The Pillars of Hercules

W. B. Yeats spent the winter of 1927–28 at the Reina Cristina. He had gone to Spain to recover from a bad cold. While nursing his cold, Yeats wrote a poem, “At Algeciras—A Meditation upon Death,” which begins with a pretty portrait of the straits:

The heron-billed pale cattle-birds

That feed on some foul parasite

Of the Moroccan flocks and herds

Cross the narrow Straits to light

In the rich midnight of the garden trees

Till the dawn break upon those mingled seas.

Back in town my more optimistic bird-watcher was saying again, “I don’t think that flag is flapping as hard as it was this morning.”

Gypsies, Germans, Moroccans, Africans, sailors, families, small children, motorcyclists, dogs, truck drivers, bus passengers—everyone was waiting. Some were drunk. Many slept in their vehicles. Backpackers lay on the floor of the terminal in their sleeping bags. And people were still arriving by car in Algeciras to take the ferry to Tangier or Ceuta.

It was just over an hour to Ceuta, about two hours to Tangier. But now three days had passed without any ferries. And still the wind blew. I took the bus to Tarifa, to kill time. It was a pleasant little town buffeted by wind. Spray blew from one side of the harbor to the other, drenching the bronze statue erected to “Men of the Sea.”

The wind gave me a headache that would not go away. It made me irritable. It woke me in the middle of the night and made me listen to it damaging the town and scraping at the window. During the day it made me feel grubby. It hurt my eyes. It exhausted me.

Algeciras was such a small town and I was there such a long time that I kept seeing the same people. I got to know some of them. The ceramic seller with the terra-cotta piggy banks, the many Moroccans selling leather jackets. The dwarf selling lottery tickets. The scores of agencies selling ferry tickets; the fruit sellers and market butchers and fishmongers. Some born-again Christians who had once been hippies ran a cafe that offered Bible study with its sandwiches; I got to know them. The Indian watch salesman who had lived in Spain for ten years, “and no Spanish person ever said to me, ‘You fucking Indian,’ like they did to me in London—or four or five men come up to me in the tube train and say things. Spanish are good people”—I met him, too.

And there was Juana. She stood on the sidewalk near Bar El Vino. She was twenty, or perhaps younger. But a serious drug habit made her look much older—haggard, red-eyed, wild-haired. The wind tore at her hair and snatched at her skirt as she clutched her jacket and searched passersby with her pockmarked and pleading face. She was cold and impatient, and sometimes plainly desperate.

“Señor—hola!”

Most of them hurried past. She was harmless, but there was something dangerous and witchlike about her appearing from the shadows beside Bar El Vino in this wind.

Juana became a familiar face, and so I usually said hello to her.

This friendliness encouraged her. “Fucky-fucky?”

“No, thank you.”

“Three thousand.” That was twenty-five dollars.

“No, thank you.”

“Anything you want to do, I will do.”

“No, thank you.”

“The money includes the room at the hotel!”

“No, thank you.”

“It is cheap!”

And following me down the street, bucking the wind, she would be summoned back by a big growly-voiced woman, calling out, “Juana!”

It was too windy for me to read. I couldn’t think in this wind. Listening to music was out of the question, and so was conversation. After dinner I watched TV in the neighborhood bar, and it seemed as though I had begun to live the life of a lower-middle-class resident of Algeciras. Crocodile Dundee was on one night, dubbed in Spanish. We watched that. We watched wrestling and football. One night there was a bullfight. A matador mounted on a horse wounded a bull, then rode back and forth poking the bleeding animal with a pikestaff. The bull turned and gored the horse, then flipped the horse and rider and trampled them. The matador lay motionless, next to the crumpled horse, until the bull was distracted and run through with a sword. It was possible that this ten-minute corrida produced the death of the bull, the horse and the matador.

We watched cartoons. That was what I had been reduced to by five days of Levanter wind: a middle-aged mental case sitting on a wobbly chair in the filthy Foreign Legion Bar, watching Tom and Jerry cartoons.