I returned from Spain recently and have been ambling through a profusion of Spanish history, attempting to make sense of an endless procession of kings, princes, corpulent dictators and bad-boy knights. Spanish history is a nilhist's pursuit: everything seems to end in war and terror, empires grow large and are tossed back to the ground, idealistic revolutions end in something exponentially worse. In the middle of this comes Norman Lewis, widely renowned as one of England's best travel writers. "The Tomb of Seville" was his last book, published in 2003 when he was all of 95, but it does not reads as some sort of enfeebled final memory.
In 1934, the young author and his Sicilian brother-in-law, Eugene, set off to find the family tomb at the behest of the patriarch, who knows it is located in Seville. The two young men cross the border from France into Spain and find they have walked directly into the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, an impending crisis that they (being young and foreign) do not fully grok. The tone of the book is a curious mixture of youthful fun - because what young person has not to some degree wanted to be involved in great historical doings, in revolution? - and premonition of something horrible on the horizon.
Throughout the book, Lewis and Eugene nervously shrug off the impending revolt, the impending rise of violence ("Surely not another revolution?" as Lewis remarks to Eugene as they are impeded from crossing the border at France). They walk into a shot-up Madrid and find themselves crawling on their hands and knees to cross the street, and still the are unflappable. The journey to Seville proves roundabout and convoluted owing to the "situation" - they are forced to detour north to Salamanca and down by way of Portugal, crossing over the river back into Spain not entirely legally.
Eugene reveals himself to be an aspirant socialist during their time in Madrid, and the author is forced to talk him down from immediately joining up with the Red Army and marching off to fight for social change. Lewis himself appears to have no particular political conventions, tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism for communism - as he remarks to Eugene, "Anyway, communism is only one of the modern religions. Trouble is, I'm not a believer." Eugene for his part, isn't fazed by his companion's skeptical view of the entire revolutionary affair: as he informs Lewis, "I can't tell you how lucky we are to find ourselves here, waiting for the curtain to go up." The curtain would indeed go up, but not as Eugene had envisioned it.
Seville cathedral.
Norman Lewis was always praised most for his clear-eyed and achingly simple prose, his spot-on descriptions of landscapes, and this comes through to great effect in this little book. There are brilliant passages throughout, evocative of a sort of faded and mysterious Spain, a place where a healthy portion of the people still lived in caves and vast wildernesses cut off one city from another, pre-bombings and pre-modern warfare and all of its incumbent trappings. The Spain Lewis describes is desperately poor but it is not ugly, not yet.
Further, there is a mysterious and ancient aspect to the people themselves, which Lewis - the son of an English physic medium - taps into and notes with clear-eyed detail. In Portugal, they are still burning witches, and the townspeople claim she gave herself up for the attention. Madrid's women flock to the slaughterhouses to drink fresh blood in the hope of warding off evil. Castilian men keep watch for foreigners and alert the village when unknown souls float through, far before tourists and tour buses and t-shirt shops. This is the primitive and backwards Spain that used to be, the pre-industrial Spain that did not entirely die until after Franco's passing.
The family tomb in Seville turns out to be a fantasy. Located in Seville's cathedral, it has been dismantled and taken out to the rubbish pile in the back - as the priest explains, only a Christopher Columbus really has the wherewithal to be buried in the cathedral forever, lesser mortals are simply allocated time. Eugene's father, the bombastic old Ernesto Corvaja, unexpectedly races to Seville immediately after, in the hope of stopping his son from joining up with the Reds and involving himself in an imbroglio far larger then he can comprehend. Lewis tells us at the end of the book that he got his wish and returned to Spain to fight on the side of the communists - he survived the battle, but would die soon after, weakened by the periods of starvation he endured during the fighting. He at least got his rendezvous with destiny.
As Senor Corvaja says, darkly, on their last day in San Sebastian upon shutting himself up in his room with some musty literature, "Excuse me, I am off to relinquish the modern world". Lewis's Tomb in Seville is one of the finest testaments to this past and gone Spain we have. Highly recommended.
