The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “And how did he sleep, the companion?” asked he.

  “Beautifully,” I said.

  He opened the door and let in a freezing, dawnless wind, lit the forge fire, and began to hammer out a ploughshare. Four wild, unshaven men with tousled hair and bloodshot eyes rushed in and called for brandy. They had slept in the tower.

  “More!” they cried.

  They drank four glasses each, and then ran for their lives down the road to the team they had let wander on its own.

  Labourers came in and brought ploughshares and pieces of wheel to be mended. The smith and his brother fell to the clang-cling tap of the anvil. The little hovel was showered with sparks and raftered with blows. The woman did not appear. There was no talk of food. The sun was cast into the sky, but the wind was steel cold. The plains were as pale as frost lain to the blue mountains from which, the night before, I had struggled. I saw the buildings and the tower, cold, tarnished blocks of stone.

  After a couple of hours a stout, unshaven fellow, a bailiff, for he was not dressed in the peasant leather and corduroy, came to have his horse shod. He was a greasy, yellow man, with a face like a football, almost featureless, and he wandered about complaining about prices, weather, women, horses, everything, with a stained stump of cigarette stuck to his loose lower lip, and his hat planted on the back of his head. The young smith took no notice of him, but sent hard swinging blows arching down upon the anvil. The place rang like a belfry.

  A boy brought a bullock to be shod, for the bullocks are yoked for drawing big loads. The beast was put into a kind of stocks outside the smithy, roped down by the horns, and lifted bodily almost off the ground by two straps under its belly, and with its feet trussed by ropes. Two small half-moons of steel were nailed to its hoofs.

  Then the woman came out and boiled me a couple of eggs and some coffee, and charged me only two reales—about fourpence—for my food and lodging. I made long speeches and protestations of farewell and, looking up at my enemy the sun, wondered if I could get to Caceres before he conquered that country of rock and pink furrows and besieged the town itself.

  (1928, 1988)

  FROM

  The Spanish Temper

  CHAPTER 1

  I make these notes during those two hours of impatience which begin in the early morning when the electric train clatters out of Biarritz Ville. One is hungry and queasy, one has slept badly and begins smoking nervously and too soon. In the corridor no one wants to talk after this night. Women are patching up their faces, combing their hair, men stand outside rubbing the night’s growth of beard. The lavatory smells. One watches the long shadows of the rising sun in the pines; one sees the dust, the dewy greenness, the dry, heavily tiled houses, the fruitful green of a kind climate, a candid sky, and the sedate life. Yesterday’s sun is still warm in these villa towns of terracotta. Here one would be glad to have a doll’s house and count one’s pension and rentes thirty times a day like a Frenchman and rest one’s nervous northern mind in conversation consisting so largely of abstract nouns, to parcel out one’s sous, one’s pleasures and permissions.

  But the prolonged sight of France annoys; one is impatient for the drama of the frontier and for the violent contrasts, the discontent and indifference of Spain. One is anxious to fill out that famous text of Galdós, so often quoted from the Episodios Nacionales: “O Spain, how thou art the same into whatsoever part of thy history one may look! And there is no disguise to cover thee, no mask to hide thy face, no fard to disfigure thee, for wherever thou appearest, thou art recognized at once from a hundred miles away, one half of thy face—fiesta; and the other misery; one hand bearing laurels and the other scratching thy leprous sores.”

  To know what we are up against we ought to go to Spain by aeroplane and fly to the centre of it. Beneath us England is packed with little houses, if the earth is visible at all through the haze; France lies clearly like green linoleum broken into a small busy pattern, a place of thriving little fields; but cross the dark blot of the Pyrenees, and Spain is reddish brown, yellow, and black, like some dusty bull restive in the rock and the sand and (we would guess) uninhabited. The river-beds are wide and bleached and dry. After Switzerland this is the highest country in Europe. The centre is a tableland torn open by gorges, and on the table the mountain ranges are spaciously disposed. There is little green, except on the seaboard; or rather the green is the dark gloss of ilex, olive, and pine, which from the height at which we are flying appear in lake-like and purple blobs. For the most part we are looking down at steppe which is iced in the long winter and cindery like a furnace floor in the short summer. Fortified desert—and yet the animal image returns again and again in this metalled and rocky scene, for occasionally some peak will give a sudden upward thrust, like the twist of a bull’s horns, at the wings of the plane. Flying over Spain, we wonder at the torture that time had put upon the earth’s crust and how human beings can live there. In Soria, the terrible province, below the wicked mountains of Aragón I remember picking up an old woman who had fallen off her donkey and carrying her to the side of the road and wiping the blood off her nose. She was a figure carved in wood, as light as a husk. It was like having starvation in one’s hands.

  But it is better, I think, to go the slow way to Spain and to feel the break with Europe at the land frontiers. It is true that at Irún one is not in Spain but in the Basque provinces, among people of mysterious race and language who are an anomaly in Europe; and that, at the other end of the Pyrenees, one is in Catalonia, where the people are really Provençal, speak their own tongue, and scornfully alter the Spanish proverb: “Africa begins at the Pyrenees,” into “Africa begins at the Ebro.” But the stamp of Spain is on these provinces and the Spanish stain runs over the frontiers. One finds it in Montpellier; on the Atlantic side it reaches into Biarritz, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, and Bayonne. And in these towns one meets something profoundly and disturbingly Spanish, which goes down to the roots of the Spanish nature: one meets the exiles. For, long before the Europe of the 1930’s or the Russia of the early nineteenth century, Spain is the great producer of exiles, a country unable to tolerate its own people. The Moors, the Jews, the Protestants, the reformers—out with them; and out, at different periods, with the liberals, the atheists, the priests, the kings, the presidents, the generals, the socialists, the anarchists, fascists, and communists; out with the Right, out with the Left, out with every government. The fact recalls that cruel roar of abuse that goes up in the ring when the bullfighter misses a trick; out with him. Hendaye and Bayonne are there to remind us that before the dictatorships and police states and witch-hunters of contemporary history, Spain has been imperial in the trade of producing exiles. And the exiles go out over the bridge at Hendaye into France, the country that has tolerated all, and at the windows of the French hotel the new exile stands, looking across the bight of sea at the gloomy belfries of his native country, hears their harsh bells across the water, and hates the France which has given him sanctuary. He is proud of his hatred, sinks into fatalism, apathy, intrigue, quarrels with all the other exiles, and says with pride: “We are the impossible people.”

  Hendaye: the train dies in the customs. One gets a whiff of Spanish impossibility here. A young Spaniard is at the carriage window talking to a friend who is on the platform. The friend is not allowed on the platform; what mightn’t he be smuggling? The gendarme tells him to go. The Spaniard notes this and says what he has to say to his friend. It is a simple matter.

  “If you go over to see them on Wednesday tell them I have arrived and will come at the end of the week.” But if a bossy French gendarme thinks that is how a Spaniard proceeds, he is wrong. The simple idea comes out in this fashion:

  “Suppose you see them, tell them I am here, but if not, not; you may not actually see them, but talk to them, on the telephone perhaps, or send a message by someone else and if not on Wednesday, well then Tuesday or Monday, if you have the car you could run over and choose your day and say you saw me, you met
me on the station, and I said, if you had some means of sending them a message or you saw them, that I might come over, on Friday, say, or Saturday at the end of the week, say Sunday. Or not. If I come there I come, but if not, we shall see, so that supposing you see them …” Two Spaniards can keep up this kind of thing for an hour; one has only to read their newspapers to see they are wrapped in a cocoon of prolixity. The French gendarme repeats that the Spaniard must leave. The Spaniard on the platform turns his whole body, not merely his head, and looks without rancour at the gendarme. The Spaniard is considering a most difficult notion—the existence of a personality other than his own. He turns back, for he has failed to be aware of anything more than a blur of opposition. It is not resented. Simply, he is incapable of doing more than one thing at a time. Turning to the speaker in the train, he goes over the same idea from his point of view, in the same detail, adding personal provisos and subclauses, until a kind of impenetrable web has been woven round both parties. They are aware of nothing but their individual selves, and the very detail of their talk is a method of defeating any awareness of each other. They are lost in the sound of their own humming, monotonous egos and only a bullet could wake them out of it. Spanish prolixity, the passion for self-perpetuating detail, is noticeable even in some of their considerable writers—in the novels of Galdós, for example: in the passage I have quoted there are three images to describe “disguise”—and it creates a soft impenetrable world of its own. Yet they have a laconic language, the third-person form of address is abrupt and economical, their poetry even at its most decorative is compressed in its phrases and cut down to the lapidary and proverbial, and they can be as reserved and silent as the English; and yet when, in their habit of going to extremes, they settle down to talk, one feels one is watching someone knitting, so fine is the detail, so repetitious the method. The fact is that they are people of excess: excessive in silence and reserve, excessive in speech when they suddenly fly into it. It is absurd of course to generalize about a nation from the sight of two people on a railway platform; but we are travellers—let us correct one generalization by adding a great many more. There will be time to reflect on the variety of human nature, and the sameness of its types, afterwards. Let us consider the other Spaniards on the train.

  It was easy to pick them out from the French when they got on the train in Paris; not quite so easy to pick them out from the Italians. The Spanish men were better dressed than the other Latins, and this was true of all classes. Their clothes fitted them at the waist and the shoulders, they carried themselves with reserve and dignity. Their gestures were restrained, their farewells were quiet and manly, they did not talk much and what they said was dry, composed, and indifferent. They behaved with ease as people who live by custom do; and they gave an impression of an aristocratic detachment. This is true of all classes from the rich to the poor, who have the same speech and the same manners. There are no class accents in Spain worth mentioning; there are only the regional variants of speech. This man is an Andalusian, this a Gallego; you can only guess his class from his clothes. One is markedly among gentlemen, and even the “señorito,” the bouncing little mister, falls back on that when he has exhausted his tricks. The word “gentleman” is not altogether complimentary, for it implies a continual conscious restraint on part of the human personality, and it carries a narrow connotation of class. In this narrow sense a Spaniard cannot be a “gentleman,” for though he has a sense of fitness in his quiescent mood, he is unrestrained when he wakes up. His conduct is ruled by his personal pride, not by his category; and it is natural for him to be proud. His pride may be a nuisance, but it fits him and it cannot be removed. He is, he has always been, a hidalgo—a hijo de algo—a person of some consideration. And upon this consideration, however impalpable it may be, the very beggar in the streets reposes. A point not to forget is that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spaniards were the master-race of the world, the founders of the first great empire to succeed the Roman Empire, more permanent in their conquest and administration than the French, who followed them, successful where the Germans have never yet succeeded, the true predecessors of the British empire-makers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Spaniards in the train had the simplicity of people who had once had the imperial role. One could suppose them to be looking back on it with philosophical resignation. The place of those who have ceased to rule is to teach.

  There was no conceit or vanity in these travellers. The nervous pushing bustle of the European was not in them. The quick vanity and sharp-mindedness of the French, their speed in isolating and abstracting a problem, were not there. Nor were there the naïve vivacity and affectability which electrify the agreeable Italians. These races care to attract or please continuously; the Spaniard cares very little and leaves to us to discover him. He gives us time to breathe by his very negligence. “Nada—nothing,” he says restfully before every subject that is broached.

  They stood in the corridor of the train and they gazed at the fields of France. These fields are richer and better cultivated than a good deal—though not all—of the Spanish land. The Spaniard does not deny this, though he will think of the province of olives in Jaén, the vega of Granada, the vines of Rioja and Valdepeñas, and the long rich cultivations of Valencia and say, with that exaggeration which is natural to local pride, that these are “the richest places in the whole world”; and about Valencia he will be right. But Spain on the whole is a poor country, and he does not deny it. He is simply not interested in what is outside of Spain; because he has no feeling for the foreign thing and even regards its existence as inimical and an affront. He turns his back. His lack of curiosity amounts to a religion.

  When I first crossed the frontier at Irún nearly thirty years ago, I remember listening to a declamation by a Spaniard against his own country. At the time I thought the protest was a sign of some specific political unrest, but I have heard that speech dozens of times since. Again and again: “It is one of the evils of Spain. We are decadent, priest-ridden, backward, barbarous, corrupt, ungovernable,” etc., etc. Spain is either hell or heaven, a place for fury or ecstasy. Like Russians in the nineteenth century, the Spaniards are in the habit of breaking into denunciations of their country, and between 1898 and 1936 these denunciations culminated in a puritan renaissance. There had been two savage civil wars in that century and, among intellectuals, these wars presented themselves as a conflict between reactionary Catholicism and liberal Catholicism, between Africa and Europe, tradition and progress. In the writings of Ganivet, in Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, the early Azorín, in Maeztu, in Ayala and Baroja—a brilliant school which has had no successors and which was contemporary with the effective efforts of Giner de los Ríos to create an educated minority—the examination of the Spanish sickness was made without rhetoric. Wherever one finds a superior mind in Spain it is certain to have been formed by this tragic generation, many of whom died of broken hearts in the Civil War, were executed, or are in exile. Possibly some of these train travellers have been influenced by them, possibly they are hostile or indifferent; if we are to find some common ground on which they stand we shall have to look beyond the accidents of opinion. That common ground is not their nationality.

  For the Spaniards are not Spaniards first, if they are Spaniards in the end. The peninsula is a piece of rocky geography. It is the subject of Spanish rhetoric, the occasion for their talk about Spanishness, for chauvinism and rebellion—and they know from experience in every generation how those things end: they end in nada, nothing, resignation. The ground these travellers rest their lives on is something smaller than Spain. They are rooted in their region, even nowadays, after the Civil War, which has mixed up the population and broken so many ardently maintained barriers. They are Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Castilians, Andalusians, Valencians, Murcians, and so on, before they are Spaniards; and before they are men of these regions they are men of some town or village; and in that place, small or large, they think perfectio
n lies—even the self-castigating people of Murcia, who say of themselves: “Between earth and sky nothing good in Murcia.” One thinks of that little play of the Quintero brothers called The Lady from Alfaqueque. A lady in this lost little Andalusian town, who was so in love with it that she could be cajoled and swindled into any folly by anyone who said he came from that place. I remember a woman in Madrid who had spent the last ten years in political exile saying: “We had a much better life abroad when we were in exile, but I could never forget the water of Madrid and the craving for the taste of it became a torture.”

  This provinciality of the Spaniard is his true ground and passion. And with it runs a psychological parallel. His town is not like any other town. It is the only town. And he too is not like any other human being; he is indeed the only human being. If he is brought to the test, there is only himself in the world, himself and, at the other extreme, the Universe. Nothing between man and the Universe. For ourselves, the Westerners, there is something else besides man and the ultimate, or universal; there is civilization, or what Spaniards call despairingly “ambiente”; and it is their continual argument that nothing can be done in Spain because of this “lack of ambiente” or lack of a favourable atmosphere; how can anything as mundane as a “favourable atmosphere” exist where people do not feel related to each other, but only to some remote personal extremity. The pious belong to God, not even to the city of God, but to some deeply felt invisible figure; the impious to some individual vision. In the end they are anarchists.

  Irún. Holiday-makers on the French side of the river that divides the two sides of the Basque country watched the fighting begin in the Civil War here and saw men swim the river to safety. The town of Irún is famous in the history of Pyrenean smuggling. There have been two traditional kinds of smuggling on this frontier: the mule loaded with tobacco coming over the mountain paths at night, and the smuggling organized by high-up officials from Madrid, which is part of the bribery system that never dies in Spain. It is described in the Galdós novel La de Bringas. In all classes the personal approach through “influence” is preferred to the direct one; without “influence” one cannot “get in.” A foreign official told me that after many years living in Spain he had come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of Spaniards: those who have “influence” and those too poor to have any; for the former, life is “normal,” for the latter it is hell. The pursuit of “influence” is partly due to economic causes. In poor countries a job of some slight importance is a phenomenon and attracts a court of parasites. The fortunate slave at the desk is besieged by a crowd of less fortunate slaves; the fortunate slave himself is the unfortunate slave of one more fortunate. Like the Russian bureaucracy in Gogol’s time, the Spanish is a huge collection of poor men. One has only to buy a motor-car or make a contract to be surrounded by people consumed by the anxiety to “facilitate” the deal, register the papers, put the thing through with the right officials, for a small commission. The affair would be lost in the ordinary and proper channels. Weeks and months would go by and nothing would happen. Fatal to take the normal course; indispensable to have an introduction in the right quarter. Watch the fortunate Spaniard at the railway office. Discreetly he inquires about a ticket, does not boldly ask for it. A significant rubbing together of thumb and forefinger takes place, a furtive flicker comes into the eyes. A little personal deal is starting: unfortunate Spaniards without “influence” will not get the seat, but he will. It is an unjust system, but one unjust flea has other unjust fleas on his back; the method introduces elaboration, sociability, a sea of acquaintance, into ordinary action: “I will give you a card to my uncle, who will arrange everything.” Everyone in Spain, down to the extremely poor, to whom so little is possible, is waiting for someone else, for a “combination,” or arrangement, of some kind, and since time is no object, they make a lot of friends. If time is an object, if it is a matter of life and death, then a black figure which all Spaniards understand, rises up and interposes her immovable hand—the great croupier, Fate. “Ay, señor, que triste es la vida.”