The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “Never mind Mussolini, look at the exquisite statue of Archimedes,” was the exhortation of people who couldn’t put two and two together. Or it was classical trivia: “Archimedes said ‘Eureka!’ in Siracusa,” or, “The philosopher Plato was made a slave in Siracusa!” the Siracusans said, which was just about all they knew of Plato.

  Looking at glorious ruins always put me in a bad mood. I walked around instead. I saw a cake sale in a piazza. Cakes and pies were stacked on a number of tables, and there were about thirty people hawking them.

  “Buy a cake,” a woman said, as I slowed down to look at them. “They are really delicious.”

  “I’m traveling. I don’t have room.”

  “Where have you just come from?”

  “Sardinia.”

  “Lovely place. Rocky. Natural. Unspoiled. Not like here at all,” the woman said. And then, “Buy a small cake,” she said. She showed me two or three.

  Some other women gathered around, boosting their baked goods, all seeming very earnest.

  “Are you trying to raise money for a particular purpose?” I asked.

  “Not for us. It is for the families in Bosnia.”

  That touched me. So the larger world and its disorder intruded on this small settled place. But in fact Bosnia was not very far away. And when I gave them five dollars in Italian lire and wished them well, a woman chased me through the piazza with a bag of cookies.

  The town was dedicated to one of its native daughters, Santa Lucia. But it was the Madonna of Tears who had produced the most miracles—people cured of blindness, deafness, gammy legs, blights, poxes, and diseases, and an enormous sanctuary was being built in her honor outside Siracusa in the shape of a vast cement wigwam.

  • • •

  The low season might have meant poor business and hotel and restaurant closures and grumbling entrepreneurs, but it also meant that people had their towns to themselves. In Siracusa this took the form of the passegiatta—the streets dense and chattering with promenading citizens. The streets and squares of the Ortygia were thronged on weekend nights, Siracusans of all ages walking, families with small children, groups of girls flirting with groups of boys; punks, lovers, scolding crones in widow’s black bombazine, old shysters wearing sunglasses. Some walked dogs, or carried cats, or pushed infants in carriages. They swarmed among the ruins and shops and the pizza joints, buying ice creams or candy but not much else. It was all friendly—no suggestion of pickpockets, no aggression, just good humor.

  It was a nighttime turnout, and I had never seen such a thing anywhere. Frenchmen played boules under the trees, while their womenfolk walked the family dog. Spanish men met outside cafes, and yakked. Men in Corsica and Sardinia gathered on street corners and whispered. Some Arabs did the same in Marseilles. But never the whole family, never little children and old people and lovers and animals; and never at night. This was extraordinary and carnivallike, beginning just after dark and going on until eleven or so, the tramping up and down the cobbled streets, swarming around the fountains and the squares, everyone well-dressed and cheery.

  They talked among themselves. They greeted and kissed and shook hands. They whispered and laughed. It was an old ritual of sharing—sharing the street, the air, the gossip; it was a respectable way for women to be allowed out, after the meal was cooked and the dishes were done. It was something the telephone or urban crime or traffic had done away with elsewhere. It probably had medieval origins. It was the way old friends and neighbors caught up in news, the way people met and wooed each other; the way they courted; the way people showed off a new hat or coat. The air was full of greetings and compliments. “Nice to see you! Beautiful hat! Sweet little child! God bless him!”

  The next day they were all back at work. I was tempted to take a ferry from here to Malta, but there was only one a week and I had just missed it. I went to the fish market and noted the prices of the clams and oysters and octopus. There was not much fishing here, the fishmongers told me. These had come from Venice and Marseilles. The only local product was mussels, sold bearded in black clumps, the sort that are left to the seagulls on Cape Cod.

  “You’re traveling, eh?” the fishmonger said. “Sardinians—cordial people!”

  This was typical. Italians seldom spoke ill of each other. Compliments warded off aggression, and while Italians could be seriously quarrelsome when they were cross, they got no satisfaction in carping, and were not interested in nit-picking, which was why chatting to them was nearly always a pleasure. Of the Calabrese they said, “They’re like us!” Of Neapolitans, they said, “Musical people!” Of Romans, “Clever! Cultured!” They knew that putting it mildly Sicily had its problems of underdevelopment and poverty and organized crime, and so they were not quick to judge other parts of Italy. The worst they would venture was something like, “Up north? It is very hard sometimes to understand the way they speak.”

  That day I hiked out of town to the hill called Belvedere. Along the way there were tumbled villages thick with orange groves, laundry hanging from every balcony, prickly pear cactus growing wild, schoolchildren shrieking or else holding hands, or an old mustached woman in black howling her hello to another passing crone, and in her garden a crucified Michelin man—fatso as a scarecrow—and the village street sweeper going about his job using a seven-foot palm frond, more effective than a push-broom. I thought with a retrospective shudder of the chilly streets of Nice, and the south of France generally, all the skinny widows and their lapdogs, and their way of studiously refusing to see that this otherwise impeccable Riviera was awash in dogshit. Sicily had its sanitation problems, but dogshit was not one of them.

  On my walk back I took a different route, by way of the Anapo River, and reaching the shore saw ahead of me twelve nuns in black habits waving their arms and strolling by the blue sea. It was a Sicilian combination of the bizarre, the religious, the humorous, the tender, and the surreal.

  9

  The Ferry Villa to Calabria

  Instead of entering Messina on the way back, I stayed on the train, and the train and I were rolled onto the clanging deck of the ferry Villa—railway tracks were bolted to the deck. This shunting was done in jolting installments, sections of three or four coaches at a time, uncoupled, lined up side by side until the whole train was on board, sixteen coaches. The whole railway train, minus its engine, physically transferred to the vessel, was then floated across the Straits of Messina.

  Standing in the darkness of the steel-hulled Villa among the greasy train wheels, I heard a man’s hoarse pleading voice.

  “I lost my arm.”

  It was too dark to see anyone, though I could hear the laborious pegging of a crutch or a cane knocking against the metal deck.

  “Help me,” the voice said.

  I stepped back, and the noise I made gave me away and directed him to me.

  “Give me something,” he said. “I lost my arm.”

  He then dimly emerged from the soupy darkness and I smelled him more clearly than I saw him. The smell was stale bread and decaying wool, spiked with a hum of vinegary wine.

  “Please,” he said. And then, “No, I can’t take it!”

  My coins were clinking because he bumped them with the stump in his ragged sleeve.

  “No arm! Put them in my pocket!”

  All this was in the stinking darkness of the ship’s hull, among the detached coaches of the train.

  “Have a good trip,” he said, and pegged past me, rapping his crutch, and I heard other passengers giving him money—not out of mercy, but in exchange for his blessing, out of superstition.

  On deck with the departing Sicilians and the returning Calabrese, all of them munching sandwiches, I saw that we were pulling out of Messina’s harbor. Sicily had clouds the shape and color of old laundry billowing over it, and the straits were windy too, but except for whitecaps and blown froth, it did not seem to be a bad sea. This could have been just an illusion. A whirlpool might make a low howling sound, but it is no
t usually visible until you are on top of it.

  The Odyssey’s whirlpool Charybdis (“Three times / from dawn to dusk she spews … a whirling maelstrom …”) is not fanciful; it actually exists near Messina, on the Sicilian side, opposite the small village of Ganzirri. Scylla, the six-headed monster with twelve great tentacles, has not been sighted recently, but she is always heard. At just the spot where Scylla “yaps abominably” the sea-swells roll into the stone caverns on the Calabrian side, where they make a gulping sound, audible to anyone on the water—a familiar yapping to anyone who lives within earshot of cavernous seashore. This could easily be mistaken for the voice of the beast, Scylla, that Ulysses heard, “a newborn whelp’s cry, though she is huge and monstrous.”

  Much of The Odyssey’s Mediterranean geography is either misleading or imaginary (I had passed the Islands of the Cyclops near Catania, but didn’t recognize them), yet occasionally, as in Bonifacio and here, the topographical description is so specific I got a thrill in matching it to the text. The art in Homer’s lines still precisely reflected nature. There was also a private satisfaction in savoring the ways that Ulysses managed to have a pretty bad time. Homer’s epic seldom celebrates the joys of seamanship or marvelous landfalls. It is about delays and obstructions and messy deaths. Ulysses’ crew is nearly always complaining or fearful, and the captain himself rather dislikes the gray sea and the fickle winds, the toil of shipboard life, the distances, the inconveniences, the dangers. Among many other things The Odyssey is a poem about the frustrations and miseries of travel, and the long voyage home; in a word, an epic of homesickness, greatly consoling to a traveler reading it.

  The Calabrians had cracked a ghoulish joke by naming a village on the shore after the monster that had to eat six sailors at a time (“she takes, / from every ship, one man for every gullet”); in fact, Scylla was a little place nearby on the railway line to Naples and Rome, where this train was going. Above the shore here were great eroded slopes of steep hills, all settled and scraped bare, and like Sicily the landscape was mostly urbanized or settled. No hill existed in Italy without an antenna planted on it, or a fort, or a dome, or a crucifix. Italians fulfill themselves by building and reorganizing the landscape. It is as though nature has no interest for them until it has been improved by digging and urbanizing it. That is one thing Italians have in common with the Chinese. Another is a love of noodles. Yet another, an ancient belief in dragons.

  It was a one-hour crossing of the Straits of Messina, and then the train was slung out of the ferry in sections and reconnected at Villa San Giovanni, which was just a ferry port and a mass of chanting signs, Al Treno, To the Train, Au Train, Zum Zug.

  At a certain hour of the day in Italy, one of the more demoralizing aspects of being in a forlorn little station like Villa San Giovanni was seeing a big comfortable express train that would be departing in ten minutes for Rome, arriving tomorrow, just as the shutters were being flung up in the bookstores and restaurants. The passengers on the Rome Express looked out at me, probably thinking, Poor sucker, because they knew that I was just another peasant waiting for the branch line train to Reggio, fifteen minutes down the line, on the toe of Italy’s boot.

  Twenty-three Italian soldiers, wearing maroon nightcaps with dangling blue pompoms, stood with me, and soon after the Rome Express moved importantly north, our little choo-choo went clinkety-clank south, to Reggio, which was dark and cold and windy. It was Sunday night in this poor town—it had once been the capital of Calabria but it had fallen on hard times like most of the south. It too had been flattened by the 1908 earthquake that had destroyed Messina. Strangely, even after pacing up and down, the only hotel that I could find open in Reggio turned out to be the most expensive one of my trip, so far ($81), though hardly better than the rest of them.

  Almost a hundred years ago the English writer George Gissing (born poor, wrote New Grub Street, married a prostitute) made a solitary and often melancholy trip around southern Italy, which he called By the Ionian Sea. He stopped in Reggio and saw “few signs of activity; the one long street, Corso Garibaldi, has little traffic; most of the shops close shortly after nightfall, and then there is no sound of wheels … the town is strangely quiet, considering its size and aspect.”

  That was precisely what I reported to my diary, until around seven in the evening I heard a loud commotion, and howl of human voices, and I asked a man in the doorway of the hotel, “What’s happening?”

  “Nothing,” he said in the local dialect, not niente but ninte.

  So accustomed was he to the sound, it meant nothing to him. But I should have known.

  “You from around here?”

  “Squillace,” he said, and it seemed a very grim name.

  “And you?”

  “United States.”

  “Good. I got relatives there.” From his agitated hand gesture, and his pursed lips, I was to understand that there were very many of them.

  It was Sunday night in Reggio and that meant the parade of locals, great and small, old and young, male and female, the ritual of the passeggiata—that was the sound I heard. It fascinated me, more there than in Siracusa, because the weather was colder. On this foul, windy night in the small town of Reggio, in the depths of winter dampness, the whole populace turned out to march, bundled up against the weather. It was a gentle mob scene, the loud scuffing of their shoes, their chattering voices, up and down Corso Garibaldi, or milling around the piazza, on street corners, talking, laughing, walking three or four abreast, about a quarter of a mile and then back again, commandeering the main street.

  The most remarkable thing to me was the controlled fury of it, all the voices creating one loud, almost deafening drone, everyone talking at once; that and the motion of the people in the street, on which there were no cars—not that they were specifically excluded, but who in a little Fiat would risk facing all those tramping arm-swinging Calabrians? This was a cheery event. It started round about seven, and by ten everyone had gone home.

  Obviously, George Gissing had not seen Reggio on a weekend (though he had seen it just before the earthquake brought it down). It was still true almost a century later that Reggio was a just a little lighted place with darkness all around it—not wilderness or woods but dry tiny villages set amid the strange and infertile landscape of rocks and ravines, in the dusty hills of Calabria. They were remote and forgotten places even now. People in the nearby village of Bova spoke a dialect that was nearer Greek than it was Italian, and it has been suggested that the people in this region had been yakking happily in Greek during the whole Roman era, speaking Latin to officials only when they had to. When Roman rule was supplanted by the Byzantines, Greek came back into vogue and was once again the language of commerce and the greater empire. Nonetheless, for all this classicism and all the civilizations that had come and gone, there were villages in Calabria that still had no electricity or running water.

  No wonder so many Italians said good-bye here. Near the port of Messina, in the poorest region of Italy, Reggio was the last landscape tens of thousands of emigrants saw, before they boarded ships for America; Reggio was less a town than a jumping-off place.

  The ones in the passeggiata were the ones who had stayed behind. Eating pasta, drinking wine, I watched them from the window of a restaurant, while I scribbled. The idea that most of them had relatives in the United States made them seem resolute, if not defiant, to me, and it was as though they were celebrating the fact that they were still there, carrying on, after all these years, proudly rooted in the peculiarly stony soil of their native land.

  Again, I seemed to be the only guest of the hotel. That suited me. The empty foyer, the shadowy corridors, my gloomy cubicle—this was an appropriate setting. I was reading the copy of Frankenstein I had bought in Siracusa, to put myself in the mood for the gothic darkness of Calabria. And that night I read how Dr. Frankenstein had been born in Naples, when his parents were passing through.

  I was not heading for Naples. The next d
ay I bought a ticket to Metaponto, half a day’s train ride in the other direction, in the arch of the Italian boot. Usually I just rattled to a new place and hoped for the best; but today I had a specific objective at Metaponto.

  After Reggio there were a succession of straggling settlements by the sea, some dilapidated vineyards crowded by factories and junk heaps. It was a view of the Mediterranean that was new to me, mile upon mile of empty stony beaches, here and there some fishermen venturing out in small wooden dinghies. Inland on the sea-facing slopes there were hamlets of houses, some of them ancient-looking, and many of them had great cracks in their walls which could have been produced by the 1908 earthquake. There were newer houses, but they seemed as ruinous as the old ones. The soil looked infertile, much of it white chalky clay plowed into clods at Brancaleone, and sluiced into stony gullies at Bova.

  The beaches were littered but there was no one on them, even at Locri, one of the bigger towns. Albichiara was one of those old yellow villages built high on a ridge, almost at the skyline (“against the barbarians”), and in the plains below it were fruit trees and olive groves. The station at Soverato was crowded with people clamoring to board this train—which was going to the distant provincial capital, Taranto, and terminating at the city of Bari on the Adriatic. But not all the people were boarding; many were there to say good-bye.

  “Have a good trip!”

  “Bye, Grandma!”

  A priest joined me in my empty compartment. He had the evil eye, of course. So no one else came in, and those who passed in the corridor averted their eyes and hurried past.

  Squillace was not as ugly as its name suggested. It was Virgil’s “shipwrecking Scylaceum” and in Gissing’s time was squalid: “Under no conditions could inhabited Squillace be other than an offense to eye or nostril.” But I saw only the settlement around the station. The village itself was five miles inland and was perhaps still offensive.