Hermit in Paris (10 page)

Atomic Matters

In some vague way this is an accursed land, so it is natural that it was in this desert that they secretly invented the atomic bomb and continue to manufacture it, thus bringing to life the Indian legend that is unique to this area that here a power capable of destroying the earth was unleashed. Then it turned out that it was precisely here that they discovered uranium, but this was later and now uranium is starting to become the only hope of wealth for the area. Naturally I was only able to view the laboratory sites from the outside (and there are also research laboratories on human resistance to space flights and on the effects of radiation on animal and vegetable organisms), and in these few days I have not been able to approach any scientists, something that I regret but also perhaps it’s better that way because from the few and far between glimpses I have had I have formed the idea that scientists are the only group which can lead to something new in America, because many of them possess alongside what is predictably the most advanced technical expertise a highly sophisticated knowledge of the humanities, and above all they are the only intellectuals with any power, and with any say; this idea of mine, I was saying, I fear very much could be undermined by further meetings with them. Scientists’ links with arts people are not regular; I have asked about this all around, and they say yes, perhaps there are a few like I describe. However, here atomic questions remain shrouded in a veil as in Indian legends; a local guy in all seriousness shows me a woodland area where spies would meet to exchange atomic secrets but then the FBI discovered them.

The People Around Here

Going around without a car has the advantage that it forces me wherever I go to mobilize the whole village around my person, but certainly by now after several months of this it is always the same thing. Here I am sent from one old lady to another who runs an Indian antiques shop or a bookshop or other cultural enterprise. But deep down now that I know the terrifying dullness of American life I understand more the people who come to live here, just as I understand more the way they love Italy, which previously got on my nerves.

Texas

How do you go about acquiring an image of Texas? That’s what I have continued to ask myself in all these months, convinced that this State which is so peculiar in terms of its spirit and economic life was in reality difficult to capture in a very short stay, such as the one I intended to devote to it, and staying in a big city I would just see a big city like so many others and not ‘the real Texas’, whereas staying in a little country town I would miss so many aspects. Consequently, having made up my mind to stay in Houston, which is the biggest city of the once-biggest State in the Union, I was not expecting to receive any strong impressions of local colour. Instead, I arrive when the Fatstock Show is on, the livestock display, and when it’s on the biggest rodeos of the year in the whole of America take place here. So I arrive and the city is full of cowboys from all over Texas, and from all the livestock-rearing States, but they are all dressed as cowboys, even those who are not cowboys, old men, women, kids, the whole Texan spirit is flaunted here in a way that makes this place ostentatiously, visibly different from the rest of the States. And on the famous desire for independence in Texas, there is no need to conduct a special inquest; many cars have written on them: ‘Built in Texas by Texans’, and in the city’s flagstands the Texan flags clearly outnumber the Federal ones. What comes over is an impression of a country in uniform, these middle-class families marching in formation all wearing stetsons and fringed jackets, proudly displaying their practicality and anti-intellectualism which has developed into their mythology, fanaticism, and alarming belligerence. Luckily it is a mythology that is constantly tied to work, to production, to business, to this enormous amount of livestock, whose display I witness surrounded by a troupe of a hundred or so Pakistani students who have come here to study agriculture. And so there is a hope that, even though Texas feels itself ready to make war on Russia, immediately if need be, as some of them claim, nevertheless deep down the isolationism of the agricultural mentality will have the upper hand (as you know, Texas managed to go to war with Germany a year before Pearl Harbor, sending a volunteer corps with the Canadian air force).

The Rodeo

The rodeo, which is held in an indoor stadium as big as the Vél d’Hiv, is also a mixture of practicality and mythology. The majority of the exploits in which the cowboys engage are operations they perform in their daily work: mounting a horse with or without a saddle, lassoing a calf or bull in a certain number of minutes; but in between one competition and another you get interludes of totally fake Western mythology: the singing cowboys from TV, who are greeted with wild enthusiasm. However the cowboys’ technique is excellent: chasing a calf on horseback, lassoing it with a rope, flinging yourself on to it to turn it over on to its back, managing to tie its legs with the help of the horse which has to keep the lasso taut.

We Are Now in the South

Despite the Texan spirit, the man who drives me on a tour round the city (there is nothing to see: the usual city full of houses and little green lawns, sprawling and shapeless; the black areas that already have the air of poverty of the South) puts his seat-belt on when he drives, because the statistics show that in the majority of accidents, etc. He is a good man, a financial agent, who works for the Democrats: he is the only one who does so here, he is one of the few liberals and he fights for the blacks’ right to vote. But I will talk to you about this when I am in Louisiana or the Deep South. Tonight I am leaving for New Orleans, which is now at the height of Mardi Gras.

Diary from the South

Montgomery, Alabama, 6 March

New Orleans

Despite warnings from everyone, I arrive in New Orleans without any hotel reservation, on Monday the 29
^th
, right in the middle of the Mardi Gras celebrations (Mardi Gras in America – or rather in New Orleans: the only place where it is celebrated – is an elastic term meaning our ‘
Carneval
’, whereas a ‘carnival’ usually refers to a funfair.) I arrive early in the morning, all the hotels are of course full to the brim, and I start roaming around the Vieux Carré, which is exactly as it looks in photographs, all the houses with little balconies and colonnades in wrought iron. I am used to encountering anything ‘antique’ in America only in minimal proportions but swollen and falsified by rhetoric and propaganda; here, though, I must say that New Orleans is really all New Orleans, decadent, decaying, smelly, but alive. It is a controversial question whether the New Orleans style is more French or Spanish: the present look of the old town is the one given it by the Spanish who governed it for sixty years, before it returned to the French for a few months in 1803 and was then sold by Talleyrand to Jefferson. Now Franco has presented the town with majolica plaques with the street names from the time of Spanish domination, so that the much-vaunted French spirit of the town (many families still retain a cult of Napoleon, as is also shown by the furniture) is countered at every street corner. To cut a long story short, I find a ghastly room which costs me a fortune in a dusty apartment hotel in the middle of Royal Street, and – from the spotless, disinfected world of the motels I have become used to – I am plunged into a Tennessee Williams atmosphere where everything disintegrates into pieces through old age and filth; in a dark closet between my bedroom and the porch a ninety-year-old woman is kept enclosed all day. The Garden District, where the French families went to live in the nineteenth century, is totally different (whereas the Vieux Carré became the black quarter until about ten years ago when it was rediscovered as the great tourist attraction of the South and it became an area of antique shops, hotels and night-spots) and it is all big villas, many of them fine examples of plantation houses with columns and everything. New Orleans closed in on itself in its French aristocratic pride and remained one of the most impoverished and backward cities in the States, and the consequences of the Civil War did the rest; now it is recovering a certain prosperity as an oil city and as a harbour for South American fruit and minerals. The harbour is an Italian quarter, the heart of one of the most ancient Italian settlements in the United States, with families originally from Sicily and the Lipari Islands who have never spoken Italian in previous generations and often have no idea even of their origin. But I am here to see the famous Mardi Gras; and indeed this is in itself a
Carneval
town, with its eighteenth-century décor, like Venice. Even nature here wears a
Carneval
mask: oaks and sycamores in the huge parks have their branches covered in Spanish moss, a parasite with flowing tendrils and festoons. Mardi Gras lasts a week and paralyses the whole town and consists of a series of parades of floats which are not anything special compared to the
Carneval
floats in Viareggio or Nice – because in any case the floats and grotesque masks actually come from Viareggio: from last year’s Viareggio
Carneval
: special firms there sell them on and export them here. And even the black element, which I expected to be one of the main attractions, is not very prominent. To be sure there are blacks mixed up in the enormous crowds, and black musicians on the floats, and some of them improvise dances in the streets, but they are a very small percentage and the only specifically black element are the bearers of the enormous torches in the night-time parades, who often move in a way that emphasises this ritual’s primitive symbolism. The fact is that the blacks have their own Mardi Gras, in their own neighbourhoods, and nobody is willing to take me there because of the danger that a large number of drunk blacks represents; however, from what I hear, there are often white tourists who organize expeditions to the black areas to see the black
Carneval
(but without getting out of their cars, of course): the route they take is always along streets that no one ever knows in advance. Well, on my first evening, particularly as luck had it that I found myself without a companion, I got bored and ended up going from one burlesque joint to another, drinking awful whiskey and trying to start discussions with the girl dancers about unionization, but they were only interested in making me buy them drinks, the usual racket, and so on. However, the next day, which is Mardi Gras itself, when the whole city plus half a million visitors go mad for twenty-four hours, I see that this is something really big and unique, even by European standards, because the protagonists here are the people themselves, displaying great imagination in their masks and sheer vitality. In short, an impressive mass spectacle: it has imagination, joy, sensuality, vulgarity and atmosphere, all in the right proportions, and all done in such a way as to redeem the decadent atmosphere of the place with waves of popular feeling. In a word, eighteenth-century Venice could not have been very different, as I tried to explain in an interview for local television. It is intensely cold, but most of the people are almost totally naked; unfortunately, the beautiful girls are outnumbered by homosexuals in female dress: New Orleans is a big centre for transvestite clubs, and homosexuals converge there from all over America, and
Carneval
is the ideal opportunity for displaying their particular ingeniousness in cross-dressing. People drink hurricanes, tall glasses of rum and fruit juice, and beer out of cans, which are then abandoned on the side of the pavement as harbingers of the desolation of Ash Wednesday, along with the pearl necklaces which are thrown during the parades, each with a little tag (strange are the routes of leisure products): ‘Made in Czechoslovakia’. In short, this New Orleans is just that decaying place that we all knew about, and you can live here only if you know how to make the decadence functional, namely all the antique-dealers, furniture dealers, etc. I forgot to say that the majority of the stories told by the guides about happenings in New Orleans’ historic houses were invented by Faulkner; because when he was young, Faulkner lived here for a few years working as a guide taking tourists around the place; and the stories he told were all invented by him but they were all so successful that all the other guides also started to tell them and now they are part of Louisiana’s history. I was also invited into the villas of the upper class; in fact the most luxurious and aristocratic house that I have been in in this country was certainly here (built a few years ago but all in plantation style and all its accessories authentic), visiting a woman for whom I had a letter of introduction; not having a clue who I was, she invited five or six corporation presidents, who made me listen to the most reactionary discourses that I have heard in the whole journey: enough to make you despair, because the American ruling class understands nothing but power-politics, is a thousand miles away from starting to think that the rest of the world has problems to solve, that Russia offers the way to some solutions and they don’t. The usual pronouncements for and against Nixon were made in these terms; and a man from Investments and Securities supported Nixon because at this point in time you need ‘a tough, ruthless guy’. In any case, the Southerners talk too much, just the way we imagine they do; when I left, with me in the limousine to the airport there were some men coming back, I think, from a local Democratic Party convention; and what do you think they were talking about? They were against the Yankees and the Easterns [
sic
] who are stirring up the blacks, because where they live there are very few blacks, but we’d like to see them here where the blacks outnumber us forty to one etc. etc., all the things that you usually hear white Southerners say. Even slightly more sophisticated and adventurous people always talk about this as well, only they do it ironically, expressing blandly anti-segregationist views. Those who are anti-segregationist either eke out the miserable, frightened and isolated existence of the American progressive (I will need to devote a whole instalment to them, to their condition as exiles), or if they are rich or privileged, they close themselves in isolation and don’t see anyone and are careful not to express their opinion, like the philosopher (a friend of Abbagnano) James Fiebleman, who has written twenty-two books, particularly on aesthetics, and has a wonderful modern house full of statues: 4 Epsteins, 1 Manzù, 1 Marini. In short, this is a place that would make you shoot yourself; the only thing to do is act like the Italian professor at the local university, a young man called Cecchetti, about whom I have no idea whether he’s any good as a literary critic, and who in his opinions is very conservative (‘I would not send my children to school with black kids, but not for racial reasons, you know, only for social reasons: the blacks all belong to the lower classes’), but he is someone who does the only intelligent thing to be done to justify the fact of living in America: he plays the stock exchange. Spending the mornings at the local branch of Merrill Lynch, Fenner, Pierce and Smith, following on the ticker-tape the dealings on the New York stock exchange, the fluctuations on the electronic noticeboard, studying the right moment for buying and selling, with the tele-printer in the room displaying the latest news on which to base your dealings, studying the ups and downs of all the major American firms, reading the
Wall Street Journal
the minute it arrives, that is the only way to live the life of a big capitalistic country in a way that is not passive, it is in fact the real democratic aspiration of America, because even if it does not give you any chance of influencing events, other than speculation on the financial markets, nevertheless it keeps you plugged into the mechanism in its most advanced and active area, and requires constant attention – in this country of frighteningly local and provincial interests – to the whole system. I would not hesitate to declare that in this country where the man who follows and determines party policies is in the vast majority of cases the spokesman for very specific and nearly always reactionary interests, where even the unionized worker refuses to think anything outside strict economic increases for his category, the crowd – the enormous crowd – of owners of small quantities of shares, of small speculators in this highly sensitive stock exchange system represents the blueprint for the most modern citizenry.

Montgomery, Alabama, 6 March

This is a day that I will never forget as long as I live. I have seen what racism is, mass racism, accepted as one of a society’s fundamental rules. I was present at one of the first episodes of mass struggle by the Southern blacks: and it ended in defeat. I don’t know if you are aware that after decades of total immobility black protests began right here, in the worst segregationist State in the country: some were even successful, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, a Baptist minister, advocate of non-violent protest. That is why I came here to Montgomery, the day before yesterday, but I did not expect to find myself right in the middle of these crucial days of struggle.

The scene today is Alabama’s Capitol (which was the first Confederate Capitol, in the early months of the secession, before the capital moved to Richmond), a white building like the Washington Capitol, on a wide, climbing street, Dexter Street. The black students (from the black university) had declared that they would go to the Capitol steps for a peaceful protest demonstration against the expulsion of nine of them from the university, who last week had tried to sit down in the whites’ coffee shop in Court Hall, the State court building. At half-past one there was a meeting of the students at the Baptist church right beside the Capitol (the church where King had been minister, but now he is based in Atlanta directing the whole movement – though in these days he is back here – and his church has another local leader). But the Capitol was already ringed by policemen with truncheons and Highway Police in their cowboy hats, turquoise jerkins and khaki trousers. The pavements were swarming with whites, mostly poor whites who are the worst racists, ready to use their fists, young hooligans working in teams (their organization, which is only barely clandestine, is the Ku Klux Klan), but also comfortable middle-class people, families with children, all there to watch and shout slogans and obscenities against the blacks locked inside the church, plus of course dozens of amateur photographers taking shots of such unusual Sunday events. The crowd’s attitude varied between derision, as though they were watching monkeys asking for civil rights (genuine derision, from people who never thought the blacks could get such ideas in their heads), to hatred, cries of provocation, crow-like sounds made by the young thugs. Here and there, along the pavement, there are also a few small groups of blacks, standing aside, men and women, dressed in their best clothes, watching silently and still, in an attitude of composure. The waiting becomes more and more unbearable, the blacks must by now have finished their service and must be ready to come out; the Capitol steps are blocked by the police, all the pavements are blocked by the crowd of whites who are now angry and shouting ‘Come out, niggers!’ The blacks start to appear on the steps of their church and begin singing a hymn; the whites begin to make a racket, howling and insulting them. The fire-fighters arrive with their hoses and position themselves all around; the police begin to give orders to clear the streets, in other words to warn the whites that if they stay it is at their own risk and peril, whereas the small groups of blacks are dispersed roughly. There is a sound of horse-hooves and the scene is invaded by cowboys wearing the CD (Civil Defense) armband, a local militia of volunteers to keep public order, armed with sticks and guns; the police and militia are there to avoid incidents and see that the blacks clear off, but in reality the whites remain in charge of the street, the blacks stay in their church singing hymns, the police manage to send away only the most peaceful whites, the white thugs become more and more menacing and I who am keen to stay and see how things turn out (naturally, I am on my own; the few pro-black whites cannot allow themselves to be seen in these situations, well-known as they are) find myself surrounded by tougher and tougher looking characters, but also by youths who are there as though to see something funny, and just to make a noise. (I will later learn – though I did not see him – that there is also a white Methodist minister – the only white man in Montgomery with the courage to make a stand for the blacks – and as a result his house and his church have already been bombed twice by the KKK – who was there in front of the church and had organized his white congregation into providing a service to take the blacks safely from the church door to the cars; but, I repeat, I did not see him; the images in my head are of an all-out racial war, with no halfway houses.) Then begins the most painful part to watch: the blacks come out of the church a few at a time, some head down a sidestreet that I cannot see, but which I think the police have cleared of whites, but others go down Dexter Avenue in small groups along the pavements where the white thugs have gathered, walking away silently with their heads held high amid choruses of threatening and obscene sneers, insults and gestures. At every insult or witticism made by a white, the other whites, men and women, burst out laughing, sometimes with almost hysterical insistence, but sometimes also just like that, affably, and these people, as far as I am concerned, are the most awful, this all-out racism combined with affability. The most admirable ones are the black girls: they come down the road in twos or threes, and those thugs spit on the ground before their feet, standing in the middle of the pavement and forcing the girls to zigzag past them, shouting abuse at them and making as though to trip them up, and the black girls continue to chat among themselves, never do they move in such a way as to suggest that they want to avoid them, never do they alter their route when they see them blocking their path, as though they were used to these scenes right from birth.