On Thursday of Holy Week, the shops close and now the whole of the city is out and crowds swarm in on the country buses. At five in the afternoon the popular paseo begins, the ritual of walking up and down. Until now the women had been present but inconspicuous. The Sevillana is small and plump and pale, inclined to roundness and heaviness in the face and, until she talks, without light in her eyes. Beside the male, whether of the grave Roman type or the jumping cracker, the lady is placid and demure. But on Thursday the sex suddenly grows a foot taller. They have taken off their flat slippers and shoes—so convenient for the cobbles of this cobbled place—and have put on their high heels, their high combs and their black mantillas. One blinks. Women who were un-noticeable the day before have suddenly become beauties, coolly conscious of a part to play. A hidden pride has come out. They rarely, one notices, deign to talk to their escorts. After Holy Week, in the excitement of the Feria, they will change again. They will be clapping hands, snapping thumbs and fingers, clacking the castanets in the night-long dances that go on in the casetas,the family marquees and avenues by the Park. It will be a new play of whirling and stamping pleasure.
The civilisation that Seville has inherited is a good deal Arab. Almost all the older things in Seville were built by Arab craftsmen and although modern blocks of flats have gone up, the main domestic part of the city is based on the Arab patio or courtyard. There is a strong white wall, and the rooms open on to a central court. The streets of Santa Cruz wind and tangle. They are built to catch only glancing blows of the terrible Spanish sun, to be channels of cool air, and the names of these streets are set out in the large black classical letters of centuries ago, and are dramatic in their direct and simple evocations. Streets are called, quite plainly: Air, Water, Bread, Straw, the Dead Moor, Glory, Barrabas, Mosque, Jewry and Pepper. No fantastications in that heroic age. The Spaniards of the Reconquest were simple men. In the gypsy quarter of the Triana, the traditional home of bullfighters, dancers and singers, the main street is called Pureza—Purity. It is one of the clues to the character of the Sevillano that even in modern streets he has not changed his lettering. It is superior to that of any city in the world and it emphasise show important place and locality are to the Sevillian temperament. No search for identity here; he is a man and, as Don Juan said when he posted his name on a wall, if anyone wants anything of him, here he is. The streets of Seville are clean; even the poor streets are clean. There is no filth in the Triana. One breathes flower-borne air, as one passes the grilled windows and gates of the houses and looks into the courtyards. From the modest patios to those of the greater houses, the cool ferns stand there on the tiles and the flowers are massed. These patios are really open rooms, often with chairs and tables in them and under the gallery in the house of some well-off lawyer or family who do well out of the olive oil or the sherry trade, one sees the best pictures of the house and the finest furniture standing virtually in the open. Silent always, mysterious and as if entranced by their own flowers, the patios are little stage sets, little peep-shows in themselves. They display the pride of the family as well as its natural pleasure in living in the open air.
In the Feria, those who can afford it hire or build “casetas”, wooden booths or marquees near the Park. The caseta has a “living room” in the front and a kitchen concealed behind it; the living-room is separated from the street by a low rail and there many families move elegant pieces of furniture from their houses—armoires, sideboards, handsome dining tables. Pictures hang on the wall. Publicly, with some air of consequence, the family lives in the open for the Fair and takes enormous family pride in keeping open house, inviting the passing stranger as well as their friends to drink with them. There is no rough-and-ready camping about this. They are here to be seen at their best and in abandoned gaiety, drinking and dancing all through the night. In the Feria,there is the procession of carriages to watch. Remarkable and luxurious equipages go by, drawn by their teams of fine horses. The great families own them; the less great hire them. At this time one sees the parade of riders, formally dressed in the Andalusian style—the lowcrowned Cordoba hat, the short jacket that sets off the waist of the rider, the tight trousers with the florid leather facings and, behind the riders, the girls in their long red-and-white dresses, their combs and the roses or carnations in the hair.
So well known is this, that when the foreigner thinks of Spain, he thinks of this Sevillian scene, hears the castanets and the tambourines and the speed of the tossing music of the Sevillana. Spain is, of course, quite unlike this. It is a purely Sevillian scene and it has spread abroad that legend of romantic Spain which has infuriated so many Spanish writers. There is, one has to say, something very provincial in this city. Its habits and manners are set. The stranger must not get the impression that the gaiety he sees will pass the bounds of formality, even when it appears at its wildest. The very wildness has its rules. Spanish life is profoundly unromantic. Overwhelmingly it is ruled—as the theatre is ruled—by the strict sense of genre and local style. Things change, of course. Seville has become an important river port. The Vespas roar in the streets, the old grinding yellow trams have gone and have been replaced by the trolley bus. Young girls go in for blonde hair dips. And lovers, sitting among the roses in the park, are bolder. It is now permissible for them to hold hands or put an arm round a waist. Many of those lovely houses in Santa Cruz are let out in flats. The bull-fights after Holy Week are rarely good, for this spectacle has its terrible periods of boredom, when the bulls are bad or the torero incompetent. There are plenty of people in the crowd coming away from the bull ring complaining of the enormous prices charged, the commercialisation of the show and the decline of its quality. Foreigners who used not often to go now swarm in and there is a good deal more of showiness than the rigour of the game. Foreign writers who have become fans of the bullfight have a lot to answer for.
But, in defence of the provinciality of Seville and its contented incuriosity towards the outside world, this must be said. Provinciality has preserved the Sevillano and enhances his local genius. He is incurably an actor and a mocker. “Come on, gypsy,” calls out one gypsy, derisively, to another in the street. He loves to shout a compliment to a woman and prides himself on the neat-ness of it. To a very tall woman a workman shouted, “Come by tomorrow so that we can see the other half. ”The piropo, or public compliment, is now supposedly illegal—it annoyed foreigners—but it has not entirely vanished. Wit, the invention of conceits, are irrepressible in the Sevillano; he loves riposte and fantasy. At the height of Holy Week, when the crowds are thickest and the café tables almost filled one little square, I heard two rival shrimp and crab sellers shouting at each other from their stalls on opposite sides of the square. One was making up fantastic eulogies, full of astute local references, of his shrimps that came from Cadiz; his opponent listened, carefully, the crowd was almost silent and then burst into admiring laughter. Then it was the turn of the other, a man from Alicante, who let fly with his own fantasy. The crowd were entranced. The act went on for half an hour, a real battle of comical words between two cities. I wish I had written it down, but it was going too fast for me and both parties were helpless with laughter. Make a light passing remark to any inhabitant of this place and he will outstrip you in a flash. “How are you this morning?” you say to the cab driver expecting a mild little “Very well, thank you” or a conventional “Fine”. That’s too dull for the cabman. Skinnily he stands up and looks down at his skinny horse which is soon for the bull ring, “Stupendous!” he says.
Seville is theatre. Great theatre, yet with thousands of little turns and scenes going on its stage. Its vanity is to be the city of Don Juan; it is in fact far more the city of Figaro, mocking, playing practical jokes and then dropping off into a self-absorbed yet blank-minded doze, until the next wicked or childish opportunity occurs. A place of dignity—and yet I have seen an old gentleman of the gravest kind pick up a sugar castor and, leaning out of the café window where he was sittin
g, sprinkle another old gentleman’s hair with it. I suppose people use the telephone there out of simple respect for the instrument; for their real business they send a boy out with a note to the favourite bar or café of the person it is addressed to. It is a paradise of hangers-on, of doorstep characters who know everything, of people who stop to talk; but do not suppose it is happy-go-lucky and unbusiness-like. The slowest action in the blissfully slow life of Andalusia is the action of letting money pass out of one’s hand. Seville put up a considerable struggle to keep the South American gold.
The regions of Spain and their cities have an extreme independence of temperament and, even in the levelling of modern civilisation, some of this survives in the attacks of ridicule they jealously make upon one another. When one uses this word “theatre” of Seville, the citizens of other cities read it in the pejorative sense of shallowness, showiness, rhetoric and the arts of the mountebank. It must be admitted that modern Seville, beyond the Park, is either pretentious or ugly. It reached the depths of decadence at the time of the Exhibition in the thirties. Seville has no need of rhetoric about its past. In that enormous historical show the city put on in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were no rhetoricians; it was the time of men of action. All the cities of Europe have great historical claims on our imagination, until we are choked with history. The claim of Seville is truly colossal and world-changing. I do not know whether many people visit the Archives of the Indies, but in that not very interesting building, near the Cathedral, one has the shock of knowing what it must have been like to be discoverers and colonists of America. It meant, above all, the work of men of action: explorers, sailors, soldiers, governors, architects, builders, judges. Here, in thousands of white boxes, are their documents: their plans for cities like Buenos Aires, for the forts at Cartagena, for the avenues of Montevideo and the government houses of Peru; the drawings, the leases, the law suits, the certificates of governorship, the trials, the executions. Here we can read the report of Hernan Cortes, the letters of Columbus. And of a failure, too: the long letter of Cervantes, the imprisoned tax collector, failed author, unwanted soldier, and cathedral brawler—applying vainly for a job overseas. Seville played out the great roles; and now history has passed beyond it, it amuses itself with the little ones, the magic that passes the tedious hours of life.
9
Turkey
It was midday. All the torpid and sweetish morning one had been distracted by the shouts of raucous males in the steep street below the window. Men were selling cakes and bread rolls from the trays or cases on their heads, or goat’s milk from the cans carried by their mules. And then, suddenly, sharp at twelve, a louder and prolonged bawling struck up from somewhere in the sky. It was like the noise of a brawl. It came from a minaret close to the hotel. Upon its little balcony stood the muezzin, a shabby young man in jacket and collarless shirt, looking like a factory hand. His hands were cupped to his mouth and he was yelling out: “Great is Allah. Allah alone is God.” One was in Istanbul.
Coming from western Europe, seeing the Bosphorus and hearing that cry for the first time, the traveller exclaims: “The Orient at last!” Coming from Persia or India or Arabia, he says, “Very soon, the West!” Istanbul stands at one of the dramatic junctions of the world. Here two continents come down to the beautiful blue straits and land-locked seas and grind against each other; here two religions and two races jar; and here a huge, dusty, mud-brown city of backbreaking hills, with a skyline of moony domes and minarets, squats across the dividing waters, split into three by the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara.
Looking south from the ugly European quarter to the Golden Horn, you watch the ferryboats come out and make across the Bosphorus. Their smoke trails crisscross on the sheets of water all day long. By night the ferries crawl across like lit-up insects. In a few minutes they will be in Asia. To the east, where the Bosphorus narrows on its way to the Black Sea, a strong schoolboy can swim from one continent to another. It is unbelievable. The Turks who boast of it do so incredulously, too —glumly, with fatalism. There is a Bosphorus splitting their minds. The educated are Westerners; the mass of people on the Anatolian tableland are living the primitive Asiatic life that has changed little for thousands of years.
Istanbul is no longer the most splendid city in the world. It is no longer Byzantium, the first capital of Christendom. It is no longer Constantinople, chief city of the great Ottoman Empire that once cut deeply into the side of Europe and south into Africa as far as the Sudan. But in situation the city is sublime; it is intrinsically dramatic and hag-ridden, stupefied by its own drama.
When we drink our tea from the samovar and eat our nougat or papery wafers in the neat, fashionable cafés in the narrows of the Bosphorus; when we try out our first hubble-bubble pipe there, watching the thousands of bass, mackerel, and mullet being brought off the boats rocking at the quays, we are uneasy. We know we are at the limit of Europe. The forests rising to the Balkans are on our backs; the Soviet Union is around the corner by the Black Sea; before us is the tableland that leads on to the steppe and desert of Asia Minor and of Asia itself.
We are at a key point. No Great Power is going to let another Great Power control these waters. And the key point is ancient. Beyond the Sea of Marmara is the Dardanelles. The Trojan War was fought for this strait, and so was the Gallipoli campaign in World War I; the twelfth century B.C. and the twentieth A.D. unite in that. All Europe had hated the Turks from the time of the Crusades and from the Turkish capture, in 1453, of the capital of Eastern Christendom, when the great cathedral of Saint Sophia, far older than the present St. Peter’s, became a mosque; but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Turkey was “the sick man of Europe” and its empire had almost gone, no one wanted the Turk to be driven off his final strip of European soil. It was safer to let him keep the door key of the gate between Slav, European, Asiatic, and Arab.
And so there is the small sliver of European Turkey,the Turkey of seas and straits—and the Asiatic Turkey of Anatolia, a high, bare tableland buttressed by mountains and stretching eastward for, say, a thousand miles,to Mount Ararat and the frontiers of Iran. The northern coast borders the Black Sea, once colonized by Greeks,a warm, wooded region running past Trebizond to the moist tea plantations on the frontier of Russia. To the south of Ararat lies Iraq; to the south-west is Syria; the southern coast hangs over the eastern end of the Mediterranean and bends around northward to the Greek Aegean.
And the Turk stands there, a prosaic, sober, stubborn, dogged, soldierly man, not quick to speak like the Greeks, not quick to smile, more solid than the excitable Arab races, fatalistic, a distinctly puritanical descendant of the nomadic tribes of Central Asia. (He does not like the word tribe.) He has been settled on the European straits and the tableland of Anatolia for six hundred years at least. He has been formed, as he settled, by many earlier cultures: Hittite, Phrygian, Persian, Greek, Alexandrian,Roman, and Byzantine; his Hittite carvings, his Greek theatres and cities, his Roman hippodromes, his Byzantine churches, his Crusaders’ castles have made him a custodian of remnants.
Istanbul has meant so much to the imagination that the reality shocks most travellers. We cannot get the Sultans out of our minds. We half expect to find them still cross-legged and jewelled on their divans. We remember tales of the harem. The truth is that Istanbul has no glory except its situation. It is a city of steep, cobbled and noisy hills. Taxis and buses fling the human body about at sudden corners; the distances are long and exhausting. The chief hotels are in the European quarter, called Beyoglu. It has improved its appearance in recent years,but it is still heavy, rather Germanic and ugly. One’s constant idea is to get out of it.
You make your way to the Galata Bridge, cross the Golden Horn to the heart of the old city, and meet the Turkish swarm head on. Aesthetes detest the bridge, but,for myself, the swarm and the noise are the making of it.There is the merchant shipping on the Golden Horn; the blasting of the scores of smoking
ferries; the mass of fishing-boats, barges, tugs, and wherries along the quays, and on every barge dozens of people dropping lines into the dirty water and bringing up fish at the rate of two a minute.
The rush hour in Naples cannot compare with the Galata crowds. With thick black hair, thick black eyebrows, and scowling, too, they cross the long bridge eight deep, the ragged and the elegant. You are bawled at by old porters bent double under fearful loads. They are carrying huge pieces of furniture, yards of steel, cases of glass, hundredweights of cloth. With a carrying frame or leather hump on their backs, they are the pack mules of the city, unable to see where they are going, but shouting their way forward at a fast pace. Soon they will be climbing hills that rise at a gradient of one in four.In doorways everywhere you see these men, with their ropes on their knees, waiting for the next job. And yet, in this gruff, solemn crowd, I have seen a man walk dreamily across the bridge, treading with the delicacy of a young pasha, and leading a beautifully brushed white Angora goat with a red silk bow on its neck.
Dust and smoke are in your eyes, the curious smell of Istanbul is in your nostrils, something compounded, it seems, of hair oil, nougat, and spice. You make your way past the enormous grey mosque at the foot of the bridge.Mosques of this size have the air of squatting froglike on the ground. They stare at you like globular faces. You pass a wall where the public letter-writers are sitting,sad, chain-smoking, cynical men. One is tapping with two fingers at his old typewriter while a customer stands by, anxiously telling him what to say. You fight your way through the traffic to the spice market, which is mainly a stretch of passages under stone arches. You are engulfed in the smells of spices, most of which you cannot name. Stranger still, people are buying them.
Foreign Faces Page 15
