Of course nearly every faith is represented here. There are mosques Sunni and Shia (tucked away in the depths of the Balad). There is a small Buddhist temple at Hen Chaiu Lu, and one sometimes sees its yellow-robed acolytes buying saffron at the morning market. The synagogue is in the old Scuola Levantina of the Venetian Jews; two aged monks are alleged to survive from the Russian monastery of the Holy Ghost, destroyed in the great fire of 1928. The Anglican church may be full of oil-drums, but the Roman Catholics still worship at the French cathedral, the Orthodox Greeks are in Saladin’s mosque, the Lutherans still have their chapel next door to the old Residenz, and sundry Maronites, Copts and Nestorians maintain their places of worship, tentative or robust, here and there across the city. The Indian squatters of Little Yalta have built themselves a rickety little Hindu temple by the sea. Once when I was wandering through the Balad in the evening I heard loud enthusiastic singing in an unknown tongue, and walking up an alley to investigate found a happy congregation of black people in full flood of Pentecostal conviction.
But I think it may be true, as Mahmoud said, that Hav as a whole, Hav in genere so to speak, is without religion: and as a pagan myself I enjoy this wayward scattering of spirituality, this carefree pragmatism, which makes me feel that I might easily run into those fundamentalists in the Cathedral of St Antoine one day, or find nonagenarian Russian monks helping out with the Buddhist rites.
However I have repeatedly heard of a remarkable deviation from this general rule. Signora Vattani first told me of the hermitage in the eastern moors. She told me that before the war there arrived in Hav from nowhere in particular a strange young Malian nicknamed Topolino, ‘Little Mouse’, after a small Fiat car popular then.
He dressed himself in a rough brown habit, like a Franciscan, and began giving extempore pavement sermons: and though he was really neither a monk nor a priest — just a layabout, Signora V. says — though his political views seemed almost communist and his religious ones inchoate, though he was disgracefully impertinent to the Italian Resident, and for that matter to the late Signor Vattani, besides using terrible language in his homilies, nevertheless he was taken up by some of the Italian families of the concession and established a kind of cult. He lived somewhere in the Balad, but was often to be encountered in his tattered brown cassock at soirées and cocktail parties, and even made an appearance sometimes at Palace festivities. For two years running, Signora Vattani says, he took part in the Roof-Race. His favourite preaching-place was the quayside immediately outside the Fondaco, which he used to denounce as a symbol of Italian imperialism.
When the war came, Topolino left the city — to avoid conscription, the Signora maintains — and with a few of his followers built himself a hermitage on the moorland south of Hen Chiau Lu. There he died in 1954, his body being unexpectedly claimed, and taken to Italy, by an eminent Christian Democrat politician (‘No, I will not tell you his name — I have my loyalties’) who turned out to be the Little Mouse’s brother. However, I had often been told that his hermitage still existed, and last week I drove out to find it. Nobody could say exactly where it was, but all agreed that you could not take a car all the way. So I started early in the morning, with a packed lunch in a knapsack, and leaving the car at the southern end of China Bay, set off across the tufty grassland into the rolling bare moors, apparently uninhabited, that lie to the south.
It was a marvellous walk. Sometimes the Hav sky seems higher and wider than any sky anywhere, except perhaps in Texas, and on mornings like this the Hav sea, too, seems matchless — so profoundly, bottomlessly blue, so beautifully flecked with the buoys and boats of the Chinese in their wide bay, and falling so lazily, in such long slow waves, upon the silent foreshore. To the south-west silently lay San Spiridon, its church tower protruding over the ridge, and much further away, far out at sea beneath the drifting white clouds, I fancied I could see the distant smudges of other countries altogether — Cyprus? Syria? The Hesperides?
In front the moors looked empty. The magical spring flowers have left Hav now, and the only bright colours in those heathlands were occasional splodges of yellow furze and speckles of a sort of blue poppy they call in Turkish göz kraliçe, ‘eye of the queen’. Otherwise all was brownish-green, and more brown than green. Sometimes a hawk hovered high above me. Sometimes I started a gamebird from my feet. As the sun came up every rock seemed to flicker with its lizard, and out of the earth the warmth brought a faint aroma, dry, sweet and pungent, which I took to be a memory of all the flowers that had been born, blossomed and died there. But of human life, not a glimpse looking across the moors suggested to me the battlefields of the Boer War, whose similarly treeless landscapes so often looked just as deserted, until the rifle-fire of the Afrikaners spat and blazed from hidden kopje trenches.
No Mausers, I am glad to say, opened up on me. The morning was absolutely silent. But presently, scrambling around a rocky outcrop (lizards twitching everywhere, dark lichen in declivities), I looked up and saw, on a low rise far ahead, a small patch of tangled green, like an overgrown garden, and beside it, waving, two brown-clad figures. It took me a good hour to get up there; and whenever I looked up again, there those figures always seemed to be, waving their encouragement.
They came the last half-mile or so to meet me, and when I saw them striding easily in my direction I remembered for a moment a Buddhist mystic I encountered thirty years ago in the Himalayas, who seemed hardly to walk at all over the snows, but rather to levitate. However these ascetics of Hav turned out to be anything but ethereal — light on their feet perhaps, because they were very thin, but smiling very straightforward smiles, offering me jolly greetings in Italian, and showing evidence all too clear, in their stooped old figures and arthritic-looking fingers, that they were as corporeal as anyone else. Their cassocks, tied with straw ropes in monkly style, were neatly patched. They wore rubber flip-flops, incongruously blue and yellow, upon their feet. They had straggly grey beards, and both looked to me in their seventies.
I was ashamed to find myself breathless as these old men, so agile despite their infirmities, cheerfully paced me over the moor. But they laughed my apologies aside. It was no competition, they said, since they lived such wonderfully healthy lives out there; and indeed when we reached the hermitage, and the seven other members of the community, four men, three women, crowded around to welcome me, they did look extraordinarily spry, though all were of a similar age, and gave the impression that were it not for the deep tans of so many summers on the moorland, their cheeks might have been quite rosy.
They seemed to inhabit a pergola: at least the wide shelf of the rising ground there, perhaps a hundred yards long, had been roofed with a construction of wood and wire which, covered as it was all over with wild vines, meant that the place was half indoors, and half out. It was all green and leafy, wonderfully cool, and it was bisected by a small stream which came out of a conduit above, and went splashing away through the heather towards the sea. Along this dappled belvedere were eight or nine little wooden huts, very well built of rough oak, which formed the cells of the community, together with a store-house at the end. Outside was a long trestle table with benches, and an iron stove whose chimney disappeared through the leaves of the pergola. The hermits produced water in thick white china mugs, and we all sat down at the table while they explained things.