Iberia

by James A. Michener

  I asked, ‘Are you buying or selling?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Where are your horses?’

  ‘Mine?’ he laughed. ‘I have no horses. I’m a comprador [purchaser].’ He went on to explain that he made his living by attending fairs and bringing suspicious farmers who wanted to buy into contact with other suspicious farmers who wanted to sell. ‘The Spanish farmer is a suspicious creature. He’ll never trust himself or another farmer, so he has to trust a gypsy. He hires me to do his bargaining for him.’

  I had been with Antonio Suero for some time when he was approached by two fine-looking young farmers from a village near Almendralejo. José Gallardo and his brother Juan farmed a profitable wine and olive plantation of a thousand acres. ‘We already have three tractors,’ José told me, ‘but we’d like to buy a good mule to do the close-up work.’

  ‘Why don’t you just buy the mule?’

  The Gallardos looked at me as if I were insane. ‘Us?

  Buy a mule?’ I judged I had offended their pundonor and wondered if I should apologize, but José said, ‘A Spaniard can’t go to another Spaniard and argue with him about the price of a mule. Well, it just couldn’t be done. Nor would the man with a mule to sell want to haggle with me. It would be beneath his dignity. So we hire Señor Suero here to do it for us.’

  At this point José and the gypsy withdrew to discuss terms, and I asked Juan, ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘Suero? He’s famous for being the best bargainer in these parts. We have to trust him. Watch.’

  The gypsy, having learned what the Gallardo brothers wanted and what they would pay, left them and ran like a young boy from one group of men to another, waving his rattan cane and cursing. Once I heard him bellow, ‘For that mule? My friend, I have two gentlemen who know mules. I’d be ashamed to take that animal before them.’ Before long he came running back, waving his cane in the air. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘I’ve found the finest mule ever to reach Sevilla.’

  He brought with him an old, suspicious, mean-tempered farmer in a broad hat and chaps who was leading what I took to be a very average mule, but as I watched, Suero put on one of the finest bits of acting I was to see in Spain. He laughed, he wept, he cursed, he pleaded, he cajoled and he swore as heaven was his witness that this was a good mule and that the price was just, but apparently he had not yet received a firm price from the seller, for as the bargaining proceeded the latter changed his price, whereupon Suero began reviling him as a thief for trying to sell this spavined beast to a decent man. Then, as soon as a firm price was determined, he became the seller again. Taking José Gallardo’s hands in his he became a wise and understanding father. ‘Believe me, Don José, I knew your father, I knew your uncle, and fine men they were. How many animals did I find for them, tell me. And did I ever recommend one that was faulty? Take my word for it, Don José, you’ll search this feria on your knees before you find a mule as good as this one.’

  According to the tradition of the feria the gypsy’s job was to make the Gallardo brothers produce a hundred-peseta note, which he would then hand as a token to the seller, and the deal would be closed on the word of the two men. Suero, therefore, took José’s hand in his right hand, the dealer’s in his left and brought the two together, pleading with José to produce a hundred pesetas as a token. Tears came to his eyes; his voice broke; he could only mumble; then he began to speak like a machine gun and it seemed to me that about ninety percent of what he said was irrelevant. Slowly Gallardo produced a note and placed it among the four clasped hands, at which Antonio Suero gave a deep sigh.

  At the great horse fair a young man studies a possible purchase.

  ‘You have bought yourself a great mule,’ he said, and with this he turned his attention to a farmer who had been tugging at his sleeve. To my surprise, it was the suspicious wine grower from Cádiz who had been haggling with the boy over the donkey. Apparently the two had remained locked in an impasse and now sought adjudication from Antonio Suero Varga. ‘Coming, coming!’ the gypsy cried as he ran off, waving his rattan cane, to solve this new problem. Later he would return to collect his commission on the Gallardo purchase.

  It was during the horse fair some years ago that I stumbled upon a rewarding acquaintance. I had ridden a bus out to the Guadalquivir to spend the day with the gypsies and had eaten, at one of their kiosks, a mixture of grain, chopped meat and gravy, and now I returned on foot to the heart of the city. I rested for some time in the Court of the Orange Trees, using the stone slabs provided there, and then went into that fine street along which the Holy Week procession ends.

  Spanish police are notoriously abrupt with pedestrians who try to cross other than at traffic lights, so I waited in line for the green to show, because I wanted to spend the rest of the day wandering in the area by the bullring. I happened to look across the street at the people waiting on the other side and saw there two handsome young men whom I judged to be in their late twenties. One of them, a tall slim fellow with unusually fine features, I was sure I had seen somewhere before; these were the days when Hollywood was beginning to produce many films in Spain and I supposed he was an actor. Then it came to me. I had seen his picture in an American paper. And his name, for some curious reason, leaped to mind. He was John Fulton Short. And he came from Philadelphia. And he was a bullfighter.

  We met in the middle of the street and I said, ‘Aren’t you John Fulton?’ which was the name he fought under. He nodded and I introduced myself. He nodded again in much the manner that a Spanish grandee nods to the baker peddling bread from a barrow. ‘Good luck, Matador,’ I said, using the traditional Spanish phrase, and we crossed over, each headed his own way.

  I learned later that the young man with him that day was Jerry Boyd, an aspirant writer from America who happened to be married to the daughter of one of my favorite artists, the fine Jewish Shakespearean actor from Budapest and London, Abraham Sofaer. It was Boyd, I later learned, who told Fulton, ‘My God! If that’s who he said he was, he’s from Philadelphia too. Maybe we better see if he’d be interested.’ John Fulton, in the manner of matadors, knew nothing of books and had no special desire right then to meet anyone from Philadelphia, for he was conspicuously down on his luck, but he allowed Boyd to double him back, and after a short walk, for I was moving slowly, they overtook me near the bullring.

  ‘Are you from Philadelphia?’ Fulton asked. I replied that I was and he gave me his card: ‘John Fulton, Matador de Novillos, Hernando Colón, 30, Sevilla, España.’ He smiled and said, ‘Why don’t you drop around?’ But Jerry Boyd intercepted the card before I could take it and asked, ‘You did say your name was Michener, didn’t you?’ When I nodded, he asked, ‘And you do write books?’ I nodded again and he let me have the card, and it was through this chance meeting that I embarked upon those adventures of the spirit which led to the writing of this book.

  John Fulton, art student and would-be matador from Philadelphia, had a small second-floor apartment on a side street which debouched into the Court of the Orange Trees, and here, during a period of some six or seven years, came most of the Americans who got as far south as Sevilla. Maharajas stopped here and dozens of actors making movies in the area and writers and newspapermen and artists from England. The hospitality that John Fulton extended during the years was astronomical and he offered it while being stone-broke and trying to make his way in one of the toughest professions in the world. To be a bullfighter in Spain requires from even the Spanish youth an endurance that most men cannot visualize; but to be an American trying to crack that vicious and closed society demands absolute courage.

  How Fulton supported himself during those bleak and wonderful years, I do not know. Most of us who trespassed on his hospitality managed in some way or other to leave behind donations: one brought the wine, another anchovies, another the cheese. Hemingway made his contribution by check; a delightful woman from Cleveland made hers by throwing memorable flamenco parties at which she gave John a fee for his profe
ssional help; I made mine by commissioning Fulton to paint me a picture, for I judged that he had more chance to succeed as an artist than as a matador.

  I was right. He was an excellent artist and subsequently made a name for himself as an illustrator of children’s books; for his paintings he also acquired a distinguished list of patrons, including Adlai Stevenson and the Baroness von Trapp. But whenever I talked with him about the desirability of his attending art school somewhere and applying himself to that profession, he replied, ‘I am going to be a matador.’ His dedication never faltered, in spite of doubters like me, and L watched with sorrow as he beat his head in futile rage against the indifference of Spanish promoters. This handsome young fellow from Philadelphia might want to be a bullfighter, but the impresarios of Spain did not intend to help.

  Those were marvelous days in Sevilla. In the afternoon we ate at a small restaurant called El Mesón (The Inn), where substantial food was served at reasonable prices in an atmosphere of bullfight posters and butchered pigs hanging from the ceiling. Food in Sevilla during the spring festival is apt to be dismal; some meals served in the major hotels are shocking, but at El Mesón we ate well. It was there I first tasted three fine Spanish items which together made a meal. First we had a tall pitcher of sangría, a drink made of harsh red wine, cognac, seltzer water, quartered oranges, lemon juice, some pineapple squares and red cherries, sweetened with not too much sugar and served with lots of cracked ice and cinnamon. It was delicious, and travelers who learn to like its different taste prefer it to other Spanish drinks.

  For our second course we had gazpacho, an ice-cold soup which can be compared to nothing. If you ever travel in Spain and come upon a restaurant that serves gazpacho, take it, because no other dish in the country will you remember with such affection. Once when I had been out of Spain for some years, a neighbor found in a gourmet shop in Princeton a shelf of canned gazpacho, but since she could not be sure whether it was any good or not, she bought only one can, plopped it in her refrigerator and when it was ice-cold, called us over. When she served it with some chopped onion, cubes of cucumber and bits of tomato, tears of joy came to my eyes, something she had not been able to achieve with flamenco records or colored slides of Spain, and next day I drove all the way to Princeton to buy up the remaining cans. For gazpacho is Spain. The cook at the Mesón told me how to make it.

  Take two stale rolls and reduce them to crumbs. Soak in water until they form a thick paste and set aside. Into your blender put two pounds of tomatoes, one large pared cucumber, two large green peppers, a quarter-cup of pimientos and two small sweet onions. Season with pinches of salt and pepper. Now comes the tricky part. To this mixture you must add olive oil and vinegar, which are the heart of the soup. A Spaniard will use one cup of the former, a tablespoon of the latter. Americans, of whom I am certainly one, prefer not more than a quarter-cup of oil and four tablespoons of vinegar. At any rate, reduce all ingredients except the bread to a liquid, then mix in the bread by hand and put the result in a covered wooden bowl and place in the refrigerator for six hours. Serve ice-cold and pass a serving tray containing separate dishes of chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and small cubes of bread. No part of this strange recipe sounds very good, but taken together and properly blended, these ingredients produce a soup which is as distinctive as vichyssoise.

  For dessert we had membrillo and Manchego cheese. The latter is the only good cheese Spain produces, a salty, coarse-grained product from the Don Quixote country. When eaten along with membrillo it makes a spicy dish, for membrillo is a grainy gelatin-like dessert made of quince. It is both sweet and acid and has a delicious chewy quality. Burnt orange in color, it is served in generous slabs as if it were a cheese, and at the Mesón was extra good, brought in from a small town near Córdoba which specializes in its manufacture; I believe that it too can sometimes be bought in the United States, but I haven’t tasted it yet. However, the waiter warned me, ‘Be careful where you buy your membrillo. Some of those other restaurants make theirs of sweet potato.’

  At night in this in-between period we would rout out a near-blind flamenco singer, Gafas (Spectacles) they called him, and in the old days he could chant flamenco with as great an artistry as anyone in Spain, but now his voice was gone. We used to rent an attic in the medieval part of town, import a set of dancers and drag in a keg of wine, some bread, cheese and anchovies, and dance till morning. It was with Gafas singing in his cracked, wine-heavy voice; which no one could call beautiful, that I learned his version of that haunting song whose music I had first heard in Valencia years before, ‘Petenera,’ about the forbidden Jewess who brought disaster to her village and herself:

  Where are you going, beautiful Jewess,

  All dressed up and at such an hour?

  I am going to meet Rebeco,

  Who is now in the synagogue.

  Whoever named you Petenera

  Didn’t know how to name you.

  You should have been named

  The perdition of men.

  If you hear the bells,

  Don’t ask who has died,

  Because you will be told

  By your own remorse.

  One would like to know the origin of that last verse. Is it an authentic Spanish statement anticipating John Donne? I suspect it’s a late addition reflecting the popularity of Ernest Hemingway.

  Whenever Gafas sang ‘Petenera’ to the rather banal music that accompanies it, I felt that I was in medieval Spain, as I do today when I hear it. In time this unimportant little song, to which each singer had his own dozen verses, including usually the three given above, came to represent for me the best of flamenco, and even though it is not one of the great songs, I would rather hear it sung well by a peasant voice like that of Gafas, tired and world-weary at the end of the day, with the guitar flying in mournful accents, than the finest formal chanting I have so far heard. It is in a very real sense my particular song of Spain; in the years when I worked submerged in Jewish materials I would often recall its phrases, and they came to me not in the syllables of the various recordings I had purchased, nor in the poetry, which is of good quality, but rather in the cracked and reedy voice of Gafas as he sang in the attics of Sevilla in those good days. Shortly after I heard him for the last time he died, leaving behind no recording of his ‘Petenera.’

  At John Fulton’s there was much talk of art, but as I have said, I got nowhere trying to convince him that he should apply himself to painting. In his apartment when I knew it, one found Mexican matadors, Chilean painters, Minnesota architects and Vassar philosophy majors in Spain for their junior year. The visitor who gave me the most trouble was a Danish schoolteacher from Copenhagen; she was in her late twenties and no beauty, but she had a wonderfully soft quality about her and obviously loved children, to whom she imparted her strong sense of values. She taught, if I remember correctly, chemistry, which seemed an odd subject for a quiet girl like her, but she explained, There’s an unusual need for chemists today. Especially in Denmark. And those of us who have any skill in the field are kept busy.’ I judged that her pupils received good instruction.

  The white dove of Spanish poetry rests easily on the shoulder of the arrogant gypsy.

  But one meets many schoolteachers in Spain. What set this admirable young lady apart was the fact that on a previous vacation she had conceived a grand passion for a young Welshman who, like John Fulton, was determined to become a bullfighter. The fellow had no prospects whatever, insofar as I could determine, yet he hung on, year after year. At the beginning of each summer his Copenhagen schoolteacher appeared on the scene, with her savings from the term before, and together they moved from one fair to the next, she blond and he swarthy, clinging to the fiction that one day he would become a great fighter, one day they would marry. The illusion kept them going, and I was with them at the end of one season when the little Welshman actually got an invitation to fight in the fair being put together by an impoverished village.

  It wou
ld be more accurate to say that he had been invited to participate in the fair, because it wasn’t going to be a formal bullfight; the Welshman would be welcomed if he paid for his suit, for his assistants, for a horse to be ridden by his picador and for part of the bullring expenses. In return he would receive no wages at all but would be allowed to test himself against an overage, overweight, wily old bull who had already in previous fights sent two men to the hospital.

  This offer presented a serious dilemma to the schoolteacher. Obviously the funds required of the Welshman could be provided only by her, and if she laid out this substantial amount she felt that she ought at least to attend, especially since there was a strong likelihood that her matador would be wounded, if not killed. But to attend the fracas, for that’s what it shaped up to be, would require her to miss the opening of her school in Copehagen. She asked me what I thought she ought to do, and I, as a conservative who used to teach school myself, taking it very seriously, said without hesitation, ‘You take the next plane to Denmark.’

  Apparently I brought her to her senses, for she put down the money for the fight, canceled her flight to Denmark and accompanied her hero to the village festival. On the way she explained, ‘They can’t fire me. Chemistry teachers are hard to come by.’ I asked if her school board knew that she was spending her vacations in Spain, living with a bullfighter. She replied, ‘I suppose they know. At least the children do. They think it’s rather sporting.’

  We got to the village, a Welsh bullfighter with a Danish manager, a Portuguese assistant, a Mexican picador and an American cheerleader. As so often happens, there was no fight; the local impresario had collected funds to buy the two bulls and had then absconded.

  It was in this world of broken promises, venal arrangements and utter corruption of all principle that John Fulton struggled. How he maintained his good humor I will never know, for he was humiliated by the numbers. One, promise him a fight. Two, wheedle him into designing the handbills. Three, make him agree to fight overage bulls. Four, make him employ my brother-in-law as his picador. Five, postpone everything. Six, abandon everything. Year after year this continued; year after year either he told me or wrote me: ‘I will be a matador.’