NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (17 page)

“Are there nuclear plants along the Mediterranean as there are along the coast of Britain?” I asked.

At this point Catherine called over to Jean-Luc Thierry, the Greenpeace nuclear expert.

Jean-Luc said, “No. They are not built on the Mediterranean, they are inland. But they are not far. There is a nuclear reprocessing plant at Marcols-les-Eaux, a hundred kilometers up the Rhône. We’ve found traces of plutonium in the river and in the estuary.”

Where there were Gypsies and horses and almond blossoms, there was plutonium.

“What sort of a reception are you getting with your campaign in the Mediterranean?”

“The French are very suspicious of efforts like this. The first question we always get is, ‘Where does your money come from?’ ”

“That’s true of a lot of countries.”

“France is worse. They suspect us of having foreign influence—the French paranoia—money from America or Russia.”

As though if this were true it would cast doubt on the statistics or invalidate the effort to clean up the Mediterranean.

“Does the pollution vary from country to country, according to the part of the Mediterranean?”

“Yes, but the most serious division is the north against the south,” Jean-Luc said. “A lot of the waste and pollution on the European side affects North Africa.”

The next morning
Rainbow Warrior
sailed for Calvi in Corsica, to carry the environmental message.

Later that afternoon, reading
Nice-Matin
on a bench on the promenade, I saw there was a symphony concert that night at the Acropolis, Nice’s cultural center. It was a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, but when I got there a man was waving his arms and saying, “No tickets—all sold,” to some disappointed people. I suppose I had a look of consternation on my face, because a woman came up to me and asked me whether I wanted a ticket. Her mink coat, her look of evasion and aloofness, and even her air of innocence made her seem like a tout; and yet she did not scalp me, but asked for the exact price that was printed on the ticket.

She vanished a moment later, and only then—as I was congratulating myself on my luck—did it occur to me that she had sold me a fake ticket.

Soon afterwards, I found my seat, and in the seat beside it was the woman in the mink coat. She smiled at me.

“My husband is sick,” she said. “So you are lucky. This is a popular concert.”

She was not a tout, nor anything near it. She was a good, kind, compassionate and honest person, whom I had wrongly suspected of being a hustler.

“My husband is so sorry to miss it,” she said. “But now you can enjoy it. May I look at your program?”

She was Madame Godefroy, and, for the duration of the concert, I became her husband. We shared the program. We agreed that the playing was wonderful. It was Berlioz (Overture to “Beatrice and Benedict”) and Beethoven Piano Concerto Number Three, and a Dvorak symphony (No. 5). The soloist was French and warmly applauded. The conductor was Chinese, Long Yü, and young (born 1964). We chatted about the weather, what a terrible winter it was! What a wet day! What a lovely concert!

Flushed and breathless with all these exclamations, Mme. Godefroy and I went into the foyer and had a glass of wine.

“We were living in Clermont-Ferrand, where my husband was working,” she said. “After he retired, about eight years ago, we came here.”

“Is it more expensive here in Nice?”

“The apartments cost twice as much, or more, as in Clermont-Ferrand. Property is very expensive in Nice. But everything else is the same—food, clothes, whatever.”

“I liked Marseilles,” I said.

Mme. Godefroy winced but said, “Yes, there are the Le Corbusier buildings. But Marseilles is dangerous. It has all the problems, too—drugs, immigrants, AIDS.”

She was too polite perhaps to mention blacks and Arabs, but I was reminded of how the young blacks in Marseilles imitated American dress code: baseball hats on backward, track suits, baggy pants, expensive running shoes, and the same unusual haircuts. There were no other role models in France, or in Europe, but the Americanized look marked these youths out and must have seemed like a threat.

“So you’re happy here, Madame?”

“Nice is safe,” she said. “The weather is good, except for this year. It is youthful, because of the universities and language schools. There are many retired people—perhaps thirty percent. But Cannes is worse—it doesn’t have universities, so it’s mostly retired people.”

“I always imagined that the French were settled people. I didn’t realize that they retired and moved to the coast the way people do in Britain and the United States.”

“My parents never retired and moved,” she said. “It happened after the war, when children moved away from their parents to find work. Before, in France, everyone lived together, the children looked after their parents, and they lived in the father’s house. But—no more.”

So the breakup of the family home was an economic necessity, dating from the recent past, when the young were uprooted and had to search for jobs. And the nature of jobs changed—the decline of agriculture, and manufacturing, the rise of the service industries; all of this since the war.

“Do you have any relatives living in Nice?”

“No, and I miss them. I miss my children and my grandchildren. All my children are married. Well, my younger son has been living with his girlfriend for so long they are good as married.”

She sipped her wine.

“My father is dead. He was ninety-three when he died. My mother is alive. She is ninety-one—but in good health and very alert.”

“Where are your roots in France?”

“Strasbourg. I was born there and my family lived there for many generations.”

“Hasn’t Strasbourg also been German at times?”

“Yes, it has gone back and forth, from French to German and back again. During the war”—she sighed—“we had to leave Strasbourg. It was a bad time. The Germans occupied it. We fled to Aix-en-Provence.”

She told me about the fighting, the house-searches, the crowded train, the hunger. This woman in furs in the foyer of the concert hall in Nice, the very picture of bourgeois serenity, had once been a refugee, fleeing from town to town, ahead of the Huns, in a desperate struggle for survival.

This talk of the war clearly depressed Mme. Godefroy, who perhaps realized that she was talking with a stranger who had been sitting in her husband’s seat, an inquisitive American. I liked her, though—her rectitude, her stoicism, her clear-sightedness: law-abiding, polite, married for life.

“Are you staying in Nice?”

“For a while. I want to travel in this immediate area. And then I’m going to Corsica.”

“I have been there. Once. It is very different. The people, especially the ones in the mountains, are very severe.”

At her request, because it was late, and there were lurkers here and there, I walked Mme. Godefroy to the taxi stand. I said good night, and then headed back to the Place Mozart, through the empty city, and detoured down the promenade, which was bright with wet reflections, and the water, too, the Bay of Angels a sea of gleaming liquefaction.

The concert had been a local event, part of this wintry low season, not a tourist attraction. There were other events—dances, plays, and this week—because the Lenten season had just begun—a two-week festival of parades and exhibitions. I went to one of the parades, because it seemed to me to have been put on expressly for people who lived in Nice and the surrounding towns.

The parade was called “Le Bataille des Fleurs,” and it involved floats
and flower tossing. It interested me as local events often did for the way they roused people from their homes, children and spouses, and revealed their fantasies and enthusiasms. Families lined the streets, and so did soldiers and policemen and priests and punks. These French punks were grubby youths, swigging wine, looking dirty and dangerous. They jeered and shouted at the floats which were piled with flowers, and on each float a pretty girl in a ball gown or a tight dress or sequins, stood flinging mimosa (which had just come into bloom) to the bystanders. The sprigs of mimosa, with tufty yellow fluff, had the look of baby chicks.

One of the flower girls was black and attractive, wearing a white wedding dress and a veil.

“She’s a good one,” said a man beside me to his friend.

“Oh, yeah,” the friend said, and leered at the girl. “Amazing.”

And they clamored for her to throw them some mimosa.

There were military bands with blaring trumpets. A Tyrolean oompah band. Another: St. Georg’s Bläser from Haidenbach. A brass band called The Wolves
(Les Loups)
, playing loud and wearing baggy wolf costumes. More floats, more skinny fox-faced girls in pretty dresses flinging mimosa, and when they ran out of mimosa they tore flowers from their floats and threw those. There were Germans dressed as Mexicans, French cowgirls and drum majorettes, medieval knights and wenches, playing trumpets and twirling elaborate flags. Twenty little girls in traditional Provençal costumes tossing flowers and inviting the stares of elderly gentlemen. Zouaves, clowns, and a band of pink teddy bears. Musical policemen and “Miss Galaxie” and the forty-piece band of Stadtkapelle Schongau (Bavaria) in lederhosen: more oompah. “Los Infectos Acelerados” and a down-home band from East Texas State University—baton-twirling cuties in black leotards and short skirts.

Seeing Americans, the French children became hysterical and began spraying strings of goo at them out of aerosol cans, screaming,
“Mousse!”

The day after the parade, I tiptoed to Nice Station. It is impossible to stride confidently through Nice, city of dog merds.

When the English painter Francis Bacon was seventeen he saw dogshit on a sidewalk and had an epiphany: “There it is—this is what life is like.” What enchantment he would have found in Nice, where pavements are so turdous that a special one-man turd-mobile trundles along sucking
them up its long snout. Even that ceaseless activity hardly makes a dent.

The turd-mobile is defeated by an unlikely enemy: an older overdressed French woman, a widow, a retiree, a prosperous landlady, someone precisely like Mme. Godefroy. She is the last person you would associate with dogshit, and yet this delicate and dignified woman spends a good part of the day calculating the urgencies of her dog’s bowels. There are thousands of these women and their dogs all over the Riviera. They are forever hurrying their tiny mutts down the sidewalk and looking the other way as the beasts pause to drop a stiff sausage of excrement just where you are about to plant your foot.

At the station, I said to myself: If the next train goes east, I’ll head for Ventimiglia and eat spaghetti in Italy. If it goes west, I’ll eat in Antibes or Juan-les-Pins.

It was an eastbound train to Mention, and once again I was struck by the courtesy of the older French rail passengers, strangers to each other, who chatted about trivial things and seldom departed in silence; nearly always when they left a train compartment they said, “Bye, now” or “Bon voyage” or “Take care.”

There was something else about the train, that Fitzgerald mentions in
Tender Is the Night.
“Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.”

Beyond the pretty bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a little jewel among rocky cliffs, I could see St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where King Leopold of Belgium, sole proprietor of the Congo, had built a regal estate that was so complete, even his mistresses and his private priest, his confessor, lived in a private mansion on the grounds. The idea was that the king could sin all he wanted, for the priest was on call to give him absolution on his deathbed. Somerset Maugham had bought the priest’s house, the Villa Mauresque—named for its Moroccan decor. I had planned to stop here, but the whole kingly place was now a set of condominiums.

Past Beaulieu-sur-Mer, palmy, sedate, piled against the hillside, with mansions on ledges; past Eze-sur-Mer, less grand, with great clusters of banana
trees at the station. The bays beyond Eze were beautiful but the beaches were stony, the cliffs perpendicular, a wall-like coast similar to the one I had seen on the Costa Brava. After Cap D’Ail came Monte Carlo—bigger, sleepier, nastier than I had expected, and it was impossible to tell the condos from the grave vaults. I decided to stop there for lunch.

I walked from the station, trying to figure out where I was. There are three regions in the Principality of Monaco—Monacoville, the hill where Prince Rainier’s palace dominates; the valley of the Condamine; and another hill, Mount Charles—Monte Carlo. The whole place owes its existence to Grace Kelly, who provided Rainier with a son, thus maintaining the Grimaldi line. She met Rainier when the prince became involved as a human prop in a photo shoot in Monaco to promote one of her films; then he pursued her, with a priest acting as a go-between. He was well aware of the clause in Monaco’s treaty with France that asserted that Monaco would be absorbed into France if Rainier did not somehow produce an heir. Now it is for the young balding playboy, Albert Grimaldi, to secure the Grimaldi line with an heir of his own.

The Grimaldi family, said to be the oldest monarchical line in Europe, is—like most of those families—royally dysfunctional, filled with stressful and unsatisfying relationships, though Grimaldi self-esteem is not in short supply. They are well aware that their home was a dump until the mid-nineteenth century, when Prince Charles III built a casino. He did it in much the same spirit that the Pequot Mashantucket Indians introduced gambling to Connecticut, because it was forbidden everywhere else (France and Italy had banned it). So Monaco got rich, as the Pequots got rich, on suckers being encouraged to throw their money away.

But the wealthy people who live in Monaco are the opposite of gamblers. They are mainly anal-retentive tax exiles with a death grip on their cash and a horror of spending, never mind gambling. There are thirty thousand residents. Fewer than ten percent of them are natives, which says a great deal. Tax havens are by their very nature boring or else actively offensive; if they were pleasant, everyone would want to live in them. But only by promising tax incentives do the places attract their resident populations. This is not Happy Valley. For one thing, the chief characteristic of wealthy people is that they are constantly whining about how poor they are; the rest
of us can take a malicious satisfaction in the fact that these tycoons have only each other at which to cry poormouth.