Through the hole in the wall
Christopher Howse
DON QUIXOTE'S DELUSIONS: TRAVELS IN CASTILIAN SPAIN by Miranda France Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 243, ISBN 0297842773 As Miranda France lay in bed with her Peruvian revolutionary lover he complained at the draught from the widening crack in the wall through which as the day wore on transvestites and addicts could be seen fixing their makeup or shooting up their fixes. In 1987 it seemed a friendly, homely place to spend a year of a university language course in, just off the Gran Via, where it kinks, in the centre of Madrid, a dozen years after the death of Franco.
Madrid is not typical of Spain, and these lodgings were not typical of Madrid — more like Soho before it came into money. As it happens, the neighbourhood is just next to the parish chosen in 1956 by Michael Kenny for his anthropology field project. His findings then in Spanish Tapestry contrast interestingly with Miranda France's. Madrid has always been noisy, but gone is the sereno with his bunch of huge keys for tenement doors; he would roar out the hours all night, and latecomers would shout 'Serene in the street till he came to let them in. Thirty years on, Miranda France found her unpatrolled stairwell a hideaway for junkies.
In the Fifties the film censors would rewrite the plots of dubbed films; to avoid the scandal of adultery in American movies, they would make the heroine the hero's sister. Kenny notes that this sometimes gave an unintended frisson of incest. Miranda France remarks that the rush into democracy after the Franco years sometimes seemed to bear as its two chief fruits public drug-taking and pornography. When she returned a decade later she found half the junkies dead and the pink-covered erotic novels a drug on a bored market.
It is not that we get long lessons from this author. She has a wonderfully quick and vivid eye for convincing detail seen through that crack in the wall. One glimpse is of the Chinese family upstairs, who had to be dissuaded from hanging fish to dry on the pulley clothes-line over the back yard directly above her clean washing.
And then she is taken on a nocturnal tour of the narrow streets of Toledo by a blind girl in her twenties, a lottery seller for the charity Once, the sponsor of every street corner pitch, who curses the city council for planting bollards in the middle of the pavement, calling them mataciegos, `blindkillers'. The two women are joined by two belly dancers from a bar and end up high above the city: "It's so beautiful", they said, "it really is." And it was.'
Castilians speak their minds, full or empty. Mataciegos is an epithet that echoes Matamoros, 'Moor-killers', a traditional title of praise for St James, the nation's patron. Cervantes lost an arm at the great sea battle of Lepanto in 1571, which broke the power of the Turks in the Mediterranean. He became known as El Manco de Lepanto, the One-Armed Hero of Lepanto. But that did not earn him a living. Nor did the runaway success of his Don Quixote. Professor Carroll B. Johnson, a Freudian commentator on the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, observes that his beard is 'an upwardly displaced analogue of the virile member'. Gratefully we hear no more of the professor.
Just as no two commentators can agree on Don Quixote, so Quixote himself is unsure if he is ever seeing the same thing twice, because there are 'enchanters going about among us, changing things and giving them a deceitful appearance'. As Calderon put it, La Vida es Suerio — Life's a dream. This should be the motto of Castile. It gets people through a life of suffering, but it can also mean that to fall into the hands of a Castilian enemy is greatly to be feared, for, if all is a dream, your cruel torments mean nothing to your captors.
Truth and appearance: one day Miranda France is in the middle of experimenting painfully with a waxy depilation of her armpits in the cracked house when a child knocks at the door begging food. With a tee-shirt pulled awkwardly over her torso and trapped arms she answers the door. 'He may have thought I had some kind of deformity; it was not unusual in Spain.' No, indeed. Spain is still a treasure house for students of outmoded prostheses, built-up shoes, invalid carriages, surgical appliances, of old-fashioned goitres, imbeciles, hydrocephalics and hunchbacks. I once saw a man in a back-street bar enjoying a Saturday morning drink with his friends; he had no lower jaw. One evening I saw a man in a wheelchair being given a tow home by a friend behind his motor-bike at 30 miles an hour.
Miranda France tells of a friend who made his living with the help of several passports, which he hid under the carpet, installing telephones in rented flats, turning them into locutorios from which Latin Americans paid to phone home cheaply. When the bills came in he moved on. One day a Guatemalan client held a palmreading session at the /ocutorio. Reading the revolutionary lover's hand, and doing nothing to soften the blow, she declared, 'You will die young, away from home.' But in this book another death takes us by surprise. I shall not spoil it.
With all the scenes that ring true, it is odd to find that Miranda France doesn't quite see into Spanish religion aright. That is no disgrace, since, for different reasons, neither did George Borrow, or Richard Ford, or V.S. Pritchett. But the civil war, for example, makes no kind of sense without this insight. To her Spanish friends Miranda France excuses herself as a Protestant, and, as a correlative, it is true enough that few Spaniards really understand what that means. This is a country where the word for 'human being' is Cristiano and the word for 'Christian' is Catolico.
If Spain is still 50 per cent practising Catholic, the practice does not extend to having children. The birth rate is the second lowest in the world. (So Miranda France says. Can that be true?) But the book ends in a happy moment with her little baby lying on a well-dressed mattress in the street next to seven other prettily adorned mites, as the village priest gives them benediction with the Blessed Sacrament while the traditional, devilishly costumed El Colacho crouches to make his spring like Evil Knievel over the line-up, to bring them health and fortune.
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