Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 Page 36

  There was the somewhat sinister Mr. Black, whom I never met, but who, I am told, kept an outsize electric refrigerator in his sitting room, in which there was a collection of half-pint glass jars. Occasionally he would open the refrigerator door, inspect the labels on the bottles and select one. Then in front of his guests he would pour its contents into a glass and drink. A lady I know, who was present one day when he did this, innocently inquired if what he had in the glass were a combination of beet and tomato juice. “This is blood,” he said. “Will you have some? It’s delicious chilled, you know.” The lady, who had lived in Tangier for many years and was thus determined to show no astonishment at anything, replied: “I don’t think I will right now, thank you. But may I see the jar?” Mr. Black handed it to her. The label read: Mohammed. “He’s a Riffian boy,” explained Mr. Black. “I see,” she said, “and the other jars?” “Each one is from a different boy,” her host explained. “I never take more than a half-pint at a time from any one of them. That wouldn’t do. Too debilitating for them.”

  Not at all sinister is Miss Higginbotham, who, like so many of the older residents, came to Tangier for a short vacation and never again managed to leave. Since it was all of forty years ago that she arrived, one can assume that she will be staying on a while longer. She calls everyone “Ducks,” including the members of the large company of animals and fowls that have come her way over the years. You go into her kitchen and find it bustling with hens and roosters. You pass by the door of her bedroom and hear the fierce barking of many dogs. The screams that issue from her dining room are only some cockatoos and a macaw conversing, but the door from there into the sitting room must be kept shut, or the spider monkey will get in and tease the birds. And if you are unfortunate enough to go into her bathroom you will be met by an irate goat that resents even Miss Higginbotham’s intrusions. “I tried to tether the poor dear in the garden,” she explains. “But those beastly Spaniards who live downstairs tormented him night and day. Sooner or later they’d have eaten him. They’re Communists, you know.”

  Not all the peculiar people in Tangier are outsiders. Si Mokhtar, who wears rags, spends his days hurrying from bazaar to bazaar demanding money from the proprietors. He always gets what he asks for, and immediately distributes his loot to the small children in the street. When he is tired, he climbs into the nearest taxi and commands the driver to take him somewhere well out of town – to the top of The Mountain or the lighthouse at Malabata. Since he never has a franc on his person, these excursions are necessarily gratis. For Si Mokhtar is mejdoub, which means that he has every right and no responsibility. According to popular belief, the feebler the individual consciousness, the better equipped it is to serve as an instrument through which God can speak.

  There was an extraordinary young man who stood for several years in the Zoco Chico, looking into the sky for a portent that would herald the return of the English lady with whom he had had a liaison. It was a full-time occupation for his waking hours; no matter what went on in the crowd moving past him, his attention was never diverted from its object: the patch of sky above the Spanish telegraph office.

  The Beats, famously, sought out Bowles in Tangier. This group, photographed by Allen Ginsberg in the Villa Muniria hotel garden, is, from left: Gregory Corso, Paul Bowles, Ian Sommerville, Michael Portman and William Burroughs.

  You are bound to run into offbeat characters like these, no matter how and where you live. And there are various ways of living in Tangier. The most satisfactory is probably to buy a Moroccan house or two (or an entire neighborhood of Moroccan houses, as was done by Miss Barbara Hutton) and rebuild according to your own fantasy. Or you can rent an American-style bungalow in the Barrio California and pretend you are back home. I lived in hotels for years before I finally bought a house. The younger Americans do exactly what the younger Americans did thirty years ago, although then they were not called Beats for doing it. They rent spacious old houses in the Medina or the Casbah and occupy them in groups, so that each one comes out paying two or three dollars a month for his room. Food is a minor consideration: there are tiny Moroccan restaurants where they eat lunch for twenty-five cents. Dinner is usually a cooperative undertaking: you all get the meat and salad and we’ll get the bread and wine. It’s a pleasant enough way to live until winter comes along and the houses begin filling up with rainwater. Then leases are broken and pleasure-palaces evacuated, and the younger Americans disappear into anonymous little hotels in a futile effort to escape their landlords. Settlements are generally reached; sometimes, if the house is not too wet, the hardier tenants remain in it and shiver until spring. There is always the chance of their being invited to The Mountain, where they can thaw out in front of a blazing fireplace while the butler prepares a fresh supply of vodka martinis. When I was young, everyone went down to the desert in the winter. But with the expanding economy, the pleasures of the poor have become the privileges of the rich; it costs money now to winter in the Sahara, and so the younger Americans do without that luxury. But as they tell you, the Tangier scene is worth making, and they are making it.

  Zany Costa del Sol

  Holiday, April 1965

  I WAS JUBILANT at my luck in La Línea. The Spanish are conducting a program of official harassment of motorists here, at the border between Gibraltar and Spain. By holding each car arbitrarily at the gate for fifteen minutes they can create an impressive bottleneck; the purpose is to discourage people with cars from passing between the two territories. If there is any traffic at all, the wait can be interminable. Six or seven hours of sitting at La Línea is not unusual. On the advice of my driver, we left very early in the morning and had only two cars ahead of us. In thirty-five minutes we were through the gate.

  It was very fine to be moving along through the precise countryside of Andalusia in the bright morning sunlight. The Mediterranean was spread out on my right like a great sheet of glass, without a ripple on its surface, and along the curving coast ahead, the tiny white towns were just visible at the base of the bare brown and violet mountains.

  The first time I saw this region, now known as the Costa del Sol, was in 1934. At that time it was nameless, and no one seemed to think of it as an entity. I drove from Granada straight down to Motril on the sea, and then along the coast to Gibraltar. There were no striking features in the landscape. Large barren mountains on the north; between their base and the Mediterranean, a slightly sloping plain where figs, olives, sugar cane, cork oaks and small parasol pines grew. An occasional long alley, bordered by date palms, led to an isolated farm. Here and there a camel, hitched to a mule, pulled a plow. What was impressive about the ride was the fact that here were a hundred and forty miles of Mediterranean shore whose dun-colored sand had never been used for anything more than drying nets and beaching fishing boats. The villages were very white, like all the villages of Andalusia; possibly they were a little poorer than most.

  Since then the strip of shore has become the site of Europe’s most spectacular land boom. When a region is growing as fast as this, it can have a different aspect every few months; and it was more than three years since I had paid a visit to the Costa. Already in 1961 the donkey’s bray had been overpowered by the roar of traffic, and the sound of the guitar replaced by that of the jukebox. Today the transformation has gone much farther; at certain focal points of activity there is a small chaos of trucks, derricks, cement mixers and sewer pipes. Hillsides are being leveled, depressions filled, roads extended. And everywhere concrete boxes are going up. The small ones are “authentic Andalusian villas,” the large ones “blocks of superb luxury flats.” The twentieth century has taken roots.

  That which is new is good. In the center of Torremolinos, outside of Málaga, I got into a cab and asked to be taken to the Hotel Carihuela Palace, adding: “That’s the best one, isn’t it?”

  “No, señor!” the driver announced, relishing my ignorance. “The Carihuela’s been running since 1960. They’ve built several here since then.”
He began to list the newer and therefore better hotels, detailing their advantages, eager to have me see any one of them for myself. Condescending when I declined, he agreed that the Carihuela was a very good hotel, but there was no getting around the fact that it was already four years old. He had thought the señor might be happier at one of the better ones.

  On my first walk around Torremolinos I had the impression that a series of blockbusters had fallen on the region. It used to be a quiet little town at the top of a not very high cliff above the sea, where in the early decades of the century a few urban Spaniards had built some hideous villas. It had much in common with Praia da Rocha on Portugal’s Algarve coast, but it did have some high shade trees. (It does not have them anymore.) There were two pensiónes atop the cliff overlooking the sea. I had stayed at both for weeks at a time, but now I could not even find the original site of either. From the Pensión Santa Clara you used to look down on La Carihuela, a string of fishing shacks along the beach where the nets were spread out to dry and the children ran naked. La Carihuela is still there; it has become a tough little nucleus full of bars and rooming houses, where the original inhabitants in their partially remodelled huts live side by side with vacationing party girls from Stockholm and Hamburg.

  The foreigners who have been in the region for ten years or more consider themselves old residents; they are indignant that Torremolinos should have become more like Las Vegas than like Santa Barbara. And then Torremolinos has set the style for the whole coast; it is where the boom started, and where the haphazard construction, having been longer in process, has reached monstrous proportions. “Look what they’ve done to it! It used to be so charming, and now look at it!”

  It certainly does not look Spanish, if that is what they mean. But it is a much more serious matter that the great Andalusian cities of Seville, Cordova and Granada should have come down with the same disease and been disfigured by it. In the face of that, how can we care what has happened to a tacky little suburb of Málaga? 1 am inclined to hope the fever in Torremolinos rages even more furiously. Perhaps if it reaches an extreme whose absurdity is manifest to the Spanish themselves, they will take steps to protect other parts of their country from being attacked by a similar architectural blight. It seems likely that one day the entire Costa del Sol will offer the same anarchic aspect as the present two-mile strip of Torremolinos; planning could scarcely rescue any of it now.

  I AM TOLD that this is too lugubrious a view, that there is a recently formed association of property owners which stresses as one of its objectives the encouragement of legislation restricting the height of buildings constructed outside the town limits of a given community. Should such a law be enacted, and then Señor Contreras takes it into his head to put up a hotel in the form of a battleship or Señor Peralta decides to erect a row of apartment houses that look like igloos or pagodas, these errors at least will not be visible from ten miles away. If they can do even this much, they reason, it will be a beginning.

  The cover of Holiday magazine, for which Paul Bowles wrote this piece. The magazine, published in Philadelphia, commissioned most of Bowles’ travel writing, alongside contributions from John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell.

  What is Torremolinos like? A short letter from a resident, printed in the pages of Lookout, the English-language magazine published on the main street of the town, provides us with a concise portrait of its soul: “This morning when I looked out the window I saw two large objects bobbing up and down in the water. On closer inspection they proved to be enormous plastic replicas of a Pepsi Cola and a Mirinda bottle anchored there as advertisements.” Torremolinos is pop art in the flesh. Its residents defend it fiercely. As a riposte to Kenneth Tynan’s Esquire article entitled “Eclipse of the Fun”, Lookout came up with an issue called “Terrible, Terrible Torremolinos”. Here, expressing the local point of view, the editor opines: “A small, provocative, sinful, razzle-dazzle seaside resort such as Torremolinos is just what was needed to complete the picture.”

  IN A 238-page report called “The Costa del Sol and its Problems”, recently issued by Málaga’s Technical Office of Coordination and Development, there is a large folding graph showing the motor accidents, fatal and otherwise, which occurred during the past year along the single highway that links the towns of the coast. To see the Ferraris, Mercedes 300’s, Jaguars and Aston Martins in orbit on the congested fifteen-foot-wide road is to wonder how it is that so many people are still alive. But precisely where the road has been widened, as at Torremolinos, the accident incidence is far higher.

  I take a taxi into Málaga. Sure enough, I am nearly killed. As usual, a quarter of the vehicles in the road are ten-ton trucks transporting crushed stone and building materials. Without warning, one of them applies all its brakes and stops. There are three cars between us and the truck; we are all going along at a good clip. Each driver swerves to the left, and we all end up almost touching one another; at that moment there happens to be no oncoming traffic, so we remain alive.

  An American of Torremolinos tells me, “The accidents here are famous.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard about them all along the coast.”

  “But the ones here are spectacular. A man’s head will land on one side of the road and his body on the other.”

  Wherever the pieces may land, Torremolinos is definitely not a place for anyone who likes to walk. Each time I wanted to go into the town I had to walk part of the distance in the highway; there was nowhere else to put my feet. Later they may build sidewalks where hillocks of dirt are now.

  Miss Honor Tracy, the novelist, appears to have suffered a traumatic shock when she returned to Torremolinos after several years’ absence. “To look at it now,” she wrote, “is like looking at the face of a friend struck with not one but every affliction of the skin: warts, wens, carbuncles, pox, leprosy and lupus.” Naturally I sympathize with her, but the vehemence of her language bewilders me, because the face of her friend was ‘nothing remarkable in the beginning.

  Lookout warns its readers against journalists, because they are “dangerous.” It takes umbrage at any reference in the foreign press to drunkenness, the using of drugs, or unusual sexual behavior among the inhabitants of the coast. This is natural and desirable. Everyone knows that journalistic reports of large-scale misconduct, whether they be date-lined Torremolinos, Tangier, Naples or Macao, are necessarily invented or, at their most objective, very much inflated.

  The local authorities show an admirable tolerance of extravagant behavior, but only on the part of outsiders. A local Bohemian put it succinctly: “Foreigners never get busted here. Only the Spanish.” There is no doubt that the citizens of the land are closely supervised. I doubt, however, that this is the reason for the low incidence of crime in Spain. It seems much more likely that the causes are in the actual fabric of Spanish culture: more than anything, I should think, in the stress put upon family loyalty, which presupposes love. There are few neurotics among the Spanish, few who feel themselves unwanted and thus outside.

  THE RED NEON tubes spell out BAR, Bar, *B*A*R*S, and the noise rolls out into the narrow streets. Everyone is playing at being Spanish, handclapping and screaming “Olé!” In the naming of establishments the tropical motif has been emphasized: Tahiti, Aloha, Tabú, Acapulco, Las Antillas, Ecuador, La Tropicana. A waiter remarks proudly, “Now we have the Miami Beach in Espain.”

  If Torremolinos is Miami, then Marbella, down the coast to the west, is Palm Beach. Its roster of property owners glistens with titles and fortunes, includes such names as Los Duques de Alba, Prince and Princess Bismarck, Los Marqueses de Villaverde, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. It boasts the best winter climate of Europe, and at the moment is considered the most elegant place to live on the Costa del Sol. This is reflected in the prices; even in the supermarket they are 10 to 20 percent higher than in other towns of the region. The visitor should feel that he is paying a luxury tax for the privilege of being in a place that has retained some
of its Andalusian flavor.