To Run Across the Sea (20 page)

The Calle Dos de Mayo remains my favourite Sevillian street, with its entrance just across the road from the Cathedral. It widens immediately into a tiny plaza called Almirantazgo, then squeezes through a narrow arch in the Sevillian baroque manner—the original toll-gate of the city. A wall-panel in ceramic tiles put up by a forgotten soap-manufacturer nearly a century ago depicts this spot as it was then, and hardly anything has changed. This remains almost a countryside byway, with sparse traffic and a few elegant horse-drawn carriages mixed in with the cars. All the windows in the high white walls are draped with sumptuous folds of baroque plaster picked out in chrome yellow. The colour is exclusive to Seville, the paint being produced by some millennial process from the richly coloured soil of the nearby Alcalá de Guadaïra, which otherwise lays claim to local fame with its bullfighting school.

A turning to the left 100 yards up the Dos de Mayo leads past the house of the legendary Don Juan, who, persuaded to repentance by a dream in which he found himself attending his own funeral, turned the magnificent building over as a charity hospital for the use of the poor.

Immediately ahead in the rundown but atmospheric Calle Santander, a badly tended wall shrine has attracted much veneration since the intervention of the Virgin it contains, in a nocturnal duel, extinguishing the light of her lamp whenever the opponents lunged at each other with their swords.

The same building houses the Bodegón de la Torre d’Oro. This restaurant is a local institution that in some miraculous way has been able to resist the standardisation imposed by our times. Strangely, Sevillians who prefer to eat in small, crowded, intimate places are apt to object that it is too large. Nevertheless, they are drawn there by its unbeatable value. What marks it as different in the experience of a foreigner is the bearing that one’s distance from the serving counter has upon the price of food. There are three tariffs, and the nearer the customer stations himself, whether standing or crouched at an exceedingly small table, to the anarchy at the bar, the less he pays. At about 7 p.m. neighbourhood families with many children drop in for beer and snacks, vacating their tables to more affluent-looking diners by 9. After that customers under no compulsion to rise early begin to drift in, and may stay on until midnight. About a third of the Bodega’s cavernous interior is screened off to provide a restaurant of the conventional kind, patronised by the occasional Japanese in search of local colour. Sevillians breakfast here at about 11 a.m., often on
picatosta—
a slice of fried bread sprinkled with sugar—usually accompanied by a glass of manzanilla, sipped slowly and in a reflective manner. Otherwise the Bodega specialises in potato omelettes, cooked until quite dry, and eaten with the fingers, and fried fish, the latter offering a prime culinary experience that bears absolutely no relationship to the English version.

The River Guadalquivir flows quietly at the end of the street, overlooked by the chrome-yellow and white bull-ring—the most elegant in Spain. From across the road a statue of Carmen keeps an apprehensive watch on its principal gate, opened only for the departure of a bullfighter who has been accorded a triumph in imperial Roman style, or for the removal in state of one whose life has ended in the ring. On the last occasion (in 1985) when it opened for the second reason, the circumstances were extraordinary. The bull was already down, regarded technically as dead, and the matador had turned away to acknowledge the plaudits of the crowd, when with a last convulsive effort the bull righted itself to kill him with a horn thrust through the heart.

Such a death still provides immortality of a kind, even in the days when the goal-shooting stars of FC Sevilla have become the idols of youth. Bullfighting, as its aficionados insist, is an art, not a sport, and there is even a touch of the old pagan religion about it. Those who sacrifice themselves to it are never forgotten. The great figures of the past, such as Joselito, drew more crowds to Seville than the reigning king on one of his visits. Joselito spent half his fortune on the purchase of four emeralds for the Virgin of Macarena, patroness of bullfighters (and originally smugglers) and when at the age of 23 he died in exemplary fashion in the ring, the Virgin was dressed by her attendants in widow’s weeds, in which she remained for a month.

Belmonte, considered the greatest bullfighter of the century, was a depressive, who committed suicide, having failed to die, as he would clearly have wished to do, by the horns of a bull. An attempt by the Church to deny him burial in sacred ground collapsed in the face of public outcry, and permission was given for interment in the Seville cemetery, provided that the tomb was black and devoid of any normal religious ornamentation. Juan Belmonte, who lies under the model of a black marble piano, continues to live in the popular memory. Seville, always on the lookout for an excuse for a fiesta, decided this January to revive the traditional procession known as the Cavalcade of the Three Kings. There were to be many children robed in white, an assortment of bands, and camels if they could be found. Inevitably, on such occasions the name of Belmonte springs to mind, for the leader of the three Kings was to be dressed in the very same attire worn by this folk hero when he had led the cavalcade so many years before.

It was the first procession of the Sevillian year, to be followed by many others in a city where the mere act of pacing the streets in the company of those who share the same spiritual tradition establishes a bond with religious overtones. The ceremonial year would reach its peak with the church parading its magnificence, and its incomparable sense of theatre in the festivities of the Semana Santa. Seville possesses 70 confraternities, dedicated, as they have been for 600 years, to the sombre pomp of Easter. This year once again the hooded penitents of each cofradía would form the many nocturnal processions (the longest itinerary takes twelve hours to complete) to carry their images to every corner of the city. Every street and square would resound throughout the night with drum beats and trumpets, and the strident outcry of flamenco singers from balconies and roof-tops, saluting the passing of a succession of virgins beneath. Only Seville has the history, the traditions, and the passion to stage such a pageant.

T
HE AMAZON FOREST LEAVES
its mark on the imagination of all who see it. It is one of nature’s exaggerations, matching the great river, which viewed across white beaches, the further bank out of sight, could be an ocean drifting eastwards.

One third of the world’s trees grow in the forest’s five million square kilometres—an area larger than Europe. It extends its umbrella of shade over half Brazil; the cool, damp, crepuscular corner of a continent. It is shown as blanks on the map between the veining of rivers and has little legend and no history.

Romantic explorers and holy madmen like the celebrated Colonel Fawcett paddled their canoes up creeks, and hacked brief trails in the jungle in search of hidden cities, but there was never anything there but trees and painted, feathered Indians, almost as much a part of the jungle as the trees themselves. The first satellite photographs revealed more of the details of the forest than had three centuries of exploration. The trees provided the final refuge of 100-odd Indian tribes, numbering perhaps 40,000 people. It is believed that almost as many have disappeared since the turn of the century—many as the result of outright murder, more through the white man’s diseases, against which the Indian has no immunity. Occasionally a new Indian group is found—flushed out of the trees by pioneers who cut the trails ahead of the road-building gangs—and when this happens about a quarter of those ‘contacted’ can be expected to die of one commonplace Western ailment or another within the year. Indians are entirely dependent upon the forest. They cannot survive outside it.

Theodore Roosevelt, spokesman and clairvoyant of the world of quick profits, pondered over the Amazonian vacuum and predicted what was to come. He had written a book about the pleasures of ranching, but had little use for trees. ‘The country along this river,’ he wrote in 1914, ‘is fine natural cattle country, and one day it will see a great development.’ His judgment as to the suitability of the land for cattle ranching was abysmally wrong; his prediction at least half correct. The ranchers arrived and the great attack on the trees began.

Sixty years later the Brazilian people were to learn that about a quarter of the forests of the Amazon Basin and Mato Grosso had already been destroyed. Eleven million hectares of trees had been cleared in the preceding decade alone, and it became a matter of simple arithmetic, if this were allowed to go on, to forecast a date when the forest would cease to exist altogether.

Most of the clearing was done by foreign enterprises such as Daniel Keith Ludwig’s Jari Forestry and Ranching Company, the Italian firm Liquigas, Volkswagen do Brasil, and King Ranch of Texas. These and many more had been encouraged in their attack on the forest by financial incentives offered by the Brazilian Government. Great fires—some of them ignited by napalm bombing—raged all over Amazonia, consuming trees by the hundred million, and for months on end travellers on planes on their way from Belém to Manaus or Brazilia saw little of the landscape beneath them through the smoke.

There were few parts of the world left in this century where uninhibited commercial adventures of this kind were still possible, where land could be picked up for next to nothing. Wages were about a tenth of those paid in Europe or the US, and a modest investment in stock and equipment offered the prospect of spectacular profits. The Government’s early enthusiasm for giant ranches began to falter when it was found that, like the trees they replaced, they seemed to live on themselves, and produced little surplus to help with the balance of payments. Nor did they relieve unemployment, because when a ranch became a going concern it took only one man to look after 1,000 head of cattle.

With the growing suspicion that the multinationals were little concerned with the long-term problems of the nation, voices were raised to inquire whether this rape of the forest, so apparently devoid of economic reward, might not in the long run have some undesirable effect on the climate. The mild obsession, familiar in northern latitudes, over the possibility of the return of the Ice Age is replaced in the tropics with a conviction that the reverse is likely to happen. In Peru a loss of permanent snow has been recorded from the Andean ice-peaks. Bolivia has suffered from declining rainfall and searing winds, while in Brazil itself parts of the north-east in the area of Ceará have been reduced to near-desert.

These misgivings were given alarming substance by the publication of figures based on 17 years’ field-studies in Amazonia. This research was done by Harald Sioli, Director of the Max Planck Institute of Limnology, in West Germany, and his calculations argued that the Amazon forest contributed through photosynthesis 50 per cent of the world’s annual production of oxygen. He claimed that it could not be sacrificed without a dramatic, if not fully predictable, deterioration in world climate. He calculated that the forest contained about 300 tons of carbon per hectare, and that its total extension of 280 million hectares, if burnt down, would allow sufficient carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere to cause a 10 per cent increase of the gas. The threat was two-fold: the loss of the forest’s important contribution of oxygen, and of its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. Sioli noted that the burning of fossil-fuels had already caused a 15 per cent increase in carbon dioxide over the past century, and that the forests were failing to contain the increase. He concluded that destroying the Amazon forest would be like getting rid of one of the world’s major oceans—environmentally suicidal.

There has been some scientific bandying of arguments over these figures, which have been wholeheartedly endorsed by some experts and received with caution by others. One climatologist, for example, has argued that one-third of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil-fuels remains in the air, while another believes that the proportion is two-thirds. These are matters for discussion by the
illuminati
. On the danger represented by oxygen reduction, Dr Mary McNeil, an American specialist in laterite soils, says that were all tropical forests—of which the Amazon forest is a major component—to go, the earth’s atmosphere would soon be denuded of oxygen.

To turn to the other problem of the excess of carbon dioxide, Norman Myers, a consultant in environmental conservation, wrote in
New Scientist
, in December 1978, ‘Widespread deforestation in the tropics could lead to increased reflectivity of sunlight in the equatorial zone (the “albedo effect”) and to a build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Both these processes could upset global climatic patterns … ’

Enear Salati, professor of physics and researcher in agriculture at the University of São Paulo, was quoted in
Critica
of Manaus as saying that the destruction by burning of the Amazon forest, and consequent increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, could result in heightened world temperature, the melting of the polar ice-caps, and a sufficient rise in ocean levels to bring about the inundation of hundreds of coastal cities throughout the world.

The predictions of all these experts are deeply worrying in their various ways. It seems clear that the least we have to fear from the loss of the Amazon forest is undesirable meteorological changes, and the worst the catastrophe promised by Sioli and Salati.

The threatened forest offers the paradox of an area into which is crammed the greatest abundance and diversity of living things to be found anywhere on earth, yet is potentially a desert. Only the thinnest skin of humus covers the laterite floor. Apart from what is derived through photosynthesis, the trees live almost by what can be described as self-cannibalisation, upon nutrients furnished by the litter they themselves provide, made rapidly available through the action of insects, worms and fungi. The forest recycles 51 per cent of the rain that falls on it, and produces little more energy than it consumes. It lives then, almost independent of the soil, in a state of equilibrium.