NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  The galley steward fussed when he saw me showing up for dinner.

  “You’re late—I can’t help you.”

  “The ship’s just leaving,” I said. “What time do you close?”

  It was a buffet, there was food all over the place and not many eaters. But this was just a little spirited obstinacy on the part of the steward.

  “We were going to close right now,” he said, and sighed and looked overworked, and shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “I am just an ignorant American, but I’m hungry.”

  “Where did you learn Italian?”

  “From my mother.”

  “Okay, go ahead. But all we have is menu food. No natural.”

  “What’s ‘natural’?”

  That set off in him a virtuoso flurry of gestures, hurried shrugging, the what-do-you-expect-me-to-do? pursing of hands, and he looked around in his impatience, as Italians do, as though pleading for a witness.

  I paid my money, I got my receipt, I chose my food, as the ship’s engine made a meat-grinder noise of departure. “Natural” was a sign of the times; the theory of sensible eating had arrived in the island of spaghetti-benders: it meant health food, low-fat mozzarella and low-sodium pasta. The rest was fried and fatty.

  A young man, monotonously complaining and stuffing his face with pasta, had put one foot on the arm of his girlfriend’s chair, in a sort of misplaced tenderness, as though chunking his big clumsy foot against her elbow was a romantic gesture.

  I hate the noisy way you eat,

  I hate your nose, I hate your feet.

  Because in Italy there was such an ingrained contempt for the law, la legge, it continued to amaze me that anything as orderly as meals and departures and arrivals were timely; yet my experience of boats and trains was favorable—there were very few hitches. Mealtime, for example, was sacred. It would have been unusual if the steward had turned me away from the buffet. Traveling in Italy, I could nearly always depend on a meal at the end of the day and a cheery person to serve it. I was seldom disappointed.

  The life of the mind was something else. Any honest thoughtful effort, any attempt at seriousness or intellectual ambition, was usually ridiculed. I knew that I would be made a fool of for my diligent note-taking and—though I tried to hide it—my air of scholarly industry. Only suckers tried to get ahead, bookish people were laughable, and already I could sense that once again I was among philistines, with all the responsive jollity and hearty appetite that was usual with philistinism.

  As far as I could tell there were very few Sardinians on the Torres, but there were all sorts of Sicilians: city slickers (Armani suits, pointy shoes), smug Palermitanis (overcoats draped on their shoulders like a cape), sinister toughs (sunglasses at midnight), and all the rest: the students, the punks, the poor; from “men of respect” (as the mafiosi called themselves) who looked stylish and unreliable, to Gypsies with gold teeth and long skirts and scarves, squatting on the floor and breast-feeding babies.

  I saw a sign, Your Muster Station is—(II Vostro Punto di Riunione è—) and it filled me with alarm.

  Supine in my cabin, listening to the engine’s drone and the thumping of the screws, I could just imagine the panic and clawing and yelling and colorful language and class warfare if the ship ran into trouble. I thought: Do I want to be in a sinking boat with these people? Do I dare to share a lifeboat with them?

  In a sunny Sicilian dawn, the sun blazing behind a golden haze, we entered the Bay of Palermo, mountains on either side and a great harmonizing background of stucco-colored peaks behind the ancient buildings. The tallest man-made structures were the church steeples and cathedral domes.

  Rather than stay in Palermo, where I had been before, I wanted to spend a day in Cefalù, just down the railway line; and then go to Messina and Taormina and Siracusa, places I had never seen. Still, I needed to walk in order to stretch and get the stiffness out of my legs, and I wanted just to browse in the city. So I left my bag at the station and then looked around, and decided on a hike.

  Whenever I asked directions I was usually told the place I wanted was “very far” (lontanissimo) even when it was a fifteen-minute walk. I was urged to catch a bus.

  “But you’ll need a ticket.”

  “Of course.”

  “You buy one there.”

  Silly me for not knowing that bus tickets were sold in a seedy little tobacco and porno shop, Bar “T”—Cafe Stagnitta—Articoli da Fumo, Articoli da Regalo, Articoli da Gioca—smoking paraphernalia, presents and games. And bus tickets, of course. It was preposterous to think that a bus ticket would be sold in a bus or in a vending machine. A man who sold bus tickets had to have a large stock of cigarettes, and candy, and tit-and-bum magazines.

  The swagger of the Sicilian men in Palermo was remarkable for its confidence, the men, swarthy as Arabs, shouting to each other. Anthony Burgess once heard a young man in Palermo telling his friends how he had devised a foolproof method for discovering whether his new bride was sexually innocent on his wedding night. “He was going to paint his penis purple, he said, and if his bride evinced surprise he was going to cut her throat.”

  I was fumbling with my wallet, when a woman took me aside. She said, “You’re a stranger?”

  “Oh, yes. American.”

  “Watch your pockets,” she said.

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.”

  “You see, Palermo is very beautiful—eh—”

  She lifted the fingers of her right hand and flicked forward, beneath her chin.

  “We’re good people—eh—”

  Again she grazed her chin with her fingers.

  “And you’ll be all right here—eh—”

  Her gesturing continued, as she looked slightly away, and then with a final caution, she walked off.

  I had seen this chin-flick gesture before. I had understood it to mean a deep defiance, Up yours, so to speak. But that is another, more severe use of it, say in Naples and north. Here, the flicking fingers were meant as a contradiction. Yes, I am saying this is a nice place but notice that I am indicating with my hand that it is not true in every instance; be warned.

  That was nicely candid. Standing at a bus stop, the gestures were more subtle as a priest joined the little crowd. There were some mutters but no one spoke to the priest. Italians—men especially—squint at priests’ skirts. They believe that priests who pass butcher shops turn the meat bad. Priests are neither men nor women. They have the evil eye.

  I was alert to everyone around me when I saw a priest in Italy. A silence fell when this one appeared, but often there would be a series of simultaneous gestures, because of the belief that priests had the evil eye. For an Italian man, the commonest and most effective way of dealing with the clerical evil eye was to touch his own testicles and subtly prong his fingers at the priest. I never found out what Italian women did. Perhaps they prayed, but in any case they were less anxious than the men in matters that related to the supernatural.

  I took a bus to Monte Pellegrino, on the recommendation of Goethe, who had written about it. The high hill was outside the northwest corner of the city and as this was a weekday in March, there was hardly anyone else on the footpath. I had been told that I could see as far as the Lipari Islands from the summit of Pellegrino; the day was too hazy to see any distance, yet the view of Palermo and its bay was splendid, enough of a reward for a two-hour walk.

  But the view had stirred something in me. Walking down the slope towards the bus, I became agitated about my trip. Perhaps it was the sight of all that coast, and the thought that almost two months into it, where was I? Kicking along a dusty path in Sicily made me feel tiny, overwhelmed by everything that lay ahead of me—Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, all the rest of North Africa, not to mention the war in Croatia and Bosnia, the islands of Cyprus and Malta.

  Then I remembered that I had plenty of time. I had no job, no deadlines, nothing else; and I reminded myself why I had come here. To eat spaghetti
and talk to people and, first of all, to see Cefalù.

  Cefalù was where the English Satanist Aleister Crowley had lived in the 1920s and 30s, studying yoga and black magic and writing dismal poetry. He was also a mountaineer, and had climbed a number of high peaks—had even worked out a method for climbing Mount Everest, “rushing the summit.” His Confessions, published only in 1970, showed him to be one of the loonier figures in recent history. He was a dabbler and a dilettante, and as a wealthy man—he had inherited a fortune from the family brewing business—he could afford to be. There was no end to his high spirits. He filed his teeth to points. He showed these fangs to women and said, “Would you like a serpent’s kiss?” A number of women doted on him. Today he would be called a New Age guru, they would be called groupies or cultists. He had named his favorite sex partner The Ape of Thoth.

  So, after a late lunch, I traveled about twenty miles down the coast on the line to Messina and stopped at Cefalù to see whether anything remained of the Crowley ménage. But no one in town recognized the name of Aleister Crowley and, though I walked the streets, I could not find the house where he had worked black magic and tried to bamboozle visitors and wore a sorcerer’s funny hat.

  But mine was not a wasted trip. There was something pagan and animistic in the monstrous lions carved in the facade of Cefalù’s cathedral—how appropriate that Crowley had chosen to live in a place where the supernatural still mattered. There were oranges and lemons on the trees and behind the little town, snowcapped mountains. And from the cliff at Cefalù, I could at last see to the east the Lipari cluster of islands, also known as the Aeolian Islands. The volcano Stromboli was regarded in ancient times as the home of Æolus, god of the winds.

  Late in the day, I caught an express train to Messina. It was called “The Archimedes” (the mathematician was born in Siracusa, on the other side of Sicily) and it was due in Messina in a couple of hours.

  More interesting than the fruit trees and the sight of the sea and the snowy peaks was the man next to me in the compartment, scribbling notations on sheets of paper lined for musical scores. He was murmuring, but he was not humming. He was thoroughly absorbed in his scribbling. Occasionally he tapped his foot. He was writing music?

  I would not have believed such a thing was possible except that various people had claimed they had done it, the most famous example being Beethoven in his deafness.

  The man was small and bald, about fifty, with a pleasant face. He quickly filled three sheets of paper with music. Then I interrupted him with a grunt.

  He stopped tapping his feet. He smiled. “Yes?”

  “Are you writing music?”

  “Yes,” and showed me the sheet with beads and squiggles on it. “I usually write music on this train. It’s not hard.”

  “But you have no instrument. There’s no music.”

  “This is music. And I don’t need an instrument. I write from memory.”

  “Amazing.”

  “The music is already in my mind before I write it. When I get home I will continue.”

  “In silence?”

  “I use a piano at home for composing, but my favorite instrument is an accordion.”

  This odd word fisarmonica I had learned in high school as a joke, and this was the first time in my life I had ever heard it spoken. And this man was a fisarmonicista.

  “It’s a typical Sicilian instrument. But I am the only composer of accordion music that I know. I think I might be the only one in Sicily. I love modern music, and mine has folkloric melodies in it.”

  His name was Basilio. He had just been in Palermo playing in a piano bar, both piano and electric keyboard. Not only his own music but Frank Sinatra hits.

  “‘Staranger Een Danah,’ ‘Conflowah Me,’ ‘Myweh’—they are the most beautiful,” he said, mingling English and Italian.

  “You spend a lot of time traveling back and forth to Palermo.”

  “I don’t have a problem. I’m not married,” he said, and laughed. “I have a girlfriend, though. My family is always asking me when I’m getting married, but I say to them, ‘Eh, what about my music?’ ”

  We were passing more orchards and a stretch of coast where there were empty beaches.

  “Look, all empty,” he said, seeing that I had glanced out the window. “It’s so lovely. Sicily is warm from March until October, but no one comes here—why?”

  “Maybe something to do with the Mafia?”

  “The newspapers! The newspapers! It’s all lies,” Basilio said. “All the news is about Mafia and danger. Eh, where’s the Mafia? Do you see them?”

  “I haven’t looked,” I said, startled by his sudden energy.

  “Forget it—it’s lies. As for beauty, listen to me—three-fourths of Sicily is untouched. Absolutely untouched! No one comes here—they’re afraid. Of what?”

  “Yes, it is very pretty,” I said, wishing I had not roused his fury.

  He was now talking to the other person in the compartment, a man in a heavy sweater and purple socks, holding on his lap a damp and stained parcel that stank of cheese.

  “We have—what—a million people or so?” Basilio said.

  “About a million,” the man agreed.

  Surely more? I thought. In fact, there are more than five million people in Sicily.

  “A little island. Not many people. And so that makes it all the more friendly,” Basilio said. “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a writer, Basilio.”

  “That’s great. Please, when you write”—he put his hands together in a little prayer gesture, then he held them apart, cupping them in a Do-me-a-favor mode—“tell people it’s nice here.”

  It’s nice here. Lemons, oranges. Composers on trains. Staranger Een Danah!

  “I travel a little myself,” he said. “We find Sicilians everywhere. You don’t have to speak French or English. There’s always a Sicilian taxi driver!”

  “You’ve been in Sardinia?”

  “To my shame, no, not to Sardinia. The purest dialect is Sardinian—the worst is Bergamo. As for Corsica—what’s wrong with them? Why don’t the Corsicans admit they’re Italians?” He was laughing. “I love to travel, of course. Although I haven’t been to other places in Italy, I have been everywhere in Sicily.”

  He sounded a bit like Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, I have traveled much in Concord.

  “Sicily fascinates me, the way the dialects here reflect Spanish, French, and Arabic.”

  “I am headed for Siracusa.”

  “One of the best places,” Basilio said. “Ancient. And natural too. Up north, the beaches are filthy. But here they are clean.”

  We happened to be passing one that was brown with muddy water from runoff.

  “Some of the beaches are a little muddy from the recent rains.”

  “Very muddy, I’d say.” And they were strewn with such rubbish and rocks, and bounded by trash-filled streams and open sewers. Italians were such litterers.

  “It will pass! Listen, Germans come here in November and go swimming. For them the water is warm!”

  Protesting that I was a wonderful person, and urging me to tell people how delightful Sicily was at all times of the year, he called out, “See you again!” and got off at Santa Agata di Militello. Then it was just small hot stations and embankments and so many tunnels it was as though we had traveled to Messina in the dark.

  The most God-fearing places in Italy were those that had experienced a natural disaster; such an event was inevitably a goad to Italian piety, and nothing provoked prayer like a flood or an earthquake or a tidal wave. Messina had all three just after Christmas in 1908, when almost the entire city, in fact this whole corner of the island, was destroyed. Part of Calabria was also leveled. Almost a hundred thousand people died in the one-day disaster (earthquake at 5 A.M., tidal wave just after that, then flooding; cholera came later)—it was equivalent to the entire population of the city.

  That is why there are no ancient buildings in Messi
na, though quite a lot of talk about how the Virgin Mary engaged in vigorous correspondence with Messina’s city fathers and reassured them, “We bless you and your city.” There is a large pillar in the harbor of Messina, too, with a statue of Mary, making a gesture of blessing that also looks as though she is dropping a yo-yo, and under it, for every ship to see, the same message in Latin, Vos et ipsam civitatem benedicimus.

  A melancholy plaque at Messina railway station records the fact that 348 railway workers died in the earthquake (A pietoso ricordo dei 348 funzionari ed agenti periti nel terremoto del 28 dic MCMVIII).

  It was easy enough to find a place to stay in Messina, and no problem eating, but apart from strolling along the harbor, and admiring the Calabrian coast across the straits—lumpy gray mountains streaked with snow—there was not much to do in this rebuilt city. It had obviously been brought back to life, but it was not quite the same afterwards. Or perhaps it was something else.

  I fell into conversation with a man in Messina who told me that, without any hesitation, Catania was an absolute haunt of crime.

  Catania is a port about halfway between Messina and Siracusa on the southeast-facing side of the Sicilian triangle.

  “The Mafia control the whole city,” he said.

  Now and then you got one of these Sicilians who admitted flat-out that the Mafia was pervasive and dangerous; and they could be specific, too, about certain towns or cities.

  “How do you explain it?”

  “Business is good there. They get a share of it. And the drugs.”

  “Because it’s a port?”

  “That’s probably the main reason.”

  “Palermo and Messina are also ports. So perhaps the Mafia is strong in these places as well.”