Iberia (50 page)
Authors: James Michener
At the same time other couples are about to join the parade,
and these are much different. The men’s suits are more subdued.
The horses’ garnishings are more expensive, as are the horses
themselves. And the women, who this time will ride alone, each
on her own animal, are stunning beyond compare. They are the
gentry, the social leaders from the Aero Club, and all are dressed
in formal black or charcoal gray or very dark brown. The women’s
suits are of whipcord; their hats are slimmer and flatter than the
men’s; their heavy leather chaps are apt to be trimmer than those
we saw before. They ride with the reins lightly held in the fingers
of the left hand, their right hand turned in against the waist, and
invariably their hair is done with austere plainness. With little or
no make-up they ride forth, as handsome a group of women as
one can find. In some strange way, in their somber mien, they
make the pillion riders, despite their rainbow colors, seem drab.
But even these beautiful women are overshadowed by a
phenomenon of this fair: ornate carriages pulled by two or four
beribboned horses, driven by two coachmen in antique costume
and bearing four or six girls in colorful dress, accompanied
sometimes by gentlemen. These delightful carriages, looking like
some procession that had driven into Sevilla from the eighteenth
century, ease themselves into the files of horsemen, and around
the streets of the H they go, back and forth for three or four hours.
Sometimes as many as a hundred carriages, each of different size
and quality, move along under the trees, the occupants laughing
and visiting with their friends; half the parade moves clockwise,
the other half counter-clockwise, so that on any one tour, if that
is the proper word, one meets half the paraders, and since it is
permissible to reverse one’s direction after having made a couple
of circuits, by the time the huge promenade has ended, one has
met up with most of the participants.
I cannot describe how lovely and quiet and satisfying this
parade under the broad trees and along the casetas is. Even if one
has no horse and saddle of his own, nor access to the expensive
carriages, he can still join the parade, for at any corner he can hire
a kind of horse-drawn taxicab and for surprisingly little money
ride back and forth along the majestic streets of the H. Where do
they come from, these hundreds of carriages for hire? How can
a modest city like Sevilla find so many horses?
Whenever a horseman reins up before a caseta owned by his
friends, courtesy requires that both he and his lady be handed
small glasses of sherry. Without dismounting, the riders drink,
return the glasses and thank their hosts. Once I was left in care
of a caseta while the family joined the riders in a carriage, and not
then knowing the custom of the sherry I stood by while a
particularly vivacious couple reined up before me. They waited.
I waited. Then, in disgust, the man snapped in Spanish, ‘At this
damned caseta the hospitality flows like lead.’ I understood
enough to catch his meaning and in my broken Spanish asked
what had gone wrong. When he realized that I was a stranger he
jumped from his horse, showed me where the sherry was and
flagged down all his friends. That night he took me on a tour of
his favorite casetas, and we hired our own band of Triana gypsies,
and the boisterous flamenco we provided with our company of
fifty is still spoken of.
A feature of the parade is that select band of carriages which
are pulled by eight horses, the postillions being dressed in robber
costumes from the eighteenth century. Not only are the carriages
worthy of respect and the horses a delight because of their
matched appearance, but a ninth horse in front seems not to be
attached to the carriage in any way, nor to the other horses. He
moves by himself, guided by invisible wires attached to his bit
and by words called by the driver, who rides a considerable
distance behind. It is something to see such a carriage coming
down the avenue, surrounded by a hundred riders and meeting
dozens of other carriages, with the lead horse quietly picking his
way without apparent assistance.
Thus the great fair of Sevilla continues, day after day. Toward
dawn on the last night I stood at the entrance to the Aero Club
as members of the nobility departed for the last time, and in the
street stood an old man leading a donkey. He was not the kind
who would own a caseta, nor a horse to ride in the daily
procession, nor even a job in one of the carnivals. He was a rural
peasant come in with his donkey to see the sights, and as he
watched the ending of the fair he sang:
(I am a miserable spirit lost in this tormented world.) And as he
wandered off, singing to himself, the tents of the five circuses were
coming down, the parking lot where the carnival trucks waited
came back to life and electricians were disconnecting their wires
from the multitude of little casetas, which would soon vanish.
As I stood in the darkness that night I reflected upon the strange
development of Spanish history which permitted the nobles to
play so important a role without suffering the limitations to their
power that overcame their fellows in England, France, Italy,
Germany and Russia. In Spain a conde is still somebody and a
duque is a near-god. In the year 1400 the arrogant nobles of the
major European countries were about equal in the power they
exercised, but one by one the other European nations, in the order
named, underwent revolutions of fact and spirit which cut back
the absolute power of their nobles and transferred that power to
a new and educated middle class, from which would come the
political and industrial leaders of the future. In Spain this did not
happen; on the contrary, the nobles arrogated more and more
power to themselves, so that as late as the nineteenth century they
dominated Spanish life, especially in the countryside. They told
priests what they might and might not preach; they terrorized
schoolteachers; they put newspapermen out of business; they
exercised control over the cabinet, the army, the Church hierarchy
and agriculture. Even today, as we shall see later when discussing
a typical business operation in Madrid, they dominate Spanish
life. No other nobility in the world compares in power and wealth
with Spain’s, and as one watches it in operation the only parallel
he can find is the operation of the Hungarian nobility in the late
1700s.
If the Spanish nobility had exercised a leadership commensurate
with its privilege, as was frequently the case in England and France,
Spain would have prospered, but that did not happen. When
Spain needed industrialization, the nobles said no. When Spain
required a first-class army and navy to defend its empire, the
nobles insisted upon using these services as their private
playthings, with one general for every ten or fifteen men, and so
abused the army that it fell from being the best in Europe to the
worst. When the Church should have been doing what it did in
all other major countries, adjusting religion to a changing world,
the nobles, through their occupancy of high positions, refused to
allow speculation. No nation in Europe, except possibly Hungary
and Rumania, has been so badly served by its upper classes as
Spain. With the intellectual and moral capacity to govern, they
refused to do so; instead of seeking the common good they sought
their own preferment, and the gap between them and the people
became tragically wide.
I think the best light one can throw on the problem of the
Spanish nobility is an oblique one shining from Peru, Chile,
Paraguay, Venezuela and other Spanish countries of America. In
the capitals of Europe one of the standard figures is the exile
bearing a name like Juan Jiménez López. He was born in one of
the Latin countries of South or Central America and was either
elected or appointed to office, which he held for about five years,
during which time he stole every peso or bolivar he could and
sent it to a numbered account in Switzerland. Señor Jiménez
caught the last plane out, said goodbye forever to his homeland
and now lives happily and with a certain flair in Europe. Never
in his upbringing did he catch a glimpse of what public service
meant. Reared on a mixture of pundonor and Viva yo, he had no
option but to do what he did, for he felt no obligation to his
homeland other than to use it as his milk cow. The defect lay not
in Jiménez but in the fact that the Spanish upper classes, from
which he at least spiritually sprang, have never undergone
indoctrination in the principle of noblesse oblige.
There was another contributing factor. During the critical years,
say 1500-1815, when the nobility of England and France were
being either educated or eliminated, Spain was governed in a
spirit of absolutism not known in the other major countries save
Russia by a series of kings who were not Spanish, and under their
system of rule most of the best administrative jobs went to
foreigners. Forget the fact that these foreigners stole the country
blind, one after another retiring to his homeland with a fortune;
forget the savage mismanagement and forget the subversion of
law; the important fact was that the Spanish upper classes were
thus deprived of the schooling in government which might have
modified their insularity, arrogance and general incompetence.
Other nations have suffered foreign kings. If Flemish not Spanish
was spoken at the court in Toledo, so German not English was
spoken in London; but the English upper classes would not permit
their German kings to import outside ministers; indeed, it was
sometimes the presence of the German king that spurred the
English upper classes to greater energy and a more resolute defense
of national prerogatives. Therefore, in the period when new
lessons were to be learned, the English upper classes were in a
position to learn them and the Spanish were not. Later, when it
was necessary to make crucial decisions on which the fate of the
social order as well as the empire rested, the English had been
trained to make those decisions; the Spanish had not and the
series of disastrous wrong choices followed.
The choices were wrong only for the nation and the general
welfare. The upper classes looked out for themselves, so that each
year the chasm between the very rich and the very poor became
greater, until it seemed that all Spain was divided between these
two extremes. No region of Spain is better equipped to exhibit
this differential than Andalucía are much richer; Extremadura
has produced few noble families and those not of top power.
When one speaks of a ‘grandee of Spain’ he visualizes primarily
the great families of Andalucía: aloof, arrogant, powerful,
indifferent.
This was illustrated one hot afternoon as I was driving from
Sevilla to Córdoba and was accosted by a workman who said he
must get to the latter city. He said, with no reluctance before a
stranger, ‘It’s dreadful for a poor man to live in Andalucía. We
starve. The rich ones don’t live out here, you can be sure of that.’
When I asked where they did live, he pointed contemptuously
over his shoulder at La Giralda. ‘Huddled together in the city
where the police and the army and the Guardia Civil can protect
them.’ When I asked him why, he said, ‘Because if they lived out
here they’d be killed in their sleep. That’s why.’ It is this legacy of
bitterness which one sometimes glimpses during the spring feria
that otherwise seems so gay. It recalls the perceptive statement
made by a Frenchman: ‘Spain has had many revolutions but it
has always missed the revolution.’
In recent years the feria has acquired an international cast which
it did not formerly have. So many famous people arrive and so
many motion pictures are shot in the surrounding area that the
Alfonso XIII, a grand hotel situated not far from the cathedral,
the casetas and the bullring, becomes during this period the jet-set
capital of Europe. Orson Welles holds court here and American
visitors are impressed by the reverence in which he is held by
Europeans; he is judged to be one of the six or seven most
significant Americans. Audrey Hepburn lends gracia to the old
hotel, while Rita Hayworth and Juliette Greco add piquancy. In
1966 the two American princesses, Jacqueline Kennedy and Grace
Kelly, stole the show as they paraded their crystal beauty at the
various exhibitions. Spaniards were specially pleased when Jackie
Kennedy rode through the park dressed in a faultless costume of
Andalucía topped by a flat-brimmed hat. They were surprised at
her fine horsemanship, and several members of the noble families
expressed the hope that she might want to settle permanently in
Spain. ‘She is one of us,’ they said. ‘She’d find our way of life
congenial.’
11:00
A.M.
Get up. Breakfast on hard roll
and coffee.
12:00
Dress in riding habit and join the
parade.
P.M.
Leisurely lunch.
P.M.
Walk to the bullfight.
8:00
P.M.
Visit with friends and talk.
11:30
P.M.
Leisurely dinner.
A.M.
Drive to the Aero Club for
dancing.
A.M.
Nightcap with friends, then off
to take things easy. If at dawn there is excitement on one of the
bull ranches or if Don Angel Peralta is giving an exhibition of
horsemanship at his ranch near Sevilla, the true devotee skips the
sleep.
that scowling giant who in his youth had trained to be a matador,
and he said in his rumbling voice, ‘What it comes down to is
simple. Either you respect the integrity of the drama the bullring
provides or you don’t. If you do respect it, you demand only the
catharsis which it is uniquely constructed to give. And once you
make this commitment you are no longer interested in the
vaudeville of the ring. You don’t give a damn for fancy passes and
men kneeling on their knees. There used to be this fraud who bit
the tip of the bull’s horn. Very brave and very useless, because it
played no part in the essential drama of man against bull. Such
tricks cheapen the bull and therefore lessen the tragedy. What
you are interested in is the art whereby a man using no tricks
reduces a raging bull to his dimensions, and this means that the
relationship between the two must always be maintained and
even highlighted. The only way this can be achieved is with art.
And what is the essence of this art? That the man carry himself
with grace and that he move the bull slowly and with a certain
majesty. That is, he must allow the inherent quality of the bull to
manifest itself. Today in Spain we have many vaudevillians and
you won’t waste your time completely if you watch them. We
also have men of bravery and it’s always rewarding to observe
this rare commodity in action. But of the true artists who
comprehend the fruitful relationship that ought to exist between
man and bull there is only one, Curro Romero. And until you
have seen him, my friend, you have seen nothing. For this young
man, handsome of face but round of body, can launch passes
which are the essence of bullfighting. He is really so good that it’s
difficult to believe that this age produced him, for he has the style
of the past, when vaudevillians had little place in the arena. Some
day you’ll see this boy at his greatest, and I’ll be there, and we
shall nod to one another across the intervening people, and you
will thank me for having insisted that you go to see him.’
Unfortunately, Curro Romero did not fight when I had tickets,
so I had no chance to see him.