Le Voyageur

HOW IT HAPPENED I DO NOT KNOW. But in 1979 I had sailed off to start a new life in America, leaving my family safely behind me in London, and then one way or another they all ended up in New York. The gloom and lobsters of the Chelsea Hotel had pleased my mother so much—or maybe she was just lazy—that she looked no farther and bought an apartment in a brownstone one block away on Twenty-second Street. And there two Americans who had finally come home set up house together, not in the New York of their imagination but in a harsh, expensive, ugly, and indifferent city where, instead of being feted by le tout Londres nobody paid much attention to them at all. Hylan wrote me a letter describing what a punishing adjustment it had been:

America was meant to be some kind of rebirth with little reference to the social reality. And the realities were so much more than we had imagined. Our little English souls were tried. Gone was the exceptionalism and in its place a sordid squalor that permeated everything we even vaguely understood. Holing up in the Chelsea Hotel with its shabby glamour, we struggled through our separate terrains, wandering New York like ghosts looking for a lost time. Dee was still funny through it all with that pilgrim’s resilience shielding, somewhat, a state of disbelief.…

The awful irony was that their “little English souls” were far more disturbed in New York than their big American souls had ever been in London. Playing the brash outsider while married to Freddie, whose fame had turned the lonely little boy at Eton with the funny name and looks into the consummate insider, was easy. As Lady Ayer (acquired when Freddie was knighted in 1970) she could piss all over anything and anybody she wanted from inside the tent—to borrow LBJ’s inimitable metaphor—but with Professor Sir Alfred Ayer removed from the construct, Dee Wells found herself entangled in a mess of soggy canvas and frayed ropes, in a strange campsite that she didn’t care for at all.

ALTHOUGH HIS GYPSY WANDERINGS around London, squatting with various friends, had come to an end when he moved in with Freddie and Vanessa, Nick was still having trouble staying in school and staying off drugs. He had dropped out of City and East College, then he had dropped back in, and by the time he left he had pulled off a major coup by failing to pass a single solitary exam. The drugs business was much more serious. If Nick didn’t break out of that world soon, he knew he would get sucked in deeper and deeper, until Christ-knows-what happened. Just about the only thing his parents agreed upon, as their divorce cranked its venomous way through the English legal system, was that their son needed to get out of London and make a fresh start in—where else?—New York.

Professionally Nick was willing to give anything a whirl. He started out with Larry’s Italian Ices, sold from a street cart, with Larry taking most of the profits, moved on to a similar arrangement with the Great Dane Pastry Company, which always made me think of those gigantic dogs but was actually a silly pun. Nick soon tired of being outside in the healthy fresh air all day long, and his next venture involved a vintage clothing store called Trash and Vaudeville on St. Mark’s Place, followed by a short spell at a rival establishment, Andy’s Chee-Pees, located on the same busy street. But maybe Nick wasn’t cut out for the schmatte business after all; perhaps home furnishings would be a better bet? And so it turned out to be. Having started as a stock boy at ABC Carpets, by the time he left he was the manager of the new furniture department.

Still, Nick knew that his picaresque adventures in the ice-cream, carpet, pastry, distressed-jeans, and sofa business couldn’t go on forever, so on a visit with his dad to Bard College, where Freddie was being given an honorary degree, a deal was made: If he could pass his SATs (which he did with no trouble at all) he could start at Bard in the fall of 1984. For an extremely bright kid whose education—through no fault of his own—had been a total dog’s dinner, Bard was just the answer. Apart from stuffing Nick’s head full of possibly useful, or at least interesting, notions and knowledge, it had the added advantage of getting him out of Twenty-second Street and two hundred miles away from his mother.

That first Christmas after Vanessa died, Freddie came to stay with us in New York. Deeply wounded, almost unable to function, he’d had a true coup de vieux and was suddenly a vulnerable old man in need of looking after. At home with baby Rebecca, my life floated by in a milky miasma watching my daughter lurch about the playground, cooking soothing nursery food, and teaching her to put bits of it in her mouth. When Freddie arrived in Bank Street, I just set another place at the table, and we all had shepherd’s pie and rice pudding together, served on Peter Rabbit plates. Without the strength to do much of anything beyond reading, and writing a bit, he would sit slumped on the sofa, an unopened book by his side, and stare despairingly out the window. How, alone in his midseventies, could he ever hope to rebuild a life for himself?

ONE DAY when Rebecca was well over two years old, Peter and Harry Evans had lunch, and as they parted on the sidewalk outside the Century Club on Forty-third Street, Harry asked him what I was up to. Not a lot, bugger all. She has sunk into a bottomless milky pit, lost her mind, and fallen in love with somebody else: “Actually, we’ve just [sic] had a baby, but I know she is really eager to get back to work.”

“Ask her to call me, please. I’m starting a new magazine.”

Until Harry came along, travel magazines published yawn-inducing rubbish cobbled together by sycophantic hacks who roamed the world, courtesy of the airlines and hotels they wrote about. But what if you did things in a completely different way? What if Condé Nast Traveler were to send writers incognito, pay its own way, tell it like it is, and run stories that sometimes scared advertisers away?

“You mean, Harry, I can call up any writer I like and send them anywhere in the world?”

Oh, this was going to be way more fun than dealing with those argumentative Israeli generals at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Edna O’Brien got tangled up in the romance of Dublin; V. S. Pritchett explored his private London; Peter Matthiessen trekked through the Himalayas; Norman Lewis, at age eighty, returned to the Ronda; Christopher Hitchens profiled the incomparable Patrick Leigh Fermor; Jan/James Morris described what it was like to travel both as a man and as a woman, as only she/he could have done; Christopher Buckley cruised the Amazon with Malcolm Forbes; Gregor von Rezzori went back in time to his childhood home in the Danube Delta—and so it went on. On a trip to London I discovered a book by Wilfred Thesiger, documenting his travels among the Marsh Arabs in the thirties (a half century later the marshes and their inhabitants would be decimated by Saddam Hussein) that became a twelve-page feature, illustrated with Thesiger’s own photographs. Reading Granta in the bath one day, I came across an extract from a book by Martha Gellhorn, who had famously reported on the Spanish civil war (she’d met Hemingway, her future husband, while they were both being shelled by the Nationalists), and after a long epistolary courtship, persuaded her to write a piece for me.

I don’t recall how Harry and I came up with the idea, such as it was, but I remember we both thought it was rather inspired at the time. Martha Gellhorn lived in Wales, Lord Snowdon had a Welsh title; why don’t we send them off to wander around this country so dear to both their hearts, and see what happens? At first Ms. Gellhorn quite sensibly resisted our scheme, but after an evening spent getting drunk together on vodka and orange juice, served in tooth mugs, in her hotel room in New York (for some reason she’d refused to go to the bar), we agreed that she might think about it again. Her next letter began “Dear Gully, I think boozing in a hotel room justifies first names, don’t you?” But she was still holding out on the earl. And after I’d given up hope of ever getting her to do it, I suddenly received this: “Dear Gully, I may be loopy and you may have found another writer, but I’ve changed my mind. Suddenly it seems funny to me, Snowdon and me, really the Odd Couple. We have in common being branded for life by our first mistaken marriages. Only I am much worse off than he is.”

However, Martha was an extremely busy lady, and it was impossible to pin her down on dates. She was revising two books, starting a new one, making a television documentary in Finland, looking after her roses, and if that wasn’t enough, she had just been visited by a plague of Welsh locusts:

A hamsin was blowing yesterday and there is an invisible and inaudible insect, called the harvest bug because it appears in the spring, lasts all summer and disappears invisibly at harvest time. It attacks only under clothes and preferably in the erogenous zones. Its bite beats anything I have met in jungles, tropics, or anywhere on earth, size of a really strong hive, burns for days.

She ended the letter with “Are you well and pretty and still short-skirted? When I see new fashion pictures I think of you.” I was touched and ridiculously flattered.

But back to the earl:

I think I’ve made a five star mistake in thinking it would be fun/funny to travel with the Earl … the telephone rang, a young female voice said, “Is Martha there?” I tried to think who it was, always frightened of forgetting and hurting feelings. Then she said, “I have Lord Snowdon for you,” and I sat holding the telephone, waiting. I’ve read of this, but never experienced it.… I think my mad habit of trying out any new experience may have led me into a minor horror journey.… I was warned by chums in London, but paid no heed.

The trip turned out to be less awful than she’d feared: “Dear Gully, It is over and I am exhausted. He wasn’t so bad, the Earl, and I reckon he’d say the same of me.”

So that was good. I eagerly awaited the piece, congratulating myself on having pulled off this editorial coup. Her next letter was addressed not to me but to Harry, who had taken the liberty of rearranging one or two of her paragraphs: “Dear Mr. Evans, I am appalled by the treatment of my Wales article. Would ‘shambolic’ be too strong … I am told that you think it would be a good idea to move the goal posts; now a touch of Tony-and-Marty-in Wales is needed.… In fact the trip was cold, wet, unbelievably uncomfortable and boring.…”

In the end I managed to broker some kind of peace, and the article was published alongside the earl’s moody (as she had informed Harry, the weather had been rainy, cold, and cloudy, just for a change) photographs. Somewhat surprisingly she forgave us both, and a few months later wrote telling me about a new trip she was anxious to embark on as soon as possible: “I have to get myself to Diksmuide in Belgium, the last Sunday in June, where if you can believe it, Neo-Nazis from all over Europe meet to honor the Nazi dead in WW2, in Nazi uniforms etc.” Possibly not quite the thing for the Traveler, but if we didn’t want that, how about sending her scuba diving in the Maldives? She was eighty at the time.

What’s with all the geriatrics? What had possessed me to collect a stable of writers whose combined ages approached the millennial mark? Apart from the fact that they wrote superbly—which would be the main point—they were living witnesses to a now-vanished era of travel. Long before tourism became the world’s biggest industry—which it is today, extending its tentacles to every back of beyond on the planet, engulfing us all in a flood of sweaty fellow travelers—they had ventured to foreign places when they really were foreign.

But perhaps I could write, too. Hadn’t I spent every summer since the age of eleven in that house in France? Surely in all those years I must have learned something about Provence. Of course I had. How about a story on Haute-Provence, where an enterprising Parisian architect had just opened a hotel in a remote Saracen village called Crillon-le-Brave? It worked. Now why hadn’t I thought of that before?

Next, I took on the Romans who had given Provence its name (Provincia was their Miami, the place where retired generals and legionnaires settled to enjoy their hard-earned sunset years) and returned to Arles, Nîmes, the Pont du Gard—and of course, the Hôtel Nord-Pinus. After that it was Avignon, the Palais des Papes and a hotel of laughable perfection where I slept in a room wallpapered with delicately painted pagodas, peacocks, and chattering monkeys swinging through a forest of bamboo. French windows opened onto a terrace, which in turn led down to the garden, where the air buzzed with the sound of bees, drunk on sticky oleander-flower cocktails.

Still, I really couldn’t expect the magazine to keep gobbling up course after course of delicacies from this one small corner of the world. What other dishes could I tempt them with? Not yet confident enough to write about a place I didn’t know (that would come later, with pieces on Russia, Jamaica, Brazil, China, Mexico, Estonia, Sicily, and God knows where else), there was only one other option: Spain. During the five years we had explored the country together, Tom had taught me well, and I was rather proud to have graduated top of the class in my college of one. According to my tutor I was unusually gifted at art and history, my grasp of current affairs was less assured, and as for my language skills—the sorry results spoke for themselves. Which was more than I could do.

The editors loved the idea of Madrid—the rebirth of a democratic Spain, the excitement of la Movida, King Juan Carlos’s relationship with the Cortes—but now I was in a total panic. Could I write the story all by myself? Probably. But could I produce a piece with real insight, quotes from interesting politicians, an overview of the revolution that had taken place in Spain since Franco’s death? You must be kidding. It had been fifteen years since I had set foot in Spain, fifteen years since Tom had called me in London to announce he was getting married, fifteen years since we had last spoken. But what were old friends for, if not to help you out in an emergency?

We met at the Café Gijón on the Paseo de la Castellana, the same place his grandfather used to go before the civil war—oh, if only the old man had lived long enough to see Franco entombed in the Valle de los Caídos, and his country’s triumphant return to democracy.

“Una manzanilla La Gitana para la Señora, por favor.”

What else would I drink in Madrid?

“Y dos raciones de chipirones en su tinta.”

And two portions of squid in black ink.

Tom smiled and leaned across the table. “As I was saying yesterday.…”

“Ah, Miguel, how could I forget?”

Miguel de Unamuno, a friend of Dr. Marañón’s, and one of the great Spanish intellectuals of that generation, had been the rector of the University of Salamanca during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Famous for his liberal views, he had been thrown out in 1924 and sent into exile on Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands. After Rivera’s fall in 1930, Unamuno returned to the university and began his first lecture with the immortal words, “As I was saying yesterday.…” As if no time had passed at all.

As we were saying fifteen years ago … as if no time had passed at all. The tutorials resumed, and over the next week Tom introduced me to journalists, politicians, writers, the man who ran the Prado, the woman who ran the mayor of Madrid—people I could never have met or interviewed if we hadn’t had lunch at El Gijón.

“Hey, you remember that place we went to the first time I ever came to Madrid, off the Plaza Mayor, where we had coagulated blood and rat’s penis to start, and the poor little calf’s head with the milky eyeballs, and the dismembered baby pig? Do you think it’s still there?”

“Of course it’s still there. It opened the year before Cervantes lost his arm in the Battle of Lepanto. Why one earth wouldn’t it be?”

“Okay. Since you have been the fixer from el cielo, I propose we go there tomorrow night before I fly back to New York in the morning.”

The Madrid piece ran a few months later, and I was thrilled to get a letter from a Spanish reader complimenting me on how well I had captured his hometown. It was forwarded, with love and gratitude, to my tutor.

SOMETIMES I DIDN’T EVEN have to dream up an idea for a story to get on a plane. Every year the magazine gave a big party at the ASTA (American Society of Travel Agents) convention, wherever it happened to be—Rio, Hong Kong, Budapest, Lisbon, Sydney. The agents lived for their work, and didn’t mind how many thousands of miles they had to travel (first class) to be feted at various extravaganzas laid on by the titans of their industry.

In 1993 the convention was to take place in Cairo, and Tom Wallace, who was now the editor (restless Harry had left to become head of Random House), asked me if I would go with him. The climax of this dazzling evening would be the presentation of awards—the Oscars of the travel business—to whatever airline, resort, hotel, spa, car rental agency, and city the discerning readers of Condé Nast Traveler had voted best in the world. It seemed that my role was to play Vanna White to Tom’s Pat Sajak.

However, not all the recipients were glossy advertisers. Vladimir Chernousenko, a Russian physicist, had gone into Chernobyl as leader of the team that had the grim job of trying to clean up and contain the disaster. He was rewarded for his bravery with the loss of his job, after he had spoken out publicly about the situation, the Condé Nast Traveler Environmental Award, a trip to Cairo, a check—and cancer. Vladimir was staying at our hotel, and some days he was so weak he couldn’t leave his room, but that night was different. His eyes shone as he gazed out at the Pyramids—“You know, when I was a small child I used to dream of them”—he enjoyed his wine as only a Russian can, flirted energetically with every lady in sight, and when the band started to play the first bars of “Strangers in the Night”—“Ah, my favorite song!”—he asked me to dance.

Okay, it was a cliché. Sinatra, champagne, candles, camels outlined against the Pyramids, but a transcendental, unforgettable cliché because of the heroic dying man I was dancing with.

NO MORE THAN six or seven, younger than Rebecca, wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a torn T-shirt, the boy darted through the rush-hour traffic, almost getting hit by a bus, garlands of tiny white flowers dangling from one skinny brown arm. The lights turned red, he ran toward the car holding one of his fragile jasmine necklaces out to me, smiling, and I gave him whatever money I had in my bag. It must have been quite a lot because he seemed momentarily stunned and pushed the rest of his flowers through the window, trying to make me take them. “No, no, you must keep them. But please, please get out of the traffic.” I waved frantically toward the sidewalk, pleading with him. Laughing, he made it back just as the lights changed. I slipped the jasmine necklace over my head.

Yes, it was the same scent that had infused the magical tent. No, the obscene tent. How much had that ridiculous circus cost, anyway? How much food had been thrown out last night? (Or had the staff taken every last bit? I hoped so.) Oh, do shut up. If you really cared, you wouldn’t be weeping in the back of an air-conditioned car, you wouldn’t be telling Park Avenue orthodontists where to go on vacation, you wouldn’t be prancing around in Chanel. Go get a job at Oxfam, why don’t you? Work for the UNRWA in a Palestinian refugee camp, or how about joining the Peace Corps? But of course you could never leave your family, could you? So find something in New York; plenty of kids in the South Bronx who need help. With no snappy comeback, I reverted to my usual faute-de-mieux reply and told my conscience to fuck off.

No, after careful consideration, I thought I’d just continue with my own peculiar, erratic, impetuous, highly emotional, disorganized response to poverty. Go on giving Vinnie—who hangs out on the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Tenth, entertaining passersby with strange whistling noises—coffee, cigarettes, and sandwiches, and in the winter enough money for the shelter. When in St. Petersburg, give your complimentary fruit basket, with additions of brandy, a chocolate bar, and a pack of Marlboros from the minibar to the old man with one arm, selling pencils on Nevsky Prospekt. Always hand out rubles to roaming bands of raucous street kids, ignoring the advice of Russian friends who will tell you: “You mustn’t do that. It just makes them wilder, and we’ll never get rid of them.” Olga was right. It did, and we didn’t.

“They’re just sharamigas; pay no attention to them.”

“And what the hell are sharamigas?”

So she explained. During the retreat from Moscow, Napoleon fled back to Paris in his sable-lined sleigh, while his poor starving frozen soldiers were reduced to begging, “Cher ami, cher ami—aidez-moi s’il vous plaît.”

Never, ever haggle. Why would you want to cheat somebody with so much less than you? Why not go on handing out beer and a bag of pretzels to anybody who looks as though they could use a drink? Jesus, don’t we all need a stiff cocktail when the going gets rough? And I might just hit the next person who, when I stuff a couple of bucks into a sharamiga’s empty paper cup, says, “Oh, you mustn’t give him anything. He’ll just go straight out and spend it on drugs or alcohol.”

Well, perhaps I won’t actually hit them. Instead I’ll tell the truth: “Oh, but I must. You see, it’s entirely selfish. If you’re a member of the Good Luck Sperm Club, you have to do something to stop yourself going completely mad.”