Words of Mercury

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

  After three weeks, frightened of overstaying but bidden to stay, J and J planned a marvellously slow and adventurous joint return to Madrid, whence we had to take wing. So we clanked off happily in Janetta’s siege-engine across Andalucia, stopping to see a beautiful life-size Roman bronze of an ephebe at Antequera, then on through Osuna to Seville, where we stayed in an hotel almost in the orangetree-shaded cloisters of the Cathedral; eating an early 11 p.m. dinner in a rowdy joint beyond the plateresque Ayuntamiento and Snake Street. The walls indoors were so thickly covered with azulejos that every syllable uttered by the hundred munchers within bounced from wall to wall resoundingly as a fives ball. Cowering among these massed reverberations and echoes, and rivalling them with our own output, we drank ourselves into a blissful and travel-worn stupor, which was only broken by the clanging bells of the Giralda next day. Morning passed in the Cathedral; then a stroll under the oranges of the Alba house, where J had to pick up or drop something (its lady was away); then we went to buy some boxes of sweets (for presents) from a convent of enclosed Carmelites, no, Augustinians, I think. They were delivered through one of those wooden turntables that totally hide one’s interlocutrix but encourage hobnobbing. Ours was an old friend of Jaime’s, so the transaction involved much banter and laughter with the cheery wimpled chatterbox in the nether shadows. We crossed the Guadalquivir and stopped to peer at the Roman theatre at Italica, and wonderful mosaic floors with game birds and pygmies waging war on cranes and crocodiles. (Scipio founded Italica and Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius were all born there.) Thence into the wilds of Estremadura and the Sierra Morena. It rolled along in wavering hills and mountains suitably windswept and bleak, forested with cork-oak under whose branches enormous herds of black pigs were swallowing acorns against time, under their benign drovers’ gaze, and almost visibly expanding. We stopped at a wayside posada beyond the stricken hamlet where Zurbarán was born. Here, tented by a table-cloth from the thighs down and with our forty toes clustering close to the charcoal’s glow, we ate a brew of lentils and chick peas with jugged hare to follow and then partridges, under the gaze of courteous swineherds.

  The next night was very different. We got to the steep castled town of Trujillo at nightfall. The ledge-like plaza, surrounded by arcaded houses, a palace or two and a cathedral, was dominated by an enormous bronze equestrian knight in plate armour with tossing plumes and a long sword. It looked familiar . . . It was the cast of an identical statue in the Plaza de Armas in Lima, of Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru! He was born here, a poor nobleman—so poor, in fact, that Prescottt says he was suckled by a kind-hearted sow on the steps of his parish church; gathering strength for his subsequent looting of all the sheet-gold from the sun-temple of the Incas in Cuzco. Here we dossed down in a vast palace of the Mendoza-Chavez family, owned and visited fleetingly every year or so by its Whitney owners, but inhabited in between-whiles by a hospitable Portuguese friend of Jaime’s. The state was tremendous. A troop of servants unloaded our shabby effects, giant cocktail-shakers rattled, black velvet armorial curtains stiff with gold wire closed behind us one after the other down groin-vaulted corridors; bath-oil-scented steam enclouded us in Poppaea-like bathrooms and we dined in a forest of candelabras, watched by portraits of the Catholic Kings, the Cardinal-Infant of the Netherlands, Joan the Mad and Pedro the Ceremonious of Aragon; retiring at last to four-posters that could have slept three infantas abreast in their farthingales, or seven in their shifts. (Have you noticed the strong resemblance between the Infantas of Velasquez and Evelyn?* Especially the younger ones. I was struck by it again, later on with Las Meninas in the Prado.) We explored castles and churches all morning, banqueted sumptuously in the palace; then crept on to Caceres. It’s full of conquistadors’ palaces, some with shields on them showing a great sun and said to mean descent from Montezuma. Early storks were already repairing last year’s nests here, after their season further south, on belfries: much roomier than the minarets over the sea that they had just left. (I forgot to say that, the day before, we had halted in Merida, where we marvelled at a wonderful Roman theatre with a nearly complete proscenium of sixty or seventy Corinthian pillars; also marvellous mosaics in a temple of Mithras, in rather flashy colours; dawns, sunsets, winds, constellations, tempests, chariots and gambolling dolphins.) That night we slept at Placencia in a draughty hotel, where the only other guests in the dining room were two dignified, deafish and parrot-voiced crones, who had dined there every night for thirty-seven years. We nearly took their table by mistake . . . Our journey was becoming rather like a picaresque novel: (Chap. XXXIII: ‘How our four friends reached the old city of Placencia, what befell them there and the company they found. The Innkeeper’s story’ etc.) We craned at Gothic vaulting in the Cathedral next day, at the clustered piers, the blaze of gilt on the retables and Madonnas dressed as Mary Stuart, their pincushion-hearts seven times transfixed. Carved wooden Vices and Virtues ran riot over the Burgundian choir stalls.

  Our next halt, where the wild last stretch of Estremadura climbs into the Gredos range, was rare, memorable and seldom visited, perhaps because of its remoteness. A small abbey is peopled by a little community of white-habited Hieronymite monks. Damp and sequestered, it is lost among chestnuts, walnut and ilex woods. To the wall of the church a two-storeyed kind of shooting box clings like a limpet, with airy loggias, a garden running wild among the brambles below, and a clogged fish pool. It is Yuste, where the great Charles V retired after his abdication in favour of his son Philip II! The walls of the seven rooms inside are hung with black velvet in mourning for his beautiful Empress Isabella; all rather small, with crucifixes and four-posters; and, forestalling the Escurial, a wide squint pierces the wall, aimed at the high Altar so that the Emperor could see ‘God made and eaten every day’* as he lay gout-ridden in bed. He didn’t take Holy Orders; in fact, he kept an advisory hold on the Empire’s affairs and wars. A copy of Titian’s portrait of him hung over the velvet, the one with his hand on a languishing hound’s pate. His small court and staff and guard were quartered in the glum hamlets round about, complaining bitterly. He was particularly fond of fish, so every stream, river and pool for miles was assiduously fished to keep him in trout, pike and eels, so our wan conducting Hieronymite murmured; then he pointed out in the crypt the trough his body reclined in for a decade (with his head under the high Altar) till Philip II, having finished the Escurial, whisked it away to entomb it in the state that became a Holy Roman Emperor. Don John of Austria was present at his deathbed, not knowing he was the Emperor’s natural son; the kind wife of a chamberlain brought him up as hers in the next village, where they were billeted. He only learnt who he was when Charles’s will was read; a hardy boy of thirteen. Then there was no stopping him till the Battle of Lepanto, a decade later, when he utterly destroyed the Turkish fleet. We left this strange place with pounding hearts.

  On we rumbled, Janetta and Jaime taking turns at the wheel of the great vehicle; breaking bread at 3 p.m. in the scowling keep of Oropesa, which had been turned into a parador inside; on again, with the snowy peak of Almanzor (‘El Mansur’ Arabic for ‘the Conqueror’) floating high in the distance; through Talavera, thinking of Wellington’s victory; until, late in the afternoon, TOLEDO soared . . .

  Well, darling Diana, you know all about this . . . I was flung into a trance from which I’ve not quite come round, never having seen it before. We stayed just outside the town, looking across the Tagus from roughly the point where El Greco must have set up his easel. There was the Alcantara Bridge and its barbicans, there St Martin’s, and between them, the twisting fiver, the cliffs and the complex hill with the rebuilt Alcazar, the cathedral, a score of monasteries and palaces and churches; with wintry grass green all round it, and, as though to oblige, the weather, which had been like summer in Andalucia, windy in Estremadura, and splashing into occasional rain after we had crossed into New Castile, turned into just the fidgety grey and silver disturbance of cloud that my fellow-Cretan lets loose over To
ledo. (It was like—do you remember?—being suddenly confronted outside Florence by the background of Benozzo Gozzoli’s Coming of the Magi—on that tortoise-crawl from I Tatti with B.B.,* ages ago?) We were particularly lucky next morning. Arriving at the cathedral the moment it was opened, we joined a congregation of two in a little side-chapel where Mass is still said or sung in the Mozarabic Rite, which differs considerably from the ordinary Tridentine Mass, but is nevertheless O.K. at Rome, because it is a survival of the Rite used by the Visigoths for the centuries they were under the Moslem Emirs of Toledo; and it is still in Latin; which makes me think that poor Auberon,†recoiling from the new vernacular missal after Vatican II, might have found solace as a Mozarab, instead of becoming a Ukrainian Uniat.

  Replete with marvels (and also with delicious trout from the Tagus, eaten in the corner of the Plaza Zocodover) we rumbled out under the great eagle’d barbican, and I dozed off—‘forty winks’ is called ‘a bishop’s nap’ in Spanish: una siesta de obispo, ‘sieta de obipo’ in Andalucia. I was roused from mine by the car stopping in front of a little convent in the plain which Jaime knew, where a white Mercederian sister showed us into the church to contemplate the marvellous El Greco picture of St Ildefonso (pc enclosed). By sundown we were storming into Madrid; we stayed at a vast old-fashioned, station-like hotel called the Victoria, rather nice with labyrinthine furlongs of passage where one always lost one’s way, by mistake bursting in on loving couples, clergymen reading their breviaries, or solitary Negroes frying aubergines on a primus . . . Here we haunted the Prado for every hour it stayed open, while the evenings were given over to social glamour and late feastings; until, two days later, there were rainy farewells at the airport, and off we flew. Across my lap lay a reminder that it hadn’t all been a wonderful dream; viz. an enormous ham from Estremadura (cured and smoked, I was told, in Salamanca), muslin-wrapped, with the trotter still projecting intact . . . the trotter won all hearts at the customs in Athens.

  So here we are, back in the cold and wintry Mani, with nothing planned till March, when Robin Fedden and I canoe down two northern Greek rivers—the Aliacmon and the Acheloös. One’s waist is laced into light skiffs, it seems, like the waists of those Infantas in their farthingales. Before rapids, one lands and trudges along the bank with the boats upside down on one’s head, like those salmon-fishers in Marvell.* I’m scribbling in the studio with great olive-logs blazing. Through the window I can see Joan (who sends her love) summoning her troop of cats to dinner; massed miaows ascend, and their tails wave like the sea; while, over the wall, I can hear Lela (who sends her love too) scattering corn to the chickens . . .

  Paddy.

  *Andrew Marvell (1621–78), ‘Upon Appleton House’:

  But now the salmon-fishers moist

  Their leather boats begin to hoist;

  And, like Antipodes in shoes,

  Have shod their heads in their canoes.

  How tortoise-like, but not so slow,

  These rational Amphibii go!

  Let’s in: for the dark hemisphere

  Does now like one of them appear.

  *Waugh.

  *From Browning’s ‘The Bishop orders his Tomb,’ a great favourite of Duff’s and Diana’s.

  *Bernard Berenson.

  † Auberon Herbert.

  Christmas Lines for Bernard of Morlaix

  The Times Literary Supplement, 21 December 1979

  Urbs Sion aurea, patria lactea, cive decora,

  Omne cor obruis omnibus obstruis, et cor et ora

  Nescio, nescio quae jubilatio lux tibi qualis

  Quam socialia gaudia, gloria quam specialis, etc.

  — Bernard of Morlaix in the Pyrenees, Benedictine monk of Cluny, ft. c. 1230

  O golden Zion and long-fabled lion, both legend and hearsay,

  Murmur at neap-tide, warmer by sheep-side, hear what the deer say:

  ‘Smooth shuttles flickering where threads are bickering, o loom of doomsday

  — Who can forestall the theft of either warp or weft, what woof or tomb-stay?

  Why are the gold bells spinning their cold spells on Christmas morning?

  Better than frost in May, rime on our hosting day, born shorn, not scorning

  Cowsheds and mangers and herdsmen and strangers, while the wild snow falls.

  Blown by the weather one shiny feather from the black crow falls.

  (Hay-rack and waggon-gloom, strake not a spoke too soon, whole hubs unfelloed,

  — Can this brass jingle, can these battered swingletrees haul half a hay-load?)’

  In the rank chamber of dark dank December the angels and Angles

  Scatter bright nosegays that flatter white rose-bays with tinkles and spangles.

  (See how this lighter loot settles on rind and root, unfangled mangolds!)

  King’s Lynn and Chichester link sin, the niches stir, saints faint with painting,

  Tongues tintinnabulate, rotten rungs escalate, all saints are fainting.

  (Rats in the belfries and bats are the small fry ginger-cats laid low.)

  Congeners congregate, Gregory contemplates. (All hail his halo!)

  ‘No one to whistle to under the mistletoe,’ throbs, sobs the robin.

  ‘Better to chew the cud out of the sleet and mud,’ Snowball tells Dobbin.

  Hark to the ding-dong bell! What does the sing-song spell? Hungers and angers?

  Welcome the bright shade’s glow, no deadly nightshade now endangers mangers.

  (Handle creaks, cattlecake flies like a shuttlecock, rattles the pailful:

  Sniff while the harm of death dies by the charm of breath, all bales unbaleful.)

  Daisy and Buttercup on lazy fodder sup, what crunch of munching

  Clover by candlelight! These drovers can turn night brighter by bunching

  Sticks in a pyramid, fixing their beer amid midnight’s mad shadows

  While thunder rumbles on Wrekin and Dumbleton’s sheds, steads and meadows.

  Repining in mantled clime, pining for antler-time, drear deer lie fallow.

  Bell in the splinter thin! Icy in winterspring, ringdme rings hollow.

  (Cockcrows cut bray and boom, down cowpats drop-like doom, a crumplehorn fanfare

  Sounds in the coughing smoke; let no dull coffin-stroke thump for an encore.)

  Small hours are donkey-grey, solan-geese honk-away, farm barns are yawning —

  — What franker frankincense, frankly, can rank in scents with fawnborn dawning?

  Weak we in Christmas week, lifetime a shrieking streak—lend length and strengthen!

  Poultice the harm away, charm the short solstice day! Send strength and lengthen!