“The first time I came here, in ’68,” said Bobby, “the passport officer said, ‘You want nice hash?’ I thought it was the biggest put-on I’d ever heard. I mean, a passport officer! I said, ‘No, no—it gives me big headache.’ ‘You no want hash?’ he says. I told him no. He looks at me and shakes his head: ‘So why you come to Afghanistan?’ ”
“Far out,” said Lopez.
“So I let him turn me on.”
“It’s a groovy country,” said Lopez. “They’re all crazy here.” He looked at me. “You digging it?”
“Up to a point,” I said.
“You freaking out?” Bobby sucked on the hashish cigarette and passed it to me. I took a puff and gulped it and felt a light twanging on the nerves behind my eyes.
“He is, look. I saw him on the train to Meshed,” said Lopez. “His head was together, but I think he’s loose now.”
Lopez laughed at the egg stain on my pocket. The jacket was dirty, my shirt was dirty, and so were my hands; there was a film of dust on my face.
“He’s loose,” said Bobby.
“He’s liquefying,” said Lopez. “It’s a goofy place.”
“I could hang out here,” said Bobby.
“I could too, but they won’t let me,” said Lopez. “That scumbag passport shit only gave me eight days. He didn’t like my passport—I admit it’s shitty. I got olive oil on it in Greece. I know what I should do—really goop it up with more olive oil and get another one.”
“Yeah,” said Bobby. He smoked the last of the joint and made another.
With the third joint the conversation moved quickly to a discussion of time, reality, and the spiritual refuge ashrams provided. Both Lopez and Bobby had spent long periods in ashrams; once, as long as six months.
“Meditating?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, meditating and also hanging out.”
“We were waiting for this chick to come back from the States.”
Lopez was thirty-one. After graduation from a Brooklyn high school, he got a job as a salesman in a plastic firm. “Not really a salesman, I mean, I was the boss’s right-hand man. I pick up a phone and say, ‘Danny’s out of town,’ I pick up another one and say, ‘Danny’ll meet you at three-thirty.’ That kind of job, you know?” He was earning a good salary; he had his own apartment, he was engaged to be married. Then one day he had a revelation: “I’m on my way to work. I get off the bus and I’m standing in front of the office. I get these flashes, a real anxiety trip: doing a job I hate, engaged to a plastic chick, all the traffic’s pounding. Jesus. So I go to Hollywood. It was okay. Then I went to Mexico. Five years I was in Mexico. That’s where I got the name Lopez. My name ain’t Lopez, it’s Morris. Mexico was good, then it turned me off. I went to Florida, Portugal, Morocco. One day I’m in Morocco. I meet a guy. He says, ‘Katmandu is where it’s happening.’ So I take my things, my chick, and we start going. There was no train in those days. Twelve days it took me to get to Erzurum. I was sick. It was muddy and cold, and snow—snow in Turkey! I nearly died in Erzurum, and then again in Teheran. But I knew a guy. Anyway, I made it.”
I asked him to try to imagine what he would be doing at the age of sixty.
“So I’m sixty, so what? I see myself, sure, I’m sitting right here—right here—and probably rolling a joint.” Which seemed a rash prophecy, since we were in the No-Man’s-Land Hotel, in a candlelit room, without either food or water.
Somewhere at the front of the hotel a telephone rang.
“If it’s for me,” Lopez shouted, but he had already begun to cackle, “if it’s for me, I’m not here!”
The Pathan Camp
THE CENTER OF KABUL IS NOT THE BAZAAR, BUT THE RIVER. It is black and seems bottomless, but it is only one foot deep. Some people drink from it, others shit beside it or do their washing in it. Bathers can be seen soaping themselves not far from where two buses have been driven into it to be washed. Garbage, sewage, and dirt go in; drinking water comes out. The Afghans don’t mind dying this way; it’s no trouble. Near the bus depot on the south bank bearded Afghans crouch at the side of a cart, three abreast, their faces against metal binoculars. This is a peep show. For about a penny they watch 8mm movies of Indian dancers.
Further up the Kabul River, in the rocky outskirts of the city, I found a Pathan camp. It was large, perhaps thirty ragged white tents, many goats and donkeys and a number of camels. Cooking fires were smoldering and children were running between the tents. I was eager to snap a picture of the place, and had raised my camera, when a stone thudded a few feet away. An old woman had thrown it. She made a threatening gesture and picked up another stone. But she did not throw it. She turned and looked behind her.
A great commotion had started in the center of the camp. A camel had collapsed; it was lying in the dust, kicking its legs and trying to raise its head. The children gave up their game, the women left their cooking pots, men crept out of tents, and all of them ran in the direction of the camel. The old woman ran, too, but when she saw I was following, she stopped and threw her stone at me.
There were shouts. A tall robed figure, brandishing a knife, ran into the crowd. The crowd made way for him and stood some distance from the camel, giving him room and allowing me to see the man raise his knife over the neck of the struggling camel and bring it down hard, making three slashes in the camel’s neck. It was as if he had punctured a large toy. Immediately, the camel’s head dropped to the ground, his legs ceased to kick, and blood poured out, covering a large triangle of ground and flowing five or six feet from the body, draining into the sand.
I went closer. The old woman screamed, and a half a dozen people ran toward her. They had knives and baskets. The old woman pointed at me, but I did not pause. I sprinted away in the direction of the road, and when I felt I was safe I looked back. No one had chased me. The people with the knives surrounded the camel—the whole camp had descended on it—and they had already started cutting and skinning the poor beast.
Dingle
THE NEAREST THING TO WRITING A NOVEL IS TRAVELING IN A strange country. Travel is a creative act—not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing, and moving on. The discoveries the traveler makes in broad daylight—the curious problems of the eye he solves—resemble those that thrill and sustain a novelist in his solitude. It is fatal to know too much at the outset: boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot. And the best landscapes, apparently dense or featureless, hold surprises if they are studied patiently, in the kind of discomfort one can savor afterward. Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain.
A strange country—but how strange? One where the sun bursts through the clouds at ten in the evening and makes a sunset as full and promising as dawn. An island which on close inspection appears to be composed entirely of rabbit droppings. Gloomy gypsies camped in hilarious clutter. People who greet you with “Nice day” in a pelting storm. Miles of fuchsia hedges, seven feet tall, with purple hanging blossoms like Chinese lanterns. Ancient perfect castles that are not inhabited; hovels that are. And dangers: hills and beach cliffs so steep you either hug them or fall off. Stone altars that were last visited by Druids, storms that break and pass in minutes, and a local language that sounds like Russian being whispered and so incomprehensible that the attentive traveler feels, in the words of a native writer, “like a dog listening to music.”
It sounds as distant and bizarre as The Land Where the Jumblies Live, and yet it is the part of Europe that is closest in miles to America, the thirty-mile sausage of land on the southwest coast of Ireland that is known as the Dingle Peninsula. Beyond it is Boston and New York, where many of its people have fled. The land is not particularly fertile. Fishing is dangerous and difficult. Food is expensive, and if the Irish government did not offer financial inducements to the natives they would probably shrink inland, like the people of Great Blasket Island, who simpl
y dropped everything and went ashore to the Dingle, deserting their huts and fields and leaving them to the rabbits and the ravens.
It is easy for the casual traveler to prettify the place with romantic hyperbole, to see in Dingle’s hard weather and exhausted ground the Celtic Twilight, and in its stubborn hopeful people a version of Irishness that is to be cherished. That is the patronage of pity—the metropolitan’s contempt for the peasant. The Irish coast, so enchanting for the man with the camera, is murder for the fisherman. For five of the eight days I was there the fishing boats remained anchored in Dingle Harbor, because it was too wild to set sail. The dead seagulls, splayed out like oldfangled ladies’ hats below Clogher Head, testify to the furious winds; and never have I seen so many sheep skulls bleaching on hillsides, so many cracked bones beneath bushes.
Farming is done in the most clumsily primitive way, with horses and donkeys, wagons and blunt plows. The methods are traditional by necessity—modernity is expensive, gas costs more than Guinness. The stereotype of the Irishman is a person who spends every night at the local pub, jigging and swilling; in the villages of this peninsula only Sunday night is festive and the rest are observed with tea and early supper.
“I don’t blame anyone for leaving here,” said a farmer in Dunquin. “There’s nothing for young people. There’s no work, and it’s getting worse.”
After the talk of the high deeds of Finn MacCool and the fairies and leprechauns, the conversation turns to the price of spare parts, the cost of grain, the value of the Irish pound, which has sunk below the British one. Such an atmosphere of isolation is intensified and circumscribed by the language—there are many who speak only Gaelic. Such remoteness breeds political indifference. There is little talk of the guerrilla war in Northern Ireland, and the few people I tried to draw out on the subject said simply that Ulster should become part of Eire.
But no one mentions religion. The only indication I had of the faith was the valediction of a lady in a bar in Ballyferriter, who shouted, “God bless ye!” when I emptied my pint of Guinness.
On the rainiest day we climbed down into the cove at Coumeenoole, where—because of its unusual shape, like a ruined cathedral—there was no rain. I sent the children off for driftwood and at the mouth of a dry cave built a fire. It is the bumpkin who sees travel in terms of dancing girls and candlelight dinners on the terrace; the city slicker’s triumphant holiday is finding the right mountaintop or building a fire in the rain or recognizing the wildflowers in Dingle: foxglove, heather, bluebells.
And it is the city slicker’s conceit to look for untrodden ground, the five miles of unpeopled beach at Stradbally Strand, the flat magnificence of Inch Strand, or the most distant frontier of Ireland, the island off Dunquin called Great Blasket.
Each day, she and her sister islands looked different. We had seen them from the cliffside of Slea Head, and on that day they had the appearance of seamonsters—high-backed creatures making for the open sea. Like all offshore islands, seen from the mainland, their aspect changed with the light: they were lizard-like, then muscular, turned from gray to green, acquired highlights that might have been huts. At dawn they seemed small, but they grew all day into huge and fairly fierce-seeming mountains in the water, diminishing at dusk into pink beasts and finally only hindquarters disappearing in the mist.
Nudists in Corsica
CORSICA IS FRANCE, BUT IT IS NOT FRENCH. IT IS A mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera. In its three climates it combines the high Alps, the ruggedness of North Africa, and the choicest landscapes of Italy, but most dramatic are the peaks, which are never out of view and show in the upheaval of rock a culture that is violent and heroic. The landscape, which furnished some of the imagery for Dante’s Inferno, has known heroes. The Latin playwright Seneca was exiled there, Napoleon was born there, and so—if local history is to be believed—was Christopher Columbus (there is a plaque in Calvi); part of the Odyssey takes place there—Ulysses lost most of his crew to the cannibalistic Laestrygonians in Bonifacio—and two hundred years ago, the lecherous Scot (and biographer of Dr. Johnson) James Boswell visited and reported, “I had got upon a rock in Corsica and jumped into the middle of life.”
The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty. On the west are cliffs that drop straight and red into the sea; on the south there is a true fjord; on the east a long, flat, and formerly malarial coast with the island’s only straight road; on the north a populous cape; and in the center the gothic steeples of mountains, fringed by forests where wild boar are hunted. There are sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, boulder-strewn beaches; beaches with enormous waves breaking over them, and beaches that are little more than mud flats, beaches with hotels and beaches that have never known the pressure of a tourist’s footprint. There are five-star hotels and hotels that are unfit for human habitation. All the roads are dangerous, many are simply the last mile to an early grave. “There are no bad drivers in Corsica,” a Corsican told me. “All the bad drivers die very quickly.” But he was wrong—I saw many and I still have damp palms to prove it.
On one of those terrible coast roads—bumper-scraping ruts, bottomless puddles, rocks in the middle as threatening and significant as Marxist statuary—I saw a hitchhiker. She was about eighteen, very dark and lovely, in a loose gown, barefoot, and carrying a basket. She might have been modeling the gown and awaiting the approach of a Vogue photographer. My car seemed to stop of its own accord, and I heard myself urging the girl to get in, which she did, thanking me first in French and then, sizing me up, in halting English. Was I going to Chiappa? I wasn’t, but I agreed to take her part of the way: “And what are you going to do in Chiappa?”
“I am a naturiste,” she said, and smiled.
“A nudist?”
She nodded and answered the rest of my questions. She had been a nudist for about five years. Her mother had been running around naked for eleven years. And Papa? No, he wasn’t a nudist; he’d left home—clothed—about six years ago. She liked the nudist camp (there are nine hundred nudists at Chiappa); it was a pleasant, healthy pastime, though of course when the weather got chilly they put some clothes on. Sooner than I wished, she told me we had arrived, and she bounded toward the camp to fling her clothes off.
At Palombaggia, the tourist beach a few miles away, I hid behind a pine tree and put on my bathing trunks. I need hardly have bothered—the beach was nearly deserted. Rocks had tumbled into the sea, making natural jetties, and I decided to tramp over a dune and a rocky headland to get a view of the whole bay. There were, as far as the eye could see, groups of bathers, families, couples, children, people putting up windbreaks, strollers, rock collectors, sandcastle makers—and all of them naked. Naked mommy, naked daddy, naked kiddies, naked grandparents. Aside from the usual beach equipment, it was a happy little scene from idealized prehistory, naked Europeans amusing themselves, Cro-Magnon man at play. It was not a nudist camp. These were Germans, as bare as noodles, and apart from the absence of swimming togs, the beach resembled many I have seen on Cape Cod, even to the discarded Coke cans and candy wrappers. I stayed until rain clouds gathered and the sun was obscured. This drove the Germans behind their windbreaks and one woman put on a short jersey—no more than that—and paced the beach, squinting at the clouds and then leering at me. I suppose it was my fancy bathing trunks.
New York Subway
NEW YORKERS SAY SOME TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT THE subway—that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. For tourists it seems just another dangerous aspect of New York, though most don’t know it exists. “I haven’t been down there in years” is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more Original Sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.…”
“Subway” is not its name, because strictly speaking more than half
of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, “The Rapid Transit”? You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in the section of T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” often
… an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about …
It is also frightful-looking. It has paint and signatures all over its aged face. People who don’t take it, who never ride the subway and have no use for it, say that these junky pictures are folk art, a protest against the metropolitan grayness, and what a wonderful sense of color these scribblers have—which is complete nonsense. The graffiti are bad, violent, and destructive, and the people who praise them are either malicious or lazy-minded. The graffiti are so extensive and so dreadful it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are not the recipients of some enormous foundation grant. The subway has been vandalized from end to end. It smells so hideous you want to put a clothespin on your nose, and it is so noisy the sound actually hurts. Is it dangerous? Ask anyone and he will tell you there are about two murders a day on the subway (though this is not true). It really is the pits, people say.
You have to ride it for a while to find out what it is and who takes it and who gets killed on it.
It is full of surprises. Three and a half million fares a day pass through it, and in 1981 the total number of murder victims on the subway amounted to thirteen. This baker’s dozen does not include suicides (one a week), “man under” incidents (one a day), or “space cases”—people who quite often get themselves jammed between the train and the platform. Certainly the subway is very ugly and extremely noisy, but it only looks like a death trap. People ride it looking stunned and holding their breath. It’s not at all like the BART system in San Francisco, where people are constantly chattering, saying, “I’m going to my father’s wedding” or “I’m looking after my Mom’s children” or “I’ve got a date with my fiancée’s boyfriend.” In New York, the subway is a serious matter—the rackety train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream.