A Writer's World (21 page)

Here are the things that overjoyed me most, when that kindly man, with a barely perceptible examination of my passport, sent me whistling into Finland, guided by an exquisite airline hostess: Finnish airline hostesses first, for their reviving breath of elegance; clean, glistening architecture second, for its whisper of liberty; nice little houses in a row; Esso and International Harvester, for their welcoming gleam of profit; cars of all
nations, driven at a proper pace (in Russia they never seem to exceed thirty, even in the howling spaces); the rosy cheeks of plump burghers, and children playing in their own gardens; shop windows gracefully dressed, well-cut suits, a quayside that anyone can walk along, a jolly polished steam train beside the docks, Simplicity patterns,
My Fair Lady
in Swedish, coffee-pots whose lids, you may be confident, will not fall off with a dismal splash into the coffee-cup.

Even after Leningrad, that loveliest wraith among cities, Helsinki feels marvellously free, easy and undaunted, and down its comfortable streets all the breezes of the West sweep like a cocktail of elixirs. A visit to the city’s most famous bookshop, which claims to be the largest in Europe and is bursting with the books of a dozen languages, is like a shot in the arm and a sniff of salts after the drab, dutiful, brownish bookshelves of the Soviet Union. A stroll beside the harbour, where the patient ice-breakers (when they are not on strike) potter stolidly backwards and forwards down the shipping lanes, is wonderfully exhilarating: the wind off a Russian sea feels like a death in the family, but when it blows out of the Gulf of Finland it is only a tingle in the cheek. An hour in a sauna, the Finnish steam bath, where you are slapped periodically with birch and twigs and plunged deliciously from agonizingly hot to shivering cold, is enough to scour the very miasma of Russia from your person and leave you as clean, brisk, and spanking as a magazine advertisement.

After the stocky, buttoned Russians the people of Helsinki seem marvellously lithe and light-footed, big but agile, jovial at smorgasbords or loping and sloping across their snow-fields like Tibetan holy men. Their children, slithering about with ice-hockey sticks, give the heartening impression that they came into the world on skis and have not just put them on in the interests of some ideological demonstration. Their wives are as neat as pins, and gossip sharply in expensive coffee-shops. Their hotels are either delectably modern, all pale wood and sliding glass, or fragrantly Edwardian, with murals and cigar-smoked panelling. Their suburbs are posh with provincial snobbery, and they are a people that nobody in the world, not even the heart-throb marching progressive, could possibly feel sorry for. They are as tough as nails, and twice as spiky.

In Helsinki, only an hour from the Winter Palace, you can do exactly what you like. You can take a ride in a sleigh across the frozen harbour, unimpeded by suspicious policemen and pulled by a bleary kind of pony. You can build yourself a little hut on the ice and fish for your dinner through a hole. You can drink mystical liqueurs from the forests, made of berries, pine cones and
Arctic brambles. You can eat, stifling a sentimental tear, smoked reindeer tongue with salad, or guzzle your way through a fish cock – pork stuffed with fresh-water herring, and baked peculiarly into a loaf. You can go to a French film or an American play, and read the English papers with a flourish outside the Presidential Palace (a pleasant minor mansion of the kind described by estate agents as being ‘suitable for conversion’).

All these many pleasures and stimulants greet you as your taxi skids genially into Helsinki; and all the fun and freedom of the West welcomes you, and all the vitamins and calories are there to bolster your wasted stamina. Most people, when they leave the potato world behind the Curtain, seem to pine for some fresh or virile victual, a lettuce or a pineapple, a cucumber or a pickled egg. My own craving, when I flew into Finland out of eastern Europe, was for raw carrots, and when I arrived in Helsinki I went straight to a grocer, ordered half a pound, washed them in my hotel bathroom, and ate them luxuriously with a glass of schnapps.

But here is an odd and provoking fact: I ate those rich red vegetables with delight, and I wallowed like an emperor in all the milky pleasure of capitalism; but when, later that day, I wanted something to read with my dinner some unexpected instinct guided my choice, a kind of reluctant nostalgia, a niggling trace of respect and affection, and when I sat down to my pig’s trotters I found myself dining with Turgenev. (And all that well-dressed little capital, I felt, all that brave and courteous citizenry, could not offer me quite such company.)

‘What’s become of Waring?’ asked Browning’s poem about the vanished man-about-town. You may well ask of Trieste (where, in fact, Waring was), for never a city slipped so adroitly out of the world’s headlines, or vanished so utterly into the limbo of forgotten crises. Sometimes a traveller returns
with a glimpse of the place – a forlorn and demoralized city, he says, without a purpose in life. Sometimes a wandering diplomatist, passing through from Egypt or the East, thinks he recognizes a demarcation line or hears the echo of a Slovene demonstration. For the rest of us, Trieste has simply faded from our acquaintance, and most of us have even forgotten what all the fuss was about.

For fuss there was, for several years after the Second World War, when both Italy and Yugoslavia laid claim to this port, and squabbled so fiercely over it that time and again some sort of half-cock conflict seemed imminent. The dispute fizzled out gradually, inconclusively, point by point, and the
de
facto
result is that, while the neighbouring peninsula of Istria has dropped into the maw of Yugoslavia, Trieste is now, in an anonymous and muffled sort of way, part of Italy again. There is still a testy Slovene minority in the city, and there are Slovene schools and cultural centres, but in effect this is an Italian port. Bright little Fiats scurry along the waterfront, smart Italian liners laze beside the quays, and the girls who stroll by arm-in-arm, high-bosomed and languid-eyed, look like so many aspirant Sophia Lorens. The flavour of Trieste today is unmistakably Italianate, and high in the grand old Governor’s Palace sits the Commissioner-General, every inch a Roman consul.

There is a slight legal haziness to it all, though, owing to the fact that the United Nations never really made up its mind what to do with the place, and this blurred status perhaps contributes to the torpor of Trieste. It is a dissatisfied, rather petulant city. It is nearly half a century since it lost its old function as the chief outlet of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but to this day it is always looking over its shoulder to the palmy days of old, the lavish imperial days, when the floodtide of the Empire’s prosperity poured into its coffers, and all the urbanity of Vienna spilled over into its salons. Trieste is now the easternmost protrusion of Italy, but it looks central European still, four-square and brooding, and suggests to me one of those impoverished gentlewomen, addicted to piquet and von Hofmannsthal, who are still to be found in stuffy drawing-rooms bewailing the decline of the Habsburgs. ‘Of course,’ this city seems to say, ‘we were used to better things, but there, ha! the world has changed! And how’s your poor dear mother?’

For those few years of contention, after the war, Trieste was, if not happy, at least alive and crossly kicking. Its hinterland had been lost, and its position as a great entrepôt centre: but the eyes of the world were upon it, boosting its ego, and the powers argued over its future, gently buttressing
its id. Perhaps it was only whistling in the dark, but there was foreign money about in those days, and a well-paid occupying soldiery. They were effervescent, speculative, exciting times, with a riot on Saturday night and a hey-ho for Tito! Today, however, Trieste has subsided into lassitude. By slow stages the Italian government has integrated the port into the affairs of the Republic, and there is nothing special about it any more. It has been domesticated, and lost its fizz. Once it was the seventh port of the world. Now it is only the third port of Italy.

Of course, chance and history have dealt harshly with Trieste. ‘Our city is built in a very uncomfortable position,’ a Trieste lawyer once remarked to me: and so it undeniably is. Those bleak hills over the ridge are in communist territory. Those waters beyond the headland are the Adriatic, bounded by Marxist shores. Most of the hinterland that should cherish these wharves has been bundled behind the Iron Curtain, and it is many a long uneconomic mile to the factories and markets of Italy. Look at the map of Europe, even so, and you will see why nobody wants to invest capital or enthusiasm in Trieste, poised so precariously between the ideologies.

To be sure, it is still the seaport of Austria – the trains that clank industriously along the promenade have usually come from Graz or Vienna. A reasonable amount of traffic still flows through Trieste. The shipbuilding yards are, when they are not on strike, fairly busy. There are several new local industries. Unemployment is no worse here than it is anywhere else in Italy. The tourists still come in season. People are quite well dressed, and adequately fed. This is still an important insurance centre, and the name of Lloyd Triestino is still familiar on the high seas. Nothing very tragic is happening to Trieste. It is simply pottering. ‘Look at Genoa,’ say the Triestinos angrily, ‘and Bologna, and all the Italian boom-towns! Look at Fiume! Look what the Italians promised us! Look at this bumble-head bureaucracy they’ve given us! I’ll tell you, my friend,’ – here a flick of cigarette ash, a drooping of eyelids, an intricate change of inflection – ‘there are times, loyal Italian though I am, when I wish our problems had never been solved!’

For it is lack of gusto that mostly strikes you in Trieste today. Neither time nor toil, said Browning’s eye-witness, could mar the features of Waring; but Trieste has not been so resilient in its exile from celebrity. Its talented young people are leaving, its old liberal tradition is neglected, its brave commercial instincts are blunted or frustrated. Depressed and halfhearted, it meanders on in disillusionment: not drunk, indeed, or crippled by war, or oppressed, even destitute; just bored, that’s all, just bored.

Southwards from the glistening steel-blue Titicaca runs the highway through the Bolivian Altiplano. To the east stand the splendours of the Andean cordillera, rank upon rank of noble snow-peak, but the road passes through a landscape more lunar than celestial, an arid, drear, friendless kind of country, 14,000 feet above the sea. It is littered with the poor mud huts of the Aymara Indians, and the piles of stones they have scraped and scrabbled from their miserable soil, and sometimes you meet a peasant with his donkeys or his llamas, and sometimes you set the dust flying in an adobe village, and sometimes you see far away across the wilderness some solitary Indian woman, like a huddled witch on a moor, hastening bent-back across the rubble.

For sixty miles the road plods on through this monotony, and then it falls over a precipice. Suddenly it crosses the lip of the high plateau and tumbles helter-skelter, lickety-spit into a chasm: and as you slither down
the horse-shoe bends you see in the ravine below you, secreted in a fold of the massif, the city of La Paz. Its red roofs and mud huts pile up against the canyon walls and spill away into the river valley below. All around is the immensity of the Altiplano, and high above it to the south meditates the lovely white mountain called Illimani, where the royal condor of Inca legend folded its great wings in sleep.

La Paz is the highest of the world’s big cities, at 12,000 feet. It is a tumultuous, feverish, often maddening, generally harum-scarum kind of place, but nobody with an eye to country or a taste for drama could fail to respond to its excitements, or resist the superb improbability of its situation. After such an approach, in such an environment, you might reasonably expect to find, like the old voyagers, men with three eyes, or heads slung beneath their shoulders. Well, La Paz does her best. Consider a few simple facts about the city:

There, I am laughing at the place, but only with wry affection, for I have seldom found a city more enthralling. It is anything but comical beneath the veneer. It is pathetic, tragic, stimulating and menacing, and it still retains some of the savage glare and breathless glitter that the
Spaniards brought when they founded it four centuries ago. It is not in itself a beautiful place. Its few old buildings are swamped in halfhearted modernism, and all around it in the bowl of its canyon the Indians have built their terraced streets of mud and corrugated iron. It possesses nevertheless, to an almost eccentric degree, the quality of individualism. There is nowhere else much like La Paz on the face of the earth, but if I had to find an analogy I would suggest some quivering desert city, Damascus, say, or Kairouan, miraculously transplanted to a declivity in the Tibetan plateau.

This is a city of the Andes, and it is the swarming Aymara Indians of the Andes who nowadays set its style. The men are sometimes striking enough, with their ear-flapped woollen hats and Inca faces, but the Andean women are fascinating beyond description. With their rakishly cocked bowler hats, their blinding blouses and skirts, their foaming flounces of petticoats, the babies like tumultuous infant potentates upon their backs and the sandals made of old tyres upon their feet – gorgeously accoutred and endlessly industrious, plumed often with a handsome dignity and assurance, they give to La Paz a flavour part gypsy, part coster and all pungency.

An Indian, highland turbulence keeps this city tense and wary, and makes the midnight curfew more the rule than exception. In the halls of the National Congress, beneath the painted scrutiny of Bolívar, they are mostly Spanish faces, declaiming Latin polemics, but high in the balcony above the debate, peering silently over the railing, are the dark, attentive, enigmatic eyes of the Aymaras. In La Paz you feel everywhere the rising awareness of the Indian people, together with the smouldering of latent violence. It is a city of rumours and echoes. Sometimes the miners of Catavi are about to march upon the capital, dragging their hostages behind them. Sometimes, before daybreak, you may hear the tread of marching feet and the singing of slogans outside your window. Sometimes masked carabinieri, slung about with tommy guns, ransack your car for arms, and sometimes you find a chain slung across the city gate on the hill-top, and a civilian with a rifle vigilantly beside it. Fifteen years ago the mob of La Paz hung the mutilated body of their president from a lamppost in the Plaza Murillo, and today the old square is stiff with soldiers, in German steel helmets and thick high-collared jackets, self-consciously ceremonious on little platforms outside the Presidency, unobtrusively watchful upon the roof of the cathedral.

All this passion, all this energy, thumps through the city night and day,
sharpened into something knifelike and tremulous by the breathless clarity of the altitude. You can feel it on the promenade at weekends, when the wide-eyed girls and men with small moustaches chatter with a kind of gay intensity at the tables of the Copacabana. You can feel it in the conversations of the place, dark with plots but humorous with tall stories, cynical but often secretive. You can sense it in the myriad slogans daubed on almost every wall, with their baffling permutations of political initials and the paint that drips down in frenzied blobs from their exhortations. You can even see it reflected in the smiling, bustling, and wagging of the city’s enchanting Carpaccio dogs. The marvellous glacial air of La Paz, which sends the tourists puffing and dizzy to their beds, makes for fizz, bounce and heady enthusiasm, and the isolation of this queer city, mountain metropolis of a land-locked state, gives it a striking sense of introvert obsession.

And most of all you will know the pressure of La Paz if you visit the high Indian quarters after dark. They tumble and straggle dustily upon the hillside, and at night they are tumultuous with activity. It is not a noisy sort of energy – it has a padded, hushed insinuation to it – but it is tremendously purposeful and intent. Crouching along every alley are the indefatigable street-sellers, huddled about some hissing brazier, or sprawling, a confusion of skirts, shawls and babies, behind their stalls of mandarins. Hundreds of candles illuminate the pavement counters; beneath a multitude of canvas awnings, the Indians eat their thick stews or sip their coca tea; outside each dark and balconied courtyard, the caravanserais of La Paz, the lorries are preparing for the dawn journey – down to the steaming Yungas for tropical fruits and jungle vegetables, across the Altiplano for the fabulous rainbow trout of Titicaca.

The scene is shadowy and cluttered, and you cannot always make out the detail as you push through the crowd; but the impression it leaves is one of ceaseless, tireless energy, a blur of strange faces and sinewy limbs, a haze of ill-understood intentions, a laugh from a small Mongol in dungarees, a sudden stink from an open drain, a cavalcade of tilted bowlers in the candlelight – and above it all, so clear, so close that you confuse the galaxies with the street lamps, the wide blue bowl of the Bolivian sky and the brilliant cloudless stars of the south.

But here is an odd thing. When you come to La Paz from the north, over the escarpment, it seems a very prodigy among cities; but if you drive away from it towards Illimani and the south, looking back over your shoulder as you cross the last ridge, why, all the magic has drained
from it, all the colour has faded, all that neurosis seems an illusion, and it looks like some drab old mining camp, sluttish among the tailings.

In Peru you can smell misery, and you need not sniff too hard. Behind Lima, where the arid Andean foothills slouch down towards the sea, there is a hill called San Cristóbal, crowned with a cross of pilgrimage, that commands a famous view of the capital. Splendidly below you lies the City of the Kings, huddled beneath its winter vapours: the gorgeous golden suburbs of San Isidro and Miraflores, the inevitable skyscrapers of the city centre, the towers and plazas and rambling old palaces that made this capital of the Viceroys, for two legendary centuries, the first city of the western hemisphere. Immediately at your feet, however, clustered on the hillside like some nightmare belvedere, there is a quarter very different. Magnificently sited upon that eminence, ironically surveying the grandeur of the prospect, squats a slum so festering, so filthy, so toad-like, so bestially congested, so utterly devoid of water, light, health or comfort, so deep in garbage and excrement, so swarming with scabbed ragged barefoot children, so reeking with squalor that just to wander through its alleys makes you retch into your handkerchief. From these unspeakable stews the stench of degradation rises, veiling the City of the Kings in a kind of haze, and even eddying around the cross on top of the hill.

Lima is ringed by such fearful
barriaras
. Perhaps a quarter of a million people live in them, in a city of 1.2 million, and nowhere in the world have I experienced quite so distressingly the gulf between the immensely rich and the unbelievably poor, with almost nothing homely in the middle – no diligent allotment-gardeners, no chug of second-hand lawnmower, hardly a china seagull winging it across high tea. Peru presents all the stock symptoms of reaction: absentee landlords, enormous semi-feudal estates, widespread illiteracy, political irresponsibility, intricate meshworks of financial interest, snobbery, sophistry, indulgence, ostentation. The symbolism of San Cristóbal is dead accurate. For generations the City of the Kings was as effectively insulated against its bleak hinterland as ever
was old St Petersburg: but misery has crept up on it, the penniless Indians and half-castes have swarmed in from the countryside, and today, to the impressionable foreigner if not to the leggy girls on the society pages, it is no longer the grand old churches or the jacaranda gardens that express the meaning of Lima, but the slums at the back of your mind.

The country does not feel on the brink of a convulsion, but it feels as though somewhere far away, in a remote fastness of the Altiplano, perhaps, or in some cell or chamber more distant still, a dampish fuse has begun to smoulder. For this Peru has nobody to blame, as I see it, but her rulers. If ever a revolution does come to Peru, and the proud patricians of Lima are humbled with violence and degradation, they can kick nobody but their own scented selves. Today they are, I am told, reluctantly awakening if not to altruism, at least to self-interest: but by their history, their heedlessness, their vulgar opulence and their exclusivity, they have marvellously qualified themselves for the garrotte.

You will therefore forgive, I hope, a crude and perhaps hasty conclusion from a true-blue British traditionalist. The other day I drove direct from the hideous purlieus of San Cristóbal to have tea at the Country Club in San Isidro. The odour of the slum went with me, clinging to my jacket and the soles of my shoes like some blasphemous travesty of incense, and as I sat there among the little black dresses and the sticky cakes, the greying distinctions and the foppish playboys, the starched nannies and the exquisite children on the lawn, the chic and the cultivation and the chitchat of urbanity – as I sat there with the squalor still in my hair I could not help remembering, Pharisaical though it seems in retrospect, Dr Johnson’s celebrated differentiation: I smell, you stink.

Out of a mountain in Peru fifteen llamas sway down an ancient road, silently pursued by a man in a poncho and knee breeches and a woman wearing a white straw hat, a blazing flurry of petticoats, and a baby-hammock on her back. The man is chewing an opiate wad of the coca leaf, the woman is planning to request the intercession of the Lord of the Earthquakes, whose miraculous figure in the town below is known to sweat in sympathy and weep real tears of compassion.

To the north an elderly American locomotive, with a cow-catcher and an old wail of a whistle, is plunging zig-zag into the valley with a string of cattle-trucks. From the south a clanging of cracked bells rings out of a florid campanile. And as those travellers swing round the last dusty corner, with a soft shuffle of bare feet and padded cameloid hoofs, there below them they see, clear-cut in that Alpine sunshine, the capital of the Land of the Four Quarters.