MACABRE MONDAY

L. P. Hartley’s “Podolo” (1948)

Although he’s known primarily as a literary novelist, L. P. (Leslie Poles) Hartley also dabbled in stories of the grotesque and macabre, most of which are collected in The Travelling Grave.¹ I present here, hopefully for your future delectation, his story of a doom-filled desert island in the Gulf of Venice, “Podolo.”²

The narrator is nameless, typically a bad sign. Why wouldn’t you take your friend’s wife on a day junket to a festering trash-heap while he’s on a business trip? As Vincent Vega would have it, “It’s normal. Just like taking your friend’s wife to a movie or something.” Everything about the trip is subtly off. Podolo, desolate and rocky, makes little sense as a picnicking destination: “I knew that when Angela actually saw the dull little island, its stony and inhospitable shore littered with broken bottles and empty tins, she would think what a fool I was, with my romancing.”

There are four characters: Anonymous Narrator, Wife Angela, Hapless Gondolier Mario, and Husband Walter, barely there (he’s in Trieste and they’re supposed to be back in time to meet his train in the late afternoon, but events occur and they… don’t). The story is oneiric; the characters’ motivations are obscure and they seem possessed by a kind of inflexible dream logic. Angela detects a starving kitten on an island allegedly inhabited only by rats, and, failing to feed it, develops an obsessive compulsion with killing it to put it out of its hunger and misery. The narrator’s reliability is questionable. He makes occluded references to bad times on Podolo before:

“I saw that she was preoccupied and couldn’t get the cat out of her mind. Any form of suffering in others affected her almost like an illness. I began to wish we hadn’t come to Podolo; it was not the first time a picnic there had gone badly.”

‘I tell you what,’ Angela said suddenly, ‘if I can’t catch [the kitten] I’ll kill it. It’s only a question of dropping one of these boulders on it. I could do it quite easily.’

She disclosed her plan to Mario, who was horror-struck. His code was different from hers… ‘Poveretto! It has done no one any harm,’ he exclaimed with indignation…. I expounded the gondolier’s point of view to Angela, but she was not impressed…. ‘It may be a messy business but it will soon be over. Poor little brute, it’s in a horrible state. Its life can’t be any pleasure to it.’”

While Angela murderously pursues the cat, Mario and the narrator literally and figuratively drift off; they take a late-afternoon nap in the gondola as it floats offshore and awaken after darkness. They return to find there is somebody or something on the island that is not the kitten and not Angela.

“Mario, usually so quick to execute an order, did not move. He was staring straight in front of him.

‘There is someone on the island,’ he said at last, ‘but it’s not the signora’….

‘It was a man, then?’ said I.

‘It looked like a man’s head.’

‘But you’re not sure?’

‘No, because it didn’t walk like a man.’

‘How then?’

Mario bent forward and touched the ground with his free hand. I couldn’t imagine why a man should go on all fours, unless he didn’t want to be seen.”

The narrator never even sees The Thing, if there is indeed a Thing to be seen; only Mario sees it (“What it wants is a machine gun”), but that’s enough to spread a panicky contagion. They flee cravenly without Angela.

‘You don’t want to go to the island now, signore?’

‘No, no. Straight home.’

I looked back. Transparent darkness covered the lagoon save for one shadow that stained the horizon black. Podolo...”

I was unable to find a picture of Hartley with a cat, although he did write an essay entitled “The Cat.” Here he is smoking a cigarette.

1 “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” is the famous first line of The Go-Between (1953); even people who have never heard of Hartley or his novel recognize the quote. Valancourt put out a nice new edition of Travelling Grave (https://www.amazon.com/Travelling-Stories-Valancourt-Century-Classics/dp/1943910790), but since most of Hartley’s stuff is now in the public domain, my copy is from here: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Horror-Weird-Supernatural-Stories-ebook/dp/B07BKMW5YW/ Worth the $0.99.

2 Podolo may be loosely based on Poveglia (https://luxeadventuretraveler.com/poveglia-italy/) as an islet near Venice with an evil reputation, although Poveglia has a great deal more infrastructure. Venice seems to be a Locale for Horror; I’m thinking Robert Aickman’s “Never Visit Venice,” Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers.