Naked at Lunch (14 page)

While it is technically true that there are no laws against nudity in Spain, you just don’t see people strolling Las Ramblas in Barcelona in the buff, walking naked through the Alhambra in Granada, or sitting at cafés nude in Madrid. So while it’s legal throughout the country, it’s not really encouraged. Except in Vera.

“Why turn Vera into a nudist city?”

He burst out laughing. “Why not?”

He had me there.

The mayor continued. “It’s about personal liberty. We respect the rights of each person.”

This I could follow in my limited Spanish, but then he went off saying something that I couldn’t catch. I turned to Pilar, who bit her lip and said, “The typical tourist is compatible . . . eh, with a naturist tourist, and each tourist can . . . eh . . . live together.” Pilar looked up, apologetic. “Maybe.”

The mayor seemed to enjoy the language malfunction that was occurring. He looked at Pilar and laughed. “Your English is no good.”

It was a good-natured ribbing and Pilar smiled. “Next year I’m going to study in at . . .
escuela idioma
. . . I would like to . . . eh . . .
recuperar
. . .”

“Recover your English?” I ask.

She nodded. “Yes.”

I’d like to recover my Spanish but I’m not sure much of it existed in the first place. I turned back to the mayor. “What is the economic influence of the naturist developments for the city?”

“Most of the jobs here are directly or indirectly related to tourism,” he said.

Pilar looked at me and said, “About five years ago there was a building boom here, a lot of people were building houses and complexes, but with the crash everything stopped and now we are living in another time.”

Just like in the United States, Spanish real estate prices rose almost 200 percent between 1997 and 2007,
³⁹
and, just like in the United States when the real estate bubble popped, the banks fell into crisis and the government—with help from the European Union—was forced to step in and bail them out. This set off a chain reaction of plummeting home values, austerity measures, inflation, and unemployment as high as 25 percent.
⁴⁰
Construction stopped and, as Pilar so eloquently expressed it, the Spanish “are living in another time.”

The economic crash explains the empty lots, half-built
urbanizaciónes
, defunct nightclubs, and abandoned construction sites that are scattered throughout the area around the beach.

“The worst part is most of the resorts and
urbanizaciónes
are now in the hands of the banks. You can buy a house for very cheap.” Pilar looked like she was about to set me up with a realtor. Not that I need a recommendation—there were For Sale signs up everywhere. According to one, you could snag a two-bedroom, two-bath condo a few blocks from the Mediterranean for about 70,000 euros.

I was thinking about Bob Tarr and the “thorny issue” he claimed existed between naturist
urbanizaciónes
and textile ones. So I asked the mayor about it.

The mayor considered my question and then said, “We don’t know about any problem.
No pasa nada
. The whole sector of the beach is for naturists. Vera is a city that is very open about this.”

Which made me wonder if it was more of a one-sided concern; in other words, the naturists want to keep the beach for themselves.

“What do the people of Vera think about all these naked people running around?”

He shrugged. “We have never had a problem.
Nunca
problema.
”

Pilar added, “The people that don’t like . . . eh, that like to stay with the clothes don’t go to the place with the people without the clothes.”

The mayor smiled. “I am not a naturist, but I am not afraid to encounter one.”

Which I found to be a very enlightened attitude. Why couldn’t it be like that on beaches in the United States? Why have laws restricting people from doing what they want? Does anyone really believe that seeing a naked person causes anyone any harm?

The mayor continued. “In the United States you just now have gay marriage. In Spain we have had this for a long time and we don’t have a problem. It is the same with naturists. There is no problem. People have rights to do what they wish and you can’t bother people anymore.”

According to the mayor—who’s a member of the center-right political party—all the political parties in Spain are tolerant of people’s desires and respect individual liberty.

After the meeting I wandered around the city, enjoying the small-town bustle of the streets. I got hungry and ended up at a restaurant that Pilar had recommended. The Terraza Carmona didn’t serve lunch until two, and it was only twelve thirty. I must’ve looked sad or hungry or some combination of sad and hungry, because they said that although the restaurant was closed, I could eat tapas and have some wine in the bar. They then carted out a few small plates. I sipped an icy Verdejo from a producer called Campustauru and ate
albóndigas de pescado
,
pimientos rellenos
,
and some fresh cheese doused with the best olive oil I’ve ever tasted. All that and Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia” was playing on the restaurant’s sound system. Everything was delicious and made me wonder why the food surrounding the naturist area was so mediocre. If the impulse to swim and lie in the sun naked is hedonistic, shouldn’t that extend to gastronomy?

The street that leads to the entrance to the hotel is called “Hotel Street” by the locals. It’s lined with bars, restaurants, a tiny
supermercado
, and A’Divina, a gay bar that features drag shows called
Espectáculos de Transformismo
every Sunday. There is a sad-looking discotheque and a swingers’ club. The bars and restaurants seem to fall into two distinct camps: ones frequented by local Spaniards and ones for tourists and expats. There are a couple of traditional pubs dishing up fish and chips and pints of beer for the British, an Indian restaurant, and a Dutch pub for visiting northern Europeans.

Sitting right in the middle of Hotel Street is the Ponte Sexy, which seems to be some bizarre hybrid of a club, a cocktail lounge, and a retail lingerie and sex-toy store. Customers sip cocktails on rattan chairs in an open-air bar while racks of trashy lingerie hang near the wall. A mannequin displays some kind of clothing that looks like it’s been pulled from a Colonial Williamsburg fetish shop. The finishing touch—and what really ties the place together, if you ask me—is the multicolored disco ball light effect swirling over the whole place. This may be exactly what advertising pundits mean when they talk about “selling a lifestyle.”

The restaurants and bars on the strip have an easygoing feel. People, for the most part, wear clothes when they’re on Hotel Street, but that didn’t stop a naked man from walking into a bar to get his wineskin refilled or a nude couple in their twenties from picking up a six-pack of beer at the little grocery store. Nobody got offended or unnerved or even seemed to notice.

I was having a drink in a pub called Frankie’s, which is run by a British expat named Alan. The place was crowded and a group of middle-aged men and women, their noses crisply red from a day at the beach, were drinking pints and getting rowdy. One man in the group came back to the table but then realized he’d forgotten to get something at the bar. As he turned to leave one of his friends joking called him a “dickhead.” The man stopped, then turned around, dropped his pants, and waggled his penis at his friends while doing his best De Niro impression. “You talking to me? You talking to me?”

Where in most places this kind of behavior might be met with shock or arrest and prosecution—maybe even being labeled a sex offender for the rest of your life—here the response was peals of uncontrollable laughter.

While I don’t necessarily want my friends waving their cocks at me when I’m out at a bar, I also don’t want them to be arrested if they do. Which is why I find the ideology of mutual respect, the live-and-let-live attitude of Vera Playa, inspiring. After spending four days here, reading by the pool, walking on the beach, even working out in the gym—yes, I used an elliptical trainer wearing only my tennis shoes—I found myself getting more relaxed with the whole nonsexual social nude thing and the American attitude about the naked body became more and more laughable. Not because it’s funny, but because it’s so extreme. Why are we infusing our nakedness with guilt and shame? Why is skinny-dipping seen as some form of perversion?

Here the nudity is so commonplace it’s almost boring. I never would’ve thought seeing a hundred naked people around the swimming pool would be dullsville, but it is. Sure, the occasional surprise jumps out at you, the incredibly beautiful woman who really is incredibly beautiful, or the tall man who looks like he’s had an elephant trunk grafted on to where his penis should be, but these are the exceptions. Everyone else—young, old, fat, thin, tall, short, smooth, hairy, whatever—just looked naked. Which is not to suggest there are no weirdos or eccentrics in the place. For example, the guy with the elephant trunk schlong was continuously walking back and forth in front of all the sunbathers as if he’d just forgotten something and had to go and get it. I’m guessing he forgot to show us how gargantuan his penis was.

The Man in the
Fishnet Diaper

T
he cabdriver spun the wheel and hit the gas like she was in some bad French version of
The Fast and the Furious: Tourist Season
. Already going faster than I thought was normal for a cab ride, the taxi suddenly lurched to the right and bombed around a corner, juddering and slewing, before cutting back sharply to the left and accelerating through a roundabout at top speed. With each jerk and careen, I could hear my suitcase in the trunk of the cab skitter across the floor and slam against the side, only to bounce off the roof of the trunk and cartwheel back across as we hurtled through a series of winding turns. The cabdriver looked at me and said, “See, your suitcase is so happy to be in Cap d’Agde she is dancing!”

I wasn’t dancing. I’d been traveling for almost thirty-six hours. I left Vera Playa and drove my sweet rented Fiat 500 to Granada, where I caught an overnight train to Barcelona called a TrenHotel. I had an excellent meal on the train—roasted salmon and a bottle of Albariño—but sleeping in the small cabin was like trying to sleep on the back of an angry and flatulent whale. In Barcelona, after a near nervous breakdown from sleep deprivation, I caught the coastal train to Perpignan, France, where I ate a waffle from a vending machine. Fortified by a blast of sugar, I took a small regional train that slow-danced its way through the Languedoc-Roussillon, stopping to say hi to every vineyard and gas station in the area, until finally, my brain scrambled by pure Belgian sugar, I was sitting in the back of a cab listening to my suitcase being abused, on my way to what is arguably the most famous nudist resort in the world.

By the time we got to Cap d’Agde it was almost ten o’clock at night and I was dizzy with adrenaline. I climbed out of the taxi—and if I was a religious person I might’ve kissed the ground—to see the cabdriver dancing and shaking her ass to some samba beat only she heard in her head. I gave her a generous tip, in the hopes that I would never see her again, and walked into the security office at some kind of checkpoint.

I showed my passport, paid an entry fee, and was given my keys and a card that would buzz me through the security gates. They also handed me an indecipherable map of what looked like plans for a lunar settlement or maybe the inside of a vacuum cleaner. When I asked the security guard how to get to my apartment, she waved off into the night and said, “Go to the right.”

I began walking through the darkened streets toward a series of buildings, figuring my keys might open a door in one of them. But as I pulled my suitcase along the sidewalk, I noticed something strange. For the largest naturist resort on the Mediterranean, no one was naked. In fact, people were very clothed.

A young, muscular, and deeply tanned German man walked toward me. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but that’s not alarming. What caught my attention was the ankle-length leather skirt he had on. It was cut into long panels, making him look like one of King Tut’s retinue drawn by Tom of Finland.
********
He rocked motorcycle boots, heavy black eye shadow, and several studded straps around his waist. The woman holding his hand was wearing a miniskirt made out of thin black straps that I can only describe as a Goth macramé project that exploded. They were headed toward the swingers’ club. They looked ready for action.

Also ready for action was the hunched and diminutive man walking with his equally hunched and diminutive wife behind them. They looked to be in their midseventies and were also wearing some kind of motorcycle-inspired fetish gear. The geezer had the leather hat and leather vest, but somewhere he’d gone rogue; he wasn’t wearing pants or chaps or even an ankle-length skirt, but a fishnet Speedo, black mesh briefs that were too big for him and hung so baggy at the back that they looked more like a fishnet diaper. And these weren’t the only people on the street. Everywhere I looked it was as if I had been dropped into some nighttime fetish parade. They were pouring out of the apartment buildings, dozens of men in skirts and leather gear, women in latex catsuits or see-through minidresses, clomping in thick-soled boots or perched atop vicious stiletto heels. I knew I looked lost, completely alien, wearing jeans and pulling a small suitcase, unable to speak the language. As I watched the man in the fishnet diaper disappear into the crowd of costumed fetish freaks out for a night of swinging, it occurred to me that there was not enough ecstasy in the world to make this seem normal.