The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Then I began to think that this was perhaps the best reason for going to see this part of the world, that it was so over-visited it was haunted and decrepit, totally changed. Change and decay had made it worth seeing and an urgent subject to record. I was the man for it. Half a lifetime of traveling had given me a taste for the macabre.

  Some countries swallow the traveler; certainly in Africa and Polynesia and South America I found this to be true. But Europe, and the Mediterranean in particular, is like a stage set. It gives drama to a trip—it is a background.

  You know this already. You have been to Italy—very likely to Sicily, perhaps to Siracusa, and you stayed at the same little hotel I found. Near the harbor? Run by a grumpy man who wrote poetry? About twenty-five dollars, with breakfast? And you might read this and say: It was not that way at all! Siracusa was delightful, the hotel was clean, the poet was a cheery soul. Or it might be somewhere else we both visited, in Spain or Greece or Egypt. Never mind.

  That was your trip, that was your Italy. This book is about my trip, my Italy. This is my Mediterranean.

  My idea was to begin in Gibraltar, and go to Spain, and keep going, hugging the coast, staying on the ground, no planes; to travel by train, bus, ferry, ship; to make a circuit of the sea from the Rock of Gibraltar all the way around to Ceuta, from one Pillar of Hercules to the other. To travel the whole shore, from the fish and chip shops of Torremolinos to the gun emplacements of Tel Aviv, by way of the war in Croatia and the nudist beaches of Crete.

  The Mediterranean, this simple almost tideless sea, the size of thirty Lake Superiors, had everything: prosperity, poverty, tourism, terrorism, several wars in progress, ethnic strife, fascists, pollution, drift nets, private islands owned by billionaires, Gypsies, seventeen countries, fifty languages, oil drilling platforms, sponge fishermen, religious fanatics, drug smuggling, fine art, and warfare. It had Christians, Muslims, Jews; it had the Druzes, who are a strange farrago of all three religions; it had heathens, Zoroastrians and Copts and Baha’is. It is over two thousand miles from end to end. It is noted for being salty. It ranged from the shoals and shallows of the northern Adriatic to the almost sixteen-thousand-foot depths in the Ionian Basin, west of Crete. Although it is deficient in plankton, it is still the home of dolphins, and in the deeps around Mallorca sperm whales (some of them entangled in drift nets) are often sighted. Giant loggerhead turtles—an endangered species in the Mediterranean—return in diminishing numbers every year to the Greek island of Zákinthos, where they struggle among tourists and beachside restaurants for nesting sites.

  One of the many strange facts about the Mediterranean people is that compared with the British and the Northern Europeans they are not great fish eaters. This is Emil Ludwig’s observation and it is generally true. One of the more anticlimactic experiences in a Mediterranean market is surveying the fish goggling on marble slabs. There are not many, they are rather small, and the larger proportion have been caught outside the Mediterranean. Tuna is the exception, because it makes an annual journey through the Pillars and across the Mediterranean to spawn in the Black Sea. Dolphins are protected. With the exception of illegal drift-net vessels that use nets up to ten miles long (for example, Greenpeace France detected and documented 137 illegal Italian drift-netters between April and June 1994), fishing is small-scale and unrewarding. Deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean is almost unknown, apart from the illegal drift-netters and the competition for the migrating tuna.

  It is not a fishy sea, but it is blessed with a beautiful climate, and though Mediterranean storms and high winds can be devastating, it has been noted for its calm waters. The very word Mediterranean signified sunny skies and balmy weather, and for thousands of years these shores had been a kind of Eden, fruitful with grapes and olives and lemons.

  But soon after I set off, I mentioned my itinerary to a young French student on a train. Pointing to my map, I remarked on how it was so easy to travel around the Mediterranean.

  “Croatia! Albania!” the student said. “And what about Algeria—are you going there?”

  “Of course. I’ve always wanted to see the souk in Algiers, Albert Camus’ Oran, taking the night train from Tunis to Annaba.”

  “In the past two years, twenty thousand people have been killed in fighting in Algeria, most of them on the coast,” he said. “You didn’t know that the most recent election was annulled and the Muslim fundamentalists have a policy of killing all foreigners?”

  No, I did not know that.

  “Maybe I’ll skip Algeria.” And I thought: Maybe they’ll stop killing each other before I get there.

  Gibraltar is tiny, just two square miles of it, mostly uninhabited cliffs, and there are almost as many apes as there are humans. The name is from Tarik el Said, the Moorish conquerer who named it “Geb-el-Tarik” (Hill of Tarik). I arrived on a cheap flight from London sitting with Mr. Wong, from the People’s Republic. We looked at the rock.

  “Like a small mountain,” Mr. Wong said.

  Like a beheaded sphinx, I thought, all buttocks and trunk, crouching with its paws on the water, and the more impressive for there being no other monstrosities or mountains near it.

  Mr. Wong told me he was planning to start a Chinese restaurant in the town. “And why did you come here?”

  “Because I’ve never been here before,” I said.

  I had never been to Spain either. Once I had been to the south of France, to see Graham Greene in Antibes. That tiny fishing port was all I knew of the Riviera. I had seen a little bit of Italy and had spent one day in Athens, but apart from that had not traveled in the Mediterranean, not even to the most obvious places. Israel, no. Lebanon, no. Egypt, no—had never seen the pyramids. Most English people I met had been to Mallorca; I had never been there. Because I had not been to any of these Mediterranean places I had vigorous and unshakable prejudices, and those prejudices amused me and kept me from wanting to visit the places.

  And in the way that you don’t really understand great novels until you are older and experienced, you needed to be a certain age to appreciate the subtleties of the Mediterranean. I had reread Anna Karenina and felt that it was a different novel from the one I had read when I was twenty-one. I had also reread Tender Is the Night, and The Plague, and The Secret Agent. I wondered whether they would have the same impact. They did, but for different reasons; they were different books, because thirty-odd years later I was a different man.

  By a happy coincidence these books all had Mediterranean connections. Dick and Nicole Diver single-handedly invent the Riviera by turning the sleepy fishing village of Juan-les-Pins into a fashionable resort. Anna Karenina and her lover Vronsky escape Russia, and the scandal of their liaison, and experience bliss in a romantic interlude in Venice, Rome, and Naples; but after an extended stay in a palazzo in a small Italian town, they are disillusioned with Mediterranean life, “and the German tourists became so wearisome, that a change became absolutely necessary. They decided to return to Russia.”

  Joseph Conrad wrote the whole of his London novel in the south of France, in Montpellier, and Camus, who was born on the Algerian coast, set his novel in Oran. I had also recently read Hemingway (bullfighting in Spain), Naguib Mahfouz and Cavafy (both Alexandria), Flaubert (Salammbo in Carthage), Cyril Connolly (the Riviera again in The Rock Pool), and Evelyn Waugh’s Labels, which takes in almost the whole of the Mediterranean. One of the most neglected postwar American novels of the Mediterranean coast—in this case, southern Italy—is William Styron’s complex and brilliant Set This House on Fire. I reread it with renewed admiration for its portraits of expatriate artists and drunks and posers, their brains baking in the Amalfi sunlight. And I had finally got around to reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi. The miserable little village he writes about, which he called Gagliano, isn’t on the Mediterranean, but it is near enough; the real place, Aliano, is only about twenty miles from the sea, at the arch on the sole of Italy’s boot. These books fueled my desire to travel there.
Perhaps unconsciously I had been doing homework.

  There was a time when I wanted to see only wild places, and was reluctant to go to a place that had been written about extensively. But then—it is so funny about travel—I would go to a place that everyone had been written about and it was as though I was seeing something entirely new. I felt that when I was writing about Britain. My Britain was different from anything I had read. It made the going good because I was unprepared for what I saw. That was always the best part of travel, the sense of discovery. When there was none and it was all predictable I wanted to go home.

  The Mediterranean was not one place, but many; and I was at last calm enough to venture into its complexity without the risk of getting lost. I was happier with love in my life. I was not looking for a new home, traveling hopefully down the road rejecting places as I passed through. I was traveling in the purest way, without envy or a spirit of acquisition. I was setting out on an extensive trip around the shores of the Mediterranean, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and heathen; to meet the people, eat the food, get rained on and shot at.

  My idea was to see it out of season, when the tourists were back home, spending the fall and winter in the northern half, the spring and summer in the Levant and North Africa, going from one Pillar to the other; and to make a modern Grand Tour, seeking out wise people.

  An inland sea is perfect for a journey, because the coastline determines the itinerary.

  • • •

  The day I arrived in Gibraltar, the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Joe Bossano, was at the United Nations, explaining to the assembly why Gibraltar wanted to remain itself, autonomous. But Gibraltar has nothing but the rock and its strategic location. It makes nothing, it sells nothing, it imports everything it needs to sustain life; it is tiny in both land area and population (a mere twenty-eight thousand people, of which sixteen thousand are voters). It is just a few streets at the base of the rock, and on the lower slopes there are some luxury homes and gun emplacements. There is not enough room for an airport, and so when a plane is due the main road into Spain is closed—barriers swing shut—and traffic is halted until the plane has landed. The aircraft taxis across the road, and the portion of Gibraltar known as The Neck, and continues to the terminal. At the All Clear, the road reopens.

  The Spanish dictator Franco, El Caudillo (his title is the Spanish equivalent of Hitler’s Führer or Mussolini’s Duce), with his iron hand in a chokehold on the throat of every Spaniard until just the other day, closed his border with Gibraltar in 1969.

  “He died in 1975,” a Gibraltarian told me, “but it was another ten years before the border was opened again.”

  That was ordered by Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales, in 1985. But Spain has never wavered in insisting that Gibraltar be given back to Spain.

  So for sixteen years Gibraltar was hemmed in like a little penal colony. And it did no good for the people in Gibraltar to harangue the Spaniards with the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave Britain sovereignty over the Rock in 1713. In this same treaty the island of Manhattan was swapped for Surinam. In the most casual conversation in Gibraltar, people quoted the relevant clause of the Treaty of Utrecht. I took a closer look at the Treaty and saw that the terms of Article 10 prevented “residence or entry into the town of Gibraltar by Jews and Moors.”

  The anonymous author of How to Capture and Govern Gibraltar (1865) stated that Protestants ought to be encouraged and given low rents and hospitality. But “Papists, Moors and Jews” should be discouraged.

  And in some ways this sentinel rock became a bigoted British island at the entrance to the Mediterranean. As a British garrison it could hardly fail to be reactionary, backward, philistine and drunken, as it upheld the Royal Navy tradition of rum, sodomy and the lash. For years it was noted for its vast number of taverns. But there is something so wonderful and stark about the rock—and it is the only grand work of nature for miles around—that its enchantment is transferred to the people who live on its lower slopes and at its base. It stands enormous and immutable, dwarfing everything and everyone nearby; and so Gibraltarians seem like a tribe of tiny idolaters, clinging to their mammoth limestone shrine.

  It is pretty clear that shrunken bankrupt Britain finds Gibraltar too expensive to run, no more than an inconvenient relic of a former age. It even looks it. Apart from the Rock it looks like an English coastal town, much smaller but with the same seediness and damp glamour of, say, Weston-super-Mare; a little promenade, and tea-shops, and fish and chip shops, and ironmongers, and respectable-looking public houses, and bus shelters and twitching curtains. Its Englishness makes it safe, tidy, smug, community-minded.

  Gibraltar’s historical notes satisfied my curiosity for meaningless facts and colorful atrocities. There was first the list of sieges, fourteen of them, going back to the year 410, when the Vandals overran the Roman Empire, and the later incursions of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. Franco’s closure of Spain’s frontier with Gibraltar is known as the fifteenth siege. In the seventh century King Sisebut persecuted Gibraltar’s Jews, tortured thousands, and forcibly baptized ninety thousand of them overall. Then there were seven hundred years of Moors in Gibraltar. And this: “In 1369, when Pedro the Cruel, who had succeeded Alfonso XI, was assassinated, the Count of Translamara seized the throne of Castile and became Henry II. The following year, 1370, Algeciras was destroyed by Mohammed V.” And on December 13, 1872, “the mystery derelict Marie Celeste arrived in Gibraltar.”

  Lastly, Gibraltar is known as the scene of a sudden shocking multiple murder. The woman who told me where it had taken place described it in a whisper: “Walk down Winston Churchill Road, and just before the overpass, across from the Shell station, that’s where it happened.”

  One Sunday in 1986, much to the horror of Gibraltarians, three civilians were shot dead by men wearing masks. Witnesses described the suddenness of it, all three cut down, and one masked man lingering over a supine wounded man and finishing him off. And then the masked men vanished. It was not hard for them to get away, since they were members of the British SAS sent on this deadly mission by Margaret Thatcher.

  No one mourned the dead men. They were Irish. It was claimed that they were going to plant a bomb at The Convent, the Governor’s House, during a parade. That was not firmly established—the whole affair was obscured by official secrecy. Two years after the killings, a British minister in Mrs. Thatcher’s government blandly explained that the government briefings to journalists at the time of the incident had been inaccurate. The dead men had not been armed, as had been suggested. And the car parked in Gibraltar had not contained explosives. So why were these men killed?

  The minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, said, “They made movements which led the military personnel operating in support of Gibraltar police to conclude that their own lives and the lives of others were under threat.”

  The official version stressed that a bomb would have been devastating. The blast would have damaged two schools and a Jewish home for old folks and the marchers and the spectators. It would have been on a par with the bomb hidden under the bandstand in Hyde Park, that killed eleven members of a military band, one of the nastiest IRA crimes; it is very easy to plant a bomb in a peaceful trusting place. But no one ever knew whether there had been any good reason for the murders of the three Irishmen that day.

  Gibraltar is still a garrison, though greatly reduced in numbers of men, and the steep town looks severe but is actually rather friendly. In common with an English village the Gibraltarians are friendly to the point of nosiness. It is small enough so that everyone knows everyone else, except the Moroccans who come and go. The Gibraltarian family names are all known—the English, the Spanish, the Jewish ones, especially. The great thing in Gibraltar is to be able to date your ancestry to the Genoese who emigrated early in the eighteenth century.

  Because Gibraltarians asked me questions I returned the compliment and pestered people about their origins.

  “I’m a Gibraltarian,” a m
an named Joe told me. His real name was José, and his surname sounded Spanish too. I asked him about that.

  He said, “I’m not Spanish, I’m not English.”

  “What does your passport say?”

  “Colony of Gibraltar,” he said. “But we would rather be an English colony than part of Spain. The majority of people here want autonomy.”

  In other words, for Gibraltar to govern herself and for Britain to pay the bills.

  “We want independence and to be part of the EC. The frontier was opened in 1985 only to satisfy the EC—the Spanish were trying to make friends.”

  “What did you do all those years when it was impossible to go across the road to Spain?”

  “I went to Morocco.” He shook his head. “It was not like anything I ever saw before.”

  “Interesting?”

  “Awful.”

  We talked about the absence of any manufacturing in Gibraltar.

  “But we have shipyards,” he said. “We can repair ships.”

  “You speak Spanish?” I asked.

  “And English.”

  The idea in Gibraltar was that the Spaniards were vastly inferior to the Gibraltarians; they were despised for their passionate gesticulation, their forty years of Franco’s fascism, their twanging guitars, their provincialism and irrationality and bean-eating and bull-torturing. Prejudices in Gibraltar were quite similar to those I had encountered in English seaside resorts, an enjoyable mixture of bluster and wrongheadedness, the Little Englander in full spate. But these poor rock-hoppers were, it seemed to me, about to be abandoned. In the fullness of time, I could see this place handed over to the Spaniards just as ruthlessly as Hong Kong had been served up like a dim sum to whining Chinese plutocrats and executioners. Gibraltarians would soon discover how bankruptcy could make a nation unsentimental and self-serving.