View of the World (7 page)

At the weekends things brightened up. Saturday evening saw an invasion from the countryside of farm-labourers and their heavily
chaperoned
girls. The farm-labourers worked cheerfully all the hours of daylight for eighteen pesetas – or about three shillings – a day. On Saturday nights they paraded the principal street of Santa Eulalia, which does not possess a single neon sign, until it was time to go and dance at Ses Parres – Ibicenco for The Vineyards. Drinks at Ses Parres cost only three pesetas and the purchase of a round entitled the patron to watch the floor show and to dance all night. About a third of the girls still sported the local costume, which is voluminous in an early-Victorian way, a matter of many petticoats and an abundance of concealed lace, worn with a shawl like Whistler’s mother, pendant earrings, and
long-beribboned
pigtails. Many still wear the
paesa
costume because it is insisted upon by their husbands or future husbands. A friend, a
prosperous
small farmer, told me that of a family of eight girls, only his wife retained the paesa dress, the pigtail and the tight side curls. He had insisted on this and made it a stipulation of the marriage, as he thought it improper that another man should see his wife’s legs. Women dressed in paesa style are allowed to wear ‘modern’
ciudadana
clothes and rearrange their hair style if they leave the island – usually on a visit to a medical specialist in Palma.

Sunday mornings in Santa Eulalia always produced a curious spectacle. As the growth of the village away from its defensive position on the hill had left the church rather at a distance from the centre, people had taken to going to mass in the chapel of a tiny convent away among the grocers’
shops and the bars in the main street. The sixty women, or thereabouts, who attended seven o’clock mass filled this building to overflowing, so that the men – who in any case were separated from them by custom – were obliged to form a devotional group on the other side of the road. Here, divided from the rest of the congregation by the flow of morning traffic, they followed the service as best they could. There were usually about twenty of them, and, as in Catalonia, I noticed that no fishermen were present. The fishermen of Ibiza are, and have probably always been, almost savagely anti-Catholic. This antagonism does not arise merely from recent conflicts over attempts to compel fishermen to attend mass or to join in religious processions, but appears to be rooted in some ancient resistance never completely overcome, to Christianity itself. It is unlucky to see a priest, or to mention the name of God unless coupled with an obscenity, and fatal, indeed, to the day’s luck with the line or nets to overhear Christian prayer. One of my fisherman friends told me that his daughter, whom he had been obliged to send to the nuns to be taught her three r’s, took advantage of this fear of his, to blackmail him into taking her fishing. If he refused, all she had to do was to threaten him with the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer for him was a malefic incantation of terrible power which would bring the dolphins to ruin his nets.

‘And then of course,’ Vicente said, ‘you’ll have heard of the Inquisition. They used it to try to get the better of us. All this happened somewhat before my time, fifty or sixty years ago. It was our wives they were after. Every priest’s house had a hole dug in it with iron hooks on the sides and a trap door. If they took a fancy to your wife they ordered you to take her to their house for some reason or other, and you can be sure that it wasn’t many minutes after you got there, before the priest had your wife, and you were down the hole.’

Ses Parres bar, dancing and cabaret, functioned on both Saturday and Sunday nights. The floor show was innocent entertainment, intended to provide something typical for foreign visitors, and usually consisted of a group of local artists performing Ibizan dances. However unexciting this might have been for the peasants in the audience it at least did nothing to
dissatisfy them or endanger their cultural integrity by potentially corruptive spectacles from the outside world. In these dances of Ibiza – so unlike the bouncing jotas and sardanas of the neighbouring regions of Spain – anything that is not Moorish is pre-Moorish, or perhaps even Carthaginian, in origin. The woman twists, turns, advances, recedes, eyes cast down with resolute unconcern, body uncompromisingly stiff, feet twinkling invisibly beneath the sweeping skirt. The effect is that of an oriental doll moved by an exceptionally smooth clockwork mechanism. Her partner is more active. He postures at a distance, arms raised, hands clacking castanets, and swoops deferentially to the rhythm of flute and drum. Sometimes the rhythmic beat may be accentuated by striking a suspended sword. Occasionally the entertainers at Ses Parres are persuaded to sing those strange songs – the
caramelles
– each line of which ends in a sobbing, throaty ululation. The caramelles are properly sung before the altar on high feast days, and nobody knows anything about them, except that there is nothing to be heard like them anywhere in the world, and that their antiquity is so great that they no longer sound like music even to the most imaginative ear.

Ibiza’s un-European flavour is, simply enough, the product of the island’s geographical position, of which its history has been almost the automatic consequence. It is on the nearest sea route between Spain and the two conquering North African civilisations of the past – those of Carthage and of the Moors. It was taken and colonised by Carthage only 170 years after the foundation of the mother city herself in 654
BC
. For the Moors it was the indispensable halfway port of call – in the days when a fair proportion of galleys never reached their destination – between Algiers and Valencia, the richest city of Moorish Spain. These were the two civilising influences in the island’s early history and the thousand years in between were full of the pillagings of Dark Age marauders: Vandals, Byzantines, Franks, Vikings and Normans. In 1114 Ibiza was considered by Pope Pascual II a sufficiently painful thorn in the Christian side to justify the organisation of a minor crusade in which five hundred ships were necessary to carry the loot-hungry adventurers normally employed on such expeditions. But
after Ibiza’s final recapture from the Moors in 1235 its strategic importance was at an end. It was no more than a remote and inaccessible island, with no natural wealth to attract Spanish settlers, and soon deteriorated into a hideout for corsairs, pillaged indiscriminately by Christians and Arabs. Within a few years of the recapture, the population had declined to five hundred families.

 Much of the island’s distinctive style, and those special and subtle flavourings which differentiate it from the other Balearic islands, and also from the adjacent mainland, are likely to have been formed in the two breathing spaces of peace and plenty of antiquity. The Carthaginians taught the natives almost all they knew about agriculture, including such basic Mediterranean techniques as how to grow olives. They also instructed them in the making of garum, the most famous of Carthaginian dishes, which consisted of the entrails of the tunny fish beaten up with eggs, cooked in brine and left for several months to soak in wine and oil – a modern version of which,
estofat del buche del pescado
(tunny-fish stomach stew) is still prepared. They struck enormous quantities of coins bearing the effigy of their god Eshmun, shown as a bearded, dancing dwarf, and built cave temples for the worship of Tanit, the Carthaginian Venus, who in spite of her appearance, which in her statuettes is as sensible as a Dutch barmaid’s, had a sinister reputation for demanding young children as sacrifices in time of national stress. The Carthaginians were extremely systematic in the disposal of their dead, which they buried in vast necropolises, as standardised in all their details as a modern block of flats. Although most of these must have been ransacked in the past, a few still remain intact, and one or two, with their inevitable yield of ivory charms, figurines and lachrimatories, are opened every year.

During and after the Carthaginian period, the island manufactured and exported great quantities of amphorae. The Ibizan product was esteemed throughout Europe for certain magical properties attributed to the clay from which it was made, including the talismanic power of driving away snakes. Many galleys laden with them foundered in storms when outward bound along the island’s excessively rocky coast, and a
minor modern industry has arisen as a result of the large number of amphorae which have been salvaged intact in the fishermen’s nets. These amphorae fetch between 500 and 1000 pesetas apiece in Ibiza, according to their size, shape, and the secondary interest of the marine encrustations with which they are covered. The industry consists in ‘improving’ genuine amphorae with interesting arrangements of shells, which are cemented in position – it took me several hours to remove those that had been stuck on a wonderful 2600-year-old pot I bought – and submerging modern amphorae in the sea until enough molluscs have attacked them to deceive the would-be buyer of a genuine antique.

The Arab contribution to the Ibizan scene is obvious and dominant. It persists in the names of all the most essential things of life – which tend to be prefixed with the Arabic definite article ‘
Al
’; in the cunning systems of irrigation with which the Ibizan farmer sends water coursing in geometrical patterns all over his fields; in the semi-seclusion of the women; and above all in the architecture. An Ibizan farmhouse, which is as Moorish-looking as its counterpart in the Atlas mountains, is in its simplest form a hollow cube, illuminated only by its door. With the family’s growth in size and prosperity, more cubes and rhomboid shapes are added, apparently haphazardly, although the final grouping of stark geometrical forms is always harmonious, and perfectly suited to its natural setting.

In recent years poor communications and austere standards of comfort on the island have fostered Ibiza’s individuality. An air service was inaugurated in 1958, but when I was there the most direct route from Spain was by a grossly overcrowded ship sailing once weekly in winter and twice weekly in summer from Barcelona. It required long foresight and a fair amount of luck to obtain a passage on this; sailing times were sometimes changed without notice, and in my experience letters to the Compania Transmediterranea, who are the owners, were rarely answered. One’s best hope of getting to Ibiza in the summer season was to arrive in Barcelona on the day previous to sailing, and to be ready to queue at the company’s office soon after dawn on the following morning. The sea
crossing still takes all night, and conditions probably parallel those of a pilgrim ship plying between Somaliland and the port of Jeddah. Decks are packed with the recumbent but restless forms of passengers doing their best to doze off under the harsh glare of lights, installed with the intention of reducing contacts between the sexes to their most impersonal level. This concern for strict morality gives the ships of the Compania Transmediterranea, as they pass in the night, an appearance of gaiety that is deceptive.

Island transport is by buses of a design not entirely free from the influence of the horse-drawn vehicle, by taxis which until recently were impelled by what looked like kitchen stoves fixed to their backs, and by spruce-looking farm-carts without much springing. The choicest spots in the island are only to be reached on foot, or with the aid of a bicycle, which has to be carried across flowery ravines. Once, when I was temporarily interested in spear-fishing, I asked a Spanish friend on the mainland where to go with a reasonable chance of seeing that splendid Mediterranean fish, the mero, which has practically disappeared from the coastal waters of France, Spain and Italy. He said, ‘That’s easy enough. All you do is to look out for a place without things like running water and electric light … a dump with rotten hotels, where no one in his right mind wants to go.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Ibiza,’ he said. ‘That’s it. That’s the place you’re looking for.’

The description was most exaggerated and unjust. You can find a bleak, clean room in a
fonda
anywhere in the island, and if it happens to be in Ibiza town itself, or in San Antonio or Santa Eulalia, there may be a piped water supply, and almost certainly a small, naked electric bulb that will gleam fitfully through most of the hours of darkness. What can you expect for thirty pesetas a day, including two adequate – often classical – Mediterranean meals? Ibiza is very cheap. (I know of people who still pay rents, fixed in the early years of last century, of one peseta a month, for their houses.) Resourceful explorers have found that by taking a room only, at five pesetas a day, and buying their food in the market, they can live for a third of this sum. The standard price for drinks in backstreet bars – whether beer or brandy – is two pesetas, as compared to five
pesetas in Barcelona. The strong wines of Valencia and of Tarragona are sold at six pesetas a litre. The proper drink, though, of Ibiza, is suisse – pronounced as if the final ‘e’ were accented. This is absinth mixed with lemon juice, and costs one peseta a glass. At the
colmado
of San Carlos – a village once famous for excluding as ‘foreigners’ all persons not born in the village – you can see the customers on Sundays line up, a glass of suisse in hand, to receive an injection of vitamin B in the left arm, administered by the proprietress, Anita. The injection costs five pesetas, and is supposed to ensure success in all undertakings, especially those of the heart, during the ensuing week. These economic realities make Ibiza the paradise of those modern remittance men, the freelance writer who sees two or three of his pieces in print a year, and the painter who sells a canvas once in a blue moon.

Every year the Spanish police decide that they must cut down on the floating population of escapists, who regard the island as a slightly more accessible Tahiti, and a purge takes place. Deportation is usually carried out on grounds of moral insufficiency. A fair amount of laxness in the private life is tolerated in Spain so long as an outward serenity of deportment is maintained. A departure from this, whether it be a matter of habitual drunkenness in public places, or brawling, or obvious sexual nonconformity, becomes officially ‘
un escándalo publico
’, and the perpetrator thereof receives a visit from the Commisario de Policia, who if it is a lady who is concerned will kiss her hand, before begging her to depart on the next boat. Annually, Ibiza’s bohemian plant is pruned back to the roots, and with each new season it produces a fresh crop. Most of these Gauguins are both harmless and picturesque. In 1955 the beard came in again and was adopted by all nationalities except the Spanish. It was no longer the furious growth inherited from naval service but a sensitive and downy halo worn on, or under, the chin in true
fin de siècle
style. The female of the species looked as if she might have woven her own clothes.