Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 by Christopher Isherwood

Author:Christopher Isherwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448162475
Publisher: Random House

October 27. Yesterday, at 8:15 in the evening, we docked at Lisbon. (We made the landfall about four hours earlier, when the hills around Sintra appeared over the horizon, while we were drinking tea to the accompaniment of “Claire de Lune.”) It was too dark to see much, but we went into the town and walked around, through crowds of dark homely runty but charmingly polite Portuguese. Chief impression: a beautiful tower with an elevator in it, leading to a covered passage high above the street, by which, apparently, you could reach an upper level. Immense numbers of taxis, nearly all empty, darting back and forth. Cafés occupied almost entirely by men. The beautiful old houses with tiled facades and the narrow lanes.

We sailed again shortly after midnight, which means we’ll be late getting into Gibraltar, maybe we won’t arrive till after dark. Now we’re going through the fuss and nuisance of tipping—who shall get how much? No land in sight, but quite a lot of tankers and fishing boats.

October 28. Here we are, on board a boat called the Monte Calpe, crossing the straits from Gilbraltar to Tangier. We only left the Saturnia last night at 7:00, but already we seem completely transplanted from a first-class to a second- or third-class world.

Leaving the Saturnia was, of course, interminable. We packed, stood around, were told to wait upstairs, downstairs, upstairs again. Don was angelic—as he has been throughout this voyage—and did all the tipping himself.

We found we couldn’t get a room in the good hotel “The Rock,” nor in the middling hotel “The Bristol,” so we had to be content with “The Grand,” which isn’t. But the manager was one of the most charming and helpful hotelkeepers I have ever met. And the food wasn’t bad.

We went into a bar called the Café Universal which was crowded with sailors, British and Australian, as well as a few Latin-looking civilians, some of whom may have been pimps. As we drank our warm whiskey, a man beside me crashed over on to the floor and lay there. He seemed drunk, but Don noticed that the mouths of his two friends were twitching as if from dope. Many of the sailors were staggering drunk. A few camped, hugged each other, mouthed kisses and executed hula dances. All this in spite of shore patrol and M.P.s outside. A bunch of sturdy, horse- or pig-faced little whores executed Spanish dances with great goodwill and were deafeningly applauded. Huge photographs of [Queen] Elizabeth and [Prince] Philip looked down on the scene. They were both facing toward the left—which made it look as if Philip had made an off-color remark and Elizabeth had turned away from him in disgust.

Our bedroom was of the interior Spanish kind, with windows opening on to a staircase. Every sound made by anybody in any of the rooms was clearly aubible. The man and woman going to bed next door might just as well have been going to bed with us. On top of this, my cough came back, together with grave suspicions that I have crabs—God knows how.

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