19
IN VENICE THERE is a small bridge leading over a side canal. Halfway up the steps crossing this bridge there is a landing, and a little café has found a perch there. In front of this café there is one table with two chairs. If you choose the chair with its back to the café, you can overlook the steps you climbed and also the steps leading toward you from the canal path ahead of you. This is an obscure neighborhood crossroads, a good place to sit with a cup of cappuccino and the newspaper you got from the newsstand behind Piazza San Marco. Of course you must have a newspaper, a book, a sketchpad—anything that seems to absorb you. If you are simply sitting there, you will appear to be a Lonely Person and people will look away from you. If you seem preoccupied, you can observe them more closely. In any event, I do not sit there for the purpose of people watching. No, I am engaged in the pastime of Being by Myself in a City Where No One Knows Who I Am and No One Knows Where to Find Me. I have such places in many cities: London, of course. Paris. Rome. Stockholm. Edinburgh. Cape Town. Cannes.
I have another private place in Venice. The night of the day in 1965 when I disembarked from Cape Town, I wandered into a little bar in Piazza San Giacomo, behind San Marco, and was greeted by the exuberant owner, a young man whose wife was minding their son in a corner. Lino, for that was his name, knew the name of everybody who came in. He hurried around the bar and, without asking, deposited a plate of oysters in front of me. They were alive and began to click. I had never eaten a raw oyster. It was the wise Jonathan Swift who told a friend, “It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.” I opened the oysters and ate them. I’d never tasted one before except in Uncle Bill’s turkey dressing. I returned to Lino’s every time I came to Venice, and returning to Venice became a necessity. Once in Lino’s an old man who ran a tourist gimcrack shop on the other side of the square personally cooked everyone gnocchi. No charge. Lino always recognized me, or made signs indicating he did. I went once with my friend McHugh. Every subsequent time, Lino used his hands to indicate a man of Falstaffian dimensions and we would agree on my friend’s name: “Giovanni.”
One year I returned and there was no Lino. I asked inside: “Lino?” I was pointed around the corner to the Trattoria alla Rivetta, with canal steps passing its front window. Lino had moved up in the world to a restaurant with a back room. I walked in. Giovanni! Giovanni! He used sign language for Santa Claus. During the 1972 Venice Film Festival, I took everyone I knew there: Dusan Makavejev, Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson, Thomas Quinn Curtiss. Usually I would go alone and sit in the back room, reading during dinner. Lino and I had only one word in common, but we always remembered it.
On our honeymoon in 1982, Chaz and I visited Lino’s. I waited for Lino to say “Giovanni!” He did. Chaz was surprised: “I thought you were making that up.” Nearly thirty years had passed. In 2004, we took my stepdaughter Sonia and her children to Venice. I looked in at Lino’s in the afternoon. There was no Lino. His son, now nearing forty, explained: “Lino, he a little retired. Here only in morning.” The next morning I looked in through the window. All the lights were off except those in the kitchen. Lino, now bald and grey, was kneading pasta. I could have knocked on the glass and had his attention and heard Giovanni! again, but I didn’t. That would have been pushing it.
In Two Weeks in the Midday Sun, my book about the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote that I always wake up very early on the morning after I arrive, because of jet lag. I leave Chaz sleeping in our room at the Hotel Splendid and walk down the rue Félix Faure, passing the flower sellers setting out their bouquets, the fishmongers unloading iced oysters, and the street cleaners hosing down the pavement. I walk through the market, inhale the scents of the melons and the roses, and buy the International Herald Tribune. I turn down the hill toward the old harbor, and at a particular café, Le St. Antoine, at a particular table on the sidewalk, I order, in shameful French, a café au lait, a Perrier, and a croissant. This is a ritual. One year I looked up and saw Jeannette Hereniko, the founder of the Hawaii Film Festival, approaching me from the direction of the bus stop. She was in a bit of a crisis. It was six a.m., the airline had lost her carry-on bag, and she had no idea of the name of her hotel. She had been reading my book on the flight over and decided to see if she could find me at that café. Of course she could. I couldn’t tell her where she was staying, but she had a cup of coffee.
Of all the words I have written, a brief passage in that out-of-print book is the one most often mentioned to me. People tell me they know exactly what I’m describing. Here it is. It takes place on the other end of town from the old harbor:
I walked out of the Martinez and was made uneasy again by the wind. So I turned inland, away from the Croisette and the beach, and walked up into one of the ordinary commercial streets of Cannes. I cut behind the Carlton, walked past the Hotel Savoy, and before long was at the little fruit and vegetable marketplace, at the other end of town from the big market. I took a table at a cafe, ordered an espresso and a Perrier, and began to sketch.
Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes not even once a year, and focused all my attention inward on a momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony. I sat very still. I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found. I was like a spirit returned from another world. All the people around me carried on their lives, sold their strawberries and called for their children, and my presence there made not the slightest difference to them. I was invisible. I would leave no track in this square, except for the few francs I would give to the cafe owner, who would throw them in a dish with hundreds of other coins.
After a time the intensity of my feeling passed, and I sat absolutely still at the table, a blank, taking in the movements before me. There are times when I think it would be possible to lead my life like this, a stranger in a foreign land, sitting in a cafe, drinking espresso, sketching on a pad, sometimes buying a newspaper which would tell me in my own language what was happening in other places to other people. I would see myself in the third person—that anonymous figure in the distance, crossing under the trees. Most of the time I am too busy to entertain such fantasies. I have filled my life so completely that many days there is no time to think about the fact that I am living it. But these still moments, usually in a strange city, give me the illusion that in some sense the person that is really me sits somewhere quietly at a table, watching it all go by.
I’ve been back to the café several times again, always hoping for the same seat at the same table. Such returns are an important ritual to me. Chaz says it is impossible to get me to do anything the first time, and then impossible to stop me from doing it over and over again. After we were married, we went to Europe on our honeymoon.
“What did you visit?” her best friend Carolyn asked her.
“We visited Roger’s previous visits,” she said.
It is true. “I always go to Sir John Soane’s house,” I would tell Chaz. And, “This is my favorite Wren church.” And, “This is the oldest restaurant in London. I always order cock-a-leekie soup, toad-in-the-hole, bangers and mash, and, to follow, spotted dick.” I always say it exactly that way: “… and, to follow, spotted dick.” Chaz studied the menu and told the waiter she would have the lamb chops. “Excellent choice, madam,” he said, giving me a look that translated as, I remember you, all right.
My new bride was also made to take a particular train from the Liverpool Street station to Cambridge and accompany me on a walk in the meadows above the River Cam to the village of Grantchester to visit the Rupert Brooke memorial and have lunch at the Green Man. And of course we had to walk slowly past the Old Vicarage, as I recited:
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
And we had to ascertain that the church clock indeed still stood at ten to three, the irrefutable evidence cited by generations of Cambridge students who protested it was not yet Closing Time. The villagers have recently raised the money to repair the clock, so that for the first time since before the Great War it keeps accurate time. The repair amounts to vandalism.
I may appear to suffer from some sort of compulsive repetition syndrome, but these rituals are important to me. I have many places where I sit and think, “I have been here before, I am here now, and I will be here again.” Sometimes, lost in reverie, I remember myself approaching across the same green, or down the same footpath, in 1962 or 1983, or many other times. Sometimes Chaz comes along on my rituals, but just as often I go alone. Sometimes Chaz will say she’s going shopping, or visiting a friend, or just staying in the room and reading in bed. “Why don’t you go and touch your bases?” she’ll ask me. I know she sympathizes. These secret visits are a way for me to measure the wheel of the years and my passage through life. Sometimes on this voyage through life we need to sit on the deck and regard the waves.
I first visited the Moscow Arms near Pembridge Square in 1970, when the room fee at the Hyde Park West Hotel, now named the Blue Bells, was four pounds a night. I have never met anybody in that pub. I always sit in the same corner. There is a man who comes in every lunchtime, tattooed, bald, and wearing a motorcycle jacket. He is nearly forty years older now, but he is still there, and it appears to be the same jacket. Has he noticed me crossing his field of vision fifty or seventy-five times in his lifetime? Certainly not. But if he still comes at lunchtime every day, it is my duty to bear witness, because by now I have become the only person in the Moscow Arms who knows how long he has been doing this, or cares. I believe this includes him.
I always visit a used bookstore, Keith Fawkes, in Flask Walk, Hampstead. I’ve found many precious books there. Then I go to the Holly Bush pub, up Heath Street to Holly Mount, where there are snug corners to ensconce myself. A corner is important. It provides privacy and an anchor and lets you exist independently of the room. It was while walking down from the Holly Bush that I first saw the Catto Gallery and made my best friends in London. In the opposite direction there is a pub I have been visiting so long that I remember when Helena Bonham Carter moved in upstairs, and when she moved out. I’ve had some pleasant interviews with her, going back to 1986, when she made Lady Jane and was nineteen. Did I ever ring her bell? Certainly not.
In the years when I was drinking, I drank in these places. I haven’t had a drink since 1979, and I still visit them with the same enjoyment—actually more. The thing about a British pub is that you don’t have to drink booze. If you don’t, nobody looks at you funny. They provide tea, coffee, lunch, atmosphere, a place to sit, a time to think. At the Holly Bush I always have the ploughman’s lunch with an extra pickle.
But let me stop place-dropping. These places do not involve only a visit, but a meditation: I have been here before, I am here now, I will be here again. Robert Altman told me he kept track of time not by the years, but by the films he was working on. “I’m always preparing the next film,” he said. That is living in a time outside time. Of course everyone’s time must run out. But not yet. Not until I’m finished touching a few more bases. I will sit in the corner by the fire in the Holly Bush again, and stand in the wind on top of Parliament Hill, and I know exactly how to find that café in Venice, although I could never describe the way. Oh, yes I do.