The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Seventeen months after leaving Algeciras in sunshine, on the road to Morocco the long way, I arrived back, in a high wind. There is something about a seaside town on a stormy night. This was not any old wind, this was the Levanter, and the official weather station in the port of Algeciras clocked its gusts at ninety-three miles per hour (150 kilometers per hour). On the Beaufort scale seventy-two miles per hour is the strongest wind for which there is a designation. It is a hurricane, number 12. Most of the time the Levanter was blowing in the 50s and 60s—gale force, occasionally rising to storm force, number 11. This was the third day of the storm. The hurricane gusts had knocked over light poles and put Algeciras in darkness.

  The wind was news. Like Málaga and Melilla, the port of Algeciras had shut down. So had Tangier. So had Ceuta. This entire end of the Mediterranean was closed. In Algeciras, traffic had accumulated at the ferry landing. People were sleeping in the lobbies of the terminal, they picnicked beside their cars. There were few vacant rooms to be had at the hotels, and this normally quiet town was full of people, waiting for the ferries to leave.

  Just down the coast at Tarifa the loose sand and gravel had blown off the beach, leaving a hard smooth packed-down surface. One of the proverbs relating to the violent Levanter wind was that of the Portuguese sailors: “When the Levanter blows, the stones move” (Quando con Levante chiove, las pedras muove). Along the coast road plastic bags were plastered against the sheep fences; billboards had blown down, so had some trees and power lines. In the narrow backstreets of Algeciras obscure objects rose up and smacked me in the face. The palms on the promenade were noisy, their fronds smashing. Large metal signs were knocked from buildings and clattered into the street.

  The other thing about constant wind, which is one of the worst forms of bad weather, is that it can drive you mental. It is more deranging than rain, a greater nuisance than snow; it is invisible, it pushes, it pulls, it snatches your clothes, it twists your head, and finally your mind. That night and the next day passed. The wind did not cease. It seemed odd to go to sleep hearing the wind blowing hard, and to wake up with it still blowing. On my second day in Algeciras it seemed to be blowing harder.

  “I’ve been to Morocco twenty-three times,” a bird-watcher named Gullick told me. “That’s forty-six crossings. Only one of them was canceled—New Year’s Eve, out of Tangier.”

  Gullick was conducting a birding expedition to Morocco. His Range Rover was hung up on the quay, his passengers were becoming agitated.

  “We’re all birders,” the only woman in the group told me.

  Her name was Debbie Shearwater.

  “That’s an amazing coincidence, for a bird-watcher to have a bird’s name.”

  “I changed it, from Millichap, for personal reasons,” she said. “But also I hated having to spell Millichap all the time.”

  “Everyone spells Shearwater right, then?”

  She laughed. “No! They call me Clearwater, Stillwater, Sharewater—”

  “That flag’s not flapping as strong as it was yesterday,” one of the other bird-watchers said, looking up at the flag on the Boughaz (“The Straits”).

  But it was, it was whipping hard.

  “Where I come from,” Debbie Shearwater said, “a wind like this would be news. It would be on the front page.”

  Later that day, Gullick proudly passed around an item from El Pais about the Levanter. The facts were that the port had been closed for two and half days. The gusts had been clocked at 150 kilometers per hour. There were fifteen-foot waves in the gong-tormented Straits. Some fishing boats had been lost. The other news concerned the large number of people waiting in Algeciras—travelers, truckers, Moroccans, Spaniards. These travelers milled in the town like displaced people, unable to move on.

  One hotel in Algeciras was fairly empty—it was the best one, located at the edge of town, the Hotel Reina Cristina. I was staying near the ferry landing, so that I could watch the progress of the ships as well as the storm, but one day I walked out to the Reina Cristina to kill time. This hotel had a pool, and gardens, and was surrounded by trees, and was more like a villa in the country than a hotel in this port town. On the lobby wall were the bronzed signatures of some of the hotel’s more illustrious guests: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, July 20, 1937; Cole Porter, 1956; Lord Halifax; Estes Kefauver, 1957; Alfonso XIII; Orson Welles.

  W. B. Yeats spent the winter of 1927–28 at the Reina Cristina. He had gone to Spain to recover from a bad cold. While nursing his cold, Yeats wrote a poem, “At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death,” which begins with a pretty portrait of the straits:

  The heron-billed pale cattle-birds

  That feed on some foul parasite

  Of the Moroccan flocks and herds

  Cross the narrow Straits to light

  In the rich midnight of the garden trees

  Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

  Back in town my more optimistic bird-watcher was saying again, “I don’t think that flag is flapping as hard as it was this morning.”

  Gypsies, Germans, Moroccans, Africans, sailors, families, small children, motorcyclists, dogs, truck drivers, bus passengers—everyone was waiting. Some were drunk. Many slept in their vehicles. Backpackers lay on the floor of the terminal in their sleeping bags. And people were still arriving by car in Algeciras to take the ferry to Tangier or Ceuta.

  It was just over an hour to Ceuta, about two hours to Tangier. But now three days had passed without any ferries. And still the wind blew. I took the bus to Tarifa, to kill time. It was a pleasant little town buffeted by wind. Spray blew from one side of the harbor to the other, drenching the bronze statue erected to “Men of the Sea.”

  The wind gave me a headache that would not go away. It made me irritable. It woke me in the middle of the night and made me listen to it damaging the town and scraping at the window. During the day it made me feel grubby. It hurt my eyes. It exhausted me.

  Algeciras was such a small town and I was there such a long time that I kept seeing the same people. I got to know some of them. The ceramic seller with the terra-cotta piggy banks, the many Moroccans selling leather jackets. The dwarf selling lottery tickets. The scores of agencies selling ferry tickets; the fruit sellers and market butchers and fishmongers. Some born-again Christians who had once been hippies ran a cafe that offered Bible study with its sandwiches; I got to know them. The Indian watch salesman who had lived in Spain for ten years, “and no Spanish person ever said to me, ‘You fucking Indian,’ like they did to me in London—or four or five men come up to me in the tube train and say things. Spanish are good people”—I met him, too.

  And there was Juana. She stood on the sidewalk near Bar El Vino. She was twenty, or perhaps younger. But a serious drug habit made her look much older—haggard, red-eyed, wild-haired. The wind tore at her hair and snatched at her skirt as she clutched her jacket and searched passersby with her pockmarked and pleading face. She was cold and impatient, and sometimes plainly desperate.

  “Señor—hola!”

  Most of them hurried past. She was harmless, but there was something dangerous and witchlike about her appearing from the shadows beside Bar El Vino in this wind.

  Juana became a familiar face, and so I usually said hello to her.

  This friendliness encouraged her. “Fucky-fucky?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Three thousand.” That was twenty-five dollars.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Anything you want to do, I will do.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “The money includes the room at the hotel!”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It is cheap!”

  And following me down the street, bucking the wind, she would be summoned back by a big growly-voiced woman, calling out, “Juana!”

  It was too windy for me to read. I couldn’t think in this wind. Listening to music was out of the question, and so was conversation. After dinner I watched TV in the neigh
borhood bar, and it seemed as though I had begun to live the life of a lower-middle-class resident of Algeciras. Crocodile Dundee was on one night, dubbed in Spanish. We watched that. We watched wrestling and football. One night there was a bullfight. A matador mounted on a horse wounded a bull, then rode back and forth poking the bleeding animal with a pikestaff. The bull turned and gored the horse, then flipped the horse and rider and trampled them. The matador lay motionless, next to the crumpled horse, until the bull was distracted and run through with a sword. It was possible that this ten-minute corrida produced the death of the bull, the horse and the matador.

  We watched cartoons. That was what I had been reduced to by five days of Levanter wind: a middle-aged mental case sitting on a wobbly chair in the filthy Foreign Legion Bar, watching Tom and Jerry cartoons.

  The Levanter was as strong on the sixth day as it had been on the first day. But there was nothing new about this. In 1854, in a book called The Mediterranean, Rear Admiral William Henry Smyth wrote, “The hardest gale of the neighborhood is the Solano or Levanter of the Gibraltar pilots … That the winds in the Straits of Gibraltar blow either from the east points or west points of the horizon (technically termed down or up) in general has been immemorially remarked; and the conformation of its coasts on both sides renders the reason palpable. Of these winds, the east is the most violent, being often the cause of much inconvenience in the bay, from its gusty flaws and eddies, besides its always being found raw and disagreeable on shore: hence Señor Ayala, Historian of Gibraltar, terms the east wind ‘The Tyrant of the Straits’ and the west their ‘Liberator.’ ”

  The morning of my sixth day sickly yellow-gray clouds with shafts of dawn appeared over Gibraltar. Though from La Linea the Rock had the appearance of the Matterhorn, and from the heights of Algeciras Gibraltar seemed like a fortress, glimpsed from the port here the complicated rock looked like a mutt snuffling on a hearth rug.

  “I think that flag’s starting to droop a bit,” the bird-watcher said.

  He was wrong again, but that afternoon the wind did abate, and by evening it had slackened enough for the port authority to give the order to start loading the ferries. After that, everything happened quickly. The whole port came awake, people began running to their cars, gathering their children and dogs. The truckers started their engines. And Algeciras, which had been scoured by wind for six days, just slumped and lost its look of defiance. The storm was over. The town was as limp as its flag and it reassumed its guidebook description: “An ugly town of very slight interest.”

  After all this, the ferry trip was an anticlimax; from Algeciras to Ceuta, the southern Pillar of Hercules, took just one hour. The pillar stood at right angles to Gibraltar. Hardly more than a hill, it was said to be Gibraltar’s “rival in antiquity if not in splendor.” Neither photogenic nor remarkable, it was upstaged by its geraniums, another two-star relic that made me reflect again that what matters is the journey, not the arrival.

  That glimpse of the other Pillar of Hercules should have meant the end of my grand tour. But I had waited so long to get to Morocco I decided to stay in Tangier. Besides, David Herbert had just died, at the age of eighty-six. “End of an era,” the obituaries said, writing of his frivolity: “He became the toast of Tangerine society. In that ‘oriental Cheltenham’ (as Beaton called it) he was often to be found arranging flowers for one of Barbara Hutton’s rooftop parties in the casbah.” I had been urged to look him up. “He’s awful—you’ll love him.” He was colorful, he wore a wig, his sister was lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mum, he had known everyone who lived in or had ever visited the place, and every pasha and pederast in Sodom-sur-Mer.

  David Herbert’s father was Lord Herbert, elder son of the fifteenth earl of Pembroke and twelfth Earl of Montgomery—he was also bankrupt. The old man had inherited Wilton, “perhaps the most beautiful house in England.” As second son, David Herbert had no title, though to irritate his brother he called himself Lord Herbert. He was known as the “Uncrowned Queen of Tangier.”

  I rode from Ceuta to Tangier with a pair of terrified tourists, a husband and wife, in a busload of Moroccans. “I’m a surgeon and my wife is an attorney,” the man said, with uncalled-for pomposity. They were from Minneapolis.

  “Both those professions will come in handy here,” I said.

  It was raining very hard when we entered the city, and at the Avenue d’Espagne, where it met the Rue de la Plage, the pelting drops turned the puddles mirroring the bright piled-up Medina into its own glittering reflection.

  Almost at once I was set upon by four men.

  “Big welcome, my friend—”

  “Listen, I not a guide. I want to practice my English—”

  “I am student. I show you what you want—”

  “I take you to hotel—”

  They followed, haranguing me, and it was hard to shake them off; but I walked resolutely in the rain as though I knew where I was going, and they dropped by the wayside. Farther on I was accosted by beggars, but the street grew steeper—Tangier is spread across several hills—and soon there was no one except the Moroccan men and women, Smurfs and nuns, their pointed hoods up against the rain and cold. I passed the Medina. Medina in Arabic means the city, and is usually the walled city in any Arab settlement; Casbah means citadel. The most convenient definition is: A medina is a walled city with many gates, both exits and entrances; a Casbah, being a fortress, has only two, an entrance and an exit.

  I was headed for the Hotel El Muniria, the hotel in which William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch, and where Jack Kerouac and others had stayed. On the way, as I stepped out of the rain into a lighted doorway to read my map, a man appeared and asked me what I was looking for. When I told him he said, “This is a hotel.” He showed me a room. It was pleasant enough and cost fifteen dollars (140 dihran), and besides my feet were wet and I really did not want to go any farther.

  From the beginning of my trip I had hoped to drop in on Paul Bowles, who was as important to the cultural life of Tangier as Naguib Mahfouz was in Cairo. David Herbert had been no more than a colorful character, but Bowles had written novels that I had admired—The Sheltering Sky, and Let It Come Down and The Spider’s House. Many of his short stories I regarded as brilliant. Some of the strangest and best writers of the twentieth century had come to Tangier; Bowles had known them all, Bowles represented the city. He had known Gertrude Stein and William Burroughs and Gore Vidal and Kerouac and all the rest; he was a writer and a composer. He had translated books from Spanish and Maghrebi Arabic. Most of the world had visited. Everyone had left. Bowles remained, apparently still writing. In a world of jet travel and simple transitions, he refused to budge. He seemed to me the last exile.

  “Mister Bowles is very ill,” a Moroccan told me.

  It was not surprising. Bowles was in his mid-eighties. The weather was terrible—first the six-day Levanter, and now this rain. It was cold enough for me to be wearing a jacket and a sweater. I needed the radiator in my hotel room. But I dreaded Bowles’s illness too, his being sick. I did not want to pester a sick man, and it also seemed to me that any illness in this damp cold city could have serious consequences. Besides, I had no introduction to him. I did not know where he lived.

  This Moroccan, Mohammed, who claimed to know Bowles, said, “He has no telephone.”

  Would he deliver a letter for me? He said yes. I wrote a note, telling him that I was in Tangier, and asking him whether he was well enough to have a visitor. I handed it over to Mohammed for delivery.

  “We meet tomorrow at three o’clock,” Mohammed said. “I will tell you the answer.”

  The rain continued to crackle all night on the cobblestones, blackening the narrow streets of the Kasbah, and emptying the Medina of pedestrians or else forcing them to shelter in doorways, and giving the city an air of mystery: in the rain Tangier was gleaming and unreadable. In such bad weather all Moroccans pulled their hood up over their head and it looked like a city of monks.

  I coul
d understand why certain foreigners might gravitate to Tangier. It was full of appealing paradoxes. The greatest was that it seemed so lawless and yet was so safe. It was also superficially exotic but not at all distant (I could see solid, hardworking Spain from the top floor of my hotel). Tangier had an air of the sinister and the illicit, yet it was actually rather sedate. Except for the touts, the local people were tolerant towards strangers, not to say utterly indifferent. Almost everything was inexpensive, and significantly, everything was available—not just the smuggled comforts of Europe but the more rarefied pleasures of this in-between place, that was neither Africa nor Europe.

  If you decided to stay in Tangier there were other people just like you, writing books, composing music, chasing local boys or foreign girls. The city was visually interesting but undemanding. I realized that as I waited for a response from Paul Bowles. It was an easy city to kill time in. Its religion was relaxed and its history was anecdotal. The rough real Morocco was behind it, beyond the Rif Mountains. A foreigner might have to be careful there. But everyone belonged in Tangier. “Cosmopolitan, frowsy, familiar Tangier,” Edith Wharton wrote in her travel book In Morocco (1925), “that every tourist has visited for the last forty years.”

  From 1923 until 1956 Tangier had been officially an International Zone, run by the local representatives of nine countries, including the USA. But even its absorption into Morocco at independence in 1956 did not change Tangerine attitudes nor its louche culture. In addition to the Casbah and the drugs, and the catamites that hung around the cafes, Tangier had the lovely Anglican cathedral of St. Andrews and the Grand Mosque. It seemed to me not Moroccan but Mediterranean—a place that had closer links to the other cities on the Mediterranean than it did to its own country. The great Mediterranean cities had much in common, Alexandria and Venice, Marseilles and Tunis, and even smaller places like Cagliari and Palma and Split. Their spirit was mongrel and Mediterranean.