fragrances

The woman in my seat is voluminous and on the wrong side of youthfulness. She advertises her despair at the physical tolls of aging by copiously applying the cosmetic equivalent of masking tape – in bright orange. Heavy fashion accessories dangle from neck and hair, her face is covered in thick paint, and a dense fog of volatile chemicals shrouded her figure. She was the exact opposite of the city I was leaving.

Marseille is ageless, old beyond numbers and concern. The Phoenicians traded in its harbor when the Romans were still too young to be let out on their own. Marseille is unbothered by appearance, refreshingly aloof in questions of style or fashion. It's also a mess: chaotic, dirty, colorful, rushed and confused.

In contrast to most other French cities, Marseille doesn't try to hide its minorities and sequester its social problems in the banlieue. There are monstrous high rises at the periphery and neighborhoods best avoided, but the mess and jumble isn't contained. And it doesn't just spill over. It's everywhere; it belongs. Deprivation is as much a part of life as is wealth. The city, a mosaic in time and space, accommodates all.

With the stolidity of age comes an imperturbable confidence, the lack of any pretense, a sense of being down to earth because the earth is the only thing of permanence. The conviction of having seen it all, over the centuries, nullifies any attempts at grandeur. Marseille doesn't have to prove anything.

This afternoon, I saw a fine example of this self-assurance in Mazargues, a marginal part of town, far from the center but not exactly a suburb. There, a neighborhood pizzeria was called Top 20. Consider, for a moment, the kind of message this name sends. The place doesn't claim to be Numero Uno or even Top 10. Here, people don't mind being associated with top 20, somewhere above average in other words. Maybe just about average, if you think about it, maybe a tick below. Ok, towards the bottom, to be honest, but certainly not last. And even if, who cares?

Earlier, I had woken up to a fine morning, to the eternal summer of the Mediterranean where the cold January air is always mellowed by a hot sun. It felt like vacation. The sea lapped against the shore in gentle waves starkly at odds with all the upheaval and violence these waters had witnessed over the millennia. Away from the sea stretched the Provence in unlimited scents and unbelievable color, a region to come back to and stay.

Life isn't so generous. With the sun setting, I was on my way back to Gatwick where, on the way out a few days earlier, I had felt compelled to ask the boarding pass inspector at the entrance to security whether everyone was on strike or still on lunch break. The departure hall looked abandoned, as if evacuated after some unspeakable incident, but the line I found myself in was epic, and largely immobile.

"It's Friday afternoon, sir", the wallah replied. "It's always like this." If this had been a tightly scripted movie I would have feigned incredulity. "How come you not only know about the problem, but also about its recurrence, and still you haven't asked your supervisor to assign more staff to remedy the situation?" Instead, in the stupor reserved for situations where a brain is an impediment, I crawled on. There was enough time to make the plane even in a slow line, but not enough to engage in futile discussions.

The lady from the beginning, by the way, had been in the wrong seat. Muttering the French of the oppressed and enraged, she moved into her middle seat and let me slip across to the window. As I fell into my seat, the cloud of perfume left behind by her departure condensed on my glasses and in my throat, depriving me of vision and oxygen.

I fell momentarily unconscious. When I recovered I found my neighbor dig through a PowerPoint presentation of corporate vacuousness from the world leader of flavors, as every slide proclaimed. The woman could have been senior secretarial staff or senior management. The difference is hard to tell at the best of times, and with the hot air in front of her, all bets were off.