Joy Unconfined

by Ian Strathcarron

  Yet are Spain’s maids no race of Amazons,

  But form’d for all the witching arts of love:

  Though thus in arms they emulate her sons,

  And in the horrid phalanx dare to move,

  ‘Tis but the tender fierceness of the dove

  Pecking the hand that hovers o’er her mate.

  Byron loved Sevilla, and later even made Don Juan a Sevillano.

  Apart from the women and oranges I was looking forward to meeting my collaborator Dr. Simon Hashtan. We intermet on the internet. I was researching Byron in Spain and he had been researching his family history. His task was longer, worthier than mine. A Sephardic Jew, his family had been kicked out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. After what can only be thought of as biblical wanderings his particular Diaspora had fetched up in South Africa where he studied music. Now about seventy, he is still a performing classical violinist. He became a widower two years ago, was withou tissue and alone and decided to visit Sevilla to delve into what he could of his own and his people’s ancestry. He fell in love with the city and with no good reason to go home forgave Ferdinand and Isabella and has stayed here ever since. He was brought up speaking Ladino, aJudaeo-Spanish language derived from Latin, and one which whenhe arrived enabled him to understand nearly all Spanish, and for the Spanish to understand ‘less than half ‘ of what he said in return. Two years later he is fluent.

  He is also, and the reason that we met on the internet, a Byron enthusiast. I had sent him Hobhouse’s notes on Sevilla and he had agreed to delve into the city’s archives in the same way he had delved into his own. The problem is the Spanish preoccupation with place names and their uncontrollable habit of changing them. But given time and patience old maps reveal where what once was was and where what once was now is. We arranged to meet in the lobby of the Hotel Alfonso XIII.

  The tiny and ancient Simon comes bundling over. His firm hand- shake and deep voice seem to belong to someone else, someone larger and younger. We retreat to the Café Floriana for coffee. He produces page after page of yellow pad notes. I feel guilty about all his research in Byron’s cause. He won’t allow an apology.

  In July 1809 Sevilla was the headquarters of the Spanish Junta and its population of thirty thousand had been swollen by a further seventy thousand soldiers, officers and the other camp followers of war. The only accommodation was with families taking in guests and so Byron, Hobhouse, Rushton and Sanguinetti found themselves lodging with Josefa Beltrán and her younger sister at Callea de las Cruzes 19. All four guests shared a room; not a solution of which Byron would have approved.

  We leave the Café Floriana in search of the Beltrán lodgings and head into the heart of the old city. The streets narrow and the cobbles grow cobblier with every turn. There are lots of turns. ‘And now right just here,’ says Simon.

  I look up and see the sign for Calle Fabiola. ‘This is, well was, Callea de las Cruzes,’ Simon points down the alley which funnels into a passage barely wide enough to take a mule. There is no pavement. Behind us we hear an angry red scooter echoing our way. We press ourselves against a dusty wall and survive the attack; eardrums take a little longer.

  The house is disappointingly dilapidated. In fact it is boarded up, declared unfit for habitation by either the local council or a property developer. Like the alley in which it lies it is tiny. There are three floors, but the top one seems to have been added more recently. There are windows to the left and right; presumably our foursome snuggled up in one of the rooms up there. The number ‘19’ can be seen clearly, if fadedly, above the lintel.

  A lock of Josefa’s hair - rich, brown and curly by description - is still with us. Here’s how: Josefa took a shine to Byron and invited him to her bed ‘at two o’clock’ (a.m. or p.m. is not known). For once in his life he declined, probably because Robert Rushton was in the same room if not the same bed. As they left she declared her undying love and gave him a lock of her hair, which is now in the John Murray archives. As Byron told his mother: ‘We lodged in the house of two Spanish unmarried ladies. They are women of character, and the eldest a fine woman, the youngest pretty, but not so good a figure as Donna Josefa. The eldest honoured your unworthy son with very particular attention, embracing him with great tenderness at parting (I was there but three days), after cutting off a lock of his hair, and presenting him with one of her own, about three feet in length, which I send, and beg you will retain till my return. Her last words were “Adieu, you pretty fellow! You please me much.” She offered me a share of her apartment, which my virtue induced me to decline.’

  There was no food at number 19 so they ate, much to Hobhouse’s disgust, at the ‘3 Kings’ in Calle Franca.

  ’And you found the “3 Kings”, Tres Reyes, in Calle Franca?’ I ask Simon. ‘Is that far?’

  ’Sígame!’ says Simon with a flourish.

  ’Lead on McDuff,’ I misquote.

  We turn left and right, right and left, in quick succession and find a wider alley, a street - a pedestrian street, thank heavens - called Calle Francos. Simon declares this to have been Calle Franca. Towards the cathedral end of Calle Francos the street narrows past some spruced up yet charming neo-rococo shops: there is Casa Rodriguez selling’Articulos Religiosos, Loli Vera, Diseñadora de Moda Flamenca selling flamenco frocks, Corseteria Peque selling corsets and Cordoneria Alba selling cordons. The colours are deep and dark in shades of blue and red. If there is such a thing as neo medieval this must be the epicentre. As the road widens and twists right all of a sudden there are laughing tables of lunchers under parasols.

  ’Esto es Los Tres Reyes, señor,’ Simon announces. Hobhouse’s’3 Kings’ has now become the Bar Restaurante Baco, and very smart it is too. They’ve added a portico and painted it bright yellow. Above the door a sign says md cc lxxxii but it seems to have been added later, although that would fit in with it being the Tres Reyes. They have brasseried the interior, all varnish and brass and mirrors and bottles. In a side room where Hobhouse ‘passed through the coffee room and observed a little smoking apparatus on each table’ there is now a beautiful tiled private dining room, with a sign of a local Ceramica dated 1895.

  It seems the least I can do to buy Simon lunch, so we lunch there and then. From his notes Simon reads: ‘We went to the 3 Kings for lunch - dined on two plates of nasty pork, two meagre fowls, and dirty chops dressed in the most greasy fashion, with a poultice pudding. For this, with two bottles of good red Catalonian wine, four dollars.’’Sounds like Hobhouse,’ I reply, ‘I’m sure we will do better.’ We do, albeit for €35 rather than four dollars. Like Byron and Hobhouse we spend the afternoon in the cathedral, after St. Peter’s in Rome and St. Paul’s in London the third largest in the world, and the world’s largest Gothic church. It is as magnificent as one might hope, and only experience reveals its depth and wonder. As the poet himself said, ‘Seville is a fine town; but damn description, it is always disgusting.’ Byron was particularly moved by the 270- foot high Giralda with the huge statue of Faith on top of its minaret tower. Hobhouse climbed, presumably alone, to ‘the highest gallery of Seville Cathedral where I wrote this.’ As we had spent all day stalking him I’m sure he appreciates that I am writing this here too, most likely on the same table in the far north corner, a table which seems to have been here forever.

  ***

  After thanking and bidding farewell to Simon the next morning, and assuring him that he had not joined some obscure footsteps cult, I set off for Utrera, where the entourage spent the night of 28 July. The town impressed them then as it would anyone now. They stayed at the Golden Lion Inn but the Posada León de Oro is no more and no one knows anything about it. Utrera is indeed a pleasant enough and unpretentious Andalusian town, but its purpose as the half-way point between Sevilla and Jerez and Cadiz has been superseded by the Autovia AP4-E5.

  They left Utrera at first light in order to reac
h Cadiz by nightfall and to leave enough time for a long and liquid lunch en route. This was to be hosted by a distant Byron relative, James Gordon, whose family were Aberdeenshire Gordons as was Byron’s mother, Catherine. The Gordons of Jerez, as they came to be known, also hosted a remarkable recent story and subsequent dynasty.

  The dynasty was started by Arthur Gordon, who fearing the coming persecution of Catholics fled Scotland after the Battle of Culloden. He arrived in southern Spain in 1754 at the age of 25. He worked his way up through the wine business, buying vineyards and experimenting with new production techniques. He started his own bodega in 1787 at the age of 58. Within seven years the business was such that he imported his nephew James from Scotland to help him run it and then take it over. It was with this young James Gordon, only slightly older than himself, that Byron took lunch in the bodega Las Atarazanas, now Plaza San Andrés 7, in Jerez.

  The sherry trade was established in England after Sir Francis Drake ‘borrowed’ 3,000 butts of sherry wine in a raid on Cadiz. The butts (a butt being a 500-litre barrel) were opened in London to great acclaim and quenching of thirst. Soon merchants were trading and it was only natural that they would later want to also control the means of production, the vineyards and bodegas. Thus, led by the Gordons, was started the great British occupation of the vineyards of Andalusia and the bodegas of Jerez, which at its peak boasted such other famous families and brands as Osborne, Sandeman, Croft, Garvey, Terry, Williams and Harvey.

  Byron wrote that ‘At Xeres [i.e. Jerez], where the sherry we drink is made, I met a great merchant - a Mr. Gordon of Scotland - who was extremely polite, and favoured me with the inspection of his vaults and cellars, so that I quaffed at the fountainhead.’It was with these very words that Mauricio González Gordon, the sixth Marqués de Bonanza, James Gordon’s great great grandson greets me at the bodega. ‘We are particularly fond of that expression of young Byron’s “quaffed at the fountainhead”. Let me show you our archives, and then let’s have our own tour of the vaults and cellars. I can also assure you like my many greats grandfather I am also extremely polite.’

  Polite is far too modest a word to describe the hospitality they showed me that day for my own research into Byron’s liquid lunch in Jerez. In the archives I learnt that through various marriages and mergers the family name became Gonzales Gordon and the company name became Gonzales Byass, most famously makers of Tio Pepe. Queen Isabel II bestowed the title of Marqués de Bonanza on the head of the family in 1860 after the family gave up some of its land in Bonanza for a field hospital. The English version of Bonanza has come to mean good fortune or windfall but it is actually the name of a Spanish port at the mouth of the Rio Guadalquivir up to Sevilla. Christopher Columbus and the New World galleons actually left from Bonanza rather than Sevilla, so when they returned laden with gold all might be forgiven for shouting ‘Bonanza!’

  After the vaults and cellars, and some sampling thereof, we repaired to the family home for lunch. The house is finely assembled in the Spanish grandee style, each piece austere within itself, plentifully gathered together without being overcrowded. Each room sets its own scene: the hall formal, stone floored, bare walled, rather forbidding; the drawing room with dark landscapes on white walls - for comfort modern sofas in one half, for receiving on No. 14 chairs in the other; the dining room, parquet floor, oblong and pastel with sombre portraits around a deeply polished refectory table and two dozen Charles II chairs. We sit in the middle six, the Marquésa, Milagra, on my left, their daughter-in-law Cristina on my right, with the Marqués opposite, his son Mauricio (so James’s great great great grandson) on his right side and his daughter Bibiana on his left.

  We talk about the Gordon dynasty. Everyone speaks perfect English, even at times to each other. The Marqués is a very sprightly eighty-five years old and officially retired, although it is hard to see any evidence of that. The younger Mauricio is now the chief executive and has the hope that his son, Pedro, now at a prep school in Suffolk, will one day take over the bodegas.

  With the roast beef the butler pours a 1994 Beronia Gran Reserva from the family’s vineyard in La Rioja. Quaffing at the fountainhead continues apace. There are about one thousand Gordons in Spain; everyone is cousin him and cousin her. I have actually spoken to two of them: cousin Alvaro who lives in Switzerland and who now owns Las Atarazanas where Byron and Hobhouse lunched with today’s forebears, and cousin Alfonso who lives in Madrid and is the family archivist, and is my introduction to today’s generosity. Every now and then groups of them dust off the kilts and reunite at Huntley Castle, near to the original family fountainhead of Wardhouse Castle, a hundred years ago the honeymoon spot for the king and queen of Spain but now in sadness neglected by the Scottish chapter of the clan.

  The bodega also makes brandy, and after lunch we sample the Lepanto Gran Reserva sherry brandy. Hobhouse wrote that they enjoyed ‘two bottles of most capital Sherry given us by Mr Gordon.’ That was probably the same thirty-year-old Nóe that we enjoy next too. It is becoming more and more of a privilege to be carrying on the conversation and quaffing tradition with such a splendid, sophisticated and hospitable family that the afternoon soon becomes evening and with a borrowed book, Lord Byron’s Iberian Pilgrimage, in one hand and the book Sherry written by the Marqués’s father in the other, I feel it is time to stagger outwards if not upwards.

  As I stumble across the threshold doing my best Buster Keaton impersonation I think I tell the Marqués that when I’m reincarnated I’d like to be a Spanish grandee who owns his own bodega and is jefe of a most extended family. To have his easy grace and natural manners would be no bad thing either, but I think that occurs to me on the Autovia to Cadiz just before I narrowly miss the police car coming in the opposite direction. Or maybe that was the absinthe from my hip flask.

  Somehow or other Byron and Hobhouse and the writer all found Cadiz. Byron and Hobhouse rode as far as Puerto, now El Puerto de Santa Maria, and were sailed or rowed over in an hour to the bastion of Cadiz, sitting then on its isthmus of sand, now motorwayed, from the mainland. Hobhouse noted that there was ‘great bustle at Puerto, pretty scene.’ No more I’m afraid, El Puerto is now a container port. But for Byron then, and the writer now, the citadel of Cadiz more than compensates.

  They ‘went to Bailly’s Hotel, where well served - the bog through a scullery at the top of the house with a suffocating vapour and many black beetles.’ Bailly’s was on the Calle de Piedro Conde, now the Calle de San Francisco, and as far as can be determined from a photocopy of a photocopy of a map from the Museo de Cadiz is now a block of offices above a KFC. The KFC was not intruded upon, even in the interests of research. Instead of Bailly’s there is the Hotel Las Cortes de Cadiz, a little further along San Francisco. Very well served it is too, with the bog en-suite and without the suffocating vapours and or any black beetles.

  While Hobhouse was busy with his notes and errands, meeting General Doyle, Don Diego Duff (the English Consul), Lord Jocelyn, the Earl of Roden, Henry Wellesley (one of Wellington’s endless brothers), Mr. Terry (from the Terry bodega) and the retired Arthur Gordon ( James’s uncle and the Gordon & Co. founder) Byron was falling in love with Cadiz in general and the female half of its population in particular.

  As he told the world: ‘Cadiz, sweet Cadiz! It is the first spot in the creation. The beauty of its streets and mansions is only excelled by the loveliness of its inhabitants. For, with all national prejudice, I must confess the women of Cadiz are as far superior to the English women in beauty... the most delightful town I ever beheld... [It is] full of the finest women in Spain, the Cadiz belles being the Lancashire witches of their land.’ There was more: ‘Fair Cadiz, rising o’er the dark blue sea!’ ‘Ah, Vice, how soft are thy voluptuous ways!’ ‘All sunny land of love!’ ‘Although her eye be not of blue/Nor fair her locks like English lasses/How far its won expressive hue/ The languid azure eye surpasses!’

  One could say C
adiz brought out the exclamation mark in him. Funnily enough ‘The Girl of Cadiz’ (from which the last quote is taken) was originally written for canto I of Childe Harold ‘s Pilgrimage, but didn’t make the cut and wasn’t published until eight years after his death.

  Meanwhile Hobhouse was taking rather a dim view of Byron in full flirt, harrumphing that his companion had become ‘a little mad and apt to fall in love’. The final straw was the opera - which one is unrecorded but right there and then one presumes that Don Giovanni would have been Hobhouse’s choice if it were his to make. Byron took up the story in a letter to his mother:

  I sat in the box at the opera with Admiral Cordova’s family; he is the commander whom Lord St. Vincent defeated in 1797, and has an aged wife and a fine daughter, Sennorita Cordova. The girl is very pretty, in the Spanish style; in my opinion, by no means inferior to the English in charms, and certainly superior in fascination. Long black hair, dark languishing eyes, clear olive complexions, and forms more graceful in motion than can be conceived by an Englishman used to the drowsy, listless air of his country women, added to the most becoming dress, and, at the same time, the most decent in the world, render a Spanish beauty irresistible. Miss Cordova and her little brother understood a little French, and, after regretting my ignorance of the Spanish, she proposed to become my preceptress in that language. I could only reply by a low bow, and express my regret that I quitted Cadiz too soon to permit me to make the progress which would doubtless attend my studies under so charming a directress. I was standing at the back of the box, which resembles our Opera boxes, (the theatre is large and finely decorated, the music admirable,) in the manner which Englishmen generally adopt, for fear of incommoding the ladies in front, when this fair Spaniard dispossessed an old woman (an aunt or a duenna) of her chair, and commanded me to be seated next herself, at a tolerable distance from her mamma. At the close of the performance I withdrew, and was lounging with a party of men in the passage, when, - en passant, - the lady turned round and called me, and I had the honour of attending her to the admiral’s mansion. I have an invitation on my return to Cadiz, which I shall accept if I repass through the country on my return from Asia.