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FORTY-TWO

I suspect that I have just celebrated my last Ferragosto in Italy. It is an amiable holiday in August celebrating the birth of our great emperor Augustus who gave the world the Pax Romana, a long period of peace and prosperity after a chaotic time of wars, civil and otherwise. I cannot imagine any of our recent presidents being remembered for so long much less praised generation after generation. But last night was his night and we watched the fireworks as reflected in the bay of Salerno. All the while preparing the books to be moved back to the U.S., a melancholy business at best. For some reason I keep thinking of Nureyev who came to say good-bye some ten years ago. He had been putting in order his house on an island opposite Positano up the coast from us. “From bedroom I can see, on the right, sun come up and, on the left, sun go down. I die there. Is perfect.” He had AIDS. But at regular intervals a doctor from Paris would arrive and change his blood. When this happened, he would be full of energy for a few weeks. On the island, next to his house, was a studio built by a previous occupant, Massine the dancer-choreographer. Revived by new blood Rudi would switch on a gramophone in the studio and dance. The upper part of his body had begun to dwindle away but the legs were unchanged. He sweated like a horse. Finally, Rudi came to lunch with us. As usual, he threw off all his clothes and plunged into the pool. “Must go back to America, doctor says.” After lunch and a great deal of white wine he lay down on the sofa in my study. I switched on the television: it was during a time of dramatic transition in Moscow. We watched as the statue of a chief of the KGB was pulled down. Only the bronze boots remained vertical. “They make good quality boots back then,” Rudi observed; and slept. He expressed few political opinions on Russian matters. He hated it when the press depicted him as a defector from Communism. “I get out only to dance more. Is frozen there, the great dance companies. So I left.”

I never heard him denounce the Soviet system. On the other hand, he was no enthusiast for our system. He was particularly irritated when he was criticized for not admitting that he had AIDS. “If I do, I cannot reenter U.S. Law says no one with such a disease can be allowed in. So I must be silent.” He had a great deal of property in and around Washington, D.C., where he had installed relatives. He was also eager to get his mother to America if only for a visit. The Soviet authorities were cooperative but the Americans were not. Someone suggested that he appeal to President Carter. This proved to be a disaster. The beloved ex-president-to-be was not yet on view. Instead, “wreathed in malaise” as he called it, he was in no mood to grant favors to someone like Nureyev. Rudi was still in a rage as he described Carter’s treatment of him. He had been summoned to the White House where Carter reminded him that the leader of the free world had quite a lot on his plate and had no time to bother about the mother of a famous dancer. Rudi was shocked by the little man’s bad manners. It was all so like Rudi’s native Siberia where “criminals” were sent and petty bureaucrats ruled. Carter made it very clear that he would do nothing to help Rudi’s mother to visit America. Rudi’s volatile Mongol temperament was aroused: “I expected better from an American president so I cursed him.”

Nureyev pays a final call at La Rondinaia.

“You did what?” I was not certain I’d understood him. He was grinning in memory. “I cursed him first in Russian but there was no translator so I cursed him again in English.” When I asked for some technical details of the curse—bell, book, and candle, say? “I told this Carter he would be punished for not allowing an old woman to come visit her son, for his cruelty and his rudeness and then I said that because of this behavior he would lose the coming election, which he did and all thanks to my curse. Very powerful, these Russian curses.” I told Rudi he should open an office for people who could use his supernatural powers: today, of course, he would be overworked. Then I walked him to the gate of La Rondinaia and, no doubt affected by this talk of curses, I imitated an old Russian friend and made the sign of the cross on his chest: he bowed gravely. He died soon after. Someone who knew him far better than I said it was like a powerful flame going out.

In early 1978 Howard and I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. The Red Brigades in Italy had kidnapped then murdered the former prime minister Aldo Moro and everyone’s advice was “get out of Italy which is falling into chaos.” Since chaos is the normal state of that oddly happy nation or perhaps I should say entity I did not fear the apparently rising tide of Communism all over the world possibly because I knew so many interested political and media types in Washington whose wild allegations could then be checked by consulting certain wise Italians or, indeed, Europeans of any sort grown sick of our constant howling wolf when, more and more, we were being identified as the wolf advancing upon the house of the three little pigs. When asked what advantage there is to having two houses, one in the Hollywood Hills and the other on the Amalfi coast, I have seldom had an answer. But now, after half a century, I am aware of receiving a wider range of information about what is going on in the world as opposed to the non-news and propaganda of most of our media. Certainly the Italian Communist Party so often demonized by our media was never of any great danger to anyone while radical splinter groups like the Red Brigades could hardly be called Communist: Moro was killed because he favored what Italians call “the historic compromise” between the conservative Christian Democrats and the mildly liberal Communists, each anathema to certain incoherent American activists of the sixties. Had we not intervened so ferociously in the election of 1948 the compromise would have taken place earlier to, one suspects, no great effect, good or bad.