The Pillars of Hercules

“That’s El Caudillo in his military uniform. That’s from 1940.”

Because I wanted to get him on the subject of Franco, I haggled a little, offered him less than he had demanded, and he said okay.

“Why is it I never see statues of Franco?” I asked, pocketing the picture.

“Here in Valencia there are none. But you’ll see them in Madrid, and in Barcelona. Plenty in Galicia.”

“Why aren’t there any here?”

“Politics!” he exploded, and threw up his hands.

The portrait made Franco look like a Roman emperor, just the sort of image that a man noted for being personally timid would choose. He praised and attempted to flatter the Nazis, who returned the favor by nicknaming Franco “The Dwarf of the Pardo.” Paul Preston in his exhaustive thousand-page biography, Franco, writes, “the hunger for adulation, the icy cruelty and the tongue-tied shyness were all manifestations of a deep sense of inadequacy.”

“Despite fifty years of public prominence and a life lived well into the television age, Francisco Franco remains the least known of the great dictators of the twentieth century.” This is how Preston begins his book. “That is partly because of the smoke screen created by hagiographers and propagandists. In his lifetime he was compared with the Archangel Gabriel, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, El Cid, Charles V, Philip II, Napoleon, and a host of other real and imaginary heroes.”

Valencia Railway Station was picked out with ceramics of figures and fruit, and prettily painted, with flags stirring and a gold ball and eagle. It had the whimsy and hospitality of the front gate of a fairground. Entering it gave a pleasant feeling of frivolity if not recklessness to any onward train journey.

The bullring next to the station was huge and well-made, elaborate brickwork, arches and colonnades, not old, but handsome and a bit sinister, like the temple of a violent religion, a place of sacrifice, which was what it was. There were no bullfights that week in the Valencia bullring, but there were plenty on television. Televised bullfights I found to be one of the irritations of eating in cheap restaurants—the way the diners stopped eating when the bull was about to be stabbed, the close attention they gave to the stabbing—a silence in the whole place—and then the action replay, the whole length of the sword running into the bull’s neck, the bull dropping and vomiting blood in slow motion.

It’s not really a Catholic country, the Spaniards told me, but this express train to Barcelona was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. I asked the conductor why this was so. “It’s just a name,” he said.

The Virgin sped out of Valencia and along the Mediterranean shoreline of gray sand and blue sea, a plain of gardens and trees and square houses of brown stone, the hills rising to mountains in the background, a classic Spanish landscape of dry overgrazed hills, some of it hardly built upon. But most of it, especially around the coastal town of Tarragona and beyond, is overdeveloped, full of houses. Yet even the most unsightly place was relieved by vineyards or lemon trees, orchards, palm trees. It did not have the nasty urban desolation of industrialized Europe.

There were mainly Spaniards on the train. A few foreigners were heading to Barcelona, others to Port-Bou, the last stop in Spain before the train entered France. There were clusters of Japanese, and French businessmen, and Moroccans. And Kurt, who was heading back to Germany. He was very fat and bearded, in a leather vest, with a tattoo on his wrist, and very drunk at two in the afternoon, in the buffet car.

“This tattoo—I made it myself! I got drunk and took a needle and just went plunk-plunk-plunk for three hours.”

The tattoo seemed to show a hot dog in a man’s hand, but Kurt helped me to see that it depicted a bulky submarine being crushed by an enormous hairy fist. Above it were the words Germany—Navy and below it, Killer Submarine Crew.

“Why are those words in English?”

We were speaking German. Kurt did not speak English.

“They just are.”

“Were you in the navy?”

“For twenty years, based in Wilhelmshaven, but I also traveled.” It seemed an unlikely question because he was not much older than I was but I asked, “Did you destroy any submarines?”

“No, but I would have if I had to. I knew how.”

“Why did you leave the navy?”

“Family problems. My son is a diabetic. He needs my help. And my wife is in the hospital.”

“Serious?”

“Yes. She jabs herself—with a needle, you know. She is not a fixer, not really. She is sick.”

“What brought you to Valencia?”

“Football. Karlsruhe was playing Valencia.”

“Who won?”

He growled and made a face. “Valencia,” he said, and uttering the word seemed to make him thoughtful. He was probably thinking of the defeat, the details of the game. He drank for a while longer, and while he was lost in his thoughts I started to slip away.