1957 Chevrolet convertible
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
― Lao Tzu
― Lao Tzu
After passing the night in the hostel at Anglet, my new travelling companion and I were lucky enough, next day, to thumb down a lift with – would you believe it? – a Mexican fellow, wearing a white cowboy hat, behind the wheel of a 1957 Chevrolet convertible, an ideal vehicle from which to view the Pyrenees.
Unfortunately for us, he was not crossing the mountains, but dropped us off just short of the border. At the frontier, we exchanged our French francs for Spanish pesetas, and then the kilt did good service again, for within minutes a Bedford van passed by, swung off the road and stopped. Making a dash for it, we discovered a couple of girls settled in the front seats. The driver asked where we were headed, and when I said Madrid, we were invited to climb aboard, for that was their destination, too. I couldn't believe our luck!
Unfortunately for us, he was not crossing the mountains, but dropped us off just short of the border. At the frontier, we exchanged our French francs for Spanish pesetas, and then the kilt did good service again, for within minutes a Bedford van passed by, swung off the road and stopped. Making a dash for it, we discovered a couple of girls settled in the front seats. The driver asked where we were headed, and when I said Madrid, we were invited to climb aboard, for that was their destination, too. I couldn't believe our luck!
1960 Bedford Van
Our benefactors
turned out to be from New
Zealand England Britain
How exhilarating
it was to be streaming down an open, virtually deserted, road in, what for us
was an undiscovered country, with two girls for company! But our fun was abruptly cut off by some trouble with the van. A recurring irritation, Delwyn said. One of the gears
wouldn’t engage smoothly. With the van parked on the verge, I jumped out and investigated
underneath. I knew little about motor mechanics in those days, so that though
I located a linkage that moved when gears were changed, I saw no sign of an
obvious fault.
But the static van
soon attracted the attention of three policemen on motorbikes, who swerved off the
road and stopped. Dismounting, they strode over to the van in the sea-green
tunics and trousers and glazed black three-cornered hats and tall polished
boots of the Guardia Civil. None of
them knew any English, their words made clear, but they clearly took a ready
interest in conversing with the girls. I was later told that Spanish men
regarded foreign girls as ‘easy’, because they were so very independent
compared to the girls of General Franco’s Spain
On the road
again and peering through the rear door windows, I saw that two of our protectors were tailing
us, and, turning to the road in front, I saw the third streaking ahead. In
fact, this escort ushered us all the way to the next town, where the girls intended
to get professional help.
It really was
just a hamlet, where our affairs aroused considerable curiosity, as a crowd of about fifty spectators gathered around the van to gape while a local man tinkered with its gears. It was evening when the job was done, and the cops were long gone when we retired
to the town’s taverna, directed there by the owner himself.
The place was naked of patrons but harboured a store of vats and bottles and glasses and a makeshift
counter consisting of a sheet of wood propped on two wine barrels. Somehow,
I managed to convey to the tavernero
that I wanted to know the price of a glass of wine.
“Una peseta,” he
replied.
One peseta? Unbelievably cheap!
I nodded and watched him pour out a draught of the purple liquid while I fished in my pocket for a peseta and placed it on the counter. I took up the glass, but the peseta was ignored. A little later, when I returned for a refill, no peseta was requested and I offered none. I had learned something already about Spain: it was not as money mad as any of the other countries I had ever known. Quite a crowd of villagers was now gathering in the place, and though, in toto, a gallon or two of wine must have been drunk that night, no money changed hands.
I nodded and watched him pour out a draught of the purple liquid while I fished in my pocket for a peseta and placed it on the counter. I took up the glass, but the peseta was ignored. A little later, when I returned for a refill, no peseta was requested and I offered none. I had learned something already about Spain: it was not as money mad as any of the other countries I had ever known. Quite a crowd of villagers was now gathering in the place, and though, in toto, a gallon or two of wine must have been drunk that night, no money changed hands.
As I was unused
to guzzling glasses of wine, I got extravagantly smashed as the night swept by,
so that only a single incident of it remains in my memory. Naturally, I needed to relieve myself after a time, but in plunging through the doorway to find the khazi outside, I tripped ridiculously on the threshold and fell flat
on my face to the ground. After meditating momentarily about how I had done such a stupid thing, I rolled over onto my back, where my eyes were instantly mesmerised by a vast panorama
of sparkling stars.
Stars! How
wonderful! I mused, lying half in and half out of the taverna, and… well… wasn’t
all of this so novel! Here was I, a common Manitoba
I was in Spain
Spain!!
And I had come
here all on my own! … Well, not all on my own maybe… I’d come part of the way
with McClain… I wonder where he got to anyway… and I'd come another part of the way with Roland… A
much nicer fellow, Roland… Yeah…
And now… Now here
we were in this taverna… Well, I was half in it anyway… with these two New Zealand
Anthea… Those dark
eyes of hers drew you.
Yeah… They did…
Oh, how I’d like to put
my arms around her and…
“Colin! What are
you doing down there?” a voice demanded.
The question
ended my pleasant reverie. It was Roland. I would have to frame some kind of
reply.
“I wos goin’ to
the to’let an’ I fell…”
“But why don’t
you get up?”
“I don’ wanna.”
“Just a moment,”
he said, I’ll go get some water.”
All quiet again...
Yeah… That
Anthea… I wonder if she likes me… I like her… I really like her… I really,
really do…
Suddenly something
cold and wet drenched my face.
“I couldn’t find
any water,” Roland opined. “That was lemonade.”
A handkerchief now came floating down beside my face, and then he helped me to my feet.
I managed my
intended business without further mishap, and returned to the taverna to drink
more wine, until… a dark curtain fell…
-----------------------------
-----------------------------
Opening my eyes next
morning, I was surprised to find myself regarding the sky again, now pink with
the break of a new day. Twisting sideways in my sleeping bag, I noted Roland rolled
close by in his. We were stretched in a vacant field beside a stone wall. I did not
feel like moving, but I had to stir myself for the reason that anyone must do who
has spent the previous evening getting legless on alcohol.
I wriggled out
of my sleeping bag and got to my feet and staggered up to a stone wall and stopped, steadying
myself against it to tinkle. The van was parked in the stillness of the field across the wall, its windows screened with closed curtains patterned with flower designs.
Wisps of tissue paper adorned the ground about the van like white blossoms. I
confess that the picture conjured up of Anthea squatting in the darkness of this field
dented to some extent the romantic image I had been painting of her, but not enough to extinguish my interest.
Back in my bag, I
dropped off to sleep again and rose later with Roland when the sun was
well up and the girls were stirring. What had happened at the end of the
evening? I was curious to know. My Scottish friend said that the tavernero had simply named a figure of
some two or three hundred pesetas. Roland had offered something less, perhaps
half, and that had been accepted. I gave him half of what he had paid and
though it seems the pair of us had furnished wine for the whole of the
taverna’s clientele, we were well content.
I don’t know
what time it was when we got on the road again, but by evening we’d reached Vitoria Madrid
Jumping out at
the foot of an immense wall that might have figured in a film featuring the
Foreign Legion, we approached a prodigious gate where a matched pair of soldiers with shouldered
rifles stood stiffly in the slanting sunlight, one to either side of the gate. But
when we attempted to enter, both blocked our path with weapons crossed. We
tried to make them understand we only wanted directions, but our ignorance of
the Spanish language made that a lost cause, and straight away we were herded through
the gate and into a gloomy office where a cross-belted moustachioed officer sat
behind a desk on a dais overlooked by a giant portrait of General Franco on the
wall behind.
As this grandee demanded to see our passports, we handed them over. These, he examined meticulously
in the light of a table lamp, returned them to us and then motioned to the waiting
soldier to return us to the outside world − without the information we had come
for. We had been extremely naïve. I don’t suppose the army of Franco’s Spain
But we did find
the hostel, and when we entered its dormitory, a fellow perched on the
edge of a lower bunk looked up. It was McClain.
“I see you’ve
brought the Jocks,” he said. And not a lot else. He avoided talk of our split and
was silent on the topic of his activities since. And he was still on his own.
The next day, the
Bedford Madrid
The city didn’t impress me. It was big, modern and hot − very hot. Thus I cashed a travellers cheque at a bank and passed the night at the youth hostile in the Casa de Campo, the largest park in Madrid, in advance of tramping the road again, this time for Lisbon. McClain, I knew, would be headed that way too.
Youth Hostel, Casa de Campo, Madrid
Casa de Campo, Madrid (modern photo)
I was baffled at
the lack of traffic along an artery linking two capital cities. In those days,
you could stare at an empty stretch of tarmac for twenty minutes or more before
a car came by. As a consequence, I fell upon a doctor doing his rounds. I waited
in his car while he made a visit to a patient, and when he returned, we drove
on to the next patient in the next village. When he finished his duties, my
lift was finished too.
I plodded a long
way under my weighty pack that day, and when I drenched my head under a water spout
somewhere in the declining sun, I marvelled at my stamina, for two years of
bakery work and paint scraping had not done much to sustain it. I was awakening
now to an invigorating faith in my native powers and a profound feeling of
freedom, of the prospect of new worlds opening on the path that I had chosen.
A week had now gone by since my break with McClain in Paris, but I didn’t miss him any more. Solitude no longer held any dread for me. I was beginning to embrace it. With such uplifting thoughts, I trudged through the dusty streets of Truyillo in lonely and remote Extremadura, clambered over a stone wall and bedded down for the night under a great spreading tree in a field just outside of town, pink with the dusk of the declining day.
Trujillo
I opened my eyes
next morning to the site of several bulls twitching their tails in the field where
I lay! I might mention now that my sleeping bag was a cheap nylon one without a
zip and tapered, so that once inside I was warm enough, but as helpless as a larva
in a cocoon. With exquisite care, then, I wormed my way out of the bag and crept
behind the trunk of the tree that had served me as shelter for the night. I watched
these fearful creatures until I was certain they could not gallop towards me
and gore me with their horns before I’d made my escape. Then, encumbered with
my rucksack, I made a dash for the wall and clambered over it to the safety
of the roadway.
Extremadura
This was the
country of the Conquistadors, a hard, scrubby, unforgiving country, forgotten
by the modern world. As I resumed my solitary way, I encountered a woman riding
to town on a donkey slung with two bulging panniers stuffed with green stems. She
was swaddled in a black garment and rocked from side to side under a big black
mushroom-shaped umbrella.
Motor vehicles
were something of a rarity in this region of Spain Bedford New
Zealand
They did. Soon, I
had resumed my former seat beside the open slide-door in rackety chatter with
these two friendly females, while the wild and lonely landscape of Extremadura
swept by. Once I saw a woman, clad all in black, kneeling on a blanket in a
field. She was winnowing wheat by tossing fragments of grain into the wind. God,
what unforgettable spectacles had come my way! And God, thank-you for granting me another crack at Anthea!
But a second surprise was in store. A fellow with a pack on his back was trudging up the
roadside ahead and as we passed him by, I viewed through the rear door window a
marching figure featuring the pained face of McClain.
“Hey, I know him!” I said.
Well, I couldn’t
just ignore him, could I? Within minutes, my first travelling companion had
taken Roland’s place and – presto! An awkward trio had been transformed into a
very pairable quartet. It was now my fervent hope that McClain would entertain Delwyn
while I enchanted Anthea.
Later in the day
we came to a village where the street was lined with trees hung with a
flame-coloured fruit, ripe and full: oranges! None of us had ever tasted
oranges as fresh as these. Who owned them? we wondered aloud. Anyway, what harm
would it do to take a few? There were plenty of them. When the van was brought
to a halt under one of the tempting trees, McClain and I clambered on top, but as we
parted the dark green leaves to reach the dimpled fruit, I spied a black-clad
figure some hundred yards up the road, hobbling along a footpath with a walking-stick.
When the old woman saw what we were about, she raised her cane to the sky and hobbled
faster forward like an Arab with a sword.
At the advent of this attacking granny, we promptly forgot the fruit, descended swiftly from our perch and made a getaway.
We left Spain Portugal Badajoz
Evora
By evening
we had reached Evora, where the four of us entered a taverna and fell in with an affluent middle-aged man who bought us all drinks. Now the more my insides warmed with
wine, the more my passion was inflamed for Anthea. Her hazel eyes, her satin skin
and her small, doll-like body drew me more and more into her orbit. But I
scanned her face in vain for the merest flicker of an interest returning mine. Alas,
I’d not yet learned to be a thing of
interest to a female. I was twenty-two years old now, but still more of a lad than
a man.
When we stumbled
out under the stars in the early morning, our Portuguese patron prevailed upon
us to follow him home. And what a hacienda that was, we saw, when we filed
through its entrance. Grandiose, it was, with marble floors, white walls, blonde
wood trimming and a central stairway ascending to a mezzanine floor with rooms off.
As we surveyed the place, a woman in her twenties suddenly materialised aloft
in a dressing gown. Her hair was thick and black and long and tousled, and her
features were of classic Spanish perfection. She strode along the balcony and
descended halfway down the stairs, shrieking a stream of abuse at our host. As
he took not the least notice of this verbal thrashing, the apparition
ascended the stairs again and vanished.
The rest of that
night is mostly lost in the mists of memory, but there remains a confused
recollection of a tête-à-tête I engaged in with McClain in the kitchen, where,
finding ourselves famished, I succumbed to his insistence that we abstract a
couple of morsels from the fridge and pacify our famishment.
A drowsy dawn was awakening in the sky when we trailed outside to say good-bye. The master of the house now shook
hands with we two lads, and then just fell upon Delwyn to plant a massive smacker
on her lips. Next he swept Anthea into his grasp, bending her backwards to extract
a long, lingering, eviscerating kind of kiss, a kiss that maddened me to see. Outraged,
I stepped between them and shoved him away.
“You bastard!” I shouted.
He just levelled an uncomprehending glare at me as though he thought I wasn’t quite right in the head, and then we four travellers climbed into the van and headed back to town.
I probably
wasn’t quite right in the head. At the time, I deemed I’d rescued an innocent
maid from the clutches of an inveterate rake. But in time I was inclined to conclude she'd rather fancied them, and that my fury had its source in the fact that he’d
enacted in very deed the desire that distracted my mind.
Now the confusing
path to Anthea’s affections took another turn, when the girls determined to
pass the day at a local swimming pool, while McClain chose to repeat his Paris Lisbon
Was I, hell! I
was very tired at this point. Lying beside a pool would be a great way to snooze
the day away. – Mmmm… Anthea in a
swimsuit, eh?
So I split again with my initial travelling companion, but how different the conditions this time! This time, his departure would mean no lonely exile in a strange city. I could scorn it − except that I
imagined his continued presence might have proved useful in engaging Delwyn while I ventured to get friendly with Anthea.
Why was he leaving, anyway? What was wrong with Delwyn? She was
wonderfully tall – though that might have bothered him. So what if she lacked a
face to launch a thousand ships. Though plain in appearance, she was lively and
pleasant in manner. Anyway, he was far from being a Prince Charming. In Paris
I might have
gone for Delwyn myself, if Anthea hadn’t been a brighter pearl. Probably most of
my talk was with the taller one anyway, as the smaller one was more aloof.
Sometimes I wondered why I didn’t switch my romantic fancies from the one to the
other, for I felt they would be pleasantly received. But when Anthea slowly
turned her dazzling eyes upon me, I was deprived of the power to choose.
It was really a foolish
fantasy to expect any romantic move from McClain, for I came to realise later
that, where girls were concerned, he was even more backward than me!
So good-bye, McClain.
Go on. Go to Lisbon New Zealand
Later that
morning, I came out of a swimming-pool changing room in my trunks and picked
a place on the sunny poolside grass to sit down on my towel and wait for my
female friends. They came out in bikinis and sat down on towels to my left,
Anthea nearest. Was that an accident, or was she signing that she was ‘with
me’? She rubbed some suntan oil into her smooth skin – while I tried not to
look too much – and then the girls stretched themselves out to soak up some
sun. I had never ever been a sun-lover. Few Canadians were. Hot sun had
sometimes made me feel sick. But now, with nothing else to do, and tired as I
was, I stretched out beside Anthea and drifted off to dreamland.
When I awoke, it
was to find that seven hours had passed! My body burned with fire from head to
foot and my insides were soon billowing with nausea. Then, as is usual in these
cases, I began to shiver. Alarmed, the girls went off for help, and returned moments
later with four athletic local males who seized me by the arms and legs and
just shot off with my torso slung among them like the carcass of a beast selected for sacrifice. This savage handling of my injured skin was dreadfully
painful, causing me to scream blue abuse into my tormentors’ uncomprehending
ears. But it was as nothing compared to the refined torture of the ‘treatment’ they administered when they’d borne me through a door and slung me on a bench.
Each of these trained apes grasped a baked limb with one hand and began to rasp back and forth along its length with the fingers of the other, as my screams of rage and pain rang in the room all unheeded, while the girls looked on in helpless silence. Just what sort of medieval remedy or ritual was being practiced here, I never learned, but eventually, to my profound relief, my torturers abandoned this mad practice and vanished.
Each of these trained apes grasped a baked limb with one hand and began to rasp back and forth along its length with the fingers of the other, as my screams of rage and pain rang in the room all unheeded, while the girls looked on in helpless silence. Just what sort of medieval remedy or ritual was being practiced here, I never learned, but eventually, to my profound relief, my torturers abandoned this mad practice and vanished.
My griddled skin
shrank from the touch of my clothing as, with infinite caution, I got dressed again in the changing room. But I
was not able to force my swollen feet into my shoes. Thus I gathered them up,
along with my pack and shuffled out the door. Shambling to the van, I haltingly deposited my belongings in the back and climbed carefully inside, where the girls were waiting. In maternal concern they took me into town now,
where they bought for me a bottle of medicine, and then they parked the van in
a field on the outskirts of the town to prepare themselves for sleep.
Nor did they cease
their ministrations then. No open field for me now. I was invited inside the
van to sleep with them. When they’d prepared themselves for the night, a door
opened and I got in. Two female forms reclined, partly in and partly out of sleeping
bags, with arms lying bare and shoulders veiled in the folds of lacy
nightdresses. Delwyn was oriented head toward the passenger seat, while Anthea
had arranged herself reversed beside her friend. I stretched out in the vacant
space, head to head with her I hungered for.
Well, I was
feeling sick that night - very sick - but here was the girl who had dominated my
desire for the last four days, lying right beside me in a nightdress. I’d have
tossed my illness to the winds if she’d given me a single hint of any fondness
for me. But she didn’t. She went straight to sleep. Or seemed to.
Anthea… lovely
Anthea… wake up... look at me… touch me… Give me a sign that you feel about me
as I do about you.
She was as still
and silent as a figurine. At length I curled my arm around her dormant form,
but still she stirred not. After a long time I fell asleep, but more than once I
awoke in the night to the same conflict between sickness and passion, and cuddled
her motionless form more closely to mine.
Foolish lad!
You were looking for a sign? At the pool, she came and sat next to you, interposing her body between you and Delwyn, didn’t she? Was that not a sign? In the van she laid out her bed in reverse to Delwyn’s, leaving a space for you beside her. Was that not a sign? In the night, when you cuddled her, she never pushed you away. Wasn’t that a sign too? What did you want her to do? Fetch a megaphone? Or did you wish her to shoot you a harlot stare as Brenda had done at the drive-in movie? You missed that chance, and you missed this one too! Life, adventure, love – they were here all right. Maybe McClain had spurned them, but you, you fool, with your longing to embrace them, let them slip right through your fingers!
So
declares the prosecution.
What says the defence?
The defence pleads mitigating circumstances grounded in a fundamental fear of women emanating from the defendant's long experience of a mother who never ever showed any affection for him and who once beat him in a rage and a grandmother who had recently cast him out of her house onto the street.
It took years to dislodge the belief that women were creatures to be feared.
The very next
day, my rollicking, romantic adventure across two countries rolled to a close,
when the girls set me down at my declared destination, almost as far west in
Europe as you can get, at a place called Catalazete, some fifteen kilometres beyond
Lisbon. Then I was saying good-bye to them once more, this time forever. When
their van vanished down the road, I lifted my pack and passed barefoot through
the portal of a hostel sited right on the edge of the broad estuary of the River
Tagus.
Youth Hostel at
Catalazete: It’s still there!
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