The Pillars of Hercules

            It was not until I was on board the ferry Venezia, among dowdy women wearing long trousers under their thick skirts and grizzled cheese-paring men in cloth caps and frayed track suits—both men and women had the faces of fretful tortoises—that I realized that I was at last on my way to Albania. I had rehearsed it all mentally with such thoroughness that the whole business seemed inevitable. I had bought a ferry ticket from an agent in Ancona. The ferry was leaving from Bari, two-hundred-odd miles down the coast. I went by train to Bari. Returning to a city I always retraced my steps. In Bari this meant the same hotel, a certain laundry, a certain restaurant, a certain bookstore, a stroll down the Corso to the port. The women at the laundry remembered me, and one said, “We think you’re an artist of some kind.” That was nice. But they expressed amazement that I was going to Albania, which is regarded with horror by the Barese.

Another man in Bari was franker. “Albanians are the filthiest,” he said. Sporchissimi. “And the poorest.” Poverissimi “Stay here!”

No argument could detain me. I was beyond being determined; I was programmed for Albania. I had my fifty-dollar ferry ticket. My clothes were washed. I had a stock of books and batteries for my radio. I even had a map of the place. I did not want to listen to any Italian’s opinions about Albania—none of the ones I met had been there. But it was only on the deck of the Venezia as we headed east out of the harbor that I remembered that I had no visa for Albania, I hadn’t the foggiest idea where I was going, or why. All I had done was offer myself as a passenger. I had merely shown up and said: Please take me.

But where? The importance of getting to Albania had preoccupied me to such an extent that I had forgotten why I was going. On board, I wanted to ask people what their intentions were in Albania, thinking that it would offer some clue as to why I was going. No one was very conversational. The passengers were seedy but calm. The Albanians muttered in Geg or Tosk and ignored me. They crouched over little paper parcels of food, sinister-looking scraps of meat and crumbly crusts of bread and mousetrap cheese. There were not many children, though one family with two children had among its possessions, packed into cardboard boxes, a rocking horse with green fur glued to it.

The decks of the ferry were crammed with stolen cars. I had been told by people in Bari that the cars on the ferry to Durrës had been snatched from streets all over Europe, given new documents, and exported to Albania, where they would be sold on the black market and then vanish down dusty roads. There were the usual aid workers and the vans from various charities making their weekly food and clothing run. But Italian aid workers were the opposite of solemn—they were truck drivers, smokers, shouters, practical jokers, goosing each other and laughing. They sprawled in the cafeteria, mocking the awfulness of the food (wet spaghetti, soggy salad, inky wine) and yakking, then one would say, “You recognize this song?” and would begin singing something sacrilegious in a falsetto voice.

I had the feeling that I was the only one on board who was just going for the ride. On deck I tuned my radio and listened to the news. “The trial of Ramiz Alia, former prime minister of Albania, started in Tirana today,” I heard, and told myself that my trip was timely, yet knew that I was kidding myself. I knew nothing of Albania except that for fifty years the paranoid dictator Enver Hoxha had allowed few foreigners to enter and no Albanian to leave. Albania, cut off from everything, had a reputation for being one of the strangest countries in the world. With the great shakeup brought on by the Soviet collapse, Albania had changed—hadn’t it? It must have, because here I was, en route to the coastal city of Durrës.

The moon was up, the ship passed parallel to the shore, along a sea-level string of lights that were the streetlamps of the coast road south of Bari. Then the ship swung east, into the darkness.

Hurrying from Croatia to Italy to catch this ferry, I had a sense of weariness, and wondered whether I had the stomach to push on. But the notion of going to Albania lifted my spirits, because I had never been there before and I knew nothing about it, and neither did anyone else. That in itself seemed a novelty, for here on the most heavily beaten path in the world, the shore of the Mediterranean, it was still possible to travel into the unknown.