At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Your passport,” says the police officer, for that is what he is.

  The Catalan’s utterance had come from such depths that it had exhausted him. He handed over his passport like a child. Half an hour later, I saw him standing in the corridor outside his compartment of the train. He was an oldish man and was now melancholy. What had happened I could not bring myself to ask, but inside the compartment sat four or five young Spaniards, all looking gentle and sad. One of them was softly strumming a guitar, and to its note the old man, quietly and in broken voice, was singing a song. I caught just one line, which said, “I am a poor man and you have broken my heart.” It was like seeing the funeral of an ego. Resignation, the curious relapse, after violence, into apathy: even the earthshaking Catalans of the Mediterranean have this habit. Across the border in France, in Arles, in Marseilles, you can pick out the Spaniards at once by their look of resignation, indifference and blank sadness.

  The Catalan coast is mountainous and rocky. The sea burns blue in the coves and caves of what is now called the Costa Brava, where the tourists roast. (In lively weather, the Mediterranean waves have that nasty short punch or chop that deceives and almost winds the bather who is used to the longer Atlantic rhythms.) But for a long interval after you have left Spain for France, you are in a plain of salt marshes that spread out from the mouth of the Rhône. Rock will not begin again until you reach the limestone of Marseilles. This marshy Camargue region is one of the strangest along the Mediterranean. In some places it is a stretch of sand that blows under the stilted houses; in others it is a land of large meres where the village houses are roofed with reeds and where the bulls and the famous stocky white horses of the cowboylike warders wade in the summer heat, where the ibis, the avocet and flamingo live. Being horse country, it is gypsy country too; the gypsies come in to Saintes-Maries on their annual pilgrimage. Inland at Arles, Julius Caesar’s Roman hill town, you are in the Van Gogh country; there are his torn cypresses that act as windbreaks for the peach orchards, the swirling wheat he painted, and the plantations of sunflowers. Farther inland you are among Cézanne’s rocky hills. You are beginning a journey through the Provençal Mediterranean, and it is like passing from one Impressionist painting to another.

  You understand why these painters, who set out to paint light itself and who stared straight into the sun, settled in Provence. There is a difference between Spanish and Provençal light, and how to define it is difficult. I would say that the Provençal light has flecks of gold in it; it is clear, but since there is more water than in Spain, the heat hazes are veils of moisture through which the limestone seems to burn. The light has silver in it, too, the silver of the turned leaves when the mistral blows—the wind that tears down the funnel of the Rhône Valley.

  The force of that wind is as surprising as the force of the Mediterranean Sea; the sea that looks so peaceable, the wind that seems, until it strikes you, like a breeze that is going to cool the fiery heat. It is an angering wind, clattering the shutters and windows, keeping up its mindless cold whistle for days. It makes the vineyards toss and the trees look mad. It breaks the cypresses, drives in the dust, plays intolerably on the nerves and the eyes. Its particular nastiness is that it comes violently out of a clear sky and leaves the sun naked, wild, without heat.

  The mistral is blamed for the violence in the south of France. Avignon is noted through history for its crimes, especially murders. Bodies are thrown into the Rhône. (The body of a murdered English girl was fished out when I was there.) One hears of the driver who shoots a man who keeps him waiting for gasoline. People get “nervous” and quarrel. The waiter announces he is going to shoot his wife. C’est le mistral. It was at Saint-Rémy that Van Gogh walked into the asylum after cutting off his ear. Van Gogh saw none of the gaiety of Daudet’s novels. He didn’t find the girls beautiful. (Henry James admired them; he called them “straight-nosed,” and those slender straight noses are indeed very fine.) In the arena, the bulls frequently jump in among the spectators. Zola’s violence is associated with the country around Aix. His father brought a lawsuit against the town: here he got his material for his novel about Cézanne, whose friend in youth he had been.

  All regions of the Mediterranean are different. In the triangle between Arles, Aix and Marseilles you are at a junction of landscapes—marshland, rocky plateau where the sheep graze, and rich farming country. The traffic beats down the main roads, the lorry drivers strip to the waist in the heat. Arles, you have been told, is a town of beautiful women, and you expect to find that this is a romantic lie, boosted by Daudet and light opera; but in fact the number of beautiful Arlésiennes is astonishing. I was there during the summer fete, when they parade in the streets in costume, and the sight takes one’s breath. It is all solemn but simple. The comic bugle bands and the drum-and-whistle bands walk by—for no one really marches—and the girls, the children, the elderly men and women follow in their costumes. The grace, the instilled sense of occasion, the lack of showing off are delightful. Compliments are shouted out to some of the beauties, the people sitting in the cafés stand up and clap their hands, especially at the ladies who sit on the white horses behind the men of the Camargue. Occasionally one of those solid, sun-burned horsemen will be unable to resist showing how he can turn his horse full circle in one sudden, acrobatic movement.

  Occasionally you will see an alien Spanish touch in the black Cordova hat of one of the women. Next afternoon there will be a bullfight, with local and Spanish toreros in the fine Roman arena of the town. And it is Roman, not a mere twentieth-century Plaza de Toros; it is the real arena the Romans used for their bloody sports. The evening concert will take place in the Roman theater. Of course the tourists come in, but what strikes you is that this is a real fete. In the morning the farmers stand talking among the tables of the cafés, as if at the market. They do not sit down to drink; they don’t drink at all; they have more serious things on hand. And the waiter does not mind, except that he wishes they would not block his way to his few real customers. And as the morning hots up, the sad young Spanish guitarist strums at the street corner, giving a Spanish shrug, full of indifference to this world.

  You make for the narrow, shaded streets of Arles to get out of the great heat. You go to the bank, and here you find a scene that drives the northerner mad. It is good to get out of the heat into the cool office where the clerks sit at desks covered with papers and forms that look as though they have been there for years. At once a clerk leaves the customer he is dealing with to ask your business; he cannot bear to think you are waiting. But he at once abandons you for another customer, who may be some gossiping old farmer’s wife who chats about her relatives and who will draw you into the conversation. And everyone who comes in shakes hands with half the staff.

  Suddenly the clerk, indeed all the clerks, it seems, disappear; not for coffee or anything idle like that, but impelled by some psychic distraction. The manager comes out of his office, a man in an open-necked shirt, leading his little daughter, so we go through compliments again. Then a clerk you have not seen before, a woman who has been typing away in a dark corner, looks up at your desperate face, and in a headlong rush comes over and deals with you. She has to write everything down in triplicate and in her best handwriting—which is very slow, clear and good—and then you wait for the cashier to come back to his glass case and count out your money. You have been there about half an hour. In the street afterward, you have the suspicion that by the standards of Arles and any farmer for miles around, you have done something very eccentric; in Arles you don’t go to a bank to take money out, you go to pay it in.

  The summer night in Arles, in all the Provençal towns, is what you are waiting for. You walk down the black tunnels of the trees, passing the families sitting out on the benches—a time for old people and for lovers to take the air. You come into a sunken earthen square enclosed by huge planes, four deep, that shut out the sky. The place is almost deserted. You hear the voice of a young man making up to a
girl. You pass down the empty avenue of ghostly trees; you cross one of the canals that lead out from the Rhône. You take a towpath under the trees, where the mosquitoes bite and a few late cicadas are scissoring away. Just behind you in the black water, you hear a sudden bark. A bullfrog is barking, and then, in from the old Roman “catacombs” (they are, in fact, above ground)—and what an appropriate place!— you hear the true night sound of Provence, the mass chorus of the bullfrogs. It is as if all the Roman and medieval dead were harshly talking, thousands of them. The manly din of shouting corporals can be heard for miles. All day in the woods, the cicadas; all night the frogs.

  In all Provence, as indeed in Spain and Italy, the wise inhabitants keep out of the sun. The famous light is to be avoided. How often you pass a bar where men sit around playing cards or reading papers in darkness, or a dark room where a woman sits sewing or stands at her ironing. In these places they are cool and their eyes are rested. But noise does not afflict them. The din of a motor bicycle in a narrow street distresses only the foreigner. The more noise the better in the south.

  Arles was a Caesar’s strong point, commanding the roads to Spain and Italy. He sent his boats down the Rhône for the recapture of Marseilles. Now Arles is dead and Marseilles claims to be the second city of France; more than a city, it is an enormous industrial conurbation, a place of soap makers, millers, petrol refineries, heavy industries and docks. The ugly church of Notre Dame de la Garde on its precipice dominates as Sacré-Coeur dominates Paris. One looks down from it at steep limestone hills that are now crowned by high apartment blocks. It is a place of brick and concrete; more and more concrete and long, hilly distances and noise.

  Before the war, they used to say vice was more open in Marseilles than in any other seaport of Europe; it is fairly open now, but in general it is probably true that the city has become relatively respectable. This is still a sailor’s city, providing at night the eternal comedy of the sailor and the girl. (Conversation in the square by the town hall. Anxious, battered fat lady to swaying sailor: “You love Chuchot. You do not love me.” Sailor swears he loves her. Lady asks doubtfully, “Are you sincere?”) And by day there is the comedy of sailors not knowing what to do with themselves. One sees groups of them tacking from one side of the street to the other, from one stocking-shop window to another, where they stand dumfounded, nervous and in committee, before the terrible question of what to buy for a lady. The decision is beyond them. You have never seen men so gloomy. They long for the shops to close and the night to come.

  The Germans blew up—it is said at French request—the old night town of Marseilles by the Vieux Port, and the cheerful prostitutes moved over to the Opera House district. The Vieux Port is still gay. The yachts and the fishing boats are still there, and so are the cafés and the restaurants, which are either expensive or bad. In spite of the songs about bouillabaisse, Marseilles is not what it was gastronomically. The south of France is always twice as expensive as Paris, for its season lasts only half the year; but the average restaurants are terrible. Still, the taste for bouillabaisse clearly lasts. The jolly girls who stand by their boats, selling the fish and squids and eels that are the basis of it, do a busy trade. Elsewhere fishwives have a bad reputation; something about the popular fish trade calls for a lot of shouting and for slapping the fish over to the customer and daring him to hesitate. Not so in Marseilles; the fish girls of the Vieux Port are merry and even gracious. Again, this is a southern trait in all the markets; they like you to discriminate and take your time. They recognize your innate human right to pick your fish and to consider it carefully.

  There has been one big change in the Marseilles crowd around the Canebière district in the center—a street whose drains now stink. There used to be Arabs in burnoose and slippers; now they wear European dress. The change is that there has been a huge increase in the Algerian and Negro population (with that gift for the vivid phrase, the Marseillais calls both pieds noirs). Over 200,000 of these people came in from Africa when Algeria became independent and were absorbed by Marseilles and the towns of the Riviera. The oily black hair, the sallow faces, the eyes sharp as needles make them instantly recognizable. Many of them are very poor, but they are enterprising, energetic people. Very quickly large numbers have got into shop-keeping and offices. They have captured important businesses. This has rather shaken the native Marseillais, an exuberant man who works in bursts. You see the poorest of the Algerians or Negroes begging, working as street photographers, selling combs, playing mandolins; and stopping everything to be lost in a long, gazing dream if a beautiful girl goes by.

  There are rich meadowy belts of country, stretches of forest and wilderness as you travel eastward out of Toulon to Hyères, Antibes and Nice, but there the mountains come in close with the Alps behind them. The mistral is not supposed to strike here. You are indeed in a coast of pleasure, but one in which two kinds of pleasure run side by side. One is the sheer pleasure of sun and sea and abandon, in which the body comes into a freedom that was lost to it in office and factory; this is a place of wholehearted festivals. The other pleasure, in the inner Riviera, is of a reflective delight, in which the artist and thinking being can work. It is a safe guess that nearly all the distinguished men and women of our civilization have spent some time on this coast. It is dotted mostly with painters and craftsmen—workers in ceramics and glass—but also with writers, actors, even philosophers. The lure is the climate, the sun, the good life. There is, especially in the old towns, the feeling of the intensity of an old civilization with established habits and inherent dignity. Anarchy and publicity break in, of course; Saint-Tropez is now filled with the faces that appear in the international glossies, yet I remember it as a little town with one café and one town drunk—who followed the one town crier through the streets imitating the trumpet with which he called the people together to announce all the market prices of sardines—and with miles of deserted beach not far beyond.

  What the millions cannot destroy is the landscape of this coast. There are the fiery-colored mountains of the Maures, that stretch eastward from Marseilles. Then there is the red rock and the encroaching of the Alps above Antibes and Nice and Monte Carlo, giving shelter but also a sort of triumphant, overpowering fantasy to the crowded scene. The unending loops of the rocky bays and promontories will continue far into Italy. The real towns are fragments of rock surrounded by villas. Monaco is the strangest fragment: the smallest state in Europe, only two and a quarter miles long, as narrow as 160 yards and never wider than 1100 yards. There has been gambling there since 1856, but the inhabitants are not allowed at the tables. The state exists as a tolerated protectorate of France and depends upon the millionaires.

  But the strength of Monte Carlo is in its legends: the stories of the losers kept off the cliff edge and paid off to commit suicide outside the principality, the cinema scenes at the tables, the robberies, the tales of the man who broke the bank, and the endless stories of successful “systems” with their mathematical fancies. The past memories of princes and dukes, the bejeweled gamblers, the present glamour of Princess Grace leave the tourist open-mouthed as he goes in to make his cautious and humble throw, just to say that he has done it. He has challenged Fortune in its most glittering home and has the illusion of being back in la belle époque, when kings were kings and courtesans were Cleopatras. Unreal kingdom, it is really literature or film. Even the Monte Carlo motor race, roaring up those one-in-seven streets, is converted to extravagance. The car crashes of the corniche have a sort of permitted folly. Le pile-up is a sort of pleasure.

  It is in the evening that the northerner feels the dramatic spell. The mountains and promontories are cut out sharp against the sea. The sunsets are reddened but hard. At Antibes, as at Marseilles, one is transported on some nights into Japanese paintings, into a gaudy Gauguin, a sportive Chagall, into a colored scene that is a scene of theater. It will seem like that again at Ventimiglia, on the Italian border, when they thrust bouquets of carnations at y
ou into the train; at Menton, all down the tormented and tunneled coast to Genoa, and beyond to Rapallo, Portofino and Spezia. Indeed in Italy the sense of theater will become operatic. The roses and flowering creepers pour over the dusty walls. Nature outglares the human being. The flowers live to the full their unrestrained electric lives.

  One sees how it must be for these Mediterraneans: they will not, in this hard, rich exuberance of the earth, believe in anything beyond what they can see or touch or smell or taste. Why should they? They accept the cornucopia that overflows; they will also accept it when, by misfortune or the hard seasons of the year, it is empty. The Mediterranean is a realist—a realist about the body, about his feelings, about money, about human nature. The good life is possible only when you accept things as they are.

  At Ventimiglia, French gray and white is giving way to the green shutters, the saffron walls of Italy. You notice that the sense the French have of knowing everything and of having settled it, precisely, once and for all, is giving way to something else. The Frenchman does not need to love you. But the Italian does. The Frenchman corrects your mistakes in French. The Italian never corrects your mistakes in Italian. He is too eager to love you to mind a trifle like that. He needs you, clamors for you, to dance around you, dazzle you, please you. He doesn’t want to be loved, but he needs to love you. He is an actor, you are his audience. If you happen to entertain him by putting on a play yourself, he will adore it. If both these things happen to fall flat, he will fall into a dignified melancholy. There will be a feeling that you and he are in an empty theater. He falls back on the Mediterranean glumness.