The Large Sky

On certain days the sky is unbearably large.
Cloudlike ships of state cleave through the firmament,
Milk-white forms incise the crystal blue,
Swept clean by cold, persistent wind,
Purified by shafts of glinting platinum light,
Life on earth, purpose in heaven, luminous, numinous.
The enigma of why we are here,
Insignificant beneath this strident paean.

Elizabeth died on a day like this. Hearing the news
We stood by the window, looked into the puffy clouds
Conscious of each other, of larger realities,
Projecting ourselves into the endless, fathomless sky,
Holding hands and sliding through immense spaces,
Drawn along, torn and helpless as the wisps of vapour.

Elizabeth, beautiful with long black hair and brown eyes,
Luminary skin, graceful body, feminine voice;
The illness racked her, ravaged her body,
And finally, when she was yellow and wasted,
It claimed her, dust to dust. Monstrous affront,
Who were we to carry on living and stand there
Looking so ardently at the sky's brilliance,
Becoming every detail of that momentous day?

The Overloaded Ark

I had some spare time after I had finished work in Siracusa and so I decided to visit the Archaeological Museum. The historical centre of the city is one of the closest approximations to "a rose-red city, half as old as time". The archaeological remains of Magna Graecia appear suffused with the Mediterranean sun, especially the faces of the terracotta maidens, perpetually fresh and young.

The Museum was full of teenage girls in dark blue suits. Apparently, they had some custodial role, but what it was could only be guessed: a dozen of them patrolled the museum's corridors and I was the only visitor, hopelessly outnumbered. Made up like juvenile filmstars, very much in the Southern manner, they simpered at me and followed ma around with their eyes, wistfully. Romantic notions of a rich foreigner ready to bear the lucky winner away to a new life of luxury and experience--definitely not me!

Industry and commerce are at a low ebb, unemployment is rife, and so public institutions are stuffed with employees until they appear like an overloaded ark. Nowadays, the fashion is for temporary contracts and starvation wages--the precariato. The teenage employees of the museum were too young and inexperienced to have realised the irony of their situation, but that cannot be said for their older counterparts who have weathered the temporary contracts and achieved the miracle of being taken on as 'proper' employees, not mere "collaborators". Perpetual job security and unattractive salaries have left many of them with a "world-owes-me-a-living" mentality and a marked reluctance to change anything for the better, even human relations, or perhaps especially that. These are the people who turn their backs and pretend to be busy as soon as you walk into their office. A book that purported to explain Italian culture to foreigners stated that in every office in Italy there are six people. Five of them do absolutely nothing and the sixth does the work of all of them combined and is referred to by his compatriots as "il fanatico".

If there is not enough to do--and how could there be with so much overstaffing?--then shear boredom dictates that some form of work must be invented: self-justifying work, that creates its own raison d'etre. Recently, I did a day's teaching. A modest sum will be paid to me after a majority of my earnings have been taken away in tax and social security deductions. When preparation and travel time are included, the remuneration is far from generous. To obtain it, I had to fill in eight forms. On these, I stated my date and place of birth four times. I signed eight times. I wrote my address four times and I gave my taxpayer identification number four times. I wrote my bank details three times on one form alone. I filled in an extra form on a government web site, and, strictly following instructions, I repeated my bank account details three times on the same form. Given my qualifications, in terms of labour costs the whole exercise was worth something more than a third of my net earnings. I also had to purchase and affix an administrative stamp--the cherry on top of the bureaucratic cake.

A Tuscan who went to work in the USA once said to me, I think with some justification, that "in American one works well and lives badly; in Italy one lives well and works badly". A Swiss pathologist whom I met at a conference opined that Italy is the country where genius is closest to madness. "In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce...? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles was wrong about the cuckoo clock, a German invention, but what sort of Renaissance would modern Italian bureaucracy produce?

Now it can be told

A quarter of a century has passed and at last the story can be told. As it is still "politically radioactive", and its half-life has definitely not passed, I have changed the names of the people, places and organisations. It is as well to do so, as some heavy accusations are involved. Naturally, the following account is absolute fantasy--of course it is! What else could it be?
In December 1982 several hundred hectares of land slid into the sea on the northern fringes of a city with a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants. It was Europe's largest urban landslide, and it left two people dead and thousands homeless. Almost 300 buildings were left completely unserviceable, including two large hospitals and a significant part of the local university. The main arterial road and railway lines were pushed into the sea.

I arrived in January 1983 and spent the next five years studying the landslide and its many physical, political and social ramifications.

The national scientific research council instituted a research programme with the objectives of finding out the exact causes of the landslide. It was co-ordinated by Don Giuliano, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Terravecchia. In the South of the country civil engineering is one of the few professions to be constantly lucrative. To be a full professor of the subject is to be in an undeniable position of power with respect to the contracts for the planning, design and management of large projects. In fact, Don G. had cornered the market in this field. No professional geotechnical engineer or applied geologist in the southeast could work without Don G's tacit or explicit permission. There was an unwritten agreement that the bosses at the University of Terranova would have absolute control over the projects in the west. Terravecchia would control the east, and contracts relating to places in between would be shared between the two fiefdoms. At his own university, Don G. had his minions write his scientific articles for him. This was a no-risk strategy, as the authors were far too in awe of his power to confess publically. In fact, the only drawback was the occasionally at conferences a foreign academic would ask Don G. what he had meant in one of his articles and he couldn't remember having published it, or perhaps he had not even read it. In any event, an international society awarded him a gold medal in recognition of his "extraordinary scientific productivity". Indeed!

For Don G. and his followers, it was a major coup to be able to shift activities to a lucrative area further north, an achievement that had much to do with Don G's alliance with the Rector of the University of Miramare, who would later move down the coast to preside over a seat of higher learning closer to Terravecchia (where he would eventually be indicted for nepotism).

Given the scale of the emergency in Miramare, the national government invested significantly in the scientific effort to study the causes and mechanisms of the landslide. Although the sums were paltry by the standards of many Western countries, earth sciences in Italy had been starved of funds to the extent that the Miramare landslide project was a sudden, unexpected windfall that stimulated many researchers' appetites for funded work.

Of course, to preserve the existing power structures, the available funds had to be divided up between all parties, and universities, that exerted some influence in the area. The result was a free-for-all that led to a very heterogeneous scientific effort. When large landslides occur it is opportune to study the subsoil by sinking a number of borings. At Miramare more than 110 were drilled, but in a completely haphazard pattern that contributed very little to the general picture of the causes and mechanisms of the movement. One painful consequence of this was that when a meeting was held in the Great Hall of the University of Miramare's Rectorate to present the results of the scientific enquiry to the public, the researchers had no answers to the practical questions posed by the association of people made homeless by the landslide, such as could the damaged buildings be rehabilitated? and was it safe to rebuild in the area?

The Miramare landslide had been a political question for more than two centuries. It had inherited a heavy political baggage in terms of the decision to expand the city northwards into an area that had suffered major landsliding in the 1770s and 1920 (although not to the extent of the later disaster). From the morning after the 1982 landslide functionaries and politicians scrambled energetically to avoid the political responsibility or deflect it onto their colleagues, and any attempt to understand the aftermath has to take account of this tendency.

One of the aspects of the scientific enquiry that is most difficult to understand is its sheer amateurish irrationality. Nevertheless, if the framework of analysis is changed, it suddenly springs into focus and becomes eminently explainable. Let us see how and why.

Although the landslide was perforated like a sieve with boreholes, only one of them, located right in the middle, penetrated deeper than a few tens of metres. At 240 metres below the surface there appeared to be a hiatus in the continuity of the sediments that were being drilled through. It was taken to indicate the presence of a plane of movement that had caused the entire landslide to rotate in a deep axis with a perfect curvilinear movement. Justification for this model was taken from a case in Alaska, which, however, was much smaller, had occurred in very different sediments, and was caused directly by a major earthquake (the Miramare landslide may have had some long-term connection with earth tremors, as the area is seismically active, but no quakes occurred in December 1982 and the landslide was undoubtably caused by prolonged rainfall). The rotational movement hypothesis quickly assumed the status of orthodoxy and it made a rapid transition to "established fact" (Don G. vigorously promoted it), even though in mechanical terms it was ridiculously unsuited to the case at Miramare and there was plenty of evidence to support a flatter, shallower movement that was more a sort of conveyor belt than a rotating bowl.

For many years it was not clear to me why such an unsuitable model had been adhered to so enthusiastically. Indeed, a dozen years after the landslide, one of Don G's senior collaborators took me aside in the coffee room during a national conference and confidentially pulled some borehole logs out of his pocket: one seemed to point to the rotational model but the other 19 roundly disproved it.

Not that it was easy to acquire information. Don G. and his team did not want an independent expert buzzing around their investigations. This was made very clear to me when in 1986 I was invited to an international conference in Don G's home town and systematically prevented from speaking at it. In truth, I had prepared an utterly innocuous 12-minute talk on something quite unconnected with Miramare, but the organisers decided to be prudent: who knows what I might have revealed ad libitum?

For two field seasons I was the guest of the Mayor and City Council of Miramare. They provided accommodation while I conducted my research and in return I was asked to write confidential reports containing my evaluation of the developing situation regarding the landslide. Clearly the Mayor did not regard any local or national authority as sufficiently independent to give him an unbiased assessment taken from an impartial viewpoint. As Professor at a large American university I was the only foreigner to make my presence felt in scientific circles at Miramare at that time.

Eventually, a large geotechnical engineering report on the landslide was compiled. With all the tests, simulations and compendia of data, it filled a series of boxes that reached a metre and a half above the floor. I found it extremely disappointing. The data had been collected in such an unsystematic manner that it proved impossible to evaluate alternative models of the landslide mechanism beyond a few minor variations. The report struck me as shallow and inconclusive, but at the time it did not cross my mind that this might be a deliberate strategy. The report concluded that a substantial infill of rock and sediment on the downslope, seaward side of the movement would stabilise it and permit redevelopment of the slope. This struck me as ridiculous in mechanical terms, but I was unaware of the motives that led to such a conclusion.

My reports to the Mayor of Miramare were written with great care and attention. I stuck rigorously to general principles and observations, said nothing specific about any existing document or ongoing study and made sure that I separated the facts from my own opinions. In short I tried to keep out of the political minefield. While this strategy avoided any direct criticism of other people's work--which would have been dangerous under the circumstances--the sheer vagueness of my observations made them amenable to a wide variety of possible interpretations amid the political currents of the time.

One day in December 1988 the regional newspapers all carried the headline "U.S. expert throws out landslide plan". My reports had been stolen from a locked desk in the regional government headquarters and leaked to the press. There was an immediate political firestorm. It hinged on the question of whether it was a good idea to spend $40 million on the projected infill at the base of the landslide. Whether or not this would have done any good, the stated justification for it (i.e. stabilising the movement) was patently wrong. The regional government abandoned the plan and was forced to convene a high-level commission of enquiry. I later found that its first task was to enquire into me and my motives, but as I had received no payments from anyone in Italy there was nothing I could be indicted for. The commission ratified the decision to abandon the infill project.

Two decades later I found out that Don G. had planned the infill as a means of disposing of the waste from gypsum quarrying in his home region. Two groups of people would have enriched themselves on the basis of a gigantic and wasteful engineering project that would probably have caused more problems than it would have solved, and would have created some extremely dubious environmental modifications. The people of Miramare got out of that, although they had other concrete-steel-and-earth-moving projects of debatable utility foisted upon them. The geological fraternity in Italy closed ranks against me and I thus failed to get a chair at an Italian university. And Don G. suffered one of the very few setbacks that have interrupted his long and brilliant career.

In any account such as this the writer will add a measure of self justification. Judge for yourself, gentle reader, how close to reality this story is. I repeat that it is pure fantasy--of course!

San Casciano in Val di Pesa

Night
Go to the roof of the house and look at the sky,
Capacious, luminous, portentous,
The inside of a great, blue, steel bowl, mixing
Watercolour violet, indigo ink, tincture of cobalt,
OmarKhayyamesque in its glory.
The transparent walls contain us,
Far away from whatever lies beyond:
Infinite space, unimaginable vastness,
The great seas in which the imagination coasts,
Punctuated by stars, illuminated by moonbeams,
Edged by the hills and towers and roofs
Of the black landscape in which we live.
Indistinct are the wavering lines of lights
That zigzag up the hill to Fiesole, under
The black shroud of the northern mountains,
Candles held by an expectant throng,
Silent and waiting in the distance.

Day
The view is sharper in the pearly light of a winter's day.
Pervasive but restrained, it etches out the detail,
Transforms the landscape into green and grey,
Garnished with silver in the sprays of olive leaves
That grow in clumps among the fields; brown
In the serried ranks of vines, Spartan, pruned back,
They endure the winter cold to sprout again
In the warm weather, ridiculously green.
Church bells peal casually and the sound carries out
In endless permutations of clangs, percussive
It rolls around the hills and floods back to us,
On its back the devotions of centuries, for
The Convent bells of the Clarisse have pealed
For twenty-one generations, inexorably
Marking cycles of life and death, death and life.
This land resounds with patience and endurance,
The jugular surge of life, pain and pleasure mixed.

So, wondrously, does the mundane become the sacred.

The Siege of Scarperia

The Florentines were worried about the lawlessness of the Apennines and the potential for invasion from the north. Hence in 1294 they chose some sites and started to build new fortified settlements on the road to Bologna: Scarperia and Firenzuola, its northerly neighbour. The former took its name from the scarp foot at which it was built, with the Mugello Apennines as a backdrop. By 8 September 1306 the construction of the town was sufficiently advanced that a ceremony of inauguration could be held. The commemoration of the diotto, 'eighth day', has been repeated each September ever since. By the middle of the 14th century the expansionist policies of Archbiship Giovanni Visconti, Duke of Milan, fully justified the Florentines' fears, for his army was marching south, sacking and pillaging towns and villages as it went.
In 1351, when the Milanese arrived, Florence was in a pitiful state, its resources depleted by a recent war against Lucca. In the Mugello the Ubaldini family of nobles was exerting tyranny from their mountain castles. The Florentines needed to take the Mugello by force and subdue its rebellious inhabitants. Meanwhile, the Pisans pretended to be neutral but secretly sent 200 knights to join forces with the Milanese. Pistoia, under the Panciatici family, wavered and threatened to betray Florence. On 26th March it surrendered without a fight to the force of 800 knights that the Florentines had sent to threaten it. A show of force was needed, because the previous strategy, based on the Trojan Horse principle, failed when the Florentine notary Piero Gucci woke up too late to infiltrate Pistoia and get his sympathisers to open the gates to the Florentine troops. Meanwhile Giovanni Visconti da Oleggio, distant cousin of the homonymous Milanese leader, led the march on Florence. Firenzuola, too distant to defend adequately, fell immediately, and so the Florentines concentrated their resistance on Scarperia.
Visconti and his troops were disorganised and in eight days of siege failed to take Pistoia. On 7 August 1351 they left it alone and instead sacked Campi Bisenzio, Brozzi and Peretola, all perilously close to Florence. However, Visconti had neglected his supply lines, so he turned to Calenzano in the hope that by taking this town, on the northern side of Florence, he could re-establish dominion over the Apennine route to Bologna, which was well-guarded by the Florentines. Iacopo del Fiore and his guards in Calenzano took fright at the advance of the Milanese army and fled to the relative safety of Florence. He was quickly sent back into the mountains to defend Scarperia at the head of a force of 200 knights and 300 infantrymen (many of whom were, however, German mercenaries).
Scarperia was by no means completely fortified. It had been under construction for less than 60 years and building works were slow in those days. Part of the town's wall had yet to be built and all there was in their place was a palisade of stakes about two metres high. The defenders rapidly reinforced this and dug two concentric ditches on the outer side. By September the Milanese were camped in the neighbouring fields and Scarperia was under seige.
Inside the defences there were 600 soldiers. A force of 1800 knights and 3000 infantrymen was on its way, but many of these were coming from Siena and Perugia and they were being harried in the Arno Valley by troops from Arezzo. The defenders looked out with trepidation upon Visconti's 2000 knights and 600 infantrymen, fearing that yet more would arrive from the direction of Bologna. The situation seemed hopeless.
On the first Sunday of October 1351 the Milanese attacked, despite the prevailing taboo against fighting wars on Sundays. They swarmed over the two ditches that surrounded the town and began to scale the walls. At first the Florentines held their fire, but when the Milanese started to climb the walls and palisade the invaders met with a hail of arrows, crossbow bolts, stones from ballistas and torrents of boiling water. They were beaten back but tried again at dawn the following day. This time they attempted to tunnel under the defences. Iacopo del Fiore reacted by ordering his troops to dig a ditch inside the walls, so that the defence would continue if they collapsed. He organised a sally and for two days his men fought with swords and maces on the open ground until eventually they reached the entrance to the tunnel and destroyed it.
After two months of marching and hard fighting the Milanese troops were beginning to lose heart. As an incentive Giovanni Visconti da Oleggio promised them double pay if they could take Scarperia and he organised a surprise attack at midnight. Fortunately for the Florentines, their sentinels had not relaxed their guard and the attack was beaten off. At dawn on 17 October 1951 the Milanese could be observed retreating towards Bologna. The overjoyed Florentines gave each of the mercenary horsemen 500 golden florins and the title of knight, while the foot-soldiers received a double-month's pay. The inhabitants of Scarperia were compensated for their privations with ten years' exemption from taxes.
For the fortitude and courage of its inhabitants, Scarperia received the honour of being the only town in Florentine territory that could adopt the white flag emblazoned with the red lily bearing pistils, which is still widely displayed there with pride.
All this my little house has seen, for the building appears on the map of Scarperia made at its founding in 1306.

My life as a palagi

In 1985 I spent a brief period as Visiting Professor at the University of the South Pacific on the Fijian island of Viti Levu. These are some of my recollections. 'Palangi' is a somewhat contemptuous term for a Caucasian white man.
The South Pacific is indeed a pacific place. I was there in August, in deepest mid-winter, and the weather was warm, sunny and pleasant. White, puffy clouds graced the serene blue sky and green waves whelmed in a lulling rhythm on the sandy beaches.
Viti Levu, the largest of the Fijian islands, is covered in island rainforest on the 'wet' side and straw-yellow savanna on the 'dry' side, where sugar cane is grown in extensive plantations. The University of the South Pacific serves nine island nations and the campus at Laucala Bay (a converted British Army barracks) is a restful place. Parrots sharpen their beaks on the guttering and the windows are made so that they cannot be shut: there is practically no need to close them.
The population of Fiji is almost evenly divided between Melanesians and Indians. The latter were brought there from South India in the nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. They proved to be much better entrepreneurs than the Melanesians, but despite their economic success, they cannot own the land, which is held in tribal trusts by the indigenes. When I was there, USP had a student population that was more varied than this simple distinction implies. There were Polynesians and various outer islanders, as well as some Chinese and Japanese. But the most spectacular were the Indian women: the long, silky black hair, the electric blue tunics and clinging pants, the glittering anklets, the flowing scarves. There were times when a walk around campus felt like a journey through the Arabian Nights.
Viti Levu is served by buses that have the characteristic "Fijian air conditioning"--meaning no glass in their windows. This is a good thing, as the weather can be unbearably hot and humid. It also stops the windows rattling on the uneven tracks that are the only roads into the interior of the island. Bus drivers are great stars in Fiji, as they are the only men that Indian women are able to meet, such is purdah. And they live up to it by dressing like Bollywood film stars, shirts open to the waist, gold chains swinging at their necks.
And then there are the Melanesian women. On the surface they are submissive and welcoming. Beneath that beguiling exterior they are out to snare a man: any man who has a guaranteed stipend of more than 15 Fijian dollars a month will do. Their strategy is deceptively simple. Attentive, appreciative, available and affectionate, they offer themselves in the most disarming way, but once the offer had been accepted the only possible outcome is marriage. Patrick, the Englishman who was my host, was much taken by these tall beauties with their curly black hair and regal features. A year after my visit he sent me a photograph of his wedding to a tall, straight-backed Melanesian girl called Fipe. And six months later his daughter was born. I can imagine how he must have felt when he found she was pregnant and her family came to see him with long-bladed sugar-cane knives in their hands to persuade him to "do the decent thing". He ended up with two children and a messy divorce.
Unaware of this, on my first night I went to a disco. Before going in, my two companions, Melanesian stalwarts, stopped at a bush. Each of them clipped off a sprig of foliage and put it behind his ear, so I did likewise. They laughed and playfully punched me on the shoulders. Only later did I realise that the sprig of foliage was symbolic of an unattached man looking to mate an unattached woman. Fortunately, none of the ladies in the discotheque took me seriously enough to make an offer. I later found that when one met these girls socially their opening gambit was usually "are you married?" (I wasn't) and then "do you have a job?" (I did, and by their standards a stratospherically good one). Later during my stay in Fiji I was particularly taken by a young girl with a complexion the colour fo milky coffee and spectacular bosoms who was part of a dance troupe that entertained the tourists. She clearly registered my interest. But by then I was ready to go home to America and was not going to allow myself to fall into the trap. So when she asked me "Are you married?" I said "Yes!"
The highlight of the disco was a dance by a troupe of brown-skinned Melanesian men dressed in nothing but grass skirts and war paint, who wielded spears and bamboo shields. Under strobe lights and to the sound of pulsating disco music the impression they left was quite unforgettable, and their ability to do break-dancing with spears and shields in their hands was the stuff of legend.
Then we went back to Patrick's house and sat in his living room drinking small glasses of Fiji Bitter, the dark, potent beer of the islands, sitting there in a silent revery watching the geckos fight each other on the ceiling above our heads and listening to them cluck menacingly. At intervals the guttering outside would rattle as yellow-crested galars strutted along it, and all the time the leaves of the banana trees in the garden rustled in the breeze like soft, intense rainfall.
We went to Wainimala in the centre of the island. We took some gifts with us: a few tins of pilchards, bags of tea; some yaqona, the root of the kava plant. We stayed with the local school teacher, who very kindly gave up his house to us and spent the night sleeping on the floor of his kitchen, a building made of bamboo and banana leaves. I had the pleasure of sleeping on a damp, termite-proof piece of plywood, which I suppose was his bed. In the morning I got up and put on my sulu, a brightly coloured skirt. This reminds me that in Fiji it is the men who wear the skirts. The male soldiers of the Fijian Army who guard the Governor's Palace, the home of the chief Ratu, wear leather skirts. The typical Fijian businessman wears a jacket, waistcoat, old school tie and elegantly tailored pin-striped skirt, and he carries a briefcase. Ordinary people wear a piece of cotton, wound round their waists and stretching to just below their knees, which for modesty's sake must be covered.
I went into the kitchen and sat down on the floor next to the red-and-white checked tablecloth. On this, food was spread out for breakfast, mostly food left over from the night before. Fortunately there was no boiled tapioca, which I found could not be swallowed below the level of the Adam's apple. In the corner of the table cloth there was a hen which was laying an egg. To be honest, I had never seen a hen lay an egg and I did not realise it was such a painful and traumatic process. The hen clucked and crowed in a crescendo of sound that ended when the egg rolled out and the hen disappeared out the door of the kitchen in a flurry of feathers after running desperately across the tablecloth and plunging her claws into all the food on it as she went. Then we proceeded to eat the egg.
Walks in the forest were most elevating. The old, spent volcanoes of the centre of the island towered above it, slate grey in the distance. The foliage was an intense green, the leaves of some of the forest plants were as large as a sheet, a green sheet with deep, translucent veins in it. Dragon flies buzzed around them with their wings shimmering brilliantly. I picked up a seed that was the size of a medal, it gleamed a rich mahogany brown. Although the Melanesian Fijians are nominally Christians of various denominations, in the fields of yaqona plants I found a pagan idol carved out of that curiously dense and fibrous mass of roots that can be found on tropical islands. Its eyes were blindfolded.
At night the villages echo to the rhythmic thump of yaqona being pounded to dust so that it can be infused with river water to make 'grog', the drink of the ethnic Fijians. Yaqona (pronounced "yangona") is mildly soporific and has very little taste (most of that comes from the mud in the river water). It is drunk in half a coconut shell with much ritual clapping and cries of "Mahther!" ("down in one"). Yaqona is the root of life, and in fact it looks like a human figurine, rather as does the Ginseng root or the mandrake. Fijians are addicted to ceremony and as such a hundred years ago they found an unexpected affinity with their British colonists (the Fijian Islands annexed themselves to the British Empire in 1870).
Many protocols and conventions must be observed when entering a village: backpack lowered in the name of humility, knees covered in the name of modesty; never sit higher than you host. And take your gifts straight for the house of the village chief. Even if this is only one room, it will be divided into four parts: public, semi-public, semi-private and private. One enters, of course, into the public part. There will be furniture, but Fijians will not use it, for they are much more comfortable squatting on the floor, and that is what their visitors must do, however agonising it feels. Yaqona is infused in a carved dish of tropical hardwood called a tanoa. Coconut shells are filled and passed around, cupped hands are clapped, "Mahther!" is said (with feeling) and speeches are made. This is sevu-sevu, the Fijian welcoming ceremony. At one sevu-sevu I ended up drinking twelve helpings of yaqona and I must admit it had no effect on me whatsoever.
During a lull in one of these ceremonies, a tribal elder turned to us and said, reflectively, "You know, a hundred years ago.... we'd have eaten you!"--a comforting thought. Officially, the last person to be eaten on Viti Levu was the English Methodist minister the Rev. James Baker. He was an insufferable zealot and to some extent must have deserved his fate. His body was dismembered and pressure cooked in a hole in the ground. A thigh garnished with steamed spinach was presented to Matanitu, the chief of the islands. But Matanitu had by then obtained a B.A. from Oxford University and affected to be disgusted by the offer. "Take it away, old boy!" he said in his affected Oxford accept. On the way to the dump the thigh disappeared. This was somewhat strange, as the meat of the white man was considered inferior to that of the Melanesians: no one wanted to absorb the spirit of such a person. However, it was the end of an era, so perhaps this macabre gastronomic theft reflected nostalgia for an earlier way of life. But not quite the end, apparently, as I heard rumours that someone had been eaten, deep in the mountains, in 1957.
One day we went down to Nausori airport to catch a plane to Levuka. Patrick spent most of the waiting period trying to chat up the loquacious Fijian girl who sold newspapers in the terminal, but before he could get around to asking her for a date along came a farm tractor towing our aircraft. At $9.50 Fijian for a one-way ticket it was not an expensive flight, nor was it a very long one. We got into the plane and, as I was sitting with my knees pressed into the small of the pilot's back, I said to him "Do you realise you have a flat tyre?" He replied in a broad New Zealand accent "Nah nah mate, these tyres are low profile. If they were fully blown up we'd dig a trench in the runway."
The take-off went well enough and we soon reached our cruising altitude of 90 metres above sea level. This afforded a good view of the mangrove coasts of Motoriki Island and shortly after that we landed at a clearing in the rainforest of Overlau, the chief island of the Lau Group. The landing was bumpy, and I assumed this was because the runway was effectively a ploughed field, but when I climbed down from the aircraft it was immediately apparent that the right tyre was blown up and the left one was not. Before I could say anything the pilot had turned the plane around and taken off, with a rolling diagonal gait, for the next island on his itinerary.
Our first port of call was the Chief of Police's house. He proved to be quite welcoming and his house was remarkably western in style, with modern furniture and fittings. His wife invited us into the kitchen for a cup of tea, but as Melanesians do not like sitting on chairs we sat down under the kitchen table and looked up at the lady as she brewed the tea above our heads.
The guest house on Overlau was pure colonial in style. Most of the guests were mosquitoes, with whom we had quite a battle as they tended to get trapped in the acres of netting that we rolled into in a vain attempt to get to sleep. In recompense there were fresh papayas for breakfast, and they were as tangy as mangoes.
But Overlau was the first place in the South Pacific that I saw really poor people. Families of Indians lived in houses made out of flattened-out oil cans. The local restaurant had no furniture, no cutlery and only the smallest number of bowls: chapatis and chicken curry, balanced on one's knees, eaten with the hands, crouched in the corner of a large, empty cement room. We walked up a dirt track into the centre of the island, the ancient crater of an extinct volcano. The track wound its way through clamps of nicotine-yellow coconuts that gleamed in their giant husks. The road surface was pitted with the flattened bodies of frogs that had been run over and tanned by the midday heat. The island rain forest with which the crater walls were garlanded was a gorgeous deep green and the huge leaves of the plants dripped with sweet sap and crystal clear rainwater.
Back on Viti Levu I was introduced to Emosi, the Chief of one of the outer islands. I had hired a tiny car in the hope of driving right around the island. Emosi said he would come with me. He had no experience of travelling by car, as his island had no roads on it, only four fishing villages connected by boat journeys. We set off in grand style, whooshing past the colonial villas surrounded by palm trees and pineapple plantations. But after several hours of wrestling with the steering wheel, I had to give up. The road was too rutted to be travelled along in a Suzuki 800. On the way back we stopped at a local restaurant, a typical bamboo and banana leaf eatery, and Emosi ordered a plate of eka vaka lolo (fish with coconut sauce). It was made in the traditional way by boiling the fish, shaking the coconut down from the tree, splitting it open with an awl, throwing the juice away and grating the flesh onto the fish. The cook then added a garnishing of potatoes and large lumps of tapioca, the world's most indigestible vegetable. Emosi sunk his teeth into this shining example of Melanesian cuisine and said "Ah! That's real food!" He looked disparagingly at my chicken curry and added "I can't stand that fancy stuff you're eating."
Shortly before I was due to leave Fiji the Methodist community decided to celebrate its centenary on the cricket pitch outside the Ratu's palace. In the Pacific Grand Hotel the ceiling fans stirred up the moths and mosquitoes and the rattan chairs creaked much as they had in the colonial era. Crowds dressed in mud-daubed bark-skin licked at 'Tip-Top' ice-creams (whatever Tip-Top made its ice creams with, there was certainly no milk or cream in them). And outer islanders came by in troupes and phalanxes, designer glasses and grass skirts--real grass skirts, not the fluorescent plastic ones that were being sold down by the port for $2.95 Fijian.
My last night in Fiji was idyllic. I sat cross-legged in a bamboo and banana leaf hut drinking coconut-half after coconut-half of yaqona, clapping with cupped hands and listening to the members of the Viti Levu Rugby Club strum their ukuleles and sing in that sonorous harmony that is so hauntingly characteristic of the South Pacific (their team had just lost a match against Vatulele, the second island). The moon hung large in the tropical sky, the waves burst rhythmically on the shore nearby, fireflies shimmered in the night air, and next to me a tall, straight-backed Fijian maiden with frizzy black hair smiled at me in that disarming way that they have and looked beautiful in the moonlight.
Palangis are not often welcomed into island society in Fiji. In fact, the tourists, most of whom are brash Australasians, are rigidly segregated from the real Fiji. I was privileged to be allowed into the villages of the Wainimala and Levuka districts. I was perhaps not a perfect guest, but I tried to act with humility and show sensitivity to local traditions and a sincere appreciation for the hospitality that was given to me.
A year later there was a minor civil war on Viti Levu. The Govinda Hari Krishna restaurant in Suva appeared on television screens around the world with smoke and flames pouring out of it. That was such a pity as it was the cleanest and best restaurant in the country and the food was cheap and very good. It was more of a pity for the ethnic hatred and unrest that it symbolised. By demographic force of numbers the Indians had won the general election. The Melanesian Fijians induced the Army to stage a coup d'etat in order to ensure that the Indians did not dismantle the tribal trusts that held the land. It ushered in an uneasy period of partial and awkward political accommodation that unfortunately is still going on.

Universities I have known

There is a species of academic known as the 'gypsy scholar'. He or she is generally a competent teacher, perhaps an adequate researcher, but for reasons of character, personal history or something else the individual is unable to secure a permanent post and thus must move from one temporary job to another. Seldom is this a matter of choice, but it is instead dictated by cruel necessity. In the worst cases the scholar remains in this academic limbo for an entire career, but in any case most of us have had the experience, for there is often a gap between finishing one's studies and finding a suitable place to develop one's career.
As I currently lack continuity of employment I suppose I am close to returning to gypsy scholar status. If that is so, I can only blame myself, for I voluntarily left a comfortable, permanent position as a tenured full professor. It is hard to see any professional justification for this self-inflicted penitence, as I have already done my stint of moving from one university to another, and I have done it in more than one country.
As an unemployed PhD graduate I managed to garner some temporary work in various English universities. One of these was Cambridge. I started on a humble level teaching a short course at Homerton College, a nondescript establishment that trained teachers and was hardly considered authentic by the ancient and famous colleges of the University federation. Later, I gave a lecture at Emanuel, which was very different, especially when they invited me to evening dinner. This took place by candle-light in an oak-panelled hall that was constructed by the Puritan founders in 1584. We sat their in our gowns and ate with silver cutlery that dated from 1747 and is in the national historical register. The college staff served us cutlets of venison and glasses of vintage wine. It was all rather overbearing and, although it was picturesque, it left me feeling lucky that I did not have to socialise in that way every Friday evening.
Next I did some tutoring that was split between two sites: the Geography Department in Downing Street and Fitzwilliam College. The latter, known locally as 'Fitz', was founded in 1860 but housed in a modern version of the old monastic-collegiate arrangement created in 1970 by the architect Denys Lasdun. Though obviously monied, the students were no more brilliant than I had been used to in London (where as fate decreed, I worked in another of Lasdun's buildings, an overbearing pile that the University had insensitively built in place of one of the famous Bloomsbury squares). Yet in the breakfast room there were sketches by Picasso. At lunch there was an entire Stilton, king of cheeses, and the servants were deferential in a manner that made my skin creep.
Waikato was an entirely different kind of university. Situated in verdant countryside next to a small town on North Island, New Zealand, it was a haven of peace and contemplation. The students were a mixture of Kiwis, Aussies, Polynesians, Melanesians and Japanese, but all of them very deferential. Everything, from the buildings to the atmosphere in the common room it radiated conservatism. At this point I began to miss the vitality and confusion of my alma mater, the London School of Economics and Political Science.
For one term, while on sabbatical from the University of Massachusetts, I taught in the Geology Department at the University of Urbino. The town of Urbino, situated deep in the hills of central Italy, is spectacularly picturesque. Its cobbled streets lead to the crest of a hill, upon which is situated a stupendous ducal palace, a sixteenth century fairy castle, packed with art treasures and visited in large numbers by those tourists who venture away from the main cities of Italy. Urbino is a small town and the university is hidden away inside its close-knit urban fabric. But it is a desperately provincial temple of learning. Its horizons extend no further than Ancona and southern Romagna, but a few tens of kilometres away.
When I was there, Carlo Bò was Rector. In Italy the rectors of universities accede to the title of 'Il Magnifico'. Many of them are far from being magnificent, but Carlo Bò at least had the advantage of being very tall and straight-backed. He was also very a well-known intellectual with a long history of participating in the nation's affairs. His university, at the time one of only four private institutions of higher learning in Italy, lacked a place where the academics could congregate and socialise. It was a typical "mordi e fuggi" university ('teach and flee'). Virtually none of the staff deigned to live in Urbino or the surrounding villages--too isolated. Instead, they came from Rome, Bologna, Ferrara and such places, taught, saw their students and rushed back home as soon as possible. But at lunchtime they needed a place to go, and by default it was the Ristorante da Franco, situated off the main square of the small town. Table no. 1 in this establishment was strategically reserved for the Magnificent Rector. On the rare occasions when Carlo Bò graced it with his presence, the academics would all rise and stand to attention as he strode in. The atmosphere was positively surreal and the menu was something I soon got to know by heart (the waiter, however, was Iranian, although Carlo Bò would be served by Franco himself, bowing and scraping his way back to the kitchen and muttering about what an honour it was).
I recall little of my contact with the Bangladesh universities. In one of these institutions, in Dhaka, the fierce tropical heat of summer had caused the brickwork to bloom with a picturesque efflorescence of precipitated salts. The facilities were adequate but rudimentary and the books were all printed on that curious pink paper that abounds in the Indian subcontinent and disintegrates as one turns the pages. The agricultural college at Comilla had this much in common with the institutions in the capital, but at its centre it had a huge lake, which steamed in the heat and wreathed the groves of mango trees with silky mist. There were armed soldiers in the corridors, even in the cafeteria, but whereas in the capital they would have been deployed to quell student riots, which are frequent there, in Comilla they were there to protect the students against the incursions of brigands which lived amid the jack-fruit trees in the surrounding rainforest.
At the University of the South Pacific I was briefly Visiting Professor. It was very difficult to teach the students, a mixture of Indians and Melanesians, about my experience, as this had mostly been garnered almost exactly on the other side of the world--to be precise 177 degrees away. I set myself to study Matanitù, the last of the great tribal chiefs, whose reign ended gradually with the annexation of Fiji to the British Empire in 1870. During the course of my studies I learnt much about Fijian traditions, for the people of the Pacific islands are enamoured of formality and are adept at blending it with ancient beliefs about spirits, ancestors and life-forces. Some of this was acted out in front of me while I was there, as the USP campus hosted a meke-meke, a tribal gathering. As the University was jointly owned by nine island nations (Vanua Atu, Samoa, Western Samoa, etc.) this traditional festival was colourful and varied. Much spear waving and dancing took place, with the men in grass skirts and the women attired in bark-cloth with traditional brown and black designs printed in it.
I visited the University of Kazan' in one of the Russian Republics of what was then the Soviet Union in Autumn when the weather was cold and snow had already fallen. The room in which Lenin had attended lessons was preserved exactly as it had been in his time and one could sit in his usual place--the third row of benches, on the extreme left (prophetically, perhaps?)--and absorb the atmosphere. The University was dusty and overheated, and it had more of an eighteenth-century feeling to it than one connected with October 1917. When I was there it had only two computers, both IBMs, which were jealously guarded in a small room.
I have known many other universities and all of them have had some essential characteristic that made them unique and particular, sometimes in a pleasant manner, sometimes in one that was difficult for an outsider to accept.