The Spanish Temper

by V. S. Pritchett

  At six in the evening the country buses collect their passengers for the drive back to the villages. A barrel organ strikes up to entertain the departing, and the departure is more like a family gathering than something on a schedule. The passengers, their lives and wishes, the events of arrival or departure, are more important than the bus, which itself is more like some dusty animal than a machine. The machine, one could say, has been dominated by the human beings and has not dehumanized them. If the bus is hot, if one chokes with dust, if one’s teeth are rattled loose and the drive is hair-raising, subject to breakdowns and disaster, these horrors are countered by the liveliness of the people. They live. They look at the bus with contempt. The “backward” countries have retained the human qualities we are so anxious to lose in the interests of efficiency. It is true that, unlike us, these passengers are not day-dreamers; they are not imaginative; they are jumping crackers living in the minute and without much sense of anything beyond themselves. Their life is on the surface.

  The evening paseo in Almería reveals the great beauty of the women. Many are superb, almost all are fine. So many beautiful women are there that the senses are bewildered and quietened; one finds oneself in a state of exalted contemplation. It is as well: the women are unapproachable. No glance is ever returned. By nine o’clock they have gone. The only women to be seen after that are the raucous lottery-seller, the old gypsy, the fierce girl at the counter, the bar, or the cake kiosks. The town has come into the possession of the men once more and in hundreds they sit about or walk: the male voice, rumbling or shouting, rules the quiet warm night.

  The mind drifts to Chekhov in Almería. We are in one of his bright but fading Black Sea towns. One feels the shut-in provincial life ruled by habit and dominated by one or two families. I passed a “school”: twenty little children packed round a dining-room table in a tiny front room, with the master—rather like Chekhov to look at—jammed against the door. A charming sight; but these were privileged children. They actually had a school to go to. As I sat in one café, I counted twenty blind passers-by in a quarter of an hour, and after that gave up. They are the victims of trachoma. Almería, too, like Málaga was a Red town in the Civil War—all Spanish ports were. The maritime towns, with their sense of the world outside of Spain, have always been republican and liberal, liberal too in their Catholicism—which, according to the catechism in use there still, is mortal sin. The fortress-like Cathedral was untouched, but the Reds burned Santo Domingo with its patron Virgen del Mar. That has been rebuilt inside where the damage was done, and the Virgin in her green cloak looks very pretty in her jewels and her flood-lighting. The burning is not to be defended; but the fire burned out the traditional gloom of churches like this. At Mass on Sunday, Santo Domingo was packed out, but clearly by the “good people” as they say—that is to say, the solid, the secure who have a little money. A young priest from Málaga told me: “We have lost the poor—and it is our fault.”

  Chapter IX

  Before running into the town of Murcia itself one can turn off to look at the outer parts of the province, by the sea, where the women of Mojácar veil their faces with shawls, where no rain falls, and where the villages are wretched. The fondas are often dirty; one or two have given themselves a coat of whitewash and have cleaned up inside, but the food is scanty, poor, and dear, flies swarm over everything, and the people are morose. In the main cafés of these villages there are no customers, but they swarm with shouting youths and children, who run round the tables while the proprietor sits miserably with a friend near the counter, playing cards. A single, dim electric bulb puts a dejected yellow light on the place. Those who work do so chiefly in the agricultural seasons, but not for the rest of the year, and, as usual, one has the impression of two classes: those who are obliged to work themselves to death, and those who idle to their death. A man with a treasure—a lorry, for example—will slave fanatically all through the night, repairing the engine, keeping the whole village awake. A sad region—the end of human hope. A meal will be garlic soup, which is a thin liquid with bread soaked in it, and two or three small fish. The wine is thin and disgusting. Yet this was once the rich mining province of Europe. The wealth of Tyre was founded on the precious metals which the Phoenicians took from Murcia; its mines enabled Hannibal to make war on Rome. The Carthaginian shafts can still be seen. Under the Moors, Murcia was a continuous garden, and was sometimes compared with Egypt. Now the Murcians are the poor outlanders of Spain, marked, as in Almería, by trachoma from the esparto grass, ill-fed, and with a proverbial dislike of themselves.

  “El cielo y el suelo es bueno—el entresuelo malo”—heaven and earth are good, but what lies between is bad. The Murcians have the reputation of being “litigious, superstitious, and revengeful.”

  But one sees how good the earth can be in the huerta or oasis of Murcia, where the old irrigation has been maintained. The long mountain walls, levelled at the top so that one is travelling for tens of miles below an entrenchment of precipices, are the violet, silver, and rust colour of iron ore, but in the plain the dark palms wind in their stately turbaned processions upon the yellow soil. These palms will become thicker until the desert town of Elche is reached. The fig and the orange, the brown soda plant, the silver olives, and the cotton flower grow. In the gardens of the well-watered city of Murcia itself the pomegranate swells, the red chilis are laid out to dry in squares on the slopes by the road. Rabidly the Spaniards who work get what they can out of their land.

  The brown city with its low heavy tiled roofs is scattered round its churches and the mass of its Cathedral. In this town one comes across the first decent bookshop for weeks. The main street, covered by awnings against the daily stunning of the sun that flattens the population and makes walking about after eleven in the morning an oppression, recalls, in a more provincial way, the prosperous well-being of Seville. It is pleasant to pass their good shops and their airy cafés, to see the large family groups of the prosperous talking through the cool night. And by family I mean a full gathering of in-laws, and grandparents: one sees how powerful, gay, and quick of tongue are the women in these patriarchal gatherings. Those night conversations of Spain: the enormous family gathers in its circles and there they shout and laugh. Yet there is not always laughter. One can pass the open balcony where another huge group of relatives sits. The head is walking up and down reciting a prayer for the dead, while the rest gravely, in that strange, harsh monotone of which the Spaniards are masters, intone the responses. In these large families who love the fantastic tale or the long, detailed description, the dead are a continual memory. It is the custom in the evenings to remember them.

  A green river moves slowly past the tropical gardens of the town and past the long dike or promenade which is the walk for families, for lovers, nurses, and for children stiffened by their best clothes. The lovers walk a yard apart, the hands never touch; the children—to an English eye—are vain, passionate, and spoiled. Constantly, because they are in their best clothes, they have to be checked and told not to do this and that; a continuous nervous series of commands goes out to the little anarchists and egotists, who are thereby stimulated very early to defiance, temper, and wilfulness. As long as they preserve “the fine appearance,” they can do what they like. Sad, proud, brilliant-eyed, little sallow faces, they already have the national self-regard. In a few years the spoiled boys will be shouting orders to the mothers and women who spoil them. “Mother!” the youth of eighteen shouts from the other end of the flat. “What?” shouts back the lady. “Come here,” he orders. And if she does not come at once, shouts with violence. Obediently the mother goes to the grown son, not the son to the mother.

  The people of Murcia seemed to me easy and generous. We went to see Salzillo’s carvings at the hermitage on the outskirts of the town, and on our way back an old lady stopped me to ask me to admire the flowers she had picked, for all these southerners have a child’s adoration of flowers. Another made a poetic speech about her pig t
hat was lying in the street.

  “Isn’t he beautiful, isn’t he fat, isn’t he lovely? How rich and fine he is! Oh, how lovely, look at him.

  These sudden wakings up into spontaneous delight, these sudden leaps out of torpor into pleasure, are the charm of southern character. This woman had a small shop and took me in to see “an even more beautiful pig, a noble one, a fine one,” which her sons had just killed. There it was lying on the bench in the small yard by an open forge and a stove, and the sons were shaving off its bristles. Again it was:

  “Isn’t he lovely? Isn’t he fine? Isn’t he rich and delicious? I have never seen a pig so beautiful in my life. And there are my two sons, two fine boys, strong, hard-working—a mother never had such sons—who killed the beautiful pig and are getting it ready. And I have put a pot of onions to cook to stuff the pig with, the largest and finest onions from our beautiful garden, and we shall sell the pig, cooked, in slices.”

  Superlative delight in this big woman’s rapturous face. It was, for her, one of those supreme, superlative, hyperbolical moments for which the southerner lives, the crisis of extravagance and delight.

  At the hotel the manager was idly doing his books at two in the morning, and reading a Western. A solid intelligent man, he announced loudly that he could see no difference between the Falangists and the Communists—indeed, many of the Communists had notoriously joined the Falange. He was a Socialist of the centre. He had fought for the Republic on many fronts, as a volunteer. “I told them so. They did nothing to me.” These manly fellows in all parties are the backbone of Spain: outspoken, immovable, honest, and brave. Many who survived the Spanish war seem to have escaped persecution by sheer force of character. Their difficulty is that, being the energetic element in the country, they are restless. They long to get out of the provincial towns. The man was like the lawyer in Granada, the lorry-driver of Barcelona, the man with a small garage in the small town, restive under his poor money and wanting more scope; and in any case half the population of Murcia wants to leave the province. Spain cannot support its people.

  From the Cathedral tower one looks across the town and the oasis, through the clear air, into a Biblical landscape which has the naïve, clear-cut, polished stillness of a lithograph. The candid Mediterranean light is already on the land. The Cathedral is late Gothic, but the delight is in its golden baroque façade. Sacheverell Sitwell has described this façade as one of the best in Europe, and compares it to a piece of cabinet work carved on an immense scale. The green and blue tiled domes of the church and convents of Murcia are marked by statues, and in all parts of the city one comes across the lovely flourishes of that moving and humane mode of art.

  The baroque is one of those importations which have been supremely congenial to the Spanish genius and scene. The landscape, whether it is harsh or gentle, calls for this decorative and voluptuous relief. The historians divide Renaissance architecture into four periods (see Martin Briggs’s essay on Spanish architecture and sculpture in Allison Peers’s Spain): the plateresque, the middle Renaissance, the baroque, and the academic revival. The plateresque or goldsmith work can be seen at its best in Salamanca. This casket-like decoration was brought to Spain from Italy by a Catalan goldsmith who settled in Toledo and had a great influence on the Flemish architect Egas, who was one of the great peaceful Flemish invaders. The plateresque is basically Italian, and it proceeds really from the time of Spanish dominion in Italy. There are splendid examples of the plateresque in Valladolid. But the baroque is the mode which most strongly stirred the imagination of the Spanish artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They took at once to its formality, its circumstance, its worldliness, which were so happily combined with movement and freedom. In the earlier decades of the seventeenth century, Spain was still in the state of exhaustion that quickly followed the conquests in America; then followed a time of intellectual delight, extravagance, the silver age of the minor artists; and it is this style which Spaniards made their own, and which they took to America. Compared with them, the Anglo-Saxon colonists of the north produced no architecture of transcendent interest. They exterminated the Indians and built pleasant homes, but no great buildings. The Spaniards did not exterminate their Indians and built imaginatively. The statues, the broken cornices, the porticoes and pomp of baroque, its suggestion of epicurean balance and energy, are the beginnings of an extravagance which the extreme and fantastic spirit of the Spaniards soon entered upon. Did they have this passion for detailed exuberance from the Moors? Certainly the Cartuja in Granada emulated the Alhambra; and it is to the Moorish tile-makers that Spanish baroque owes its use of the green and blue tiled domes that are characteristic of the style; Valencia is a city of these tiles. The true Spanish excess is seen in the work of Churriguerra and his disciples. Such are the celebrated doorway of the Hospicio Provincial in Madrid, an orgy of decoration which at first seems vulgar—but upon reflection one sees that this bold carving of deep shades is very suited to the powerful sunlight in which the deep relief has to be seen. These decorations seem to quarry the sunlight, as well as to fantasticate the stone.

  After Murcia there are small baroque towns like Villareal de la Plana and Valencia, and in all the towns between them and Alicante the baroque façade meets the eye, delighting by its gaiety, its composure, its assurance of sensuous pleasure on earth. There will be no seeking after God here; He will come to us without disturbance and be a pagan like ourselves and content with a miracle or two. No mystics can be thought of in these amicable convents; the church is a drawing-room, heaven is inlaid mother-of-pearl. The clergy yawn with a day’s indigo growth of beard on their chins and scratch and nudge as they intone their harsh, sonorous and no longer meaningful prayers. Upon the façades of these churches are the gourmet’s calm, the hedonism and drama of a civilization that has gone. Golden in the sun, they are ecclesiastical stomachs reposing upon their dozing authority.

  Murcia has a reputation for its pasos, or images, which are borne round in Holy Week. Like other Spanish towns, Murcia considers its pasos supreme in Spain, a point one would never dispute with a murciano. A pagan scepticism, blowing in from the Mediterranean and touched by Italy and Rome, enlivens the murcianos. In fact, the pasos really are remarkable. The figures were carved in wood by Salzillo, the last of the great Spanish polychrome artists, of whom Montañés is the chief. The figures are in a hermitage on the outskirts of the town and the outstanding ones are an almost life-size modelling of the Last Supper. Caught to the life by Spanish realism, the disciples sit gesturing at the table as one walks in awe round it. One has intruded upon living people. One almost resents the dramatic expressiveness of the faces; one is meeting, this time in art, the overwhelming and dominant sense of the human personality that the Spaniards convey to one in life. These figures recall so many scenes of public repentance and self-dramatization in Spanish churches and Holy Week processions. The Spanish religious artists get their realism from the dramatic sense of life in the people around them. Hence the pagan familiarity of the people with their religious images, which are admired for their cost, richness, and beauty and are treated with the easy, conversational intimacy, half-mocking, half-reverent, but wholly possessive, one would give to a son, wife, father, or betrothed in the street. The conception of God seems never to be metaphysical, and the spirit cannot be conceived of by them—it would seem—without the flesh. Man is not raised to God, but God is brought down to man. The Spaniards and their God are of the earth, and in the harsh bang of the church bells from the worn, proud churches one is made aware of a peremptory and ubiquitous temporal power, conventional, pedantic, customary. There will be no escape. One will learn fatalism from those intolerable bells.

  That long Mediterranean coast from Alicante northwards turns to the richest country in Spain and the most intensively cultivated in Europe. The figs, the olives and vines of Murcia give place to the orange groves of the Levante, glossy in their brigades, and to the rice fields. One good main road only
runs to Barcelona; the rest of the roads are either cut into deep ruts by the orange carts or pot-holed by the lorries. In any case, the road disappears in the wide, dusty towns. The car grinds from hole to hole.

  The mountains keep out the winds of Castile from this long fertile strip, and in the early spring they are made snowy by the almond blossom. Above each large town the mountain spur is crowned by the long castle walls of the Roman occupation, and in the towns the oranges are cased, the rice is sacked, the grapes are brought in for the Valencian market. In towns like Játiva and Gandía there are large threshing-floors—for there is little agricultural machinery in Spain—and the white husks of the maize are set out in orderly patterns on the pavements. Nothing is wasted in the Mediterranean. The women sweep the maize into heaps at their doorsteps, big, large-boned women who can carry anything on their hips. All this region is a suburb of Rome. The blue houses look at the blue sea towards southern Italy, and on the flat roofs the kindling wood is stacked in its bundles, the pumpkins ripen, and the tame rabbits run. There are no fields of grass here and there is no cornland, for this country depends on its rich irrigated soil, which runs sometimes to five crops a year like an intensive garden. Outside and higher up in the mountain there is not much for a wild rabbit to eat. The tame rabbit goes into the paella—that dish of rice, oil, meat, fish, and peppers which, in one form or other, is the main meal of these places.

  Valencia is the province of tiny farms which are hardly more than gardens. On two acres a man does well; on ten acres he is rich. It is the old Spanish story: good rainfall or water and you have the small peasant proprietor or the wine-grower whose lease is determined by the length of life of his vines. The land reverts to the owner when three-quarters of the vines have died, which meant (up to the nineties of last century, before the phylloxera fell upon the vines) that a tenant had a good fifty years’ run. Since the nineties the vines come from America, and their life is only half as long. Everything on the land is, of course, political, and the rural quarrel about the reduced lease and the American vine has for years been at the back of the revolutionary troubles in this rich region. The people are either plain Left or Right, republican or traditionalist; anticlerical-ism is strong, Catholicism is liberal rather than reactionary; the anarchists, who were thick along the Mediterranean—many of them migrants from the true home of anarchism in the south—were on the poor dry land. In the Civil War, many a Catholic will tell you proudly, he was Red. The general spirit is the civilized, worldly, pagan, active, hard-working, and sceptical spirit of the Mediterranean basin; the social conscience is strong, but not fanatical. There is deep respect for the older liberal leaders in their exile in France and Majorca.