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Five Countries-2 of 5

 

DATE BOOK FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 10: Read Chthon and dinner at Les Marroniers and plan trip to 12.

DIARY PAGE: Up late again and don't feel like doing anything except reading, so I do read "Chthon," which starts out pretty poorly and ends rather well, and then JJ is home and I want to go out SOMEWHERE, and he suggests Les Marroniers, so we're out to eat in the quietly nice place with a simple menu, and the food is quite good and the prices are reasonable. He refuses to listen to my arguments about seeing any of the tourist restaurants, and that's something that everyone ends up saying: they absolutely REFUSE to let me go to La Tour D'Argent or Maxim's, since they can't see spending anything like that amount of money for food. It's made for tourists, they say, and while the food may be perfectly good, it's possible to get food as good or better for less than half the price, and since I say I'm after the food, there's no reason to go. But even when I point out to them that I AM a tourist, and not a Parisian, and that I WANT to see what the PLACE is like as well as what the food is like; they still don't listen to me. But the standard of living is different in NYC, they have restaurants that charge as much that I LIKE to go to, and go to often, so why shouldn't I do the same in Paris? Only the tourists go there, I don't like it there, so YOU won't like it there, they counter. But even if I don't like it, I shout in desperation, it's worth the money so that I can go and decide for myself that I don't like it. No, they refuse to understand, and choose some other restaurant that I've never heard about which is good for the people or the decorations or the seafood or the service, and we're out into a place that's filled with Parisians and they're proud, and the food is good, and their point is only partly made. Consequently, since I refused equally to go alone to such a great place, I didn't go to any of these places. We're back to the apartment and put a rough itinerary together, and it begins to look like a rough trip, since only about 5 or 6 of the 30 days have been planned for just sitting somewhere and relaxing by the ocean, and I had somehow thought it would be a very leisurely trip. Portugal is definitely out, though I put into the back of my mind that if we have time, maybe we can make a small detour there. But the whole vacation definitely seems to have become centered around Morocco, and since I don't know any of the places anyway, it doesn't make much difference to me.

DATE BOOK FOR FRIDAY, APRIL 11: Grand Palais at 10:30, Petit Palais at noon. Jeu de Paume at 1, lunch at 3, Louvre at 3:30-5:30, dinner at Etchegory, and see Funny Girl.
DIARY: SCRAPS FROM PARIS: Salon des Independents: Grand Grand Palais, moldering floors from rain and 4700 paintings---most unlookatable, some fun, why or why not MORE male nudes? Only white statue of torso and athletes and the cock-nosed one. See it 10:30-noon, 5400 seconds, about one painting per second!
Petit Palais---good Redon room, so many realists who painted LIKE Manet who AREN'T, and how much these pieces need the environment. A chair out of place is ludicrous.
DIARY PAGE: Decide I have to see some of the remaining sights of Paris, and anyway the maid is coming this morning, so I'm dressed and out to the Grand Palais at 10:30, and the building is more impressive than the acres and acres of works by everyone under the sun, in every style imaginable, and with a monopoly on lousy works of art. But the building looks like a closed-in train station, with huge, transparently-visible means of support, and if a function of a building was ever displayed in all its members, it's been done in this enormous, opaquely-covered with glass, hanger of a building. Old elevators are rusting into the pillars, and doors can be swung back to reveal narrow spiral staircases which I would love to investigate, but the rust has gone so far I fear for its structural strength. The vistas of the building are more impressive than the ranks of art, though there are a few surealists which are fun, but I know now that mere blotches of bright color on a canvas do not a pleasing picture make, there has to be some sort of unifying tone. And smoothly skillfully done realistic paintings get to be boring at a time, too, though not quite as boring as the areas of Mondrian visible yesterday last. Out at 12, with visual gluttony sated, and across to the Petit Palais for a more rococo building with less satisfying art, and the furniture and junk is rather unimpressive, and there are rafts of lesser known French painters who rival the terrible English portraitists in the insipidity of their work. Over to the Jeu de Paume at 1, and there the Impressionists are represented in force, and there are a number of fantastically famous paintings, though many are equally fantastic in the other direction. Out to sit in a little cafe and eat lunch at 3 of a ham sandwich in that lovely pain de compagne and a beer, then rest enough to get back to the Louvre from 3:30 to 5:30, and metro back to meet JJ for dinner at Chez Etchegorry, where I choose the wrong meal and very much the wrong wine, and we dash out to grab a cab to "Funny Girl," (which is interesting for French subtitles letting me know how much is lost in the process of subtitling), and the fact that Piaf is the one who made "My Man" famous, so they don't have subtitles for the beautifully simple climax of the film. Home very tired, tomorrow we leave!

DATE BOOK FOR SATURDAY, APRIL 12: Start "Varieties of Psychedelic Experience," pack, JJ gets car, leave at 3, Fontainbleau at 4, Vezelay, Avalon and Saulieu, eat at 9, car stops at 11, sleep in camp 1-7 am.
DIARY: MEALS AT COTE D'OR IN SAULIEU: Diner: Cote de boeuf du charloais grillé accompagne de sauce marchand de van a la moelle, potatoes au gratin (gratinée dauphinoise), glace pralinée nappée de caramel. Wine: Clos de Nuits St. George, Badoit.
DIARY PAGE: I start reading "Varieties of Psychedelic Experience" while JJ goes back to his garage to get his car, which is finally ready, and we pack and fuss about and finally leave the house at 3, with the trunk loaded with stuff, the pocket of the dashboard filled with maps, and the back seat loaded with stuff that we think we'll use. Had no idea there's be so much stuff along. Down the crowded Peage to Fontainebleau, and he wants some coffee so that gives me a few minutes to dash back along the palace's jardin anglais, see the Etang des Carpes, and look out over the Parterre before running back to the car to start south again along the Carrefour de Maintenon and N5 to Sens, where we stop for a moment to look at the Cathedral St. Etienne, and then down N6 to Auxerre, where there's another huge old Cathedral St. Etienne. Then we're down tiny little roads to Vezelay, which he wants very much to see, and we bounce up the awful road to the top and see the Basilique St. Madeleine, which is in terrible condition, and wander around the ramparts while the sun lowers and JJ tells me about the Son and Lumiere they have here wherein all the surrounding villages are lit up. Rattle through the town square looking at shops and old houses, then down and into Avallon as the sun sets over the Italianate hills, Look at the cathedral and drive through the narrow streets searching out the old houses, and then it's getting dark and we drive into Saulieu, where we can get a meal but not a room. The meal is fabulously good, and after it's finished it's about 10, but he wants to continue down to Autun, so we take off onto N80, and as we go over hill and dale, the car breaks down. No farmhouses around, no one passes, and the motor is boiling over. Try going back slowly, letting the radiator cool, but it heats and we have to stop. After a couple of hours of this we get back into town, but no hotel has room, and we end up in a trailer camp, parking the car and getting out the tonneau cover to warm me, and JJ goes into his sleeping bag. The night is long and cold, and I can't get comfortable, and see the hours passing quietly as I move from side to side trying to relax. Sheer torture, but finally it gets light out and the next day has begun without the last properly ending.

DATE BOOK FOR SUNDAY, APRIL 13: Lunch at Cote D'Or, sit, wander town all over, listen to music, read, eat, go to bed at 11, nice place.
DIARY: MEALS AT COTE D'OR IN SAULIEU: Dejeuner: Terrine; Noix de Veau; Poire Belle Helene; Badoit. Diner: Tomates, Poularde, Chambolle.
DIARY PAGE: Into the dirty cold-water bathroom to rinse off a bit, then back into town, parking in the garage, and thankfully the Cote D'Or has a room for this night and the following. We check into the room and wash properly, and unpack a bit to change for lunch, which is equally excellent, and we're back to the room to listen to JJ's cassette playing Beethoven's last quartets and Mozart piano concertos and Cosi Fan Tutti. Then we're tired of sitting and get out to wander the town, going down the main road until we come to the signs on the side of the road: on the right as we leave, facing us, the sign with the slash across it, on the left, backward, the sign of entry. We go a bit further, but the town has ended as if a razor had slashed it off, and there weren't even farmhouses, only fields stretching out below the crest of the hill. Back a block and wander up an old weed-grown farm road, going into town through the back entrance, and we look at barns with walls caving in and their ceiling stuffing of straw pushing out the loft-doors, and houses that look unchanged for the past millennium. There are few people, so we talk to the cows that we pass. Then there's the back road of N77 bis, and we're back into town to look at the Hotel de Ville and the little graveyard on the hill, and the old church, and we look in dismay at the outcropping of plastic flowers, and all the men killed in the first and second world war, what a waste! Then down to town and I take my book into the luxurious lounge and as darkness falls there's a strange sight outside for so late in the year: snow! It doesn't stick, and then they start up the fire and we're relaxing before there's real need to, but it's pleasant. Another fantastic dinner, even though we're running out of things to order, and again poke around the lounge until time for bed at 11, quite a pleasant place.

DATE BOOK FOR MONDAY, APRIL 14: Train to Avalon at 9, walk town to 11. Buy Michelin, lunch at Hotel de la Poste to 1, train 3-5, dinner at Cote D'Or, bed.
DIARY: Lying in Mont d'Or listening to the cocks crow and the growing traffic on the street.
DIARY PAGE: The car will be ready by the time the garage closes this afternoon, but JJ's already made reservations for the evening, so we're staying on, which no one minds. We've found the schedule of the train to Avallon, and we walk down the city streets in the other direction to the train depot, and watch the small drama of little people going to the big town. The ride is fast and colorful through the green countryside along the highway, and we're back in the town we passed through twice before. While walking the streets it dawns on me that I want SOME sort of a guide, and buy a Michelin surprisingly cheaply, and we retire to the town square and a coffee shop where the coffee is terribly strong, so strong that sugar doesn't even dent it, and glance through the book. Then at noon we're tired of sitting, though the shirtless workers on the facade of the building next door are nice to look at, and some of our fellow tourists are surpassingly beautiful, and we get into the Hostelleria de la Poste, where Napoleon shacked up one night, and we repair to the gentlemen's rooms, nicely cool and marbled, to wash, and into the vaulted narrow dining room. The people crowd around and the menu is surpassingly elegant, and the stuffiness grows and grows as JJ points out differences between the formality of this and the ease of Cote D'Or. The meal is tasty, but the chicken in paté sauce comes out looking absolutely black, and it's a rather forbidding color for a meal, no matter how good it tastes. Quite expensive, too. Look around the town some more, walking down to the point and gazing down into the valleys on either side, then walking down the steep road to the Parc des Chaumes and looking at the fields clinging to the sides of the hills, and then it clouds up and begins to rain, and we walk back to the station and wait for the train at 3. It comes a bit late, but gets us back to Saulieu in the allotted two hours, and we walk even more slowly back to the hotel, because there's nothing more to do. Again we're reading, I'm continuing on "Varieties," and again it's time for dinner, and we're into the main dining room this evening, and every night they're crowded with people, sometimes elegant old couples, sometimes families tutoring their children on good food, sometimes groups who look like the local Chamber of Commerce. But the car is ready, and this is the last night, so I fill the tub and take a green-smelling bath which leaves my hair impossible, so next I have to wash it again, but a warm smelly bath is comforting, though again we have done nothing yet to be comforted FROM.

DATE BOOK FOR TUESDAY, APRIL 15: Leave at 9 to Tympanum at Autun, Church at Paray-le-Monial, thru Vichy, Riom for statue, lunch in Issoire at 2, Gorges du Tarne and Chaos at Montpelier-le-Vieux, dinner at Millau, Beziers at 11.
DIARY: Sainte-Enemie: Fantastic view from cliff-top. So hard NOT to think of the far more vastly superior splendors of the Flume, Yoho, Grand Canyon, Gunnison, when driving through the Gorges of the Tarn. BUT for the fact that whenever you LOOK, there are the terraces built of piled rocks, farm houses falling down, bridges collapsed, huge mansions with no possibility of auto usage, and grape vines, grape vines, grape vines.
At night, listening to the so-French words "mistral" and "tramontagne," feeling the car rock from the wind, and looking at the bright planet going green, yellow, a flash of red, white, and no blue at all. Through tree fronds skewed by side winds, car booming over road.
DIARY PAGE: We're off on the road again at 9, after paying and tipping everyone, and I expect the car to stop again at any moment. JJ has another sight he wants me to see at Autun, the tympanum of the Cathedral St. Lazare, but I simply can't get excited about this hunk of stone, signed by its carver about 900 years ago, simply because it's not very beautiful to look at, partly because it was very primitive to start with, partly because it's become damaged with time. We start on one of a series of discussions about art, he saying he gets a feeling for the people by looking at the art AS IT IS, I saying first I'd like to see it restored, secondly, the people who did it didn't think they were doing anything special, they just developed slightly from their predecessors, enabling their successors to go a bit farther. He doesn't agree, and it gives us something to talk about. We drive down through Digoin and detour to Paray-le-Monial, which is interesting even before entering because it's built on a series of canals, but the church itself leaves me cold, though JJ explains that it's remarkably unified because it was built before the styles had a chance to change, but the towers of Rouen still float before me, and the yellowed rock without embellishment before me leaves me as cold as it strikes me as being in itself. We're rather silent because he feels cheated of my appreciation, so I take it up by praising the countryside, which is quite pleasant. Pass through le Donjon and onto a winding curving road which is fun to ride on, and through Lapalisse to Vichy, where we get a glimpse of the Parc des Sources and the Grand Casino before we hit the Parcs De L'Allies and cross the river of the same name. Michelin tells me that Riom has a three-star Vierge a L'Oiseau in the Eglise Notre Dame du Marthuret, and pretty it is when we stop, but JJ is getting impatient so we whiz through Clermont Ferrand and I'm beginning to starve, so we stop in Issoire for a sandwich and beer for lunch, and down to the viaduct de Garabit over the Gorges de la Truyere, beautiful, and to the Gorges du Tarn by way of Ste-Enimie, fantastic grape cuttings growing on rock ledges, isolated villages on tarn-sides, fabulous views to la Malene. We detour to the Chaos de Montpellier le Vieux, romp on rocks until dark, incredibly tortured, and it rains as we go over fantastic road to Millau, coming in more like an airplane than a car, eat in the fair one-star Commerce, and rush down to Beziers at 11, staying at the Nord, after a day of incredible roads and driving.

DATE BOOK FOR WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16: 9:30 to Perpignon at 11, leave car, see Castillet, Cathedral, lunch and pastis in Loge to 2:30, then Palace of Majorca Kings and car at 5:30. Along GREAT coasts and FUN roads to Cadaques at 9, and bed at 11 after lovely walk through town. Flat tire in AM.
DIARY: Day in Perpignon---WIND, except at Loges---blowing at the Castillet, outside the Eglise, where you drop a franc to see the chapel lit, and especially atop the Palace of the Kings of Majorca, and getting eyes filled with stones, mouth full of grit, and face full of dust on road to car, and told to sit in waiting room at 4:15, and by 5:15 the car is fixed and we're ready to start.
So I DO have to write, so I DO. I want to get the impressions---lying in bed in Cadaques listening to the dogs and cats in heat, and screaming kids, and the staccato jabs of a motor scooter.
DIARY PAGE: Up at 9:30 to breakfast and down to Perpignan at 11, leave the car in the garage that we found through Michelin, and then walked back to the heart of the city. It still wasn't particularly hot, but the sun was blazing down and the wind which tore along the street carried such dust that it seemed we were in Morocco already. We see the Ethnic Museum in the base of the Castillet, which JJ doesn't want to pay to see, but then circumambulating the pile, we find that's the only entrance. Costumes and artifacts and tools and religious icons are artfully placed in showcases, and some of the small altars are interesting in their combination of mythic and Catholic. Up more flights of worn spiral stairs, and we find ourselves on the terrace roof, and later on the tower roof of the Castillet, where the wind blows harder than ever and the palm-lined canals through the town remind us that we're getting farther south, as if the orange trees we've begun to see along the highway weren't clue enough. Down and to the Cathedral just as it closes, and across to the Loge, which rates a star in Michelin, as almost everything else in town does. We're into one of the lining restaurants for a pretty bad lunch, latterly shared with a busload of tourists which make me glad I'm not on a tour, at least not on THAT tour, and then we're out to one of the tables in the sun to wait a long time before being served, then just after we get it, we have to pay the bill and give the glasses back because they close for siesta at 2. What a place! Finish and roam through the town trying to find the Palace of the Kings of Majorca, and get lost in the terribly narrow twisting streets, but find it finally and into the massive-decorated brick entry-hall and into the hugely-proportioned court, where another French guide takes over, this one terrible and rushing, and we see the remains of the chapel, the enormous dining hall, secret passages, royal living quarters, the profound well, and other apartments of royalty until we're tired of walking around, and JJ is tired of listening to his southern French accent, where the normally silent last syllables are pronounced lovingly. By now it's 5, and the car should be ready, so back through the same windy streets to the garage, and it's finished about 6. Drive quickly through Banyuls-sur-Mer, Port-Bou, Llansa and Cadaques, finding a hotel, eating, walking town, bed.

DATE BOOK FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 17: Drive to Barcelona by 11:30, see Sagrada Familia by 2, lunch at Lutecia, buy guide, tire fixed, Parque Guell and Tibidabo and roads poor to Montserrat at 9:30 for quick dinner and bed.
DIARY: Lying in Montserrat listening to the weird croon of the crippled woman in the next bathroom as I fantasize her masturbating to herself.
DIARY PAGE: Yesterday was the best of all so far, winding along the coast on impossible roads, terrified on the turns lest we meet someone coming the other way, or that we go over the side as we gawk into the canyons. This entire area is not at all developed, yet the surf crashes most satisfyingly below, and further south there's sign of building, but here it's still natural. Around Cadaques last night, so we drive back inland through Gerona and then get caught in truck traffic along the ocean headed for Barcelona. It's getting hotter and hotter, and Barcelona is an oven, and the top's down all the time. Go directly to the Sagrada Familia, park, and into the area of the church, looking at the fantastic gypsum model of the completed edifice, then taking the elevator to the top of one of the towers, clambering up and down to see the various views, and at one point there's a scream and postcards and a sweater goes floating down, and a strange dark girl says she'd been attacked, but someone ran up the steps to find no one, though JJ remembered a boy in white trousers who followed her. I retrieve a book of hers, and we finish sightseeing while she tells her story to everyone else. There's an area we're not supposed to go into, but we do anyway, climbing around the concrete forms for the slanting columns, the organic windows, the strange leaf-like decorations that Gaudi is so fond of. Tired and hot and find a cool restaurant that takes ages to be served in, and we locate a Spanish Michelin after much looking, and read about Poblet and Montserrat. Get lost driving through the streets for the Parque Guell, and see Gaudi's apartment building quite by chance, luckily. The Parque is wackily beautiful in color and form, but too distant from the city to be well used. Continue up the hill to Tibidabo, for great views over Barcelona, then get lost in the little back roads and cover all of Tarrasa and Martorel and Olesa, in increasing darkness, until we're up the final road to Montserrat at 9:30, get a meal just before the restaurant closes, and walk a few streets in the dark before bed, early but tired at 10:30.

DATE BOOK FOR FRIDAY, APRIL 18: Fog and clouds and rain, and I come and out at 8:30 to Poblet 11:30-1, and lunch in Montblanch and along coast to Alcala to city tour of Valencia to Luiz Vives Parador in El Salar at 8:30, and walk beach and bed.
DIARY: Lying in Saler listening to the very faint sea waves over the golf course, the putt of a power mower (following through the Castle of the Majorcan kings in Perpignan, and Poblet) on the greens, the people moving furniture upstairs, JJ in the shower, having gone in though he ADMITTED that he felt lazy, as I smiled up to him as he crawled wryly out of bed at 8:20. I want to capture the PEOPLE: the wonderfully sunny fat red-cheeked woman walking quickly on chunky legs in Argentan, the sulky waiter at the Normandy Hotel in Avranches, the colored guy from Guadeloupe in the Tuilleries, the coughing woman at the opera, the jabbering people at "Funny Girl," the boy saying goodbye to his tearful mother at the Saulieu train, the Legion of Honor man at the Hostelerria de la Poste in Avalon, the angry garage man at Saulieu, the lovely English men at Millau eating in the Hotel du Commune, the cute kid in the cafe at Cadaques as we passed, the thigh-assed waiters in the Playa-Sol, the Jewish-novel casual guy and pert blond girl across from us, the Germans with the dog that wouldn't sit down, the abruptness of coming through customs, the gruff "Oh, all right" of the official when JJ told him I was American. The red-nosed French guide in Perpignon, the people at the Loge (girls and guys and mongoloids) in Perpignon, the hard-nosed Spanish guide in Poblet, and all those lovely blue-jeaned boys in the town, the cute married man with his big brown eyes and furry eyebrows and packed body at lunch at Montblanch, the cute feisty gas station attendant, the marvelous mélange of people in the restaurant at Soler. The garbage smells and dust and noise of Barcelona, the orange smell---blossoms, fruit and burning wood through Castillon and Valencia. The lousy Spanish wines, the surprise of paella in Valencia having no seafood, only large lima beans, hard peas, green beans, yellow rice and good chicken. The transcendent sunlight from behind on tree leaves in south France, the shadowed cutout silhouettes of range on range through Spain toward sunset, the SHOCK of the cloud-foggy snow caps from Perpignan. The pleasure of listening to JJ's cassette playing Beethoven's last quartets while I'm lying quiet in bed. The wonder about our having sex, a wholly different subject, but my hand's getting sore, and I must be up now at 8:45. But the wait at breakfast is long, and I take the chance to cite breakfast yesterday at Montserrat, when the tea was SALTY in taste, the marmalade was not quite marmalade, being dark and sweet, and the chocolado, ugh, was sweet and so thick it poured in glops and had to be eaten with a spoon, until I called for milk, when equal milk and chocolate made it hot and palatable, except when the last milk poured FOAMY from the silver pitcher and JJ asked if that was usual and I lied, "Yes."
DIARY PAGE: Up early to enormous foggy day and misty rain, breakfast of incredible hot chocolate and salty tea, then decide not to wait for fog to lift, but drive through eerie valleys and Igualado to Poblet, which is quite disappointing, mainly because we must go on a tour, and the only tour leaving is full of kids who speak only Spanish. The church and tombs of the kings are nice, but the cloisters and monasteries don't particularly impress, and we leave at 1, when they close for a few hours. Drive down to Montblanch to strange empty restaurant for lunch, watching workers from the factory trudge up the hill to lunch and back down from lunch, and back to the coast at Tarragona. Along a steamy coast with oranges for sale everywhere, and even pass Miami Playa. Tired of driving finally and JJ sees the town of Alcala de Chivert down the road and we drive into it, finding dirt streets flanked by stucco facades painted pink and yellow and green and the most vibrant blue possible. The blue is so intense his camera even fails to capture any of it. Peer at the old church and wander the vacant streets, and when someone sees us, they stare at us as if we visited from another planet, as, compared to them, we are. Down to Valencia, and there are a lot of one-star attractions in the city, so I pore over the map and we turn and peer and get lost and re-turn and find our way and consult on the map, and by the time we've finished, we've theoretically seen it all, yet it's just a blur. Get too far out on the docks to get to El Saler, and I'm getting disgusted with the maps and the directions here in Spain, having gotten us lost a number of times. Finally on the right road at dusk, and we race along the coast, sheltered from the surf by a row of trees and jungle between the road and the ocean, and on the right is a lagoon stretching out to the lights of the city. Finally we hit the Parador Luis Vives, and it's a modern building fronting a golf course which fronts the sea. In and eat a typical parador meal, enjoy our room, then out to wander the grounds and walk through the ice plants to the ocean, which we listen to crashing on the shore for a long time, then back to the room to bed.

DATE BOOK FOR SATURDAY, APRIL 19: Out at 10:15 after I write leisurely. See Alicante's 50-story skyscraper, stop in Elche Park for lunch and drive lush green Murcia-Gau-Dix road to dark Grenada, walk and eat and bed at 11:30.
DIARY: I just simply have GOT to write more. It's April 19th---now about one month since I've left, and I've waked up each morning, feeling rested and comfortably stretchable in bed---that time when the bed feels so comfortable no matter what your position, the blankets and sheets fall neatly around your limbs no matter how you position them, the warmth is all-pervasive, and contrasts so beautifully with the coolness of the morning room. Each morning---in Perpignan, in Cadaques, in Montserrat, and this morning south of Valencia, south of El Saler, I wake at seven and lie and think and feel alternatively very good and very bad about the trip, and love being on it for its lovely moments---the twisted roads over the sea, the white-tiled houses of Cadaques, the broken-tiled brilliance of Parque Guell, the scream from the top of the tower at Sagrada Familia, the comfort of the hotels, the late walk on the beach at the Parador---and fear the rest. What will we do today? How far will we go? What will we do with our lack of knowledge of Spanish? Will the car break down a third time? Will we get a third flat? Will we wreck the car---these persistent Spanish drivers? What will we talk about? Will we get sick from the food or the water or the weather or the insects or the hotels? What will we talk about? Will we see anything SPECTACULAR today? Where will we sleep tonight, eat lunch this afternoon, go tomorrow? When will we RELAX? For we've been DRIVING! We didn't want to stop in France, but there was Fontainebleau and Vezelay and Paray le Monial and Saulieu and Avalon and the Gorges du Tarn and Millau and Beziers and Perpignon (where JJ forgot to see the Gare that Dali always talks about). Then we wanted to speed through Spain, to get to sunny Morocco, but there was Cadaques and Barcelona and Montserrat, when the clouds gathered and the fog moved like clumps of rain, visibly clouding the small areas against the car. So we left, over my suggestions that we wait for it to clear, and it cleared on one side so that we could see the sun shining in the northern valley, then we moved south and the clouds, instead of rising UP the hill, clearing the valleys, flowed DOWN the hill, coming from some inexhaustible reservoir in the sky. So we flew south along the coast, driving steadily from 10 am, stopping for lunch in Montblanch, driving on a ludicrous twisting car tour of Valencia, and leaving at dark to get lost on the docks and follow the small pocked road south of El Sale, bordered by woods and pines and palms on the left and by marshy plains rising only dozens of kilometers away into lighted dwelling areas, to the Parador. Then this morning I thought of how MUCH I wanted to write, and knew how stupid I was to bring the typewriter---at least now as we rush down to Grenada. We haven't yet come to the lazy days I expected at the beach, where to avoid the sun I'd retreat to the room to type. And those days may NEVER come, since the route through Morocco has city after city and much to see and drive through, and little open spare time where I can trouble to take out the typewriter for even one hour. So I haven't typed yet in the first week, the first quarter, of the trip, and I feel guilty about it. Oh, I don't really MIND now, as I won't really MIND later typing up all these things, but I WILL mind when I'll want a log of the trip, day by day, and I'll curse myself (as I did for the last days at the Taj Mahal, or through Canada on the last US trip, that I simply never got around to doing---or some of the days with the Eastern Canada trip with Larry---and did I do that one at ALL?) for not having started earlier.
DIARY PAGE: Sleep late and I get some writing done, and we're out at 10:15 and down along the ocean to Benidorm and Alicante which boasts an enormous 50-story skyscraper which must be the highest for some distance, and inland to Elche, which is a dusty little town, and we can't find the Palmerai, so we get to the city park in the palms, and find a little restaurant with a voracious one-eyed cat who eats most of JJ's fish, and the ambiance of whiteness is nice, in the shade under the palms. Wander the gardens afterward, and most of them aren't too well tended, but there are some lovely lilies in spots, and some huge violet flowers which neither of us knows. By this time all the flowers are out, and wherever we look there are flowers. The orange blossoms of the north have given way to the oranges of the south, and the smells are similar yet distinguishable. The days are sizzling hot and I take care to wear a beret so I don't get burned, which JJ does, but he seems to want to be. I continue wearing a long-sleeved white shirt so the sun doesn't get through to my arms, but my face is burned into the shape of my sun-glasses, since I'm continuing to wear my contacts, and JJ begins to call me Mickey Mouse, with my large white eyes in the midst of a red face. The road is wide and there's little traffic down the center of the country to Murcia, and we pass Lorca and Velez Rubio looking at the green hills and the beautiful clouds, and whipping along in the convertible, this really seems like a day of vacation. Spanish children wave to us all over the place, and we're delighted to see a group of them running like crazy to the top of a steep hill so that they can see us coming and whizzing past while waving to us. At one point I have my hand up against the sun and we pass a crew of soldiers marching, and they begin to salute when I realize that my hand up is a salute in itself, and I almost feel like standing up in the front seat as we zip past and review them. A cheer goes up from them as we pass, and it lasts in my ears quite a while. Along about Guadix and Purullene there are troglodytes living in caves, and we look in amazement at the whitewashed facades to holes in the ground, looking like houses from below a cliff-crest, but above the cliff there's nothing to be seen at all! Darkness falls as we wind over the convoluted roads leading into the clouds toward Grenada, and the scenery gets more and more impressive after the sun sets, and I'm sorry when it finally turns completely dark, and all we can see below us are the scattered lights of towns. The airplane effect, again. Trouble finding a hotel in Grenada, trouble finding ALCAZAR, settle in Washington Irving.

DATE BOOK FOR SUNDAY, APRIL 20: Up lazy late and breakfast at 10, to Alcazar at 11:30, then Alcazaba and Generalife and Cathedral and St. Nicholas terrace and walk to car. To Sierra Nevada at 10:15, and to bed an hour later.
DIARY: A cold coral color of red was left in the sky, fighting an overwhelming wash of pearl gray. Sunset came before the Alcazar, and we got lost in Granada, twice.
1:30 pm. Alhambra---I probably FIRST heard it as the "Stories from the Alhambra" by Washington Irving in high school, but forgot about it so thoroughly it was only at breakfast that I recalled the reason for the stupid presence of the Hotel Washington Irving in which we spent the night, surrounded by passing motors of cars and scooters, groups of boys howling at passing girls, and the morning sounds of bells, cars, moaning putative basses, the moving of heavy creaking furniture in the next room, the scream of kids, the Spanish babble of tourists. "Will you wait outside?" and he gestured out to the terrace of the Parador, higher than the towers of the Woman and Children and Captives, overlooking the green oblongs of the manicured trees of the Generalife terraces. Birds shot past, bees fucked in the flowers, butterflies pitter-pattered over the hedges, and the lizards scurried up and down the walls. Smells of all sorts of flowers, JJ's violet "glycine" (which turned out to be wisteria), rose trees bursting into bloom, yellow minarets like fat goldenrod sticking straight up, huge white flowering trees, violet-flowering trees, enormous bushes of yellow common-like tea roses, beds of delicately shaded anemone-like flowers of every color of yellow and pink and red. Orange trees, lemon trees, cherry trees in blossom, marroniers, palms, banana trees, small trees of pom poms, and a little branch of withered cherry-sized sour apples decorated by hair. Garden paths with trimmed hedges, banks of broom, brick ruins of old houses, bridges, roads. Green arches of fir, so solidly green they press like bed springs. Sparrows munch crumbs not three feet from my two feet, flies flirt everywhere, hanging like living jewels in the light walls of the tower.
And always the whistlers and the singers and the kids howling like dogs, crowds of English, Italian, French, German, Spanish tourists, all staring at stalactite ceilings and lion fountains and gold-covered ceilings, straining against iron bars to see the views.
But, with wine, the birds and the whistlers fade into a muzzy glow---all is well, it's too much trouble to write. How nice of society to allow at least THIS form of soma. Kindly. SHIT.
DIARY PAGE: Walked late last night to see the lit ruins, so up late and write a bit and have a leisurely breakfast and over to the Alcazar. I read that some parts are closed at noon, and it's 11, so I dash through with an unhappy JJ at my heels, getting unsatisfying glimpses of glorious rooms hidden by hordes of tourists, and see the gardens of Daraxa, but then it seems that they're not going to close them, and JJ's lost his patience with me and says that we'll each look at what we want to look at, and meet at the exit to the gardens at 2. Back to the beginning and the very informal (read: weed-grown) garden of Machuca, the Cour du Mexuar in a state of disrepair, low, worm-eaten ceiling beams looking oddly out of place, but the Ambassador's Room in the Tour de Comares is brightly lit and resplendent with carved and painted plaster decorations, deeply cut and forming shadows in the bright light, but green and yellow and blue-painted newly to give an impression of what it must have been like when it may have been inlaid with gold, with carpets on the floors, and brilliant chandeliers above (brilliant candles??). Somehow I'd thought that myrtle were trees, so the Cour des Myrtes was disappointing until I found that they were actually those low bushes. But the court is nice and open and sunny, but there's not too much to see IN it, except as a hallway to the richly decorated alcoves off on either side, and in one of them the leather-work and gold ceiling is in the process of being restored. The Cour de la Grille is a tiny one with a trickling fountain, leading to the beautiful Jardin Daraxa, tree-filled and shaded, looked down on from the balconies encircling it, and leading off by twisting ways to the baths, which must have been lovely when they were filled with clean water, but now that they have standing pools, there's a dankness, even in the colored lights thrown off by the domed skylights. The Salle des Deux Soeurs is again brilliantly done, opening into the Cour des Lions, and again the lions don't strike me, but the effect, I'm sure, is different filled with musicians and cushions, rather than filled with screaming tourists and clots of touring groups. Out to the gardens, all through, eat at the Parador (see Diary), then the Alcazaba and Generalife, walk to Cathedral, huge, and I get to St. Nicholas terrace, drive up to Solyniege, eat, and bed at 11:15.

DATE BOOK FOR MONDAY, APRIL 21: Up better by 8 to sun on snow, but leave at 10:30 after ferry hassle. Drive up to snow line at 2680 km, then to Grenada, good road to sea and lunch at Nerja Parador. To Malaga Giraldofaro and Torremolinos Parador at 6, on beach to 8, bed 11.
DIARY: 4/21 am. One of the benefits of being above the snow line---SILENCE. Sun bright off reflected snow makes me early at 7:15, and there's utter stillness. Not even the furniture movers are awake (they wake later, however). No birds, no dogs, no cows, no whistlers or singers. It's almost another world, sun gleaming off snow still white on the hills, though it may have been there for weeks or months.
10 am. FRUSTRATION! Waiting AGAIN for a telephone call---no one seems to be doing anything and JJ walks slowly around with a slow low speech and a long face saying "Well, maybe there is not enough gas" for the trip to the top of the hill. Here we are, 10 km from the top of Europe and the people at the hotel talk and laugh their own language, and I sit, waiting, frustrated. Tourists here are just an interruption, someone to be made fun of or tolerated. The phones are impossible---waiting for a call from only 400 km away, and there's no idea when it will come through. JJ presses his lips together and saunters out to the hall and outside, looking into the trunk of the car and under the hood.
The wind in the grass had a silvery sheen, like the fur on a fat cat's back.
The eternal thoughts recur, recur, just as the waves do. In and out the water runs, in sunlight and in shadow. In and out, the elements toss to and fro, the water beating the rock until it crumbles into sand, lying there in homogeneous unity with bark bit and fish bone and slate shard and sea shell. The water beats them up and grids them down on beaches, then the water rises or falls, and the beaches sink or rise dry. Eventually, anyway, the beach becomes the earth, leavened with dung, peppered by tree droppings, caressing the dead. Plants grow, trees grow, produce fruit, animals eat, man eats---all---the plants, the fruits, the animals. Even now man dreams of reaping the sea directly of its nutrients to speed up the cycle. And so the particle becomes part of a man, perhaps the eye, which perceives it sees, or the hand, which senses it touches, or the mind, which thinks it understands. It thinks of the cycle, the cycle of the waves and the sand and the earth and the food and the man itself. The mind thinks of the mind thinking, and the pen is urged to cover the paper with marks, like the wind covering the grasses in the back roads of Spain, patting the grasses to make them sleek. Man walks the beach, searching, and can find the cycle of the waves or the droppings of the waves---stones, shells, twigs, small dead animals. Man searches through the ocean's excrement for---what? The perfect stone, tapering to a perfect oblate, either flawlessly colored white or pink or green, or else pleasantly mottled, artistically, esthetically pleasing, to the current senses of artistic or esthetic. Man searches for the perfect shell, not pierced by the killer clam that unsprings the welkin, or not cracked in its journeys through the oceans of waves, not mottled by seaweed's dyes or yet blasted white by the sun. The perfect shell---but all are not quite symmetrical, or have lost one scallop, or have but the tiniest imperfection---man throws it back and hunts another. Or keeps it and looks out at the hundred, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of hundreds of thousands, and realizes his pockets seem suddenly small. Sandpipers---seven---nibble at slimy goodies from the sea, then they are gone---looking for the perfect slimy goody. Allegory, allegory. Waves come and go, all perfectly the same, yet all completely different, in weight, in volume, in size, in shape, in color, in sound in smell in taste in touch. The sea is white or yellow at the foam at the edge, brown or yellow with sand in the surf, green or grown in the shallows, blue or green in the middle distance, and gray or blue in the distance---yet isn't water white, always, as foam? Appearances and allegories. Clouds fade from pink to gray as sun moves from up to down, like values on a scale. Analogies and appearances and allegories. One writes, sandpipers fly in formation, turning themselves from brown to white, and the wind blows from rearward, fingering under the edge of my sweater, cooling the backs of my arms, raising my hackles, and I watch two sand flies taking dirty sand baths as they consort. Do they come? Do they like it? Can they masturbate? Are the women passive? Are there gay flies? Bar flies? Stupid.
It grows cold as the light dies, yet my hand warms two stones and one shell I've gathered. I can throw them away or keep them. If I throw them away, someone else may pick them up and throw them away or keep them. If I keep them, I, or someone else, someday, somehow, in some way, will throw them away. Or they'll be burnt, or buried, or drowned, or vaporized, if my possessions encounter these potential ends. So nature will dispose of them, as they are ALWAYS, somehow, eventually, thrown away. Cycles of waves and particles. Though not now on drugs, I feel that everything connects. Sandpipers and sand flies and sex and stones and the sun and the cycle of the sea.
The waves come in aslant the beach, and break from right to left. My writing tends to poetry, and I find it rather depressing. Why did I say that? I didn't say that, I WROTE that. You're becoming coy, and in a dialogue yet. Stop that. OK. Don't be funny. I'm not, my mind just goes on so.
Look, here comes a plane.
Trailing two plumes of smoke, flashing a red light in its belly and one high on its tail, its high-pitched whine grows louder as it wobbles back and forth in the wind, heading down for the Malaga airport. As it passes overhead the wheels can be seen reaching for touchdown, and the pitch shifts to bass as Doppler insists on taking his Effect. Moments later, the reversed roar of engines for braking sound louder than the waves, then the ocean takes over. How the ocean would take over if the plane CRASHED in it! Depressing again.
Shadow at my shoulder on the page, and I turn back to see dust-laden sun shafts pointing to trees and sections of the beach. It grows brighter until I feel heat, and the clouds are burned away and the white of the waves takes on a new sparkle and glitter, though the sun is dying---it has only a half hour to live. A-, but, it will be reborn. That lucky old sun! My sitting shadow reaches out to touch the waves with its head, and another joined pair, or the same joined pair, of sand flies grapple at my foot.
The two stones and a shell now are moist as well as warm in my hand, as my grasp grows harder. I look at them---fantastically beautiful---and fling them to land separately in three small fountain sprays of sand. They're lost, they're gone. But only to me. For the rest of the world, they remain in the same status they always had. They ARE.
My exclamation---THE exclamation from my mouth---the exclamation from the mouth on my body---the exclamation from the mouth on the body which I---never mind. "My!" I say, like an effete Jack Benny, when I see a sight I like. I don't say "Oh" and leave it, I say "My," like a baby crying for something beyond his reach. "Mine, MINE, give it to ME!"
Without ME it's unimportant (I kill a bug---ugh, a mess---walking across my page---here's---the spot. Red. Do bugs have blood? Ugh.
As the foam crosses over the wave, it forms a dark tunnel, shaded from the sun. A dark tunnel. A tunnel without lights. Life? Mind? Writing? My ankle is sore where I twisted it this afternoon---I hope it gets well. I stop writing, and look around. I look back down to the page I'm writing, following the tip of the ballpoint pen as it makes uniformly blue marks in a terrible scribble across the white page. Maybe the page isn't white, because my shadow---the shadow I---never mind. I look up. And a person, JJ, comes---and if I stop writing, I won't write anything more. How's that? For a fact.
Peace. Simple tranquility. Even the pen moves more slowly over the page. Warm now, inside, after the cold which succeeded the sunset, while I watched the tanker sail from Malaga to across from Torremolinos---such NAMES, and I'm THERE. JJ has an opera on his cassette, and my nose is only cold, and I anticipate the coming meal and bed, my cheeks tingling with the warmth. I could ask him who's singing, even what opera, though I seem to hear it's Cosi Fan Tutti, but it seems absolutely not to matter. A man walks from the apartment next door, head hidden, only shoulders to thighs showing, and I want for a moment to see the head, but his head isn't visible, so I don't see it, so that's that. I sit, soaked in comfort and the music, and yet I think, and thinking words, seek to write. When JJ walked up on the beach I wanted him to ask me to read him what I'd written, but felt shy at the same time. When the setting sun left my eyes filled with a red-gold after-image, I looked up at an approaching plane and blurrily shaped it into a flying saucer. Of COURSE, coming to get ME! They had observed me by the edge of the sea, limned by the setting sun, and had come for me. They'd received word from their planet, where everything is strange because their day is like our second, thus we seem enormously slow, or their second is our day, and they have to study us with complex instruments, and watch us photographically, as we have to watch subatomic events with cloud chambers in intervals of micro-seconds. I, I, I, I want to be SO important. I want EVERYONE to read what I write and say, "Yes, that's JUST how it is. I've seen JUST what he's seen, thought JUST what he's thought, but he's said it so neatly, so aptly, so beautifully, we love him for it. Is that him? Oh, let's talk to him, let's give ourselves to him, for he writes so beautifully." Is THAT why I write? It may be, since it's the other side of the idea that I write because I have no one I love to talk to.
Remember the enormous inconsequential conversations with tricks on the first nights? All about schooling and childhood and likes and dislikes and sex urges and cruising and theaters and bars and music and opera and ballet and best foods and dreams and visions. Now? Now everything seems so LONG that it's untellable, even in a lifetime. Maybe that's the growing from a one-night stand attitude (when everything could be equally told in one night) to the love for life attitude, that TAKES a life to TELL all to.
Again I find myself on a trip, as with Larry, or Madge, or Chuck, or Avi, or alone, wondering WHY I was traveling like this, when we SHOULD travel with one we LOVE.
But JJ seems so distant---yet in the same way I imagine I appear distant, yes, maybe hostile, to him in return.
How crazy people are? Automatic question mark---and why? They're NOT, they just all want the SAME thing, love, and invariably manage NOT to find it. SELFISH and LOVE don't GO together.
DIARY PAGE: Up at 9 to glorious absolute silence, look out over the blinding snow and JJ goes to insure that the car didn't freeze overnight, since they had no garage in which to park the obviously anti-freezeless car. Trouble with arrangements as described in the Trip Diary, and he accedes to my wish to go as high as we can. Magnificent cloud effects, and they're building the road in places, which slows us down considerably and makes it dusty. Rolling brooks fall over the cliffs, small restaurants and pensions cover the hills where they don't have flowers, and rounding a bend with other cars we see an enormous snow-drift covering the road. It's only a little distance on, though, that I see clear road, and walk up that patch to see another huge drift, this one completely burying the road indefinitely. So that's the end of the highest auto road in Europe, and we're about a mile and a half high. Walk on the crystalized snow and get some into my hands just to feel it this late in the year, and look over the view of the surrounding snow-capped hills, and then down again through the same blocked roads, roaring along the trolley track and the stream, needing gas, down to Grenada again to gas up and into town to find that the Tangier Ferry is full when we want to go, and we'll have to go from Malaga (this is a lie, as we later find). Down to the bank to cash money for the expensive ferry, then into much traffic out of Granada, and take off on a little country road that's just ideal: no traffic, no signs of life, no signs, absolutely nothing but a well-paved road winding through beautiful countryside. Fantastically patterned hill of tiny diamond-shaped fields of all different colors just before we hit the ocean at Almunecar, and the surf is breathtaking, but we feel we can't stop, since we want to hit the Parador at Nerja for lunch and maybe stay there. This place strikes JJ as the best yet, swimming pool and natural beach and rolling lawns strewn with deck chairs, large timbered dining room with elegant clientele. Eat and find there's no room, continue to Malaga and up the Gilbralfaro where I twist my ankle painfully, but there's no room, so we reserve at the Torremolinas one, drive there and it's distant and pleasant, down to the beach to write for a long time, dinner and sit enjoying music before bed at 11, sailing tomorrow.

DATE BOOK OF TUESDAY, APRIL 22: Up at 7, out at 8 to ferry, sail to 9, land at 1:20 after breakfast and lunch. Tangiers a mess of pushers, but we get change and insurance and gas tickets and go south to Rabat, check into Balima, have good meal, walk hopped-up town, bed at 11, waked till 3 by awful roomer noise.
DIARY: So the coast of Spain passes silently past the ferry to Tangier, and again my mind ricochets through the standard ideas: this is actually ME, on an actual BOAT, sailing past the actual coast of honest-to-God Spain! Somehow this is the antithesis of Krishnamurti's philosophy to FORGET about the self, and it's true that he has an inarguable point. It's the essence of simplicity: if you're NOT thinking, DEFINE that as happy, and you've got it made. As soon as you think ANYTHING, even the thought "Oh, my God, I'm so HAPPY," the mere ACT of thinking gives almost the idea of shouting it aloud, and as the mental ears hear the mental shout, it sounds forced and phony and false. But that's the same reaction to thinking ANY thought "aloud."
With the tendency to act theatrically buried so deeply, or rising so high, in me, it's impossible to do anything with thought without putting on a performance for people around me, people in the distance, absent friends, or even people from another planet, as happened last night as I stood alone on the sunset beach silhouetted for the observers from the flying saucer.
And there's a certain truth to the idea of the unimportance of thought: in memory, so much a part of thought (does Krishnamurti say this?) there's only the memory of the OBJECTIVE, the place, the weather, the people, not the memory of the THOUGHTS. The horror of having a perfect memory begins to appear, if that perfection would include the recollection of ALL thoughts on ALL occasions. But the exponential increase of this memory makes SUCH a perfection seem impossible.
Anyway, I'm on a ferry between Spain and Morocco---this morning enjoying the freshness of a warm Spanish sunrise serenaded by birds caged and uncaged, this afternoon in the unknown heat of Morocco.
Again there comes to mind the thought of this book, JJ's car, my binoculars, my fragmented body, drifting at various speeds or at the same speed down through the troubled blue depths after a boiler explosion on the ship---blasting everything to the bottom of the sea, where the salt and fish and currents would reduce all objects in the course of years to the sunless muck at the bottom---in this era to re-arise as old Atlantis or Mu, to wait for an evolutional rising in the next era, thousands or millions of years from now, or the atoms may rest, tranquil, until the annihilation of the solar system by a supernova somewhere near, unthinkable eons away, when all will be dissociated into particles, or even energy, to blast out, condense into space dust, to be scooped out by a passing star, thus to be flung out onto another life-bearing planet, or to rest in a star for the life of the star. And it (children running to see us and wave to us on our way to Grenada) strikes me, self-consciously, that I'm throwing around eons of time with great ease. Again the remonstration: I think too much. So let's stop writing, watch the coast, look forward to Gibraltar, and stop thinking long enough to be happy.
Entry to Tangiers a riot: off boat fast, onto end of last line of cars. Immediately little brown men surround the car, tugging at JJ to get insurance, gas tickets, change, money vouchers, passport clearances, girls, anything.
We go off with one, but it seems a hoax, and that sours us for the others, and we sit, saying we'll wait, while the others shrug their shoulders and look at us as if we were crazy. We finally ask a cop, who says we have to go to a bank. Drive through town, being shouted at by people from all sides, and I DISLIKE it very much, but when we get lost, in desperation I look at one of the Moroccan maps and find the National Tourist Office, we ask a smiling cop for Boulevard Pasteur, and JJ gets a city map and genuine information about banks and insurance and change, and then I buy a Guide Bleu that tells EVERYTHING and things look up. Have coffee to wait for 3:30, and the bank opens at 2:30 and we go to address given, then find insurance man by looking at six or seven building entrances, enquiring of five or six businessmen, being approached by four or five runners, and being given three or four other addresses. Even when we know where it is, and fellow is same that JJ met in Tourist Office, a runner demands his cut and the salesman, trying to hide his grin when given a US $20, indicates he'll probably pay him off.
Drive down to Rabat, get a bit lost in main streets, find hotel, bit put off by poor room and shoddy dining room, but the liver is excellent. Later that night there's a host of hollering American types who run down halls, slam doors, knock on other doors, and keep me up from 11-2, hoping to kill them.
DIARY PAGE: Up at 7, before breakfast, and out at 8 to ferry, which we'd checked out yesterday, and we're on board and sail at 9, and I'm onto deck to watch the Spanish coast slip by, write, gape at the oddly unexpected shape of Gibraltar, and saddened by the fog covering the coast of Morocco, so that the first we see is when we steer into the harbor at Tangier. Had a poor lunch on the ship because there was nothing better to do, and I'm put off by the old ladies in sun-bleached hair and tight trousers plunking coins into the slot machines through to entire trip; not to mention the drinkers. Off the ship into the hassle described in the Trip Diary, and I can think of nothing better than to get OUT of Tangier, hoping to pick up the trip around Cap Spartel and the Caves of Hercules on the way back. Begin driving south, and we see by the hotel guidebook that we'll have to stop in Rabat, because there's nothing between here and there. Down past Larache, but since we're not on the coast, it looks rather like the interior of Spain, except that the people are much darker, and they ride mules and donkeys rather than old trucks on the roads. See by the Guide Bleu that there's a Tuesday market in Arbaoua, and we detour to drive through the dusty town, but that's about all there is: dust, and we figure we've missed it. But, south of Souk-el-Arba-du-Rharb, there's a place on the map called Souk-el-Tleta-du-Rharb, and there's quite a bit doing, even a marriage. We're out to stare at people who are too startled to stare back at us, and see the grain and date shops, rows of barbers, fly-ridden lamb bodies, plastic goods, and piles of colored herbs that we haven't the slightest knowledge of. JJ talks to a kid with the wedding, as they play their drums and flutes while the smiling bride rushes past in brilliant clothing, and they say the celebrations go on for three days. Down to nothing Kenitra, and into Rabat at dark, deciding on the Balima, which gives us a good meal, and we walk along the arcaded streets and parks to get accosted twice by drugged tramps who attach themselves to us and offer to show us the town, red-eyed and staggering and too much happy. Bed at 11, but waked at 3 to loud noises, and sleep fitfully.

DATE BOOK FOR WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23. 23: Up at 8, very tired, and breakfast outside and take off along coast in heat, but clouds and coolness come, lunch and tour Casablanca, to Safi late and Marhaba Hotel, tired and to bed at 10 and sleep.
DIARY: Museums in Rabat, especially the bronzes, are fantastically good, beauties and in such a place? Even if it IS the capital of Morocco.

Drive and have lunch at Sijilmassa in Casablanca, great almond-raisin rice with Sijilmassa chicken and JJ's veal tagine is good, too, though the place is empty. Car tour the city, finding nothing of note but the post office, the Place des Nations Unis, a small market, the posh hotel area, the docks, the aquarium, in short---really nothing to see but the elaborately shoddy League of Arab Nation's Park. Drive down and down, now about 4, and it's suddenly cold and foggy after heated departure from Rabat. At 5 pm we stop at Cap Blanc and a native and his little friend start talking to me, and I say I like looking at the waves and the wind, and JJ's my friend. We three talk and JJ offers a cigarette and another to his friend, and then we're being escorted down the rocks to the beach, where he points out a cave in which lives "a fellow who helps people who are sick" and we talk more, he about "Americans who have a lot of money and Moroccans working in Paris" and then as we go he whispers to JJ "Tu veux Niquer?" JJ says no, he says "Your friend?" and JJ asks me if I want to have sex. I say no, and we fear reprisal, but we're up and off with no hard feelings (pity) but a firm handshake.
Into Safi as darkness falls and find the Marhaba, and it's 4A and we dress for dinner and Valpierre is tasty, but the veal and rice is not earth-shakingly good. Bed THIS time is under the theater, but JJ doesn't want to change rooms, so I try to go to sleep, and do so IMMEDIATELY, to everyone's surprise; even JJ said HE had trouble sleeping until it was over.
DIARY PAGE: Up very tired at 8, have trouble locating breakfast, and then just barely rescue it from the flies, and JJ finds the car specklessly polished. The day starts bright and very hot, and I put the beret on and fear the worst, having gone to pick up suntan lotion and a comb, which I'd been missing. Down along the coast road, getting off the track into a dead-end at Tamara Plage, and down to Casablanca, where we drive along the coast to get to Ain-Diab, where I want to eat at Sijilmassa, which we do, but there's no one there, and even though the food is very good, it's uncomfortable eating alone in an echoing chamber designed for cabaret-style entertainments. JJ insists on seeing some of the town, so we drive back into town along the Avenue Moulay Rachid, pass the moth-eaten Park of the Arab League, which might say something about the condition of the league itself, past the Place des Nations Unies and the Stadium, and into the Bouskoura quarter where the streets are narrow but too citified to be pleasant. See the huge luxury hotels, and begin to joke about Avenues Hassan II and Place Mohammed V, which we hit in every single town. There's really nothing to be seen, and we don't want to stop at the Aquarium, so we pass again the private clubs along the beach, and through Ain-Diab again, verifying what the guide said "There is little to call attention to." Down the road to Azemmour and El-Jadida, which look pleasant from across the Oued Oum with their walls still standing through the years, and continue on the little coast, looking for the ruins of Tit (that's what it says), and pass Dar ed Dou, and see "The lighthouse of Cap Blanc where the cliffs fall precipitously into waters abounding in fish." And we find the adventure described on page 12 of the TD. Leave, looking back on the good views to the rear, through Oualidia, which name I like, along the capes down to Safi, where we decide, after our bad encounter with the Balima, the only place we can stay is the Marhaba, and it IS nice, particularly the huge-windowed dining room overlooking the city, and the carpets and serving carts and good food with a varied menu. To bed to find that there's a movie theater above, but I'm tired enough to go to sleep anyway, but JJ has trouble, strangely enough.

DATE BOOK FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 24: Up at 8, breakfast and tour medina and potter's quarters and go for car till 12:30, and along coast and fun surf to Essaouira for lunch and hills and fog and rain to Agadir and Hotel hunt and end at posh Marhaba and decide to spend two days.
DIARY: Up to walk the Medina and get lost in crazy dead ends and are just going for Potters Quarter when the guide grabs us, and we're into potter's shops and watch wheels turn and JJ buys four egg cups and we look at souks and back to hotel about 12:30, catching a white horse in heat flapping his huge cock around. Into car and drive down to Essaouira, road getting pretty bad as it peters out when we take wrong track at beaches, but enjoy looking at huge surf smashing against rocks. By the end of the day we have huge fish waved at us, a live chittering squirrel being swung by a rope around its neck, a series of people in one village proffering bracelets by running shouting after the car, and we stop to see a view as a cute kid on a donkey comes up and holds out his hand for money. Rather depressing. JJ and I have long talk about gap between tourist and peasant, and I agree---but he thinks it'll get much worse. Lunch at Cafe de la Playa, and JJ loves his lobster but my veal chop is utterly terrible, and Chaudsoliel isn't very tasty. Hot sun, even inside, but it clouds up again and even rains a bit in the hills outside Agadir.
Have bad time finding the Mediterranne, and when we do it's private. Look for Club Balneaire des Dunes, then find Hotel des Dunes reference and try THAT, then look around Dune D'Or signs, then ask taxi man and get told it's now the El Salam. We look and it's lousy, so we get to the Marhaba and find it's a very deluxe 78DH for the room, though the meals are only 20DH apiece. Into suit for dinner, but the Boulfef turns out to be liver wrapped in greasy white fat and not very good at all. JJ and I talk about salesman types (the kind we meet), and the types we'd LIKE to meet. Determine to relax the next day, after seeing about Goulimine for Saturday market.
DIARY PAGE: Up at 8 to breakfast and walk down to tour the Medina, in the back door at the top and make our way down through smelly curved streets that only pedestrians can use. Into the central section and find a fight between a kid and someone who seems to be a red-haired prostitute with scars on her face. Go off on another tack to find the potters quarters, but end up in a dead end where the kids look at us curiously. Behind many of the rotting wood doors, when they're open, we can see bathroom-type tile stretching into a cool courtyard, and inside it's very clean, so it might not be so bad to live there, but it's terrible to visit, as junk is tossed out into the streets at us. We didn't see sewers, but we never actually SAW shit in the gutters, so maybe they dig cesspools or something. Kids everywhere, looking at us shyly, and sometimes they could be coaxed into giving small pieces of information in French by JJ. We get tied up with a tourist who tried English, German and French on us until we decide he's worth having around, asking him about bound bark stuff and he says it's for cleaning teeth, and other things are for candies or cooking, and he offers to show us the potter's quarters. Really into the place, to see the ovens baking the stuff, and the unskilled laborers sitting around shoveling squares of the clay around, molding it in their practiced way on the turntables, then they paint it, then bake it, then glaze it, and we can look through all their wares for sale, of course, and JJ starts looking for egg cups, and I like the unglazed finishes better, but they're too fragile. Finish with the guide and back to the hotel at 12:30, and can't find the car. Walk and walk and see the town VERY well, but the names of the streets have changed, and the places look slightly different, and since JJ rode down in the car and back on a motorbike, everything looks different on foot. Finally find it, and I suggest we eat there, but he wants to get on his way, so we're out again and down to Essaouira, where we find a beach place that serves lobster, and JJ goes out of his mind, but my veal is terrible. Sun beats down on hippies and us, and it's 3 by the time we're off into the cloudy rainy mountains for a search for hotels (see TD) in Agadir, but we end up at the Marhaba. Dining room is very elegant with Eames furniture, so we dress for dinner, my Mickey Mouse eyes worse than ever, but the food is good and the beds are wonderful.

DATE BOOK FOR FRIDAY, APRIL 25: Up at 8 and breakfast in room, and out to read and sun from 10-12. Buffet on lawn, read, and to post office and Club Mediterranée and dinner at 8, talk, and lounge and bed early after making plans for the rest of the trip.
DIARY: 4/25 is INDEED a lazy day. Wake at 8, try info at 8:15, call for breakfast, and at 9 they say Goulimine is ONLY Saturday and a good road. Laundry and dry cleaning is out at 9, sure to be expensive, and we wash and out into sun. I sit in shade and read Morocco, and that bores me so I lie in sun, but that gets too hot, so I put feet into pool. That's too cold so I go back to reading, first in sunshine then on shaded swing. Cute photographer's assistant is nice to watch, but I'd rather be sightseeing or watching the waves on the ocean. We have to go to the post office and tour Club Mediterranée, then pass the time to dinner, then after dinner.
But it gets back [don't forget the smells, indubitably of shit, wafting up the hill to intrigue the pool-siders] to the point: no matter where you go, you take YOURSELF, seeking, love-less, thinking, dreaming, with you, and you can't get away from that.
Then the radio from the hotel playing stupid American jazz doesn't help---nor does the "talkie-walkie" of JJ when the photographer communicates by wireless to his co-pain [I had "copain," but this is brilliant!] on a ladder through the palm grove. Nor the blatantly American couple teaching their two daughters to swim, nor the construction sound from all around, and the cars racing just past. The pool is too cold---at least you can WATCH the ocean. The sun is too hot, but if you're doing something besides lying in it (like snorkeling in it) it's a glorious way to get burned. So, maybe, I acceded to JJ's wish for a "lazy American luxury vacation day" and I hated it and I don't think HE liked it much, either.
Then at 7:15, when the laundry isn't back, it appears it might not be back for a number of hours---maybe days? For these things the US is great. Let's just say that Morocco is interesting, but I wouldn't want to live there. The French couple read paperbacks---they could read to the day they DIED---what difference would it make? Again to the WDDIM!
DIARY PAGE: So we decide to spend the day. Everything covered in TD but tour to the Club Mediterranée. They won't let us in without a guide, and he's snobby and officious as we walk through the palm-strewn grounds. There's the enormous dining room where the food couldn't be very good, and a bar which must be terribly crowded every night. To the pool and the sundeck, and there are all sorts of people giving us the eye, both male and female, and it seems that what the guide keeps intoning could be true: TOUT que vous pouvez desirer, TOUT. And there would be men or women or couples or even children if you want them, but there were very few children. There were tents for bridge and poker and classes in karate and yoga and pottery making and body-building and make-up and modeling. There were platforms for plays and theaters for movies. We went into the sauna and talked to two towel-wrapped lobsters about having to reserve far in advance unless you come off season, and we got the price, which was the same as an expensive hotel. Then ever upward to another lounge where we could buy what we wanted, but of course there was no money in use, as advertised. Then down to see the living quarters, rather starkly plain, though the bathrooms were adequately equipped. There was no air conditioning, but everything was open to the breezes and everything was separate, so that it would be quiet: no one overhead. People wandered around in casual suits, bathing suits, long muumuus, and versions of sarongs and towels and bikinis, everyone tanned and oiled, but the crowd got somewhat older. Down the rivuletted walks and past fountains and shops where you could buy what you wanted, and the cuteness of the names of the buildings, each with its alphabetized section, was a bit much. No cars allowed inside either, and there didn't seem to be anyone at the beach, and JJ ventured that the forced sociability would send him up the wall in two days. To buy stamps in the a-building town, and back to the hotel. Make plans for the following day and to bed early.

DATE BOOK OF SATURDAY, APRIL 26. Up and out at 7, down good road to Tiznit and Goulimine at 9 and great market until 12, lunch of oranges, Rallye and bad road from 5-10 pm, and get to Agadir at 11 and eat in all-night dive to 12:30 and tired to bed.
DIARY: Irked again (coises, irked again!) by the Moroccan traffic stop between Tiznit and Tafrout. Get pulled off the road by a cop who says twenty minutes and it's not over by half an hour as seven or eight cars pull past with numbers up to 31. This at the end of a morning almost ruined by not finding the cattle sale at Goulemine, but when I look over the wall near Hotel Salam, and see 200-300 camels with their stupid looks and splay feet and knocked knees, I know we've found the place. Along with sheep, rams, goats, cows, asses, dragged by hind feet, walked like wheelbarrows on front feet, grabbed by horns and heads and necks and wool of the back.
Back to Tiznit to look for a place for lunch and find none, so pass one store whose "patron" isn't there, and find another who climbs into his stall by a well placed foot on the edge at front and back and grabbing a short rope for assistance. We get to 1DH70 and JJ adds two tiny bananas and the price jumps to 2DH and he hollers, but the heat gets through to me and I get hot and then we're stopped for the Moroccan Rallye and JJ has to get gas and I say we have to get into the shade, so we eat our petit buerre and oranges watching about 8-9 cars race past. Then onto terrible road past Tafraoute and wind through rocky valley that gets more incredible as we go, the cliffs stretching above us and the rocks "like meteors" meaning they don't look as if they belong---they came from "somewhere else," they're erratic boulders. Lovely stucco pink and white and brown houses against the brown rocks. Stopped once for the Rallye, and that thought makes the road more interesting---its hills and turns and sudden changes now romanticized by the numbered cars trying to make every second in time cover as many centimeters of distance as possible. Climb into the hills, flowers on every side, and when we stop and let the car cool (something always wrong with the carburetor) I pick many kinds of pink, white, yellow, red, purple flowers and one daisy-like one, with roots of white petals stained yellow by its pollen burden, was a haven for tiny pink spiders that scurried out from where the white changes to green at the base of the flower. Seven on the petals, blown off; seven more scurry up, blown off, and one by one, seven more emerge at lengthening intervals---a HAVEN. The road climbs and turns and slowly we gain height, until the U-shaped (glacial?) valley is under us and the absolute quiet of the atmosphere lends a magic to the slopes, silhouettes now in the hazy distance with the sun at the back. For about twenty levels of superposed shades of blue-gray, all lovely, all with rays of light from the sun creating interesting areas of light and dark haze, gray and ochre shadows. Still the flowers are underfoot, and that's been one of the fantastic parts. All roadside greenery is hardly green under its bower of daisies, violets, lupine-like yellow stalks, little violet buds, red poppies. Every hedge is a mound of blossoms: huge horns of morning glories with bells three inches at the bottoms, echoing the still larger shapes of yellow trumpets pendulous in their weight, from higher hedges. Violet blossoms, red flowers erupt from every crevasse of shrub. Trees are again trees now, with glistening green chartreuse nuts hanging already in the sun. Entire fields are red or yellow from flowers, the mud hut walls are blazes of bloom and flower, though the trees were relatively quiet, bearing only oranges and lemons. Gone were the huge fragrant lycine of Spain, vividly purple, but here the climbing vines of flowers so intensely purple that they must have another color name for them, so overtook huge trees that the trees themselves might as well have blossomed. Then, that terrible night, darkness came on, saved from completeness by a moon which lit a layer of cloud between us and it, so there was a translucent gray canopy over us, broken in spots so that the edges of the cloud glowed pearl in the moon. We had passed one car going the other direction earlier, about five, near the start, and toward the end we passed two trucks going in our direction, but otherwise the horrid rocky road was ours. Except for the people. We saw them first from a distance, standing in groups of two or three almost hidden in their fields, veils held over their noses and mouths, wide dark eyes looking soberly out. Then there were boys by the roadside, dark skinned, eyes bright, who widened their enormous eyes and waved a small hand as we waved: they were too shy to smile. Then there was the solitary figure above us, leaning against a tree without losing her dignified tallness, a woman who stood with folded arms, face bare, showing a fine straight nose and a full dark-lipped mouth and good chin. Dark areas around the eyes looked like makeup, but the serene tranquility of the face seemed to belie any need for artifice. A hand went up in a gesture almost of benediction, and the clear black eyes under perfect eyebrows were a reminder of the beddable beauty of Danny Thompson back at work, half civilized, half sexy beast. Then girls fled the road, hiding behind trees, and we'd wave, and like a flash their veils would drop as their hands flew up in greeting; their faces broadened into ecstasies of delight and they screamed and giggled and ran after us with a swirl of dark material, running to touch the car, to wave at us, to shout words we didn't know, but which were softer than the hard Arabic and must have been Berber. "B'dass, B'dass" or something like that they shouted, and it was almost as if our wave had beckoned them to be our brides, and they were flinging back their delighted assents. They ran, laughing and wide-eyed, gold teeth showing even so early, and struck the car with either the sharp or blunt edge of their small sickles. It was like the tiny girl in the extravagantly flowered dress in Goulimine. She grinned to see us and chortled when we waved at her. She clapped her little hands and glanced distractedly around, picked up a rock, and threw it at us with a laugh. Maybe she was giving us something, maybe she was being literally "outgoing," but the rock, and the sickle, was in a spasm of joy, not in malice. Then we saw three carrying their flowers home, and they silently drew their veils until we smiled and waved, then again the veils and flowers dropped and they ran after us, shouting words. JJ stopped the car and they stood in the road behind us, wide-eyed with fright and delight. One, terribly pretty, stepped toward us with a flowering branch in her hand, holding out the other hand and saying words. I waved to her to come, but she shook her head once and almost planted her feet. I got out of the car and their eyebrows flew up and their mouths gaped and they turned and ran, stumbling in their haste, screaming with joy and fright and anticipation, stopped further away, turned and talked and beckoned. We stood at impasse, each taking small steps toward each other until we were about ten meters apart, then she again looked alarmed, and I stopped and beckoned "Come." She waved the branch and said something. I said "Come here," pointing to my feet, and she said something else, smiling brilliantly. I stepped forward and she shouted and hiked up her skirts, dropping the branch, and ran. I went to pick it up and waited to return it to her, gathering other flowers to add to it, she conferred with the older women (the younger one had run far up the road) but ran again, shouting and laughing, as I advanced again.
Darkness grew and I could hardly continue the game, so I crawled back into the car, waving and calling "Au revoir" and they shouted back something else. Further we passed a tall handsome man, lovely trimmed black mustache, and he bowed gravely "Bonjour" as we passed, all confidence and poise. Lovely people. It got darker and darker, some oued fords became treacherous as speeds dropped to zero and JJ eased the tires literally from one stone to the next. Pits, rocks, gullies, dry streams, small patches of encouragingly good road, mud and gravel, particularly bad in sections they were in the process of "Repairing." The night wore on at a speed of 20 km/hr, sometimes rising to a maximum of 35 on a good stretch for a very short time, many times dropping to 5 or 10 for rocks or deep ruts. Tires threw stones against the under chassis, the muffler ground along clay stone more than a few times, dust swirled on corners and the odometer passed forward painfully slowly as I refused to look at my watch, knowing we'd missed the 10:30 dining room closing. JJ munched some of the biscuits to fend off hunger and I knew it would be impossibly difficult to have to stop and try to sleep in the car without any real food since the previous day's dinner. Bumps and rocks and turns and shifts of gear and listen to the munch and crunch and crack of gravel and rock. Shapes of hill against the cloud, shadows of valleys and sparkling oueds below, small towns, isolated houses, sometimes passing people, a very few signs, a moon once in awhile. Stop for a piss break, stop to read a sign, stop to debate building a bridge across a particularly nasty fording. Time, time, time, shifting in the seat, turning the heater on and off, small comments---JJ about "twenty-five rabbits running ahead down the road" when two red-eyed fellows got trapped in our tracks, bounding in panic ahead of our headlights. Clouds lowered but thankfully we hit only a few snatches of fog. Onward, onward, Taroudant unthought of, trying for Agadir sometime before midnight. Roads turning off without signs, JJ driving by instinct, I waiting in fear for the next sign to say we've missed the track, we're now headed for somewhere else, or traveling in a circle, on this damnable PISTE, trail, track, through southern Morocco. Think, comment, get hypnotized by the road swinging in front of the headlights, then jerk to the right or left as a glint of light reflects off my contact lens. But there are no lights, only dogs and frogs which hop to be crushed under our tires, rocks, huts, villages with no signs to say what they are or where. No mile stones, only a very few curve indicators, and some white poles with red tops for the worst curves. On and on, hoping JJ doesn't doze, hoping the car doesn't have a flat, watching the gas level fall and the temperature rise and the oil pressure waver and listen to the door and springs and something under the dashboard rattle as if in preparations for breaking off. Looking at the speedometer, through tears from flecks in the contacts, trying to see the pointed top of a 4, the slim bottom of a seven, in the murky maze of numbers clicking slowly around. 50, oh God 50 more to go. Changes to 60, only now to 70, to 80, to 90, to 00, only four more changes, but it takes so long. Changes to 70, and so long. AD INFINITUM.
FINALLY to Ait Baha and a better road, and roar toward Ait Melloul, to find ourselves turned toward Taroudant, and have to return and back. To hotel to find 207 still free, but no food except an all-night place at beach. It's loud with the Club Mediterranée castoffs, terrible-looking girls, intense and smiling with pasted smiles, and too-loud fellows with wandering eyes. JJ has a steak, I have a yummy cheese omelet with a huge swatch of toast and a gritty banana milk (Manana Bilk?) shake, and we're in bed somewhat after 2:30, exhausted.
DIARY PAGE: This day has been written up for the most part in TD 14-19, so I'll have to think about something else. The trip started on a fantasy notion that I could go to bed again with JJ, but it didn't turn out like that. His short hair made his thin face seem even more nervous and neurotic than before, and I had forgotten about some of his habits and characteristics. He cleared his throat very often, and later in the trip it became a dry sore cough which sounded irritated and irritating. His eyes were unpleasantly red in many places, but the strange thing was that some nights, under the candles at diner, he looked terribly good and gentle and kind and loving, but there was the smell that I associated with bad breath and Paul associated with not washing, which really was off-putting when I got close to him. He's kept up with his exercises, but his body really wasn't pleasant, looking rounded and hairless and red and vulnerable, and his ass was the worst of all, maybe not his ass, but the way his legs fitted into them, like women's legs with rounded fleshy thighs which fit poorly into his skinny ass. And then there were those briefs which I just hated, for some reason. His swivel-hipped walk, flat-footed, and his arms in front like some sort of mantis, didn't endear him, but the worst thing was his picking of his fingers, which I had forgotten completely. He'd chew down with his teeth, then hack with his opposing fingers, sometimes with his other hand, until strips of flesh would peel away and they would begin to bleed. Then he'd have the scabs to pick at, and another excuse to fuss with them. I waited for them to clear, but he kept at them, and then they became scabbed again. Sometimes the whole car would shake with the force of his bearing down, and the sound was almost too much to bear, and at various times I found myself getting nauseous at the sight and sound of himself torturing himself. I tried to put my mind in other places, but it was difficult. There was also his troubles with English, and I was in one part pleased that he took the effort to speak, but he was so self-conscious that he made me uncomfortable. So we didn't go to bed, and since we were together, there was no chance to meeting someone else, though in truth, since we didn't look for it, it really didn't seem terribly available. We had no knowledge of bars or cruising places, but in the hotels later on, it seemed that just wandering the grounds was enough to attract them, but then they seemed somewhat dirty, and unpleasantly furtive. So there was only Marc.