by Jan Morris
In the region called Bro Vigouden (Bigouden in French), in the south-west, there is a well-known clan of Breton women with genetically odd-sized legs, so that on market day you may sometimes see people limping about lopsidedly, as though they have been punished by a cruel spell in a fairy tale; the coifs of this clan have even got taller in recent years, more assertive perhaps, and are now so unwieldy that women have to bend sideways almost double to get into cars – especially awkward when they also have one leg longer than the other. In rainy weather they wear supermarket shopping-bags over the top of them. I have before me some photographs of several hundred such ladies, all of them old, assembled for a reunion at Pont an Abad (Pont l’Abbé to the French) in the 1990s, and I doubt if anywhere else in Europe at the time could have offered such a spectacle: severe, tough, creased faces peering back at me from below their peculiar head-dresses – the braided hair of maidens on septuagenarian widows – fringed shawls and embroidered lace – the towering white forest of coifs swaying and bobbing, this way and that, as the company limped towards its celebratory victuals.
49 Wanting an old lady
Perhaps in the end a few such quirks, and some odds and ends of folklore, will be all that is left of Bretonism, but for the moment there remain echoes at least of the Celtic culture, very old, holy and serene. In the 1970s my small daughter and I looked up from the waterfront of Douarnenez to see an old woman smiling down at us from an upstairs window. She was not wearing that white coif, but she had a shawl around her shoulders, her face was infinitely wrinkled, and her smile was so kind that it seemed to be coming to us from different times altogether – before the Fall perhaps. ‘I want that lady,’ my small daughter said.
50 Heart in a hard city
The most vivid of the European minority nations are the Catalans, one of the five or six peoples long ago subjected to the supremacy of Castilian Spain. They had an empire of their own once, and they were always a tough and brilliant lot – history tells of few fiercer, more arrogant, more merciless and more often victorious soldiers than the fourteenth-century mercenaries called the Grand Company of Catalans. They are just as hard and successful now, the great achievers among the European minorities, and their capital, Barcelona, is the minority capital par excellence. Half the influences that have moulded the continent have touched down in Barcelona at one time or another. The Greeks and the Romans were there; Spaniards and Frenchmen and Italians have left their mark – ideologies from Catholicism to anarchism, tastes of the Provençals, manners of the Moors, all heated up, enriched, spiced and garlicked by the peculiar pungent genius of the Catalans. I have disliked the city for thirty-five years, but I cannot deny its buzz.
I spent the Christmas of 1994 in Barcelona, and patriotic buzz was everywhere. The city was in Spain, but only just of it. In the Plaça Sant Jaume the offices of a genuine Catalan Government, with real authority, flew the Catalan flag in a properly sovereign style. The Catalan language was ubiquitous, and people who did not speak it seemed a little embarrassed to be asked. By the standards of minority capitals Barcelona seemed to me astonishingly self-confident, conscious of its status as the metropolis of a vigorous industrial country with its own history, its own language, its own literature, its own architecture, and most decidedly its own character.
I wish I could say I relished that character, but I didn’t. There was not much on the surface of things that moved me or gave me hope. I disliked the little-black-dressed and waistcoated rich, all heritage and condescension, to be seen taking tea on squashy sofas at the Ritz. I distrusted the gangs of bravoes urgently traversing the Plaça de Catalunya, or riding their motor-bikes sinisterly muffled down side-alleys. I felt no spontaneous emanations of human warmth and geniality when I wandered into the city’s cafés and brasseries. I missed, in short, the consolation of kind hearts en masse. Of course these were subjective responses of the most simplistic kind – people who live in Barcelona swear to me they love it. All the same, it came as an unexpected relief to me that afternoon when I chanced to see an elderly lady in a red coat, flanked by an attentive young couple, walking vigorously but a little stooped towards the Rambla. She looked frail, I thought. She looked somehow too gentle for Barcelona. The passing pedestrians took no notice of her – why should they? – and it was almost like a hallucination when, as she drew nearer, I realized her to be Lady Thatcher, the former Iron Lady of Europe. Vicious opponent though I was, to an almost Catalan degree, of Thatcherism and all it represented, I was touched and even strangely comforted to see her there. She seemed to be paying particular attention to heroic statues.
51 A Lapp artist
The Lapps are more often called the Sami now, but you know who I mean – those befurred short people, in flapped hats and trousers tied with thongs, so often to be seen in pictures driving their reindeer across the tundra of Norway, Sweden and Finland. In the 1950s they were still all known as Lapps, and a sturdy group of them gave me a kind welcome when I walked into their settlement somewhere around Kiruna, in northern Sweden, where I had wandered off from the guest-house of a local iron-ore mine. They were seasonal nomads, and had settled there with their herds for the winter. They took me to their school, and I was astonished by the beauty of the pictures one boy was painting, bold of composition, limpid of colour. I bought one, and its solemn creator, five or six years old, signed it carefully on the back for me. It showed, in a semi-abstract way, a pale, cold, extremely Lappish landscape with reindeer, and spoke to me so hauntingly of those Arctic horizons, the very lip and antithesis of Europe, that for years afterwards it hung in my house, until its paper browned and its colours faded. I put it away then, sentimentally, wondering where those reindeer were grazing now, and what had become of the little Lapp artist.
52 A propagandist
Nobody has ever baffled me like the Basques did when I first went to their country in 1962, under Franco’s dictatorship. They seemed to me at once raw and mystic. I understood not a word of their esoteric language, the use of which was officially discouraged anyway. The very place-names of the country – Oxocelhaya, Itxassou – made me feel I had somehow strayed out of Europe altogether. At first I thought the Basques entirely materialist. In the towns every other building seemed to be a bank, and everywhere groups of businessmen discussed what I took to be contracts or stock prices in sober grey suits over plates of eel-spawn. In the country, life seemed to be almost mechanically practical, and visiting a farmhouse was rather like opening the windows in an Advent card: here to reveal the farmer oiling his scythe, there his wife stirring the soup, the daughter of the house sewing in one room, the son at his homework in another, and handily available in the middle of the building a couple of milking cows.
But I presently became aware of a more emotional streak in the Euzkadi, as the Basques call themselves. Twenty-five years before there had briefly been a Basque Republic, suppressed by General Franco when he won the Spanish Civil War, and now and then I had come across its relics: a faded patriotic poster, escaping the vigilance of the Guardia Civil, a postage stamp, a banknote pushed wryly to the back of a drawer, about as worthless as a currency could be. Over the border in France there was still a Basque Government in Exile, but within Spain Basque nationalism seemed to be permanently stifled.
Then I came to Guernica, from time immemorial the shrine of Basque liberties, where for centuries an Euzkadi parliament had sat in sovereignty. In 1937 German bombers had destroyed the centre of it, on Franco’s behalf, and since then it had obviously been deliberately run down. It was a sad sight to see. All the virtue seemed to have left the Oak of Guernica, successor to a pedigree of trees which had been sacred to the Basques since at least the fourteenth century. The remains of its shrine were dusty and forlorn. Grass grew in the cracks of the legislative benches all around. To restore the place would clearly be an act of hostility to the Spanish State, and if anyone tried, I thought, in no time at all he would be in one of the Generalissimo’s jails. As I stood meditating there, a large m
an in a long blue greatcoat engaged me in conversation: and when I tentatively raised the subject of the Basque identity he was not in the least inhibited after all. On the contrary, he explained it all to me in a booming and grandiloquent voice that must be audible, I nervously thought, as far as Madrid itself. He would tell me what the Basques were, cried this reckless patriot, and he would tell me what they were not. I wrote his words down word verbation in my notebook, and this is what he shouted. ‘We are NOT a region, NOT a group of provinces, NOT a language, NOT a folk tradition, but a NATION, EUZKADI, THE NATION OF THE BASQUES!!!’
53 The grunt beyond the mystery
When I next came to the Basque country, fifteen years later, things had greatly changed. The aged Franco had relaxed his grip, the Basque language was less severely proscribed, and a surge of Euzkadi nationalism was now inescapable. Fiery sermons were being preached. Police clashed with protesters at violent demonstrations. There were strikes which were hardly strikes, really, but patriotic gestures. A Basque underground army, an army of terrorists to its opponents, was fighting with bombs and machine-guns a perpetual war against Spanish authority. I was far more aware this time of yet another side of Basqueness, the grunt beyond the mystery: the brutal energy which had made this people pre-eminent in every kind of crude contest – the chasing of bulls through the streets of Pamplona – the trapping of migrating pigeons in Pyrenean passes – the awful sport called goose-game in which a live goose was hung head-down from a wire, and men tried to decapitate it with their bare hands – the thrilling energy of pelota – the innumerable Basque competitions of strength or appetite, beer-swilling, log-chopping, stone-cutting, steak-eating. So it was to be for the rest of the twentieth century, as the unappeasable Basque patriots fought on for their liberty, once again achieving autonomy of a kind but never relaxing the fury of their demands. Whenever I read of another arrest or explosion, another set of dirty tricks by the police, another terrorist ambush, I remembered that bawling propagandist at Guernica.
54 The unchosen
The old Ottoman Empire, before the First World War, was officially said to include seventeen and a half nationalities. The half was the nation of the Gypsies – to whom it has only in my own time become the courtesy to give a capital G – and they remain a nation that is not a nation, a nation without frontiers, without a capital, without a homeland, without myths, without heroes, without monuments, without a Book. There are Gypsies and Gypsies, of course, and in some parts of Europe the oriental Romany strain has been so diluted that it is hard to know the difference between a Gypsy and a tinker, traveller or layabout. Over much of the continent, nevertheless, the name of ‘Gypsy’ means much what it always meant, and incites persecutions and even pogroms to this day – the inherited reaction, since classical times at least, of the settled to the nomadic. Especially in eastern Europe the Gypsies have born the brunt of prejudice. If they could not be exterminated, as the Nazis wanted, surely they could be turned into ordinary citizens like everyone else! The Polish Communists forced them into settlement, calling the process ‘The Great Halt’. The Albanian Communists herded them into tenement blocks. The Bulgarian Communists forbade all mention of them, ignored them in census, and made them change their names. Nothing seemed to work. By the 1990s there were said to be some 8 million Gypsies – the biggest and fastest-growing minority people in Europe.
Various Gypsy institutions had come into being, in attempts to give some more conventional nationhood to the race – in the elections for the Bucharest City Council in 1996 the Gypsies’ National Party got 1 per cent of the vote, rather less than the Motorists’ National Party; but anyway no uniform of State, no lapel badge or armband, could be more unmistakable than the all but indefinable splash of bright colour which was the mark of the Gypsy still. In every country the Gypsies were among the least-educated people: what a prodigious source of talent had gone neglected! In some parts of the continent they were universal scapegoats too, and almost everything, from petty thieving to State corruption, was blamed on them. In Romania especially, by then the centre of gravity of European Gypsydom, every conversation seemed to get around to something the Gypsies had squatted in, spoiled, infested or were likely at any moment to steal. When I once surmised that perhaps their ill-treatment by the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu had something to do with their own behaviour, pshaw! they said – everyone knew Ceauşescu was a Gypsy himself.
55 The romantics
I was always a sucker for the romance of this disturbing people. In 1953 I wrote some articles about Gypsies for the London Times, and spent some time searching them out. In those days continental Gypsies sometimes crossed the English Channel in the course of their wanderings, the Romany language was quite widely spoken in Britain, and everything about the English Gypsies charmed me. I attended a Gypsy funeral in the marshes of Essex, where the wooden caravan of an old lady was ritually put to the flames, like a Viking longboat. Gravely around the pyre stood all the members of her tribe – and tribes there really were then, sharing the old English Gypsy names, Lee, Boswell, Hearne, Stanley, and unmistakably allied in the brown, big-nosed, dark-eyed, solemn dignity of their faces. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ a Hampshire lady told me, ‘but I believe in the Blessed Lord because I’ve seen his photo.’ Another observed, ‘Whenever I make myself a cup of tea I looks up to Heaven and I says, “Very much obliged to you.”’ I learnt to admire and envy the Gypsy ways. I made a pilgrimage to the grave of Abram Wood, the most famous of the Gypsy harpers of Wales, who was buried heroically in 1799 high above the sea at Llangelynnin – outside the church porch. Every Christmas I went out in the countryside around our house to share a whisky with an old Gypsy couple who still lived literally in the hedgerows, protected only by a crude canvas sheet among the prickles.
I loved the dazzle of the Gypsies, too. I was bowled over in the 1960s by the theatrical allure of the Sacromonte people, in their caves at Granada in Spain – bold, insolent, magnificent people, I thought, whose heel-stamping, castanet-clicking, nasal-voiced dances may have been, as cynics so often told me, devised especially for the tourist trade, but which seemed to me to come straight from their irrepressible hearts. I loved to stumble across one of those great splashes of muddle, life, dust and colour that was a Gypsy encampment. There was one on the Argolis shore near Nauplia in Greece, down the road from Mycenae: the people lived beside the sea in big circular tents, like Mongols, and there was a lively coming and going of Gypsy women with their baskets from town, and youths lounged against tent-poles as they lounge in old pictures of the Levant, and there were old cars here and there, and carts, and a wide gallimaufry of panache beside the blue water of the gulf. And what of the Gypsy violinists of eastern Europe, who so miraculously ignored the drab norms of Communism? They brought to their art a marvellous mixture of cynicism, mischief, arrogance and collusion, flinging out across their café tables a sort of defiance – challenging their dazed audiences to call their bluff or dare dispute their supremacy, with much the same charm and grace that Charlie Chaplin undoubtedly inherited from his Gypsy grandmother. They were hardly trying to please. They were expressing their own liberty and superiority, like kings in disguise. Nothing was more inspiriting, in the dark days of Hungarian Communism, than to walk along to the old Gellért Hotel in Buda, a faded prodigy of art nouveau, and hear the Gypsy fiddlers soaring and diving through their melodies: and thirty years later I most gratefully slipped a few notes into the carefully sited jacket pocket of a Bulgarian virtuoso – while the music played on.
56 Sight-reading
In the ill-lit pedestrian tunnel that went under the Elbe at Dresden, in Germany, I once heard ahead of me strains of those same violins, from a couple of Gypsies playing Viennese waltzes. I was in a stingy mood, and determined to give them nothing. As it happened there was nobody else in the tunnel at that moment, and as I passed the musicians, still eloquently playing, I felt their eyes thoughtfully following me. I was decidedly self-conscious, knowing very well that I o
ught to put something in the open violin-case at their feet, and as I walked towards the daylight my resolution wavered. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ said I to myself, so when I emerged into the open I dug a few coins out of my purse and re-entered the tunnel. Melodies from the Vienna woods were still sounding in its twilight, and the Gypsies were not in the least surprised to see me back. They had read me like a book, and were expecting me. I put my coins in their violin-case, and they both bowed courteously, without a smile. I bowed back in admiration.
57 In a woodland glade
But there is no pretending that everything about the Gypsies fits my romantic fancies, and even my sympathies were strained when I drove one day in the 1960s, with a car full of my family, into a woodland glade in the interior of Corfu. It was such a glade as plays are set in, banks where the wild thyme blew, gnarled old olives like oaks in Windsor Park, and I stopped the car with a view to having a picnic. Instantly there fell upon us a posse of savage Gypsy women, from their tents and caravans in the woods. These were not the patrician Lees and Boswells of my memories, graceful violinists or stately Welsh harpers! These were scrabbling, raggedy, predatory primitives, dressed in vivid torn cottons, holding babies as monkeys hold them, swarmed around by children, banging on the car, clutching at the door-handles, pushing their thin grasping hands through the open windows. To the begging demands of the Gypsies outside were added the banshee yells of my terrified children within: and so, hooting my horn furiously, skidding wildly through the undergrowth, I put my foot down and got the hell out of there.