Mayes - A year in the world: journeys of a passionate traveller

Contents

To the couple standing in the middle of the autostrada beside their jackknifed camper.

To the mother and two-year-old boy in seats 42 A and B during the ninth hour of flight.

To the family of six crossing Europe in a Deux Cheveaux singing Blessed Be the Ties That Bind.

To the small girl screaming on the floor of the trattoria at eleven P.M.

To K.A.T., who said Good, now Ive been and dont have to go again.

To the forgotten new yellow panties and bra left drying on the rim of the hotel bathtub.

To the captain diving into waving algae in search of the dropped scuba mask.

To the suitcase that went to India.

To T.A., who couldnt open the train door and rode on to Castiglion Fiorentino.

To the Southern man limping through Pienza calling to his wife, Ive seen all I want to see.

To the character described by Novalis, who went off to find a blue flower seen in a dream.

To Edwardwith you I will go.

Acknowledgments

We found many friends during these travels, and for friendship I am always most grateful. Special thanks to Fulvio, Aurora, and Edoardo Di Rosa, Carlos Lopes, Enver Lucas (Geographic Expeditions), Lori Woods, Susan MacDonald, Cole Dalton, Kate Abbe, Robin and John Heyeck, the Mavromihalis family, Steven Rothfeld, Bernice and Armand Thieblot, Riccardo Bertocci, Maria Ida and Salvatore Avallone of Villa Matilde, Rachid Tabib, Hafid El Amrani, Guvan Demir, and Lina Bartelli. My abiding love to all the writers whose works enriched my travels and stretched my worldview.

Peter Ginsberg of Curtis Brown Ltd., my agent, shares my love of travel, as does Charlie Conrad, my editor at Broadway Books. Both have given me their enthusiasm and expert guidance. I am lucky to work with them, and with their staffs. My thanks also go to Francesca Liversidge at Transworld; Dave Barbor, for international publications; Terry Karydes, for the design of this book; Laura Maestro, for the map of my travels; and my publicists, Joanna Pinsker and Rachel Rokicki. Catherine Pollock and Alison Presley brought their ideas and attention to this book. To Steven Barclay of the Steven Barclay Agency, a grand bacione. May we all toast our travels together soon.

The wild seed of this book took root long ago, and I offer mille grazie to my father, who said the family motto should be Packing and Unpacking, and to my mother, who always said, Go.

Preface

Cupolas
of Alghero

... we are words on a journey

not the inscriptions of settled people.

W. S. MERWIN

The silhouette of Alghero rises from the Mediterranean. My husband, Ed, and I are walking toward town just after noon, when sunlight slips straight through the clean water, rippling the white bottom of the sea with ribbons of light.

Limpida, he says, chiara. Limpid, clear, the slow tide pushing light in bright arcs across the sandy floor. Alghero, nominally an Italian town on the western edge of Sardinia, has colorful geometric-tiled cupolas, Catalan street names, Arabic flourishes in the cuisine. I feel a sudden attraction to Spain, to exotic Moorish courtyards, fountains that soothed those desert invaders, to the memory of a Latin man who once whispered to me, Please, share my darkness in Barcelona. A desire for some fierce, unnameable, dour, and dignified essence of Spain. I imagine walking there, along a whitewashed wall, peeling an orange, a book of Lorcas poems in my pocket.

Id like to taste the last drop, I say, a non sequitur.

Ed is not bothered by non sequiturs. He just picks up on the word taste. Were going to a trattoria where they specialize in lobster with tomatoes and onions. Sounds deliciousaragosta allalghereselobster from these waters cooked in the style of Alghero. He consults a piece of paper where he has written an address. And yes, I know what you mean.

What if we didnt go home? What if we just kept travelling? The European writers always had their Wanderjahr, their year of wandering in their youth. Id like one of those, even at this late date.

Probably better now than when you were young. Where do you want to go?

How far are we from Spain?

I must mention that I have a job. He points to a hump of land. Neptunes Grottowell take a boat out there after lunch. I would like to go to Morocco, he adds.

Greece was the first foreign place I ever wanted to see and Ive never been. A map of the world unscrolls in my mind, the one I looked at when I was ten in a small town in Georgia. Bright flags line the sides of the map, and the countries are saffron, lavender, rose, and mint according to their altitude and geology. Sweden. Poland. The Basque country. India. Then I shift into an explosion of images: Im threading my way through the spice bazaar in Istanbul, assaulted by hot scents rising from sacks of fenugreek, turmeric, gnarly roots, and dried seeds; were leaning on the railing of a slow boat when a crocodile splats its tail in the murky green waters of the Nile; Ed is shaking out a picnic cloth as I look into the green dips and curves of a valley punctuated with cromlechs and dolmens; Im driving past a marsh, russet in autumn light, and I recognize the barrier island off the coast of Georgia, one of the Golden Isles, where I spent summer vacations as a child.

That archipelago was the first place I ever longed for. During the rainy winter months of my childhood, sometimes mercurial sensations of the island came to me in a rushhumid, salty air catches in my hair, the saw palmettos clatter in the torrid breezes of August, and my hand sweats in our cook Willie Bells hand as we walk toward a low bridge, where she will lower a crab trap baited with high meat into black water. I ached not to be in Miss Golfs first-grade classroom, where the floors smelled of pine oil and sawdust and the little letters followed the big letters in colored chalk around the room. I wanted the firm feel of Willie Bells hand, the horror of rotting raw meat in the crab trap, sunrises on the beach, and the long walk back to the house on the crushed oyster shell path.

At six, that sensation was a tide, a rhythm, a hurt, a joy. This powerful first sensation of a place I have come to know well because Ive kept it all my life, just as Ive kept square thumbnails and insomnia. One of my favorite writers, Freya Stark, acknowledged a similar feeling in The Valley of the Assassins: It shone clearly distinct in the evening light, an impressive sight to the pilgrim. I contemplated it with the feelings due to an object that still has the power to make one travel so far. Her it being anything that pulls us hard enough so that we take the passport from the drawer, pack the minimum, and head out the door with an instinct as sure as that of an ancient huntress with quiver and bow.

The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter. How my mother would have loved the mansard apartment we borrowed from a friend in Paris. Will I be lucky enough to show pieces of the great world to my grandchild? Im longing to hold his hand when he first steps into a gondola. Ive seen his freedom burst upon him on hikes in California. Arms out, he runs forward. I recognize the surge.