To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  We went into the empty Café du Centre which was fitted with booths to which strips of buttoned leather upholstery still adhered. There was a faint reek about the place of coffee and Gauloise cigarettes which I accepted as an illusion since these things were no longer to be found in such a place. Through the window we watched the Sunday afternoon formal promenade of dignified black men in winged collars and their wives who wore hats tied in place with motoring veils.

  ‘This,’ said Johnson, ‘is a copy of France as it once was. You won’t hear Creole spoken here. These people actually believe themselves to be French. Take that old man with the white beard we just saw. I know him. He has papers to prove he’s a descendant of the Duc de Brantôme. There’s another family here that goes back to Lamartine. Forget about Papa Doc Duvalier. This is the real Haiti. This is the heart and soul of the island.’

  A small boy had brought our rum, but now I saw a woman I took to be the proprietress approach. She was an exceedingly beautiful mulatta, of the kind they described here as jaune with the palest of golden skin and soft chestnut hair. This was the end product of generations of selective breeding by a rich family struggling towards their white ideal. Anywhere but here she would have passed as white, and only her huge, Pre-Raphaelite eyes betrayed her racial secret. She smiled and beckoned with her finger. ‘Venez voir les oiseaux,’ she said.

  We got up and followed her through the back of the bar into a garden overlooking a wide swamp spread through the valley under a black mountain. A half square mile of the swamp was covered with flamingoes, possibly a thousand of them, and at this moment—perhaps because someone had fired a gun—they were beginning to take off. Slowly, as the coverlet of birds was stripped back it was converted into a pink cloud which floated away between two low peaks and was lost to sight.

  A circular thatched hut of the kind you saw everywhere in Haiti had been built in a corner of the garden. ‘Is this the place where they hold the cock fights?’ Johnson asked.

  ‘We do not have cock fights,’ she said. ‘The people come here for their celebrations.’ She had switched easily into English.

  She went ahead and we followed her into the hut which was much larger than most. It had been decorated as if in readiness for carnival, still several weeks ahead. Cut-out paper shapes dangled from the thatch and the floor was covered with intricate designs traced out in flour, recalling the complex wrought-iron patterning of the last century. The roof was supported by a number of poles, from each of which hung large drums. Pictures of the kind that might have been painted by children with a taste for the bizarre stood on the floor all round the walls: intertwining snakes, staring eyes, a dancing skeleton, Jonah captured by his whale. ‘Voodoo,’ Johnson said. ‘In this of all places. I’d never have dreamed of it. They’re certainly advancing their frontiers.’

  Childish fantasies were followed by a row of Haitian gods. Johnson catalogued them with a kind of proprietorial relish, while standing before them, the woman curtsied to each in turn. Baron Samedi, lord of the underworld—shown here as an undertaker, in top hat, dark glasses, coat with starched cuffs, white gloves and cane. Ogwé, wearing his admiral’s uniform, guardian of good manners. Ogón, sword in hand, god of war. General Brutus, patron of adulterers, who assumes human form to molest young girls. Maitress Erzulie, goddess of love, a dark-eyed Madonna with a sword appropriately thrust through her heart.

  The café-owner spoke to each in Creole. Her white skin glistened in the thin shafting of light through the walls of the hut. Addressing the images she smiled continuously in a cajoling fashion as a saleswoman recommending a doubtful product might have done. ‘Now I have introduced you,’ she explained to us.

  ‘And these are the gods you pray to?’ Johnson asked.

  ‘We don’t pray,’ she said. ‘The Haitian gods don’t listen to prayers. They are very businesslike. We hold a celebration, we feed them and we dance to them, and in return they give us their help.’

  ‘Could they be persuaded to do anything for us, if approached in the right way?’

  ‘Of course,’ the woman said. ‘They are very reasonable. If you fear death you should leave a bottle of rum for Baron Samedi. Ogón will defend you from your enemies. You can repay him with cheroots.’

  ‘I think in both our cases an offering to Maitress Erzulie might be more appropriate,’ Johnson said. ‘What do you suggest?’

  The café proprietress pondered a moment. ‘She’s a woman,’ she said. ‘You can’t go wrong with cold cream.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Johnson told her. ‘Perhaps you could obtain some for us. We will leave the money.’

  At this moment a workman clattered in with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled broom. He put these down, picked up a stick and struck out at the biggest of the drums, filling the hut with doom-laden reverberations. The woman crossed herself and started to berate him, and we left them and went outside and stood looking down over the town. It had been raining and the rain had stopped, and now the sun filled the view to overbrimming with bright reflections. Naked children splashed joyfully in a brief torrent running in the street. A woman washed clothing in a pellucid puddle. A bell clanked and a little procession of hatted church-goers paddled past, shoes in hand.

  We went down to the Facel-Vega. There were no tontons in this poor, devout place, and a small crowd had gathered in ecstatic admiration of the car. Someone had made up a little garland of white flowers, and this now encircled the firm’s emblem, a sprinting greyhound, which embellished the radiator. Johnson passed it over to me to sniff. It was very fragrant. ‘The spiritual life here seems to be quite intense,’ he said. ‘It would have been nice to stay a little longer. But with our problem with the lights I think we should be making a move.’

  RONDA

  PEACE, SO RELENTLESSLY DENIED the traveller on the Costa del Sol, descends instantly when, just beyond Marbella, he turns off north onto the Ronda road. This is marvellously deserted. Ronda—kept (allegedly by a hoteliers’ conspiracy) short of accommodation—rids itself of the bulk of its visitors at the end of every day. A few cars passed me on their way downhill to the coast, otherwise there was little sign of life in these splendidly empty mountains.

  Five miles short of Ronda I pulled in at a roadside café. It was precariously sited close to the slope of a steep valley, and a previous customer’s car, unsuccessfully parked, had rolled fifteen yards downhill into a corral with some donkeys. From the organised life of an area now described as the California of Europe I had suddenly crossed an invisible frontier into the improvised Spain of old. The man who ran the place made me an omelette of potatoes studded with mountain ham—very dense and dry, to be correctly eaten with the fingers. He poured himself a glass of blueish wine and sat down with me to share the view. A huge bird—eagle or vulture—flapped into sight over a nearby peak and planed down the valley. I asked him why there were no houses, and he said it was because this had been bandit country. There had been bandits in these mountains as late as the forties. One of them had ridden in here one night for what turned out to be his last meal before falling into an ambush laid by the Civil Guards.

  While this conversation was in progress a large and handsome nanny-goat had stationed herself at the back of my chair. Now, with great delicacy and precision, she leaned forward, picked up a piece of my bread and began to chew. ‘Hope the goat doesn’t bother you,’ the man said. ‘She’s a friend of the family. Often pays us a visit.’

  ‘She doesn’t bother me in the slightest,’ I said. ‘She’s a fine-looking animal. What’s her name?’

  The man looked surprised. ‘Not being a Christian,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t have one. We just call her the goat.’

  I thanked him, patted the goat on the head and left. Ten minutes later as I drove over the top of the sierra and down through the outskirts of Ronda the landscape burst into life. There were hens and pigeons and litters of scuttling black piglets in the open spaces. A mother snatched up her baby from the verge of the
road, a horseman wearing leather chaps and a big hat galloped after an escaping cow, and a traditional turkey-woman controlled her flock with a seven-foot whip.

  The great Arab gate called the Puerto Almocabar bars the way at the entrance to the town. It is flanked by massive towers and through it a perfect white Andalusian street of matching houses curves up into the heart of Ronda. The road narrows among the Gothic and Moorish buildings at the top of the hill and then descends to the New Bridge over the theatrical gorge of the River Guadalevin, with glimpses through ornamental grilles of cyclopean boulders rearing up 300 feet from the trickle of water in the bottom. Across the bridge the town opens into the Plaza de España, a charming if haphazard square smelling of geraniums and saddlery, with shops like caverns, a country coachman plying for hire on the box of a vehicle like a tumbril, and men with sonorous voices calling the numbers of lottery tickets for sale.

  Here, through a fine, ruined archway is the town’s carpark where the cars line up under a backdrop of the old town across the river, its white houses crammed like a seaside terrace along the edge of a 500-foot precipice. On our side, Don Miguel’s restaurant juts out over the gorge at its narrowest and most fearsome point, recalling a scene in Tibet. I asked the knowledgeable attendant about eating there, and he replied, ‘You could do worse. Personally, I never set foot in the place. I suffer from vertigo and it makes my head swim.’

  In all, it was a memorable first encounter; a small corner of Spain miraculously preserved, hardly changed, as it seemed, since the editor of Murray’s Handbook, a difficult man to please, wrote of it in 1880: ‘There is but one Ronda in the world.’

  By now it was 8 p.m., with the sun waning in power at the bottom of the sky, and an evening refulgence diffused from surfaces of bare rock, and a nacreous speckling of clouds to warm the whiteness of the buildings. The best of Ronda is built along the edge of the Tajo, rising to nearly 1,000 feet, looking at this hour like a vast amphitheatre saturated with fading light, men on donkeys and mules immediately below among ancient, abandoned houses with trees growing through their roofs, a herd of sheep running as nimbly as cats, a threshing floor ringed with stones like a miniature Stonehenge, and in the distance, the sierras being pulled apart, range from range, by the mist.

  The Tajo provides the reason for Ronda’s existence, for apart from this incomparable natural defence why should it have occurred to anyone to settle here? Only the unreliable irrigation provided by the Guadalevin river offers relief in an environment largely copied from African deserts. The cliff abetted the inhabitants in their struggle against marauding armies, but the living was poor. Before the new affluence promoted by tourism, Rondeños picked olives, raised pigs and cured ham. Before the war, day-labourers might hope to find employment for 100 days a year, and the daily wage could be as low as 3.50 pesetas at a time when there were nine pesetas to the US dollar. Andalusia was described at that time as the poorest region in Europe, and there were Andalusians, as reported in the newspapers of the day, who literally starved to death. Hence the chronic and permanent banditry. Hence the garrotte, set up two centuries ago outside the Church of Los Dolores in Ronda, where desperate peasants who had taken to robbery were brought to be strangled in batches of four—as recorded in macabre fashion by the figures carved in the church’s porch.

  Unendurable poverty, and its long legacy of hatred, determined the atrocious aspects of the Spanish Civil War in Andalusia. It is widely asserted that the cliff in Ronda was the scene of the episode described in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls in which local supporters of the Franco revolt were compelled by cudgel-armed peasants to run the gauntlet before being tossed over the edge. There is no clear-cut evidence that this actually happened, and the subject is avoided in local discussion, but it is not denied that many hundreds of civilians were murdered in the town. With its capture by the nationalists, republican sympathisers were punished, as elsewhere in Andalusia, with extreme severity. Broadcasting from Seville, the Nationalist General Queipo de Llano had said: ‘For every person they [the government supporters] kill, I shall kill ten, or perhaps even exceed that proportion.’ There is no doubt that he meant it.

  Panem et Circensis was the Roman recipe for civil peace, and there can be no doubt that even when bread is in short supply in Spain, fiestas, the Spanish equivalent of circuses, are provided in abundance.

  I arrived in Ronda half-way through the annual September festivities which, although scheduled in the handsome official programme to take place between the 8th and 14th of the month, had been inflated by tacking a full extra week of jollifications onto the front. What was on offer was a marathon of pleasure guaranteed in the end to reduce revellers to a state of exhaustion. Every day of the interminable two weeks was crammed with such attractions as displays of horsemanship; shows put on by folklore groups invited from numerous countries; a concert by cante flamenco singers; pageantry by lovely ladies in old-style costumes; a carriage-driving contest; military parades to the music of stirring bands; a pentathlon; an ‘interesting’ football match; a bicycle race; a procession of giants and ‘big-headed’ dwarves; a comic bullfight in which aspirant toreros dressed as firemen would squirt each other with fire-hoses while being butted round the ring by aggressive calves; and finally, two versions of the real thing, a novillada fought with young bulls and the celebrated annual Goyesca in which all participants are attired in the bullfighting regalia of the eighteenth century.

  Those who are still on their feet at the end of the long festive day are expected to make a night of it at the feria, outside the town, in operation from 1 a.m. until dawn. Here casetas (temporary cottages) are for hire where families entertain their friends, sherry flows like a river in spate and professional gypsy dancers and guitarists can be called in to keep the party going.

  Alarm is often voiced at the inroads made by expanding fiestas into the serious business of living. Here is Don Rafael Manzano, director of the Alcázar of Seville on the subject of that city’s spring fair—now, according to Don Rafael, completely out of control—which Ronda has set itself to imitate if not surpass. ‘Until recently only rich people with no work could stay up and enjoy themselves all night. Now everybody tries to. If the parents stay up, so do the children, as part of their democratic right. The result is that my own children fall asleep over their books at school. As a nation we are in danger of forgetting that there is work to be done.’

  The main attractions of the Ronda fiesta are staged in its bull-ring—the excuse for the fiesta itself being to commemorate the birthday of Pedro Romero, a Rondeño who became the most famous bullfighter of all time. Romero invented the modern style of bullfighting, conducted largely on foot. At a time when life was notably short and brutish he lived until the age of 90, having faced his first bull as a boy of eight, and having killed some 6,000 animals in all. Pedro Romero attracted the attention and admiration of Francisco Goya, and the archaic costumes worn in the annual bullfight in homage to both men are based on the paintings from his tauromaquia collection in which some paintings depict Romero in action.

  The bull-ring, scene of so many of Romero’s exploits, is one of the oldest, the largest and the most elegant in existence. Its exterior with the exception of the splendid baroque main gate, featured in the film of Carmen, appears of massive African simplicity, giving the illusion of an enormous, white, slightly flattened dome, dominating the centre of the town.

  The museum it contains offers a wide though eccentric variety of bullfighting memorabilia, with occasional bizarre items such as a pair of matador’s pantaloons displaying the blood-stained rent through which the wearer accidentally skewered himself with his own sword. What is probably the first bullfight poster published advertises the appearance of Pedro Romero, who, with his cuadrilla, would kill 16 bulls, the promoter promising that slothful or reluctant beasts were to be animated by savage dogs. The Goya prints are interesting, all the more so because lengthy descriptions clarify activities which otherwise might remain obscure. Coul
d captured Barbary pirates have been forced to fight in the ring in Goya’s day? Several prints show dark-faced bullfighters in turbans and flowing robes defending themselves somewhat hopelessly with their swords. In one case they are mounted pitifully on donkeys—which the bull effortlessly demolishes. These prints, the captions assure us, are based not upon fact, but upon the painter’s imagination. Nevertheless, one wonders. Ronda is devoid of self-conscious displays of the trappings of antiquity. The monuments from the Roman, Arabic and Gothic occupations associate in a comfortable and matter-of-fact way with the buildings of our day; the Minaret de San Sebastián next to an ironmonger’s shop, facing the bakery at the top of the Calle Salvatierra, and, at the foot, the princely façade of the Salvatierra Palace itself in an environment of bars. History is taken for granted everywhere. The permanently crowded bar La Verdad (Truth) in the Calle Pedro Romero has an ancient Arabic inscription running all round the doorway leading to the kitchen. It reads: ‘There is no conqueror but Allah’, a remarkable declaration of outlawed faith in a town where the Inquisition once ruled. So much is forgotten, so much overlooked.

  José Paez, author of a book and many newspaper articles about the town, accompanied me on a final stroll through the streets. It was the last day of the fiesta and there were girls by the hundred in Sevillian-style costumes, roaming in groups, clicking their castanets, dancing and singing in their high-pitched voices. Sometimes a man went with them as they passed from street to street, banging a drum, leaving no corner or alleyway unvisited, as if beating the bounds of the town. José agreed that what we were witnessing must be the vestiges of some bygone ceremony by which the town had been cleansed of evil influences. The dancers seemed moved by compulsion, communicating a little of this to onlookers or passers-by in their vicinity. As the current of excitement took possession, women put down shopping bags and abandoned babies in prams to join in, and once in a while a man, correctly dressed for the routine of an office or bank, would stop to dance a few steps. It was a moment when one saw the fiesta in a new guise, not merely as the vehicle of popular enjoyment, but—at least in part—as a ritual left over from pre-history, once seen as essential to the wellbeing of the community.