NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  “And to think that there were British people who went to Estepona to retire and find the good life,” I said to an Englishman in Marbella.

  “I’ve met a number of expats on the Costa del Sol who are trying to sell up and go home. Prices are high, taxes are high—to pay for the redevelopment and the improvement. That’s why Marbella looks nice. The people came because life was so cheap here in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and now it’s more expensive than Britain. They want to go home.”

  “You see all these houses being built?” a Spanish real estate agent told me. “It’s all Kuwaiti money. Middle East people.”

  This was impossible to verify, though other locals mentioned it—that this building boom had been a result of Arab investment in the late eighties and early nineties, punters hoping to make a killing in the Spanish property market. It had the look of a bubble, though: too many houses, too much development. The “For Immediate Sale!” and “Prices Slashed!” signs had a desperate note of hysteria in them.

  I hung around Marbella for a day and a half, noted the youngsters prowling the empty discotheques and clubs, and ate paella.

  When I inquired about the bullfight I hoped to see, I was told to go to Malaga … to Granada … to Barcelona … to Madrid—anywhere but Marbella; and so I left on a bus, heading north along the shore to Torremolinos. There were no coastal trains here—none until Valencia or thereabouts—but the buses went everywhere.

  The utterly blighted landscape of the Spanish coast—Europe’s vacationland, a vile straggling sandbox—begins about here, north of Marbella, and continues, with occasional breaks, all the way up the zigzag shore to France. The meretriciousness, the cheapo appeal, the rankness of this chain of grease-spots is so well-known it is superfluous for me to describe it; and it is beyond satire. So why bother?

  But several aspects of this reeking vulgarity interested me. The first was that the debased urbanization on this coast seemed entirely foreign, as though the whole holiday business had been foisted on Spain by outside investors hoping to cash in. The phenomenon of seaside gimcrackery was familiar to anyone who had traveled on the British coast and examined The Kingdom by the Sea. Spain even had the same obscene comic postcards, and funny hats, and junk food. It was also ridiculously cheap, in spite of the retirees’ complaints about the high cost of living. The Spaniards did not mock it, and they were grateful for the paying guests; for many years this was the chief source of Spanish prosperity. It was also remarkably ugly, and this was especially true in these out-of-season months. In full sunshine it might have had a cheap and cheerful carnival atmosphere, but under gray skies it hovered, a grotesque malignancy, sad and horrible, that was somewhere between tragedy and farce. And Spain seemed distant.

  I felt intensely that the Spanish coast, especially here on the Costa del Sol, had undergone a powerful colonization—of a modern kind, but just as pernicious and permanent a violation as the classic wog-bashing sort. It had robbed the shore of its natural features, displaced headlands and gullies and harbors with futile badly made structures. It did not repel me. It showed what unruly people were allowed to do to a magnificent shoreline when they had a little money and no taste. It had a definite horror-interest.

  The landscape was obliterated, and from the edge of the Mediterranean to the arid gravelly inland slopes there were off-white stucco villas. There were no hills to speak of, only sequences of stucco rising in a hill shape, like a collapsing wedding cake. There were no people, there were few cars, and after dark only a handful of these houses were lighted. In the poorer nastier coves there were campsite communities and the footprint foundations in cement for caravans and tents.

  A poisonous landfill, a dump with a prospect of the sea, dominated Fuengirola, which was otherwise just high-rises and huts. Ugly little towns such as Arroyo de la Miel sometimes had the prettiest names—in that case Honey Gulch—but the worst indication of blight on this coast was the gradual appearance of signs in English: “Cold Beer” and “Afternoon Tea” and “Authentic English Breakfast” and “Fish and Chips”—and little flapping Union Jacks. They were also the hint that we were nearing Torremolinos, which was grim and empty and dismal and sunless, loud music mingled with the stink of frying, souvenir letter openers and ashtrays and stuffed animals and funny hats stacked on a narrow strip of gray sand by the slop of the sea.

  There were some tourists here—British, French, German—making the best of things, praying for the sun to shine. Instead of staying I found a train and took it back to Fuengirola, which was just as awful as Torremolinos. That night strolling along the promenade—the sea was lovelier at night—I saw a bullfight poster, announcing a feria the next day at Mijas, not far away.

  There was a bullfight on television in a cafe near my hotel that night. The cafe was filled with silent men, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee. A few disgusted tourists left. I watched for a while with these attentive Spaniards. It seemed just a bloody charade of ritual slaughter, a great black beast with magnificent horns trotting around the ring, snorting and pawing and full of life, reduced in minutes to a kneeling wreck, vomiting blood, as a narrow-hipped matador gloated—this was something that made me deeply curious, even as it filled me with dread.

  I went to Mijas and took a seat in the bullring. It was a novillada, a bullfight with young bulls. The matadors here were also young—trainees (novilleros)—nervous, tentative teenagers. One walked out stiffly in tight pants. People cheered. The bull appeared from a gate. It was a small bull, because the matador was still learning; but even so this beautiful bewildered animal made him look like a punk. Attempting to be fearless, the matador knelt and was almost immediately gored. He tumbled, the bull was on top of him. The cape-men distracted the bull and after a while stuck banderillas into the bull’s neck. This tore the neck muscles, the bull lowered its head—an easy target. The matador made an attempt with his sword, but so badly the bull was crazed—surprised, fearful, fighting for its life—and chased the matador into a blind. Confused, dying, the bull bled against its own flanks for a while and then, weak and kneeling, was dispatched with a sword thrust, and the dead thing was dragged away by a mule team.

  This was all worse, more farcical, more horrible than I had imagined, because it was so inefficient. People cheered, but pointlessly—the bull was doomed from the start. The bullring is round: there is nowhere for the bull to hide; but the “blinds” allow the matador to hide with ease.

  The second bull was less lucky—though all bulls are unlucky—and ended up howling, bellowing as the matador fumbled with the sword and cape. He was butted. The bull was bleeding and roaring. At last the bull was stabbed. At this point about fifteen English tourists left the bullring, muttering with indignation. A third bull entered. A new matador faced this creature and was downed inside a minute. He tried three times to stab this bull, but succeeded only in enraging him. He was gored and limping. He lost his cape. He then stabbed the bull, but ineptly, skewering the bull so grotesquely that the animal was given courage, and it cantered around, bleeding and complaining, with the sword bobbing from its neck. The Mijas church bells tolled, and the pigeons flew out of the belfry, the matador was chased, there was great confusion, until at last the bull was slowly, amateurishly, painfully put to death.

  There is nothing in bullfighting except blood—the anticipation of blood, the letting of blood, and the brutally choreographed death of a ramping animal which just a moment ago was bucking and snorting with life. It is the sight of terrible beauty victimized and killed, in style. The word matador is unsubtle. Matar is the verb to kill. Matador means killer. In the larger bullrings, the great corridas, the bulls are enormous, monstrous even, but in minutes, the bull is reduced to a slobbering, drooling wreck, shitting in alarm and desperation, and finally knifed to death. Olé.

  The small bullring at Mijas, about the size of a circus ring at a state fair, was almost a century old. Mijas, a lovely town in the hills above Fuengirola, is the scene of In Hiding, by Ronald
Fraser, which describes how the Republican mayor of Mijas was forced to remain hidden in his house for thirty years; a good example of the absurd cruelties brought about by the Franco government, which by the way encouraged bullfighting.

  Bullfights are as frequent on Spanish television as football games. It is not unusual to find them on three channels simultaneously, three different bullfights. Spaniards, not a people noted for finding common agreement on anything, are almost unanimous in their enthusiasm for bullfighting. It is not a sport, Hemingway said; it is a tragedy, because the bull dies. But the bull dies in the worst possible way, first tortured by knives in its neck and then stabbed—usually clumsily by a prancing man with a sword—and then it bleeds to death.

  A tragedy? Isn’t it pretty to think so. It is certainly not a sport. It is a gruesome entertainment, on a par with bear-baiting or the exquisitely nasty Chinese “Death of a Thousand Cuts.” It is a cruel farce, and since cheating is involved (shaving the bull’s horns, drugging the animal), often it is no more than a charade, just a gory spectacle. It woke in me an unholy pleasure at the prospect of seeing a matador gored.

  This debased form of the corrida is not ancient; it dates from the late eighteenth century, with many gory modernisms. Yet elaborate cultural explanations are made on behalf of bullfighting. I found them all laughable, and the only satisfying part of a bullfight to me was seeing a gored matador lying in the sand being trampled flat by the bull’s hooves, the bull’s horns in the supine torero’s gut. It is what ought to happen to anyone who dares to torment an animal. It was a reminder of the ape and the tourist: This bull is cruel—when I stab him he tries to gore me.

  Give it a chance, Spaniards told me. You will become an aficionado. “Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion,” Hemingway writes in The Sun Also Rises. But his hero and alter ego Jake Barnes has “aficion” (enthusiasm), he proves it, he is loved for it. Spaniards buy him drinks! “We’re talking bulls,” Jake says, when he is invariably talking balls. The novel is a pretentious sermon on the nobility of the corrida, one bloody bull after another, and all the pedantry of bull fever. It is an example of how badly the novel fails that the blood and the physical cruelty of the bullfight are never touched upon. “We had that disturbed emotional feeling that always comes after a bullfight, and the feeling of elation that comes after a good bullfight.”

  I went to bullfights in Málaga, in Lorca, in Barcelona. What perversity in the Spanish character demanded this sickening spectacle? You couldn’t blame Franco for this, although it must have been a tremendous safety valve for all the frustration of fascism. The corridas depressed me, and I was glad to abandon the effort. But the events were inescapable, always on television, constantly in the newspaper. Even the small provincial papers in Spain had a page or two devoted entirely to news of bullfights. The section is headed “Bulls” and it deals with local ferias and ones that are much farther afield. Cartagena was a modest-sized town up the coast. The Cartagena paper had reports of bullfights in Lorca nearby, in Murcia, farther away in Zaragoza, and in Lima, Peru.

  Nearly all the matadors had nicknames: El Tato (The Kid), El Niño, El Balsiqueño, Niño de la Taurina, El Quilas. There was a popular matador called Jesulín de Ubrique. The reports were detailed, using the numerous terms that are applied in a bullfight for the movements of the matador, or the bull’s defensive maneuvers, or the disposition of the severed ears. All this for a staged hemorrhaging.

  The Spaniards were well-mannered with one another, restrained, seldom aggressive, seldom drunk in public, and they were generally kind to their animals. The idea that as members of the European Community the Spaniards might have to curb their appetite for bull torturing just made them laugh. They also jeered at the thought that they might have to abandon the practice of what could only be termed “chicken-yanking”—riding on horseback and snatching a live chicken from a row that hung on a line.

  “Spain must not give this image!” an animal rights poster announced, showing various cruelties to animals, and it included bullfighting. But for this Spanish organization, ADDA—the Association for the Defense and the Rights of Animals—it was all uphill. It was hard for me to imagine that Spain would ever get rid of this institutionalized sadism.

  I took the train to Málaga. A Malagueno said to me, “Everything in Spain is expensive. Also we have no money. Also there is twenty percent unemployment.”

  The man was direct and pleasant and unsentimental, and I realized that I had wandered so widely in poor, envious, demoralized places that I had become accustomed to surliness and delay. The promptness of Spanish life was unexpected. Buses and trains traveled on time. Spanish politeness made me take the people and their pastimes more seriously.

  Málaga was proud, tidy, a city of substance, with a pleasant harbor and a busy port. Ferries here left for the Spanish toehold of Melilla in Morocco, trains for Granada. The university was not far from my hotel and so I had the impression of Málaga as a place with a youthful population.

  It was all so familiar, though, not just the overlay of Europe—banks, post offices, telephones—but the fact that many aspects of Euro-culture had been inspired by America. On the cosmopolitan shores of the Mediterranean, our electronic modernity had been absorbed along with our crass popular culture. Communications were so efficient they left few opportunities for people to meet each other. There was nothing like a bad ride or a long wait to inspire friendship and get strangers talking. But the simplicity of these features of Spain meant that people traveled quickly, efficiently, in silence. Not long ago in Europe if you wanted to make anything except a local telephone call you went to the telephone exchange and filled out a form and waited to be directed to your booth. In the smallest village in Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey—everywhere in Mediterranean Europe except Albania—you can make a phone call from a public phone, using an access code. In the park in Málaga I stepped into a phone booth and called my brother Peter, who happened to be in Casablanca. The next day in Guadix, in the barren mountains beyond Granada, I called Honolulu from the phone on the wall in the local bar.

  Who’s that singing in Spanish?

  I was on my way in a bouncing bus via Almería and Cartagena to Alicante.

  Just inland in the villages above Almería, there were cave dwellers: caves had been cut or enlarged in the rubbly biscuit-colored hills and house fronts fixed to the cave entrance. The slopes were devoid of trees. It was a land of so little rain, and of so few people, of such dust and emptiness, that it could have been the far west of the United States—Arizona or New Mexico. When I remarked on this to a Spaniard in Almería he told me that it had been the location for many of the Sergio Leone so-called spaghetti westerns.

  Almost in sight of the overbuilt coast, this countryside was lovely in its grandeur and in its sunlight and emptiness, its white huts and grazing goats and olive groves, houses of stacked stone, some with grape arbors and others hung with garlands of drying red peppers, shielded by stands of pines, or clusters of broom, olive pickers riding in the backs of trucks with their faces masked against the dust, and elderly shepherds in blue suits in postures so intense they seemed to be preaching to their flocks. Beyond a sun-baked ravine there were thirty black goats in a field, and a mass of swallows diving into a small bush. It was no wonder that Spaniards felt at home in Mexico and Peru.

  There were no foreigners in Lorca, in a Mexican landscape which was only twenty miles from the coast, where the majority of people were tourists. Lorca was a town of granite and gravel quarries, a center for ceramic and every sort of porcelain object from toilet bowls to vases. There were luxuriant palms along the main street, Avenida Juan Carlos. In the center of town so much dust had collected on the roofs of houses—dust raised by a stiff wind blowing over the dry riverbed, the brown fields, the stony hills—that a wild straggling variety of cactus had taken root in the tiles. There was no sightseeing here, the bullfights were a local matter, and so it was just the quarri
es and the bathroom fixtures, the drugstores, the supermarkets, and the candy stores, which were also retailers of pornographic picture books.

  Mazarrón lay at the far end of a series of wide grassy valleys, but the grass was as dry as dust. A bit farther was Puerto Mazarrón, by the sea, a tiny place which had somehow escaped the ravages of tourism. I arrived in darkness, found a place to stay, and left early on another bus to Cartagena.

  “There is another Cartagena in Colombia,” I said to a man in Cartagena.

  “Yes, I have heard of it,” he said. “Maybe people from Cartagena went there and named it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Cartagena of the Indies—that’s what we call it,” he said.

  And this one founded by Hasdrubal over two thousand years ago had been named for the original Carthage, farther along my route, in Tunisia. An important and much-coveted town for that whole time, it was noted for having the safest and best natural harbor on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Most Mediterranean ports like this, perhaps every port in the entire sea, had a history of being raided and recolonized. After Hasdrubal, Cartagena had been plundered by everyone from Scipio Africanus in 210 B.C., through the Moors and Francis Drake, to the Nationalists in 1938.

  The harbor was filled with ships even this cold day, and there were yachts at the marina. There was no beach. One of Cartagena’s relics was a big old submarine in a garden near the harbor. It looked like a vast iron cigar, and it had been placed there because the supposed inventor of the submarine was born in the town.

  I spent my day walking in the hills behind the town, and that night having a drink in a bar ran into a drunken crowd of British soldiers. From their conversation I gathered they had just recently been on maneuvers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and they were full of angry stories, and they were telling them, interrupting each other.