View of the World

by Norman Lewis

  The Arab contribution to the Ibizan scene is obvious and dominant. It persists in the names of all the most essential things of life – which tend to be prefixed with the Arabic definite article ‘Al’; in the cunning systems of irrigation with which the Ibizan farmer sends water coursing in geometrical patterns all over his fields; in the semi-seclusion of the women; and above all in the architecture. An Ibizan farmhouse, which is as Moorish-looking as its counterpart in the Atlas mountains, is in its simplest form a hollow cube, illuminated only by its door. With the family’s growth in size and prosperity, more cubes and rhomboid shapes are added, apparently haphazardly, although the final grouping of stark geometrical forms is always harmonious, and perfectly suited to its natural setting.

  In recent years poor communications and austere standards of comfort on the island have fostered Ibiza’s individuality. An air service was inaugurated in 1958, but when I was there the most direct route from Spain was by a grossly overcrowded ship sailing once weekly in winter and twice weekly in summer from Barcelona. It required long foresight and a fair amount of luck to obtain a passage on this; sailing times were sometimes changed without notice, and in my experience letters to the Compania Transmediterranea, who are the owners, were rarely answered. One’s best hope of getting to Ibiza in the summer season was to arrive in Barcelona on the day previous to sailing, and to be ready to queue at the company’s office soon after dawn on the following morning. The sea crossing still takes all night, and conditions probably parallel those of a pilgrim ship plying between Somaliland and the port of Jeddah. Decks are packed with the recumbent but restless forms of passengers doing their best to doze off under the harsh glare of lights, installed with the intention of reducing contacts between the sexes to their most impersonal level. This concern for strict morality gives the ships of the Compania Transmediterranea, as they pass in the night, an appearance of gaiety that is deceptive.

  Island transport is by buses of a design not entirely free from the influence of the horse-drawn vehicle, by taxis which until recently were impelled by what looked like kitchen stoves fixed to their backs, and by spruce-looking farm-carts without much springing. The choicest spots in the island are only to be reached on foot, or with the aid of a bicycle, which has to be carried across flowery ravines. Once, when I was temporarily interested in spear-fishing, I asked a Spanish friend on the mainland where to go with a reasonable chance of seeing that splendid Mediterranean fish, the mero, which has practically disappeared from the coastal waters of France, Spain and Italy. He said, ‘That’s easy enough. All you do is to look out for a place without things like running water and electric light … a dump with rotten hotels, where no one in his right mind wants to go.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Ibiza,’ he said. ‘That’s it. That’s the place you’re looking for.’

  The description was most exaggerated and unjust. You can find a bleak, clean room in a fonda anywhere in the island, and if it happens to be in Ibiza town itself, or in San Antonio or Santa Eulalia, there may be a piped water supply, and almost certainly a small, naked electric bulb that will gleam fitfully through most of the hours of darkness. What can you expect for thirty pesetas a day, including two adequate – often classical – Mediterranean meals? Ibiza is very cheap. (I know of people who still pay rents, fixed in the early years of last century, of one peseta a month, for their houses.) Resourceful explorers have found that by taking a room only, at five pesetas a day, and buying their food in the market, they can live for a third of this sum. The standard price for drinks in backstreet bars – whether beer or brandy – is two pesetas, as compared to five pesetas in Barcelona. The strong wines of Valencia and of Tarragona are sold at six pesetas a litre. The proper drink, though, of Ibiza, is suisse – pronounced as if the final ‘e’ were accented. This is absinth mixed with lemon juice, and costs one peseta a glass. At the colmado of San Carlos – a village once famous for excluding as ‘foreigners’ all persons not born in the village – you can see the customers on Sundays line up, a glass of suisse in hand, to receive an injection of vitamin B in the left arm, administered by the proprietress, Anita. The injection costs five pesetas, and is supposed to ensure success in all undertakings, especially those of the heart, during the ensuing week. These economic realities make Ibiza the paradise of those modern remittance men, the freelance writer who sees two or three of his pieces in print a year, and the painter who sells a canvas once in a blue moon.

  Every year the Spanish police decide that they must cut down on the floating population of escapists, who regard the island as a slightly more accessible Tahiti, and a purge takes place. Deportation is usually carried out on grounds of moral insufficiency. A fair amount of laxness in the private life is tolerated in Spain so long as an outward serenity of deportment is maintained. A departure from this, whether it be a matter of habitual drunkenness in public places, or brawling, or obvious sexual nonconformity, becomes officially ‘un escándalo publico’, and the perpetrator thereof receives a visit from the Commisario de Policia, who if it is a lady who is concerned will kiss her hand, before begging her to depart on the next boat. Annually, Ibiza’s bohemian plant is pruned back to the roots, and with each new season it produces a fresh crop. Most of these Gauguins are both harmless and picturesque. In 1955 the beard came in again and was adopted by all nationalities except the Spanish. It was no longer the furious growth inherited from naval service but a sensitive and downy halo worn on, or under, the chin in true fin de siècle style. The female of the species looked as if she might have woven her own clothes.

  A fair number of these refugees from the left-bank cellars of the northern cities drifted up the coast to Santa Eulalia. Our prize specimen, of whom we were very proud, was an English actor who had embraced a strict yoga discipline, and who regularly reached phases of reintegration in our open-air café, El Kiosko. On one such occasion he sank to his knees, eyes lifted heavenwards, in the path of a bus just about to depart for Ibiza, and remained in this position for about five minutes, while the bus awaited his pleasure with the engine ticking over and a pair of civil guards sat at a nearby table eyeing him with a kind of grim connoisseurship. We also had with us for a short time, until he was removed to a madhouse, a genial American who in his less lucid moments believed himself to be Ernest Hemingway, while any evening after five it was unusual not to be accosted in one of the two popular bars by a Russian nobleman anxious to explain his solution of the problem of perpetual motion. Native – or perhaps I should say Spanish – eccentrics were comparatively rare, but they included a massive Catalan who strode through the streets perpetually cracking a stock whip, and a fair-only bullfighter who had found a summer asylum in the house of a local lady of quality and used to accompany her on long walks holding an iron bar in his extended right arm to develop the muscles employed in skewering his bulls.

  These were some of the transients who brightened our lives. We also had our small colony of permanent foreign residents who sometimes acted strangely by Spanish standards. The only American resident, for example, a charming lady who loved animals, built a tower just across the water from Ses Estaques to shelter a pony she had found with a broken leg. The tower, in faultless local style, harmonised with the several others that had survived in this majestic panorama from the Middle Ages, but the quixotry of the action was complicated by the fact that it had inadvertently been built on someone else’s land. But the Spanish were as tolerant of all such foibles as if they had been Buddhists of the Hinayanist canon. No extravagances ever produced so much as a raised eyebrow. If they’d had the chance to travel, they’d probably have cut a comic spectacle in the foreign country too. That was how the man in the street saw it. The police sat and pondered whether or not yoga trances in the main thoroughfare constituted a public scandal, shrugged their shoulders and decided to refer the matter to higher authority.

  The interest I developed in Ibiza’s eccentrics, both of the present time and of the past, actually provoked me into making a pilgrimage, to t
he highly inaccessible village of San Vicente, where Raoul Villain – most notable of them all – spent his last years.

  In July 1914, Villain succeeded in concealing himself in the French Chambre des Députés, and there shot dead the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, who opposed France’s entry into the First World War. This action was committed by Villain in the sincere belief that he was a reincarnation of Joan of Arc, charged with the mission of protecting France from the shame of a craven retreat. He spent a few years in a lunatic asylum, after which he was quietly released and smuggled out of the country by his relatives, who sent him to San Vicente on the north-east corner of the island. Here he lived quietly enough until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when he was killed by the anarchists.

  San Vicente is about eight miles up the coast from Santa Eulalia, and as it was said to be in surroundings of extraordinary beauty, I decided one day to make a trip there. When Villain’s influential kinsmen had picked out San Vicente as being, so far as Europe went, the end of the world, they were undoubtedly well-informed. The hardiest of our taxistas excused himself from taking me in his 1923 Chevrolet, so I hired a bicycle – as usual, devoid of brakes – which I hauled most of the way through a landscape of infernal grandeur. Peasant women robed like witches passed with a slow gliding motion over fields that were stained as if with sacrificial blood. Ancient isolated fig trees hummed and moaned mysteriously with invisible doves sheltering in their deep pools of foliage. The stumps of watch-towers stood up everywhere half strangled with blue convolvulus, and the air was sickly with the odour of locust beans. This was a scene that had not changed since Gimnesia, the Island of the Naked, was written about in Periplus – except that in the matter of clothing the people had gone from one extreme to the other.

  I lost my way several times and was redirected by signs and gestures by the aged women who were permitted to appear at the doors of their houses, from one of whom I received a bowl of goat’s milk. San Vicente proved to be a sandy cove, deep-set among mouldering cliffs, with a derelict house, a farm, a fonda, and a shop. The beach, which was deserted, had been carefully arranged with antique wooden windlasses and a frame like a miniature gallows, from which huge, semi-transparent fillets of fish hung drying against a violet sea. The quality and distribution of these objects in this hard, clear light, had clothed them in a kind of vitreous surrealism. This may have been the chief Carthaginian port in Ibiza. About a mile inland lies the cave temple of the goddess Tanit, called Es Cuyerám, which is only partially excavated, and from which in the course of amateurish investigations great archaeological treasures have been recovered, and most of them smuggled out of the country.

  The derelict house had been built by Villain, but never finished. The walls were painted with faded fleurs-de-lis, and there were black holes where doors and windows had been. The first inhabitant of San Vicente I ran into had known the exile well, and luckily for me he spoke Castilian Spanish. Villain, he said, had been much liked by the village people, among whom he had developed a kind of gentle patriarchal authority. He had been a bit funny in the top storey, my informant said, screwing his forefinger against his temple in a familiar Spanish gesture – but then, clever people like that often were. The villagers, it seemed, had shown no desire to argue when Villain propounded his doctrine of reincarnation, and had listened with interest and respect while he described episodes from his previous existence, and told them what it felt like to be burned at the stake. When the anarchists landed there soon after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, they all ran away except Villain, who, in his grand role, and carrying the standard of Joan of Arc, went down to the beach to meet – and perhaps repel – the invaders. My informant’s belief – which is commonly held – was that he was on the anarchists’ list for liquidation. This strikes me as highly unlikely. The truth of the matter probably is that they had as little sense of humour as they had regard for human life. At all events, Villain was shot twice and left for dead, lying on the beach. Two days later, when the villagers decided to return, he was still there, and still alive – but only just, and before a doctor could be brought, he was dead.

  When you have seen enough of Ibiza’s foreign birds of passage, all you have to do is to move out of one of the three centres already mentioned, where they concentrate between migrations. The interior of the island, which is 26 miles long, with an average width of about 9 miles, and has a population of 36,000, is not only unspoilt but mysterious: so much so that Don Antonio Ribas, the leading authority on everything appertaining to folklore in Ibiza, was unable either to confirm or to deny a rumour that a mountain hamlet exists in which women are still veiled in Moorish style.

  The Ibizan peasant is the product of changeless economic factors – a fertile soil, an unvarying climate, and an inexhaustible water supply from underground sources. These benefits have produced a trance-like routine of existence, a way of life that in the absence of some social cataclysm might remain in a state of cosy ossification until doomsday. The peasant lives, on the whole, monotonously, with calculation and without surprise. He suffers from inbreeding, which produces a great deal of baldness in the women, an addiction to absinth (which in Ibiza is the real thing), and an abnormally high incidence of syphilis. Like the industrial proletarian, the Ibizan peasant carefully separates work from play, and his many fiestas and ceremonies are the sauce for the long, savourless days of hard labour. Much of the remote past is conserved in the husk of convention, and archaic usages govern his conduct in all the crucial issues of existence.

  Of the peasant’s many customs the most singular are those associated with courting, called in the Ibizan dialect festeig. This has no parallel elsewhere in Spain – or probably in the world – and is at least an intelligent advance on the matchmaking system employed in most oriental and serni-oriental lands. A marriageable girl’s state is officially proclaimed by the act of her attending mass standing between her father and mother. Eligible young men may then present themselves formally at the girl’s home and apply to her father for permission to take part in the festeig, which is staged in public. The father usually appoints an hour or more on three evenings of the week – Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays – for this. Courting time begins at eight o’clock, to give the girl time to prepare herself after her day’s work in the fields, and in the case of a girl who has a large number of suitors it may be continued until midnight, or even one in the morning. The highest number of suitors reported by my informant was fifteen. Three chairs are placed in the centre of the principal room, one each for the girl and her father, and a third for the suitor, and this is occupied in turn and for exactly the same number of minutes by each of the young men who have entered the amorous contest. While he puts his case the others look on critically. As soon as his time is up he is expected to get up and leave of his own accord, and if he fails in this the suitor whose turn comes next is entitled to throw small stones at him as a reminder. If this warning is ignored it is taken as a deliberate insult, and in theory at least the injured party leaves the house and waits outside for his rival, with knife drawn. The festeig – now only to be found in remote parts of the island – has in the past been responsible for numerous killings.

  While docile in all other things the Ibizan is traditionally pugnacious where the heart is affected. A girl who finds herself unable to accept any of the candidates presenting themselves at her festeig, or who takes too long to make up her mind, may be publicly stoned. Peasant society – though not the Guardia Civil – approves of an admirer showing his enthusiasm for a girl by firing his pistol at a point in the ground a few inches from her toes as she leaves mass. If rejected, he sometimes, and with public toleration, gives vent to his natural frustration by firing at the ground behind the girl. In either case she loses face if she displays anything but the completest indifference. This amorous gunplay has given the police some trouble in the past. Even now a civil guard rarely passes a young peasant who is not at work when he should be, without satisfying h
imself that he is not concealing a weapon. The commonness of feuds in bygone days arising from breach of courting and other customs is attested by the fact that even now, no Ibizan paes greets another after dark: originally this was to avoid the possibility of betraying his identity to an enemy.

  Such customs as these – the miming and buffoonery at the annual pig-killing, and the elaborate feasting and dancing which accompany the communal ploughing and the harvesting of various crops and, above all, marriages – are on the point of disappearance. They can no more survive improved education and ‘standards of living’, technical progress, and the example of how the rest of the world lives as demonstrated by the cinema, than similar customs could survive these things elsewhere. One other extraordinary custom survives, and in spite of the energetic disapproval of the Guardia Civil. This is the encerrada – which also continues to exist in off-the-beaten-track regions in Andalusia, and is described by Mr Gerald Brenan in his book South from Granada.

  The Spaniards appear always to have felt an antipathy towards the remarriage of widows or widowers. There is evidence to suggest that in the Bronze Age the surviving partner was promptly killed off, since husband and wife appear to have been buried at the same time, squeezed into the same funeral jar. The encerrada is the public form taken by this disapproval, which varies very much and according to the circumstances of the case, between the extremes of noisy but harmless peasant horseplay and something very close to a lynching party. The Ibicencans, who are scrupulous about the forms of mourning, consider it particularly scandalous to remarry within the year, the more so if either of the contracting parties has children. The encerrada in its mildest form consists in a party of neighbours collecting to keep the newly-weds awake all night on the first night of the marriage by a raucous serenade played on guitars and accompanied by the blowing of conch shells and the beating of tin cans. When a breach of custom has been unusually shocking, the encerrada may be prolonged for four or five nights and draw hundreds of participants from other parts of the island. An atmosphere of hysteria prevails and obscene verses are improvised and screamed under the windows. At this point the civil guard usually arrives, and the violence and bloodshed start. In 1950 at the village of Es Cana the police arrested the participants in an encerrada, all of whom spent fifteen days in gaol; but the encerrada still goes on. Police permission is actually given for an encerrada, so long as no obscene verses are sung. When permission is refused, the encerrada is still sometimes organised by the women only, in the knowledge that they will receive milder treatment from the civil guard, when they appear upon the scene, than would the menfolk if they too had been involved. The object of the encerrada, when it is seriously undertaken, is clearly to force the offenders to leave the neighbourhood, and in this it is usually successful.