Spain (4 page)

It is not offensive, this kind of chauvinism, only assertive—and
sometimes sad. Older Spaniards are often pathetically ignorant of the world outside, and its intrusion can pitiably shake their equanimity. Even the most gaily soigné of citizens, if you plump him in a salon full of foreigners, often looks strangely self-conscious and ill-at-ease, like a man in a dress shop, and it is astonishing how few Spaniards even in Madrid, the capital, speak a single word of any language but their own. The feeblest cooking in Europe is the Spanish, when it swops its fine old stews, crabs and partridges for some dismal approximation of the French cuisine. As for the cities of Spain, they only begin to feel provincial when they abandon their ancient isolated hauteur, and try for cosmopolitanism.

Spain is always conscious of her own symbolisms, and rightly so. ‘Spain
hurts
me', cried the essayist Miguel de Unamuno fifty years ago. ‘When I speak of Spain,' wrote the poet Antonio Machado in the thirties, ‘I speak of Man.' Time and again Spain has been a cockpit, where the conflicts of the world have had their first round, and sometimes even their last. It was by the Treaty of Tordesillas, still a very grand little Castilian town, that the Borgia Pope Alexander VI partitioned the New World between Spain and Portugal—‘All Lands Discovered or Hereafter to Be Discovered in the West, towards the Indies or the Ocean Seas'. It was the Synod held at Elvira, near Granada, some time in the fourth century that first decreed the celibacy of the Catholic priesthood. The Reconquest, that protracted struggle of Christian against Muslim, represented for all Europe a struggle between good and evil, and knights from many countries came to fight in it: Sir James Douglas was killed in one of its campaigns, shouting ‘A Douglas! A Douglas!' as he charged the Moors, and wearing the heart of The Bruce in a small casket around his neck. The Inquisition, as it developed in Spain under Isabel and Ferdinand, set a pattern of intolerance for the world, and is still remembered today, we may fancy, wherever there is a dank cell or a torture chamber. The War of the Spanish Succession changed the face of Europe. The Peninsular War took Wellington to Waterloo. The Spanish Civil War, when the Nazis obliterated Guernica and the Russians set up their secret police headquarters in Alcalá de
Henares, not half a mile from Cervantes, birthplace—that nightmare was a preview or rehearsal of the world war that was to follow, and so bemused the impotent Powers of the West that Anthony Eden nicknamed it the War of the Spanish Obsession.

Spain does have a microcosmic quality, and this sometimes makes her people feel a kind of chosen race. Many Spaniards have Jewish blood in them, and Spain possesses some of the doomed, self-centred, inspirational quality of Jewry—a feeling not merely of isolation, but of vocation. It is not, however, anything divine. It is only the land, the wind, the sun, and the history. The master illusion of Spain is the conviction that the Spaniards are a people different, when they are only a people separate—that
alma
has made them so, when it is only geopolitics. Spanishness is as much a response as an impulse, and Spain is so Spanish because until now she has known little else: because long ago she turned her back upon the rest of us, and thus prolonged not only many archaic miseries, but also many grandeurs and beauties of the human spirit. She made her own bed, in the brief years of her Golden Age, and she still tosses and turns in it.

Sancho thought it was an island because his master had always promised him one, and Spain too has long been an Isle Barataria: an island that is not an island, an island across the railway line, that thinks itself alone among the waters because Don Quixote says so.

East from Saragossa, near the road to Barcelona, stands the strange mountain of Montserrat, a pile of queerly serrated jags, bumps, and crevices which was hacked into shape by the golden axes of angels. It is one of the oddest of Spain's celebrated sights, so bizarre but refulgent in its outline in the sunlight, and it naturally possesses all kinds of meanings. For some it is the jolliest of afternoon outings, with its high mountain meadows to scatter wastepaper on, its several funiculars and its fragrance of pines. For many more it is the shrine of the Black Virgin of Montserrat, found miraculously in a cave up there, and now the centre of one of Spain's best-loved and liveliest cults.

But for others it represents chiefly the diversity of Spain, the centrifugal nature of this State: for Montserrat is the focus or emblem of Catalonia, one of several nations long since embedded in the side of Spain, but still recognizably masters of their own character. Montserrat could only be in Catalonia, the most endlessly
energetic and ingenious of these old entities. It could exist nowhere else in Spain. It is a very holy place, but if you spend a night in its monastery hotel you will find that it is far from the sepulchral otherworldliness of the Escorial. On the contrary, it proliferates with earthy life. The pilgrims process energetically around the courtyard with their candles, singing the sweet hymn of Montserrat and led by jolly bearded friars. The eighty-four Benedictine monks of the establishment cross themselves in vigorous unison in the Basilica. The funiculars burst with trippers. The young people up from Barcelona dance the
sardana
, a faunlike capering of Catalonia, in prancing circles outside the post office. Tourists happily meander through the souvenir shops, priests stroll in smiling pairs along the mountain paths, and often through the doors of the shrine comes the sickly music of the Montserrat choirboys, who have been singing in this particular way, in this particular place, for at least seven centuries. Montserrat has a bounce and a gusto that is all Catalan. It is unmistakably Spain, but Spain, the Catalans would say, plus. If you look at the table of pamphlets in the porch of the Basilica, you will find that one pile is in Castilian Spanish, but the other in the Catalan tongue.

Seven arrows in a yoke formed the crest of Isabel and Ferdinand, representing not only their own union in marriage, but also the union of Spain. Unity is an obsession in this country, if only because it is so precarious, and centralism
versus
federation is one of the perennial Spanish issues. To the Romans Spain was always plural, and even when the separate Spanish principalities were united, the Castilian monarchs still carefully called themselves
Los Reyes de las Españas
—Kings of the Spains. The old entities—León or Navarre, Asturias, Galicia, Aragón, or Catalonia—maintained their autonomy for centuries. They had their own parliaments, armics, civil services, and exchequers, and their legal systems were so trenchantly independent that to this day the
fueros
or public privileges of Aragón form an appendix to the Spanish civil code.

Inevitably the dangers of separatism have preoccupied the rulers of Spain. King Ramiro II of Aragón, faced with a rebellion among
his subject lords, invited them all to Huesca to show them, he said, a wonderful new bell whose sound would be heard all over the country: when they got there, he decapitated them all and, placing fifteen heads in a circle to represent the bell rim, hung the sixteenth from a string to be the clapper. Isabel and Ferdinand, after the fall of Granada, firmly suppressed the power of the great nobles; and just to make sure that Aragón and Catalonia did not become economic masters of the kingdom, a codicil to Isabel's will decreed that no citizen of those two regions was to conduct any commerce in the New World. Since then successive rulers have tried to concentrate all power in Castile, the heartland of Spain—from Philip II, who made Madrid the capital, to General Franco, a Galician himself but a stern proponent of central government.

They never quite succeeded. The old kingdoms are still remembered in the modern regional groupings of Spain—Galicia, León, Asturias, Old and New Castile, Navarre, Aragón, Catalonia, Estremadura, Murcia, and Andalusia; and in the provinces of the north, in particular, the yoke that binds the arrows always chafed. Guernica, that symbolically tragic little town in Vizcaya, demonstrates how mystically potent these old prides can be. It is a very small place, encouched in a green valley among the hills, but for at least a thousand years it has been the holy city of the Spanish Basques. The bomb-aimers of the German Condor Legion did their best to destroy it for Franco in the Civil War, but even now it still feels like the capital of some separate, secret State. The Basques are the queerest and staunchest of the Spanish minorities, a people that seem to have no relatives, and may be the last remnant of the original Iberians. Their language is so complex that a verb, for example, incorporates in its one word not only the pronoun but also the complement, so that each transitive has twenty-four variations—‘he gives to you' is one word, and ‘she gave to us' is another. Their Catholicism is so dour and stolid as to be almost Calvinist in flavour. Their architecture is all blacks and whites and patterned walls. Their churches look like airship hangars, they invented the art of whaling, and their national game,
pelota
, is the fastest of all ball games.

The racial pride of this mysterious people has always revolved around the sacred oak of Guernica, beneath whose branches the laws of the Basques were promulgated and the Kings of Spain swore to respect their privileges. You may see it there still, and marvellously suggestive it remains of ancient right and loyalties. The bombing miraculously spared this part of the town, and the oak still stands in the shadow of the old Assembly House. You will find it beneath a little cupola in the garden, a stunted, shrivelled old thing, less like a tree than a kind of totem: and as you peer at it through the iron railings, with a stocky Basque gardener, perhaps, keeping an eye on you from inside, or a pair of housewives gossiping in incomprehensible polysyllables behind your back—as you look at this rather uncanny old relic you may feel how forceful are the emotions that it inspired in the past, emotions that lie beneath the tragedy of Picasso's famous picture, and are still a thread in the texture of Spain.

These northern peoples have always felt themselves stifled or exploited by the Castilian centre of Spain. They feel that they provide an unfair proportion of the State's brawn and brainpower—that they are more advanced than Castile, more enlightened, more European. Most of the nation's industry is in Catalonia, Asturias, and the Basque country, and much of Spain's contemporary intellectual ferment is occurring among the Catalans. The only properly modern big cities in Spain—cities, that is to say, comparable to the metropoles of the industrial West—are Barcelona and Bilbao: the one a rip-roaring, furious, and sometimes dangerous Mediterranean seaport, the other an exceedingly well-ordered sort of Hamburg. Driving into Barcelona from Valencia or Saragossa is like passing into a different civilization: the road sweeps into town through smoky plants and resplendent glasshouses, there are great buildings all about you, and pompous Parisian boulevards, a port full of foreign ships, an overhead railway lurching across the harbour, noise indescribable, pressure intense, a passionate, avaricious, tireless feeling in the air—and all the way along the approach road, like the frenzied motels that guide you into an American city, straggles a parade of garish camping-sites, evidence of the truth that Barcelona is always
looking outwards, northwards, over the frontier, to where the new things come from.

No wonder the centrifugal instincts of the Basques and Catalans have proved irrepressible. Before the Civil War both provinces had their own autonomous governments, Catalonia actually constituting a separate republic within the Spanish State. Franco suppressed them, but failed to destroy the old patriotisms that lay behind. Throughout his rule the Basques maintained their own Government in exile in France, and the moment he died both they and the Catalans demanded the restoration of their old rights, sometimes constitutionally, sometimes in violence.

The other regions, too, began to chafe at the centralism of Spain, and demanded some degree of independence—even the Canary Islands had their nationalists—and the new Spanish democracy pledged itself almost from the start to devolution of one sort or another. For the Basque and the Catalan extremists of course, nothing but absolute separatism will suffice. More probably Spain, so long obsessed with the unity of authority, will loosen itself one day into a federal State, recognizing rather than repressing the separate styles of its several ancient entities; and perhaps in the end this re-distribution of power will prove to be the most distinctively Spanish contribution to the progress of the nation-states.

Spanish loyalties are subdivided, too, for Spain is not merely a regional country, but a passionately local one as well. To many Spaniards, patriotism goes no farther than the village, and Spain in the abstract is only a tax-collector or a sergeant-major. The Spanish language varies not only from province to province, but actually from village to village, and so self-contained is the village entity that in the Napoleonic Wars the Mayor of Móstoles, a hamlet near Madrid, personally declared war on France. The strength of the dominant Castilian culture clothes this country in a common patina, but beneath the yoke and the arrows it is a place of astonishing diversity.

Spain, the microcosm, is always evoking somewhere else, partly because Spain has set her seal upon so much of the world, partly
because of her own immense variety. She is the kingdom of exceptions, where every generalization must be qualified, and every judgement half reserved. What is true of part of her is seldom true of another. What seems to be a national characteristic turns out to be only a village custom. When the fruit is falling in the south, the blossom is budding in the north. There are hardly any mules in the Basque country, but hundreds of thousands in Andalusia. There are hardly any bull-rings in the north-west, but every southern village has one. In Andalusia the houses are blazing white and red-tiled, in Aragón they are mud-brown and flecked with bits of straw. In Asturias they build their grain stores with tiled eaves and stilts, to keep the rain and the rats out. The Basque policemen wear red berets, the men of La Mancha wear headscarves and ride about in covered wagons like Western pioneers. The churches of Valencia have blue tiled domes, the fences of Galicia are made of upright stone blocks, every part of Spain has its own traditional costume, pictured in flurries of ruffles and pleated petticoats in all the best tourist brochures.

In the Levante live the people of the lagoons, rice growers and eel fishers; in Asturias the miners look like Glamorgan men in clogs; in Andalusia rich gypsies inhabit caves with two stories and refrigerators. In Catalonia you are almost a Provençal, honouring the familiar values of southern Europe; in Andalusia you are a kind of African, smouldering with gypsy blood and freely relieving yourself, if twelve years old or under, on the front door step of your own house. The people of La Alberca, a famous tourist village near Ciudad Rodrigo, are said to be Swabians, and sit in their narrow cobbled lanes looking pinched and secretive, as though they are expecting dark news from Bavaria. The people of the moorlands near Astorga are Maragatos, a stocky race of muleteers, whose origins are unknown and whose thirty-six hamlets, strung out drearily across the flatlands, look like railway villages along some abandoned English branch line.

This is still a country of local specialities: wines vary widely from town to town, and so do foods. In San Sebastian they make small pastries designed to look like ham and eggs. In Toledo they make marzipan. Oviedo is famous for its stews, richly compounded
of vegetable broth and black pudding, and Vigo for its cel-pies. Segovia is the place for suckling pigs, their forlorn little carcases spread-eagled pink and spongy in the restaurant windows. Seville is the home of
gazpacho
, a delicious cold soup of cucumber, tomato, and miscellaneous garnishings. In Estremadura they feed their pigs on snake-flesh to improve the quality of the ham. In Aranjuez, near Madrid, they will offer you the best strawberries in Europe, served with a little orange juice and ripe in early March. Only in Catalonia can you eat a proper
zarzuela
, a gargantuan fish soup; in only one Spanish town—Soria—have I ever been given fresh-water crayfish. Uniformity has not yet fallen upon Spain, and towns often retain a sense of guild: this one makes paper, this one lace, this one swords, this one cars, this one wooden figures of Don Quixote, and the little town of Jijona, near Alicante, makes nothing else but nougat. ‘Local in everything' is how Richard Ford described the Spaniard a century ago; and though his horizons have clearly widened since then, parochial loyalties can still be so fierce that more than once the pious devotees of one village Virgin have crept out at night and destroyed the sacred image of the Virgin down the road.