The Pillars of Hercules

I had traveled east to Menton; my ferry to Corsica was not leaving for another day and a half; and so I went westward to Antibes on the stopping train—Nice, St.-Laurent-du-Var, Cros-de-Cagnes, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Villeneuve-Loubet, Biot, Antibes.

A lovely blonde French woman got off the train at Antibes, and as she was struggling with a suitcase I offered to help. She gladly accepted, and we were soon walking from the station in Antibes together, her suitcase banging against my leg.

“I am sorry my suitcase is so heavy,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m fairly strong. Ha-ha!”

“You are so kind.”

The thing weighed about fifty pounds. If I had not offered, how would she have carried it?

“I suppose you have tools in it, or guns of some kind?”

“Cosmetics,” she said.

“That’s all?”

“It is full of cosmetics,” she said. “I have just come from Nice where I was demonstrating them in a store.”

She was that attractive, rather formally dressed and businesslike coquette with mascara and red lips you sometimes see in the aisle of a department store waving a tube of lipstick or else offering to squirt perfume on your wrist.

I put the bag down. I said, “Just resting. Ha-ha!”

“Ha-ha.”

“What about having lunch?” I said.

“Thank you. But I have an appointment.”

“A drink, then? Or a coffee?” I said. “I am a stranger here.”

The word stranger had an effect on her. It is not the way a French traveler would describe himself. He would say, Je ne suis pas d’ici, I am not from here. My way of saying it was odd and existential, something like “I’m a weirdo,” and it did the trick. Moments later we were clinking glasses.

“Menton is for the old,” she said. Her name was Catherine. “So is Nice. St. Tropez is superficial. Money, drugs, rich people, lots of Italians. No culture, no mind at all.”

As a demonstrator of cosmetics, who did nothing but travel from town to town with her leaden suitcase, she knew France very well and the Riviera like the back of her dainty hand.

“And Monaco is just a joke,” she said.

“That’s what I decided, but I thought it was because I am an American.”

“Believe me, it is a joke. I spent five days there and it was like a year. I spend five days everywhere, showing the products. I was recently in St. Malo. Brittany is good, but it’s cold.”

She was about thirty, not married, slightly enigmatic. She said that in spite of its superficiality she liked the south of France.

“Where this wine comes from,” I said.

“Cassis, yes,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Just looking around,” I said. “I was in Antibes about fifteen years ago, visiting a man. I want to see if his apartment is still here. Want to see it?”

Catherine smiled, and it seemed to mean yes, and so we finished our glasses of wine and walked down the street, to where Graham Greene’s old apartment, “La Residence des Fleurs,” stood.

On the way she said, “Some men disapprove of cosmetics.”

“Not me,” I said. “A woman wearing makeup likes to appear in a certain way.” I tried to explain this, but did not have the words.

“Attrayant,” she said.

It sounded right. I said yes, definitely, vowing to look the word up.

“As you do.”

She seemed pleased and embarrassed, and touched my hand. She said, “I know this address.”

“An English writer lived here. Graham Greene.”

“I don’t know the name. What did he write?”

“Novels, stories. Some travel books.”

“A good writer?”

“Very good.”

“I think you are a writer,” she said. “From your questions.”

“Yes. I want to write something about the Mediterranean.”

“You should go to a different part—not here. Nothing to write about here! Ha-ha.”

“Plenty to write about here,” I said.

I was thinking about my previous visit to Antibes. Then, I had not wondered why a millionaire novelist would choose to live in a small apartment three blocks from the harbor, with no sea view at all. But I wondered today. How could Greene have lived so long by the Mediterranean in a flat where all he saw from his windows were other houses? He had lived there more than twenty years, and I found it hard to spend a single afternoon in the place—the foreshore packed with apartment houses, the harbor jammed with yachts and sailboats, no beach to speak of, the little town blocked with traffic. Greene had wanted to avoid paying his British taxes—but what a way to go about it.

“It’s almost time for lunch,” I said.

“But I must go. My friend will be wondering where I am. He can get very excited.”

“He lives in Antibes?”

“No. He is visiting from Paris. He has a dangerous job.” She smiled at me. “A stuntman for films.”