by Jan Morris
Even Spanishness itself, casticismo, the quality that binds the nation and makes its flavour instantly recognizable—even this is tempered by the provinces, and has its lights, shades and distortions. The archetypal Castilian has to him something of the gaunt meditative quality that El Greco gave to his saints, or Velázquez to his Hapsburgs: his eyes are deep-set, his expression is concentrated, and whether he is jogging to a shack on a big mule, or stepping into a night club out of an Alfa-Romeo, he looks as though he is pursued by some mighty preoccupation. This grave model is coarsened by the Catalans, dullened by the Galicians, solidified by the Basques, and parodied by the flamboyant Andalusians. To the haughty Castilian, the people of the provinces spring from lesser breeds—‘south of the Ebro Africa begins’; and if you watch some jaunty Sevillian walking along a street, and compare him with the image of this noble norm—if you superimpose the Andalusian upon the Castilian style, you will begin to see why. Into the sad eyes there steals a hint of hilarity. Into the stately step there intrudes a flamenco beat. That air of tremendous meditation is replaced by an exhalation of ceaseless charm. The impeccable Castilian intonation is slithered and slurred, the solemn courtesy is laced with bonhomie, and in the very harmony of the Andalusian presence the Dorian seems to be replaced by a syncopated Phrygian mode. The Andalusian is a Spaniard still, a Spaniard unmistakable; but in the context of casticismo, some Spaniards are distinctly more Spanish than others.
For when we think of Spain, we think of Castile, with its peers of the high meseta. For some the other provinces may be Spain plus; for me they are always Spain minus. It is in Castile that the proper magic of Spain resides, casting its spell from Finisterre to Almería, and projecting its familiar image to the four corners of the world. It is not, I think, either a tolerant or a talented country. Its manner is autocratic, often domineering. Its landscapes arc cruel and its climate is terrible—nine months of winter, says the proverb, three of hell. But as we wander through the narrative of this book, around the wide perimeters of Spain, so we shall feel ourselves looking always over our shoulder to the stern splendours of the interior: just as sometimes up at Montserrat, when the echoes of the sardana are wheezing reedily beneath your window, or the gay little waitresses are giggling at the kitchen door—sometimes in the Catalan fizz of it all you may pine for that other country to the west, so aquiline and lofty, and wish you were there in some grand old city of the tableland, musty among its steppes, with a cadaverous grave waiter to bring you your garlic soup, and Philip II, with Torquemada and El Greco, dining silently at the next table.
3 Lady of Elche
‘South of the Ebro’, the traditionalists sneer: but it was not so far south of the Ebro that the most splendid ancestor of casticismo was interred and resurrected. Near Valencia there stands a town called Elche. It is indeed half African in temper. Around it there straggles the biggest palm grove in Europe, a phenomenon whose dates are not of the best quality, but whose palm fronds, weirdly tied together in bunches on the tree, and thus whitened through lack of sap, are in demand all over Spain because of their well-known powers of protection against lightning. Elche is a low, squarebuilt, flat-roofed, whitewashed, unprepossessing place; but in the shade of its palm forest in 1897, they dug up one of the most celebrated busts in the world, La Dama de Elche—the Lady of Elche, carved by an unknown artist at least twenty-five centuries ago, and now, on her plinth in the Prado Museum in Madrid, looking more castiza than ever.
She is a formidable dame: a broad-shouldered, rosy, heavily built woman, slung about with amulets, with an elaborate cartwheel head-dress and a general air of no-nonsense, as though she is about to tell a recalcitrant nephew to pull himself together, or ask some wilting cousin where on earth she bought that frightful dress. She looks as though, if there were more to her than head and shoulders, her arms might well be akimbo. In her steady and accusatory gaze, however, I like to fancy you can see the beginnings of the Spanish artistic taste, as it has been immortalized in the pictures, the buildings and the literature of this fitfully fertile country. The Lady of Elche, who is plainly Iberian with strong Greek blood, is representational, to be sure—vividly, rather alarmingly so. But she is truth slightly heightened, clarity with a shot of mescalin: and much of the art that has succeeded her down the centuries, like the society itself that gave birth to it all, has this quality of being lifelike, but more so—intenser, taller, more vertical, perhaps more real than reality.
Its basis is clarity, for this is the first characteristic of Spain. Here all is sol or sombra—sun or shade, as they call the two halves of the bull-ring. You are seldom halfway in Spain. It is either fearfully hot or frightfully cold. You are either a good man or a bad one, either very rich or very poor, either a faithful church-goer or an out-and-out disbeliever. The light is brilliant, the atmosphere is preservative, the colours are vivid—so vivid, for all the vast monotony of the meseta, that sometimes this seems like a painted country, as the mauve and purple shadows shift across the hills, as the sun picks out a village here, a crag there, as the clouds idly scud across the candlewick landscape of olives or cork oaks, and the red soil at your feet seems to smoulder in the heat. It is no accident that the Spaniards are masters of the art of floodlighting. They learnt the skill from nature, and it is a splendid thing to see one of the great buildings of Spain illuminated suddenly by sun or lightning against this background of fugitive colour—the grand tower of Segovia, say, standing suddenly among the cornfields, or the exotic domes and towers of Saragossa, resplendently alone beside the Ebro.
Intellectually Spain is similarly unequivocal, and expresses herself well in the long analytical stare that often greets the stranger in Castile. The shape of Spain is symmetrical, and the Spaniard likes everything else to conform. He distrusts loose ends and anomalies. Limpieza, purity, is one of the great Spanish abstractions. Spain does not, like the oyster, turn her grit to pearls: she merely spews it out. Jews, Moors and gypsies have all been expelled from this kingdom in the cause of purity, and the world is generally full of Spanish exiles. Some three hundred thousand people left Spain because of the Spanish Civil War: Picasso, Balenciaga, Casals, Salvador de Madariaga were all exiled pieces of Spanish grit. The Spaniard likes things to be final, and emphatic. Even the Spanish exclamation mark exclaims twice, thus: !Caramba!—which is to say, in our milder vernacular, Goodness me! (though as a matter of fact this legendary Spanish expletive is rarely heard nowadays, and has perhaps reverted to its other dictionary definition, ‘an ancient headgear for women).’ No wonder absolutism has been the leit-motif of Spanish politics. ‘Do you forgive your enemies?’ a nineteenth-century Duke of Valencia is asked on his deathbed in a famous Spanish anecdote. ‘I have no enemies,’ he retorts, ‘I’ve had them all shot.’
Everything must be definite, positive, cut-and-dried. Castilian itself, besides being one of the most phonetic of all languages, is one of the most subtly precise, and the sages of the Spanish Academy are constantly polishing its idioms. Spain is a country of polarities—it used to be maintained among the Spanish Jesuits, indeed, that the human body being magnetic, if you placed a corpse in a big enough bath its head would swing around to north. The endless proverbs of Spain, so dear to Sancho Panza, are nearly always of a dry, succinct kind, revolving to very obvious conclusions: and Don Quixote itself is so graphic in its symbolisms that without much simplification it can be retold as one of the best of all children’s stories. The mystics of Spain have often had a universal appeal: St. John of the Cross, that whole-hog little ascetic, whose poems can still move the most truculent agnostic, or St. Theresa, such a saint as every small girl, during her religious phase, would give her favourite pony to emulate; or even St. Ignatius, the Basque soldier, who once tested God’s will by allowing his mule to decide whether or not a disputatious Moor should be killed—‘if the beast goes right, I spare him, if it goes left, he dies’. The intellectuals known as the ‘generation of ninety-eight’ (Cuba fell in 1898, and with it the last prete
nsions of Spanish imperialism) couched their ideas in language as catchy and easy to understand as advertising copy—‘I feel a mediaeval man in me’, ‘Spain hurts me’. ‘Nothing if not a man’, ‘We love Spain because we do not like her’. Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered in 1936 and buried in an unknown grave, foretold his own fate in a remarkable instance of this exact and explicit kind of mysticism:
Then I realized I had been murdered.
They looked for me in cafés, cemeteries and churches …
but they did not find me
They never found me?
No. They never found me.
The Spaniard likes to be sure. The monotony of the corrida lies in the fact that the bull always loses, but to Spanish minds this is essential to the drama, just as death is essential to life. Philip II, wishing to be absolutely certain, lived surrounded by dossiers, and you have only to visit a Spanish Government department today, stagger past its endless bureaux and be guided through its networks of dockets, cross-references, lines of authority or channels of responsibility, to know that the Spaniard still revels in the minutiae of bureaucracy. He loves to have everything tabulated: when the Bishop of Ciudad Rodrigo was murdered at his desk during the Civil War, his assassins looked at his papers to see what he had been doing, and found that he had been sorting out his 13,400 card references to the History of Toledo. Castles, caves, and churches all have street numbers in Spain, and every Spanish cathedral has upon its façade a mark showing its altitude. Upon one of the gates of Burgos there is a dim scratch, in the shadow of the arch, which romantics variously interpret as indicating the length of the Cid’s sword or the arm-span of that hero as a monstrous babe-in-arms, but which certainly is, whatever, its original purpose, a sign of the Spaniard’s immemorial passion for measuring things. Spanish roads are among the most carefully and intelligently signed in Europe. Spanish traffic policemen, though their style greatly varies from town to town, or perhaps from mood to temperament, are nothing if not lucid: with a snap or a click of muscles they halt you, white gloves beneath white sun-helmet, or with a Wagnerian sweep they wave you on, and sometimes they ornament their gestures with little grace-notes of traffic control—like the man to whom Mr. H. V. Morton once gratefully tipped his hat, and who responded by removing his helmet and bowing.
Spanish bookshops are full of multi-volumed, heavily indexed, neatly tabulated tomes about the structure, organization, flora, literature, geology, economy, communications or Women of Spain, and the Spaniard has actually managed to whittle away at geography with his enthusiasm for neat ends—the colonies on the other shore of the Mediterranean, Ceuta and Melilla, have long been metamorphosed in the Spanish official mind into integral parts of the peninsula. Often the papers will tell you that the hottest place in Spain yesterday was Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, seven hundred miles out in the Atlantic. The cities of Spain are often wonderfully tidy and close knit, and the ports of Spain often look like model harbours in a museum. A quaint example of this toy-like exactitude of Spain is the royal palace at Santander on the northern coast, built for Alfonso XIII by public subscription: it stands upon a little spit, halfway between the port and the bathing beaches, and looks like a child’s idea of a palace, its castellated mansion nicely on the summit of the peninsula, its stables and servants’ quarters properly disposed about its flanks, surrounded on three sides by the sea and on the fourth by loyal subjects. There is nothing cloudy or crooked to Spanish arrangements. The structure of syndicates, or official trade unions, established by Franco’s Government was actually called a vertical system: the pillar of consultation began with the worker, rose neatly through management and ownership, and ended at the top, oddly enough, with General Franco.
I once asked a lighthouse-keeper at Algeciras how he liked his job, and he replied unexpectedly that it was muy romántico—very romantic. If logic can be touched with rhapsody in Spain, so much the better—the official name for the old part of Madrid is the Romantic Quarter—and if the dramatic solution can be reached with a proper formality, it is always worth seeking. I once reported a theft to the criminal investigation department of Barcelona, a resolutely smoky, shabby, Maigret-like place, with a pair of detectives playing chess to an attentive audience of colleagues, and a smell of ink, tobacco, typewriters, and old clothes. They listened to me carefully, took down my deposition in triplicate, and threw open a door into an inner room in which, they fondly supposed, my stolen goods were displayed upon a table. A dejected young villain was already snuffling in a corner, awaiting my arrival; the policemen led me to the table with proud struts of achievement; but alas, the goods were somebody else’s, victim could not be confronted with culprit, and the detectives seemed so disappointed at the failure of the coup de théâtre that even the chess game flopped, and I left them morosely putting the pawns away in a cardboard box.
Spain prefers the all-or-nothing. She is an etched country. The acid in her life makes the picture dignified but preternaturally distinct, and she is torn always, as her own writers have a tendency to tell us, between two tremendous poles—Man and Universe.
So it is a kind of towering realism, spiced with the caustic, that characterizes the most typically Spanish art—that partnership of Quixote and Sancho, or St. Theresa’s ‘God among the saucepans’. Even before that Lady of Elche, the cave artists of Altamira were painting deer that looked like deer—but a little lither and lovelier than they would be on the hoof. The great Spanish painters usually talk in a language that we all understand; and even when they are immigrants to Spain, nevertheless that language is generally the pure and stately vernacular of Castile.
If it is El Greco the Cretan who is painting, the idiom is tinged with something mystical and searching, expressed in a lengthening of feature and a sad uniformity of expression: all El Greco’s men have virtually the same face, and it is a face so absolutely and unmistakably Spanish that you may see it still today wherever the Castilians have left their mark. If it is Velázquez at work, then the extra dimension is at once more human and more pathetic: the officers of The Lances, some watching the formalities of surrender, some glancing at the painter, with looks of proud melancholy detachment; or Prince Baltazar Carlos on his plump pony, who ought to be having a splendid time, but somehow, at seven years old, already looks weighed down by the burdens of princeship; or the little Infanta of Las Meniñas, never alone, always watched—by her proud parents, by her doting ladies, by the court chamberlain at the door, by the jester and the female dwarf and the grave kind artist himself, the eye of the world.
If it is Goya who is painting, then the foreshortening goes another way, and mankind is made stumpier and coarser than life: the figure of St. Anthony, in the Church of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid, is so prosaic that although he is in the act of raising a man from the dead, at first you do not notice him at all among the gay figures of the frieze. The family of Charles IV, in the most famous and enigmatical of all royal portrait groups, looks as though its members have been squashed in some kind of satirical press. The tragic figures of 1808 rising against the French look less like patriotic heroes than aborigines, all mop-hair and thick limbs. The ghastly figures of Goya’s ‘black paintings’, the cannibalistic Saturns, flying witches, and monsters, look to my eye all too down-to-earth, as though they are unfortunate entries in a fancy dress competition.
Even the great modern Spaniards—Picasso, Dali, Miró—sometimes express a similar swollen realism. No picture ever had a more instant and universal impact than Picasso’s Guernica, in all its tangled horror, and when we look along one of Dali’s silent Catalan beaches it is as though we are seeing our own favourite holiday cove infinitely extended, infinitely hushed, and littered with things like giraffes and trombones that we might well have seen for ourselves, if we had been luckier with the weather.
No less in sculpture does the Spanish artist make you feel that the thing is familiar, but divinely ennobled. Spain is endlessly rich in suggestive statues, from the gently
smiling figures of the Virgin to be found in every other cathedral—a little wry, a little self-deprecatory—to the celebrated figures of Quixote and Sancho in the Plaza de España in Madrid, the old knight riding his Rosin-ante with such an air of command that the Communists used to say his outstretched hand was directing them to storm the prison, while the Nationalists claimed it was giving the Fascist salute. Up the road, near the Royal Palace, the equestrian figure of Philip IV, the best horseman in Spain, is a stirring example of the genre: Velázquez designed it, it was cast in Florence, the mathematics of its construction are said to have been worked out by Galileo, and it stands there so gloriously lifelike that even now you almost expect it to wheel around with a whinny and a toss of its mane, and make for the next jump.
There is a seventeenth-century figure of St. Bruno, in the monastery of Miraflores at Burgos, so disconcertingly realistic that somebody once said of it that ‘if he weren’t a Carthusian he would certainly speak’. There is a figure of Goya in the cathedral plaza at Saragossa, which is attended by four stone admirers, giving it an extraordinary feeling of immediacy: they are a charming, summery group of young people, in cravat and crinoline, disposed at a respectful garden-party distance on the lawn. There is a figure of the Cid, beside the river Burgos, whose tremendous romantic gusto almost halts the passing traffic: a giant of a man, on a great bronze brute of a horse, with his cape flying like wings in the wind behind him, and his eyes beneath the iron helmet trained ferociously upon an unseen army across the bridge. And best of all are the royal monuments of Spain: the cold grand effigies of the Catholic Monarchs in Granada Cathedral, guarded by the most sumptuous of screens and surveyed by birds with gilded beaks; or the superb alabaster figures of Juan II and Isabel of Castile, in the Miraflores at Burgos, carved with exquisite grace and humour by the great Gil de Siloé; or Philip II, breathtakingly lifelike, kneeling erect with his family in the chapel of his own Escorial: memorials, all of them, that marvellously reflect the mystic nature of kingship, its claim to be something grander and more privileged than nature.