The Pillars of Hercules

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.

5

“Le Grand Sud” to Nice

            What 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.