Paul Theroux: The Pillars of Hercules

All over the Rock of Gibraltar there were signs in six languages (English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Arabic, French) that said Do Not Feed the Apes! and Apes Might Bite! These signs were more frequent at the top, where one of the ape tribes — the friendlier of the two — lived.

Here at the top of the Rock, an ectoplasmic middle-aged woman, a French tourist, plump and pushy and grinning, picked up a pebble and approached an ape. It was a mother ape that was nuzzling her child, urging it against her pink nipple, with that serene and happy expression that mothers have when they breast-feed their young. The tourist’s name, I felt sure, was Grisette. She poked the pebble at the mother ape, giggling, while her three friends watched. One of the friends jerked the arm of her small boy, forcing him to watch Grisette tease the ape.

The mother ape took the pebble and considered it a moment before dropping it to the ground. Grisette laughed very hard and then went closer, making a hideous face. Grisette wore glasses with lenses so thick and distorting, her eyes swam and changed shape as she nodded at this cornered ape. The mother ape expressed concern, and when Grisette reached over and touched her young suckling baby the mother ape raised a cautioning hand — a shapely hand wonderfully pink, human in miniature, with fine nails. There were enough lines on the ape’s palm to occupy a fortune-teller for a whole session of palmistry.

Provoked and a bit irritated by the cautioning mother ape, Grisette poked the baby ape as though testing a doorjamb with a Wet Paint sign. Grisette’s friends laughed again. The ape mother raised her cautioning hand again, and when Grisette pinched the baby, the mother ape rapped Grisette’s knuckles. This went on, back and forth, for a minute or so. I thought that the ape was going to leap into Grisette’s face and bite and claw her — Apes Might Bite!

But the mother ape showed enormous patience, as though she knew she was dealing with someone simpleminded and unpredictable, a nuisance rather than a threat. She merely raised a hand and restrained the stupid woman, and when Grisette put her big googly-eyed face nearer — simpering and calling her friends as she tormented the mother and child — all the mother ape did was show her teeth and she crept away, off the little rail, out of the sunshine where she had been suckling her infant. And as she padded away, still graceful in the face of all that provocation, the mother ape growled, just audibly to me, “This is unconscionable.”

Grisette moved heavily over to her fellow tourists, one of whom was hitting her child and saying, “I’m not a millionaire!” and an English one — British Army spouse, I supposed—“Get off me before you get a smacked bottom!” Grisette was chattering and scratching herself and looking to her friends to praise her for having pinched the ape baby and maddened the mother ape and driven them away.

And I thought: Yes, the apes are better mannered than the tourists, and while the tourists brutalized and screamed at their kids, the apes were tender towards their young. The apes did not say, “I told you to stop it — I’ll give you a clout!” The tourists yakked and giggled, the apes were quiet and thoughtful. The tourists teased the apes, the apes never teased the tourists. When the apes played they rolled over and over on the steep slopes or on the walkways of the Rock; when the tourists’ children played they hurt each other and made noise and it always seemed to end in tears. And the apes never made faces unless the tourists made faces at them first. Ape funerals were held in pious secrecy, a tourist death or funeral was accompanied by howling grief and hysterics. The tourists were obstreperous, the apes were dignified and correct. Yet every year apes are shot and killed on the Rock of Gibraltar for biting tourists.

The woman might have been a tourist from any country in the Mediterranean. She fit the description of “the Mediterranean sub-racial group” I found in a textbook entitled Advanced Level Geography (1964): “brown-skinned, long-headed, wavy-haired, dark-eyed, slightly-built.” These people traveled back and forth, across this interesting stretch of water, all the time, keeping to their particular basin. But Mediterranean tourists were generally so offensive and ill-natured that I made a vow early in my trip to ignore them, the way I ignored the flies in Australia; to avoid writing about tourists at all. Far better to write about the apes.

“This ape is cruel,” the tourist says, and it is like an epitaph for the world’s animals. “When I pinch him he bites me.”

For years I was happy flopping along elsewhere, avoiding the Mediterranean. Such a trip had always been regarded as the Grand Tour, a search for wisdom and experience. Yet at the age of fifty I still had never been to Spain. All I had seen of Yugoslavia was the main line from Ljubljana to the Bulgarian border. Yugoslavia was now five separate nations. I had never been to Israel or Egypt or Morocco or Malta. Most people I met had been to many of these countries; everyone knew much more of the Mediterranean than I did. Everybody had been there. I suspected that from one end to the other it was nothing but urbanization and clip joints. James Joyce once wrote, “Rome reminds me of a man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” I assumed the whole Mediterranean was like that, tourism as ancestor worship and the veneration of incoherent ruins.

Then I began to think that this was perhaps the best reason for going to see this part of the world, that it was so over-visited it was haunted and decrepit, totally changed. Change and decay had made it worth seeing and an urgent subject to record. I was the man for it. Half a lifetime of traveling had given me a taste for the macabre.

Some countries swallow the traveler; certainly in Africa and Polynesia and South America I found this to be true. But Europe, and the Mediterranean in particular, is like a stage set. It gives drama to a trip — it is a background.

You know this already. You have been to Italy — very likely to Sicily, perhaps to Siracusa, and you stayed at the same little hotel I found. Near the harbor? Run by a grumpy man who wrote poetry? About twenty-five dollars, with breakfast? And you might read this and say: It was not that way at all! Siracusa was delightful, the hotel was clean, the poet was a cheery soul. Or it might be somewhere else we both visited, in Spain or Greece or Egypt. Never mind.

That was your trip, that was your Italy. This book is about my trip, my Italy. This is my Mediterranean.

My idea was to begin in Gibraltar, and go to Spain, and keep going, hugging the coast, staying on the ground, no planes; to travel by train, bus, ferry, ship; to make a circuit of the sea from the Rock of Gibraltar all the way around to Ceuta, from one Pillar of Hercules to the other. To travel the whole shore, from the fish and chip shops of Torremolinos to the gun emplacements of Tel Aviv, by way of the war in Croatia and the nudist beaches of Crete.

The Mediterranean, this simple almost tideless sea, the size of thirty Lake Superiors, had everything: prosperity, poverty, tourism, terrorism, several wars in progress, ethnic strife, fascists, pollution, drift nets, private islands owned by billionaires, Gypsies, seventeen countries, fifty languages, oil drilling platforms, sponge fishermen, religious fanatics, drug smuggling, fine art, and warfare. It had Christians, Muslims, Jews; it had the Druzes, who are a strange farrago of all three religions; it had heathens, Zoroastrians and Copts and Baha’is. It is over two thousand miles from end to end. It is noted for being salty. It ranged from the shoals and shallows of the northern Adriatic to the almost sixteen-thousand-foot depths in the Ionian Basin, west of Crete. Although it is deficient in plankton, it is still the home of dolphins, and in the deeps around Mallorca sperm whales (some of them entangled in drift nets) are often sighted. Giant loggerhead turtles — an endangered species in the Mediterranean — return in diminishing numbers every year to the Greek island of Zákinthos, where they struggle among tourists and beachside restaurants for nesting sites.