Maiden Voyages (41 page)

As I drove up into the town, a group of lads threw stones at my car; I had heard before that this was an ancient Rondeño custom. I knew of a crippled Englishman staying in Ronda who had had to renounce his walks about the town because his foreignness and his lameness drew stones and jeers. I got out at the magnificent one-span eighteenth-century bridge, the Puente Nuevo, and looked down into the gorge,
which is certainly very singular and noticeable. It is, of course, the great point about Ronda: whether it improves the look of the town or not might be argued; it depends on whether one likes towns to be cleft in two by a gorge, or whether one prefers them all in one piece. Be that as it may, it is a remarkably fine gorge, very wide and very deep; a Salvator Rosa kind of gorge. It actually has some water running in it—most unusual in Spanish rivers in summer. No wonder that the romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries adored it. Indeed, it is a romantic thing to stand on a bridge and look across from an old Moorish town of the eighth century to an old Spanish one of the fifteenth. Both towns, or rather, both halves of the town, have charm. The fifteenth-century town, the Mercadillo, a good deal rebuilt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is, for the most part, regular, clean and white; many of the houses have beautiful balconies and
rejas
; there are among them some narrow Moorish streets and Moorish houses. There is a handsome eighteenth-century bull ring, and a generally admired alameda with a fine precipitous view. But the more interesting part of Ronda is, of course, the older town, the Ciudad, with its narrow, twisting Moorish streets, and white houses with walnut doors. From one of the oldest houses, the Casa del Rey Moro (prettily restored and charmingly bijou, with terrace and patio and gorge view) stone steps cut into the rock by Christian slaves lead down into the Tajo. I did not go all the way down; after about a hundred steps I returned to the street, and followed it down past the two older bridges, the Moorish Puente Viejo and the later Puente de San Miguel. I got on to a path that wound down into the gorge and to the flour mills; the view of the river, the great bridge, and the sheer precipices on either side of the gorge, with apparently decadent houses clinging precariously to their edges, was, in the gathering dusk, intimidating in the extreme.

It takes Bædeker (who does it very well) to describe how one steers a tortuous course about the maze of the Mercadillo and the Ciudad, the Tajo and the streets. It is, to say the truth, confusing, and I made little of it that evening. But the next morning I arrived, largely by chance, at the various things that should be seen—the Renaissance house of the Marqués de Salvatierra (or so I was informed, though it had 1798 above the family arms on its carved stone door); various Arab houses
and arches, various pretty plazas with ochre churches and charming belfries. The best church was Santa Maria Mayor, a fascinating pastiche mosque (of which some remains) built on Visigothic (nothing to be seen), 1485 Gothic on the mosque, sixteenth and seventeenth-century extension on to this, very rich spacious and plateresque, with fine jasper pillars. There are other churches; and there is the Alcázaba, begun by the Romans, continued by the Goths, and finished by the Moors, and rebuilt after the French blew it up in 1809; it was once the most impregnable fortress in Bætica. There was a strong and active resistance movement to the French in Ronda; the Rondeños were adept at maquis methods, and the French did not enjoy their occupation of this town.

I should have liked, but had not time, to visit the ruins of Ronda la Vieja; they are said, however, to be now negligible. I should have liked too, given time, to explore the
serranía
for the sites of all the perished towns of the neighbourhood listed in the fifteenth century. And how many little Iberian-Roman-Moorish villages and walled towns are still extant in these mountains, seldom visited because too remote? Ronda is famous, because of its size and its eccentric gorge, so admirable, so picturesque, so serviceable for the throwing down of enemies and slain bulls. But the mountains and ravines of Andalucia are set with the crumbling walled villages where Moors and Christians settled, desiring to live their lives unmolested, and to molest, so far as might be, the lives of others.

I left Ronda at noon, for the magnificent silence of the mountain road, where there moved only a few donkeys with loads and a few groups of roadmenders; I passed my three friends of yesterday, who waved their hats and called greetings. And so down through the great wild blue-shadowed sierras to the Mediterranean road again, smooth, easy and civilized, rich with sugar canes, orange groves, bananas and tropical plants. All along it were white villages. At Estepona ships were building on the beach, and donkeys ambled along untended with huge loads of straw and chaff. Beyond Estepona there was a pleasant beach, with a cove between two spurs of rock, one of which jutted out to sea. I thought I would bathe from these rocks, but a
guardia civil
emerged from a hut on the road above and told me that this beach belonged to an English general at Gibraltar, who allowed no one to bathe there. People might
only bathe from the other side of the further rocks. It seemed that the general owned about half a kilometre of beach. I asked if I might swim out from further down the shore and land on the rocks of the general; the guard said no, the general did not permit that one landed on his rocks. Does the general own the sea too? I asked. Yes, the sea also was the general’s. For how far out? For two kilometres, replied the guard—further than I would wish to swim, and I agreed. Who, I asked him, is this general, and how much does he pay for all this beach, sea and rock? The guard did not know the general’s name, but believed that he paid nothing at all. The guard was a pleasant man, and had a sense of humour. It seemed either that the cove was a gift to the English general from the Spanish nation, which, in view of Gibraltar, was generous; or that the general had, with true casual British imperialism, just annexed it, and engaged a guard to defend it. I felt my customary admiring pride in the exploits of my countrymen, and thought there should be a Union Jack flying over the beach. It was Sunday afternoon; some Spanish families came presently to bathe and picnic; we were all warned off the general’s cove and had to bathe further down. But it was a pleasant bathe, in that warm and scintillating afternoon sea. It was, I reflected, one of my last Mediterranean bathes, for it was only about twenty-five miles to the Straits, the Pillars of Hercules, where the known world ended and the dark bottomless void of the misty Ocean began.

(1912-1989)

from
STONES OF FLORENCE

Everyone complains of the noise; with the windows open, no one can sleep. The morning paper reports the protests of hotel-owners, who say that their rooms are empty: foreigners are leaving the city; something must be done; a law must be passed. And within the hotels, there is a continual shuffling of rooms. Number 13 moves to 22, and 22 moves to 33, and 33 to 13 or to Fiesole. In fact, all the rooms are noisy and all are hot, even if an electric fan is provided. The hotel-managers know this, but what can they do? To satisfy the client, they co-operate with polite alacrity in the make-believe of room-shuffling. If the client imagines that he will be cooler or quieter in another part of the hotel, why destroy his illusions? In truth, short of leaving Florence, there is nothing
to be done until fall comes and the windows can be shut again. A law already exists forbidding the honking of horns within city limits, but it is impossible to drive in a city like Florence without using your horn to scatter the foot traffic.

As for the Vespas and the Lambrettas, which are the plague of the early hours of the morning, how can a law be framed that will keep their motors quiet? Readers of the morning newspaper write in with suggestions; a meeting is held in Palazzo Vecchio, where more suggestions are aired; merit badges to be distributed to noiseless drivers; state action against the manufacturers; a special police night squad, equipped with radios, empowered to arrest noisemakers of every description; an ordinance that would make a certain type of muffler mandatory, that would make it illegal to race a motor “excessively,” that would prohibit motor-scooters from entering the city centre. This last suggestion meets with immense approval; it is the only one Draconian enough to offer hope. But the motor-scooterists’ organization at once enters a strong protest (“undemocratic,” “discriminatory,” it calls the proposal), and the newspaper, which has been leading the anti-noise movement, hurriedly backs water, since Florence is a democratic society, and the scooterists are the
popolo minuto
—small clerks and artisans and factory workers. It would be wrong, the paper concedes, to penalize the many well-behaved scooterists for the sins of a few “savages,” and unfair, too, to consider only the city centre and the tourist trade; residents on the periphery should have the right to sleep also. The idea of the police squad with summary powers and wide discretion is once again brought forward, though the city’s finances will hardly afford it. Meanwhile, the newspaper sees no recourse but to appeal to the
gentilezza
of the driving public.

This, however, is utopian: Italians are not civic-minded. “What if
you
were waked up at four in the morning?”—this plea, so typically Anglo-Saxon, for the other fellow as an imagined self, elicits from an Italian the realistic answer: “But I
am
up.” A young Italian, out early on a Vespa, does not project himself into the person of a young Italian office worker in bed, trying to sleep, still less into the person of a foreign tourist or a hotel-owner. As well ask the wasp, after which the Vespa is named, to think of itself as the creature it is about to sting. The
popolo minuto
, moreover,
likes
noise, as everyone knows.
“Non fa rumore,”
objected a young Florentine workman, on being shown an English scooter. “It doesn’t make any noise.”
^*

All ideas advanced to deal with the Florentine noise problem, the Florentine traffic problem, are utopian, and nobody believes in them, just as nobody believed in Machiavelli’s Prince, a utopian image of the ideally self-interested despot. They are dreams, to toy with: the dream of prohibiting
all
motor traffic in the city centre (on the pattern of Venice) and going back to the horse and the donkey; the dream that someone (perhaps the Rockefellers?) would like to build a subway system for the city.… Professor La Pira, Florence’s Christian Democratic mayor, had a dream of solving the housing problem, another of the city’s difficulties: he invited the homeless poor to move into the empty palaces and villas of the rich. This Christian fantasy collided with the laws of property, and the poor were turned out of the palaces. Another dream succeeded it, a dream in the modern idiom of a “satellite” city that would arise southeast of Florence, in a forest of parasol pines, to house the city’s workers, who would be conveyed back and forth to their jobs by special buses that would pick them up in the morning, bring them home for lunch, then back to work, and so on. This plan, which had something of science fiction about it, was blocked also; another set of dreamers—professors, architects, and art historians—rose in protest against the defacement of the Tuscan countryside, pointing to the impracticalities of the scheme, the burdening of the already overtaxed roads and bridges. A meeting was held, attended by other professors and city-planners from Rome and Venice; fiery speeches were made; pamphlets distributed; the preservers won. La Pira, under various pressures (he had also had a dream of eliminating stray cats from the city), had resigned as mayor meanwhile.

But the defeat of Sorgane, as the satellite city was to be called, is only an episode in the factional war being fought in the city, street by street, building by building, bridge by bridge, like the old wars of the Blacks and Whites, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Cerchi and Donati. It is
an uncertain, fluctuating war, with idealists on both sides, which began in the nineteenth century, when a façade in the then-current taste was put on the Duomo, the centre of the city was modernized, and the old walls along the Arno were torn down. This first victory, of the forces of progress over old Florence, is commemorated by a triumphal arch in the present Piazza della Repubblica with an inscription to the effect that new order and beauty have been brought out of ancient squalor. Today the inscription makes Florentines smile, bitterly, for it is an example of unconscious irony: the present Piazza, with its neon signs advertising a specific against uric acid, is, as everyone agrees, the ugliest in Italy—a folly of nationalist grandeur committed at a time when Florence was, briefly, the capital of the new Italy. Those who oppose change have only to point to it, as an argument for their side, and because of it the preservers have won several victories. Nevertheless, the parasol pines of the hill of Sorgane may yet fall, like the trees in the last act of
The Cherry Orchard
, unless some other solution is found for the housing problem, for Florence is a modern, expanding city—that is partly why the selective tourist dislikes it.