Iberia (40 page)

‘About nine o’clock at night there’s one hell of a noise.
Flamenco music and shouting and general brawling. And then
on all sides of the central plaza, the Real del Rocío, the parade
forms, and for more than three hours we ride past the chapel of
the Virgin and pay our respects. It’s something to see, a
recollection of old Spain, but the best part comes after the formal
parade breaks up, because then gangs of riders rip and roar
through the village all night. When I am in England and try to
recall why I love Spain so much, I think of two things. The birds
at the palace and the night-riding at El Rocío.

‘On Sunday morning at ten o’clock something happens you
wouldn’t believe. The Real is crowded with people who have come
to celebrate a field Mass in which a portable altar is set up. Riders
attend on horses, as they did in cavalry days, and when they
dismount to kneel, it’s something to see.

‘Sunday night is a sort of bleary time, a sentimental wandering
from one community house to the next. Men you wouldn’t bother
with in normal business suddenly become good friends, because
they took the trouble to visit El Rocío. The singing continues all
night, and if there is someone who simply can’t take the noise
any longer, he sneaks out into Las Marismas and sleeps under the
stars.

‘Monday is the day! Early in the morning the Virgin, the
original statue about which all this fuss is being made, is brought
out of the church atop a rather large wooden structure like a float
in order to make a paseo so that she can bless the pilgrims who
have come to do her honor. Honor! That’s the word. By tradition
her float is carried only by the men from Almonte, because it was
they who first did so when they took her from the tree. But the
rest of us are free to volunteer, but if we do the men from Almonte
push us away.

‘So how does a man win the honor of helping to carry the float?
By gouging, kicking, pulling and clubbing whichever men have
her at the moment. A shirt lasts about three minutes. I have seen
fights in the shadow of this Virgin that makes one of your sales
at Macy’s look puny. I’ve seen men so eager to touch the float
that they rear back, take six running steps and torpedo themselves
headfirst into the face of the man who was holding the float. You’d
think the man who was hit wouldn’t have a tooth left in his head.
He’d stagger back and want to fight, but someone would shout,
“!Viva la Paloma Blanca!” and he’d wipe his mouth and grin.

‘How long does the brawling last? Four or five hours. Maybe
more. The Virgin moves a few yards at a time, trembles, teeters,
almost falls in the dust, but hands always catch her at the last
minute and keep her erect. The fighting continues at fever pitch
because as soon as anyone is exhausted and has to withdraw,
someone fresh plunges in determined to capture the float.

‘By late afternoon Monday the two-wheeled carts begin to drive
back along the roads to sanity. The battered Virgin is restored to
her quiet niche in the shrine and the community houses are slowly
boarded up for another year. The stores that have been opened
to serve the pilgrims are shut down. The gypsy bands move on
to another fiesta and everywhere you look you see tired men and
women sleeping on porches or under trees. Horses that have not
rested for days sleep standing or graze along the edges of the
swamp.

‘On Monday, Cecilia and I ride back to the palace, and believe
me the birds are a welcome change from the madness we’ve been
sharing. On Tuesday we return through the dunes and come to
the edge of the river. On the other side we see the low roofs of
Sanlúcar and wonder if the ferry will ever spot us and come to
fetch our horses.’

In the spring of 1498, when Christopher Columbus proposed
to sail from Sanlúcar on this third voyage of exploration to the
New World, he was forced to delay the departure of his six ships
until the thirtieth of May, ‘because his sailors had gone off to El
Rocío and would not return.’ When the five ships of Magellan
assembled at Sanlúcar in 1519, prior to setting out for their
circumnavigation of the globe, the season of El Rocío was well
past, for it was mid-August, but most of his sailors from the
Sanlúcar district would have made the pilgrimage earlier, for the
Virgin looked after her devotees.

‘She’s a wonderful Virgin,’ Señor Ybarra assured me as we stood
under the eucalpyts in her deserted town, ‘and she’ll forgive me
if I say that the best single thing about El Rocío is the honey. Until
you’ve tasted our honey, you can’t know what Las Marismas is.’
I asked him why he spoke of ‘our honey,’ and he said, ‘Each
Whitsuntide my father drives here in a carriage and opens the
cottage as his father did before him. We send ships all over the
world, but El Rocío is our spiritual home. Taste the honey.’

We had stopped at the only store which keeps open throughout
the year, a thoroughly beat-up shack with earthy peasant
proprietors who looked after the cottages during the silent
months, and the wife brought us a kilo of dark honey in a glass
jar that had once housed peanut butter made in California. How
it had reached El Rocío, I could not guess, but the honey, when
I tasted it on a piece of hard bread, was all that Señor Ybarra had
predicted. I’ve sampled honey in most of the areas where it is
made and have had some very fine brands, especially in Japan
and India, but the heavy, dark El Rocío honey gathered from
flowering weeds in Las Marismas was finer than any I had
previously tasted. Señor Ybarra summarized its quality precisely
when he said, ‘Tastes like Spain, doesn’t it?’ If Spain has a taste,
it would be either that of El Rocío honey, or a dark red wine from
Rioja, or a fish zarzuela from Badajoz or the anchovies of
Barcelona or perhaps the incredibly good bread of Arévalo, which
we shall meet later. Certainly this excellent honey would be one
of the components.

Like the honey, Señor Ybarra was a heavy, dark man with a
graying mustache who spoke rapidly with both a lisp and a marked
southern accent, but the subjects with which he dealt were so
interesting that I found myself understanding him better than I
did most Spaniards. ‘The unique flavor of El Rocío honey comes
from the rosemary and eucalpytus on which the bees feed, and
also from the swamp flowers.

‘One thing you must see while you’re here is the new chapel
we’re building for the Virgin. Look! She’ll have a throne of pure
silver. What a change from the tree trunk in which she used to
rest. You ought to take a set of the El Rocío tiles home with you.’
He showed me the nine orange, blue and yellow tiles which when
cemented side by side in a wall would create an image of the Virgin
enthroned and surrounded by a grand halo of sixteen gold disks.
‘Our legend says that the statue was carved in Italy and sent to
North Africa to help convert the heathen. She wound up in
Morocco, and after converting that land, was brought to Spain
to save us. When the Moroccans changed to Islam they wanted
to take her back lest she bring us good luck, and that’s why Spain
was invaded.’ In bemused silence she sits in her old shrine waiting
for the new one to be finished, as profoundly loved as any Virgin
in Spain, in a strange, wild way.

The more I was with Señor Ybarra the more impressed I was
with his affection for the land; again and again he returned to this
topic. ‘My father had a great love for the Guadalquivir, probably
because he saw it in such majesty here in Las Marismas. Anyway,
he said, “There’s nothing another river can do that our river
can’t.” Somebody said that the Volga could produce caviar, and
my father took this as a challenge. He remembered that even in
Roman times the Guadalquivir was famous for its sturgeon. There
was an old Roman coin found at Coria del Río which showed the
sturgeon. So he searched through Europe to find Russian émigrés
who knew how to make caviar and finally found an expert living
in Cape Town. Brought him here in 1929 and within a year my
father was producing all the caviar sold in Spain. You go into a
fine hotel and ask for caviar…Well, a lot of people do. You get
Guadalquivir caviar and even the experts can’t tell the difference.’

It was unusual to find a Spaniard who spoke with such love of
rivers and meadows and mountains, for Spain more than any
other European nation has abused its land. It is in this respect
that Spain is guilty of the charge that Frenchmen so often make
against her, that she is not a European nation but an African:
‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees.’ Demographically this is not so; in
the abuse of natural resources it is.

The nearly eight centuries during which Spain waged
intermittent war against African invaders, 711-1492, created a
type of gentleman to whom the maximum good in life was
knightly behavior in war, which was not in itself destructive,
because for different reasons similar values were respected in all
European countries, but in Spain a contempt developed for
anyone who worked with his hands, especially farmers. It became
an actual disgrace, from which a family could not cleanse itself,
for a member to work at agriculture; inevitably, the land suffered.

What was worse, a system grew up whereby gentlemen who
were not allowed to farm were allowed to herd the highly
profitable Merino sheep, so long as the animals grazed at will over
vast territories rather than on a single farm owned by one man.
A gigantic cooperative developed, the Mesta (The Group of
Proprietors of Sheep), and because only gentlemen were allowed
to join, it won special privileges from the Spanish kings and
flourished as a major economic agency in Spain from about 1300
through the first quarter of the 1800s.

Its flocks were so huge that in one poor year the census showed
1,673,551 sheep, ceaselessly in motion, like a great pendulum of
destruction oscillating between the northern limit of the central
plateau and the southern. In this heartland of Spain where a
rational agriculture should have been developing, fencing off was
not permitted; fields had to be kept open for the passage of sheep,
and any settled farmer who tried to protect his crops from the
vagrant sheep was hauled not before a magistrate but before an
officer of the Mesta who traveled with the sheep, dispensing a
harsh and arbitrary justice. Before 1585 there was no appeal from
a decision of the Mesta judges.

Many books have been written about the terror that possessed
Christian settlements in Spain when the Muslims came up from
the south; others have dealt with the fear engendered by the
Inquisition when it was probing into private lives, but I suppose
the best book that could be written, the one that would tell more
about day-to-day Spanish life than any other, would be the story
of some village whose farmers watched in dismay as the outriders
of the Mesta crossed their fields, warning them that the sheep
would soon follow. Then the farmers had to retire, remove
obstacles, make no effort to protect their crops and wait in their
huts until the all-powerful sheep had passed.

Why did this extraordinary condition prevail? Partly because
sheep-herding had become recognized as an occupation for
gentlemen but mainly because the kings of Spain had discovered
that in the wool from their Merinos, which under pain of death
could not be smuggled out to other lands which did not have
them, they possessed a commodity which other nations would
pay for at a price that Spain would determine. Merino wool was
recognized as the best available and the Spanish economy was
geared to produce Merino and to protect the men who tended
the sheep that grew it. The Mesta existed as a mobile feudal
kingdom, ravaging the best land and inhibiting its proper
utilization. By the time the Mesta declined, an irreparable damage
of two kinds had been done: the land was depleted and the
ordinary agricultural processes which English, French and German
farmers had mastered through the centuries were not known.

The capricious nature of this division between acceptable sheep
growers and unacceptable farmers should not disturb the reader,
for many other societies have made similar distinctions, equally
impossible to justify. Thus in the American west it was the
cattleman who was acceptable and the sheep man who stood
outside the pale; I have been present when a self-respecting
Coloradan entered a restaurant, took one sniff of the cooking
odors, turned on his heel and stalked out, growling, ‘They’re
serving lamb in there.’ It was in Hong Kong, however, that I
observed arbitrary categories at their best. A long-time English
resident, having volunteered to help me buy a watch, took me to
a shop called something like Ledyard’s, and when a satisfactory
deal had been concluded, he said, ‘Good fellow, Ledyard.’ In the
street he reprimanded me for having said, ‘Mr. Ledyard.’‘The
man’s in trade,’ he pointed out. ‘Should never be addressed as
Mister. Couldn’t possibly be a gentleman.’ When I asked why,
my friend said, ‘Ledyard could buy and sell me seven times over,
but by God, in nineteen years I’ve never called him Mister.’ While
I was in Hong Kong a convivial chap who ran a bar was finally
admitted to one of the exclusive clubs, to which he had sought
admission fruitlessly during many years; the club had not changed
its rules excluding men who were in trade, but the saloon owner
had that week sold his bar and gone into wholesale distribution
of beer and whiskey, and that, according to British tradition, was
not trade.

But if all nations have similar peculiarities, few have suffered
from theirs as much as Spain has from hers. Hundreds of
perplexed travelers during the last three hundred years have
commented on the fact that the country was filled with virtual
paupers who maintained their classification as gentlemen by
refusing to work; they starved but they remained gentlemen.
Although such a system had deleterious effects on farming and
manufacturing, it had the virtues of not being based exclusively
on money or big houses; a man with one room and one suit, if
he carried himself properly, could be just as much a gentleman
as a man with a palace, and this universal eligibility has permitted
a friendship between economic classes which has not existed in
other European countries. The impoverished Don Quixote, and
many of them exist today across Spain, feels no sense of
embarrassment in addressing as an equal the duque or conde or
marqués with whom he comes in contact, while to the recent
millionaire he feels superior.