My Stamp Collection

Foreigners who stayed in Spain for any length of time were required to leave the country every six months and re-enter, acquiring an entry stamp on their passport at that time. We had spent some time in England in the summer of 1975 and Joanne had spent the previous Christmas in Morocco. I, however, needed to add a stamp to my collection.

A passenger ferry regularly connected Málaga and Genoa. However, a second option presented herself in the form of our neighbor, Claude deBretteville. Claude led tour groups for one of the largest tourist companies in Europe. She regularly took groups to Morocco and offered me the opportunity to tag along. I leaped on the opportunity. Morocco would cost far less than Genoa and would be a lot more fun in the company of someone I knew who could explain things to me.

Claude was a striking looking woman, around six feet tall with raven black hair and the brown complexion of a pied noir, a French-Algerian. But she was Danish. She attributed her appearance to a Gypsy not too many generations back, but some of her tour clients insisted that she must be American Indian. She spoke Danish, of course, because she was born in Denmark. But she married a Norwegian and carried a Norwegian passport. She spoke English and Spanish idiomatically, and Arabic as well. However, she claimed that her best language was French.

I looked forward to the trip because Claude possessed one of the most equable natures I had ever met. A month or so earlier she had come home from a trip to somewhere or other when she found our son, Eric, and jumping up and down on her car while her two sons, Suki and Mino, watched. She screamed at them and they scampered off.

She soon came to our house, not to complain about our son’s behavior but to apologize for screaming at him. Once I understood the situation I told her that she shouldn’t have screamed at him: she should have thrown a rock.

But just because she didn’t throw rocks at my son didn’t mean I wouldn’t go to Morocco with her.

On this trip Claude was conducting a group of Norwegian salesmen to Morocco. They worked for Philips Electronics and had won some sort of sales contest, a week on the Costa del Sol, courtesy of their company. We picked them up at their ocean front hotel at 8:00 o’clock in the morning. There they were, a dozen of them, ready, willing, and drinking brandy.

We motored down the Málaga-Cadiz highway on our way to Algeciras (ahl.hay.SEE.rus) where we caught the ferry to Ceuta (say.YOU.tuh). We had to stop halfway there for a brandy break, but eventually boarded the ferry. The salesmen disappeared in search of a bar. During this interlude Claude told me what I might expect to find in Morocco.

Joanne had spent the previous Christmas there and she advised me that if I bought from a street vendor to never take the first offered price but to make a 10% counter offer. This would give both of us plenty of wiggle room. Claude thought that was an entirely reasonable approach since street prices were notoriously elevated.

We had lunch in Ceuta with Moroccan red wine. Surprisingly, it was not all that bad. Perfectly acceptable at a formal dinner with hot dogs and sauerkraut.

After lunch a street vendor soon offered me a wallet, hand tooled, made of genuine camel leather, for only 1000 pesetas, about $20.00 U.S. Remembering Joanne’s advice in time, I smelled the wallet as carefully as a dog on a fire hydrant. Camel leather, if not properly cured and tanned, will smell like a camel, a smell only another camel could love. And it will smell that way forever. Leaving the wallet out in the weather or perfuming it with sheep dip does no good. It just enhances the camel smell. And if the wallet gets wet, it smells like three camels.

I sniffed and snurffed. Nope. No camel smell. So I made my counter offer. “I’ll give you a hundred.”

“Pesetas?” he asked.

“No. Diram.”

“No way. This wallet cost me more than that.”

We discussed the matter further and he came down to 800 pesetas, but I bargained from a position of strength. I didn’t want his stupid wallet. I already had a perfectly good wallet, one that wasn’t even coming apart at the seams. I walked away and, as I walked, the price of the wallet came down and down rapidly until it reached one I could live with. I believe I paid 100 pesetas, about $2.00 U.S.. Friend Claude said that was about right.

I’m not really sure where we were in Morocco after lunch. I believe it was Tétouan (TEH.twahn), far enough inland so the Norwegian salesmen couldn’t see the ocean. We weren’t in anything as formal as a soukh (sook), but more like a field with lots of people selling things. Including snake oil.

I kid you not, this Arab type gentleman stood with a 3-foot boa constrictor draped over his shoulders. He had a few cans of salve on hand and I could hear him chanting, “You say you’re not convinced, you say you’re not satisfied, you say you want more. Tell you what I’m gonna do.” But in Arabic. Probably a dozen men surrounded him, paying him undivided attention. Probably most of them were shills.

His presentation would have gone well if his boa hadn’t peed on him. Perhaps snake oil is good for stiff, arthritic joints. But snake pee?

I moved on to Omar’s Camel Rides. Joanne rode a camel the previous Christmas and had her picture taken. I could do no less.

I’ve always been fascinated by camels, liked watching them at the zoo, admired the way their feet spread out so they can walk on sand. Omar brought me a camel, a creature of such gentle refinement that they had to use ten yards of jute to muzzle him. In the picture I have, neither one of us looks very happy.

But all good tours must come to an end and as the sun slowly sank in the west our Norwegians drank their way back to Algecires. Aboard the bus they passed the brandy bottles back and forth with the dexterity of professional jugglers. A Norwegian setting next to me explained that they don’t drink that way all the time. In fact, in Norway liquor costs so much they hardly drink at all. So when they get to a place like Spain where “plonk” is cheap and abundant, they do a year’s drinking all at once.

And Spain is certainly a place of cheap booze. Claude later informed me that Scandinavian countries have alcohol tours to Spain. Tourists start drinking when they get on the charter plane and don’t stop until they’re poured off a week later, safe and cirrhotic, back where they started from.

I got my stamp for my collection and I learned something on that trip. I learned that I didn’t ever want to be a tour guide, herding a bunch of drunks through customs and trying to not lose any of them.

Mierde Suave

One day a major sewer backup occurred on one of the streets leading into Torremolinos. The resultant spill covered the roadway with effluent. But Spanish drivers are bold souls and were not to be deterred by a slippery roadway. They splashed through anyway, covering the sidewalks and buildings with a rich, aromatic and colorful spray.

Finally, one store owner could stand it no longer. He posted a large sign in front of his shop for the motorists to read and heed. Despacio. Mierde Suave.

I shouldn’t have to translate beyond despacio means “slow” and suave means “soft.” When I left Spain “Despacio, mierde suave” became one of my favorite expressions. It's a motto to live by.

Joanne at the Post Office

Freelance writing in Spain had both advantages and disadvantages. It was easy to get my query letters read. The envelopes would arrive in an editorial office adorned, festooned even, with Spanish postage stamps. These envelopes always got opened and the contents read.

Mailing manuscripts was another story. For me, at least, a mailed manuscript meant a trip downtown to the post office, walking of course since there was never a place to park, and they never had stamps in the exact denomination I needed. Also, a Spaniard has a built in aversion to standing in line for anything. Instead a post office crowd consists of many unruly people, a seething cluster, a scrum, as each person tries to be served first. It’s fun to watch, but not to participate in.

On this particular overcast day, gray with precipitation, a cross between a fog and a drizzle, Joanne was taking a manuscript to the post office for me, and then going to pick up something at the office of Lookout, the English language magazine for the Costa del Sol. She made her way to the window and the clerk calculated the postage. Joanne always likes to pay to the last penny, pence, centavo, sous, dirham, whatever, so she fished out a handful of coins and began to carefully count them into the clerk’s outstretched hand. She was very pleased to have the exact change and pressed the last coin into his hand in triumph. Then she thought to herself, “Oh, oh, that was suggestive.” In Spain, everything a female does is suggestive.

“Oh, well,” she thought, and then left the post office for home. Several minutes into her journey she remembered the Lookout mission. With a mental, “Oh, darn,” she wheeled and found herself face to face with a little man who looked vaguely familiar. The little man was not short by Spanish standards, but he was several inches shy of Joanne’s six feet. He smiled shyly as she walked by him on her way to the magazine.

But halfway there she realized it was too wet. She had no car with her and it was beginning to rain. She wheeled again to go home after all, and there stood the same little man, same shy smile. Just a little wetter.

Joanne brushed by him again and returned home. It wasn’t until after she got home and was telling me the story that she realized that the little man was the post office clerk. Apparently Joanne’s pressing the coin into his hand drove him mad with passion and he just closed up his window and followed her out the door.

Such behavior would be bizarre here, but perfectly understandable in Spain.

House Warming

Our house had rubble walls covered with stucco and a clay tile roof. This is standard Spanish construction. For all I know, it may be standard European construction. The house didn’t even have a mud sill or any sign of a vapor barrier anywhere. As a result, during the winter months when it was cold and rainy, the house walls wicked up moisture the same way that a cloth strip wicks up kerosene in a lamp. It got colder than a teacher’s wit in our house.

Our only source of heat was a fireplace and we used it a lot. Most people who had fire places bought their firewood. The favored fuel was olive, dense, oily, wonderfully scented, expensive olive wood. We never felt good about burning olive wood. The expense bothered us a little bit, but the knowledge that we might be burning wood from a tree that was planted before Jesus was born bothered us a lot. We decided that we would burn trash wood that we could find in our neighborhood.

The neighbors thought we were crazy, but we persisted and over a year-and-a-half period we cleaned up our entire neighborhood. We couldn’t find a stick of junk wood anywhere. No broken chairs or picture frames or anything. So. Principles be darned, we bought a load of olive wood to see us through our final spring.

Some of the junk wood we harvested was very dirty, but we burned it anyway. Also we never cleaned the chimney, nor did we hire a chimney sweep.

One afternoon we were surprised to hear the sound of a rumbling freight train running through our back yard even though we had no tracks there. Joanne thought it was more like a jet engine, but we had no airport in the back yard either. What we had was a chimney fire.

There was very little about our house that was made of wood. Some of the doors and the dining room table just about exhausted the inventory. Our clay tile roof had wooden supports. Everything else was relatively fireproof.

The chimney was covered with brick and stucco with holes for the smoke to escape from four different directions. This time it was flame escaping, leaping out at least three feet, so we had a pyrotechnic display to go with our rumble and roar.

There was no way we could get close enough to the fire to deal with it. We did the only thing we could. We stood by and watched and felt thankful that our house was relatively fireproof.