Exactly twenty-five years ago last Saturday (15th June)
Spain’s 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 week’s 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 Maugham’s 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. Maugham’s 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 Franco’s 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 Kinsley’s key sources for this was Elliot Paul’s 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 I’ve 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 Hungarian’s 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
Elmyr’s 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 former’s
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 gunman’s 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 Bibliomaniac’s home territory and
in-depth coverage of the Civil War will be properly left to Emily;
suffice it to say that Elliot Paul’s second ‘massacre’ (i.e. the
Falangist one) forms the starting point of Kinsley’s 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 Pistolero’s 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 Kinsley’s
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 Kinsley’s 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 I’m
nuts. You know why? He and his mate asked me what the English do with
all the almonds they buy from the island. They’ve 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 + postage) from Peter Kinsley, tel. 0044 (UK)
207 652 2587.
“Peter Kinsley, May 2002”
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“The Pistolero
title-page (publisher’s proof)”
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