Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Little can be said in defense of such an ending; in its way it is as bad as the fake classicism it supplanted. Excess in either direction was regrettable, but the grotesqueries of romanticism had the added weakness of being open to burlesque, so when the duke’s play had been on the boards for some years a cartoonist offered this spoof: a demented poet, ranting his verses on a night when the moon scuttled between clouds, stands tiptoe on a precipitous cliff, with a rope around his neck, a dagger at his throat, a lion at his rear and a crocodile waiting for him below. The whole extravagance of romanticism is lampooned, and especially the extravagance of Don Alvaro. Yet the play was not a waste. It paved the way for realism and for a while provided much pleasure and excitement. It also questioned the nonsense of exaggerated family pride, but I suppose that during the years of its greatest success this parody of pundonor was not so recognized; the landed families of Spain must have seen the play and said among themselves, ‘By God, that’s the way brothers should act when an up-start meddles with their sister.’ In fact, if the play were given in Sevilla tomorrow, I would expect the great families to applaud.

  Seventeen-year-old gypsy mother.

  After similar plays of the Romantic Movement had circulated for some time, accompanied by novels and music of like vein, the adjective romantic acquired a new definition which stressed not a literary tradition emphasizing nature but a sentimental mélange of sex and adventure summed up in the advertising phrase which has come to characterize Spain: ‘Visit Romantic Spain.’ This tag is both the damnation and the salvation of Spain and she had better be careful what she does with it. By damnation I mean that it encourages the country to engage in certain abuses solely because tourists from abroad will pay money to witness them. Thus, in recent years in tourist cities like Palma, the bullfight has been burlesqued into a vaudeville show because tourists and uneducated Spaniards prefer it that way. Flamenco, as I have pointed out, has degenerated into a flabby night-club act, because such debasement is profitable. In Spain generally stress is laid on the past rather than the future, because it is the past that is marketable. Romantic carry-overs like the imprisonment of women, the excesses of pundonor and the backward look in the arts are supported. Enough wrong judgments of this kind can destroy a country, and thus Spain’s official adoption of romanticism as her international badge is damning.

  By salvation I mean that whether one likes it or not, this is the concept available to Spain for peddling to the world at large, and if she does her job well, she can earn needed income from it without corrupting her soul. The enormous building developments which we shall later see along the Mediterranean coast of Spain are there because northern European capital considers Spain romantic; financially, Spain would be ill-advised to alter the image of herself which she circulates abroad. I can best explain what I mean by reference to Hawaii, which is something like five-percent Polynesian, fifty-five-percent Oriental. Some years ago the Caucasian and Oriental businessmen who were putting up most of the money for advertising the islands said in effect, ‘It’s silly to keep on publishing those photographs of hula girls and ukuleles and grass shacks. We’re a modern society with fascinating Oriental customs, a great art museum, a fine university and forward-looking industries. These are the facets we should be stressing.’ So they took the hula girls off the advertising and put on the alternatives, and incoming travelers diminished by some startling percent. The rest of the world had decided that Hawaii was the land of the hula girls, and if facts proved otherwise, then to hell with Hawaii. Who would want to spend the time and money to visit islands simply because they had a good university, an art museum and challenging confrontations between the Orient and the Occident? The tourists of the world knew what Hawaii was better than the business leaders, and after a disastrous hiatus, the posters reappeared with hula girls, and everyone has been happy ever since.

  Spain, I am afraid, is stuck with the romantic legend portrayed in Don Alvaro; people shivering in Sweden and Germany want sun and romance, and Spain has no alternative but to provide them. The neat trick, as the people of Hawaii have learned, is to peddle this romantic illusion to outsiders but not to oneself. For the present, Spain has not yet mastered this trick; however, a few leaders of the country are becoming aware of the facts and they will probably adopt the policy of Hawaii’s canny leaders: ‘For the tourists hula girls. For the natives IBM computers!’

  But even as I was formulating these judgments in the rocky defile of the Convento de los Angeles, I was false to my own conclusions, because when I approached King Baudouin’s road I decided to turn right toward San Calixto rather than left toward the highway that would take me to Sevilla; I wanted to see the refurbished monastery where Baudouin and Fabiola had stayed and to compare it with the convent I had just seen. The monastery was nothing, but as I reached it I found that the hunt clubs of this part of Spain had convened for a trial of their packs, and some four or five hundred of the best hunting dogs, lashed two-by-two for safety in transportation, were preparing for a dash across the desolate emptiness of these hills. It was a brilliant moment, with rural costumes, the sound of horns, the yapping of the dogs and on some distant hill the waiting stag. Five hundred years ago men and women exactly like this, with dogs like this had come here attended by servants no whit dissimilar to hunt over these barren reaches. A thousand years ago, when Moors held the land, these were, of course, cultivated fields supporting hundreds of families, but with the expulsion of the Moors the lands had fallen idle and would long remain so. My companion, listening to the confusion of sound and looking at the huntsmen as they saddled up to chase across the distant hills, asked, ‘Isn’t it romantic?’ It was … in both senses of the word.

  V

  LAS MARISMAS

  One wintry day when storm clouds hung low over Sevilla, I set out on a journey to the south to complete a task I had set for myself some years earlier. I had been planning a novel with a Mexican setting, and because of the Spanish background of one of my characters I required to know something of life on a Spanish ranch given over to the rearing of fighting bulls. I had selected as my prototype the historic and honored ranch of Concha y Sierra (Shell and Mountain Range) and a matador living in Sevilla had agreed to show it to me. He respected the Concha bulls because of their heroic performance during the past eighty years.

  ‘The ranch lies in the swamps,’ he warned me as we set forth, and this seemed an unlikely statement, since one visualizes a bull ranch as occupying hard, rough soil which strengthens the bull’s, legs. ‘A common misunderstanding,’ the matador assured me. ‘It’s the nature of the grass, the minerals in the water … something in the essence of the land and not its hardness. That’s what makes a good bull. Anyway, the Concha y Sierras live in the swamps.’

  We drove south to the end of the road. Parking our car in the rain, we set out on foot along a narrow earthen path that might have been passable in the dry season but which was now so muddy that going was difficult; if we stepped off the path on either side we were in swampland, not the green-covered stagnant swamp of fiction but an interminable area extending for miles in all directions, consisting of completely flat land covered with grass and two or three inches of water. ‘These are the swamps of the Guadalquivir,’ the matador said, and for the first time I looked out upon the infinite desolation which was to attract me so strongly and in so many ways.

  The storm clouds swept rain squalls ahead of us which beat down upon the brackish waters to bounce back in tiny droplets, so that it seemed as if there were no horizon, as if sky and earth alike were made of mist and grayness. For two reasons that first day persists in memory. The immensity of the swamps astounded me; I had not realized that Spain included so large an area of primitive land, a retreat given over primarily to wildlife, where birds from all parts of Europe and Africa came in stupendous numbers to breed; this swamp, lying so close to Sevilla, was as wild as the seacoast of Iceland, as lonely as the steppes of Russia.

  What I remember most vividly,
however, is that on this introductory day, for reasons which no one has been able to explain, as the matador and I walked a flock of swallows stayed with us, perhaps a hundred in all, and when we took a step they swooped down to the tips of our shoes, then off into the sky, one after another, so that we moved in a kind of living mandorla such as encloses the saints in Italian religious painting. At times the swallows came within inches of our faces, swooping down with an exquisite grace past our fingertips and to our toes, flicking the swamp water with their wings. This continued for about half an hour, during which we seemed to be members of this agitated flock, participants in their spatial ballet, which moved with us wherever we went. It was one of the most charming experiences I have ever had in nature, comparable I suppose only to the day when I first skin-dived to the bottom of the coral beds off Hawaii; there was the same sense of kinesthetic beauty, of nature in motion, with me in the center and participating in the motion.

  Why the swallows stayed with us for so long, I cannot guess; once during the walk I wondered if our feet, to which they seemed to be paying most attention, might be kicking up insects too small for us to see but inviting to the birds; but I had to dismiss this when I saw no evidence that the swallows were catching anything. There was also the possibility that our steps were throwing up droplets of water which the birds were taking in the air, but again there was no evidence that we were doing so, and I concluded that they were simply playing a game. This was not unreasonable, for obviously they were enjoying our walk as much as we were. At any rate, they served to remind me that these swamps existed as a realm for birds and that in entering it I was trespassing on their terrain.

  The area is called Las Marismas (The Tidelands, in this instance a twofold tide, one coming in from the Atlantic Ocean direct and a more important one creeping up the Río Guadalquivir to spread out over an immense area). Las Marismas is roughly forty miles from north to south, thirty-five miles from east to west, but it is not square and has an area of less than a thousand square miles, or about six hundred thousand acres, of which only about three hundred thousand could be called swampland proper, the rest being equally flat and bleak but free of water most of the year.

  I was fortunate in visiting Las Marismas for the first time in winter, for this was the rainy season and I was thus able to see the bull ranch in maximum swamp condition; it seemed to me that about seventy percent of its land was either under water or was so water-logged that if I stepped on what appeared to be a solid tussock, it collapsed beneath me with a soft squish, so that my feet were again in water. It was on such land that the Concha y Sierra bulls flourished, but it was not until the matador led me to the dry area on which the ranch buildings stood, and I saw the famous brand of an S inside a C scrawled on the side of a corral, that I was ready to believe that this was the territory of the bulls about which I had read so much.

  The Concha y Sierra bulls had a brave history, and many a noble head had gone from the bullring to the taxidermist’s and from there to the wall of some museum, with a plaque beneath to inform the visitor as to what this bull had accomplished before he died.

  On June 1, 1857, the Concha Bull Barrabás participated in what the books describe as ‘one of the most famous accidents in the history of bullfighting’ in that, with a deft horn, it caught the full matador Manuel Domínguez under the chin and then in the right eye, gouging it out. It was assumed that Domínguez would die, for his face was laid open, but with a valor that had characterized his performance in the ring he survived, and three months later was fighting again as Spain’s only one-eyed matador, having stipulated that for his return the bulls must again be from Concha y Sierra. For another seventeen years he fought with only one eye and enjoyed some of his best afternoons with Concha bulls. He is known in taurine history as Desperdicios (Cast-off Scraps, from the contemptuous manner in which he tossed aside his gouged-out eyeball).

  On August 3, 1934, the Concha bull Hormigón (Concrete) verified his name by killing the beginning bullfighter Juan Jiménez in Valencia, and on May 18, 1941, in Madrid the gray Farolero (Lamplighter) killed the full matador Pascual Márquez, thus ending the career of a young fellow of great promise. On August 18, 1946, the Concha bull Jaranero (Carouser) killed young Eduardo Liceaga, brother of one of Mexico’s best matadors. And so the story goes, with the great gray bulls of Concha y Sierra defending themselves valiantly in all plazas.

  The matador and I left the ranch buildings and on horseback set off across the marshes to see if we could find any of the bulls in pasture, and after we had ridden for some time in the direction of Guadalquivir, that meandering, desultory river of such force and quietness, the matador suddenly cried, ‘Look!’ and off to our left, rising from the reeds and thistles like an apparition, loomed a gray bull, his horns uptilted, his ears alert. We stopped the horses. He stopped. We stared at each other for several minutes, and then we saw, gradually appearing from the mists behind him, the shapes of fifteen or twenty other bulls, and slowly they moved toward us, not in anger but rather to see what we were doing. They came fairly close, much too close for me, but the matador said, ‘They won’t charge as long as they’re together and we stay on the horses,’ and so we stayed, among the bulls who had materialized from the swamps, and after a while they gradually drifted away and the mists enveloped them.

  It was while wandering in this fashion in Las Marismas that I became aware of the Spanish seasons—the rain and the drought, the cold and the heat, the flowering and the harvest—and I decided that if I ever wrote about Spain, I would endeavor to cover each of the seasons. I have never spent all of any one calendar year in Spain, but I have visited each major area except Barcelona during at least two different seasons so as to see the effect of the passing year upon it; so far as I can remember, the only month I have missed is February, and it is possible that one of my Easter visits started in late February, but if so, it could have involved only a few days, and I do not remember it. I have seen Las Marismas in all seasons, never as much as I would have liked but enough to teach me a few facts about the land of Spain.

  From the swamps.

  Spain! It hangs like a drying ox hide outside the southern door of Europe proper. Some have seen in its outlines the head of a knight encased in armor, the top of his casque in the Pyrenees, the tip of his chin at Portugal’s Cabo de São Vicente, his nose at Lisboa, his iron-girt eyes looking westward across the Atlantic. I see Spain as a kaleidoscope of high, sun-baked plateaus, snow-crowned mountains and swamps of the Guadalquivir. No one of these images takes precedence over the other, for I have known fine days in each of these three contrasting terrains. That snow should be a permanent part of my image may surprise some, but Spain has very high mountains and even in the hottest part of July and August, when the plains literally crack open from the heat and when the blazing skies described in Spanish fiction hang everywhere, snow lies on the hills less than thirty miles north of Madrid. In the middle of August not long ago I drove across the mountains that separate the Bay of Biscay from the city of León and saw snow about me for mile after mile; at another time, when I had come to Spain in midsummer for my health, doctors in Philadelphia asked, ‘Is it wise to visit Spain in July? Won’t you suffocate?’ But my plans took me to the high north, where during much of the summer I needed a topcoat at night.

  But now we are speaking of Las Marismas, in the heart of the southland, and to appreciate it, and the land of Spain in general, we must watch it through one whole year, and if in doing so I seem to be speaking primarily of birds, that is appropriate, for here is one of the great bird sanctuaries of the world, as if nature, realizing how difficult it was going to be for birds to exist in a constantly encroaching world, had set aside this random swamp for their protection.

  WINTER

  The Guadalquivir itself never freezes, of course, but occasionally areas of shallow water with low salt content will freeze to a thickness that would support a bird but not an animal. In winter the tides run full, and even if no addition
al rain fell they would be sufficient to fill the streams that crisscross the swamps; but rains do fall, most abundantly week after week, and the tides are reinforced, so that water stands on the land. The sky is mostly gray, but when storms have moved away, it becomes a royal blue set off by towering cumulus clouds moving in from the Atlantic; Las Marismas is a product of the ocean; it is not a somnolent offspring of the Mediterranean Sea.

  Maximum flooding occurs in January, and then one can move by boat across large segments of the land, and in this boggy, completely flat wilderness life undergoes conspicuous modification. Animals like the deer and lynx have taken refuge by moving to preselected higher ground, and in their place come several million birds from northern Europe to prepare for breeding. Three hundred thousand game ducks have moved in to winter, ten thousand large geese. In January untold numbers of coots arrive to breed. Through a hundred centuries they have found in Las Marismas a plentiful food supply, for the marsh grasses provide seeds and roots and the shallow waters teem with swimming insects.

  Toward the end of winter the birds begin to settle upon specific clumps of grass, testing them for strength and protection, and in March they begin weaving nests which will house them for the important work ahead in spring. Where do they get the material for the million or more nests they must build? From all imaginable sources but particularly from the weeds themselves. However, in the nests I have seen feathers, bits of mouse fur and even strands of hair from cattle.

  In the winter men leave Las Marismas pretty much alone. Along its edges, of course, towns have grown up and in them live skilled hunters who know all the footpaths that cross the swamps. Here also are herdsmen who pasture their cattle on the grassy portions in the summer, and fishermen who work the Guadalquivir. And there are, I am glad to say, a handful of men who simply love the bleakness of the swamps and study it year after year, as they would a book, but in winter even they stay mostly at home.