The Pritchett Century (23 page)

It was easy to pick them out from the French when they got on the train in Paris; not quite so easy to pick them out from the Italians. The Spanish men were better dressed than the other Latins, and this was true of all classes. Their clothes fitted them at the waist and the shoulders, they carried themselves with reserve and dignity. Their gestures were restrained, their farewells were quiet and manly, they did not talk much and what they said was dry, composed, and indifferent. They behaved with ease as people who live by custom do; and they gave an impression of an aristocratic detachment. This is true of all classes from the rich to the poor, who have the same speech and the same manners. There are no class accents in Spain worth mentioning; there are only the regional variants of speech. This man is an Andalusian, this a Gallego; you can only guess his class from his clothes. One is markedly among gentlemen, and even the “señorito,” the bouncing little mister, falls back on that when he has exhausted his tricks. The word “gentleman” is not altogether complimentary, for it implies a continual conscious restraint on part of the human personality, and it carries a narrow connotation of class. In this narrow sense a Spaniard cannot be a “gentleman,” for though he has a sense of fitness in his quiescent mood, he is unrestrained when he wakes up. His conduct is ruled by his personal pride, not by his category; and it is natural for him to be proud. His pride may be a nuisance, but it fits him and it cannot be removed. He is, he has always been, a hidalgo—a
hijo de algo
—a person of some consideration. And upon this consideration, however impalpable it may be, the very beggar in the streets reposes. A point not to forget is that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spaniards were the master-race of the world, the founders of the first great empire to succeed the Roman Empire, more permanent in their conquest and administration than the French, who followed them, successful where the Germans have never yet succeeded, the true predecessors of the British empire-makers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Spaniards in the train had the simplicity of people who had once had the imperial role. One could suppose them to be looking back on it with philosophical resignation. The place of those who have ceased to rule is to teach.

There was no conceit or vanity in these travellers. The nervous pushing bustle of the European was not in them. The quick vanity and sharp-mindedness of the French, their speed in isolating and abstracting a problem, were not there. Nor were there the naïve vivacity and affectability which electrify the agreeable Italians. These races care to attract or please continuously; the Spaniard cares very little and leaves to us to discover him. He gives us time to breathe by his very negligence. “
Nada
—nothing,” he says restfully before every subject that is broached.

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—though not all—of 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 remember 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 Azorín, 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. Nothing between man and 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 in the Civil War here and saw men swim the river to safety. The town of 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 waiting 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 its 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 aristocratically 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 regime. We are not Christians. By that the official means we are not Roman Catholics; if you are 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?