The fairs and fiestas are gay; the severe spirit of Castile is far away, and though the girls who are trimming the grapes in the fields will soon tell you—in one of those characteristic protest meetings that take place at a moment’s notice in any Spanish village—that they earn only fifteen pesetas a day from seven till seven (which is only 18 s. od. a week at the present rate of exchange), they belong to a traditionally prosperous community. The rice exchange in Valencia, where the peasants bring their samples to the desks and cunning men finger the grains in their palms, is very much a place of peasant sharpness and prosperity. Haggling over small bargains is a Mediterranean pleasure. A town like Játiva has three cinemas, and at half-past one in the morning, as the audience sits in the open air, one hears the bawling of its sound track, the roar of its cante flamenco, half-way across the dark town. In Valencia, which has become a little Madrid in its central part, the nights are a hell of noise; but the city is not a typical city of urban civilization. Everyone has family connections in the villages around. The bank clerk goes out to his uncle’s in the country to collect his oranges, and with Mediterranean care will treat the fruit as if it were a vintage wine, going only to a particular orchard, and there to a few trees which he knows have the delicate flavour he likes. He is not the pre-war bank clerk, for in order to keep pace with the cost of living, he takes on extra work at night, or puts off the retiring age. It is the tale of the middle classes all over western Europe; they survive at the cost of working two or three times as hard as they used to do.
The sights of Valencia are its Cathedral and its churches and its market, the Lonja, or exchange, in florid and lovely Gothic, and its palaces. They claim to have the Holy Grail in the Cathedral. It is a disappointing object which might have come from Tiffany’s. There is a Neapolitan rather than a purely Spanish disengagement about the devout who go into the churches here to kneel and to murmur their prayers. They gaze about them as they pray, or yawn, or wander about waiting for friends; this is more like Italy than Spain. At night there is music in the cafés, mild tunes for the bourgeoisie, rowdier ones for the populace. Valencia is a lively city, but it is also a place of bad memories in the Civil War—the road outside has sinister memorials to the murdered supporters of Franco—for this was the heart of the Republican region and the seat for a long time of the government; on the other hand, such is Spanish intolerance, there are no memorials to the murdered Republicans anywhere in Spain. The thousands massacred in the bullring at Badajoz have no remembrance; the bones of the poet Garcia Lorca lie in a pit into which hundreds of anonymous bodies were thrown. (See Gerald Brenan: The Face of Spain.)
In this region one notices a change in the attitude to the Civil Guard. The Guards are thick in the pleasure resorts, in places like the pretty town of Benidorm, perhaps because the rich have a passion for protection, perhaps because Benidorm is a very agreeable place. There is no doubt that the very rich Spaniards have had the fright of their lives. In the south, in Andalusia, the Civil Guard is the traditional ally of the bailiff on the large estates, who watches the huge population of serfs; in Valencia, and much more in Catalonia, the Guards keep their eye on a prosperous and predominantly anti-Franco population which, before Franco, always stood for some degree of regional autonomy. The Catalans despise Madrid and poor Castile, and the population does not like this alien armed body who offend the pride of independent and defeated people. The Guards, of course, represent corporate order, solidarity, discipline, and loyalty; whatever may be said against them—and they have behaved at times with great cruelty and are agents of a rotten system—the Spanish state is unimaginable without some such body.
There is moisture in the air along the east coast, and by September one wakes up in the morning to see dirty clouds and sleepy mists all the way down from Barcelona. For miles on either side of Valencia one has run under the heavy shade of plane and acacia, through miles of rich market garden, towards the vineyards of the mouth of the Ebro Squares of cypress protect the orange groves. The mule carts are packed in the evening with handsome families, all wearing the wide-brimmed straw hat of the region, and a little dog tethered to the axle of the cart trots along behind it, barking. The clouds clear and we are left with the simple eastward face of the Mediterranean sky. It is a coast of promontories and headlands. At Calpe, a monstrous, uninhabited Gibraltar sticks out naked and clear, cut in a massive silver-lavender stare of rock. “Why,” says a peasant aggressively, “do people come and gape at it? There are even two hotels. What for? What is the use of it? It isn’t beautiful.”
“It is strange.”
“There is no food on it,” he says. “It is just rock. I wish they’d move it away.”
Below Tortosa is the promontory of Peniscola, where a small fishing town is built into the ramparts of a castle of the Templars. The blue-washed houses are flat-roofed in the manner of the region, black nets hang over the doors, the streets are made out of rough stone and rock. The place smells of fish, and the village appears to be barnacled on to the precipitous ruins of the castle. I called to a woman at a window that I wanted to get into the castle. She shouted down the street to another house in an iron voice. A loud squawk came out of the door.
“What is it?”
“Tell Aunt Antonia to open the castle.”
A shout from that house to another house, out of sight. “Aunt Antonia, someone at the castle.”
“Coming,” bawled Aunt Antonia.
The village might have been one family in a great kitchen, everyone shouting orders.
Aunt Antonia came coughing up the street, thin, bent, and shrinking in her jersey. She was a woman of about forty, tired, ill, and morose.
There was a fig tree in the castle. “Are they ripe?” she said. “This one is.” And snatched at it and put it in her pocket. She knew, one guessed, every one of those figs, depended in some way on their number. There was the anxiety and precision of poverty in her face; not hunger, but that sort of poverty which in Spain makes people watch every item of their small wealth, even if it is only half a dozen figs. She would sell it, not eat it. She looked like one of those coughing, disheartened, and prickly women one meets in Russian stories.
Down in the shacks on the shore they were frying prawns and langostinos; the smell of burning shells was heavy in the little place. In one place a small band of guitarists with a jazz drum had struck up. It was the fiesta week. One or two couples did a slow, awkward dance on the sand with that air of doughy boredom and that sullen determination not to offend public opinion by unseemly gaiety which make the Spaniards seem so English.
In September the great fiestas go on all up the coast. There was a small bullfight at Peniscola, or rather a teasing of the reluctant and sleepy animals in the “ring” that had been rigged up in the ruins of the castle entrance. Farther north in Tortosa, the fiesta was livelier. Coloured lights, flags across the streets. And giant figures stalked about the town to the sound of drum and whistle. Suddenly these staring dolls appeared at street corners followed by two or three children, all day, without special aim, but mocking everyday life with the reminder that this was homely saturnalia. These giants are a reminder that one is really leaving Iberian Spain, and entering a region which is a good deal Provençal. The giant kings and queens were Ferdinand and Isabel, the Catholic sovereigns who united this part of Spain with Aragón and Castile and so occupied the peninsula. These giants are really the dolls of forgotten political propaganda. Rockets were exploded all through the night, and for hours there was the scrape, scrape, scrape of strolling people. Another sign of the north at Tortosa was a sporting stadium, and the fiesta was being celebrated with an all-in wrestling display. Half the town turned out for it, walking mysteriously in the dust at about midnight to the arc lights of the place. Large numbers of children went to it. I went with a man who ran a small restaurant and his friend, a carpenter. The restaurant-keeper had fought for the Reds in the Civil War and had escaped by boat to France. He was a typical Catalan of his kind:
loathed the rest of Spain, said everything south of Tortosa was Africa and gypsies, hated the Church and Franco and was a Catalan nationalist. There was the usual row at the entrance to the ring. The crowd were shouting together in unison, protesting because the sponsors had put up the price of the tickets. This sort of row is very common. But so nervous and touchy are the authorities in Catalonia that they lose their heads at the smallest signs of public criticism. The gates of the stadium were pulled open suddenly and out rushed a dozen armed Civil Guards. The crowd fled at once, the shouting stopped, and the people were, unpleasantly, cowed.
“That is why we hate Franco,” the carpenter said. “Police, for the slightest thing.”
It is hard to know in all-in wrestling what is spontaneous and what has been arranged. In Tortosa that night, one saw, however, the Iberian style and the excellent opportunities for the display of native temperament. The boastful, strutting, conceited man came on in his beautiful dressing-gown, followed by a resolved, silent, and austere opponent. Naturally the conceited man soon got the worst of it. He was thrown, flung, scissored; soon he began to foul. The crowd booed him. Spanish pride goes mad under ridicule—except in the restraints of the bullring—and presently the conceited fellow sprang away from his seconds who were mopping him in his corner, charged at his opponent in the opposite corner, and tried to hit him over the head with a pail. In another bout, another, bald, bullet-headed man, with a spade beard and long hairy legs, tried to brain the referee with a bottle. The referee, who was a small middle-aged man in neat white flannels, seized some part of the bearded man and tossed him out of the ring into the audience. Raging, the Beard got back and tried again: the same thing happened. The Beard was finally chased through the audience and half round the stadium by his opponent. Several times the Guards removed people who protested. There were good, clean, imperturbable wrestlers in this display, but one saw in their opponents the other side of Spanish stoicism, strength, and courage: the theatrical, the revengeful side. One saw the “Spanish fury” suddenly spring out, and whether it was genuine or calculated acting, it was tremendous and terrifying in its passion. One also saw what I can only call “the murderous speciality.” One wrestler was famous all over the region for the hardness of his skull. He could always be defeated by science and calm, but his dreadful aim was to crack heads with his opponent. One crack from that iron head, that human cannon ball, could half kill any man. The carpenter I was with held his forehead half the time during this bout and made whining, expectant sounds of sympathetic pain. The night passed in protests, fouls, and horseplay. Dripping with sweat, the wrestlers were led away by their supporters to be cleaned up in the wasteland behind the seats.
Tortosa was badly damaged in the Civil War, and its riverside houses were destroyed. Now they are rebuilt. “Who lives in those houses now?” “The new rich,” said the carpenter as we walked back through the soft, black, warm night over the new bridge that has been built over the Ebro.
He was a small bourgeois. His children went to school, he was a respectable man on the European model, questioning, active, and with a good notion of the world beyond the Pyrenees and marked by the toleration and curiosity of the Mediterranean. In Castile, in Andalusia—in what is called Spain—he would have been poor, sombre, hostile to Europe, his children going very little to school. It is a difference of race and temperament; also a difference that arises between life in a rich region and life in a poor one.
Chapter X
At Tarragona one strikes the rock and mountain Aagain, the country dries and rises. It is all mountain between here and the frontier, a hundred or more miles away, and packed, prosperous yellow towns. One learns to put a slice of lemon in the red wine. One eats the best fish in Europe, above all the best shellfish; meals are delicate, long, gluttonous, stretching far into the afternoon. One sees the full, round, lively faces. One sees big, comely, well-fed people. One has forgotten the lean bodies of Castile and sees only the happy composure of the flesh. This comeliness is not like the torpid obesity of Seville, for in Catalonia the fat people are electrified by vitality and energy. They talk loudly, boast at large. I lunched with a wine traveller in Barcelona at one of the small, cheap popular restaurants, in the terrible slum of the Barrio Chino, and as we filled and refilled ourselves, he pointed to the classical figure of the young waitress, a creature divine in her amplitude. “Doña Abundancia” he said with the gourmand’s sad, sly sigh.
A corniche road winds along the promontories to Barcelona. The beaches are hot and spongy to the feet, the sand burns, and the eyes cannot face the flash of the hot sea. The swimmer finds the waves short, sharp, and violent, each small wave punching like a fist, The scrub seems to smoulder on the cement-coloured soil and rock. One stops in little flat-roofed resorts like Sitges where, in the sudden enthusiastic manner of these people, they put up a small statue to El Greco a few years ago. What the Catalans like, they boost exuberantly. El Greco has nothing to do with Catalonia, but a few people in Sitges who admired him could not resist the notion of doing something publicly about it. The Catalan lives outwardly. If there is fantasy in his head, he wants at once to turn it into commerce, into action, into stone.
Barcelona is a Spanish city, but in spite of itself. Its boulevards, the Ramblas, are French in style; the name comes from the Arabic. The common language is Catalan, which is a form of Provençal. The temperament of the people is energetic, boastful commercial. The city is a place of big-chinned world-shakers who talk in thousands and millions, of go-getters with briefcases. “It doesn’t matter how good-looking you are here,” said an astonished Andalusian lorry-driver, “the women won’t nibble till they have seen your pocket-book.” The province of Catalonia is a mountainous buttress of the Pyrenees, but it is well watered and fertile; its agriculture prospers in innumerable small tenant farms; and Barcelona itself is a great textile manufactory. With Bilbao it is the only industrial city of any account in Spain, and it is an important port. Ebullient and ambitious, the Barcelonese have tried to claim that Columbus was a native of the city and not of Genoa, and they have built a monstrous statue to him at the bottom of the Ramblas. Unfortunately there is little doubt that Columbus was a native of Genoa; his very avarice proves it.
Modern Barcelona, like Madrid, belongs to the megalomaniac group of northern Mediterranean cities: it has the characteristics of Milan, Genoa, and Marseille, ancient cities to which modern industrialism has come late and suddenly. Immense wealth has gone into the hands of an energetic middle class, which still has connections with the peasantry, and this wealth has acted like a series of crude electric shocks upon their minds. They have gone in for fantastic and bombastic architecture. The poor of other provinces have crowded into the bursting city, and it is a horrifying mixture of vulgar splendour and swarming slums. The drying wind from the Pyrenees gives a hard clarity to the air, so that each building when one looks down on it from a height seems separate and has the isolation and hardness of a thing seen in a stereoscope. The thousands of windows stare back like the loopholes of armoured cars, and this distinctness is an assault on the eyes and makes its contribution to what the newspaper headlines have been telling us for more than two generations now: that Barcelona is one of the violent cities of Europe. It looks it.
The tension is political. It is true that the Civil War has exhausted the political movements of Catalonia. The only evidence of the ferment now is the pursuit of revolutionaries turned brigand in the Pyrenees, or the trial of anarcho-syndicalist plotters who have courageously come over the border from Perpignan. If Catalonia is apathetic now, and if men over the age of forty look back with nostalgia to the days of active intellectual life and liberal progress before the Civil War, the fundamental causes of tension in Catalonia still exist and will continue to do so for a long time. For though Catalonia likes to regard its separateness from the rest of Spain as its own personal problem, the fact is that Catalonia embodies the struggle between Europe and Iberia (not to say Africa) in the Spanish hea
rt, and in the most active and concrete forms. Catalonia is the one part of Spain which has successfully made itself Western and where the balance is tipped in favour of Europe.
In Castile, the unifying principle, despotic, aristocratic, conservative, frugal, tragic: in Castile the mediaeval spirit, Don Quixote defeated, Sancho Panza in office and dominant. Castile, the rentier; Catalonia, the maker. In Castile, wheat; in Catalonia, cloth. In Catalonia, industrial society, middle class, optimistic, liberal, sceptical, and very anticlerical in religion, but split violently by the class wars of industrial society. Modern capitalism entered Spain in the forties of last century when foreign companies came in to build the railways. The only peoples to vie with the foreigners were the new Basque iron-founders and bankers, and the textile-manufacturers of Barcelona. The attraction of Spain to the northerner is its rejection of modern life, its refusal of the Reformation, the French Revolution, of all that we call Progress; this rejection is not entirely negative by any means. By indolence and recalcitrance the Spaniards have preserved their individuality, a creature unashamedly himself, whose only notion of social obligation is what old custom dictates. The Spaniards have demonstrated that people can survive as personalities without good government, without a sense of corporate responsibility, without compromise, without tolerance—and that, in being themselves, they are willing to pay the appalling social price which their negligence exacts. They are not unnerved by having to face the worst every day; so long as once, every decade or so, they can break out in destructive rage against one another.
The Spanish Temper Page 18
