Benalmadena

 we bought this sconce in Torremolinos

 We arrived home in the stilly hours of Sunday morning, in steady reassuring rain: a rain which has intensified through this public holiday. The home improvement shops have extra staff on duty in expectation of their busiest day, but with my dripping umbrella, I’m one of the few who make the trip. Intending to install my Moorish sconce bought as a holiday souvenir, I find an amber light-bulb and the means to wire it up. Our return trip was reassuring at every step. Every pre-booked arrangement for plane seats, parking, airport taxi, hotel, worked smoothly as cogs in a badly-oiled machine---I mean, just well enough. K’s visa had arrived so late we nearly cancelled our trip. I’m ever the anxious traveller. 

One final worry remained till we moment of opening the front door on our return. My formless anxiety was crystallized into an absurd yet compelling fantasy: that we had accidentally left the neighbourhood black cat locked in our house for the entire week. It had been prowling round, trying to get in, at the moment of our departure. As I double-locked the front door, I saw it outside, in the front yard. Ah, but there are two black cats as you would discover in this post. 

As we drove into our quiet street, it occurred to me that the other cat might have sneaked in unnoticed, and starved therein for seven days. Such is our power to create myths as hooks to hang our feelings: in my case the feeling that I’d have preferred to stay home. 

 We had stuck a pin in the map, and taken a chance. Every traveller takes a chance. Life is a journey. The rolling stone gathers no moss but still, the context of our travels is no more than the prepared canvas on which we must paint our own picture. And so forth. What our hotel lacked in luxury and sophistication it made up for in size.

 Each morning its restaurant offered a buffet, a nightmare Spanish version of the classic English (Welsh, Irish, Scottish, American, Australian) breakfast: a thousand fried eggs staring from a hotplate, a thousand bacon rashers, ditto with slices of stewed tomato, sausages . . . with various breads, toasts, marmalades, cornflakes, coffee-dispensers, alleged “fruit juices”; guests crossing the floor diagonally to replenish their plates, unsmiling, skilfully avoiding eye- and body-contact like commuters in an over-crowded railway station. 

Outside in the winding lanes leading down to the seashore nestled a thousand expatriate bars with whimsical names like “Why Not?” (because your steel shutters are closed, that’s why), “El Open Arms” (also closed), “Not the Full Shillin’”(one of a hundred whimsical Irish bars), the “Oh So Kozee Bar”, “The Port o’Call”, “Tequila Worm”, “The Stumble Inn”. Should we cross the threshold of real Spanish bars, or leave the proud aboriginal Spaniards clinging to their threadbare dignity? We were the odd couple, one English and one Jamaican, another piece of scenery to be goggled at by tourists and locals alike. Oh, there were a few other blacks, other zebra couples; one or two African ladies, even, gowned and coiffed in batik with a dignity of carriage that would trump all others. dawn as seen from our hotel balcony

The underlying concept of the Costa Del Sol---which had turned fishing villages into a continuous urbanizacione extending from Malaga to Gibraltar, with high-rise apartments everywhere in the idiom of traditional pueblos---was surely the beach, or at least the glimpse of that blue Mediterranean viewed on the horizon. Yet the beach itself was a nothingness: mud-coloured sand, no one swimming, rows of sun-beds with straw parasols.

If I’d have known, I’d have suggested an inland vacation, perhaps in Granada. It was hard to find any unspoilt nature. The mountains would have been a rugged thankless climb, but the Paloma Park offered free-range chickens and rabbits. Under the well-clipped hedges the hens brought up their chicks, while the roosters postured and crowed. I wish every park had them roaming free, to remind us that they aren’t just convenience food. 

 Being a stranger in Europe brought back memories of impoverished months in Paris, Marseilles and Florence: a lost penniless traveller in 1962. Imagination has wings but the human body needs food, drink, toilet amenities, somewhere to rest, sleep and wash. Fugitives, exiles, pilgrims. By the time I reached Assisi I had been so ragged that seeing my sandals mended with string, a stranger had offered me money, assuming that in joyful devotion to Lady Poverty I was following the footsteps of St Francis himself. In contrast, our vacation had the luxury of a hotel balcony, on which my love affair with notebook and fountain-pen could be carried on, without betrayal of my beloved Muse. I had brought along In Defence of Sensuality, by John Cowper Powys, determined at last to write an article on this extraordinary self-help book written in 1930.

Seen in Benalmadena: an array of little fluttering windmills, in the genre of airy kinetic municipal street sculpture to put on a roundabout 

We also discovered, in a back alley of Torremolinos, a well-known second-hand bookshop, where I found Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly. The proprietor said any book we bought could be returned after reading, and sold back to the shop at half-price. “Oh, like a lending library?” I asked her if she knew Shakespeare & Company, in Paris. “If only!” said she, as if its glory was fabled, not real. I told her I lived there once, as one of the writers offered a free bed by its proprietor George Whitman, along with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and so many others. Even Henry Miller had been a recent guest, on a trip to Paris from Big Sur (in March ’62). It was the Librairie Mistral in those days. George took over the Shakespeare name when Sylvia Beach died. See this article in Wikipedia. K gave me a look, a well-timed warning to stop me launching into extended reminiscences. 

Sitting on the hotel balcony I started planning out a book version of my memoirs, with “lonely traveller” as its unifying theme. It would be a “palimpsest” as Powys uses the term in the book I mentioned above: “Infinitely various are such memories. But I think all of them will be found to partake of the nature of psychic palimpsests wherein certain images from one’s own past recede back and back and back, into much vaguer impressions from the lives of one’s ancestors.”