The You of My Song: Notes from a Voluntary Exile

The You of My Song

Notes from a Voluntary Exile

by Mike Booth

Have you ever dreamed of

starting fresh in a new country?

This is a book by someone who
has done so, and has no regrets.

“Busca la vida, que la muerte viene sola.”

“Seek life. Death comes on its own.”

Spanish proverb

Chapter 1 – An Awakening

It was a pristine December morning in a Spanish orange grove in 1968 when I stuck my head out of a green army-surplus sleeping bag and found myself surrounded by trees laden with plump ripe fruit. In the east two strips of blue crossed the horizon, one over the other, the bottom one sparkling and the top one streaked with rose-fringed clouds, backlit by the rising sun. It was my first experience of the Mediterranean and I thought: This must be what Homer called ‘…the child of the morning, rosy-fingered Dawn…’ Climbing out of the sleeping bag, I pulled my boots on and attacked the oranges, peeling and devouring them until the flesh under my thumbnail smarted and the aroma of exploding orange peel filled the morning air. Yellow finches darted and twittered as the sun climbed up the sky, gently warming my orange grove. Truly, this was a far better place for me.

Where was I coming from? How did I get here? Why did I leave? What did I leave behind? What was Spain like in those days? What happened then? This is a story about an American boy arriving in a new country in search of a fresh start, about how this new country became his own, how it took him to its bosom, how endearingly poor it was then, how vastly it has changed over the years, and how it’s changed me. I want to tell you about its history and heroes, its people, its food, its wine, its transition to democracy and first-world living standards. I want to tell you about its gentle and savage customs, its language and its elegant sense of humor, about its best people and its worst.

To tell the truth, I can’t remember all the details of my arrival in Spain. It was the end of 1968, and a Swiss kid called René had picked me up the previous day hitchhiking on the outskirts of Basle, where the evening before I had stretched my sleeping bag out on top of a pile of leaves in a city park and sunk in for the night. The next morning the Swiss burghers walking across the park had a good laugh when a dishevelled 25-year-old American hitchhiker appeared out of the pile of leaves.

René was in his early 20’s, slender with what I suspected was his first attempt at a goatee. He wore round, wire-rimmed spectacles like a clockmaker or a bank clerk. He had with him his big boxer, Schatzy, who had a flatulence problem. “ ‘E ‘as a delicate stomach,” said René, more to justify his dog’s anti-social habits than to apologize for them, I thought. We crossed the French-Spanish border at La Junquera in his brown coffin-shaped Peugeot sedan and immediately the sun came out, the first time I had seen it in three weeks. Rolling into Barcelona in the early evening, we went looking for a great restaurant quarter which we heard about from some Australian hitch hikers in Arles. We only knew that it was in the neighbourhood of the Barcelona harbor. When we got to a central-looking zone with a statue of a guy with a funny hat on a tall pedestal, René spotted a police officer. He pulled the car over to the curb, suggesting I ask him the way to the port.

I screwed up my courage, rolled down the window, and said to him as clearly as I could, “¿Dónde está la puerta?” He looked puzzled, though not ill tempered. “¿Dónde está la puerta?” “¿Cómo?” replied the cop. René started laughing, which didn’t help. Convinced by now that the officer was hopelessly thick, I gave it one last try, louder this time: “¿DÓNDE ESTÁ LA PUERTA?” The dim-witted cop just turned his palms upwards and shrugged his shoulders, as if he thought I was the retarded one. René pulled away gasping and shedding real tears. He could hardly drive. “What’s so funny?” I demanded. “Nothing,” he said, “except you were asking him, ‘Where is the door?’”

Despite my false start with the traffic cop, it didn’t take René and me long to find Barcelona’s Barrio Chino, which was actually just a stone’s throw from the statue on the pillar, who turned out to be Christopher Columbus. We walked into an attractive restaurant with a brick façade and a wood fire roasting chickens on spits at the entrance. An elderly waiter with a white napkin draped over his forearm greeted us with formal Old World cordiality and led us to a table. We ordered a paella and a bottle of red wine. That was René’s idea, as I had no idea of “paella.”

There was 45-minute wait for the Spanish rice, and in that time we finished the wine and ordered a second bottle. Neither René nor I had ever drunk much wine, but it was our first night in Spain and it called for a celebration. The saffron-yellow rice, beautifully adorned with mussels, fat shrimp with the heads on, tiny little clams on their shells, and strips of roasted red pepper, arrived steaming hot in the big double-handled flat pan it was cooked in. There was a lot, and before we were halfway through it we were obliged to order more red wine. Before it was over we had put away five bottles of the stuff, plus a few tiny little glasses of an ice-cold sticky sweet liquor which the waiter assured us was “muy digestivo.” So how did we make it from the port of Barcelona out to that orange grove at the edge of the Mediterranean 30 or 40 kilometres down the coast? I don’t know. You’d have to ask Swiss René. Though I’m pretty sure he can’t remember, either.

The departure point for this trip to Europe was Aspen, Colorado, where I had landed at the end of a hitch hiking trip around the western US. The Rockies, my first mountains, made a powerful impression on me, and I decided to hole up in Aspen for the winter and see what happened. But my plans were soon changed. The first snow of the season had just fallen on the slopes when a forwarded letter arrived from an old college friend from Michigan State, suggesting we embark on our much postponed trip to Europe. Ellis Pearson was a bright, engaging kid from upstate New York who, like a lot of students from the East, had come to study in Michigan on a lark. We were both interested in photography, books, and fast cars, and we became good friends. Ellis had just graduated from college, and had some time all for himself, as his girlfriend Margie, a 99-pound powerhouse, was spending a year in Afghanistan buying furs and hides for a New York leather company. A few days after receiving Ellis’s letter I caught a flight from Aspen to Denver, and another one from there to New York, where Ellis was waiting to take a cheap-and-cheerful Icelandic Airways flight to Europe. Little did he know he was providing the final nudge in a process which would change my life forever.

The Colorado flight in a little 12-seat, twin-engine plane was a fascinating experience, not only because I sat in the co-pilot’s seat and got to see the top of the Rockies close up, but also because I had the feeling my life was headed for a new beginning. We took off from the Aspen airport and in a few minutes touched down on a landing field which was just a green meadow high in the Rockies. Its only features were a little hangar and a fuel pump. The pilot taxied up beside the gas pump, slid open the plane’s Plexiglas side-curtain and said to the attendant: “Fill’er up, and check the oil.” That seemed quaint to me then, but today it seems to hark straight back to the Wright Brothers. I had $500 in my pocket from working on an exploratory-drilling crew in Silverton and digging ditches in Aspen, and another $500 on the way from photographing an elk hunt there. That would keep me in Europe for a few months. Though my real objective wasn’t a few months, it was five years, a goal which seemed to me wildly extravagant at the time.

The lift-off from Kennedy Airport was full of portent. Not only were we going to attempt to cross the Atlantic in a turboprop DC-8, but we had no idea what to expect on the other side. I had dispossessed myself of my worldly goods, physically abandoned my mother country (and my mother), and was flying out into the unknown, powerful stuff for a small-town kid from Michigan. Was my former life behind me for good? Was my Nemesis waiting on the other side? Time would tell. In the meantime, I was feeling euphoric with a non-drug-related elation which I had never experienced before.

About the only thing I remember about the flight is it was full of kids like us with knapsacks, on their way to Europe, and there was a girl who had smuggled her pet spider monkey aboard, hidden in her jacket. We had a brief layover in mid Atlantic, at Keflavik airport in Iceland, and soon after we were back in the air the pilot informed us over the intercom that the plane would land in Brussels due to bad weather in Luxembourg. That was a bit farther away from Frankfurt, our first destination, but we didn’t mind. It was all Europe.

We caught the airport bus into the center of town, found a cheap, damp hotel, tried practicing our college French on the receptionist until he replied in perfect English, dropped our knapsacks, washed our faces and stepped out onto the streets of Brussels. There was a neighborhood soccer match going on in a field opposite the hotel, so we walked over to have a look. The first thing that caught my attention was a young man on a hillock on the west end of the field. Silhouetted against the setting sun, he was standing there in profile, tranquilly urinating in full view of everyone in the little stadium. His stream looked electrified, like an extremely thin, arching neon sign. Nobody seemed even to notice. Europe, it seemed, was different.

We were headed for Frankfurt to meet a friend. Mike Olson, a big raw-boned Norwegian-American kid from Minnesota who was on active duty in the U.S. Army there, serving his last few months as part of an unlikely theater group which staged propaganda plays for American troops around Germany. Propaganda plays? You know, stage representations of the patriotic thing to do when the Viet Cong starts driving burning bamboo splinters under your fingernails. Mike had been in line to become a baseball pro but for a nasty knee injury, so instead he studied English literature at the University of Minnesota. When we met he was a chaplain’s assistant at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. It’s not that he was particularly religious, but he did know how to read. The invitation Mike extended to us in Frankfurt included barracks lodging and board, plus occasional bus tours around Germany, for as long as we liked. We didn’t intend to stay long, but it was thoughtful of him to welcome us in such a generous way.

We spent almost three weeks with Mike and his little troupe of players, doing what you do in the Army: drink beer, smoke dope, and show up at mealtimes. Occasionally the whole crew would get on a bus and go to some nearby American base to mount their show, and we would go along for the ride. This included an overnight stay and meals in a typical German gasthaus, which tended to be invitingly oldy worldy, nicely carpeted and decorated with lots of carved wood and chintz fabrics. The first time we sat down to eat at one of those places a bevy of apronned waitresses in local costume welcomed us with big half-liter steins of beer for everyone. Mike Olson leaned over to me and said, “Be a little bit careful with that stuff, Mike. It’s stronger than the beer you’re used to.”

“Thanks for the warning,” I said, “but you don’t need to worry about me.”

After an hour and a half of schnitzel and sausages, good laughs and maybe four or five of those big brown beers, I stood up to go to the toilet. I took three whole steps before an evil Technicolor flower burst in front of me in slow motion. “Don’t worry about me,” indeed. This was just the beginning. The boy from Michigan had a great deal to learn about life in Europe.

After three weeks, Ellis and I had yet to see the sun. We were also weary of barracks life and itched to head south, so we decided to hitch down to Spain. Mike Olson agreed to join us there when he got out of the army a few months later. On the morning of our departure, Ellis and I split up so as to make hitching easier. We agreed the first one to arrive in Barcelona would go to the American Express office every day at noon till the other one showed up. I know that arrangement sounds antediluvian today, but it was in the days before cell phones.

So, a few days after leaving Frankfurt—the morning after the paella debauch— I managed to convince Swiss René to double back to Barcelona to pick up Ellis. When we arrived at the American Express office just before noon, there he was. We loaded his knapsack in the trunk and headed south. Ellis and I took turns sitting in the back seat with Schatzy, the boxer who farted.

As Swiss René was driving all the way to Morocco, on the other side of the Straits of Gibraltar in North Africa, the three of us continued together for nearly the full length of Spain’s Mediterranean coast, down through the provinces of Barcelona, Tarragona, Valencia, Castellón, Alicante, Murcia, Almería, Granada and Málaga. This was before Spain’s “autopistas,” and the two-lane coast road meandered lazily through towns and villages, making for a much more interesting drive. The coastlines of the northernmost provinces, the most advanced in the business of tourism, seemed like ghost towns at that time of year, made up of rows of empty sea-front apartment buildings. The more backward southern provinces took a few more years to reach that level of progress.

Ellis and I didn’t know where we were heading. Basically we were just looking for a pleasant place to stop. It’s a strange situation for young people to be in: no destination, no obligations, no schedule, no supervision, no house, no car, no mother, no father, and no girlfriend. We were back to basics. We had a bit of money and we had time. We had aspirations, but it wasn’t quite clear to what. And we were in a country where we didn’t even speak the language. We were mute, illiterate immigrants. It felt like adventure, and it tasted like opportunity, but what was immediately clear was that there was a lot of work to be done in order to give any kind of form to the project. The most beautiful part was the Spanish setting and that it was up to us alone.

This was the beginning of a process which lasted years, and is not over yet. I arrived knowing nothing, to a place where everything was alien. Then, little by little, I began to learn, to adapt, to integrate, to enjoy. My ideas start changing, my schemes to fragment. As time went by all my chapters had to be rewritten and renumbered. Many of my previous attitudes were sloughed off like old snakeskin, and new awareness and values incorporated. A few years down the line there came a point when I realized I would never be going home again, that I was at home. With that realization came a whole new set of joys and challenges.

By the time we got as far as the province of Málaga, there wasn’t that much of the Mediterranean coast left before it terminated at the Straits of Gibraltar, where René was to catch the boat for Morocco. A decision was forcing itself upon us. Then we pulled into a coastal village called Nerja (pronounced Nair-ha). The place announced itself a couple of kilometres before we arrived with its carefully tended farm plots tended by campesinos who could be seen mornings and evenings riding their donkeys and mules along the roadside. These lovingly worked garden plots which surrounded the village on three sides were not only beautiful and ever changing, but they lent a soothing Zen-like quality to the landscape. This was “tierra alegre,” “happy land,” in a subtropical climate which permitted up to three plantings a year of garden crops, as well as fruit trees, bananas and sugar cane, grain and legumes. In the higher, drier sections of the land were olive and almond groves. The almond trees blossomed in January, turning the mild winder landscape lacy white.

The farmer and fisher folk of the Spanish south coast were self sufficient in almost everything, with a few exceptions such as coffee and chocolate. Chocolate was accorded almost reverential treatment, never to be eaten without bread. To do so was considered degeneracy, a motive for punishing children. Their regimen of fresh fish, olive oil, legumes and home-grown fruit and vegetables was later to be known as the “Mediterranean diet,” and became all the rage in advanced western countries. By the time this phenomenon took hold abroad, however, a great part of the Spanish diet had veered off in the direction of sticky sliced bread, frozen pizzas, hamburgers, and microwave popcorn.

By the mid sixties Nerja was already on the Spanish tourist map in a modest way, due to a discovery made in 1959 by a group of local schoolboys. They were hunting bats on the hillside above the neighboring village of Maro when they stumbled across what would later be called “la Cueva de Nerja,” a fabulous cave with important archeological artefacts from Paleolithic times. In the early 1960’s it was equipped to accommodate orchestral and ballet events and to this day hosts an annual summer music and dance festival.

Our first night in the town we slept underneath the “Balcony of Europe,” a belvedere cantilevered over the Mediterranean from the middle of the town. In the morning we took stock. Would we be well served by a fishing and agricultural village of some 6,000 souls, with kilometers of beaches, narrow cobbled streets, sparkling whitewashed houses, deeply dark-eyed girls and eight-peseta (12-cent) liters of wine, served up from plump botas made out of whole goatskins? We decided we would, bid goodbye and good luck to Swiss René and started looking for a place to stay. After a couple of nights in a guest house, we managed to rent an apartment in a new building on the edge of town. It was pretty pedestrian stuff, looking more like the New Jersey than the Spanish coast, but it would do for a while. Ellis and I were among the first inhabitants in a new six-story building called “La Conbessa.” It was standard turista fare in those days: thin walls, a tiny kitchen, living/dining room, two bedrooms, a balcony overlooking a pockmarked volcanic landscape at the edge of town, and all mod cons, including a tiled bath with bidet. We were fascinated by the bidet. Wasn’t this some sort of arcane French sexual accessory? We were baffled as to what to do with it, but as it was essentially just a bowl which you could fill with water, and we were short of bowls, we used it for washing lettuce and soaking garbanzos.

La Conbessa apartments were located on a bluff over the kilometre-long Burriana Beach, opposite a little hotel/restaurant operation by the same name, Apartamentos Burriana, run by a young Englishman, John, and his wife, Maureen. Their two tow-headed children, a boy and girl ages five and seven, were tutored by a South African woman, the wife of an Irish novelist, perhaps the only writer in the whole town who actually wrote, at least the only one who published anything. John was an affable host and barman who could tell jokes and whip up a proper English breakfast in a jiffy: eggs, sausages, fried tomatoes and mushrooms and fried bread. He also did that pinnacle of traditional British cuisine: beans on toast. Maureen was a good cook in about five nationalities, and a person possessed of a special charm and warmth. She was sweet and easy to look at and to listen to, with her captivating Manchester accent. I confess I’m a pushover for a girl who says “soil” instead of “dirt” and “tipper lorry” for “dump truck.” She was also a painter. Ellis and I took to straying across the street for the occasional breakfast, coffee or glass of wine. As it turned out, we weren’t the only ones. Half the men in the town dropped by the restaurant regularly. There were the local señoritos, with their slick black hair forming oily ringlets at the back, as well as tradesmen, fishermen, and a fair representation of the town’s foreign contingent which numbered around a hundred. She handled them all with perfect aplomb, always maintaining her distance, demurely pretending not to notice their heavy breathing and thinly veiled innuendos.

I think the only one who wasn’t moving on her was me. I was objective enough to recognize that I, your basic dope-smoking, hitch-hiking hippy, had nothing to offer her, so I just sat back and enjoyed her occasional company during mornings at the bar when business was slow. Before long we became friends and laughed a lot together. Once we did a duet making mayonnaise in the kitchen, she beating the egg yolks with a wire whisk, I slowly pouring olive oil into the bowl.

By the time Mike Olson got out of the army and came down to live with Ellis and me, we had rented the bottom floor of a big old village house on the Calle Carabeo. My room had a cave-like arched ceiling. We got it cheap because the rear of the house faced the back side of the cine de verano outdoor cinema and in summertime there was no way one could go to bed before 1:00 a.m. Many nights we simply surrendered and went to the movies. I suspect that is the origin of my devotion to the Spanish summer cinema, one of the country’s most delightful solutions for hot summer nights.

All of this happened nearly 40 years ago. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. The Spanish say, “Ha llovido…” “It has rained…” Here I sit, four decades later, in this converted goat shed with an olive-wood fire at my back and an old grey cat who never steps on the keyboard, wondering about you, dear reader. You are fundamental to this project. Who are you? What are you like? Whom do you admire, what do you regret? Do you love animals? Are you a biker, a feminist, a self deluder, or all three? Are you an eager beaver, a calculator, or a wise woman? Did you stop reading newspapers years ago because they were too depressing? What moves you, what awakens your indignation? What do you aspire to? How do you propose to achieve it? Did you ever fantasize leaving your country and beginning again somewhere else?

How dare I address myself to you if I don’t even know you? My guess is that if you are an American you may want to put this book down right now, because you’re going to be outraged by it. I have some plain truths for you that even your best friend wouldn’t tell you, about your country’s cynicism and rapine around the world, and your own indifference to/complicity in it. Booth’s Law of Collective Responsibility maintains we’re all guilty.

What’s the point of trying to reach those who don’t want to know? The Americans themselves have demonstrated the futility of trying to change other people’s hearts and minds. On the other hand, why bother preaching to the converted? Maybe it’s in the vain hope of making a difference. Remember St. John? “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” It’s difficult to know the truth in the United States these days. Maybe someone should have one more go at clarifying the issues. It’s presumptuous to think that someone should be me, but having lived abroad for most of my adult life, I have escaped from the United States’ numbing gravitational field of don’t-want-to-know amorality, and can see the country more clearly, see it as other outsiders—Europeans, the rest of the world—see it. Then there is the question of urgency. The George W. Bush administration has dramatically accelerated the process of American interventions around the world, making it a much more dangerous place than it was when he took office in 2001. And it’s getting worse every day.

Before we go any further I’d like to say something about a writer’s obligation to tell “both sides of the story.” I won’t be doing that here. That’s for journalists who are theoretically “impartial.” How can anyone be impartial in these dire times? Did Tom Paine tell King George’s side of the story? No. He wrote in The Crisis, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” (See the full text of The Crisis here: http://www.ushistory.org/paine/crisis/c-01.htm.) The United States has enough advocates already. Thanks to their ubiquitous and all-powerful mass media, we hear one or another version of their side of the story for breakfast, lunch, and dinner practically every day of our lives. So here, with your permission, I’m going to present my considered opinion in opposition to all that.

It is not one of my missions in these pages to note that Americans also invented the Declaration of Independence and the electric light bulb, but to point out that the former, which was a beacon of hope and egalitarianism shining around the world in 1776, looks like an ironical dead letter in the glow of today’s electric light bulbs. My job here is to tell the other story, the one most Americans have chosen to turn their backs on, and is coming back to haunt them. It’s a story of greed, injustice, hypocrisy, and unrelenting high handedness around the world, in big issues and little ones. Not only is it fascinating to read, but it sheds more light on the causes and implications of today’s world events than the official version. It’s possible this whole exercise is just to go on the record. In any case, here you have it, intertwined with some reflections on the “better place” which I discovered. This is not to say Spain is perfect, far from it. Spain was the evil empire of its time, marauding and spreading its religious intolerance around the world for nearly half a millennium. Even so, arriving here at the end of the 1960’s, I found very little of that. To the contrary, I discovered a country which was so un-materialistic, so close to the earth, so intensely human, that it captured my heart. It was so profoundly different from the one I left behind that it aroused in me a fascination and an admiration which has never abated.

Along the way in this narrative from both sides of the Atlantic you’ll learn something about me, about the people who stayed behind, and what has happened to them, about how they were misguided, lied to, robbed and brutalized by a right-wing cartel of militarists, industrialists, and politicians, the very “military-industrial complex” President Eisenhower warned us about so eloquently in his 1961 farewell address, full text here: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm, video of President Eisenhower’s comments on the military-industrial complex here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY.

Yes, I want to tell you about the United States of America, the country I renounced before a magistrate in the Audiencia Provincial de Granada on April 22, 1984, in order to take Spanish citizenship. When the brief ceremony was over the dignified old judge arose gravely from his heavy, ornately carved chair, stepped down and around the bench, and took both of my hands in his own. “¡Enhorabuena!” (“Congratulations!”) he said, smiling as if welcoming home a prodigal son.

Chapter 2 – The Early Days in an Andalusian Fishing Village

The Spanish population of Nerja in those days could not have been more dramatically different from that of the U.S. in the late 60’s. It was made up of humble, hard-working farmers, fishermen, shopkeepers and bar owners living meagre-but-dignified lives in an agrarian ecomony. Though they were living in Paradise, they were hardly aware of it because the vast majority of them had never been anywhere else. Though strongly traditional in their own lives, they were tolerant of the extravagant lifestyles of their foreign guests, looking upon them more with curiosity and good humor than disapproval.

The bikini was invented in 1964, and soon became common currency for Northern European girls on the Spanish coasts, even though this kind of exhibitionism was still illegal under Spanish law. In the beginning the local boys would form fascinated hard-staring circles around foreign women on the beach and the machine-pistol-toting Guardia Civil patrols would have to choose between dispersing them or arresting the exhibitionists. The Spanish had a generic term for all of these scantily clad, and by extension morally loose foreign girls: “Suecas,” “Swedish girls.” They had a reputation for sexual licence which many of them didn’t bother trying to live down. It was this radically different beachwear which opened the first breach in the rigid social structure to which Spanish women had been tied for the previous 2,000 years, as they soon began to imitate their northern European sisters.

The townspeople lived in traditional whitewashed stone houses with Roman tile roofs and wrought-iron window grates or “rejas.” Nerja women decorated their rejas with flowers. This flower-pot phenomenon escalated into contests among the village women, resulting in entire facades, then whole streets festooned with lavish displays of flowers and hanging plants. The resulting effect was of beauty, grace, and wellbeing throughout the town.

Such is the Spanish sense of community that the farmers did not live on their land, but resided in the town, making their way each morning out to their campos. It was an experience strolling through the town between eight and nine in the morning, with the open-doored bars emitting an unmistakable perfume of strong coffee, black tobacco and “aguardiente de anis,” the local firewater. This was the hour when the campesinos would emerge from the front doors of their houses leading their donkeys and mules behind them. Though it must have driven their compulsively clean wives crazy, it was the only way, as the stables were located behind the houses which were butt up against one another along the cobblestone streets. On these walks the passing schoolchildren would greet me shyly, smiling and saying “Adios.” This had me perplexed for a long time. Why were they saying “goodbye” to me, instead of “hola,” hello?” Then it hit me. “Adios” doesn’t mean just “goodbye.” It means literally, “Go with God.”

On these morning walks I would pass a house with an elongated back garden where there was usually a young man turning the crank on a bicycle wheel adapted to twist agave cactus fibers into long lengths of strong, beautiful rope. This was Ayo, following his father’s and grandfather’s cottage-industry tradition. Ayo, allegedly one of the schoolchildren who discovered the Nerja Cave, is of interest to us for another reason. He is a case study for tracing the evolution of the society of the Spanish costas over the past 40 years or so. In 1970, detecting the onset of a discreet tourist industry, Ayo opened a humble cane-thatched beach bar (“chiringuito”) on Nerja’s Burriana Beach. He specialized in paellas, which he prepared himself over a wood fire on the sand. As the business grew he started producing giant seafood paellas, for up to 100 people, and became something of a local celebrity, both for his excellent Spanish rice dishes and the exuberant spectacle of making them over an open fire.

In the mid-1980’s Spanish television sent a crew down to Nerja to film a TV series called “Verano Azul,” “Blue Summer,” about a group of charming kids on vacation there and their adventures with a lovable old seadog called “Chanquete,” “Whitebait.” The series turned out to be one of Spanish television’s historic successes and it was Ayo’s chiringuito which was chosen as children’s hangout and the setting for many of the scenes. So then, besides being a successful restauranteur, Ayo was a television personality. Meanwhile, foreign tourism continued to grow in Nerja, with the development on the volcanic badlands outside the town of a new subdivision of tourist residences called “Capistrano Village.” But Capistrano is in Orange County, California, you say? Never mind, the name obeyed the logic of shrewd international property developers. More progress.

Ayo’s Nerja beach restaurant is now made of bricks, and instead of being alone on the kilometer-long Burriana Beach, it forms part of the new “paseo maritimo” which includes a whole string of restaurants set against an imposing backdrop of tourist apartments. Ayo, meanwhile, can hardly recall winding rope with a bicycle wheel in his parents’ backyard.

I thought the Spanish language could be learned without a teacher, just with my Spanish in 90 Days book and a Spanish-English dictionary, along with talking with the locals. That’s how children learn, and they don’t even have a book. So the first chance I got I sidled up to a couple of gnarled old fishermen in Pepe Gómez’s El Molino bar in Nerja, ordered a glass of wine and discreetly eavesdropped on their conversation. Here I was at last, a stone’s throw from the Mediterranean, about to partake of its millenary wisdom in the original language. The two old timers spent a long time not saying anything at all, then one turned to the other and mumbled,

“Amovay…”

“Amovay, amovay?” That word didn’t appear anywhere in my book. He said it again. I was stumped. A couple of days later I bumped into Oliver, a young American fine-art printmaker who spoke the best Spanish of all the foreigners in town. Oliver was a good friend of Pepe Gómez, and hung out a lot at El Molino, so I took the opportunity to consult him. “I was listening to two old fishermen talking at the end of the bar at El Molino the other night and they kept saying ‘Amovay…’ What’s this ‘Amovay?’” I can’t find it anywhere in my Spanish-English dictionary. Oliver laughed and put me straight: “It sounds like ‘amovay’ when they pronounce it with their Andalusian accent, but it’s really ‘Vamos a ver, ‘Let’s see…’ It’s right out of chapter two of your Spanish lesson book.” Oliver added sympathetically, “If you’re interested in learning Spanish, those two are the wrong guys to get next to. That’s Paquito and Miguelín, and they’ve been standing in that same corner of the bar soaking up wine for more than 20 years. They’re completely pickled, utterly unintelligible. Nobody understands what they’re talking about!”

Oliver was—and is— an exceptional draftsman and etcher and had his prints posted for sale in a few restaurants around the town. One day he was invited to dinner by a wealthy American psychiatrist and his wife. They lived and practiced in Paris and had been instantly besotted by Oliver’s work. Before the meal was over they had reached an agreement with the young printmaker to rent an apartment in the town and set him up in a professional workshop with all the trimmings: etching press, resin box, inks, papers, rollers, blotters, drying racks, well-lit work surfaces, and a small exhibit space. Oliver wound up marrying a Belgian girl who had grown up in Nerja from her youngest childhood. They still live there. He still makes his living as a printmaker and sculptor.

I finally did learn Spanish and have found it to be an unending source of discovery and delight, just as rich as English, though comparisons are odious and the two languages probably have more similarities than differences. Both descend essentially from Latin, both are the principal remnants of defunct empires. Both have made important contributions to world literature. Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same day, April 23, 1616. But what I like best about Spanish, as it is spoken in everyday life, particularly in Andalusia, is its extreme playfulness. It has words which dance and glisten, capable of brightening up your day with their music all by themselves, words like mequetrefe, tiquis miquis, ojalá, cuchitril and gilipolla… You don’t even need to know their meaning. Just their lilting sounds make you happy.

In fact, there are almost as many versions of Spanish as there are towns in the country, each one with its own take on the language. Some of these versions, especially rural areas, are hard to get a grip on, even for Spaniards sometimes. For years I thought I might be exaggerating the question of indecipherable pueblo accents, but years later I heard a remark from the young financial director of a Granada construction firm with its origins in a village. He said, “When my father and uncles get together and talk among themselves, there are times when I can scarcely make out what they’re saying!”

With time it became something of a hobby for me to guess where people were from, based on their accents. One time I was introduced to the mother of the owner of a small hotel on the Granada coast. She had a delightful and somehow familiar sounding musical speech. I said to her, “Are you from Chauchina?” “No, I’m not,” she replied. “I’m from the next village over, Trasmulas…”

She, Doña Maria del Carmen Uceda y Morientes, was the beautiful wife of El Manolón, a successful Granada gypsy antique dealer who had made his money in the fifties travelling through the villages of Andalucia with a moving van full of Formica tables. He would arrive at the village square and pay a peseta to the pregonero, or town crier, a figure which still existed into the early sixties, to announce his unbelievable proposition. He was offering genuine factory-new Formica tables in exchange for the villagers’ nasty old, wooden tables of pine, oak and walnut, most of them handmade by local carpenters many decades before. No money changed hands, just old tables for new. It was an unbelievable deal! El Manolon’s son, Manolo, was no slouch, either. Besides marrying exceedingly well, he was one of the earliest developers of tourist accommodation along the Granada coast, including the hotel where we were staying, a wealthy man in his own right before he was 40 years old.

Where were we? Oh, the language. Nor must we forget its rich vein of profanity, surely one of the most creative and colorful in the world. The basic curses are: “Me cago en Dios,” “I shit on God.” and “Me cago en tu puta madre,” “I shit on your whore mother.” The former is too blasphemous for polite company, and the latter can get you killed, so they have refined them down a great deal. The first one gets abbreviated to “¡Hostias!” (“Communion wafers!”) which one hears on the street and in the bars ten times a day. That business about your mother gets distilled down to, “¡Leche!” in reference to one’s mother’s milk.” Actually, Spain’s two most virulent insults are directed not at the object of contempt, but at his women. “¡Hijo de puta!” (“son of a whore”) goes for his mother and “¡Cabrón! (“cuckold”) for his wife.

Spanish profanity is employed in another way, but you have to be an advanced user to get away with it. I’ll never forget the first time I heard it, recently arrived in Spain. I was standing at a red light on Madrid’s Paseo de la Castellana, the six-lane central north-south artery. Suddenly the 40-year-old gentleman in a business suit standing next to me started screaming ugly expletives at someone on the other side of the street. “¡Hijo puta, cabrón, la puta que te parió…!” The other guy responded in the same vein and with the same vehemence. Surely when these two met at the center line they were going to kill each other. But no, they dashed out to the middle of the street, threw their arms around one another and gave each other a big hug. “Son of a whore,” it seems, can be used as a term of endearment, if only on special occasions.

Not all Spaniards swear. A lot of them wouldn’t say “hostias” if they had a mouthful, some for religious reasons, others simply as a question of good manners. Most Spanish people, from the humblest peones to the nobility, have excellent manners, whether the homespun modesty and gentility of the campesino, or impeccable manners cultivated in genteel homes and Jesuit schools.

Spanish is a relatively easy language for English speakers to learn, something like a three on the one-to-ten scale. Obviously, there is an age factor. The experts say if you don’t learn a second language by the time you’re 13 you will probably never speak it like a native. Then, the older you get, the more difficult it is to learn. Many northern European retirees in Spain have learned. The typical model of the retired couple looks like this: She, at 62, goes to the market, talks to the maid and gardener, gets out on the street, and has business to attend to in the running of the house. At 62 she is just coming alive. He, at 66, has recently retired from a good position in a big company, a trauma in itself. He drinks gin. She coaxes him into taking Spanish lessons. He will not pay attention. He drinks gin during the classes. She is having a wonderful time. He is burned out. This is the pattern. That’s why Spain’s coastal towns are full of northern European widows who speak passable Spanish.

As one would expect, the animals here also speak Spanish, not English. No self-respecting Spanish rooster would ever say “cock-a-doodle-doo.” He sings “kikirrikí.” Instead of cackling, the hens “cacarean,” saying “coc co co coc.” Songbirds “trinan,” saying “pío pío,” and dogs bark, “guau guau.” The only Spanish animal who speaks proper English is the pig, who says “oink.”

Though there are a lot of people who don’t bother, I cannot overemphasize the importance of learning the language of one’s new country. Language is not just a vehicle for communicating ideas, desires, questions and commands. It’s a secret passage into the heart of a country, its values, its humor and, ultimately, its people. What is a people’s most prized possession, whether they realize it or not? Their language. It’s their mother tongue and their literature, their lullabies and poetry. It’s their most-beloved sound, their identity. They will go to war for it. To participate in that communion with them is a sacred rite, one which consecrates and unites. The Czech statesman and philosopher, Thomas Masaryk, said, “To know another language is to live another life.”

I didn’t learn much Spanish, however, in my eight months in Nerja. The “artists’ colony” of exotic foreigners completely absorbed my interest. I had never met a Dane before, and only one Englishman. And here I was, dropped into a multinational village populated by Scandinavians, Brits, Canadians, Dutchmen, Australians, Germans, Austrians, Irish and one enigmatic Norwegian woman. Olga was the wife of Clive, a successful British advertising man who came to Nerja to write a book and/or drink Fundador. It was never quite clear in which order. Olga was a potter with a chubby blonde five-year-old daughter and a ceramics workshop in the back of their nicely appointed old Spanish house in the middle of town. She went for walks in the campo and brought back dried flowers.

When groups of friends got together Clive would talk a lot, and well, but she would just observe, listening attentively, not speaking unless spoken to directly, not sullen, but melancholy. At one of these gatherings someone recalled that the Three Billy Goats Gruff was a Norwegian folk tale, and asked her to recite the story of the goats and the troll who lived under the bridge in its native Norwegian. “Ah,” she said, “De tre Bukkene Bruse,” lighting up immediately. She began telling the story, and everyone in the room was transfixed. The uncanny thing, aside from Olga’s sudden animation, was that her recounting of the story was perfectly intelligible to everyone familiar with the fairy tale, even if they didn’t know any Norwegian. Eventually she returned to her country with her little girl. Her husband stayed in Nerja to continue the unfinished Fundador novel.

The Nerja of the extranjeros was driven by lust and alcohol, the latter contributing to the former in more ways than one. Obviously booze loosened morals but, more importantly, it led disoriented northern European husbands into alcoholism, which drove their wives into let’s-see-if-we-can-do-better mode. This placed the hapless husbands in the classic Spanish role of the cabrón, though some of these wives hardly had time to award their husbands with the hallowed crown of cuernos, the horns of the cuckold. The story of Charles and Gillian is typical. A couple of bright young journalists from the British midlands, they came to Nerja on vacation and promptly decided to sell up in England and return to this charming Mediterranean fishing village and buy a bar. Before four years were up Charles was dead at 34, choked on his own vomit in the servicios of his bar, the Happy End. Gillian moved on.

It wasn’t just drink which loosened the morals of newcomers to Spain’s Mediterranean coast. There was a complex set of factors which social anthropologists might do well to study one day. It had to do with the sultry hot climate, the sensuousness of the perpetually lapping sea, the lush pastel bougainvilleas draping over all walls, and the galán de noche flowers which perfumed the nights lewdly. Morals were further slackened by generalized feelings of being transplanted to a new world where nobody was looking.

Old barriers were left behind in stuffy offices in cold, damp cities where it rained almost every day of the year, in soulless schoolrooms full of psychotic midgets, at deadly telephone switchboards, and in clammy pubs with greasy kitchens and moist ten-year-old carpets which harbored rich ecosystems. Old customs were abandoned in closets with snow shovels, earmuffs, wellies and umbrellas. Here umbrellas were sombrillas, used as much for protection from the rays of the sun as for rainy days. Here in the blinding Mediterranean light the immigrants from the North found everything was new, everything was possible, they were finally free of their pedestrian sensible-walking-shoes selves. They were someone new, exotic butterflies about to emerge from their cocoons. Clearly, they hadn’t read Kavafis, who says in The Town:

No hope of another town; this is where you’ll always alight.

There is no road to another, there is no ship

To take you there. As here in this small strip

You spoiled your life, the whole earth felt your squanderings.

Nerja in those days was a magnet for foreign dilettantes. Since nobody knew where anybody else was coming from, everybody could pretend to be whatever he or she fancied. So the bright young expressionist painter from New York was, in reality, a creative small-time dope dealer who embarked innocent European girls on the boat from Tangiers to Algeciras with their underthings stuffed with hashish. And the distinguished retired Irish surgeon, brilliant conversationalist and gourmand was a pederast, eventually denounced in court by 24 delivery boys between the ages of 10 and 15. He took refuge in Tangiers, where he plied his trade for a few more years. Would-be writers there were a few, and out-and-out crazies a few more. There were also crooks. One of them, a tall, exceedingly white 35-year-old Swede, carried a walking stick and spoke pretentious English. He was in the business of conning the elderly with supposedly fabulous investments in a Swedish aircraft company. When Interpol finally showed up to take him away he took off—straight through a plate-glass door in his ground-floor apartment and actually got away.

There were also a few slackers of the sort which the British call “remittance men,” sons of wealthy families just passing the time while waiting to collect their inheritances. One of them, Thomas Wentworth-Lake, was living on a modest remittance from England while impatiently awaiting the demise of his elderly father. In the meantime he drank a lot of Pims No. 1 Cup and pretended to write fiction. When Thomas arrived in Nerja he was about 40, his father nearly 80, so the heir was counting on collecting his inheritance in short order. His plan was to buy a two-masted yacht, sail it to the West Indies, and take his time looking for a congenial place to anchor it. The old man was loath to cooperate, however, and when Thomas Wentworth-Lake died of liver sclerosis 15 years later his father pronounced a loving homily at the funeral. The old man died a couple of years later, and Thomas’s son, Thomas IV, picked up all the chips.

Since many of the town’s foreign residents were British ex-colonials, they brought along heavy doses of the racism which they had cultivated for centuries throughout the empire. These old-guard ex-colonials, who lived for the most part on a diet of nostalgia, snobbery, and brandy and soda, referred to the local people as “the natives,” and looked upon them exclusively as menials: cheap cooks, maids, waiters and gardeners. They thought the generous, almost childlike Andalusians were stupid. This misconception was to cost the British in Spain dearly. The Spanish weren’t stupid. They were biding their time and learning fast. Today, 40 brief years later, the Spanish have surpassed the British on most indices of civilization. Even the Spanish national health system has outdistanced that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Although the sun never sets on British pretensions to grandeur, arrogance alone is not enough to secure world domination for long.