I looked again at the alcove, thinking of my debt to this poverty-stricken man of Jerez who had left Extremadura, tried to make a go of it in the islands of the New World, but found himself so deeply in debt that he had to smuggle himself to the mainland at Panama in a cask of provisions. There his fortunes improved, for his quick ear caught two bits of rumor: beyond the mountains swept a vast ocean not yet seen by white men, and far to the south along the shores of that ocean lay a land called Peru, heavy with gold. Due solely to the determination and courage of Balboa, an expedition forced its way through the jungle to the crest of the mountains and from there looked down on the Pacific. Among the soldiers was Francisco Pizarro, who first heard of Peru from Balboa.
On his return to the Atlantic side Balboa dispatched enthusiastic reports back to Spain, plus samples of his booty. His promise of much gold excited the home government and he was made admiral of the South Sea, but he was a driving man who aroused the envy of others, and before long his superiors grew bitter over his grandiose plans for conquering Peru. The governor of Panama waited and watched and one day trapped him. A drumhead court-martial convicted him of treason, not against Spain but against the local governor. With no show of justice, Balboa was sentenced to death. Like a common criminal he was publicly beheaded in 1517, but his enthusiasm for Peru found refuge in the mind of Pizarro.
With inherent grace this Spanish family poses naturally before their cracked and ancient oven. The boys will probably go to Germany.
In spite of this mournful history, Balboa’s birthplace caused me to chuckle over a bit of delightful nonsense that occurred years ago when I was a student in Scotland. One of the first newspaper columnists, an Englishman with an irreverent sense of humor, announced a poetry contest for schoolboys. He said that he had heard so much adverse comment on boys of the current generation, he wanted to show the people of Britain that some at least were interested in things of the mind. For weeks he reported the contest daily, with clergymen praising his effort and judges saying that this was the sort of thing Britain needed. Finally the winner was announced, somebody like Malcolm McGrory from a rural school, and his poem was printed with pride:
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
The columnist ended with a condescending paragraph in which he said that this poem, uneven though it was, showed promise for a boy of fourteen and that if young-McGrory applied himself he might one day be entitled to call himself a poet.
Well, the roof fell in. From all over the British Isles people wrote in, pointing out that Malcolm McGrory had filched his prize-winning sonnet right out of the collected works of John Keats. The columnist, as I remember, played it straight and tried to place the blame for this fiasco on the judges, who should have known better than to be hoodwinked in this way. He was then off for another dozen columns bewailing the lack of honor in the younger generation, and especially in Malcolm McGrory, who would try to fob off onto the British public, many of whom read books, a cheap theft of this sort. He predicted a very bad end for Malcolm.
It is strange that Keats should have immortalized the wrong man, so that even in death Vasco Núñez was cheated. In Jerez de los Caballeros, I could find no statue to him, nor to the town’s other outstanding conquistador, Hernando de Soto. (The nearby town of Barcarrota claims De Soto, but this is an error.) There was, however, a Plaza Vasco Núñez, an odd-shaped square at the end of Avenida José Antonio marked only by a watering trough for horses and a large metallic sign: Coca-Cola.
Friends came to Jerez to drive me back to Badajoz, and as we were passing through a cork forest, whose silence was broken only when a herd of pigs, grubbing for acorns, grunted at us, we came to a clearing which housed a small village, from which two members of the Guardia Civil ran out to halt us. Wondering what law we had broken, we pulled to the side of the road.
‘What’s wrong?’ the driver asked.
The Benemérita pointed to where four villagers were bearing the inert body of a man. ‘He fell from the church steeple,’ a guardia said. ‘He was cleaning it. May God have mercy on him.’
‘What do you wish of us?’
‘Turn the car around. We’ve got to take him to Jerez.’ To me, the man seemed quite dead, but the second guardia put his hand over the man’s heart and said, ‘He’s still alive.’
Since the two guardia would not split up, it was arranged that they would occupy the back of the car with the unconscious body and that the man’s wife would ride in front. That meant that I would have to wait in the village until the car returned, and this I volunteered to do, so the car sped back down the road to Jerez and I was left alone with a group of disturbed villagers.
A tall, very thin man in his late forties and his almost equally tall wife, also thin, suggested that I come to their house in the village and wait there. They led me about a quarter of a mile from the road, accompanied by eight or ten villagers, and toook me to an immaculate cottage with a dirt floor, one table, a rope bed and one chair. Although I offered the wife the chair, I was forced to take it, and while I waited there for a couple of hours the villagers sat on the floor about me and we talked of many things.
‘Is América del Norte really as rich as they say?’
‘We have many poor people. And even those who are not poor have to work hard.’
‘As poor as Spain?’
‘Our worst, yes. Farmers like you, it’s better in America.’
‘Can black men live in América del Norte wherever they want?’
‘No, but things are getting better.’
‘Are there also Catholics in América del Norte?’
‘Many. In the little town where I live there are many.’
They sent for a neighbor who had some cigarettes and he arrived to offer me one, very formally, and when I said I didn’t smoke, he carefully folded back the top of his pack and returned it to his pocket. Another neighbor brought a bottle of wine and two badly chipped glasses and he and I had a drink.
‘How much a day do you make in the fields?’ I asked, because it was obvious that these people wanted to talk about important things.
‘Forty pesetas a day.’ (Sixty-seven cents)
‘For grown men?’
‘Yes.’ They told me that they stripped cork for the man I had watched in the Casino de Badajoz, Don Pedro Pérez Montilla, and they spoke well of him. ‘He has three automobiles,’ they said, forming their hands into fists, about a foot apart, and moving their elbows sharply up and down to simulate a chauffeur driving a car.
‘How do you feed yourselves? Clothe yourselves?’
‘The credit goes to our wives.’ The man who said this nodded slightly, not to his own wife but toward the mistress of this house, and when I looked at her grave, dark face I could better understand that wedding feast at Trujillo, when the rural bridegroom had spent fifty-six cents, most of a day’s income, to honor his stalwart bride with ice cream sandwiches.
The men and women who sat with me in the bare kitchen were a handsome lot, rich in gracia. Their faces were strong and deeply lined, but their eyes shone with humor. Their rough corduroy clothes were cleaner than one would have thought possible under the cirumstances. I recalled the list of prices I had collected at the stores in Badajoz, and now, against a wage of sixty-seven cents a day for the head of the
family, they seemed appallingly high. A man’s suit of clothes for thirty-seven dollars. That would be two months’ wages, and no wonder the men about me wore homespun.
Then as I looked into the sober faces of the men who worried about their friend who had fallen from the steeple, I had the sensation that I was back in that farmhouse which I had visited in Teruel, more than thirty years before, and it was apparent that no matter how much urban Spain had prospered in the intervening decades, little wealth had filtered down to the farms. I could not recall any land other than India where the discrepancy between the rich and the poor was so great. Don Pedro, who owned the cork forest in which these men worked, drove three cars but his workmen earned sixty-seven cents a day. In Badajoz, during the nightly paseo, I had seen hundreds of people dressed as well as my neighbors dress in Pennsylvania, but in no part of America could I find farmers living at the miserable level that these Spanish farmers lived. It was a miracle, I thought, that Spain maintained its tranquillity when such conditions prevailed, and I could understand why the Guardia Civil patrolled the villages.
‘Is it true,’ one of the villagers asked, ‘that in América del Norte you eat corn?’
I nodded, and they burst into laughter. ‘We grow corn … for pigs.’ They laughed again and asked if it were the same kind of corn. I nodded, for in the fields of Extremadura I’d seen some corn which if eaten young would have been as good as what we ate at home. ‘Corn is for pigs and Mexicans,’ they said, and I wondered if that was why Spain refused this food. When the conquistadors invaded Mexico they found the Indians eating tortillas, and in their pride, turned their backs on this major source of food. Viva yo.
‘How many people live in your village?’ I asked.
This was the question that unlocked the floodgates of communication, for there was much they wanted to tell me. Forty years ago, when the speakers were young … ‘we had more than two hundred people here. You can see the church, it’s rather fine. But in recent years it’s been impossible to live in Extremadura. The wages are just too low. So, many of our young men go to Germany and work there for six or seven years.’
‘How many from this village?’
The doleful litany began. ‘My two sons, and the son of Gómez, and her two cousins, and the priest’s nephew.’
I judged there must have been about fifty men of the village absent. ‘How many would you say?’ I asked again.
‘Well, maybe sixty.’
A woman interrupted. ‘But you understand, they’re not all in Germany. A good many have gone to Barcelona.’
At this name the group grew silent, as if it were a worse fate to go to the Spanish city of Barcelona than to the German city of Düsseldorf. A woman explained why. ‘When our men go to Germany we know they’ll come back. In Germany they find no Catholics, no girls to marry. So as they work they remember life back home, some girl in this village. And they come home.’
‘Barcelona?’
‘It’s Spain,’ a man said. ‘My younger brother went to Bacelona. He found a girl there. Life in Barcelona …’
He spoke of the city as if it held the Holy Grail. ‘I tell you,’ another villager said, ‘in Barcelona it’s as good as it is in New York. He was there one week and found a job at a hotel on the Costa Brava. Tourists. Now he speaks French … my brother.’
‘It would be a lot better,’ his wife said, reflecting a family argument, ‘if we could all go to Barcelona.’
‘Do your men like Germany?’ I asked.
The villagers pointed to a man who had spent five years there, and he did not speak, but he did make three most informative gestures which I was to see often. With his right hand he fed himself, signifying, ‘In Germany you eat well.’ With the thumb and forefinger of his right hand he felt the cloth of his shirt, meaning, ‘In Germany you can dress decently.’ And with two hands he made the sign of a man driving an automobile. These were the universal comments on Germany.
‘You mean to say you had an automobile in Germany?’ The man nodded. ‘Then why did you come back to Extremadura?’ The man blushed and pointed with his head toward his wife.
‘Aren’t your women allowed to go to Germany, too?’
I didn’t understand the answer to this question and my Spanish was not good enough to pursue the nuances. Either the Spanish government would not allow women to go or the pressure of Spanish rural society was so great that any female who dared to leave was considered as good as dead. From what happened next I suppose it was the latter, for the villagers, seeing that it was going to be some time before my car returned, took me on a tour of their village, and I heard a lament that I was to hear often in rural Spain. ‘This house is closed. They went to Barcelona.’ Or, ‘This house is closed. The sons went to Germany.’ One man said, ‘I used to work in Jerez de los Caballeros. There were twenty thousand people there then. Now there’s only fourteen thousand. You must have seen the shuttered houses.’
Bullring at Badajoz.
They were taking me to the church from whose steeple the injured man had fallen, and on the rude oaken door of the church I read a poster in which some bishop of the diocese had long ago laid down the rules which were to govern local life:
1. Women shall not appear on the streets of this village with dresses that are too tight in those places which provoke the evil passions of men.
2. They must never wear dresses that are too short.
3. They must be particularly careful not to wear dresses that are low-cut in front.
4. It is shameful for women to walk in the streets with short sleeves.
5. Every woman who appears on the streets must wear stockings.
6. Women must not wear transparent or network cloth over those parts which decency requires to be covered.
7. At the age of twelve girls must begin to wear dresses that reach to the knee, and stockings at all times.
8. Little boys must not appear in the streets with their upper legs bare.
9. Girls must never walk in out-of-the-way places because to do so is both immoral and dangerous.
10. No decent woman or girl is ever seen on a bicycle.
11. No decent woman is ever seen wearing trousers.
12. What they call in the cities ‘modern dancing’ is strictly forbidden.
July 11, 1943
The church was not open because with the sharp decline in population it was no longer possible to provide a full-time priest. In fact, I judged from what I was told here and elsewhere that priests were in rather short supply. On one side of the church, carved deeply into the stones of the wall and whitewashed, was the name JOSE ANTONIO.
Wherever we went in that village the story was the same: ‘He went to Germany,’ and I reflected that in the Golden Age of Spain the men of Extremadura had gone out to Mexico and Peru to build civilizations there, and none of their work had profited Spain; now their descendants were leaving to build up Germany, not Spain, and the creative energy of the land was once more being perverted.
‘No,’ a woman reproved me when I raised this question, ‘the men do send home money. There are many of us who would die if it were not for the money from Germany. It’s not all loss.’
As she said this I came upon that sign which had blossomed across Spain in recent months. The Franco government, always alert to remind Spaniards of their blessings, had pasted on fifty thousand vacant walls posters reading: ‘Twenty-five years of peace.’ I pointed to the sign, and a man said, ‘He’s the only leader in the world who can say that to his people. He did bring us a quarter of a century of peace.’
Back in Badajoz, I sought out the structure which for a few weeks in 1936 focused the eyes of the world upon this city. I was told that plans were under way to tear it down and I trust this will be done, for while it stands it is a monument to evil. If you go to the cathedral and stand at the main entrance, you will see off to one side the narrow and lovely Calle de Ramón Albarrán. ‘Who was he?’ I asked half a dozen men from Badajoz. No one knew, but several
said, ‘Oh, that was a family well known in these parts.’ If you follow this street, looking at the fine doorways on either side with their marble stoops which women wash each morning, you will pass a neat barbershop and then the impressive entrance to the College of Pharmacy, and at the far end, where the street terminates before a massive red building, you will find yourself facing the bullring. It is this building that is the terror and shame of Badajoz.
Today it is simply another plaza de toros, round in shape and with a billboard from which hangs a tattered poster announcing the latest motion picture to be shown inside: Gregory Peek, Ann Blyth and Anthony Quinn in El mundo en sus manos. Spanish is defective in that in such a construction you don’t know in whose hands the world is, because su stands for his, her, its, your, their or one’s, and you must guess which. The interior is rather attractive, in a nineteenth-century sort of way, for the tiers of seats are made of rough stone and the slender columns supporting the partial roof are of a handsome ironwork, with intricate grillwork serving as capitals. On the grayish yellow sand, where the bull would normally be fought, stands a forest of folding metal chairs facing a very large improvised screen for outdoors movies. A rusty yellow band of paint runs around the wooden barrier that encloses the fighting area, while off in the distance to the left rises a tall new office building of many floors.
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