The Pillars of Hercules

I muttered an insincere curse. This was not good weather for the three-day voyage to the far side of Morocco. It was not good for the short voyage to Sicily. There were no other ships to Morocco, and I had vowed not to take any planes. The Marseilles ferry was leaving next week. I decided to make my way by train through Italy to France, where I might find a ferry to Morocco. It was a very long detour, but what was the hurry?

My travels soon became what an exasperated English person would call a bugger’s muddle. Refusing to leave the ground, I traveled from Sicily to Naples again, to Rome; and north by train to Livorno and Pisa. Crossing from Nice to Corsica I had missed this section of coast, which was dramatic, and dignified by rocky cliffs and blasted by the wind. This was one of the loveliest coastlines in the entire Mediterranean. It was another place that I would be happy to return to. I consoled myself by thinking that on the Garyounis I would have missed it—the houses clustered on the great plunging rock cliffs of seaside Cinqueterre, the villas and precipices south of Antignano, the enormous blocks of marble piled at the station of Massa, near Carrara, which had supplied raw material to almost every Italian sculptor.

On the coast, all the way from Chiavari—where I was proud to have relatives—to Portofino and Rapallo and Genoa, the cliffs were too rugged to be vulgarly modernized, too sharply angled to serve as the foundations for condominiums. They had that in common with the cliffs of the Costa Brava in Spain, and the seaside heights of Croatia, and sections of the Turkish coast, and North Cyprus. But wherever the Mediterranean coast was flat it was overbuilt; the low-lying shores had been deemed suitable for hotels and mass tourism, and had been destroyed.

The rarest sight in the Mediterranean was surf, but at Imperia, Porto Maurízio, approaching Ventimiglia, I saw six-foot rollers dumping foam onto the beach. Something unusual was happening in the Mediterranean this week; and still the wind was blowing from the east.

There were six older American couples in the train, bewildered by the weather, burdened by seventeen heavy suitcases. They were from Jackson, Mississippi, and they soon became embroiled with some Spanish students in a fuss about seats. The blustering turned to abuse. It was a blessing that these gentle people were not aware of what was being said to them in Spanish. They were the sort of patient Americans whom I had seen being taken advantage of and overcharged all over the Mediterranean. It did not matter that they said Antibes as though it rhymed with “rib-eyes,” and pressed their faces to the window and chanted “Monny Carla.” After all, no one else here could have pronounced the grand Mississippi name Yoknapatawpha.

“You’re a yella-dog Democrat,” Billy Mounger said to me, concluding—correctly—that I would vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Republican.

I said, “I think I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Democrat, too.”

He laughed at that. He said, “We’re yella-dog Republicans. We’re probably the most right-wing people you probably ever met.”

“Go on, then, shock me, Billy,” I said.

“I’m chairman of the Phil Gramm for President Committee.”

“That is pretty shocking.” Mr. Gramm claimed to be the most conservative candidate of all the Republicans.

“That ain’t the story,” Mounger said. “One of our guys back there is against Phil Gramm. Says to me, ‘I don’t want no oriental damn woman as the First Lady in the White House.’ ”

Mrs. Gramm, born and raised in Hawaii, was of Korean descent.

“You said it, Billy, he’s one of your guys.”

They all got off at Cannes, rhyming it with “pans,” and I stayed aboard, rattled down the track to Marseilles, where I was told there were no ferries to Morocco. I got into my berth and slept until Port-Bou, the frontier, changed trains at dawn, and at Barcelona got another train to Valencia. Twenty-six hours ago I had left Rome.

Gently rocking around the edge of the Mediterranean once again, in the opposite direction, this Spanish train stopped at the town of Tortosa. It was exactly opposite—that is to say, at the far end of the Mediterranean—from the Syrian town of Tartus, where I had been over a month ago. Tartus had once been given the name of Tortosa by the Crusader Knights. We passed Xilxes, which, printed boldly on its station signboard, had the appearance of an obscure Roman numeral. I stayed only long enough at the lovely station at Valencia to buy some oranges and a ticket through the fields of fruit trees, past a small chapellike building lettered Urinario, to Alicante. I would have continued, but I was too late for the Málaga train, so I slept there and went to Málaga the next day.

At Málaga I bought a ticket on the ferry to Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco; then I went out and had dinner of local pickled eels.

“Where are you from in America?” the bartender asked me.

“Boston.”