NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (9 page)

            
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small coach left every few hours from Marina Station on the beach at Alicante and chugged northeast on a narrow gauge railway, through Villajoyosa and Benidorm and Altea, to the old port village of Denia, where I had been told I could catch the late-night ferry to Palma in Mallorca.

Benidorm was a mass of beachside high-rises, the worst place I had seen on the coast so far, worse than Torremolinos, which was slap-happy seaside tackiness of a familiar and forgivable kind. But Benidorm was ugliness on a grand scale—tall blocks of apartments, hideous hotels, winking signs, the whole place as badly built and visually unappealing as a suddenly thrown-up town on the shores of the People’s Republic of China. Everything that Spain was said to stand for—charm, dignity, elegance, honor, restraint—was denied in the look of Benidorm. And because this was wet chilly winter, the wide streets were empty, most of the hotels were shut, no one sat on the beach or swam in the sea: the useless horror, naked and raw, in the low season, was demoralizing and awful.

In 1949, Benidorm was a tiny impoverished fishing village, “said to be an open door for smugglers,” an English visitor wrote. I walked around. I had a pizza. I sat on a bench surveying the Mediterranean, and then the wind picked up and the rain began.

The rain delighted me. It whipped against the sea. It darkened the
stone of the hotels and tore at the signs. It coursed down the empty streets and flooded the gutters and cut gullies through the beach sand. A bit more wind and the lights would fail, a bit more rain and it would be a real flood. And that would be the answer, the cure for Benidorm—nature’s revenge, an elemental purifying storm that would wipe the place out.

It lifted my spirits to imagine the destruction of such a place, and I boarded the onward train feeling joy in my heart at the prospect of the wholesale destruction. The rain swept loudly against the side of the railway car like a shower of gravel. I was the only passenger. Darkness fell as we shuttled towards Denia in the storm. “Of all the lovely places down the Iberian seaboard, I believe Denia (the Roman Dianium) to be the most attractive and the place I would most like to spend my days,” Rose Macaulay wrote in her Spanish coast book,
Fabled Shore.
Her confidence is understandable; when she drove down the coast in 1948 she saw only one other British car. But the day I was at Denia the rain was torrential. I could not see Denia’s famous lighthouse. There were flooded streets in the little town, the station was drenched, the rain glittered in the lights of the port, where the ferry was moored by an empty puddled quay.

It was possible that this look of desertion meant that I had the departure time wrong.

“You are sure this ferry goes to Palma tonight?”

“Yes. No problem.”

“Where are the other passengers?”

“Perhaps there are no other passengers tonight.”

It was ten o’clock. I bought my ticket and boarded ten minutes later. The ferry
Punta Europa
had space for 1,300 passengers. A sign in Spanish on the upper deck spelled it out:

Then a man and his son came aboard. That made three of us on the Punta Europa. There were five inside saloons for passengers, filled with seats; every seat was the same, narrow, hard-edged molded plastic, and so we sat bolt upright as the ferry sailed out of Denia, roaring like an express train
in the storm. The saloon lights still burned, the crew stayed below, the wind made the doors bang, the whole ferry stank of oil and the reek of decaying cork on its interior decks. A television set had been left on in each saloon—a man loudly reading the news. Outside was the black furious Mediterranean. It was my first storm on this sea and it thrilled me, because I had been seeing it as a sink of gray slopping water, and the wind and waves tonight gave it the look of a great ocean.

Four hours of this, the ferry pitching and rolling, and then the wind eased and the sea grew calmer as we approached Ibiza. It was three in the morning. An English couple boarded, murmuring, but they were not talking to each other, they were reassuring their pets, a nervous dog on a leash, a whining cat in a handheld cage. Now the passengers numbered five, and two animals. The lights still glared, the television screen flickered, still on but no program.

All those seats and yet not a single one was comfortable—straight backs, hard armrests, no leg room in front. None of them reclined. I propped myself up and when I could not stand the discomfort and the burning lightbulbs anymore I went on deck. The black swell of sea sighed against the hull, while I yawned and fiddled with my shortwave radio. After three hours the eastern sky grew lighter.

In the misty light of daybreak there was nothing, not even a sunrise—only the whitish water of dawn, no land. We did not raise Mallorca until seven-thirty or so, the west coast, Dragonera Island, and then rounded Cabo de Cala Figuera, where there was a lighthouse. I could see tawny hills and a mountainous interior, a lovely rugged place. At the edge of some beaches there were white hotels stacked up, and dense settlement, but there were stretches of coast on which there was very little evidence of any building.

Mallorca, sometimes called the heart of the Mediterranean, for embodying all its virtues, is known in Britain as a package holiday destination, and so is a synonym for cheapness. It is one of those place names which, like Frinton or Bognor, carries with it so many dubious associations that it has been given the status of a household word and just pronouncing it, deliberately twanging it, calling it “Majorca,” and sounding the “j,” has the same effect as cracking a joke.

“Yes, it is lovely,” the Spanish passenger said when I remarked on the
beauty of the island. His son was still asleep as we pulled into the harbor. “When I was growing up this island was all natural.”

I asked him his age. He was fifty. He remembered the coming of the package tours, the rise of the hotels. He said there were parts of Mallorca that were very beautiful.

“But in the summer it is terrible all over.”

He said that business was awful here at the moment—worse than on the mainland.

“But things are improving. There is a fiesta on the weekend.”

Arriving by ferry gave me a good look at the place. I had resolved not to fly anywhere in the Mediterranean anyway, and the decision was useful in forcing me to make elaborate detours (like the one to Denia) which gave me a perspective on places I would not otherwise have had.

Mallorca looked elegant from the sea, as we crossed the wide Bahía de Palma. Nearer the port I could see the old town of Palma, the ornate cathedral dominating the city walls and the stucco buildings, some of them ancient, and the newer suburbs to the west, the fertile fields and valleys at a greater distance to the north.

I walked down the gangway and through the port building to the main street, by one of the marinas. Over breakfast, studying a map, I debated whether to take the narrow gauge train through the mountains to Sóller on the rocky north coast. “As beautiful a run as any in Switzerland,” one brochure said. But I also wanted to see the more remote seaside villages on the west coast which were nowhere near the railway. A rental car seemed a good idea.

The phone book listed a number of rental agencies. And because of the large British population there were many British businesses, a whole sub-directory listing importers of sausages and beer and books and jam, as well as advertising clothes, haircuts, and houses.

There was even an English radio station, beaming sentimental songs from Palma to British residents on the island. I discovered this after I had rented the car. I tuned to that station, which was all the more affecting because it was so amateurish.

“Valerie is on her way to London,” the woman announcer said. “She’ll be in Mayfair tomorrow. Safe trip, Val. Here’s a song for Valerie.”

It was “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.”

“I was thinking how I first heard that song at the Hammersmith Palais,” the announcer said, after it had ended.

I had driven out of Palma and I was passing small fertile farms, and stone houses, heading for the mountains.

“What’ll I Do” began to play, with Fred Astaire singing to the wobbly melody. The music made me homesick, but homesickness seemed a natural condition of travel. I can only travel when I am happy, but when I am happy I miss the productive routines of my life, and the woman at the center of it. Each morning these days I woke to the questions,
Where am I and what am I doing here?
and then got up and attempted to make something of the day.

“I’ve got to say cheerio now. But remember, if you do it, do it good. And if you don’t do it good, don’t do it at all.”

The mountainside rose abruptly from the flat Palma plain, and it was steep, a vertical ascent of hairpin bends. At the ridge I looked across the rocky cliffs and saw green slopes and a bay and blue ocean. But as I descended a storm crowded the coast, and it was raining like hell as I entered Sóller.

I was so wet and bedraggled that at least four Spaniards took me for a native and asked me difficult questions. One question was, “Where is the office that processes insurance claims for injured workers?”

Walking around the town to get my bearings, I saw three coin-operated machines in the plaza. One dispensed gum. One dispensed plastic toys and beads. The third dispensed (for two hundred pesetas) pairs of condoms encased in small plastic globes. I could see them in the fishbowl top of the dispenser. I was trying to decide where I should spend the night when I saw a sign to Deyá.

“An English poet lived in Deyá, isn’t that so?” I asked a man near Sóller harbor.

“Robert Graves,” the man said, without hesitating. “His house is still there. Now his son and daughter live there.”

“I think he was a wonderful poet. Do the people here know his poems?”

“Yes. We have a high regard for his work. We compare him with the great poets, not just of Spain but of the world.”

It seemed a pleasant idea to make a trip to Deyá—maybe walk there
along the cliffs, and look at the landscape that Graves had praised for so many years.

I found a hotel within the sound of the harbor. Sóller had such a placid harbor, such magnificent cliffs, I decided to stay a few days and catch up with my note-taking. I hadn’t written much since Alicante. I had lost a night’s sleep on the
Punta Europa.
I was delighted to find this peaceful place. On most trips I kept rolling until I found a place I liked, and when I got a certain feeling I came to a stop. This was another reason I traveled alone, because it was rare for two people to see the same qualities in a place (“Why do you want to stop here? I thought we were supposed to keep going”). Sóller was pleasant. But even in this low season there were some tourists here—hikers mostly.

That seemed a good idea to me. I bought food in the supermarket, yogurt, sardines, fruit juice, picnic food for homemade
bocadillos
—fat sandwiches. I bought Sóller’s prized oranges and a topographical map; and when the rain stopped and the sea glittered with sun, I spent two days hiking, looking at birds, making notes, glad that I had found such a lovely corner of this supposedly hackneyed island.

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent—they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them. What I had missed most of all in my trip so far was a chance to look at a landscape that was not wall-to-wall hotels and condos and clip joints and “English Spoken Here.” Perhaps I was too ignorant for ruins; whatever the reason, they did not interest me greatly, nor did tombs, nor churches. It was not my philistinism, it was my desire to see the life of the coast, no matter what form it took. I made some exceptions. Big crumbling Roman or Greek amphitheaters were another story. They looked absurd and ancient, and there they lay with all their ambitious symmetry in the oddest settlements. “Here is where the gladiators entered.” “Notice the ruts of the rich people’s chariots.” (I was to see such structures in Albania in a slum in Durrës and in the south of Tunis in the otherwise ramshackle town El Djem.)

Not long before I had been thinking that it was seldom possible to be alone at any point on the Mediterranean coast; and then, by chance, I found this part of Mallorca. True, it was dotted with villages and parts of it were
jammed with houses, but it was the prettiest coast I had seen so far. I hiked to the village of Fornalutx on the slopes of Sóller’s mountain, Puig Mayor, in the shape of a witch’s hat, and went bird watching on the vertiginous path along the sea cliffs.

At the end of my two days’ hiking I caught up with my chores, my notes and laundry. If it seemed strange to be alone on the cliffs, no sounds except sea birds and the occasional Teutonic squawk, it seemed even stranger to be in a launderette in Sóller, with young mothers and children, folding clothes.

“Hello. How are you?”

“Very well. You are a visitor?”

“Yes. I like Sóller. Very pretty.”

“Not spoiled,” the woman said.

“I wonder why.”

“Because there are no flat places. It is all cliffs and crags and steep slopes. The few hotels we have are all at the harbor and on the road leading out of the village.”

That seemed a good explanation. It was not possible to put up a big hotel here, and there was no money in a small hotel—no room for the package tours.

“It’s a quiet time of year.”

“Mostly the Germans now.”

Only Germans, really, big chunky waterproof hikers, pairs of them, in parkas and knickerbockers, carrying walking sticks and binoculars. And when I saw Germans like that I did not think of hiking but invasion. They were Germans, of a robust pink-cheeked sort, wearing thick-soled hiking boots, taking advantage of the cheap rates and marching up and down the mountain paths, as though unintentionally auditioning for a production of
The Private Life of the Master Race.