The Wild Valleys of Hell

Nobody knows for sure how the country of Andorra, in the Pyrenees, got to be there. In Andorra itself, they say that the place was founded by Charlemagne, in 784 A.D., when the Andorranos helped him fight the Moors; "He who helps Charlemagne doesn't rue the day," Charlemagne is said to have said, at any rate, and created Andorra in a trice. Indeed, the Andorranos of today call themselves the sons of Charlemagne, and the Andorran national anthem, which loses almost everything in translation, has it that:

My father, Charles the Great the Great, Rescued me from the Moors, And ... I am the only remaining daughter

Of the Carolingian Empire.

A footprint of Charlemagne's is still pointed out in Andorra, more than a thousand years later, and a house in Andorra is still advertising that Charlemagne slept there, a story that is also authenticated by an old document, kept, in Andorra, behind a half-dozen locks and keys. It is written in Latin, is dated 784, is signed and sealed by Charlemagne. This document is the Charter of Andorra, which is not only treasured by the Andorranos themselves but which has been examined, with great interest, by (continued on page 58) Wild Valleys (continued from page 49) the scholars of other nations, who are virtually unanimous in calling it a shameless forgery. Its language, they say, is that of the 11th Century.

The story of Charlemagne, then, doesn't give us much of an inkling as to why Andorra is where it is; but there it is, nevertheless, and nothing can be done about it, apparently, at this late date. Andorra is roughly 18 miles wide and 17 miles from north to south, and roughly 7000 persons live there; they speak in Catalan, a language that's also heard in parts of France and Spain and in parts of Sardinia, Cuba and Argentina, but isn't official anywhere but Andorra. "Andorra" is not a Catalan word (it's from the Arabic, meaning "woods," although Charlemagne is supposed to have taken one look at the place and cried, "Wild valleys of hell, I christen thee Endor!"), but the word andorrano has been taken into the Catalan language in recent centuries: it means a man of silence, a clam. I myself didn't find them so, but that's what people say. Andorranos, for the most part, are tight, rugged people of the mountains; their usual occupations are said to be smuggling and sheep raising, but one is quickly assured in Andorra that smuggling is a thing of the past, having been supplanted in recent times, and in that order, by the cultivation of tobacco and tourists. Andorra's tobacco is sold, for the most part, in tins for people who roll their own, but it's also made into two-foot cigars for the tourists and into eight popular brands of cigarettes -- Charlemagnes, Carmelas, New Havanas, Imperials, Ysers, Reig Gresas, Duxes, which can easily be mistaken for the German Luxes, and Golden Suns, which can easily be mistaken for Lucky Strikes by those who aren't aware that Lucky Strike green has gone to war, and which bear the inscriptions on the package, "Made in U.S.A." and "A Blend of the Finest Turkish and Domestic Tobaccos Golden Sun Formula an Entirely Principle in Cigarette Manufacture." The tourists, too, are an entirely principle in Andorra. They have been going there for a dozen years, and by now the traditional folk dance of Andorra, the sardana, is seldom to be seen. Instead, the tourists and the Andorranos themselves can now be found in the caffè espresso shops, tapping their feet to such current Andorran favorites as Papa Loves Mambo, In the Mood and Rock Around the Clock.

The topography of Andorra is that of a "Y" -- three valleys, whose crystal, cold rivers come together at the capital city, Andorra the Old. One of the valleys goes to Seo de Urgel, Spain, and another goes to France, over the highest pass of the Pyrenees. The third valley doesn't go anywhere in particular. One afternoon when I was in Andorra, I went along it as far as I could: the road was of macadam at first, then gravel, then dirt; then, it was full of ruts and cobbles and then it disappeared entirely. Two or three gloomy, gray stone houses stood in the area, like mausoleums, and gray stone walls were like basking snakes on the hillside.

The official name of Andorra is Valls d'Andorra, the Valleys of Andorra. (Even so fundamental a fact is none too clear, like so many things about Andorra. A number of state papers call it "the Valley of Andorra," and the Sentence of 1278, of which more in a minute, plays it close to the chest, repeatedly calling the place "the Valley or Valleys of Andorra.") There isn't any question, of course, that Andorra is a valley, or valleys, but there is a question that it's a republic, as it's often called, and a good case could be made that it isn't even a country. Such a case, an embarrassing one, naturally, for all Andorranos, was made only four years ago by a French spokesman, who put himself on record during one of the recurrent crises in Franco-Andorran affairs as saying, "Relations between France and Andorra cannot be broken, because Andorra is not a sovereign state." What the spokesman meant is that the President of France -- then, Vincent Auriol: now, Charles de Gaulle -- is ex officio the reigning Prince of Andorra, too. There is still another reigning, ex officio Prince of Andorra, the Bishop of Urgel in Seo de Urgel, Spain, and, between the two of them, the co-princes do so very much reigning that Andorra behaves, generally, not so much like a sovereign country as like 191 square miles of land belonging at the same time to France and Spain.

The Andorranos would have you think that this arrangement is just ducky. "A man can have two defenders, but he cannot have two masters," they tell you, but their heart isn't always in it, and there are times, clearly, when Andorra has two masters and isn't happy with either. When Andorra wanted a gambling casino, the President of France said no, readying a battalion on the border; when Andorra wanted a telegraph, the Bishop of Urgel said no, cutting it down; when Andorra began to grow tobacco, the president and the bishop said no, pulling it up by the roots. Naturally, this sort of business has kept the Andorranos in a constant sweat, and their only solution is to lean toward one of the co-princes, to get more favors out of the other. Unhappily, it isn't always apparent which way to lean: in the 1860s, half of the Andorranos wanted to lean north and the other half wanted to lean south, and the upshot was a civil war -- the Revolution, as it's called in Andorra. The Revolution lasted two years, was ended by the Treaty of Pont dels Escalls and caused only one fatality, an old woman, who was hit by a ricochet bullet as she watched the war from a balcony; her last words were reported to me as having been, "Well, just look at those silly people." At war's end, the silly people were still leaning north and south.

The incumbent co-princes of Andorra, General de Gaulle and Mgr. Ramón Iglesias Navarri, have, to my knowledge, never yet been introduced to each other. It's all an awfully inconvenient arrangement, I think. When I tried to learn the historical reason for it, I ran into the tangled yarn of Charlemagne, but apparently what happened is that Andorra, in medieval days, was something of a hot potato. To protect it, Charlemagne gave the country to his son, Louis the Debonair, who gave it to his son, Charles the Bald, not to be confused with the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, who gave it to the Count of Urgel, who gave it to the Bishop of Urgel, who -- anyhow, by 1203 it belonged to the Count of Foix. At this point, the bishop decided he wanted it back, and everything was in a how-de-do for most of the century. War was declared, but. through the good offices of a certain King Pedro III, the bishop and the count made up, signed the aforementioned Sentence of 1278 and agreed in it to make Andorra a co-principality, to be its co-princes and to receive from it an annual co-tribute. The Sentence of 1278 is still in effect, but what with the fluctuations of the franc and peseta, the tribute to be paid by Andorra now is $2.75 to the French, and $10.82, six hams, six cheeses and a dozen hens to the bishop, who gives them to the Old People's Home in Seo de Urgel. Spain. The Bishop of Urgel is still the Bishop of Urgel, but the Count of Foix became, in the course of time, the King of France, whose successor today is the president, De Gaulle. In a strict sense, of course, the successor to the King of France is the great-great-grandson of the last one, Louis Philippe -- M. Henri d'Orléans, the Count of Paris, who today is the pretender not only to the throne of France but, with somewhat less enthusiasm, to that of Andorra. M. d'Orléans' pretensions were more or less passive until the summer of 1934, when he sent a courtier to Andorra to reign as co-prince in his stead. The man, whose name is remembered there as either Escassirev or Skossyref, came to Andorra in a taxi, checked into the Modern Hotel, wore a monocle, proclaimed himself as Prince Boris I, proclaimed some other things, beat his wife, broke her arm on one memorable (continued on page 66)Wild Valleys(continued from page 58) occasion, and was amiably tolerated by the Andorranos for roughly a year, when he was told to beat it, which he did.

What with French presidents, Spanish bishops and occasional envoys of M. Henri d'Orléans trying to govern Andorra, there's precious little governing left for the Andorranos themselves to do. What there is of it, these days, is being done by the Very Illustrious Seignoir Francisco Caerat, the President of Andorra, a small, fleshy, venerable, white-haired man who evidences the courtly air of a Spanish don, being one of the very few Andorranos to wear a shirt, coat and tie -- usually a black one, with a red-and-white regimental stripe. His fellow citizens have been electing Mr. Caerat as president every three years, for as long as anyone can remember. Generally, he discharges the functions of his office from 10 A.M. to one on weekdays in a dusty, sunless room at Andorra the Old, but after trying, and failing, to find him there for seven days running, I eventually sought him in Sant Julià de Lòria, his home town. I drove to Sant Julià and asked, at the first tobacco shop, if Mr. Caerat were about, and the clerk replied that he certainly was: indeed, he was Mr. Caerat.

For the next several minutes, the President of Andorra and I chatted at his tobacco shop, while customers came and went -- he sold them Old Golds, Charlemagnes, two or three cans of roll-your-own and a vial of French perfume, Shalimar, as I recall. He apologized for not having been at the office, but said that he'd gone unexpectedly to Paris to attend a funeral. A good deal of work -- mostly passports and auto licenses to be signed and letters to be answered -- had piled on his desk in the interim, and he hoped to have a go at them the following morning at tea. His wife would run the tobacco shop in the meantime.

My last question to the President of Andorra was what, if anything, had to be done for the country in the coming years; he thought about this, and finally said the road to France ought to be fixed, of course, seeing how Andorra is so dependent on tourists, now that smuggling is a thing of the past.

• • •

Well, smuggling isn't a thing of the past, and how I know is from nobody else but M. Auguste Pi -- a smuggler. M. Pi is a Frenchman, a big and husky fellow, and the lines of his face are furrows in two or three days' stubble; his coat had a Shanghai label. When I met him in Andorra, he told me he'd been a businessman in Shanghai for 20 years, had been taken by the Japanese in World War II, had walked across Indochina a thousand miles, had been more or less everywhere else in the world, spoke English, Spanish, French, Catalan and Chinese, and for the preceding five years had been a businessman -- well, sort of a businessman -- there in Andorra. M. Pi never told me what it was he smuggled, except to mention, on one occasion, that two million "goods" had just arrived from France (all two million of them weighed four tons, so I guess they're radio parts). However, M. Pi did say that in the past -- in the past, mind you -- he and people he knew of had smuggled watches, cameras, Cadillacs, mules, chinaware, French tulle, and even steel and aluminum I-beams, his own specialty having been Cadillacs, which he got, apparently, from rich Americans who had taken them to Europe for a year-or-so's vacation. Most of this was smuggled into Spain in the Civil War and into France in World War II; now, it's smuggled indiscriminately to both, the smugglers getting less of a profit, though. In wartime France, M. Pi said, a kilo of dried tobacco went for seven or eight dollars; it's worth a dollar now. (Presumably, this is why an elder statesman of Andorra exclaimed, in 1941, "May God continue to give us wars, not on our soil but close to it.") M. Pi said, in conclusion, that the usual procedure of the smugglers was to put the chinaware, watches, I-beams, etc., into a truck or one of the Cadillacs, drive to the border, and give a three- or four-hundred-dollar bribe to the customs people, en passant.

Frankly, I was rather disappointed by this. I explained to M. Pi that everything I'd known of smuggling in the Pyrenees had been gotten from Act III of Carmen; it had been my belief, consequently, that a smuggler went by night over the dire, snow-blown passes, with a pistol at his side and a swad of contraband on his back, and to discover that what a smuggler really did was to drive a Cadillac full of chinaware and French tulle to the border, tossing three or four hundred smackers to the customs people, was, naturally, a good deal of a letdown. M. Pi looked hurt; he assured me that the smugglers to be met in Carmen are also met in Andorra. They're none of them in the big time, M. Pi said, as they handle only tobacco and every once in a while a case of absinthe, but, if I wished to be introduced to some, he'd gladly take me to one of their haunts. I thanked him and said I did.

The scene that ensued was straight from Carmen, Act III. The smugglers I met were dark, weather-beaten men of all ages, dressed in blue or brown corduroy; there were a dozen, and they were playing cards, just like Carmen. Some of them wore sneakers, some berets. Thepart of Carmen herself was provided by Mrs. Diana Browne, a young, blonde, American woman at my hotel, who had asked to accompany M. Pi and me. Diana had never worked at a cigarette factory, but she had visited one that very afternoon, in Sant Julià de Lòria. Her husband, Mr. Malcolm Browne, also was with us -- I suppose he corresponds to Don José -- and a discordant note from Acts II and IV was sounded by the presence of a real toreador, Paco, a friend of M. Pi's, who had fought at Madrid and Barcelona, had been badly gored on two occasions, had come to Andorra to recuperate and get his morale back, and who spent the evening combing his hair and protesting his love to Diana. All of us were assembled for this at the Posada Cataluña, a café that's popular with the smuggling set in Andorra the Old, where Diana, Malcolm, Paco and I had graciously been taken by M. Pi. The Posada Cataluña was another discordant note from Act II; it was murky, it was naked, it was full of soot and of scurfy, unwashed drinking glasses. One entered it through a curtain of milk-white beads; inside, a dozen calendars were on the wall -- most of them girly calendars, including Ava Gardner, but one a calendar of the saints -- and a few vases of wilted blue flowers and water like old formaldehyde were on the bar. Nearby, at the center of the room, was a black, pot-bellied stove, and circling it was an eight-sided table, and circling it were the smugglers, all of them playing cards, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes and Charlemagnes, and dropping the ashes into white ash trays with the advertisement Byrrh, or into a heap of orange skins. I gathered they were taking the night off; M. Pi said later that most of their colleagues had gone into the mountains some days earlier, with several bales of something, and that the smugglers at the Posada Cataluña were waiting for a telephone call from Barcelona to hear if it got there safely (it did). The smugglers were friendly, and we quickly took to each other. One of them bowed to Diana gallantly as we got there, complimenting her on her long golden hair: it was like a saint's halo, he said, and therefore he wouldn't kill us. He was smiling all the while and I'm certain he said it in fun, but I thanked him nevertheless.

I'm sorry to keep harping on the theme of Carmen, but it's my recollection that in the middle of Act III, Carmen is having her fortune told in the Pyrenees and draws the ace of spades, and I think it ought to be pointed out to Mr. Bing, or whoever is in charge of these matters, that in the Pyrenees there isn't an ace of spades. The playing cards the smugglers were using at the Posada Cataluña had an ace of clubs, (continued on page 84) Wild Valleys (continued from page 66) an ace of swords, an ace of cups and an ace of oros -- that's all. The oros were golden coins that had been used in Catalonia, I was told; there was one oro on the ace of oros, two oros on the two of oros, three oros on the three, etc., not to mention a rather intoxicating background of anchors, flags, knights, crowns, lions and snakes. The cups also were golden, the swords were blue, and the clubs were just that -- clubs, with ugly red knots and black twigs growing along the shank (indeed, the ace of clubs had a smear of blood). All of these suits were numbered from one to 10, and there were three picture cards, too -- the squire, the caballero, and the king.

It took quite a while, naturally, for Diana, Malcolm and me to make head or tail of this, but once we had we seated ourselves at the eight-sided table and asked the smugglers to deal us in, joining the game with gusto. The stakes were low -- there was never more than a dollar on the table -- and I think the smugglers were happy to have us. After the first hand, we ordered a round of wine for them; it came in a porrón, a glass carafe with a peculiar narrow spout, the Catalan counterpart of the Basque wineskin. One holds the porrón a foot or two away, tipping it boldly, and a fountain of cool, red, Spanish wine tumbles out of the spout and into the throat if one is a smuggler, into the left eye if one is Diana, or over the shoulder if one is me -- and all three circumstances were enjoyed by the smugglers hugely. Presently, Malcolm had had enough of the porrón, and suggested we avail ourselves of this rare opportunity to have some absinthe, too. Absinthe, he explained, is an alcoholic beverage made of pimpinella and ivormwood, so heady a brew that it commonly gives rise to delirium tremens and, eventually, will drive a person crazy; it isn't allowed in the United States, he continued, but is always being imbibed in the best Hemingway, and we ought to give it a tumble. The barman at the Posada Cataluna poured a glass for Diana, Malcolm and me, after making sure that he'd heard us rightly; then, he poured water in, and the color of the absinthe went from a Paris green to a cloudy green, a chemical reaction which, Malcolm said, is spoken of highly by Mr. Hemingway, and occurred, to his recollection, at least half-a-dozen times in The Sun Also Rises alone. The absinthe didn't do anything very memorable to us. Frankly, it tasted like a pernod, an alcoholic drink that's to be gotten anywhere in France and Spain, also turns to a greenish-yellow and doesn't drive you crazy.

Shortly afterwards, as we walked to the hotel, M. Pi obligingly told us about the smugglers at the Posada Cataluña, how they operate. He said they travel to France or Spain once a week, sleeping by day, walking by night, a trip of several days over the mountain passes. Only one of them carries a gun, to be discharged not at the customs people but at wolves, bears and such; a smuggler is scared to death of the customs people and he'll drop everything when he sees one and take to the hills like a frightened rabbit. Every smuggler has 50 or 60 pounds of tobacco, said M. Pi, and 30 or 40 smugglers travel at once.

"How about making it 33?" I asked -- meaning Malcolm, Diana and myself.

"No. Jesus was 33 when he died," said M. Pi. "The smugglers never travel in 33s." I was about to suggest 31 or 32, but M. Pi was already shaking his head.

• • •

Inside Andorra, there isn't any law against smuggling, but it's good to know, at least, that you cannot get away with murder there. It isn't often that murder is committed, but it's dealt with summarily when it is -- the most recent one having been in 1943, when a boy near the village of Ransol murdered his elder brother with a hunting gun and was executed only an hour after the trial. His motive was to get his hands on the family fortune (it also came out in the wash that he poisoned his sister in 1928, for the very same reason). Once the wicked deed was done, the boy hurried to Ransol and told the sheriff something to the effect that his brother was dead, let's bury him. The sheriff, though, reasoned that an investigation was called for, and began one immediately by visiting the scene of the crime and interrogating the most knowledgeable party, the corpse, saying, "Mort, qui t'ha mort?" -- i.e., "Dead one, who has killed you?" The sheriff at Ransol is an intelligent person, and, in fairness to him, it should be pointed out that such a question on such occasions has been customary in Andorra for many hundred years. The dead one didn't answer it, which also is customary, so the sheriff went on to exclaim, "Mort, alça't! Mort, alça't! Mort, alça't! La justicia t'ho mana!"-- "Dead one, arise! Dead one, arise! Dead one, arise! The judge is ordering it!" (It didn't.) These proceedings were ended when the sheriff, addressing himself to the quick instead of the dead, said "Es un mort el qui no parla" -- "It is a dead one who doesn't speak" -- by which time the guilty brother was so thoroughly unnerved that he confessed. He was tried by two Spaniards and a Frenchman, was sentenced to die, was taken, immediately, to the square of Andorra the Old, and was tied along a stake, lest he flee to the church, a sanctuary; a prayer was said by the Association of the Good Death, and he was killed. He was carried to a cemetery by the Good Death people and speedily buried. While I was in Andorra, I couldn't even learn his name.

The unwritten law of Andorra (almost all the law of Andorra is unwritten) makes it clear that a person like the above is to be killed by strangulation, by the garrote, a grisly, black, cumbersome vise that was kept, for this purpose, in a cathedral hard by the village square. However, it was always a great bother for the judges to find somebody in Andorra who cared to apply this garrote--it took a month of cajolery, often--and finally in 1943, when the aforementioned boy was to be executed, they said the hell with it, and shot him. The ugly garrote is now applied on nobody but the tourists, and in fun, and is kept no longer in the cathedral but in the House of the Valley, a hideous old moldering stone building that has been going to seed since 1580 in a gloomy corner of Andorra the Old, and which houses not only the garrote and other memorabilia, but also the national jail and the executive offices of the president, the Very Illustrious Seignoir Caerat.

The House of the Valley -- the White House, as it were -- is open to the general public from 10 A.M. to one on weekdays, when the president is in and, at other hours, to those members of the general public who have the time and inclination to ferret out the jailer. The jailer is a difficult man to ferret; it took me almost an hour. (I learned, too, that he has been ferreted by some of his own prisoners, who had sunned themselves on the terrace all day and wanted to get back in.) Eventually, I found the jailer at a caffè espresso place, a block and a half away: he was gnawing a toothpick and sibilating a caffè espresso, and he promised to be ready anon. Anon, he got agonizingly to his feet, chug-a-lugged what was left of the caffè espresso, walked to the House of the Valley with me, produced from somewhere on his person an extraordinary two-foot, four-pound iron key, and with it opened the House of the Valley's door. The door is rotten and is topped by a medieval, time-worn tablet that says, in effect, and in Latin, that Andorra belongs to France and Spain at the same time, and is rather pleased about it:

Behold: these are the arms of a neutral

valley And quarterings that nobler nations

triumph in.

Each of them, alone, has blessed an

alien people,

Oh, Andorra! Together they shall

bless your golden age.

While I was translating this, the most unferretable character in Andorra gave me the slip, leaving me alone in the House of the Valley.

-- Not quite alone. I discovered, by and by, that two prisoners were there, to be seen through a knothole as a couple of fitful shadows in a dim, slovenly room, laden with brick and bottle shards; one of them was a thief, the other a counterfeiter, I learned -- no smugglers, of course, though my friend the jailer is said to indulge. The jail is located on the House of the Valley's first floor, just off the lobby; on the second floor, at the end of dilapidated stairs, is a large pink room full of ancient frescoes of the crucifixion; and at the end of that, as I learned by gadding innocently into it, is the office of the president, Mr. Caerat. I have already mentioned that the office is dusty, sunless; it is also cold, being heated by nothing but a small orange electric grill in front of Mr. Caerat's desk, and another in back. The desk is simple, and I was pleased to note that Mr. Caerat was making headway against the pile of state papers which, he had told me, accumulated there during his visit to Paris: only a passport and two or three letters were left, and the drawers were almost empty. In other parts of the president's room were a heap of yellow archives, a dusty telephone, an autographed picture of the President of France, an autographed picture of Mgr. Iglesias Navarri -- who looks like a football coach, or did in 1943, when the picture was taken -- and finally, along the walls, a set of 24 stiff, cane-bottom armchairs, to be used by the 24 members of the General Council, the legislative body of Andorra.

I'm afraid I wasn't able to learn just what sort of laws, if any, the General Council of Andorra legislates (it hasn't even the power to tax), but I did learn some other, alternative facts about it, after my visit to the House of the Valley, and I'm happy to pass them along -- viz., that it's elected every two years, that the selfsame men are elected every time, that all of them are 30 or older, that none of them are drinkers, that some of them are smugglers, that none of them are paid, and that, if the occasion demands it, they trick themselves out in silver shoes, blue stockings, red garters, gray trousers, white shirts, black coats, red collars and black three-cornered hats. I also learned that the General Council of Andorra met, in the old days, in the large pink room where the frescoes of the crucifixion are, and that it met in the old, old days in a cemetery, to get a more sober appreciation of the business at hand. In the old days, when it met in the large pink room, the General Council not only legislated at the House of the Valley but also ate and slept there, and a visitor can still behold, on the second floor, the rude, sooty kitchen where the 24 councilmen would cook.

Nowadays, the councilmen eat and sleep at the Hotel Mirador. They convene at the House of the Valley five times a year, ordinarily, but an extraordinary session can be called, ad libitum, by Mr. Caerat, or, for that matter, by anybody else in the world willing to pay for food and transportation, and those of my readers who wish to do so should forward the sum of 2000 pesetas -- about 47 dollars -- and some sort of legislative proposal to the Very Illustrious General Council of Andorra, c/o Mr. Francisco Caerat, House of the Valley, Andorra the Old, Andorra. The postage is 15 cents.