Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

This was the sort of coast that had inspired the witty last line in Harry Ritchie’s book about the Costa del Sol, Here We Go. Looking up from the deranged coast of hooligans and package tourists, and seeing the sunset on the mountains, the author reflects, “Spain. It looked a beautiful country. Someday, I thought, I really must go there.”

To Fuengirola again— Everything for Your Pets, Real British Pub —and then on to Marbella via trailer parks and the hills of white condos, beside the white raging Mediterranean, reminding every frail dwelling on shore that this old sea, the actual water that had been described on the first page of the Bible, was not to be underestimated, and nature was greater than anything man-made. Good-bye to your beach umbrellas and your ridiculous signs and your awnings and your gimcrack fences; good-bye to your condos and your haciendas; good-bye to the very shoreline of fragile soil. Nature was also the Sunderer of Delights and the Destroyer of Dreams.

The storm gave the sea a symmetry I had never seen in it before, the order of sets advancing on the shore from the horizon. These waves pounded the beaches and the promenades, and scoured the dark sand, and dragged trash away.

Seventeen months after leaving Algeciras in sunshine, on the road to Morocco the long way, I arrived back, in a high wind. There is something about a seaside town on a stormy night. This was not any old wind, this was the Levanter, and the official weather station in the port of Algeciras clocked its gusts at ninety-three miles per hour (150 kilometers per hour). On the Beaufort scale seventy-two miles per hour is the strongest wind for which there is a designation. It is a hurricane, number 12. Most of the time the Levanter was blowing in the 50s and 60s — gale force, occasionally rising to storm force, number 11. This was the third day of the storm. The hurricane gusts had knocked over light poles and put Algeciras in darkness.

The wind was news. Like Málaga and Melilla, the port of Algeciras had shut down. So had Tangier. So had Ceuta. This entire end of the Mediterranean was closed. In Algeciras, traffic had accumulated at the ferry landing. People were sleeping in the lobbies of the terminal, they picnicked beside their cars. There were few vacant rooms to be had at the hotels, and this normally quiet town was full of people, waiting for the ferries to leave.

Just down the coast at Tarifa the loose sand and gravel had blown off the beach, leaving a hard smooth packed-down surface. One of the proverbs relating to the violent Levanter wind was that of the Portuguese sailors: “When the Levanter blows, the stones move” (Quando con Levante chiove, las pedras muove). Along the coast road plastic bags were plastered against the sheep fences; billboards had blown down, so had some trees and power lines. In the narrow backstreets of Algeciras obscure objects rose up and smacked me in the face. The palms on the promenade were noisy, their fronds smashing. Large metal signs were knocked from buildings and clattered into the street.

The other thing about constant wind, which is one of the worst forms of bad weather, is that it can drive you mental. It is more deranging than rain, a greater nuisance than snow; it is invisible, it pushes, it pulls, it snatches your clothes, it twists your head, and finally your mind. That night and the next day passed. The wind did not cease. It seemed odd to go to sleep hearing the wind blowing hard, and to wake up with it still blowing. On my second day in Algeciras it seemed to be blowing harder.

“I’ve been to Morocco twenty-three times,” a bird-watcher named Gullick told me. “That’s forty-six crossings. Only one of them was canceled — New Year’s Eve, out of Tangier.”

Gullick was conducting a birding expedition to Morocco. His Range Rover was hung up on the quay, his passengers were becoming agitated.

“We’re all birders,” the only woman in the group told me.

Her name was Debbie Shearwater.

“That’s an amazing coincidence, for a bird-watcher to have a bird’s name.”

“I changed it, from Millichap, for personal reasons,” she said. “But also I hated having to spell Millichap all the time.”

“Everyone spells Shearwater right, then?”

She laughed. “No! They call me Clearwater, Stillwater, Sharewater—”

“That flag’s not flapping as strong as it was yesterday,” one of the other bird-watchers said, looking up at the flag on the Boughaz (“The Straits”).

But it was, it was whipping hard.

“Where I come from,” Debbie Shearwater said, “a wind like this would be news. It would be on the front page.”

Later that day, Gullick proudly passed around an item from El Pais about the Levanter. The facts were that the port had been closed for two and half days. The gusts had been clocked at 150 kilometers per hour. There were fifteen-foot waves in the gong-tormented Straits. Some fishing boats had been lost. The other news concerned the large number of people waiting in Algeciras — travelers, truckers, Moroccans, Spaniards. These travelers milled in the town like displaced people, unable to move on.

One hotel in Algeciras was fairly empty — it was the best one, located at the edge of town, the Hotel Reina Cristina. I was staying near the ferry landing, so that I could watch the progress of the ships as well as the storm, but one day I walked out to the Reina Cristina to kill time. This hotel had a pool, and gardens, and was surrounded by trees, and was more like a villa in the country than a hotel in this port town. On the lobby wall were the bronzed signatures of some of the hotel’s more illustrious guests: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, July 20, 1937; Cole Porter, 1956; Lord Halifax; Estes Kefauver, 1957; Alfonso XIII; Orson Welles.

W. B. Yeats spent the winter of 1927–28 at the Reina Cristina. He had gone to Spain to recover from a bad cold. While nursing his cold, Yeats wrote a poem, “At Algeciras — A Meditation upon Death,” which begins with a pretty portrait of the straits:

The heron-billed pale cattle-birds

That feed on some foul parasite

Of the Moroccan flocks and herds

Cross the narrow Straits to light

In the rich midnight of the garden trees

Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

Back in town my more optimistic bird-watcher was saying again, “I don’t think that flag is flapping as hard as it was this morning.”

Gypsies, Germans, Moroccans, Africans, sailors, families, small children, motorcyclists, dogs, truck drivers, bus passengers — everyone was waiting. Some were drunk. Many slept in their vehicles. Backpackers lay on the floor of the terminal in their sleeping bags. And people were still arriving by car in Algeciras to take the ferry to Tangier or Ceuta.

It was just over an hour to Ceuta, about two hours to Tangier. But now three days had passed without any ferries. And still the wind blew. I took the bus to Tarifa, to kill time. It was a pleasant little town buffeted by wind. Spray blew from one side of the harbor to the other, drenching the bronze statue erected to “Men of the Sea.”

The wind gave me a headache that would not go away. It made me irritable. It woke me in the middle of the night and made me listen to it damaging the town and scraping at the window. During the day it made me feel grubby. It hurt my eyes. It exhausted me.

Algeciras was such a small town and I was there such a long time that I kept seeing the same people. I got to know some of them. The ceramic seller with the terra-cotta piggy banks, the many Moroccans selling leather jackets. The dwarf selling lottery tickets. The scores of agencies selling ferry tickets; the fruit sellers and market butchers and fishmongers. Some born-again Christians who had once been hippies ran a cafe that offered Bible study with its sandwiches; I got to know them. The Indian watch salesman who had lived in Spain for ten years, “and no Spanish person ever said to me, ‘You fucking Indian,’ like they did to me in London — or four or five men come up to me in the tube train and say things. Spanish are good people”—I met him, too.