A Single Swallow (35 page)

I must have seemed strange; La Linea is not a tourist town: it was the first time that I had been looked on not as a traveller, but as an unknown quantity. People's expressions were not friendly. I found myself in a supermarket, confused and dazzled by the huge choice of bright goods. I asked for a coffee in a bar and met outright hostility. I do not know why, but they threw me out, a young man angrily shouting something I did not understand. I lost my sense of direction and wandered in circles in the thickening rain. The only thing I recognised were the birds: there were swallows cutting through the low streets, slicing rapidly across the grid of small yellow houses.

On the outskirts of town was a stretch of wasteland and beyond it a rise to a stand of trees. A path led past a junkyard, up through the trees and on, past tethered horses, to a hill. High ground would give me bearings. I went slowly now; the soaked leather of my shoes rubbing sorely against my heels, my legs heavy. I had been walking since four in the morning. The rising ground turned in to the foot of a wide hill, climbing away from the sea to the north, covered with spring flowers, spiky bushes and hardy, succulent plants. I took my shoes off to give my blisters a break. The rocks were sharp and the bushes wet with rain. I came to a concrete pillbox, and then another. From the top of one you could see many more, all supporting each other, dug into the flanks, ridges and crests of the hill. They were all serviceable; I half-expected them to be occupied. What were they doing here, with their gun-slits facing the Straits, and Africa? Anywhere else in Europe I would have assumed that they were relics
of the Second World War – but Spain had been neutral then: what army were they supposed to oppose? There was something horribly sinister about the network of pillboxes and slit trenches; it was like stumbling across the preparations for an undeclared war. ‘Fortress Europe' was suddenly more than an expression. It had real battlements, real teeth.

Each ridge, surmounted, revealed another beyond. The pillboxes climbed with the contours: at the top of the hill was a gate and another cluster of fortifications. There was an army truck there, but no sign of anyone. Curtains of rain swung in from the north-west. Below, beyond Gibraltar, the Straits were a pearly swirl of changing weathers in which the coast of north Africa came and went. I reckoned I had an hour left in my legs before I would have to stop. The way forward was barred; the nearest road was below me to the west. There was a fence down there, but even from here a wide gap was visible, and not far beyond that a road and traffic.

It took half an hour to descend the hill and reach the gap in the fence. It had been a formidable construction, once, but was now rusted and sagging; from the plant growth the gap had been there a long time. It would save a considerable detour. Not far beyond the fence was tarmac.

The first sign of trouble was another army truck parked under some trees. My heart sank a little but I continued, too tired to turn back. The next truck was an unfamiliar design, with a rig at the back and stabilisers. The road turned a corner and I found myself walking between a double line of trucks. There were missiles mounted on their backs. The eerie thing was the silence. There was no sign or sound of anyone, anywhere. The rain had stopped; it was a still, strange day and a strange moment in it, neither afternoon nor evening.

There were a great many more missiles on either side of the road. They did not look very modern, more like antiquated, Cold War things, but I was scared to look too closely. All I could think to do was to keep staring at the ground, to not see too much, and keep going through a large and deserted barracks like a film set, like an aftermath,
like a scene of the end of the world: trucks, and missiles, and silence. I suppose I thought a combination of innocence, error and being European would be some protection.

Beyond an open space like a parade ground was what looked like the main gate, with a barrier and guard hut. I walked towards it very quietly. I could not see anyone. I began to walk past it, practically on tip-toes, and was at the barrier when the shout came. There was a woman in uniform in the hut, summoning me, a puzzled expression on her face. I thought about running but did not.

She asked questions I did not understand. I tried to explain that I had made a mistake but nothing I said made sense to her. Then she asked, in hesitant English:

‘Are you the man who is running?'

I did not know what to say. Three soldiers approached, carrying rifles; their officer was another woman. More questions, more incomprehension. Then another officer appeared, with a small orange dog. Perhaps it had been trained to look for drugs: the soldiers hefted their rifles and everyone watched as the dog sniffed me. Another soldier came, in camouflage, wearing a sludgy green beret. He seemed different: by his appearance he could have been English but he did not respond to my appeals. Was I the man who was running? Had they mixed me up with some sort of escape and evasion exercise? I hoped not, or it would be interrogation next. They were waiting for something. Gesturing with their rifles they herded me away from the gate towards a doorway.

‘Now what? Up against a wall and shot?' I asked, not entirely lightly.

They did not respond. The barriers opened and a four-by-four sped through, blue lights flashing: enter the Guardia Civil. There were two of them, a tall youth and his boss, a short, portly officer with thinning hair. The latter conferred briefly with the soldiers, then advanced, shouting questions. I am a writer, I am watching birds, I came through a gap in the fence by mistake, I tried to explain, but he understood nothing and became angry, screaming questions into my face. His anger seemed to swell and ebb in waves. One moment he
was calm, the next his hands shook and he grabbed me. He was sweating. There were beads of it on his scalp and brow. He threw me against the wall, pulled me back, turned me round and threw me against it again. He kicked my legs apart and spread-eagled my arms. There was a fierce, almost sexual excitement in him. Before he moved in he glanced, almost involuntarily, over his shoulder, exactly like a school bully checking that he is unobserved. It seemed to confirm that this was off-the-record, beyond control or formal process. Another blow came, a sort of cuff. I was repulsed but not seriously frightened: had I not been white, had I been female, had he had me in a cell . . . Perhaps nothing more would have happened, but it was horrible to imagine.

Then, for no reason I could discern, it all stopped. The officer spat something at me, spoke with the soldiers, and I was hustled to the barrier and pushed past it. I walked down the road very slowly. At the bottom was a roundabout where I stood with my thumb out for a while, until a man stopped. We did not understand each other but he drove me into La Linea again and put me out in front of a tall building, the Hotel Ibero-Star.

In normal circumstances this hotel might have seemed unremarkable but that evening, in that state, it was repulsive. It was the most modern building I had been into in weeks, equipped with everything today's business traveller presumably expects. It was entirely devoid of personality. There was no sense that the staff could make any decision: their role was to operate the hotel like a machine, to apply the rules, to uphold the corporate image, to carry out the corporate function.

The cleanliness was inhuman: the whole place was biologically, forensically, hysterically clean. This fortress of sanitation seemed designed and determined to resist the grubbiness that is people – I was certainly the grubbiest it had allowed in for a long time. The manic, authoritarian air of hygiene frightened me; the bathroom was terrifying. A basket of toiletries sat on a ledge like a surreal sculpture of a crustacean. The facecloth had been coiled into a crescent, its corners forming claws: a shell of soaps and shower caps made a body
and shampoo bottles with spherical caps protruded from the front like crab's eyes on stalks. It was such a baroque, extravagant construction that I shrank from it. This must be policy; there must have been one in every room. The shower was so clean it seemed never to have been used. The entire room seemed to be wrapped in a layer of invisible cling-film. On television men in suits discussed something they called a worldwide financial crisis. The crisis did not seem to be hurting them: they laughed at it, shook their heads and shrugged in smiling disbelief. The glitz of television made it all entertainment, the rolling news channels rolling everything smoothly into the ad breaks. A card on the desk promised rewards for loyalty, trumpeting the virtues of the Ibero-Star chain. Where we spend, what we buy, to which corporations we are loyal – these things will displace passports, I thought, staring at it, corporate loyalty will define us more powerfully than the mere accident of where we are born, as long as we are born into the fortress.

Breakfast was the same in its extreme fecundity, a jewelled wealth of bright wrappers, gleaming pots, everything advertising itself, a banquet of edible marketing. Afterwards I stood on the pavement, at a loss. A man pulled up in a people-mover.

‘Are you waiting for me?' he asked. He was English. He seemed friendly and assured.

‘I don't know – who are you here for?'

‘I'm supposed to pick someone up and take him to Malaga.'

‘Yes,' I said, for no reason.

We listened to Michael Bolton on his stereo.

‘As I've got older,' he said, ‘I've come to appreciate this sort of music more – you know, just nice music, nice words . . .'

He dropped me off at the airport. I went in and bought a ticket to Madrid. As I passed through the scanners, at the point where you empty all your pockets into a tray I was struck by the impulse: with a British passport and a wallet full of plastic you can still go pretty well anywhere, replace pretty well anything, pay at any door until it opens. I walked away from the scanner without picking up my tray, abandoning everything to the X-ray machine. I landed at Madrid
with a few euros and the clothes I was wearing. Of everything I had set out with, from my birth certificate upwards, nothing now remained.

It was a cold night in early April; the streets gleamed after rain. I hung around the bus station for a long time, keeping warm, then started to walk. Madrid seemed vast and empty, long pale boulevards rolled away, exhaustingly, in every direction. It all seemed so sudden, so established and indifferent that I felt I had fallen into a new world, deserted and austere. I asked a policeman if he knew anywhere cheap to stay. He asked me for my identification. I told him I had none. He said I must report the loss of my passport to a police station. What police station? He showed me on a map. I looked for an hour and I must have been close, at times, but I could not find it. A boy who was putting up posters gave me a lift in his van at one point. In the small hours of the morning I found the police station and was told to wait. A girl was waiting too; she was feverish with excitement.

‘I'm going to report him this time,' she said, in English. ‘I'm going to get him arrested.'

‘Who?'

‘My neighbour, the bastard.'

‘Why?'

‘He won't leave me alone! And this time he went too far.'

‘What did he do?'

‘He banged on my door, shouting that he loves me.'

‘You're going to get him arrested because he loves you?'

‘Because the bastard bangs on my door!'

The police took my statement and gave me a form.

‘Now go,' said the officer.

‘I have nowhere to go – may I stay here?'

He looked me over. ‘Two hours,' he said, pointing at the bench in the waiting room. ‘You can stay for two hours, but don't lie down.'

I closed my eyes. Immediately, it seemed, though two hours had passed, they shook me awake.

I walked through the streets as the sky lightened. The air was fresh and cold. There was a bewildering treasury of waste on the pavements. In one skip were jumpers, a bag, shoes, umbrellas, shirts, jeans, shorts and T-shirts. I re-equipped myself, because such riches seemed too good to pass up, but the weight of the bag was exhausting and I returned it to another skip. Madrid's skips and recycling bins act as an exchange for street people: you trade in your rags for anything better you find. I counted my euros: five left. A café owner let me use his bathroom.

‘Do you want something?' he asked, as I was leaving.

‘I have no money,' I said. He shrugged, made me a coffee and presented me with a heart-shaped cake on a plate. His face was stern and unforgiving, but his kindness was amazing. He showed me the door as soon as I had finished and waved away my thanks, almost irritably.

People were going into a church for morning Mass. I joined them, took a seat and tried to stay awake. The Latin was soporific and I failed to keep my eyes open, awaking to a hand shaking my shoulder. A man stood over me, dressed in ragged clothes. His head was swollen and his eyes bulging. His breath came in loud, whistling snorts. He seemed to be the self-appointed guardian of the church and he was upset and angered by me. He chased me out with shooing gestures, huffing and whistling furiously. I walked through parks and down long streets; I huddled on benches. My head spun. At one point I went into a hospital but they did not understand what I wanted and were not interested in the cut on my head. I was neither tourist, nor traveller (whoever heard of a traveller without a bag?), nor worker, nor resident: I felt as though I had fallen through a grating into a kind of invisibility. Madrid seemed to divide into well-to-do quarters, where people looked through me, and bohemian areas, where entire squares were filled with colourful crowds of rockers, bikers, beggars and students – the anarchic and the bourgeois separating themselves like oil and water. The astonishing thing was the way this city, the
European capital closest to Africa, did not refer to that continent at all. Instead, it was the tidal pull of another empire, another history, which was everywhere: South America. I gazed at Ecuadorian, Venezuelan and Peruvian faces, music and food. I saw some Moroccans, but their culture was comparatively invisible. I spent another euro on a coffee. Cigarettes were no problem; every ashtray was rich in butts. It began to get dark again and I joined the hurrying crowds, to keep going and keep warm, but also to feel part of the city by appearing to be, to keep its rhythm. Two euros. There was so much food in the cafés and shops but I could not work out where they threw it all away. I was desperate to sleep somewhere. Finally, I went into a hotel lobby, borrowed a phone book and found – miracles! – the name of the parents of a friend. One euro went on that, and one on the metro ride to the station near their home, and that is all it took. One phone number, two euros, and the kindness of near-strangers.