NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “This plaque is coming up a treat, Gina.”

  “I could do with a nice cup of tea.”

  We then learned the island was called Malta and the natives showed us unusual kindness, is written in Acts 28:1–2. In the King James translation the name is given as “Melita,” the Greek name (derived from meli, the Greek word for honey, for which Malta was renowned). The rest of the biblical chapter is a good traveler’s tale about shipwrecked Paul. Gathering some sticks for a fire, Saint Paul is bitten by a snake. Seeing this bad omen the “barbarous” Maltese take the stranger to be a murderer. But Paul plops the snake into the fire and shrugs, and “they changed their minds and said he was a god.” After some effective faith healing, Paul is feted by the Maltese and given all the provisions he needs to take him onward to Sicily and onward to Rome.

  The cheeriest man I met in Malta was Mr. Agius, “coffin-maker and undertaker,” busy in his shop near the church. He had been taught the coffin trade by his father and grandfather and he told me that a good mahogany coffin with silver handles went for a thousand dollars while the cheapest one, of plain pine, cost $165.

  “This is for poor people,” he said, showing me the cheap one. “There are many poor people in Malta. They choose this one.”

  He disposed of three or four coffins a week. He nipped from one coffin to the next, pointing out its virtues, the flourishes, the angels, the crosses, the handles, the gilt, the panels.

  All the while I talked to him his son sat with his face in a radio that was blaring old rock and roll songs—“Peggy Sue” and “Rock and Roll Music (Any old time you use it).”

  Malta had the culture of South London in a landscape like Lebanon—news agents selling The Express and The Daily Telegraph, video rental agencies, pinball parlors, pizza joints, and a large Marks and Spencer. All those, as well as fortresses and churches and many shops that sold brass door-knockers. But chip-shops and cannons predominated.

  “I want to see the sights,” I said to a man at a bus stop in Valletta in desperation.

  “What about the salt pans of Buggiba?” he said.

  It was early afternoon. On the afterdeck of the Seabourn Spirit, pecan pie was being served with vanilla bavarols with coffee and armagnac.

  I boarded the goddamned bus and rattled down the narrow road to Rabat and Mdina, across the island. The names were Arabic, like many others in Malta, and for all its Italian loan words Maltese was a Semitic language. Even the people had a Arab cast to their features, though they sneered at such comparisons, for the English had taught them to despise Gippos.

  More fortifications and cannon emplacements at Mdina, a walled town on a hill, looked over dusty fields and complaining donkeys; and seeing this landscape of powder and dead trees I began to understand Malta’s serious water shortage. The brackish water from the faucets had forced nearly everyone to drink imported bottled water. Mdina and Rabat were parched, and were lifeless, like Valletta. It was as though only war, or talk of it—memories of plucky heroics—animated the Maltese. The war was advertised all over Malta in exhibits and museums and memorials; it was all that anyone talked about. But the war stories ranged from the earliest Crusades to World War Two. The reason for this was obvious enough. The Maltese had only been useful during military campaigns, but in times of peace they had been ignored. This was a garrison.

  Wandering down the street of Mdina, I saw some people from the ship.

  “I don’t think much of this place—”

  “A little disappointing, like Pompeii—”

  “I could use a drink—”

  They were headed back to the ship, so I joined them on the bus, just got on after my ten-cent ride on an old British bus to Mdina.

  The Maltese guide, haranguing on a microphone for the ship’s passengers, was determined to make a case for Malta.

  “This has become a very very fashionable part of Malta,” she said. We passed a low hill of square houses. And at a small row of shops: “This is a very trendy discotheque—all the young people in Valletta go here,” and “Major shops. Your Bata Shoes, your Marks and Spencer, your Benetton.”

  After that she uttered the sort of sightseeing sound bite I had started to collect.

  “The Germans dropped a two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-kilo bomb on that church, while five hundred people prayed. It did not go off. People said it was a miracle of the Virgin Mary.”

  At Valletta, the busload was offered a choice of visiting another church or going back to the ship.

  “Ship” was unanimous. The feeling was that Malta—magnificent from the ship, with a drink in your hand—was rather disappointing up close. Afterwards, no one had a good word for Malta, even after having given it a good five hours of thorough scrutiny.

  That night, as the Seabourn Spirit crossed the Ionian Sea at twelve knots, I dawdled over my note-taking and went to the dining room late. On this ship, everyone had a right to eat alone, but the maître d’ said that if I wished he would seat me with some other people—providing they did not object.

  That was how I met the Greenwalds, who were from Montreal. Constance was demure, Jack more expansive—the previous night I had seen him polish off two desserts.

  “What did you think of Malta?” I asked.

  “If you wanted to buy a brass door-knocker,” he said, “I guess you’d come to Malta. There are thousands of them for sale there, right? Apart from the door-knockers, it wasn’t much.”

  “Did you buy one?”

  He was a bit taken aback by my question, but finally admitted yes, he had bought a brass door-knocker. “I thought it was an eagle. But it’s not. I don’t know what it is.”

  “Isn’t that a regimental tie you’re wearing?” I asked.

  “Yes, it is,” he said, and fingered it. “The Royal Household Cavalry.”

  “They let Canadians join?”

  “We are members of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth,” he said. “Though as you probably know, there’s a secessionist movement in Quebec.”

  “What sort of work do you do?”

  He semaphored with his eyebrows in disgust and said, “Scaffolding.”

  “Really?”

  He smiled at me and said, “See, that’s a conversation stopper.”

  “Mohawks in New York City are capable of climbing to the top of the highest scaffolds,” I said, to prove it was not a conversation stopper.

  “I’m not in scaffolding, I was just saying that,” he said. “‘What do you do?’ is the first question Americans ask. But it’s meaningless. ‘I’m Smith. I’m in steel manufacturing.’ ”

  He was a big bluff man, and his habit of wearing a blazer or a peaked cap gave him a nautical air, as though he might be the captain of the Seabourn if not the owner of the shipping line. He seldom raised his voice, and he took his time when he spoke, and so it was sometimes hard to tell when he had finished speaking.

  The waiter was at his elbow, hovering with a tureen of soup.

  “Oh, good,” Jack Greenwald said. “Now I’m going to show you the correct way of serving this.”

  After we began eating the conversation turned to the cruise. Most people on the cruise talked about other cruises they had taken, other itineraries and shipping lines and ports of call. They never mentioned the cost. They said they took ships because they hated packing and unpacking when they traveled, and a ship was the answer to this. It was undemanding, the simplest sort of travel imaginable, and this sunny itinerary was like a rest-cure. The ship plowed along in sunshine at twelve knots through a glassy sea by day, and the nights were filled with food and wine. Between the meals, the coffee, the tea, the drinks, in the serene silences of shipboard, young men appeared with pitchers of ice water or fruit punch, and cold towels. And there was always someone to ask whether everything was all right, and was there anything they could do for you.

  “I was on a Saga ship, cruising to Bali,” Jack Greenwald said. “Forty-one passengers and a hundred and eighty crew members. Can you imagine the number of times I
was asked, ‘Is everything all right?’ ”

  Over dessert—again Jack was having two, and being very careful not to spill any on his regimental tie—and perhaps because I had not asked, he volunteered that he had been the producer of a number of plays and revues. The names he mentioned meant nothing to me. Up Tempo was one. It rang no bells. The Long, the Short and the Tall? Nope. Titles of plays or musicals, because they were usually reworded clichés, sounded familiar but inspired no memories.

  “Suddenly This Summer?”

  “Rings a bell.”

  “Parody of Tennessee Williams,” Jack said. “Did very well.”

  “Before my time, I think.”

  “I sometimes have problems with writers,” he said. “There was one that made problems. I had to pay him two-fifty a night for one joke he had written. Just one line.”

  “What was the line?”

  “Someone in the cast says, ‘Will the real Toulouse-Lautrec please stand up?’ ”

  “That’s not very funny,” I said.

  “No. And the writer complained that he was not being paid on time. His lawyer sent me a big long lawyer letter. I said to myself, ‘Hell with it,’ and took the line out. Writers.”

  “That’s what I do for a living.”

  “Know the story about the writer?” he said. “Writer makes it big in Hollywood and wants to impress his mother. So he invites her out to visit him. She takes the train and he goes to the station with flowers, but he doesn’t see her anywhere. Finally he goes to the police station to see whether they know anything, and he spots her there. ‘Ma, why didn’t you have me paged at the station?’ She says, ‘I forgot your name.’ ”

  “That’s not funny either,” I said, but I was laughing.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it, Brownie?” he said to his wife. “We’ve broken our rule. We’ve actually had dinner with another passenger.”

  “I hope that wasn’t too painful for you,” Constance said to me.

  “Tomorrow I’ll tell you how I made some lucky investments in the Arctic,” Jack said. “Frobisher Bay. Making a deal with some Eskimos while they ate a raw seal on the floor. I’m not joking.”

  • • •

  After a man has made a large amount of money he usually becomes a bad listener. Jack Greenwald was not a man in that mold, he was not in a hurry, and he was a tease, but with an air of mystery. “I happen to be something of an authority on Persian carpets,” he would say. Or it might be Kashmiri sapphires, or gold alloys, or oil embargoes. If I challenged him I was usually proven wrong.

  These deals in the Canadian Arctic, this talk of “my carver,” “my goldsmith,” and the billiard room he was planning to build, with a blue felt on the billiard table, made him seem like the strange tycoon Harry Oakes, whom he somewhat resembled physically; but there was an impish side to him too, a love of wearing Mephisto sneakers with his dinner jacket, and a compulsion to buy hats, and wear them, and a tendency to interrupt a boring story with a joke.

  “Hear the one about the eighty-year-old with the young wife?” Jack said, when the subject of Galaxídhion, our next port, was raised in the smoking room, where he had just set a Cuban cigar aflame. “His friend says, ‘Isn’t that bad for the heart?’ The old man says, ‘If she dies, she dies.’ ”

  I had fled from Corfu after arriving on the boat from Albania. I had tried and failed to get to Ulysses’ home island of Ithaca. But there was only one ferry a week. The Seabourn passed south of it in the night and I felt I had returned to roughly where I had left off and was continuing my Mediterranean progress. I had felt a deep aversion to Corfu which even in the low season was a tourist island. The whole of Greece seemed to me a cut-price theme park of broken marble, a place where you were harangued in a high-minded way about Ancient Greek culture while some swarthy little person picked your pocket. That, and unlimited Turkophobia.

  We had sailed south of the large island of Cephalonia, and passed Missolonghi, where Lord Byron had died, into the Gulf of Corinth, anchoring off the small Greek village of Galaxídhion, on a bay just below Delphi. Indeed, beneath the glittering slopes of Mount Parnassus.

  Tenders took us ashore, where we were greeted by the guides.

  “My name is Clea. The driver’s name is Panayotis. His name means ‘The Most Holy.’ He has been named after the Blessed Virgin.”

  The driver smiled at us and puffed his cigarette and waved.

  “Apollo came here,” Clea said.

  Near this bauxite mine? Great red piles of earth containing bauxite, used to make aluminum, had been quarried from depths of Itea under Delphi to await transshipment to Russia, which has a monopoly on Greek bauxite. In return, Russia swaps natural gas with Greece. Such a simple arrangement: we give you red dirt, you give us gas. Apollo came here?

  “He strangled the python to prove his strength as a god,” Clea went on, and without missing a beat, “The yacht Christina came here as well, after Aristotle Onassis married Jackie Kennedy, for their honeymoon cruise.”

  Through an olive grove that covered a great green plain with thousands of olive trees, not looking at all well after a three-month drought, we climbed the cliff to Delphi, the center of the world. The navel itself, a little stone toadstool omphalos, is there on the slope for all to see.

  “I must say several things to you about how to act,” Clea began.

  There followed some nannyish instructions about showing decorum near the artifacts. This seemed very odd piety. It was also a recent fetish. After almost two thousand years of neglect, during which Greek temples and ruins had been pissed on and ransacked—the ones that had not been hauled away (indeed, rescued for posterity) by people like Lord Elgin had been used to make the walls of peasant huts—places like Delphi were discovered by intrepid Germans and Frenchmen and dug up.

  Delphi had not been operational since the time of Christ. In the reign of Claudius (A.D. 51), “the site was impoverished and half-deserted,” Michael Grant writes in his Guide to the Ancient World, “and Nero was said to have carried 500 statues away.” Delphi was officially shut down and cleared by the Emperor Theodosius (379–95), who was an active campaigner for Christianity. It is no wonder that what remains of Delphi are some stumpy columns and the vague foundations of the temples—hardly anything in fact except a stony hillside and a guide’s Hellenistic sales pitch. Anyone inspired to visit Delphi on the basis of Henry Miller’s manic and stuttering flapdoodle in The Colossus of Maroussi would be in for a disappointment.

  The Greeks had not taken very much interest in their past until Europeans became enthusiastic discoverers and diggers of their ruins. And why should they have cared? The Greeks were not Greek, but rather the illiterate descendants of Slavs and Albanian fishermen, who spoke a debased Greek dialect and had little interest in the broken columns and temples except as places to graze their sheep. The true philhellenists were the English—of whom Byron was the epitome—and the French, who were passionate to link themselves with the Greek ideal. This rampant and irrational phili-Hellenism, which amounted almost to a religion, was also a reaction to the confident dominance of the Ottoman Turks, who were widely regarded as savages and heathens. The Turks had brought their whole culture, their language, the Muslim religion, and their distinctive cuisine not only here but throughout the Middle East and into Europe, as far as Budapest. The contradiction persists, even today: Greek food is actually Turkish food, and many words we think of as distinctively Greek, are in reality Turkish—kebab, doner, kofta, meze, taramasalata, dolma, yogurt, moussaka, and so forth; all Turkish.

  Signs at the entrance to Delphi said, Show proper respect and It is forbidden to sing or make loud noises and Do not pose in front of ancient stones.

  I saw a pair of rambunctious Greek youths being reprimanded by an officious little man, for flinging their arms out and posing for pictures. The man twitched a stick at them and sent them away.

  Why was this? It was just what you would expect to happen if you put a pack of ignoramuses in charge of a jumb
le of marble artifacts they had no way of comprehending. They would in their impressionable stupidity begin to venerate the mute stones and make up a lot of silly rules. This Show proper respect business and No posing was an absurd and desperate transfer of the orthodoxies of the Greeks’ tenacious Christianity, as they applied the severe prohibitions of their church to the ruins. Understanding little of the meaning of the stones, they could only see them in terms of their present religious belief; and so they imposed a sort of sanctity on the ruins. This ludicrous solemnity was universal in Greece. Women whose shorts were too tight and men wearing bathing suits were not allowed to enter the stadium above Delphi, where the ancients had run races stark ballocky naked. In some Greek places photography of ruins was banned as sacrilegious.

  In spite of this irrationality, the place was magical, because of its natural setting, the valley below Delphi, the edge of a steep slope, the pines, the shimmering hills of brilliant rock, the glimpse of Mount Parnassus. Delphi was magnificent for the view it commanded, for the way it looked outward on the world. The site had also been chosen for the smoking crack in the earth that it straddled, that made the Oracle, a crone balancing on her tripod, choke and gasp and deliver riddles.

  “‘What kind of child will I give birth to?’ someone would ask the Oracle,” Clea said. “And the Oracle was clever. She would say, ‘Boy not girl,’ and that could mean boy or girl, because of the inflection.”

  “I don’t get it,” someone said. “If the Oracle could see the future, why did she bother to speak in riddles?”

  “To make the people wonder.”

  “But if she really was an Oracle, huh, why didn’t she just tell the truth?”

  “It was the way that oracles spoke in those days,” Clea said feebly.

  “Doesn’t that mean she really didn’t know the answer?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t that mean she was just making the whole thing up?”

  This made Clea cross. But the scholar Michael Grant describes how the prophecies were conservative and adaptable to circumstances, and he writes of the Oracle, “Some have … preferred to ascribe the entire phenomenon to clever stage management, aided by an effective information system.”