I Came, I Saw

by Norman Lewis

  Now suddenly she announced that she had given up the idea of living anywhere in England, and made the suggestion that we should emigrate to Spain, where she had spent the happiest times of her life. It was an idea that seemed attractive enough to me if only a way could be found of making a living there. In the early summer of 1936 we made a trip by car to Spain to investigate the possibility of such a move.

  We drove to Seville and stayed there with the Estradas, friends of Ernestina, a young couple who lived in a tiny Moorish palace with an unimposing entrance next to a shoeshop in the celebrated Calle Sierpes — thus named from the serpentine fashion in which it twists through the heart of the old town. We found the city in a state of turmoil, and were told and could read for ourselves in the newspapers that the rest of the country was no better off. What we had no way of knowing was that the outbreak of the Civil War lay only a few weeks ahead.

  Like most of Spain’s upper and middle classes of their day the Estradas were staunch fascists. It would have been hard to imagine a man milder in appearance and manner than young Juan Estrada, but he was a landowner in an area where the peasantry lived in the harshest conditions in Europe, employed as seasonal labourers on vast estates for extremely low wages. The newspapers reported almost daily cases of peasants dying of starvation in nearby villages, and some three years before the police had carried out a massacre in the village of Casas Viejas where the peasantry had attempted to occupy uncultivated land.

  On the first evening of our stay with them the Estradas took us for dinner to a fashionable restaurant some three miles out of town, an ancient coaching inn of great charm in a setting of featureless prairies of ripening wheat. On each of the tables placed in the shade of the vines a small pile of copper coins had been placed. Peasants — largely women and children — emaciated and in rags, lurked by a hedge surrounding the restaurant, and from time to time one of them would make a cautious advance to a table and, at a signal from a diner, pick up one of the coins — a half-peseta piece known as a perro chico. At intervals one of the restaurant staff would run out screaming abuse to slash at the beggars with a whip and drive them off. Within minutes they were back again and the mute submissive collection of these coins of minuscule value went on, virtually unnoticed by the diners, as before.

  Juan Estrada very quietly and calmly explained to us that the time had come to put these people in their place. He and a number of friends, all of them landowners and all excellent riders, had formed a band — well, almost a private army, he said — and in a matter possibly of days they would make the rounds of the villages and deal with the Reds in their own fashion. One of our fellow guests was a rejoneador who had been spearing bulls in the ring in Seville only the Sunday before, and laughingly he referred to this as valuable practice.

  It was an environment in which Ernestina and I found ourselves out of our depths. Next day we started off on our way back, making for France. We took the direct route through Cáceres and Salamanca, to avoid Madrid, but just short of Plasencia we were stopped by a police roadblock and directed, with no reason given, to a diversion through the small town of Ciudad Rodrigo. The Sierra de Gata had to be crossed. It was the Europe of the Dark Ages, ghostly and skin-and-bone poor, with weasels sunning themselves in the dirt road, macabre trees, and once in a while a grey, wall-eyed shack with no glass in the windows and the slates sliding off the roof. For hours on end there were no signs of human presence.

  Ciudad Rodrigo, grimed, sullen and silent, was closed up from end to end, doors bolted and windows shuttered. There was no one to ask the way, and when we stopped to study a road sign we heard the sound of shots terribly close and resonant in the narrow canyons of the streets. At the far end of the town we found the main hard-surfaced road to Salamanca, but a few miles further on two carts barred the road, and men carrying firearms of all descriptions came out from behind them. They had the underdog’s face of the Spanish countryside, fleshless, displaying all the details of the skull, and they would have been interchangeable with the wretched peasants begging for ha’pence at the smart restaurant outside Seville, but for the dignity conferred by hunting rifles and fowling pieces.

  They were quite happy to explain, almost in a childish way, what was going on, and to provide acceptable reasons for their interference with traffic. They pointed proudly to their red armbands, explaining that they were milicianos del pueblo, and that their village had been under attack by a fascist band which they had beaten off, leaving one dead. An unshaven, wild-eyed man, looking like a bandit but describing himself as the schoolmaster, had pushed to the front, and began a short pedantic lecture on the political situation, before being cut short by a heavy burst of firing from the far end of the village. At this we all lay down in the road behind the carts for perhaps ten minutes, after which, following the example of the milicianos, we began to crawl on hands and knees for the shelter of the nearest houses. We found ourselves in a small, dark, earthen-floored room with a mother and her two small children under the table and, resisting an impulse to join them, remained standing with our backs to the wall as far as possible from the small window, for about an hour, while sporadic firing went on — some from the roof above.

  After that the schoolmaster was back, happy and excited by some new triumph. A mopping-up operation — he savoured the expression affectionately — and we would be obliged to go back to Ciudad Rodrigo to spend the night. The inn was for people who brought their sheep with them, he said, but at the other end of the scale, the Parador Nacional was highly to be recommended, and as this was closed for the emergency he proposed to go there with us and open it up.

  A stop was made on the way to pick up a cook. The schoolmaster hammered on the great feudal door, and the caretaker let us in. He was happy to welcome us, he said. There was a hint of a suggestion by the cook, in her recommendation to us not to worry if we found there was too much to eat, as she had a large family at home who would help out.

  In the morning the schoolmaster joined us for breakfast, so changed in his appearance as to be almost unrecognizable. He had had a close shave and was wearing a clean shirt, buttoned at the neck, and polished shoes, and the wild eyes of the night before were calm and confident. The gun slung over his shoulder seemed out of place in the sumptuous and orderly environment. He caressed it like a child before propping it against the leg of the enormous table and sitting down.

  ‘Were you disturbed during the night?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought I heard shooting.’

  ‘You did,’ he said. ‘The last of it. Now we are at peace again.’ He gestured in a regal manner at the dark, grandiose furniture, the paintings, the tapestry. ‘All this belongs to the people,’ he said. ‘Stay as long as you like, and tell them to send the bill to me.’

  The cook, beaming and nodding, came in bearing a lordly dish on which tiny eggs with bright red yolks that might have been laid by a thrush floated in greenish olive oil. A separate platter held rashers of black mountain ham. It was clear that she had served English guests before, and understood their breakfast requirements. She was followed by the caretaker who opened shutters and windows, and we listened reassured to the slow exchange of neighbourly pleasantries, and the chiming of a bell.

  ‘In Italy and Germany the fascists overthrew the people,’ the schoolmaster said. ‘What they did not understand was it could never happen here. When they struck we were ready for them. It was all over in a few hours. From now on you can go where you like, and no one will bother you.’

  Four days later we were back in England, and a week later the Civil War broke out. The whole province of Salamanca was instantly occupied by Nationalist rebel troops, and there were few towns such as Ciudad Rodrigo where massacres did not take place; it is virtually certain that the schoolmaster would have been killed in one of these.

  Chapter Ten

  EARLY IN JUNE IT was the Corvajas’ custom to pack up and move to Ostend where they stayed for the three months’ gambling season at the Casino, so that by
the time we were back in England they had already left. Ernesto gambled every day, but gave us no account of his operations, nor did he welcome the presence of any member of his family when he was at the tables.

  This year we were invited to stay a week with them. In conformity with Ernesto’s dislike of flamboyancy in any form we found that they had installed themselves in a second-class hotel in a side street, where they had arranged for us to be put up. We took our meals in restaurants of the family kind, with the proprietress keeping severe watch in something like a telephone booth and with elderly waiters suffering from scurf, with copious grease-stains on their jackets. Ernesto, in fear of being despised by such as these, always overtipped, but then studied their faces anxiously to assure himself that they were satisfied.

  The routine after dinner was that the couple would go off to the Casino together and Ernesto would stand by and watch Maria lose her small daily limit on rouge et noir, after which she would take a taxi back to the hotel. Thereafter, for her husband the business of the evening began in earnest. One evening there was an urgent telephone call from someone speaking broken English with a French accent, whose voice I recognized as that of a regular visitor at Gordon Street. Neither Ernesto nor Maria could be found, so the man left a message to say that his car had broken down, and he would not be at work at the usual time. Maria came in first and let the cat out of the bag. ‘Oh, that must be Georges,’ she said. ‘The head croupier.’ It is only to be supposed that Ernesto and Georges were involved in what is now known as a sting.

  Ernesto never admitted to having won at the tables. At most he would say, ‘I made my expenses.’ Back in London when the season was at an end I would watch for signs of an increase in affluence, but there was none. There was no way of knowing with the Corvajas, remembering their traditional avoidance of conspicuous consumption. Maria went on wearing the same absurd dresses it seemed to me she had always worn, and the same old valuable but dowdy jewellery, and there was no scope in Ernesto’s simple existence to indicate a change in fortune. In reality life offered them all they asked for without whatever extras Ernesto’s forays at the Casino might have provided. Only one thing was denied to them — freedom of movement — for outside these annual trips to Ostend they had lived for so many years in what amounted to close confinement in London.

  Life with the Corvajas had the effect in time of stifling natural curiosity. In a way the family members seemed to be reaching out with tentacles to anchor themselves to each other, and were ant-like and corporate in their activities. Yet with this it was clear that personal privacy was closely guarded, and no one was allowed to look into the Corvaja mind. Like the Arabs, the Sicilians seemed absorbed in current affairs. Just as in Arabic, there is no future tense in the Sicilian dialect, and in discussion I found that there was little taste or talent for reminiscence. These attitudes, I suspected, resulted from the training of a sad history. Sicilians are avid for the physical company of others, probably inspired by that ancient and universal saying that there is safety in numbers. Yet when they are together — in the case of the Corvajas apart from the ritual of the evening quarrel — they easily fall into silence. I have never forgotten the experience some years later of standing after nightfall in the main street of the small Mafia-ridden town of Cáccamo, and watching the groups of males trudging endlessly up and down, each group carefully maintaining its distance within a dozen or so yards of the next, while no one spoke.

  Suddenly, just after the return from Ostend, Ernesto asked me to do him a favour, and what was proposed — much to his discomfiture — could not be accomplished without a revealing discussion of the problems involved. He was obliged to begin at the beginning, cautiously and grudgingly, and sketch in the details of his early life. Up to this moment I had heard of little more than the ambush in New York, and a few garish anecdotes of his days as a young blood in Palermo. He now told me that while in his twenties in Catania he had been charged with a major crime, had escaped from prison and — through the influence of an uncle, the Prior of one of the religious orders — had been smuggled away to America. Later I was to discover the existence of a family legend that he had been carried aboard the ship bearing him to the New World in a coffin in which the necessary air-holes had been drilled. A further admission was that in New York he had become a member of the Unione Siciliana, an organization by his description formed to look after poor Sicilian immigrants who suffered intense exploitation in the States. To use his own words, ‘My people were under attack and I felt it my duty to do what I could to protect them.’ For the first time I learned that he had studied law at the University of Berne, the suggestion being that he had served what is seen by outsiders as a somewhat sinister association in a largely advisory capacity. In New York he seemed to have lived in some style in an apartment stuffed with antique furniture, and not having by that time developed their appreciation of music, he and Maria spent their leisure hours together filling scrap-books with ‘artistic pictures’ cut from American magazines.

  What must have been a pleasant and possibly exciting existence came to an abrupt end when Ernesto fell into the ambush as he was stepping down from a cab outside his apartment. The survival rate of those exposed to such an experience is negligible. Two machine-gun bullets carried his hat away, but he lived, and two days later he and his wife, leaving all their possessions, including their treasured scrap-books, took the boat for Europe. They chose England because, after the expiry of the original arrest warrant, Ernesto was placed under an order of permanent banishment from Italy.

  Now, after the years of exile and the patient but possibly reluctant devotion to craftsmanship in the home, relieved only by the all too brief annual escape to Ostend, a way had been opened for the return to Italy. It all depended on the backing, if this could be secured, of a powerful fascist hierarch, Count Aldo Giordano, who lived in Milan. An approach had been made and negotiations that showed promise entered upon by one of Ernesto’s Sicilian contacts. Then suddenly, when the affair seemed to be in the balance, all communication with this man had ceased, and all Ernesto could suppose was that he had fallen foul of the law. At this time I was interested in the possibility of importing used Italian sports cars into England, and had mentioned that I might make a quick trip over there to see what was to be had. Ernesto hoped that it would be possible for me to do this without delay and at the same time carry a message for him to Giordano in Milan.

  I agreed and, before I left for Italy, Ernesto treated me to what I came to recognize as the set lecture kept in readiness by any Sicilian to try to explain away the sorrows of his country. For a thousand years Sicily had been under the heel of a succession of a dozen or so foreign governments, from that of the Arabs to United Italy with its capital in Rome. Each of these, in the ends of the efficient extraction of booty, had made its own laws to be added to the legalistic muddle left by its predecessors. In the end there were tens of thousands of enactments, most of them quite ununderstandable to the layman, and many of which contradicted each other. Since the law as it stood failed to protect the citizen, it had to be every man for himself and, under the polite and civilized exterior that was all the foreign visitor saw of Sicily, the reality was one of survival through sheer personal strength, political connections, through skill in forming defensive alliances, and the power of the bribe. Ernesto believed that the best any man could hope for was to be able to look after his family and his friends. In the depths of this harangue I suspected a lurking plea of extenuating circumstances. I never came to know what was the crime for which he had been obliged to flee the country.

  Count Aldo Giordano was glutted with fascist honours and awards. He was one of the youngest of the motley crew who had tagged after Mussolini in ‘the march on Rome’, was officially designated a squadrista, having been inscribed in the early fascist squads, and had been decorated with the government’s highest award, the Sciarpa Littorio. He was probably the only Italian who regularly wore a bowler hat, and when he came to pick me u
p at my hotel in Milan and take me to lunch, he had one of these with its inevitable associate, a furled umbrella, resting on the seat beside him of the open black Alfa Romeo he was driving.

  We lunched in a roof-top restaurant under the laced profile of the Cathedral of Milan. There were soldiers everywhere, many in splendid uniforms and wearing plumed Alpine caps. These were for Italy the intoxicating days following the conquest of Abyssinia, and a revolt in the Tripolitanian colony had just fizzled out after its leaders had been captured and thrown from aeroplanes. It was hard to think of the Count as a participant in the aggressive policies of the fascist state. He was small-boned and fragile-looking and a little monkish in his dark, heavyweight English suit. He spoke good English learned from a Scottish nanny, with a thin, bleating voice, and mentioned that his family were descended from the Longobards, ninth-century invaders of Italy who wore long beards, but were said to have exceptionally small penises — a disadvantage, he added with a dry smile, that had rectified itself with the passage of centuries.

  The count said that he was interested in money and, having read in my presence Ernesto’s letter, he asked me if he were rich, to which my reply was, probably, but there was no way of knowing. He mentioned that he was in the import-export business, trading in such diverse goods and commodities as goat skins, ostrich feathers, bilingual talking dolls, Hornby train sets, and camel flesh which, minced up with appropriate herbs and served with pasta of various kinds, formed an important part of the rations of the colonial troops. His many possessions included a balloon, a mountain of china clay, and a finger-bone — one of many small relics gnawed under the pretext of a reverent kiss — from the embalmed body of St Francis Xavier, on display at the Church of the Bom Jesus in Goa. His wife, said this small, rather bird-like man, was an ex-Miss Italy. He sipped his Pellegrini contemplatively and added that his sexual needs were well attended to, as he kept a brace of mistresses as well.