I Can't Stay Long

by Laurie Lee

  Two more things. For much of my journey back across Europe I was accompanied by a young German wife and her child. She was married to a Pole in Cracow and was on her way to visit her Stuttgart mother, whom she had not seen for nine years. At Cheb, on the Czechoslovakian frontier, I saw a hundred elderly, silent Germans, with pink, pinched faces, in new overcoats and boots, line up to board the train. They were political prisoners being repatriated. For twenty hours the Polish-German wife made small talk with me; then, when we arrived at last in Germany, she wept as I have never seen anyone weep. The hundred elderly Germans, received at their home-stations with bands, flowers, press photographers, and crumpling-faced wives, turned away from their welcome, one by one, and leaned against the hoardings, weeping like found children.

  Having been able to compare, even so briefly, the two worlds that make up our world; having sensed the solemn, passionate, puritan purpose of the one; the brassy, busy, bosomy, every-man-for-himself cosiness of the other, I am in no doubt now which one I must choose. But I am not at all sure that, in the long run, it will be the one that history chooses.

  Ibiza High Fifties

  You got there by a slow boat, full of beatniks and Germans; and unless you were lucky you sat on the engine from which a reek of hot grease, coughed up by the pistons, accompanied the wallowing journey. It was six hours from Mallorca, empty sea all the way, and you dozed on a bed of rivets. That’s how we got there anyway, knowing no other method. (They in fact built an airstrip during the course of our journey, but nobody told us about it.) So we idled all day across the hundred mile sea, playing dice and drinking bad wine, and when the island appeared at last in the twilight we felt we’d come to the end of the world.

  I had no notion what to expect, I knew nothing about Ibiza and the young gentlemen from Palma in their blue dacron suits had coughed when I asked them about it. ‘Very rough and brutish,’ they said, ‘very backward. No cars and no society.’ And now it approached us – a red rock like a shell splinter, bare headlands like a new kind of metal, with a few bone-white temples standing on the empty shore among which a dark group of figures watched us.

  It looked like a place no one else had visited, something waiting unused for this evening, the shade of some long-preserved netherworld even older than the Mediterranean. Who were these watchers among their temples? What were their clothes? their gods? We sidled nearer towards the quayside. Details grew steadily clearer. Revealing the watchers to be boys in more blue dacron suits, the temples new holiday bungalows; and we couldn’t land till a French actress on board had been filmed disembarking three times …

  The port of Ibiza, the main town in the island, has a commanding but scratch-me-down look – a broody old citadel squatting plumply on a rock and trailing feather-white slums in the water. Save for occasional sea-mists it has extraordinary clarity and if Greek would be hymned for its light. Politically Spanish, emotionally Catalan, and pagan-Catholic by nature, it is otherwise nothing but itself – which is something history has never defined. Long successions of occupiers have set it apart like a dungeon in which to develop their private excesses – it was a Roman jail, an Egyptian lust-pot, an Arabic treasury, a hide-out for pirates, a nip-and-run depôt for the fleets of Napoleon, and during the Spanish Civil War a brief theatre for murder. In the intervals it was usually abandoned or ransomed, having little but isolation to offer. And even today when no ships come, or are delayed through storm and sloth, there are times when the streets grow suddenly silent, and the town sits and stares at the sea, and temporarily lowers its prices, and drinks an absinthe too many, and wonders if it’s not been forgotten again.

  It’s never forgotten for long however. It has what we runways want. Heat, sunshine, the antiseptic sea, iced drinks, and the cheap peseta. Also that flattering air of the Latin retainer which makes every bum-poet feel a Byron. If you’re a tax-refugee you’ll feel easy here, as you will if you have nuclearophobia. For the British tourist there are brand-new hotels where the waiters are reassuringly insolent. For retired colonials there are echoes of the Pacific, with the natives to deplore at sundown. And for painters and writers, idleness without guilt, and more light and more drink at less cost, and the feeling of being recharged with important experiences.

  It was some time since I’d been on Spanish soil, and never before on a Spanish island. We found a cheap fonda down by the harbour and then went to look at the town. Night had fallen and we had no guide, but we instantly felt at home. By air and by sea we had come a thousand miles, but we were still in SW3. For the Mediterranean image – Chelsea/King’s Road version – had been snugly re-imported, a reassurance, to avoid disappointment, that local folklore was still in flower. In the Bagatelle night-club, done in bamboo and fish-nets, two blondes called Pam were embracing. On the floor with his head in a champagne bucket was Ronnie, dressed Capri à la Simpson. ‘I’m Giles Stoke-Manderville, the brass-arsed Crusader,’ he mumbled, and invited us to take a rubbing. From farther up the street came sounds of wild clapping mixed with Anglo-Andalusian cries – and there, sure enough, was a Casa Pepe, with a guitarist, and several Susans in prints. The guitarist, a hollow-eyed man from the mainland, played flamenco with a livid sneer, while the nordic girls crouched round him, sweating gently, sipping brandy, and bawling Olé!

  Where were the inhabitants of Ibiza this night? I fancy they were cowering indoors. This was not Ibiza nor anywhere on earth, but something we’d packed like a picnic, an idea we’d brought with us to ensure local colour in case the natives should turn out untypical. This night-life in fact, apart from the price of the brandy and the casual licensing hours, could have been anywhere in Central London. (Indeed, most of the management came from there; you could even pay for it beforehand in Regent Street.) Down the road, just as jealously, was a cave run by Germans, reflecting their version of Spain. And I suppose this is now what tourism has become, what it had to become in the end. For the more one travels the more one seeks home (or to have one’s home prejudices confirmed). Certain cyphers may remain – busbies, post-marks, ruins, kilts, funny money, and subsidised ceremonial. But travel is little more than a round-about way now of collecting postcards and stamps; for the rest one seeks continual reassurances – one’s native language, home cooking and drink (beer in Jerez, gin and lime in Gerona, ham and eggs in Assisi, Coca-Cola in the Loire), familiar plumbing, air-mailed newspapers, and Thomas Cook’s guaranteed return.

  Did we once naïvely believe tourism would make us cosmopolitans? We find we don’t travel for that. Tourism is fast creating a third world, one that is neither home nor abroad, a never-land of posturing fishermen, of scrubbed peasants from a Museum of Folklore, of pre-fabbed hand-crafts and papier-maché charm, of dirt and poverty bleached off the streets, of booming Shakespeare in indifferent Stratfords, holy shrines with the cocktail annexe, and bullfights run for Anglo-Saxon kicks while the Spaniard surreptitiously plays football. Tourism is to many countries an alternative agriculture which can turn even the bad lands green. The hay-cocks are hollow, the milkmaids of wax, the flowers everlasting, of plastic – but the paying crop is national self-consciousness, served with salads of dollars and pounds, sprayed artificially to tickle the nose and air-brushed for Kodachrome. Who’s to blame for all this? Should anyone be blamed? Client and pandar have worked it together. The tourist, revealed as essentially a home-bird, prefers to see the world in his image. And as tourism develops and grows ever more easy it offers this paradox – that we are able to feel at home over wider stretches of earth, while we learn less and less of the world.

  Ibiza, even so, is not yet quite obliterated; it still maintains an underground life. Our quayside fonda was bare and obliging, with a back door open all night. One climbed the steep stairs as a test of sobriety to an irregular room with two beds. The room was white-washed, plain, and monkish, but scarcely designed for rest. There was no glass in the windows and mosquitoes came in, also moths the size of newspapers. The electric light had an invisible switch and so burnt a
ll night long as in prison. Through the open windows came the sounds of the night; constant, various, and arresting. From a nearby house a man howled for two hours; a child went ‘er-ha, er-ha’; someone started to practise a hunting horn, the cockerels to twang and cackle. At dawn a sea-mist came up from the harbour and wrapped us in hacking coughs, and the damp rolled off our eyebrows. When I got up at last I had to iron my notebooks and put my cigarettes on the windows to dry, while the moths and mosquitoes, now waterlogged themselves, splashed down round the floor like tears.

  The boat from the mainland was due at dawn, so we watched the preparations. An old man with a broom first swept the harbour. Then a dog fell in the water. Beachcombers gathered to watch it drown. The waiters set out their tables. Facing the sea like theatre boxes the harbour cafés rapidly filled. It was 6 a.m., so we went down and joined them and ordered our coffee and coñac. Around us were mothers with ribboned daughters, boarding-house keepers and priests, officers in pyjamas, gaunt models with hangovers, and local beat-boys waiting for money.

  We sat there, not speaking, in the early sun, watching the sea like a letter-box. Then at last round the lighthouse slid a cat’s-cradle of rigging, and the boat moved into the quayside, and towered above us, flat and emotional, like the troopship in Cavalcade. No wonder we all rise at dawn to meet it; everything that is not Ibiza is here. Everything that is not of this ground nor of this shallow sea, that is not wood, clay, straw, or crude alcohol – every ounce of petrol and necessary metal, every pound of rubber and nylon, every bottled brandy and aspirin, plastic cup and ballpoint pen, everything that makes this place tolerable for us exiles must be brought in at dawn like this. New mistress, rival, the draw, the discard, the boat bringeth and the boat taketh away … It is not that we seriously wished to run away at all, and we’re down here each dawn to prove it.

  The morning’s arrivals, the new blood of the island, are viewed first with a gingerly suspicion. A party of Lancashire dads, with their print-frocked women, are packed in coaches to their pre-booked hotel. Then the Left-bank Messiahs disembark one by one, bearded, with Parisian pallor, uniform in unisex jeans, carrying chess sets and guitars, trailing their uniform twin-sister girl-friends. They are soon absorbed by the local colony, and new chess games are quickly in motion. The pool of beatniks is thus replenished, with scarcely a ripple, hardly a word. Threadbare and silent, this brotherhood moves not, but sticks closely to the harbour cafés. Members are casual, bronze, and sad, and few either work or spend. So they shuffle and cut, and deal each other like cards, and change their rooms and their bed-mates weekly. Yet most of the men are quite solemn and moral, believing non-involvement to be a state of grace. Silence is the Word; conversation is vulgar, show-off, the lush affectation. Communion, if any, is by pre-set phrases, telegraphic and agreed beforehand. The Brotherhood consists mostly of poets and painters, but activity in either art is frowned on. Pure creation lies in inspired inertia, the controlled passivity of the pole-squatter – any physical statement, either in word or paint, merely blurs and diminishes the Image. Sterility is fecundity; least said furthest sent; pure silence and balance is all.

  Even so there exists a kind of domestic life, a relentless second force, which writes out its own loud separate pattern like flowers nibbling round a tomb. Willy-nilly, these fakirs have fathered a swarm of children – those noisy, golden, bell-haired angels one sees bouncing around the town. These Nordic imps create a counterpoint to the silence, as do their open-bloused, sunburned mothers – each of whom seems to be called either ‘Heidi’ or ‘Trude’, and are as alike as a row of Dutch cheeses.

  These girls – all beautiful, young, and low-heeled – play the patient rôle of salvation. They set out the chessmen, cushion the theories, glide dutifully from market to bed. Their huge empty eyes reflect the unsized canvases and unwritten poems of their men; meanwhile they guarantee sanity, as did Mrs Blake, by sitting naked and making no noise.

  The importance of the girls, and their likely history on the island, can be illustrated by the case of Heidi the Fleming, who had just recently come to Ibiza. One saw her often about the harbour, lacey and slender – even more beautiful than the others – trailing some morose and crop-pated Buddhist. This violet-eyed, loose-haired, decolleté love-knot seemed to glow like a public street lamp, and to have no will or purpose other than that necessary acquiescence – shared by her sisters – to the man with the lighter. Typically enough she had been brought to the island by a rich button-maker from Hamburg, who had established her in one of the harbour hotels and there planned an unhurried seduction. He was romantic, noisy, carnal, and plush, but he misinterpreted the girl’s morality. Quite shocked by his tastes she had locked herself in the lavatory, where she found a poor sleeping Swede. They had passed the night there, then he gave her to a friend, who bequeathed her, when he left, to a Dane. Since when she had passed formally from hand to hand like a soothing bubble-pipe.

  As for the men of the group, who were they, where did they come from, what sent them, and why were they here? Unanswerable questions, most of these, except for their points of origin. More various than their girls, they were yet alike in habit, each sharing a similar ennui. Their numbers included some stranded Fulbrights, a Mexican pundit, a Lapp, a Bill-of-Rights painter, a Fulham Road ditto, and several classless stateless Australians. Perhaps the most vocal were the two Dutch outsiders, who each worked several hours every day. I remember the first of these taking me aside and confessing that he was ‘the only Dutchman to have read the whole of Louis MacNiece’s study of William Butler Yeats in English’. He then broke down completely, admitted that he just finished a 200,000-word novel, adding unhappily, ‘I am not very quiet about it.’ The second Dutch scribe wrote for strip-cartoons, about which he was much more brazen. ‘If this must be boring,’ he boomed, ‘then I am telling them in what way it shall be boring. If bad, from what direction its badness …’ And finally there was he whose type had never before walked mortal earth, the miracle Quiz-King from Brooklyn, a plump youth of twenty, already bald, who having won a small fortune on the television networks had got out of America for good. In all, this company are the gypsies of tourism, inbred and vastly conventional, exotic only in a professional way, forming no part of the land they live on.

  This symphonic seaport of Ibiza soon palls, and in spite of our affection for its ragged bustle we decided to move on elsewhere. The season was early so we found a house without trouble – a concrete villa in a small sea-village standing at the mouth of the island’s one river. This ugly box, which we shared with two friends, had five rooms and a shower, a charcoal-fired kitchen, was furnished, and cost £6 a month. Perched on a hill, beneath a fortress-like church, it overlooked farms and the sea, with the village itself – scarcely more than a street – lying some distance below to the left.

  We liked it here: the roads were bad, and a wooden bus ran but rarely. There was nothing to do except work, drink and swim; nothing to look at but fields and the ocean. Sometimes a four-masted schooner, carrying salt to the Peninsula, spent the morning working up the horizon; or a cart climbed the hill with a barrel of water; or someone beat down the fruit of a carob tree. It was otherwise a landscape of slow, clean stillness which is the bonus of bad roads yet. Anywhere in the world, if you want longer days, or to taste the cream of old speech and actions, it’s not craft-guilds, national parks, or medieval mummery you need, merely a generous allowance of potholes. Here, for instance, only a few miles from San Antonio, where speedboats and charabancs roared, bad communications left time in the air, a floating bubble of unrippled reflections. Little girls and old crones sat all day in the fields, watching the family’s pig or goat; a man opened a water sluice, went to sleep for three hours, then woke up again and closed it; a straw-hatted girl hung her babe in a tree and started to sickle some grass; three boys walked the hill sucking sugar canes; the blacksmith hammered a wheel … The most violent shock any newcomer might suffer would come from the wild Ibicencan hounds – pale
rib-thin beasts with mad slanting eyes who ran on the slopes like cheetahs, and would suddenly spring on you from behind a rock, fawning for bread and fish-bones.

  All was easy and indolent here; there were no hours, even in business – where you could unlock the post-office, buy stamps on credit, even recall a rash letter once posted. An impudent dignity informed one’s relations with tradesmen and other commercials – you were told what to buy, you didn’t choose, you also learned to accept their charity. For instance I’d been in the village two weeks, and hadn’t bothered to shave, when a man came up to me in a bar: ‘I encounter your beard very ugly,’ he said. ‘To me I find it most bad.’ ‘Who are you?’ I snapped. ‘The barber,’ he answered, ‘Francisco Juan Tur, your servant.’ It was after midnight; he led me firmly to his shop, unlocked it, and shaved me for nothing.

  I had come to Ibiza to finish a book, because I write on wine, and it’s cheaper. The days were so hot, I worked in a shuttered room, with my bottle in a bucket of water. By late afternoon the words were running with sweat, so I’d bathe and then go to the cafés. The evening drink, which was palo or absinthe, together with the measureless life one led, created for me a set of new dimensions by which to observe the world. In the rose-hot twilight under the café trees it was the minute in scale that absorbed me. There was a cactus nearby in which a colony of spiders shared a vast dusty web between them. Motionless for an hour I’d watch a solitary earwig, each foot on a separate strand, go waltzing across the throbbing cotton while the spiders recoiled in nausea. For a while that web could fill the whole sky, become the ladder and plains of Babel, a hideous progress up which the earwig marched, beset, on his way to paradise. Next I might watch a small hole in a wall disgorge a winged troupe of nuptial ants. Their pale silver wings gave them the frock-coated appearance of fashionable bloods at a St Margaret’s wedding; some would take off and go spiralling into the heavens, but others just lounged round the nest – till savage little pages, wearing mobile shears, came and snipped off the laggards’ wings. Last of all were the flies, who were legion here, so that one swatted a dozen a minute. I’d swat several more, watch them roll on the ground, and again feel that dislocation of scale … Who knows, I’d think heavily, their last slow hours, their immense capacity for dying, that they lie all night among boulders of sand, or among lacerating brambles of floor-dust, broken, panting, cracked with thirst, despairing of aid or rescue, with dying shades of bliss and terror running across their million eyes?