Not politics. There are no politics inside of people.
The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth, underneath the noise of opinions and “beliefs,” is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard, white salt.
This salt is the core. The four a.m. reality of being.
When I came to understand this, it was literally four a.m. and I was staring at an actual mountain of salt. I had been in northern Spain, tracking subminister Platon.
The subminister had traveled to a village called Cardona, where he met with Spanish investors. That day, we (he and I, though he had no idea we were “together”) had been in Girona, a city of fanatical Catholic architecture and fetid standing water, where daytime mosquitoes hovered around the bare legs of tourists. While Platon ducked into a side door of the main cathedral to meet with side-dealing Catholic clergy, I blessed myself irreligiously that mosquitoes do not bite me.
After Girona we had driven through the dust and heat to Cardona. From the highway, tall craggy mountains stretched across a section of horizon like a diabolical curtain, sharp and jagged, frozen black flames against sky.
In Cardona, Platon had spent the night in a castle above the village, next to the famous salt mines of that region. The castle had been converted into a hotel, one of the state-run paradors (luxurious for government-run hotels). My own room was across a courtyard from the subminister’s. From my exterior-facing windows, I could see the salt.
I looked out, unable to sleep. It was, as I said, four a.m. The moon was full, and the night sky was rinsed in the brilliant blue of indigo dye. The moon shone down on a mountain of salt, which wasn’t white, it was a dirty reddish, coated in clay particulates.
The salt of Cardona had been mined for thousands of years, but now it was a tourist attraction. It came up from deep inside the earth. This mountain of it would somehow replenish forever, according to the brochure in my room. It would keep emerging as if by magic. In Roman times, salt was so precious it served as money. It is the source of the word “salary.”
I stood at the window at four a.m. and told myself: You, too, have a core of precious salt. The human core of inner salt, like this salt of Cardona, comes from the deepest part. Human salt, like this salt, is everlasting. Mine it, use it, and it will not deplete.
In my own salt, my own core, this is what I knew:
Life goes on a while. Then it ends.
There is no fairness.
Bad people are honored, and good ones are punished.
The reverse is also true. Good people are honored, and bad people are punished, and some will call this grace, or the hand of God, instead of luck. But deep down, even if they lack the courage to admit it, inside each person, they know that the world is lawless and chaotic and random.
This truth is stored in their salt. Some have access. Others don’t.
A gift or a curse, that my salt is right here, with me all the time?
A gift.
I’d rather be driven by immutable truths than the winds of some opinion, whose real function is to underscore a person’s social position in a group, a belief without depth.
These boys in the library would profess to share beliefs. But eventually, they might become enemies—of those beliefs, of one another. They will adopt new beliefs, new personas.
It is better to be steadfast.
Me, I adhere to my salt. I draw strength from it, use it. I keep watch over my salt, and when it serves me, I keep watch over other people’s salt. I mine my salt, and sometimes, I mine the salt of others. Which is to say: I cooperate with the part of them that they can’t reach, are not in touch with, cannot see, but that sometimes, when I am lucky, I can see quite well.
After the night “we” spent in the castle overlooking the mountain of salt, I followed Platon into the grubby medieval village of Cardona proper, which was below the castle, down a set of steps. I walked, while the subminister was driven, not by Georges, but by a driver based in Barcelona. To drive from the castle down to the village took longer than walking, so I paused, gazing at the salt mine over the wall of the open-air medieval steps, waiting for the car to appear. When it did, Platon emerged, and I followed at a comfortable distance.
This village, though in twenty-first-century Europe, reminded me of war-torn Kabul or the slums of Benghazi, with its jerry-rigged electrical wiring and a population that looked to be suffering from rickets and other diseases you don’t see in the developed world. Platon went into a municipal building. I feigned tourism and read the plaque on the exterior of a shabby Romanesque church. It had been built in the eleventh century, and it looked like it.
As I pretended to read, a woman crawled on her knees along the ancient, grimy cobblestones—either physically disabled or disabled mentally, such as by a religious zeal, I could not tell. She was pulling herself on a thick slab of cardboard.
The front doors of the church opened. A priest emerged, dressed in stained white robes belted with a dingy braid.
He lit a cigarette, the vapors of its smoke heavy in the air of this dank and narrow street.
He watched the woman, in his dirty vestments, his cigarette pluming away.
She slid past the church, over the cobblestones, on the cardboard, on her knees.
She was still inching along on her hands and knees when the priest finished his cigarette and flicked it into the gutter. He went back inside the church.
Platon reappeared. He (“we”) went in the opposite direction of the struggling woman, toward his waiting driver.
PASCAL INVITED ME TO STAY for their communal dinner. I said I was tired. I wanted to return to my rented jalopy on the town square, drive back to Lucien’s family’s moldering estate, drink bad beer I’d purchased in Boulière, and do some research and planning.
Pascal asked if I remembered the way, or would I like someone to accompany me?
“Florence can walk you,” he said.
But before he could summon her, I assured him I was fine to walk alone.
It was seven p.m. and the hottest part of the day, the peak temperature spike, at least forty degrees Celsius, maybe 105 in Fahrenheit, and by any measurement hot as balls.
Up ahead, something dropped from above and landed on the road. It was a snake. Snakes in heat waves don’t coil up on tree trunks. They sleep hanging down from a branch; it’s a tactic for staying cool. Sometimes they fall, which is what must have happened to this snake. It slithered into a drainage ditch.
I walked in the middle of this road, instead of in the shade of overhanging trees, in order to avoid falling snakes.
I heard a car coming from behind and turned around. It was Nadia Derain in her dusty Renault.
This was the stretch of road she patrolled. I moved over. She drove up alongside and coasted the speed of my walking.
