Monday, September 22, 2014

Plus Ca Change



Punta Tragara and The Faraglioni

Though I will not access -- and hope never to see -- the videos, I remain constant of the horrors their images contain. And sadly aware that in the 21st century, if shocked, we are experiencing nothing that mankind hasn't seen (and too often relished) in the past. Today it's the internet, but in recent centuries of our Western World beheadings were public events in town and city squares -- the executioners and victims on the stagings of Great Britain, the towering guillotines of revolutionary France. No need to frequent the streets if today curiosity compels you to look -- simply sit at the computer and click.


Not privy to U.S. Intelligence nor expecting transparency from the current Administration, personal knowledge of Islamic ISIS is limited to what one can garner from the media. Finding there the usual debates between Hawks and Doves, the hesitations and indecisions on confrontation of terrorism.  Reluctance to wage war but fear of attack on the homefront. Though long an adherent to Roosevelt's "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," I question whether fear could, or should, negate concern for and constructive action against whatever threatens us. Joseph Kennedy, Charles Lindberg and other isolationists of the 1930s argued that the Nazis and Fascists posed no threat to the US, as did one of the history teachers in my high school class -- while practically every boy in that class was aware of the atrocities spreading throughout Europe, resigned to the fact that he'd inevitably have to fight it.



As often in my travels abroad, I'd wandered away from the civic center and found myself lost in a neighborhood of Capri little-frequented by tourists. A beautiful, narrow street -- more like a lane -- bordered by blooming vine-covered walls and hand-crafted gates which but partially concealed the fine villas and extensive gardens beyond them.  Stopping to admire a spectacular spill of bougainvillea, I saw a half-hidden sign in the rocks behind the fiery bloom. Via Tragara. Though it merited a street name, this lovely walkway was undoubtedly dead-ended, as I could see its not-distant terminus at a small piazza high above the sea.
My loneness was suddenly broken by a signora who emerged from a splendidly carved wooden gate fronting one of the villas. Warmly garbed in a white, ankle-length cape, sheathed in a wimple of the same color, she walked with regal bearing ahead of me. Luxury and privilege was in her proud gait, something of a vision, really, like the fine structures and exquisite foliage surrounding us.  It was hard to concede that the residents of Via Tragara had ever known want or care, shielded from worldly slings and arrows by their flowered barricades. When we reached the piazza with its overlook down to Capri's famed Faraglioni dramatically piercing the sea, the signora settled on one of the few benches in the intimate area, lifted her face to winter's sun and closed her eyes.

At the edge of the belvedere, hugging the steep cliff, was a salmon-colored villa of extraordinary architecture which was not walled. I could not resist mounting its steps, studying the fine forms and sensitive details of a labor of love. It was obvious that the building needed no protective wall, as the public façade was but a fraction of an extensive dwelling concealed behind it. I encountered no inhabitant during my inspection, but did discover an embedded plaque discretely placed to face the piazza.  It revealed that the villa had been designed in the 1920s by Le Corbusier for Count Goffredo Manfredi and that Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower had met and convened there during World War II. I did not know that day if the villa was occupied, but learned later that it had been renovated and is today Hotel Punta Tragara.


When I re-entered the piazza, a casual exchange of Buona Seras with the signora prompted the invitation to sit beside her. We spoke of and awaited together the brilliant sunset on the sea's horizon. My accent betrayed American origin, and she commented at having seen me studying the plaque on Villa Tragara, presuming I'd been much interested in the Allied meeting there. She said she'd been a child at that time, and wistfully added "Such an unhappy little girl." Her home here on the Via had been a place of quarrel, father, brothers and uncles in dispute at the dinner table, those for and against alliance with Germany, pro and anti Fascist, supporting or damning Mussolini's dream of the New Roman Empire. It was a time in her family, she explained, when nobody seemed to know what was right or wrong, what actions to take or not take. The heated debates among those loved by the child had haunted her for years. I was silent during the brief monologue, but recognized the quote (though she spoke in Italian, not the translation offered here) with which she ended it: "And I -- my head oppressed by horror -- said Who are these people so defeated by their pain." Dante's Inferno.


Pain, perhaps, but mostly anger is what I see and hear in the media concerning US indecisive reaction to the Islamic State being forged by ISIS. The signora of Via Tragara never forgot childhood exposure to  the invectives of radicals and pacifists; I these days think on teenage witness of foreign totalitarianism and the cries for US involvement or isolationism. With so much political posture and falsehood presented us by print and airwaves, one is tempted to lay aside the newspapers and magazines, silence the TV, turn instead to the bookshelf and one of the classics.  But no, our world cannot be ignored.