In Europe (97 page)

General de Gaulle was finally at liberty to meet with a political leader who he had always held in great – if unspoken – admiration: Francisco Franco. The two men dined together on several occasions, but it did not result in a lasting friendship. When push came to shove, the theatrical de Gaulle remained a democrat, albeit a formal and primitive one. He was not, like Churchill, a man of the substantive democracy, of the heated democratic debate, of the democratic compromise. He sought the people's mandate, then went on to regard that as a licence to act as he saw fit. In that way he prefigured later Southern European leaders like Silvio Berlusconi and José María Aznar. But whatever else he was, he was not a dictator who tried to bend the press and the courts to his own will.

‘The country could accept him on his own terms, in other words unconditionally, and without demanding from him a programme,’ his biographer Brian Crozier wrote. ‘Or else it could stew in its own juice. If it chose the latter he would, as he said on several occasions, return to his sorrow and his loneliness.’

MY BUS IS PARKED ALONG THE CREUSE, AND I EAT MY APPLE BESIDE
the old building where the villagers of Chitray once did their laundry. The stones are warm in the October sun, a squirrel is knocking nuts from the trees, the river churns. The spring water continues to run into the basin, day after day, but the women who laughed and gossiped here for centuries are gone, they are forgotten and lie now in the churchyard, just like the women from the wash houses in all the other villages of France.

One of my brothers lives close to here, in a dot on the map with about a hundred inhabitants. In 1900 there were 1,400 people living in that village, most of them in dire poverty. In the summer the men earned a little money working as masons in Paris, and when concrete was introduced and they could also work there throughout the winter, they took their wives and children with them. This was the first wave of rural families to move away. After the war, when the big factories in the cities began taking on thousands of workers, the second wave came. Today there are only retired people living in the village. ‘Every once in a while someone from Paris buys a house here,’ my brother says, ‘but after a couple of years most of them throw in the towel.’

All over Europe I had seen the remains of that farming culture, the infrastructure that was still shaping the entire world at the start of the last century, and that had been wiped away a hundred years later: ruined farmhouses in Spain and Italy, abandoned wash houses in France, overgrown fields on the slopes of the Pyrenees, empty village hovels in Poland and Portugal and forgotten kitchen gardens in Vásárosbéc. In cities everywhere I had met former farmers and their children, adrift in the huge
grey blocks of flats in Bilbao, in the churches of Warsaw, in the refugee centres of Holland.

In 1951, more than forty per cent of Italy's population lived from agriculture and fishing. By 1972 it was seventeen per cent. In Holland, one out of every five families lived on a farm in 1950; fifty years later it was one out of every fifty. In France in 1999, some 15,000 villages were in danger of vanishing completely. The British were moaning about the creation of a ‘brave new countryside’, where no one had dirt under their fingernails.

My brother shows me the stump of a tree that once stood in the middle of an overgrown path, between what used to be the pastureland and gardens of his village. ‘I counted the rings,’ he says. ‘This tree began growing around 1950. In other words, by that time there was no longer any real reason to keep this path cleared. It was a turning point, apparently most of the villagers had left by then.’

Here, after the great dying out, came the great flourishing. Everything became covered in forest. ‘All the woods you see here are new, all those terraces have become overgrown, this whole view didn't exist back then,’ my brother says, waving his arm. ‘Only a few old people still remember what the old landscape looked like. I know them, but it won't last very long. Then even the memory will be gone.’

A few days later I drive into the Pyrenees. The days are warm and clear, the nights cold, the houses low and grey. A girl is herding her sheep, a cigarette between her lips. The road becomes narrower all the time. A lone bird of prey is circling high above. A barn, ‘
Vive de Gaulle!
’ written on it in faded blue. My newspaper, which I read on my laptop, welcomes the six billionth earthling. When my father was born in 1899, we reached a billion. Now it's six times that. We're living in strict accordance with the disaster scenario sketched for us by the Club of Rome in 1972, which, along with the oil crisis, rang in the end of the golden years of 1945–73.

At the time, the club's calculations brought the world down with a bump. It appeared that less than a third of the human race consumed four fifths of the most important raw materials, and those were quickly becoming depleted. At the same time, the world population continued to grow by leaps and bounds. ‘Under these circumstances,’ the report
said, ‘people everywhere are increasingly confronted with a series of intractable problems, almost impossible to deal with: environmental disturbance, a crisis in norms and customs, bureaucratisation, the uncontrollable expansion of the cities, uncertainty concerning employment, alienation on the part of young people, economic disruptions and the rejection by a growing number of people of our society's value system.’ These seemingly divergent issues were extremely complicated, showed up all over the world and had a pronounced mutual interaction ‘in a way we cannot as yet comprehend’.

Within the next twenty-five years, the report said, countermeasures could still be taken, but after the year 2000 it would be impossible to turn the tide. ‘The world system simply no longer has the space and the abundance to tolerate such egocentric behaviour on the part of its inhabitants,’ and if the world did not impose ‘limits on growth’, it predicted scarcity, catastrophe and wealthy states which would increasingly withdraw into themselves.

A quarter of a century later, what everyone talks about most is climate change: in a pub in Kent, people wonder aloud about why it has not snowed there since they were teenagers. ‘The average English garden moves 200 metres south each day,’ a British magazine reports; my friends in central Italy note the arrival of strange, multicoloured birds, apparently from the tropics; my newspaper in the Netherlands reports regularly on unprecedented flooding; Wladek Matwin in Warsaw sees the spring growing shorter, the winters growing longer, and by late May it is already as hot as in the middle of summer, all very unusual.

I pick up a hitchhiker, a man from around here. He spends his Saturdays as follows: he climbs a mountain, turns the contents of his bag into a giant bird, jumps off the mountain and then flies around like an eagle amid the summits and valleys. ‘That must be fantastic,’ I say. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but there isn't much more I can say about it.’ A silence. ‘Yes, it's fantastic.’ Again he falls silent. ‘It's totally peaceful up there, only the wind. Unless the weather starts acting up, then you get a rollicking too, my God, yes …’

In late afternoon the first billboards begin popping up – Hôtel SainteBernadette, Hôtel de la Grotte, Hôtel Virginia – and then the Las Vegas of Sorrows looms up before me. I pull into Lourdes just in time for
dinner at the Hôtel Majestic. There is a lot of cheerful laughter at the tables. One of the groups is discussing prayer. How frequently does one pray? ‘I pray for an hour each day,’ an older gentleman says.‘That's enough for me and my children.’ The women at the table do it more quickly, and besides, praying for an hour, how many requests can one have for Jesus anyway? ‘Jesus?’ the man says sternly. ‘Yes, we always pray to Jesus.’ ‘And what about the Virgin?’ ‘Well, not as often.’ This raises a new question: to whom does one pray? Or rather: to whom does one pray for certain problems? And we still have the whole evening in front of us.

At the spring, hundreds of people are waiting in line to fill their plastic bottles with holy water. The crowd in front of the cave is completely silent, there are thousands of people standing or sitting or lying there in prayer, here and there a deformed child is held up: all the better for Mother Mary to see them. A determined man trudges around with a gigantic banner for the Virgin, the huge pennant flaps all evening above his head.

The shops of Lourdes are full of plastic Mary bottles to hold the spring water – the Virgin's head serves as a screw-on top. They also sell huge framed colour photos of Jesus on the cross – when looked at from a certain angle, he open his eyes or closes them again – and ashtrays, vases, Padre Pio and the Pope in a thousand different shapes and sizes. And, at the same time, Lourdes is a place where every franc is pinched till it bleeds. You have souvenirs starting at around five francs, less than a euro. There are cheap hotels, the food is simple and filling, the men tote groceries around in big plastic bags, the women wear cheap coats, the faces are lined, the eyes glance shyly at all this strange opulence.

Two pilgrim trains are about to leave the station: one for Boulogne, the other for Perpignan. A few dozen young spastic people have been lined up on the platform, beside them four wooden trolleys full of worn suitcases, crutches and jerry cans of spring water. Many of the passengers are carrying fluorescent plastic Virgins and marble grave decorations, for there is no reason why the dead cannot receive gifts as well.

Today, in 1999, the pilgrim trains are no longer the stinking, miserable carriages that Émile Zola described in his novel
Lourdes
(1894); they are mostly silver high-speed trains in which the suffering is neatly covered up. Except, that is, in the
Train Vert
; the hospital cars for the lame and
terminally ill who are headed for Perpignan still exude the old-fashioned smell of illness and Lysol. Unlike in Zola's day, today there are antibiotics, TB has been eliminated, the patients are mostly well nourished and all illness and suffering has been skilfully excised from public life. Except in Lourdes. Lourdes is the clearance sale for all the suffering our society normally hides from sight, and for a few days it leaves its isolation. Is that the comfort this pilgrimage brings? I enter into a conversation with an old woman in a wheelchair, she has scarves wrapped around her head, a pair of what look like motorcycle goggles protects her eyes. She saved for this trip for eighteen months; she enjoyed herself. ‘Oh, sonny,’ she says, grabbing my hand. ‘When you're here you're close to heaven's gate for a while.’ The locomotive blows its whistle, the train begins to move. Patients wave, some of them lie on their mattresses and pray.

The next evening there is a huge procession. First, thousands of pilgrims swarm around the enormous square before the basilica, men in their Sunday best, women in crisp dresses, old people cough, children hobble along on crutches, an incredible swarm without system or goal. But then darkness falls, the procession begins to take shape, and there they go: hundreds of men and women in wheelchairs, candles held high, moving their lips along with the ‘Ave Maria’ blasting from the loudspeakers, some of them slouching under their blankets, some with bandaged faces, a few with faces blemished from AIDS. A husband and wife try to support the head of their paralysed son: look, look at the Virgin. All the despair from all the back rooms of Europe bursts out here.

Everyone is old, everyone is poor. The pace is overwhelming, the helpers are almost sprinting, sometimes whole human chains are formed to keep the rushing wheelchairs on course. Then come the beds, at the same pace, the patients lying beneath a red sheet, handbags resting on their stomachs, a boy races by with an intravenous drip dangling from his hand, father and mother praying on both sides, a little runaway pietà.

The next day I cross the Spanish border again, and a few hours further along I see what I call the Lake of Dried-Up Expectations. On the mountainside are a few villas, a hotel and a boarded-up village bar, but the eye is drawn only to the gravel bottom of what was supposed to be a large mountain lake, with cheerful beaches and vivacious young people.
Lying here and there in the mud are a few lost boats, all that is left of all this promise. It is an absurd place, this bare valley and this drained water basin, with its brave hotelier and a few homeowners holding out in the face of it all: someday this will turn out all right, someday we will have cheerful beaches again, discos and pretty girls.

After Franco had been in power for about ten years, right after the end of the Second World War, a visitor described Spain as a ‘washed-away chunk of South America’: parched earth, constantly circling vultures and the introspection of a dream castle. The great wars more or less passed it by, the democratisation was in no hurry. It is only in the last two decades that things have started rolling again. Franco's economic policies were based on pure autocracy, and for the Spanish this resulted in a level of starvation and disease unknown since the Middle Ages. On 31 December, 1939 he announced that all the country's problems were over: ‘Huge amounts of gold have been found in Spain!’ It was one big swindle. Not long afterwards, the Austrian Albert von Filek convinced the dictator that he could make petrol from water and a secret plant extract. He was allowed to build a factory on the River Jarama, and for a long time Franco believed that his own car was the first to run on this new fuel. Between 1940–4 alone, some 200,000 Spaniards died of starvation.

In Madrid I take a little city tour of Franco's sanctuaries. For this general who liked nothing more than playing king, El Pardo was the perfect palace: just outside the city, nothing in the surroundings to provoke unrest, yet positively dripping with aristocracy. For fifteen years the Francos lived here in complete isolation, interrupted only by brief trips to other parts of Spain and no more than three foreign visits: to Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar. Greece is the only missing name in that line-up of kindred spirits; it was not until 1967 that Georgios Papadopoulos imposed his shaky nationalist dictatorship, and by then Franco was too old to travel far.