The old Panhard I was a passenger in had slewed about the skidpan surface. It began to leak. Its wipers groaned. Visibility was stunted. The driver – who would subsequently die of a massive overdose – quite lacked an elemental instinct for self-preservation and raced on heedless of his passengers’ jabbering imprecations.
By the time the bolts were exhausted and the tympanic mayhem had abated, we had crossed the border whose guards had been atypically lax, preferring to risk the security of El Caudillo’s fascist bastion rather than get soaked. San Sebastian was deserted under a sullen sky.
The streets were shiny. The bay of La Concha was spellbinding. Here was nature aping Cocteau, a doucely fantastical stage set of bosky headlands with a magic island between them and sea mists swirling on cue with the aplomb of choreographed dry ice. Now, I have been back to San Sebastian many times but custom has never staled it.
The illusion that it is an epic artifice, a creation, remains curiously intact. It feels as man-made as the park of Buttes Chaumont in northeast Paris, where cliffs and caves are constructed in concrete. It might be a life-size model rather than a happenstantial collision of ocean, rock and flora.
The purpose of driving 250km from Bordeaux was not of course to admire this decor. It was to hang out in a listless teenage way. To bar crawl. And to eat.
France’s culinary chauvinism was not, even then, so stubborn that it failed to appreciate its neighbours’ cooking – in certain instances. One of those instances was San Sebastian, which was ungrudgingly considered in Bordeaux to be a gastronomic mecca, an exception to the Spanish norms: part of the point being that San Sebastian’s cooking (inventive, whimsical, ever mutating) has little in common with that of its adjacent Spanish provinces.
But nor, strangely, does it own much affinity to that of Biarritz, Bayonne and St Jean de Luz. The Spanish Basque country and French Basque country are notably different. Their cooking is merely one indication of that gulf. There is no serious separatist aspiration on the French side of the border. The only bombers are fugitives from Spain gone to the mattresses in Béarnais villages.
During San Sebastian’s extravagant Semana Grande, secessionist malcontents – persons who look as though they wouldn’t know a good time were it to sit on their grim faces – take the opportunity to parade with banners and drums and chants in front of the vast crowds gathered in pursuit of their various pleasures.
Which do not include enthusiastic appreciation of political, linguistic and cultural warriors. Again, the Basque separatist urge to ban bullfighting because it may be taken as a symbol of Castillian colonialism or unwelcome unification, is regarded as an irritation rather than as a serious threat to humankind’s inalienable right to torture animals. To be a bullfighter is still quite something.
The dark-blue Mercedes Benz Sprinter vans which comprise El Juli’s circus attract envious attention and are stroked for good luck (www.eljuli.net). Meanwhile, the toreador himself is being interviewed for local radio – in Castillian, of course. The dangers of the trade are made graphic by the hasty alterations to programmes: neither Enrique Ponce and Javier Conde would be appearing because of recently sustained injuries. It is a pusillanimous fear of seeing humans gored rather than of bulls humilatingly stabbed that keeps me away.
Untangling what is Basque and what is pan-Hispanic is, to borrow a Basque simile, like trying to put the fish back together after the soup has been made. It is well known (and inaccurate) that the only word the Basque language has given to the world is “yacht”. Were it so it would be fitting for the sheer outdoorsy sportiness of the Basque people is a genuine characteristic.
Every village is dominated by a church and a fronton, a court which is adapted to the several varieties of jai alai, chistera and pelota – games that recall fives, rackets and squash. They are played at every level, demand formidable fitness, agility and eye/hand co-ordination. They are, however, positively girlie in comparison to rowing in eights across rough seas, chopping tree trunks, forming human pyramids, hefting barrels of concrete, throwing dwarfs (subject to availability: kiddies provide an adequate substitute). These are not the pursuits of a slothful southern culture: indeed there are correspondences with highland games.
The Basque Country is hostage to its weather. Cool – hence the flight in summer from the furnace of Madrid to San Sebastian – and wet, very wet. The time before last that I was here it rained hard for four days and four nights. This was as potentially maddening as the Mistral. The climate alone cannot of course account for the wonderful mayhem of late nights during the Semana Grande.
Throughout the day the city is calm and, while hardly deserted, it is no more animated than Bournemouth. There are, nonetheless, buildings to delight: Rafael Moneo’s recent Kursaal is a far more satisfying creation than Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao; the baroque façade of the cathedral is almost Sicilian in its farouche exuberance; there is a spectacular belle époque bridge in the same spirit – art nouveau was the great-great-grandchild of the baroque. It is a pleasurable place to walk in. Bourgeois families amble along the front.
Oldsters potter in contemplation of something or other. Teenage boys race each other on makeshift rafts fashioned from oil drums, tyres, polythene demijohns, planks. Middle-aged boys fly remote-control aircraft, the screeching models swoop parlously low above sunbathers like seagulls with a grudge. The beaches are all surf and flesh. But flesh that is judiciously uncovered, with propriety and decorum: this is not a city for the card-carrying body fascist or the mammarial exhibitionist.
It is not till some time after dusk that the cloak of respectability is doffed. Eating, talking, drinking, walking. The early nocturnal rhythms are soon established. Groups move from bar to bar. Soon they’ll be lurching from bar to bar. Our self-scourging myth that public inebriation is never found outside Britain is exposed here. At half past ten the crowd’s nature changes. It is as though the disparate groups are suddenly subject to a centripetal force.
The tide of breath and expectation moves inexorably in one direction, towards the eastern end of La Concha. Where night after night pyrotechnic “teams” – from all across Iberia, from Italy, France, Britain, etc – scribble graffiti on the sky, lighting it with evanescent displays of corkscrewing spacecraft, endowing the heavens with new constellations, leaving cliffs and valleys of smoke that recall Europe after the Rain.
Now there are carmine diaereses and cobalt cedillas and golden ampersands. Verdant rayments and taffeta skirts in richest amber disappear – to where? Bright white sperms rush to their goal. The noise is colossal. The city quakes. It is as though the ultimate pyrotechnic aim to is to change climate. To challenge nature with chemistry. To ape an electric storm of long ago.
Then the cosmic gives way to the comic. Through the crowds rush boys dressed in bull costumes, with headdresses of fire. There are screams. Prayers to the Virgin. But this is the work of Pan. The night is mad, pagan, dense with smoke and sweat and scent. Most of all, the night is ancient.
NEED TO KNOW
Kirker Holidays offers three nights with breakfast in a deluxe room at Hotel Maria Christina, Iberia flights from Heathrow to Bilbao and private transfers, from £559 per person, based on two sharing, and a supplement for Semana Grande of £139 (August 14-21); www.kirkerholidays.com
