Iberia

by James A. Michener

  As for Parque Güell, a garden area lying northwest of the church, it is a child’s delight and faces the same problems as the church. It was never finished, really, and the dreamlike buildings have become dilapidated; I don’t see how they could be properly refurbished without an expenditure of funds that could scarcely be justified. For as long as they last, however, the inventions which Gaudí poured into this park are a joy to the spirit: caves where one can rest and towers that seem made of gingerbread, flights of stairs lined with rocks of all hues and huge flat buildings whose Assyrian-like pillars lean at odd angles. It was in this park that I saw a work of Guadí’s that made my heart skip through sheer pleasure: it was a swinging gate made of wrought iron. Its basic design was a series of large squares onto which were fixed circles fashioned to look like the ribs of a palm branch with the core off center. The solidity of the squares, the beauty of the circles, the unbalanced position of the cores and the airiness of the whole concept represented invention of the highest order, and if I had seen nothing else done by Gaudí, I would have known from this gate that he was first rate.

  ‘This is how he looked,’ Dr. Bonet said, handing me a photograph taken in front of the cathedral one Corpus Christi day. Gaudí was a small man, a Catalan to be sure, with white hair and beard, ill at ease in a dark store-made suit and staring intently into space while those around him attended to the formation of the parade in which he would march, carrying a long wax taper. The thing that no one could miss was the way he leaned forward from his ankles, as if there was work to be done or a quest to be followed. He never married; he left no coherent account of his artistic philosophy; only rarely was he able to finish the great works he began; and he must have been a difficult man to deal with. But one glance at his iron gate and you know that he was a poet.

  In view of what I shall later be saying about another Catalan, Ramón Llull, I should like to leave Gaudí, who moved me deeply, as described by Dr. Bonet: ‘He felt the entire Mediterranean to be at his disposal. Here he used the palm trees of Egypt and the pillars of Karnak. Byzantium was very much on his mind. And the caves of Crete and the temples of Greece. He had deep affinity for the Etruscans, their hard colors and sure touch. Rome was there, the great builders, the men who were not afraid to throw aqueducts across valleys. He looked out to the Mediterranean and was in no way provincial.’

  I said, when speaking of Córdoba, that I would not bore the reader with a recital of my disappointments in trying to find a good performance of flamenco, but what happened when I carried my quest to a village near Barcelona could not be termed boring. When friends heard that I was still trying to find authentic flamenco they proposed a dance hall at the waterfront end of Las Ramblas, but when I looked at the program I saw that the music was to be provided by a band called something like Les Greer and his Dixie Wildcats and the dancer was The Flame of Cadiz, and I felt that I could forgo that one; but about this time I met one of Spain’s best-publicized playboys, and he said, ‘Michener, this country would be humiliated if a serious student like yourself came here and found no decent flamenco, so I’ve arranged for the best flamenco party in recent times, and you’re to be guest of honor.’

  I was driven to a finca in the country, an exquisite place overlooking the sea and decorated with animal skins from African safaris. Four professional bartenders served drinks and the audience was glittering: three motion-picture stars of world reputation, several writers whose books were widely known, four Spanish noblemen including a couple of condes, a famous bullfighter retired to honor and a score of similar luminaries. We had convened at midnight and the singing was to last till dawn. All but a few lights were turned off, and before the music began we could hear the whispering of the Mediterranean. This was not one of the legendary gypsy caves of Andalucía, but it was the next best thing, and my host said, without smiling, ‘If you don’t like this flamenco you don’t recognize duende when you see it.’

  I should have been warned when I saw the principal singer. Instead of a man trained over many years in the intricacies of the art, a square-built woman of forty appeared, with a voice like a bullfrog, or worse. She was apparently a great favorite of the crowd, for when she gave her deep, throaty ‘Adiós, amigos,’ one of the condes called something and she yelled back, ‘Soy más macho que todos aquí, y tengo un par de cojones así de grande!’ which a friend translated as ‘I’m more manly than anyone here and I’ve got the biggest testicles.’

  Well, flamenco types are sometimes rather tough and I assumed that this was merely her manner of speaking, and that when the music began she would sing properly, but the appearance of her guitarist gave no assurance of this; he was a kind of comedian, with a rubber face, who could play tricky little passages which went well with her kind of singing, such as it was. I groaned, and then the principal girl dancers came out, tall, willowy, beautiful gypsy girls, I thought, and the evening started. I didn’t recognize the first song, but the others did. It was more like a rock-and-roll flamenco than what I had hoped for, but with the savage grunting of the singer and the simplified dancing of the two girls it was acceptable.

  It was on about the fifth number that I finally realized that something was more seriously wrong about this evening than the beat of the guitar. I was sitting on a Mongolian-style hassock covered with the skin of a lion which the owner of the finca had shot, when the prettier of the girls came to stand before me and dance a sevillana, for which normally she would have had a partner. After a few steps, which I recognized as something less than top flamenco, she began a slow motion of her shoulders, which I had not seen before in this dance. She continued thus for some minutes and then began to undress, taking off one piece of clothing after another until she stood about a yardstick from me wearing only a burlesque G-string, which she proceeded to throw away while the female singer uttered her guttural nonsense and the guitarist played a music hall number. After some moments of dancing for me, as guest of honor, the young lady asked me to join her, but I did not feel equal to the task, not knowing either the steps of the flamenco or those she was improvising, but one of the condes obliged and the pair did a brief fandango of sorts, after which she picked up her bits of clothing, chucked me under the chin with her G-string and repaired to a corner, where she slowly dressed in view of everyone.

  In this style the flamenco continued till dawn. There were breaks, during which casually arranged couples drifted off to nearby rooms, and occasionally one of the guests would take over the singing or even the guitar playing; once or twice there were moments of quiet beauty as the second of the strippers sang folk songs in an appealing voice, once while standing naked by a window. I remember that there was almost a fight, too. A Catalan asked a man from Madrid how he liked Barcelona, and the Madrileño said condescendingly, ‘Este pueblo no es mi pueblo,’ which in Spanish carries a lilting condescension because of its repetition of words: ‘This town ain’t my town.’ ‘What’s the matter with this town?’ the Catalan demanded. ‘It just ain’t my town,’ the Madrileño said, but neither was drunk enough to fight.

  At eight in the morning, when a cab came to drive me back to Las Ramblas, my host finally dropped his pose of seriousness and said, ‘Well, you won’t see another flamenco like this one in a hurry.’ I laughed, and he said, ‘The singer’s the one who’s famous. We all love her.’

  On the way back to town I thought of the contradictory reputation Spain has in this matter of sex. The country is advertised abroad as the home of passionate women who click their heels with impatience, but the press, the Church and political leaders always speak of Spain in puritanical terms. The highest moral ideals are preached, yet most men who can afford it maintain mistresses with the tacit approval of the Church, which knows how far to go in these matters. The major cities boast of the absence of prostitutes, yet when a foreign male checks into a hotel alone he is barely in his room before his phone rings and a soft voice says, ‘Ello, Señor Brooks of New York. This is Encarnación. Señor Keller asked me to cal
l you.’ And on all levels of society there is a circumspect, rather well-behaved circuit of sexual freedom whose operation I had witnessed this night. From what I have seen of Spain in action, it seems to me that they handle the moral problem about as well as any country I’ve visited … if one can dull his ears to the moral preachments, which at times grow downright tedious.

  Under normal circumstances the high point of my stay in Barcelona would have been the Sagrada Familia, but because of the agitated political situation the thing I remember most was the aftermath of a chance meeting that had occurred some months before in a remote valley northeast of León where the road from Potes to Riaño crosses the mountain range known as Picos de Europa. There at a well beside the road I had met a Catalan university student whom I shall call Pau Lluis Freg. We had talked politics for some minutes, and after I had answered a chain of his questions, he said, ‘When you get to Barcelona, look me up. I have friends who would enjoy talking with you.’ I lost his address, but one night in the city, as I was about to deliver a speech to an assembly of students, he appeared suddenly out of a doorway and with conspiratorial manner said, ‘I shall call on you at your hotel.’

  Through him I was introduced to student life in Barcelona at a time when it was under serious stress, and I must make clear, because people who have never lived under a dictatorship are sometimes confused as to what happens in a country like Spain as compared to Russia, that I shall here report only a fragment of what students told me. We conducted a series of the most frank and open discussions I have ever held with university people; they were no more afraid to speak openly and in open places than I would have been in Pennsylvania, and if in what follows critical points are left untouched, it was only because I didn’t raise them or have forgotten what I was told. The muffled hesitancy that I had known in other countries I did not encounter in Spain; yet the Spanish students were afraid in other ways and had good cause to be, for many of their associates were already in jail. If this is a contradiction, it is merely what I experienced.

  ‘The turmoil in our university is much worse than the newspapers have dared admit,’ Pau Lluis told me as we walked through the small streets off Las Ramblas. He was an earnest young man of twenty, dressed like a conservative English businessman but with the eyeglasses of a student. ‘There have been six riots that I know about and my division is closed down altogether. I don’t know what I shall do for an education.’

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘We protest. We meet near the university, but you understand … we’re locked out. There are no classes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Riots. We reached the end of our patience. Really, our endurance was used up. So there were riots. I think the administration was with us and could have handled the problem, but the police saw a chance to get even with us and gave us severe beatings. Real trouble in the streets. So it was the government that closed the doors. The police, you might say.’

  I was vague as to what had caused the riots, for newspaper accounts had been meager, it being one of those cases in which I learned more from the New York Times than from the Spanish papers, which were under severe censorship. ‘What are the riots about? Politics?’

  Pau Lluis looked at me in astonishment. ‘No! We’re not radicals or anything like that. We had to strike because we were being treated with contempt. Let me tell you why I finally struck. I had four professors, and three of them were swine. True swine. They came to class about two times in five, and when they did come they stood at the podium and insulted us. Once I asked a question about a difficult passage, and the professor shouted, “I am the professor and I explain when I think it’s necessary. Sit down.” To show his displeasure he didn’t come back to class for three weeks.’

  From this carefully designed window of Gaudí’s Templo de la Sagrada Familia a stork is seen on its way to Africa.

  ‘Who taught the class?’

  ‘Nobody. If a professor becomes angry, there’s nothing the students can do.’

  ‘Then how do you learn?’

  ‘You don’t. Time of the examination comes and you’re not prepared. So you flunk, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  I found this difficult to believe, so Pau Lluis introduced me to an English boy who was studying at the university and he confirmed the story. ‘In English universities we were sometimes treated with infuriating condescension, but here we’re treated as pigs. The government fears us … hates us, really. In Spain the educated man is held in contempt.’

  This was a direct contradiction to what I had been told by Dr. Fernández-Cruz, who had emphasized the regard in which doctors were held because they were educated, and I asked about this. Pau Lluis said, ‘Both points are correct. The Spanish countryside loves the medical man because he can do something and despises the scholar because he can do nothing but read. Don’t forget that Don Quixote was held to be a fool principally because he read books. The idea still exists.’ At another time he said in frustration, ‘Of all the major countries, Spain has the greatest need for intelligence, and we distrust our universities, which are the only agencies that can, provide it. Most of those people out there, even in Barcelona, honestly believe that if the students said their prayers and listened to the police, they wouldn’t need the university.’

  I asked whether the riots in Barcelona, which had been prolonged and violent, had anything to do with Catalan nationalism, and Pau Lluis laughed. ‘Everywhere I went in the north, on that trip when I met you, people asked the same question. In the last four years I haven’t once heard Catalan separatism mentioned seriously. We used to talk about it in lower school … the poets … the bad days of betrayal. But now what sensible man would believe that Cataluña could exist as a separate state? That’s what you go to university for. To learn some sense.’

  ‘Do you think of yourself as a Catalan? Or as a Spaniard?’

  ‘As a Catalan. An American who studied with us last year said, “If I hadn’t known Texas, I wouldn’t have understood Cataluña. They’re Texans first and Americans second. You’re even worse.” He was right, I suppose. But as a Catalan I’m quite satisfied to be part of Spain. It could be good for both of us. As a matter of fact, Spain without Cataluña would be a miserable place.’

  ‘Were the priests who rioted also free of politics?’

  ‘Quite. If you read the stories carefully you saw that the reason the priests marched in defiance of police orders was to show their support for us students. That’s all it was. On the other hand, the police had begun to resent the freedom with which young priests were speaking out on social problems, so I suppose you’d call that politics. When the government gave the word “Beat up those damned priests,” the police did it with real brutality. I was there, marching behind the priests, and it would have been just as easy for the police to beat us up but they were gunning for the priests and they waded in dreadfully. It was very bad to see. A priest would fall down and the police would jump on him and club him. It was the natural hatred for the priest in black showing itself in a new form.’

  ‘How do the students feel about the Church?’

  On that one Pau Lluis bit his cheeks for a long time. ‘We were pleased that the priests marched in our defense. It was a ray of hope. Maybe the Church is going to abandon the big families and the army and finally help the people. Certainly the young priests know that this is what it should do.’

  ‘The Church as a whole?’

  ‘I know only Cataluña. Here there’s a possibility, but I suppose you know that once again, when our bishopric became vacant, they refused to appoint a Catalan and brought in some fellow from Astorga. I think the Madrid government fears the Catalan church as much as it does the Catalan university.’

  In the days when I knew Pau Lluis there was great agitation in the Church. Seminarians marched out on strike, something unheard of before. Junior priests signed manifestoes which they carried in person to newspaper offices, so that even though we were unable t
o find out what was being protested, we know that protests of a vital nature were being made. Other priests of high rank circulated petitions demanding that the precepts of Pope John XXIII be followed in reforming the Spanish clergy. And in a small city not far from Barcelona, one priest who was outspoken in his demand for a general reform of the Church was arrested and publicly charged with having had immoral relations with a female parishioner in the back seat of an automobile. No one I met could recall ever before having heard of a public charge of this nature. It seemed to a group of Americans, some of them Catholic, who followed the turmoil, as if ‘the young priests had matriculated at Berkeley.’

  Pau Lluis was an unusual student in that he spoke no foreign language; we conducted our conversations in Spanish, and when we encountered a subject for which my Spanish did not suffice we sought out translators, and one Saturday afternoon while traveling out into the countryside to visit the lodgings of the student from England, I became involved in an experience which quite startled me. We were riding in one of Spain’s good trains and the coach was crowded with a group of schoolgirls heading for a weekend camping trip, accompanied by four young, attractive nuns. After a preliminary half-hour of squealing as we pulled out of Barcelona, the girls subsided into informal group singing. ‘My Bonnie Lies Oyer the Ocean’ and ‘Old Black Joe’ they dedicated to me. I think they next sang ‘Cielito Lindo,’ which made their first three songs English, American and Mexican, which was properly international for a group of Catalans. Then they began a soft folk song, one of the best ever written; I have often wondered why it has not been introduced to the United States, for it seems to me to have everything a song of this type requires. I could not believe that the girls of this Catholic school were singing it, so I asked one of the nuns, ‘What’s the song?’