The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [108]
Larry treated Mitchell’s interest in Christian mysticism the same way. He noticed. He made it clear he noticed. But he made no comment, for the time being.
Besides, Larry was undergoing his own transformations on the road. He bought a purple silk scarf. His smoking, which Mitchell had thought a temporary affectation, became habitual. At first Larry bought cigarettes singly, which apparently you could do, but soon he was buying whole packs of Gauloises Bleues. Strangers began bumming cigarettes off him, skinny, Gypsy-looking dudes who put their arms around Larry’s shoulder, Euro-style. Mitchell felt like Larry’s chaperone, waiting for these confabs to end.
In addition, Larry didn’t appear to be sufficiently heartbroken. There was a moment, on the ferry to Rosslare, when he’d gone on deck to smoke a moody cigarette. It was understood that he was thinking about Claire. But he tossed the cigarette overboard, the smoke drifted away, and that was that.
From Ireland they returned to Paris, and took an overnight sleeper to Barcelona. The weather felt almost balmy. Along the Ramblas, jungle wildlife was for sale, wise-looking macaques, Technicolor parrots. Heading farther south, they stayed a night each in Jerez and Ronda, before moving on for three days in Sevilla. Then, realizing how close they were to North Africa, they decided to continue south to Algeciras and ride the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier. They spent their first days in Morocco failing to buy hash. Their guidebook listed the location of a bar in Tétouan where hash could be easily scored but included a warning, at the bottom of the same page, comparing Moroccan prisons to the Turkish jail in Midnight Express. Finally, in the small mountain village of Chaouen, they came into their hotel to find two Danes sitting in the lobby, with a softball-size chunk of hash on the table in front of them. Mitchell and Larry spent the next days gloriously stoned. They wandered the narrow beehive streets, listening to the muezzins’ emotional cries, and drank bright green glasses of mint tea in the town square. Chaouen was painted light blue to blend in with the sky. Even the flies couldn’t find it.
It was in Morocco that they realized their backpacks were a mistake. The coolest guys they met weren’t the expeditionists with their camping gear. The coolest guys were the travelers who’d just returned from Ladakh carrying nothing more than a tote. Backpacks were unwieldy. They marked you as a tourist. Even if you weren’t an overweight waddling American, with a backpack on you were. Mitchell got stuck entering train compartments and had to wave his arms frantically to wriggle free. Getting rid of their backpacks was impossible, however, because, as they returned to Europe in October, the weather was already turning cooler. Leaving the warmth of southern France, they headed up into autumnal Lausanne, breezy Lucerne. They took out their sweaters.
In Switzerland Mitchell hit on the idea of using his MasterCard to buy things that would alarm his parents when they received the statements. Over three weeks he made charges of: 65 Swiss francs ($29.57) for a Tyrolean pipe and tobacco from Totentanz: Cigarren und Pfeifen; 72 Swiss francs ($32.75) for a meal in a Zurich restaurant called Das Bordell; 234 Austrian schillings ($13) for an English edition of Charles Colson’s memoir Born Again; and 62,500 lire ($43.54) for a subscription to a Communist magazine, published in Bologna, to be shipped once a month to the Grammaticus home address in Detroit.
They reached Venice on a cloud-cushioned afternoon in late October. Unable to afford a gondola, they spent their first hours in the city traversing bridges and flights of stairs that all seemed to lead, as in an Escher drawing, back to the same piazza, with the same burbling fountain and duo of old men. After finding a cheap pensione, they went out to visit the Piazza San Marco. In the dimly lit museum in the Doge’s Palace, Mitchell found himself staring at a mysterious object in a vitrine. Made of badly corroded metal links,