Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 433
that was now inaccessible. Derrida loved Naples and Pompeii,
Capri, Paestum, and Sicily. Maurizio Ferraris says that one day, in
Rende, he said he was thrilled to be in Calabria, because in Algeria
he’d often heard about the brigands in Calabria: ‘After dinner, we
went out for a stroll and Jacques told me how much he’d loved
stories about the mafi a, ever since he’d been a boy. At that very
moment. the music from The Godfather wafted out from a nearby
house... .’^51 North Italy was linked to his friends Valerio and
Camilla Adami, with whom he enjoyed a few days’ holiday with
Marguerite, in Arona in the fi rst years, then in Meina, on the edge of
Lake Maggiore. He enjoyed taking part in a summer seminar here.
For him this was a real dream, an ideal happiness: ‘two or three
days in the sun in an amphitheatre overlooking the lake, speaking
about something like the origin of the work of art in front of Italian
students and artists’.^52
Travelling was not always such a simple matter. For fi ve years,
anxiety had stopped Derrida boarding a plane. He had needed to
make a real eff ort to travel again by plane, but gradually he had
started to enjoy it, especially since his status meant that he was
invited to travel business or fi rst class. Those long hours of travel
were for him a privileged time when, without any risk of being
disturbed, he could work intensely, as if in suspended animation,
outside of time. But his anxiety had not evaporated; it was merely
more diff use: ‘I never go away on a trip [.. .] I never put any distance
whatsoever between me and my “house” without thinking – with
images, fi lms, drama and full orchestral soundtrack – that I am
going to die before I return.’^53
Derrida’s anxiety was also for his family, as if his absence placed
them in danger. No sooner had he arrived anywhere than he phoned
home to reassure himself. ‘As soon as I enter a hotel room, even
before looking at its walls (sometimes I don’t even see them for
several days), I worry about the phone, the local number of the
MCI or ATT, and I phone.’^54 He had already done so when he was
at Yale, and Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller came to pick him up
at Kennedy Airport: as soon as he had picked up his suitcase, he
rushed off to phone. He may have made ‘the event’, the ‘arrivance’,
into one of his main themes, but he was forever pleading for ‘nothing
to happen’, as if nothing could happen without it being something
bad.^55
Derrida had few leisure activities. Playing football, one of the great
passions of his youth, had not survived his move from Algeria. He
had stopped playing after Koléa and watched football matches
on television only occasionally. At the beginning of the sixties, he
played tennis regularly: the fi rst image that Sollers kept of Derrida