The PowerBook by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online

back their necks to stare at the Villa Jovis. The rock face is sheer and unclimbable. Far up, the dot of a human appears.
    ‘
Èccola!
’ says the guide. ‘From that spot Tiberio flung his victims to death.
Morte! Morte! Morte!
’
    He spreads his hands expressively, and the party shades its shaded eyes to better imagine the tumbling body twisted through time.
    ‘Women too,’ says the guide. ‘
Tiberio cattivo,
’ and he spits.
    Of course, it may well be that spiteful Suetonius was a slandermonger. Perhaps Tiberius never did hurl his enemies into space-time. An imaginary island invents itself. It takes part in its own myth. There is something about this place that suggests more than it reveals. Capri has been thoroughly plundered—its woods, its treasures, its stories. It has been well known for more than two thousand years. Yet it slips through the net of knowing as easily as the small fishes in the harbour.
    The Marina Grande was built in the nineteenth century to accommodate the smart steamboats bringing the smart English to the smart hotels. Aquatints of the harbour show luggage being piled onto handcarts, much as it is today, and horse anddonkey landaus jostling for custom where the taxi rank is.
    The funicular railway, completed in 1906, connects the harbour to the main square, and its sheer, vertiginous ascent is a kind of Tiberio-strategy in miniature. If the tension between the upward car and the downward car were to relax, both cars would crash through the red pantile roofs of the side-by-side houses and, collecting olive trees and grapevines as a memorial, the train and its passengers would career into the sea, nose first, broken backed, to join the other wrecks never recovered.
    This does not happen. The upward car brakes the downward car, while the downward car powers the upward car. The passengers are aboard. A bell rings, like the start of an exam. The driver, who was lounging Italian-wise drinking a thimble of coffee, flings it aside, dives into his cab and releases the brake.
    It is the moment of action for which there is no preparation.
    As I stand in the front car, holding on to the rail, and feeling the train move down through the sunlight towards the tunnel, I feel like I am beingborn. I find myself gripping the bar, unable to take my eyes off the point where the single track divides as it enters the tunnel. It divides into a curved diamond, a vulva, a dark mouth—one of the many caves on the island where a rite of passage is observed.
    Then we are out again, into the sunshine, into the bustle of the harbour, with one glance back at the slow car of souls leaving this life.
    Then, as now, the pleasantest way from the Marina Grande to the square is to be driven privately, round and round the impossible bends, the driver with one hand on the wheel, the other glued to the horn. He would sooner let go of the wheel than give up hooting.
    Everyone prefers the open-top cars, and those drivers not fortunate enough to own a factory model customise their own. They saw off the roof, sometimes leaving the window pillars, sometimes not. Then they rig up an awning out of bamboo, and fasten it to the windscreen at one end and the boot lid at the other with rusty crocodile clips. The kind you use to jump-start a flat battery.
    These bamboo cars will carry anything for you—children, dogs, bags, bikes, boats. I saw a driver strap a dinghy to his bonnet. Off he went, round and round the bends, prow first, both hands on the horn this time. As a safety measure, he said.
    The smart hotels are very smart. The oldest, La Palma, reclines in its own tropical garden and offers its guests secluded, shaded tables, from which they may watch the throng of expensive shoppers, glint-eyed over their Cartier and Vuitton.
    These shops have always traded expensively. The Medicis used to come here for cameos in the fifteenth century. In the eighteenth century it was antiquities for the English. In the nineteenth century dandies,