To Run Across the Sea (19 page)

A taste for the bizarre, typified by Gaudí’s occasionally nightmarish architecture and always present here, finds expression even in small ways. Half-way down to the port, the principal market opens its grandiose portals on to the Ramblas like those of a baroque church. The visitor may be confronted with a stallful of fungi, some sinister, some startling, all curious. There is an element of freakishness, even in fish-market displays, where you might find a deep-sea monster, armoured like a Dalek, parading jerkily with an occasional flicker of internally generated light among a mixed exhibit of live crustaceans. The more grotesque the fish, the greater the admiration aroused.

The meat market also sets out to impress. My visit there followed a
corrida
in the Plaza Monumental in which six bulls had been killed, and here were their bodily parts arranged in ingenious and arresting ways, the whole show overlooked by the heads of the animals themselves staring down with misted, reproachful eyes upon the throng of excited buyers. These were prepared to pay 25 per cent more for the flesh of bulls killed in the ring than for that of those who had encountered death in the ordinary way.

The Ramblas slopes gently down to the port. On the right it skirts the Barrio Chino, an area that still retains a sinister waterfront vitality, only comparable to that of the Vieux Port of Marseilles in its seedy prime, now long past. Perhaps under the Barrio’s influence a certain profligacy is in the air; the ranks of bourgeois promenaders thin, and some turn back. The last of the bookstands with their lavishly produced special editions and rich offerings of soft pornography are left behind as the performers, the buffoons, the illusionists and the cheats come into their own. They are drawn from many countries: Venetian tumblers in their bird masks; Indian flute-players from icebound Andean villages; a Hindu ascetic on his bed of nails; fire and sword swallowers; tellers of Tarot card futures; a Bolivian peddling llama foetuses from the witches’ market in La Paz; a man who throws all his limbs out joint; nimble, confiding pimps on the watch for elderly loiterers.

Barcelona, infinitely indulgent, tolerates them all. It is now said to have been ‘discovered’ only in the last few years. If this is true, it is hard to imagine how it could have been overlooked because, in reality, it has always been like this—a good-natured and permissive city, even in the darkest days of the Franco régime. An English boy of 17 who had gone abroad with his guitar to join forces with a group of Franco-Italian strolling players said of it: ‘This kind of scene doesn’t happen anywhere else in Europe. The Spanish people are nice and the police don’t give you hassle. The worst place to work in is England; this is the best. We’re always sorry to pull out of Barcelona, and glad to be back.’

Barcelona stands on the frontier between the familiar, sun-cured Spanish landscape to the south and, to the north, the most densely wooded countryside of the Mediterranean, stretching to the Pyrenees and the French border. This area, nearly 150 miles across, contains forests of almost Amazonian density of cork-oak and pine and—with a curiously oriental touch—even thickets of bamboo. The woods are full of flowers in spring, some of great rarity. Empordà, to give the north-east corner of Spain its ancient name—still in use—is an Arcadia to be explored with all possible speed for, like all Arcadias that have come within reach of affluent and expansive cities, it must inevitably disappear.

Owing to its distance from the coast, the times have passed Empordà by, which is why many of the gracious customs of the past have survived here and why the cuisine is the best in Spain—and therefore among the best anywhere. It is a terrific fallacy among English travellers who have been subjected to Spanish food in the hotels and restaurants in holiday resorts to judge it as second-rate. Those who take to the byroads of Empordà will encounter a cuisine of an ingenuity, variety and charm hard to equal in similar circumstances in, say, Italy, or even France.

A car is essential for the exploration of these low mountain ranges and forests. The general strategy is: never leave a third-class road unless it cannot be avoided. Here, as elsewhere throughout the Peninsula, they conduct the traveller into those nooks and crannies of the countryside where the past makes its last stand. Behind the scenes in Empordà nothing has changed visually since the Middle Ages. Cows still carry horns, farm-carts are drawn by horses, fields mown with scythes. Great porticoed and colonnaded farmhouses dominate the fields, their architectural form inherited from Roman predecessors. Their large numbers reflect the richness of the soil and the prosperity of the rural past. Inevitably, these masterpieces have attracted the attention of city-dwellers in search of a country house of noble proportions for weekend use. For those prepared to drink well-water and generate their own electricity, such a building in grand mediaeval style can be picked up cheaply enough. Agents in nearby towns such as La Bisbal specialise in unusual country properties and will even increase the feudal atmosphere of the purchase, if desired, by the addition of a defence tower, built with authentic materials, at an additional cost of about £10,000. An agent in San Feliù de Guixols will undertake to demolish three substantial farmhouses and rebuild them in the form of a pigmy castle, authentic in every detail, for about half a million. Where new stonework has to be patched in, the patina of age can now be sprayed on.

The penetration of the rich into such regions, whose charm depends upon simplicity and the restraints imposed by sparse incomes, can have a curiously deadening effect. There are four mediaeval villages immediately east of Gerona; Pals, Peretallada, Villastret and Gruilles (which has a 150-foot tower with a tree growing out of its top). All are of great interest, and not to be missed, for until now they have withstood intrusion by our times, remaining productive living communities of their own. Now the eyes of affluent city-folk have fallen upon them, and it is hard for a peasant owner to resist an offer of a level swap for his small, dark gem of twelfth-century architecture for a comfortable and well fitted modern flat in the nearest town.

In due course the new owner from Barcelona or Gerona moves in. Usually he is a man of education and taste and a sympathetic restoration begins under the watchful eye of the planning authority, determined to ensure that none of the harmonies of the ancient village are disturbed. At most, the new man will get away with the addition of a discreet picture-window. To take the case of Pals, whatever has been done has been with huge respect for the past. Yet, this small town is fossilising into a museum piece. Two thirds of its original people have sold out. There are no children or animals, and in its over-clean streets the only sound apart from that of a Mercedes sneaking past to the place where it will be parked out of sight, is likely to be Handel’s choral music piped from the church.

The story of Catalonia’s coastal development is a sad one. The once stupendous coastline between Blanes and the French frontier—much of it unchanged since the voyages of Odysseus until forty years ago—has been buried under concrete so that many entrancing small towns such as Tossa, Lloret and Estartit are hardly now to be identified. The few exceptions are Cadaquès in the far north and a string of villages, probably saved by difficulty of access—Aigua Fredda, Sa Tuna, and Aigua Blava—the most impressive in its location, with rufous cliffs stacked at the entrance to a tiny bay and a few houses wedged among rocks and pines. The water is of unexampled transparency, provoking a sensation of vertigo in the mask-wearer when swimming over great depths. Mysteriously, it is quite free of pollution, now afflicting so much of the Mediterranean.

Ugliness is encountered elsewhere, surging up from the coast. Grey, fortress-like hypermarkets, car cemeteries, pretentious restaurants, sport-cabin villages and parking lots intrude upon the natural order of the landscape. The ancient honey-coloured sandstone buildings of Empordà are perfectly proportioned and in total sympathy with the sombre green foliage of oaks and pines, and russet earth. Here the monotonous white cubes of Mediterranean coastal villas are offensively out of place.

Fortunately, ugliness on the Costa Brava is easily escaped by a quick retreat into the interior. In the north, where the country is flat, the no-man’s-land of eyesores may extend for five miles. South of Palamós along the remaining 30 miles of the coast the undefiled woods come right down to the sea, offering instant retreat into delight.

‘M
Y NAME IS ELENA VALLEVERDE
,’ the Sevillian lady said, ‘but I am more familiarly known as “Elena of the cats”.’

I found her on my way to the city’s centre on the once gracious promenade, now fallen into decay, known as the Alameda of Hercules. She had just unpadlocked the garden gates of an abandoned great house and was about to feed some of the several thousand cats that have taken up residence in such pacific surroundings in Seville. She was fiftyish with the figure of a young girl, an expression of maternal sweetness, an old-fashioned frilled dress and a high Spanish comb. She had arrived with a boy assistant carrying a case neatly packed with the remains of meals collected in neighbouring restaurants. Today’s menu for the cats, which were exceptionally large, sleek and calm, was paella.

‘I look after about 500 in my daily round of the district,’ Elena said. ‘In addition to food a number of residents contribute small sums of money for their upkeep. I am one of several volunteers who undertake this work. We Sevillians admire cats for their dignity and restraint, and regard them as an ornament to the city. Friends of mine also take care of the birds.’

Beyond and above the splendid decrepitude of the street, with its tousled palms, its Roman columns and its windfalls of oranges, the belfries of great baroque churches floated like the poops of galleons in a sparkling winter sky. It was one o’clock and the children came pouring out of the nearby school and went dancing past. Elena and her assistant moved on to the next vast Amazonian garden, unpadlocked the gates and went in. This was the peak of the Sevillian day, with every bar crowded, and the lottery-sellers going with the voices of heralds through every street. Even in winter, Seville lives out of doors.

For this reason, all business deals are conducted not in boardrooms but bars, and preferably in one of the hundred or so in and around the Calle Sierpes. This is the home ground of all that is essentially Sevillian and the showcase of wonderful survivals. A patisserie at its entrance on the corner of the Plaza Campana is embellished with Art Nouveau panels, almost certainly overlooked by its clientèle who flock in to buy its ingenious and somewhat oriental cakes. Many advertisements have been executed in charming but imperishable azulejo tiles and urge the purchase of such things as early Kodaks, gramophones with horns, mustard plasters and treadle-operated sewing-machines, most of them obsolete for at least half a century. The finest example of lost promotional effort is in the parallel Calle Velasquez, which still devotes 60 square feet of wall space to the 1926 Studebaker, showing five ladies of the day in their first ecstatic outing. Back in the Calle Sierpes a vintage hatter displays typical Sevillian headgear in several colours, a clock maker’s features an example of their craft that chants the hours in plainsong; and a nearby chemist sells asafoetida, gum Senegal, snake bite, leeches, blue unction, and a range of glass eyes. The Calle Velasquez offers nothing better in the way of clubs than the Tertulia Culturál Bética, which seats six members in two rows to face the street in an environment hardly more cheerful than that of a dentist’s waiting-room. By comparison, accommodation at the Sierpes’s Círculo Mercantíl y Industriál is luxurious, as well as immensely discreet. Here, when night falls, members settle behind tinted glass in almost complete darkness to entertain themselves with the gay and melancholy flux of life surging through the street within feet of where they sit.

The secretary was away, so information about membership qualifications somewhat vague.

‘It helps to own 10 caballerías of land,’ the employee suggested.

‘How much is a caballería?’

‘Do you ride?’

‘More or less.’

‘It is the area you can ride round in 15 minutes at a steady trot … There is a waiting list of about fifty years.’

The Sierpes saw the origin of that inspired and revolutionary snack, the tapa, meaning cover, thus named because it started life as a slice of ham covering the glasses of wine sent out for to the nearest cellar, in the days when dust swirled in Seville’s unpaved streets. Since then it has evolved to a point when all dishes, however elaborate, can be sampled in this miniature form. Leading bars offer up to fifty varieties of the tapa, and for many Sevillians a selection of a half-dozen eaten at the counter constitutes an imaginative midday meal.

Beyond the narrow Calle Sierpes the city spreads its wide streets and squares in which stand those great islands of mediaevalism, the Cathedral (the world’s third-largest church), and the Moorish fortress of the Alcázar. The Christian faith of its day advertised itself in the sheer size of its undertakings. ‘Let us build a church so big that we shall be held to be insane,’ a member of the Chapter urged, as soon as the great mosque had been levelled and the building of the cathedral began. The Emperor Charles V broke in upon the scene a few tragic years too late. Most likeable of the Spanish monarchs, who collected parrots, enjoyed gardening, and had done his best to impress his subjects by taking on an enfeebled bull in the arena of Madrid, he had been in time to prevent the destruction of the Mosque of Córdoba. To the Sevillians he said, ‘You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world.’

The Cathedral of Seville is indeed vast and very dark, and wandering in its perpetual twilight one has sometimes the feeling of being lost in some huge railway station in a foreign land. Nevertheless, seen from the exterior at night, its icy gothic traceries lit against the sky, it produces a stunning impression. It is set in surroundings of outstanding charm. Beyond its bustling central streets, Seville is a quiet city. All this historical area, patched with small plazas and dominated by ancient buildings, fosters its own brand of tranquillity; where elsewhere the mediaeval background may be remote and often lifeless, here it is close and familiar. An aesthetic experience of the first order is within reach of anyone prepared to arm themselves with a map and approach this enchanted area not through the city streets but along the ancient lanes skirting the walls of the Alcázar—which to some minds is a more impressive building than the better-known Alhambra of Grenada. The quarter is entered by Alfaro de Murillo, leading from the Calzado de Ribera gardens. The first turning to the left, into a lane called Aguas, is followed by one to the right into Judería, which opens after a few yards into the Patio de Banderas. Orange trees have been planted all the way, and the memorable Patio de Banderas is virtually a grove in the heart of the city. Fallen oranges littering the square by night are picked up at first light and piled in a central fountain awaiting collection. It is better to undertake this ten-minute excursion at about nightfall, best of all in the mild Sevillian winter, in the hope of finding the patio misted with rain through which fruit by the thousand glisten under the lamps. From this small, ancient, and virtually deserted square a Moorish gateway opens upon a theatrical presentation of the Cathedral and the Giralda tower. It is a scene to which one returns repeatedly.