by Norman Lewis
Almost immediately after leaving Salamanca, a main road to the west and to the town of Guarda over the Portuguese frontier crosses a vast swampy plain, in places more than a hundred miles wide, with one of the lowest populations in Europe, in fact numerically less than that of a single small Portuguese town. This is because according to the season much of this great spread of grass is under water, and with little to support human life beyond the modest requirements of the occupants of some twenty of Europe’s tiniest villages. As would be suspected, the members of these communities have been compelled to develop extraordinary strategies to cope with the disadvantages of their surroundings in which incessant rainfall keeps the ground sodden the year round. This, it seems likely—as in the case of El Panadero—may have benefited the possessors of exceptionally large feet.
With the intention of discovering whatever it might be that this sodden landscape had to offer we hired a jeep in Salamanca, and after two miles along the main road to Zamora in the north turned left into an extremely narrow track along the bank of the Rio Tormes, covering a difficult and sometimes hazardous twenty-five miles before being obliged to turn back. What faced us from this point on were marshes.
Two features of this drive were exceptional. One was the rain, which started three miles out of Salamanca, and continued as if automatically switched on by our presence until the end of the road. The second was the lively colour of these floods in which blues, greens and yellows intermingled as if stirred by currents in the depths. A sharp, watery smell was released, we believed, by the mud and gas from a million exploding bubbles. Grunwald mentioned that the water was believed to possess substantial therapeutic qualities, adding that dogs allowed to drink nothing else often became more sexually active.
Where there was dry land growing nothing but brilliant grass, the primitives of Salamanca had dug out their caves. These, often chosen by preference for human habitation, are virtually a speciality of Spain. There are enormous communities of cave dwellers down in Guadix in the far south and, as we had seen at Tudela, on the road to Zaragoza, several thousand citizens had chosen to live beneath the earth’s surface, many of them in reasonably sophisticated surroundings. Neither the lifestyles nor life span of these people were affected by the absence of blue sky overhead. Caves hollowed out of the earth were clearly cheaper to construct and obviously easier in a cold climate than houses exposed to the winds. Nevertheless Grunwald admitted that the so-called primitives of Salamanca would be lucky to reach two-thirds of the urban man’s life span. ‘It’s cold in winter in those holes in the ground and you need more to eat than if you live in a house. Starvation doesn’t come into it. El Panadero eats more than an urban man. He eats as much as the Archbishop of Salamanca, but it’s the wrong kind of food.’
Grunwald had been looking into the question of the best possible route to take to the south. Only one thing matters,’ I said. ‘That is to get to Seville with the minimum loss of time.’
‘I’m sorry, my dear friends,’ Grunwald said. ‘I was just this moment on the phone to some business contacts and they all agree that your best hope is to go via Portugal.’
‘Portugal? Why on earth?’ I said. ‘It would take us hundreds of miles out of our way.’
Grunwald shrugged. ‘Well not quite that, but it would certainly be a bit of a detour. The news is that the State of Alarm will almost certainly be reinstated. Most of the buses are off the road already and trains to the south are likely to be delayed. It would be slow going via Portugal, but the thing is you’d get there. I forgot to mention that a general strike has been called at Caceres which you’d have to pass through on the direct Spanish route. One of the good things about Portugal is that they don’t have strikes.’
Eugene wanted to know how long a detour through Portugal might add to the journey, and Grunwald told him perhaps a week. ‘I’m afraid it’s one of those places,’ he said, ‘where time seems less important than it does to us. I put in the best part of a year there and I found out by the end of that time that I’d stopped worrying too. Travelling by train in Portugal can be quite amusing, in any case. Troubadors, if you can imagine it, come aboard to sing to you. I had to go down to Coimbra last year. They didn’t bring the drinks along as usual and one of the passengers said he was thirsty. A peasant woman who was nursing her baby said, “Sorry about that. How about a drop of my milk?” They all thought it a great joke. That’s how the Portuguese are. Great people and full of fun. You’re going to fall for them.’
‘I know we will,’ Eugene told him. ‘The trouble is my father is paying our fares and he doesn’t have a sense of humour.’
‘All the better that it’s so cheap,’ Grunwald said. ‘The Portuguese travel whenever they can because it’s supposed to be good for the liver. Half the time they don’t know where they’re going, or when they’ll get there. The slower the train the better it is for the digestion, they tell you. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention this, but when and if you go to Portugal you’ll find that the Salamanca–Porto Express averages six and two-thirds miles an hour for the journey.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ I said. ‘Surely you must be joking.’
‘It’s far from a joke,’ Grunwald said, ‘nor does it break the record. They’re experimenting with a diesel electric train somewhere up in the north which so far for a long journey has only averaged two miles per hour.’
Next day we took the train for Barca de Alba on the Portuguese frontier. This, so far as we could see, carried no passengers other than ourselves and a few Portuguese labourers, whose standard of living was so low that they could actually work and save a little money in Spain to take home with them. Three of these displayed, with a touch of pride, ulcers on their arms that had developed from small wounds that had turned septic—probably, we guessed, as a result of malnutrition. Within minutes of setting out, the golden steppes of Spain had faded away and the landscape became green with intensive cultivation. At this our fellow passengers crowded to the window and smiled rapturously as they pointed out for our benefit the first vines and cabbages of Portugal.
At Barca de Alba we boarded the Portuguese train that awaited us. We were greeted by a group of mummers with faces painted in medieval style who muttered what we were assured was a welcome between outbursts of what seemed to us sinister laughter.
The train was even worse than the Spanish one, with compartments both cramped and sharply rectangular, plus doorways so narrow that a stout passenger had some difficulty in squeezing through. The carriages were high above the tracks and since there was no platform, elderly passengers—several of them sick—were surrendered to the desperate struggle of fellow travellers attempting to lift or drag them aboard. The compartments were always crowded, and we were obliged in the end to squat with our legs curled up among collections of baggage piled on the floor.
The little we could see of the scenery came as a disappointment. The mountainous slopes among which the Douro wound its way were so thoroughly cultivated as to render the river as insignificant in appearance as an irrigation ditch. Even the tongues of rock projecting into the water had in many cases been covered with soil and planted with vegetables, thus the landscape had been reduced to an enormous, rolling cabbage patch. Trivial, and to us even boring, the outlook was one that filled our fellow travellers with excitement. There was always competition for a place at the window and this was solved in what seemed to us an extraordinary fashion. A queue of three or four passengers would form and the viewing time for each checked by a watch that set off an alarm at the termination of what seemed to be some five minutes. The passenger at the head of the queue would then, if slow in his withdrawal, be taken resolutely by the shoulders by whoever followed him and thrust irresistibly aside. It was clearly a regular procedure, and taken in perfectly good part.
Apart from the application of the law of the survival of the fittest to the initial processes of catching and boarding the train, relations once the journey was under way were cordial. Conversation was genera
l and food communally shared to the last pullet’s wing and crust of saffron-flavoured bread. Having brought no food with us this was a custom that caused us much embarrassment. This was the time when we were to learn that all the old courtesies and primitive social mechanisms surviving in Spain only as flowers of speech were still in everyday operation in Portugal. When a peasant on a Spanish train pulls out his bread and sausage and invites you to join him the single word employed is ‘Gusta?’ and the conventional answer, ‘Que aproveche’, besides meaning ‘good appetite’, also implies polite refusal. This is not the case in Portugal, and in these first encounters we were to realise that faced occasionally with such a refusal the offerer showed signs of feeling hurt.
Unfortunately although we could just about read a Portuguese newspaper, the rapid and confident gabble of the peasant world had nothing in common—as we had hoped it would—with the clear-cut verbalisms of Spain, and we were only too often reduced to mime.
There was only one incident among the many communal jokes and discussions which we could appreciate. This was when an old lady, being called hastily from the lavatory for one reason or other, succeeded in losing her drawers. We were coming to the station where she would have to get out and the impropriety of climbing down the steep steps in her condition filled her with panic. Her frenzied individual appeals to the other occupants of the carriage set everybody in fits of mirth. Only when we had come to the station and the performance was over did someone produce the missing garment and return it to her out of the window.
CHAPTER 11
WE INTERRUPTED OUR INTENDED journey down through the length of Portugal and then to Seville on account of a highly sensational witchcraft murder in a village near Porto.
This had taken place in Marco do Canavezes, where a woman had been burned to death in the presence of a considerable crowd in accordance with the rites of the Book of St Cyprian, a species of manual dealing with the black arts, still on sale, we were told, in most village post offices.
Her neighbours believed that this young woman was occupied by an evil spirit, for which the only remedy was death by fire. According to the book, however, all was not lost, for in the scriptures according to St Cyprian exposure to fire was in reality no more than a curative exercise, after which the victim would be born again, arising from the ashes, as the book put it, ‘as pure as a white lily, or dove’.
It was this triumphant conclusion that the villagers were said to have waited for, possibly with fading hopes, as they stared down at the remnants of the holocaust at the dead end of a village street, and quoting, as they did, the book’s instructions when brought before the judge, it was impossible to convince them that they had been involved in what the law insisted was murder.
A few days later the police arrested the ‘Witch of Caudal’, a local celebrity under whose guidance the precepts of the Book of St Cyprian were administered. Innumerable illiterate peasants had contributed their tiny sums to her revenue, but the names of magistrates, bankers and generals were also to be found on her books. The newspapers published a photograph of her taken at a reception in one of the embassies in Lisbon at the moment of raising a glass in acknowledgment of good wishes. She had at first been punished by an official rebuke.
A doctor who spoke good English happened to be staying at the hotel and we talked about the burning over a drink.
‘Does the poverty you see everywhere here have any bearing on happenings like this?’ Eugene wanted to know.
‘In a way undoubtedly,’ our friend said. ‘All these villages are poor—and in a way deprived—although not desperately so. The suicide rate is high, but lower I would say, for example, than in a Balkan country. I mention this because in a curious sort of way this is beginning to look more like suicide than murder.’
‘What gave you that idea?’ I asked him.
‘Well, in the first place our peasants don’t kill each other, but there are almost epidemics of suicide.’
‘It’s something I would never have suspected.’
‘It puzzles us, too. It may be a matter of loss of self-esteem. They see themselves as failures. The victim in this case, for example, had lost her lover and her confidence collapsed. She began to talk about being persecuted by an evil spirit to which she ascribed her troubles. The next thing she’s heard to say is that she’s tired of life. “I’m going,” she said, “I’ve had enough of it. Make sure that you’re at least here to help me when I go.”’
‘To a dreadful end,’ I said. ‘But why did she choose such a fearful way of doing the thing?’
‘Because for her it was a triumph of a kind. She was going to be the star performer in a tragedy that the whole country would hear about. Tourists would come in buses to see the place where she’d chosen to die. By this time she probably saw herself as a heroine.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘The fact is that this book is the vade mecum of suicides. They’re all hoping for an easy way out. We have to remember that on the whole these people are a soft-hearted lot. There’s even a recipe for a dose to be given to felons to quieten them down before execution.’ He paused to give further thought to the possibilities. ‘She may have been blind drunk when it came to the crunch,’ he said. ‘Let’s hope that’s the way it was.’
‘Is it true,’ I asked, ‘that there’s been talk of a memorial plaque to mark the spot?’
The doctor barked a scornful laugh. ‘That wouldn’t go down well even with tourists. No, this has to be forgotten. Nobody’s going to make the pilgrimage to this dull little place just for the kick of seeing where they burned that poor, silly girl. Memorial plaques are out,’ he said.
Marco de Canavezes, we decided, was not to be missed. The doctor put us in touch with a car hire firm which supplied the aged Fiat that carried us through flowering valleys and eagle-encircled peaks down to Canavezes. We stopped to gaze down on the pink roofs gleaming among the trees over the Sousa River. A hill road curved down and through to the small square where the tragedy had been staged. The village was poor with tiny houses built on its outskirts, sometimes appearing to consist of a single room. Women in black squeezed past us along the narrow street. Leaving the car as soon as we could, we continued on foot down to the centre, to which, said the notice, only horse-drawn traffic was admitted.
We had been recommended by our friend to announce our presence to the police, but a notice tacked to the station door informed us that the officer in charge was away for that day. We were later to learn that he was shared with other villages.
Fortunately the doctor had arranged for us to meet an ex-patient of his, a tall pink-faced young man in his early twenties who blinked nervously when informed of the purpose of our visit. He put aside whatever he was doing to talk to us, having first pulled down the blind over his window. There was some difficulty because the man spoke only Portuguese, but a friend was fetched who translated what he had to say into Spanish.
‘Did you know her?’ I asked.
‘In the village,’ he said, ‘we all know each other.’
‘Do you believe she was possessed by an evil spirit?’
He winced, and drew his fingers across his mouth as if to wipe away something clinging to his lips. A moment of silence followed before he said, ‘I cannot reply to this.’
‘Why do you think they burned this poor woman?’
‘They blamed her for the plague that killed many people two years ago.’
‘Plagues are not caused by evil spirits,’ I told him, ‘but the dirt in the big cities, and the sickness that spreads from it.’
He nodded, as if in agreement, although I believed that his opinion remained the same.
‘When they took this woman from her house,’ he said, ‘she was laughing, so they put a gag in her mouth. After that they carried her to the place where the stake was set up and tied her to it. They covered her face with a mask. The priest was there to pronounce the forgiveness of the Church and to frustrate the devil by renaming her Gabriel,
after the angel. All the people who went with her were religious persons who were concerned with her acceptance into the world of those who are saved. The church bell was tolled three times, the people covered their eyes, and the fire was lit. Those who attended the ceremony shook hands with each other. A few women wept.’
‘Did you stay?’
‘No one was allowed to leave, but many turned their heads away. You see, we Portuguese are compassionate by nature. Many covered their faces to hide their tears.’
The next day we took a slow train to Coimbra which proved to be a city of tea shops and beggars, but above all it was known for eccentric happenings in which it was conceivable that its citizens took some pride. The latest story, related by the waitress in our first tea shop, was of a man who had put on wings, leapt into the air from a low cliff and broken both legs. There was a disputed claim as to whether or not a priest displayed the stigmata and that day’s paper reported that a house consisting of nine rooms built one on top of the other had just collapsed.
Coimbra had been put on the tourist map at the beginning of the century by the visit of the celebrated Prince of Lichnovsky who was there in the first instance for treatment of ‘a complaint of the loins’, for which it was said that the town’s physicians were still renowned. Sufferers from this ailment must have flocked to its hospitals and clinics and Lichnovsky’s relief at their efficiency may have been reflected in his description of the town. Of it, the most distinguished traveller of his day said, ‘Nothing similar to its beauty and magnificence have I gazed upon in all Europe.’ Of the neighbouring forest of Bussaco, he said, ‘I feel myself wafted away in the marvellous and very ancient wooded regions of the Orient.’ This ecstatic description was reproduced in a booklet published by the Portuguese Touring Club, which, however, ignored Lichnovsky’s recommendation of the forest as ‘exceptionally suitable for romantic exploits of an intimate character’.
