Paul Theroux: The Pillars of Hercules

“The Cook Islanders go fishing and New Zealand pays the bills. Something like that?”

This made Sir Joshua wince. He said, “The best solution would be the utmost autonomy in internal matters, and a treaty with Britain that would remove the wide powers of the governor.”

“What would Spain say to that?”

“Spain would never agree that Gibraltar should have its own government,” he said. “But I don’t want to be colonized by Spain. I was colonized already by Britain!”

“Weren’t you worried when Franco was in power?”

“Yes, because he had a tyrannical government. But just the other day the Spanish foreign minister made a speech demanding sovereignty over us and calling us ‘the last colony in Europe.’ The Spanish say, ‘It is a matter of honor!’ But we have honor too.”

“Isn’t Gibraltar a colony?”

“We call ourselves a dependent territory.”

“I have the impression that business is rather poor, with most of the British troops pulled out.”

“Business isn’t good. We get tourists, and some day-trippers from Spain”—the tormentors of the Rock apes, the souvenir hunters that arrived in buses from Torremolinos and Marbella. “We used to have day-trippers from Morocco, but because of French paranoia against North Africans the Moroccans now need visas to enter EC countries. It’s ridiculous and very bad for business.”

“Gibraltar’s in the EC?” This was news to me.

“Yes. We are a full member politically. But we are excluded from VAT and other taxes.”

I asked him, “Are you aware of being a sort of folk hero and father figure of Gibraltar?”

He smiled at this, as though agreeing with what I said but forbidden by modesty to say so.

“I am speaking to you candidly now,” he said. “I go to Spain every now and then. My wife shops for vegetables there. On one trip I said to a guard, ‘Why are the Spanish police and guards here so courteous to me, when they know that I want to keep Gibraltar independent from Spain?’ ”

The order in Sir Joshua’s office and the way he was dressed, with that excessive neatness that is common to morticians and lawyers, told me that he was fastidious. Perhaps this was why he pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes, as though an unpleasant thought was passing through his mind.

“The guard said to me, ‘Because you put sus cojónes sur la mesa—’ ”

“Your balls on the table,” I said.

“Yes. He continued, ‘And you haven’t offended anyone.’ ”

“That’s a pretty neat trick.”

“Oh, yes. I was flattered.”

It was time for me to go. I thanked him for seeing me and speaking frankly, and I told him sincerely that I had enjoyed myself in Gibraltar. Though I did not tell him this, fearing he would misunderstand, I liked it best because it was unexpected; the rain, the gusting wind, the dignified apes. It was not at all the Mediterranean port I had expected but more like an English seaside resort in autumn, full of plucky retirees and gasconading soldiers.

“The only thing wrong with us,” Sir Joshua said, ruefully rather than in anger, “is our bloody size!”

To prove a point to myself about Gibraltar’s smallness I picked up my bag and walked from my hotel in the middle of Gibraltar to the Spanish frontier; got my passport stamped, and then sauntered into Spain; another stamp. The whole international journey from my thirty-dollar room in Gibraltar to the cheese-colored suburbs in the foothills of Andalucia was less than half an hour.

My first day in Spain. I thought of a line from the Spanish writer Pio Baroja, that V. S. Pritchett quotes.

“It may look as if I am seeking something; but I am seeking nothing.” (Parece que busco algo; pero no busco nada.)

There were no coastal trains from Algeciras, no useful trains at all until Málaga. The Algeciras bus was waiting at the station at La Línea, over the border, a town cauchemaresque in its littleness and its sense of being unpeopled and nowhere. Its nondescript beach was noted for its smugglers — drugs, cigarettes, appliances. This bus was just a rattly thing, full of locals who were heading home from work to the ferry port that lay beneath the brown hills. I looked back and saw that Gibraltar was no more than its dramatic rock. The town was not visible until darkness fell, and then all you saw were lights on its lower slopes like candle flames flickering around an altar. As we passed around the bay the rock receded, changing shape, as the prospect altered.

The best view of Gibraltar is from Algeciras, across the bay, where the rock appears as a long ridge, like a fortress, something man-made and defensive, rather than the recumbent and misshapen monster at the edge of the sea. The Neck, Gibraltar’s land connection to Spain, is so low, almost at sea level, that the enormous citadel of rock seems to be detached from the mainland.

That low-lying neck gave Oliver Cromwell a bizarre idea. He decided to make Gibraltar an island; to detach it — dig a wide trench that would quickly fill with water, and sever the Rock from the Spanish mainland. Presto, the English island of Gibraltar. According to Samuel Pepys, Cromwell authorized a ship loaded with picks and shovels to set sail in 1656 to accomplish this godlike task of fiddling with the landscape. The ship was captured by the Spaniards. Then Oliver Cromwell died. The scheme was abandoned.

Algeciras was merely my starting point. “An ugly town of very slight interest,” the guidebook said. But this was the sort of guidebook that recommended a town when it had a building that it could praise in these terms: “The central dome is supported on a hexadecagonal beading over squinches.”

A scruffy little Spanish man took me aside.

“You German?”

“American.”

“Good, I like Americans,” he said. “You want to buy one kilo of hash?”

“No, thank you. It may look as if I am seeking something, but I am seeking nothing.”

“You no like me?” he said, and turned abusive.

I ignored him and walked to the harbor, where the ferry, Ciudad de Zaragoza , was setting out for Tangiers. Another ferry left from Tarifa, where in the past Barbary pirates demanded payment from all ships passing through the straits (and so this tiny haven of extortionists, Tarifa, gave us our taxation word “tariff). Morocco, across the water, was as near as Falmouth is to Vineyard Haven. It was my intention to end my trip there, and to get there by the most roundabout route, via France and Italy, Croatia, Albania, Malta, Israel, and every other Mediterranean shore, even Algeria, if I had the stomach for it. It gave me pleasure to turn away from the ferry landing and walk to the bus station, and buy a ticket to Marbella. I assumed it would take a year or so to reach Morocco.

The bus had plenty of empty seats, and yet when a couple got on wearing matching warm-up suits, the woman sat at the front alone and the man sat right next to me.

He was in his mid to late sixties, with a big intrusive face and mocking frown and hairy ears. He looked careless and lazy, and he stared at me in a meddling way. He said, “Hi there.”

My dim smile was meant to convey that I was perhaps Spanish. I said nothing. I wanted to concentrate on this, my first experience of Spain.

We rolled out of town, past the bullring. The man next to me muttered “Plaza de Toros” in a self-congratulatory way, though he merely squinted at the rest of the graffiti on the walls next to the Autovia di Mediterraneo, most of it very angry: Yanqui = Terroristas and Republica Si! — Monarchia No! and Don’t Vote — Fight! (No Vote — Lucha!). The grandly named highway was just a winding two-lane road along the coast, running past scrubby fields and truck stops and low rocky hills under a gray sky on a Saturday afternoon, the market closed, the beaches empty — the water much too cold for swimming — and even the little old men fishing from the jetties wearing foul-weather gear.