Iberia

by James A. Michener

The best time of year, for me, in Las Marismas is autumn, because three things happen to make it both bearable and exciting: the dreadful heat diminishes, so that temperatures become quite pleasing; the first rains come and with them a new color in all living things; and the movement of birds is captivating. As for the heat, Las Marismas, which in midsummer seems as hot as tropical Africa, stands at about the same latitude as San Francisco (Sevilla 37°, 27′ N; San Francisco 37°, 40′; Richmond 37°, 30′, Wichita 37°, 48′). Therefore, when autumn comes and the baleful effect of winds blowing in from Africa and the Mediterranean has gone, the temperature is delightful; one wears loose clothing during the day, a substantial jacket of some kind after dark, and if one wishes to ride over Las Marismas at midnight to spot wildlife, a sturdy coat. I would suppose that anyone who loved the outdoors, and especially the tracking of birds in their larger migratory movements, would find Las Marismas in autumn almost irresistible, for then nature changes its aspect daily, and what has been a barren wasteland marked by whitened carcasses becomes a meadow which will sustain millions of birds in their migrations.

  The change begins with the first rain. Year after year it arrives sometime between the twentieth and twenty-fifth of September, as if it had been waiting for summer officially to end. This is only a slight rain, not even enough to heal the cracks that mar the land, but it is followed in desultory fashion by one or two others. On Columbus Day, October 12, celebrated throughout the Spanish world as El día de la raza (The Day of the Race), the people who live along the edges of Las Marismas enjoy their last guaranteed clear day and their picnics are apt to be gay, for with strange regularity, on October 13, comes the first drenching rain of sufficient duration to soak the ground, but even though enormous quantities of water fall in this and subsequent storms, there is still not enough for any to collect. No lakes re-form and the permanent rivers are no higher than they were before; this water seeps into the dried earth. In doing so it reactivates plants, and even before the swamps re-form they look as they did when water was plentiful.

  Now a few courageous ducks and geese begin to arrive from Scandinavia, and they must be sorely frustrated by what they find, for there are no lakes and food is bitterly scarce, for seeds of autumn have not yet fallen and the water plants on whose roots the birds exist have not matured. There is even trouble in finding a lake on which to rest; most are dried basins, their cracks just beginning to heal. And even when some accidental lake is found, its water is extremely brackish and unable to provide the swimming life which ducks and geese use to supplant the seeds and roots. But these first arrivals struggle with their problems and no living thing in Las Marismas must welcome subsequent rains with more excitement. One day I watched as a group of land-bound geese wiggled and cried with delight as rain came down upon them; it was the promise of a fruitful autumn.

  These newcomers face an additional problem, for when they are kept from their normal feeding and hiding grounds, they lay themselves open to attacks by the imperial eagles, who now move in for easy kills. Perhaps easy is the wrong word, because the eagles have to exercise real skill if they want to catch a graylag goose who has protected itself in the north for the last six months. No eagle flying alone has ever been seen to take a goose except by sheer accident, for although the eagle is stronger and has powerful talons, he cannot overtake a goose in full flight; pursuit is useless. Therefore, the eagle finds himself a partner and as a pair they become formidable. One flies rather high, in the fly-space of the goose, and somewhat awkwardly, so that the target gets the idea that he can outfly this enemy. The other eagle flies low and well behind the first, and as the awkward eagle maintains altitude on the goose and makes a series of futile passes at him, the big bird takes the easy way out and with adept spirals evades the eagle by dropping to a lower altitude, where the second eagle sweeps in with terrifying talons.

  The ancestors of this fighting bull, standing along the banks of the Guadalquivir, were brought up the river by Romans more than two thousand years ago.

  There is other death in Las Marismas now. The cattle who have been browsing all summer on the safe flat lands begin to withdraw to higher ground as the rains start to engulf them, and by following paths long established, they retreat, but often one stumbles into an ojo, now camouflaged by growing grass and shrubs, or he waits too long and is trapped on an islet, where he dies, or the long trek weakens him. In any case, he is carefully watched by the vultures who scout the vast expanses day after day. In Las Marismas nothing rots.

  For human beings in the region the autumn is as exciting as it is for the birds and animals, because this is the season of the vendimia (vintage) when the first fruit of the vine is pressed to the accompaniment of week-long celebrations. If one wanted a single painting of Spain to remind him of the best of the country, he could do worse than choose Goya’s exquisite painting of the vendimia, now hanging in the Prado in Madrid, in which idealized peasants bring in the grapes while a nobleman, his pretty wife and their little boy, dressed in green velvet and red sash, taste them. Spaniards love this unpretentious work, for it speaks to them of the land, the rich, hard land of southern Spain when the harvest is under way.

  In Sanlúcar the vendimia is celebrated with the same rustic vigor that it has been for the last thousand years, but at nearby Jerez de la Frontera, from which sherry takes its name, occurs the most renowned vendimia. Then the world-famous families who make and sell sherry—Domecq González, Byass, Osborne—set up kiosks where wine is served. Countrymen arrive to promenade in carriages drawn by six horses. There are bullfights and celebrations that last through the night. All around the rim of Las Marismas there is festivity in which Catholic Spain remembers pagan rituals and combines the old religion and the new in fascinating juxtapositions.

  Now, too, is the time when huntsmen concentrate on the swamps, for the latter contain two enormous herds of deer, an indigenous red deer with pointed horns, which is held to be an honorable target for the huntsman, and the grosser-formed fallow deer with palmated horns imported from Asia in the early 1900s, and not allowable as quarry for a gentleman. One autumn I was in a car filled with huntsmen speeding over the macadam-hard swampland, scouting for deer, and because I wear rather strong glasses I could see farther than my companions. ‘Buck!’ I shouted with some excitement as I spotted a handsome animal with large horns off in the distance. The car slowed down; the men looked; and there was silence as we drove on. I concluded that I had mistaken a doe for a buck, but shortly thereafter I spotted what could only be a buck. To my eyes he was majestic, with a spread of antler exceeding any I had seen before. ‘Buck!’ I cried, this time with firmness. The car stopped; the men looked; and in embarrassed silence drove on. On the third spotting, for I was still seeing animals before the others, I cried, ‘Goddamn it, that’s a buck.’ This time the car did not even bother to slow down, but one of the Spanish gentlemen did whisper, ‘Michener, look at the horns! No gentleman would shoot a beast like that.’ I had been spotting fallow deer, and they didn’t count. After a long silence I saw a herd of perhaps sixty deer, and they were different, red instead of spotted brown, pointed horns instead of palmate. ‘Buck!’ I shouted for the fourth time, and there stood a series of noble beasts with proper horns. My alarm caused some excitement, and the gentleman at my side whispered, ‘Well done. Those are deer.’

  I am not a huntsman, except with camera, so to me the deer-stalking of autumn was less exciting than the subtle transformation of the land. I have never seen Las Marismas in late autumn when the water system of winter is fairly well formed, but I have seen it twice in early autumn when the rains have begun to take effect, and to see lakes quietly come into being, to watch dead rivers creep back to life and above all to see the surface of the land begin to collect its water and sotten itself from concrete into mud, with grasses and flowers gently appearing, is a profound experience. I wouldn’t be able to say when the swamps had fully reestablished themselves, perhaps by the first weeks in December, but at any sta
ge in the process they afford an insight into nature that one cannot obtain elsewhere. How beautiful this transformation is, how simple: the land was barren and a raceway for the wind; it is now a meadow and a home for birds.

  Man of Las Marismas.

  As always, it is the birds that inspire. A cold wind comes down from Madrid and next day all the migrants from Africa have taken flight. Remember, it is hardly five hundred miles from Los Marismas to the first deserts of Africa, and beyond them it is a couple of days’ flying time to the warmer regions in which the birds are accustomed to spend their winters. The bee-eaters, the hoopoe birds and some of the egrets depart, and in their place come the robin and woodcock and widgeon. For a short period the swampland seems relatively depopulated, for the birds that have fled were conspicuous in size and color whereas the newcomers are markedly less brilliant, but after a few weeks of emptiness the damage is repaired, for now the real flocks of ducks begin to appear, so that a lake that was empty one day may have a thousand birds the next, and as the waters replenish themselves, the birds do likewise, and the poetic year of Las Marismas draws to a close.

  It would be difficult to say where the capital of Las Marismas was, because the Guadalquivir cuts the area into two parts, the larger lying on the right bank, the more productive on the left. The right bank contains no major settlement, although, as we shall see, it does have the two major features, a shrine and a palace; the left bank contains one of the most memorable towns in Spain, and so far as I am concerned, it is the capital.

  Sanlúcar de Barrameda is a dirty, low-lying settlement located at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, a seaport partaking of the nature of both the ocean and the river. When I first saw it, only one street was paved, and it poorly. The bullring was built in the ancient Moorish style, with onion-bulb gates and crescent windows. On the small hill that rises in the center of the town a ruined castle perches; it houses a tribe of gypsies and four families of peregrine falcons that fly out each morning to hunt the swamps. In its alleys, incredibly dirty in comparison with the rest of Spain, I saw many more horses than automobiles, and the only industry I could spot besides fishing was the lonely salt bed in which oveflow from the ocean was trapped and allowed to evaporate, leaving behind a brownish deposit, half mud, half salt. In one of the bars a man said, ‘You’re in the best town in Spain. Real spirit here. This is where we make manzanilla.’ If this was true, Sanlúcar deserves more fame than it has received, for manzanilla is one of Spain’s noblest wines, a sherry so pale and dry that it seems hardly to be a liquid but rather a delicate spirit. I had not imagined it as having come from a miserable spot like Sanlúcar.

  But the more I came to know the town, the more attractive it grew. In the old days every treasure boat from the New World was required to drop anchor in these roads so that government officials could go aboard and check the bullion. ‘The men in Sanlúcar you could trust,’ a Spaniard explained, ‘but if the gold once slipped through to Sevilla unweighed, there wasn’t an official who was honest.’ It was from this dreary little port that Christopher Columbus set sail on his third voyage to the New World. He had a difficult time in Sanlúcar, for reasons unconnected with the town, as we shall see shortly. It was also from here that Magellan set sail to circumnavigate the globe, and it was to Sanlúcar that one of his ships returned three years later, but without him.

  Noble families distinguished in Spanish history had their seats in Sanlúcar, though why, I shall never know, and in the middle of the last century the sun-baked little town became rather prominent; Queen Isabel II’s younger sister married a son of the King of France, and when apprehension arose lest he try to gain the Spanish throne, he and his bride were banished to Sanlúcar where they could do no harm. Only a few years ago another noble, with vague claims to the throne, died here in Sanlúcar, and as I wandered through the streets I tried to visualize what royal exiles did to occupy their time in this backwater. In their letters they usually spoke of Sanlúcar with affection; in recent years adventurous American naval officers who work at the submarine base not far away have rented fifteenth-century homes on the hill and have lived there without electricity or running water. ‘The best town in Spain,’ they report unanimously. ‘It has character.’ If I were to live in the south for any period, I think I would elect Sanlúcar. It has quality and lies near Las Marismas.

  In the heart of the swampland there was a building which I scarcely expected to find in such a place, a stone church which served as a shrine for a dramatic cult centering upon a wooden statue of the Virgin, known formally as Nuestra Señora del Rocío and popularly as la Paloma Blanca (the White Dove). Around the church has grown up an extraordinary village of some six or eight tree-lined streets with cottages on each side, so that the place looks almost as much English as it does Spanish. The village is unusual in that it is empty for fifty-one weeks each year; it is the fifty-second week that counts.

  To appreciate the significance of El Rocío one must go far back in history to a time prior to 711, when the Visigoths still ruled Spain after having converted it to Christianity. There must have been in those days many churches in Sevilla and other settlements along the edges of Las Marismas and each contained a stone or wooden statue of the Virgin, who even then was popular in Spain. In 711 the Muslims invaded from Africa and within a few months overran the southern areas of the country and threatened the others. Then Christians, terrified by this unknown enemy who crushed any army that confronted him, grabbed the statues from their churches and buried them in remote spots to protect them from profanation by the infidel. As it turned out, their apprehensions were unjustified because Islam, even though it sought converts, preferred that conquered peoples remain Christian, for if they did extra taxes could be levied. Thus churches were not only permitted to continue but were encouraged to do so.

  When the relatively benevolent nature of the new order was discovered, many of the buried statues were dug up and returned to their niches, but others remained where they were and were forgotten. Perhaps the man who had buried a given statue was the one who embraced the new religion when he saw that it was economically profitable to do so; if he had converted, it was unlikely that he would dig up a statue relating to his old faith. At any rate, when four or five centuries of Muslim occupation had passed and Christians began regaining their lost territories, it became fairly common for shepherds, who lived under the open sky year after year with little to occupy them, to uncover by accident in some remote spot one of these long-buried Virgins. Word of his discovery would flash across the countryside and before long would reach the bishop in the capital. Investigations would be launched, but by this time the simple act of uncovering the statue would have been clothed in heroic or spiritual garb. ‘For three nights running Juan the Shepherd saw a light hovering above a rock.’ Or ‘While Tomás was tending his sheep he heard a voice speaking to him.’ Thus a miracle was born.

  In my travels through Spain, I was to come upon at least eight of these miraculous appearances of the Virgin, but none with a more appealing history than the finding of the El Rocío statue in Las Marismas. More than a century had passed since the area had passed from Muslim control to Christian, and one day a hunter from the town of Almonte was looking for game when his dogs assumed a point before a thicket. He verified that there was no game in the brush, but the dogs continued their point, so he investigated and found hidden in the hollow of a tree a statue of the Virgin. He abandoned his hunt, took the image in his arms and set out for Almonte, but with his burden he became weary and fell asleep, only to awaken and discover that the image had disappeared. He returned to the tree and was overjoyed to find that the statue had returned there and was once more in the hollow, where he left her to report the miracle in Almonte. A group of villagers, doubting his story, walking the long distance to the tree to see for themselves, and when they entered the thicket they found the statue hiding in the tree. Again they tried to carry her to Almonte and again she insisted upon returning to the tree, whereupon t
he men ran back to the village and informed their priest, who explained that by this gesture she meant to tell them that it was there that she wished to be worshiped. Accordingly, they raised a hermitage on that spot, which accounts for the remote location of so famous a shrine. She was at first called, after the place of the apparition, Nuestra Señora de la Rocina, a name which was later altered by the villagers, no one knows exactly when or how, to the simple and poetic Nuestra Señora del Rocío (Our Lady of the Dew).

  As for the village that has grown up about it, a full-scale settlement with many cottages wholly furnished for one week’s occupancy a year, the fame of the Virgin of El Rocío became so widespread that each spring an enormous pilgrimage is organized throughout southern Spain, when families in traditional two-wheeled carts decorated with banners and flowers and drawn by oxen similarly decorated take the long trek to El Rocío to pay homage to the stubborn Virgin who knew where she wanted her home to be. In special years as many as eighty thousand pilgrims ride over dusty roads to enjoy as wild a weekend as Spain has to offer.

  Unfortunately, I never saw El Rocío in fiesta, but friends introduced me to Don Luis Ybarra González, the forty-year-old son of a distinguished Sevilla family that specialized in all things relating to olives. Their commercial empire became so extensive that they were required to put together their own shipping company, and this in turn encouraged them to enter collateral fields. Señor Ybarra was a well-known amateur naturalist with whom it was a pleasure to roam Las Marismas, except that he entertained so many foreign visitors, each speaking a different language, that in self-defense he referred to birds and animals only by their Latin names. ‘The only sensible way,’ he told me. ‘Birds are the same everywhere. It’s the countries they visit that change.’

  On the banks of the Guadalquivir rice planters work at one of the relatively high-paying occupations of Las Marismas.