Iberia Page 3

  That Sunday night the picador and I went to a café near our hotel, where we were joined by a gang of Valencian bullfight fans who started to discuss the day’s events in an animated dialect which I could little understand, and it was their opinion that Ortega had been exceptional. However, the purpose of the evening was not to rehash the bullfight but to enjoy a famous flamenco team of a woman dancer and a male guitarist. They had come from Madrid, I believe, or possibly Sevilla. At any rate, the smoky hall was crowded and waiters scurried about serving sweet wine and cakes or sour wine and anchovies, and our table chose the latter. Girls provided by the management wandered among the tables and three invited themselves to join us. The picador insisted that they provide one who could speak English, but none was available. They did, however, find one who spoke South American-style Spanish, and her I could understand.

  What few lights the café had were dimmed. A single chair was placed on stage to be occupied by a round, fat, baldheaded man carrying a guitar. He was greeted with applause and launched directly into a composition which I would remember as one of the best I was to hear in Spain. I asked the girl beside me to explain the song, and she said that flamenco had more than a dozen standard types of song, like malagueños, fandangos and peteneras. This was a good example of the last. When I asked what words accompanied the music, she said, ‘We have many versions. But the best tell the story of a beautiful Jewish girl named Petenera.’

  Where are you going, Petenera?

  Where are you going, Jewish maid?

  I suppose that ‘Petenera,’ as this particular song was called, has become more a part of me than any other piece of folk music I have ever heard, the story of a Jewish girl and her tragic effect upon a small Spanish town. It must be very old, dating back at least to the 1400s, when Jews were common in Spain; the music is not exceptional and the words are arbitrary, but others have testified to the fact that the song as a whole has a powerful effect on them too, so I am not unusual in liking it.

  It was obvious that this fat man on the chair was a notable guitarist, for he could make his instrument roar and whisper, laugh and sob. Both he and his music were very Spanish, and I relished each, but in due course he struck a series of commanding chords that sounded much like a machine gun, and onto the stage whirled my first flamenco dancer. She was a woman in her forties, not at all pretty and much fatter than I would have expected, but after that quick inventory I forgot her visible characteristics, for she could dance.

  On Monday morning an event occurred that was to come back to me with terrible effect in the years that followed, although when it was happening I could not have anticipated its significance. I was in the central square, or at least one of the central squares, where the ashes of Saturday night’s fire were being cleared, when from one of the government buildings I saw a procession crossing toward me. It was composed of many men in fine dark suits, including three or four in formal morning wear. In the center of the front rank was a most ordinary-looking man, apparently in his fifties, undistinguished in face, slightly dumpy in body and awkward in manner. I remember distinctly that even then I thought him to be a man of good though flabby will, and somebody beside me whispered that he was the President of Spain. It was Niceto Alcalá Zamora, the quiet man chosen to head Spain after the departure of King Alfonso XIII, who had slipped out of the country only the year before, thus avoiding the necessity of abdication. In this simple, fumbling man I saw the Republican alternative to the Bourbon dynasty (in Spanish, Borbón) and I was not impressed.

  Then, to my astonishment, the cortege of black-suited men came straight at me, and a big crowd gathered behind me, so that I was wedged into position. President Alcalá Zamora—a fussy lawyer who was known, in a mixture of affection and contempt, as Botas (Old High Button Shoes)—spoke casually to several people in the crowd, then stopped and faced me.

  How long ago it seems that I first saw Valencia.

  ‘You are a stranger, I believe?’

  ‘An American,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, norteamericano. How do you like Spain?’

  ‘The fireworks last night,’ was all I could manage.

  ‘What else have you seen?’

  ‘Teruel.’

  There was a long silence, and the president softly said, ‘Teruel. Not many get to Teruel,’ and he was gone.

  When I returned to the hotel I found that the picador had departed with Ortega’s cuadrilla for a fight in some other part of Spain but had left me an envelope containing a free ticket for the novillada (a bullfight in which novices rather than full matadors appear) scheduled for that afternoon. The young matadors put on a fight of some skill even though facing bulls somewhat smaller than the full matadors had fought. Having tasted the day before the essence of bullfighting in the work of Lalanda and Ortega, I was eager to apply what I had learned to a less professional performance. I saw much that day and have often wondered who the three aspirants were. Did they go on to glory? Were they men whose names I am now familiar with? Or were they merely three more among the hundreds who manage a fight or two in Valencia or Sevilla or Córdoba and then vanish? I suppose there must be some way I could track down their names, because for that one Monday in Valencia they were proficient.

  When the time came for me to leave Valencia, I reflected: I’ve seen the best Spain has to offer. The well-dressed businessmen. The luxurious clubs, they’re as good as any in Europe. The gaiety of a first-class fiesta. Good hotels, good restaurants, good entertainment. A substantial city that seems to be well run. I’ve even seen the president himself, moving unguarded among his people and willing to talk with a norteamericano. I have seen Spain.

  But as I rode out to the port of Valencia to rejoin my ship for the long haul back to Scotland, I could not help recalling the peasants of Teruel and the abysmal and almost terrifying poverty that was their lot. Between these two Spains, and remember that I had not yet seen the superarrogant nobility of Sevilla, there existed such a gap that I simply could not bring it into focus. It was like the test the oculist gives you when you have weak eyes: ‘You will see before you two halves of a picture. Use all your muscles to make them form one single picture. Try! Try!’

  Now, if the two halves are things like a countryman in Scotland as opposed to a banker in Edinburgh, there is at first a discrepancy, but as one exercises his muscles he can bring them together into one fused portrait of Scotland that is not difficult to comprehend. The countryman remains a countryman and the banker a banker, and they can stand side by side with no embarrassment. In the same way you can fuse a coal miner in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and a storekeeper in Pittsburgh. But to fuse the rural peasant of Teruel and the rich clubman of Valencia lolling in his leather chair after a gorging meal was for me impossible, and I began at that moment to formulate that series of speculations regarding Spain which were to exercise me for the next decades. Whenever I read about Spain it was to find answers to these questions, and remember that they were posed some years before the Civil War disfigured the country. These are the questions of peace, and whenever I traveled in Spain or talked with Spaniards in America or England, I continued to study only these permanent questions. Later, after the war had ended, I applied myself to these speculations and did not torment myself with questions as to who was right or wrong in the war, for I have always regarded Spain as my second home and I have wanted to know about its enduring quality, not its current preoccupations. These are the speculations which have concerned me.

  Speculation One. Spain and Italy are both peninsulas that jut out from the mainland of Europe, and in the north each is marked by mountains which formerly cut the inhabitants off from the main intellectual and political movements of the continent, but Italy was able to adjust to those continental movements and even to mold and lead them whereas Spain was not. Why? It is true that for a relatively brief period during the reigns of Carlos V and Felipe II, Spain succeeded in reversing this tradition and in governing much of Europe, but in the long run of her history she
was emotionally confined to her peninsula whereas Italy was not. Why?

  Speculation Two. In the period of greatness referred to above, Spain faced east toward her possessions in Italy, north toward her important holdings in the Low Countries, west toward her vast empire in the Americas and south toward involvement in Africa, but she never seemed able to make up her mind as to where her basic interests lay and thus frittered them all away. Why this indecision?

  Speculation Three. During a period of some four centuries prior to 1492, Spain had shown herself more hospitable to varied cultural, religious and ethnic groups than any other major power, including those in Asia and Africa, and this tolerance appeared to be an established way of life, yet with startling speed she reversed herself and extirpated from Spanish soil all Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Illuminati and Jesuits, transforming herself into one of the most homogeneous and frightened people in the world. What accounted for this dramatic reversal?

  Speculation Four. With her drive toward uniformity and centralism, why has it been Spain who has preserved so strongly a regional pattern of life? With her devotion to a royalist theory of government, why has she so persistently produced strong democratic movements? With her love of personal freedom, why has she repeatedly sought her major solutions in dictatorial forms of government, and why do these work so well with the Spanish people?

  Speculation Five. Why did Spain, when she was already one of the richest countries in Europe, spend so much energy gaining control of the riches of the New World, then allowing this influx of gold and silver to generate an inflation which converted her into the poorest country in Europe and one of the poorest in the world? This is a perplexing question, for it touches upon one of the real tragedies of history and has implications for present nations. I used to consider this self-impoverishment of Spain a tragedy that could not be explained and assumed that it had occurred without anyone’s being aware of the problem; but that is not so. Recent studies have proved that certain Spanish theorists in the sixteenth century understood that a sudden importation of raw wealth which had not been created by productive work within the nation would create an inflation which would bankrupt Spain, and they warned against it. But they were not listened to. Why?

  Speculation Six. Prior to the industrial revolution which re-formed the face of Europe, Spain was a leader in the manufacture of quality goods, a leader in world trade and a leader in agriculture. Had she merely projected this leadership at a normal rate of growth and had she been able to make the relatively simple adjustments that were afoot throughout the rest of Europe, she would probably have remained the leader in manufacturing, trade and agriculture and might even have improved her relative position. Instead, almost consciously and with calculated arrogance, she dedicated herself to an opposite course. She hamstrung her manufacturers, restricted her trade and crippled her agriculture. Within a few generations world leadership in these crucial fields had passed into the hands of France, Germany and England, and to a lesser degree, Italy. Who can explain this extraordinary series of wrong decisions?

  Speculation Seven. For several centuries Spain was one of the exciting leaders in art, music, drama, poetry, the novel, philosophy—both as producer and consumer. Then abruptly the leadership was abandoned. The traveler to Spain can have no more perplexing an experience than to visit the Prado Museum and see there the paintings of Italians like Titian, of Flemings like Roger van der Weyden and of Germans like Dürer and to realize that during the lifetimes of those men Spain was the art capital of the world, and then to search in vain for a Spanish museum which contains comparable samples of the Frenchman Cézanne, the Italian Modigliani, the Russian Soutine, the Austrian Kokoschka or the German Klee. One fails to find the work of even Spanish-speaking artists like Picasso, Miró, Orozco and Rivera. What can explain this dramatic volte-face?

  Speculation Eight. No aspect of Spain is more perplexing to the foreigner than her passionate devotion to the Catholic Church, which she has defended at heavy cost in wealth and manpower, while never being reluctant to oppose the Pope when she considered him in moral or political error. Several times Spanish kings mounted armies to attack the Vatican, and both Carlos V and Felipe II, who are described in Spanish history as the nonpareils of Catholic orthodoxy, were excommunicated because of their anti-Rome behavior. Papal decrees were often refused entrance into Spain; Spanish kings and cardinals simply refused to promulgate them, and even today there is a tendency for the Spanish Church to consider one of its main tasks to ‘save Rome from itself.’ Such contradictory behavior is one of the continuing anomalies of Spanish history.

  Speculation Nine. On my first day in Teruel I found that the contradictions I was becoming aware of could be explained only by reference to what might be termed the central mystery of Spanish psychology. How can the Spaniard, who is so outgoing, so earthy, so in love with the trivia of daily existence, be at the same time so withdrawn and inwardly mystical? In this book the reader will not find an answer to this permanent enigma, but he will find, I hope, certain illustrations of it from which he can draw his own conclusions.

  In other words, to travel in Spain is not like traveling elsewhere. The people are exciting, but so are they in Greece; the land is compelling, but so is it in Norway; art forms like flamenco, the bullfight and the decoration of the central plaza are unique, but so are the art forms of Italy; and if reflections on Spanish history drive the stranger to speculation, so do reflections on German history. What makes Spain different is that here these speculations are positively unavoidable. The people are so dramatic in their simplest existence that one must identify with them, and when one does he begins to think like a Spaniard; the art forms are so persuasive that the stranger is sucked into their vortices, even against his will; and the problems of history are so gigantic and of such continuing significance that one cannot escape an intellectual involvement in them. Some travelers, of whom I am one, find also an emotional involvement in Spanish history, and when this happens we are lost, for then Spain haunts us as it has haunted our predecessors, Georges Bizet, Henry de Montherlant, George Borrow and Ernest Hemingway.

  What I am saying is that Spain is a very special country and one must approach it with respect and with his eyes open. He must be fully aware that once he has penetrated the borders he runs the risk of being made prisoner. I believe I sensed this danger on that silvery dawn many years ago when I stood, off the shore of Burriana and watched the heaving men and the straining oxen, dimly aware that in nearby Castellón there was a fiesta which awaited me and in the hills cold Teruel, which would be forever one of the principal cities of my mind. I knew then that Spain was a special land, and I have spent many subsequent trips endeavoring to unravel its peculiarities. I have not succeeded, and in this failure I am not unhappy, for Spain is a mystery and I am not at all convinced that those who live within the peninsula and were born there understand it much better than I, but that we all love the wild, contradictory, passionately beautiful land there can be no doubt.

  II

  BADAJOZ

  Badajoz still lay forty miles to the north. In a hot bus that talked back to itself I was plodding through the vast region called Extremadura, that empty, rocky section of Spain lying southwest from Madrid along the Portuguese border. It was a day of intense heat, with the thermometer well above a hundred and ten. For as far as I could see there were no towns, no villages, only the brassy, shimmering heat rising up from the plains and the implacable sky without even a wisp of cloud. When dust rose, it hung in the motionless air and required minutes to fall back to the caked and burning earth. I saw no animals, no birds, no men, for they refused to venture forth in this remorseless heat.

  In fact, the only thing in nature that moved was the sun, terrible and metallic as it inched its way across that indifferent sky. I was relieved therefore when the bus descended a long hill and we came to a meadowland filled with trees, but such trees I had not seen before. They were not tall like elms, nor copious like maples. They were l
ow, extremely sturdy, with dark gray trunks and gnarled branches that reached wide, so that each tree was given a considerable area to itself. The meadowland in between was filled with small yellow flowers, as if it were a carpet of gold, accented here and there with concentrations of white daisies and punctuated by the massive trees with their dark crowns.