The Drifters (55 page)

I grabbed Gretchen’s arm and asked, ‘What happened?’ and she said, ‘That damned Susan Eltregon. Saw a chance to get her hooks into Monica. Fed her some LSD. Laura and her gang have been using it.’

‘Joe has Monica in tow,’ I said.

Yigal now led us through the alleys to the big plaza at the post office, and there Joe stood, with a nearly naked Monica locked in his arms.

When Gretchen reached them she asked, ‘What did you do with the car?’ They were clearly unable to answer coherently, so she told me, ‘They undressed in the living room at Laura’s and ran onto the beach. Laura’s gang thought it very funny, but first thing you know, they had climbed into the pop-top and were roaring off toward town. I yelled at them to stop, but Laura said, “What can happen?” and I said, “They can get killed!” and she said, “The car’s insured, isn’t it?” I suppose it’s cracked up against a telephone pole somewhere.’

We found the car in an unlikely place. Cato had driven it into the lobby at the Northern Lights, where the Swedish manager was holding the key. Slowly we collected the group, but when we got everyone back to the car and Gretchen had paid for the damage to the hotel, Monica and Cato were still unaware of what had happened or of the condition they were in.

‘It’s so magnificent!’ Monica assured me. ‘You see colors … so brilliant … they embrace the world.’ She
collapsed into unconsciousness, and I asked with some apprehension, ‘What should we do?’ and Joe, who had handled LSD cases at the bar, said, ‘Put her to bed.’

We did so, and I asked Gretchen, ‘Why did Miss Eltregon give them LSD?’ and Gretchen said, ‘She knew that Monica was taking something. She felt that if she encouraged her she might get a leverage to make Cato join the Haymakers.’

After we had tucked the pair into bed we sat in the apartment, discussing how near they had come to being arrested, and Gretchen said, ‘Before we go to Italy, I think we ought to find some quiet place away from pot and LSD and sort of unwind.’ She looked at me as if I would know such a place, and the thought occurred that they would enjoy what I had always considered the gentlest, loveliest part of Europe, that remote and undiscovered southern end of Portugal called Algarve.

When I told them of the sweeping beaches, the almond-covered hills and the small forgotten towns with Crusader castles—and especially when I mentioned the cheapest prices in Europe—their eyes widened and they agreed that this was what they were looking for. ‘Algarve,’ I told them as dawn began to break, ‘is a more beautiful Torremolinos, two hundred years ago,’ and they decided to head for it.

At eight in the morning, when Monica and Cato had recovered from the effects of the LSD, the six young people piled into the yellow pop-top. Joe was at the wheel, for he was now the official chauffeur, and the others were tucked away in various imaginative positions. The regular bunks that came with the car were stowed, while the improvised ones were secured to the ceiling by ropes and pulleys. Considering all the gear—the books, the cans of Spanish food, the bottles of wine—I doubt that even a pussycat could have jammed into that vehicle. Joe sounded the horn. Gretchen leaned out to shout goodbye to the neighbors who had been so kind to her, and old women stood in their doorways to wave farewell.

At the top of the hill a policeman halted the pop-top, checked to see that Joe and his Jesus beard were leaving town, and waved the car on its way.

A Spaniard is a Portuguese with brains; a Portuguese is a Spaniard with character.

There isn’t very much in Spain, or Portugal either, to get excited about if you’ve already seen Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.

Nature is seldom wrong, custom always.—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

If I did not have a mirror, nor a memory, I would think I was fifteen years old.—Jane Digby, at age 44, when

about to marry an Arab sheik

The best way to change society is to replace it one man at a time.

Children are amused by games; the lower classes diverted by bullfights; gentlemen are entertained by noble discourse.

I think society must protect the right of the university professor to free speech, but when someone comes up with the theory that condemns a whole race of people—and it’s just a theory with no proof—then I think the professor should not be allowed to wrap himself in the robes of academic freedom. He ought to be dragged right down into the marketplace, and if his theory is wrong he
should have his teeth kicked in. Of course, I’m referring to Dr. Shillington’s thesis that Italians are inherently defective in moral codes and intuitively mafiosi.

Never refuse him anything he asks. Observe a certain amount of reserve and delicacy before him. Keep up the honeymoon romance whether at home or in the desert. At the same time do not make prudish bothers, which only disgust and are not true modesty. Never permit anyone to speak disrespectfully of him before you, and if anyone does, no matter how difficult, leave the room. Never permit anyone to tell you anything about him, especially of his conduct with regard to other women. Always keep his heart up when he has made a failure.—Isabel Arundel’s memorandum to herself on the eve of her marriage to Richard Burton.

Hieronymus Bosch is a fink. He paints the Establishment that is to be.

A bachelor is a man who comes to work from a different direction every day.

My mother always told me: ‘Son, you can’t buy happiness!’
She never told me I couldn’t rent it.

Be considerate. Look at it from her point of view. No man can be considered really old who has $500,000,000.

People who live in grass houses shouldn’t get stoned.

The trip from Spain to Portugal would exert a critical influence on two of the travelers.

Joe, at the wheel of the pop-top, saw for the first time the desecration that Spain had promoted along that stretch of shoreline reaching westward from Málaga to Gibraltar. As he picked his way through the traffic that jammed it, he was forced to look at what had happened to the small towns which had made this one of the most pleasant roads in Europe.

From Torremolinos to Fuengirola a concrete forest had grown up, a plethora of high-rise apartments crowding the waterfront, a jungle of shacks and hot-dog stands inland where the money was being made. What little open land he did see was being converted into golf courses.

And it was ugly, ugly beyond the operation of chance. It looked as if Spain had invited to its southeast corner a convocation of the world’s worst architects and given them a commission: ‘Transform this beach into an apogee of ugliness.’ Prize money would have to be divided, for if the German architects created monstrosities, the Spaniards did worse. It was ironic—builders who had lived in Stockholm all their lives, seeing the beauty which northern architects had devised, moved into Fuengirola and erected slums, devoid of beauty or congeniality.

‘Pretty grim,’ Joe said as they drove toward Marbella and saw the beehive hotels under construction; these were American and had been lifted from downtown Los Angeles—the poorer section, that is.

What depressed him was that the open plazas, which had once made these towns attractive, giving them a sense of occupation by fishermen who worked for a living, were being filled in by concrete: stores, junk shops, apartment houses that could never be appealing. The rhythm of life
that had once characterized the sea front had been destroyed beyond recall.

‘Where’s Spain?’ Joe asked with some dismay as he stared at the ugly apartments sprouting on the once-empty road from Marbella to Estepona, and with this question he put his finger on the worst feature of this desecration: the buildings which destroyed the landscape were being erected not for Spaniards but for Belgians and Germans and Swedes, who in their native cities built good-looking homes. When the concrete strip was completed, it would be populated not by Spaniards who sought the sea but by wealthy northerners who would use the area only as their playground. Few families would be raised in this ugliness and those that were would not speak Spanish.

‘Looks to me like a sell-out,’ Joe said, pushing the pop-top toward Gibraltar, and as he drove, his mind conjured up pieces of landscape he remembered from his trip across America, and he began to formulate an attitude toward the uses to which the earth should be put. As yet he had no substantial understanding of how things ought to be, but in the swirling snowstorm that had smothered him at the crossroads in Wyoming he had seen emergent patterns of land left open, structures that conformed to such land as was used, a fertile symbiosis between necessity and beauty, and above all an obligation to help people move and concentrate intelligently.

He said to Gretchen, riding beside him, ‘If a relatively few Europeans … wrecking this region, I mean … well, if they can ruin a whole area.’ He paused, attended to his driving, then concluded, ‘Imagine what we’ll be able to ruin in America when we really put our mind to it.’

It was a gloomy thought and he found no solace in Gretchen’s suggestion: ‘Maybe by then the world will have more sense.’ He shook his head and told her, ‘Don’t you believe it.’

He stayed depressed all the way to the approaches to Gibraltar. His passengers would have enjoyed visiting the Rock, but some nonsense between the Spanish and British governments prevented this, so they parked at the barrier which halted traffic and climbed out to view the impressive bastion, lying only a few hundred yards away.

‘Why can’t we see it?’ Cato asked.

‘Governments,’ Monica said ‘Any time you meet something
totally stupid, the answer has got to be “governments.” ’

‘Whose?’ Cato asked.

‘Mine,’ Monica snapped. ‘One good thing you can say about the British. They’re impartial. If they screw up Vwarda and Gibraltar, they also screw up Wales and Ireland.’

In some irritation they returned to the car and started the long drive up the coast to Cádiz. In some ways it was even more mournful, for this road left the areas occupied by the Germans and Swedes to traverse purely Spanish operations, and the difference was conspicuous, because in the stretch just completed, the northerners had created ugliness backed up by adequate funds, and there was in the tall buildings such as the ones the Greeks had built at Torremolinos a certain professionalism, but on the far side of Gibraltar, foreign money had not yet penetrated, and Spanish entrepreneurs were attempting garish projects without adequate resources.

‘Instant slums,’ Joe said bitterly as he inspected one collection of miserable buildings after another.

Yigal, remembering the good things in Grosse Pointe and Haifa, said, ‘Looks as if every time a Spanish architect gets near the ocean he goes crazy.’

‘Isn’t this still the Mediterranean?’ Cato asked.

‘Atlantic,’ Yigal said. He was always amazed that Americans, who presumed to rule the world, knew so little about it.

‘You’d think,’ Joe said despondently, ‘that somebody would blow a whistle and shout, “If you have to do it, let’s do it right.” ’

‘Who’d listen?’ Monica asked, and for the rest of that day’s trip none of the passengers spoke of Spain’s despoliation of her natural beauty.

But Joe, who had it constantly before him as he drove, became involved in trying to differentiate between the good and the bad, and the latter was so preponderant that when he did spot some construction that bespoke human beings solving human problems, he remembered it with affection.

That night, as they pulled up beside the great and muddy Guadalquivir to convert the pop-top into a dormitory, he said to Yigal, ‘Do they do things as badly
as this in Israel?’ and the Jew said, ‘We have so little land, we have to respect it.’

For a long time—as insects buzzed about the screens, retreating when Monica sprayed them with a buzz-bomb, shouting, ‘Back, you black little bastards!’ at which Cato growled, ‘Watch out what you sayin’, girl!’—Joe reflected on what Yigal had said. When you have a little land, you have to treasure it. But the fact was, as Joe saw clearly for the first time, everyone has only a little land and no one is caring for it.

He could not sleep, so he left the pop-top to walk beside the river, and after a while Gretchen joined him and they talked of Spain and the desolation he had seen that day, and she said, ‘In college we had several lectures on Spanish history, and the point was made that Spain had a tradition of ruining her land … something about sheep and contempt for agriculture. A heritage from the Moors, I seem to recall. Upland Spain was ruined four hundred years ago. Now the wreckers are moving to the seacoast.’

‘Aren’t we doing the same … in America, I mean?’

‘As Monica says, “If a government can make mistakes, it will.” ’

‘But we have an opposite tradition,’ Joe said. He remembered how his hometown had agitated to get forest land put into the national reserve. The leaders of the community had flown to Washington. Then he said, wryly, ‘While we were fighting on our side of the forest to save it, on the other side ranchers were fighting to destroy it.’

‘In Spain the ranchers win,’ she said.

Next morning they drove to Sevilla to see that stark cathedral. They camped that night in a vineyard, after which they drove slowly to La Rábida to see the beach from which Columbus had set forth to discover America. To the surprise of the others, it was Britta who seemed most deeply affected; she lingered on the beach, staring westward. At dawn next morning Joe drove the pop-top to the bank of the Río Guadiana, which separates Spain from Portugal, and the girls held their breath as he inched the car onto a ramshackle ferry that had seemed about to sink even when empty.
‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’
Monica intoned as she boarded the frail thing.