Books on Ibiza
Bibliomaniacs' Corner by Martin Davies
Gaston Vuillier (Part Two)
Looking
from the crest of the Majorcan sierra on a clear day, the spectator sees far to
the south-west a small network of dark blue specks breaking the clear turquoise
of the sea. They are the Pithyusæ, the least known and most remote of the
Balearic group. An old paddle steamer, which makes a service between Palma and
Alicante, calls at Iviza on the way, and I decided to avail myself of it to go
to these distant and rarely visited islands.
Thus
begins the account of Ibiza's first and most underrated travel writer in The
Forgotten Isles (1893, English ed. 1896). The early life Gaston Vuillier was
the subject of our previous article, so here we will only recap in brief: born
to a lowly Perpignan servant-girl surnamed Pont, he was packed off to a mountain
village, recalled to attend grammar school in the provincial capital, recognized
by his father (who had by then married the said domestic) and swiftly promoted
to the upper-bourgeoisie. Sent to Aix-en-Provence to study law, he switched to
fine art and completed his studies at the academy in Marseilles. An acquaintance
with a maverick politician led to his appointment as an officer at the outbreak
of the Franco-Prussian War, followed by six years in the French colonial administration
in Algeria. Empire-building was then abandoned for art, and his apprenticeship
brought to a conclusion under a leading Parisian landscapist. He began engraving
for magazines in the same year (1876), writing short pieces to accompany sketches
made in Algeria. His literary overture was a full-length article about Andorra
(1888) in Le Tour du Monde, a sort of francophone National Geographic.
This career-shift was consolidated by longer pieces on Majorca, Sardinia and Menorca,
so that by the time the forty-four year old arrived on Ibiza in the autumn of
1889, he was enjoying the first flush of modest journalistic success. Mallorca
had been a breeze: the island's unspoilt beauty stole his heart and soul and he
was to return on several occasions, eventually becoming a rare Hijo Predilecto
(Favourite Son). He also made friends with the Archduke Luis Salvador, a foreign
savant whose magnificent study of the Pityuses had appeared in print two decades
earlier. The generous Austro-Tuscan granted Vuillier permission to use some of
his unpublished Ibiza photographs as the basis for engravings to illustrate the
forthcoming article. It has been suggested that Vuillier's close relationship
with the Balearis major had a bearing on his initial take on the sister
island: "I had been warned in Majorca that I should find Iviza a dirty place
... terrible things were intimated about the Pithyusæ." As we saw in
the previous instalment, this was par for the course - in fact it rather whetted
the appetite of those in search of local colour. It was unfortunate that when
Vuillier stepped off the boat the Pityusan capital was also in the throes of a
full-scale diphtheria epidemic. The paddle steamer was
to return to Palma in ten days, leaving our investigator just over a week to come
to terms with the queen (or Cinderella) of forgotten islands. His methodology
of finding experts to brief him on local customs was helped by the simple fact
of being French: few of the Anglo-Saxon visitors a generation or so later spoke
fluent Spanish (as equally few Spaniards spoke English) and were thus forced to
rely largely on personal observation. Added to this was the fact that Vuillier's
childhood in deepest Aude allowed him to converse in Catalan, leaving Spanish
and French for the refined citizens of the capital. Among his letters of introduction
was one to Don Juan Torres y Ribas, a local canon who later became bishop of Minorca.
The two met by chance in the Upper Town and the cleric quickly became Vuillier's
principal informant and adviser. His first suggestion was to leave Formentera
out of the projected itinerary: if the wind should change, he warned Vuillier
grimly, he could be stranded there for weeks on end. The
first of Vuillier's two chapters on Ibiza is devoted to the capital - its rudimentary
accommodation, its unattractive food and the pervasive stench in the air; the
second, which describes visits to San Antonio and Santa Eulalia, focuses on unusual
local customs. At all times the author, like a modern-day TV travel journalist,
kept his audience in mind: if those discerning Tour du Monde readers were to make
a major investment in cash and time, they had to have the bottom line; any glossing
over weaker points would have meant a failure of duty. In fact the report Vuillier
filed stressed good as well as bad, maintaining a style throughout as elegant
as it was drily ironic: After
the customary struggle with rival porters, who each seized upon a separate article,
I reached the fonda with my train of bearers, all of whom, especially the man
who carried my umbrella, kept mopping their brows to show me how heavy their burdens
had been.
Or
The
town of Iviza, with seven thousand inhabitants, possesses only one hotel, and
even this lacks all comfort, in spite of the sonorous name of the landlord, José
Roig y Torres. He was familiarly known as el Cojo (Hoppy), from an infirmity in
his gait. I can see the man now, with his enormous head and his ugly eyes blinking
under lashes as thick as horsehair, balancing his ungainly body on his deformed
legs as he coursed round the table with the gestures of a performing bear, stopping
to expectorate at my very feet, and panting like a wild beast, his breath reeking
of vile tobacco. And then the dishes of Heaven knows what meat, floating in oily
sauce, which he shoved under my nose, saying each time "Now,
this, Señor, is simply delicious!"
The
charge of second-rate scribbler is thus hardly borne out by Vuillier's prose;
to this is added his extremely successful career (almost all his books were translated
into several other languages) as well as continuing popularity over time: a whole
century later readers from Syracuse to San Antonio - not to mention the length
and breadth of France - rarely fail to fall under the Frenchman's spell. There
is, it has to be owned, the odd peccadillo, inevitable in a ten-day field trip
with no proper authorities to fall back on in Paris. A tiny error is made about
the lookout point in Dalt Vila, the Catalan-Gothic window of Can Comasema is described
as 'Moorish' and La Marina (outside the walls) was not built, as he writes, after
the French put an end to Algerian piracy (a version which went down a treat on
the banks of the Seine). The meat though, the folklore, is highly accurate, even
if drama is heightened for literary purposes. After all, that is what a travel
writer does for a living, unlike the one-man encyclopaedist, the Archduke Luis
Salvador. Here is Vuillier on a long-vanished courting custom: Some
days after my visit to San Antonio, I drove out to the village of Santa Eulalia,
where I was again the guest of the parish priest. The peasants had just come out
from attending mass, and as I was talking to the clergyman at the door of his
house, I was startled by several loud reports. On my asking the priest what the
sounds meant, he led me quickly to the foot of a little hill, where I perceived
a girl walking slowly home from church. A young man with a musket was hurrying
after her, and just as he overtook her he suddenly fired at her very feet, raising
a cloud of stones and dust which almost hid her from view. But without so much
as the quiver of an eyelash the girl continued to walk serenely on, and the young
peasant placing himself by her side, they both continued their road chatting amicably
together. This, it appears, is the recognised form of salutation between man and
maid throughout the island, and the girls make it a point of honour to betray
no emotion at the firing, though they are always taken unawares; for the lovers,
wearing light espardenyas, creep up behind them as silently as panthers.
One
could quote endlessly from this splendid book, so generously packed with amusing
vignettes and ethnographic detail. The accompanying illustrations, exactly where
required, elevate the whole to a veritable livre d'artiste. The detail
of these engravings (in which Vuillier was assisted by one Charles Brabant) places
them alongside the best of surviving photographs, as is confirmed by their repeated
appearance in later works - and now websites. But this graphic fame is largely
anonymous - or mealy-mouthed. Most Ibicencans have seen the illustration below,
but few know the name of the Frenchman responsible, and local commentators inevitably
trot out the well-worn cliché about his inability to write. There are twenty-eight
illustrations in total, of which seventeen may be examined at http://www.uoc.es/humfil/eivifor/a2_cat/
e1/vuillier.html.
|
An Ardent
Avowal |
Vuillier's later career will be the subject of the third (and final) instalment
in a fortnight's time. But first, why is it that so many front-rank authors such
as Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Santiago Rusiñol have incurred
the indignation, indeed even wrath, of Ibiza's intellectuals? In Vuillier's case,
there are at least four factors involved, shared largely by his fellow-scribblers:
firstly, he unwittingly offended local sensibilities by stressing the Moorish
connection, which ran counter to a persistent desire to be seen as European rather
than African or Arabic. In a 1974 article in the journal Eivissa, the local
poet Marià Villangómez began by enumerating all the passages in
which Vuillier characterises a local feature as 'Arabic' or 'Moorish'. (The artist's
six years in Algeria, it may be noted, put him in a far better position to make
such comparisons than those who have never set foot in such lands.) Secondly,
the Frenchman's fascination with the more violent aspects of local mores was regarded
as giving a false impression of what the island was really like. Sophisticated
Ibicencans were horrified to see so much space devoted to vanishing customs with
which they were barely acquainted - the 'barbarisms' beloved of Palma wits. Thirdly
his frank characterization of local food, lodging and sanitation seemed to place
in jeopardy the slim hope of diverting a little modest tourism to Ibiza's shores.
(The diphtheria outbreak of 1889 may have marked a particular low-point.) Finally,
the empirical-scientific approach of the Archduke Luis Salvador became the benchmark
against which all subsequent foreign writing on Ibiza was appraised - even novels
and travel books. Limited linguistic knowledge has saved almost all Anglo-Saxon
travel writers from a similar fate, their accounts never having been subject to
the same stern scrutiny by local authors. Time moves on though. We now know
that the Arabic centuries have left their mark (although Vuillier himself stressed
the contributions of other cultures, above all in the capital); we feel almost
nostalgic about those 'barbaric' customs; gourmet restaurateurs and trained receptionists
have swept colourful fondistas into history's out-tray; many fervently
wish that Mallorca would keep back a few of those foreign visitors; and finally,
there is a realization that a passing travel-writer can hardly be judged as if
he were chief editor of the Enciclopèdia d'Eivissa i Formentera.
In fact, many of Vuillier's illustrations now grace the pages of that splendid
publication, which reached the first part of the letter 'F' in its fifth volume.
I would not be surprised if all twenty-eight engravings were eventually included.
I promised a fortnight ago to reveal the true death-day of English literature's
most cherished ornament, allegedly shared with Cervantes and Wordsworth (April
23rd). Shakespeare did indeed pass away on April 23rd, but in 1616 this was not
the same in England as it was in Spain: the Most Catholic Kingdom had already
adopted the Gregorian calendar (introduced by Gregory XIII in 1582), while the
Anglicans remained with the Julian (named after Caesar) until right up until 1752.
Just to be different. This means that the immortal bard took his final breath
(and was probably born too) on what is now 3rd May, ten days after Cervantes and
ten days after UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day. Time's
glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood and bring truth to
light Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594) Could
somebody please tell Paris? |
|
Es Joc de Gall (The
Cock Game", Santa Eulalia) | Martin
Davies
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