NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  It seemed to me to be the ultimate Mediterranean city, for its size and its diversity. As soon as I left the station and started down the marble stairs to the city, I saw a Gypsy woman smoking a pipe in the sunshine, and another counting coins she had made from playing tunes on her accordion. These Gypsies were as sorry-looking here as in Spain where they are relentlessly romanticized by travel journalists and persecuted by locals. Gypsies are generally despised in the Mediterranean as they are in the rest of Europe. The same could be said for the Moroccans and Algerians, who were said to account for Marseilles’s being notorious for crime. But every Mediterranean race was represented here, the Arabs were as common as the French, and there were Greeks, Spaniards, and Italians; there were tall loping Tuaregs in blue robes, and Berbers from Tunisia, and Senegalese selling handbags and watches. Arab women begged, each one squatting and holding a snotty-nosed child instead of a pleading sign, in a futile attempt—the Marseillaise seemed impervious to the pleas—to elicit sympathy.

  In Marseilles the foreign men linger on street corners in small groups, because they come from cultures without telephones, where men linger on street corners in small groups. There they stood, dusky men, yakking and smoking. The so-called Foreign Quarter is in the Old Town, just below the station. The Baedeker Guide, Mediterranean for 1911, mentions this area: “On the N. side of the Quai du Port, the scene of motley popular traffic (pickpockets not uncommon), lies the Old Town, with its narrow and dirty streets, inhabited by the lower classes, including numerous Italians of whom the city contains about 100,000.” Now it is Arabs and Vietnamese in the Old Town; and the same perceptions—motley pickpockets, lower classes, cutpurses, parasites.

  I walked down the Canebière (“Can o’ Beer”) along the Promenade Louis Brauquier (“poet and painter”) to the mouth of the Old Port. Out of the wind, sitting in the sunshine against a wall, was a line of people in various postures—old Moroccan women in shawls, men in berets, dog walkers, men with their shirts off, other men stripped to their underwear grinning into the sunshine.

  Farther on, standing at the limit of the fort I looked out, and the Mediterranean had the look of a limitless ocean. I walked on, to the Gare Maritime, where ferries left for Algeria and Tunisia, and Corsica. I was headed for Corsica but the station timetables told me that I could continue down the Côte d’Azur and catch the once-a-week (in the winter) ferry from Nice to Bastia, a port in the north of Corsica. At the ferry station passengers were boarding the French ship to Algiers, all of them Algerian Arabs. Not a single Frenchman, nor any foreigners. There was a good reason for this: at that point seventy-one foreigners, and tens of thousands of Algerians, had been killed by Islamic terrorists in Algeria in a fifteen-month period.

  I kept walking. Because of Marseilles’s pleasant thoroughfares, its absence of heavy traffic, its venerable architecture and its hills, it is pleasant for walking in and full of views. It was not particularly expensive either. My hotel, near the railway station, was about forty dollars a night.

  It was fairly easily to get lost in Marseilles, particularly in the Old Town. As the Arab quarter, it had the fiercest reputation, though all I saw were cats and stragglers and the mindless defacing of the ancient walls with spray-painted graffiti. From behind bolted shutters I heard Algerian hilarity and screechy music. This was the area which in 1911 had the disreputable Italians.

  My greatest fear walking down these backstreets was of being killed by a garbage truck. These vehicles came quickly around the corners and did not slow down, and as they filled the entire street I found myself diving for a doorway and flattening myself against it.

  Because Marseilles was so frightening to visitors it lacked the touristic triteness that was so common on the rest of the Riviera, expensive hotels, and sluttish recreations, and piggy food and curio shops. The day after I arrived I walked in a different part of the city and found a market crowding the narrow lanes of the town around Place du Marche des Capucines that was more like an Arab souk. Sacks of nuts, and piles of dates, ten kinds of olives, fish and fruit and couscous, and French, Arabs and Africans mingling and haggling. The Arabesque of Marseilles, loathed and feared by the French, was one of its most interesting and liveliest aspects.

  The maddening thing was my inability to speak to any Arabs. Their French I found peculiar and I don’t speak Arabic. I felt there was the same vast cultural gulf between the French (Catholic, bourgeois, monoglot) and the Arabs (Muslim, peasants, Arabic-speaking). They really did not know each other at all.

  Walking past a police station, I decided to go in and bluntly inquire about crime in Marseilles, since that was all that travelers talked about. I had seen no sign of it, not even on the previous night, as I loitered and lurked.

  There was an anteroom where five policemen sat smoking cigarettes and twirling their truncheons.

  One policeman said, “Yes, we have one big problem here in Marseilles. My colleague will tell you what it is.”

  The others laughed, as—on cue—a policeman said, “Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs.”

  “They are the cause of all the trouble,” the first policeman said. “Be very careful.”

  In such circumstances, talking to someone who was generalizing in such a racist way, I had a choice of challenging his logic, scolding him for uttering such offensive things, and in this way ending the conversation; or keep listening, without interrupting, nodding and smiling in mild encouragement.

  “What will the Arabs do to me?”

  “They will steal your bag, your money, anything.”

  “Are they armed?”

  “This is not New York! No, no guns. The knife is the favorite weapon of the Arab.”

  “Who are these Arabs? From what country?”

  “They are Algerians. Also Moroccans, but mainly Algerians. They are awful. And they are everywhere.”

  The French are entirely frank in expressing their racism. I wondered whether this lack of delicacy, indeed stupidity, was an absence of inhibition or simply arrogance. Their public offensiveness ranged from smoking in restaurants to testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Perhaps they did not know that the world had moved on, or perhaps they just did not care; or, more likely, they delighted in being obnoxious.

  I thanked the policemen for this information and pushed on, pondering the relationship between racism and xenophobia. By a coincidence I saw an article that day in a Marseilles newspaper describing a bill put forward by Jacques Toubon, the French Minister of Culture. This bill was intended to cleanse the French language; it would ban all foreign words—anglicisms mainly—and enforce linguistic purity. Everyone knew the words, everyone used them. In the course of traveling along the French part of the Mediterranean I picked up a number of them which were specifically denounced by the minister and which would have been banned by the bill.

  Most English-speakers are aware that the French—indefatigable trend-spotters—have picked up words such as le weekend, un snack and le club; and as a result of this quest for novelty French is rife with anglicisms. The French feel the same frisson from saying le smoking (meaning a tux) that English speakers feel from saying frisson. There are roughly three thousand entries in the Dictionnaire des Anglicismes. For example, le pad-dock (also used for bed), l‘autostop (hitchhike), le ketchup, and le leader. Le jamesbonderie is French for a daring feat; surbooker means overbook, le best-of, le challenge and le hit parade are obvious, and se faire lifter means to have a face-lift.

  But a large element in French officialdom (representing an element in public life) hated this. It seemed to me that hating foreign words was perhaps related to hating foreigners, and was another example of French insecurity. Three months later the bill was ratified—fines of up to twenty thousand francs (thirty-five hundred dollars) for the public use of an English word when a French one would do; the next problem lay in its enforcement, particularly in a polyglot city such as Marseilles.

  On my last day in Marseilles I treated myself to a bouillabaisse, the dish t
hat Marseilles gave to the world. The fish broth was pungent and flavorful, saffron-colored as in the classic recipe, presented with croutons and cheese and remoulade and potatoes. And the vital ingredients were the fruit of the Mediterranean—rouget (mullet), rascasse (red spiny hogfish found only in the Mediterranean), Saint-Pierre (John Dory), moules, whiting, monkfish, bass, gurnet, weever, conger eel, crab, crawfish, clams.

  The crab was very small. The waiter lifted the shell with a fork.

  “And this, as they say in English, you suck.”

  This one meal cost nearly as much as my hotel room, but it was worth it to sit with a view of the port, stuffing myself and reading a book and glancing at the boats in the port. Marseilles was obviously a tough place, but it was neither irritatingly sophisticated nor conspicuously poor. That was what I liked most about it, its air of being a cultural bouillabaisse made up of distinctly Mediterranean ingredients. I also had a confidence that I could go anywhere in the city—not a confidence I had ever had in New York or London. There were no mansions in Marseilles. The rich stayed in outlying villages, behind high hedges and barbed wire and Chien Méchant (“Wicked Dog”) signs, pretending they are in the bosom of Provence, and not in the city of stray cats and prostitutes and wanderers from the Barbary Coast. The reality of Marseilles was Arabs, skateboarders, hookers, the drug trade, and people working, all of them together, usually in the same narrow lanes.

  I took a boat—a small launch—to the islands in the Bay of Marseilles, to the tiny Château d’If of The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas lived in Marseilles) and to the Frioul Islands. Château d’If was a combination of Alcatraz and the Magic Kingdom, a Disney prison, and like the nearby islands of crumbly sun-faded rock that looked like stale cake. No trees here, but ashore there were dry treeless headlands dusted with green, which were the last of the bushes.

  I liked being out on the blue Mediterranean, among the sailboats, again that feeling of being at the edge of the sea that obliterated any clear idea of nationhood—the ports having mixed populations and a common destiny, living by the sea.

  “The Mediterranean is beautiful in a different way from the ocean, but it is as beautiful,” Victor Hugo wrote on a visit to Marseilles. He made some pleasing distinctions. “The ocean has its clouds, its fogs, its glaucous glassy billows, its sand dunes in Flanders, its immense vaults, its magnificent tides. The Mediterranean lies wholly under the sun; you feel it by the inexpressible unity that lies at the foundation of its beauty. It has a tawny stern coast, the hills and rocks of which seem rounded or sculptured by Phidias, so harmoniously is the shore wedded to gracefulness.”

  When I returned from the little cruise I decided to take another launch, and let it be my departure from Marseilles. We sailed along the coast, past the offshore islands of Tiboulen, Maire, Jane, Calseraigne, stopping briefly at Sormion and Morgiouy, and ending up at Cassis, where I caught another train. It was “Le Grand Sud,” stopping at Toulon, St. Raphael, and Cannes, passing St. Tropez, Fréjus, and Antibes. Most of the time the line was within sight of the sea, and the Aleppo pines and the palms at the shore, but as the train approached Nice the large apartment blocks and tall buildings obstructed the sea view.

  The dream of the Mediterranean is not the Albanian coast or the docks of Haifa or the drilling rigs at the edge of Libya. It is the dream of this part of France, the sweep of the Riviera as a brilliant sunlit lotophagous land—the corner of the Mediterranean from the outskirts of Toulon eastward to Monte Carlo, a hundred-odd miles of Frenchness—food, wine, style, heat, rich old farts, gamblers and bare-breasted bimbos. All that and art too. It is the Cagnes of Renoir, the Nice of Matisse, the Antibes of Graham Greene; the Cannes Film Festival, the casinos. In describing the machismo of the corrida, Hemingway had put Spain on the map. Fitzgerald in his short stories and Tender Is the Night was the first chronicler of the Riviera, the bon vivants and drunks and flappers and phonies of Antibes or Juan-les-Pins. It could be said that Fitzgerald invented the Riviera as a fashionable place, but he had many collaborators in keeping it in business.

  Ten years after Fitzgerald the names had changed. “All along the coast from Huxley Point to Castle Wharton to Cape Maugham, little colonies or angry giants had settled themselves,” the dissolute Naylor ponders in Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool, summing up the literary Riviera in the thirties. “There were Campbell in Martigues, Aldington at Le Lavandou, any one who could hold a pen at St Tropez, Arlen in Cannes, and beyond, Monte Carlo and the Oppenheim country. He would carry on at Nice and fill the vacant stall of Frank Harris.”

  Yet it rains on the Riviera too, the traffic is awful, and there is no elbow room. It has been called the zone nerveuse and a special sort of madness attributed to residence in this part of the Mediterranean, “the arid foreshore of that iodine-charged littoral.” It is mainly older people, retirees, crooks, tax exiles—who else can afford it?—and meretricious businesses and dog walkers and stony beaches on the sluggish sea. Nothing is sadder than a resort out of season, no matter how good the food. And there are times when even this dreamland is crammed with all the stale and wilted lotuses that no one wants to eat.

  • • •

  It was a rainy February night in Nice and I was walking down the wet gleaming street from the station. I was pleased with myself for having arrived here at the lowest point of the season. The hotels and restaurants were empty. No need for reservations: I felt liberated from having to plan ahead. And so I kept walking, to evaluate the likely hotels, avoiding the ones directly on main streets (car noise, motorcycle blast), or near churches (organ music, yakking), or schools (screams, bells), or near restaurants (drunks, music, banging doors). A hotel on the seashore would have been perfect—silence, a light breeze, the slop and wash of little waves; but not even the great hotels of Nice are on the sea. As in Brighton, to which Nice is often compared, a busy main road separates the sea front from the hotels.

  On a quiet square, the Place Mozart, a little old woman rented me a room for forty dollars, and just to see what I was missing I walked down to the Promenade des Anglais to the Hôtel Negresco for a drink at the bar. It is said to be the most expensive hotel in Nice, if not the best. Ha! Built in 1913, but imitating the Belle Epoque style, it is a hodgepodge of fatuous Frenchness, the bellmen and concierge and flunkies in footmen’s breeches and frock coats, bowing and scraping, and groveling for tips under gilt and chandeliers and red flock wallpaper, candlesticks with lightbulb flames and copies of bad paintings.

  What I liked the best about Nice that night was the heavy rain. Nice was smack against the sea, and so the many lights from the apartment houses and the old world streetlamps created a Whistlerish effect of glowing bulbs and reflections, like one of his wet nocturnes. Yes, that was possible in New Jersey, too.

  The next morning I walked down to the port of Nice, the Genoese-looking harbor, which is not a fanciful comparison—Nice belonged to Italy until 1860, Garibaldi was born there—and I saw the Rainbow Warrior at one of the docks.

  This Greenpeace ship—one of three or four in the world—had sailed there to educate the French about environmental threats to the Mediterranean. The crew members were selling t-shirts and bumper stickers and handing out leaflets detailing terrible pollution statistics.

  “Pollution is only one of the problems,” Catherine Morice said. She was from the Paris office of Greenpeace. “Drift nets are legal in the Mediterranean. And Italian drift nets are extremely long. Many kilometers. Spain and France also use drift nets. That’s something that has to be stopped.”

  She showed me some reports detailing the drift-netters’ abuses—and the length of the nets, ten and fifteen miles long. I told her I was traveling along the Mediterranean coast, and had just come from Marseilles and Arles.

  “That is one of the worst regions for pollution.”

  “But Arles is pretty—you mean the Rhône?”

  “The Rhône at Arles stinks and it’s dangerous. It’s a terrible river. We call it the couloir c
himique—chemical corridor. It makes the Camargue a mess.”

  And where travel writers rhapsodize about Gypsies and horses and Van Gogh—well, I had done a little bit of that, hadn’t I?—she said the oil factories and chemical factories of the Camargue are the source of a lot of Mediterranean pollution.

  “Are there nuclear plants along the Mediterranean as there are along the coast of Britain?” I asked.

  At this point Catherine called over to Jean-Luc Thierry, the Greenpeace nuclear expert.

  Jean-Luc said, “No. They are not built on the Mediterranean, they are inland. But they are not far. There is a nuclear reprocessing plant at Marcols-les-Eaux, a hundred kilometers up the Rhône. We’ve found traces of plutonium in the river and in the estuary.”

  Where there were Gypsies and horses and almond blossoms, there was plutonium.

  “What sort of a reception are you getting with your campaign in the Mediterranean?”

  “The French are very suspicious of efforts like this. The first question we always get is, ‘Where does your money come from?’ ”

  “That’s true of a lot of countries.”

  “France is worse. They suspect us of having foreign influence—the French paranoia—money from America or Russia.”

  As though if this were true it would cast doubt on the statistics or invalidate the effort to clean up the Mediterranean.

  “Does the pollution vary from country to country, according to the part of the Mediterranean?”

  “Yes, but the most serious division is the north against the south,” Jean-Luc said. “A lot of the waste and pollution on the European side affects North Africa.”

  The next morning Rainbow Warrior sailed for Calvi in Corsica, to carry the environmental message.

  Later that afternoon, reading Nice-Matin on a bench on the promenade, I saw there was a symphony concert that night at the Acropolis, Nice’s cultural center. It was a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, but when I got there a man was waving his arms and saying, “No tickets—all sold,” to some disappointed people. I suppose I had a look of consternation on my face, because a woman came up to me and asked me whether I wanted a ticket. Her mink coat, her look of evasion and aloofness, and even her air of innocence made her seem like a tout; and yet she did not scalp me, but asked for the exact price that was printed on the ticket.