Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Spain will remain Catholic, more completely so than either France or Italy; newspapers will continue to report ecclesiastical developments as headline news; and the Church will continue to be a major force in the land. But a lively argument within the Church will determine the social and political course it will take. For example, during my last trip Spanish newspapers were giving an inordinate amount of coverage to discussions in the Italian parliament of a limited divorce law. I asked, ‘Why this sudden interest in Italian politics?’ and a newspaperman told me, ‘We don’t give a damn about Italy. But we’re much interested in the attempt of a Catholic country to get a workable divorce law. We’re forbidden to discuss a Spanish law. So we write about Italy as if it were Spain. Everyone understands.’

  As for the grandiloquent exhibition at Santiago de Compostela on El día de Santiago, the outside observer has the suspicion that whereas the oligarchy want desperately to believe that the present system will prevail permanently, they have not convinced the general population. When Admiral Núñez thunders, ‘We will never permit either error or false doctrine to snatch away our great treasure of Religious Unity,’ he is voicing more a hope than a fact. If religious unity continues only as it is, the handmaiden of those who rule, it must eventually be challenged; but if under the pressure of younger priests it can change and adjust itself to the spirit of Pope John XXIII, there could be real hope that in the next time of change the churches and the monasteries will not be burned.

  Madonna of the Pontevedra Museum.

  It is rewarding to visit Compostela at any time, but in Holy Years—that is, any year in which July 25 falls on a Sunday—there are additional inducements, for then northern Spain holds continual festival in honor of Santiago. The Holy Years fall in an endless sequence of 6–5–6–11, and since the last occurred in 1965, the next will fall in 1971 and 1976. I asked Father Precedo specifically, ‘Are non-Catholics welcomed here during a Holy Year?’ and he gave me a document which showed that during the preceding celebration the senior government official in Galicia had been Mohammed ben Mezian bel Kasem, a Muslim from Spanish Morocco. ‘If we can tolerate a Muslim at the spot where Santiago went forth to battle the Moors, we can surely welcome Protestants.’

  There were long periods when Holy Years meant little at Compostela. In the early 1600s, after more than seven hundred years as the spiritual center of northern Europe, it fell on bad times because of an English pirate and a French king. In 1589 Sir Francis Drake put together a large fleet with fourteen thousand soldiers, with the announced intention of destroying Santiago, ‘that center of pernicious superstition.’ As his armada approached the Galician coast, priests hid the bones of Santiago, and when Drake retired, the location of the once-famous grave was forgotten.

  In 1681 King Louis XIV declared that thieves and pickpockets and false priests were so brazen in their robbery of pilgrims that no Frenchmen would henceforth be allowed to make the journey. Cynics suggested that what Louis was really trying to do was to cut off the flow of money and trade goods into Spain, and he succeeded.

  For the next two hundred years the Way of St. James was largely deserted, and then in 1879 devout priests rediscovered his grave. From Rome special investigators arrived to check the authenticity of the find, and after scientific studies by medical men and archaeologists, declared this to be the ancient grave of Santiago. The flood of pilgrims resumed, and a wise priest who worked at Santiago wrote, ‘These remains, be what they may, have revived the spirit of pilgrimage.’ Today that spirit continues as powerful as ever.

  There are within the region of Compostela four additional pilgrimages worth taking which I had always felt constrained to make. Two lie within the city itself and two outside, so it was to the former that I now moved. On a bright sunny afternoon, when giant figures on stilts paraded to the delight of children, an enormous Moor proving especially popular, to judge from the squeals he provoked, I walked through a chain of medieval alleys to find myself at last on the edge of the city, at a spot where the small Río Sar became visible, and there, along its banks, I came upon one of the most remarkable churches in existence, a structure so bizarre that I find difficulty in believing that it still stands in this century.

  As I approached the small stone building a band of children gathered about me, singing sentences from a popular song, with one enterprising boy of eleven shouting as the others sang, ‘Ten pesetas, Englishman. Your only chance in this world to hear songs in true Galician.’ I told him I doubted if he knew a word of Galician, whereupon he joined the others in hideous wailing, none of whose words I could understand. ‘That’s not Galician,’ I replied, and instead of arguing with me he halted his choir and said solemnly, ‘All right, you want me to take you to the church that’s falling down?’

  I told him that I wouldn’t require his services; the church lay directly ahead of me and I couldn’t miss it if I wanted to, whereupon a devilish smile came over his childish features, and he watched with growing pleasure as I approached the church and found the door tightly barred. ‘You found it,’ he said with evil glee, ‘but you can’t get in.’

  ‘Can you get me in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how much?’

  ‘The same ten pesetas.’

  I handed him the money and with a benign smile he led me to the woman sacristan, who had been on her way to open the church from the moment I had first seen it. ‘You will like it,’ the boy said. ‘It’s the only church in Spain that’s always falling down.’

  He was correct. It was the only church in Spain or elsewhere, so far as I know, that is always falling down, and I did like it. The Colegiata de Santa María la Real de Sar was built in Romanesque style in the early years of the twelfth century and had a rugged cloister attributed to Maestro Mateo of the Pórtico de la Gloria. What makes the church unique, however, and a center for pilgrimages by those who love architecture, is the fact that its two lines of heavy interior columns are not perpendicular, like those of a self-respecting church, but are cocked outward from the central nave to such an extreme degree that they seem about to topple over into the aisles.

  The effect of this unnatural pitch is such as to induce vertigo. You are reluctant to believe that anyone would build a church like this on purpose, and your first impression is, ‘I must be dizzy.’ Then, when your senses have adjusted to this weird visual sensation, you begin to argue with what you are seeing. ‘They couldn’t lean so far over and not fall down.’ But they do, and when the sacristan shows you the spot from which the pillars exert their maximum effect, some leaning this way and others that, your eye jumps back and forth between the extremes, unwilling to accept what stands before it.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked the sacristan.

  ‘The builder intended to show the majesty of God,’ she replied. ‘Even though the pillars are falling down, He can sustain them.’ She then took me outside to show me the massive flying buttresses that had obviously been added at some later time. ‘When the great earthquake struck Lisboa in 1755 the effects rumbled right across Galicia and we lost many buildings. When the quake stopped, people ran out to see if the church was still standing. It was, but the walls were weakened. So these buttresses were needed to reinforce the pillars at the top.’

  Later I asked Father Precede about the bewildering little church, and he said, ‘We believe that the architect originally planned it to look somewhat as it does today. For some reason we can’t comprehend, he wanted to show what could be done with pillars off the perpendicular. But when the church was up, an underground river was found to be eating away the foundations and for that reason the flying buttresses had to be added, probably long before the earthquake.’

  Whatever the genesis of this strange church, it is worth a visit. It defies reason and abuses the senses, but it is a rugged building that has been in the process of falling down for the last eight hundred years, and barring further earthquakes and wandering subterranean rivers, it looks good for the next eight hundred.
>
  The second personal pilgrimage which I took in Compostela required only a few steps from the cathedral, for the far side of the Plaza de la Quintana, the austere one which contains the Puerta Santa with the twenty-four, is delineated by the wall of the Monasterio de San Payo, now a Benedictine convent, deeply engraved with that ever-present rubric: José ANTONIO. I have seen so many of these fearful signs on churches across Spain, and without anyone’s ever commenting upon them, I suspect that Spaniards may be just a little embarrassed by the whole-hearted manner in which their bully-boy has been identified with their religion. Had Germany and Italy won World War II and had beefy men like Hermann Goering and Count Ciano been forced down the world’s throat as authentic gods, then surely José Antonio would have been their Spanish counterpart; but the ideals represented by these three deities did not prevail, and today when one sees the name of the Spanish Fascist cut into the walls of so many churches, one feels a sense of anachronism.

  At the end of the blank wall so emblazoned, one comes to the inconspicuous church of the convent which contains an altar so baroque, so outrageously gingerbread, that it serves as a corrective to Romanesque austerity. Even the purist needs a touch of the bizarre; any man who loves the cold asperity of El Viti ought to relax now and then in the sunny warmth of Curro Romero’s arabesques, and for me such relaxation is found in this convent church.

  Two very large pillars, flattened out to provide space for decoration, flank the approach to the main altar, and from the moment one sees these warning sentinels he prepares himself for an orgy of gilt and exaggeration, for the pillars are twisting Solomonic columns in which foliage intertwines with plaster angels, with horsemen whose mounts are rearing furiously, with wreaths, whole landscapes, bas-relief scenes from the lives of saints, and with a host of odds and ends thrown helter-skelter in hopes that some might stick. Most did.

  The two pillars are a mere warming-up for the main altar, forty feet across and seventy high, which stands well to the rear. Every inch of this huge construction is plastered not only with gold leaf but also with figures of saints unnumbered, niches carved deep with flowers, propitiatory tablets set off in high relief, life-sized horsemen galloping forth at strange angles, good men ascending to heaven and other good men being beheaded by pirates. Here the smaller pillars which outline the altar are covered with so many golden vines, shields and flying angels that they seem to be crawling, while over everything there is such a wealth of glitter and gold, of precious stones and violent movement, that the eye is not permitted a moment of repose. Yet the altar and its two forward pillars are so harmonious in their relationship that the overall effect is pleasing.

  Walter Starkie, the scholar of the Way of St. James.

  The two excursions outside Compostela take me through the countryside of Galicia, which hardy English travelers have considered the best region in Spain. I like it very much, a hard, cold, dour land resembling Scotland, where I took my graduate education. The food is heavy, like Scottish food; the dress is colorful, like Scottish dress; like Scots, the Galicians have to be cautious if they are to subsist on their harsh land; the bawdy sense of humor of the two peoples is alike; and the music of Galicia comes from the bagpipe, an instrument almost identical in construction and sound to that made famous by the Highlanders of Scotland. Of course, when I compare the sturdy Galicians with the Scots I knew in my youth I am not, God forbid, referring to the pasty Lowlanders of Robert Burns and Walter Scott but to the honest Highlanders of Ross and Skye and the Outer Isles.

  Even a few miles’ travel to the countryside of Galicia shows the observant traveler the secret of this land: the granite rock which is both the glory and the curse of the region. From deep quarries, which seem to abound, the Galician digs out a gray-and-white flecked granite which he uses for everything. A farmer wants a barn? He builds it of granite. He wants a corncrib to protect his grain from rats? He builds one of solid granite. Garages, lean-tos, small homes and large are all built of this fine stone, and nowhere else in Europe could one find so many skilled stonemasons. This sounds ridiculous, but in the fields even fences, which in other parts of the world would be built of wood, are here built of granite: long thin slabs, beautifully cut and stood on end to form stony palisades. Galicia is the granite land.

  But this prevalence of stone is also the curse of the region, for land is inherited not by the eldest son alone but by all, so that fields are divided and subdivided so often in the course of a hundred years that the resulting areas are scarcely big enough to support a family. What makes it worse is that each canny Galician insists upon outlining his new field, however small, with granite walls, until the area absorbed by stone equals about thirty percent of the tillable land. And with each death, the fields grow smaller and the fences bigger.

  The results: During the last sixty-six years Galicians have been going into voluntary exile across the world, so that the voluntary depopulation of Galicia in this century equals the involuntary depopulation suffered by the Scottish Highlanders in the last century, and that was one of the most notorious land scandals of history. The difference is this. In Scotland peasants were expelled by greedy landlords. In northern Spain the crime against land was perpetrated by the farmers themselves.

  Galicians are said to have many superstitions, but these often resemble the monitory yet enticing belief which one of them described: ‘Like all country people, we have a mania about protecting our girls until they are safely married. Now, where does a country girl run the greatest risk of being seduced? At the village well, of course, to which she must go daily and without chaperones. In any village one can see girls swinging their way provocatively to the well, hoping, one might say, to be propositioned. So ages ago we created the water rat. Each well has one and sometimes more of these fearful creatures. A water rat can look at a man and nothing happens. But if he looks at any girl, she dies. Then and there. So you can be sure our girls watch carefully and behave themselves when they’re near the well. But we’re also Galicians, as well as parents, so the myth doesn’t stop there. For although the water rat does kill instantly, the death is very sweet. So our girls aren’t too careful.’

  The glory of Galicia is its chain of rías, those fjord-like indentations of the sea that reach far inland with a burden of fish and salt air and noble landscape. In some places the rías run between meadowlands to create pastoral scenes of deep loveliness; at other times they cut through low hills to produce islands, and I have often picnicked beside them; here a sandy beach for swimming, a forest reaching down to the water; there a ruined castle on the hill; on that headland a long-forgotten church; and each day a golden sun, the smell of salt, the unannounced appearance of a low-sweeping fog and then the sun once more, with everywhere the soft, sweet motion of the sea wandering inland. Galicia has about a dozen of these rías, nicely differentiated, and tourists in general seem not to have discovered them.

  But when I headed for the southern rías it was not to go picnicking; I sought the small city of Pontevedra, near the border of Portugal, through which a branch of the pilgrims’ route had led up the coast from the seaports of Lisboa, Porto and Vigo. English pilgrims in particular liked to come by boat to Vigo so as to have a relatively short trip overland to Compostela. But Portuguese also followed the route in large numbers and their movement made Pontevedra a center of some importance.

  The reader has probably noticed that the Way of St. James lacked one thing to make it an almost perfect pilgrims’ route: nowhere was the cult of the Virgin Mary exploited, so that a good half of the mystical wonder of the Catholic Church was unprovided for. At Oviedo, north of the main route, one could detour to see relics of Christ himself, while international saints like Martin of Tours. Nicholas of Bari and James of Compostela could be known familiarly; but the Virgin Mary was not much in evidence, and with her increasing importance in the Church, this lack was felt.

  It fell to the little town of Pontevedra to correct this. There, in the years when pilgrimage to Compostela
had diminished to a trickle, a new cult grew up around a legend claiming that the Virgin Mary had been the first pilgrim to the tomb of Santiago, who had given his life for her son.

  I went to a delightful little gingerbread sanctuary built in 1778 in the form of a combined cross and scallop shell, inside which in a place of high honor I found a most saucy religious statue. It was the Pilgrim Virgin, representing her as a primly dressed eighteenth-century traveling lady in stiff German brocade, a comfortable shawl with tassels, long black Restoration curls, bejeweled staff and gourd, and a positively enchanting Jesus dressed like a child’s doll. Atop the Virgin’s head stood a jaunty cockaded hat festooned with cockleshells. To be accompanied on one’s way by such a delightful lady must have been enjoyable, but the true pilgrim, remembering the dangerous adventures of preceding generations, must have longed for the harsher reality of Santiago with his heavy road-worn shoes and staff. At a kiosk near the sanctuary I bought a portrait of Santiago, and he too had become a sickly-sweet cardboard figure; the granite-hard Matamoros who had led Spain to victory, who had incited whole armies and who had sustained pilgrims on their foot-weary march of nine hundred miles had degenerated into a sentimental nineteen-year-old high school senior with a premature beard. Thus did the impetus of pilgrimage diminish.

  It was in this gloomy frame of mind that I met José Filgueira-Valverde, alcade of Pontevedra and my favorite Galician. A very tall and robust man, he thundered onto the scene, crying, ‘Michener! How fine to see you back in Pontevedra.’ Before I had a chance to speak he had laid out the day for me. ‘A few minutes to see what we’ve been doing with the museum, a short tour of the city to see how we’re saving the old buildings, then a drive to Bayona, where I have a little surprise for you.’ The mayor is so dynamic as to be exhausting, yet his delight in what he is doing is so obvious that one keeps up. The museum, for example!