The Pritchett Century (22 page)

“Many people come over the border at night—it is not too far—and bring gold and silver,” he said doubtfully.

“Yes,” said the smith, and explained again what I did, but the carter only glared, and said it struck him as fantastic that a man should travel from his own country and on foot from Badajoz and not bring contraband. All the Portuguese brought contraband.

We talked and argued till nearly midnight. Then the smith went out with the carter, and left his wife and me sitting on the doorstep.

A taut, clear wind was stretched across the darkness, and the stars were scattered from horizon to horizon, like the night fires of a myriad shepherd camps on an immense plain. Fires like a multitude of jewels, and when one raised one’s arms to the heavens the stars shone like rings upon the fingers. One had the sense of omnipotence and of the incalculable riches of the heart, and again the sense of blackest loneliness. The tower was crowned like a king with a diadem of stars.

The woman sat at the door. She was pretty and tired. Her voice was slow and weary. Again and again she sighed, “Ay! Ay!”

“Are you married?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Have you any children?”

“No.”

“Ay. No children either. No children. How lonely life is without children. Seven years I have been married and I have no children,” she said blankly. “Ay! And your wife is alone? Ay! Poor creature, to be alone. And you wander alone? Like the shepherds who never see their families. What a life for them. Ay, poor creatures. And is your wife older than you? I am older than my husband. I am two years older. It is
better for the woman to be older. Ay, it is better, much better. Ay de mi! It is better, because thus there is more confidence in the house,” she said. “Ay de mi! I travelled twenty miles to-day on a donkey to the market and I am tired out. It is wonderful to go to the city.”

Her husband came back with two big sacks of straw. “Antonio,” she said, “he is married and he has no children either.” She looked blankly at him like a pretty cow.

“I am sorry,” he said to me. “God has given us no children either,” he said.

He then presented me with two sacks of straw. “I am sorry to have to ask you to sleep here, but we have no bed,” he said. We laid the sacks on the floor. He turned out his two greyhounds and bolted the door.

An old man appeared tottering with a stick at the inner door and walked across to what was evidently a bedroom on the opposite side of the smithy. He looked like the smith’s father. The smith and his wife and two younger brothers followed him in, shut the door, and left me in darkness, with polite “good-nights,” to make the best of a bad job on the sacks, having previously covered me with two vivid red and yellow mule blankets which smelled strongly of their owners. I slept under a boarded-up window near the door. The night was very cold. My limbs stiffened quickly and every turn was agony.

I dozed for a while, but the smithy and its surroundings, which had been so quiet a few hours before, now became as lively as the tuning-up of an orchestra. A flock of sheep, their bells babbling loudly, were penned at the back of the smithy; and near-by was a pen of goats, with bells too, but on a higher, shriller note. The bells of yoked oxen nodded tolling by the tower. Country dogs began barking like artillery, or solitarily howling; and the smith’s greyhounds spent hours jumping up at the door and sniffling and whining around. Little pittering ballets of mice ran about the thatch and the benches tearing up paper—the heavens rending like calico—and once or twice the creatures chased across me as though I were nothing but a mountain range on the floor. To add to this minute uproar and dancing, the peacock gouged the air with his twisty cry. I lay musing. The floor had begun to make itself felt through the sack, and a host of insects advanced from the straw and took possession of me like Lilliputians.

At four o’clock I was awakened most dramatically out of my stupor by one of the greyhounds, which, in fury and despair, had leaped at the boarded window above my head, burst the boards in, and landed plumb on top of me. In the confusion the beast became entangled with my legs, and though I kicked him savagely and sent him away yelping, he insisted on coming back and licking my face. He then curled himself up on my feet and slept. He kept me warm. At five o’clock the bedroom latch clicked up and out stepped the smith. Obviously he had slept in all his clothes.

“And how did he sleep, the companion?” asked he.

“Beautifully,” I said.

He opened the door and let in a freezing, dawnless wind, lit the forge fire, and began to hammer out a ploughshare. Four wild, unshaven men with tousled hair and bloodshot eyes rushed in and called for brandy. They had slept in the tower.

“More!” they cried.

They drank four glasses each, and then ran for their lives down the road to the team they had let wander on its own.

Labourers came in and brought ploughshares and pieces of wheel to be mended. The smith and his brother fell to the clang-cling tap of the anvil. The little hovel was showered with sparks and raftered with blows. The woman did not appear. There was no talk of food. The sun was cast into the sky, but the wind was steel cold. The plains were as pale as frost lain to the blue mountains from which, the night before, I had struggled. I saw the buildings and the tower, cold, tarnished blocks of stone.

After a couple of hours a stout, unshaven fellow, a bailiff, for he was not dressed in the peasant leather and corduroy, came to have his horse shod. He was a greasy, yellow man, with a face like a football, almost featureless, and he wandered about complaining about prices, weather, women, horses, everything, with a stained stump of cigarette stuck to his loose lower lip, and his hat planted on the back of his head. The young smith took no notice of him, but sent hard swinging blows arching down upon the anvil. The place rang like a belfry.

A boy brought a bullock to be shod, for the bullocks are yoked for drawing big loads. The beast was put into a kind of stocks outside the
smithy, roped down by the horns, and lifted bodily almost off the ground by two straps under its belly, and with its feet trussed by ropes. Two small half-moons of steel were nailed to its hoofs.

Then the woman came out and boiled me a couple of eggs and some coffee, and charged me only two reales—about fourpence—for my food and lodging. I made long speeches and protestations of farewell and, looking up at my enemy the sun, wondered if I could get to Caceres before he conquered that country of rock and pink furrows and besieged the town itself.

(1928, 1988)

I make these notes during those two hours of impatience which begin in the early morning when the electric train clatters out of Biarritz Ville. One is hungry and queasy, one has slept badly and begins smoking nervously and too soon. In the corridor no one wants to talk after this night. Women are patching up their faces, combing their hair, men stand outside rubbing the night’s growth of beard. The lavatory smells. One watches the long shadows of the rising sun in the pines; one sees the dust, the dewy greenness, the dry, heavily tiled houses, the fruitful green of a kind climate, a candid sky, and the sedate life. Yesterday’s sun is still warm in these villa towns of terracotta. Here one would be glad to have a doll’s house and count one’s pension and
rentes
thirty times a day like a Frenchman and rest one’s nervous northern mind in conversation consisting so largely of abstract nouns, to parcel out one’s sous, one’s pleasures and permissions.

But the prolonged sight of France annoys; one is impatient for the drama of the frontier and for the violent contrasts, the discontent and indifference of Spain. One is anxious to fill out that famous text of Galdós, so often quoted from the
Episodios Nacionales:
“O Spain, how
thou art the same into whatsoever part of thy history one may look! And there is no disguise to cover thee, no mask to hide thy face, no fard to disfigure thee, for wherever thou appearest, thou art recognized at once from a hundred miles away, one half of thy face—fiesta; and the other misery; one hand bearing laurels and the other scratching thy leprous sores.”

To know what we are up against we ought to go to Spain by aeroplane and fly to the centre of it. Beneath us England is packed with little houses, if the earth is visible at all through the haze; France lies clearly like green linoleum broken into a small busy pattern, a place of thriving little fields; but cross the dark blot of the Pyrenees, and Spain is reddish brown, yellow, and black, like some dusty bull restive in the rock and the sand and (we would guess) uninhabited. The river-beds are wide and bleached and dry. After Switzerland this is the highest country in Europe. The centre is a tableland torn open by gorges, and on the table the mountain ranges are spaciously disposed. There is little green, except on the seaboard; or rather the green is the dark gloss of ilex, olive, and pine, which from the height at which we are flying appear in lake-like and purple blobs. For the most part we are looking down at steppe which is iced in the long winter and cindery like a furnace floor in the short summer. Fortified desert—and yet the animal image returns again and again in this metalled and rocky scene, for occasionally some peak will give a sudden upward thrust, like the twist of a bull’s horns, at the wings of the plane. Flying over Spain, we wonder at the torture that time had put upon the earth’s crust and how human beings can live there. In Soria, the terrible province, below the wicked mountains of Aragón I remember picking up an old woman who had fallen off her donkey and carrying her to the side of the road and wiping the blood off her nose. She was a figure carved in wood, as light as a husk. It was like having starvation in one’s hands.

But it is better, I think, to go the slow way to Spain and to feel the break with Europe at the land frontiers. It is true that at Irún one is not in Spain but in the Basque provinces, among people of mysterious race and language who are an anomaly in Europe; and that, at the other end of the Pyrenees, one is in Catalonia, where the people are really Provençal, speak their own tongue, and scornfully alter the
Spanish proverb: “Africa begins at the Pyrenees,” into “Africa begins at the Ebro.” But the stamp of Spain is on these provinces and the Spanish stain runs over the frontiers. One finds it in Montpellier; on the Atlantic side it reaches into Biarritz, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Bayonne. And in these towns one meets something profoundly and disturbingly Spanish, which goes down to the roots of the Spanish nature: one meets the exiles. For, long before the Europe of the 1930’s or the Russia of the early nineteenth century, Spain is the great producer of exiles, a country unable to tolerate its own people. The Moors, the Jews, the Protestants, the reformers—out with them; and out, at different periods, with the liberals, the atheists, the priests, the kings, the presidents, the generals, the socialists, the anarchists, fascists, and communists; out with the Right, out with the Left, out with every government. The fact recalls that cruel roar of abuse that goes up in the ring when the bullfighter misses a trick; out with him. Hendaye and Bayonne are there to remind us that before the dictatorships and police states and witch-hunters of contemporary history, Spain has been imperial in the trade of producing exiles. And the exiles go out over the bridge at Hendaye into France, the country that has tolerated all, and at the windows of the French hotel the new exile stands, looking across the bight of sea at the gloomy belfries of his native country, hears their harsh bells across the water, and hates the France which has given him sanctuary. He is proud of his hatred, sinks into fatalism, apathy, intrigue, quarrels with all the other exiles, and says with pride: “We are the impossible people.”

Hendaye: the train dies in the customs. One gets a whiff of Spanish impossibility here. A young Spaniard is at the carriage window talking to a friend who is on the platform. The friend is not allowed on the platform; what mightn’t he be smuggling? The gendarme tells him to go. The Spaniard notes this and says what he has to say to his friend. It is a simple matter.

“If you go over to see them on Wednesday tell them I have arrived and will come at the end of the week.” But if a bossy French gendarme thinks that is how a Spaniard proceeds, he is wrong. The simple idea comes out in this fashion:

“Suppose you see them, tell them I am here, but if not, not; you may
not actually see them, but talk to them, on the telephone perhaps, or send a message by someone else and if not on Wednesday, well then Tuesday or Monday, if you have the car you could run over and choose your day and say you saw me, you met me on the station, and I said, if you had some means of sending them a message or you saw them, that I might come over, on Friday, say, or Saturday at the end of the week, say Sunday. Or not. If I come there I come, but if not, we shall see, so that supposing you see them …” Two Spaniards can keep up this kind of thing for an hour; one has only to read their newspapers to see they are wrapped in a cocoon of prolixity. The French gendarme repeats that the Spaniard must leave. The Spaniard on the platform turns his whole body, not merely his head, and looks without rancour at the gendarme. The Spaniard is considering a most difficult notion—the existence of a personality other than his own. He turns back, for he has failed to be aware of anything more than a blur of opposition. It is not resented. Simply, he is incapable of doing more than one thing at a time. Turning to the speaker in the train, he goes over the same idea from his point of view, in the same detail, adding personal provisos and subclauses, until a kind of impenetrable web has been woven round both parties. They are aware of nothing but their individual selves, and the very detail of their talk is a method of defeating any awareness of each other. They are lost in the sound of their own humming, monotonous egos and only a bullet could wake them out of it. Spanish prolixity, the passion for self-perpetuating detail, is noticeable even in some of their considerable writers—in the novels of Galdós, for example: in the passage I have quoted there are three images to describe “disguise”—and it creates a soft impenetrable world of its own. Yet they have a laconic language, the third-person form of address is abrupt and economical, their poetry even at its most decorative is compressed in its phrases and cut down to the lapidary and proverbial, and they can be as reserved and silent as the English; and yet when, in their habit of going to extremes, they settle down to talk, one feels one is watching someone knitting, so fine is the detail, so repetitious the method. The fact is that they are people of excess: excessive in silence and reserve, excessive in speech when they suddenly fly into it. It is absurd of course to generalize about a nation from
the sight of two people on a railway platform; but we are travellers—let us correct one generalization by adding a great many more. There will be time to reflect on the variety of human nature, and the sameness of its types, afterwards. Let us consider the other Spaniards on the train.