NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (18 page)

I had a pizza, and walked around, but all my attempts to start conversations with the Monagasques ended in failure. That was another unhelpful personality trait of tax exiles—paranoia.

Farther down the railway line, nasturtiums grew like weeds at Rocquebrune, and in Cabrolles there was space and light and a great valley slotted into a range of high snow-dusted mountains, with stony features that matched those of the local bourgeoisie.

Menton was a Victorian-looking seaside resort of indescribable dullness. The fat, philandering Edward VII used to like it here, for the apparently limitless opportunities it afforded him to eat and chase women. Menton was having its own celebration today, the Lemon Festival
(Fête du Citron).
This one was obvious and programmatic, and it was watched without much enthusiasm. The floats were constructed of lemons and oranges in the shape of whales, dinosaurs, the Eiffel Tower, airplanes, full-figured women, windmills and so forth. It was neither as rich nor as revealing as Nice’s parade with its flowers and oddballs.

I had decided that if I grew cranky I would simply move on to a better place, but it was not convenient for me to leave Menton. I did see the reality of United Europe at Menton station. Here we were on the border between France and Italy. A group of elderly Italians, none of them younger than seventy or so, were trying to buy cups of coffee and some cookies. The French woman at the counter was snarling at them.

“If you don’t have the money stop wasting my time,” she said.

They did not have French money, they did not speak French. The woman at the counter, a mile or so from Italy, did not speak Italian.

“What is she saying?” a man asked plaintively in Italian.

“She is asking for money.”

“If you want to buy, change your money!” the woman said in French.

“For francs, I think.”

An Italian said to her in Italian, “All we want to buy is coffee. It’s not worth changing money for that.”

Another Italian said to her in Italian, “We will give you a thousand lire apiece. You can keep the change.”

“Don’t you understand me?” the French woman said.

So there was no sale, nor were the Italians able to eat or drink anything; the border between France and Italy was simple to pass through, but the language barrier was insurmountable.

The European Union, seen from the Mediterranean, was full of misunderstandings which made that argument a trifle. People were so confused about EC regulations in the Mediterranean that Euro-rules had become Euro-myths. They were ludicrous, but still they were believed, and they made EC nationals angry. Fishermen will have to wear hair nets, it was said. All fishing trawlers will have to carry a supply of condoms. There would be a ban on curved cucumbers. British oak would no longer be used in furniture because it was too knotty. Donkeys on beaches would have to wear diapers because of droppings. Henceforth, all European Community coffins would have to be waterproof.

There were advantages to being in the European Community, but the Mediterranean was a community, too. At the fruiterer’s in Menton in February there were grapes from Tunisia, strawberries from Huelva in Spain, tomatoes from Morocco and Sicily, mandarin oranges from Sicily, and the North African dates, figs, prunes, nuts. Clementines from Corsica. And locally grown artichokes and lemons, and apples (Bertranne and Granny Smiths)—all from Provence. In addition, there were cheese, sausages, honey and preserves, and ten varieties of olives. Almost the whole of the world’s production of olive oil came from these neighboring Mediterranean countries. The suburban density in Menton and on the Riviera generally was misleading; the shoreline catered to the hordes of tourists and the complacent rich, but just across the coastal highway and railway tracks the land was still profoundly agricultural—both in mood and culture.

Back in Nice, I did my laundry, sitting in “Albertinette,” the launderette, and writing notes. On my right was a housewife folding clothes, on my left an Arab watching his clothes revolve in the washer. With maintenance in mind, I got a haircut afterwards. The woman cutting it was interrupted by a man who came up and began gesticulating and complaining.

He said in French, “Your hair is too long!”

“That’s why I am here,” I said.

“But it’s still too long, the way you have it.”

“You don’t approve of my hair?”

“No. You need to emphasize your body,” he said, becoming passionate, plucking at my hair. “Cut the hair shorter, show the energy of the face. Make it so you can run fingers through it—like this! Get some harmony!”

I was not sure whether he actually believed this or was simply teasing me by pretending to be a stereotypical Frenchman and demonstrating how passionately he could talk about trivialities. On the other hand, maybe he was serious. In any case, I ended up with very short hair.

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.”

So I ate lunch alone, more fish soup and fruits de mer and wine. I had not been trying to pick her up—I had love in my life. Yet I thought how there was no mistaking this word “stuntman,” which she had said in English. It seemed to me, as she spoke it, to suggest one of the most intimidating professions imaginable. If she had said he was a boxer or a marksman I would not have been more seriously cautioned. You see this lover of hers defying explosions and car crashes and hurtling through flames, enough for anyone’s manhood to shrink to the size of a peanut.

Attrayant
means alluring.

After lunch, I hurried out of town, walking to Juan-les-Pins. In 1925, Gerald and Sara Murphy took up residence in their “Villa America,” at this end of Antibes. They were the bright couple who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald
to create the civilized and generous hosts Dick and Nicole Diver in
Tender Is the Night.
He and Zelda supplied the dark side, the most interesting part, hysteria, madness and desperation, in those characters, “in the grip of fashion … while up north the true world thundered by.”

In great contrast to Nice, where the beach is shingly and stony, the beach at Juan-les-Pins is sandy, though it is small and narrow. “The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one,” Fitzgerald writes in his brilliantly observed novel. “In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by the sea-plants through the clear shallows.” To the west, under a reddened sky a complex and lovely view, where Cannes lay under a headland.

“A shameless chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west,” runs a line in
The Rock Pool.
That, in a single observation, is the English writer’s embarrassment in the face of natural beauty.

Since almost every other writer who has described the Riviera has praised it, it is worth looking at a paragraph of Riviera abuse, that is, a general unfavorable review of the whole Mediterranean Sea. It is rare to find a body of water accused of being so hideous and worthless.

“The intolerable melancholy, the dinginess, the corruption of that tainted inland sea overcame him [Cyril Connolly writes]. He felt the breath of centuries of wickedness and disillusion; how many civilizations had staled on that bright promontory! Sterile Phoenicians, commercial-minded Greeks, destructive Arabs, Catalans, Genoese, hysterical Russians, decayed English, drunken Americans, had mingled with the autochthonous gangsters—everything that was vulgar, acquisitive, piratical, and decadent in capitalism had united there, crooks, gigolos, gold-diggers and captains of industry through twenty-five centuries had sprayed their cupidity and bad taste over it. As the enormous red sun sank in the purple sea (the great jakes, the tideless cloaca of the ancient world) the pathos of accumulated materialism, the Latin hopelessness seemed almost to rise up and hit him. Like Arab music, utterly plaintive, utterly cynical, the waves broke imperceptively over the guano-colored rocks.”

The insults are almost comic—Connolly was actually a sucker for the voluptuousness of the Riviera, and returned to that landscape in one of his
other books,
The Unquiet Grave
, where he wrote of “swifts wheeling round the oleanders … armfuls of carnations on the flower stall … the sea becomes a green gin-fizz of stillness in whose depths a quiver of sprats charges and counter-charges in the pleasure of fishes.”

Under the pines in the Jardin de la Pinede and at the Square F. D. Roosevelt in Juan-les-Pins, there were friendly folks playing boules. Why was this interesting? Because they were all men, they were all polite—they all shook hands before and after a match; and most of all because they seemed the antithesis of what people wrote about Juan-les-Pins. They were obviously hard-up, blue collar, manual workers, fishermen and cabbies and farmers. They completely possessed the center of the square. A number of them were Vietnamese. I watched three Vietnamese trounce three Provençal players—their winning technique lay in lobbing the steel ball in a perfect arc, so that it bombed the opponent’s ball and sent it skidding.

One of the players walked towards me to sit down and smoke, and so I talked to him. But he waved his hands at me, to get me to stop talking.

“It is not necessary regulation to speak to my face in the French,” he said in English. “I can catch all the majority of what you are saying.”