Tomb in Seville (2 page)

As the day wore on the excitement and despair of the early hours were replaced by a growing lethargy as the public became acclimatised to a crisis that had never been explained. But what exactly was a State of Alarm, and why had one been declared? These were the questions the citizens of San Sebastián now demanded more insistently be answered, as indeed did I. Choosing a quiet spot in the gardens along the sea-front Eugene was ready with an explanation.

‘Spain is on the verge of a civil war,’ he said. ‘I had a quiet chat with the manager while you were having your camera fixed, and he told me that the miners in Asturias have started a revolt.’

‘And that’s the State of Alarm?’

‘No, that’s only part of the thing. Listen, I should have told you before but I’ve been putting it off. I’ve joined the Communist Party, and apart from Ernesto’s ridiculous pilgrimage idea, that’s the reason I’m here.’

‘You could have told me,’ I said.

‘Of course I should have. I kept putting it off.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t know how you’d take it.’

‘It’s a pity you didn’t. We’ve known each other long enough for me not to give a damn what party you join. Anyway communism is only one of the modern religions. Trouble is, I’m not a believer.’

There was a moment of silence. ‘But listen,’ I said. ‘Do you really believe this country’s going to go Red?’

‘I’m certain of it.’

‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘The Spanish are individualists to a man. You’ll not catch them turning into a bunch of fanatics,’ I assured him. ‘I know them too well, and you should too.’

‘Anyway we’ll soon see,’ Eugene said.

Where did he pick up this bout of fanaticism, I asked myself, particularly with a father like Ernesto who had assured him in my presence that no Sicilian believed in anything?

‘So when’s it going to start?’ I asked. ‘The real thing. When is the man on the street—who’s the one who really counts—going to throw out his chest and tell you he’s a member of the party of Lenin?’

‘Very soon,’ Eugene assured me. ‘A month—two months at most. You and I are going to be present at one of the great moments in history. I can’t tell you how lucky we are to find ourselves here, waiting for the curtain to go up.’

‘And where and when will that happen?’

‘In Madrid, and probably today. By the way, the manager let it slip that the Asturian miners in Oviedo are already out fighting in the streets.’

‘That’s a couple of hundred miles away up in the north. Our problem now is how do we get to Madrid?’

‘Well, naturally from here, or anywhere else, as soon as the trains start running again. The hotel people have been through all this before, and they say a week or two at most.’

‘Just imagine another couple of weeks stuck in this place,’ I said.

The fact was that neither Eugene nor I had any idea of what manipulations the Spanish politicians and the military were conducting behind the scenes. The present situation, in which an official State of Alarm could impose near-paralysis upon the public, had largely arisen through brusque and unexpected changes of direction in the corridors of power. From 1923 to 1930 Spain had suffered under the almost medieval dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. When he fell there had been a political swing to the opposite extreme and the Second Republic was established, practising liberalism in an extreme form. For the first time women were given the vote. Little could the legislators of the day have imagined that far from pressing for more liberal reforms, women would instead come to the aid of the powers of reaction. This, however, they did, and a new feminine alliance was formed to clear Spain of politicians with liberal ideas. It was from this climate, with women close to political control, that such measures as the State of Alarm were frequently in use, and battles, as we were to discover, could be fought even on the streets of Madrid.

T
HE HOTEL MANAGER, ENRICO
, seemed to have taken a liking to us, and with time on his hands, due to the State of Alarm emptying three-quarters of his rooms, he was happy to conduct us round the formal gardens known as La Concha. These were normally out of bounds to members of the male sex for several hours during the day. This, he explained, was to protect the privacy of several hundred wet nurses who, with their charges held to their bosoms, took over the more secluded areas of the park in the early afternoon. Enrico timed the operation like a military manoeuvre, enabling us to slip in and out of the cover of the hedges and remain uninvolved. Screened as we were among the leaves, not an eye appeared to have been raised in our direction as rows of mammae on all sides were unslung and then, with drill-like precision, duly put away.

The wet nurses were followed at a discreet distance by a horde of young children with their attendant servants. The servants, Enrico told us, were all Basques, tall and muscular young fellows, dressed, in order not to be confused with visitors, in uniforms displaying fashions of the last century. These included pigtails tied with immense bows and shirts with leg o’mutton sleeves. When on rare occasions—usually by mistake—ordinary visitors happened to wander into these secluded areas at this busy hour, these servants were trained to greet them with welcoming smiles and low bows.

Enrico had invented a new attraction for the town’s visitors. He employed pigtail-wearing servants from La Concha, dressed in their nineteenth-century livery as before, but also carrying lanterns, to accompany hotel guests on sight-seeing tours of the town by night. It was a project, however, that lost business and had to be abandoned.

I cornered Enrico again. ‘Can you think of any way out of here? Even if we could get only a few miles along the road to Seville it would be something.’

‘But you’d never do it,’ he said. ‘The only place you might be able to get to from here is Pamplona.’

‘It’s in the wrong direction,’ I pointed out.

‘It’s in the
only
direction. You wouldn’t get a mile along the Seville highway. Pamplona’s on a side road.’

‘But why Pamplona? What’s it got to offer?’

‘Its insignificance. It’s the old Spain. Something out of the past. Nobody bothers about the place. They won’t even notice you’re there. Be polite to the old people and buy the kids a few sweets. The place is run by a sergeant in the Civil Guard. He’s fifty-eight and gets all the sleep he can. In Pamplona they still bury people standing upright. About twenty or thirty families live in caves.’

‘How does going to Pamplona help us get to Seville?’ I wanted to know.

‘Well at the moment it doesn’t,’ Enrico said, ‘but it’s the sort of place where it’s easy to make yourself liked, which means that if they can do anything for you they will. And that includes finding some way of getting to Seville.’

‘Doesn’t the State of Alarm bother them?’

‘No way of knowing, but if it does I’d guess the pressure is a lot less than in San Sebastián.’

A van with an official pass stuck on the windscreen was delivering meat to Pamplona that afternoon. ‘So why not take a chance?’ Enrico suggested. ‘You’ve nothing to lose. The police have got plenty to keep them occupied just now without bothering about you.’ The van was parked in a street at the back of the hotel and the driver looked in the other direction while we pulled up the flap at the back and clambered in.

The road took us through pleasantly mountainous countryside dotted with wooden houses, half extinguished, in the Tyrolean fashion, by their eaves. Beauty was once again under the protection of poverty. There was no money about, the driver said, as we bumped along round the holes as deep as baths that kept the tourists away. An eagle, tearing at some small carcass, waited until we were within fifteen yards before spreading its wings to take to the air. Where there are eagles, the driver said, men go short of bread.

Behind this desolate beauty the outline of Pamplona raised itself cautiously from among low hills and I was at first delighted by the town’s mouldering ramparts but then almost immediately discouraged as an area of industrial development came into sight. What do they produce in the heart of this amphitheatre of nature, I asked, and the reply was bathroom fittings and sanitary appliances. While old Pamplona guarded its silences, the new town uttered a muffled roar of profitable activity. Understandably there were no tourists in sight, for Pamplona, we were to learn, possessed just one hotel. The Montaña charged eight pesetas fifty centimos a day—the equivalent of six shillings and nine pence for full board, and naturally enough, said the manageress, wine was included with both meals.

We were already well aware of the fact that such cheap Spanish hotels, however little they charged, always did their best to give a lot for the money. Thus, instead of concentrating on simple two-course meals based on wholesome materials, they insisted on performing feats of camouflage with what was left over and bought at auctions in the markets at the end of the day’s business, and in serving it up in four or five often abominable courses.

The Montaña offered the finest example of this competitive policy in action that one could hope to find; both ingenuity and imagination were employed in the processes of substitution and falsification of what was on offer. The tang of corruption was suppressed as far as possible by wholesale use of garlic. All cooking was done in the cheapest of rancid oil promoting odours that wandered through the building for an hour or so before and after each mealtime. This was to remind me that one of the charges on the indictment drawn up by the Inquisition leading to the expulsion of the Spanish Jews was that (to the offence of Christian nostrils) they cooked in oil.

Falsifications generally employed in such low-cost establishments were common throughout Spain in those days. It seemed extraordinary that the counterfeiters of food went to the lengths they did. There were even occasions in restaurants when we were confronted with such wild impostures as a fish described as a salmon but possessing the three-cornered spine of a conger eel or a small shark.

Among the small surprises of the Montaña Hotel was the news that its manageress was an ardent communist who organised the many political rallies taking place in the central square. Her husband, a mason, was employed at five pesetas (three shillings) a day on the building of a giant seminary just outside the town. He supplemented his wages, she told us with some pride, by producing busts of Lenin which commanded a good sale as household ornaments, replacing the biblical figures of old among the working class.

Eugene produced his membership card and we were invited to a cell meeting at which the prospects for the success of the coming revolution were discussed. At this time the armed revolt by Asturian miners was in full swing, with even such government newspapers as the
ABC
reporting with misgivings the slaughter produced by the shock troops employed to quell the revolt. Pamplona’s communists had gone to the trouble of bringing down a miner to talk to them—a near dwarf whose ancestors had worked underground for generations. He convinced them with splendid oratory that the victory of socialism was at hand. Next day we were to discover that government censorship had suppressed all news from the north on the eve of a final battle in which tanks were in action against strikers armed with pickaxes, and a victory, never in doubt, was proclaimed.

Our State of Alarm problem refused to go away. In Pamplona we faced increasing difficulties through the frequent changes in and misunderstandings of the regulations applied to travel. All public transport in the Pamplona area remained at a standstill, in addition to which there were differences of opinion as to whether it was permissible or even safe to use private cars. This led to a delay in the supply of provisions to the towns, long queues at the food stores, and even their temporary closure.

Then news filtered through that although at first depressing, seemed to Eugene on second thoughts to offer a glimmer of hope. We were assured by one of the communists who had connections in Zaragoza that the only train in service in the country at that time was based in that town, and that it connected solely with Madrid. The capital was not quite halfway to Seville, but even to get so far as this on our journey offered hope of escape from our present frustrations. But how were we to reach Zaragoza? Such was the effectiveness of the State of Alarm in the Pamplona area it appeared that the last private cars had disappeared from the road.

One of the comrades suggested that we should simply walk there, the distance being a matter of about a hundred and ten miles and—as they assured us—it was a journey that had been done many times in the past. It was a solution, we decided, at least to be contemplated, and with the possibility, we hoped, of toughening ourselves we undertook what for us at that stage were several fairly strenuous lung-expanding walks into the surrounding countryside.

Finally, assuring ourselves that we had nothing to lose, we took the plunge. In a way we were unlucky due to the fact that after a long and exceptionally dry summer the rains had now started and the unsurfaced road to which we had committed ourselves, in a mistaken hope of shortening the distances involved, was soon to be deep in puddles. Fortunately the rain stopped, although it was to start again in a few hours, and we were able to take refuge and dry ourselves in the first of the few cafés to be encountered in the course of the journey. A remarkable feature of this small village, and several others to follow, was its possession of a church large enough for a medium-sized town, but even more singular was that its main tower appeared to serve as a lookout post over the surrounding countryside. It also had a small bell-tower for the transmission of simple messages. Thus, when after a few minutes we continued our walk, the bells were rung, and this peal appeared to have been answered by bell-ringing in the tower of the next church some three miles along the road. It was a method of communication to be followed from village to village the next day.

Happily, with the first two settlements behind us, and a sudden change in the weather, the rich gilding of summer returned to the Navarran landscape. It was Navarra that first confronted us with the splendour, the magnitude and even the mystery of these Spanish landscapes, which for many miles into the countryside round Pamplona offered the charm and the delicacy of a Chinese painting on silk. We moved across boundless plains of billowing rock purged of all colour by the sun. Distant clumps of poplar seemed to have been drawn up into the base of the sky in an atmosphere of mirage and mist. Behind the mountains ahead luminous and symmetrical clouds were poised without shift of position as we trudged towards them for hours on end. At our approach an anomalous yellow bloom shook itself from a single tree, transformed into a flock of green singing finches. Lizards, basking in the dust, came suddenly to life and streaked away into the undergrowth.