We arrived home in the stilly hours of Sunday morning, in steady reassuring rain: a rain which has intensified through this public holiday. The home improvement shops have extra staff on duty in expectation of their busiest day, but with my dripping umbrella, I’m one of the few who make the trip. Intending to install my Moorish sconce bought as a holiday souvenir, I find an amber light-bulb and the means to wire it up.
Our return trip was reassuring at every step. Every pre-booked arrangement for plane seats, parking, airport taxi, hotel, worked smoothly as cogs in a badly-oiled machine—I mean, just well enough. K’s visa had arrived so late we nearly cancelled our trip.
I’m ever the anxious traveller. One final worry remained till we moment of opening the front door on our return. My formless anxiety was crystallized into an absurd yet compelling fantasy: that we had accidentally left the neighbourhood black cat locked in our house for the entire week. It had been prowling round, trying to get in, at the moment of our departure. As I double-locked the front door, I saw it outside, in the front yard. Ah, but there are two black cats as you would discover in this post. As we drove into our quiet street, it occurred to me that the other cat might have sneaked in unnoticed, and starved therein for seven days. Such is our power to create myths as hooks to hang our feelings: in my case the feeling that I’d have preferred to stay home.
We had stuck a pin in the map, and taken a chance. Every traveller takes a chance. Life is a journey. The rolling stone gathers no moss but still, the context of our travels is no more than the prepared canvas on which we must paint our own picture. And so forth.
What our hotel lacked in luxury and sophistication it made up for in size. Each morning its restaurant offered a buffet, a nightmare Spanish version of the classic English (Welsh, Irish, Scottish, American, Australian) breakfast: a thousand fried eggs staring from a hotplate, a thousand bacon rashers, ditto with slices of stewed tomato, sausages . . . with various breads, toasts, marmalades, cornflakes, coffee-dispensers, alleged “fruit juices”; guests crossing the floor diagonally to replenish their plates, unsmiling, skilfully avoiding eye- and body-contact like commuters in an over-crowded railway station. Outside in the winding lanes leading down to the seashore nestled a thousand expatriate bars with whimsical names like “Why Not?” (because your steel shutters are closed, that’s why), “El Open Arms” (also closed), “Not the Full Shillin’”(one of a hundred whimsical Irish bars), the “Oh So Kozee Bar”, “The Port o’Call”, “Tequila Worm”, “The Stumble Inn”. Should we cross the threshold of real Spanish bars, or leave the proud aboriginal Spaniards clinging to their threadbare dignity? We were the odd couple, one English and one Jamaican, another piece of scenery to be goggled at by tourists and locals alike. Oh, there were a few other blacks, other zebra couples; one or two African ladies, even, gowned and coiffed in batik with a dignity of carriage that would trump all others.
The underlying concept of the Costa Del Sol—which had turned fishing villages into a continuous urbanizacione extending from Malaga to Gibraltar, with high-rise apartments everywhere in the idiom of traditional pueblos—was surely the beach, or at least the glimpse of that blue Mediterranean viewed on the horizon. Yet the beach itself was a nothingness: mud-coloured sand, no one swimming, rows of sun-beds with straw parasols. If I’d have known, I’d have suggested an inland vacation, perhaps in Granada. It was hard to find any unspoilt nature. The mountains would have been a rugged thankless climb, but the Paloma Park offered free-range chickens and rabbits. Under the well-clipped hedges the hens brought up their chicks, while the roosters postured and crowed. I wish every park had them roaming free, to remind us that they aren’t just convenience food.
Being a stranger in Europe brought back memories of impoverished months in Paris, Marseilles and Florence: a lost penniless traveller in 1962. Imagination has wings but the human body needs food, drink, toilet amenities, somewhere to rest, sleep and wash. Fugitives, exiles, pilgrims. By the time I reached Assisi I had been so ragged that seeing my sandals mended with string, a stranger had offered me money, assuming that in joyful devotion to Lady Poverty I was following the footsteps of St Francis himself.
In contrast, our vacation had the luxury of a hotel balcony, on which my love affair with notebook and fountain-pen could be carried on, without betrayal of my beloved Muse. I had brought along In Defence of Sensuality, by John Cowper Powys, determined at last to write an article on this extraordinary self-help book written in 1930.
We also discovered, in a back alley of Torremolinos, a well-known second-hand bookshop, where I found Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly. The proprietor said any book we bought could be returned after reading, and sold back to the shop at half-price. “Oh, like a lending library?” I asked her if she knew Shakespeare & Company, in Paris. “If only!” said she, as if its glory was fabled, not real. I told her I lived there once, as one of the writers offered a free bed by its proprietor George Whitman, along with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and so many others. Even Henry Miller had been a recent guest, on a trip to Paris from Big Sur (in March ’62). It was the Librairie Mistral in those days. George took over the Shakespeare name when Sylvia Beach died. See this article in Wikipedia. K gave me a look, a well-timed warning to stop me launching into extended reminiscences.
Sitting on the hotel balcony I started planning out a book version of my memoirs, with “lonely traveller” as its unifying theme. It would be a “palimpsest” as Powys uses the term in the book I mentioned above:
“Infinitely various are such memories. But I think all of them will be found to partake of the nature of psychic palimpsests wherein certain images from one’s own past recede back and back and back, into much vaguer impressions from the lives of one’s ancestors.”
a wayfarer’s notes 
I can't help seeing the irony in a post about life's travels and the lonely traveller (good book concept, by the way!) – and here we all are lonely bloggers traversing a rather lonely wildnerness that is the blogosphere. Funnily enough, my first tentative steps into the blogosphere (before I settled on Short Short Fiction) was with a blog I called The Accidental Web Tourist – in which as a lonely blogger I travelled the world wide web, randomly guided by that word of the day. In many ways, years later, the blogosphere can draw many parallels with the urbanisation of the Costa Del Sol!
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yes, we graze in the vulgar savannas. And I didn't want to sound snobbish in this piece. Or imply any status as a writer. George Whitman in those days stipulated that only writers could earn the free bed in his shop in return for a daily task. Mine was mopping the floor, cleaning up the shit and piss his large dog used to leave on the tiled ground floor overnight. After I'd been there a couple of weeks he asked what I was writing. “A book about Zen Buddhism”, I replied, mendaciously. He was no eager conversationalist. A couple of weeks later, he asked “Why does everyone write about Zen and not Mahayana?”
Your “word-of-the-day” web travels remind me of Dave Gorman's book “Googlewhack”. He actually went around the world interviewing the owners of websites which had the unique hit to a two-word search.
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fascinating trip–of course–George Whitman jumped out–
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Scot, yes – it was hard to find on the Net a photo of George as he looked in '62: a brooding Sean Penn could play the part. His own bedroom was the front upstairs room of the shop and I had to avoid bumping into his girlfriend in the mornings. the kitchen was a corridor linking the back and front bedrooms. The squat toilet was plumbed into the shower enclosure next to the fridge – the most space-saving layout I've ever seen but the most awkward too.
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Scot, i have just noticed that the motto of your blog, “Be not unhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise” is also written on a wall inside Shakespeare & Co. Was it from there that you obtained it? If not, do you know from whence it originates?
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I like rain. I like writing like yours in the rain it seems! I just finished reading this post, your last paragraph, again the last paragraph, took me on a little adventure back into my past, Fellini, fond memories of hours of watching and wondering, I couldn't even remember his name, had to scroll thru a list of Directors, found Bergman whom I was fond of, but Fellini is who this post, and your last one, put me in the taste of.
The anxiety and reluctance, almost canceling, the cats black two, double lock the front door, the seven days starvation threat hanging heavy like a dark cloud, the steel pin in the mysterious map of reality….then the fantastic surreal scroll unrolls to reveal the streets and the parade thru them from the breakfast parlor of the hotel filled with the adventurers among whom you and yours stand out like the costumed realities marching to your own drums in their midst and clamour.
Yes, and the wild life, the crowing proud roosters and their broods, all prancing thru their own mysterious rituals freely escaping the normal restraints of a reality we all want to be free from. And this juxtaposed with the calling card beach and sea, the depopulated resort, the unexpected quiet and stillness in a world of normal madness.
Then off you go into your own reality, ancient musty spaces of pleasured hardships and formative spectacles and experiential living, wrapped in the security blanket of growth and certainty unknown. A Book Store of renown, names of wonders and windows and doors of flights of magnificent words and tales of beauty cloaked in earthy realities and struggles of mundane life. The magic mode of your writing lifts the mood off the page and, like a canvas, paints itself on my walls of limitations in my little studio room as I wait for the incoming storm to take me off this internet and turn my lights out for the evening, mysteries abound and the mood carries my night in its' arms.
My heart, your heart, we are outside ourselves.
Wonderful wonderful post Vincent, thanks immensely for the voyage.
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Monday, this holiday you might be pointing too, here is more Fellini..
Just so happens that, without my control, I was taken on this day of expected crowds in the home improvement shops, I was taken there by a friend.
And as I read the last post before this one, 'sconce' popped into my head, what did it mean I wondered.
Just an aside to the wonderful postings here Vincent. Thanks again.
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Vincent
I have been to City Lights many times and my daughter while studying in London jumped over to Paris and found the bookstore–she went back a couple of times and spent a few hours in there. She loved it. She brought me a Beat poetry book with the Shakespeare stamp on it along with bookmarks with the caption–“be not…” I hear an American in Paris might be one thing, but I hope to visit the shop some day
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Fantastic! I have to say, I'm a bit confused. Did you or did you not find a cat locked up in your house upon returning?
I can commisserate with you on the part of the hotel breakfast. Working in the IT industry, I've done my share of hotel breakfasts… just as you say, the people muddle about trying not to disturb one another or even catch each others' gaze, as if such would bring forth some shocking travesty everyone quietly knows about.
It sounds as though, even in your pensive outlook, you managed to find some semblance of enjoyment – the whole purpose of taking a vacation.
The sconce looks nice.
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Tim, no actual cat. More like Schrödinger's cat, as in Douglas Adams' first book of Dirk Gently: a quantum cat. And as for the hotel breakfast, we felt it to be less rational & friendly than you describe. I suspect a kind of racism, as if these English of the more stolid class go to the Costa Del Sol to recreate an ideal England on foreign soil; a new colonialism. They did not expect to find an educated couple of mature age, the woman being black: though in our home town we attract no unfavourable vibe. (We do feel it here sometimes but don't tell one another. Racism is something that can be felt—the presence and the absence—with scarce. the flicker of a muscle to display it.
And yes, we did enjoy it (with the unspoken resolve never to go back there again!) For it reminded me that physically, we always take the risk of chaos or hell when we leave home. Or for some people, the risk is no less if we stay home.
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Scot, thanks for that clarification about the motto. It does seem original then: it all traces back to George Whitman, for he understands himself to be that angel in disguise. Which explains a lot. He is in some respects unlike a normal human being. That was my experience, unmodified by meeting him again briefly in '95, and everything I have read about him. It would take more space than I have here to explain that. I have met other angels over time who were similarly unreal: well one, at least. The usual angelic encounter is momentary. In this post I described providing that illusion for someone else, in a classic tale when I appeared as an angel to a stranger.
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Jim your comments are magnificent. The one beginning “I like rain” is a symphonic variation on my original post that enhances it greatly, showing that the effect I try to achieve in my writing (to set something off in the reader with a life of its own, the reader's creation and not the writer's) does work, at least in one reader.
For there have been many writers—I'm not the only one—who pray for at least one sympathetic reader. For example, here is the beginning of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
“Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts.—So it is not a textbook.—Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it.”
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We all are lonely travellers on a lonely planet we just pretend that we have some company… 🙂
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Why did nature give us the capacity to be aware of ourselves, but be alone in it and to be conscious of that fact too? Maybe it is just an evolutionary mishap, like an appendix or wisdom teeth.
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20box and Petrichor: I don't know. I thought loneliness was an individual choice. I see others huddling together for psychological warmth: certainly in the Costa Del Sol.
Petrichor, your question assumes that an earlier question, the God-question, has already been answered in the negative. In any case, I don't see it as a mishap. What I do see as a tragic mishap is the elevation of intellect to a pre-eminent status in the human armoury.
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I visited Shakespeare and Co on my first trip to Paris, in '94. My Parisean girlfriend met me there, and with a quick word and a wave to George, led me upstairs to look around. I was struck by the dished wooden stairs, a bit awed over the many well-known writers who wore them away over the years.
My friend was then publisher and editor of a lush art magazine and well wired into the European art community – she argued with me that the name of the bookstore is not “& Company” but “& Co.” and should be pronounced that way, with a long 'o'. I was amused and rather delighted by the name's transformation and wondered how common it is to call it that.
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Yes, Hayden: “& Co” is everywhere in England, pronounced as you say. Accountants' firms, partnerships of solicitors . . .
Or a joking use to mean “that gang” as in “Bush & Co”
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“We had stuck a pin in the map, and taken a chance. Every traveller takes a chance. Life is a journey. The rolling stone gathers no moss but still, the context of our travels is no more than the prepared canvas on which we must paint our own picture.”
SO lovely … can I borrow it – hoard it away w/ my quotes for use another day??
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of course you can use this collage of clichés, my dear, and anything else that takes your fancy.
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Why did nature give us the capacity to be aware of ourselves, but be alone in it and to be conscious of that fact too? Maybe it is just an evolutionary mishap, like an appendix or wisdom teeth.
Fascinating concept .. perhaps the underlying notion may well be that god is .. erm .. the sum total of the consciousness within planet community? nah perish the thought. Rome rules.
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Vincent, am having a night “OFF”. Do not wish to sully nor contaminate your beautifully written posts.
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it's a unique travellogue (at least, as far as i have read).
“alleged fruit juices” — lol
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Davo, I hope your night “off” has not left you with too much of a hangover. And I'm glad you have the facilities to post some interesting stuff. The photos on your latest one convey a lot!
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Yes Ghetu, the travelogue: at least we know better now than to go on such a trip. I had never been on a “packaged holiday” before, and K had never been to another country before – apart from Jamaica and UK, so there was nothing to lose. But I tried to convey some of the aspects that made us squirm.
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It's interesting, the relationship between memory and creativity. For some it seems stronger than others.
Wordsworth's definition of poetry, I think in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, was “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
But did I already mention this?? I can't remember!
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You did mention it Paul, some while ago. But worth mentioning any number of times. Some people have poor memory, which rules out certain things. We have to do what we can with what we've got, I guess!
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