by Jan Morris
Very different is our second great fane, the Gothic cathedral of Burgos. Burgos is a political city—the home of the Cid, the ancient capital of Castile, General Franco’s capital during the Civil War—and its cathedral too has to it a feeling of profound temporal consequence. There is no fun or flare to Burgos Cathedral. Its exterior is all grey solemnity. Its two grilled towers, gun-metal colour, look like the lattice-work masts of old American battleships. Its north door is always locked—to prevent the citizens of Burgos, so the guidebooks say severely, using the cathedral as a public throughfare. Grim grey steps lead you to the main doors; forbidding vergers jangle their keys inside; all through the cathedral darkness lies, like smoke or night-time. Burgos Cathedral is French in architectural origin, but nothing in Spain feels more Spanish. There looms the great coro, black and square, and through the twilight there coruscate, wherever you look, wonderful shining or fretted things—huge golden grilles, gilded staircases, figures of saints, kings, or heroes, reliquaries in silver frames, vast and glorious reredoses, canopies, cupolas, the mitres of dead bishops and the banners of victorious kings.
In the Condestable chapel, beyond the high altar, there lies upon his splendid tomb Don Pedro Hernandez de Velasco, Hereditary Constable of Castile, who died in the fifteenth century, but whose marble thick-veined hands still warily grasp his sword-hilt. In the chapel of Santísimo Cristo hangs the miraculous Christ of Burgos, supposed to have been fashioned by Nico-demus, made of soft buffalo-hide and real hair, emaciated, tragic, and so lifelike that in the old days it used to be thought its fingernails had to be manicured. High on the wall of the sacristy stands the rusty old iron-bound chest called the Coffer of the Cid, which that resourceful warrior once filled with sand and pledged to some gullible Jews as a chest of gold. Burgos is a gnarled, dour, idiosyncratic building; and when you leave its gloomy old purlieus, wander down to the pleasant riverside gardens of the city, or drive away up the hill into the bare countryside all about, it remains in your memory not as a joy, nor even an inspiration, but as an iron glower in the mind.
Sometimes the sharpness of the Spanish style goes sour or muzzy—just as the clarifying drugs, if taken to excess, end by making you either muddled or megalomaniac. There is much that is ugly in Spain, and there is a good deal that has taken a step over the frontier of reality, and feels half crazy.
For all its beauties it is a Philistine country. Switch on your radio, as you drive away from Burgos, and you will find its programmes drowned in raucous commercialism. Stroll down to the fine old theatre, when you stop for the night, and you will almost certainly find it closed for lack of support: virtually the only theatres left in the Spanish provinces are the ramshackle plaster-and-canvas stages of the travelling players—a company of whom once told me, at their muddy stand outside Vich, that their two most popular productions were Peter Pan and La Dame aux Camélias. Turn off your light when you go to bed, and you will find the night hideous with the hootings, exhaust roars and loud voices of a society that has not yet adapted itself to the machine age, and actually prefers noise. Cast around for a bookshop in the morning, and if you find one at all it will probably be the sort that hides its limited literature behind a selection of sunglasses, china matadors, and postcards of Andalusian beauties with revolving plastic eyes. The church music of Spain is usually screeching, saccharine, or fortissimo. The universities are only now recovering from the impositions of a repressive Catholicism and an intolerant neo-Fascism. The Inquisition’s narrowing of judgement or intellectual initiative is still apparent in Spain, and there is a depressing shortage of properly educated, generally cultivated men and women—what in other countries of the West constitutes ‘the reading public’. The educationalist Francisco Giner tried to create such a class in the nineteenth century, and the generation of 1898 was the brilliant nucleus of one, but the Civil War put the Philistines in command, and the artists, writers, architects and publishers of Spain are only now recovering their verve.
This is nothing new. Spanish architecture, in particular, has often been impelled by vulgar motives—the desire to go one better or, more pertinently, one bigger. It was Charles V who, in 1526, deposited in the middle of the Alhambra the gigantic circular palace now named after him, crudely disrupting the precious frivolity of the place. It was the same king’s royal council that sanctioned the building of a cathedral in the centre of the great mosque at Córdoba—against the fervent wishes of the local municipality, which bravely declared that the work destroyed in the operation ‘could never be replaced by anything of such perfection’. The fantastic Churrigueresque sacristy of the Carthusian monastery at Granada, and the vast cathedral humped up against the Giralda at Seville, were patently demonstrations of the Christian ability to build bigger and more elaborate buildings than any old infidel. The exquisite Transitional cathedral of Salamanca was dwarfed in the sixteenth century by the enormous mass of the new cathedral that was built beside it—intended to proclaim not so much glory of God as the fame of Salamanca University. The Spaniards are perpetually erecting huge and awful figures of Christ, to dominate the sweet hermitages and shrines of earlier generations, and though their best restorers are among the most skilful in Europe, their lesser practitioners seem constitutionally incapable of leaving well alone.
The Spanish taste for strong leadership has done much to vulgarize the scene. The Escorial rises far above rhetoric, if only because of its fanatic dedication, but Franco’s Air Ministry building down the road in Madrid, so lumpish, so grandiloquent—such a building is a very proclamation of autocracy’s habitual mediocrity. Spain is littered with such tasteless monuments—the writhing symbolisms of innumerable war memorials, vast and sanctimonious seminaries, the indescribably dreadful Labour University at Gijón, the barrack-like hostels erected by the syndicates on the ski slopes above Madrid. The exquisite balance of Toledo has been upset by a huge military college on the other side of the river. The evocative little cave of Covadonga, where Pelayo the Visigoth, we are told, fought the battle that began the Reconquest—that haunting shrine in the heart of the Asturian mountains has been overwhelmed by a grandiose Basilica built across the valley. A massive convent has tarnished the best view of Avila; a bishop’s palace built by Gaudi, like a CARDBOARD OGRE castle, stands grossly beside the pleasant cathedral of Astorga. It is almost as though the Spaniards deliberately try to disturb the equilibrum of the scene, to seize your attention by shocking your sensibilities, and make your hackles rise.
This is a disagreeable aberration from the Spanish norm—so decorous, so discreet, so sober. Much more attractive is the turn the genius takes when, sated at last with so much logic, it takes off into fallacy, and presently confuses the fanciful with the true. ‘Absurdity,’ the historian Angel Ganivet once wrote, ‘is the nerve and mainstay of Spain.’ This is the country of picaresque, whose eccentrics are usually likable and whose gamblers are always optimistic—‘Patience and reshuffle’, says the Spanish proverb gaily, calling for a new pack. Legends, myths, and fairy tales line the chronicles of Spain, and Spaniards cherish a strong taste for a dream-like kind of make-believe—most creepily embodied, perhaps, in the gait of the Bigheads, those swollen puppet-heads which Spaniards put on at fiestas, so upsetting the normal balance of their locomotion that they have to walk around the town in a peculiar rolling, strutting movement, like figures in a nightmare —this one a witch, this one a policeman, this one a painted old harridan with a fly as big as a mouse upon her nose.
You would expect to find such oddities and hallucinations in Galicia, where the Celtic strain is strong, and where wee folk, poltergeists, and the smell of brimstone are all familiar; and indeed one of my favourite examples of Spanish second sight concerns the shrine of St. James at Santiago. The Galicians will readily tell you why the shrine is there. St. James the Greater, they say, preached the Gospel in Spain soon after the Crucifixion, and after his martyrdom in Jerusalem his body was smuggled back to Galicia by a party of Spanish disciples. During the sea
voyage its miraculous presence saved the life of a man who had been carried out to sea by a frightened horse, and since both man and beast were found covered with scallop shells, the scallop became the badge of St. James and of the Galician pilgrimage. All this, the Galicians say, is well known. The sarcophagus was lost for several centuries, but a star revealed its whereabouts—Compostela means ‘field of a star’—and there the city of Santiago was built. St. James was a great traveller, they will tell you, which is why he is often portrayed as a pilgrim, and a great warrior, which is why he is often portrayed on horseback, smiting black infidels with a sword.
But in all this, alas, they are deceiving themselves, and for the stranger it has become exceedingly difficult to sort out fact from Santiago fancy. St. James, so all the best scholars seem to agree, never came to Spain at all. He was never a soldier. There is no earthly reason why his body should be brought to Galicia, and nothing of the sort is suggested in the Acts of the Apostles, where his death is recorded. He died several centuries before Islam was conceived, probably never mounted a horse in his life, and certainly never slew an infidel. If his emblem is a shell, it is probably because he was a fisherman by trade. If he is pictured with a pilgrim’s staff, it is because the sculptors, years ago, mixed up the cause with the effect, and confused the saint with his supplicants. There is no historical reason why Santiago should be a place of pilgrimage, why the cunning monks of Cluny should have fostered its international reputation, or why that joyful shrine should exist at all. It is only an illusion; but so long has it been in the Spanish mind, so attractive is it in itself, that long ago, in the way of all the best hallucinations, it achieved a kind of truth.
This is, of course, the essence of Quixotry. ‘The Character’, as they call him in Spain, was crazy—but in his craziness he expressed great truths. To this day an aura of hazed reality surrounds the name of Don Quixote in Spain, for just as the Galicians have convinced themselves that St. James fought the Muslims at Santiago, and Londoners look in all seriousness for 221B Baker Street, so many Spaniards take it for granted that Don Quixote actually existed. I once stopped my car in the colourless expanses of La Mancha, the knight’s homeland, and asked a couple of ploughmen which of the villages I could see around me was in fact Don Quixote’s birthplace. ‘Don Quixote de la Mancha?’ said they, for they always give him his full title, out of respect. ‘Why, he was born just outside Argamasilla de Alba. They’ve pulled the house down, but you can still see the place—over there, señor, beyond the church tower, that’s where Don Quixote de la Mancha was born!’
They had no doubt about it: for just as the Character himself had no doubt about the windmills, so Spain sometimes likes to rise above the brilliant sunlit clarity of her landscapes, and peer into the mists above. Down here it is stately dames with arms akimbo. Up there the knights and saints ride by.
4 Sol Y Sombra
We are in the Spanish South. The castanets click from coast to coast, the cicadas hum through the night, the air is heavy with jasmine and orange blossom, the soil is rich red or raw desert, there are prickly pears at the roadside, the girls have black eyes and undulating carriages, and often there hangs upon the evening the sad but florid strain of cante jondo—the ‘deep song’, part Oriental, part Gregorian, part Moorish, part Jewish, that the gypsies have made the theme music of the south.
For half the world the image of Spain is the image of Andalusia —the huge slab of country, mostly mountainous, that begins where the tableland is bounded by the southern sierras. Eight Spanish provinces make up Andalusia. Almería, in the extreme south-east, is an Andalusian city, and so is Cádiz, in the far west. Andalusia contains the highest mountain in Spain, the hottest shoreline, the teaming tourist resorts of the Costa del Sol, the fine old cities of Seville, Granada, and Córdoba, the ports of Málaga and Cádiz, the handsome mountain town of Ronda, Jerez de la Frontera, where the sherry comes from, and Vejer de la Frontera, perhaps the most spectacular of all Spanish villages.
Andalusia is romantic Spain, popularized by Gautier, Mérimée, Bizet, and Washington Irving, and still dangerously bewitching. The very name of the Alhambra stands for courtesans and silver slippers. The very sight of the Seville tobacco factory sends one off humming the Toreador Song. Thevery glimpse of a bull-fight poster from Torremolinos, taken home by some eager tourist and stuck upon a living-room wall—the mere glimpse of those gaudy colours, with their memories of pasodobles and seafood in the evening, sums up the romantic allure of Spain, and makes the citizen of the dank north fret for his summer holidays. To the Moors, Andalusia was an earthly paradise. To the travel agents it still is. To the rest of Spain it stands in rather the relationship of some flibbertigibbet but undeniably charming cousin—of whom indulgent elders say you really needn’t worry, John’s the kind that always falls on his feet.
But to all too many of the Andalusians themselves, this is a homeland less than Arcadian. Andalusia is sol y sombra both—sun on one side of the street, shadow on the other: a mirror both of Spain’s delight, and of her lingering poverty.
It is only fair to look first at this profligate in a winning streak, for the overwhelming characteristic of Andalusia is charm, and the glummest of sociological analysts could scarcely drive through its countryside without enjoying himself. As you descend to this lotus-land down some winding highway through the Sierra Morena, Andalusia lulls you at once into susceptibility. There lies the first of her villages, down in the river hollow, with a fine old bridge to take you there, and a lofty old church awaiting your arrival. There is a thread of smoke on the air, and a smell of fat from the breakfast batter they are cooking in the streets, and on the river bank a few early risers are already scrubbing their sheets beside the water. In you go, down the whitewashed cobbled streets, and all around you there seem to be flowers—in pots affixed to outside walls, in neat little gardens, in patios glimpsed through the grilled doors of houses.
Such a place often looks like a set in some old-school Ruritanian musical, and its inhabitants, too, move against these delightful backdrops with a stagy air. Here are all the stock characters of the Spanish legend: the leathery muleteer, his string of animals heavy with sacks, panniers, or baskets of vegetables; the Murillo boy trotting by on his donkey, all tousled mischief; the swanky landlord’s agent in his flat Cordoba hat, one hand elegantly at his hip, on a grey mare with a fancy saddle; the women chattering perpetually around the fountain, their big water-pots propped upon its parapet; the village grocer, glimpsed dimly through a curtain of hanging hams, garlics, and sausages; the staunch old beldame, all in black, whitewashing her house with a bundle of sticks for a brush; the silent shepherd with his goats and sheep, jostling each other down the street; the miller in his windmill on the ridge, with a smell of flour, a creaking of old wooden mechanisms, and two caged partridges on a wall; the gamblers playing dominoes and explicable card games in the café; the priest, and the pair of Civil Guardsmen in their grey capes and patent-leather hats, and the busybody official watching your arrival from a municipal window, and the comical village policeman in his white helmet, his face a very picture of bucolic bonhomie.
Of course there are motor-bikes too, and cars, and television aerials, but still the old image is true. Andalusia gloriously lives up to its reputation, and is as full of colourful vitality as any opera stage; full of hard work, as the labourers pursue their archaic skills in the fields; full of gossip and curiosity and the music of unseen radios, as the cheerful children swarm about your car, and the old ladies in shawls gaze at you unwinking from the doors of their houses. There are no half-measures in such a place, so close to the earth, so perilously near the frontiers of caricature. You feel that its people have already made up their minds, after some deliberation: having decided not to cut your throat, for the dramatic effect, they are, with a policeman’s salute and a wave from the shrouded grocer, altogether at your service.
Such is romantic Spain at its roots. To see it at its flowering climax, you should go to
the famous Feria of Seville, which takes place in April, and is at once so unusual, so entertaining, and so beautiful that few other fairs in the world can match it. The old city warms up to the event for some weeks in advance. The great fairground, down by Carmen’s tobacco factory, is prettied up with flowers and fairy lamps. The proud families of Andalusia, the clubs, the syndicates, and the livelier commercial firms, erect their tented pavilions along the boulevards. The hotels, cautiously doubling their prices for the occasion, rent out their last upstairs back rooms. The whole rhythm of the city is accelerated, the pressure is intensified, the streets are crowded, the cafés hilarious, magnificent horsemen clatter through the city centre, the stranger feels that some civic blood-vessel is surely about to burst—and finally, early in April, all this happy fever detonates the annual explosion of the Feria.
It is part a parade, of horses, fashions, and handsome citizens. It is part a binge, where people eat and drink all night, and dance into the morning. It is part an entertainment, where the best dancers and musicians of Andalusia come to display their talents. It is part a mating session, where the best families gather to share reminiscences, swop prejudices, and introduce eligible nephews to likely nieces. In the morning there takes place the most brilliant of all Spain’s paseos—a paseo with horses. Hour after hour, in the warm spring sunshine, the Andalusians ride up and down that fairground—to see and be seen, look each other’s dressage up and down, and inquire after the dear Marquis. The married and the very young ride by in lovely polished carriages, drawn sometimes by the proudest of mules, sometimes by pairs of elegant Arabs, and just occasionally by that prodigy of the carriage trade, a five-in-hand. Their coachmen are sometimes decked up in gorgeous liveries, turbans, toppers, Druse costume or tam-o’-shanters, and often some winsome grand-daughter perches herself upon the open hood of the barouche, her frilled white skirt drooping over the back.