The Pillars of Hercules

“Lots of them,” the American said.

“Where do you think we should stay?”

“Not in Marseilles. Arles, maybe. Van Gogh? The painter? That Arles. Like you could always take a day trip to Marseilles.”

“Is it that bad?”

The second American said, “I’d go to Marseilles again if I could leave my stuff behind. That’s why I didn’t go to Morocco. What would I do with my guitar?”

“You speak French?” the Japanese traveler asked.

“I can read it. Do you know any other languages?”

“Japanese.”

“Your English is great.”

“I grew up in New Jersey,” the Japanese man said.

At this point I took out my notebook, and on the pretext of reading my newspaper wrote down the conversation. The Japanese man was talking about Fort Lee, New Jersey, his childhood, the schools. The man with the guitar was also from New Jersey.

“Fort Lee’s not that nice,” the man with the guitar said. It seemed a harsh judgment of the Japanese fellow’s hometown.

“It used to be,” the Japanese man said. “But I’d be freaking out when I went to New York.”

“My brother loves sports, but he’s too scared to go to New York and watch the games.”

“Like, I never took the subway in ten years.”

“I don’t have a problem with the subway.”

“Except, like, you might get dead there.”

The Japanese man was silent. Then he said, “How did these guys attempt to rob you?”

“Did I say ‘attempt’?”

“Okay, how did they do it?”

“The way they always do. They crowd you. They get into your pockets. One guy went for me. I kicked him in the legs. He tried to kick me when he got off the train.”

“That’s it. I’m not going to Marseilles,” the Japanese man said.

I got tired of transcribing this conversation, which was repetitious, the way fearful people speak when they require reassurance. It all sounded convincing to me, and it made me want to go to Marseilles.

The landscape had begun to distract me. Almost immediately a greater prosperity had become apparent—in the houses, the way they were built, the trees, the towns, the texture of the land, the well-built retaining walls, the sturdy fences, even the crops, the blossoms, the way the fields are squared off, from Banyuls-sur-Mer to bourgeoisified Perpignan.

With this for contrast, I saw Spain as a place that was struggling to keep afloat. It had something to do with tourism. The Spanish towns from the Costa Brava south are dead in the low season; the French towns just a few miles along looked as though they were booming even without tourists. They did not have that soulless appearance of apprehension and abandonment that tourist towns take on in the winter: the empty streets, the windswept beach, the promises on signs and posters, the hollow-eyed hotels.

The train was traveling next to the sea—or, rather, more precisely, next to the great lagoon-like ponds called étangs: Étang de Leucate, Étang de Lapalme, and into Narbonne, the Étang de Bages et de Sigean, the railway line between Étang de l’Ayrolle—like a low-lying Asiatic landscape feature, the traverse between fish farms or paddy fields.

Towards Narbonne there were fruit trees in bloom—apples, cherries, peach blossoms. And shore birds in the marshes, and at the edges of the flat attenuated beach. There were Dalí-esque details in all this—I put this down to my recent visit to the crackpot museum. The first was a chateau in the middle of nowhere, with vineyards around it, turrets and towers and pretty windows, a smug little absurdity in the seaside landscape, a little castle, like a grace note in a painting. There was no reason for it to be there. And much stranger than that, what looked like an enormous flock of pink flamingos circling over the étang a few miles before the tiny station of Gruissan-Tourebelle. I made a note of the name because I felt I was hallucinating. Flamingos? Here?

That night, in Narbonne, in Languedoc, I was wondering about those flamingos I thought I had seen flying out of the salty lagoons by the sea on the way into the city. Having a cup of coffee in the cool blossom-scented air of Mediterranean midwinter I struck up a conversation with Rachel, at the next table. A student at the university in Montpellier, she was spending a few days at home with her family. She was twenty, a native of Narbonne.

“They are flamingos, yes—especially at Étang de Leucate,” Rachel said.

The tall pink birds had not been a hallucination of mine; yet it was February, fifty degrees Fahrenheit. What was the story?

“All the étangs have flamingos”—the word is the same in French—“but in the summer when there are a lot of people around they sometimes fly off and hide in the trees.”

Rachel did not know more than that.

She said, “The étangs are very salty, very smelly at low tide, but there are fish in them and lots of mussels.”

“I associate flamingos with Africa,” I said.

Rachel shrugged. “I have not traveled. You are traveling now?”

“To Arles, and then Marseilles.”

“I have never been to Arles,” she said.

It was thirty miles beyond her college dorm at Montpellier.