In three days’ time, it will already be a month since Spain carried off the World Cup. The Spanish onslaught that has carried everything in its path over the last few years seems to show no signs of abating: two years ago they won the European Cup in style, and we have had Barcelona dominating the European stage for years, Alberto Contador winning three successive Tours de France, Nadal grabbing every chunk of silverware from the world’s tennis courts, Fernando Alonso winning two F1s and now Pedroza finally upstaging Valentino Rossi in the MotoGP.
The day of the final I was in the Piazzetta in Capri and, as expected, the local crowd was for the Spanish. A minority Dutch enclave stood close to where I was sitting and I could not help giving them some consolation: “I’m sorry for you guys, but it seems this time the Spanish are too strong, even for you.” “Yes we know!” “However,” I said, “the Mafia says the best revenge is the one eaten cold.” “What sort of revenge are you talking about?” “Remember five hundred years ago, you fighting the Spanish? Your War of Independence, I mean. No? The famous Dutch Revolt?”
I could see they had not got it. “It’s a long story. In the 1500s, the Spanish were like the Communists in the 1950s: a scheming ideological super-power that had tentacles everywhere and its two goals were to contrast the French and restore Catholic ascendancy in Europe. And you Dutch were caught willy-nilly in their clutches and all because a Spanish Princess married the Flemish heir to the Hapsburg throne, who also happened to own the Dutch Provinces. So all of a sudden your Protestant Netherlanders found that the fiercely Catholic Spanish were right on their doorstep.”
“We don’t know much about history” they responded. “Yes, who knows anything about history nowadays?” So I sort of shut my mouth for a while. During the game, the Spaniards slowly took control and the Oranges were left watching them weave their articulate passing in preparation for that final mortal blow. It was inevitable that I would sooner or later return to the argument, if only to keep up their morale a little. “It looks pretty much like the Siege of Antwerp. It was a brutal war then, I can tell you, much like tonight. The Spanish at that time were a terror of the first order, like the Nazis in World War II, and their land armies were practically invincible. When they first sacked Antwerp under Philip II they massacred thousands and burnt the city to the ground. The Spanish Fury they called it then. I tell you, every Dutchmen should see red when he hears the word ‘Spain’! Think about it: they still call themselves ‘the Red Furies’.”
When the game was over and lost, one Dutch girl suddenly had a flash of memory. “Ok, so why in the Dutch National anthem do we say: ‘The King of Spain I have always honoured’?” “Do you actually say that?” I asked, “I never knew! Well, I guess it must mean: we never wanted the war and the bloodbath, Philip. You did!”
Talking of Capri, it is so ironic that this tiny paradise on earth, which until the middle of the 19th century had been a forgotten backwater of Naples, gained its notoriety due to the comings and goings, the deeds and misdeeds of homosexuals, lesbians and pederasts. My wife, who is an avid consumer of fin-de-siècle biographies, tells me that the bacchanal survived a good 50 years due mainly to the abject poverty of the locals, who acquiesced to the presence of these deviants so long as they made an extra penny out of them. And let’s face it, when the clients were of the calibre of Oscar Wilde, Andre Gide, the Marchesa Casati, Compton Mackenzie, Somerset Maugham, Freidrich Krupp and Norman Douglas, then one had to close an eye, if not both, for survival’s sake.
Nineteenth century homosexuals were tame in comparison with today’s lot. In public you couldn’t distinguish them from the normal straight-laced upper class types of the day, but in private they let their hair down in the languid ambiguous sexuality so typical of the Mediterranean. Most of them had escaped Victorian sexual repression and had found complete liberty across the Channel, first in the French Riviera, then Tunisia, Marrakesh and Capri.
And quite a few of them were exceptional: Europe’s richest magnate of the day, Fritz Krupp, besides being a philanthropist of the first order, took it upon himself to construct one of the more spectacular sights of Capri, the pedestrian stone ramp that goes down from the Giardini di Augusto to Marina Piccola. His enthusiasm for the beautiful local boys, however, soon got the better of him and when he started shipping Neapolitan lads up to a hotel in Berlin, a full-scale scandal broke out. This was compounded by the fact that his orgies inside Capri’s caves soon became the talk of the town. One day he was unceremoniously kicked off the island and he eventually committed suicide.
Norman Douglas, the most famous of Capri’s expats, actually bought his lads from impoverished families, gave them an education of sorts and even ended up financing the careers of some of his protégées. Their families were so grateful to the writer that they started calling him ‘Uncle Norman’ and on his final return to the island in 1921, crowds acclaimed him as if he were the local patron saint. I guess if anyone were to repeat his kind of behaviour today, they would be locked up and the key thrown away.
Douglas, however, was not as evil as one could be forgiven for believing. He planted hundreds of trees on Capri and restored derelict houses with a passion – frequently going bankrupt. Apart from his sexual predilections, he was a deeply philosophical person who adored youths for their lack of inhibition and their enthusiasm for life. He took his inspiration from the Greek philosophers who practised Socratic love with their male students and hated with a vengeance the strict moralities imposed by ideologies and religions. In old age he even came to look like a Greek philosopher. All moralities, he used to say, are generalisations and generalisations are so boring!
Capri, of course, has always been famous for its exhibitionistic streak, but today’s poseurs are minnows compared to the likes of the Marchesa Louisa Casati, who visited Capri frequently and even managed to astound the already seasoned, jaded local hedonists. She must have been a joy to watch: she wore live snakes for jewellery, not infrequently went about naked under her open fur and silk gowns and had naked servants covered in gold leaf follow her everywhere to attend to her whims.
At her soirées, guests discovered that she had placed bizarre wax mannequins sitting at table with them. She roamed the streets with pet cheetahs on diamond-studded leashes and, with her enormous green eyes, black make-up, thin lithe body and mop of flame-coloured dishevelled hair, must have looked like a harpy from hell.
Back to Malta and it is the same old humdrum story: last Wednesday I decided to go to Gnejna Bay for a quick dip while my wife did a commercial, and there, for the love of Mike, I found cars parked all over the sandy beach. Now you tell me where on earth does one go to a beach and find this sort of indecorous obscenity? All around the Mediterranean I am always directed to park in makeshift car parks, such as unploughed fields, and then made to walk to my beach. Never would anyone dream of driving right onto one. Never.
God, are we gross!