NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (5 page)

“Because of the clause about Jews and Moors being forbidden to stay in Gibraltar more than a month. But they needed us. They had to look to Morocco for vittles. Because of realities they drove a coach and horses through the treaty.”

He shuffled some documents.

“I wrote a paper about it. My thesis was that Gibraltar developed despite the treaty.”

“Do you think the Chief Minister made any headway the other day at the U.N.?”

“Joe Bossano doesn’t know what he wants,” he said, and leaned towards me. “When people go berserk they ask for something they don’t understand. The idea of a colony smells bad.”

“So what’s the best solution?”

“It is very difficult! There are three choices for Gibraltar. Independence is one. Or, to be part of a state—but Spain is out of the question. Or free association, like the Cook Islands and New Zealand.”

“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!”

            
T
o 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.

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.