Here was someone with whom I could thoroughly identify. I saw much of myself in d’Annunzio. One day I intended to meet him. Together we could do so much. As the simple country doctor said, there was a Renaissance about to dawn all over the West. Greece was flourishing. France was restoring herself. England was extending the Reign of Law. And Germany, too, must soon recover from the trauma of defeat, putting an end to the sickness of socialism which currently infected her wounded body politic. America was resting, yet she would rally, I knew. A great brotherhood of Christian nations would emerge, united in its common purpose, to drive the Bolshevik wolf to its death and send the Islamic jackal scurrying into the desert from whence it had come. A little drunk on the rough young wine, I spoke of these dreams to my Italian friend. He toasted me enthusiastically and spoke of his country’s renewed friendship with mine (which he thought was England). He had a dream: the future would show us a world balanced between two Great Empires, the British and the Roman, each mutually admiring, each complementary, each with its own distinct character.
‘It will exemplify the Renaissance ideal,’ he told me. ‘The ideal of Harmony and Moderation. Science will flourish in all forms, but it will be humane, tempered by the wisdom of the Church.’
As if to confirm this statement, there came a high-pitched drone from above. The sun was setting bloody and huge behind Otranto’s castle, and out of it flew the distinctive silhouette of an SVA5 biplane. It lifted its nose above the fortress battlements and then, turning lazily to circle the red tiles of the old town, began to bank down towards a dark green line which was the sea. It was seemingly swallowed back into a magical realm where the ordinary rules of nature did not apply, flying as easily through water as it had through air. Then it disappeared.
Drunkenly, the doctor and I applauded it. We toasted d’Annunzio once more. We toasted Otranto. After some debate, we rose to our feet and toasted the Pope.
Later it occurred to me the plane was probably a Customs spotter, hunting out illegal shipping. I wondered if it had seen Captain Kazakian’s steam launch off the nearby coast and was searching for smugglers or secret immigrants. As soon as we could we should be on our way to Rome. (I learned soon afterwards I had been far luckier than I realised. Italian coastal patrols had been doubled in recent months. There was an influx of stateless refugees desperately fleeing the ruined countries of Eastern Europe and Asia Minor.)
That night I told Esmé we were going to Rome, to the seat of her religion, to a city older than Byzantium. The wholesome food and the innkeeper’s wife’s loving attention had restored her considerably. My news made her almost gay. She began to apologise for her behaviour. I told her how I understood. It is a terrible thing to be torn up by the roots, even if those roots are buried in poisoned soil.
Soon afterwards we took the train to Rome. A little group of our Otranto friends saw us on our way. The journey proved extremely comfortable, if mainly dull. It was good, however, to know the luxury of true first-class travel again. The seats and the general appearance of the train impressed Esmé. She grew animated; her wonderful, girlish self; her eyes as bright as ever by the time our final train pulled in to great Central Station.
It was Sunday, July 4th 1920. Esmé and I had arrived at last in Rome, that city of lush gardens and timeworn stone; that city of the automobile where every second citizen seemed a priest or a policeman and where, consequently, Church and State were neither remote nor frightening institutions but familiar, ordinary and reassuring. A helpful cab driver recommended the Hotel Ambrosiana at 14, Vicolo dei Serpenti. We took a suite there. Warm sunlight poured through the French doors leading to our own little balcony. Esmé danced with pleasure. She was rapidly putting even a hint of her old terrors behind her, becoming ebullient, eager to go onto the streets, to visit the cafés, the shops. ‘And there must be circuses,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of them. Cabarets, too. And the cinema, of course!’
It was a wonderful new world. It smelled free in a way Galata never had. Esmé marvelled at the straightness of the streets, their cleanliness, the relative absence of dogs and beggars. This, she said, was very much as she had thought of Heaven, when she was younger. And she had identified Rome, of course, with Heaven.
I asked her what she wanted to do most urgently. She skipped beside me, her hand in mine, her eyes smiling up at me.
‘Oh, the cinema!’ she said. ‘It has to be the cinema!’
After a light lunch at a pleasant little café near the Barberini Palace we went to look for a picture-house. We rushed straight in to the first one we found. They were showing Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeii and we were entranced, almost overwhelmed by the film’s epic reality. There could have been no better choice, no better place to watch it. Esmé hugged me and held my hand all the way through. Occasionally, in her delight, she would kiss me. I could not imagine happiness more perfect.
My rebirth was consolidated at last.
TEN
THE ETERNAL CITY had seduced us both. Hand in hand we walked everywhere, entranced. Amidst the casual accumulation of three millennia, the conventional symbols of an antique greatness, her ruins, her churches and her modern monuments, Rome’s citizens conducted a routine life reminiscent of my own salad days in Odessa. Romans struck matches against Caligula’s columns and strung washing from balconies where Michelangelo or Raphael might have leaned to improve their view of St Peter’s. Motor-cars, trams, buses and trains buzzed and crashed around the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus, cheerfully unimpressed by this weighty glory. The natives were if anything amused by foreign pilgrims who piously gasped at their pagan and their papal shrines. Rome herself was looking forward, was more consciously a modern city than ever before.
In the little bars, dance halls and night clubs around the Via Catalana we would soon find convivial company. Here intellectuals and bohemians gathered; futurists clashed swords with socialists, d’Annunzio was toasted and Giolitti, the Prime Minister, slandered. Plans were made to build a new Empire whose legions would advance by rail and in tanks, pausing to establish factories rather than forts wherever they went. Yellow sandstone and pink marble walls were covered with every persuasion of political poster, indiscriminately mixed with advertisements for sports cars, air races, cinema films; all these equally of consuming interest to the Romans.
They were attracted to the romance of technology, by the thrill of the great, simple deed. They were simply entertained or irritated by the petty bickerings of corrupt liberals and apoplectic anarchists. In this tolerant humanity they were again like Odessans. They lived in warm, friendly sunshine, in their cafés; in their restaurants they ate and drank with gusto; in the streets they laughed and danced to the music of little brass bands and accordions; they even dressed with the gay flamboyance of pre-war Odessa. If they expressed admiration for Bolsheviks it was both dismissive and ironic, acknowledging the Reds as successful criminals, not with a pursing of the lips but with a sardonic laugh. Lenin was ‘that noble successor to Ivan the Terrible’ or ‘the greatest Byzantine monarch since Julian the Apostate’, while Trotski was either Joshua or Attila. Artists of Mayakovski’s bent were ‘the glorious children of Marinetti’ whose canvases were whole cities, whose materials were dynamite, gunpowder and ruptured flesh: Poets of a New Apocalypse opposed to all that was old, devoted to everything that was new, born into a world where electricity, the internal combustion engine and powered flight were commonplace, ‘to use, not to examine’.