The Pillars of Hercules

“The Boston Strangler.” El Estrangulador del Boston.

“That’s me.”

The ferry Ciudad de Badajoz left Málaga at one in the afternoon for Melilla. It was a gray windy day, and only about twenty of us were making the trip. Most of them were Moroccans, the men looking like Smurfs in djellabas, the women like nuns in habits and hoods, traveling with gunnysacks for luggage. A handful of Spaniards had cars or trucks down below. It was a large ferry, five stories from its Plimsoll line to its top deck. I regretted that I had not been able to take one like it from Tunisia, but anyway I would be in Melilla in seven hours.

Leaving Málaga’s outer harbor, the ferry pitched and began sailing aslant the wind, the shoulder of the easterly hard against its port beam. Seasickness bags were distributed by the crew. The Moroccans used theirs, and some of them could be seen tottering along, bearing these little sacks to the deck where they were jettisoned over the rail. This was a lesson to me. After a year and a half of glaring at the Mediterranean and writing “tame,” “lakelike,” “a vast pond,” “sloshing waves,” “almost featureless,” “wearing a dumb green look of stagnation,” and so forth—heaping abuse on the Mediterranean the way you might insult someone lazily snoring on a sofa—the sea had come alive and was howling in my face, the way someone lazily snoring in a sofa would react if unfairly abused.

It was not a long swell and a distant fetch between waves, but rough irregular waves and a strong wind—a sea that was more confused and noisy than many oceans I had seen. The storm was not an illusion. This large ferry was tossing in it like a chamber pot.

“Windy,” I said to a man at the rail.

The seasick passengers inside had made me feel queasy and had driven me outdoors.

“It is the Levanter,” he said. I had not heard that word spoken before, though I had read it in books about the Mediterranean. It was the weather-changing wind from the east that could blow at gale force. But I had only known sunny or gray or rainy weather; no storms, nothing to interrupt my plans.

“Going to Melilla?”

“I hope so.”

“Why ‘hope’?”

“Because this weather is very bad.”

He looked worried. It had not occurred to me that the wind was anything but a nuisance. How could it be a danger? This was the Mediterranean, after all. Yes, I had read of the severe storms in The Odyssey, but that epic was famous for its hyperbole.

“This is a large ship,” I said.

“Some ships are not large enough for the Levanter,” he said.

To change the subject I said, “Isn’t Melilla a bit like Gibraltar? It is a little piece of Spain in Morocco, the way Gibraltar is a little piece of Britain in Spain.”

“That is true. It is the same. But we still want Gibraltar.”

“Maybe the Moroccans want Melilla.”

“Yes, but so do we. And Gibraltar too.”

He laughed, seeing the contradiction, but refusing to concede.

It was cold on deck, and though there was wind but no rain the deck was wet with spray and spoondrift. The wind had raised the sea and lowered the sky. The visibility was poor. The smack of the waves against the ship was as loud and violent as though the hull were being struck with metal, the sound like the clapper in a cracked bell.

The man’s name was Antonio. He was from Mijas. I told him that I had been to a bullfight in Mijas over a year ago. I had found the whole thing generally disgusting and brutal, but in the hope of eliciting an opinion about bull fever I refrained from telling him my true feelings. Besides, this storm did not create an atmosphere that was conducive to the free flow of ideas.

“Mijas is becoming very famous,” he said. “The young matadors start there, like the ones you saw, and they soon make a reputation.”

“But the most famous matador in Spain is from Colombia, isn’t that so?”

“No. The best one now—the real hero—is Jesulín de Ubrique. Every man and woman loves him—every girl wants to meet him.”

“Ubrique is near here, isn’t it?”

“Down the coast,” Antonio said. He gasped and clutched the rail as a wave crashed against the deck below. He raised his voice. “And another one is the son of the famous El Cordobes, though El Cordobes refuses to say that he is his son.”

“What’s the son’s name?” I shouted over the wind.

“Manuel Diaz el Cordobes, and he is crazy like his father. More crazy! His father used to play with the bull, but this Manuel Diaz puts his face against the bull’s face. He is double crazy!”

“I have a theory that Spanish people prefer football to the corrida.”

“Not true. We love the corrida more.”

“But it’s not a sport.”

“No. It is a spectacle,” Antonio said.