NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Four hours of this, the ferry pitching and rolling, and then the wind eased and the sea grew calmer as we approached Ibiza. It was three in the morning. An English couple boarded, murmuring, but they were not talking to each other, they were reassuring their pets, a nervous dog on a leash, a whining cat in a handheld cage. Now the passengers numbered five, and two animals. The lights still glared, the television screen flickered, still on but no program.

  All those seats and yet not a single one was comfortable—straight backs, hard armrests, no leg room in front. None of them reclined. I propped myself up and when I could not stand the discomfort and the burning lightbulbs anymore I went on deck. The black swell of sea sighed against the hull, while I yawned and fiddled with my shortwave radio. After three hours the eastern sky grew lighter.

  In the misty light of daybreak there was nothing, not even a sunrise—only the whitish water of dawn, no land. We did not raise Mallorca until seven-thirty or so, the west coast, Dragonera Island, and then rounded Cabo de Cala Figuera, where there was a lighthouse. I could see tawny hills and a mountainous interior, a lovely rugged place. At the edge of some beaches there were white hotels stacked up, and dense settlement, but there were stretches of coast on which there was very little evidence of any building.

  Mallorca, sometimes called the heart of the Mediterranean, for embodying all its virtues, is known in Britain as a package holiday destination, and so is a synonym for cheapness. It is one of those place names which, like Frinton or Bognor, carries with it so many dubious associations that it has been given the status of a household word and just pronouncing it, deliberately twanging it, calling it “Majorca,” and sounding the “j,” has the same effect as cracking a joke.

  “Yes, it is lovely,” the Spanish passenger said when I remarked on the beauty of the island. His son was still asleep as we pulled into the harbor. “When I was growing up this island was all natural.”

  I asked him his age. He was fifty. He remembered the coming of the package tours, the rise of the hotels. He said there were parts of Mallorca that were very beautiful.

  “But in the summer it is terrible all over.”

  He said that business was awful here at the moment—worse than on the mainland.

  “But things are improving. There is a fiesta on the weekend.”

  Arriving by ferry gave me a good look at the place. I had resolved not to fly anywhere in the Mediterranean anyway, and the decision was useful in forcing me to make elaborate detours (like the one to Denia) which gave me a perspective on places I would not otherwise have had.

  Mallorca looked elegant from the sea, as we crossed the wide Bahía de Palma. Nearer the port I could see the old town of Palma, the ornate cathedral dominating the city walls and the stucco buildings, some of them ancient, and the newer suburbs to the west, the fertile fields and valleys at a greater distance to the north.

  I walked down the gangway and through the port building to the main street, by one of the marinas. Over breakfast, studying a map, I debated whether to take the narrow gauge train through the mountains to Sóller on the rocky north coast. “As beautiful a run as any in Switzerland,” one brochure said. But I also wanted to see the more remote seaside villages on the west coast which were nowhere near the railway. A rental car seemed a good idea.

  The phone book listed a number of rental agencies. And because of the large British population there were many British businesses, a whole sub-directory listing importers of sausages and beer and books and jam, as well as advertising clothes, haircuts, and houses.

  There was even an English radio station, beaming sentimental songs from Palma to British residents on the island. I discovered this after I had rented the car. I tuned to that station, which was all the more affecting because it was so amateurish.

  “Valerie is on her way to London,” the woman announcer said. “She’ll be in Mayfair tomorrow. Safe trip, Val. Here’s a song for Valerie.”

  It was “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

  “I was thinking how I first heard that song at the Hammersmith Palais,” the announcer said, after it had ended.

  I had driven out of Palma and I was passing small fertile farms, and stone houses, heading for the mountains.

  “What’ll I Do” began to play, with Fred Astaire singing to the wobbly melody. The music made me homesick, but homesickness seemed a natural condition of travel. I can only travel when I am happy, but when I am happy I miss the productive routines of my life, and the woman at the center of it. Each morning these days I woke to the questions, Where am I and what am I doing here? and then got up and attempted to make something of the day.

  “I’ve got to say cheerio now. But remember, if you do it, do it good. And if you don’t do it good, don’t do it at all.”

  The mountainside rose abruptly from the flat Palma plain, and it was steep, a vertical ascent of hairpin bends. At the ridge I looked across the rocky cliffs and saw green slopes and a bay and blue ocean. But as I descended a storm crowded the coast, and it was raining like hell as I entered Sóller.

  I was so wet and bedraggled that at least four Spaniards took me for a native and asked me difficult questions. One question was, “Where is the office that processes insurance claims for injured workers?”

  Walking around the town to get my bearings, I saw three coin-operated machines in the plaza. One dispensed gum. One dispensed plastic toys and beads. The third dispensed (for two hundred pesetas) pairs of condoms encased in small plastic globes. I could see them in the fishbowl top of the dispenser. I was trying to decide where I should spend the night when I saw a sign to Deyá.

  “An English poet lived in Deyá, isn’t that so?” I asked a man near Sóller harbor.

  “Robert Graves,” the man said, without hesitating. “His house is still there. Now his son and daughter live there.”

  “I think he was a wonderful poet. Do the people here know his poems?”

  “Yes. We have a high regard for his work. We compare him with the great poets, not just of Spain but of the world.”

  It seemed a pleasant idea to make a trip to Deyá—maybe walk there along the cliffs, and look at the landscape that Graves had praised for so many years.

  I found a hotel within the sound of the harbor. Sóller had such a placid harbor, such magnificent cliffs, I decided to stay a few days and catch up with my note-taking. I hadn’t written much since Alicante. I had lost a night’s sleep on the Punta Europa. I was delighted to find this peaceful place. On most trips I kept rolling until I found a place I liked, and when I got a certain feeling I came to a stop. This was another reason I traveled alone, because it was rare for two people to see the same qualities in a place (“Why do you want to stop here? I thought we were supposed to keep going”). Sóller was pleasant. But even in this low season there were some tourists here—hikers mostly.

  That seemed a good idea to me. I bought food in the supermarket, yogurt, sardines, fruit juice, picnic food for homemade bocadillos—fat sandwiches. I bought Sóller’s prized oranges and a topographical map; and when the rain stopped and the sea glittered with sun, I spent two days hiking, looking at birds, making notes, glad that I had found such a lovely corner of this supposedly hackneyed island.

  All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent—they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them. What I had missed most of all in my trip so far was a chance to look at a landscape that was not wall-to-wall hotels and condos and clip joints and “English Spoken Here.” Perhaps I was too ignorant for ruins; whatever the reason, they did not interest me greatly, nor did tombs, nor churches. It was not my philistinism, it was my desire to see the life of the coast, no matter what form it took. I made some exceptions. Big crumbling Roman or Greek amphitheaters were another story. They looked absurd and ancient, and there they lay with all their
ambitious symmetry in the oddest settlements. “Here is where the gladiators entered.” “Notice the ruts of the rich people’s chariots.” (I was to see such structures in Albania in a slum in Durrës and in the south of Tunis in the otherwise ramshackle town El Djem.)

  Not long before I had been thinking that it was seldom possible to be alone at any point on the Mediterranean coast; and then, by chance, I found this part of Mallorca. True, it was dotted with villages and parts of it were jammed with houses, but it was the prettiest coast I had seen so far. I hiked to the village of Fornalutx on the slopes of Sóller’s mountain, Puig Mayor, in the shape of a witch’s hat, and went bird watching on the vertiginous path along the sea cliffs.

  At the end of my two days’ hiking I caught up with my chores, my notes and laundry. If it seemed strange to be alone on the cliffs, no sounds except sea birds and the occasional Teutonic squawk, it seemed even stranger to be in a launderette in Sóller, with young mothers and children, folding clothes.

  “Hello. How are you?”

  “Very well. You are a visitor?”

  “Yes. I like Sóller. Very pretty.”

  “Not spoiled,” the woman said.

  “I wonder why.”

  “Because there are no flat places. It is all cliffs and crags and steep slopes. The few hotels we have are all at the harbor and on the road leading out of the village.”

  That seemed a good explanation. It was not possible to put up a big hotel here, and there was no money in a small hotel—no room for the package tours.

  “It’s a quiet time of year.”

  “Mostly the Germans now.”

  Only Germans, really, big chunky waterproof hikers, pairs of them, in parkas and knickerbockers, carrying walking sticks and binoculars. And when I saw Germans like that I did not think of hiking but invasion. They were Germans, of a robust pink-cheeked sort, wearing thick-soled hiking boots, taking advantage of the cheap rates and marching up and down the mountain paths, as though unintentionally auditioning for a production of The Private Life of the Master Race.

  “Once the British came, but when the prices went up, the French and Belgians took their place. Now it is Germans in the winter. Some British people still come in the summer months.”

  She knew who frequented Sóller. She was a room cleaner in one of the hotels. Her husband was a fisherman. He caught shrimp in these months and in the spring he would look for sardines. Fishing was a hard living, she said.

  Her little girl goggled at us and used a small square of cloth to imitate her mother’s clothes-folding.

  I bought gas for the car—four thousand pesetas to fill the tank, about $35 for this tinky-winky Renault 5, another revelation about the high cost of living in Spain. But generally speaking in the Mediterranean a liter of gas cost twice as much as a liter of table wine.

  The next morning, my last in Sóller, I woke once again to the sound of the waves sloshing against the beach, regretting that I had to leave.

  In my two days of hiking I had walked almost to Deyá. Today I drove there on the narrow winding coast road, and early on, came upon the sight of a head-on collision (no one hurt but a car and a truck badly damaged). I was cautioned by the consternation of the young man standing by his smashed jeep, his face dark with anxiety; the busy movements of the truck driver who had rammed him on the sharp bend in the road. A tunnel was being dug through the mountains. The shout No Tunnel! was scrawled all over this part of the island. I agreed. There was a train. There was a road. There were already too many cars in Mallorca.

  The village of Deyá was for so many years the home of the poet Robert Graves that the villagers passed a resolution and in 1969 made Graves “an adopted son,” the only one in the long history of the village. He had come there in 1929 on a hunch and lived there for more than half his life.

  It is hard for me to work up any interest in a writer’s birthplace, and I hate pilgrimages to writers’ tombstones, but I do enjoy seeing where they lived and worked; writers’ houses fascinate me. And writers often choose magnificent landscapes to live in, whether they have money or not. Henry Miller settled in Big Sur and lived in a cabin long before Big Sur became a coveted piece of real estate; D. H. Lawrence was in pre-chic Taos, Hemingway was in Key West for the fishing, and moved on to Cuba for much the same reason. Robert Louis Stevenson was an early visitor to California and Hawaii and at last a pioneer in Samoa.

  In the literary history of the Mediterranean, many places became famous and fashionable long after foreign writers discovered them and wrote about them. Very often the writers were residents. Usually it was a case of putting a fishing village on the map, and that ended when the tiny port was turned into an expensive resort. This is pretty much the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald glorifying the Riviera, of Norman Douglas in Capri (South Wind), Lawrence Durrell in Corfu (Prospero’s Cell) and Cyprus (Bitter Lemons) and of Somerset Maugham in Cap Ferrat. There are scores of other examples—people in Greece looking for Zorba or the Magus, literary pilgrims in Alexandria looking for Justine. The reductio ad absurdum of this, and probably the worst thing that can happen, is for the writer’s paradise to turn into hell while he or she is still living there—the hell of traffic and hotels, visitors and literary pilgrims. The writer may have unintentionally caused this to happen, by raving about the place.

  In her typical gnomic way, saying that it was “Paradise—if you can stand it!” Gertrude Stein suggested that Robert Graves try Mallorca. And so having left his wife and children he went there, with his lover, the impossible Laura Riding. Graves found this idyllic island in 1929 which, in the course of his lifetime, almost sank under the weight of package tourists. Yet Deyá was still a somewhat remote and pretty village, high on sea cliffs, surrounded by the lovely Teix Mountains. He went there because it was cheap and off the beaten track. It also seemed a happy blend of two landscapes he loved—North Wales and Corfu. He was determined not to leave. He wrote in “The Next Time,”

  And when we passengers are given two hours,

  When once more the wheels fail at Somewhere—Nowhere,

  To climb out, stretch our legs and pick wild flowers—

  Suppose that this time I elect to stay there?

  I easily found Graves’s house. It was named Canelluñ and, made of local stone, it occupied a lofty position on a ledge outside of the village. It was a dignified house on a steep slope, crags behind it, and the rocky shore far below it. There was an unexpectedly luxurious hotel in the center of Deyá, La Residencia, the sort of hotel I had been avoiding, since this was supposed to be a breezy trip. My idea was to press on; it was an enormously long coastline, and I was trying to avoid being corrupted and detained by luxury and lotus-eating.

  Graves had bought Canelluñ in 1934 with his profits from I, Claudius and had lived there for many years with Laura Riding, who like so many other mistresses in literature began as his muse and ended as a nag. It has been said that one of the reasons this powerful novel of the decline of Caesardom is so convincing is because Graves “used it as a vehicle for expressing the dark side of his feelings for Laura Riding.” He saw her character in the wicked and manipulative poisoner Livia. Laura was known in the village as “a bossy eccentric who wore strange clothes.” After some years and some suffering Graves tossed her out and took up with another White Goddess.

  An interviewer once asked Graves a boring question about his living in Deyá.

  “Has living in Deyá, isolated from what you call the mechanarchic civilization, led you to what you call handicraft in your poetry?”

  This produced an interesting answer from Graves. “I once lived here for six years without moving out—in nineteen thirty to thirty-six,” he replied. “Didn’t even go to Barcelona. Apart from that I’ve always made a point of traveling. One’s got to go out, because one can’t live wholly in oneself or wholly in the traditional past. One’s got to be aware of how nasty urban life is.”

  By keeping his head down, he had tried to get through the Spanish Civil
War. He had fought in the First World War (and written a book about his disillusionment in his precocious—he was thirty-three—autobiography Goodbye to All That). Franco kept threatening to invade Mallorca, and when the time came, and the island grew dangerous, Graves fled.

  The village of Deyá is lovely. How to account for the fact that it remained so long after other parts of the island had fallen to the crassest of developers? Perhaps it was as the woman in Sóller had said to me, “no level places”—that and the narrow roads. If a place was inaccessible it had a chance of keeping its identity and remaining untainted.

  “Deyá had little to recommend it except the Graves magic,” Anthony Burgess wrote dissentingly in his autobiography, speaking of a period when he had lived in the village. He went on, “A literal magic, apparently, since the hills were said to be full of iron of a highly magnetic type, which drew at the metal deposits of the brain and made people mad. Graves himself was said to go around sputtering exorcisms while waving an olive branch.”

  The Mallorcans I spoke to in the north of the island all knew of Graves, they knew the village and the house. They knew everything except Graves’s poetry. That was the way of the world. The man’s reputation was good enough for them, and it inspired their respect. A celebrated writer who lives in a small town or a village has an odd time of it. It is amusing when the local philistines disparage the writer in the neighborhood, but it is downright hilarious when the writer is strenuously championed by the local illiterates. Graves lived among olive-squashing peasants and fruiterers and shepherds, as well as prosperous retirees and aristocrats. He shocked some, but his love for the island and for the village in particular impressed them to the point where most of the locals were his well-wishers.