UNTIL THIS POINT, OUR experience of Spain had been largely confined to the north of the country, including such towns as San Sebastián and Pamplona, which being close to the French frontier had come inevitably under the influence of France. Apart from this we had been obliged—largely by the exigencies of the foot-slogging journey to Zaragoza—to spend a short time there to be followed by a stay in Madrid, which apart from its revolutionary fervour at the time of our visit was otherwise noted for its cosmopolitans. Andalusia, into which we now plunged, was therefore a wholly new experience.
We had become accustomed by this time to a degree of social depression, to people living in caves. But here in Andalusia, misery came into its own. Only a few miles from Ayamonte, we were to pass through settlements of windowless huts consisting of no more than holes dug in the ground with branch and straw coverings shaped like upturned boats to take the place of roofs.
Outside the first of these settlements, two blind old people quarrelling violently groped with their fingernails at each other’s faces. Propped against a nearby wall was a beggar whose single leg had wasted away almost to the thinness of a finger. Obliged to stop here while the bus waited to pick up travellers, we were greeted hopefully by the poor fellow, whose act was to impart a palsied tremble to the limb for the benefit of passers-by, following this on most occasions with a howl of successful salesmanship.
Andalusia, nevertheless, was shortly to present the first of its many paradoxes. The liveliest scene in any of the small villages we passed centred on barbers’ shops, around and in which the menfolk, when deprived of gainful occupation, conducted their social lives. It was socially incorrect, we were told, for Andalusian males to shave themselves, and we were assured that most self-respecting bachelors in Ayamonte visited the barbers for a shave twice a day plus a hair trim twice a week.
There was no better way of travel than by the Huelva bus rattling slowly along, with stops at a barber’s every three or four hundred yards, to appreciate the only too often tragic beauty of the Spanish far south. Here the old-fashioned social conventions survived under the protection of poverty. Men still bowed low to women, acknowledged favours with hands pressed over hearts, and slipped a small coin in the sleeve of a beggar whom they addressed with the formality due to a member of the middle class.
We picked up speed and swooped through Andalusian villages that after sunset had become wholly white, and could be seen ahead glowing faintly in the sheen of the moon like a row of phosphorescent cubes set down on each side of the road. All the houses were white inside too, and then came the inescapable surprise. Although windows were covered with iron grilles like those of a feudal castle, doors were always open by way of a declaration of at least theoretical trust. Polished copper cooking utensils hung among tiny cages containing decoy partridges. But members of the household were never in sight. Under what spell had these families fallen?
At Huelva martial law was very much in evidence. The Civil Guards in their characteristic winged black hats and the newly created Assault Guards were both missing and had been replaced by a swaggering body of Marines who patrolled the streets and had occupied public buildings. Released for a half-hour or so from the bus, supposedly to allow us to stretch our legs, we joined the promenading crowds with just enough time to taste the savoury omelettes being cooked on every street corner. It was strange while engaged in this way to be startled by a brief burst of gunfire in a neighbouring street.
Returning to the bus we learnt that, after the driver’s discussion with the police, it had been decided to call off the rest of the very considerable journey to Seville for that night. Accommodation was found for us in a commercial hotel where eleven travellers in the same predicament were put up in a vast single room from which a noisy caged parrot was conveniently removed.
The first wave of mass tourism had washed over Huelva only in the past few weeks and much of the surrounding area was in the process of transformation into limitless sandy beaches. This would now be renamed the Costa de la Luz, said a leaflet issued by the Tourist Board accompanying the hotel’s bill. The new Costa, explained the leaflet—making the situation as clear as it could without giving local offence—would offer a solution to the problem of bringing this area of Spain up to date. There had been many instances in the past of the country being charged with failing to keep up with the times in the treatment of its visitors holidaying in the area, especially in the matter of the freedom of association of the sexes. The Costa de la Luz, concluded the leaflet, ‘will take a leading role in the attraction of visitors to our country, as well as spreading the fame of a neglected earthly paradise’.
Fortunately the earthly paradise predicted for the Costa de la Luz was never likely to extend its frontiers through the shallow valleys and low, sun-dried tableland to Seville, some sixty miles away. We drove there finally in a rackety bus stuck with the tattered remnants of posters advertising a remedy for dyspepsia. It was a landscape withered at the end of a long summer, with vineyards protected by shade trees producing an abundance of small and shrivelled grapes. Grape pickers, blackened and blistered by the sun, straightened up to wave at the bus as it rattled past. There was a shortage of water here, a passenger told us, but the loneliness of imported workers used to the city life was the worst of their problems. There were stops to check tyre pressure and top up the radiator, but eventually after three hours on the road the clear profile and sparkling towers of the great southern city freed themselves from their veils of mist. Within a half-hour we were in suburbs thronged with bullock carts. Here the driver made use of a special siren to clear a passage for the bus.
We had been given the address of a rooming house overlooking the Guadalquivir. The thing was, we were told, that even forgetting the view, it offered the chance to get away from the noise. It was very cheap and the rooms were clean. A beatifically smiling small boy dashed in, trapped and killed the spiders in the corners, collected ten centavos and went off. A river boat’s huge melancholic voice sounded a warning or lament as it passed below. It was followed by absolute silence apart from the swishing of the leaves in the riverside trees, and we washed and went out to find a restaurant.
The purest chance had brought us close to Seville’s cathedral—largest and most splendid of Spain’s numerous great churches—and this, the objective of our pilgrimage, was to be seen towering next morning in the dawn light, from among the hugger-mugger of lesser buildings crowding its walls. All accounts spoke of its grandeur and the architectural splendours it had to offer, of the reredos—largest in all Christianity—of the silver and bronze tombs, the great store of Goya and Murillo masterpieces, the forty-seven silver monstrances carried in the Corpus Christi procession and the much admired gift of a stuffed crocodile presented by the Sultan of Egypt.
These were clearly the surroundings in which a member of the fairly rich and powerful Corvaja family would have sought to be entombed in anticipation of the resurrection, but we were by this time overtaken by fatigue, and it was decided to postpone the great moment of our journey’s formal completion until the next day.
Here people avoided what they could of the morning heat and rose more or less at dawn, so we followed their custom and breakfasted at six and were at the cathedral’s massive doors in well under the hour. In the early light the building remained silent and aloof in surroundings devoid of human activity. The nearby bushes were full of partridges which had learnt that here they were immune from the sportsmen’s attack.
An hour passed before the cathedral’s peons arrived on their bicycles to haul back the great outer doors, and the notice ‘cerrado’ was hung on the inner ones. This was removed in another half-hour and we found ourselves in the almost barbaric splendour of the great building’s interior. This came almost within an ace of the most lavish of fairground attractions, but in the struggle for ecclesiastical advertisement, good taste was never abandoned.
A swelling crescendo—a thunder almost—of organ music filled the air. A thousand lights restored the concealed brilliance of innumerable dark corners. The cathedral had been perfumed, we were assured, by five hundred arum lilies, provided in weekly instalments by a manufacturer of railroad equipment, and the bill for a splendid music system and records of sacred music imported from Germany had been picked up by the best-known of the nation’s brewers of beer. We wandered past splendid statuary of the biblical martyrs and saints, and images of the three wise men gazed up at the star, twinkling in the ceiling, followed by them in their peregrination on Earth.
Later we were to compare the effect of this building upon each other. I was beginning to suspect the presence, in Eugene’s case, of a Sicilian ambivalence, notable in members of his family—his father included—who while describing themselves as atheists, subjected themselves, however reluctantly, to the power of the Christian Church. Despite himself, Eugene could be described as slightly carried away, and I had not failed to notice a telltale glistening of his eye as we passed through the cathedral’s doors.
There were tombs galore to be inspected, but an hour later after a careful examination of the inscriptions it had to be accepted that none bore the Corvaja name. We broached the problem with an attendant who recommended that we consult the registers. To be able to do this we would have to see the official in charge and an appointment was fixed with him for later in the day.
He proved very pleasant and eager to be helpful, although suffering from some visual impairment which caused him difficulty with the close print of the register.
‘We suffer,’ he said with a brief gesture at the vast interior, ‘from a chronic shortage of space, with the result that only the great monarchs of our past such as Don Alfonso El Sabio, and Don Pedro, known as The Cruel, have been given permanent resting places in the Tomb of the Kings. All those interred there in subsequent centuries have been, and will remain, permanently undisturbed.’ He slightly lowered his voice to assume a conciliatory tone. ‘National figures on a lesser historical scale—although, for example, famous in the literary and even financial world—might occupy a splendid sarcophagus for some twenty or thirty years. But due to what one might describe as competition for the space that remains vacant, the period of the occupation is constantly under revision. I should point out that it is not only the Corvaja family that has felt the effects of the situation.’
He took a paper from his satchel and ran his eyes over it. ‘According to this report,’ he said, ‘the Corvajas were only confirmed as in possession of the place originally allotted for a quarter of a century, and this expired some two years ago. Several letters were sent to them, but no reply has been received to date.’
‘So what has happened?’ Eugene asked, and the registrar crooked his finger.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I will show you.’
We followed him as he shuffled across the nave towards a small door in the wall which he opened for brilliant sunshine to shaft through and, crossing the threshold, we found ourselves in a narrow unmade-up road running parallel with the cathedral wall. On the far side of the road a vast dry ditch contained a mountainous assortment of litter. The background to this scene was a high straggling hedge, and beyond that a seemingly empty field. We walked to the edge of the ditch for a closer inspection of its contents. These appeared for the most part to be fragments of tombstones, mixed with discarded articles of ecclesiastical furniture, some with a hardly spoiled finish, others cracked and stained or blackened by a long exposure to the elements. ‘This,’ said the registrar, ‘is the temporary repository of tombs we have been obliged to remove.’
‘Would there be any hope,’ I asked, ‘of unearthing an inscription, or even part of the inscription, from the Corvaja tomb?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Very little I’m afraid. Even if the fragments survived they are likely to be under a great weight of subsequent additions. The cathedral would do all it could to help you in your efforts but would not wish to arouse impossible hopes. There have been several attempts to recover family inscriptions but none, to the best of my knowledge, have been successful. We must remember that some tombs are now buried under tons of shattered stone and portions of them in some cases are likely to have been reduced to powder. Special machinery would be required at considerable cost to deal with the situation, and I believe in this case one should avoid holding out impossible hopes.’
I shook my head. ‘That being so,’ Eugene said, ‘there’s really nothing more to be done.’
‘You could of course apply for government aid,’ said the registrar. ‘My feeling is that they would be sympathetic, and surely it would be worth a try. There is perhaps one drawback. The time factor. The officials involved are notoriously slow to act in such cases and might take a considerable time to reach a decision. There would certainly be a delay.’
‘Of months I suppose,’ I said.
He shook his head and his expression had been changed by a slow, conciliatory smile.
‘No, years,’ he said.
We bowed to each other and, still smiling, the registrar backed away, turned and made for the small door in the wall. I caught Eugene in a sigh. ‘Not exactly the sweet taste of success,’ he said, and once again his eyes glistened.
‘Not exactly. All the same Ernesto will know we’ve done what we could for him. For all his bluster he’s a philosopher at heart. A bit of a disappointment. That’s all.’
Softly, through the closed door, we heard the organ begin what might have been the music of one of the psalms, and I believed it was even the psalm calling upon the believer to cast away doubt. So the tomb had now become part of the territory of legends. What of the old palace, I wondered. Doubtless, that too would have gone. But then again, perhaps it had not—and if any part of it was still there I could imagine Ernesto’s joy to be sent a photograph.
We called in at a tourist office to enquire and were assured that the once-called palace would be found in one of the side-streets off the Calle Sierpes—celebrated for its serpentine wanderings among the cramped buildings of old Seville. Once in the Sierpes itself we were given more precise directions. ‘It’s the big shoe shop just down the road,’ said our informant. We went there and spoke to the owner who made it clear that his shop was not just big, but the biggest in the province—stocking, he said, two thousand pairs of shoes.
He was a young man of great charm, who having listened to the history of our misfortunes, immediately invited us to lunch. A narrow door opened onto a stairway spiralling up what was clearly a medieval turret in which we were to discover that a modern room had been built, and in this the meal was served. It was part of a process of renovation by which most of the palace’s medieval interior had been replaced, and the new owners had benefited above all in matters of air and light. They had also been able to create, as he said, more useful space, in which stock previously stored elsewhere—amounting to roughly one thousand, five hundred pairs of shoes—could now be kept on the premises saving rental and insurance costs.
We congratulated him. What else could we do? He was a very hospitable man, and we told him how much we had enjoyed our meeting and listening to his account of the fortunes of the shoe business, and then took our leave.
‘What on earth are we going to say to Ernesto?’ Eugene asked.
‘Tell him the truth,’ I said. ‘Well, more or less.’
We rang London and left a message. Ernesto came through a few minutes later. Curiously enough, his voice was clearer and his slightly broken English more comprehensible than in an ordinary conversation, as if an instrument held in his hand in some way helped to clarify and reorganise his thoughts.
‘So how was the cathedral?’ he asked.
‘Marvellous,’ I told him. ‘I suppose you’d say a bit disorganised. They were getting ready for a big celebration. Everything was upside down.’
‘You saw the tomb?’
‘The whole area was closed off. We’ll probably go back today. You’ll be interested to hear we managed to see something of the old palace. Inevitably it had been left to run down.’
‘They told me that,’ Ernesto said.
‘The Council seems to have a hand in a restoration of sorts, and a private interest was brought in.’
‘It’s no more than I expected,’ Ernesto said. ‘Municipalities don’t throw money away on run-down palaces. What have they done to it?’
‘It’s been turned into a store.’
‘What does it sell? Works of art, like most of the others?’
‘This one sells shoes,’ I told him. ‘They call it Super Shoe—the biggest store of its kind in the province—or so they say. A Council member praised it in a speech the other day. He said it had contributed to the prosperity of Seville.’
‘Has the medieval part of the building been left alone?’
‘Apparently that couldn’t be done. Two thousand pairs of shoes had to find a home.’
‘Does anything remain of the old place as it was?’ Ernesto asked.
‘Only the central turret. It is used for board-meetings. The Municipality agreed to the original windows being replaced by stained glass.’
‘Vulgar as ever,’ Ernesto said.