Gracia. This is a lovely word, which my Spanish friends use a good deal and which for a long time I was unable to understand. ‘Does it mean grace?’ I asked. That and much more. ‘Is it a sense of humor?’ Without one you could not have gracia, but it would have to be a very gentle sense of humor, one that smiled quietly at the inanities of the world. ‘Sometimes you use the word as if it meant good judgment or breeding.’ It includes all of that and much more. Spaniards are fond of saying, ‘Our coins state that Franco is caudillo by the grace of God. Fact is, Franco is caudillo because God has a sense of gracia.’ I didn’t catch the implication, and then one day while I was wasting time in the plaza at Pamplona, waiting for the bullfight to begin, I saw a fat girl with almost no neck and strangely cocked eyes, a girl one would not normally bother with, except that she had some peculiar charm that was immediately apparent to all who saw her, and the young man who sat with her knew this, for obviously he loved her. She radiated a warmth that made itself felt across the plaza, and I was so captivated that I had to raise my glass to her and nod. She must have thought that I was making fun of her, although that was not my intention, for she looked at me with a frank and melting charm that many beautiful women never attain, and smiled at me and raised her glass with an awkward gesture, making fun of me in her way. To my friends who had been trying to explain words, I said, ‘That girl has gracia,’ but they corrected me. ‘That one is gracia.’ We saw her often during the fair and noticed that she was never without male companions who seemed to find her fascinating. When the feria ended and was gone, my friends and I never referred to the beautiful Swedish girls we’d seen nor the German blondes who had decorated the city, but we often recalled the fat girl with no neck, for she had gracia, and when a girl has this she illuminates a plaza and gives it character. There is much in Spain that has a gracia which cannot be found elsewhere.
Ambiente. I once hired a car and took a Badajoz family for a picnic. I provided the wine, the cheese and the anchovies. They brought the bread, the meat, the cake, the utensils and the blankets. We were in high spirits and the countryside was beautiful. This was bound to be a great picnic in a land where picnics are a way of life. We drove first toward the Portuguese border and I saw several spots that were, to my thinking, ideal for an outing, but the wife, who was by no means the head of this family and who usually kept silent, said firmly each time, ‘No hay ambiente,’ which meant that the spot I was suggesting had no ambiance. Well, with the aid of the driver I uncovered some half-dozen other spots, but in the opinion of the woman none had ambiente, so we turned around, retraced our route and headed south, where a series of equally desirable spots unfolded, each to be dismissed with that scornful ‘No hay ambiente.’ Finally we came to an old farm beside a stream, with large olive trees, a grassy meadow, ducks on the water and cattle in the opposite field. Immediately we saw this spot, so gracious in the midday sun, with shade for all and room to move about in, we realized that our critical woman had been right. The other spots had not had the proper ambiente for a picnic. This one did. It longed for people to enter into it and spread their blankets beside its stream and upon its flowers. A Spaniard would willingly travel an extra fifty miles to find a spot with ambiente. Let word get around that a restaurant has ambiente and it is filled. If a vacation spot has ambiente its registration is crowded. The antique bullring at Ronda has ambiente, so that even though it lies perched in almost inaccessible mountains, people from all over Spain willingly travel long distances to see a fight there. The entire city of Sevilla has ambiente and is loved therefor. Madrid is too young to have achieved ambiente yet, but since it has power it is respected. What bestows ambiente upon a place? I don’t know. But I have often been with Spaniards who have walked into what outwardly appeared to be a rather ordinary place and have been struck instantly by its charm. ‘This place has ambiente!’ they have cried, and in that split second I have known that it did. How did they know? How did I know? No one can explain, but without ambiente a thing can scarcely be Spanish. With ambiente it needs little else.
Pundonor. Many languages have cultivated special meanings for the word honor, and nations using those languages have developed particular connotations for this word. I think one would agree that in France, with its tradition of dueling, the concept of honor has had a rather more delicate definition than in America. In imperial Germany, where the dishonored infantry officer was left with a revolver as the only solution for having transgressed the code, the definition was also specialized, and no other nation has been able to enforce the strict interpretations that England observes regarding a businessman’s word of honor. In Japan a whole culture, the samurai’s, grew up around this word. However, in other countries in which I have lived but had better not name, none of the above concepts has any currency, and in the United States we have been rather more lax in our application than Germany and France and markedly more lax than England and Japan. But it has been left to Spain to cultivate not only the world’s most austere definition of honor but also to invent a special word to cover that definition. Of course, Spanish has the word honor, which means roughly what it does in French, but also the word pundonor, which is a contraction of punta de honor (point of honor). At any rate, it is not sufficient for a meticulous Spaniard to worry about his honor. Many things that an American man can in all decency forgive, the Spaniard cannot. If he is a man of pundonor, he must take action against insult. A young man with four unmarried sisters had better cultivate a nice sense of pundonor. A politician, a businessman engaged in intricate dealings, a stage idol and above all a bullfighter must be studious of their pundonor, and in this book, where I deal with several men noted for their pundonor, I shall make use of this uniquely Spanish word, for I have found that whenever I am perplexed about what a Spaniard might do under certain circumstances, or the nation as a whole for that matter, it is instructive to ask, ‘Under these circumstances what would a man do who subscribed to an acute or even a preposterous sense of honor?’ And from endeavoring to answer this question I often find clues as to what the Spaniard will do. After all, Don Quixote is an engaging study of Spanish traits not only because it lampoons the concept of pundonor but also because it demonstrates that no man ever possessed pundonor to a greater degree than the doleful knight.
Sinvergüenza. Sin = without. Vergüenza = shame. A sinvergüenza is a man the precise opposite of one with pundonor. In no country of the world except Japan is it so damaging to a man to charge him with being a sinvergüenza, and when one throws this accusation against another he must be prepared to defend his judgment.
Estupendo, including other such extravagant words as maravilloso, fantástico and magnífico. Few Americans and no Englishmen have ever mastered these peculiarly Spanish expressions, for we have reserved them for things like Cecil B. De Mille movies and the circus. But observe my experience in Madrid. I had rented a car and like others found much difficulty in parking it, but at a restaurant nearby I became acquainted with a doorman who seemed to have psychic powers in determining where empty parking spaces would be. For this service I tipped him rather generously, I thought, about a quarter in American money, which he accepted grudgingly. Against my better judgment I raised the tip to thirty-five cents, with no appreciable modification of his manners, and then to forty cents, which brought only the same surly acknowledgment. However, one day I went to this restaurant with Víctor Olmos, the ebullient Reader’s Digest editor for Spain, who wheeled into the parking area, slammed on his brakes, leaped from the car and left it. When we returned, the attendant hurried for the car (he dawdled disgracefully when getting mine) and cried, ‘Señor, I found you a place.’ ‘Estupendo!’ Olmos said as he gave the man a six-cent tip. The attendant’s face was wreathed in smiles. ‘Fantástico!’ Olmos added. ‘Simply maravilloso,’ The attendant nodded and I could see that he felt good all over. When I next parked there I gave him a twenty-cent tip and cried ‘Estupendo!’ and he beamed. Later on it was fantástico and extraordinario, and I had bu
ilt myself a secure place in his attentions. My car came promptly now, for like a good Spaniard he needed words as much as he needed money, and the words he wanted had to be the most expansive and inflated available. In Spain words form a kind of currency which must be spent freely, and to do this is not easy for an American, yet not to do it in Spain is to miss the spirit of human relationships. For this purpose I prefer estupendo. Its four syllables, properly pronounced, ripple off the tongue, and if one drags out the pen for four or five seconds, the effect can be seductive. For the American it can also be corrupting. For example, when I showed Robert Vavra, whose photographs illustrate this book, the first completed chapter, he cried, ‘Don Jaime! Estupendo!’ For a moment I was delighted that my work had found favor in his expert eye, but before I had a chance to make an ass of myself I realized that he had been living in Spain for a long time. What he meant was that the material was not wholly offensive. Estupendo, properly used, means ‘It might get by.’
Viva yo. This phrase will not be found in dictionaries. Some time ago there was a competition for the cartoon which best expressed the Spanish character, and the winner, without a close second, was one showing an arrogant little boy urinating in the middle of the street and spelling out the words ‘Viva yo,’ which could be translated as ‘Hurray for me,’ except that the guts of the phrase is the implied second half, ‘and to hell with everyone else.’ A comprehension of the Spaniard’s addiction to Viva yo will help anyone trying to make his way in Spain. When the little car barrels right down the middle of the highway, forcing everyone else into the ditch, you don’t swear at the driver. You say ‘Viva yo’ and you understand what happened and why. When you pay seven dollars for a seat at the bullfight and find it occupied by a man who will not move, you don’t punch him. You say ‘Viva yo’ and steal someone else’s seat. The spirit of Viva yo animates groups as well as individuals and sometimes the entire nation. It crops up in unexpected places and accounts for some very funny newspaper stories: ‘Last night the music lovers of San Francisco, California, stormed the box office and paid up to fifty dollars for seats to hear the great Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus make his debut in that city. Also in the cast was the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland.’ When a group of Spaniards who had emigrated to Australia changed their minds after a year and came scuttling back to Spain, an editorial announced: ‘They said that they had returned because they loved Spain better than any other country on earth, they wanted to live within the embrace of the Catholic Church, which was their spiritual home, and they had learned that if they didn’t leave right away they would be drafted into the Australian army for service in Viet Nam.’ The little boy spelling out his philosophy on the street grows up to be a man determined to live by that philosophy, and at times he can be aggravating. Even the poorest Spaniard subscribes to the spirit of Viva yo and is prepared to act upon it. This makes for some trying times, but with gracia they can be weathered. If, however, one finds that the constant exhibition of Viva yo irritates him, he should stay out of Spain and probably Texas too.
As for the other Spanish words that one would naturally want to use, most of them have found their way into the English language and can be adopted without definition. Some of the more common are: agua, alcalde, blanco, caballero, conquistador, flamenco, fiesta, mantilla, paseo, patio, plaza, rojo, sierra, siesta, tortilla and such bullfight terms as banderilla, banderillero, cartel, cuadrilla, matador, picador, toro and torero. The word toreador is also in the English dictionary but no one in Spain uses it any longer, for it is held to be archaic.
While assembling the above list I discovered to my surprise that pundonor has also become a good English word, although in our language it identifies a specific point of honor rather than a general attribute. And of course it does not carry the philosophical connotations which it has in Spanish.
It was my intention when visiting the major cities of my itinerary to make certain side trips to smaller towns and villages which held points of unusual interest, and Badajoz presented an opportunity for four such expeditions, all within Extremadura. One of the side trips was not an opportunity; it was an obligation, but of it I shall speak later.
The first trip took me into Roman Spain. How had Rome gained control of the peninsula? By 150 B.C. indigenous Iberians were well established along the coasts and had probably wandered inland, following rivers like the Guadiana. By 1300 B.C. Celtic invaders from the north had begun to displace them and had pretty surely reached Extremadura. By 1120 B.C. Phoenicians were building lighthouses on prominent peninsulas and founding the city of Gades (Cádiz), making it the oldest continously occupied city in Europe. By 630 B.C. Greeks had arrived, and two centuries later the Carthaginians had taken charge of much of the peninsula. Historic names such as Hamilcar and Hannibal then appeared in Spanish history, the latter taking a Spanish wife and commanding territory as far inland as the site of Mérida, but the Second Punic War, 218–201 B.C., determined that Spain would pass under the control of Rome. This control was easier to establish along the coasts than it was inland, so what Rome could not gain in battle she tried to win by guile, and it was in 147 B.C. that the part of Extremadura surrounding the future site of Mérida became important.
Then Viriathus, a brilliant uneducated shepherd of the region, decided that the continued pressures and treacheries of Rome could no longer be tolerated. He led an uprising of Extremadurans that was subdued only because the Romans invented some new treachery which cost 9,000 Extremaduran dead and 20,000 men sold into slavery, among them Viriathus. As a Roman slave he learned much, and when through heroism he escaped, it was to raise fresh troops and to lead a major war against the Romans. At one point he controlled most of central Spain and even laid siege to Cádiz. He inflicted heavy defeats on Rome, and an army of magnitude was sent from Italy to subdue him once and for all, but he outmaneuvered it and killed many. He became the first hero of Spanish history, a native-born Extremaduran who had repulsed Roman armies.
But then Scipio Aemilianus, adoptive son of the house that had defeated Carthage, was dispatched with a major expedition to put an end to the business. Refusing to fall into the kind of military trap that Viriathus had sprung against previous Roman armies, Scipio baited a trap of his own. He entertained three of Viriathus’ envoys and discussed peace with them, but while doing so he suborned them with wine and gold and sent them back to their leader, bedazzled by promises. The three ambassadors did not report to Viriathus but lingered outside the camp until he was asleep, then slipped into his tent and murdered him. Thus died Spain’s first hero, a self-taught general of marked courage and considerable skill; after his death Scipio pacified the peninsula, and Spain became as much a part of the Roman Empire as Italy was. In fact, the first two Roman settlements established outside Italy and conferring citizenship were located in Spain.
The importance of Spain is illustrated by that unbroken chain of Spaniards, that is to say, men born in Spain or of Spanish parents, who made significant contributions to the Roman Empire. Three emperors who well exemplified the glory of Rome—Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius—were Spaniards. So were the two Senecas (in Spanish, Séneca), the second of whom we shall meet in more detail at Córdoba. Lucan the historian, Quintilian the master of rhetoric, Martial of the epigrams, men of foremost rank in Roman literature, were also Spaniards. There were others who served Rome well, the latest family being one that came long after the empire, the Borjas (Borgias) from Valencia, who supplied two popes, Calixtus III and the infamous Alexander VI, father of Lucrezia and Cesare, and one saint, Francis Borgia, third general of the Jesuits.
To see Roman Spain at its best, one must visit Mérida, thirty-six miles up the Río Guadiana from Badajoz. Its history began only in 25 B.C., when the Emperor Augustus authorized the veterans of his Fifth and Tenth Legions to retire from active service and take farms in the area, to be known henceforth as Augusta Emerita (Augustus’ Veteran Colony), whence Mérida. A long bridge was then built over the Guadiana, and Mérida became
a chief link in communication between Hispalis (Sevilla) in the south and Salmantica (Salamanca) to the north.
Iberia Page 7