The Pillars of Hercules

Dust and yellow clay and rock gave way to flatness and agriculture, vineyards and vegetable fields, then the poor suburbs of Bari.

I finished reading Frankenstein, sad that it was over. “I am … the fallen angel … Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.” Also, I noted, the monster was a vegetarian: “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”

It had been cold and windy at Taranto, and the people were dressed unfashionably in sturdy clothes for the bad weather. But here in Bari the weather was pleasant, and I decided to stay for a while to do laundry and make phone calls and make plans for the journey ahead. I had run out of books to read. Bari seemed to me a useful city in every sense. It had bookstores and restaurants and inexpensive hotels. It had a concert hall and an ancient fort. It was small scale, everything in the city was reachable on foot.

There was an air of unfussy helpfulness and goodwill in Bari that I put down to its being a Mediterranean port which dealt more with people than with cargo. With Ancona and Brindisi it was one of the great ferry ports of the Adriatic. The fact that it was a busy port meant that it had to be efficient. At the moment the ferries to Croatia were suspended, but there were numerous ferries to Greece and there were four a week to Durazzo (Durrës) in Albania.

I ran into a man in Bari who said that if I stayed another week he would take me cross-country skiing.

“You mean there’s enough snow in southern Italy for cross-country skiing in March?”

“Plenty,” he said. His name was Ricardo Caruso, he was a fresh-air fiend after my own heart. He hiked, he rock-climbed, he skied.

I told him I had been to Aliano.

“That’s a good place,” he said. “Padula’s also good. There’s an old ruined abbey near Padula. Hidden—and so beautiful.”

Having established some rapport, I asked Ricardo about the Albanians who had escaped from their country and come to Bari in their thousands in big rusty ships, so laden with refugees that the ships were on the verge of foundering. At first the Italian government had admitted many of them on political grounds. This charity provoked an outcry: What will we do with these indigent Albanians?

It was only an overnighter from Albania to Bari. What if thousands more came?

Thirty thousand more did arrive, very soon after. Some worked as waiters or manual laborers. Many joined the beggars on Bari’s streets—panhandlers often advertised themselves on placards as “Albanian Refugee” or “Ex-Yugoslavia,” meaning Croatian.

“It was terrible,” Ricardo said, with such feeling that I dropped the subject.

I asked a woman at my hotel. What exactly was the story on the Albanians?

She made a grieving sound, and she was so ashamed, she said, she could not talk about it.

“A tragedy,” she said, and turned away. “Please.”

I finally found a man in Bari willing to talk, and more than that, he drove me to the Bari Stadium, where the Albanians had been held until they could be repatriated.

“Thirty thousand of them,” Giacinto said. “Most of them young men, all of them screaming. But we have problems, we couldn’t let them in.”

There was Albanian graffiti still scrawled over the stadium door; the largest motto read in Italian: We Are with God, God Is with Us.

“The worst was when some of them got loose,” Giacinto said. “So they’d be running all over the place—in the city, all over the streets. Listen, this is a nice city. Then you’d look up and see some skinny strange Albanian guy, his eyes like a madman’s. He’d run into a restaurant, to hide, or into a hairdresser’s. And the police would have to drag him out bodily, while he’s struggling and screaming in Albanian.”

Giacinto smiled at the weirdness of it.

“Misery turned them into fiends,” I said, quoting Frankenstein.

“True. And this is a little country. Business is awful. What are we supposed to do?”

Three days of good meals in Bari set me up, too. Gnocchi was a local specialty, so was risotto made with champagne; eggplant, olives, cauliflower, and fruit and fish. My laundry was done. I had books to read, among them one by Italo Svevo, who had lived in Trieste, where I was headed. I bought some more maps. Everyone in Bari had been pleasant to me.

I went on my way, up the Adriatic coast in a mood of optimism. For consolation and mothering, I thought, no country could match Italy.

10

The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia