Sándor
Márai
American Journal
Part One:
1952 - 1967
...
Something is in the process of emerging in opposition to 'Eurasia' which is
not designated 'Euramerica' on maps but nevertheless is that in reality.
Last night a vision: Europe and America.
I see Europe as a swamp full of colourful flowers, birds and sedges. This
huge swamp is steaming with perilous, scalding, marshy vapours.
America I see as a primeval forest, full of secrets. One can only advance
step by step; a wanderer is obliged to throw himself to the ground at any
moment so as to fumble about on the ground, covered in lianas, ferns, mosses
and leaf-mould, and check whether there might be a nest of snakes or trap
somewhere. In this primeval forest one can only crawl ahead slowly, knife
between teeth. Amongst the unrestrained foliage of the trees and the shrubs,
mysterious monsters howl, orang-utans, tigers, monkeys chatter, brightly plumed
cockatoos screech. This is a primeval forest with secrets and no rules, full
of instantaneous surprises.
Europe, however, is the mature, steaming, poisonous, exciting, heady swamp.
I saw all this last night, so real that it was palpable.
*
At noon today, the unveiling of a memorial plaque commemorating
the purchase of Manhattan Island took place in front of our apartment. The
city dignitaries rolled up in limousines and top hats. Then American Indians
showed up, men and women, in feather headdresses. A police band also arrived.
A number of officials made speeches. One of the speakers was the chairman
of New York City's tax commission, and he related that the island on which
Manhattan was built, and which the Dutch had purchased from the Indians, on
this very spot, three hundred years ago for the sum of 24 dollars, today represented
9 billion dollars in real-estate value. Everyone applauded, the Indians included.
Amongst them was a young and pretty woman. The men had painted their faces
in red and yellow pigments. During the ceremony, the descendants of the Manhattan
Indians sat with discomfited expressions on the seats of honour, as though
they were ashamed their ancestors had been such mugs.
The simple memorial was then unveiled, and the police band launched into a
triumphant blaring. The Indians signed autographs for students, then in full
war dress hurried off on foot towards the nearby subway station. I sat down
on a bench opposite the memorial. The sun was shining; it was a balmy spring
day. I would never have imagined a day would come when a memorial plaque before
my home would proclaim the moment the Dutch purchased the territory of New
York from the Indians.
*
In America the salesman is an embodiment of roughly the
same social ideal as an army officer was in Hungary of old. A well groomed,
well mannered young man who 'gets around everywhere' (and salesman here, like
the army officers back home, do indeed 'get around' the best families because
they knock on every door), is well dressed and dashing, has an esteemed position
in society. He has young girls dreaming about him, just as girls in olden-day
Hungary would dream about a hussar lieutenant of good family. Always clean-shaven,
always dapper, always sociable, always ready with an elegant greeting and
a polite smile to boot.
*
America is now going through a period when it is no longer
expanding through immigration, as it did in the last century, but through
natural increase, from its own population stock. Immigrants no longer have
a role as a leavening or booster. The 160 million mass is multiplying naturally.
The result is not yet a 'Race' but is already a 'people'.
*
One phenomenon amongst American immigrants of recent times
is the dimwitted adventurer. In earlier times an adventurer could not afford
to be dim, because he would perish in the great competition. Only an adventurer
who was talented, courageous and daredevil could thrive in the America of
the pioneering days. Nowadays, however, there are many dimwit immigrant adventurers
who possess neither the courage nor the talent for this tough and hazardous
métier yet believe they can make it with a few tricks. They come to grief.
The other phenomenon: immigrants of petty bourgeois background who arrive
on the shores of the New World and believe they have 'won out'. Here they
are, in a democracy, and for a while they unbridledly, ostentatiously, with
a newcomer's immoderation celebrate their release from a Europe poisoned with
'aristocratic, feudal prejudices' where, for whatever reason, they did not
feel valued at their true worth. Here, though, in this democracy, where 'success'
is the touchstone of everything, man included, they will be able to prove
themselves to the hilt... After some time has passed, they realise that things
are not quite like that. If they have acquired some money, they soon notice
that there are others who acquired more money before they did, and the latter
are loath to mix socially with those who came more recently and have acquired
less money. Yet in an aristocratic society a man who, through birth or circumstances,
is started off at in the worldly race with a handicap may still find the means - through
individual excellence, learning, talent, nobility of principles - of rising
to the very top, even without tasting 'success'. In this democracy, a person
who is 'merely' excellent, talented or high principled yet does not have 'success',
the hall-mark of money, to match will not make it to the top. The newcomer
tumbles to that and, as a result, there arise those strange depressions, nervous
breakdowns, intolerable social unrest, the pathological symptoms of petty-bourgeois
snobbery about careers, and persecution manias.
*
This morning a Negro of thirty-five or forty was sitting
opposite me in the subway car: an intelligent-looking man, who glanced attentively
around before mustering me at length. Suddenly, an involuntary spark of hatred
gleamed in his eyes that there was no mistaking. For a second he 'saw' the
better-dressed White man, then immediately turned away to stare in front of
him with the wearily listless gaze that Negroes generally adopt in public
places. His right hand was feeling the place where his left arm would be,
and it was only then that I noticed he had an arm missing. Encounters like
this are everyday occurrences, but the spontaneity of that look of hatred
was such as I have rarely observed before here, in New York. The helplessness,
the inexcusable, the fact that he was black and, moreover, had an arm missing! -
this Creature's by now not-so-much-accusatory as just flashing, confirmatory
glare was more terrible than that. What is God's will? Does He 'will' anything
at all?
*
Americans have a touching desire for tradition: to commemorate
Abraham Lincoln they not only built 'the largest monument in the world' but
also placed his top hat in a glass case in one of the museums here. The hat
is a shabby, stovepipe construction. Americans would like to have a tradition
of some kind, speedily, modestly, and for home consumption, but that need
is nothing more than a collective nervous tic. The need for tradition is no
longer alive in their private lives: no one parts from his home, his place
of residence or inherited possessions with so light a heart as an American.
*
An immigrant Hungarian, finickily unsatisfied with conditions
here, asks why, in point of fact, am I in America. My answer is because this
is the only way in which I can hope to remain a Hungarian writer. Curious
though it may be, that really is the case.
[...]
1956
Homesickness to see again the Neapolitan handicraftsmen 'making
their little pots', weak-eyed and painstakingly, at the front of their dark
little workshops in the back-street alleys. They sole shoes, or engrave intaglio
designs, or repair umbrellas, and express a sense of the enjoyment of work
in the reverential care with which they bend over their work. This is the
purest 'satisfaction', one that Freud seems not to have had in mind when he
constructed his arbitrary hypotheses on the 'Lustprinzip' - the pleasure principle.
'Satisfaction' is not 'pleasure', more a special, serious and, simultaneously,
cheerful - yes, optimistic fulfilment of duty, which also denotes complete 'satisfaction'.
The 'little potters' know this, in Naples as elsewhere.
A chilly day, first leaves, small-town folk sauntering on Fifth Avenue - and,
at the same time, the folk of the global pageant, an astonishing, colourful
and unpredictable human swirl. I sit for a long time in front of the central
building of the Public Library, the young, bespectacled girl next to me gravely
reading Waugh's satire, The Loved One. A Negro woman comes by with Joyce's
Ulysses in her hand. The whole setting is at once small-townish and also cosmopolitan.
The costliest of boutiques jostle with discount stores selling job-lot goods
at knock-down prices. That range in quality goes for the people as well.
*
7 November. - After an eight-hour flight over ocean
and clouds, a sudden explosion of light. The plane tipped from the West into
the air space of the East. No gradual 'dawn' but, all at once, the world becomes
dazzlingly light. We fly above a thick, fleecy layer of cloud. The firmament
is an azure such as I have never seen before. We carry on flying for a further
two hours in that way. The machine suddenly descends into the dense cotton
wool of the clouds: all goes dark as we fly for a quarter of an hour in cloud.
Then a familiar brown element starts to emerge far below: dry land, Europe.
We touch down in Scotland, near Glasgow. Half an hour's stroll in the air
terminal, behind the grille to which the passengers are shepherded by women
in uniform. The grille is already familiar - European. The mist descends.
After half an hour, onwards. The machine cuts over the Channel in a few minutes,
then over Belgium and the Netherlands without landing. After sixteen hours
of flying, a smooth touchdown in Munich. In the streets, flags lowered to
half-mast as a mark of mourning for Hungary, protestors.
10 November, Munich. - Refugees are talking. One of them, an engineer,
saw my younger brother just a few days ago in Budapest. Another says, "It's
too late now, I'm sorry to say. But there were a few days there... from the
twenty-third of October to maybe the second of November... when the country
had a government that was recognised and supported by the whole Hungarian
nation... the Imre Nagy government... why did the United Nations not send a team
of observers to Budapest at that point?" More than one is speaking at once.
This is the moment when they are coming to. Some of them were still on Hungarian
soil just twenty-four hours ago; some will go back. "The Russians dare not
come out of their tanks by night; that's when it is possible to cross the
frontier." Then once again, abruptly: "There were ten days when there was
no frontier to the West, no Iron Curtain... Everyone came and went as they pleased...
That was how it was up till the third of November, and even for two or three
days after... It's trickier now... But even now it is possible..."
*
22 November, Munich. - Back in a storm. Snow is falling
when the plane arrives at Munich, the wheels skid on touching down. Once again
in the Jewish pension. One refugee - a physician, Jewish, once in a labour camp - had
arrived three days before: "There was no anti-Semitism during the days after
October the twenty-third; no class, no denomination. Everyone was united.
It was worth living for that alone. I'm a Jew, and I have many bad memories;
but during these days, for the first time in my life I felt proud to be a
Hungarian."
Another refugee, an engineer, says, "It's not true that radio stations fomented
the uprising. That's nonsense or a malicious rumour spread by the Russians.
Nor is it true that they promised arms or armed support." He falls silent
as he carefully chooses his words: "But it's true that every Western radio
station and newspaper, then the statesmen and everyone else assured us, for
years on end, that the West feels solidarity." He again pauses before saying,
calmly and quietly, "I tell you, we Hungarians now want to live in a neutrality
of the mind."
[...]
I am at a stage of life when that strange
anticipation in which, in the past (during youth, maturity, then the early
phase of old age) there was a ceaseless, workaday awareness of life underpinning
wakefulness and dream, has ceased for me. I no longer 'look forward' to anything.
The 'waiting-for-Godot' demeanour has totally vanished from my life. One used
to look forward to Pleasure, or Success, or Surprise, and somehow they always
came along, Pleasure and Success and Surprise, in their good and their bad
variants. But then a moment ensues when somehow nothing 'comes' any more,
which is when Anticipation also ceases. For a while longer one awaited a sort
of Vindication... but then one morning one awoke and grasped that there is no
Vindication. All there is are facts. That is what I sense every day, and that
is why I don't 'look forward' to anything. I am starting to grow old.
There must have been around a hundred and fifty of us in the courtroom when
I took the oath of allegiance for American citizenship. The chamber was on
one floor of the municipal building of New York's so-called South District,
the Stars and Stripes and an eagle in one corner. On the dais there were armchairs
upholstered in green leather for the judges; in front of the dais, tables
for the court officials. I was summoned to appear at a quarter to two and
had to sign the citizenship papers, then we all sat in the rows of benches
and waited for the judge who was going to administer the oath.
A few minutes before the judge arrived, an official stood at the centre of
the chamber and called on all those who had undergone a "change in heart"
to announce if they had changed their intention and did not wish to become
American citizens. There was still time to do so, the official said, but in
a few minutes, once they had been sworn in by the judge, they would be citizens,
and that gave them rights but also responsibilities. No one budged. The next
few minutes passed in profound, solemn silence.
A gavel was tapped, and through a noiselessly opening, heavy oak door stepped
the black-gowned elderly judge. He stood at the centre of the dais, a black-bound
book in his hand, just like a priest. One of the officials, in remembrance
of some antique judicial tradition, shouted out a triple "Hear ye!" We all
got to our feet. The official then read out the oath, some passages of which
we repeated, right hand raised. The chamber buzzed quietly - only the vow "So
help me God" sounded somewhat louder.
Now the judge started to speak, his discourse flat and clerical. "This country
is not an earthly Paradise," he said. "Do all in your power that it should
be better and more perfect. Thank you!" He then left the chamber.
[...]
When the sun goes down, Phoenix, that sun-loving
Arizonan city, loses the magic of its desert brilliance and turns into a soulless
American provincial town. By night, the modern city becomes frozen, like a
lizard in the cold sands of wintertime. What does a provincial American think
about at night? The day is taken up with the great job, with business. But
what does he think about at night, once he has done with his bourbon and his
television? How real is the 'perennial optimism' that supposedly imbues American
thinking between the three oceans? There is still room, shelter and food enough
for hundreds of millions more. How matters will develop it is impossible to
predict. America's technological culture and consummate organisational approach
will easily secure American ascendancy for a long time to come. They believe
in the unconditional power of advertising. Do they feel comfortable with this?...
A European proverb teaches us that there are situations when one cannot see
the wood for the trees. Here, in America, there are times when one cannot
see the trees for the wood: cannot see the Individual for the Statistics,
the Little for the Big and the Many, and Americans for America. Every radio,
newspaper and television trumpets, night and day, that 30 million people smoke
such-and-such a cigarette brand, 40 million Americans eat or drink this, 50
million believe or swear by that... But there are trees in the wood as well.
Poets must be awfully lonely in this neck of the woods.
*
Houston. Over Texas by aeroplane: rocks and desert in every
direction. Even modern energy production is unable to cope with the erosional
character of the American landscape. In Texas, oil wells thirstily suck up
the hidden energy reserves of the barren deserts. From up on high, out of
the plane's window, the oil wells, along with the big-bellied, silver storage
tanks, evoke the visions of Hieronymus Bosch. But then the oil tanks also
resemble metallic marquees built to house some tribe of Martians. In the seat
next to me is a young American. He has come from Alaska and immediately dozes
off, waking up only when they bring the champagne round. He thirstily drains
three glasses, in succession. He starts chattering, unsolicited, the moment
he has woken. The cost of living in Alaska, he says, is as expensive as it
must have been in California during the Gold Rush. He is now on his way to
Mexico because "he had enough of the cold." These new-style pioneers switch
countries and continents like "a feverish patient his bolsters" (to quote
Kleist on restiveness). Far below lies Houston. Whilst the big plane circles
over the airport, awaiting clearance to land, the passengers - most of them
native Texans - good-naturedly sip champagne, play cards, and ready their things
for disembarkation. They are quite evidently 'at home' in the America of the
optimist, where nothing is impossible. Up here, over Houston, that optimism
is catching. A million people live down below, on the edge of the ranges.
This is the fabled city which has the reputation of being 'the most rapidly
growing settlement in the United States.' The appearance, from up above, is
striking: in this city there is nothing else to see than the cityscape itself.
Every word on the advertisements beside the highway that leads through the
desert from the airport into the city is screamingly over-the-top. The people
who erect these roadside billboards - the new iconoclasts, who no longer destroy
'images' but the landscape - defile the American country with their superlatives
and childishly inflated attributives. Through the car window, at 60 mph, the
traveller is informed that this is "the oil capital of the world", "the most
cotton" is exported from here, "the most synthetic rubber" is manufactured
here. The many superlatives are palpably meant to drown out some adolescent
sense of insecurity.
The car whisks by a small, provincial cemetery. The burial ground is quite
tiny because those who live in the city arrived here not long ago and have
not yet had time to die. Yet the commercial telephone directory in the hotel
is already almost as thick - 1,300 pages - as that for inner-city New York, because
here they live fast and with violent energy. In the streets, stunted, single-storey
shacks squat at the foot of skyscrapers. Only things that are of use for the
moment are tolerated here. It's not the detail but the whole that is important.
This city, which planners immediately sketched on the blue sky as a fata morgana
construction, limning a 'skyline' of skyscrapers, presents an apparition of
concrete, metal and glass from which the concept of 'beauty' has been banished.
In Houston there is no term to cover this concept, in its Aristotelian and
Kantian sense. The city is defiantly, deliberately bleak.
Whilst travelling, the daily task is to see history in the landscape. In Houston,
the 'history' is not the past - that does not exist - but the present, which shrieks
and demands. Here history is not made by the soldier, statesman or adventurer
but by the subscribers to the telephone book: the grocer, the oilman, the
trucker and the engineer. The artist has yet to put in an appearance. Ornament
is a disturbing element here, 'arrogant'. In the suburbs, set alongside one
another in their thousands, are cheap, timber-framed, verandahed provincial
houses finished with a skimming of plaster - all done on credit and thus overpriced.
The owner, musing in his rocking chair on the porch - reminiscent of Rodin's
Thinker - is in the process of working on his gentrification. Year by year,
new social strata rise out of a working-class lot into petty-bourgeois and
eventually middle-class status. Houston is deep-sea, the true, undisguised
America in ferment, like a huge experimental display colony. It is untrue
that the middle-class attitude towards life has been lost in a world of mass
culture; ever new masses aspire to a middle-class standard of living, and
the technological revolution provides the means to do that. The question is,
whose is in this lifestyle? The new bourgeois or the new parvenu? Americans
are much exercised by that question. These newly fledged petty-bourgeois Americans,
in their rocking chairs on the porches of their Houston model houses, are
patriots. But not nationalistic. The patriot loves what is his; the nationalist
envies what belongs to others. America wants nothing from the world, yet there
is an aggressive restiveness in this verandahed, petty-bourgeois self-satisfaction.
In the fact that Americans have not yet responded to the world. Technological
culture is not a 'response'. In the fact that they have responsibility for
a world situation that, whilst they did not provoke it, they often (short-sightedly
and lazily) tolerated, despite having it within their power to pre-empt its
dangerous consequences. In the fact that the meaning of 'permanent revolution'
does not lie in a change in property relations but in a new civilisation that
is built on human needs rather than Principles and Ideals. What is important
about this experiment in civilisation is not the fanatical Ideal but Man,
for whom a more human existence has to be fashioned - and today at that. That
mundane possibility exercises the man on the Houston porch more than any utopia.
[...]
1964
New York. - Jury duty for two weeks, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
each day. One hundred and twenty of us jurors who have been called are in
the assembly chamber at the New York Civil Court. The chamber is air-conditioned,
and one may smoke and read. It is forbidden to speak with strangers or witnesses;
the jurors' behaviour comes under hawk-eyed scrutiny from lawyers. The twelve
jurors due to decide on a case are put up by an official drawing lots. The
lawyers examine each juror to determine whether they are 'prejudiced'; some
are ob-jected to.
Most of the legal actions are petty affairs - reneging on promises, breaches
of contract. Always, obsessively, about money - when, where, why not more... Then
a suit for damages that lasts for four days. This is a regular soap opera,
as they say here, a Beggar's Opera. Entitled Leon and the Woman.
Leon, a thirty-two-year old who cuts a fine figure, is an aggressive, arrogant
spiv; a wholesaler who owns a Cadillac. He was engaged to marry a blonde,
blue-eyed 23-year-old innocent, but it was broken off, and Leon is sueing
for return of the three-carat diamond engagement ring. The young man is no
gentleman, but it turns out that the maiden is no lady either. She sobs unabashedly
in front of twelve complete strangers, yelling out between the sobs that on
the farewell evening, when the engagement broke up (Leon had second thoughts),
in the Cadillac going home "he touched the private part of my body..." In short,
she is not prepared to return the ring. Everyone keeps a straight face, judge
and we, the jury. It goes on like this for four days; the maiden's parents
are demanding ten thousand dollars in compensation from Leon, because the
Cadillac incident had "ruined the girl's nerves." Leon clutches his head in
his hands and stares before him, as if he were only now starting to grasp
how rash he had been to lose his self-control in the Cadillac. The drama-queen
mother, a petty-bourgeois woman in garish blue and canary yellow, who is past
the first bloom of life, mimes a heart attack until the judge ticks her off.
In the end, we bring a judgement of Solomon. After an hour and a half of deliberation,
the decision is "given is given": the man did not behave in a "gentlemanlike"
way, but the maiden was not "ladylike" either; the girl may keep the ring,
but the touching of her "private parts" does not call for compensation from
Leon. There are ten male jurors, including one Negro, the other two are women.
The men were unanimous in determining that Leon had been rash in the car,
but it did not amount to ten thousand dollars (a sort of 'what-would-things-come-to'
grumble is heard from the jury chorus in the course of the deliberations).
The women sullenly hold their tongues, they have a different opinion.
The figures are of more interest than the low comedy: the complainant is no
"lady", she merely puts on an act of being that... She is tow-headed, her hands,
legs, figure, smile and everything about her speaks of that immature type,
without sexual attributes to speak of and incapable of expressing them, that
is to be seen in magazines and in advertisements in cinemas and television
shows. It is incomprehensible that Leon did not see that: American men have
heard about the vamp, the glamour girl, the business woman and the country
girl, but Woman is still an unsettlingly strange quantity for them, as it
was in the days of the Puritans and pioneers.
The air of a Kafkaesque trial in the big building: noiseless doors, everyone
suspicious. The scent of Money mania in everything and everywhere. At least
here, in New York, it is undisguised. Anyone who has money is not just rich
but good-looking, virile, young, clever, cheerful, heroic - and all because
he has money. So most people believe. Then there are the rebels who splutteringly
deny this. Avarice, crude and ruthless money-grubbing are just as prevalent
in Europe, but only few admit their ravenous hunger.
[...]
What does 'writing' mean?... What was I actually
seeking to do when, every now and then, I sat down in front of a sheet of
paper and 'wrote' something?... The question has a grotesquely immediate point
to it, coming as it does at the end of a career (if writing can be called
a 'career'...). Why does a person 'write'? He wants to say something to other
people, but what? Speaking personally, I sometimes think that one must protest
and rebel the moment anybody (or anybodies) seek to create System out of the
natural, living order of life. Everything that is System - religious, political,
economic or intellectual System - is a deadly danger and threat to life's living
order. I think that's what I wanted to say when I 'wrote'. Others write about
other things, but every writer has something to say that is his alone, and
he speaks eternally about that, in a hundred volumes, a hundred different
ways.
*
Confused dreams. Every dream - a moment when the madman who
resides within us is liberated in the consciousness. During the hours of wakefulness
this madman is watched over by nurses, that is say, Reason, Upbringing, Surrounds;
but those nurses no longer stand watch over a sleeping person's consciousness,
and the madman, in the get-up of the dream, starts to roam around in the mind,
gesticulating, grimacing, behaving disgracefully and sticking his tongue out.
*
It is odd, to say the least, that amongst the hundreds of
millions of American publications printed in this century not one demanding
work by a single Hungarian writer of any significance has reached the American
reading public. In the last century Jókai was inescapable; the great story-teller's
works were also published here. However, not a single line of Mikszáth, Krúdy,
Móricz, Babits or Kosztolányi has been brought out in English by an American
publisher. These writers have spoken in French, German, Spanish, Italian,
and - yes - even in English translation in Europe, but American publishers have
not picked up the works of this century's great Hungarian writers. Works by
Hungarian authors which have appeared during these decade are academic books;
literary works that cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the century's
Hungarian classics; dross in the form of anecdotal, occasional writings; or
mush for the stage and screen. No Hungarian novel or play that was written
with any claim to high intellectual standard, however, has found a voice in
America during the present century... Hungarian visual arts of the twentieth-century
are similarly unknown: the great Hungarian post-Impressionists, Rippl-Rónai,
Csók, Rudnay, Szinyei Merse and the Ferenczys - ignored here. Bartók was the
first Hungarian intellectual of this century to make any inroads in America,
but only posthumously; whilst he was alive he was passed over and had to kick
his heels in the waiting room. The truth is that the major efforts of the
Hungarian mind in our century have been hushed up, deliberately and successfully,
in America.
*
Foreignness - and everything appertaining to it, the sea of
indifference above all - is not just a threat but a stimulus. Yet it takes
a 'writer'... In a world of the neon lights, big drums and trumpets of intellectual
confidence men, hacks, a 'writer' can do no more than attempt to enter into
a dialogue, on the intellectual short-wave, with the few readers who are listening
in, feeling and thinking on the same frequency... The 'writer' who cuts, like
a laser beam, into the living tissue of life, modifying or destroying it,
is always a rare creature, and nowadays practically a laboratory phenomenon....
A poet who writes in his native tongue abroad is writing for the very few...,
but whilst back home the ideological big drummers continually bang on in the
name of the people, the nation and humanity, the poet abroad learns what Emily
Dickinson meant when she said something like: "If I read something, and I
feel an icy chill run from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, as if
I were freezing..., then I know that what
I was reading is poetry." A poet senses that more fatefully abroad than at
home, where he has no way of 'freezing' because there he is surrounded by
the tepid warmth of familiarity, a human and intellectual complicity.
[...]
Salerno. - I watch from the elevation
of the terrazza as the Italian street 'opens up' in the early morning:
shutters are pulled up, the fruiterer sets out his wares - the fleshy, fragrant,
bountifully ponderous fruits of the Campagna, medlars, chestnuts, apricots
and peaches, noble pears, apples, Muscat table grapes - whilst the baker places
the fresh breads and pastries in the shop window. This puffing and blowing,
piously assiduous Italian streetscape is like a toy that is wound up and the
puppet stall-keepers start to move. But there is something else: in this area
there are many Italians who have been to America and who have returned home
to carry on what they have left off doing over there. Like the singing-school
question in the children's poem: "We've come from America, and our craft..." - that
is what this serious game is humming down below. The children's poem went
on to retort with the tag "Each and every one pursues his chosen craft." That
too is true. A barber strops his razor. A baker bakes. A cobbler soles. A
writer writes.
Translated by Tim Wilkinson
