The Pillars of Hercules

“Forty-two years,” he said. He was asthmatic with grief, struggling for breath, poor old guy, looking so lost here on this Albanian shore.

“Oh, God.”

“That lady over there is just a friend,” he said. “I went out with her long ago, before I met my wife. I don’t know what will happen now. I’ll sell my motor home soon.” He looked sadly at me. “I don’t expect you to understand. But you’re kind to listen.”

Fatmir had come to the quay to see the tourists leave.

“Come back to Albania, Mister Paul,” he said. “When you come back it will be better.”

The sad old man said, “That’s a shocking big bag you’ve got there.”

“I’m a stowaway,” I said. I explained how I had come from Tirana and was sneaking aboard, so that I could get to Greece.

“Good lad.”

My passport was examined and stamped. I found a seat on the upper deck, feeling pleased with myself. Kathleen and Sally waved to me from another seat. But on board, among the tourists, I got gloomy. Spring had arrived and so had the trippers and the holiday-makers, the Germans, the cut-price package people, in their annual combat with the hectoring locals. “I geeve you good price!” “You eat here!” “The food were filthy.” “Just ignore him, Jeremy.” All that.

As we left Sarandë on this boat to Corfu Town, fifteen or twenty boys leaped from the pier and began swimming in the roiling water of the stern, yelling, “Money!” and “Give me your hat!” and “Soldi!” as a smaller number of them had done at Durrës.

Some of the tourists taunted them, just as the tourists had taunted the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar. Others threw bits of paper or peanuts. Some coins were flung from the rail—small-denomination leks which, although made of some sort of metal, were so worthless they could float in water. The Albanians boys began to complain. The tourists laughed. The boat gathered speed.

“Fuck you!” one of the boys yelled. He made a finger sign. Then they all took up the cry. “Adio!” “Fuck you!” “Va fan cul’!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!” “Fuck you!”

“The universal language,” Kathleen said in her lilting Dublin accent.

13

The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul

            On our third day at sea we were all given a printed directory, a little four-page brochure, as elegant as a gourmet menu, of the passengers’ full names, and where they lived. I kept it, read it carefully, used it as a bookmark, and as it became rubbed and foxed with use I scribbled notes—question marks, quotations, warnings to myself—beside some of the names.

From Richmond Virginia, then, came Mr. William Cabell Garbee, Jr., and Mrs. Kent Darling Garbee, and from Southold, New York, the Joe Cornacchias, whose horse “Go for Gin” had just won the Kentucky Derby; from East Rockaway, the Manny Kleins, to whom on the quay at Giardini Naxos, near Taormina, I gave instructions in the use of an Italian public telephone. Mr. Pierre Des Marais II and Ms. Ghislaine LeFrancois had come from Ile Des Soeurs, Quebec; Ambassador Bienvenido A. Tan, Jr., and Mrs. Emma Tan, from Manila, Republic of the Philippines—the ambassador, retired, now did “charitable work,” in a public manner; and the Uffners, the Tribunos and the McAllisters from New York; all these joined the Seabourn Spirit that day on the quay at Nice.

The Mousers were from Boca Raton, and smoked heavily and invented fabulous new destinations with their malaprops, such as their cruise “to Rio J. DeNiro” and “Shiva, Fuji.” And from Honolulu there were the Bernsteins: Mark, who had once been obliged to destroy on behalf of a client twenty-two million Philippine pesos (one million U.S. dollars), a five-hour job on his office shredder; and his wife, Leah, who represented the popular Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiw’o’ole, whose current weight was over seven hundred pounds. Mrs. Sappho Drakos Petrowski from Simsbury, Connecticut (but formerly a dealer in fresh flowers in the Florida Keys), was traveling as a companion to Mrs. Mary P. Fuller, ninety-one years old, of Bloomfield, Connecticut, widow of brush tycoon Alfred Fuller, who sold brushes door-to-door and then founded the Fuller Brush Company.