Marseilles—the yellow-speckled maw of a seal with brine dripping between its teeth. When its gullet opens to snag the brown and black bodies thrown to it by ship’s companies according to their timetables, it exhales a stink of oil, urine, and printer’s ink. This comes from the tartar baking hard on its massive teeth: newspaper kiosks, lavatories, oyster stalls.
The harbor people are a bacillus culture, the porters and prostitutes issuing from the city’s continuous decomposition with a resemblance to human beings. But the palette itself is pink, which is the color of shame here in Marseilles, and of poverty. Hunchbacks wear pink, as do female beggars. And the filthy women who cruise along the rue Bouterie take their only tint from the sole pieces of clothing they wear: pale-pink shifts.