NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

go to the first bullfight I found advertised.
    In the meantime I had found a place to stay in Marbella. As an experiment in budget travel I had found a ten-dollar-a-night room in a pensione behind the oldest church in the town, the Iglesia de la Encarnación. This was in the Old Town. An effort had obviously been made in Marbella to renovate this older neighborhood and reclaim some of its narrow alleys and small lanes. I regarded this as a challenge. Anyone can go to a strange town and buy comfort and goodwill. With the single exception of limping vandalized Albania, which is in a state of disrepair and anarchy, luxury is available in most places on the shores of the Mediterranean.
    I knew from experience that the deluxe route was the easy way out, and that it was unreal, the fast lane, where I would meet stuffy travelers and groveling locals. I did not require luxury, I needed only modest comfort and privacy, and it was often possible to find what I wanted for ten or fifteen dollars. This was particularly so in the off-season, as the wind blew through these coastal resort towns, where business was terrible.
    Even Marbella, which had the reputation of being one of the more salubrious resorts, was hurting. The summer had been bad and nothing was happening now; it would be a long winter. The rise in inflation and the cost of living generally had surprised the British who had retired here. Many were in the process of selling their houses—at a loss in some cases—and moving elsewhere.
    “And to think that there were British people who went to Estepona to retire and find the good life,” I said to an Englishman in Marbella.
    “I’ve met a number of expats on the Costa del Sol who are trying to sell up and go home. Prices are high, taxes are high—to pay for the redevelopment and the improvement. That’s why Marbella looks nice. The people came because life was so cheap here in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and now it’s more expensive than Britain. They want to go home.”
    “You see all these houses being built?” a Spanish real estate agent told me. “It’s all Kuwaiti money. Middle East people.”
    This was impossible to verify, though other locals mentioned it—that this building boom had been a result of Arab investment in the late eighties and early nineties, punters hoping to make a killing in the Spanish property market. It had the look of a bubble, though: too many houses, too much development. The “For Immediate Sale!” and “Prices Slashed!” signs had a desperate note of hysteria in them.
    I hung around Marbella for a day and a half, noted the youngsters prowling the empty discotheques and clubs, and ate paella.
    When I inquired about the bullfight I hoped to see, I was told to go to Malaga … to Granada … to Barcelona … to Madrid—anywhere but Marbella; and so I left on a bus, heading north along the shore to Torremolinos. There were no coastal trains here—none until Valencia or thereabouts—but the buses went everywhere.
    The utterly blighted landscape of the Spanish coast—Europe’s vacationland, a vile straggling sandbox—begins about here, north of Marbella, and continues, with occasional breaks, all the way up the zigzag shore to France. The meretriciousness, the cheapo appeal, the rankness of this chain of grease-spots is so well-known it is superfluous for me to describe it; and it is beyond satire. So why bother?
    But several aspects of this reeking vulgarity interested me. The first was that the debased urbanization on this coast seemed entirely foreign, as though the whole holiday business had been foisted on Spain by outside investors hoping to cash in. The phenomenon of seaside gimcrackery was familiar to anyone who had traveled on the British coast and examined The Kingdom by the Sea. Spain even had the same obscene comic postcards, and funny hats, and junk food. It was also ridiculously cheap, in spite of the retirees’ complaints about the high cost of living. The