By the Seat of My Pants

by Lonely Planet

  From the beach we can see the twinkling lights of the town centre in the near distance. The Beagle Channel is shrouded in darkness. I am beginning to suspect that, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all bleak coastal towns are bleak in exactly the same way. The place reminds me of other coastal towns we’ve visited in winter: Akranes, Iceland; John O’ Groats, Scotland; Crescent City, California. There is the same saltwater smell, its vague fishiness somewhat mitigated by the cold, mingling with the scent of coal fires; the same grey sky meeting grey sea; the same sense of loneliness, of having arrived at the last place on earth. These places trigger a similar feeling of sadness, despite the fact that, when on vacation, one generally does not have much to be sad about. A by-product of the drenching melancholy is a desire to connect in an intimate way with another human being, to shrug off the cold and the vastness of windblown spaces by warming up to another body. To put it simply, bleak coastal towns always make me want to get laid.

  I turn to my husband, who is having a rather dignified conversation with the mutt on the subject of submarinos, a delicious kind of hot chocolate served in Argentina and favoured mostly by schoolboys. ‘The secret is in the little foil-wrapped chocolates’, my husband is saying to the dog, who sits eagerly on his haunches, panting and taking in the lecture. ‘You have to swirl them into the hot milk at precisely the right speed.’

  ‘Do you want to go back to our room and do it?’ I ask.

  Both my husband and the dog tip their heads towards me as if they’d forgotten my presence. The dog makes an uninterested whimper.

  ‘Excellent idea’, my husband says. One thing I have always admired about him is that he is always up for that sort of thing, no matter the time or the weather.

  Just then the lights go out.

  ‘What was that?’ I ask.

  We both look towards the town, which only moments ago twinkled like a Christmas tree in the distance. Now it is entirely dark. We have been plunged into that kind of darkness one finds only in the most rural places. The only illumination comes from the glow of the moon seeping through the fog. I reach for my husband’s hand. The mutt is panting between us, his damp dog smell penetrating the air.

  ‘A blackout’, my husband says, pulling me close. ‘I could have my way with you right here and no one would know.’

  ‘He would’, I say, feeling the pressure of the dog’s small, muscular body against my legs.

  The headlights of a single car wind slowly towards the shadow of the town. I think of the prisoners in their wooden shacks down by the water a hundred years ago, feel the sweet thrill of being on a grey beach beside a grey sea in a black night on the edge of the world, hand in hand with my husband.

  We pick our way along the dirt path back to the motel, and leave the dog whimpering by the door. The lobby, deserted only a short while ago, is now crowded with about a dozen guests who seem to have emerged from the woodwork. There’s a sense of jovial camaraderie about the place. The concierge in the funny hat is distributing free candles and flashlights for a fee. We wait in line for a couple of candles wrapped in foil. There are no candlesticks. ‘Use the drinking glasses in your room’, the concierge instructs us. As we walk away, I can hear him mumbling something in Spanish to one of the other guests about Hollywood.

  Minutes later my husband and I are unclothed and in bed, the candles glowing softly on the dresser. Making love during a blackout in a foreign country is something like making love on a speeding train or in the office after hours. It’s so new and different that one irrationally assumes, in the blissful midst of the act, that nothing could possibly go wrong. The walls are very thin and our room is just off the lobby; we can hear the happy commotion of the other guests just outside our door, a pleasant background noise. It’s so noisy, in fact, that it takes me a couple of moments to realise that someone has opened the door.

  The father enters the room first. He’s holding a candle in one hand and a large piece of luggage in the other, and he doesn’t appear to notice us as he heads for the dresser to set down the candle. By the time he sees us, his entire family has followed him into the room: two small children, a teenaged son, and a skinny wife bringing up the rear. I can’t help but let out a shriek. My husband is on his back, eyes closed, concentrating on the business at hand, so he naturally assumes that my cry has something to do with his technique.

  ‘Was that good or bad?’ he asks, opening his eyes. At which point he too sees the family, who are now standing in a line at the end of our bed. Not one of them is moving, as if by their stillness they might disguise the disconcerting fact of their presence.

  There is the feeling of a train wreck about the whole thing, the family standing in paralysed horror while I sit astride my husband, my entire torso exposed. I tug at the sheet, trying to cover myself, but it’s too short and I can only get it to come up to my waist. My back is to the family, but the teenaged son begins to slowly inch around the end of the bed, as if to get a better look. My husband pulls me down towards him in an attempt to hide my nakedness, and the wife’s face takes on a horrified expression. It occurs to me that she must think my husband is trying to get on with the lovemaking.

  In the candlelight I can see that the two younger children are dressed identically, except that one is wearing a white cap and the other is wearing a red one. The child in the red cap finally breaks the silence, pointing and blurting out something in Spanish that I can’t decipher. The child’s voice seems to jolt the mother from her paralysis. She grabs the children’s heads and pulls them to her, then backs out the door. The teenager and the father are in no hurry to go anywhere.

  ‘You must be the Californians’, the father says in slightly accented English. I get the uncomfortable feeling that he’s waiting for us to invite him to sit down for a friendly chat and a cup of mate.

  ‘Yes’, my husband says.

  ‘Sorry for the intrusion. We must have the wrong room. Have a nice vacation.’ He picks up his candle and suitcase and says something in a scolding voice to the teenaged son, who shrugs, gives me a polite nod, and walks out as if nothing has happened. The father follows his son into the hallway and softly shuts the door.

  The blackout lasts for another hour. It’s too dark to read, we can’t watch TV, and both of us have given up on romance for the night. The following afternoon, having exhausted all the possibilities of the town, including the kitsch prison museum, we find ourselves on a catamaran taking an excursion into the Beagle Channel. The main attractions of the cruise are supposed to be Isla de los Pajaros and Isla de los Lobos – two small, rocky outcrops whose only distinction is that they are home to cormorants and sea lions. We have just settled into our seats and are loading film into the camera when the family of five appears. The teenager spots us first and smiles awkwardly. The mother is momentarily caught off guard and holds my gaze too long, as if trying to recall exactly where she’s seen me before. The child in the red hat points again, and I wave. Now that my embarrassment has faded, I feel a vague satisfaction. Like us, the family missed the skiing, the snow sculptures, the Longest Night National Party, and the rest. But at least they saw something on their trip to the end of the world.

  THE SNOWS OF CARRARA

  DAVID DOWNIE

  Paris-based David Downie writes for leading publications worldwide, from the Australian Financial Review to the San Francisco Sunday Chronicle, Gourmet, Bon Appétit and the London Sunday Times. His latest travel-cookbook is Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome (www.cookingtheromanway.com). David is currently working on Paris, Paris, a collection of travel essays.

  ‘The snows of Carrara never melt’, said my wife, Alison, as she read aloud from the guidebook we’d bought a week earlier in the Cinque Terre. She paused to regard me with a gimlet eye. ‘If it snows, how am I supposed to take photos to go with your article?’

  ‘Snow?’ I repeated, chuckling. ‘No, dear, that’s not snow. It’s marble dust. All the books say so. Besides, it d
oesn’t snow on the Italian Riviera in May.’

  The idea of snow seemed completely out of place in this Mediterranean paradise, where Tuscany meets Liguria. The rocky beaches were already colonised by large pale bodies and just yesterday we’d been hiking and building up a sweat in the spring sunshine.

  Our guidebook had informed me that marble discards and dust have been accumulating on the Apuan Alps’ craggy slopes since antiquity, which was why I knew that what Alison was looking at wasn’t real snow. The Apuans lie eight kilometres or so from the coast, forming an amphitheatre around Carrara, Pietrasanta and Massa. The trio of towns have been synonymous with stone since Roman slaves wrenched Trajan’s Column from the Fantiscritti quarry high above the Colonnata Valley (so named because its marble is ideal for columns). The mountains’ deposits are estimated at twenty-five kilometres long, almost ten wide and two deep. In them lie forty kinds of marble, an alphabet of colour and texture nuances, from swirled grey Arabescato via snowy Statuario to zebra-striped Zebrino.

  Our assignment for an English magazine was to explore Carrara as an unusual destination for intrepid travellers. We looked forward to seeing and photographing what friends had told us was overwhelming, spectacular scenery. Squiring us around would be a local marble expert from International Marble Machines. I’ll call him Giovanni. When I’d phoned Giovanni several weeks earlier to go over the details of our private tour, he’d immediately boasted – rather gleefully, I thought – that the area’s ‘snow’ is visible from outer space.

  ‘You’ve had Martian visitors?’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha… You are the spirited type of American’, he’d laughed. ‘Come, you’ll see the eternal snows. Seeing is believing.’

  As arranged, Giovanni was waiting for us at the headquarters of International Marble Machines, on the outskirts of Carrara. A wiry, moustachioed, dark-haired man in his fifties, he shook hands vigorously then opened an umbrella, holding it out for Alison and her photo equipment. ‘I’m sure the rain won’t last’, he said apologetically, ‘and you will be able to take stupendous photographs. Shall we take my car?’

  It was a rhetorical question. The company Fiat Panda was compact but unstoppable, he said; the ideal vehicle for visiting quarries. ‘Since precipitation appears to have begun unseasonably,’ Giovanni added, ‘perhaps we should start by visiting an artist’s workshop? The rain will stop soon, and then we can head up into the quarries.’

  Again, the question was rhetorical. We sped along wide modern avenues into Carrara’s historic heartland, a heart reportedly carved from purest marble. The white Fiat darted through spring showers among trucks and Formula One wannabes driving SUVs.

  ‘The entire area is a vertically integrated factory’, said Giovanni amiably, swabbing at the windshield. ‘The history and livelihoods of countless people like me revolve around marble and always have.’ As he spoke, the rain drummed on the car’s tin roof. He raised his voice, a sonorous baritone. ‘Marble follows us from the baptismal font to the tombstone.’

  ‘Is that fog up ahead’, Alison asked nervously, ‘or snow?’

  ‘Mmmm’, acknowledged Giovanni vaguely. ‘Fog, definitely fog. Be gone in a minute, I’m absolutely sure.’ He motioned beyond the steamy windows. ‘Look up at the hills’, he directed. ‘To us, the mountains are beautiful titanic sculptures, the greatest work of art of all. Did you know that Michelangelo in the early 1500s decided to transform the top of Monte Sagro, up there, into the statue of a giant?’ I began to roll down my window for a look but the rain was coming down too hard. ‘Never mind, you’ll see it later’, Giovanni said confidently. ‘Michelangelo would have succeeded except that the Marquis Alberigo Cybo Malaspina, who was Lord of Carrara, did not have the funds and workmen. Mount Rushmore would have seemed nothing in comparison – a bagatelle, a molehill!’

  We were creeping through what seemed to be the old part of town; the streets were narrow, the traffic thick and slow. ‘Bello, bello!’ Giovanni bellowed suddenly, a rapturous smile lifting his moustache. ‘You’ll see, once the fog lifts…’

  Alison nodded, trying not to shiver. We were underdressed. To stop her teeth from chattering, she asked Giovanni whether it was true that Carrara’s medieval centre was chock-a-block with marble churches, theatres and aristocratic palazzi constructed from choice white stones.

  ‘Yes, yes’, Giovanni agreed, his hands leaving the wheel to flutter, bird-like. ‘And the humble dwelling houses were built from marble leavings – you know, bits and pieces – covered with plaster.’

  Beyond the windows I caught sight of a handful of vintage buildings in what appeared to be hazy pastel tones, though it was hard to be sure because of the rain.

  ‘Piazza Alberica,’ Giovanni declared, his hands alive, ‘paved with marble blocks. See the sculptures of lions, of giants, of statesmen, of heroes and quarry workers? All are marble.’

  Glimpsed through the precipitation they looked like chess pieces on a glistening marble chessboard, I said. Giovanni liked that. Alison was itching to stop and take a picture but the weather was too awful.

  We parked under what I assumed were trees on a square and stepped into the downpour. The barn doors ahead turned out to belong to the famous eighteenth-century sculpture workshops of Carlo Nicoli. Giovanni danced over the puddles, holding up his umbrella. ‘They have been in the Nicoli family for six generations and are Carrara’s most illustrious’, he explained.

  The studio was an Aladdin’s cave of busts and statues, shrouded in a heavy layer of dust. It merged with the mist coming in from outside, making photography impossible. We could barely see the heads of flesh and stone that surrounded us. ‘Giuseppe Garibaldi’, Giovanni shouted over the din of drills and hammers. ‘There, there’, he pointed, coughing and waving. ‘That’s Disraeli, there’s Christ and Queen Victoria.’

  Moments later Signor Nicoli, a distinguished man with a scarf wrapped stylishly around his neck, emerged from the dust cloud and beckoned us into his office. After a brief introduction he seemed eager to show us records proving that around three hundred marble busts of Queen Victoria had been sculpted here. It was unclear whether they were originals made by Nicoli’s great-grandfather, grandfather and father, or copies of sculptures owned by the Royal Family. ‘You are writing for an English publication, are you not?’ Nicoli enquired. ‘Bad luck with the weather…’ He glanced at Alison’s cameras.

  The rain had eased by the time we found our way through the fog to the invisible white Fiat. ‘Above, it will be sunny and beautiful for photography’, said Giovanni, undaunted. ‘We’ll drive up through marble villages, shall we?’

  As the two-lane road chased its tail uphill the fog turned into low cloud. Water rushed down the road carrying chunks of rock and clots of white mud. I’d read that the systematic devastation caused by quarrying had inadvertently wrought man-made majesty in a stunning natural setting, and the little I could see of the landscape seemed brutally beautiful. We passed through hamlets and villages perched over gaping ravines that seemed set to swallow them.

  ‘Isolated houses occasionally do disappear’, Giovanni said mildly. ‘They are engulfed by the vortex of quarries.’

  ‘Sounds poetic’, Alison remarked.

  ‘Very. Have you read Dante?’

  We pulled over onto a shoulder and got out of the car. I could hear a river thundering below but all I could see was wet whiteness, as if we’d become stuck in a milking machine.

  ‘The Garrione runs white’, Giovanni murmured, sounding like a soothsayer.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The name of the river is Garrione. It means, perhaps there will be a little more precipitation’, he admitted. ‘That’s good, the rain will wash away the fog and then you’ll be able to see for yourself the beauty of the setting.’

  As we continued to motor upward the jagged hills seemed to have been softened by cotton balls. Mist dampened the staccato percussion of pneumatic tools. We slowed as Giovanni looked around him, and suddenly an outsized b
ulldozer appeared a few feet away from us and began piling up shattered stone. Giovanni fiddled with the emergency blinkers and headlights as he pulled off the road again.

  ‘Do you think maybe you should honk the horn?’ I suggested.

  Giovanni laughed operatically. ‘Oh no, no, no. They see us, believe me. They very rarely have accidents – well, rarely, occasionally, let us say.’

  ‘But the car is white…’ Alison added meekly.

  Transported by hilarity, Giovanni opened the door and stepped into a puddle the size of a fishpond. We followed suit and sank to our ankles in white mud.

  ‘Look!’ Giovanni commanded. ‘At the base of sheer rock faces such as this the bulldozers make mounds of chips to cushion the fall of massive blocks. Do you hear the whir of the high-speed diamond wires overhead? No? The blocks weigh up to twenty tonnes each. See?’ Directing our attention to rows of truck headlights penetrating the fog in perilous proximity, he lifted me by the arm and led me forward. ‘Below us is the Ferrovia Marmifera’, he explained, conducting an unseen orchestra. ‘It’s a railway through tunnels and over bridges. Very spectacular. You see?’

  ‘Oh yes’, I lied, wondering how I would be able to describe the scene without having seen it.

  ‘Wonderful’, Alison added as she wiped the rain off her cameras.

  We’d admired photos of the Ferrovia Marmifera’s elegantly arched bridges in the guidebook. The bridges had been built at the turn of the twentieth century, specifically engineered for trains, but now monster earthmovers used them.