The Pillars of Hercules

After dinner I took a walk through the town and Olbia seemed, as many places seem while they are twinkling in the dark, a magical place—and I was glad I had come. The reality of daylight was that it was a rough place, and the more I walked the more miserable it seemed, with clusters of mean houses, or else apartment houses, and beyond them stony fields and sheep and goats. The poverty and all the talk of emigration in search of work made Sardinia seem like Ireland, an offshore island that had plenty of culture but no money. Apart from the touristy parts, the Costa Smeralda of the speculating Aga Khan, there was little development. This was a remote Italian province of narrow villages and a hinterland of sheep and emptiness.

One of the Sardinian habits that was inescapable was the advertising all over town of a death or an anniversary of death by sticking up posters of the deceased on any vertical surface. Many of the posters were as large as a bath towel, and except for the black border could have been mistaken for election posters. With the photo, many in color, was a name in bold letters—PADRE or FRANCESO or MARIOLINA or PIERO or SALVATORE. It is a variety of lugubrious advertising of grief, common in Irish newspapers, but fairly bizarre appearing on fences and walls, though the funereal faces had a strange appropriateness on the sides of derelict or condemned buildings.

I was copying down some names and sentiments from these grieving flyers when I looked over and saw that an African was staring at me. I had seen such Africans, very dark and silent, in Palau and also at Santa Teresa. They were in Marseilles and in some of the other large cities on the Riviera, and I guessed they were from the former French colonies in West Africa. Tall, unsmiling, with swollen eyes and matted linty hair, with clawed and scarified cheeks, they hovered near squares of plastic on which were arranged various items for sale, sunglasses, watches, belts, purses, wallets, toys—junk, on the whole, and one unsmiling African’s junk was identical to another’s. It had not seemed odd to me to see them in the south of France—it was the modern version of the empire striking back; after all, innumerable French people had insinuated themselves in Africa for hundreds of years, hawking all sorts of dubious merchandise. But what were these Africans doing in a small town in Sardinia?

“Hello—good morning,” I said to that staring man in Italian. “Are you looking at me?”

“No,” he said, his reddened eyes, with dark-flecked whites, fastened to me.

Almost purple, with dusty hair, his wool coat wrapped around him, long legs, discolored and broken teeth, and those spotty staring eyes; he could not have been a stranger apparition in this small town with its unaccommodating provincial air.

“What are you selling?”

“Whatever you want.”

“It looks like a lot of Chinese merchandise to me.”

“No. These are good things.”

His Italian was shaky, supplemented by French, which was better than mine. His name was Omar.

“Chinese watches. Chinese glasses. Chinese picture frames. Cigarette lighters from China.”

“What do you want to buy?”

“One kilo of hasheesh.”

Omar did not smile.

“Just a joke,” I said.

Two of his friends, thinking that he was in trouble with a plainclothes policeman, stepped over to listen. Their names, they told me, were Yusuf and Ahmed.

“Three Muslims in a little Catholic town.”

They stared at me.

“From what country?”

“Senegal,” Omar said. He was older and taller than the others. “I come from a place ten kilometers from Dakar. My town is called Tuba.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“More than ten years,” Omar said.

By “here” he meant the Mediterranean generally—out of Africa. He explained that he had lived for six years in Cannes, and also in Livorno and Florence. He had lived in Olbia for two years.

“And them?” I nodded at Yusuf and Ahmed.

“A few months.”

“Why here?”

“Olbia is a good place—not expensive,” Omar said. “We have two rooms. We all live together.”

“Do you have any Italian friends?”

“No—well, maybe a few.”

“What about North Africa? There are lots of Muslims in Algeria and Morocco, and business might be better than here.”

Business might have been better anywhere but here in Olbia where they stood, ignored and idle, while the townsfolk hurried past them looking slightly nervous. There were no tourists in Olbia.

“We can’t go to those places. No documents. But here I have a paper. So I come and go. The police don’t bother us at all.”

“When you say ‘come and go’ do you mean you return to Africa occasionally?”

“Yes. I plan to go there in a few months. My family is there. Wives. Children. All that.”

He had a clumsy clacking way with Italian, and I thought I might have misheard. “Did you say ‘wives’?”

“Yes.”

“More than one?”

“Only two.”

“Children?”

“Only a few,” he said. “Six.”