Iberia (90 page)

 

Flamenco
. Pamplona, on the other hand, has nothing to match
the flamenco shows of the casetas in Sevilla, which is to be
expected, since Pamplona lies outside the flamenco zone.

 

Circus
. The circus area in Pamplona is scattered and ineffectual
and the circuses that frequent it are small. The area in Sevilla is
concentrated and the circuses are delightful. When the carnival
area of Sevilla is added, the advantage is all Sevilla’s.

 

Picnics
. I have already spoken of the pass at Roncesvalles, but
I am not forgetting the fine picnics in Las Marismas, and for the
average visitor not concerned with Charlemagne and Roland, I
suspect a picnic in the Sevilla area might be preferred.

 

Acceptance
. This is a subtle point that might weigh heavily with
younger people, although it is no longer of much importance to
me. To be accepted in Pamplona one needs only a white shirt,
tennis shoes, a red scarf, a red sash and a bota of wine. With this
equipment the town and the square and the bullring are available,
and the fellowship continues for eight long days. To be accepted
in Sevilla…the phrase is a misnomer. One is never accepted in
Sevilla. I have spent much time in that city, during feria and
otherwise, and I have rarely received either hospitality or courtesy.
I thought perhaps that this was because I didn’t ride, but a
distinguished horseman told me, ‘If you ride you’re treated even
worse. If your jacket is an inch too short the Sevillanos ask, “You
hunting for frogs?” If your hat is not cocked at precisely the right
angle, they say, “You boor.” And if your horse is not obviously
the most expensive, they jeer, “You cheapo.”’ To wangle an
invitation into a caseta is almost impossible, and I once sat for an
entire feria in the Aero Club without once being spoken to, not
even by waiters. Some of the loneliest and unhappiest people I
have ever met have been Europeans, not Americans, trying to
make a go of it in Sevilla. But I have reached the age at which I
neither expect nor demand acceptance; all I require is that the
local citizens not throw bottles at me, so my preference between
the two ferias remains with Sevilla. The privilege of seeing the
Holy Week procession before the feria starts, and the daily parade
in the park, and the casetas, and the horse fair, plus the superb
bullfights in the best of rings is an opportunity I would not
surrender, not even when the people who organize these matters
are so inhospitable.

 

All ferias end, but few so mournfully as Pamplona’s. At nightfall
after the last bullfight, is over, the bands that were once so gay
pass slowly through the plaza and the narrow streets playing
dirges, and when they reach the mournful wail which concludes
their requiem, those marching throw themselves prostrate in the
street, and with their foreheads beating the stones, cry in the night,

‘Poor me, poor me! How sad am I.

A city is in lamentation, and well it should be, for there are not
many things like San Fermín.

 

Now the Feria of San Fermín

 

Has ended. Woe is me.’

 

X
BARCELONA

To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like
drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of
champagne. For Barcelona is an exhilarating city, replete with
challenging aspects. It is not only the political capital of the north,
where one can best evaluate the problem of regional separatism
in Spain, expecially Catalan, but it is also the intellectual capital
of the country, with a fascinating collection of museums. It is a
world almost to itself, a unique metropolis bound more to the
Mediterranean than to the mountains, more to France than to
Africa.

I approached Barcelona in a leisurely and almost ideal way.
One morning I awoke in the Parador de San Francisco inside
Granada’s Alhambra. This is generally held to be Spain’s choicest
parador if one is concerned with history and architecture, for it
is very old and its cloistered patio is exceptional. After a farewell
visit to the tinsel-and-stucco buildings of the Alhambra and a
final look at Manuel de Falla’s carmen, my wife and I drove out
past the Torre Bermeja and up onto the plateau that would lead
us eastward to the Mediterranean. At the last curve we looked
back at the beautiful Muslim city and at the cathedral where my
four kings lay, Fernando, Isabel, Felipe, Juana, and like the Moor
we saw no more.

It was autumn as we drove north and harvesting was under
way. Golden grain, russet fruits, red grapes and crimson peppers
were being gathered and this part of Andalucía looked positively
rich, so rich that I remembered the explanation as to why Granada
produced poor wine: ‘Her grapes have not suffered enough.’ In
the good fields we saw that morning there had been little suffering.

Before long I was surprised to come upon the famous village
of Guadix, for I had supposed that it lay farther south. During
the final siege of Granada in 1491 a crucial victory had been gained
here by the Christians, but memory of it has pretty much been
submerged by the fame of the town’s cave dwellings, and these
are something to see. Set in a lunar landscape of bleak hills and
rocky pinnacles the houses of Guadix are dug into the faces of
the hills, and when chimneys are piped up through the solid rock
so that fires can be lit, are quite comfortable. This style of
architecture has been adopted in many different countries, most
notably in central Turkey, but at Guadix there is a difference,
because the doorways into the caves have been handsomely
plastered and decorated with red tiles, so that they look like the
entrances to churches or villas of some importance. They have
been rewhitewashed once or twice a year for six or seven centuries,
so that like the house of Núñez de Balboa in Jerez de los
Caballeros, they are now encrusted in a kind of man-made rock
of soft and delicate outline. To see Guadix in the afternoon sun,
with its pinnacles dark brown like burnished gold and its cave
entrances stark white, is to see a dream village more appropriate
for goblins and giants than for human beings.

The reason I wanted to see Guadix had nothing to do with its
architecture, handsome though that was. This was the pueblo in
which Alarcón had located his short novel

El sombrero de tres
picos
, and as I looked at the miserable economic level at which
the villagers lived, I could hear the music which Falla had
composed for this work and I could visualize the four leading
actors in the rustic comedy. This was the house of the hardworking
miller and over there was the fly-stained office of the lecherous
corregidor (one who corrects, hence magistrate) who had
conceived an evil passion for the miller’s wife. This grapevine
could be the one from which she plucked the grapes used for
bedeviling the corregidor, and that little stream is probably the
one into which he tumbled while pursuing her. And the biggest
of the houses, not attached to any cave, would pretty surely have
been the corregidor’s, where the miller went to enjoy himself with
the corregidor’s wife while the latter was having no luck with the
miller’s wife. Seeing the supposed setting of the ballet gave me a
better understanding of Falla’s music, for he caught the color and
sound of a Spanish village. Two orchestral suites have been
excerpted from the ballet. The first summarizes the dance of the
miller’s wife, the magistrate and the episode of the grapes, and is
not outstanding; the second gives us the dance of the neighbors,
the miller’s farruca and the final dance, and is probably the best
work Falla ever did. I have never been able to account for the
discrepancy in the quality between the two suites, but I have come
to prize the second as fit to stand beside Stravinsky’s
Petrouchka
or Prokofiev’s
Love for Three Oranges
.

Beyond Guadix we came to that series of Andalusian villages
perched on the sides of hills where life is as bleak and unrewarding
as anywhere in Europe. The bulk of the people are illiterate and
are intended to be kept that way by their landed masters. Life is
even more miserable than in the villages of Extremadura, because
here there is less hope. The earthen floor, the solitary garment
with patch upon patch upon patch, the early marriage and the
early death, these are the marks of rural Andalucía. It is no wonder
that whole villages have emigrated. Where do they go? Listen to
the litany of rural Spain as I heard it from an Andalusian.

‘A good many men from this village…Germany. When they
go they promise, “We’ll come back. I won’t forget you,
Prudencia.” But we never see them again.’

‘Do they find Catholic girls? In Germany?’

 

‘They come back to Spain. But not to this dump.’

 

‘Where do they go?’

 

‘Where would any sensible man go? Barcelona.’

 

Whenever a man from Andalucía, fed up with his miserable

lot, pronounced the word Barcelona it was as if he were uttering
a benediction. ‘That whole village beyond the hill, they all went
to Barcelona. You can plow the main street and plant your grapes,
because they won’t be back.’

‘Is life in Barcelona that good?’ I asked.

 

‘No. It’s very hard. But it’s a life.’ Here the Andalusian made
the gestures which I had seen before. He rubbed the cloth of his
shirt to signify that in Barcelona men could afford clothing. And
with his fingers he put imaginary food in his mouth, and this
required no interpretation. Wherever I went in rural Andalucía,
I encountered these signs.

 

I sought out an intellectual from the area, living of course in a
different part of the country, and he said, ‘My region is the heart
and soul of Spain. Everything good comes from Andalucía, and
believe me when I say that all of us who live in exile do so with a
sigh. Just as our hard fields make great fighting bulls, so they make
fighting men. If I thought I’d never again see Andalucía, I don’t
think I could live.’

 

‘Then why do so many leave?’

 

‘Two harsh reasons. The landed families own Andalucía and
they’ve sworn that nothing down there will ever change. For them
the system is good, and for them it will continue. The second
reason, the Church. In this city you’ve met liberal priests. In
Barcelona they have tremendous priests, willing to fight even the
police on behalf of students and ordinary people. But in Andalucía
the Church has one last stronghold of the old system, when
peasants behaved and listened to their betters. So down there the
Church is an agency of repression. It preaches a kind of life that
flourished five hundred years ago…when things were supposed
to be good.’

 

My informant paused and said, ‘Actually, a thousand years ago
when Moors occupied the region life was probably better than it
is now. A thousand years and there’s been no progress. Have you
ever seen a true back-of-the-mountain Andalusian village?’

 

‘I’ve seen Guadix.’

 

He laughed. ‘That’s a metropolis. They have buses and a
cinema. They have no money but they do have spirit. No, I mean
the really forlorn Andalucía. You haven’t seen it and you can’t
know.’

 

I said. ‘I went into the Sierra Nevada south of Granada. Well
back. I’ve seen.’

 

He reflected on this for a moment and said, ‘Even that’s the
good part. I’m speaking of the truly bleak areas over toward
Murcia. Spend a week in one of those villages, as I have, and you’ll
understand why people from Andalucía flock to Barcelona.’

 

‘Why not Madrid?’

 

‘That’s a subtle problem. In the minds of these people Madrid
is merely an extension of what they already have. Landed power.
The Church. Feudalism intensified. But Barcelona, with its
nearness to France and its fronting on the Mediterranean, is a
complete break. In Madrid there’s not much hope for an
Andalusian peasant. In Barcelona all things are possible. And
when you get to Barcelona and see the tremendous number of
Andalusians who have emigrated there, look at how poorly they
live. Really, until they get established they live like swine. But not
one ever leaves to return home. Because in Barcelona there is
hope.’

 

I asked what would happen to Andalucía if the exodus
continued, and he said, ‘The landed families and the Church will
win their battle. They’ll keep it just as it was five hundred years
ago. Unless…’

 

As so often happens in conversations with Spaniards, he
hesitated, considered his words carefully, then plunged ahead. ‘If
at Franco’s death there is trouble, everyone expects it to come in
Madrid and Barcelona, especially the latter. It won’t. Well, in a
way it will. There’ll be some rioting and temporary disturbances,
but they’ll be easily handled. But if the atheistic peasants of
Andalucía rise, watch out. Because they will not be easily put
down.’