By 1936, he was the military commander of the Canary Islands—posted there by the left-leaning government in Madrid, which hoped to keep him at a safe distance from the capital. Instead, the islands served as a superb base for plotting. That July, Franco boarded a chartered plane from Las Palmas to Morocco, where he and his fascist co-conspirators mustered the so-called Army of Africa and began marching north. Three years and six hundred thousand deaths later, he prevailed.
By the mid-seventies, the Generalissimo was elderly and ill, but he clung to power, while the Spanish people existed in a state of suspended animation. Despite a veneer of modernity along the coasts, where hotels and apartment buildings rose to accommodate tourists, inland Spain was not much changed from the nineteenth century. With Franco’s secret police and the Catholic Church conspiring to keep society in check, censorship prevailed, and laws forbade homosexuality, abortion, contraception, and divorce. During the evenings, I watched girls and boys my age walk out in the plazas to cast secretive glances at one another, but stern chaperons kept them apart.
Las Palmas sat on a peninsula, set off from the rest of the island by barren mountains. The whole city—a sun-blasted place of low, blunt, sand-colored buildings—pointed at the sea, with a military base on one side and a beach lined with tourist hotels on the other. When we arrived, we discovered that there was no passage to Laayoune. Morocco and Spain were in conflict over the fate of the colony, and the boat was reserved for soldiers. Africa was just across the water, but there was no clear way to get there. I had eighty dollars’ worth of traveller’s checks left.
Since we were waiting for a boat, we decided that there was no better place to camp than the port, and we found a deserted concrete yard alongside the wharves, where commercial fishing nets were laid to dry. In some areas, the nets were bunched in mounds, offering hiding spots. It was a refuge that shielded us from view but allowed us to keep watch on both the main port entrance and the closest city street.
The nets were like an islet that shipwrecked sailors swam to, and then, depending on their luck, were either rescued or figured out how to survive. Before long, a small group of us had coalesced there. There was Baba, the Moroccan who had come with us on the boat, and Najir, a friend of his. There was also a Ghanaian named Brando, who claimed to be a prince in exile. We never knew whose story was true, and mostly we didn’t ask.
A Malaysian boy named Pili was on the nets when we arrived. He was thin, barely five feet tall, funny and engaging and bright; he had learned passable Spanish in just two months in Las Palmas. He told us that he was from a coastal village on the Malay Peninsula, where commercial fishing fleets came to force young men into servitude. After more than a year in virtual slavery, Pili had escaped in Las Palmas, when the ship’s officers went into the city, leaving the crew for days without food.
Years later, human-rights investigations confirmed the kidnappings that Pili had described. But other visitors’ stories were harder to verify. Hassan, a charming, sophisticated Lebanese man in his late twenties, turned up on the nets wearing a conspicuously expensive leather jacket. As we lay there one night, stargazing and trading stories, he told us that he was a cardsharp, trained by a man who lived in a citadel in the Lebanese mountains—a gambler so skilled that he had been banned from casinos around the world.
After a long apprenticeship, Hassan said, his mentor had pronounced him ready to go practice what he had learned. He’d headed to Monte Carlo, where on his first night he won fifty thousand dollars at poker. The next evening, when he returned to the casino, heavies ushered him into a back room and warned that if he didn’t leave town they would cut off all his fingers. Now Hassan was stuck in Las Palmas like the rest of us, trying to figure out his next move. But he was cavalier: “Don’t worry—one day soon, I’ll be out of here and back on my feet.”
Hassan stayed a few days before he vanished. Then, several weeks later, I was standing on the avenue in front of the port when someone called out from a car. It was Hassan, at the wheel of a Mercedes, smiling and waving. I waved back. Then the traffic moved and he sped off. I never saw him again.
“Hold on . . . did you mean to hit Snooze or Jazz?”
Cartoon by Ed Himelblau
Las Palmas was an attractive place for international intriguers: wayward sailors, hippies carrying paperbacks by Paul Bowles, and mercenaries on R. and R. One of these fighters was a giant Finn with a red beard—too persistently drunk for me to find out where he was stationed, though I guessed it was Rhodesia, where the so-called Bush War was being fought between white settlers and Black nationalist guerrillas. Another, a Spaniard who called himself Fidel, joined us on the fishing nets for a few nights. He hinted at being involved in clandestine political maneuvers—perhaps with the Canaries’ separatist movement, which a few years later planted a bomb at the local airport, leading to a devastating collision between two 747s.
Sleeping on the nets had risks. Dogs ran wild there, and one night a bitch in heat began following me, until a pack of males, evidently mistaking me for competition, backed me away from her, growling. There were thieves, too, and I once woke up to find that my backpack had been opened, its contents strewn around—though the thief must have quickly realized that I had nothing of value to take.
The most persistent threat was the Guardia Civil. At dawn one morning, we were awakened by the screech of a patrol wagon pulling up next to us. A half-dozen officers jumped out and began swinging nightsticks at everyone they could reach. But their real targets were the two Moroccans, Najir and Baba, whom they quickly surrounded, viciously beat, and then hurled into the patrol wagon—to be detained for a month on what we later discovered were charges of vagrancy. We began setting lookouts for the Guardia at night, but it was harder to avoid patrols in the street. Not long after Najir and Baba were arrested, Pili vanished, too. Several weeks later, I encountered him walking along a road. I called out, but he seemed to barely recognize me and was speaking gibberish. Afterward, I heard that the Guardia had beaten him so badly that he lost his mind.
During the day, we all went our separate ways. John and I usually headed for a fountain in a plaza, across from an ancient church, where travellers gathered. For young foreigners contending with Spain’s repressive society and strict laws, the plaza served as a node in a bush telegraph—a place to exchange survival tips, warnings of risk, and rules of the road. Yet when John and I asked people we met there how we might get to Togo, no one knew anything. We discussed going back the way we had come, travelling the length of Spain to catch a boat in Marseille, but with our shrunken funds and me on a crutch it seemed implausible. Besides, we had come so