Europe @ 2.4 km/h (49 page)

Joan Miró was the last of Barcelona’s great eccentrics. I take the funicular up to Montjuïc, where his legacy, the Fundació Joan Miró, stands on a promontory overlooking the city. It is a hallmark of Miró’s humour that a painting title will tell you either nothing, or everything, about its theme and contents. Witness his 1951 painting
Painting
. (In the same room hangs a 1925 painting also titled
Painting
but it’s easy to tell them apart because they’re on opposite walls.) Never afraid to shock, he called one 1938 work
Man
and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement
. Shit, I think, trying to distinguish the man from the woman from the excrement, he would have done better to name it
Painting
.

Up the slope I push, to the summit of Montjuïc. There is just enough twilight for me to peer inside the Olympic Stadium. You see where Muhammad Ali’s archery illusion kindled the Olympic flame, you feel the connection with history.

On Day 211, I have covered a record distance of 20.1 km. My daily average speed — a blistering 4.1 km/h — is at the top of my range. The credit belongs to Barcelona, to its smooth pavements; an outbreak of summery weather; the proximity of each destination from the next; the pure joy of rambling on Las Ramblas; and the long descent from Montjuïc back to the centre, all of which enticed me to clock up the kilometres without noticing. Paris apart — where I averaged 11.55 km per day because the paucity of usable public transport forced me to get out and about — Spain has seen the most freewheeling passages of the journey. I’ve been bettering 10 km a day here.

1466 km

‘Chancers and adventurous rule-breakers have always intrigued, or been admired by, Spaniards.’
⁴⁵
One would expect that to apply to the Catalans in spades, and be grievously disappointed … Yesterday I arrived at Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic cathedral on closing time and the Gothic landmark’s ticket vendor told me when to come back. It’s a great Barcelona tradition to go up on the roof, and she said nothing to deter me. Perhaps she thought I would see it was impossible. Well, I didn’t; and I don’t.

It would take more than a couple of steps into the chapel that gives on to the lift to stop me. When a finger-wagging official closed the chapel door and disappeared, I crawled to a pew in the chapel and persuaded another visitor to hand my wheelchair up.

The door gave way. The officer had dared not lock it, knowing a few people already on the roof would need to come down. When they had done so I slipped through, closeted myself in the lift and pressed the UP button. Now came the business of hauling myself up a steel scaffolding of three dozen steps. The next five or ten minutes were pure bliss, enjoying views of Barcelona’s skyline and a Picasso’s-eye glimpse of the Mediterranean. I was about to come down when the lift came up for the third time, but now its human cargo was in uniform.

Two police officers — one friendly, the other slightly menacing — trooped up the steps, partly obscuring a grey-jacketed subordinate of the finger-wagger.

‘What are you doing up here?’ I challenged them.

‘We were going to ask you the same thing,’ the friendlier cop said. ‘Enjoying the views just the same as other tourists,’ I replied. ‘Take a look around, there’s no crime here. You’ve been called out for nothing. You should be down there catching criminals.’ (I pointed vaguely at the street below.) We left it at that — or, to be more precise, they left me to come down in my own good time — though the issue may not be closed for keeps. There is always the risk I will burn in hell for confronting a churchwarden, but you know the drill. No one expects the Spanish inquisition, let alone the Church police.

SOUTHERN IBERIA (SOUTHERN SPAIN, SOUTHERN PORTUGAL)

Time spent in country: 18 days

Distance covered: 2062 km

Distance pushed: 131.6 km

Average speed: 2.685 km/h

Journey distance to date: 26,271 km

1478-1484 km

Bus sleep usually comes fitfully for me, if at all, but the pace I’ve been keeping up these past few days has been the most relentless yet, so my brain in its wisdom decides to let my body claim its reward. The first time I awaken we are pulling out of Valencia, having tracked south-west since Barcelona. Our road now veers west before breaking south. The Sierra Nevada, rising darkly, keeps its brooding distance.

You don’t often see graffiti by conservatives, but Cordobans obviously live in a different world. UNO — UNESCO CORRUPCIÓN says one of two messages on a brick wall. TV DESTROYS THE FAMILY says the other — which comes with a helpful drawing in case you had no idea what a television looks like. I call it street art; Joan Miro would probably have called it
Painting
.

Cordoba was one of the glistening jewels in the Muslims’ empire of Andalusia (al-Andalus) which ruled the south of this peninsula from 711 until ‘Their Catholic Majesties’, Ferdinand and Isabella, expelled them all — along with the Jews — in March 1492. The Edict of Expulsion marked the greatest tragedy to befall the Jews between the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the Russian pogroms of the 19th century. More significantly for the world we live in, Muslims whose names we all know still voice outrage over the loss of their Western caliphate.

As Robert Fisk points out — and I don’t know of any other writer or commentator who has given this fact the prominence it deserves — Osama bin Laden, to name but one, sees a parallel between the Christian reconquest of Spain (the
Reconquista
) and the re-establishment of Israel. Fisk writes,
⁴⁶
‘What is also clear from his tapes … is bin Laden’s almost obsessive interest in history. “… we shall never accept that the tragedy of Andalusia shall be repeated in Palestine.”’

In the heart of Andalusia, the immensity and history of Cordoba’s former mosque, now its cathedral, the Mezquita, put me in mind of Istanbul’s Aghia Sofia. After my rude encounter in León’s cathedral, this is one place Spaniards are awed into silence. Maybe it’s because there is no sign commanding it … In a passage headed ‘The Mother Church of the Dioceses’ the brochure handed to me on entry insists the cathedral is not ‘a temple of different cultures’. The ancient stones and exhibits in the city’s Museum of San Vicente, it says, prove that the Visigoths were Christians (which must have been news to the Romans).

King Ferdinand III (the one that we saw was crowned in León’s cathedral in 1230) reconquered Cordoba in 1236. The brochure deplores ‘the inconvenience of celebrating the liturgy among a sea of columns’. Pews which take up perhaps one five-hundredth of the mosque-cum-church’s interior show that after all this time the Christians have produced a solution that is at least architecturally respectful.

Curiously, they then give themselves a pat on the back for having kept the mosque structure intact. ‘It is the Church through its cathedral chapter that has made it possible to keep the former mosque of the Western caliphate, the oldest cathedral in Spain, and a World Heritage site, from becoming a heap of ruins.’ How disingenuous of Christian triumphalists. Preservation has surely not been achieved in order to safeguard Islamic heritage?

The Juderia is Cordoba’s old Jewish quarter. In 1491 this was a flourishing community, by 1493 a mini ghost town. It seems a ghost town still, but that is because I arrive during the siesta, which is taken very seriously — and somnolently — in the south of Spain. On my way through the Juderia my ears catch the haunting strains of a flamenco guitarist from deep within one of the medieval courtyards playing
House of the Rising
Sun.
The lyrics easily rearrange themselves.
There is a house in Cordoba they call the synagogue …

To the Hebrews it was the year 5075 — to the Christians 1315, to the Muslims 763 — when this synagogue was built. After 1492 it was converted into a hermitage. Four centuries on, a priest discovered its original purpose when a section of the mortared walls collapsed and — in a signally progressive gesture for that time — it was declared a national monument in 1885.

Today it has been restored, but as an exotic tourist attraction rather than a working synagogue. An original Star of David mosaic graces its courtyard, a candelabrum sits in splendid isolation on a recessed ledge, and extracts from the Book of Psalms line the upper parts of the internal walls. Across the street is a Sephardic museum, whose curator — Angelo — looks after the exhibits as if he himself were Jewish. In Cordoba today, he reveals, there are just four or five Jewish families and no Judaic worship services.