Wednesday, May 27, 2009

An Unnamed Cave

Several caves in the Málaga vicinity (if you define “vicinity” broadly) are noted tourist attractions, or should be, with natural wonders or prehistoric paintings. But other caves have no claim to fame. They have no prehistoric paintings. They are not remarked in tourist guides. Fodors has nothing to say about them. They are tubes in the ground, unlit, unmarked, and fit only for teenagers to explore. Those are the good ones.

Our son, Eric, and his friend, Victor deGroot, decided to camp overnight in one such hole in the ground near Torremolinos. The boys hitchhiked to their chosen cave with cans of food and bedrolls, prepared for a great adventure. It was cloudy and threatening rain. All the better. More adventure.

Night fell darkly. Rain fell heavily. The cave leaked wetly. The boys decided that their adventure was uncomfortable and they would be better off home. But it was harder to hitchhike on a dark, rainy night and the boys met with no success. Finally some policemen pulled up in a car and made the boys stand in the rain while they played Twenty Questions. At last the police told the boys to go home. The boys asked for a ride but met with a resounding, “Nope.”

Teenage years are hard. And sometimes wet.

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Carratraca

We made an overnight weekend trip to Carratraca with the American Club in the spring of 1975. Who or what is a Carratraca? For that matter, what was the American Club?

Carratraca is a village of fewer than 1000 permanent residents and the site of a sulfur springs. For millennia people have believed that sitting neck deep in stinky water is healthful and restorative. For extra money, I understood, someone would pack your entire body with mud. It would probably make you feel healthy and restored just to get that nasty stuff off your body. Apparently people have wallowed in Carratracas’ sulfur baths since the Romans.

The American Club was founded by Americans who moved to Spain and decided that the thing they most wanted to do was to associate with other Americans. We had joined the American Club because someone invited us to, attended a meeting because we had nothing else to do that evening, and joined the group because we couldn’t think of a graceful way out of it.

And that is how we found ourselves on a bus loaded with American tourists headed into the hills, bound for the sulfur springs. We weren’t all old. Our daughter, Patricia, a high school sophomore, went with us. Another young woman, a college undergraduate, gave her someone to bond with. There was at least one young man who probably hadn’t seen 21 summers yet. As I write this I’m looking at a group photo and I must admit they look much younger to me now than they did 32 years ago.

Carratraca itself looked like a typical Spanish village with it whitewashed buildings, rough streets and dark interiors. We had arrived at our hotel at lunch time, pre-siesta time, The village seemed to have gone into a nothing-much-happening-right-now-folks mode.

Our room was on the first floor, which is really the second floor in genuinely civilized countries, at the back side of the hotel. But when we reached our room and looked out the window, we saw not a drop not a ten-foot drop but another street. Our hotel was dug into a steep hillside, hence our hotel front facing a road and the back facing another road one story up. People familiar with San Francisco architecture will have no trouble with this concept.

Disco was the big thing in those days. There was even a song about a disco duck. Our hotel clerk informed our daughter and her friend that yes, indeed, Carratraca boasted a very fine discoteca, one in which they took great pride. The two girls set off to find this emporium of music but Pat returned an hour later to report that though they had looked high and low and in between, they could discover no discothèque.

Apparently the girls had not gone on their quest unaccompanied, but were joined by the young male I mentioned earlier. That evening before dinner he bought me a glass of wine, which I thought very amiable of him. Then he asked, “Do you mind if I marry your daughter?”

I thought the matter over for a few seconds, swished the wine around in my mouth savoring its taste, then replied, “That depends on your health, your morals, and whether you can fix Volkswagens.” I don’t think he really wanted to marry my daughter. I think he wanted to see if I’d spit up my wine. In any event, he didn’t look like a Volkswagen mechanic.

We learned at dinner that Carratraca’s famous discothèque was located inside our very own hotel. This suited me since I didn’t want my nubile daughter cruising the streets of Carratraca, a village inhabited by a hell hound bent on (he said) matrimony. (Hell hounds might have changed since my day – but they couldn’t have changed that much.)

Some of the older members of the American Club said that they would go to the discothèque just to “keep an eye on the youngsters.” Who, I wondered, was going to keep an eye on them?

Joanne and I went to bed and Pat went out to disco. At the witching hour, I believe 9:00 but it may have been 10:00, the band struck up and the party was ON! Joanne and I were out of bed like someone had hotwired it, for the famous discothèque was located in the room directly under ours. Our room had become an echo chamber. I said to Joanne, “I can’t handle this. I’m going down there. It can’t be any worse.”

But it was worse. It was far, far worse. For one thing, the band was far, far louder. Few people danced. Instead they shouted at each other and still couldn’t hear, drank cheap wine and pretended they were having fun. So I returned to our room, buried my head under my pillow regretted not having drunk more at dinner.

But eventually, mercifully, the “music” ended, Pat returned, and I settled in for some well deserved sleep. But not to be, for some lusty lad had parked his motorcycle on the street directly outside our window some time during the day. He had danced his little toes raw and now it was time to crank up his Bultaco motocicleta.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned Bultaco only had two cylinders and it didn’t always use both of them. Vroom vroom cough vroom fart spit vroom splutter. But after five minutes of vrooming the machine ran to our young dude’s satisfaction and he drove off. Thank God it was downhill or he’d probably still be there.

At last. After two in the morning, but it was as quiet in Carratraca as it had been when we arrived at noon the day before. To sleep, perchance to dream. Who cares if I dream. To sleep. Bring it on.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Ben the Baker on Spanish Taxes

Although it was difficult if not impossible for a foreigner to work legally in Spain, they were encouraged to go into businesses that would provide employment for Spaniards. One could own a book store, a restaurant-bar, a souvenir shop. Ben, a burned out Philadelphia attorney, owned a bakery outside of Torremolinos. He specialized in gourmet breads that he sold to various hotels.

Oddly enough, he could do this because he had purchased a centuries old house with an attached centuries old bakery equipped with a centuries old oven. It looked like don Quixote’s breakfast rolls might have come out of that oven.

Bread was baked on a huge stone wheel inside the oven that rotated by means of a hand crank. The wheel was around four inches thick and at least ten feet across, perhaps twelve. Ben’s bakers loaded the loaves that needed the longest time to bake on the inside of the wheel, gradually turning it as they loaded more loaves. When the wheel was fully loaded, then with a few more turns baked loaves were unloaded on a first-in-first-out basis. The heat came from an olive wood fire that had been started early in the morning. Set scientifically, the fire gradually burned itself out and no refueling was necessary. And the whole thing happened without computers.

It happened without the use of fuel oil, either. And that’s where the gourmet bread comes in. We lived in Spain during the last year of Francisco Franco’s life and the first year of Juan Carlos’ reign. During that time, food was available to everyone by means of subsidized bread, milk, and fish. People of very limited means could still put food on the table and didn’t have to watch their families starve. It kept them from slipping across the border to France to work as illegal aliens. Also, wine was cheap and everyone seemed to have a television set. There were only two or three channels, but it was something. I’ve always felt that Franco kept the lid on things and there were no revolutions because everybody had something to lose. The subsidized bread had to be baked by bakers who used government subsidized fuel oil to heat their ovens. They baked the bread and sold it at a loss or at best broke even. Since Ben didn’t use the fuel oil, he didn’t have to bake the cheap bread.

But Ben still paid the price. Olive wood was very expensive fuel. He thought it was a trade off.

And Ben had to pay his taxes. Spanish taxes and American taxes have a curious difference. In the U.S. everyone knows who’s going to pay. We just don’t know how much, and the government couldn’t say within billions of dollars just how much money they’re going to get. In Spain, the government knew to the peseta, but they didn’t know who was going to pay. But, then, they didn’t care, either.

Here’s how it worked. Each year the government would tell the bakers’ of Torremolinos sindicato how much they were going to cough up for taxes. The sindicato would then meet to determine how the tax would be paid and who would pay it. Ben said he always attended that meeting. Otherwise his colleagues might vote that he pay it all. It was the same way with all the other sindicatos in Spain. "Here's the revenue service hat, amigos. Fill 'er up."

He baked great bread, by the way.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Amphitheater of Italica and 8th-grade (Male) Students

Scipio Africanus founded Italica, north of present day Seville, as a place to retire soldiers wounded in Africa. It became a reasonably important settlement with 8000 people in its heyday. It was the birthplace of Emperor Trajan, the town’s most famous son.

Although Italica only had a population of 8000, their amphitheater seated 25,000, third largest in the Roman Empire. (Little strange, that. I didn't question those figures in 1976, but they don't seem quite right now.)

Moving right along, we saw the remains of the mini-coliseum on a trip in the spring of '76. I thought it was a pretty dinky amphitheater when I saw it, but I was thinking chariot races, naval battles, Cecil B. DeMille.

As we watched, a bus load of 8th-grade boys with their harassed teacher pulled up. Close to 40 boys crammed into the bus, 40 eighth-grade boys. In the center of the amphitheater’s arena lay a pit, maybe for lions or Christians, who knows. Maybe it was a green room for the gladiators.

The teacher shouted to his students, “Don’t go near the pit!” He must have been a new teacher who didn’t realize what happens when you tell eighth-graders not to do something. As soon as the words left the teacher’s mouth everyone of the boys ran to the pit and hung ten. They all jostled for position in the front row and it’s a wonder they didn’t all fall in.

Maybe I misread the situation. Maybe the teacher was a burn out case who was hoping the kids would all fall in and he could go out for a glass of wine.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Calle San Miguel

Like many cities and towns in Europe, Torremolinos had a walking street, Calle San Miguel. No cars or any other wheeled vehicles allowed, no cell phoning drivers, no bicyclists wired into I-pods, no skateboarders or in-line skaters. You can walk in any direction you want any time you want providing no one is blocking your way. Just pedestrians. Sweet. As a maraschino cherry topping, Calle San Miguel was paved with yellow bricks.

The people on Calle San Miguel were cosmopolitan and raffish all at once. Torremolinos was no longer the Hippie Haven it was when James Michener wrote The Drifters, but many young people sported longer hair than Spanish custom dictated, and some played guitars as though they held a species of bass drum. Many of them, it seemed to me, were either passing through or not, but either way waiting for something to happen. Anything. Many wore tee-shirts with the names of American universities. UCLA’s shirt was the most popular in Europe. However, the shirt didn’t mean they attended that school. Some young people didn’t even speak English and somewhere else was a young Southern Californian wearing a Heidelberg tee-shirt who spoke no German.

People kept Spanish hours, surprise, surprise. During siesta time you could have gone bowling except Calle San Miguel had a very definite tilt downhill toward the Mediterranean. The street ended in a steep stairwell to the beach named Calle del Peligro, Street of danger. The danger was if you fell on the stairwell, you’d go a long way.

No one ever lost a bowling ball, but once a soccer ball got loose. Before it was recovered by the boy who owned it every foot on the street had touched it at least once including a nun in her habit. Caught the ball beautifully in the sweet spot on her foot. Nice shot, sister. Europeans play that game well.

In the evening the tourists came out to play. That’s when Calle San Miguel revealed itself in its true colors, a glorious tourist trap. You could buy post cards, sleazy little ash trays with “recuerdo de Torremolinos,” written on it, oil paintings of Spanish villages mass produced in Morocco. Every third door opened onto a bar. We stopped in one once to listen to some music and absent mindedly ordered a sangria. The bartender slopped in heavy dollops of vodka and gin before he even reached for fruit and wine. We stopped him in his tracks. We wanted a drink and he was mixing a prescription.

Life went on like a Old West gold mining boom town until 3:00 or so. Then the store owners aimed their guests out the door, cleaned up after them, weighed their day’s money, and got ready for the next day’s business. We didn't have to watch television. There was more entertainment on Calle San Miguel.

Copyright Ken Harris 2009