Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

“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.