The Breaking Point (24 page)

Even now, when so much has been changed, the tourist leaves Ronda with regret and nostalgia. He sips his last Ritzo - the sweet insidious liqueur of the country - he smells his last Rovlvula flower, that heady blossom whose golden petals cover the streets in late summer, he waves his hand for the last time to a bronzed figure bathing in the Rondaquiver; and he is standing in the impersonal lounge of the airport, soon to be heading east or west, back to work, to the cause, to the bettering of the lives of his fellow-creatures, away from the land of unfulfilled desire, away from Ronda.

Perhaps the most poignant thing about the capital today - apart from the palace, which, as I have said, is now a museum - is the one remaining member of the reigning family. They still call her the Archduchess. For a reason which will be later revealed, they did not butcher her with her brother. The Archduchess holds the secret of eternal youth - the only member of the archducal family, other than the reigning Archduke, ever to have done so. Her brother told her the formula before they came to kill him. She has never revealed it, and she will carry the secret with her to the grave.They tried everything, of course: imprisonment, torture, exile, truth-revealing drugs and brain-washing; but nothing would make her give to the world the secret of the elixir of youth.

The Archduchess must be over eighty, and she has not been well for some months. Doctors say that her ordeal can hardly last another winter. She comes of rare stock, though, and she may yet defeat the pessimists. She is still the most beautiful girl in the whole Republic, and I use the word girl advisedly, because, in spite of her years, the Archduchess
is
still a girl, in appearance and in ways.The golden hair, the liquid eyes, the grace of manner that fascinated so many of her contemporaries, now dead - murdered, most of them, in the Night of the Big Knives - have not altered. She still dances to the old folk-tunes, if you throw her a rondip (which is a coin about the value of one dollar). But to those of us who remember her in her prime, who remember her popularity among the people - I would go so far as to say her adulation by them - her patronage of the arts, her great romance with her cousin Count Anton, which the growing revolutionary feeling in the country denied . . . to those of us who remember these things, the sight of the Archduchess Paula of Ronda dancing for her supper and for the amusement of the tourists brings a feeling of nausea, a constriction of the heart. It was not so once. We remember the days of the balcony, and the airy-mice.

So . . . if it would not bore you too much - and remember, the details are not in the modern history books of the country that students are rewriting for the instruction of future generations - I will tell you, as briefly as I can, how the last principality in Europe fell, how Ronda became a republic, and how the first feelings of unrest stirred the people, partly through misunderstanding of this same Archduchess who, fallen from favour, you can now see dipping and bobbing in the palace square.

I propose to skip Rondese history. The original peoples came by sea from Crete and overland from Gaul, and later there was a mixture of Romany blood. Then, as you have heard, during the early part of the fourteenth century the flooding of the Rondaquiver killed off at least three-quarters of the inhabitants. The first Archduke restored order, rebuilt the capital, saw to the planting of the crops and the tending of the vines - in short, gave back to the stricken people the desire to live.

In this self-imposed mission he was largely helped by the spring waters, which, even if the Archduke was the only one to hold the secret of how they could be made to give eternal youth, did in themselves contain valuable properties. They gave, to whosoever drank them, that sense of well-being on waking which a child has before puberty; or perhaps it would be more correct to say the renewal of wonder. A child who fears neither parent nor instructor has but one desire when he opens his eyes, and that is to leave his bed and run out with bare feet under the sun. Then alone his dream can be recaptured, for the day that has dawned has dawned for him. The waters of Ronda gave this renewal.

It was by no means an illusion, as sceptics have sometimes maintained. Modern scientists know that the chemical properties release certain substances in the endocrine glands, which is why the bottling of the waters now constitutes the main industry of Ronda. The United States buys over eighty per cent of the total annual output. Originally, though, since the industry was in the hands of the Archduke, the waters were bottled privately, and sold only to those visitors who crossed the borders into the country. The wastage must have been enormous, if you consider the source, flowing as it did from the cave nine thousand feet up on the Ronderhof and cascading in falls down the mountain-side. All that energy, which might have been tapped and pumped into the veins of tired Americans, merely tumbled over bare rocks into the air and down to the valleys below, where it nourished the already rich earth and produced the golden Rovlvula flower.

The people of Ronda, of course, drank the waters with their mother’s milk: hence their beauty, and their
joie de vivre
, and the gaiety which made them incapable of ill-feeling or ambition. That, I have always understood from the historians, was the essence of the Rondese character - contentment, lack of ambition. Why, asked Oldo, Ronda’s famous poet, why kill, when we are lovers? Why weep, when we are glad? And why indeed should the Rondese cross the Ronderhof to countries where there was sickness and plague, poverty and war, or sail down the Rondaquiver to lands where the people were herded together in slums and tenements, each man imbued with the determination to do better than his neighbour?

It did not make sense to the Rondese. They had had their flood. Their ancestors had perished. One day perhaps the Rondaquiver would rise and overwhelm them again, but until that day came let them live and dance and dream. Let them spear the leaping fish in the Rondaquiver, let them jump the waters of the Ronderhof, let them gather the golden Rovlvula flowers and tread the petals and the vines, harvest the grain, tend the cattle and the sheep, cherished and watched over by the prince of eternal youth, the prince who passed and was born again.This is roughly what Oldo said, but Rondese translates with difficulty, for the whole idiom is so different from that of any other European language.

Life in Ronda, therefore, changed little during the centuries after the flood. Archduke succeeded Archduke, and no one ever knew the age of the ruler or of his heir apparent. Rumour would go about that the monarch was ailing or had suffered some accident - there was never anything secret about it; the thing happened and was accepted - and then the proclamation was fastened to the palace gates and it would be learnt that the Archduke had died and that the Archduke lived again. It could be called religion. Theosophists argue that it
was
religion, that the Archduke symbolized spring. Whatever it was, religion or working tradition, it suited the Rondese. They liked to think of their monarch handing on the secret of eternal youth to his successor, and they liked his blond beauty, and his white uniform, and the shining scabbards of the palace guards.

The monarch did not interfere with their pleasures, or indeed with their lives at all. As long as the land was tilled, and the harvest gathered, and enough food grown to feed the people - after all, their wants were few, with fish and fowl and vegetables and fruit, and the wine and liqueur from the vines - no laws needed to be passed. The marriage law was so self-evident that no one ever dreamt of breaking it. Who would want to marry a woman who was not Rondese? And what woman would consent to hold a child in her arms that might be born with the pudgy limbs and flabby skin of some stranger over the border?

It will be argued that the Rondese intermarried, that a small country the size of Cornwall was populated by people who were all related. This cannot be denied. It was indeed obvious to those who knew Ronda well in old days that, though nothing was said, many brothers paired with many sisters. Physically, the result appeared beneficial, mentally it did no harm. There were very few idiot children born in Ronda. It was this intermarrying, though, which, according to historians, made for lack of ambition amongst the Rondese, their rather lazy contentment and their disinclination for war.

Why fight, as Oldo said, when we want for nothing? Why steal, when my purse is full? Why ravish a stranger, when my sister is my bride? No doubt these sentiments could be described as shocking, and many tourists were shocked, when they came to a country so flowing with sensuous charm, so empty of moral principle; but however carping, however outraged, in the end the tourist was won. He could not stand up to beauty. Argument fell away, and by the time his holiday was over the tourist who had partaken of the spring waters was himself a proselyte, having discovered in Ronda an attitude to living that was both selfless and hedonistic, with mind and body in perfect harmony.

Here lay the tragedy. Western man is so constituted that he cannot abide contentment. It is the unforgivable sin. He must forever strive towards some unseen goal, whether it be material comfort, a greater and purer God, or some weapon that will make him master of the universe. As he becomes more conscious he becomes more restless, more grasping, forever finding fault with the warm dust from which he sprang and to which he must return, forever desirous of improving and so enslaving his fellow-men. It was this poison of discontent that finally infiltrated to Ronda, bred, alas, by contact with the outside world, and nurtured to maturity by the two revolutionary leaders, Markoi and Grandos.

You ask what made them revolutionaries? Other Rondese had crossed the borders and returned again unharmed. What was so special about Markoi and Grandos that made them wish to destroy the Ronda which had remained virtually unchanged for seven centuries?

The explanation is simple. Markoi, like Oedipus, was born lame, with a twisted foot: therefore he had a grudge against his parents. They had brought into the world a maimed being, and he could not forgive them for not having made him beautiful. The child who cannot forgive his parents cannot forgive the country that cradled him, and Markoi grew up with the desire to lame his country, even as he himself was lame. Grandos was born greedy. It has been said that he was not of pure blood, and that his mother, in a moment best forgotten, had coupled with some stranger from beyond the seas, who afterwards boasted of his conquest.Whether true or not, Grandos inherited an acquisitive nature and a quick intelligence. At school - there were never any distinctions in education, all receiving the same tuition except the reigning family - Grandos was always first in his class. He often knew an answer before his teacher. This made him conceited. The boy who knows more than his master knows more than his prince, and so eventually feels himself superior to the society into which he has been born.

The two boys became friends. Together they crossed the border and travelled in Europe. They returned, after six months, with the seed of discontent, unconscious hitherto, ripened and ready to break surface. Grandos went into the fishing industry and, being intelligent, made the discovery that the fish of the Rondaquiver - the staple diet of the Rondese, and so delectable to the connoisseur - could be used in other ways. The backbone, when split, was so curved that it was the exact shape of a woman’s breast supporter, and the oil of the fish, if smoothed into a paste and scented with the Rovlvula flower, made a beauty cream that would nourish the toughest and oldest of complexions.

Grandos started an export business, sending his products all over the western world, and was soon the richest man in Ronda. His own countrywomen, who hitherto had never used a breast supporter or a beauty cream in their lives, found themselves beguiled by the advertisements that he inserted in the newspapers, and began to wonder whether they would not increase their happiness by making use of his products.

Markoi did not go into industry. Despising his parents’ vineyard, he became a journalist, and was soon appointed editor of the
Ronda News
. This had originally been a news sheet giving the events of the day and the particulars of Rondese agriculture or trade, with an art supplement three times a week. It was the custom to read the news during the midday siesta, whether in the countryside or in the cafés. Markoi changed all this.The news was still given, but with a subtle slant, a mockery at the old-established customs such as treading the vines (this was a hit at his parents, of course), and spearing the fish (this to help Grandos, because spearing injured the fish’s backbone and so harmed the export business), and gathering the Rovlvula flower (another piece of indirect assistance to Grandos, whose beauty paste demanded the crushed heart of the flower, which meant tearing the golden Rovlvula to pieces). Markoi encouraged the tearing of the flower because he liked to see anything beautiful destroyed, and because it hurt the feelings of the older people of Ronda, whose favourite springtime custom had been the flower gathering and the decorating of home and capital and palace with the fragrant blossoms. This artless enjoyment was something that Markoi could not bear, and he was determined to put an end to it, together with the other customs he disliked. Grandos was his ally not because he himself felt any sort of hatred towards the customs or traditions of Ronda, but because in destroying them he furthered his export trade, and therefore became richer and more powerful than his neighbours.

Little by little the young Rondese were indoctrinated with the new values which they read about every day. The appearance of the newspaper was cunningly timed as well. It was no longer issued at midday, to be browsed over and then forgotten during the siesta, but was sold on the palace square and in the villages at sundown, that moment before dusk when the Rondese sips his Ritzo and is therefore more susceptible, more easily seduced. The effect was marked. The youthful Rondese, who until now had thought of little else but enjoying the two most perfect seasons of the year, the winter snows and the spring verdure, and making love through both, began to question their upbringing.