Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Collected here, from a period of nearly five decades, are thirty-six of Norman Lewis's best articles. In each, his writing crackles with poker-faced wit and stylistic brilliance. As a witness to his times – the good, the bad and the absurd – he was unmatched, and his instinct for important events, and moments, was infallible. His range here includes Ibizan fishermen, an interview with Castro's executioner, the genocide of the South American indigenous tribes, a paean to Seville and his meeting with a tragic Ernest Hemingway. Lewis told Ian Fleming, who had commissioned him, that the meeting was 'a shattering experience of the kind likely to sabotage ambition'. Fortunately it didn't, and the articles assembled between these covers are compulsive, hilarious, tender and beautifully written, at times deeply upsetting and always unforgettable.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 883
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
1
A Quiet Evening
The Travels of Norman Lewis
selected and introduced by JOHN HATT
3
At first I believed in pure travel, and that it was necessary never to have a purpose…. Later I found that the discipline of writing compelled me to see more, to penetrate more deeply, to increase my understanding, and to discard a little of my ignorance.
Norman Lewis From The Changing Sky, 19594
5
6
Contents
Introduction
After founding eland in 1982 with the purpose of reviving exceptional travel literature, my earliest ambition was to bring Norman Lewis to a wider readership. Therefore Eland’s first publication was A Dragon Apparent, his wonderful account of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia before those nations were engulfed in the Vietnam war.
I went on to republish what I considered to be Norman’s four best books. After passing the Eland baton to Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson, I stayed in close touch; but, because they managed the company with such love and skill, I took a back seat. All the same, I recently beseeched them to allow me to assemble a new anthology of Norman’s best articles. They generously agreed, and this is the result.
Why was I so keen to publish this collection? The main reason was my perplexity and sadness that so much of Norman’s magical writing was languishing unread. Despite previous collections, published over several decades, many of Norman’s keenest fans were unaware of the articles that are published here. Why were they not better known?
One reason could be the difficulty of selling anthologies. A related and wider question is why Norman, revered even by so many other travel writers, was insufficiently honoured during his lifetime. There are several reasons, quite apart from the bad luck of having an unmemorable name.
Too often he was published without sufficient enthusiasm. The publisher, Collins, for instance, didn’t seem to realise that they were publishing someone whom Graham Greene has described as ‘one of the greatest writers of our century’. When I purchased the 10world English language rights in perpetuity for A Dragon Apparent, Norman’s stock had fallen so low that they were sold to me for £250. And when his agent sold me those rights, he never told me that they were also available for Norman’s masterpiece, Naples ’44.
Norman’s modesty was another reason for his lack of fame. He didn’t care to be part of any literary coterie, and he was too dignified to tolerate the degradation of the typical publicity bandwagon. But he paid a penalty. His brilliant Voices of the Old Sea, for instance, was published in 1984, soon after Eric Newby’s On the Shores of the Mediterranean. Unlike Newby’s celebrated A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, the latest book was hardly more than a potboiler, but it was universally reviewed. By contrast, Norman’s book at first failed to receive even a single review. Though Eland wasn’t the publisher, and though I was a nobody in the publishing world, I was so perturbed that I wrote to every literary editor to complain. A few reviews finally surfaced.
When eventually I purchased the rights to republish Naples ’44, I was determined that this marvellous book, so deserving of becoming a classic, should get better known. For the first time, I hired a publicist who helped promote the book, getting Norman newspaper interviews and broadcasts, including an appearance on Desert Island Discs. Before hiring the publicist I had asked Norman if he would go along with her plans. He replied, ‘I very rarely keep promises, but this time I really will try.’ He kept his promise.
For this anthology I have had the advantage of being able to select all the best articles from Norman’s entire life. None of his articles are without magic, but the necessity of earning a living meant that previous anthologies always contained some articles that were workaday rather than dazzling. None of these have been included.
Two sources have been invaluable for researching the prefaces for each article. The internet, unavailable for any previous collection, has often been a source of useful information, some of it recondite. Norman would have relished some of the discoveries, including the material about Catherine the Great’s pubic hair. An even more invaluable source has been Julian Evans’s Semi-Invisible Man, his remarkable and thorough biography of Norman. I have pillaged it mercilessly.
11Having selected the articles, a decision had to be made about their order. The obvious solution was to arrange them chronologically. But this concept didn’t really work, as Norman quite often wrote the article a long time after the event. Instead, where it makes sense, I have created clusters of subjects. Some of the clusters are geographical, but some reflect his passion for indigenous people, or his horror at their oppression, or his admiration for their resistance to the modern world’s homogeneity.
In particular, the three major articles on the dreadful plight of South America’s indigenous peoples are gathered together. The subject matter makes gruelling reading, but I felt it would be wrong to intersperse them with anything less serious. Otherwise, I have endeavoured to make the book as enjoyable as possible. Long articles are mostly interspersed with shorter ones, and the most serious with those that are more light-hearted. I had in mind that, when reading Gerald Brenan’s great book, South from Granada, I came to a dense chapter called ‘A Chapter of History’, but I persevered – without skipping – aware that the next chapter was called ‘Almeria and its Brothels’.
When I handed Eland over to Rose Baring and Barnaby Rogerson, I pleaded with them not to place introductions or prefaces in the front of the books, especially not those written by famous people. And most especially not if the introductions gave any subjective views about the quality of the book. I believe that readers should come fresh to a book, and any additional information of interest can be placed at the end. But rules are made to be broken; and having been allowed editorial control, I am taking advantage to explain my enthusiasm for this conclusive collection of Norman’s articles.
Three ingredients are necessary for an author to be great. To use a well-worn metaphor – from the era of gambling on fruit-machines – you need all three lemons in a row to hit the jackpot. With two lemons, the author may write an adequate book but, for a book to be great, all three lemons must swing into view. What are these three lemons?
12The first one is obvious: content. Many travel writers manage only one good book, at the most. And, if it is a successful book, their subsequent ones are all too often the result of discussion with a publisher who is eager for a subsequent success. The writers may have no genuine communication with the people they travel among – perhaps because they are constantly on the move, or because they don’t speak the language, or because their curiosity isn’t sufficient. Too often, their prime reason for travelling is only to produce a book.
Norman was the very opposite: his addiction to travel preceded any idea of writing about his journeys. In his foreword to The Changing Sky he wrote, ‘Travel came before writing. There was a time when I felt that all I wanted from life was to be allowed to remain a perpetual spectator of changing scenes. I managed my meagre supply of money so as to be able to surrender myself as much as possible to this addiction; and charged with a wonderful ignorance I went abroad by third-class train, country bus, on foot, by canoe, by tramp steamer, and by Arab dhow …When I began to write, it was probably, at least in part, an attempt to imprison some essence of the experiences, the images which were always slipping, fading, dissolving, taking flight.’
The second lemon is the possession of a literary gene – something that is, so to speak, God-given, rather than learnt. Even a combination of cleverness and hard work can’t guarantee writing that sings. Take academics: although mostly clever, they can rarely produce prose that is a pleasure to read. And if one of their number succeeds in writing a bestseller, the others get crazed with jealousy. Of course, Norman was a painstaking writer, who wrote almost every morning of his life, but he had an innate skill that was dazzling. One sign of a born-writer is their use of metaphor – a metaphor that manages to vividly sum up a concept, without being strained. Consider Norman’s description of a Latin American tyranny: ‘The Paraguayan dictatorship had not been above sending planes and tanks to kill a hundred or so, but for the moment it had fallen like a digesting crocodile into a kind of watchful inactivity.’
13The third lemon, as intangible as the literary gene, is the character of the writer. So much of writing is ultimately autobiographical, whether camouflaged or overt. In Norman’s case his wisdom, passion and wit shine through. A revealing test of character is the relationship between travel writers and their photographers, which can often be fraught, especially during testing journeys. It is no exaggeration to say that – with the sole exception of Lord Snowdon – Norman formed warm and strong bonds with all his accompanying photographers.
One aspect of character is what one might call ‘soul’. Soul overlaps with ‘empathy’ but it is something more. Perhaps it also overlaps with another hard-to-define word, ‘duende’, so cherished by Lorca, Norman’s favourite poet. I can think of travel writers who produce elegant, impeccable prose, but their cold heart or mundane brain results in a lack of soul, thus producing books that are adequate, sometimes admirable, but never great. Thirty years after publication they will mostly be forgotten. But Norman did have ‘soul’, and when, for instance, he writes about genocide in South America, the reader can sense that this isn’t mere journalism, but that he is motivated by a fiery passion.
So the three lemons for writing to be great are content, inherent writing skill, and the author’s character. These are essentials. But let me mix the metaphor – as Norman would never have done – and claim that the three lemons are the ingredients of a cake, and thus add two cherries to decorate its icing.
The first cherry is Norman’s magnificent sense of humour. It is easy to miss because his humour is often subtle, deadpan, dry, and sometimes nearly invisible; but it is there on almost every page, even the darkest ones.
The second is his acute power of observation. Norman’s son, Gawaine, who travelled with him along the Sumatran coast, was astounded by what his father noticed on a journey that Gawaine had considered unfruitful, even boring. I had a similar experience. Norman once told me that he was going on a holiday with his wife, Lesley, to Andalusia. Because I had recently made a similar trip, I 14advised them to visit an unusual nobleman’s castle that was open to the public. When Norman returned, he described his visit to the castle with such vividness that I felt ashamed by how much I had failed to notice. Ian Fleming (who features in this anthology) spotted Norman’s power of observation, and in a BBC conversation with Raymond Chandler said, ‘Norman Lewis has got an extraordinary visual eye. Photography is one of his main hobbies and he’s got this astonishingly clear eye for detail and situation. A very remarkable man.’
Another striking aspect of this anthology is Norman’s unbeatable range. Can any other travel writer compete with someone who interviews Castro’s executioner, investigates bandits in Sardinia, exposes genocide in Brazil, issues one of the earliest warnings of a climate calamity, lampoons tourism in Panama, provokes Ernest Hemingway in Havana, and spends whole summers among the fishermen in a still-traditional Ibiza?
In an unashamedly personal introduction, I can’t resist ending on a personal note. Julian Evans interviewed me for Norman’s biography, recording some of my observations. Although I have no memory of the following, I am so grateful to have this opportunity to repeat what I once said.
‘I had these long, long telephone calls with Norman. He was the master of the fruitful telephone conversation, there would always be interesting or wise things to come out of it. And the thing was, I might as well just say it now, in my life he was one of the most remarkable people I ever met. I think that often one’s interest in somebody or affection, or whatever, can be gauged by how often you say to yourself, “Oh I’d like to tell some particular person that; it would interest them or make them laugh or they would be able to top it with something interesting themselves.” And very, very often I thought I must tell Norman something. He was completely unlike anybody I had ever known, and a tremendous addition to my life.’
John Hatt
Cumbria, 2024
A Quiet Evening in Huehuetenango
Norman Lewis first visited Guatemala in 1946. In this article, written nine years later, he arrived soon after a CIA-backed coup overthrew the elected government.
He mentions that his reason for the visit was to gather background material for a novel. Indeed soon afterwards he wrote The Volcanoes Above Us, published in 1957. It was enthusiastically reviewed, in several cases by famous writers such as V. S. Pritchett and Cyril Connolly. It may have been Lewis’s most successful novel, and Russian readers especially took it to heart, buying more than two million copies.
Guatemala consistently inspired Lewis. The hero of The Volcanoes Above Us contends that ‘For anyone who has lived in Guatemala, other countries, by contrast, are lacking in savour’.
First published in the New Yorker, July 13, 1956
In the bleak depths of an interminable English winter, I was suddenly seized with an almost physical craving to write a novel having as its background the tropical jungles and volcanoes of Central America. Having succeeded in persuading my publishers that this would be a good thing from both our points of view, I boarded a plane at London Airport one morose evening in January, and two days later I was in Guatemala City. I chose Guatemala because I had been there before and knew something about it, but also because all that one thinks of as typical of the Central-American scene – primitive Indians, Mayan ruins, the 16wrecks of grandiose Spanish colonial cities – is found there in the purest concentration.
For three weeks I did my best to absorb some of the atmosphere of life in seedy banana ports of the Caribbean and the Pacific, where bored men in big hats still occasionally pull guns on each other. I went hunting in jungles said to abound with jaguars and tapir without shooting anything more impressive than a species of giant rat. I talked with wily politicians of the country, survivors of half-a-dozen revolutions, and took tea with exiled fellow-countrymen on isolated coffee plantations, who had lived so long among the Indians that they sometimes stopped in mid-sentence to translate their very proper English sentiments from the Spanish in which they now thought.
My final trip was to the far north of the country, the remote and mountainous area beyond Huehuetenango, which lies just south of the Mexican state of Chiapas and is reached after three hundred miles of infamous roads and stupendous scenery. Here under the Cuchumatanes, the ultimate peaks of Guatemala, even the onslaught of the Spanish conquistadors faltered and collapsed. And here the mountain tribes were finally left in peace, to live on in the harsh but free existence of the Stone Age, touched only by the outward forms of Christianity, consoled in secret by the ancient gods, and rejecting with all their might the overtures of Western civilisation.
In the early afternoon of the fourth day, my taxi, driven by a town Indian from Guatemala City called Calmo, reached the top of the 12,000-foot pass overlooking the valley of Huehuetenango. We stopped here to let the engine cool and noticing that the trees in this windswept place were covered with orchids, I astounded Calmo by suggesting we should pick some. ‘Flowers?’ he said. ‘Where? They don’t grow at this height!’ I stumbled, weak and breathless from the altitude, up the hillside towards an oak, loaded with vermilion-flowered bromeliads. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you mean the parasitos. Well, certainly, if you like, sir. When you said flowers, I didn’t realise... We call these weeds – tree-killers.’ Calmo was not only an intrepid driver, but a qualified guide supplied by the State Tourist Office. He 17spoke a version of English which so effectively stripped the meaning from his remarks that I steered him back to Spanish whenever I could. For the rest, he was gentle, sad-looking and pious, dividing his free time between visits to churches and – although well into middle age – running after women.
We got into Huehuetenango at four in the afternoon, and it turned out to be an earthquake town, with corrugated-iron roofs on fine churches, squat houses iced over with multicoloured stuccoes, and a great number of pubs having such names as ‘I Await Thee on Thy Return’. We went into one of these, each of us carrying an armful of orchids, Calmo probably hoping that no one he knew would see him bothering himself with such contemptible weeds. The woman who brought the beer had a Mayan face, flat-featured but handsome, and full of inherited tragedy. Calmo told her in his most dignified way, ‘This I say with all sincerity. I want to come back to this place and marry you.’ The woman said, ‘Ah bueno,’ shaking off the compliment as if an invisible fly had settled on her cheek. She wore a massive wedding ring, and there were several children about the floor.
After that, Calmo wanted to go into the cathedral to pray for success in that week’s lottery. The cathedral had just been freshly decorated for the pre-Lenten festival with huge bouquets of imitation flowers, their stiff petals varnished, and dusted over with powdered glass. Indians were lighting candles among the little separate patches of red and white blossoms that they had spread out on the flags to symbolise the living and the dead. Hundreds of candles glimmered in the obscurity of the cleared space where the Indians worship in their own way in the Christian churches, grouped in whispering semicircles round the candles, while their shamans passed from group to group, swinging incense-burners and muttering magical formulas. The Indians were dressed in the frozen fashions of the early sixteenth century: the striped breeches of Castilian peasants, the habits of the first few Franciscans who had scaled the heights to reach their villages, the cod-pieces of Alvarado’s ferocious soldiery. They had left their babies hidden 18in the old people’s care in the mountain caves, still remembering the days before the conquest, when at this season the rain god had taken the children for his annual sacrifice. These Indians were still surrounded by a world of magic and illusion, living characters in a Grimm’s fairytale of our day in which the whites they see when they come down to the towns are enchanters and werewolves, who can kill with a glance, but are themselves immortal.
We went out into the sunshine again. A meteorite shower of parakeets fell screeching across the patch of sky stretched over the plaza. Soldiers, shrunken away in their American uniforms, were fishing in space with their rifles over the blood-red balustrade of the town hall, which was also their barracks. The green bell in the cathedral tower clanked five times, and the sleepers on the stone benches stirred a little in the vast shade of their sombreros. Calmo woke up an ice-cream vendor, bought a cornet, then said, ‘I cannot eat it. The hot for my teeth is too great.’ When speaking English he found special difficulty in distinguishing between opposites such as heat and cold.
We sat down in the car to decide what to do with the evening. The sleepiness of the place was beginning to paralyse us. Nothing stirred, but the vultures were waving their scarves of shadow over the flower beds. Calmo said, ‘Yesterday a market-day, tomorrow a procession; so that today we have no prospect but an early night. There is really nothing to do.’ As he spoke, a man came riding into the plaza on a tall, bony horse. The man looked like an Englishman on his way to a fancy-dress ball: he was lean, pink-cheeked, mildly aloof of expression, and his improbable costume of black leather with silver facings had clearly been hired out too often and was on the loose side for its present wearer. He was carrying a bundle of what looked like yard-brooms wrapped up in coloured paper. Calmo explained that these would be rockets for use in the next day’s celebrations. The clip-clop of the hooves died away, and the silence came down like a drop-curtain. Huehuetenango was a place of apathetic beauty, built out of the ruin of a devastated Indian city. There was a sadness, a sense of forgotten tragedy in the air; and here 19it seemed that silence was a part of the natural condition. As Calmo had so often said, ‘We Indians are a reserved people. Even in our fiestas. Our joys and our weepings are hidden away inside: for us only, you understand – not for the world.’
There was a notice over the hotel door that said, ‘Distinction, Atmosphere and Sympathy’. The atmosphere was all-pervasive. The garden had been turned into a floral jungle encircled by borders of Pepsi-Cola bottles stuck neck-down in the earth. Quite ordinary flowers like stocks and hollyhocks were throttling each other in a savage struggle for living space, and hummingbirds like monstrous bees zoomed about the agonised sea of blossom. Goldfish bowls containing roses hideously pickled in preserving fluid, stood on every table-top. The bedroom towels were embroidered with the words, ‘Sleep My Beloved’.
Food in this hotel was American Plan – words which have now been accepted into the Spanish vocabulary of Central America. They no longer refer to the system of charging for accommodation inclusive of meals, but describe a special kind of food itself – the hygienic but emasculated fare supposed to be preferred by American visitors, and now generally adopted on the strength of what are believed to be its medicinal and semi-magical properties. This time American Plan meant tinned soup, spaghetti, boiled beef and Californian peaches. The whole loaf of bread and a half-pound of butter of a generation ago had wasted away to two slices of toast and a pat of margarine. The milk was the product of Contented Cows, served in the original tin as a guarantee of the absence of dangerous freshness. We got through the boring ritual of dinner as soon as we could. The other guests – businessmen drawn from the elite ten percent of pure white stock – were still inclined to congratulate one another on the downfall of the last government, which had not been liked in commercial circles. ‘A minimum wage. And why not? – I’d be the first. But when all’s said and done, friends, what happens when you give an Indian more than forty cents for a day’s work? You know as well as I do. He doesn’t show up the next day – that’s all. They’ve got to be educated up to it.’
20After dinner I resigned myself to an early evening, and went to bed under a religious picture consisting of an eye that projected rays in every direction, and beneath it the question: ‘What is a moment of pleasure weighed in the scales against an eternity of punishment?’ I had hardly dozed off when I was awakened by an explosion. I got up and opened the window. The street had filled up with people who were all going in the same direction and chattering excitedly. A siren wailed and a motorcycle policeman went deafeningly past, snaking in and out of the crowd. There was another explosion and, as this was the homeland of revolutions, it was natural to assume that one had started. I dressed and went out into the courtyard, where the hotel boy was throwing a bayonet at an anatomical chart given away with a Mexican journal devoted to home medicine. The boy said that so far as he knew there had been no pronunciamento, and the bangs were probably someone celebrating his saint’s day. I then remembered the lean horseman.
As the tumult showed no signs of abating, I walked down to the plaza, which had filled up with blank-faced Indians moving slowly round in an anti-clockwise direction as if stirred up by some gigantic invisible spoon. There were frequent scuffles and outcries as young men singled out girls from the promenading groups, breaking coloured eggs on their heads, and rubbing the contents well into the thick black hair. The eggs were being sold by the basketful all over the plaza, and they turned out to have been emptied, refilled with some brittle, wafer-like substance, repaired and then painted. When a girl sometimes returned the compliment, the favoured gallant stopped to bow, and said: ‘Muchas gracias.’
Calmo, whom I soon ran into, his jacket pockets bulging with eggs, said it looked as if there was going to be a fiesta after all. He couldn’t think why. There was really no excuse for it. The fashionable town-Indians, most of them shopkeepers, had turned out in all their finery, headed by the ‘Queen of Huehuetenango’ herself – a splendidly flouncy creature with ribbon-entwined pigtails down to her thighs, who was said to draw her revenues from a maison21de rendezvous possessing radioactive baths. There was a sedate sprinkling of whites, hatted and begloved for the occasion.
Merchants had put up their stalls and were offering sugar skulls, holy pictures, plastic space-guns, and a remedy for heartsickness which is a speciality of Huehuetenango and tastes like inferior port. We found the lean horseman launching his rockets in military fashion from a wooden rack-like contraption. They were aimed so as to hiss as alarmingly low as possible over the heads of the crowds, showering them with sparks; sometimes they cleared the building opposite and sometimes they didn’t. Other enthusiasts were discharging mortaretes, miniature flying bombs, which leaped two or three hundred feet straight up into the air before exploding with an ear-stunning crack. The motorcycle policeman on his scarlet Harley-Davidson with wide-open exhaust, and eight front and six rear lights, came weaving and bellowing round the plaza at intervals of about a minute, while a travelling movie-show was using part of the cathedral’s baroque façade as the screen for a venerable Mexican film called Ay mi Jalisco featuring a great deal of gunplay.
A curious hollow structure looking like a cupola sliced in half had been built on the top of the town hall, and about this time powerful lights came on in its interior and nine sad-faced men in dark suits entered it by an invisible door, carrying what looked like several grand pianos. A moment later these pieces of furniture had been placed end to end to form an enormous marimba, under an illuminated sign that said ‘Musica Civica’. A cosmic voice coughed electrically and then announced that in response to the esteemed public’s many requests the municipal orchestra would have pleasure in rendering a selection of notable composers’ works. Eighteen hammers then came down on the keys with a responding opening flourish, and the giant marimba raced into an athletic version of ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’.
Calmo and I took refuge from the torrent of sound in a tavern called The Little Chain of Gold. It was a place of great charm containing a shrine and a newly installed jukebox in addition to the usual accessories. The main room was decorated with beautiful 22calendars given away by Guatemalan bus companies, and a couple of propaganda pictures of mutilated corpses put out by the new government after the last revolution. The Little Chain advertised the excellence of its ‘hotsdoogs’. Most of its customers were preparados, Indians who had done military service and had rejected their tribal costumes in favour of brightly coloured imitations of American army uniforms. Some of them added a slightly sinister touch to their gay ensembles of reds and blues by covering the lower part of their faces with black cloths, a harmless freak of fashion which I was told had originated in a desire to breathe in as little dust as possible when footslogging along the country roads.
Calmo said that the main difference between a preparado and a tribal Indian was that the preparado, who had acquired a civilised taste for whisky, couldn’t afford to get drunk so often as an uncivilised drinker of aguardiente.
We drank the aguardiente. It smelt of ether and had a fierce laboratory flavour. Every time the door opened the marimba music pressed on our eardrums. Calmo made an attempt to detain one of the serving girls. ‘Don’t go away, little treasure, and I’ll bring you some flowers from the gardens in the plaza, whatever they fine me.’ He received so baleful a stare for his pains that he dropped the girl’s hand as if she had bitten him. At last the hour of civic music ran out. From where we sat, we saw that the Mexican outlaws had ceased to gallop across the cathedral wall. The crowds had thinned into groups of stubborn drunkards. Calmo was becoming uneasy. ‘In my opinion it is better to go. These people are very peace-loving, but when they become drunk they sometimes assassinate each other in places like this. Not for malicious reasons, understand me, but as the result of wagers or to demonstrate the accuracy of their aim with the various firearms they possess.’
We paid our bill and had just got up when the door was flung open and three of the toughest-looking desperadoes I had ever seen reeled in. These were no shrinking Indians, but hard-muscled ladinos, half-breeds who carried in their faces all the Indian’s capacity for resentment but none of his fear. They wore machetes as big as 23naval cutlasses in their belts. For a moment they blocked the doorway eyeing the company with suspicion and distaste, then one of them spotted the jukebox, which was still a rarity in this part of the world. His expression softened and he made for our table putting each foot down carefully as if afraid of blundering into quicksands. He bowed. ‘Forgive me for addressing you, sir, but are you familiar with the method of manipulating the machine over there?’
I said I was.
‘Perhaps then you could inform me whether the selection of discs includes a marimba?’
I went over to the jukebox. These ladinos, I thought, would still be living the frontier life of the last century; a breed of tough, illiterate outcasts, picking up a livelihood as best they could, smugglers and gunmen if pushed to it, ready, as it seemed from the frequent newspaper reports, to hack each other – or the lonely traveller – to pieces for a few dollars, and yet with it a tremendous, almost deadly punctiliousness in ordinary matters of social intercourse. I studied the typewritten list in Spanish. There were several marimbas. The ladino looked relieved. He conferred in an undertone with the other two fugitives from justice, came back, bowed again, and handed me a Guatemalan ten-cent piece. ‘If you could induce the machine to play “Mortal Sin” for us, we should be much indebted.’
I returned the ladino five cents change, found a US nickel – which is fairly common currency in Guatemala – and put it in the slot, while the three ladinos edged forward, studiously casual but eager to watch the reptilian mechanical gropings by which their choice was singled out and manoeuvred into the playing position. ‘Pecado Mortal’ turned out to be a rollicking son – a kind of paso doble – executed with the desperate energy of which the sad music-makers of Central America are so prodigal.
Calmo and I were halfway through the door when I felt a tap on the shoulder. The principal bandit was insisting that we join him for a drink. ‘Otherwise, my friends and I would feel hurt, gentlemen.’ He laid bare his teeth in a thin, bitter smile. We went back and sat down again. While he was getting the drinks Calmo said, ‘In the education 24of our people the most important thing taught after religion is urbanidad – good manners. Even those who have no schooling are taught this. I do not think that we should risk offending these men by showing a desire to leave before they do.’ A moment later our bandit was back with double aguardientes and a palmful of salt for us to lick in the proper manner, between gulps. The music stopped, and his face clouded with disappointment. Behind him a lieutenant loomed, swaying slightly, eyes narrowed like a Mongolian sage peering into the depths of a crystal, mouth tightened by the way life had gone. He was holding a coin. ‘Might I trouble you to perform the same service for me, sir?’ he asked politely.
It turned out that the second mestizo wanted to hear ‘Mortal Sin’ again. ‘It is remarkable,’ he said, ‘and most inspiring. I do not think it can be bettered.’ The three tough hombres moved away uncertainly towards the jukebox again, simple wonderment struggling beneath the native caution of their expressions. The needle crackled in the ruined grooves, and we heard the over-familiar overture of ear-splitting chords. Someone found the volume control and turned it up fully. Every object in the room was united in a tingling vibration. The second bandit drew his machete with the smooth, practised flourish of a Japanese swordsman, and scooped the cork out of a fresh bottle of aguardiente with a twist of its point. Two more members of the band stood waiting, coins in hand.
‘Mortal Sin’ had been played five times, and we were still chained by the polite usage of Central America to our chairs, still gulping down aguardiente and licking the salt off our palms, when it suddenly occurred to me that it was unreasonable that an electric train should be rumbling through a subway immediately beneath us in Huehuetenango. I got up, grinning politely at our hosts, and, balancing the liquid in my glass, went to the door. The lamps in the plaza jogged about like spots in front of my eyes, and then, coming through the muffled din from The Little Chain of Gold, I heard a noise like very heavy furniture being moved about in uncarpeted rooms somewhere in space. The world shifted slightly, softened, rippled, and there was an aerial tinkling of shattered glass. I felt 25a brief unreasoning stab of the kind of panic that comes when in a nightmare one suddenly begins a fall into endless darkness. Aguardiente from my glass splashed on my hand, and at that moment all the lights went out and the music stopped with a defeated growl. The door of The Little Chain opened and Calmo and one of the ladinos burst through it into the sudden crisp stillness and the moonlight. Calmo had taken the ladino by the forearm and the shoulder – ‘And so my friend we go now to buy candles. Patience – we shall soon return.’
‘But in the absence of electricity,’ the ladino grumbled sadly, ‘the machine no longer functions.’
‘Perhaps they will restore the light quickly,’ Calmo said.
‘In that case we shall play the machine again. We will spend the whole night drinking and playing the machine.’ The ladino waved in salutation and fell back through the doorway of The Little Chain.
We moved off quickly under the petrified foliage of the plaza. Nothing stirred. The world was solid under our feet again. A coyote barked several times sounding as if it were in the next street, while a distant clock chimed sweetly an incorrect hour.
‘A quiet evening,’ I remarked. ‘With just one small earthquake thrown in.’
‘A tremor, not an earthquake,’ Calmo said. ‘An earthquake must last at least half a minute. This was a shaking of secondary importance.’
There was a pause while he translated his next sentence into English. He then said: ‘Sometimes earthquakes may endure for a minute, or even two minutes. In that case it is funny...No, not funny, I mean very serious.’
The Snakes of Cocullo
So much of the traditional life witnessed by Lewis has vanished, but remarkably this outlandish festival, which he visited in 1989, seems to have thrived. You can see photographs and read a description by googling ‘abruzzissimo ancient snake festival’. A most atmospheric video of the festival can also be found by googling ‘Nick Hankins cocullo, Italy Magazine’. In the accompanying brief article, the author reveals that the Toothache Bell, mentioned by Lewis in the article, is still now firmly in use, despite having been banished by the Church.
Edward Burman, a writer living at L’Aquila, had been asked by a friend to show Lewis around. Burman and Lewis subsequently became friends, though Burman told Lewis’s biographer that his first impression was of ‘a dull old man bent over the bar’. He changed his mind over the subsequent days. He observed Lewis ‘talking to shepherds, old ladies, and priests. I watched him coax information from stubborn interviewees with the most innocent-sounding questions’.
First published in the Independent, October 21, 1989
Cocullo sits on a hilltop in abruzzo, on a level with Rome, but under the Apennines. This is a land of dark, lumpy mountains, empty roads threading through the valleys, and nothing in the silent fields to attract even carrion birds. An occasional village is crammed on to the top of a steep rock pinnacle, some half-empty, some wholly deserted. Fragments of the old southern customs survive where there are still inhabitants. Guaratrici (female 27healers) and prefiche (professional mourners) still serve local needs. Makers of amulets and those who concoct love philtres carry on a semi-clandestine trade. This is the part of Italy where magic and Christian faith are hardly separable. The ‘Catholicism of the people’ exists alongside the authorised version of the religion.
It is very much a family affair. The saints are still rewarded for their successful intercession in village matters, blamed for failures, and carried in procession to pay one another courtesy visits. Some houses have protective formulae against the Evil Eye carved in the stone over their doors.
The fame of Cocullo lies in the survival here of a snake-cult dating from pre-Roman worship of Angizia, goddess of agriculture and snake-charming in the ancient Marsican culture. On 19 March every year, the young men who have inherited or acquired the intuitions and skills required in the capture and domination of snakes go into the surrounding mountains for the ritual of the annual hunt. The snakes taken at this time are brought back to the village where – treated with a certain indulgence, even affection – they are prepared to adopt the principal role in the festival held on the first Thursday of May, when the procession of the serpari (snake-men) takes place. Before this they receive the blessing of the Church, and are then ‘offered’ to San Domenico. The saint – also a snake-charmer in his time – arrived in Cocullo in ad996, to take over officially from the goddess. The ritual, however, seems to have continued much as before.
The pagan goings-on at Cocullo seem to have been practically unnoticed even in most of Italy until a visit paid to the village in 1909 at the time of its snake festival by a Mr W. H. Woodward, who thereafter gave an account of his adventures in the Manchester Guardian. Mr Woodward arrived as the proceedings were about to start. Making straight for the church, he was surprised to find, a half-hour before High Mass was due to be celebrated, that a number of shepherds were kneeling at the altar rail, each with several huge white wolfhounds held on a leash, their muzzles resting on the rail. The dogs were there to be blessed and at the same time to be ‘reverently’ touched by a relic 28left by San Domenico when taking his departure from the village. This took the form of a shoe from his mule. The shoe was employed as a talisman against rabies. An even more cherished gift made by the saint, Mr Woodward was told, was a tooth he had wrenched from his jaw on the moment of parting. Ever since, sufferers from toothache in Cocullo had been able to cure themselves by kissing the relic, attaching a cord to the troublesome tooth and then using this to pull the special toothache bell in the church.
There were more surprises in store for Mr Woodward. Next day the procession took place, and he was startled by the emergence from the church of the image of San Domenico entwined with numerous snakes, and followed by members of the clergy, each carrying a serpent. It seems likely that vipers were present among the snakes carried at this time, for Mr Woodward goes on, ‘The crowd hails him with prayers and invocations. Despite the seeming peril, hands are put forward to touch the saint... The venerable priest under the canopy carried his votive serpent with no sense of horror as being an evil thing, but rather with a caressing friendliness...’
This was all too much for the pillars of the established Church in Italy. The report was brought to the notice of the Bishop of L’Aquila, who had jurisdiction over the region: he went into scandalised action. It was deemed inadvisable to attempt the total suppression of a ceremony that had been going on for more than two thousand years, so the procession was allowed to stay, but other ‘barbarous superstitions’ practised in Cocullo were banned. Thenceforward no animal was to be taken into the church, and the toothache bell was banished. Also abolished was the custom by which earth dug from a cave in which San Domenico, a hermit, had preferred to shelter was sprinkled round the village houses to keep the snakes away. Some years passed before cautious backsliding was reported. The dogs excluded from church instead received the magic touch of the mule’s talismanic shoe within sight of the saint’s image through the open door. The shoe had now been renamed ‘the branding iron’, and every sheep leaving Cocullo to join the winter migration to the plains of Apulia was branded in the same way. A decade 29passed before the toothache bell was smuggled back and put into service again, and now, once more, people sneaked by night into the cave under the church to scrape up the soil considered still to be saturated with spiritual radioactivity from the saint’s body. It is rumoured that, even as recently as 1986, one or more snakes found their way into the church itself after the May procession, under the pretence of a competition in which they were judged for colour and size. Prizes were distributed.
It was a sharp, clear morning in Cocullo on 4 May of this year. The first days of spring had breathed a little snow over the mountain tops but enormous violets showed in the road verges all along the steep climb up to the village. The houses were twisted turban-fashion through the upthrust of rocks, a little unbalanced in their grouping by a basilica that gave the place something of a Greek appearance. Under this was the cave where San Domenico had once sheltered and performed his miracles, but the building had been partly destroyed by the earthquake of 1981, since when the cult had moved its centre to the Romanesque parish church at the top of the hill. This occupied most of one side of the small square, which otherwise contained a handsome bandstand, a deeply cavernous bar and a few substantial houses with balconies.
The serpari pacing below were not as expected. As keen protagonists in an ancient magico-religious rite there should have been something about them, a certain non-conformity of appearance and manner setting them apart, but they were no different from any gathering of young men with time on their hands in a small-town square, except for the imposing presence of the snakes, some of which were surprisingly large. Big snakes roped round their necks hung down to the knees of well-pressed trousers, and small ones were worn, coiled like bracelets, round the wrists. The snakes, while alert and watchful, were sluggish in their movements. The snake-men stroked them gently and in response the snakes lifted cautious, swaying heads to study them with brilliant eyes, and thrust flickering tongues through mosaic lips.
30The snake-men were willing and even eager for their snakes to be handled by strangers, although they were clearly nervous that they might be damaged. A young man in a blue suit, who appeared to exercise some special authority, was quite prepared to talk about his involvement with the festa. Alberto Lanzara had been born into a shepherd family – all the men of Cocullo had begun life by following the flocks – but now he was a technician in the Fucino Telecommunications Centre, Telespaziale, off the next exit but one from Cocullo on the autostrada. The easy accessibility of this area of snake-fetishism to the temple of high technology made it possible for him to pop backwards and forwards in his Fiat to supervise the collection of the snakes and their care. It was an occupation providing perfect relaxation from the mental effort demanded by his work. This, he said, had been an excellent year for the snakes. The weather (sun following rain) had favoured their appearance on 19 March – the traditional date on which, if disposed to collaborate in the ritual, they could be expected to emerge, wriggling from the earth. Thereafter they were kept in roomy earthenware jars, fed and tended until the day of the ceremony, and immediately afterwards returned to the place where they had been found, in the knowledge that they would present themselves and await recapture the following year. No poisonous snakes were now employed in the ritual, although one of the preferred varieties, the colubri dalle quattro linee, was the largest found in Europe. Lanzara understood that in a previous era his predecessors charmed snakes with the music of flutes, and by spitting upon them, but nothing of that kind still continued.
The arrival at about this time of the pilgrims marked another stage in the proceedings. Parties walked painfully across the mountains from local villages, or were brought by bus from the towns of Frosinone or Sora, where descendants of people who had emigrated from Cocullo had established pockets of the cult. The first contingent, comprising elderly persons of both sexes, struggled up the hill into sight, lighted candles clenched in hands, heads bent – humbled by this moment of the great day of their year. A soft 31mewing of hymns was smothered suddenly under the vast wheeze and groan of their bagpipes.
Firecrackers exploded overhead and, passing under a beflagged arch, the pilgrims found the serpari awaiting them, and reached out to be refreshed by the touch of the snakes.
With this influx the mood in the square quickened. New faces had appeared; faces sculpted with the long agony of field labour, and the faces of the middle class imprinted with city calculation and stress. The crowd filled all the open spaces, crammed into the church under the firmament of candles, and into the tunnel of a bar where there were thimblefuls of raw spirits on offer with ritual bread baked in the form of coiled serpents.
Midday approached, and with it the climax of the ceremony. A woman, who had been crouched behind the toothache bell with plastic bagfuls of earth from the old cave, packed up and departed; girls dressed in the marvellous uniforms of antiquity dismantled a pyramid of sweet cakes for distribution among the snake-men. The saint’s image on its platform appeared at the church door, and with this the crowd shouted all at once – a sound that surprised like a clap of thunder out of clear sky. This was the moment of the blessing of the snakes and their ‘offering’ to San Domenico, which took the form of dressing the image with their writhing shapes until every part, head, body, arms, pastoral staff and metal aureole, squirmed with stealthy serpentine movement.
The procession began, seen from the square as a slow, twisting advance through the static mass of the crowd. The top half of the image, jerking forward foot by foot, was occasionally blocked from view by children hoisted upon paternal shoulders, upheld arms holding cameras, or the magnificent hats of the police who were clearing the way.
Mixed in with locals and pilgrims were a small number of young men clearly from the outside world, some of whom I had seen arrive in big cars with Roman numberplates, which they parked at the bottom of the hill. As late arrivals they found themselves at the back of the crowd, and now, suddenly, they formed themselves 32into a wedge and surged forward with such determination that they were able to reach up and fondle the snakes as they passed. And it was clearly all-important for them to be able to do so.
In this, for me, lay the surprise of the day. These men were not here for a tourist spectacle, or for an excuse for a few hours’ escape from the world of banks. They were as much participants in the ceremony as the local peasants and shopkeepers, or the pilgrims who were now walking backwards at the head of the procession in order to be able to keep their eyes fixed upon those of the saint. Whatever the credences involved, they shared in them.
With that, the procession passed out of the square and the show was over. Many of those with cars now took themselves off to Villalago, a matter of ten miles away on the Lago di Scanno, where San Domenico had taken refuge uncomfortably for a year or two in a tiny cave over the lake. Like most of the heroes of religion he was a poor man, who had difficulty in feeding his mule, let alone himself. He appears also in the legends as an animal-lover, who objected to what he called fat laymen fishing in the lake for mere sport, and was apt to turn their catch into inedible scorpions and toads. In the close-knit family atmosphere of local religion he is spoken of as a well-liked relative, recently deceased.
A singular fact emerges about his cave, for in living memory (and as mentioned by W. H. Woodward) young children were taken there to bite through the necks of captive snakes. But why? The practices of magic, which so often present a reverse image of logic as we see it, can be strange indeed. The serpent, associated in the Bible with temptation, the Devil and banishment from Eden, appears in the mythology of old Europe in the benign form of Aesculapius, god of medicine and healing.
The cult seems always to have been strongest in the Cocullo area, where a universal medical cure has been compounded throughout history. This teriarca, which could be taken either in liquid form or applied as a salve, contained thirty ingredients, one being crushed vipers’ heads, and it was on sale by a pharmacist in Rome – who obtained it in Abruzzo – as recently as ten years ago.
33In a shepherd community, such as Cocullo, snakebite was once a common cause of premature death. Yet, in the festival, snakes are treated with affection, even a kind of reverence. The emphasis is strongly on propitiation rather than retribution. Why, then, this killing of snakes by the children at Villalago? The probable answer is that at this point, and even in this place, the ancient ceremony in the goddess’s honour would have reached its climax with the sacrifice of the snakes.
Whenever such sacrifices – either of humans or animals – were performed, it was normal for the victim to be accorded the most solicitous treatment until the culminating act. In this case a bonus lay in the hope that in death the snake would transmit to the child some of those qualities, particularly sagacity, for which it was renowned.
Fighting the Mafia
Lewis was already an expert on the Mafia when he attended this trial in 1968. His insights and his connections with Sicily were helped by marriage to his first wife, whose elegant father was – at the least – strongly connected to the organisation. In his twenties Lewis’s father-in-law had been arrested for a serious crime in Catania, escaped and was smuggled into the United States (possibly in a coffin with air-holes). Once there, he joined the Unione Siciliana, which was gradually infiltrated by the mob.
Over the years Lewis made repeated journeys to Sicily, and his reports on the Mafia received the remarkable accolade of being serialised in six consecutive articles in the New Yorker. These articles were later published as a book, The Honoured Society (1964), which also included material the New Yorker had entirely excluded – about the Mafia’s activities in the United States.
In Tristram Powell’s brilliant film about Lewis (google ‘journeyman arena Norman Lewis’) you can see Lewis at another astonishing mass trial in 1985, this time of 252 caged defendants, who were accused of being members of the Camorra.
First published in the Independent, July 22, 1989
My experience of a sicilian mafia trial was extraordinary. It had attracted some international interest, having been widely advertised as designed to lay once and for all the hideous Mafia 35ghost. Others followed, each more spectacular than the last, with the accused men caged like animals in specially built courtrooms, and the judges escorted by armoured cars from their homes to the Palace of Justice. All foundered in boredom and disbelief, and the secret government of the Mafia continued as before.
I attended this trial in 1968 on behalf of a London newspaper, and as they had asked for photographs, I went to a friend, on L’Ora of Palermo, who promised to produce a photographer. ‘He’s a low-grade man of Respect,’ my friend said. ‘You may not be inspired by his photography, but he knows how to handle the judge – which is what really counts.’
Next day I went down to the courthouse where this man awaited me in surroundings that differed hardly in the matter of noise and excitement from a marketplace. Lo Buono was small and dynamic and bursting at the seams with a kind of genial cynicism. He carried an immense old-fashioned camera with tripod, and at the moment of entering the courtroom where the nineteenth day of the trial was about to begin, we were halted by an usher. His manner was exceedingly deferential. ‘Will you be taking photographs today, Signor Lo Buono?’ he asked. ‘That is my intention,’ Lo Buono replied, and the man smiled and bowed. At that moment we had been standing under a notice which announced that photography was forbidden under pain of the severest sanctions.
The court was in session with the wives and children of the accused men seated in the front row of the public benches. They were strikingly middle class in appearance, the women dressed meticulously as if for a first communion service in church. It was quiet in this room after the clamour of the antechambers and the air was heavy with a church-like odour of hassocks and varnished wood. What might have been a vestry door at the back opened and the eight prisoners filed in, led by a carabiniere with a gun. They were attached to a long chain, from which a second carabiniere freed them as soon as they had been seated in a double row in the dock, although they were still manacled at the wrists. All the prisoners wore immaculate sports clothes with open-necked shirts, and boasted impressive 36suntans, despite the fact that some had spent a year or two on remand in that notoriously sunless prison, the Ucciardone.
At this point Lo Buono opened up his camera, walked over to the dock and took a series of photographs of the accused men, none of whom gave evidence of noticing his presence. Next he photographed the judge, who acknowledged what might have been a routine courtesy with the slightest of smiles.
Now came the most extraordinary episode of the morning. One of the carabinieri, key in hand, went down the rows of prisoners releasing each man’s left hand from the small chain attaching it to his right wrist. With this, while the judge and miscellaneous court officials turned their attention to other matters, the women and children got up, left their seats and made their way in orderly fashion over to the dock where moving scenes of family reunion were enacted. While the judge wrote in a book, the two carabinieri joined each other for a whispered chat. Hugs and kisses were exchanged, and the prisoners groping in their pockets produced sweets for the children and small gift-wrapped packages that might have contained perfume for the wives. I jerked Lo Buono’s sleeve and gestured in the direction of this scene; he shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘No one can take that picture.’
It was the last day of a trial in which once again the Italian state had revealed itself incapable of inflicting defeat upon the Mafia opponent. The Anti-Mafia Commission had been in operation for five years (it was to struggle on for another eleven), but had achieved nothing. In all trials that had taken place it was now assumed that the verdict would be ‘not guilty’. Many were abandoned when witnesses for the prosecution retracted their evidence, went into hiding, fled the country or even committed suicide. One or two who had recklessly stuck to their guns could expect to be dealt with in exemplary fashion, such as the prosecution witness in the case of the mafioso monks of Mazzarino, who was found half-dead with a hand cut off. The contention of the counsel for the defence was that the victim had carried out the amputation himself.
37
