On Spanish Beach Towns and the Perpetual End of Days
On the beaches of Nerja, a tourist town in southern Spain, I read about the end of the world in books left by previous visitors. I read Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Section Eleven, about the aftermath of an apocalyptic flu epidemic, and part of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, about the aftermath of an apocalyptic nuclear strike.
Working my way through an undifferentiated shelf, I read only the African and indigenous American myths in a book of myths and legends about the aftermath of creation; I read a book about childhood by a Swiss psychoanalyst. Under the half-pleasant half-punishing glare of the August sun, I read messages from friends, who are falling in love, feeling anxious, or wondering whether to quit their jobs; from my brother, who wonders how I am and can I send money; from a lover, who has lost his watch somewhere in my bedroom at home, very far away; from my ex-boyfriend, describing scenes from his childhood; and from my father, advising me on how to deal with the drip from the air conditioning unit in the apartment upstairs. All this in summary means that the world is not ending, or that it goes on like a zombie, not having noticed its own end.
Books about the post-apocalypse share certain tropes: the implausible presence of globally popular brands in an era after mass commodity production, as detritus or decaying billboards; looting of supermarkets or fast food chains; hostility and violence among survivors. As a child, in a period of political optimism — the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I barely understood; a house party where the adults danced hugely to celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela — I fell out of step with the time, becoming preoccupied with the prospect of global nuclear war. This bad timing was due to conflict and fragmentation in the family, but I didn’t know that then; I just thought the world was about to end. In a sense, this was true, and in a sense, it was not. For a long time I’ve been looking for a third thread to plait these two senses together. “These post-apocalypse books are bourgeois law-and-order fantasies,” I write to my ex-boyfriend. The psychoanalysis book tells me that intellectualization is a popular defense because it is so reliable.
My thoughts freeze up under the hot sun. This is the point of a holiday. Beached on the shore of what feels like an ancient sadness, ancient but trashy, like a bog man in a T-shirt, I cry a lot, sometimes for no reason and sometimes for a reason that’s not the reason, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of the friend I’m on vacation with. Is this the point of a holiday?
We are both fascinated by the families with small children, by the currents of intensity, cruelty and resentment that swirl among the members of the family unit, by the small sufferings of the children. The little proto-boys are in the process of having direct expressions of emotion repressed and the little proto-girls are undergoing a similar surgery on their physical courage. The children are so small and surrounded by tyrants; it will be years before they can escape. Each family unit enacts its dramas in the weird half-privacy of the beach, sharing habitual snacks under their striped umbrellas. We watch them to confirm what my psychoanalysis book and my friend’s therapist say about the formative power of childhood. We watch them projectively, seeing the outline of our own lacks, losses, desires, failures, feats of survival. The fathers look back at us surreptitiously and the mothers and children hardly at all.
In Granada, we sleep on my friend’s roof terrace, under a bright moon and a city-stained sky. I am frozen and heated by my thoughts of the end of the world, by the impossibility of the world, by the strangeness of the world and my place in it. These are 4am thoughts. At this hour, the hour of alienation, I have no protection from the dark inner sea, which is myself and not mine, and which I am always falling into, and slowly getting out of in the mornings. Long before he bought the apartment by the blue outer sea, my father described this as the most spiritual hour, the most melanated hour of night when the ghosts that swirl in the blood are at the peak of their powers. If lucky enough to be awake at that time, he recommended rising and eating a banana to maximize creative thoughts. He would probably no longer give this advice, but I still remember it.
In the morning, the world is still intact and I queue for an hour to buy a ticket to the gardens of the Alhambra, writing and deleting tweets about the apocalypse the whole time. I think about the twin fears of relating, fear of being abandoned and fear of being annihilated, converging opposite currents that the apocalypse novel surfs on and that have plotted out my life. Don’t hurt me, don’t leave me, don’t look at me, don’t look away. My life is so small on the big planet, so small in its many histories. Can I be loved?
The Alhambra is a city complex built in the 14th century by Moorish rulers, an official wonder of the world, and one of Spain’s biggest tourist attractions. I move through the beautiful gardens with crowds of other tourists. Selfie sticks are popular, as are carefully staged panoramic shots and perspective tricks. The palaces and gardens are thick with image making. The visitors are predominantly white. They speak many different languages but gather to take pictures of themselves exactly where others have done the same; they climb towers to exclaim the same things as the previous visitors to the tower. If I were with someone, I would say the same things too: wow, beautiful, wow, big, wow, high. The keys to Alhambra were handed over to Christian monarchs in 1492, the same famous year that Columbus touched down in the Americas, bringing ruin. What counts as an apocalypse? Now I take part in the triumphal procession of tourists through the fallen citadel.
I pass tour groups, catching fragments of the guides’ descriptions. Outside the Generalife, a woman points at a fountain and says, “Water is so important for Muslim people,” adding, perhaps aware of the absurdity of what she has just said, “and for us.” Overlooking the foundations of what were once the royal quarters, another guide tells her group, “Europeans made palaces with straight lines; the Muslim architecture was like a maze, and that’s why the crusaders were defeated when they first went to Muslim countries.” This us-and-them talk is ambiguous; the ruins of the building are also described as the remnants of a more cosmopolitan and inventive world than the Christian regime that came after, a parallel temporality to the white narrative of smooth progress from barbarity to civilization.
Nevertheless, we are the victors, the guides tell their tour groups. We are the apocalypse that laid waste to this garden-scented place. A world ended here, and a new one sprang up. In this new world, globally capitalized and divided into persons, the apocalypse is a permanent condition.
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