Paul Theroux: The Pillars of Hercules

The piles of cork oak bark stacked by the side of the road suggested that a traditional harvest ritual was taking place — not right here, but inland, away from the shore. And that was my first Mediterranean epiphany, the realization that life on these shores bore little relation to what was happening five miles inland, no matter what the country. Somewhere over this Andalusian hill a peasant was hacking bark off trees to sell. That hinterland was not my subject, though; I did not care about the perplexities of Europe. My concentration was the edge of this body of water, the ribbon of beach and cliff, and all the people who shared it, used and misused it, even the snorting old man who for some reason had chosen to sit next to me on the bus.

The Spanish newspaper I had bought in Algeciras told of a murder scandal involving wealthy English expatriates — the wife dead in mysterious circumstances, the husband a prime suspect — in Sotogrande, the next town.

“Cops,” the man next to me said.

It was a roadblock; he had seen it before me, about six policemen at a bend in the road, directing cars to an area where they were to park and be searched. This was a throwback to Franco surely. The police, the Guardia Civil, masters of intimidation and search-and-destroy missions, were plundering the trucks of cars and interrogating drivers and passengers.

This had nothing to do with the Sotogrande murder. It was a search for illegal drugs, items such as the kilo of hashish that the Algeciras punk had tried to sell me. The police, who were heavily armed, had sniffer dogs and mirrors, and two of them moved through the bus, poking luggage, looking under seats, and harassing the dirtier male passengers. The most woeful-looking passenger was ordered to stand up in the aisle while a policeman examined each cigarette in the pack he had in his pocket. The police dog slavered at me and padded on.

“This is unreal,” the man next to me said, perhaps to me, perhaps to himself.

The police, satisfied that the bus did not contain any drugs, allowed us to continue on our way.

“Spain is a land to flee across. Every town, and every capital, is a destination; and the names, which ring with refuge to the fugitive, mount with finality to him traveling relentlessly unpursued.”

That accurate description of my mood that day (even if it sounded a bit too orotund for the landscape I was looking at) is William Gaddis in The Recognitions , the great American novel of counterfeiting and forgery. Gaddis’s vision of Spain was one of the many that filled my head. The experience of Spain had been an inspiration to some of my favorite writers. If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed my desire to travel there. I did not want to risk disappointment — the reality displacing the fabulous land in my imagination. Arthur Waley, the great Chinese scholar and translator, refused to go to China; he did not want to risk having his illusions shattered. He was wise. His illusions of the harmony and grace inspired by the Chinese classics would not have survived for two stops on the Iron Rooster.

It was impossible to be in Spain and not think of Hemingway, lover of fiestas, whose literary reputation was partly based on his passion for bullfighting, and whose notions of honor and heroism, not to say the human condition, were derived in greater measure from the toreros he mooned over than from the foot soldiers in the Spanish Civil War he also wrote about. I personally had an aversion to Hemingway’s work, but that was a matter of taste; I did not dismiss him. Hemingway appears in Gaddis’s book, not by name but as a sententious old bore and boozer known as the Big Unshaven Man (BUM for short). I disliked A Farewell to Arms because it seemed to me to be written in Pilgrim Father English. I preferred Orwell’s account of the Spanish Civil War, in Homage to Catalonia , and his version of how the war had challenged his political ideas. Gerald Brenan seemed to me the best guide through Spanish history, in South from Granada , Jan Morris’s Spain was all I needed to know about the Spanish landscape, and V. S. Pritchett in The Spanish Temper seemed the shrewdest possible examination of Spanish literature and also the passions and pastimes of the Spaniards.

I had read as much as I could — everything mattered — but it struck me on this Spanish bus that I had never seen a landscape like this described anywhere, in any book I had read about Spain. That cheered me up. This was as remote from the Spain of Cervantes and Hemingway and Pritchett and everyone else as it was possible to be. This was the Spain of the absurd travel brochures, the cheap flights, the package tours and the more mendacious travel magazines.

It was a sort of cut-price colonization, this stretch of coast, bungaloid in the extreme — bungalows and twee little chalets and monstrosities in all stages of construction, from earthworks and geometrically excavated foundations filled with mud puddles, to brick and stucco condos and huts and houses. There were cheap hotels, and golf courses, and marinas and rain-sodden tennis courts and stagnant swimming pools at Estepona, where “Prices Slashed” was a frequent sign on housing developments in partially built clusters with names such as “Port Paradise” and “The Castles” and “Royal Palms”—no people on the beach, no people on the road, no golfers, no sign of life at all, only suggestions here and there that the place was known to English-speaking people. “English Video Club” was one, and another that was hardly out of view from Gibraltar to the French frontier at Port-Bou: “Fish-and-Chips.”

And it was only the other day that this whole coast had sprung up and become vulgarized as the object of intense real estate speculation. My guidebook said of awful overgrown Estepona, “As recently as 1912, the road ended here.”

Then, this end of Spain was just mules and goats; and peasants hoeing the rocky hillsides, cutting cork oak, gathering barnacles and praying on their knees. And now they are mopping the floors of the bungalows at “Port Paradise.”

“It’s all English people here,” the man next to me said. “You speak English?”

“Yes.”

“Your pants don’t have a fly,” he said.

I did not have an answer for this. He was smiling. I said, “Does that bother you?”

“Seems to me that makes them kind of inconvenient.”

I am on my Grand Tour, on this Spanish bus on a gray day out of season, minding my business, and this foolish old man who insists on sitting next to me points out that my Patagonia pants don’t have a fly. I did not ask for this at all.

He was still smiling. He said, “See my wife? That’s her up there.”

Commenting on the cut of my pants was merely a way of breaking the ice. He wanted to talk about his wife.

“She was an X-rated showgirl,” he said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that he was watching my reaction.

She had the face of an elderly baby. Her hair was stiff and blonde. She was looking out the bus window, giving me her profile. She was big, hefty even, and her baggy warm-up suit conveyed an impression of physical plentitude. Yet there was a soft and faded beauty about her, a carefulness in her makeup that told that she was still trying, that she still cared, and perhaps it was the absurdity of her husband that made me think that she was very unhappy.

“No, I’m kidding you. Not X-rated. She was a Las Vegas showgirl.”

He was not looking at me anymore. His forearms rested on the seat-bar in front of him, and he was staring.

“Imagine what she looked like forty years ago.”

We were passing gray sand, weedy yards, hillsides of condominiums — some with turrets, some with battlements, all of them empty; and houses and villas helter-skelter.