The Pillars of Hercules

“I saw one at Torrevieja with six small boxes, all filled with tiny fish. A man said to him, ‘Why are you keeping these little fish? This is the fish stock. If you don’t leave them to be fattened up there won’t be any for the rest of us.’ The fisherman said, ‘Sorry, but I’ve got a family. I’ve got mouths to feed.’ They went at it a bit more and were finally fighting with fists.”

We talked about the Mediterranean.

“If I wanted I could sail right across from here to the Turkish coast and it wouldn’t take me much more than three weeks. It’s only fifteen hundred miles or so—not such a large area, either. But I want to poke into the corners of it and take my time.”

“Do you see much pollution?”

“The most polluted part of the Med is said to be that corner between France and Italy, around Genoa. But I’ve seen some very rough beaches here in Spain—raw sewage on the beach, for example. Estepona had some.”

He was about sixty. He told me he had simply chucked everything, his job, his house, the lot, and sailed away from Britain. He was planning to spend the coming year sailing from port to port, in all seasons, in all weather, in the Mediterranean. North Africa did not interest him, but, “They say Turkey is very pleasant and very cheap.” He had no long-term plan. “We just take it a month at a time.”

I liked him for being dauntless and self-sufficient, as well as appreciative, easygoing, reliable, all the qualities of a single-handed sailor. He could even fix his own engine—his father had taught him how.

“Where are you headed?”

“Barcelona, by way of Mallorca.”

“We’ll be looking for you,” he said.

Alicante was a town in which it helped to be self-sufficient, because of the downturn in tourism and the off-season. People seemed to go their own way, many stores had closed, no one was touting for business. It was a small city, but with an air of friendliness. Many pedestrians seemed fairly elderly, the old Spaniard and his wife hobbling along, she with a string bag, he with a cane, the thick-and-thin marriage that seems so enviable from the outside, that you only seem to see in provincial towns like this.

And the other people in Alicante—mending phone lines, painting shutters, diddling with adding machines, counting money, leading children down the street, selling lottery tickets, sweeping—such people made me feel idle and superfluous, as a traveler. The worst part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills.

V. S. Pritchett speaks of “the guilt of being a tourist who is passing through and is a mere voyeur.” I did not share that guilt. I felt sorrow, horror, compassion, joy. Observing how people worked and lived their lives is one of the objectives of travel. It sometimes made me feel bad and fairly useless. But I was not a “mere” voyeur. I was a very hardworking voyeur.

In Alicante I saw for the first time on my trip the dark shiny plum-colored West Africans with their trinkets and leather bags and beads laid out on mats in the middle of the wide pretty Esplanada de España. They were from remote villages in Senegal, so they said; they had come here via France. There were also Moroccans selling sunglasses, Spanish peasants selling nuts in paper cones, Gypsies selling wilted flowers. One man held a hand-lettered sign in Spanish: “I have no job and I have three mouths to feed.” But no one took any notice.

On the day I was to leave Alicante I fell into conversation with a man in a cafe who was casually watching a bullfight on TV along with a number of other men. I realized once again how much I hated bullfights—the preening matador, the tortured bull—and yet I was still trying to account for this Spanish afición for them.

I said, “The bull always loses. So what’s the sport?”

“The matador has to work in order to win,” the man said.

“Is it really so dangerous for the matador?”

“Oh, yes. Think of the horns of the bull—how sharp they are, how big they are.”

“Yet the bull dies.”

“It is very complicated,” he said. He mentioned all the moves a matador needed to have in his repertoire. “And the matador needs so much practice.”

Elias Canetti has an epigram about wishing to see a mouse eat a cat alive, but to toy with it first. Thinking about bullfighting I wanted to see a bull torment a matador to death, not trample him but gore him repeatedly and make him dance and bleed to death. This vindictive thought might have been shared by some people who went to bullfights: to see the matador trampled.

As an ignorant foreigner I had a right to ask him the obvious: “So people really enjoy it?”

“It is a Spanish thing,” he said.

“What about you—do you enjoy it?”

“No. It is not for me,” he said. “For me it is all suffering.”

3

The M.V. Punta Europa to Mallorca