The Pillars of Hercules

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.