NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “Hello—good morning,” I said to that staring man in Italian. “Are you looking at me?”

  “No,” he said, his reddened eyes, with dark-flecked whites, fastened to me.

  Almost purple, with dusty hair, his wool coat wrapped around him, long legs, discolored and broken teeth, and those spotty staring eyes; he could not have been a stranger apparition in this small town with its unaccommodating provincial air.

  “What are you selling?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “It looks like a lot of Chinese merchandise to me.”

  “No. These are good things.”

  His Italian was shaky, supplemented by French, which was better than mine. His name was Omar.

  “Chinese watches. Chinese glasses. Chinese picture frames. Cigarette lighters from China.”

  “What do you want to buy?”

  “One kilo of hasheesh.”

  Omar did not smile.

  “Just a joke,” I said.

  Two of his friends, thinking that he was in trouble with a plainclothes policeman, stepped over to listen. Their names, they told me, were Yusuf and Ahmed.

  “Three Muslims in a little Catholic town.”

  They stared at me.

  “From what country?”

  “Senegal,” Omar said. He was older and taller than the others. “I come from a place ten kilometers from Dakar. My town is called Tuba.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “More than ten years,” Omar said.

  By “here” he meant the Mediterranean generally—out of Africa. He explained that he had lived for six years in Cannes, and also in Livorno and Florence. He had lived in Olbia for two years.

  “And them?” I nodded at Yusuf and Ahmed.

  “A few months.”

  “Why here?”

  “Olbia is a good place—not expensive,” Omar said. “We have two rooms. We all live together.”

  “Do you have any Italian friends?”

  “No—well, maybe a few.”

  “What about North Africa? There are lots of Muslims in Algeria and Morocco, and business might be better than here.”

  Business might have been better anywhere but here in Olbia where they stood, ignored and idle, while the townsfolk hurried past them looking slightly nervous. There were no tourists in Olbia.

  “We can’t go to those places. No documents. But here I have a paper. So I come and go. The police don’t bother us at all.”

  “When you say ‘come and go’ do you mean you return to Africa occasionally?”

  “Yes. I plan to go there in a few months. My family is there. Wives. Children. All that.”

  He had a clumsy clacking way with Italian, and I thought I might have misheard. “Did you say ‘wives’?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than one?”

  “Only two.”

  “Children?”

  “Only a few,” he said. “Six.”

  The young ragged man and his apprentices fascinated me, and seemed to represent an entirely new kind of penetration in the Mediterranean, a region which had known so many immigrants over thousands of years. It was a poor town on an island that was so poor the local people left it to find work. But it was also a town which had never before seen Africans.

  There were some more Africans at the railway station. I asked them the question I had meant to ask Omar. Why not get a job?

  “There is no work. We would work in a factory if we could find one. But there are no factories.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “No plan. Stay here.”

  Heading south, I took the train to a town in the north-central part of the island, Chilivani, a railway junction. Out of Olbia, the rocky sheep-nibbled hinterland of scrubby trees and low hills were all tumbled together and blown by the wind, like the Scottish lowlands. There were rocky peaks in the distance where, in the manner of Corsicans, the Nuraghic people of Sardinia had traditionally made their homes, away from the coasts, and fought off the numerous invaders. Beyond Chilivani, the people in the mountainous region of Barbagia (“extreme examples of the Sardinian national character”) had never acknowledged any rule over them and had never paid taxes. The Romans had failed to make them citizens (which was why they called these people Barbagians—barbarians). Sardinia had been annexed but so little did it figure in Rome’s plans that it was used as a place to which Jews were deported under the rule of Tiberias (A.D. 14–37). More recently, the Italians had no more luck than the Romans in bringing Sardinians under control, even with enormous numbers of policemen sent from the mainland to pacify the remote districts. Still, rural crime—murder, sheep-stealing, extortion—were unusually high in Sardinia. The Barbagians had been Barbagians for two thousand years.

  There were stone walls everywhere along the line, and as far as I could see, every mile of landscape demarcated. I was in a two-coach train filled with yelling youngsters on their way home from school. They were going fifteen or twenty miles away, and though they were very loud, and even rowdy, cackling in their incomprehensible dialect, when a woman straightened up and said, “Excuse me, but would you please close that window?” two of them instantly obeyed.

  It was a bleak untidy beauty in a sparsely populated island. We were among vineyards, running past a range of granite peaks. There were sheep grazing inside the walls in the foreground and in some places cork trees, like those in Corsica, stripped of their bark.

  The noisiest youngsters got off at a country station called Berchidda, where there was a small settlement, and others at Oschiri, which had the look of a penal colony. Many Sardinian towns looked like that, and others looked ancient, and some had the prefabricated look of having been thrown up last week.

  Chilivani was no more than an intersection of two railway lines, in a strong wind. I sat for a while and eventually connected with a train that was coming from Sassari, a bigger faster train that sped past a continuous landscape of walled-off pastures, all over the hillsides, under a large sky of tumbling woolly clouds that somewhat resembled the unshorn sheep in these pastures.

  We were less than twenty miles from the western coast, but so little connection was there between these sheep farms and the coast we might have been a thousand miles from the sea. That was a Mediterranean feature. Life was different away from the shore. Five or ten miles inland from anywhere in the Mediterranean and you were in a separate world.

  Much of what I saw was solid rock, long slopes of veined and wrinkled stone, and meadows of stone too, the whole place like an ancient lava flow, except that this was not fertile and volcanic but ironlike crusts of granite. Some of the smooth stone slopes also were partitioned with bouldery walls. I had never seen such a landscape before, nor had I ever imagined it except on a distant planet.

  At the town of Bonorva all the newer houses were made of gray cinder blocks. Out of town was a vast stony landscape of tussocky grass and dark twisted trees, the big sky full of smoky clouds. I made a note, the landscape looks abused, and only later discovered that many mining companies, foreign as well as Italian, had come and ransacked it for minerals, for antimony, coal, lead, silver and zinc.

  Farther south the sight of a mustached man in the middle of nowhere, leading sheep down a path from one field to another. A shepherd—the first of many I saw. Shepherding was as old an occupation in the Mediterranean as fishing, and this man with his flat cap and his crook and his dog represented to me a timelessness that was both melancholy and indestructible.

  Around four, I looked at my map, saw that we were near the town of Oristano, and decided to get off here and spend a night and a day, what the hell.

  Oristano seemed to be a port on the map, but my map was not very accurate. Oristano, five miles inland, might have been a hundred, for it had no real connection to the sea. It was just another small simmering town in the middle of a hot plain, the most provincial of places, at a great remove from the world. The far-off whistle of my departing train gave me a pang
of regret, but then I thought: No—this is the Mediterranean, too! Everything matters! and generally consoled myself with the thought of all the money I was saving by staying here for the night, rather than in the bright lights of big-city Cagliari.

  Oristano had a moribund atmosphere that was almost palpable, enervating heat, and an audible monotony that was like the drowsy buzz of a single futile bumblebee. I felt a sort of ghastly frivolity in the idea that by parachuting off the train with no plan in my head I was pointlessly insinuating myself in a small Sardinian town which was off the tourist trail—not because it was obscure and hard to reach but because it was utterly boring.

  It was a marketplace for the nearby farms, and the townies measured themselves against the peasants who turned up to sell vegetables or meat at the market. These peasants, Barbagians to their gnarled fingertips, were toothless and skinny and undersized people. The women wore shawls and four skirts and argyle knee socks and were more whiskery than their menfolk, who chewed broken pipestems and look oppressed. After the Oristano market closed I imagined them scuttling back to the hills and sheltering under toadstools. But they were also noted for their toughness—ferrigno, they were called, made of iron.

  The only aspects of the outside world that had penetrated here were the extremely violent American videos and Disney comics—we are cultural leaders, after all, specializing in the criminal and the infantile. Italian culture in Oristano was represented by the Church, porno comics, chain-smoking, a plethora of shoe stores. The rest was harmless obsession, Italian here—but generally true of the Mediterranean region—the mild ostentation of the middle-class women in cutting a good figure, and the male passion about sports that bordered on the homoerotic.

  Italy had allowed Sardinia to be self-governing and given it a degree of autonomy that prevented the island from nursing the sort of political grievances that were so common in Corsica. There were no bomb-throwers in Sardinia. It was a rugged place—none of the poodles and lapdogs of France, only functional mutts that had to work to earn their keep—sheep dogs and guard dogs.

  My landlady in Oristano, Regina, was a voluble Italian, whose husband worked in Cagliari. “I want you to be happy. I want this to be like your own house.” Her flunkies and room cleaners were Sardinian women from the interior, who were not forthcoming when I asked them about their own language and culture. It seemed a vaguely colonial arrangement of the memsahib and her native servants, but they got along well and worshiped in the same church.

  The more I saw of Oristano, the stronger I felt that my chief objection was that it was the sort of inbred town, with its own rules and snobberies, that I grew up in. It was full of lowbrows but it was neighborly. Strangers in the boardinghouse always greeted each other, and when someone entered a restaurant everyone said hello, calling out “How are you?” from where they sat. It was perhaps not very different from Medford, Massachusetts, and friendly and frightening in about equal parts. Excessive friendliness is perhaps a philistine trait; in a place where no one reads, no one values or understands contemplative solitude, and so they need each other to be friendly and talkative.

  I was on my way to the station in Oristano when I was accosted by an oriental man. He said, in Italian, “A hundred lire,” and clicked a cigarette lighter in my face.

  “Where do you come from?”

  “China.”

  Another Chinese man appeared.

  “You want a lighter?” he asked in English.

  “How did you get here?”

  “Cargo ship.”

  “Do you live here?”

  Yet another Chinese man joined us, and he muttered to his friends. They were all in their thirties, and were decently dressed. They spoke little Italian and even less English. They had chosen an unpromising place to hawk cigarette lighters. Perhaps this was a town that was not dominated by African hawkers. My questions and my lack of interest in their twenty-cent cigarette lighters seemed to drive them away, but where to?

  Africans living by their wits in Olbia, Chinese seamen boosting lighters in Oristano. What was this all about? The natives of the Mediterranean were always harking back to the past, which was glorious; but the present was much stranger, and baffling.

  The railway to Cagliari rattled down a long flat valley of Campidano. I dozed and made notes, and I was surprised by how warm the weather was—sunny and lovely this day in early March.

  Along with the Catholic chapel in the midst of Cagliari station, with the Holy Eucharist present in the tabernacle (a mass every Monday at ten-thirty, and every feast day at ten), there was also a pornographic bookstore, a photocopy machine, a barbershop, a coffee shop and three public telephones. This was the new Italy, after all.

  The city itself, built on a slope, old brown houses and offices, resembled Marseilles but without the Marseillaise air of criminality. Cagliari seemed huge after my experience of Sardinia’s provincial towns, but after a day it seemed very small. I had the impression that no one ever went there, but when I mentioned this the local people said, “This place is crowded in the summer. You should see Spiaggia de Poetto!”

  I went there, to this beach, and walked and saw the flamingos in the nearby lagoons. On this weekday in winter the beach was almost deserted, but that hardly mattered. I sat in the sunshine, read for a while, and walked back to town.

  In a Cagliari restaurant that night I was writing my diary, having finished my meal, when I noticed that the place was empty—all the customers had gone. The waiters, the cashier and the cook were just about to sit down to eat, having put a sign saying Closed on the front window.

  I caught a waiter’s eye. “I’d like to pay.”

  “But you’re not finished,” he said.

  “Yes, the meal was good.”

  “Your work,” he said, and gestured to my notebook, my papers and paraphernalia. “Look, I can see you’re busy. Finish your work. It’s no problem for us. We’re just eating here.”

  After I was done they invited me to join them. I asked them about Sardinia, but they said it was a horribly dull place, nothing ever happened here, and so they engaged me on their favorite subject, American basketball. Now about this Michael Jordan …

  There were Africans in the streets of Cagliari. The next day, on my way to buy a ferry ticket, I asked a man about them.

  “They’re Africans,” he said, and he shrugged, the Italian gesture for Who cares? “They’re here in the summer, lots of them. They sell little things.”

  “They’re from?”

  “Who knows? Africa. Ghana—down there.” He shrugged again.

  “What do Sardinians think of them?”

  He jerked his shoulders again and grunted, the fatalistic Eh! His tolerance was a variety of indifference. Italians are not threatened by abstractions, and unless they are directly provoked, Italians are great live-and-let-livers. In spite of their manic stereotypes, their refusal to fuss is one of their most endearing characteristics; coping with disorder is part of Italian life; and conscious of this they often make a virtue of not getting excited.

  The scariest-looking people in Sardinia were not the Barbagians, the Senegalese, the toothless shepherds, sheep-rustlers, kidnappers and Gypsies, but rather the punks of Cagliari. Young, filthy, ragged, with greasy hair and dreadlocks, rings through their noses, their lips, sniffing glue, gagging on wine and shouting vicious abuse at passersby.

  There were plenty of these strange young people hanging about in gangs near the castle, where I had gone for its good view of the harbor.

  “So what have we got here?” I asked a man, while six punks quarreled over a bottle. They wore studded dog collars and chains, and one had a tin cup that clinked at his belt.

  “It’s a shame,” the man said.

  “Anarchists?”

  “No. They believe in nothing.”

  “Nihilists, then?”

  “No. They are abandoned.”

  “There are young people like that in England and America.”

  “I’ve s
een them in Latin America,” the man said.

  Now we were walking along, up a steep cobblestone street.

  “In Brazil,” he said. “I lived in Brazil for three years. I never thought I would see them here. It was very strange there. It was ridiculous, really. Brazil is a huge country—rich too.”

  He laughed out loud.

  “So there were these paupers sitting on a mountain of gold!”

  The expression made me laugh, and my laughter encouraged him.

  “Here it’s the opposite. We’re rich, but we’re sitting on a mountain of ruins.”

  I asked him whether he ever went to Sicily.

  “Why would I want to go there?” he said, and tapped my shoulder. “Just a joke. It’s surely a nice place. But when I leave here I go to the continent”—by which he meant the Italian mainland.

  The travel agent who sold me the ferry ticket to Palermo said, “You’d be better off taking the plane. It costs the same.”

  It was sixty-seven dollars for the ferry from Cagliari to Palermo, but this way I had a first-class cabin and because it was an overnighter it was both my fare to Sicily and a bed. And there was the added pleasure of setting out from Cagliari in the evening, watching the lights of the city recede; and after a good night’s sleep, seeing the coast of Sicily appear with the sunrise.

  8

  The Ferry Torres to Sicily

  It would have been quicker for me to sail to Africa. It was a much shorter trip from Sardinia to Tunisia. Cagliari was only about 120 miles from Bizerte, city of Berbers; it was more like 180 to Palermo, Sicily. But it was generally bad manners, if not heresy, to mention Italy’s proximity to Africa and its melanzane—“eggplants,” as black Africans are described in Italian slang.

  Under a full moon in a cloudless night sky the ferry glided out of the Gulf of Cagliari, past the lighthouses and beacons, and soon the city and its twinkling hill was far astern. We were at sea and, as another Ulysses—James Joyce’s—saw it, “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

  The Sicilian crew were offhand and seemed to make a virtue of being unhelpful, so busy were they being themselves, smiling at each other with yellow faces and fangy teeth, muttering backtalk in slushy accents, and shrugging, and avoiding eye contact with any of the passengers, and all the while preserving their shabby dignity. At first there had been few passengers, but just before we left, a great number hurried on board, but few of them were cabin people. They slept in chairs, smoked on the deck, lurked in the passageways, played cards in the lounge.