Tomb in Seville

by Norman Lewis

  CHAPTER 9

  THE COUNTRY WALK RECOMMENDED at the hospital had to be put off for a few days, for despite what was generally accepted as the collapse of the revolt, normal life had not been restored. An hour’s stroll in the central streets of the capital was still likely to be disturbed by the sound of distant shots. A suicide squad held out for most of a morning in the working-class suburb of Tetuan. A car rammed into a police station after the driver had leapt to safety and the house of a leading right-wing politician was set on fire.

  In discussing the matter of a therapeutic walk the people at the hospital suggested the Toledo road, which in view of the fact that the State of Alarm was still in force was presumed to be clear of its normal volume of traffic. Taxis were not included in restrictions on travel so we hired one to take us to an area recommended for its scenery. Once there, we walked for a hundred yards or so, followed in my case by a short rest in the taxi before recommencing the walk.

  The walk turned out to be of great interest and provided an opportunity to analyse that sense of the fantastic which the Spanish landscape seldom failed to produce.

  I came to the conclusion that this visual effect originates partly in the dryness of the air which leaves the remotest corners of the plains unsoftened by distance, and in its turn produces an almost eerie feeling of proximity with the very limits of vision. With this went a kind of suppression of irrelevant detail, a directness and evenness of colouring, and something of a stylisation of light and shade in the manner of a travel poster. The hollows and hillocks, and the rare line of poplars, appeared to arrange themselves in rhythmic patterns. The fields reeled away in all directions, forming immaculate designs in pale gold and silver. Summer had long since withered away in a single week, and the sun glittered with chilly brilliance in the dark blue sky.

  By turning through a complete circle one could observe every form of agricultural and pastoral activity. In one corner the plains were being ploughed and sown, in another they were winnowing the grain, and in a vineyard they gathered the last of the grapes. Knowing nothing of the southern European agricultural routine, these juxtapositions struck me with surprise.

  Villages lay in depressions showing only their rooftops, or capped wide hummocks of grass. They were clean-cut and self-contained, like models in relief maps. Oases of trees marked the spots where there were wells. Each clump concealed a waterwheel where a blindfolded mule turned in circles from morning to night. A herd of black sheep passed across the foreground. My impression was that I could almost have hit one of them with a stone. Yet the illusory distances of Spain had reduced them almost to the size of insects.

  A dozen short walks spaced out by lifts in the taxi brought us within sight of the outskirts of Madrid. It looked like an avalanche of sparkling debris that had fallen on the edge of the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, stretching across the northern horizon.

  That evening we crossed the bridge leading into the city. Pickets of soldiers with fixed bayonets were stopping and searching all vehicles. A week before the outbreak of the revolt a shipload of the latest American cars had arrived in the capital; a half-mile further on we saw the remains of one of these which had fallen into revolutionary hands and been reduced to a smoking ruin in the middle of the road.

  Although some restrictions upon travel remained, Madrid had now reached the end of the official State of Alarm. It was at this time that outbreaks of what might have been seen as neurotic behaviour among the general public became noticeable. This was perhaps to be expected after a situation in which many Madrileños had lived under constant fire for up to five days.

  Most extraordinary of these strange temporary phenomena was a sudden mania for drinking animals’ blood. This was reported within days of the guns falling silent when queues, comprised almost entirely of middle-class women, gathered at the slaughterhouses every morning carrying receptacles such as bottles and mugs. After selecting an animal whose apparent vitality impressed them, these ladies stood by while it was killed then caught the blood as it spurted from the severed veins and gulped it down on the spot. ABC reported that ladies unwilling to risk endangering their social status by joining the blood-drinking queue in person sent a deputy, but the paper pointed out that expert opinion in this matter had warned that the loss of the blood’s natural heat would cancel out much of the beneficial effect. We were compelled to confirm by a visit to a slaughterhouse that we were not the victims of rumour, but got no further than the building’s gates before we were deterred by a woman on her way out, made terrible by the smile painted by the blood on her lips.

  The times, it was clear, were changing and with this grew a fear, in the cities, and especially in Madrid, that time-honoured aspects of Spanish national life were under threat. We were warned by friends made in the last few days of crisis that even bullfighting was now at risk through the closure of the old Plaza de Toros which was to follow a final bullfight. Whether or not closure was inevitable, people were determined to see to it that its end was in every way to be remembered. All the minor complications of normal bullfighting were to be swept aside for this grand occasion, and a single torero, generally accepted to be the finest horse rider in the land, was offering a unique performance. He would kill no less than eight bulls, using not a sword but a short lance known as a rejón which was thrust into the heart. From beginning to end he was to remain in the saddle. Neither rider nor horse would be protected by padding. There would be no team on foot to aid him in any way. The rejoneador was to be Don Antonio Cañero, whose adventurous personality was only equalled by his prowess on horseback, earning him the title of Noble Horseman of Spain.

  In its last moments the old ring was packed as never before, largely with a family audience of people of the district with three adults squeezed into a space intended for two, while children were gathered up into parental laps. The ring dated from the beginning of the nineteenth century, before such architecture had suffered elsewhere in Spain from some degeneration, when excesses of money in circulation seemed to have blunted the criteria of taste. In describing the new arena, the newspapers criticised the coldness in the colour of the stone employed by comparison with the comfortable warmth of that used in the old building. One critic considered that the principal aim of those responsible for the new plaza had been to cram as many aficionados into it as humanly possible, and no more than that.

  Don Antonio Cañero started off with a characteristic display of horsemanship. He rode a pearly grey Arab whose quality was unmistakable even to the lay eye. Circling the centre of the ring this magnificent horse was first induced to perform a series of bounds with its body almost vertical to the floor of the ring and the hooves of its hind legs possibly a foot clear of the ground. This was followed by a circus performance of delicate sidestepping round the ring in acknowledgment of the almost hysterical plaudits of the crowd.

  The first bull entered the ring and Don Antonio changed the Arab for another less showy horse, took a pair of beribboned banderillas in his right hand and trotted his horse in front and within feet of the bull. It instantly charged. Its short twinkling legs carried it forward like a battering ram. There was no movement whatever in the head or body. This was a clean unswerving attack with enough weight behind it to demolish a brick wall.

  Don Antonio spurred up to the gallop and described a perfect arc, judging the distance so as just to miss the horns, leaning over in the saddle to plant the banderillas in the bull’s shoulder muscles as it tore past. Feeling the barbs, the bull leapt into the air, tried to turn too quickly, slipped and rolled over in the sand. Everyone laughed. There were banderillas hanging from the bull’s back now. Blood trickled slowly down the shafts, staining the ribbons and dripping on the sand. With a great convulsion it shook two of them loose. The rejón that followed was evidently not thrust deep enough to pierce the heart. There had to be a second and yet a third attempt. The third time Don Antonio was just a fraction of a second out with his timing. As he stabbed down the bull’s horns
caught the horse’s groin and opened up a sagging foot-long gash. Having failed to kill with three thrusts of the rejón, etiquette now compelled him to take the matador’s muleta and sword and finish off the job on foot.

  This was easier said than done. Don Antonio’s forte was obviously horsemanship. It was evident from his overemphasised gestures that he was not happy as a matador. Moreover, facing a bull that has previously had half its neck muscles torn from their anchorage by the proddings of the picador, is one thing, and this is what happens in an ordinary bullfight. But a bull that has not been successfully crippled but most successfully enraged is another, and once again there was a swift splattering of hooves as it made its annihilating charge. Don Antonio lifted the scarlet square of the muleta in a paso do alto to induce the bull to charge through under his right arm, but this was an animal that failed to conform to the rules of the sport. Catching the matador full in the thighs it lifted him high into the air straddled on its horns. For a moment he was held with arms outstretched in an attitude of crucifixion, and then dashed to the ground. With its legs firmly planted apart and lashing the air with its tail, the bull twisted its head, goring the inanimate form. A few minutes later the attendants carrying Don Antonio came stumbling past us along the barrera. It was given out that he was dead.

  The rest of the entertainment passed off without a hitch. The seven remaining bulls were successfully reduced, by more or less scientific methods, to shambling impotence and then despatched by regular matadors kept in readiness for such an emergency, three sword-thrusts being necessary on average to finish off each animal.

  Seven repetitions of the same ritual transformed revulsion into tedium. The skilful pass of the cloak by which the bull’s strength is worn down is the most attractive part of the business to the average outsider. But this has no great appeal for the expert crowd. They are impatient of this kind of thing. It exasperates them if the matador plays the bull too long before giving it the death thrust. In both Eugene’s and my cases revulsion reigned supreme, and when in the following years I have been invited by Spanish friends to join them in their appreciation of such spectacles, I have always been ready with an excuse for avoiding them.

  CHAPTER 10

  WITH THE END OF THE official State of Alarm, it was time at last to make what arrangements we could for the continuation of our much delayed pilgrimage to Seville. Train travel between the capital and most destinations was still difficult, but a number of long-distance buses were already on the road, many of them presumably going in a southern direction, and we were recommended to choose one of these. To our surprise, however, no direct route to the south had been opened and the first stages of a journey to Seville would carry the traveller some seventy miles in a north-westerly direction to Salamanca, from which more or less direct routes to the south had, so they said, been opened. In a way this turned out to be no bad thing, although we were warned that the quality of these indirect approaches to the south left something to be desired in the way of comfort—and even security.

  The bus that went to Salamanca at half past seven in the morning seemed at first sight a foolhardy sort of vehicle to travel in. It was an ancient though massive Leyland six-wheeler that, even though parked upon what appeared a perfectly level road leaned slightly to one side as we inspected it. There were whole areas of painted-over hammer marks on the wings and the body where the ravages left by minor collisions had been straightened out. Worst of all six tyres were down to the canvas. Several women passengers who were in mourning crossed themselves before getting aboard, but this being a custom in Catholic countries, it had no special significance.

  At the last moment before starting the driver and an official of the bus company had an argument about the tyres. In the end two new ones were hastily put on the back wheels, leaving only four on the point of bursting. The driver, pointing out that he would have to drive at fifty miles an hour most of the way to reach Salamanca in scheduled time, said that he would have felt happier with the new tyres at the front. The company man regretted that they could not see their way to accommodate him in this. In their opinion the front tyres, having less weight to carry than the back, were good for another two hundred miles, or even three hundred with luck. They compromised by having two modestly worn tyres slung up on top of the bus, which, it was agreed, were only to be used in case of a burst.

  In the course of this debate, allusion was made to big losses that had to be considered. Every now and again they lost a bus. This was obvious later from the sight of charred wreckage at the bottom of ravines or piled up against the big rocks at the sides of the road. There was a notice telling you how much you could claim in case of loss sustained by accident. The sums promised were not large. Somewhere about five or six pounds in most cases. Our trip to Salamanca seemed at this point a bit of an adventure, but it turned out to be a rewarding one, for we were to experience places and people of the kind that we had no idea could exist in the remotest areas of Europe, let alone Spain.

  The Sierra de Guadarrama, which had to be crossed, proved in a way to be the most spectacular mountain range either of us had ever seen. This was largely due to the sensation evoked of total isolation. It had escaped human invasion to remain a region of almost total emptiness, with its lower slopes covered with a jumble of coloured rocks. Our exhaust thundered and rumbled as we hustled through narrow, rocky valleys, dislodging flocks of jackdaws and doves from the trees like alternating avalanches of soot and snow. Falcons, buzzards and even eagles had possession of almost every telegraph pole. Some eagles made a motion at our approach as if to launch themselves into the air, but by the time a decision had been reached it was too late; we were past and, folding their wings, they settled down again to the waiting game. A flock of some fifty pigmy deer divided to canter through the valley with us, on each side of the bus. Happily the driver was an ardent admirer of nature. Although he had done these trips almost every day for years, he was still under the spell of the mountains and sometimes shot out an arm to indicate scenes whose grandeur had never palled upon him.

  More remarkably perhaps, he was extremely critical of the occasional invasion of modern times. For already the city was reaching out its tentacles towards the mountains, befouling their skirts with ribbon building. Here and there chalets and hispano-mauresque villas strove to combine feudal aloofness with modern accessibility by being built on the summits of many of the less precipitous eminences. Once in a while a soap advertisement painted in tar appeared on a boulder, and the first of the roadhouses had tidied away the wildness of its chosen spot.

  Salamanca, most splendid of Spanish cities, awaited us, the great red towers of its universities, cathedrals, colleges and convents leaning against the sky. Its doctors, deacons and professors bustled through the streets, and it boasted the nation’s most dignified prostitutes, composing poetry and peering hopefully through the windows of the Gran Café damaged regretfully in the revolt and as yet not wholly rectified.

  This, as it happened, was market day, when the normal ease and tranquillity of the town is a little disturbed by the presence of country folk who crowd in to dispose of their produce and enjoy, even at a distance, the relaxations and entertainments of city life. In doing so they provided an unusual tourist attraction, for many of them were from the most backward and poverty-stricken area of the whole country and were even beginning, on these grounds, to make an appearance as curiosities in the brochures distributed by the local Patronato de Turismo.

  Articles had appeared in the press voicing the opinion that some of the strange country folk inhabiting the roadless undeveloped areas of the east of the city could be the descendants of such prehistoric tribes as the Visigoths, and on learning that Grunwald, the German in charge of the Patronato de Turismo, happened to be an anthropologist, we called there to hear his views on this matter.

  ‘These people,’ said Grunwald, ‘are just peasants living under impossible conditions in such places as Las Hurdes where things are as bad as they can be
, and the land so poor that nothing grows on it. Whatever they may tell you here they suffer from semi-starvation. They’re out of reach of medical aid and, of course, of education. The tourists who are taken to see them are told to bring leftovers of food along and they feed them like animals. The primitives, as they’re called, are told to make funny faces to go with their thanks. It’s easy to talk about Vandals and Visigoths and that’s all part of the tourist attraction. They fixed up a tour, “See the Wild Men of the Woods. Snack lunch included—100 pesetas.”

  ‘For these people,’ Grunwald said, ‘Salamanca on market day is heaven. They stand in line to grab meat ordered by the inspectors to be given to the dogs, and the outer leaves of the cabbages. There’s a character here they call El Panadero—the Baker—because he collects all the stale bread and carries a sackful of it back to be shared among his friends. He’s the one whose picture appeared on the cover of El Tiempo when they called him “Our Prehistoric Man”. If you’d like to make his acquaintance I’ll send for him. He’s happy to be taken notice of, but you won’t understand whatever he has to say.’

  Grunwald sent an employee to find El Panadero, who returned with him in a matter of minutes. He was a small man with a wide, flat nose, narrowed eyes and thick lips. Black down covered the lower part of his face. Grunwald had half a loaf in readiness, and taking it El Panadero’s lips seemed to writhe.

  ‘He wants to smile like we do,’ Grunwald said, ‘but he can’t.’

  El Panadero grunted softly, stuffed a crust into his mouth and began to chew. ‘Perhaps that’s the way the Visigoths talked,’ Grunwald said. ‘I’ve tried hard but I can’t understand him. Anyway, he’s a nice man and I like him, and he’s happy. That’s the main thing.’