Europe @ 2.4 km/h (43 page)

In 2006 Andorra played host to the Small Countries Olympics, and the fact that this Pyrenean principality was the fifth smallest of the seven participants
³⁴
has not changed Ms Jordana’s well-rehearsed rodomontade that bills her homeland as ‘the biggest of the small countries’. It is at this point in her spiel that questionable, or just plain wrong, statements pour forth — claims no one appears ever to have challenged. ‘We are the oldest democracy in Europe,’ she asserts, which would certainly be news to the Icelanders, not to mention the Greeks. When I pipe up about this, she bristles. Roser Jordana has delivered this monologue countless times. There can be no dispute.

Gabija Luneviciute interrupts Ms Jordana to mention that the hirsute Albinas’s camera has been malfunctioning for the past three minutes and none of her monologue has been captured on film ‘so we’ll have to do it all again’. I have the distinct impression she wants to stamp her sensible shoes on the 18th-century floorboards at this point. Instead, she sneaks a look at her watch and says to the presenter, ‘Cameramen are a pain in the neck.’ Clearly expecting some sisterly sympathy for this view, instead she is met with the stoniest of stares.

‘Well, don’t you think Monsieur Sarkozy is wonderful?’ she asks in a forced attempt at breezy conversation. You can see Ms Luneviciute’s lips move, but this has nothing to do with Sarkozy. She is rehearsing her next question. Ms Jordana gushes heedlessly on, perhaps convinced a well-delivered recitation can stand in for a discussion any day of the week.

‘He’s a little dictator, that is for sure,’ she declares. ‘But I love Napoleon, so I love Sarkozy. France needs order, and he is going to be the one to bring it to them.’

At last comes word that the camera is working.
La Tourisma
preens a little, and awaits her cue. Uh-oh, says Albinas, it’s playing up again. Patience please. Ms Jordana’s feet are killing her. Taking the weight off them, she utters a most revealing line, ‘Now I am sitting in the chair of a counsellor!’ The lady would seem to have ambitions. But something is wrong with this picture, even apart from the camera trouble, and Ms Jordana knows just what it is. Bouncing up from the seat on our left, she shifts to the more comfortable-looking one opposite, forcing Albinas to move his tripod. ‘Now I am in the prime minister’s place.’

False starts over, she runs through her spiel with just as much polish as before, almost verbatim, and has just repeated the canard about Andorra being Europe’s oldest democracy when her mobile phone starts to play
Blue Danube
. Ms Jordana tut-tuts at the distraction but insists she cannot stay because she has a 1 pm appointment. Ms Luneviciute now challenges her interviewee, on film, about her assertion of Andorra’s democratic pre-eminence. The directrix quivers but cannot help rising to the bait. ‘Not only is it the oldest in Europe,’ she now avers, ‘in fact, in the world, I would say.’

Downtown later in the afternoon I run into the dynamo on her way to the office and she invites me in for a chat. It would be churlish to say no to one of the most fascinating characters met on this trip. I begin by asking whether Andorra’s is the smallest parliamentary chamber in the world. ‘Monaco’s is very small,’ she parries, and then comes the thrust. ‘Of all the small countries, we are the largest.’

Speak of the refugee influx during the Spanish Civil War and you’ve pushed her nostalgia button. ‘Franco was very good to Andorra,’ she recalls, eyes misting over at the thought of the good old days. ‘Their children have grown up here. All these people are here, living their lives. We saved their lives, you know.’

Democracy has not exactly captured her heart. ‘People of my generation find it hard to see any advantage. I lived in the time when there was really one power. In the old days you could just chat informally with someone and things would get done.’

One point still worries me. I want to know, How long will those of Andorran extraction put up with being a statistical minority in their own country? Ms Jordana’s reply again demonstrates why she will probably never win a diplomatic posting. ‘I think Andorra needs immigration, but we are strictly selective. I don’t want to compare humans to animals. But if we have immigrants we have to know how many people we can absorb — and some of them are just like animals, in fact worse than animals.’ It’s not like the old days, of course, when animals were stabled in the parliament, but Ms Jordana is too polite to mention that.

In the National Library today I looked up the newspapers for March 1993. The voting statistics therein were revealing. While the Constitution gained 74 per cent approval nationally, the highest yes vote was in the national capital (78.5 per cent), with the lowest (64 per cent) in the country town of Ordino.
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Which only goes to show that rural conservatism is a fact of life in mini-states just as much as it is in Australia, China or the United States.

This evening, mooching through la Vella, I notice something different about Andorra. Here, in any given, or even potential, encounter between vehicle and pedestrian — or vehicle and wheelchair, come to that — the vehicle stops and the less powerful entity takes precedence. On the rare occasion someone even threatens to reverse this order — as when a young motorcyclist was speeding along this evening oblivious, though there was scarcely any risk of collision — a police officer commands the potential offender to halt (which this one did, quite sheepishly) simply by glaring at him. What a wonderfully civilised country, I thought. Where but in Andorra …?

1273-1277 km

Where but in Andorra can you ‘walk in’ off the street and get yourself a ten-minute interview spot on national radio? This morning I’m in the studio at 9.30 for a pre-recorded interview with Montse Buil, an enthusiastic young FM station announcer who conducts the interview in English for translation into Catalan.

By bus today to Ordino, that heartland of conservatism all of 8 km away. Once there I am visited by an epiphany. Imagination tells me this is what Tibet in summer must be like. In the high Pyrenees it’s nearly winter, and a thermometer reads 21 ºC. I am on a public balcony in this attractive hamlet drinking in the view of a sunlit valley. In it the prettiest trees you have ever seen shine golden and orange. Their autumn tints contrast with the dark green of mountain firs carpeting the saddles like the soft down of moss. The gentlest zephyr twirls ventilation ducts like mandalas on the sloping roofs of multi-storey buildings. The perfection, the rightness, are so timeless that the only reason
not
to wish you could go to heaven is the realisation that you’re already there.

For a small country, albeit one of the bigger smalls, Andorra has an eclectic mix of museums. One highlights tobacco; another perfume; a third bicycles; a fourth, now merely the National Museum, was once the Museum of Stuffed Animals — and there are others.
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But, for sheer eccentricity, none can compare with the one I visit today.

Ordino’s Museu de la Miniatura is a one-man show … Nikolai Siadristyi, a Kiev-born 70-year-old, is claimed as the founder of a totally new art form, micro-miniaturism. It strikes me as incontrovertible that his artworks must be ‘the most diminutive objects ever made by the hand of Man’. An adventurous Andorran family — the Famille Toni Zorzano Riera — travelling in Ukraine in the 1970s ‘discovered’ the artist and his work.

As in other museums, works here hang on the walls but, being invisible to the naked eye, they are positioned behind microscopes. By raising myself, palms on top of my tyres, I can see them as easily as anybody. The first of Siadristyi’s marvels I behold is a pure-gold model of a Roman chariot constructed within the eye of a normal-sized needle. The bowstring on the charioteer’s arrow, says an explanatory caption, ‘is 400 times finer than a human hair’.
The
Peace of the Unwise
is a human hair 3 mm long with the word ‘PEACE’ engraved along it in five languages. The artist’s most celebrated work,
The Flea with Horseshoes
, is described as ‘a golden life-sized flea with golden horseshoes’ inspired by the Russian folk tale of a craftsman who placed golden horseshoes on a flea as a present to the tsar.

Andorra often seems like a postcard brought to life. So what is wrong with this picture? Something about the beauty of the afternoon is troubling me all the way back to Andorra la Vella. By the time the bus drops me in the city centre I know what it is. No snow, and it’s almost winter. Tonight I drop into a ski shop on the Avinguda de Meritxell. The store manager, David, confirms my suspicion. ‘We are really worried whether we’re going to survive the season. We won’t if it’s like last year. We had just a little snow in December, and no falls in the New Year until the middle of February.’ Tourism — mostly in the ski season — has traditionally been Andorra’s top money-spinner, to which even shopping comes second. Global warming threatens the whole basis of Andorra’s prosperity.

1279 km

In the minibus on the way back to Toulouse I discovered that one of my fellow passengers was an English corporate headhunter, Philip Price, a resident of Andorra for the past five years. As we headed back into France amid striking landscapes, Philip unfolded an equally dramatic scenario. The country’s very existence would be under threat, he said, if the next two winters were as warm as last year’s. Confirming the ski-shop manager’s gloomy account, he pointed out, ‘The Pyrenees are not as high as the Swiss Alps … They can have all the snow cannons they like, but if there are no natural falls dedicated skiers will stay away in droves. If that happens — and with global warming it’s on the cards — it will be catastrophic for Andorra.’