The Pillars of Hercules

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.