The Pillars of Hercules

            A small coach left every few hours from Marina Station on the beach at Alicante and chugged northeast on a narrow gauge railway, through Villajoyosa and Benidorm and Altea, to the old port village of Denia, where I had been told I could catch the late-night ferry to Palma in Mallorca.

Benidorm was a mass of beachside high-rises, the worst place I had seen on the coast so far, worse than Torremolinos, which was slap-happy seaside tackiness of a familiar and forgivable kind. But Benidorm was ugliness on a grand scale—tall blocks of apartments, hideous hotels, winking signs, the whole place as badly built and visually unappealing as a suddenly thrown-up town on the shores of the People’s Republic of China. Everything that Spain was said to stand for—charm, dignity, elegance, honor, restraint—was denied in the look of Benidorm. And because this was wet chilly winter, the wide streets were empty, most of the hotels were shut, no one sat on the beach or swam in the sea: the useless horror, naked and raw, in the low season, was demoralizing and awful.

In 1949, Benidorm was a tiny impoverished fishing village, “said to be an open door for smugglers,” an English visitor wrote. I walked around. I had a pizza. I sat on a bench surveying the Mediterranean, and then the wind picked up and the rain began.

The rain delighted me. It whipped against the sea. It darkened the stone of the hotels and tore at the signs. It coursed down the empty streets and flooded the gutters and cut gullies through the beach sand. A bit more wind and the lights would fail, a bit more rain and it would be a real flood. And that would be the answer, the cure for Benidorm—nature’s revenge, an elemental purifying storm that would wipe the place out.

It lifted my spirits to imagine the destruction of such a place, and I boarded the onward train feeling joy in my heart at the prospect of the wholesale destruction. The rain swept loudly against the side of the railway car like a shower of gravel. I was the only passenger. Darkness fell as we shuttled towards Denia in the storm. “Of all the lovely places down the Iberian seaboard, I believe Denia (the Roman Dianium) to be the most attractive and the place I would most like to spend my days,” Rose Macaulay wrote in her Spanish coast book, Fabled Shore. Her confidence is understandable; when she drove down the coast in 1948 she saw only one other British car. But the day I was at Denia the rain was torrential. I could not see Denia’s famous lighthouse. There were flooded streets in the little town, the station was drenched, the rain glittered in the lights of the port, where the ferry was moored by an empty puddled quay.

It was possible that this look of desertion meant that I had the departure time wrong.

“You are sure this ferry goes to Palma tonight?”

“Yes. No problem.”

“Where are the other passengers?”

“Perhaps there are no other passengers tonight.”

It was ten o’clock. I bought my ticket and boarded ten minutes later. The ferry Punta Europa had space for 1,300 passengers. A sign in Spanish on the upper deck spelled it out:

Maximum authorized passengers

1300

Crew Members

(Tripulantes)

31

Total of passengers and crew

1331

Then a man and his son came aboard. That made three of us on the Punta Europa. There were five inside saloons for passengers, filled with seats; every seat was the same, narrow, hard-edged molded plastic, and so we sat bolt upright as the ferry sailed out of Denia, roaring like an express train in the storm. The saloon lights still burned, the crew stayed below, the wind made the doors bang, the whole ferry stank of oil and the reek of decaying cork on its interior decks. A television set had been left on in each saloon—a man loudly reading the news. Outside was the black furious Mediterranean. It was my first storm on this sea and it thrilled me, because I had been seeing it as a sink of gray slopping water, and the wind and waves tonight gave it the look of a great ocean.

Four hours of this, the ferry pitching and rolling, and then the wind eased and the sea grew calmer as we approached Ibiza. It was three in the morning. An English couple boarded, murmuring, but they were not talking to each other, they were reassuring their pets, a nervous dog on a leash, a whining cat in a handheld cage. Now the passengers numbered five, and two animals. The lights still glared, the television screen flickered, still on but no program.

All those seats and yet not a single one was comfortable—straight backs, hard armrests, no leg room in front. None of them reclined. I propped myself up and when I could not stand the discomfort and the burning lightbulbs anymore I went on deck. The black swell of sea sighed against the hull, while I yawned and fiddled with my shortwave radio. After three hours the eastern sky grew lighter.