by David Rees
Don Miguel’s remarks not only annoyed him; they frightened him. ‘It’s of little importance,’ his brother had said. ‘What on earth could he do about it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pedro answered. ‘But possibly quite a lot. Tell Dad?’
‘He wouldn’t! And even if he did, Dad wouldn’t believe him.’
‘I’m not so sure.’
He was alarmed by the intensity of Stephen’s feelings, and the response they found in himself. Casual sex was safer, much safer. Would the day come therefore when he’d avoid Stephen? He hoped it wouldn’t … but he sometimes thought it would be for the best.
He did not mind that his brother was attracted to men though he refused to take Pablo to the Café de los Dos Toros. Pablo, because of this, nicknamed him Pedro the Cruel.
TWO
Tomás Guzmán Díaz was a very odd person to find in a position of ecclesiastical eminence. He had spent a year in England as a young man, and was much impressed by Anglo-Saxon civilization. One of his enduring memories was of Sunday afternoons at Speakers’ Corner. It reminded him of Spanish street life: a Babel of raucous tongues shouting their innermost beliefs to anybody who cared to stop and listen. Most of the orators belonged to the lunatic edges of Christianity, though political bigots — communists and fascists — spoke too. And there were other wares on sale: pacifism, women’s rights, quack medicine, astrology. In some parts of Spain, he thought, particularly the south and east, and Catalonia, no religious salesman would dare to lift his voice; he’d get knifed. In a Spanish context all these speakers would be political, and in ten minutes there would be blood running on the pavement. The astonishing thing about this Anglo-Saxon crowd was its good humour; certainly people answered back, rudely, even obscenely, when they were told they were damned to hell or were being hoodwinked by freemasons and international Jewry, but no tempers flared: incredulous laughter was the common response. He wished he could export some British laughter to Spain.
England taught him tolerance, an unusual virtue for a Spanish priest. Catholicism in Spain, being traditionally of the right, upheld the archaic status quo — the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate. It had no truck with concepts like the Brotherhood of Man. Tomás, knowing his ideas were semi-heretical, kept them to himself: he was — again, unusually — not a political priest. After his ordination he worked in Seville, and he came to be respected by the archbishop of that city, Cardinal Hernandez, chiefly because no one had a bad word to say about him. He was quiet, polite, even perhaps saintly, and he was intelligent too; a good administrator. He was also rich, and the Spanish hierarchy approved of that. His parents did not have money, but he was an only child, and most of his aunts and uncles were well off and either unmarried or without issue; so he inherited, bit by bit, in his late twenties and thirties, a considerable fortune, mostly in property and land. When the see of Zahara became vacant, he was the Archbishop of Seville’s choice — not a first, second, or even fifth choice — ‘But,’ the archbishop said, when his aides protested that Tomás Guzmán, though virtuous and rich, was too young for the job, and a nonentity to boot, ‘he will cause us no trouble. And Zahara is not important.’ Archbishop Hernandez was tired of the rival and conflicting claims of the first, second, third, fourth and fifth choices.
So, in 1925, Tomás became the one Spanish bishop who believed in liberty, equality and fraternity. He dined with socialists, and did not use his pulpit to spread right-wing propaganda. Such behaviour was brought to the attention of the archbishop, who was not unduly perturbed. ‘Zahara is not important,’ he repeated, for he was also aware that Tomás did not use his pulpit to spread left-wing propaganda, and that he showed no prejudice against the most obviously conservative elements in the Church, such as the Jesuits. He was harmless and was liked — which was rare, Monsignor Hernandez said to himself, somewhat gloomily, when he returned to his palace one morning after being pelted in the street with rotten oranges.
Tomás’s chief activities during the eleven years he had been Bishop of Zahara might well be criticised, by the Catholic standards of today, as irrelevant to the concerns of his diocese. He did nothing to alleviate the lot of the poor, or to persuade the rich that it was more difficult for them to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. He thought about such things, but left them to be put into practice by men like José Badajoz. If he was a saint, he was also a coward. His two passions were writing the definitive history of Zahara de los Membrillos, and the restoration of his cathedral. Eleven years of research had gone into the history, but Tomás had so far not written a single page of the proposed book. He had, however, compiled an index of some twelve thousand cards — a catalogue of almost every stone of the city’s prehistoric, Phoenician, Roman, Visigothic, Arab, and Spanish past; the lives (such as he could discover) of prominent individuals who had lived there; and the few dramatic events — the siege by Isabella and Ferdinand, for instance, and the destruction of the summer palace of Boabdil, the last Moorish king. This index was still unfinished; in June 1936 he was only halfway through the nineteenth century, recording the visit to Zahara of a woman he found distasteful, though interesting — Queen Isabella the Second, she who was known as the Nymphomaniac. But he eventually decided that she was more palatable than the rigid first queen of that name; an erring soul, and therefore of moment to a priest, unlike the ultra-correct Catholic who had completed the Reconquest, sent Columbus to find America, and started the Inquisition.
An estimable preoccupation one might well think, indeed worthy — but open to the charge of irrelevance. Most evenings of the week, when he was not dining out, Tomás could be found in his study, poring over his books, and filling out yet another card. He preferred this to social activities. It was difficult, agreeing on Fridays with Miguel Goicoechea’s views, when on Thursdays he had been agreeing with those of Mayor Badajoz. ‘You are a great sitter on the fence,’ they both told him. He refused to utter in reply some sophism like ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ he instead concurred, meekly.
His other great project, the restoration of the cathedral, was finished. This building in the past had never merited more than a brief sentence or two in travellers’ guidebooks — eighteenth-century Baroque is ten a penny in Spain, and the ecclesiastical architecture of that period permanently out of fashion. Tomás had found his cathedral eleven years ago in a very bad state of repair. A minor earthquake in 1877 had cracked its walls, though not seriously; the exterior was crumbling, and the roof was invisible beneath a forest of weeds, bushes, lichen, snapdragons and a veritable city of storks’ nests. Inside was worse: the white columns and the ceilings had become blackened with age, candle-smoke and incense; the stucco was chipped, and the basic design of the building obscured by vulgar grandiloquence — gilded grilles, silver reliquaries, vast reredoses, third-rate paintings, huge and awful figures of Christ, smug Virgins bedecked in moth-eaten clothes, pompous statues of episcopal predecessors — all made nastier by some particularly dark nineteenth-century glass, the colour of strawberry and rhubarb, that made the whole thing a temple of gloom, doom, and gaudy superstition. It smelled of stale breath and stuffiness. Tomás had recently visited the Alhambra, which produced thoughts that were very unfavourable to Christianity. The cathedral emphasised that life was a preparation for death, whereas the Moors’ architecture proclaimed that life was glorious and could be even more enhanced by learning and pleasure. He made an instant decision: his cathedral would become as glorious as anything Boabdil and his forebears had built — a celebration of both God and man.
One of these days, he said to himself, I shall get hauled up in front of Cardinal Hernandez and accused of heresy.
He found the architect’s original plans in an ancient chest in the crypt, and he began to see what this building must once have been like, before the bishops and the bourgeoisie of Zahara had ruined it. The architect’s vision and his own were the same: a church of soaring white columns, majestic in i
ts simplicity, uncluttered by the tinsel of death.
It would cost enormous sums of money. Far more than he had, and if he appealed to either Church or State for help, he thought he would be laughed at. He was surprised to find this wasn’t so. The archbishop was sympathetic — the idea was harmless. ‘It will promote tourism,’ Tomás said. In answer to the question, why did he want to promote tourism, he explained: ‘It will bring money to the city.’ The archbishop nodded. He had not, curiously, thought of that. When the Dictatorship fell in 1931 and the Republic was inaugurated, the city council gave Tomás a large grant. By then the work was well under way, and many people had come to see what was going on. Tomás had thought atheistic socialists might approve on the grounds that it provided jobs for los descamisados, the shirtless ones — but he had not realised that they would like it, aesthetically, as well.
Even so, funds were insufficient to restore both the interior and the exterior, despite Tomás giving his entire personal fortune to the project. He had to choose, before anything could start, which it was to be: the inside or the outside. It was not a difficult decision; he was fond of storks. It was enough to send a man up onto the roof for a few weeks to repair the cracks and remove the weeds, the bushes, and the lichen. The snapdragons and the storks were left to flourish.
When it came to directing operations on the interior, Tomás’s natural reserve — his sitting on the fence — disappeared. He had had his vision, and was determined to create its reality: in the process he shocked and annoyed many people. He ordered the removal of almost all the grilles, reliquaries, reredoses, paintings and statues. They were not destroyed, though none of them was of much artistic or financial worth. Some were acquired by priests in the diocese, who felt another Virgin or crucifix would add to the attractions of their already over-laden side-chapels; some found their way into museums in Seville, Granada, Málaga and Zahara itself, and the reredos from behind the high altar was bought by the Prado in Madrid. It was not, however, put on public view — the artist was unknown. For Zahara, this was all front-page excitement; the papers were full of it: it was discussed for weeks. Catholic opinion was totally against the bishop. He had taken leave of his senses, or had been corrupted by Lucifer, or was on the pay-roll of the Communist party. But remonstrances to Seville did not help, though Monsignor Hernandez came to see for himself what the fuss was about. He told Tomás to be more discreet; that was all. He didn’t say so, but he was beginning to be enthusiastic about the restoration ― he was not very fond of his own vast, dull elephant of a cathedral. But the local anarchists were of the same opinion as the Catholics, perhaps the only time in history these two extremes have agreed. Spain’s anarchists were addicted to burning churches. Zahara’s cathedral was not one of their priorities, but, they felt, if it ever should be, Tomás Guzmán had made their task extremely difficult. Baroque woodwork burned ferociously well ― as a rule, a good-sized inferno could be produced in almost next to no time. (A Gothic building was more of a problem, and Romanesque almost impossible.) Some anarchists, therefore, harboured a grudge against Tomás. Anarchists never forget their grudges.
Tomás hired fifty stone-masons, wood-carvers and painters, paying their wages out of his own pocket. They worked slowly and laboriously for ten years. Every pillar, cornice and carved leaf, the huge ceilings and the great dome at the crossing were returned to their original splendour. Everything was painted a dazzling white, as the architect had stipulated two centuries ago, everything that is except the organ, which became a riot of gold, red, green and blue. (Someone in the eighteen fifties had coated it sepia.) The coro was demolished, so that the view from the west end to the high altar was uninterrupted. The floor tiles ― the reddish brown colour of an Andalusian roof ― were refurbished. Some of the side-chapels were allowed to keep their paintings and their statues, but only where such things were small in scale. Nothing was to interfere in any way with the majesty of the building itself, its awesome length and height, its superb vistas.
When it was finished, Tomás stood alone in the empty building for hours. The workmen had come and gone: for a decade their hammering and chipping, their quarrels and laughter, had filled the cathedral with noise. The air had been thick with stone dust but at last it had settled and was swept out into the street. Two nights ago the workmen had celebrated with a drunken, riotous, farewell party in the nave. It was not a sacrilege to do so, for the cathedral had been deconsecrated when the restoration began; no religious service had been held in it for ten years. Tomorrow, at a Solemn High Mass, Cardinal Archbishop Hernandez, accompanied by a dozen bishops and suffragan bishops, and every dignitary in the whole diocese, would be here to reconsecrate the building, and to give thanks to God that a mighty task had been undertaken and successfully completed.
But now, for a moment, the cathedral was Tomás’s, and Tomás’s alone. There were no visitors, priests, sacristans, altar-boys to break the immense silence. Sunlight poured through the new clear glass; the white stone dazzled. It was the most beautiful thing on God’s earth, he said to himself. (An opinion echoed a year later by Stephen when he saw it for the first time; ‘Nothing,’ he wrote on a postcard to Professor Potts, ‘prepares you for the shock of it, the cultural jolt it gives you. Its beauty is amazing ― a symphony of white ― soaring lines and curves, columns and domes, every part in perfect harmony with every other part.’ I hope the only shock he gets is a cultural one, the professor thought, on reading this effusion. He felt confirmed in his belief that Stephen’s mind was second-rate; no one with any feeling for architecture would gush over an eighteenth-century cathedral. Unfortunately he never had a chance to see it for himself.) All it wants now, Tomás decided, is a little music. But the organist was not there. He returned to his palace to fetch an old, scratched record of Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor, and his portable gramophone. The sound produced from this elderly, clockwork device hardly filled the cathedral, but it moved Tomás to tears as the building itself was later to move Stephen. He remembered his year in London, his visit to St Paul’s: Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph, Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. An apt parallel, he thought; then no, no ― it was devilish, the sin of pride. The words on Cardinal Portocarrero’s tomb at Toledo were much more appropriate: Hic jacet pulvis, cinis, et nihil. Dust, ashes, nothing.
Yes. It was a celebration of both God and man.
Cardinal Archbishop Hernandez, when he saw it next day, agreed. As did everybody else, the visiting church dignitaries, the newspaper reporters, the handful of tourists who managed to squeeze in, the altar-boys, the priests, the sacristans, José Badajoz (not yet mayor), the city officials, Chief of Police Goicoechea, General Araquistain, the entire congregation. Catholic opinion now said Bishop Guzmán was charitable and wise; exemplary: he had done a great thing for Zahara.
The anarchists said nothing.
Later, in the quiet of his study, Tomás wrote several cards for his index. The first said: 1925-1935: Restoration of the Cathedral by Bishop Guzmán. A lot of detailed notes followed, on both sides of the next sixteen cards.
Stephen was young, and thirsty for experience. He was enormously glad to be away from England; adaptable, easy-going, and a sexual misfit, he would have been delighted to travel anywhere. The prospect of four months’ vacation at his parents’ house in Reading had filled him with depression. Reading was insufferably dull. The metropolitan pleasures of London were just too far away for it to be financially possible for him to taste them frequently. Reading provided no pleasures at all, intellectual or of the flesh; the only man of his own kind that he knew to be associated with the town was Oscar Wilde, who had been incarcerated in its jail. So he seized the opportunity to live in Spain for the summer, though Zahara de los Membrillos was obviously more backward than Reading. At least it was different.
Pedro was a bonus: the icing on the cake.
And the seventeen-year-old son, already six feet tall and nearly a man, was stunningly good-looking, Stephen thought. Long,
dark, curly hair; black eyes; slim. But that wouldn’t have disturbed him, even if Pedro had not been around ― Pablo, just by being seventeen, he wouldn’t have considered. Stephen longed for an older man. Teaching Pablo was no problem. He was not required to give any formal lessons, just talk; though he had dictionaries and grammars with him for occasions when discussion of points of language was needed. Pablo liked English, though his pronunciation was poor and his vocabulary deficient. He had not, for instance, realised that a vast number of English words in everyday use were derived from Latin, and that almost all words, therefore, in Spanish that ended in ‘ión’ were the same in English ― constitución, constitution; construcción, construction; ‘Constipación,’ Stephen said, laughing, ‘constipation. Contracepción is what?’
‘Important,’ Pablo answered. Then horribly mispronounced the English equivalent, and added gently, in the tone of a pupil not wanting to show that an esteemed tutor has made a mistake, ‘En español, no es constipación. Es estreñimiento. Y contracepción es anticoncepción.’
‘Really? I never knew that!’
In this way, Stephen’s Spanish and Pablo’s English improved, though pronunciation left much to be desired. The main stumbling-block between the two languages is that certain letters - v, b, d, c, x and z ― do not sound quite the same; were the differences clear they might be easy to learn, but they are too subtle to grasp without a great deal of practice.
‘Velocity,’ Stephen said.
‘Belothita,’ Pablo replied.
‘No. Ve-lo-ti-ty,’
‘Be-lo-ti-ty,’
‘No.’
‘We-lo-thi-ty. Belothity. Welocity.’ Pablo’s face was all concentration, the black eyes solemn. ‘Is that better?’