The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  It’s not really a Catholic country, the Spaniards told me, but this express train to Barcelona was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. I asked the conductor why this was so. “It’s just a name,” he said.

  The Virgin sped out of Valencia and along the Mediterranean shoreline of gray sand and blue sea, a plain of gardens and trees and square houses of brown stone, the hills rising to mountains in the background, a classic Spanish landscape of dry overgrazed hills, some of it hardly built upon. But most of it, especially around the coastal town of Tarragona and beyond, is overdeveloped, full of houses. Yet even the most unsightly place was relieved by vineyards or lemon trees, orchards, palm trees. It did not have the nasty urban desolation of industrialized Europe.

  There were mainly Spaniards on the train. A few foreigners were heading to Barcelona, others to Port-Bou, the last stop in Spain before the train entered France. There were clusters of Japanese, and French businessmen, and Moroccans. And Kurt, who was heading back to Germany. He was very fat and bearded, in a leather vest, with a tattoo on his wrist, and very drunk at two in the afternoon, in the buffet car.

  “This tattoo—I made it myself! I got drunk and took a needle and just went plunk-plunk-plunk for three hours.”

  The tattoo seemed to show a hot dog in a man’s hand, but Kurt helped me to see that it depicted a bulky submarine being crushed by an enormous hairy fist. Above it were the words Germany—Navy and below it, Killer Submarine Crew.

  “Why are those words in English?”

  We were speaking German. Kurt did not speak English.

  “They just are.”

  “Were you in the navy?”

  “For twenty years, based in Wilhelmshaven, but I also traveled.” It seemed an unlikely question because he was not much older than I was but I asked, “Did you destroy any submarines?”

  “No, but I would have if I had to. I knew how.”

  “Why did you leave the navy?”

  “Family problems. My son is a diabetic. He needs my help. And my wife is in the hospital.”

  “Serious?”

  “Yes. She jabs herself—with a needle, you know. She is not a fixer, not really. She is sick.”

  “What brought you to Valencia?”

  “Football. Karlsruhe was playing Valencia.”

  “Who won?”

  He growled and made a face. “Valencia,” he said, and uttering the word seemed to make him thoughtful. He was probably thinking of the defeat, the details of the game. He drank for a while longer, and while he was lost in his thoughts I started to slip away.

  “Wait,” he said. “See this tattoo?” He rolled up his sleeve. “This one was much easier to do. I did this one myself, too.”

  Eventually I went back to my seat. As this was an express, the Virgin had a TV in each car. The video that trip was a soft-porn film of the Blue Lagoon variety—castaways, jungle, friendly parrot, and plenty of excuses for the man and woman to get their clothes off.

  Headphones were sold, though hardly anyone bought them. Most of the passengers looked out the train window at the pretty coves and the rocky shoreline, the steep cliffs, the pines and the small port villages. We had passed Sagunto and Castellón, and the Desierto de las Palmas, a high ridge with an eighteenth-century monastery to the west. Past miles of fruit trees and tenements by the sea, and after Tortosa on the River Ebro we were traveling ten feet from the sea, known in this corner of the Mediterranean as the Balearic Sea.

  In spite of its fragrant herbaceous name, Tarragona was a grim place. That seemed to be the rule on this part of the Mediterranean shore. The town had been the subject of poems by Martial. The wines had been praised by Pliny. “The emperor himself wintered here in 26 B.C. after his Cantabrian campaign.” Now it was mainly an oil-cracking plant and a strip of littered shore. The sour stink of sulfuric acid is an unmistakable indication that you have entered an industrial suburb. Sitges, farther along, once a fashionable resort, was now known mainly for its strip of homosexual beach.

  Big cities seem to me like destinations, walled-in stopping places, with nothing beyond their monumental look of finality, breathing You’ve arrived to the traveler. But I did not want to have a destination on the Mediterranean coast. I had planned to push on and to avoid places like Barcelona; or at least see them glancingly and not linger. Such a rich place seemed perfect for the person who wanted to write a book about a city. There were many with the title Barcelona. Yet I hung on.

  It was a sunny afternoon when I arrived on the “Virgen” from Valencia. I was in no hurry. And Barcelona seemed a bright and lovely place, pleasant for walking around, with parks and wide boulevards and a brightness and prosperity. The prosperity might have been an illusion. One of the city’s car factories, a division of Fiat, shut down the day I arrived, putting nine thousand people out of work. The graffiti was almost instantaneous: FIAT = MAFIA.

  But I had other reasons for liking Barcelona. In its bookstores, along with pornographic comics and photo magazines, the many bullfighting magazines, treatises on the occult, and dreams, and witches; knitting magazines, marriage manuals, motorcycle monthlies, sadistic and romantic novels, dictionaries, gardening books, gun digests, and hagiographies, were also La Costa de Mosquitos and Mi Historia Secreta, San Jack, La Calle de la Media Luna, Zona Exterior, and some more books, in Spanish translation, written by me.

  People in Barcelona were apparently buying and reading my books. Knowing that gave the city an air of sympathy and erudition and it made me want to stay a while.

  I had not had a good meal since starting. Spanish food was—what? Undistinguished, unmemorable, regional. In several Spanish towns I had been encouraged by locals to eat at Italian restaurants; in Cartagena I was told the best place was Chinese. Spaniards often disparaged their own food, and said the restaurants were terrible, and when I asked them what they liked to eat they would mention something their mother made.

  Barcelona, full of great restaurants, was the exception to all this. The city had been spruced up for the Olympics but even so it had always had a reputation for good living and great art, the Picasso Museum, the Gaudí cathedral. And that was odd for me because in my mind it was the bombed and besieged city at the heart of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, fiercely contended for by fascists, communists and anarchists.

  What was the Spanish view of all that? Presumably there were many Spanish books about that, “the National Uprising.”

  “There are almost no books of that kind,” Antonio was saying.

  We were eating sea urchins’ eggs with julienne of seared tuna at his restaurant La Balsa. There are seldom any lapses in service when you are seated with the owner.

  “We have no memory. For example, no one in Spain writes biographies. There are no memoirs at all.”

  “It is as though we do not want to remember the past,” his companion Beatriz said. “It’s strange, but that’s Spain.

  “We live for today and tomorrow. We don’t think about yesterday. It’s not good. Maybe it’s better to have no memories at all than have bad memories.”

  “My family was okay,” Antonio said. “They were not for Franco, but they were monarchists.”

  Beatriz said she had been an anarchist, an unexpected announcement from a prosperous and well-turned-out woman, who had just praised the wine, or perhaps it was my ignorant presumption that an anarchist was an outlaw. And I should have known better, because Orwell, who had been a member of a Trotskyite militia, had described the anarchist brigades.

  She smiled and said that anarchists greeted each other with the word “Salud!”

  “Let’s say your great-great-grandfather went to Cuba and made a fortune selling and buying slaves,” Antonio said. “If someone writes a book about that, a biography, and claims this relative of yours was a slaver, the family will be hurt, eh? Better not to hurt the family. I think this.”

  “Tony uses that example because his great-great-grandfather sold slaves in Cuba,” Beatriz said.

  “Maybe he sold
slaves and maybe not, but anyway he made his fortune in Cuba.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Many things.” Antonio was smiling sheepishly. “That is why I say, better not to ask.”

  I said, “But when I asked about the past I wasn’t thinking of the eighteenth century. I was thinking about thirty years ago, or less.”

  I had yet to accustom myself to such remote allusions. This example of colonial Cuba was typical of a certain Mediterranean way of thinking. Antonio might easily have mentioned the ancient Iberians. The Gibraltarians casually quoted the Treaty of Utrecht, the coastal French could talk about the Roman occupation until the cows came home, and the Italians reminisced about the Etruscans. Even this was nothing compared with a Greek in full cry, describing his glorious Hellenic heritage (“Euripides once said …”), or a Turk animadverting about the Ottoman Empire. And references to Masada, Moses, and the wisdom of the prophet Abraham were part of most Israelis’ small talk. Much of this was romance, or at least sentimental. The Frenchmen who talked about the Romans would be evasive when the subject of the German occupation was raised. Israelis might not be happy talking about something that occurred in South Lebanon last year. There was a book to be written about Mediterranean notions of time.

  Nor, in the Mediterranean, were there clear divisions between the dead and the living, between the mythical and the real. That was another book.

  Meanwhile, Antonio was answering my question.

  “For some people there is a clear memory of Franco,” he said. “It is not good. Everything changed after he died—in fifteen years we changed totally. But maybe we had changed before, and kept it to ourselves.”

  Beatriz said, “The taxi drivers are sentimental. They say things were better before—less crime, no drugs, more order.”

  “Taxi drivers all over the world say that,” I said.

  “And the young people say, ‘Franco? Wasn’t he a general?’ ”

  “It was the tourists who kept us up to date,” Antonio said.

  Was he talking about individual travelers, or the vast numbers of predictable and frugal package tourists, the English out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, wearing socks under their sandals and demanding Watney’s Red Barrel and the Daily Express and complaining of garlic in the food and joking about tummy upsets and diarrhea, and overdoing it on the first day and—too late—putting Timothy White’s sun cream on their big sunburned beaks. The Spannies don’t have our clean ways, innit?

  Them, he said, the lower-middle-class hearties and trippers.

  “We learned a lot from them,” he said. “Ideas, style, what they thought of us and our government. We learned about the rest of the world. And Franco thought he had closed the door.”

  But the reason might also have been that in the twilight period of the seventies, Franco was on his deathbed, and book and movie censorship had been relaxed. Of these years, Colm Tóibín writes, in Homage to Barcelona, “People [in Barcelona] lived in a free country of their own invention, despite the police, despite the dying Dictator.”

  My dinner companions asked me about my trip so far, about the provinces of Andalusia and Murcia and Valencia.

  This raised a common Mediterranean theme. There was another book to be written, based on the text: This is not one country—this is many countries. Italy was several countries; so were Turkey and Israel and France and Cyprus. Yugoslavia was quite a few countries. And Spain?

  “Spain is not a country,” Antonio said. “It is many different countries, with many different languages. Andalusia is so different from Castilia and Galicia. Yet, somehow, Andalusian culture got exported—the guitar, the dances, the songs, all that. Foreigners think that Spanish culture is Andalusian only. But this is many nations.”

  “That’s why the Spanish can’t write about it,” Beatriz said. “Only outsiders can.”

  We talked about the Spain of Gerald Brenan, and Pritchett, and Jan Morris, and H. V. Morton, and Hemingway, and George Borrow, and Rose Macauley, and Robert Graves. It was true, Spain had been thoroughly anatomized by foreigners, the British especially.

  “Mario Vargas Llosa comes here quite a lot,” Antonio said, referring to the novelist who ran unsuccessfully for President of Peru. “He says, ‘People in Spain talk in a lively and intelligent way. They are very perceptive and sometimes very rude. Then they go home and do nothing.’ ”

  One night in Barcelona I had been invited to one of those parties where everyone was witty. There was a poet, a moviemaker, a philosophy professor, a publisher, a painter, a musician, about fifteen people around a table, all intellectuals and artists, and all of them friends, all drunk on champagne—the empty bottles littered the table—celebrating the director’s forty-fourth birthday. They laughed and poked fun and quoted each other, while I sat and marveled. It was a bright, cliquey, old-fashioned, unself-conscious gathering of people, neither fashionable nor wealthy, but all of them talented—and, incidentally, every person at the table was smoking a cigarette.

  Antonio went on quoting Vargas Llosa, “‘The English meet at London parties. They are very polite, they hardly talk. Then they go home and write amazing things—rude, wicked, funny, lively.’ ”

  “Paul is so polite,” Beatriz said. “Maybe that means he is going to write something wicked!”

  On the contrary, in Barcelona I was thinking kindly of the Spanish; what I saw (and it made me hopeful for the rest of my trip) was simple affection. In other travels I had not seen much affection between men and women, that is, open displays of physical intimacy—kissing, hand-holding, snogging, canoodling, a sudden hug; not lust but affection, friendship, reassurance, paddling palms and pinching fingers. I had hardly seen it in China. It was rare on the islands of Oceania. It did not exist in India.

  I saw it in Spain: old married couples holding hands, young people kissing, married ones embracing. It was not submissive and sexist. It was deeply affecting, spontaneous and candid. I thought: I like this.

  Even at the Barcelona bullfight, my last bullfight, couples held hands there too.

  “He is a show-off,” a woman behind me said, calling him a presumido. The matador was kissing the tips of the bull’s horns, kneeling just in front of the bleeding drooling animal, and teasingly flicking the bull’s head with his finger.

  Then the bull came alive and rewarded the matador for taunting him. It bore down on the matador and tore him with its hoofs and gored him, as the cape-waggers tried to distract the murderously provoked creature. The matador got up. There was blood on his arm and his hip. The crowd cheered him, but in a robust and almost satirical way. Then I saw why. The bull in goring him had torn the matador’s tight trousers just at the crotch, and as he limped his dick was exposed, a small pink sausage.

  I fell into conversation with the man next to me and said I wondered what happened to the bull after it was dragged away dead.

  They were butchered and eaten, he said. He described the broth that was made from the bull’s tail, the steaks that were cut from its haunches; and hamburgers that were made from chopped bull.

  “And tomorrow morning you can find the bull’s criadilla on the menu of certain restaurants in Barcelona,” he said.

  Criadilla?

  “Cojónes,” he said. “But cojónes is not polite. Better to say criadilla.

  “The bull’s testicles are served like brain. And it is like eating kiwi fruits. You think they are going to be tough, then you bite, and it is soft and tender and mushy.”

  After the Picasso Museum and the climb to the top of the hill Montjuic and through Parc Güell, I made a tour of Gaudí’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Colm Tóibín, in his book on Barcelona, tells the story of Gaudí’s being interrogated by a visiting bishop. Why had Gaudí decorated the tops of towers which no one would ever see?

  Gaudí said, “Your Grace, the angels will see them.”

  And then I set out again, up the flat tame coast they call the Costa de Maresme, which would lead me to the rugged cliffy Costa Br
ava, the “Wild Coast,” and the French border.

  Badalona just outside the city was both Roman ruins and a grotesque power plant. One stop out of Arc de Triunfo station, going north along the Mediterranean, and Barcelona out the back window seemed like a small town at the foot of a wooded hill—an illusion perhaps, but that was how it seemed.

  There was enough surf for surfers and boogie boarders on the first stretch of shore, at Banys Mortgat; I could see them in black wetsuits in the cold water. The train loped along, next to the shore, and on this overcast day there were nudists sheltering from the wind at Frenys de Mar, and more just before St. Pol, a nude man and a clothed man lying together; and a nude woman reading a book that she had clasped between her knees; a nude man on his back, a nude woman on her stomach, smooth ones, hairy ones. In the winter!

  For the rest it was the Mediterranean shuffle, people walking dogs, families, pipe smokers, men in berets walking arm in arm, and old crippled nuns not only dressed up like penguins but walking like penguins, side to side, in that flat-footed way. And a man swaying and pissing in the Mediterranean in full view of the train passengers—couples, families, children, nuns, priests, monks, dogs, lovers.

  St. Pol de Mar was a dense but well-maintained seaside resort, and I could see that the towns improved as the train moved north and the coast became rockier. There were palms on the promenade at Calella, where “Fisioculturismo” was announced on a poster, the “25th Championship of Body-building—the Calella Finals.” At Pineda del Mar, apart from the pines, there were cabbages planted by the sea and vineyards inland. The bigger and busier places had signs in German and English.

  There were shouting girls on the train, and there was sexual defiance in the way they seemed to challenge the boys across the aisle with their loud laughter. Others were pushing each other and calling out. A poor old woman ate potato chips out of her handbag. A snotty infant clutched a paper bag. Two mustached nuns nodded as the train jogged on the tracks. The painter Constable said, “Nothing is ugly in this world.”