Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

To this man who had offended me by commenting on the way I was dressed I said, “I imagine she looked twenty-five.”

“She was beautiful,” he insisted. Hadn’t he heard me? “She’s still beautiful.”

You pimp, I thought, why aren’t you sitting with her?

“She knows I’m talking about her.”

The woman had glanced back and her face darkened.

“She’d kill me if she knew what I was saying. She hates having been a showgirl. That’s where I met her. Vegas. If she knew what I was saying to you she’d murder me.”

We had come to Guadalmina, which looked old-fashioned and pleasant. I wanted to make a note, but the man beside me was talking again.

“She’s tough. You wouldn’t think it, but she is. She makes all the decisions. She wears the pants in the house.”

“You seem to be an expert on pants,” I said. In my mind I imagined his wife, this bulky woman, in big brown tweedy pants and clomping shoes, walking though a house in which this man cowered.

“I once said to her, ‘I’m going to marry a rich woman next time. I don’t care if she’s fat or ugly, as long as she has money.’ ”

The man laughed, remembering this conversation.

“My wife says to me, ‘And what are you going to offer her?’ ”

“What did you say to that?”

“What could I say? She shot me down.”

We came to San Pedro de Alcántara, which was older and more settled, something like a town. Few trees to speak of , I wrote in my innocence, little knowing that on the thousands of miles of Mediterranean coastline there are few trees to speak of, no forests except for one in Corsica, hardly any woods abutting the shore. It made for a rather stark coastline, but it revealed everything — here at San Pedro the ruins of a Roman villa, a Visigoth’s basilica and a Moorish castle, and all those bungalows.

I had not planned to get off the bus at Marbella, but this man irritated me. I had the feeling that it gave him a perverse pleasure to sit with me at a distance and leer at his wife, in the way that some men enjoy watching their spouse have sex with strangers; at the very least, he wanted to go on talking. I am out of here.

Passing the woman, just before I got off, I turned to her. She looked at once alarmed and suspicious.

Laughing a little, I said, “Your husband tells me you were a Las Vegas showgirl. I would never have known.”

The last sound I heard was this woman’s howl ringing through the bus and the pusillanimous whine of her husband’s hollow denial.

In Marbella I met a Spaniard, Vicente, who had just spent a year in Mexico. He worked for a company that exported Spanish olive oil. He had liked his time in Mexico but — buttoned-up, self-conscious, innately gloomy, cursed with an instinctive fatalism, and envious in a class-obsessed way — patronized the Mexicans much as the British patronize Americans, and for the same reasons.

“They talk like this,” Vicente said, and did an imitation of a Mexican talking in slushy mutterings with his teeth clamped shut.

It seemed accurate and clever to me, and I told him so, though he seemed to be embarrassed by his effort and was too shy to continue. And, naturally, having mocked them, then said what wonderful people the Mexicans were.

“Did you go to any bullfights there?”

“Yes. Very small bulls in Mexico. Our bulls are much bigger and stronger — more brave. We breed them especially to fight.”

“Any other differences?”

“We use the horses more. And much else. I cannot explain all the differences.”

Everything I knew about bullfighting, including There is no Spanish word for bullfight , I had learned from The Sun Also Rises. Rose Macaulay’s appreciative book about Spain, Fabled Shore (1949) — an account of a trip down this coast — mentions bullfights only once and briefly: “I do not care for them.”

I said, “I was thinking of going to a corrida.”

“Have you never seen one?”

“No — never.”

This made Vicente laugh, and he insisted I should go to one.

“We love football, but the corrida is here,” he said and tapped his heart. “It is our passion. And, listen, one of the most popular toreros in Spain is from America — Colombia.”

I was grateful for Vicente’s encouragement, but I did not really need it. I had intended to go to the first bullfight I found advertised.

In the meantime I had found a place to stay in Marbella. As an experiment in budget travel I had found a ten-dollar-a-night room in a pensione behind the oldest church in the town, the Iglesia de la Encarnación. This was in the Old Town. An effort had obviously been made in Marbella to renovate this older neighborhood and reclaim some of its narrow alleys and small lanes. I regarded this as a challenge. Anyone can go to a strange town and buy comfort and goodwill. With the single exception of limping vandalized Albania, which is in a state of disrepair and anarchy, luxury is available in most places on the shores of the Mediterranean.

I knew from experience that the deluxe route was the easy way out, and that it was unreal, the fast lane, where I would meet stuffy travelers and groveling locals. I did not require luxury, I needed only modest comfort and privacy, and it was often possible to find what I wanted for ten or fifteen dollars. This was particularly so in the off-season, as the wind blew through these coastal resort towns, where business was terrible.

Even Marbella, which had the reputation of being one of the more salubrious resorts, was hurting. The summer had been bad and nothing was happening now; it would be a long winter. The rise in inflation and the cost of living generally had surprised the British who had retired here. Many were in the process of selling their houses — at a loss in some cases — and moving elsewhere.

“And to think that there were British people who went to Estepona to retire and find the good life,” I said to an Englishman in Marbella.

“I’ve met a number of expats on the Costa del Sol who are trying to sell up and go home. Prices are high, taxes are high — to pay for the redevelopment and the improvement. That’s why Marbella looks nice. The people came because life was so cheap here in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and now it’s more expensive than Britain. They want to go home.”

“You see all these houses being built?” a Spanish real estate agent told me. “It’s all Kuwaiti money. Middle East people.”

This was impossible to verify, though other locals mentioned it — that this building boom had been a result of Arab investment in the late eighties and early nineties, punters hoping to make a killing in the Spanish property market. It had the look of a bubble, though: too many houses, too much development. The “For Immediate Sale!” and “Prices Slashed!” signs had a desperate note of hysteria in them.

I hung around Marbella for a day and a half, noted the youngsters prowling the empty discotheques and clubs, and ate paella.

When I inquired about the bullfight I hoped to see, I was told to go to Malaga … to Granada … to Barcelona … to Madrid — anywhere but Marbella; and so I left on a bus, heading north along the shore to Torremolinos. There were no coastal trains here — none until Valencia or thereabouts — but the buses went everywhere.

The utterly blighted landscape of the Spanish coast — Europe’s vacationland, a vile straggling sandbox — begins about here, north of Marbella, and continues, with occasional breaks, all the way up the zigzag shore to France. The meretriciousness, the cheapo appeal, the rankness of this chain of grease-spots is so well-known it is superfluous for me to describe it; and it is beyond satire. So why bother?