The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (4 page)

Once again, through an unforeseen ascent of a hill, I've stumbled upon something perhaps far better than what I came looking for. I find myself suspecting that the humbling, intrusive hand of Providence is arranging events which couldn't seem more random. I like the idea of a design behind my desultory wanderings around Bordighera. I like thinking that perhaps this is how we should always travel, without foresight or answers, adventitiously, with faith as our compass.

As I'm making my way through a maze of narrow lanes, I finally come to an open spot that looks out toward a huge expanse of aquamarine. Straight below me is a marina. I decide to head back down to the Lungomare Argentina and am beginning to leave Bordighera Alta. Because I am already planning my return trip to Bordighera in six months, I stop at what looks like a picturesque two-star hotel. I walk inside and start by asking the man at the desk for the price of a double. Then, as though my next question follows up on the previous one, I ask if he can tell me something about the Moreno gardens. Once again I am given the same story. There are no Moreno gardens. "But Monet—" I am about to interrupt. "Moreno's land was broken up more than a century ago," says a portly man who had been chatting with the hotel's owner and was sitting in the shade. Francesco Moreno, he continues, came from Marseille and, like his father before him, was a French consul in Italy—he owned almost all of Bordighera and was in the olive and the lemon trade. He imported all manner of plants from around the world, which is why Monet tried everything he could to be allowed inside the garden. The estate, however, was sacrificed to build the Via Romana.

Moreno, it appears, did not put up a fight with the city planners, even though he was the wealthiest landowner in sight. He died, probably a broken man, in 1885, one year after Monet's visit. The family sold their land, gave the rest away, then his widow moved to Marseille. The Morenos never returned. There is scarcely a trace of the Moreno mansion or its grounds—or, for that matter, the Moreno family. For some reason no one wants to talk about them.

It's only then, as I leave the hotel and take a steep path to the Church of Sant' Ampelio by the sea, that I finally spot a white house that might very well be the house, or something that looks just like it, though I could, of course, be wrong. A rush of excitement tells me that I have found it all on my own—yes, adventitiously. Still, I could be wrong. It is a gleaming-white construction; Monet's house is not so white nor does it have a turret. But then, I've seen only cropped versions of it. I walk down the path and head right to the house. There is no doubt: same balconies, same stack of floors, same balusters. I approach the villa with my usual misgivings, fearing dogs or a mean guardian or, worse yet, being wrong.

I brace myself and ring the buzzer by the metal gate. "Who is it?" asks a woman's voice. I tell her that I am a visitor from New York who would give anything to see the house. "
Attenda
, wait," she interrupts. Before I can compose an appropriately beseeching tone in my voice, I hear a buzzer and the click of the electric latch being released. I step inside. A glass door to the house opens and out steps a nun.

She must have heard my story a thousand times. "Would you like to see the house?" The question baffles me. I would love to, I say, still trying to muster earnest apology in my voice. She asks me to follow and leads me into the house. She shows me the office, then the living room, then what she calls the television room, where three old women are sitting in the dark watching the news. Is this a nunnery? Or a nursing home? I don't dare ask. She shows me into the pantry, where today's menu is written in large blue script. I can't resist snapping a picture. She giggles as she watches me fiddle with my camera, then shows me to the dining room, which is the most serene, sunlit dining room I have seen in ages. It is furnished with separate tables that could easily seat thirty people; they must be the happiest thirty I know. The room is impeccably restored to look its age, its century-old paintings and heavy curtains bunched against the lintel of each French window. The house must cost a fortune in upkeep.

Would I like to take a look at the rooms upstairs? asks the nun. Seriously? She apologizes that her legs don't always permit her to go up and down the stairway but tells me I should feel free to go upstairs and look around, and must not forget to unlock the door leading to the top floor on the turret. The view, she says, is stupendous. We speak about Monet. She does not think Monet ever stepped inside this villa, but he must have spent many, many hours outside.

I walk up the stairs gingerly, amazed by the cleanliness of the shining wooden staircase. I admire the newly corniced wallpaper on each floor. The banister itself is buffed smooth, and the doors are a glistening enamel white. What timeless peace these people must live in. When I arrive at the top floor, I know I am about to step into a view I never thought existed, and will never forget. And yet there I was, minutes earlier, persuaded that the house was turned to rubble or that they weren't going to let me in. I unlock the wooden door. I am finally on the veranda, staring at the very same balusters I saw in Monet's painting in the New York gallery, and all around me is ... the sea, the world, infinity itself. Inside the turret is a coiling metal staircase that leads to the summit. I cannot resist. I have found the house, I have seen the house, I am in the house. This is where running, where searching, where stumbling, where everything stops. I try to imagine the balcony a hundred years ago and the house a century from now. I am speechless.

Later, I come down and find the nun in the kitchen with a Filipina helper. Together, the nun and I stroll into the exotic garden. She points to a place somewhere in the far distance. "There are days when you can see the very tip of Monte Carlo from here. But today is not a good day. It might rain," she says, indicating gathering clouds.

Is this place a museum? I finally ask. No, she replies, it's a hotel, run by Josephine nuns. A hotel for anyone? I ask, suspecting a catch somewhere. Yes, anyone.

She leads me back into an office where she pulls out a brochure and a price sheet. "We charge thirty-five euros a day." I ask what the name of this hotel is. She looks at me, stupefied. "Villa Garnier!" she says, as if to imply, what else could it possibly be called? Garnier built it, he died here, and so did his beloved son. The widow Garnier, unlike Moreno's, stayed in Bordighera.

 

It would be just like me to travel all the way to Bordighera from the United States and never once look up the current name of the villa. Any art book could have told me that its name was Villa Garnier. Anyone at the station could have pointed immediately to it had I asked for it by name. I would have spared myself hours of meandering about town. But then, unlike Ulysses, I would have arrived straight in Ithaca and never once encountered Circe or Calypso, never met Nausicaa or heard the enchanting strains of the Sirens' song, never gotten sufficiently lost to experience the sudden, disconcerting moment of arriving in, of all places, the right place. What luck, though, to have found the belfries and heard the sad tale of the Moreno household, or to have walked into an art gallery in New York one day and seen the other version of a painting that had become like home to me, and if not home, then the idea of home—which is good enough. I tell her I'll come back to the Villa Garnier in six months.

But the nun has one more surprise in store for me.

Since I've come this far for Monet, she suggests, I should head out to a school on the Via Romana that is run by other nuns and is called the Villa Palmizi, for the palm trees growing on what was once Moreno grounds. The school, which is totally restored, she tells me, contains part of the old manor house.

We say good-bye and I head out to the Villa Palmizi, eager to speak to one of the nuns there. The walk takes five minutes. The end of one search has suddenly given rise to another. I knock, a nun opens. I tell her why I've come. She listens to what I have to say about Monet, about the Villa Garnier, then asks me to wait. Another nun materializes and takes her place. Then another. Yes, says the third, pointing to one end of the house that has recently been restored, this was part of the Moreno house. She says she'll take me upstairs.

More climbing. Most of the schoolchildren have already gone home. Some are still waiting for their parents, who are late picking them up. Same as in New York, I say. We climb one more flight and end up in a large laundry room where one nun is ironing clothes while another folds towels. Come, come, she signals, as if to say don't be shy. She opens a door and we step onto the roof terrace. Once again, I am struck by one of the most magnificent vistas I have ever seen. "Monet used to come to paint here as a guest of Signor Moreno." I instantly recognize the scene from art books and begin to snap pictures. Then the nun corrects herself. "Actually, he used to paint from up there," she says, pointing to another floor I hadn't noticed that is perched right above the roof. "
Questo è l'oblò di Monet.
" "This is Monet's porthole." I want to climb the narrow staircase to see what Monet saw from that very porthole.

The story of Monet's
oblò
is most likely apocryphal, but I need to see what Monet might have seen through this oblong window just as I needed to come to Bordighera to see the house for myself. A sense of finality hovers in my coming up here to see the town through Monet's window. Same belfry, same sea, same swaying palms, all staring back now as they did more than a century ago, when Monet first arrived.

I begin to nurse an eddy of feelings that cannot possibly exist together: intense gratitude for having witnessed so much when I was so ready to give up, coupled with the unsettling disappointment which comes from knowing that but for luck and my own carelessness, I would never have witnessed any of this, and that, because luck played so great a part in things today, whatever I am able to garner from this experience is bound to fade. Part of me wishes to make sense of all this, only to realize in a flash of insight as I'm standing in Monet's room, that if chance—what the Greeks called
tyche
—trumps meaning and sense every time, then art, or what they called
techne
, is itself nothing more than an attempt to give a tone, a cadence, a meaning to what might otherwise be left to chance.

All I want, all I can do is retrace my steps and play the journey over again. Stumble on the image of a house on my wall calendar, spot the same house in a gallery, arrive by train, know nothing, see nothing, never sight the old
città alta
until I come upon it, see the town "with" and "without" the belfry, with and without the sea, with and without the chopped-up quarter of Moreno's house, and always, always chance upon Garnier's home last. I want to restore this moment, I want to take this moment back with me.

Stepping out of Monet's tiny room, I am convinced more than ever that I have found what I came looking for. Not just the house, or the town, or the shoreline but Monet's eyes to the world, Monet's hold on the world, Monet's gift to the world.

FROM
Harper's Magazine

T
HE BRISTOL MOTOR SPEEDWAY
, its silver grandstands towering 220 feet above a half-mile track, is often compared to the Roman Colosseum. Measured in seating capacity, the comparison is if anything belittling: the Colosseum could accommodate 55,000 spectators; Bristol has room for three times that number. But unlike the streets of ancient Rome, the rural byways of Sullivan County, in northeastern Tennessee, offer nothing else close in terms of scale. Arriving at the track feels like moseying up to a favorite fishing spot and seeing at the dock the
Queen Mary 2.
For NASCAR diehards, the speedway is a national shrine, a destination whose very specialness inspires tautological koans that are uttered there reverently and yowled there drunkenly and stenciled there on many a T-shirt and cap: "
Bristol is Bristol." "That's Bristol, baby." "It's Bristol, fuck it.
"

On a Friday night in March, two days before a big Sprint Cup race, I wandered among several thousand NASCAR lovers on the grounds outside this colossus. The crowds had come to hear a free concert and watch their favorite drivers play Wii video games and to pose for photographs with people dressed as Tony the Tiger, or as Snap, Crackle, and a walking Ding Dong. The fans shook hands with the proud drivers from minor racing leagues, women and children and older men who sat at foldout tables in front of their variously sized and styled race cars. They nodded admiringly at the muscle cars that locals had souped up themselves and driven over to the track for display.

Near two Hooters girls,
I
HOOTERS
stickers adhered to their décolletage, I watched a man's eyes widen into full ovals and his lips form a silent "Oh shit" as he realized he was standing beside Kerry Earnhardt, son of the late Dale Earnhardt Sr. (once NASCAR's most beloved driver), and half brother of Dale Earnhardt Jr. (currently the sport's most popular star). Gail and Bill Long, a couple who had driven seven and a half hours from Alliance, Ohio, told me that they had been to the Bristol race four years in a row and were even married at the track. "I told Bill I wanted to get married on 8/8/08," Gail said—8 and 88 being Dale Jr.'s former and current car numbers. "And he said, 'Let's do it at Bristol.' We ended up doing it 8/23/08."