Spain

by Jan Morris

  But more terribly, it may be a reminder of that last and worst of the Spanish wars, which tore this country apart in the thirties, and left it half hushed and numbed until only the other day: a broken bridge, perhaps; a row of crosses; the little cork grove, near Salamanca, where General Franco became the Caudillo; or some shabby city of the north, Gerona, Vich, or Tortosa, over whose cobble-streets and dowdy houses even now there seems to hang some residual ignominy of defeat.

  8 Christ the King

  The Gothic cathedral at León is one of the few in Spain that feel light—the Spaniards did not share the French taste for glass walls, and preferred a brawnier, grimmer style. León has a vast amount of marvellous glass, no coro to obstruct the central view, and a general sense of lucidity; and as if to exploit this feeling of revelation, the chapter has enclosed the west end of the nave with an enormous sheet of plate glass, enabling the tourist to press his nose against the window when a service is actually taking place inside.

  This is an astonishing sensation. Immediately in front of you, a foot or two beyond the glass, an elderly Spanish canon will be sitting before his missal in all the glory of his golden vestments—champing at the mouth a little, perhaps, or fidgeting with his stole, so dose that you can almost smell the cough-drops on his breath or turn over the pages for him. To right and left, embedded in their stalls, the other canons sit reverently engrossed, birettas hung on the walls behind; and at the lecterns below them, rising and sitting in antiphony, two young precentors chant the liturgy —churchmen of immense enthusiasm, like up-and-coming barristers, who throw their whole physiques into their devotions, and do not neglect, now and then, to cast a swift glance behind them, to see how that profane audience behind the glass is behaving itself. It is almost like being a Spanish priest yourself, to stand so close to those vivacious canonicals; or perhaps you may be reminded, without irreverence, of the great aquaria in America, through whose thick portholes you may squint to see the poor dolphins sporting themselves inside.

  Spain is a Christian country in the way that Saudi Arabia is Muslim, Burma Buddhist, or Russia Communist. To the average citizen of the West, with his pagan or humanist social background, her Christianity is as exotically mysterious as any faith of fetish or of ancestry. Church and State may no longer be virtually synonymous, as they were in Franco’s day (the Caudillo was ex officio a canon of Astorga), but for centuries the Catholic Church has been one of the ruling forces of Spain, and even now, the moment you set foot within her frontiers the tokens of the creed are as ubiquitous as prayer-wheels in Nepal. Christianity was for generations the binding force of this centrifugal nation. It was in the name of Christ that the Catholic Monarchs united Spain, earning for this country, by Papal Bull, the perpetual right to eat meat on Fridays. In a sculptured relief in Granada Cathedral Ferdinand and Isabel are shown accepting the surrender of Granada with their spiritual adviser, Cardinal Mendoza, so powerful a prelate that he was known as Tertius Rex; and it is properly symbolic, perhaps, that of the three, only the Cardinal is wearing gloves. It was in the cause of Christian unity that the Jews and the Moors were expelled—the Jews because of their ‘continual attempts to divert and turn faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith, taking them away from it and drawing towards their own diseased beliefs and opinions’. The ships of the conquistadores crossed the Atlantic loaded deep with crosses, missionaries, missals, and Christian convictions, and Spain in her heyday saw herself as the champion of Christian orthodoxy, whose task it was to unite the world in Catholicism; it was the defeat of the Armada by the English Protestants, in 1588, that cracked her confidence in her mission and herself.

  In the Spanish context Christianity has always meant power and purpose. Within this stronghold, a heretic is traditionally a fifth columnist—and indeed, five centuries after the fall of Granada it was a Spanish Christian general who coined that very phrase, to describe the secret body of sympathizers who would help the four Nationalist columns to seize Madrid for the faith. For the faith! As the whole course of the Reconquest was partly a war and partly an act of devotion, so to many Nationalists the Civil War, which brought Franco’s regime to power, was the last of the holy wars. The Republic had rashly tried to break the Church’s hold on education, and generally to separate religion from Government; the war memorials of their opponents usually describe the dead as having laid down their lives ‘for God and for Spain’. ‘Commend your soul to God,’ cried Moscardó to his son, over the telephone line from the Alcazar, ‘shout Viva España, and die like a hero’—and thus he summed up the three estates of Christian casticismo, universal, patriotic, individual. The decisive moments of Spanish history have always occurred when Christianity has, by force or persuasion, welded the nation into one of its periods of purpose. One such moment was that annus mirabile, 1492, when the last Moors were defeated, the Jews were expelled, and the Cross first set sail, beside the Spanish flag, for the Americas. Another such moment, you may like to remind yourself as you peer through the plate glass at León, has only just come to an end.

  This does not mean that every Spaniard goes to Mass. Before the Civil War it was estimated that only a third of the population confessed or communicated; today the proportion is probably less than half, with women predominating. Anti-clerical feeling in Spain, as distinct from anti-religious feeling, has often been violent. Church and power have so often gone together—‘Money is very Catholic’, says a bitter Spanish proverb—and though the association of the two has done some great things for Spain, it has also helped to sour the attitude of the poor towards organized religion. The saddest statues in Europe are the mutilated figures of saints outside Tortosa Cathedral, which look as though they were hacked about by Cromwellian troopers or Muslim fanatics, but were in fact desecrated by furious citizens of modern Spain, half a century ago.

  The Spanish Church has always been proud, and frequently independent. Its bishops have seldom been flaccidly subservient towards the Vatican, and in our own time the gentle Pope John ΧΧΙII so disapproved of Spanish policies that when a distinguished ex-Minister was nominated to represent this Christian State at the Holy See, his accreditation was refused (and he killed himself). Spain is a much more sceptical, ironic country than Italy, say, and within her frontiers the faith seems to have wider limits than elsewhere. At one end we have the severe intellectuals of the hierarchy, whose pale ascetic faces you may see in any Spanish cathedral, absorbed in their books in the dim-lit coro, or scattering like a meteor shower after vespers—each to his own small chapel in the transept, and thence through a little door into the evening light. I once walked into the cathedral of La Seo in Saragossa to find in progress the public examination of a newly nominated canon, and never did I feel more strongly the intellectual iron of Catholicism. In the background there hovered a couple of choirboys in surplices, and a stoop-shouldered beadle in a mouldy wig. At a table behind the coro the young canon was reading his thesis with gusto, speaking very fast about one of the abtruser theological conceptions, and sometimes emphasizing his point with a gentle slap of his hand upon the table. And bundled mysteriously on their benches before him were his seniors of the chapter, screwed up in cassocks, embroidered surplices, and stoles, one facing this way, another that, and all looking immensely old, eminent, and saintly. At first I thought these wrinkled objects were fast asleep; but I tiptoed across the aisle to their benches, and as I approached them I noticed that first one watery old eye, then another, then a third, was fastened upon me with an expression of infinitely lively awareness. I withdrew abashed, and there pursued me towards the door the tap of the beadle’s censorious wand, and the rich voice of the candidate, pressing home a dogma.

  At the other end stand all those miraculous relics which, to the cold northern mind, blur the edge between religion and superstition, and give to Spanish Catholicism an odour of wizardry. All over Spain there are miracle-working images of the Virgin, hallowed and well-loved objects with traditional powers of cure and protection. They ar
e usually squat, primitive, vaguely Oriental figures, blackened by centuries of candle smoke, and sitting upon their high plinths, their banks of flowers, or their altars like dark little idols. Most of them are mediaeval figures which were buried for their safety when the Moors conquered Spain, whose whereabouts was forgotten during the seven centuries of Muslim rule, and whose rediscovery after the Reconquest was regarded as miraculous. A typical story is that of the Black Virgin of Montserrat. This small, almost African-looking image, now to be seen as a small black blob among the multitudinous flowers, gems, and candles of its altar, was discovered by some shepherds who noticed strange lights flickering, to celestial music, outside a cave on the holy mountains; a sweet fragrance surrounded the image, a halo hovered about its head, and when they carried it down the steep mountain track it presently grew so strangely heavy that they left it where it was, and built around it a monastery that is famous now wherever Christianity is known.

  Others claim a genesis even more remarkable. The Virgin of the Forsaken, the patroness of Valencia, was carved in the fourteenth century as the emblem of a charitable society; legend says that it was made by a group of pilgrims who asked the society for four days’ supply of food and a sealed room, and who disappeared without a trace, leaving the image behind them and thus proving themselves to have been, beyond all reasonable doubt, angels. Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose monastery stands in a slouching mediaeval village in Estremadura, was discovered by a herdsman in the thirteenth century. A dead cow he was skinning suddenly came to life again, and as it staggered to its feet, so there appeared beside it a vision of the Virgin, who said that if they dug on the spot where the cow had lain, there they would find a miraculous image: they did, and Our Lady of Guadalupe presently became so famous that half the Kings of Spain paid homage to her, Don John of Austria gave her Ali Pasha’s stern lantern after the Battle of Lepanto, Columbus named an island for her, and she possesses a wardrobe of several thousand dresses, marvellously worked and studded with precious stones.

  There is something very touching to these old legends, and something moving to the devotion that simple people still accord to these antique objects. Occasionally, though, an element more eerie creeps into a cult. One of the more alarming examples, to my mind, is the Virgin of the Pillar at Saragossa, which owes its fame to an apocryphal journey to the city by the ubiquitous St. James. On January 2nd in the year 40, we are told, St. James was visited at Saragossa by a vision of Our Lady, who descended from Heaven upon a pillar of jasper. Around this pillar, and the fifteenth-century figure of the Virgin that now surmounts it, a formidable Basilica has been erected. It is a severe rectangular building, with four tall towers and a central tumble of cupolas, and its pinnacles rise like watchtowers above the Ebro, dominating the plain of Aragón. It stands there rather like a Spanish Kremlin, and its interior is dark, mysterious, and very stuffy, as if no fresh air has been admitted for centuries, and all is stale breath, incense, and candle smoke.

  High upon her pillar the Virgin stands, set against a background of indescribable glitter—she is said to be adorned with 8,000 diamonds, 145 pearls, 74 emeralds, 62 rubies and 46 sapphires. Around her people are always praying, priests are always hurrying, incense is always swirling, and sightseers are always mutely staring. She has been there for at least five centuries, and in those years, we are assured, there had not been a single daylight moment when she has been alone. It is not, though, these activities of devotion that give her shrine its chill fascination. It is something older and darker, something pre-Christian perhaps, that puts you in mind of magic and moonlight. Near the shrine there hang two unexploded bombs, which were dropped on this cathedral by the Republicans during the Civil War, but miraculously failed to explode—the Virgin had been officially appointed Captain-General of the city. And behind it, below that compartment into which the priests clamber to change her costumes or her jewellery, like dresses at an opera—through a small aperture behind you may see a small bare portion of the holy pillar itself. All day long the pilgrims pause at this spot, to stoop in the dark and kiss that piece of stone. The atmosphere is thick and queerly hushed around them, the candles flicker through the sickly lilies, somewhere a Mass is being said, and nobody has ever broken it to those devotees that St. James never came this way at all, nor ever saw Our Lady beside the Ebro.

  Perhaps it is true now, because so many people have believed it so long—thousands of Spanish girls are christened Pilar in honour of the Saragossa Virgin. Certainly there is to the more atavistic symbols of Christianity in Spain a dignity that comes not from themselves, but from the centuries of devotion, respect, and fear they have inspired. One of the best-loved figures in Spain is that called the Christ of the Plain, which hangs in the little Basilica of St. Leocadia below the walls of Toledo. Before this image, we are told, a young peasant girl and her faithless betrothed once asked Our Lord to arbitrate between them; the sad, emaciated figure above the altar lowered its right arm from the Cross to acquit the girl—and thus the arm hangs still, in the seclusion of the little church, down on the plain beside the arms factory. Another pleasant legend is illustrated in the fine cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, in Old Castile. In this small city, long ago, a young man who had been wrongly hanged for theft miraculously came to life again upon the gallows, and the bystanders hastened off to the Mayor to have him cut down; the Mayor was having his dinner, and was just about to start work on the two plump roast chickens that lay on the table before him when the disconcerting news arrived. ‘Nonsense!’ he cried. ‘You might just as well say that these two birds on my dinner table could get up and crow!’ Need I end the tale? They crowed to such effect that to this very day, in a kind of gilded coop inside the cathedral, two live white chickens, a cock and a hen, perpetuate their memory; they do an eight-day shift, but are excused duty in the winter because the buildings gets too cold.

  In the cathedral of Barcelona there is a figure of Our Lord which is oddly twisted in the trunk; this, we are told, was taken to Lepanto by Don John, and twisted itself in the course of the action to evade a Turkish cannon-ball. In León Cathedral stands the Madonna of the Die: an unlucky gambler once threw his dice at this figure, and was horrified to find that the nose of the Christ Child began to bleed in protest. In the agreeable little cathedral of Santander the heads of two local martyrs are kept in an illuminated socket in the front of the high altar; their skulls are fitted with silver replicas of their faces, and when I once asked the sacristan when they were martyred, he assured me kindly that it was ‘many years ago’, as though I was afraid they might not be quite dead yet. In Valencia Cathedral there is a graceful goblet which is claimed to be the Holy Grail—and which indeed, though it was made some centuries after the Last Supper, really did inspire many of those deeds of devotion that created the Grail’s legend, and thus is the true progenitor of Morte d’Arthur and Lohengrin. In the cathedral of Oviedo, preserved in a kind of deposit-crypt, a splendid eleventh-century coffer contains two thorns from Christ’s crown, a sandal of St. Peter’s, several pieces of the Cross, and one of the thirty pieces of silver—saved from the Moors by subterfuge, and from Napoleon’s troops by bribery.

  There are two handkerchiefs in Spain claiming to be St. Veronica’s: one in the monastery of Santa Clara, outside Alicante, the other lying in an urn above the high altar of Jaén Cathedral, supported by golden cherubs and reached by pilgrims by means of a wooden ladder behind. An entire wall of a chapel in the monastery at Loyola, the birthplace of St. Ignatius, is covered with relics of the saint, from his bones to his gloves; as for St. Theresa, her poor body was exhumed some years after her death, and broken into miracle-working relics that are now scattered across Christendom. There are 7,500 holy relics inside the Escorial, including the sacred wafer which, so Augustus Hare darkly tells us, ‘bled at Gorcum when trampled on by Zwinglian heretics’; high on one of the central towers, if you look carefully from the north side, you may see a small rectangle of gilded bronze, said by some to co
ntain the veil of St. Barbara, and certainly covered with invocations against lightning.

  The ex votos of Spain are often fascinating. Sometimes they are only wax heads, limbs, or little figures, but often they are crudely painted pictures of escapes or recoveries—sick men rising from their beds, muleteers narrowly escaping trains at level crossings, appalling car accidents in which the grateful donor is miraculously thrown clear, X-ray pictures of needles in children’s stomachs, water-colours of people being gored by bulls, caught in revolving water-wheels, falling in fires, thrown off horses down precipices, or rescued from certain drowning, sunk as they are in the troughs of gigantic seas, by visions of Our Lady above the storm clouds. Even animals are sometimes remembered: in Oviedo Cathedral there is a statue of St. Anthony with his pig, symbolic of the earthly possessions he has renounced, and always hung around his waist are five or six small wax piglets, placed there in gratitude by peasants who assume him to be the Patron of the Sty. All over Spain there are statues whose feet are worn smooth by kissing, or whose heads shine from the touch of countless reverent hands, through several centuries of Christian certainty. The toes of a figure of San Pablo de Alcántara, which was erected outside Cáceres Cathedral only in 1954, are already rubbed smooth and brassy by the faithful; as for that statue of Maestro Mateo in the portico of Santiago, so many people have bumped foreheads with it, in search of inspiration, that it has a perceptible dent between the eyes.