Europe @ 2.4 km/h (52 page)

Sometimes the literature is less than informative. This afternoon I lose interest in a brochure that begins, ‘Cadiz Museum’s 150-year history indicates that the institute enjoys a long tradition …’ The museum’s prize exhibits are two identical-looking sarcophagi — one containing the skeleton of a male, dated
circa
400 BC, the other presumably his wife. The first was discovered in 1887, the other only in 1980.

The curator tells me Trajan was the first Roman Emperor of Hispanic origin (reigning from AD 98-117). They say you learn something every day, so that’s my quota right there. Ancient sources said that the journey by ship from here to Ostia, the port of Rome, took nine days. Estrabon, an ancient historian with a droll sense of humour, quipped that the population of Cadiz spent more time on the high seas than on terra firma.

1535-1537 km

How we judge by appearances even as we deplore the habit in others. This morning, fresh out of town on the train to Seville, the only other passenger in my carriage looked worse than scruffy. I was disinclined to offer him more than the briefest of pleasantries. Tiago, on the other hand, was eager to talk. A few minutes into our ride, the young Portuguese looked out the window and said matter-of-factly, ‘I have slept on this beach my first night in Cadiz.’

The only part of his life story that lodged in my brain was that he was a balloon-tying artist — animals being his speciality — and a juggler. Appearances deceive. I would not have thought the man well travelled. He had been in the Netherlands but stated categorically, ‘I didn’t like Amsterdam or the Dutch. They are like this.’ On ‘this’ his mobile features snap-froze into a frown. I couldn’t help but laugh. The atmosphere had lightened. I put away my book. He spoke with an unpretentious fondness of his ten-year-old son, who has lived with his mother since his wife died in a car crash three years ago. Suddenly I felt a rush of sympathy for someone whom I’d regarded as an annoyance five minutes ago.

When he had said his fill, Tiago lapsed into silence. Idly, he took out a balloon and fashioned a dog from it, which he gave to a wide-eyed five-year-old girl who had just come on board. Her mother looked on indulgently. Then he got up and juggled a few balls while the train moved ahead, blaming its low ceiling when one of them speared astray.

Whereas Cadiz is charming, Seville I find too prettified by half. Its authentic soul is to be found far from the tourist drawcards but it is worth questing after.

Flamenco is often likened to other folk music but it strikes me more as the authentic jazz of Spain, all the more so for its seemingly infinite adaptability to other musical styles and tastes, from bossa nova to hip hop. A pub barn called La Carbonéria hosts flamenco nights every night at eleven (free of charge, but that’s how they get the crowds in: beer sales pay the performers’ wages). Tonight I beat the crowd by arriving two hours early and securing a front-row seat — my own, of course. The house band,
Quadro Flamenco de
la Carbonéria
(Carbonéria Flamenco Quartet), are past masters at rousing an audience to fever pitch. Their star dancer, Anna Japon, has such attitude that by the end of the performance the crowd are clapping in time to her stamping feet and whistling her emphatic and virile movements. Her dancing provides the perfect counterpoint to the extraordinary tone of anguished passion and yearning in the voice of lead singer Juan Murube. After the show the flautist, Mauro Perego, who visited Australia in 2000, smiles broadly on learning that I hail from Melbourne. ‘I really enjoyed the shopping in Chapel Street!’ he enthuses.

1538-1546 km

Jésus, the desk manager at the
pensión
where I am staying in Seville, possesses the endearing mannerism of saying ‘Any problem’ when he means ‘No problem’.

‘Can I buy a Coke?’

‘Any problem,’ replies Jésus, reaching into the fridge.

I look at my head in the mirror and know this is time for a haircut; I look at my whereabouts on the map and know this is the place. Where else can I visit the barber of Seville without forking out mega-euro at the box office?

To my surprise, no one around town seems to have heard of a
peluqueiro
(loosely translated as a stroppy Spaniard) appropriating the opera’s title for his business. So any old barber shop will do, I decide. The first one I come to, La Caballero (The Horseman), is just opening its doors. On seeing this out-of-season tourist, Paco — a rake-thin barber of the old school — raises his eyebrows but, luckily, not his prices. Unlike Gibraltar’s governor, Paco doubtless has something to say — have you ever met a member of his profession who didn’t? — but, failing a language in common, all is silence save for the monotonous chirruping of blades. Until the moment Paco opens his mouth to sing, that is. Nothing operatic, sadly, just an itty-bitty ballad. But, as he brushes the last stray hairs from my collar, Paco gestures to the wall on my left — where I see some yellow clippings, not of hair but the newspaper kind. And the headline over the longest article says, you guessed it, El Barbro de Sevilla.

As Arantxa seats her tour group in the stands at Seville’s Plaza de Toros, I consult a written description of bullfighting ceremonial which I’ve been keeping since Arles in Provence:
The classic rules of the corrida [fight] are established. The paseo [parade] opens the show. The toreros parade in their spangled costumes, followed by the
banderilleros, picadors and the ‘mules’ — horses that will drag away the bull’s carcass.

There are compensations for those who cannot occupy a grandstand seat. On a signal from Arantxa, a gatekeeper admits me to the arena, thus affording me a bull’s-eye view of the world without the downside.

Up in the stand, Arantxa tells the crowd King Juan Carlos is a fight fan. He has been to this stadium, but not Reine Sofia. ‘The Queen doesn’t like bullfighting. She is Greek.’ As if that explains everything which, on reflection, it probably does.

The fight begins with the entrance of the animal, emerging from the toril [bullpen], where he has been kept in the shade, into the full sunlight of the arena. The torero waits with his cape, tries to calm the bull’s anger to master it and impose his own will. This is the phase of the passes.

I ask Arantxa, ‘What is your best argument against the critics who say bullfighting is cruel and barbaric?’ She gives me two. ‘Bullfighting will always be. It is part of the expression of men’s lust for death and violence.’ Her secondary argument boils down to this: a man has to eat. She quotes a famous bullfighter who once said, ‘It is more painful to feel the horn of hunger than the horn of a bull.’

The second phase begins when the picadors, with their lances, wound and provoke the beast.

‘You should know something about it before you criticise,’ Arantxa remonstrates. ‘Every movement [in the sport] is well designed.’

Next, the banderilleros come to stick their arts into the bull’s flesh to excite him and make him fight.

‘It’s not so easy to kill a bull. You have to pierce it at a part of the flesh between the third and fourth vertebrae. And you have to kill it through the heart. The connection is direct from the spine to the brain.’

The fight ends with the work of the muleta.
⁵¹
The toreador, muleta in hand, brings the animal to the point of exhaustion to finish him off by a death thrust.

‘It is an instant death. People believe that bulls are innocent animals, but they are not. They are wild animals and they will attack anything that moves.’ The death of a man in the arena is rare but in Olympic year 1992, with the eyes of the world on Spain, two
banderilleros
were gored to death within a month. One of those deaths still makes Arantxa quail. ‘It was quite awful,’ she confesses. ‘It was televised.’

I ask Jésus his opinion of Portugal and the Portuguese. ‘For them Spain is an important country; for us, Portugal is not so important,’ he tells me. ‘But the ones we see here, they are nice people. For us they are any problem.’

As the regional bus bears me back into Portugal, I am still trying to bring to mind the source and exact words of that poem about the land and the sea. But I reach my hostel room in Faro, the largest town on the Algarve, unable to recall it and unsure why it seems so insistently to matter.