Iberia Page 2

  What a marvelous fiesta that was, my first in Spain, with a huge workman to guide me and orchestras and girls throwing streamers and comedians making jokes about Burriana, and the great warmth of Spanish hospitality as one knows it in a provincial city.

  I cannot remember now how I discovered my technique for exploring a strange land, for I have followed this procedure for as long as I can recall. I enter the country unannounced and without a letter to anyone. I stand back and look at the scene before me, talk with anyone who cares to talk with me, then go to the bus station and buy a ticket for the end of any random line. This drops me in some village out in the country, and there I spend a couple of days just sitting and looking and talking. This produces some very dull days, but also some memorable ones.

  At the end of World War II, I did this in Canton and saw enough of China to nourish my imagination for decades. I used the same system in Bali, and later in Japan I skipped out of Tokyo and wound up in Morioka, a small city to the north, where I had a series of experiences through which I gained an understanding of Japan that would have been denied me otherwise. I often forget Tokyo but never Morioka. With its lantern-lit little shops and its sprawling rock-strewn river, Morioka will be with me always. Anything good I have written about Japan stems from Morioka.

  Now, in Castellón I went to the bus station and found that my plan wouldn’t work. It seemed that the only buses then available ran to Burriana, but there was a railroad which wandered about the countryside, and on the advice of a straggler I purchased a ticket to Teruel, thus projecting myself into a corner of Spain not often visited by strangers.

  The train that carried me there consisted only of third-class carriages, a euphemism for boxcars lined with rough-plank benches which were filled before the whistle tooted, so that more than half the passengers had to stand. When started, the train moved quite slowly and threw an unusual amount of cinders through the screenless windows. It was jerky in motion, creaky in sound, antique in appearance and utterly captivating.

  For it was filled with human beings of a kind I had not met in my college textbooks on Spain. Here there were no grandees, no industrial giants. There were no caballeros in leather, no beautiful women in mantillas. There was only a jostling crowd of extremely poor people, dressed in the oldest of clothes, huddled together in a dirty boxcar. This was a Spain for which I was unprepared, yet as I settled down and began to make friends with these apparently suspicious and silent people, I found myself among some of the most congenial persons I had so far encountered in Europe, and the interminable trip developed into exactly what I had hoped for.

  For the first hour the train chugged south along the coast toward Valencia and the oppressive smell of the boxcar was offset by the sweet aroma of oranges, but then the line diverged abruptly to the west and we began to climb a steep valley marked by low mountains, a rushing stream and poor forests. Most of the day we climbed slowly upward; so that I became convinced that Teruel must be perched on a considerable mountain, an impression which has never left me. How dull, how tedious that long day’s trip could have been, with cinders in my eye and hunger in my stomach. The land was bleak, with scarcely a town or any human element to relieve the monotony, and such stragglers as we did see appeared to be shepherds, incredibly poor. Even their dogs were scrawny and lovable.

  But the more forbidding the terrain the more delightful the peasants in my boxcar. These were tremendous men and women, hard as treated leather, determined as the mountains among which we were traveling. When at a junction I purchased a generous supply of bread and cheese to throw into the common pot, I gained admission to the group, as it were, and the wine bottles were passed to me and the tins of anchovies and the rock-hard ends of sausage. We were all so hungry by now that our odds and ends of food seemed a feast and it was natural that the men and women who sang best should offer us a series of quiet songs, nothing boisterous and nothing to tempt a man into unseemly bellowing, but rather a quiet, forceful series of statements about love and rural life and the fiestas that occur in small towns. I could understand few of the words.

  But as the day wore on I talked much with these people of the boxcar. They were peasants, even those who lived in towns like Teruel and Castellón, and their life was indescribably hard; one of the strangest bits of information I gathered in my long conversations was that most of these people were wearing their best clothes. It was something important to be making so long a trip by train and they were wearing the best they had. How pitiful they seemed, with trousers mended four times at the same spot with four different swatches of cloth, with dresses in which whole panels had been replaced by cloth of a different color. Shoes were shabby beyond description and socks were filled with holes even in the nonessential parts that clung about the ankles. The men’s caps were mostly torn and the women’s shawls were ragged at the edges, and not because of fringes either. Such teeth as had been lost had not been replaced and many of these people showed need for a doctor, to whom apparently they had no access. Speaking only of outward appearances, these people were as poverty-stricken as any I had ever seen.

  But about them, in all they did, there was a stolid dignity and a profound joy. When they sang it was as if they were in a cathedral, for they took each note seriously but not pompously, and their voices blended for powerful effect. When they spoke it was only after weighing each word, not for its effect but for its appropriateness. The volubility which one thinks of in relation to Latin peoples was not evident here, but rather the taciturnity of New Englanders or Scots. But in both the singing and the conversations there was joy, and when a joke was told it brought forth the guffaws common to all rural people.

  It was a remarkable day, one of the best I would ever spend in Spain, and at last our tired and cinder-throwing engine chugged up the final hill and brought us into the station at Teruel. ‘Adiós, norteamericano!’ the passengers said softly as I hauled down my small bag and asked directions for the heart of the city. These people had provided me with a solid introduction to Spain and I would be forever indebted to them. I was loath to separate from them, but the journey was ended and they were now headed for their separate homes. I visualized them going to English-type cottages with hollyhocks about the door, as if they were the ordinary rural people of Europe. Later I would see what kind of homes they actually lived in.

  For me Teruel was the introduction into a new world, the hard, remorseless, poverty-stricken world of provincial Spain. The lives I saw in Teruel were terribly confined within some of the narrowest circles I have ever known. The streets were equally narrow, as if hewn out of solid rock. The architecture was not pleasing, like the panoramas shown in my textbooks on Spain. The restaurants were uncongenial, the theaters were ugly and the band in the central plaza played off-key. But there was a compelling durability about this town that one had to admire, and the longer I stayed there the better I liked it. I remember chiefly the acrid smell of roasting chicory or some similar coffee substitute, so that even today whenever 1 chance upon the smell of burning chicory I think of Teruel.

  On my first morning in the city, according to habit, I wandered out past the edges of town to see in what respects it might be different from the Burriana region or from Castellón, and as I was walking along a country road I heard a voice calling, ‘Eh, norteamericano!’ I turned to find at the doorway to a house one of the men with whom I had shared my bread and cheese on the train the previous day, and he invited me into his home, something that I later wished he had not done, for I can still see it as it was that day, and having seen his home I could no longer preserve storybook myths about this powerful land of Spain.

  Peasant.

  The walls were of stone unchinked with cement or mortar. They had, however, been tightly packed with clay and were both water- and wind-proof, forming a solid and pleasing barrier against the elements. The floor was of packed earth, worn smooth by centuries of use, for I judged the house to have been built at least three hundred years earlier. No dust rose f
rom the floor and it was surprisingly even, for through the centuries the earth had been leveled until it was now at least as flat as an average flagstone floor. The house had two rooms, the partition between them consisting of some of the poorest lumber I have ever seen, scarcely good enough for the making of a cheap industrial crate in a country like Germany. I could see through the wall at many spots where warping had occurred or the chipping off of fragments, for the boards were paper-thin, and this in an area where forests had once abounded and where to a lesser degree they still existed. If lumber was being harvested in the Teruel district, none of it was filtering down to homes like this.

  The house contained one table, one chair, one bed, one cradle. That was about all. There were no cupboards, no shelves, no rocking chairs, no benches, no sideboards, no bathroom, no iron stove, nothing. A man some fifty years old and his wife of about the same age had each worked in Teruel for forty years, for they had begun at the age of ten, and frugally they had saved their money, and at the end of twoscore years of labor this was what they had accumulated.

  I was a stranger and was not afraid of rebuffs, so I asked to see everything. What clothes did they have? What eating gear? What food supplies? What books? Books! Neither wife nor husband could read. Clothes? Mainly what they had worn on the train, plus older ones for working, and I have already described what the good ones looked like. Food? They had enough to live on for three days, for they had no refrigerator, and after three days they would go to the store and buy more food, if they had the money. I did not know the Spanish word for hope, but in a roundabout way I asked them what their plans were for the future. The future? What future?

  And so I wandered back and forth across Teruel, that austere mountain city, and allowed the reality of Spain to beat in upon me. One evening I went to the cathedral, if I am using the proper word for so mean a church, and there I attended my first religious service in Spain. It was overwhelmingly impressive, with candles and choirs and priests who seemed to bear the weight of this poor settlement upon their necks. The people of Teruel that I saw worshiping that night were devout and to them religion was terribly important, but as I looked about the gloomy church I found in the congregation few of the peasants I had ridden with on the train. This praying group came from a different stratum and I was pleased to have a chance to see it. The church people were better dressed than my earlier acquaintances and better shaved too, but they were equally solid, and when I met them later in cafés or stores they were equally attractive.

  I had an exciting time in Teruel, a moving time for a young man trying to discover for himself what Spain was like, and after I had seen several of the better-class houses in the city, finding them to have floors such as we had in Pennsylvania and bookcases and shelves for storing food and colorful patios, I began to wonder if I had been unlucky in first stumbling upon that earthen-floored hut containing almost nothing. Had I by chance been deceived? Was rural Spain better than I had judged?

  So I went out into the country in the opposite direction and stopped at three different farmhouses selected at random, and at each I introduced myself and was generously received. The farmers and their wives offered me water and wine, if they had any, and seemed pleased to talk with a norteamericano who had taken the trouble to learn their language, however poorly. They showed me their homes: earthen floors, one table, not enough chairs to entertain formally even one guest, few clothes, no stores of food.

  When I returned to Teruel, I was met at the edge of the city by two armed men dressed in nineteenth-century uniforms featuring two-cornered patent-leather hats called tricorns after an older version which had three points. They were members of the Guardia Civil, whose job it was to keep watch on everything that happened in rural areas like Teruel, and they traveled in pairs, having learned that it was safer to do so. They did not stop me but fell in beside me as I walked. They were cordial and correct as they asked, ‘Looking at the countryside?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Visiting friends?’

  ‘Not friends.’

  ‘And when are you leaving Teruel?’

  ‘In the morning.’

  When the train pulled out they were there, extremely pleasant and smiling, their highly polished hats gleaming in the morning sunlight as if they were part of the chorus for a New York production of Carmen. They were my last sight of Teruel.

  I was to rejoin my ship at Valencia, that powerful and often rebellious capital of the eastern coast, and as my dirty little train chugged into the center of the city I was made aware that Valencia was to be something special. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was arriving on the Saturday evening which marked the height of the fiesta that celebrates the end of winter, and as I left the station the sky above Valencia was filled with exploding fireworks and the air with shouts and music and screams of delight. Valencia is the fireworks capital of Europe and outdoes itself at the fallas (bonfires). In the public square enormous wooden structures are raised, representing horses or galleons or Mont Blanc in Switzerland or the leaders of the nation, and each foot of timber is wound with colorful explosives, while chains of smaller firecrackers hang in festoons in all possible directions. I mean that these structures are sometimes as high as three-story buildings and are very solidly constructed.

  Well, when the maximum crowd has gathered and the wind is right, these mammoth things are set afire, and as the wood begins to burn and the explosives ignite and the lovely loops of firecrackers explode, it seems as if the whole city of Valencia is going up in flames. It is really something to see, one of the great spectacles of Europe.

  And the cafés! They were filled with well-to-do people and the food was excellent, emphasizing fish provided by the Mediterranean. The theaters were crowded and the same comedians who had delighted me in Castellón had arrived to tell the same bawdy jokes about being forced to spend the night in the hotel at guess where … Burriana! And as the chambermaid was described and her sexual capacities suggested, the Valencian crowd roared approval. Each time the name Burriana was mentioned the people of Valencia howled. Here the paseo was a wild affair, with some of the best-dressed women I was to see in Spain going with the clock and hordes of young men in fine suits marching in the opposite direction to inspect them. Apparently, in Valencia the people of Spain lived well.

  But what I can never forget was the next day, when a tall, heavy man stopping in my hotel said in fine Spanish, ‘Sir, I trust you will be attending the bullfight.’

  ‘Is there one?’

  ‘At five,’ he said graciously and offered to lead me to where I might buy a ticket. As we paraded through the streets I noticed that the men of Valencia paid deference to my companion and some spoke to him with a kind of reverence. At the ticket window, not at the bullring but at a downtown office, the same respect was paid, and I finally asked, ‘Who are you?’ and he explained that he was picador for one of the men fighting that afternoon. I was less impressed then than I was to be later.

  The cartel that afternoon contained the names of three matadors who were to be remembered in the history of Spanish bullfighting: Marcial Lalanda, Domingo Ortega and El Estudiante. The first was one of the most poetic matadors ever to grace the rings of Spain, and passes which he invented are still being used by his successors. Ortega, an illiterate farm-hand often referred to as el de Borox (he from the trivial village of Borox), was to become the cold classicist and the idol of those who love an icy, controlled excellence. On this day in 1932 he was just beginning his career at the advanced age of twenty-four. In the 1950s he was still fighting now and then, a man remarkably durable and never hurried or vulgar. El Estudiante was something special, a young student named Luis Gómez who had graduated from high school but who had given up his studies for glory in the bullring. He was to make a less lasting contribution to the history of bullfighting than either Lalanda or Ortega, but his arrival on the scene and under the conditions I have described was emotionally exciting, and he was to have a series of good years.
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br />   I could not have been introduced to bullfighting under more auspicious conditions: a professional picador to choose my seat, a poetic matador to open the fight and an austere classicist to compete with him, followed by the young student whom Spain was taking to her heart. I settled down in my front-row location and waited. The interior gates of the plaza swung open. The band burst into music. Bugles sounded and the opening parade was under way. I did not know enough to identify the matadors, nor the banderilleros, but behind them on horseback rode the man who had helped me buy my ticket, and in his leather pants, cockaded hat and articulated leg armor he looked enormous, as knights must have looked centuries ago when they ventured forth to battle. He nodded to me as he rode past and I felt that I was part of the fight.

  Some years before, when still a student in a small Pennsylvania college, I had been cajoled into attending my first symphony concert, at which Arturo Toscanini was to conduct Beethoven’s Fifth and Third in that order, and I can truthfully say that in the first minute of this music I understood as much about orchestral music as I was ever to know, even though I studied it avidly during subsequent years. So also, in that first minute in the bullring at Valencia, I understood bullfighting, even though I have been improving my knowledge at rather close range ever since. When Lalanda came out to unfurl his cape and with a series of breath-taking passes bring his bull under control, I understood that I was watching a theatrical display and not a sport. When the bull killed the first horse—because if I remember correctly either pads were not used that day in Valencia or only inadequate ones if they were—I understood that I was participating in a tribal tragedy dating back to prehistoric times and not in a game. At Valencia in those days they still used on cowardly bulls the black banderillas with firecracker heads that exploded harmlessly above the bull’s neck muscles, frightening him into action, and when a pair of these went off not ten feet from where I sat, with the bull’s face pointed at mine, I saw the effect on the animal, saw him stare at me in amazement, then leap sideways in the air and thunder off, and I was forever after a friend and a student of the fighting bull. And when on his first bull el de Borox took his truncated red cloth for the final act of his fight and dominated a towering bull as if the latter had been a tame puppy, I understood that this spectacle was intended to show puny man engaged in his war with the powerful forces of night. I was never to see Ortega better than he was that day, and I left the ring hopelessly addicted to this short, swarthy, cold perfectionist. I was curiously pleased to discover that my picador belonged to the cuadrilla of Ortega and not to one of the others. Later I was to travel briefly with this cuadrilla and to see Ortega in various plazas, and he was as great a matador as I thought him that first day. I concluded then, and have never changed my mind, that if I were to be a matador I would want to be like Domingo Ortega. Being far too chunky in the bottom to qualify as even a third-rate matador and not being hefty enough to be a picador aboard a horse, I never entertained any illusions in this direction even though at intervals I have spent a lot of time with the bulls and have even fought the smaller calves, but as a writer I have often remembered Ortega and have tried in words to attain some of the controlled effects he achieved with cloth and sword. To me, el de Borox would always be a Spanish archetype.