NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  She vanished a moment later, and only then—as I was congratulating myself on my luck—did it occur to me that she had sold me a fake ticket.

  Soon afterwards, I found my seat, and in the seat beside it was the woman in the mink coat. She smiled at me.

  “My husband is sick,” she said. “So you are lucky. This is a popular concert.”

  She was not a tout, nor anything near it. She was a good, kind, compassionate and honest person, whom I had wrongly suspected of being a hustler.

  “My husband is so sorry to miss it,” she said. “But now you can enjoy it. May I look at your program?”

  She was Madame Godefroy, and, for the duration of the concert, I became her husband. We shared the program. We agreed that the playing was wonderful. It was Berlioz (Overture to “Beatrice and Benedict”) and Beethoven Piano Concerto Number Three, and a Dvorak symphony (No. 5). The soloist was French and warmly applauded. The conductor was Chinese, Long Yü, and young (born 1964). We chatted about the weather, what a terrible winter it was! What a wet day! What a lovely concert!

  Flushed and breathless with all these exclamations, Mme. Godefroy and I went into the foyer and had a glass of wine.

  “We were living in Clermont-Ferrand, where my husband was working,” she said. “After he retired, about eight years ago, we came here.”

  “Is it more expensive here in Nice?”

  “The apartments cost twice as much, or more, as in Clermont-Ferrand. Property is very expensive in Nice. But everything else is the same—food, clothes, whatever.”

  “I liked Marseilles,” I said.

  Mme. Godefroy winced but said, “Yes, there are the Le Corbusier buildings. But Marseilles is dangerous. It has all the problems, too—drugs, immigrants, AIDS.”

  She was too polite perhaps to mention blacks and Arabs, but I was reminded of how the young blacks in Marseilles imitated American dress code: baseball hats on backward, track suits, baggy pants, expensive running shoes, and the same unusual haircuts. There were no other role models in France, or in Europe, but the Americanized look marked these youths out and must have seemed like a threat.

  “So you’re happy here, Madame?”

  “Nice is safe,” she said. “The weather is good, except for this year. It is youthful, because of the universities and language schools. There are many retired people—perhaps thirty percent. But Cannes is worse—it doesn’t have universities, so it’s mostly retired people.”

  “I always imagined that the French were settled people. I didn’t realize that they retired and moved to the coast the way people do in Britain and the United States.”

  “My parents never retired and moved,” she said. “It happened after the war, when children moved away from their parents to find work. Before, in France, everyone lived together, the children looked after their parents, and they lived in the father’s house. But—no more.”

  So the breakup of the family home was an economic necessity, dating from the recent past, when the young were uprooted and had to search for jobs. And the nature of jobs changed—the decline of agriculture, and manufacturing, the rise of the service industries; all of this since the war.

  “Do you have any relatives living in Nice?”

  “No, and I miss them. I miss my children and my grandchildren. All my children are married. Well, my younger son has been living with his girlfriend for so long they are good as married.”

  She sipped her wine.

  “My father is dead. He was ninety-three when he died. My mother is alive. She is ninety-one—but in good health and very alert.”

  “Where are your roots in France?”

  “Strasbourg. I was born there and my family lived there for many generations.”

  “Hasn’t Strasbourg also been German at times?”

  “Yes, it has gone back and forth, from French to German and back again. During the war”—she sighed—“we had to leave Strasbourg. It was a bad time. The Germans occupied it. We fled to Aix-en-Provence.”

  She told me about the fighting, the house-searches, the crowded train, the hunger. This woman in furs in the foyer of the concert hall in Nice, the very picture of bourgeois serenity, had once been a refugee, fleeing from town to town, ahead of the Huns, in a desperate struggle for survival.

  This talk of the war clearly depressed Mme. Godefroy, who perhaps realized that she was talking with a stranger who had been sitting in her husband’s seat, an inquisitive American. I liked her, though—her rectitude, her stoicism, her clear-sightedness: law-abiding, polite, married for life.

  “Are you staying in Nice?”

  “For a while. I want to travel in this immediate area. And then I’m going to Corsica.”

  “I have been there. Once. It is very different. The people, especially the ones in the mountains, are very severe.”

  At her request, because it was late, and there were lurkers here and there, I walked Mme. Godefroy to the taxi stand. I said good night, and then headed back to the Place Mozart, through the empty city, and detoured down the promenade, which was bright with wet reflections, and the water, too, the Bay of Angels a sea of gleaming liquefaction.

  The concert had been a local event, part of this wintry low season, not a tourist attraction. There were other events—dances, plays, and this week—because the Lenten season had just begun—a two-week festival of parades and exhibitions. I went to one of the parades, because it seemed to me to have been put on expressly for people who lived in Nice and the surrounding towns.

  The parade was called “Le Bataille des Fleurs,” and it involved floats and flower tossing. It interested me as local events often did for the way they roused people from their homes, children and spouses, and revealed their fantasies and enthusiasms. Families lined the streets, and so did soldiers and policemen and priests and punks. These French punks were grubby youths, swigging wine, looking dirty and dangerous. They jeered and shouted at the floats which were piled with flowers, and on each float a pretty girl in a ball gown or a tight dress or sequins, stood flinging mimosa (which had just come into bloom) to the bystanders. The sprigs of mimosa, with tufty yellow fluff, had the look of baby chicks.

  One of the flower girls was black and attractive, wearing a white wedding dress and a veil.

  “She’s a good one,” said a man beside me to his friend.

  “Oh, yeah,” the friend said, and leered at the girl. “Amazing.”

  And they clamored for her to throw them some mimosa.

  There were military bands with blaring trumpets. A Tyrolean oompah band. Another: St. Georg’s Bläser from Haidenbach. A brass band called The Wolves (Les Loups), playing loud and wearing baggy wolf costumes. More floats, more skinny fox-faced girls in pretty dresses flinging mimosa, and when they ran out of mimosa they tore flowers from their floats and threw those. There were Germans dressed as Mexicans, French cowgirls and drum majorettes, medieval knights and wenches, playing trumpets and twirling elaborate flags. Twenty little girls in traditional Provençal costumes tossing flowers and inviting the stares of elderly gentlemen. Zouaves, clowns, and a band of pink teddy bears. Musical policemen and “Miss Galaxie” and the forty-piece band of Stadtkapelle Schongau (Bavaria) in lederhosen: more oompah. “Los Infectos Acelerados” and a down-home band from East Texas State University—baton-twirling cuties in black leotards and short skirts.

  Seeing Americans, the French children became hysterical and began spraying strings of goo at them out of aerosol cans, screaming, “Mousse!”

  The day after the parade, I tiptoed to Nice Station. It is impossible to stride confidently through Nice, city of dog merds.

  When the English painter Francis Bacon was seventeen he saw dogshit on a sidewalk and had an epiphany: “There it is—this is what life is like.” What enchantment he would have found in Nice, where pavements are so turdous that a special one-man turd-mobile trundles along sucking them up its long snout. Even that ceaseless activity hardly makes a dent.

  The turd-mobile is defeated by
an unlikely enemy: an older overdressed French woman, a widow, a retiree, a prosperous landlady, someone precisely like Mme. Godefroy. She is the last person you would associate with dogshit, and yet this delicate and dignified woman spends a good part of the day calculating the urgencies of her dog’s bowels. There are thousands of these women and their dogs all over the Riviera. They are forever hurrying their tiny mutts down the sidewalk and looking the other way as the beasts pause to drop a stiff sausage of excrement just where you are about to plant your foot.

  At the station, I said to myself: If the next train goes east, I’ll head for Ventimiglia and eat spaghetti in Italy. If it goes west, I’ll eat in Antibes or Juan-les-Pins.

  It was an eastbound train to Mention, and once again I was struck by the courtesy of the older French rail passengers, strangers to each other, who chatted about trivial things and seldom departed in silence; nearly always when they left a train compartment they said, “Bye, now” or “Bon voyage” or “Take care.”

  There was something else about the train, that Fitzgerald mentions in Tender Is the Night. “Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.”

  Beyond the pretty bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a little jewel among rocky cliffs, I could see St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where King Leopold of Belgium, sole proprietor of the Congo, had built a regal estate that was so complete, even his mistresses and his private priest, his confessor, lived in a private mansion on the grounds. The idea was that the king could sin all he wanted, for the priest was on call to give him absolution on his deathbed. Somerset Maugham had bought the priest’s house, the Villa Mauresque—named for its Moroccan decor. I had planned to stop here, but the whole kingly place was now a set of condominiums.

  Past Beaulieu-sur-Mer, palmy, sedate, piled against the hillside, with mansions on ledges; past Eze-sur-Mer, less grand, with great clusters of banana trees at the station. The bays beyond Eze were beautiful but the beaches were stony, the cliffs perpendicular, a wall-like coast similar to the one I had seen on the Costa Brava. After Cap D’Ail came Monte Carlo—bigger, sleepier, nastier than I had expected, and it was impossible to tell the condos from the grave vaults. I decided to stop there for lunch.

  I walked from the station, trying to figure out where I was. There are three regions in the Principality of Monaco—Monacoville, the hill where Prince Rainier’s palace dominates; the valley of the Condamine; and another hill, Mount Charles—Monte Carlo. The whole place owes its existence to Grace Kelly, who provided Rainier with a son, thus maintaining the Grimaldi line. She met Rainier when the prince became involved as a human prop in a photo shoot in Monaco to promote one of her films; then he pursued her, with a priest acting as a go-between. He was well aware of the clause in Monaco’s treaty with France that asserted that Monaco would be absorbed into France if Rainier did not somehow produce an heir. Now it is for the young balding playboy, Albert Grimaldi, to secure the Grimaldi line with an heir of his own.

  The Grimaldi family, said to be the oldest monarchical line in Europe, is—like most of those families—royally dysfunctional, filled with stressful and unsatisfying relationships, though Grimaldi self-esteem is not in short supply. They are well aware that their home was a dump until the mid-nineteenth century, when Prince Charles III built a casino. He did it in much the same spirit that the Pequot Mashantucket Indians introduced gambling to Connecticut, because it was forbidden everywhere else (France and Italy had banned it). So Monaco got rich, as the Pequots got rich, on suckers being encouraged to throw their money away.

  But the wealthy people who live in Monaco are the opposite of gamblers. They are mainly anal-retentive tax exiles with a death grip on their cash and a horror of spending, never mind gambling. There are thirty thousand residents. Fewer than ten percent of them are natives, which says a great deal. Tax havens are by their very nature boring or else actively offensive; if they were pleasant, everyone would want to live in them. But only by promising tax incentives do the places attract their resident populations. This is not Happy Valley. For one thing, the chief characteristic of wealthy people is that they are constantly whining about how poor they are; the rest of us can take a malicious satisfaction in the fact that these tycoons have only each other at which to cry poormouth.

  I had a pizza, and walked around, but all my attempts to start conversations with the Monagasques ended in failure. That was another unhelpful personality trait of tax exiles—paranoia.

  Farther down the railway line, nasturtiums grew like weeds at Rocquebrune, and in Cabrolles there was space and light and a great valley slotted into a range of high snow-dusted mountains, with stony features that matched those of the local bourgeoisie.

  Menton was a Victorian-looking seaside resort of indescribable dullness. The fat, philandering Edward VII used to like it here, for the apparently limitless opportunities it afforded him to eat and chase women. Menton was having its own celebration today, the Lemon Festival (Fête du Citron). This one was obvious and programmatic, and it was watched without much enthusiasm. The floats were constructed of lemons and oranges in the shape of whales, dinosaurs, the Eiffel Tower, airplanes, full-figured women, windmills and so forth. It was neither as rich nor as revealing as Nice’s parade with its flowers and oddballs.

  I had decided that if I grew cranky I would simply move on to a better place, but it was not convenient for me to leave Menton. I did see the reality of United Europe at Menton station. Here we were on the border between France and Italy. A group of elderly Italians, none of them younger than seventy or so, were trying to buy cups of coffee and some cookies. The French woman at the counter was snarling at them.

  “If you don’t have the money stop wasting my time,” she said.

  They did not have French money, they did not speak French. The woman at the counter, a mile or so from Italy, did not speak Italian.

  “What is she saying?” a man asked plaintively in Italian.

  “She is asking for money.”

  “If you want to buy, change your money!” the woman said in French.

  “For francs, I think.”

  An Italian said to her in Italian, “All we want to buy is coffee. It’s not worth changing money for that.”

  Another Italian said to her in Italian, “We will give you a thousand lire apiece. You can keep the change.”

  “Don’t you understand me?” the French woman said.

  So there was no sale, nor were the Italians able to eat or drink anything; the border between France and Italy was simple to pass through, but the language barrier was insurmountable.

  The European Union, seen from the Mediterranean, was full of misunderstandings which made that argument a trifle. People were so confused about EC regulations in the Mediterranean that Euro-rules had become Euro-myths. They were ludicrous, but still they were believed, and they made EC nationals angry. Fishermen will have to wear hair nets, it was said. All fishing trawlers will have to carry a supply of condoms. There would be a ban on curved cucumbers. British oak would no longer be used in furniture because it was too knotty. Donkeys on beaches would have to wear diapers because of droppings. Henceforth, all European Community coffins would have to be waterproof.

  There were advantages to being in the European Community, but the Mediterranean was a community, too. At the fruiterer’s in Menton in February there were grapes from Tunisia, strawberries from Huelva in Spain, tomatoes from Morocco and Sicily, mandarin oranges from Sicily, and the North African dates, figs, prunes, nuts. Clementines from Corsica. And locally grown artichokes and lemons, and apples (Bertranne and Granny Smiths)—all from Provence. In addition, there were cheese, sausages, honey and preserves, and ten varieties of olives. Almost the whole
of the world’s production of olive oil came from these neighboring Mediterranean countries. The suburban density in Menton and on the Riviera generally was misleading; the shoreline catered to the hordes of tourists and the complacent rich, but just across the coastal highway and railway tracks the land was still profoundly agricultural—both in mood and culture.

  Back in Nice, I did my laundry, sitting in “Albertinette,” the launderette, and writing notes. On my right was a housewife folding clothes, on my left an Arab watching his clothes revolve in the washer. With maintenance in mind, I got a haircut afterwards. The woman cutting it was interrupted by a man who came up and began gesticulating and complaining.

  He said in French, “Your hair is too long!”

  “That’s why I am here,” I said.

  “But it’s still too long, the way you have it.”

  “You don’t approve of my hair?”

  “No. You need to emphasize your body,” he said, becoming passionate, plucking at my hair. “Cut the hair shorter, show the energy of the face. Make it so you can run fingers through it—like this! Get some harmony!”

  I was not sure whether he actually believed this or was simply teasing me by pretending to be a stereotypical Frenchman and demonstrating how passionately he could talk about trivialities. On the other hand, maybe he was serious. In any case, I ended up with very short hair.

  I had traveled east to Menton; my ferry to Corsica was not leaving for another day and a half; and so I went westward to Antibes on the stopping train—Nice, St.-Laurent-du-Var, Cros-de-Cagnes, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Villeneuve-Loubet, Biot, Antibes.

  A lovely blonde French woman got off the train at Antibes, and as she was struggling with a suitcase I offered to help. She gladly accepted, and we were soon walking from the station in Antibes together, her suitcase banging against my leg.