Iberia (55 page)
Authors: James Michener
the Madrid newspapers have
escaped somewhat from the heavy hand that held them down,
and from them I can get a sensible idea of what is happening in
the world. During one American election there were extensive
analyses of the senatorial race in Illinois, the influence of Robert
McNamara on national policy and the shifting popularity of
President Johnson as the Viet Nam war intensified. I could find
out almost anything I wanted to know except what was happening
in Spain. Although censorship of Spanish news had not been
relaxed, a salient difference between the Spain of two decades ago
and now is the improvement of the newspapers.
Then
television was nonexistent;
now
it dominates Spanish life
and most of the Madrid homes I visited had a set. Since American
shows are popular, magazines regularly offer articles such as ‘What
Was the Real Eliot Ness Like?’
Then
Madrid was a fairy-tale city in which one rarely dined
before eleven at night and could go to the theater for the second
show at one…in the morning, not the afternoon. There was an
infectious charm about long afternoons in which luncheon was
served at four if anyone was in a hurry, at five if not, and no one
acquainted with Madrid in those indolent days will ever forget
the gracious city;
now
, although the eleven o’clock dinner is still
popular, one can eat at nine or even earlier, and the theater begins
at ten.
wine was the drink;
now
beer is popular.
anything like a cafeteria would have been an insult to the
Spanish way of life. A few were attempted but they were derided
as American abominations;
grab-and-run restaurants are
not only popular but essential, because the noontime break in
offices is being shortened from three hours to two or even one.
The most popular medium-priced restaurants in Madrid today
are chrome-brightened places with names like California,
Nebraska, Iowa and Samoa, the American name having become
an asset rather than a liability. ‘You can trust such places to serve
good food, clean food and quick food,’ a Spanish secretary told
me as she had a hot dog while I had gazpacho.
The biggest social differences between then and now is the
radical change effected by what a Spanish man called ‘the
revolution of the Sueca.’ I had better let a Madrid businessman
explain: ‘I’m not joking when I say that the Sueca has had an effect
in Spain somewhat greater than the atomic bomb on those atolls
in the Pacific. We had been taught for centuries that any woman
who allowed a man to touch her before marriage, and I mean
touch literally and not as a euphemism for sexual intercourse,
was damned. Society was rigid and allowed no deviations from
the central rule. Life was hard and anyone who transgressed was
doomed. It was what you call in the United States puritanism,
but much stronger than yours because our whole society
supported it. Then came the Swedish girls, Suecas we call them,
young, blond, laughing, the most beautiful girls in motion
anywhere. Of course, there were also Finns and Norwegians and
Danes and Germans, but we link them all together as the Suecas.
They discovered Spain and flocked down here by the planeload.
Their first impact was on the beaches, and once they stripped
down to their bikinis and we saw what the human body could be,
the old laws simply could not be enforced. You couldn’t tell a
Spanish man he had to wear a top with his trunks when those
damned Suecas were on the beach. He wanted them to see his
pectorals.
‘Well, the first result of the Sueca invasion was cataclysmic. I
can’t tell you what a thrill swept over the manhood of Spain when
they discovered that such girls were on our beaches looking for
sun…and romance. In the old days the proudest boast of a Madrid
dandy used to be “I know a bullfighter” or “I’m having an affair
with an actress.” Now it’s “I have a Sueca down at Torremolinos.”
To have a Sueca as your mistress, tall and leggy and blond, is the
best thing that can happen to a man these days. I know half a
dozen of my friends who have Suecas, and their lives have
blossomed like lilac bushes in spring.
‘Take this fellow Agapito. A very conservative vice-president
of a bank here in Madrid. When I visited Torremolinos, here
comes Agapito dressed in old blue dungarees, with a tattoo on
his arm, a ring in his ear and a beard. I say, “Agapito! What the
hell has happened?” and he says, “Ssssssh! I dress this way every
vacation and tell the Suecas I’m a sailor from Alicante. They think
it’s romantic and I’m doing better than ever.” I asked him, “But,
Agapito, what do you do when your vacation ends?” and he said,
“I throw a party at a restaurant and tell everyone sadly that my
ship is sailing from Alicante and I must be off. They cry. I cry.
Then I drive to the next town and shave my beard and come back
to Madrid.” You know what I think, Michener? I think that one
of these days some Sueca is going to go into his bank to cash a
traveler’s check and there’s going to be hell to pay.’
This gentleman also told me that the Sueca invasion has yielded
two unexpected results. ‘It’s been rather hard on the traditional
Spanish gallant to whom courtship is a series of set positions, as
it were. In church he stares at the girl. At the grille he sighs deeply.
In the cinema he is allowed to hold her hand for three
minutes…each show. He has his set speeches, arranged in order
of passion, and these he delivers on schedule over a six-month
period. It’s all been set out for him by custom and if he omits
even one step the girl feels he isn’t properly ardent. Imagine what
happens when such a system runs up against a Sueca who has
paid a lot of money to get to Torremolinos, has a limited vacation
and doesn’t have much time to waste. When our Spanish gallant
starts to go into his set act she’s liable to say, “Sure, where?” I’ve
seen a lot of Spanish men completely thrown over by such a
response. They don’t know what to do. They’re unnerved and
they run away.
‘But a more lasting effect has been the psychological. As I said,
we’ve been taught that if a girl allowed a man to touch her, she
was proscribed, but we see the Suecas come down, live with men,
have a marvelous time and go home as good as they were when
they arrived. In my group the enlightenment came when we saw
in a newspaper that Birgit So-and-So, whom we had all known
at Torremolinos, had married a Swedish official. One of my
friends yelled, “But I used to sleep with her!” What he meant was
that if a girl had slept with a man she was condemned. But here
was this Sueca marrying an important man. It didn’t seem fair.
But slowly the Suecas have revolutionized our thinking. Not all
the world needs to live the way we do in Spain. I cannot begin to
tell you how profound this revolution has become. Its effects will
be greater, in the long run, than those of the labor unions.’
He then added an interesting afterthought. ‘It has many
ramifications. Especially regarding you norteamericanos. We see
your beautiful girls at our university here, or visiting the military
bases. And we see that they are as free sexually as the Suecas. It’s
fun for us and we have some great times. But then the nagging
question comes up. “Should we respect the norteamericano for
his manufacturing, his successful democracy, his rich way of
life…if he can’t even protect the honor of his daughters?”’ I asked
him if he thought the Spanish way was better, and he said, ‘In the
long run, yes. Women should not appear in bikinis at
Torremolinos. Or stay out at night the way your girls do in
Madrid. Women should be kept closely guarded at home.’ Then
he looked wistfully across the avenue and said, ‘But the Suecas
have ruined all that. Because our women have begun to study the
Suecas too.’
One aspect of Madrid remains unchanged, then or now, the
Prado. The collection of paintings has such a plethora of riches
that I know travelers who plan any trip to Europe in such a way
as to have a couple of days in Madrid, not to see the city but to
stroll once more through this forest of masterpieces. If I want to
see eight top paintings, I go to Venice. If I want to see eighty, I
come to the Prado.
I was therefore excited as I walked down the avenue one
morning in 1965 and saw this stalwart, unimaginative building
waiting. The miniskirts, the traffic, the restaurants might change,
but the Prado remained permanent and unique. It is a family
museum, most of its paintings having been acquired because
some specific king or queen loved art and bought a specific
painting. Here there was no buying of already assembled
collections formed in Paris or London, the way the Romanovs
gathered the paintings in Leningrad’s Hermitage. Here there was
no robbing of museums in cities defeated in war, the way
Napoleon robbed to fill the Louvre in Paris. The Prado began as
a private collection formed for the most part by the people of one
continuous family, at first Spanish, then Habsburg, finally Borbón,
and it was never enriched by theft or expropriation. From 1492,
when Queen Isabel I the Catholic was making her first cautious
purchases, to 1868, when Isabel II of Borbón ended her reign, the
pictures were bought one by one, and what we see today are the
family heirlooms of this extraordinary sequence of rulers.
Of course, when the Prado was opened as a public museum
other Spaniards contributed pictures, and some were very good,
but essentially the museum reflects the taste of Habsburg and
Borbón.
Among the royal donors, three kings stand out. Carlos V
regarded Titian (1477-1576) as the best painter in Europe and
commissioned several portraits. In the best of these the emperor
appears in full armor astride a black horse caparisoned in purple.
In a stormy landscape the setting sun illuminates the small,
bearded king as he appeared during the notable victory of Spanish
forces over German at the battle of Mühlberg in 1547.
The second of the great collectors was Carlos’ son, Felipe II,
whose portrait by Titian shows him as a young, intense and
capable man. Felipe was known as an ascetic, yet if one segregates
the paintings he brought into Spain one finds that he was
responsible for the glowing nudes of Titian and Rubens
(1577-1640); he also added the wonderful sex-filled paintings by
Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) to the collection and other
lush canvases from Venice and Brussels.
The third of the master collectors is as familiar to us in
appearance as one of our own family, for Felipe IV, grandson of
Felipe II, was painted numerous times by Velázquez (1599-1660)
on horseback, or standing in lace ruffles, or half-length in austere
black, or even as seen in a mirror while having his portrait painted.
This king stares back at us with heavy-lidded eyes, huge curling
mustache and that enormous chin which characterized the
Habsburgs. His family is also known to us through many
Velázquez portraits: his two wives, his handsome son and above
all his adorable little daughter.
The relationship between Felipe and Velázquez was one of the
most rewarding in art history, for not only did the royal family
provide the artist with some of his finest subjects, but Felipe also
commissioned Velázquez to travel in Europe and buy paintings
on his behalf. Twice he toured the continent, and many of the
choice works in the Prado are there because in riding back and
forth between Italian cities he came upon canvases which he
thought the king might like.
Today the royal collections are housed in a dark and handsome
building located in the center of Madrid. The Prado was originally
built in 1787 as a natural history museum but in 1814 was
converted for its present use. I had hoped that I might see it in
company with Señor Don Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón, who
has been associated with it for many decades and has been
responsible for its catalogue. Museum people in other countries
hold him in high regard, but each time I reported to his office he
was engaged elsewhere, so I missed meeting him, but his secretary
provided me with a guide who in many ways was even better,
because with Sánchez Cantón, I would have seen merely paintings;
with José María Muguruza, I saw everything else.
He was a tall, scholarly Spaniard in his mid-sixties, outspoken
and enthusiastic. In the circular tower room which he used for
his office he said, ‘Everybody knows me because of my brother.
A really great architect. He did lots of the buildings Spain is proud
of and I suppose I got my job because of him. He died young,
you know. I’m an architect in charge of the Prado and you might
like to see some of the crazy things we’ve been doing.’
I said, ‘I’m familiar with the changes. The new wings, the way
you’ve converted empty courtyards into new exhibition rooms.’
some real excitement?’ I said I was, and he grabbed a cane which
he would use for pointing out details of what had taken place.
‘From the outside does the museum look any different from when
you first saw it?’ I shook my head. ‘But from the inside! That’s a
different story!’
inside changes had been no different from what take place in any
good museum, but what I was about to see was unique. Dr.
Muguruza led me up a steep flight of stairs, then another and
another, until we stood on the roof of the old building. There, in
Madrid sunlight, he said, ‘In the building below us,’ and he kicked
on the roof, ‘we have a collection of paintings which are beyond
value. What would they bring? Supposing they could be sold? A
billion dollars, two billion? And if they were lost, the damage to
the human spirit would be incalculable. So we couldn’t risk
keeping them in an old building put up a hundred and seventy
years ago.’