Iberia Read online

  I had barely inspected this pleasing landscape when the trees changed radically. Their trunks, up to a height of perhaps ten feet, turned suddenly bright orange, as if they had been painted that morning. And before I could adjust to orange-colored trees they were replaced by trunks of angry russet, then by trunks of a dark and heavy brown, and finally by trees whose trunks were the original gray I had seen at first; but all the trees, whether orange or gray, sent their limbs twisting and turning in the hot air as if they were gasping for breath.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked the driver.

  ‘Cork forest. The bright orange means a tree that was stripped of its cork a few days ago. Enough time and the bark grows gray again.’ We saw a low shed back among the spacious trees but no sign of life. ‘The cork harvesters are taking a siesta,’ the driver explained.

  We next came to a grove with quite different trees; the trunks were badly shattered, as if the trees were dying; in some there were holes through which I could see; the branches were low and carried delicate leaves that were dark on top, silvery gray on bottom, with clusters of small black fruit. ‘Olive grove,’ the driver said. ‘When the breeze comes through, the leaves flutter. Beautiful.’ But this day there was no breeze.

  Most of the land was barren, with no trees at all. The soil was rocky and red from decomposing ferrous elements. At times a stream-bed, empty of water for the past five months, crawled like a wounded snake across the plain, but often there was not even this to watch. I longed for at least a buzzard to mark that merciless sky, but none appeared. ‘Sleeping,’ the driver said. ‘Everything is sleeping.’

  We came to a village, a truly miserable collection of adobe huts clustered about an unpaved square. One bar was open, apparently, for its doors were not closed, but no men were visible behind the strands of beads that served as a curtain for keeping out the flies. Farther on there was a town, and since it was now nearly five in the afternoon people were beginning to move about, but the heat was so intense that no work was being done. It was a town that had little to commend it except its longevity; Roman legions had known this town, and when their expeditions had ended in the years before the birth of Christ, Caesar Augustus had allowed the oldest veterans to take up land here. Over the ravine at the edge of town ran a stone bridge that had been used in its present form for more than two thousand years.

  Cork harvester.

  ‘You want to stop for a drink?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Not in this town,’ and we pushed on.

  We came now to fields that looked as if they might have been cultivated and to a series of oak and olive forests that were well tended. ‘We’re getting close to Badajoz,’ he said, pronouncing the word with respect. As evening approached, the heat grew more bearable and in one river valley we actually felt a breeze. We climbed a hill, turned west and saw below us the Río Guadiana, which farther on would form the border between Portugal and Spain, and in its valley stood a city without a single distinction: no towers, no ancient walls, no exciting prospects. The eastern half looked old and unrepaired; the western half, new and unrelated to the rest; and there was no apparent reason why a man in good sense would descend the hill to enter that particular city, for this was Badajoz, the nothing-city of the west. ‘Precisely what I wanted,’ I said.

  In America when I had explained to my friends that I was heading for Badajoz, they had shrugged their shoulders because they had never heard of it, and when I told my Spanish friends they grimaced because they had. ‘For the love of Jesus, why Badajoz? It has absolutely nothing.’ In Spanish this last phrase sounds quite final: ‘Absolutamente nada,’ with the six syllables of the first word strung out in emphasis. They tried to dissuade me from going, explaining that Badajoz was a mere depot town along the border, that it was lost in the emptiness of Extremadura, and that if I was determined to visit a remote town, why not a beauty like Murcia near the Mediterranean, or Jaén in the mountains, or Oviedo, where the relics of Christ were kept? ‘Why Badajoz?’

  Why indeed? I had not tried to explain, but there was an explanation and a good one. When I heard the word Spain, I visualized not kings and priests, nor painters and hidalgos, nor Madrid and Sevilla, but the vast reaches of emptiness, lonely uplands occupied by the solitary shepherd, the hard land of Spain stretching off to interminable distances and populated by tough, weatherbeaten men with never a ruffle at their throats nor a caparisoned hose beneath them. In short, when I thought of Spain, I thought primarily of Extremadura, the brutal region in the west, of which Badajoz was the principal city.

  There was a reason. Apart from my first brief visit to Castellón de la Plana and Teruel as a student, my introduction to Spain had come in the American southwest, in the empty areas of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and California, where the Spanish impact had been great. To me, a Spaniard was a man like Coronado, who had ventured into Kansas in 1541. Hernando de Soto and Cabeza de Vaca were my Spaniards and the unknown men who settled Santa Fe and Taos. The Spain I had known in western United States was a heroic Spain, the Spanish landscape with which I was familiar reached at least four hundred miles in any given direction over largely empty land. To have been a Spaniard in those early days in New Mexico and Arizona signified, and the closest approach to that Spain in the home country was Extremadura.

  My second contact with Spain was different. I had spent considerable time in Mexico and at one period or another had lived in all but two of its states, always seeing Mexico as a land that had been discovered, occupied, developed and ruined by Spaniards. I knew well the routes traveled by Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Aztecs, and I had studied those haunting plateresque churches built by his followers in towns where silver was mined. There were few Spanish buildings in Mexico that I had not explored, and some of the happiest days of my youth were those spent in drifting across the plateaus of Chihuahua or exploring the jungles west of Vera Cruz. But whenever I looked at Mexico, I saw Spain. Mexican culture was meaningful only as an extension of Spanish culture, and the cyclones of Mexican political history were merely a reflection of the home country.

  Early in my study I discovered that most of the Spanish heroes who had operated in the Americas had come from Extremadura. The New World was won for Spain not by gentlemen from Toledo and Sevilla but by a group of uneducated village louts who, realizing that they had no future in their hard homeland, had volunteered for service overseas, where their Extremaduran courage proved the most valuable commodity carried westward by the Spanish galleons.

  Extremadura was my Spain, and no one who had missed my experiences in New Mexico and Old could appreciate what Badajoz meant to me, but when I saw this unlovely, battered town, called Pax Augusta by the Romans, and when I saw about me the suspicious, dour Extremadurans, whose ancestors had conquered not cities but whole nations and continents, I felt that I had come back to my own land.

  My first experience in the city proved that I was in Extremadura. The hotel to which I had been sent was dark and mean and tucked away on a side street. The clerk growled, ‘We can let you have a small room for tonight. Fifty pesetas.’ This was eighty-three cents and I judged I could go a little higher, so I said, ‘I’ll be here for a month, so if you have a larger room …’

  ‘A month! In that case the room will be sixty pesetas.’

  This confused me, and I started to explain that elsewhere if a man stayed for a month the price went down, not up, but he stopped me. ‘We don’t want people coming here. We have too many already.’ I looked about the dark lobby and saw no one. I was about to point this out when he snapped, ‘You can’t have a room for a month. Nobody can have a room for a whole month.’ He looked at me suspiciously, as if to ask, ‘Why would a foreigner want to stay in Badajoz for a month?’

  My second experience was one that I look back upon with affection. Through the warm night I walked to the main square and asked a policeman where a hungry man could get a decent meal, and he took me by the arm and said, ‘There’s only one place—Restaurante Colón.
And you’ll thank me later.’ He led me to an old narrow building whose face had recently been lifted with purple plastic, chrome and neon. I hesitated but he pushed me in, and I found a menu which offered a bewildering selection: green plate, gray plate, black plate, ivory plate and white plate, each for about a dollar twenty. When the waiter came, a very tall, thin Extremaduran, he grabbed the menu away and whispered, ‘If you want the best, take the zarzuela.’ I was pretty sure I knew what a zarzuela was, so I asked, ‘How’s that again?’ And he growled, ‘Take the zarzuela.’

  A zarzuela, unless I was out of my mind, was what I had seen in Castellón de la Plana, a short Spanish-type musical comedy in which the songs are closer to opera than those of an American musical. I had seen some good zarzuelas and had enjoyed them, but now I was being asked to eat one.

  I must have shown my apprehension, because the waiter said an extraordinary thing: ‘My friend, if you trust in the goodness of God, take the zarzuela.’ Such advice I could not ignore, so I nodded, fearing the worst.

  Instead I got the best: a ramekin containing olive oil, a judicious amount of garlic, some baked potatoes, chopped onions, pimientos, tomatoes and a heavenly assortment of shrimp, crayfish, squid, octopus, hake and filet of sole, all done to a golden brown and served with croutons and an effervescent white wine. It was a savory introduction to Badajoz and I had to agree with the waiter that sometimes the goodness of God must be trusted.

  When I finished, it was still light and I had no intention of going back to my gloomy hotel. I decided instead to stroll through the streets of Badajoz and to see with a fresh eye how a Spanish city looked. I wanted, as it were, to build a base of understanding to which I could add as I visited the nine other cities of my projected tour, and in retrospect I am glad that I did this, because if one understands Badajoz he will understand Spain.

  The Restaurante Colón stood on the main plaza, and as I left it I faced the cathedral, a low, squat ugly building built many centuries ago and one of the least attractive in Spain. It carried a square tower of no distinction, decorated by nine urns on each side, looking like the battlements of a fortress and not a cathedral. Eight bells hung in the tower, but during my stay I did not hear them ring. The massive walls had no Gothic windows, nor did they carry any ornamentation to relieve their drabness. The building was entered by a sadly inappropriate door flanked by four Ionic columns which some architect had added in the eighteenth century in an attempt to dress up the façade, and on the great slab-sided front facing the plaza appeared the two words which I would see carved into the walls of churches all across Spain: JOSE ANTONIO. The letters were accompanied by seventeen laurel wreaths cast in rusting iron.

  Although the cathedral was unusually ugly it conveyed a sense of dignity, for it was a frontier church-fortress, and only the security which it provided had allowed Badajoz to survive its sieges and attacks. It was then and remained now the center of Badajoz life, and the society which it supervised was much like it: ancient, unornamented, solid and well able to protect itself.

  The plaza which the cathedral dominated was small and awkward and as undistinguished a main square as I would see in Spain. There were old buildings of no quality and others like the Restaurante Colón whose face-lifted façades gleamed garishly in plastic and neon. The Banco Mercantil had recently been redone in ultramodern style and looked rather handsome. Its windows were low, and to keep idlers from sitting on the sills, the latter were decorated with sharp, tall spikes. The six white columns of the Palacio Municipal supported a balcony ready for an orator who never came.

  What was the chief characteristic of the plaza? That it was jammed with automobiles and had the same parking problem as Rome, London or New York. The parking of cars was supervised by a corps of crippled war veterans who collected their fee whenever a car drew up to the curb. Traffic through the very narrow streets leading into the plaza was constant and was guided by policemen with a good sense of humor. Every four or five minutes large buses passed through the square on various routes which took them to all parts of the suburbs. The buses hauled large numbers of passengers, as they did throughout Spain.

  Having completed a rapid survey of the plaza, I closed my eyes and asked, ‘Is there anything here that would prove I am in Spain?’ I looked again, and apart from the obvious signs in Spanish, saw nothing that would betray the origin of this city. It could have been Italy, or southern France, or even rural Texas. I want to make this point secure because travelers often expect strange cities to look a certain way, but with modern technology, architecture and traffic most of them look alike. If I had tried this test of ‘Where am I?’ in the plazas of the villages and towns of southern Extremadura the answer would have been, ‘This can only be Spain,’ but in the cities, no. They are international.

  Yet even as I said this I saw two minor things that would have betrayed a Spanish origin. At the far end of the plaza stood a statue to the painter Luis Morales (1509–1586) and in the next small square another statue to another painter, Francisco Zurbarán (1598–1664). Spain is inordinately proud of its painters and writers. The Spanish jet which had brought me from New York bore the name El Greco and I tried to imagine an American plane, patronized by our businessmen, bearing the name Jackson Pollock. And on one of the plaza walls stood the type of marble plaque common in Spain. This one recalled the salient event of recent Spanish history, the Civil War:

  SPAIN CONQUEROR OF COMMUNISM IN THE CRUSADE WHICH BEGAN THIS DAY TO ENSURE PEACE FOR THE EMPIRE. FOR UNITY, FOR GREATNESS, FOR LIBERTY IN THE SIGN OF FRANCO, THE CAUDILLO, ¡ARRIBA ESPAÑA!

  17–18–19 JULY 1936

  When I left the plaza I entered the old part of Badajoz, and was delighted with the narrow streets and the memories of Spain as it used to be. This was a pleasing part of town and here I was not in Rome or Texas. This was authentic Spain, but when I moved to the west and to the area of big new buildings, sprawling schools and hospitals, I might once more have been in any modern European city. Taken building by building, Badajoz was a respectable-looking city, clean, well organized and modern. Homes, stores, theaters, the lesser churches and the public offices were about what one would expect in a city of similar size in Italy or France. Beauty there was not, but solidity there was. There was also evidence that the citizens had money, for whenever in my tour I reached a high point of ground, I saw numerous television aerials; sets in the city could bring in both Portuguese and Spanish programs.

  What kind of people lived in Badajoz? I returned to the main plaza and found an outdoor table, where I sat for some hours simply looking at the passers-by, and as the cooler temperatures of evening arrived a good many people appeared for their nightly stroll. As to the girls, they looked exactly like girls of similar age in New York or London. They wore the same amount of make-up, the same length of dress, the same hairdos. They giggled in the same way at private jokes, and when they walked with young men they held hands and sometimes kissed in public. If the young women gave no signs of being Spanish, certain of the older women did, but only because they wore much more black than I would have [unclear] England or America.

  This fat pig, fed on acorns from the forests of Extremadura, has been dead for two years and may hang proudly in the butcher’s window for another two before it is eaten. Price in Spain, twenty-three cents a pound.

  Young men looked exactly like their cousins around the western world. In dress they were wholly indistinguishable from boys their age in Chicago or Mexico City, except that not many wore their hair long. They did, however, carry transistor radios, which they used as abusively as young people elsewhere. Spaniards are conservative in dress and this became especially noticeable when I studied the older men, for of all groups they alone did betray the fact that they were Spanish, but only because they wore extremely somber clothes. I saw not a single sport shirt, nor a blazer, nor even a light-colored suit of any kind.

  In facial appearance I could not detect among the young any characteristics that would brand them as Span
ish, but as both the girls and boys grew older a certain Spanish look did seem to appear; I mentioned this to an Englishman whom I met later, and he said, ‘You’re wrong. If you put a hundred of the older people in various European cities, you’d not be able to identify them. France, Italy, Greece, Turkey would absorb them without your knowing. Sweden and Finland? No. The Spaniards are a little darker than the European average and against the blonds of those two countries they’d be conspicuous.’

  One point I must make clear. You could sit in the plaza at Badajoz for three months and see no women trailing by in mantillas. You’d see no castanets, no high ivory combs, no colorful shawls tied about the waist. Nor would you see any men dressed like Don Quixote or conquistadors. No bands of guitarists gather at midnight, wrapped in cloaks, to serenade women behind iron grilles, and the Spanish types one sees in Carmen are visible only in the bullring, where in the infrequent fights matadors dress as they did a century ago.

  Yet certain trivial customs create a Spanish atmosphere. There being little public assistance as we know it in America, it is traditional for blind people to roam the streets selling lottery tickets; cripples park cars or peddle things, and consequently one sees more deformity in Spain than he would elsewhere. There is, however, no begging. Shoeshine boys are also more numerous, but usually they are grown men who move endlessly from one café table to the next, calling ‘¿Limpia?’ (Shall I clean?), so that in the course of two hours one could have his shoes shined by ten or fifteen different men.

  One of the sure signs that this is Spain is the number of young married women who have allowed themselves to get fat. On my first night in Badajoz, I estimated that Spanish women of thirty years and older weighed about twenty pounds more than American or French women of comparable age and social background. I commented on this to a Spaniard, and he said approvingly, ‘It’s one of the most beautiful sights in Spain. To sit in the plaza at dusk and watch the fat married women roll by with their husbands and children. It’s beautiful because in Spain, once a woman is married, she never again has to fight the dinner table. She has her man and nothing on earth can take him away from her, so she doesn’t give a damn how fat she gets. In Spain there’s no divorce and her children cannot be taken away nor her home either. She’s safe. Of course, her husband will probably take a mistress. Three-fourths of the fine Spanish gentlemen you’ve been meeting and enjoying so much have mistresses. But they’d have them whether their wives were slim or fat. So our women eat and love their children and go to the movies and gossip and put their faith in the Church, and to hell with dieting, and you won’t find a more contented group of women in the world.’