by Jan Morris
For the Spaniards live in clusters, like squatters around the water-holes. Only in the green regions of the north can they live like other countrymen of the West, comfortably among their own fields. Elsewhere in Spain they are crowded always beside the water—in big river cities, in minuscule wellhead hamlets, or in the rich irrigated valleys that the Moors first made. Wide empty areas separate one pocket of habitation from another, and they themselves range in fecundity from the luxuriant to the lunar. The people of the Valencian littoral inhabit the most fertile slab of land in Europe, and the most densely populated agricultural region outside Egypt and India: its oranges sometimes weigh seven pounds apiece, and its markets seem to burst with plump, rosy, earthy, sweet-smelling nutriment. The people of the Murcian coast, on the other hand, inhabit the fringe of a desert—one of the most barren and depressing of them all, its surface all scrubby scree, its rocks streaked with sulphurous colours, its valleys permanently waterless. The average wheat yield in Logroño, in the north, is nearly six times as great as the average yield in Almería, in the south-east. The coastline around Málaga, in the south, is as lush as any tropical shore, with its sugar-canes and its thick sweet wines. The plateau of the interior, where the villages often look more like piles of rubble than human habitations, can be as dismal and demanding as any altiplano of Peru. The mountain country of Asturias, whose hearty hillmen drink draught cider and eat smoked trout, offers the same kind of rude sufficiency as do the Highlands of Scotland.
And yet, such is the power of the Spanish presence, all is unmistakably one country—the desperately dry, the obscenely fertile, the rough green mountain country. Whether the tree is a palm or a northern pine, the wind that sways it could only be Spanish, and the earth beneath it smells of Spain.
Partly it is plain old-fashionedness that makes Spain feel so special. She has a fatal weakness for the past. When the French were building in the Gothic style, she was still building Romanesque. When they moved into the Renaissance, she was still building Gothic. She retained her mediaeval values when they had long been abandoned elsewhere in Europe, so that at Spanish universities in the eighteenth century they were still wondering whether Copernicus was right, and anxiously debating whether the sky was made of metal or of fluid. No Beethoven symphony was performed in Madrid until 1866. It was only in the present century that the most primitive of the Spaniards, in the shuttered valleys near Salamanca, first heard of God. When Mr. Gerald Brenan went to live in Andalusia after the First World War, his neighbours assumed that he had been fighting the Moors, and were of the firm opinion that Protestants were people with tails.
This time-lag still makes Spain an anachronism among the nations. Her industrial revolution is really only happening now, and in many ways she retains the simplicity, even the innocence, of a pastoral nation. A Victorian propriety and formality, too, makes the stranger feel that his passage through the mountains has been a return in time. Carriages still sway down Andalusian lanes, with ladies chatting in their cushioned recesses, and coachmen flicking stray dogs with long leather whips. Hay carts still rumble down the hill lanes of Galicia, the bullocks sweating in the shafts and the yokels in straw hats hanging on behind. Splendid brass-bound locomotives snort in steam and metal polish down Spanish railways. Spanish country buses, so bumpy and gregarious, still flaunt the rollicking gusto of the mail coaches. Except in the sophisticated cities, Spanish courtships are still discreet, Spanish mothers are still dominant, Spanish men are very manly and Spanish women usually chaste. Spanish towns stand so far apart from one another that they often still feel like City-States, wrapped up in their own parochial affairs, looking inwards to the cathedral and the coffee shop rather than outwards to the rockets or the situation in the Middle East.
Nothing indeed could feel much more proper and permanent than life in such a Spanish country city—La Capital to the peasants of the surrounding countryside, but to the foreigner no more than a middle-sized market town on the way to somewhere else. Life has changed beyond description, I am told, since the early thirties, when a young man hardly dared speak to an unmarried girl, and courtship was conducted under restrictions not merely puritanical, but actually Islamic. It has changed enormously, once again, since the 1960s. Even so, to an outsider life in a Murcia, a Zamora, or a Jaén seems marvellously unruffled by social progress.
In the market, for instance, the homely ways of the countryside are still reassuringly lively—the butcher skins a sheep before your eyes as easily as peeling an apple, the hens are tied together with hairy string upon their basket-tops, there is chicken-earth upon the egg-shells, and the market woman wraps up your radishes in thick brown paper. In the shopping streets the bourgeoisie parades past the cafés in a dazzle of polished shoes and spotless gloves, its small moustaches carefully clipped, its hair impeccably curled, its infants primped and frilly. Outside the cathedral knots of busy priests are engaged in earnest conversation, standing very close to each other, and talking with such intensity that sometimes the brims of their wide hats actually touch, and knock the whole argument askew. Along the river promenade elegant pigtailed schoolgirls saunter home, swinging their satchels, and an old mendicant sits on a wall selling a knobbly assortment of herbs. There are big pink jars in the shelves of the apothecaries, and huge wine-stained barrels on the wineshop floors, and scrumptious sticky cakes in the cakeshops, and the liqueur bottles in the cafés are decorated with the gold medals of forgotten exhibitions and the escutcheons of extinct dukes. Among the flower-beds of the plaza the starched nannies gossip in a Watteau-like tableau of prams, aprons, sailor suits, and eagerly eavesdropping little girls; from the huge dim-lit windows of the Casino (as they call a club in Spain) four or five apparently mummified figures glare glassily at the passersby, with tumblers of what looks like lukewarm water listlessly at their elbows.
And in the evening, when the paseo begins in the main square when the young men stroll purposefully up and down in one direction, and the girls giggle in groups in the other, when the municipal officials emerge pomaded from their departments and the young officers of the garrison, smoothing their glove-fingers, clamber out of their taxis and stride gallantly into the crowd—when the evening paseo begins, with all its unwritten formalities of flirtation and politesse, then you may feel yourself back in some long-dead Europe, the England of Barchester and the Proudies, perhaps, or Gogol’s vanished Russia. The dignitaries grow grander as the evening wears on; and the subalterns will stay talking indefinitely at the salute, unless you implore them, my dear fellows, not to stand upon formality.
It is very charming to see, but sometimes the nostalgia of Spain has a more elemental quality: when an ore train plods across an endless landscape for example, with a plume of its black smoke in the evening light, and a long clanking snake of wagons across the tableland; or in some hangdog mining town, Dickensian in filth and gloom, where the old women grub for waste coal among the railway sidings, and make you think of Poor Susan; or in the Hogarthian slums of Barcelona, where the sailors’ brothels are, the prostitutes are busted like pouter pigeons. The archaism of Spain is often touching, but often tough. The Spanish folk costumes have almost disappeared, surviving only in a kerchief here, a coloured apron there, or the clodhopping clogs of the north-west; but the peasantry of Spain is till marvellously earthy, and the miners of the north are dauntingly militant. This is still a frugal, sober, strong people, rich in men of the yeoman kind—lorry drivers, petty officers, mechanics, head porters, farm workers you would trust not only with your hay-making but with your life or your daughter too. Hombre! is the Spanish countryman’s habitual greeting—Man!—and such straight, square old courtesies reflect what is best about the old-fashionedness of Spain: something frank and comradely, unaffected by time or money, rooted in the conviction that a man’s a man for a’ that. Part of the Spaniard’s strength lies in his stubborn regard for the past. In most languages of the West we use the same form of farewell—Goodbye, Adieu, Addio, Adios! Only in Spain, though,
will you occasionally hear some fine old countryman, with a handshake like mahogany, spell it out in three grave separate words: Go with God!
Spain is distinct, furthermore, because she has style. In a prosaic age she is not afraid to be patrician. She has always had the grand manner—‘the arrogant and insolent grace’, as a French historian once described it—and sometimes even the noblesse oblige: one of the most Spanish of all pictures is Velázquez’s wonderful Surrender of Breda, nicknamed The Lances, in which the superb Marquis de los Balbases receives the sword of his defeated Dutch adversary with a smile of ineffably considerate regret. Spain is a high-flown country. Marquises, dukes, and counts abound, and the traditions of Spain are rich with the conduct normally expected of nobles. Alonso de Guzmán, a thirteenth-century Spanish hero, allowed the Moors to kill his own son beneath the walls of Tarifa rather than surrender the town to them—he threw down his own dagger for the execution, crying, ‘Kill the boy! I’d rather lose six sons than surrender!’ Seven hundred years later Colonel Ituarte Moscardó, defending the Alcazar at Toledo for General Franco, allowed the enemy to kill his son too, rather than give up the fortress—‘Commend your soul to God’, he told the boy over the telephone, ‘shout Viva España, and die like a hero!’ Spain loves such postures, at once tragic and defiant, just as she has a persistent regard for flags, tall horses, and splendid isolation.
And often enough even those innumerable Spaniards who reject such values, who profess themselves internationalists, egalitarians, or modern materialists, nevertheless often possess an embarrassingly patrician style themselves. Most Spaniards are, to use an unfashionable term for a fast-vanishing condition, gentlemen. They are, rich or poor, angry or complacent, to the manner born. Nobody will treat the stranger with more elegant ease than the raggety peasant of Aragón or Castile, with his old cloak slung about his shoulders, his bruised hat on his head, his chin a little prickly and his hand calloused by a lifetime’s labour: he will turn on his donkey as though sitting in the saddle of some magnificent thoroughbred, he will look you straight, solemn, and courteous in the eye, and he will answer your inquiry in a Spanish so distinguished and precise that it might be an extract from some recorded language course. He always makes you feel welcome, he never patronizes you, he always knows when to go, and he does not gush.
The Spanish castes are indeed distinct, though hard for the stranger to distinguish because there are no class accents. When great issues are at stake, hatred between them can be cruelly inflamed. Of the fourteen thousand regular officers in the Spanish Army at the beginning of the Civil War, only two hundred chose to fight for the Left: of the eight thousand regular non-commissioned officers, not more than a score chose to fight for the Right. It is apparently not envy, however, that excites these passions—the Spanish revolutionary does not usually covet riches for himself. In normal times Spaniards of all classes treat each other with a casual courtesy, almost a familiarity, that suggests to me the oddly easy relationship between master and serf in Tsarist Russia. Spanish Catholicism partly accounts for this lack of awkwardness, with its emphasis on Death as the great leveller, and some say too that it is an echo of the Roman’s family attitude towards his slave. Whatever its origins, one reason for the success of the old Spanish armies is said to have been their democratic ease of intercourse, officers and men sharing the same mess; and if you ever visit one of the great fairs of Andalusia, when the landowning families come to town with their splendid horses and their flouncy polka-dots—if ever you mingle with the Andalusian gentry at such a festivity, you will find that grandees, belles, grooms, lackeys and all seem to converse with a dashing kind of fellowship, so that you are hard put to tell which is master, which is man and sometimes (for they are a lean and handsome lot) even which is horse.
It is this independence of manner, this head-high and straight-eyed ambience, that makes Spain feel so awfully noble, and keeps its aficionados dewy-eyed with thoughts of uprightness and individuality. In these austere and desolate landscapes there is indeed something bravely perpendicular about a man, something that makes him feel a finer, or at least an intenser, species than he is elsewhere. One powerful reason for the separateness of Spain is the fact that she always feels more so. In this country everything seems to be heightened, as by some elevating drug, and people in particular seem crueller, stubborner, kinder, and always grander. Spanish philosophical conceptions are full of synonyms for this loftiness of spirit, and slushy devotees of the culture are only too anxious to translate them—alma, for instance, which means more than merely soul, but is something almost anatomically detectable, or casticismo, which is more than just purism, but has come to stand for the very quality of Spanishness, the elusive but always pungent substance that floats around you the moment you cross the Spanish frontier.
And this exalting influence of Spain is catching, and makes the visitor, too, feel his alma swelling, rather like the mumps. Nothing expresses the mescalin quality of this country better than the bull-fight, that lurid and often tawdry gladiatorial ritual, which generally repels the northerner in the theory, but often makes his blood race in the act. All kinds of unexpected instincts are revived by this Spanish spectacle. The trumpet sounds; the gate falls open; the bull storms stocky, puzzled, and filming into the arena; instantly the foreigner, overwhelmed by the glare, the colour, the mass emotion, the pageantry, and the heat of the moment, feels himself to be in some barbaric dissecting room, where all that is worst about Man is exposed to heartless floodlights. It is not at all a pleasant spectacle—not a sport at all. Blood runs, men are often wounded, poor padded blindfold horses are gored, the bull inevitably dies and is dragged out for beef. The crowd all around, that Greek chorus of the bull-ring, with its little cigars clenched between its teeth, its cardboard sun-visors on its foreheads, its one-peseta cushions plumped beneath its bottoms on the hard seats—the crowd all around seems animated, to the foreign eye, chiefly by a brutish lust for blood. ‘I would not have been displeased,’ wrote Nelson to his wife after watching a bull-fight, ‘to have seen the spectators tossed.’
And yet, such is the contagion of Spain, if you sit it out for long enough you will probably succumb yourself to the savage magic of the corrida. As its ghastly parade continues, circus tinsel beside high tragedy, as death succeeds death and blood blood, as the young gods are cheered around the arena or hissed out of sight, as the silent old horses topple in and the tossing caparisoned mules drag the carcases out—as the band thumps away at its music and the evening shadow creeps across the ring, so you will feel yourself, hour by hour, fight by fight, half united with the fierce multitude at your side. The nobility of death, so the experts assure us, is the point of the bull-fight—the ultimate Moment of Truth that comes, in the end, to us all; and before very long you too may feel that, through the blood lust and the intolerance, something of grandeur emerges. If you are unlucky, your corrida will be one long inept butchery, odious to watch; but if you have chosen well you may see a kill by one of the masters, short, calm, elegant, almost sacerdotal. The beast, after one clean, almost imperceptible sword-thrust, sinks slowly to its knees. The matador, as proud and kind as any victorious Marquis reaches out a gentle hand, in a movement infinitely graceful and brotherly, to touch his dying adversary between the horns. It is a sentimental moment perhaps, possibly deceitful, certainly theatrical; but as that garlic crowd greets the gesture with a long deep sigh of admiration, so you may respond yourself to some inner pasodoble, and feel the old Spaniard stir in you.
All this adds up to the specialness of Spain, but in some ways it is illusory. If you drive down to the Ebro from Pamplona, and turn eastward along the river, presently you will reach the island that Sancho Panza governed. It is not an island at all, as any local will hasten to tell you; but it is the original, so tradition tells us, of the Isle Barataria, which Sancho ruled with such sturdy success through nine chapters of Don Quixote. Here occurred the ultimate illusion of that hallucinatory masterpiece. Here Sancho himself w
as deluded. He soon saw through the specious allure of power (though he ‘ordained so many good things that to this day they are preserved in that place and called the Constitution of the Great Sancho Panza’); but he really did suppose that the territory assigned to him was an island—down the foothills of the Pyrenees, beside the Saragossa railway line.
Nowhere in western Europe could be much more dismal than the Isle Barataria today, reverted once again into a hamlet called Alcalá del Ebro, and slumped upon a bend of the river in an attitude of awful dejection. Its houses are mostly mean, its narrow streets are sloshed with winter mud or choked with dust, its river is brown and sluggish, and all day long there clank and clatter past the village, slung in containers from an overhead conveyor, loads of salt-rock destined for a factory beside the level-crossing. It was called Barataria, Cervantes says, either because that was its name anyway, or because of its exceedingly low real-estate value—baratura means cheapness. I incline to the latter interpretation, for it seems to me a dominion with no asset but its Spanishness. It lives by casticismo—its courtesy, its arid landscape all about, the mud in its streets, the solemn faces at its saloon door. There is nothing special about the place, except its famous fable and its poverty; but in such a village, with such an association, you can appreciate how insular is the pride of Spain, and how delusory.
There is no country in Europe more introspective than Spain, and few admire themselves more. It is true that the Spaniard is subject to fits of wild self-criticism—‘We are a backward nation, we lack culture, we are not formal enough, we can never catch up, never trust a Spaniard.’ More often, though, he still seems convinced, for all the ignominious evidence of the centuries, that his nation is not only best, but also altogether unique. Even in Strabo’s time the Spaniards used to boast that they had been a literary and law-abiding nation for more than six thousand years (though since the Spanish year then lasted four months, the brag was less majestic than it sounds). On every Spanish passport, the historian Angel Ganivet once said, there were written the invisible words: ‘This Spaniard is authorized to do whatever he wants.’ In Spain foreigners have generally been regarded as inferiors, and the Fleming courtiers who came to Spain with the Hapsburgs were so generally despised that their very name, some people think, entered the language in derogation—flamenco, which now means a kind of song and dance, apparently used to mean an oafish vagabond. If you ask a Spaniard who fought the Battle of Trafalgar, he will tell you the Spanish and the British, quite forgetting the French; if you ask him who fought the Peninsular War, he will say the Spanish and the French, quite forgetting the British. Spaniards prefer not to be laughed at, and do not much like losing: they tend to remember only what is flattering to Spain, and they readily believe the State schoolmaster, when he says there is no nation on earth so famous, so successful, so rich, or so powerful as theirs.