by Paul Theroux
My interest was the Mediterranean. I chose two films about places I had been. But I had not been able to penetrate the countries to this extent. Couvre Feu (Curfew), directed by a Palestinian, Raschid Masharaoui, was an insider’s account of simple bravery and defiance against great odds, the stone throwers of the Intifada facing machine guns of the Israeli soldiers.
Throughout the Mediterranean, the most-quoted atrocity of Bosnia was not a list of the number dead but rather the deliberate shelling by the Serbs of the ancient bridge over the river at Mostar. The destruction of the bridge symbolized everything that was wicked about the war—the stupidity and meanness in the conflict, and all the atavistic cruelty that was still present in the Mediterranean. In Bosna (Bosnia) directed by Bernard Henry I saw the bridge destroyed—and much else. This documentary showed the carnage of the war, the pitiful merciless slaughter, the inert corpses by the roadside, the blood and broken glass and decapitations; the mass graves, weeping children, terrified adults and brutalized soldiers—snow, rain and ruin. But no atrocity in the film stirred the audience more than the shells—about a dozen of them altogether—falling on the bridge itself, which had stood for five hundred years, finally falling to pieces into the river. The people in the theater gasped, there were pitiful groans, and when the lights came up there were tears in their eyes.
I went back to my hotel after the film about Bosnia and listened to the news on my shortwave radio. “Serbian forces are advancing on Bihac to reclaim territory they lost to the Bosnians in the past two weeks,” I heard. The casualty figures for the dead and wounded and missing were given, and the news that Sarajevo (which I had seen shelled in the year-old documentary Bosna just an hour ago) was being shelled again.
The weather was rainy and cold. I was eager to move on. I returned to Mr. Habib, the agent for the shipping lines.
“We are waiting for notification,” the agent said. He was friendly. He spoke English well. He said that it would be an interesting voyage.
I said, “As it’s a Libyan ship I think I should tell you that I am an American.”
“No problem. I’ll talk to the captain, just in case anyone thinks of doing something stupid to you.”
I kept trying. But three days later Mr. Habib was still waiting for notification, and there was no word about the Garyounis.
18
To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz
This lakelike sea with such a tame coast had so habituated me to sunshine and mediocre weather that it did not occur to me to stick my face into the wind today and fathom its force. Surely the whole point about picturesque landscapes was that they were not dangerous? But if I had simply wetted my finger and held it up I would have known a great deal. As the rain and wind increased, I waited for the Garyounis to take me to Morocco. I saw only that the wind was lifting the flags higher and straighter than normal. A seasoned Mediterranean sailor would have seen more muscle in that wind than I had, sensed something darker and chillier, a turbulence from the Levant, a dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea. It was the weather we had been having for a week. Mediterranean weather usually came and went. But this did not go.
One day, Mr. Habib said, “The Garyounis was put into dry dock. The Libyans are sending a different ship. It does not take passengers. Therefore, you will have to go some other time.”
I muttered an insincere curse. This was not good weather for the three-day voyage to the far side of Morocco. It was not good for the short voyage to Sicily. There were no other ships to Morocco, and I had vowed not to take any planes. The Marseilles ferry was leaving next week. I decided to make my way by train through Italy to France, where I might find a ferry to Morocco. It was a very long detour, but what was the hurry?
My travels soon became what an exasperated English person would call a bugger’s muddle. Refusing to leave the ground, I traveled from Sicily to Naples again, to Rome; and north by train to Livorno and Pisa. Crossing from Nice to Corsica I had missed this section of coast, which was dramatic, and dignified by rocky cliffs and blasted by the wind. This was one of the loveliest coastlines in the entire Mediterranean. It was another place that I would be happy to return to. I consoled myself by thinking that on the Garyounis I would have missed it—the houses clustered on the great plunging rock cliffs of seaside Cinqueterre, the villas and precipices south of Antignano, the enormous blocks of marble piled at the station of Massa, near Carrara, which had supplied raw material to almost every Italian sculptor.
On the coast, all the way from Chiavari—where I was proud to have relatives—to Portofino and Rapallo and Genoa, the cliffs were too rugged to be vulgarly modernized, too sharply angled to serve as the foundations for condominiums. They had that in common with the cliffs of the Costa Brava in Spain, and the seaside heights of Croatia, and sections of the Turkish coast, and North Cyprus. But wherever the Mediterranean coast was flat it was overbuilt; the low-lying shores had been deemed suitable for hotels and mass tourism, and had been destroyed.
The rarest sight in the Mediterranean was surf, but at Imperia, Porto Maurízio, approaching Ventimiglia, I saw six-foot rollers dumping foam onto the beach. Something unusual was happening in the Mediterranean this week; and still the wind was blowing from the east.
There were six older American couples in the train, bewildered by the weather, burdened by seventeen heavy suitcases. They were from Jackson, Mississippi, and they soon became embroiled with some Spanish students in a fuss about seats. The blustering turned to abuse. It was a blessing that these gentle people were not aware of what was being said to them in Spanish. They were the sort of patient Americans whom I had seen being taken advantage of and overcharged all over the Mediterranean. It did not matter that they said Antibes as though it rhymed with “rib-eyes,” and pressed their faces to the window and chanted “Monny Carla.” After all, no one else here could have pronounced the grand Mississippi name Yoknapatawpha.
“You’re a yella-dog Democrat,” Billy Mounger said to me, concluding—correctly—that I would vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Republican.
I said, “I think I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Democrat, too.”
He laughed at that. He said, “We’re yella-dog Republicans. We’re probably the most right-wing people you probably ever met.”
“Go on, then, shock me, Billy,” I said.
“I’m chairman of the Phil Gramm for President Committee.”
“That is pretty shocking.” Mr. Gramm claimed to be the most conservative candidate of all the Republicans.
“That ain’t the story,” Mounger said. “One of our guys back there is against Phil Gramm. Says to me, ‘I don’t want no oriental damn woman as the First Lady in the White House.’ ”
Mrs. Gramm, born and raised in Hawaii, was of Korean descent.
“You said it, Billy, he’s one of your guys.”
They all got off at Cannes, rhyming it with “pans,” and I stayed aboard, rattled down the track to Marseilles, where I was told there were no ferries to Morocco. I got into my berth and slept until Port-Bou, the frontier, changed trains at dawn, and at Barcelona got another train to Valencia. Twenty-six hours ago I had left Rome.
Gently rocking around the edge of the Mediterranean once again, in the opposite direction, this Spanish train stopped at the town of Tortosa. It was exactly opposite—that is to say, at the far end of the Mediterranean—from the Syrian town of Tartus, where I had been over a month ago. Tartus had once been given the name of Tortosa by the Crusader Knights. We passed Xilxes, which, printed boldly on its station signboard, had the appearance of an obscure Roman numeral. I stayed only long enough at the lovely station at Valencia to buy some oranges and a ticket through the fields of fruit trees, past a small chapellike building lettered Urinario, to Alicante. I would have continued, but I was too late for the Málaga train, so I slept there and went to Málaga the next day.
At Málaga I bought a ticket on the ferry to Melilla, the Spanish enclave in Morocco; then I went out an
d had dinner of local pickled eels.
“Where are you from in America?” the bartender asked me.
“Boston.”
“The Boston Strangler.” El Estrangulador del Boston.
“That’s me.”
The ferry Ciudad de Badajoz left Málaga at one in the afternoon for Melilla. It was a gray windy day, and only about twenty of us were making the trip. Most of them were Moroccans, the men looking like Smurfs in djellabas, the women like nuns in habits and hoods, traveling with gunnysacks for luggage. A handful of Spaniards had cars or trucks down below. It was a large ferry, five stories from its Plimsoll line to its top deck. I regretted that I had not been able to take one like it from Tunisia, but anyway I would be in Melilla in seven hours.
Leaving Málaga’s outer harbor, the ferry pitched and began sailing aslant the wind, the shoulder of the easterly hard against its port beam. Seasickness bags were distributed by the crew. The Moroccans used theirs, and some of them could be seen tottering along, bearing these little sacks to the deck where they were jettisoned over the rail. This was a lesson to me. After a year and a half of glaring at the Mediterranean and writing “tame,” “lakelike,” “a vast pond,” “sloshing waves,” “almost featureless,” “wearing a dumb green look of stagnation,” and so forth—heaping abuse on the Mediterranean the way you might insult someone lazily snoring on a sofa—the sea had come alive and was howling in my face, the way someone lazily snoring in a sofa would react if unfairly abused.
It was not a long swell and a distant fetch between waves, but rough irregular waves and a strong wind—a sea that was more confused and noisy than many oceans I had seen. The storm was not an illusion. This large ferry was tossing in it like a chamber pot.
“Windy,” I said to a man at the rail.
The seasick passengers inside had made me feel queasy and had driven me outdoors.
“It is the Levanter,” he said. I had not heard that word spoken before, though I had read it in books about the Mediterranean. It was the weather-changing wind from the east that could blow at gale force. But I had only known sunny or gray or rainy weather; no storms, nothing to interrupt my plans.
“Going to Melilla?”
“I hope so.”
“Why ‘hope’?”
“Because this weather is very bad.”
He looked worried. It had not occurred to me that the wind was anything but a nuisance. How could it be a danger? This was the Mediterranean, after all. Yes, I had read of the severe storms in The Odyssey, but that epic was famous for its hyperbole.
“This is a large ship,” I said.
“Some ships are not large enough for the Levanter,” he said.
To change the subject I said, “Isn’t Melilla a bit like Gibraltar? It is a little piece of Spain in Morocco, the way Gibraltar is a little piece of Britain in Spain.”
“That is true. It is the same. But we still want Gibraltar.”
“Maybe the Moroccans want Melilla.”
“Yes, but so do we. And Gibraltar too.”
He laughed, seeing the contradiction, but refusing to concede.
It was cold on deck, and though there was wind but no rain the deck was wet with spray and spoondrift. The wind had raised the sea and lowered the sky. The visibility was poor. The smack of the waves against the ship was as loud and violent as though the hull were being struck with metal, the sound like the clapper in a cracked bell.
The man’s name was Antonio. He was from Mijas. I told him that I had been to a bullfight in Mijas over a year ago. I had found the whole thing generally disgusting and brutal, but in the hope of eliciting an opinion about bull fever I refrained from telling him my true feelings. Besides, this storm did not create an atmosphere that was conducive to the free flow of ideas.
“Mijas is becoming very famous,” he said. “The young matadors start there, like the ones you saw, and they soon make a reputation.”
“But the most famous matador in Spain is from Colombia, isn’t that so?”
“No. The best one now—the real hero—is Jesulín de Ubrique. Every man and woman loves him—every girl wants to meet him.”
“Ubrique is near here, isn’t it?”
“Down the coast,” Antonio said. He gasped and clutched the rail as a wave crashed against the deck below. He raised his voice. “And another one is the son of the famous El Cordobes, though El Cordobes refuses to say that he is his son.”
“What’s the son’s name?” I shouted over the wind.
“Manuel Diaz el Cordobes, and he is crazy like his father. More crazy! His father used to play with the bull, but this Manuel Diaz puts his face against the bull’s face. He is double crazy!”
“I have a theory that Spanish people prefer football to the corrida.”
“Not true. We love the corrida more.”
“But it’s not a sport.”
“No. It is a spectacle,” Antonio said.
In the course of our little conversation the weather had grown much worse. Spray flew into the windows and salt grains frosted the glass. Sea-water ran across the upper decks, and the lower decks were awash. Now and then you hear about a storm sinking a ferry, because they are not built for storms. But you don’t remember those news items until you are on a ferry, in a serious storm.
“I have lived around here my whole life. I cross to Morocco a lot. I have never seen it this bad,” Antonio said.
“We ought to be there soon.”
“No. It’s many hours away.”
“It’s only a seven-hour trip, and we’ve been sailing for five.”
“Going slowly,” he said.
“Maybe the weather is better in Melilla.”
“With the wind in this direction it will be worse. The Levanter blows against it.”
The fury of the sea, the height of the waves, the screaming wind—they all defied me, author of the words “junk waves,” “mush-burgers,” “slop and plop of the Mediterranean.” It was a maddened sea and this huge ferry was having trouble negotiating it. From the hold came the sound of clanking chains, the creak of cars and trucks, the rolling clatter of steel barrels and the rattle of loose bolts on the steel gangways.
Antonio said, “I am afraid about my car. I think it will crash into another one.”
I stayed on deck. True, it was cold and windy on deck. But it was stifling in the cargo hold. It was nauseating in the lounges. Now and then someone would stagger out to the deck to practice projectile vomiting. I held on, pressed into a corner, tried to read an old fluttering copy of the Guardian I had found in Málaga.
I thought: When we get to Melilla this will just seem like a bad dream.
Soon after, as it was growing dark, the captain made an announcement: “Because of the wind and the poor conditions we are not proceeding to Melilla. We are returning to Málaga.”
The vast squarish bulk of the ferry turned clumsily into the wind, twisting as it went, the sea-spray flying, and then the vessel was in full retreat from the storm.
The phlegmatic Spaniards, used to bad news, took this well. The Muslim Moroccans, contrary to all the teachings of Islam, took the announcement badly and shouted and threw things and argued and slammed the hatchways. Their children cried. The menfolk ranted. The women sulked. They did not want to go back to Spain.
Hours later, in darkness, we were back in Málaga. I was frustrated by the return, but I was also relieved. The captain knew these seas; he would not willingly abandon the voyage if he had confidence in his ship. So he had feared for the ship. The port was closed. All further ferries were canceled.
Antonio gave me a lift to the bus station. He said, “These Levanters usually last three days.”
Perhaps there would be more of it. My response was to go in full retreat myself, back to where I had begun my trip. It was only an hour and a half from Algeciras to Ceuta, the southern Pillar of Hercules. I was disappointed that I had not been able to sail from Tunisia, but it was interesting, was it not, that I had been forced to go
all the way back to the Straits of Gibraltar to make my crossing? It had not really spoiled my plans, because—always improvising—I had never had much of a plan.
The coast was stormy all the way to Algeciras. This time Torremolinos was wild and windblown, and so was Torreblanca, the sea gray and the heavy surf smashing thick suds onto the deserted beach. I was heading back to where I had begun, and the signs went from Spanish, to bilingual, to English as we traveled south. Then it was Liquor Shop, Property Brokers, Video Rental, Hairdresser, Music Cafe, Insurance Broker, Real English Breakfast, the Sun on the newspaper racks, Iron Monger’s Shop, Legal Advice.
This was the sort of coast that had inspired the witty last line in Harry Ritchie’s book about the Costa del Sol, Here We Go. Looking up from the deranged coast of hooligans and package tourists, and seeing the sunset on the mountains, the author reflects, “Spain. It looked a beautiful country. Someday, I thought, I really must go there.”
To Fuengirola again—Everything for Your Pets, Real British Pub—and then on to Marbella via trailer parks and the hills of white condos, beside the white raging Mediterranean, reminding every frail dwelling on shore that this old sea, the actual water that had been described on the first page of the Bible, was not to be underestimated, and nature was greater than anything man-made. Good-bye to your beach umbrellas and your ridiculous signs and your awnings and your gimcrack fences; good-bye to your condos and your haciendas; good-bye to the very shoreline of fragile soil. Nature was also the Sunderer of Delights and the Destroyer of Dreams.