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me to jump into a doorway, and a Mini Metro that might have escaped from the set of The Italian Job raced past. If you don't want to end up smeared across the walls of Toledo you'd be wise to remember when exploring these deceptively quiet and empty back-streets that you are still in the twenty-first century. Despite the fact that the people of Toledo are now almost wholly dependent on the tourist industry for their livelihoods, their motorists display a fine contempt for visitors, matched only by the gargoyles on the cathedral, which from their stony looks seemed shocked that such an idle heretic as myself had not been arrested yet.

And of course in this town all streets lead to the cathedral. The poet Garcilaso de la Vega described Toledo as a clear and illustrious nightmare', and this building is at the heart of the uneasy dream, a distillation of many disturbed nights. When I entered its darkly glittering interior, I was reminded of nothing so much as one of Francis Bacon's screaming Popes. It is all gold and jewels, ancient ironwork, enraptured faces in stone and oils flickering by candlelight, and a gloom of the consistency that Milton must have had in mind when he wrote of darkness made visible'. This dream seems more solid and real than the waking world; it's the sort you come gasping out of in a cold sweat, desperately worried about things you normally don't give much thought to, such as your immortal soul.

Feeling somewhat purged, and certainly put in my place as a spiritual and temporal outsider, I emerged blinking into the sunlight and went with the flow of the human stream along the crowded Calle del Angel. Like a piece of flotsam, I was bobbed aimlessly along the trinket shops and tapas bars until eventually being washed up at the western edge of the city, on a plaza next to the Monasterio de San Juan de Los Reyes. Here, a spectacular view across a parched landscape, and a welcome cool breeze, cleared my head, and I glanced up at the walls of the 15th century Fransiscan monastery. And here again the past came shockingly to life. It is as if Toledo were a survivor of some great injustice: once you step through that gate, she won't let you go until you've been shown every scrap of memorabilia she's hoarded up against a future settlement of accounts. The walls around the main doorway are decorated, if that's the right word, with the fetters leg irons of Christian prisoners of the Moors. It was a bit like coming across braziers and gibbets of the Inquisition hanging on government buildings in Madrid, or an old guillotine in Paris. Most modern cities have such relics hidden away in museums or in vaults, sanitising their past into guidebook versions of history. Not Toledo. I came across the same sense of hurt pride, and a refusal to let go of treasured reminders of more glorious times, in parts of Belgrade a few years ago. Perhaps if a country, region or town invests so much of its psychic energy into a relatively short space of time, it cannot move on from that centre of gravity and is doomed to endlessly return to it, colouring its present with the symbols of the past. Toledo and Belgrade, I suspect, would agree with William Faulkner's view that the past is never dead, it's not even past.' Once stalwart defenders of the faith, they still in their dotage endlessly re-enact old struggles, refusing or simply unable to let go of the old ghosts. Don Quixote is still very much alive, and half mad, in this part of Spain.

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