The Pillars of Hercules

“Wait,” he said. “See this tattoo?” He rolled up his sleeve. “This one was much easier to do. I did this one myself, too.”

Eventually I went back to my seat. As this was an express, the Virgin had a TV in each car. The video that trip was a soft-porn film of the Blue Lagoon variety—castaways, jungle, friendly parrot, and plenty of excuses for the man and woman to get their clothes off.

Headphones were sold, though hardly anyone bought them. Most of the passengers looked out the train window at the pretty coves and the rocky shoreline, the steep cliffs, the pines and the small port villages. We had passed Sagunto and Castellón, and the Desierto de las Palmas, a high ridge with an eighteenth-century monastery to the west. Past miles of fruit trees and tenements by the sea, and after Tortosa on the River Ebro we were traveling ten feet from the sea, known in this corner of the Mediterranean as the Balearic Sea.

In spite of its fragrant herbaceous name, Tarragona was a grim place. That seemed to be the rule on this part of the Mediterranean shore. The town had been the subject of poems by Martial. The wines had been praised by Pliny. “The emperor himself wintered here in 26 B.C. after his Cantabrian campaign.” Now it was mainly an oil-cracking plant and a strip of littered shore. The sour stink of sulfuric acid is an unmistakable indication that you have entered an industrial suburb. Sitges, farther along, once a fashionable resort, was now known mainly for its strip of homosexual beach.

Big cities seem to me like destinations, walled-in stopping places, with nothing beyond their monumental look of finality, breathing You’ve arrived to the traveler. But I did not want to have a destination on the Mediterranean coast. I had planned to push on and to avoid places like Barcelona; or at least see them glancingly and not linger. Such a rich place seemed perfect for the person who wanted to write a book about a city. There were many with the title Barcelona. Yet I hung on.

It was a sunny afternoon when I arrived on the “Virgen” from Valencia. I was in no hurry. And Barcelona seemed a bright and lovely place, pleasant for walking around, with parks and wide boulevards and a brightness and prosperity. The prosperity might have been an illusion. One of the city’s car factories, a division of Fiat, shut down the day I arrived, putting nine thousand people out of work. The graffiti was almost instantaneous: FIAT = MAFIA.

But I had other reasons for liking Barcelona. In its bookstores, along with pornographic comics and photo magazines, the many bullfighting magazines, treatises on the occult, and dreams, and witches; knitting magazines, marriage manuals, motorcycle monthlies, sadistic and romantic novels, dictionaries, gardening books, gun digests, and hagiographies, were also La Costa de Mosquitos and Mi Historia Secreta, San Jack, La Calle de la Media Luna, Zona Exterior, and some more books, in Spanish translation, written by me.

People in Barcelona were apparently buying and reading my books. Knowing that gave the city an air of sympathy and erudition and it made me want to stay a while.

I had not had a good meal since starting. Spanish food was—what? Undistinguished, unmemorable, regional. In several Spanish towns I had been encouraged by locals to eat at Italian restaurants; in Cartagena I was told the best place was Chinese. Spaniards often disparaged their own food, and said the restaurants were terrible, and when I asked them what they liked to eat they would mention something their mother made.

Barcelona, full of great restaurants, was the exception to all this. The city had been spruced up for the Olympics but even so it had always had a reputation for good living and great art, the Picasso Museum, the Gaudí cathedral. And that was odd for me because in my mind it was the bombed and besieged city at the heart of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, fiercely contended for by fascists, communists and anarchists.

What was the Spanish view of all that? Presumably there were many Spanish books about that, “the National Uprising.”

“There are almost no books of that kind,” Antonio was saying.

We were eating sea urchins’ eggs with julienne of seared tuna at his restaurant La Balsa. There are seldom any lapses in service when you are seated with the owner.

“We have no memory. For example, no one in Spain writes biographies. There are no memoirs at all.”

“It is as though we do not want to remember the past,” his companion Beatriz said. “It’s strange, but that’s Spain.

“We live for today and tomorrow. We don’t think about yesterday. It’s not good. Maybe it’s better to have no memories at all than have bad memories.”

“My family was okay,” Antonio said. “They were not for Franco, but they were monarchists.”