View of the World (27 page)

The situation was a difficult one because, as Mr Depue explained, in all the years he had spent as a missionary, he had never heard of a single instance of an Indian punishing a child, which was to say that the conception of corrective chastisement seemed to be beyond their grasp. Mr Depue spoke of this aversion to punishment as of some genetic defect inherited by the whole race. It had now come to be a trial of strength, and he could only hope that the deadlock would soon be resolved. He took up an ‘it-hurts-me-as-much-as-it-hurts-them’ attitude, assuring us that he had decided to share the general discomfort by ordering the water supply to the mission house to be cut off as well. It occurred to us that he might have prudently arranged for a reserve, because we happened to arrive when the missionary and his family were at lunch, and both water and soft drinks appeared to be in reasonable supply.

Mr Depue happened to have read the newspaper’s account of Cañe’s misfortunes, and remembered that he himself had ‘brought him in’, during a pacification drive in the Chaco. Three or four youngsters,
including Cañe, had become separated in the panic from their tribe. ‘I kept out of sight and sent Ayoreo-speaking Indians to offer them a better life, and to persuade them to come in, and they did.’

It was by chance on our way back from this expedition that we saw our first
criada
– a Chiquitano Indian girl who had been ‘adopted’ by a white family, and happened to serve us in her foster-parents’ bar. The
criada
system is far from being exclusively Bolivian, and exists under different names in backward rural areas in most Latin American countries where there are groups of depressed and exploited Indians.

In the hope that they will receive some education, and an economically brighter future, Indians give their children away to white families. The little Indian – usually a girl – becomes a Cinderella no prince will ever discover. She will be put to unpaid drudgery from the age of four or five, be traditionally available for the sexual needs of the sons of the family, and will not be able to marry, although she will be allowed to have children, who in their turn will become
criadas
.

Our German friends knew this girl well, but having lived for some years in Bolivia, and become accustomed to its institutions, they were not horrified, as we were, that such barely disguised forms of slavery could exist.

A
criada
, they informed us, could be lent or given away. They had no rights of any kind: rural untouchables of Latin America, whose existence went unnoticed. There was no saying how many there were in Bolivia, they said. In some parts of the eastern provinces almost every farm kept one.

Santa Cruz is a boom town, a little dizzy with quick profits, and displaying its wealth as best it can. It has a new Holiday Inn, full of American oilmen in baseball caps, and possesses no fewer than four ring-roads. Among its leading citizens are Germans, the most successful and affluent of the foreigners in Bolivia. There are about 300,000 of them, and it is said that President Banzer, who is a descendant of one of the older German families, came to power through a military coup financed by the German colony.

The powerful Dr Strauss, in control of immigration, comes of German forebears, and Teutonic surnames are scattered liberally through the lists of directors of the country’s leading enterprises. Near Abapó Izozóg, immediately adjoining the nominally empty area (save for a few thousand Indians) that Dr Strauss proposes to people with Rhodesians, South-West-African whites of German descent and refugees from South Africa, the Germans occupy a colony about the size of Holland. They have founded other vast colonies at Asención de Guarayos in the centre of the country, and at Rurrenaháque, in the north, and they have sunk fortunes into building roads and costly irrigation schemes.

A high percentage of German immigrants arriving since the war had remained loyal to Nazi political philosophy, and recently neo-Nazi groups had also emerged. The Bolivian government appears indifferent to this phenomenon, and has pushed its neutrality to the lengths of resisting the extradition of at least one war criminal. Neo-Nazi journals imported from Germany, and such militaristic publications as
Soldaten-Zeitung
, find avid readers.

Our own brief experience of martial nostalgia was to be warned at our hotel of an impending dinner for some 300 Germans, to raise funds for the German school (the best in Eastern Bolivia). With some
embarrassment
it was hinted that many of the guests were ex, or actual, Nazis and that we might find some of their old wartime drinking songs offensive. We listened to the clamour but kept out of the way. Most extraordinary of all, to us, was to be assured that German Jews in Bolivia had sunk their differences with their old Aryan persecutors, and now fraternised at such gatherings, joining to chorus the ‘Horst Wessel’ along with the rest.

Our final conclusion was that Dr Strauss’s justification for the plan to bring in whites from the South African countries – i.e. economic necessity – was not quite the whole story. Bolivia is potentially one of the richest of South American countries, since apart from other largely untapped timber resources in the east, aerial surveys have indicated that the Amazon Basin it shares with Brazil contains one of the most valuable and diverse mineral profiles in the world. It is also among the
weakest of these countries, with a population of five millions, many of whom are illiterate and subjugated Indians, contributing little to the country’s muscle. With these human resources it must be ready to defend the thousand miles of frontier it also shares with Brazil, which has 110 millions.

At the moment, Brazil is fully engaged in gobbling up its own resources, but it can be imagined that sooner or later it might turn its eyes westwards with renewed appetite and in a mood for expansion. Brazilian roads have either been built or resurfaced by Army engineers to take the heaviest tanks. One such road points to the heart of Bolivia through Corumbá, after which, crossing the frontier, it dwindles to dirt. Also, through foreclosures, Brazilian banks already own much land along Bolivia’s eastern borders.

Almost imperceptibly, Bolivia has been a country bleeding to death. In a series of wars fought and lost over the past century it has seen its territory whittled away by victorious neighbours: first the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert and the port of Antofagasta to Chile; then the Acre Territory to Brazil; then three-quarters of the Chaco to Paraguay. Always these losses have been the result of its failure to fill ‘empty’ spaces occupied by the Indians, who do not count.

Seeing into the future with Dr Strauss’s eyes one might be tempted to agree with him that, from his viewpoint, and that of the Bolivian government, the problem of filling this territorial vacuum is urgent. Strauss has to have his immigrants, and sooner or later he will probably get them, as the intransigence of the South African whites stokes up fuel for the fire tomorrow.

Together with the powerful German-Dutch minority already in place, these newcomers could transform Bolivia into a strong,
white-dominated
, ultra-right, anti-Communist state in the heart of Latin America. This vigorous transformation would discourage the future covetousness of neighbouring states, and it would delight the United States by laying forever the ghost of Che Guevara – himself once attracted to empty spaces in Bolivia.

T
HERE ARE FEW HOTEL BEDS
to be had in Seville when it acclaims the Spring in its inimitable fashion. I found a place to stay out of town, dumped my baggage, and travelled in by taxi. At the San Telmo bridge over the Guadalquivir we ran into snarled-up traffic dominated by a woman policeman with a dark, ecstatic face. She ran, leaped and cavorted, unmeshing and directing the crawl of cars with competence and with artistry, and the drivers wound down their windows to shout their applause. ‘That’s a gypsy,’ the taxi driver said. ‘She used to dance at the Arenal. If we pull over and wait till the traffic clears, she’ll do a seguidilla for us.’ But the policewoman snapped her fingers at us and threw back her head, and we joined the queue on the bridge. There was another jam on the further side and the driver had a suggestion. We turned left into the wide and relatively quiet Avenida Colon that follows the river, then stopped and he pointed to a narrow street entrance across the road. ‘Why don’t you do the rest on foot?’ he asked. ‘The centre’s only a couple of hundred yards up there.’

I walked up the Calle Dos de Mayo, as directed, a calm and almost countryfied street of white walls, and windows draped in sumptuous folds of baroque plaster, picked out in sober yellow. Orange blossom bespattered the cobbles, and there was a champagne sparkle of May in the air. A victoria of the most fragile elegance – a ‘milord’ of the kind introduced by Edward VII – passed with a clip-clop of hooves and a soft rumble of wheels. Blind white cubist shapes were piled round a Moorish battlement at the end of the street, and above and beyond, the Giralda Tower, once the greatest of all the minarets of Islam, possessed the sky. A
wall panel in ceramic tiles showed the Calle Dos de Mayo as it was nearly a century ago, and there has been little change. The panel was put up by a soap-maker and it is one of the many magnificent advertisements for such things as the first Kodaks, for gramophones with horns, cough mixtures, mustard plasters, and forgotten motor cars that decorate the city’s walls. All the products promoted in this charming fashion have one thing in common: they no longer exist.

At the end of this short cut to the centre, I was confronted with the grey, fortress shape of the Cathedral. ‘Let us build a church so big that we shall be held to be insane,’ a member of the Chapter urged as soon as the great mosque had been levelled and the building of the Cathedral began. The Emperor Charles V, most human of the Spanish monarchs, who gardened and kept parrots in his modest quarters in the Alcazar nearby, would not have approved; but he was too late upon the scene, although in time to abort a similar operation on the Mosque at Cordoba. ‘You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere,’ he said, ‘but you have destroyed what was unique in the World.’

The Cathedral of Seville is vast, high and very dark, with visitors wandering a little apprehensively in the gothic twilight, like travellers lost in a foreign railway station. Light invests the gloom from a side-chapel in which a Madonna with the tear-streaked face of an unhappy
fourteen-year
-old girl broods over piled-up church treasure. A thousand candles flicker and the great organ crashes and booms.

I had hoped to see the tomb of Pedro the Cruel, but it turned out that this, which is in the crypt, could be visited only on one day in the year. Of the doings of this monarch, identifiable to his trembling subjects, as he stalked the streets at night, by his creaking knee joints, a single episode illustrates the utter foreignness of the medieval mind. When rejected by a celebrated beauty, Señora Urraca Osorio, the King had her burned to death. Having studied his record, this does not surprise us. What does – what remains beyond the compass of our mentality – is that the one thing that seems to have been of importance on this occasion was that Señora’s modesty should not have been placed in jeopardy, and that to prevent
this possibility her maid leaped into the flames so as to screen her mistress from any such exposure.

Pedro is supremely the ‘bad’ king of Spanish history. St Ferdinand, conqueror of Seville from the Moors, whose ‘incorruptible’ body lies in a silver casket in the Cathedral’s Capilla-Real, the one who meant well. The saint, a rigorous pietist who died eventually through excessive fasting, was the scourge of heretics, setting his people an example of righteous severity in one instance by lighting in person the pyre on which an assortment of dissenters of one kind or another were to be incinerated. ‘His Majesty wore a rough gown tied by a rope, and carried a large cross. He ordered all those who had come to the place to kneel and pray, and imposed upon them a penance. Before taking the torch from the hand of the executioner he kissed the cheek of each of those who were about to suffer.’

The Cathedral expresses conquest and domination in architectural terms of sheer mass, and it comes as a surprise to learn that it is not the largest building in Seville, being second to the nearby tobacco factory, now the University, in itself only exceeded in size by the Escorial. It was here that Don José had his first encounter with Carmen. Five thousand girls were employed to make cigars, and the Victorian British visitor found sexual release at the sight of a girl rolling a cigar on her thigh, which she could be persuaded to do for a payment of ten centavos, equivalent of a penny. Murray, of the celebrated guidebook, viewed the scene with both unction and disapproval, although he clearly found it hard to tear himself away. He found the girls handsome but smelly, and ‘reputed to be more impertinent than chaste.’

My visit to Seville in the Spring of this year [1984] had followed one in the autumn of 1981, and I was delighted and relieved to discover the town transformed by change and renewal. In 1981 it had seemed dirty,
depressed
and anarchistic, a prey still to moral confusion and lack of guidance following the disappearance of the dictatorship. Sevillians had shown themselves at a loss to know what to do with civil liberty, and some excesses had stirred up a sullen reaction. The walls were covered
with resentful graffiti. ‘Democracy is a lie, democracy kills’, they said. Franco’s face had been stencilled everywhere, accompanied sometimes by the supplication, ‘Come back to us. We can’t carry on without you. All is forgiven’.

Municipal workers – like so many Spaniards at that time – had been on strike for months, and the streets were piled high with rubbish, visited by innumerable rats. Pornography had arrived – a stunning experience for a strait-laced people – with blue cinemas everywhere, horror video cassettes, and window displays of the Karma Sutra in booksellers previously specialising in devotional manuals and the lives of the saints. For nearly forty years prior to Franco’s death in 1975, Spanish lovers had been forbidden to kiss in public, and in small-town cinemas a priest stationed himself at the projectionist’s side ready with a square of cardboard to be held over the lens where a romantic episode might be held to weaken public morality. With the return of democracy there was time to be made up. In 1981 public courtship had become a ritual, and in Seville couples fell into each other’s embrace in any square that provided suitable benches, and lay locked together while the hours passed and the rats scuttled through the rubbish under their feet.

Package-deal trips to London were advertised to deal with unwanted pregnancies, at the all-in charge including two nights in the British Capital, of £250. The restraining influence of the Catholic Church seemed to have collapsed along with that of the State, and the city filled up with mystic carpet-baggers eager to fill the vacuum, with mediums, sun-worshippers, ‘cosmobiologists’, whirling dervishes, American fundamentalists howling for Armageddon, and sects dating from the pre-Christian era, including one, as the newspapers reported, that sacrificed chickens and drew omens from a study of their entrails.

All the symptoms of a society in advanced decay were present, yet suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, Sevillians had managed to work the poison out of their systems, and the phase was at an end. Now all appeared sweetness and light. The streets had been swept and garnished, flowers were in bloom in all the parks, Pied Pipers had lured all the rats away, and the walls had been cleansed of their nostalgia and their hate.
Some Sevillians were of the opinion that the Virgin known as La Hiniesta had come to their aid in response to the conferment to her image – despite the steadfast opposition of Communist councillors – of the City Medal of Honour. Now she was junior only to the Macarena Virgin, who not only held the medal but had been promoted in 1937 by General Queipo de Llano to Captain General of the Nationalist Armed forces.

I looked up an old Sevillian friend. ‘What finally happened about Cristina?’ (Three years ago he had been in despair after his only daughter, aged twenty, had gone off to live with a married man aged forty-four.) He seemed surprised that the matter should have been brought up. ‘Oh, that’s a thing of the past. She’s settled down now with a nice chap who works in the Banco de Espana. Daughter aged two and expecting their second.’

The talk turned to the condition of Seville, and some mention was made of the fact there had been four bank robberies on the previous day, May 10th.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Something they picked up from
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. A boy walks into a bank, pulls out a gun, tries to speak Spanish with an American accent, and say ‘
esto es un robo
’ just like they do in the film. The customers line up with their hands up against the wall, the cashier pushes a few thousand pesetas through his window, and the kid picks it up and gets out. It’s a phase. Not a thing to take seriously. Nobody gets hurt.’

This relaxed view was in part shared by Charles Formby, HM Consul in Seville. ‘In this town they snatch handbags and break into cars,’ he said. ‘We have specialists called
semaforazos
who break the windows of cars held up at traffic lights and grab what they can. This is not a dangerous city. No one gets violently robbed. You’re safer walking the streets of Seville at night than you are in London.’

Charles Formby supplied the statistic that at 38 per cent Seville’s unemployment (it is the centre of a depressed agricultural area) is the highest in Spain, and that 12 per cent of the unemployed are university graduates. He did not agree that petty criminality was a product of this economic situation, but believed it was a matter of obtaining money to buy drugs.

Don Rafael Manzano, Director of the Alcazar of Seville, agreed with him, adding his conviction that Spanish society was now the most permissive in Europe. Since the departure of Franco, the police were no longer feared, persons found to be in possession of small amounts of drugs were not charged, and gaol sentences were light except for serious crime. He mentioned that on May 10th – the day of the four bank robberies – a young man only released from prison a few hours previously had been arrested in the act of throwing packets of cannabis and heroin over the prison wall.

One of Seville’s problems seems to lie in its nearness to the point of entry of drugs from North Africa. ‘I happened to be down at Algeciras, the other day,’ said a reporter on
El Correo de Andalucia
, ‘and watching all these pregnant women getting off the ferry from Tangier, I wondered how many were really great with child, and how many with bundles of hashish.’

So the drug problem remained, but otherwise Sevillians seemed to be ridding themselves of the social sickness mild or grave, largely transmitted through the movies. The likely lads of Spain were no more immune than the youth of any other country from the cultural revolution inspired by such films as
The Wild Ones
, and the first bikers had appeared ten years ago. But they were a dwindling cult, and the Sevillian Hell’s Angels Chapter were down to a fraction of its former membership. I found a group tinkering with their Yamahas in a square on the edge of town. The majority were gypsies with sensitive Asiatic faces and melancholy eyes, and one was quite frank about their problems. ‘It never really took off here. In my view to be a real
Angel del infierno
you have to wear the right leather gear, and how can you expect anybody to do that when the temperature never drops below ninety in the shade?’

In 1981 there had been a few poorish imitations of punks and skinheads about, but now they were out of fashion, and were no more to be seen. On the other hand, youngsters in plenty thronged the well-lit squares and avenues far into the night. It was something new in Spain, a phenomenon the beginnings of which I had observed on the earlier visit, bands of well-dressed and well-behaved children ranging in age between twelve and sixteen, who turned the nocturnal streets into a playground.

Back to Don Rafael in his cell of an office, tucked away behind the scenes in the magnificence of the Alcazar. ‘We are suffering,’ he said, ‘from the side effects of the levelling process. Until recently, only rich people who didn’t have any work to do, could stay up enjoying
themselves
all night. Now everyone tries to. At the time of Holy Week it’s understandable. The processions are going on all night, and it’s
something
you have to see. No sooner is Holy Week over and we’re into the Spring Fair.’ The upper class rent chalets in the fairground and give parties that finish at six in the morning. Nowadays, however bad the unemployment crisis people were determined to defend their democratic rights, one of them being to stay up as late as the rich. If the parents stay up all night, said Don Rafael, so do the children, their argument being that democracy knows no age limits. As a result they fell asleep over their books at school. ‘We as a nation,’ he said, ‘have lost the ability to say no.’

All the old Spanish things were staging a comeback, including
bullfighting
. In the Autumn of 1981 so gloomy was the outlook for the national spectacle that the concluding
corrida
of that year had to be put forward a day because Sevilla FC would be playing at home on the Sunday originally planned. Of this overshadowed occasion, the
Correo de Andalucia
’s sportswriter said, ‘So the present decadent season draws to its end. It has offered little but boredom for the public, and bad business for the promoters, with about half the seats unsold. In this last
novillada
we saw underweight bulls, the fourth with a marked tendency to slip away, and the last two virtually calves, tottering about on shaky legs. There was great protest from the crowd that the fifth was lame. It wasn’t. It was numb from being shut up in a pen for so many weeks. As for the fighters, what can we say? Carlos Aragon was sad and insipid. He spread boredom like a disease. When they trundled the sixth bull in I said to my neighbour, “wake me up if anything happens”. He didn’t because he, too, fell asleep.’