To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  There was no wealth of any kind to be exploited in Gredos, therefore little incentive to build roads. A single highway linking the towns of Avila and Toledo crosses the range at its narrowest point. It is narrow, winding and dangerous. Two secondary roads run parallel to the chain of peaks, north and south of the range. They are of the kind that discourage modern traffic and are devoid of side-roads leading into the mountains themselves.

  In an attempt to attract tourism, a single track about 15 kilometres in length has been built, leading into the central massif from a point in the road near the somewhat gloomy parador of Gredos. Colossal rocks—often balanced two and three on top of each other in an eccentric and precarious fashion—are strewn about this amphitheatre, and glinting lizards of several colours scuttle over their surfaces. A wide spread of water, the Laguna Grande, appears at a distance to be veiled in gauze, an impression given by the innumerable dragonflies exploring its surface. Once in a while the water fountains up as a fishing eagle plunges after a trout. There are roe-deer and ibex under the peaks through which in midsummer the old snow still curls like a white river. In the holidays a few children trudge up here to camp by the banks of the many trout streams, but, their brief occupation at an end, Gredos reverts to the primaeval wilderness.

  Isolation is the keynote, not only of these mountains, but of the swell of foothills and the plains among which they are set. Only a handful of shepherds inhabit the Sierra itself but the approach to it is through areas among the least populated in Spain. A history of Oropesa offered for sale at the parador explains why this should be. It was the custom of Spain over the centuries to spend up to a third of its income on foreign wars, and in 1635, with the nation reduced almost to bankruptcy by the wars in Portugal and France, Philip IV applied to the Count of Oropesa for a contribution of 60,000 ducats to the public treasury. In return, a royal decree granted the Count the right to enclose the common-lands in the Gredos region and convert them into pastures for sheep. ‘The consequences of this action are with us today,’ the historian writes, and he provides a long list of communities of which no trace remains. Mysteriously half a dozen villages, favoured by their position in the flanks of the mountains, were able to hold out. They drove off the attackers, including those sent by the Count, fed themselves, did a little trade, built up a little prosperity. The isolation that defended them, held them back, so that mediaeval practices, long abandoned elsewhere, have survived into our times. For this reason they are among the most interesting communities in Spain.

  There is no better way to make an approach to the Sierra than across the straight and narrow road leading to it from Oropesa. This is without motor traffic, and the absence of almost all signs of human life along its length of 25 kilometres has encouraged the presence of spectacular birds. The River Tiétar spreads its tributaries through the oak woods, in which enormous boulders that might have been designed by Henry Moore have been scattered among tall flowers, branching like yellow candelabras. Sheep pass through in vast herds, moving at considerable speed and apparently unattended. Where there are pockets of good grass by the water, black fighting-bulls, looking outstandingly pacific, graze behind flimsy wire. There are here storks by the thousand, sometimes placed in contemplative ranks by the banks of a stream. A splendid crow, the azure-winged magpie, flocks in the oaks; but above all, the Egyptian Vulture, which apart from its black wing-tips is white and immaculate, spirals above the tree-tops in a brisk territorial survey, covering 10 square miles in an hour. In the background the Sierra takes shape on closer approach, its green sheen breaking through the vapour, gently rucked and folded here and there like a carpet lifted by the wind.

  This is a landscape of antiquity restored by the banishment of human presence. The boundary containing it is the Toledo-Avila highway, packed with transient traffic. Mombeltrán is built where the mountains close in to defend the pass and cut the lines of communication of marauding soldiery in the endless wars. It had been taken by surprise by the widening of the road and the arrival of trippers from Talavera (who are sometimes rebuked for their failure to maintain decorum in the matter of dress), otherwise it sleeps fairly comfortably in the past. The town is overlooked by a massive castle with no romantic nonsense about it, being provided with enough dungeons to hold an army; everything has been sacrificed to the necessities of defence. Narrow crooked alleys, taking the place of streets, run up and down the mountainside, and the tall half-timbered houses that lurch into each other are honeycombed with secret chambers and passages. The Gothic church served when necessary as a fortress with a construction like a stone igloo built into its side into which the defenders of the hill upon which it is built could crawl for a last stand.

  At one point in Spanish history a royal decree commanded subjects with incomes too low to be subjected to tax, to seat themselves on chairs no more than a hand’s span in height. Many still do, and it is a strange sight in the cool of the evening to see little circles of old people who have carried their chairs out of the cellar-like darkness of their houses to sit facing inwardly, hardly a word passing between them, in the otherwise empty squares. The typical dishes of the Gredos area are not to be found in hotels and most restaurants, but are served in a bar here called La Ilusioń del Cazador (The Hunter’s Illusion), including pigs’ ears in sauce, and migas, bread fried in garlic with ham and onions, topped with black grapes, lightly boiled. Seating, influenced by ancient custom, is uncomfortable even in this public place, with the plates on the table hardly accessible to knife and fork.

  It is in this cramped, secret and defensive style that Valverde de la Vera, on the southern flanks of the Sierra, is built. It is clean, austere and silent, scented with the clear mountain water that runs in shallow conduits down the middle of each street. There are no dogs or cats to be seen; not even the usual caged canaries on the walls. Most of its wooden houses were built in the far past, by the families who were to live in them. Some are very beautiful with carved balconies supported by wooden columns, a few of which retain their ancient carved capitals. Occasionally, the upper stories of houses facing each other across a street have been extended to touch or even fuse with each other, thus creating a tunnel for the passage of pedestrians beneath. The Plaza de España, presenting this architectural theme as an uninterrupted unity, is unique of its kind.

  Valverde’s income is derived from tobacco, of which it grows less and less. Apart therefore from its innate conservatism, determined to leave everything ‘as it has always been’, there is no money here to pay for change. Thus an ancient stone phallus still crowns the well at which women gather throughout the day to draw water, and a sinister-looking pillar—a chain hanging from it—stands at the village’s entrance, to which, in the absence of a prison, malefactors were once shackled and left.

  Against this background of self-sufficiency and isolation, it is not surprising that Valverde’s Easter Week celebrations should be purely mediaeval. There is proof that the somewhat macabre ritual of the Thursday of Holy Week has remained unchanged for centuries, for in 1556 a Flemish painter in the suite of the Emperor Charles V visited the village and recorded on canvas the scene as it is to be witnessed today. The Emperor himself was almost certainly there, watching from his litter, for he had just formally renounced his kingdoms, and chosen the area of La Vera, seen as the back of beyond, for his retirement from the world.

  The unique feature of Easter Week at Valverde is the representation in its procession of the suffering of Christ, dragging himself under the weight of his cross along the Via Crucis on his way to Golgotha. In such manifestations elsewhere in Europe the custom is for a man to be selected for the part on the basis of his high moral standing. In Valverde on the contrary, it falls to a penitente (a confessed sinner) who commits himself to the agonising experience as a result of a promesa (vow). What is more extraordinary about the procedure is that there is no limit to the number of penitentes—as many as ten or fifteen are usual—who are permitted to adopt the sacred role. ‘There’s n
othing exclusive about this,’ the mayor’s secretary said. ‘Say the word and we’ll put you down for next year. It’s purely a matter of whether or not you think you can stay the course. All we expect of you is to learn the verses to be repeated at the various stations.’

  As the secretary made clear, this is an ordeal. The penitent sinner, referred to as the empalao (the man fixed to a pole) walks barefoot through every street of the village, his arms extended and bound with esparto rope to the beam of a plough carried on his shoulders, which may weigh up to 100 lb. The same esparto rope is wound so tightly round the torso that it would appear to restrict the breathing. The empalao wears only a woman’s white skirt, and a veil serving to conceal grimaces of pain, and the blood trickling from wounds caused by the crown of thorns clamped down over his head. Two crossed swords, pointing upwards, fastened to his back, compel him to walk with head bowed. He is accompanied throughout the dark streets by a ‘second’, draped from head to foot in a dark cloak, whose task is to light the way with an oil lamp and give what aid he can in the case of the empalao’s collapse. This scene was also painted by Goya, who has encircled the empalao with the night-gowned and hooded figures of an auto-da-fé, capturing thus the slightly nightmarish quality of the scene in the way only he could have done.

  Villanueva de la Vera, four miles down the road, devotes itself to its annual carnival in a spirit of what at first appears no more than innocent merriment. At the height of the jollifications a man-sized doll—Pero Palo—dressed in seventeenth-century clothing, is delivered to the crowd to be torn to pieces. At one period this act of light-hearted destruction was preceded by a semblance of castration, now omitted from the festivities, but there is still fierce competition for the possession of the carved, wooden head. Differences of opinion exist in Villanueva as to who the effigy represents, a common view being that in real life Pero Palo was an inquisitor, finally lynched by the populace in retribution for intolerable abuses. However, the fact is that the ritual is known to have been performed long before the establishment in La Vera of the Holy Office.

  A clue to the possible origin of the custom is afforded by the fact that a year is spent in the preparation of the doll in secret—each year in a different house, the location of which is known only to the adepts of what amounts to a village secret society. Various stages of the manufacture and dressing of the effigy are accompanied by dancing and drumming, and coplas are sung, which, since they relate to the events and topics of the far past, are now largely devoid of significance.

  At the end of the Civil War an attempt was made by the Franco régime to suppress the Pero Palo ritual along with folk custom elsewhere possessing an element of secrecy which the government could not approve. The people of Villanueva were able to avoid the ban with a modified version in which the effigy’s name was changed and it was ‘drowned’ in the village fountain instead of being torn to pieces. Since then Pero Palo is back in its original form and a scientific work has appeared to deal with its origins. The author’s verdict is that this is an example of the survival on the Peninsula of a Bronze Age fertility sacrifice, bearing in this case a strong resemblance to those practised in Ancient Greece. He has also unearthed the details of a trial conducted by the Inquisition in 1581 in which a number of villagers were charged with membership of a sect involved in the annual sacrifice of a human victim. Amazingly, they were discharged on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

  Pero Palo at Villanueva, rooted in the magic practices of pre-history, may be the most anciently established of the springtide celebrations of the Sierra, but almost every village dismisses winter, and hails the coming of spring in its own special fashion. In Easter week the streets everywhere are full of hooded and barefoot penitents dragging their chains. In Fuenlabrada and Hichosa, the masked and horned devils of winter are chased away by the children. Elsewhere, vaquillas—young and aggressive cows—are released in the streets, and their domination provides the symbolism required by the season. Sometimes, as in Mogarraz, fighting bulls are included, to be put to death in the village square, adding to the theme of triumph over evil that of the fertilisation of the earth through the effusion of blood.

  Jarandilla is the last of the Gredos villages before the Sierra sinks into the plains beyond Barco de Avila. It was once a place of some note and, under the protection of its own castle, could afford the luxury of living space and wide streets. Its principal building is an enormous church, once a Moorish fortress, built on an outcrop of rock, which from its battlemented exterior gives no indication of ever having been put to religious use.

  Such appearances of affluence as Jarandilla retains are linked to a vanished past. The life of today—certainly at night—is concentrated in 100 yards of brilliantly lit street forming part of the road to Plasencia. Here half a dozen cafés are filled with patrons nostalgically watching the lively flux of main-road traffic. Behind them, Jarandilla is turning into a ghost town of enormous old houses with fallen-in roofs, like delapidated barns. The impression of desolation seems to be heightened rather than relieved by the occasional circle of old people, huddled in silence like mourners on their tiny chairs, in an otherwise empty and shuttered street. Jarandilla’s annual fiesta is a relatively low-key affair, occupying only four days instead of the nine devoted to festivities in up-and-coming towns. Giants and big-headed dwarves parade the streets, there is a modest firework display, a poetry competition, a woman’s football match, a folkloric entertainment including an ancient version of the jota in which girls dance with brooms, and a contest for the biggest tobacco leaf. The villagers would like to be chased by infuriated heifers, or even to release a bull with fireworks attached to its horns—the most popular of such diversions—but they cannot run to the expense, so make do with what they can get.

  The Emperor Charles V spent two of his last years in Jarandilla’s castle, and just as largely apocryphal stories of royal doings of old still circulate in villages of the home counties exposed to the occasional excursions of the Tudor or Stewart monarchs, the presence of the Emperor is still felt here. By this time, at the age of 56, he was already a bespectacled old man, unable to stand and having to be carried in a litter like an oversized pram through the village on his occasional sorties to watch his subjects at work or play. He was simple and genial; the most human ruler of his day, who kept parrots, and had once liked to garden, his health fatally undermined by an addiction to spiced Spanish food which had left him crippled by gout. The Emperor loved to commune with nature and, as revealed in his letters, to listen to the song of the nightingale. He chose Gredos because it offered him these things and also because he believed that in the high mountains a man was nearer to God.

  As soon as it could be done, a monastery was got ready for his retirement at Yuste, 12 kilometres away, and to this he withdrew to end his days. His apartments are dark and austere, furnished in the lugubrious style associated with piety in the minds of the Spanish of those days. A chair of a rustic kind with iron leg supports was made for him locally, and in this he spent most of the day on his veranda. He was seated here when overcome by his fatal stroke, and his last view, according to the position in which he had been placed, would have been of the peaks he so much admired, or perhaps of the lush valley of La Vera with its strange villages, which, as painted by the Flemish artist, would have appeared very much as they do now.

  THE NIGHT HUNT FOR THE NEW YEAR

  IN THAILAND PEOPLE SET out with the determination that everything should go well on New Year’s Day, which establishes the pattern and style of the twelve months to come. The average active and hopefully minded citizen bounds out of bed at dawn, puts on a new suit with nothing less than 1000-baht notes in its pockets, resolves to renew failing friendships and to forgive his enemies. Next he collects the up-market car, such as a convertible Mercedes, that he has hired for the day and drives over to the nearest temple to join in the pleasant ceremony of washing the Buddha image. On this day, men of cool-headed decision, like bankers and stock-mar
ket manipulators, discover untapped reserves of superstition in their personalities. For once all their endeavours are tempered with caution. Above all they must be sure not to put a foot wrong until the sun rises again, twenty-four hours later.

  Amorin Surin, who lived by selling beautiful and often rare butterflies to tourists in the night market of Chiang Mai, took me in his mini-van to the renowned temple festival at Wat Prathat Haripoonchai in Lumphan, a town profoundly asleep in the past as a result of being by-passed by the main Bangkok highway 16 miles below the northern capital. Surin was a dedicated hunter and therefore in the top category of those addicted to superstition of every kind. All the hunters in the area made a point of a New Year’s visit to the Wat, favoured by them for its proximity to Doi Khun Tan National Park. Although debarred by zealous wardens from entry into the park itself in pursuit of the splendid game harboured in its forests, there was no law to prevent them lying in ambush along the perimeter for animals crossing the frontier between relative security and danger. Even on less auspicious days, many of them made a point of calling in at the Wat to ask the Buddha’s blessing when any such enterprise was contemplated.