So much for my life on the Plaza de la Cebada. In my leisure hours, when I had any, I persuaded myself that I was more miserable than I really was. Nothing suited me. Madrid compared to Paris was appallingly expensive—for the balance of payments changes the face of Europe from one generation to another. I did not like Spanish food, and I had not realised that Spanish wine should be drunk from the wood or the leather, not from the bottle. Other amusements were too formal. The Spanish vision of reality left no room for any pleasantly pagan fairyland between the altar and the cattle-market. I was thus compelled to be faithful to Marina and sourly to content myself with contemplation of my own virtue.
It also began to occur to me that I was using none of the qualities with which an expensive education had presented me, and none of its opportunities. That I was earning my living without them was a matter for satisfaction genuine enough to hide from me the fact that I had pushed away the conventional ladder of a career, but at bottom sardonic.
In such a mood of discontent—the physical causes well known to me, the spiritual less obvious—I visited Toledo; and never, perhaps, was odder reason for a pilgrimage to that harsh and beautiful power-house of history than to study its potentialities as a banana market. A couple of hours among the retailers convinced me that it was best served from Madrid, and I actually found time to enter the cathedral. I had a sense of guilt that I should give time to art, for there was a strain of masochism in me which suited the town. Because I so disliked to impose my poor Spanish and my amateur salesmanship upon men pretending to be busy, I never felt I had done enough of it. Later on, when I was more certain of my judgement and more used to the hair shirt of the salesman, I should have admitted that in Toledo a half-hour’s wearing of it was ample.
I had lunch at a humble fonda, sharing a table with some citizen of Christian birth and exquisite breeding who did not find it necessary to wear a collar and tie. He was probably a small farmer. Starting from the admirable relationship between our two selves, which had quietly developed over a second litre, we discussed—so far as my Spanish and his education allowed—the long lovers’ quarrel between our countries. I was surprised to hear myself declaring, though he had courteously refrained from forcing any such conclusion on me, that the Reformation was a disaster and Francis Drake a pirate. He left the fonda before me, and when I called for my bill I found it had been paid.
That, of course, was a point of honour among old-fashioned Spaniards. We were only allowed to stand a round of drinks in a market café when the little banana war was over and Fyffes had been accepted as a permanent lodger. But I had not realised that courtesy would be so commanding as to pay in secret for the stranger’s lunch and the wine which he himself had, with permission, ordered. Nor was my friend a man who could readily afford to offer himself such luxuries of behaviour.
I walked out of the city and stood by the roadside, looking across the gorge of the Tagus to the barren hills beyond. There, with an almost Pauline suddenness of emotion, I felt a sense of unity with this country, hitherto disliked. I knew beyond any doubt at all that in Spain I should find or fulfil a destiny.
It was akin to the upsurge of love which any Englishman must experience when on some perfect June day he stands upon the smooth Wiltshire or Dorset turf and looks down, northwards, over the elms and hedges of the vale. He is not moved only by beauty of landscape, and nor was I. The bare autumn of Old Castile, the yellow stone, the distant and unpitying sky—not for these alone were skin and hair moving and sensitive, but for what they had bred. That unknown farmer, casually exposing a small splendour of humanity as if a church servant should open the doors of a golden ikon, was for ever beyond my imitation yet appealed to an ideal of generosity which I did not know I held at all.
My impressions of men and manners—vague preferences and prejudices which I had hardly attempted to analyse—took on a meaning. Then and there I realised that what I had learned from Roumania was the least of what was in it to learn, and that France when a Spaniard sees her, a little fat and sullen, from the Pass of Roncesvalles seems less essential to the well-being of mankind than when she glitters across the Channel.
Dignity, so far as it was not the unselfconscious Spanish dignity of bearing, rolled down the hill into the Tagus. Discretion appeared as an art of giving, not as an excuse for withholding oneself. A cold analysis. What happened was that Spain, so gloriously full of the trumpets and banners of the spirit, marched past; and I fell in with the baggage and the carts of pikes.
A fine conversion, it may be answered! The man had been soaking up free red wine and now maintains that he was intoxicated by a sort of mysticism. To that I reply that the conversion was permanent: that the values which I then for the first time accepted, I still accept. As for wine, my normal receptiveness is that of a cold Englishman, and it is hard to convince me of anything at all without some moderate aid from that divine drug which no scientist’s prescription will ever be able to surpass. The laboratory indeed may learn to restore a tired mind or body as efficiently as the stronger alcohols; but wine heightens human sympathy and human perception. It carries me, even if in times past with too much noise and extravagance of spirit, towards the possible man at whom I was intended to aim.
Have I in fact found a destiny in Spain? Not at any rate in the number of my visits, for it is twenty years since I was there. War sent me farther afield, and peace is such peace that I hesitate to break the pattern of the years by travel. But the influence of Spain and Spanish America is, I suspect, marked in my personality as a writer. In the real person there is only a veneer of Latinity, occasionally merging with solid wood. To Toledo, and not to any youthful training in leadership, do I owe such liking as my fellows and subordinates had for me in war. From Toledo I date the courtliness with which—I hope—I treat the stranger, though my manners to my friends leave much to be desired. Because I could think as a Spaniard I was able, when I knew neither their customs nor their language, to be easily correct among Arabs. And to this day—a trivial point but dating precisely from Toledo—if I cannot afford the best which Europe offers I prefer Spanish food.
But one ribald instance of fact is worth all this groping for the intangible. When I had been a year or more in the United States I took a boat through the Panama Canal from New York to Los Angeles. It stopped for eight blessed hours at Havana, and I fled into the peace of the old town, hungry for all the familiar simplicities. They were the days of prohibition, and, though the ship once outside territorial waters opened a bar, American thirst was too impatient to be bothered with wine.
When, therefore, I came on a cellar full of imported Rioja in the wood, I went in and ordered a ten-litre carboy, or garrafón, to take on board with me. The social atmosphere was restful, so I remained sitting among the barrels with other customers until I suddenly realised that the ship was due to sail. To my horror, I found that after paying for the wine and its container I had not a cent left in my pocket for a taxi.
One of my companions upon the bench insisted that there was no need for such raw alarm, and that we had time to appreciate still another glass of Rioja. He was, he said, a taxi-driver, and it would be a pleasure for him, if I permitted it, to take me to my ship.
We reached the quay with five minutes to spare, and I said good-bye to my saviour at the length and with the warmth that his civilisation merited. Going on board with my garrafón, I was aware that hundreds of American eyes were watching me from the promenade deck with curiosity. Because I was late? Because I was carrying a container normally used for sulphuric acid? It took me some minutes to realise that in fact it was because the caballero with whom I happened to be on such excellent terms was coal-black. I had not even noticed it—or only as you notice whether a man has brown eyes or grey—since I had been thinking in Spanish and it was therefore impossible that my manners should be affected by colour. Most of those Americans would have been, no doubt, just as courteous as I, but they would have bee
n conscious of virtue. I was not. Yet if I were in Durban, not Havana, I doubt if I could always treat the African as I should wish to—though it would be my English sense of class rather than colour which prevented me—unless I deliberately imagined that he spoke Spanish.
A footnote to my story. The barman threw my garrafón overboard when I was not looking, and with studied insolence hardly troubled to pretend that he had not. It would have been excusable if there had been anything to drink with the unspeakable meals upon that floating hell of sweetness and light; but since there was not, the murder of my garrafón, drowned as if it had been some monstrous kitten, showed a lack of business sense which one does not expect in barmen. Wine with my meals instead of the iced water with which my fellow passengers were encouraging their future ulcers would have increased my tolerance, and I should have bought more, not less, of the poisons poured from his shining and hygienic dispensary.
But why exasperate memory? Let us return to Spain. With Madrid reluctantly buying bananas, Moore sent out his missionaries farther afield. Blairsy took over roaring Barcelona. I carried the propaganda to the North Coast, and in the spring of 1927 opened an office in Bilbao. I was astonished to discover that I was an efficient business man, confident in my ability to judge the market, to remember the nicknames of the stevedores, to handle the customs, the mates of Spanish ships (who could bring disaster on all of us if they did not watch the temperatures in the holds) and the stationmasters from whom I had to extract closed wagons. Against this, I readily admit that I could never have held a job as shipping clerk or accountant. If I had to count crates unloaded from ship to wharf, I got the total wrong; and it took me months to master Fyffes’ basically simple method of accounting for fruit and cash by one immense sheet on which little totals travelled from box to box and line to line until, sweating with panic, they emerged from the maze into reality by a turnstile in the bottom right-hand corner.
This was in a way success, and it is possible that I looked forward in rare moments of ambition to becoming a director of Elders & Fyffes. Certainly I would far rather have been that than a director of the Ottoman Bank at four times the income. But I suspect that I handled my branch, profitable though I made it, in too personal a manner—a fault in war and in commerce, for it sets unnecessary difficulties for a successor. I liked to have big customers and few of them. I hated to start competition to men who had taken a chance with me in the first few months—more especially as I was very fond of them.
First and toughest was Bernardino Garay, a sturdy, pock-marked man in his middle forties, with the face of a Roman emperor on a day when the legions were doing well and his chief rival had died in battle. He had the short, thick hawk-nose common among the Basques, which I was to see again in Lebanon.
When I first called on him he was a plain corner grocer with a couple of bunches of bananas hanging in his doorway. He listened to my story, checked the figures and plunged. With the profits of the first half-year he rented the whole basement under a block of flats, fitted it up for scientific ripening and handed over the grocery shop to his wife.
Like all Basque business men, he had a contemptuous confidence in his own ability to make twice as much money as other Spaniards in half the time, and it infuriated him that his and my chief competitor, a charming and worried Canary Islander who imported from his brothers’ estates, could occasionally lay a successful ambush. The feeling between the relentless Basque and the dashing Andalusian grew so bitter that I had to reduce temperatures by getting them together over a dinner table. The party became uproarious and exclamatory as soon as they discovered that the bad risks in the market were telling the same lies to both of them.
There was a small British colony in Bilbao, all engaged in shipping and the iron-ore trade, but I saw little of them—with the exception of a salesman of my own age, named Foster, who loved Spain for the same intangible reasons and spoke a Spanish as fluent as my own and less coarsely proletarian. We met for the first time on the top of a mountain and, though each morally certain that the other was English, opened conversation in formal Castilian. After that we were frequent companions on the wild beaches, in the dusty lanes and at the wine-stained tables in remote country taverns.
Otherwise I lived as a middle-class Spaniard and mixed only with them. That this was pleasant and possible was due entirely to Bernardino Garay. He introduced me to the customs and foods and wines of the Basque Provinces, explained to me the customs of other provinces, corrected me if my manners were insufficiently punctilious and educated me in the fine points of bull-fighting. Not that Bilbao cared for too refined an artistry. We preferred the big Miura bulls and swordsmen such as Martin Aguero who killed with a single thrust. The butterflying of gipsies, however exquisite, left us cold if they finished by poking at the bull from—should there be such a thing—a safe distance.
I had small customers all the way from Pamplona to Oviedo, and big ones at San Sebastian and Santandér. I loved the narrow-gauge railways which carried me from port to port and, above all, the toy train which rumbled, stopping for lunch a full comfortable hour, from Santandér into Asturias along the loveliest coast in Europe—still mercifully without hotels though I could wish that one would be opened for me alone.
In San Sebastian my buyer, Macario Sanz, was a merry man of Aragon, blasphemous, excitable and a gifted player of the guitar. Compared to Garay, he seemed more like an Italian than a Spaniard. That dancing, thoroughbred nervousness had given him a stomach ulcer. You would never have known it except when he cursed blind because he had to drink milk. A triumph of temperament over pain.
In Santandér I had two customers, with stands opposite each other separated only by the central aisle of the market. The wives, who were ladies of very decided character, were not on speaking terms and their husbands obeyed. One was a mass of bosom and dignity, a pillar of Church and State dressed always in black, with a little daughter neatly curled and frilled. The other, a republican and an atheist, was dressed in whatever she happened to find under the bed when she got up, with several little daughters in rags. The working capital of both families was about equal.
Anywhere else the quarrel could be analysed as a question of class, between a woman trying to rise and another who could not be bothered, or—looking for a political rather than a social cause—as a quarrel between authoritarianism and democracy. But in Spain both simplifications are too easy. Even among women any head-tossing or verbal expression of class difference is rare. As for democracy, the Spaniard is too solid a realist to consider the vote a practical method of government. It is a pantomime of approval or disapproval.
The antagonism between my two customers began in the middle of the last century, caused the revolution, burst out into the Civil War and is nowhere near a solution yet. On the right of the market was monarchy and paternalism for the worker; on the left, republicanism and legislation for the worker. But the political division does not correspond to our own, where the left stands for state control and the right for such individual liberty as is still possible. The Spanish Left had a strong tendency to anarchism and put individual liberty above all else. That was the ideal which wrecked the Republic. It refused to govern. The Spanish Right was for authority first, and liberty afterwards.
But between the two positions there was plenty of room for compromise. Dignity disapproved, like any respectable woman, of Alfonso XIII and had an exaggerated opinion of the dictator, Primo de Rivera. Rags would have hanged Primo de Rivera on the market gates but saw qualities in Alfonso XIII which might have made him a picturesque leader of the masses. The fundamental division was over the Church, and it was their respective attitudes towards the Church which forced the two parties, in Santandér market as in Spain, into positions from which there was no retreat.
Only the foreigner profits, and I was no exception. I had only to tell one that the other did not complain of my price and was giving me a big order for her to do so as well. I am than
kful to record—since it is a good omen for Spain—that eventually their common sense triumphed. They compared notes; and on my next appearance in the market each listened to the other telling me what she thought of me. But Church was so pleased by the cutting courtesy of her beautiful Spanish, and the Embattled Working-Class by its flow of Rabelaisian invective that I was quickly forgiven.
After a year of casual business drinks with both husbands, Church asked me to lunch at her flat. This was utter tragedy for Labour, for she could not bring herself to do the same, knowing how primitive her family living quarters were. It was a proud day in my life when at last she took the plunge, since it showed a confidence that I would not compare, not despise and not talk. I must admit that when I reached her depressing room I thought politeness was going to have to work overtime. But it was not necessary. Aided by some obscure and heavenly dish from her own village of Torrelavega, warmth took its place.
Thereafter lunch in Santandér presented a complication of protocol which would have puzzled a court chamberlain. I had to choose between inviting or being invited by one of the families. That offered four possible alternatives, one of which would be correct and three of which would be wrong. They were again not on speaking terms, but their stalls were so close that each could hear the other’s invitation; and I am certain those confounded women used to take a quiet pleasure in waiting for whatever social lies I should have to invent.
While all this entertaining and, for me, revolutionary life was going on, only a third of me appreciated it once the door of my room was shut. The other two-thirds were in love and steadfastly refusing to take no for an answer.
Against the Wind Page 4