The Pillars of Hercules

Oristano seemed to be a port on the map, but my map was not very accurate. Oristano, five miles inland, might have been a hundred, for it had no real connection to the sea. It was just another small simmering town in the middle of a hot plain, the most provincial of places, at a great remove from the world. The far-off whistle of my departing train gave me a pang of regret, but then I thought: No—this is the Mediterranean, too! Everything matters! and generally consoled myself with the thought of all the money I was saving by staying here for the night, rather than in the bright lights of big-city Cagliari.

Oristano had a moribund atmosphere that was almost palpable, enervating heat, and an audible monotony that was like the drowsy buzz of a single futile bumblebee. I felt a sort of ghastly frivolity in the idea that by parachuting off the train with no plan in my head I was pointlessly insinuating myself in a small Sardinian town which was off the tourist trail—not because it was obscure and hard to reach but because it was utterly boring.

It was a marketplace for the nearby farms, and the townies measured themselves against the peasants who turned up to sell vegetables or meat at the market. These peasants, Barbagians to their gnarled fingertips, were toothless and skinny and undersized people. The women wore shawls and four skirts and argyle knee socks and were more whiskery than their menfolk, who chewed broken pipestems and look oppressed. After the Oristano market closed I imagined them scuttling back to the hills and sheltering under toadstools. But they were also noted for their toughness—ferrigno, they were called, made of iron.

The only aspects of the outside world that had penetrated here were the extremely violent American videos and Disney comics—we are cultural leaders, after all, specializing in the criminal and the infantile. Italian culture in Oristano was represented by the Church, porno comics, chain-smoking, a plethora of shoe stores. The rest was harmless obsession, Italian here—but generally true of the Mediterranean region—the mild ostentation of the middle-class women in cutting a good figure, and the male passion about sports that bordered on the homoerotic.

Italy had allowed Sardinia to be self-governing and given it a degree of autonomy that prevented the island from nursing the sort of political grievances that were so common in Corsica. There were no bomb-throwers in Sardinia. It was a rugged place—none of the poodles and lapdogs of France, only functional mutts that had to work to earn their keep—sheep dogs and guard dogs.

My landlady in Oristano, Regina, was a voluble Italian, whose husband worked in Cagliari. “I want you to be happy. I want this to be like your own house.” Her flunkies and room cleaners were Sardinian women from the interior, who were not forthcoming when I asked them about their own language and culture. It seemed a vaguely colonial arrangement of the memsahib and her native servants, but they got along well and worshiped in the same church.

The more I saw of Oristano, the stronger I felt that my chief objection was that it was the sort of inbred town, with its own rules and snobberies, that I grew up in. It was full of lowbrows but it was neighborly. Strangers in the boardinghouse always greeted each other, and when someone entered a restaurant everyone said hello, calling out “How are you?” from where they sat. It was perhaps not very different from Medford, Massachusetts, and friendly and frightening in about equal parts. Excessive friendliness is perhaps a philistine trait; in a place where no one reads, no one values or understands contemplative solitude, and so they need each other to be friendly and talkative.

I was on my way to the station in Oristano when I was accosted by an oriental man. He said, in Italian, “A hundred lire,” and clicked a cigarette lighter in my face.

“Where do you come from?”

“China.”

Another Chinese man appeared.

“You want a lighter?” he asked in English.

“How did you get here?”

“Cargo ship.”

“Do you live here?”

Yet another Chinese man joined us, and he muttered to his friends. They were all in their thirties, and were decently dressed. They spoke little Italian and even less English. They had chosen an unpromising place to hawk cigarette lighters. Perhaps this was a town that was not dominated by African hawkers. My questions and my lack of interest in their twenty-cent cigarette lighters seemed to drive them away, but where to?

Africans living by their wits in Olbia, Chinese seamen boosting lighters in Oristano. What was this all about? The natives of the Mediterranean were always harking back to the past, which was glorious; but the present was much stranger, and baffling.

The railway to Cagliari rattled down a long flat valley of Campidano. I dozed and made notes, and I was surprised by how warm the weather was—sunny and lovely this day in early March.