NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules Read Free Page B

and continues to the terminal. At the All Clear, the road reopens.
    The Spanish dictator Franco, El Caudillo (his title is the Spanish equivalent of Hitler’s Führer or Mussolini’s Duce), with his iron hand in a chokehold on the throat of every Spaniard until just the other day, closed his border with Gibraltar in 1969.
    “He died in 1975,” a Gibraltarian told me, “but it was another ten years before the border was opened again.”
    That was ordered by Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales, in 1985. But Spain has never wavered in insisting that Gibraltar be given back to Spain.
    So for sixteen years Gibraltar was hemmed in like a little penal colony. And it did no good for the people in Gibraltar to harangue the Spaniards with the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave Britain sovereignty over the Rock in 1713. In this same treaty the island of Manhattan was swapped for Surinam. In the most casual conversation in Gibraltar, people quoted the relevant clause of the Treaty of Utrecht. I took a closer look at the Treaty and saw that the terms of Article 10 prevented “residence or entry into the town of Gibraltar by Jews and Moors.”
    The anonymous author
of How to Capture and Govern Gibraltar
(1865) stated that Protestants ought to be encouraged and given low rents and hospitality. But “Papists, Moors and Jews” should be discouraged.
    And in some ways this sentinel rock became a bigoted British island at the entrance to the Mediterranean. As a British garrison it could hardlyfail to be reactionary, backward, philistine and drunken, as it upheld the Royal Navy tradition of rum, sodomy and the lash. For years it was noted for its vast number of taverns. But there is something so wonderful and stark about the rock—and it is the only grand work of nature for miles around—that its enchantment is transferred to the people who live on its lower slopes and at its base. It stands enormous and immutable, dwarfing everything and everyone nearby; and so Gibraltarians seem like a tribe of tiny idolaters, clinging to their mammoth limestone shrine.
    It is pretty clear that shrunken bankrupt Britain finds Gibraltar too expensive to run, no more than an inconvenient relic of a former age. It even looks it. Apart from the Rock it looks like an English coastal town, much smaller but with the same seediness and damp glamour of, say, Weston-super-Mare; a little promenade, and tea-shops, and fish and chip shops, and ironmongers, and respectable-looking public houses, and bus shelters and twitching curtains. Its Englishness makes it safe, tidy, smug, community-minded.
    Gibraltar’s historical notes satisfied my curiosity for meaningless facts and colorful atrocities. There was first the list of sieges, fourteen of them, going back to the year 410, when the Vandals overran the Roman Empire, and the later incursions of the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths. Franco’s closure of Spain’s frontier with Gibraltar is known as the fifteenth siege. In the seventh century King Sisebut persecuted Gibraltar’s Jews, tortured thousands, and forcibly baptized ninety thousand of them overall. Then there were seven hundred years of Moors in Gibraltar. And this: “In 1369, when Pedro the Cruel, who had succeeded Alfonso XI, was assassinated, the Count of Translamara seized the throne of Castile and became Henry II. The following year, 1370, Algeciras was destroyed by Mohammed V.” And on December 13, 1872, “the mystery derelict
Marie Celeste
arrived in Gibraltar.”
    Lastly, Gibraltar is known as the scene of a sudden shocking multiple murder. The woman who told me where it had taken place described it in a whisper: “Walk down Winston Churchill Road, and just before the overpass, across from the Shell station, that’s where it happened.”
    One Sunday in 1986, much to the horror of Gibraltarians, three civilians were shot dead by men wearing masks. Witnesses described the suddenness of it, all three cut down, and one masked man lingering over