The Pillars of Hercules

            It would have been quicker for me to sail to Africa. It was a much shorter trip from Sardinia to Tunisia. Cagliari was only about 120 miles from Bizerte, city of Berbers; it was more like 180 to Palermo, Sicily. But it was generally bad manners, if not heresy, to mention Italy’s proximity to Africa and its melanzane—“eggplants,” as black Africans are described in Italian slang.

Under a full moon in a cloudless night sky the ferry glided out of the Gulf of Cagliari, past the lighthouses and beacons, and soon the city and its twinkling hill was far astern. We were at sea and, as another Ulysses—James Joyce’s—saw it, “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

The Sicilian crew were offhand and seemed to make a virtue of being unhelpful, so busy were they being themselves, smiling at each other with yellow faces and fangy teeth, muttering backtalk in slushy accents, and shrugging, and avoiding eye contact with any of the passengers, and all the while preserving their shabby dignity. At first there had been few passengers, but just before we left, a great number hurried on board, but few of them were cabin people. They slept in chairs, smoked on the deck, lurked in the passageways, played cards in the lounge.

The galley steward fussed when he saw me showing up for dinner.

“You’re late—I can’t help you.”

“The ship’s just leaving,” I said. “What time do you close?”

It was a buffet, there was food all over the place and not many eaters. But this was just a little spirited obstinacy on the part of the steward.

“We were going to close right now,” he said, and sighed and looked overworked, and shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“I am just an ignorant American, but I’m hungry.”

“Where did you learn Italian?”

“From my mother.”

“Okay, go ahead. But all we have is menu food. No natural.”

“What’s ‘natural’?”

That set off in him a virtuoso flurry of gestures, hurried shrugging, the what-do-you-expect-me-to-do? pursing of hands, and he looked around in his impatience, as Italians do, as though pleading for a witness.

I paid my money, I got my receipt, I chose my food, as the ship’s engine made a meat-grinder noise of departure. “Natural” was a sign of the times; the theory of sensible eating had arrived in the island of spaghetti-benders: it meant health food, low-fat mozzarella and low-sodium pasta. The rest was fried and fatty.

A young man, monotonously complaining and stuffing his face with pasta, had put one foot on the arm of his girlfriend’s chair, in a sort of misplaced tenderness, as though chunking his big clumsy foot against her elbow was a romantic gesture.

I hate the noisy way you eat

,

I hate your nose, I hate your feet.

Because in Italy there was such an ingrained contempt for the law, la legge, it continued to amaze me that anything as orderly as meals and departures and arrivals were timely; yet my experience of boats and trains was favorable—there were very few hitches. Mealtime, for example, was sacred. It would have been unusual if the steward had turned me away from the buffet. Traveling in Italy, I could nearly always depend on a meal at the end of the day and a cheery person to serve it. I was seldom disappointed.

The life of the mind was something else. Any honest thoughtful effort, any attempt at seriousness or intellectual ambition, was usually ridiculed. I knew that I would be made a fool of for my diligent note-taking and—though I tried to hide it—my air of scholarly industry. Only suckers tried to get ahead, bookish people were laughable, and already I could sense that once again I was among philistines, with all the responsive jollity and hearty appetite that was usual with philistinism.

As far as I could tell there were very few Sardinians on the Torres, but there were all sorts of Sicilians: city slickers (Armani suits, pointy shoes), smug Palermitanis (overcoats draped on their shoulders like a cape), sinister toughs (sunglasses at midnight), and all the rest: the students, the punks, the poor; from “men of respect” (as the mafiosi called themselves) who looked stylish and unreliable, to Gypsies with gold teeth and long skirts and scarves, squatting on the floor and breast-feeding babies.

I saw a sign, Your Muster Station is—(II Vostro Punto di Riunione è—) and it filled me with alarm.

Supine in my cabin, listening to the engine’s drone and the thumping of the screws, I could just imagine the panic and clawing and yelling and colorful language and class warfare if the ship ran into trouble. I thought: Do I want to be in a sinking boat with these people? Do I dare to share a lifeboat with them?