by Paul Theroux
“The only thing wrong with us,” Sir Joshua said, ruefully rather than in anger, “is our bloody size!”
2
The “Mare Nostrum” Express to Alicante
To prove a point to myself about Gibraltar’s smallness I picked up my bag and walked from my hotel in the middle of Gibraltar to the Spanish frontier; got my passport stamped, and then sauntered into Spain; another stamp. The whole international journey from my thirty-dollar room in Gibraltar to the cheese-colored suburbs in the foothills of Andalucia was less than half an hour.
My first day in Spain. I thought of a line from the Spanish writer Pio Baroja, that V. S. Pritchett quotes.
“It may look as if I am seeking something; but I am seeking nothing.” (Parece que busco algo; pero no busco nada.)
There were no coastal trains from Algeciras, no useful trains at all until Málaga. The Algeciras bus was waiting at the station at La Línea, over the border, a town cauchemaresque in its littleness and its sense of being unpeopled and nowhere. Its nondescript beach was noted for its smugglers—drugs, cigarettes, appliances. This bus was just a rattly thing, full of locals who were heading home from work to the ferry port that lay beneath the brown hills. I looked back and saw that Gibraltar was no more than its dramatic rock. The town was not visible until darkness fell, and then all you saw were lights on its lower slopes like candle flames flickering around an altar. As we passed around the bay the rock receded, changing shape, as the prospect altered.
The best view of Gibraltar is from Algeciras, across the bay, where the rock appears as a long ridge, like a fortress, something man-made and defensive, rather than the recumbent and misshapen monster at the edge of the sea. The Neck, Gibraltar’s land connection to Spain, is so low, almost at sea level, that the enormous citadel of rock seems to be detached from the mainland.
That low-lying neck gave Oliver Cromwell a bizarre idea. He decided to make Gibraltar an island; to detach it—dig a wide trench that would quickly fill with water, and sever the Rock from the Spanish mainland. Presto, the English island of Gibraltar. According to Samuel Pepys, Cromwell authorized a ship loaded with picks and shovels to set sail in 1656 to accomplish this godlike task of fiddling with the landscape. The ship was captured by the Spaniards. Then Oliver Cromwell died. The scheme was abandoned.
Algeciras was merely my starting point. “An ugly town of very slight interest,” the guidebook said. But this was the sort of guidebook that recommended a town when it had a building that it could praise in these terms: “The central dome is supported on a hexadecagonal beading over squinches.”
A scruffy little Spanish man took me aside.
“You German?”
“American.”
“Good, I like Americans,” he said. “You want to buy one kilo of hash?”
“No, thank you. It may look as if I am seeking something, but I am seeking nothing.”
“You no like me?” he said, and turned abusive.
I ignored him and walked to the harbor, where the ferry, Ciudad de Zaragoza, was setting out for Tangiers. Another ferry left from Tarifa, where in the past Barbary pirates demanded payment from all ships passing through the straits (and so this tiny haven of extortionists, Tarifa, gave us our taxation word “tariff). Morocco, across the water, was as near as Falmouth is to Vineyard Haven. It was my intention to end my trip there, and to get there by the most roundabout route, via France and Italy, Croatia, Albania, Malta, Israel, and every other Mediterranean shore, even Algeria, if I had the stomach for it. It gave me pleasure to turn away from the ferry landing and walk to the bus station, and buy a ticket to Marbella. I assumed it would take a year or so to reach Morocco.
The bus had plenty of empty seats, and yet when a couple got on wearing matching warm-up suits, the woman sat at the front alone and the man sat right next to me.
He was in his mid to late sixties, with a big intrusive face and mocking frown and hairy ears. He looked careless and lazy, and he stared at me in a meddling way. He said, “Hi there.”
My dim smile was meant to convey that I was perhaps Spanish. I said nothing. I wanted to concentrate on this, my first experience of Spain.
We rolled out of town, past the bullring. The man next to me muttered “Plaza de Toros” in a self-congratulatory way, though he merely squinted at the rest of the graffiti on the walls next to the Autovia di Mediterraneo, most of it very angry: Yanqui = Terroristas and Republica Si!—Monarchia No! and Don’t Vote—Fight! (No Vote—Lucha!). The grandly named highway was just a winding two-lane road along the coast, running past scrubby fields and truck stops and low rocky hills under a gray sky on a Saturday afternoon, the market closed, the beaches empty—the water much too cold for swimming—and even the little old men fishing from the jetties wearing foul-weather gear.
The piles of cork oak bark stacked by the side of the road suggested that a traditional harvest ritual was taking place—not right here, but inland, away from the shore. And that was my first Mediterranean epiphany, the realization that life on these shores bore little relation to what was happening five miles inland, no matter what the country. Somewhere over this Andalusian hill a peasant was hacking bark off trees to sell. That hinterland was not my subject, though; I did not care about the perplexities of Europe. My concentration was the edge of this body of water, the ribbon of beach and cliff, and all the people who shared it, used and misused it, even the snorting old man who for some reason had chosen to sit next to me on the bus.
The Spanish newspaper I had bought in Algeciras told of a murder scandal involving wealthy English expatriates—the wife dead in mysterious circumstances, the husband a prime suspect—in Sotogrande, the next town.
“Cops,” the man next to me said.
It was a roadblock; he had seen it before me, about six policemen at a bend in the road, directing cars to an area where they were to park and be searched. This was a throwback to Franco surely. The police, the Guardia Civil, masters of intimidation and search-and-destroy missions, were plundering the trucks of cars and interrogating drivers and passengers.
This had nothing to do with the Sotogrande murder. It was a search for illegal drugs, items such as the kilo of hashish that the Algeciras punk had tried to sell me. The police, who were heavily armed, had sniffer dogs and mirrors, and two of them moved through the bus, poking luggage, looking under seats, and harassing the dirtier male passengers. The most woeful-looking passenger was ordered to stand up in the aisle while a policeman examined each cigarette in the pack he had in his pocket. The police dog slavered at me and padded on.
“This is unreal,” the man next to me said, perhaps to me, perhaps to himself.
The police, satisfied that the bus did not contain any drugs, allowed us to continue on our way.
“Spain is a land to flee across. Every town, and every capital, is a destination; and the names, which ring with refuge to the fugitive, mount with finality to him traveling relentlessly unpursued.”
That accurate description of my mood that day (even if it sounded a bit too orotund for the landscape I was looking at) is William Gaddis in The Recognitions, the great American novel of counterfeiting and forgery. Gaddis’s vision of Spain was one of the many that filled my head. The experience of Spain had been an inspiration to some of my favorite writers. If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed my desire to travel there. I did not want to risk disappointment—the reality displacing the fabulous land in my imagination. Arthur Waley, the great Chinese scholar and translator, refused to go to China; he did not want to risk having his illusions shattered. He was wise. His illusions of the harmony and grace inspired by the Chinese classics would not have survived for two stops on the Iron Rooster.
It was impossible to be in Spain and not think of Hemingway, lover of fiestas, whose literary reputation was partly based on his passion for bullfighting, and whose notions of honor and heroism, not to say the human condition, were derived in greater measure fr
om the toreros he mooned over than from the foot soldiers in the Spanish Civil War he also wrote about. I personally had an aversion to Hemingway’s work, but that was a matter of taste; I did not dismiss him. Hemingway appears in Gaddis’s book, not by name but as a sententious old bore and boozer known as the Big Unshaven Man (BUM for short). I disliked A Farewell to Arms because it seemed to me to be written in Pilgrim Father English. I preferred Orwell’s account of the Spanish Civil War, in Homage to Catalonia, and his version of how the war had challenged his political ideas. Gerald Brenan seemed to me the best guide through Spanish history, in South from Granada, Jan Morris’s Spain was all I needed to know about the Spanish landscape, and V. S. Pritchett in The Spanish Temper seemed the shrewdest possible examination of Spanish literature and also the passions and pastimes of the Spaniards.
I had read as much as I could—everything mattered—but it struck me on this Spanish bus that I had never seen a landscape like this described anywhere, in any book I had read about Spain. That cheered me up. This was as remote from the Spain of Cervantes and Hemingway and Pritchett and everyone else as it was possible to be. This was the Spain of the absurd travel brochures, the cheap flights, the package tours and the more mendacious travel magazines.
It was a sort of cut-price colonization, this stretch of coast, bungaloid in the extreme—bungalows and twee little chalets and monstrosities in all stages of construction, from earthworks and geometrically excavated foundations filled with mud puddles, to brick and stucco condos and huts and houses. There were cheap hotels, and golf courses, and marinas and rain-sodden tennis courts and stagnant swimming pools at Estepona, where “Prices Slashed” was a frequent sign on housing developments in partially built clusters with names such as “Port Paradise” and “The Castles” and “Royal Palms”—no people on the beach, no people on the road, no golfers, no sign of life at all, only suggestions here and there that the place was known to English-speaking people. “English Video Club” was one, and another that was hardly out of view from Gibraltar to the French frontier at Port-Bou: “Fish-and-Chips.”
And it was only the other day that this whole coast had sprung up and become vulgarized as the object of intense real estate speculation. My guidebook said of awful overgrown Estepona, “As recently as 1912, the road ended here.”
Then, this end of Spain was just mules and goats; and peasants hoeing the rocky hillsides, cutting cork oak, gathering barnacles and praying on their knees. And now they are mopping the floors of the bungalows at “Port Paradise.”
“It’s all English people here,” the man next to me said. “You speak English?”
“Yes.”
“Your pants don’t have a fly,” he said.
I did not have an answer for this. He was smiling. I said, “Does that bother you?”
“Seems to me that makes them kind of inconvenient.”
I am on my Grand Tour, on this Spanish bus on a gray day out of season, minding my business, and this foolish old man who insists on sitting next to me points out that my Patagonia pants don’t have a fly. I did not ask for this at all.
He was still smiling. He said, “See my wife? That’s her up there.”
Commenting on the cut of my pants was merely a way of breaking the ice. He wanted to talk about his wife.
“She was an X-rated showgirl,” he said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was watching my reaction.
She had the face of an elderly baby. Her hair was stiff and blonde. She was looking out the bus window, giving me her profile. She was big, hefty even, and her baggy warm-up suit conveyed an impression of physical plentitude. Yet there was a soft and faded beauty about her, a carefulness in her makeup that told that she was still trying, that she still cared, and perhaps it was the absurdity of her husband that made me think that she was very unhappy.
“No, I’m kidding you. Not X-rated. She was a Las Vegas showgirl.”
He was not looking at me anymore. His forearms rested on the seat-bar in front of him, and he was staring.
“Imagine what she looked like forty years ago.”
We were passing gray sand, weedy yards, hillsides of condominiums—some with turrets, some with battlements, all of them empty; and houses and villas helter-skelter.
To this man who had offended me by commenting on the way I was dressed I said, “I imagine she looked twenty-five.”
“She was beautiful,” he insisted. Hadn’t he heard me? “She’s still beautiful.”
You pimp, I thought, why aren’t you sitting with her?
“She knows I’m talking about her.”
The woman had glanced back and her face darkened.
“She’d kill me if she knew what I was saying. She hates having been a showgirl. That’s where I met her. Vegas. If she knew what I was saying to you she’d murder me.”
We had come to Guadalmina, which looked old-fashioned and pleasant. I wanted to make a note, but the man beside me was talking again.
“She’s tough. You wouldn’t think it, but she is. She makes all the decisions. She wears the pants in the house.”
“You seem to be an expert on pants,” I said. In my mind I imagined his wife, this bulky woman, in big brown tweedy pants and clomping shoes, walking though a house in which this man cowered.
“I once said to her, ‘I’m going to marry a rich woman next time. I don’t care if she’s fat or ugly, as long as she has money.’ ”
The man laughed, remembering this conversation.
“My wife says to me, ‘And what are you going to offer her?’ ”
“What did you say to that?”
“What could I say? She shot me down.”
We came to San Pedro de Alcántara, which was older and more settled, something like a town. Few trees to speak of, I wrote in my innocence, little knowing that on the thousands of miles of Mediterranean coastline there are few trees to speak of, no forests except for one in Corsica, hardly any woods abutting the shore. It made for a rather stark coastline, but it revealed everything—here at San Pedro the ruins of a Roman villa, a Visigoth’s basilica and a Moorish castle, and all those bungalows.
I had not planned to get off the bus at Marbella, but this man irritated me. I had the feeling that it gave him a perverse pleasure to sit with me at a distance and leer at his wife, in the way that some men enjoy watching their spouse have sex with strangers; at the very least, he wanted to go on talking. I am out of here.
Passing the woman, just before I got off, I turned to her. She looked at once alarmed and suspicious.
Laughing a little, I said, “Your husband tells me you were a Las Vegas showgirl. I would never have known.”
The last sound I heard was this woman’s howl ringing through the bus and the pusillanimous whine of her husband’s hollow denial.
In Marbella I met a Spaniard, Vicente, who had just spent a year in Mexico. He worked for a company that exported Spanish olive oil. He had liked his time in Mexico but—buttoned-up, self-conscious, innately gloomy, cursed with an instinctive fatalism, and envious in a class-obsessed way—patronized the Mexicans much as the British patronize Americans, and for the same reasons.
“They talk like this,” Vicente said, and did an imitation of a Mexican talking in slushy mutterings with his teeth clamped shut.
It seemed accurate and clever to me, and I told him so, though he seemed to be embarrassed by his effort and was too shy to continue. And, naturally, having mocked them, then said what wonderful people the Mexicans were.
“Did you go to any bullfights there?”
“Yes. Very small bulls in Mexico. Our bulls are much bigger and stronger—more brave. We breed them especially to fight.”
“Any other differences?”
“We use the horses more. And much else. I cannot explain all the differences.”
Everything I knew about bullfighting, including There is no Spanish word for bullfight, I had learned from The Sun Also Rises. Rose Macaulay’s appreciative book about Spain, Fabled S
hore (1949)—an account of a trip down this coast—mentions bullfights only once and briefly: “I do not care for them.”
I said, “I was thinking of going to a corrida.”
“Have you never seen one?”
“No—never.”
This made Vicente laugh, and he insisted I should go to one.
“We love football, but the corrida is here,” he said and tapped his heart. “It is our passion. And, listen, one of the most popular toreros in Spain is from America—Colombia.”
I was grateful for Vicente’s encouragement, but I did not really need it. I had intended to go to the first bullfight I found advertised.
In the meantime I had found a place to stay in Marbella. As an experiment in budget travel I had found a ten-dollar-a-night room in a pensione behind the oldest church in the town, the Iglesia de la Encarnación. This was in the Old Town. An effort had obviously been made in Marbella to renovate this older neighborhood and reclaim some of its narrow alleys and small lanes. I regarded this as a challenge. Anyone can go to a strange town and buy comfort and goodwill. With the single exception of limping vandalized Albania, which is in a state of disrepair and anarchy, luxury is available in most places on the shores of the Mediterranean.
I knew from experience that the deluxe route was the easy way out, and that it was unreal, the fast lane, where I would meet stuffy travelers and groveling locals. I did not require luxury, I needed only modest comfort and privacy, and it was often possible to find what I wanted for ten or fifteen dollars. This was particularly so in the off-season, as the wind blew through these coastal resort towns, where business was terrible.
Even Marbella, which had the reputation of being one of the more salubrious resorts, was hurting. The summer had been bad and nothing was happening now; it would be a long winter. The rise in inflation and the cost of living generally had surprised the British who had retired here. Many were in the process of selling their houses—at a loss in some cases—and moving elsewhere.