Journal of Italian Translation

Blossom S. Kirschenbaum /Fernanda Pivano
Once There Was Beirut
by Fernanda Pivano
Translated by Blossom S. Kirschenbaum
Some fifteen years after the end of the war [World War II] we
went to Beirut, which was then a splendid city, its shoreline studded
with fabulous hotels, those that the criminal madness of munitions
makers would have destroyed some twenty years later, mowing
down so many human lives on the pretext of this or that ideology.
In one of these hotels, the Phoenicia, its English name ready
for American tourists, we were given a very lovely room with balcony
overlooking the sea, a room that welcomed us with an enormous
basket of fruit.
“With the compliments of the manager,” said the card placed
on the fruit, according to a custom now vanished or in the process
of vanishing.
The open-air bar was set up at a lower level than the swimming
pool, and once we were seated there the swimmers could be
seen from low down instead of from above. I don’t know if the
gorgeous girls who took turns swimming the breaststroke were paid
by the management to display themselves in that tantalizing way
for the privileged clientele or if they were looking for clients themselves;
but nonetheless the concept worked marvelously well.
Even apart from the pool the hotel was so pleasant that we
stayed there for several days just doing nothing, resting after a very
exhausting trip in the Middle East. Then we set about looking for
the usual guide willing to carry around photographic equipment.
I don’t recall the name of the horrible man whom we hired
faute de mieux. He was short, fat, foul-smelling, dirty: he had everything
wrong with him, and he was so disagreeable that instead
of hiring him for the next day we made an appointment with him
for three days later, hoping to find someone else.
We rented a car and on our own went touring around the
city, through the hills around there covered with aromatic cedars
and through “true” neighborhoods not meant for tourists. We visited
one of the most beautiful museums ever seen, we bought some
item for my ethnographic collection, Lino took tens of rolls of photographs.
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