Cantona (2 page)

Marseilles often appears not to be part of France at all. A Parisian friend had told me: ‘Marseilles is the only city in France where you don’t feel you’re in province’. I, coming from Rouen (Flaubert’s home town), know all about the province – the cafes which empty at 9pm, the picturesque town centres with their gothic churches, markets, maisons de bourgeois and opulent civic buildings. Beyond the city walls, space has been found to house those who have less money, the immigrants in particular. For them, concrete tower blocks and, should they be more affluent, bungalows and pavilions have been built, dotted on land which was cultivated not that long ago, with not a shop in sight. A drive away, hypermarkets and vast branded warehouses are selling anything from sportswear to cheap leather sofas. This drab, mind-numbing template is repeated from Lille to Strasbourg, from Nice to Bordeaux. Marseilles, however, seems out of place on this map of prettiness, pettiness, anonymity and boredom. My friend was right: to the first-time visitor, Marseilles does not look, smell or feel remotely like it belongs to La République. Tourists hardly ever visit Cantona’s hometown. Holiday-makers, wary of its reputation for excess and violence, troubled by the extraordinary number of ‘foreigners’ who walk its streets, might stop briefly in one of the dozens of restaurants which serve approximations of the traditional bouillabaisse around the magnificent old harbour. They then move on to the more reassuring surroundings of the Riviera resorts, unaware that they’re leaving behind the most beautiful and vibrant of cities.

There’s a whiff of danger about the Massalia of the Greeks, their first settlement in the western Mediterranean, which has been inhabited far longer than almost any other region in France. When Marseilles makes the national news, you can pretty much bet that the news is not good. Torched cars. Corruption scandals in the local administration. Drug traffickers and mafiosi. Local rap artists preaching insurrection (or something similar, but oddly incomprehensible, because of the ‘funny’, unsettling nature of their speech). Supporters of Olympique de Marseille throwing flares on the pitch, beating up visiting fans, reprising their thirty-odd years’ war against Paris-Saint-Germain. Éric Cantona.

So Marseilles and its 1,600,000 inhabitants are pretty much left alone, which suits them fine. Cantona is truly one of a breed: Marseillais care little for their reputation. Their sense of dignity, the conviction that they are, somehow, not just different from, but superior to the rest of France, feeds on the unease they sense in those who come from the outside. Half a century ago, their image, shaped by the novels, plays and films of Marcel Pagnol, was more benign. Pagnol’s Marseillais played cards, drank pastis, told tall tales with an endearing, song-like accent. The sardine that blocked the harbour of Marseilles was one such story, which I heard many times around respectable tables in my youth. ‘Ah, those Marseillais . . .’ – only there was a note of affection for the Southerners. Their amusing pomposity somehow redeemed their tendency to listen to the hot blood rushing in their veins rather than to the cool voice of reason. How things have changed since then. All because of the immigrants, of course, whom non-Marseillais are quick to call ‘foreigners’, missing the point that Marseilles’ cosmopolitanism is of a unique kind. Whoever comes to the old Phocea takes root in its fluid, amazingly fertile soil, and that includes the hundreds of thousands of ‘pieds-noirs’ and ‘harkis’ (the predominantly Muslim soldiers who remained faithful to the Republic throughout the war of decolonization) who fled Algeria in 1962 and disembarked at the Vieux-Port. Most of them had left with nothing; but public opinion did not see victims in the refugees who carried their belongings in cardboard suitcases. They were the cause of all their own problems, and of those they had inflicted on the métropole – the terrorist attacks, first by the independence fighters, then by the OAS loyalists. This first wave was soon followed by the mass immigration of Arabs from the Maghreb, who had been invited by the French government to lend their arms to the manufacturing and construction boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Quite naturally, like the banished
colons,
the formerly colonized settled in vast numbers in the Marseilles region, mostly in the huge housing estates that sprang out in the eastern and northern parts of the city. Zinédine Zidane would be born in one of those ugly, featureless ghettos.

Such was the hostility towards the new arrivals (‘they’ve kicked us out of Algeria, now they come to eat our bread’) that the perception of Marseilles changed markedly over less than a decade, and not for the better. It shouldn’t have, or certainly not to that extent. Every Marseillais’ ancestor had, once, been an exile himself, and the Cantonas were no exception.

A matter of history, perhaps. From the day the city was founded – some six hundred years before the birth of Christ – Massalia’s doors have always been open to the populations of the Mediterranean. Some came there in search of trade; others sought a refuge from poverty or persecution. At some point in the eighteenth century (no one knows exactly when), Catalonian fisher-men had established a small colony on one of the hills surrounding the harbour, not far from the Pharo and the Fort St Nicolas: it bears their name to this day (‘Les Catalans’). Closer to us, tens of thousands of Italians, mostly from the impoverished South, had made a beeline for Marseilles. Reminders of this constant flow of population are everywhere to be seen, including in the village where the Cantona clan built a home, Les Caillols, which is where I found myself in search of Éric in the autumn of 2007.

London, April 2009

Éric’s studio at home in Auxerre.

‘As soon as I walked, I played football. My parents have told me: as soon as I saw a ball, I played with it. This is something I have in me . . . Maybe, on the day I caressed a ball for the first time, the sun was shining, people were happy, and it made me feel like playing football. All my life, I’ll try to capture that moment again.’

To find the house in which Éric Cantona was born, you board a gleaming, air-conditioned tram that takes you uphill from the heart of Marseilles’ Old Town. Just before La Palette, ten minutes at the most from the quayside of the Vieux Port where fishmongers sell live sea bream on a multitude of small slabs, you find yourself suddenly in Provence. The trees growing alongside the boulevard will bear olives in the autumn; the road’s gradient becomes steeper; and the pine-covered hills of the Garlaban, the backdrop to Marcel Pagnol’s
Jean de Florette
and
Manon des Sources
, draw nearer. A few modern housing estates are peppered between tile-roofed villas enclosed in small walled gardens.

Once in the village of Les Caillols, the names on the mail boxes tell their own story. Hardly any of them sounds ‘French’. Italian, yes; Spanish, too. Every Marseillais has an ancestor who was once an exile, and the Cantonas were no exception. No French city is more truly cosmopolitan; the social division of the city does not prevent an easily carried elegance in the rapport between the communities. Only in London have I seen so many friends and lovers cutting across racial and ethnic distinctions. Marseillais we are first, French second – maybe. In a video he shot in 1995, shortly after the end of the eight-month ban which nearly precipitated his second and final retirement from the game, Éric Cantona chose to address the camera clad in a T-shirt on which can be read: ‘
Fier d’être Marseillais
’ – Proud to be a Marseillais. Alone among the conurbations that have doubled or trebled their size in the last fifty years because of the influx of North and Western African immigrants, Marseilles exudes the sense of vitality and youthful exuberance one would associate with cities where new lives can be made.

As I walk along the dusty alleyways that arrow from the Grand-Rue, each of them leading to a modest house set in a clump of small trees, a lady – Madame Ferrero – calls from her doorstep. She’s seen me jotting a few words in my notebook, and I realize that I must look out of place. In Les Caillols, no one wears a suit when summer lingers so warmly in October. There is curiosity in her voice, but no abruptness. Am I looking for something? she asks. When I tell her I have come to see the place where Éric Cantona grew up, she points out to a hill in the distance. ‘You see that white house, there?’ It’s hard not to. It is already halfway up the mountain, pink and white against the green of the pines; gigantic compared to the modest dwellings in the village. ‘That is where they lived.’

In fact the house is still theirs, even if they have now acquired another home in the Basses-Alpes, and Éric’s brother Joël has moved towards Notre-Dame de la Garde. The postcode tells us we haven’t quite left the great city; everything else, the plane trees, the monument to the dead of the Great War, the unpretentious church, the ground cleared to play boules or
pétanque
, all this speaks and smells of Provence. Marseilles is a peculiar city: its dozens of villages have been swallowed by the metropolis over time, but, once there, the air you breathe still carries the fragrances of the countryside. The Marseilles Éric Cantona grew up in had little if anything in common with the concrete jungle that gave some shade to Zinédine Zidane and his friends when they hit a football in the Castellane
quartier.
It is a ‘poisoned city’, where unemployment tops 50 per cent and firemen hesitate to answer a call, as they fear being stoned by feral youths. But if La Castellane speaks of a fractured city within a fractured country, Les Caillols sings with a Provençal accent. The breeze that freshens its few streets carries the scent of tomatoes gently simmering with garlic at lunchtime. What Zidane kept of his tough upbringing is a volatile, sometimes violent temperament. But Cantona’s rebelliousness flowed from a different source – certainly not from his own environment, which was loving and, in many ways, idyllic.

According to Éric’s father, Albert, ‘this land didn’t cost much, because no one thought it would be possible to build a house on such rocky terrain’. After a long search, in 1954 or 1955 (depending on which member of the family is speaking) Albert’s mother Lucienne had found this site located on the border between the 11th and 12th
arrondissements
of Marseilles, all stones and weeds. This, she decided, is where the future home of the Cantonas would be built. Come the weekend, picnicking families would unfold their tablecloths on the slope to enjoy the magnificent view, as yet uncluttered by tower blocks – from there you could see the Garlaban mountains and the rugged outposts of Cassis, rising as if they were close enough to touch; on clear days, the first houses of Aubagne, St Marcel and La Vierge de la Garde could be glimpsed on the horizon. Later, when the young Éric walked onto the terrace, he could watch players kicking the ball some 500 yards away on the pitch of the Arsène-Minelli stadium, the home ground of his first club, Sports Olympiques (‘SO’) Caillolais.

But view and price aside, this piece of land had little to commend itself. Local tradition had it that the German army used this promontory as a look-out in the last months of the Second World War; but if they had, no trace of their presence is left. All that Lucienne’s husband, Joseph (a stonemason by trade), could find as shelter when he embarked on the huge task of building a house on the face of the hill was a small cave, covering a bare nine square metres, which the couple protected from the elements with a curtain in winter. Contrary to legend, Éric himself never lived the life of a troglodyte, but his teenage father most certainly did. Nicknamed
‘la chambrette’
, the cave survived the erection of the family home, a memento of the hardship Joseph and Lucienne had to overcome.

It’s true that hardship had long been a companion of the Cantonas. Joseph’s roots were in Sardinia, whose odd language, with its ghostly remnants of Phoenician and Etruscan, was still spoken at home when he grew up on the Boulevard Oddo, the first port of call for transalpine immigrants. To his own parents, Marseilles had been what the New World represented for the Italians who could save enough to pay for their passage overseas. Money was hard to come by; when winter came, with no electricity, proper heating or running water, Lucienne had to cook pasta in melted snow; but her husband’s energy and the fierceness of her determination overcame shortcomings like these and, slowly, a house rose from the dust. This was followed by a second one, built on top of the original to accommodate Albert’s young family.

Albert was nicknamed
‘Le Blond’
(‘the Fair One’), not because of the colour of his hair, but because of his eye for the ladies. He had fallen in love with Eléonore (‘Léonor’) Raurich, the handsome daughter of Catalan refugees named Pedro and Paquita. Poverty and exile looked over her side of the family too, with a measure of tragedy. In 1938, Pedro, a republican partisan, had suffered a serious injury to his liver while fighting the Franquist forces in Catalunya. He sought medical help across the Pyrenees, only to be caught by the Vichy police two years later and sent to a detention camp set up for the ‘undesirables’ of the collaborationist regime. Upon his release, after a forced stay in the town of St Priest in the Ardèche, the passionate anti-fascist finally settled in Marseilles – accompanied by the much younger Paquita. Pedro would never see his parents again. With such a background, which combined fidelity to one’s own and almost constant displacement to an inextricable degree, is it surprising that Éric understood the attraction of nomadism better than most?