Happy Ant-Heap (7 page)

I was late on the scene the next year, and by then the first of the tourists had arrived. They were two French girls who had found a room over the bar, but who soon moved on, although their brief presence left an extraordinary effect. The fishermen’s wives who spent most of their day mending nets spread out on the beach had been much impressed by their clothes, and had copied them carefully. Within a matter of weeks, still busy with torn netting, they were clad in reasonable imitations of French fashions. These, although unsuitable to the background, attracted much admiration both in Farol and in other villages in the vicinity. The accommodation over the bar had been rented at rather above-average prices, thus giving the couple who ran the place the idea of adding to their establishment an annexe with two more rooms. As soon as this was completed it was occupied by more French tourists, and a developer attracted as if by magic to the scene put in plans for a three-storey hotel.

By year three a startling change had come about. All the main highways from the frontier were now resurfaced, the potholes in the local roads filled in, the swamp drained and the bridge put in order. The new hotel, ‘modernistic’ in design, dominated the mild contours of the old village like an army strongpoint and was full of English and French, and the foundations of two new hotels were already in place. Dances were arranged for the foreigners every night, and the young fishermen, having overcome their shyness, joined in. Most significant and even disturbing was the news that two or three had abandoned the sea to work as waiters in the hotel and a cafe that had opened, and in doing so made far more from tips than the most experienced fishermen on the boats.

I was shown the plans for the further development of Farol, which was to include a marina, a sea-front promenade, several restaurants, more hotels and a large car park. By the time all this was completed what had once been a tiny village would have become a town with suburbs. Someone mentioned that there had been emotional disturbances. Two local betrothals had come to nothing following fifteen-day romances with foreign holidaymakers, and one promising young fisherman had gone off, taking nothing but his guitar, and no more had been heard of him. The time had come, I decided, to move on.

In 1984, after an absence of thirty-four years, I returned to Farol on a visit suggested by a London newspaper. I had suspected that I should find it unrecognisable and this proved to be the case. What I drove into after formidable traffic delays was a
Costa
city stamped out as if by some industrial process. Part of the village’s original charm lay in the straggling irregularities of its narrow streets. Now they had been blasted and bulldozed into a uniform width with buildings of a standard design. A one-way system corkscrewed its way down through a firmament of traffic lights to a point where I knew the sea lay somewhere ahead, but it was invisible behind hoardings. Moments later I was to find that most of the beach had become a car park, with long lines of cars and notices warning of the danger of theft. Back in the streets there were burger restaurants, amusement arcades and advertisements for go-kart racing, and a refulgent sign in English urged
Let’s Go Play Cowboy Games.
Fishing was at an end, but fishermen who could not bring themselves wholly to abandon the sea had fitted glass bottoms to their boats and took tourists on trips ‘to explore the beauties of the coral gardens’. (Both the coral and the huge shells with which the sea-bed had been littered were of Pacific origin.)

I ran to earth one of the old friends with whom I had gone tunny- and sardine-fishing so many years before. He seemed, strangely enough, to have been saddened by what should have been a tremendous stroke of luck. Shortly after my departure he had inherited a valueless scrap of land in the village’s centre, on which his wife had kept chickens. Twenty years later he had sold this for several million pesetas, putting most of the cash into a scheme to convert a sluggish stream on the town’s outskirts into a canal with gondolas in the Venetian style. The project had come to nothing, for no method had been found to stop the water seeping away.

‘Do the girls still wear those Parisian dresses they used to put on to mend the nets?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘They all work as laundresses or chambermaids these days. It wouldn’t be suitable.’

‘What about the poetry they used to recite in the bar?’

‘If you started reciting poetry now they’d think you’d gone off your head.’

‘Everything changed,’ I said. ‘And you gave it up.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t quite that. It wasn’t a question of us giving poetry up. We were forsaken by poetry.’

The fate of Farol is an outstanding example of what was to destroy the extraordinary charm of the villages and towns of the eastern seaboard of Spain, including those such as Torremolinos and Benidorm, once fishing villages with a population living in enchanting surroundings and great tranquillity. In 1984 the municipality of Farol announced with pride that 200 hotels and campsites had been built in the vicinity and that 100,000 guests could be accommodated in these at the height of the season.

In Spain the damage inflicted by tourism out of control has been largely confined to the Mediterranean coast, whereas in France, according to a report issued by the Ministry of the Environment, it has affected all parts of the country. France, it was announced, possessed 10,000 temporary holiday villages, of which 4,000 were unsatisfactory, either by posing serious safety risks or through damage to their surroundings. The report cited a situation in the Pas de Calais where out of 237 tourist villages, only twenty-one took any safety precautions. It stated that in Corsica 174 such sites were in danger from forest fires, usually started by picnickers, which everywhere in the south of the country were on the increase. There was criticism of the degradation of the environment in the vicinity of such villages. ‘Wherever you look,’ said an informant, ‘there is a terrible mess.’

The wildlife of countries attracting most tourists has been badly affected everywhere in the post-war period. In the past, Spanish flora was the richest in Europe. A botanist writing in the
Bulletin of the Alpine Society
in 1972 spoke of mountain slopes in Andorra being covered ‘possibly by millions of wild daffodils’. They would have been reached in those days by footpaths, but now there are roads, and retracing the author’s footsteps two years ago I discovered that collectors had left no sign of the flowers. Even the Spanish national press is concerned at such happenings. ‘Mallorca is a botanical garden on the verge of extinction,’ said a headline in
Diario De Mallorca
on 1 October 1995. The paper warned that 37 per cent of the species of plants to be found only on the island had already been destroyed by tourists uprooting them. An attempt to protect what was left had been made by enclosing several hundred miles of roads with wire fences, but the fear was that this measure might have come too late.

Animals are equally under threat in Spain, the rarest of them, such as the lynx and the brown bear, although protected by law, having survived only in the remotest areas. Within a year of the opening of the frontier at the end of the Civil War, the international press carried an account of an incident when bears held up traffic on the main highway joining Huesca with Pamplona. Cars formed a queue and after a half-hour or so the bears ambled away into the woods.

With the return of peace and prosperity things had changed. I made the acquaintance of a road-construction engineer who had just put up an ugly house in the village. ‘If it’s wildlife that interests you,’ he said, ‘you should go to the Cantrabrians. We’ve just built 200 kilometres of new roads up there. The wolves come into the villages to clear up the rubbish at night. I read in
Vanguardia
that they still have bears in the caves at Somiedo and foreign sportsmen pay up to 300,000 pesetas for the chance to kill one.’

Remembering this conversation several years later I went to Somiedo and, finding the caves empty, was directed to Abbeyales, believed locally to be the most isolated and inaccessible village in Spain. People here still lived in the circular stone houses of pre-history, with their animals sheltered in byres under the living rooms (‘We need them in winter to keep warm’). Don Juan Fernandez Serra, the priest, was also unofficial mayor and an honorary policeman. From the wildlife point of view, he said, the news was poor. Only the wolves were doing fairly well, but with huntsmen now paying up to the equivalent of £3,000 even for a bear cub, and £1,000 for a lynx, these species were locally approaching extinction.

Otherwise, he said cheerfully, things were looking up. Their new road had opened up exciting prospects for the community, and government officials had promised the construction of three ski-lifts, designed, he supposed, to carry foreign tourists to the treeless upper pastures ideally suited to their sport. There was talk, too, of building a holiday camp to accommodate 250 visitors. If the scheme went through, a
discoteca
was certain to be opened, and there were plans to provide entertainment of the sort enjoyed by holidaymakers in an exceptionally lively small town called Espinareda, twenty miles across the mountains.

I went to Espinareda, of which I had seen picture postcards in Somiedo. They showed a row of gracious wooden houses with enormous Alpine-style balconies but these, I was to discover, had been demolished and replaced by angular breeze-block constructions like miniature forts. Espinareda had three
discotecas,
a supermarket, a police station and two English-style pubs. Graffiti were spreading across its walls, there were notices in English and a degutted car had been abandoned in a ditch. Some trouble had arisen through children caught taking drugs, the mayor told me, but otherwise things weren’t too bad. He was bursting with enthusiasm. ‘Someone like you from the big city is bound to see this as a sleepy little place,’ he said, ‘but the population is due to double in five years. Come back after that and you won’t recognise it.’

1997

I
N THE WINTER OF
1957, I went to Liberia for the
New Yorker.
Landing at Spriggs Payne Airfield in Monrovia at about midnight, I was told by the small boy who had taken over my luggage that he would not be able to bring it to the hotel until it was light, to avoid the possibility of being kidnapped. A report in the
Liberian Age
the next morning threw more light on the situation. Two men and a child had been murdered to make
borfina,
a ‘medicine’ manufactured from the organs of dead persons and used as an aphrodisiac and to promote rainfall. The whole business was discussed with total frankness. I learned that
borfina
was produced by professional ‘heart men’, witch doctors who worked at night, selecting for preference women and children as their victims. It was expensive, but there was no shortage of rich men who would pay a hundred dollars for a scent-bottle full. Heart men belonged to a whole range of secret societies, with names such as the Human Elephants, the Leopards, the Snake People and the Water People; and some to an occult group (popular, it was said, among politicians) which had the macabre title of the Negee Aquatic Cannibalistic Society. The remains of their victims were described in some detail in the press. According to another Liberian paper, the
Listener:
‘We are assured by experts that a body discovered this morning in the vicinity of the airfield had been deprived of flesh taken from the forehead, the palms of the hands, and other bodily regions. Foul play is to be suspected.’

A few days later I travelled north to Bgarnba, carrying an introduction to Mr Charles Williams, the district commissioner, a pleasant and hospitable man who invited me to stay the night. He was in court next morning, he said, to try several cases which he thought I, as a foreigner, might find of interest, and I was welcome to attend. Mr Williams was a devout Episcopalian, but most of the people under his jurisdiction were non-Christian, and in their cases trial would be by ordeal—more suited, he believed, to the pagan mentality. Males charged with crimes would drink
carfoo,
a poison of a mild kind, fatal only in the case of pagan perjurers.

Next morning, following him into the courtroom, squeamishness caught me by surprise when I was obliged to watch the swallowing of the poison. The two defendants drank, vomited briefly, then seemed much as before, and when they were found not guilty and released, I was mightily relieved.

But there was no escaping Mr Williams. The next case was less common, he said. It was of a woman accused by her husband of adultery with five lovers. Although any Liberian of standing, Williams explained, was expected to have no fewer than three wives—each purchased from her father at the standard bride price of forty dollars—the law was very strict in dealing with any wife falling short of absolute marital fidelity. Mr Williams ascribed the woman’s fall from grace in this instance to the use of
borfina,
in itself a criminal offence only where a woman was concerned.

A trial by burning iron was to be held in the yard at the back, where we found a heart man preparing his fire. The accused woman and her husband, dressed with extreme formality and devoid of expression, were seated side by side. The heart man pulled a long iron spoon from the fire, tested its glowing surface with his spittle and nodded to the girl, who put out her tongue. He bent over her, and there was a faint sizzle. Someone passed a jug of water to her, and she rinsed and spat and thrust out her tongue for the court’s inspection. There were insufficient signs of burning, and Mr Williams declared her not guilty. I asked if her five lovers would stand trial, and he seemed surprised. They had already been fined ten dollars each on the spot, he said, but the money, he assured me, would be refunded.

This is the closest I have come to the real hard core of sexual stimulants, or supposed ones. The softer aphrodisiacs are better known, though in my experience just as fanciful; the irrationality of the search for sexual vigour knows no bounds. Rhinoceros horns have been sawn off to be replaced by plaster imitations in the museums of the world. A whole category of animals in China are deprived of their gall bladders, the contents of which are mixed with white wine. All parts of a tiger are now marketable, including skin, whiskers and intestines. There are regular gatherings by diners in a Hong Kong restaurant to consume not only bird’s nest soup, but a more invigorating broth prepared from the lungs of a vulture. In Britain, animal-welfare groups claim in advertisements that Canadian fishermen have slaughtered at least 10,000 seals so that their penises can be exported to China, where they fetch a hundred pounds apiece as an important constituent of ‘sex potions’.