NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Blanes was a cut above the others in this strung-out shore of small resorts, and not on the main line. Although I was going farther, it is the limit of a day trip, as far as it is possible to go on an outing from Barcelona. It lies in a bay, the beginning of the Costa Brava, with a rocky bluff and a rocky promontory and a harbor with fishing boats and sailboats, and only its post-war architecture identifies it as Spanish—a wall of stucco flat-fronted tenements and apartment blocks, with rusty balconies facing the sea. Today the sea looked like iron, and the beach was brown sand and chilly palms, with a cold sun glowing behind the thick clouds.

  And at Blanes the same signs I had been seeing ever since I had left Gibraltar: Snak Bar, Snaks, Pizza, Helados, Lotteria, Motel, Pizzeria, Hamburguesa, Hotel del Mar, Bar Paraiso, Camping, Telefon, Heladeria, Bistro, Bodega, Viajes, Peluqueria, Cambio-Exchange-Change-Wechsel, Bebe Coca-Cola, Discoteca, Piscina, For Rent, For Sale, Cerveceria, Club Nautic, Hostel, but also because this was militant Catalonia, the angry graffiti, Puta Espanya and Puta Madre and En Catalan and Free Catalunya!

  Blanes, with its trampled sand, its masses of footprints, its blowing paper, its empty promenade, could stand for them all.

  In the morning I got back on the main line, traveling north to Figueres and the frontier. At each station on the line, stocky men puffing cigarettes were cutting the smaller branches from the plane trees, turning them into ugly stumps, some of the trees looking castrated and others like amputees and the slighter ones seeming as though they had had brutal haircuts. The neat bundles of branches, the procession of ladders, all the saws and axes, and the many men carrying out the operation gave it the appearance of a solemn ritual—so methodical, unhurried, tidy and self-important, the cutters seeming priestly as they went about their business. The ritual element might also have meant that they were members of a labor union. I had the feeling that they would never allow a woman to do a simple job. This was going on at Sils and Flassá and Camallera and Vilademat.

  The heart of Girona is medieval. The cathedral dates from the eleventh century. Guidebook: “It was with stone, from a steeple of this old cathedral, that the clergy of Girona celebrated Easter 1278 by bombarding the adjacent Judería [ghetto].” Yet from the train Girona was like a view of China—the plain brick buildings, the leafless trees, the bright dry hills outside, the harshness, the streets being swept by men with twig brooms, the sticklike trees and tiled roofs; it looked to me like any Chinese town of the same size, even to the turgid river Onyar with its water a dubious color. Outside it, the way the gardens were planted in narrow allotments, the look of the tile roofs of the stucco cottages, the neatness, the fruit-farms, an absence of decoration made it seem intensely Chinese.

  There were so many trains on this line that I got off, walked around Girona; caught another train north, went to Figueres, got off, walked around Figueres.

  In a cafe in the middle of Girona an Arab—who was perhaps a Moroccan—was sprawled on the floor. He was tangled in the chair legs, as a policeman nagged him and people stared. The Spanish are both very polite and very curious, an awkward combination of traits, and so they have developed an economical and yet piercing way of eavesdropping, an unintrusive way of being nosy. The policeman and another man helped the Arab to his feet and then sat him down. And then the policeman began hitting the Arab on the arm as he questioned him. The Arab looked too drugged and dazed to care. He looked as though he was being picked on, but also in such a provincial town in Spain every outsider looked like a Martian.

  On the way to Figueres a little sorority of Japanese girls twittered among themselves. They lacked the characteristic Nipponese submissiveness, but as their giggles grew louder and a bit frenzied an old Spaniard stood up and turned his evil eye upon them and silenced them, and they became enigmatic. They were the first of many young Japanese women who were boldly traveling along the shores of the Mediterranean, some of them taking advantage of the low season, others refugees from language schools in France and Italy.

  One of the first buildings I saw in Figueres was the Asilo-Villalonga—the town asylum, for mental cases. In 1904, Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres. This was nine months after his brother (also named Salvador) died, and the second Salvador might have ended up in this asylum if his madness had not also brought forth paintings and sculptures of great ingenuity. As a sixteen-year-old he wrote in his diary, “Perhaps I’ll be misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius. I am sure of it.”

  Dalí’s parents always kept a huge (“majestic”) painting of the first Salvador (who died at the age of seven) in their bedroom. Dalí said he lived two lives, his brother’s and his own. In Madrid as a young art student he met Federico García Lorca, and later in life Dalí reminisced about his friendship with the distinguished poet and playwright.

  “[Lorca] was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice … I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.”

  Sentiments of this sort in Dalí’s autobiography shocked George Orwell, who regarded him as abnormal, without any morality, and James Thurber, who jeered at him. Dalí simply laughed: his book had succeeded in upsetting readers. He spent his life attempting to outrage people’s sense of decency; he played at perversion and then came to believe in it, even in the nonsense he uttered. In his eyes there was no portrait or landscape that could not be improved by adding another breast, or a corpse, or a handful of ants.

  Yet Dalí was also the consummate Spaniard—a Catalan to boot—and throughout his work are the Spanish preoccupations and iconography: bulls, Christs, Quixotes, Virgins, nakedness, fetishism, eroticism, humor, anticlericalism, dry hills, matadors. A Dalí crucifixion is erotic and pious at the same time. In Dalí’s work as in Spanish life there is no dividing line between the sacred and the profane, between a shrine and a boudoir, a sport and a sacrifice, between sexual passion or spiritual ecstasy. Dalí made the fetishes and relics of the church his own obsessions; and his wife Gala (who had been the wife of the French poet Paul Eluard) was at once virgin, whore, Venus; his mother, his madonna and his coquette.

  “I am the king of cuckolds!” Dalí shrieked as he saw Gala being rowed out to sea by a young fisherman who fancied her. Dalí indulged Gala in her preference for young handsome men. Gala was active with these studs well into her seventies, though the sexual athletics may also have shortened her life. When Gala died Dalí stopped eating and went off his head—or rather went madder in such a melancholy way that he ceased to paint.

  He had delighted in being a spectator to Gala’s numerous romances and, intensely voyeuristic, he took his pleasure in watching the sexual act being performed live by hired hands in his castle. He inspires a similarly voyeuristic impulse in anyone who looks at his pictures. He invites voyeurism: you don’t enter his pictures, or even feel them much. You stand a few feet away, fascinated. It is hard to know what to think of the cannibals and giraffes and amputees in the pictures; it is also hard to look away, because Dalí has a diabolical mastery of space. And so you gape, a bit ashamed, a bit amused, mostly bewildered.

  Although he cheerfully mutilated his pictorial subjects, he was capable of painting the human body in its most idealized form; and perhaps since the act of sodomy fascinated Dalí—he paid couples to perform it privately for him—he was at his most expressive and naturalistic when painting human buttocks. The shapely curves of thigh and back are found all over his work—not shocking at all, but lovingly presented, not an ant in sight, no disfigurement at all. A good example of this, one of his most brilliant bums, is the painting “Dalí Raising the Skin of the Mediterranean Sea to Show Gala the Birth of Venus.”

  That painting hangs in the quirky Dalí Museum, one of Figueres’ former theaters, Dalí’s legacy and living joke
. Dalí is also buried there, which ranks it as one of the more bizarre mausoleums in the world. Entering the museum is like walking inside Dalí’s teeming brain. He designed the museum and so it is as much his house as his head—his life’s work, perhaps his masterpiece of surrealism. It is an eccentric but well-arranged building, with a gift shop where you can buy Dalí tarot cards and Dalí scarves and even a melted wristwatch that gives the exact time.

  Rooms and corridors, painted ceilings, monsters, masks, junk, a 1936 Cadillac with a fat seven-foot goddess straddling the hood and opera music blasting from the radiator grille. Elsewhere there are skeletons—dog skulls, croc skulls, an entire gorilla skeleton with the head of the Virgin Mary encased in the rib cage. The gorilla bones are gilded. There are ants everywhere. The unlikeliest objects such as chamber pots are covered in feathers; machine parts are coated in fur; human bodies in soup spoons.

  A fetching photo of Dalí shows him wearing a loaf of bread on his head. His Venus de Milo has desk drawers for breasts. There is a shrine with big buckets and even bigger nudes, and “Sala de Mae West” is a pair of enormous lips and nostrils, with a specially erected viewing stand.

  Much of it is mockery—of classicism, the Church, authority, women, convention, Christ, Spain. He did riffs on Velazquez, copies of Las Meninas, a satire of Millais in the style of Seurat, a satire of Picasso in the style of Picasso.

  You need to be a talented Spaniard maddened by all that history and culture to explode like this. Obviously brilliant, often childish, at his best he seems as great as an old master, and then you see that it is pastiche—his originality is a kind of comedy, the comedy of outrage, and perhaps the personification of the Spanish temper.

  One of the highest compliments in Spain is the dedicatory bullfight. On August 12, 1961, this honor was accorded to Dalí, in the Plaza de Toros in Figueres, “An Extraordinary Corrida to Pay Homage to the Eminent Artist Salvador Dalí.”

  In his later years he supported Franco, and this alienated those friends of his who had endured his nonsensical and dotty utterances. They drew the line at fascism. Once, after a lunch with Franco, Dalí said, “I have reached the conclusion that he is a saint.” Before then he had not been particularly political—he was not yet scatterbrained enough for that. He had chosen to be oblique, and had said, apropos of “Autumn Cannibalism” (two semi-humans, feeding on each other, propped up with crutches and garnished with ants) that it showed “the pathos of the Civil War considered (by me) as a phenomenon of natural history, as opposed to Picasso who considered it a political phenomenon.”

  Luis Buñuel made The Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou) with Dalí; a celebrated image in the notorious fifteen-minute film is an eyeball sliced with a razor. But Buñuel eventually came to regret and finally loathe Dalí for his self-promotion and irresponsible encouragement of Franco. Buñuel had said in his memoirs that he considered surrealism “a poetic, a revolutionary, and a moral movement.”

  Dalí did not reply, though he might have said that all war was inevitable because we are so unpredictable and impulsive, and because all human life involves savagery and fetishism. Religion and politics, in the Dalí scheme of things, are the primitive expression of our fears and desires. There is no question that he succeeds at depicting this.

  The Dalí Museum in Figueres is a repository of flea-market castoffs and visual paradoxes; it is junkyard art, found objects, ceramic ambiguities, and perverse natural history. It is a monument to Dalí’s exhibitionism. He occupies the middle ground, somewhere between a buffoon and a genius, wearing his deviation on his sleeve a bit too obviously for many people’s comfort, hiding very little. He is somewhat like the youths of Figueres who spray the old walls of the town with graffiti as they chew Bubbaloo (“The gum stuffed with liquid!”) and are watched by old men who wear vast floppy berets. Dalí has been belittled as a buffoon. The proof of Dalí’s gift is that he knows how to arouse us, and outrage us, and make us laugh.

  Apart from this artistic funfair, Figueres is an ordinary town, of whiny cars and narrow streets, and working people. It is conventional to see Dalí as an aberration. But I had the feeling, seeing the Spaniards of Figueres, that Dalí was speaking for them, perhaps for all of us, from the depths of our unconscious.

  There was no train to Cadaqués. I took a bus to this vertical village. Here, nearby at Port Lligat, Dalí lived, on the Costa Brava, the real, wild thing, with rocks and cliffs and a dangerous shore. It is steep and stony, with precipitous cliffs and headlands with some vineyards. There are few beaches to speak of, only small tight harbors and coves, littered beaches with masses of flotsam. Another bus took me across a steep cape of land, back to the railway line.

  This was Llanca. It was sunset. I hated traveling after dark, because it meant I could not see anything out the window. So I stayed in Llancà, a pretty bay with condos by the sea, all looking (perhaps this was surrealism suggested by my recent experience of Dalí) like kitchen appliances. They were all shut for the winter. After writing my notes and having a drink I walked to the beach, where some fishermen stood under a cold purple sunset sky. They were casting and standing by their poles, rubbing their hands, waiting for a nibble as night fell, and to the north there was a shadow, a black sky, winter in France.

  5

  “Le Grand Sud” to Nice

  What threw me was the sameness of the sea. The penetrating blue this winter day and the pale sky and the lapping of water on the shore, continuous and unchanging, the simultaneous calm in eighteen countries, and those aqueous and indistinct borders, made it seem like a small world of nations, cheek by jowl, with their chins in the water. And it was so calm I could imagine myself trespassing, from one to the other, in a small boat, or even swimming. So much for the immutable sea.

  On land, the station at Port-Bou, the edge of Spain, was like a monument to Franco. Fascism shows more clearly in the facades of buildings than in the faces of people. This one was self-consciously monumental, austere to the point of ugliness, very orderly and uncomfortable, under the Chaine des Arberes, a gray range of mountains. The train rattled, and it moved slowly on squeaky wheels through the gorge to the station at Cerbère, the beginning of France.

  There were no passport formalities, the bright winter light did not change, and yet there was a distinct sense of being in another country. And that was odd because all we had done was jog a short way along the shore. Gibraltar is a marvel of nature—it looks like a different place. But the border between Spain and France (and France and Italy, and so on) looks arbitrary, vague in reality and distinct only on a map. But some aspects of it spoke of a frontier: the different angle of the mountains, especially the way the lower slopes were covered in cactuses, plump little plants, sprouting from every crevice and ledge on the rock face and cliffs that overlooked the harbor at Cerbère, an odor, too—disinfectant and the sea and the cigarette smoke; but most of all the Arabs. There had been none in the small port towns over the border, but there was a sudden arabesque of lounging cab drivers, porters, travelers, lurkers.

  “There are a lot of them in Marseilles,” a young man said in English. He was sitting just ahead of me, with his friend, and holding a guitar case on his lap, he was addressing two Japanese travelers, still saying “them.”

  He was referring to the Arabs without using the word.

  “We’re going there,” one of the Japanese said.

  “That’s a real rough place.”

  “What? You mean we’ll get ripped off?”

  “Worse.”

  That stopped them. What was worse than being robbed?

  “Like I got robbed on the subway train,” the first American said. “And then they tried to steal my guitar. There are gangs.”

  “Gangs,” the Japanese man said.

  “Lots of them,” the American said.

  “Where do you think we should stay?”

  “Not in Marseilles. Arles, maybe. Van Gogh? The painter? That Arles. Like you could always take a day trip to Marseilles.�
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  “Is it that bad?”

  The second American said, “I’d go to Marseilles again if I could leave my stuff behind. That’s why I didn’t go to Morocco. What would I do with my guitar?”

  “You speak French?” the Japanese traveler asked.

  “I can read it. Do you know any other languages?”

  “Japanese.”

  “Your English is great.”

  “I grew up in New Jersey,” the Japanese man said.

  At this point I took out my notebook, and on the pretext of reading my newspaper wrote down the conversation. The Japanese man was talking about Fort Lee, New Jersey, his childhood, the schools. The man with the guitar was also from New Jersey.

  “Fort Lee’s not that nice,” the man with the guitar said. It seemed a harsh judgment of the Japanese fellow’s hometown.

  “It used to be,” the Japanese man said. “But I’d be freaking out when I went to New York.”

  “My brother loves sports, but he’s too scared to go to New York and watch the games.”

  “Like, I never took the subway in ten years.”

  “I don’t have a problem with the subway.”

  “Except, like, you might get dead there.”

  The Japanese man was silent. Then he said, “How did these guys attempt to rob you?”

  “Did I say ‘attempt’?”

  “Okay, how did they do it?”

  “The way they always do. They crowd you. They get into your pockets. One guy went for me. I kicked him in the legs. He tried to kick me when he got off the train.”

  “That’s it. I’m not going to Marseilles,” the Japanese man said.