The Pillars of Hercules

Table of Contents

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Contents

Epigraph

1. The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar

2. The “Mare Nostrum” Express to Alicante

3. The M.V. Punta Europa to Mallorca

4. The “Virgen De Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond

5. “Le Grand Sud” to Nice

6. The Ferry ÎLe De Beauté to Corsica

7. The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia

8. The Ferry Torres to Sicily

9. The Ferry Villa to Calabria

10. The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia

11. The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar

12. The Ferry Venezia to Albania

13. The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul

14. The M.V. Akdeniz: Through the Levant

15. The 7:20 Express to Latakia

16. The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece

17. The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah

18. To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz

About the Author

“THEROUX, WHEREVER HE IS,

IS ALWAYS WORTH READING.”

—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[Theroux’s] observations come in hilarious quips and thought-provoking bolts…. Disdaining museums, ruins and ‘famous graves,’ he seeks out human encounters, from rich retirees on a luxury cruise to ragged beggars in Albania, from intellectual writers such as Naguib Mahfouz and Paul Bowles to the punks of Cagliari.”

—The Kansas City Star

“Vivid … Theroux flourishes in the gritty texture of daily life in all these ports, where he eats the food, sleeps in the hotels, eats in the low-rent cafes that most locals do—and, like them, seeks the water.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Powerful … A nimble, multilayered armchair journey, bristling with sights, sounds, smells, anecdotes, brief encounters, snippets of erudition, reading suggestions, impromptu decisions, moments of danger, bursts of indignation, sudden ecstasies … Theroux’s keen wit and descriptive gifts are in peak form.”

—The Sunday Oregonian

“Travel writing at its eccentric best—a mix of irony, adventure lucidity, and cross-grained crankiness.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“In the best tradition of the 19th-century Grand Tour, Theroux’s travels provide an unsentimental education in history and human nature, drawn not from museums and monuments but from a varied, and occasionally surprising, landscape peopled with an array of memorable characters. Certainly there is lots of meaty material to work with: centuries of art and architecture, classical myths and contemporary writers, the constant movement of emigrants, refugees, and travelers. And Theroux rises wonderfully to the occasion.”

—Islands Magazine

“A beautiful adventure.”

—Booklist

(starred review)

By the Same Author

FICTION

Waldo

Fong and the Indians

Girls at Play

Jungle Lovers

Sinning with Annie

Saint Jack

The Black House

The Family Arsenal

The Consul’s File

A Christmas Card

Picture Palace

Londom Snow

World’s End

The Mosquito Coast

The London Embassy

Half Moon Street

O-Zone

My Secret History

Chicago Loop

Millroy the Magician

My Other Life

Kowloon Tong

Hotel Honolulu

CRITICISM

V. S. Naipaul

NONFICTION

The Great Railway Bazaar

The Old Patagonian Express

The Kingdom by the Sea

Sailing Through China

Sunrise with Seamonsters

The Imperial Way

Riding the Iron Rooster

To the Ends of the Earth

The Happy Isles of Oceania

Fresh Air Fiend

Sir Vidia’s Shadow

A Fawcett Book

Published by The Random House Publishing Group

Copyright © 1995 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Excerpt from “At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death,” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats. A New Edition, by Richard J. Fenneran, reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc., copyright © 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed by Bertha Georgie Yeats, in the U.S., and Michael Yeats in the U.K. and Canada.

Excerpts of the The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, copyright © 1961, 1963 by Robert Fitzgerald and renewed 1989 by Benedict R. C. Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Excerpt from “The Next Time,” from The Collected Poems of Robert Graves, reprinted with permission from Oxford University Press, in the U.S., and Carcanet Press in the U.K. and Canada.

The edition published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Fawcett is a registered trademark and the Fawcett colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96586

eISBN: 978-0-307-79028-6

Map by John Burgoyne

v3.1

To the memory of my father,

Albert Eugene Theroux,

13 January 1908–30 May 1995

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Epigraph

1. The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar

2. The “Mare Nostrum” Express to Alicante

3. The M.V. Punta Europa to Mallorca

4. The “Virgen de Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond

5. “Le Grand Sud” to Nice

6. The Ferry Île de Beauté to Corsica

7. The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia

8. The Ferry Torres to Sicily

9. The Ferry Villa to Calabria

10. The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia

11. The Ferry Liburnija to Zadar

12. The Ferry Venezia to Albania

13. The Seabourn Spirit to Istanbul

14. The M. V. Akdeniz: Through the Levant

15. The 7:20 Express to Latakia

16. The Ferry Sea Harmony to Greece

17. The Ferry El Loud III to Kerkennah

18. To Morocco on the Ferry Boughaz

About the Author

Have you ever reflected on what an important sea the Mediterranean is?

—James Joyce in a letter to his brother Stanislaus

The Mediterranean is an absurdly small sea; the length and greatness of its history makes us dream it larger than it is.

—Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

1

The Cable Car to the Rock of Gibraltar

People here in Western Civilization say that tourists are no different from apes, but on the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the Pillars of Hercules, I saw both tourists and apes together, and I learned to tell them apart. I had traveled past clumps of runty stunted trees and ugly houses (the person who just muttered, “Oh, there he goes again!” must read no further) to the heights of the Rock in a metal box suspended by a cable. Gibraltar is just a conspicuous pile of limestone, to which distance lends enchantment; a very small number of people cling to its lower slopes. Most of them are swarthy and bilingual, speaking intelligible English, and Spanish with an Andalusian accent. Mention Spain to them and they become very agitated, though they know that as sure as eggs are huevos the British will eventually hand them over to the King of Spain, just as they chucked Hong Kong into the horny hands of the dictator of China.

The Rock Apes of Gibraltar are Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus), the only native apes in Europe. The apes are still resident, and have lived there longer than most Gibraltarian families. There is a social order among the ape tribes, as well as ape rituals that are bizarre enough to be human. Ape corpses and skeletons are never found on the Rock. Somewhere in the recesses of this rock that looks like a mountain range there is said to be a secret mortuary established by the apes; ape funerals, ape mourning, ape burials. The apes are well established, but disadvantaged—unemployed, unwaged, destitute welfare recipients. The municipal government allocates money to feed them.

But there might be darker motive in this food aid. A powerful superstition, held by locals, suggests that if the apes vanish from Gibraltar, the Rock will cease to be British. For hundreds of years—since 1740, in fact—the apes have been mentioned by travelers—Grand Tourists, in whose footsteps I was following. Yet Gibraltar has been visited almost since Hercules, patron of human toil, flung it there on his journey to capture the Red Oxen of Geryones, the monster with three bodies (Labor Ten). He tossed another rock across the straits, Ceuta in Morocco. These two promontories, Cape and Abya to the Greeks—the Mediterranean bottleneck—are the twin Pillars of Hercules.

My idea was to travel from one pillar to the other, the long way, with the usual improvisations en route that are required of the impulsive traveler; all around the Mediterranean coast, the shores of light.

“The grand object of traveling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean,” Dr. Johnson said. “On those shores were the four great Empires of the world; the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.”

“Our” of course is as questionable as “savages,” but you get the idea. A great deal happened on this coastline. It was not until the second century B.C. that the Romans sailed through the Pillars of Hercules. The reason for this late, if not timid, penetration of the straits was not the current, nor was it the inconvenient westerlies that blow through this narrow opening of the inland sea; it was the Mediterranean notion that nothing lay beyond the pillars except the Garden of the Hesperides and the lost continent of Atlantis, and hellish seas.

The pillars marked the limits of civilization, “the end of voyaging,” Euripides wrote; “the Ruler of Ocean no longer permits mariners to travel on the purple sea.” And later, in the second century B.C., Polybius wrote, “The channel at the Pillars of Herakles is seldom used, and by very few persons, owing to the lack of intercourse between the tribes inhabiting those remote parts … and to the scantiness of our knowledge of the outer ocean.”

Beyond the pillars were the chaos and darkness they associated with the underworld. Because these two rocks resembled the pillars at the temple to Melkarth in Tyre, the Phoenicians called them the Pillars of Melkarth. Melkarth was the Lord of the Underworld—god of darkness—and it was easy to believe that this chthonic figure prevailed over a sea with huge waves and powerful currents and ten-foot tides.

The point is not that the Mediterranean peoples had never ventured westward through the straits, but that they had dared it—the Phoenicians had reached Britain by a sea route—and verified that it had a wicked and destructive turbulence. From this they conceived the idea that nothing useful existed past the straits, only the spooky Mare Tenebrosum, the dark and dangerous ocean which lay beyond the Middle Sea, a purple river of furious water. The Greeks named this the Stream of Ocean. It circled the earth at which they were privileged to live at the center, its precise location at Delphi, where a stone like a toadstool marked the Navel of the World. Mediterranean, after all, means “middle of the earth.”

The surface current moves through the straits at a walking pace to the east, streaming through the fifteen-mile-wide pillars into the Mediterranean; but two hundred and fifty feet below this another sub-current rushes in the opposite direction, westward, into the Atlantic, pouring over the shallow sill of the straits, “that awful deepdown torrent,” Molly Bloom murmurs in her bedtime reverie. The unusual circular exchange of water at the straits is the only way this just-about-landlocked sea is kept refreshed and alive. Very few large rivers flow into it. For thousands of years, until the Suez Canal was opened, to the strains of Verdi’s Aïda, in 1869, the Straits of Gibraltar—“The Gut,” to the English sailors, “The Gate of the Narrow Entrance” (Bab el Zukak) to the Moors—was the only waterway to the world.

Even so, the Mediterranean has an odd character. It has almost no tides at all, and except for a whirlpool here and there (notably at Messina), an absence of distinct marine currents. It is dominated by winds rather than currents, and each wind has a name and a series of specific traits: the Vendaval, the steady westerly that blows through the Straits of Gibraltar, La Tramontana, the strong wind of the Spanish coast, La Bora, the cold wind of Trieste, le Mistral, the cold dry northwesterly of the Riviera, and so on, through the Khamsin, the Sirocco, the Levanter, and about six others (often the same wind, with a different name) to the Gregale, the northeast wind of Malta that blows in winter and was probably the wind that caused Saint Paul to be shipwrecked on the coast of Malta, as described in the Bible (Acts 27–28).

It is not a sea that is affected by the phases of the moon—it has moods rather than monthlies. Its nervous character has been mentioned by sailors, and its colors—purple, wine-dark, and its blueness in particular. The Mediterranean was the White Sea to the Greeks—the Turks still use that name for it: Akdeniz, “White Sea,” and the Arabs use a variant, “The White Central Sea.” If the oceans can be compared to vast symphonies, the German traveler Emil Ludwig has written, the Mediterranean “is subdued in a way that suggests chamber music.” It is tentative, and its waves with their short fetch, and its strange swells, are unlike any found in the great oceans.

All over the Rock of Gibraltar there were signs in six languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, French) that said Do Not Feed the Apes! and Apes Might Bite! These signs were more frequent at the top, where one of the ape tribes—the friendlier of the two—lived.

Here at the top of the Rock, an ectoplasmic middle-aged woman, a French tourist, plump and pushy and grinning, picked up a pebble and approached an ape. It was a mother ape that was nuzzling her child, urging it against her pink nipple, with that serene and happy expression that mothers have when they breast-feed their young. The tourist’s name, I felt sure, was Grisette. She poked the pebble at the mother ape, giggling, while her three friends watched. One of the friends jerked the arm of her small boy, forcing him to watch Grisette tease the ape.

The mother ape took the pebble and considered it a moment before dropping it to the ground. Grisette laughed very hard and then went closer, making a hideous face. Grisette wore glasses with lenses so thick and distorting, her eyes swam and changed shape as she nodded at this cornered ape. The mother ape expressed concern, and when Grisette reached over and touched her young suckling baby the mother ape raised a cautioning hand—a shapely hand wonderfully pink, human in miniature, with fine nails. There were enough lines on the ape’s palm to occupy a fortune-teller for a whole session of palmistry.

Provoked and a bit irritated by the cautioning mother ape, Grisette poked the baby ape as though testing a doorjamb with a Wet Paint sign. Grisette’s friends laughed again. The ape mother raised her cautioning hand again, and when Grisette pinched the baby, the mother ape rapped Grisette’s knuckles. This went on, back and forth, for a minute or so. I thought that the ape was going to leap into Grisette’s face and bite and claw her—Apes Might Bite!

But the mother ape showed enormous patience, as though she knew she was dealing with someone simpleminded and unpredictable, a nuisance rather than a threat. She merely raised a hand and restrained the stupid woman, and when Grisette put her big googly-eyed face nearer—simpering and calling her friends as she tormented the mother and child—all the mother ape did was show her teeth and she crept away, off the little rail, out of the sunshine where she had been suckling her infant. And as she padded away, still graceful in the face of all that provocation, the mother ape growled, just audibly to me, “This is unconscionable.”

Grisette moved heavily over to her fellow tourists, one of whom was hitting her child and saying, “I’m not a millionaire!” and an English one—British Army spouse, I supposed—“Get off me before you get a smacked bottom!” Grisette was chattering and scratching herself and looking to her friends to praise her for having pinched the ape baby and maddened the mother ape and driven them away.

And I thought: Yes, the apes are better mannered than the tourists, and while the tourists brutalized and screamed at their kids, the apes were tender towards their young. The apes did not say, “I told you to stop it—I’ll give you a clout!” The tourists yakked and giggled, the apes were quiet and thoughtful. The tourists teased the apes, the apes never teased the tourists. When the apes played they rolled over and over on the steep slopes or on the walkways of the Rock; when the tourists’ children played they hurt each other and made noise and it always seemed to end in tears. And the apes never made faces unless the tourists made faces at them first. Ape funerals were held in pious secrecy, a tourist death or funeral was accompanied by howling grief and hysterics. The tourists were obstreperous, the apes were dignified and correct. Yet every year apes are shot and killed on the Rock of Gibraltar for biting tourists.

The woman might have been a tourist from any country in the Mediterranean. She fit the description of “the Mediterranean sub-racial group” I found in a textbook entitled Advanced Level Geography (1964): “brown-skinned, long-headed, wavy-haired, dark-eyed, slightly-built.” These people traveled back and forth, across this interesting stretch of water, all the time, keeping to their particular basin. But Mediterranean tourists were generally so offensive and ill-natured that I made a vow early in my trip to ignore them, the way I ignored the flies in Australia; to avoid writing about tourists at all. Far better to write about the apes.

“This ape is cruel,” the tourist says, and it is like an epitaph for the world’s animals. “When I pinch him he bites me.”

For years I was happy flopping along elsewhere, avoiding the Mediterranean. Such a trip had always been regarded as the Grand Tour, a search for wisdom and experience. Yet at the age of fifty I still had never been to Spain. All I had seen of Yugoslavia was the main line from Ljubljana to the Bulgarian border. Yugoslavia was now five separate nations. I had never been to Israel or Egypt or Morocco or Malta. Most people I met had been to many of these countries; everyone knew much more of the Mediterranean than I did. Everybody had been there. I suspected that from one end to the other it was nothing but urbanization and clip joints. James Joyce once wrote, “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” I assumed the whole Mediterranean was like that, tourism as ancestor worship and the veneration of incoherent ruins.

Then I began to think that this was perhaps the best reason for going to see this part of the world, that it was so over-visited it was haunted and decrepit, totally changed. Change and decay had made it worth seeing and an urgent subject to record. I was the man for it. Half a lifetime of traveling had given me a taste for the macabre.

Some countries swallow the traveler; certainly in Africa and Polynesia and South America I found this to be true. But Europe, and the Mediterranean in particular, is like a stage set. It gives drama to a trip—it is a background.

You know this already. You have been to Italy—very likely to Sicily, perhaps to Siracusa, and you stayed at the same little hotel I found. Near the harbor? Run by a grumpy man who wrote poetry? About twenty-five dollars, with breakfast? And you might read this and say: It was not that way at all! Siracusa was delightful, the hotel was clean, the poet was a cheery soul. Or it might be somewhere else we both visited, in Spain or Greece or Egypt. Never mind.

That was your trip, that was your Italy. This book is about my trip, my Italy. This is my Mediterranean.

My idea was to begin in Gibraltar, and go to Spain, and keep going, hugging the coast, staying on the ground, no planes; to travel by train, bus, ferry, ship; to make a circuit of the sea from the Rock of Gibraltar all the way around to Ceuta, from one Pillar of Hercules to the other. To travel the whole shore, from the fish and chip shops of Torremolinos to the gun emplacements of Tel Aviv, by way of the war in Croatia and the nudist beaches of Crete.

The Mediterranean, this simple almost tideless sea, the size of thirty Lake Superiors, had everything: prosperity, poverty, tourism, terrorism, several wars in progress, ethnic strife, fascists, pollution, drift nets, private islands owned by billionaires, Gypsies, seventeen countries, fifty languages, oil drilling platforms, sponge fishermen, religious fanatics, drug smuggling, fine art, and warfare. It had Christians, Muslims, Jews; it had the Druzes, who are a strange farrago of all three religions; it had heathens, Zoroastrians and Copts and Baha’is. It is over two thousand miles from end to end. It is noted for being salty. It ranged from the shoals and shallows of the northern Adriatic to the almost sixteen-thousand-foot depths in the Ionian Basin, west of Crete. Although it is deficient in plankton, it is still the home of dolphins, and in the deeps around Mallorca sperm whales (some of them entangled in drift nets) are often sighted. Giant loggerhead turtles—an endangered species in the Mediterranean—return in diminishing numbers every year to the Greek island of Zákinthos, where they struggle among tourists and beachside restaurants for nesting sites.

One of the many strange facts about the Mediterranean people is that compared with the British and the Northern Europeans they are not great fish eaters. This is Emil Ludwig’s observation and it is generally true. One of the more anticlimactic experiences in a Mediterranean market is surveying the fish goggling on marble slabs. There are not many, they are rather small, and the larger proportion have been caught outside the Mediterranean. Tuna is the exception, because it makes an annual journey through the Pillars and across the Mediterranean to spawn in the Black Sea. Dolphins are protected. With the exception of illegal drift-net vessels that use nets up to ten miles long (for example, Greenpeace France detected and documented 137 illegal Italian drift-netters between April and June 1994), fishing is small-scale and unrewarding. Deep-sea fishing in the Mediterranean is almost unknown, apart from the illegal drift-netters and the competition for the migrating tuna.

It is not a fishy sea, but it is blessed with a beautiful climate, and though Mediterranean storms and high winds can be devastating, it has been noted for its calm waters. The very word Mediterranean signified sunny skies and balmy weather, and for thousands of years these shores had been a kind of Eden, fruitful with grapes and olives and lemons.

But soon after I set off, I mentioned my itinerary to a young French student on a train. Pointing to my map, I remarked on how it was so easy to travel around the Mediterranean.

“Croatia! Albania!” the student said. “And what about Algeria—are you going there?”

“Of course. I’ve always wanted to see the souk in Algiers, Albert Camus’ Oran, taking the night train from Tunis to Annaba.”

“In the past two years, twenty thousand people have been killed in fighting in Algeria, most of them on the coast,” he said. “You didn’t know that the most recent election was annulled and the Muslim fundamentalists have a policy of killing all foreigners?”

No, I did not know that.

“Maybe I’ll skip Algeria.” And I thought: Maybe they’ll stop killing each other before I get there.

Gibraltar is tiny, just two square miles of it, mostly uninhabited cliffs, and there are almost as many apes as there are humans. The name is from Tarik el Said, the Moorish conquerer who named it “Geb-el-Tarik” (Hill of Tarik). I arrived on a cheap flight from London sitting with Mr. Wong, from the People’s Republic. We looked at the rock.

“Like a small mountain,” Mr. Wong said.

Like a beheaded sphinx, I thought, all buttocks and trunk, crouching with its paws on the water, and the more impressive for there being no other monstrosities or mountains near it.

Mr. Wong told me he was planning to start a Chinese restaurant in the town. “And why did you come here?”

“Because I’ve never been here before,” I said.

I had never been to Spain either. Once I had been to the south of France, to see Graham Greene in Antibes. That tiny fishing port was all I knew of the Riviera. I had seen a little bit of Italy and had spent one day in Athens, but apart from that had not traveled in the Mediterranean, not even to the most obvious places. Israel, no. Lebanon, no. Egypt, no—had never seen the pyramids. Most English people I met had been to Mallorca; I had never been there. Because I had not been to any of these Mediterranean places I had vigorous and unshakable prejudices, and those prejudices amused me and kept me from wanting to visit the places.

And in the way that you don’t really understand great novels until you are older and experienced, you needed to be a certain age to appreciate the subtleties of the Mediterranean. I had reread Anna Karenina and felt that it was a different novel from the one I had read when I was twenty-one. I had also reread Tender Is the Night, and The Plague, and The Secret Agent. I wondered whether they would have the same impact. They did, but for different reasons; they were different books, because thirty-odd years later I was a different man.

By a happy coincidence these books all had Mediterranean connections. Dick and Nicole Diver single-handedly invent the Riviera by turning the sleepy fishing village of Juan-les-Pins into a fashionable resort. Anna Karenina and her lover Vronsky escape Russia, and the scandal of their liaison, and experience bliss in a romantic interlude in Venice, Rome, and Naples; but after an extended stay in a palazzo in a small Italian town, they are disillusioned with Mediterranean life, “and the German tourists became so wearisome, that a change became absolutely necessary. They decided to return to Russia.”

Joseph Conrad wrote the whole of his London novel in the south of France, in Montpellier, and Camus, who was born on the Algerian coast, set his novel in Oran. I had also recently read Hemingway (bullfighting in Spain), Naguib Mahfouz and Cavafy (both Alexandria), Flaubert (Salammbo in Carthage), Cyril Connolly (the Riviera again in The Rock Pool), and Evelyn Waugh’s Labels, which takes in almost the whole of the Mediterranean. One of the most neglected postwar American novels of the Mediterranean coast—in this case, southern Italy—is William Styron’s complex and brilliant Set This House on Fire. I reread it with renewed admiration for its portraits of expatriate artists and drunks and posers, their brains baking in the Amalfi sunlight. And I had finally got around to reading Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi. The miserable little village he writes about, which he called Gagliano, isn’t on the Mediterranean, but it is near enough; the real place, Aliano, is only about twenty miles from the sea, at the arch on the sole of Italy’s boot. These books fueled my desire to travel there. Perhaps unconsciously I had been doing homework.

There was a time when I wanted to see only wild places, and was reluctant to go to a place that had been written about extensively. But then—it is so funny about travel—I would go to a place that everyone had been written about and it was as though I was seeing something entirely new. I felt that when I was writing about Britain. My Britain was different from anything I had read. It made the going good because I was unprepared for what I saw. That was always the best part of travel, the sense of discovery. When there was none and it was all predictable I wanted to go home.

The Mediterranean was not one place, but many; and I was at last calm enough to venture into its complexity without the risk of getting lost. I was happier with love in my life. I was not looking for a new home, traveling hopefully down the road rejecting places as I passed through. I was traveling in the purest way, without envy or a spirit of acquisition. I was setting out on an extensive trip around the shores of the Mediterranean, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and heathen; to meet the people, eat the food, get rained on and shot at.

My idea was to see it out of season, when the tourists were back home, spending the fall and winter in the northern half, the spring and summer in the Levant and North Africa, going from one Pillar to the other; and to make a modern Grand Tour, seeking out wise people.

An inland sea is perfect for a journey, because the coastline determines the itinerary.

• • •

The day I arrived in Gibraltar, the Chief Minister of Gibraltar, Joe Bossano, was at the United Nations, explaining to the assembly why Gibraltar wanted to remain itself, autonomous. But Gibraltar has nothing but the rock and its strategic location. It makes nothing, it sells nothing, it imports everything it needs to sustain life; it is tiny in both land area and population (a mere twenty-eight thousand people, of which sixteen thousand are voters). It is just a few streets at the base of the rock, and on the lower slopes there are some luxury homes and gun emplacements. There is not enough room for an airport, and so when a plane is due the main road into Spain is closed—barriers swing shut—and traffic is halted until the plane has landed. The aircraft taxis across the road, and the portion of Gibraltar known as The Neck, and continues to the terminal. At the All Clear, the road reopens.

The Spanish dictator Franco, El Caudillo (his title is the Spanish equivalent of Hitler’s Führer or Mussolini’s Duce), with his iron hand in a chokehold on the throat of every Spaniard until just the other day, closed his border with Gibraltar in 1969.

“He died in 1975,” a Gibraltarian told me, “but it was another ten years before the border was opened again.”

That was ordered by Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales, in 1985. But Spain has never wavered in insisting that Gibraltar be given back to Spain.

So for sixteen years Gibraltar was hemmed in like a little penal colony. And it did no good for the people in Gibraltar to harangue the Spaniards with the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave Britain sovereignty over the Rock in 1713. In this same treaty the island of Manhattan was swapped for Surinam. In the most casual conversation in Gibraltar, people quoted the relevant clause of the Treaty of Utrecht. I took a closer look at the Treaty and saw that the terms of Article 10 prevented “residence or entry into the town of Gibraltar by Jews and Moors.”

The anonymous author of How to Capture and Govern Gibraltar (1865) stated that Protestants ought to be encouraged and given low rents and hospitality. But “Papists, Moors and Jews” should be discouraged.

And in some ways this sentinel rock became a bigoted British island at the entrance to the Mediterranean. As a British garrison it could hardly fail to be reactionary, backward, philistine and drunken, as it upheld the Royal Navy tradition of rum, sodomy and the lash. For years it was noted for its vast number of taverns. But there is something so wonderful and stark about the rock—and it is the only grand work of nature for miles around—that its enchantment is transferred to the people who live on its lower slopes and at its base. It stands enormous and immutable, dwarfing everything and everyone nearby; and so Gibraltarians seem like a tribe of tiny idolaters, clinging to their mammoth limestone shrine.

It is pretty clear that shrunken bankrupt Britain finds Gibraltar too expensive to run, no more than an inconvenient relic of a former age. It even looks it. Apart from the Rock it looks like an English coastal town, much smaller but with the same seediness and damp glamour of, say, Weston-super-Mare; a little promenade, and tea-shops, and fish and chip shops, and ironmongers, and respectable-looking public houses, and bus shelters and twitching curtains. Its Englishness makes it safe, tidy, smug, community-minded.

Gibraltar’s historical notes satisfied my curiosity for meaningless facts and colorful atrocities. There was first the list of sieges, fourteen of them, going back to the year 410, when the Vandals overran the Roman Empire, and the later incursions of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. Franco’s closure of Spain’s frontier with Gibraltar is known as the fifteenth siege. In the seventh century King Sisebut persecuted Gibraltar’s Jews, tortured thousands, and forcibly baptized ninety thousand of them overall. Then there were seven hundred years of Moors in Gibraltar. And this: “In 1369, when Pedro the Cruel, who had succeeded Alfonso XI, was assassinated, the Count of Translamara seized the throne of Castile and became Henry II. The following year, 1370, Algeciras was destroyed by Mohammed V.” And on December 13, 1872, “the mystery derelict Marie Celeste arrived in Gibraltar.”

Lastly, Gibraltar is known as the scene of a sudden shocking multiple murder. The woman who told me where it had taken place described it in a whisper: “Walk down Winston Churchill Road, and just before the overpass, across from the Shell station, that’s where it happened.”

One Sunday in 1986, much to the horror of Gibraltarians, three civilians were shot dead by men wearing masks. Witnesses described the suddenness of it, all three cut down, and one masked man lingering over a supine wounded man and finishing him off. And then the masked men vanished. It was not hard for them to get away, since they were members of the British SAS sent on this deadly mission by Margaret Thatcher.

No one mourned the dead men. They were Irish. It was claimed that they were going to plant a bomb at The Convent, the Governor’s House, during a parade. That was not firmly established—the whole affair was obscured by official secrecy. Two years after the killings, a British minister in Mrs. Thatcher’s government blandly explained that the government briefings to journalists at the time of the incident had been inaccurate. The dead men had not been armed, as had been suggested. And the car parked in Gibraltar had not contained explosives. So why were these men killed?

The minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, said, “They made movements which led the military personnel operating in support of Gibraltar police to conclude that their own lives and the lives of others were under threat.”

The official version stressed that a bomb would have been devastating. The blast would have damaged two schools and a Jewish home for old folks and the marchers and the spectators. It would have been on a par with the bomb hidden under the bandstand in Hyde Park, that killed eleven members of a military band, one of the nastiest IRA crimes; it is very easy to plant a bomb in a peaceful trusting place. But no one ever knew whether there had been any good reason for the murders of the three Irishmen that day.

Gibraltar is still a garrison, though greatly reduced in numbers of men, and the steep town looks severe but is actually rather friendly. In common with an English village the Gibraltarians are friendly to the point of nosiness. It is small enough so that everyone knows everyone else, except the Moroccans who come and go. The Gibraltarian family names are all known—the English, the Spanish, the Jewish ones, especially. The great thing in Gibraltar is to be able to date your ancestry to the Genoese who emigrated early in the eighteenth century.

Because Gibraltarians asked me questions I returned the compliment and pestered people about their origins.

“I’m a Gibraltarian,” a man named Joe told me. His real name was José, and his surname sounded Spanish too. I asked him about that.

He said, “I’m not Spanish, I’m not English.”

“What does your passport say?”

“Colony of Gibraltar,” he said. “But we would rather be an English colony than part of Spain. The majority of people here want autonomy.”

In other words, for Gibraltar to govern herself and for Britain to pay the bills.

“We want independence and to be part of the EC. The frontier was opened in 1985 only to satisfy the EC—the Spanish were trying to make friends.”

“What did you do all those years when it was impossible to go across the road to Spain?”

“I went to Morocco.” He shook his head. “It was not like anything I ever saw before.”

“Interesting?”

“Awful.”

We talked about the absence of any manufacturing in Gibraltar.

“But we have shipyards,” he said. “We can repair ships.”

“You speak Spanish?” I asked.

“And English.”

The idea in Gibraltar was that the Spaniards were vastly inferior to the Gibraltarians; they were despised for their passionate gesticulation, their forty years of Franco’s fascism, their twanging guitars, their provincialism and irrationality and bean-eating and bull-torturing. Prejudices in Gibraltar were quite similar to those I had encountered in English seaside resorts, an enjoyable mixture of bluster and wrongheadedness, the Little Englander in full spate. But these poor rock-hoppers were, it seemed to me, about to be abandoned. In the fullness of time, I could see this place handed over to the Spaniards just as ruthlessly as Hong Kong had been served up like a dim sum to whining Chinese plutocrats and executioners. Gibraltarians would soon discover how bankruptcy could make a nation unsentimental and self-serving.

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”—the 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.

“The only thing wrong with us,” Sir Joshua said, ruefully rather than in anger, “is our bloody size!”

2

The “Mare Nostrum” Express to Alicante

To prove a point to myself about Gibraltar’s smallness I picked up my bag and walked from my hotel in the middle of Gibraltar to the Spanish frontier; got my passport stamped, and then sauntered into Spain; another stamp. The whole international journey from my thirty-dollar room in Gibraltar to the cheese-colored suburbs in the foothills of Andalucia was less than half an hour.

My first day in Spain. I thought of a line from the Spanish writer Pio Baroja, that V. S. Pritchett quotes.

“It may look as if I am seeking something; but I am seeking nothing.” (Parece que busco algo; pero no busco nada.)

There were no coastal trains from Algeciras, no useful trains at all until Málaga. The Algeciras bus was waiting at the station at La Línea, over the border, a town cauchemaresque in its littleness and its sense of being unpeopled and nowhere. Its nondescript beach was noted for its smugglers—drugs, cigarettes, appliances. This bus was just a rattly thing, full of locals who were heading home from work to the ferry port that lay beneath the brown hills. I looked back and saw that Gibraltar was no more than its dramatic rock. The town was not visible until darkness fell, and then all you saw were lights on its lower slopes like candle flames flickering around an altar. As we passed around the bay the rock receded, changing shape, as the prospect altered.

The best view of Gibraltar is from Algeciras, across the bay, where the rock appears as a long ridge, like a fortress, something man-made and defensive, rather than the recumbent and misshapen monster at the edge of the sea. The Neck, Gibraltar’s land connection to Spain, is so low, almost at sea level, that the enormous citadel of rock seems to be detached from the mainland.

That low-lying neck gave Oliver Cromwell a bizarre idea. He decided to make Gibraltar an island; to detach it—dig a wide trench that would quickly fill with water, and sever the Rock from the Spanish mainland. Presto, the English island of Gibraltar. According to Samuel Pepys, Cromwell authorized a ship loaded with picks and shovels to set sail in 1656 to accomplish this godlike task of fiddling with the landscape. The ship was captured by the Spaniards. Then Oliver Cromwell died. The scheme was abandoned.

Algeciras was merely my starting point. “An ugly town of very slight interest,” the guidebook said. But this was the sort of guidebook that recommended a town when it had a building that it could praise in these terms: “The central dome is supported on a hexadecagonal beading over squinches.”

A scruffy little Spanish man took me aside.

“You German?”

“American.”

“Good, I like Americans,” he said. “You want to buy one kilo of hash?”

“No, thank you. It may look as if I am seeking something, but I am seeking nothing.”

“You no like me?” he said, and turned abusive.

I ignored him and walked to the harbor, where the ferry, Ciudad de Zaragoza, was setting out for Tangiers. Another ferry left from Tarifa, where in the past Barbary pirates demanded payment from all ships passing through the straits (and so this tiny haven of extortionists, Tarifa, gave us our taxation word “tariff). Morocco, across the water, was as near as Falmouth is to Vineyard Haven. It was my intention to end my trip there, and to get there by the most roundabout route, via France and Italy, Croatia, Albania, Malta, Israel, and every other Mediterranean shore, even Algeria, if I had the stomach for it. It gave me pleasure to turn away from the ferry landing and walk to the bus station, and buy a ticket to Marbella. I assumed it would take a year or so to reach Morocco.

The bus had plenty of empty seats, and yet when a couple got on wearing matching warm-up suits, the woman sat at the front alone and the man sat right next to me.

He was in his mid to late sixties, with a big intrusive face and mocking frown and hairy ears. He looked careless and lazy, and he stared at me in a meddling way. He said, “Hi there.”

My dim smile was meant to convey that I was perhaps Spanish. I said nothing. I wanted to concentrate on this, my first experience of Spain.

We rolled out of town, past the bullring. The man next to me muttered “Plaza de Toros” in a self-congratulatory way, though he merely squinted at the rest of the graffiti on the walls next to the Autovia di Mediterraneo, most of it very angry: Yanqui = Terroristas and Republica Si!—Monarchia No! and Don’t Vote—Fight! (No Vote—Lucha!). The grandly named highway was just a winding two-lane road along the coast, running past scrubby fields and truck stops and low rocky hills under a gray sky on a Saturday afternoon, the market closed, the beaches empty—the water much too cold for swimming—and even the little old men fishing from the jetties wearing foul-weather gear.

The piles of cork oak bark stacked by the side of the road suggested that a traditional harvest ritual was taking place—not right here, but inland, away from the shore. And that was my first Mediterranean epiphany, the realization that life on these shores bore little relation to what was happening five miles inland, no matter what the country. Somewhere over this Andalusian hill a peasant was hacking bark off trees to sell. That hinterland was not my subject, though; I did not care about the perplexities of Europe. My concentration was the edge of this body of water, the ribbon of beach and cliff, and all the people who shared it, used and misused it, even the snorting old man who for some reason had chosen to sit next to me on the bus.

The Spanish newspaper I had bought in Algeciras told of a murder scandal involving wealthy English expatriates—the wife dead in mysterious circumstances, the husband a prime suspect—in Sotogrande, the next town.

“Cops,” the man next to me said.

It was a roadblock; he had seen it before me, about six policemen at a bend in the road, directing cars to an area where they were to park and be searched. This was a throwback to Franco surely. The police, the Guardia Civil, masters of intimidation and search-and-destroy missions, were plundering the trucks of cars and interrogating drivers and passengers.

This had nothing to do with the Sotogrande murder. It was a search for illegal drugs, items such as the kilo of hashish that the Algeciras punk had tried to sell me. The police, who were heavily armed, had sniffer dogs and mirrors, and two of them moved through the bus, poking luggage, looking under seats, and harassing the dirtier male passengers. The most woeful-looking passenger was ordered to stand up in the aisle while a policeman examined each cigarette in the pack he had in his pocket. The police dog slavered at me and padded on.

“This is unreal,” the man next to me said, perhaps to me, perhaps to himself.

The police, satisfied that the bus did not contain any drugs, allowed us to continue on our way.

“Spain is a land to flee across. Every town, and every capital, is a destination; and the names, which ring with refuge to the fugitive, mount with finality to him traveling relentlessly unpursued.”

That accurate description of my mood that day (even if it sounded a bit too orotund for the landscape I was looking at) is William Gaddis in The Recognitions, the great American novel of counterfeiting and forgery. Gaddis’s vision of Spain was one of the many that filled my head. The experience of Spain had been an inspiration to some of my favorite writers. If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed my desire to travel there. I did not want to risk disappointment—the reality displacing the fabulous land in my imagination. Arthur Waley, the great Chinese scholar and translator, refused to go to China; he did not want to risk having his illusions shattered. He was wise. His illusions of the harmony and grace inspired by the Chinese classics would not have survived for two stops on the Iron Rooster.

It was impossible to be in Spain and not think of Hemingway, lover of fiestas, whose literary reputation was partly based on his passion for bullfighting, and whose notions of honor and heroism, not to say the human condition, were derived in greater measure from the toreros he mooned over than from the foot soldiers in the Spanish Civil War he also wrote about. I personally had an aversion to Hemingway’s work, but that was a matter of taste; I did not dismiss him. Hemingway appears in Gaddis’s book, not by name but as a sententious old bore and boozer known as the Big Unshaven Man (BUM for short). I disliked A Farewell to Arms because it seemed to me to be written in Pilgrim Father English. I preferred Orwell’s account of the Spanish Civil War, in Homage to Catalonia, and his version of how the war had challenged his political ideas. Gerald Brenan seemed to me the best guide through Spanish history, in South from Granada, Jan Morris’s Spain was all I needed to know about the Spanish landscape, and V. S. Pritchett in The Spanish Temper seemed the shrewdest possible examination of Spanish literature and also the passions and pastimes of the Spaniards.

I had read as much as I could—everything mattered—but it struck me on this Spanish bus that I had never seen a landscape like this described anywhere, in any book I had read about Spain. That cheered me up. This was as remote from the Spain of Cervantes and Hemingway and Pritchett and everyone else as it was possible to be. This was the Spain of the absurd travel brochures, the cheap flights, the package tours and the more mendacious travel magazines.

It was a sort of cut-price colonization, this stretch of coast, bungaloid in the extreme—bungalows and twee little chalets and monstrosities in all stages of construction, from earthworks and geometrically excavated foundations filled with mud puddles, to brick and stucco condos and huts and houses. There were cheap hotels, and golf courses, and marinas and rain-sodden tennis courts and stagnant swimming pools at Estepona, where “Prices Slashed” was a frequent sign on housing developments in partially built clusters with names such as “Port Paradise” and “The Castles” and “Royal Palms”—no people on the beach, no people on the road, no golfers, no sign of life at all, only suggestions here and there that the place was known to English-speaking people. “English Video Club” was one, and another that was hardly out of view from Gibraltar to the French frontier at Port-Bou: “Fish-and-Chips.”

And it was only the other day that this whole coast had sprung up and become vulgarized as the object of intense real estate speculation. My guidebook said of awful overgrown Estepona, “As recently as 1912, the road ended here.”

Then, this end of Spain was just mules and goats; and peasants hoeing the rocky hillsides, cutting cork oak, gathering barnacles and praying on their knees. And now they are mopping the floors of the bungalows at “Port Paradise.”

“It’s all English people here,” the man next to me said. “You speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Your pants don’t have a fly,” he said.

I did not have an answer for this. He was smiling. I said, “Does that bother you?”

“Seems to me that makes them kind of inconvenient.”

I am on my Grand Tour, on this Spanish bus on a gray day out of season, minding my business, and this foolish old man who insists on sitting next to me points out that my Patagonia pants don’t have a fly. I did not ask for this at all.

He was still smiling. He said, “See my wife? That’s her up there.”

Commenting on the cut of my pants was merely a way of breaking the ice. He wanted to talk about his wife.

“She was an X-rated showgirl,” he said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was watching my reaction.

She had the face of an elderly baby. Her hair was stiff and blonde. She was looking out the bus window, giving me her profile. She was big, hefty even, and her baggy warm-up suit conveyed an impression of physical plentitude. Yet there was a soft and faded beauty about her, a carefulness in her makeup that told that she was still trying, that she still cared, and perhaps it was the absurdity of her husband that made me think that she was very unhappy.

“No, I’m kidding you. Not X-rated. She was a Las Vegas showgirl.”

He was not looking at me anymore. His forearms rested on the seat-bar in front of him, and he was staring.

“Imagine what she looked like forty years ago.”

We were passing gray sand, weedy yards, hillsides of condominiums—some with turrets, some with battlements, all of them empty; and houses and villas helter-skelter.

To this man who had offended me by commenting on the way I was dressed I said, “I imagine she looked twenty-five.”

“She was beautiful,” he insisted. Hadn’t he heard me? “She’s still beautiful.”

You pimp, I thought, why aren’t you sitting with her?

“She knows I’m talking about her.”

The woman had glanced back and her face darkened.

“She’d kill me if she knew what I was saying. She hates having been a showgirl. That’s where I met her. Vegas. If she knew what I was saying to you she’d murder me.”

We had come to Guadalmina, which looked old-fashioned and pleasant. I wanted to make a note, but the man beside me was talking again.

“She’s tough. You wouldn’t think it, but she is. She makes all the decisions. She wears the pants in the house.”

“You seem to be an expert on pants,” I said. In my mind I imagined his wife, this bulky woman, in big brown tweedy pants and clomping shoes, walking though a house in which this man cowered.

“I once said to her, ‘I’m going to marry a rich woman next time. I don’t care if she’s fat or ugly, as long as she has money.’ ”

The man laughed, remembering this conversation.

“My wife says to me, ‘And what are you going to offer her?’ ”

“What did you say to that?”

“What could I say? She shot me down.”

We came to San Pedro de Alcántara, which was older and more settled, something like a town. Few trees to speak of, I wrote in my innocence, little knowing that on the thousands of miles of Mediterranean coastline there are few trees to speak of, no forests except for one in Corsica, hardly any woods abutting the shore. It made for a rather stark coastline, but it revealed everything—here at San Pedro the ruins of a Roman villa, a Visigoth’s basilica and a Moorish castle, and all those bungalows.

I had not planned to get off the bus at Marbella, but this man irritated me. I had the feeling that it gave him a perverse pleasure to sit with me at a distance and leer at his wife, in the way that some men enjoy watching their spouse have sex with strangers; at the very least, he wanted to go on talking. I am out of here.

Passing the woman, just before I got off, I turned to her. She looked at once alarmed and suspicious.

Laughing a little, I said, “Your husband tells me you were a Las Vegas showgirl. I would never have known.”

The last sound I heard was this woman’s howl ringing through the bus and the pusillanimous whine of her husband’s hollow denial.

In Marbella I met a Spaniard, Vicente, who had just spent a year in Mexico. He worked for a company that exported Spanish olive oil. He had liked his time in Mexico but—buttoned-up, self-conscious, innately gloomy, cursed with an instinctive fatalism, and envious in a class-obsessed way—patronized the Mexicans much as the British patronize Americans, and for the same reasons.

“They talk like this,” Vicente said, and did an imitation of a Mexican talking in slushy mutterings with his teeth clamped shut.

It seemed accurate and clever to me, and I told him so, though he seemed to be embarrassed by his effort and was too shy to continue. And, naturally, having mocked them, then said what wonderful people the Mexicans were.

“Did you go to any bullfights there?”

“Yes. Very small bulls in Mexico. Our bulls are much bigger and stronger—more brave. We breed them especially to fight.”

“Any other differences?”

“We use the horses more. And much else. I cannot explain all the differences.”

Everything I knew about bullfighting, including There is no Spanish word for bullfight, I had learned from The Sun Also Rises. Rose Macaulay’s appreciative book about Spain, Fabled Shore (1949)—an account of a trip down this coast—mentions bullfights only once and briefly: “I do not care for them.”

I said, “I was thinking of going to a corrida.”

“Have you never seen one?”

“No—never.”

This made Vicente laugh, and he insisted I should go to one.

“We love football, but the corrida is here,” he said and tapped his heart. “It is our passion. And, listen, one of the most popular toreros in Spain is from America—Colombia.”

I was grateful for Vicente’s encouragement, but I did not really need it. I had intended to go to the first bullfight I found advertised.

In the meantime I had found a place to stay in Marbella. As an experiment in budget travel I had found a ten-dollar-a-night room in a pensione behind the oldest church in the town, the Iglesia de la Encarnación. This was in the Old Town. An effort had obviously been made in Marbella to renovate this older neighborhood and reclaim some of its narrow alleys and small lanes. I regarded this as a challenge. Anyone can go to a strange town and buy comfort and goodwill. With the single exception of limping vandalized Albania, which is in a state of disrepair and anarchy, luxury is available in most places on the shores of the Mediterranean.

I knew from experience that the deluxe route was the easy way out, and that it was unreal, the fast lane, where I would meet stuffy travelers and groveling locals. I did not require luxury, I needed only modest comfort and privacy, and it was often possible to find what I wanted for ten or fifteen dollars. This was particularly so in the off-season, as the wind blew through these coastal resort towns, where business was terrible.

Even Marbella, which had the reputation of being one of the more salubrious resorts, was hurting. The summer had been bad and nothing was happening now; it would be a long winter. The rise in inflation and the cost of living generally had surprised the British who had retired here. Many were in the process of selling their houses—at a loss in some cases—and moving elsewhere.

“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 quarries 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.

“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 Mediterranean 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 sea. 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.

Four hours of this, the ferry pitching and rolling, and then the wind eased and the sea grew calmer as we approached Ibiza. It was three in the morning. An English couple boarded, murmuring, but they were not talking to each other, they were reassuring their pets, a nervous dog on a leash, a whining cat in a handheld cage. Now the passengers numbered five, and two animals. The lights still glared, the television screen flickered, still on but no program.

All those seats and yet not a single one was comfortable—straight backs, hard armrests, no leg room in front. None of them reclined. I propped myself up and when I could not stand the discomfort and the burning lightbulbs anymore I went on deck. The black swell of sea sighed against the hull, while I yawned and fiddled with my shortwave radio. After three hours the eastern sky grew lighter.

In the misty light of daybreak there was nothing, not even a sunrise—only the whitish water of dawn, no land. We did not raise Mallorca until seven-thirty or so, the west coast, Dragonera Island, and then rounded Cabo de Cala Figuera, where there was a lighthouse. I could see tawny hills and a mountainous interior, a lovely rugged place. At the edge of some beaches there were white hotels stacked up, and dense settlement, but there were stretches of coast on which there was very little evidence of any building.

Mallorca, sometimes called the heart of the Mediterranean, for embodying all its virtues, is known in Britain as a package holiday destination, and so is a synonym for cheapness. It is one of those place names which, like Frinton or Bognor, carries with it so many dubious associations that it has been given the status of a household word and just pronouncing it, deliberately twanging it, calling it “Majorca,” and sounding the “j,” has the same effect as cracking a joke.

“Yes, it is lovely,” the Spanish passenger said when I remarked on the beauty of the island. His son was still asleep as we pulled into the harbor. “When I was growing up this island was all natural.”

I asked him his age. He was fifty. He remembered the coming of the package tours, the rise of the hotels. He said there were parts of Mallorca that were very beautiful.

“But in the summer it is terrible all over.”

He said that business was awful here at the moment—worse than on the mainland.

“But things are improving. There is a fiesta on the weekend.”

Arriving by ferry gave me a good look at the place. I had resolved not to fly anywhere in the Mediterranean anyway, and the decision was useful in forcing me to make elaborate detours (like the one to Denia) which gave me a perspective on places I would not otherwise have had.

Mallorca looked elegant from the sea, as we crossed the wide Bahía de Palma. Nearer the port I could see the old town of Palma, the ornate cathedral dominating the city walls and the stucco buildings, some of them ancient, and the newer suburbs to the west, the fertile fields and valleys at a greater distance to the north.

I walked down the gangway and through the port building to the main street, by one of the marinas. Over breakfast, studying a map, I debated whether to take the narrow gauge train through the mountains to Sóller on the rocky north coast. “As beautiful a run as any in Switzerland,” one brochure said. But I also wanted to see the more remote seaside villages on the west coast which were nowhere near the railway. A rental car seemed a good idea.

The phone book listed a number of rental agencies. And because of the large British population there were many British businesses, a whole sub-directory listing importers of sausages and beer and books and jam, as well as advertising clothes, haircuts, and houses.

There was even an English radio station, beaming sentimental songs from Palma to British residents on the island. I discovered this after I had rented the car. I tuned to that station, which was all the more affecting because it was so amateurish.

“Valerie is on her way to London,” the woman announcer said. “She’ll be in Mayfair tomorrow. Safe trip, Val. Here’s a song for Valerie.”

It was “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

“I was thinking how I first heard that song at the Hammersmith Palais,” the announcer said, after it had ended.

I had driven out of Palma and I was passing small fertile farms, and stone houses, heading for the mountains.

“What’ll I Do” began to play, with Fred Astaire singing to the wobbly melody. The music made me homesick, but homesickness seemed a natural condition of travel. I can only travel when I am happy, but when I am happy I miss the productive routines of my life, and the woman at the center of it. Each morning these days I woke to the questions, Where am I and what am I doing here? and then got up and attempted to make something of the day.

“I’ve got to say cheerio now. But remember, if you do it, do it good. And if you don’t do it good, don’t do it at all.”

The mountainside rose abruptly from the flat Palma plain, and it was steep, a vertical ascent of hairpin bends. At the ridge I looked across the rocky cliffs and saw green slopes and a bay and blue ocean. But as I descended a storm crowded the coast, and it was raining like hell as I entered Sóller.

I was so wet and bedraggled that at least four Spaniards took me for a native and asked me difficult questions. One question was, “Where is the office that processes insurance claims for injured workers?”

Walking around the town to get my bearings, I saw three coin-operated machines in the plaza. One dispensed gum. One dispensed plastic toys and beads. The third dispensed (for two hundred pesetas) pairs of condoms encased in small plastic globes. I could see them in the fishbowl top of the dispenser. I was trying to decide where I should spend the night when I saw a sign to Deyá.

“An English poet lived in Deyá, isn’t that so?” I asked a man near Sóller harbor.

“Robert Graves,” the man said, without hesitating. “His house is still there. Now his son and daughter live there.”

“I think he was a wonderful poet. Do the people here know his poems?”

“Yes. We have a high regard for his work. We compare him with the great poets, not just of Spain but of the world.”

It seemed a pleasant idea to make a trip to Deyá—maybe walk there along the cliffs, and look at the landscape that Graves had praised for so many years.

I found a hotel within the sound of the harbor. Sóller had such a placid harbor, such magnificent cliffs, I decided to stay a few days and catch up with my note-taking. I hadn’t written much since Alicante. I had lost a night’s sleep on the Punta Europa. I was delighted to find this peaceful place. On most trips I kept rolling until I found a place I liked, and when I got a certain feeling I came to a stop. This was another reason I traveled alone, because it was rare for two people to see the same qualities in a place (“Why do you want to stop here? I thought we were supposed to keep going”). Sóller was pleasant. But even in this low season there were some tourists here—hikers mostly.

That seemed a good idea to me. I bought food in the supermarket, yogurt, sardines, fruit juice, picnic food for homemade bocadillos—fat sandwiches. I bought Sóller’s prized oranges and a topographical map; and when the rain stopped and the sea glittered with sun, I spent two days hiking, looking at birds, making notes, glad that I had found such a lovely corner of this supposedly hackneyed island.

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent—they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them. What I had missed most of all in my trip so far was a chance to look at a landscape that was not wall-to-wall hotels and condos and clip joints and “English Spoken Here.” Perhaps I was too ignorant for ruins; whatever the reason, they did not interest me greatly, nor did tombs, nor churches. It was not my philistinism, it was my desire to see the life of the coast, no matter what form it took. I made some exceptions. Big crumbling Roman or Greek amphitheaters were another story. They looked absurd and ancient, and there they lay with all their ambitious symmetry in the oddest settlements. “Here is where the gladiators entered.” “Notice the ruts of the rich people’s chariots.” (I was to see such structures in Albania in a slum in Durrës and in the south of Tunis in the otherwise ramshackle town El Djem.)

Not long before I had been thinking that it was seldom possible to be alone at any point on the Mediterranean coast; and then, by chance, I found this part of Mallorca. True, it was dotted with villages and parts of it were jammed with houses, but it was the prettiest coast I had seen so far. I hiked to the village of Fornalutx on the slopes of Sóller’s mountain, Puig Mayor, in the shape of a witch’s hat, and went bird watching on the vertiginous path along the sea cliffs.

At the end of my two days’ hiking I caught up with my chores, my notes and laundry. If it seemed strange to be alone on the cliffs, no sounds except sea birds and the occasional Teutonic squawk, it seemed even stranger to be in a launderette in Sóller, with young mothers and children, folding clothes.

“Hello. How are you?”

“Very well. You are a visitor?”

“Yes. I like Sóller. Very pretty.”

“Not spoiled,” the woman said.

“I wonder why.”

“Because there are no flat places. It is all cliffs and crags and steep slopes. The few hotels we have are all at the harbor and on the road leading out of the village.”

That seemed a good explanation. It was not possible to put up a big hotel here, and there was no money in a small hotel—no room for the package tours.

“It’s a quiet time of year.”

“Mostly the Germans now.”

Only Germans, really, big chunky waterproof hikers, pairs of them, in parkas and knickerbockers, carrying walking sticks and binoculars. And when I saw Germans like that I did not think of hiking but invasion. They were Germans, of a robust pink-cheeked sort, wearing thick-soled hiking boots, taking advantage of the cheap rates and marching up and down the mountain paths, as though unintentionally auditioning for a production of The Private Life of the Master Race.

“Once the British came, but when the prices went up, the French and Belgians took their place. Now it is Germans in the winter. Some British people still come in the summer months.”

She knew who frequented Sóller. She was a room cleaner in one of the hotels. Her husband was a fisherman. He caught shrimp in these months and in the spring he would look for sardines. Fishing was a hard living, she said.

Her little girl goggled at us and used a small square of cloth to imitate her mother’s clothes-folding.

I bought gas for the car—four thousand pesetas to fill the tank, about $35 for this tinky-winky Renault 5, another revelation about the high cost of living in Spain. But generally speaking in the Mediterranean a liter of gas cost twice as much as a liter of table wine.

The next morning, my last in Sóller, I woke once again to the sound of the waves sloshing against the beach, regretting that I had to leave.

In my two days of hiking I had walked almost to Deyá. Today I drove there on the narrow winding coast road, and early on, came upon the sight of a head-on collision (no one hurt but a car and a truck badly damaged). I was cautioned by the consternation of the young man standing by his smashed jeep, his face dark with anxiety; the busy movements of the truck driver who had rammed him on the sharp bend in the road. A tunnel was being dug through the mountains. The shout No Tunnel! was scrawled all over this part of the island. I agreed. There was a train. There was a road. There were already too many cars in Mallorca.

The village of Deyá was for so many years the home of the poet Robert Graves that the villagers passed a resolution and in 1969 made Graves “an adopted son,” the only one in the long history of the village. He had come there in 1929 on a hunch and lived there for more than half his life.

It is hard for me to work up any interest in a writer’s birthplace, and I hate pilgrimages to writers’ tombstones, but I do enjoy seeing where they lived and worked; writers’ houses fascinate me. And writers often choose magnificent landscapes to live in, whether they have money or not. Henry Miller settled in Big Sur and lived in a cabin long before Big Sur became a coveted piece of real estate; D. H. Lawrence was in pre-chic Taos, Hemingway was in Key West for the fishing, and moved on to Cuba for much the same reason. Robert Louis Stevenson was an early visitor to California and Hawaii and at last a pioneer in Samoa.

In the literary history of the Mediterranean, many places became famous and fashionable long after foreign writers discovered them and wrote about them. Very often the writers were residents. Usually it was a case of putting a fishing village on the map, and that ended when the tiny port was turned into an expensive resort. This is pretty much the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald glorifying the Riviera, of Norman Douglas in Capri (South Wind), Lawrence Durrell in Corfu (Prospero’s Cell) and Cyprus (Bitter Lemons) and of Somerset Maugham in Cap Ferrat. There are scores of other examples—people in Greece looking for Zorba or the Magus, literary pilgrims in Alexandria looking for Justine. The reductio ad absurdum of this, and probably the worst thing that can happen, is for the writer’s paradise to turn into hell while he or she is still living there—the hell of traffic and hotels, visitors and literary pilgrims. The writer may have unintentionally caused this to happen, by raving about the place.

In her typical gnomic way, saying that it was “Paradise—if you can stand it!” Gertrude Stein suggested that Robert Graves try Mallorca. And so having left his wife and children he went there, with his lover, the impossible Laura Riding. Graves found this idyllic island in 1929 which, in the course of his lifetime, almost sank under the weight of package tourists. Yet Deyá was still a somewhat remote and pretty village, high on sea cliffs, surrounded by the lovely Teix Mountains. He went there because it was cheap and off the beaten track. It also seemed a happy blend of two landscapes he loved—North Wales and Corfu. He was determined not to leave. He wrote in “The Next Time,”

And when we passengers are given two hours,

When once more the wheels fail at Somewhere—Nowhere,

To climb out, stretch our legs and pick wild flowers—

Suppose that this time I elect to stay there?

I easily found Graves’s house. It was named Canelluñ and, made of local stone, it occupied a lofty position on a ledge outside of the village. It was a dignified house on a steep slope, crags behind it, and the rocky shore far below it. There was an unexpectedly luxurious hotel in the center of Deyá, La Residencia, the sort of hotel I had been avoiding, since this was supposed to be a breezy trip. My idea was to press on; it was an enormously long coastline, and I was trying to avoid being corrupted and detained by luxury and lotus-eating.

Graves had bought Canelluñ in 1934 with his profits from I, Claudius and had lived there for many years with Laura Riding, who like so many other mistresses in literature began as his muse and ended as a nag. It has been said that one of the reasons this powerful novel of the decline of Caesardom is so convincing is because Graves “used it as a vehicle for expressing the dark side of his feelings for Laura Riding.” He saw her character in the wicked and manipulative poisoner Livia. Laura was known in the village as “a bossy eccentric who wore strange clothes.” After some years and some suffering Graves tossed her out and took up with another White Goddess.

An interviewer once asked Graves a boring question about his living in Deyá.

“Has living in Deyá, isolated from what you call the mechanarchic civilization, led you to what you call handicraft in your poetry?”

This produced an interesting answer from Graves. “I once lived here for six years without moving out—in nineteen thirty to thirty-six,” he replied. “Didn’t even go to Barcelona. Apart from that I’ve always made a point of traveling. One’s got to go out, because one can’t live wholly in oneself or wholly in the traditional past. One’s got to be aware of how nasty urban life is.”

By keeping his head down, he had tried to get through the Spanish Civil War. He had fought in the First World War (and written a book about his disillusionment in his precocious—he was thirty-three—autobiography Goodbye to All That). Franco kept threatening to invade Mallorca, and when the time came, and the island grew dangerous, Graves fled.

The village of Deyá is lovely. How to account for the fact that it remained so long after other parts of the island had fallen to the crassest of developers? Perhaps it was as the woman in Sóller had said to me, “no level places”—that and the narrow roads. If a place was inaccessible it had a chance of keeping its identity and remaining untainted.

“Deyá had little to recommend it except the Graves magic,” Anthony Burgess wrote dissentingly in his autobiography, speaking of a period when he had lived in the village. He went on, “A literal magic, apparently, since the hills were said to be full of iron of a highly magnetic type, which drew at the metal deposits of the brain and made people mad. Graves himself was said to go around sputtering exorcisms while waving an olive branch.”

The Mallorcans I spoke to in the north of the island all knew of Graves, they knew the village and the house. They knew everything except Graves’s poetry. That was the way of the world. The man’s reputation was good enough for them, and it inspired their respect. A celebrated writer who lives in a small town or a village has an odd time of it. It is amusing when the local philistines disparage the writer in the neighborhood, but it is downright hilarious when the writer is strenuously championed by the local illiterates. Graves lived among olive-squashing peasants and fruiterers and shepherds, as well as prosperous retirees and aristocrats. He shocked some, but his love for the island and for the village in particular impressed them to the point where most of the locals were his well-wishers.

Graves’s son and daughter still lived at the house, I was told. I decided not to ring the bell—for fear of intruding but also for fear of being turned away, rebuffed for invading their privacy. Apart from curiosity I had no profound reason for poking my nose in. I was simply interested in what his desk looked like, the room, the books, the pictures; it gave some idea of the writer’s mind.

I looked too disreputable for La Residencia; I had a cup of coffee in the village and spent the day walking around the steep lanes, admiring the fruit trees and the tidy houses. The village had great dignity and enormous physical beauty. It was a place, I decided, I would gladly return to.

Even in Deyá, in casual conversation I did not find anyone who knew Graves’s poetry. But no matter. The question that was in my mind was about Franco, and in particular his hold on Mallorca. Because the Spaniards are so polite generally and reserved it was a long time before I could steel myself to ask. Also, asking about a dictator who had been in power so long was also a way of asking people about themselves, a question like “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”

Anyway, in Deyá, I popped the question. The man I asked was of that generation, in his early seventies, a thoughtful person out walking his dog. I had caught him unawares, while we were discussing the route to Valdemosa. Then he considered my Franco question.

“In that time”—he seemed to be avoiding saying the Franco’s name—“we could not do certain things. We could not say certain things. Some things we could not think.”

“So there was political repression?”

“Yes. We were not as free as we are now,” he said. “But there was work for everyone and there were tourists. When you have work you are satisfied and you don’t ask questions. You get on with your life. If you have work and food you don’t think about political matters.”

“And if there’s no work?”

“Ah, then you ask questions.”

“So under Franco there was full employment?”

“The country was growing. But that was a different time. Now everything has changed.”

“Was the Catholic church stronger then?”

“Much stronger.”

He was talking about Spain’s entering the modern world. Long after the rest of Europe had joined it, little had changed in Spain. I took That was a different time to mean that it was ancient history. And in a short time, only since the late seventies, Spain had worked to catch up—to lighten its mood and learn how to vote; most of all to cope with the humiliation of having lived so long under a dictator who presumed to think for them. It must have been like living in an abusive household.

Rather than spend the night here in Deyá I decided to stay at Valdemosa, another lovely place above a fishing port; more olive trees, more fruit trees and fincas, but an altogether more level town. Part of Valdemosa’s fame rested on the fact that George Sand had brought her lover Chopin here in the winter of 1838–39 and, while he recovered from an illness and wrote his “Preludes,” she had quarreled with the locals. Afterwards she had written a famously cruel book about their sojourn.

This seemed the perfect place to read the copy of Winter in Majorca that I had bought in Palma. It was a locally published edition, translated and extensively annotated by Robert Graves—most of his notes were rebuttals or else cleared up Sand’s misapprehensions or her willful judgments.

At the time of their visit, Chopin, younger than George Sand, was twenty-eight; she was thirty-four. Her real name was Baroness Aurore de Dudevant, née Dupin; “the child of a mésalliance between an aristocrat and an ex-milliner, was the uncrowned queen of the Romantic,” Graves wrote.

Chopin passed as her husband, but it was known that they weren’t married and perhaps that was why the locals did not warm to the foreigners, who perhaps suspected that she was pursuing a secret love affair. It was the worst, most rainy winter in years, the olive crop was a failure, and George Sand’s writing was not going well. As if that were not enough, Chopin suffered an attack of virtuousness and began to think godly thoughts. This provoked his anticlerical mistress, who liked to think of herself as a liberated soul. It was not a happy household. The village disapproved. The island was cold.

The book was George Sand’s way of settling scores. She wrote it, raging, after she got back to France. She railed about the vulgarity and spitefulness of the people, she complained about everything from the way the Mallorcans built their houses and looked after their animals, to the poor quality of their olive oil, which she called “rancid and nauseating.” She called them monkeys, barbarous, thieves and “Polynesian savages,” as if the civilized navigators of the Pacific had not already been ill-used enough by the French.

At one point, she quotes a French writer who begins a sentence, “These islanders are very well-disposed, gentle and hospitable,” and suddenly interrupts with, “We know that in every island, the human race falls into two categories: the cannibals and the ‘very well disposed.’ ”

In another aside, she used the Mallorcans in order to generalize about Spain, how easily offended and thin-skinned the Spanish are. “Woe betide the traveler in Spain who is not pleased with everything he encounters! Make the slightest grimace on finding vermin in a bed, or scorpions in the soup, and you draw upon yourself universal scorn and indignation.”

“We nicknamed Majorca, ‘Monkey Island,’ ” she writes, “because when surrounded by their crafty, thieving yet innocent creatures, we grew accustomed to defending ourselves against them,” and then, showing a certain ignorance about the natural world’s distribution of primates, she goes on, “but felt no more scorn than Indians feel toward chimpanzees or mischievous, timid orang-outangs.”

Soon after the book appeared it received solemn rebuttals. It is one of the livelier and funnier Mediterranean travel books, and for gratuitous rudeness it is on a par with Evelyn Waugh’s Labels as an example of a traveler’s bad temper in the Mediterranean.

I mentioned A Winter in Majorca to a man in Valdemosa. “It’s a silly book. And it’s old. I’m surprised that people still read it.”

“I’m reading it because it’s funny.”

“It’s full of lies about Valdemosa.”

“It’s not about Valdemosa,” I said. “It’s about George Sand.”

“Yes.” He was relieved and saw me as an ally. “That is right.”

I drove the next day down the long hill back to Palma, across the island. It seemed to me that tourist Mallorca was at the beach, the masses of hotels on the south and the east. But even the town of Palma seemed traditional Spanish, not touristy, and it even had a venerable look to it—the lovely thirteenth-century cathedral, one of the few in Europe that had never been sacked or bombed.

“This place is nice now,” a man from Cordova told me. “But it is madness in July and August.”

I stayed in a small hotel in a suburb to the northeast, where there were just working people and inexpensive boardinghouses. People getting by. I shopped in the supermarket, drank in the bar and watched football and bullfights like everyone else. And living in this way I tried to sum up the Spanish contradictions. They still puzzled me, the way the independent spirit of Spain had endured a dictatorship for forty years; the way Spanish passion seemed at odds with Spanish courtesy. They were churchgoing Catholics who were loudly anticlerical. And how could one reconcile the strenuous libido (the papers crammed with personal ads for everything from boyfriends to sado-masochism) with the low birthrate?

The elderly people in Spain were often the most broadminded. Pornography was the most vivid example of their tolerance. There were porno shops and movies in all the Spanish towns and cities, and even the smaller places like Cartagena had at least one or two porno outlets.

It seemed incontestable to me that a country’s pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth but it contained many clues and even more warnings. Japanese porno is unlike anything in Germany, French is unlike Swedish, American unlike Mexican, and so forth.

Spanish pornography baffled me. It seemed beyond sex, most of it. It involved children and dogs and torture; men torturing women, women being beastly to men; much of it was worse than German varieties, possibly the most repellent porno in the world. Some of it was homegrown—hermaphrodites and toilet training. One film I saw concerned a woman, a man and a donkey. Another, one of the strangest I have ever seen, concerned a Moroccan boy of about thirteen or fourteen, and a very bewildered goat.

In the primmest little districts in Alicante or Murcia or Mallorca, such films were on view next to the candy store or the hairdresser. And the candy stores themselves sometimes sold porno—not just tit and bum magazines, but hard-core porn. Here is Granny behind the counter selling Juan a lottery ticket and on the magazine rack with the kiddies books and the evening papers and How to Knit is S & M Monthly, with page after page of women being tortured, burned, tied up, sexually mutilated, spiky objects being forced into their vaginas, their arms being twisted, their screams recorded: Help! Socorro!

Porno comic books seemed to me the worst of all, because the sexual torture was idealized and easily accessible, in a realm of unreality and fantasy that seemed dangerous. I presumed that photographs would be so off-putting and disgusting—and such photographs hardly existed, showing torture and death. But anything was possible in the comics, anything could be pictured, and usually was, including bestiality and necrophilia.

“If you are not going to buy that magazine, please put it down, señor.”

One sunny morning I boarded the ferry at Palma and sailed past the lump of Ibiza under blue skies back to the mainland port of Valencia. It was eight hours, mostly sunshine. There were about thirty of us on the ship that could accommodate fifteen hundred. I sat on deck, scribbling. Inside, a roomful of men watched the day’s bullfight on television, and each time the coup de grace was delivered, the whole length of the matador’s sword driven into the stumbling bull, a thrill of satisfaction went through the room, an intense sigh of passion.

4

The “Virgen de Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond

If a quest for the Holy Grail began in Valencia it would be a very short quest, because the Holy Grail is propped on an altar in a small chapel of the Cathedral, in the Plaza de Zaragoza, in the middle of Valencia. It is the real thing, that was drunk out of by Jesus at the Last Supper, and then passed around to the Apostles. This chalice, teacup size, was carved from greenish agate (chalcedony), as is the base, an inverted cup set with pearls and emeralds, with gold handles, and it is held together by a gold post and jeweled bands. The whole thing is seven inches high, small but complex. The simple cup might have acquired the gold and jewels since Jesus used it. The authorized Cathedral pamphlet offers all this conjecture as fact.

The Last Supper was held in the house of St. Mark. After this, Joseph of Arimathea collected drops of blood in it from Jesus’ crucified body. The cup—usually called the grail—was taken to Rome by St. Peter and it was used as the Papal Chalice until the time of Sixtus II. It was then sent to Huesca by St. Lawrence, first Deacon of the Roman Church, where it stayed until 713. It was carried as part of the portable paraphernalia of the Court of Aragon. In the eleventh century it was in Jaca, in the twelfth century at Juan de la Pena Monastery, in the fourteenth it was taken to Zaragoza by King Martin the Human, and in 1437 it was presented to Valencia Cathedral by Don Juan, the King of Navarre. Most of the churches in Valencia were vandalized or bombed during the Spanish Civil War (euphemistically called “the National Uprising”), but the grail remained intact. It had been taken out and hidden in the village of Carlet, in the mountains southwest of Valencia, so that it would not be smashed.

It is venerated. It “receives a continuous growing cult … The cup is very ancient work and nothing can be said against the idea that it was utilized by the Lord during the first eucharistic consecration,” J. A. Oñate writes in his definitive book on the subject.

Oh, well, all of this might be true. But even if it isn’t the Holy Grail, the agate cup is much prettier than the chunks of the True Cross that are displayed all over Italy—enough pieces of the cross, it is said, to rebuild the Italian navy.

A priest was saying mass in the Holy Grail chapel each time I took my skeptical self to examine it. This continuous mass struck me as being exactly analogous to the plot device in Paul Bowles’s short story “Pastor Dow at Tacaté,” where an American preacher can only attract Indians to his church by playing “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” on a wind-up Victrola. As long as the song plays the Indians sit quietly, and when the music stops (and the Indians get up to leave the church) the preacher rushes over and gets the music going again.

In the same way, godless visitors looking for the cup enter the chapel where a priest is saying mass, and as the Holy Grail is fairly small and far-off, these idly curious people are forced to sit down or kneel. Then, gawking at the Holy Grail, they are trapped by the mass. And there they remain, squinting, listening to the mass and the preaching and the denunciations.

There was once a mosque where this cathedral stands. The mosque had itself displaced a Christian church. That early church had been built on the ruins of a Roman temple to Diana. These layers of history, like sedimentary rock, are less typical of Spanish history than of the historical multiplicity of the Mediterranean coast. Very similar layers existed on the coasts of Italy and Albania and Egypt, and elsewhere. Nine cultures on the same spot.

The city center of Valencia was mobbed with beggars jostling for the best begging spots. Beggars tended to congregate around the churches (as they do around mosques in Muslim countries). They were not all old women selling prayer cards, or the lame or the blind. There were some pale youths, and harridans, bearded junkies in black leather, all haranguing passersby or churchgoers. Some others held elaborate signs. I am the father of three young children and I have no job.

Valencia, an old provincial capital on the sea, had a pleasant aura. It was low and gray; it was not busy; it seemed to me happily unfashionable, and though it is Spain’s third-largest city it had an air of friendliness. The central part of Valencia was labyrinthine, dusty, full of shabby shops selling hardware and groceries and cheap clothes. This was Valencia in the winter, a city returned to itself, with no tourists and little traffic; but even in the summer I imagined that the tourists would be at the beach.

Fishermen headed out of the nearby port of El Grao and netted sardines, farmers grew oranges near the city in the irrigated plain the Spaniards call a huerta. I had a sardine sandwich for lunch, and two oranges. Then I walked in the sunshine to the Torres de Serrano, not to marvel at the antiquity of these towers, but to see the flea market in the same neighborhood. This flea market told sad stories. It was a mass of old and semi-destitute people selling things no one could possibly want—broken eyeglasses, bent coat hangers, old plastic toys, rusted alarm clocks, faded cassette tapes, faucets, battered board games, old magazines, beads, books, and more. It was very grubby stuff. Only the old clothes were moving. Most of the people were browsing and chatting. This was one example of hard-up Spain, but it could not have been typical since nearly all the stuff was worthless.

A man selling postcards caught my eye and said, “These are valuable.”

“How much is this one?” It was General Franco.

“Four hundred pesetas.” Three dollars.

“Why so much?”

“That’s El Caudillo in his military uniform. That’s from 1940.”

Because I wanted to get him on the subject of Franco, I haggled a little, offered him less than he had demanded, and he said okay.

“Why is it I never see statues of Franco?” I asked, pocketing the picture.

“Here in Valencia there are none. But you’ll see them in Madrid, and in Barcelona. Plenty in Galicia.”

“Why aren’t there any here?”

“Politics!” he exploded, and threw up his hands.

The portrait made Franco look like a Roman emperor, just the sort of image that a man noted for being personally timid would choose. He praised and attempted to flatter the Nazis, who returned the favor by nicknaming Franco “The Dwarf of the Pardo.” Paul Preston in his exhaustive thousand-page biography, Franco, writes, “the hunger for adulation, the icy cruelty and the tongue-tied shyness were all manifestations of a deep sense of inadequacy.”

“Despite fifty years of public prominence and a life lived well into the television age, Francisco Franco remains the least known of the great dictators of the twentieth century.” This is how Preston begins his book. “That is partly because of the smoke screen created by hagiographers and propagandists. In his lifetime he was compared with the Archangel Gabriel, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, El Cid, Charles V, Philip II, Napoleon, and a host of other real and imaginary heroes.”

Valencia Railway Station was picked out with ceramics of figures and fruit, and prettily painted, with flags stirring and a gold ball and eagle. It had the whimsy and hospitality of the front gate of a fairground. Entering it gave a pleasant feeling of frivolity if not recklessness to any onward train journey.

The bullring next to the station was huge and well-made, elaborate brickwork, arches and colonnades, not old, but handsome and a bit sinister, like the temple of a violent religion, a place of sacrifice, which was what it was. There were no bullfights that week in the Valencia bullring, but there were plenty on television. Televised bullfights I found to be one of the irritations of eating in cheap restaurants—the way the diners stopped eating when the bull was about to be stabbed, the close attention they gave to the stabbing—a silence in the whole place—and then the action replay, the whole length of the sword running into the bull’s neck, the bull dropping and vomiting blood in slow motion.

It’s not really a Catholic country, the Spaniards told me, but this express train to Barcelona was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. I asked the conductor why this was so. “It’s just a name,” he said.

The Virgin sped out of Valencia and along the Mediterranean shoreline of gray sand and blue sea, a plain of gardens and trees and square houses of brown stone, the hills rising to mountains in the background, a classic Spanish landscape of dry overgrazed hills, some of it hardly built upon. But most of it, especially around the coastal town of Tarragona and beyond, is overdeveloped, full of houses. Yet even the most unsightly place was relieved by vineyards or lemon trees, orchards, palm trees. It did not have the nasty urban desolation of industrialized Europe.

There were mainly Spaniards on the train. A few foreigners were heading to Barcelona, others to Port-Bou, the last stop in Spain before the train entered France. There were clusters of Japanese, and French businessmen, and Moroccans. And Kurt, who was heading back to Germany. He was very fat and bearded, in a leather vest, with a tattoo on his wrist, and very drunk at two in the afternoon, in the buffet car.

“This tattoo—I made it myself! I got drunk and took a needle and just went plunk-plunk-plunk for three hours.”

The tattoo seemed to show a hot dog in a man’s hand, but Kurt helped me to see that it depicted a bulky submarine being crushed by an enormous hairy fist. Above it were the words Germany—Navy and below it, Killer Submarine Crew.

“Why are those words in English?”

We were speaking German. Kurt did not speak English.

“They just are.”

“Were you in the navy?”

“For twenty years, based in Wilhelmshaven, but I also traveled.” It seemed an unlikely question because he was not much older than I was but I asked, “Did you destroy any submarines?”

“No, but I would have if I had to. I knew how.”

“Why did you leave the navy?”

“Family problems. My son is a diabetic. He needs my help. And my wife is in the hospital.”

“Serious?”

“Yes. She jabs herself—with a needle, you know. She is not a fixer, not really. She is sick.”

“What brought you to Valencia?”

“Football. Karlsruhe was playing Valencia.”

“Who won?”

He growled and made a face. “Valencia,” he said, and uttering the word seemed to make him thoughtful. He was probably thinking of the defeat, the details of the game. He drank for a while longer, and while he was lost in his thoughts I started to slip away.

“Wait,” he said. “See this tattoo?” He rolled up his sleeve. “This one was much easier to do. I did this one myself, too.”

Eventually I went back to my seat. As this was an express, the Virgin had a TV in each car. The video that trip was a soft-porn film of the Blue Lagoon variety—castaways, jungle, friendly parrot, and plenty of excuses for the man and woman to get their clothes off.

Headphones were sold, though hardly anyone bought them. Most of the passengers looked out the train window at the pretty coves and the rocky shoreline, the steep cliffs, the pines and the small port villages. We had passed Sagunto and Castellón, and the Desierto de las Palmas, a high ridge with an eighteenth-century monastery to the west. Past miles of fruit trees and tenements by the sea, and after Tortosa on the River Ebro we were traveling ten feet from the sea, known in this corner of the Mediterranean as the Balearic Sea.

In spite of its fragrant herbaceous name, Tarragona was a grim place. That seemed to be the rule on this part of the Mediterranean shore. The town had been the subject of poems by Martial. The wines had been praised by Pliny. “The emperor himself wintered here in 26 B.C. after his Cantabrian campaign.” Now it was mainly an oil-cracking plant and a strip of littered shore. The sour stink of sulfuric acid is an unmistakable indication that you have entered an industrial suburb. Sitges, farther along, once a fashionable resort, was now known mainly for its strip of homosexual beach.

Big cities seem to me like destinations, walled-in stopping places, with nothing beyond their monumental look of finality, breathing You’ve arrived to the traveler. But I did not want to have a destination on the Mediterranean coast. I had planned to push on and to avoid places like Barcelona; or at least see them glancingly and not linger. Such a rich place seemed perfect for the person who wanted to write a book about a city. There were many with the title Barcelona. Yet I hung on.

It was a sunny afternoon when I arrived on the “Virgen” from Valencia. I was in no hurry. And Barcelona seemed a bright and lovely place, pleasant for walking around, with parks and wide boulevards and a brightness and prosperity. The prosperity might have been an illusion. One of the city’s car factories, a division of Fiat, shut down the day I arrived, putting nine thousand people out of work. The graffiti was almost instantaneous: FIAT = MAFIA.

But I had other reasons for liking Barcelona. In its bookstores, along with pornographic comics and photo magazines, the many bullfighting magazines, treatises on the occult, and dreams, and witches; knitting magazines, marriage manuals, motorcycle monthlies, sadistic and romantic novels, dictionaries, gardening books, gun digests, and hagiographies, were also La Costa de Mosquitos and Mi Historia Secreta, San Jack, La Calle de la Media Luna, Zona Exterior, and some more books, in Spanish translation, written by me.

People in Barcelona were apparently buying and reading my books. Knowing that gave the city an air of sympathy and erudition and it made me want to stay a while.

I had not had a good meal since starting. Spanish food was—what? Undistinguished, unmemorable, regional. In several Spanish towns I had been encouraged by locals to eat at Italian restaurants; in Cartagena I was told the best place was Chinese. Spaniards often disparaged their own food, and said the restaurants were terrible, and when I asked them what they liked to eat they would mention something their mother made.

Barcelona, full of great restaurants, was the exception to all this. The city had been spruced up for the Olympics but even so it had always had a reputation for good living and great art, the Picasso Museum, the Gaudí cathedral. And that was odd for me because in my mind it was the bombed and besieged city at the heart of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, fiercely contended for by fascists, communists and anarchists.

What was the Spanish view of all that? Presumably there were many Spanish books about that, “the National Uprising.”

“There are almost no books of that kind,” Antonio was saying.

We were eating sea urchins’ eggs with julienne of seared tuna at his restaurant La Balsa. There are seldom any lapses in service when you are seated with the owner.

“We have no memory. For example, no one in Spain writes biographies. There are no memoirs at all.”

“It is as though we do not want to remember the past,” his companion Beatriz said. “It’s strange, but that’s Spain.

“We live for today and tomorrow. We don’t think about yesterday. It’s not good. Maybe it’s better to have no memories at all than have bad memories.”

“My family was okay,” Antonio said. “They were not for Franco, but they were monarchists.”

Beatriz said she had been an anarchist, an unexpected announcement from a prosperous and well-turned-out woman, who had just praised the wine, or perhaps it was my ignorant presumption that an anarchist was an outlaw. And I should have known better, because Orwell, who had been a member of a Trotskyite militia, had described the anarchist brigades.

She smiled and said that anarchists greeted each other with the word “Salud!”

“Let’s say your great-great-grandfather went to Cuba and made a fortune selling and buying slaves,” Antonio said. “If someone writes a book about that, a biography, and claims this relative of yours was a slaver, the family will be hurt, eh? Better not to hurt the family. I think this.”

“Tony uses that example because his great-great-grandfather sold slaves in Cuba,” Beatriz said.

“Maybe he sold slaves and maybe not, but anyway he made his fortune in Cuba.”

“Doing what?”

“Many things.” Antonio was smiling sheepishly. “That is why I say, better not to ask.”

I said, “But when I asked about the past I wasn’t thinking of the eighteenth century. I was thinking about thirty years ago, or less.”

I had yet to accustom myself to such remote allusions. This example of colonial Cuba was typical of a certain Mediterranean way of thinking. Antonio might easily have mentioned the ancient Iberians. The Gibraltarians casually quoted the Treaty of Utrecht, the coastal French could talk about the Roman occupation until the cows came home, and the Italians reminisced about the Etruscans. Even this was nothing compared with a Greek in full cry, describing his glorious Hellenic heritage (“Euripides once said …”), or a Turk animadverting about the Ottoman Empire. And references to Masada, Moses, and the wisdom of the prophet Abraham were part of most Israelis’ small talk. Much of this was romance, or at least sentimental. The Frenchmen who talked about the Romans would be evasive when the subject of the German occupation was raised. Israelis might not be happy talking about something that occurred in South Lebanon last year. There was a book to be written about Mediterranean notions of time.

Nor, in the Mediterranean, were there clear divisions between the dead and the living, between the mythical and the real. That was another book.

Meanwhile, Antonio was answering my question.

“For some people there is a clear memory of Franco,” he said. “It is not good. Everything changed after he died—in fifteen years we changed totally. But maybe we had changed before, and kept it to ourselves.”

Beatriz said, “The taxi drivers are sentimental. They say things were better before—less crime, no drugs, more order.”

“Taxi drivers all over the world say that,” I said.

“And the young people say, ‘Franco? Wasn’t he a general?’ ”

“It was the tourists who kept us up to date,” Antonio said.

Was he talking about individual travelers, or the vast numbers of predictable and frugal package tourists, the English out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, wearing socks under their sandals and demanding Watney’s Red Barrel and the Daily Express and complaining of garlic in the food and joking about tummy upsets and diarrhea, and overdoing it on the first day and—too late—putting Timothy White’s sun cream on their big sunburned beaks. The Spannies don’t have our clean ways, innit?

Them, he said, the lower-middle-class hearties and trippers.

“We learned a lot from them,” he said. “Ideas, style, what they thought of us and our government. We learned about the rest of the world. And Franco thought he had closed the door.”

But the reason might also have been that in the twilight period of the seventies, Franco was on his deathbed, and book and movie censorship had been relaxed. Of these years, Colm Tóibín writes, in Homage to Barcelona, “People [in Barcelona] lived in a free country of their own invention, despite the police, despite the dying Dictator.”

My dinner companions asked me about my trip so far, about the provinces of Andalusia and Murcia and Valencia.

This raised a common Mediterranean theme. There was another book to be written, based on the text: This is not one country—this is many countries. Italy was several countries; so were Turkey and Israel and France and Cyprus. Yugoslavia was quite a few countries. And Spain?

“Spain is not a country,” Antonio said. “It is many different countries, with many different languages. Andalusia is so different from Castilia and Galicia. Yet, somehow, Andalusian culture got exported—the guitar, the dances, the songs, all that. Foreigners think that Spanish culture is Andalusian only. But this is many nations.”

“That’s why the Spanish can’t write about it,” Beatriz said. “Only outsiders can.”

We talked about the Spain of Gerald Brenan, and Pritchett, and Jan Morris, and H. V. Morton, and Hemingway, and George Borrow, and Rose Macauley, and Robert Graves. It was true, Spain had been thoroughly anatomized by foreigners, the British especially.

“Mario Vargas Llosa comes here quite a lot,” Antonio said, referring to the novelist who ran unsuccessfully for President of Peru. “He says, ‘People in Spain talk in a lively and intelligent way. They are very perceptive and sometimes very rude. Then they go home and do nothing.’ ”

One night in Barcelona I had been invited to one of those parties where everyone was witty. There was a poet, a moviemaker, a philosophy professor, a publisher, a painter, a musician, about fifteen people around a table, all intellectuals and artists, and all of them friends, all drunk on champagne—the empty bottles littered the table—celebrating the director’s forty-fourth birthday. They laughed and poked fun and quoted each other, while I sat and marveled. It was a bright, cliquey, old-fashioned, unself-conscious gathering of people, neither fashionable nor wealthy, but all of them talented—and, incidentally, every person at the table was smoking a cigarette.

Antonio went on quoting Vargas Llosa, “‘The English meet at London parties. They are very polite, they hardly talk. Then they go home and write amazing things—rude, wicked, funny, lively.’ ”

“Paul is so polite,” Beatriz said. “Maybe that means he is going to write something wicked!”

On the contrary, in Barcelona I was thinking kindly of the Spanish; what I saw (and it made me hopeful for the rest of my trip) was simple affection. In other travels I had not seen much affection between men and women, that is, open displays of physical intimacy—kissing, hand-holding, snogging, canoodling, a sudden hug; not lust but affection, friendship, reassurance, paddling palms and pinching fingers. I had hardly seen it in China. It was rare on the islands of Oceania. It did not exist in India.

I saw it in Spain: old married couples holding hands, young people kissing, married ones embracing. It was not submissive and sexist. It was deeply affecting, spontaneous and candid. I thought: I like this.

Even at the Barcelona bullfight, my last bullfight, couples held hands there too.

“He is a show-off,” a woman behind me said, calling him a presumido. The matador was kissing the tips of the bull’s horns, kneeling just in front of the bleeding drooling animal, and teasingly flicking the bull’s head with his finger.

Then the bull came alive and rewarded the matador for taunting him. It bore down on the matador and tore him with its hoofs and gored him, as the cape-waggers tried to distract the murderously provoked creature. The matador got up. There was blood on his arm and his hip. The crowd cheered him, but in a robust and almost satirical way. Then I saw why. The bull in goring him had torn the matador’s tight trousers just at the crotch, and as he limped his dick was exposed, a small pink sausage.

I fell into conversation with the man next to me and said I wondered what happened to the bull after it was dragged away dead.

They were butchered and eaten, he said. He described the broth that was made from the bull’s tail, the steaks that were cut from its haunches; and hamburgers that were made from chopped bull.

“And tomorrow morning you can find the bull’s criadilla on the menu of certain restaurants in Barcelona,” he said.

Criadilla?

“Cojónes,” he said. “But cojónes is not polite. Better to say criadilla.

“The bull’s testicles are served like brain. And it is like eating kiwi fruits. You think they are going to be tough, then you bite, and it is soft and tender and mushy.”

After the Picasso Museum and the climb to the top of the hill Montjuic and through Parc Güell, I made a tour of Gaudí’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Colm Tóibín, in his book on Barcelona, tells the story of Gaudí’s being interrogated by a visiting bishop. Why had Gaudí decorated the tops of towers which no one would ever see?

Gaudí said, “Your Grace, the angels will see them.”

And then I set out again, up the flat tame coast they call the Costa de Maresme, which would lead me to the rugged cliffy Costa Brava, the “Wild Coast,” and the French border.

Badalona just outside the city was both Roman ruins and a grotesque power plant. One stop out of Arc de Triunfo station, going north along the Mediterranean, and Barcelona out the back window seemed like a small town at the foot of a wooded hill—an illusion perhaps, but that was how it seemed.

There was enough surf for surfers and boogie boarders on the first stretch of shore, at Banys Mortgat; I could see them in black wetsuits in the cold water. The train loped along, next to the shore, and on this overcast day there were nudists sheltering from the wind at Frenys de Mar, and more just before St. Pol, a nude man and a clothed man lying together; and a nude woman reading a book that she had clasped between her knees; a nude man on his back, a nude woman on her stomach, smooth ones, hairy ones. In the winter!

For the rest it was the Mediterranean shuffle, people walking dogs, families, pipe smokers, men in berets walking arm in arm, and old crippled nuns not only dressed up like penguins but walking like penguins, side to side, in that flat-footed way. And a man swaying and pissing in the Mediterranean in full view of the train passengers—couples, families, children, nuns, priests, monks, dogs, lovers.

St. Pol de Mar was a dense but well-maintained seaside resort, and I could see that the towns improved as the train moved north and the coast became rockier. There were palms on the promenade at Calella, where “Fisioculturismo” was announced on a poster, the “25th Championship of Body-building—the Calella Finals.” At Pineda del Mar, apart from the pines, there were cabbages planted by the sea and vineyards inland. The bigger and busier places had signs in German and English.

There were shouting girls on the train, and there was sexual defiance in the way they seemed to challenge the boys across the aisle with their loud laughter. Others were pushing each other and calling out. A poor old woman ate potato chips out of her handbag. A snotty infant clutched a paper bag. Two mustached nuns nodded as the train jogged on the tracks. The painter Constable said, “Nothing is ugly in this world.”

Blanes was a cut above the others in this strung-out shore of small resorts, and not on the main line. Although I was going farther, it is the limit of a day trip, as far as it is possible to go on an outing from Barcelona. It lies in a bay, the beginning of the Costa Brava, with a rocky bluff and a rocky promontory and a harbor with fishing boats and sailboats, and only its post-war architecture identifies it as Spanish—a wall of stucco flat-fronted tenements and apartment blocks, with rusty balconies facing the sea. Today the sea looked like iron, and the beach was brown sand and chilly palms, with a cold sun glowing behind the thick clouds.

And at Blanes the same signs I had been seeing ever since I had left Gibraltar: Snak Bar, Snaks, Pizza, Helados, Lotteria, Motel, Pizzeria, Hamburguesa, Hotel del Mar, Bar Paraiso, Camping, Telefon, Heladeria, Bistro, Bodega, Viajes, Peluqueria, Cambio-Exchange-Change-Wechsel, Bebe Coca-Cola, Discoteca, Piscina, For Rent, For Sale, Cerveceria, Club Nautic, Hostel, but also because this was militant Catalonia, the angry graffiti, Puta Espanya and Puta Madre and En Catalan and Free Catalunya!

Blanes, with its trampled sand, its masses of footprints, its blowing paper, its empty promenade, could stand for them all.

In the morning I got back on the main line, traveling north to Figueres and the frontier. At each station on the line, stocky men puffing cigarettes were cutting the smaller branches from the plane trees, turning them into ugly stumps, some of the trees looking castrated and others like amputees and the slighter ones seeming as though they had had brutal haircuts. The neat bundles of branches, the procession of ladders, all the saws and axes, and the many men carrying out the operation gave it the appearance of a solemn ritual—so methodical, unhurried, tidy and self-important, the cutters seeming priestly as they went about their business. The ritual element might also have meant that they were members of a labor union. I had the feeling that they would never allow a woman to do a simple job. This was going on at Sils and Flassá and Camallera and Vilademat.

The heart of Girona is medieval. The cathedral dates from the eleventh century. Guidebook: “It was with stone, from a steeple of this old cathedral, that the clergy of Girona celebrated Easter 1278 by bombarding the adjacent Judería [ghetto].” Yet from the train Girona was like a view of China—the plain brick buildings, the leafless trees, the bright dry hills outside, the harshness, the streets being swept by men with twig brooms, the sticklike trees and tiled roofs; it looked to me like any Chinese town of the same size, even to the turgid river Onyar with its water a dubious color. Outside it, the way the gardens were planted in narrow allotments, the look of the tile roofs of the stucco cottages, the neatness, the fruit-farms, an absence of decoration made it seem intensely Chinese.

There were so many trains on this line that I got off, walked around Girona; caught another train north, went to Figueres, got off, walked around Figueres.

In a cafe in the middle of Girona an Arab—who was perhaps a Moroccan—was sprawled on the floor. He was tangled in the chair legs, as a policeman nagged him and people stared. The Spanish are both very polite and very curious, an awkward combination of traits, and so they have developed an economical and yet piercing way of eavesdropping, an unintrusive way of being nosy. The policeman and another man helped the Arab to his feet and then sat him down. And then the policeman began hitting the Arab on the arm as he questioned him. The Arab looked too drugged and dazed to care. He looked as though he was being picked on, but also in such a provincial town in Spain every outsider looked like a Martian.

On the way to Figueres a little sorority of Japanese girls twittered among themselves. They lacked the characteristic Nipponese submissiveness, but as their giggles grew louder and a bit frenzied an old Spaniard stood up and turned his evil eye upon them and silenced them, and they became enigmatic. They were the first of many young Japanese women who were boldly traveling along the shores of the Mediterranean, some of them taking advantage of the low season, others refugees from language schools in France and Italy.

One of the first buildings I saw in Figueres was the Asilo-Villalonga—the town asylum, for mental cases. In 1904, Salvador Dalí was born in Figueres. This was nine months after his brother (also named Salvador) died, and the second Salvador might have ended up in this asylum if his madness had not also brought forth paintings and sculptures of great ingenuity. As a sixteen-year-old he wrote in his diary, “Perhaps I’ll be misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius. I am sure of it.”

Dalí’s parents always kept a huge (“majestic”) painting of the first Salvador (who died at the age of seven) in their bedroom. Dalí said he lived two lives, his brother’s and his own. In Madrid as a young art student he met Federico García Lorca, and later in life Dalí reminisced about his friendship with the distinguished poet and playwright.

“[Lorca] was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice … I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I did owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole.”

Sentiments of this sort in Dalí’s autobiography shocked George Orwell, who regarded him as abnormal, without any morality, and James Thurber, who jeered at him. Dalí simply laughed: his book had succeeded in upsetting readers. He spent his life attempting to outrage people’s sense of decency; he played at perversion and then came to believe in it, even in the nonsense he uttered. In his eyes there was no portrait or landscape that could not be improved by adding another breast, or a corpse, or a handful of ants.

Yet Dalí was also the consummate Spaniard—a Catalan to boot—and throughout his work are the Spanish preoccupations and iconography: bulls, Christs, Quixotes, Virgins, nakedness, fetishism, eroticism, humor, anticlericalism, dry hills, matadors. A Dalí crucifixion is erotic and pious at the same time. In Dalí’s work as in Spanish life there is no dividing line between the sacred and the profane, between a shrine and a boudoir, a sport and a sacrifice, between sexual passion or spiritual ecstasy. Dalí made the fetishes and relics of the church his own obsessions; and his wife Gala (who had been the wife of the French poet Paul Eluard) was at once virgin, whore, Venus; his mother, his madonna and his coquette.

“I am the king of cuckolds!” Dalí shrieked as he saw Gala being rowed out to sea by a young fisherman who fancied her. Dalí indulged Gala in her preference for young handsome men. Gala was active with these studs well into her seventies, though the sexual athletics may also have shortened her life. When Gala died Dalí stopped eating and went off his head—or rather went madder in such a melancholy way that he ceased to paint.

He had delighted in being a spectator to Gala’s numerous romances and, intensely voyeuristic, he took his pleasure in watching the sexual act being performed live by hired hands in his castle. He inspires a similarly voyeuristic impulse in anyone who looks at his pictures. He invites voyeurism: you don’t enter his pictures, or even feel them much. You stand a few feet away, fascinated. It is hard to know what to think of the cannibals and giraffes and amputees in the pictures; it is also hard to look away, because Dalí has a diabolical mastery of space. And so you gape, a bit ashamed, a bit amused, mostly bewildered.

Although he cheerfully mutilated his pictorial subjects, he was capable of painting the human body in its most idealized form; and perhaps since the act of sodomy fascinated Dalí—he paid couples to perform it privately for him—he was at his most expressive and naturalistic when painting human buttocks. The shapely curves of thigh and back are found all over his work—not shocking at all, but lovingly presented, not an ant in sight, no disfigurement at all. A good example of this, one of his most brilliant bums, is the painting “Dalí Raising the Skin of the Mediterranean Sea to Show Gala the Birth of Venus.”

That painting hangs in the quirky Dalí Museum, one of Figueres’ former theaters, Dalí’s legacy and living joke. Dalí is also buried there, which ranks it as one of the more bizarre mausoleums in the world. Entering the museum is like walking inside Dalí’s teeming brain. He designed the museum and so it is as much his house as his head—his life’s work, perhaps his masterpiece of surrealism. It is an eccentric but well-arranged building, with a gift shop where you can buy Dalí tarot cards and Dalí scarves and even a melted wristwatch that gives the exact time.

Rooms and corridors, painted ceilings, monsters, masks, junk, a 1936 Cadillac with a fat seven-foot goddess straddling the hood and opera music blasting from the radiator grille. Elsewhere there are skeletons—dog skulls, croc skulls, an entire gorilla skeleton with the head of the Virgin Mary encased in the rib cage. The gorilla bones are gilded. There are ants everywhere. The unlikeliest objects such as chamber pots are covered in feathers; machine parts are coated in fur; human bodies in soup spoons.

A fetching photo of Dalí shows him wearing a loaf of bread on his head. His Venus de Milo has desk drawers for breasts. There is a shrine with big buckets and even bigger nudes, and “Sala de Mae West” is a pair of enormous lips and nostrils, with a specially erected viewing stand.

Much of it is mockery—of classicism, the Church, authority, women, convention, Christ, Spain. He did riffs on Velazquez, copies of Las Meninas, a satire of Millais in the style of Seurat, a satire of Picasso in the style of Picasso.

You need to be a talented Spaniard maddened by all that history and culture to explode like this. Obviously brilliant, often childish, at his best he seems as great as an old master, and then you see that it is pastiche—his originality is a kind of comedy, the comedy of outrage, and perhaps the personification of the Spanish temper.

One of the highest compliments in Spain is the dedicatory bullfight. On August 12, 1961, this honor was accorded to Dalí, in the Plaza de Toros in Figueres, “An Extraordinary Corrida to Pay Homage to the Eminent Artist Salvador Dalí.”

In his later years he supported Franco, and this alienated those friends of his who had endured his nonsensical and dotty utterances. They drew the line at fascism. Once, after a lunch with Franco, Dalí said, “I have reached the conclusion that he is a saint.” Before then he had not been particularly political—he was not yet scatterbrained enough for that. He had chosen to be oblique, and had said, apropos of “Autumn Cannibalism” (two semi-humans, feeding on each other, propped up with crutches and garnished with ants) that it showed “the pathos of the Civil War considered (by me) as a phenomenon of natural history, as opposed to Picasso who considered it a political phenomenon.”

Luis Buñuel made The Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou) with Dalí; a celebrated image in the notorious fifteen-minute film is an eyeball sliced with a razor. But Buñuel eventually came to regret and finally loathe Dalí for his self-promotion and irresponsible encouragement of Franco. Buñuel had said in his memoirs that he considered surrealism “a poetic, a revolutionary, and a moral movement.”

Dalí did not reply, though he might have said that all war was inevitable because we are so unpredictable and impulsive, and because all human life involves savagery and fetishism. Religion and politics, in the Dalí scheme of things, are the primitive expression of our fears and desires. There is no question that he succeeds at depicting this.

The Dalí Museum in Figueres is a repository of flea-market castoffs and visual paradoxes; it is junkyard art, found objects, ceramic ambiguities, and perverse natural history. It is a monument to Dalí’s exhibitionism. He occupies the middle ground, somewhere between a buffoon and a genius, wearing his deviation on his sleeve a bit too obviously for many people’s comfort, hiding very little. He is somewhat like the youths of Figueres who spray the old walls of the town with graffiti as they chew Bubbaloo (“The gum stuffed with liquid!”) and are watched by old men who wear vast floppy berets. Dalí has been belittled as a buffoon. The proof of Dalí’s gift is that he knows how to arouse us, and outrage us, and make us laugh.

Apart from this artistic funfair, Figueres is an ordinary town, of whiny cars and narrow streets, and working people. It is conventional to see Dalí as an aberration. But I had the feeling, seeing the Spaniards of Figueres, that Dalí was speaking for them, perhaps for all of us, from the depths of our unconscious.

There was no train to Cadaqués. I took a bus to this vertical village. Here, nearby at Port Lligat, Dalí lived, on the Costa Brava, the real, wild thing, with rocks and cliffs and a dangerous shore. It is steep and stony, with precipitous cliffs and headlands with some vineyards. There are few beaches to speak of, only small tight harbors and coves, littered beaches with masses of flotsam. Another bus took me across a steep cape of land, back to the railway line.

This was Llanca. It was sunset. I hated traveling after dark, because it meant I could not see anything out the window. So I stayed in Llancà, a pretty bay with condos by the sea, all looking (perhaps this was surrealism suggested by my recent experience of Dalí) like kitchen appliances. They were all shut for the winter. After writing my notes and having a drink I walked to the beach, where some fishermen stood under a cold purple sunset sky. They were casting and standing by their poles, rubbing their hands, waiting for a nibble as night fell, and to the north there was a shadow, a black sky, winter in France.

5

“Le Grand Sud” to Nice

What threw me was the sameness of the sea. The penetrating blue this winter day and the pale sky and the lapping of water on the shore, continuous and unchanging, the simultaneous calm in eighteen countries, and those aqueous and indistinct borders, made it seem like a small world of nations, cheek by jowl, with their chins in the water. And it was so calm I could imagine myself trespassing, from one to the other, in a small boat, or even swimming. So much for the immutable sea.

On land, the station at Port-Bou, the edge of Spain, was like a monument to Franco. Fascism shows more clearly in the facades of buildings than in the faces of people. This one was self-consciously monumental, austere to the point of ugliness, very orderly and uncomfortable, under the Chaine des Arberes, a gray range of mountains. The train rattled, and it moved slowly on squeaky wheels through the gorge to the station at Cerbère, the beginning of France.

There were no passport formalities, the bright winter light did not change, and yet there was a distinct sense of being in another country. And that was odd because all we had done was jog a short way along the shore. Gibraltar is a marvel of nature—it looks like a different place. But the border between Spain and France (and France and Italy, and so on) looks arbitrary, vague in reality and distinct only on a map. But some aspects of it spoke of a frontier: the different angle of the mountains, especially the way the lower slopes were covered in cactuses, plump little plants, sprouting from every crevice and ledge on the rock face and cliffs that overlooked the harbor at Cerbère, an odor, too—disinfectant and the sea and the cigarette smoke; but most of all the Arabs. There had been none in the small port towns over the border, but there was a sudden arabesque of lounging cab drivers, porters, travelers, lurkers.

“There are a lot of them in Marseilles,” a young man said in English. He was sitting just ahead of me, with his friend, and holding a guitar case on his lap, he was addressing two Japanese travelers, still saying “them.”

He was referring to the Arabs without using the word.

“We’re going there,” one of the Japanese said.

“That’s a real rough place.”

“What? You mean we’ll get ripped off?”

“Worse.”

That stopped them. What was worse than being robbed?

“Like I got robbed on the subway train,” the first American said. “And then they tried to steal my guitar. There are gangs.”

“Gangs,” the Japanese man said.

“Lots of them,” the American said.

“Where do you think we should stay?”

“Not in Marseilles. Arles, maybe. Van Gogh? The painter? That Arles. Like you could always take a day trip to Marseilles.”

“Is it that bad?”

The second American said, “I’d go to Marseilles again if I could leave my stuff behind. That’s why I didn’t go to Morocco. What would I do with my guitar?”

“You speak French?” the Japanese traveler asked.

“I can read it. Do you know any other languages?”

“Japanese.”

“Your English is great.”

“I grew up in New Jersey,” the Japanese man said.

At this point I took out my notebook, and on the pretext of reading my newspaper wrote down the conversation. The Japanese man was talking about Fort Lee, New Jersey, his childhood, the schools. The man with the guitar was also from New Jersey.

“Fort Lee’s not that nice,” the man with the guitar said. It seemed a harsh judgment of the Japanese fellow’s hometown.

“It used to be,” the Japanese man said. “But I’d be freaking out when I went to New York.”

“My brother loves sports, but he’s too scared to go to New York and watch the games.”

“Like, I never took the subway in ten years.”

“I don’t have a problem with the subway.”

“Except, like, you might get dead there.”

The Japanese man was silent. Then he said, “How did these guys attempt to rob you?”

“Did I say ‘attempt’?”

“Okay, how did they do it?”

“The way they always do. They crowd you. They get into your pockets. One guy went for me. I kicked him in the legs. He tried to kick me when he got off the train.”

“That’s it. I’m not going to Marseilles,” the Japanese man said.

I got tired of transcribing this conversation, which was repetitious, the way fearful people speak when they require reassurance. It all sounded convincing to me, and it made me want to go to Marseilles.

The landscape had begun to distract me. Almost immediately a greater prosperity had become apparent—in the houses, the way they were built, the trees, the towns, the texture of the land, the well-built retaining walls, the sturdy fences, even the crops, the blossoms, the way the fields are squared off, from Banyuls-sur-Mer to bourgeoisified Perpignan.

With this for contrast, I saw Spain as a place that was struggling to keep afloat. It had something to do with tourism. The Spanish towns from the Costa Brava south are dead in the low season; the French towns just a few miles along looked as though they were booming even without tourists. They did not have that soulless appearance of apprehension and abandonment that tourist towns take on in the winter: the empty streets, the windswept beach, the promises on signs and posters, the hollow-eyed hotels.

The train was traveling next to the sea—or, rather, more precisely, next to the great lagoon-like ponds called étangs: Étang de Leucate, Étang de Lapalme, and into Narbonne, the Étang de Bages et de Sigean, the railway line between Étang de l’Ayrolle—like a low-lying Asiatic landscape feature, the traverse between fish farms or paddy fields.

Towards Narbonne there were fruit trees in bloom—apples, cherries, peach blossoms. And shore birds in the marshes, and at the edges of the flat attenuated beach. There were Dalí-esque details in all this—I put this down to my recent visit to the crackpot museum. The first was a chateau in the middle of nowhere, with vineyards around it, turrets and towers and pretty windows, a smug little absurdity in the seaside landscape, a little castle, like a grace note in a painting. There was no reason for it to be there. And much stranger than that, what looked like an enormous flock of pink flamingos circling over the étang a few miles before the tiny station of Gruissan-Tourebelle. I made a note of the name because I felt I was hallucinating. Flamingos? Here?

That night, in Narbonne, in Languedoc, I was wondering about those flamingos I thought I had seen flying out of the salty lagoons by the sea on the way into the city. Having a cup of coffee in the cool blossom-scented air of Mediterranean midwinter I struck up a conversation with Rachel, at the next table. A student at the university in Montpellier, she was spending a few days at home with her family. She was twenty, a native of Narbonne.

“They are flamingos, yes—especially at Étang de Leucate,” Rachel said.

The tall pink birds had not been a hallucination of mine; yet it was February, fifty degrees Fahrenheit. What was the story?

“All the étangs have flamingos”—the word is the same in French—“but in the summer when there are a lot of people around they sometimes fly off and hide in the trees.”

Rachel did not know more than that.