NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  I wanted to talk to someone in power about this—someone other than people I casually encountered in public houses and at bus stops; so I sent a note to the distinguished former Chief Minister, Sir Joshua Hassan, and waited for a reply.

  It was rainy and cool these October days. I became fond of this weather for various reasons. It was good writing weather, and it kept the tourists away. In such grim weather there was always a place to stay and it was seldom necessary to make onward arrangements. I liked feeling that I could leave a town at a moment’s notice and be assured that I would find a hotel farther up the line. In the whole of the Mediterranean, all seventeen countries, traveling off-season, I never had a problem of that sort, showing up in a place that was full of No Vacancy signs. In fact, most hotel owners complained to me that there weren’t half enough tourists these days.

  In the several days that I waited to hear from Sir Joshua, I climbed the Rock. There was a lovely view from a vantage point at 1,350 feet, at the top of the Rock. To the west was Algeciras on a sweep of bay; to the north the low brown hills of San Roque beyond The Neck; to the south, beyond the lighthouses at Europa Point, across the Straits, was Morocco—Ceuta, the other Pillar, and farther west, Tangier.

  At that altitude, wandering among the tourists and apes, learning to distinguish between them, I concluded that because the apes were both intelligent and deprived they are quite like the homeless people in big cities, soft-voiced, panhandling, desperate and yet chastened creatures. They are, horribly, like the poor in Europe—ragged and dispossessed, tenacious and yet fatalistic, as they hang on, knowing they are despised; they have that resentful yet fatalistic look of natives who have been displaced by swindling latecomers. The apes on the Rock are one of the underclasses of Gibraltar. Another underclass are the Moroccans. Coincidentally, the apes also originated in Morocco, from which in 1740 a whole tribe of apes was imported.

  There was a strong sense of community in Gibraltar, which made it much odder for me to reflect that I was in a place that was both a racial hodgepodge and also deeply paranoid about admitting aliens. It was partly a result of Gibraltar’s insularity—the Rock is significantly an island. But tribalism and xenophobia were also Mediterranean character traits. Never mind that the history of the Mediterranean is a history of mongrelization; these days the most common sound was the native mongrel yapping about his pedigree and driving off foreign mutts.

  After I saw the French tourist taunting the mother ape I asked a Gibraltarian who worked on the Rock whether many people were attacked.

  “Lots of people are bitten,” he said, “but the strange thing is that nine out of ten are women—the women get the bites. We had one yesterday—a woman—big bite on her arm.”

  His name was Jerry. One of his jobs was operating the cable car. I asked him whether the apes had rabies.

  “No. These apes are medically looked after. But we send the people to the hospital anyway.”

  I told him what a policeman in New York had once told me, that a human bite is much more dangerous than an animal bite, and that a tourist who bit you would do more harm than an ape.

  From the top of the Rock it was possible to see that Gibraltar was little more than a harbor and a cluster of tenements, and like many towns with hills nearby, the higher you live on the slopes, the posher your house. The cable car passed over swimming pools and hot tubs and foaming whirlpool baths attached to luxury homes. Later, I looked at an 1810 map of Gibraltar and it reminded me of a colonial map of Boston: fifteen batteries—Queen’s Battery, King’s, Norman’s, Cockaigne’s, Prince of Hesse’s, Mungo’s and so forth. Then The Neck and the Spanish lines and all the Papists on the Spanish side. It was as though Dorchester Heights remained British while the rest of America went its own way—just as odd and inconvenient and anachronistic.

  Major Brian Cooper Tweedy of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was posted in Gibraltar late in the last century. His daughter Marion, known to all as Molly, lost her virginity to one Harry Mulvey in Gibraltar. Later, particularly at bedtime, she ruminated on her sexual encounters in Gibraltar. This woman, literature’s earth mother, is of course Molly Bloom, and her girlhood in Gibraltar, being kissed under the Moorish Wall, is vividly recounted in her drowsy soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.

  Molly remembers “those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end,” and the obscene Gibraltarian graffiti that “used to be written up with a picture of a woman on that wall in Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere.” The rock in her memory is emblematic and powerful, “looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies.”

  She ruminates on the weather: “the rain was lovely and refreshing just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant.” And even the apes: “I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old Barbary apes they sent to Clapham without a tail.”

  Most of all, Molly’s remembrance is of her first sexual encounter, one of the most passionate in literature. She hardly remembers Mulvey’s name but the incident is vivid: “we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down.” And the moment itself: “he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth.” And the glorious Gibraltarian conclusion: “… I put my arms around him yes and drew down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

  There could be a Molly Bloom Defloration Tour of the Rock, but there isn’t. James Joyce never visited Gibraltar; he was scribbling and studying maps in another corner of the Mediterranean—Trieste. But it is a testimony to his imaginative powers that it is impossible to be in Gibraltar and not hear Molly’s sensuous voice. The presence of Jews in Gibraltar interested Joyce greatly—after all, his Ulysses figure, Leopold Bloom, was a Dublin Jew. In spite of Gibraltar being associated with Jewish expulsions, its Jewish community has deep roots. There are five synagogues in the little town.

  Still waiting for a reply from Sir Joshua Hassan, I met Stephen Leanse, a Jewish entrepreneur.

  “I was born in the Bahamas,” he said, “but my wife’s family, the Serruyas, came here in 1728.”

  The majority of Gibraltarians trace their origins to Genoa and are Catholic. Some others are Maltese. A few are British expatriates—shopkeepers, ex-servicemen. No one admits to being Spanish. Stephen was one of a thousand or so Jews in Gibraltar, members of about a hundred Jewish families. It was not a large number, but it was an influential—and cosmopolitan—segment of the population. They were all Sephardic Jews, some of them speaking Spanish—the word Sephardic means “of Spain.” Others were speaking Ladino—the Sephardic language, that combined Renaissance Spanish with elements of Hebrew.

  Like most other people I met in Gibraltar Mr. Leanse told me that the place was small, perhaps too small; and business was poor; and the future was uncertain.

  “I would love to live in Israel, but my family is here.”

  “Are the Jews in Gibraltar associated with any particular business?”

  “No. All sorts of businesses. We don’t manufacture anything. Some of us are in banking, or we have shops, or restaurants. Some are politicians.”

  One of the Jewish restaurants was The Bomb House Lane Glatt Kosher Restaurant, where I heard Yiddish, Ladino, Spanish, English and Hebrew spoken, all at once, sometimes in the same sentence, under a picture of David Ben-Gurion and another of a girlish Queen Elizabeth II. Everyone in the place wore a yarmulke, even the funny little man depicted on the menu. Because this glatt kosher restaurant was in Gibraltar some of the dishes on the menu were Moroccan. The cook—along with most cooks, cleaners, bus
drivers and waitresses in Gibraltar—was Moroccan. A good proportion of the Jewish diners had come from Morocco.

  Glatt indicates a specific sort of kosherness in meat. The word glatt is Yiddish for “smooth” and signifies that after the animal was ritually slaughtered by a shochet, its lungs were examined and found to have no punctures. It also suggests that in life it had no imperfections on its skin: a cow with no spots, a calf an even shade of brown, a monochrome chicken, a fluffy little prancing lamb, a goat that was above reproach. The opposite of glatt is trayfe (or terefah), meaning “torn”—and that could be a creature with a punctured lung, or a fatal laceration, or a suppurating wound. All this was discussed in the Talmud (which advocated the eating of several species of locusts, providing they were not trayfe). It was also somehow related to the idea of sacrifice—that if a lamb was worthy to be slain, it had to be the sort of lamb that would win a blue ribbon at a county fair. God loved you for sacrificing your best, most impressive animal.

  Dietary laws fascinate me for the way they mingle good sense with utter foolishness. But for me the glatt concept was purely academic. I told the waiter I was not a meat eater and ordered fish.

  My sea bass was grilled. It was a kosher fish, no imperfections, with both fins and scales. (Every fish that has scales also has fins, but not vice versa.) But when I stuck my fork into it the middle was still frozen and tasted trayfe. When I sent it back to be thawed and recooked, they obliged me. The bill was nineteen dollars—twelve handsomely engraved Gibraltar pounds—and so I complained, but it was no use.

  Soon they would have competition from Mr. Wong and his joint-venture Chinese restaurant.

  In the Jewish Social and Cultural Club a leaflet on a notice board announced Hillel Tours’ “Annual Trip to Spain.” It sounded as though this destination was remote—a journey to a far-off land—when in fact, if you walked down Bomb House Lane and looked west you could see Algeciras, and after a ten-minute stroll north you could spit to La Línea, where once there had been bullfights (Molly Bloom: “the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear”).

  But because Gibraltar has turned its back on Spain, Spain seems remote; and the Gibraltarian’s face is averted from Morocco. It seems irrelevant that Gibraltar occupies one side of the Bay of Algeciras. It is an inward-looking place, and in spite of its majestic position on the Mediterranean, hardly anyone seems interested in the water.

  The exception to this apparent hydrophobia are the members of the Mediterranean Rowing Club, who scull a thirty-foot four-man boat called a yola, a very beamy craft made in Florence.

  I went to the club, hoping to go for a row, but the Gibraltarians who showed me around said that the day was too windy.

  “The prevailing wind is a westerly—a fresh, cool one, like today,” said Alfie Brittenden, one of the club’s rowers. “The Levanter is an easterly that brings humidity. Sometimes the Levanter makes a cloud form on the Rock.”

  “Do you ever row across the Straits?” I asked.

  “Occasionally we row to Morocco, for an annual charity event. But it’s very hard. There’s a four-knot current and rough water.”

  “I was wondering whether I might bring my kayak here.”

  “It would be suicide to try it alone,” Alfie said.

  But another man at the club told me that I should not be intimidated.

  “Ees there, Morocco,” he said. “Ees eesie.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You can’t loose eet.”

  That night I went to the NAAFI at one of the military barracks near the harbor and watched a World Cup qualifying match, England versus Holland. The room was packed with hundreds of screaming, chanting England fans. At first England seemed to be holding its own. The whole room was united in its howling, but when Holland scored two goals in quick succession and England had no reply there was disappointment and then real anger among the soldiers who earlier had been screaming for blood. That loss cast a pall over Gibraltar, and the next day the Rock was in mourning for England’s interment by the Dutch.

  Hearing nothing from Sir Joshua Hassan, I called his office and told him I was planning to leave soon. He apologized and said I could visit him that same afternoon.

  He is the grand old man of the Rock, the father of modern Gibraltar. “Sir J. Hassan & Partners,” was on the top floor of a bank. On the wall of Sir Joshua’s office there was a large photograph of the man himself, at the time he was Chief Minister, addressing a vast crowd in Gibraltar’s main square. A framed charter signed by the queen. A gilded document: “We have inscribed your name in the Golden Book of Jewish Unity.” And a telegram from Prince Philip: “Congratulations on your well-deserved honour”—Sir Joshua’s knighthood.

  He was dark and small and stout and lined, a kindly sloping presence, and he had the softest hands, and the limp handshake of an old woman. His Ladino accent and his solemn face made him seem at times not Jewish but Spanish, but his confidence and fits of sudden jollity transformed him into a Dickensian barrister. He was seventy-eight.

  Realizing I did not have much time, I bluntly asked him about the status of Gibraltar.

  “The person who says ‘I want Gibraltar to be Spanish’ does not exist in Gibraltar,” he said. “If Gibraltar is not my country, where is my country? Ha! We consider ourselves Gibraltarians irrespective of where we came from. We get along very well together.”

  “So you are totally committed to Gibraltar,” I said.

  Sir Joshua said, “Jews have a second loyalty—to Israel. But that is an emotional loyalty. My daughter lives there.”

  His own people, he said, the Hassan family, had emigrated to the Rock in 1788, from Morocco—from a town just across the water, Tetouan. On his mother’s side, the Cansino family came from Minorca. “We’re all settlers here,” he said, “dating from roughly 1704.”

  I said, “It amazes me how everyone quotes the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht when they talk about Gibraltar.”

  “Because of the clause about Jews and Moors being forbidden to stay in Gibraltar more than a month. But they needed us. They had to look to Morocco for vittles. Because of realities they drove a coach and horses through the treaty.”

  He shuffled some documents.

  “I wrote a paper about it. My thesis was that Gibraltar developed despite the treaty.”

  “Do you think the Chief Minister made any headway the other day at the U.N.?”

  “Joe Bossano doesn’t know what he wants,” he said, and leaned towards me. “When people go berserk they ask for something they don’t understand. The idea of a colony smells bad.”

  “So what’s the best solution?”

  “It is very difficult! There are three choices for Gibraltar. Independence is one. Or, to be part of a state—but Spain is out of the question. Or free association, like the Cook Islands and New Zealand.”

  “The Cook Islanders go fishing and New Zealand pays the bills. Something like that?”

  This made Sir Joshua wince. He said, “The best solution would be the utmost autonomy in internal matters, and a treaty with Britain that would remove the wide powers of the governor.”

  “What would Spain say to that?”

  “Spain would never agree that Gibraltar should have its own government,” he said. “But I don’t want to be colonized by Spain. I was colonized already by Britain!”

  “Weren’t you worried when Franco was in power?”

  “Yes, because he had a tyrannical government. But just the other day the Spanish foreign minister made a speech demanding sovereignty over us and calling us ‘the last colony in Europe.’ The Spanish say, ‘It is a matter of honor!’ But we have honor too.”

  “Isn’t Gibraltar a colony?”

  “We call ourselves a dependent territory.”

  “I have the impression that business is rather poor, with most of the British troops pulled out.”

  “Business isn’t good. We get tourists, and some day-trippers from Spain”—t
he tormentors of the Rock apes, the souvenir hunters that arrived in buses from Torremolinos and Marbella. “We used to have day-trippers from Morocco, but because of French paranoia against North Africans the Moroccans now need visas to enter EC countries. It’s ridiculous and very bad for business.”

  “Gibraltar’s in the EC?” This was news to me.

  “Yes. We are a full member politically. But we are excluded from VAT and other taxes.”

  I asked him, “Are you aware of being a sort of folk hero and father figure of Gibraltar?”

  He smiled at this, as though agreeing with what I said but forbidden by modesty to say so.

  “I am speaking to you candidly now,” he said. “I go to Spain every now and then. My wife shops for vegetables there. On one trip I said to a guard, ‘Why are the Spanish police and guards here so courteous to me, when they know that I want to keep Gibraltar independent from Spain?’ ”

  The order in Sir Joshua’s office and the way he was dressed, with that excessive neatness that is common to morticians and lawyers, told me that he was fastidious. Perhaps this was why he pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, as though an unpleasant thought was passing through his mind.

  “The guard said to me, ‘Because you put sus cojónes sur la mesa—’ ”

  “Your balls on the table,” I said.

  “Yes. He continued, ‘And you haven’t offended anyone.’ ”

  “That’s a pretty neat trick.”

  “Oh, yes. I was flattered.”

  It was time for me to go. I thanked him for seeing me and speaking frankly, and I told him sincerely that I had enjoyed myself in Gibraltar. Though I did not tell him this, fearing he would misunderstand, I liked it best because it was unexpected; the rain, the gusting wind, the dignified apes. It was not at all the Mediterranean port I had expected but more like an English seaside resort in autumn, full of plucky retirees and gasconading soldiers.