Spain (8 page)

You would expect to find such oddities and hallucinations in Galicia, where the Celtic strain is strong, and where wee folk, poltergeists, and the smell of brimstone are all familiar; and indeed one of my favourite examples of Spanish second sight concerns the shrine of St. James at Santiago. The Galicians will readily tell you why the shrine is there. St. James the Greater, they say, preached the Gospel in Spain soon after the Crucifixion, and after his martyrdom in Jerusalem his body was smuggled back to Galicia by a party of Spanish disciples. During the sea voyage its miraculous presence saved the life of a man who had been carried out to sea by a frightened horse, and since both man and beast were found covered with scallop shells, the scallop became the badge of St. James and of the Galician pilgrimage. All this, the Galicians say, is well known. The sarcophagus was lost for several centuries, but a star revealed its whereabouts—Compostela means ‘field of a star'—and there the city of Santiago was built. St. James was a great traveller, they will tell you, which is why he is often portrayed as a pilgrim, and a great warrior, which is why he is often portrayed on horseback, smiting black infidels with a sword.

But in all this, alas, they are deceiving themselves, and for the stranger it has become exceedingly difficult to sort out fact from Santiago fancy. St. James, so all the best scholars seem to agree, never came to Spain at all. He was never a soldier. There is no earthly reason why his body should be brought to Galicia, and nothing of the sort is suggested in the Acts of the Apostles, where his death is recorded. He died several centuries before
Islam was conceived, probably never mounted a horse in his life, and certainly never slew an infidel. If his emblem is a shell, it is probably because he was a fisherman by trade. If he is pictured with a pilgrim's staff, it is because the sculptors, years ago, mixed up the cause with the effect, and confused the saint with his supplicants. There is no historical reason why Santiago should be a place of pilgrimage, why the cunning monks of Cluny should have fostered its international reputation, or why that joyful shrine should exist at all. It is only an illusion; but so long has it been in the Spanish mind, so attractive is it in itself, that long ago, in the way of all the best hallucinations, it achieved a kind of truth.

This is, of course, the essence of Quixotry. ‘The Character', as they call him in Spain, was crazy—but in his craziness he expressed great truths. To this day an aura of hazed reality surrounds the name of Don Quixote in Spain, for just as the Galicians have convinced themselves that St. James fought the Muslims at Santiago, and Londoners look in all seriousness for 221B Baker Street, so many Spaniards take it for granted that Don Quixote actually existed. I once stopped my car in the colourless expanses of La Mancha, the knight's homeland, and asked a couple of ploughmen which of the villages I could see around me was in fact Don Quixote's birthplace. ‘Don Quixote de la Mancha?' said they, for they always give him his full title, out of respect. ‘Why, he was born just outside Argamasilla de Alba. They've pulled the house down, but you can still see the place—over there, señor, beyond the church tower, that's where Don Quixote de la Mancha was born!'

They had no doubt about it: for just as the Character himself had no doubt about the windmills, so Spain sometimes likes to rise above the brilliant sunlit clarity of her landscapes, and peer into the mists above. Down here it is stately dames with arms akimbo. Up there the knights and saints ride by.

We are in the Spanish South. The castanets click from coast to coast, the cicadas hum through the night, the air is heavy with jasmine and orange blossom, the soil is rich red or raw desert, there are prickly pears at the roadside, the girls have black eyes and undulating carriages, and often there hangs upon the evening the sad but florid strain of
cante jondo
—the ‘deep song', part Oriental, part Gregorian, part Moorish, part Jewish, that the gypsies have made the theme music of the south.

For half the world the image of Spain is the image of Andalusia —the huge slab of country, mostly mountainous, that begins
where the tableland is bounded by the southern sierras. Eight Spanish provinces make up Andalusia. Almería, in the extreme south-east, is an Andalusian city, and so is Cádiz, in the far west. Andalusia contains the highest mountain in Spain, the hottest shoreline, the teaming tourist resorts of the Costa del Sol, the fine old cities of Seville, Granada, and Córdoba, the ports of Málaga and Cádiz, the handsome mountain town of Ronda, Jerez de la Frontera, where the sherry comes from, and Vejer de la Frontera, perhaps the most spectacular of all Spanish villages.

Andalusia is romantic Spain, popularized by Gautier, Mérimée, Bizet, and Washington Irving, and still dangerously bewitching. The very name of the Alhambra stands for courtesans and silver slippers. The very sight of the Seville tobacco factory sends one off humming the Toreador Song. Thevery glimpse of a bull-fight poster from Torremolinos, taken home by some eager tourist and stuck upon a living-room wall—the mere glimpse of those gaudy colours, with their memories of
pasodobles
and seafood in the evening, sums up the romantic allure of Spain, and makes the citizen of the dank north fret for his summer holidays. To the Moors, Andalusia was an earthly paradise. To the travel agents it still is. To the rest of Spain it stands in rather the relationship of some flibbertigibbet but undeniably charming cousin—of whom indulgent elders say you really needn't worry, John's the kind that always falls on his feet.

But to all too many of the Andalusians themselves, this is a homeland less than Arcadian. Andalusia is
sol y sombra
both—sun on one side of the street, shadow on the other: a mirror both of Spain's delight, and of her lingering poverty.

It is only fair to look first at this profligate in a winning streak, for the overwhelming characteristic of Andalusia is charm, and the glummest of sociological analysts could scarcely drive through its countryside without enjoying himself. As you descend to this lotus-land down some winding highway through the Sierra Morena, Andalusia lulls you at once into susceptibility. There lies the first of her villages, down in the river hollow, with a fine old bridge to take you there, and a lofty old church awaiting your
arrival. There is a thread of smoke on the air, and a smell of fat from the breakfast batter they are cooking in the streets, and on the river bank a few early risers are already scrubbing their sheets beside the water. In you go, down the whitewashed cobbled streets, and all around you there seem to be flowers—in pots affixed to outside walls, in neat little gardens, in patios glimpsed through the grilled doors of houses.

Such a place often looks like a set in some old-school Ruritanian musical, and its inhabitants, too, move against these delightful backdrops with a stagy air. Here are all the stock characters of the Spanish legend: the leathery muleteer, his string of animals heavy with sacks, panniers, or baskets of vegetables; the Murillo boy trotting by on his donkey, all tousled mischief; the swanky landlord's agent in his flat Cordoba hat, one hand elegantly at his hip, on a grey mare with a fancy saddle; the women chattering perpetually around the fountain, their big water-pots propped upon its parapet; the village grocer, glimpsed dimly through a curtain of hanging hams, garlics, and sausages; the staunch old beldame, all in black, whitewashing her house with a bundle of sticks for a brush; the silent shepherd with his goats and sheep, jostling each other down the street; the miller in his windmill on the ridge, with a smell of flour, a creaking of old wooden mechanisms, and two caged partridges on a wall; the gamblers playing dominoes and explicable card games in the café; the priest, and the pair of Civil Guardsmen in their grey capes and patent-leather hats, and the busybody official watching your arrival from a municipal window, and the comical village policeman in his white helmet, his face a very picture of bucolic bonhomie.

Of course there are motor-bikes too, and cars, and television aerials, but still the old image is true. Andalusia gloriously lives up to its reputation, and is as full of colourful vitality as any opera stage; full of hard work, as the labourers pursue their archaic skills in the fields; full of gossip and curiosity and the music of unseen radios, as the cheerful children swarm about your car, and the old ladies in shawls gaze at you unwinking from the doors of their houses. There are no half-measures in such a place, so close to the earth, so perilously near the frontiers of caricature. You feel that
its people have already made up their minds, after some deliberation: having decided not to cut your throat, for the dramatic effect, they are, with a policeman's salute and a wave from the shrouded grocer, altogether at your service.

Such is romantic Spain at its roots. To see it at its flowering climax, you should go to the famous Feria of Seville, which takes place in April, and is at once so unusual, so entertaining, and so beautiful that few other fairs in the world can match it. The old city warms up to the event for some weeks in advance. The great fairground, down by Carmen's tobacco factory, is prettied up with flowers and fairy lamps. The proud families of Andalusia, the clubs, the syndicates, and the livelier commercial firms, erect their tented pavilions along the boulevards. The hotels, cautiously doubling their prices for the occasion, rent out their last upstairs back rooms. The whole rhythm of the city is accelerated, the pressure is intensified, the streets are crowded, the cafés hilarious, magnificent horsemen clatter through the city centre, the stranger feels that some civic blood-vessel is surely about to burst—and finally, early in April, all this happy fever detonates the annual explosion of the Feria.

It is part a parade, of horses, fashions, and handsome citizens. It is part a binge, where people eat and drink all night, and dance into the morning. It is part an entertainment, where the best dancers and musicians of Andalusia come to display their talents. It is part a mating session, where the best families gather to share reminiscences, swop prejudices, and introduce eligible nephews to likely nieces. In the morning there takes place the most brilliant of all Spain's
paseos
—a
paseo
with horses. Hour after hour, in the warm spring sunshine, the Andalusians ride up and down that fairground—to see and be seen, look each other's dressage up and down, and inquire after the dear Marquis. The married and the very young ride by in lovely polished carriages, drawn sometimes by the proudest of mules, sometimes by pairs of elegant Arabs, and just occasionally by that prodigy of the carriage trade, a five-in-hand. Their coachmen are sometimes decked up in gorgeous liveries, turbans, toppers, Druse costume or tam-o'-shanters, and often some winsome grand-daughter perches herself
upon the open hood of the barouche, her frilled white skirt drooping over the back.

As for those of marriageable age, they trot up and down those boulevards like figures of Welsh mythology: two to a horse, the young man proud as a peacock in front, the girl seductively sidesaddle behind. He is dressed in all the splendour of the Andalusian dandy, the tightest of jackets and the most rakish of hats, looking lithe, lean, and possibly corseted; she wears a rose in her hair and a long, full, flowering, flounced polka-dot dress—blue, pink, mauve, bright yellow or flaming red. Never was there such a morning spectacle. The old people look marvellously well fed and valeted; the coachmen are superbly cocksure; and sometimes one of those courting couples will wheel around with a spark of hoofs, the beau reining sharply in like a cowboy at the brink of a canyon, the belle clutching his shapely waist or holding the flower in her hair, to mount the pavement to some gay pavilion, the horse snorting and the lovers laughing, and accept a stirrup cup from a smiling friend.

In the evening the binge begins, and the fairground, blazing with flags and lights, becomes a stupendous kind of night club. The air is loud with handclaps and the clicking of castanets, and all among the huge ornamental buildings that flank the fairground, with their ponds, parapets, and courtyards, groups of young people are dancing in the shadows—sometimes suddenly swooping, like so many flocks of chirping birds, from one corner to another, from one alcove to the next, or helter-skelter over a hump-back bridge to the other side of the water. The bright pavilions of the fairground streets now sizzle with celebration—bands thumping, dishes clashing, families deep in gossip over their drinks, gypsies cooking ghastly greasy stews outside tents of sybaritic silkiness, stolid railwaymen listening to the music, or groups of children, resplendent in their southern fineries, dancing stately measures on a stage. Sometimes you hear a hoarse flourish of
cante jondo
, from some gypsy virtuoso hired for the evening. Sometimes the young bloods come dancing by, arm in arm across the pavement, with a transistor to give them rhythm, and feathers in their hats. Everywhere there is the beat of the flamenco, the
clatter of heels and castanets, the creak of carriage wheels, the smell of horses, the swish of romantic skirts, and the noise, like the shuttle of distant looms, of twenty thousand clapping hands.

It lasts for most of the night, three nights running, and when you wake up in the morning, to feel the city in a happy but exhausted hush all around you, it is as though the whole experience has only been some elaborate dream—too much red Rioja, perhaps, or eating your mussel soup too fast.

It is the standard dream of the Spanish South, the romantic bag of tricks. If you are only on holiday, it is enough—few regions on earth today can offer you so much fun, so much excitement, so much spontaneous beauty. But to see the other face of the Andalusian mirror, you must turn away from the dazzle of Seville, and look for a moment at a statistical map. Of the ten poorest provinces in Spain, five are in Andalusia: there are only two Andalusian provinces that reach the mean level of Spanish prosperity. This is the country of the great estates and the landless peasantry, and it is here, all among the orange blossom, that we can best remind ourselves of the poorness of Spain.

For despite her air of grandeur, she is not a rich country. Her moments of prosperity have been transient. The Romans and the Moors both brought her some prosperity, in the days when her land was less eroded. The Incas and the Aztecs willy-nilly enriched her, in the days when the gold of the Americas poured convoy by convoy into her coffers. Before the Spanish Civil War she still possessed the sixth largest gold reserve on earth—mostly frittered away during the conflict in buying arms from the Russians. She is, though, one of the generically poor countries. It used to be thought that her unexploited reserves of minerals—iron, copper, bauxite, manganese—were virtually limitless, and had only to be released from their seams to make her rich again. Now the experts are more cautious. There is plenty of hydro-electric power in Spain, and plenty of low-quality coal, but there is no oil at all, and most of the other deposits are apparently too skimpy to allow much industrial expansion. The first Spanish industrial
revolution, bravely launched by the Basques and Catalans in the early nineteenth century, never quite sparked: to this day the industries of Spain are largely confined to three small areas—Madrid, Catalonia, and the Cantabrian coast, where the Basques and Asturians live. Spain has never properly adjusted to the technical era. She does not have the carburettor touch, and the only Spaniards who treat a car with any finesse are the meticulous street thieves of Barcelona.

Spanish agriculture, for all the space of its landscapes and diligence of its peasants, can only just produce enough food to feed the population. Spain is self-supporting in that mystic trio of foodstuffs, wine, wheat, and olives, which is the traditional staple of a Mediterranean diet; in a bad year, however, she already has to import other foods, and her population is increasing faster than her agricultural production. Sixty per cent of Spain has never been cultivated, and never will be—half the soil of Andalusia, the geographers say, has been blown into the sea. Of the rest, much is cultivated with archaic inefficiency. Many farms have been split so many times, in the course of family inheritance, that they are now almost farcically fragmented. Sometimes a hundred acres is divided into a couple of thousand plots and distributed among two or three hundred owners, and there are olive trees in Spain that have been distributed branch by branch among brothers. The one-cow farm is a commonplace in Galicia, where the farmer's wife may often be seen leading her entire livestock on a string. On the other hand the vast
latifundios
of the south, estates on a South American scale, are too immense and unwieldy to be efficient: the landlord usually lives far away, in some comfortable apartment of Madrid or Seville; the agent is often corrupt, usually ignorant, and seldom enlightened; tie landless peasants labour on, generation after generation, with no incentive but the stark need to survive. Hundreds of thousands are obliged to go abroad to get work at all, and there is a ceaseless migration out of the countryside into the towns. The markets of Spain are often such miracles of lush fecundity, so cherry-red and corn-rich, that it is difficult to realize how harsh a life Spain offers all too many of her countrymen, how constantly they must struggle against climate, social
structure, and terrain, and how enormous is the gulf that divides visitor from villager.