by Jan Morris
They never, however, quite obliterated Christian Spain. Even in the south there were Christian grandees who obtained for themselves a sort of autonomy, and in the drizzly north a little nucleus of Christians never surrendered at all. At the legendary battle of Covadonga in 718 a band of 31 Christians, we are told, halted the advance of 400,000 Muslims, and thus kept the Moors out of the mountains of Asturias; and around the memories of this feat, over the generations, there assembled the dream of reconquest. This was the age of the Cid and his fellow stalwarts of romance. Led by such magnificos, the Christians fought back in fits, starts, and marauds, gradually nibbling their way southwards again, sometimes fighting among themselves, sometimes cohering, sometimes turning coat to help a Muslim friend against a Christian enemy. It was a haphazard kind of Crusade, but by the end of the eleventh century the Christians, grouped in several principalities, had recaptured the central plateau of Spain. By the end of the thirteenth they had taken Córdoba, and mastered all but a southern coastal strip. And in 1492 the Catholic Monarchs of Christian Spain, Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón, expelled the last of the Moorish kings from his delectable palace in Granada, and completed the liberation. The cross went up in the mosques of the Alhambra, somebody produced a grammar of the Castilian language, and Spain became recognizably herself.
Now we are approaching the top of that graph, for at this moment of her history Spain became, almost simultaneously, free, united, rich and powerful. She became free by the subjugation of the Moors. She became united because her two dominating Christian kingdoms, Castile and Aragón, were joined in marriage. She became rich and powerful because in the very month of the fall of Granada, when the last of the Moors tumbled out of the Alhambra to be forcibly baptized, Christopher Columbus was summoned to the presence of the Catholic Monarchs, and given a mandate to explore the western ocean. He discovered America, and instantly made Spain one of the Great Powers of the world. Now her indomitable adventurers, escaping from the impoverished gloom of her plateaus, strode irresistibly through Latin America, toppling the fantastic kingdoms of Aztec and Inca, building churches, missions, and palaces, sending home a dizzy stream of bullion. In the flush of excitement and achievement, the Spaniards seemed invincible. Charles I lopped the negative off the old tag, and adopted the slogan plus ultra, as if to imply that nothing was beyond the reach of Spain. The Pope grandly gave the Spaniards title to all land west of the Cape Verde Islands, and they themselves, by war and advantageous weddings, boldly extended their dominions until they ruled the greatest empire since the Romans.
The Hapsburg Charles I, father of Philip II, was Holy Roman Emperor too, and the territories he bequeathed to his son included the whole of South and Central America, much of what is now the United States, large chunks of France, the Low Countries, southern Italy, the Philippines, Ceylon, the Congo, and miscellaneous islands and settlements from Sumatra to the Azores. When Philip moved into the Escorial, having supervised every finicky detail of its still unfinished construction, Spain had reached the top. She was the supreme Power, and the universal champion of Catholicism. Her culture a rich mixture of Christian and Moorish, Iberian and Roman, her national image so proud that the Spanish patrician was Europe’s cynosure of elegance and command, her voyagers outrageously swashbuckling and her experience of the New World unrivalled, she must have seemed, in the eyes of less vivid States, a very prodigy of a nation. She was flamboyantly, aggressively Christian, and God seemed to be distinctly on her side. Truth, the Spaniards thought, was not only indivisible, but essentially Spanish: and if an empire knows the only truth, who can supersede it?
But every empire thinks it knows, and the Spaniards did not stay long upon that glittering apex. Gangrene and exhaustion set in, upon the nation as upon the king, and when Philip’s catafalque was borne away, and his body committed to the pudridero in the vault, Spain had already set out upon the long descent. Everything, excepting only art, rotted. At home and abroad enemies were recklessly made in the cause of Catholic unity. The treasures of the New World were squandered in war and political mayhem all over Europe. The Dutch rebelled, and the Catalans, and the Protestant English, who had already defeated the Armada, now went about crowing heretical triumph. The glory turned out to be no more than a mirage, and even the heroic past of Spain went sour, as Cervantes mocked its pretensions of chivalry in the book that is said to have killed a nation. Spain was rich in talents still, in painters and writers, mystics and philosophers, but behind her façade of pomp she was already a kingdom of poor men and self-delusions. The sap of the Moor had dried, as the irrigation works were allowed to crumble. The old centrifugal forces of Spain, inherited from tribe and rival kingdom, revived to plague the body politic, and tug at the strong nub of power that was represented by the Escorial. Never was a nation’s moment of supremacy quite so brief, or quite so dazzling; and never again was Spain to be quite certain about her role in the world.
In 1700 the Hapsburgs were succeeded upon the throne of Spain by the Bourbons, a family whose name has become synonymous with decay, and under their aegis the nation sank into provincial impotence. The War of the Spanish Succession stripped the Spaniards of their European empire, plus their own Rock of Gibraltar. The Napoleonic Wars led first to the loss of Louisiana and Trinidad, then to the calamity of Trafalgar, and finally to the French occupation of the peninsula and the elevation of Joseph Bonaparte to be King of Spain. The Peninsula War—which the Spaniards call the War of Independence—restored the Bourbons to power and demonstrated the ferocious fighting spirit of the Spanish working people, but it only emphasized Spain’s dependence upon more powerful allies. A succession of colonial wars led only to the independence of the South American republics. The two Carlist Wars, concerned with succession to the throne, ravaged the Spanish countryside and inflamed the people in internecine passion. The Rif wars in North Africa drained Spain’s coffers and decimated her man-power. The Spanish-American War, ending ignominiously in 1898, not only lost her Cuba, the last of her great colonies, but also demonstrated her isolation in the world, neither fish nor fowl among the States, proud but poor, famous but powerless, imperial without an empire. At home there were constant conflicts between traditionalists and liberals, landowners and working classes, centralists and federalists, and for thirty years of the Victorian era the titular ruler of Spain was the nymphomaniac Isabel II, whose red-plush love-nest above a restaurant in Madrid is still shown to tourists of scholarly instinct. Even the Industrial Revolution failed to ignite. Even the artistic genius dried up. Never was a century more disastrous to a nation than the nineteenth century was to Spain.
So she limped into our own times—with one half of her being, for the other half was still lingering wistfully with the Cid and the conquistadores. She was a mess of a country: addled by bitter politics at home—between 1814 and 1923 there were forty-three coups d’état; embroiled in constant wars in the pathetic remnants of her empire, now confined to a few sandy or foetid enclaves in Africa; diplomatically a cipher, strategically so inessential that the First World War contemptuously passed her by. Conflicting ideologies tortured her—dogmas of monarchy, theocracy, despotism, democracy, socialism, anarchism, Communism. Her rural poverty and urban squalor periodically erupted into violence. Her colonial policies were so inept that in 1921 her Moroccan army was annihilated in the Rif. A dictator, Primo de Rivera, came and went; in 1931 the last of the Bourbons, bowing himself out of the chaos, gave way to a left-wing Republic; and in 1936 all these centuries of failure, schism, and frustration gave birth to that ultimate despair, the Spanish Civil War.
It was theoretically a revolt by the Nationalist conservatives against the Republic, but in the end it was really a double revolution—by Right and Left against Centre. The passions it brought so hideously to the boil had been simmering for five centuries, and were so wounding that to this day the scars still show. ‘The Others’ is how Spaniards of the defeated Left sometimes referred to their adversaries, and this dark retice
nce, so muffled, so oblique, properly expressed the heritage of the conflict. For more than forty years after General Francisco Franco’s victorious Nationalists set up their autarchy of the Right, Spain was trapped within the aftermath of war, subjected to a despotism whose first aim was to ensure that the status quo would never be broken again. Only with Franco’s death in 1975, and the re-establishment of the monarchy as he decreed, did Spain begin to escape from her crippling inhibitions.
What next? We do not know. Here the graph peters out, with King Juan Carlos on the throne of Spain and a liberal democracy spluttering and sometimes exploding into life around him, complete with all the paraphernalia of parties, elections, strikes, protests and graffiti. Spain is a democracy now, but still the Spanish role remains uncertain, the Spanish destiny seems unfulfilled, and we can only look at the Spanish future through a veil of memory and conjecture—‘a cloud of dust’, as the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once put it, ‘left in the air when a great people went galloping down the highroad of history’.
Generally the visitor, adjusting his eyesight to the shadows, pauses for a time in the coro to consult his guidebook—resting his back against a sculpted crocodile, perhaps, or propping the book upon a fourteenth-century music-stand. When he feels he has the gist of the building, has mastered its origins and sorted out its periods, he sets off to explore the rest of it: and so the traveller too, if he has read the text of the Escorial, may feel equipped to inspect the aisles and chapels of Spain, where the dust loiters and dances on the sun-shafts, and you can faintly hear the rumble of the cars outside.
1 Isle Barataria
Spain is almost an island—a fragment crudely soldered, so the poet Auden thought, to the shape of Europe. Whichever way you enter her, from Portugal, France, Gibraltar, or the open sea, instantly you feel a sense of separateness—a geographical fact exaggerated by historical circumstance. The first of the invading Moors actually thought Spain was an island, and it was the Phoenicians, already sensing this seclusion or withdrawal, who called the country Spania—a word which some dullard philologists believe to mean The Land of Rabbits, but which all proper amateurs of Spain accept in its alternative interpretation, The Hidden Land.
The best entrance of all is the pass of Roncesvalles, the most heroic of the ten defiles that pierce the Pyrenees. It is a high, demanding route, resonant with romance. Here, a thousand years ago, the knight-errant Roland blew his enchanted horn so deafeningly that the birds fell dead about him, and here the savage Basques, hurling themselves upon Charlemagne’s rearguard, slaughtered half his men-at-arms. Through the pass of Roncesvalles, throughout the Middle Ages, caravans of pilgrims plodded southwards to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela, carrying forests of palm-crosses and singing brave hymns. Potentates of every era have passed this way into Spain, spies and ambassadors, merchants and marriage brokers, princesses destined for Spanish thrones and holy men on their way to sainthood. Here Marshal Soult fought a running battle with the British, as they chased the French out of the peninsula in 1813, and along this road thousands of wretched refugees stumbled into France during the Spanish Civil War. Roncesvalles is one of the classic passes of Europe, and a properly sombre gateway into Spain.
Winter is the time to make the journey. Then, as you approach the pass, the Pyrenean ramparts of Spain are at their most suggestive: brown, purple, and forbidding, with blushes of pink along their high snow-ridges, and wild white clouds eddying down their valleys. Beyond them, you feel, floodlights are perpetually blazing upon the stage of Spain, and you approach them with all the excitement of a visit to the theatre. There is a fanfare to the very name of Spain, and no nation offers an image more vivid. She seems to follow no fashion, obey no norm. She has generally stood aloof from the events of the recent past, from the Second World War to the nuclear race, and while to some her allure is only the spell of bathing beach and cheap wine, to others she stands apart because she does not yet feel reconciled to the twentieth century—has not quite succumbed to those pressures of materialism which we, like so many dim Frankensteins, half regret having devised.
Spain is one of the absolutes. Most States nowadays are willy-nilly passive, subject always to successive alien forces. Spain still declines in the active mood. She is not a Great Power, but in her minor way she is one of the prime movers still—still a nation that sets its own standards. To us poor ciphers of the computer culture, us cosmopolitan, humanist, cynical serfs of the machine, nothing is more compelling than the drama, at once dark and dazzling, of that theatre over the hills—the vast splendour of the Spanish landscape, the intensity of Spain’s pride and misery, the adventurous glory of a history that set its seal upon half the world, the sadness of a decline that edged so inexorably from triumph to tragedy, through so many centuries of rot. All this, distilled in blazing heat and venomous cold, dusted by the sand of Africa, guarded by that mountain barricade above you—all this seems to await your arrival, beyond the pass of Roncesvalles.
Presently it all comes true. Skidding upwards through the windy sleet, soon you reach the head of the pass, and stand at the gate of Spain. All is deserted and forlorn up there. An old snowplough lies tilted beside the road, a line of army huts lies derelict among the firs. Between the trees there broods the gaunt Augustinian monastery of Roncesvalles, with roofs that look like corrugated iron, and a great wet empty courtyard. A woman looks out of a door as you pass through its sullen hamlet. Two hooded policemen, huddled against the wind, respond numbly to your wave. Your first moments of Spain, if theatrical enough, hardly make you tingle.
But then you turn a corner out of the woodland, and suddenly there before you, below the level of the mist, there unfolds the great plain of the Ebro, with the foothills sweeping down towards the river. Space immeasurable seems to lie down there. All is brown but magnificent monotony—monotony of the desert kind, that has something mystic and exciting to it. In the middle distance a group of gypsies hastens with caravans, donkeys, and skinny dogs along the road, and beyond them all Spain seems to be expecting you—Spain of the shrines, Spain of the knightserrant, Spain of the guitars, the bull-rings, and the troglodytes. That evening you will sleep in Pamplona, where they let the young bulls loose in the streets on the feast of St. Fermín, where legend says they once killed ten thousand Jews to celebrate a prince’s wedding, where the church bells sound like the clashing of coal shovels in the small hours, and the hotel pillows feel as though they are stuffed with mule-hair.
It is partly environment that gives you this feeling—the feeling that you have burst into some bizarre private world beyond the mountains. The land of Spain resembles no other, so foursquare and rough-hewn is its outline (the shape of an open bull-hide, so the old geographers thought). It is like an immense fortress. Its average height is about two thousand feet, and mountains rise almost sheer from its coasts, leaving only narrow seaside strips or estuaries.
Within these mountain walls a vast plateau extends, like the bailey of a castle—once thickly forested, now stripped of its top-soil, and itself so corrugated by mountain ranges that wherever you are in Spain, at any time of the year, you are never surprised to see the distant blur of the snow summits. This is a harsh highland country, second only to Switzerland, among the nations of Europe, in its general altitude. The highest road in Europe is in Spain, above the city of Granada. The highest inhabited village is said to be Trevélez, in the Alpujarra mountains of the south. Perpetual wind is one of the characteristics of Spain, the lowering levante of the east, the Atlantic bluster of the south-west, and above all the dagger wind that scours the central meseta—a wind, so the proverb says, that can kill a man, but can’t blow out a candle. It is a climate of ferocious extremes: when I picked up a Spanish newspaper one morning at the end of May, I found that on the previous day the temperature at Cordoba had been thirty-two degrees centigrade, while the temperature at León had been four.
Few dependable rivers soften this cruel terrain. Except in the north-west
, Spanish rainfall is sparse and erratic—in Alicante in 1882 more rain fell in one day than fell in all the rest of the year put together. When it does rain, or the mountain snows melt, then the rivers flood ferociously down to the sea, often destroying roads and bridges, and carrying away good soil; but for most of the time they are dry, and are frequently used as mule-tracks themselves, so that a cool blue tracery on the map turns out to be only a hot pebbly strip of wasteland, with goats nibbling at its scrubby grass, and a limp horse or two breathing heavily in the shade of its bridges. There are only five big rivers in Spain—the Ebro, the Guadalquivir, the Guadiana, the Tagus and the Duero—spread across the country like the open fingers of a man’s hand. For the rest, some of the oldest Spanish jokes concern their lack of water. The River Manzanares at Madrid, one of the most anaemic of them all, was once described as looking like ‘a university town in the long vacation’. Somebody else said that if you wanted to see it, you should jump into a bus the moment it rained, or tHe river would be gone before you got there. Philip II, who threw the great Puente de Segovia across its stingy stream, was told by a candid critic that he either ought to sell the bridge or buy himself a new river. Water is one of the prime preoccupations of Spanish life. The pump is the traditional village focus, and until very recently the sale of contract of every Madrid apartment specified where the water came from. The most absolute demarcation lines in Spain are the lines that separate the dry land from the damp, the arid from the humid zones, the desert from the irrigated plain—the purgatory, in short, from the paradise.