From Torremolinos to Fuengirola a concrete forest had grown up, a plethora of high-rise apartments crowding the waterfront, a jungle of shacks and hot-dog stands inland where the money was being made. What little open land he did see was being converted into golf courses.
And it was ugly, ugly beyond the operation of chance. It looked as if Spain had invited to its southeast corner a convocation of the world’s worst architects and given them a commission: ‘Transform this beach into an apogee of ugliness.’ Prize money would have to be divided, for if the German architects created monstrosities, the Spaniards did worse. It was ironic—builders who had lived in Stockholm all their lives, seeing the beauty which northern architects had devised, moved into Fuengirola and erected slums, devoid of beauty or congeniality.
‘Pretty grim,’ Joe said as they drove toward Marbella and saw the beehive hotels under construction; these were American and had been lifted from downtown Los Angeles—the poorer section, that is.
What depressed him was that the open plazas, which had once made these towns attractive, giving them a sense of occupation by fishermen who worked for a living, were being filled in by concrete: stores, junk shops, apartment houses that could never be appealing. The rhythm of life that had once characterized the sea front had been destroyed beyond recall.
‘Where’s Spain?’ Joe asked with some dismay as he stared at the ugly apartments sprouting on the once-empty road from Marbella to Estepona, and with this question he put his finger on the worst feature of this desecration: the buildings which destroyed the landscape were being erected not for Spaniards but for Belgians and Germans and Swedes, who in their native cities built good-looking homes. When the concrete strip was completed, it would be populated not by Spaniards who sought the sea but by wealthy northerners who would use the area only as their playground. Few families would be raised in this ugliness and those that were would not speak Spanish.
‘Looks to me like a sell-out,’ Joe said, pushing the pop-top toward Gibraltar, and as he drove, his mind conjured up pieces of landscape he remembered from his trip across America, and he began to formulate an attitude toward the uses to which the earth should be put. As yet he had no substantial understanding of how things ought to be, but in the swirling snowstorm that had smothered him at the crossroads in Wyoming he had seen emergent patterns of land left open, structures that conformed to such land as was used, a fertile symbiosis between necessity and beauty, and above all an obligation to help people move and concentrate intelligently.
He said to Gretchen, riding beside him, ‘If a relatively few Europeans … wrecking this region, I mean … well, if they can ruin a whole area.’ He paused, attended to his driving, then concluded, ‘Imagine what we’ll be able to ruin in America when we really put our mind to it.’
It was a gloomy thought and he found no solace in Gretchen’s suggestion: ‘Maybe by then the world will have more sense.’ He shook his head and told her, ‘Don’t you believe it.’
He stayed depressed all the way to the approaches to Gibraltar. His passengers would have enjoyed visiting the Rock, but some nonsense between the Spanish and British governments prevented this, so they parked at the barrier which halted traffic and climbed out to view the impressive bastion, lying only a few hundred yards away.
‘Why can’t we see it?’ Cato asked.
‘Governments,’ Monica said ‘Any time you meet something totally stupid, the answer has got to be “governments.” ’
‘Whose?’ Cato asked.
‘Mine,’ Monica snapped. ‘One good thing you can say about the British. They’re impartial. If they screw up Vwarda and Gibraltar, they also screw up Wales and Ireland.’
In some irritation they returned to the car and started the long drive up the coast to Cádiz. In some ways it was even more mournful, for this road left the areas occupied by the Germans and Swedes to traverse purely Spanish operations, and the difference was conspicuous, because in the stretch just completed, the northerners had created ugliness backed up by adequate funds, and there was in the tall buildings such as the ones the Greeks had built at Torremolinos a certain professionalism, but on the far side of Gibraltar, foreign money had not yet penetrated, and Spanish entrepreneurs were attempting garish projects without adequate resources.
‘Instant slums,’ Joe said bitterly as he inspected one collection of miserable buildings after another.
Yigal, remembering the good things in Grosse Pointe and Haifa, said, ‘Looks as if every time a Spanish architect gets near the ocean he goes crazy.’
‘Isn’t this still the Mediterranean?’ Cato asked.
‘Atlantic,’ Yigal said. He was always amazed that Americans, who presumed to rule the world, knew so little about it.
‘You’d think,’ Joe said despondently, ‘that somebody would blow a whistle and shout, “If you have to do it, let’s do it right.” ’
‘Who’d listen?’ Monica asked, and for the rest of that day’s trip none of the passengers spoke of Spain’s despoliation of her natural beauty.
But Joe, who had it constantly before him as he drove, became involved in trying to differentiate between the good and the bad, and the latter was so preponderant that when he did spot some construction that bespoke human beings solving human problems, he remembered it with affection.
That night, as they pulled up beside the great and muddy Guadalquivir to convert the pop-top into a dormitory, he said to Yigal, ‘Do they do things as badly as this in Israel?’ and the Jew said, ‘We have so little land, we have to respect it.’
For a long time—as insects buzzed about the screens, retreating when Monica sprayed them with a buzz-bomb, shouting, ‘Back, you black little bastards!’ at which Cato growled, ‘Watch out what you sayin’, girl!’—Joe reflected on what Yigal had said. When you have a little land, you have to treasure it. But the fact was, as Joe saw clearly for the first time, everyone has only a little land and no one is caring for it.
He could not sleep, so he left the pop-top to walk beside the river, and after a while Gretchen joined him and they talked of Spain and the desolation he had seen that day, and she said, ‘In college we had several lectures on Spanish history, and the point was made that Spain had a tradition of ruining her land … something about sheep and contempt for agriculture. A heritage from the Moors, I seem to recall. Upland Spain was ruined four hundred years ago. Now the wreckers are moving to the seacoast.’
‘Aren’t we doing the same … in America, I mean?’
‘As Monica says, “If a government can make mistakes, it will.” ’
‘But we have an opposite tradition,’ Joe said. He remembered how his hometown had agitated to get forest land put into the national reserve. The leaders of the community had flown to Washington. Then he said, wryly, ‘While we were fighting on our side of the forest to save it, on the other side ranchers were fighting to destroy it.’
‘In Spain the ranchers win,’ she said.
Next morning they drove to Sevilla to see that stark cathedral. They camped that night in a vineyard, after which they drove slowly to La Rábida to see the beach from which Columbus had set forth to discover America. To the surprise of the others, it was Britta who seemed most deeply affected; she lingered on the beach, staring westward. At dawn next morning Joe drove the pop-top to the bank of the Río Guadiana, which separates Spain from Portugal, and the girls held their breath as he inched the car onto a ramshackle ferry that had seemed about to sink even when empty. ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Monica intoned as she boarded the frail thing.
‘My God!’ Cato shouted ‘Look!’ And down the unpaved slope leading to the ferry came a huge truck loaded with pipe.
‘You going to bring that on board?’ Britta asked the ferryman in Spanish.
‘Why not?’ He signaled the driver to come forward cautiously, and when the front wheels reached the ferry, the boat sank about two feet and water sloshed aboard, but the truck kept coming until the rear wheels hit the ferry, at which point t
he gunwales were only a few inches above water.
‘Just fine!’ the ferryman called cheerily.
‘What’d he say?’ Yigal asked, and when Britta translated the optimistic news, Monica said, ‘Wow,’ and crossed herself.
It was an exciting introduction to Portugal, this perilous transit of a muddy river on a ramshackle ferryboat. On the Portuguese side there was amiable confusion, with all work stopping while the customs crew gathered to inspect the pop-top. The chief climbed in and asked Gretchen to show him where they all slept.
One of the young Portuguese pointed first at Joe and Gretchen, then at the bed, asking without words if they shared it, but before anyone could answer, the chief rebuked the young man. In Spanish, Britta started to converse with the chief, who looked at her sternly, answering in French: ‘We never speak Spanish here. We can, but we don’t.’ He found a map, which he handed to Gretchen with peasant gallantry. His stubby forefinger traced the roads of Portugal for her, coming to stop at an inconspicuous village on a road well back from the ocean. ‘Alte of the four mountains. Alte of the rushing river. You are fine young people and I hope you will do me a favor. Drive up to see Alte. Because I want you to know Portugal at its best.’
He shook hands with each of the six and wished them a pleasant sojourn in his country. An assistant handed Joe the car papers, properly stamped, and as the pop-top started to leave the customs shed the chief turned his attention to the Spanish driver of the truck, and Britta heard him growl in Spanish, ‘And what the hell are you going to do with those pipes?’
The introduction to the new country was a revelation. Because Portugal stood so far behind Spain on any social or economic index—it was really an eighteenth-century land—the modern excesses that had ruined the coast of Spain had not yet penetrated here, and one saw how beautiful mountain land could be when it fell gently to meet clean, uncluttered beaches. The towns of Portugal were neat and ancient and feudalistic. Along the edges of the Atlantic there were no skyscrapers, and such foreign millionaires as had slipped into the area to build had been forced to do so unostentatiously, so that from the winding highway the traveler could not even see the new buildings.
But it was the land itself that captivated Joe. The hills were covered with low trees so beautiful in formation that he stopped the car and persuaded Britta to ask what they were. She tried Spanish, but the man she was speaking to refused to use that language, even though she suspected he understood. ‘Almonds,’ he said in French. ‘You should have been here in January when they bloomed. You could smell them for miles.’
There were oranges, too, and old oaks and evergreens, but most of all there was a wealth of small farms, their fields marked off by walls of rock, their homes built low against the ground and looking as if they had grown from the soil and not been built upon it. ‘This is pretty special,’ Joe said, and the more he saw of the land, and its visible signs of having been tended and loved throughout the centuries, the more he enjoyed Portugal. ‘I feel as if I’d been here before,’ he said ‘It’s like coming home.’
Slowly he drove through that magic area of forest and hill and ocean called Algarve. He suspected that this was one of the choice spots in the world, a locale fortunate of itself, but also fortunately ignored by history and development. Here there was no Málaga airport bringing thousands of money-spending tourists every day. If you wanted to visit Algarve, you had to spend time and ingenuity, not merely money.
‘Let’s have lunch at Albufeira,’ he said, looking at the map. ‘It’s on the ocean. Afterward we can go back into the hills to see what Alte has to show.’ The others agreed with this, so they proceeded—with many stops to view the long, empty beaches—to that curious town on the waterfront where the streets wind in and out of tunnels which carry them through low hills. At one minute they were on a crest … two turns to the left and they were directly under where they had been a moment before. Monica was delighted with the fairy-tale quality of the town and cried, ‘It’s so marvelously different from Torremolinos.’ But Joe noticed, as he told me later, that when the time came to eat, she intuitively smelled out the one bar grubby enough to have fitted into the Torremolinos scene.
Inside, an angular, pasty-faced English expatriate known as Churchill lounged in a corner, and with a telepathy that was uncanny, he and Monica recognized each other, not by name but by condition.
‘Hullo,’ he mumbled as if not fully awake. ‘You’re English, I see.’
‘Name’s Monica. How’s the food here?’
‘Bloody dreadful.’
‘And the beer?’
‘Acceptable, if you’re buying.’
‘I am, if you tell us something about the place.’ She directed Cato to move some tables together, and said to Churchill, ‘Join us.’
He said he wasn’t hungry, but he sat with them as he nursed a beer and gave them his evaluation of Algarve: ‘Consider it a British colony. We’re smart. We know where the bargains are.’ With a bony finger he pointed at tourists crossing the square. ‘Those two are English. So are the other three. Hell, they’re all English. It’s bloody dreadful.’
When the waiter brought two greasy menus, Churchill pitched them onto the floor and told the man, in lively Portuguese, ‘Go across the street and fetch us six portions of caldeirada de peixe.’
‘What did you order?’ Britta asked.
‘You get it, you eat it,’ he said rudely. He was about forty, extremely thin, un-barbered, aquiline-faced, sloppily dressed, with dirty tennis shoes, and seemed too bored with his exile to be either witty or truly sardonic. But he was informed, and when Joe said, ‘We thought we’d take a look at Alte,’ he clasped his hairy hands about his stubbled chin and said, ‘God must have lent you His compass. I congratulate you on choosing the best spot in Algarve.’
While he was expatiating on the region, and sipping the dark beer of Portugal, the waiter returned with a tray containing three huge tureens, placing one before each of the girls. ‘What is it?’ Britta asked. Taking her spoon, Churchill dredged the bottom of the tureen and brought up some shellfish and a baby octopus. Lifting them high in the air, he splashed them back into the tureen. ‘Seafood,’ he growled, ‘of majestic quality.’
Britta, unruffled by his behavior, smiled gently and asked, ‘Aren’t you having any?’ and he replied, ‘A bite or two from yours,’ whereupon he dipped in, catching a small octopus, which he lifted into the air, allowing it to dribble into his mouth, one tentacle sliding down over his chin. With a loud sucking noise he drew the errant tentacle into his mouth, chewed it sloppily, swallowed it, and said, ‘Best dish in Portugal.’ He thrust his spoon into Monica’s tureen, then Gretchen’s, stealing an octopus from each.
The meal was a good introduction to Portugal: hot garlic bread, green wine, and an abundance of potatoes and onions in the caldeirada. Britta kept score on the kinds of fish in her helping: eel, shellfish, perch, sardines, squid, and best of all, the baby octopus, sweet and chewy and very marine-like in taste. ‘This is good,’ she told Churchill and again he growled, ‘Majestic quality. I told you it would be.’
It was late afternoon before they left Albufeira. They drove some distance into the hills before finding a road which led to Alte. After several miles of moderately steep climbing, they reached a turn from which they could look down upon a village so compact that it could be encompassed in a single glance. Perched on the side of a cascade which tumbled down a narrow canyon, Alte was surrounded by four hills; it was a doll’s village, and as attractive as any they had ever seen.
It was dusk and drovers were returning from the hills, leading their horses. ‘I’m going to like this place,’ Joe said.
The second person whose life was affected by the trip to Portugal was Britta, for when the time came on that first night out of Torremolinos to arrange the pop-top for sleeping, she faced up to something that had been troubling her for the past few weeks. The pop-top, as modified, offered six sleeping spaces, and how they were distributed became i
mportant. The factory had built in four sleeping spaces: a double bed along the length of the car, spacious and comfortable; one jammed in along the front seats, soft but small; and a hammock suspended from the roof, neither comfortable nor large. The additional pair that Yigal and Cato had contrived were separate bunks cantilevered from the sides; they were large but not very soft.
Going to bed thus became a tactical problem similar to the one faced by the man who first canned herring: who would lie next to whom? Arrangements had to begin with the double bed, for what happened there would determine the rest, and Gretchen, as owner of the car, solved this firmly and in a manner which invited no discussion.
‘Joe has to drive and he needs a good night’s rest. He gets the big bed. Cato is tall, so he sleeps with Joe. Monica is the shortest, so she takes the catty-corner bed up front, and Yigal is short enough to use the hammock. That leaves the new beds for Britt and me.’ Monica started to speak, but Gretchen cut her short: ‘And if anyone just has to have sex, you can borrow the big bed during the afternoon.’ She nodded slightly toward Monica and Britta.
It was this that forced Britta to make a decision. She had now been away from home four months, and as she climbed awkwardly into the bed assigned her, stepping over Joe as she did, it occurred to her that the restrictions of the pop-top were providential. She had known for some time that her affair with Joe had about run its course.
What is there in it for either of us? she thought as she lay in the unfamiliar bed. He’s a good guy … but where will it lead?
She was not thinking of the fact that Joe had no money to support her, nor any immediate likelihood of earning any. Nor was she worried about the improbability of his ever marrying her; she enjoyed sex on her own terms and liked men enough to live with them on her own responsibility. She intended one day to marry, if, in the term used so often by girls her age, ‘things worked out.’ By this she meant that she would have to meet the right man, under the right circumstances and with the right promise for a productive future. If, as the young people also said, ‘things didn’t work out,’ she would not be averse to living according to the pattern of the past four months.