I look back upon the time spent with the Condesa. de Peña Ramiro as one of the most gracious experiences I was to know in Spain. The woman was so simple in her manner, yet so profound in her concern about the things that interested me, that to share her information was a privilege. On her dining-room wall hung a portrait of King Alfonso XIII inscribed to the conde; in a corner stood the framed commission of an uncle who had governed the Philippines; old photographs told of old glories that had come to the distinguished family in the nineteenth century, but it was not a family which lived in the past, for the conversation was alive with present references, and I wondered how the conde and his condesa managed this. At the end of our long discussion I asked the condesa, ‘From what part of Spain do you come?’
‘From Galicia, of course.’
Then her unusual quality became explicable; she was one of those granite-hard Galicians whom I like so much. She came from the part of Spain I was about to enter, a part I had remembered, in absence, as one of the best segments of the Spanish scene; and she was an ideal representative of that region.
But before I reached Galicia I was required to follow the final agony of Sir John Moore’s collapsing army as it left Villafranca to try to reach the evacuation ships waiting at La Coruña, forerunners of those later ships that would wait for another defeated British army a hundred and thirty-one years later at Dunkirk.
It was in their approach to Cebrero, the highest point on the old pilgrims’ route and surely the most desolate, that the British army suffered its Gehenna. All through the preceding year the army had been pleading with both the English and Spanish governments for money to speed the war, and at last they had got some, but now on the dreadful cliff-lined pass to Cebrero the paymasters had to back their wagons to the edge of the precipice and throw away their funds, a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in gold coins, too heavy to carry any longer, and starving foot soldiers had to listen impotently as the worthless gold clinked down the mountainside. It was January, 1809, the coldest part of the winter, and men froze to death in the heavy snow. Women died of starvation and their bodies lay covered with ice beside the road. Horses had to be killed by the hundreds; to save ammunition they were herded to some precipice and forced to jump to their own screaming deaths. At every Spanish village, houses were looted and soldiers would lie down in the ditch, a bottle of wine to their lips, knowing that if they got drunk they would not rise again, but they drank on and hundreds made the noiseless transition from drunkenness to death.
Now, as I stood in this miserable pass, a summer sun radiated from the rocks where low shrubs flowered and it was difficult to visualize the vast debacle that had overwhelmed the British army, one of the worst in its history, but I did take a perverse pleasure from the fact that it was under these circumstances that my hero, Sir John Moore, did finally bring his rebellious troops under control, did lead them on to La Coruña, did stand off a constant series of attacks by Soult, did preserve his men for embarkation upon the ships as planned, and did save for General Wellington’s later use in Spain a hardened cadre of men and officers who would ultimately whip both Soult and Napoleon. He, of course, was dead before even the embarkation took place, killed on the field of battle by a French cannonball which carried away most of his left shoulder, exposing the heart and lung. He had lost eight thousand men and himself, but he had saved what he had set out to save: the mobility of the British Army.
During one of my earlier pilgrimages to Santiago I had traversed Cebrero pass in the snow of winter and had experienced some of the misery that had afflicted pilgrims who passed this way. It was night and I was accompanied by Don Luis, who had said, ‘It’s dark and it’s snowing but I’m sure you’ll want to see the amazing village perched up there. I doubt if it could be equaled in all Europe.’ We left our car at the highest point of the pass and climbed on foot a rather steep hill, at the top of which I saw two flickering lights glimmering through the snow, and it required no imagination on my part to see myself a pilgrim struggling to find a night’s lodging. We came upon an extraordinary village, a hilltop cluster of very low thatch-roofed houses unmodified since the days of the earliest Celts. Open fires burned in the middle of the floor and no chimneys allowed the smoke to escape. Wind howled over the place all winter and clouds obscured it much of the time, as they did now. It is maintained in the midst of modern Spain as a memorial to the manner in which hill Spaniards used to live, a huddle of eight or ten houses centering about a low, rugged stone sanctuary which looked in the darkness of night as if it had been built of pinkish stone without the use of mortar. It was unoccupied and unutterably lonely, a rough thing that must have dated far back before the beginning of Romanesque or Gothic. Possibly it was of Celtic origin.
At any rate, in this rude spot I somehow lost Don Luis, and in the snow I spent the better part of a half-hour shouting, ‘Halooo, Don Luis!’ but I could find neither him nor the footpath leading down to our car. So there I was, as many a pilgrim must have been in the old days, lost on the mountain that had destroyed an army and had caused the despair of millions of pilgrims. It was really a rather bad experience, for the low houses, with no lights or chimneys showing sparks, hid from me and I wandered back and forth in the stormy darkness.
An old shepherd finally heard me and showed me how to open the door of the desolate sanctuary, and there I waited in the dank night till Don Luis should find me. I was standing in shadowy darkness, for there was only one candle guttering behind a pillar, when I heard the shepherd speak from his share of the darkness. He had white hair which showed beneath his cap, and no teeth, but he told a strange story of Cebrero.
‘It was during a winter like this,’ he said, ‘with wind and storm and snow and frozen sheep. A monk was left here to say Holy Mass for any pilgrims who appeared at the sanctuary, but no one ever came except an old shepherd like me. Juan Santín his name, and each day in the storm he would present himself before this altar to hear Mass, so the grudging monk would have to leave his fire and come to this cold place to celebrate the mystery.
‘One special night, when the storm was worse than ever before, the monk aspired to stay by his fire, but Juan Santín appeared for evening Mass. It was his only pleasure in life besides caring for his sheep, so the grumbling monk had to leave his fire once more. “Poor me, persecuted me! That I should be driven through the storm just because this idiot of a shepherd comes to hear how I pronounce a few words of Latin before this bit of bread and drop of wine.”
‘And as he spoke, a clap of thunder roared through the storm, and a great flash of light filled this sanctuary, and on that altar the bread turned into the Body of Christ itself, and the wine in that very chalice which you see tonight, became His blood. And the voice of Jesus Christ said to the monk, ‘I too have come to hear Mass said this night, for I too am a shepherd.” ’
The miracle of Cebrero echoed through Spain and France and the shrine became one of the most sacred on the Way of St. James. Queen Isabel was especially moved by it and donated some of the treasures to be seen here now; to me as a writer the old man’s story had special meaning, because of all the pilgrim legends told along this road, this seemed the one that applied most closely to the life of the artist. Just as the grumbling monk read his Mass day after day, practically alone, never knowing when he would entertain an audience, so the beginning writer sits alone through many months putting down words which he himself doubts the meaning of, and he wonders if anyone will ever bother to read them. Then, long after they are finished and even forgotten, he may receive a letter from a strange part of the world saying, ‘Tonight I was in the sanctuary of Cebrero as I read your words.’
Don Luis finally found me and led me back to the car. In storm we crossed the lonely hills of Galicia and at midnight came to that last small rivulet separating us from Compostela. Here in past centuries guards had been posted to ensure that all pilgrims disrobed for an obligatory bath. Priests claimed, ‘It’s to clean ourselves before we kneel before S
t. James.’ But wise men knew it was to wash away the lice.
As we climbed the hill beyond the rivulet I knew that from the next high spot the lights of Compostela would be seen, but I was not prepared for what Don Luis did as we rode through the night. ‘Mountjoy!’ he suddenly cried. ‘I am king.’ He had revived the most ancient rule of the pilgrims’ road, that whoever should first spy the towers of the cathedral would call out in French, ‘Mon Joie,’ and he would be recognized as king of that group. It is amusing to think that most people in the world with family names like King, König, Leroy or Rex obtained their names because some keen-eyed forebear had been first in his pack to see Compostela.
In the summer of 1966 I was in the city only a few minutes before I received a phone call from a valued friend. Father Jesús Precedo Lafuente, a youngish priest then serving as canon of the cathedral and a man of whom much was expected in the future. He had started his studies at Rome with the Gregorians and had finished them in Jerusalem with the Franciscans. He was a Galician from La Coruña and the best kind of clerical intellectual in that he wrote with professional skill and argued with facility on all matters regarding the Church. As he spoke on the phone I could visualize him as I had last seen him: late thirties, a dark handsome man with Galician features and a disarming smile, the kind of priest on whom the Church in Spain has been depending more and more in recent years.
His message characterized the man. ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday, and I know you aren’t Catholic. This being the shrine of Spain, it’s understandable that we have no Protestant church here for you to attend, but there’s a good one not far away, and if you’d like, I’ll send a car around for you in the morning.’
I replied, ‘From the canon of the cathedral, that’s more than generous and I appreciate it, but I’d rather spend the time revisiting the cathedral with you.’ So early the next morning we set out together to explore again one of Spain’s most sacred monuments, and much of what I have to report about Compostela comes from what Father Precedo has said or written about his cathedral.
It is unique in Spain in that it can be seen from four different sides, each set off by its own plaza, all of which are architectural treasures. At first glance, of course, it is the western façade that dominates, not only because it is extremely ornate, topped by two soaring and poetic towers, but also because the plaza in front is the second finest in Spain, ranking only slightly behind that gem in Salamanca. It is a huge plaza, and one night I saw many thousands of people occupy it without crowding. Four handsome buildings delineate it, each with its distinctive style of architecture, so that poets have said that at night one can hear a whispered colloquy among the architectural styles that have made Spain beautiful: Romanesque at the religious college, plateresque at the Hostal de los Reyes Católicos, eighteenth-century neoclassical in the city hall, and the wildly ornate baroque of the cathedral.
If one were to see only the western façade of the cathedral he would have to conclude that it was an eighteenth-century work, built upon the site where a series of older churches had stood; but move around to the southern façade and you will see what might be called the true cathedral. The Plaza de las Platerías (Silversmiths) is a delightful, closed-in, antique little square dominated by the huge bell tower of the cathedral and by this southern façade, which is a pure and stately Romanesque. I could very happily devote much of my time to this beautiful wall, but I have something even more compelling drawing me on, so I shall merely say that to see the cathedral pretty much as it originally was, one must come to this Plaza de las Platerías, where the statue of an insouciant King David playing his fiddle on the left doorjamb is a joyous work, probably the cathedral’s best-known piece of sculpture.
The next plaza, the eastern, is my favorite, for from this vantage point, especially from the top of the steps at the extreme right, one can see the great cathedral to advantage. The plaza itself is nothing more than a huge empty square hemmed in by the bleak wall of a convent, some low arcades and the beautiful Romanesque wall of the cathedral, into whose face has been let one of the finest things in Compostela, the Puerta Santa (Holy Door), which is opened only during the years of special pilgrimage and is a sculptural masterpiece. The door is protected on each side by twelve finely carved figures of apostles and prophets and along the top by larger figures of St. Athanasius on the left, St. Theodore on the right, and in the middle the best-known representation of Santiago in pilgrim’s attire, with wide-brimmed hat, gourd and cockleshell. When I think of Santiago, I think of this notable figure carved in 1694 by the Portuguese artist Pedro do Campo. The twenty-four figures which guard the Holy Door are active in the life of Compostela. Who stole the widow’s cow? ‘One of the twenty-four.’ Who ran off with the municipal funds? ‘One of the twenty-four.’ Not long ago, when the university administered an especially difficult examination, one of the students responded, ‘For the answer to this question you’ll have to consult the twenty-four.’ And there they stand, twenty-four wonderful figures from the Romanesque age, clothed in massive simplicity, topped by the three plateresque figures of Pedro do Campo. For a dusty pilgrim to have entered through this beautiful door to the cathedral which had lured him on for nine hundred miles must have been a culminating spiritual experience.
The remaining north plaza, known as the Plaza de la Azabachería (The Place Where Trinkets of Jet Are Sold), would be world-famous if it were located, say, in Toledo, whose cathedral cannot be seen from any vantage point, but in Compostela, where it must compete with three finer plazas, it seems ordinary, for the façade which faces it is a dull baroque affair of jumble and confusion. However, from the steps of the monastery across the way one obtains a good view of the cathedral as a whole, with its varied towers and turrets, and one can begin to unravel the complexity of this strange monument. The earliest church must have been a wooden affair built shortly after the discovery of the body of St. James in 812, and we know from excavations that it was built upon the ruins of an extremely ancient Roman cemetery which dated back to before the time of Christ. This wooden church was quickly replaced by the stone church of Alfonso II, which was in turn rebuilt by Alfonso III at the end of the ninth century. The Muslim al-Mansur al Allah (Victor by the Grace of Allah) destroyed everything in his invasion of 997. A temporary replacement was erected in the early 1000s, but in 1075 Alfonso VI authorized the building of the Romanesque church which has ever since formed the core of this magnificent edifice. In the early 1100s Alfonso VII and his cantankerous Archbishop Gelmírez completed a cathedral which in outline must have looked pretty much as it does today. To this permanent nucleus was then added one feature after another, the last major change being the erection in 1738–1750 of the tempestuous baroque main façade by Fernando de Casas y Novoa.
All this, one can decipher from the supposedly uninteresting northern plaza, but one can see a great deal more. When I looked up at the pile of figures topping the neoclassical monastery facing the cathedral, I asked a guide, ‘Who’s the man on horseback?’ ‘Santiago,’ he said without hesitating. But as I studied the figure I saw that the rider was cutting his cloak in two with a long sword and I realized that I was looking not at Santiago but at one of the most popular saints of the medieval period, the jovial Hungarian known as St. Martín of Tours, patron of roustabouts, tavern brawlers and reformed drunkards. And this reminded me that I was standing in what for centuries had been the powerful French section of Compostela and the financial capital of this part of Spain. Just as Medina del Campo had determined the value of international coinages in the Renaissance, so the Azabachería had determined it in the Middle Ages, and through this plaza every pilgrim from northern lands was required to pass when he entered the cathedral. This was where the journey from Paris and Brussels and Stockholm ended. This was the French town within the Spanish town, and to reach the Plaza de la Azabachería and to know that you were again within the protection of French power must have been reassuring.
From the Tree of Jesse and from the passing
of centuries this hand gains strength.
To see the work of art for which this cathedral is famous you must go back to the main plaza, climb the long flight of stairs to the entrance and pass through one of the doors of the façade. Immediately inside, and before you enter the cathedral itself, you find youself in the enclosed Portico de la Gloria, fifty-one feet long, thirteen feet wide and some sixty feet high, one of the major glories of world art which a week of visits will not exhaust. On the floor there is nothing and on the ceiling only routine carving on the ribs of the vaulting. On the two small end walls, nothing, and on the western wall, which is, of course, the back of the baroque façade, merely a set of sculptured Biblical figures and angels: Mark stands by himself in the left corner; then Luke and John the Baptist together; Esther and Judith; and off by himself, Job. The angels aloft are not noteworthy; those who play trumpets direct the bells of their instruments down toward the observer.
So for five-sixths of this portico there is not much to comment about, but the remaining wall, through which one enters the cathedral, contains such a wealth of sculpture and of such stunning quality that I am perplexed as to why it is not better known. It is a masterwork of Romanesque art, an enticing summary of medieval thought, yet as modern in execution as a painting by Picasso. Psychologically it is profound; humanistically it is one of the most delightful works ever composed; artistically it is, of the first order; and religiously it recapitulates the faith of an epoch. But having said this I have still missed the essential quality of this masterpiece. It is fun. It has a throbbing sense of real human beings. It depicts laughter, not tears. It contains hundreds of separate figures and a huge proportion of them are having a good time. The oppressive heaviness of much medieval art is here missing and a kind of jollity suffuses the figures. Even Jesus himself is staring wide-eyed at the world about him and finding it good. The Pórtico de la Gloria is not only one of the world’s supreme artistic creations; it is also one of the most human, alive and joyous.
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