I can’t begin to tell you how surprised I was. I went to the washroom, and when I returned, we started talking. His name was Carlos, and he had studied for a year in the United States. Carlos, I’d noticed earlier, was from the New World. Judging by the features of his face, it was plain he had an indigenous ancestry. As it turned out, Carlos was from Colombia.
Spain’s empire once covered half the world. It’s gone now, but the language remains so that even in the deepest jungles, even in the most inaccessible mountains of South America, the indigenous peoples speak the tongue of a faraway land.
“Colombia,” Carlos said, “is a beautiful country, but no one thinks of it that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what do you think of Colombia?”
The answer was plain. “Cocaine, drug lords, guerrillas … lots of bad stuff.”
“That’s right. I’m an economics student, but everywhere I go, as soon as I pull out my passport …” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Flying here, I was held at the airport in Madrid for ten hours.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he said, “I’m a rock climber. I’m climbing here in the north and also in France. There’s some of the best climbing in the world in both places — a Mecca for climbers. Well, you know, climbers use a kind of talcum powder for their hands. You have to keep them dry.” An impish grin appeared on his face. “Whenever I show my passport, they take me aside and tear my bags apart. In one bag they found my talcum powder and, of course, they thought …”
He laughed and so did I. We hooted until the other people in the line regarded us strangely.
“They had to get it tested, they told me,” Carlos said between wheezes. “I tried to explain things to them, but —” He exploded in laughter again. “Dumb fucks! They really pissed me off.” Old Carlos had learned his English well.
He told me, too, that he was cutting his trip short. The new government in Colombia had called for an all-out war against the guerrillas. The last government had promoted a policy of appeasement, a leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone sort of thinking. That didn’t work. Carlos told me he felt he should be home when things started happening.
“It’s sad,” he said. “Colombia really is a beautiful country. For example, have you ever heard of the pink dolphins?”
“No.”
“Well, they live in the tributaries of the Amazon. They’re the only freshwater dolphins in the world. They’re pink and quite rare. In Colombia we have a legend about them. The male of the species can change into a human form at will. Often they’ll come into the towns when they know there’s going to be a big party. They’re very handsome, it’s said, and so they seduce young girls and sleep with them. Always, though, they wear hats to hide the blowholes high on their foreheads. It’s the only way to know they’re not human.”
It was then that I realized Carlos was wearing a ball cap. I pointed at it. “So what’s under your hat, Carlos?”
When I got as far south in Spain as I could go, I signed up for a sailing course. Although I was still in Europe, I was no longer in Spain. I was in Gibraltar, a very odd place and the remnant of yet another great empire.
Like Spain before it, Britain cast its net over the world, and Gibraltar was one of its catches. The colony is as English as Trafalgar Square. You can buy fish and chips there and pay for it in British pounds. If you walk a thousand steps to your right, however, you find yourself back in Spain.
Very odd. And, of course, rearing above everything is the Rock. It’s quite a slab of stone, knifing out of the dark ocean. Across the straits a similar mountain looms out of the water near Africa. Together they’re called the Pillars of Hercules, the doorway to the Mediterranean.
If you control this point, you dominate the Mediterranean. And that’s why Gibraltar is still British. Up on the Rock, kilometres and kilometres of secret tunnels bore into the cliffs. No one knows quite what’s in there, but I walked up and discovered razor wire marked with forbidding signs from the Ministry of Defence.
I had come here for sailing lessons. During the first days, we went into the harbour to sail. I learned to tie the required knots and crank on the necessary winches. Phil was the skipper of our ship. He had lived in Gibraltar all his life and was quite certain the tunnels above us were filled with British military surveillance technology — stuff beyond the wildest dreams of the civilian world. He spoke in hushed tones with, oddly, a bit of a lisp, as well. Perhaps it was something in the air.
Anyway, Gibraltar remains resolutely British. Unlike Hong Kong, the United Kingdom will never let it go. It won it fair and square, and anyone who says otherwise can step right up for a very proper thrashing.
The end of the sailing lesson was to be a crossing from Gibraltar to Africa. We would sail under our own power, but what I didn’t realize is that we would be heading into a war zone. Just as I got there, a small war broke out. The previous week Morocco had invaded tiny Isla del Perejil, quite literally Parsley Island.
It was the first invasion of European soil since the Second World War — a turf battle, to be sure. Territory was being marked again. I admit, though, I’m using the words war and battle pretty loosely. About a dozen poorly armed Moroccan frontier guards landed on the island, equipped with a radio, two flags, and a couple of tents. No one was there to see them raise the flag except some lizards, bugs, and possibly a very confused goat.
Spain, however, was incensed. The island historically belonged to it. It was protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so the Spanish immediately sent a warship to straighten things out.
Phil, our sailing instructor, laughed off the danger. Despite the fact that we would be sailing right by Isla del Perejil, he insisted the war had nothing to do with us.
Tell that to a bullet.
I noticed that Phil had a strange accent. His th sound was always an f. “Fank you,” he’d say politely when I handed him one of the charts. “I fink today I’ll get you to raise the sails by yourself.”
We spent a few days tacking and gybing in Gibraltar’s harbour beneath the massive Rock. From the top of Gibraltar, on a clear day, Mount Acha on the coast of Africa is visible. Also up on the Rock are the famous Barbary apes, the only primates in Europe. Actually, they were brought over by British soldiers a couple of centuries ago. The troops kept the monkeys as pets not long before the Battle of Trafalgar, and a number of the apes went wild, perhaps when their owners didn’t return from the battle. When I was on Gibraltar, they howled over the mountaintop, snapped at tourists’ fingers, defecated on cars, and stole my goddamn water bottle!
At the other end of the Rock is St. Michael’s Cave. It was here in 1855 that a strange thick-furrowed skull was unearthed. Two years later a similar skull was uncovered in a place called Neanderthal, Germany. The Neanderthal race was once as common on this planet as we are now. For some reason, though, they all disappeared about thirty thousand years ago.
Here were a people even older than the Basques, so old they weren’t even quite human. It’s not known, for example, if Neanderthals spoke any language. They had skulls and jaws significantly different from ours, but the existence of vocal cords can neither be proven nor disproven. Neanderthals did have a small hyoid bone, a technical necessity for having a larynx, and they possessed a gene, FOXP2, which is associated with human language. However, this gene is also found in songbirds so that it’s difficult to say what sort of communication systems Neanderthals employed.
In fact, the lack of language might be one