Iberia (91 page)

He suggested that when the turnover came I forget Madrid and
Barcelona, for they would provide only flashy headlines. ‘Keep
your eye on what happens in Andalucía, for that will be the
powder keg. If it can be controlled, all will be controlled.’

 

I asked, ‘But haven’t the more durable spirits gone off to
Germany and Barcelona?’

 

‘They have. That’s why the powers in control down there have
never tried to halt emigration. They want the bolder men to get
out. But conditions are so poor that even the not-so-bold may
feel they have to do something. Watch Andalucía.’

 

At Guadix, I had faced two major decisions and with a lack of
courage had in each case chosen the easier way out. Repeatedly I
had been told, ‘You cannot understand modern Spain unless you
look into the Gibraltar Question. And you must see what’s
happening in Torremolinos.’ Had I intended doing either, my
last chance would have been to head south at Guadix, but I
ignored the turnoff and continued due east. Concerning the
Gibraltar Question, which monopolized Spanish newspapers
during my last three visits, I did not feel qualified to judge. In
1704 the English had occupied the rock during a war in which
Spain performed poorly. On July 13, 1713, a provision of the
Treaty of Utrecht confirmed English possession. Since then the
promontory had constituted a key link in the life line that bound
England to Egypt, India and Australia. The Treaty of Utrecht
contained many provisions, two of which England had apparently
broken during the years when Spain was in no condition to
challenge her: According to the treaty, England was allowed to
occupy only the area immediately adjacent to the rock and was
obligated to respect a demilitarized zone established between
English and Spanish holdings, which was easy to comply with in
an age of ships, but which could not be respected in an age of
aviation when British forces stationed at Gibraltar required
landing fields that could be built only in the demilitarized zone;
in this respect the Treaty of Utrecht was unquestionably violated.
Out of respect for Spanish sensibilities, England also undertook
never to bring into Gibraltar any Jews or Muslims, but during
the years of indolence she had allowed several Jews to take up
residence and many Muslims, and had thus once more violated
the treaty.

 

It was interesting to see how Spain enlisted support from jurists
in all parts of the world, especially Latin America, to condemn
England for having unilaterally abrogated a treaty 253 years old;
but in addition to this legalistic approach there was the more
persuasive one that colonialism as represented by England’s
holding on to Gibraltar when Spain wanted it back was outmoded.
Again a storm of support was whipped up in the Latin countries,
and barely a day went by without my reading in the papers some
statement from a dignitary in Lima or Caracas condemning Great
Britain as a colonial tyrant. This argument was somewhat blunted
by the fact that Spain herself held tightly to a chain of colonies in
Africa, and I was often amazed at the prospect of Spain’s
lambasting Great Britain for doing only what Spain was doing;
but just before I left the peninsula for the last time, the Spanish
government cut that moral Gordian Knot: ‘We will give all our
colonies self-government as soon as they are ready for it.’

 

This question of self-government is a tricky one, because if a
plebiscite were held in Gibraltar, which the Spanish often call El
Peñon (the Large Rock), there is good reason to believe that at
least seventy percent of the residents would elect to remain under
some kind of British rule. To the Spanish this is an infuriating
statistic, but I never felt that it was determinative. In the long run
Gibraltar ought to be Spanish and to keep it in any other status
is anachronistic. I suppose that most sensible Britons feel the same
way and that in time some kind of modus vivendi will be worked
out, perhaps fifteen or twenty years hence, when tempers have
cooled a bit. In the meantime, two factors operate to keep Spain
from pressing the matter as diligently as she seems entitled to.
First, an open breach with Great Britain would necessitate an
interruption of the profitable sherry trade with London, which
would quickly throw Andalucía into bankruptcy. Second, Spain
as a newly baptized tourist country could not afford a belligerency
which would frighten away even one season’s flow of tourist
income. As a matter of fact, I thought that both Spain and Great
Britain were behaving well. One day the Spanish press, in
obedience to government orders, stirred up such a frenzy of attack
against London that minor anti-British riots broke out in several
cities, with the stoning of British automobiles and the menacing
of British consulates. Later I learned that the Spanish government
had been frightened by the implications, and during the next
week the press carried no more inflammatory nonsense. Instead
there was a warm article about England’s queen, Isabel II, and a
laudatory review of a London football team.

 

(When the plebiscite was held, on September 10, 1967, those
living in Gibraltar voted as follows:

 

Citizens eligible to vote
12,672

 

Number who actually voted
12,247

 

Spoiled ballots
65

 

Number preferring to return to Spain
44

 

Number preferring staying with Great Britain
12,138

 

Percentage favoring Great Britain
99.6)

 

The Gibraltar Question has produced an accidental side effect
that is unfortunate. Spain is one of the few nations in the world
which has refused to recognize the State of Israel. Three reasons
have been given: the government’s reluctance to exacerbate
Muslim feeling since Spain’s colonies contain mostly Muslim
inhabitants; the understandable desire of a Catholic country to
have the holy city of Jerusalem governed by an international
commission to which the Pope would appoint a large proportion
of the representatives, rather than to have it as it long was, half
in Muslim hands, half in Jewish; and the inconsistency that would
result if Spain were to recognize a Jewish state while invoking
against England the anti-Jewish terms of the Treaty of Utrecht. I
suppose the last reason is the operative one. It is ironic that Spain
should refuse this gesture to the Jews, because Generalísimo
Franco is highly regarded by Jews; during the worst days of World
War II, when pressures from Hitler were at their heaviest, Franco
refused to issue anti-Jewish edicts and instead provided a
sanctuary, never violated, for Jews who managed to make it to
Spain. Many thousands of Jews owe their lives to Franco, and this
is not forgotten.

 

On the other hand, it is not uncommon to find in unexpected
quarters stubborn anti-Jewish propaganda. For example, Agustín
Serrano de Haro’s
Yo soy español
(I am a Spaniard), a text in
primary history, was written by a government inspector of primary
education, endorsed by Church and lay authorities, and widely
used since publication in 1944. One of its chapters dealt with still
another case of supposed ritual murder by Jews of a Christian
child, this time seven-year-old Domingo del Val de Zaragoza,
who in the thirteenth century was supposed to have been crucified,
thus attaining local sainthood. Serrano’s inflammatory text was
accompanied by three horrendous illustrations, the last of which
showed the hideous Jews catching the child’s blood in goblets.
When I first saw the book the chapter ended with this tag line,
‘So now you know, children, what Jews are like.’ After
disenchantment with Nazi Germany set in, this line was dropped,
and when in the spring of 1967 I saw the twenty-sixth edition of
the text, I found that the whole chapter had been eliminated.

 

As for Torremolinos, I was visited in Pamplona by a delightful
Californian who runs a bar in the beach town, and he said,
‘Michener, you would be false to every canon of good reporting
if you chickened out on Torremolinos. It’s the living most…the
capital de gustibus…the new wave…the perpetual party. It’s
Sweden-on-the-Sand. It’s the Lourdes of LSD. It’s the only spot
in Spain where the Guardia Civil doesn’t run things, and you
must see it.’

 

Several other advisors had recommended Torremolinos, in
somewhat similar phrases; it had become the international capital
of the Mediterranean, superior to Positano, more fun than Nice
and less expensive than either. I heard some great stories about
the goings-on in the marijuana belt, but I judged that here was a
town that merited a younger man than I to record its frivolity,
and with some regret I headed north.

 

Just before we hit the Mediterranean coast we came to Elche,
where we saw a sign saying, ‘See the Dama de Elche,’ and I stopped
quickly at a garage: ‘Has the famous statue of Elche been brought
down here from the Prado?’

 

‘Yes. You can see it in town.’

 

I thought how fine it would be to see this famous work on the
site of its discovery seventy years ago, but when I had parked near
the building where it was on display, a policeman said, ‘Never
heard of it. What is it?’ and I supposed that I was once more in
an area where citizens were unacquainted with their town’s
principal treasure, but in a bookstore the clerk smiled warmly
and said, ‘Señor, what a pity! The great statue was here. For our
two-thousandth birthday. But it’s now back in Madrid.’ I was
disappointed, but she took a paper and drew a map. ‘If you’ve
already seen the statue, why not go out to the farm where it was
discovered? You’d find it most interesting.’

 

So we sought a small country road and traveled through the
once-great date plantations of Elche; in Muslim days there had
been over a million date palms here and their fruit was famous
as far as Egypt. Now the vast plantation has diminished to a mere
fraction of its former size, and many have adduced this as proof
of how Spain suffered when the Moors were expelled. I think a
truer interpretation would be that tastes have changed and that
non-Muslims simply do not eat as many dates; where the palms
used to grow I found almond trees, one of the most poetic of the
fruit family and as gracefully restrained as a solitary guitar playing
at night. While I was marveling at the beauty of the almond trees,
my wife pointed to a spot at which five fields came to a point,
producing something I had not previously seen: growing side by
side were dates, almonds, olives, oranges and pomegranates. As
much as anything I saw in Spain, this curious juxtaposition
demonstrated how rich the Mediterranean littoral had always
been, whether under Roman, Visigoth, Muslim or Spanish rule;
we were in a garden that stretched for hundreds of miles.

 

The farm where the Dama de Elche was found, if indeed she
was a dama, had assembled a small, miserably arranged museum
of artifacts found within its boundaries. In it we found griffons
dating back to 400
B.C.
, lintels from Roman temples, Visigothic
sherds and a wealth of urns, jewelry, lions and mosaic floors. The
very helter-skelter of the place lent it a kind of historical integrity:
this was how things were dug up at such a site; and when we
explored the fields themselves we could see the roots of the
buildings: this had been a temple which at some period had served
as a synagogue and later as a mosque. Elche must have been
enormously wealthy in its great days, for these buildings were
rich; beyond them lay the field where the statue had been found
and here I experienced the same sense of frustration that had
overtaken the scholars who first studied the work. Judging from
the site, the statue could have been lost there as late as Renaissance
times, but if someone had told me, ‘You can see that it might have
been laid down long before the Romans came,’ I would have had
to agree to that too. I think it appropriate that this splendid work
remain a mystery. Man or woman, Iberian or Roman, priest or
warrior, the thing stands nobly by itself, a perpetual challenge to
the imagination.

 

I had heard of Alicante, one of the big seaports on the coast,
and I knew that like all the littoral it had experienced considerable
growth in recent years, so I was not entirely surprised when I saw
its dozens upon dozens of new high-rise apartment houses,
occupied principally by newcomers from Scandinavia and
Germany; but I had never heard of San Juan de Alicante, a trivial
little seaside village four miles to the north. I suppose, looking
back on it, that this was one of the biggest shocks I experienced
in Spain for as we came around a bend in the road following the
sea, I found myself facing a resort settlement which three years
ago had been barren ground and which now sprouted some three
dozen fourteen- and eighteen-story spanking-new apartment
buildings done in the most advanced modern style. They looked
like mushrooms that rise on a forest floor after a storm, and the
storm that called them forth was a mighty one which has swept
the entire Spanish seacoast. From the French border south to
Gibraltar a score of San Juan de Alicantes have risen in the past
five years, and for the remainder of our trip north to Barcelona
we would never be out of sight of this forest of new apartment
buildings…not clusters of two or three but literally hundreds at
a time and many thousands in all. I doubt if there is another area
in the world that even comes close to the explosion that has
overtaken this coast.

 

Who built the apartment houses? Spanish gamblers who have
put together a little capital, borrowed heavily from banks and
sold off their product to tourists before the first floor was finished.
Who owns them now? Mostly Germans, some Swedes, some
Dutch, a good many French. Some entrepreneurs from those
countries buy entire apartment houses, which they rent out by
the season; more often the floors are sold off singly to individual
families on a cooperative basis. In one area of San Juan de Alicante
all signs were in German; in another, French. One has to travel
this coast to appreciate how unimportant to modern Spain are
the English-speaking tourists, for I did not come upon any district
in which the signs were in that language.