The Pillars of Hercules

It was all so familiar, though, not just the overlay of Europe—banks, post offices, telephones—but the fact that many aspects of Euro-culture had been inspired by America. On the cosmopolitan shores of the Mediterranean, our electronic modernity had been absorbed along with our crass popular culture. Communications were so efficient they left few opportunities for people to meet each other. There was nothing like a bad ride or a long wait to inspire friendship and get strangers talking. But the simplicity of these features of Spain meant that people traveled quickly, efficiently, in silence. Not long ago in Europe if you wanted to make anything except a local telephone call you went to the telephone exchange and filled out a form and waited to be directed to your booth. In the smallest village in Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey—everywhere in Mediterranean Europe except Albania—you can make a phone call from a public phone, using an access code. In the park in Málaga I stepped into a phone booth and called my brother Peter, who happened to be in Casablanca. The next day in Guadix, in the barren mountains beyond Granada, I called Honolulu from the phone on the wall in the local bar.

Who’s that singing in Spanish?

I was on my way in a bouncing bus via Almería and Cartagena to Alicante.

Just inland in the villages above Almería, there were cave dwellers: caves had been cut or enlarged in the rubbly biscuit-colored hills and house fronts fixed to the cave entrance. The slopes were devoid of trees. It was a land of so little rain, and of so few people, of such dust and emptiness, that it could have been the far west of the United States—Arizona or New Mexico. When I remarked on this to a Spaniard in Almería he told me that it had been the location for many of the Sergio Leone so-called spaghetti westerns.

Almost in sight of the overbuilt coast, this countryside was lovely in its grandeur and in its sunlight and emptiness, its white huts and grazing goats and olive groves, houses of stacked stone, some with grape arbors and others hung with garlands of drying red peppers, shielded by stands of pines, or clusters of broom, olive pickers riding in the backs of trucks with their faces masked against the dust, and elderly shepherds in blue suits in postures so intense they seemed to be preaching to their flocks. Beyond a sun-baked ravine there were thirty black goats in a field, and a mass of swallows diving into a small bush. It was no wonder that Spaniards felt at home in Mexico and Peru.

There were no foreigners in Lorca, in a Mexican landscape which was only twenty miles from the coast, where the majority of people were tourists. Lorca was a town of granite and gravel quarries, a center for ceramic and every sort of porcelain object from toilet bowls to vases. There were luxuriant palms along the main street, Avenida Juan Carlos. In the center of town so much dust had collected on the roofs of houses—dust raised by a stiff wind blowing over the dry riverbed, the brown fields, the stony hills—that a wild straggling variety of cactus had taken root in the tiles. There was no sightseeing here, the bullfights were a local matter, and so it was just the quarries and the bathroom fixtures, the drugstores, the supermarkets, and the candy stores, which were also retailers of pornographic picture books.

Mazarrón lay at the far end of a series of wide grassy valleys, but the grass was as dry as dust. A bit farther was Puerto Mazarrón, by the sea, a tiny place which had somehow escaped the ravages of tourism. I arrived in darkness, found a place to stay, and left early on another bus to Cartagena.

“There is another Cartagena in Colombia,” I said to a man in Cartagena.

“Yes, I have heard of it,” he said. “Maybe people from Cartagena went there and named it.”

“Maybe.”

“Cartagena of the Indies—that’s what we call it,” he said.

And this one founded by Hasdrubal over two thousand years ago had been named for the original Carthage, farther along my route, in Tunisia. An important and much-coveted town for that whole time, it was noted for having the safest and best natural harbor on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Most Mediterranean ports like this, perhaps every port in the entire sea, had a history of being raided and recolonized. After Hasdrubal, Cartagena had been plundered by everyone from Scipio Africanus in 210 B.C., through the Moors and Francis Drake, to the Nationalists in 1938.

The harbor was filled with ships even this cold day, and there were yachts at the marina. There was no beach. One of Cartagena’s relics was a big old submarine in a garden near the harbor. It looked like a vast iron cigar, and it had been placed there because the supposed inventor of the submarine was born in the town.