Life Embitters

by Josep Pla

  Borrow speaks enthusiastically about Sintra – and emphatically. “If there be any place in the world,” he writes in the first chapter of his book, “entitled to the appellation of an enchanted region, it is surely Sintra: Tivoli is a beautiful and picturesque place but it quickly fades from the mind of those who have seen the Portuguese Paradise.”

  This is merely Mr Borrow’s personal opinion, and it is understandable given tendencies in matters of taste at the time. It is a comparison that has no objective basis in reality.

  By Sintra he means the whole area: the city, the palace – the Pena castle – the buildings, woods, and Moorish ruins … “Nothing is more sullen and uninviting than the south-western aspect of the stony wall, which, on the side of Lisbon, seems to shield Sintra from the eye of the world, but on the other side is a mingled scene of fairy beauty, artificial elegance, savage grandeur, domes, turrets, enormous trees, flowers, and waterfalls, such as is met with nowhere else beneath the sun.”

  Borrow’s description is rather superficial and stagey, but the final list has a serious tone, and is a broad brushstroke that really fits Sintra.

  Set on a lofty peak, surrounded by a wild garden with wonderful foliage, the castle of Pena is hugely theatrical. However, it’s not at all significant architecturally. It is simply an accumulation, I’d almost say a heap of different building styles from mudéjar to modernista, and done quite gracelessly. That’s to say, Pena has suffered the worst that can happen to a piece of architecture: a process of one restoration being superimposed on another. This stylistic chaos is, nonetheless, saved by the veneer of the place and its historical importance, because it holds within it the history of the Portuguese monarchy in miniature. It isn’t a building like El Escorial or Versailles, constructed all of a sudden, in the course of a reign and according to the taste of one prince, but is a building elaborated over time that reflects different tendencies.

  From the parade square, through the empty almond of a semi-arch, you survey a stunning landscape. In the foreground the tops and foliage of ancient trees drift across a large expanse of terrain. Seen from above, this thick woodland, in autumn the color of burnt gold, with vinegar, sulfur, and cinnamon-hued tints, spreads out like a sumptuous carpet. Beyond that, over sloping land, are cultivated fields, green in spring, flaxen in summer, ocher and reddish now. And beyond that, the gray, immense Atlantic.

  In Sintra you lose touch with your intellect: everything is pure, thrilling sensual bliss. It is a shadowy, recondite mirage, an ecstatic atmosphere of vegetation perpetually dissolving into trickles of green, moist softness, incandescent moss, liquid yolks, iridescent molds, glittering cobwebs, slimy dead leaves, green insects and gleaming black beetles. Sintra is an alkaloid, not a naïve picturesque romanticism, of the most morbid literary kind. Against the sickly backdrop of decomposing greens, the castle is a relic of Walter Scott as in a yellowing print.

  When the Republic was established in Portugal, Sintra went into decline. It was a royal residence, and the new institutions preferred to locate themselves in sunnier, more open terrain. The regime kept a guard in Sintra. When I reached the front of the castle, the studded door was opened by a poorly dressed, ten- or twelve-year-old girl, the daughter – she later told me – of the man keeping guard in Pena. This girl showed me the castle and its gardens. A remarkable guide. I recorded her name in my diary: Lucília Trindade Martins. The visit proceeded like this: she went in front and I followed. As we walked, she’d sometimes turn her head and look at me with her large, still dark eyes, her small snub nose, a tiny black freckle under her pale cheek, a dimple on her cheek … and a minute later she’d start walking again. As she turned round, she smiled. In my lifetime I’ve come across an infinite number of guides. The dark-haired, pallid, petite Lucília of Sintra is the only one whose memory remains distinct.

  Silently following her footsteps I wandered at length through the halls of the great castle. Most of the rooms are full of memories of the last kings who were murdered. They seem untouched and shot through with the grim melancholy prompted by what is trite and dismal. The big surprise of my visit is the bad taste of the most recent kings. It is even shocking. Magnificent tables, next to a fine painting, are strewn with countless items of no value at all, cheap baubles. On a bedside table, next to a three peseta alarm clock is a cameo or a most beautiful miniature. Next to a genuine Saxony vase, a beer mug from Munich, the last word in Teutonic trash. And when I ask Lucília to show me the books and library, she shrugs her shoulders in bewilderment. There is not a single book in the castle. Only the odd photograph album or sports magazine – some of the very first – on tables and a yellowing copy of the Parisian L’Éclair.

  After roaming through the castle rooms, we paid the gardens a visit. Black swans with bright orange beaks swam over tremulous water, full of the ponds’ green plants and dead leaves. We walked under brown trees, along undulating paths, between rustling leaves, smelling the scent from the dense, shadowy woods, the vista under the spell of moist, golden air. Lucília always walked in front; she occasionally turned round and smiled a pleasant, vaguely sad smile.

  We said goodbye by the tall gate, wrought iron in the shape of slender spears – wrought iron from Versailles – that enclosed the garden. The royal crown sits atop the gate. When she received her tip, Lucília bowed and flashed her eyes. Then, as the taxi prepared to drive off, I saw her struggling to shut the great wrought iron gate. She walked off, then suddenly turned around and I saw her dark eyes, her little nose, and delightfully messy hair for the last time. She waved her hand and disappeared. Lucília, Lucília, what path did your life follow? Are you still of this world? Or did you die away, and do you wander now through a castle of dreams in the other world as you wandered through Sintra castle?

  With the Sun on Your Back

  The Côte d’Azur has its friends and its foes. Countless people in England, France, and northern Europe dream of settling down along this coast. Quite a number of celebrities live there. However, there are also those who don’t like the place, who prefer Biarritz, Normandy, or Brittany. If I may be allowed to voice an opinion on such an important issue, I would say I occupy the middle ground.

  You become nostalgic for the Mediterranean. Once you have tasted its poor, spare ribbon of coast, it’s hard to forget. It is a sea that seems purpose-built for contemplation – a sea tailor-made for humans. It is a sea that doesn’t disturb or arouse the monsters of the imagination, but rather lulls them to sleep with its drowsy presence.

  When you have lived four or five years in northern Europe without a break, a moment comes when you want to come back to life, to see your body’s shadow once again, to feel a gentle breeze on your skin and the sun caress your flesh. When you are in that state of mind a trip to the Côte d’Azur seems a pleasant prospect. If you want to appreciate this stretch of country, you must come out of necessity, not on holidays, whether paid or not.

  The Côte d’Azur makes a huge impact if you come from northern Europe. If you come from our country, I think it’s much less. I have realized by now that everything in this world is relative, especially the consequences of human geography. Apparently nothing could be more set in stone than the south and the north. In practice, nevertheless, it is much harder to draw out precise consequences about the nature of things and people simply from their geographical location! For a Swede from Stockholm, a Swede from Malmö is very similar to how a Parisian sees someone from Marseille, a Milanese, a Neapolitan or a Sicilian, a Scotsman, a Londoner or a Welshman, a Barcelonan, someone from Malaga or Seville. Northerners, so they say, are hardworking, persistent, positive, and practical, have a sense of humor, aren’t flowery and go straight to the point. And southerners are quite the opposite: lazy, mercurial, frivolous, verbose, sad, sentimental, and in a daze; they spend the day playing the guitar. But when we speak in this fashion, which north and which south do we mean? Do we speak about them inasmuch as these terms are geographical absolutes or suggest national relativities?
For if we affirm that they play the mandolin too much in Malmö, speak in a singsong manner, and are very easy-going, where does the south really begin? In this case, what level of picturesque, musical life must we lead who are really geographically in the south?

  Yes, all this is so obvious. No matter, I will repeat what I was saying: the Côte d’Azur makes a huge impact if you come from the north, when you can feel physically that you are landing in a southern country: a southerliness that hits you in your eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. When you come from a country like ours that is even further south, the impact isn’t so striking, it feels different, even though you appreciate the country for other reasons that remain worthy of consideration.

  This first discrepancy is evident in Marseille. When a visitor from the north reaches Marseille he thinks he has arrived in a land of milk and honey. It is a disorderly, chaotic mess. I have never been able to see Marseille like that. I’ve always thought the city showed remarkable tenacity. Have you seen Marseille from the sea? – a gray earthy stew of a city against a backdrop of bare, inhospitable, chalky mountains. The horrible, completely charmless landscape around Marseille brings out its authentic character, points to the city’s wealth of energy.

  The countryside around Marseille is so nondescript. Those elephantine-backed mountains, covered in scrub and gorse, are repulsive and dull. They constitute an enormous blot on the delightful, diverse landscape of Provence. But a moment comes, traveling towards Toulon, when Provence resurfaces. This valley of vineyards and olive groves belongs to Cassis. Cassis today is universally renowned. It is a small town of fishermen and country folk with no special features – like so many in France! It has a small delightful port where one or two yachts are always moored. It has a wonderful little restaurant where one eats in a civilized fashion. There is a stretch of level ground, protected from the wind, shaded by plane trees that the sun reaches in the winter, where boxing matches are staged. What a wonderful way to spend the early evening! And the surrounding country crisscrossed by rural paths and dry streambeds, red roofs under foliage, and wonderfully well-kept gardens. Cézanne country.

  Bandol and Sanary are towns very similar to Cassis: small sleepy ports in front of a valley. They are small valleys enclosed by hills that trace gentle, graceful lines across the sky. Vines are the main crop, agave grows along the borders, branches of old fig trees sway sensually in the air, olive trees flash myriad silvery smiles, carob trees dot the land, the waves’ whitecaps glint, shimmer, and dazzle beyond the sleepy pines, lulled by their deep music. It is a heavy, sumptuous, mature landscape with a dense leaven, despite the light touch brought by human hands. Coming from the north, where everything seems vaporized and liquid, it is a landscape with a terrestrial presence. What most strikes you is the ease with which the different forms of life express themselves in the presence of such an ancient, such a young sea. A pine branch, the incline of a hill, the flight of a thrush or starling, the trunk of a fig tree possess a keen desire to find almost impertinent, concrete expression. Their plasticity, life’s urge to become form, their passion to exist, is like a ingenuous form of exhibitionism, showing off in ways that can be wise and profound yet surly, adolescent, and unnerving. Provence’s astonishing landscape hungers, yearns for plasticity! Our landscape is more delicate, more Gothic, and more flirtatious; it never attains this distilled, exuberant ripeness.

  Hyères is a most elegant town with a large number of huge eucalyptus trees that are hundreds of years old. Such amazing trees! Nevertheless, its entangled plant life, like a good part of the city’s architecture from the heyday of the bourgeoisie, is rather out-of-fashion.

  The best policy in Hyères is to abandon the direct Marseille-Nice route – that goes inland, via Draguignan – and go to L’Esterel at the leisurely pace allowed by the local rail line.

  L’Esterel, also known as the Coast of the Moors, is wild, mountainous terrain, crossed by very few roads, with a solitary coast of middling high, reddish cliffs that cradles the charming small town of Saint-Tropez in one of its curves. It is a country of cork oaks with the pale grayness these trees bring. The resemblance to our Les Gavarres range is striking. It is a remote, sparsely populated area, like Les Gavarres, crisscrossed by deep ravines with a wintry, very twilight existence. In the summer, it is a land of cicadas that sing furiously in the heat of the dry, bitter cork-oak groves.

  L’Esterel isn’t the Côte d’Azur. The coast has left Provence, it is lighter, airier country, and that’s why its name is so well chosen. The Coast of the Moors is reddish rather than blue, and its granite cliffs aren’t gray or its basalt deep brown: these cliffs are a warm, fiery deep ocher. There is another difference: on the Côte d’Azur, the mountains provide a backdrop; in L’Esterel the mountains plunge precipitously down to the sea, occupy the frontline. The villages must hide in small coves.

  The usual means of transport is the narrow gauge railway, a provincial operation that winds through valleys and mountains gasping like a dolphin and whistling to give you goose bumps. It has a vague, agreeable timetable. One of the most noteworthy and curious features of the line are the splendid, large hats worn by the station masters. The journey from Hyères to Saint-Tropez is inordinately long. You watch the trains make all manner of maneuvers and as the time spent there accumulates, your affection for those white hats increases.

  It is a wonderful railway: the best of feelings – of sociability – are nurtured in its small carriages with upholstery that is now beginning to look threadbare; conversations spring up, friends are made, and you learn strange things about the places you are passing through. This rather shabby means of transport carries a kind of traveler that has completely vanished from the big railway network. Apart from the fact that if there is some sort of disaster, it is never on such a grand scale! Whenever I go to Saint-Tropez, I never fail to visit the friends this railway has so generously given me. We uncork a good bottle of local wine and are genuinely happy to meet up again. I don’t think a form of travel exists in Europe today that can offer such boons.

  The line doesn’t always follow the coast. Sometimes it has a stroke of genius and impetuously takes the shortest route across the peninsula. It follows an almost straight line from Hyères to Le Lavandou, and when it reaches Cavalaire bids farewell to the sea and heads inland, leaving the Saint-Tropez peninsula grievously incommunicado. Almost the entire journey is through deserted territory, with very few villages, to the extent that you sometimes think you aren’t in France. The coast is as empty as the hinterland, if not more so: you feel you have moved to an isolated corner of the Mediterranean. Well, in my view, the most intense expanses of sea are the most empty, the most deserted.

  The first time I went to Saint-Tropez I did think it was a faraway place. A walled town with ancient dark stone that took on a coppery hue at dusk. Mounted in an old mansion with huge rooms, my hotel looked over the mirror of the small port. An anachronistic hotel: a table d’hôte with petulant, fussy commercial travelers as in Stendhal’s times. From the balcony I could see a small ketch anchored by the breakwater and the flickering reddish glow of its harbor light, I imagined it was Guy de Maupassant’s Bel Ami. In the pearly light of dawn, the town’s old houses and blackened walls were reflected in the pale pink, celluloid waters. Two or three small coastal packets, with light, airy rigging, bobbed like toys. On the other side of the gulf, beyond the glistening green pine groves, the white walls of Saint-Maxime floated and shimmered above a white sea.

  Life was quiet and tranquil, with no nasty surprises. The port was reasonably active. The harbor master caulked boats and boiled a pot of tar that perfumed the air. A labyrinth of bare narrow streets hustled and bustled within the walls and it seemed Italian from our latitudes, rather than French. On these hot, sticky streets you sometimes caught a glimpse of a girl with a complexion the color of potato purée and dark, dilated eyes. The quay was overlooked by the statue of Admiral Suffren, the famous mariner from Provence (a local), from the era of Louis XV. It is
a remarkable bronze work, with a veneer of verdigris, grandiose, emphatic but empty, as if styled by a swanky hairdresser. Statues seem to create zones of silence. That statue, which was so demonstrative, deepened the silence in Saint-Tropez. A sparrow sometimes perched on its stentorian hat and left a derisory dropping. The small church bell chimed. The train whistled shrilly. The crickets’ frenzied cries from the cork-oak groves to the south drifted faintly on the summer air. Everything was silent and remote: oblivion.

  The small Saint-Tropez local train comes to an end in Saint-Raphaël where you rejoin the general transport network. You reach Antibes in a numbered seat on a grand express.

  The origins of tourism on the Côte d’Azur are to be found in Hyères and Cannes. Their urban splendor is the creation of doctors. At a given moment, the medical powers-that-be decided that the most suitable climate for tuberculosis patients was a maritime one. They in fact prescribed Cannes, Hyères … There wasn’t a wealthy tuberculosis patient on the continent (Russia still included) who didn’t heed that prescription throughout the second half of the last century and the first years of this. People thought eucalyptus trees killed microbes, so large numbers were planted. If one day you feel curious and visit the cemeteries in these towns, etched on marble pantheons, amid a splendid array of symbolic bronze and stone the passage of time has dimmed, you will see the most prestigious names of the European nobility and bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. And so many tombs of young people! That was how the first stone came to be laid on the Côte d’Azur.

  Then doctors changed their criteria. The most suitable climate for tuberculosis patients was no longer by the seaside. They now prescribed high mountains: Davos, Saint-Moritz, and Zermatt, which made much more sense, as far as you could make out. This discovery was a setback for this area, but by the time the re-routing took place, the Côte d’Azur was by and large constructed.