Joseph Ayok
I suppose that most visitors to Barcelona sooner or later make the trip to Montserrat (Serrated Mountain) but, paradoxically, few ever see it. They see the famous monastery, of course, and the shrine beloved of all Catalans, and they take one of the numerous téléphénque rides to the tops of peaks, but the mountain itself, one of the most exquisite in the world, they do not see, for this can be done properly only by going far north of Barcelona to the ancient town of Vich, which is worth a trip in itself if only to see the church decorated in gold murals by José María Sert. From Vich, whose hotel has a restaurant of notable reputation, one drops back south to where Route N-141 cuts off toward the mountains, and as one drives down this twisting road he comes to a spot from which Montserrat in all its wonder stands forth against the southern sky.
The mountain is prodigious, a chain of sawtooth peaks that resemble the Tetons of Wyoming except that the former are not so tall, only 4072 feet against the Grand Teton’s 13,747 (of course, Montserrat starts from sea level whereas the base of the Tetons is well above it). The peaks of Montserrat are more compact, and if one can use the word in this sense, more artistic. They blaze in the sky like tongues of flame, not one or two peaks but scores of them thrown together to make a jagged pattern. When I saw Montserrat from this ideal vantage point I’d already seen most of the world’s famous mountains, but for an assembly of peaks of limited scope I had seen nothing to surpass this group.
The ascent from the north is also more exciting, I think, than the traditional approach from the south, which is how one climbs if he starts from Barcelona, but by either path the narrow road is magnificent and the final turn which throws one onto a small plateau just under the summit of the mountain is surprising, for unexpectedly one finds himself face to face with a series of massive buildings wedged into crevices below the rocky spires that rise above them like a crown. I had expected to end my climb at a shrine; instead I found enough recent buildings to house a small town and was amazed to think that all these rocks and timbers and steel girders had been lugged up this steep mountain.
Obviously, centuries had been required to build this complex. As long ago as the year 700, religious hermits had established themselves in these caves and had launched the legend of pure men hiding in inaccessible mountains. Their isolation ended after the year 880, when shepherds found in one of the caves a beautiful wooden statue of the Virgin, dark of face and majestic in manner; she had been hidden there when Muslims overran Cataluña. A Church commission affirmed that she was the last statue carved by St. Luke. She made the mountain famous; Goethe and Schiller visited the monastery that developed in her honor, as did innumerable kings and cardinals. Throughout Europe, Montserrat became identified with the legendary Monsalvat, the hiding place of the Holy Grail as depicted in Wagner’s Parsifal, so that pilgrims had a double reason for climbing the mountain; even today the path is crammed with devout travelers who know that if they can complete this journey, some special blessing will be accorded them.
Nature forms in La Sagrada Familia.
Even if one were not religious, an expedition to Montserrat would be a rewarding experience, for when the buildings are reached the day has only begun; from them téléphériques swing upward to the tips of the highest peaks, from which amazing views of Cataluña can be seen, even as far as Las Islas Baleares (the Balearic Islands). There are also picnic grounds tucked away at high altitudes and trails across the plateaus to needles which can be climbed if one has ropes and crampons.
Montserrat is the shrine of Cataluña; here couples come each day of the year to be married, a custom which became additionally popular during the years when the Catalan language was proscribed, for at Montserrat the wedding service was conducted in Catalan, no matter what the Madrid bureaucrats decreed. As one middle-aged woman told me, ‘I wouldn’t feel married if the priest had done it in Spanish.’
But Montserrat has always been, and still is, primarily a monastery. In many-tiered buildings, whose multiple windows, set against rocks, reminded me of the Buddhist lamaseries of Tibet. Benedictine monks maintain the old traditions of prayer and work. It is they who occupy this plateau set among spires; they operate the stores and collect the profits from the téléphériques. They live far removed from the problems of Spain’s ordinary life and seek a perfection which not even the average monk living elsewhere could attain. Says the official guide: ‘The monks’ chief occupation is reciting the Mass, and this they try to perform with the utmost care in every particular, so that it may be effective to the Glory of God and for the good of the Church.’
José María Lassaletta holds a photograph of his brother Luis, killed in Africa by a Gabon viper, whose skull Don José holds in his right hand.
As I traveled in and out of Barcelona, and especially when I went to high points like El Tibidabo and Montjuich, I became aware of a singular building in the eastern section of the city. From a distance it looked something like a church, except that it had four main steeples and a covey of smaller ones. When I asked what it was, a friend said, ‘El Templo de la Sagrada Familia, The Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family. But its real name should be Gaudí’s Folly.’ When I asked why, he said, ‘Go look. You’ll understand.’
When I told the taxi driver that I wanted to see the Expiatory Temple and so on, he interrupted: ‘Gaudí, okay,’ and after a short drive, put me down before one of the strangest-looking serious buildings in the world, a huge unfinished cathedral, a gaping wound in the heart of genius. For some minutes I stood in the street, just looking at the fantastic thing. All I could see was a façade terminating in the four spires I had noticed from El Tibidabo. Behind the façade … nothing, but off to the right I could see what looked like one spur of the transept topped by the group of lesser spires.
When I say spire I do not mean the traditional church steeple that ends in a cross. I mean something quite different. A French visitor was also in the street, looking through field glasses at the top of one of the spires, and noticing my interest, said, ‘One of the true masterpieces of modern art. Regard.’ He passed me the glasses, and at first I could not believe what I was seeing through them. First of all, the spires were built in such a way that they resembled pretzel sticks studded with salt crystals, except that at the upper end they narrowed down to points of rock candy, brilliantly colored. The spire was decorated with ceramic bits set in plaster and color was reflected everywhere. ‘The sun lives in each part,’ the admiring Frenchman said, and since many of the ceramic pieces were finished in gold, the spire seemed to be a finger of the sun.
‘Have you studied the tip?’ he asked, and how can I explain what I saw when I did? I said it wasn’t a cross but I would be hard put to say what it was. I could think only of Angkor Wat and its repeated use of the cobra head with hood extended. Yes, it looked much like a cobra, except that it was angular, off center, totally bizarre and with the hood indicated by a score of ceramic balls that looked as if they had been racked up for a celestial billiard game. There was also something that resembled a fourleaf clover and a series of golden protuberances that looked like either sails or segments of a peeled orange.
‘Glorious, eh?’ the Frenchman asked.
‘What is it supposed to be?’
‘Who cares? It’s a work of genius. So who cares?’ He took back the glasses and passed into the unfinished building, but I remained in the street, studying the lower portions of the façade, for it was here and not in the fantastic towers that the genius of Gaudí had manifested itself. The entire front was a kind of garden rising vertically from the pavement. Vines climbed upward to provide niches in which statues of Biblical figures stood as if resting in some countryside grape arbor. What in a traditional façade would have been a pillar, here became a tree in whose spreading branches perched stone birds. On either side of the main entrance, at eye level, families of realistic chickens scratched, beautifully carved, and wherever human figures appeared, animal life appeared also, for it was obvious that
Gaudí had loved nature; his definition of religion encompassed all that lived.
I suppose the outstanding characteristic of the façade was that when seen from where I stood, there was scarcely a square foot that was not covered with ornament in some way. One night, when I saw it illuminated by flares, it cast a million shadows and the spires looked like decorations on a wedding cake. Few lines were straight and some of the windows were wonderfully inventive; the man who designed this façade knew what fun was. It reminded me of two other structures I’d seen, one in Barcelona and the other in Watts, the Negro section of Los Angeles. The first, of course, was the Palau de la Música, and I assumed that Gaudí had also built that, but I was wrong. In Barcelona at the turn of the century there had been a flowering of the Catalan spirit, and a different group of architects had been responsible for the Palau. As for Los Angeles, in Watts in the early years of this century an immigrant Italian tile setter named Simon Rodia decided to build by himself a memorial to his love for the United States, and it took the form of a cluster of huge towers one hundred feet tall and built of iron rods handsomely interwoven. He ornamented them with anything he could salvage from junk yards: broken plates, green and blue soft-drink bottles, chipped cups and saucers, flashy tiles from old bathrooms. From the seashore he collected shells and from garbage dumps odd containers, and all this he set into concrete slabs which formed the sides of his structure. Working pragmatically and alone, he spent thirty-three years on his task, creating what has been called ‘the greatest structure ever made by one man.’ Today the towers have become an embarrassment to Los Angeles, for they have begun to deteriorate and vandals have worked much damage; it may be that they will have to be torn down, but if they vanish something unique and beautiful will have been lost, as subtle as the skin of a lizard, and committees have been formed to save them, for many world critics judge them to be the one authentic work of art to have been produced by California. At any rate, if one has seen the Watts towers he is prepared for the Gaudí, and vice versa.
I left the street and passed through the façade as if I were entering the church, but inside there was nothing. Not even the walls were up, except at the unfinished transept. ‘How long have they been building this?’ I asked a caretaker.
‘A long time,’ he said, pointing to a crane I had not previously seen. Some work was under way, but from the magnitude of the task that lay ahead, I judged it would take a crew of thousands forty or fifty years to finish. ‘Are they proceeding with it?’ I asked, but the caretaker shrugged his shoulders.
I did find a placard which explained the façade. It was intended to portray events connected with the birth of Christ, and the four spires represented the major symbols of the faith which Christ had founded: the cross, the walking stick of Joseph, the ring and the miter, though what religious significance the last three had I did not know, but I did know that an architect of noble imagination and vast intention had drafted this memorial to the Holy Family but had somehow run out of energy. The demanding task had staggered to a halt and I saw in the gaping emptiness both wonder and tragedy and was driven to discover what had happened and why.
I asked so many questions about the building that friends arranged for me to meet the one man in Barcelona best equipped to explain. I was taken to an attractive country-style house which now stood well within the city but which must have been in a rural area when built. An old-style fence with the kind of latched gate I knew as a boy surrounded a pleasant yard, and at the door of the house a girl obviously just in from the country bowed and said in Catalan, ‘Dr. Bonet will see you shortly.’ She led me into a library, where I found, in addition to the ninety volumes of the Espasa-Calpe, whole shelves of books about Gaudí. French, Italian, American and especially German writers had compiled an impressive series of essays on Gaudí and photographic studies of his work, and from their titles it was obvious that their authors considered him one of the important men of his generation. But what was his generation? When did he live? I did not feel free to take down the books, but since they all appeared to be of recent publication, for they were largely in the new international format, I judged that he must have died fairly recently.
The door to the library swung open and a slight, old-fashioned gentleman in dark suit and vest, in his late sixties perhaps, came into the room with that air of excitement which marks men who love to talk about work that fascinates them. ‘Luis Bonet y Gari,’ the man said, extending his hand. ‘I am delighted to meet with someone from América del Norte who knows the work of Antoni Gaudí.’ I decided not to tell him that I was there because I knew nothing about Gaudí, for it was obvious that he had much to tell. He wore a black bow tie which stood out against the whiteness of his shirt and hair. His eyes were unnaturally bright and he spoke crisply.
‘I am, as they told you, the architect of the Sagrada Familia. I was a student of Gaudí’s, and although no one can say what his exact plans were for finishing the structure, I am at least in harmony with his general ideas.’
‘When did he die?’ I asked.
Dr. Bonet was surprised that an expert like me didn’t know this fundamental fact about the master, but he said courteously, ‘Born 1852 Antoni Gaudí i Cornet in the small Catalan town of Reus. Struck down by an automobile here in Barcelona in 1926. Unrecognized, he was thrown into a pauper’s bed in an out-of-the-way hospital, where he died some days later without having regained consciousness.’
‘Then the Sagrada Familia dates from the last …’
‘Another architect had made preliminary plans for a traditional kind of church, but in 1882 Gaudí drew a set of sketches showing how a structure more suited to Cataluña could be evolved from the work then under way. He got the job and the result is history.’
‘How did he come upon the ideas he used in the façade?’ I asked.
‘Ah! Where? As a young man I worked with him and discovered many secrets about building in the new style, but how he conceived that style I never knew. Obviously, he saw architecture as an outgrowth of nature. Obviously, he was inspired by the Mediterranean and all the cultural forces that grew up along its shores. But above all else he was a Catalan, and something of our essence flowered in him. He could have come only from Cataluña.’
I was afraid to ask the next question, for it would betray my ignorance, but I was caught up with the mystery of Gaudí, so I asked, ‘Did he do much work in Cataluña?’ It turned out to be a good question, because Dr. Bonet pulled down from his shelves a score of books written within the last decade by non-Spanish experts and in their pages showed me pictures of the work Gaudí had done.
‘The amusement park here in Barcelona. Oh, don’t miss that! It’s a child’s fairyland built in stone. Then the apartment houses with their shining roofs. And don’t forget his beautiful Casa Vicens not far from here.’
What really surprised me was a sketch Dr. Bonet showed me of the church as it had been intended to look, for this showed that the façade I had been looking at was not the main one at all but merely the entrance to the south transept; the main nave had not yet been started, except for the apse, which stood under the cluster of lesser towers. The finished church would have eight more of the giant spires; and the placard I had seen earlier was wrong. The spires did not represent abstract attributes of the church but rather twelve men from the New Testament: the four already standing were those for Barnabas, Jude, Simon and Matthew.
Dr. Bonet reviewed the plan with me and I could see that he visualized the church finished as his master had intended. It would require sixty or seventy years to complete, but the determination to do so was present. ‘The four existing spires of the Sagrada Familia have become for Barcelona what the Eiffel Tower is for Paris or the Statue of Liberty for New York. They are the recognized symbol of this city and of Cataluña. It is unthinkable that the remaining eight should not be completed, because the four we have are among the few works of true architecture built in the last century. Throughout the world they are recognized as such.
’
But not in Spain. I was to find that among Spaniards familiar with the problem, Gaudí is looked upon as a Catalan crank and his work dismissed as irrelevant. One man in Madrid asked me, ‘What can you make of those towers? At their base. Gothic. Midway up, pure Art Nouveau. At the top, Picasso cubist. It’s junk architecture and it’s lucky for us it was left unfinished. Perhaps a real architect can move in now and bring the mess to some conclusion.’ I heard the same arguments in Barcelona. ‘The Sagrada Familia should be turned over to a committee of architects under the age of fifty. Make that forty-five. They should keep what’s already up and finish the damned thing off in some kind of ultramodern simplistic style and give us a church that can be used. The four main towers can stand where they are. They’re no good, but they do no harm.’
If a plebiscite on this matter were taken throughout Spain, it would be meaningless, for most Spaniards know nothing of the Sagrada Familia. If only those qualified to vote were polled, I suppose the decision would be to finish the job quickly and without regard to Gaudí’s imperfectly recorded master plan. If the architects of the outside world were questioned, I believe they would vote for finishing the church with due respect for Gaudí’s plan but with modifications dictated by the probable taste of 1990. (This would be my preference.) But to the devoted followers of Antoni Gaudí, the only way to finish this monument is in strict adherence to his wishes. This would require eight more towers, an additional lesser façade depicting the Passion of Christ to balance the existing Infancy, and a gigantic main entrance showing Christ in Glory with a wealth of imaginative detail that I fear only Gaudí himself could have devised. He was a unique genius who carried his plans in his head and I doubt that they could be reconstructed from the inadequate notes he left.
What will be done? No one knows. In fact, no one has even a coherent guess. Men like Dr. Bonet are convinced that sooner or later the people of Barcelona will recognize in this magic shell a Catalan treasure and will insist upon its completion. A committee has been formed to speed the work and collections are taken each year; visitors from other countries often return home and write out checks to further what one correspondent described as ‘the most exciting thing I saw in Spain.’ But the city fathers, faced with this gaping wound and the prospect of another century before it can be healed, are understandably impatient to get along with the work in some simplified manner. The debate is bitter.
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