NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (14 page)

Dalí did not reply, though he might have said that all war was inevitable because we are so unpredictable and impulsive, and because all human life involves savagery and fetishism. Religion and politics, in the Dalí scheme of things, are the primitive expression of our fears and desires. There is no question that he succeeds at depicting this.

The Dalí Museum in Figueres is a repository of flea-market castoffs and visual paradoxes; it is junkyard art, found objects, ceramic ambiguities, and perverse natural history. It is a monument to Dalí’s exhibitionism. He occupies the middle ground, somewhere between a buffoon and a genius, wearing his deviation on his sleeve a bit too obviously for many people’s comfort, hiding very little. He is somewhat like the youths of Figueres who spray the old walls of the town with graffiti as they chew Bubbaloo (“The gum stuffed with liquid!”) and are watched by old men who wear vast floppy berets. Dalí has been belittled as a buffoon. The proof of Dalí’s gift is that he knows how to arouse us, and outrage us, and make us laugh.

Apart from this artistic funfair, Figueres is an ordinary town, of whiny cars and narrow streets, and working people. It is conventional to see Dalí as an aberration. But I had the feeling, seeing the Spaniards of Figueres, that Dalí was speaking for them, perhaps for all of us, from the depths of our unconscious.

There was no train to Cadaqués. I took a bus to this vertical village. Here, nearby at Port Lligat, Dalí lived, on the Costa Brava, the real, wild thing, with rocks and cliffs and a dangerous shore. It is steep and stony, with precipitous cliffs and headlands with some vineyards. There are few beaches to speak of, only small tight harbors and coves, littered beaches with masses
of flotsam. Another bus took me across a steep cape of land, back to the railway line.

This was Llanca. It was sunset. I hated traveling after dark, because it meant I could not see anything out the window. So I stayed in Llancà, a pretty bay with condos by the sea, all looking (perhaps this was surrealism suggested by my recent experience of Dalí) like kitchen appliances. They were all shut for the winter. After writing my notes and having a drink I walked to the beach, where some fishermen stood under a cold purple sunset sky. They were casting and standing by their poles, rubbing their hands, waiting for a nibble as night fell, and to the north there was a shadow, a black sky, winter in France.

            
W
hat threw me was the sameness of the sea. The penetrating blue this winter day and the pale sky and the lapping of water on the shore, continuous and unchanging, the simultaneous calm in eighteen countries, and those aqueous and indistinct borders, made it seem like a small world of nations, cheek by jowl, with their chins in the water. And it was so calm I could imagine myself trespassing, from one to the other, in a small boat, or even swimming. So much for the immutable sea.

On land, the station at Port-Bou, the edge of Spain, was like a monument to Franco. Fascism shows more clearly in the facades of buildings than in the faces of people. This one was self-consciously monumental, austere to the point of ugliness, very orderly and uncomfortable, under the Chaine des Arberes, a gray range of mountains. The train rattled, and it moved slowly on squeaky wheels through the gorge to the station at Cerbère, the beginning of France.

There were no passport formalities, the bright winter light did not change, and yet there was a distinct sense of being in another country. And that was odd because all we had done was jog a short way along the shore. Gibraltar is a marvel of nature—it looks like a different place. But the border between Spain and France (and France and Italy, and so on) looks arbitrary, vague in reality and distinct only on a map. But some aspects of it
spoke of a frontier: the different angle of the mountains, especially the way the lower slopes were covered in cactuses, plump little plants, sprouting from every crevice and ledge on the rock face and cliffs that overlooked the harbor at Cerbère, an odor, too—disinfectant and the sea and the cigarette smoke; but most of all the Arabs. There had been none in the small port towns over the border, but there was a sudden arabesque of lounging cab drivers, porters, travelers, lurkers.

“There are a lot of them in Marseilles,” a young man said in English. He was sitting just ahead of me, with his friend, and holding a guitar case on his lap, he was addressing two Japanese travelers, still saying “them.”

He was referring to the Arabs without using the word.

“We’re going there,” one of the Japanese said.

“That’s a real rough place.”

“What? You mean we’ll get ripped off?”

“Worse.”

That stopped them. What was worse than being robbed?

“Like I got robbed on the subway train,” the first American said. “And then they tried to steal my guitar. There are gangs.”

“Gangs,” the Japanese man said.

“Lots of them,” the American said.

“Where do you think we should stay?”

“Not in Marseilles. Arles, maybe. Van Gogh? The painter? That Arles. Like you could always take a day trip to Marseilles.”

“Is it that bad?”

The second American said, “I’d go to Marseilles again if I could leave my stuff behind. That’s why I didn’t go to Morocco. What would I do with my guitar?”

“You speak French?” the Japanese traveler asked.

“I can read it. Do you know any other languages?”

“Japanese.”

“Your English is great.”

“I grew up in New Jersey,” the Japanese man said.

At this point I took out my notebook, and on the pretext of reading my newspaper wrote down the conversation. The Japanese man was talking about Fort Lee, New Jersey, his childhood, the schools. The man with the guitar was also from New Jersey.

“Fort Lee’s not that nice,” the man with the guitar said. It seemed a harsh judgment of the Japanese fellow’s hometown.

“It used to be,” the Japanese man said. “But I’d be freaking out when I went to New York.”

“My brother loves sports, but he’s too scared to go to New York and watch the games.”

“Like, I never took the subway in ten years.”

“I don’t have a problem with the subway.”

“Except, like, you might get dead there.”

The Japanese man was silent. Then he said, “How did these guys attempt to rob you?”

“Did I say ‘attempt’?”

“Okay, how did they do it?”

“The way they always do. They crowd you. They get into your pockets. One guy went for me. I kicked him in the legs. He tried to kick me when he got off the train.”

“That’s it. I’m not going to Marseilles,” the Japanese man said.

I got tired of transcribing this conversation, which was repetitious, the way fearful people speak when they require reassurance. It all sounded convincing to me, and it made me want to go to Marseilles.

The landscape had begun to distract me. Almost immediately a greater prosperity had become apparent—in the houses, the way they were built, the trees, the towns, the texture of the land, the well-built retaining walls, the sturdy fences, even the crops, the blossoms, the way the fields are squared off, from Banyuls-sur-Mer to bourgeoisified Perpignan.

With this for contrast, I saw Spain as a place that was struggling to keep afloat. It had something to do with tourism. The Spanish towns from the Costa Brava south are dead in the low season; the French towns just a few miles along looked as though they were booming even without tourists. They did not have that soulless appearance of apprehension and abandonment that tourist towns take on in the winter: the empty streets, the windswept beach, the promises on signs and posters, the hollow-eyed hotels.

The train was traveling next to the sea—or, rather, more precisely, next to the great lagoon-like ponds called
étangs:
Étang de Leucate, Étang de Lapalme, and into Narbonne, the Étang de Bages et de Sigean, the railway
line between Étang de l’Ayrolle—like a low-lying Asiatic landscape feature, the traverse between fish farms or paddy fields.

Towards Narbonne there were fruit trees in bloom—apples, cherries, peach blossoms. And shore birds in the marshes, and at the edges of the flat attenuated beach. There were Dalí-esque details in all this—I put this down to my recent visit to the crackpot museum. The first was a chateau in the middle of nowhere, with vineyards around it, turrets and towers and pretty windows, a smug little absurdity in the seaside landscape, a little castle, like a grace note in a painting. There was no reason for it to be there. And much stranger than that, what looked like an enormous flock of pink flamingos circling over the étang a few miles before the tiny station of Gruissan-Tourebelle. I made a note of the name because I felt I was hallucinating.
Flamingos? Here?

That night, in Narbonne, in Languedoc, I was wondering about those flamingos I thought I had seen flying out of the salty lagoons by the sea on the way into the city. Having a cup of coffee in the cool blossom-scented air of Mediterranean midwinter I struck up a conversation with Rachel, at the next table. A student at the university in Montpellier, she was spending a few days at home with her family. She was twenty, a native of Narbonne.

“They are flamingos, yes—especially at Étang de Leucate,” Rachel said.

The tall pink birds had not been a hallucination of mine; yet it was February, fifty degrees Fahrenheit. What was the story?

“All the étangs have flamingos”—the word is the same in French—“but in the summer when there are a lot of people around they sometimes fly off and hide in the trees.”

Rachel did not know more than that.

She said, “The étangs are very salty, very smelly at low tide, but there are fish in them and lots of mussels.”

“I associate flamingos with Africa,” I said.

Rachel shrugged. “I have not traveled. You are traveling now?”

“To Arles, and then Marseilles.”

“I have never been to Arles,” she said.

It was thirty miles beyond her college dorm at Montpellier.

“Or Marseilles, or Nice,” she went on. “I went to Spain once. And to Brittany once. I prefer the sea in Brittany—it is rough and beautiful.”

“What about the Mediterranean?”

“It is not exciting,” she said.

I could have told her that the Mediterranean extended to the shores of Syria, was tucked into Trieste, formed a torrent at Messina, hugged the delta of the Nile, and even wetted a strip of Bosnia.

“And will you stay in Nice?” she said.

“For a few days. Then I’ll take the ferry to Corsica.”

“I have a friend from Corsica. He told me that the people are very traditional there. The women are suppressed—not free as they are here.”

“Is his family traditional?”

“Yes. In fact, when they heard that he was talking about life there they got really angry. Corsicans think it’s bad to repeat these things. I feel bad that I am telling you.”

So to change the subject, I asked her about her studies.

“I am studying psychology. It’s a six-year course. I chose it because I want to work with autistic children after I graduate.”

“Have you ever worked with autistic children?”

“In the summer, yes, several times,” she said. “Ever since I was twelve I knew I wanted to work with handicapped people. I knew it would be my life.”

“That’s hard work, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s hard. You give a lot. You don’t get back very much. But I don’t mind. Not many people want to do it.”

Such idealism seemed to me rare. These were not sentiments I had heard expressed very often, and they lifted my spirits.

The next day was sunny, and Arles was not far. I left my bag at Narbonne railway station and went for a walk along the étangs, and watched the flamingos feeding and flying.

This Mediterranean sunshine was like a world of warmth and light, and it was inspirational, too. It was easy to understand the feelings of T. E. Lawrence, who took a dip there in 1908 and wrote to his mother, “I felt I had at last reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece,
Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete,… they were all there, and all within reach of me.”

I had thought that I had left Narbonne in plenty of time, but the early darkness of winter fell upon Arles just as the train pulled into the station. I had wanted to arrive in daylight. It was the seventeenth of February; Vincent Van Gogh had first arrived in Arles on the twentieth (in 1888), and because of that timing his life was changed.

“You know, I feel I am in Japan,” he wrote to his brother Theo.

It was the light, the limpid colors. It was, most of all, the trees in bloom. And strangely that February was very cold and snowy. To see branches covered in snowflakes and white blossoms thrilled Van Gogh—and this in a low Hollandaise landscape of flat fields and windbreaks by the Rhône. They were almond blossoms mostly, but also cherry, peach, plum and apricot. Van Gogh painted the almond flowers on the branches, a Japanese-style picture that resembled a floral design that he had seen before on a screen panel.

Even in the dark I could see some blossoms, and in the glary light of streetlamps the almond petals were like moths clustered on the black branches and twisted twigs.