NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “I am sorry my suitcase is so heavy,” she said.

  “I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m fairly strong. Ha-ha!”

  “You are so kind.”

  The thing weighed about fifty pounds. If I had not offered, how would she have carried it?

  “I suppose you have tools in it, or guns of some kind?”

  “Cosmetics,” she said.

  “That’s all?”

  “It is full of cosmetics,” she said. “I have just come from Nice where I was demonstrating them in a store.”

  She was that attractive, rather formally dressed and businesslike coquette with mascara and red lips you sometimes see in the aisle of a department store waving a tube of lipstick or else offering to squirt perfume on your wrist.

  I put the bag down. I said, “Just resting. Ha-ha!”

  “Ha-ha.”

  “What about having lunch?” I said.

  “Thank you. But I have an appointment.”

  “A drink, then? Or a coffee?” I said. “I am a stranger here.”

  The word stranger had an effect on her. It is not the way a French traveler would describe himself. He would say, Je ne suis pas d’ici, I am not from here. My way of saying it was odd and existential, something like “I’m a weirdo,” and it did the trick. Moments later we were clinking glasses.

  “Menton is for the old,” she said. Her name was Catherine. “So is Nice. St. Tropez is superficial. Money, drugs, rich people, lots of Italians. No culture, no mind at all.”

  As a demonstrator of cosmetics, who did nothing but travel from town to town with her leaden suitcase, she knew France very well and the Riviera like the back of her dainty hand.

  “And Monaco is just a joke,” she said.

  “That’s what I decided, but I thought it was because I am an American.”

  “Believe me, it is a joke. I spent five days there and it was like a year. I spend five days everywhere, showing the products. I was recently in St. Malo. Brittany is good, but it’s cold.”

  She was about thirty, not married, slightly enigmatic. She said that in spite of its superficiality she liked the south of France.

  “Where this wine comes from,” I said.

  “Cassis, yes,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just looking around,” I said. “I was in Antibes about fifteen years ago, visiting a man. I want to see if his apartment is still here. Want to see it?”

  Catherine smiled, and it seemed to mean yes, and so we finished our glasses of wine and walked down the street, to where Graham Greene’s old apartment, “La Residence des Fleurs,” stood.

  On the way she said, “Some men disapprove of cosmetics.”

  “Not me,” I said. “A woman wearing makeup likes to appear in a certain way.” I tried to explain this, but did not have the words.

  “Attrayant,” she said.

  It sounded right. I said yes, definitely, vowing to look the word up.

  “As you do.”

  She seemed pleased and embarrassed, and touched my hand. She said, “I know this address.”

  “An English writer lived here. Graham Greene.”

  “I don’t know the name. What did he write?”

  “Novels, stories. Some travel books.”

  “A good writer?”

  “Very good.”

  “I think you are a writer,” she said. “From your questions.”

  “Yes. I want to write something about the Mediterranean.”

  “You should go to a different part—not here. Nothing to write about here! Ha-ha.”

  “Plenty to write about here,” I said.

  I was thinking about my previous visit to Antibes. Then, I had not wondered why a millionaire novelist would choose to live in a small apartment three blocks from the harbor, with no sea view at all. But I wondered today. How could Greene have lived so long by the Mediterranean in a flat where all he saw from his windows were other houses? He had lived there more than twenty years, and I found it hard to spend a single afternoon in the place—the foreshore packed with apartment houses, the harbor jammed with yachts and sailboats, no beach to speak of, the little town blocked with traffic. Greene had wanted to avoid paying his British taxes—but what a way to go about it.

  “It’s almost time for lunch,” I said.

  “But I must go. My friend will be wondering where I am. He can get very excited.”

  “He lives in Antibes?”

  “No. He is visiting from Paris. He has a dangerous job.” She smiled at me. “A stuntman for films.”

  So I ate lunch alone, more fish soup and fruits de mer and wine. I had not been trying to pick her up—I had love in my life. Yet I thought how there was no mistaking this word “stuntman,” which she had said in English. It seemed to me, as she spoke it, to suggest one of the most intimidating professions imaginable. If she had said he was a boxer or a marksman I would not have been more seriously cautioned. You see this lover of hers defying explosions and car crashes and hurtling through flames, enough for anyone’s manhood to shrink to the size of a peanut.

  Attrayant means alluring.

  After lunch, I hurried out of town, walking to Juan-les-Pins. In 1925, Gerald and Sara Murphy took up residence in their “Villa America,” at this end of Antibes. They were the bright couple who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to create the civilized and generous hosts Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. He and Zelda supplied the dark side, the most interesting part, hysteria, madness and desperation, in those characters, “in the grip of fashion … while up north the true world thundered by.”

  In great contrast to Nice, where the beach is shingly and stony, the beach at Juan-les-Pins is sandy, though it is small and narrow. “The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one,” Fitzgerald writes in his brilliantly observed novel. “In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by the sea-plants through the clear shallows.” To the west, under a reddened sky a complex and lovely view, where Cannes lay under a headland.

  “A shameless chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west,” runs a line in The Rock Pool. That, in a single observation, is the English writer’s embarrassment in the face of natural beauty.

  Since almost every other writer who has described the Riviera has praised it, it is worth looking at a paragraph of Riviera abuse, that is, a general unfavorable review of the whole Mediterranean Sea. It is rare to find a body of water accused of being so hideous and worthless.

  “The intolerable melancholy, the dinginess, the corruption of that tainted inland sea overcame him [Cyril Connolly writes]. He felt the breath of centuries of wickedness and disillusion; how many civilizations had staled on that bright promontory! Sterile Phoenicians, commercial-minded Greeks, destructive Arabs, Catalans, Genoese, hysterical Russians, decayed English, drunken Americans, had mingled with the autochthonous gangsters—everything that was vulgar, acquisitive, piratical, and decadent in capitalism had united there, crooks, gigolos, gold-diggers and captains of industry through twenty-five centuries had sprayed their cupidity and bad taste over it. As the enormous red sun sank in the purple sea (the great jakes, the tideless cloaca of the ancient world) the pathos of accumulated materialism, the Latin hopelessness seemed almost to rise up and hit him. Like Arab music, utterly plaintive, utterly cynical, the waves broke imperceptively over the guano-colored rocks.”

  The insults are almost comic—Connolly was actually a sucker for the voluptuousness of the Riviera, and returned to that landscape in one of his other books, The Unquiet Grave, where he wrote of “swifts wheeling round the oleanders … armfuls of carnations on the flower stall … the sea becomes a green gin-fizz of stillness in whose depths a quiver of sprats charges and counter-charges in the pleasure of fishes.”

  Under the pines in the Jardin de la Pinede and at the Square F. D. Roosevelt in Juan-les-Pins, there w
ere friendly folks playing boules. Why was this interesting? Because they were all men, they were all polite—they all shook hands before and after a match; and most of all because they seemed the antithesis of what people wrote about Juan-les-Pins. They were obviously hard-up, blue collar, manual workers, fishermen and cabbies and farmers. They completely possessed the center of the square. A number of them were Vietnamese. I watched three Vietnamese trounce three Provençal players—their winning technique lay in lobbing the steel ball in a perfect arc, so that it bombed the opponent’s ball and sent it skidding.

  One of the players walked towards me to sit down and smoke, and so I talked to him. But he waved his hands at me, to get me to stop talking.

  “It is not necessary regulation to speak to my face in the French,” he said in English. “I can catch all the majority of what you are saying.”

  “I was watching you playing boules.”

  “The game of bowlings is a genius, and you can perform so many skill-tricks to gain the winnership and shock the opponent, your enemy.”

  “Of course.”

  “So you see the French games nothing like American—hit people with ball and fight with hands or take—ha! ha!—your gun and gain. What you see is typical French bowlings.”

  “Is it a sort of club?”

  “Also”—he wasn’t listening to me—“wonderful alimentation in Provence.”

  “Where did you learn English?”

  “From the war. From people,” he said. “But explain me one thing, why Americans speak English in France the manner they speak in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, everywhere, and so we cannot catch at all. But if I speak French to them the way I speak with my wife, ah, whoof! They will never catch!”

  This went on a bit more. Then I walked back to Antibes by way of the lighthouse, the Phare de L’Ilette on the Cap d’Antibes.

  The Mediterranean here was an enigma. It was corrupt, it was pure. There were horrible apartments, there were beautiful headlands. There were nasty tycoons, there were friendly folks. The sea was polluted and blue, the sea was a green gin-fizz of stillness. Everything that had been written about the Riviera was true.

  6

  The Ferry Île de Beauté to Corsica

  It took all night, a twelve-hour trip in the Île de Beauté, a ferry as large as an ocean liner, to get to this other part of France; but it is a French province in name only. Corsica is Corsica.

  I liked being on the water again, and I liked the empty ship, hardly anyone on the quay at Nice, just a few people in the cafeteria buffet which was open all night—spaghetti and rice and salad, and calamari that looked and tasted like shredded gym shoes. Some men were playing video games, Germans among them, bikers in tight leathers with shaven heads that gave them odd blue skulls. There was a lounge where people were drinking wine, some unruly children ran among the chairs, and there were the usual bronchitic French people coughing their guts out and chain-smoking.

  The deck was empty, except for a man muttering solemnly to his dog in French, and a Tibetan woman clinging to the rail. The night was black, almost starless, like a pierced blanket, and not cold but cool in late February. I stood watching the foaming wake in this emptiness that was like a great ocean, and thinking how it must have been so easy for the Mediterranean people to believe that this was the whole world.

  After a while I looked up and saw the Frenchman and the Tibetan were gone. I went to my cabin, and crept into my bunk and read a bit more of the biography of the painter Francis Bacon. “The truth comes in a strange door,” Bacon said. And as for his gory paintings and his frequently bloody subjects: “It’s nothing to do with mortality but it’s to do with the great beauty of the color of meat.”

  The purr of the ship’s screws put me to sleep, and when I woke the sun was rising on a calm sea, a rubious dawn lighting Cap Corse and the distant mountains in the island’s interior, the great granite peaks and the ridge above the port of Bastia. There are twenty tall peaks on the island, which is the most mountainous in the Mediterranean.

  The Île de Beauté (which is also a name for Corsica) docked, and I hoisted my bag and walked down the gangway into the middle of Bastia, empty at this early hour of the morning—only pigeons cooing and shitting on big bronze statues in the Place Nationale. I had breakfast in a cafe and immediately became aware that the men around me were not talking French but amiably and incoherently showing their teeth and joshing, gabbling in a sort of Italian. Corsican is a variety of old Tuscan, tumbling and Italian-sounding, like a secret tongue. I imagined that it seemed to an Italian the way a Scottish accent sounds to an English speaker, a regional dialect that was familiar even when it was incomprehensible. When I addressed the men—asking some directions—they became serious and polite and slipped into French or Italian.

  The language business—no outsider I met spoke Corsican—heightened my sense of Corsica’s being a colonized place, with the secret life that all colonies have: the parallel culture lived in another language. The fact that Corsican life is known to be explosive makes it all the more enigmatic.

  Bastia is a seaport in the shadow of a granite mountain. Most of the travelers who have passed through it express a measure of disappointment when speaking of the city, perhaps because it seems Italian rather than Corsican. Prized for its harbor rather than its fortifications (being hard to defend it was frequently captured), Bastia’s architecture is Genoese. In its older quarters it is still an Italian-looking town, with a picturesque old port. In Bastia I walked all over, in a way that I had not done on the Riviera, and I realized that it was probably true, as I had read, that a great deal of the pleasure to be had in Corsica was from walking—not only along cliff paths and mountain tracks, but on country roads and on the backstreets of the handsome city.

  That night, at dinner, the Corsican waiter approached me shyly and asked in French, “How do you say bon appetit in English?”

  Bastia is also well-served by ferries and is a simple place to leave. I could have gone to Nice or Sardinia or Tunis. I could have gone to Italy, leaving Bastia on the Corsica Regina in an hour or two for Livorno, and been in Florence in time for lunch.

  There are small districts within the city, including a Moroccan—or perhaps Arab—quarter, near the old port. This exotic corner was also where the city’s only synagogue was located. Very small, in a narrow passage, Rua du Castagno, which is a long flight of stone stairs, it is called “Beth Meir” synagogue.

  There was a recently erected sign on the wall, putting all the blame for the wartime anti-Semitism on the French government that had existed during the war: “La Republique Français/En hommage aux victimes/Des persecutions racistes and antisemites/Et des crimes contre humanité/Commis sous l’autorité de fait/Dite ‘Gouvernement de l’état Française’ (1940–1944)/N’oublions jamais.”

  It seemed to me ironic that Arabs had taken up residence in what in former days had been the Jewish ghetto, and that they were being harassed at the moment.

  Arabs in France are like The Tribe That Hides from Man, and so I deliberately sought one out in this district in Bastia, just to talk to. His name was Sharif—eyes close together, skeletal, skinny, his narrow shoulders showing through his burlap gown.

  “I am from Gardimaou, in Tunisia, near Djanouba, on the border of Algeria. But the Algerians are—oh, well!”

  “Are there many Tunisians here?”

  “Lots of them in Corsica. Moroccans, too. But no Algerians.”

  “Why is that?” And I was aware when I asked the question that Corsicans believed that island was full of Algerians, because no one differentiated among North Africans.

  “There is something wrong with Algerians,” Sharif said. “In their heads. They are very nervous types. And you see, that makes them dangerous. They cause all sorts of trouble on the mainland. They are not like other people. And some of them hate foreigners.”

  “Like me.”

  “Unfortunately.”

  Sharif had worked in Corsica for tw
elve years, but still the Corsican language was a mystery to him. He did not know a word of it. “It is too difficult.”

  But no language is difficult. Language is an activity, a kind of play, learned through practice. It requires little intelligence. It is social. So you had to conclude that in his dozen years no one had ever spoken to Sharif in Corsican. That activity was closed to him.

  There was no mosque in Bastia, indeed none in Corsica. He made a tentative face, as though he wanted to say more, then thought better of it. “Lots of Muslims, though.”

  “In my village in Tunisia, life is good, but there is no money. In other places where there are tourists, life is fine but it is expensive. I came here for work.”

  I pressed him about the nonexistent mosque. He said, “Yes, it is odd that there is none, but who can say why?”

  It was later that I found out that two houses, where Muslims met to pray, near Bonifacio, had been blown up. And later, after the French government took over an oriental-style building in Ajaccio (crescent, archway, arabesque doorways, domes—it had been the headquarters of a company selling Turkish tobacco), that too had been torched by arsonists, who believed—because of its unusual decor—that it was going to be used by Arabs.

  Some people in Bastia seemed impartial in their abuse. Not far away on an ancient pillar of Bastia’s cathedral, the fifteenth-century Église Ste. Marie: Jésus est mort (Jesus is dead).

  I gathered that there were many ways to see Corsica. The most strenuous is on foot on the many paths, or from north to south on the famous high-level trail, the Grande Randonee 20, more than two weeks of trudging at such an altitude that you see the whole island but hardly meet Corsicans. There are the local ferries, from Bastia to Bonifacio, Ajaccio to Propriano. There is renting a car and driving through Corsica, the simplest and most popular way of traversing the island—on good roads, and nightmarish ones, some of them vertiginous, all of them spectacular.