To the east of Granada lies the province of Murcia, and to the south-east is Almería. The last consists of wide stretches, miles and miles of them, of depopulated country. The region is one of painful and dilatory train journeys that wind away from their destination towards distant junctions and then coil back. All journeys take all day. (Once outside of big cities like Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, and Seville, once one is lost somewhere in the provinces, one is generally obliged to be awakened at three or four in the morning in order to catch the rápido. That night scene in the commercial fonda of small Spanish towns is always terrible and inevitable. The station will lie two miles outside the town, a shattered old brake will meet the trains. The night porter, who has been coughing and spitting half the night at the door, goes round banging and shouting at the bedroom doors, waking up the wretched passengers. If one happens sleepily to wander into the kitchen by mistake, one will see perhaps a cook or two lying fast asleep on the kitchen table, and wearing those peculiar white calico combinations tied with tape at the ankles, while the maid sleeps on some bedding at the bottom of a cupboard. Spanish sleeping is always crowded. At the junction for Plasencia in Extremadura many years ago, I saw two men carrying an iron bedstead into the ticket office. They put the bed together and presently the enormous stationmaster, with a great deal of gold braid on him, slept there in blue and white striped pyjamas which heaved like a marquee under his snores. He was waiting for the sublime moment of his life: the arrival of the night train.) This region can be crossed by the local buses, which are always packed with live-stock and human beings, but life in the small villages will try the stomach of the traveller.
Leaving Granada, the road climbs and falls into the narrow rich valleys that lie between the city and the dry yellow town of Guadix, and though Guadix has its poplars and eucalyptus trees, its maize and its vines, it is on the edge of the desert. The Cathedral dominates the town like a wily old southern landlord, fat, dawdling, and pock-marked. It contains some of Churriguerra’s fantastic ornamentation, that sculpture of emblazoned tripes; it corresponds to the element of ornate presumption and worldly fantasy which is one aspect of the Spanish taste for excess. It is a good thing to indulge this taste by a journey northwards to the town of Lorca, a high place of some rather destitute elegance which is rich in creations of the eighteenth century, and where Churriguerra may be enjoyed in the eight churches of the town. The doorway to the palace of the Guevara family and the enormous staircase within are worth seeing.
But this is a digression from Guadix, where some cave-dweller, hoping for an American cigarette—for they do not value their own pure black tobacco—is asking one to visit the caves. I have already described these caves. The interest of those at Guadix is their bizarre setting opposite the town. One might be looking at the rock islands of the Mexican or Arizona landscape. One is looking at what appear to be a collection of bowler hats made out of rock, or rather of peculiar kettles, for each one has a chimney striking out of the top of it. Each hat or kettle contains a number of caves. On a Sunday here one notices that although the children may be half-naked—which is sensible—in the sun, the young women are well dressed. The “good appearance” is a law. At Guadix the cave-dwellers have been visited by so many motorists now that they are vain of themselves as a curiosity, but they do not molest as much as Italian peasants and children; dignity and self-containment, the restful and smiling indifference of the Spaniards, are their protection. Like the rest of their nation they regard the foreigner as fantastic, abnormal, absurd, a person of the wrong religion and intolerable ideas. Envy and covetousness do not exist. They are shocked by the sight of wealth and the kind of work we have to do in order to get it. The general attitude of the Spaniard, from the cave-dweller to the grandee, to those who point out the beauties of social reform, better health and housing, is possibly polite agreement, but it is generally angry resentment; fundamentally, the attitude is that it is we who live in a spiritual slum which the Spaniards could rescue us from, if they felt the effort worth while—but they do not. In a few years we shall have blown ourselves to pieces or killed ourselves off by a germ warfare, and the survivors will then see the irresistible but unattainable advantage of the Spanish way of life.
At Guadix one looks out upon one of those panoramas of rock and mountain which are the delight of the peninsula. It is a land for the connoisseur of landscape, for in no other European country is there such variety and originality. Here Nature has had vast space, stupendous means, and no restraint of fancy. One might pass a lifetime gazing at the architecture of rock and its strange colouring, especially the colouring of iron, blue steel, violet and ochreous ores, metallic purples, and all the burned, vegetable pigments. These landscapes frighten by their scale and by the suggestion of furrowed age, geological madness, malevolence, and grandeur. One is looking out on a perspective of causeways, going up step by step, for miles at a time to the steeper walls of the horizon, and each step worn into short vertical furrows. The colours, gold, brown, violet, and slate by turns, the aspect that of a wrinkled face, the scale gigantic. One is entering upon those mountains that seem like the coarse, plated hides of the rhinoceros. The sight appals. Once pine forests were here, but now the only pines one sees are a few “trees,” no more than a foot high, planted in the stones of the roadside. Rain is a mere memory. Worse appears if one goes down to Almería by way of Vera. These lumpish mountains open at one point into an enormous amphitheatre, twenty or thirty miles across, perhaps more. Range after range surrounds it until the farthest are a faint ring of tossing flames. One can only say that Nature has died and that only its spectre, geology, remains. It is simply chaos. Ravines are gashed out, sudden pinnacles of rock shoot up five hundred feet into the air; their tops seem to have been twisted by whirlwind, the Ice Age has eaten into their sides, the Great Flood has broken their splitting foundations into gullies. This amphitheatre is the abandoned home of fire and water, for only wind lives there now; the colours are of the rusted knife, the bruised body, the bleached bone. For miles the road follows a watercourse which lies in a deep and ragged ravine, but it is simply a shingle bed with no water in it. There has not been water for years. It is rare to see a human being; and if one does, it will be a man making a fire in the bed, burning, I suppose, the soda plant. Or one will pass the solitary lime-burner.
But an oasis begins after one has dropped over the mountains into the outskirts of Almería. Almería is a hot little seaport cooped into a hole below the coastal range. It has doubled its population since the middle of the last century and has a rich trade abroad with the small Almería grapes, figs, and esparto grass. There is some air of prosperity. The town lies in its heat like a plum soaked in brandy. The thermometer never goes below 60° Fahrenheit in the winter, but it can go up to nearly one hundred in the summer. It is hard to think of Almería now as “the Manchester of Spain”; it was really a counterpart of Algiers, a “pirates’ nest,” and in the time of the Moors—it was conquered a few years before Granada—it was considered greater than Granada, which was called the mere inland granary or farm of the seaport. The Cathedral at Almería looks like a fortress, and was indeed one: it was built to repel the attacks of pirates.
I listened one hot afternoon to the priests droning out their Latin there in their powerful, wonderfully snarling resonant southern voices that establish the authority of the classical tongue by incantation, its hypnotizing and inescapable sense of order, its degeneration into a sort of monotonous groaning of the prayer wheel. The sound puts a spell upon the listener, its rhythms suggest the sessions and durbars of Ashanti, creating the spell of communal rule. To what noise in contemporary life can one compare this endless chanting, which goes on in a vacuum; to the hum of a factory? To the monotonous propaganda poured out on the radio, which no one listens to, not even God? The superiority of the Roman incantation, mechanical, unheeding, torpid, is manifest, and the Spaniards settle to it with all the ease of habit. It is always pleasant to watch a choir or to
see people self-enchanted. It was a hot afternoon; in the pauses, these large, fat, important men yawned, scratched an itching leg, and got through the dawdling routine of the religious vocation. The Spanish priesthood are casual in their devotions and treat ceremony lazily, like a donkey taking them to market; the magic is an everyday affair, and in Spain one feels that is how it should be. I ought to say I have heard brisker performances by men in Castile and indeed was once shown the El Grecos at Illescas by one Sister in white who left her choir and came round singing with me from picture to picture, with sweetness and propriety.
The light that flashes off the Mediterranean is intolerable to the eyes in the morning at Almería. The English used to come out this way from Gibraltar in the nineteenth century, before Málaga became fashionable, and the best hotel in the town has the English Victorian spaciousness and disorder. Its galleries, its pictures, its knotty armchairs have Victorian charm. There are two excellent restaurants in the main street: shellfish, the langouste and langoustine, and mayonnaise and white wine are brought.
The mountains rise steeply out of the town itself. From the top of the Moorish castle one looks down on a flat-roofed city which is Oriental in its greater part; down below the red-wheeled horse-cabs trot. The main street is shaded by the low thick branches of the fristo trees, and under them half the population seems to sit all day and half the night. By day, they sit like flies drowned in syrup, unable to move because of the weight of the sun, unable, almost, to talk. When they do talk, their minds run easily to conceits which, as we have read, also preoccupied the Arab courts.
“Why are there so many police in this town?” I asked a man who was sitting at my table, for I could count nearly twenty in various uniforms within a hundred yards. He turned his head slowly and as slowly turned it back again.
“There are not many police,” he said.
Then a conceit occurred to him: he glittered for a moment in the southern way.
“When you see policemen in the main street, it is because a policeman lives for his uniform. He wants it to be admired. They gather here to enjoy their uniforms. The middle of a town is the policeman’s mirror.”
This fancy exhausted him.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nada.” Or “Nichevo.” The end of a southern conversation: a sudden whizzing journey up to the sky like a rocket, a burst, and then extinction, nothing.
There was a lame lawyer—and Spain is full of anxious, idle lawyers; half the students take law at the universities—standing in the doorway of a postcard shop. A man of forty. He started in a pious, caressing voice to say how he would like to kiss General Franco’s feet for the blessings he had brought. This lawyer had read a great deal, chiefly poetry and the novels of Camus and Sartre: he loathed them for their realism.
“There is going to be a great romantic revival,” he cried out in an exalted, pretty way. “The world is becoming romantic. Pessimism is going. There is joy. Everywhere,” he said. “In the heart,” and he plucked at his breast. “In the spirit,” he said, boring a delicate finger into his ribs. “In the mind,” he said, pinching his eyebrows together with four fingers.
“After twenty years of horror?” I said.
“Because of them. I will give you an example. In the Civil War I was arrested by the Reds and I was put into prison. I was condemned to death. I saw my friends, some of the good people in this town, taken off to be shot. Good—well! I went last year back to the place where we were imprisoned. I went to the very room, the very corner where I used to be. It wasn’t horrible. It was marvellous. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘is where I lay. Here So-and-so died beside me, and from here many were taken out and seen no more.’ And I was happy. I was not sad. I wasn’t happy because I had escaped, but because I lived it all again. I felt ecstasy. That is what the world is feeling now, ecstasy at having lived through these terrible times—exultation, a heroic feeling that one has been chosen. It is romantic. It is poetic. It is strange. It is not like the realism of Cela [a very good young novelist in Madrid] or Sartre.”
A bootblack in the same town who had been a refugee on the road from Málaga when it was bombarded had been, unlike the lawyer, a Red. He said very much the same thing: the horrors were unspeakable, but “the sensation of excitement in the bombardment was pleasing.”
Almería is close enough to the wild region of the Alpujarras to have a number of fantastic stories of the people of those mountains, and indeed Spain has always been a place of dramatic life-stories and strange situations. Where else could a man and his mistress travel down to Granada, in order to find new girls for their string of brothels, with no disguise that this was their business? Where else but in Spain would a distinguished surgeon suddenly renounce his profession and the world, repent not only of his sins but of his scientific knowledge and go about, in religious habits, prescribing herbs for the sick, refusing money, and living like a hermit? Spain produces, as England does, a large number of solitaries; the monasteries and nunneries by no means absorb all the disjointed souls, the unwanted spinsters and incarnate bachelors. There was a tale about two old ladies shut up in the big house of a village outside Almería. They were the daughters of a town clerk and of a family which claimed to be of ancient distinction and wealth. In fact their father’s office is famous in Spanish cities for its corruption. Town clerks make their fortunes. After his death these two ladies found their money dwindling, and when they became very old, it was not enough for them to afford even the small wages of a servant to get them water from the village fountain, for even the big house of a Spanish village will be without running water. They therefore went out very late in the night so as not to be seen, to get the water themselves, and this was the only time they left the house. Illness at last shut one in, and then both. They died of thirst.
I have listened to dozens of tales of family and personal pride, and this story of the daughters of the town clerk does not sound untrue. These life-stories have always some element of human fantasy, extremity, and disorder, such as used to be found in Russian novels. The Civil War produced a crop of miracles where “Communists” were struck dead by the hand of a saint as they went to set fire to an altar, when brothers called to brothers across the Tagus when this river separated the fronts, when fathers were challenged by their bastards.
The story of the siege of Alcázar at Toledo is well known. The commanding officer refused to surrender and save the life of his son. In all Spanish tales there is fantasy and the primitive extreme. Like the Russia of the nineteenth century—and today—Spain is full of individuals who grow, regardless of society, into their own full, dramatic bloom. Even when the element of truth in the tales told is small, they indicate the extreme dramas the Spaniards like to imagine. But so many strange things can be seen in Spain that one believes everything. I once talked with three blind peasant women near a fork in a deserted country road in the north, who wanted to walk to Vigo and feared they would take the wrong turning to Léon. “Sir, we are blind,” their voices went up. Two were totally blind, the third could see just a little. Gaunt, tall, in their black dresses, splashed by the red mud of the rains, they were going to walk one hundred and fifty miles. They were not beggars or gypsies.
Almería is a byword in Spain for its remoteness, yet its port and its banks are busy and its grapes are famous. It is a small place to look at, yet it has 100,000 inhabitants: all Spanish towns are bursting with their population. In England such a place might have 20,000 at the most. The poor are as thick as flies in the heat and dust among the cactus of the hills on the outskirts, in the strange chessboard of low Oriental houses of a single storey, those houses one so often sees in the south, colour-washed, with huge heavy doors and iron-grilled windows that seem far too large for the house. The very poor have their caves in the steep rock, and they go up to them on rough tracks. Outside the town are blocks of pleasant, small, new houses for workers. The Franco régime has built many of these small estates. That does not mean the housing of the lowest-paid labourers. It nev
er does in Spain. There is always that large population just above the starvation line which lives where and how it can: in shacks, sheds, and huts along the beaches. Yet here—such is the force of “the good appearance”—one will see a very respectably, almost smartly dressed girl leave one of these shacks where her brothers are playing naked, and where the mother is saying, with a fatalistic pride: “You see us in our misery”—you will see this girl leave the place for her job in the ice-cream bar or the cake stall in the town, and go with a friend to walk in the evening paseo.
The Spanish Temper Page 16