To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  Barcelona stands on the frontier between the familiar, sun-cured Spanish landscape to the south and, to the north, the most densely wooded countryside of the Mediterranean, stretching to the Pyrenees and the French border. This area, nearly 150 miles across, contains forests of almost Amazonian density of cork-oak and pine and—with a curiously oriental touch—even thickets of bamboo. The woods are full of flowers in spring, some of great rarity. Empordà, to give the north-east corner of Spain its ancient name—still in use—is an Arcadia to be explored with all possible speed for, like all Arcadias that have come within reach of affluent and expansive cities, it must inevitably disappear.

  Owing to its distance from the coast, the times have passed Empordà by, which is why many of the gracious customs of the past have survived here and why the cuisine is the best in Spain—and therefore among the best anywhere. It is a terrific fallacy among English travellers who have been subjected to Spanish food in the hotels and restaurants in holiday resorts to judge it as second-rate. Those who take to the byroads of Empordà will encounter a cuisine of an ingenuity, variety and charm hard to equal in similar circumstances in, say, Italy, or even France.

  A car is essential for the exploration of these low mountain ranges and forests. The general strategy is: never leave a third-class road unless it cannot be avoided. Here, as elsewhere throughout the Peninsula, they conduct the traveller into those nooks and crannies of the countryside where the past makes its last stand. Behind the scenes in Empordà nothing has changed visually since the Middle Ages. Cows still carry horns, farm-carts are drawn by horses, fields mown with scythes. Great porticoed and colonnaded farmhouses dominate the fields, their architectural form inherited from Roman predecessors. Their large numbers reflect the richness of the soil and the prosperity of the rural past. Inevitably, these masterpieces have attracted the attention of city-dwellers in search of a country house of noble proportions for weekend use. For those prepared to drink well-water and generate their own electricity, such a building in grand mediaeval style can be picked up cheaply enough. Agents in nearby towns such as La Bisbal specialise in unusual country properties and will even increase the feudal atmosphere of the purchase, if desired, by the addition of a defence tower, built with authentic materials, at an additional cost of about £10,000. An agent in San Feliù de Guixols will undertake to demolish three substantial farmhouses and rebuild them in the form of a pigmy castle, authentic in every detail, for about half a million. Where new stonework has to be patched in, the patina of age can now be sprayed on.

  The penetration of the rich into such regions, whose charm depends upon simplicity and the restraints imposed by sparse incomes, can have a curiously deadening effect. There are four mediaeval villages immediately east of Gerona; Pals, Peretallada, Villastret and Gruilles (which has a 150-foot tower with a tree growing out of its top). All are of great interest, and not to be missed, for until now they have withstood intrusion by our times, remaining productive living communities of their own. Now the eyes of affluent city-folk have fallen upon them, and it is hard for a peasant owner to resist an offer of a level swap for his small, dark gem of twelfth-century architecture for a comfortable and well fitted modern flat in the nearest town.

  In due course the new owner from Barcelona or Gerona moves in. Usually he is a man of education and taste and a sympathetic restoration begins under the watchful eye of the planning authority, determined to ensure that none of the harmonies of the ancient village are disturbed. At most, the new man will get away with the addition of a discreet picture-window. To take the case of Pals, whatever has been done has been with huge respect for the past. Yet, this small town is fossilising into a museum piece. Two thirds of its original people have sold out. There are no children or animals, and in its over-clean streets the only sound apart from that of a Mercedes sneaking past to the place where it will be parked out of sight, is likely to be Handel’s choral music piped from the church.

  The story of Catalonia’s coastal development is a sad one. The once stupendous coastline between Blanes and the French frontier—much of it unchanged since the voyages of Odysseus until forty years ago—has been buried under concrete so that many entrancing small towns such as Tossa, Lloret and Estartit are hardly now to be identified. The few exceptions are Cadaquès in the far north and a string of villages, probably saved by difficulty of access—Aigua Fredda, Sa Tuna, and Aigua Blava—the most impressive in its location, with rufous cliffs stacked at the entrance to a tiny bay and a few houses wedged among rocks and pines. The water is of unexampled transparency, provoking a sensation of vertigo in the mask-wearer when swimming over great depths. Mysteriously, it is quite free of pollution, now afflicting so much of the Mediterranean.

  Ugliness is encountered elsewhere, surging up from the coast. Grey, fortress-like hypermarkets, car cemeteries, pretentious restaurants, sport-cabin villages and parking lots intrude upon the natural order of the landscape. The ancient honey-coloured sandstone buildings of Empordà are perfectly proportioned and in total sympathy with the sombre green foliage of oaks and pines, and russet earth. Here the monotonous white cubes of Mediterranean coastal villas are offensively out of place.

  Fortunately, ugliness on the Costa Brava is easily escaped by a quick retreat into the interior. In the north, where the country is flat, the no-man’s-land of eyesores may extend for five miles. South of Palamós along the remaining 30 miles of the coast the undefiled woods come right down to the sea, offering instant retreat into delight.

  WINTER IN SEVILLE

  ‘MY NAME IS ELENA VALLEVERDE,’ the Sevillian lady said, ‘but I am more familiarly known as “Elena of the cats”.’

  I found her on my way to the city’s centre on the once gracious promenade, now fallen into decay, known as the Alameda of Hercules. She had just unpadlocked the garden gates of an abandoned great house and was about to feed some of the several thousand cats that have taken up residence in such pacific surroundings in Seville. She was fiftyish with the figure of a young girl, an expression of maternal sweetness, an old-fashioned frilled dress and a high Spanish comb. She had arrived with a boy assistant carrying a case neatly packed with the remains of meals collected in neighbouring restaurants. Today’s menu for the cats, which were exceptionally large, sleek and calm, was paella.

  ‘I look after about 500 in my daily round of the district,’ Elena said. ‘In addition to food a number of residents contribute small sums of money for their upkeep. I am one of several volunteers who undertake this work. We Sevillians admire cats for their dignity and restraint, and regard them as an ornament to the city. Friends of mine also take care of the birds.’

  Beyond and above the splendid decrepitude of the street, with its tousled palms, its Roman columns and its windfalls of oranges, the belfries of great baroque churches floated like the poops of galleons in a sparkling winter sky. It was one o’clock and the children came pouring out of the nearby school and went dancing past. Elena and her assistant moved on to the next vast Amazonian garden, unpadlocked the gates and went in. This was the peak of the Sevillian day, with every bar crowded, and the lottery-sellers going with the voices of heralds through every street. Even in winter, Seville lives out of doors.

  For this reason, all business deals are conducted not in boardrooms but bars, and preferably in one of the hundred or so in and around the Calle Sierpes. This is the home ground of all that is essentially Sevillian and the showcase of wonderful survivals. A patisserie at its entrance on the corner of the Plaza Campana is embellished with Art Nouveau panels, almost certainly overlooked by its clientèle who flock in to buy its ingenious and somewhat oriental cakes. Many advertisements have been executed in charming but imperishable azulejo tiles and urge the purchase of such things as early Kodaks, gramophones with horns, mustard plasters and treadle-operated sewing-machines, most of them obsolete for at least half a century. The finest example of lost promotional effort is in the parallel Calle Velasquez, which still devotes 60 square feet of
wall space to the 1926 Studebaker, showing five ladies of the day in their first ecstatic outing. Back in the Calle Sierpes a vintage hatter displays typical Sevillian headgear in several colours, a clock maker’s features an example of their craft that chants the hours in plainsong; and a nearby chemist sells asafoetida, gum Senegal, snake bite, leeches, blue unction, and a range of glass eyes. The Calle Velasquez offers nothing better in the way of clubs than the Tertulia Culturál Bética, which seats six members in two rows to face the street in an environment hardly more cheerful than that of a dentist’s waiting-room. By comparison, accommodation at the Sierpes’s Círculo Mercantíl y Industriál is luxurious, as well as immensely discreet. Here, when night falls, members settle behind tinted glass in almost complete darkness to entertain themselves with the gay and melancholy flux of life surging through the street within feet of where they sit.

  The secretary was away, so information about membership qualifications somewhat vague.

  ‘It helps to own 10 caballerías of land,’ the employee suggested.

  ‘How much is a caballería?’

  ‘Do you ride?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘It is the area you can ride round in 15 minutes at a steady trot … There is a waiting list of about fifty years.’

  The Sierpes saw the origin of that inspired and revolutionary snack, the tapa, meaning cover, thus named because it started life as a slice of ham covering the glasses of wine sent out for to the nearest cellar, in the days when dust swirled in Seville’s unpaved streets. Since then it has evolved to a point when all dishes, however elaborate, can be sampled in this miniature form. Leading bars offer up to fifty varieties of the tapa, and for many Sevillians a selection of a half-dozen eaten at the counter constitutes an imaginative midday meal.

  Beyond the narrow Calle Sierpes the city spreads its wide streets and squares in which stand those great islands of mediaevalism, the Cathedral (the world’s third-largest church), and the Moorish fortress of the Alcázar. The Christian faith of its day advertised itself in the sheer size of its undertakings. ‘Let us build a church so big that we shall be held to be insane,’ a member of the Chapter urged, as soon as the great mosque had been levelled and the building of the cathedral began. The Emperor Charles V broke in upon the scene a few tragic years too late. Most likeable of the Spanish monarchs, who collected parrots, enjoyed gardening, and had done his best to impress his subjects by taking on an enfeebled bull in the arena of Madrid, he had been in time to prevent the destruction of the Mosque of Córdoba. To the Sevillians he said, ‘You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world.’

  The Cathedral of Seville is indeed vast and very dark, and wandering in its perpetual twilight one has sometimes the feeling of being lost in some huge railway station in a foreign land. Nevertheless, seen from the exterior at night, its icy gothic traceries lit against the sky, it produces a stunning impression. It is set in surroundings of outstanding charm. Beyond its bustling central streets, Seville is a quiet city. All this historical area, patched with small plazas and dominated by ancient buildings, fosters its own brand of tranquillity; where elsewhere the mediaeval background may be remote and often lifeless, here it is close and familiar. An aesthetic experience of the first order is within reach of anyone prepared to arm themselves with a map and approach this enchanted area not through the city streets but along the ancient lanes skirting the walls of the Alcázar—which to some minds is a more impressive building than the better-known Alhambra of Grenada. The quarter is entered by Alfaro de Murillo, leading from the Calzado de Ribera gardens. The first turning to the left, into a lane called Aguas, is followed by one to the right into Judería, which opens after a few yards into the Patio de Banderas. Orange trees have been planted all the way, and the memorable Patio de Banderas is virtually a grove in the heart of the city. Fallen oranges littering the square by night are picked up at first light and piled in a central fountain awaiting collection. It is better to undertake this ten-minute excursion at about nightfall, best of all in the mild Sevillian winter, in the hope of finding the patio misted with rain through which fruit by the thousand glisten under the lamps. From this small, ancient, and virtually deserted square a Moorish gateway opens upon a theatrical presentation of the Cathedral and the Giralda tower. It is a scene to which one returns repeatedly.

  The Calle Dos de Mayo remains my favourite Sevillian street, with its entrance just across the road from the Cathedral. It widens immediately into a tiny plaza called Almirantazgo, then squeezes through a narrow arch in the Sevillian baroque manner—the original toll-gate of the city. A wall-panel in ceramic tiles put up by a forgotten soap-manufacturer nearly a century ago depicts this spot as it was then, and hardly anything has changed. This remains almost a countryside byway, with sparse traffic and a few elegant horse-drawn carriages mixed in with the cars. All the windows in the high white walls are draped with sumptuous folds of baroque plaster picked out in chrome yellow. The colour is exclusive to Seville, the paint being produced by some millennial process from the richly coloured soil of the nearby Alcalá de Guadaïra, which otherwise lays claim to local fame with its bullfighting school.

  A turning to the left 100 yards up the Dos de Mayo leads past the house of the legendary Don Juan, who, persuaded to repentance by a dream in which he found himself attending his own funeral, turned the magnificent building over as a charity hospital for the use of the poor.

  Immediately ahead in the rundown but atmospheric Calle Santander, a badly tended wall shrine has attracted much veneration since the intervention of the Virgin it contains, in a nocturnal duel, extinguishing the light of her lamp whenever the opponents lunged at each other with their swords.

  The same building houses the Bodegón de la Torre d’Oro. This restaurant is a local institution that in some miraculous way has been able to resist the standardisation imposed by our times. Strangely, Sevillians who prefer to eat in small, crowded, intimate places are apt to object that it is too large. Nevertheless, they are drawn there by its unbeatable value. What marks it as different in the experience of a foreigner is the bearing that one’s distance from the serving counter has upon the price of food. There are three tariffs, and the nearer the customer stations himself, whether standing or crouched at an exceedingly small table, to the anarchy at the bar, the less he pays. At about 7 p.m. neighbourhood families with many children drop in for beer and snacks, vacating their tables to more affluent-looking diners by 9. After that customers under no compulsion to rise early begin to drift in, and may stay on until midnight. About a third of the Bodega’s cavernous interior is screened off to provide a restaurant of the conventional kind, patronised by the occasional Japanese in search of local colour. Sevillians breakfast here at about 11 a.m., often on picatosta—a slice of fried bread sprinkled with sugar—usually accompanied by a glass of manzanilla, sipped slowly and in a reflective manner. Otherwise the Bodega specialises in potato omelettes, cooked until quite dry, and eaten with the fingers, and fried fish, the latter offering a prime culinary experience that bears absolutely no relationship to the English version.

  The River Guadalquivir flows quietly at the end of the street, overlooked by the chrome-yellow and white bull-ring—the most elegant in Spain. From across the road a statue of Carmen keeps an apprehensive watch on its principal gate, opened only for the departure of a bullfighter who has been accorded a triumph in imperial Roman style, or for the removal in state of one whose life has ended in the ring. On the last occasion (in 1985) when it opened for the second reason, the circumstances were extraordinary. The bull was already down, regarded technically as dead, and the matador had turned away to acknowledge the plaudits of the crowd, when with a last convulsive effort the bull righted itself to kill him with a horn thrust through the heart.

  Such a death still provides immortality of a kind, even in the days when the goal-shooting stars of FC Sevilla have become the idols of youth. Bu
llfighting, as its aficionados insist, is an art, not a sport, and there is even a touch of the old pagan religion about it. Those who sacrifice themselves to it are never forgotten. The great figures of the past, such as Joselito, drew more crowds to Seville than the reigning king on one of his visits. Joselito spent half his fortune on the purchase of four emeralds for the Virgin of Macarena, patroness of bullfighters (and originally smugglers) and when at the age of 23 he died in exemplary fashion in the ring, the Virgin was dressed by her attendants in widow’s weeds, in which she remained for a month.

  Belmonte, considered the greatest bullfighter of the century, was a depressive, who committed suicide, having failed to die, as he would clearly have wished to do, by the horns of a bull. An attempt by the Church to deny him burial in sacred ground collapsed in the face of public outcry, and permission was given for interment in the Seville cemetery, provided that the tomb was black and devoid of any normal religious ornamentation. Juan Belmonte, who lies under the model of a black marble piano, continues to live in the popular memory. Seville, always on the lookout for an excuse for a fiesta, decided this January to revive the traditional procession known as the Cavalcade of the Three Kings. There were to be many children robed in white, an assortment of bands, and camels if they could be found. Inevitably, on such occasions the name of Belmonte springs to mind, for the leader of the three Kings was to be dressed in the very same attire worn by this folk hero when he had led the cavalcade so many years before.

  It was the first procession of the Sevillian year, to be followed by many others in a city where the mere act of pacing the streets in the company of those who share the same spiritual tradition establishes a bond with religious overtones. The ceremonial year would reach its peak with the church parading its magnificence, and its incomparable sense of theatre in the festivities of the Semana Santa. Seville possesses 70 confraternities, dedicated, as they have been for 600 years, to the sombre pomp of Easter. This year once again the hooded penitents of each cofradía would form the many nocturnal processions (the longest itinerary takes twelve hours to complete) to carry their images to every corner of the city. Every street and square would resound throughout the night with drum beats and trumpets, and the strident outcry of flamenco singers from balconies and roof-tops, saluting the passing of a succession of virgins beneath. Only Seville has the history, the traditions, and the passion to stage such a pageant.