We walked up a narrow path paved with Roman brick some of the way, tile in places and cut from the bedrock the rest of the way, over the hill that separated the coves. The hillside was covered with a mix of Scotch pine; live oaks; and, above those
(and out of sight), olive groves. Below the path, the almost-vertical hill fell precariously to the one-lane main road. Below that was the glittering sea.
As we walked along, we got tantalizing glimpses of the turquoise water. The air was filled with the scent of basil, arugula, and wild thyme, as well as the perfume of gardenias wafting over the walls of several fabulous old villas. These I-wonder-WHO-lives-
there?!
villas were surrounded by shady gardens replete with huge terra-cotta amphorae and fountains.
The Paraggi Bay (where the beach was that we sat on all day) was framed by high hills. The air was filled with the smell of the pines, gnarled and misshapen, looking like giant bonsai trees that hung at odd angles over the water. There were black powdery pine nuts strewn in the alley behind the changing cabins, which I smashed between rocks to get at the sweet tangy white flesh. The smell of cooking wafted out of the pensione kitchen and got progressively more delicious all day.
We breakfasted on rolls, apricot jam, and hot chocolate and dined on fabulous pork and veal roasts, fresh green salads, huge vine-ripened tomatoes striped with green and yellow and still warm from the sun, grilled fish rubbed with minced sage, big creamy slices of cheese, and grated Parmesan on pastas and risotto. But no wine for us!
We had church on Sundays up in Mom and Dad’s room and had to sing hymns. Mom said grace at our meals, which made everyone else on the terrace stare at us, a daily and mortifying event. When I was twelve or so, I drummed up the courage to press Mom on this point.
“Mom,
why
do you have to pray out loud?” I asked, after supper one night while we were taking our stroll around the main square in Portofino.
“Why would I change what we do just because we’re on vacation?”
“But everyone always looks at us!”
“And I hope it reminds them that they should be thinking about eternal things.”
“Can’t we just eat?”
Dad was walking next to Mom and had said nothing. He surprised me when he spoke up a few moments later.
“Edith, you know you
could
pray a shorter prayer. I don’t like watching my soup get cold every night.”
Mom gave me a oh-how-could-you? look. Then she shook her head sadly at our worldliness and said nothing more. After that, I noticed her prayers were a bit shorter for a few days; but soon she was back to saying a long nightly grace.
Most of the time in Italy, I was free of being born-again. The vacation was a time when I was as “normal” as I ever got. I was free of my polio leg, too. Italy was the one place where I never had to wear my embarrassing and uncomfortable brace. I was barefoot most of the day and spent two thirds of each day in the water. And the only time I really had to think, rather than just BE, was because of the deliciously agonizing daily choice of what to spend my fifty-lire-per-day vacation allowance on—one slice of pizza, an ice cream, or a lemon soda?
Italy was where I first got to hear “jazzy music,” actual jazz and even rock and roll! The one catch was that in the early years, before she relaxed, I had to be careful not to let my mother see me hanging around the jukebox by the snack bar; I had to pretend that I was just watching the snack-bar lady making pizza. The key was to not tap your foot to the “demonic rhythm.”
Dad didn’t become a famous and Evangelical leader (awash
in book-royalty money) till I was in my late teens. So during my childhood, I was haunted by the big question: Is there enough money in the vacation box this year? There always was, although some years there was no money for the extra treats like ice cream.
Even when giving was down, Mom somehow saved the money for the train tickets and the cost of the pensione and/or hotel. (Of course, the great exchange rate between dollars, Swiss francs, and lire helped.)
Italy was where I got to know Lino, an almost-famous surrealist painter. He was probably in his late thirties when I first met him. Lino was slender, olive-skinned, quiet, and polite. He was also very “typically Italian-looking,” according to Mom. He dressed impeccably in a suit, even when he was painting
I would take Lino my paintings and drawings, which I was always working on while in Italy. He talked to me as a fellow artist, not as a child. I also got to know his debonair middle-aged homosexual lover and manager—a tall aristocratic man who dressed in gray wool slacks, pastel knit shirts, and loafers with no socks and a sweater draped over his shoulders, perpetually tan, and smelling faintly of exotic cologne—and several other artists who let me hang around their studios in Portofino.
I’d known Lino and his lover since I was six or seven—“forever”—and had always hung around Lino’s studio watching him paint. It was my favorite after-the-beach-before-dinner place to visit.
Lino told me that his first big break as an artist was being commissioned to paint a large mural on the ill-fated SS “
Andrea Doria
,” the famous Italia Line ship that sank off Nantucket. He once showed me a postcard of his mural, then shrugged, and said, “And now it is all at the bottom of the sea!”
Mom and Dad seemed to thrive in Italy, too. They would slip off in the evening for the walk from Portofino out to the lighthouse that sits at the tip of the peninsula protecting the harbor. The path was lit by small, beautifully concealed lights that cast a soft romantic glow over the flagstone path. Mom and Dad would leave me playing in the main square, or up in my room with Debby reading to me, and slip away. If I was up when they came back, I always noticed how happy they were. They would seem so relaxed and so in love. Mom’s eyes were bright. Dad was smiling. They would always be arm in arm and head straight for their bedroom.
If two lines were forming—one headed to the L’Abri chapel, the other to Portofino—I always knew which line
I’d
be in! Portofino was paradise! You’d walk past a small gallery where there were Salvador Dali’s for sale and sometimes Salvador Dali himself. I saw Rex Harrison, Jackie Kennedy, Princess Grace, mob bosses, and probably most of the ever-changing Italian government, and everyone else who drifted in on a yacht or came over from Santa Margarita in a slick power boat of a late afternoon.
This was the Riviera as portrayed in the first thirty minutes of
The Talented Mr. Ripley
(before the movie’s story turns dark). It truly was
La Dolce Vita.
It was warm air, and the smell of fresh pizza coming from the chimney of some little trattoria or the aroma of leather goods wafting out of shoe stores. It was the glittering window displays of boutiques that sold belts and sweaters too expensive to bother putting a price tag on.
I absorbed a vision of a verdant existence that somehow was bigger than everything else. This fleeting vision left me happy and wistful, longing for something I could not pin down. I still feel it.
My unnamable longing has to do with sex, and living forever, and the freshest food, and best smells, from wild arugula
to spilled red wine, to the distant sounds of motor boats and the scratchy whisper of lizards’ claws scampering over sun-baked walls, and girls in bikinis, sultry mothers breast-feeding babies, cobblestone back alleys full of stores smelling of the glue used to repair shoes, and the stale blood of butchered rabbits on sawdust in the tiny shops that lined the alleys where we would walk in the nearby town of Santa Margarita, cigarette smoke and thick dank air of the bars we’d duck into to buy a fresh-squeezed orange juice now and then. Mostly it has to do with beauty, and wanting . . . what? I can’t name what it was or is. Perhaps it has to do with wanting to live well and never getting there, because “there” is to be unself-consciously Italian and you have to be born that way, and I wasn’t.
The smell of Italian leather still evokes those glorious shoes and belts with no prices and still makes me feel dreamy and luxurious, as if I’ve been transported to a world of perpetual warm water and the distant sound of boat engines, the smell of oil paint and linseed oil, that easy feeling of all being well in a world where the colors are bright, the people happy, cats are scrawny, girls are pretty, men are polite, children numerous, dinner is late, ice cream is dark and impossibly chocolatey. Many a saleswoman on Madison Avenue probably wonders why this middle-aged man will step into their shoe emporium, sniff the leather-scented air, close his eyes, sigh, and then head back out to the street in a blissful trance.
And my parents God bless them, let me be! Italy was where they proved themselves to be so much more than their fundamentalist beliefs. It was as if they
wanted
me to somehow grow past the constricted world they had fallen into.
I think Mom and Dad were a lot more comfortable in Portofino, too, than they were in L’Abri. Mom dressed like a
movie star; Dad looked like one of the more intellectual faculty-members of some Italian university. And Mom always looked so elegant. She had taste and was extraordinarily creative. She could combine her few simple pieces of silver jewelry, a silk skirt she’d made, and a blouse bought on sale for a dollar or two, into an outfit that made people do a double-take, as in “who is she?” Besides, in Europe, that intellectual craggy look of Dad’s was always “in.”
My parents certainly did not look American. In fact, Mom would often say, with a disgusted shake of her head, “They look
so
American!” as a put-down to visiting missionaries who came thorough L’Abri, or, heaven forbid, if we saw Americans in Italy, or during our ski vacations in Zermatt. My sisters would hiss: “They look American! Stop speaking English until they go away!” And we’d clam up or speak French. Mom and Dad always went along with this, although, because Dad never learned French and Mom spoke it incredibly badly, they would just sit silently until the danger passed.
12
I
n the winters, we went to the Hotel Riffelberg. It was perched above a cliff overlooking the Zermatt Valley and a range of jagged peaks, including the famous Matterhorn. To the north, the hotel faced a steep snowfield perfect for skiing, which swept up for a mile or more to the top of the Riffelhorn and beyond that to the summit of Gornergrat Mountain. We stayed at the Hotel Riffelberg because it was less expensive than the hotels in Zermatt, and the skiing was better.
The trip from Huémoz to Zermatt began at the front door of Chalet Les Mélèzes with my mother running down the stairs while Debby acted as a kind of relay team whose duty it was to both relate information about Mom’s progress to my father and to hurry Mom along out of the chalet.
At last my sister bundled her down the icy steps, along the path cut through the snow, through the gates, then down the steep stairs to the road. Mom’s descent was watched by my exasperated father, the furious driver of the yellow postal bus, and the angry passengers who—mostly heavyset and malodorous peasant women on errands to Aigle, our “big town” in the valley—were by now ready to make good their threat to drive off and leave Mom and the rest of us
“Américaines”
to find another way to get to the station.
“Tell Edith,” Dad yelled, “that if she’s not here in ten seconds, everyone in this bus will miss their connections in Aigle! Tell her we’ve probably already missed the ten-forty to Visp and the connection to Zermatt! Tell her that if we miss the twelve-ten to Zermatt, there isn’t another one until five-eighteen and we’ll miss the Gornergrat train and won’t get to Riffelberg tonight!”
“Yes, Dad,” I said.
“And tell that woman that if we miss the Gornergrat connection, she can just forget the whole thing!”
The driver added a sour comment,
“Non, mais! C’est pas possible! Je pars en trente secondes! Nom de Dieu! Non, mais! Merde!”
On the cog rail line that was the last step in the four-hour journey, I’d be staring at the snow-covered pine trees. Their branches were weighed down so heavily that the snow formed an almost straight white sheath, making the trees look strangely narrow. Through the trees, the high peaks could be glimpsed, dazzling white and towering above everything as the view unfolded. My heart always raced at the thought of what the slopes were going to be like, judging by the amount of deep powder piled in tall sparkling drifts along the track.
Riffelberg was only a mile or so above Zermatt as the crow flies, but the cog railway slowly meandered for twenty minutes through dense forest and over several high bridges, as well as through various glistening icicle-crusted tunnels, before it ground its way out into the open above the tree line. The forest suddenly ended, and the splendid twilit view of the town of Zermatt below and the pale mountains above exploded around us. Stars were visible in the darkening arch of sky.
13
M
om used two trees to illustrate a major point in her “Talk on Prayer.” She had several standard talks. There was the “L’Abri Story,” her “Girl’s Talk,” and the famous “Talk on Prayer.”
Ours was such a “special story,” right up there with the biblical narrative of the struggles of the People of Israel, that when a new guest arrived at L’Abri, the first thing that happened was that Mom, or one of my sisters, would sit them down and tell them “The L’Abri Story.” (In later years, Mom wrote
L’Abri,
and it became a best-selling book, her first of many that led to a huge following of evangelical readers.) The new guest would learn about what mighty deeds God had done to raise up The Work that they might be led to us. They had stepped into an ongoing miracle. And they could become a part of it, too—or, as Mom would say, “Another thread in the tapestry.” With every new chalet added to The Work, every new brother-in-law, every new step—for instance, when Dad and Mom published their books—the “L’Abri Story” got longer.