EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALJanuary 20, 1999
Ronda
I’m knocking on James’ door. His room is off the salon. The
proprietor stands at the desk, facing me and my knocking. James pulls the door towards him
and a great cloud of smoke and steam escapes the little room. I can barely see him through
the cloud. It turns out he has accidentally flooded the floor with an unruly showerhead.
The water has crept from the bathroom to the bedroom and into his socks and long
underwear. He is dripping, standing here in the doorway. He wants me to close the door
before the man at the desk takes notice.
Later, as we sip our cafés, James bundles his long underwear into his
knapsack and confesses his pleasure at the retribution provided by the leaking shower. Our
rooms were cold enough to hang meat.
It doesn’t matter how small, how insignificant, how basic a bar
may be in Spain. There may be nothing more than a countertop and an espresso machine. They
may dip your used glass in a tub of cold water before placing it on the drying rack. They
may have nothing more to eat than a few olives. It doesn’t matter about these things
because there is always, always a juicer. And there are always oranges. Someone behind the
bar will squeeze you a glass of the most delicious orange juice for breakfast.
James has driven us to Camarinal. We’re on a great stretch of
beach, flanked by a tall set of dunes and a dense forest of pines. These pines look like
broccolis. They have strong, clean trunks, capped with a mushroom-shaped, full head of
small branches with dense needles. The smell is sweet, like vanilla and maple syrup.
The beach is clean and white. We peel our layers and stroll its length,
stopping to inspect the catch of the day in a bucket at the water’s edge. Two sharks.
A pile of eels. The bodies ripple when the wind blows hard. The eels bear their teeth
post-mortem.
There’s a bunker here, too. It’s a pillbox. At first, David
says, "This wouldn’t be bad, waiting here for a few years…the weather is
fine and the view fantastic". Indeed, the day is perfect, and it’s January. One
can see forever out along the Costa de la Luz. Then we pear into the tiny hole at the edge
of the pillbox. It’s dark in there. And filled with garbage. It looks cramped and
unpleasant. "Perhaps a bit uncomfortable".
Driving along the coast is a lesson in the birth and rise of Spanish
tourism. Brits outnumber anyone else on the Costa del Sol. The road is a highway of
connecting, gated condominium complexes and country clubs. Mucho Plastico. Everything is
in English. Punctuating the artificial arcade is a spattering of coastal cities, once,
when my parents lived here in 1964, miniscule fishing villages, barely noticeable,
invisible to the outside world. We venture past Algeciras and towards the British outpost
of Gibraltar. The little green Opel is surrounded by young men tapping on the hood and
windows.
"Gibraltar? By foot or by car?"
David rolls his window a little and tells the man we are driving.
"2000 pesetas"
"To cross the border?" David starts firing questions, in
English, at the disheveled man who is waving tickets. The man's friend stands on the other
side of the car, pressing a tattered identification card against the window. James
accelerates and stops at the next group of Gibraltar-Ticket-Vendors. David continues the
confuse-them-with-complex-English-sentences technique. It works well until we reach the
border-crossing wicket. The officer wants to see our passports.
Not all of us have brought our passport, so we make a U-turn and drive
away from the Gibraltar-Ticket-Vendors and the Jurassic limestone Rock, and the
24-kilometre crossing to North Africa and the Barbary Apes.
Estepona is quiet, but still the waiter looks at us with contempt. I
can see why. This restaurant is filled with middle-aged Brits, ordering their English food
in English. The marina is chock-a-block with Tupperware. Fancy Tupperware. Estepona is a
grid of restaurants and Real Estate offices.
It’s a breathtaking, green and undulating series of switchbacks to
Ronda. Speeding Spaniards threaten to topple the little green Opel. The town was built at
the edge of the Serrania de Ronda, at the edge of an infinite gorge, cut by the Guadalevin.
It drops vertically from the bridge Puente Nuevo, down a sheer rock face. It’s socked
in this afternoon; the edge of the bridge disappears into a misty, grey cloud.
