The Pillars of Hercules

Along with the Catholic chapel in the midst of Cagliari station, with the Holy Eucharist present in the tabernacle (a mass every Monday at ten-thirty, and every feast day at ten), there was also a pornographic bookstore, a photocopy machine, a barbershop, a coffee shop and three public telephones. This was the new Italy, after all.

The city itself, built on a slope, old brown houses and offices, resembled Marseilles but without the Marseillaise air of criminality. Cagliari seemed huge after my experience of Sardinia’s provincial towns, but after a day it seemed very small. I had the impression that no one ever went there, but when I mentioned this the local people said, “This place is crowded in the summer. You should see Spiaggia de Poetto!”

I went there, to this beach, and walked and saw the flamingos in the nearby lagoons. On this weekday in winter the beach was almost deserted, but that hardly mattered. I sat in the sunshine, read for a while, and walked back to town.

In a Cagliari restaurant that night I was writing my diary, having finished my meal, when I noticed that the place was empty—all the customers had gone. The waiters, the cashier and the cook were just about to sit down to eat, having put a sign saying Closed on the front window.

I caught a waiter’s eye. “I’d like to pay.”

“But you’re not finished,” he said.

“Yes, the meal was good.”

“Your work,” he said, and gestured to my notebook, my papers and paraphernalia. “Look, I can see you’re busy. Finish your work. It’s no problem for us. We’re just eating here.”

After I was done they invited me to join them. I asked them about Sardinia, but they said it was a horribly dull place, nothing ever happened here, and so they engaged me on their favorite subject, American basketball. Now about this Michael Jordan …

There were Africans in the streets of Cagliari. The next day, on my way to buy a ferry ticket, I asked a man about them.

“They’re Africans,” he said, and he shrugged, the Italian gesture for Who cares? “They’re here in the summer, lots of them. They sell little things.”

“They’re from?”

“Who knows? Africa. Ghana—down there.” He shrugged again.

“What do Sardinians think of them?”

He jerked his shoulders again and grunted, the fatalistic Eh! His tolerance was a variety of indifference. Italians are not threatened by abstractions, and unless they are directly provoked, Italians are great live-and-let-livers. In spite of their manic stereotypes, their refusal to fuss is one of their most endearing characteristics; coping with disorder is part of Italian life; and conscious of this they often make a virtue of not getting excited.

The scariest-looking people in Sardinia were not the Barbagians, the Senegalese, the toothless shepherds, sheep-rustlers, kidnappers and Gypsies, but rather the punks of Cagliari. Young, filthy, ragged, with greasy hair and dreadlocks, rings through their noses, their lips, sniffing glue, gagging on wine and shouting vicious abuse at passersby.

There were plenty of these strange young people hanging about in gangs near the castle, where I had gone for its good view of the harbor.

“So what have we got here?” I asked a man, while six punks quarreled over a bottle. They wore studded dog collars and chains, and one had a tin cup that clinked at his belt.

“It’s a shame,” the man said.

“Anarchists?”

“No. They believe in nothing.”

“Nihilists, then?”

“No. They are abandoned.”

“There are young people like that in England and America.”

“I’ve seen them in Latin America,” the man said.

Now we were walking along, up a steep cobblestone street.

“In Brazil,” he said. “I lived in Brazil for three years. I never thought I would see them here. It was very strange there. It was ridiculous, really. Brazil is a huge country—rich too.”

He laughed out loud.

“So there were these paupers sitting on a mountain of gold!”

The expression made me laugh, and my laughter encouraged him.

“Here it’s the opposite. We’re rich, but we’re sitting on a mountain of ruins.”

I asked him whether he ever went to Sicily.

“Why would I want to go there?” he said, and tapped my shoulder. “Just a joke. It’s surely a nice place. But when I leave here I go to the continent”—by which he meant the Italian mainland.

The travel agent who sold me the ferry ticket to Palermo said, “You’d be better off taking the plane. It costs the same.”

It was sixty-seven dollars for the ferry from Cagliari to Palermo, but this way I had a first-class cabin and because it was an overnighter it was both my fare to Sicily and a bed. And there was the added pleasure of setting out from Cagliari in the evening, watching the lights of the city recede; and after a good night’s sleep, seeing the coast of Sicily appear with the sunrise.

8

The Ferry Torres to Sicily