Europe

by Jan Morris

  ¶ ‘In numerical order,’ said a taxi-driver to me in Stockholm, ‘what are the chief attractions of Wales, first, second, third?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said I, ‘but I know what’s forty-eighth.’ ‘The food,’ he instantly and perceptively replied.

  74 The least Power

  So, recuperated, we come to the Powers. In the last decade of the twentieth century there are still five States in Europe which see themselves as Powers – only a united Europe could claim to be a super-Power, and it hasn’t come to that yet. Of the five, Spain is the least convincing in its pretensions, which are based less on present circumstances than on past glories (in the Rambla at Barcelona stands the Palace of the Viceroy of Peru!) and on the continuing and growing importance in the New World of the Spanish language.

  I went to Spain in 1960 because I had been commissioned to write a book about the country. I had only been there once before. I bought a Volkswagen camper and a Spanish language course on records, and drove there over the Pyrenees. Spain was still in the grip of Franco’s dictatorship, smouldering with the hatreds of its Civil War twenty-five years before, and separated from the rest of Europe not just by geography but by deep gulfs of history, habit and ideology. I still remember with a frisson the moment when, dropping down from the high pass of Roncesvalles (guarded by surly Civil Guardsmen in their patent-leather tricorn hats), I found myself among the Spaniards. The very first town I reached was Pamplona, where the bulls famously run through the streets on the feast of St Fermin, and in 1960 nowhere could have been more quintessentially Spanish. The people in the streets seemed to me dark, brooding, glowering people. Church bells clashed all night long. In the morning I drank hot chocolate tangy with cinnamon out of little cups. In the evening I hung around my sombre hotel until at ten o’clock dinner was served at last. My fellow guests seemed excessively grave and formal, and their children should have been in bed hours before. I remember the whole city as dark and clenched. I found it extremely exciting.

  To some degree I was right in my romantic responses. Of course I was influenced by Spain’s red-hot reputation – the familiar legends of violence, towering sensuality, dukes, castanets, raging bulls and all that. But I was to discover that much of the traditional flair of Spain really had survived the years of autocracy, and even the unforgiving recriminations of the ex-soldiers, Royalist or Republican, Fascist or Communist. Spain then was almost an island, so rigidly had history cut it off from the rest of Europe, and within its frontiers marvellous things survived from earlier times: customs and crafts, ways of thought and manners of speech, all the high drama of Andalusia and Castile. Across the wide landscapes of Spain, in those days, bullocks pulled ploughs across apparently interminable fields, and fierce dogs marched about with long sticks in their collars, to keep them out of the house. How poor were the poor of Spain then, how lordly the aristocrats, how ubiquitous the priests, how infinitely remote seemed the whitewashed villages of the mountains, where women in black sat around sewing, and flocks of goats scampered between the doorsteps! I hardly thought of Spain as being part of Europe at all: it was like another continent, astonishing to discover.

  75 A melancholy capital

  Madrid in those days seemed to me infused with melancholy. A quarter of a century after the Civil War, which had placed it at the heart of all the world’s preoccupations, it felt lonely, stagnant and neglected. The warring armies had fought at the very gates of the place; now, when I sought out the correspondent of the London Times, to pick his brains, I was told that the paper no longer had a correspondent in the city. Madrid struck me as a capital out of an Orwellian past, animated only by elderly disputes – Left against Right, Liberals against Fascists, agnostics against the Church, anarchists against authority, even Spaniards against Foreigners. Foolish headlines announced, day after day, the Caudillo Franco’s latest unparalleled triumph of policy. The new Air Ministry building was said to have more doors than the Air Force had aircraft. The Minister of Public Information, when I went to call upon him, gave me as a memento a book called Death in Spanish Painting. Very few new ideas seemed to be knocking around. I went to the Prado to see Giorgione’s marvellous picture of the Virgin, St Roch and St Anthony of Padua, which had been in that museum since 1839: and as I stole once more into Giorgione’s bewitched silent world of unanswered inquiry, where something mysterious or portentous is perpetually on the brink of happening, I felt the picture was a proper anagram of the city outside the gallery, where for a third of a lifetime history had been holding its breath.

  76 That’s where!

  In the country too, though in a nobler way, time seemed to have been suspended, and perhaps reality too. I once stopped my camper in the colourless expanse of La Mancha, Don Quixote’s homeland, and asked a couple of ploughmen which of the villages I could see around me was the Knight’s birthplace. ‘Don Quixote de la Mancha?’ said they, for they always gave him his full title then, out of respect. ‘Why, he was born just outside Argamasilla de Alba. They’ve pulled the house down, but you can still see the place – over there, beyond the church tower, that’s where Don Quixote de la Mancha was born!’ I half expected them to say they remembered him well.

  77 The sense of oppression

  When I look back at it now, over the motorways and supermarkets of modern Spain, over the high-rises of the Mediterranean coast, over the fizz and urbanity of Madrid, what lingers most in my memory is a sense of second-rate oppression. The Civil Guardsmen at Roncesvalles were only the advanced patrols of a Philistine army, dedicated to keeping Spain in the condition that Generalissimo Franco had decreed for it, and they were inescapable. Church and State were supreme, supported by all the forces of reaction and revenge – for Franco had never forgiven his enemies of the Civil War, and the place was heavy still with suspicion and accusation. Emblems mysterious to me kept the memories alive: names of heroes familiar only to the Spaniards, badges of lost divisions with high-flown mottoes, memorials to forgotten battles or atrocities. Dark secrets were kept still. Some people were better left unmentioned – La Pasionaria, García Lorca. Terrific tales were told and retold, of sacrifices and massacres and epic defences. One day in Madrid I saw the old dictator himself, deep in the back of his limousine, surrounded by the prancing splendour of his Moroccan cavalry. I thought he looked as though he would live for ever: when, years later, he lay on his deathbed, his doctors desperately kept him alive with infusions and injections, week after week, as though when he went Spain would go too.

  78 New Spain

  So it did, in a way. By the 1990s Spain was another country, a full member of the European Union, a democratic kingdom, a leader in the movement towards political regionalization – a sort of Power, in fact. It was an odd anomaly that there were still Spanish colonies on the north coast of Africa, where those resplendent cavalrymen had been recruited, and from where Franco had begun his rise to power – the only European possessions left in all Africa. Madrid had become one of the sprightliest and most exhilarating of capitals: when the Olympic Games were held in Barcelona in 1992 they were hailed as a brilliant exhibition of Spanish modernism.

  Spain is a big place, though, still devoted to its own ways, and it will be a long time before it is all like other countries. In the very year of those Olympics, I made an experimental return journey to one of its most traditionally backward and isolated regions, the Alpujarras. This is mountain country between the Mediterranean and the Sierra Nevada: when the writer Gerald Brenan went to live there after the First World War its people combined their Catholicism with a lively paganism, and his neighbours were under the impression that Protestants had tails. But it is perilously close to Málaga, the awful Costa del Sol and the other nightmare littorals of Andalusian tourism, and I was not surprised to find the chief road into the area proclaimed a Ruta Turistica, or to pass on my way the tourist super-train called the Andalusian Express, sweeping down to Seville.

  All the standard conveniences of our time have penetrated the Alpujarras, and I v
ery much doubt if today’s local prostitutes, like their predecessors in Brenan’s time, would be satisfied with half a dozen eggs as payment for their services. A helicopter pad, a solar energy panel, several Citroën agencies, a Disco Pub, rap music and a total non-appearance of priests – these were among the symptoms of the new Spanishness that I took note of as I rambled through. I also noticed a vast amount of rubbish, from the hulks of discarded cars to beer cans and plastic bags. Somehow, though, this did not offend me. Just as in Spanish cities the tapas bars contrived to be welcoming despite the almost ankle-deep litter of their floors, so here in the back-country the least biodegradable trash managed to seem organic, and was so mingled with the rocks, the brown soil, the gravel and the scrub that it became part of the landscape.

  And, as the Alpujarras seemed able to live with the new physical garbage, the excreta of progress, so they were apparently rising above cultural trashing too. Modernization was evidently happening on the Alpujarras’ own terms, and there was still never a moment, I thought, when I could be anywhere else but Spain. There were mules about, carrying women to market or simply tethered, as they had always been, mysteriously alone to wayside posts. There was mutton and roast partridge still to eat. There were folk-healers, if not witches. Women in flowered pinafores brushed their front yards with besoms, watched by cats. Old men propped their crooked sticks against walls while they pissed beside the highway, and prickly stalwarts with guns slung across their shoulders struck into the mountains in search of game, attended by gambolling dogs. Spain, 1992 – Olympic Year!

  79 Among the Italians

  Three things were true of Italy, when I first arrived there, that now seem almost inconceivable. (1) Some marks on the pavement in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan were shown to me as bloodstains from the corpses of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, suspended there heads-down not long before. (2) The most prominent politician of the day, Alcide de Gasperi, had begun his career as a deputy in the Austro-Hungarian parliament in Vienna. (3) Another two years were to pass before espresso coffee was invented (by the Milanese barman Achille Gaggia).

  Fifty years ago the British popular image of Italy was less than flattering. Propaganda had persuaded most of us that the Italians were a nation of buffoons, their soldiers incompetent, their organizational powers laughable. Few of my generation had been to Italy before the Second World War, and when elders went on about beakers of the warm South it sounded to me like maundering sentimentality. The glories of Italian art and literature seemed altogether of the past. Modern Italy had been summed up for us by Winston Churchill, when he dismissed Mussolini as Hitler’s jackal – a metaphor enthusiastically adopted by the dutiful London cartoonists of the day.

  Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers, including me, found our attitudes changed when we set foot in Italy itself. Some, having been stranded behind enemy lines for one reason or another, told heart-warming tales of Italian kindness and sacrifice. Others, having fought with the partisans, gave us startling new insights into Italian fighting capabilities. And nearly all of us, I suspect, were impressed by the Italians’ apparent lack of xenophobia. That the population had probably been as welcoming to German soldiers as they were to us may have initially disturbed me (for I was very young and callow, and my ideas of patriotism were elementary), and I was doubtless arrogantly scathing about the fact that Italy had started the war on one side and finished it on the other, but I soon perceived a maturity to these attitudes that we perhaps lacked ourselves.

  80 ‘He will never know’

  I was an anarchist manqué, and I was impressed too by the average Italian’s disrespect for authority in all its forms. Once, having illegitimately purloined my colonel’s jeep for a jaunt into the mountains, I bashed it into a wall in the valley of Cadore. At all costs it had to be back in camp next morning, as though it had never been out. What to do? ‘No worries,’ said my Italian mountain hosts. ‘We’ll fix it.’ They took me to the village garage, only a stage removed from a smithy, and through the night its solitary mechanic hammered and painted. In the morning, swathed in complicit smiles, they returned the jeep to me just as it had been – not too pristine, or my colonel might have smelt a rat. ‘He will never know,’ they said in delight: and he never did, for the dear man is dead now.

  81 The Italian infection

  I was bowled over, even then, by Italian design. I had supposed the nation’s visual genius to have been atrophied, or at least to have coarsened into the trumpery of Fascist art, but the contemporary objects I saw around me seemed of an elegance I hardly knew. What a world separated the lumpish Austin Seven of home from the delicate little Topolino, Mickey Mouse, which hardly looks archaic half a century later! The only typewriters I knew were heavy industrial-looking Underwoods or Remingtons: here for the first time I saw the Olivetti portable – sleek, light, strong and graceful – and I was to stay with it in its various forms until I entered the computer age. (‘What’s that?’ demanded an American customs officer in the 1960s, when I took my adorable bright-red Olivetti Valentine into New York, for it did not look like a typewriter at all. With an Italianate gesture I swept it out of its integral case, and the officer, marvelling at its neatness and beauty, thanked me courteously for the demonstration.)

  And, like everyone else, I gradually realized that in Italy, more than in most countries, the past and the present overlapped. Leonardo might have devised that Topolino, or Michelangelo designed the Valentine. The old grace of Italy had its benign effect on me, and I recognized that the memoirs of those pre-war travellers had not been the mere nostalgia of ancients. Italy infected me, as it infected countless young Britons deposited there by war and history then. Long before opera was reinvented as a popular art form by the brilliant publicists of the 1994 world football championship, innumerable British soldiers of all backgrounds had learnt to enjoy it. My own very first opera was at La Scala itself. It was La Traviata, and I remember still the delicious frisson of hearing for the first time Alfredo’s off-stage aria ‘Amor, amor è palpito’ – soft and distant, half-muffled, from somewhere deep behind the scenery, out of Italy’s heart.

  82 A benediction

  Italy was a benediction: and the greatest blessing of all came when one morning my commanding officer summoned me to his tent and told me commiseratingly that I was to be detached for a time to help run the motor-boats of Venice, all then requisitioned by the British Army. We were shortly to be transferred to Palestine, and he assured me that I would be back with the regiment in time for that: in the meantime, while he was extremely sorry to do this to me, for organizing motor-boats seemed a plebeian sort of task to such a professional cavalry colonel, still he hoped I would make the most of the opportunity, and gain something from it.

  It was the best present anyone had in life. Getting to know Venice changed everything for me. Fourteen years later I wrote a book about the city, and my association with the place was to be a continuing joy to me. One of my duties then was to welcome visiting generals and conduct them into the city in one of our boats. As time passed I developed a proprietorial pride in this activity. Few of those senior officers had ever been to Venice before, and I felt myself almost in loco parentis, adolescent that I was, as we chugged up the Grand Canal, and I watched the shifting expressions of astonishment and delight that passed over their grizzled warlike features. Venice was a dream then, hushed and empty in the aftermath of war, still imbued with the melancholy that so captivated its Victorian visitors, and which bewitched me too. I was billeted with a friend in a house on the island of Giudecca, looking over the waste lagoon, and in the evenings especially, when the island was silent except for the lapping of water in our boat-house, or a sudden peal of laughter, perhaps, from somewhere over our garden wall, I found the wistful loveliness of the place almost orgasmic – my first intimation that love for a beautiful place could be more than simply sensual, but actually sexual too.

  83 An Italian dog

  Remember that Scottish dog, following
its master to the corner pub? Here is an Italian dog. It is a fat spaniel waddling along a quayside, plod, plod, tail wagging, and it stops at a big wooden warehouse door and gives a throaty bark. In a moment the door opens and a man virtually identical with the animal, except for his two rather than four legs, broadly beams down at the spaniel, and over it at us. Then he kneels on the pavement and embraces it. The dog pants affectionately, tongue lolling. So does the man.

  84 Black Italy

  There were black sides to Italy too, which haunted me down the years as the sunshine and the ripple enchanted me. The black economy, which used to sound engagingly libertarian to one of my temperament, turned out to be generally not free at all, but mercilessly governed by the brutality of the Mafia. The charm of Italian medievalism, its narrow winding lanes and eccentric towers, often gave a specious veneer to a world of squalid ignorance. Join me now one evening in 1961, when as a literary voyeur I followed a couple of lively girls up the hill to their home in Cagliari, the capital of Sardinia. Downtown Cagliari, where we first set eyes on them, is a vivacious cosmopolitan seaport in the 1960s, and the girls seem full of confidence and fun. Sailors wink at them, youths whistle. The cafés, spilling across the pavements under the street lights, are properly crowded and animated. Squadrons of Fiats and Vespas scurry up and down the boulevards. The girls saunter through with easy aplomb, here greeting an acquaintance, there stopping to gaze in a shop window, until, not very late, while the Via Roma is still pulsating with zest and enjoyment, they walk home to the Dark Ages.