December 15, 2004

Que sera sera

Whatever will be, will be, especially in a timeless village in Andalucian Spain. Until, that is, it is "discovered" by the invading hordes of New Europe and beyond.

By Eric Ellis


NOSTALGIA famously isn't what it used to be, and neither is the tiny Andalusian village of Vejer de la Frontera. I remember, soon after buying a 1000-year-old terrace house in Vejer’s old town in 1991, being chided by my new neighbour, Thereza, when I complained about the torrential rain that confined me to a tiny dining room. Coming from a typically soggy London summer, this July downpour, I griped, was unseasonal and most unwelcome, as I’d been so looking forward to Spain’s alleged sun, sea and sangria (or sex, depending on which British tabloid one read). “Si, pero bueno para el campo” (“Yes but it’s good for the countryside”), Thereza admonished, Vejer then earning its living as this agricultural region’s service town. It was an instant lesson in real life for Los Vejeriegos, as the locals are known, that I’ve never forgotten.

It was raining the day I returned – this past summer after four years away – my first elongated visit since being married here in 1998. Neighbour Thereza and I exchanged besos (kisses), as if I’d never been away. Then she complained about the weather. “Si, pero bueno para campo,” I said. The ever-wise Thereza, remembering, laughed. “Si, pero no para las turistas!”

The New Europe has changed much here, sometimes for good, sometimes not. There are obvious things such as the euro and the internet. In 1991, not that long ago lest I sound like one of Spain’s old Falangists or fascists who patronised Vejer’s atmospheric old Bar Chirrino before it was demolished, a reviving café con leche was no more than diez duros (10 duros) – 50 pesetas in old money (a duro, or “hard one”, being an old weight equal to five pesetas) – in most places. Now the same cup is rounded up to at least a euro, or trente duros (30 duros), if you’re lucky. And if they still used that old term.

The internet is great for peripatetic periodistas such as me. In 1991, I had to ring my copy by collect-call to my office in Sydney in the dead of night at the public booth in Vejer’s main Plaza de Espana, as bemused teen canoodlers looked on. Today, I can infra-red it to my mobile, and despatch stories in seconds from anywhere, anytime. And you can buy The Economist from the kiosk on the plaza.

In 1991, the only braying one heard in Vejer was of grumpy burros (donkeys) as they lugged themselves door-to-door, their herdsmen selling onions, lettuce and tomatoes from groaning panniers. I haven’t seen any donkeys on this visit 13 years later but, heading down my street, I heard some different braying as a woman with an overly plummy voice stood on her balcony, mobile phone to ear, declaring “Caroline, Caroline” – or maybe it was Jane, or Victoria – “I can hear you, I can hear you.”

After she’d located Caroline, I introduced myself in English as her neighbour. She said: “I can’t talk now, I’ve got the BBC coming.” It turned out to be the lesser ITV doing a story on Brits living abroad but the BBC sounds a lot better to friends and relatives back in Oxfordshire. And, presumably, neighbours. I later learned some Brit had won a house here in a UK reality TV show by guessing its price. Maybe it was her.

I first “discovered” Vejer in 1986. I was the ­Hong Kong correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald but had been in Morocco on holidays. I’d entered Morocco via ferry from Gibraltar, after flying to Seville in southern Spain. I returned to Gib, as unappealing and contested a British colony then as now, and began the drive back to Seville. It was a late August evening, the rent-a-car I’d parked for three days at Gib was low on juice and I only had traveller’s cheques, the mid-1980s pre-dating ATMs in Andalusia.

Driving into a service station, with no Spanish except gracias (which I remember, oh-so-sophisticatedly, pronouncing as “gra-chus” instead of “gra-thee-us” as the lisping Spaniards do), I tried to exchange a cheque. The attendant looked at me as though I was an alien and pointed to the sky. Above was this splash of white paint on the hillside, a whitewashed mountain village which I would’ve driven straight past were I fuelled up. “Banco!” he said.

I drove up, arriving in a very dead town plaza. The only place with light was Bar Peneque, still there today. A group of elderly hombres with gravel in their voices were playing cards in the cave-like bar, swathed in cigar smoke. A bullfight – of course – was on the TV. I pushed a traveller’s cheque across the bar. The amiable waiter laughed at it and presumably said something like “get serious, what you need is a drink” and pushed a chilled sherry back at me, my first ever fino. I now know one is supposed to savour a manzanilla “like a beautiful woman”, as a man in a local bodega once unapologetically told me. But I drained it like it was water. He re-filled it and so it went on, the fight a blur as the evening progressed. Knowing no Spanish, I’m nevertheless sure I spoke the best Castellano of my life that evening with my new card-playing amigos as I remember waking up some time the next afternoon with the most fabulous headache in an impossibly beautiful house, all white walls, exposed beams, magnificent courtyard.

A young woman of about 20 served me ice-cold water and a sandwich of ham and manchego cheese before disappearing, never to be seen again. Who was she? Had I slept with her? I still don’t know. I still don’t know where this magnificent house is. All I remember of that lost weekend is getting up, walking around the ancient old town and its narrow labyrinthine lanes, captivated by it, and then retiring for another sleep. I awoke on Monday – the house absent of people, the girl gone – and finally found a bank. I found Peneque again to pay for the finos but was refused. I filled up, drove on to Seville and a later flight and vowed, as travellers often do, that if I ever returned to Europe – unlikely as I was living in Hong Kong and intent on making a career in the region – I would buy one of those fine houses.

But in 1990, I was posted to the Herald’s European bureau, in London. Spain, by now, was booming. Los Labios, “The Lips”, as Spain’s shiny new prime minister, Felipe Gonzalez (a Paul Keating prototype), was known, was turning this ancient country into a modern euroland, mostly with Brussels’ largesse. With the then-upcoming Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and the Seville Expo, Spain was a story for the international press. I came to Seville on assignment, drove down to Vejer and saw a beautiful hand-sketched drawing of a house in a shop window, Se vende (for sale).

Barely two hours later, I had agreed to buy it, using all the money I had. It wasn’t as grand as the house I’d hangovered in but in many ways it was better, more charming. The place was a shell but a solid one. We installed windows, bought doors from local flea markets, got a few new ones made by the now-deceased carpenter Manolo and generally made it liveable. We first stayed in it for Easter 1992. I ran with the bulls (many Spanish villages have Pamplona-style bullruns) and came to spend a lot of time in Spain that year, mostly on the trail of the now-deceased fugitivo, Christopher Skase.

Fast forward to May 2004, on my first real recce here since 1998. I enter Plaza de Espana in search of that chocolatey coffee. When I first bought in 1991, the plaza was pretty much a no-go area, all the marcha (action) concentrated on another plaza across town. Today, there are groovy restaurants and locals tending clientele in flawless English (if anything was a second language in 1991, it was French or German because of all the Spaniards working abroad). The new Hotel La Califa has taken over the old courthouse and has profitably turned the region’s ingrained xenophobia of nearby Morocco (40km away as the crow flies) on its head (my neighbours, for the life of them, can’t figure out why I’d go to Morocco from here, always warning me to be “cuidate de los Moros”: careful of the Moors). And there’s a blue van parked with spanishproperty.co.uk on it. Tourists in their middle-class-Brit-abroad uniform of chinos, chambray shirts and panama hats pile out. I ask the woman leading them if she’s a sales agent. Yes, she says. I say I’ve got a house here. “Ooh,” she says sniffily, “we don’t sell existing houses, we’re selling off-the-plan, half to Brits, half to Spaniards.” As I later learn, she’s referring to a suburb going up behind Vejer’s new town with new villas and the like, rumoured to be attached to a golf course, one of five (!) also rumoured for the area between Vejer and the wild Atlantic coast that’s five minutes’ drive away through fields of European Union-subsidised sunflowers.

Later, as I sit at home in front of my computer going through a backlog of notes, Thereza comes over with an unexpected lunch (a lovely chorizo stew) because she is worried that with my wife still in Singapore, I’m not getting sufficient nourishment. We have one of those languid chats of resignation Andalusians have and, as a party of loud Hollanders gambol past, we grouse about all the foreigners Europe’s budget airlines have injected into the region, it never occurring to her that she’s talking to one. Her husband says I am an Andaluz “hablando como la sierra”, which sort of means I speak Spanish like someone from the mountains, and I think is meant as a compliment. I say, touching my heart, that my body is Australian but my heart is Andalusian. How ridiculous one can be sometimes.

This foreign influx has even spawned an English-language magazine and as many as 10 estate agencies when in 1991 there were none. I even spotted, in the main square, two London yuppies in metropolitan black squabbling over who’ll push their groovy three-wheeled baby stroller. Shocking! The actor Jude Law is rumoured to be buying and, as a journalist, I’m particularly bemused at how articles about Vejer have suddenly appeared in the British press, penned by people after they’ve bought here. That’s got to be good for (their) prices. At various bars, I’ve engineered a few conversations with some of these new arrivals and ask them how long they’ve been here. The average is two to three years and their smug chatter is of a real-estate boom and how by on-selling or mortgaging the loft in London they’ve bought in Vejer. They pick up my accent and ask if I’m visiting from “Orstralia”. I say no, I’m a reporter, based in Singapore, here for a few weeks of work going through notes from an assignment in Afghanistan. “How interesting,” they lie politely: “staying in a hotel?” No, I’ve got a house in the old town, I say. “Oh, we had no idea there were Orstralians here … when did you buy?”

1991, I say, and look on as their face contorts as I puncture their sense they were the first to “discover” the place, when of course that honour probably goes to the Phoenicians. I then get transformed into resident eccentric/not-so-elegant roué, despite my relatively young 42, wife and various work-related gadgets. Poms (and I’m married to one) like to pigeon-hole you and perhaps the disappointment of Australians in Vejer never once came up on their social antennae. Perhaps “colonials” in Vejer somehow makes it less special for them. As they ply me with drinks, I tell them a few stories of “old” (1990s!) Vejer; like how the place was once so poor they had to sell the palms around the square to a nearby town, an unpopular decision which saw the mayor of the day removed in the next election. And that the area, or was it a street, between the new and old towns was once dubbed Las Malvinas in sympathy with the Argentine claim over Britain’s Falkland Islands. My interlocutors then say how delightful the “Vejerians” are, as if they are characters from Star Trek, and what fabulous lives they must lead in this lovely place. I say, yes of course, they and it are great but it’s probably like any other small town (and I was raised in a small rural Victorian town of 4000-odd people) anywhere once you get to know it, just has a few more fiestas than Yorkshire.

“Whatever do you mean?” they ask. I say: “well, that woman who just walked past did time for drug offences [true], and Vejer has had a serious heroin problem among its teens [also true], and there was a rapist running rampant a few years back [true again].” And in that time-honoured tradition of Australians abroad, I ­cheekily tell them I’m thinking of opening a Kangaroo Bar and bringing in waitresses from Bangkok! And like good Englishmen, they make their excuses and leave me chortling with the beers they’ve bought me.

In today’s Vejer, there are more people and cars, the cops are more numerous, younger and have sharper squad cars and uniforms. Antonio the charity lottery ticket seller – whose cry of “Me voy” (I’m off!) would loudly announce his presence in the street – has died and so has the old cobbler who sat stitching shoes in a hole-in-the-wall shop into the evening. One of my neighbour’s girls, who as a teen tried to teach me to dance the sensuous Sevillana is married and a mother and the French hash dealers who lived next door have sold to a nice family from Madrid. I saw another neighbour’s kid, a cute three when we bought, transformed into a chain-smoking street tough teen (but he still kicks his football incessantly against our wall). And I confess to somehow quite liking the two-dozen electric windmills that whirr up the incessant wind as it blows in from the Atlantic over the hill above the village but then I’m not the German who tipped hundreds of thousands into the new Hotel Buena Vista only to see its “good view” – and presumably his profits – marred by them. There are now Iranians, Haitians, Argentines and Filipinos in Vejer, and most of Europe’s myriad nationalities. There are Chinese from Fujian selling trinkets now, not just illegal Senegalese. And the gypsies have new caravans.

But some things don’t change. The motorbikes charging around Vejer’s narrow lanes may be faster and more dangerous but the riders still don’t wear helmets. Constantine the barber, whose shop near the plaza seems more a masonic society for old Vejeriegos than for hair cutting, still calls me “Henry” as he shaves me, “Eric” being a pronunciation too far. Vejer’s lazy tongue still turns buenos dias into bon dia or, simpler still, buena and it’s still impossible to walk into a genuine hippy bar called Janis Joplin and not hear The Doors. And Africans are still drowning on the region’s beaches, believing Europe’s streets are paved with gold, though in 1991 the beaten-up boats from which the Tangiers mafia pushed their human cargoes, 2km off the Spanish coast at night, weren’t funky features in a Vejer beach bar.

The birdsong that fills my upstairs patio from 6am still wakes me, so I wander over to the wall to be enthralled again by the way the rising sun burns the morning cloud off the plain hundreds of metres below, and by Morocco’s Rif Mountains in the distance. The ginger cat that was a kitten in 1992 still steals over the wall at night to sleep in our upstairs room and sniff hopefully around for a feed. As I walk outdoors to walk indoors in that architecturally gifted Mudejar workmanship of Vejer’s older houses, she looks up lazily at me as if to say: “Hombre, we’re all getting older.” She’s right, of course, but on this visit a revitalised Vejer, all 2000 years of it, sort of feels like it’s only getting younger in the booming New Europe. And I still love it.