The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “I knew it was the same fucking bloke we were looking for because the car was fucking traced—”

  “He comes up to me and I says to him, ‘Don’t you fucking move!’ ”

  “The RUC didn’t give us any fucking help—”

  “But Simpson was like a father to me. I wouldn’t have stayed in the fucking army if it wasn’t for Simpson—”

  “The RUC ran a check on him—”

  “Remember that little fucker?”

  “What little fucker?”

  “From Hull.”

  “Oh, that little fucker.”

  I wondered whether to ask them what they were doing in Cartagena, but they became restive and even louder as they went on drinking, and so I thought, Never mind, and went out to look for a restaurant.

  I knew only two things about Spanish politics—that General Franco ruled Spain as a dictator from 1937 until 1975, when he died. On his deathbed, so the story goes, he heard the grieving crowds crying out, “Adiós, great general!” and he said, “Where are they going?”

  The second thing I knew was that Felipe Gonzales was the current prime minister and that he was being given a hard time, because of the current economic situation.

  Later, I was watching TV in a small restaurant with the waiter, when a fat smug man appeared on the screen and began declaiming about his struggle (mi lucha).

  “Politician?”

  “Yes,” the waiter said. “That’s Fraga. He is very right wing.”

  “He must hate the socialist government.”

  “Yes, but we have plenty of right-wing politicians here in Murcia.”

  “Friends of Franco?”

  “Fraga was a member of Franco’s government,” he said, seeming to make a distinction between friend and colleague.

  Fraga was crowing, having just won another election, the presidency of “Galicia.” This in itself was not so surprising. What was remarkable was that Manuel Fraga had been a great friend of Franco. Indeed, he had been Minister of Tourism, with the responsibility (so this waiter told me) for carrying out Franco’s ambitious pro-tourist effort—so much so, that Fraga was today identified with all the hastily thrown-up hotels and apartment blocks on the tourist-ravaged coasts—Costa del Sol and the Costa Blanca and Costa Brava. Franco wanted this tourist boom, for the foreign exchange it provided, though he could not have foreseen what a corrupting influence in all senses it would prove to be.

  Introducing this topic of Franco was regarded as rather impolite. Spaniards were reluctant to talk about this pious monster and their part in his holding power. It was bad taste in Spain to talk about the fascist past at all, those years of collaboration and repression. That was the theory. But for a note-taker like myself it is only the unpopular subjects that are worth raising in any country.

  My questions brought forth from the waiter a story about Fraga’s strange career, which included Fraga’s friendship with Fidel Castro—he was friendly with both Fidel and Fidel’s parents, who, along with many other Cubans, traced their origins to the northern province of Galicia. Fraga had cultivated Fidel and created an understanding that made Spain an ally and a refuge for many Cubans.

  “When Fidel visited the grave of his grandparents in Galicia,” the waiter said, “Fraga stood beside him and burst into tears, while Fidel simply stared at the tombstone.”

  Meanwhile, on the TV screen, Fraga was still howling in victory. He was a survivor from a time of shame, a relic and a reminder of the dictatorship, but nonetheless he was still popular.

  “So what is his secret?” I asked.

  “He is a little rich.”

  “So that makes him powerful?”

  “Well, he just won—they can’t stop him.”

  I looked at the florid, triumphant face of this Galician. He was said to have all the Galician traits—above all, Galicians were inexplicable and enigmatic. A Spaniard named Alberto gave me a vivid illustration of this.

  “If you meet a Galician on a stairway,” he said, “it is impossible to tell whether he is going up or down.”

  “Trains do not depart: they set out, and move at a pace to enhance the landscape, and aggrandize the land they traverse.”

  That is William Gaddis, and although my train was small and slow, this seemed to me a fair description. I was leaving Cartagena on a misty morning at 9:05 and heading north to Murcia via Torre Pacheco and Balsicas. Murcia, noted for its abundant fruit trees, is just inland from the town of Los Alcazares—The Fortresses—on its own enclosed Mediterranean lagoon, called Mar Menor. The train passed through a plain of orange groves, bushy trees with dark green leaves, many of the trees still with fruit on them—the last fruit of the season. And at Murcia itself there were orange trees in most gardens and by the front doors of the houses.

  I was not stopping in Murcia, just changing trains for Alicante up the coast, on the Costa Blanca, catching the express “Mare Nostrum.”

  Onward past Orihuela to Elche, home of the only palm forest in Europe, and at the very end of the trip the train passed next to the beach, where there was a bit of wind-blown surf, and the trains were so close to the sea some spray flew against the windows.

  It had become a stormy day and the rain and wind made the city interesting. My idea was to spend a day or so here and then try to find a ship going to the Balearic islands, Mallorca or Ibiza. It did not matter to me where the ship was going. I thought that if I got to one of those islands I would look around and then take another ship back to the mainland, farther up the coast, perhaps to Valencia or Barcelona.

  “It is low season,” a Spanish travel agent told me. “The ferries to Mallorca might not be running.”

  He shrugged—he didn’t know. He told me to fly. I said there had to be a ferry.

  “Yes. Perhaps. You might have to go to Valencia. It is low season.”

  I liked that expression, low season was a good expression, indicating the strange and the unpopular and the unpredictable.

  There was a ferry, I found out, from the insignificant seaside village of Denia, about fifteen miles away on a headland. It was leaving the next day, at the inconvenient hour of eleven at night. When I asked the agent whether he had any tickets for the ferry he said, “Many!” and laughed.

  A statue on the esplanade in Alicante greatly resembled Franco. I asked a man whether this was so. He said, “No”—angrily, and did not pause to enlighten me. This was an example of the risk of raising the forbidden topic of Francisco Franco. I seriously wondered whether there were statues of the man still standing in Spain; and what of the question of Franco’s robust and reactionary Catholicism and his sinister and cabalistic movement Opus Dei?

  “But this is a Catholic country?” I said to a man in Alicante later that day.

  “No, no,” he said. “Just the people are Catholic. It was a Catholic country when Franco was in power, but not anymore. Now it is a democratic country.”

  We were talking about birth control. Spain had the lowest birthrate in Europe. This seemed unbelievable to me—that it was lower even than Germany’s or Denmark’s. But it was apparently true. Abortion was legal and there were measures afoot to make it even easier to secure one. It was also a fact that little kiddies were not much in evidence. This could have been a result of the dire economic situation: Europeans kept their families small in times of recession.

  The waves were breaking on the beach below the Castello de Santa Barbara, and the rock above it, which was more impressive than the castle, where I was headed—restless for something to do; though it was a clear sign of desperation when I contemplated sight-seeing. My lowest points were visiting churches and ruins, and famous graves were rock bottom. It was a cold day. The beach stretched for miles. One person splashed in this gray sea, a small blue girl.

  I wandered over to the harbor and found a cruising sailboat, the Legrandbois out of Guernsey, and had a chat with the captain, John Harrison, who had sold up, got rid of all he owned, and left Blythe, near Newcastle, to cruise the Medite
rranean with his wife.

  “I bought this sailboat four years ago and sailed it here slowly, coming down along Portugal, taking my time,” he said. “We were at Gibraltar for a long time. Did you see those semi-inflatables, the black ones, piled with cargo? They’re used for smuggling cigarettes across to Morocco and Algeciras and La Línea.”

  “I heard there was smuggling at La Línea.”

  “The smugglers buy the cigarettes legally. They’re dealers and there’s no tax. They have cellular phones and everything else. Now and then the police stop them, but usually they come and go as they please.”

  “I thought the Spanish police were supposed to be tough,” I said, and told him about the roadblock I had seen.

  “They had a reputation for being bureaucratic and unfriendly, but they’ve eased up. They’ve been friendly to us. I think they’re smashing.”

  “How long are you going to be here in Alicante?”

  “I don’t know. We stay weeks or months in a place, depending on how much we like it. It’s true there are very few people out there sailing in this weather, but this isn’t bad. I used to sail on Christmas and New Year’s out of Newcastle, and I can tell you that the North Sea at that time of year is pretty rough.”

  “Is that fishing tackle?” I asked, indicating some odds and ends on the deck.

  “Yes. We occasionally fish. I catch small mackerel and we grill them.”

  “I thought there were hardly any fish at all in the Mediterranean.”

  “There’s no question it’s overfished. The hake and mackerel you see in the market is all local, and there are still squid and octopus. But it’s going to be dire if they keep catching these undersized fish.”

  “I haven’t seen many commercial fishermen.”

  “I saw one at Torrevieja with six small boxes, all filled with tiny fish. A man said to him, ‘Why are you keeping these little fish? This is the fish stock. If you don’t leave them to be fattened up there won’t be any for the rest of us.’ The fisherman said, ‘Sorry, but I’ve got a family. I’ve got mouths to feed.’ They went at it a bit more and were finally fighting with fists.”

  We talked about the Mediterranean.

  “If I wanted I could sail right across from here to the Turkish coast and it wouldn’t take me much more than three weeks. It’s only fifteen hundred miles or so—not such a large area, either. But I want to poke into the corners of it and take my time.”

  “Do you see much pollution?”

  “The most polluted part of the Med is said to be that corner between France and Italy, around Genoa. But I’ve seen some very rough beaches here in Spain—raw sewage on the beach, for example. Estepona had some.”

  He was about sixty. He told me he had simply chucked everything, his job, his house, the lot, and sailed away from Britain. He was planning to spend the coming year sailing from port to port, in all seasons, in all weather, in the Mediterranean. North Africa did not interest him, but, “They say Turkey is very pleasant and very cheap.” He had no long-term plan. “We just take it a month at a time.”

  I liked him for being dauntless and self-sufficient, as well as appreciative, easygoing, reliable, all the qualities of a single-handed sailor. He could even fix his own engine—his father had taught him how.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Barcelona, by way of Mallorca.”

  “We’ll be looking for you,” he said.

  Alicante was a town in which it helped to be self-sufficient, because of the downturn in tourism and the off-season. People seemed to go their own way, many stores had closed, no one was touting for business. It was a small city, but with an air of friendliness. Many pedestrians seemed fairly elderly, the old Spaniard and his wife hobbling along, she with a string bag, he with a cane, the thick-and-thin marriage that seems so enviable from the outside, that you only seem to see in provincial towns like this.

  And the other people in Alicante—mending phone lines, painting shutters, diddling with adding machines, counting money, leading children down the street, selling lottery tickets, sweeping—such people made me feel idle and superfluous, as a traveler. The worst part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills.

  V. S. Pritchett speaks of “the guilt of being a tourist who is passing through and is a mere voyeur.” I did not share that guilt. I felt sorrow, horror, compassion, joy. Observing how people worked and lived their lives is one of the objectives of travel. It sometimes made me feel bad and fairly useless. But I was not a “mere” voyeur. I was a very hardworking voyeur.

  In Alicante I saw for the first time on my trip the dark shiny plum-colored West Africans with their trinkets and leather bags and beads laid out on mats in the middle of the wide pretty Esplanada de España. They were from remote villages in Senegal, so they said; they had come here via France. There were also Moroccans selling sunglasses, Spanish peasants selling nuts in paper cones, Gypsies selling wilted flowers. One man held a hand-lettered sign in Spanish: “I have no job and I have three mouths to feed.” But no one took any notice.

  On the day I was to leave Alicante I fell into conversation with a man in a cafe who was casually watching a bullfight on TV along with a number of other men. I realized once again how much I hated bullfights—the preening matador, the tortured bull—and yet I was still trying to account for this Spanish afición for them.

  I said, “The bull always loses. So what’s the sport?”

  “The matador has to work in order to win,” the man said.

  “Is it really so dangerous for the matador?”

  “Oh, yes. Think of the horns of the bull—how sharp they are, how big they are.”

  “Yet the bull dies.”

  “It is very complicated,” he said. He mentioned all the moves a matador needed to have in his repertoire. “And the matador needs so much practice.”

  Elias Canetti has an epigram about wishing to see a mouse eat a cat alive, but to toy with it first. Thinking about bullfighting I wanted to see a bull torment a matador to death, not trample him but gore him repeatedly and make him dance and bleed to death. This vindictive thought might have been shared by some people who went to bullfights: to see the matador trampled.

  As an ignorant foreigner I had a right to ask him the obvious: “So people really enjoy it?”

  “It is a Spanish thing,” he said.

  “What about you—do you enjoy it?”

  “No. It is not for me,” he said. “For me it is all suffering.”

  3

  The M.V. Punta Europa to Mallorca

  A small coach left every few hours from Marina Station on the beach at Alicante and chugged northeast on a narrow gauge railway, through Villajoyosa and Benidorm and Altea, to the old port village of Denia, where I had been told I could catch the late-night ferry to Palma in Mallorca.

  Benidorm was a mass of beachside high-rises, the worst place I had seen on the coast so far, worse than Torremolinos, which was slap-happy seaside tackiness of a familiar and forgivable kind. But Benidorm was ugliness on a grand scale—tall blocks of apartments, hideous hotels, winking signs, the whole place as badly built and visually unappealing as a suddenly thrown-up town on the shores of the People’s Republic of China. Everything that Spain was said to stand for—charm, dignity, elegance, honor, restraint—was denied in the look of Benidorm. And because this was wet chilly winter, the wide streets were empty, most of the hotels were shut, no one sat on the beach or swam in the sea: the useless horror, naked and raw, in the low season, was demoralizing and awful.

  In 1949, Benidorm was a tiny impoverished fishing village, “said to be an open door for smugglers,” an English visitor wrote. I walked around. I had a pizza. I sat on a bench surveying the Mediterranean, and then the wind picked up and the rain began.

  The rain delighted me. It whipped against the s
ea. It darkened the stone of the hotels and tore at the signs. It coursed down the empty streets and flooded the gutters and cut gullies through the beach sand. A bit more wind and the lights would fail, a bit more rain and it would be a real flood. And that would be the answer, the cure for Benidorm—nature’s revenge, an elemental purifying storm that would wipe the place out.

  It lifted my spirits to imagine the destruction of such a place, and I boarded the onward train feeling joy in my heart at the prospect of the wholesale destruction. The rain swept loudly against the side of the railway car like a shower of gravel. I was the only passenger. Darkness fell as we shuttled towards Denia in the storm. “Of all the lovely places down the Iberian seaboard, I believe Denia (the Roman Dianium) to be the most attractive and the place I would most like to spend my days,” Rose Macaulay wrote in her Spanish coast book, Fabled Shore. Her confidence is understandable; when she drove down the coast in 1948 she saw only one other British car. But the day I was at Denia the rain was torrential. I could not see Denia’s famous lighthouse. There were flooded streets in the little town, the station was drenched, the rain glittered in the lights of the port, where the ferry was moored by an empty puddled quay.

  It was possible that this look of desertion meant that I had the departure time wrong.

  “You are sure this ferry goes to Palma tonight?”

  “Yes. No problem.”

  “Where are the other passengers?”

  “Perhaps there are no other passengers tonight.”

  It was ten o’clock. I bought my ticket and boarded ten minutes later. The ferry Punta Europa had space for 1,300 passengers. A sign in Spanish on the upper deck spelled it out:

  Maximum authorized passengers 1300

  Crew Members (Tripulantes) 31

  Total of passengers and crew 1331

  Then a man and his son came aboard. That made three of us on the Punta Europa. There were five inside saloons for passengers, filled with seats; every seat was the same, narrow, hard-edged molded plastic, and so we sat bolt upright as the ferry sailed out of Denia, roaring like an express train in the storm. The saloon lights still burned, the crew stayed below, the wind made the doors bang, the whole ferry stank of oil and the reek of decaying cork on its interior decks. A television set had been left on in each saloon—a man loudly reading the news. Outside was the black furious Mediterranean. It was my first storm on this sea and it thrilled me, because I had been seeing it as a sink of gray slopping water, and the wind and waves tonight gave it the look of a great ocean.