NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (6 page)

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.

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?

But several aspects of this reeking vulgarity interested me. The first was that the debased urbanization on this coast seemed entirely foreign, as though the whole holiday business had been foisted on Spain by outside investors hoping to cash in. The phenomenon of seaside gimcrackery was familiar to anyone who had traveled on the British coast and examined The Kingdom by the Sea. Spain even had the same obscene comic postcards, and funny hats, and junk food. It was also ridiculously cheap, in spite of the retirees’ complaints about the high cost of living. The Spaniards did not mock it, and they were grateful for the paying guests; for many years this was the chief source of Spanish prosperity. It was also remarkably ugly, and this was especially true in these out-of-season months. In full sunshine it might have had a cheap and cheerful carnival atmosphere, but under gray skies it hovered, a grotesque malignancy, sad and horrible, that was somewhere between tragedy and farce. And Spain seemed distant.

I felt intensely that the Spanish coast, especially here on the Costa del Sol, had undergone a powerful colonization—of a modern kind, but just as pernicious and permanent a violation as the classic wog-bashing sort. It
had robbed the shore of its natural features, displaced headlands and gullies and harbors with futile badly made structures. It did not repel me. It showed what unruly people were allowed to do to a magnificent shoreline when they had a little money and no taste. It had a definite horror-interest.

The landscape was obliterated, and from the edge of the Mediterranean to the arid gravelly inland slopes there were off-white stucco villas. There were no hills to speak of, only sequences of stucco rising in a hill shape, like a collapsing wedding cake. There were no people, there were few cars, and after dark only a handful of these houses were lighted. In the poorer nastier coves there were campsite communities and the footprint foundations in cement for caravans and tents.

A poisonous landfill, a dump with a prospect of the sea, dominated Fuengirola, which was otherwise just high-rises and huts. Ugly little towns such as Arroyo de la Miel sometimes had the prettiest names—in that case Honey Gulch—but the worst indication of blight on this coast was the gradual appearance of signs in English: “Cold Beer” and “Afternoon Tea” and “Authentic English Breakfast” and “Fish and Chips”—and little flapping Union Jacks. They were also the hint that we were nearing Torremolinos, which was grim and empty and dismal and sunless, loud music mingled with the stink of frying, souvenir letter openers and ashtrays and stuffed animals and funny hats stacked on a narrow strip of gray sand by the slop of the sea.

There were some tourists here—British, French, German—making the best of things, praying for the sun to shine. Instead of staying I found a train and took it back to Fuengirola, which was just as awful as Torremolinos. That night strolling along the promenade—the sea was lovelier at night—I saw a bullfight poster, announcing a
feria
the next day at Mijas, not far away.

There was a bullfight on television in a cafe near my hotel that night. The cafe was filled with silent men, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee. A few disgusted tourists left. I watched for a while with these attentive Spaniards. It seemed just a bloody charade of ritual slaughter, a great black beast with magnificent horns trotting around the ring, snorting and pawing and full of life, reduced in minutes to a kneeling wreck, vomiting blood, as a narrow-hipped matador gloated—this
was something that made me deeply curious, even as it filled me with dread.