NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (15 page)

Arles had three or four large luxury hotels, but I was put off by their ridiculous prices. I had found the name of a twenty-dollar hotel in a guidebook. This was called La Gallia. It was apparently a cafe and pizza joint.

The man at the coffee machine said, “Go outside, turn right, go around to the back and up the stairs. Use this key. The light switch is on the wall. Your room is on the second floor. You can’t miss it.”

“Do you want me to sign anything?”

“No name needed. No signature. Just the money in advance. No passport. Sleep well!”

“Is there a toilet?”

“It’s in the hall. But you have a sink.”

It was a medieval tenement on a backstreet, with a cobblestone courtyard and a winding staircase. I was halfway up the stairs when everything went black; the timer on the light ran out. I struggled in the dark to the
landing, where I fumbled my flashlight out of my bag. I used this to find the light switch on the next landing. It seemed so difficult contriving to enter and leave this odd empty building that I stayed in my room and went out at the first sign of dawn.

That morning there was an old man with a wooden leg trying to climb the stairs.

“Softly,” I said.

There was only room for one person at a time on these precipitous stairs.

“This wooden leg of mine is heavy,” he panted. “It was the war.”

“My uncle was here in the war.”

Cpl. Arthur Theroux of Stoneham, Massachusetts.

“Fighting?”

“Running a blood bank. He was a medic. Thirty-third Station Hospital.”

We had to throw most of the French blood away, Paulie. They all had syphilis. The American whole blood was the stuff we used.

In the watery morning light I saw a profusion of almond blossoms. But I would have noticed them without the suggestion of Van Gogh; there was no subtlety. It was an explosion of flowers, the trees frothing with blossoms. The cherry blossoms of early spring in London and on Cape Cod always indicated to me that winter was almost over, and there is something magical about their appearing before the trees were in leaf.

Walking towards the river, a man—American—asked me directions to the railway station. He was Jim, from Connecticut, relieved to be in Arles after a harrowing trip—so he said—through Portugal and Spain.

“I hated Spain. I almost got robbed in Madrid.”

He was a recent graduate of Bucknell. Philosophy major.

“Ever heard of Philip Roth? He went to Bucknell,” Jim said. “We had to study him. Everyone at Bucknell reads him. I hated that stuff.”

I asked him whether he was on vacation.

“No. I quit my job. I hate the job market. I worked a little while for Cadbury-Schweppes. They were developing a home soft-drink dispenser. The whole bit. Syrup, gas, water—your own soft drinks on tap. It was like a coffee machine.”

“What were you doing?”

“Test-marketing it.”

“Did it fly?”

“It was a failure. It was too expensive—and who needs it?” He kicked along beside me. “They weren’t open to new ideas, so I quit.”

“I’m sure you did the right thing—and here you are, a free man, seeing the world.”

“What are you doing?”

His lack of interest in writing or reading encouraged me, and so I said, “I’m a publisher.”

“What do you look for in a novel?” he asked suddenly. It was a good question.

“Originality, humor, subtlety. The writing itself. A sense of place. A new way of seeing. Lots of things. I like to believe the things I read.”

I pulled a novel,
The Rock Pool
, by Cyril Connolly, out of my back pocket and waved it at him.

“This has some of those qualities, but not enough.”

“What’s it about?”

“People going to pieces on the Riviera.”

“Another one of those!”

True enough, I thought. “Do you do any writing?”

“No. I’m planning to go to art school, but at the moment I’m heading for Bratislava.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Supposed to be a pretty nice place.”

With that, he jogged off to the railway station, and I continued strolling through the backstreets of Arles to the river. In many respects this was much the same place that Van Gogh saw; many of the same buildings still stand, the same streets and squares and boulevards. There is a vast Roman arena in the town, a splendid hippodrome the size of a small football stadium, used at certain seasons for bullfights. One series had just been held, another, the Easter Feria
(Feria de Paque)
, was coming soon.

Not far from here, the town of Nîmes was the center of French bullfighting and had been for a decade or so, since the revival of the nauseating—what? recreation? pastime?—you could hardly call it a sport. It had been dying out, but Nîmes’s right-wing backward-looking mayor, Jean Bousquet, provided guidance and enthusiasm. There are three bullfighting
festivals a year in Nîmes, one attracting almost a million people. Of course French bullfighting had been denounced by animal-rights activists and foreigners, but nothing encourages the French so much as disapproval, especially from aliens.

“Do you go to the bullfights?” I asked a man walking a dog along the river.

“Sometimes. But you know these special events are to bring in the tourists,” he said. “I prefer football.”

Arles was a small town and it had the two disfigurements of pretty French towns in the provinces, dog merds and graffiti. The sidewalks were so fouled they were almost impassable because of the merds. As for the graffiti, there was something particularly depressing about spray-painted scrawls on the stone of ancient facades.
Up your ass, Paris (Paris-t’on cule)
and
Gilly = a whore and a slut (Gilly = pute et salope)
were two of the more picturesque obscenities.

The town had prepared itself for tourists, but on this winter day it looked especially empty: too many brasseries, hotels, gift shops, and stores; in July it would be packed, the people said. But Arles had an off-season friendliness and lack of urgency. The waiters were not surly. One explained the drinks available and laughed with me over the odd names Foetus Whisky, Delirium Tremens Beer (“It’s from Belgium”) and the blue cordial liqueur called “Fun Blue.”

I eavesdropped in Arles, though it annoyed me when people were talking and I could not understand them, because of the intrusive background music or other voices. It was like looking at something interesting while someone intruded on my line of vision. I felt stifled and frustrated.

Some of the snippets tantalized me:

A man said, “Let’s do in Italy what we did in France, back at the hotel—”

A woman said, “I am not going to go to another place like that again, because, one, it’s too complicated, and two, what if we got sick? And three, the other people look really strange—”

There were almond blossoms everywhere, which gave a great freshness to Arles and all its fields and made it seem still rural, picturesque and even inspirational. I liked the provinciality of the place, and its clear light.

But Arles was not all floral, and tweeting with sparrows. The mailman
was doing his rounds, a hardworking housewife with big red hands down at the grocer’s was complaining about the high price of morel mushrooms. This so-called cup fungus was selling at 168 francs for a hundred grams, which worked out at $126 a pound. And even in the early morning there were drinkers leaning on bars. It was never too early for a drink in provincial France. Two ladies were tippling Pernod. And down the street a florid blowzy woman was nursing a beer. This was at seven in the morning in an Arles backstreet.

To verify that Arles is a seaport, I walked along the east bank of the Rhône, in a southerly direction for a day of sunshine and sweet air. There were windbreaks of twigs and boughs, and the wide flat fields. There had been floods a few months before which showed on the banks of the river. Some sections of it had been fortified, sections of the retaining wall and the embankment filled in.

In the late afternoon I walked back to town to take the train the short distance to Marseilles. At the small railway station at Arles there were almond trees on each platform and they were in blossom. Such a pretty station! Such lovely trees! And then the TGV was announced. The TGV is the French high-speed train, much too fast and too grand to stop at a little station like Arles. It screamed past the platforms with such speed and back-draft that a special yellow TGV line was painted on the platform, so that people would stand at a safe distance, giving the train six feet of leeway. It howled like an earthbound jet, doing about 160 miles an hour, and with such a rush of air that petals were blown from the almond trees. The sight, the sound, the rush of air, made it a deafening event, the train slicing the day in half and leaving such a vacuum that I had the sense that my brain was being sucked out of my ears.

Anyone who hankers for the romance of railways, of the branch lines jogging through Provence, ought to consider the fact that the newest trains are nearly as obnoxious—as noisy and intrusive—as jets.

But even by the little blue, normal, stopping train of French National Railways it was an hour or less to Marseilles—about sixty miles away. We crossed the low delta of the Rhône, the fields of horses and flowers and vegetables,
thriving in the winter sunshine; through the towns of Entressen and Miramas and along the shore of the Étang de Berre. I stayed as close as possible to the shore of the Mediterranean, which meant bypassing Aix-en-Provence and all the rest of the romanticized and much-written-about villages of Provence. They were not on my coastal route, which was neither a gastronomic tour, nor a sentimental wallow in the life of rural Europe. That seemed a good thing too—from what I saw of those clumps of cottages, the tarted-up villages seemed more pretentious and expensive than the jammed ports and cities of the Mediterranean, where settlements were too active to be stuffy. And I had a sense that these coastal places had stronger links with each other than they had with the inland capitals and gentrified villages.

That was true of Marseilles, a wonderful city to arrive in by train, certainly one of the best in the world, because the ornate St. Charles railway station is on a bluff. You walk outside and all of Marseilles is spread out below—the Old Town, the Old Port, the boulevards, the rooftops, and chimneys and church steeples, and on the far hill the cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde, a gold statue on its dome. I could see the islands, the bluffs, the earthworks and fortresses and lighthouses. All this from the high stairs of the railway station.

“I read so much about the crime in Marseilles in my guidebook that I’m going to skip it altogether,” Jim, the American, had told me in Arles.

I was suitably warned, not to say terrified. Until I found a hotel I left my bag in a station locker; I carried nothing in my hands; I had no camera and very little cash. I walked briskly, as though I had somewhere to go.

Marseilles was a frightener; it was famous for its boasters and liars, for the way its people exaggerated, and it had a wicked reputation—for its gangs, its badly housed immigrants, its racism, and most of all for its crime. No wonder people compared it to New York City. It was certainly a center for drugs. The cocaine that was produced in the former French colonies in West Africa, the raw paste was smuggled into Marseilles to be processed, made into crack or base or crystal, or else powdered and cut with dry milk from Italy and sold all over Europe. Petty crime was commonly spoken of in Marseilles; I kept my head down and was safe. Such wickedness as drugs and racketeering, which kept both the police and the gangsters busy, did not affect the idle wanderer that I was.

It seemed to me to be the ultimate Mediterranean city, for its size and its diversity. As soon as I left the station and started down the marble stairs to the city, I saw a Gypsy woman smoking a pipe in the sunshine, and another counting coins she had made from playing tunes on her accordion. These Gypsies were as sorry-looking here as in Spain where they are relentlessly romanticized by travel journalists and persecuted by locals. Gypsies are generally despised in the Mediterranean as they are in the rest of Europe. The same could be said for the Moroccans and Algerians, who were said to account for Marseilles’s being notorious for crime. But every Mediterranean race was represented here, the Arabs were as common as the French, and there were Greeks, Spaniards, and Italians; there were tall loping Tuaregs in blue robes, and Berbers from Tunisia, and Senegalese selling handbags and watches. Arab women begged, each one squatting and holding a snotty-nosed child instead of a pleading sign, in a futile attempt—the Marseillaise seemed impervious to the pleas—to elicit sympathy.

In Marseilles the foreign men linger on street corners in small groups, because they come from cultures without telephones, where men linger on street corners in small groups. There they stood, dusky men, yakking and smoking. The so-called Foreign Quarter is in the Old Town, just below the station. The Baedeker Guide,
Mediterranean
for 1911, mentions this area: “On the N. side of the Quai du Port, the scene of motley popular traffic (pickpockets not uncommon), lies the Old Town, with its narrow and dirty streets, inhabited by the lower classes, including numerous Italians of whom the city contains about 100,000.” Now it is Arabs and Vietnamese in the Old Town; and the same perceptions—motley pickpockets, lower classes, cutpurses, parasites.

I walked down the Canebière (“Can o’ Beer”) along the Promenade Louis Brauquier (“poet and painter”) to the mouth of the Old Port. Out of the wind, sitting in the sunshine against a wall, was a line of people in various postures—old Moroccan women in shawls, men in berets, dog walkers, men with their shirts off, other men stripped to their underwear grinning into the sunshine.

Farther on, standing at the limit of the fort I looked out, and the Mediterranean had the look of a limitless ocean. I walked on, to the Gare Maritime, where ferries left for Algeria and Tunisia, and Corsica. I was headed for Corsica but the station timetables told me that I could continue
down the Côte d’Azur and catch the once-a-week (in the winter) ferry from Nice to Bastia, a port in the north of Corsica. At the ferry station passengers were boarding the French ship to Algiers, all of them Algerian Arabs. Not a single Frenchman, nor any foreigners. There was a good reason for this: at that point seventy-one foreigners, and tens of thousands of Algerians, had been killed by Islamic terrorists in Algeria in a fifteen-month period.