The Pillars of Hercules

I was not stopping in Murcia, just changing trains for Alicante up the coast, on the Costa Blanca, catching the express “Mare Nostrum.”

Onward past Orihuela to Elche, home of the only palm forest in Europe, and at the very end of the trip the train passed next to the beach, where there was a bit of wind-blown surf, and the trains were so close to the sea some spray flew against the windows.

It had become a stormy day and the rain and wind made the city interesting. My idea was to spend a day or so here and then try to find a ship going to the Balearic islands, Mallorca or Ibiza. It did not matter to me where the ship was going. I thought that if I got to one of those islands I would look around and then take another ship back to the mainland, farther up the coast, perhaps to Valencia or Barcelona.

“It is low season,” a Spanish travel agent told me. “The ferries to Mallorca might not be running.”

He shrugged—he didn’t know. He told me to fly. I said there had to be a ferry.

“Yes. Perhaps. You might have to go to Valencia. It is low season.”

I liked that expression, low season was a good expression, indicating the strange and the unpopular and the unpredictable.

There was a ferry, I found out, from the insignificant seaside village of Denia, about fifteen miles away on a headland. It was leaving the next day, at the inconvenient hour of eleven at night. When I asked the agent whether he had any tickets for the ferry he said, “Many!” and laughed.

A statue on the esplanade in Alicante greatly resembled Franco. I asked a man whether this was so. He said, “No”—angrily, and did not pause to enlighten me. This was an example of the risk of raising the forbidden topic of Francisco Franco. I seriously wondered whether there were statues of the man still standing in Spain; and what of the question of Franco’s robust and reactionary Catholicism and his sinister and cabalistic movement Opus Dei?

“But this is a Catholic country?” I said to a man in Alicante later that day.

“No, no,” he said. “Just the people are Catholic. It was a Catholic country when Franco was in power, but not anymore. Now it is a democratic country.”

We were talking about birth control. Spain had the lowest birthrate in Europe. This seemed unbelievable to me—that it was lower even than Germany’s or Denmark’s. But it was apparently true. Abortion was legal and there were measures afoot to make it even easier to secure one. It was also a fact that little kiddies were not much in evidence. This could have been a result of the dire economic situation: Europeans kept their families small in times of recession.

The waves were breaking on the beach below the Castello de Santa Barbara, and the rock above it, which was more impressive than the castle, where I was headed—restless for something to do; though it was a clear sign of desperation when I contemplated sight-seeing. My lowest points were visiting churches and ruins, and famous graves were rock bottom. It was a cold day. The beach stretched for miles. One person splashed in this gray sea, a small blue girl.

I wandered over to the harbor and found a cruising sailboat, the Legrandbois out of Guernsey, and had a chat with the captain, John Harrison, who had sold up, got rid of all he owned, and left Blythe, near Newcastle, to cruise the Mediterranean with his wife.

“I bought this sailboat four years ago and sailed it here slowly, coming down along Portugal, taking my time,” he said. “We were at Gibraltar for a long time. Did you see those semi-inflatables, the black ones, piled with cargo? They’re used for smuggling cigarettes across to Morocco and Algeciras and La Línea.”

“I heard there was smuggling at La Línea.”

“The smugglers buy the cigarettes legally. They’re dealers and there’s no tax. They have cellular phones and everything else. Now and then the police stop them, but usually they come and go as they please.”

“I thought the Spanish police were supposed to be tough,” I said, and told him about the roadblock I had seen.

“They had a reputation for being bureaucratic and unfriendly, but they’ve eased up. They’ve been friendly to us. I think they’re smashing.”

“How long are you going to be here in Alicante?”

“I don’t know. We stay weeks or months in a place, depending on how much we like it. It’s true there are very few people out there sailing in this weather, but this isn’t bad. I used to sail on Christmas and New Year’s out of Newcastle, and I can tell you that the North Sea at that time of year is pretty rough.”

“Is that fishing tackle?” I asked, indicating some odds and ends on the deck.

“Yes. We occasionally fish. I catch small mackerel and we grill them.”

“I thought there were hardly any fish at all in the Mediterranean.”

“There’s no question it’s overfished. The hake and mackerel you see in the market is all local, and there are still squid and octopus. But it’s going to be dire if they keep catching these undersized fish.”

“I haven’t seen many commercial fishermen.”