The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

by Frederick Forsyth

  I took my grip and walked from the hostel to the Lamotte apartment beside the old Miramar Hotel, and introduced myself. My lodging was three pounds per week, but Spain then was so extraordinarily cheap that the other three pounds of my weekly allowance would be more than enough pocket money. I would have a room of my own and eat all meals with the family.

  Madame’s children were her son, at seventeen the same age as me while also awaiting his call-up into the armed forces, and her daughter, two years older and engaged to be married. They spoke not a word of English and had never seen an Englishman, let alone a Protestant. I spoke no Spanish, but I had a grammar primer, and mercifully Madame could just remember her native French and help me out when we got really stuck.

  Málaga back then was still a sleepy, quaint, and intensely traditional community. Each evening, the girls of the respectable classes not yet “spoken for” would slowly parade the length of the palm-lined paseo, duly chaperoned by a mother or aunt. From the sidelines, they could be observed by the young men not yet engaged. It was a marriage market of great decorum.

  The girls would have high ivory combs in their hair, draped with a black lace shawl, the mantilla. The young men often wore the short jacket, the traje corto, and the wide-brimmed black or dove-gray hat known as the cordobés.

  If or when a young man saw a girl he really fancied, he would ask around for her name. When he had it, he would go to his father, who would then inquire about the girl’s own father, and if he was also of a respectable family in a good house and with a worthy profession, the two fathers would meet to confer over a possible union of their offspring. There was no question of the youngsters meeting for a chat.

  The girl’s father would then invite the young man to his house for tea. As tea was served, the girl’s mother and possibly a bevy of aunts, all agog with curiosity, would sit with the girl on one side of the room, and the young guest and his father on the other. It must have been a very stilted occasion, with all sides pretending it was just a cup of neighborly tea.

  In fact, both sides were sizing up the other. Courtship was carried on with the eyes. The young people never touched. If impressions were favorable, the father would later consult with his wife and invite the boy to join them for Mass the following Sunday.

  While he had seen her during the paseo when she caught his eye, that first stilted cup of tea would be for the girl her first sight of her new admirer. Her curiosity must have been immense. My new friend Miguel Morales told me all this because he had been through it via his sister.

  As chastity was total, there had to be some release valve, and this was the bordello, of which there were many. At the top of the range, these were also pretty dignified establishments. It was far from impossible for the mayor and the chief of police to take a glass of sherry with a leading madam, who was also a pillar of the community (not to consort with wives, of course) and a donor to good causes such as the church and the orphanage, to which her girls, if they were careless, might one day contribute.

  From a vantage point sixty years later, it is hard to imagine all this, but that was the way it was. The chief of police was not run ragged by overwork, because crime was very rare and violent crime just about unheard of. The occasional knife fight might take place among the Gypsies, or gitanos, who lived in a camp out of town and who made a living either tending horses or giving demonstrations of flamenco at private soirées, or in cafés with a hat passed round. And that was before the gawping tourists arrived.

  To get in trouble with the police, a troublemaker would really have to work at it, but political opposition was a serious concern, and police tolerance was nonexistent. But that seemed to be the way the people liked it. They had experienced four years of war and cruelty in the late thirties when the Phalangists (Fascists) fought the Communists, and they did not want it back.

  Life was cheap, the prices minimal. For ten pesetas, one could have two large schooners of fine sherry, attended by enough free tapas to constitute a good dinner.

  The scholastic course was 160 lectures. I attended the first in January and the last at the end of March. I would have missed that as well, but for the fact that a foreign student peered at me nursing a large bumper of amontillado at a café table on the day before and asked me if I was the missing English student. Then she told me about the final exam the following day.

  Without a hope of passing it, I showed up and met an amused and sardonic Don Andres Oliva. I noticed something quite quickly. The hostel students spoke a grammatically perfect but stilted and awfully accented Spanish. I was rattling away in torrents of street Spanish with an Andalusian accent. Don Andres had to exercise all his self-control not to burst out laughing.

  The examination turned out to be one single essay in Spanish on a subject of the student’s choosing, drawn from the five headings of the language, literature, culture, geography, and history of Spain. And there I had a problem. I did not know anything about any of them. So I chose history.

  But that proposed a further problem. Recalling our history lessons at school, it appeared that every time British and Spanish history made contact, we were fighting each other, especially in 1588. That was when King Philip II sent his Armada up the English Channel to invade and subdue the heretical Protestant English. The Devonian sea dog Francis Drake, a former pirate along the Spanish Main off Central America, was instrumental in the Spanish fleet’s destruction. It was not very diplomatic, but it was the only story I knew that involved a bit of Spanish history. If only I could have stuck to the conquistadors.

  Legend has it that when the sails of the Armada hove over the horizon, Drake was on the expanse of greensward outside Plymouth known as Plymouth Hoe playing bowls. He is supposed to have told those who came to warn him that he would finish his game before taking on the might of Spain.

  Then arose the third problem. They play boules in France, virtually the same thing, but no bowls in Spain. So, despite all the Spanish I had learned, I did not know how to say “bowls.” The exam markers must have been somewhat bewildered to be told that when the Armada appeared, Francis Drake was playing with his balls.

  Anyway, these Andalusian scholars must have been intensely tolerant, for five days later they actually gave me a diploma in Hispanic studies. At the inevitable sherry party, I protested to Don Andres that it was wholly unmerited. He smiled somewhat sadly and said, “Frederico, mine is not a rich country. We need these foreign course fees. So when you get home, please tell everyone what good value this course is.”

  And I did. At least, I wrote to the governors of Tonbridge to recommend the Granada University’s Málaga course as an excellent avenue for future holders of the Knightly Scholarship to perfect their Spanish. But after the reception, I had to leave, because my father had arrived with my mother in tow, was lodged in the Marbella Club Hotel, and wanted to see me.

  It was all because someone else, a neighbor from Ashford, had perchance seen me imbibing sherry, again in the heat of the day, at a street café. He had asked me what I had been doing and, being a bit lightheaded from the sherry and the blazing sun, I told him. He had scurried back to his hotel and rung Ashford with the news. That was what brought my parents on the next plane to Gibraltar.

  I had not spent the middle 158 lectures sitting drinking sherry. After my arrival in January, I investigated what I had really come for. Bullfighting.

  During my last year at school, I had come across and devoured Ernest Hemingway’s classic Death in the Afternoon, and had become fascinated by this brutal but incredibly testosterone-fueled spectacle on the sand of the arena beneath a glaring sun: a lethal pitting of a man against half a ton of truly wild animal. I had followed up Hemingway with Ibáñez’s Blood and Sand and various other books. And I was determined to see it.

  In Spain, winter is the close-down season for the corrida—which simply means “the running.” But in the deep south, it is still warm and sunny even in January,
February, and March—or it used to be. That was the time for the novilladas.

  A fighting bull suitable for a full-fledged corrida is usually five years old. Until he trots out of the dark pen beneath the stands for his last twenty minutes on earth, he has led an idyllic life roaming free on the vast ranches with a herd of lady friends and all the lush grass he can eat. Not for him a miserable abattoir at barely a year old. But he is emphatically not sweet-tempered.

  Any talk that a fighting bull has to be provoked to charge is nonsense. He will charge at anything not on four legs. That is why the vaqueros on the ranches have to be mounted. Any human descending to the ground on two legs is committing suicide. Because the bull is nearsighted and sees in monochrome, it is not the “red” that he is charging, but the cape, flickering and taunting him. When he has hit it and felt no impact, he turns and charges again. And again. If the matador remains motionless beside the cape in his hands, he should get away with it. Some do, some don’t, because those huge horns are absolutely deadly.

  While it is still a calf, or becerro, the bull will probably be tested once and briefly so that it does not remember later what happened. The point is to see if, when taunted by a cape, it will run straight and true or turn away. If the latter, then it will be for the knackers’ yard. But if it charges, it will go back to the ranch to spend four more years coming to full maturity.

  But at three it is called a novillo, and in the deep south, corridas featuring only novillos take place. They are mainly for young matadors who have not yet graduated to the great summer festivals. These are what I wanted to see in Málaga. The novillo may not be as big as a five-year-old, but he is still a very dangerous brute. When I made inquiries at Málaga’s famous bullring for the spring program, I discovered something interesting. There was a training school there as well. I signed up at once.

  Basically, it was under the tutelage of a retired matador with a heavy limp. He had stopped one horn too many and his hip had never healed. This did not prevent him teaching, because the matador is not supposed to run around much anyway.

  The school met in the mornings, out on the sand of the arena, beneath the empty stands: about half a dozen young aspirants with hopes of one day starring in the big festivals of Granada, Seville, or Madrid. A teenager could still look up and imagine those stands thronged with swooning señoritas and hear the clang of the paso doble and the roared olés that greet an impressive passage of capework. Then Don Pepe ended the daydreaming and introduced us to the two capes: the capa and the muleta.

  The capa came first, a heavy canvas semicircle, magenta on one side and yellow on the other. The surprising weight of the capa explains why matadors have immensely strong wrists. The muleta, a smaller bright scarlet cloth splayed on a sword and a wooden stick, used only for the third and last section of the encounter, would come later.

  There was of course no real bull. They are expensive and not to be wasted on apprentices. The contraption that charged was a construction of two wheels on a frame. At the front of the frame was a set of two real horns from a long-dead Miura, fearsome artifacts about a yard wide, each with needle tips that would really hurt if they hit you.

  Behind the frame were two long shafts, and the whole thing was raced across the sand by two boys earning themselves a bit of pocket money. At the start of the charge they held the ends of the shafts high, so that the horns were dipped low, for that is how a bull really charges.

  As the horns went through the cape, the running boys would thrust downward on the shafts, causing the horns to swerve upward as the bull sought to gore and toss his enemy. After several mornings, it became plain I was never going to make a matador. As the horn tips swept up toward the genitalia, I tended to step sideways. This caused great merriment.

  The matador is supposed to stay absolutely still, his feet planted, and sway his hips like a ballet dancer, so that the rising horn almost brushes the fabric of his trousers. My father later averred that he would have taken a ten-foot leap. But my single step was enough to earn a mocking cheer from the Spanish teenagers and a grin from Don Pepe. Toward the end of my stay, I completed the lessons but gave up any hope of ever going further.

  That was when the neighbors from Ashford spotted me at the café and rang my father. Within days, my parents were in the Marbella Club, then a small private hotel out on the Marbella road. My dad came to collect me from Madame Lamotte’s flat after the diploma ceremony. He told me never to reveal to my mother that I had been in a bullring. She would attain her gray hair one day without any help from me.

  The only other thing of interest during those ten weeks in the hot, sunny spring of 1956 was a torrid affair with a thirty-five-year-old German countess. She frequented the training sessions, and later taught me many things a lad should know as he steps out on life’s bumpy road.

  She had the quaint habit of singing the “Horst Wessel Song” during coitus. At the time, I did not know what it was, and only a year later learned it was the marching song of the Nazis. This probably meant she had been involved during the war with something deeply unpleasant, which would explain her migration to Spain, which, under Franco, was tolerant of that sort of thing.

  My folks spent a week at the Marbella Club, then we all left for Gibraltar and the ferry for Tangier.

  TANGIER AND COMMANDOS

  Tangier in 1956 was an extraordinary place, my first taste of Africa and the world of Islam. Morocco had been, until very recently, a French colony, but Tangier was under tripartite administration between the British (the post office), the French (police and law courts), and the Spanish (general administration).

  There was a vigorous independence movement called Istiqlal, which rioted elsewhere, but the Tangerines are known for their civility and tolerance, so Tangier was spared the rioting, at least while we were there.

  It had a fascinating old quarter called the Medina and a large covered market, the souk, where tourists could browse for bargains in perfect safety. I recall that the French were not liked, as they represented the law and punishment, while we were identified as British, so it was smiles all around. As we ran only the post office, our sole visible presence was the little red vans delivering letters.

  Tangier was also a free port into which freight ships would arrive to unload out-of-bond cargo immune from even French or Spanish taxes. The cargoes underpinned the smuggling operation, which was considerable. Lined up at the quay was a line of lean gray Second World War motor torpedo boats, war surplus bought cheap but easily able to outrun the motorboats of the Spanish customs across the water.

  Thus, each evening as the sun set, they would slip mooring and head toward the Spanish coast, loaded with perfume, toilet soap, silk stockings, and, above all, cigarettes, mainly Camels and Lucky Strikes, which were contraband but highly prized and therefore expensive in Spain.

  They would cruise through the darkness slowly, lights doused, engines rumbling quietly, until the first flashlight on the shore indicated where the mule trains were waiting. Then it was a fast run to shore, frantic hands discharging the cargo before the arrival of the Guardia Civil, and the mules lumbering away into the olive groves. A fast run back out of Spanish territorial waters and a slow cruise home brought them back to Tangier by dawn.

  The going rate was fifty pounds for a deckhand per trip, which was a lot of money back then, so I went down to see if anyone would take me on, but was rebuffed. No vacancies. The jobs were extremely sought after, despite twenty years in a Franco jail if caught, and anyway I had had no seamanship.

  Otherwise, Tangier was noted for the sumptuous palace occupied by Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton. It was also a magnet for elderly European gays, because the Moroccan boys were numerous, willing, and cheap.

  My parents played the tourist out of the El Minzah Hotel, but I could not, like them, retire to bed at ten p.m., so I would steal back out and explore the bars and dives of the port quarter. It was here I met the
Marine Commandos.

  There was a British warship moored in the outer harbor on what is called a “flying the flag” mission. The idea was to spread pro-British goodwill along the African coast. It was in a dockside bar that I came across a group of Marines who were having terrible trouble making themselves plain to the bar staff, who spoke only Moorish Arabic and Spanish.

  I tried to help and was promptly press-ganged as unit interpreter by the senior sergeant. They were all from Glasgow, from, I believe, Gallowgate, or the Gorbals: about five feet tall and just as wide.

  The problem was not between English and Spanish. That was easy. It was between English and Glaswegian. I could not understand a word they said. Eventually a corporal was discovered whom I could decipher and the three-language enigma was solved. We moved from bar to bar as they spent their shore leave and accrued pay on pints of beer and triple-scotch chasers.

  Another problem, and quite a big one on a goodwill mission, was that they tended to leave each bar looking as if a bomb had gone off. I solved this by suggesting a gratuity for the staff. Contrary to rumor, Glaswegians are not stingy. When I explained the Tangerines were dirt poor, the Marines chipped in generously. But I explained to the bar staff that the extra money was the house-repair budget. Smiles all around.

  Each morning, I was decanted from a taxi outside the El Minzah at about five, just in time for a short nap before joining my parents for breakfast at eight.

  On the third day, the Royal Navy warship weighed anchor and cruised off, taking the commandos to continue their friendship-building mission somewhere else.

  After six days, my parents and I went back by ferry to Gibraltar and then by plane to London. I had reached seventeen and a half and needed to get on with the serious task of wangling my way into the Royal Air Force. But in three months, all on the tab of the late Mr. Knightly, I had learned fluent Spanish, collected a Granada University diploma, learned how to handle a cape in the face of two charging horns, discovered what to do in bed with a lady, and developed a rock-hard head for alcohol. I was out on the “dusty high road” referred to in the Tonbridge School song and enjoying every minute of it.