The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

Anyway, these Andalusian scholars must have been intensely tolerant, for five days later they actually gave me a diploma in Hispanic studies. At the inevitable sherry party, I protested to Don Andres that it was wholly unmerited. He smiled somewhat sadly and said, “Frederico, mine is not a rich country. We need these foreign course fees. So when you get home, please tell everyone what good value this course is.”

And I did. At least, I wrote to the governors of Tonbridge to recommend the Granada University’s Málaga course as an excellent avenue for future holders of the Knightly Scholarship to perfect their Spanish. But after the reception, I had to leave, because my father had arrived with my mother in tow, was lodged in the Marbella Club Hotel, and wanted to see me.

It was all because someone else, a neighbor from Ashford, had perchance seen me imbibing sherry, again in the heat of the day, at a street café. He had asked me what I had been doing and, being a bit lightheaded from the sherry and the blazing sun, I told him. He had scurried back to his hotel and rung Ashford with the news. That was what brought my parents on the next plane to Gibraltar.

I had not spent the middle 158 lectures sitting drinking sherry. After my arrival in January, I investigated what I had really come for. Bullfighting.

During my last year at school, I had come across and devoured Ernest Hemingway’s classic Death in the Afternoon, and had become fascinated by this brutal but incredibly testosterone-fueled spectacle on the sand of the arena beneath a glaring sun: a lethal pitting of a man against half a ton of truly wild animal. I had followed up Hemingway with Ibáñez’s Blood and Sand and various other books. And I was determined to see it.

In Spain, winter is the close-down season for the corrida—which simply means “the running.” But in the deep south, it is still warm and sunny even in January,

February, and March—or it used to be. That was the time for the novilladas.

A fighting bull suitable for a full-fledged corrida is usually five years old. Until he trots out of the dark pen beneath the stands for his last twenty minutes on earth, he has led an idyllic life roaming free on the vast ranches with a herd of lady friends and all the lush grass he can eat. Not for him a miserable abattoir at barely a year old. But he is emphatically not sweet-tempered.

Any talk that a fighting bull has to be provoked to charge is nonsense. He will charge at anything not on four legs. That is why the vaqueros on the ranches have to be mounted. Any human descending to the ground on two legs is committing suicide. Because the bull is nearsighted and sees in monochrome, it is not the “red” that he is charging, but the cape, flickering and taunting him. When he has hit it and felt no impact, he turns and charges again. And again. If the matador remains motionless beside the cape in his hands, he should get away with it. Some do, some don’t, because those huge horns are absolutely deadly.

While it is still a calf, or becerro, the bull will probably be tested once and briefly so that it does not remember later what happened. The point is to see if, when taunted by a cape, it will run straight and true or turn away. If the latter, then it will be for the knackers’ yard. But if it charges, it will go back to the ranch to spend four more years coming to full maturity.

But at three it is called a novillo, and in the deep south, corridas featuring only novillos take place. They are mainly for young matadors who have not yet graduated to the great summer festivals. These are what I wanted to see in Málaga. The novillo may not be as big as a five-year-old, but he is still a very dangerous brute. When I made inquiries at Málaga’s famous bullring for the spring program, I discovered something interesting. There was a training school there as well. I signed up at once.

Basically, it was under the tutelage of a retired matador with a heavy limp. He had stopped one horn too many and his hip had never healed. This did not prevent him teaching, because the matador is not supposed to run around much anyway.

The school met in the mornings, out on the sand of the arena, beneath the empty stands: about half a dozen young aspirants with hopes of one day starring in the big festivals of Granada, Seville, or Madrid. A teenager could still look up and imagine those stands thronged with swooning señoritas and hear the clang of the paso doble and the roared olés that greet an impressive passage of capework. Then Don Pepe ended the daydreaming and introduced us to the two capes: the capa and the muleta.

The capa came first, a heavy canvas semicircle, magenta on one side and yellow on the other. The surprising weight of the capa explains why matadors have immensely strong wrists. The muleta, a smaller bright scarlet cloth splayed on a sword and a wooden stick, used only for the third and last section of the encounter, would come later.

There was of course no real bull. They are expensive and not to be wasted on apprentices. The contraption that charged was a construction of two wheels on a frame. At the front of the frame was a set of two real horns from a long-dead Miura, fearsome artifacts about a yard wide, each with needle tips that would really hurt if they hit you.

Behind the frame were two long shafts, and the whole thing was raced across the sand by two boys earning themselves a bit of pocket money. At the start of the charge they held the ends of the shafts high, so that the horns were dipped low, for that is how a bull really charges.

As the horns went through the cape, the running boys would thrust downward on the shafts, causing the horns to swerve upward as the bull sought to gore and toss his enemy. After several mornings, it became plain I was never going to make a matador. As the horn tips swept up toward the genitalia, I tended to step sideways. This caused great merriment.

The matador is supposed to stay absolutely still, his feet planted, and sway his hips like a ballet dancer, so that the rising horn almost brushes the fabric of his trousers. My father later averred that he would have taken a ten-foot leap. But my single step was enough to earn a mocking cheer from the Spanish teenagers and a grin from Don Pepe. Toward the end of my stay, I completed the lessons but gave up any hope of ever going further.

That was when the neighbors from Ashford spotted me at the café and rang my father. Within days, my parents were in the Marbella Club, then a small private hotel out on the Marbella road. My dad came to collect me from Madame Lamotte’s flat after the diploma ceremony. He told me never to reveal to my mother that I had been in a bullring. She would attain her gray hair one day without any help from me.

The only other thing of interest during those ten weeks in the hot, sunny spring of 1956 was a torrid affair with a thirty-five-year-old German countess. She frequented the training sessions, and later taught me many things a lad should know as he steps out on life’s bumpy road.

She had the quaint habit of singing the “Horst Wessel Song” during coitus. At the time, I did not know what it was, and only a year later learned it was the marching song of the Nazis. This probably meant she had been involved during the war with something deeply unpleasant, which would explain her migration to Spain, which, under Franco, was tolerant of that sort of thing.

My folks spent a week at the Marbella Club, then we all left for Gibraltar and the ferry for Tangier.

TANGIER AND COMMANDOS

Tangier in 1956 was an extraordinary place, my first taste of Africa and the world of Islam. Morocco had been, until very recently, a French colony, but Tangier was under tripartite administration between the British (the post office), the French (police and law courts), and the Spanish (general administration).

There was a vigorous independence movement called Istiqlal, which rioted elsewhere, but the Tangerines are known for their civility and tolerance, so Tangier was spared the rioting, at least while we were there.

It had a fascinating old quarter called the Medina and a large covered market, the souk, where tourists could browse for bargains in perfect safety. I recall that the French were not liked, as they represented the law and punishment, while we were identified as British, so it was smiles all around. As we ran only the post office, our sole visible presence was the little red vans delivering letters.

Tangier was also a free port into which freight ships would arrive to unload out-of-bond cargo immune from even French or Spanish taxes. The cargoes underpinned the smuggling operation, which was considerable. Lined up at the quay was a line of lean gray Second World War motor torpedo boats, war surplus bought cheap but easily able to outrun the motorboats of the Spanish customs across the water.

Thus, each evening as the sun set, they would slip mooring and head toward the Spanish coast, loaded with perfume, toilet soap, silk stockings, and, above all, cigarettes, mainly Camels and Lucky Strikes, which were contraband but highly prized and therefore expensive in Spain.

They would cruise through the darkness slowly, lights doused, engines rumbling quietly, until the first flashlight on the shore indicated where the mule trains were waiting. Then it was a fast run to shore, frantic hands discharging the cargo before the arrival of the Guardia Civil, and the mules lumbering away into the olive groves. A fast run back out of Spanish territorial waters and a slow cruise home brought them back to Tangier by dawn.

The going rate was fifty pounds for a deckhand per trip, which was a lot of money back then, so I went down to see if anyone would take me on, but was rebuffed. No vacancies. The jobs were extremely sought after, despite twenty years in a Franco jail if caught, and anyway I had had no seamanship.