Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil Read online

  Europa Editions

  214 West 29th St., Suite 1003

  New York NY 10001

  [email protected]

  www.europaeditions.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2013 by Catherine Izzo

  First publication 2013 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Howard Curtis

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609451752

  Jean-Claude Izzo

  GARLIC, MINT AND SWEET BASIL

  INTRODUCTION

  MEDITERRANEAN NOIR:

  IN PRAISE OF JEAN-CLAUDE IZZO

  by Massimo Carlotto

  Translated by Michael Reynolds

  Recalling the work and the person of Jean-Claude Izzo will forever remain painful for those who knew him. Izzo was first and foremost a good person. It was impossible not to feel warmth for that slight man who always had an attentive, curious look in his eyes and a cigarette in his mouth. I met him in 1995, in Chambéry, during the Festival du Premier Roman. Izzo was there to present Total Chaos. I bought the book because its author stirred my interest: he seemed a little detached in many of those cultural gatherings, as if faintly annoyed by them, as he was most certainly annoyed by the quality of food and wine offered by the organizers. I read his book traveling between Chambéry and Turin, where the Salone del Libro was underway. I found it a superb, innovative book, an exemplar in a genre that was finally starting to establish itself here in Italy. I recommended it to my publishers. And not long after, Izzo arrived in Italy. A few sporadic meetings later, I went to Marseilles for a conference. Izzo was not there. He was in hospital. Everyone knew how serious his illness was. Marseilles was rooting for its noirist. Every bookshop in town filled its display windows with Izzo’s books. Then, on January 26, Jean-Claude left us. He wasn’t even fifty-five. He left us with many fond memories and several extraordinary novels that convincingly delineated the current now known as “Mediterranean noir”.

  Autodidact, son of immigrant parents, his father a barman from Naples, his mother a Spanish seamstress. After lengthy battles as a left-wing journalist, having already written for film and television, and author of numerous essays, Izzo decided to take a stab at noir, penning his Marseille trilogy, Total Chaos, Chourmo and Solea. The protagonist: Fabio Montale, a cop.

  Montale, son of immigrant parents, like Izzo, and child of the inter-ethnic mix that is Marseille, defiantly stakes out his ground in the city that gave birth to the National Front. In Solea, Izzo writes: “It felt good to be in Hassan’s bar. There were no barriers of age, sex, color or class among the regulars there. We were all friends. You could be sure no one who came there for a pastis voted for the National Front, or ever had. Not even once, unlike some people I knew. Everyone in this bar knew why they were from Marseilles and not somewhere else, why they lived in Marseilles and not somewhere else. Friendship hung in the air, along with the fumes of anise. We only had to exchange glances to know we were all the children of exiles. There was something reassuring about that. We had nothing to lose, because we’d already lost everything.”

  Izzo’s writing is political, in the tradition of the French neo-polar novels, and the writings of Jean-Patrick Manchette. But compared with Manchette, who does not believe in direct political action inasmuch as he believes it is ineffective and doomed to failure, and who limits himself to using noir as an instrument with which to read reality, Izzo goes further. His use of the noir genre is not limited simply to description but penetrates deep into the heart of the incongruities, leaving room for sociological reflection and for a return to his generation’s collective memory, and above all, gives sense to the present day. Via Montale’s inner journey, Izzo declares his inexorable faith in the possibility of transformation, both individual and collective. The point that matters most to Izzo, politically speaking, that is, the point that cannot be abandoned, is the existence of a united culture. From the defeats of yesterday come the losers of today. From this perspective, Montale is an extraordinary figure. Son of marginalization, he joins the police so as to avoid the criminal margins. He abandons his group of childhood friends, a group that embodies multiple ethnic differences, but he will never forget his roots. This becomes a source for his feelings of guilt when faced with his role as cop in a society that is becoming increasingly intolerant. An internal gestation and growth obligates him to leave the police force and to become a loner in search of the justice that is not furnished by the courts. What gets him into trouble is the ethic of solidarity and the desire, common to culturally and ethnically mixed milieus, to find a place and a moment in which he can live peacefully.

  Izzo considers himself a man of the Mediterranean, with deep roots in the history of this sea he loves to observe from the Sainte Marie lighthouse, but he is above all a Marseillais. He frequently says that Marseilles is his destiny and quotes these lines by Louis Brauquier:

  Lost men from other ports,

  who carry with you the conscience of the world!

  It is not just a question of a passionate love for his city, it is a political conception of belonging to the area of the Mediterranean, that leads him to fight against the transformation of Marseilles into a border post between Northern Europe and the countries of the South. The true enemy is the dominant culture of the North, which, starting with the economy, aims to bring about standardization. In his demand for hybridization as the only possible social fabric, Izzo proposes again a Europe born on the shores of the Mediterranean whose only future, to quote Glissant, lies in “Mediterranean Creoleness.”

  Solea is flamenco music’s backbone, but also a piece by Miles Davis. Indeed, music is one of the author’s passions. Particularly jazz and the mix of Mediterranean rhythms that characterize contemporary Southern European and North African music. In Izzo’s writing, however, music does not simply represent rhythm and a source of nostalgia, but also a key to understanding generational differences. Montano contemplates the merits of rap music. He doesn’t like it much, but he reflects: “I was always amazed by the content. How relevant what they said was. How cleverly they used words. What they sang about was the lives of their friends, on the street or in the joint.”

  With Solea, Jean-Claude Izzo gives substance to the political intuition that is the cornerstone of Mediterranean Noir. He understands that the sticking point the movement must face consists in the epochal revolutions that have transformed criminality. Babette Bellini’s investigation does not result in the typical affirmation of the Mafia’s superiority and organized crime’s collusion with higher powers. Izzo defines the outlines of Mediterranean Noir when he introduces into his novel the principal contradiction present in the crime society dyad: “The annual world income of transnational criminal organizations is in the region of a thousand billion dollars, a figure equivalent to the combined gross national product of those countries categorized as low-income.” The need to launder this mountain of dirty money is at the root of the dizzying increase in the corruption of institutions, of police forces. It is also the catalyst for strategic alliances between entrepreneurs, financial policing bodies, politics, and organized crime. The society in which we live is criminal inasmuch as it produces crime and “anti-crime,” resulting in an endless spiral in which legal and illegal economies merge in a single model. Call it, if you will, a socio-economic locomotive, as in the case of northeast Italy.


  Mediterranean Noir, in this sense, departs from the existing conception of French Noir, and likewise from the modern police novel. The novel no longer recounts a single “noir” story in a given place at a given moment, but begins with a precise analysis of organized crime.

  Another of Izzo’s intuitions was his having individuated the Mediterranean as the geographical center of the universal criminal revolution. There is a rich fabric of alliances in this region between new illegal cultures emerging from the east and from Africa. These alliances are influenced by local realities, which they in turn absorb into themselves. As a result, they possess the means to pursue direct negotiations with established power structures.

  This is what Mediterran Noir means: to tell stories with a wide swath; to recount great transformations; to denounce but at the same time to propose the culture of solidarity as an alternative.

  The Mediterranean

  and its noir

  THE MEDITERRANEAN:

  POSSIBILITIES FOR HAPPINESS

  On his return from Cairo, Flaubert wrote to a friend: “I’ve come to the conclusion that the things we expect rarely happen.” That’s the way it often is in the cities of the Mediterranean. You never really find what you came looking for. Maybe because this sea, the ports it gave birth to, the islands cradled by its waters, and the contours of its shores make truth inseparable from happiness. The very intoxication of the light arouses the spirit of contemplation.

  I discovered this at home, in Marseilles. Near the Baie des Singes, some distance beyond the little harbor of Les Goudes, at the very eastern end of the city. Hours spent watching the fishing boats returning through the straits of Les Croisettes. It is there, and nowhere else, that they appear to me, and will always appear to me, the most beautiful. I also spent hours watching for that moment, as magical as any, when a cargo ship sails into the light of the sun setting over the sea and disappears for a fraction of a minute. Time enough to believe that anything is possible.

  Here, we do not think. Only afterwards. It is afterwards that we dream of all those hours in our lives when we should have learned, and all those when we should have forgotten. Of course, it is unusual for a whole life to go by like this, in contemplation. “The nomad,” writes Jean Grenier, “regards the oasis as the Promised Land, and his life is an alternation of grim wandering and bouts of merrymaking. To him, the city is the oasis.”

  I have travelled like that. From oasis to oasis. From Tangier to Istanbul, from Marseilles to Alexandria, from Naples to Barcelona. And each of these cities, with its narrow, winding streets swarming with people, has offered me its colors, its fruits, its flowers, the gestures of its men and the gaze of its women. Until one day I was able to utter the one essential truth: yes, I love these Mediterranean cities where we feel as if we are carried away.

  My Mediterranean is not the one you see on the picture postcards. Happiness is never given, it has to be invented. Not all travelers have the same tastes. Some travel to see, others to enjoy. Still others seek both. But all you need to have done is take, at least once, a bus to a distant oasis, lost in the sands, to know that here, in the Mediterranean, everything will always be given to you, provided you want it, provided you open your eyes and your hands to it.

  I arrived in Biskra one evening to find a light hot wind, a smell of dust and coffee, the light of a bark fire, the smell of stone, of mutton floating in the air. I made them mine. In this way we lay claim to landscapes.

  That is the essential thing when we travel on these shores: to lay claim to what we will never be able to carry away with us, to what exists only in the moment when we look at it and belongs not to our memories but to the joy of living. Small things, like the last quiver of the light before noon. Because, as Leila would say, “life is a fragment of nothing.”

  I remember one late afternoon in Oran. I had left behind the tumult of the city center to climb the hill of Le Planteur. As far as Santa Cruz. The higher I climbed, the more distant the horizon. The sky opened up. I discovered the city, then the city and the sea, then the city and the sea and the mountain of Tlemcen.

  I don’t know what I was looking for in Santa Cruz that day. But I liked what I found. Peace. Perhaps because all I had needed to do was close my eyes and the landscape entered into me and became mine, and I realized it would stay inside me wherever I went.

  I realized later, in other ports, in other cities of this Mediterranean, that it would always be like this. That what I had discovered was not the pre-packaged Mediterranean sold to us by travel agents and purveyors of easy dreams. That it was just one of the possibilities for happiness that this sea offered. Offered me. Somewhere else, of course, it would have been the same.

  And so, over the years, I have created for myself a geography of possibilities for happiness. Byblos is part of this geography. Yazid, a fisherman I met in the little harbor, told me the legend of Adonis. A Phoenician legend. On the first day of spring, Adonis died in the arms of Astarte, at the source of the river that today bears his name. His blood gave birth to the anemones and turned the river rust-red. Astarte’s tears rained down on a resurgent nature and brought her lover back to life. A Phoenician temple at the foot of the cave of Afqa pays homage to Astarte.

  It was this temple that I had come to see. A temple to love. To fidelity. I was alone. Beirut and its big-city bustle were 25 miles away, and Jounieh, a seaside resort like any other, was just as far. I had barely taken a few steps into the town when, for me, Byblos once again became Gebal, one of the oldest cities in the world.

  Yazid did not go with me. That walk to the temple was a solitary one. As were my walks along the Cinque Terre coastline in Liguria, from the Mesco headland to the San Pietro headland. I had let myself be borne along from village to village: Monterosso al Mare, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore.

  Evoking these names was already a joy in itself. You can’t get lost in such small villages, and yet that was the true pleasure, to lose yourself in this maze of dark, narrow streets piled one on top of the other, some made entirely of steps.

  At a certain point, we know, we will come back to the sea. Inevitably. Each of these villages at the end of five valleys resolutely turns its back on the mountains and faces the Mediterranean. For a long time, it was only possible to reach them by boat. And this memory of the sea is even inscribed on the hulls of the boats, when, upended on the shore to receive a new coat of paint, they reveal shells stuck to their prows.

  To get to Manarola, I had taken the Via dell’Amore. The road of love. The only land link between that village and Riomaggiore. A road hollowed out of the rock that falls sheer to the sea, a road that crosses hills covered in vineyards. You feel the desire to caress that nature, even those walls of rock resting in the water.

  It was late spring. The hour when the light has not yet grown dense. I was assailed by other images. The Golden Shell of Palermo, where the sun rests all day like a flower in a vase. Djemila, where a heavy, unblemished silence reigns, with that woman running, as in a short story by Camus, toward the starry night that will finally restore her tranquility. Ronda, the Andalucian mountain city hanging in the sky, which even cured Rainer Maria Rilke’s depression. The blue bay of Salamis, when you discover it from the Philopappos Monument, between bare hills and the stony plain.

  I searched with my eyes for the island of Elba, and other islands emerged. The volcano of Santorini, which rises from the sea with the transparency of glass. Cape Sounion, and the tiny Psara, swept by the dust and the winds, Symi, the island of sponges, clinging to Mount Siglos.

  This Italian land suddenly spoke to me in Greek. Doubtless because in Greece, as Jean Grenier has written, there is a “friendship between minerals and man.” And the Mediterranean is nothing other than an appeal to their reconciliation.

  There, gazing lovingly around, I remember telling myself that there is nothing more beautiful, more significant, for anyone who loves Afric
a and the Mediterranean with the same love, than contemplating their union in this sea. When, that evening, I got back to Vernazza, the village flag, with its Arab crescent moon, merely confirmed it. At that point, the only thing remaining was to go to the Princes’ Islands, a stone’s throw from Istanbul. Kizil Adalar—“the Red Islands” in Turkish. There, I discovered the limpid waters of the creek of Kalpazankaya. But I didn’t travel there only to bathe in the sea, or even to eat the most delicious tandoor kebab—mutton roasted in a clay oven. I went there for the sheer pleasure of knowing that I was between two waters, between two worlds. Between East and West.

  LISTENING TO THE SEA

  From Marseilles, I look at the world. It is from here—at the top of the steps that lead up to the Sainte-Marie lighthouse, at the eastern end of the sea wall—that I think of the world. Of the distant world, of the world nearby. That I think of myself too. Mediter­ranean. A Mediterranean man.

  Marseilles is 2,600 years old. I belong to that history. I am in that history. I am in this minor century and sea, as the Neapolitan writer Erri de Luca so rightly calls it. Marseilles is my destiny, like the Mediterranean. Yes, that is what I declare as I gaze out at the open sea, my back up against the hot stone of the Sainte-Marie lighthouse, my head full, as always, of the poetry of Louis Brauquier:

  Lost men from other ports,

  who carry with you the conscience of the world!

  Marseilles exists only in these words. All the rest is just hot air. Political, or economic. Cultural too, sometimes. If we forget that, we die.

  Wherever I go these days, the word on everyone’s lips is Europe. That’s why I come to the Saint-Marie lighthouse. It’s enough to make you despair. Because I don’t see any European future for Marseilles. In spite of what they say. Marseilles is a Mediterranean city. And the Mediterranean has two shores. Not just ours. Today, Europe only talks of one, and France is all too ready to fall in line. Making this sea, for the first time, a border between East and West, North and South. Separating us from Africa and Asia Minor.