The Pillars of Hercules

I drove the next day down the long hill back to Palma, across the island. It seemed to me that tourist Mallorca was at the beach, the masses of hotels on the south and the east. But even the town of Palma seemed traditional Spanish, not touristy, and it even had a venerable look to it—the lovely thirteenth-century cathedral, one of the few in Europe that had never been sacked or bombed.

“This place is nice now,” a man from Cordova told me. “But it is madness in July and August.”

I stayed in a small hotel in a suburb to the northeast, where there were just working people and inexpensive boardinghouses. People getting by. I shopped in the supermarket, drank in the bar and watched football and bullfights like everyone else. And living in this way I tried to sum up the Spanish contradictions. They still puzzled me, the way the independent spirit of Spain had endured a dictatorship for forty years; the way Spanish passion seemed at odds with Spanish courtesy. They were churchgoing Catholics who were loudly anticlerical. And how could one reconcile the strenuous libido (the papers crammed with personal ads for everything from boyfriends to sado-masochism) with the low birthrate?

The elderly people in Spain were often the most broadminded. Pornography was the most vivid example of their tolerance. There were porno shops and movies in all the Spanish towns and cities, and even the smaller places like Cartagena had at least one or two porno outlets.

It seemed incontestable to me that a country’s pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth but it contained many clues and even more warnings. Japanese porno is unlike anything in Germany, French is unlike Swedish, American unlike Mexican, and so forth.

Spanish pornography baffled me. It seemed beyond sex, most of it. It involved children and dogs and torture; men torturing women, women being beastly to men; much of it was worse than German varieties, possibly the most repellent porno in the world. Some of it was homegrown—hermaphrodites and toilet training. One film I saw concerned a woman, a man and a donkey. Another, one of the strangest I have ever seen, concerned a Moroccan boy of about thirteen or fourteen, and a very bewildered goat.

In the primmest little districts in Alicante or Murcia or Mallorca, such films were on view next to the candy store or the hairdresser. And the candy stores themselves sometimes sold porno—not just tit and bum magazines, but hard-core porn. Here is Granny behind the counter selling Juan a lottery ticket and on the magazine rack with the kiddies books and the evening papers and How to Knit is S & M Monthly, with page after page of women being tortured, burned, tied up, sexually mutilated, spiky objects being forced into their vaginas, their arms being twisted, their screams recorded: Help! Socorro!

Porno comic books seemed to me the worst of all, because the sexual torture was idealized and easily accessible, in a realm of unreality and fantasy that seemed dangerous. I presumed that photographs would be so off-putting and disgusting—and such photographs hardly existed, showing torture and death. But anything was possible in the comics, anything could be pictured, and usually was, including bestiality and necrophilia.

“If you are not going to buy that magazine, please put it down, señor.”

One sunny morning I boarded the ferry at Palma and sailed past the lump of Ibiza under blue skies back to the mainland port of Valencia. It was eight hours, mostly sunshine. There were about thirty of us on the ship that could accommodate fifteen hundred. I sat on deck, scribbling. Inside, a roomful of men watched the day’s bullfight on television, and each time the coup de grace was delivered, the whole length of the matador’s sword driven into the stumbling bull, a thrill of satisfaction went through the room, an intense sigh of passion.

4

The “Virgen de Guadalupe” Express to Barcelona and Beyond

            If a quest for the Holy Grail began in Valencia it would be a very short quest, because the Holy Grail is propped on an altar in a small chapel of the Cathedral, in the Plaza de Zaragoza, in the middle of Valencia. It is the real thing, that was drunk out of by Jesus at the Last Supper, and then passed around to the Apostles. This chalice, teacup size, was carved from greenish agate (chalcedony), as is the base, an inverted cup set with pearls and emeralds, with gold handles, and it is held together by a gold post and jeweled bands. The whole thing is seven inches high, small but complex. The simple cup might have acquired the gold and jewels since Jesus used it. The authorized Cathedral pamphlet offers all this conjecture as fact.