Iberia (15 page)

 

‘Shall we let in another?’ the alcalde called down.

 

‘We can’t see to cape it,’ the matador called back.

 

‘We’ll let her run through anyway,’ the alcalde shouted, and
the ropes were pulled to make the various doors swing open. A
heifer, larger than the first, ripped into the arena; obviously she
could see in darkness better than the men opposing her, for within
a few seconds she had bowled over three men, one after the other,
and had ripped the cape out of the matador’s hand. He prudently
fled behind the barrier and called, ‘Get her out of here. She has
radar.’ The gates swung open and the little cyclone swept
majestically from sight, having defended her terrain against all
comers. The ring was closed down and the birds settled into the
nests of which we had deprived them.

 

When the matador joined us he said, ‘I’d like to have seen that
last one in daylight. She charged like a thunder-bolt.’

 

‘She comes from a good strain,’ the alcalde said proudly, and
we trailed back from the testing plaza to the ranch house, where
Señora Pablos had laid out a vast country-style supper lit with
torches, and under the starry Extremaduran sky we began to eat
the crisp salad, the rugged potato omelette and something I was
not often to taste in Spain, a good cheese. It was tangy and of
excellent texture, and the men asked for seconds and I for thirds.
‘Where did you find such a good cheese?’ I asked, and the alcalde’s
wife replied, ‘I make it. I came from a farm family and we always
had good cheese.’ The night grew cooler, so the workmen started
a fire and we finished our supper with sparks flying into the air
and transforming themselves into stars. I took this opportunity
to get an expert opinion from the matador. ‘In New York a young
man told me there was a new star in bullfighting, Curro Romero.
Is he any good?’

 

Matadors are notoriously envious, but this one said, ‘You
should go to much pains to see Romero, for he is special. He is
very slow with the cape, like a guitarist who is sure of himself and
doesn’t have to stamp and whistle. At the end of the fight he is a
genius, wrapping the bull around him as if it was a blanket. Never
have you seen anything so slow. If you’re going toward Sevilla,
watch out for him. He’s worth seeing.’

 

We then spoke of Trujillo during the various wars of succession
and of how it so often backed the wrong contender, and of the
conquistadors wandering across the Americas, and the alcalde
repeated a prediction from Clodoaldo Naranjo’s local history. ‘I
am not afraid to assert, almost prophetically, that the day is not
far distant when the greater part of America will feel for Trujillo
the same veneration that in its religious life it feels for those spots
which were the birthplaces of messiahs and prophets.’

 

Thus ended my three casual expeditions out of Badajoz: to
Mérida and its Romans, to Medellín and Cortés, and to Trujillo
and its Pizarros. Now the obligatory trip was to begin and I headed
south to the little town with the lovely name, Jerez de los
Caballeros. In Spain, as in the United States, where we have several
Portlands and many Springfields, names of towns are apt to be
repeated in the various provinces, so some kind of distinguishing
phrase is frequently added. Thus there is the great Jerez of the
wine industry; it lies south of Sevilla on the old Christian-Muslim
frontier and is called Jerez de la Frontera; and there is Jerez de los
Caballeros on a hill commanding a large section of the
Extremaduran plains. Who were the knights of the name?
Originally they were a band of murderously tough Knights
Templars who owned the city and were responsible for guarding
the town against Islam; in the last chapter of this book, when
visiting a similar city in the north, we shall learn what happened
to these unfortunate Templars. When they vanished the rugged
little city passed into the ownership of the Knights of Santiago,
who used it as an anchor in their assaults on the infidel. Jerez de
los Caballeros was an embattled city, and when I first saw its
towers from a creaking autobus bouncing over dusty, unpaved
roads, it seemed like a haven whose protection I would enjoy, but
as the bus crawled closer I began to have doubts, yet it was
imperative that I visit Jerez, for I was drawn there by a kind of
pilgrimage.

 

The only thing I knew about Jerez came from a travel book
written by an Englishwoman. She had had a miserable time,
finding nothing to commend, but even her savage condemnation
of the place—poor food, inhospitable people, bad beds, foul
climate—had contained a whisper of attraction, as if to say, ‘If
you want to see Spain at its worst, test yourself on Jerez de los
Caballeros.’ English writers have a particular knack for describing
a strange place in terms that are both repellant and attractive,
especially when they write about Spain.

 

It is difficult to explain why the best writing on Spain has
usually been done by Englishmen, but that seems to be the case.
I have sometimes thought that it was because the sherry trade
required Englishmen to live in Spain, but I could find no one
directly connected with that trade who had written with any charm
of the peninsula. I’ve also suspected that it might be the
Englishman’s intuitive yearning for the sun which accounted for
his preoccupation with Spain, but that doesn’t seem to stand
inspection either. Whatever the reason, if you want good reading
on Spain, read the English.

 

Richard Ford’s classic account remains unsurpassed. It came
into being because Ford, son of the man who created London’s
mounted police, married the daughter of the Earl of Essex and
gained thereby a yearly income and a sickly wife whose doctor
ordered her to travel in a warmer climate. In 1830 Ford took her
to Spain, where they lived for three years and where she regained
her health.

 

As a result of this stay, Ford acquired an immense library on
Spain, and in 1839 when the London publisher John Murray
happened to remark that he was looking for a guidebook on Spain,
Ford volunteered. Five years later he delivered the manuscript
for his famous
Handbook for Travellers in Spain
, but after it was
printed in 1845 Murray grew apprehensive that it was too
outspoken and suppressed it. Later an expurgated version was
published and it became a classic. Finally, in 1846, a
supplementary volume titled
Gatherings from Spain
was issued,
and the two taken together are the foundation of Ford’s
reputation.

 

I prefer George Borrow’s strange narrative
The Bible in Spain
,
in which he recounts his experiences in 1836-1840 as an itinerant
peddler of Bibles. As the book’s editor said: ‘It was in an
atmosphere of hatred, intrigue and adventure that Borrow lived,
striving manfully to print and propagate an alien gospel among
the fanatical Spaniards.’ It is a robust book, opinionated,
specialized and often infuriating. It is written in an apocalpytic
style which recalls Doughty’s similar writing on Arabia and
remains indispensable for anyone wanting to dig below the surface
into Spanish matters, but I would think that Catholics might find
it irritating. Two facts about the book interest me. Borrow too
saw Spain first at Finisterre: ‘On the morning of the 10th of
November, 1835, I found myself off the coast of Galicia, whose
lofty mountains, gilded by the rising sun, presented a magnificent
appearance.’ And he too started his journey at Badajoz, on January
5, 1836: ‘In a moment I was on Spanish soil, and having flung the
beggar a small piece of silver, I cried in ecstasy, “Santiago y cierra
España!”’ (This is the traditional battle cry of the nation. Its literal
translation is ‘St. James and close Spain.’ Its meaning is ‘Help us,
Santiago, and let’s go, Spaniards, in closed ranks.’) Then Borrow
adds: ‘I was now at Badajoz in Spain, a country which for the next
four years was destined to be the scene of my labors. The
neighborhood of Badajoz did not prepossess me much in favor
of the country which I had just entered.’

 

Ford and Borrow are classics, but they are garrulous. For a
short, highly condensed view of Spain one can do no better than
V. S. Pritchett’s
The Spanish Temper
(1954). It requires only a few
hours to read but is of such high specific gravity as to provide
enough hard material to keep the mind working for weeks.
Constantly Pritchett throws out challenging observations: ‘The
very day when Fernando VII closed the university in Sevilla, he
opened a school for bullfighters there.’‘Spaniards are born
disciples of Seneca, natural stoics who bear and forbear.’‘If El
Greco painted out of the day and the land, Goya paints out of the
night.’‘It was a Spaniard who founded the first order of
Commissars in Europe, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).’

 

For the essential romanticism of Spain, I suppose one should
rely upon Somerset Maugham’s sardonic
Don Fernando
(1935),
for although the great storyteller never wrote a novel about Spain,
it haunted his life, and it was to this country that his alter ego
Philip Carey of
Of Human Bondage
dreamed of escaping, a dream
which was truncated by his involvement with Mildred. The essays
in
Don Fernando
are exasperating, and some of them seem unduly
precious, but they are fun and throw such an oblique light on
Spain that the reader will often find himself discovering a new
set of meaningful shadows.

 

A good analysis of Spanish character is Havelock Ellis’
The Soul
of Spain
(1908). Neither systematic or complete, the little book
contains so much wry comment and so many particular
judgments that it constitutes one of the best approaches to matters
Spanish. On a recent rereading of this pivotal work I was
impressed by something that had escaped me the first two times
around. Ellis, like me, had made his basic acquaintance with Spain
not through the mother country but through the colonies, in his
case Peru. He thus saw the peninsula reflected, as it were, in the
shield of Theseus, and apparently this is a good way to approach
Spain, for then certain fundamental characteristics stand forth
which might otherwise be missed. At any rate, Ellis loved Spain
and wrote of it with deep affection, whereas many who approach
it more directly fail to do either.

 

If the reader finds my account too favorable to Spain, I direct
him to
Silk Hats and No Breakfast
(1957) by Honor Tracy, in
which this witty Irish woman presents a bittersweet account of
her travels in 1955. She saw little that was not contemptible and
expressed her contempt by citing one pejorative incident after
another. No aspect of Spanish life was sacred and none was
accorded charity. It is an old-fashioned book in that everything
foreign is held up to ridicule, and I would suppose that Spaniards
despise it.

 

Finally, since the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 was a major
historical event of the first half of the twentieth century and since
I am not going to belabor it, I recommend two books: for the
background, Gerald Brenan’s
The Spanish Labyrinth
(1943), and
for the war itself, Hugh Thomas’
The Spanish Civil War
(1961).
With typical British impersonality and with a high regard for
truth, Thomas picks his way magisterially through the debris of
this anguished period to produce what will long be the classic
account of the war. It seems to me that he writes the general truth
concerning these sad events, and the fact that his book has been
unofficially adopted by the Spanish people as the legitimate
narrative of the war signifies that the winners at least do not
consider it offensively wrong.

 

For light reading, and as an antidote to the acerb quality of
Honor Tracy’s work, one could profitably look into H. V.
Morton’s
A Stranger in Spain
(1955), in which this professional
traveler relates Spanish history to events occurring simultaneously
in England. This presupposes the hypothesis that real history was
occurring in England, but that interesting by-plays were occurring
at the same time in Spain. This makes England the universal
measuring stick, but since Americans tend to know English history
better than they do American, and certainly better than Spanish,
there is an advantage to Morton’s system:

I never really grasped what a good claim Philip II had to the
English throne. I suppose a Catholic genealogist at the time of the
Armada would have infinitely preferred his blood-relationship
with the House of Lancaster to Elizabeth’s tenuous Tudor
connexion with the House of York; and perhaps had the Armada
been invincible we might have heard a great deal about this….

John of Gaunt’s adventures in Spain are an odd and fascinating
little chapter in Anglo-Spanish history…. John of Gaunt, whose
first wife was dead, married Constance of Castile, while his brother,
Edmund of Langley, married her sister Isabel. In twelve years’
time John of Gaunt and Constance took an English army to Spain
to claim the throne of Castile, though the expedition ended not
in war but in wedding bells. They gave up all claim to the throne
upon the marriage of their daughter Catherine to Henry III of
Castile. This is the Catherine who is buried in Toledo, a woman
who, as a little girl, lived in the Savoy and saw the Strand in those
days when London was

…
small and white and clean
,

 

The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green
.

She knew Geoffrey Chaucer, who must have taken her on his
knee many a time, and she probably had as governess that
much-maligned woman, Catherine Swynford, Chaucer’s
sister-in-law and her father’s mistress. She would have
remembered the turmoil of Wat Tyler’s rebellion and the sacking
of her father’s place in the Strand….

Catherine could not have had a happy life in Spain. Her
husband was an invalid, and like so many queens of Spain she was
left with an infant heir and lived in terror that he might be taken
away from her. But he was not. He became John II of Castile and
the father of Spain’s greatest queen, Isabel the Catholic. It is
interesting to think that Isabel’s grandmother was the daughter
of John of Gaunt….