NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules Read Free Page A

the Riviera by turning the sleepy fishing village of Juan-les-Pins into a fashionable resort. Anna Karenina and her lover Vronsky escape Russia, and the scandal of their liaison, and experience bliss in a romantic interlude in Venice, Rome, and Naples; but after an extended stay in a palazzo in a small Italian town, they are disillusioned with Mediterranean life, “and the German tourists became so wearisome, that a change became absolutely necessary. They decided to return to Russia.”
    Joseph Conrad wrote the whole of his London novel in the south of France, in Montpellier, and Camus, who was born on the Algerian coast,set his novel in Oran. I had also recently read Hemingway (bullfighting in Spain), Naguib Mahfouz and Cavafy (both Alexandria), Flaubert
(Salammbo
in Carthage), Cyril Connolly (the Riviera again in
The Rock Pool)
, and Evelyn Waugh’s
Labels
, which takes in almost the whole of the Mediterranean. One of the most neglected postwar American novels of the Mediterranean coast—in this case, southern Italy—is William Styron’s complex and brilliant
Set This House on Fire.
I reread it with renewed admiration for its portraits of expatriate artists and drunks and posers, their brains baking in the Amalfi sunlight. And I had finally got around to reading
Christ Stopped at Eboli
, by Carlo Levi. The miserable little village he writes about, which he called Gagliano, isn’t on the Mediterranean, but it is near enough; the real place, Aliano, is only about twenty miles from the sea, at the arch on the sole of Italy’s boot. These books fueled my desire to travel there. Perhaps unconsciously I had been doing homework.
    There was a time when I wanted to see only wild places, and was reluctant to go to a place that had been written about extensively. But then—it is so funny about travel—I would go to a place that everyone had been written about and it was as though I was seeing something entirely new. I felt that when I was writing about Britain. My Britain was different from anything I had read. It made the going good because I was unprepared for what I saw. That was always the best part of travel, the sense of discovery. When there was none and it was all predictable I wanted to go home.
    The Mediterranean was not one place, but many; and I was at last calm enough to venture into its complexity without the risk of getting lost. I was happier with love in my life. I was not looking for a new home, traveling hopefully down the road rejecting places as I passed through. I was traveling in the purest way, without envy or a spirit of acquisition. I was setting out on an extensive trip around the shores of the Mediterranean, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and heathen; to meet the people, eat the food, get rained on and shot at.
    My idea was to see it out of season, when the tourists were back home, spending the fall and winter in the northern half, the spring and summer in the Levant and North Africa, going from one Pillar to the other; and to make a modern Grand Tour, seeking out wise people.
    An inland sea is perfect for a journey, because the coastline determines the itinerary.
    • • •
    The day I arrived in Gibraltar, the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Joe Bossano, was at the United Nations, explaining to the assembly why Gibraltar wanted to remain itself, autonomous. But Gibraltar has nothing but the rock and its strategic location. It makes nothing, it sells nothing, it imports everything it needs to sustain life; it is tiny in both land area and population (a mere twenty-eight thousand people, of which sixteen thousand are voters). It is just a few streets at the base of the rock, and on the lower slopes there are some luxury homes and gun emplacements. There is not enough room for an airport, and so when a plane is due the main road into Spain is closed—barriers swing shut—and traffic is halted until the plane has landed. The aircraft taxis across the road, and the portion of Gibraltar known as The Neck,