Here and There (2 page)

He had felt interesting times – revolutions, terror, famine, death – all through the bodies of the men who'd caused it, and he had a remarkable gift. My girlfriend went to him and he asked her where she was from. London, she replied. No – he held her foot – you've come home. You're from Africa. And although you couldn't tell to hear her, she is indeed from Durban. And then, with a firm curiosity, he travelled his fingers over the soles of her feet, and told her every country she'd walked in, never making a mistake, never getting one wrong.

Our feet have a diary, a passport. We keep a physical journal of the lands we've trod. I'm not making any of this up; it's not a traveller's tale. And there's a moral here. Travel doesn't broaden the mind, but it does give you interesting blisters.

The market-driven truth

A market reflects the people
it serves – what they have, what
they need – except in France,
where they're for worshipping,
not shopping.

My weakness, my pleasure, is markets. Whenever they say, what would you like to see? The museum, the opera house, the red light district, the bridge over the river? I always say the market. I want to see where the women buy their vegetables. I want to see the fish, the butchers, the quarter of cobblers and tailors. You can't fake a market. You can't make it what it's not. It is as true a reflection of the people it serves as anything; what they have, don't have, what they make and import, and what their pretensions and weaknesses are.

The Mercato in Addis Ababa, biggest market in Africa: dangerous red-eyed tribesmen, maddened and delusional on khat, unloading bushels of the stuff flown in daily from the ancient cities on the Somali border. The stalls selling coffee and the winding lanes of incense dealers, the gifts of the Magi, smelling of martyrdom and plainsong.

Tsukiji, the Tokyo fish market: miles of frozen tuna, lying like a thousand unexploded bombs steaming in the dawn as the auctioneers paint red characters on them, buyers cutting tiny nuggets of flesh from their tails to knead for water content. The unspeakable nameless denizens of a dozen oceans flapping and squirming in brine, all the height of gustatory sophistication, or speechlessly depressing, depending on where you stand.

The fish market in Zanzibar: a slithery soup of scales and guts and too-few fish, the spindly outrigged dhows having to go further and further into the Indian Ocean to find a catch. And then the fish markets of southern Spain, where everything is kept alive, the skate laid on their backs with their squashed baby faces, dribbling blood from their severed tails, looking like mortifyingly religious parables.

The dawn markets in Saigon: vast and frantic, but beautiful. Thousands of ducks and chickens waiting to be plucked, mountains of flowers. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, with its streets of gold-dealers and ziggurats of pastel Turkish delight, the caviar merchants, the bags of nuts and dried fruit. Peshawar's many, many markets: older than civilisation, leatherworkers making bandoliers and sandals with the soles of old Russian tyres, the pomegranate-juice sellers, and the boys trussing and skewering sparrows.

Crawford Market in Bombay, the book market in Calcutta, the bird market in Denpasar, the karaoke market in Tashkent. All markets are vitally and vibrantly different, but they're also fundamentally similar. They work on the universal principles of supply and demand, daily bread, bargains, extravagance and thrift. Markets are the true face of cities and of countries.

But of all the markets in the world, there is one example that stands as a template for markets – the market's market, the perfect market against which all others are measured: the weekly markets of southern France. Most white, Western, middle-aged tourists travel to France in the belief that here they will find the apogee of domestic sophistication and taste. Apart from all the hot and tedious haute couture, the museums, the churches, the ruins and the endless, endless art, which must of course be genuflected to and murmured at reverentially, the true civilised genius of France is not what it has made and done, but what it doesn't do. And not doing anything, with a languid haughtiness, is France's great contribution to the Western canon.

The great places of pilgrimage for masterly inactivity are France's markets. The markets entrance and astonish and comfort the rest of the world because somehow they manage to encompass and impart a way of life that is particularly, peculiarly French. No one outside France has quite managed to codify or explain cogently what this uniquely French existence consists of, so they come up with a French phrase to encompass it all:
je ne sais quoi
.

Je ne sais quoi
is France's abiding gift to the world. More
je ne sais quoi
for your euro is to be found in a French market than anywhere else. We wander down the aisles of trestles and stalls aghast at the marvellous repose of produce. There are peaches warm from the tree, ripe and golden. Figs, green and black, bursting with sweet, ancient, darkly lascivious simile. The smell of fresh lemon, the bunches of thyme and lavender and verbena, the selections of oil and olives, pale green and pungent, and the honey, from orange blossom, from heath and orchard, and the beeswax. The charcuterie, the dozens of ancient and dextrous things to do with a dead pig, in all the hues of pink and pale, fatty cream.

The smell of the complements of pimiento and fennel, the strings of sausages, of bones, of pâté and rillettes. And then there's the ducks, with their unctuous, giving, bloated, lustrous livers, poached in sealed jars cuddled around truffles and cognac. And pirouetting chickens, like coutured birds smelling of very heaven with delicate legs poised on a spit. The boulanger, with loaves crisp and hard, plaited and rounded, wheat and rye, malted and dusted. Bitter crusts and soft sour centres, the pastries and sweetmeats, the plates and bowls of little titbits in sauce, the oeufs en gelée, the asparagus, the snails with their puffy green butter stuffing, the store selling napery and embroidery, the beautiful rustic starched pride of peasant tables and French rooms. The fussy caps for confitures and cake trays, the chocolatiers with their outré soft-centres, and the cheeses – the land of a thousand cheeses. The market will wind its way around a boules-rabbled square with pollarded planes and uncomfortable ironwork benches, and at its corners will be the most holy of holies in the
je ne sais quoi
market: a café. A café with cream and pink woven chairs and little metal tables and a waiter with a long apron and the look of a man who is beaten by his wife. And here you will meet the rest of your party after two hours of worshipping at the long temple of Frenchness and order your café au lait and perhaps just an Armagnac, if you're having one, and perhaps a tasse of the rough but immensely agreeable local wine – just to smell it is to understand utterly the superiority of terroir over mere talent.

And you can examine the rewards of your forage, the amulets of pilgrimage. Oh, I didn't get much – just this artichoke, because I liked the colour. Oh well, we got this marvellous chèvre. The man said it was made with his grandmother's goats, or perhaps that his grandmother was a goat. And this charming gingham bag for hanging on the back of the kitchen door and keeping old plastic bags in. Not, of course, that we now use plastic bags anymore, on principle. And no, you're right – we don't actually have a kitchen door, either. But still, it seemed so here, so right. I'll give it to the daily; she's from the Philippines. Did anyone get any olives? I tried to get some of that divinelooking pâté, but I think I bought an eggtimer instead.

And here is the truth of French markets: it's almost impossible to actually buy anything in them. If you had to really do your entire weekly shop in one, it would take you a fortnight. So consequently the French don't – they use supermarkets like everyone else. This isn't for buying, it's for worshipping. France isn't really like this at all, it's just an idea of a France just like this. This is where they teach their
je ne sais quoi
before they go to the convenience store, the gym and the office and figure out how to be more like the Germans and the English and the Irish and the Americans. I said that what I liked about markets was that you couldn't fake them, that they're immutably driven by commerce. Except for these ones. They are the exception that proves the rule. The French are not like their markets at all. Their markets are actually like the rest of us, or our ideal selves. Somebody once said that when good Americans die they go to Paris. Well, the rest of us go to a market somewhere in the south of France.

All in the family

Only in Sicily is organised crime
a tourist attraction. Just don't
ask the locals about it.

There are many singular and specific things about Sicily. Indeed, Sicily is a specifically singular place. But perhaps the most striking singular thing is that it's the only holiday destination on earth that tourists visit because of the organised crime. Sicily has the distinction, dubious or ironic, of having murderous kidnapping and extortion as an attraction, like the whirling dervishes of Istanbul or the street mimes of Vienna. (Actually, slightly less murderous than the street mimes of Vienna.)

The mafia's USP – and I think in this it is also alone in the world of crime – is having a strict rulebook that prohibits the robbing of strangers. You keep it in the family. Sicilians are understandably taciturn and annoyed by the visitors' interest in their thugs. It's like having a psychopath in the family that everyone else thinks is a charming and exciting raconteur. The black hand of crime families grew out of the grotesque feudal poverty of the Bourbon rule of Sicily. Peasants had no rights, no redress and no justice; the secret organisation grew from the aching tumour of revenge. But unlike Robin Hood, the mafia didn't rob from the rich to give to the poor; it robbed the poor and protected the poor against robbery, setting up a circular monopoly of both crime and crime prevention that has lasted ever since. Taxi drivers and hotel concierges fend off the inquisitive questions from tourists with a wearied thin politeness, like men being asked about their prostates.

From the moment you land in Palermo, you're aware that one of the defining characteristics of Sicily is that it isn't like the rest of Italy. A secretive, watchful, hard and self-contained place, there is none of the light-hearted bantering and flirtation you associate with the mainland. Indeed, there are few women around, and it's outwardly as overtly masculine as the countries across the straits in North Africa. I was always aware of being watched in the hugger-mugger collapsing streets of the old capital. Whenever I looked over my shoulder there was somebody looking back. Not threatening or intimidating, just noticing, marking your movements through the teeming streets. The balconies of the old baroque houses have blankets hung over their metal balustrades to protect the modesty of daughters leaning over to whisper secrets and dart dark, meaningful glances. Or just hang out the washing.

There are hundreds of huge and vainglorious palaces here, ancient and decrepit, dropping their decoration and pediment like stone lepers. They're blackened and crippled, strung with utility cables like life-support, and inside the warren of rooms is a mass of illegal immigrants from Tunisia and points south from Africa. The poignancy and beauty of extreme penury and desperation set against crumbling, reduced grandeur is one of the endearing pleasures of sightseeing. Picturesque slums were ever the background of The Grand Tour, which took in Sicily for the poorest and most aesthetically pleasing peasants in Europe. Its ruins of half-a-dozen defunct civilisations and Mount Etna continue to be the living symbols of hubris and nemesis: compared to the power of ancient gods, human vanity and aesthetics are merely laughable graffiti.

There are few places that have quite so much naked, molten history as Sicily. Dozens of invasions, uncountable massacres and clearances, relentless vendettas. The past infects the present and the future, it glows in the brooding, and seeps from one generation to the next. Blood, as they say around here, calls for blood. Everything about Sicily seems to be a cautionary tale. Everything is itself and a symbol and part of a code. It's not an easy place to grasp, or necessarily one that you're drawn to. There are a lot of people here, a lot of poor people and a lot of corruption. Modern buildings of the most dispiriting type seen outside the dreams of Stalinism crust every hillside and elbow every small town. There was a time in the '70s when they said Sicily was the second-biggest importer of concrete in the world after Nigeria. It was a society adept at milking the guilt and hush-money of European grants for the least lasting good.

But it still manages a striking and harsh beauty, an unpolished or unfenced sense of the ages made palpable and accessible. A people whose hardship and secrets have also given surprising moments of sweetness and sympathy. I was particularly drawn to the confectionery. Traditionally cakes and pastries are made by nuns in closed and silent orders, who make delicate and intricate moments of almond and honey with infusions of soft fruit and citrus and chestnut, sugared and shaped into devout little braille prayers. There are hundreds of these sweet things offered to martyrs or on religious holidays. The intensity and the hardness of the belief and the life made them give each a flavour that transcends the marzipan and ricotta. They have a memory of the crypt, a veiled reminder of incense and death. And behind the childish pleasure of sweetness is mortality and pain and guilt and mortification. The island is heavy with mandarin oranges. The air is full of the smell of their blossom, heady and morbid.

I went up to the small hill village of Savoca in the south-west. Not many people make it up here. It's a typical Sicilian village, buttoned down and shuttered. It curls in on itself like a stone snake with an itch. There's a good church, which is locked, with an interesting Norman mural, a crypt of dried mummies with bay leaves and rags in their stomachs, and a view that stretches across the centuries to the sea.