Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 Page 30

  “End of the Rif,” I said sadly to Christopher.

  The young katib pointed to the wall map behind his desk. “In the Middle Atlas, on the other hand, I can arrange something for you. Within a very few days, if you like. The Ait Ouaraine.”

  “Yes, I should like it very much,” I told him.

  “Come, please, tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.”

  “Thank you,” we said.

  I came back here to the Hôtel Guillaume Tell and got into bed. The room is not made up here, either, but there is plenty of space in it and my meals are brought up on a tray, so it is not important. Yesterday Christopher and Mohammed Larbi made contact in the street with a group of professional musicians who agreed to record today. Their ensemble consisted of three rhaitas, four tbola (beaten with sticks) and eight rifles. The first price asked was high; then it was explained that if the rifles were not to be fired during the playing the cost would be cut in half. The agreement reached provided that only the rhaitas and tbola would perform.

  Mohammed Larbi’s excessive consumption of kif has given him a serious chronic liver disorder; he feels ill most of the time. Last night he went out for a walk after dinner. At the end of an hour he came in, his expression more determined than usual, and announced to us: “I’m finished with kif.” Christopher laughed derisively. To implement his words, Mohammed Larbi tossed both his naboula, bulging with kif, and his cherished pipe, on my bed, saying, “Keep all this. You can have it. I don’t want to see any of it again.” But this morning before breakfast he went out and bought a fifth of Scotch, which he sampled before his morning coffee. When he came into my room later to pack up the recording equipment, he had the bottle with him, and Christopher made loud fun of him.

  “ O chnou brhitsi?” he cried indignantly. “I’m not smoking kif any more. Do you expect me to leave my poor head empty?” This amused Christopher and depressed me. I foresee difficulties with a belligerent Mohammed Larbi. Kif keeps men quiet and vegetative; alcohol sends them out to break shop windows. In Mohammed Larbi’s case it often means a fight with a policeman. I watched with misgivings as he prepared to go out.

  This was the first time any recording had been done in my absence. But it all went smoothly, said Christopher on their return. There was a slight altercation at the moment of payment, because in spite of the agreement by which the men were not to discharge their rifles, they had not been able to resist participating, so that at three separate points in the music they fired them off, all eight of them, and simultaneously. At the end they presented a bill for twenty-four cartridges, which Mohammed Larbi, by then well fortified with White Label, steadfastly refused to pay. “All right. Good-bye,” they said, and they went happily off to play at a wedding in a nearby village.

  SEPTEMBER 22

  THE WHISKEY HAS done its work, but in a fashion I had not expected. This evening, when the bottle was nearly empty, Mohammed Larbi spent two hours trying to telephone his wife in Tangier. Finally he got the proprietor of a grocery near his house to go and fetch her, and had a stormy conversation with her for five minutes. I could hear him bellowing from where I lay, at the other end of the hotel. When he came into my room he looked maniacal.

  “I’ve heard my wife’s voice!” he shouted. “Now I’ve got to see her. She may have somebody else. I’m going tonight. I’ll get there by tomorrow night.”

  “You’re walking out on your job?”

  “I’m going to see my wife!” he cried, even louder, as though I had not understood. “I have to do that, don’t I?”

  “You’re going to leave me here, sick in bed?”

  He hesitated only an instant. “Christopher knows how to take care of you. Besides, you’re not sick. You just have a fever. I’ll give you the grocer’s number, and you telephone me when you get to Fez. I’ll see you in a week or ten days. In Fez.”

  “All right,” I said, without any intention of calling him. If he is going to be on whiskey, it would be better not to have him along, in any case.

  And so now I have at least a pound of very strong kif among my possessions. In another two or three days I should be well enough to go up to Tahala and capture the Ait Ouaraine. The Rif is finished, and I managed to record only in two places.

  Madeira

  Holiday, September 1960

  WHEN I FIRST thought of visiting Madeira I was advised by my English friends to reconsider. “You’ll loathe it,” they told me. “No character whatever.”

  “Dreary, stuffy little place.”

  “Nobody goes there but very elderly ladies.”

  “Madeira! Whatever for?”

  “I had a great aunt who used to go religiously. I believe the poor old thing eventually died out there.”

  “It’s the absolute end!”

  This unanimity of adverse opinion might have dissuaded me had I not already made up my mind that I was going there no matter what; besides, it turned out each time that my informant had not actually been there, but was expressing an opinion prevalent nowadays in literary London.

  I had always felt I should like Madeira, and so I came, and was glad I did. Their descriptions now strike me as completely unreal; by assessing the place in terms of British tourists, it was as if they had insisted that New York’s streets are empty save for Chinese, or that California consisted solely of film studios. Madeira has plenty of character, even though it is not precisely the character ascribed to it by the tourist brochures. “Ideal year-round climate.” “Madeira rises out of the Atlantic like some fantastic emerald out of an incredible waste of lapis lazuli.” (I believe similar visions are not uncommon with the peculiar narcotic mescaline, but I doubt there is a pill which can make the winter climate seem ideal.)

  It’s true that the cliffs rise spectacularly from the depths of the Atlantic. Madeira is a country of about 285 square miles which is literally one huge volcanic rock surrounded by the sea. The sea air is all-pervasive; even in the quiet valleys of the interior there is often the unmistakable smell of the salt water. You cannot reach the island except by ship; it lies 570 miles southwest of Lisbon, and 320 miles due west of the coast of Morocco. There is no airstrip, and the seaplane service was discontinued in 1958.

  Four hundred years ago Camoëns, the Portuguese poet, described the place as being “do mundo a derradeira” (at the end of the world), and there are occasions now when it gives the same impression, particularly on a sunless day when the rough Atlantic pounds against it and the tops of the perpendicular cliffs are smothered in low-flying clouds. It is a rough, uncomfortable country with a relatively mild climate and a strong hybrid people. The original Portuguese stock was soon reinforced by Italian, Spanish and Dutch settlers; later came Moslem and Jewish refugees from Christian Spain, and finally Negroes from the African mainland, who were brought in as slaves to work the sugar plantations. The present population is an undifferen-tiated amalgam of these various strains. A hardy race of men, accustomed to dealing with wind and waves, but not capable of understanding the twentieth-century mentality of visitors who find such a race an admirable phenomenon. They see no advantage in their own extraordinary sturdiness – only misfortune in the conditions that made it necessary for them to develop it.

  A small conversation I had during my first visit has remained in my mind. I was enthusing to a Madeiran about the charm of the country. I remarked that he didn’t know how lucky he was to live in such a delightful spot, and he said quietly: “Yes. A bird can light in the courtyard of a prison and fly away again without ever knowing where it has been.”

  In the park of Funchal’s Quinta Vigia there are little signs that read: respect the plants. It would be hard not to. Madeira is a land where you are very conscious of the vegetable world around you. Plants grow quickly in the mild, humid air. As you drive through the countryside you feel that every acre at some point in the past must have been laboriously landscaped; it is hard to believe that such a vast rock garden could have come into existence without human planning.

 
Where the land is worked, whole mountain slopes have been transformed by terracing. Often each level has its tiny channel of water, fed by the nearest levada. The levadas are a complicated network of irrigation canals that guide the valuable rainwater down from the peaks to the sea. The average levada is not more than three feet wide and two feet deep, but the water in it is so clear and cold that you are tempted to drink it. The canal project was begun in 1836 and is still going on; at present there are 435 miles of it, every stone hewn and laid by hand.

  But when the day is finished and the laborer goes home, instead of reading the paper he scratches around in his garden. There is no dwelling too miserable to have its little flower plots, its trellises and arbors. Every window has its flower box, the smallest courtyard is crowded with palms and philodendron, the most wretched shack stands in the midst of blossoming vines and banana plants. Often the edges of the road in the remote country have been planted with ivy, or lilies, or fern. Sometimes grapevines are trained in arbors across the highway so that wayfarers may walk comfortably in the shade. In the center of Funchal there are three deep ravines where, in the rainy season, wild torrents roar down from above, on their way to the ocean. These have been transformed into tunnels by planting bougainvillaeas and other flowering shrubs and stretching them from bank to bank, so that from the bridges, as you look up or down a ravine, nothing is visible of it, but the roof of the tunnel – a long prospect of solid flowers. Twenty feet below, the water rushes by.

  When the Portuguese first discovered Madeira more than 600 years ago its slopes were entirely covered with virgin forest. There was no sign that a human being had ever set foot on it. The density of the vegetation was such that the colonists decided to burn everything. This proved to be a poor idea, since the resulting holocaust forced them to put to sea again. It is said to have been seven years before the fire finally burned itself out, and the primeval forest was almost completely destroyed (a few patches of it still exist in the northern part of the island). But during the ensuing centuries the fertile soil and the peculiar climatic conditions have managed to make an impressive second growth.

  Although the original flora of the island was not specifically tropical, a great many exotic trees and flowers from Portugal’s African colonies grow well here, not because the temperature ever rises very high, but because it never sinks very low.

  Where the virgin forest was not razed, there are such native juxtapositions as tree ferns and maples, or chestnut trees and bamboo; in the towns there are the imported champac, jaca-randa and kapok trees.

  In one respect my London friends were right: most of the visitors to the island are British. They arrive in Funchal on British ships and go directly to the big British-run hotels in the suburbs, where they remain a week or two – possibly three – but rarely longer, and where, in theory, they pass their time playing tennis or golf, and swimming in one of the big pools (since beaches are nonexistent). But only if they are lucky with the weather, which they generally are not, since most of them come in the winter when it rains. My advice to Americans is to visit Madeira in the dry season, which is the summer, or they will be bitterly disappointed.

  However, people who live in the British Isles are appreciative of an occasional half hour of sun or even of a cloudy day when no rain falls and this explains why they continue to use the island as a winter resort.

  The first time I landed in Funchal not having been able to get previous information about any other kind of establishment, I went along with the British to one of these enormous institutions. It was quiet, comfortable and depressing like a sanatorium. I had to wear my coat in the bedroom because there was no heat, it is true. (But then, Americans have to wear extra clothing indoors during the winter in England too, if they want to be warm enough.) Through the tiny meshes of the screens in my windows I had a dim panorama of terraced gardens with palms, bananas and papayas rising above occasional villas with red tile roofs and beyond, the gigantic gray backdrop of nearby mountains whose peaks were permanently hidden by clouds. Several times each day a thin curtain of rain would unroll from the sky above the mountains and softly advance toward me. By the time it had reached the hotel a shaft of pale sunlight would already be illuminating some distant cliff up on the heights, and the English guests in their wet mackintoshes would be atwitter down in the drenched garden.

  “I really think we shall have some sun.”

  “Isn’t it lovely?”

  “Much nicer than yesterday.” I never ceased to marvel at their pleasure in what seemed a show of unmitigatedly foul weather.

  It was the monotony of the “English” meals which finally decided me to change living quarters. I moved into town to a Portuguese hotel with a brazenly Portuguese bill-of-fare, and never looked back with longing on the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. There was no heat here, either, but then, if you are getting a room and three good meals for two dollars and a half a day, you don’t expect grand luxe.

  Fashions in drink come and go like fashions in everything else; for the past few decades sweet wines have not been much in favor. I, for instance, had drunk very little port before living in Portugal; and had scarcely tasted Madeira until I came here. Surprisingly enough, good Sercial, which can be had in any can-tina of Funchal, is almost as dry as dry sherry. I don’t remember ever having had Sercial in the United States, but I should think it could have considerable popularity there. Its texture gives an indefinable impression of luxury.

  All the Madeira wines have this quality to some extent, but the Malmsey, Boal and even the Verdelho are too sweet to suit my American taste. Sercial became my password in the cafés and cantinas of Funchal. Later in Lisbon I was indignant when I couldn’t get it in an ordinary bar and was forced to settle for vinho verde. Now I am back in Funchal once again, and this time I appreciate the luxury of finding it at the humblest wine counter.

  The simplest way for the visitor to get an exact idea of the range of bouquet and body in Madeira wines is for him to visit the armazem of one of the large export firms in Funchal. There he can spend a pleasant hour sitting at a bar in a roomful of old casks, sampling century-old vintages and having the technique of preparing each variety described to him by a barman who keeps no tab since all drinks are on the house.

  IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON, and I was leaning against a haystack looking westward. No matter in which direction you look, the landscape at Santana is hard to believe. It is as if a nineteenth century painter with a taste for the baroque had invented a countryside to suit his own personal fantasy. Worked into the canvas are pictorial details of a “poetic” variety, which such a man would have felt belonged there: an Alpine background with a high waterfall, meadows of an unlikely green, carpeted in patches with unnecessarily bright flowers and coquettish little thatched cottages, their steep roofs reaching to the ground, smothered in masses of rambler roses. It is the sort of picture that used to adorn the grocer’s calendar. I accepted it because I stood in the middle of it.

  To my right stretched an unending expanse of poster-blue sea, silent and motionless because it was some thirteen hundred feet below. From the map I had gathered that Santana was on the coast, and so it is, but at the top of a cliff that nobody ever seems to climb up and down. The cobbled road leading back to the village was about two feet wide, with moss and tiny flowers growing between its stones. Soon a barefoot peasant appeared wearing the hand-made, archaic-looking costume fitting to the general décor, and I called down to him for a match. He looked up, smiled, and said: “I have none, but I’ll go back and get you some.” Then he turned and went back the way he had just come.

  It happened so quickly that my reaction was a second late. “No, no, no! Don’t bother!” I shouted. He continued on his way up to the village.

  In ten or fifteen minutes he reappeared at the top of the hill, running. I went to meet him. Breathless and still smiling, he held out the box of matches he had just bought and, with a curious mixture of pride and reserve, presented it to me as if it were a v
aluable gift. I accepted it in the same spirit. We lighted cigarettes, and I looked at him. He was probably in his thirties, with unruly hair and wide-apart eyes. There was a definite difference between this face and the kind of faces I was used to seeing. It was as if this one had been made by hand, the others mass-produced. Even as this thought occurred to me I was aware of my own weakness for romanticizing about unevolved people. But this time I quickly decided I was right: here was the first Madeiran peasant I had spoken with, and even before meeting me he had gone far out of his way to be friendly. It seemed a good beginning.

  Funchal, where I had lived for a month, was four hours away by bus. I inquired if he knew the city, and regretted my question. I might as well have asked if he had been to New York. Funchal was a long way off, he explained, and he had never had the occasion to make the trip. However, he added, there were many people in the village who had been there. Then he wanted to know if I was from Lisbon. No, I said: America. Ah, he sighed, smoking thoughtfully. He had a cousin who had sought refuge in America – Venezuela, to be exact. (There is a good deal of emigration from Madeira to Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico, as well as a smaller amount to the United States, and this change of homeland is often referred to as “seeking refuge”. The refuge is purely economic, but they don’t specify that. It seemed there was also a lady from America who had been in Santana earlier in the year. She had come back to visit, and of course had brought a great deal of money.

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Of course. If she hadn’t got the money she couldn’t have come all the way back to Madeira.” He stood with his legs far apart, digging his bare toes into the soft black earth beside the path. “Tell me,” he said suddenly. “How does it happen that it’s so easy to make money in America?”

  “It isn’t,” I assured him. “It’s very difficult.”

  He shook his head. “But if you put aside a certain amount of money each year, you have enough to pay for the ship. And in Madeira, even if you save up two thousand, five thousand, even ten thousand escudos, it still isn’t enough to pay for a trip to America and back. Why is that?”