The Pillars of Hercules

The idea in Gibraltar was that the Spaniards were vastly inferior to the Gibraltarians; they were despised for their passionate gesticulation, their forty years of Franco’s fascism, their twanging guitars, their provincialism and irrationality and bean-eating and bull-torturing. Prejudices in Gibraltar were quite similar to those I had encountered in English seaside resorts, an enjoyable mixture of bluster and wrongheadedness, the Little Englander in full spate. But these poor rock-hoppers were, it seemed to me, about to be abandoned. In the fullness of time, I could see this place handed over to the Spaniards just as ruthlessly as Hong Kong had been served up like a dim sum to whining Chinese plutocrats and executioners. Gibraltarians would soon discover how bankruptcy could make a nation unsentimental and self-serving.

I wanted to talk to someone in power about this—someone other than people I casually encountered in public houses and at bus stops; so I sent a note to the distinguished former Chief Minister, Sir Joshua Hassan, and waited for a reply.

It was rainy and cool these October days. I became fond of this weather for various reasons. It was good writing weather, and it kept the tourists away. In such grim weather there was always a place to stay and it was seldom necessary to make onward arrangements. I liked feeling that I could leave a town at a moment’s notice and be assured that I would find a hotel farther up the line. In the whole of the Mediterranean, all seventeen countries, traveling off-season, I never had a problem of that sort, showing up in a place that was full of No Vacancy signs. In fact, most hotel owners complained to me that there weren’t half enough tourists these days.

In the several days that I waited to hear from Sir Joshua, I climbed the Rock. There was a lovely view from a vantage point at 1,350 feet, at the top of the Rock. To the west was Algeciras on a sweep of bay; to the north the low brown hills of San Roque beyond The Neck; to the south, beyond the lighthouses at Europa Point, across the Straits, was Morocco—Ceuta, the other Pillar, and farther west, Tangier.

At that altitude, wandering among the tourists and apes, learning to distinguish between them, I concluded that because the apes were both intelligent and deprived they are quite like the homeless people in big cities, soft-voiced, panhandling, desperate and yet chastened creatures. They are, horribly, like the poor in Europe—ragged and dispossessed, tenacious and yet fatalistic, as they hang on, knowing they are despised; they have that resentful yet fatalistic look of natives who have been displaced by swindling latecomers. The apes on the Rock are one of the underclasses of Gibraltar. Another underclass are the Moroccans. Coincidentally, the apes also originated in Morocco, from which in 1740 a whole tribe of apes was imported.

There was a strong sense of community in Gibraltar, which made it much odder for me to reflect that I was in a place that was both a racial hodgepodge and also deeply paranoid about admitting aliens. It was partly a result of Gibraltar’s insularity—the Rock is significantly an island. But tribalism and xenophobia were also Mediterranean character traits. Never mind that the history of the Mediterranean is a history of mongrelization; these days the most common sound was the native mongrel yapping about his pedigree and driving off foreign mutts.

After I saw the French tourist taunting the mother ape I asked a Gibraltarian who worked on the Rock whether many people were attacked.

“Lots of people are bitten,” he said, “but the strange thing is that nine out of ten are women—the women get the bites. We had one yesterday—a woman—big bite on her arm.”

His name was Jerry. One of his jobs was operating the cable car. I asked him whether the apes had rabies.

“No. These apes are medically looked after. But we send the people to the hospital anyway.”

I told him what a policeman in New York had once told me, that a human bite is much more dangerous than an animal bite, and that a tourist who bit you would do more harm than an ape.

From the top of the Rock it was possible to see that Gibraltar was little more than a harbor and a cluster of tenements, and like many towns with hills nearby, the higher you live on the slopes, the posher your house. The cable car passed over swimming pools and hot tubs and foaming whirlpool baths attached to luxury homes. Later, I looked at an 1810 map of Gibraltar and it reminded me of a colonial map of Boston: fifteen batteries—Queen’s Battery, King’s, Norman’s, Cockaigne’s, Prince of Hesse’s, Mungo’s and so forth. Then The Neck and the Spanish lines and all the Papists on the Spanish side. It was as though Dorchester Heights remained British while the rest of America went its own way—just as odd and inconvenient and anachronistic.