PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS

THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO
and Other Stories

Ivan Bunin was born in 1870 in Voronezh, Russia. His early writing career brought rapid fame and by 1910 he had achieved popular success after the publication of a couple of books of verse, a translation of Longfellow’s Hiawatha and some short stories. At this time, his main theme was that of the classical nineteenth-century writers: the life of the peasants and the landowners. His later works, ‘The Dry Valley’, for example, contained in The Elaghin Affair and Other Stories, confirmed that Bunin continued the critical realism of his famous predecessors.

However, in his next series of stories, he turned away from Russia and described life in foreign, often exotic lands. The Gentleman From San Francisco falls into this category and initiates a major theme in Bunin’s work – the enigma of death.

In 1920 Bunin left Russia and was condemned as a traitor. In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. This was a controversial decision as he was an émigré and outspoken enemy of the Soviet régime. He lived an unsettled life in exile and died in the South of France in considerable deprivation in 1953.

Ivan Bunin

THE GENTLEMAN
FROM
SAN FRANCISCO
and Other Stories

Translated by David Richards and Sophie Lund

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PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published by Angel Books 1984

Copyright © Estate of Ivan Bunin and Agence Hoffman, paris, 1984, 1987

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-196540-6

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Gentleman from San Francisco

The Primer of Love

Chang’s Dreams

Temir-Aksak-Khan

Long Ago

An Unknown Friend

At Sea, at Night

Graffiti

Mitya’s Love

Sunstroke

Night

The Caucasus

Late Hour

Visiting Cards

Zoyka and Valeria

The Riverside Tavern

A Cold Autumn

INTRODUCTION

Life should be a delight.

Bunin: Arsenev’s Life (1933)

Ivan Bunin (1870–1953) is one of Russia’s supreme literary artists, yet even today – more than fifty years after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – the unique power of his strikingly individual voice has not gained anything like due recognition in the English-speaking world.

This neglect, however, would seem to be a not unexpected sequel to a life marked throughout by uncertainties and deprivations. After a happy childhood and youth on his parents’ estates in Central Russia, Bunin resolved in 1895 to devote himself to a full-time literary career. From then on his financial position was insecure and this, together with his penchant for a nomadic existence, meant that for many years he possessed no permanent home. On top of this he suffered first a long and tortured affair and then a disastrous marriage, the collapse of which was followed by the death of his only child at the age of five.

Bunin’s early literary endeavours met with encouraging success. Between 1902 and 1909 Gorky’s publishing house, Znanie, issued five volumes of his work, he was three times awarded the Academy of Sciences’ Pushkin medal for his poetry, and in 1910 he achieved popular acclaim for his long story of life in the Russian countryside, ‘The Village’. Not until he was in his mid-forties, however, did Bunin produce his first prose masterpieces, three of which, ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ (1915), ‘The Primer of Love’ (1915), and ‘Chang’s Dreams’ (1916), open the present volume. Just when his literary position seemed to be assured, the political upheavals of 1917 provoked a fresh crisis in his life. Once it became clear that the Bolsheviks would be victorious in the ensuing civil war, Bunin emigrated from Russia, never to return. In 1920, at the age of fifty, he had to start a new life and literary career in western Europe.

Astonishingly, this was when his genius came into full flower. In a golden decade of creativity he proceeded to compose a seemingly endless stream of movingly eloquent short stories and also two longer works, ‘Mitya’s Love’ and his Proustian fictional autobiography, Arsenev’s Life. Eight masterly pieces from this period are included in the present selection: ‘Temir-Aksak-Khan’ (1921), ‘Long Ago’ (1922), ‘An Unknown Friend’ (1923), ‘At Sea, at Night’ (1923), ‘Graffiti’ (1924), ‘Mitya’s Love’ (1924), ‘Sunstroke’ (1925) and his much admired philosophical reverie, ‘Night’ (1925).

Outside a small set of Russian émigré admirers, however, Bunin’s superb post-revolutionary work was tragically ignored during his lifetime. In the Soviet Union he was condemned as a traitor and after 1928 nothing of his was published there until after his death twenty-five years later. Few western European literati knew Russian, and the translations of his works which occasionally appeared were either grossly inaccurate or completely insensitive, or both. Bunin’s fortunes, both literary and financial, were given a welcome boost when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933, but the benefits from this triumph were short-lived and soon completely extinguished by the Second World War which Bunin endured in Grasse in the South of France, in a state of considerable deprivation.

The final disappointment of his life came when even his Russian émigré supporters turned away: his last volume of stories, Dark Avenues, which was published in full in Paris in 1946 (eleven of the stories had been issued in New York three years earlier in a limited edition), was met with either silence or expressions of dismay at what were regarded as distasteful descriptions of sexual encounters. Bunin had cherished high hopes for this volume which he more than once claimed as his best work. Every one of the thirty-eight stories in Dark Avenues is about love, and although they almost all end unhappily, their overall effect on the reader is not in the least dispiriting since the protagonists’ experiences are recounted with such confident gratitude and delight. Six stories from this volume – ‘The Caucasus’ (1937), ‘Late Hour’ (1938), ‘Visiting Cards’ (1940), ‘Zoyka and Valeria’ (1940), ‘The Riverside Tavern’ (1943), and ‘A Cold Autumn’ (1944) – conclude the present collection.

Like the great Russian realists he admired, Turgenev, Chekhov and, above all, Tolstoy, Bunin drew artistic inspiration from his personal experience. Hence his stories are set for the most part in that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia which he knew in his youth, but also in the France where he spent the last thirty years of his life, and in those various countries of Europe, Africa and Asia which he visited in the early years of the century.

Bunin’s characters too are based on people he encountered – men and women of all sorts and conditions, foreigners as well as Russians. By his own account the first of his impulses as a writer was the realist’s traditional determination to record for posterity as graphically as he could the solid, material reality of the places and people of his time, which he consciously schooled himself to observe with the closest attention. A fine example of his ability to evoke locations is furnished by the opening story of this collection, ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’, with its vivid descriptions of life aboard a cruising liner and its pictures of soulless Italian holiday resorts in winter.

Many of his human records are necessarily external portraits – wonderfully firm, clear outlines, but with only hints of an inner life; such for instance are all the figures who appear in ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’. Those of Bunin’s characters who do reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings tend to be variations of a single type – a modern man, or sometimes woman, with a reflective turn of mind, finely tuned emotions, knowledge of the world and a capacity for wonder. This is no accident, for when it comes to psychology Bunin is not concerned to depict a variety of human reactions but rather to present to the reader the only psychological reality he is fully cognisant of, namely his own. ‘A real artist,’ he stated in an article of 1928 giving advice to young writers, ‘always speaks primarily about his own heart.’ Bunin’s art is markedly egocentric: what he communicates is not an analysis of society together with a moral, political or religious message à la Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or socialist realism, but a particular emotional response to the world, a response which remains remarkably consistent throughout his long career.

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The most fundamental element in Bunin’s view of life is an almost painfully acute sense of the precariousness of existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of all human constructions, achievements and hopes, a constant recognition that everything we value can be snatched away at any moment. As he wrote in the diary of his voyage to Ceylon just before the First World War:

Over and over again I find myself reflecting: what a strange and terrible thing our life is – you are hanging by a thread every second. Here I am, alive and healthy, but who knows what may happen a second later to my heart, which, like every human heart, is unique in the whole of creation in its mysteriousness and fragility? And on just such a thread hang also my happiness and peace, that is the life and health of all those I love and whom I cherish much more than myself …

It was only natural that Bunin’s post-emigration work should possess an elegiac quality, but even before the Bolshevik revolution destroyed so much that he cherished, the aristocratic Bunin and many of his heroes were nostalgically mourning the loss of the Russian past, while examples of the ravages of time – from individual deaths to derelict country estates and the passing of whole civilizations – appear again and again even in his early pages. Ecclesiastes’ lament, ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ echoes through Bunin’s writing and in his protagonists’ hearts and heads from the very beginning.

Yet this sense of precariousness and futility does not lead to despair. Quite the contrary, since it is those people with the keenest awareness of death, Bunin intimates, who paradoxically possess also the greatest capacity for joy and the most vivid appreciation of what for him was of supreme importance, namely those private experiences of awe, wonder or rapture which stir a man to the depths of his emotional being and leave an indelible mark on his spiritual consciousness. Bunin’s second and most distinctive impulse as a writer was to depict precisely these experiences – sensitive moments which together constitute what he would call the poetry of life. All his positive characters are conscious of this poetry and it is their experiences of it which form the centre and meaning of almost every mature Bunin story. At the same time, it is the absence of this capacity to experience the poetry of life which distinguishes Bunin’s negative characters, like the gentleman from San Francisco or the hero’s faithless sweetheart Katya in ‘Mitya’s Love’.

Bunin’s positive characters enjoy poetic emotions in various recurring situations. In the first place they are moved by the beauty of the created universe: they may be awestruck by the grandeur of the heavens or by the surging power of the great oceans of the world, like the captain in ‘Chang’s Dreams’; they are gently charmed by the Russian countryside, as is Ivlev, for instance, in ‘The Primer of Love’; or they find themselves much more powerfully intoxicated by the burgeoning luxuriance of nature, like the young hero of ‘Mitya’s Love’. Indeed, nowhere is Bunin’s unique fusion of precise observation and sensual indulgence deployed more lavishly than in his depictions of spring and summer in this extraordinary work.

Another frequent fount of poetic emotion is memory, which as early as 1916 Bunin described in ‘Chang’s Dreams’ as, ‘that God-given sight which none of us can understand’. The human memory, according to Bunin, not only helps us to make sense of our lives by sifting the significant events in our past from the insignificant, but, even more important, automatically transfigures and poeticizes the past which acquires then a certain legendary quality. Almost all Bunin’s stories provide illustrations of this process, as one character after another recalls emotionally vibrant incidents from his past, such as the two elderly passengers in ‘At Sea, at Night’, the narrators of ‘Late Hour’ or ‘A Cold Autumn’, the doctor in ‘The Riverside Tavern’ – even the dog in ‘Chang’s Dreams’! Often his narrators seem to be expressing the writer’s own nostalgia, as for example in ‘Long Ago’, where we read of ‘that sweet bitter dream of the past by which my soul will live until the grave’, or in ‘Late Hour’ which describes an old man’s return to the little Russian town in the steppes which he has not seen since his early youth.

A special place in Bunin’s poetry of life is occupied by sexual love, for although in this realm we may hope to enjoy the highest flights of rapture, we may also be driven as nowhere else to the blackest depths of despair. In many respects Bunin’s approach to sex is surprisingly modern. His heroes are for instance in an almost perpetual state of erotic expectancy. It is not only the young hero of ‘Mitya’s Love’ who is looking for ‘that legendary world of love which he had secretly been awaiting since childhood’. Bunin’s older men too have constantly appreciative eyes for the slender waist, the neat ankle above an elegant shoe, the transparent white blouse or the coquettishly veiled face. Nor does Bunin shy away from describing nakedness – from Katya’s innocent bosom early in ‘Mitya’s Love’ to the tiny, pear-shaped breasts, thin ribs, generous hips and luxuriant hair of the girl in ‘Visiting Cards’. Occasionally he even unexpectedly titillates the reader, as for instance, when this same girl is described deriving further erotic stimulation from her awareness that other people are passing by only inches away from where she is lying with her lover, or when the chubby Zoyka in ‘Zoyka and Valeria’ tricks her companion into kissing her bared behind.

This seemingly carefree attitude, however, which curiously anticipates the permissiveness of the decade after Bunin’s death, is not the whole picture. ‘Love is no simple episode in our lives,’ reads Ivlev, the hero of ‘The Primer of Love’, in the ancient volume from which the story takes its title, and indeed, for Bunin the consequences of love (or even of a brief sexual encounter, as in ‘Sunstroke’) may be not only profound and enduring, but even ultimately destructive. In story after story sexual entanglements drive Bunin’s characters to desolation, madness or self-destruction. An older-fashioned and deeper morality than permissiveness seems to dictate that in this area of poetic experience rapture has to be paid for, and we are reminded, more forcibly than elsewhere, of our fundamental human fragility.

Bunin provides his most detailed analysis of sexual derangement in ‘Mitya’s Love’, a Russian version of Goethe’s Werther. Against the ironic background of a radiantly blossoming natural world he traces with penetrating insight the inexorable steps in a poetically inclined young man’s descent from the joyful confidence of early love to nightmarish despair. This long story, Bunin’s only novella, is one of the most compelling accounts of disintegration in all modern literature.

Finally, art, especially literature, is portrayed as a constant source of delight. In Arsenev’s Life Bunin describes his own early recognition of his calling to poetry and his growing love for the literature of his native land. Later, he was often to cite with approval the words of his favourite Persian poet, Saadi’s characterization of the writer’s lot: ‘How excellent is the life spent in contemplating the beauty of the world and leaving after one the impress of one’s soul.’ And, he argues in ‘Graffiti’, the most ordinary people as well as the great writers of the world derive satisfaction from leaving behind mementoes of their emotional experiences, if only in the form of their initials carved on trees. Indeed, Bunin rarely has literary men for his fictional heroes, but he regularly introduces quotations from his favourite prose writers and poets into his stories and often makes his characters highly sensitive to literature. Thus, the young hero of ‘Mitya’s Love’ sees his personal joys and fears reflected in the poems he reads in the family library, while in the fourteen hauntingly pathetic letters which form ‘An Unknown Friend’ Bunin gives to the invisible writer’s lady admirer some of his own firmest convictions about art.

When modern Russian critics and readers call Bunin ‘the last of the classics’ they have in mind not only his nostalgic evocations of pre-revolutionary Russian life, but also his manner of writing. In his restrained and dignified way Bunin is one of the greatest stylists in the Russian language.

In the first place, his Russian is musical. Like Pushkin, Turgenev and Pasternak, he started his literary career as a poet and often commented that he did not draw a sharp line between his verse and his prose. The latter possesses of course not the regular rhythms of poetry but a subtler melodiousness which nevertheless still induces the reader to speak it aloud. Bunin claimed that prose, like verse, ‘must be in a definite key’ and spoke too about the need to establish ‘the general resonance’ of a work.

Bunin’s prose reflects the poet’s sensitivity in two further ways, in his keen eye for accurate detail and in his cool verbal precision. All short-story writers rely on significant detail, but Bunin’s images are particularly sharp, as much in his concise descriptions of, say, a haze of pollen wafting over the fields, the moon turning dark pavements into black lace or the peculiar gait of pigeons, as in his vivid extended accounts of, for example, wintry weather in the Mediterranean (‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’), a sleazy inn (‘The Riverside Tavern’), the animated quayside at Eupatoria (‘At Sea, at Night’) or a formal Parisian funeral (‘Late Hour’).

In a passage in Arsenev’s Life Bunin commented on his own extraordinarily keen senses:

... my sight was such that I could see all seven stars of the Pleiad, my hearing could catch a marmot’s whistle in the evening countryside nearly half a mile away, and I would become intoxicated by the smell of a lily-of-the-valley or of an old book …

No less miraculous than this gift was Bunin’s enduring ability throughout the thirty-three years of his life in emigration to recall with striking clarity detail after detail of his early days in Russia. Artists, he claims in ‘Night’, are distinguished by ‘an especially vivid and especially graphic sensory memory.’ One of the most convincing illustrations of this thesis is Bunin himself.

With all his linguistic genius Bunin never indulges in verbal fireworks for their own sake. No matter how violent or lyrical his subject matter may be, his language remains cool, controlled and precise – in other words classical. His early stories are more ornate and contain much lengthier descriptions than the later ones, in some of which Bunin achieves a fluent economy of diction rarely matched by any other Russian writer; ‘A Cold Autumn’, for instance, conveys in a few brief pages of the simplest language all the pathos of war and revolution and the pain and poetry of a woman’s entire life. As the émigré Russian critic Vladimir Weidlé put it, Bunin is fascinated above all by ‘the confident full weight of a sentence set firmly in its place and riveted to the thought it expresses’. In this precision, which gives a uniquely close attention to each word, says Weidlé, Bunin is superior even to Turgenev and Tolstoy.

Ironically, the refined grace of Bunin’s Russian stems in part from his very abandonment of his homeland after the revolution. Living in western Europe, he was able to avoid not only the political pressures of socialist realism but also the linguistic changes wrought by Communism. Even in his late writings his language remains that of the nineteenth-century landed gentry, now slightly old-fashioned, but possessing the poetic charm of a lost golden age.

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One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern Russian literature – not only under the Soviet regime, but from about the middle of the nineteenth century – is its moral earnestness and the prominence given to social and political questions. Bunin, however, is right outside this tradition. His characters express no interest in the organization of society and say almost nothing about either politics or morality. Bunin does not try to educate his readers and, unlike his admired and envied master Tolstoy, he was never a repentant nobleman striving to expiate his sense of guilt over his privileged position in pre-revolutionary Russian society. From the beginning Bunin was above all a literary craftsman whose first concern was to produce elegantly shaped works of art.

On top of this, his enjoyment of the poetry of life and his hedonistic delight in the simpler pleasures of existence – food, drink, sunshine, good conversation, travel, flirtation – are so direct and are accompanied throughout by such an openly expressed sense of wonder at the splendour of it all that even the darker experiences in his fiction are embraced within a pervasive feeling of gratitude. Reading Bunin is always uplifting because his work, more convincingly than that of any other Russian writer except perhaps Pushkin, confirms Pasternak’s assertion that ‘art, even tragedy, is an account of the happiness of being alive.’

David Richards

Exeter, 1984 and 1986

THE GENTLEMAN FROM SAN FRANCISCO

Translated by David Richards

The gentleman from San Francisco – no one remembered his name either in Naples or on Capri – was travelling to the Old World for two whole years, with his wife and daughter, purely for entertainment.

He was firmly convinced that he possessed a perfect right to rest, pleasures and an exclusively first-class tour. His justification for this was first that he was rich and secondly that he was only just beginning to live, in spite of his fifty-eight years. Until now he had not lived, but merely existed, true not at all badly, but still resting all his hopes on the future. He had worked tirelessly – the Chinese coolies whom he had enlisted in their thousands to labour for him knew only too well what that meant! – and at last he saw that he had achieved much, almost overhauling those whom he had accepted as models, and decided to take a break. People in the circle to which he belonged tended to start enjoying life with a voyage to Europe, India or Egypt. He too resolved to do the same. Of course he meant primarily to reward himself for his years of labour, but he was also happy for his wife and daughter. His wife had never been particularly sensitive, but all middle-aged American women are keen travellers. As for his daughter, a somewhat ailing girl of marriageable age, for her the journey was frankly essential – quite apart from the benefit to her health, didn’t journeys sometimes provide opportunities for happy meetings? One can find oneself sitting at table or admiring frescoes next to a multi-millionaire.

The gentleman from San Francisco had worked out an extensive itinerary. In December and January he was hoping to enjoy the sun of Southern Italy, the monuments of antiquity, the tarantella, the serenades of wandering musicians and also – something to which men of his age are particularly susceptible – the love of young Neapolitan girls, even if it should not be given entirely disinterestedly; he planned spending carnival time in Nice and Monte Carlo, where at that season the most select company gathers to indulge in motor-car and yacht racing, in roulette, in what is commonly called flirtation, or in pigeon-shooting – against the background of a forget-me-not-blue sea, birds very prettily soar up into the air from cages on emerald lawns, immediately to thud down on to the ground like little white bundles; he intended devoting the beginning of March to Florence, and then towards Holy Week he was to travel to Rome to hear a Miserere; his plans also included Venice and Paris, a bull-fight in Seville, sea-bathing in the British Isles, then Athens, Constantinople, Palestine, Egypt, and even Japan – the last of course on the return journey … And at first everything went splendidly.

It was the end of November, and until they reached Gibraltar they had to sail through an icy murk alternating with flurries of wet snow, but they sailed perfectly safely. The passengers were numerous, but the liner, the famous Atlantis, was like an enormous hotel with every luxury – an all-night bar, Turkish baths and its own newspaper – and life aboard followed a strictly measured routine. They would get up early to the sound of a bugle which echoed sharply down the passageways at that shadowy hour when the slow, bleak dawn broke over the grey-green watery waste swelling heavily in the mist; donning their flannel dressing-gowns, they drank coffee, chocolate or cocoa; then they took baths and did exercises to stimulate their appetites and a feeling of well-being; they washed, dressed and went to breakfast; it was the done thing until eleven to stroll briskly about the deck, inhaling the cold ocean freshness, or to play shuffleboard and other games to stimulate their appetites anew, and at eleven to fortify themselves with broth and sandwiches; once fortified, they would contentedly read the newspaper and placidly await lunch, which was still more nourishing and varied than breakfast; the next two hours were devoted to rest; for this all the decks were covered with long cane chairs on which the travellers lay, wrapped in rugs, and either gazed at the cloudy sky and the foaming ridges which appeared fleetingly at the side of the ship or lapsed into a sweet somnolence; between four and five, glowing and cheerful, they were regaled with strong perfumed tea and biscuits; at seven bugle calls would herald that which constituted the supreme aim and consummation of their existence … And at this point the gentleman from San Francisco would hurry to his luxurious cabin to dress for dinner.

In the evenings the portholes on the many decks of the Atlantis stared into the darkness like countless fiery eyes, and a great multitude of servants worked in the kitchens, sculleries and wine-stores. The ocean running outside was awesome, but no one gave it a thought, firmly trusting to the power exercised over it by the captain, a red-haired man of monstrous height and weight who always seemed half-asleep; in his uniform with its heavy gold braid he looked like an enormous idol, and very rarely emerged from his mysterious quarters to show himself to the passengers. Every few minutes a siren on the forecastle would emit moans of infernal despair or yelp with frenzied malice, but very few of the diners heard that siren, muffled as it was by the sound of a fine string orchestra playing elegantly and tirelessly in the two-toned dining-room which was suffused with a festive light and packed with décolleté ladies, men in tails and dinner-jackets, slender waiters and polite maîtres d’hôtel, one of whom, the one who took orders only for wine, even paraded with a chain round his neck, like a lord mayor. The gentleman from San Francisco’s dinner-jacket and starched linen made him look much younger. Dry, short, wrongly cut but firmly sewn, he sat in the pearly-gold radiance of that palatial dining-room behind a bottle of wine, a whole row of delicate glasses and a lush display of hyacinths. There was something Mongolian about his sallow face with its trimmed silvery moustache; his big teeth gleamed with gold fillings and his strong bald head glistened like old ivory. His wife, a large, solid, reserved woman, was attired expensively, but appropriately for her age; his daughter, tall and slender with magnificent, superbly coiffured hair, breath redolent of violet water and the tiniest of pink pimples by her lips and between her lightly powdered shoulder-blades, wore a dress which was elaborate but light, transparent and innocently revealing. Dinner lasted over an hour, and after dinner the ballroom offered dancing; during this the men, including of course the gentleman from San Francisco, put their feet up, smoked Havana cigars until their faces grew crimson and drank liqueurs from the bar manned by negroes in red waistcoats and with eyes like shelled hard-boiled eggs. The mountainous black ocean waves ran booming outside while the snowstorm whistled powerfully through the burdened rigging, and the whole liner would shudder as it strove against both storm and waves, like a plough turning over the ocean’s heaving mass which incessantly seethed and soared up with lappets of foam; the siren, muffled by the mist, groaned in mortal anguish; the men on watch froze in the cold and felt their minds wandering from over-concentrated attention; the underwater depths of the liner, where gigantic furnaces voicelessly cackled and with their candescent gorges devoured the piles of coal clangorously shovelled into them by half-naked men who were bathed in acrid, dirty sweat and lurid from the flames, were like the torrid dark bowels of the last, ninth circle of the inferno; but in the bar the passengers jauntily put their feet up on the arms of chairs, decanted brandy and liqueurs and swam in waves of heady smoke; the ballroom sparkled and everything exuded light, warmth and joy; couples spun round in the waltz or bent in the tango, while the music in its sweetly brazen melancholy insistently implored ever one and the same thing … Among this resplendent throng was a certain great tycoon, clean-shaven and tall in his old-fashioned tails, there was a celebrated Spanish author, there was an international beauty, and there was an elegant couple very much in love whom everyone watched with curiosity and who made no attempt to conceal their happiness: he danced only with her and everything they did was so refined and charming that only the captain knew that they were paid by Lloyds to feign their love for high wages and had long been sailing on one ship after another.

In Gibraltar the sun suddenly cheered them; it was like early spring. A new passenger, the crown prince of some Asian state, travelling incognito, appeared on board the Atlantis and attracted universal interest; he was a small man, completely wooden, with broad cheeks and slit eyes; he wore gold spectacles and although there was something uninviting about the way the skin showed through the long hairs of his moustache, as on a corpse, he seemed on the whole pleasant, straightforward and modest. In the Mediterranean heavy waves were running, like many-hued peacocks’ tails; in the bright sunshine and under a perfectly clear sky they were whipped up by the tramontana which blew towards them in its cheerful fury … Then on the second day the sky began to pale and the horizon grew misty: land was approaching. Ischia and Capri suddenly came into view, and through binoculars Naples was already visible, spread out like lumps of sugar at the foot of some blue-grey mass … Many of the ladies and gentlemen had already put on light fur-trimmed coats, and the meek Chinese cabin-boys who always spoke in whispers, bandy-legged youths with jet-black pigtails down to their heels and girlishly thick eyelashes, were unhurriedly dragging rugs, walking-sticks, suitcases and overnight bags towards the companion-ways … The gentleman from San Francisco’s daughter was standing on the deck beside the prince, who by a happy coincidence had been introduced to her the previous evening, and pretending to look attentively into the distance towards where he was pointing as he rapidly explained something to her in a low voice. With his short stature he looked like a boy among the other passengers; he was not at all handsome, indeed even a little odd with his spectacles, his bowler hat, his English coat, his sparse moustache just like horsehair, and the delicate, dark, almost varnished skin which seemed to be tightly stretched over his flat face, but the girl listened to him and in her agitation took in nothing of what he said to her; her heart was beating with incomprehensible rapture: absolutely everything about him was different – his dry hands and his pure skin under which ancient royal blood flowed; even his perfectly simple, but somehow especially neat, European clothes held an inexplicable charm. The gentleman from San Francisco himself, wearing grey spats, kept eyeing the international beauty who was standing beside him, a tall blonde with an amazing figure and eyes made up in the latest Paris fashion who incessantly conversed with a tiny, cringing, hairless dog which she held on a silver chain. And his daughter, feeling vaguely embarrassed, tried not to look at him.

He had been fairly generous during the voyage and so fully accepted as genuine the solicitude shown by all who brought him food and drink, served him from dawn to dusk, anticipating his slightest desire, kept him clean and rested, carted his things, summoned porters for him and conveyed his trunks to hotels. So it had been everywhere, so it had been during the cruise, and so it was to be in Naples too. Naples was growing larger and coming closer; the band, their brass instruments gleaming, had already assembled on deck and suddenly they deafened everyone with the exultant roar of a march; the giant captain appeared on his bridge in his dress uniform and waved a hand in greeting to the passengers like a benevolent pagan god. When the Atlantis finally entered the harbour and brought its packed, many-storeyed bulk to a halt alongside the quay and the gangways clattered down, what a horde of porters and their assistants in gold-braided caps, what a horde of agents of various sorts, whistling urchins and sturdy tatterdemalions with sheafs of coloured postcards in their hands surged towards him offering their services! He smiled at the tatterdemalions as he made his way towards the car sent from the hotel where the prince too would probably be staying and calmly repeated under his breath, now in English, now in Italian:

‘Go away! Via!’

Life in Naples immediately fell into its set routine. Early in the morning there was breakfast in the gloomy dining-room, an unpromising sky and a throng of guides at the entrance to the vestibule; then came the first smiles of a warm, pinkish sun and from their high overhanging balcony they enjoyed the view: Vesuvius, completely enveloped in a radiant morning haze, the pearly-silver ripples of the bay with the faint outline of Capri on the horizon, the little donkeys running along the quay below, pulling their two-wheelers, and detachments of tiny soldiers marching off somewhere to cheerfully defiant music; then they would step out to the car and take a slow drive through the crowded, narrow, wet, corridor-like streets, between the tall, many-windowed buildings, visit deadly clean museums, where the light was as even and pleasant but as boring as snow, or inspect cold churches smelling of wax, every one of which offered exactly the same – a magnificent entrance with a heavy leather awning, and then inside a huge empty silence, the faint little flames of a seven-branched candelabrum flickering red on a lace-covered altar at the far end, a solitary old woman among the dark wooden pews, slippery memorial plaques under the feet and someone’s invariably famous Descent from the Cross; at one o’clock came lunch on San Martino, where a good few top-class people always congregated towards noon and where on one occasion the gentleman from San Francisco’s daughter was almost taken ill, as she fancied she saw the prince sitting in the dining-room, even though she knew from the newspapers that he was in Rome; at five there was tea at the hotel, in the elegant salon, made warm by its carpets and blazing fires; and then again the preparations for dinner – again the mighty, imperious boom of the gong which echoed through every floor, again the strings of silk-clad, décolleté ladies reflected in the mirrors and rustling down the stairs, again the wide and hospitably open palatial dining-room with the red-jacketed musicians on the rostrum and the black throng of waiters around the maître d’hôtel who with extraordinary dexterity ladled a thick pink soup into rows of plates … Again the dinners were so lavish with main dishes and wines and mineral waters and puddings and fruit that by eleven o’clock chambermaids were going round all the bedrooms with rubber hot-water bottles to soothe the stomachs of those who had dined.

However, December turned out less than successful. Whenever the porters were asked about the weather they only shrugged their shoulders ruefully and muttered that no one could recall another year like it, though it wasn’t the first time they had had to mutter this and cite the dreadful things happening everywhere else: unheard-of downpours and storms on the Riviera, snow in Athens, Etna also covered in snow and glowing at night, and tourists running away from Palermo to escape the frosts … Every day the morning sun was deceptive in that after midday the sky would cloud over and the rain would come down harder and colder; then the palm trees outside the entrance to the hotel would gleam like wet tin, the town would seem especially dirty and crowded, the museums excessively dull, the cigar-butts of the fat cabmen in their wind-blown rubber capes insufferably foul, the energetic cracking of their whips over the heads of their scrawny horses obviously false, the footwear of the signori sweeping the tramlines ghastly, and the women splashing through the mud with their dark heads bare to the rain outrageously short-legged; the overwhelming dampness and the stink of putrid fish coming from the sea foaming along the quay were simply indescribable. The gentleman from San Francisco and his wife began to bicker in the mornings; their daughter would look pale and complain of headaches, or recover, go into raptures over everything and be sweet and beautiful; beautiful too were those tender, complex feelings which had been aroused in her by that encounter with the ugly man of special blood, for in the end it is perhaps not all that important what awakens a maiden’s heart – money, fame, or illustrious ancestry … Everyone assured them that it was quite different in Sorrento and on Capri – warmer and sunnier, the lemon trees in blossom, manners more honest and the wine more pure. And so the family from San Francisco decided to set off with all their trunks for Capri to look it over, to tread on the stones at the sites of Tiberius’s palaces, visit the fabulous caves of the Blue Grotto, and listen to the Abruzzian bagpipers who roam all over the island for a whole month before Christmas singing praises to the Virgin Mary; then they were to move to Sorrento.

On the day of departure – that memorable day for the family from San Francisco – there was no sun from earliest morning. A thick mist covered Vesuvius down to its foot and hung grey over the leaden ripples of the sea. Capri was completely invisible, just as if it had never existed. And the little steamer making her way towards the island rolled from side to side so heavily that the family from San Francisco lay immobile on divans in the passengers’ saloon with rugs over their legs and their eyes shut from seasickness. The wife thought she was suffering the most; several times she was overcome and believed she was dying, but the stewardess, who kept running to her with a bowl and who for many years, summer and winter, had been tossed about daily by these waves and was still indefatigable, only laughed. The daughter was dreadfully pale and held a slice of lemon between her teeth. The gentleman himself, lying on his back in a full overcoat and a wide peaked cap, kept his teeth clenched the whole way; his face grew dark, his moustache turned white and he had a severe headache; during the previous few days the bad weather had led him to drink heavily in the evenings and feast his eyes on too many tableaux vivants in various nightclubs. And the rain beat against the shuddering glass panes and dripped onto the divans, the howling wind rushed against the masts and from time to time, with the help of a swooping wave, turned the little steamer almost onto her side, and every time she did so something rolled about down below with a clanging noise. It was slightly calmer at the two stopping-places, Castellammare and Sorrento, but there too the tossing was frightful, so that the shore, with all its ravines and gardens, pine trees, pink and white hotels and smoky, crisp-green mountains, appeared to rise and fall as if on a seesaw; boats banged against the sides of the steamer, the moist wind blew through the doorway and a guttural-voiced boy on a rocking barge with a pennant proclaiming Hotel Royal yelled ceaselessly, trying to entice travellers onto his boat. And the gentleman from San Francisco, feeling – as well he might – a thoroughly old man, was already thinking anguished and malicious thoughts about all those grasping and garlicky little people whom the world called Italians; opening his eyes during one of the stops and sitting up on the divan, he caught sight of a huddle of such wretched, mould-encrusted stone houses under a rocky slope, stuck together right at the water’s edge among a clutter of boats, rags, tins and brown nets, that, remembering this was the real Italy which he had come to enjoy, he was seized with despair … At last, when it was already dusk, the dark mass of the island loomed up, seemingly pitted with red lights at its base; the wind grew softer, warmer and more fragrant, and golden snakes of light from the lamps on the jetty came shooting across the waves which were rippling like black oil. Then suddenly the anchor clattered and plopped heavily into the water, and the frenzied vying shouts of the boatmen echoed around. Relief was felt at once, the lights in the saloon seemed to shine more brightly and everyone wanted to eat, drink, smoke and move about. Ten minutes later the family from San Francisco stepped down into a big wooden barge, and in another five they climbed onto the stone quay and entered a brightly-coloured little cable car which with a humming noise glided up the hillside through fields of vine-stakes, dilapidated walls and gnarled, damp orange trees, protected here and there by straw canopies, which all slipped back downhill, with their gleaming fruit and thick, lustrous foliage, past the open windows of the little compartment … The earth of Italy smells sweet after rain, and each Italian island has its own peculiar aroma.

The island of Capri was wet and dark that evening. But it momentarily revived and brightened up in places. At the top of the mountain, on the funicular’s arrival platform, a throng of those to whom it had fallen to offer a fitting welcome to the gentleman from San Francisco already stood in wait. There were other arrivals too, but none worthy of attention – a few Russians who had settled on Capri, slovenly, bearded and absent-minded men in glasses and with the collars of their worn overcoats turned up, and a band of long-legged, round-headed German youths in Tyrolean costumes, with knapsacks on their backs; they had no need of anyone’s services and were decidedly unfree with their money. The gentleman from San Francisco, who calmly kept his distance from both these groups, was immediately marked. He and his ladies were quickly helped to alight, people ran ahead to show them the way, and once again he found himself surrounded by urchins and those sturdy Capriote peasant-women who carry the cases and trunks of respectable tourists on their heads. Their wooden soles clattered across the tiny, operatic square, above which an electric globe swung in the moist wind, the horde of urchins whistled like birds and turned somersaults while the gentleman from San Francisco walked in their midst as though across a stage towards a medieval archway under a group of houses which seemed to merge into one another; beyond the archway the brightly lit entrance to the hotel was approached uphill by a tiny ringing street, with a fringe of palm trees visible above flat roofs to the left and the blue stars standing out against the black sky above and ahead. And it was as if everything in the wet little stone town on that rocky Mediterranean island had revived specifically in honour of the visitors from San Francisco, it seemed that it was they who had made the proprietor of the hotel so happy and welcoming and that it was only they who had been awaited by the Chinese gong which sent its summons to dinner booming through every floor just as they entered the vestibule.

The proprietor, an exquisitely elegant young man who gave a polite, refined bow as he greeted them, momentarily disconcerted the gentleman from San Francisco: he suddenly recalled that amidst all the turmoil that had filled his sleep the previous night he had dreamt of this very man, exactly as he stood there in that same morning-coat and with that same mirror-smooth hair. Astonished, he hesitated for a moment. But since his heart had long since ceased to harbour the smallest grain of any so-called mystical intuitions, his astonishment immediately faded. Jokingly, he told