Spain (10 page)

I once hailed a taxi in Madrid and asked the driver to take me to the synagogue. He was only faintly surprised by the commission, and after a few fruitless drives up drab back streets, knocking at closed doors and looking for mistaken street numbers, he deposited me at the door of a biggish modern office block. There, said he, were the Hebrews. Sure enough, when I had gone inside, and taken the elevator upstairs, and entered a small, dark, carpeted apartment, there the Hebrews were—small quiet men from North Africa, with the voice of a cantor giving a singing lesson in the room next door, and along the hall a plain, discreet little place of worship. They had no complaints, they said. The Government treated them kindly enough. They had not lately been accused of eating Christian infants, and if anyone thought them capable of sorcery, nobody had yet engaged their services.

In this they differed from their cousins, the Spanish gypsies, whose talents are always in demand. The most famous gypsies in the whole world are the painted dancers of the Sacromonte in Granada, a clan of prosperous, grasping, and exceedingly talented performers who batten upon the poor visitor with steely talons, plump him gasping upon a kitchen chair in a cave, offer him a glass of unspeakable wine, treat him to half an hour of the best folk-dancing in Europe, grossly overcharge him, and send him back to his hotel feeling rather as the yokels of folk-lore used to feel, when the devil had kept them up in a trance, footing it around a fairy ring all night. The zing, the flare, the unutterable nerve of the Sacromonte gypsies, which have made their name a swear-word wherever tourists gather to swop experiences, are characteristic of the Spanish
gitanos
—much the most exciting of all the aliens of Spain.

There are gypsies all over this country, pure or half-caste, raggety with their dogs and wagons on the lanes of Navarre, inexcusably swaggering through the streets of Granada, where
they have been settled at least since the fifteenth century. One contemporary authority, Jean-Paul Clébert, says that in Spain they have ‘found one of their most favourable homes', but it was not always so. Their life in Spain has been full of ups and downs. The Catholic Monarchs threatened to banish them, unless they gave up their gypsy life. Philip II tried to settle them in towns. Philip IV ordered that ‘they be taken from their places of habitation, separated from one another, with express prohibition to come together publicly or in secret'. Charles II forbade them to own horses. Charles III called them Neo-Castilians, and gave their horses back again. The prophets of the French romantic movement seized upon their dances, their costumes, their rhythms, and their strident voices and made them synonymous, to the world at large, with the reputation of Spain herself. Much that seems to us most Spanish is really gypsy. Bull-fighting is an art in which the
gitanos
have always excelled; flamenco they have made their own; wherever a castanet clicks in Spain, a heel taps, a pair of hands claps, or a deep sad voice wails through the night, then the influence of the gypsies is somewhere about.

They possess, to a degree no other Spaniard does, a gift for irrepressible enthusiasm. They crackle. In the delightful little Andalusian town of Ubeda I was approached one night by two gypsies who asked if I would like to hear their companion, an older man of distinctly theatrical appearance, sing the
cante jondo
. He was, they said, a most distinguished performer, well known in all the best caves of the Sacromonte—which is to say, in the
gitano
context, top of the bill at the Palladium. The singer's throat was muffled in an elegant spotted scarf, rather in the Barrymore tradition, and he complained, with an anxious arpeggio or two, of a sore throat. He agreed to do his best, though, and off we set towards a nearby café. It was rather like joining a trio of flamboyant picaresque rogues in a minor bank robbery. The place was full of solemn townsmen, playing earnest games of dominoes, who looked up as we entered, in a flurry of badinage and conceit, rather as though we were interrupting the sermon. We were, however, unperturbed. Up the steps we went, now and then breaking into a few clattering dance steps, and clearing ourselves a
place at a trestle table, and ordering wine all around, we sat down, gave that lofty tenor a few respectful moments of silence, and presently burst into song.

Never in my whole life have I had more fun, or been more stimulated by animal high spirits. The great man, breaking his melancholy, soon led us from the sad
cante jondo
into the most raucous kind of flamenco, and before long that whole room was an uproar of violent clapping, clicked fingers, wild laughs and cries, stamped feet, ear-splitting songs and side-splitting witticisms. The domino-players abandoned their games, the floorboards shook, and presently the proprietor, shouldering his way through the din, interrupted to say that if we wished to continue the entertainment, we must do so elsewhere. So we parted, Barrymore, his two merry agents, and I, only pausing in the moonlight for a last actor-managerial clearing of the throat and a brief altercation about performing fees—those splendid fellows at first demanding, not with much conviction, rather more than five times what they actually got.

Ah, the gypsies! If they are not the salt of Spain, they are the spiciest of sauces.

Many another foreigner has left his mark. The Roman has left his great aqueducts and fortifications, the theatres of Mérida and Sagunto, the villas of Tarragona, the city wall that surrounds the cathedral city of Lugo, or the noble bridge across the Tagus at Alcántara—a name which means, indeed, merely The Bridge. The Spanish bull-ring is clearly descended from the Roman amphitheatre—if you have doubts, look at the ruined ring at Alcoy, north of Alicante, which was wrecked during the Civil War, and now looks exactly like an archaeological specimen in Rome. Roman place names are all over Spain—Badajoz means Pax Augusta, Saragossa comes from Caesarea Augusta. Olives from Roman stock are still the best. Some people think that
gazpacho
is really the Roman
posca
, a standard Roman Army ration; and some travellers consider that the most evocative memorial in all Spain is the unfinished Roman obelisk that stands in the shade of a wild garden north of Tarragona, dappled by sunshine, fragrant
with pines, with the sweet breezes of the Mediterranean ruffling its cypresses, and a strong emanation of dryads.

French influence in Spain has been persistent and profound. French monks of Cluny created the Santiago pilgrimage. French architects inspired half the great cathedrals. A Frenchman was first Archbishop of Toledo. Thirty-four expeditions came from France to help the Spanish Christians in their crusades against the Moors. Throughout modern Spanish history, France has been Spain's symbol of modernism—sometimes feared, often detested, frequently envied, but never quite out of the Spanish mind. Dutchmen too, Germans, Flemings, and Italians have all brought their skills to Spain, and left behind a curtain-wall, a tapestry, the slope of a buttress or the angle of a pediment. The telephone system still bears the stamp of the Americans who used to manage it, and who stuck to their switchboards with such tenacity that throughout the Civil War they served both sides impartially—often the first news of a city's loss reached the Government when some Minister telephoned the local commander from Madrid, to be answered by the enemy. Foreign capital from many countries has been essential to the jerky development of Spanish industry. The Army, with its jackboots, goosesteps, Africa Korps caps and Nazi steel helmets, is a reminder that foreign troops were fighting on this soil less than forty years ago: sometimes, on the lonely steppe, you will find a small memorial, in the old German script, to some young pilot of the Condor Legion, and outside Salamanca there is an ironically beautiful memorial to all the Italians who died in these parts for the gimcrack cause of Fascism.

And, of course, you cannot escape the British, the sea-gypsies, whose history touches the story of Spain so often and so intimately that John of Gaunt had a perfectly reasonable claim to the throne of Castile, Charles I of England once came to Madrid, dashingly incognito, to find himself a Spanish bride, and the Dukes of Wellington are, to this day, Dukes of Ciudad Rodrigo too. The British flag still flies over Gibraltar, and there is a large British colony in Spain proper—thousands of expatriates have escaped from the drizzle and the taxation to Andalusia or the Balearics. There are many Spanish Anglophiles: Jerez, whose sherry sells in
vast quantities on the English market, and whose industry was partly built by Englishmen, is recognizably British still, full of impeccable Anglo-Spanish accents, handsome hacking jackets and visiting gentry from the London office. And most telling of all the figures of the relationship, perhaps, are the British old-age pensioners who, finding winter life on the Costa del Sol both cheaper and more fun than retirement at home, come out in their rollicking groups each year to occupy the grateful holiday hotels: for very soon, often enough, these old dears succumb to the environment, are transformed into honorary Andalusians themselves, and are to be seen in the middle of the morning happily flirting with total strangers over wine glasses beside the sea.

Where the Guadalquiver River comes down to the sea, the upper-works of the ships from Seville riding queerly through the palms and sandbanks, there lies a great marshland, the Coto Doñana—the biggest roadless area in western Europe. The best way to sample this extraordinary region of marsh and sand dune—short of taking a string of mules and making for the middle of it—is to visit a fascinating village called El Rocío, twenty-odd miles off the road from Seville to Huelva.

It is chiefly a place of pilgrimage, for its imposing modern church contains a miraculous figure of the Virgin whose annual fiesta is one of the most colourful events in the Spanish calendar. Half the buildings of the village are white shrines, chapels, hermitages or pilgrims' hostels: the rest are simple single-storey cottages, and among them there runs a series of wide green swards, shaded by big cork trees. Most of the houses are modern, the village now doubling as pious destination and holiday resort, but the place
still possesses a quality of mystery and remoteness: and if this is partly because of the Virgin's presence there, it is partly because El Rocío stands on the very edge of the Coto Doñana. If you wander down beyond the houses, following the sound of children's voices, there you will see, beyond the muddy shallows where the small boys play, the swamps, reeds and sand dunes of the great nature reserve stretching away towards the sea.

It looks illimitable and almost impenetrable, so thick are its high rushes, so flat, hot, and hazy its horizon. Scarcely a sign of life disturbs it, not a rustle in the rushes, not the smoke of a distant steamer—only an occasional gliding bird, perhaps, or a croak out of the sun. It is, though, one of the richest wildlife refuges in Europe, and teems with birds, mammals, and multifarious insects. Here all the resources of pristine Spain are left unsnared, unshot, and uneaten (except for the predations of a few enterprising poachers, who concentrate on herons' eggs). There are lynxes on the Coto Doñana, and wild boars, mongooses, chameleons, sand skinks, snakes of a dozen varieties, tortoises and terrapins, wildcats, genets, flamingoes, great crested grebes, glossy ibises, spoonbills, bee-eaters, golden orioles, tarantulas, scorpions, Algerian Owls and Edible Dormice. Its midges are so numerous that their mating swarms rise above the marshland like thick black columns of smoke. Its birds are so varied that in one recent afternoon, in an area of about a hundred acres, a single ornithologist spotted 1,891 birds of 35 species. It even boasts the only wild camels in Europe, remnants of a troop which were brought to Spain from the Canary Islands in 1829, and proved such abysmal failures with pack or plough that they were turned loose into the Coto; by the early 1960s there were only three animals left, but they were reinforced by dromedaries left over from the filming in Spain of
Lawrence of Arabia
, and can now occasionally be seen splashing eerily through the marshes in clouds of salt spray.

All this in Andalusia, a morning's drive from Seville, in the second half of the twentieth century! But the Coto Doñana is only a climax, for Spain as a whole remains the wildest country of western Europe, except perhaps the northernmost part of
Scandinavia. The human population of Spain has risen from some eighteen million at the beginning of the century to some thirty million today. The people are mostly packed, however, into a few densely populated areas, and are pressing ever more insistently out of the country into the towns. At least a third of the Spaniards live in the seven biggest cities of the country, and even in rural areas, except in the north-west, they are grouped in tight hubs of population. It is thought that Spain can support double her present population, if the land is worked properly, but even then half her country will be uncultivated. Even in the arable areas, there is plenty of room for wildness; and beyond the fields there always rise the vast, spare, rock-ribbed mountains, which can never be spoilt or tamed. As recently as the twenties there were fullscale expeditions into the Sierra Nevada, and there were some high corners of the Picos de Europa, in Asturias, that were unexplored until the 1960s.

There are bears still in Spain, in the gloomy mountains of the north. There are wolves in some parts: on a blistered beach in Murcia I once found a wolf-corpse, half eaten by ants and grinning maliciously. There are great bustards, most imposing of game birds, all over Andalusia: huge pompous creatures, with muscular necks and bristly moustaches, whose great wing-beat is one of the most tremendous sounds of ornithology. The fighting bulls of Spain, bred deliberately to ferocity, are a far cry from the test-tube hybrids of less elemental countries: powerful, thick-set, and heavy-chested, they roam the great bull-pastures like proper monsters, and are only rounded up with respect, by lithe experienced gauchos with lances. Spain is a great place for owls, gazing disapprovingly at the passer-by from telegraph wire or umbrella pine: Spanish legend says that an owl sat upon the cross-beam of the Cross, and that ever since its descendants have been hooting ‘
Cruz! Cruz!
' Spain is full of mole-crickets, shrill little underground insects whose goggle eyes you may sometimes see peering sleeplessly out of their burrows, and whose buzz is so energetic that their whole bodies vibrate down there like the radiators of very old motor-cars.

Eagles and vultures swoop around many a Spanish cliff-face.
Fastidious egrets stalk the water-meadows of the west. Gay little crested hoopoes glide enchantingly across every province. Frogs croak so loud that they sound like puppy-dogs in the dark. Seagulls go as far inland as the salt marshes of La Mancha, and swarms of martins give to many Spanish castles the ‘delicate air' that Banquo liked. The nightingales of the Generalife gardens, above Granada, tirelessly live up to their reputation as they sing away among the cypresses. Snakes wriggle perpetually across the lanes of Spain, glow-worms flicker in the night, lizards bask at every picnic site, flying beetles, giant moths and unexpectedly vicious bees are constantly hurling themselves at your windscreen or easing themselves through your bedroom window. All over this country you may pay your respects to the solemn chapter of Spanish storks, clicking their gullets on church-towers and chimneypots from Navarre to Andalusia. Their capital is the Estremaduran city of Cáceres, whose mediaeval houses and cluttered hillside streets seem to cower beneath the domination of the storks' nests; but they are at their most lordly upon the Roman aqueduct at Mérida, through whose arches the big trains steam toward Portugal, and upon whose highest stones the great storks sit in majesty.

It was in Spain that Charles I of England was given trout, out of the Segovia hill streams, so big that he actually took the trouble to write home about them—‘certaine troute of extraordinary greatnesse'. Throughout the mountain masses of Spain delectable unfrequented trout streams abound, and the fjord-like estuaries of the north-west are full of salmon. Nothing is better organized, in the whole gamut of Spanish life, than the system by which the fish of the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts are hurtled across Spain to the capital: a tragic sense of urgency informs the process, from the swift silent loading of the ice-boxes at Valencia or San Sebastian to the pounding of the big trucks through the night—ensuring that whatever else may happen in the world, whatever strikes or outrages may mortify Spain, still there will be red mullet, lobster, oysters, and spider-crabs for lunch in Madrid tomorrow. There are always fish about in Spain: fish in the stream beside the road, fish glistening in the huge markets, dried fillets of
fish in boxes on grocers' counters, trapped fish leaping helplessly in the salt-pans of Cádiz, fish brought by mule or truck to the remotest mountain village, or—if they count as fish—those little wisps of elvers, hardly old enough to be animate, which are offered to you like dishes of some fine-spun pasta in every Valencian eating-house.

Behind the wild fauna, too, peering wistfully over lynx and mongoose, armies of domesticated animals keep Spain close to nature. This is a country still visibly impelled by muscle-power. The tractors and the cars are now ubiquitous, but four stout legs and a good wind are still perfectly normal prerequisites of Spanish locomotion. It is a country of horses, from the pampered beauties of the Seville Feria to the tired Rosinantes which, looking much too tall for their duties, still labour around the Spanish cities with their hackney-carriages. Spain and horses have always gone together, and Spanish stud mares have always been in demand—among the ancients, not least for their supposed powers of virgin birth, what Sir Thomas Browne mockingly described as ‘sub-ventaneous conception from the Western Wind'. Spaniards love and understand horses, and even the most fanatical of bull-fight
aficionados
will sometimes admit to a pang of sympathy for the picadors' wretched mounts (whose vocal chords are cut to stop them screaming).

The brawny Spanish mule, though retreating before the rumble of modernism, handsomely holds his own. The Spanish goat still prospers: in many a little Spanish town and you may see a herd trotted around from door to door, to allow the owner of each animal to pop her inside for a minute or two, milk her, and return her to the care of the goatherd. Oxen still haul the hay-wains (though no longer the ploughshares) of the north. No sight is more instantly Spanish than the flocks of thin sheep which, guarded by a single tongue-tied shepherd boy, roam the bare tablelands, and for thousands of sentimental travellers the most beguiling figure in all Spain is that paragon of pretty patience, the donkey.

Dogs are rather eccentric in Spain. Some look like scented lap
dogs but do the dirty work on farms. Some ride precariously on the backs of donkeys, like Venetian dogs on the prows of market-barges. Some wear long thin sticks beneath their chins, to prevent them from scavenging. Some are apparently of independent means, and are often to be encountered in lonely places, huge spiked collars around their necks, giving you only a cursory glance of inspection as they pace thoughtfully off towards their next appointment. Very few are unfriendly. The Spaniard is popularly supposed to be cruel to animals, and to vagabonds he often is; but to his own beast he is nearly always courteous—his big mongrel dog fears no whip and snarls at no stranger, his docile ass has an affectionate nickname, his lovely Andalusian mare trots among the orange blossoms in a glow of pride and friendship. In Spanish the pronoun
tú
is reserved for relatives, intimates, and animals. Charles I of Spain so loved his cat and his parrot that after his death in the monastery of Yuste they were sent all the way to Valladolid in the royal sedan chair; the Cid so loved his mare Babieca that her burial place is still marked, outside the convent of San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos; the sixteenth-century tomb of Bishop Villalan in Almería Cathedral has a loyal terrier at its feet; I once saw some workmen, doing a job of work in the Alhambra, taking a parrot along with them in a cage.

It is perfectly true that a century ago working people in Bilbao used to eat cats, stewed in sherry; on the other hand there is no more affectionate piece of sculpture in Spain than the famous column-head in Tarragona Cathedral which portrays a big tomcat, taken joyously to his funeral by a company of rats, suddenly coming to life and eating them all. The open-air pet stalls in the Ramblas at Barcelona, where you may buy anything from a mouse to a monkey, are always surrounded by doting bystanders, and the cat who lives in the grille outside the south door of Valencia Cathedral is, as you may see from the hideous mess of fishbones and gristle that lines his lair, never without his well-wishers. To the Spaniard the animal is part of the universal pattern: if a vagrant cat is stoned, or a whining pye-dog kicked away, it is because they have acquired no place in the pyramid of being, and
have no right to approach it. Dignity springs from order, and order admits no strays.

There is something soothing to this sense of natural decorum, just as the pristine landscapes of Spain can often calm the anxious nerves. Behind all the plodding, fluttering, thundering, or wriggling menagerie of Spain, there stands always the sweet silence and emptiness of the Spanish land, daubed in spring with unbelievable blues, reds, and yellows of wild flowers, and still preserving the innocence of a virgin soil. Spain smells of nature: rosemary, thyme, lavender, the homely smell of wood fires, the chemical smell of pine woods after rain, the blowzy smell of orange blossom and roses, the heady smell of a million wild flowers—of the ten thousand varieties of flowers known in Europe, more than half are found in Spain. The Western world offers few pleasures more intoxicating than the delight of awaking, early one spring morning, in a tent upon a Spanish hillside, and looking out through the flap, as the sausages sizzle upon the cooker, across the wide sierra. Perhaps you may see the distant campanile of a village, or hear the faint mellow clanging of its bell. Perhaps, far down in the valley, a solitary muleteer is labouring to market, his head shrouded in a brown blanket. Up on that hill, though, you are all on your own. A kite keeps an eye on you overhead. A party of speckled pigs, high on the slope above, snorts around the bluebells. As the sun warms up there is a buzzing, a humming, a whizzing of small insects in the air, a hooting and chuckling of birds, a chafing of crickets in the grass. The morning is scented with damp turf, blossoms, tent canvas and sausages. By the time you reach the marmalade, you feel you could walk a hundred miles that day, swim the Channel before lunch, or take on single-handed the entire personnel of the Inland Revenue.