The Pillars of Hercules

7 The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia

My reward after all the fuss and delay of getting to Bonifacio harbor was a classical glimpse of the harbor itself, the pale fissured limestone, the caverns at the shoreline, as the Ichnusa plowed past the last ramparts of the citadel, and then, as though splashing from between the rhythmic chop of two Homeric couplets, a pair of dolphins appeared, diving and blowing, with that little grunt and gasp that all good-sized dolphins give out as they surface, as though to prove they are worried little overworked mammals just like you.

That triumphant sight of Mediterranean dolphins made the whole inland sea seem ancient and unspoiled, peopled by heroes, terrorized by Laestrygonian giants, and all the goddesses and warriors that Ulysses encountered. It was the sea of triremes and sea monsters and big fat-faced gods, like the ones from the corners of old maps, with pursed lips and blown-out cheeks that created strong winds.

Bonifacio was the first place I had come to that could be identified in The Odyssey. The bay and harbor of Bonifacio is described in Book 10, and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation depicts it clearly, with the directness that characterizes the whole epic:

… a curious bay with mountain walls of stone

to left and right, and reaching far inland, —

a narrow entrance opening from the sea

where cliffs converged as though to touch and close.

Curious about this island (“Lamos”), Ulysses moors his black ship against a rock and climbs the cliff to get his bearings. He and his men meet a young girl carrying water, and she directs them to the haunt of the queen (“a woman like a mountain crag”) and the blood-drinking Laestrygonian king, Antiphates. The rest is cannibalism and rout, as the crew face a whole howling tribe of Laestrygonians, “more than men they seemed, / gigantic when they gathered on the sky line / to shoot great boulders down from slings.”

And the water where those angry boulders splashed was now stirred with dolphins gasping onward towards the little rocky islets, Lavezzi and Cavallo, that trickle south from Corsica’s southeastern shore. In an old quarry on Cavallo an ancient bust of Hercules has been carved into the side of a large rock, perhaps by Romans, more likely by ancient troglodytic islanders needing a god to bother.

Back in Ajaccio, at our last meeting, Dorothy Carrington had told me a story about an experience she and her husband had had almost fifty years ago in Sardinia.

“We took a boat from Bonifacio to Sardinia just to have a picnic,” she said. “We gave all the money we had to a fisherman and when we got there we sat on the beach eating our sandwiches. Then we saw a great line of women wailing and a boy sitting in the sand. The women were throwing sand onto his head and shrieking. It was because his father had decided to go to Corsica. This was their way of showing grief.”

At the time there was no work in Sardinia and the Sards — as she called them — were resented for going to Corsica and taking jobs and working for very low wages.

“The man came with us on our boat and when he saw the lights of Bonifacio he went mad and so he wouldn’t overturn the boat we held him down by sitting on him.”

This brought to mind another of Dorothy’s amazing tableaux: Sir Francis and Lady Rose, imprisoning a demented Sardinian by jamming him against the deck of a fishing boat with the combined weight of their aristocratic bottoms.

“A few days later I saw the Sard in a cafe in Ajaccio,” she said. “He was having a drink with two nuns!”

The Ichnusa was no larger than the Martha’s Vineyard ferry Great Point, perhaps smaller. The distance it traveled was hardly more than from the Cape to the Vineyard — the Straits of Bonifacio are only seven miles wide between Cape Pertusato and Punta del Falcone. There were about ten passengers on board, all returning Sardinians, and two medium-sized trucks carrying stacks of cork bark from trees that had been stripped somewhere on Corsica’s east coast. Corsica was an island of no heavy industry. It grew and exported fruit and wine, and some lumber, and this cork. But in fact Corsica depended for revenue on the tourist trade. The island was the Corsicans’ own solemn stronghold for eight months or so; for the other sunny months they shared it with bargain-hunting vacationers from all over Europe, but mainly the despised French and the ubiquitous Germans who shocked the prudish locals with their petty stinginess and their assertive nudity.

“The people are very unlike Italians in some respects: wanting their vivacity — but with all their intelligence and shrewdness,” Edward Lear had written about the Corsicans. The same seemed true of the Sardinians. (Or was it the Sardines? Or was it the Sards?)

The ferry passengers were all returning Sardinians, not very jolly, but friendly enough. The crossing took only an hour but the few people on board, and the infrequency of the ferry — once a day in the afternoon — made it seem something of an event. There was also the fact that it was traveling from France to Italy. This was only technically the case. Corsica was no more France than Sardinia was Italy. Both were strange little islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, whose islanders were more interested in differences than similarities. Neither of them was fond of the mainland, and they rather disliked each other.

“I’m not comfortable with those people,” a Sardinian woman told me in Santa Teresa di Gallura, the little port at the top of Sardinia, where the ferry landed. She was wagging her finger at Corsica, just across the straits. “I find that I have — what? — no rapport with them. So?”

It had been a fairly long walk from the port to the town — so long that darkness had fallen just as I reached the piazza of Santa Teresa. With darkness the town began to roll down its shutters and put an end to the day’s business. But even in daylight business could not have been very brisk. Santa Teresa, the port in the narrow Bay of Longo Sardo, was a small place, hardly bigger than a village that sprawled along the cliffs, but with a cheerier feel than its equivalent in Corsica. People were perambulating in the square, and doing the last of their shopping; there were raised voices and even some loud laughter.

I wanted to go to Olbia, where there was a train south. There was a bus to Olbia, but no bus station. It stopped on a backstreet, no one was quite sure where. And the bus tickets — ah, yes, I should have known. They were sold at a small coffee shop three streets away. Having established all this, I was told that the bus had left. I would not have been able to buy a ticket anyway. The cafe owner took only Italian money, and all I had were francs, and the banks were closed. So I had a pizza and found a hotel. The hotel owner said, “The Corsicans in Bonifacio speak a very similar dialect to us, but they are neither French nor Italian. And — you know? — we don’t really understand them.”

Never mind the delay, I went to bed contented, and I woke in a good mood. The weather seemed milder than in Corsica, and I was happy to be in a place where I spoke the language reasonably well — the lingua franca, actually, since there were four distinct Sardinian dialects, several of them closer to Latin and Spanish than Italian (yanno—from janua—for door; mannu—from magnus—for huge; mesa for table). A Sardinian told me that there is an organization which is committed to bringing Corsica and Sardinia closer by twinning towns, sending schoolchildren back and forth, and arranging cultural exchanges. Having disclosed this idealistic plan, he then burst out laughing, as though he had just described something absurdly far-fetched, something like a scheme for teaching dogs to walk on their hind legs.

Santa Teresa was only on the map for its port and the ferry landing; it was otherwise ignored, and yet it was the sort of provincial place that I liked. It had a hill and a pretty church and a dramatic view of the sea; and everyone knew everyone else. The local dish, a man told me, was wild boar (cinghiale, he said, with big zanne—tusks), and it was prepared in a variety of ways.

“But I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

“You want vegetables? You came to the right place.” And then he remembered that he had an uncle in Vermont.

In daylight everything was simple: I changed money, I bought a bus ticket, I found out the times of the buses, and then I was headed east across the top of the island on my way to Olbia.

At Palau, the bus stopped for passengers and a coffee break.

“There’s a place in the Pacific called Palau,” I said to the driver.

“Another one! Amazing.”

After talking casually for a little while I nerved myself and asked, “There used to be a lot of kidnappings in Sardinia.”

“You mean, a long time ago?”

“No, fifteen years ago, maybe a little more,” I said.

“Yes, I’ve heard there were a few kidnappings.”

A few! In the 1970s kidnapping of foreigners had amounted almost to a cottage industry, and Sardinia was known to have developed a culture of kidnapping. The style of crime had deep roots in mountainous regions of the island. Almost anyone with a little money visiting Sardinia was snatched and held in a peasant hut in the mountains by semi-literates demanding millions from their desperate family.

“Kidnapping is labor-intensive,” a Sardinian, Questore Emilio Pazzi, told Robert Fox, who described the encounter in his chronicle of the modern Mediterranean, The Inner Sea: “A band needs at least twelve men to act as look-outs, messengers and negotiators, as well as seizing and guarding the victim. Unlike the Mafia families of Sicily and Calabria, the gang works together for one crime only, and then disperses.”

“So this was long ago?” I asked the driver. “Who was responsible?”

“Bandits.”

“I read that it was sheep-stealers”—I did not know the Italian term for sheep-rustling—“but they ran out of sheep to steal, and so they decided to kidnap people.”

“Who knows these mountain people?”

His pride dented, he had become a trifle cool towards me, because I had impugned something in his culture.

“More people get killed in America,” he said.

“So true,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

It was only an hour or so from here to Olbia. After we arrived I walked the streets like a rat in a maze, looking for a likely place to stay: quiet, not expensive. As in most of the towns I had visited since Spain, business was terrible and in this wintry low season there were plenty of available rooms.

The weather was pleasant, brilliant sunshine, mild temperatures, lemons on the trees; and March was only a few days off. Olbia was on a gulf, but the port that served it was about five miles away at Golfo Aranci, the end of the train line. Just to see where these Italian ferries left from I took the train and walked around Aranci, marveling at how easy it was — generally speaking — to travel in this part of the Mediterranean. There were several ferries a day to different parts of Italy. But my idea was to take a train the length of Sardinia and then get a ferry to Sicily.

The woman who ran my boardinghouse in Olbia urged me to go to a particular restaurant that night where they were serving Sardinian specialties.

“No wild boar, thanks.”

“Many good things,” she said.

The first dish I was served was, appropriately, sardines. The root is the same, related to Sardinia, just as the word for a Sardinian plant (“which when eaten produced convulsive laughter, ending in death”) had given us the word sardonic — derisive, sneering — because sardonios in Greek meant “of Sardinia.”

“People in the country around here eat these all the time,” the waiter said.

Squid with celery and tomatoes; chickpea and bean soup; goat cheese covered with dried oregano; seaweed fried in batter; then fish, grilled triglia, and finally pastries.

Normally I hated eating alone, but this was Italy, the waiter was talkative, and after the emptiness and general solemnity of Corsican restaurants, this one was noisy and friendly. It was not a fancy place, and yet several grinning middle-aged men were talking on cellular phones as they ate. It was not business, it was just yakking in Italian. Uh, and then what did she say? Oh, yeah? Did you tell her you had the money? You imbecile!

After dinner I took a walk through the town and Olbia seemed, as many places seem while they are twinkling in the dark, a magical place — and I was glad I had come. The reality of daylight was that it was a rough place, and the more I walked the more miserable it seemed, with clusters of mean houses, or else apartment houses, and beyond them stony fields and sheep and goats. The poverty and all the talk of emigration in search of work made Sardinia seem like Ireland, an offshore island that had plenty of culture but no money. Apart from the touristy parts, the Costa Smeralda of the speculating Aga Khan, there was little development. This was a remote Italian province of narrow villages and a hinterland of sheep and emptiness.

One of the Sardinian habits that was inescapable was the advertising all over town of a death or an anniversary of death by sticking up posters of the deceased on any vertical surface. Many of the posters were as large as a bath towel, and except for the black border could have been mistaken for election posters. With the photo, many in color, was a name in bold letters — PADRE or FRANCESO or MARIOLINA or PIERO or SALVATORE. It is a variety of lugubrious advertising of grief, common in Irish newspapers, but fairly bizarre appearing on fences and walls, though the funereal faces had a strange appropriateness on the sides of derelict or condemned buildings.

I was copying down some names and sentiments from these grieving flyers when I looked over and saw that an African was staring at me. I had seen such Africans, very dark and silent, in Palau and also at Santa Teresa. They were in Marseilles and in some of the other large cities on the Riviera, and I guessed they were from the former French colonies in West Africa. Tall, unsmiling, with swollen eyes and matted linty hair, with clawed and scarified cheeks, they hovered near squares of plastic on which were arranged various items for sale, sunglasses, watches, belts, purses, wallets, toys — junk, on the whole, and one unsmiling African’s junk was identical to another’s. It had not seemed odd to me to see them in the south of France — it was the modern version of the empire striking back; after all, innumerable French people had insinuated themselves in Africa for hundreds of years, hawking all sorts of dubious merchandise. But what were these Africans doing in a small town in Sardinia?

“Hello — good morning,” I said to that staring man in Italian. “Are you looking at me?”

“No,” he said, his reddened eyes, with dark-flecked whites, fastened to me.

Almost purple, with dusty hair, his wool coat wrapped around him, long legs, discolored and broken teeth, and those spotty staring eyes; he could not have been a stranger apparition in this small town with its unaccommodating provincial air.

“What are you selling?”

“Whatever you want.”

“It looks like a lot of Chinese merchandise to me.”

“No. These are good things.”

His Italian was shaky, supplemented by French, which was better than mine. His name was Omar.

“Chinese watches. Chinese glasses. Chinese picture frames. Cigarette lighters from China.”

“What do you want to buy?”

“One kilo of hasheesh.”

Omar did not smile.

“Just a joke,” I said.

Two of his friends, thinking that he was in trouble with a plainclothes policeman, stepped over to listen. Their names, they told me, were Yusuf and Ahmed.

“Three Muslims in a little Catholic town.”

They stared at me.

“From what country?”

“Senegal,” Omar said. He was older and taller than the others. “I come from a place ten kilometers from Dakar. My town is called Tuba.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“More than ten years,” Omar said.

By “here” he meant the Mediterranean generally — out of Africa. He explained that he had lived for six years in Cannes, and also in Livorno and Florence. He had lived in Olbia for two years.

“And them?” I nodded at Yusuf and Ahmed.

“A few months.”

“Why here?”

“Olbia is a good place — not expensive,” Omar said. “We have two rooms. We all live together.”

“Do you have any Italian friends?”

“No — well, maybe a few.”

“What about North Africa? There are lots of Muslims in Algeria and Morocco, and business might be better than here.”

Business might have been better anywhere but here in Olbia where they stood, ignored and idle, while the townsfolk hurried past them looking slightly nervous. There were no tourists in Olbia.

“We can’t go to those places. No documents. But here I have a paper. So I come and go. The police don’t bother us at all.”

“When you say ‘come and go’ do you mean you return to Africa occasionally?”

“Yes. I plan to go there in a few months. My family is there. Wives. Children. All that.”

He had a clumsy clacking way with Italian, and I thought I might have misheard. “Did you say ‘wives’?”

“Yes.”

“More than one?”

“Only two.”

“Children?”

“Only a few,” he said. “Six.”

The young ragged man and his apprentices fascinated me, and seemed to represent an entirely new kind of penetration in the Mediterranean, a region which had known so many immigrants over thousands of years. It was a poor town on an island that was so poor the local people left it to find work. But it was also a town which had never before seen Africans.

There were some more Africans at the railway station. I asked them the question I had meant to ask Omar. Why not get a job?

“There is no work. We would work in a factory if we could find one. But there are no factories.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“No plan. Stay here.”

Heading south, I took the train to a town in the north-central part of the island, Chilivani, a railway junction. Out of Olbia, the rocky sheep-nibbled hinterland of scrubby trees and low hills were all tumbled together and blown by the wind, like the Scottish lowlands. There were rocky peaks in the distance where, in the manner of Corsicans, the Nuraghic people of Sardinia had traditionally made their homes, away from the coasts, and fought off the numerous invaders. Beyond Chilivani, the people in the mountainous region of Barbagia (“extreme examples of the Sardinian national character”) had never acknowledged any rule over them and had never paid taxes. The Romans had failed to make them citizens (which was why they called these people Barbagians — barbarians). Sardinia had been annexed but so little did it figure in Rome’s plans that it was used as a place to which Jews were deported under the rule of Tiberias (A.D. 14–37). More recently, the Italians had no more luck than the Romans in bringing Sardinians under control, even with enormous numbers of policemen sent from the mainland to pacify the remote districts. Still, rural crime — murder, sheep-stealing, extortion — were unusually high in Sardinia. The Barbagians had been Barbagians for two thousand years.

There were stone walls everywhere along the line, and as far as I could see, every mile of landscape demarcated. I was in a two-coach train filled with yelling youngsters on their way home from school. They were going fifteen or twenty miles away, and though they were very loud, and even rowdy, cackling in their incomprehensible dialect, when a woman straightened up and said, “Excuse me, but would you please close that window?” two of them instantly obeyed.

It was a bleak untidy beauty in a sparsely populated island. We were among vineyards, running past a range of granite peaks. There were sheep grazing inside the walls in the foreground and in some places cork trees, like those in Corsica, stripped of their bark.

The noisiest youngsters got off at a country station called Berchidda, where there was a small settlement, and others at Oschiri, which had the look of a penal colony. Many Sardinian towns looked like that, and others looked ancient, and some had the prefabricated look of having been thrown up last week.

Chilivani was no more than an intersection of two railway lines, in a strong wind. I sat for a while and eventually connected with a train that was coming from Sassari, a bigger faster train that sped past a continuous landscape of walled-off pastures, all over the hillsides, under a large sky of tumbling woolly clouds that somewhat resembled the unshorn sheep in these pastures.

We were less than twenty miles from the western coast, but so little connection was there between these sheep farms and the coast we might have been a thousand miles from the sea. That was a Mediterranean feature. Life was different away from the shore. Five or ten miles inland from anywhere in the Mediterranean and you were in a separate world.

Much of what I saw was solid rock, long slopes of veined and wrinkled stone, and meadows of stone too, the whole place like an ancient lava flow, except that this was not fertile and volcanic but ironlike crusts of granite. Some of the smooth stone slopes also were partitioned with bouldery walls. I had never seen such a landscape before, nor had I ever imagined it except on a distant planet.

At the town of Bonorva all the newer houses were made of gray cinder blocks. Out of town was a vast stony landscape of tussocky grass and dark twisted trees, the big sky full of smoky clouds. I made a note, the landscape looks abused, and only later discovered that many mining companies, foreign as well as Italian, had come and ransacked it for minerals, for antimony, coal, lead, silver and zinc.

Farther south the sight of a mustached man in the middle of nowhere, leading sheep down a path from one field to another. A shepherd — the first of many I saw. Shepherding was as old an occupation in the Mediterranean as fishing, and this man with his flat cap and his crook and his dog represented to me a timelessness that was both melancholy and indestructible.

Around four, I looked at my map, saw that we were near the town of Oristano, and decided to get off here and spend a night and a day, what the hell.

Oristano seemed to be a port on the map, but my map was not very accurate. Oristano, five miles inland, might have been a hundred, for it had no real connection to the sea. It was just another small simmering town in the middle of a hot plain, the most provincial of places, at a great remove from the world. The far-off whistle of my departing train gave me a pang of regret, but then I thought: No — this is the Mediterranean, too! Everything matters! and generally consoled myself with the thought of all the money I was saving by staying here for the night, rather than in the bright lights of big-city Cagliari.

Oristano had a moribund atmosphere that was almost palpable, enervating heat, and an audible monotony that was like the drowsy buzz of a single futile bumblebee. I felt a sort of ghastly frivolity in the idea that by parachuting off the train with no plan in my head I was pointlessly insinuating myself in a small Sardinian town which was off the tourist trail — not because it was obscure and hard to reach but because it was utterly boring.

It was a marketplace for the nearby farms, and the townies measured themselves against the peasants who turned up to sell vegetables or meat at the market. These peasants, Barbagians to their gnarled fingertips, were toothless and skinny and undersized people. The women wore shawls and four skirts and argyle knee socks and were more whiskery than their menfolk, who chewed broken pipestems and look oppressed. After the Oristano market closed I imagined them scuttling back to the hills and sheltering under toadstools. But they were also noted for their toughness—ferrigno, they were called, made of iron.

The only aspects of the outside world that had penetrated here were the extremely violent American videos and Disney comics — we are cultural leaders, after all, specializing in the criminal and the infantile. Italian culture in Oristano was represented by the Church, porno comics, chain-smoking, a plethora of shoe stores. The rest was harmless obsession, Italian here — but generally true of the Mediterranean region — the mild ostentation of the middle-class women in cutting a good figure, and the male passion about sports that bordered on the homoerotic.

Italy had allowed Sardinia to be self-governing and given it a degree of autonomy that prevented the island from nursing the sort of political grievances that were so common in Corsica. There were no bomb-throwers in Sardinia. It was a rugged place — none of the poodles and lapdogs of France, only functional mutts that had to work to earn their keep — sheep dogs and guard dogs.

My landlady in Oristano, Regina, was a voluble Italian, whose husband worked in Cagliari. “I want you to be happy. I want this to be like your own house.” Her flunkies and room cleaners were Sardinian women from the interior, who were not forthcoming when I asked them about their own language and culture. It seemed a vaguely colonial arrangement of the memsahib and her native servants, but they got along well and worshiped in the same church.

The more I saw of Oristano, the stronger I felt that my chief objection was that it was the sort of inbred town, with its own rules and snobberies, that I grew up in. It was full of lowbrows but it was neighborly. Strangers in the boardinghouse always greeted each other, and when someone entered a restaurant everyone said hello, calling out “How are you?” from where they sat. It was perhaps not very different from Medford, Massachusetts, and friendly and frightening in about equal parts. Excessive friendliness is perhaps a philistine trait; in a place where no one reads, no one values or understands contemplative solitude, and so they need each other to be friendly and talkative.

I was on my way to the station in Oristano when I was accosted by an oriental man. He said, in Italian, “A hundred lire,” and clicked a cigarette lighter in my face.

“Where do you come from?”

“China.”

Another Chinese man appeared.

“You want a lighter?” he asked in English.

“How did you get here?”

“Cargo ship.”

“Do you live here?”

Yet another Chinese man joined us, and he muttered to his friends. They were all in their thirties, and were decently dressed. They spoke little Italian and even less English. They had chosen an unpromising place to hawk cigarette lighters. Perhaps this was a town that was not dominated by African hawkers. My questions and my lack of interest in their twenty-cent cigarette lighters seemed to drive them away, but where to?

Africans living by their wits in Olbia, Chinese seamen boosting lighters in Oristano. What was this all about? The natives of the Mediterranean were always harking back to the past, which was glorious; but the present was much stranger, and baffling.

The railway to Cagliari rattled down a long flat valley of Campidano. I dozed and made notes, and I was surprised by how warm the weather was — sunny and lovely this day in early March.

Along with the Catholic chapel in the midst of Cagliari station, with the Holy Eucharist present in the tabernacle (a mass every Monday at ten-thirty, and every feast day at ten), there was also a pornographic bookstore, a photocopy machine, a barbershop, a coffee shop and three public telephones. This was the new Italy, after all.

The city itself, built on a slope, old brown houses and offices, resembled Marseilles but without the Marseillaise air of criminality. Cagliari seemed huge after my experience of Sardinia’s provincial towns, but after a day it seemed very small. I had the impression that no one ever went there, but when I mentioned this the local people said, “This place is crowded in the summer. You should see Spiaggia de Poetto!”

I went there, to this beach, and walked and saw the flamingos in the nearby lagoons. On this weekday in winter the beach was almost deserted, but that hardly mattered. I sat in the sunshine, read for a while, and walked back to town.

In a Cagliari restaurant that night I was writing my diary, having finished my meal, when I noticed that the place was empty — all the customers had gone. The waiters, the cashier and the cook were just about to sit down to eat, having put a sign saying Closed on the front window.

I caught a waiter’s eye. “I’d like to pay.”

“But you’re not finished,” he said.

“Yes, the meal was good.”

“Your work,” he said, and gestured to my notebook, my papers and paraphernalia. “Look, I can see you’re busy. Finish your work. It’s no problem for us. We’re just eating here.”

After I was done they invited me to join them. I asked them about Sardinia, but they said it was a horribly dull place, nothing ever happened here, and so they engaged me on their favorite subject, American basketball. Now about this Michael Jordan …

There were Africans in the streets of Cagliari. The next day, on my way to buy a ferry ticket, I asked a man about them.

“They’re Africans,” he said, and he shrugged, the Italian gesture for Who cares? “They’re here in the summer, lots of them. They sell little things.”

“They’re from?”

“Who knows? Africa. Ghana — down there.” He shrugged again.

“What do Sardinians think of them?”

He jerked his shoulders again and grunted, the fatalistic Eh! His tolerance was a variety of indifference. Italians are not threatened by abstractions, and unless they are directly provoked, Italians are great live-and-let-livers. In spite of their manic stereotypes, their refusal to fuss is one of their most endearing characteristics; coping with disorder is part of Italian life; and conscious of this they often make a virtue of not getting excited.

The scariest-looking people in Sardinia were not the Barbagians, the Senegalese, the toothless shepherds, sheep-rustlers, kidnappers and Gypsies, but rather the punks of Cagliari. Young, filthy, ragged, with greasy hair and dreadlocks, rings through their noses, their lips, sniffing glue, gagging on wine and shouting vicious abuse at passersby.

There were plenty of these strange young people hanging about in gangs near the castle, where I had gone for its good view of the harbor.

“So what have we got here?” I asked a man, while six punks quarreled over a bottle. They wore studded dog collars and chains, and one had a tin cup that clinked at his belt.

“It’s a shame,” the man said.

“Anarchists?”

“No. They believe in nothing.”

“Nihilists, then?”

“No. They are abandoned.”

“There are young people like that in England and America.”

“I’ve seen them in Latin America,” the man said.

Now we were walking along, up a steep cobblestone street.

“In Brazil,” he said. “I lived in Brazil for three years. I never thought I would see them here. It was very strange there. It was ridiculous, really. Brazil is a huge country — rich too.”

He laughed out loud.

“So there were these paupers sitting on a mountain of gold!”

The expression made me laugh, and my laughter encouraged him.

“Here it’s the opposite. We’re rich, but we’re sitting on a mountain of ruins.”

I asked him whether he ever went to Sicily.

“Why would I want to go there?” he said, and tapped my shoulder. “Just a joke. It’s surely a nice place. But when I leave here I go to the continent”—by which he meant the Italian mainland.

The travel agent who sold me the ferry ticket to Palermo said, “You’d be better off taking the plane. It costs the same.”

It was sixty-seven dollars for the ferry from Cagliari to Palermo, but this way I had a first-class cabin and because it was an overnighter it was both my fare to Sicily and a bed. And there was the added pleasure of setting out from Cagliari in the evening, watching the lights of the city recede; and after a good night’s sleep, seeing the coast of Sicily appear with the sunrise.