by Norman Lewis
‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s too far and too complicated. This isn’t half the distance. We stay on the N122 but only as far as the Beliche River which flows into the Guadiana. With luck we’ll find a boatman on the river to take us across to the far shore. At this point you’re in Spanish territory with a cart-track leading to the main Huelva road. There’s plenty of local traffic. With luck you’ll be in Huelva tonight.’
‘What happens to the deportees?’
‘That’s up to you. Probably better to dump them as soon as possible. Four people travelling together attract more attention than two.’
Next morning the police van was under our window at dawn—that sleepy and slow-moving hour in south Portugal, imbued with the regeneration of memory and the sounds of things past. The Chief was buoyed with high spirits and the promise of even the mildest of adventures. The deportees were crammed into the back; unnecessarily handcuffed for the occasion, they viewed the outside world with indifference.
‘So far, so good,’ the Chief said, and a backwards jerk of the head suggested the promise of partial victory. ‘Now all that matters is whether we shall have the good luck to find a boat … Well, we shall see.’
The N122 went straight ahead, plunging resolutely into the flatlands where human purpose—perhaps from fear of invaders from Spain—appeared largely to have been abandoned. Only the great medieval pile of the fortress, Castro Marim, had survived, and perhaps even defeated Spanish incursions. Or possibly the freebooters from Spain found little inducement here to persist in their invasions. This was territory long-since deserted, and in the morning shadows the great castle shared with a single buffalo a landscape of water, mists and sky. It was less than an hour to the Beliche River, which uncoiled through innumerable curves down from the mountains of the north to straighten itself finally among the sheep south of Azinhal.
Our relief when this small town came distantly into view was very great. Greater still was the sight of the Beliche bridge and of the promised boatman and his boat tied up by the bank where the river curved away into thin forest, with a glimpse between the tree trunks of the distant mountains of Spain. We clambered down a slight elevation for a better view of the river. Below us a great spread of smooth water appeared to slide rather than flow through sun-scorched terrain stretching to the far horizon. In this prospect, and at that moment only, floating bunches of leaves indicated the speed and direction of the current.
The boatman greeted us with huge enthusiasm although obviously as a matter of habit, turning his head slightly away when he spoke. It was a tic clearly induced by a disfiguring birthmark on his left cheek, and I was reminded that it was the compassionate habit of the rural Portuguese to grant such jobs as his to persons suffering from physical defects.
The Chief explained our presence and asked whether any problems were likely to arise in the crossing to Spain. The boatman assured us that none would. ‘In fact we might even run into a taxi driver from Huelva cruising on the other side in hope of picking up a fare.’ He would be quite happy to carry us across the Guadiana, he said—all the more as he had just been able to pick up a cheap two-stroke outboard engine able to cope with the river’s strong currents following the autumn rains.
We asked whether he knew the positions of the Spanish frontier posts, to which he replied that he would not expect to stay long in business if he did not. And did many Portuguese risk crossing the frontier? ‘Many,’ he said. ‘Many things are cheaper in Spain, so naturally people cross the river to buy them.’ And the Spanish? Did they cross over, too? He shook his head. ‘The girls in the cantinas here are cheaper, but they say it’s easy to pick up something calling for a trip to the doctor, so the Spanish boys stay where they are.’
We sipped a harsh Portuguese sherry while our friend went through a list of attractions—many of them unique—which the Guadiana had to offer. For the most part they were only accessible to fishermen and collectors of wildlife who sometimes sneaked, armed to the teeth, across the frontier from Spain.
The Guadiana was seen locally as unique and extraordinary in every way.
‘I do not expect you to do anything but cast scorn on the local belief in water-sprites,’ our informant said, ‘but it is remarkable how many persons of at least average education laugh and change the subject whenever it is brought up. In some areas local fishermen attempt to bribe the water-nymphs by casting edible luxuries into the river before entreating them to help with the catch. Our fishermen baptise their children without the presence of a priest who they believe would rob them of access to Almighty God.’ Our friend shook his head, ‘We only bring up these topics in the case of outsiders who wish to know something of our life. Above all we are conscious of the heavenly powers. You will see our fishermen at prayer before casting their lines, and every one of them bows to the river whenever a fish is caught.’
We clambered aboard and the boat took off heading south through the last of the mountain scenery where the Guadiana roared and splashed through the narrow ravines. It was to be the part of our journey that provided Eugene, as a keen amateur naturalist, with constant interest and some degree of excitement. The river’s colour offered an endless variation of soft greys and greens. Bright flowers dropped by some unknown species of tree rotated like tiny wheels on the surface as they slipped by. Where the current slowed, fishermen up to their knees in water had placed themselves in the shade of every second or third tree. Curiously these fishers seemed to have disguised themselves with coolie hats like Japanese in a picture by Hiroshege. It was a scene in which little had changed for centuries.
As well as being haunted by water sprites—and slightly blurred photographs of these had appeared in the local press—the Guadiana provided curative water effective in various sicknesses and the gratitude of the community was shown by nominal libations of the best wine. What impressed us most was its marked effect on local character. The locals were cautious and premeditative in most of their activities. A fisherman, for example, might claim for a single day the right to a position among the roots of a riverside tree, but next day he moved on to a new site, not in the next tree, but the next but one. There was no such thing here as luck as we accepted it, and a permanent contest was maintained here between man’s brains and those of the fish.
We were passing through a wood of tall, broad-leaved trees, claimed by the boatman to be a form of South European oak. For me the interest lay in the fact that their boughs sheltered an extraordinary population of birds, most of them vociferous members of the crow family. There were also many butterflies where the sunshine streamed through the glades. Most remarkable was the sudden vision of a densely clustered crowd of the tortoise-shell variety, under attack as they fluttered through by a number of small birds that might have been local sparrows. Two or three of these were caught while the boatman slowed down to allow us to watch, but the superior aerobatics of the butterflies in most cases permitted escape.
Although this was still Portugal at its eastern edge, the atmosphere of southern Spain soon made itself felt, and a few miles further to the east the oaks—if this they were—came to an end and the dry prairies of the European far south began.
The river’s colour was a soft, almost unnatural green in which occasional sparkling reflections came and went. Nearby seasonal floodings had created a muddy depression between us and the bank, and these had been colonised by long-legged wading birds as motionless as garden statuary as they inspected their surroundings. Eugene was delighted to have discovered a golden water-lily growing there although this had been half-eaten by the birds. He spent some time in the collection of this remarkable plant.
The ferryman interrupted at this point to ask if we were ready to cross, and we climbed back into the boat and within a matter of minutes we were in Spain. It was an experience we had prepared for but which, nevertheless, took us by surprise. Less than an hour before we had been in Portugal—then familiar, but now distant and alien. Could it possibly be that even the odour of Spain was
different a hundred yards from the Portuguese shore? The answer was obviously not. Yet here a peppery scent tickled the nostrils and, turning our backs on an outline of trees, we saw a village as white as an old bone in the coils of a bare mountain, behind which the sun had recently risen.
The taxi arrived as if called from a rank, driven by a Spaniard with a hard face, and the soft-faced ferryman’s boat pulled away over the bright green water, into the calm trees and then out of sight. The taxi driver actually spoke English with the faint resonance of an accent picked up while working in Stoke-on-Trent.
‘Do many foreigners manage to get into Spain doing it this way?’ I asked him.
He laughed. ‘On a good day, plenty,’ he said. ‘They come down here to look for a good time and even a virgin goes cheap. You can get around and enjoy yourself now we’ve finished with the State of Alarm.’
‘How about the trouble in the Rio Tinto?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘They shot a few miners, and now they’re back at work.’
I told him to take us over to one of the cafés by the water in Ayamonte and we spent a relaxed half-hour sipping anis con sifón. From where we sat I realised I was roughly fifty yards across a channel from Villa Real, which I had left only the night before.
‘We were over there yesterday,’ Eugene told him.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘You told me. How many miles in all did you have to travel to get here the way you did it?’
‘About twelve.’
‘You could have paid a boatman a few hundred escudos, about a fiver, to run you over here at night.’
‘It’s just a question of knowing the ropes,’ I said. Then I remembered the matter of the non-existence of an entry stamp in my passport.
He laughed. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘You’re in Spain now. They don’t bother about these odds and ends. If you’re in, you’re in, and that’s all that matters.’
In crossing the frontier we seemed to have left one civilisation behind and to have plunged into an entirely different one. There could have been no more complete diversity between the delicate and even withdrawn Portuguese way of life, and the hard and often bleak lifestyle Spain offered across a narrow stretch of water. The limp smiles and soft nasal voices were no more. The shoppers in the Ayamonte market, from which the bus to Seville and Cadiz set out, snapped their orders and barked their criticisms of the goods they were served. The surly, blue-jowled Spanish frontier police were in striking contrast to their simple and friendly Portuguese counterparts we had left behind.
CHAPTER 15
UNTIL THIS POINT, OUR experience of Spain had been largely confined to the north of the country, including such towns as San Sebastián and Pamplona, which being close to the French frontier had come inevitably under the influence of France. Apart from this we had been obliged—largely by the exigencies of the foot-slogging journey to Zaragoza—to spend a short time there to be followed by a stay in Madrid, which apart from its revolutionary fervour at the time of our visit was otherwise noted for its cosmopolitans. Andalusia, into which we now plunged, was therefore a wholly new experience.
We had become accustomed by this time to a degree of social depression, to people living in caves. But here in Andalusia, misery came into its own. Only a few miles from Ayamonte, we were to pass through settlements of windowless huts consisting of no more than holes dug in the ground with branch and straw coverings shaped like upturned boats to take the place of roofs.
Outside the first of these settlements, two blind old people quarrelling violently groped with their fingernails at each other’s faces. Propped against a nearby wall was a beggar whose single leg had wasted away almost to the thinness of a finger. Obliged to stop here while the bus waited to pick up travellers, we were greeted hopefully by the poor fellow, whose act was to impart a palsied tremble to the limb for the benefit of passers-by, following this on most occasions with a howl of successful salesmanship.
Andalusia, nevertheless, was shortly to present the first of its many paradoxes. The liveliest scene in any of the small villages we passed centred on barbers’ shops, around and in which the menfolk, when deprived of gainful occupation, conducted their social lives. It was socially incorrect, we were told, for Andalusian males to shave themselves, and we were assured that most self-respecting bachelors in Ayamonte visited the barbers for a shave twice a day plus a hair trim twice a week.
There was no better way of travel than by the Huelva bus rattling slowly along, with stops at a barber’s every three or four hundred yards, to appreciate the only too often tragic beauty of the Spanish far south. Here the old-fashioned social conventions survived under the protection of poverty. Men still bowed low to women, acknowledged favours with hands pressed over hearts, and slipped a small coin in the sleeve of a beggar whom they addressed with the formality due to a member of the middle class.
We picked up speed and swooped through Andalusian villages that after sunset had become wholly white, and could be seen ahead glowing faintly in the sheen of the moon like a row of phosphorescent cubes set down on each side of the road. All the houses were white inside too, and then came the inescapable surprise. Although windows were covered with iron grilles like those of a feudal castle, doors were always open by way of a declaration of at least theoretical trust. Polished copper cooking utensils hung among tiny cages containing decoy partridges. But members of the household were never in sight. Under what spell had these families fallen?
At Huelva martial law was very much in evidence. The Civil Guards in their characteristic winged black hats and the newly created Assault Guards were both missing and had been replaced by a swaggering body of Marines who patrolled the streets and had occupied public buildings. Released for a half-hour or so from the bus, supposedly to allow us to stretch our legs, we joined the promenading crowds with just enough time to taste the savoury omelettes being cooked on every street corner. It was strange while engaged in this way to be startled by a brief burst of gunfire in a neighbouring street.
Returning to the bus we learnt that, after the driver’s discussion with the police, it had been decided to call off the rest of the very considerable journey to Seville for that night. Accommodation was found for us in a commercial hotel where eleven travellers in the same predicament were put up in a vast single room from which a noisy caged parrot was conveniently removed.
The first wave of mass tourism had washed over Huelva only in the past few weeks and much of the surrounding area was in the process of transformation into limitless sandy beaches. This would now be renamed the Costa de la Luz, said a leaflet issued by the Tourist Board accompanying the hotel’s bill. The new Costa, explained the leaflet—making the situation as clear as it could without giving local offence—would offer a solution to the problem of bringing this area of Spain up to date. There had been many instances in the past of the country being charged with failing to keep up with the times in the treatment of its visitors holidaying in the area, especially in the matter of the freedom of association of the sexes. The Costa de la Luz, concluded the leaflet, ‘will take a leading role in the attraction of visitors to our country, as well as spreading the fame of a neglected earthly paradise’.
Fortunately the earthly paradise predicted for the Costa de la Luz was never likely to extend its frontiers through the shallow valleys and low, sun-dried tableland to Seville, some sixty miles away. We drove there finally in a rackety bus stuck with the tattered remnants of posters advertising a remedy for dyspepsia. It was a landscape withered at the end of a long summer, with vineyards protected by shade trees producing an abundance of small and shrivelled grapes. Grape pickers, blackened and blistered by the sun, straightened up to wave at the bus as it rattled past. There was a shortage of water here, a passenger told us, but the loneliness of imported workers used to the city life was the worst of their problems. There were stops to check tyre pressure and top up the radiator, but eventually after three hours on the road the clear profile and sparkling towers of
the great southern city freed themselves from their veils of mist. Within a half-hour we were in suburbs thronged with bullock carts. Here the driver made use of a special siren to clear a passage for the bus.
We had been given the address of a rooming house overlooking the Guadalquivir. The thing was, we were told, that even forgetting the view, it offered the chance to get away from the noise. It was very cheap and the rooms were clean. A beatifically smiling small boy dashed in, trapped and killed the spiders in the corners, collected ten centavos and went off. A river boat’s huge melancholic voice sounded a warning or lament as it passed below. It was followed by absolute silence apart from the swishing of the leaves in the riverside trees, and we washed and went out to find a restaurant.
The purest chance had brought us close to Seville’s cathedral—largest and most splendid of Spain’s numerous great churches—and this, the objective of our pilgrimage, was to be seen towering next morning in the dawn light, from among the hugger-mugger of lesser buildings crowding its walls. All accounts spoke of its grandeur and the architectural splendours it had to offer, of the reredos—largest in all Christianity—of the silver and bronze tombs, the great store of Goya and Murillo masterpieces, the forty-seven silver monstrances carried in the Corpus Christi procession and the much admired gift of a stuffed crocodile presented by the Sultan of Egypt.
These were clearly the surroundings in which a member of the fairly rich and powerful Corvaja family would have sought to be entombed in anticipation of the resurrection, but we were by this time overtaken by fatigue, and it was decided to postpone the great moment of our journey’s formal completion until the next day.
Here people avoided what they could of the morning heat and rose more or less at dawn, so we followed their custom and breakfasted at six and were at the cathedral’s massive doors in well under the hour. In the early light the building remained silent and aloof in surroundings devoid of human activity. The nearby bushes were full of partridges which had learnt that here they were immune from the sportsmen’s attack.
