Portraits and Observations (12 page)

Then it was August; we felt the sun before it had risen. Strangely, here on the open mountain, the days were cooler than the nights, for more often than not a booming breeze blew off the water; at sunset the wind turned, plowed seaward, south, toward Greece, Africa. It was a month of silent leaves, shooting stars, red moons, a season of gorgeous moths, sleeping lizards. Figs split, plums swelled, the almonds hardened. One morning I woke to hear in the almond trees the rattle of bamboo canes. In the valley, off on the hills, hundreds of peasants, working in family groups, were knocking down the almonds, then gathering them off the ground; and they sang to each other, one voice leading the rest, Moorish, flamencolike voices
whose songs began nowhere, ended nowhere, and yet contained the marrow of work, heat, a harvest. They were a week bringing in the almonds, and each day the singing reached a not quite sane intensity. I could not think for it; there was in me such an overriding sense of extra-life. At the end, during the mad last days, the fierce fine voices seemed to rise from the sea, the almond roots; it was as if one were lost in a cave of echoes, and when darkness came, and stillness, even so I could hear, at the edge of sleep, the sound of singing, and it seemed, though one tried to push it back, about to tell a pitiful, painful story, about to impart some terrible knowledge.

We do not have many visitors at Fontana Vecchia; it is too far a walk for casual callers, and days go by when no one knocks at the door except the ice boy. Blond, witty, the ice boy is a scholarly-looking child of eleven. He has a beautiful young aunt, surely one of the most attractive girls I’ve ever known, and I often talk to him about her. Why, I wanted to know, does A., the aunt, have no beau? Why is she always alone, never at the dances or the Sunday promenade? The ice boy says it is because his aunt has no use for the local men, that she is very unhappy and longs only to go to America. Perhaps. But it is my own theory that the men in her family are so jealous of her that no one dares come too near. Sicilian males have quite a lot to say about what their women do or don’t; heaven knows, the women seem to like it. For instance our cook, G., who is nineteen, has a somewhat older brother. One morning she appeared with a split lip, blackened eyes, a knife gash in her arm, and bruised yellow-green top to toe. It was astonishing; she should have been in a hospital. Smiling lopsidedly, G. said, Well, her brother had beat her up; they’d quarreled because he felt she went too often to the beach. Of course, we thought that an odd objection; when did she go to the beach—at night? I told her to pay no attention to her
brother, that he was
brute
, ugly. Her reply, in effect, was that I should mind my own business; she said her brother was a fine man. “He is good-looking and has many friends—only to me is he
brute
.” Nevertheless, I went to our landlord and complained that G.’s brother must be warned that we would not tolerate his sister’s coming to work in this kind of condition. He seemed mystified: why should I blame the brother? After all, a brother is entitled to reprimand his sister. When I spoke of it to the ice boy he agreed with the landlord, and stated firmly that if he had a sister who didn’t do what he said, he would beat her up too. One evening in August, when the moons were so preposterous, the ice boy and I had a small but chilling exchange. He asked, What do you think of the werewolf? Are you afraid to go out after dark? As it happened, I’d just that day heard of the werewolf scare: a boy walking home late at night claimed to have been set upon by a howling animal, a human on all fours. But I laughed. You don’t believe in werewolves, do you? Oh yes. “There used to be many werewolves in Taormina,” he said, his gray eyes regarding me steadily; then, with a disdainful shrug, “Now there are only two or three.”

And so autumn came, is here at this moment, a tambourine wind, a ghost of smoke moving between the yellow trees. It has been a good year for grapes; sweet in the air is the smell of fallen grapes in the mold of leaves, new wine. The stars are out at six; still, it is not too chilly to have a cocktail on the terrace and watch, in the bright starlight, the sheep with their Buster Keaton faces coming down from pasture, and the goats, whose herd-movement makes a sound like the dragging of dry branches. Yesterday men brought us a wagonload of wood. So I am not afraid of winter’s coming: what better prospect than to sit by a fire and wait for spring?

The first person who ever impressed me, beyond the reaches of my family, was an elderly Japanese gentleman called Mr. Frederik Mariko. Mr. Mariko ran a florist shop in New Orleans. I met him when I was perhaps six, just wandered into his shop, you might say, and during the ten years of our friendship, or until he quite suddenly died on a steamboat trip to St. Louis, he made me with his own hands a score of toys—flying fish swung on wires, a maquette garden filled with dwarf flowers and feathery medieval animals, a dancer with a wind-up fan that fluttered for three minutes; and these toys, much too exquisite to be
played
with, were my original aesthetic experience—they made a world and set a standard of taste. There was such mystery about Mr. Mariko, not as a man (he was simple and alone and hard-of-hearing, which emphasized his apartness) but because one could never decide, watching him work at his arrangements, what made him choose between those brown leaves and that green vine so sophisticated, so accurate an effect.
Years later, reading the novels of Lady Murasaki or
The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon
, and then, later still, seeing the Kabuki dancers and those three astonishing films (
Rashomon, Ugetsu
and
Gates of Hell
), the memory of Mr. Mariko loomed, but the mystery of his luminous toys and dwarf bouquets somewhat subsided in a realization that his gifts were the extension of an entire national sensibility: like visual musicians, the Japanese seem to have perfect pitch in areas of shape and color.

Perfect: when the curtain rises on a performance of the Kabuki dancers, a premonition of the entertainment, the
frisson
it will ultimately achieve, is already there in the severely rich patterns of color, exotically solemn postures of the dancers kneeling in their robes like porcelain figurines. Or again, a scene, a pantomime, from
Rashomon:
the young bride, traveling in a veiled sedan chair and attended by her husband, sways slowly through the forest, the camera creating a rapturous menace out of leaves and sunlight and the sleepy, seducing eyes of a watching bandit. Of course,
Rashomon
was filmed in black and white; it was not until
Gates of Hell
that the complete palette came into view, the colors like new inventions: absinthe, and browns that sparkle like sherry. It is all a ceremony of Style, a phenomenon that seems to rotate, in a manner quite separate from emotional content, on absolute style alone.

High style has never been a forte of the Western theater; at any rate, we have not developed anything so chemically pure and self-contained as this. A half-comparison might be made with Restoration comedy: there is at least the same appreciation of the artificial; and it is true that in the gangster thriller and cowboy genre Americans have produced a classically stylized form of code and behavior. But these are snappy fragments, outbursts; the Japanese sense of style is the accumulation of long and seriously beautiful aesthetic thought. Although, as Arthur Waley has mentioned,
a principal basis of this thought is dread—dread of the explicit, the emphatic—hence the single blade of grass describing a whole universe of summer, the slightly lowered eyes left to suggest the deepest passion.

In ninth-century Japan, and indeed earlier, most correspondence was conducted in poetry: a cultivated Japanese knew several hundred poems and scriptures from which he could quote lines suitable to any idea or occasion—if not, he contrived his own, for poetry was the entertainment of the day. Judging from what we have seen of their entertainment recently, their dances and their films, the custom still prevails; certainly what we have received have been poems of communication.

On Saturday, the seventeenth of December, 1955, a foggy wet day in West Berlin, the cast of the American production of
Porgy and Bess
and others associated with the company, a total of ninety-four persons, were asked to assemble at the company’s rehearsal hall for a “briefing” to be conducted by Mr. Walter N. Walmsley, Jr., and Mr. Roye L. Lowry, respectively Counsel and Second Secretary of the American Embassy in Moscow. Mr. Walmsley and Mr. Lowry had traveled from Moscow expressly to advise and answer any questions members of the production might have concerning their forthcoming appearance in Leningrad and Moscow.

This trip to Russia, the first of its kind ever attempted by an American theatrical group, was to be the culmination of a four-year world tour for
Porgy and Bess
. It had come about after many months of complicated, in some areas still beclouded, negotiation between
the U.S.S.R. and the producers of the Gershwin opera, Robert Breen and Blevins Davis, who operate under the name Everyman Opera, Incorporated.

Although the Russians had not yet delivered their actual visas, the enormous troupe, consisting of fifty-eight actors, seven backstage personnel, two conductors, assorted wives and office workers, six children and their schoolteacher, three journalists, two dogs and one psychiatrist, were all set to depart within the next forty-eight hours, traveling by train from East Berlin via Warsaw and Moscow to Leningrad, a distance of some eleven hundred miles, yet requiring, apparently, three days and nights.

On my way to the diplomatic briefing, I shared a taxi with Mrs. Ira Gershwin and a square-cut, muscular man called Jerry Laws, who was formerly a boxer and is presently a singer. Mrs. Gershwin is of course the wife of the lyricist, who, aside from being the brother of its composer, is himself co-author of
Porgy and Bess
. Periodically, for the past four years, she has left her husband at home in Beverly Hills to accompany the opera on its around-the-world wanderings: “Ira’s such a stick-in-the-mud. He hates to go from one room to the next. But I’m a gypsy, darling. I love wheels.” Known to her friends as Lee, an abbreviation of Lenore, she is a small and fragile woman devoted to diamonds, and wears them, quite a few, at both breakfast and dinner. She has sun-streaked hair and a heart-shaped face. The flighty fragments of her conversation, delivered in a girlish voice that rushes along in an unsecretive whisper, are pasted together with terms of endearment.

“Oh, love,” she said, as we rode through the dark drizzle along the Kurfurstendam, “have you heard about the Christmas tree? The Russians are giving us a Christmas tree. In Leningrad. I think that’s so sweet of them. Since they don’t
believe
in Christmas. They don’t—do they, darling? Anyway, their Christmas comes much
later. Because they have a different calendar. Darling, do you think it’s true?”

“About whether they believe in Christmas?” said Jerry Laws.

“
No
, love,” said Mrs. Gershwin impatiently. “About the microphones. And the photographs.”

For several days there had been speculation among the company on the subject of personal privacy in Russia. It was based on the rumor that their letters would be censored, their hotel rooms wired and the walls encrusted with concealed cameras.

After a thoughtful moment, Laws said, “I believe it.”

“Oh, darling, you don’t!” Mrs. Gershwin protested. “It can’t be true! After all,
where
are we going to gossip? Unless we simply stand in the bathroom and keep flushing. As for the cameras—”

“I believe that, too,” said Laws.

Mrs. Gershwin settled into a musing silence until we reached the street where the rehearsal hall was located. Then, rather wistfully, she said, “I
still
think it’s nice about the Christmas tree.”

We were five minutes late, and had difficulty in finding seats among the folding chairs that had been set up at one end of the mirrored rehearsal hall. It was crowded and the room was well heated; nevertheless many of those present, as though they could feel already the cold winds of the steppes, sat bundled in the paraphernalia, the scarves and woolly coats, they’d specially acquired for their Russian journey. A competitive spirit had pervaded the purchasing of these outfits, of which more than several had a certain Eskimo-look.

The meeting was called to order by Robert Breen. In addition to being the co-producer of
Porgy and Bess
, he is also its director. After he’d introduced the representatives from the Moscow Embassy, Mr. Walmsley and Mr. Lowry, who were seated behind a table facing us, Mr. Walmsley, a stocky middle-aged man with a Mencken-style
haircut and a dry, drawling manner, began by speaking of the “unique opportunity” the proposed tour offered and congratulating the company in advance on the “great success” he was sure they would have behind the iron curtain.

“Since nothing happens in the Soviet Union that isn’t planned, and since it is
planned
that you should have a success there, I feel perfectly safe in congratulating you now.”

As though sensing a faultiness in his colleague’s presumed compliment, Mr. Lowry, a youngish man with the straitlaced façade of a schoolmaster, interposed to suggest that while what Mr. Walmsley had said was perfectly correct, it was also true that there was “a genuine excitement in Russia about your coming there. They know the Gershwin music. In fact, a Russian acquaintance of mine told me he was at a party the other night where three friends of his sang ‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’ all the way through.”

The cast smiled appreciatively, and Mr. Walmsley resumed. “Yes, there are some nice Russians. Very nice people. But they have a bad government,” he said, in slow spelling-it-out tones. “You must always bear in mind that their system of government is basically hostile to our own. It is a system, with rules and regulations, such as you have never experienced before. Certainly in my experience, which is a long one, I’ve never encountered anything like it.”