by Laurie Lee
A long morning of exhaustion and enchantment, sucking dry lemon-skins, with the exquisite landscapes growing like dreams one out of the other. Vines and mulberries and moon-coloured olives; wayside Madonnas laced with dusty flowers; and steep little fields tilted towards the sun, full of red wheat and flickering salamanders.
By noon I had walked twelve miles and Siena stood above me. My three-day journey was almost over. Slowly I crawled towards its rusty walls. By now Siena had become for me a city of ice, of courtyards dripping with wet roses, of sparkling fountains and flashing fish.
It was not quite that; but it gave me a cool room, and chaste white wine, and a long sleep in a bed. It also gave me streets too narrow for Cadillacs, streets in which to walk and draw one’s fingers along the walls of palaces, in which to hear the sounds of choirs, mandolines, and flutes, and cataracts of conversation. It was a city gilded with the patina of ancient devotions, the brooding celestial visions of its fourteenth-century painters, the gaunt glory of its supreme personality, St Caterina. It was a city that seemed all molten gold by day, and by night a ghostly silver, beaten out by a huge and antique moon. It was a city of pilgrimage, and one to which one must always return.
But next time I think I’ll take a train, or perhaps a string of mules.
Spain: The Gold Syllable
Spain is not Europe. It is not even Africa-in-Europe. It is an island cut off by pride and geography, by its indifference to its neighbours and by the presence of its three seas – Biscay, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. On that island, as on other true islands, everywhere, ancient traditions of custom and character have developed to a point of excess.
Before the days of the aeroplane most people went to Spain by sea; most went as conquerors, and few escaped. Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Moors – the country trapped them among the grills of its mountains, fried them in its oils, turned them a gentle brown, then served them up in a kind of racial paella that is still the symbol of the stockpot of Spain. Not even its present invader, the traveller’s-cheque tourist, can pass through the country unmarked. Because Spain, self-closed in its arid square, remains one of the few countries in the world that do not adore change, that do not look towards the fatter nations with envy, that do not prefer the sterilized caution of the ice-box society to the rawer flavours of life-as-it-comes.
Spain is poor, crude, ignorant of much of the world; over half the country is mountain and wilderness; it knows a savage climate, vast aching skies, interminable landscapes of distance and silence. But within the bright walls of its towns and villages it has developed a gregarious and extrovert ritual of life in which there are few outsiders and little loneliness. The Spaniard believes himself superior, both in culture and morality, to any other people in the world, and believes this so steadfastly he neither boasts nor hates but welcomes strangers with a chivalrous warmth based on compassion for their benighted shortcomings.
Much more lies behind that gold syllable, ‘Spain’, than the bullfight and dance of the posters. It’s neither as simple as that nor as trivial. It is an island, yes; it is also an archipelago; it is one name but many countries. They lie side by side, from Biscay to the Mediterranean, each separate in face and behaviour. Great mountains divide them, they are split by east-west rivers; their frontiers are the Sierra de Guadarrama, Sierra Morena, Despeñaperros, Nevada, the rivers Ebro, Douro, Tagus and Guadalquivir. Contained by these barriers, they have developed wide distinctions of habit; but they breathe one air, which is Spain.
In the north, for instance, are the Welsh-like Basques, who dig mines and write incomprehensible poetry; there are the north-west Galicians, who have Celto-Irish blood, inhabit green hills among the Atlantic mists, drink raw red wine, own the bones of St James and blow on bagpipes for strange formal dances. Eastward, in Catalonia, are the only Europeans in Spain – a brilliant, restless, politically agitated people whose city, Barcelona, is the most ‘advanced’ and is perhaps half in love with Paris. These three, the Basques, Galicians and Catalans, have independent dreams and separate languages.
In the middle of the country is something else again: the bare, almost mile-high plain of Castile, a place of ringing emptiness and rare blue air, whose solitary distances have bred cruelty and saints as well as the half-crazed idealism of Quixote. Much of it is desert, where hungers grow huge and put on flesh to torment the wanderer. But in the centre, like an anchored liner at sea, rides the fantastic city of Madrid.
Madrid is probably the first and best place for the hurried traveller to visit, for it contains all Spain, like an anthology. Until 1607 a neglected provincial town, it was commanded to exist, with one of those supremely royal gestures, by Philip III. Now it is the wonder of its two million inhabitants.
‘When I die,’ they say, ‘let me go to heaven, but let me have a little window to look down on Madrid.’ It is difficult to interpret the Madrileno’s passion for his city but it doesn’t take long to share it. It is in many ways an ugly place; its main streets are vulgar and pretentious, its public buildings swollen platitudes in stone, its slums worse than those of Naples. But it is one of the few cities in the world still used as a frame for living rather than as a labyrinth in which to work and hide. There is at all times in the streets a palpable alegria, which all who come may share, arising from the warm, relaxed manners of a people who would rather make friends than money.
Spread on its plateau, under huge stars at night and by day within a sharp sight of the mountains, Madrid has a vigour that only high towns know. At no time during the day or night does the city seem to run down. The inhabitants move in clockwork tides to the pull of their traditional pleasures. As the night-lovers depart the dawn-markets wake up. The washed-down streets catch the edge of the sun. There are smells of fresh coffee and burning charcoal, and the market stalls are all noise and glitter, piled with great presses of vegetables and fish and streaming with rainbows of morning water.
After breakfast you walk – as does everyone else – and re-acquaint yourself with vertical man. To the parks, perhaps, with their frock-coated photographers, their starched children pretty as pies. Or to the Prado, stacked with its glowing Goyas – which like wine seem much headier here at their source than anywhere else on earth. Or to pick over the Rastro, the city’s flea market, where one can buy anything unimaginable – a medieval soup pot, a tame flamingo, a sack of horseshoes or a suit of lights.
About noon (or at any moment you choose before it) you may stop at some cool-scrubbed tavern. The tide of apéritif drinkers – which includes most of Madrid – begins then to approach its flood. Glasses of sherry, manzanilla and vermouth line the bars like golden tulips. With each drink you will be served, from great blocks of ice, some of the best sea food in the world – oysters, lobsters, crayfish, prawns, sea snails, cockles and crabs. It is now the holy hour in Madrid, the peak of the middle day. There are rapturous reunions between dandy young men who have not seen each other for at least twenty minutes. Passenger trains all over the country have been halted or shunted into sidings in order that the crustaceans from Biscay, Vigo and Málaga may be rushed still alive to the city. And here, in the heart of the baking land, hundreds of miles from any ocean, the inheritors of Cristóbal Colón drink, pause, break the crust from a prawn and smell again the salt seas of past glories.
As well as the sea food with which any bar will provide you, there will also be a range of delicious hot morsels – fried tongue, baked sparrows, larks on a spit, stewed cow’s belly and kidneys in garlic. Such tidbits, though for many a banquet in themselves, are designed merely to awake the appetite. At three in the afternoon comes the main meal of the day, and in Madrid this must not be missed.
In a country that is not particularly renowned for its cooking (other than for its habit of delicious apéritifs), Madrid has several famous old restaurants, all relatively cheap, that specialize in traditional dishes. One does well if in the first place one knows what to avoid. Spain of the three seas is of course best with its
sea food, next with its stews and its treatment of game. Meat other than pig is not good. But in old restaurants such as Lhardy’s you will meet memorable dishes that offer the best of regional Spain.
Cocido Madrileño is the city’s own. It is a stew for giants, made of chick-peas, potatoes, red and black sausage, fat bacon, chicken and herbs. The Valencian paella is another great filler – a pile of saffron-baked rice mixed with chicken and shellfish, such as mussels, small crabs and prawns. Other dishes that will bring you the flavours of coast, of mountain or the hot dry plains are Langosta a la Catálana (fried slices of lobster served in saffron sauce with white wine, pimento and parsley); Bacalao a la Vizcaina, a north-coast dish of smoked cod, tomato, thyme, red peppers, onions, bay leaf and garlic; Cochinillo, from Segovia, a royal platter of suckling pig, usually cooked over a wood fire; and Fabada, a stew of fine-chopped haricots, Galician ham, pigs’ ears, smoked bacon, fresh bacon, red and black sausage and any vegetables the cook can lay hands on. Such dishes are usually taken with a kilo of bread and a bottle of wine per person.
Naturally the midday meal will knock you clean out and send you crawling to your hotel for sleep. The slumber that follows will be long and dreamless and will carry you on into the late afternoon. When you next sally forth you find the world reborn, with everyone fresh as salads. The siesta habit offers two days in one, and your second day is the evening. All appetites are now renewed and there are many ways in which to use them. First the luxury shops along the Gran Via or Alcalá, or in the little arcades around the Puerta del Sol. Here you may buy excellent leatherwork and lace and tourist trophies of unforgivable cuteness. If it’s high life you want, you can take cocktails at the Ritz or team up with Hollywood at the Castellana Hilton. Or visit the Bar Chicote, of Civil War fame, now living on its past like a garrulous general – its bar stools crowned with failed war correspondents and other bicarbonated copies of Hemingway.
For the tourist, of course, there are the usual attractions: the Sunday bullfight, where you can meet your friends (most Spaniards today prefer football); the tavern of Luis Candelas, in the Arcos de Cuchilleros, whose mild waiters are dressed up as bandits; the ‘bullfighters’ bars in Nūñez de Arce, where they will sell you bulls’ ears for fifty pesetas; or the flamenco dives such as La Zambra and El Duende, where you’ll see Spanish dancing in its most vigorous decline, with stamping gypsies like glossy black mares dancing to clipped Anglo-Saxon Olé’s.
For my part, when I can, I like to go to the old city, the district south of the Puerta del Sol, a shadowy place with sudden outbursts of light – cakeshops, printsellers and the old coaching inns, where carters and truck drivers sit around in the courtyards mending harness and punctures together. Down here at night-time all life is turned outward. Barbers play their guitars between customers. The men are at the bars, the women hang from their windows, the young girls walk up and down, the beautiful children run barefoot till midnight, the old folk doze on the pavements.
From the street peddlers here you can buy a jewelled ring for a few pennies, or camellias and jasmine for a shilling, or a lottery ticket, which is quite worth buying (I have twice won handsome prizes). Just hanging around is a good occupation for the encounters that are likely to occur. Or if feeling more sober you can go to the two national theatres and see Calderón or Lope de Vega. And almost any night, from May to September, there will be a verbena in one district or another, a rejoicing in honour of some favourite saint, with dancing, sideshows, balloons and circuses, shooting galleries and African sweetmeats to be washed down with a glass of anis.
This, then, is Madrid, the bull’s-eye of Spain, stretched high on its sparkling plateau, where duchess and dishwasher speak the same pure Spanish and man is still preferred to the machine, where the days and nights are spent in an electric air and it is almost impossible to be alone.
Fond as I am of this city, however, sooner or later I always turn south. For south is where I most wish to be. South are the cornlands wealed with red poppy, the shipwrecked castles, drunken storks in the vineyards and, on the way, gaunt Toledo, where luminous El Grecos seem to be hanging in every house. Farther south, best of all – beyond the Sierra Morena and the sharp ridge of the Despeñaperros – lies the land of promise, gold Andalusia, tilted towards the sun.
This is the place I feel I know best, to which I return again and again. I came here first as a wandering tramp, long ago, before the Civil War, sleeping each night among the wine-filled fields and playing a violin in the cafés by day. They were the last days of peace and absolute freedom and, spent there, cannot be forgotten.
The Province of Andalusia is the southern edge of Spain, with a coastline some three hundred miles long. It’s where the Moorish invasion left its deepest imprint in Europe and was under Islam for seven hundred years. Many of its villages are still severely Arabic, with squat, salt-white houses, heavily barred windows, fortress doors and interior patios. The extreme modesty of the women can only be a relic of purdah; indeed, in some villages they still go veiled.
Almost all that is thought to be most typical of Spain stems from this vivid subtropical region. The cult of the bull – relic of Cretan invaders – has survived here for five thousand years. The modern technique of bullfighting was invented in the hill town of Ronda and most of the best-known toreros of the last hundred years come from two narrow alleys in Cordova. The cult of the horseman, symbol of the Spanish dandy, was born on the bull-herding pastures round Seville. (The American cowboy, curiously enough, was also invented here and imported into the States through Mexico to become the tough-hombre prototype of our TV Quixote with his cut-and-dried, black-and-white chivalry.)
Music and dance, the guitar and flamenco, also come from this province, through Africa. The guitar was originally an Arab instrument and the flamenco is clearly Oriental. Some of the most famous Spanish dancers of theatre and cabaret were raised in the gypsy caves of Andalusian Granada or in the gypsy ghettos of Seville. Most of the classical dance forms of the flamenco school – the Sevillana, Granadina, Malagueña, Fandango de Huelva – were developed in the hot solitudes of the cities that bear their names. And from the red fields of Jerez, Puerto de Santa Maria and Cordova come the sherries, brandies and amontillados that give the dancers their hysteric powers.
But Andalusia is not just the tourist’s dream, the vida tipica of the travel poster. It is also the home of starving fishermen and beggar poets, of smugglers, clowns and madmen, of a people indolent, amiable and vague, mixing cruelty with acts of kindness, and of great religious festivals under whose Christian cloak much older gods are worshipped – Adonis mourned and Osiris buried, Astarte borne in from the sea, the Virgin Earth-Mother praised and prayed to and the corn god resurrected at Easter …
This is an old stretch of land whose signs of occupation go back to the beginnings of man, with rich-painted caves scattered throughout the area – and some of them still inhabited. It is a grape-blue landscape saved from being a desert by the snow waters of the big sierras. Blindfolded mules still draw water from the wells dug by slaves a thousand years back. The earth is rich with quick-growing harvests, with sugar and wheat and olives. In the lives of the farmers, in their tools and techniques, you will see manners unchanged since Homer.
Perhaps the most intimate way to get to know this province is to travel on the small local buses. One should avoid, if possible, the money-raddled coasts and the well-defined tourists’ tracks. Go from city to town, from town to village, make no plans and stop where you will. You will be rewarded by a chain of surprises, and each will be your own discovery.
In Algeçiras, for instance – which the tourist ignores – you can talk to smugglers loaded with watches. Or go to the small local theatre (hard seats, one shilling) and see some of the best strolling players in Spain. In Jerez de la Frontera you can drink sherry from the source and eat free fish just caught from the bay. In Seville, for a pittance, you can learn Spanish dancing in a week and have your name baked and glazed on a tile.
In Granada, under the Sierra Nevadas, city of hawks and sadness, you can see the palace of the desert kings, whose lyrical gardens, full of fountains and nightingales, are kept fresh by the mountain springs.
Between cities, take a bus to the cut-off country, to such villages as Medina Sidonia. Bad roads will protect you; there will be only small inns to stay at; but you will be rewarded by a landscape pure as the sea, ancient, wind-ravaged and bare, where storks and vultures circle majestic skies above herds of black fighting bulls. Show that you are in no hurry, that you’re ready to let things happen, and the human encounter, which is Spain, will follow. Before you know it you will be invited to a wedding, to a birth or to a pig-killing feast. And if you know a little Spanish everyone will be delighted and will praise you for having taken the trouble.
The great show places are all clearly marked. Follow the first footsore type you see with a camera and he will lead you to them. Meanwhile if you are still restless, feel you haven’t seen enough, hire a donkey or mule, leave the main roads altogether and take one of the old drove tracks inland. These are shepherd paths, several thousand years old, and cover most of the wilder country. You will move slowly, in solitude, through steep brooding gorges, over bridges put there by the Romans; you will sleep rough, drink harsh wines, feed on stews of beans or perhaps nothing but bread and olives. But you will be entering a Spain that few have seen, the Spain of the Middle Ages, passing through silence like an act of God, into regions of rock and pine, arriving finally at villages that appear never to have been visited or that seem to have been waiting for you to come.