At the end of the street I discover that an hour has passed and that I have been walking the wrong way all the time. I come out into a broad oblique avenue full of streetcars and traffic. Suddenly the Chop Suey signs are gone and now everything is Spaghetti, Pizza, Ravioli, Bella Napoli, Grotta Azzura, blooming in painted signs along the housefronts. There are Italian bakeries and pastry shops breathing out almond paste and anise. In small bars men sit talking noisily as they drink black coffee out of glasses.
Restaurants smell of olive oil and spilled wine.
I cross the street and at the top of another hill catch a glimpse of a white tower shaped like a lighthouse. As I walk up through a shabby light-gray cheerful quarter where all the doorbells have Italian and Spanish names, and where the air out of doorways smells of garlic and floor polish and there begin to be pots of geraniums on the tops of scaly walls that conceal small gardens, or carnations now and then on a window sill, it suddenly feels like the quiet streets back of Montmartre or, so many years ago, Marseilles. I reach the top of Signal Hill just in time to take refuge in the tower from a spat of driving rain. From the tower I look down into a swirl of mist, shot with lights and shadows like the inside of a shell, that pours in from the ocean. Two young men in khaki are standing beside me, squinting to see through the rain-spattered glass.