In the last forty years there have been great material changes in Mediterranean life. The people hung on longer there than elsewhere in Europe to the conventions of the nineteenth century. The women, for example, were still wearing black until the 1930s or later. There was an air of severe mourning; and manners in all classes followed rigid patterns. Custom ruled absolutely. In commerce, in travel, one was surrounded by unnecessary difficulties; a large, ill-paid bureaucracy hung on to its jobs by evolving a maze of petty regulations. All this has vastly changed as the lessons of the north are now learned by its old teacher. The south—one can’t repeat this too often— is organizing itself. It is possible for the Mediterranean now to be an effective active man. If he emigrates to the Americas, his rapid and penetrating intelligence brings him, again and again, to the top, especially in the sciences, for his educated men have been exactingly well-educated. An ordinary ill-paid engineer will not only know two or three languages but may be an art historian or a wide reader of serious literature. One continually meets the multiple talent. But whether the man of the Mediterranean succeeds or not, his profound gift for putting personal life and care for the arts of living and pleasure first never leaves him. It is the great benison of that ancient civilizing sea.
[1966]
5
Guideless in the Pyrenees
You wake up in the morning to see the green rump of a mountain slanting from top to bottom of your window, and a corner of a fair blue sky at the side. High up among the rocks are two or three white goats; below them, on the vivid mountain turf, a man is raking down the grass he has scythed; at the end of the day he will put it into a long sack like a bolster and roll it home. The place where he is working can hardly be called a field, but a ragged strip of short grass hanging between the boulders. It is astonishing that he can stand upright there. The mountain plunges among rock, ash trees and beeches to the bed of a noisy torrent, whose green water whitens and boils all day and night, drops under a stone bridge seventy feet high and goes cascading mile after mile down the valley, from gorge to gorge.
You open the window. The mountain air at four or five thousand feet is light and sharp. There is the smell of grass, moss, thyme, ponies, cows—something clean and keen and milky. You are at Gavarnie, ajasse, or high valley, of the central Pyrenees on the French side.
Presently the peace is broken. A motor coach comes pah-pahing up the hill and unloads a dozen French families; husbands in shirt sleeves, grandmothers, aunts, mothers and children get out near the hotel opposite, which advertises “Terrasse et télescope.” That beautifully dates the place sometime before 1914: the telescope is for looking up at the snow peak, a few miles off, and at the fantastic waterfall that hangs like the thin beard of a ghost, from the ledge of a mountain wall that the Romantics could have called horrendous and impenetrable. On the other side of it, the people tell you, is Spain.
The coach passengers despise the telescope. The businesslike villagers have got them all bundled and tied safely onto ponies and donkeys, and the procession trots off through the village. Hour after hour new busloads will arrive, new cavalcades of ponies and donkeys will start off. They climb over the rough paths, round cliffs and precipices, until at last they arrive at one of the most dramatic mountain sights of Europe: the Cirque de Gavarnie, a semicircular “wall” rising in sunless, vertical terraces to a height of fifty-six hundred feet, two miles in diameter, all but enclosing an amphitheater that could hold an army. Last winter’s stale snow is still on the higher ledges, down streaks the water—for some reason frightening because it is so thin a streak—into a natural tunnel of snow that has been preserved and frozen hard at the sunless base of the precipice. You crick your neck to look at the line of ten-thousand-foot peaks that top the wall. And as you stare, your French friend reminds you that it is precisely these cirques, or semicircular walls, that distinguish the Pyrenees from all the other mountains of Europe.
The Pyrenees are not as lofty or as compact as the Alps, although their passes are high. They are not snow covered all the year. Their valleys are greener. Glaciers scarcely exist, the lakes are small. On the French side the scene is verdant, well watered by the Atlantic winds blowing across the pine-covered Landes, over Bayonne; on the Spanish side the scene is burned up, desolate for large areas, and austere.
As they run, separating France from Spain, for some 240 miles from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees do not flash as the Alps do in the north of Italy. They move in wild, waving procession. They mark a single frontier and a very strange one. It is supposed not to exist in any fundamental sense by those who think of Spain as European; but it does exist. On the north side, in populous France, anywhere between Bayonne and Perpignan; you are a Western European; in the scattered villages of Aragon on the Spanish side you are likely to be quite courteously asked arresting questions such as “Are you a Christian ?” by a passing peasant or Guardia Civil—a common phrase harking back to the time when it was important, for the future of the world, to know whether you were a Moor and an infidel and intended the conquest of Europe. The hackneyed phrase that “Africa begins at the Pyrenees” is not entirely a metaphor. In the Alps you are at the hub of the European wheel, where its German and Latin strains are jointed, but in the Pyrenees you are on the rim, where Europe grates against something not quite like itself. Travelers in the Pyrenees often say that they feel “freer” there, and indeed the mountains are more open; but they sometimes mean that on the passes they are looking down into another civilization. This has been true from the time of Charlemagne, when Roland fought at Roncesvalles, and when slowly the Saracen was driven, century after century, back over Spain and across the Straits of Gibraltar.
Until not long before World War II there were only two completely finished railroads through the Pyrenees, one at the Atlantic end of the chain, at Hendaye in the French Basque provinces, the other at the Mediterranean or Catalan end, at Port Bou. The central Pyrenees were a real wall between France and Spain for centuries; now four railroads and four motor roads break through, and the Spanish side is a little better known.
The names of the peaks on the Spanish side testify to the hard desperation of the mountain scenery of Spain: the Accursed Mountain, the Peak and Mouth of Hell, the Lost Mountain (above Gavarnie) and the Bewitched. The highest peaks are on the Spanish side and, as so often happens in the Spanish scene, the rock shapes are tortured into fantastic shapes. One understands why there is so much fear and mystery in the legends of the Spanish Pyrenees. The fact is that the French side has always been more accessible because there the valleys travel direct to the backbone of the range, like a flight of stairs at right angles to the main ridge. As you stand twenty or thirty miles away on the famous promenade at Pau you see the Pyrenees as a long, serrated cavalcade of peaks. Change your viewpoint, cross over to Spain, and the sense of a procession vanishes. You are faced by a running tawny tide of parallel ranges; crossing one you are faced by another, so that you are lost like a swimmer in the trough of a wave, in a sea that is sixty miles wide. To fly over the Pyrenees into Spain is to see gay green country torn into the great brown and furrowed shoulders and head of a bull that comes charging up against the lighter body of Europe.
The Pyrenees have cut Spain off for centuries, and the low penetrable eastern and western ends are occupied by alien races: at Port Bou by the Catalans who are more Provençal than Spanish; at Hendaye and Bayonne by the Basques, whose origin is a mystery and who are neither Spanish nor French. Both have sought freedom from Spain in the last 30 years; both have traditionally blocked the gates.
At Bayonne in the Basque country, it is hard to know whether one is in France or Spain. The white stone arcades are Spanish, the cathedral Gothic and French. Almost all churches in the Pyrenees are Romanesque. In the back-street bars of Bayonne there are the smoked farm bacon, the Basque wine and the bullfight posters. There is even a bullring, although bullfighting is not a Basque taste: that is for Spanish visitors. The Basques prefe
r pelota.
But in the bars under the arcades the talk is either French or Basque, but chiefly French. The old postman and his friend from the chemist’s will come in for their glass of port while Madame is dampening the table napkins, and the old sinners will delight her swelling eighteen-year-old daughter with compliments about the white skin of her shoulders and the dip of her breasts. The beauty of a young woman is not a matter for one short compliment. It has to be gone into in as many epigrams, proverbs and amorous jokes as they can think of. This salty gallantry is not Basque; for the Basques are hearty, sporting fellows, fond of larks, horseplay, trade and feats of strength. It is not their idea to waste much time on women. Nor do they talk much. They would sooner be with the Iceland fishing fleet. Their unmusical language sounds like the crunching and banging of boat hulls against the quay, or the clang of a hoe on a stone. And although they are gay enough when it comes to vigorous dancing—for they are dance-mad and on the Spanish side will even be seen dancing under umbrellas in the village squares in the pouring rain—their usual manner is, in the stout ones, stolid, obstinate and silent; and in the thin ones, shrewd, hawklike and watchful. Lyrical is not the word for them. Good-natured, yes—but dry.
A storm of rain came on suddenly one day in Bayonne when I was sitting in a bar, and here I saw how different from these people the true Frenchman is. An old gentleman came in. He was about seventy; he was very distinguished; he had walked down the street in his shirt sleeves, soaked to the skin. With him was his wife, also distinguished, elderly, arthritic, walking with the aid of a stick but as rigid as he in the determination to be unruffled. She was wearing excellent clothes out of date by thirty years.
“Please bring me two glasses of cognac.” The old gentleman sparkled at once as he came in. “No, not cognac, this is Armagnac country, it would be more suitable to have two little glasses of Armagnac. A pleasant rain. I am, of course, soaked to the skin, but that has given me the pleasure of ordering an Armagnac and I shall be beautifully warm. I may, in spite of that, catch pneumonia, but that will give me one more pleasure: I shall be nursed by my beautiful wife. I may of course die, but even there I shall be lucky, for she will give me a splendid funeral. Drink up your Armagnac, my dear, the rain is stopping. We must go.”
And as they went into the downpour, he was still expatiating on the delights of adversity and she was following with silent elegance: two addicted pursuers of pleasure.
The Basque spirit is at once more formal and more impish. That night in Bayonne, when the shops were closed and those narrow streets that climb to the cathedral were empty, I heard the notes of guitar, whistle and tabor. At a street corner a dozen young men and girls were performing an elaborate dance for their own pleasure. When it was over they went off playing their music round the dark streets, sometimes stopping to give one of their formal dances, sometimes singing a folk song. Occasionally they broke into that comic dance in which the guitar stops and all crouch on their knees except a witch figure with a wand, who tries to catch a defaulter. The guitar starts up again, up they get and on they stroll until the music stops again. I believe this dance represents a crowd of peasants hoeing a field, kept at it by the stick of the master. The delightful thing about this performance was its decorum and its impudence, the gaiety and yet the care with which the steps were correctly done. When they got down to the main road where the traffic streamed by heading for Biarritz, a waiter ran out offering them drinks if they would play in the café.
“One moment,” the leader said solemnly. He gave an order. They squatted on their haunches, in a circle in the road, silently. In chorus they rapidly slapped their knees with a sound like a hundred pigeons flying up, and gave that weird Basque cry, something between the yelp of a jackal and a childish cry of wonder. Then they rose to their feet and went to the café. There they were, singing and dancing. The cars pulled in. The French crowd watched. A dozen Spanish Basques had held up the town with laughter for the evening.
The French, of course, disapprove of the Spaniards, but they can never resist them. That is one of the lessons of the Pyrenees. One shout of “cante flamenco,” one swirl of the jota brought over the mountains from Aragon, and the French forget they have just been calling the Spaniards in the next frontier town quarrelsome drunkards, always fighting among themselves, idle, simple, backward, proud and bloody-minded. And, of course, in the Pyrenees, the French understand that they long ago lost what the Spaniards have retained: the stubborn, regional spirit. The folk cultures of the world are dying out; the Basque language is dying, the Pyrenean dialects are dying, and where the dances and costumes survive in France, it is by conscious desire to please tourists and to foster folklore as part of “culture.” In Spain, where such impulses from the central government are fitful or incompetent, things survive only if the people themselves want them to.
And here we come upon that basic difference between France and Spain which has existed since the days of Charlemagne. North of the Pyrenees: civilized Europe, central government, authority, intellectual leadership, the powerful, logical and able Latin spirit. South of the Pyrenees: regionalism, rejection of the leadership of Europe, denial of the Latinity of civilization, the belief in men not Man, the ambiguous attitude to authority. The Spanish leader must be overwhelmingly a person who dominates other persons and yet must not give himself an air of superiority. To quote the old oath of Aragon to the King, “We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than we, to accept you as our King and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our statutes and laws; and if not, no.” Si no, no: the famous double “no” of Spain.
So that when you ask travelers about the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees, the reply is generally: France for landscape, food, gaiety, instruction and pleasure; but Spain for people.
Down from St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port is Navarre and the road to Pamplona. Navarre is not really Basque, or not purely so. A great deal of it is well-watered country of mountain, wood and wide pasture. It is rich. This is one of the contented regions amid Spanish poverty. It is worked by people who have always owned their farms, and the father has always chosen an heir from among his children to hold the farm for the family. Navarre is patriarchal, aristocratic, isolated and virile, violently conservative. It is the home of absolutism and traditionalism, more papist than the Pope, more royal than the king. The Navarrese took the side of the pretender Don Carlos and the ultramontane priests in the civil wars of the nineteenth century; in the civil war of this century their furiously Catholic troops, called requetés, gave a violent medieval color to General Franco’s lower-middle-class Falange. The famous fiesta of Pamplona, where the young men of the city tackle the bulls let loose in the street—an orgy of danger, wine drinking and wildness—expresses the spirit of the Navarrese. They are bold and reckless. A few hours of their company is like an injection of strong spirit.
And as one moves eastward into Aragon, into the wide desolate valleys or the tangle of mountains sixty miles deep which are built up against the Pyrenean peaks, one encounters yet another variant of the mountain character. There is nothing more striking than to come over from the beguiling, well-buttered and nourished towns of the Béarn or Roussillon to the austere Aragonese towns. They are poor, they are sternly dilapidated, they are rough yet noble. The food is strong and crude, the wine harsh. Up in the higher mountain towns of Aragon I have frozen all night in my room in some bare posada, with oleographs of the Virgin and the Carlist generals on the walls, and have been awakened every hour by a night watchman shouting out the hour when the church bell clanged: “Ave María Purísima. Son las quatro.” Four o’clock. And strong Spanish oil and wine fighting in your stomach.
I do not confound the Basques with the Spaniards, though for claims to ancient race, great family and the practice of personal equality, the Basques and Spaniards are matched. In Bayonne, the Basque is a peasant subdued by the central power; he is poorer in France than he is in Spain. At the border in Irún, he is an urban industri
al worker whose devout and solid Catholicism differs strongly from the fanatical Catholicism and anti-Catholicism of Spain, and who is not only egalitarian in his habits but a natural parliamentarian. His habits have not always been peaceable. The Basques held the gates to Spain. They plundered the pilgrims going to the summit conferences of the medieval Crusaders at Santiago de Compostela in Spanish Galicia. The Basques were converted very late to Christianity and have been, some would say, more tough than Christian. When you stand on the long bridge at Bayonne where two fine rivers meet, and watch the rows of men fishing from the balustrade, your mind may go back to the times when the Counts of Bayonne hung their tortured prisoners over the bridge and watched them drown in the rising tide.
One is, alas, constantly reminded that the Pyrenees are a frontier and that along frontiers there are hairbreadth escapes to freedom and appalling betrayals and trappings of prisoners. It must however be said that, on this frontier, it is usually the Spaniard who is escaping from his own people. Spain has always been a prison for someone. In generation after generation the smuggler, the donkey, the mule, the bus, the train have brought the political exile over the frontier. Tens of thousands of Spaniards must have gazed up at the Pyrenees and cursed a country that cannot tolerate its own people.
At Bayonne you are still on the plain, but after an hour or so’s journey you are in St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port at the foot of the pass of Roncesvalles. It is not a high pass, nor is it austere, for it is gracefully wooded; but at the top you stand at what Hilaire Belloc called “one of the sublime heights” of European myth and history. For here, according to The Song of Roland, Roland blew his horn so hard that his brains came out of his ears. He was calling for help for the dilapidated rear guard of Charlemagne’s army.
At Home and Abroad Page 16