The Pillars of Hercules

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.