The Pillars of Hercules

We talked about the Spain of Gerald Brenan, and Pritchett, and Jan Morris, and H. V. Morton, and Hemingway, and George Borrow, and Rose Macauley, and Robert Graves. It was true, Spain had been thoroughly anatomized by foreigners, the British especially.

“Mario Vargas Llosa comes here quite a lot,” Antonio said, referring to the novelist who ran unsuccessfully for President of Peru. “He says, ‘People in Spain talk in a lively and intelligent way. They are very perceptive and sometimes very rude. Then they go home and do nothing.’ ”

One night in Barcelona I had been invited to one of those parties where everyone was witty. There was a poet, a moviemaker, a philosophy professor, a publisher, a painter, a musician, about fifteen people around a table, all intellectuals and artists, and all of them friends, all drunk on champagne—the empty bottles littered the table—celebrating the director’s forty-fourth birthday. They laughed and poked fun and quoted each other, while I sat and marveled. It was a bright, cliquey, old-fashioned, unself-conscious gathering of people, neither fashionable nor wealthy, but all of them talented—and, incidentally, every person at the table was smoking a cigarette.

Antonio went on quoting Vargas Llosa, “‘The English meet at London parties. They are very polite, they hardly talk. Then they go home and write amazing things—rude, wicked, funny, lively.’ ”

“Paul is so polite,” Beatriz said. “Maybe that means he is going to write something wicked!”

On the contrary, in Barcelona I was thinking kindly of the Spanish; what I saw (and it made me hopeful for the rest of my trip) was simple affection. In other travels I had not seen much affection between men and women, that is, open displays of physical intimacy—kissing, hand-holding, snogging, canoodling, a sudden hug; not lust but affection, friendship, reassurance, paddling palms and pinching fingers. I had hardly seen it in China. It was rare on the islands of Oceania. It did not exist in India.

I saw it in Spain: old married couples holding hands, young people kissing, married ones embracing. It was not submissive and sexist. It was deeply affecting, spontaneous and candid. I thought: I like this.

Even at the Barcelona bullfight, my last bullfight, couples held hands there too.

“He is a show-off,” a woman behind me said, calling him a presumido. The matador was kissing the tips of the bull’s horns, kneeling just in front of the bleeding drooling animal, and teasingly flicking the bull’s head with his finger.

Then the bull came alive and rewarded the matador for taunting him. It bore down on the matador and tore him with its hoofs and gored him, as the cape-waggers tried to distract the murderously provoked creature. The matador got up. There was blood on his arm and his hip. The crowd cheered him, but in a robust and almost satirical way. Then I saw why. The bull in goring him had torn the matador’s tight trousers just at the crotch, and as he limped his dick was exposed, a small pink sausage.

I fell into conversation with the man next to me and said I wondered what happened to the bull after it was dragged away dead.

They were butchered and eaten, he said. He described the broth that was made from the bull’s tail, the steaks that were cut from its haunches; and hamburgers that were made from chopped bull.

“And tomorrow morning you can find the bull’s criadilla on the menu of certain restaurants in Barcelona,” he said.

Criadilla?

“Cojónes,” he said. “But cojónes is not polite. Better to say criadilla.

“The bull’s testicles are served like brain. And it is like eating kiwi fruits. You think they are going to be tough, then you bite, and it is soft and tender and mushy.”

After the Picasso Museum and the climb to the top of the hill Montjuic and through Parc Güell, I made a tour of Gaudí’s masterpiece, the Sagrada Família. Colm Tóibín, in his book on Barcelona, tells the story of Gaudí’s being interrogated by a visiting bishop. Why had Gaudí decorated the tops of towers which no one would ever see?

Gaudí said, “Your Grace, the angels will see them.”

And then I set out again, up the flat tame coast they call the Costa de Maresme, which would lead me to the rugged cliffy Costa Brava, the “Wild Coast,” and the French border.

Badalona just outside the city was both Roman ruins and a grotesque power plant. One stop out of Arc de Triunfo station, going north along the Mediterranean, and Barcelona out the back window seemed like a small town at the foot of a wooded hill—an illusion perhaps, but that was how it seemed.