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Who: The artist Van Stein and me.
What: A road trip commencing from the Principality of Monaco.
Where: To Andorra, a micro-state deep within the Pyrenees—Basque territory—in between France and Spain.
When: July 2005.
Why: A prelude to looking up Salvador Dali's spirit in Figueres, Spain.
How: a brand spanking new VW Gti, six-speed, six-litre, sixteen-cylinder engine, which, on windy days, can actually take flight.
We let it rip on the autoroute
behind the Cote d’Azur—160
kilometres an hour, whizzing past St-Remy and Arles in Provence, stopping once
for salami sandwiches and apple juice before sailing past Nimes and
Montpelier.
At Perpignan, a right turn
westward into the mountains.
We wind upward and downward, upward and downward, again and again—a hundred hairpin turns, ideal terrain for a Gti.
It is mid-afternoon when we pull
into Andorra le Vella, in a valley surrounded by mountains.
Amoeba-shaped Andorra is larger and
more bustling than we expect. At first
glance, it looks like there’s
much going on as I steer into the courtyard of The Andorra Park Hotel.
An expansive lobby within, but no people—aside from a solitary receptionist who unsmilingly assigns rooms.
An expansive lobby within, but no people—aside from a solitary receptionist who unsmilingly assigns rooms.
The accommodation is excellent:
contemporary, sleek, and equipped with a shower featuring seven nozzles, including a pair at thigh height which, one assumes, is designed for do-it-yourself colonics.
A Caucasian of no discernible
origin joins us in the elevator and mumbles about us being American, about
visiting Texas recently, seeing rodeos, watching people get thrown, a bunch of
pussies compared to him. When the
elevator door opens, he snorts twice and trots off.
Van Stein and I exchange glances.
The Bull Man.
“I see his kind everywhere,” says Van
Stein. “They want to suck my energy.”
A male has replaced the female on
duty earlier: Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
I ask directions to the hotel
business center; he directs me out a back door, across the garden, into a
multilevel car park, an elevator down to the street, and around the corner to
what is probably an Internet café.
“You mean I can’t access the
Internet in this hotel?”
“Eh?”
“The Internet. Online.”
“Eh?”
“I want to check my emails.”
“Eh?”
“Okay, let’s try this: What’s the
best restaurant in Andorra?”
“Eh?”
“Food. Mange?”
“This hotel restaurant.”
Van Stein and I stroll to the hotel
dining room, consult the menu, glance around.
There are no people. Where there
should be a bar (specified on the website) sits a large empty cloakroom. No cloakroom attendant; no coats, just a lot
of lonely hangers.
“Where is everyone?” I ask Van
Stein.
The artist shakes his head. “Must be out of season. This place is about skiing.”
“In other words, the one time it
makes sense for us to be somewhere in January we’re here in July?”
We follow Manuel’s directions
through the garden, into a parking garage, an elevator, which releases us into
the middle of a department store. We
exit the store and find ourselves on a main street chock-a-block with shops
selling stuff at duty free prices.
Andorra, it transpires, is one
large open-air shopping mall–a
consumer’s
paradise—and that is all
that is going on: heavy-duty (or rather no
duty) shopping. No charm. Even less character. And an ugly in-bred people caught in a time
warp.
Van Stein sets off to scout
inspiration and vantage points (scarce on both counts); I return to the hotel.
The soul-less lobby features a
flat-screen TV playing to no one. I
search in earnest for a hotel bar.
Manuel explains that I should take a seat in the large, empty lobby and
someone should, in theory, manifest to take my order for a drink. I look around. Sobriety is my preference.
When Van Stein descends, we follow
Manuel’s
directions to a bar–“beer
only”–but
his recommendation offers less ambience than the hotel, so we continue our
search, settling on a tapas bar called Mama Maria’s, a high-table
with a bottle of Marquis di Rascal rioja.
“This is a very odd town,” I say to
Van Stein. “The people don’t smile, and it’s just as well
because they have worse teeth than Brits.”
Mama Maria’s fills up
around us, a social hub of sorts. The
natives are misshapen. Andorra’s young women
are cursed with lopsided faces beneath dark hair parted in the middle and worn
in a bun, all of them sporting the same black rectangular spectacles,
off-kilter across crooked noses.
“Can you imagine living
here?” I shake my head. “Thank God for this rioja.”
We consult the menu. “I’d
avoid calamari and shrimp,” says Van Stein, noting the long trek we’d taken from the
sea. “Must be frozen. And if
it wasn’t, we’d be in worse
trouble.”
“So, what’s indigenous?”
“Dandelion.”
I take my chances with calamari, anchovies, and Fried Potato with Spicy Sauce—which is actually soggy fries with ketchup. Everything
else comes smothered in greasy breadcrumbs.
I assume a second bottle of rioja
will help us see a more pleasant side to Andorra. But I presume too much,
momentarily forgetting the secret to happiness:
low expectations.
Four local women–Frumpy, Dumpy,
Stumpy, and Grumpy– take
a table next to ours.
“I can’t get an urge in
edgewise,” says Van Stein, speaking into his cassette recorder. “This is a short, stocky people. Dark and serious and traditional. This little hole of a microstate has been
here thousands of years. Little has
changed. People come through one end,
six million a year, buy a bunch of stuff, and gurk out the other end. I bet the locals can trace their lineages
back fourteen generations—to the same family.
Over the last two generations this place has become consumerism
central. The local culture has
dissipated, but the people are stuck, landlocked, no where to go. I sense a lot of unconscious rebellion.” Van Stein likes to roll into a place, figure it out, tap
its psyche before setting up an easel.
“And/or-ism,” he concludes.
“And/or-ism,” he concludes.
“What’s
that?”
“Trapped.”
“Trapped.”
A few tables away, Bull Man has manifested himself. He’s with a woman—his wife? Or maybe someone posing as his wife. Are they here to suck Van Stein‘s energy—or keep tabs on me? And if so for whom? (Potential priers have propagated of late.)
“Maybe Andorra is nicer when it’s dark out?”
says Van Stein, reeling me back from semi-paranoia.
Turns out, it isn’t.
But there’s no
leaving. Once you’re there, it’s a long way
out. And, anyway, I have business in the
morning. So I seek refuge on my balcony facing the mountains.
As usual, Van Stein is the decoy,
suspiciously prowling the dark streets in the early hours of the morning,
keeping Bull Man occupied, while I do secret work, dry-cleaning my
tracks next morning through car-parks and department stores for my covert
meeting.
As soon as it’s over, I’m ready to bail
this bog, with no plan to return. Ever.