'Undergraduate Page
THE AMATEUR SMUGGLER
ByANNE KARMINSKI (Girton College Cambs.) Madame L. was justified in her praise. We sat in front of a low symmetrically-gabled Basque inn, and watched the incessant enter- taining life of the village. Most of the houses set round the cross- roads, which was our observation-point, were three or four centuries old, simply and amply built of wood, and faced with cream-coloured plaster between their dark beams. Their inhabitants, and especially the children, seemed to spend little time within doors. They were always in the street, talking, playing or, like us, sitting on a chair or bench and watching everyone else go by. A variety of wheeled traffic passed us ; a large motor coach called " Le Basque Bondissant," full of excited tourists ; then two magnificent cream-coloured oxen drawing a cart ; and a stream of people, young and old, on bicycles, hung about with knapsacks or large straw-covered wine-flasks. These last were bound for the frontier. At the first village inside Spain food and wine were to be bought at half the French prices, and with French francs. It was easy enough, they said, to cross the border without detection, though if the Spanish carabineros found you, they might clap you in gaol at Pampeluna for fifteen days or so.
I had felt the excitement of living on the edge of a foreign and mysterious country long enough. We were in the foothills of the Pyrenees ; if I walked to the end of the village I could see the neighbouring mountains ; I knew that some of them were in Spain. Spain was so close ; I had to set foot in it. A little later that evening I borrowed a bicycle and set off, in my oldest clothes, and with my British passport settled firmly in my skirt-pocket. I wobbled hastily from the left to the right hand side of the village street ; a dog barked, the chemist's wife waved to me, and from the steps of th school two Soeurs de la Croix watched me, and smiled in the depths of their great black hoods, like tortoises imprisoned in their shells. Then I was out of the village, past the church with its graceful curving facade, and pedalling along by the fields of maize and the ruined tower in the middle of them, which had once been inhabited by a sorcerer, and now held only a sheep's skull wreathed in ivy.
The Basque country has a charm peculiar to itself. The chief ingredient is mellowness. The landscape is not primitively wild, nor is there anything of the upstart about its cultivation. One feels that the land has been tilled and disciplined for so many centuries that Nature and the hand of man have become perfectly reconciled. The houses, the dark stocky people, the animals, the very crops themselves, fit into the larger design of hills and rivers and woods with extreme seemliness. Nothing jar.; ; there is a Virgilian serenity about the whole. Through this warm fertile country I rode slowly, watching the tawny hills deepen their colour, hearing the quiet rustling of the dark green and gold spears of maize. Beyond the fields the road passed through oak-woods, deliciously cool and shadowy, where the roots of sturdy trees had clawed their way into the beds of streams. The woods lasted for several miles. I came out of them at last, realising that I must be very near Spain. The frontier, I knew, was marked by a river at this point ; the road crossed a bridge, which was guarded on both the French and Spanish sides, and then ran through the village for which I was aiming. Visaless, I had to avoid the bridge and reach the village by turning off the road to the right, half a mile or so away from the frontier. Then there was a path that led over a hill and into the back yards, so to speak, of the Spaniih village.
Meanwhile another cyclist had caught up with me, and had agreed to show me the way. This was a twelve-year-old girl who was smuggling more professionally that I was. She went regularly over the frontier, she ekplained, to buy lemons and peanuts in large quantities ; and then she sold them at double the price in the coast- towns. She took me to a farm where we left our bicycles, evidently by arrangement, in a shed where cow-hides on the wall flapped menacingly above our handlebars.
We climbed a steep hill and slithered down its opposite side ; then we came to a rickety wood bridge over a small river, and, after crossing it, slipped into the village by the small door that is always cut into one wall of the pelota "fronton." We cautiously crossed the open space beyond, and my guide knocked on the door of one of the houses whose backs clustered together in front of us. We went in ; the ground-floor of the house was half grocery-store, half living-room. We drank glasses of sweet sticky Muscatel wine ; I ran an eye along the shelves. There were real coffee and rice and sardines, not to be had in France at that time, and every kind of wine and liqueur ; also chocolate, lemons, oranges, nuts and canvas sandals galore. Everything was astonishingly cheap. A thin melancholy Spaniard, to all appearances the only inhabitant of the house, packed the purchases into our bags ; we pushed the requisite notes into his hand and left. As we went up the hill again, back into France, we met several people ; they warned us that the French dauaniers were at the farm below. We avoided it accordingly.
We were making for the further house where our bicycles were when we heard footsteps behind us. We walked stolidly on, only too well aware of the menacing presence pursuing. They caught us up—two business-lilte French customs men. Sorrowfully, we were made to empty our spoils on the tarmac. My small trophies were obviously not for re-sale ; my explanation that they were presents was accepted. But the little Basquaise was in trouble, because she had three kilos of nuts and the same of lemons, and had to admit she was going to sell.them. The douaniers told me to go on, and announced their intention to keep my companion at the frontier station for the night. But they didn't. At that I lost my temper and stumbled over my French ; they thought I was Spanish, and were angry, too. I said I was English, and then they were amused. On the strength of this, the two of us were allowed to go on again, still clutching our contraband goods. We rode back happily through the woods. My fellow-smuggler told me about herself. She was an orphan, adopted by the State, and living with the family of a farmer on the hill above my inn. She was going to leave school in a year, and then—?
At this point two more officials appeared on the road, and wanted to examine our sacks ; but fortunately one of them was the police- man who lived opposite us in the village, and whose little girl played with the twins whom I nursery-maided. We exchanged amiabilities ; and he let us pass., Soon we were back in the village again. At the inn I stopped ; my companion rode on. There was a little stir of excitement on the porch at my arrival ; the two little girls who were my charges ratt forward and hugged me as hard at if I had been all the way to the North Pole and back again. Their mother followed more decorously, and we unloaded the oranges and sardines and wine and rice under the plane trees. The two women were still knitting, and soon I was back in my place beside them. It was scarcely three hours since I had left. The innkeeper brought us all vermouth. He was the roi de contrebandiers of the whole country- side ; he travelled calmly by night in a small black van, and made (reputedly) big deals in Pernod and rice with the Spaniards. Some- times I watched from my window in the moonlight. I heard the grinding of his brakes, and saw him unload mysterious sacks and bales in a very business-like manner. But for me the venture into Spain had been an excitement, an adventure, to be wrapped in the cotton-wool of pleasant memories, and such it still remains.
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