Iberia (61 page)

 

My life in the tertulia, which was one of the most instructive
things that happened to me in Spain, was marred by envy, because
although this was the most pretigious tertulia then operating in
Madrid, there was another which met in an opposite corner of
the café which fascinated me and I longed to join it, but that would
have been impossible. It was composed of six or eight elderly
men, caricatures of Spanish gentlemen, in tweed trousers, hunting
jackets, mustaches and with low rumbling voices. ‘It’s a
huntsmen’s tertulia,’ one of my group explained. When I asked
what they talked about, he said, ‘Horses, dogs and things they’ve
shot.’ What impressed me most about this tertulia was that for
long periods the members would sit just looking straight ahead
and saying nothing. Occasionally one would mumble something
about wild boars or stags and the others would nod. I was assured
that it was a most exclusive tertulia and that its members looked
on our group as young radicals who read books, something which
none of them did.

 

In Madrid I met an unusual man whose friendship was to mean
much, the dour and salty Scotsman, Angus Macnab, who wrote
about Spain with such insight that I wondered how an outsider
had managed to penetrate so acutely the Spanish mentality.
‘Simple,’ he said, drawing on his pipe and speaking out of the
corner of his mouth, ‘I’m a Spanish citizen.’ After knocking about
in various countries, he had found Spain the most congenial and
had decided to make it his home.

 

‘I like the cautious form of government, the rocklike stability
of the people. Mind you, there are many things wrong, but none
that hard work won’t mend. And it’s a marvelous place to bring
up children.’

 

Through visiting Macnab, I came to know the new suburbs
whose spectacular proliferation had allowed Madrid to increase
its population so sharply. ‘Is there another city in Europe which
has built so high a percentage of new homes in the last decade?’
he asked, and I could think of none. Scattered about in all
directions, eight-story apartment buildings had spread over the
countryside, not a dozen here and there, but hundreds in clusters.
Architecturally they were bleak, and some were beginning to crack
after only six years of life, but they were homes. Macnab, his lively
wife and children lived in such a colony out beyond the bullring,
and as I visited him through the years I could watch the sudden
manner in which sixty or seventy great buildings appeared during
a ten-month absence.

 

‘Last time I was here you were on the edge of the country,’ I
said. ‘Now it’s a new city!’

 

Macnab said, ‘You must keep this in mind when you ask why
so many Spaniards support the government. It has built homes
and it’s given them to us at reasonable rates. You were
complaining about the fact you can never find a taxi when you
want to come here. Why can’t you? Because the rates are kept so
low that any workman in Madrid can afford a taxi. Here the good
things are not restricted to the rich.’

 

Macnab’s apartment in one of the new buildings was
comfortable and well arranged. ‘A home for a workman,’ he said
proudly. ‘That’s what I am. I work in the foreign office.’ He did
not tell me what kind of work he did, but he was such a skilled
linguist that I assumed it had to do with international documents.

 

‘Didn’t you go to Oxford?’ I asked one day.

 

‘Indeed yes. Some of my chums from those days would be
surprised to see me here, spending my years as a Spaniard. But
this is a good country…a good country.’ He spoke with such
conviction that I felt certain he had found in Spain a depth which
other Anglo-Saxons missed.

 

‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘out in the suburbs like this we have our
young hoodlums, just as you do in America. But our police don’t
coddle them.’ Macnab showed me many aspects of modern Spain
that I would otherwise have missed, but the point he made
repeatedly was that it was an excellent place to raise a family.
‘Here the emphasis has always been on the family. It’s the
fundamental fact about Spain, and if you miss that you miss
everything.’ On picnics he would point out the families; when we
discussed education he would stress what it meant to family life;
and often when we were just wasting time gossiping about things
Spanish he would revert to this matter of stability. It was obvious
that he loved Spain and felt it deep in his bones. One day I
accompanied him to Toledo, where he had lived for some years
following his arrival in the country, and I remember how, when
we reached the church he had attended, people of all ages ran out
to greet him as if he were a member of their extended family. I
thought it strange that a Scotsman with an Oxford education
should have been adopted so easily into Spanish life; perhaps it
was through the Macnab children that this acceptance came, for
they were Spaniards and indistinguishable from the others.

 

‘There is a profound permanence in Spain,’ Macnab told me
one day, ‘and if you’re lucky enough to identify with it, you have
found yourself a very stable home.’ He knew the regions of Spain,
and certain of the cities I chose for my tour, those that might not
attract others, were chosen because of his recommendation. ‘You’ll
like that city,’ he would say. ‘It has an honest quality.’ Talking
with him convinced me that he had chosen Spain as his permanent
home because of this honesty.

 

Twenty-eight miles northwest of Madrid lies a vast and gloomy
building off to itself, El Escorial (The Slag Heap), a strange pile
of gray-black stone set among foothills and the subject of much
debate. I find it not only impressive in an overpowering sort of
way, but also representative, in its heaviness and simplicity, of
the essential Spanish characteristics. El Escorial is Extremadura
carved in rock, the barren plains of Castilla set in order by an
architect.

 

Others who know Spanish architecture better than I condemn
the building as an alien monstrosity. Where they ask, is the
beautiful ornamentation of plateresque? Where is the echo of
Romanesque or Gothic, two styles that made themselves at home
in Spain? And where in this enormous rectangle is there even a
hint of the fact that Spain was for seven hundred years Moorish?
These critics charge that the mausoleum, for that is what El
Escorial is now principally restricted to, is a poor rendition of an
Italian idea and about as appropriate to Spain as a replica of King
Victor Emmanuel’s wedding-cake monument would be if it were
translated from Rome to the plains of Castilla.

 

The traveler must make up his own mind in reference to his
own experiences, and since most foreigners visiting Spain see the
Gothic, the Romanesque and the Moorish and come to think of
them as representing Spanish values, El Escorial must be a
disappointment. Those like myself who have identified with
Extremadura, and Las Marismas and the lonely plains of Castilla,
have developed different visions of the country, and to these El
Escorial conforms.

 

What is it? Four things, interrelated and enclosed within
common walls: a palace from which kings ruled Spain; a grandiose
mausoleum holding the sarcophagi of many kings; a monastery;
and an enormous church. It came about because the death of
Carlos V at Yuste in 1558 followed closely upon a signal victory
of Spanish troops at St. Quentin on the tenth of August, 1557,
which day happens to be the feast day of St. Lawrence (in Spanish
San Lorenzo). During his last illness Carlos had directed his son
to assume responsibility for burying him wherever Felipe thought
appropriate, and the latter had the happy idea of building a
monastery of unprecedented dimensions which would serve as a
mausoleum for the Habsburgs. He scouted the countryside and
found this hill onto which mining scoria had once been dumped,
whence the name El Escorial, and there he caused work to begin.
St. Lawrence had been martyred by being roasted alive on a
gridiron, and whether by conscious design or not, when El Escorial
was finished, it resembled a rectangular gridiron, complete with
handle.

 

The building has four severe façades whose rather pleasing lines
derive from the multitude of windows set into the otherwise bleak
walls. The main façade has an entrance marked by twelve Grecian
columns and two bronze doors to which the dead kings of Spain
were brought for sepulture.

 

‘Who seeks entrance?’ the monks asked.

 

‘The Emperor of the Spanish empire.’

 

‘Who seeks entrance?’

 

‘The King of Spain.’

 

‘Who seeks entrance?’

 

‘The man Carlos.’ Only then did the gates swing open to admit
the dead man to his mausoleum.

 

Today it is one of the most provocative spots in Spain, an
octagonal room deep in the lower reaches of the building. In tiers
of four sarcophagi each, the kings of Spain lie as if on file in a
library, waiting to be lifted down. At the top of one group lies
Carlos V, below him Felipe II, then III, then IV. In other tiers the
queens rest, but since some of the kings had three and four wives,
only those who gave birth to children who inherited the throne
are interred here. Associated with the main mausoleum are others
reserved for the royal heirs who died in infancy and for the royal
bastards, of whom there was a plentiful supply. In this last room
lie the reassembled remains of Don Juan of Austria, who even
today has the power to attract more visitors than the legitimate
rulers.

 

El Escorial contains much more: galleries of art, tapestries by
Goya, long halls covered with pictorial maps, a fine library and
the living quarters of the ancient rulers. It is so immense that
when one has seen all this, the complex of the monastery remains
to be explored, for this is a town set within walls.

 

I am embarrassed to report that it was not until my third visit
that I discovered El Escorial contained, hidden away in its
capacious interior, a church much bigger than many cathedrals.
I had wandered through the halls for two days, vaguely aware that
off to one side stood a chapel of some sort, but I was preoccupied
with other areas and so missed a building of mammoth dimension.
How could such a thing happen? When I travel I am wary of
guides, preferring always to look at things for myself. I find that
if I do not see an object fresh, on my own terms as it were, I often
never see it except through a haze of verbalism. Guides, I find,
are trained to reduce all things to a common level, and their flow
of words weaves a net over the whole, so that one sees only
through the interstices and never clean. Furthermore, the things
they point out that I might otherwise have missed I would often
have been well advised to miss. When I visit a site I want to see
three or four things at most and am never loath to ignore others
that might have little interest for me. Sometimes my plan causes
me to miss something I should have seen, as at El Escorial; I must
be the only visitor ever to have missed so large a church.

 

As if to rub it in, it was a professional guide who finally pointed
it out to me, and I was surprised at how clean and beautiful it
was. The Patio de los Reyes, the enclosed area before the entrance
to the church, was big enough for army maneuvers, while the
interior vistas, all severely neoclassical, were much more spacious
than I would have guessed. When imprisoned inside the church
and unable to see the expanse of the surrounding building, I felt
it to be totally un-Spanish, and even when I came to the two
groups of stautary for which the church is famous, I found them
also alien, which was not surprising, since they were cast in Italy
by Pompeo Leoni.

 

They are delightful and were described to me by an Englishman
as ‘poor art but pure heart.’ Facing the high altar on the gospel
side is a group of five life-size figures, three kneeling in prayer,
two standing in the rear. They are Carlos V, accompanied by his
faithful wife Isabel of Portugal—not to be confused with the
earlier Isabel of Portugal, who went mad—his two queenly sisters,
María of Hungary and Leonor of France, and his daughter María,
who married Maximilian II. The group is ranged behind a
beautifully draped table carved in bronze and topped by a pillow
whose tassels are so real they seem ready to flutter should a breeze
come unexpectedly through the church. I liked especially the
bronze robe worn by Carlos and decorated with the Habsburg
eagle and panels from the lives of saints. The whole group is sized
so as to fit comfortably in the towering spaces of the church and
placed so high that it is not dwarfed, a delightful Italian version
of a Spanish royal family.

 

Poised opposite, on the epistle side, is a matching set, also of
five figures, also ranged behind a draped table and a pillow, but
this shows Felipe II, brooding spirit of El Escorial, and it has a
certain quality of arrogance befitting that prince. Where the eyes
of Carlos are downcast in prayer, those of Felipe stare straight
forward, as if daring God to touch him. He is surrounded by three
of his four wives—María of Portugal, Elizabeth of Valois and Ana
of Austria, with his second wife, Mary of England, appropriately
absent, for she had always been difficult for him to handle—and
by his heir, Don Carlos who is shown as a thin-faced, intelligent
young man of sixteen or seventeen.

 

If I had missed the hidden church, I wouldn’t have lost much,
but if I had missed these two sculpture groups I would have missed
a view of Spain that I could have acquired in no other way. I had
always felt kindly toward Carlos, but the austerity of Felipe
repelled me, proving that I was guilty of the grave error which
Spanish critics charge against most Anglo-Saxon writers, that I
had been contaminated by the Black Legend, that body of charges
assembled by non-Spanish scholars, especially Protestants, to
discredit Spain and Catholicism.