The Pillars of Hercules

Beatriz said she had been an anarchist, an unexpected announcement from a prosperous and well-turned-out woman, who had just praised the wine, or perhaps it was my ignorant presumption that an anarchist was an outlaw. And I should have known better, because Orwell, who had been a member of a Trotskyite militia, had described the anarchist brigades.

She smiled and said that anarchists greeted each other with the word “Salud!”

“Let’s say your great-great-grandfather went to Cuba and made a fortune selling and buying slaves,” Antonio said. “If someone writes a book about that, a biography, and claims this relative of yours was a slaver, the family will be hurt, eh? Better not to hurt the family. I think this.”

“Tony uses that example because his great-great-grandfather sold slaves in Cuba,” Beatriz said.

“Maybe he sold slaves and maybe not, but anyway he made his fortune in Cuba.”

“Doing what?”

“Many things.” Antonio was smiling sheepishly. “That is why I say, better not to ask.”

I said, “But when I asked about the past I wasn’t thinking of the eighteenth century. I was thinking about thirty years ago, or less.”

I had yet to accustom myself to such remote allusions. This example of colonial Cuba was typical of a certain Mediterranean way of thinking. Antonio might easily have mentioned the ancient Iberians. The Gibraltarians casually quoted the Treaty of Utrecht, the coastal French could talk about the Roman occupation until the cows came home, and the Italians reminisced about the Etruscans. Even this was nothing compared with a Greek in full cry, describing his glorious Hellenic heritage (“Euripides once said …”), or a Turk animadverting about the Ottoman Empire. And references to Masada, Moses, and the wisdom of the prophet Abraham were part of most Israelis’ small talk. Much of this was romance, or at least sentimental. The Frenchmen who talked about the Romans would be evasive when the subject of the German occupation was raised. Israelis might not be happy talking about something that occurred in South Lebanon last year. There was a book to be written about Mediterranean notions of time.

Nor, in the Mediterranean, were there clear divisions between the dead and the living, between the mythical and the real. That was another book.

Meanwhile, Antonio was answering my question.

“For some people there is a clear memory of Franco,” he said. “It is not good. Everything changed after he died—in fifteen years we changed totally. But maybe we had changed before, and kept it to ourselves.”

Beatriz said, “The taxi drivers are sentimental. They say things were better before—less crime, no drugs, more order.”

“Taxi drivers all over the world say that,” I said.

“And the young people say, ‘Franco? Wasn’t he a general?’ ”

“It was the tourists who kept us up to date,” Antonio said.

Was he talking about individual travelers, or the vast numbers of predictable and frugal package tourists, the English out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, wearing socks under their sandals and demanding Watney’s Red Barrel and the Daily Express and complaining of garlic in the food and joking about tummy upsets and diarrhea, and overdoing it on the first day and—too late—putting Timothy White’s sun cream on their big sunburned beaks. The Spannies don’t have our clean ways, innit?

Them, he said, the lower-middle-class hearties and trippers.

“We learned a lot from them,” he said. “Ideas, style, what they thought of us and our government. We learned about the rest of the world. And Franco thought he had closed the door.”

But the reason might also have been that in the twilight period of the seventies, Franco was on his deathbed, and book and movie censorship had been relaxed. Of these years, Colm Tóibín writes, in Homage to Barcelona, “People [in Barcelona] lived in a free country of their own invention, despite the police, despite the dying Dictator.”

My dinner companions asked me about my trip so far, about the provinces of Andalusia and Murcia and Valencia.

This raised a common Mediterranean theme. There was another book to be written, based on the text: This is not one country—this is many countries. Italy was several countries; so were Turkey and Israel and France and Cyprus. Yugoslavia was quite a few countries. And Spain?

“Spain is not a country,” Antonio said. “It is many different countries, with many different languages. Andalusia is so different from Castilia and Galicia. Yet, somehow, Andalusian culture got exported—the guitar, the dances, the songs, all that. Foreigners think that Spanish culture is Andalusian only. But this is many nations.”

“That’s why the Spanish can’t write about it,” Beatriz said. “Only outsiders can.”