NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “Very interesting.”

  But I was being polite. I disliked it all for being a theme park devoted to Roman dissipation—just chat and speculation, a rather unsatisfying amusement, like Epcot’s preposterous Italy-by-the-Lagoon in Orlando, Florida. In the end, all that people will remember will be the statue and fresco of Priapus showing his torpedo.

  We were soon on more fertile conversational ground when I saw a priest—an American, or at least non-Italian, priest was walking past us with another group.

  “Riccardo, when you see that priest,” I said, “do you think he’s a jettatore who might give you the evil eye?”

  “That is a superstition you find in Sicily and south of Naples,” Riccardo said, laughing insincerely. “Not here very much.”

  “Don’t some people do something when they see a priest?”

  “You scratch your—somethings—and you make a cornuto if you see someone with the evil eye. A priest, maybe.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I don’t worry much, except—”

  He was hesitating. I said, “Yes?”

  “Nuns,” he said with disgust. “I hate to look at them. Their faces can be frightening, especially the ones with a black cloth over their heads.”

  “What do you do when you see them?”

  “I have a special thing that I do,” he said. He winked at me, but he would not say what his precaution was against the evil eye of a black-shawled nun.

  Whatever Riccardo devised in the way of counter-magic was something in the folklore of Italian superstition that had been proven effective against the evil eye. The belief was ancient and so were the remedies. Touching iron was recommended—keys, nails, a horseshoe, the hinge of a door—because iron was associated with magnetism, to absorb the malevolent power. If no iron was immediately available, a man secretively grasped his goolies. Garlic worked—some people carried a few cloves in their pocket. Some people wore garlic on a string, or a piece of onion, or a saint’s picture, or a necklace of pigs’ teeth. They might carry a goat’s horn, or a plastic imitation. Some colors repelled the evil eye: blue in the north of Italy, red in the south. Was there a jettatore standing on the road making a malocchio on your house? Sprinkling water sometimes helped. Even better, pissing on the spot where the evildoer stood, because urine also acts as counter-magic.

  Thin people, priests, nuns, Gypsies were all potentially dangerous jettatori, suspected of possessing the evil eye. The jettatore was not to be confused with the Sicilian strega, a witch but a useful—probably indispensable—woman, who (observed by both Norman Lewis and the Sicilian reformer Danilo Dolci) “arranges marriages, concocts potions, dabbles a little in black magic, clears up skin conditions, and casts out devils.”

  The evil eye is probably rooted in envy; such fears predominated in places where people were more or less equal in their misery, where resources were scarce and there was heavy competition for them. It was also related to the struggle in such places of getting ahead without looking superior or stronger, the paradoxes of power and difference, and the fear of the unknown.

  The shores of the Mediterranean, so divided in certain matters, are united in their fear of the evil eye. Compliment a Frenchman and he blows lightly, to ward off the curse. If someone says, “What a lovely baby!” to almost any Italian parent in the presence of their child, the parent will immediately (and covertly) prong their fingers at the speaker, as a way of fending off evil spirits. Or they might spit three times at the suspected jettatore as soon as the person’s back is turned. In any case, the parent kisses the baby when he or she suspects it of an evil eye being projected on the child. Riccardo said that anyone who compliments a baby without adding “God bless you” (Dio ti benedica, or in dialect Di’ bendet) is probably wishing evil upon the child.

  Some chants worked in Italy, I was told. Fearing the eye, you muttered the words for the three blackest things in the world: “Ink! Black mask! And the buttocks of a female slave!” (Inga! Mascaro!? natiche di schiava!) or simply, “Away! Tuna eggs in France! Let bad luck go to sea!”

  Maltese fishing boats have the horned hands painted on the bow to deflect evil. Small replicas of finger horns were worn, or kept on key chains. Crusaders—the Knights of St. John—had sculpted eyes in the watchtowers in Valletta as part of the harbor defenses. In Greece, not priests but people with blue eyes are dangerous as bringers of the evil eye, and it is perhaps significant that Greeks think of Turks as being blue-eyed people, a whole nation of evil eyeballs ablaze. The remedy is a glass blue eye that Greeks use as a pendant. In Turkey (where this remedy originates) the glass blue eye can attain the size of a dinner plate, and the glass eye, along with other necessities such as matches and cooking oil, is sold in every kiosk and shop. It is really a fish eye, and plucking out a fish’s eye and stepping on it is efficacious counter-magic in the eastern Mediterranean.

  But I should not think of Italians as people who walked around worrying about the evil eye, Riccardo said. Did I know what a gobbo was? Yes, I said, a hunchback.

  A gobbo got his hump by having been the victim of the evil eye, in infancy. But it also meant that he was the repository of counter-magic.

  “So it is good luck to touch the hump of a hunchbacked man,” he said. “And if the hump is on a dwarf, that’s even better. Some people go about with a hunchback all the time. Gamblers, for example.”

  The modern version of Pompeii is probably the nearby town of Positano, a small harbor shared unequally by the idle rich and the landladies and the fishermen. If Positano were to be buried in volcanic ash today, future generations would understand as much about our wealth and our pleasures and the prosaic businesses such as bread-making and ironmongery as Pompeii taught us. They might not find a brothel, but they would find luxury hotels, the San Pietro and Le Sirenuse. The Roman author and admiral Pliny the Elder died in the Pompeii disaster; a Positano disaster could gobble up the film director Franco Zeffirelli, who lives in a villa there. It was perhaps this coast’s reputation for wickedness that induced Tennessee Williams to make his decadent Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer begin to go to pieces in Amalfi, before he was finally eaten by cannibalistic boys in another Mediterranean resort, the mythical Cabeza del Lobo.

  The Seabourn was not leaving until late, and so I paid a Sorrentino driver eighty dollars to take me to Positano. This was my expansive Seabourn mood: I would never have paid that money when I was jogging along on trains and ferries.

  Along the Amalfi drive, winding around the cliffs and slopes of this steep coast—much too steep for there to be a beach anywhere near here—I told the driver my fantasy of Positano being buried in ash. The driver’s name was Nello, and he was animated by the idea.

  “It could happen,” Nello said, and began to reminisce about the last eruption.

  It was in 1944, he was twelve. “My madda say, ‘Hashes!’ ”

  Nello insisted on speaking English. He claimed he wanted practice. But that was another thing about travel in a luxurious way: the more money you had, the more regal your progress, the greater the effort local people made to ingratiate themselves and speak English. I had not known that money helped you off the linguistic hook.

  “Vesuvio wassa making noise and zmoke. The hashes wassa flying. Not leetle hashes but ayvie, like theese,” and he weighed his hands to show me how heavy they were. “We has hambrella. Bat. The weend blows hashes on de roof and—piff—it barns.

  “‘Clean de roofs!’ my madda say.”

  “It sounds terrible,” I said.

  “It wassa dark for two day. No san. Hashes!”

  And it was certain to erupt any minute, Nello said. The volcano was long overdue.

  We got to Positano. Isn’t it lovely? Nello said. Yes, it was, a steep funnel-shaped town tumbled down a mountainside into a tiny port. What could be more picturesque? But it was a hard place to get to—the narrow winding road. It was expensive. It was the sort of place, like Pompeii, that you took a picture of and showed yo
ur friends and said, “We went to Positano.” And they said, “Isn’t it darling? Those gorgeous colors.” It was the Mediterranean as a museum: you went up and down, gaping at certain scenes. But really I had learned more about Italy in the crumbling village of Aliano or the seedy backstreets of Rimini.

  On the way back to Sorrento and the ship Nello said he was too tired to speak English, and so, in Italian, we talked about the war.

  “The Germans had food when they occupied Naples,” he said. “We didn’t have anything to eat. They threw bread away—they didn’t give any to us. And we were hungry!”

  “What happened after Liberation?”

  “The Allies gave us food, of course. They handed out these little boxes with food in them. Delicious.”

  “So the war was all about food, right?”

  “You’re making a joke!”

  But I was thinking that this precise situation was happening across the Adriatic: the Serbians had food, the Bosnians had none; the war was being fought as viciously as ever.

  • • •

  We sailed from Sorrento after dark, and sometime in the night we passed through the Straits of Messina. This time I did not think of Scylla and Charybdis. I was absorbed in my meal and probably being a buffoon, saying, “Yes, Marco, just a touch more of the Merlot with my carpaccio.” The ship was silent and still in the morning. I pressed the button on my automatic window shade and it lifted to show me the coast of Sicily. Craning my neck, I could see Etna, and on the heights of the cliffs on the nearby shore the bright villas and flowers of Taormina.

  It was so beautiful from the deck of this ship anchored in the bay that it seemed a different town from the one I had trudged around some months ago. I had been a traveler then, looking for D. H. Lawrence’s house. This time I was a tourist. I bought some ceramic pots, then I walked to the quay and showed Manny Klein how to use the public telephone.

  “You’re an old pro,” he said.

  Later, in the lounge, the Seabourn Spirit passengers said they were a bit disappointed in Sicily. But it wasn’t really that. It was a growing love for the ship which eventually took the form of a general reluctance to leave it, to look at any ruins, to eat ashore, or even go for a walk on the pier when the Seabourn Spirit was in a port. The ship had become home—or more than home, a luxury residence, a movable feast.

  “May I suggest the Two Salmon Terrine with caviar and tomato, followed by Essence of Pigeon with Pistachio Dumplings?” the waiter, Karl, asked. “And perhaps the Game Hen with Raisin Sauce to follow?”

  Karl, of Italian, German and Ethiopian ancestry, was the spit and image of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, one of whose grandmothers was a black Abyssinian.

  “As I mentioned the other day, I try not to eat anything with a face,” I said. “Which is why I had the asparagus and truffles last night, and the stir-fried vegetables.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nor anything with legs.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nor anything with a mother.”

  “No fish, then.”

  “Fish is a sort of vegetable,” I said. “Not always, but this Gravlax with mustard sauce, and the Angler Fish with Lobster Hollandaise might fall into that category.”

  “Soup, sir?”

  I looked at the menu again.

  “I’ll try the sun-dried blueberry and champagne soup.”

  For dessert I had a banana sundae with roasted banana ice cream, caramel and chocolate sauce. The man at the next table, gold buttons flashing, had just finished a plate of Flamed Bananas Madagascar and was about to work his way through a raspberry soufflé with raspberry sauce.

  After dinner I went on deck and strolled in the mild air for a while. The night was so clear that from the rail I could see the lights of Sicily slipping by; the places I had labored through on the coastal trains were now merely a glowworm of winding coast, Catania, Siracusa and, farther down, at the last of Sicily, the twinkling Gulf of Noto.

  It is only sixty or seventy miles from the coast of Italy to Malta, but that night it was a rough crossing, and for the first time the Seabourn rolled in the westerly swell. Sometime in the early hours there was peace again, my bed was level, and by dawn we were anchored on the quay at the edge of Valletta, in Grand Harbor, walls and turrets and watchtowers on every side. I could see the staring eyes that had been sculpted into some towers by the Crusaders as a defense against the evil eye.

  Malta has been identified as Calypso’s island in The Odyssey and was home to the Crusaders, the Knights of St. John, and is still an impressive fortress. It is also low, almost treeless, dusty, hot, and priest-ridden. There is so much Christianity in Malta, and of such a kneeling and statue-carrying and image-kissing variety, that there is an old Arab proverb that goes, “He’s calling to [Muslim] prayer in Malta!” (Wu’ezin fi Malta!)—in other words, asking for something utterly hopeless; trying to get blood from a stone, or as they said in Italy, “blood from a turnip.”

  Most of the Seabourn passengers had already gone ashore, for the bus tour to Mdina. I decided to make my own walking tour of the town, though it would not have been difficult to include the whole island. It was about eight miles wide and eighteen miles long. If you could take the heat and dust, much of it was walkable in a day. Apart from the forts and citadels there were small square houses and dusty streets, not very different from the place that Edward Lear described to his sister Ann when he passed through in 1848: “There is hardly a bit of green in the whole island—a hot sand stone, walls, & bright white houses are all you can see from the highest places, excepting little stupid trees here and there like rubbishy tufts of black worsted.” The people were very kind, he added, “But I could not live at Malta.”

  But who could? Anthony Burgess and various British tax exiles had tried it in the 1970s but they were undone by the Maltese government, which harassed them. Burgess, an ardent and prolific book reviewer, was accused of soliciting and receiving pornographic books—that is, review copies—and the books were frequently intercepted by Maltese customs. He eventually left and moved to Italy, though the government seized his house and confiscated his library. The Malta sections of Burgess’s autobiography are chapters of sorrowful accidents and misunderstandings and frustrations. It baffled me why writers chose the most irritating Mediterranean places in which to live and be creative—Maugham in Cap Ferrat, Greene in Antibes, Burgess in Malta. After writing his masterpiece His Monkey Wife (or Married to a Chimp) and a movie script for The African Queen, John Collier went to Cassis, near Marseilles, and wrote very little.

  I walked down the gangway and up the cobbled street into Valletta, bought a map and some stamps and listened awhile to a small sweating woman in a damp t-shirt shrieking into a bullhorn.

  “Most important thing! Beauty with a purpose! You see? She is lovely but she is holding hands with two Down’s syndrome sufferers!”

  “What’s going on here?” I asked a Maltese man in a snap-brim hat.

  “That’s Miss Malta,” he said.

  The buxom young woman in the yellow ball-gown tugged the two shy, bewildered girls down the sidewalk, past an outdoor cafe of gaping Maltese.

  “Beauty with a purpose!” the bullhorn woman yelled. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!”

  She lowered the bullhorn to get her breath.

  “Hello,” I said. “Is that Miss Malta?”

  “Miss Republic of Malta, yes,” she gasped. “We are going to the Miss World Pageant in Johannesburg next month.”

  The Maltese seemed approachable, friendly, rather lost, a bit homely, dreamy, decent and well-turned-out. The garrison atmosphere was much the same as I had found in Gibraltar. Even the Maltese who had never been in England had a sort of shy pride in their English connection and spoke the language well.

  The English had found these people, used them to service their fleet and dance for their soldiers, educated them, made them into barbers and brass-polishers, turned over to them London lower-middle-class cultu
re and the sailor values of folk dances, fish-and-chips, BBC sitcoms and reverence for the Royal Family, and given them a medal. Every schoolboy—Maltese as well as British—knew that Malta had been awarded the George Cross for bravery in the last war.

  But the British soldiers had left, the brothels and most of the bars were closed, business was awful here too, and at a time when most British war heroes were auctioning off their medals at Sotheby’s—a Victoria Cross was worth about $200,000—Malta’s medal was hardly valuable enough to keep the economy going. The neighbor island of Gozo was the haunt of retirees living off small pensions. The only hope was in Malta’s joining the European Community, to make the islands viable.

  I never saw Lear’s “stupid trees.” Presumably they had all died in the severe drought that was still going on—there had been no rain for six months. The earth was so parched that the plowed fields had the same look as the nearby stone quarries, for the fields were also littered with chunks and blocks of hardened clay. The fields were bounded by stone walls, cactuses, and spiky yuccalike plants. It was a fearfully rocky place, and still so dry that the island’s five desalination plants were going at full bore.

  After the Carmelite church and St. Paul’s Shipwreck Church and the crusader fortress, I went to St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral. In this island of 360,000 people, all were Catholics, except for the 180 paid-up Protestants at St. Paul’s Anglican. Today the church was being prepared for the harvest festival: English ladies with the pallor and fretfulness of exiles polishing brasses, arranging flowers and piling fruit.

  “I’ll put this bougainvillea on this wire frame and if it dies, there it is.”

  “Quite.”

  “And your maize cobs, Joan?”

  “Trying to get them to spill out of this bally little basket.”

  Fussy, helpful, panting church helpers, brass polish in one hand, cut stems in the other, and surveying their labors the keen eye of a vicar, hoping to impress a bishop. With so many dead heroes and clerics and crusaders and expired retirees in Malta the church was thick with brass plaques all in need of a good polishing.