The Pillars of Hercules

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.”