At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  It was by the harbor of Collioure, where the Pyrenees can be said to end, that I met the quintessential Catalan, “the earth shaker.” Tall, heavily built, treble-chinned, laughing, his vast harsh voice boomed over the harbor as we ate our prawns. His thoughts shook him from head to foot. Everything out-sized he loved: high mountains, large cars, large business, big long books, huge numbers of shares, enormous women, big families, colossal emotional crises, travel all over the world. He was in textiles. In a minute, I thought, I should be swept into textiles too; or out to sea. It was like talking to an opera.

  “We are Romans,” he shouted as loud as Nero. “Older than the Romans. More modern than the Americans!”

  We had finished our dinner. He became quieter.

  “I will show you some conjuring tricks,” he said suddenly in a childish voice. “Look at this. This will be stupendous. Waiter, bring me a glass of water.”

  I sat through an hour of floating pennies, disappearing watches, knives stuck in the ceiling and goodness knows what.

  “Ah,” he said in a throwaway line when he had done. “The Catalan has the gift of miracles”—and he produced my fountain pen from his pocket. His hug when we parted made the whole town tilt, to my eye.

  All the Spanish regions struggle to get away from the central Spanish axis of Aragon and Castile, but the Catalans—like the Basques though for different reasons—have strong racial and cultural justification for their restiveness. The Pyrenees in fact stretch between two nationalisms—the Catalan and the Basque—and their situation in the lower mountains at either end of the chain and by the sea have given them that intimate contact with the outside world that central Spain has always hated. On the French side, as in the Basque country, the Catalan has been tamed by the powerful logic of the French central government; but on the Spanish side the Catalan character is untamed although racially it is more French than Spanish. The Catalans, as you can tell from their language, are a good deal Provençal; their culture is Greek and Roman; their national dance, the sardana, is a purely Mediterranean measure—no wildness of the Spanish dancers here. It is at the foot of the Mediterranean mountains that Picasso—half Catalan, half Malagueño—Braque and Dufy have painted.

  Most of all the traveler feels the change in light: he is standing in the luminous, classical clarity where the burning light of the land is indistinguishable from the burning light of the sea. And he notices too the change in the people. He has traveled from the solemn, silent Basque at one end, the proud and goodhearted seaman, to the exuberant, rhetorical fantasticating Catalan, whose geese are all swans; from the canny Basque bankers to the booming, go-getting Catalan manufacturers. And between the two extremes lie the mountain people, who may be tinged with the Spanish habits of Aragon and Navarre, gleam like butter with the contentments of Béarn or turn rosy with the wines of Roussillon, but who are fundamentally of their own separate mountain valleys, handing down their little independent farms from generation to generation, minding their sheep and marked by the acute watchfulness and the independent temper of mountain races. Modern roads, tourists by the million, newly discovered oil wells, new natural-gas plants, have smoothed away the exclusiveness that pleased romantic travelers generations ago; but one has only to look at the sharp faces, the steady yet fast walk of the villagers, to know that a Pyrenean type still exists.

  [1962]

  6

  Journey in Greece

  It was a hot night in September. I had arrived in Athens a few hours before, and I was sitting in Constitution Square, trying to learn the Greek alphabet from the neon signs. I was also listening to my friend Kosta. Greece is the land of oracles, and Kosta is both a Greek and an oracle, mystifying and loud. His voice silenced the traffic, the cars that went by like glossy schools of fish. There were the neon signs on the roofs, and beyond them we could see the cliff of the Acropolis like lit-up toffee and on top of it the Parthenon dressed up by floodlighting to conceal the tragic brutality of time. I thought it was pretty, and still do. But not for Kosta. He banged his stick on the pavement. “The Acropolis striptease for foreigners. It looks like a whore.” And then, suddenly finding the idea in his head and being a Greek uttering it at once, he said: “At night all modern cities are alike. But by day we have light that no other country in the world has. Greece was created by its light.”

  The Greek light—who has not heard of it? I had seen all Athens and its mountains turn pink as the sun went down and then change again to white for a minute or two, a white as dead and staring as a stick of chalk, when the day abruptly died. The flight from Paris had been a journey into fire—as Kosta said, into light, pure and elemental. He knew and I knew the hard and, to us, empty light of North America; we knew the painted light of the European Atlantic done with the charged brush, sweeping the greens, the blues, the purples on and off, emotionally, every quarter of an hour.

  We knew the subtle light of France, the light refracted in curved flashes from the Alps, the tender cloud operas of Italy. But, as the plane passes from the heel of Italy to Corfu and the Gulf of Corinth, you enter the pure Greek flame. It has burned the mountains white. It has burned all moisture from the air. Even Cairo, the meteorologists say, does not have a light as pure as this. There is nothing like it, except the light of the Red Sea. Kosta, of course, does not accept the Red Sea.

  So the coasts of Greece burn. We are suddenly conscious of the elements—earth, air, water and fire. It is a liberation to the senses. The towns are dry and clear, their houses are separate and could be counted like beads dropped through the fingers. Even looking at Athens from the sea, at its tens of thousands of houses scattered for miles across the tilting plain under its white mottled mountains—even here you could pick out the buildings one by one. At least one of the gifts the Greeks have retained since ancient times is their curiosity. Has their light made them see too much? Have they—a people easily distracted—been too distracted by the equal distinctiveness of everything they see? Yes, they have, Kosta said; this light has the quality of their passion for “pure reason.”

  There is another quality that follows from the candor of the Greek light. Looking at the wild and silvered mountains of the ragged coast of Greece, you get the impression of an incinerated and tormented land striking out violently into promontories, wounded by gulfs and inlets, throwing out scores of rock islands into the Aegean and Ionian seas; yet, except in the very early morning, and in the sudden storms of a changeable climate, there is no mist in the gorges and valleys. There are simply degrees of fire, degrees of shadow, a light shadow laid on a dark.

  These scenes appeal less to the eye than to the hand, or indeed the whole body: as if you could reach out, touch, feel the shapes and hold them. This light is for sculptors, not for painters, a light for rock and stone. And you remember that the one great Greek painter was El Greco, who found something of Greece in the landscape of Castile and painted a sculptor’s rather than a painter’s forms.

  “What are the modern Greeks like?” I used to ask Kosta.

  “Exactly like the ancient Greeks,” said Kosta. “Talkers, quarrelsome. There is no difference.”

  They all say this.

  “Look at the map,” he said. Well, we had no map, but we spread one out in our heads. We saw the Balkan mountains descending from the north, the passes difficult, the people poor, only old people left there and young Communists who cannot get passports. The stormy mountains divide into valleys inaccessible from one another, and shredding into a coast so indented that it used to be—and often still is—quicker to take a boat and go by sea to get to your neighbors. And if you went to your neighbors it was to contradict and fight them.

  To the north, Kosta said, are the “barbarians”—the Yugoslavs, the Albanians behind their Russian barbed wire, the Bulgarians, who owe the Greeks a war indemnity and are industrializing faster than Greeks like to think—all Communists, mainly Slavs with the traditional Slav longing to get to the Mediterranean and Aegean and to feed on the wealth of
the Levant. On the East are the Moslem Turks, the old enemies, who occupied Greece for centuries. “But,” Kosta said reluctantly, “we are beginning to get on better with the Turks.” (The two enemies are in NATO, heavily supported by American money, because they are at the key strategic point of the Middle East.)

  “This is a ragged country,” Kosta boomed out. “In every generation the sons grow up without remembering their fathers, for the fathers have been killed in war—the Balkan wars, wars against the Turks, the Italians, the Germans, and the civil war at the end of World War II. I did not know my father: he was killed by the Turks. My father did not know his father. My own son will not know me. Now everything is fine—but for how long? I give us ten years and then—once more! All Greeks know this in their bones and have always known it from the beginning of time.”

  No tragic look, no shrugs, but a light, reckless sound of excitement, a sort of curiosity, was in Kosta’s rhetoric.

  “We are indestructible,” he said. “You know what the Greek poet said”—I forget the name—“ ‘The Greeks are like yeast. You bite a piece off and it goes on growing.’”

  It was half past eight, the rush hour; people were pouring out of the shops and offices—for Athens closes down at one o’clock until five in the afternoon, and only then is this hot, noisy, dusty city quiet. But now the cafés were packed. People were eating ice cream and drinking water. In spite of the great heat people walked briskly, for they are nervous, active and volatile in temperament. The men and the women looked sturdy and their eyes were alive; but beauties and handsome men were rare—and I saw no Greek profiles, none at all. But if you speak to anyone, there is a sudden change. These sun-darkened, sun-eaten beings, the well-fed or the thin and harassed, who walk along expressionlessly shut up in their thoughts, will light up dramatically with an avid yet gentle dignity and grace. Sympathy is their first impulse, inquisitiveness the next, along with a quite unguarded openheartedness, and all contained within a natural sense of fineness and consideration. The Greek is all yours, but not obsequiously, intrusively, nor by calculation. You would think that a people who are such demons for trade and a real nation of shopkeepers and bankers, who in fact ran the commerce of Turkey for the Turks, might be out for the main chance in some direction or other. But no, their manners are their very skin—a form of perceptiveness, a foreseeing, a manifestation of their cleverness, which they delight in exercising. Besides—if nothing else—you are their thriller and their story. And for a story they will do anything.

  There was an air of wealth and luxury in the middle of Athens. Greece has recovered from the starvation and ruin of its civil war. American money has come. Greece is a NATO power, its army is one of the best small forces in Europe, the shipyards of Niarchos thrive, thousands of foreigners bring in their money, and the Karamanlis government has been continuously in power for the incredible period of six years (there were twenty-six governments between 1946 and 1955). The government has succeeded in stabilizing the country—but what problems there are! One of the lowest per capita incomes in Europe; a fatal decline in the chief export, tobacco, which used to go mainly to Germany. (America introduced the Germans to Virginia tobacco after the war, and the Greek peasants now have tobacco drying on the fences unsold.) There is great illiteracy.

  About politics, the favorite topic of conversation in Greece, I came away with these conclusions: Karamanlis, the premier, is a practical man who has done well, but he holds his power because most Greeks fear the Communists, who overbid their hand at the last elections and have, in fact, only 10 or 15 percent of the voting power. The Party is outlawed, but known Communists are openly in the opposition parties. The reforms of Karamanlis have been sensible, but he is now up against the fact that the boom has benefited only a few thousand people directly and that there is rising unemployment. The old ELAS Communist movement of the civil war has disintegrated; the peasants are violently anti-Communist—but something like Communism is noticeably increasing in cities like Piraeus, Athens and Salonika. Wages are low. Seasonal emigration to prosperous countries like West Germany has started on a large scale. In short, to get Greece out of its fundamental poverty will be a long and painful business. The government claims to have solved the problem of the refugees—that is to say the huge Greek population turned out of Turkey after World War II, the massacre and persecution of Greeks having been traditional with the Turks for centuries and for political and religious reasons. Hostility to Greeks is the Turkish anti-Semitism. The Greek government has built houses for thousands of refugees; but they number a million and a half, and no one who has seen their shacks on the way down to Piraeus from Athens will think the problem solved. Still, something has been done.

  The Greek lives an open-air life in a hot climate. The mass of people rarely eat meat more than a few times a year. They live on fish and vegetables and fruit. Olive oil is their butter; honey is their sugar; wine or water their drink. They have goat’s milk and cheese. Their life is simple but ceaselessly active.

  “This is a country,” a one-time cabinet minister said to me, “where the rich are ashamed of their riches and the poor ashamed of their poverty.” And yet position and wealth are irrelevant to them. Not a Greek but thinks he has the greatest ability. The merest boy will go into the boss’s office and tell him with entire confidence that he could run the place. He thinks it is simple bad luck, not lack of experience or capacity, that stands in the way of his being prime minister. Politics are in the blood. But—and this goes back to ancient Greece, when the city-states were shut off from one another by the mountains—the Greek does not vote for something; he votes against. A vote for Karamanlis is a vote against the Communists, not a vote for him! A vote for the Communists is a vote against American influence. And as for going Communist, the overpowering feeling of Greek nationalism is against it, and so is the old, long-headed Greek mistrust of putting all your eggs in one basket.

  “We are,” said this politician, “by nature a people who are éparpillé. We scatter our interests. We cannot bear monotony.”

  The Greeks are a people of mountain and sea.

  “Leave this noisy place. It is an ugly modern city; one hundred and fifty years ago it was only a little market town. Get out to the islands and the sea!” Kosta used to shout at me. The islands! They are always in sight. You would say they were leaping over the sea like schools of huge dolphins in the sun, passing and effacing one another, old islands vanishing, new ones appearing to take their place.

  To reach the islands you go down to Piraeus—it is only half an hour in the bus from Athens and is really joined to it by suburbs strung out along the road—to white Piraeus with its cliff and its harbors and its markets and its Communist mayor. It is early in the morning. In dozens of cafés and eating houses the market workers are eating their stew, some mess scooped out of the huge pans on the counter; on the broken pavements, outside the tattered, sun-rotted buildings, the crowds have found broken chairs and rickety tables to sit at. The buses disgorge. By the quay are the ferry steamers, always coming and going, always full, always people struggling up the gangplanks. If these people are poor, they are not passive; they are eagerly alive.

  The harbor stinks of fish and drains, the heat is already slapped on, the flies buzz, but on the steamer all is easy and spick-and-span. You drink your coffee, eat cold cheese patties, and cast off to the noise of radio and accordion. You are packed in with families of all kinds. The fat boy next to you is being taught French by his mother—Greece is a country of fat boys; the old peasant woman is sitting on her bundles; the doctor is discoursing.

  Soon the distant islands begin their dance, sliding one after another into view. In an hour or so you will call at one of them. They are rocky and barren, mere pasturage for goats, except at sea level. At Poros, you could imagine yourself to be beside the painted houses of a little harbor on the Italian lakes. A powerful woman comes out on a balcony and combs her thick black hair, watching your steamer arrive. The cafés on the quay
are crowded with idlers. There is a blue-washed church. Olive trees lean as though in a ballet. There are a few vines, and the black paintbrushes of the cypresses.

  Beyond Poros, as you pass through the straits and plunge into open water again, island rocks appear, little Gibraltars of the Aegean, and you are heading past other islands for Idhra, that perfect island town, an island of mountain, almost uninhabited. There is only half a mile of rocky road in Idhra; the rest is donkey track, promontory, precipice, and the utter island silence. You look down on emerald water, grinding and frilling to white continually round the rock, and clear to the golden rock floor of the sea. Idhra has a deep-set harbor and the town stares like a still stone face of inspecting windows. It is as complex as an abstract painting. And very silent, for there are no quayside crowds here. A few people sit in the little cafés, eating their honey-soaked cakes. The fishermen spread out their golden nets. The back streets are sedate and white and hot. They are like part of a miniature Capri before Capri was ruined by tourism. Idhra is secretive. Its houses, you notice, are plain but fine; this was once a rich island. The houses belonged to sea captains whose wealth came from piracy, for all the Greek islands were natural hiding places in the perpetual warfare of the Greeks against the Turks. Idhra was the chief port of the Greek insurgents in the fight for freedom in the 1830s; its money began to give out in the War of Independence, finally vanishing when sail gave place to steam. It is now a faraway place for a few people.

  Aegina, Poros and Idhra are the nearer islands, a day’s journey to and from Athens; the longer journeys are to the Cyclades, to Crete and to Rhodes. But you notice that these farther islands have their own life; little boats are always phutting off to other islands, taking fishermen or peasants. You could pass months traveling from one to another, dodging the Aegean storms, caught in the sun’s blaze and the blue, the indigo, the wild emerald of a strong and drugging sea. In each island there is a steep little town or village of closely built stone, erected centuries ago.