by Norman Lewis
I had hoped to see the tomb of Pedro the Cruel, but it turned out that this, which is in the crypt, could be visited only on one day in the year. Of the doings of this monarch, identifiable to his trembling subjects, as he stalked the streets at night, by his creaking knee joints, a single episode illustrates the utter foreignness of the medieval mind. When rejected by a celebrated beauty, Señora Urraca Osorio, the King had her burned to death. Having studied his record, this does not surprise us. What does – what remains beyond the compass of our mentality – is that the one thing that seems to have been of importance on this occasion was that Señora’s modesty should not have been placed in jeopardy, and that to prevent this possibility her maid leaped into the flames so as to screen her mistress from any such exposure.
Pedro is supremely the ‘bad’ king of Spanish history. St Ferdinand, conqueror of Seville from the Moors, whose ‘incorruptible’ body lies in a silver casket in the Cathedral’s Capilla-Real, the one who meant well. The saint, a rigorous pietist who died eventually through excessive fasting, was the scourge of heretics, setting his people an example of righteous severity in one instance by lighting in person the pyre on which an assortment of dissenters of one kind or another were to be incinerated. ‘His Majesty wore a rough gown tied by a rope, and carried a large cross. He ordered all those who had come to the place to kneel and pray, and imposed upon them a penance. Before taking the torch from the hand of the executioner he kissed the cheek of each of those who were about to suffer.’
The Cathedral expresses conquest and domination in architectural terms of sheer mass, and it comes as a surprise to learn that it is not the largest building in Seville, being second to the nearby tobacco factory, now the University, in itself only exceeded in size by the Escorial. It was here that Don José had his first encounter with Carmen. Five thousand girls were employed to make cigars, and the Victorian British visitor found sexual release at the sight of a girl rolling a cigar on her thigh, which she could be persuaded to do for a payment of ten centavos, equivalent of a penny. Murray, of the celebrated guidebook, viewed the scene with both unction and disapproval, although he clearly found it hard to tear himself away. He found the girls handsome but smelly, and ‘reputed to be more impertinent than chaste.’
My visit to Seville in the Spring of this year [1984] had followed one in the autumn of 1981, and I was delighted and relieved to discover the town transformed by change and renewal. In 1981 it had seemed dirty, depressed and anarchistic, a prey still to moral confusion and lack of guidance following the disappearance of the dictatorship. Sevillians had shown themselves at a loss to know what to do with civil liberty, and some excesses had stirred up a sullen reaction. The walls were covered with resentful graffiti. ‘Democracy is a lie, democracy kills’, they said. Franco’s face had been stencilled everywhere, accompanied sometimes by the supplication, ‘Come back to us. We can’t carry on without you. All is forgiven’.
Municipal workers – like so many Spaniards at that time – had been on strike for months, and the streets were piled high with rubbish, visited by innumerable rats. Pornography had arrived – a stunning experience for a strait-laced people – with blue cinemas everywhere, horror video cassettes, and window displays of the Karma Sutra in booksellers previously specialising in devotional manuals and the lives of the saints. For nearly forty years prior to Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish lovers had been forbidden to kiss in public, and in small-town cinemas a priest stationed himself at the projectionist’s side ready with a square of cardboard to be held over the lens where a romantic episode might be held to weaken public morality. With the return of democracy there was time to be made up. In 1981 public courtship had become a ritual, and in Seville couples fell into each other’s embrace in any square that provided suitable benches, and lay locked together while the hours passed and the rats scuttled through the rubbish under their feet.
Package-deal trips to London were advertised to deal with unwanted pregnancies, at the all-in charge including two nights in the British Capital, of £250. The restraining influence of the Catholic Church seemed to have collapsed along with that of the State, and the city filled up with mystic carpet-baggers eager to fill the vacuum, with mediums, sun-worshippers, ‘cosmobiologists’, whirling dervishes, American fundamentalists howling for Armageddon, and sects dating from the pre-Christian era, including one, as the newspapers reported, that sacrificed chickens and drew omens from a study of their entrails.
All the symptoms of a society in advanced decay were present, yet suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, Sevillians had managed to work the poison out of their systems, and the phase was at an end. Now all appeared sweetness and light. The streets had been swept and garnished, flowers were in bloom in all the parks, Pied Pipers had lured all the rats away, and the walls had been cleansed of their nostalgia and their hate. Some Sevillians were of the opinion that the Virgin known as La Hiniesta had come to their aid in response to the conferment to her image – despite the steadfast opposition of Communist councillors – of the City Medal of Honour. Now she was junior only to the Macarena Virgin, who not only held the medal but had been promoted in 1937 by General Queipo de Llano to Captain General of the Nationalist Armed forces.
I looked up an old Sevillian friend. ‘What finally happened about Cristina?’ (Three years ago he had been in despair after his only daughter, aged twenty, had gone off to live with a married man aged forty-four.) He seemed surprised that the matter should have been brought up. ‘Oh, that’s a thing of the past. She’s settled down now with a nice chap who works in the Banco de Espana. Daughter aged two and expecting their second.’
The talk turned to the condition of Seville, and some mention was made of the fact there had been four bank robberies on the previous day, May 10th.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Something they picked up from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. A boy walks into a bank, pulls out a gun, tries to speak Spanish with an American accent, and say ‘esto es un robo’ just like they do in the film. The customers line up with their hands up against the wall, the cashier pushes a few thousand pesetas through his window, and the kid picks it up and gets out. It’s a phase. Not a thing to take seriously. Nobody gets hurt.’
This relaxed view was in part shared by Charles Formby, HM Consul in Seville. ‘In this town they snatch handbags and break into cars,’ he said. ‘We have specialists called semaforazos who break the windows of cars held up at traffic lights and grab what they can. This is not a dangerous city. No one gets violently robbed. You’re safer walking the streets of Seville at night than you are in London.’
Charles Formby supplied the statistic that at 38 per cent Seville’s unemployment (it is the centre of a depressed agricultural area) is the highest in Spain, and that 12 per cent of the unemployed are university graduates. He did not agree that petty criminality was a product of this economic situation, but believed it was a matter of obtaining money to buy drugs.
Don Rafael Manzano, Director of the Alcazar of Seville, agreed with him, adding his conviction that Spanish society was now the most permissive in Europe. Since the departure of Franco, the police were no longer feared, persons found to be in possession of small amounts of drugs were not charged, and gaol sentences were light except for serious crime. He mentioned that on May 10th – the day of the four bank robberies – a young man only released from prison a few hours previously had been arrested in the act of throwing packets of cannabis and heroin over the prison wall.
One of Seville’s problems seems to lie in its nearness to the point of entry of drugs from North Africa. ‘I happened to be down at Algeciras, the other day,’ said a reporter on El Correo de Andalucia, ‘and watching all these pregnant women getting off the ferry from Tangier, I wondered how many were really great with child, and how many with bundles of hashish.’
So the drug problem remained, but otherwise Sevillians seemed to be ridding themselves of the social sickness mild or grave, largely transmitted through the
movies. The likely lads of Spain were no more immune than the youth of any other country from the cultural revolution inspired by such films as The Wild Ones, and the first bikers had appeared ten years ago. But they were a dwindling cult, and the Sevillian Hell’s Angels Chapter were down to a fraction of its former membership. I found a group tinkering with their Yamahas in a square on the edge of town. The majority were gypsies with sensitive Asiatic faces and melancholy eyes, and one was quite frank about their problems. ‘It never really took off here. In my view to be a real Angel del infierno you have to wear the right leather gear, and how can you expect anybody to do that when the temperature never drops below ninety in the shade?’
In 1981 there had been a few poorish imitations of punks and skinheads about, but now they were out of fashion, and were no more to be seen. On the other hand, youngsters in plenty thronged the well-lit squares and avenues far into the night. It was something new in Spain, a phenomenon the beginnings of which I had observed on the earlier visit, bands of well-dressed and well-behaved children ranging in age between twelve and sixteen, who turned the nocturnal streets into a playground.
Back to Don Rafael in his cell of an office, tucked away behind the scenes in the magnificence of the Alcazar. ‘We are suffering,’ he said, ‘from the side effects of the levelling process. Until recently, only rich people who didn’t have any work to do, could stay up enjoying themselves all night. Now everyone tries to. At the time of Holy Week it’s understandable. The processions are going on all night, and it’s something you have to see. No sooner is Holy Week over and we’re into the Spring Fair.’ The upper class rent chalets in the fairground and give parties that finish at six in the morning. Nowadays, however bad the unemployment crisis people were determined to defend their democratic rights, one of them being to stay up as late as the rich. If the parents stay up all night, said Don Rafael, so do the children, their argument being that democracy knows no age limits. As a result they fell asleep over their books at school. ‘We as a nation,’ he said, ‘have lost the ability to say no.’
All the old Spanish things were staging a comeback, including bullfighting. In the Autumn of 1981 so gloomy was the outlook for the national spectacle that the concluding corrida of that year had to be put forward a day because Sevilla FC would be playing at home on the Sunday originally planned. Of this overshadowed occasion, the Correo de Andalucia’s sportswriter said, ‘So the present decadent season draws to its end. It has offered little but boredom for the public, and bad business for the promoters, with about half the seats unsold. In this last novillada we saw underweight bulls, the fourth with a marked tendency to slip away, and the last two virtually calves, tottering about on shaky legs. There was great protest from the crowd that the fifth was lame. It wasn’t. It was numb from being shut up in a pen for so many weeks. As for the fighters, what can we say? Carlos Aragon was sad and insipid. He spread boredom like a disease. When they trundled the sixth bull in I said to my neighbour, “wake me up if anything happens”. He didn’t because he, too, fell asleep.’
The aficionados blamed it on the quality of the bullfighters themselves. The spirit had ceased to breathe upon them, leaving them cold and cautious, and their performance a tawdry commercial transaction in which a minimum is returned for money received. Fighters of old such as Joselito, drew more crowds to Seville than a visit by the King. Half his personal fortune went into the purchase of four emeralds for the Macarena Virgin, protectress of bullfighters (and, unofficially, smugglers), and when, at the age of twenty-five, he died in the ring in exemplary fashion, the image was dressed by her attendants in widow’s weeds in which she remained for a month.
Could there ever be a return to those days? Even that seemed possible. The bullfights accompanying the Spring Fair this year suggested a long-hoped-for renaissance, and at a time when the enthusiasm for football was on the wane, all seats in the Seville rings were sold out. At last, we were assured, the bullfighters had put their house in order, and meek bulls with shaved horns were a thing of the past.
It was too soon to hope for another Joselito, but there were plenty of newcomers of promise, including Manuel Ruiz Manili, a rising star of the old order, already nicknamed El Jabato (the young wild boar), who put on a near-suicidal display. ‘This man,’ said one critic, ‘really hurls himself into the fray … If only he lasts!’ He made another sportswriter shiver. ‘I could feel those horns scrape his cuticles. Number two was as wicked a beast as I’ve ever seen. “Watch me cut him down,” Manili said. “They’ll either carry me out on their shoulders, or I’m going to hospital.” They carried him out. Delirium.’
Manili, accorded the title El Triunfador (the triumphant) at the fair, was a gypsy, and he could have been the brother of the stylish policewoman I had seen directing the traffic at the Puente San Telmo. In 1984, as ever, the gypsies remain a little mysterious, uncharted human territory on the fringes of Spanish society. There was not a gypsy bank manager in the whole of Spain, but the best bullfighters, the best musicians and the best dancers were, and always had been, gypsies. For many foreigners, and quite a few natives, too, the mental image called to mind that typified the attraction of Spain was that of the arrogant dancing gypsy.
The capital of gypsy Spain had been the Sevillian suburb of Triana, birthplace of the Emperor Trajan, but the developers laid siege to it, and it fell. In Triana of old, fountain-head of the popular music of Spain, the gypsies lived in extended families in tiny, immaculate communal houses around a courtyard glutted with flowers. These were called corrals, and now of the hundreds of such nuclei of which Triana had been composed, one only remained. It was occupied by twenty-three perplexed families lost among the upsurge of modern buildings, their main problem seeming to be how to pay for the water for the four hundred pot plants which turned their courtyard into a tiny Amazonian jungle.
For all the changes, stout-hearted pockets of resistance remained. In Triana, the secluded patios where dances dating in all likelihood from before the days of Trajan had been taught and practised, had all been swept away, but the dance went on. Anita Domingo’s Academy of Spanish Art, where little girls go to stamp their heels and click their castanets, while Anita thumps out a Sevilliana on the stiff piano has a longer waiting list than ever. Half the pupils are gypsies, neat and small-boned, with flashing black eyes and the classic profiles stamped on ancient coins. Ancient customs refused to die. Newspapers reported the case of a gypsy working in a Triana department store, who was involved in a dispute over the granting of three days’ leave of absence to allow her ritual abduction, the essential preliminary to a gypsy marriage.
Holy Week was at an end and, graced by the Royal Family’s participation, it was spoken of as the greatest success since the days before the Civil War. The Spring Fair had been – to use a fashionable adjective – a marathon one, but here there was an undertow of caution in the deluge of praise. It was noted that only fifty years back three days had been considered ample for civic festivities, originally based on the conviction that they were essential to the production of Spring rains. Now it was commented upon that not only had the fair been increased to seven official days, but that further prolongation was threatened by tacking two more days onto the front ‘to test the illuminations’.
With these excitements at an end, we had slipped into the calm aftermath of the ‘Easter of Flowers’ when the city turns back with reluctance to the routines of normal existence. There was nothing at this time, I was assured, likely to be of interest to the visitor, except relatively unimportant processions when local Madonnas were carried on tours of their zones of influence, as if to be allowed to see for themselves that all was well. Arrangements were informal. Sometimes the little cortege might stop at the door of a particularly devout household to allow its head to be summoned into the presence, bowing a little anxiously to report on the doings of the family. Such outings were collectively known as ‘Her Majesty in Public’.
In the Easter of Flowers a light diet and early t
o bed were the orders of the day. ‘Good fun while it lasted,’ was the general view of the fiesta. ‘Now let’s catch up on some sleep.’ Released from the treadmill of pleasure, people escaped out from the bustle of the centre to take a quiet stroll by the river or settle for a night-cap and a chat in one of the cafés on the Avenida de las Constitucion, among night-scented flowering trees and within sight of the great and ancient places of their history.
Sitting with them, I noticed the pull exercised by these grandiose surroundings; how, as if moved by the tug of a magnet, they would shift their chairs for a better view of the floodlit palaces, the spires, the domes and the impeccable profile of the Giralda, the contemplation of which by night is claimed by some Sevillians to foster a lucid tranquillity conducive to untroubled sleep.
The last of the milords passed homeward-bound, ghostly against the sash of mist marking the course of the Guadalquivir. An exceedingly polite waiter who always said ‘at your service’ whenever he took or served an order, caught in a moment of inactivity swayed a little, eyes half-closed. Somebody at the next table said, ‘Early night tonight, then,’ but nobody moved.
At this moment a tremendous din started in the side-street to my rear, and within seconds an excited crowd came into view. In their midst, though towering over their heads, stalked a dozen outlandish figures, on six-foot-high stilts to which their legs were bound. They were patched and masked in medieval style, some of them disfigured with beaks and flapping wings like nightmarish birds. There was something compulsive and a little sinister about their vitality as they came on with a pounding of drums and a clash of cymbals, sometimes breaking into a grotesque, stiff-legged dance.