NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  In the recent Italian election, the neofascists of the National Alliance Party had helped Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia! party win a majority. The Minister of Transportation was the neofascist who had called Mussolini “the greatest statesman of the century.” Another party in Berlusconi’s coalition was the Northern League, which was pledged to regaining parts of Slovenia and Croatia and creating a Greater Italy once again. Rijeka in Croatia had once been the Italian city of Fiume. An Italian minister flew to Trieste and, directing his comments at Slovenia, screamed, “On your knees!”

  It was so much like old times that I would not have been surprised to see a gesticulating politician call for another invasion of Ethiopia. I hated noticing politics, but this verged on surrealism and could not be ignored. It was the anticommunist element in Italian fascism, and the protection of the Vatican—in habitual collusion with Fascists—that allowed Klaus Barbie and other Nazis to be spirited to Bolivia. There “Klaus Altman” formed The Fiancés of Death, an underground organization for smuggling drugs and arms, and committing the occasional murder. After many years Barbie was caught and extradited to France, to the annoyance of the neofascists.

  Having left Bari, I was in a noisy compartment, with a priest and several old women and some businessmen, on my way to Ancona via Foggia and San Benedetto del Tronto. It was such a crowded train these passengers had no choice but to join this priest and his evil eye in this compartment.

  “If Jesus came on earth to save souls, huh, why didn’t he come sooner in world history?” a hectoring woman asked the elderly priest. “Eh? What about all the others before him, for all these thousands of years?”

  “Good question,” the priest said.

  Some other people were chattering about politics, so I asked about the neofascists. What did they actually stand for?

  “I’m not sure,” one man said. He was middle-aged, tweedily dressed, possibly a lawyer, and was headed to Ancona. I addressed the question to him because he had the kindliest demeanor. “No one is sure. The neofascists say they have broken with the past.”

  And yet I had the feeling they idolized Mussolini. After all, the party was formed by old-line fascists. But I hesitated to say this.

  “What’s on their minds—race, imperialism, or immigration?”

  “Probably all three. They also talk about the work ethic and crime and lazy people and wasted taxes.”

  The man sitting beside him was blunter. He said, “They want a police state.”

  Later on, a young man handed me a leaflet in a train station. The message on it was that the neofascists were intent on suppressing personal freedom, democracy, the press and to limit rights generally.

  At Foggia, some people got off, two nuns got on. One with the meaty face and bulldog jowls of J. Edgar Hoover took a nip of brandy from beneath her robes and poured the whole thing into a glass of orange juice. She then glugged it down. Her black-robed companion, a dead ringer for the singer Meatloaf, quaffed a similar drink. It was 11:30 in the morning. They told the rest of the people in the compartment that it was the feast day of Santa Maria Antigua and with that they began saying the rosary very loudly in loud auctioneering voices for the next half hour. After the last Hail Mary the nun who looked like Meatloaf burst into tears. The other nun comforted her until she said, “I am all right now,” and changed her seat.

  I was reading the Bari newspaper which had a story describing how Italy’s birthrate was the lowest in Europe. That was quite funny. The pope had recently denounced condoms as sinful.

  The very fat woman who had joined in the nuns’ loud rosary took out a magazine and a sandwich. It was a health magazine called Sta Bene; the sandwich was mozzarella and ham. She read and munched all the way to Pescara.

  Next to the railway line the calm and relatively shallow Adriatic gleamed, almost motionless, even at the shoreline, all the way through Abruzzi. And always the little ritual of the stationmasters at the smaller stations, the man in his crimson peaked cap, brandishing his wand, blowing his whistle, finally saluting as the train clanked away, all the couplings ringing like hammered anvils. I saw fat sheep and grapevines and olive trees. There were backyards, too, some of them with miserable-looking people in them. I remembered how, for years in London, riding the train home, I felt a sense of personal failure riding past the backyards of Clapham and Wandsworth. There was a point to be made about the way the trains in the Mediterranean traversed the rear of so many houses, and their melancholy backyards. It was so revealing, if you could stand it.

  Leaning against the window, in the corridor of the train, looking at the road that ran beside the tracks, I heard two young men beside me talking. They were noticing the more expensive cars. A large red motorcycle, a man and his woman passenger, swung out from behind a car and passed it, the shapely woman hugging and holding on.

  “What a bike,” the first boy said. Che moto.

  “What an ass,” the second boy said. Che culo.

  I got off at San Benedetto del Tronto, where at the Center for Aqua-culture and Mariculture at the University of Camerino I looked for someone to talk to about the condition of the Mediterranean. San Benedetto advertised itself as a holiday destination—the coast was crammed with hotels and beaches—but I was interested in water quality and fish farms.

  “Yes, we have fish farms,” said Dr. Gennari Laurent, who was half French and half Italian. He said he was glad to see me. There was not a lot of public interest in fish farms. “We are growing sea bass and bream.”

  He was talking about small numbers—three hundred thousand fry compared to 200 million grown in the rest of Europe. But it took three years for a fish to grow to maturity in northern waters, two years in the south.

  “We are mainly a research establishment. Still, we eat them.”

  “Do you put them into the Mediterranean?”

  “It is very difficult to introduce fish into the sea,” Dr. Laurent said. “Take a fry that has been fed on dry pellets. You can’t fatten him and put him into the sea, especially a sea bass. They have a particular way of feeding. A bream might possible adapt. But that’s not our purpose. We are studying a whole new area of fish farming.”

  “For commercial purposes?”

  “Eventually,” he said. “Greece has hundreds of fish farms—bass and bream. France raises trout. The British grow salmon. Italy is way ahead in eels—for eating, of course.”

  The decline in the eel population was a good indication of how bad pollution had become, he said. The European glass eel was once found all over the Adriatic, and was caught in great numbers around Venice; but now the eel did not travel more northerly than Ancona, because of the vile water.

  “The Yugoslavia side of the Adriatic is deeper, so there are more fish,” he said. “One of the problems on the Italian coast is river pollution. The Po is very bad. I studied it myself. I found very bad water quality in the delta areas. Metals. Nitrates. Copper, for example. In fish it is immunodepressive—it breaks down the fish’s immune system, so they get diseases.”

  “I was under the impression that fish farms created pollution from all their accumulated excrement.”

  “Yes, that happens. The laws are lax here but strict in, say, Holland. But it is possible to reduce the level of ammonia through certain diets, or by using filtration.”

  “Do you think that someday there will be no fishermen in the Mediterranean, just fish farms?” I asked.

  “There will always be some fishermen here,” he said. “During two months in spring there is a ban on trawling, but after that everyone fishes twice as hard. It’s hopeless!”

  By the time I left the university and reclaimed my bag at the station it was dark and so I spent the night in San Benedetto, a tourist town with no tourists yet. I caught an early train to the good-sized city of Ancona. This was also a large harbor and ferry port, with ships to Greece and Croatia. The district at the end of the railway line in Ancona was called Pinocchio. “As for Ancona,” James Joyce wrote at the tur
n of the century, “I cannot think about it without repugnance. There is something Irish in its bleak gaunt beggarly ugliness.” Some of that bleakness is apparent today, but it is softened by the friendly and apparently prosperous people of Ancona, whose luck it is to live on one of the great harbors of the Adriatic.

  As soon as I found a hotel I went for a walk to the harbor. A fisherman at the port, Signor Impiccini, said that his catches were miserable. I told him I liked the fish they called triglia.

  “They are best when they are small,” he said. “Over eight or nine inches they don’t taste nice.”

  “Are they found outside the Adriatic?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “The bottom of the Adriatic is sandy and muddy because of the rivers that empty into it. Triglia from the Adriatic are best in soup or baked. But the Tyrrhenian Sea has a rocky bottom. Triglia from that rocky bottom are best grilled.”

  As I walked along the harbor I saw a gathering of men, three men apologizing and explaining something to an older man, who was complaining. Then, having finished explaining, the men told him how much they liked him, and when the first one finished, he goosed him by driving a finger into the man’s buttocks. The startled man jumped in anger. The second man did the same—a declaration of friendship and then a goose. The third man took a handful of the man’s ass and twisted it, all the while talking in mock sincerity. Finally, they walked away from the man, laughing in triumph, and muttering “He can shove it” (Va fan cul) and “Unnerstan?” (Eh gabeet?) and “To hell with it!” (Mannaggia la miseria!)

  Few words are more vulgar than “ass” in Italy, and “shove it” sounds very coarse in Italian. Nevertheless, it was a fairly common refrain. I thought of the young men on the train (“What a bike” … “What an ass”) and how, ever since Sicily, whenever I bought a morning paper I was struck by the pornography on newsstands, not the fact of it—because of course it was everywhere, as common as postcards and devotional literature—but the kind of pornography; its themes and emphasis. There were videotapes and picture magazines. Most of it was prominently advertised as sodomy.

  “Top Anal” and “Sex School (100% Anal)” were displayed along with the “Donald Duck” comics and the Sacred Heart prayer cards. “Capriccio Anale” was stacked next to Italian-English dictionaries, and The Sights of Ancona—or wherever. Some of it was euphemistic: “A View from Behind.” Much of it was blunt: “The Seeker of a Deep Ass.” Often these combined women and animals, dogs mostly, in such videos or magazines as “Moscow Dog,” “Three Women and a Dog,” “Animal Instincts (Anal),” “Super Animal,” and so forth, displayed for anyone buying a newspaper to inspect. In Italy pornography was as publicly proclaimed, and as inescapable, as religion.

  In Spain I had reached the conclusion that a country’s pornography reveals an inner state and gives clues to a society’s unconscious: its predilections and compulsions. What sells as pornography in one country would be laughed at in another. I happened to be in Ancona, but Italian pornography was pretty much the same all over the country. There were also unambiguous advertisements in Italy, such as the lovely woman appearing to fellate a penis-shaped fudgicle (motto: “Me and my Magnum!”). But what did this Italian obsession with sodomy and bestiality indicate? It was not a delicate subject but it was a delicate question.

  I risked asking it in Ancona, in a bar the night that I arrived. I was among students—Ancona seemed to be full of schools and colleges. One was reading a thick book, Il Fenomeno Burocratico. On the little piece of paper she was using as a bookmark were scribbled the words “Chi si considera—vale poco; chi si confronta—vale molto.” I fell into conversation with some of them, who were talking about the war in Bosnia, and after I said that I was an American they practiced their English with me. Eventually they got around to asking me what I thought of Italy.

  “The food is wonderful, and I am grateful for the hospitality,” I said. “People are also gentle with children, open-minded and appreciative. The newspapers are lively, the bookstores are excellent. Most of all Italians are pleasant to be with because they are pleasant to each other.”

  I went on in this way, meaning what I said, and then, choosing my words carefully, I asked about the emphasis on sodomy in the porno I had been noticing.

  “That’s an old Italian method of birth control,” one boy said, and they all laughed.

  On my way to Rimini the next day I passed the seaside towns of Senigallia and Fano, the beginning of what Italians call “The German Coast,” La Costa Tedesca, because of the annual visitation of Germans in the hundreds of thousands, from May until September. There were German trailer parks at Marotta, and signs in German on most beaches. The train passed so near the sea I could clearly hear the sluggish Adriatic slosh against the jetties and the breakwaters that ran parallel to the shore. It was as heavily developed and as tacky as the Spanish coast, but unlike Spain far lusher inland: hills of black pines, meadows bounded by junipers and poplars, modest vineyards and orchards, fields of hay being cut and baled.

  The look of tragic absurdity in a resort out of season was epitomized by Rimini, so hopeful, so ready, so empty. No town in Italy, except Rome, is so Fellini-esque. Rimini was where the great director was born and grew up; it was deeply a part of his mind, it fueled his imagination, it was the scene of a number of his movies. Rimini, an ancient town that was also a cheap seaside resort, a blend of classical ruins and carnival entertainments, was a perfect image for Italy, too. No wonder Fellini returned to it again and again to evoke his wildest imagery. (A vast fat woman dancing on Rimini’s beach and chanting, “Shame! Shame!” to a little boy.) The town is justifiably proud of Fellini. After he died a pretty park near the seafront was named after him.

  A faintly seedy place, Rimini is another resort that is noted for its throngs of German tourists. Yet some of the town is elegant, with boulevards of substantial villas, and the older part of town is ancient and lovely. There is a Roman amphitheater, a cathedral, several handsome churches. The local cuisine is also delicious. The area is well-known for its whitebait and clam sauce and fizzy wines. I tried everything, but still felt somewhat uncomfortable. The problem is Rimini’s small size. It was true of other towns on this coast. They were simply not built for this many people. The market overflowed the piazzas and streets and alleys, and on Saturdays there was no old town, simply stall after stall selling fruit and vegetables, cheese and meat, and stacks of clothes, as well as pots and pans, t-shirts, sweaters, and all sorts of Chinese knock-offs of U.S. merchandise that are now sold the world over.

  As the sun sank and the lights began to wink Rimini became Fellini-esque—something about the lights twinkling in the emptiness, under the moonless sky, the wind whipping at the seaside pennants and making the awnings flap. There were little chairs and empty pavilions, and the avenue along the shore was scoured by the wind hurrying off the sea, out of the Adriatic darkness, making Rimini seem like an abandoned carnival in the wilderness: small, weak, painted, futile, doomed. As Catholics said, and as Fellini insisted, the town was an occasion of sin.

  I hiked up and down the seafront, liking the strangeness of all the hotels and cafes and lights, self-mocking in their abandonment. The beach was completely divided into horrible little fenced-off areas, the very sand taken over and planted with tables, chairs, beach toys, changing rooms, playgrounds—everything evenly spaced, right out to the tide-mark, with signs and flags. But it was empty on this low season night. I came to a better part of town, the Viale Principe Amedeo, with its villas side by side, the Villa del Angelo, Villa Mauro, Villa Jacinta, all looking wonderful and solid, family houses for the summer, the very image of bourgeois smugness, with palms and walled gardens.

  And there this cold night, among the walls and the evergreens, on that street and the side streets, were numerous prostitutes, hailing the few passing cars, caught in the headlights’ sudden gleam like deer dazzled in the road. Their long coats were flung apart by their urgent strutting—they wore cycling shorts and
miniskirts and lingerie under these coats. They were big women—tall, not fat but imposing. Some were as big as men, and might well have been men—male transvestites. Seeing me they became animated, and called out, and sang, Eh, baybee! I larf you!

  “Good evening,” I said.

  “You want something nice?” this laughing woman said.

  “I just want to know how you are doing.”

  Another big one lunged at me and grabbed my crotch and said, “I want this!”

  They all laughed at me, so bored and frustrated were they on a chilly night with no cars. There were more of them farther on, standing on the street, lurking in the driveways, in black slacks and blue suits. Some were Africans, a few might have been Germans or Slovenians, Bosnian refugees, recently liberated Albanians. Apart from me, they were the only pedestrians, and yet they were not walking, but rather actively standing, posturing, hallooing, waiting to be picked up by cars that went by. And after a while a few cars did go by, very slowly, the drivers appraising the women.

  Fellini would have loved it: the bourgeois neighborhood, the expensive cars, the windy nights, the whores scattered among the villas, the shrieks and catcalls.

  Seven or eight young boys went down the street and began teasing them, but the prostitutes stood their ground, jeering at the boys, questioning their virility.

  “You’ve got nothing down there, boy!”

  In the Via Gambalunga, also on a “nice” street (dentists’ offices, villas, apartment houses), there was the “Club Riche Monde—Cabaret” and in small print No one under 21 Admitted and Porno Show. This also seemed Fellini-esque—degradation in a respectable neighborhood. As a younger man, ravenous for experience, I would have gone in. But it was after midnight, and I knew what was inside: expensive drinks and exhibitionism, and the kind of shakedown that makes you ashamed of how predictable the libido is. That, and the feeling of unease I got in the presence of public sex, like the irritation I felt when I saw comic books and porno mags all jumbled together on the newsstand. I went back to my hotel and read a book. Nowadays I did not want to put myself in the hands of pimps.