The Pillars of Hercules

We got to Positano. Isn’t it lovely? Nello said. Yes, it was, a steep funnel-shaped town tumbled down a mountainside into a tiny port. What could be more picturesque? But it was a hard place to get to—the narrow winding road. It was expensive. It was the sort of place, like Pompeii, that you took a picture of and showed your friends and said, “We went to Positano.” And they said, “Isn’t it darling? Those gorgeous colors.” It was the Mediterranean as a museum: you went up and down, gaping at certain scenes. But really I had learned more about Italy in the crumbling village of Aliano or the seedy backstreets of Rimini.

On the way back to Sorrento and the ship Nello said he was too tired to speak English, and so, in Italian, we talked about the war.

“The Germans had food when they occupied Naples,” he said. “We didn’t have anything to eat. They threw bread away—they didn’t give any to us. And we were hungry!”

“What happened after Liberation?”

“The Allies gave us food, of course. They handed out these little boxes with food in them. Delicious.”

“So the war was all about food, right?”

“You’re making a joke!”

But I was thinking that this precise situation was happening across the Adriatic: the Serbians had food, the Bosnians had none; the war was being fought as viciously as ever.

• • •

We sailed from Sorrento after dark, and sometime in the night we passed through the Straits of Messina. This time I did not think of Scylla and Charybdis. I was absorbed in my meal and probably being a buffoon, saying, “Yes, Marco, just a touch more of the Merlot with my carpaccio.” The ship was silent and still in the morning. I pressed the button on my automatic window shade and it lifted to show me the coast of Sicily. Craning my neck, I could see Etna, and on the heights of the cliffs on the nearby shore the bright villas and flowers of Taormina.

It was so beautiful from the deck of this ship anchored in the bay that it seemed a different town from the one I had trudged around some months ago. I had been a traveler then, looking for D. H. Lawrence’s house. This time I was a tourist. I bought some ceramic pots, then I walked to the quay and showed Manny Klein how to use the public telephone.

“You’re an old pro,” he said.

Later, in the lounge, the Seabourn Spirit passengers said they were a bit disappointed in Sicily. But it wasn’t really that. It was a growing love for the ship which eventually took the form of a general reluctance to leave it, to look at any ruins, to eat ashore, or even go for a walk on the pier when the Seabourn Spirit was in a port. The ship had become home—or more than home, a luxury residence, a movable feast.

“May I suggest the Two Salmon Terrine with caviar and tomato, followed by Essence of Pigeon with Pistachio Dumplings?” the waiter, Karl, asked. “And perhaps the Game Hen with Raisin Sauce to follow?”

Karl, of Italian, German and Ethiopian ancestry, was the spit and image of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, one of whose grandmothers was a black Abyssinian.

“As I mentioned the other day, I try not to eat anything with a face,” I said. “Which is why I had the asparagus and truffles last night, and the stir-fried vegetables.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nor anything with legs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nor anything with a mother.”

“No fish, then.”

“Fish is a sort of vegetable,” I said. “Not always, but this Gravlax with mustard sauce, and the Angler Fish with Lobster Hollandaise might fall into that category.”

“Soup, sir?”

I looked at the menu again.

“I’ll try the sun-dried blueberry and champagne soup.”

For dessert I had a banana sundae with roasted banana ice cream, caramel and chocolate sauce. The man at the next table, gold buttons flashing, had just finished a plate of Flamed Bananas Madagascar and was about to work his way through a raspberry soufflé with raspberry sauce.

After dinner I went on deck and strolled in the mild air for a while. The night was so clear that from the rail I could see the lights of Sicily slipping by; the places I had labored through on the coastal trains were now merely a glowworm of winding coast, Catania, Siracusa and, farther down, at the last of Sicily, the twinkling Gulf of Noto.

It is only sixty or seventy miles from the coast of Italy to Malta, but that night it was a rough crossing, and for the first time the Seabourn rolled in the westerly swell. Sometime in the early hours there was peace again, my bed was level, and by dawn we were anchored on the quay at the edge of Valletta, in Grand Harbor, walls and turrets and watchtowers on every side. I could see the staring eyes that had been sculpted into some towers by the Crusaders as a defense against the evil eye.