by Jan Morris
And the oddest of all these manifestations is not a miracle at all, not even a very holy image, but only a clever piece of theatrical mechanics. If you go to Mass one Friday morning in the Church of Corpus Christi in Valencia, you will notice above the altar a fine picture of the Last Supper by Francisco Ribalta. At the climax of the service, while the choir sings the Miserere, there is a slight whirring and creaking noise from the recess behind the altar, and this picture suddenly vanishes—to be replaced first by blue velvet curtains, which are drawn to reveal black velvet curtains, which are drawn to reveal in a moment of undeniable excitement, a vividly illuminated life-size crucifix. The choir sings softly throughout this phenomenon, the congregation is on its knees, a genuine sense of drama emanates from the mechanism, and it is easy to see that not so very long ago, to the breathless peasants of the Valencia plain, it must have seemed proof positive that Christ was born to die for us.
Sleight of hand indeed, but in Spain the Church is dealing with a populace in whose minds, even now, the Christian faith is inextricably confused with older values. ‘The Spaniards are good Christians,’ a Venetian ambassador once observed, ‘but immoral.’ Where their pagan superstitions end, and where their Christianity begins, the most sophisticated candidate for canonry could scarcely begin to demonstrate.
Sometimes, though, beliefs and customs can be directly traced to the rites of paganism. At Mérida, the old Roman fortress-city, an elegant shrine to the god Mars has been turned into a chapel in honour of the child-martyr St. Eulalia—said to have been roasted on the spot in the reign of Diocletian. It is customary for the women of Mérida to toss locks of their hair through the chapel grille from the pavement outside, and the little building is regarded with such veneration that often you see people on the other side of the street, staid young couples or solitary old gentlemen, standing stock-still in prayer and contemplation before it. One evening I was standing before its grille, half lost in meditation myself, when I heard pants and footsteps beside me: two small girls in red coats were crossing themselves at my side, and when I looked down at them they hastily pressed their thin arms through the grille, dropped two pink-ribboned pigtails on the floor before the altar of Mars, crossed themselves again, and ran quickly home through the street lights.
Pagan or Christian? I do not know which to think the great fiestas of Spain, which have become, through the medium of tourist pamphlet and travel agency, as emblematic of this country as the Folies Bergères used to be of Paris. Marvellously varied is the form of these great displays. In some parts of Andalusia they lead lambs through the streets on strings, to celebrate Easter morning. In Catalonia, on Corpus Christi Sunday, they create elaborate patterns of petals in the city streets. To celebrate the feast of St. Joseph in Valencia, they build vast effigies of characters fictional, real, or symbolical, and burn them in a final wild orgy at midnight. On the feast of St. Fermín, in Pamplona, they let young bulls loose in the streets, and allow the youths of the city, gay in the yellow sashes of Navarre, to pit their courage against their horns.
The greatest of the fiestas are the Passion Week processions of Andalusia. There are few spectacles on earth to match the holy parades of Málaga or Seville—events all the more haunting because their strangeness, dignity, and reverence are coupled with an odd matter-of-fact detachment, as though the whole affair is only one more job in the daily round, like catching the morning bus or doing the shopping. Imagine such an evening of display, in such a city of the Spanish South. It is almost certain to be warm —Málaga claims the finest climate in Europe, with the lowest rainfall. It is almost certain to be sticky, for so many people come south for Easter week that rents go up all along this southern littoral, and if you want a hotel room for a night you may have to book it for the whole week. It is almost certain to be slightly disorganized, for though the Spaniards are masters of crowd control, the only function they ever begin on time is the bull-fight—whose crowds will clap and cat-call if the opening trumpet is a moment late.
The pavements, then, are packed and jostling, the ice creams and fizzy drinks are selling well, the big-wigs are looking grand but uncomfortable upon their chairs of honour, and presently there advances at a funereal pace along the avenue one of the strangest of all processions. An equestrian officer leads it, perhaps, sword drawn and medals dangling, but hard at his heels there pace the penitents, living survivals of the old flagellating sects, grouped by fraternity, with tall conical hoods upon their heads, narrow slits for their eyes, wands in their hands, and bright silken gowns —crimson, blue, or white—trailing about their ankles. They move in singular movements, looking warily from side to side, for their hoods obscure their vision; and with the swaying motion of the head that this gives them, together with a general manner of casual, swaggering, lordly menace, they look like eerie travesties of regimental drum-majors, parading down some very different Mall. Lines of infant penitents follow them, jollied along by young priests, and chewing gum to keep them on their feet; a band may come next, playing the sombre hymns of Passion Week; and then there lurch into sight, grotesque and towering in the lamplight, the great floats that are the purpose of the procession—vast gilded images of Our Lord or the Virgin Mary, elaborate with palm trees or tabernacles, decked in flowers, candles, and carpets, carried by ranks of bent-backed, panting, cowled or cassocked men. A hooded major-domo keeps them in time, walking back-wards before them and clanging a bell, and every few paces they have to stop, so enormous is the weight of the floats; and so in a sad and dreadful rhythm, to the muffled beat of a drum, they make their slow way through the city streets, so high, so ornate, so heavy, so queer, with the hoods of those penitents, the beat of that drum, the smell of the flowers on the air and the flicker of the candles, that the most tremendous of military parades, the tanks in Red Square or the Garde Républicaine down the Champs Élysées, pale in the imagination beside them.
Occasionally a woman standing in the crowd, or leaning from some high balcony, breaks into the hard thrilling notes of a saeta—an arrow-song of mourning or remorse which she projects like a missile towards the passing image. Such interventions are mostly prearranged, however, and if you are close enough to the procession you will see that when those floats stop for a rest the men who carry them, stretching their backs and flexing their muscles in relief, often wave cheerfully to a friend in the crowd, exchange a few words of badinage with some hooded apparition, call jokingly for a Coca-Cola, or even light up a cigarette. They smell of sweat. They sometimes grumble. They are, one feels, only on contract to tradition, and old gods of atavism have signed their work-sheets.
‘Speak Cleanly! Law, Morality, and Decorum Alike Forbid Blasphemy.’ So it says above the public washhouse on the waterfront at Corunna, and until a few years ago all it implied was true. Not only did Decorum and Morality prohibit Blasphemy, but the Law did too: not only was the Christian Church confessor and comforter to the people, it was also Authority. Today the old grip on public conduct has been broken. The ever-visible multitude of priests, monks and nuns, which used to give Franco’s Spain an almost Tibetan feeling, is less apparent now. The Church itself stands uncertainly amidst the whirl of change: what would the bishops have thought in Franco’s day, to see the young couples publicly embracing in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, or find the lurid girlie magazines upon the bookstalls of Seville?
The death of Franco, the fall of his values, left Spain eager for all the liberties, including liberty of morals, so that within a year or two few countries in western Europe seemed more permissive. But it was deceptive in a way. The old standards were only out of fashion, and all over Spain, at any moment of any day, the old ways and rituals still proceeded. The X-certificate films might be packing the houses in Madrid, but at a thousand churches up and down the country a service was being conducted, if only for a congregation of two or three. In dozens of seminaries the pale young students still learnt their Latin. In scores of closed convents the nuns were praying. In many a village a local sain
t’s day was being celebrated, and the first communicants were walking home from church in bridal gowns and sailor suits; more than 1,500 saints are honoured in the Spanish calendar, and each has his fervent devotees. (‘He’s not a saint,’ sniffed a caretaker when I asked the identity of a holy man buried in Santo Domingo de la Calzada, ‘he’s only a Blessed!’) On the north tower of Astorga Cathedral, on the north-east tower of the Cathedral of the Pillar at Saragossa, on the dizzy pinnacles of Gaudi’s Church of the Sagrada Familia at Barcelona, on the staid mock-Gothic of the cathedral of Madrid—on all these great Christian structures, and many more, the builders were hammering and the cranes clanking. At the bull-ring the priest stood by for human casualties outside the little whitewashed chapel, and in a remote and lovely corner of Las Hurdes, a wild landscape of west Castile long supposed to be inhabited only by demons, the shy Carmelites of the monastery of Las Batuecas, locked away behind their high walls, had written beside their door-bell: ‘Brother! This is not a place of Tourism or Diversion! Unless you have Real Need, do not Ring this Bell!’
Did not God say, in the vision of the Great Promise, that Spain was a chosen land? Is she not still a nation of saints, mystics, hermits and evangelists? (St. Francis Xavier, the greatest missionary of them all, came—as the Spaniards would say—from a very good family in Navarre.) Was it not Spain, in our own lifetimes, that Paul Claudel apostrophized in his poem Aux Martyres Espagnols—‘sixty thousand priests massacred and not one apostasy’?
I dare say that Spain, now that she is launched on the libertarian path, will never be quite so Christian again. The decrees of the churchmen will never be so absolute, and the Church itself will never again be so formidable an estate of the realm. The loyalty of many centuries, though, does not wither in a generation, especially when it is shot through with faith: there may yet be a time when the Spaniards look once more to the Catholic Church, as they did in the days of the Reconquest, to lead them out of alien tyrannies, or give them pride again.
9 Four Cities
It is especially in the interior of Spain that the faith still rings true, for though Christianity is more ebullient in the south, the stern landscapes of the tableland are like sounding-boards for the spirit. Here, though your voice often falls flat upon a dry soil, or is whisked away by the bitter wind, ideas seem to echo and expand, visions form in the great distances, and man, all alone in the emptiness, seems only the agent of some much greater Power. No wonder the Spaniards, at once oppressed and elevated by the character of the place, have built upon this plateau some of the grandest of all human artifacts, the cities of the centre. They are grand not so much as collections of treasures, or gatherings of people, but as things in their own right: all different, all indeed unique, all instantly recognizable for their own savour and design, but all touched by this same resonance of setting, and thus, one feels, by something nobler still. Let us visit four of them now, and see how powerfully this combination of variety and inner cohesion contributes to the presence of Spain.
Salamanca, on the western edge of the meseta, is made of sandstone. One does not often specify the raw material of a city, but Spain likes to be explicit: Santiago is granite, Salamanca is sandstone. She is the calmest of the famous cities of the tableland, set more tranquilly than most beside the River Tormes, insulated by age and culture against the fierce intensity of the country. Salamanca is above all a university city—‘Mother of the Virtues, the Sciences, and the Arts’—and though her scholarship has long been shrivelled, her colleges decimated in war or emasculated by autocracy, still she has the special poise that marks a place both learned and long admired.
You approach her, if you come the right way, by foot across a fine Roman bridge, and this in itself is a kind of sedative. The bridge is old, stout, and weather-beaten; the river below is wide and steady; groves of larches and poplars line the banks; and if you pause for a moment at the alcove in the middle, you will find that life around you seems wonderfully simple and assured, as though the big trucks pounding along the ring road are only some transient phenomenon from another civilization. In the thicket immediately below the bridge, perhaps, a solitary student is deep in his book at a trestle table, supported by a bottle of pop from the shanty-café along the path, and inspired by flamenco music from the radio beneath his chair. Downstream the bourgeoisie washes its cars in the river water. Across the river a small boy canters around on a pony. A mill-wheel turns at the weir upstream; sheep graze the fields beyond; in the shallows an elderly beachcomber is prodding the mud with a stick.
Raise your eyes only a little, and there above you, scarcely a stone’s throw away, stand the two cathedrals of Salamanca—so close is the Spanish country to the Spanish town, so free from peevish suburbs are these old cities of the interior. It is rather like entering Oxford, say, in the Middle Ages. The city is the heart and the brain of its surrounding countryside, so dominant that the olive trees themselves seem to incline their fruit towards its market, and the mules and asses pace instinctively in its direction. Yet the physical break is instant, and complete. One side of the river is the country, the other side is the city, and there is no straggle to blur the distinction.
Almost immediately, too, the meaning of Salamanca becomes apparent, and you seem to know by the very cut or stance of the place chat this is a city of scholars. Here is the old courtyard of the university, where generations of students have written their names in flowery red ochre; and here are bookshops, those rarities of contemporary Spain, heavily disguised with magazine racks and picture postcards, but still recognizably university shops; and here is the great mediaeval lecture-room of Luis de León, still precisely as he knew it, still bare and cold and dedicated, with his canopied chair just as it was when, reappearing in it after four years in the cells of the Inquisition, he began his lecture with the words ‘Dicebamus hesterna die …’—‘As we were saying yesterday …’
Salamanca University was founded in the thirteenth century, and for four hundred years was one of the power-houses of European thought. Columbus’s schemes of exploration were submitted to the judgement of its professors. The Council of Trent was a product of its thinking. The concept of international law was virtually its invention. The first universities of the New World, in Mexico and Peru, were based upon its statutes. It was while serving as Professor of Greek at Salamanca that Miguel de Unamuno, driven out of his mind by the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, rushed into the street one day shouting curses on his country, later to die of grief.
Around this institution, over the centuries, a noble group of buildings arose, and stands there still in golden splendour. The gorgeous plateresque façade of the Patio de las Escuelas, with its dizzy elaborations, its busts of Ferdinand and Isabel, and its lofty inscription—‘The King and Queen to the University and the University to the King and Queen’—is a reminder of the importance of this place to the State, the Crown and the Church throughout the grand epoch of Spanish history. The New Cathedral, pompous and commanding, was opened in 1560 to express the grandeur of a university that then boasted twenty-four constituent colleges, six thousand students, and sixty professors of unsurpassed eminence. One of the most delightful buildings in Spain is the House of the Shells, built at the end of the fifteenth century for a well-known Salamanca sage, and covered all over with chiselled scallops. And nothing in Europe better expresses a kind of academic festiveness than the celebrated Plaza Mayor, the drawing-room of Salamanca: its arcaded square is gracefully symmetrical, its colours are gay without being frivolous, its manner is distinguished without being highbrow, and among the medallions of famous Spaniards that decorate its façade there have been left, with a proper donnish foresight, plenty of spaces for heroes yet to come.
It is a lovely city, but like many lovely Spanish things, it is sad. Its glories are dormant. Its university, once the third in Europe, is now classed as the seventh in Spain, and seems to have no life in it. Few outrageous student rebels sprawl in the cafés of the Plaza Mayor, no da
zzling philosophical theories are emerging from these libraries and lecture-rooms. Expect no fire from Salamanca. The Inquisition dampened her first, and in our own time Franco’s narrow notions fatally circumscribed her. The genius of this tableland is not friendly to liberty of thought: and just as Spain herself is only now headily experimenting with the freedom of ideas, so it will be a long time, I fear, before Salamanca rejoins the roster of Europe’s intellectual vanguard.
There is sadness too in Avila, though of a different kind. This is a soldier’s city, cap-à-pie, and when you approach it from the west over the rolling plateau almost all you see is its famous wall: a mile and a half of castellated granite, with eighty-eight round towers and ten forbidding gates. It looks brand new, so perfect is its preservation, and seems less like an inanimate rampart than a bivouac of men-at-arms, their helmeted front surveying the meseta, their plated rear guarding some glowing treasure within. It looks like an encampment of Crusaders on the flank of an Eastern hill: a city in laager, four thousand feet up and very chilly, with the smoke rising up behind the walls where the field kitchens are at work.
But inside those watchful ranks, no treasure exists. Avila is like an aged nut, whose shell is hard and shiny still, but whose kernel has long since shrivelled. Her main gate is by the mottled cathedral, whose apse protrudes into the wall itself, and around whose courtyard a dozen comical lions—the only light relief in Avila—hold up an iron chain, their rumps protruding bawdily over the columns that support them. At first the shell feels full enough, as you wander among the mesh of mediaeval streets inside, through the arcades of the central plaza, and down the hill past the barracks; but presently the streets seem to peter out, the passers-by are scarcer, there are no more shops, the churches tend to stand alone in piles of rubble, and the little city becomes a kind of wasteland, like a bomb-site within the walls, several centuries after the explosion.