The Other Side of a Frontier, page 34
They stood in the corridor of the train and they gazed at the fields of France. These fields are richer and better cultivated than a good deal of – though not all – the Spanish land. The Spaniard does not deny this, though he will think of the province of olives in Jaén, the vega of Granada, the vines of Rioja and Valdepeñas, and the long rich cultivations of Valencia and say, with that exaggeration which is natural to local pride, that these are ‘the richest places in the whole world’; and about Valencia he will be right. But Spain on the whole is a poor country, and he does not deny it. He is simply not interested in what is outside of Spain; because he has no feeling for the foreign thing and even regards its existence as inimical and an affront. He turns his back. His lack of curiosity amounts to a religion.
When I first crossed the frontier at Irún nearly thirty years ago, I remembered listening to a declamation by a Spaniard against his own country. At the time I thought the protest was a sign of some specific political unrest, but I have heard that speech dozens of times since. Again and again: ‘It is one of the evils of Spain. We are decadent, priest-ridden, backward, barbarous, corrupt, ungovernable,’ etc., etc. Spain is either hell or heaven, a place for fury or ecstasy. Like Russians in the nineteenth century, the Spaniards are in the habit of breaking into denunciations of their country, and between 1898 and 1936 these denunciations culminated in a puritan renaissance. There had been two savage civil wars in that century and, among intellectuals, these wars presented themselves as a conflict between reactionary Catholicism and liberal Catholicism, between Africa and Europe, tradition and progress. In the writings of Ganivet, in Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, the early Azorin, in Maeztu, in Ayala and Baroja – a brilliant school which has had no successors and which was contemporary with the effective efforts of Giner de los Ríos to create an educated minority – the examination of the Spanish sickness was made without rhetoric. Wherever one finds a superior mind in Spain it is certain to have been formed by this tragic generation, many of whom died of broken hearts in the Civil War, were executed, or are in exile. Possibly some of these train travellers have been influenced by them, possibly they are hostile or indifferent; if we are to find some common ground on which they stand we shall have to look beyond the accidents of opinion. That common ground is not their nationality.
For the Spaniards are not Spaniards first, if they are Spaniards in the end. The peninsula is a piece of rocky geography. It is the subject of Spanish rhetoric, the occasion for their talk about Spanishness, for chauvinism and rebellion – and they know from experience in every generation how those things end: they end in nada, nothing, resignation. The ground these travellers rest their lives on is something smaller than Spain. They are rooted in their region, even nowadays, after the Civil War, which has mixed up the population and broken so many ardently maintained barriers. They are Basques, Catalans, Galicians, Castilians, Andalusians, Valencians, Murcians, and so on, before they are Spaniards, and before they are men of these regions they are men of some town or village; and in that place, small or large, they think perfection lies – even the self-castigating people of Murcia, who say of themselves: ‘Between earth and sky nothing good in Murcia.’ One thinks of that little play of the Quintero brothers called The Lady from Alfaqueque: a lady in this lost little Andalusian town, who was so in love with it that she could be cajoled and swindled into any folly by anyone who said he came from that place. I remember a woman in Madrid who had spent the last ten years in political exile saying: ‘We had a much better life abroad when we were in exile, but I could never forget the water of Madrid and the craving for the taste of it became a torture.’
This provinciality of the Spaniard is his true ground and passion. And with it runs a psychological parallel. His town is not like any other town. It is the only town. And he too is not like any other human being; he is indeed the only human being. If he is brought to the test, there is only himself in the world, himself and, at the other extreme, the Universe. For ourselves, the Westerners, there is something else besides man and the ultimate, or universal; there is civilization or what Spaniards call despairingly ‘ambiente’; and it is their continual argument that nothing can be done in Spain because of this ‘lack of ambiente’ or lack of a favourable atmosphere; how can anything as mundane as a ‘favourable atmosphere’ exist where people do not feel related to each other, but only to some remote personal extremity? The pious belong to God, not even to the city of God, but to some deeply felt invisible figure; the impious to some individual vision. In the end they are anarchists.
Irún. Holiday-makers on the French side of the river that divides the two sides of the Basque country watched the fighting begin the Civil War here and saw men swim the river to safety. The town Irún is famous in the history of Pyrenean smuggling. There have been two traditional kinds of smuggling on this frontier: the mule loaded with tobacco coming over the mountain paths at night, and the smuggling organized by high-up officials from Madrid, which is part of the bribery system that never dies in Spain. It is described in the Galdós novel La de Bringas. In all classes the personal approach through ‘influence’ is preferred to the direct one; without ‘influence’ one cannot ‘get in’. A foreign official told me that after many years living in Spain he had come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of Spaniards, those who have ‘influence’ and those too poor to have any; for the former, life is ‘normal’, for the latter it is hell. The pursuit of ‘influence’ is partly due to economic causes. In poor countries a job of some slight importance is a phenomenon and attracts a court of parasites. The fortunate slave at the desk is besieged by a crowd of less fortunate slaves; the fortunate slave himself is the unfortunate slave of one more fortunate. Like the Russian bureaucracy in Gogol’s time, the Spanish is a huge collection of poor men. One has only to buy a motor-car or make a contract to be surrounded by people consumed by the anxiety to ‘facilitate’ the deal, register the papers, put the thing through with the right officials, for a small commission. The affair would be lost in the ordinary and proper channels. Weeks and months would go by and nothing would happen. Fatal to take the normal course; indispensable to have an introduction in the right quarter. Watch the fortunate Spaniard at the railway office. Discreetly he inquires about a ticket, does not boldly ask for it. A significant rubbing together of thumb and forefinger takes place, a furtive flicker comes into the eyes. A little personal deal is starting: unfortunate Spaniards without ‘influence’ will not get the seat, but he will. It is an unjust system but one unjust flea has other unjust fleas on his back; the method introduces elaboration, sociability, a sea of acquaintance, into ordinary action: ‘I will give you a card to my uncle, who will arrange everything.’ Everyone in Spain, down to the extremely poor, to whom so little is possible, is writing for someone else, for a ‘combination’, or arrangement, of some kind, and since time is no object, they make a lot of friends. If time is an object, if it is a matter of life and death, then a black figure which all Spaniards understand rises up and interposes her immovable hand – the great croupier, Fate. ‘Ay, señor, que triste es la vida.’
The railway station at Irún is as shabby as it was thirty years ago. The place is glum, thinly painted, and grubby. The eye notices how many ordinary things – things like pipes, trolleys, door handles – are broken. The grass grows out of the rusting tracks, the decaying old-fashioned coaches and wagons rot in the sidings, the woodwork exposed to a destructive climate. The railways were half ruined by the Civil War, but, except for the electric trains of the Basque provinces, they were always shabby and went from bad to worse as one travelled southwards or got off the main lines. After France this material deterioration is sudden except in one respect; in the last two years the Spaniards have built a new train, called the Talgo, which runs three days a week to Madrid and has shortened the thirteen-hour journey across Castile by two or three hours. This Talgo is a luxury, Pullman train, low in build like the London tube coaches, and each coach has a concertina-like section in the middle which enables it to bend at the alarming mountain curves in the Basque mountains. Its motion is, however, violent. One cracks one’s head, or bruises one’s stomach against the handrails; but it is a change from the slow, dusty, bumping caravan of coaches that crawl to Madrid on other days of the week. Spanish locomotives are always breaking down. There is still not a complete double track from the frontier to Madrid, or from Madrid to Seville.
Nothing else has changed at Irún. One has heard Spanish garrulity; now one meets for the first time Spanish silence, disdain, and reserve on their own soil. Those superb Spanish customs officers, young, handsome, wearing the tropical uniforms of naval officers, stroll up and down in a quiet ecstasy of satisfaction, talking and handsomely ignoring the crowd. Their leisure is lovely to gaze at. The inferior officers who examine your luggage wearing white gloves – it is possible to refuse examination until the gloves are put on, but I have never seen a Spanish customs official without them – are poor devils and they get to work suspiciously and tragically. They fumble with listless dignity in the midst of some private wretchedness. The tragedy is the habit of work perhaps. They have the melancholy of people who go through this monotonous life with nothing on their minds, and not very much – at the present cost of living – in their stomachs. They look as though they are thinking of some other world, and possibly about death. More likely, until something dramatic happens, they are extinct. Our suitcases might be coffins.
Sombreness is so much the dominant aspect of these people that one is puzzled to know how the notion of a romantic and coloured Spain has come about.
What shall we declare at the customs? Almost everything will be opprobrious to them. We are English – and we have Gibraltar. We defeated the Germans and Italians; the Franco government supported them actively, and has in a large number of ways copied their régime. We are not Christians. By that the official means we are not Roman Catholics; if you are a Protestant you are not a Christian. You are, for him and historically speaking, a Moor, or a Jew. Or if we are Roman Catholics, Spanish Catholics will be quick to point out improprieties in our Catholicism. And then suppose you are on the Right politically, that will not help you. Are you a Carlist from Navarre, a descendant of those who supported the pretender to the Spanish throne in the two civil wars of the nineteenth century and who professed feudalism in politics and the ultramontane in religion? Or are you a monarchist, an old conservative, a clerical, a supporter of the Jesuits or the Army; are you for the Church without the Jesuits, or for Franco’s Falange, which Franco himself does not much care for or, at any rate, plays down so that he can keep his balance between them, the higher Army officers, and the bishops? The Pope can be left out of it; the Spanish Catholics have always treated as equals with the Italian Pope. Or do you declare you are on the Left? Well, privately the customs officer is on the Left, or half his relations are. If you are on the Left you are a Red. But what kind of Red? Are you an old liberal republican, liberal monarchist, liberal anticlerical? One of several kinds of socialist? Which kind of anarchist? Which kind of Communist – Trotskyite, Titoist, Leninist, Stalinist? Though against the Church, are you a non-practising Catholic? A mystic? An atheist, a new atheist? The Spaniards are not allowed by government decree to discuss Party politics; there is only one Party. They do, of course, discuss them, but without much energy: that energy was exhausted in the Civil War, but the political look burns in the sad eye, a spark inviting to be blown on. And we have not exhausted the parties: for where do you stand on Basque and Catalan autonomy? Are you a centralist or a federalist?
These silent questions are rhetorical, for, as I say, no political questions may be publicly discussed in Spain today. There is only one Party, General Franco does not like it and has forbidden public discussions. So exhausted is the nation by the Civil War that people have little desire to talk about politics. They have fallen back on a few jokes. And suppose that, hoping to curry favour, you declared that you were in favour of the state of vertical syndicates, the military conquest of Gibraltar and Portugal, the renewal of the Spanish Empire, the ecclesiastical control of all ideas, and a return to the glories of Ferdinand and Isabel there would be an appalled suspicious silence. People would step back a yard or two from you and say: ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ and leave you firmly alone in your abnormal orthodoxy. For you would have declared something no Spaniard can possibly think: that the Spanish government is good.
But one does not make any of the foregoing declarations. One declares simply that, being a foreigner, one is inevitably the enemy; occasionally, in remote places, I have had showers of stones thrown at me when I walked into a village. I have been asked also whether I was a Portuguese jewel-smuggler in a place outside Badajoz. And, crossing the Tagus once, whether I was a Frenchman ‘making plans’ – the tradition of the Napoleonic invasion still alive, handed down from father to son for a hundred and fifty years. And many times if I was a Christian, suggesting as I have said, not that I was an atheist, but a Moor or a Jew.
I do not mean that enmity means open hostility; one meets that open suspicious antagonism in France and Italy, but not in Spain, where manly welcome and maternal kindness, simple and generous, are always given to the traveller without desire for reward or wish to exploit. The poorer and simpler the people, the more sincere the welcome. In some lonely inn, a venta of Extremadura, where there are never beds to sleep in, but men sleep on the floor in the outer stables, while their mules and donkeys sleep inside, just as they did in the time of Cervantes, they will ask you if you have brought your sack and your straw, and if you have not brought them, they will get them for you. The suspicion common in industrial society, the rudeness of prosperous people, have not touched the Spaniards; one is treated like an equal among equals. There is never avarice. One sits before the hearth, the brushwood blazes up, the iron pan splutters on the fire, and conversation goes on as it has always gone on. The enmity I speak of is part historical inheritance and part an unbridgeable difference of type. A very large number of the beliefs of people brought up in modern, urban, industrial civilization make no contact even with the urban Spaniard. As for the historical inheritance, an Englishman thinks of the life-and-death struggle with Spain in the Elizabethan age. Spain threatened our life as a nation, our Protestant faith, the idea of freedom on which, for economic and spiritual reasons, our life during the last four hundred years has prospered. A Dutchman would make the same reflection. To Protestants, Spain was what Protestants have hated most: the totalitarian enemy. To Spanish Catholics, the Protestant attack upon the Church was their supreme stimulus to action in the Counter-Reformation. They were the first people in Europe to put into practice ideals which liberal societies have always resisted: the ferocious doctrine of racial purity or ‘limpieza’, revived by the Nazis; the paralysing idea of ideological rightness, the party line, supervised by the Inquisition, which, for all the excuses that are made on its behalf, remains the notorious model of contemporary persecution in Russia and in America. It was a Spaniard who founded the first order of Commissars in Europe, the Society of Jesus. Time has softened, abolished, or transformed these things in Spain; but they were, in spirit, models which the enemies of liberal civilization have copied. The Spanish mind invented them and made them intolerably powerful. They represent something which is permanent, still potential, if not always powerful in Spanish life. One may be a foreign Catholic and still be on one’s guard against them; many great Spaniards have fought their country’s tendency and suffered from its authoritarianism.
Spanish fanaticism has sown fanaticism on the other side of its frontiers. It has its comedies. How many foreigners, especially the English-speaking countries, are Ruskinians about Spain. In his autobiography Et Praeterita, Ruskin describes his own ludicrous meeting with the daughters of his father’s Spanish partner in the sherry trade, the Domeqs. He behaved with all the gaucheness and absurdity of a Protestant youth.
‘… my own shyness and unpresentableness were further stiffened, or rather sanded by a patriotic and Protestant conceit, which was tempered neither by politeness nor sympathy … I endeavoured to entertain my Spanish-born, Paris-bred and Catholic-hearted mistress with my views upon the subjects of the Spanish Armada, the Battle of Waterloo and the doctrine of Transubstantiation.’
The young ladies from Jérez de la Frontera would have only noticed his ‘shyness’; shyness is incomprehensible to anyone born in Spain.
On their side, the Spaniards might reply, and many have: We are not an industrialized society, but look at the sickness of industrial man! We have little social conscience, but look at the self-mutilation of countries that have it. If we are medieval, the latest communities, and, most of all, the Communist, indicate a return to a medieval conception of society. Whom would you sooner have, the Commissars or the Jesuits? We have digested all that long ago, Spanish scepticism is inseparable from Spanish faith, and though we have a large population of illiterate serfs, we have not a population of industrial slaves. We present to you a people who have rejected the modern world and have preserved freedoms that you have lost. We have preserved personality.
This silent dialogue in the Customs House is a dialogue of half-truths. It indicates only one thing: we have already been infected by the Spanish compulsion to see things in black and white. We are entering the country of ‘todo o nada’ – all or nothing.
