Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Gradually, as I visited him more often, I became aware of a quiet young man who seemed to be sharing the apartment and to be decorating it with photographs of high quality. For long periods, when the talk was on subjects in which I had little interest, I would study the photographs, excellent works in very dark blacks and pure whites, and I became convinced that the man who had taken them understood Spain.

  The quiet young fellow with well-fitted suits and conservative haircut was Robert Vavra, from California, a nature photographer. He had been working for some years on a book of text and pictures describing in detail the life and death of the fighting bull, and from the first moment I saw his work in sequence I was convinced that here was a man who could photograph the movement and sense of animals; but I was equally impressed by his shots of people. He seemed to catch the spirit of things in repose; there was little artiness about him and I began to look forward to my visits to the apartment: I wanted to see what Vavra had done recently.

  There followed a chain of unforgettable days in Las Marismas, tracking bulls, watching wildlife and marking the migration of birds to Africa. It was on such trips that I renewed my acquaintance with the bee-eater, that spectacular bird which was to become so important to me when I worked in Israel. Here, too, I saw my first hoopoe bird, which would be even more important.

  Then one day, as I studied a batch of Vavra’s photographs and listened to his plans for a series of children’s books in color, a project which was happily come to fulfillment, I happened to see a chance arrangement of some twenty or thirty fine photographs depicting the people and life of Spain: they were not the usual body of material, for there were no cathedrals, no medieval houses and no flamenco dancers. There was simply the look of Spain, static and yet persuasively alive, and in that moment not far from the Court of the Orange Trees this book was born.

  Because I was burdened with a heavy schedule that would keep me busy for some years, I could not then speak to Vavra of my incipient plans; but when my work was completed I went back to Sevilla, and in that same quiet and delightful period between Holy Week and carnival, when the gypsies were again preparing to trade horses on the riverbank, I proposed that we do this book together.

  John Fulton and Antonio Ordóñez at the entrance to a small-town bullring. They wear the traditional Andalusian cowboy costume used in non-formal fights.

  I remember the commission we agreed upon: ‘Vavra will go over Spain guided only by his own eye, completely indifferent as to what Michener may write or think or prefer. Shoot a hundred of the very finest pictures he can find and make them his interpretation of Spain. If he can succeed in this, the pictures will fit properly into any text. But Vavra must avoid trying to guess what someone else wants. Make others see what he has seen.’

  For the capacity to see a foreign country is extremely rare; hardly one person in a thousand can do this, so that all the vast sums of money spent by Pan American and Air France in their enticing advertisements—‘See Lebanon. See Egypt. See Brazil’—are largely wasted, because the people who fly forth to see these places rarely do. Vavra can see.

  When the religious parades have ended, when the horse fair on which the spring activity originally centered has started to convene, and when old friends have had a chance to renew acquaintances during the time of relative rest, the real Sevilla fair, as most people think of it today, convenes. Now the night clapping begins to echo through the city.

  In a spacious park lying at the southern edge of Sevilla, and within easy walking distance from the center of town, three separate but connected areas have been staked out, each the size of a small pueblo. For the next week these three areas will become the heart of Sevilla to charm the visitor as few other fairs in Europe can.

  In the first area, improbable as it seems, five different circuses, each complete in itself, have gathered from various parts of the continent. There’s a Swiss circus, with famous clowns, an Italian one, a brilliant Chinese one featuring acrobats and Oriental girls, a Spanish one and, best of all, a large German circus with four different wild-animal acts.

  To one who loves circuses, the Sevilla fair is unique: one can spend three days moving from one tent to the next and even then he will not be able to see all the acts. There is something quaint and even nineteenth century about these European circuses; occasionally a family will work in one for forty or fifty years, and no effort is made, as in America, to keep all the women beautiful. In these tents one sees whole families growing old surrounded by events they love. For example, I have never seen another animal act so utterly delightful as the one in the German circus in which a hefty woman in her late fifties, dressed in bespangled tights, put a cageful of tigers through their paces. It was charming in the way sadistic old fairy tales are charming.

  In the area adjoining the circuses noise is king. Here you will find more noise than the human ear can absorb or the sane man imagine, because this is the carnival space, filled with rides, games, shooting galleries, half a hundred outdoor restaurants, loop-the-loops, trips to Mars and a near-score of other rides. Apparently it is obligatory for each business to own a microphone and five or six of the loudest loudspeakers. ‘Come here!’ bellow the shills. ‘Mothers, take your children through the mysteries of outer space!’ The call of ‘¡Churros!’ is popular, for these greasy fritters served laden with sugar, are the delicacy of the fair. But no one cry predominates, for wherever you stand you are assailed by at least twenty loudspeakers, relatively close to your ears.

  One night I took a friend from America to the middle of the carnival area, and he stood in admiration at the frenzy around him. ‘The Spaniards are to be congratulated,’ he said. ‘They’ve discovered noise incarnate.’

  Yet the area is not vulgar. It too has a controlled Spanish charm and a much wider variety of booths at which to spend money than I have been able to indicate. Merely to stroll through the lanes and sample food at each of the booths would require, I suppose, a couple of days, and to ride on each of the wheels and whips would take another two. The section is clean, brightly lighted and constitutes a little fair by itself, a swirling concentration of revelry.

  It operates, of course, twenty-four hours a day. At four one morning I wandered among the tents, checking to see how many features I had missed on previous visits, and I came upon a large field jammed with nothing but trucks and wheeled caravans that had hauled this weird collection of rides and restaurants to Sevilla. Painted red and green and gold and blue, the trucks huddled together like a collection of bizarre animals assembled from all parts of Europe, and in almost every cab some man or woman was sleeping. Now when I think of the carnival part of Sevilla’s fair I remember not the noise but rather that silent, slumbering collection of gaudy vehicles.

  In spite of the richness of the circuses and the flamboyance of the carnival, it is the third section of the park that captivates most people, and it is true that of a hundred foreigners visiting Sevilla for the spring festivities, a good ninety see only the area I am about to describe. They miss the Holy Week, the horse fair, the circuses, the carnival and even the bullfights, but what they do see makes the trip worthwhile.

  This part of the fair has been laid out along a grid of unusually wide streets, the main ones forming a massive capital H with top and bottom closed. Along the sides of the streets forming this enormous H, and along lesser contributary streets as well, the citizens of Sevilla have been accustomed for the past half-century to build each spring small wooden structures whose walls and roofs consist of brightly striped canvas. They are called casetas (little houses), and each has a wooden floor, electric lights, running water, perhaps a refrigerator, a table and at least two dozen chairs. Each caseta stands jammed against its neighbors, and to see a quarter of a mile of such little houses, each with its distinctive and gaudy color system, is delightful to the eye.

  It is in these casetas that the well-to-do people of Sevilla will spend most of their time during the fair, returning to their homes only in time to ca
tch a few hours’ sleep between five and eleven in the morning.

  What happens in the casetas? When the front canvas wall has been rolled up so that passers-by can see within, specially invited guests stop by for refreshments, drinks and light conversation. Entertainment is provided by amateurs and by troupes of noisy flamenco dancers imported from across the river in Triana. With music and dancing, with sherry wine and churros, with laughter and flirtation the long nights drift by. Young couples sometimes wander away from the caseta to the carnival area or even to the circus, but by one in the morning most are back where they belong. A special feature of the casetas is the presence of children between the ages of four and twelve, beautifully dressed in folk costumes and dancing flamenco patterns until two or three in the morning. It is incredible how much music there is in these lines of gaily colored casetas: one night at two o’clock I made a casual count and came up with sixty-five different orchestras.

  And the songs! In one tour of the casetas I heard amateur performances covering the complete range of flamenco, from the so-called deep songs to the little songs. One jazzy folk song intermixed with the flamenco had a standard opening verse and a rather startling conclusion:

  If a brunette is worth a duro

  Any blonde is worth two.

  But I go to the low-priced love,

  The love of my heart.

  My Virgin of Marcarena is brunette,

  Oh, she’s a real brunette!

  She comes from Sevilla

  And is sweeter than the morning star.

  When the real morning star appears the father of the family rolls down the canvas wall facing the street. A son runs off to summon a horse-drawn carriage. The gypsies are paid off and the refrigerator is locked. The tired family piles into the carriage and drives off through the morning twilight. From the carnival area nearby come volumes of sound, for the rides and restaurants are still busy, and as the family rides homeward through the darkened streets they hear the sound of muffled clapping coming from other groups who are walking home. At dusk next evening the family will return to its caseta, and for a whole week this procedure will be repeated. During the fair Sevilla gets little sleep.

  In addition to the small family casetas, at which no stranger is welcomed unless specifically invited, so that many Americans spend an entire week at the fair without ever being inside one, most companies doing business in Sevilla operate their own large casetas, and some of these are public. By paying a small fee one can sit at a table, listen to professional flamenco and drink beer or champagne.

  Among these large casetas stands one with special importance. It belongs to the Aero Club and its membership is so highly restricted that it constitutes, during the season of the fair, the focus of Spanish society. Here congregate those especially handsome people who form the apex of Spanish life: the duques, the condes, the grandees of Spain. And they are a forbidding, impressive lot, perhaps the most conspicuous nobility operating today.

  In daylight hours the side curtains of the Aero Club are rolled up, so that passers-by can observe the great figures taking a light lunch or drinking their Tío Pepe along with a handful of roasted nuts. Condesas, accompanied by leading bankers, sit at tables looking out into the street; duquesas share their tables with famous bullfighters; at one table it’s all pretty women and racing-car drivers. At night the curtains are lowered and two different bands alternate from six in the evening till four in the morning. During two fairs I held honorary tickets to the Aero Club, and I would judge the Spanish leaders I met to be among the most carefully groomed people I have ever seen. It is difficult, as one observes their old-fashioned gentility, to believe that they are part of this century.

  To observe this manifestation of Spanish society one does not require a ticket to the Aero Club, entrance to that establishment costing some forty dollars. Each day at noon an informal parade starts through the wide streets of the H and in it participate most of the leaders of Sevilla society. As twelve o’clock approaches, in all parts of Sevilla horses are saddled up and handsome young men appear dressed in formal riding habit. They wear fine jackets with five buttons on the sleeve, dark riding trousers covered by large hand-tooled leather chaps, white ruffled shirts with lace at the throat and front, and flat, wide-brimmed hats. When they have mounted they adjust a pillion behind them, from whose rear projects a small leather handle which passes under the horse’s tail. It is on this pillion that the gentleman’s girl companion will ride, perched sideways across the rear of the horse, one hand passing about the man’s waist, the other gripping the leather handle. Since the girls are dressed in resplendent gypsy costume, gold and blue and red predominating, the couples form attractive images as they ride forth. When three or four hundred begin to converge in bright sunlight on the caseta area, a parade of lovely dimensions is under way. For some three hours they ride back and forth along the tree-lined streets, halting now and then to chat with fellow riders, dismounting occasionally to visit with friends in the casetas and displaying to good effect both their fine costumes and their well-trained horses. The girls resemble a convocation of butterflies, they are so colorful.

  At the same time other couples are about to join the parade, and these are much different. The men’s suits are more subdued. The horses’ garnishings are more expensive, as are the horses themselves. And the women, who this time will ride alone, each on her own animal, are stunning beyond compare. They are the gentry, the social leaders from the Aero Club, and all are dressed in formal black or charcoal gray or very dark brown. The women’s suits are of whipcord; their hats are slimmer and flatter than the men’s; their heavy leather chaps are apt to be trimmer than those we saw before. They ride with the reins lightly held in the fingers of the left hand, their right hand turned in against the waist, and invariably their hair is done with austere plainness. With little or no make-up they ride forth, as handsome a group of women as one can find. In some strange way, in their somber mien, they make the pillion riders, despíte their rainbow colors, seem drab.

  This mother-and-daughter fruit-selling team expresses the gracia of Sevilla.

  But even these beautiful women are overshadowed by a phenomenon of this fair: ornate carriages pulled by two or four beribboned horses, driven by two coachmen in antique costume and bearing four or six girls in colorful dress, accompanied sometimes by gentlemen. These delightful carriages, looking like some procession that had driven into Sevilla from the eighteenth century, ease themselves into the files of horsemen, and around the streets of the H they go, back and forth for three or four hours. Sometimes as many as a hundred carriages, each of different size and quality, move along under the trees, the occupants laughing and visiting with their friends; half the parade moves clockwise, the other half counter-clockwise, so that on any one tour, if that is the proper word, one meets half the paraders, and since it is permissible to reverse one’s direction after having made a couple of circuits, by the time the huge promenade has ended, one has met up with most of the participants.

  I cannot describe how lovely and quiet and satisfying this parade under the broad trees and along the casetas is. Even if one has no horse and saddle of his own, nor access to the expensive carriages, he can still join the parade, for at any corner he can hire a kind of horse-drawn taxi-cab and for surprisingly little money ride back and forth along the majestic streets of the H. Where do they come from, these hundreds of carriages for hire? How can a modest city like Sevilla find so many horses?

  Whenever a horseman reins up before a caseta owned by his friends, courtesy requires that both he and his lady be handed small glasses of sherry. Without dismounting, the riders drink, return the glasses and thank their hosts. Once I was left in care of a caseta while the family joined the riders in a carriage, and not then knowing the custom of the sherry I stood by while a particularly vivacious couple reined up before me. They waited. I waited. Then, in disgust, the man snapped in Spanish, ‘At this damned caseta the hospitality flows like lead.’ I understood eno
ugh to catch his meaning and in my broken Spanish asked what had gone wrong. When he realized that I was a stranger he jumped from his horse, showed me where the sherry was and flagged down all his friends. That night he took me on a tour of his favorite casetas, and we hired our own band of Triana gypsies, and the boisterous flamenco we provided with our company of fifty is still spoken of.

  A feature of the parade is that select band of carriages which are pulled by eight horses, the postillions being dressed in robber costumes from the eighteenth century. Not only are the carriages worthy of respect and the horses a delight because of their matched appearance, but a ninth horse in front seems not to be attached to the carriage in any way, nor to the other horses. He moves by himself, guided by invisible wires attached to his bit and by words called by the driver, who rides a considerable distance behind. It is something to see such a carriage coming down the avenue, surrounded by a hundred riders and meeting dozens of other carriages, with the lead horse quietly picking his way without apparent assistance.

  Thus the great fair of Sevilla continues, day after day. Toward dawn on the last night I stood at the entrance to the Aero Club as members of the nobility departed for the last time, and in the street stood an old man leading a donkey. He was not the kind who would own a caseta, nor a horse to ride in the daily procession, nor even a job in one of the carnivals. He was a rural peasant come in with his donkey to see the sights, and as he watched the ending of the fair he sang: