NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  I got tired of transcribing this conversation, which was repetitious, the way fearful people speak when they require reassurance. It all sounded convincing to me, and it made me want to go to Marseilles.

  The landscape had begun to distract me. Almost immediately a greater prosperity had become apparent—in the houses, the way they were built, the trees, the towns, the texture of the land, the well-built retaining walls, the sturdy fences, even the crops, the blossoms, the way the fields are squared off, from Banyuls-sur-Mer to bourgeoisified Perpignan.

  With this for contrast, I saw Spain as a place that was struggling to keep afloat. It had something to do with tourism. The Spanish towns from the Costa Brava south are dead in the low season; the French towns just a few miles along looked as though they were booming even without tourists. They did not have that soulless appearance of apprehension and abandonment that tourist towns take on in the winter: the empty streets, the windswept beach, the promises on signs and posters, the hollow-eyed hotels.

  The train was traveling next to the sea—or, rather, more precisely, next to the great lagoon-like ponds called étangs: Étang de Leucate, Étang de Lapalme, and into Narbonne, the Étang de Bages et de Sigean, the railway line between Étang de l’Ayrolle—like a low-lying Asiatic landscape feature, the traverse between fish farms or paddy fields.

  Towards Narbonne there were fruit trees in bloom—apples, cherries, peach blossoms. And shore birds in the marshes, and at the edges of the flat attenuated beach. There were Dalí-esque details in all this—I put this down to my recent visit to the crackpot museum. The first was a chateau in the middle of nowhere, with vineyards around it, turrets and towers and pretty windows, a smug little absurdity in the seaside landscape, a little castle, like a grace note in a painting. There was no reason for it to be there. And much stranger than that, what looked like an enormous flock of pink flamingos circling over the étang a few miles before the tiny station of Gruissan-Tourebelle. I made a note of the name because I felt I was hallucinating. Flamingos? Here?

  That night, in Narbonne, in Languedoc, I was wondering about those flamingos I thought I had seen flying out of the salty lagoons by the sea on the way into the city. Having a cup of coffee in the cool blossom-scented air of Mediterranean midwinter I struck up a conversation with Rachel, at the next table. A student at the university in Montpellier, she was spending a few days at home with her family. She was twenty, a native of Narbonne.

  “They are flamingos, yes—especially at Étang de Leucate,” Rachel said.

  The tall pink birds had not been a hallucination of mine; yet it was February, fifty degrees Fahrenheit. What was the story?

  “All the étangs have flamingos”—the word is the same in French—“but in the summer when there are a lot of people around they sometimes fly off and hide in the trees.”

  Rachel did not know more than that.

  She said, “The étangs are very salty, very smelly at low tide, but there are fish in them and lots of mussels.”

  “I associate flamingos with Africa,” I said.

  Rachel shrugged. “I have not traveled. You are traveling now?”

  “To Arles, and then Marseilles.”

  “I have never been to Arles,” she said.

  It was thirty miles beyond her college dorm at Montpellier.

  “Or Marseilles, or Nice,” she went on. “I went to Spain once. And to Brittany once. I prefer the sea in Brittany—it is rough and beautiful.”

  “What about the Mediterranean?”

  “It is not exciting,” she said.

  I could have told her that the Mediterranean extended to the shores of Syria, was tucked into Trieste, formed a torrent at Messina, hugged the delta of the Nile, and even wetted a strip of Bosnia.

  “And will you stay in Nice?” she said.

  “For a few days. Then I’ll take the ferry to Corsica.”

  “I have a friend from Corsica. He told me that the people are very traditional there. The women are suppressed—not free as they are here.”

  “Is his family traditional?”

  “Yes. In fact, when they heard that he was talking about life there they got really angry. Corsicans think it’s bad to repeat these things. I feel bad that I am telling you.”

  So to change the subject, I asked her about her studies.

  “I am studying psychology. It’s a six-year course. I chose it because I want to work with autistic children after I graduate.”

  “Have you ever worked with autistic children?”

  “In the summer, yes, several times,” she said. “Ever since I was twelve I knew I wanted to work with handicapped people. I knew it would be my life.”

  “That’s hard work, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it’s hard. You give a lot. You don’t get back very much. But I don’t mind. Not many people want to do it.”

  Such idealism seemed to me rare. These were not sentiments I had heard expressed very often, and they lifted my spirits.

  The next day was sunny, and Arles was not far. I left my bag at Narbonne railway station and went for a walk along the étangs, and watched the flamingos feeding and flying.

  This Mediterranean sunshine was like a world of warmth and light, and it was inspirational, too. It was easy to understand the feelings of T. E. Lawrence, who took a dip there in 1908 and wrote to his mother, “I felt I had at last reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete,… they were all there, and all within reach of me.”

  I had thought that I had left Narbonne in plenty of time, but the early darkness of winter fell upon Arles just as the train pulled into the station. I had wanted to arrive in daylight. It was the seventeenth of February; Vincent Van Gogh had first arrived in Arles on the twentieth (in 1888), and because of that timing his life was changed.

  “You know, I feel I am in Japan,” he wrote to his brother Theo.

  It was the light, the limpid colors. It was, most of all, the trees in bloom. And strangely that February was very cold and snowy. To see branches covered in snowflakes and white blossoms thrilled Van Gogh—and this in a low Hollandaise landscape of flat fields and windbreaks by the Rhône. They were almond blossoms mostly, but also cherry, peach, plum and apricot. Van Gogh painted the almond flowers on the branches, a Japanese-style picture that resembled a floral design that he had seen before on a screen panel.

  Even in the dark I could see some blossoms, and in the glary light of streetlamps the almond petals were like moths clustered on the black branches and twisted twigs.

  Arles had three or four large luxury hotels, but I was put off by their ridiculous prices. I had found the name of a twenty-dollar hotel in a guidebook. This was called La Gallia. It was apparently a cafe and pizza joint.

  The man at the coffee machine said, “Go outside, turn right, go around to the back and up the stairs. Use this key. The light switch is on the wall. Your room is on the second floor. You can’t miss it.”

  “Do you want me to sign anything?”

  “No name needed. No signature. Just the money in advance. No passport. Sleep well!”

  “Is there a toilet?”

  “It’s in the hall. But you have a sink.”

  It was a medieval tenement on a backstreet, with a cobblestone courtyard and a winding staircase. I was halfway up the stairs when everything went black; the timer on the light ran out. I struggled in the dark to the landing, where I fumbled my flashlight out of my bag. I used this to find the light switch on the next landing. It seemed so difficult contriving to enter and leave this odd empty building that I stayed in my room and went out at the first sign of dawn.

  That morning there was an old man with a wooden leg trying to climb the stairs.

  “Softly,” I said.

  There was only room for one person at a time on these precipitous stairs.

  “This wooden leg of mine is heavy,” he panted. “It was the war.”

  “My uncle was here in
the war.”

  Cpl. Arthur Theroux of Stoneham, Massachusetts.

  “Fighting?”

  “Running a blood bank. He was a medic. Thirty-third Station Hospital.”

  We had to throw most of the French blood away, Paulie. They all had syphilis. The American whole blood was the stuff we used.

  In the watery morning light I saw a profusion of almond blossoms. But I would have noticed them without the suggestion of Van Gogh; there was no subtlety. It was an explosion of flowers, the trees frothing with blossoms. The cherry blossoms of early spring in London and on Cape Cod always indicated to me that winter was almost over, and there is something magical about their appearing before the trees were in leaf.

  Walking towards the river, a man—American—asked me directions to the railway station. He was Jim, from Connecticut, relieved to be in Arles after a harrowing trip—so he said—through Portugal and Spain.

  “I hated Spain. I almost got robbed in Madrid.”

  He was a recent graduate of Bucknell. Philosophy major.

  “Ever heard of Philip Roth? He went to Bucknell,” Jim said. “We had to study him. Everyone at Bucknell reads him. I hated that stuff.”

  I asked him whether he was on vacation.

  “No. I quit my job. I hate the job market. I worked a little while for Cadbury-Schweppes. They were developing a home soft-drink dispenser. The whole bit. Syrup, gas, water—your own soft drinks on tap. It was like a coffee machine.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Test-marketing it.”

  “Did it fly?”

  “It was a failure. It was too expensive—and who needs it?” He kicked along beside me. “They weren’t open to new ideas, so I quit.”

  “I’m sure you did the right thing—and here you are, a free man, seeing the world.”

  “What are you doing?”

  His lack of interest in writing or reading encouraged me, and so I said, “I’m a publisher.”

  “What do you look for in a novel?” he asked suddenly. It was a good question.

  “Originality, humor, subtlety. The writing itself. A sense of place. A new way of seeing. Lots of things. I like to believe the things I read.”

  I pulled a novel, The Rock Pool, by Cyril Connolly, out of my back pocket and waved it at him.

  “This has some of those qualities, but not enough.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “People going to pieces on the Riviera.”

  “Another one of those!”

  True enough, I thought. “Do you do any writing?”

  “No. I’m planning to go to art school, but at the moment I’m heading for Bratislava.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Supposed to be a pretty nice place.”

  With that, he jogged off to the railway station, and I continued strolling through the backstreets of Arles to the river. In many respects this was much the same place that Van Gogh saw; many of the same buildings still stand, the same streets and squares and boulevards. There is a vast Roman arena in the town, a splendid hippodrome the size of a small football stadium, used at certain seasons for bullfights. One series had just been held, another, the Easter Feria (Feria de Paque), was coming soon.

  Not far from here, the town of Nîmes was the center of French bullfighting and had been for a decade or so, since the revival of the nauseating—what? recreation? pastime?—you could hardly call it a sport. It had been dying out, but Nîmes’s right-wing backward-looking mayor, Jean Bousquet, provided guidance and enthusiasm. There are three bullfighting festivals a year in Nîmes, one attracting almost a million people. Of course French bullfighting had been denounced by animal-rights activists and foreigners, but nothing encourages the French so much as disapproval, especially from aliens.

  “Do you go to the bullfights?” I asked a man walking a dog along the river.

  “Sometimes. But you know these special events are to bring in the tourists,” he said. “I prefer football.”

  Arles was a small town and it had the two disfigurements of pretty French towns in the provinces, dog merds and graffiti. The sidewalks were so fouled they were almost impassable because of the merds. As for the graffiti, there was something particularly depressing about spray-painted scrawls on the stone of ancient facades. Up your ass, Paris (Paris-t’on cule) and Gilly = a whore and a slut (Gilly = pute et salope) were two of the more picturesque obscenities.

  The town had prepared itself for tourists, but on this winter day it looked especially empty: too many brasseries, hotels, gift shops, and stores; in July it would be packed, the people said. But Arles had an off-season friendliness and lack of urgency. The waiters were not surly. One explained the drinks available and laughed with me over the odd names Foetus Whisky, Delirium Tremens Beer (“It’s from Belgium”) and the blue cordial liqueur called “Fun Blue.”

  I eavesdropped in Arles, though it annoyed me when people were talking and I could not understand them, because of the intrusive background music or other voices. It was like looking at something interesting while someone intruded on my line of vision. I felt stifled and frustrated.

  Some of the snippets tantalized me:

  A man said, “Let’s do in Italy what we did in France, back at the hotel—”

  A woman said, “I am not going to go to another place like that again, because, one, it’s too complicated, and two, what if we got sick? And three, the other people look really strange—”

  There were almond blossoms everywhere, which gave a great freshness to Arles and all its fields and made it seem still rural, picturesque and even inspirational. I liked the provinciality of the place, and its clear light.

  But Arles was not all floral, and tweeting with sparrows. The mailman was doing his rounds, a hardworking housewife with big red hands down at the grocer’s was complaining about the high price of morel mushrooms. This so-called cup fungus was selling at 168 francs for a hundred grams, which worked out at $126 a pound. And even in the early morning there were drinkers leaning on bars. It was never too early for a drink in provincial France. Two ladies were tippling Pernod. And down the street a florid blowzy woman was nursing a beer. This was at seven in the morning in an Arles backstreet.

  To verify that Arles is a seaport, I walked along the east bank of the Rhône, in a southerly direction for a day of sunshine and sweet air. There were windbreaks of twigs and boughs, and the wide flat fields. There had been floods a few months before which showed on the banks of the river. Some sections of it had been fortified, sections of the retaining wall and the embankment filled in.

  In the late afternoon I walked back to town to take the train the short distance to Marseilles. At the small railway station at Arles there were almond trees on each platform and they were in blossom. Such a pretty station! Such lovely trees! And then the TGV was announced. The TGV is the French high-speed train, much too fast and too grand to stop at a little station like Arles. It screamed past the platforms with such speed and back-draft that a special yellow TGV line was painted on the platform, so that people would stand at a safe distance, giving the train six feet of leeway. It howled like an earthbound jet, doing about 160 miles an hour, and with such a rush of air that petals were blown from the almond trees. The sight, the sound, the rush of air, made it a deafening event, the train slicing the day in half and leaving such a vacuum that I had the sense that my brain was being sucked out of my ears.

  Anyone who hankers for the romance of railways, of the branch lines jogging through Provence, ought to consider the fact that the newest trains are nearly as obnoxious—as noisy and intrusive—as jets.

  But even by the little blue, normal, stopping train of French National Railways it was an hour or less to Marseilles—about sixty miles away. We crossed the low delta of the Rhône, the fields of horses and flowers and vegetables, thriving in the winter sunshine; through the towns of Entressen and Miramas and along the shore of the Étang de Berre. I stayed as close as possible to the shore of the M
editerranean, which meant bypassing Aix-en-Provence and all the rest of the romanticized and much-written-about villages of Provence. They were not on my coastal route, which was neither a gastronomic tour, nor a sentimental wallow in the life of rural Europe. That seemed a good thing too—from what I saw of those clumps of cottages, the tarted-up villages seemed more pretentious and expensive than the jammed ports and cities of the Mediterranean, where settlements were too active to be stuffy. And I had a sense that these coastal places had stronger links with each other than they had with the inland capitals and gentrified villages.

  That was true of Marseilles, a wonderful city to arrive in by train, certainly one of the best in the world, because the ornate St. Charles railway station is on a bluff. You walk outside and all of Marseilles is spread out below—the Old Town, the Old Port, the boulevards, the rooftops, and chimneys and church steeples, and on the far hill the cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde, a gold statue on its dome. I could see the islands, the bluffs, the earthworks and fortresses and lighthouses. All this from the high stairs of the railway station.

  “I read so much about the crime in Marseilles in my guidebook that I’m going to skip it altogether,” Jim, the American, had told me in Arles.

  I was suitably warned, not to say terrified. Until I found a hotel I left my bag in a station locker; I carried nothing in my hands; I had no camera and very little cash. I walked briskly, as though I had somewhere to go.

  Marseilles was a frightener; it was famous for its boasters and liars, for the way its people exaggerated, and it had a wicked reputation—for its gangs, its badly housed immigrants, its racism, and most of all for its crime. No wonder people compared it to New York City. It was certainly a center for drugs. The cocaine that was produced in the former French colonies in West Africa, the raw paste was smuggled into Marseilles to be processed, made into crack or base or crystal, or else powdered and cut with dry milk from Italy and sold all over Europe. Petty crime was commonly spoken of in Marseilles; I kept my head down and was safe. Such wickedness as drugs and racketeering, which kept both the police and the gangsters busy, did not affect the idle wanderer that I was.