Once upon a time, a river of twine, a river of offal and fish skins, of chicken heads and rotten fruit, flowed through the broad southern door of the Mercado. Its headwaters were the hooks and racks, the shining carcasses of beer-fed cattle and curly-haired sheep, the open mouths of thick-muscled hares and half-plucked geese, the oversaturated sawdust beneath chickens, partridges, quails, pheasants, the melting snows beneath the hakes, the flounders, the baskets of pulpitos, calamaritos, langostinos, and boquerones, the psychedelic pulps, the severed stalks of the dozens of edible flora that began their journeys in the hopeless predawn black, on the shoulders of half-back carts pulled by mules harnessed with twine, on the open chassis of farm-converted deux-chevaux with fan belts made from doubled, tripled, lengths of twine, from farms far up the Guadalaljama, held together by a history of bits and knots of borrowed, stolen, reclaimed twine.
The river gushed out the broad southern door onto the cobblestones, unobstructed, save for the occasional dam of a horse hoof or urchin foot, the nightly beaver lodges of the suppurating forearms and bloated torsos of careless drunks who had stumbled safely across the footbridge of Sto. Domingo from the bars of La Rábida, only to slip in the fecundity of the Mercado. Six days a week, the river wound around the open cobblestoned gutters, stampeded down the length of the Calle de la Nación, leapt blindly into the muddy waters of the Guadalaljama, for a final cathartic embrace with the wine-dark, blood-dark, shit-dark, Francophilic plutonium-luminescent Mediterranean.
On the seventh day, the river rested, and the poorest of the poor, the más gitanos of the gitanos, cleansed the riverbank of its organic silt, making rags, soap, and breakfast of the remains.
Progress, in the form of a hydroelectric dam fifty miles above Mariposa, has turned the Guadalaljama itself into a dry gutter. A bridge-jumper will encounter nothing damper than spit-moistened grass and tin cans, except during an infrequent lunar bender when the moon spews a garbage-strewn tide a mile or so upriver.
The Junta Andalucía, in the foreknowledge that 1992 would bring tourism in the form of curious, womb-obsessed Americans to the shores of Spain, indentured the itinerant gitano knife sharpeners, musicians, pickpockets, and other vagrants serving time in the regional prisons, and pressed them into digging three-foot ditches in patterns decipherable only by students of the Rosetta Stone. These trenches were then cobbled over thoroughly enough to protect the sensibilities of the out-of-towner, but with a grating giving access, every twenty feet or so, to the familiar sewer, so the freedom-loving Mariposan gentry could continue to liberate itself of whatever liquid or semisolid matter happened to inconvenience it at the time.
So fundamental are the rights of the individual that, since the days when their harbor serviced the Phoenician ships of Tar-shish, Mariposanos have clung proudly to their reputation of being at odds with whatever authority presumed to establish itself. While the bulk of Andalusia fell to the Fascist insurgents within the first few days of the Civil War, Mariposa hung on for a few more months—not for love of the Republic, but merely to show a difference. So it was with Ferdinand the Catholic in 1487, with the Moor Tariq in 711, with the Romans and the Carthaginians before them. Walk the streets today, sixteen years after the death of Franco, and you will still see the occasional obstinate Guardia Civil, refusing to exchange his snub-front hat and machine gun for the more sophisticated cap and pistol of his comrades.
The only truly successful conquest of Mariposa has been by the tourist trade, and by the tourist trade I do not mean the Hilton, Club Med, American Express, or Thos. Cook zaibatsus. In Mariposa, individuals slip a tip to other individuals, small operators match clients to desires that only Mariposa can fulfill. In Mariposa, renegade sons, unmarried daughters, owners of decrepit, fictitious buildings, sell out to wildcat real-estate developers, unencumbered by zoning laws or European standards of taste and tradition—a twenty-story condo here, a ranch house there, an elementary school next door to a Palm Beach-based haberdashery displaying dyed summer furs, all surrounding a gaudy nineteenth-century customs house that stands resolutely, defiantly useless. In this climate of unregulated, uncontrollable movement, the tourist expects nothing and is surprised by everything. She moves about the city and believes not that this world was created for her eyes alone—as she might, wandering into an exquisite begonia-choked patio in the Barrio Santa Cruz of Sevilla—but that she herself is doing the work of architects and time, creating a city in a way she thought possible only in her sleep. As in the days of the Phoenician sailors from Tyre, Mariposa is the headquarters of the unplanned, unlooked-for vacation, the birthplace of Anarcho-Hedonism.
Although the Mercado closes shortly after noon every day except Sunday, a few bars and restaurants remain open until late at night, primarily to serve the unexpected diner the unanticipated adventure. Recommended are the Pinta and the Santa María. The latter serves nothing but wine and beer, the former nothing but fried fish. One orders the fish by weight, choosing a fleshy piece of merluza, a whole baby flounder from the salt marshes of Cádiz, a dozen pieces of squid, or a couple of hundred thumbnail chanquetes, which are then coated in batter, deep-fried in soybean and olive oils, and delivered in a paper cone at a temperature designed to be edible by the time a drink has been bought across the street.
At the Santa Maria, all wine is drawn from double hogsheads propped up on sawhorses around the perimeter of the shadowy hall. Although beer and a variety of sherries can be ordered, the rule of the establishment is to drink the wines of Málaga, throttled from the rich, overripened muscat grape, then mixed in permutations to please the driest to even the sweetest of tastes. From Seco Añejo, the color of straw, to Lágrima Añejo, Seco Trasañejo, Lágrima Trasañejo, and the vintage Pedro Ximenes 1908, as impenetrable as Guinness with a smoothness to coat a full set of teeth, all can be ordered and folded into the sherries to spawn yet another generation. At sixty pesetas for a three-ounce glass, three or four samplings are the least politely possible, and several more are often required.
Ben