadia it was also a Department of France. La République, Third, Fourth or Fifth –
‘Françaises et Français!’
– is as tough, as rooted, enduring, cohesive and diverse as the more ancient meridional civilisations, and the conjunction of the perennial austere beauty of climate and nature – scouring mistral, the unfudging sun – with the sweetness and sharpness and quickness, the rippling intelligence, the accommodating tolerance of the French manière de vivre gave one a large sense of living rationally, sensuously,
well
, of pleasure on many levels: now and before us and for years to come, as no other place in Europe, no other place in the world, France between the wars made one this present of the illusion of freedom.

As I was to learn. Later; imperfectly, conjecturally (the French and their ways are infinitely complex), at times sharply, with conscious joy. Not yet then; not during that summer, my first time in France.

I had come by way of Paris, a stopover not attempted before. So the first time I put foot in France, after a sleepy queasy transfer from boat to train, was on the pavement outside the Gare du Nord. I did not kiss the ground; I found a bus to take me to the Gare de Lyon. The female conductor was unamiable about my suitcase, which couldn’t have been large. Having left it at the cloakroom, I had the day before me (from noon that was until the last night-train South). I still remember how I spent it and still blush. What did Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein feel on their first day in Paris, France? I cringe, for I felt nothing very much. But then these illustrious expatriates had not stepped off the quick green omnibus at the Place de la Madeleine at the age of fifteen and a half. That was where I started. I was not impressed and wondered if I should have been. Nor did I know what to make of the unfamiliar façades of the Grands Boulevards, the slate-grey straightness, the compound gusts of smells: 
open
pissoirs
with tin screens like fire-guards being prominent and numerous. I ate a hurried lunch at a prix fixe and trotted off again. My mother had told me to go to the Tuileries, stand in the Place du Carrousel and look at La Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe beyond. This I did, and the nobility of the perspectives, evidence that the theme contrapuntal to French easeful dailiness is La Gloire, left me not entirely unvisited by a sense of grandeur. It was so again in front of the Hôtel des Invalides.

I visited the Louvre, experienced dumb inadequacy with the
Mona Lisa
and found more familiar enjoyment in the quattrocento rooms. On impulse I went to the Cluny, stabbed by the unexpected memory that this had been my father’s favourite museum (Paris: a place he loved), and felt spookishly pulled back among exhibits I could recognise as the source of inspiration for his own collection … Oh, I did fill my day. I walked down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, no associations flowered. I missed the Luxembourg, missed crossing the Seine over a bridge on foot, I missed Notre-Dame. I took a bus instead back to the Right Bank to look at the Sacré-Coeur; it was still daylight, hours before night-life, and there was something menacing about the quiescent garishness of Montmartre. I wandered about, unnoticed, unmolested. Eventually I had dinner in some small restaurant. The food was unmemorable (curious point, that). All the same, I must have lingered because I did not miss my train by what seemed seconds, propelled by a furious guard and scolded by a corridorful of
disagreeable
people.

Next morning I was met by Alessandro and my mother at the modest railway stop that serves Sanary-cum-Ollioules, a dot of administrative France so inconsiderable in the countryside that it might have been in rural Mexico. Now it was my turn to be conveyed to what would doubtlessly be another transitory summer home by that ramshackle little station bus. (It continued its not unuseful career for many years to come.) For me its juddering inside remains the scene of a most painful moment of my early life. Rattling along in heat and dust and din, my mother opposite on the wooden seat sprang an entirely
uncharacteristic question:
Have I changed?
It went home: there was no lightness in her tone, nothing of the self-mockery that had seen us through so many predicaments,
she
required something from
me
. Her beauty had been an intrinsic attribute, hers by nature, unassisted, worn without vanity, casually, carelessly as a well-bred man is supposed to have worn his clothes. Now it seemed not so. I did what her question imposed, and I did it a fraction too late, I looked at her. I saw what unasked I might not have seen: intimations of wear. Oh she was still beautiful – some might have said more so – what was gone? a glow? She was older.

I can still hear the answer I gave – again not quite quickly enough – the forced voice (and
what
showed in my face?), an answer to the effect that for me she was, she would be, always the same. I remember the exact words but cannot bear to write them down in their shameful inadequacy. My mother, so merciless on verbal shoddiness, let them pass.

The house was small and jerry-built, a bungalow without attempts at amenity or charm: it was less than two minutes’ walk from beach and sea and that was it. One entered through a verandah into the kitchen, there was the salle à manger and two largish bedrooms with a very large bedstead and a wardrobe in each and little else; the walls were thin and the wallpaper florid and hideous. It was all quite clean. For once my mamma and Alessandro had not left their mark beyond a scattering of books and dog baskets; a bad sign, I thought. In
retrospect
the main impression of those weeks I spent with them was constraint. I don’t know what, if anything, had happened; we were talking less. One thing was an evident shortage of money – a
consequence
of their move from Italy? – embarrassing small economies of the kind that upset the young.
I
was used to them with the Robbinses but Susan and Jack cracked jokes: my mother had almost stopped doing that, another bad sign. She had asked me how much money I’d brought and taken it off me without a by your leave. It was understood that Alessandro knew nothing of this, it was like the pawning of my cigarette case – Susan doing the deed, Jack not to be told: so the women think up the hanky-panky while the men are supposed to 
keep their ignorance? Perhaps Alessandro
had
been allowed to grasp some facts about the erratic nature of his wife’s financial situation, and he – who was a neat man and a realist at heart for all his floating on the surface of the days – had in his turn been shaken into some cognisance. Both seemed troubled. The house was kept going by a
femme de
ménage
who came in the mornings, a dumpy woman, not too well disposed; we thought her a slut. Supper was cooked by Alessandro or my mother, both quite good quick cooks and he a tidy one as well. We had no guests. No friends had been asked to stay that summer. At Sanary we knew no one: we had not mixed with the summer people and to the inhabitants we were just that.