The Pillars of Hercules

Nothing held me in Taormina. I took a taxi down the hill and caught the train to Siracusa. Traveling towards Catania, we crossed the lava flow from the volcano. At Carruba there were blackish cedars by the shore, and lemon groves sagging with fruit. Then, Cannizaro, Lentini, Paterno: almost every town in Sicily reminded me of the names of my high school friends, and a Sicilian railway timetable looked like a list of the Medford High Class of ’59.

Catania was big and grim, the sort of place only a mafioso would tolerate, and that for its opportunities to whack it for money. The coast here was miles of great ugliness, oil storage depots, refineries, cracking plants, and cement factories. Offshore, a man was rowing backwards in the sea, pushing the oars instead of pulling them. By the side of the track, the scrawl Cazzo—Italian slang for the male member, when spoken sounding like gatz.

The end of the line was Siracusa.

“But what could I do at Syracuse? Why did I come there? Why did I buy a ticket just to Syracuse and not to any other place? Choice of destination had certainly been a matter of indifference. And certainly being at Syracuse or elsewhere was a matter of indifference. It was all the same to me. I was in Sicily. I was visiting Sicily. And I could just as well get on the train and return home.”

This paragraph from Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversation in Sicily had a definite resonance for me. Vittorini was born in Siracusa the year of the earthquake, 1908, and was a young man in the fascist era, the period described in this novel and some of his stories. All this I discovered in Siracusa.

I had stopped inside a bookstore on the long walk from the station to the old city, which was across a bridge, on a small island, Ortygia. The bookstore owner told me about Vittorini and recommended his writing.

“This was a great city once—capital of Sicily,” he said.

He named for me the famous Siracusans—Theocritus, the Greek playwright Epicarmo, Saint Lucy, Vittorini.

“So many people have come and gone. We’ve been Phoenician, Greek of course, from long ago. But also more recently Arab, Spanish, French. You can hear it in the names. Vasqueza is a Siracusa name—Spanish. We have French ones too. Take my name, Giarratana—what do you think it is?”

“Can’t imagine.” But the truth was that I did not want to guess wrong and risk offending him.

“Pure Arab,” said Mr. Giarratana. “That Giarrat is an Arab word.”

“What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m not an Arab!”

Later I checked with my Arabic-speaking brother Peter and discovered that Giarrat was probably a cognate of Djarad, meaning locust.

“Our dialect is amazing,” Mr. Giarratana said. “It would be hard for someone like you to understand. Even other Sicilians have trouble with it.”

He had a growly Sicilian voice, deepened with dust and smoke. I asked him for some examples of the incomprehensible dialect.

“Wango,” he said. “Asegia. Stradon. What do those words mean?”

“No idea.”

“Bank. Chair. Street,” he said, smiling because he had stumped me. “We don’t say orange [arancia], we call them portuale.”

That was also from an Arab word for orange, which was burtugal, probably from one of the countries which grew them, Portugal.

The most Sicilian of Sicilian words, known and used throughout the world, is mafia. It is identical to the obsolete Arabic word mafyá, meaning “place of shade,” shade in this sense indicating refuge, and is almost certainly derived from it. Norman Lewis describes in his 1964 book about the Mafia, The Honored Society, how, after the orderliness of Saracen rule in Sicily was obliterated by the Normans in the eleventh century, Sicily became feudalistic. “Most of the Arab small-holders became serfs on the reconstituted estates. Some escaped to ‘the Mafia.’ ” It became an alternative—and secret—system of justice, society and protection; a refuge.

I bought the Vittorini novel he had spoken about and also a copy of Frankenstein, which I had been meaning to reread. Then I continued down the street and across the bridge to find a hotel. It was not much of a decision. Nearly all the hotels in Siracusa were closed, or being renovated, but not the nameless one run by Dr. Calogero Pulvino, poet and philosopher. One star, twenty-three dollars with breakfast and the occasional impromptu seminar by Dr. Pulvino.

He sat, surrounded by books, looking harassed, as though inspiration had just deserted him, or he had momentarily mislaid his lyric gift. He kept his hat on, as though it was his badge of authorship if not part of his uniform, and he amazed me with his pedantry.

I said, “So many books, doctor.”

“This is not many,” he said, dismissing my question. “I own lots more than these.”

“What sort of books are they?”

“They are not books.” He smiled at my ignorance.

“What are they?”

“They are my friends.”

To him this sort of excruciating exchange was sheer poetry.

“Are you writing one yourself?”

“Yes.” He showed me some closely typed pages. He wanted me to admire them, but when he had an inkling that I was reading them he snatched them away, saying, “These are unfinished chapters.”

“A novel?”

He laughed a big hollow theatrical laugh. He then said, “I am not interested in fantasy, my friend!”

“Are novels fantasy?”

“Completely.”

“A waste of time?”

“You have no idea.”

“What are these chapters, then?”

“Philosophy,” he said, in a reverential way, savoring the word.

“What books have you published?”

His arm snaked to the shelf and he withdrew a hardcover book, which he handed to me.

I read the title, Il Riparo delle Rosse Colline D’Argilla (The Shelter of the Red Hills of Clay).

“A volume of my poems,” said Dr. Pulvino.

“About Sicily?”

He sniggered slightly at my ignorance of geography. He said, “Tunisia. I went there for inspiration. You want to buy a copy?”

I had just bought two books that morning. Books are heavy, especially hardcovers. My method was to buy paperbacks, and read and discard them. I only bought new ones when I had nothing more to read. It was pointless to explain this to Dr. Pulvino.

“Not now.”

“The price is twenty thousand.” That was thirteen dollars. No way.

“I’ll pick it up in a bookstore.”

“Impossible.”

“I’ll bet Mr. Giarratana has it in his store.”

“Mr. Giarratana does not have it. You see, my friend, this book is out of print. This is one of very few copies left.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to find it.”

“Only I can supply you with one.”

After that, whenever I saw him, he said, “Have you decided about the book?”

Dr. Pulvino was one of a number of people in Siracusa who warned me to be careful of thieves. Mr. Giarratana had mentioned “clippers”—bag snatchers, known as scippatori. They were notorious in Sicily for their merciless efficiency, and I heard many stories of people who had lost passports, wallets, handbags, watches, jewelry. But perhaps because this was not the tourist season the thieves were on holiday.

There was “A Very Important Notice” displayed in each of Dr. Pulvino’s tiny rooms. “The hotel’s esteemed guests, especially our lady guests, because of unpleasant incidents which have already happened, are advised, when going out of the hotel, to avoid taking any bags, or handbags, for the possible risk of becoming victims of bag snatchers and even of being hurt. The manager Dr Calogero Pulvino, together with the entire City of Syracuse, apologizes for this situation.”

The next time I saw him I said, “You speak English.”

“Without any doubt,” said Dr. Pulvino.

• • •

Another amphitheater, more broken columns, assorted marble slabs. Just by three pizzerias was the Fountain of Arethusa, with ducks bobbing in it. It is not really a Greek ruin. It is a place Siracusans take their kids to say “Look at the duckies!” and throw pizza crusts at them. Probably the Greeks did the same thing. The Temple of Apollo was just down the street from Emporio Armani. The Catholic cathedral had been built into and around a Doric temple, probably Athena, and so you could see Grecian columns inside and out, and crucifixes, and bleeding hearts and gilded halos, and more old columns that even Cicero had praised (“in his oration against Verres”).

The exaggerated attention in Siracusa as in much of Italy was this guff about Greeks and Romans, all glory and harmony, and then silence, as though nothing else had happened in the last two thousand years. Nothing about the years of lecherous and satanic popes settling into big feather beds with their mistresses and fondling them under gilt crucifixes, or plotting murder, stranglings and poisonings in the Vatican cellars. Never a word about Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92), who commercialized the papacy and sold pardons, and who had a hooligan son by one of his mistresses whom he set up in style; nothing about Pope Alexander VI and his seven children, one of whom was Lucrezia Borgia, another Cesare Borgia, who was made a cardinal, along with his uncle. Apart from the poisonings and murders, one of the highlights of Alexander VI’s papacy was a bullfight that was held in the piazza of St. Peter’s to celebrate a victory over the Moors. Nor anything about Leo X, who handed out cardinals’ hats to his cousins, or Sixtus IV, another murderer. Not relevant? But surely these were the ancestors and inspiration for Padre Carmelo and his Mafia monks at the Franciscan monastery in Mazzarino.

The Middle Ages had not occurred. There was never anything about the centuries of rape and pillaging, cities destroyed by hairy Vandals or Ostrogoths in furry pelts; nothing about bubonic plague or cholera, nothing about the thirteenth-century Hohenstaufens, who goose-stepped all over Sicily, nothing about those religious fanatics and show-offs, the Crusaders, who went clanking around the island in their rusty suits of armor building castles and sniffing out Muslims to murder for Christ, nothing about Muslims and their weird depredations (though the occasional mutter about “Saracens”), nothing about the Jewish expulsions, the cruelty and intrigues, little villagers ratting on the local rabbi and then seeing the old bearded Jew carted off or tortured; and never anything about the war that ended just the other day, how they had changed sides; and nothing about their cowardly little dictator—just the mentioning of his name in polite company was immeasurably worse than farting.

“Never mind Mussolini, look at the exquisite statue of Archimedes,” was the exhortation of people who couldn’t put two and two together. Or it was classical trivia: “Archimedes said ‘Eureka!’ in Siracusa,” or, “The philosopher Plato was made a slave in Siracusa!” the Siracusans said, which was just about all they knew of Plato.

Looking at glorious ruins always put me in a bad mood. I walked around instead. I saw a cake sale in a piazza. Cakes and pies were stacked on a number of tables, and there were about thirty people hawking them.

“Buy a cake,” a woman said, as I slowed down to look at them. “They are really delicious.”

“I’m traveling. I don’t have room.”

“Where have you just come from?”

“Sardinia.”

“Lovely place. Rocky. Natural. Unspoiled. Not like here at all,” the woman said. And then, “Buy a small cake,” she said. She showed me two or three.

Some other women gathered around, boosting their baked goods, all seeming very earnest.

“Are you trying to raise money for a particular purpose?” I asked.

“Not for us. It is for the families in Bosnia.”

That touched me. So the larger world and its disorder intruded on this small settled place. But in fact Bosnia was not very far away. And when I gave them five dollars in Italian lire and wished them well, a woman chased me through the piazza with a bag of cookies.

The town was dedicated to one of its native daughters, Santa Lucia. But it was the Madonna of Tears who had produced the most miracles—people cured of blindness, deafness, gammy legs, blights, poxes, and diseases, and an enormous sanctuary was being built in her honor outside Siracusa in the shape of a vast cement wigwam.

• • •

The low season might have meant poor business and hotel and restaurant closures and grumbling entrepreneurs, but it also meant that people had their towns to themselves. In Siracusa this took the form of the passegiatta—the streets dense and chattering with promenading citizens. The streets and squares of the Ortygia were thronged on weekend nights, Siracusans of all ages walking, families with small children, groups of girls flirting with groups of boys; punks, lovers, scolding crones in widow’s black bombazine, old shysters wearing sunglasses. Some walked dogs, or carried cats, or pushed infants in carriages. They swarmed among the ruins and shops and the pizza joints, buying ice creams or candy but not much else. It was all friendly—no suggestion of pickpockets, no aggression, just good humor.

It was a nighttime turnout, and I had never seen such a thing anywhere. Frenchmen played boules under the trees, while their womenfolk walked the family dog. Spanish men met outside cafes, and yakked. Men in Corsica and Sardinia gathered on street corners and whispered. Some Arabs did the same in Marseilles. But never the whole family, never little children and old people and lovers and animals; and never at night. This was extraordinary and carnivallike, beginning just after dark and going on until eleven or so, the tramping up and down the cobbled streets, swarming around the fountains and the squares, everyone well-dressed and cheery.

They talked among themselves. They greeted and kissed and shook hands. They whispered and laughed. It was an old ritual of sharing—sharing the street, the air, the gossip; it was a respectable way for women to be allowed out, after the meal was cooked and the dishes were done. It was something the telephone or urban crime or traffic had done away with elsewhere. It probably had medieval origins. It was the way old friends and neighbors caught up in news, the way people met and wooed each other; the way they courted; the way people showed off a new hat or coat. The air was full of greetings and compliments. “Nice to see you! Beautiful hat! Sweet little child! God bless him!”

The next day they were all back at work. I was tempted to take a ferry from here to Malta, but there was only one a week and I had just missed it. I went to the fish market and noted the prices of the clams and oysters and octopus. There was not much fishing here, the fishmongers told me. These had come from Venice and Marseilles. The only local product was mussels, sold bearded in black clumps, the sort that are left to the seagulls on Cape Cod.

“You’re traveling, eh?” the fishmonger said. “Sardinians—cordial people!”

This was typical. Italians seldom spoke ill of each other. Compliments warded off aggression, and while Italians could be seriously quarrelsome when they were cross, they got no satisfaction in carping, and were not interested in nit-picking, which was why chatting to them was nearly always a pleasure. Of the Calabrese they said, “They’re like us!” Of Neapolitans, they said, “Musical people!” Of Romans, “Clever! Cultured!” They knew that putting it mildly Sicily had its problems of underdevelopment and poverty and organized crime, and so they were not quick to judge other parts of Italy. The worst they would venture was something like, “Up north? It is very hard sometimes to understand the way they speak.”

That day I hiked out of town to the hill called Belvedere. Along the way there were tumbled villages thick with orange groves, laundry hanging from every balcony, prickly pear cactus growing wild, schoolchildren shrieking or else holding hands, or an old mustached woman in black howling her hello to another passing crone, and in her garden a crucified Michelin man—fatso as a scarecrow—and the village street sweeper going about his job using a seven-foot palm frond, more effective than a push-broom. I thought with a retrospective shudder of the chilly streets of Nice, and the south of France generally, all the skinny widows and their lapdogs, and their way of studiously refusing to see that this otherwise impeccable Riviera was awash in dogshit. Sicily had its sanitation problems, but dogshit was not one of them.

On my walk back I took a different route, by way of the Anapo River, and reaching the shore saw ahead of me twelve nuns in black habits waving their arms and strolling by the blue sea. It was a Sicilian combination of the bizarre, the religious, the humorous, the tender, and the surreal.

9

The Ferry Villa to Calabria

Instead of entering Messina on the way back, I stayed on the train, and the train and I were rolled onto the clanging deck of the ferry Villa—railway tracks were bolted to the deck. This shunting was done in jolting installments, sections of three or four coaches at a time, uncoupled, lined up side by side until the whole train was on board, sixteen coaches. The whole railway train, minus its engine, physically transferred to the vessel, was then floated across the Straits of Messina.

Standing in the darkness of the steel-hulled Villa among the greasy train wheels, I heard a man’s hoarse pleading voice.

“I lost my arm.”

It was too dark to see anyone, though I could hear the laborious pegging of a crutch or a cane knocking against the metal deck.

“Help me,” the voice said.

I stepped back, and the noise I made gave me away and directed him to me.

“Give me something,” he said. “I lost my arm.”

He then dimly emerged from the soupy darkness and I smelled him more clearly than I saw him. The smell was stale bread and decaying wool, spiked with a hum of vinegary wine.

“Please,” he said. And then, “No, I can’t take it!”

My coins were clinking because he bumped them with the stump in his ragged sleeve.

“No arm! Put them in my pocket!”

All this was in the stinking darkness of the ship’s hull, among the detached coaches of the train.

“Have a good trip,” he said, and pegged past me, rapping his crutch, and I heard other passengers giving him money—not out of mercy, but in exchange for his blessing, out of superstition.

On deck with the departing Sicilians and the returning Calabrese, all of them munching sandwiches, I saw that we were pulling out of Messina’s harbor. Sicily had clouds the shape and color of old laundry billowing over it, and the straits were windy too, but except for whitecaps and blown froth, it did not seem to be a bad sea. This could have been just an illusion. A whirlpool might make a low howling sound, but it is not usually visible until you are on top of it.

The Odyssey’s whirlpool Charybdis (“Three times / from dawn to dusk she spews … a whirling maelstrom …”) is not fanciful; it actually exists near Messina, on the Sicilian side, opposite the small village of Ganzirri. Scylla, the six-headed monster with twelve great tentacles, has not been sighted recently, but she is always heard. At just the spot where Scylla “yaps abominably” the sea-swells roll into the stone caverns on the Calabrian side, where they make a gulping sound, audible to anyone on the water—a familiar yapping to anyone who lives within earshot of cavernous seashore. This could easily be mistaken for the voice of the beast, Scylla, that Ulysses heard, “a newborn whelp’s cry, though she is huge and monstrous.”

Much of The Odyssey’s Mediterranean geography is either misleading or imaginary (I had passed the Islands of the Cyclops near Catania, but didn’t recognize them), yet occasionally, as in Bonifacio and here, the topographical description is so specific I got a thrill in matching it to the text. The art in Homer’s lines still precisely reflected nature. There was also a private satisfaction in savoring the ways that Ulysses managed to have a pretty bad time. Homer’s epic seldom celebrates the joys of seamanship or marvelous landfalls. It is about delays and obstructions and messy deaths. Ulysses’ crew is nearly always complaining or fearful, and the captain himself rather dislikes the gray sea and the fickle winds, the toil of shipboard life, the distances, the inconveniences, the dangers. Among many other things The Odyssey is a poem about the frustrations and miseries of travel, and the long voyage home; in a word, an epic of homesickness, greatly consoling to a traveler reading it.

The Calabrians had cracked a ghoulish joke by naming a village on the shore after the monster that had to eat six sailors at a time (“she takes, / from every ship, one man for every gullet”); in fact, Scylla was a little place nearby on the railway line to Naples and Rome, where this train was going. Above the shore here were great eroded slopes of steep hills, all settled and scraped bare, and like Sicily the landscape was mostly urbanized or settled. No hill existed in Italy without an antenna planted on it, or a fort, or a dome, or a crucifix. Italians fulfill themselves by building and reorganizing the landscape. It is as though nature has no interest for them until it has been improved by digging and urbanizing it. That is one thing Italians have in common with the Chinese. Another is a love of noodles. Yet another, an ancient belief in dragons.

It was a one-hour crossing of the Straits of Messina, and then the train was slung out of the ferry in sections and reconnected at Villa San Giovanni, which was just a ferry port and a mass of chanting signs, Al Treno, To the Train, Au Train, Zum Zug.

At a certain hour of the day in Italy, one of the more demoralizing aspects of being in a forlorn little station like Villa San Giovanni was seeing a big comfortable express train that would be departing in ten minutes for Rome, arriving tomorrow, just as the shutters were being flung up in the bookstores and restaurants. The passengers on the Rome Express looked out at me, probably thinking, Poor sucker, because they knew that I was just another peasant waiting for the branch line train to Reggio, fifteen minutes down the line, on the toe of Italy’s boot.

Twenty-three Italian soldiers, wearing maroon nightcaps with dangling blue pompoms, stood with me, and soon after the Rome Express moved importantly north, our little choo-choo went clinkety-clank south, to Reggio, which was dark and cold and windy. It was Sunday night in this poor town—it had once been the capital of Calabria but it had fallen on hard times like most of the south. It too had been flattened by the 1908 earthquake that had destroyed Messina. Strangely, even after pacing up and down, the only hotel that I could find open in Reggio turned out to be the most expensive one of my trip, so far ($81), though hardly better than the rest of them.

Almost a hundred years ago the English writer George Gissing (born poor, wrote New Grub Street, married a prostitute) made a solitary and often melancholy trip around southern Italy, which he called By the Ionian Sea. He stopped in Reggio and saw “few signs of activity; the one long street, Corso Garibaldi, has little traffic; most of the shops close shortly after nightfall, and then there is no sound of wheels … the town is strangely quiet, considering its size and aspect.”

That was precisely what I reported to my diary, until around seven in the evening I heard a loud commotion, and howl of human voices, and I asked a man in the doorway of the hotel, “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” he said in the local dialect, not niente but ninte.

So accustomed was he to the sound, it meant nothing to him. But I should have known.

“You from around here?”

“Squillace,” he said, and it seemed a very grim name.

“And you?”

“United States.”

“Good. I got relatives there.” From his agitated hand gesture, and his pursed lips, I was to understand that there were very many of them.

It was Sunday night in Reggio and that meant the parade of locals, great and small, old and young, male and female, the ritual of the passeggiata—that was the sound I heard. It fascinated me, more there than in Siracusa, because the weather was colder. On this foul, windy night in the small town of Reggio, in the depths of winter dampness, the whole populace turned out to march, bundled up against the weather. It was a gentle mob scene, the loud scuffing of their shoes, their chattering voices, up and down Corso Garibaldi, or milling around the piazza, on street corners, talking, laughing, walking three or four abreast, about a quarter of a mile and then back again, commandeering the main street.

The most remarkable thing to me was the controlled fury of it, all the voices creating one loud, almost deafening drone, everyone talking at once; that and the motion of the people in the street, on which there were no cars—not that they were specifically excluded, but who in a little Fiat would risk facing all those tramping arm-swinging Calabrians? This was a cheery event. It started round about seven, and by ten everyone had gone home.

Obviously, George Gissing had not seen Reggio on a weekend (though he had seen it just before the earthquake brought it down). It was still true almost a century later that Reggio was a just a little lighted place with darkness all around it—not wilderness or woods but dry tiny villages set amid the strange and infertile landscape of rocks and ravines, in the dusty hills of Calabria. They were remote and forgotten places even now. People in the nearby village of Bova spoke a dialect that was nearer Greek than it was Italian, and it has been suggested that the people in this region had been yakking happily in Greek during the whole Roman era, speaking Latin to officials only when they had to. When Roman rule was supplanted by the Byzantines, Greek came back into vogue and was once again the language of commerce and the greater empire. Nonetheless, for all this classicism and all the civilizations that had come and gone, there were villages in Calabria that still had no electricity or running water.

No wonder so many Italians said good-bye here. Near the port of Messina, in the poorest region of Italy, Reggio was the last landscape tens of thousands of emigrants saw, before they boarded ships for America; Reggio was less a town than a jumping-off place.

The ones in the passeggiata were the ones who had stayed behind. Eating pasta, drinking wine, I watched them from the window of a restaurant, while I scribbled. The idea that most of them had relatives in the United States made them seem resolute, if not defiant, to me, and it was as though they were celebrating the fact that they were still there, carrying on, after all these years, proudly rooted in the peculiarly stony soil of their native land.

Again, I seemed to be the only guest of the hotel. That suited me. The empty foyer, the shadowy corridors, my gloomy cubicle—this was an appropriate setting. I was reading the copy of Frankenstein I had bought in Siracusa, to put myself in the mood for the gothic darkness of Calabria. And that night I read how Dr. Frankenstein had been born in Naples, when his parents were passing through.

I was not heading for Naples. The next day I bought a ticket to Metaponto, half a day’s train ride in the other direction, in the arch of the Italian boot. Usually I just rattled to a new place and hoped for the best; but today I had a specific objective at Metaponto.

After Reggio there were a succession of straggling settlements by the sea, some dilapidated vineyards crowded by factories and junk heaps. It was a view of the Mediterranean that was new to me, mile upon mile of empty stony beaches, here and there some fishermen venturing out in small wooden dinghies. Inland on the sea-facing slopes there were hamlets of houses, some of them ancient-looking, and many of them had great cracks in their walls which could have been produced by the 1908 earthquake. There were newer houses, but they seemed as ruinous as the old ones. The soil looked infertile, much of it white chalky clay plowed into clods at Brancaleone, and sluiced into stony gullies at Bova.

The beaches were littered but there was no one on them, even at Locri, one of the bigger towns. Albichiara was one of those old yellow villages built high on a ridge, almost at the skyline (“against the barbarians”), and in the plains below it were fruit trees and olive groves. The station at Soverato was crowded with people clamoring to board this train—which was going to the distant provincial capital, Taranto, and terminating at the city of Bari on the Adriatic. But not all the people were boarding; many were there to say good-bye.

“Have a good trip!”

“Bye, Grandma!”

A priest joined me in my empty compartment. He had the evil eye, of course. So no one else came in, and those who passed in the corridor averted their eyes and hurried past.

Squillace was not as ugly as its name suggested. It was Virgil’s “shipwrecking Scylaceum” and in Gissing’s time was squalid: “Under no conditions could inhabited Squillace be other than an offense to eye or nostril.” But I saw only the settlement around the station. The village itself was five miles inland and was perhaps still offensive.

Spivs, little old women in black, nuns whose noses were longer than their bonnets, salesmen with crates, and fussing couples got on at Catanzaro, which was a good-sized town among ferocious-looking cliffs of dusty clay. After the desolate grandeur of the great sweeping fields and valleys, littered with stones, the hills near Cutro were so scored with erosion they seemed covered with heavy folded drapes of clay. The redeeming feature was the glittering sea; no waves, no swell, just placid water nudging and sloshing at this arid edge of Italy.

Crotone was a port with fields and factories around it, and a statue of the Virgin at the station. Cape Colonna just at the south side of town was also known as Capo di Nau, a corruption of the Greek word naos, meaning temple. The Greek Temple of Hera, made up of forty-eight marble columns, had stood on the headland for hundreds of years, but was torn down in a fit of militant piety in the sixteenth century by the Bishop of Crotone. The columns were then broken up and used to build the bishop’s palace. The earthquake of 1783, which had devastated this whole area and much of Sicily, knocked down the palace, and the remainder of the temple was used to strengthen Crotone’s harbor. Many of those marble slabs were still in place.

“This squalid little town of today has nothing left from antiquity.” What George Gissing said of Crotone could have been said of hundreds of places in Sicily and Calabria.

The priest got off at Crotone; a quarreling couple and an old woman took his place in my compartment. As soon as we drew out of Crotone a nun ambushed us, passing out holy cards: the Virgin on one side, a calendar of holy days on the reverse. I accidentally dropped my card and before I could retrieve it the old woman pounced and snatched it up, then brought it to her mouth and kissed it, in a kind of greedy veneration. She looked up at me and handed it over—reproachfully, I thought. I kept the card as a bookmark in Frankenstein and for weeks afterward, whenever I came across it, I thought of that old woman rescuing it from the indignity of a train floor and planting a kiss on it as a way of propitiating the Madonna. I saw stranger manifestations of religion in this trip but I remembered that gesture for its passion.

The starkness, the emptiness, the yellow-gray slopes, and stones, the stucco houses, the bare hills matching them, the exhausted-looking soil: except for the vineyards places like Strongoli and Torre Melissa looked like places I had seen in rural China, in the poverty-stricken regions of Gansu and Ningxia, just as poor and as hard to till.

The sea was almost irrelevant here, and it was as though Mediterranean culture did not penetrate beyond the narrow beach. The towns were a little inland or else on hills, with fortifications. There were no fishing boats for miles here, no boats at all. No marina, no docks, nothing that hinted at recreation. It was too cold for swimming but even so no one walked along the beach. So the blue coast was more like a barrier, a use I saw it serve in other places on my trip: the Mediterranean as a moat.

Great snow-covered peaks rose behind Sibari—wholly unexpected, like the first glimpse I had gotten of the snowy crater of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Mountains seemed so unlikely, and the snow was an added bonus. I looked at my map and guessed it to be Monte Pollino, seventy-four hundred feet high.

And Sibari itself, this insignificant railway station in a wide dusty valley in Calabria, deserted by peasants (who had fled to Naples or Brooklyn), where no one got on or off the train, on the Gulf of Taranto, where all I remember was the glimpse of a snowy peak—this place that passed in the blink of an eye, was once the rich Greek town of Sybaris, whose inhabitants were so hoggishly self-indulgent, living in such luxury, that their lifestyle had given a new word to the language, sybaritic.

I alighted at Metaponto, and even accustomed as I was to small and squalid places, I was surprised by the smallness of Metaponto.

My intention was to leave here as soon as possible. I had another book in mind, that I had read years ago, that filled me with a sense of mission. Metaponto was the nearest coastal town to Aliano, which was the scene of Carlo Levi’s brilliant memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli. The title of the book is slightly confusing. Levi was quoting a local maxim in Aliano: the point was that Christ stopped at Eboli, fifty miles away (near Salerno), and never got as far as Aliano, in the benighted province of Basilicata, where the people regarded themselves as heathens and savages, living on a crumbling hill.

Carlo Levi, a Florentine Jew and a medical doctor, was banished to Aliano in 1935 because of his antifascist views (the Abyssinian War had just begun: Italian machine guns against African spears), and in this obscure and distant village (Aliano is called Gagliano in the book) he stayed for an entire year. He languished under a casual form of house arrest, confino. There was no chance of escape: Aliano was the Italian equivalent of Siberia. Levi kept a diary, he painted pictures, he attended to medical problems of the people in the village, and after he left he wrote his book, which is a masterful evocation of life in a remote place. He got to know everyone in the village. The book is unclassifiable in the best sense; it is travel, anthropology, philosophy; most of all, it is close and compassionate observation.

I had been avoiding inland places, but Aliano was near enough to the Mediterranean shoreline to be on my route. I wanted to go there, just to see it. In The Inner Sea, Robert Fox wrote of a trip he took to Aliano in 1983, and of the mayor, Signora Santomassimo, saying that Donna Caterina “is still alive, over ninety—you can hear her shrieking at the moon on some nights, mad as a hatter.”

Now, twelve years later, the old woman was almost certainly dead, but that compelling description roused me. What about the rest of them? What of the village itself which is such a strong presence in Carlo Levi’s book? There were other details that I wondered about, too. For example, there was a fascinating description in the book of a church at the nearby village of Sant’Arcangelo which contained the actual horns of a dragon. People went to look at the horns. The dragon had terrorized the whole region: “it devoured the peasants, it carried off their daughters, filled the land with its pestiferous breath, and destroyed the crops.” The strongest lord of the region, Prince Colonna of Stigliano, had the encouragement of the Virgin Mary (“Take heart, Prince Colonna!” the Virgin said). He slew the dragon, and cut off its head and built the church to enshrine the dragon’s horns.

From Metaponto I could easily reach Sant’Arcangelo and see the dragon’s horns. It was only about fifteen miles to Aliano. And I was lucky to have chosen to get off at Metaponto, because in the summer it welcomed tourists, and although the summer was far off, there were facilities here that did not exist in the places I had come through.

By the time I had found a car to rent, the day was almost gone.

“You can see the ruins,” Mr. Gravino said.

“I want to drive to Aliano.”

“It’s a very small place,” he said. “You might be disappointed.”

“If it is very small I will be very happy,” I said.

I spent the night in Metaponto and early the next morning drove up the flat valley to Pisticci and Stigliano (where the dragon-slayer had lived) and beyond. It was a sunny day, and there were green fields beside the shrunken river, and yet the sense of remoteness here was powerful, not merely because the region was so rural and empty, but more because of the condition of the houses, which looked very poor and neglected. A branch line train had once run through here but it was gone and the stations were ruined. Many houses were in a state of disrepair, many had been abandoned. It was that look of old Ireland you see in book plates that show the effects of the potato famine—collapsed roofs, dead animals, weedy fields. This was also a region that many people had migrated from and no one else had moved in to reoccupy. It was both the prettiest and certainly the poorest area I had seen so far in the Mediterranean.

It was also a land almost without signposts, and the signs that existed were unhelpful, directing me to the road for the distant cities of Potenza and Salerno.

I saw three men on an embankment and when I slowed down I saw that they carried long worn poles. They were goatherds, two old men and a young man in his twenties. Their goats were grazing in the meadow just below the road.

“I am looking for Aliano.”

“Up there.”

They indicated a cluster of old buildings on a crest of a steep dry hill.

Then I asked them about their goats—was there enough grazing here?—just small talk, because I wanted to hear their voices, I wanted to study their faces. They were as Levi described the peasants hereabouts—short, dark, with round heads, large eyes, thin lips. “Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most Italic types.” He goes on: “They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect.”

Aliano exactly crowned the hill. I had not expected it to be so high up, but of course the height of a village here did not indicate its importance. The poorer and weaker peasants put their villages in these almost inaccessible places. All around it was dry light-brown soil, and some olive trees with grayish leaves and gnarled trunks, and tussocky grass.

A narrow winding road led to the summit and, climbing it, I could see that the village was not at the top of the hill, but rather spread on the ridge between two steep ravines.

Ahead, an old woman laden with two pails, a shovel, and a bag of freshly picked spinach was laboring up the road. She wore a kerchief on her head, and a black skirt, and an apron—the uniform of the peasant in the deep south of rural Italy. I slowed down and saw that she was perspiring, gasping from the effort of carrying all that paraphernalia.

“Please, I am looking for the house of Dr. Levi.”

“It is on the other side of the village.”

“Far?”

“Yes. Very far.”

“Do you want a ride?”

“No,” she said, not out of pride or obstinacy, I guessed, but because of the impropriety of it. She was a poor old woman carrying more than she could manage, but still it was wrong for her to ride with a strange man. Levi had something to say about that too. As a young unmarried man he had to be careful not to cause a scandal by appearing to compromise the virtue of an Aliano woman. That meant he could never be alone with any woman.

The houses were built so close to the edge of the hill that the walls of some of them were flush with the sides of the cliffs. Between the upper part of the town and the lower part there was a small square and at its edge a precipice, still known as “the Fossa del Bersagliere, because in earlier days a captured bersagliere [infantryman] from Piedmont had been thrown into the ditch by brigands.”

The old woman had said “Very far,” but I knew it was nothing like that. I left my car at the edge of the upper village and walked down the narrow street. Passing cave entrances that had doors on them, I thought of China again, how I had seen people near Datong, in a landscape just like this, living in the hollowed-out sides of mountains. But these were wine cellars.

An old man in a cloth cap sitting on a wooden folding chair near the main square smiled at me and said hello. We talked awhile, and then I told him what I was looking for.

“Yes. Levi’s house is down there,” he said. “There is a sign on it. There is a museum near it.”

As we were talking, another man approached. He was small, wrinkled, smiling, welcoming. He was Giuseppe DeLorenzo. His friend was Francesco Grimaldi.

“Grimaldi is a good name,” I said. “Your family rules Monaco.”

“My family is all dead,” he said. But he liked the joke. “That is another family.”

They offered to show me where Carlo Levi’s house was, and so we walked to the lower village, on the other part of the saddle, on the ridge. I was aware of being very high, of being able to see the plain stretching south to Metaponto and the sea. We were on a steep pedestal of dry mud and brush and from the street that connected the two crumbling parts of Aliano you could look straight down the Fossa del Bersagliere, 150 feet to a ledge of olive trees, and then another drop.

“You call this a gorge?” I said, using the word gola.

“No. A burrone.” And he grinned at me. When I checked I saw that this word might have come from the Arabic burr, for land or wild slopes.

We walked down the hot cobbled street, the hot sun beating on our heads. Flowers all over the valley gave it color and perspective, especially the poppies, which glowed a brilliant crimson against the dust.

We were passing some squarish crumbling houses.

“You have to see this,” Francesco said. “This is the historic part of Aliano. It is very old.”

“The palazzo,” Giuseppe said.

Another crumbling house.

“The signorina’s palazzo.”

“Where is the signorina?” I took this to be the Donna Caterina, “mad as a hatter,” who was said to bay at the moon.

“Dead. The whole family is dead.”

“What was the family’s name?”

“The family Scardacione.”

We walked down the cobbled street, to Piazza Garibaldi, though “piazza” gives the wrong impression—this square was hardly bigger than the floor of a two-car garage—to DeLorenzo’s house. The house was ancient, a section of cracked stucco attached to a row of stucco boxes. His cat yowled at me and crawled into a strangely made clay contraption that looked like a large birdhouse fixed to the wall of the house.

“What’s that?”

“A chimney.”

He reached over and removed a large brick from under the shelf where the cat had taken cover.

“See? It’s an oven. For making bread.”

Now I saw that it was a small scorched fireplace. The cat was curled up on the shelf where the loaf was placed; the chimney flue was connected to the fire pit, where Giuseppe was replacing the brick. It was an artifact from another age, and brought to mind the hard, simple labor of bread-making that also involved someone toting faggots of wood to use as fuel. I had seen small blackened bread-ovens similar to this in Inca villages in the Andes.

“It’s very old,” I said.

Giuseppe made the Italian gesture of finger-flipping that meant “An incredible number of years—you have no idea.”

“When was the last time it was used for bread?”

“This morning,” Giuseppe said, and then barked an unintelligible word.

A wooden shutter flew open and banged against the wall of the house. A woman, obviously Signora DeLorenzo, stuck her head out of the window and groaned at her husband, who made another demand, unintelligible to me.

The woman was gone for a moment and then appeared and handed down from the window an iron key ten inches long.

I greeted the old woman. She jerked her head and clicked her teeth. Meaning: I acknowledge your presence but I am much too distracted to return your greeting.

“Follow me,” Giuseppe said.

We went down the sloping cobbled street to a narrow road that lay against the steep hillside. A little fence and a steel gate surrounded a weedy garden and a grape arbor. Francesco dragged the gate open.

“A doctor came here,” Giuseppe said, slotting the key into a wooden door in the hillside. “He was like you. Just traveling. He told me a good thing. ‘Worlds can’t meet worlds, but people can meet people.’ ”

“That’s very nice.”

“Very wise,” Francesco said. “See, worlds are big. Worlds can’t meet worlds.”

“But people can meet people,” Giuseppe said, entering the cavernous room.

“So who was this wise doctor?”

“Just a traveler!” Giuseppe beckoned me into the dark room.

It was cool inside, with a musty earthen smell of stale wine and damp dust and decayed wood. As I asked what it was my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I saw some large wooden casks set on racks.

“It is a cantina,” he said, gesturing in the vinegary coolness. He was using the word in its precise sense, for cellar. “In the Aliano dialect we call this una grota”—a cave.

Apart from the six wine casks, there was also a wine press that had been taken apart, and a great deal of dusty paraphernalia—rubber tubes, glasses, bottles, pitchers, buckets.

“What do you call this?” I said, tapping a cask.

“In Italian it’s a botte, but we call it a carachia,” Giuseppe said, using a word that was not in any Italian dictionary. “Please be seated.”

Francesco drew off a pitcher of wine and with this he filled three glasses. We toasted. Francesco downed his in two gulps. Giuseppe and I took our time.

Sitting at a rough wooden table, in the semi-darkness of the little cave, the bright white day glaring in the doorway, I asked the men their ages. Francesco was seventy-two, DeLorenzo was seventy. They were little boys at the time Carlo Levi had lived as an exile in the village.

“You must have seen Carlo Levi,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Francesco said. “I remember him well. I was a small boy at school.”

“Have you read his book?”

“Yes, yes,” both of them said.

I had a strong feeling this was not true, yet as it was the book that had put Aliano on the map, they had a civic duty to say that they had read it, even if they had not.

“He was a doctor,” I said. “Did he ever take care of you or your parents?”

“Doctor? He was no doctor,” Francesco said, and poured more wine for us.

We toasted again, and I recalled how on his first day in the village, and almost the first page of the book, Levi was asked to cure a man stricken with malaria. Levi asked why the man was in such a bad way (he died soon after) and he was told that there was no doctor in the village. So, in addition to being an exile, he was Aliano’s doctor.

The men smiled at me.

“Carlo Levi was a writer,” Francesco said. “A very intelligent man. He was writing most of the time.”

“We saw him writing!” Giuseppe said.

According to the book, which Levi began (so he said) in 1943, some seven years after leaving Aliano, Levi sketched pictures, and went for walks, and tended the sick. Because of his status, an antifascist political prisoner in a village whose mayor boasted that he had been described as “the youngest and most Fascist mayor in the province of Matera,” Levi was hardly likely to be seen writing in public.

“We would see him walking up and down.” Francesco got up and walked a few steps, swinging his arms. “He would be writing the whole time.”

“What did the village people think of him?”

“We put up a statue of him!” Francesco said. “That’s what we thought of him!”

“Thanks very much,” Giuseppe said, as Francesco filled his glass again. “He’s buried in our cemetery! You can visit his grave!”

Francesco was urging me to finish my wine so that he could fill my glass again. It was red wine, strongly flavored with a dusty aftertaste, and drinking it in the cool shadows of the cantina, with the full glare of the doorway in my eyes, I quickly became dizzy. Nonetheless, I obliged, because I liked talking to these two hospitable men.

They were recognizable from the book. It was the first feeling I had had when I encountered the woman with the buckets toiling up the hill. She had looked at me as though at another species and had turned away. The men were small and compact, the old Italic round face and large eyes and thin lips. Their language was different and they were proud of that. But there was something more, a greater difference, the very thing that Levi wrote about. The sense in which the villagers felt they were regarded as not Christians, not even human; “we’re not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. They at least live for better or worse, like angels or demons, in a world of their own, while we have to submit to the world of Christians, beyond the horizon, to carry its weight and to stand comparison with it.”

Levi had written a great deal about the language. Their word crai, for tomorrow, was a version of the Latin cras, but it also meant forever and never. Yes, Giuseppe laughed, that is our word and he was delighted that I used it.

“This is a lovely village, not a prison,” I said, my happiness fueled with wine.

“Who said it was a prison?” Francesco said.

“For Carlo Levi it was a prison,” I said. “He was sent here by the police.”

“Because we are so isolated,” Francesco said. “There was no road, nothing at all, just a path. We had no water, no electricity.”

“I remember when the electricity came,” Giuseppe said. “And the water for drinking.”

“Oh, sure,” Francesco said. “Before that it was just candles, and getting water from a well. That meant a long walk down the hill.”

“I didn’t mean to say that Aliano was a prison.”

“Not a prison at all. Just far!”

“And full of Fascists,” I said.

“Yes, it was all Fascists,” Francesco said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. The police liked Levi a lot.”

This was not true, according to the book, but if it allowed the men to take pride in the village and not be ashamed, that was all right with me. In fact, the police had from time to time made life difficult for Levi, who was prohibited from leaving the village. This was enforced. The limit of his world was the boundary of Aliano. “The surrounding lands were forbidden territory, beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

Meanwhile we were still at the table, in the little wine cave, drinking and talking. Levi himself had spoken of the hospitality of the people, how they would share whatever they had, how attentive they could be in the presence of strangers.

“Was he tall or short?” I asked. “What was his face like? Very kind, I imagine.”

Giuseppe considered this. He said, “A strange face, of course.”

“Why strange?”

“Well, he wasn’t Italian.”

“Yes. He came from Florence.”

“No. He came from another country—far away.”

People in Aliano looked upon strangers from the north as though they came from another world, Levi had written, “almost as if they were foreign gods.”

“I’m sure it was Florence,” I said.

“He was a Brega,” Francesco said. “He had a foreign face.”

What was this “Brega”? I tried to think of a country that it might apply to, but I drew a blank. I asked each man to repeat the word. Still it sounded incomprehensible to me.

“If he was a Brega,” I said, using the word, “then where did he come from?”

“From far away.”

“Not Italy?”

“No. Maybe Russia,” Giuseppe said.

This seemed pretty odd. His Italianness was the whole point of Christ Stopped at Eboli: an Italian from Florence was exiled to a village in the south of Italy, and living with such a strange breed of Italians, he felt as though he was “a stone that had dropped from the sky.”

“This word Brega, is that his nationality?”

“Yes,” Francesco said, and he could not imagine why I did not understand him.

Then the light dawned. I said, “Are you saying Ebraica?”

“Yes.”

Two syllables, four syllables, what was the difference, the word meant Jew, like our word Hebraic. He was no Italian—he was a Hebrew!

And so sixty years and twenty-three printings of the book in English, and twice that in Italian, and fame, and literary prizes, and a world war and the fall of Fascism—none of these had made much difference. The man who had suffered exile and made Aliano famous in this wonderful book was not an Italian, after all, but just a Jew.

These two men were not anti-Semites. They were villagers. Everyone who visited was measured by the standards of the village, and when it came to nationality the standards had strict limits.

By this time all of us were full of wine. I stood up and staggered and said, “I have to go. I want to see Levi’s house. And then I want to go to Sant’Arcangelo.”

“A lovely place.”

“There are said to be the horns of a dragon in the church.”

“That’s true. A lovely church.”

Francesco stacked the tumblers that we had used for the wine, and outside he used his enormous key to lock the door to the cavern.

“I imagine this historic part of town is old,” I said.

“Very old,” Giuseppe said.

“Probably fourteenth or fifteenth century,” I said.

Francesco laughed so hard I could see his molars and his tooth stumps and his tongue empurpled with his own wine.

“No! Before Christ!” he said. “Some of this was built in the ancient times.”

And walking back up the narrow road to the piazza and the edge of the ravine, they went on encouraging me to share their belief that the village of Aliano—many of these same buildings, in fact—had existed for the past two thousand years.

Because of our drinking—almost two hours of it—the lunch hour had passed. I was dazed from the alcohol and dazzled by the sun. They pointed me in the direction of Levi’s house, and there I went and found it locked. It was high, at the top of a steep street, off the crooked Via Cisterna. It was signposted Casa di Confina, and it had not been renovated, only preserved, with a crumbling wall around it, the shutters broken and ajar, facing south. There were two small hilltop villages in the distance, Sant’Arcangelo and Roccanova, each one “a streak of white at the summit of a bare hill, sort of miniature imaginary Jerusalem in the solitude of the desert.”

I sat on Levi’s porch in the shade, among the broken chunky walls of stucco and brick, the tiled roofs sprouting weeds, broken paving stones and ceramic shards and dusty cobbles. It was all poor, and lovely, and primitive, with no charm but a definite warmth of a savage kind. Its height was part of its beauty, so close to the blue sky, the clouds, the enormous view across the ravine to the sea.

There I stayed until I regained my balance, and then in the coolness of the afternoon I walked back through the village, noting the little quotations from the book, written on tiles, many of them not complimentary at all: “… cones, slopes of an evil aspect, like a lunar landscape.” (… coni, piagge di aspetto maligno, come un paesaggio lunare.)

Some students were sketching pictures of an old house in the town.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“No. We’re art students,” one of them, a young woman, said. “We’re from Eboli. Where the book is set.”

“Have you read the book?”

“No,” she said.

I said, “The meaning of the title is that Christ stopped at Eboli. The Savior didn’t get as far as Aliano.”

They smiled at me, looking incredulous, and perhaps thinking that I was wrong—that Carlo Levi was a man from Aliano who had written a book about their hometown of Eboli.

The cemetery was beyond the top of the town in a grove of junipers. Some old women were tending a grave there, weeding a flower bed, digging, their fatigue giving them a look of grief. The graves were of marble and granite, sarcophagi the shape of small cottages, with flowers and portraits of the dead in niches in their facades.

Levi’s grave was the smallest, the most modest, in the place, a gray slate stone: Carlo Levi 29.11.1902–4.1.1975.

Some birds were chirping in the junipers and on the gate of the cemetery was another quotation from the book, referring to this spot as “… il luogo meno triste,” a less sad place than the village itself.

How strange, the unusual power of a book to put a village this small on the map. It was also strange that this region was full of villages as obscure and poor as this one. It did not seem to me that Aliano had changed much. Already Levi was partly mythical, but one of the characteristics of Aliano he had described was the way its people did not distinguish between history and legend, myth and reality.

I was both uplifted and depressed by the visit. The village was unchanged, the people as enigmatic as those he had described, good people but isolated, bewildered, amazed at the world. I was uplifted because it was a solitary discovery; depressed because the National Alliance was part of the coalition government. That was the new name for the neofascist party. There were Fascists in power once again in Italy. The ministries of agriculture, posts, environment, cultural affairs, and transport all had neofascist ministers; and at least one of them was still publicly praising Mussolini.

It was growing dark. I hurried back to Metaponto. I got rid of the rental car, because it was dark—too late to go to Sant’Arcangelo to see the dragon’s horns.

From Metaponto to Taranto on the coastal railway line there were miles of pine woods and pine barrens on a flat plain stretching inland from the wide sandy coast, and there were dunes nearer the shore covered with scrub and heather, some of the pines twisted sideways by the strong onshore wind. This counts as wilderness in Italy, which has little or none of it, about twenty miles of empty beach: no road, no people.

A suddenness of scrappy settlements was a warning of Taranto and its smokestacks, its fearful-looking outskirts, depots and docks and freighters. Almost everyone in the train piled out at Taranto—youths, old people, nuns, and a Japanese girl who seemed terribly confused.

The Japanese girl, another solitary wanderer who had yet to master the language, asked me in basic Italian whether I was also getting out here.

“No. I am going to Bari,” I said. “Do you speak English?”

“Poco.”

“What about Italian?”

“Poco.”

“How long have you been in Italy?”

“One week, but I have studied Italian for four years.”

She was going to Alberobello, but where was the Taranto bus station? And did the bus go to Alberobello?

My map showed Alberobello to be a tiny hamlet some distance to the north. What was there?

“A certain building,” the Japanese girl said. “Very old.”

“A church?”

“I do not know.”

“A pretty building?”

“I do not know.”

“Why are you going there?”

My question bewildered her, but after I made myself understood she showed me a guidebook, in Japanese, filled with ugly pictures the size of postage stamps.

“This is the most popular guide in Japan,” she said. “It says to go to Alberobello.”

“Good luck,” I said. “But you should also be careful.”

“The Italian men,” she said, and compressed her face in consternation. “They say ‘Let’s eat,’ or ‘Come to my house.’ I always say no, but they still ask. I think they are dangerous.”

Off she went to an uncertain fate. I boarded the train again and it swung inland, crossing the top of Italy’s heel through gullies and rocky ravines and a shattered-looking landscape. Seeing ruined and cracked houses at Palagiano and Castellaneta, I turned to an old man near me.

“The war?”

“The earthquake.”

Dust and yellow clay and rock gave way to flatness and agriculture, vineyards and vegetable fields, then the poor suburbs of Bari.

I finished reading Frankenstein, sad that it was over. “I am … the fallen angel … Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.” Also, I noted, the monster was a vegetarian: “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”

It had been cold and windy at Taranto, and the people were dressed unfashionably in sturdy clothes for the bad weather. But here in Bari the weather was pleasant, and I decided to stay for a while to do laundry and make phone calls and make plans for the journey ahead. I had run out of books to read. Bari seemed to me a useful city in every sense. It had bookstores and restaurants and inexpensive hotels. It had a concert hall and an ancient fort. It was small scale, everything in the city was reachable on foot.

There was an air of unfussy helpfulness and goodwill in Bari that I put down to its being a Mediterranean port which dealt more with people than with cargo. With Ancona and Brindisi it was one of the great ferry ports of the Adriatic. The fact that it was a busy port meant that it had to be efficient. At the moment the ferries to Croatia were suspended, but there were numerous ferries to Greece and there were four a week to Durazzo (Durrës) in Albania.

I ran into a man in Bari who said that if I stayed another week he would take me cross-country skiing.

“You mean there’s enough snow in southern Italy for cross-country skiing in March?”

“Plenty,” he said. His name was Ricardo Caruso, he was a fresh-air fiend after my own heart. He hiked, he rock-climbed, he skied.

I told him I had been to Aliano.

“That’s a good place,” he said. “Padula’s also good. There’s an old ruined abbey near Padula. Hidden—and so beautiful.”

Having established some rapport, I asked Ricardo about the Albanians who had escaped from their country and come to Bari in their thousands in big rusty ships, so laden with refugees that the ships were on the verge of foundering. At first the Italian government had admitted many of them on political grounds. This charity provoked an outcry: What will we do with these indigent Albanians?

It was only an overnighter from Albania to Bari. What if thousands more came?

Thirty thousand more did arrive, very soon after. Some worked as waiters or manual laborers. Many joined the beggars on Bari’s streets—panhandlers often advertised themselves on placards as “Albanian Refugee” or “Ex-Yugoslavia,” meaning Croatian.

“It was terrible,” Ricardo said, with such feeling that I dropped the subject.

I asked a woman at my hotel. What exactly was the story on the Albanians?

She made a grieving sound, and she was so ashamed, she said, she could not talk about it.

“A tragedy,” she said, and turned away. “Please.”

I finally found a man in Bari willing to talk, and more than that, he drove me to the Bari Stadium, where the Albanians had been held until they could be repatriated.

“Thirty thousand of them,” Giacinto said. “Most of them young men, all of them screaming. But we have problems, we couldn’t let them in.”

There was Albanian graffiti still scrawled over the stadium door; the largest motto read in Italian: We Are with God, God Is with Us.

“The worst was when some of them got loose,” Giacinto said. “So they’d be running all over the place—in the city, all over the streets. Listen, this is a nice city. Then you’d look up and see some skinny strange Albanian guy, his eyes like a madman’s. He’d run into a restaurant, to hide, or into a hairdresser’s. And the police would have to drag him out bodily, while he’s struggling and screaming in Albanian.”

Giacinto smiled at the weirdness of it.

“Misery turned them into fiends,” I said, quoting Frankenstein.

“True. And this is a little country. Business is awful. What are we supposed to do?”

Three days of good meals in Bari set me up, too. Gnocchi was a local specialty, so was risotto made with champagne; eggplant, olives, cauliflower, and fruit and fish. My laundry was done. I had books to read, among them one by Italo Svevo, who had lived in Trieste, where I was headed. I bought some more maps. Everyone in Bari had been pleasant to me.

I went on my way, up the Adriatic coast in a mood of optimism. For consolation and mothering, I thought, no country could match Italy.

10

The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia

With fascists in the Italian government for the first time since the war, I was interested to see whether the trains would be running on time. But even in Christian Democratic times they had nearly always been punctual. Italians told me that in the era of Mussolini, who boasted of railway promptness, the trains were often late. These days Italian State Railways were so eager to please they printed Buon Viaggio in big blue letters on each square of toilet paper—under the circumstances creating a rather puzzling and ambiguous impression of farewell.

In the recent Italian election, the neofascists of the National Alliance Party had helped Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! party win a majority. The Minister of Transportation was the neofascist who had called Mussolini “the greatest statesman of the century.” Another party in Berlusconi’s coalition was the Northern League, which was pledged to regaining parts of Slovenia and Croatia and creating a Greater Italy once again. Rijeka in Croatia had once been the Italian city of Fiume. An Italian minister flew to Trieste and, directing his comments at Slovenia, screamed, “On your knees!”

It was so much like old times that I would not have been surprised to see a gesticulating politician call for another invasion of Ethiopia. I hated noticing politics, but this verged on surrealism and could not be ignored. It was the anticommunist element in Italian fascism, and the protection of the Vatican—in habitual collusion with Fascists—that allowed Klaus Barbie and other Nazis to be spirited to Bolivia. There “Klaus Altman” formed The Fiancés of Death, an underground organization for smuggling drugs and arms, and committing the occasional murder. After many years Barbie was caught and extradited to France, to the annoyance of the neofascists.

Having left Bari, I was in a noisy compartment, with a priest and several old women and some businessmen, on my way to Ancona via Foggia and San Benedetto del Tronto. It was such a crowded train these passengers had no choice but to join this priest and his evil eye in this compartment.

“If Jesus came on earth to save souls, huh, why didn’t he come sooner in world history?” a hectoring woman asked the elderly priest. “Eh? What about all the others before him, for all these thousands of years?”

“Good question,” the priest said.

Some other people were chattering about politics, so I asked about the neofascists. What did they actually stand for?

“I’m not sure,” one man said. He was middle-aged, tweedily dressed, possibly a lawyer, and was headed to Ancona. I addressed the question to him because he had the kindliest demeanor. “No one is sure. The neofascists say they have broken with the past.”

And yet I had the feeling they idolized Mussolini. After all, the party was formed by old-line fascists. But I hesitated to say this.

“What’s on their minds—race, imperialism, or immigration?”

“Probably all three. They also talk about the work ethic and crime and lazy people and wasted taxes.”

The man sitting beside him was blunter. He said, “They want a police state.”

Later on, a young man handed me a leaflet in a train station. The message on it was that the neofascists were intent on suppressing personal freedom, democracy, the press and to limit rights generally.

At Foggia, some people got off, two nuns got on. One with the meaty face and bulldog jowls of J. Edgar Hoover took a nip of brandy from beneath her robes and poured the whole thing into a glass of orange juice. She then glugged it down. Her black-robed companion, a dead ringer for the singer Meatloaf, quaffed a similar drink. It was 11:30 in the morning. They told the rest of the people in the compartment that it was the feast day of Santa Maria Antigua and with that they began saying the rosary very loudly in loud auctioneering voices for the next half hour. After the last Hail Mary the nun who looked like Meatloaf burst into tears. The other nun comforted her until she said, “I am all right now,” and changed her seat.

I was reading the Bari newspaper which had a story describing how Italy’s birthrate was the lowest in Europe. That was quite funny. The pope had recently denounced condoms as sinful.

The very fat woman who had joined in the nuns’ loud rosary took out a magazine and a sandwich. It was a health magazine called Sta Bene; the sandwich was mozzarella and ham. She read and munched all the way to Pescara.

Next to the railway line the calm and relatively shallow Adriatic gleamed, almost motionless, even at the shoreline, all the way through Abruzzi. And always the little ritual of the stationmasters at the smaller stations, the man in his crimson peaked cap, brandishing his wand, blowing his whistle, finally saluting as the train clanked away, all the couplings ringing like hammered anvils. I saw fat sheep and grapevines and olive trees. There were backyards, too, some of them with miserable-looking people in them. I remembered how, for years in London, riding the train home, I felt a sense of personal failure riding past the backyards of Clapham and Wandsworth. There was a point to be made about the way the trains in the Mediterranean traversed the rear of so many houses, and their melancholy backyards. It was so revealing, if you could stand it.

Leaning against the window, in the corridor of the train, looking at the road that ran beside the tracks, I heard two young men beside me talking. They were noticing the more expensive cars. A large red motorcycle, a man and his woman passenger, swung out from behind a car and passed it, the shapely woman hugging and holding on.

“What a bike,” the first boy said. Che moto.

“What an ass,” the second boy said. Che culo.

I got off at San Benedetto del Tronto, where at the Center for Aqua-culture and Mariculture at the University of Camerino I looked for someone to talk to about the condition of the Mediterranean. San Benedetto advertised itself as a holiday destination—the coast was crammed with hotels and beaches—but I was interested in water quality and fish farms.

“Yes, we have fish farms,” said Dr. Gennari Laurent, who was half French and half Italian. He said he was glad to see me. There was not a lot of public interest in fish farms. “We are growing sea bass and bream.”

He was talking about small numbers—three hundred thousand fry compared to 200 million grown in the rest of Europe. But it took three years for a fish to grow to maturity in northern waters, two years in the south.

“We are mainly a research establishment. Still, we eat them.”

“Do you put them into the Mediterranean?”

“It is very difficult to introduce fish into the sea,” Dr. Laurent said. “Take a fry that has been fed on dry pellets. You can’t fatten him and put him into the sea, especially a sea bass. They have a particular way of feeding. A bream might possible adapt. But that’s not our purpose. We are studying a whole new area of fish farming.”

“For commercial purposes?”

“Eventually,” he said. “Greece has hundreds of fish farms—bass and bream. France raises trout. The British grow salmon. Italy is way ahead in eels—for eating, of course.”

The decline in the eel population was a good indication of how bad pollution had become, he said. The European glass eel was once found all over the Adriatic, and was caught in great numbers around Venice; but now the eel did not travel more northerly than Ancona, because of the vile water.

“The Yugoslavia side of the Adriatic is deeper, so there are more fish,” he said. “One of the problems on the Italian coast is river pollution. The Po is very bad. I studied it myself. I found very bad water quality in the delta areas. Metals. Nitrates. Copper, for example. In fish it is immunodepressive—it breaks down the fish’s immune system, so they get diseases.”

“I was under the impression that fish farms created pollution from all their accumulated excrement.”

“Yes, that happens. The laws are lax here but strict in, say, Holland. But it is possible to reduce the level of ammonia through certain diets, or by using filtration.”

“Do you think that someday there will be no fishermen in the Mediterranean, just fish farms?” I asked.

“There will always be some fishermen here,” he said. “During two months in spring there is a ban on trawling, but after that everyone fishes twice as hard. It’s hopeless!”

By the time I left the university and reclaimed my bag at the station it was dark and so I spent the night in San Benedetto, a tourist town with no tourists yet. I caught an early train to the good-sized city of Ancona. This was also a large harbor and ferry port, with ships to Greece and Croatia. The district at the end of the railway line in Ancona was called Pinocchio. “As for Ancona,” James Joyce wrote at the turn of the century, “I cannot think about it without repugnance. There is something Irish in its bleak gaunt beggarly ugliness.” Some of that bleakness is apparent today, but it is softened by the friendly and apparently prosperous people of Ancona, whose luck it is to live on one of the great harbors of the Adriatic.

As soon as I found a hotel I went for a walk to the harbor. A fisherman at the port, Signor Impiccini, said that his catches were miserable. I told him I liked the fish they called triglia.

“They are best when they are small,” he said. “Over eight or nine inches they don’t taste nice.”

“Are they found outside the Adriatic?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “The bottom of the Adriatic is sandy and muddy because of the rivers that empty into it. Triglia from the Adriatic are best in soup or baked. But the Tyrrhenian Sea has a rocky bottom. Triglia from that rocky bottom are best grilled.”

As I walked along the harbor I saw a gathering of men, three men apologizing and explaining something to an older man, who was complaining. Then, having finished explaining, the men told him how much they liked him, and when the first one finished, he goosed him by driving a finger into the man’s buttocks. The startled man jumped in anger. The second man did the same—a declaration of friendship and then a goose. The third man took a handful of the man’s ass and twisted it, all the while talking in mock sincerity. Finally, they walked away from the man, laughing in triumph, and muttering “He can shove it” (Va fan cul) and “Unnerstan?” (Eh gabeet?) and “To hell with it!” (Mannaggia la miseria!)

Few words are more vulgar than “ass” in Italy, and “shove it” sounds very coarse in Italian. Nevertheless, it was a fairly common refrain. I thought of the young men on the train (“What a bike” … “What an ass”) and how, ever since Sicily, whenever I bought a morning paper I was struck by the pornography on newsstands, not the fact of it—because of course it was everywhere, as common as postcards and devotional literature—but the kind of pornography; its themes and emphasis. There were videotapes and picture magazines. Most of it was prominently advertised as sodomy.

“Top Anal” and “Sex School (100% Anal)” were displayed along with the “Donald Duck” comics and the Sacred Heart prayer cards. “Capriccio Anale” was stacked next to Italian-English dictionaries, and The Sights of Ancona—or wherever. Some of it was euphemistic: “A View from Behind.” Much of it was blunt: “The Seeker of a Deep Ass.” Often these combined women and animals, dogs mostly, in such videos or magazines as “Moscow Dog,” “Three Women and a Dog,” “Animal Instincts (Anal),” “Super Animal,” and so forth, displayed for anyone buying a newspaper to inspect. In Italy pornography was as publicly proclaimed, and as inescapable, as religion.

In Spain I had reached the conclusion that a country’s pornography reveals an inner state and gives clues to a society’s unconscious: its predilections and compulsions. What sells as pornography in one country would be laughed at in another. I happened to be in Ancona, but Italian pornography was pretty much the same all over the country. There were also unambiguous advertisements in Italy, such as the lovely woman appearing to fellate a penis-shaped fudgicle (motto: “Me and my Magnum!”). But what did this Italian obsession with sodomy and bestiality indicate? It was not a delicate subject but it was a delicate question.

I risked asking it in Ancona, in a bar the night that I arrived. I was among students—Ancona seemed to be full of schools and colleges. One was reading a thick book, Il Fenomeno Burocratico. On the little piece of paper she was using as a bookmark were scribbled the words “Chi si considera—vale poco; chi si confronta—vale molto.” I fell into conversation with some of them, who were talking about the war in Bosnia, and after I said that I was an American they practiced their English with me. Eventually they got around to asking me what I thought of Italy.

“The food is wonderful, and I am grateful for the hospitality,” I said. “People are also gentle with children, open-minded and appreciative. The newspapers are lively, the bookstores are excellent. Most of all Italians are pleasant to be with because they are pleasant to each other.”

I went on in this way, meaning what I said, and then, choosing my words carefully, I asked about the emphasis on sodomy in the porno I had been noticing.

“That’s an old Italian method of birth control,” one boy said, and they all laughed.

On my way to Rimini the next day I passed the seaside towns of Senigallia and Fano, the beginning of what Italians call “The German Coast,” La Costa Tedesca, because of the annual visitation of Germans in the hundreds of thousands, from May until September. There were German trailer parks at Marotta, and signs in German on most beaches. The train passed so near the sea I could clearly hear the sluggish Adriatic slosh against the jetties and the breakwaters that ran parallel to the shore. It was as heavily developed and as tacky as the Spanish coast, but unlike Spain far lusher inland: hills of black pines, meadows bounded by junipers and poplars, modest vineyards and orchards, fields of hay being cut and baled.

The look of tragic absurdity in a resort out of season was epitomized by Rimini, so hopeful, so ready, so empty. No town in Italy, except Rome, is so Fellini-esque. Rimini was where the great director was born and grew up; it was deeply a part of his mind, it fueled his imagination, it was the scene of a number of his movies. Rimini, an ancient town that was also a cheap seaside resort, a blend of classical ruins and carnival entertainments, was a perfect image for Italy, too. No wonder Fellini returned to it again and again to evoke his wildest imagery. (A vast fat woman dancing on Rimini’s beach and chanting, “Shame! Shame!” to a little boy.) The town is justifiably proud of Fellini. After he died a pretty park near the seafront was named after him.

A faintly seedy place, Rimini is another resort that is noted for its throngs of German tourists. Yet some of the town is elegant, with boulevards of substantial villas, and the older part of town is ancient and lovely. There is a Roman amphitheater, a cathedral, several handsome churches. The local cuisine is also delicious. The area is well-known for its whitebait and clam sauce and fizzy wines. I tried everything, but still felt somewhat uncomfortable. The problem is Rimini’s small size. It was true of other towns on this coast. They were simply not built for this many people. The market overflowed the piazzas and streets and alleys, and on Saturdays there was no old town, simply stall after stall selling fruit and vegetables, cheese and meat, and stacks of clothes, as well as pots and pans, t-shirts, sweaters, and all sorts of Chinese knock-offs of U.S. merchandise that are now sold the world over.

As the sun sank and the lights began to wink Rimini became Fellini-esque—something about the lights twinkling in the emptiness, under the moonless sky, the wind whipping at the seaside pennants and making the awnings flap. There were little chairs and empty pavilions, and the avenue along the shore was scoured by the wind hurrying off the sea, out of the Adriatic darkness, making Rimini seem like an abandoned carnival in the wilderness: small, weak, painted, futile, doomed. As Catholics said, and as Fellini insisted, the town was an occasion of sin.

I hiked up and down the seafront, liking the strangeness of all the hotels and cafes and lights, self-mocking in their abandonment. The beach was completely divided into horrible little fenced-off areas, the very sand taken over and planted with tables, chairs, beach toys, changing rooms, playgrounds—everything evenly spaced, right out to the tide-mark, with signs and flags. But it was empty on this low season night. I came to a better part of town, the Viale Principe Amedeo, with its villas side by side, the Villa del Angelo, Villa Mauro, Villa Jacinta, all looking wonderful and solid, family houses for the summer, the very image of bourgeois smugness, with palms and walled gardens.

And there this cold night, among the walls and the evergreens, on that street and the side streets, were numerous prostitutes, hailing the few passing cars, caught in the headlights’ sudden gleam like deer dazzled in the road. Their long coats were flung apart by their urgent strutting—they wore cycling shorts and miniskirts and lingerie under these coats. They were big women—tall, not fat but imposing. Some were as big as men, and might well have been men—male transvestites. Seeing me they became animated, and called out, and sang, Eh, baybee! I larf you!

“Good evening,” I said.

“You want something nice?” this laughing woman said.

“I just want to know how you are doing.”

Another big one lunged at me and grabbed my crotch and said, “I want this!”

They all laughed at me, so bored and frustrated were they on a chilly night with no cars. There were more of them farther on, standing on the street, lurking in the driveways, in black slacks and blue suits. Some were Africans, a few might have been Germans or Slovenians, Bosnian refugees, recently liberated Albanians. Apart from me, they were the only pedestrians, and yet they were not walking, but rather actively standing, posturing, hallooing, waiting to be picked up by cars that went by. And after a while a few cars did go by, very slowly, the drivers appraising the women.

Fellini would have loved it: the bourgeois neighborhood, the expensive cars, the windy nights, the whores scattered among the villas, the shrieks and catcalls.

Seven or eight young boys went down the street and began teasing them, but the prostitutes stood their ground, jeering at the boys, questioning their virility.

“You’ve got nothing down there, boy!”

In the Via Gambalunga, also on a “nice” street (dentists’ offices, villas, apartment houses), there was the “Club Riche Monde—Cabaret” and in small print No one under 21 Admitted and Porno Show. This also seemed Fellini-esque—degradation in a respectable neighborhood. As a younger man, ravenous for experience, I would have gone in. But it was after midnight, and I knew what was inside: expensive drinks and exhibitionism, and the kind of shakedown that makes you ashamed of how predictable the libido is. That, and the feeling of unease I got in the presence of public sex, like the irritation I felt when I saw comic books and porno mags all jumbled together on the newsstand. I went back to my hotel and read a book. Nowadays I did not want to put myself in the hands of pimps.

Another Fellini episode occurred the next day in Rimini. I was walking along one of the main streets and a bus lurched to a halt, and the passengers began banging on the windows. The driver had barricaded them in by locking the exit door, and a crowd gathered around the bus to watch the passengers arguing and struggling to get out. The police were summoned, and so were the ticket collectors from a nearby bus stop. There was fury inside the bus.

Ten African girls were gesticulating and howling in Italian. Then the doors opened and some old women got out. The African girls were still yelling at the driver. The police questioned them. “Where’s your ticket?” “Don’t touch me!” “We’re all together!”

An Italian dwarf in a silk suit, smoking reflectively, stood near me to watch.

“What’s up?”

“Tickets,” he said.

The crowd grew around the bus, and now the African girls were screaming. They were Somalis or Sudanese or Eritreans, from the old Italian colonies and mission stations. It was hard to tell where they came from because they were so thoroughly urbanized, each one in an expensive wig and tight pants and heavy makeup—purple lips, glittering mascara. It was a showdown, and it went on for about twenty minutes, but at the end the girls were triumphant, and they screamed abuse at the spectators and waved their bus tickets and swore at the driver. The police shrugged. The bus drove off.

Not all encounters between Africans and Italians are so jolly. The Violence Observatory, a Rome-based organization that monitors such incidents, reported that an average of at least one attack a day on foreigners was recorded in 1993, and the figures were higher in 1994. These were stabbings, shootings, beatings. All it took to provoke such an attack was a single episode—say a carload of Moroccans running down an Italian girl (as happened the same month at the Tyrrhenian resort of Torvavianca)—and local people began assaulting any darkish foreigner they encountered. A few months after I saw this odd encounter in Rimini a fire destroyed a barracks housing hundreds of farmworkers in Villa Literno near Naples. The victims were mostly Africans, who are now Italy’s tomato-pickers.

A satirist like Fellini, merciless and impartial, would have had something to say. And I began to think once again that the great justification for traveling the shore of the Mediterranean, if such a justification was necessary, was that the foreground—these sudden strange encounters—was much more interesting than the Roman amphitheaters and the ruins.

• • •

From Rimini I took a branch line train inland to Ferrara, via Cérvia and Lido di Savio, detouring around the enormous low-lying delta of the Po. The train stopped everywhere, picking up old people and noisy schoolchildren in this tucked-away part of Italy, all farming communities, crammed with fig trees and vineyards and fields tangled with artichokes.

I stopped in Ferrara and took a taxi to the nearby village—so it seemed from the map; it was called Dodici Morelli, it was just a crossroads, some houses, a thicket of hedges, a small church.

“There is not much here,” the taxi driver said.

“My grandfather was born here,” I said. “My mother’s father.”

“Bravo,” the man said. “He did the right thing—went to America!”

“He used to write poetry,” I said.

“Bravo.” He said it with feeling.

It was a short trip by train from Ferrara to the little station at Rovigo. On the way a Portuguese couple in my compartment quarreled with the conductor. The woman had injured her arm, she said. The conductor doubted her. He asked her to fill out a declaration. The woman did not speak Italian. I gathered that she was drunk.

“Why you write I push de doors? I no push de doors! Geeve me, you dunno!”

“In Venice you go to police.”

“Why? No! I no go! I escape from theese man!”

I stepped from that screaming into the green fields of Rovigo and caught another branch-line train, even smaller, the spur to Chioggia by way of the tiniest Italian villages I had seen so far, the farms and settlements that feed the appetites of Venice. It was a happy discovery: in the midst of all the celebrated cities, this obscure corner, reachable on a little rattling two-car train. The land was as flat as Holland, it had the look of a floodplain, and garlic and onions and lettuce sprouted from it.

At the end of this branch-line railway was the small ancient seaside town of Chioggia, the last, most southerly island in the chain of narrow barrier islands that form the eastern edge of the lagoon of Venice. The lovely city hovers in the distance like a mirage on water, dreamlike spires and domes in the mist.

• • •

Chioggia is Venice with motor traffic. As a consequence it is scruffy and noisy, not livelier but more chaotic—few tourists, lots of locals, only dogs and children in the backstreets, and only one hotel that I could see. I was not planning to stay. I had arrived early enough in the day to look around and then leave. With no splendid image to live up to, a rather ordinary town on the water, Chioggia was restful and pleasant. There were concerts and events advertised, but it was obvious that Chioggia had constantly to defend itself against the taunts of people who compared it unfavorably with Venice.

I left my bag with the ferry captain of the Clodia at the main quay and then walked from one end of town to the other, and across bridges and along the small canals. After lunch, I followed a nervous and exhausted bride and groom who were having their pictures taken; the family trailed behind, with gently mocking friends, and onlookers, and all the while the bride’s white gown and long train dragged through the mud of the quay.

I bought an antique postcard with a 1935 postmark in Chioggia, not for the picture—of Trieste—but the message: “You are always in my thoughts. Infinite kisses.” (Sei sempre nei mei pensieri. Baci infiniti.) Such tender sentiments lifted my spirits.

Workers from Chioggia commuted to the Lido on the Clodia. Anything but an easy trip, it was cheap but exhausting, over an hour and a half, involving ferries, buses, and in places legging it. The whole affair of transfer had the laborious efficiency of Italian travel. The ferry crossed to Pellestrina Island, where at the quay a bus was waiting to transport the ferry passengers to the north end of the Pellestrina. This island of somewhat recent, somewhat ugly houses and green meadows, and football fields, and schools, could have been almost anywhere in coastal Italy, except that the lagoon to the left and the seawall to the right were reminders that it was unusually slender and low-lying. The soil was sodden and waterlogged, with that unnatural reclaimed look that Holland has, hardly land it seems so fragile and false, more like a raft or a carpet, not terra firma but something more easily drowned.

Arriving at the village of Santa Maria del Mare, the bus rolled straight onto another ferry, the Ammiana, which had been waiting there at the north end of Pellestrina. This new ferry, with the bus on board, plowed into the lagoon and took us a half mile to the south end of the Lido, another long and narrow island. The bus drove off the ferry ramp, with us on it, and after a while we arrived at the Lido water taxi station.

The Lido was residential; it is for people who want tree-lined streets, and cars, and the chance to swim. As a barrier island, on the sea, it acts as Venice’s shoreline; the word lido means “shore.” Several hotels of the Lido are extravagantly grand, on their own Adriatic beaches; there are also many small hotels, and the usual boardinghouses. Today a rough sea was battering the beach of the elegant Hotel des Bains, where Von Aschenbach leered at lovely little Tadzio, and contemplated the meaning of life, in Death in Venice, the ultimate low season narrative. Perhaps the masterpiece would have been more aptly titled Death on the Lido, since the Lido bears no resemblance at all to Venice.

I considered staying at the Hotel des Bains or the Excelsior, but thought better of it. Apart from the fact that rooms were too expensive, I also felt that I would be isolated from the life of the Lido, in a gilded cage. Sometime in the future, when all I had to do was read a book, and not write one, I would return and stay there. It seemed to me that the greatest Mediterranean comforts were available at those grand hotels on the Lido, but at a price, about $600 a night. On the lagoon side of the island, I found the sort of ordinary hotel that in Italy was usually clean and pleasant, and the next morning I realized I had chosen well.

The first thing I saw the following day, as I walked down my side street to the lagoon, was a great flotilla of boats. Decked with pennants and banners, they were high-sterned wooden watercraft, larger and more elaborate than gondolas, with gold trim and bright paint, the lead boat with a tall crucifix instead of a mast and others carrying statues of saints, all of them manned by crews of oarsmen who were rowing them across the lagoon from Venice to the Lido. They bobbed busily in the early-morning sunshine.

I had arrived at a good time, the Feast of the Ascension (the Festa della ’Sensa in Venetian slang), the day of the annual ceremony of marriage with the sea, Ceremonia dello Sposalizio del Mare. In former times, the Doge threw his ring into the lagoon and a young fisherman dived into the water and grabbed it. These days it was a regatta, followed by a mass at the Chiesa San Nicolo al Lido (“Here the Emperor Barbarossa stayed before his meeting with Pope Alexander III in San Marco in 1177”—but perhaps we knew that already).

The ceremony was a ritualized blessing, the pretty boats with their bunting and flags and ribbons all fluttering in the wind, drawn alongside the embankment; the muscular oarsmen still panting from the effort of the long row, their eyes lowered, standing in their splashed costumes, their caps doffed. A mass followed this, just like the sort of happy mass that followed a wedding ceremony. I associated this amount of piety and time with the sort of weddings I had preferred in my days as an altar boy: there was usually a tip afterward from the harassed father of the bride. Tips and tokens were passing to the oarsmen who were like acolytes at this ceremony. The so-called marriage of the sea “commemorated the Conquest of Dalmatia in A.D. 1000,” my guidebook said: oars and pennants and blessings on this shore for almost a thousand years.

I took a water-bus from the Lido to Venice proper, and approaching this city in the sea, glittering in brilliant sunshine, I began to goggle, trembling a little, feeling a physical thrill and unease, in the presence of such beauty, an exaltation amounting almost to fear.

Venice is magic, the loveliest city in the world, because it has entirely displaced its islands with palaces and villas and churches. It is man-made, but a work of genius, sparkling in its own lagoon, floating on its dreamy reflection, with the shapeliest bridges and the last perfect skyline on earth: just domes and spires and tiled roofs. It is one color, the mellowest stone. There is no sign of land, no earth at all, only water traffic and canals. Everyone knows this, and yet no one is prepared for it, and so the enchantment is overwhelming. The fear you feel is the fear of being bewitched and helpless. Its visitors gape at it, speechless with admiration, hardly believing such splendor can shine forth from such slimy stones.

Language cannot do justice to Venice and nothing can detract from its beauty. It floods regularly; its marble is damaged and decayed, its paintings rot, it has stinking corners. Its canals are green, some of it looks poisonous, it is littered, it teems with rats which not even the masses of Venetian cats can cope with. The graffiti on ancient walls and on church pillars—I noted Berlusconi is Doing Harm and Berlusconi is the Assassin of Democracy—is almost incidental. People still live in Venice, children play in its backstreets, where families turn the cranks of pasta machines, men congregate to smoke, women scorch tomatoes. In the alleys beggar women cradle their children and hold signs: Please Help My Family—Ex-Yugoslavia. Even the fact that Venice is actually sinking, and might one day be destroyed if not disappear altogether, gives it an air of fragility and drama, a passionate mortality.

The outdoor pleasures of Venice—walking, traveling on the water-buses, gloating over the architecture—are as intense as the indoor pleasures of browsing among the masterpieces of painting and sculpture. Both are hopeless too, because there is not enough time to see everything you want. To use my time, because I was just passing through, I made a project for myself. I looked for paintings in churches and galleries where the sea was specifically shown—the sea battles, the blessing of fleets, the sight of canals and gondolas in the background of religious pictures, the mythology of the sea. The best by far was in the Ducal Palace in St. Mark’s, Tiepolo’s “Venice receiving the Homage of Neptune”—the lovely woman personifying the city, La Serenissima, reclining while the ancient grizzled god empties a great hornlike shell of its treasure of gold coins and jewels.

At the western edge of Venice, towards the quays where the largest ships are moored, and next to the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, is a large medieval and mournful-looking prison. Being in prison in Venice seemed to me like the classical definition of Hell—that you are near Heaven but denied it absolutely.

That was also how I felt when I had to leave Venice, on a crowded train to Trieste.

All the way to Trieste I caught little glimpses of the sea, and after the train climbed to Aurisina in the hills that funneled the famous Bora wind into the city, I had a panoramic view of the enormous notch in the Adriatic, called the Gulf of Venice on the map. It was the last gasp of Italy—you could almost spit into Slovenia from a window on the left side of this train.

The late-afternoon sun, misshapen by the risen dust, lost its lightness and its gold, and thickening, growing orange as it descended, began to break slowly, the white sea dissolving the sun’s rich pulp.

With a little shudder the train, with far fewer passengers, stopped at Trieste’s South Station. I walked out and sensed that I was no longer in Italy. It hardly looked like the Mediterranean anymore.

Trieste was once the noble port of Austria, and it still looked to me like Vienna-by-the-Sea. The city still had those gray Hapsburg buildings, every one of them looking like the headquarters of an insurance company (and that included the Church of St. Anthony the Thaumaturgist), sloping up from the port, in austere and forbidding terraces. The structures of Trieste have big flat faces. It is a city of apartments and suites, not private houses, nor any small stucco dwellings on backstreets. No chickens, hardly any cats; all the dogs on leashes, like its sister cities in northern Europe, composed of seriousness and gloom and the fragrance of sticky pastries. It is the city closely documented in the novels of Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno, the ultimate account of a man trying to give up smoking, and Senility, the story of an infatuation. Svevo’s friend James Joyce urged Svevo to call the latter book As a Man Grows Older.

Joyce lived in Trieste off and on for about seven years, and wrote most of Ulysses there, gave English lessons, fell in love with one of his students. Sir Richard Burton, one of the world’s greatest travelers, was British Consul here in Trieste towards the end of his career, and while his wife Isabel worried about the welfare of Trieste’s stray cats and overworked donkeys, Burton had worked on his books. They also spent time up the line at Villa Opicina. The Burtons liked Trieste so well they eventually colonized seventeen rooms in one of these large apartment blocks. Sir Richard filled it with his spears and his dueling swords and collections of pornography and incunabula; he wrote a dozen books, including his translation of The Arabian Nights; and here in Trieste he died.

It was just a few hours by train from the incandescent lightness of Venice to the lugubrious gray of Trieste, but of course being in the Mediterranean was all about surprising transitions. Indeed, ever since arriving on the Adriatic shore I had been anxious about my next move, the onward journey to Croatia. I had seen the ferries leaving for Split from Bari and Ancona. “No service to Dubrovnik,” I was told. None to Montenegro. I guessed the reasons why. The thought of going there preoccupied me; I knew a bit about it, just enough of the atrocities of its war and its recent devastation so that images of it invaded my dreams. Trieste was safe, but Trieste was a more serious place than any I had seen, and it seemed to be preparing me for something grimmer.

Just at dusk the city was almost empty of pedestrians. I walked the length of the port and then back on the inside streets, and found a place to stay.

“So what brings you to Trieste?” the clerk asked.

“I was curious about it,” I said, and thinking of the writer who had made the city real to me, I added, “And I have read Svevo. In English, though.”

“It is better to read Svevo in English. He’s too confusing in Italian.”

Italians were full of compliments, even here at the edge of Slovenia. The Spanish were too restrained to praise, the French too envious and uncertain, the Corsicans too proud. For the more generous and extrovert Italians, praise was normal, words cost nothing, so the flow of daily life was eased. I had lost an important ticket in Venice. At first the ticket collector mildly scolded me by clucking, but when I said, “I am a cretin—I am really stupid,” he said, “No, no—it is usual to lose a ticket, don’t be hard on yourself.”

More urgently than I intended I said to the hotel clerk, “I want to go to Croatia. Do you know anything about traveling there?”

“Nothing,” he said. “But sometimes we get the refugees.”

I saw some the next day—panhandlers holding politely worded signs, and disoriented families with bags and boxes idling at the port. After the Venetian capriccio, this sobriety. The Triestini themselves were taller than Italians I had been seeing, and paler, and rather laconic. It was a city of suits, a businesslike place with an air of solidity and prosperity.

James Joyce had been that most enigmatic of refugees, a literary exile in Trieste, sitting out the First World War in a Triestine apartment and writing his masterpiece about Dublin. But he had come there earlier. From 1904 to 1906, fleeing Ireland, practicing “silence, exile, cunning,” he was an English teacher in Trieste’s Berlitz School, while writing short stories. After a brief absence he returned to Trieste in 1907 and gave private English lessons. One of his students, Hector Schmitz, was middle-aged (Joyce was a highly excitable twenty-five-year-old) and a businessman, yet when Joyce showed him an early draft of his short story “The Dead,” his student brought out two novels he had written under his pen name. He told Joyce that they were old hat—he had published Una Vita, twelve years before, and Senilitá in 1898. The young Irishman declared him a neglected genius. Senilitá especially pleased him.

It is easy to see why. The novel is about desire as self-deceiving, and it is firmly located in a city. The style is remorselessly plain, and every phase of the main character’s infatuation is described. Emilio is a writer made susceptible by literary vanity, and obsessed by Angiolina, who both teases him and grants him the occasional sexual favor. Angiolina is a tricky and lovely young woman, who obviously has other lovers. The humiliations of passion in a labyrinthine city fascinated Joyce—both Schmitz and his hero were to become aspects of Joyce’s henpecked hero, Leopold Bloom; and Schmitz’s meticulous documentation of Trieste must have impressed the Irish writer, who was to fill Ulysses with the actual streets and pubs and theaters of Dublin.

Looking for Svevo’s Trieste I realized how much a knowledge of the city mattered to an understanding of the novel. The city is Emilio’s world. The love affair is enacted throughout the city. They meet in the center of town, on the Corso. Later, “They always met in the open air.” Emilio woos Angiolina on the suburban roads, all of them named, and then they keep to the edge of the city, the Strada d’Opicina and the Campo Marzio.

I went to the Campo Marzio in the southwest corner of Trieste, where Emilio “saw the Arsenal stretching along the shore … ‘The city of labor!’ he said, surprised at himself for having chosen that place in which to make love to her.” Some pages later Emilio is shadowing Angiolina on the opposite side of town. I went there too, to the Public Gardens and across to the Via Fabio Severo and down the Via Romagna. I climbed to the Castle and walked down the hill to the Piazza Barriera Vecchia and had a coffee and pastry on the Corso again, delighted to be able to guide myself through the city by using a novel that was almost a hundred years old.

There were no tourists in Trieste that I could see. That was a conspicuous absence, because Venice was so frenzied with them. But why would tourists come here? True, there was a Roman amphitheater in town, yet another, behind the Corso, and a broken Roman arch—the gate of the old city—but that was so ruinous and disregarded it simply stuck out of a seedy building in a backstreet, at the edge of a building site, and was somewhat in the way. Later I found out that it was the Arco di Riccardo, named after Richard the Lionhearted, who was imprisoned here on his return from the Crusades. There was no sign on the arch, only a recently scribbled exclamation: Fuck the Fascists Forever!

At about just the point I had decided that Trieste was the quietest, most law-abiding place I had seen so far, I witnessed a vicious nighttime street fight.

It was my second night in the city. I was walking through the lamplit Piazza Italia, having just eaten another good meal (and also thinking of the rationing in Croatia). I heard screams—a young woman howling; then men shouting, and loud bangs. It was outside a restaurant, the strange halting peristalsis of men nerving themselves to fight, like apes displaying anger. There were about eight or nine men, ill-assorted, first thumping on tables, then engaging in noisy sorties, drawing back and becoming more abusive with distance, then throwing the tables, a few chairs too. These were the economies of battle, just clatter and threats, a form of restraint; and all the while the young woman screeching. But at last there was no going back, and the men went at each other, kicking and punching, the wildest scene I had witnessed since leaving Gibraltar. It was the last thing I expected in Trieste.

That was an exception. It was a solemn and even dull place, but with the most attractive women I had seen so far, taller, more angular, brisker and better dressed than elsewhere, not the duck-butted women of the Marches. Trieste’s food was not highly flavored, but it was hearty, mussels and spaghetti, fruit and fish, and the fine wines of its region, Friuli. I began to understand why Joyce had decided to live here and engage in the stimulating monotony of writing a novel.

Leaving Trieste meant leaving Italy, where knowing the language with reasonable fluency I had been happy—well-treated and well-fed. Now I was boarding the train into the unknown—the new nation of Slovenia and its neighbor, the crumbling republic of Croatia.

11

The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar

My destination today was Pivka, “somewhere in Slovenia” (so I was told), reachable on the Budapest Express by my getting off very quickly at a thirty-second halt after about two hours’ traveling from Trieste. It was a sunny morning; I was dozing in the midday heat. The border formalities brought me fully awake.

Until now I had hardly shown my passport anywhere, but leaving the European Community for the hastily improvised republics of former Yugoslavia meant that I was now under scrutiny. High in the Carso plateau that formed the Italian frontier, Italian officials stamped my passport and looked through my bag. A few miles farther down the line, at Sežana on the Slovenian border, there was another search, but a stranger one. The Slovene customs man ordered me outside, into the corridor, and then kicking my bag aside, he set his sights on removing the seats from the compartment. He fossicked in the crevices where I might have hidden lawyers, guns or money. He found nothing but dust. He jammed the seats back into the racks and said good-bye in English. In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss; like a tiny cop directing traffic.

It was such an empty train. Obviously no one wanted to leave Italian abundance for the relative deprivation of Ljubljana or Budapest, or any of the desperate little stations in between. For example, I was the only passenger to alight at Pivka, a railway junction.

After all that traveling and trouble I was nowhere. Yet I had to admit that it was a satisfaction being on this tiny platform, among unreadable signs, particularly after the celebrated places I had passed through. The pathetic name Pivka seemed curiously belittling and joyless, like a nickname for a dwarf. But because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.

It was like one of those remote junctions you see in depressing East European movies where people in old-fashioned clothes commit meaningless murders. It was now the middle of a hot afternoon.

I walked into the station bar, feeling like a conspicuous stranger, and ordered a cup of coffee. It was dark inside, and shabby, and the air was dense and stinging with the smoke of cheap cigarettes. I had no Slovenian currency, but Italian money was good enough—probably better. Citizens of these new little nations were forced by circumstances to be accommodating, and to speak English. I handed over a small Italian bill and received a wad of Slovenian money in return, with the newness and inkiness of inflated currency. I calculated that the large cup of coffee had cost me thirty-five cents, the cheapest I had drunk in fifteen years.

Pasty-faced men with greasy hair chain-smoked and muttered. I wanted to make a telephone call from the rusty phone on the wall, but no one could sell me the token I needed to make the thing work.

“No tokens,” the young woman said. Her name was Marta. She spoke English.

“I am a stranger here. I want to visit Pivka. Tell me, what is the best thing to see?”

“There is nothing,” she said.

She was wearily wiping wet glasses with a dirty rag. She sucked her teeth. She pushed a loose hank of hair behind her ear.

“And the winter,” she said.

“What is it like?”

“Bad.”

“What about the summer?”

“Too hot.”

“But there’s no fighting here.”

“No, that’s—” She waved the rag to the east, slopping water on the bar’s mirror. “There.”

The men in the bar, drinking beer, smoking heavily, did not acknowledge me. Through the unwashed window I watched a dirty yellow engine shunting on Pivka rails. I thought, as I frequently do in such places, What if I had been born here?

Leaving my bag with the stationmaster, I walked into Pivka proper, which was a narrow road lined with empty shops. The town was sooty, just peeling paint and impoverishment, but it was not littered, simply fatigued-looking, like the people, like Marta at the bar. Now and then a car, always a small one, going too fast, sideswiped me as I walked down the narrow pavement of Koldvoska Cesta. A rusty Wartburg, a Zastova, some gasping Yugos. It was like being attacked by weed whackers. I could hear their whirring engines and frayed fan belts, the sputter of their leaking radiators. But even these little cars proclaimed their nationalism. One had a sticker Slovenia, the rest were labeled SLO.

Walking along, I heard a child crying inside a house, and a woman scolding; then a slap, and the child crying louder, and more scolding. Scold, slap, screech; scold, slap, screech.

I looked for a place to eat, I asked people—made eating gestures—“Station,” they said. That horrible little bar? So I went back to the station and saw that there was a train in an hour or so for Rijeka. I talked to Marta again. She urged me to go to Rijeka, even though it was in the foreign country of Croatia. I sat in the sunshine, reading, catching up on my notes, and listening to the dusty sparrows of Pivka until the train came.

This two-car Polish-made train of Slovenian Railways was about twenty years old, filled with rambunctious schoolchildren on their way home. They shrieked at each other for a while, then shut up. There was a sort of hysteria here, probably something to do with political uncertainty and recrimination. Soon they all got off. There were now about eight of us remaining in the train: seven old people and me. And it was interesting that the countryside looked as seedy as the town, as bedraggled, not like nature at all, but like a stage-set designed to symbolize the plight of the country: thin rather starved trees, ragged discolored grass, wilting wildflowers. There was a six-thousand-foot mountain to the east, Veliki Sneznik, but even that looked collapsible.

“Bistrica,” the conductor said, clipping my ticket and motioning me out the door.

At Ilirska Bistrica a youth in a baggy police uniform flipped the pages of my passport and handed it back. That was one of the irritations of nationalism—every few miles, a passport check, just a ritual, at the frontier of another tinky-winky republic.

The train jogged on to a small station building with wisteria clinging to the walls. We sat there awhile, the old folks muttering while I tried to engage one of them in conversation. There were no talkers.

“Just tell me where we are.”

“We are leaving the Republic of Slovenia,” an old man said. “We are entering the Republic of Croatia.”

There was no sarcasm in his voice, yet the bald statement was sarcasm enough. We had gone—what?—about twenty miles from Pivka.

“You will require a visa,” a policeman said.

This was Sapjane, the frontier of the Republika Hvratska (Croatia). It was a place much like Pivka or Bistrica. When a country was very small even these tiny, almost uninhabited places were inflated with a meaningless importance. A breeze was ruffling the weedy tracks, and soughing in the pines; a cow mooed, its bell clinked. More sparrows. Customs! Immigration! You will require a visa! The officious but polite policeman laboriously filled in a form (“Father’s name? Place of birth? Purpose of visit?”) and stuck a pompous-looking Croatian visa into my passport, a scrupulous operation, taking fifteen minutes. I was the only foreigner. God help them when they had four or five foreigners on the train.

We were all ethnically approved: one American, seven Croatians. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia the train would have raced through this station at eighty miles an hour. But I did not complain about the delay. This was all an experimental travel. If I had flown to Croatia from Italy I would not have been privileged to witness this sad farce.

Having done his duty, the policeman became pleasant. His name was Mario, he was from Rijeka—he commuted to this outpost—and he was a mere twenty-three. I remarked on the farcical bureaucracy—after an hour we were still at the station, waiting.

“Yes, there are delays, because we are all separate now,” he said. “Slovenia. Croatia. Serbia. In Bosnia you have Musselmans.”

“They’re different, are they?”

“Very much. You see, Slovenian people are much more like Germans or Austrians.”

That became quite a common refrain: We are big bold Teutons, they are dark little savages. But in fact they all looked fairly similar and Slavic to my eye, untutored by Jugland’s prejudices. I soon learned that a former Jug could spot an ethnic taint a mile away. Here comes a Bosnian! There goes a Slovene!

I said this in a polite form to Mario.

“That is because we married each other before,” he said. “But we don’t marry each other now.”

“What a shame.”

“Well, you see, it was Marshal Tito’s idea to have one big country. But maybe it was too big.” He was digging a big polished boot in the railway gravel. “Better to have our own countries, for political freedom. Maybe like America. One government in Washington and every state is separate.”

“Mario, we don’t need a passport and a visa to go from New York to New Jersey.”

He laughed. He was intelligent, his English was good enough for him to understand how I had shown him the absurdity of what he had proposed. And after all, the war was still on.

“Will I have a problem going to Montenegro?”

“I think, yes,” he said. “And Serbia is a problem. Where do you come from?”

“Boston.”

“Kukoc plays for the Bulls,” he said. “Divac plays for the Lakers. But I am for the Bulls.”

“They’re not doing very well.”

“They won last night,” Mario said.

Here, in the farthest corner of Croatia, on the wrong side of the tracks at Sapjane, among mooing cows, the latest NBA scores.

“Michael Jordan,” Mario said. “He is the greatest player in the world.”

The Slovenian train had returned to Pivka, and at last a Croatian train arrived in Sapjane from Rijeka, to take us on the return trip. I got into a conversation, speaking Italian with a Croatian. I remarked on the complexity of the republics that had sprung up.

“It’s all shit,” he said.

Rijeka had a reputation for being ugly, but it did not seem so bad, another Adriatic port city, rather steep and scattered, with an air of having been forgotten. Many people still spoke the Italian they had learned when the city was part of Mussolini’s empire, and named Fiume (meaning “river,” as the word Rijeka also did). “Fiume is a clean asphalted town with a very modern go-ahead air,” James Joyce wrote in a letter in 1906. “It is for its size far finer than Trieste.” Within minutes of arriving I changed a little money and left the money-changer’s a millionaire, in dinars.

Earlier on this trip I had read Nabokov’s vivid memoir Speak, Memory. He had remarked on his childhood visits from St. Petersburg to a resort, Abbazia, much frequented by Russians at the turn of the century. I had inquired about the place while I was in Italy (Abbazia means monastery), but there was no such place on the coast. But I saw the name in parentheses on a Croatian map, and I realized that just a few miles away, down the coast, the penultimate station on the line to Rijeka, was Abbazia, in its Croatian form, Opatija.

“There are dimples in the rocks, full of tepid sea water,” Nabokov wrote of the place, “and my magic muttering accompanies certain spells I am weaving over the tiny sapphire pools.”

It was 1904, Nabokov was five, he was with his doting father and mother. His family rented a villa with a “crenelated, cream-colored tower.” He remembered traveling to Fiume for a haircut. He described hearing the Adriatic from his bedroom: “The ocean seemed to rise and grope in the darkness and then heavily fall on its face.”

This was my excuse to stay in Rijeka that night, eat another pizza, sleep in another bargain-priced hotel, and to go to Opatija in the morning. The seaside resort was deserted. It retained its elegance, though, and looked like a haunted version of Menton. An old man swept the broad promenade with a push-broom. The boardinghouses looked abandoned. The restaurants were closed. The day was warm and sunny, the sea lapping at empty beach.

“People come on the weekends,” a Croatian woman at the newsstand told me in Italian.

Returning to Rijeka, I made inquiries about the train to Zadar, which had recently been under heavy Serbian shelling.

“Ha! No trains these days!” the woman at the hotel said. But she took charge of me.

“You want to know the best thing to do? Leave this hotel right now. Go straight to the port. You can’t miss it. In two hours the ferry leaves.”

It was the coastal ferry to Zadar and Split.

“You think I’ll get a ticket?”

“Ha! No problem!” she said. “No one comes here anymore!”

I snatched up my bag and hurried to the port and within fifteen minutes was in possession of a five-dollar ticket to Zadar on the ferry Liburnija, with a hundred or so Croatians, and soon we were sliding past the islands of Krk, Cres, Rab, Lošinj and Pag in the late-afternoon sunshine, and I was happy again, on the move.

There were half a dozen German tourists on board, who were taking advantage of the bargains created by the war—desperate hotel-keepers and empty restaurants, unlimited beach umbrellas, cheap beer. The rest were Croatians. I had the only ticket to Zadar; everyone else was going to Split.

The effects of the war were evident on the Liburnija, too: the chain-smoking adults, looking shell-shocked, the children, in their mid-teens, a great deal more manic and aggressive than any I had seen so far—and I had seen a large number, since they often took trains home from school. These Croatian children acted crazed—they swung on poles, vaulted barriers, punched each other, screeched and wept—this was at eleven at night off the Dalmatian coast—and well into the night kept trying to push one another over the rail into the Kvaneric channel.

I assumed it was an agitated state induced by the uncertainties and violence of the war that they had all experienced in some way, even if it was only hearing the thunder of artillery shells. They were returning to parts of Croatia that had been under fire. The Serbs had made their presence felt almost to the edge of the shore, and even many coastal towns had been shelled or invaded. The children were so hysterical at times that I expected that one of them would succeed in tipping another over the rail and that we would then spend the rest of the night searching fruitlessly for the body.

The war mood was a species of battle fatigue, depression with brief periods of hyperalertness. And it was as though, because the adults said nothing—only murmured and smoked—the children were expressing their parents’ fears or belligerence.

I went into the cafeteria of the ship to escape them, but even there teenagers were running and bumping into tables and overturning chairs. No one told them to shut up or stop.

“Those kids bother me,” I said to a young man at my table.

He shrugged, he did not understand, he said, “Do you speak Italian?”

He was Croatian, he said, but lived in Switzerland, where he was a student and a part-time bartender in a club in Locarno, just over the Swiss border at the top end of Lake Maggiore. “I hate the French and the Germans. They don’t talk to me anyway.” Girls hung around the club—from Brazil, from Santo Domingo and the Philippines. “You could call them prostitutes. They will go with a man if the money is right. I am not interested in them.”

He was on his way home to the island of Brac, across the channel from Split, for a long-delayed holiday.

“I didn’t come last year because Serbs and Croats were fighting in the mountains, and there was trouble in Split. It is quiet now, but still no people come, because they are afraid of all this fighting they hear about.”

“Are there good guys and bad guys in this war?”

“Look, we are Croats, but last year my father was robbed of almost five thousand U.S. dollars in dinars, and the robber was a Croat!” He laughed. He was busily eating spaghetti. “Serbs are Protestants, Croats are Catholics, Bosnians are Mussulmens. Me, I can’t understand Slovene or Montenegrin or Macedonian. It is like French to me. Bosnian and Serbian and Croat languages are almost the same. But we don’t speak to each other anymore!”

Having finished his meal, he went to the cafeteria line and bought another meal, more spaghetti, salad, french fries and a slab of greasy meat.

“I’m hungry,” he explained as he put this second tray down. “I’m a swimmer. I’m on the water-polo team at my school.” He resumed eating and after a while said, “This food is seven dollars. Okay, maybe this isn’t such a wonderful place, but it’s cheap.”

I went back on deck, where the youths were still running and shouting, and many people were bedded down in the open air, sleeping: stacks of bodies in the shadows. But even at nine o’clock there was some dusk left, a pearly light in the sky that made the water seem soapy and placid, and far off to the west floating fragments of the sunken sun.

There were tiny lights on the coast, and fewer lights showing on the offshore islands. Soon I saw the timed flashes of what could only have been lighthouses and we drew into a harbor that was empty and poorly lit, just a few men awaiting the ship’s lines to be thrown to them.

This was Zadar, and it was midnight, and I alone left the Liburnija and went down the gangway. I saw a light burning at the shipping office, where there were a woman and man shuffling papers and smoking.

“I just got off the ship,” I said. “I am looking for a hotel.”

The man shook his head. The woman said, “There are just a few hotels and they are full with refugees.”

“You mean there is nowhere to stay?”

“It is so late,” the woman said. “Maybe the Kolovare Hotel. They have refugees but they might have a place for you.”

“Where is it?”

She pointed into the darkness at the end of the quay. “That way. Two kilometers—maybe three.”

In fact it was more than a mile. The distance and even the late hour did not deter me from walking there; it was the thought of walking alone in a strange town that was twelve miles from the Bosnian-Serb lines. Only someone looking for trouble would walk down these dark streets at that late hour.

“It is possible to call a taxi?”

“No taxis,” the man said.

“Thanks.”

But as I turned to leave, he said, “When the ship leaves, I will give you a lift.”

So I waited on the dark quay at Zadar. It was like a quayside scene in a De Chirico painting, just as bare, just as bewildering. There were no cars, no people, nothing stirring: it was the abnormal silence full of implication that is more typical in a war zone than noise, for war is nothing happening for weeks and then everything happening horribly in seconds.

The Liburnija did not leave until almost one-thirty. I thought: Is it any wonder I travel alone? I had no idea what I was doing. I seldom knew from hour to hour what my plans were. That trip to Opatija was a sudden decision, like the decision to plunge into Pivka and abruptly leave; ditto Rijeka. And now it seemed I had drawn a blank at Zadar. It was unfair to subject another person to this impulsiveness and uncertainty. I had started the day in Rijeka, had lunch in Opatija, had bought the ticket back in Rijeka, and had been sailing since late afternoon. Now, well past midnight, I had no place to stay, and my bag felt like a boulder. I would have been apologizing like mad to a traveling companion. Actually I was pleased. You’re in Zadar, buddy, and that was something, still in the Mediterranean after all this time!

“See the holes in the buildings,” the man from the agency said, greeting me and yawning after the ship departed. He spoke English mixed with German. His name was Ivo, one of many Ivos I was to meet in the next week or so.

Lumps of stucco had been blown off the walls, some of the walls had crater holes, and many windows were broken.

“From grenades,” he explained. “The Serbs were in ships, right there, shelling us. This”—where his old car was parked—“was a crater. They filled it up. But the rest we still haven’t fixed. The town is worse than this.”

We got in and he drove, very slowly, like an elderly man uncertain of his route.

“All was dark. The whole of Zadar,” he said. “And I was so afraid, and even now—”

He laughed in an urgent mirthless way.

“I am very nervous now,” he said. “My nervousness is serious. Look—holes, holes, holes.”

We were passing blasted buildings and low ruined walls and potholes in the street.

“Do you think I should be nervous?”

“Maybe. I don’t know,” he said. “For me it was terrible. No water, no electricity. All dark. And it is still not over.”

Not more than one hundred and twenty-five miles across the Adriatic, at Ancona, Italians, their bellies full of pasta and good wine, were sleeping blissfully; and all this Croat spoke of was bombing and war.

“Many people used to come here,” Ivo said. “Now there is no one. They are afraid.”

We were still traveling through the dark city, and I was grateful for this ride. It was hard to imagine my being able to find my way through these dark streets to the hotel.

“Now—only you,” Ivo said.

“The last stranger in Zadar, that’s me,” I said.

“I hope they have a space for you,” Ivo said, as he swung into the driveway of the Kolovare.

All I saw were sandbags. They were stacked in front of the entrance, two bags deep, eight feet high. They were stacked in front of the ground-floor windows. There was a wall of sandbags along the driveway. Some dim lights burned behind them. There were definitely refugees here; the unmistakable sign was laundry hanging from every balcony and most windows, so that the front of the hotel looked like a Sicilian tenement. All the doors were locked.

Ivo roused an old woman and said something to her. He bade me farewell and disappeared behind the sandbags. The woman gave me a key and showed me to a back room. I tried to talk to her.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” she said.

Zadar had been seriously shelled—there were signs of damage everywhere, and it was obvious that it had been hit from up close and vindictively: the ancient main gate of the old town, a Roman relic, had been shelled—for what reason apart from malice?—and chunks blown out of it. The Serbs had set up machine guns and howitzers in a nearby park, where they were dug in; and these marksmen shelled the high school that was sixty feet away. The high school was now in session, students chatting in the playground, but the front door was sandbagged, so were most of the lower windows, and many upper windows were broken. The entire front of the school was cicatriced by shells. There was major damage around the window frames, misses from their attempts to fire into the windows.

I talked to some of the students. Yes, it was fairly quiet now, right here, they said. But there were roadblocks not far away. I asked about the shelling of the buildings. What was the objective?

“They wanted to kill civilians,” a young boy said.

“Students?”

“Kill anybody,” he said. “If they kill ordinary people in Zadar they think they would make us afraid.”

But life went on. The old town of Zadar was not large, and it was contained within a high wall—shops, cafes, restaurants, a theater, some churches. The churches and most other buildings in the town were sandbagged, up to fifteen or twenty feet; but they were also damaged. There were many gun-toting Croatian soldiers in the streets. They were unkempt, they had long hair, many wore earrings, some of the soldiers looked middle-aged, and none of them was particularly healthy. They were pale and harassed, like the Zadar civilians.

In the Hotel Kolovare refugee families killed time in the lobby—there was nowhere else to go, and this was now everyone’s parlor. They looked without curiosity at me. Old men dozed in the lobby chairs, children chased up and down the corridors. They were overexcited, they were crazed, ashamed. The room doors were left open, so I could see women doing their laundry in the hotel bathtubs, and dishes in the bathroom sinks, and ironing boards and household goods stacked in the bedrooms. There were whispers, and shouts. Life went on, but the moods were strange.

There was a cluster of small shops and cafes in the residential part of town, about fifteen minutes from the hotel. “Residential” gives the wrong impression, though. The houses were dilapidated; many were scrawled with graffiti, or had broken windows. Some attempts had been made to grow vegetables in the yards. The apartment houses were in the worst shape of any. I walked there to look for a newspaper, but found nothing to read, though there were girlie magazines hung from clothespins along with comic books.

At a cafe I ordered a cup of coffee. A rock song was playing.

Take your bombs away

So we have today

“Is that a local group?” I asked the young woman behind the counter.

“It’s English—must be American,” she said, and handed me my coffee.

It was none that I recognized, and they were wartime sentiments.

“You’re American?” she said.

“Yes. And you’re from Zadar?”

“No. My town is Zamunike,” she said.

“Is that very far away?”

“Twelve kilometers,” she said, and sounded rueful. “I can’t go back there. I am a refugee here in Zadar.”

Twelve kilometers was only about eight miles. Still, her house was behind Serbian lines, and that was another country, with a sealed and dangerous border.

“The Serbs are there.”

“In your house.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s awful.”

It amazed me—the nearness of everything: of war, of shelling, of nastiness, of dislocation, even of comfort, for the Italian shore was just across the water, and the stately solemnities of Trieste just up the coast. Zadar was a town which had been besieged and then abandoned. But the enemy was only a few miles away. Refugees had fled here, and no one really knew where they were or what was coming next.

We talked awhile more, then an odd thing happened. When I gave her money for the coffee she refused it. She put her own money in the cash register.

“It’s a little present,” she said.

She did not let me insist. And I was moved. Since beginning this trip months before in Gibraltar it was the first time that anyone had given me anything that could be described as a present. Most of the time I was hardly noticed. I had passed through the Costa Brava and the Côte d’Azur, and Barcelona and Marseilles and Monaco. Nothing came my way. I had to travel here to find a token of generosity, from a skinny woman in a cafe, in a town full of shell holes, in the shadow of a war. Perhaps war was the reason. Not everyone was brutalized; war made some people better.

• • •

My map showed a railway line that went south to the coastal city of Split. It went farther than that, continuing through Montenegro to the Albanian border and beyond, deep into Albania. But a map was not much good here—maps are one of the casualties of war, the single purpose of which is to rewrite them. This was especially true here on the fuzzy border of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was in fact occupied by Serbian soldiers who were attempting to capture and so obliterate Bosnia-Herzegovina. They had tried and failed in Croatia: the shell holes in Zadar were proof of that.

There were many more shell holes in and around Šibenik, which I reached on a bus, because none of the trains were running, for of course they passed through Serbian lines. The bus left Zadar and stayed on the coast road, the choppy Adriatic on the right and pale gray boulders and cheese-white cliffs on the left. Soon we were in a landscape that resembled the Corsican maquis, low fragrant bushes and an intense litter of big stones, some in piles, some forming walls, the whole place weird with them.

There were not many passengers, the usual Croatian soldiers and nuns, some elderly people, a few youths. When the bus stopped, as it frequently did, the soldiers hopped off and smoked. At Biograd I attempted a conversation with a group of soldiers but was waved away. Rebuffed, I looked at the Kornat islands offshore, an archipelago of a hundred or so uninhabited and treeless lumps of stone in the sea. The whole landscape was stony and the odd thing was that it had been demarcated into football-sized fields that served as goat pastures or great stony rectangles enclosing fruit trees.

I got off at dry windy Šibenik for lunch—a cup of coffee and a slice of cold pizza—and to look at shell holes. It had been more lightly bombed than Zadar, but it was obvious from the random shelling that Serbians had no scruples about bombing civilians. Like Zadar, like many of the towns on this coast, Šibenik wore a wounded expression and seemed to wince. I looked at these places but they did not look directly back at me. That was an effect of war, too.

The bus to Split took over an hour, though the place was only thirty miles away. I decided to stay here, to get my bearings. It was an industrial port, rather horrible-looking, enclosing the tiny ancient town of old Split in a maze of streets, with a temple of Jupiter and a cathedral and a nearby market. All over the seafront of Split, and at the ferry landings and near the bus station (near another defunct railway station) there were old women plucking people’s sleeves and offering rooms and nagging in German.

I saw those old women as my opportunity, and decided on a likely one and gave her the thrill of believing she had talked me into a ten-dollar room about a fifteen-minute walk from the ferry landing.

“Good room, cheap room,” she said in German, and she made a “follow-me” gesture by flapping her hand.

The room was on the third floor of a large seedy apartment house, but I did not regret it until it was obvious that this old woman and I did not share any language in common. She could say “room” and a few other words in German and Italian, and was of course fluent in Croat. She lived alone. She was the envy of some other old women in the apartment house, because she had snared me.

I would not have minded being trapped there if we had been able to talk, but there was no conversation, I was not able to poke through the other rooms in my nosy way, the pictures of crucified Christ and suffering saints on the walls depressed me, and I never found out her name. Some of the religious paraphernalia in the dark apartment—pictures of the Madonna and shiny rosaries—were, I later realized, souvenirs of Medjugorje, not far away, which the Madonna had been visiting fairly regularly to inspire the Croatians in their own religious nationalism.

“One week, two weeks?” the woman asked me in German.

“One night,” I said.

It passed quickly, I fled in the morning to the greater comfort of the Bellvue Hotel, and tried to find a ferry south to Dubrovnik. None were running. “Forget Dubrovnik—go to Hvar,” a ferryman said. Hvar was a nearby island. Instead, I wandered in the market, watching people selling some of their earthly goods in the Croatian version of a flea market—but these people were refugees. In desperation I looked at the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter, and then I decided to make more travel plans. It seemed you could go almost anywhere from Split—to Ancona, to Rijeka, even to Albania. The one place that was unreachable was Montenegro. The border was only ten or fifteen miles south of Dubrovnik, but it was closed. And there was no ferry traffic out of Dubrovnik. But I could bypass Montenegro by taking a ferry to Albania.

“We go to Durrës once a week,” the young woman said at the shipping agency.

Since this Albanian ferry was leaving in a few days, I could go south to Dubrovnik, then come back here and catch it.

Split seemed aptly named: it made me want to split. The Bellvue was on a noisy street. After dark the streets of Split emptied. Most of the restaurants had no diners—no one had any money to eat out. I sat eating foul mussels and overcooked pasta. Even the wine was slimy.

But one of the pleasures I experienced in Split was entering a phone booth, inserting my plastic Croatian phone card, and then dialing an access code, my calling card number, and the phone number I wanted—thirty-one numbers altogether—and hearing a sleepy voice, Hello, darling. I knew it was you. I’m so glad you called. I was worried—three in the morning in Honolulu.

Traveling from Split to Dubrovnik on a bus the next day, I was thinking: What is Croatian culture that it gathered all these people into one nation? The food was a version of the worst Italian cooking. The language was the same as Serbian. What Croatian nationalism amounted to was fanatical Catholicism as a counter to the orthodoxy of Serbian Protestantism, and both sides had terrorist groups and secret societies. Croatians had abandoned the designs they had for annexing parts of Bosnia, because they had border problems of their own—most of the places on the Croatian map were in Serbian hands.

Yet with all the talk of Republika Hvratska, and all the nationalistic graffiti, and the flags and the soldiers and the empty nights in their cities, it seemed to me that they had ceased to be individual. Driven by war and religion, they had dissolved their personal identities into the nation, and so they seemed spectral.

The ruined villages along the coast road looked like work-in-stoppage, and even the landscape had the look of a building site: whirling dust on windy bays, dry soil, broken boulders, crumbling cliffs. Half the passengers on this bus were chain-smoking soldiers who looked unfit for active duty.

We entered Bosnia. True, it was only the few miles of it that reached to the coast—Bosnia’s only shore—but thirty miles inland, up the Neretva River, was Mostar, city of atrocities and continuous shelling—it was being shelled today. After 428 years of being admired by invaders and locals alike, intact through two world wars, Mostar’s single-span bridge over the Neretva, a masterpiece of Ottoman architecture, had recently been blasted apart by mindless Serbian artillerymen.

We soon came to a checkpoint, with Bosnian soldiers, and some policemen who entered the bus and bullied civilians, denouncing them for carrying doubtful-looking identity papers. There were Croatian checkpoints, too, at Omiš, Makarska and Podgorje: the same routine. Usually the victim of the policeman’s wrath was a squirming, cowering woman. In this sort of situation the cop had absolute power: he could arrest the poor woman or boot her off the bus, or send her back where she came from.

We reached Slano, farther down the road. You did not need to be told that Slano had been the front line. The house walls were riddled with bullets, many of the roofs were missing, some of the houses were bombed flat. This was where the Serbians had dug in for their attack on Dubrovnik. They had shot at everything. There was not a structure on the road that did not have at least a divot of plaster missing. Some had bright patches of tile where the roof had been mended, and many windows were boarded up.

Welcome To Dubrovnik was repeated on a signboard in four languages, and written across it in large letters, almost obliterating the welcome, the Croatian word HAOS!—chaos.

Dubrovnik was famous for its beauty and its bomb craters; but it was another empty city, with no traffic and no tourists, and even Lapad harbor looked peculiarly bereft: no ferries running, no fishing boats, no anglers. It was a gray day, the low sky threatening rain.

I hopped off the bus in the newer part of town with the soldiers and the nuns and the others. The soldiers laughed and stayed to talk while everyone else scuttled away. That was another characteristic of the war: no one lingered anywhere—people arrived in a place and then vanished. Apart from the groups of soldiers, there were no street discussions or any public gatherings. As the only non-Croatian on the street I was wooed by taxi drivers, but it would not be dark for a few hours and so I decided to walk around the port, from hotel to hotel, to check the prices and get my bearings.

Red Cross vehicles, U.N. Land Rovers, and official cars of charitable agencies filled the parking lots of the first three hotels. The desk clerks said, “We have no rooms.”

This was not happy news. I kept walking. An aid worker, probably Canadian, judging from the maple leaf on his lapel pin, sat in the lobby reading a paperback book. The woman at reception told me her hotel was full.

“Wish I could help you,” the Canadian said.

The book he was reading was Pride and Prejudice.

Afterwards on the street, in a sharp attack of what the French call “stairway wit,” I realized I should have quipped to him, “Is that a history of Yugoslavia?” He might have laughed and thought: What a witty fellow!

Two more hotels were closed and looked damaged. The next hotel that was open had been entirely given over to refugees. But I eventually found one on a backstreet that had a spare room. It also had refugees. It was not a very good hotel. I was beginning to comprehend another axiom of war: in a time of crisis the do-gooders get the best rooms—five-star hotels to the U.N. and the charities, one-star hotels to the refugees and me.

Again, as in Zadar, and on the Liburnija, and Split, I was among rambunctious children and dozy parents—locals and refugees: more war nerves. The children played loud music and chased each other and yelled. They raced up and down the hotel corridors, they congregated noisily in the lobby. Given the fact that they had been severely bombed, they remained indoors and seemed to have an obvious and perhaps understandable aversion—not to say phobic reaction—to being in the open air.

I had no such aversion. But before I could walk very far, the rain began, first as a series of irregular showers and then as drizzle interrupted by thunder and lightning. I sheltered inside a grocer’s shop that was so small I had to excuse myself and step outside when a customer entered.

Business was terrible, the grocer said. His glum wife agreed, shaking her head.

“Dubrovnik depended on tourists,” the grocer said. “Now there are none.”

That was the strange thing about a tourist resort without tourists. The town had been adapted for people who were not there. The hotels looked haunted, the restaurants and shops were empty, the beaches were neglected as a result and were littered and dirty. Few of the shops sold anything that a native or a townie would be likely to need or could afford. So the place was inhabited by real people, but everything else about it seemed unreal.

Apart from the shellholes and the closed hotels and the bullet nicks on buildings the city was in good shape. The shattered roofs had been repaired. I had not yet seen the famously lovely old town of Dubrovnik, which had been heavily bombed, but I was told it had been restored.

“We have no income,” he said.

The stormy sky descended and darkened the town and a while later the streets were black, the storm having obliterated the transition from day to night.

The hotel was so hard-pressed that for simplicity, there was only one menu available, the refugee meal. I sat with these hundred or so people, mainly women and children, and had my refugee meal. It was one of the hours in the day when, stuffing their faces, the children were quiet. Elsewhere—but not far away—just across the mountains that hemmed in Dubrovnik, in Bosnia, food was being dropped from American planes or tossed out of the back of U.N. trucks; yet there was famine all the same. These refugees who had gotten to the shores of the Mediterranean were the lucky ones.

After dinner I began talking with a man in the lobby. First the subject of the weather—rain. Then business—no tourists. Then the war. He was aggrieved that America had not done more to help.

“Help who?” I asked.

“Help us in our struggle,” he said.

I said, “Tell me why American soldiers should get killed in your civil war.”

He did not like my tone.

“No one cares about us,” he said.

“Everyone cares,” I said. “No one knows what to do, and I don’t blame them, because so far it has all looked so petty and unpredictable.”

“Clinton is weak,” the man said.

It irritated me very much that a tribalistic Croatian on this bombed and squabbling coast, with its recent history of political poltroonery, not to say political terror and fratricide, should criticize the American president in this way.

“Who told you that, Tudjman?”

Tudjman, the Croatian president, was noted for being a fanatical nationalist and moralizing bore and an irritant generally.

“He’s very strong, isn’t he?” I said. I could not keep my eyes from dancing in anger. “You’re so lucky to have him.”

The old fortified town of Dubrovnik in sunshine lived up to its reputation of being one of the loveliest in the Mediterranean: a medieval walled city, a citadel on the sea, with an ancient harbor. It was the Republic of Ragusa, so prosperous and proud that even when its buildings were destroyed in an earthquake in the mid-seventeenth century it was scrupulously restored, and has been so well preserved that the oldest paintings and etchings of it show it as it is today, unchanged. The town is listed as “a treasure” by UNESCO.

The worst damage since that natural disaster in 1667 had happened just recently, between late in 1991 and well into 1992, when as many as thirty thousand Serbian and Montenegrin shells hit the city—there were cannons firing from behind the city, on the heights of the mountain range, and more cannons on warships just off shore, as at Zadar. There was no reason for this. The capture of the port meant almost nothing from the military point of view. The Serbian assault was rightly termed “cultural vandalism.”

Most of the bomb damage had been repaired. Dubrovnik was a prettier place by far than Rijeka or Zadar or Split, or any of the other coastal towns, but there was something spooky about a preserved old town, one of the most venerable on the Mediterranean shore, that was totally empty. It was like Venice after the plague. Just after the Black Death, in 1345, when most of its citizens lay dead, Venice was begging outsiders to settle, and this queen of cities promised citizenship to anyone who became a Venetian: it must have looked something like Dubrovnik, with its empty streets and scarred walls and its air of bereavement.

But Dubrovnik was putting on a brave back-to-normal face and that made the whole place seem odder still, because it was empty—empty and handsome. Some stores were open, some cafes, even some restaurants. Art galleries sold pretty pictures of the town, sprightly oils of the glorious stone buildings and the harbor; watercolors of church spires, pastoral scenes of sweetness and light.

None of war, none of damage, nor emptiness: no despair, no soldiers.

“Some artists came after the fighting and did sketches of what the bombs had done,” a gallery owner told me. “They went away.”

I asked a question about the siege.

“No,” the woman said, and turned away. “I don’t want to think about it. I want to forget it.”

It was only twenty-odd miles from Dubrovnik to the border of Montenegro, the smallest of the improvised republics, then maybe another sixty or so to Shkodër in Albania, and that was—what?—a couple of hours.

No, no—not at all. Although these distances seemed in American newspapers to be enormous, the pronouncement “We journeyed from the Republic of Croatia to the Republic of Montenegro and then to the Republic of Albania” described a two-hour jog in a car, a mere piddling jaunt, with plenty of time to stop and admire the view. Geographically it was nothing, politically it was something else. It was, in fact, a political distance, like the eighty miles that separate Cuba from Key West, or the few miles that divide Mexico from California. You could not get there from here without the danger of physical harm.

Montenegrins had allied themselves to Serbia and both had designs on Croatia. So the border was closed. It was impossible to tell whether the Albania-Montenegro border was open: probably not. My hope lay in a ferry from Split to Albania, but even so I looked for someone willing to take me to the checkpoint on the border.

I found a taxi driver, Ivo Lazo, a friendly man who had worked for fifteen years in Germany and who spoke German and managed some English.

He would say, “So the Serbian chetniks take the—was ist Messer?”

“Knife.”

“—take the knife and—” And Mr. Lazo passed a finger across his throat to indicate how the chetniks slit them in their fanaticism.

“Can you take me to Montenegro?”

“Ha!” Mr. Lazo exclaimed, meaning “ridiculous!”

“What about to the border?”

“Ha!”

“Maybe just to look at it?”

“Ha!”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“I will show you something interesting,” Mr. Lazo said.

Passing a sign reading DUBROVNIK on which was scrawled To HELL, Mr. Lazo drove me to the upper road, on the mountainside behind Dubrovnik, near where the Serbian artillery had shelled the city. This was quite a different perspective from the one I had had within the city itself. From this high position I had an aerial view of the bombardment’s effects—about a third of the roof tiles were new, in great contrast to the old gray tiles; the repairs to the walls were still visible, the new stucco work was large pale areas. Perhaps in time the colors would blend and the stone would be uniformly mellow. At the moment it was a city wearing patches.

“Five hundred to seven hundred bombs hit it—you see?” Mr. Lazo said.

“Where were you at the time?”

“Over there,” he said, and pointed to the newer part of Dubrovnik, in the Lapad district, near the other harbor.

“Did you have any warning?”

“The first indication we had was from the Serbian families here,” he said. “Four thousand of them—yes, many. The men started to go away, little by little. The old women stayed. They knew something.”

“How did they know?”

“How did they know! How did they know!” Mr. Lazo threw up his hands, and then began to explain the network of Serbian whispering, the foreknowledge of the attack.

He did not hate the Serbs, he said. He had lived with them almost his whole life. The chetniks of course were a different matter.

“They have long beards, they are dirty, they are—so to say—fundamentalists. They are like the Gestapo. They don’t just kill. They torture. Women, children, all the same.”

The chetniks were famous for their daggers and their muddy boots and their long hair, and there was something about their filthy faces that made them seem more ruthless and frightening, like the Huns and Visigoths—their distant ancestors—who had raped and pillaged their way through here at the end of the fifth century. Chetniks also were driven by the worst and most merciless engine for violence there is—religious crankishness.

In October 1991, the Lazo family in Lapad became very anxious, noticing that by degrees their Serbian neighbors had crept away. Soon the shelling began and lasted through November. They cowered in their house, twelve of them, Ivo and his parents and wife and children and some cousins. The shelling continued. It was now December. Many people had died, many houses had caught fire. The water was cut off. “We carried water from the sea to use in the toilet.” They shared a well for drinking water. There was no electricity. It was cold; some days it snowed.

In a horrible and pitiless way it is interesting how gutless and patient soldiers can be, even when they have their enemy pinned down. The war all over the former Yugoslavia was—and still is—the epitome of this sort of cowardly onslaught. In almost every siege, in Sarajevo and Mostar and twenty other places there has been no forward motion. The attacking army found a convenient position on a mountain or a road or at a safe distance at sea, and then for as long as it had artillery shells it bombarded the target, pinning the people in their houses.

This was why the war seemed endless: instead of infantry attacks or guerrilla fighting or even aerial bombing, it was a war of sieges, like the oldest Mediterranean warfare. Every coastal town or port in this sea had been under siege at some point in its history—Gibraltar had fourteen of them, Malta had known even more—Turks attacking crusaders in Valletta harbor, British attacking French during the Napoleonic war; Phoenicians, Romans, Goths, Vandals, Turks, Nazis, the U.S. Marines and my American uncles had all made war in these Mediterranean ports. But there was a significant difference between invaders and besiegers. Siege was hardly a military art; it was a simple method of wearing down and starving and demoralizing a civilian population. It was a massive and prolonged insult, carried on by a merciless army with a tactical advantage.

The Serbian army had massed their tanks on the north side of town, on the road, near Slano, where I had seen the bomb damage. That was the forward line, the little villages of Trsteno and Orašac, where there were holiday homes and time-share bungalows built by Germans and British people in happier times.

There were also tanks on the road south of Dubrovnik, around Cilipi where the airport was—half an hour by road from Montenegro; and more tanks on the eastern heights that Lazo called Jarkovitze Mountain (it was not on my map). The ships were a mile or so west, off shore. So Dubrovnik was completely surrounded, and shells were falling from the four points of the compass.

“My daughter Anita was very worried,” Mr. Lazo said. “I said to her, ‘Go to the Old Town. You will be safe there.’ ”

There was an almost mystical belief in the sanctity and inviolability of the Old Town. Because of the enormous walls, ten feet thick and four stories high; because of the beauty of the town; because of its historical importance—its association with Venice; its great trading history, site of the oldest apothecary in the Mediterranean; because, most of all, of the town’s religious connections—St. Blaise had lived and died here, St. Nicholas was its patron saint—for all these good reasons, the Old Town was a refuge.

Anita Lazo fled there with a number of others, and on the sixth of December, the Feast of St. Nicholas—the timing was deliberate—the Old Town was shelled.

“I looked up and saw the tanks on the mountain,” Mr. Lazo said. “They were like matches lighting—the fire and then whouf—the bombs.”

Hundreds were killed, as many as 250 civilians in that siege alone, and the destruction was enormous. Anita Lazo survived. Mr. Lazo drove me to a point overlooking Lapad Harbor, showed me the burned-down freezer plant, the ruined buildings, the rubble, the boats that had been shelled and sunk, still lying dead in the water as hulks. This was the newer part of town, not a priority; about half the roofs had been repaired.

“They didn’t come closer. They bombed. But to take the city—to capture it—that is very difficult,” Mr. Lazo said. “We had Kalashnikovs and other guns. We could defend it, man to man. But still the bombs fell.”

The siege lasted three months—tension, noise, eerie silences, rumors; no water, no lights. Not long before they’d had as many as seventy thousand tourists in a season. Now they had—how many?

“We have you,” Mr. Lazo said. “Ha!”

We went to Slano where there was hellish damage and more sunken boats.

“It will take ten years to go back to normal,” Mr. Lazo said. That seemed a popular number; many Croats mentioned ten years, and I was wondering whether they were quoting someone. “Even then there will be big differences. We are of the West. Croatia had nine hundred years of Austro-Hungarians, Serbia had five hundred years of Ottoman Turks. They have the Eastern Orthodox, like the Russians. We have Rome—we are Catholics.”

That meant, for example, that on the third of February, the Feast of St. Blaise, they went to the church in the Old Town and a priest placed two lighted candles against their neck and said a prayer, because among other things St. Blaise was the patron saint of neck ailments. I knew that from my childhood in Boston: the smell of beeswax, the flames warming my ears.

I avoided the theology of warfare and asked him why, after fifteen years in Germany, he had come here, to be bombed.

“I came home. Because home is home.”

In a year of Mediterranean travel it was one of the most logical statements I heard.

“Tell people to come here,” Mr. Lazo said. “We are ready.”

True, Dubrovnik was open for business, and like its women, war had given it a gaunt beauty. But it was a city that had been traumatized and still looked patched up and fragile. My hotel was $18 a night, quite a bargain, even with the resident refugees and their manic war-nerves. The traffic in town was mainly the modern equivalent of camp followers—Mother Courage and her children: U.N. Land Rovers, Red Cross vans, “Caritas” trucks, vehicles of various U.N. agencies. The beaches were foul. The casino was closed. Many hotels were shut. It was not possible to count all the broken windows, nor had much of the broken glass been picked up from the ground.

The clearest sign that it was still a city of refugees was that laundry hung from every window and every porch and balcony, the sad scrubbed and faded clothes fluttering like battle flags.

I stayed a few more days in Dubrovnik, to catch up on my notes and for the pleasure of walking along the coast, the only tourist in town. One day I met an Italian taking a shipment of Red Cross medicine to Mostar. It was a day’s drive from here. He had a Caritas truck.

“Mostar was very badly bombed, but there is no fighting in town now,” he said. “A bit outside the town there is shelling.”

“I’d like to go there, just to see.”

“I can’t take you, because of the insurance.”

“I wanted to see the famous bridge.”

“It’s fallen,” he said. Caduto.

On the way back to Split, the bus broke down at Slano. So while the driver made a mess of replacing the fan belt—hammering the bracket with his monkey wrench, struggling with rusty nuts—I had another chance to examine the bomb damage. Then I sat beside the road, with the grumbling soldiers, and the bus driver swore at the limp fan belt.

I now understood why, the moment the bus had gasped to a stop, an attractive young woman had dashed out the door and run into the road and begun hitchhiking. A few cars went by her, but within five minutes she had a ride. She was on her way and we were sitting at the edge of the broken road with a clapped-out bus. She exemplified another axiom of war: don’t wait for your vehicle to be mended—just use your initiative; flash your tits and take off. It may be your only chance.

Back in Split I went to the Albanian ferry agency. The ferry for Durrës was scheduled to leave tonight.

“Sorry. It was canceled,” the young woman told me. “I cannot sell you a ticket.”

“How do I get there?”

She shrugged. She did not know.

But I had a suspicion that if I took a ferry back to Ancona in Italy I could get one from there, or possibly from Bari, where I had been told there were regular departures. I bought a ferry ticket to Italy on tomorrow’s sailing, feeling that I would reach Albania eventually, even if it meant crisscrossing the Adriatic. But it seemed a waste: in Dubrovnik I had been just two hours by road from Albania; but the trip was impossible. I was now faced with a four-day journey.

The point about atrocity stories, especially here, was that everyone told them. For a week I had been listening to stories about chetnik fanaticism; but, killing time in Split until the day the Ancona ferry left, I met an aid worker from Canada who told me about the Croatian fanaticism.

“Didn’t you see them?” he said. “Weren’t you here a few days ago?”

“I was in Dubrovnik.”

“There were groups of Ustasha soldiers in the bars here in Split, all singing Nazi songs—the ‘Horst Wessel’ and all of that.”

The Ustasha were Croatian commandos, much like the Serbian chetniks. They modeled themselves on the Nazi SS and wore black shirts and a “U” insignia. Their ruthlessness and racism dated to the fascist Ustasha regime which had governed Croatia with Nazi help during the Second World War and off its own bat, without Nazi control, had operated its own death camp. Serbian “ethnic cleansing” was now well enough known to be universally condemned, but this policy of Croatian “purification” was new to me.

“So what’s going to happen here?”

“In ten years”—that magic figure again—“things will be quieter,” he said. “And there will be a greater Serbia, a greater Croatia and a smaller Bosnia.”

On the quay, having just bought tickets to Italy, was a family of refugees—a hollow-eyed man and his painfully thin wife and his child. The little boy looked robust, the parents half-starved, and so it was easy to conclude that the child had been given the parents’ rations.

“We were airlifted by helicopter from Tuzla,” he said, and since Tuzla was in Bosnia, the family obviously had been through the wringer.

They had escaped from Sarajevo, leaving their parents and their house and everything they possessed. All they had were two small suitcases, and a pram for the child (who was too heavy for them to lift), and a bag of food. This family had been sponsored by a French organization, Solidarité, which had provided the helicopter getaway.

The family’s story was not complicated, but in its simplicity it amply illustrated the despicable nature of this civil war, which was a border dispute fueled by ancient grievances (the assassination of the Croatian King Zvonimir in 1089, for example), wartime collaboration and score-settling, racism, and religious differences.

“I am a geologist,” he said. His name was Dr. Tomic; he was probably in his mid-thirties but his haunted look made him seem much older. “I am from ex-Yugoslavia. My parents are Serbian, but I was born in Bosnia, so I am a Bosnian. Sarajevo is my home. My wife is a Muslim. That’s the problem.”

Mrs. Tomic gave me a wan smile and shrugged her skinny shoulders.

“For eight years I had been at the university in Sarajevo, specializing in the geology of the area,” Dr. Tomic said. “Then my colleagues began to ask me questions as though to test me. Finally they said, ‘We have lost confidence in you.’ ”

“Did they say why?”

“No—they couldn’t. My geology is very local, just the thing that is studied there,” he said. “My neighborhood was next. My neighbors began to make problems. They were blaming my wife for things. They know she is a Muslim. It got very bad.”

“How bad? Give me an instance,” I said.

“Dangerous—threats,” he said, and seemed so shaken by the memory that I did not press him.

“We considered fleeing to Slovenia,” he said. “They have camps here, but we don’t qualify. They have Serbs in one camp, Croats in another, Muslims in a third. We don’t fit in, because we are mixed.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Go to France,” he said. “Take the ferry to Italy, then the train to Paris.”

They were leaving everything behind, most of all abandoning hope for their country. It interested me that they had only two small bags and this folding pram; I imagined it to be the little boy’s clothes, and a change of clothes for themselves. The average tourist in Italy on a short holiday—they would probably be sharing the train with many such people—had ten times this weight in baggage.

After that, whenever I read about troop maneuvers or politicians grandstanding or mortar attacks on cities or the pettiness and terror of the war, I thought about this skinny man and wife, each one holding a bag, pushing their little boy down the quay at Split, their starved faces turned to the Mediterranean, waiting for the ferry to take them away from here.

The next day I saw the refugee couple on the ferry Ivan Krajc standing in the rain by the rail watching the Croatian shore recede from view.

The rest of the passengers divided themselves into groups—Italian truck drivers who joked and sang and ate, Italian pilgrims who had just come from Medjugorje and were still praying (dozens of them, standing on deck in the rain and chanting the rosary out loud), Croatians like the Tomic family, looking furtive and anxious; and aid workers down from Bosnia, with a few days to spend in Italy.

“We drove down from Zenica today,” an aid worker told me. Zenica was about forty miles northwest of Sarajevo. “Last year it took us ten days to drive from Zenica to Split, because of roadblocks and fighting. Today it took eight hours. Maybe things are improving!”

He was an Australian, traveling with his American wife, who was also an aid worker. She had a neighborly manner, and he was upright, mustached, and had a military bearing—he later told me he had been a soldier in South Africa. He was in his mid-forties, with the charity World Vision. His name was David Jennings. He and Theresa were making their first-ever visit to Italy, as a break from their aid project in Bosnia.

They asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a writer.”

“Journalists are a pain,” David said.

“They all cover the same story—four guys in four separate cars go to the same place,” Theresa said.

“They come for the big stories, when they can get their face on the camera, with shooting behind them,” David said.

“I’m not a journalist,” I said. “I don’t work for anyone. I’m just looking around.”

“I went back to Australia for about ten days last January,” David said. “I looked at the paper, flipping the pages, and there was nothing about the war—nothing. I called the editor. I said, ‘Hey, mate. I’ve just come back from Bosnia, and I’ve got some news for you—the war’s still on!’ ”

“What sort of thing do you do?”

“I’m a logistician,” he said. “But I do everything. I mean, we all do. We have heart specialists driving ambulances.”

“Isn’t logistics about making things happen?”

“Yes. I coordinate shipments of food and equipment. My military background is useful for that. It takes patience, though. I mean, like waiting for six hours at a checkpoint because some jumped little guy pretends there’s something wrong with my papers.”

The problem was that all the borders were so blurred. Serb, Croat and Bosnian lines were close and continually shifting.

“Because I’m working in Bosnia they see my work as helping the enemy,” he said. “And they’re fussy too. In my office I have a Bosnian Muslim, a Croat and a Serb. They get along fine. But my interpreter was dealing with a freight forwarder in Zagreb over the phone. After a few minutes my interpreter handed the phone to me. ‘She doesn’t want to talk to me.’ The woman in Zagreb suspected—from the interpreter’s Serbo-Croatian accent—that he might be a Muslim. I asked the Zagreb woman for a reason. She says, ‘He is not speaking my language.’ ”

“I was thinking of going to Mostar,” I said. “But I was warned that it was dangerous.”

“You might have hit it on a bad day,” he said. “Hey, I was standing talking with some U.N. Protective Force (UNPROFOR) guys at Tuzla airport the other day. I felt a tug in my chest—a hard poke—and heard a bang and saw a slug spinning on the floor. Someone had fired at me.”

“But it bounced off?”

“I was wearing a flak jacket.”

“Who was the sniper?”

“Might have been anyone,” he said. “Probably thought I was UNPROFOR. They all hate them. They suspect them of helping the enemy, whoever that might be.”

Theresa said, “They try to demoralize people. That’s how they think they’ll win.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Each side,” she said.

“Demoralizing” took the form of being beastly and unreasonable in uniquely horrible ways.

Later, in my cabin on the Ivan Krajc at midnight, twiddling my radio, I found an FM station broadcasting from Split in English, for the benefit of aid workers and U.N. soldiers. It was a war report, and it sounded as bland as a stock market update.

—and three artillery shells fell just outside the city of Tuzla today. There were no casualties. Small-arms provocation was reported in Bihac lasting thirty-five minutes this afternoon. Twenty-five people are still listed as missing in Sarajevo. Two shells struck a house in Gorazde—demolishing it. No one was injured. Two mortar bombs exploded in Travnik. It was agreed that the left bank of the Neretva River in Mostar be officially reopened after six P.M. tomorrow. One member of UNPROFOR was critically injured by sniper fire in—

The soporific drone of the ferry’s engines mercifully eased me to sleep. I slumbered all the way across the Adriatic, and in the morning I was back in Italy, looking for a way by ship to Albania.

12

The Ferry Venezia to Albania

It was not until I was on board the ferry Venezia, among dowdy women wearing long trousers under their thick skirts and grizzled cheese-paring men in cloth caps and frayed track suits—both men and women had the faces of fretful tortoises—that I realized that I was at last on my way to Albania. I had rehearsed it all mentally with such thoroughness that the whole business seemed inevitable. I had bought a ferry ticket from an agent in Ancona. The ferry was leaving from Bari, two-hundred-odd miles down the coast. I went by train to Bari. Returning to a city I always retraced my steps. In Bari this meant the same hotel, a certain laundry, a certain restaurant, a certain bookstore, a stroll down the Corso to the port. The women at the laundry remembered me, and one said, “We think you’re an artist of some kind.” That was nice. But they expressed amazement that I was going to Albania, which is regarded with horror by the Barese.

Another man in Bari was franker. “Albanians are the filthiest,” he said. Sporchissimi. “And the poorest.” Poverissimi “Stay here!”

No argument could detain me. I was beyond being determined; I was programmed for Albania. I had my fifty-dollar ferry ticket. My clothes were washed. I had a stock of books and batteries for my radio. I even had a map of the place. I did not want to listen to any Italian’s opinions about Albania—none of the ones I met had been there. But it was only on the deck of the Venezia as we headed east out of the harbor that I remembered that I had no visa for Albania, I hadn’t the foggiest idea where I was going, or why. All I had done was offer myself as a passenger. I had merely shown up and said: Please take me.

But where? The importance of getting to Albania had preoccupied me to such an extent that I had forgotten why I was going. On board, I wanted to ask people what their intentions were in Albania, thinking that it would offer some clue as to why I was going. No one was very conversational. The passengers were seedy but calm. The Albanians muttered in Geg or Tosk and ignored me. They crouched over little paper parcels of food, sinister-looking scraps of meat and crumbly crusts of bread and mousetrap cheese. There were not many children, though one family with two children had among its possessions, packed into cardboard boxes, a rocking horse with green fur glued to it.

The decks of the ferry were crammed with stolen cars. I had been told by people in Bari that the cars on the ferry to Durrës had been snatched from streets all over Europe, given new documents, and exported to Albania, where they would be sold on the black market and then vanish down dusty roads. There were the usual aid workers and the vans from various charities making their weekly food and clothing run. But Italian aid workers were the opposite of solemn—they were truck drivers, smokers, shouters, practical jokers, goosing each other and laughing. They sprawled in the cafeteria, mocking the awfulness of the food (wet spaghetti, soggy salad, inky wine) and yakking, then one would say, “You recognize this song?” and would begin singing something sacrilegious in a falsetto voice.

I had the feeling that I was the only one on board who was just going for the ride. On deck I tuned my radio and listened to the news. “The trial of Ramiz Alia, former prime minister of Albania, started in Tirana today,” I heard, and told myself that my trip was timely, yet knew that I was kidding myself. I knew nothing of Albania except that for fifty years the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha had allowed few foreigners to enter and no Albanian to leave. Albania, cut off from everything, had a reputation for being one of the strangest countries in the world. With the great shakeup brought on by the Soviet collapse, Albania had changed—hadn’t it? It must have, because here I was, en route to the coastal city of Durrës.

The moon was up, the ship passed parallel to the shore, along a sea-level string of lights that were the streetlamps of the coast road south of Bari. Then the ship swung east, into the darkness.

Hurrying from Croatia to Italy to catch this ferry, I had a sense of weariness, and wondered whether I had the stomach to push on. But the notion of going to Albania lifted my spirits, because I had never been there before and I knew nothing about it, and neither did anyone else. That in itself seemed a novelty, for here on the most heavily beaten path in the world, the shore of the Mediterranean, it was still possible to travel into the unknown.

At 6:30 in the morning I woke with a start in the tobacco-stink of my cabin and only then realized I had no porthole. I had to go on deck to see that we were in bright sunshine approaching the low green outline of what had been ancient Illyria. This dissolved as we drew closer, and now a brown cluttered headland loomed, the forehead of Durrës, ancient Epidamnus beneath it, with cranes and tenements. Nearer still, I could see the dome and minarets of a white mosque, my first glimpse of Islam on this trip. Another brown hill and at its top, a large white house, the palace of Ahmet Zogu, who in 1928 had styled himself Zog the First, King of Albania. Ten years later, with an ultimatum from Italy (whose monarch Victor Emmanuel called himself King of Italy and Emperor of Ethiopia and Albania), Zog was headed into permanent exile, Albania’s whole treasury in his luggage.

“Passport control,” a deckhand said to me, and pointed to a card table that had been shoved under the broken TV set in the lounge. Two unshaven men in dirty sports shirts sat there with a stack of passports, looking tough as they took turns thumping the pages with their rubber stamp. It was as though the whole aggressive ritual was intended to erode your confidence: the shirts, the flimsy table, the grubby men, the jumble of passports. And their pad was so dry the men had to pound it to make even a feeble impression with the rubber stamp.

My passport was flung to me and I went back on deck to see the Venezia moving stern first towards the dock so that the stolen cars and aid trucks could be off-loaded. Beside us there was a hulk sunken to its gunwales, and a blond Albanian boy of about twelve or thirteen dived from it. He swam beside our ship, calling out for the passengers to throw money. He gagged and spat as the screws of our ship churned up swirling mud from the harbor bottom. The Italian truck drivers flung balled-up paper money and coins and soon there were four or five boys swimming for it and squabbling.

Knowing so little in advance, I had mentally prepared myself for anything in Albania, but even so I was shocked by Durrës. My first sight, as I walked off the ship, was of a mob of ragged people, half of them beggars, the rest of them tearful relatives of the passengers, all of them howling.

It was hysteria, and dirt and dogs and heat, but what alarmed me most were the people snatching at me. No one elsewhere on my trip had noticed me. I was so anonymous I felt invisible wherever I went. No one had ever touched me. Here they pounced. They took hold of my hand, tugged at my shirt, fingered my pen. “Signor!” “Money!” “Soldi!” “Please! You geeve me!” “Meester!”

They fastened themselves to me, pleading. I could not brush them aside—they were truly ruined. They looked hysterical, they were poor, ravaged, bumpy faced with pox scars—mothers with children, blind men with boys, old hectoring crones, all of them plucking at me. “Geeve me theese!”

Third World, I thought, but it was the only Third World scene I had ever witnessed that was entirely populated by Europeans—the most dissolute and desperate and poverty-stricken and rapacious, lunging at me, following just behind me, demanding money.

I was a sitting duck for this attention. The Italian aid worker passengers had vehicles. They drove through the mob. The Albanian passengers dragging cardboard boxes had nothing to give. But even travel weary and plainly dressed, I looked prosperous compared to the ragged mob at the port, and worst of all I was on foot. They were all around me, in my face, snagging my clothes, their hands in my pockets.

Hurrying on, I pretended I knew where I was going. I found a path, cut through a junkyard, went across the railway tracks and followed them, hoping to get to the train station, all the while passing curious people. Some beggars had stayed with me, still pleading, as I walked on into Durrës, which was a world of dust and ruination.

Nothing was right in Durrës. Even the trees were dirty and had rusted leaves; blighted and dying, most of them had the smashed, dilapidated look of the hideous tenements near them. Many limbs had been lopped and the ones that had been left were maimed. It was not that the trees looked dead, but rather that they had never been alive, just moth-eaten props on a cheap stage set from a show that had closed long ago. High weeds grew in the railway yard, and the coaches that I could see were either tipped over or else derelict, with broken windows. Bright sun bore down on everything and the stink that I had first noticed as I walked off the ship still hung in the air—it was a shit smell in the heat, an odor of decay and dust, of rotting clothes and even the earth—the dirt I was kicking as I hurried onward—had a rancid gasoline pong that was like the reek of poison.

In a filthy and deranged way it all fit together—the toasted trees, the cracked buildings, the nasty earth, the trains that didn’t run, and everywhere I could see people in rags. Sporchissimi, poverissimi, summed it up. When the people saw me it was as though they had seen The Man Who Fell to Earth and they ran towards me and screamed for me to give them something—money, food, clothes, my pen, anything. The minute I made eye contact the person lunged for me and began pleading.

It was just as well I came here ignorant. If anyone had told me about this in advance—the way Durrës looked, the filth and desperation—I would not have believed them.

In the meantime I could not shake off these pleading people. I was still being followed and brayed at by two begging boys, a young woman holding a limp comatose child, and an old woman wearing leggings and a shawl. They were behind me as I walked down the tracks towards the station, and they stood with me at the station as I rattled the locked door. The station windows were cracked and broken, but I could see inside that it was empty, papers littering the floor, several chairs tipped over, the one-number pad calendar on the wall showing the wrong date.

A woman approached me, looking much like all the others: tortoise-faced, wearing a sweater in spite of the heat, trousers under her skirt, big broken shoes. But this one carried a bunch of keys—the badge of her authority.

“Train?” I asked.

“Jo treni,” the woman said, and waved her hands with a flap of finality.

That was clear enough—anyway, I could have guessed there was no train, having seen the weeds growing over the tracks, and the vandalized coaches, and the wrecked station. Seeing me flummoxed, the beggars seized my hesitation as their opportunity and pleaded with me to give them something.

The woman with the keys was pointing to the front of the station.

“Autobusi,” she said.

That was plain too, but nothing else was as it should have been, not the thing itself, nor even a symbol of it: the station was not a station, the sidewalks were not sidewalks, the trees were not trees, the streets were not streets, even the buses I saw did not look like buses. The vehicles were ravaged and three of them together at the front of the station made the space look like a junkyard, not a bus depot.

The beggars stayed beside me, and there were other people squatting on the ground or standing in groups. Everyone was looking at me, waiting to see what I would do.

I’ll go to Tirana, I thought. I knew from my map that it was only twenty-five miles away. Come back here some other day.

I went to one of the wrecked buses. Some more people followed me. I wanted to shake them all off.

“Tirana?” I asked.

“Tirana!” They pointed to another bus. And a ragged young man, in his early twenties, stepped over to me. I thought he was going to ask me for money, but instead he said, mixing English and Italian, “This bus is going soon to Tirana.”

I climbed in and sat by the back door.

“It costs fifty leks,” the young man said, and seeing that I was confused, he took out a scrap of red rag that was a fifty-lek note and handed it to me. “You will need this.”

Before the door clapped shut I managed to give the young man some Italian lire in return, perhaps its equivalent. For the second time on my trip I received a gift from an unlikely person. He had given me, a stranger, what was in Albania a half-day’s pay, knowing that I would never see him again. This sudden act of kindness, like the cup of coffee from the woman in the bar at Zadar, took the curse off the place, and though Durrës still looked horrific I was won over.

The bus was full. I was jammed on the long seat at the back being bumped by the passengers standing in front of me. There was a great stink of mildewed clothing and tobacco smoke, but I was near enough to the door to stick my head out when we came to a stop. It was a slow bus, the stops were frequent, but none of this mattered very much to me—I was on my way, fascinated by most of what I saw.

Men and women in the fields by the roadside worked with primitive implements—they wielded crooked-handled scythes, and big sickles, they forked hay into heaps on horse-drawn wagons with ancient-looking tridents, they plowed with yoked teams of horses. This was not even turn-of-the-century technology—these were the sort of farm tools that had been used in Europe hundreds of years ago. There wasn’t an engine in sight, no tractors or cars—and no other vehicle on the road apart from this wheezing bus.

The fields were as rubbly and irregular as everything else. They were not flat, the furrows were not parallel, nothing was plumb. Since arriving in Albania I had not seen a straight line. That was true of the houses, too, the small collapsing hovels and sheds and tottering barns. And this absence of true geometry, this disorder, made Albania seem deranged and gave Albanians a suspicious and retarded look.

I had seen ruin before in other places, but it was odd to see farms that were so disorderly. Even in Third World countries where people lived in poor and misshapen huts their fields had order and there was always a symmetry in the plants, the windbreaks, the ditches. But there was no harmony here.

That was simply strange, yet the landscape had another feature, and it floored me—the bunkers and bomb shelters. I saw the first ones on the outskirts of Durrës and had wondered what they were. Most of them looked like igloos in cement, some big, some small; others were like pillboxes, round or square. The smaller ones could not have accommodated more than one or two people. Twenty or more people could have fitted in some others, which were the size of bungalows. They were like stone lumps. They had no windows, though most of them had gunslits.

They were scattered all over the open treeless landscape, rows of them on ridges, along the sides of the road, hidden in hollows, on the banks of stagnant creeks, and distantly, perhaps for miles—as far as I could see—they continued, they were everywhere.

These bunkers are unusual enough to have been remarked on by an Albanian writer, Ismaïl Kadaré. He is also the only Albanian novelist who has been translated into English. In his best-known novel, The General of the Dead Army (1970), Kadaré writes about a visiting Italian general who sees them: “The blockhouses were all silent and deserted … they looked like Egyptian sculptures with expressions that were sometimes cold and contemptuous, sometimes enigmatic, depending on the design of the gunslits. When the slits were vertical then the little forts had a cruel, menacing expression that conjured up some evil spirit; but when the slits were horizontal, then their strange petrified mimicry expressed only indifference and scorn.”

“Egyptian”? “Cruel”? “Scorn”? No, most of this description is fanciful. They are mute and not very well made. The remarkable thing to me was how numerous they were—so many of them that they were the only landscape feature. A few had been converted into dwellings—their laundry unfurled in the sun was proof of that; but most of them looked abandoned and moldering, and there were clusters of them that had been vandalized.

That vandalism was the salient aspect of Albania that I noticed so far; that it was not merely poor—I had seen poor countries and deprived people elsewhere—it was brutalized, as though a nasty-minded army had swept through, kicking it to bits. It was not the poverty of neglect or penury. There was something melancholy about a neglected place—the sagging roof, the dusty glass, the worm-eaten door frame, the ragged curtains. This was not melancholic, it was shocking. And this was violent. Many of these roofs had been torn off, windows had been broken, curtains had been ripped. We passed a factory: it had been burned out. We passed a garage: buses were scorched and tipped over, as the train coaches had been. We passed twenty or more greenhouses: most of the windows were cracked or broken—there was broken glass everywhere, and only a few of the greenhouses were being used for growing plants—tomato vines strung up.