by Norman Lewis
I discovered that Eugene had actually packed a small extensible butterfly net of the kind, he said, used by museum curators. The morning after our arrival a great sulphur-coloured butterfly failed to escape a swipe with this and was held for further inspection before release.
The next section of the rainforest was different in every way except the density of the arboreal growth. This was divided surprisingly between oaks and species of conifer. A covey of partridges circled the area while we were there, beating the air with stiff wings. We listened to a quick shuffle of small animals in a central thicket in which a splendid variety of the arum lily displayed a triumph in perpetual twilight. This indubitably was a rainforest, for a slow, steady rainfall fell all the time we were there. Eugene was happy to collect a snail that had purplish markings and was the size of a fist. A few dark moths changed direction to inspect us as they passed and we were treated to our first and probably last vision of that magnificent butterfly, the Purple Emperor—native almost exclusively of the oak-woods of southern Europe.
Yet another section of the forest was to take us by surprise. We climbed a slope up to a rampart of trees to be confronted with a black still-life of vegetation, dead to the eye. Here there were vast oaks set out by nature in their ranks and semicircles, lifted by centuries-old accumulation of leaf mould at their base to a kind of regal eminence over recent arboreal growth. The surrounding odour was one of sharp decay and an unchallenged antiquity bolstered by silence. Eugene noted down approximate measurements, pacing out the distances between trunks. They were smooth, as if lightly polished, all reaching—he estimated—a height of about thirty-five feet. Holes made by woodpeckers were present in most cases about twenty feet from the ground—the area of trunk immediately below these entrances being whitened by the birds’ droppings.
It was difficult not to be affected by this somewhat funereal environment, enlivened by the presence of many forms of attractive wildlife—the exotic birds, the spectacular butterflies and the extraordinary insects described in the illustrated booklets Eugene had included in his luggage. We were later to learn that this and other rainforests in the area were of special interest for the variety and exceptional size of their spiders. Their study had been wholly restricted to a few American scientists, and regarded as not of sufficient interest to the general public for books to be devoted to the subject, only one in fact having ever been published.
In the end our decision to spend a night in the rainforest was seen not only as a mild adventure but a closer association, however brief, with the greatest and most awe-inspiring of all living things, in the shade of which creatures of the jungle were puny indeed. Faced with these towering oaks that had grown from seeds no longer than fingernails to dominate their environment for centuries—or even a millennium—one was encouraged to speculate over the possible duration of life itself. Centuries of leaf-fall had covered the primeval terrain with a deep palliasse of leaf mould with which we made our beds. In the depths of this sounds suggestive of animal life were detected and were inevitably hostile to sleep. Eugene, whose hearing, as well as his capacity for belief, was better than mine, shovelled away at the leaf soil for an hour before putting his ear to the ground and then reporting a variety of sounds. He had read somewhere, he said, of colonies of prehistoric creatures collected and supported by trees in their deep roots.
High overhead a tide of birds had been swept in by the night, and began their sad hootings among the topmost branches. Until then we had heard little, the only sound being the clicking of stick insects hurrying along the twigs in search of their prey. Now there were only the owls to remind us of night.
Beyond the last of the forest next day we discovered a cautious return of the human presence. There were plots of cultivated land, some with the scrawny remains of the harvest of that year, and the first isolated settlement. Here we encountered a plea from a lonely man. ‘We don’t see anyone here for days on end. If you live in this place you long for the sight of a fresh face. Couldn’t you stay a little and talk? I can’t tell you how much we long to hear the latest news. Why not stay until tomorrow?’
The occupants of these tiny clusters of cottages lacked occupation and any form of creativity. Few crops could be induced to grow on this arid, sandy soil which normally supported little more than a kind of pampas grass. Such isolated communities were in the end bled dry, too, by the loss of the most energetic, intelligent and creative of their youngsters who were tempted to go in search of employment in the great Rioja vineyards, a day’s journey away to the west. Of those who went there in search of a new life, few wished to return.
The feudal overlords of this area were the owners of the vineyards who lived, according to our informants, in palatial mansions a day or so’s horseback journey away. We were later to learn in Zaragoza that they liked, above all, to be considered patrons of the arts, and one had even written a book on the antiquities of the area, scattered largely through the fields. These had been moulded in some cases by ten thousand storms into more or less recognisable animal, or even human, shapes, and were collected by rich landowners who built them into the walls of their houses. The serf who found one might even be paid up to the equivalent of a year’s wages for it.
Small, sluggish rivers trickled slowly in all directions across the plain, and cranes, carefully spaced out, possibly to avoid spoiling each other’s catch, waited patiently with a taxidermic rigidity in the shallows. Fish, however, remained plentiful, and finding a shop with fishing tackle for sale we equipped ourselves with rods and lines, and were repaid with a few sizeable fish, rescuing us from semi-starvation.
The day’s long walk offered a rare moment of luxury when we came to its end at Tafalla, which had a hotel with a bar and even, to our amazement, the ghost of a paseo, with several crestfallen girls awaiting an invitation to display their charms. Next morning we set out early but had to take refuge from the rain in the stark little village of Ujué—an almost unpronounceable name given it, we were told, by a nomadic tribe which finally established itself there a thousand or so years back.
No more settlements were shown in this area on the map, so we slept out uneasily, and were frequently disturbed by strange whining sounds in our vicinity. Could wild dogs possibly exist in Spain, we wondered. There was no reason to defer an early start, so we set off shortly after dawn, reaching Tudela in the early afternoon. This—the most extraordinary town either of us had ever seen—came into view across the river Ebro. It appeared at first to be composed entirely of cave dwellings, many of them very large. Later, after a brief exploration, I wrote in my notes that on first sight we estimated there were probably as many caves as normal houses.
We ran into a local man strolling with his dog on our side of the river who was happy to talk to us. He agreed that probably half the population were cave-dwellers, but since the caves were cooler in summer and warmer in winter he insisted that many families did so out of preference. There were, of course, economic advantages. Caves were bought, sold and rented precisely as normal houses were, although naturally at lower prices. The more complex caves were divided into several rooms: those in the neighbourhood of such towns as Zaragoza could be fitted with electric light and leased or sold by instalments or otherwise through the usual housing agents. They attracted little or no outside interest, he assured me. Many tourists, he said, came to Tudela, invariably in summer, to visit the local stork colony—one of the largest in Spain—and to photograph the immense nests built on the towers of the church.
With some difficulty we found a room in one of the smaller and simpler caves and were served an excellent meal in another which, through development, had become a miniature labyrinth.
A little nervous about the possibility of missing the train to Madrid, we reluctantly decided to abandon our plan to spend a further day in Tudela and to press on with all possible speed. We were therefore up at dawn in the absurd hope of reaching Zaragoza in a single day. The surrounding landscape, we were to find, had changed a
lmost miraculously overnight and featureless plains were filling with uplands such as the Montes de Castagon from the crags of which a number of fishing eagles launched to investigate us as we passed. Whereas the plains had been almost as dry as a desert, here it had rained in the night, filling the air with damp autumnal scents. Plants of all kinds were waking from the long trance of summer, and wherever we looked small starry blooms popped up on the surface of the earth.
Approaching the banks of the river at Alargon, we passed close to a group of piratical-looking fishermen in hooded capes and long boots wading in the shallows. Stopping for a moment to watch them we were astonished by the way they bowed their heads as if in prayer before casting in their lines. They were close enough for us to chat with a recent arrival before he splashed into the water. It had been a hot, dry summer, he said. This was the best time to fish. Particularly when the rain happened to coincide with a religious feast, when up to double the normal catch could be expected. Reminded that these were moveable feasts, he returned a happy laugh. ‘It is of no importance. God’s blessing comes with the feast, whether they move or not.’
Everywhere the night’s rains had saturated the landscape through which we had been limping on sore feet. A final spurt would have brought us within reach of the suburbs of Zaragoza before dark, but we gradually realised that this was a forlorn hope and decided to stop at Casetas. This substantial village offered a casa rural with beds, and its owner, dressed as an American cowboy, rode up to guide us in. There was food and lodging of a kind, and that was all that mattered. It was hardly dark before we were asleep.
The cowboy wakened us with the first light, and insect-bitten, with raw skin and feet bandaged in our shoes, we set out on the last miles of the long trudge with the towers of Zaragoza, strangely Muscovite at that distance, finally jutting out of the horizon. Slowly the last of the hamlets fell behind and shrank in the distance. In their isolation they had remained part of the Spain of the past, dignified in their poverty and uneasy with progress. But as we had found, they were full of style, and we saw them as the successful human furniture of these sun-drenched plains backed by the distant sierras.
CHAPTER 4
OLD SPAIN WAS A COUNTRY of white cities, but Zaragoza’s outline was dark. For five days we had drawn the purest of air into our lungs, but even with three miles to go before we faced its suburbs we sniffed a sharp industrial scent. There was something about the intertwining syllables of this city’s name that Eugene found oriental. And by what manoeuvre, we asked ourselves, could it be in this time of national crisis that the only travellers to the capital by train would be those boarding in Zaragoza?
We were now faced with a new experience, for this was one of Spain’s leading industrial towns, priding itself in a modernity of outlook and style not to be outclassed anywhere in the country. We reached the first of the suburbs by the early afternoon, and were shortly passing the first of its many factories. We had walked a hundred-odd miles through landscapes scented by pastures, rivers, and even mists. Zaragoza, we were to decide, smelt of electricity.
We had been warned that we would find the town expensive and therefore set out to choose our lodgings with caution. By this time we had learned, too, that cheap accommodation was to be found on the outskirts of most Spanish towns—the furthest out from the centre being the cheapest—and here we contracted ourselves for a single night in the first hotel to come into sight. What was unusual about this particular hotel was that it did business under four different names: the Granadina, Oriente, Pilar and La Perla. It was Granadina over the door, Oriente on the form the porter handed me to fill in, the notices in the rooms referred to it as El Pilar, and the luncheon menu bore the name La Perla, while the crockery in use in the evening meal carried yet another name.
The Hotel Granadina bore evidence of having once been fashionable, but never was the approach of dissolution more evident. A whiff of change and decay lingered in all the public rooms. Chipped spittoons alternated with drooping palms along untrodden corridors. Our only fellow diner was a priest whose leanness, deeply melancholic eyes and choice of hotel marked him out as unsuccessful in his calling.
Zaragoza was a communist stronghold, which possibly was justifiable since I could not remember ever visiting a town in which poverty presented itself in so stark a contrast with wealth. The number of Rolls-Royces in its streets could only have been exceeded by those in the West End of London. The poor were engaged in such operations as sifting through rubbish bins and dumps, and in the worst possible cases even guarding the sewer mouths for the nameless garbage vomited at intervals into the river. Communist propaganda posters were abundantly on display.
Being a Party member Eugene considered it something of a duty to pay a call at the headquarters of the class struggle in such a politically-minded city, and we obtained the necessary address from the first person we stopped in the street and went there without delay. We were received by a charming lady secretary dressed in a garment suggesting a compromise between fashion and politics, and having registered his presence in the city Eugene took me aside to raise a question. Surely, he suggested, the moment had arrived for me to sign the book? I felt obliged to explain that I was not religious.
‘Nor am I,’ he said. ‘Religion has nothing to do with this.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ I told him.
I had discovered that the leaders of the faithful here called themselves ‘rasouls’. It was an Arabic word that had somehow survived in modern Spanish, meaning in Arabic ‘disciples’, although now translated as ‘communists’.
I left Eugene at the Communist Party headquarters and went back to the hotel. When he returned it was with the exciting news that an armoured train would leave for Madrid at midday on the next day, and that he had been able to buy tickets. What, I asked, did he suppose was an armoured train? He replied that they had made some reference to the fact that it carried troops with heavy machine-guns, to defend the train if it came under attack.
At headquarters, Eugene had been allowed to attend a meeting in which the likelihood of an armed insurrection was considered, the general expectation being that this would take place in a matter of days. It had been reported from Madrid that minor skirmishing between communist shock troops and a company of the new Assault Guards had occurred in the outer suburbs of the city. We congratulated each other on what we saw as the huge stroke of luck by which we had arrived in Zaragoza at this moment in history.
In search of occupation to fill the rest of the day we were staggered to learn that the city was in the grip of a purity campaign, and no sooner had we appeared again in the street than we were encircled by young Leaguers of the Pure Lily who tried to pin flags on our shirts and to explain how best to keep ourselves unsullied by the world. A film company had been drawn into this and had issued a leaflet announcing a programme of films of a devotional character. Zaragoza had been spoken of by an American in San Sebastián as a place where they danced in the streets at night, but all this had come to an end, for part of the Leaguers’ campaign included a drive to get people early to bed and early to rise.
In the old days many cafés in Zaragoza gave concerts based on such beloved folk music as the native rondalla of Aragon. This, the Pure Lily Leaguers criticised as not only worldly, but out of date. On the whole the Leaguers appeared to distrust art in all its forms, and only religious chanting in sessions held for this purpose was regarded as wholly acceptable. Nevertheless ‘Hot Rhythm’, having recently penetrated the cities of Spain, was tolerated if not approved, being seen merely as a passing fad and offering no threat to religious zeal.
The paseo still functioned, although the version permitted in Zaragoza kept the sexes apart, and phalanxes of frigid-faced girls marched up and down the promenade, a few carrying Leaguers’ flags, and all stolidly indifferent to the usual compliments and solicitations of the soldiers of the town’s garrison. We arrived on this scene at about 8 p.m., just as the girls marched off. With this, the paseo had disinte
grated, leaving a residue of frustrated young males to be pestered by boys hired by a pharmaceutical firm as salesmen for a remedy for impotence.
Next morning came the news that, through some muddle over the termination or not of the State of Alarm, the train for Madrid, originally scheduled for three in the afternoon, would not now be leaving until the morning of the next day. With this, quite suddenly, the mood in Zaragoza changed. Plans of all kinds were thrown into disarray, as illustrated by the case of the Granadina hotel whose sad and sallow rooms had been empty for weeks but were now suddenly filled in a single day. Chaos, we were to discover, was caused not only by the delay in the train’s departure, but the arrival of large numbers of would-be travellers pouring in from the countryside and determined at all costs to escape the monotony of their existence during the Alarm.
Many had been travelling down the roads all through the night, and we were to discover that not only was the station waiting room crammed to the doors but luggage had been piled everywhere on the platforms themselves. We asked a railwayman how all these people and their possessions could be packed into a single train, and his reply was, ‘Don’t you worry, sir, we’ll cram them in somehow. It’s a big train as they go.’
It was a situation that left us with a free day. We decided to devote it to a health-giving walk out of town, to be followed by a swim in the river if we could manage to reach any part that was free from pollution.
To avoid having to traverse the rubbish dumps, we crossed the bridge before starting on our walk, finding ourselves in a matter of a few hundred yards in what might have been another continent. We had read somewhere of the beautiful wilderness across the river and it was immediately clear that this had been colonised by gypsies, of whom a hundred or so came into view. Spain, as we were soon to confirm, was probably the one country where this mysterious race had guarded its isolation. Here a considerable group had occupied a gently sloping bank down to the river.