by Jan Morris
As for those of marriageable age, they trot up and down those boulevards like figures of Welsh mythology: two to a horse, the young man proud as a peacock in front, the girl seductively sidesaddle behind. He is dressed in all the splendour of the Andalusian dandy, the tightest of jackets and the most rakish of hats, looking lithe, lean, and possibly corseted; she wears a rose in her hair and a long, full, flowering, flounced polka-dot dress—blue, pink, mauve, bright yellow or flaming red. Never was there such a morning spectacle. The old people look marvellously well fed and valeted; the coachmen are superbly cocksure; and sometimes one of those courting couples will wheel around with a spark of hoofs, the beau reining sharply in like a cowboy at the brink of a canyon, the belle clutching his shapely waist or holding the flower in her hair, to mount the pavement to some gay pavilion, the horse snorting and the lovers laughing, and accept a stirrup cup from a smiling friend.
In the evening the binge begins, and the fairground, blazing with flags and lights, becomes a stupendous kind of night club. The air is loud with handclaps and the clicking of castanets, and all among the huge ornamental buildings that flank the fairground, with their ponds, parapets, and courtyards, groups of young people are dancing in the shadows—sometimes suddenly swooping, like so many flocks of chirping birds, from one corner to another, from one alcove to the next, or helter-skelter over a hump-back bridge to the other side of the water. The bright pavilions of the fairground streets now sizzle with celebration—bands thumping, dishes clashing, families deep in gossip over their drinks, gypsies cooking ghastly greasy stews outside tents of sybaritic silkiness, stolid railwaymen listening to the music, or groups of children, resplendent in their southern fineries, dancing stately measures on a stage. Sometimes you hear a hoarse flourish of cante jondo, from some gypsy virtuoso hired for the evening. Sometimes the young bloods come dancing by, arm in arm across the pavement, with a transistor to give them rhythm, and feathers in their hats. Everywhere there is the beat of the flamenco, the clatter of heels and castanets, the creak of carriage wheels, the smell of horses, the swish of romantic skirts, and the noise, like the shuttle of distant looms, of twenty thousand clapping hands.
It lasts for most of the night, three nights running, and when you wake up in the morning, to feel the city in a happy but exhausted hush all around you, it is as though the whole experience has only been some elaborate dream—too much red Rioja, perhaps, or eating your mussel soup too fast.
It is the standard dream of the Spanish South, the romantic bag of tricks. If you are only on holiday, it is enough—few regions on earth today can offer you so much fun, so much excitement, so much spontaneous beauty. But to see the other face of the Andalusian mirror, you must turn away from the dazzle of Seville, and look for a moment at a statistical map. Of the ten poorest provinces in Spain, five are in Andalusia: there are only two Andalusian provinces that reach the mean level of Spanish prosperity. This is the country of the great estates and the landless peasantry, and it is here, all among the orange blossom, that we can best remind ourselves of the poorness of Spain.
For despite her air of grandeur, she is not a rich country. Her moments of prosperity have been transient. The Romans and the Moors both brought her some prosperity, in the days when her land was less eroded. The Incas and the Aztecs willy-nilly enriched her, in the days when the gold of the Americas poured convoy by convoy into her coffers. Before the Spanish Civil War she still possessed the sixth largest gold reserve on earth—mostly frittered away during the conflict in buying arms from the Russians. She is, though, one of the generically poor countries. It used to be thought that her unexploited reserves of minerals—iron, copper, bauxite, manganese—were virtually limitless, and had only to be released from their seams to make her rich again. Now the experts are more cautious. There is plenty of hydro-electric power in Spain, and plenty of low-quality coal, but there is no oil at all, and most of the other deposits are apparently too skimpy to allow much industrial expansion. The first Spanish industrial revolution, bravely launched by the Basques and Catalans in the early nineteenth century, never quite sparked: to this day the industries of Spain are largely confined to three small areas—Madrid, Catalonia, and the Cantabrian coast, where the Basques and Asturians live. Spain has never properly adjusted to the technical era. She does not have the carburettor touch, and the only Spaniards who treat a car with any finesse are the meticulous street thieves of Barcelona.
Spanish agriculture, for all the space of its landscapes and diligence of its peasants, can only just produce enough food to feed the population. Spain is self-supporting in that mystic trio of foodstuffs, wine, wheat, and olives, which is the traditional staple of a Mediterranean diet; in a bad year, however, she already has to import other foods, and her population is increasing faster than her agricultural production. Sixty per cent of Spain has never been cultivated, and never will be—half the soil of Andalusia, the geographers say, has been blown into the sea. Of the rest, much is cultivated with archaic inefficiency. Many farms have been split so many times, in the course of family inheritance, that they are now almost farcically fragmented. Sometimes a hundred acres is divided into a couple of thousand plots and distributed among two or three hundred owners, and there are olive trees in Spain that have been distributed branch by branch among brothers. The one-cow farm is a commonplace in Galicia, where the farmer’s wife may often be seen leading her entire livestock on a string. On the other hand the vast latifundios of the south, estates on a South American scale, are too immense and unwieldy to be efficient: the landlord usually lives far away, in some comfortable apartment of Madrid or Seville; the agent is often corrupt, usually ignorant, and seldom enlightened; tie landless peasants labour on, generation after generation, with no incentive but the stark need to survive. Hundreds of thousands are obliged to go abroad to get work at all, and there is a ceaseless migration out of the countryside into the towns. The markets of Spain are often such miracles of lush fecundity, so cherry-red and corn-rich, that it is difficult to realize how harsh a life Spain offers all too many of her countrymen, how constantly they must struggle against climate, social structure, and terrain, and how enormous is the gulf that divides visitor from villager.
For Spain is full of hardship—do not be deceived by the smiles, the elegant clothes, the ubiquitous aerials and the slum clearance. Men of the Spanish bourgeoisie, teachers, bureaucrats, or army officers, often have two separate jobs to make ends meet, and even the overwhelming love of children that is so characteristic of Spanish life stems partly from the fear of poverty, for one day those boys and girls, so prettily indulged today, will have to support their aged parents. There is no more heart-rending experience than to spend a morning with a team of Spanish sardine fishermen on a bad day; they work like slaves, wading into the sea with their huge net, laboriously hauling it, inch by inch, hour by hour, up the sands: so much depends upon that catch, so much labour and good humour has been expended, so courteous are those men to one another, so many hungry children are waiting to be fed at home—and when at last the catch appears, a dozen small fish in the mesh of the net, a sensation of hopeless resignation seems to fall upon the beach, and the fishermen, carefully clearing up their tackle, separate to their homes in weary silence.
All this you may sense most pungently in Andalusia, if you get off the main roads and keep your reactions sharpened. The worst is over now, as modernity creeps into the south; down on the coast the glittering blocks of the tourist towns are very symbols of change and chance; but this is a country only just escaping from indigence, and there are abject corners still. Only within the last couple of decades have Andalusian country people been introduced to running water, lavatories, domestic electricity, tractors. Many village streets are still made of earth—cloudy dust in the summer, impassable when the rains fall. In thousands of village houses cocks, goats and even pigs share living quarters with the owners. The children look much healthier nowadays, but the last generation’s poverty is everywher
e to be seen—women aged beyond their years, men mis-shapen, blind or mindless.
Sometimes even now this poverty is so primitive that you have to rub your eyes or blink to make sure that you are in Europe at all. The cave-dwellings of Andalusia, for instance, though generally comfortable enough, are sometimes little more than burrows: if you wander through the great cave-city of Guadix, east of Granada, which rises like a huge warren among the hills above the town, you will find that the lower caves are nicely whitewashed and pleasantly furnished, lit by electric light, with bright curtains at their entrances, flowers on their trellises, and demure women sewing at the tables of their little patios. Go further up the hill, though, through the maze of lanes and cave-terraces, and presently you will find those tunnels getting dirtier, and darker, and crumblier, and more lair-like, until at last, in the ashen slopes high above the town, some wild covey of slum children will come swooping out of a crack in the ground, so wolfish, swift and swart that you will turn on your heels instinctively, and fall headlong down the hill again.
And most elemental of all are the strange thatched huts, more haystacks than houses, that you still see here and there in Andalusia, like kraals in the African veldt. I was once most kindly entertained in one of these homesteads—a pair of huts, side by side, with living quarters in one and sleeping quarters in the other. Nothing could be simpler, or much nearer the lives of our neolithic forebears. An open fire burnt in the centre of the living hut, and everything inside seemed charred or blackened with smoke. The hut-people had no beds to sleep on, only a pile of blankets; they had no schools to go to; they lived, so far as I could make out, on soup and bread; and when I stumbled over a sack upon the ground, I heard a faint but testy squeak beneath my feet, and discovered that it contained a small black pig. Those Spaniards possessed, I think, not one single inessential—not a picture, not an ornament, not even a ribbon for the hair. They could not read, they had no wireless, and they had never seen a city. They were, as nearly as a European human can be in the twentieth century, animals.
But animals of dignity. I asked the father of the family if he liked his way of life, and his only complaint was the inflammability of the huts—they were always burning down, he said. The Spaniard bears his poverty without much grievance, so that the visitor, overwhelmed by the flourish of it all, scarcely notices how poor the people are. Indeed, life is undeniably improving, as modernity creeps in: most villages have electric street lighting nowadays, and there can hardly be a row of houses in Spain that does not possess a television. Your conscience will not always niggle you, as you wander through Andalusia. It is a tactful kind of Paradise. You will be able to convince yourself, easily enough, that half the poor prefer to be poor, and the other half won’t be poor much longer.
For one must admit that the earthiness of Spain, which is the cousin of backwardness, is often very beautiful to experience. One of the glories of Spain is her bread, which the Romans remarked upon a thousand years ago, and which is said to be so good because the corn is left to the last possible moment to ripen upon the stalk. It is the best bread I know, and its coarse, strong, springy substance epitomizes all that is admirable about Spanish simplicity. It is rough indeed, and unrefined, but feels full of life; and poor Spain too, as you may see her in Andalusia, seems crude but richly organic. Some of her vast landscapes have still never felt the tread of a tractor. All has been tilled by hand, and all still feels ordered and graceful, the energies of the earth rising in logical gradation through ear of corn or trunk of olive into the walls and crowning towers of the villages, sprouting themselves like outcrops of rock from the soil. Spain is a hierarchal country: on the farm, from the grave old paterfamilias at one end to the turnips in the field at the other; in the nation, from the grandees of Church and State, the brilliant young men at the Feria, or the debutantes showing their knees in the noisy sports cars of Madrid, to those simple people of the thatched huts, with their huddle of blankets on the earth floor, and their piglets in sacks beside the fire. It may not be just, the sol y sombra, it is inevitably changing, but it feels all too natural: just as the bread, though it may lack finesse, certainly fills you up.
5 Aliens
Cante jondo, I observed a few pages back, is part Oriental, part Gregorian, part Moorish, part Jewish, and is best sung by gypsies. I was, however, oversimplifying. Some authorities detect Phoenician origins in this archetypically Spanish music. Some fancy echoes of Byzantine liturgy. Some hear the rhythms of the African Negroes, and some castanets of Troy. There never was such a palimpsest as Spain, so layered with alien influences. From the tiers of the Roman amphitheatre at Sagunto, the casus belli of the Second Punic War, you may see the memorials of five different cultures: in the hillside above, the holes of the Iberian troglodytes; in the country around, the vines of the Greeks; beneath your feet, the Roman paving-stones; behind your back, a rambling Moorish castle; and away at the water’s edge, the tall black chimneys of a blast furnace. Spain is the most militantly insular of States, but she is trodden all over with foreign footsteps.
How much is Moorish in the national temperament, and how much indigenous Iberian, the experts seem unable to decide; but there are moments, when the harshness of Spanish life feels particularly oppressive, when one is tempted to call everything abrasive Iberian, and everything lubricant Moorish. Certainly there are nagging undertones of regret to the greatest of the Islamic monuments of Spain, the Great Mosque of Córdoba, for now that its mihrab has been demoted to be a mere curiosity, its courtyard taken in hand by the canons, its huge martial expanse blocked by the Christian altars in the middle, its old brotherly arcades walled in, its ablution fountains converted to ornamental pools, and its wandering sages banished for ever from the orange trees—now that it has been Christianized for seven hundred years, it feels a marvel manqué, a Dome of the Rock drained of its lofty magic, or a Kaaba removed from Mecca. It is only lately, under the example of foreigners, that the Spaniards have really recognized the Moorish genuis—Unamuno, indeed, thought the Moorish conquest the supreme calamity of Spain. The Alhambra was used by the conquering Christians as a debtor’s asylum, a hospital, a prison, and a munitions dump, and it is only in our own times that they have placed upon the ramparts of that golden fortress the haunting appeal of De Icaza’s blind beggar:
Dale Limosna, Mujer,
Que no hay en la vida nade
Come la pena de sex
Ciego en Granada.
Alms, lady, alms! For there
is nothing crueler in life
than to be blind in Granada.
The last Moriscos, or Christianized Moors, were expelled from Spain in 1609, but all over this country you will see people in whom the Moorish blood still runs—swarthy, skinny men built for the burnous, women whose eyes peer at you obliquely out of narrow windows, scampering small boys like Kasbah urchins, old men with fringed beards like marabouts. There are no longer, as there were before the Civil War, women in the south who veil their faces like Muslims; but time and again, when some old village lady wanders into the grocery store and spots a stranger there, you will notice that she takes the corner of her black headscarf between her teeth, and holds it there defensively—precisely as the women of Egypt, midway between purdah and emancipation, half veil themselves in reflex. The Spaniards do not ride their donkeys in the rump-seated Arab manner (though the Spanish knights of the tourneys did adopt the short stirrup of the Moors); close your eyes one day, all the same, when some blithe donkey-man is passing your window, and as the neat little clip-clop of his hoofs echoes down the street, and as the man hums, half beneath his breath, some complex quarter-tone refrain, you may almost think yourself in Muscat or Aqaba, watching a portly merchant of the suk plodding through the palm groves.
The timeless quality of Spanish life still feels very Muslim: at the frontier with Andorra, any hot weekend, a Spanish frontier official sits on a kitchen chair in the sunshine to examine the passports, and looks so thoroughly pasha-like, with his papers
and his paunch, that you actually notice the absence of his hubble-bubble. The Spanish talent for enjoyment sometimes reminds me of the Arab countries: like the Egyptians, the Spaniards love public holidays, public gardens, picnics, lookout towers, rowing incompetently about in boats or trailing in vast family groups through scenic wonders. The deadpan face of Spanish politics sometimes evokes visions of reticent sheikhs, and the Spanish passion for sweet sticky cakes has something to it of houris, harems, and jasmine tea. Now and then the guidebook will tantalizingly observe, of some small village in the Ebro delta, perhaps, or a remote high pueblo of Andalusia, that its people ‘still preserve certain Moorish customs’; and though the book is never more explicit, and the village, when you reach it, usually seems all too ordinary, still the phrase may suggest to you, in a properly Oriental way, hidden legacies of magic, pederasty, or high living that make the East feel pleasantly at hand.
For the Moorish way of life was not confined to any conquering elite. The Moors impregnated the whole of society with their manners, so that even now it is easy to imagine the black tents of the Bedouin pitched, as once they were, around the walls of Toledo. During the centuries of the occupation, all Spain was bilingual—even the Christian princes of the north spoke Arabic to each other, and decked themselves in Moorish fineries. The Cid fought sometimes for a Christian faction, sometimes for a Muslim, and throughout the campaigns of the Reconquest there was constant intercourse, if only through the medium of refugees, between one side and the other. Many Christians were converted to Islam. Many more, though they kept their Christian faith under Moorish rule, looked, lived, and probably thought like Moors. The Muslims were rulers in Spain for more than seven centuries, and they dug their roots deep.
