BADAJOZ! WHAT QUEER, far-off schoolboy memories that word calls up! The boring classroom and the smug tone of the history master’s voice as he spoke of its sack by Wellington’s troops – the pun in Thomas Hood’s poem, printed in a little red school edition that cost 6d. – the look of the name itself, so absurd in its English pronunciation! Then a year or two later I read in Borrow’s Bible in Spain of how he had crossed the wild heath of brushwood that surrounded the city, listened to the washerwomen singing their songs by the shallow river and fallen in with the gypsies. This fixed it in its permanent lineaments. And now here, after all these years, it actually was! That white town clustering on its hill in the grey evening light was the famous fortress of the Guadiana.
We crossed the river by a low, many-arched bridge – built, so the guide-book informed us, by Herrera, the architect of the Escorial – and climbed by narrow streets to the hotel. It proved to be a well-run, up-to-date place with a lounge and cocktail bar – not in the least in the Borrow tradition. I was told that it exists chiefly to cater for motorists travelling between Spain and Lisbon. We engaged rooms and went out to get a drink.
Badajoz, as a glance told us, has preserved its Moorish plan. Its streets are steep and narrow and few of them can take wheeled traffic. Following one of them, we came out at what was evidently the centre of the town – the Cathedral Square. The crowds amazed us. Up and down the street that traverses it, which, since it runs along the summit of a ridge, is relatively flat, moved a dense pack of middle-class people, talking, laughing, gesticulating. It was the hour of the evening paseo: the girls were in their best frocks: the young men had oiled and smoothed their hair, and so many rays and flashes of eyes and teeth passed between them that one would have said that this was some special feast day. What a contrast this scene of life and gaiety made to the deadness and glumness of La Mancha!
We had a drink at one of the large cafés that faced the cathedral and then joined in the two-way procession that shuffled up and down the narrow street. At a certain point, marked by a rise in the steepness, its character changed: the middle-class promenaders turned back and a procession of working-class people succeeded them. Following this, we came to the market-square, known as the Plaza Alta. This is an oblong enclosure of high, white, arcaded houses, having that reserved and sphinx-like air of houses built in a classical style, and dating, I imagine, from the early seventeenth century. At its farther end it is continued by two rows of lower but extremely massive houses, whose arcades are supported either on short columns or on heavy piers of masonry: these houses, I was told, go back to the thirteenth century. They are by far the most impressive thing in Badajoz, and seen by lamplight, with their thick, white, lime-encrusted walls and cave-like interiors and the towers of the Arab castle rising spectrally behind them, they satisfy all one’s unspoken desires for romance and mystery. This is also the red-light quarter of the town: returning to it later that evening, when the hour of the paseo was over, we found that it had acquired a sinister and malign quality. The brothels, which occupy the Calle de la Encarnación (in English, Street of the Incarnation), had disgorged their occupants, and tawdrily dressed and undressed girls lolled in the archways and exchanged glances with prowling apache types and drunken soldiers. The police withdraw their post from the square at ten o’clock and the narrow lanes that lead off down the hill are unlit. It is not then a place to linger in.
Badajoz viewed by the morning light makes a less exciting impression. One sees then a dull little provincial town with a core of middle-class shopkeepers and officials, a few soldiers, smugglers, cattle-merchants and horse-copers, and a broad fringe of extreme poverty. The cathedral, built in 1258, is a cramped, fortress-like affair, choked up inside by a box-like choir that almost completely fills it. It is so dark that the paintings it contains by Zurbarán and Luis de Morales are invisible.
This Morales, surnamed el Divino, seems to require a word, for he was a native of Badajoz and spent his life here. His dates are c. 1509–84. He was one of the first of the Spanish mannerists and painted devotional pictures of the sort that were later to be so popular, of ecstatic saints and agonised Christs and Madonnas. In his own time he was not much appreciated, in spite of his being the painter of the ascetic and mystical movement that derives from San Pedro de Alcántara and Santa Teresa, because the taste for this kind of expressionistic painting came in later. But recently he has attracted some notice as a clumsy forerunner of El Greco. However no one but an art expert need visit Badajoz to see his work: he was an uneven painter and his best pictures are in Madrid.
From the cathedral we climbed up past the Plaza Alta to the Moorish castle. This is a fine, decaying ruin, crowned like an Edwardian lady with strange ramshackle objects which turn out to be storks’ nests. One elegant octagonal tower dates from the time of Al-Motawakkil, the last king of Badajoz, who was dethroned in 1094 by the Almoravides. But not all the remains are Moorish. Alongside the castle are other buildings of a later date, as well as an open space where the inner city, with the palaces of the Dukes of la Feria, the Archbishop and the Knights of Calatrava, once stood. This space forms today a sort of park: children play here among the crumbling walls and trenches, and soldiers and workmen stare in their incurious, melancholy, Iberian way at the view. For a view there is: the battlements fall away sheer to the river and all around lies the great plain – green, treeless, dotted with white farms, but not a village to break the monotony. The reason for this is that, although today the plain is cultivated, a hundred years ago it was heath.
As we stood looking round us, an elderly man – fierce, grizzled and hoarse-voiced, and wearing a cap that fell low over his watery eyes and a black muffler – came up to us and offered to show us round. We accepted.
‘Few tourists come here nowadays,’ he said, clearing his throat loudly. ‘Very few. The last I spoke to was a Jew from Tangier. He told me, this Jew, that one of his ancestors, a famous man in his time, occupied a house in the Plaza Alta in the fifteenth century. He had come from Tangier to see it and had brought with him the door key which his family had carried away when they were obliged to leave Spain five centuries ago. And what do you think – it fitted.’
I tried to look as if I believed this old chestnut, on which, stretching out his stick towards the War Memorial to the Foreign Legion beside which we were standing and clearing his throat once more, the man began, in the solemn rhythmical tones of an official guide, to describe it.
‘You see here a monument of remarkable – historic – importance. To commence at the bottom, the base, which you see here, is composed of limestone slabs cemented together. It weighs, without the cement, seventeen – and a half tons. This block, which lies upon it, is of red granite and comes from a granite quarry. It weighs five – and a quarter tons. Note that it is all of one piece and that the polishing was done by – special machinery brought here for the purpose. The shaft which stands upon it is of a different granite brought expressly from another quarry. Its weight is seven – and a third tons. Observe the gilt lettering of the inscription, which was executed by – a special process. The ball . . .’
‘And so the English troops climbed up this way to the citadel?’ I asked.
‘What English troops?’
‘The troops of Wellington, when he captured the city from the French in 1812.’
But either the man did not like being interrupted or else the subject was distasteful to him – what business had foreign soldiers doing in his city? – for the answer he gave was inaudible. Then I noticed that he was wearing a metal badge that had on it a cross, a chain and a sheaf of arrows.
‘Is that a medal?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied, his eyes lighting up. ‘It is the badge of the Confraternity of Prisoners. I earned it because I was the first man to be thrown into prison by the Republicans when the army rose on 17 July 1936. Had the relieving troops not arrived just when they did, I should have been shot. Sí, señor. I before anyone. They would have paid me that honour.’
‘Were you a Falangist?’ I asked.
‘All my life I have been a Monarchist,’ he answered proudly. ‘A Monarchist from the feet upwards. When I was in the Civil Guard I was one, and today I am more of that persuasion than ever. I wrote a letter to Franco to tell him so.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He did not answer.’
‘And so you want the King to come back?’
Suddenly all his bitterness poured out of him.
‘Today even the dogs in the streets are wishing that, let alone his old followers. I tell you that things couldn’t be worse here than they are. One can’t live, one can’t eat. Everyone is starving – everyone, that is, except the people who are plundering the country. Never, never, has Spain sunk so low before. And there’s nothing to be done. So long as ese hombre, that man, is at the head of things, there’s no hope. You’re a foreigner – tell me, why don’t the other nations do something to help us?’
And in his hoarse ex-policeman’s voice he went on to explain that while he had to live on ten pesetas a day, the price of potatoes, which were his chief food, had recently been raised by the town council above the market value to benefit their friends. We left him muttering and mumbling under his breath, while the storks and crows and hawks and pigeons, which nest in the ruins, flew in streaks and circles round us.
It is down by the river that the Eastern character of Badajoz strikes one most forcibly. No washerwomen sirens as in Borrow’s time – few people sing in Spain today – but plenty carrying bundles and pitchers on their heads. One does not see this in Andalusia. Many of the poor went barefoot and there were more mules and donkeys than I have seen in any other Spanish city.
The eighteenth-century ramparts are still much as they were when the English redcoats swarmed over them. But another more recent assault interested us more. This was the occasion when, on 14 August 1936, the 16th Company of the 4th Bandera of the Tercio, or Foreign Legion, forced their way into the city by a narrow breach. A notice on the wall recalls their feat and su desposorio con la muerte, ‘their marriage with death’. Out of one company only ten men were left: in all two thousand men of the Tercio were killed within an area of a few yards, and had the Republican municipality not a short time before removed the gateway to give more room for the traffic, the city, which was defended by a strong force of Carabineers and Assault Guards as well as by several regiments of conscripts, could never have been taken at all. As a grizzled sergeant said to me, ‘They would be fighting there still.’
The massacre that followed became famous. All the prisoners who had used their arms – to the number of many thousands – were mown down by machineguns in the Cathedral Square and bullring. Shocking though this is, it seems to me more excusable than many other things that happened during the civil war. The Foreign Legion had taken the ramparts by storm after terrible casualties: they were a corps trained in a neurotic cult of death, and in Africa, where they had been formed to fight against the savage Moors of the Riff, they were not in the habit of giving quarter. And then, during the first year of the civil war, neither side gave quarter. The old, cruel habit of the First Carlist War reasserted itself and all prisoners were shot automatically. What I find more distasteful is that certain English journalists, who knew the truth, denied it. By their determination to prove that all the atrocities that took place were committed by one side, they helped to increase the bitterness and venom of the struggle.
I must now relate a small but characteristic incident that happened to us. On the previous evening, about an hour after our arrival, a slight, dapper young man, with a smile like that conjured up by the studio camera and a sad, hang-dog look about the rest of his person, had come up to us in the hotel and – speaking, he said, as one writer and journalist to another – had offered his services. I asked him why he thought I was a journalist and he replied that his instinct had revealed it to him. I realised that he must have seen the form I had filled in on arrival and that he was therefore in all probability a police spy. Accordingly I answered that I was here merely as a tourist on holiday and, since I happened to be studying the city plan given in Baedeker, asked him if he could tell me the name of the street that the hotel was in.
‘The street . . . ?’ he exclaimed vaguely. ‘The street? But I don’t know the names of any streets here. I have only been in this town a few days – you see, I come from the Canary Islands.’
‘Ah really! Then you are a compatriot of that great novelist, Pérez Galdós.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am. It’s such a pity he’s dead, isn’t it?’
‘But surely,’ I replied, ‘not unnatural, seeing that he was born more than a hundred years ago.’
‘Really . . . a hundred years! Oh, I say!’
And his face went so completely blank that I thought it might vanish altogether. However, I was mistaken. In a moment he was back again and, pulling some newspaper cuttings out of his pocket and holding them up as a sort of talisman, he began to press on me his services as a guide to this town which he had just told me that he did not know. Such stupidity seemed to prove that he could be nothing else but a police agent – one of that super-idiotic tribe of whom Trotsky has drawn so brilliant a picture in the little book he wrote on his Spanish visit. I thanked my fellow-author and left.
Next day, as we were finishing lunch, he came briskly into the dining-room and sat down without being invited at our table. Pulling out again the wad of newspaper cuttings and then a pad, he said that he wanted my name and some particulars about me ‘so that he could write an article on my visit’. Then, when I refused, he began a hard-luck story. His wife was ill and staying at another hotel (as though he were really staying in this one!): his last articles had been badly paid: he could not raise enough to buy their tickets back to Madrid. He needed altogether 150 pesetas – could I lend him the money?
So they underpay their police agents! I thought. The poor devils probably have to work on a commission system. It seemed to me such a pathetically Spanish arrangement that I put my hand in my pocket and gave him a few pesetas. He thanked me effusively and left.
Our visit to the battlefield of Alarcos had pleased us so much that we thought we could not do better than spend the afternoon inspecting the site of another and greater battle, that of Zallaka or Sagrajas, where a Spanish army suffered an even more catastrophic defeat. The story of this battle is so extraordinary and so little known even to readers of Spanish history that perhaps I may be allowed to give it.
The date is 1084. Alfonso VI of Castile had just occupied Toledo and was pressing harder every year on the Arab kingdoms of the south. They had no prospect of resisting him much longer, so, in despair, they decided to appeal for aid to Yusuf ben Taxufin, the Almoravide Emir of Morocco, even though they knew that his coming to Spain must mean their ruin.
These Almoravides were a curious people. Some forty years before this time a camel-riding tribe of the Tuaregs, the veiled Bedouin who live in the Sahara, had been converted to Islam. Led by a certain faqui, or prophet, they set up a military order, known as the Almoravides from the rabidas or frontier castles they garrisoned, with vows that required them to wage perpetual war on unbelievers and to abjure both wine and music. Their progress was rapid: they conquered and converted the black races of the Niger and Senegal and occupied Morocco. Here they founded Marrakesh to be the capital of their empire and in 1084, in answer to the appeals of King Mutamid, the poet king of Seville, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to Algeciras.
The month of September of that year saw the African army assembled at Badajoz, where it was joined by contingents from the principal Arab states of Spain, led by the kings of Seville, Granada and Badajoz. Yusuf, the Almoravide Emir, was in command. He was an old man of seventy, dark, wizened, with a high-pitched voice and a thin goat’s beard. He had been born a pagan and had spent his life among the sand ergs and ashab pastures of the Sahara, and his only food consisted of barley cakes and camels’ flesh. He wore the Tuareg veil that covers the face from the eyes downwards and did nothing without consulting his holy men.
Meanwhile Alfonso had assembled his army, among which were French, Norman and Italian knights, and had marched to meet him. Prudently Yusuf waited till he was far from his base, and then sallied out. The two armies drew up some ten miles beyond the city, on either side of a stream called today the Guerrero, while messengers passed to and fro between them, fixing, as was the custom in those times, the day on which the combat should take place. For three days the armies waited, drinking the muddy water of the same stream, till at dawn on 23 October the Christians, anticipating the hour that had been agreed on, attacked.
On the first charge Yusuf’s line was surprised and thrown into confusion. Alvar Fañez, late the Cid’s lieutenant, routed the Andalusians, and Alfonso’s centre drove the Africans back. Then Yusuf sent his Tuareg camel corps to raid the Christian camp. The smell of the camels terrified the horses and caused them to stampede, so that Alfonso, who had forced his way through to the African rear, halted and turned back. Then in massed formations the African infantry began to press in upon his flanks, while the rolling of the African drums – heard for the first time in Europe – made the air rock and reverberate. The Christian ranks began to break as Yusuf’s guard of four thousand black Senegalese, armed with Indian swords and with shields of hippopotamus skin, drove forward in a compact mass, with drums beating and standards flying, against the Castilian knights. They forced their way to where the king stood and a black man drove his sword through his chain mail and wounded him in the thigh. By this time the whole Christian army was in flight and it was with difficulty that Alfonso’s companions formed a guard round him and got him away: they had a headlong ride through the darkness to Coria, eighty miles distant, before they were safe.
That night Yusuf had the Christian bodies decapitated and with their heads built a high mound. At dawn the muezzins mounted upon it to call the sleeping army to prayer. Then the heads were put into carts and carried to the Muslim cities of Spain and Africa, as had been the custom in Al-Mansur’s day. But Yusuf recrossed the straits to Ceuta, where his son lay sick, and did not follow up his victory. When four years later he returned, it was to subdue, not the Christian kingdoms, but the Arab ones.
The battle of Zallaka was a blessing in disguise for Spain. It led to no new Moorish advance, but it prevented the Christians from overrunning and conquering the Moslem states, as they would otherwise have done. Had this happened, they would have been compelled to absorb a vast hostile territory with a population many times greater than their own and a culture that was incomparably higher. They would thus have been Arabised, their vigorous if primitive institutions would have decayed, and they would have sunk to being an effete, slave-owning, semi-Oriental oligarchy. We started out in a taxi along the road to Cáceres while the sun was still high in the sky. The country was monotonous. Rolling hills thinly scattered with ilex trees, open spaces of green corn or stubble, then more ilexes. Every tree had the same shape, every shape cast the same shadows, every shadow revolved round its trunk in an identical way. We were in a country of sun clocks, but why so much chronometry when nothing but the shadows ever moved and nothing recordable ever happened? Except for the occasional chatter of a magpie, there was complete silence.
The miles passed, the trees became continuous, the road rougher. We crossed a valley bottom, passed a house, climbed a ridge. There before us was the place. Or at least there was the Guerrero, that insignificant stream, dawdling along in its narrow earth-walled bed. Beyond it the country was more open, and somewhere in that wide expanse the battle of Zallaka must have taken place. But had it? Nothing in this emptiness, airiness, silence recalled the trembling rolling of the drums, the screaming of the horses, the panting of the men at arms as they gripped their swords tighter and the sweat ran down their cheeks. Nor did the site seem to have any strategic or battle-provoking qualities. We turned back without going farther, and as we passed again the metallic trees, each with its flat shadow lying monotonously before it, felt that nothing beyond the quivering of the air in summer, the cracking of a seed pod, the dipping flight of a magpie could ever have disturbed these wastes.
At length we came out among cornfields and saw before us the city on its hill, the plain beyond it, and the river, lit mildly by the sun’s diagonal rays. The chauffeur pointed, with the gesture of Ulysses sighting land: we were in the world of human beings again. The relief felt was an entirely Iberian sentiment. Spanish civilisation is built upon a dread of and antipathy to Nature. In the huddling together of their houses and streets, in the intensity of their own life lies an anxiety to escape from the emptiness of the surrounding spaces. Every little pueblo feels itself beleaguered by the deadly boredom of the sun-drenched sierras and plains and, since the centrifugal forces that are so strong in northern countries such as England simply do not exist here, Spaniards are driven to living pell-mell on top of one another in a manner not seen anywhere else except in Arab lands. Hence the warmth and animation of social life, but hence too, when disagreements arise, the bitterness. Even the recent division of the contending parties into rich and poor can be called an accident of the age, since one has only to look at North Africa before the French occupation to find every little ksar or township divided against itself into Guelfs and Ghibellines, sniping at one another from behind walls, in a state of chronic civil warfare. History contains many sorts and kinds of explanations, and one may perhaps as well account for this state of affairs by a neurosis brought on by the dread of Nature as by a shortage of food or a lack of social justice.
Our visit to Zallaka over, we went to the Cathedral Square to have coffee. There it was again, this six o’clock quickening of the pulse, when the dull town wakes up to an hour or two of furious life! Once more we saw the well-dressed crowds ranging up and down the narrow street: once more they stopped at a certain point and turned back, to be succeeded by even denser crowds of working-class people. Hoarse amazonian women crying their wares, blind lottery sellers creeping along the walls like lizards, women so advanced in pregnancy that their stomachs seemed to point at one like cannons, men on crutches, girls with baskets, barefooted gypsies, workmen, soldiers. Then we arrived at the Plaza Alta and at the white, cavernous arcades, and climbed to the castle enclosure. A whirl of birds was circling in the air above it and on the broken arches of the ruins storks were standing with their sage fatherly look, sometimes rattling their beaks together in a quaint, Breughelesque way or opening and shutting with solemn symbolism their wings. A crimson cloud, soft as a moth’s wing, had spread over the eastern quarter of the sky and below it lay the river, shallow, divided into channels, winding now in pale sleeves, now in mirror-bright pools upon its shingly bed. A line of mules and horses was crossing it, for the men who had been digging for sand were going home, and the plain was turning from dark green to brown. Then the angelus began to ring – with a noise like the beating of tin trays: the birds circle faster and lights begin to come out in the streets below. It is time to descend – the guardian is blowing a whistle – and as we do so by a rocky path we alight on some gypsy tenements that have been built among the ruins. Outside them on the ground a fire is burning, a man is hammering a copper pot, naked children scream, there is a glimpse of dusky breasts, while from the low doorways women with babies in their arms come scrambling forward and surround us, begging for alms. We escape. Through a broken arch of the castle we drop down and come out in the Plaza Alta. Here the lights have been lit. The crowds are eddying and turning like the birds in the air above. But, as we watch, a change is taking place: the street-sellers are leaving, the shoppers making for home with their purchases, the night population is coming out. Prostitutes lean lazily against the arches, soldiers with mute, lust-dulled faces stroll by, the taverns fill up. We press on. Now we are in the long shopping street among the middle-class promenaders. Flashes of eyes and teeth, ripple of voices, bursts of sudden laughter. Then we reach the square: a moment more and we are ensconced in the red plush seat of a café. We have seen Badajoz.