To Run Across the Sea (2 page)

Narrow winding lanes bring the traveller eventually to Guadaloupe, a town of great charm with old wooden and half-timbered houses, clustered round the monastery-fortress that provides its
raison d’être
. It is near enough to the geographical centre of the country to have served for a short time as the seat of government, before the establishment of the capital at Madrid. The Catholic Kings, enthroned as stiffly as figures in cathedral stained glass, held court here, issuing royal licenses for voyages of discovery or conquest to the New World, attracted to Guadaloupe not only by its location but by its reservoir of undiluted faith.

Guadaloupe’s position in the forefront of Christian revival and endeavour was achieved following a sign from heaven shortly after its liberation in battle from the Moors. The Virgin Mary appeared to a countryman, instructing him to dig in a cave, where an image of her, hidden away from the invaders back in the eighth century, would be found. This he did, the image was recovered and a shrine set up. There followed a series of prodigious happenings of a rustic, homely kind. Asses reproached their masters for their ill-treatment in good Castilian, levitation was commonplace, and in one case a defunct cow, already in the process of being skinned, was raised from the dead. Pilgrims began to flock in.

From these beginnings there arose and grew through the centuries the enormous accretion of military and ecclesiastical architecture constituting the monastery. There are few more stunning experiences of its kind than to arrive here by night, dropping down from the black emptiness of the sierra, then, after the last hairpin bend, plunging without warning into the great spread of light from these buildings, their mediaeval banners afloat in a glowing sky.

The
parador
at Guadaloupe has borrowed a little history from them. It began as a hospital for pilgrims and in 1402 was issued a Papal privilege by which the first dissection in Spain was carried out, the body having been preserved in perfumed oils to which sacramental wine was added while awaiting the privilege’s arrival. Its guests are housed in pseudo-mediaeval surroundings, which fail quite to measure up to those offered by the monastery itself, part of which has been converted into a hostelry. This, with the distant chanting, the aloof monks padding through the cloisters, the soft, background mutter of pilgrims’ prayers, and the crashing discord of bells,
is
the Middle Ages.

In its venture into the hotel business the Church has been brilliantly successful, for nowhere in the province are guests lodged so splendidly, and nowhere do they eat so cheaply and so well. All are welcome and Guadaloupe is filled in all seasons with countrymen and women who have saved up for a year or two to come here for the good of their souls, and also to have the holiday of their lives. Zurbarán, master painter of Estremadura worked here. The monastery owns many of his canvases, and his saints wear the faces of those thick-fingered, black-clad peasants, who wander in small flocks round the Gothic ambulatory to admire the paintings of martyrdoms and miracles.

Guadaloupe, thriving on religious tourism, is an island of prosperity in the depressed economy of the province as a whole. Leaving it, the change is immediate and stark. The timbered skeleton of a once fine house that has shed its flesh stands by the roadside as a portent of what is to come; after that, only a single, rather miserable hamlet and piles of stones where others once existed are passed before Cijara is reached. One of the reasons for this last leg of the journey was the hope of seeing something of the Cijara region, generally known locally as the Siberia of Estremadura, due to its historically unhappy situation in the no-man’s-land between warring mediaeval kingdoms. Nobody lived here unless obliged to. This, coupled with a recent acute loss in population, has been to the advantage of many rare animals and birds. Included among them are the Iberian lynx, and the Egyptian mongoose, which is not to be found elsewhere in Europe. Renowned as a last refuge of obsolescent birds is El Muro, a lakeside cliff listed as the breeding ground of three species of vulture, the Black Stork, Bonelli’s Eagle and the Iberian Imperial Eagle. I was hoping to be able to visit this birdwatcher’s paradise although it is several miles from the nearest road and only vaguely defined on large-scale maps.

The Siberia of Estremadura, roughly 60 kilometres across, contains four villages and a sprawling complex of artificial lakes formed by the flooding of the Guadiana Valley. When last counted, its total population was 2,500, but that was ten years ago and there has been a steep decline since then. A government report devoted to its predicament mentions that the direct road from Toledo no longer touches a single inhabited place for 80 kilometres. Final desolation, then, draws near, although, clutching at a straw, the report says that emigration is slowing down, ‘doubtless owing to unemployment in the cities’.

Villagers without any strong ties to keep them in Cijara have pulled out, leaving those who are too old to uproot themselves, plus a hard core of devotees of the hunter-gatherer’s way of life. Isolation has welded those that remain into a family group that takes a remarkably philosophic view of its situation. They are remarkably courteous and kind, even for the Spanish. When I spoke of ‘people’ using the normal word
gente
, someone administered a gentle correction. People in Cijara were
vecinos
, ‘neighbours’, and everyone, including visiting foreigners, was included in this pleasant familiarity. ‘Communications leave much to be desired,’ said the government report. ‘Their economic resources are scant, and they rely almost exclusively upon game.’ Game, however, was varied and abundant, and in Cijara they eat well. Partridge in saffron rice was on the menu at the bar, and trout could be fished from the lake in a matter of minutes. The bread baked here was the best I have tasted in my life.

Hopes of being able to reach El Muro faded. Unseasonably in October it had been raining for days, and the view from a hilltop was of a drenched savannah through which the Guadiana River, full to the brim, had spread curlicues of water. The news at Cijara was that the direct road along the north shore of the lake had been cut off by floods and an extremely circuitous route round by the south, through Helechosa, might also be impassable. I was grateful for the excuse for this detour. Helechosa conducts a Corpus Christi ceremony in which children take up cudgels to drive out the horned and masked ‘devils’ that have invaded the village—a whispered suggestion that, despite the Inquisition’s efforts, the old Manichaean heresy, once prevalent here, that God and Satan are co-eternal, may have survived.

But, when I went there in the rain, there were no children to be seen. Perhaps there were none left for, when a village faces the possibility of its eventual extinction, the children are the first to go. Beyond Helechosa the road came to an end. The Guadiana flowed across it into the lake where once there must have been a bridge and only a ravaged track corkscrewing up into the hills offered an alternative to turning back. At this point the river in spate carried red earth in suspension. A magenta stain was widening in the lake and, as I watched, a white bird folded its wings and dropped into it after a fish.

Beyond the rising water, cork oaks were meticulously spaced in the order imposed by nature in a landscape which—apart from artificial lakes—had been left to itself, and the maquis was as clean-cut as a well tended garden. Within a decade or two the human presence would almost certainly be gone. I wondered if the wolves would eventually find their way back, as they had in the Sierra de la Culebra in the north which I had visited in the spring. Villages containing many old houses exist where a single family remains. In one village, Boya, all the self-supporting young had been enticed away to the discos in the towns, but most of the middle-aged hoped to stay on. It was a pleasant place, amazingly reminiscent of a village in unspoiled England, perhaps in the Cotswolds, with an ancient church on the green, merino sheep cropping the grass, and cottages with flower gardens. When the talk of wolves came up, Jaime Martinez, owner of the bar, was philosophical. ‘You see one now and again,’ he said, ‘but they don’t really trouble us. They’re something you can cope with. It’s the wild boars that bother us. They root up everything in the gardens. You could even say the wolves are useful in a way. At least they keep the boars down.’

E
SSEX IS THE UGLIEST
county. I only went there to be able to work in peace and quiet and to get away from the settlers from London south of the river. It was flat and untidy and full of water with the Colne and the Crouch and the Blackwater and all their tributaries fingering up from the sea and spreading vinous tendrils of water into the flat land. For half the year, the wind blew in from the east, over shingle, mud-flats, saltings and marshes, and even twenty miles inland, where I first set up house, gulls drove the crows out of the fields.

I found an empty farmhouse called Charmers End in the village of Long Crendon, took a three-year lease on it and settled in. Many of the farms and villages had odd and even poetic names, Crab’s Green, Sweet Dew, Blythe Easter, Fan-tail and Honey Wood, which I suspected of being part of a process of self-deception, for on the whole the more fanciful the name the more dismal the place. There were black-and-white cows in a shining field at the bottom of the garden when I first moved in. They were largely responsible for my choice. Otherwise, this part of Essex reminded me of the southern tip of South America where the trees are deformed, a cold wind combs the grass, and glum Indians, reserved and off-hand like the country people of Essex, are muffled in their clothes against the grey weather.

The farmer who had lived here before had grown old alone and sold his land. One day, hauling himself to the top of the tallest tree in the garden, he had drunk a quarter of a bottle of Lysol, put the barrel of a German pistol collected in the war into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. This man had liked cows, just as I liked them, but the new owner did not especially, so they disappeared soon after. The old farmer had left the place in a terrible mess. He had thrown everything that was left of his possessions out of the window but had left an old broken rocking-horse with a bunch of flowers tied to it in the kitchen. For some reason the agent who showed me the place had decided to leave this where it was. The house was surrounded by a great moat—giving some indication of the security problems of the past—and all along its banks stood big white leafless trees which, stripped of their bark and dying, would eventually fall in. It was like the Amazon. Some of the trees in the water had lost their branches, and little remained but their trunks, turned grey and slimy like submerged alligators, showing only the tips of their snouts above the surface. Those still standing provided an annual crop of an uncommon oyster fungus, collected by an Italian from Chelmsford. He called with a present of a bottle of Asti Spumante soon after I was installed.

The Post Office found me a woman to clean up four days a week. She arrived on a horse, charging up the lane and across the moat, black hair streaming in the wind, again contributing to the Latin American aspect of this corner of Essex. With her fine, aquiline features and almond eyes she could easily have been an Indian of the plains under the eastern slope of the Andes, where the natives are tall and slender.

This was Dorothea, aged 37, handsome if not quite beautiful, with a semi-disabled husband and a pretty daughter of 12.

Dorothea took control. She persuaded the pump to emit a dribble of doubtful water, removed the mummified jackdaw from the chimney, dropped a pebble by way of a test into the black and silken surface of the fluid in the septic tank, and nodded with satisfaction. The horse was a bother to her. It was impossible to leave it free to crop the grass because of holes leading to tunnels, where, as she thought, the inhabitants had once hidden themselves in the bad times of old. I said, ‘I saw you on a bicycle the other day. Why don’t you use it to come over here?’ She replied, nodding apologetically in the horse’s direction, ‘Well, I just ride it when I can. It’s something you have to do.’

She went with me in the car to point out the baker’s, the man who might agree to cut the grass and mow the lawn, and the one who could fix up a television aerial. Assistance of this kind was easily procured in Long Crendon, as Dorothea explained, by adopting a tactful, even ingratiating approach.

We passed two men in baseball caps, one wearing dark glasses and a lumberjack shirt, chatting outside a pub. ‘Americans?’ I asked.

‘No, locals. Carpenters up at the base.’

‘They look like Yanks.’

‘Well, they want to, don’t they? Most of the fellows work on the base these days. If you can call it work.’

The village was a long, narrow street, straggling in fits and starts for the best part of a mile, hence its name. There was a bad smell at one end from a rubbish dump that looked like a collapsed volcano that had been smouldering for several years, and at the other from a pig farm. The houses were simple and plain, with white plastered fronts, the poorer and smaller ones thatched, some still with leaden lights. A substantial mansion standing in gardens back from the road had suffered brutal modernisation, the garden being now enclosed with a ranch-style fence. Until the previous month it had been named Hill Top, said Dorothea, but now with a new owner who had been in property development, it had become Rancho Grande. It was the only evidence that money had been spent in the village, either on preservation or ornament.

We passed three depressed-looking pubs and a grey little school with children squabbling in the playground. The church was the only building of note, with a Norman door, good stained glass and tombstones packed close in separate familiar groups as if to carry earthly associations beyond the grave.

The tour ended with a passing glance at the village hall. ‘That’s where I go dancing with my friend Mr Short on Saturday night,’ Dorothea said.

‘Your friend?’

‘Well, not my
boyfriend
. Actually I don’t like him all that much. We just go dancing together. Otherwise I don’t find him all that interesting. I expect you heard all about Dick’s accident?’