Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings Page 10

  Contrary to What

  I said in the previous instalment, there is no other way to tour America than the car. Trying to cross it on Greyhound buses, as I did through Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico, means missing all the most famous tourist attractions, unless you stop in each place and try to organize local expeditions with guided tours or similar arrangements which would make you waste a lot of days to no end, since all the things ‘to see’ are never on the highways. But the fact is that the ‘monuments’ (nearly always here we are dealing with natural monuments: canyons, petrified forests, etc.) are never such awe-inspiring sights, and I have noticed that nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me: it is just a question of checking things you have seen in the cinema; so I ignore without regret Death Valley (which can be nothing other than a desert more deserted than anything I have seen in these last few days) and the Grand Canyon (which must only be a canyon that is more of a canyon than the others) and in a single stage of the journey I enjoy all the gradations of the Arizona desert and the romantic squalor of the Western villages and enter New Mexico.

  Depressed Area

  The bus crosses New Mexico and it is already dark and in the first village we stop at, at the usual bar where we have a snack, everything is already changed: the intangible colour of poverty (which I had completely forgotten about in California) here encloses everything, the people are nearly all Indians in Indian dress, poor women with children waiting for the bus, the drunk, the beggar, and the familiar, indefinable feel of underdeveloped countries. New Mexico, that tremendous reserve of escapist, Lawrencian exoticism for intellectuals and artists from the United States (though most of them prefer the more robust and genuine Mexico itself, which is by now an obligatory destination for all the holidays intellectuals take, and a rich source of decorative furnishings which means that New York intellectuals’ houses are all more or less small-scale Mexican museums; and Mexico has become for the USA something that fulfils the role Greece has for Europe), is in reality – in terms of the presence of its culture – not up too much (the pre-Hispanic remains are very few and not very big; and with neo-Spanish remains you never know where what is genuine ends and the fakes begin – I was not in the Hollywood studios for nothing! Albuquerque is not up to much, Santa Fe is very beautiful, though when you examine it closely it is above all well-presented) but it conveys the idea of what life is like in an underdeveloped area – in fact it is difficult to imagine anything more underdeveloped than this – that is tacked on to the least underdeveloped country in the world.

  25 February

  Today I went to Taos and liked it enormously: as a mountain area it is marvellous, and also as a place of refuge for intellectuals it is not a fake, the Indian pueblo is very genuine, the intellectuals here are nice and not just commercial, the literary appeal – D. H. Lawrence – is tangible since all his friends are still alive, there are wonderful collections of Indian and neo-Hispanic ware (the neo-Hispanic stuff is from the famous flagellant sect who are still alive out here) and there are two ski resorts just a few miles away: in short, a place where I would not mind staying at all. Tonight in Santa Fe I was invited to the house of a famous Franco-American furniture designer and architect who was born in Florence and whose house is full of simply wonderful stuff, genuinely from the Mexican people, completely unexpected: I’ve never seen anything like it before. Today there is an evening of great celebration in Santa Fe because at the theatre is the only show of the year: the Ballet Russe from Monte Carlo! I am not going because I passed up – in one of my rare moments of economic wisdom – the only chance to have a ticket that someone wanted to sell; none the less, I participate in the excited atmosphere of the little community of voluntary exiles: I really enjoy being in countries at unusual moments, when people are excited and happy. So, I was talking about underdevelopment: certainly this is a wasteland, farming consists of a few vegetables and fruit for local consumption, hardly any factories, yet the Indians enjoy the benefits they are allowed thanks to the New Deal and the Americans’ guilty conscience, and have unemployment subsidies, total tax exemption, lands, forests and fishing reserves (they live in a kind of primitive Communism and the authorities’ efforts to teach them the advantages of private initiative are pointless), hospitals with free healthcare, schools and priority in all possible types of employment (plus of course the exploitation of the fact that they are this State’s great tourist attraction). Don’t get me wrong, the poverty is still terrible, but when you consider the geographical conditions, which are much worse than any part of southern Italy, well the people of Basilicata could only dream of being able to live like them. A wise people, the Indians are perhaps the only poor people to live in a depressed area and not be prolific, and yet their population, which was heading for extinction, has in recent years been slightly on the increase.

  The Pueblos

  I go into the pueblo of San Domingo near Albuquerque and find myself in a familiar landscape: the poor suburb slums of Rome, identical. The low, squat little Indian houses are the double of those in Rome’s Pietralata or Tiburtino districts, except that here they are built in adobe (the mud bricks that the Indians learnt to bake from the Spanish and which form the essential building material for all New Mexican architecture) but they are then covered in whitewash so they all look the same. And the people all have the same look about them as they shelter from the cold in their blankets, the children playing in the mud (but staying clean) and coming up (amazingly!) to ask for charity (or rather to sell the usual coloured pebbles). (However, in this pueblo there is a church with amazing Indian paintings. As you know, the Indians in this formerly Spanish area practise both Catholicism and pagan rites: one really should stay here till a Sunday to see these famous fiestas but I haven’t really come to America to study primitive folklore.) At Taos where the biggest pueblo is, some of these flat houses are piled one on top of the other, and this gives the village an Algerian look (but of an earthen colour, not white) and the fact that in these cold, snowy days the Indians go around muffled up to their noses in multicoloured blankets contributes to this Islamic look. In any case, it is all just like Alberobello: even the interiors of the houses are just like inside a trullo. The Indians have cars, but because of the wishes of the elders they do not have electricity or any other source of heat or light in the pueblos except the fireplaces inside the little houses and the cooking-stoves in the street. Consequently they have neither radio nor TV. (It is clear that the Indian communities have no future and in the whole country there is a debate about what will happen to them, between those who favour conservation of the community at all costs and the supporters of assimilation. The fact is that the Indians rarely emigrate from their inhospitable lands and they are the ones who are most reluctant to assimilate; but now the children are studying at high school and are beginning to become Americanized. However, this is the only place in the United States where a dialectical element in the colonized people lives on – though it is hard to say to what extent. As my friend Ollier – an ex-colonial civil servant in Morocco – rightly observed, America is in everything a colonial country where what has been eliminated is the colonized people, the main characteristic, contradiction, vitality and significance of all colonies.)

  Local Tradition

  has been conserved admirably by the Anglo-Saxon Americans (but only in the last thirty years or so, I believe) and these museums, like the one of Navajo ritual paintings, for instance, are kept with the usual care and access to finance typical of the US in all things cultural, and the same goes for all the Hispanic antiquities and for the way that the old Hispanic-Mexican architecture is being continued by today’s architects. The people of Spanish origin, however, are not at all interested in the conservation of monuments to their own culture. Protestant architects construct beautiful churches in adobe and in the Hispanic-Mexican style and in them install surviving masterpieces of popular religious wooden sculpture; the Catholic priests fling in the usual tacky rubbish of cu
rrent religious iconography.

  Lawrenciana

  Naturally, being in the Taos area, I went to see Angelino Ravagli, the husband of Frieda Lawrence, who died three years ago, and the man who is thought to have inspired the character of the gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I speak to him in Ligurian dialect because (although he is from the Romagna by birth) he is really from Spotorno and he met the Lawrences when he rented them his villa there and then followed them across the world, all the way to Taos (to a ranch in the mountains which was given to D. H. by a female admirer who is still alive here and which Frieda decided to pay for with the manuscript of Sons and Lovers, but the ranch has now been left by Frieda in her will to the University of New Mexico which sends young writers there every summer to write), and then when D. H. died he married Frieda. Ravagli is the executor of Frieda’s will and co-owner of the rights for D. H.’s books (the few that are not in the public domain) along with Frieda’s children and her first husband, the German. He really regrets the money he could have made with Lady Chatterley in America but now cannot: however, perhaps he might be able to make this money if the literary agent, etc.; a question that I do not need to explain to you. (However, in fact nobody abroad really understands the question of the Lawrence literary rights.) Now he has sold this house where they came to stay after D. H.’s death and he does not know what to do with himself in Taos on his own and will go back to Italy where he has a wife to whom, according to Italian law, he is still married, and several children all in the professions, one a graduate in agriculture in Turin whose address he gives me. Angie is of course a very simple man but he is not plebeian, as the Lawrences certainly believed, but rather petit-bourgeois (he was a captain of the bersaglieri; is interested in Malagodi’s political programme;49 in his bedroom he has a picture of Eisenhower painted by himself because he has now started painting); however, he is of course very much a warm human being, as they say, and very friendly, what with all the chaos of this weird existence, and here in Taos he is very popular: many people have come to live here to be near the Lawrences, like for example a curious poet, Spud Johnson, who has taken over the Taos newspaper which is intriguingly called El Crepusculo. At Christmas Aldous Huxley came here with his wife and Julian and they spent Christmas with Angie; Aldous, through his Turinese sister-in-law, has bought a flat at Torre del Mare near Spotorno.

  Atomic Matters

  In some vague way this is an accursed land, so it is natural that it was in this desert that they secretly invented the atomic bomb and continue to manufacture it, thus bringing to life the Indian legend that is unique to this area that here a power capable of destroying the earth was unleashed. Then it turned out that it was precisely here that they discovered uranium, but this was later and now uranium is starting to become the only hope of wealth for the area. Naturally I was only able to view the laboratory sites from the outside (and there are also research laboratories on human resistance to space flights and on the effects of radiation on animal and vegetable organisms), and in these few days I have not been able to approach any scientists, something that I regret but also perhaps it’s better that way because from the few and far between glimpses I have had I have formed the idea that scientists are the only group which can lead to something new in America, because many of them possess alongside what is predictably the most advanced technical expertise a highly sophisticated knowledge of the humanities, and above all they are the only intellectuals with any power, and with any say; this idea of mine, I was saying, I fear very much could be undermined by further meetings with them. Scientists’ links with arts people are not regular; I have asked about this all around, and they say yes, perhaps there are a few like I describe. However, here atomic questions remain shrouded in a veil as in Indian legends; a local guy in all seriousness shows me a woodland area where spies would meet to exchange atomic secrets but then the FBI discovered them.

  The People Around Here

  Going around without a car has the advantage that it forces me wherever I go to mobilize the whole village around my person, but certainly by now after several months of this it is always the same thing. Here I am sent from one old lady to another who runs an Indian antiques shop or a bookshop or other cultural enterprise. But deep down now that I know the terrifying dullness of American life I understand more the people who come to live here, just as I understand more the way they love Italy, which previously got on my nerves.

  Texas

  How do you go about acquiring an image of Texas? That’s what I have continued to ask myself in all these months, convinced that this State which is so peculiar in terms of its spirit and economic life was in reality difficult to capture in a very short stay, such as the one I intended to devote to it, and staying in a big city I would just see a big city like so many others and not ‘the real Texas’, whereas staying in a little country town I would miss so many aspects. Consequently, having made up my mind to stay in Houston, which is the biggest city of the once-biggest State in the Union, I was not expecting to receive any strong impressions of local colour. Instead, I arrive when the Fatstock Show is on, the livestock display, and when it’s on the biggest rodeos of the year in the whole of America take place here. So I arrive and the city is full of cowboys from all over Texas, and from all the livestock-rearing States, but they are all dressed as cowboys, even those who are not cowboys, old men, women, kids, the whole Texan spirit is flaunted here in a way that makes this place ostentatiously, visibly different from the rest of the States. And on the famous desire for independence in Texas, there is no need to conduct a special inquest; many cars have written on them: ‘Built in Texas by Texans’, and in the city’s flagstands the Texan flags clearly outnumber the Federal ones. What comes over is an impression of a country in uniform, these middle-class families marching in formation all wearing stetsons and fringed jackets, proudly displaying their practicality and anti-intellectualism which has developed into their mythology, fanaticism, and alarming belligerence. Luckily it is a mythology that is constantly tied to work, to production, to business, to this enormous amount of livestock, whose display I witness surrounded by a troupe of a hundred or so Pakistani students who have come here to study agriculture. And so there is a hope that, even though Texas feels itself ready to make war on Russia, immediately if need be, as some of them claim, nevertheless deep down the isolationism of the agricultural mentality will have the upper hand (as you know, Texas managed to go to war with Germany a year before Pearl Harbor, sending a volunteer corps with the Canadian air force).