TravelDiary_02

‘It was here, among vulgar expats, homosexuals and Houellebecqian parties that I've come the closest to inhabiting the classical cosmos’

I spend the hours before departure in a childish impatience that embarrasses me, it is so out of keeping with the ambient ideal of a ‘busy life’, of working in the cab, in the plane, of being chauffeured through life engrossed in one’s business and nothing else. For some, travel is something that happens to the body; the mind is somewhere else. In the cramped purple seats, the latest iteration of the slim and narrow design, slimmer, narrower, closer together, onboard the ‘ultra low-cost’ airline, my body and my senses suffered in their transit. The noise cancelling headphones I brought, invented for pilots before becoming business class staples, failed to isolate me from the physical conditions of my journey. Nothing that normally lends a commercial flight some dignity was available. The inflight magazine, whose task is to create a sense of club-membership, addressing itself to you qua glamorous traveller, had a full-page advertisement for ‘Europe’s largest indoor swimming park’ in Poland (‘This isn’t Thailand, this is paradise in Poland’); the cabin crew was motley, representing no nation, dressed down in tunics and short-sleeved shirts, taking no pride in performing the safety demonstration; the food and drink was outrageously expensive, served in vile paper and plastic on miniature tables, smaller than ever, without anything to catch the crumbs which will become your seat companions for the rest of the journey. This is all I thought of for two-and-a-half hours from London to Málaga: my laptop remained unopened, my book tucked away. This is neither business nor leisure, the two modes of being of the busy modern man, but self-inflicted indignity; everyone on this flight was suffering for the sake of an idea.

I am going on ‘holiday’, though I detest that modern concept, vulgarised, deconsecrated. The Oxbridge term ‘vacation’ is better but inapplicable as I am not vacating any College accommodation; I am not bound to the divisions of term-time. I prefer to call this a ‘retreat’ in the sense of withdrawal for the sake of seclusion and contemplation, in a similar way to which the French use retraite to mean ‘retirement’. But am I that disciplined? Isn’t the trip done in the spirit of a tour, am I not looking to learn and to sample ways of being? My own intentions are caught in the confusion of modern travel.

The recent history of Costa del Sol provides a good starting point for a taxonomy of modern travellers. That southernmost stretch of the Spanish coastline, like many tourism destinations in the country, began to be developed into the ‘Sun Coast’ after the First World War. When Walter Benjamin escaped to Ibiza, notorious today for its ‘riotous nightclub-based nightlife’, in 1932, he found an isolated, mostly rural island in which he could complain of construction noise from a nearby hotel. Similarly, the southern shore of the Málaga Province dotted with small fishing villages began to feature hotels, clubs and beach bars from the twenties onward. The early days of commercial aviation created the ‘jet set’ traveller, beloved subject of Italian filmmakers of the sixties. In the late seventies, Serge Gainsbourg sang about ‘sea, sex and sun’, marking the moment when the jet set glamour of international travel had become accessible to the middle-classes. Tabloid photographs of celebrities in Torremolinos – Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra – made holidays in Costa del Sol aspirational.¹ In the eighties, celebrities began to be supplanted by middle-class tourists and second-home owners, mostly British, who have since colonised many prime stretches of seafront. Declining air fares and an explosion in holiday-home supply has made Costa del Sol even more accessible, so much so that many of the passengers on my flight seemed not middle-class but downright poor.

Driving along the Autovía del Mediterráneo from the airport, one passes through urbanizaciones rather than pueblos – a term designating large scale property developments on previously rural land. The construction of these ‘urbanisations’ is driven largely by foreign demand for holiday homes, as the multi-lingual estate agents and English-language advertisements along the motorway suggest. Some of these developments are done in a tasteful Spanish style, with white-washed buildings climbing up the steep hills, forming small terraces and narrow alleyways, the individual homes jutting and receding into one another below sloping terracotta roofs. The street signs in the urbanización of Calahonda in which I was staying are made of hand-painted azulejo-tiles, a custom which appears to be giving way to an international golf-club style of large computer designed metal letters along with the preponderance of boxy, self-contained houses with floor-to-ceiling windows in the newest developments. As everywhere, a homogenisation of taste is in view, with generic demands for big windows, rectangular rooms, roof terraces and private pools being met with aggressive indifference to local climate, geography and tradition. All people want is a large glassy house in the sunniest spot.

The first mention of ‘Costa del Sol’ reached me in the context of a British real estate programme, My Place in the Sun, where a photogenic estate agent helps ageing couples buy a second home somewhere in Southern France or Spain. The buyers appeared to be guided entirely by an abstract ideal of ‘life in the sun’, the attractions of the English seaside providing their archetype of a good time, which alas is granted them infrequently due to the English weather. Whenever there’s a sunny-spell in England, one can read reports of motorways and roads being choked up with traffic headed for the beach. Demand far outstrips supply. Moving to Spain is thus a way to have what is too often denied at home. Having been to several English seaside towns, with their chippy shops, penny slots and general overindulgence, I cannot help but feel contempt for people suffering from the vulgar idée fixe of having a ‘place in the sun’. Sloth and gluttony are sins after all, and there seems little more to this kind of expat life than peasant debauchery.

Needless to say my associations with Costa del Sol were negative, exhausted by the animating ideas of its most recent conquerors. But beneath the images of faded glamour, the machinations of real estate speculation and media-narratives is a beautiful country.²

What struck me on arrival is the weather: a gentle breeze, the strong sun, cool mornings and evenings and sweltering afternoons. The coast is sheltered from the stormy Sirocco by its proximity to Africa, the strait of Gibraltar not being wide enough for the wind to gain enough speed. Walking down to the beach from Monte Calahonda, we passed prickly fragrant Mediterranean shrubs, herbaceous grasses, wild fennel, feral olive trees, wide flat Spanish firs and noble gnarled cork oaks. Along the path were strewn many kinds of rocks, glittering white marble, blood-red feldspar and shimmering pyrite. Some looked like bones, these minerals, and I could not help but have pain suggested by their brittleness and hollow marimba roll down the hill. The wisdom of the rocks: they’re not different in kind from us, only much older, wiser; instead of our futile agitation, our exterior calloused softness, they have hardened in place, discovered some approximation of eternity – they are the literal gems of this world. Doesn’t the iris of the eye evoke their mineral beauty, which in turn is reflected in the colourful dust of our universe? It is easy to become a hippie here, easy to collect merchandise for an occult shop selling healing rocks. Conversely, it is much more difficult to be a Christian than up north when the landscape trembles with mythological suggestions, when the wind seems divine for being so gentle and cooling, sheltering us from the dominance of the sun. Monotheism had to have been invented in the desert as the discipline and hope of a thirsting and starving people; it seems foreign here in this golden blue land where danger and harshness seem to be the caprice of gods and goddesses rather than a trial of faith, the source of relief and safety being other gods rather than the consequence of Abrahamic submission.

The first few days are spent swimming in the communal pool and going down to the beach. We drive to Marbella and buy hats in the old town – Antonio García, a Spanish gentleman’s shop selling handmade Panama and waterproof felt-hats, leather belts and various types of vests and shirts. I try to relax, work up an appetite for grilled sardines, paella and pork sausages, a taste for sangría, rebujito and sweet vermouth. I enjoy being dazzled by the sun, sea salt curling my hair, wearing my hat and my espadrilles, not showering and falling asleep, naked, out of physical exhaustion each night. I feel like a Greek youth at the nudist beach displaying my still mostly hairless body to the elderly men, nude heterosexual couples and clothed women strolling past. Strong dom daddy sun gives me violent kisses, especially on my neck and feet; Poseidon cools me down on his calm days and throws me around on sharp rocks on others; I feel feminine, like Aphrodite, always draped, in my straw hat and sun specs, wearing my shirt, watching my boyfriend swim from the beach.

One evening we went down to eat at Cabopino, a small port, the Sodom of the Costa del Sol. Between a few chiringuitos on its beach, named after some ‘Andy’, you’ll find men, women and children stewing in the atmosphere of an eternal hen-do. When we arrived, a bald and oaklied man of uncertain European extraction was performing ‘It’s a Sin’ by the Pet Shop Boys. Women who must have been well acquainted with sin at the time that tune had first come out were fist-pumping, stomping and gyrating on the dance-floor; corpulent men stood in their midst smoking cheap cigars; neolithic fertility goddesses in tiny thonged bikinis were patting their lash-extensions; men the colour of parboiled lobsters crawled from the sun beds; jaundiced and malnourished mothers walked their naked daughters to the communal showers; all the while Senegalese men were plodding between tables accosting revellers with knock-off Rolexes and Gucci bags, their makeshift stalls a few metres away giving a new meaning to the phrase ‘black market’. We were wrenched from a classical world and planted in the decrepit Europe of Michel Houellebecq. I was fascinated and repulsed at this latter day interpretation of jet set decadence. Wage labour has scattered and confused natural peasants, who have adopted all manner of spurious and superstitious ideas unchecked by the discipline of the agricultural calendar and village censure. Here they were still going through the motions of a harvest festival, exhibiting a genetic memory, but without a crop to celebrate, sans health, sans limit. It was time to refresh ourselves; it was time to tour.

We drove to Seville, past mountains, wheat-fields, an olive oil factory, acres of sunflowers and rolling olive groves. We listened to the first two acts of Le nozze di Figaro, an opera set in Seville, like Don Giovanni and Bizet’s Carmen, before switching to an episode of Red Scare where ‘the ladies’ lampooned ‘Pride month’. On our arrival, we were ironically greeted by a huge Pride flag at the centre of a roundabout.

Seville was a wealthy merchant town, like Venice, to which the argosies returning from the New World were legally bound to come. Unlike Granada, dominated by its steep hills and lazy moorish luxury that sits uneasily with the modern town around it, Seville feels like a proper city where different eras and styles blend together seamlessly: it is proud and monumental, like Florence or Paris, rather than walled off and private, featuring the best Spanish takes on elements of the western canon. The Cathedral is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, with seven aisles and gigantic flying buttresses. But where flying buttresses were used in Northern Europe to allow for large, vertical windows to be constructed, in Seville the Gothic height is unaccompanied by Gothic windows. As our guide said: ‘Light was needed in the north, in the lands of cloud and mist; in Spain it can be a positive embarrassment, and Spanish churches tend to be cool and restful through the deliberate exclusion of glare’. The second most beautiful and most Spanish thing in the Cathedral are the two polychrome wooden sculptures by Juan Martínez Montañés, the ‘God of Wood’: an Immaculate Conception in one of the small plateresque alabaster chapels by the coro and a Crucifixion in the Capilla de los Dolores. The Spanish are obsessed with the Immaculate Conception and the rigor mortis of the Crucifixion, and here one can see the gorgeous high-art versions of the kitsch wooden sculptures that adorn roadside chapels and street shrines. Montañés’ virgin is dark, with dewey skin and patterned drapes, unmistakably Spanish, serious from one angle and smiling from the other.³

We went for tapas at Taberna La Fresquita, a small standing-only establishment with walls covered with images of another Spanish obsession: the weeping Virgin, the archetypal sad girl. A thurible was hanging from the ceiling with burning incense and a television was showing footage of the Passiontide processions through the town to sombre marching music. The short man behind the counter, who didn’t speak any English, moved with grace and served us two refreshing bebidas and several tapa, including cured slices of tuna and manchego with lemon preserve. The clientele was, apart from us, exclusively Spanish and mature, thoroughly at home in manners, dress and customs. The place was steeped in the ritualistic aspects of Andalusian life, the eternal return of the same, contrasting with the ruinous explorations of Cristobal Colon and the wars of the Conquistadores that originated from the city. In the Seville Alcazár one can see the personal crest of Charles V among the azulejo tiles: between the two Pillars of Hercules, the limit of the ancient world between the Rock of Gibraltar and Monte Hacho in Ceuta, is the motto Plus Ultra, which modifies the classical phrase associated with the Straits of Gibraltar Ne Plus Ultra ‘thus far and no further’. Charles V was the ruler of the first empire that stretched beyond that boundary. Here was another ancient contrast between conquest and exploration whose avatar is Alexander, my namesake, and community and ethics, the ideal of Sittlichkeit or ‘ethical life’ which Hegel found in Classical Athens. Although I enjoy moments of unreflective social being, effortless camaraderie and skilful participation in ritual, I have never been one to feel completely at home in any community. Travelling sensitises one to the helplessness of communities in the face of the forces of history and Capital. To seek to feel at home is to open oneself up to melancholy when the community inevitably gets overrun by newcomers, outcompeted or corrupted from within. No, I prefer to be a coloniser, an explorer of country and consciousness, at the helm of the ship rather than chained below deck.

The nudist beach offered the model of a loose community organised around the idea of conquest and proud exhibition. Despite the voyeurism, it is a community characterised by courtesy and respect: elderly men greeting you and younger men looking and smiling towards you. Compare it to the community on the estate in which we were staying, Doña Teresa. One evening, our elderly neighbour, a retired scientist and full-time resident, visited us on the patio in the evening and began to complain about the president of the estate, Manuela. She has overseen the gating of the community, by building walls and automatic gates in the golf-club style, as well as unnecessary repavement and rewiring works. She had also fired the previous gardener and outsourced the work to an incompetent landscaping firm. Requests to see the company accounts by the resident shareholders had been denied, and Manuela has hired a lawyer. An attempt to vote her out was defeated by a majority consisting of the Spanish residents on the estate, a few Englishmen who only live there for a couple of months per year, and the elderly English recluse Pat, who was bribed with a €14,000 payment from the company insurance for a fire started by her electrical blanket. The neighbour was worried that the full scale of the corruption and possible debts would be revealed only if Manuela sold her house and left.

I didn’t get to meet Manuela, despite wanting to personally complain about the state of the communal pool, but from what the neighbour was saying, here again was a peasant nature wrecking havoc above her station. Democracy, as Plato warns us, is a dangerous form of government prone to corruption by the vicious and ignorant. But as someone said, a peasant with a crown is still a peasant with a crown, not a king. The only person with no hope of escaping decrepitude and vice is the decrepit and vicious man himself. All one can do is pity their sorry state.

On our way back from Seville, we passed a lorry whose trailer had long horizontal slits along its side. Through the aperture of one, an area of pink flesh was protruding, the backside of a pig on its way to slaughter in some distant town. Jamón is a feature of what feels like most Spanish dishes, from being served by itself as embutidos to accompanying salads and casseroles. All this ham was the finished product of a process which was bound to come into view sooner or later. We had to stop to refuel at Estepa, and soon after returning to the motorway we passed the porcine lorry once more, this time seeing the soft snout of our moribund friend who had enough space and curiosity to turn around in his cage, but not enough intelligence to try and escape. What kind of life would await a fugitive pig? Bred for food, tuskless, unwieldy, tame – our friend may have known his servile nature and sought excellence within his circumscribed essence, having eaten its finishing feed without complaint, on to being slaughtered without a whimper, to end up as a beautifully marbled cutlet. There is a virtue of beasts, even within the death-camp conditions of industrial agriculture, a resignation that is their dignity. By contrast, the Manuelas and ‘holidaymakers’ of this world fall into debauchery and sin when freed from their cages. The thought of this had suggested itself a few days earlier by the cooked pincers and legs of a crab: the beauty of its hard shell and intricate little hairs compelled me to struggle to crack it open, despite the inadequate tools provided, so that I could honour its sacrifice by eating all of its white and pink flesh, leaving only the exoskeleton behind.

Going on ‘holiday’ can be both exhausting and boring. Most people do not know what to do with their newfound freedom and in their confusion and apparent foolhardiness come to resemble the escaped farm pig. They cannot surmount their nature, and all the ‘acting out’ is really just the affirmation of their essential cautiousness, their drives and instincts. The worst you can do is make every action depend on your desires: as Hegel argues, treating desire as law is the ultimate unfreedom. Back in Calahonda, we were both bored, bored of the pool, the beach, of alcohol and food, of sex, sun and Spain. A sorry state that seemed the consequence of overstimulation. The total abundance in which we were living massacres the imagination, which is prodded to work by the most basic needs and drives. How delicious isn’t the most humble drink after some exertion in the sun? ‘Hunger is the best spice’ goes a saying in Swedish, and I can’t help but think of Steve Jobs’ motto: ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’. Silicon Valley founders, I recall reading somewhere, are fond of fasting, meditation and various forms of dopamine detox. I repeat again: sloth and gluttony are mortal sins, and I was as guilty as anyone. To emerge from my stupor I made going down to the beach every evening a duty and set a project for myself: to ask a nude handsome man out for a drink.

Life to me is synonymous with improvement, with satisfying curiosity, with overcoming fear. My sphere of improvement is personal, unlike many of my friends who frame their projects in terms of social or political significance. But how important isn’t a single virtuous being? How significant isn’t a single well-ordered household? Everywhere I look, like the narrator in Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke, I see skewed and deformed muzzles rather than noble and serene faces. My aesthetic and ethical biases are classical – Greek – rather than Baroque. I cannot understand people who do things they knew were bad. We all have weaknesses, but to acknowledge them as entirely unredeemable is perverted kitsch, the vulgarisation of the idea that something can be ‘so bad, it’s good’.

A couple at a nudist beach instantly attracts more attention and confers an advantage that obliges one to kindness and courtesy: it’s the couple that has to make the first move. He stood in the water, looking out over the horizon, no stranger to the gymnasium, his well-developed chest ornamented with blonde hair, his perky bottom clean shaven. Where was he from? The baseball cap suggested American or possibly Australian. ‘Cold today, isn’t it?’ – I made my opening gambit while he stood next to me drying himself with a towel. His name was Amorin and he was Belgian. He asked which language I was reading Don Quixote in; I responded, apologetically, that I read Cervantes in English. ‘Which language would you read him in?’ I asked, hopefully. ‘Oh I wouldn’t read him’. I was silent for a second. Continental Europeans may know the names of the classics, but few would have actually bothered to read them. It was his last night and he wanted to stay at the beach despite his shoulders being red, which meant he was looking to cruise up at the dunes. No drink with us.

On our final morning, we left by eight-thirty: the sprinklers would come on at nine am; by ten the sun would have started to reach the patio; by ten thirty the blackbird would have caught its first worm from the wet earth. If there’s ‘American night’ then there ought to be Spanish rain, the millions of sprinklers whose jets drench lawns and flowerbeds, on whose existence depend the lives not just of culturally privileged flora, but of holiday homes and golf courses.

As I read in my guidebook, the Iberian peninsula was not a fixture on any grand tour itinerary: English aristocracy would travel down to Italy to experience the remnants of classical civilisation. Spain was seen as exotic, remote and dangerous. Washington Irving had to explain to his readers that Spain is not, as they were wont to imagine, ‘a soft southern region, decked out with the luxuriant charms of voluptuous Italy’ but rather ‘a stern, melancholy country, with rugged mountains and long sweeping plains, destitute of trees, and indescribably silent and lonesome’. Italy today can often feel like a collection of museums alongside Berlusconi-type decadence and Donatella Versace monstrosity: there is little of classical life suggested by its daily rhythms, having been thoroughly overwritten by images of modern Italy, of vespas, dolce vita, and Vatican intrigue. Spain is mostly free of beautiful images, whether ancient or modern, and it was here, among vulgar expats, homosexuals and Houellebecqian parties that I’ve come the closest to inhabiting the classical cosmos, making the world my business, life my task – wholly, commodiously, gently observing and loving.

1. Visiting Capri in the Bay of Naples today one can scarcely visit a restaurant that does not have a picture of Beyoncé eating there. Glamour has migrated elsewhere.

2. This is more than could be said of such places as Florida, which for the most part has nothing but humid swamps beneath the images, machinations and narratives. It has the merit of being the most pure instance I know of of people really suffering (hurricanes, rapid erosion, high-prices, overdevelopment, urban decay and cultural vacuity) for the sake of an abstract idea of ‘the sun’.

3. Compare her to Italian Madonnas from the same period, with their voluptuous silk drapings and their sfumato complexions, depicted with child or family rather than alone.