Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

I wanted to talk to someone in power about this — someone other than people I casually encountered in public houses and at bus stops; so I sent a note to the distinguished former Chief Minister, Sir Joshua Hassan, and waited for a reply.

It was rainy and cool these October days. I became fond of this weather for various reasons. It was good writing weather, and it kept the tourists away. In such grim weather there was always a place to stay and it was seldom necessary to make onward arrangements. I liked feeling that I could leave a town at a moment’s notice and be assured that I would find a hotel farther up the line. In the whole of the Mediterranean, all seventeen countries, traveling off-season, I never had a problem of that sort, showing up in a place that was full of No Vacancy signs. In fact, most hotel owners complained to me that there weren’t half enough tourists these days.

In the several days that I waited to hear from Sir Joshua, I climbed the Rock. There was a lovely view from a vantage point at 1,350 feet, at the top of the Rock. To the west was Algeciras on a sweep of bay; to the north the low brown hills of San Roque beyond The Neck; to the south, beyond the lighthouses at Europa Point, across the Straits, was Morocco — Ceuta, the other Pillar, and farther west, Tangier.

At that altitude, wandering among the tourists and apes, learning to distinguish between them, I concluded that because the apes were both intelligent and deprived they are quite like the homeless people in big cities, soft-voiced, panhandling, desperate and yet chastened creatures. They are, horribly, like the poor in Europe — ragged and dispossessed, tenacious and yet fatalistic, as they hang on, knowing they are despised; they have that resentful yet fatalistic look of natives who have been displaced by swindling latecomers. The apes on the Rock are one of the underclasses of Gibraltar. Another underclass are the Moroccans. Coincidentally, the apes also originated in Morocco, from which in 1740 a whole tribe of apes was imported.

There was a strong sense of community in Gibraltar, which made it much odder for me to reflect that I was in a place that was both a racial hodgepodge and also deeply paranoid about admitting aliens. It was partly a result of Gibraltar’s insularity — the Rock is significantly an island. But tribalism and xenophobia were also Mediterranean character traits. Never mind that the history of the Mediterranean is a history of mongrelization; these days the most common sound was the native mongrel yapping about his pedigree and driving off foreign mutts.

After I saw the French tourist taunting the mother ape I asked a Gibraltarian who worked on the Rock whether many people were attacked.

“Lots of people are bitten,” he said, “but the strange thing is that nine out of ten are women — the women get the bites. We had one yesterday — a woman — big bite on her arm.”

His name was Jerry. One of his jobs was operating the cable car. I asked him whether the apes had rabies.

“No. These apes are medically looked after. But we send the people to the hospital anyway.”

I told him what a policeman in New York had once told me, that a human bite is much more dangerous than an animal bite, and that a tourist who bit you would do more harm than an ape.

From the top of the Rock it was possible to see that Gibraltar was little more than a harbor and a cluster of tenements, and like many towns with hills nearby, the higher you live on the slopes, the posher your house. The cable car passed over swimming pools and hot tubs and foaming whirlpool baths attached to luxury homes. Later, I looked at an 1810 map of Gibraltar and it reminded me of a colonial map of Boston: fifteen batteries — Queen’s Battery, King’s, Norman’s, Cockaigne’s, Prince of Hesse’s, Mungo’s and so forth. Then The Neck and the Spanish lines and all the Papists on the Spanish side. It was as though Dorchester Heights remained British while the rest of America went its own way — just as odd and inconvenient and anachronistic.

Major Brian Cooper Tweedy of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was posted in Gibraltar late in the last century. His daughter Marion, known to all as Molly, lost her virginity to one Harry Mulvey in Gibraltar. Later, particularly at bedtime, she ruminated on her sexual encounters in Gibraltar. This woman, literature’s earth mother, is of course Molly Bloom, and her girlhood in Gibraltar, being kissed under the Moorish Wall, is vividly recounted in her drowsy soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.

Molly remembers “those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end,” and the obscene Gibraltarian graffiti that “used to be written up with a picture of a woman on that wall in Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere.” The rock in her memory is emblematic and powerful, “looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies.”

She ruminates on the weather: “the rain was lovely and refreshing just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant.” And even the apes: “I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old Barbary apes they sent to Clapham without a tail.”

Most of all, Molly’s remembrance is of her first sexual encounter, one of the most passionate in literature. She hardly remembers Mulvey’s name but the incident is vivid: “we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down.” And the moment itself: “he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue in my mouth.” And the glorious Gibraltarian conclusion: “… I put my arms around him yes and drew down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

There could be a Molly Bloom Defloration Tour of the Rock, but there isn’t. James Joyce never visited Gibraltar; he was scribbling and studying maps in another corner of the Mediterranean — Trieste. But it is a testimony to his imaginative powers that it is impossible to be in Gibraltar and not hear Molly’s sensuous voice. The presence of Jews in Gibraltar interested Joyce greatly — after all, his Ulysses figure, Leopold Bloom, was a Dublin Jew. In spite of Gibraltar being associated with Jewish expulsions, its Jewish community has deep roots. There are five synagogues in the little town.

Still waiting for a reply from Sir Joshua Hassan, I met Stephen Leanse, a Jewish entrepreneur.

“I was born in the Bahamas,” he said, “but my wife’s family, the Serruyas, came here in 1728.”

The majority of Gibraltarians trace their origins to Genoa and are Catholic. Some others are Maltese. A few are British expatriates — shopkeepers, ex-servicemen. No one admits to being Spanish. Stephen was one of a thousand or so Jews in Gibraltar, members of about a hundred Jewish families. It was not a large number, but it was an influential — and cosmopolitan — segment of the population. They were all Sephardic Jews, some of them speaking Spanish — the word Sephardic means “of Spain.” Others were speaking Ladino — the Sephardic language, that combined Renaissance Spanish with elements of Hebrew.

Like most other people I met in Gibraltar Mr. Leanse told me that the place was small, perhaps too small; and business was poor; and the future was uncertain.

“I would love to live in Israel, but my family is here.”

“Are the Jews in Gibraltar associated with any particular business?”