AFTERTHOUGHT
Flight '69
JOHN WELLS
If Venice is like an elderly prostitute, writes Gaye Schopenhauer. the Girl Who's Been Everywhere Once, surrendering to the tour- ist's first timid caress as she sinks wearily into the blue water of the Aegean. and Hamburg like a wise old marketwoman, proffering her nordic wares to the visitor with a dry, salty insistence, then Porto Erotico on the Costa Born in southern Spain is like an infinitely old man, bending over the purple sea in search of his lost -.inno- cence. A dusty huddle of red-tiled roofs, flaking white walls stuck with ancient pos- ters, a tiny harbour floating with offal and rotting vegetables, and the dusty alleys leading up from the port where strange, angular dogs lean against the houses in the heat—this is Porto Erotico.
Until six months ago it was not. Until then it was simply Muaz, the sultry nasal 'm' moaning through the melancholy diph- thong to the near bathetic `th' of the final consonant, fading away like woodsmoke in the Mediterranean heat. A quiet back- water, a quaint Spanish fishing village where once the Moorish warlords had sipped sherbet and eyed their dusky slave-maidens through the fretted jalousies of elfenbein gazebos, and where passion seethed with the bubbling of the hookah: where, later, in the soft twilight, the Spanish Coleridge, Perez Bolivar Turron y Marraccas, lisped his honeyed numbers to the lazy jangling of the mandoline: and where, now, the sun-shrunken, weatherworn pescadores sat on the worn stone steps of the harbour to mend their faded nets with calloused, blunt, yet adventurous hands.
Then, in the early spring of this year, Raephe Uhu, the brilliant young entre- preneur behind Sidney and Merlin, to name but two of his incredibly gifted musical protégés, decided to go into Muaz in a big way. Recognising its tourist potential almost at first sight, Uhu brought in an interna- tional team of architects, drainage experts and accountants, and within a week Muaz suffered its greatest upheaval since the Moorish invasion. Mighty earth-movers roared and shuddered by the shore, tear- ing rocks from their primaeval beds and rolling them, tipping and sliding towards the sea, the narrow alleys were ripped open by deafening pneumatic drills, and the ancient hovels of the fisherfolk collapsed in sudden falls of choking dust as the in- habitants fled to the hills, carrying their possessions in rolls of blankets.
Now, miraculously. Muaz is reborn from the rubble as Porto Erotico. and is already well on the way to becoming one of the most powerfully pulling tourist magnets in the Mediterranean. And yet, to those few visitors who knew Muaz before its trans- formation, it might seem that nothing has changed. The same romantic hovels crowd shoulder to leaning shoulder down towards to stagnant port: the same brown-skinned men sit cross-legged and barefoot on the quai, busy with their quiet tackle: the same air everywhere of ancient contemplative peace. Only behind the facades have been revived the whispers of an earlier enchant- ment, and deep-navelled dancing-girls flex and stretch in the incense-heavy lamplight to the sad warbling of melancholy pipes.
The man responsible for this gentle revo- lution is Uhu's chief architect, Hungarian- born Jascha Detzmeibeybi. `Voddizif, he asks in his heavily-accented but gramma- tically perfect English, gesturing expres- sively with his incredibly beautiful hirsute hand, `zet de turist iz lukinvor in ze olfesh- iond ambianz? I vill telyu. Vod de turist iz lukinvor beyzicali iz de lostinosens. Zet is vy ve hay chuse as symbul ze oldmen lukin indesee. Vod ze turist iz nod lukinvor iz dyoreah en netbites en ellotov crukid- fukinforinors zvindlinhim uphil en downze- dales orl rahndeklok. If he vantobe zwindle' Detzmeibeybi adds with twinkling eyes and a disarming smile, 'den he prefer be zwindle aysink by a decent provessional.' And it is this professionalism, more than anything else, perhaps, that has made Porto Erotico what it is today.
As the painstaking work of tile-by-tile re- construction was proceeding under Detz- meibeybi's personal supervision—Tggzektly same but vith airconditionings instedd ovde lice'—four subterranean hotels were being built into the cliffs to either side of the old harbour, and the beaches in front of them were being cleared before the final surface restoration of fibreglass rocks, wrecks and plastic seaweed. Simultaneously, an under- sea parking area with spaces for two thous- and cards was constructed and a four-lane motorway, also underground, was built to connect the resort with the main road some seven miles away. Soon the scenic designers were putting the last touches to the torn posters and the casual coils of rope and fishing boats in the harbour, and with a last delivery of synthetic garbage for the port itself the production was complete.
'Zen ye hit ze ony rheel snegg,' Detzmei- beybi explains, `ze bluddypeasent. Orl hey venish in ze sinnair. Ve even offer zem munni to cumbak. Nussindoin. Prefer to live in ze caves. Sumpeepul doano ven dere velloff. So ve hevto import ze filmextras. Terrible. Smoking ze pots, orgies, godnose- vot. Tree veek it hay taken for de baysic- training justo mendze netz. "Lissen" I say tozem, "mento rheecreeate lost fukinnino-
sens, not lasdays of Pompey". Gradually, however, the teething troubles were ironed out, and by the beginning of July this year the fast set were streaming into Porto Ereitico in their thousands. In the Poubelle Restaurant, built acutally under the har- bour, so that diners can look up at the colourful sediment accumulating on the grass roof, I spoke to international play- boys, dilettantes, and men about Europe, and they were all, without exception, thrilled with the wonderful upspoilt inno- cence of it all. As one socialite put it 'the curious quality of a place just being itself. really, like an old man bending over the sea.'
'Eez zo vunderful, so tooching. to see peepel so entusiast, so innosent. En whonose, zisyeah Porto Erotico. nexyeah Venezia, ze yeahaftahzat ze holebluddi- continent.'
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