Books on Ibiza
Bibliomaniacs' Corner by Martin Davies
Peter Kinsley The Spanish Jubilee
Exactly
twenty-five years ago last Saturday (15th June) Spains first general election
in forty years ushered in a brave new era of political liberty. Too little
liberty brings stagnation, wrote Bertrand Russell, and too much brings
chaos. This weeks subject, The Pistolero (1980), is a little-known
thriller which recalls the charged atmosphere of those years. It is set in a hippified
port on the Spanish Levant called Nostrumare, a place which bears more than just
a passing resemblance to Ibiza. The author Peter Kinsley, on the island recently
to promote his third volume of memoirs, has confirmed that Ibiza provided the
underlying inspiration. The alias derives from the giant hotel erected in front
of his Playa den Bossa pad, the Mare Nostrum or Hairy Nostril to waggish
British visitors. A core member of that drink-hardened platoon mentioned in the
first article, Kinsley cut his literary teeth in the late fifties as a crime reporter
on the Daily Mail and Daily Express and came to Ibiza following
a tip-off from the very summit of Mount Parnassus. While running a press agency
on the French Riviera in the early 1960s, he was called to Somerset Maughams
villa one day to publicise an impending auction of masterpieces. When the conversation
turned to letters, the wise old lizard - ever keen to assist emerging talent -
observed that Spain was where the strangest stories were to be found. Maughams
nephew - similarly advised, perhaps - was already scribbling away in an elegant
villa overlooking our own Cala Pada. Our legendary island
held a special fascination for Kinsley from the very outset, as he explains in
his latest volume of memoirs: I
wanted material for a book recalling the Spanish Civil War and what had happened
in Ibiza. I had been told that more happened on that island than in any other
part of Spain as they were trapped. The anarchists had machine-gunned all the
Nationalist prisoners in the cells, and Francos army put the same amount
of Republican prisoners in the same cells and murdered them. Prisoners had been
thrown from the old town onto the rocks below, the pistoleros shot the eldest
son of every Republican family, trades unionists and intellectuals, and finally
a bishop had to be sent from the mainland to stop the slaughter.
Bogged
Down in County Lyric (2002), p. 120
One
of Kinsleys key sources for this was Elliot Pauls memoir about Santa
Eulalia, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937), which contains a
dubious Postscript to which we will later return. In the late 60s, Kinsley
started the regular commute between Es Viver and Ibiza Town, where he joined the
ranks of scribblers waiting for Godonlyknows. As an inveterate newshound he had
a hunch that something special would eventually surface. In the meantime the local
lifestyle held him completely in its thrall: The
drinking day was starting: in another hour the night owls would emerge and do
their shopping in the market and make their way to the various foreign bars for
their bullshots and Bloody Marys and gin and tonics. Some of them would stay in
the bars all day. They would gossip away the hours and forget to eat. Some would
pick up their cestas, left in the bar from the night before, to find that the
cockroaches had eaten the pork chops or minced meat and they would have to go
and shop again. They would make an effort to go to the beach but by the time the
first three drinks were consumed it would be too hot. Torn between the bar and
the effort of travelling to the beach where it would be cool, with a breeze blowing
off the seashore, they would choose to remain in the darkened bar. The Enemy was
too much for them today
The
Pistolero (1980), p. 106
I
know what he means, even though Ive yet to see a battalion of cockroaches
putting away a pork chop. While the bar-flies were waiting for that Pulitzer-winning
plot to come into focus, an event occurred which for most (but happily not our
subject) blocked the mental viewfinder even further: the mysterious death on 11th
December 1976 of the Hungarian master-forger, Elmyr de Hory - reportedly from
an overdose of barbiturates. Throughout The Pistolero, the Elmyr drama
features as a riveting sub-plot, light relief if you like against the weightier
topics of politics and revenge. In the opening pages, the Hungarians morning
coffee at the Montesol is interrupted by a sinister character who sets a pistol,
a flick-knife and a plastic bomb down on the starched table-cloth and informs
the flustered socialite that his birth certificate is about to expire. In
the real-life incident witnessed by the author, the threat came from Elmyrs
accomplice-turned-blackmailer, Fernand Legros. In the novel though, the warning
is delivered on behalf of José Gomez, an aristocratic Ibizan
moneylender who decides the time has come for Emile (as he is called)
to settle the outstanding debts. The formers eponymous nickname, the Pistolero,
dates back to the momentous year of 1936: It
was as if it had happened yesterday: the night they have him the pistol. Then
his first killing, the socialist mayor of the town. He had shot the red dog and
then he went out night after night with the señoritos of the Falange and
shot the trade unionists, the syndicalists, the Republican schoolteachers, the
eldest son of every socialist family in the town, blowing their brains out and
burying them in orchards or in the hills, twenty of them to a lorry with the priests
giving them the chance of confession before they were despatched. Gomez had shot
so many he could not even attempt to remember names or faces, and after that first
one, it had become easier and easier
The
Pistolero, p. 94
We have been celebrating
the silver jubilee of Spanish democracy, and as Emily Kaufman is covering the
Civil War in the history column, the question really has to be asked: were there
pistoleros in Ibiza? The answer, as older Ibicencos may confirm, is in
the affirmative. The attentive reader might even spot the odd clue regarding the
identity of this particular villain. Kinsley first became fully aware of the shadowy
figure when he walked into in a local bar one evening, dropping jaws and raising
eyebrows all round: the Pistolero had a reputation for never venturing out after
nightfall. Was the erstwhile gunmans life ever really in danger, though?
Would an aggrieved local have taken revenge after a gap of forty years? It is
time to return to that Postscript. According
to Associated Press reports issued the next day, the Italian and rebel troops,
who arrived within a few hours after I was taken off on Die Falke, herded
four hundred Republicans, among whom must have been most of the male characters
in this book, and killed them with machine-guns through the small Moorish windows.
Elliot
Paul, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937), pp. 426-7
There
were indeed terrible reprisals, but not apparently on the massive scale Paul set
down in print for posterity. (The first casualty in war is the truth). This is
not the Bibliomaniacs home territory and in-depth coverage of the Civil
War will be properly left to Emily; suffice it to say that Elliot Pauls
second massacre (i.e. the Falangist one) forms the starting point
of Kinsleys thriller. A single prisoner, José Rodríguez
Tur, manages to escape and make his way to England, nursing over the following
decades a bitter dream of revenge. It is the 1977 elections which prompt him to
set off south in order to lay this ghost to rest, crossing the border illegally
as there is still an order out for his arrest. The plot
is given added momentum by the Pistoleros fondness for a little extra on
the side, Figueretes style. Things get out of hand, there is a violent scene and
the lippy foreign call-girl ends up dying in the nuns hospital. Her barman
friend decides that the Pistolero has gone too far this time, and so the race
is on between two determined avengers. Here I will stop the narrative to allow
readers to discover for themselves its final twists and turns, ingenious to say
the least. The coda, I have to be frank, is a little melodramatic, but the author
might well have been thinking of a Hollywood tie-in: an option on his first novel,
Three Cheers for Nothing (1964), had been taken up by no less a director
than John Schlesinger. The Pistolero was not Peter
Kinsleys first book about Ibiza. By the time he turned his attention to
the Civil War, he had finished work on a novelistic memoir called The Green
Fairy, a title celebrating the local liqueur (hierbas), an unusual
local night-club - the first in Spain where men could dance with men
and finally Kinsleys Irish ancestry. The ten chapters which make up The
Green Fairy have just appeared in print, concealed within the autobiographical,
Bogged Down in County Lyric. As they form a remarkable testament of the old
times in Ibiza, they will be the subject of a separate instalment. For now, a
taster. The speaker, incidentally, is best-selling Welsh mariner Tristan Jones,
whose Yarns (1990) also contains a chapter about Ibiza. That
Ibbo fisherman who started the fight thinks Im nuts. You know why? He and
his mate asked me what the English do with all the almonds they buy from the island.
Theyve seen the boats loading up for years, sacks of almonds for England.
I said they make a paste out of them and put it on top of cakes and sell them
for Christmas. I saw them tapping their heads significantly as they walked. Thought
I was round the twist - almonds made into paste and spread on cakes - who did
I think I was kidding?
Bogged
Down in County Lyric, p. 302
Bogged
Down in County Lyric can be obtained directly (25 euro + postage) from
Peter Kinsley, telephone: 00 44 (UK) 207 652 2587.
Peter
Kinsley, May 2002
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Title-page (publishers proof) | Martin
Davies
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