M y husband and I have a week’s holiday, and we
have told everyone who asks that we are going to Marrakesh. We haven’t bothered booking, of course, because we are disorganised and thus choose to believe the oft-repeated lie that there are these incredible last-minute deals on the internet. I try to buy tickets the night before we are due to depart, and there it is, the incredible last-minute deal: the price of a British Airways return flight to Marrakesh has risen to £900. We fly to Biarritz instead. Biarritz is a chic old lady who was once a rip-roaring good-time girl. The temperature is balmy but at this time of year the beach is deserted. Still, for company we have the ghosts of the rich young ragtime things who once bronzed themselves in the Biarritz sun and blew fortunes in the cool of its splendid casino.
My holiday reading is Until The Final Hour, the journal of Adolf Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge and the basis for the newly released German film Downfall. Frau Junge, who was recruited as a naive 22year-old, worked for Hitler from 1942 until his suicide in the bunker and — writing in 1947 — is honest enough to admit that she found him delightfully avuncular and solicitous of her welfare. But the Nazi horrors are fleetingly visible in her recollections of teatime banter, like scenes from a charnel house glimpsed through tiny rips in a chintz curtain. In one vignette, a certain Frau von Schirach arrives in the Berghof and, amid the tinkling chatter, suddenly remarks to Hitler, ‘I saw a train full of deported Jews in Amsterdam the other day. Those poor people — they look terrible. I’m sure they’re being very badly treated. Do you know about it? Do you allow it?’ Her grim-faced host promptly excuses himself from the company, and the outspoken Frau is invited to leave the next day. Yet Downfall, despite being nominated for an Oscar, has attracted a great deal of censure — some from weighty critics for allowing Hitler to appear human, and even likeable at times. This seems to me not only a ridiculous argument but also an irresponsible one. For if no one can admit that very bad people can sometimes make themselves extremely agreeable, then surely we are all fated to trundle through life just like poor Traudl Junge, who — as I learn from the afterword — was unable to recognise a great evil until 20 years after she was immersed in it, and was then tormented. Across the Spanish border, we find an expensive room in the old palacio in the fortress town of Hondarribia. It has no restaurant. For lunch, we stumble down the hill and straight into some kind of political canteen. An enormous Basque flag hangs on the wall, with a Basque slogan, and the menu is decorated with lively pictures of 19th-century Basque peasants. The regulars are almost certainly of the nonmilitant variety of Basque nationalists, but it’s hard to be entirely sure — and it is not a question to ask of a roomful of strangers in badly fractured Spanish, unless you are a fool. In any case the pork chops are excellent. Emboldened, we set out for dinner later in the opposite direction from the highly priced tourist restaurant indicated by the hotel receptionist. We happen upon a teeming bar: it is late at night, but the clientele includes mothers with babies, grandparents, and a Goth teenager wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the friendly slogan: ‘I fucking have the need to hate.’ This is a wonderful place, I say, and order the sopa de pescado, a rich orange seafood broth with mussel shells bobbing in it. We both feel inexplicably superior to the sheep-like guests who have followed the hotel’s advice.
At six in the morning I wake up with my guts pitching like a sailboat in a high gale. I am terribly sick. I have been poisoned by the sopa de pescado. At midday we are due to check out, and the stony-faced hotel receptionist tells my husband that there is nowhere else for me to lie down. ‘Take her to hospital,’ he says, shrugging. On, to stately San Sebastian clutching a plastic bag — and a new hotel. While my husband parks the car I clammily beg the receptionist for the key to their last available room. A whole day later, I finally rise from bed to take a shaky constitutional along the promenade. I pass a little huddle of locals, relishing their home-made lunch by the side of a car. They look up innocently as I pass, but I recognise the horrid orange liquid lurching and steaming in their bowls. It is sopa de pescado.
Oscar Wilde, as he lay dying, is famously supposed to have said: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.’ I had always thought this apocryphal, invented by some well-meaning wag to show the robustness of Wilde’s flippancy. But now, lying abed, I can see the bleak truth in it. An ill person is extraordinarily vulnerable to aggressive decor: every oppressive swirl and tassel drags them nearer to extinction. The walls of this hotel room are beautifully white and bare, however, and four sparkling beds are lined up along the wall. It looks like a classic hospital ward, rather than one in the modern British style with MRSAridden fluffballs gently tumbleweeding beneath the bed. The hotel’s uniformed chambermaids crackle with energy. Perhaps that is the solution to Britain’s disgustingly dirty hospital wards, a problem which has seemingly foxed the finest political minds in our government for many years. Hire crack squads of Spanish chambermaids, and pay them high wages to troubleshoot our filth.
Gerry Adams is on Spanish television, plugging his new book with the help of a simultaneous translator. He is unusually spruced up: I can almost smell the cologne emanating from his neatly trimmed beard. The respectful reception here must seem very soothing after his recent cold-shouldering in America and Ireland following the murder of the young Catholic man Robert McCartney in Belfast by IRA men. As the interview draws to a close, Mr Adams grows increasingly expansive. ‘I heard that you were the most important interviewer in Spain, in fact in Europe,’ he tells his host, ‘and so of course I came straight here.’ The interviewer looks flattered, and they exchange thank yous. Then Mr Adams impulsively adds, in a leaden mingling of Italian and Spanish that could only have been forged in my home town of Belfast: ‘Bonnas Notches’. He looks supremely smug after that, but the expression of the interviewer has become puzzlingly opaque. Does it contain gratification, or derision? Sometimes, even for experienced schmoozers, there can be that little schmooze too far.
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