Visiting Fireman
Tourist Angst
By ALAN BRIEN
INEVER seem to meet anyone who has been on holiday any more. They have always Just been 'abroad'—just for a spur-of-the- moment, quite-unpremeditated, few weeks in some spot which they personally have known and loved for years, long before plumbing, and policemen, and shark-nets, and DDT, and other English people began to ruin the atmosphere—but never 'on holiday'. When I was abroad last month, I suddenly realised why the phrase had be- come unfashionable. They are all suffering from the latest travel disease (psychoso- matic, naturally) which in any one year has its victims in half the beds in any continental hotel. I call it Tourist's Angst. It is a gnaw- ing suspicion that after all you've said you are still a tourist like every other tourist.
Of course, there are other travel diseases. There arc those which make you come out in spots, even those that make you go in in spots. And that commonest one which makes you look gaunt and yellow like a refugee from Devil's Island. But Tourist's Angst, which attacks without warning on the tiniest island, in the shade of the most sulphurous rock, out of the most brazen sky, seems to be practically incurable. Like most anxieties today, it is an anxiety about status. It is the fear that you are forever branded as an outsider, a tripper, a rubber- neck, and that above your head there grumbles and hovers an unmistakable English thundercloud about the size of a bowler hat.
Half the pleasure of going abroad, let's face it, is the pleasure of coming back—and then boring everyone with your anecdotes. Now, it is all very well to say with a flurry of mock-apologetics---`You know, I'm afraid we were terribly lazy. We didn't meet a single white, I mean, English person the whole time. Well, you know, we just avoided the Duomo and the Aimee and the Grotto and the belle pointe de vue. We just lazed about all day reading La Revue des Deux Mondes and doing absolutely nothing'. That won't last you through the soup, will it? So as you cash your cheque with the other tourists and pocket quires of those gaudy, improbable, foreign tea coupons, you begin to wonder what the others get up to when your peeling back is turned. Perhaps there are catacombs around the corner where plaguy corpses hang in rows like abandoned umbrellas in a lost property office. Perhaps up there on the hill there is an underground nightclub where a moody future protegee of Mr. Darryl F. Zanuck sings throatily through her hair. Perhaps that grey, dusty, Methodist-looking church is the one where that minor E. M. Forster character was horribly done away with in the middle of a short, well-bred, throw-away paragraph. Wouldn't it be awful if all those dreadful people on the coach tour went back having seen more in a day than you glimpsed in a month? And all because you couldn't bring yourself to say `Yes' to the blue-chinned
guide in the corduroy cycling jacket, to pick up that leaflet in Cook's, to join on the end of the queue in the piazza.
I say 'you' because I suspect that you have just as severe an attack of TA as I have— even though you do look rather impressively tuned in to the landscape, lounging there defiantly in the sun. Even though you are wearing a fringe beard, a gondolier's shirt and rope sandals, and your—er—wife is the colour of fried chicken in her two-handker- chief swimming costume and her beehive straw hat. I've seen you trying to translate advertisement slogans from Hugo's Italian in Three Months Without a Mistress, or whatever it is called. And I know that you too would like to seize control of the con- versation at dinner this autumn in England by saying, 'You know this scampi rather reminds me of an odd incident on Ischia when I was abroad the other day. Though, of course, there they serve them as they really should be served with cream, caviare, brandy, truffles, chocolate and just a pinch of a local herb called a rivederci.' And through your hostess's muttered asides, and your host's brave smile, you describe how the Maire and the Cure and the Marchese staged a bawdy pageant, which hadn't altered a gesture in nine hundred years, on the peristyle of a pre-Greek temple—just for you.
I just do not understand how all these famous travel writers got around and saw everything without behaving like tourists. And eventually I give up pretending to myself that I will gradually become French or Italian by some sort of osmosis, by buying Le Figaro instead of the Daily Mail, by having a siesta each afternoon, and by refusing to eat or drink anything not
produced within a radius of five kilometres.
I decide to infiltrate myself among the tourists as an undercover agent. Yet even here I find that I am acting a part. I keep hoping that the natives will realise that I am secretly a sensitive, much-travelled, over-read, multi-lingual, Sitwell relative who thinks it amusing to mingle. I try to convey to the guide that I have been here before, alone, at the personal invitation of La Contessa. I give the impression that I have read that scurrilous story about the Pope's nephew and the camp-follower years ago in Burckhardt. I want to make it quite clear that I appreciate the whole trip for different, though of course I wouldn't be such a snob as to say superior, reasons from all those gawping crumbs around me. But even then Tourist's Angst still gripes like heartburn—and I also have heartburn (psychosomatic, naturally). I keep asking myself—did Aldous Huxley have a friendly fat man digging him in the ribs when he saw the mosaics? Did Cyril Connolly have to turn back on that baking mountain track when he saw the notice Fermata Domenica? Did Peter Fleming go on a conducted tour of the glass works? Somehow there is never any mention of any- one else being around—except perhaps for La Contessa.
Then my brain begins to reel with memories of caves and towers and tapestries and spires and colonnades and fountains, I begin to feel like a tourist again—and a tourist tourist at that. Then I know what homesickness means and where home really is. Home is the place where you don't look for local colour—you are it. Home is where you can walk around with an elaborate air of unconcern and be pointed out, or at the very least, photo- graphed from coaches by Americans and Swedes. And it doesn't matter what you wear or how you look, you're a native native. You are a bit of old England and no damn tourist can take that away from you. Yet.
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