The Times - UK (2021-12-06)

34 Monday December 6 2021 | the times

Wo r l d

‘I

t is the light, of course; a

million razor blades have

shaved off the bark and

the dust, and out pours

pure colour; whiteness

from fig trees; red and green and

again white from the enormous,

the humped, the everlasting

landscape.” So wrote Virginia

Woolf about Spain, which she

described as “far the most

magnificent country I have ever

seen”.

Woolf ’s writings on Spain,

which have been gathered in a

single volume for the first time,

place her a long way from

Bloomsbury. Her observations,

published in a new book, Hacia el

sur (To the South), reveal Woolf

to be an intrepid traveller

slumming it in rustic inns and

relishing basic dishes. The

descriptions, extracted from

diaries, essays and letters from

three visits in 1905, 1912 and 1923,

have been translated into Spanish

and collated by a specialist travel

publisher, Itineraria.

They may rank her among a

handful of British writers about

Spain in the 19th and 20th

century, such as Richard Ford

and Gerald Brenan, who have

come to be called los curiosos

impertinentes, the “presumptuous

curious”, an expression coined

much earlier as the title of a

short story by Cervantes. Her

opinions are wonderfully offhand

at times but often quite pertinent.

She is a tough crowd.

Seville’s cathedral is “not really

beautiful, though certainly

impressive — in the same way

that a steep cliff or a bottomless

well is”. The city’s Alcazar palace

is “a splendid gilt & mosaic

Moorish building — a sight again

which does not charm me”.

Her impertinence is often laced

with humour. In a letter written

in 1905, noting that the best part

of going away was coming home,

she adds: “Especially when you

travel in Spain, where the trains

stop to breathe every five

minutes.” Her delight is ever

present, even when despairing of

the mosquitoes and hotels. From

Tarragona she wrote to Lytton

Strachey in 1912: “Several times

the proper business of bed has

been interrupted by mosquitoes.

They bloody the wall by morning

— they always choose my left eye,

Leonard’s [her husband] right ear.

Whatever position they chance to

find us in.”

It was while they were staying

with Brenan in the Alpujarras in

the Sierra Nevada that Woolf

wrote most enthusiastically.

However, this contrasted with her

reluctance to engage in daily life,

prompting Brenan to remark that

British people were only superior

to the Spanish in their treatment

of domestic animals. It was

during that trip, their

honeymoon, she describes the

country as the most magnificent.

“The only fault we have to find

with our journey is that it was a

great deal too hot in Madrid and

Toledo, and that these southern

skies are too invariably blue.

Occasionally we get an old copy

of The Times, and there read of

floods and cloudbursts.”

Isambard Wilkinson

MADRID

FROM OUR

CORRESPONDENT

It’s too hot, the mosquitoes are murderous but

I’ve fallen in love with Spain, Virginia Woolf

told her friends back in Bloomsbury

To her fans Ana Torroja has been

music royalty ever since her band,

Mecano, helped to define La Movida,

an explosion of creative liberty and

partying that followed the death of

the dictator Franco.

Now her decision to inherit the title

of Marquess of Torroja from her re-

cently deceased father has rocked her

throne. The title was one of dozens

Pop princess can’t resist a Franco title

created by Franco. He granted them

perpetual and hereditary status to

give thanks for the “heroic actions”

carried out during “our crusade”, re-

ferring to the 1936 military rebellion

that resulted in the civil war.

Last month the Spanish govern-

ment passed a law that will abolish

most of the titles, which have been re-

newed by successive governments

since Franco’s death in 1975. Torroja’s

petition to take up the Marquisate of

Torroja was published in the State

Official Bulletin and must be con-

firmed by King Philip’s signature.

There are 30 noble titles granted by

Franco that are active but will now be

expunged; the Marquisate of Torroja

is among a handful that will survive

because of lack of proof that Eduardo

Torroja, the first marquis and the 61-

year-old singer’s grandfather, sup-

ported the failed coup d’état, the sub-

sequent civil war or the dictatorship.

Isambard Wilkinson Madrid

In 1972 an amateur rugby team from Uru-
guay boarded a chartered plane from
Montevideo to fly over the Andes and play
a friendly match in Chile.
The five crew members and
40 passengers never made it
to Santiago. Instead, on
October 13, they became
the victims of one of the
20th century’s most
notorious aviation dis-
asters. The pilot of
Uruguayan Air Force
flight 571 mistakenly
believed that the plane
had cleared the Andes
and began to descend,
careering into a ridge high
up on Argentina’s border
with Chile.
Fifteen people were killed imme-
diately on impact and 14 more succumbed
to their injuries in the days that followed.
The story of the 16 survivors, who spent
more than two months in the mountains
and resorted to cannibalism to stay alive,

Music to our ears The singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell and Berry Gordy, the Motown Records creator, found

plenty to chat about at the Kennedy Center, where they were honoured for a lifetime of artistic achievement

Film to relive story of

Andes crash cannibals

will be told in a new Spanish-language

Netflix film, Society of the Snow.

The story of the survivors was first told

on screen in the film Alive, an adaptation

of the Piers Paul Read novel of the same

name. They finished their limited supplies

of chocolate and wine within a week, at

which point they were forced to

eat the flesh of dead passen-

gers. Three of the men

scrambled down to a river

and communicated with

Chilean herdsmen, who

alerted the authorities.

One of them was

Fernando Parrado, 71,

who lay unconscious in

the plane’s wrecked fu-

selage for four days.

“When I woke up, I was

utterly shaken because I

realised I had lost my mother

and sister in the crash,” he said.

Parrado said that cannibalism was

never the most important aspect for the

survivors. “You’re fighting against the cold,

thirst and the despair of being abandoned:

this was all far worse than the idea of feed-

ing ourselves like that,” he said.

Chile
John Bartlett Santiago

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neverthemostimp

KEN CEDENO/REUTERS