To Run Across the Sea (27 page)

Last August a national newspaper published a piece about a 1936 Mercedes Grand Tourer—described as rusted all over, with mouse-gnawed seats, and full of holes—being sold at Christie’s vintage car auction for an unprecedented £1,595,000. A. M. Davies, a butcher of Walsall, had been left the car by an uncle in 1956, since when it had slowly mouldered away in the garage at the back of his shop. It had gone to a Swedish financier, and the extraordinary price depended, the newspaper had ascertained, on the crucial fact of this car’s possession of a right-hand drive, being one of only two models thus built out of a total production of 356. Loke’s 500K, too, had been a right-hand drive version. Was this the self-same car? Possibly, and if not it could only have been the twin—equally valuable to a financier one supposed—if it had managed to escape the scrap heap.

D
ON JUAN SERRA TOLD
us: ‘We cope with our numerous wolves pretty well; largely because we refuse to provide them with food.’ Don Juan is the parish priest of the almost inconceivably isolated village of Arbeyales, tucked into a wide ledge of the Cantabrian mountains in the National Reserve of Somiedo, which is roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. A census conducted about 10 years ago put the population of the zone at 20,000 inhabitants spread over 200 villages—an average 100 each. It is now certainly much less, and falling fast as the lure of the cities empties these peerless solitudes, and the wild animals return to the deserted fields.

This was the alpine redoubt of the few that remained of the European brown bears. From where we stood on our ledge at Arbeyales a mist-veiled cliff that was not quite a precipice was in sight about three miles away: the bears had actually learned to climb its almost vertical face to reach caves where they were beyond reach of their pursuers. Once the brown bear was to be found comfortably browsing or dozing in the woods of all parts of Spain, including those on the outskirts of Madrid, Seville or Gibraltar. Now thirty or so of them are in Somiedo—mostly in the neighbourhood of Arbeyales—and although protected by law they are relentlessly hunted by international sportsmen who are happy to pay the equivalent of £3,000 for the pleasure of killing one.

No one can even guess at the number of wolves harbouring in these mountains. They are on the increase, and co-exist with a wide variety of game including deer and wild boars that conduct nightly raids upon village potato patches. Here they survive under protection of the mountains, the ancient forests of chestnut and oak, landscape virtually without roads and an appalling winter that keeps man, the adversary, out of the way for up to six months of the year.

These are the conditions which have also preserved the Celto-Iberian customs of pre-history, the circular stone houses providing shelter both for man and his animals, and the tribal language
bable—
so called by the Spanish from the outside world in an allusion to the biblical Tower of Babel and the linguistic confusion its building produced.

Don Juan Fernandez Serra is not only the ministering priest of Arbeyales but, in the absence of any other established authority, unofficial mayor and even honorary village policeman. He is also, according to Ricardo Magadán, the inspector of the Department of Natural Resources who took me to see him, the only priest in the country who is also a cowherd.

Don Juan turned out to be a man in his fifties, lean, bony and muscular, dressed in a boiler suit and wearing the standard clogs of the area with two-inch wooden spikes projecting from the soles. Far below, a meadow with beautiful cows charging through the grass took shape like a surfacing whale in the mist, before sliding from view again. Rain fell in icy splashes, and seed pearls of moisture had formed on eyebrows and beards. ‘There is no more intelligent animal than the wolf,’ said Don Juan, ‘but our Asturian cows are a match for them. They form a circle to defend themselves and they’re terribly fast with the horns. Once in a while a wolf gets skewered and the word soon gets around. The only time we lose a cow, it’s one that’s slowed down by being in calf. We can’t keep sheep and goats because there’s no pasture in the village itself, and there’s no way of protecting them.’

This was at the heart of the priest’s problem. It was 3 June, with the animals not long released from the byres under the living rooms of the houses (‘We need them in winter to keep warm’) and taken to the summer pastures, and the villagers were still cleaning out the muck and carrying it down to the ledges on which they grow spinach of giant proportions. By tradition each family cultivates only enough vegetables for its own use, its principal occupation being the cutting and storing of hay for winter fodder. The village income depends entirely on the milk, cheese and meat its animals provide.

A deep cleft in the mountain leads to the best meadows where the cattle graze. The path up to this is so steep that steps have had to be cut in the rock, and the cattle are hauled over them by middle-aged and elderly villagers to the grassy heights, and there left much to their own devices until the first snows of October. The physical effort involved in these tiny migrations is very great, and now, with the population down to 23, with not a single inhabitant under 50, and half the houses empty, they were reaching the end of their tether.

‘Last year,’ the priest said, ‘they built the road up to us.’ (He mentioned that so far as he knew I was the first foreigner to visit the village.) Now the government promised the construction of three ski-lifts to carry the villagers and their animals to and from the upper pastures. The scheme had met with opposition. In this fiercely democratic and egalitarian community people laid claim to more than their tiny vegetable patches, and a man was entitled to pasture his animals or cut wood anywhere in the mountains. But some conservationists who came here were inclined to see Arbeyales as a surviving corner of a vanished paradise. ‘Let the place alone,’ they said. ‘Ski-lifts would bring in the tourists. It would be the end.’

‘Of course it will help us if it ever happens,’ Don Juan said, ‘but it’s almost too late. In summer here we work a 13 or 14-hour day. And what do we do in the winter? We breathe in the air from our animals’ lungs, and we make clogs. There’s no demand for them anywhere else, so we give them to each other. There’s no inducement for a young lad or a girl to stay in a place like this. Naturally they’ve taken off. And even if they build the ski-lifts, does anyone really believe that after a taste of life in the city they’ll want to pack up and come back here? Frankly they’d be mad to do so.’

Like all such subsistence-economy communities, the people of Arbeyales were born into a social climate in which every man, woman and child filled an indispensable place in the life of the village. Here, as Don Juan said, there was freedom. Here no one worked for a boss. People joined forces to build one another’s houses, to manhandle the animals up and down the steep slopes, to bring in the hay. It was hard to believe that unemployment could exist anywhere. Now the young have gone, and with their escape to the town the underpinning of village society has collapsed. And there is no such thing here as hired labour with which they could be replaced.

In Arbeyales, come what might, they stuck the winter through. In other villages, such as La Perál and Santa María del Puerto, they gave in with the first snows, moving down to temporary shelter, sometimes no further off than the nearest deep valley, sometimes as far away as the coast. The custom was to leave a
vecineiro—
a sort of professional village-minder—to look after their houses during the five months or so of their absence. This man, having stocked up with firewood, cheese, chestnuts, chorizo sausage, dried beans and bundles of tapers to provide the occasional solace of artificial light, would settle with practised resignation to his clog-making, his thoughts, and the great white silence of the snow. In some extraordinary emergency he could be awakened from his semi-hibernation by anyone able to struggle as far as the church and ring the bell. On the day in April when the bell eventually rang to announce the villagers’ return, the
vecineiro
would throw open the door of his hut and drag himself out into the weak sunshine to greet the new arrivals in proper style with a Roman salute and as broad a smile as he could manage.

All these people, who are not quite nomads but who chop and change habitation according to the season, are known as
vaqueiros
. Their origin, although subject to endless discussion, remains a mystery. An incomprehensible language and strikingly different customs have set them apart from their neighbours, resulting in the past in their subjection to social discrimination. Until a century ago
vaqueiros
living in mixed villages were seated separately in the churches, and even in death were buried apart in the cemeteries.

The account published by the Spanish Council for Tourism suggests that they may be descended from tribes entering Spain from Italy in the first century
BC
. It goes on to list other possibilities—that their ancestors were released Roman slaves, or converted Muslims driven in 1517 from their last stronghold in southern Spain, or Christian renegades banished from lands recaptured from the Moors some centuries earlier: a mixed bag, in fact, of second-class citizens exiled to the Spanish Siberia of their day. The
vaqueiros
still keep their own company, and marry among themselves. The area is one where bull-sacrifices in one form or another are frequently included in local fiestas, but of this the
vaqueiros
will have nothing, preferring to concentrate on domestic themes. They are particularly strong on weddings, a principal feature of which, as in the
vaqueiro
village of Aristébano, is a procession formed to display the marriage bed, followed by musicians with
peyet-chas—
an instrument from the dawn of history resembling a long-handled pan, on which a lively if monotonous accompaniment is beaten out with a heavy key.

In their dealings with outsiders the
vaqueiros
are most at ease in the company of the true nomadic shepherds who drive their flocks all the way in summer from the sun-scorched prairies of Central Spain, taking a month over a transhumance which is now accomplished, largely by train, in a matter of days. In early June the southern nomads were pouring into Asturias where they were welcomed as ever, for under these permanently weeping skies there was grass for all. It was a swing of the human tides that had been going on, whoever the rulers and despite all the wars, for thousands of years.

Pola de Somiedo is the capital of this, the most sparsely inhabited area of an under-populated province. It crouches under the craggy mist-draped silhouette of the peak of La Palumbera, a matter of some hundred houses, a small square, a town hall like a provincial football-club headquarters, a grey little church and a bar. The bar has the only fruit machine within 50 miles and sells wine to which a sprig of vine foliage has been added during fermentation. This imparts the slightly acidulous flavour appreciated by those who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. There are jelly-babies, too, in a jar for the children that remain. But they are few, for in common with all the villages of the zone there is here a slow wastage of people.

The gossip in the bar, understandably in cattle country, was the price of cows. The beautiful and agile Asturian mountain breed, rarely seen elsewhere and probably closer than others to the original wild cattle depicted in mesolithic cave-paintings all over the country, is in great demand. Asturian cows produce a relatively small amount of exceptionally rich milk, incomparable meat, can be left to look after themselves, and flourish in the rain. The price in Oviedo for a top-grade cow had reached 500,000 pesetas, about £2,500, and the breeders of Somiedo were naturally jubilant.

For Ricardo Magadán the news was a mixture of good and bad. A villager claimed to have seen a bear with four cubs. Normally a litter is limited to a maximum of three—tiny, blind, toothless creatures hardly bigger than a rat at birth, and weighing no more than a pound. His excitement was coloured with scepticism. It seemed too good to be true. On the debit side was the strong rumour that a clandestine hunter had shot an adult bear in the vicinity. This, said the inspector sorrowfully, he found more believable.

After Somiedo the search for the old Europe narrowed into a pilgrimage to Balouta which, although only 35 miles away as the crow—or in this case the eagle—flies, calls for a long, roundabout journey down into the province of León, then northwards up the Ancares Valley and once again into the Cantabrians. Until quite recently it would have been fair to describe Balouta as the most remote village in Spain. Even now the village itself, and the road leading to it, are marked only on large-scale maps. It lies at the bottom of a deep valley on the north-western slope of the mountains across the Miravalles Pass, cut off during seven months of the year. This extreme isolation has preserved a way of life hardly to be found elsewhere in the country. A year or so ago the telephone reached Balouta so that now in an emergency a doctor can be called from San Román, some 30 kilometres away, although in winter part of the journey will have to be made on a horse. Five children attend the school. The population, estimated at 200 five years ago, is down to 88.

A third of the 40 or so dwellings in Balouta are
pallozas
. The remains of prehistoric structures of a similar kind are to be found in Cornwall and the north of Scotland, but here they have survived in their purest Celtic form, offering no concession to architectural developments in the succeeding 3,000 years. These normally circular or oval buildings are constructed with great skill and art, with drystone walls up to 18 inch thick and about 4½ foot in height, supporting a steeply conical thatched roof, devoid of a chimney. The
palloza
is divided into a main living-room and partitioned-off cooking and sleeping areas, plus stabling for the animals. A family possessing a substantial number of these will generally add a pen to the side of the house. Light and air are admitted by small window-slits or the open door and, although some of the
pallozas
now have electricity, their inhabitants seem to have accustomed themselves to the gloom, managing as ever in semi-darkness (and when meals are in preparation a fair amount of smoke). Visitors recommended to a view of the village from the mountain road high above will find themselves looking down on what appears to be an African village. Nevertheless, everything in sight here belongs to a far remoter past than that reflected in the African equivalent.