reading

Introduction

There comes to every bibliophile a time when the weight of his books becomes untenable, and he is forced to start culling them to make room for new arrivals. As I move along my shelves and amongst my heaps in search of victims, I glimpse my two battered editions of Gerald Brenan’s South from Granada and sigh with relief, for I know that they at least will never end up at the Alpujarran Women’s Association monthly bring-and-buy sale.

There are not many books you read more than four times, but in order to bone up for the purposes of this introduction, and to remind myself of the pleasures that it holds, I have just embarked on my fifth reading of South from Granada – and that doesn’t include the countless dippings and leafings-through in search of references, quotes and allusions. With each new reading I am again astonished and delighted at the quality of the book and its author.

For me it has been a seminal book to the extent of affecting the direction of my life. When I first read it I was so intrigued by the descriptions of the Alpujarras that I was drawn to see the place for myself, and subsequently decided to settle and spend the rest of my days here, not fifteen miles as the crow flies from Yegen, the village that is the subject of the book.

It has been over fifty years now since South from Granada was published (1957), and if in the course of those years Europe has changed in spectacular fashion, then Spain, bursting from the bonds of dictatorship, and even more so Yegen itself, have changed beyond all recognition. In 1919, when the twenty-five-year-old Gerald Brenan first arrived in the village, there was only the most rudimentary road, and certainly not a hint of electricity, telephone or domestic plumbing. Today Yegen is reached by an easily navigable asphalted road, the more modern-minded inhabitants enjoy the benefit of broadband internet access, and there cannot be a house in the village that has not made ‘a modest start in the direction of modern sanitation’ with the introduction of the water-operated porcelain u-bend. And thus one of several reasons for a new introduction: the book is the same; its subject has all but vanished.

The old village, whose architecture suggested to Brenan ‘something that had been made out of the earth by insects,’ is barely discernible today beneath the pebble-dash rendering and modern aberrations in reinforced concrete. You know you’re in the right place though, for what has not changed is the vast view across to the Contraviesa and the sea – ‘a feeling of air surrounding one, of fields of air washing one that I have never come across anywhere else.’

South from Granada has remained the classic idiosyncratic portrait of Spanish village life, and is unlikely to be superseded, not only on account of its own excellence, but because the villages themselves have become less worthy of observation and comment. The general homogenisation that the western world is undergoing – the ubiquity of the baseball cap, the logo of the Coca Cola company and the mind-numbing pap from Hollywood – have made of our modern villages and their villagers something so uniform and banal as to be quite unremarkable. If then we still feel the need to wonder at and delight in singularity and beauty, something other than the uniform dullness or touristy prettification which seem to be all that is left to us, the only course that remains is to steep ourselves in books written before this lamentable state of affairs came to be.

For the general reader like myself, Gerald Brenan’s book is more roundly satisfying than the more objective anthropological portraits of Spanish village life – say Julian Pitt-Rivers’ classic Peoples of the Sierra or Ronald Frazer’s The Pueblo – because it is filled with the personality of the writer, which of course a work of serious anthropology ought not to be. Gerald Brenan never claimed, though, to be a serious anthropologist: ‘I would further like to say that I am very conscious of my inadequacy to deal with some of the subjects which are included in this miscellany. [Thoughts in a Dry Season] I was never at a university and can claim no special knowledge of anything. All my life I have been a learner rather than a knower, a dabbler in matters that were often beyond my natural range or capacity, so that when I treat of these I can only excuse myself with the hope that in an age of specialists the approach of an amateur may have some interest.’

And it is precisely in this amateur and eclectic approach, embellished with meticulously crafted discourses on subjects as diverse as toxicology and Sufism, Mediterranean agriculture and prehistoric archaeology, that the pleasure of South from Granada lies.

There are those who would criticise the book for a certain lack of organization, and it is true that there is an element of rambling to it, but for me rambling is in the very nature of a discursive book; it is redeemed though, and its sometimes tangled threads given cohesion, by the illuminating and all pervading presence of its author. This is achieved by the wit and warmth as well as the penetrating intelligence he brings to bear on any subject he approaches, and its couching in what seems like effortlessly graceful prose, although in fact he spared no pains in honing and polishing his writing – two and a half years in the case of this book.

An enduring delight of the book is the portraiture. An enormous cast of characters is depicted: villagers, city people, visiting philosophers, artists and friends, and each portrait is an exquisitely observed vignette painted with such wit, perception and artistry that it makes you chuckle with pleasure. There are stories too, bright threads of narrative woven into the fabric of the book, and these along with the characters, the author’s impressive erudition that is worn so very lightly, and the singular strangeness of the world he describes, have kept readers fascinated time and again to the last page.

As I have said, what keeps South from Granada from being considered a serious work of anthropology is the constant presence of the author permeating the pages of the book. What sort of man was he, then? Don Geraldo – as the villagers came to know him – was twenty-five when he first arrived in Yegen, a bohemian, a poet and a restless wanderer, rebelling against the strictures of middle-class English life. Apart from ‘long absences because of loneliness or lovesickness’, he lived there for over three years, with regular and prolonged visits for another twelve.

He writes of himself at this time: ‘I was young for my age and rather earnest.’ But here was a man who for two whole years had experienced the horrors of trench warfare in the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, and won a Military Cross. He was modest too, as we have seen, about his erudition, which was dazzling. He read French, German and Spanish, as well as Latin and Greek, and during the writing of The Literature of the Spanish People read no fewer than two hundred and fifty books in two and a half years as well as assimilating and incorporating them into his own work. But in spite of his erudition and formidable intellectual capacity, he also had a poet’s feeling for unexpected and even whimsical imagery; in The Face of Spain for example, he was unable to resist writing – ‘The walls were the colour of women’s bodies …’

Another quality that Don Geraldo possessed was an ability to join in and take pleasure in the lives of simple country people, and it is this that gives his observations of village life such keenness and authenticity. He was as happy, or perhaps happier, striding high in the mountains with shepherds as he was in earnest discussion with the luminaries of Bloomsbury. He was also a brilliant and generous conversationalist.

A quality that strikes an answering chord in me is his profound and poetic love of Nature. His botanical observations are absolutely meticulous, yet he is as much moved by the spirit as by the science of Nature. He writes in a letter to Ralph Partridge in 1954: ‘The qualities I most appreciate in writers: the lyrical gift, the warmth in human matters, the sense of the beauty of the world, of the delight in being alive.’

South from Granada is an affectionate portrait of a world now vanished and never to be seen again, observed and recorded by a true Renaissance man, a type of which few remain today in this world of ours where the quality of specialization is prized above depth and breadth of learning.

An introduction serves first to introduce a book, put it in context, and sing its praises a little so that the potential reader, flicking through the pages in a bookshop or library, may be the more tempted to read it or buy it. Another purpose of the introduction is to prolong that delicious sense of anticipation that embarking on a good new book brings. Read the cover, front and back, the publishing details, biographical notes, list of chapters … by this time there remains only the introduction between you and the first words of the writer. The moment has come, then, to let yourself be enveloped by the luminous intelligence and the graceful prose of Gerald Brenan. I hope this book will give you as much pleasure as it has given me over the years.

Chris Stewart

Órgiva, Las Alpujarras,

October 2007

Preface

When one looks south from Granada across the red towers of the Alhambra one sees a range of mountains known as the Sierra Nevada which have snow on them all the year round. This is the famous view, so endlessly reproduced on picture postcards, which brings the tourist to Andalusia in the spring. But forget the Alhambra, forget the nightingales, and consider only the mountains. They are high enough to boast of having small glaciers, and if you cross them you will come to a broad, hollow country, very broken and separated from the sea by a coastal range. It is this country, which till quite recently could only be explored on foot or mule-back, that is the subject of this book.

Or rather the subject is a village, by name Yegen, that lies within it. It is a poor village, one of the poorest of the eighty or so that stud the Alpujarra, as this fertile region is called, and it stands high above the sea. It is so remote that until the present road was built it took two days to reach it from Granada. But in its primitive way it is beautiful, and since I lived there for some six or seven years between 1920 and 1934 and took an interest in its affairs, I feel that I know enough to write at some length about it.

The principal part of this book then is devoted to an account of this village, with its customs, its folk-lore, its festivals, and a certain number of its more striking characters with their quarrels and love affairs. After this I have written of some of the other sites of the region, of the high mountains that bound it, and of Guadix with its cave quarter, which lies immediately beyond them. Then there is a chapter on archaeology and history, followed by four chapters on Almeria and Granada as they were in those days, especially in such matters as love, courtship, and marriage. Finally I have given a couple of chapters to an account of the visits to my mountain home of four well-known writers – Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, David Garnett, and Roger Fry. Although these chapters inevitably make a break in the narrative and introduce an un-Spanish and so perhaps incongruous element, I felt that it would be a mistake to leave them out.

It will naturally be asked how I came to make my home in such a remote spot. The shortest explanation would be that I was rebelling against English middle-class life. Today in our formless society this seems to me an odd thing to do, but I can assure anyone who has grown up since 1920 that he can have no idea how stifling that life was or how very few outlets there were for a youth whose horizons had been changed by reading poetry and who could no longer be satisfied with the routine professions. The England I knew was petrified by class feeling and by rigid conventions, as well as in my case poisoned by memories of my public school, so that as soon as the war was over and I was out of uniform I set off to discover new and more breathable atmospheres. I took with me a good many books and a little money and the hope that I should be able to keep going for long enough to acquire something I badly needed – an education. After that, I would see.

Here I should like the lutes and violins to strike up and play a piece which might be called Loores de España, Praises of Spain. For I feel quite unequal to putting into a few words the peculiar feeling of acquiescence and delight which, almost from the first, this village and its way of life and, beyond it, the whole yellow, ox-hide land produced on me. I must make this quite clear, because the reader will not find much overt praise in this book. I have simply put down what I can remember having seen, and have taken it for granted that no one is going to find in Spain a model country like Sweden or Switzerland, conditioned by the rhythm of its machines, but on the contrary one which has up to now insisted on preserving a certain modicum of anarchy and non-compliance. How long this is going to continue I cannot say, but it is still true that south of the Pyrenees one finds a society which puts the deeper needs of human nature before the technical organization that is required to provide a higher standard of living. This is a land that nourishes at the same time the sense for poetry and the sense for reality, and neither of these accords with the utilitarian outlook.

There is only one other thing that I should like to put in this preface and that is an observation of a sociological kind. The village where I spent so many years was more fortunately placed than are many Andalusian pueblos, because it had plenty of water for irrigation and property was well divided. Almost everyone got enough to eat, yet the standard of food, dress, and comfort of all except two or three of the leading families was below that of the poorest English agricultural labourer or factory workman. Does that mean that they were miserable? On the contrary I would say that, though there is no way of measuring happiness, these peasants with the quickness of city dwellers got a good deal out of life. The narrow margin on which they had to manage caused them some anxiety in times of bad weather or of crop failure, and at certain seasons they had to work very long hours, yet no one ever left the village for the towns unless some trouble in the family had forced him to do so, and when, as happened from time to time, a man emigrated to America, it was nearly always with the intention of returning as soon as he had made enough money to live on. The principal reason for this was that by the fact of belonging to a closed community everyone felt assured of possessing a niche in society which was his by right, and which not even his own bad conduct could take away from him, and that was more than enough to counteract the lure of the large towns with their cinemas, taverns, and higher wages. In other words an increase in the standard of living is a poor substitute for the loss of the primitive community feeling, and Spanish villagers were wise enough to know this.

Do I need in a book of this sort to mention my sources? If so, let me say that the accounts I have given of local beliefs and customs are drawn from notes which I made at the time and which I have checked with my housekeeper, Rosario, who comes from my village and is a mine of information upon everything connected with it. In other places I have made use of fragments of diaries. Then, since my brief remarks on the foundation of Almeria are given differently in the guide books, I would like to state that I have drawn on the latest and best authority, E. Lévi-Provençal’s Histoire de l’Espagne Musulmane (1942-50). For my pages on prehistory I have relied chiefly on the sections by leading Spanish archaeologists contained in the early volumes of the great Historia de España directed by Don Ramón Menéndez Pidal, on various accounts of excavations, and on The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe by C. F. C. Hawkes, 1939. I have also consulted Don Julio Caro Baroja’s admirable work Los pueblos de España (1946), and a number of books on Spanish folk-lore and kindred subjects. I give these names merely to show that when necessary I have gone to the proper trouble, for in fact by far the greater part of this book has been drawn from my own casual observations and experiences, sifted by a bad memory. All I have aimed at is to entertain a few armchair travellers, who may enjoy whiling away a rainy night in reading of how people live in remote mountain villages in the serene climate of the South Mediterranean. One flies over these villages in the air, one sees their strange names on the map, one may even, if one leaves the main road, bump past them in a car, but their life remains as mysterious as that of the girl with the unforgettable face one caught sight of for a moment through the window of a railway carriage. Here is a description of one of these villages.

I should like to thank my friends Don Modesto Laza Palacios for having answered the many questions on all sorts of subjects that I put to him, and Mr Robert Aitken for information on water-wheels and ploughs. I am also deeply indebted to my friend Mr Guy Murchie, author of that fascinating book on the air, Song of the Sky, for driving me in his car on a tour of the country described in this book. Some of the early chapters have appeared in Der Monat, published in Berlin, and in the Anchor Review, published by Doubleday in New York, both of them under the editorship of Melvin J. Lasky.

CHAPTER ONE

Arrival and Discovery

It was in September 1919 that I went to Spain for the first time. I had just been demobilized and was looking for a house where I could live for as long as possible on my officer’s bounty. I had had little education, for what one gets on the modern side of a public school can scarcely be called that, and the war had left me with a distaste for the usual careers. Before making up my mind what I should do, I wanted to spend a few years reading the books I had collected and soaking myself in the ways of Mediterranean life. However, my choice of Spain rather than of Greece or Italy was not due to any special feeling I had for it. Almost all I knew about that country was that it had been neutral in the war and would therefore, I imagined, be cheap to live in. This was essential, for the longer I could make my money last, the longer I should have in which to enjoy my leisure.

My first impressions after landing at Corunna were discouraging. I spent a few days walking in Galicia, then travelled across the tableland by a mixed goods-and-passenger train that stopped for ten minutes at every station. As we crawled over the endless yellow expanse, I was painfully struck by the emptiness and monotony of the country. Not a bush, not a tree, and the houses built of sun-dried bricks that were the colour of the earth. If the whole of Spain were like this, I did not see how I could settle down in it. Then, hardly had I got to Madrid when it began to pour with rain, and I fell into the clutches of two harpies who kept a boarding-house. They demanded money in advance for every meal and then stood over me while I ate it, snatching my plate away before I had finished and gobbling down what was left in the kitchen. Their eyes had the dry glint of people who have not eaten for a month. Then it began to rain again as soon as I reached Granada. I saw the Alhambra in a steady drizzle, and it seemed to me shoddy and bedraggled, like a gipsy girl sitting under a damp hedge. Could this be the fabulous Oriental palace of the picture postcards?

The people too disappointed me. I had expected to find men wrapped in long cloaks with daggers stuck in their belts and women in Goyaesque postures wearing high combs and mantillas. What I saw was a glum, short-legged race who hurried past under umbrellas or else talked in loud raucous voices till two in the morning. They did not even seem friendly. The only Spaniard I made contact with was the son of the owner of the corralón (the Andalusian version of an Arab fondak) where I put up near the station. He was a cripple, and since he could not work he spent his mornings teaching himself German, which he declared was the language of the future. I offered to give him a few lessons, in return for which he told me that the hope of Spain lay in farm machinery and industrialization and that before many years had passed these would be introduced by German technicians. It seemed that he was a socialist and believed in an approaching world revolution spreading from Berlin.

Those who have been to Granada will know that immediately to the south of it there is a high range of mountains, the Sierra Nevada, which has snow on it all the year round. On the other side of these mountains, between them and the sea, lies a stretch of country, well watered and planted with villages, which is known as the Alpujarra. I had picked it out on the map as being likely to provide a good site for a house, and so I prepared to go there. I bought one of those stiff, black-brimmed Sevillian hats, which I thought would make me less conspicuous, packed a few things in a rucksack, and, as soon as the rain stopped, set off.

My plan was to make a sweep westwards in the direction of Malaga and approach the Alpujarra from the farther side. There too, in the Axarquia, I would find villages perched above the sea, and perhaps one of them would prove suitable for my purpose. But I had not taken in the problems offered by the map. The only one available was the Mapa Provincial, a small, luridly coloured sheet, about the size of a large handkerchief and intended chiefly as a reference chart for officials. It marked the villages, though not always in the right positions, but it left out the mountains and gave a purely schematic picture of the rivers and streams. I need not speak of the roads, because few of them had been built at this time, and most of my travelling would be done on mule tracks.

I set out after lunch and passed a couple of villages. After that it came on to rain. The road was a broad track, ankle deep in mud – at this time none of the Andalusian roads had been surfaced – and it stretched straight in front of me to a distant horizon of mountains. A ceiling of spongy clouds moved slowly by overhead, and on either side there was nothing to be seen but a rolling treeless plain, brick-red in colour but dusted with a thin sprinkling of stubble. I passed tilted wagons, drawn by teams of six or seven mules with a donkey to lead them, the men shouting and cracking their whips and the animals straining at their traces to draw the wheels through the mud. Then darkness fell and the stars unexpectedly came out. The crickets began to trill, and before long I saw the lights of Ventas de Huelma and heard the dogs barking.

The parador was a plain, whitewashed building with an enormous entrance door. Passing through it, I came into a vaulted hall, very white and cavernous, which began as a cobbled descargado or unloading place leading through to the stables and then, at right angles to the entrance, changed into a sort of tiled kitchen, hung round with mule-collars and other leather harness, and closed at the end by a hooded chimney. Here two women, wearing red shawls over their musty black dresses, were stirring a cooking-pot. At a short distance from them some muleteers were seated in glum silence along the walls and, pulling up an unoccupied chair, I joined them. We waited. At length, when I had almost given up hope of obtaining anything to eat, a low table was brought out, a dish of rice and bacalao – that is, salt cod – was placed on it, and we drew up our chairs. There were no plates. Each man, keeping his hat firmly on his head in the manner of a Spanish grandee asserting his equality to everyone present and to come, chose his section of the bowl, and after inviting myself and the others to do the same, dipped his spoon in it with great formality and began to eat. He continued eating till the partition that divided his section from his neighbour’s had worn thin, when he laid down his spoon and, as soon as the others had done so too, got up and washed it at the pitcher and returned it to the faja or red-flannel waistband where he usually carried it. For the first time since I had landed, my heart warmed to the people of this country, who in such an admirable way combined simplicity with good manners.

As soon as supper was over, the men rolled and lit their cigarettes, and after a final glance at their animals stretched themselves out on the straw mattresses which were piled in a corner of the room, and pulled a rug over them. I did the same and found that the stamping and neighing of the mules and donkeys made a good soporific. Then at the first glimmer of dawn we all rose. The muleteers harnessed their mules, and after tossing down a glass of aniseed spirit set off along the straight treeless highroad, while I took a rough track that led off to the left. I had a long walk before me, for I proposed to cross the coastal range and sleep at a village on the farther side called Sedella, where I had heard that there was a good posada.

My road lay through a landscape devastated by the great earthquake of thirty years before. It was a broken, barren country, burned a pale gold by the sun and spotted with irregular patches of oak scrub and dry thistle stalks. I passed two villages – dreary, run-down, shoddily built settlements – but after the second met only a single person. This was a half-witted youth who was guarding a herd of black pigs, and when I spoke to him he waved his arms at me and made gibbering noises. By this time, through trying to follow the map, I had lost my way. The path I was on rose steadily through a jumble of bare rocks and slides of rubble, dotted with dwarfed ilexes. In the stony valley below, the leaves of the occasional poplar trees had turned yellow, and here and there in the distance I could see a lonely farm-house, drawn tight within its walls as a defence against brigands. It was very hot, and the mica schists on the rocks above glittered menacingly.

When at length, after much climbing, I reached the last crest, I found myself on the Sierra de Tejeda, a massif of strato-crystalline rocks that stands over seven thousand feet above the sea. The sun was already touching the horizon. I could pick out the villages of the Axarquia far below me, the smoke rising above them in short columns and then ending. From this height they looked like splashes of white paint dropped on to a surge of pale red hills that ran off the grey rock mountain like fingers and fell in successive cones and waves and rounded protuberances to the sea. Beyond that, very far off, floating on the haze, lay the coastline of Africa.

From immediately below me came the tinkle of goat-bells, and looking down I could discern, where the steep flank of the mountain splayed out, flocks of goats and sheep, with their shepherds, sharply defined in the oblique light, pacing beside them, their cloaks thrown over one shoulder. A more sensible person would have joined them and begged their hospitality for the night, but I was set on reaching the village. I began, therefore, to scramble down the sharp knife-edges and screes and then to leap and race over the slopes below. Soon complete darkness fell, and it was not till very late, scratched and torn and soaked in sweat, that I reached Sedella. Here I found that the good posada I had been recommended no longer existed. I was forced to take one where an old crone, awakened grumbling from her sleep, fried me a couple of eggs in rancid oil and showed me to a bed where I was devoured by an army of bugs till morning. So this was Spain! I felt that I was at last coming to grips with the country.

The Axarquia is a region of high, rounded hills and intricate valleys, planted with vineyards. It grows the muscatel grape from which the famous sweet wine of Malaga is made. The sea lies spread at its foot like a silk coverlet, but its only trees are the fig tree and the almond, and I wanted a country that should be better watered and more diversified. After waiting, therefore, for my torn clothes to be mended I descended to the coast road and turned eastwards along it to Motril. But before reaching this place, which commands the entrance to the Alpujarra from the south-west side, I was attacked by dysentery.

It would be tedious to continue in detail this account of my search for a house. Dysentery dulls the mind to every impression, besides which I have no wish to trespass on a ground that, in his travel book on Mexico, has been so exhaustingly explored by Mr Graham Greene. Let it suffice if I say that for the next weeks I forced myself to keep going, driven by the fear of using up too quickly my small bank balance if I stopped to rest and get treatment. In this way I visited all the thirty or so villages of the Western Alpujarra – those that lie between Padul and Órgiva as well as the high, inaccessible ones between Cástaras and Trevélez – without finding a suitable house to let. In very low spirits and with my complaint growing worse all the time, I found myself one evening in a village of the coastal range called Murtas. Here in a posada that was alive with bugs, where the only food consisted of an oily rice cooked with the nastiest of dried cod, I reached my lowest point. A halt was clearly necessary, and on the following day I found a tolerable inn, almost free from insects, at Ugíjar. This is a small town lying in a shallow valley bottom, which ranks as the cabeza de partido, or administrative capital, of the Eastern Alpujarra.

The country here pleased me better. Órgiva lies in a deep mountain hollow, and its villages, half-hidden among orange groves and long-limbed olive trees, are airless and shut in. The Eastern Alpujarra, which inclines towards Almeria rather than towards Granada, is more open. Ugíjar in its red-cliffed, poplared valley seemed to me an enchanting place, and looking north from it I could see along the flank of the Sierra Nevada a row of villages, each surrounded by its olive groves and fruit trees, and evidently commanding a view to the south. After a day or two’s rest I set out to explore these, and soon came on two that had houses to let. One was called Mairena and the other Yegen.

Mairena was a village chiefly inhabited by gipsies. In spite of my admiration for Borrow, I took only a moderate interest in these people, and wished to live among Spaniards. It was also an isolated village, at least an hour’s walk from any road. Yegen, on the other hand, had a road, and this gave it a more habitable aspect. One can walk along a road by day or night without looking to see where one is going. Besides, there was something about the place that attracted me. It was a poor village, standing high above the sea, with an immense view in front of it. With its grey box-shaped houses of a battered Corbusier style, all running down the hill and fusing into one another, and its flat day roofs and small smoking chimneys, it suggested something that had been made out of the earth by insects. It had too an abundance of water, flowing along the mountain-side in irrigation channels, descending at times through the streets, and turning two mills. But the house had to please as well, and fortunately it did so. It was an irregularly shaped, rambling affair, joined on to smaller houses on either side and comprising some nine living-rooms on the first floor as well as two large and habitable azoteas or attics. The ground floor, which the landlord reserved, was used for store-rooms and stables. But the rent asked for this – 200 pesetas a year – was more than I could afford. With the idea of making further inquiries at some of the villages I had passed – there was one called Niguëlas which had especially attracted me – as well as in the hopes of beating this price down, I set off again on foot for Granada, with my complaint heavily on me. When I got back a fortnight later I found that the rent asked for the house at Yegen had fallen to 120 pesetas, which at that time came to £6 in English money. I took it.

The owner, Don Fadrique, was letting it under tragic circumstances. His only daughter had just died and he was going to live with his wife’s family near Granada. But he could not give me possession till the New Year. I had thus almost two months to wait till I could move in, and I decided to spend them at Malaga, where by rest and careful dieting I hoped to throw off my dysentery and with it the weakness and low spirits that made travelling so irksome. I set out therefore on foot by the still-unfinished coast road, buying as I went bread, cheese, and oranges, and sleeping on the beaches. Since I was in poor walking condition, I took five days to do the hundred and thirty miles.

At Malaga I secured a clean bedroom, previously occupied by a Norwegian sailor, near the bull-ring. After the rough life of the villages, it was a pleasure to be in a large Mediterranean city again. I found it a place of contrasts. Up on the crumbling hill, devoured by the yellow light, the Moorish castle was alive with beggars and gipsies: they dug their caves in its walls and sat delousing one another in the sun among whiffs of orange-flower and drying excrement. The children up to the age of twelve ran naked. Then, if one dropped down a stone’s throw to the Park, one came on a complete change of scene: here the victorias of the Madrid aristocracy rolled up and down – Malaga was at this time at the height of its repute as a winter resort – and sleek, jingling horses and gleaming spokes flickered by under the lattice of the plane trees. Or one could take one’s seat on one of the stone benches and watch the people on the sidewalks. With high combs standing erect on their heads and black lace mantillas draped over them, the young women of the middle classes paced along in their mannequin step, collecting glances of admiration from the men who passed them. The head-dress could be either uncouth or elegant, but all the eyes were bright with excitement and many of the faces were lovely.

For a day or two I steeped myself in the sights of the city, and then something disagreeable happened. I have always been careless in my money arrangements, and through some miscalculation the pesetas I had expected to receive did not arrive. For more than a week I was without any at all. My landlady provided me every morning with a roll of bread and a bowl of coffee, and on this and a few oranges, which I had bought with my last pennies, I kept myself going. To make my situation the more exasperating I found at the post office a letter from an old friend of my family. He was spending the winter in Malaga at the Regina Hotel and he invited me to stay there as his guest and, if the state of the roads permitted, to make some motor excursions to Seville and other places in the vicinity. But I was wearing an old corduroy suit, a pair of rope-soled shoes, and a Sevillian hat. He was a very correct man – dress had an almost religious significance in those days – and in such a garb I could not possibly appear before him. Indeed the fear of meeting him accidentally became such an obsession that I used to walk out every morning along the beach, past the fishermen’s quarters and the industrial district of Huelin, and spend the days in a dull stupor by the sea. The waves made a melancholy sound on the grey sand, the factory smoke rose forlornly into the air, as they do for all those who have no food in their stomachs.

At length my money arrived. I was able to buy a good meal and, what was equally important, a couple of books. When I had finished these I decided that the time had come for me to leave Malaga. I chose a few things at an antique shop and took the train to Granada. Here, after getting some more pottery – the Fajalauza ware with its faded indigo designs of birds and flowers had only just taken to its present crude synthetic colours – I continued by bus and mule to Ugíjar.

Christmas had now arrived. The furniture I had ordered to be made at the carpenter’s was ready. I had fetched my suitcase from Granada and so had a few books to read. I spent the last days of waiting sitting under the orange trees with a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics and, when that proved too exacting, with Bury’s History of Greece. The years of boredom in base-camps and trenches had filled me with a hunger for knowledge, and the first tasks I had set myself when I was settled were to learn something about philosophy and to teach myself Greek. I felt ashamed of being twenty-five and of having read nothing but a few novels and some poetry.

Gerald Brenan

SOUTH FROM GRANADA

With an Introduction by Chris Stewart

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

SOUTH FROM GRANADA

Introduction

Preface

CHAPTER ONE

Arrival and Discovery