a passionate pilgrim to the southern sun

LOUIS GOLDING

a contemplative author lingers reflectively to admire the colour of life in southern europe

Here follows the tale of my recent pilgrimage to the Southern sun. I had for too many months been treading the pavements of great cities—New York and London and Paris; I had heard the same themes debated, the same saxophones blaring forth the ineluctable strains of the Broadway Melody. Imagine, then, with what rapture I looked out one morning lately through the windows of my small inn upon the burning blue of the Mediterranean. In the garden below, bougainvillea foamed like a cataract. Three black cypresses stood further away against the sky's disk. There was a noise of people laughing, singing, talking; their gesticulations made a wind in the air. Oh, everybody was dreadfully busy being alive. In the great cities whence I had come (it seemed to me as I looked back on them) people were just interested in not being dead.

Oh yes, New York and Paris had been feverish enough. I don't mean merely with the sky-signs that raddled the heavens. But it was all a fever of the nerves or the brain. Here, however, in the South, it was a divine fever of the blood.

In Paris, whence I had most recently come, they had been discussing with great erudition, and violent arguings for and against, whether the art of French cooking was in a state of decadence. Had the canard aux olives become decrepit, men anxiously asked each other. Women wrung their hands and asked what had happened to the traditions of sole an vin blanc and what of the formula of oeufs a la bechamel? Had it declined from the august standard set by their grandmothers?

But down there in the South they were not talking about these things. They were eating them. They were eating them loudly, ceremonially, sacredly. Most particularly the amazing fish-stew called bouillabaisse. I met a fisherman in the train who bore the ingredients with him in a kit-bag with a portrait of his sweetheart and his mother's tombstone painted on it. Half its bulk consisted of that sinister shell-fish called the sea-urchin. Deftly the fisherman slit it open and allowed an ooze of weed to issue from it. Then I was requested to eat a pale, pink tinny substance that still adhered. Then I saw deeper into the recesses of that nefarious stew; I blanched with horror. Must I partake of these also? Squirming polypods, oleaginous ocean-eels, limpets, starfish? Oh but wait till a housewife of Marseilles boils them all into bouillabaisse for you. You will think New York, London, Paris but dim places, and have your doubts of heaven...

That evening I wandered among the mysterious by-ways of Marseilles. Now I chanced into a bar where lusty peasants, who had brought in artichokes and cheeses from the country, were dancing to the strains of a hurdy-gurdy. Among that welter of rolling knees and dizzy shoulders I recalled the polite manipulations of ball-rooms on Piccadilly and Park Avenue, and was not certain that so far as the joy of life went the peasants had the worst of it. Then I found a shadowy place where Africans and Asiatics were prone in a stupor of fiery liquor, or were crouched over little tables with coins and counters and cards. As you heard the tones of the leader chanting the successive numbers, it was all so full of awe and incantation that you might have thought yourself assisting at some black rite in an infamous temple in Ethiopia. And when, before a day or two had passed, I found myself in the glare and glitter of the Riviera casinos, I found myself wondering whether those crystal temples were not more infamous than these obscure hovels of Marseilles, and whether their high priests were not even more terrible.

I suppose the haughty cities of Cannes, Nice and Mentone only condescend to offer their secrets to you if you come purring outside their luxurious hotels in a padded limousine. Perhaps you must bear credentials from a millionaire or two and an odd duchess. They extended no rapturous welcome to my own poor knapsack and walking-stick. It is not the Southern Sea you catch sight of here, but a landscape groaning with gilded tombs. If it is good red blood in action you desire to contemplate, let me recommend the great annual foire on the Boulevard de la Bastille or Coney Island. Of course, there is the hectic excitement of the vast cosmopolitan casinos. So you think until you enter them. There is so deadening a monotony about losing to the bank that you begin to think dominoes more vicious than boule and baccarat, and Mah Jongg indecently exciting. And how you come to hate those long lean gentlemen who stand at the tables dragging the money in with long lean rakes. How bored they, too, must be, poor fellows!

For my own part I entered the Casino on the Jetty at Nice with an absolutely infallible system—quite absolutely infallible! So the nice kind gentleman informed me in the cafe on the Cannebiere in Marseilles. I gave him ten francs for his infallible system and thought it ludicrously little to pay for a certain fortune of many thousands a year and a château. Ah well! I should some time like to meet that nice kind gentleman!

Monte Carlo was even more depressing than Nice. I had lost my interest in infallible systems, but at all events I should be regaled with a few suicides, should I not? I was hardly hoping that the revolvers would be going off all day like ginger-beer bottles at a teetotal party. But at all events one had every right to expect to see a bankrupt swinging himself from a lamp-post now and again. Nothing of the sort happened. Everybody clung to life with a dull tenacity.

No, these sequined sirens of the French Riviera had it not in them to hold me up long on my pilgrimage to the Southern Sun. Enthusiastically I made my way towards Ventimiglia, the frontier town. And so exuberant, so overwhelming is the Italian spirit, that at Ventimiglia on the fringe you might think yourself at Cubbio, in the very heart of Italy. There was something Italian in the very clang of the bells in the steeples, in the colour of the whitewash, yea, in the very odour of the garlic which floated winsomely in the market-place through the curtains of macaroni and among the cascades of clematis. In the cafe there, that looks down upon the white road advancing across Italy, I sacredly sipped a glass of the liqueur called "Strega", or "Witch". And what witch in the world has lures so potent as Italy, and calls you more irresistibly? Where else than in Italy would a bent greybeard, whose nose meets his chin, shuffle into a cafe among those enormous tuns of wine, and taking a violin from its case more tenderly than a frail child, produce such sounds from it as would not shame Paganini? Where else would a casual youth, a labourer sipping his glass of dusky wine, suddenly burst into song to accompany the violin—in a voice as full of light and shade as a prima donna's, yet effortless as a skylark's? But I ask you something more. Where else than here, in an Italian market-place, would dark girls—lovely as any court lady in Titian or Tintoretto—be selling flowers by weight? Selling flowers by weighty I repeat, as if they were potatoes? Oh not, oh certainly not, in the little florists' establishments under the elevated Railway on Sixth Avenue!

Hence to Genoa I continued on my pilgrimage. There was some sort of festival on when I arrived, but I could not make out if it was religious or political, because in Italy they celebrate them with equal fervour. Banners flapped in a narrow alley over my head, where once, no doubt, the infant Columbus walked and looked down between the high buildings to a shimmering strip of sea and felt that his fate lay there. Chinese lamps came out and fluttered like fire-flies, and great naptha-flares chuckled over the barrows where they sold shell-fish and steaming pastry and favours for the girls to wear. I must confess that never in my wanderings have I seen girls more lovely than these in Genoa, that trod the purple dusk among the lanterns and the gaily-coloured trumpets.

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From Genoa I fared forth to Rome; and if the southern sun and sea were not a more imperious summons to me than the loud trumpet of history, I might still be lingering among those august shadows. For slowly the centuries begin to entangle you in Rome, and in the blue dusk you are hardly aware if it is some proud seventh century cardinal who swept round the corner there, and if the clank of metal in the courtyard was not some first century legionary fixing on his greaves. Then you might descend some cellarsteps and find yourself two centuries ahead of time, in the astonishing vaults of the Casa (VArte Bragaglia, which is a place where the supra-ultra-modernists gather. It is at once a picturegallery, a cafe and a theatre, but I could not make out whether I should have walked in backwards or on my hands. Everything is curves and cubes, and when you are about to sit down on a chair you discover it is a cocktailshaker.

Of course, you may live very violently in the year 1929, if you choose, and in some glittering night-club recreate New York and Paris and London, drinking the usual bad champagne to the music of the perennial saxophone. But I find something anxious about the nightclub life of Rome. The vast awe of the Papacy will, somehow, subtly check the jigging feet. Even the fat jazz-band grows pale and the saxophone whines away into a troubled silence.

But it was not to think thoughts so correct as these that I had armed myself with staff and scrip. Not all the Seven Hills could withhold me much longer from the goal of my wayfaring; for the rumour of it already smote against my ears, the perfect sea breaking upon the bay, the fisher-lads in the boats, the smiling girls in the narrow streets, the peasants tending their vines. At last, at last, I was in Naples again! Broadway and Shaftesbury Avenue and the Grands Boulevards—I could leave them to their fierce arclights and their haggard crowds. For here, against the intense heaven, Vesuvius swaggered, scrawling white words of smoke on the blue parchment. Along the enormous burning bow of the bay, the lazy city extended her villages, flanked by vineyards and by sea. The great peninsula of Sorrento thrust forward her limestone snout to the entranced island of Capri, lying there like a hunched sea-serpent,coiled in his dreams. The force of the southern sun was so strong that a man stopped in his traces, as if a meteor had shot past him. I sat down on a terrace above the city looking out on the Tyrrhenian waters f had arrived at journey's end. I took out my pipe solemnly and gave Vesuvius blast for blast.