Read To Run Across the Sea Online
Authors: Norman Lewis
To Run Across the Sea
Norman Lewis
Barcelona and the Forest Beyond
The Night Hunt for the New Year
O
NCE AGAIN IN RECALLING
the seductions of travel I am reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s glance backward at the days when, for him, ‘the going was good’. My own journeyings, launched in a slightly later period, were overshadowed by premonitions of what was to come. In 1950, with the Far East on the brink of irreversible change, it was clear that if I ever hoped to go there, not a moment was to be lost. Instinct served me well, for no one in these days, or henceforward, making the journey to Vietnam, to Cambodia, Laos or Burma will ever experience a tenth of the enchantment these countries then possessed.
When the going was good … The process of the world’s impoverishment in the things that really matter to most of us rushes forward at an ever-increasing tempo, although the full extent of post-war disasters has yet to be appreciated. The greatest catastrophe has been the burning of the trees. When I went to Brazil in 1979, three million hectares of forest had gone in the previous year. One car-manufacturing firm, wishing to diversify into cattle, had started a fire, photographed by satellite, that spread through an area as large as Luxembourg. Round Manaus where I stayed, forest-clearing had become a cottage industry. Truckloads of old tyres were supplied, and with these the peasantry got the fires going. In the event the areas cleared were too small to be economically viable so they were left to become pigmy deserts. Something of the kind was happening to forests everywhere in the world.
Whether the trees were taken out by loggers, or burned down, the wildlife they contained went with them. In a single decade the number of species to become extinct exceeded that known to have been lost in the whole of the preceding century. The loss was compounded by the trade in ivory, and the growth of the market for trophies such as gorillas’ heads. Even worse was the spread of the sport of big-game hunting to all those who could buy a gun in developing or Third World countries. Kenya has become the graveyard of the last of the great elephant herds. ‘Enjoy them while you can,’ said the guide at the sight of a herd. ‘You’ll never see them again.’
You can shoot a blue sheep in Mongolia by license of the USSR government for an all-in cost of about £5,000, and several other countries issue price-lists for the elimination of similar rarities. Nevertheless, it is the protected species that attract the attention of the adventurous sportsman. To shoot a jaguar somewhere in the Amazon will run to at least £10,000. Although protected, brown bears, of which some forty to fifty survive in the mountains of northern Spain, come relatively cheap at about £4,000. The protocol of slaughter demands that the cornered animal should be tied down by stalkers, for despatch by the hunter using a spear. An inordinate fee would be demanded for the opportunity to assassinate a rhinoceros—in part reclaimable by the sale of the horn (for aphrodisiac purposes), at about £2,000.
Twenty thousand or so different tribal peoples made their homes until recently in the wild places of the earth, and they are to go with the trees. Their fate, whether they like it or not, is to constitute a harvest of souls for missionary sects from the American Bible belt, carried now by the thousand in their short take-off and landing planes into every corner of the earth. They are believers in the inevitability of Armageddon, to be followed by the fiery destruction of the world from which only they and their converts will be saved. Nothing, therefore, must be allowed to stand in the way of the fundamentalist salvation, which is to be imposed at all costs, whether the recipients like it or not. The evangelists equate pleasure with sin, and will therefore have none of it. Converts must turn their backs on fun, on traditional ceremonies of any kind, on dancing, on song. They will work and pray, but laughter is to be extinguished.
If you are an amateur of primitive scenes and festivals, hunt them down and enjoy them while you can. Because they, too, like the elephant herds of Kenya, are about to vanish from the earth.
Norman Lewis, 1989
‘T
HEY CHANGE THEIR SKY
, not their soul,’ as Horace said, ‘who run across the sea.’ The sad old Roman truth is not to be refuted. Escape is never more than partial. Nevertheless, at a minor geographical level small, reviving evasions can be planned. This one was to Spain, an unlikely bolthole, it might be supposed, in the era of the package deal; yet far from the Costas in the deep interior rich lodes of undisturbed
hispanidad
remain to be discovered.
In preparing such an evasion simple rules are to be followed. Bring or hire a car, avoid great cities, travel by second- or third-class roads, make for the remoter parts of the south and west which are too far from anywhere to have made it worthwhile setting up industries. Here, where there has been no money to spend on development, the old Spain stubbornly survives. Rare and extraordinary flowers flourish in hedgerows that have never been reached by sprays. Towns built with the proceeds of the plunder of Moorish kingdoms, or of the Indies, remain intact. The best of them offer no accommodation for the traveller except occasionally a government
parador
. By way of a bonus, some of the latter are housed in grand buildings: castles, old convents, Renaissance palaces. It is normal, too, for them to be sited in areas of outstanding historic interest.
Carmona comes under this heading. It is a two days’ drive by the slow roads from Valencia, Alicante or Madrid. When Seville is
en fête
—as this alluring and anachronistic town is during most of the spring and summer—and there is not a bed to be had, Carmona supplies a small-scale and concentrated alternative. It is full of tremendous churches, the scent of incense, and scuttling nuns. Its window grilles, coming right down to the pavement, symbolise the Andalusian exclusion of the world from private affairs, and within the house—since shutters remain closed—the gloom Alexander Dumas noted as characteristic of these southern interiors, persists until lamps are lit or switched on at night.
Apart from palaces and churches, Carmona possesses no fewer than three Moorish fortresses, whose red walls spread a russet light through the streets like the glow beneath chestnuts in autumn leaf. Kestrels by the dozen hang pale and translucent in the sky over church towers that were once minarets, appearing like tiny kites manipulated by invisible strings. The principal fortress is the Alcázar del Rey Don Pedro, favourite abode in his kingdom of Pedro the Cruel. From what is now the
parador
this fearsome monarch—only to be recognised in his disguise by the clicking of his arthritic knees—stole out at night to pick a quarrel with and assassinate any defenceless subject who happened to be abroad. It was here in 1492 while awaiting the fall of Granada that Ferdinand and Isabella sat side by side on their thrones to hand down the ferocious edicts by which the conquered territories were to be governed. This was a bad time to be on the losing side. King Ferdinand the Saint, whose self-imposed penances brought about his own death by dropsy and starvation, converted the Muslim survivors in this town after its conquest. Magnanimous by the standards of his day he spared those who turned promptly to Christ. Where conversion was proved later to have been insincere, backsliders were burned in batches, the king himself frequently applying the torch to the faggots after first implanting the kiss of forgiveness upon the cheeks of those about to suffer.
Zafra is a two-hour drive away up the Estremadura highway to the north. This small, bewitching town is frequently called Little Seville, due, it is supposed, to the settlement there in the past of Sevillians seeking escape from an over-severe religious climate and its all too frequent
auto-da-fés
. Here the refugees built themselves mansions in the style of their home town: white, with baroque embellishments over windows and doors painted with the unique and costly chrome-yellow pigment derived from the soil of Alcala de Guadaïra, a few miles away. This, according to local belief, not only cools the heat of the summer sun and warms the chills of winter, but possesses also talismanic qualities against the spells of witchcraft.
Like Carmona it is a town with a brilliant Andalusian surface and dark, secretive interiors. In true Andalusian style, its people lead frugal lives, are calm and slow in their movements, conduct their business transactions verbally, and settle them without written contract. Dignity is regarded as a principal virtue, and life’s targets are kept simple. As in Seville, ceramic wall plaques are sometimes used to set forth the philosophy of the owner of a house. Several in Carmona enjoin kindness to birds.
Spaniards regard this town’s
alcázar
, in which the
parador
is incorporated, as one of the country’s most imposing, and with this I would agree, although it is smaller than most. It was built in 1443 at a time when, with the strengthening of the central government’s grip, private military enterprises of this kind were becoming obsolete. In effect, this was the town house of a rich nobleman who set out to impress his friends, for, with the front line of the war against the Moors a hundred miles away, it was unlikely ever to be required to withstand enemy attack. Nor with its make-belief Moorish-style decorative battlements, its slender towers, its elegant but not too solid keep, could it easily have done so. An exquisite Renaissance patio in white marble, by the architect responsible for the building of the Escorial was added later, further enhancing the showy domestic atmosphere of the place. It is in this setting that guests are splendidly lodged.
The
parador
is pridefully named after the conqueror of Mexico, Hernando Cortes who stayed some months here at the invitation of his patron, the Duke of Feria, before his departure for the New World. Cortes, understandably, has remained a local as well as national hero, the more so because—as with the rest of the conquistadors—he was an Estremaduran man and, like most of them, of obscure and humble origin. The picture of him to be seen here presents an imperial figure indeed. As was the custom at that time, he had been given the great man’s face of the day, based upon that of the Emperor Charles V, though modified by some slight tinkering with the features, and in particular by the correction of the pendulous Hapsburg lip. There is a mystery here, for in 1947 the Mexicans announced that the conqueror’s remains had been exhumed in Mexico City. What had been found was described as the skeleton of a hump-backed dwarf, with a right arm withered into uselessness through syphilitic infection. Such are the deceits concealed in history.
From this point on, the road leads northwards through Merida and Trujillo and then to the east into the centre of Spain. In doing so it skirts an area of roughly 25,000 square kilometres where hardly any changes have been made to the map for half a century. George Borrow, prospecting for souls in the back-lands, where he thought the ‘Genuine Spaniard’ was most likely to be found, came here to distribute his bibles on his ‘sorry mule, covered with sores, and wall-eyed’. He would have no difficulty in recognising these villages as they are now, for, notwithstanding the prosperity based upon the tourist industry of Spain’s eastern seaboard, and of cities such as Barcelona and Madrid, Estremadura remains isolated and impoverished, suffering moreover from the draining away of its human life’s blood through emigration to France and to the Spanish towns.