“Do they live out on a farm?” I asked.
“They raise bulls, not far from here. Another works for Tio Pepe.” He meant the sherry company, not some third uncle. “And the other drinks the Tio Pepe the second one makes. But tell me one thing,” he said, eyeing my bicycle. “This bicycle is yours?”
I said that it was.
“Many years ago, on one of our farms, a Frenchman came through with that very bicycle. He slept in our barn during the rain. We heard later he was a famous man.”
“This bicycle is very old,” I explained. “Older than me, I think.”
He looked at me and then back at the bike and, politely, said nothing.
“Where are you going, señor?” he asked.
“To Scotland.”
“ON THAT?”
“Yes, all the way.”
This begat a long series of stories of dangers of the road, some of which were true, or possibly true—cousins lost in rainstorms, never to be seen again, brigands on mountain passes who lived in caves and hoarded gold and diamonds, and, finally, the legend of a beast “north of here” who had eaten another cousin, or a friend of another cousin, or perhaps it was the friend of his cousin’s friend.
Why, he wanted to know, would I undertake such a journey. “There is a train from Cádiz that will take you to Córdoba,” he explained, kindly. “From there, it is possible to get to Madrid, and from Madrid you can go anywhere in the world, it is said.”
“There are no beasts on that train, and no sunlight.”
“That’s why you should take it. I advise you,” he said.
Before he left we began to talk about writing. There was some confusion at this. He told me he too was a writer, un escritor, and it took a little discussion to figure out that what he meant was that he knew how to write. I asked him if he would write his name for me and extracted my notebook and a pen and opened the page flat on the table. He arranged his chair, took the pen in hand, threw out his arm to lift his coat sleeve and flattened the pages with his left hand. Then leaning close, in slow, labored, circular strokes he inscribed his name in my book.
“Antonio Romero Rincón.”
I watched his old gnarled hands all creviced and glowing in the afternoon sun. I admired the gray stubble on his cheeks, his fine, black eyes that had seen, no doubt, during the Civil War, the horrors of starvation in this poor district of Spain where peasants of his species killed priests and ate the fighting bulls of the finca owners. I wanted to reach out and clap his neck in affection for his downright bravery at simply staying alive, but I thought it would be taken in the wrong way and kept my hands tucked under my legs while I watched.
“Thank you, I will keep this signature,” I said. “It is very well crafted.”
“You will be careful on the passes.”
“I will.”
“You will tell them in Jerez that you know Antonio Romero Rincón. People will take care of you there. After that, after Jerez, you are on your own.…”
By the time I left the café I decided it was too late to push on, and so, having traveled all of ten or fifteen miles, determined to give up and spend the night here. Among other things I knew that finding a room on a weekend at this time of year in Andalusia might not be easy.
I had been in this town once before and remembered a small pension called something like Loretta, so I set out to find it from memory. This begat many wrong turns in the warren of streets, which, after some meandering, brought me back to the town square. I had spotted a few likely pensions on my quest and miraculously on the way back to one of them found the Loretta. I unhitched the panniers from my bicycle and carried them up to my room, a sleepy, whitewashed little broom closet overlooking an interior courtyard, where I smelled cats.
The two women who ran the place dressed in dark cardigan sweaters buttoned to the neck even though it was warm. They were most concerned for the safety of my bicycle and gave me elaborate instructions as to where to stash it for the night. These instructions and directions were so complex that even had they been delivered in English I would have gotten lost; essentially I had to take my bike through another labyrinth of pathways to a small courtyard with a gate. I was to ask for a woman named Maria Luisa, who would let me hide my bicycle there when I explained that I was from the Pension Loretta. This ordeal took another forty-five minutes of more wrong turns, more directions from strangers, until, finally, I found the proper courtyard and, having dutifully rung the proper bell, summoned said Maria Luisa, and with much explanation was permitted graciously to enter. Here along with a number of suspicious looking cats I deposited my bike and said I would be back in the morning.
“Where are you going on that thing?” Maria Luisa asked.
“Scotland,” I said.
“Scotland? Very cold there,” she said. “I wouldn’t go if I were you.”
This was becoming litany.
That night I had more anguilas al horno, a carafe of local tinto, and a slice of local bull meat in a brown sauce with green peas at a small local restaurant where there were no other tourists. After dinner I went promptly to bed and was asleep in seconds.
A huge cat fight broke out beneath my window in the middle of the night and I woke up, so tired and confused I had to sit up to figure out where I was. I smelled mildew and cats, and felt the moist air of sage and salt with a hint of sharp geranium—Andalusia, I thought, Al Andalus of ancient days.
Two
The Breath of the Sun
One of the best spots in all of Western Europe to get a sense of the northward migration of birds is the Coto Doñana, a vast marsh, similar to the American Everglades, that stretches west from the banks of the Guadalquivir River. The sanctuary is one of the great stopover places for migrants moving north from Africa and also an area known for resident eagles, lynx, wild boar, and thousands upon thousands of ducks and geese.
On my way there, I stopped at Jerez for lunch and got into a discussion with a man who told me that I would have to get written permission to enter the Coto Doñana. Spanish information, directions and such like, are not always entirely accurate, and I took his advice with a grain of salt and rode on, confident that I would be able to find a place to stay and gain entrance. But at another café stop (I find it hard to pass up an inviting outdoor café) I heard the same story. By late afternoon, I arrived at the small crossroads of El Cuervo. There I spotted a likely pension in an olive grove at the end of a long drive, secured a room, and went for a walk in the fading light, watching the bats flit through the trees and feeling satisfied and healthy. I slept for a while before dinner and then met a man at the restaurant bar who told me there were lions in the Coto Doñana.
“Lions?” I asked, thinking I was missing something in translation. I thought he meant the Pardelle lynx, which is known to occur there.
“No, lions,” he insisted. “I myself have seen them.”
This begat a great discussion as to which could win in a battle, a lion or a tiger.
“The lion scratches his enemies to death in a fight,” he explained. “The tiger grabs with his claws and then bites. The tiger will always win.”
This brought him to the question of the Roman amphitheater and, as usual, the glorious days on the Iberian Peninsula and the arrival of the Moors. I wondered if he was perhaps using a metaphor for the Moors and the Christians with his lion story.
This same man confirmed the fact that the Coto Doñana was closed to visitors.
As it turned out my informants were right. An official at a tourist bureau in the next town explained that in order to get into the Coto Doñana I would have to get a permit from the central office in Seville. Undeterred, since I was going there anyway, I started out for Seville, pedaling along slowly through broad fields, spiky with young wheat and interspersed with olive groves. In time the road grew narrower and wilder and crowded with scrubland and pines until finally I came to a little ferry over the Guadalquivir, which took me across to the little town of Coria del Río, just so
uth of the city. Here, after an afternoon coffee and a little conversation, I found a pleasant little posada on the outskirts of the town, with landscaped grounds and palm trees just outside my room. As I was settling in, I heard the throaty purr of a motorcycle, and a man attired in white canvas pants and a brown leather jacket pulled in and dismounted. He had the lank blond hair of a foreigner, and the high cheekbones and angular look of an American cowboy.
Coria del Río was a sleepy, slightly rundown little town, once a district of Seville during Moorish times, and like many strategically sited spots along the Guadalquivir, it had been inhabited since prehistory by the early Iberian peoples. The Tartessos, who had control of the region between the eleventh and sixth centuries B.C., had a settlement here, and later the Romans, who recognized a good site when they came across one, established a stronghold.
At a small bright square just back from the river, I found a few cafés and kiosks, and here, in the native style, around seven o’clock, I began stopping at cafés to drink a sherry, eat boiled shrimp and peanuts, and, also in the native style, sweep the shells onto the floor. A thin gypsy woman with bad teeth came into one of the bars and explained that if I were to buy a carnation from her, God would repay me, but before I could obtain this generous blessing the barman waved his index finger at her, and she spun, flaring out her red flowered skirt, and retreated. I was sorry to see her go. I am partial to gypsies.
A man in one of the bars had seen me wheeling my bicycle off the ferry below the town square.
“How old is that thing?” he asked. This begat a discussion of bicycles, and the fabrication of bicycles in the old Peugeot factory, and what things were like around this town back in the time of the Civil War, and how the Moors had once held sway here, and how the Spanish kicked them out and shortly thereafter conquered the world.
As we were talking I saw the motorcycle man pass by, looking for a likely watering hole, and waved him in.
As I expected, he turned out to be an American, named Parker Hamilton, who was headed south to Algeciras, where he intended to take the ferry over to Tangier and points south.
This Parker W. Hamilton, aka Parky, was a great talker and adventurer. He had explored all the American West, he said, from mountaintop to cavern depth, and from cavern depth to the solitary deserts. He had lived for a while in San Francisco, where, if he were to be believed, he had been tapped to play small parts in bad movies—not implausible, I thought; he was a handsome rambler with blue eyes and ruddy skin. We took more sherry, and ate more tapas, and then went for a late dinner and talked about travel and adventure. I told him stories about gem smugglers I had known in Paris; he told me about dope smugglers he had known in San Francisco. When I asked him, in so many words, where he was bound in life, instead of answering, he told me a fable.
“Once there was a little boy,” he began, “who lived in a big house by a deep river. This little boy had everything a little boy could want in life, toys, dogs, music lessons, swimming lessons …” the story rambled on about the quality of life of the young hero, and then recounted the fact that said little boy always knew that in the river beyond his house, there were two currents. One was the current the people could see, which swept ever downstream. But the little boy knew there was another current, a deep, unseen backwash that ran upstream against the apparent flow.
“That,” Parker explained, “is the current the little boy set out to explore.…”
Our hero now was intending to circle the globe on his motorcycle. He had begun in Boulder in late summer, ridden east to New York, where he spent part of the winter, thence to London, and then, just a month earlier, to Amsterdam and points south. He was intending to ride around Africa, then India, then onward to Asia, and finally back to the coast of Chile and northward through South America and through Mexico to the United States.
“Eastward against the sun,” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
“I mean to say, you are riding eastward all the way. Into the rising sun, rather then westward with the sun.”
He shook his head uncomprehendingly.
“You know, the sun,” I said. “It rises in the east and sets in the west.”
“I guess,” he said. “Whatever.”
The following day I rode up to Seville, crossing the Guadalquivir again on a terrifying bridge, thick with dangerous noisy trucks. Some years earlier I had lived in this city, in a small rooming house not far from the Alcazar, and I headed for this now, wondering if, after an absence of some ten years, the owners were still there and would remember me. In fact they welcomed me with open arms.
“Of course we remember you,” said Anna, the wife of the owner. “El hijo del obispo. Who could forget?”
I had forgotten that somehow in one of the long interchanges we used to have I had told them that, back in America, my father was a bishop—which wasn’t true, but made good conversation and offered me an apparently memorable identity. Bishops in Catholic Europe do not marry, of course, although no doubt a few of them beget children.
Anna had taken a motherly interest in my welfare when I first lived there, expressing concern over my long nights on the town, waking me on time for classes, and periodically encircling me with her arms and drawing me to her ample bosom like the old aunties of my childhood. Like many women of her age she wore a bun of gray-black hair and a dark, conservative suit. She was always dressed in black—no sooner would one mourning period be over than another cousin would die, requiring her to don dark clothing. Some women simply give up and dress in black all the time.
Anna even remembered that I was fond of her zumos—a local drink of whipped orange juice and sugar—and offered to make me one; we sat at the dining room table of the pension, talking over old times while I explained, or tried to explain, my quest on this trip.
“Why not stay here with us,” she said. “The orange trees will be in flower soon. We will feed you eggs, just as you like and keep you from harm.”
I was tempted.
I spent the rest of the day visiting some of my old haunts and the restaurants where I used to eat, and then, in the evening, took a taxi out to the house of an American man whom I knew through a mutual acquaintance. This man, John Fulton, was a well-known character in Seville at the time. He had been for a while one of the few foreign matadors and had then retired to paint bulls and horses. His medium was part of his message. He painted in bull’s blood.
Fulton lived with another well-known personage in Seville, the horse photographer Robert Varva, and armed with a letter of introduction from these two, the next morning I went out on my bicycle to Valverde, where the office of the chief of operations of the Coto Doñana was then located. As usual, following Spanish directions got me lost, but in time I came to the spot and entered through the gate to the small stucco building. Here, for some inexplicable reason, feeding in a fenced yard on the left side of the door, was an African hyena.
The previous night at the American expatriate outpost had been confusing, with many comings and goings, and too much sherry and lights and music and a loud American woman who dressed like a local and an apparent household pet, a young gypsy boy, who danced flamenco for the assembled. The presence of this hyena in the bright sun of southern Spain, the dangerous lions of the Coto, and the whole grand folly of my adventure suddenly struck me as very funny, and I had to wait outside the fence for a while to compose myself enough to present my credentials and my disguised persona of journalist. It was not necessary; the official, a small man with a pencil-thin moustache, was ever so cavalier, and, brushing his cigarette ashes from the documents, stamped a permit and wished me good luck. “Be careful of the wild boars if you go back in the thickets,” he warned.
He also told me to look up a man named Torg while I was there, a Danish bird researcher who had permits to work in the Coto and was living at the research station there.
On the way out of the city, I crossed over once more the Guadalquivir River. It was hard to believe that
this shallow brown watercourse with its floating debris of branches and swirling islands of dried grasses from upstream once carried out from the city of Seville most of the Spanish trading vessels that set sail for the New World in the sixteenth century. The city had become established as a major European trading center in the world economy late in the fifteenth century, after the first voyages of Columbus, and the river, which had been an important shipping route during the time of the Moors, then became the major commercial route for the great fleets of Spanish galleons that sailed between Seville and the Americas. Shipping included the large fighting galleons as well as the smaller trading vessels known as carracks, and the even smaller but more maneuverable caravels.
Once in the open countryside I began encountering one of the dreaded conditions of cyclists in open country. Worse than high hills, or steep hills, or even mountains, is a steady headwind. Hills and mountains have down slopes; the wind never quits. Great hot blasts began buffeting me irregularly and for an hour or two, bent low in low gears, I pedaled against them.
All of the trade that made its way from the port of Seville was driven by wind, although ultimately it was also driven by a singular idea that somehow entered the mind of an otherwise little known and not entirely skilled sea captain, known as Columbus. The intent of the Spanish and Portuguese explorers of this period, as all American sixth graders know (or used to know, at least), was to find a short route to the Indies. Before Columbus, all trade with the East either went overland from Europe or by sea, down the west coast of Africa and then back up through the Indian Ocean. But in January of 1492, in Granada, the last of the once powerful Moorish kings surrendered what was left of Al Andalus to the sovereigns of Aragon and Castile, Ferdinand and Isabella, the so-called Reyes Católicos. With the reconquest complete, the Catholic Kings, feeling that the presence of Moors and Jews would be an impediment to their ideal of a Spanish unity, expelled them from the peninsula and began a period of expansion that would last for two hundred years.
Following the Sun Page 4