In this Madrid where we have been walking we have noticed certain buildings in rose-coloured brick with low-pitched, red-tiled roofs and wide eaves. To the streets these red buildings bring the flush of pleasure. Among them the Prado, faced by the stone of Colmenar and with great cedars shading its green lawns, is preeminent. That corner of Madrid by the Prado is an oasis in a city that is often burning and too brilliant for all the water that is swooshed on to the avenues by the hoses or that trickles in the irrigation channels under the trees. The best things in Madrid convey gravity and a familiar grace. The Prado has not the official oppressiveness of a museum. In Spain the individual, and the family, have always been more important than the state, which is by turns feared, used, exploited, and trampled on like a hotel carpet; and it is natural to Spain that the Prado should be, fundamentally, not a museum, but a private collection of pictures assembled by Hapsburg monarchs who happened to collect at the height of Spanish wealth and power. The Spaniards like to point out that, unlike the other great European galleries, the Prado contains no stolen pictures. Nothing looted in war. To all their pictures they have an indisputable private title. On this point they are almost snobbish.
The Prado is not the best-lit gallery in the world, but it is the least wearying. In it are the best Velazquezes and a very large number of Tintorettos and Titians. There is a superb collection of Flemish pictures. There are Brueghels. There are the strange pictures of Hieronymus Bosch which engaged the religious mania of Philip II. The Prado is not well provided with French, Dutch, or German paintings, and there are hardly any English, but in the Spanish school one has the whole spiritual history of Spain in Ribera, Zurbarán, Murillo, El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya. To Goya we look most of all, for Madrid is his city. It is a special experience to go from the Prado to see the Goya frescoes in the church of San Antonio beyond the north station. The church is a little museum now, but at its replica nearby the girls still come to pray to San Antonio to give them lovers. It is the favourite place for those popular weddings which begin so stiffly and which end in the party walking the streets to shouts of “Long live the bride, long live the mother of the bride, long live the sister of the bride”, and so on. They will dance in the cafés out at Cuatro Caminos to the radio and the electric organ.
Madrid stays up later, gets up later, does everything later, than any other capital in Europe. The madrileño hates the clock, and indeed, except for the sacred clock over the old Ministry of the Interior in the Puerta del Sol, all the clocks in Madrid are wrong. Often hours wrong. “What time is it,” a maid calls from the window to another maid down below, “two o’clock or four o’clock?” The zealous Falange party leaders burst out every so often and attempt to change these habits. A new Minister gives an order that all civil servants are to be in their offices by nine. He is at once christened “the abominable nine-o’clock man”. There is no getting the madrileño to eat his heavy lunch before 2.0 or 2.30 p.m. or to go back to his shop or office before five. He dines at ten.
But because the new Madrid is much more a workers’ city than it used to be, it shows signs of doing things earlier at night. The real source of changing custom is inflation and the very high cost of living. So the fashionable performance at the theatre or cinema is now the one at seven, and no longer the one at eleven o’clock. A new law forbids theatres to remain open after 1.30 a.m. Inflation is driving people out of restaurants, the popular tascas or eating-houses, into snack bars and cafeterias: the bars increase every year, the cafés decline. More standing, less sitting, lighter meals in the evening.
In the Victorian age and up to thirty years ago the people of Madrid ate enormous meals—that is to say all people who ate at all; for Spaniards still belong to two races: those who eat and those who don’t. In the Cerralbo house, there are the menus of the family—they are unbelievable in the number of courses; but I have many times sat down in humble pensions to a luncheon of huge helpings of hors d’oeuvres, soup, fish, some regional dish, followed by chicken, steak, sweet cake, and fruit. The fat men of Madrid were one of the sights of the nation as they almost lay under their ballooning bellies in the cafés or moved slowly down the Calle de Alcala with the sadness of grounded planets. Lately I have noticed only one survivor of this brotherhood. He was old, drunk, and to an indifferent café-ful of people, was denouncing oratorically “this famous modern world”. But the smart cocktail parties do not begin till eight and go on till ten or eleven. First Madrid copied “el five o’clock tea” (at seven) from Europe; the apéritif was almost unknown. Now the madrileño drinks Italian vermouth, gins of peculiar mark, and whisky. He is still an abstemious drinker. His real drink is black coffee, at all hours. It has ceased to be good because real coffee is expensive, but in the old cafés it is still served with a glass of water—the delicious mountain water of Madrid, which many of the exiles longed for after the civil war. Chocolate drinking—the strong cinnamon chocolate served in small cups and as sweet as real Turkish coffee—has almost died out.
The madrileño is in all things torn between his traditional habits and the new notions of the modern, international world. If there are crowds on the brassy Gran Via, in the pseudo luxury of the new cafés that look like Hollywood sets, there are also numbers of people in the narrow, ill-lit back streets of the older part of the city eating in the tascas. Some of these have smartened up under the influence of tourism, and are losing their Spanish simplicity. The true tasca is often a rough-looking, humble place. You go into a small, dark bar full of shouting men who stand by the zinc counter. The shouting barman slops down small glasses of Valdepeñas wine, five at a time. The eating-room of the tasca is off the bar, a place with a stone floor, possibly, and always a wall of Talavera tiles. You eat off a marble slab, or perhaps they will bring a tablecloth. No elegance. Room for about a dozen customers. The company is mostly male, the tiles give an echo to the loud voices.
You will eat suckling pig in some tascas that specialise in it. You will eat the best fish of the Biscayan coast or the Mediterranean. If Spanish sole has not the quality of Dover sole, the hake is unsurpassed; this fish, so humble in northern countries, is here transformed. There is bream baked in chillies and garlic, there are the mullets, the prawns, the langostinas, and oysters. In the good tascas one eats famous dishes like cocido, that fine clear stew of pork, chicken, leek, potatoes, and chickpeas, the mountainous paellas of rice, saffron, peppers, and mussels, or those powerful orange-coloured stews of Asturiansa usage. The tasca may be a slum bar packed with lorry drivers or market men, like the ones at the bottom of the Calle de Toledo near the fish market, but the food is pure and good. The madrileño is quarrelsome and critical if his food is not as it should be. He does not argue with the waiter or the proprietor; he calls the cook.
The people who go to the tascas are of all classes, the very rich and the modest, the aristocrat, the banker, the professor, the petit bourgeois; once at table they are en famille, barking at each other. It is in the genius of the madrileño that he puts his personality before his caste. Below the tascas are the old seventeenth-century posadas or muleteers’ taverns in the neighbourhood of Cava Baja, where the market people and peasants come and stay in the galleried courtyards where the washing drips. The shops in this neighbourhood sell harness and tobacco sieves; Madrid is a city of small shops. These posadas are outposts of Castile, and Castile is poor; the rank, sour life of the villages seeps in—those crumbling villages which now the peasants are leaving.
We are a long way from the Ritz, from Horcher’s and El Jockey, a long way from the smart patisseries, from Lhardy’s, where one meets that Edwardian grace which Madrid has preserved longer than any other city. For how much longer? At Lhardy’s I lately listened to right-wing personages talking about the decay of the regime. They knew the Spanish future was precariously in the hands of the world outside.
There were Edwardian vestiges in cafés like Varela, one of the last of the famous ones to go, at the end of Preciados (the madrileño does not ha
bitually use the word for “street”); Pombo’s went soon after the war. The bars have suffered less; the old ones in Echegaray and other streets nearby, where the flamenco singers, the dancers, the bullfighters go, are dead by day but roaring by night. The floor is deep in prawn shells and sugar papers; the wine-glasses ring; the male voices bellow and rebound from the gaudy, tiled walls where perhaps a bull’s head looks down, or some crude fresco of the life and death of Manolete, the almost sainted bullfighter. Men are meeting in that traditional chest-to-chest, back-slapping hug of the Spanish male, shouting in each other’s faces. In the back room the hired guitarists are strumming to the flamenco songs. But the bull’s head on the wall may mislead the traveller who wishes everything Spanish to be “typical”; behind the bar, among the bottles, are the results of the football lottery. The great football players are as well known as the bullfighters, and in the economic revolution through which Madrid is passing, football is a cheap spectacle, and the bull ring is exorbitantly expensive. Bars, the cinema, football are the new distractions of Madrid. The brothels have been closed. The peculiarity of the brothels was an absurd quality of homeliness; half the men who went to them did so to talk business and politics and to gossip, to wait for something muy español to happen.
Yet the “typical” distractions have survived the puritan discouragement of them in the years immediately after the civil war. The guitars talk across the stage of a night club and gradually silence the room as the climax becomes clearer, quicker, peremptory. The singers and dancers sit around as if they were waiting for some parlour game to begin. That little Arab child from Granada will soon get up, and as she stands, the childish smile goes from her face, she lowers the lids of her smoky eyes, fixes a scowl between her brows, and then, with high-tempered fingers snapping, stamps fiercely into the dance. These girls turn into savages; they arch their thin backs like bending bows, their heads shake in temper, and their heels talk fast in a mutter of hostility. These flamenco and gypsy dances elicit all the incitement and defiance in sexual passion. They are the direct language of the body, unperverted by lewdness of the mind.
Whatever the performance, whether the curious, strangled notes of the conte jondo are being torn from a falsetto voice or whether the crisis of the dance is achieved and dissipated, there are grace and insolence in the women, cruelty and mastery, absolute male conceit and dominance, in the men. “Lele, lele, lele—” the singer begins and strikes that sigh of hollow sadness, the hard sigh of the fatal transience of pleasure, love, and delight. Even in the conquering, sardonic songs in which cunning makes a fool of love, where jealousy revels in its own evil, vengeance in its own emptiness, or pleasure in its brevity and deceits, the falling minor chords of the Spanish musical genre are there in all their melancholy insinuation.
A sign of the present restlessness in Madrid, caused by the granting of a little more freedom, is the cautious revival of the theatre. After the civil war (nuestra guerra: our war, they call it, being fatally obliged to have a war the Spanish way and not the way of the rest of the world) the theatre died in Madrid. Many theatres closed permanently. Now, by collecting a small tax on the royalties of authors, two of the finest theatres in Madrid have been handsomely refurbished, and the first night of a popular zarzuela—a musical play—is a glittering occasion. There are now two state-subsidised theatres, one for the classical drama—though here foreign dramatists like Arthur Miller and T. S. Eliot have so far preponderated over the Spanish classics—and another for Spanish contemporaries. There are a number of respectable new dramatists, and there is a distinct effervescence in the experimental theatre—despite the ecclesiastical censorship, which applies to literature as well and is far more severe than the political censorship. I have heard a young Spanish dramatist take a perverse pride in the censor, as if he could not write without an enemy. All the same, Madrid is not the city to which any traveller goes for its contemporary arts. They can flourish only timidly in the artificial conditions under which ideas have to be conceived. The interesting thing is that there is enough restiveness to make the theatre stir.
And restive the new Madrid is. It has become self-conscious. The apathy which followed the civil war has gone. A younger generation has grown up which did not know that war and is bored by talk of it. There is less fear in political conversation. The spies of the police state have become pathetic. “And No. 59?” you hear the spy ask the lift boys at the hotels. They palm him off with the formula: “Muy discreto”—and shrug their shoulders with contempt. Large numbers of the increasing body of university students, housed in the fine new university residences, go abroad. They come back demanding what the students of other countries have: ordinary freedom. There are no politics in Spain at the moment; there is a vacuum; but as one Spaniard has said, they are beginning to feel “the biological need for freedom”. They are eager, sharp-minded, and bored. Madrid is a city which would perhaps still prefer to be in the nineteenth century; but now it is modern in aspect, it wants to be modern in mind as well. It is beginning to feel that tension which is the essence of city life.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that the traditional Madrid is dead. It has never been a museum. Famous old streets like the Calle de Toledo, running out of the city, are full of thriving life. The Rastro or flea market is packed tight and black with thousands of people on Sundays, buying everything from wardrobes and cheap furniture to old shoes, new clothes, and antiques. The markets roar. Life pullulates in the warrenlike slums. The blind tap along; a woman strides beside a pair of dwarfs; a laughing deaf-and-dumb couple hold up the crowd; workmen charge into the bars and order their morning brandy; the radio shouts out the latest flamenco song. At night these iron-grey streets are sour and dark and severe; they are dangerous to walk in because, lately, enterprising people have been ripping up the hydrants and selling them!
It is in these ill-lit streets of thousands of small shops or staring, shabby doorways that the madrileños like to wander. They know their city. They regard it with that homely affection all Spaniards feel for their own towns. They feel about it domestically, as they feel for their family and their friends. They never boast about it. They neglect it with love. They have nothing like the civic pride of a Parisian, a Londoner, or a New Yorker. Madrid is a familiar place, entirely personal, without loneliness. It must be the only city without loneliness in the world.
8
Seville
Take a blind man out of Castile in the spring, put him on the Tierra de María Santissima, the plain of short green corn and rye grass outside Seville and he will know at once he is in Andalusia and on the way to that city. He will know by the smell of the air. The harsh and stinging odours of lavender and thyme have gone. Now he is walking or riding no longer, but is being lifted or wafted towards the city on air that has ceased to be air and has become a languid melting of the oils and essences of orange blossom and the rose, of jasmine and the myrtle. And although in the city itself he will meet again the strong native reeks of Spanish life—something compounded of olive oil, charcoal, cigar smoke, urine, horse dung, incense and coffee—the flowers of Andalusia will powerfully and voluptuously overrule them, the rose and the orange blossom will blow hotly upon his face from walls and street corners, until he reels with the nose-knowledge of Seville.
It is even more dizzying to the eyes. As we come across the hedgeless flat country we see a low-built, oriental city of roof gardens rising innocently like a tray of white china, chipped here and there by tender ochres. We see the tops of the palms sprouting like pashas in the squares. Inside the city white walls are buried in bougainvillea and wistaria and all climbing flowers, geraniums hanging from thousands of white balconies, great lilies in windows, carnations at street corners, and roses climbing up the walls and even the trees so that all the gasps and hyperbole of pleasure are on our lips. In a minute we are voluptuaries. In two minutes our walk slackens. In three minutes we are looking for a foot of cool shade. And gazing at the oranges on the trees by the tro
lley bus stop, we ask ourselves how it is that, in a city like this, people do not pick them as they go by, how trains can be got out of the lazy station, lorries unload at the port on the Quadalquivir where ships have come up seventy miles from the sea, or how any of the inhabitants do anything but sigh, sit down or sleep.
Andalusia is the home of Spanish lyrical poetry. Delight, enchantment, all the words suggested by little fountains playing in cool courtyards come almost monotonously to the poets. George Borrow, who saw the Inquisition at every corner of this city, confessed as he stood by the rose walls of the Alcazar that he burst into tears of rapture. His rage had gone. But we need other words than delight, rapture and enchantment to define the city. What is there in the spirit of the Sevillano that breaks the burden of so much sensual beauty and saves him from oriental torpor? Certainly he sleeps in the afternoon and talks half the night, but he is notoriously the liveliest, most sparkling creature, the cleverest monkey, his enemies would say, in Spain. Ask the enemies of Seville to define it. They reply at once: “A city of actors.” Seville is theatre. It is totally and intimately a stage. Lope de Vega, the greatest of the Spanish dramatists, called it “the proud theatre of the world” and in its greatest days when Columbus came back from his first voyage to America and before its 16,000 silk looms had been silenced by the wool trade of Castile and the glut of Pizarro’s gold, there was nothing bombastic in the phrase.
Foreign Faces Page 13