The Spanish Temper

by V. S. Pritchett

  I have drawn his portrait in order to indicate the character of social and political life in Granada. In spite of his eminence or his notoriety there, he was isolated in the life of that very rich, very snobbish and conservative city. He and his family were cut off from the social life of the town. The Spaniards have a sort of caste snobbery unmatched in Europe, and the perennial calamity of their political and religious differences is that they shut their doors on their opponents. It is not “done” to read much, think much, or act much, outside the direction of the governing class—whatever it is—or the Church. Partly, Spanish family pride is at the bottom of this; partly, it is the old, old influence of absolutism. One has to remember that the Inquisition lasted until 1834 and put its stamp on what was correct. For ideological good behaviour becomes social good behaviour; it creates the socially “right” people and the “wrong.”

  Granada was the city of García Lorca, who was assassinated during the Civil War in one of the savage reprisals of the time. He has been criticized for remaining in a city so hostile, but it is known for its poets, like many Andalusian towns, and all Spaniards are profoundly attached to their birthplace and their region. A granadino remains a granadino for ever. Granada fell as quickly as Seville to General Franco at the beginning of the Civil War, and executions are said to have disposed of twenty thousand people. Nine thousand were “officially” shot—that is to say, an official list of their names exists. One of these was García Lorca. The whole of Andalusia was a stronghold of the anarchist movement, which swept Andalusia like a religious revival in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This region of slave labourers had quickly turned to the millennial doctrine of anarchism, and especially to the religious idea that all wealth was wicked. The anarchists did not wish to become as rich as the middle classes, for they thought of them as corrupted by even small private wealth. They perhaps were corrupted, but in a sense the anarchists do not mean: the Spanish middle classes have never been rich enough and they have been obliged to keep their hands sharply on their small incomes. Like the anarchists, the middle classes have been self-mutilated by the obsession with the idea of a minimum.

  Anarchism must not be confused with anarcho-syndicalism, which sought to organize the workers as a revolutionary force, and whose weapon was the violent general strike. Whereas the Communists wanted the state to control everything, the anarcho-syndicalists wanted final control to be exercised by the trade unions. Sorel, the philosopher poet of anarcho-syndicalism, with his mystique of violence, was little known in Spain. The Spaniards provided a mystique of violence spontaneously. Anarcho-syndicalism was Red (but, of course, savagely anti-Communist), and, in fact, its ideas resembled closely those of the Falange or the national syndicalism theoretically in operation under Franco’s régime in Spain today. Both brands, the Left and the Right, have been murderous: the reason lies in the native violence of the people who provided Goya with his horrors one hundred and fifty years ago, and the condition of the country—not in foreign propaganda.

  Anarchism is especially the doctrine of the thousands of poor casual labourers or serfs called in to work on large estates in dry and unfertile country. Anarchism does not exist where the peasants own the land. But in Granada there is a complication. I stood among the lilies and cypresses and roses of the beautiful gardens of the Generalife, watching one of those prolonged crimson sunsets which are the supreme sight of Granada, and asked the professor of Arabic what he supposed the Moors talked about as they sat in the mirador looking over the plains to the miles of sharp-toothed, violet mountains.

  “Politics,” he said. “Always politics. A little love, a little poetry—but mostly politics. We know it. It is in the documents. It is the great Spanish evil. We are supposed not to talk politics today—but we do. It is like breathing.”

  And the politics of Granada spring from the warm wealth of its plain and those narrow fertile valleys that reach out to the caves, the desert and moon landscape of Murcia and Almería to the east and south, and tenuously link it with the rich dark green oases that lie beyond.

  The vega or plain of Granada, and the smaller vega of Murcia (Brenan points out in The Spanish Labyrinth), are the only irrigated districts of Spain which are not in the hands of small proprietors. Large fortunes have been made out of crops like sugar beet, and rents are enormously high. The social conflict has been bitter, for the ordinary labourer is not a serf here, but a man one or two rungs up the ladder of social education; he used to be a well-trained socialist or radical in politics who knew how to organize and negotiate. The landowners were on the extreme Right, but there were notable exceptions: there was not complete solidarity between the few small and the many large landowners. A moderate property makes a man liberal; a large property turns him into a despot. Socialism itself, where it has organized large collectives, has been despotic.

  There is now reviving prosperity in the south, a small revival. I went about with a lawyer, a man going on for forty, who was in the usual situation of a Spaniard of the middle class: he practised as a solicitor part of the day, he taught in a school, and he was a “crammer” in mathematics in the evening. His wife was a schoolmistress. Each had to earn in order to survive, and since Granada was, he said, “stagnant” as far as the law was concerned, he was trying to set up in Madrid. One has learned to see that anxious, hard look in the faces of those Spanish middle-class people who are industrious. In every Spanish town one comes across these energetic men who loathe the provincial towns, and are like the doomed characters in a Chekhov story. One meets them in Pío Baroja’s novels. It is a fundamental Spanish theme: how to get out, and especially if one is a man of some education and with a taste for what other Spaniards contemptuously call “the European.” The pay of school-teachers is wretched, but Granada has one or two open-air schools, run on something like the Dalton plan. They survive from the period of educational revival in the first thirty years of the century; under the present régime they are confronted by the fanatical syndicalist schools of the Falange, where the main theme is a diluted form of fascist indoctrination. How deep does fascism go, how forceful is it? Always the answer from the ordinary person outside the movement, is that while still occasionally tiresome, dogmatic, and threatening, it has lost a great deal of its edge. The “eternal Spain,” indefinable because so various, so atomized by regional differences, is indolently nullifying it. It survives not only because it alone has the power, but because, exhausted and appalled by the war, Spaniards are politically bewildered and self-mistrustful.

  The tourists are dumped in the hotels on the cliff where the Alhambra and the summer palace of the Generalife stand, and watch, through air as crystalline as mountain water, the theatrical southern sunset. The lights spring up, clear and single, thousands of them, from the little houses of the immense plain. The air is soft and the nights are cool. Granada lies under the snow of the Sierra Nevada and can be icy cold. The smoke of lavender and gorse, the fume of charcoal, rise from the roofs of the town below, where the people are fanning their stoves, where the strong oil fries. All windows are open and only one weak naked bulb lights the rooms. One needs a strong stomach for Spanish travel, and sooner or later one is bound to go down with diarrhoea or mild poisoning; I do not believe this is due to the water, for I have drunk it without ill effect in most places. It must be said, however, that the water of Granada has not lately had a good reputation. If one has survived the heavy meal that night, one will be carried to see the gypsies dance at one of the big hotels or in their caves. It is a curious fact that the best dancers go to the hotels, for in other countries the hotels have had a corrupting influence on local talent. The Spanish hotels have, in fact, not spoiled the dancers, and exercise a sound authority on them. The proprietors are critical; in the caves, though one crouches in the firelight or smoke, the atmosphere is more “typical” and picturesque, but the dancing sometimes ragged, exaggerated, and merely violent. The gypsies are, artistically, very corruptible, though they have their dan
ces in their bones. They especially like to give one a display of dishevelled, animal fury, in which they whirl like typhoons, claw their hair, and contort themselves like wildcats, and in this they indeed show their mastery of the savage possibilities of the dance, but it is in their controlled verve, their capacity to convey the gradual crescendo of passion, the tightening of the nerves, the sense of sexual battle and the human being possessed by desire and reaching the utmost pitch of it before attack or surrender, that their art is direct and certain. It is the calculated, stylized advance towards orgy which these supple bodies best convey. The Roman poet Martial, who was born in Spain, wrote nearly two thousand years ago of the sensual power and fury of the Spanish dancers. Their comic or satirical dances soon drift into raucous vulgarity. Bullfighters, singers, dancers come out of the smart caves of the Granada hillside. Many of the gypsy families are rich. In the Albaicín, the old site of the Moorish quarter, there are many gypsies who have got on in the world and gone into the professions. I met one, and unlike the typical member of the despised race, he told me straight out at the point of introduction: “I am an educated gypsy. I am a doctor. In my generation a large number of us left the caves and have greatly improved our status”—he spoke in this formal way.

  The cave-dwellers of Granada are the most prosperous troglodytes in Spain. There are many others. Outside Guadix on the road to Murcia is another more striking colony, for here the treeless landscape of the igloo-like boulders and serrated rock gives an oddity to their appearance. Near Vera, a wretched town of Murcia, there is the large village of Cuevas. Three thousand people live outside this town in caves cut into the cliffs.

  To the northerner, emerging from his air-raid shelter, the caves of Granada and the Murcian region are a horror. The cave-dwellers themselves find the curiosity of the foreigner very amusing. In these climates where rainfall is small, the cave is dry and cool in the summer, warm in the winter. The rudimentary cave—where an old man lives alone with his few goats—is of three rooms cut into the earth—one to sleep in, one to live in, the other one for the animals. But most caves are handsomer than this. In Granada they are whitewashed, well furnished with good solid furniture. Pictures are on the wall—the oleographs of saints and nineteenth-century generals which are in all the houses of the Spanish poor—the tiled stove shines, and the smoke comes out of a chimney on the surface of the ground above among the cactus. There is usually electric light. Sanitation does not exist, but that is true of the outskirts of many Spanish towns. The church wall, the back alleys, and the walls of some old castle are the latrines of the shanty-dwellers. Oil, urine, excrement, tobacco, and the smoke of lavender wood—those are the savours of the outlying districts of Spain; indeed, not only of the outlying ones.

  At Cuevas one brilliant gypsy mother with her grown-up children showed me round with pride. The floor was tiled, the sideboard and the large double bed in walnut indicated some standing and property. Her daughter—this being late in the afternoon—had her hair well done and a pretty frock on, like a girl from the city. She might have been a genteel typist. Her eldest son, with his gold tooth or two, his good suit and plump figure, was prosperity itself; he walked about carrying a baby on his arm, and holding a dove on his finger.

  “Say ‘ocho’” (eight), he told them all when I took a photograph, “to make you smile.”

  He had a good job as a barber to a monastery. The dwellings at Cuevas are cut in the red wall of the hillside, their entrances marked by outlines of whitewash. Some were poor and people were cooking outside. They were all casual labourers here, sitting in the sun half the year waiting to be called to the round of crops. The fine straw dust of the esparto grass was their curse; it had ruined the eyes of many. They were not all gypsies, and they had the easy dignity and good manners of an aristocracy.

  The climb up the steep hill out of the ugly town of Granada towards the Alhambra is a climb for air and respite from the noise in which Spaniards love to live. The morning sun is beginning to sting with its flame-like lick, the bones are softening. One moves towards the foot of shade by the dusty wall. The sun beats like some brassy enemy, and in the cold winters of Granada one notices the sudden ice shock of Spanish shade when one steps out of the sun into it; there are always, winter or summer, these two violently different climates of sun and shade, as if there cannot be a mean or gradualness even in the simple step one takes along the road. We must be either hot or cold. The gooseflesh of Spanish religious painting comes, perhaps, not from a mortification of the body, but from that starving coldness which is everywhere waiting, suddenly to grip the whole body in Spain, when the sun has unclasped it, the ice cold of the cloister, the patio, the room in the inn.

  Charabancs, motorists, walkers, all climb to the Alhambra, the expected marvel, rising into the profound shadow of the woods where one seems to be treading on the music of water which races down through the trees, and where at night the nightingales sing. The bizarre traits of Victorian tourism appear at the approaches; the Alhambra would not be the same without them now. The tourist is part of the landscape of our civilization, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages. There are still those photographers where the grinning tourist straightens his face and, dressed up in Moorish robes, is “taken” against a confected Moorish arch and a little tracery—betrayed by the un-Moorish plumpness of his cheeks and the absurd, alien expressiveness of his eyes. A naïve prosperity and the terrible tameness of industrial man on holiday betray these innocent parodies; they have felt what all most feel in the Alhambra, a pathetic desire to get rid of everybody and to slide five hundred years back into that time.

  Except for its massive and splendid outer walls and gates, which are the main beauty of the place, the Alhambra is a gay and flimsy construction. Above the arcading of the marble pillars of its courtyards, the construction is of lath and plaster; the place itself recalls a collection of pretty exhibition buildings which have not worn well with time and have been continually restored. Workmen are always restoring some part of the palace, and the output of Moorish tiles and filigree amounts to one of Granada’s notable industries. The colours are now hard and garish, as we now see them, and, for myself, the only interest is in the stalactite ceilings. They hang, like wasps nests, from the roofs, but what they immediately suggest is the panoply or the tent, and indeed the greater tent of the sky. One is looking up with the eyes of the Arab astronomers at a stereoscopic vision of the night sky, the peaks of the stars, and the suspended valleys of space. These ceilings are the voluptuous dreams of mathematicians, a sensuous yet pedantic interweaving of the patterns of space. For the rest, the Alhambra is a site. Its delight lies in its windows that look into the cypresses of some small courtyard where a single fountain plays and the roses are fragrant, or out into space upon the clear air of the wide, gasping views towards the snow on the Sierra Nevada, or the terra-cotta roofs of the old Moorish quarter below, the Albaicín—which is the only agreeable part of the town. A good wine can be drunk there in one or two of the bars, but like the best things in Spain it is a local wine coming from one vineyard. I doubt if it is known outside one or two places in the long descending street where the market of the Albaicín is spread out on the cobbles or the doorsteps. The wine is called La Costa; it is a little like a dry port, and it is fortifying in the heat.

  Water and shade, air like spring water to breathe: these are the true delights of the Alhambra. As a piece of architecture it cannot compare with the great mosque at Córdoba. But, craftsmen and pedants in everything, the Moors of Granada knew how to work for small delights. The richness of the vega protected by its violet mountains lying back in the heat by day and coming forward, sharp as knives, when the sun goes down, the sunlight, and the abundance civilized the men from Africa and softened them. Dazed, indifferent, they let the Spaniards live. They intermarried, and when Ferdinand the Catholic conquered them, after his ten years’ siege (“taking,” as he is supposed to have said, “this pomegranate seed by seed”), he was really conqu
ering a race who had become Spaniards by six hundred years of adoption. Hence the violence of the forcible conversions, the repressions that caused the rising in the Albaicín and the massacre that followed: the King was imposing the Faith upon those who ought to have it. He had guaranteed religious freedom to the defeated Moors, which for centuries they had allowed the Christian; but seven years after the conquest the Church, in the person of Cardinal Ximénes, obliged the people to burn all their Arabic books. Nor was forcible conversion enough for Spanish extremism and intolerance. The moriscos, once converted, were at once suspected of false conversion. Their use of water, so detested by the Christians, was often enough to incriminate them in the eyes of the Inquisition. Nor were these purges satisfactory to the first totalitarians of Europe. In the first decade of the seventeenth century the moriscos of Spain were deported, as the Jews had been before them. Their skills, their labour went with them; and a rich country was left in the hands of people more concerned with guerrilla warfare, and the idle, soldierly, and frugal satisfaction of their wants. Useless for landlords to try and prevent the loss of their valuable workers; Spain was always willing to sacrifice reality to an idea.

  The Moorish occupation was long, and it can be said that Spain civilized the men of the desert who brought their own bloody quarrels with them. Their heights of civilization were achieved only after long periods of fighting, as each new wave came over the straits into the Promised Land. The Spaniards, divided from one another in the regions like different nations, frequently fought for the Moors against their own kind. The traditional Spanish hero, the Cid, fought for the Arabs against them, and he was less a knight of Christian chivalry than a soldier of fortune.

  In his History of Iberian Civilization the Portuguese historian Oliveira Martins tells us that at the peak of their civilization, between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, the Arabs had more than seventy libraries at Córdoba, Málaga, Almería, and Murcia, and that they were the masters, doctors, and soothsayers of the Christian kings, just as the Jews were their financiers and bankers. But Arab culture was that of artists rather than thinkers; “setting store almost exclusively by imagination and scarcely employing reason … they gave the preference to beautiful forms, elegant style or subtlety … their love of Greek science was a mere caprice, not a need of the spirit.” In Almería, that hot little Oriental town hemmed in by rock against the sea, on the road going eastward from Málaga, where the splendid Arab castle is cut out like a golden crown above the little city which had centuries before been one of the richest towns in Spain and the Western World, in Almería the nobility and the kings, “sceptical in religion and indifferent in politics, gave themselves up to a life of childish literature,” composing exquisite little lyrics and madrigals of love. No vestiges of the Arab rule, Oliveira Martins says, remained in the civil institutions of the people of the peninsula, owing to the toleration of the Arabs, the difference of religion, and the artificial character of Arab culture. The real influence of the Arab conquest is to be seen in the direction it gave to the national life of modern Spain. “Born in the camp in the midst of battle, the character of Spain springs rather from spontaneous sources than from the ordinances of ancient tradition, Roman or Germanic.”