Spain
Page 9
There is a place in Granada that well demonstrates how deep. On the hill above the city there stands, of course, the Alhambra—foppish within, tremendous on the outside, especially if you pick out its red and golden walls through the lens of a distant telescope, and see it standing there beneath the Sierra Nevada like an illumination in a manuscript. The building I have in mind, though, is less grandiose. It stands in the heart of the town below, and to reach it you walk down a small alley beside a bar, and push open a great studded door on the right-hand side. There you will find, tucked away from the traffic, very quiet, very old, a Moorish caravanserai. It is a square arcaded structure, with a stone-flagged court, and its walls are so high that it is usually plunged in shadow. A caretaker family inhabits one corner, and the woman may look out at you from her kitchen window, pushing the hair back from her eyes; but the courtyard itself is nearly always deserted, and feels peopled only by ghosts. Nothing is easier than to see the merchants there, with their baggage-trains and their striped blankets, their hookahs and their towering turbans. Nothing is easier than to hear the racket of their bargaining, the shouts of the caravan-masters and the grunts of their animals, the liquid flow of Arabic among the elders squatting beneath the arcade, or the lovely intonation of the Koran from some blind beggar beside the gate.
And when you leave the place, to pop into the bar, perhaps, for a glass of wine and a plate of prawns, unexpectedly you will find that the ghosts have come with you, that the man behind the bar looks, now you think of it, remarkably like a Yemeni, and the hubbub of voices in the saloon behind your back is not at all unlike the haggle of a Syrian bazaar. It was not long ago. It is not far away. You can often see the houses of Morocco from the hills above Gibraltar, and Spain still possesses two enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, over there on the Maghreb shore. In the Alpujarra mountains the godmother, returning the child to its parents after a christening, still says: ‘Here is your child: you gave him to me a Moor, I hand him back a Christian.’ When in 1936 the Nationalists besieged in the Toledo Alcazar were relieved at last by Franco’s Army of Africa, they knew their ordeal was over because, listening through their battered walls to the noise of the streets outside, they heard the Moroccan infantry talking Arabic.
I was once loitering though Cádiz, that old white seaport on a spit, when I came across a boy and a girl playing soldiers. The girl was dressed as a knight-at-arms—cardboard helmet, broad-edged wooden sword, a plastic shield from the toyshop and a grubby white nightgown. The boy was unmistakably a Moor, with a floppy towel-turban precariously wound around his head, and a robe apparently stitched together of old dusters. I asked each of them, as a matter of form, whom they represented. ‘I am the Christian caballero,’ said the girl brightly, hitching her helmet up. The boy, however, had more sense of history. ‘I am the others!’ he darkly replied, and bent his scimitar between his hands.
Nor were the Moors the only Orientals to bring a tang or a smoulder to Spain—itself a country, for all its brackish magnificence, that sometimes seems short of salt. It is almost five hundred years since the Jews were expelled from Spain, but even now you often feel their presence—shadowy, muted, but pervasive still.
Their position in Spanish society, before their expulsion (or conversion) in 1492, fluctuated from ignominy to near-supremacy. The Visigoths often treated them abominably—under King Erwig, for instance, their hair was cropped, their property was confiscated, their evidence was not acceptable in a court of law, and they were given a year to recant their faith. Under the Muslims, on the other hand, they thrived—it was partly Jewish help that enabled the Moors to occupy Spain so swiftly. Beneath the tolerant aegis of Islam, for three centuries they enjoyed their golden age: rich, honoured, cultivated, influential. There were towns in Spain that were entirely Jewish, and even Granada was known as the City of Jews. The Jews were the doctors of Moorish Spain, the philosophers, occasionally the diplomats, sometimes even the generals. Their own culture flourished as it seldom has in Europe, first in Granada, then in Toledo, and a reputation of almost Satanic ability surrounded their affairs. ‘Priests go to Paris for their studies,’ it used to be said, ‘lawyers to Bologna, doctors to Salerno, and devils to Toledo!’
In the Christian kingdoms, before the completion of the Reconquest, the Jews intermittently prospered too, and at least among the ruling classes there was nothing pejorative to a Hebrew name. Alfonso VIII of Castile had a Jewish mistress, Pedro I of Aragón had a Jewish treasurer, in the synagogue called El Tránsito in Toledo an inscription on the wall honours, all in one whirl, the God of Israel, King Pedro the Cruel of Castile, and Samuel Levi. There were several Jewish Bishops of Burgos. It was only in the late fourteenth century, when the Reconquest was nearly complete, that the persecutions began again—and even then those Jews who accepted Christianity at first suffered no hardship, and formed indeed almost the whole merchant and banking class. The secret practice of Judaism, however, turned the people against them, and in the end the most devoutly Christian Jew was likely to be suspected of continuing his dreadful practices in private, burning Catholic babies when nobody was looking, or interspersing his Masses with black magic. The afternoon of the Spanish Jews burst into a blood-red sunset. Harassed by the Inquisition, deserted by their patron-kings, burnt in their hundreds, in the very year of the fall of Granada they were expelled en masse from Spanish soil. Thus the Catholic Monarchs, at the moment of Spain’s greatest opportunity, threw out of their domains several hundred thousand of their most talented, efficient, and necessary subjects.
They went without their possessions—capital they could take out, through letters of credit on banks owned by Jews elsewhere, but their libraries, their treasures, their land and their fine houses they left behind. They left their shades in the old Jewish quarters of the cities, from the hill-top ghetto of Toledo to the lovely labyrinth called Santa Cruz in Seville. They left synagogues here and there, converted nowadays into churches or museums, with crumbling friezes of Hebrew script around their walls, and dim memories of great wealth. They left some hints of their extraordinary talents. It is said that the tremendous sculptor Gil de Siloé was a Jew. Some people think Columbus was—in his will he left ‘half a mark of silver to a Jew who used to live at the gate of the Jewry in Lisbon’. St. Theresa had Jewish origins. There was indeed a time when most men of culture in Spain were Jewish, and such a hegemony cannot easily be expunged; the Jews have left behind them a strain of blood, a look in the eye, that is apparent everywhere in the cities of Spain, and subtly contributes to her grandeur.
For several centuries after the expulsion there were no Jews in Spain at all, except those who had merged undetectably into the Christian whole. They were remembered with distaste. The palace called the Casa de los Picos in Segovia, which is studded all over with diamond-shaped stones, is said to have been faced in this way, after the expulsion, to blot out memories of its former Jewish ownership: till then it had been known as the House of the Jew, now it was the House of Bumps. In many a Spanish cathedral you will find memorials to Christians allegedly murdered by Jewish fanatics, and even today one guide to Seville describes a particular corner of the city as having been ‘a last outpost of bearded Jews, charlatans, and other queer characters’. A few Jews have come back, all the same. Some returned in the nineteenth century, and some have more recently arrived as refugees from Muslim Morocco. The English cemetery at Málaga is mostly occupied by people like John Mauger, Master of the Schooner Lady Marsella, Henry Hutting of the Brig Dasher, or William P. Beecher, of New Haven, Connecticut, whose tomb, erected to ‘commemorate the merits of his useful life’, is embellished with a mourning figure of Liberty and the thirteen stars of the original Union; tucked away in one corner, though, there is the grave of a solitary Jew, who died in 1961 of the Christian era, or 5721 years after the Creation.
I once hailed a taxi in Madrid and asked the driver to take me to the synagogue. He was only faintly surprised by the commission, and after a few fruitless drives up
drab back streets, knocking at closed doors and looking for mistaken street numbers, he deposited me at the door of a biggish modern office block. There, said he, were the Hebrews. Sure enough, when I had gone inside, and taken the elevator upstairs, and entered a small, dark, carpeted apartment, there the Hebrews were—small quiet men from North Africa, with the voice of a cantor giving a singing lesson in the room next door, and along the hall a plain, discreet little place of worship. They had no complaints, they said. The Government treated them kindly enough. They had not lately been accused of eating Christian infants, and if anyone thought them capable of sorcery, nobody had yet engaged their services.
In this they differed from their cousins, the Spanish gypsies, whose talents are always in demand. The most famous gypsies in the whole world are the painted dancers of the Sacromonte in Granada, a clan of prosperous, grasping, and exceedingly talented performers who batten upon the poor visitor with steely talons, plump him gasping upon a kitchen chair in a cave, offer him a glass of unspeakable wine, treat him to half an hour of the best folk-dancing in Europe, grossly overcharge him, and send him back to his hotel feeling rather as the yokels of folk-lore used to feel, when the devil had kept them up in a trance, footing it around a fairy ring all night. The zing, the flare, the unutterable nerve of the Sacromonte gypsies, which have made their name a swear-word wherever tourists gather to swop experiences, are characteristic of the Spanish gitanos—much the most exciting of all the aliens of Spain.
There are gypsies all over this country, pure or half-caste, raggety with their dogs and wagons on the lanes of Navarre, inexcusably swaggering through the streets of Granada, where they have been settled at least since the fifteenth century. One contemporary authority, Jean-Paul Clébert, says that in Spain they have ‘found one of their most favourable homes’, but it was not always so. Their life in Spain has been full of ups and downs. The Catholic Monarchs threatened to banish them, unless they gave up their gypsy life. Philip II tried to settle them in towns. Philip IV ordered that ‘they be taken from their places of habitation, separated from one another, with express prohibition to come together publicly or in secret’. Charles II forbade them to own horses. Charles III called them Neo-Castilians, and gave their horses back again. The prophets of the French romantic movement seized upon their dances, their costumes, their rhythms, and their strident voices and made them synonymous, to the world at large, with the reputation of Spain herself. Much that seems to us most Spanish is really gypsy. Bull-fighting is an art in which the gitanos have always excelled; flamenco they have made their own; wherever a castanet clicks in Spain, a heel taps, a pair of hands claps, or a deep sad voice wails through the night, then the influence of the gypsies is somewhere about.
They possess, to a degree no other Spaniard does, a gift for irrepressible enthusiasm. They crackle. In the delightful little Andalusian town of Ubeda I was approached one night by two gypsies who asked if I would like to hear their companion, an older man of distinctly theatrical appearance, sing the cante jondo. He was, they said, a most distinguished performer, well known in all the best caves of the Sacromonte—which is to say, in the gitano context, top of the bill at the Palladium. The singer’s throat was muffled in an elegant spotted scarf, rather in the Barrymore tradition, and he complained, with an anxious arpeggio or two, of a sore throat. He agreed to do his best, though, and off we set towards a nearby café. It was rather like joining a trio of flamboyant picaresque rogues in a minor bank robbery. The place was full of solemn townsmen, playing earnest games of dominoes, who looked up as we entered, in a flurry of badinage and conceit, rather as though we were interrupting the sermon. We were, however, unperturbed. Up the steps we went, now and then breaking into a few clattering dance steps, and clearing ourselves a place at a trestle table, and ordering wine all around, we sat down, gave that lofty tenor a few respectful moments of silence, and presently burst into song.
Never in my whole life have I had more fun, or been more stimulated by animal high spirits. The great man, breaking his melancholy, soon led us from the sad cante jondo into the most raucous kind of flamenco, and before long that whole room was an uproar of violent clapping, clicked fingers, wild laughs and cries, stamped feet, ear-splitting songs and side-splitting witticisms. The domino-players abandoned their games, the floorboards shook, and presently the proprietor, shouldering his way through the din, interrupted to say that if we wished to continue the entertainment, we must do so elsewhere. So we parted, Barrymore, his two merry agents, and I, only pausing in the moonlight for a last actor-managerial clearing of the throat and a brief altercation about performing fees—those splendid fellows at first demanding, not with much conviction, rather more than five times what they actually got.
Ah, the gypsies! If they are not the salt of Spain, they are the spiciest of sauces.
Many another foreigner has left his mark. The Roman has left his great aqueducts and fortifications, the theatres of Mérida and Sagunto, the villas of Tarragona, the city wall that surrounds the cathedral city of Lugo, or the noble bridge across the Tagus at Alcántara—a name which means, indeed, merely The Bridge. The Spanish bull-ring is clearly descended from the Roman amphitheatre—if you have doubts, look at the ruined ring at Alcoy, north of Alicante, which was wrecked during the Civil War, and now looks exactly like an archaeological specimen in Rome. Roman place names are all over Spain—Badajoz means Pax Augusta, Saragossa comes from Caesarea Augusta. Olives from Roman stock are still the best. Some people think that gazpacho is really the Roman posca, a standard Roman Army ration; and some travellers consider that the most evocative memorial in all Spain is the unfinished Roman obelisk that stands in the shade of a wild garden north of Tarragona, dappled by sunshine, fragrant with pines, with the sweet breezes of the Mediterranean ruffling its cypresses, and a strong emanation of dryads.
French influence in Spain has been persistent and profound. French monks of Cluny created the Santiago pilgrimage. French architects inspired half the great cathedrals. A Frenchman was first Archbishop of Toledo. Thirty-four expeditions came from France to help the Spanish Christians in their crusades against the Moors. Throughout modern Spanish history, France has been Spain’s symbol of modernism—sometimes feared, often detested, frequently envied, but never quite out of the Spanish mind. Dutchmen too, Germans, Flemings, and Italians have all brought their skills to Spain, and left behind a curtain-wall, a tapestry, the slope of a buttress or the angle of a pediment. The telephone system still bears the stamp of the Americans who used to manage it, and who stuck to their switchboards with such tenacity that throughout the Civil War they served both sides impartially—often the first news of a city’s loss reached the Government when some Minister telephoned the local commander from Madrid, to be answered by the enemy. Foreign capital from many countries has been essential to the jerky development of Spanish industry. The Army, with its jackboots, goosesteps, Africa Korps caps and Nazi steel helmets, is a reminder that foreign troops were fighting on this soil less than forty years ago: sometimes, on the lonely steppe, you will find a small memorial, in the old German script, to some young pilot of the Condor Legion, and outside Salamanca there is an ironically beautiful memorial to all the Italians who died in these parts for the gimcrack cause of Fascism.
And, of course, you cannot escape the British, the sea-gypsies, whose history touches the story of Spain so often and so intimately that John of Gaunt had a perfectly reasonable claim to the throne of Castile, Charles I of England once came to Madrid, dashingly incognito, to find himself a Spanish bride, and the Dukes of Wellington are, to this day, Dukes of Ciudad Rodrigo too. The British flag still flies over Gibraltar, and there is a large British colony in Spain proper—thousands of expatriates have escaped from the drizzle and the taxation to Andalusia or the Balearics. There are many Spanish Anglophiles: Jerez, whose sherry sells in vast quantities on the English market, and whose industry was partly built by Englishmen, is recognizably British still, full of impeccable Anglo-Spani
sh accents, handsome hacking jackets and visiting gentry from the London office. And most telling of all the figures of the relationship, perhaps, are the British old-age pensioners who, finding winter life on the Costa del Sol both cheaper and more fun than retirement at home, come out in their rollicking groups each year to occupy the grateful holiday hotels: for very soon, often enough, these old dears succumb to the environment, are transformed into honorary Andalusians themselves, and are to be seen in the middle of the morning happily flirting with total strangers over wine glasses beside the sea.
6 Wild Spain
Where the Guadalquiver River comes down to the sea, the upper-works of the ships from Seville riding queerly through the palms and sandbanks, there lies a great marshland, the Coto Doñana—the biggest roadless area in western Europe. The best way to sample this extraordinary region of marsh and sand dune—short of taking a string of mules and making for the middle of it—is to visit a fascinating village called El Rocío, twenty-odd miles off the road from Seville to Huelva.