The Best American Travel Writing 2011 (3 page)

I've noticed that the best travel writing doesn't have real resolutions. Instead of providing a sense of closure, which normally comes when the last word is typed and the writer and reader agree to part ways, the most memorable essays here feel like a beautiful mess at the end. This is because it's impossible to tie them up neatly. The places and the people who inhabit them still exist. Their stories go on. It's what makes travel writing so unusually difficult. All writing revolves around choices, around killing your darlings and the like. But if that's true, it means that travel writers have it harder than anyone else. How do you choose what goes and what stays when everything is new and of note? What about when it's assaulting all of your senses simultaneously? Some adventures would register to anyone as more significant than others, but the moment the writer takes leave of his or her normal life, everything falls under the purview of new experience. Nothing is safe from examination, including the writer. "It was quite fair," says Annie Proulx of the eagles that watched her like, well, hawks. "I peered at them through binoculars, they peered back."

The
This American Life
broadcast moved on to the next adorable story after the interview with the psychologist. It made no mention of the woman's response to the little girl on the airplane. Endeared as this woman must have been, there was a pair of wide eyes staring back at her, waiting for a reply to a perfectly reasonable question.
No, really: When do we get smaller?
I wonder what she said. Perhaps the little girl was encouraged to look out the window and down at the landscape below. Look at all those new places! Imagine how many kinds of lives are being lived down there right this minute. And how incongruous for the human brain that it all fits in a tiny rounded window. Whole cities! Whole oceans! Whole countries! And it's all right there, laid out for our viewing. Ready to be examined. Of course, therein lies the little girl's answer. We never do get smaller. It's just that the world gets bigger.

 

S
LOANE
C
ROSLEY

FROM
Condé Nast Traveler

T
HE ROMANCE BEGINS FOR ME
with a picture of a house by Claude Monet on my wall calendar. More than half the house is missing and the roof is entirely cropped. All one can see is an arched balcony with hints of another balcony on the floor above. Outside, wild growth and fronds everywhere, a few slim trees—palms mostly, but one agave plant stands out—and beyond, along a wide, unpaved road, four large villas and a dappled sky. Farther out in the distance is a chain of mountains capped with what could be snow. My instincts tell me there is a beach nearby.

I like not knowing anything about the house or the painting. I like speculating about the setting and imagining that it could easily be France, Italy, possibly elsewhere. I like thinking that I'm right about the wide expanse of seawater behind the house. I stare at the picture and fantasize about the torpor hanging over old beach towns on early July days, when the squares and roads empty and everyone stays out of the sun.

The caption, when I finally cheat and find it at the bottom of the calendar, reads "Villas in Bordighera." I've never heard of Bordighera before. Where is it? Near Lake Como? In Morocco? On Corfu? Somewhere in Asia Minor? I like not knowing. Knowing anything about the painting would most likely undo its spell. But I can't help myself, and soon I look up more things, and sure enough, Bordighera, I discover, lies on the water, on the Riviera di Ponente in Italy, within sight of Monaco. Further research reveals the villa's architect: Charles Garnier, famed for building the Opéra de Paris. Finally, the year of the painting: 1884. Monet, I realize, was still a few years away from painting his thirty views of Rouen Cathedral.

I know I'm bit by bit demystifying the house. As it turns out, the Internet reveals more paintings of gardens and palm trees in Bordighera, plus one of the very same house. It is a copy of the image on my wall calendar, painted by Monet, not in Bordighera but later that same year in Giverny and meant as a gift for his friend the painter Berthe Morisot. As always, Monet liked to paint the same scene again and again. Sometimes nothing at all changes—just the transit of light spells the difference between impressions of morning and noon.

Monet went to visit Bordighera for the light. His intended visit of a couple of weeks ended up lasting three laborious months in the winter of 1884. He had come the previous year with the painter Renoir for a brief stay. This time he was determined to come alone and capture Bordighera's seascapes and lush vegetation. His letters were filled with accounts of his struggles to paint Bordighera. They were also littered with references to the colony of British residents who flocked here from fall to early spring each year and who transformed this fishing and agrarian sea town famed for its lemons and olive presses into an enchanted turn-of-the-century station for the privileged and happy few. The Brits ended up building a private library, an Anglican church, and Italy's first tennis courts, to say nothing of grand luxury hotels, precursors of those yet to be built on the Venice Lido. Monet felt adrift in Bordighera. He missed his home in Giverny and Alice Hoschedé, his mistress and later wife; and he missed their children.

As far as he was concerned, Bordighera promised three things: Francesco Moreno's estate, containing one of Europe's most exotic botanical gardens; breathtaking sea vistas; and that one unavoidable belfry with its dimpled, onion cupola towering over everything. Monet couldn't touch one of these without invoking the other two. Lush vegetation, seascapes, towering belfry—he kept coming back to them, painting them separately or together, shifting them around as a photographer would members of a family who were not cooperating for a group portrait.

If he was forever complaining, it may have been because the subject matter was near impossible to capture on canvas, or because the colors were, as Monet liked to say in his letters, terribly difficult—he felt at once entranced, challenged, and stymied by them. But it was also because Monet was less interested in subject matter and colors than he was in the atmosphere and in the intangible and, as he called it, the "fairylike" quality of Bordighera. "The motif is of secondary importance to me," he wrote elsewhere. "What I want to reproduce is what lies between the subject and me." What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere. Earth, light, water are a clutter of endless, meaningless things; art is about discovery and design and a reasoning with chaos.

Many years after seeing the reproduction on my wall calendar, I finally happen upon Monet's third painting of that very same house at an exhibition in the Wildenstein gallery in New York. Same missing back of the house, same vegetation, same sky, same suggestion of a beach just steps away, except that the third floor, which is absent in the first two canvases, is quite visible here; one can almost spot the balusters lining the balcony. And there is another variation: in the background looms not the snowcapped mountains but Bordighera Alta—the
città alta
, the oldest part of the city—which like so many old towns in Italy is perched on top of a hill and predates the Borgo Marino on the shore. This inversion is also typical of Monet. He wanted to see how the scene looked from the other side.

I want to be in that house, own that house. I begin to people it with imaginary faces. A plotline suggests itself, the beach beckons ever more fiercely. Like a fleeing cartoon character painting escape routes on a wall, I find my own way into this villa and am already picturing dull routines that come with ownership.

 

Then one day, by chance, I finally find the opportunity to visit Bordighera and to see it for myself. I have to give a talk on Lake Como, so rather than fly directly from New York to Milan, I decide to fly to Nice instead and there board a train to Italy. The bus from the airport to the train station in Nice takes twenty minutes, purchasing the train ticket another fifteen, and as luck would have it, the train to Italy leaves in another fifteen. Within an hour I am in Bordighera. The train stops. I hear voices on the platform. The door opens and I step down. This is exactly what I expected. Part of me is reluctant to accept that art and reality can make such good partners.

I don't want a taxi, I want to linger, I want to walk to my hotel. Before me, leading straight from the small train station and cutting its way through the heart of the town, is a palm-lined avenue called the Corso Italia, once known as the Via Regina Elena. I've arrived, as I always knew I would, in the very early afternoon. The town is quiet, the light dazzling, the turquoise sea intensely placid. This is my Monet moment.

I've come to Bordighera for Monet, not Bordighera—the way some go to Nice to see what Matisse saw, or to Arles and St.-Rémy to see the world through the eyes of Van Gogh. I've come for something I know doesn't exist. For artists seldom teach us to see better. They teach us to see other than what's there to be seen. I want to see Bordighera with Monet's eyes. I want to see both what lies before me and what else he saw that wasn't quite there, and which hovers over his paintings like the ghost of an unremembered landscape. Monet was probably drawing from something that was more in him than out here in Bordighera, but whose inflection we recognize as though it's always been in us as well. In art we do not see, we recognize. Monet needed Bordighera to help him see something he'd spot the moment he captured it, not before; we need Monet to recognize what we've long sought but know we've never seen.

My first stop, I tell myself, will be the house on the Via Romana, my second the belfry, and my third the Moreno gardens. Luckily, my hotel is on the Via Romana too.

As I walk, I cannot believe what I am seeing: plants and trees everywhere. The scents are powerful and the air pure, clean, tropical. Right before me is a mandarin tree. Something tells me the potted lemons are false. I reach out through a fence and touch them. They are real.

I force myself to think positively of the hotel I booked on-line. I even like the silence that greets me as I arrive and step up to the front desk. Upstairs, I am happy to find I have a good room, with a good-enough balcony view of the distant water, though the space between the hotel and the sea is totally obstructed by a litter of tiny brick houses of recent vintage. I take out clean clothes, shower, and, camera in hand, head downstairs to ask the attendant where I can find the Moreno gardens. The man at the desk looks puzzled and says he's never heard of the Moreno gardens. He steps into the back office and comes out accompanied by a woman who is probably the proprietress. She has never heard of the Moreno gardens either.

My second question, regarding the house painted by Monet, brings me no closer to the truth. Neither has heard of such a house. The house is on the Via Romana, I say. Once again, the two exchange bewildered looks. As far as they know, none of the houses here were painted by Monet.

Monet's Bordighera is gone, and with it, most likely, the house by the sea. On the Via Romana, I stop someone and ask if she could point me in the direction of the town's belfry. Belfry? There is no belfry. My heart sinks. Minutes later I run into an older gentleman and ask him the same question. Shaking his head, the man apologizes; he was born and raised here but knows of no campanile. I feel like a Kafkaesque tourist asking average Alexandrians where the ancient lighthouse stands, not realizing that nothing remains of the ancient Greek city.

 

From the Via Romana, I make my way back to the train station, where earlier I had spotted a few restaurants on the long seaside promenade called Lungomare Argentina, probably because Eva Perón loved it. Yet along the way—and I barely have time to realize it—there it is: the belfry I've been searching for. It looks exactly as in Monet's paintings, with its glistening, mottled, enamel rococo cupola. The name of the church is Chiesa dell'Immacolata Concezione, built by none other than Charles Garnier. It's probably the tallest structure in town. How could anyone not know what I was referring to when I kept asking about a campanile? I snap pictures, more pictures, trying to make the photos look like Monets, exactly as I did twenty minutes earlier when I stumbled upon a public garden with leafy dwarf palms that resemble those Monet painted in Moreno's garden. An old lady who stops and stares at me suggests that I visit the
città alta
, the town's historic center. It's not too far from here, she says, impossible to miss if I keep bearing left.

Half an hour later, I'm on the verge of giving up on the
città alta
when something else suddenly comes into view: a small hill town and, towering above it, another belfry with a bulbous cupola almost identical to the one I spotted on the
chiesa
by the shore. I can't believe my luck. Bordighera, I realize, has not one but two steeples. The steeple in Monet's paintings is not necessarily that of Garnier's church by the marina but probably another one that I didn't even know existed. Coastal towns always needed towers to warn of approaching pirate ships; Bordighera was no exception. A steep, paved walkway flanked by old buildings opens before me; I'll put off my visit to the historic center and walk up to the top of this minuscule town instead. But this, it takes me yet another delayed moment to realize, is the
città alta
I came looking for. My entire journey, it appears, is made of uninformed double takes and inadvertent steps.

Bordighera Alta is a fortified, pentagon-shaped medieval town full of narrow, seemingly circuitous alleys whose buildings are frequently buttressed by arches running from one side of an alley to the other, sometimes creating vaulted structures linking both sides. Laundry hangs from so many windows that you can scarcely see the sky from below. The town is exceptionally clean—the gutters have been covered with stones, and the clay-tiled paving is tastefully inconspicuous. Except for a televised news report emanating from more than one window lining the narrow Via Dritta, everything here is emphatically quiet for so packed a warren of homes. As I make my way around the square, I see the Santa Maria Maddalena's clock tower again, and to my complete surprise, once I step into a large courtyard that might as well be a square behind the main square, another belfry comes into view. Then a post office. A church. A barber. A baker. A high-end but tiny restaurant, a bar, an
enoteca
, all tucked away serendipitously so as not to intrude on this ancient but glitzified town. A few local boys are playing
calcetto
, or pickup soccer. Others are chatting and leaning against a wall, all smoking. A girl, also smoking, is sitting on a scooter. I can't decide whether this town is inhabited by working-class people stuck on this small hill all year or whether the whole place has been refurbished to look faux-rundown and posh-medieval. Either way, I could live here, summer and winter, forever.