The Can o’ Beer, as countless English-speaking sailors have long called it, is by now a wide, ugly twentieth-century street that lives in their memories more for what its neighboring alleys offer them than for its own merits. It rises in a gigantic phallic thrust from the Vieux Port eastward toward the hard white hills that much of Marseille is built on, and in spite of its almost bleak lack of beauty, it throbs with vitality drawn from the body of the sea, the ancient riverbed it follows, the people who throng its wide sidewalks and race between its stoplights in every kind of mechanical transportation.
The Canebière has stretched along the path of the ancient sacred stream, the Lacydon, since before A.D. 909, when it was mentioned in a document of the Abbey of St. Victor, or perhaps since 1667 when King Louis XIV ordered new buildings along the path ropemakers had traced to gather hemp from its marshy banks. The whole length, of about a mile, was until 1928 called by three different names as it rose from the Old Port to the high hill where Longchamps now spouts out its beneficent waters, to replace the clogged and dwindling Lacydon in its ancient fight to cleanse an almost landlocked little harbor on the salty but nearly tideless Mediterranean.
The Lacydon was revered for its purity, by priests and people, long before Protis landed near its mouth in about 600 B.C., and even now its name has a watery magic in Marseille. Little fishing boats and sleek yachts and stylish clubs and marinas are called for it, and erudite diggers still probe its fresh-water springs, its banks and prehistoric campsites under concrete and stone and plaster, for artifacts to fix its dates firmly in history and not fable.
And over the ancient river a flood of traffic now flows, for many hours of every day. Past midnight a few signs still glare above the empty sidewalks, but except for the width of them and the street itself, it looks like any sleepy, small-town Broadway in Kansas or California.
It comes awake early, with people catching buses or hurrying toward the big railroad station of St. Charles on its northern hill. By eight it is bustling with shopkeepers heading for business or buyers for the enormous Marché des Capucins just to the south, or down to the Quai des Belges to get the pick of the fresh fish. By nine most of the shops are open: a mixed bag of elegant jewelry stores and cheap bazaars with tables out on the sidewalk piled with sleazy pants and cardboard shoes; big chain stores like Monoprix, and a famous cake shop, and an almost stylish depot catering to “Ladies of Unusual Build” (i.e., Fat, Skinny); a dozen places to buy perfumes. There are several small “exchanges,” where for a barely honest fee, money from any nation in the world can be bought or sold. There are pharmacies, usually with one old well-dressed lady sitting on a chair as if waiting for her prescription to be filled, to add respectability to the ageless trade in miracle cures for everything from warts to tertiary syphilis. There are stylish shoe stores and slick travel agencies, busy snack bars, and at the top of the long street, a few movie houses.
Once, about twenty-five years ago, my little girls and I were rambling up the Canebière, pleasantly full of breakfast and already thinking almost subliminally of ordering fresh grilled sardines for lunch, when a nicely dressed young American came from behind us and said, “Excuse me, but I was listening to you folks talk. And I need help.”
We were used to a certain amount of panhandling, although not in good Chicagoese, and Mary (my direct one) asked, “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’m really starved. Do you mind if I tell you why?” I readied myself for an old pitch: lost passport, got rolled, cable from sick mother.
He walked along beside us, and his story was too good to be anything but true. He had been chosen as Most Promising American Undergraduate by an international “luncheon” club, and for almost two weeks he had been escorted from one French town to another to give a set speech of goodwill (“It mentions Lafayette,” he said listlessly) and to sit through endless noonday banquets served in his honor. Every local specialty was produced for his pleasure. In Burgundy, he said, he ate snails four days running and coq au vin, three. In two Alsatian towns he was served choucroûte garnie on platters several feet long. Once there was a pig with a glazed apple in its mouth. Somewhere along the line he ate truffles in everything, “even in plain scrambled eggs,” he went on as if he were talking to himself.
“I’d be bilious,” Mary said, and he said, “No, I really feel O.K.” Then he stopped in his tracks, and said loudly, “But what I want to find out is, do you folks know where I can get a hamburger? If I could just eat a hamburger, I’d be all right. Five more days to go …”
We went into a huddle on the wide sidewalk, with people skirting us as if we might be contagious or tetched. The children told him that Surcouf made a really fine boeuf tartare, if he had enough money, and he said desperately, “That I’ve got! Plenty! But I have to eat a big banquet this noon, and I’ll be in some important fellow’s house tonight, and all I need is a kind of snack, something to get me through.” Then he said, “Would you care to join me, you ladies?”
Anne and Mary loved this overall designation, but grilled sardines lurked somewhere behind the pleasure on their faces. We hated to tell our gastronomical fugitive that we did not know of a single hamburger spot in Marseille, even in Provence; we asked him if he would settle for a fairly good excuse for a hot dog. His face fell and then cheered. We told him how to get to a snack stand near St. Charles. He thanked us with real emotion, and hurried up the Canebière, his head high. The children chided me when I laughed about his problem, and Anne (my hungry one) said she felt quite faint and in fact more so for food….
From across the street we read the big signs for porno movies. This was part of the Marseille routine, with my translation of a few words the girls had not yet learned in their convent. Later at lunch we talked again about the boy from Chicago, and decided his trouble might have been worse, if the luncheon clubs had tried to serve him American delicacies like pumpkin pie and fried oysters … even hamburgers.…
That morning we had stopped for breakfast about a quarter of the way up the Canebière. We came onto it from our hotel on the first short street to the right, Rue Beauvau, which runs from the big main street three blocks to the Opera. In another short block we passed the monolithic Bourse to the left, and the little Place across from it, bleak and quiet then, with plane trees around it but not showing themselves near the long perspective of the Canebière.
On the west corner of the Place, for a few years into the fifties, one of the last of the street’s famous brasseries looked almost like an elegant tearoom, or the solarium of an upper-class English hotel, with comfortable wicker armchairs painted white. It was patronized, however, by firmly French gentlemen of all ages past fifty, respectable but not stodgy. They came in the morning to read their favorite newspapers, before lunch to meet their peers for a mild drink or two, in the afternoon to doze or talk or play cards. There were genteel older ladies at teatime, and attractive younger ones then and perhaps at night, not all of them on the prowl, but apparently meeting people like aunts and lovers. And we went there for breakfast on sunny mornings because it was a fine place to watch the street, and the croissants and café au lait were the best we had yet tasted, indeed the best of our whole lives.
(This paragon of cafés is by now a streamlined publicity office for airplanes, and the only big cafés left on the Canebière are up across from the sad old Hotel de Noailles. They have a dogged air about them: elderly waiters walk tenderly on their hopeless feet; the once grand hotel has a Polynesian cocktail bar, a snack lounge. The few patrons of the café look as if they would rather be in a tiny narrow pinball joint than in spacious dinginess. But across the street under the trees of the Allées de Meilhan, there is the ineffable sight and smell of the Flower Market, three times a week.…)
One block up the Can from the Quai des Belges, there is a strange “tourist” shop on the corner of the Rue Beauvau. I knew at first sight that it was not what it seemed, but what it really was I cannot even guess. For years I was aware of the dust on the windowshelves, which thoroughly hid the interior. The little painted clay figures of the Nativity called santons, set up in every local household for Christmas and in every gift shop all year ’round for tourists, were uninteresting. The postcards faded irrevocably. The lampshades made of translucent shells lost any dubious allure they might once have had. But there was always a steady come-and-go of thin young men, certainly not dressed for the fishing boats a few dozen feet away.
Once in about 1960 my children wanted to buy a Christmas present for a dear friend who was sitting in a high window at that moment in the Hotel Beauvau, watching the Port. After long study from the sidewalk of the dirty windowshelves, they discovered a tiny silver icebucket with a bottle of champagne packed in cubes of crystal. That was the predestined offering, and it was Christmas, and we went in for it.
The man behind the rear counter looked at us with what I charitably adjudged to be amazement, and his few dapper customers slid away. He assured us grudgingly that the wee trinket was costly, but my children had saved some money, and put it out grandly for what was later called at Tiffany’s in New York a very valuable fantaisie, indeed silver, indeed crystal, and worth fifty times what they had paid. (The adored friend was appreciative but uninterested, although his wife liked it.) Both the shady boss and I were glad when we left, but the little girls were prancing with pleasure, and the trinket, dusty as it was, promised well.
I vowed silently to the puzzled uneasy boss, “I’ll never come back to interrupt you,” and I never did. But years later when I rounded that corner again, people were dragging a safe and cartons from the little shop, and I felt a pang about the dusty santons, the obsolete postcards. I longed suddenly for a little gondola made of polished shells that we had often laughed at: it had a light in it that went on and off, to show a geisha doll lying suggestively in a nest of erect coral spikes. It was marked Hong Kong, of course.
Why had I not bought it? There were two reasons: it was so hellishly quaint as to make me seem affected, especially if I carried it in my limited luggage past the mean-eyed customs inspectors in some place like Los Angeles. And I did not want to go into the strange secret shop again. The man behind the counter had not wanted me to come, and especially not to buy anything. He was pretending to sell tourist stuff, but what was he really selling? Whatever it was, I did not want it. My girls’ little silver and crystal toy could have been a password, part of a code? Was he a fence or supplier? What was he really selling?
Certainly we got our money’s worth, and judging by the low price we paid, although it seemed like a lot to Anne and Mary, he was glad to get rid of the bit of jewelry and us. The shell gondola, so lewd, still amuses me to regret, but I did not care what new front would occupy that corner on the Canebière, and felt nothing but detachment when, not long ago, I went past the little shop and saw the familiar clutter of trash and possible treasures beyond the dusty windows.
The man was back, I thought without curiosity. And my children were safe, by now.
Two little blocks up from the Vieux Port, on the right-hand side of the wide street and opposite the gigantic but strange appealing monolith called the Bourse, which can be reached by a blood-curdling pattern of pedestrian crossings, is a pleasant small square currently named for Charles de Gaulle.
The Marseillais, at least the kind I have met during the last couple of decades, plainly do not waste much love on their historical Grey Eminence, and when I would say to a taxi driver, “Place de Gaulle, please,” I was unfailingly rebuked with a sardonic correction, “The Place du Gé-né-ra-l de Gaulle, perhaps?” Of course I would agree, sometimes with a weakly muttered, “Sorry,” and the rest of the ride would be mutually amicable, or at least not hostile politically.
During the Revolution in the late eighteenth century, there was of course a busy guillotine in the little square, then called Liberté, perforce, but I have never received any cruel vibrations there. Once I lived on a small square in Dijon that had held the public guillotine during the worst years of the Revolution, and the gradual presence of its fear and rage became too strong, and I fled after three months. Nothing ugly ever happened to me on the little Place in Marseille, though, unless one counts human contacts: a Gypsy tapping hopelessly on a taxi window, a terrified tipsy Parisian. People have met there in the sunshine and rain for a long time, for good reasons as well as bad, and by now old women call the benches their own, and knit and watch over their new descendants. Many of them look as if they have sold fish or balloons or hot peanuts along the Quai des Belges in their lustier days, and its sounds still roll up to them, over all the noise of traffic, birds, babies.
The Place de Gaulle has been there since it was laid out in 1784, after the Grand Pavilion of the Arsenal of Galleys was torn down. It was called Place de la Tour, for an important man and not a tower. Later it was Necker, again for politically judicious reasons, and while the guillotine took over, it was logically renamed Liberté, and just as reasonably Impérial during the Empire, and then Royale. After the bulky grandeur of the Bourse rose in the 1860s, it gradually and almost grudgingly became known as the Place de la Bourse by the Marseillais, who liked more glamour in their civic vocabulary. It is interesting to speculate on how they will shake off the present unwelcome name, and for what substitute.…
Meanwhile the tidy little square is no longer anything it has ever been before, except that it is everything, with a definitely growing karma about it. It is an easy amble from the Vieux Port, and a short block or two from the Opera and its immediately outlying attractions, ranging from the Cozy-à-Go-Go, with rooms by the hour, day, or week, to the comparatively respectable Hotel Beauvau. Not far away in opposite directions are two of the big covered but open markets that feed the town. There is a glass kiosk like a birdcage on one corner of the Place, bulging with courteous fatherly old cops who help bewildered strangers, of which we are many. There are almost always taxis, with their little cafés across the street from the stand, fumy with pastis and with disinfectants from the obligatory toilets.
I have roamed around through the square whenever I was near it, for almost fifty years. I keep an eye on things, like what wars do to little shops. Some are empty now that once looked smart and thriving: a place that sold elegant leather gloves and belts and purses is a snack bar, as I remember … something fleeting like that. There used to be an English pub, but War and the Exchange and perhaps the Common Market closed it, as happened to a lot of British pharmacies and bars all along the Côte d’Azur, and now it is bleak and boarded up. Some noble old buildings are “modernized” into one-room studio apartments, and a once-stylish café is now an airline agency.
And one time when the Place was hastily being transformed into a little park for a Christmas present to Marseille, I watched the tall plane trees that ring three sides of it being pruned in what seemed a crazily brutal way. It was painful. They were butchered. Some of us stood outside the barricades and watched with real dismay as the fine trees endured this punishment. Then, magically, for Christmas Eve and the formal opening with its speeches and music, the tall trees turned into arbres de Noël, twinkling with thousands of little lights the color of champagne. By now they are still Christmas trees every winter, but lend cool green beauty to everything around them in the summertime, like fashion models, artificially tall and graceful.
After World War II, there seemed to be an extra lot of thin tumblers and jugglers doing shaky handstands on old carpets rolled out on the pavement of what was still the Place de la Bourse, but since about 1971 when the Old Girl got her face lifted again and wore a new if somewhat unwelcome name, she has become a charming if comparatively colorless little square, and it is rather difficult to think of it screaming with furious citizens, running with blood, blazing with firebrands.
Parts of it are a little sunken, but not so much as to be hard on oldsters and toddlers. The modern benches are many, and artfully comfortable. There is water waving musically up from shallow basins. The shrewdly planted shrubbery is low enough to discourage satyrs and agile muggers. (There are few of the latter in a port town dedicated to more serious crime, but no doubt the tidy little park has its fair share of licentious dreamers, even in broad daylight.…)
It is a nice place now, very nice, very pretty, and a few years after its latest rebirth it has a pleasant feeling of being there, of being accepted … at least until another leader can lend his political, emotional, and usually posthumous name to it. It will surely be called less cynically than by its present one. And underneath the new pavements and fountains and perhaps pre-Martian and probably post-hydrogen artifacts called monuments, there will always lie very old bones.
There have been rich invaders in Marseille since the first men found its salty swamps, and it has always made good money for them. That is why its Chamber of Commerce, oldest in France and perhaps the world, is powerful and canny, controlling airports, canals, harbors, tunnels, governed by a constantly renewed body of local merchants with a real doge as their leader, some of them already as subtly Arabian by now as they have been Corsican, Sicilian, Roman, back through the Greeks to the Ségobridgians themselves …
After the all-powerful body was formed in 1599, it functioned in several places on the Quai du Port until it moved into the new Town Hall in 1673. It continued to grow, along with the city, and shifted to temporary quarters near where it is now, until Prince Louis Napoleon laid the first stone in 1852 for the present heavy enormous rectangle called La Bourse. In 1860, when he was an emperor at least pro tem, he inaugurated this temple to Man’s studiously regulated cupidity, and it still stands, facing what is for a time called the Place de Gaulle.
There is a majestic anchor of great machismo in front of the impressive bulk of the temple. Inside, there are hidden delights. On the main floor, in what was meant as a kind of atrium, there is a quite fascinating maritime history of the Old and New Ports, with good maps and models; higher is an excellent public library of the town’s past, to be reached and enjoyed at certain times on specified days, and worth every frustrating assault, through long corridors and up endless staircases at the back of the palace; there is even a post office on one side, where I once watched a girl stamp and mail a large flimsy straw hat with a ribbon on it saying “Souvenir de Nice.” (This may sound trivial, but her insouciance and the clerk’s sardonic acceptance were part of the town.)
Of course ports are places of traffic, in and out, and Marseille has been trafficking in most of our human commodities since before Protis, the Phocean, went there in about 600 B.C.
The Greeks had been stopping along the Mediterranean coast a long time, usually to buy salt before putting out for England and its valuable metals, or perhaps to head directly home again with a full load of the precious stuff. Undoubtedly there was other traffic with the illiterate but canny Ségobridgians: a few coins for a night with a lady, a small amphora of wheat or wine for a night with a girl. Protis was apparently the first sailor to stop in the marshy little harbor and then be paid for his favors: the night he anchored his galley, he was offered the King’s daughter Gyptis by her own impetuous choice, if he would stay and rule with her. Who could refuse? How could he lose?
This forthright bartering is as intrinsic now as it was then, in the young captain’s powerful new kingdom, and is probably why the first Chamber of Commerce was established in Marseille almost four hundred years ago. The control has always been rigidly honorable and cautious, but under its almost imperial nose a dozen other international markets have continued to flourish. Not one of them is new. Now and then, and thanks perhaps to social pressures, some rare woman can be worth more than olive oil or salt, but at this moment heroin and cocaine are much more profitable to handle than “white slaves” ever were.…
Marseille is noted, as well as notorious, for its drug traffic. It is, as it always has been, a perfect center for any such trading, on the Mediterranean with three ancient continents at hand, and therefore close to depthless sources of raw material. It has a perfect Old Port, and an impressively efficient new one, easy of access and therefore of quick exit, with convenient depots in outmoded big villas scattered over the hills. It is very old, and so it is accustomed and amenable to every kind of trafficking, neither with open welcome nor with disapproval and punishment, but with ageless disinterest. It is also new and alert, and can offer the most modern laboratories and processing plants for uncountable amounts of opium and other raw drugs that are reduced, cut, tricked, distributed, mostly to the West and perhaps most of all to the Americas.
Of course some opiates are used in Marseille, as they have long been on this planet, wherever there is either sated abundance or intolerable misery. (Even the word Canebière is derived from the Latin one for hemp!) I myself have never watched any “pushing” there, although I have openly been offered a fix on Geary Street in San Francisco, and more than once in women’s toilets in luxury hotels from there to New York and back.
In Marseille, I have never noticed what I would identify as a user or addict in need of his help, although I am sure this cannot be literally so: various forms of human sadness become part of any great scene, and do not stand out. Here at home I have often been depressed or frightened by obvious highs-and-lows of people I have watched or known. But as Joseph Conrad once wrote, the Marseillais are an abstemious race, so that just as he never saw any very fat or very thin townspeople, so have I never been conscious of a badly drugged state in anyone I’ve seen there. (In this same vein, I have rarely seen a Marseillais more than happily tiddly from wine or pastis, although I am sure that alcoholism and drug addiction are commoner than they may have been one or two thousand years ago.)
Of course trade, illicit or straight, breeds its own form of subtle inebriation, and I have watched well-dressed burghers leaving the new Chamber of Commerce, or the great banks near the Place Castellane and the Rond-Point, whose clothes were only a shade more impeccably conservative, whose careful steps were only a shade steadier, than those of their henchmen around the Vieux Port. All of them have the same faces, carefully controlled in public, cold as hawks, with well-massaged jowls and a subtly Caesarean look that means heady power in the old town, as it has since the General himself reduced it to comparative serfdom in a deadly squabble with Pompey in 49 B.C.
These men all possess an intoxicating strength, and are affably courteous when they meet one another at lunch in stylish restaurants. At night it is different, and the so-called leaders of the town, escorting women obviously their wives, never recognize their shadier counterparts, as obviously dining with beautiful Scandinavian ski bunnies down from Davos or costly-looking Paris mannequins “resting” in Nice. The traders’ faces are different with sundown: more socially cautious on the one hand, on the other more arrogantly relaxed. The next morning, though, masks fit on again, and barter in international oil stocks as well as heroin, race horses, and girls will go on addictively, as it has for almost too long to recall.
According to local and even worldwide reports, traditional mob control has lost its power in Marseille crime levels. There are apparently no solid leaders; worse yet, a single one is missing, the capo, the chef. Instead, many small groups, their goons inept spratlings in an ancient shark-infested sea, fumble through petty holdups and car thefts and riots, mostly in neighboring provincial towns, or simply “wait around,” as the Pinball Boys seemed doomed to do, pandering a little, betting punily, snoozing off the caffein shakes.
Meanwhile, the vulpine traders and their henchmen keep an eye on the general state of things, perhaps waiting like many other earthlings for another Capone or Hitler. Business is good, although in flux: cocaine, hash, and heroin sell well in the West, but sexual permissiveness has hurt the flesh market.
Local Catholics are bitter against Protestants about their apparent tolerance of this new promiscuity. Protestants are equally bitter about Romish “charity” toward the insane acceptance of “Arab” citizens since the Algerian troubles in the early 1960s. Both religious groups in turn are openly hostile and even vicious about denouncing the Communists for all this. Trade suffers, but continues.
And the honored Marseillais who carry on their long supervision of the many-colored commerce of the city know almost atavistically that ideological strife has never much hurt the market. They have been appointed to four-year terms in the Chamber to “guard and defend their fellow-citizens on land and sea,” and since 1599 have done so. If they must share their fashionable tailors with the traders they smile to at lunch at the Jambon de Parme or the Pescadou and then cut dead at dinner in the New York, they act with one eye on their city’s honor and the other on its prosperity. Their mystical fortress, the Bourse, is behind them.
The palatial Bourse itself has had its whole face washed, slowly, side after side. It has been scrubbed and scraped, a gigantic and tedious cosmetic process all round, and especially on the Canebière façade, with its heroic statues stonily enduring most intimate explorations for soot, bird lice, mildew, and related grime. For a few decades now it may look somewhat friendlier and less austere than when it sulks behind city dirt, but never more ponderously important. The little square across the street remains subject to frequent changes of names, depending upon the times, but it seems inconceivable that the enormous fortress of the old-young Bourse will not signify commercial security for several centuries more, to the canny citizens who trust in it as a potent symbol.
A little farther up the Canebière from the Bourse is the Cours St. Louis, a pretty leafy Place that in good weather teams with snack stands and with people eating at them, eating on the café-terrasses, eating on the curbs. It all smells good and stays tidy, because who buys food and then throws it away? And across the Canebière is the Cours Belsunce, with the noble Port d’Aix at its far north and a big fish stand down at the hectic entrance. Traffic lights there turn red and green, cars stop or screech ahead in the inimitably hellish music of any such intersection in France, and people go right on choosing their squid or scallops from the cool seaweedy piles of them on the corner. In summer, when the stand is closed, it seems strange to turn into the Cours Belsunce without its whiff of clean subtle brininess.
All the crossings along the Canebière are hair-raising to a stranger, because of the astonishing speed the cars can attain in a few feet from a dead stop, and although there are zones marked for pedestrians in several places, it is recommended (by me as well as any other visitor claiming average intelligence and survival wishes) to spot the traffic lights and use them. There are three or four, and they are worth the extra footage to reach them. And once across the wide Canebière and safely onto the sidewalk again, one feels mystically younger.…
A good place to cross, except perhaps during the meal hours, is up in front of the vaguely drab old Noailles café, where the Boulevards Dugommier and Garibaldi meet at the Canebière. The Noailles is a fine place to sit, after a late morning survey of the Flower Market, which is always crowded, even in any rain but a downpour. People look dazed by its fresh beauty. They buy whatever flowers are in season, and every kind of nursery planting in the spring, every kind of dry root bush or tree in the fall. They buy things in pots. They take their own containers and supervise the skillful gardeners who fill them. They gather around a collection of succulents, and then drift on to look speculatively at some rare hideous begonias.
On about June 24, there used to be a Garlic Fair along the enchanted Allées, and dealers came from all over France to choose their year’s supply of the virile herb. Famous restaurateurs were there, and unknown housewives, and if the wind was right, the wonderful light whiff of all the ivory ropes of the stuff could be caught as soon as one turned up from the Quai des Belges. By now the Fair has been moved a little south of the Canebière, but it can still be smelled out, and it still is exciting.
And from the first Sunday in December, there is the Foire des Santons. It is unique, which means normal in Marseille. Dozens of booths are lined up under the bare trees of Les Allées. There are beautiful santons from human size to one-half inch, by local santonniers as well as any other reputable artists in the country or in the world, and there are many clumsy, undistinguished kinds alongside, painted garishly or left plainly in the baked “red earth of Provence stained with the Saracens’ blood.”
Weekends are liveliest as Christmas approaches, of course, with families choosing additions to their own crêches or buying new characters of the Nativity story for their friends, but perhaps the best (or strangest) time to go along Les Allées is after the holidays. Many of the stands have closed and moved away for another year. A few old women in layers of wool and thick felt boots stand hopefully behind their little counters. At first they seem to have almost nothing to sell. Then they begin to pull out broken shoeboxes and grimy paper sacks filled with flawed tiny images. Some of them are pitiful, or plainly prankish. Once I bought a two-inch santon of a famous character in the Nativity play, the village simpleton. When he looks up at the Star blazing in the sky, his jaw drops, his eyes roll, and he raises his hands mutely toward Heaven. This time, though, a mischievous santonnier had neatly turned his arms downward, at the elbows, so that his ecstatic upward gaze and his earthy gesture were shockingly at odds. At first I thought this heathenish little joke was funny. But before I took the santon home, I let it fall onto a tile floor and be shattered.
There were other small tricks that had been pulled, perhaps by naughty apprentices, and gradually the old women brought them out, looking casual but with a sharp eye on my reactions. Most of the dolls were unpainted. There were wee dogs with five legs, and some shepherds with only one. A sow a few inches long lay on a pancake of clay suckling ten piglets that were really kittens. I bought a rooster with his head on backward. With a little patience it would be easy to assemble a small-scale Nativity worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, or perhaps Salvador Dali … and it was interesting that the crowds of jolly, pushing Christmas shoppers had intuitively rejected all these mistakes. I took several back to California to give to people, but by the time I got home, their first strange humor had vanished, and they seemed almost evil.
And, as always, the windows of the dim old Café de Noailles are the best place to watch the Foire … warm and lively in the winter holidays, even at night. People come in with their children, and compare their santons over orange sodas and pastis, according to their ages. Thin “Arabs” drink tea silently. The elderly waiters move slightly faster, and the fat cashier is almost pretty in her best clothes. Down the winding stairs, the mysterious subterranean toilets rumble and shudder as usual, under the traffic of the big intersection.
The Noailles is most familiar to me at noon, though, in winter or any other season. Then the people run wildly homeward for their two-hour meals, and on Flower Market days they carry big bunches of tulips, say, or a flat of pansies. Once I saw a very short Oriental girl totter toward the café and then across the Canebière onto the Boulevard Garibaldi, under an enormous pot with a rubber plant in it, taller than she was. I watched her with amazement and alarm, but under her black silk trousers her knees were not even buckling.
This corner café is a prime place to look for a peculiar color of hair dye that was popular in 1973 but almost rare three years later. I call it Canebière Red, and like to assume that it is the same “henna” that was used two thousand and more years ago. It is almost purple in its shadows, and is more orange than scarlet. It seems to make female hair stiff and coarse, like the stuffing in a very old mattress. Many middle-aged women used it in ’73, even elderly fishwives from the Quai des Belges. Mostly it was seen, though, on tough girls of twenty or so, the kind that made no bones about being what they were … mixed blood, African, Gypsy, Indo-Chinese, candles burning bright and fast. By now this unique color has grown out, faded, perhaps even been shaved off to help cheap wigs fit better. The few women one spots from the old Noailles who still wear it are otherwise like others of their general class, short heavy sensible people, who would have their hair dyed black again if they had not invested too much in 1973 for Canebière Red.
And past Les Allées and their elegant old bandstand, now a publicity office run by the city, the Canebière seems to end logically with a huge church, set obliquely on the rising ground, called St. Vincent de Paul or “Les Réformés” or its more correct name of Les Augustins-Réformés. It is typically Marseillais, in its tongue-in-cheek bravura, for although it looks pure Northern Gothic of about the thirteenth century, it was built just in time to be dedicated in 1867. It still remains impressive: plainly an ecclesiastical joke, but not a shoddy one … perhaps a trick, but not a lie! Like the santons of the wintry fair below it in the Allées, it is noble as well as subtly prankish, a fitting comment on the street it dominates.