by Hitt, Jack
■ religious
■ cultural
■ historical
■ other (explain)
That fourth option looks so sad and out of place alongside the first three. I check this box and write in Spanish, “I’d have to write a book to answer this question.” Don Jesús reads it, laughs, and playfully snatches the clipboard from me. Apparently he doesn’t care for polls.
“You are a pilgrim. We have been welcoming you for a thousand years!” Father Don Jesús throws his arm around my shoulder and squeezes my neck.
At evening, he says, the church still rings the bell, the last call for pilgrims to find their way out of the mountains and into the shelter of the monastery. I ask him if he has any pilgrim’s passports lying around.
“Of course. We have no problem. They are here.”
I tell him that I had met a Madame Debril on the other side of the Pyrenees and that she had told me it was pointless to walk without one. Don Jesús looks up at me through caterpillar eyebrows with a pair of warm, conspiratorial eyes. He pulls out a fresh passport and makes a show of applying an intricate stamp the size of a silver dollar. Sometimes I can’t understand his fast Spanish, but just now our few words flow with all the elliptical intimacy of two old buddies.
“Ma-dame De-bril,” Brother Don Jesús intones slowly. He smiles.
“Madame Debril,” I say, and smile.
“Madame Debril,” Brother Don Jesús says.
“Madame Debril,” I say.
Slipping his arm through mine, Don Jesús escorts me out of the chapter house and into the open air. I tell him that I am especially interested in the story of Roland. There, he says, indicating an eleventh-century funereal chapel, that is where Roland blew Olifant. The shrill winds that whip through the mountains and valleys here are said to be echoes of Roland’s ancient blast. He points to an open area and says that this is where Roland broke Durendal on a rock and where he died. A large tourist bus pulls onto the gravel near Roland’s resting place and crunches to a halt.
Don Jesús drops me off for a coffee and some breakfast at a restaurant next door. Trying to be polite to the waiter, I tell him how enchanted I am to be in the place where Roland first suffered at the hands of the Arabs and Charlemagne turned the road to Santiago into a European phenomenon.
“Arabs?” muses the waiter.
“Yes,” I say, baffled at his confusion. “Arabs. Chanson de Roland. Road to Santiago,” I add, hoping my collection of Spanish phrases makes sense.
“There were no Arabs here.”
I never know how to handle this. When one is convinced one speaks with authority on a subject, there is the tricky business of imparting this obvious (on your part) superiority without coming across as supercilious.
I tell him I had just read the Chanson de Roland. He smiles to congratulate me on doing my homework but ignores the arrogant implications.
“Roland did not die in an ambush of Arabs,” he says. I decide to play along.
“So who killed him?”
“We did.”
“You?”
“The Basques killed him.”
Everyone in Spain issues warnings about Basques, and I had heard plenty before arriving here. They are a notorious people —most recently for a terrorist guerrilla war against the Spanish government. But, historically, they have always been enigmatic and work hard at perpetuating their cultural reputation. Linguists who have mapped the intersecting landscapes of language cannot place Basque anywhere on the map. Its origin remains a mystery.
A sardonic Englishman named Richard Ford published an account of his 1845 visit to this area. He found the Basque people inscrutable and their language outrageous—a people who write the name “Solomon” but pronounce it “Nebuchadnezzar.” Ford tells the legendary story of the Devil, who studied Basque in order to corrupt these people, but he abandoned his effort after seven years because he had mastered only three words.
I look at my waiter and automatically screw up a dismissive look, but he stops me.
“When my father returns, he will tell you. He knows the whole story. We are the only people who tell the truth. The French, the Spanish, the Arabs, all lie about Roland.”
Not long after, the waiter’s father arrives. He is a short, stout man with a warm, inviting face. On several occasions he stresses the depth of his knowledge of America.
“I know who Nelson Rockefeller is,” he says with a wink of braggadocio.
He owns this inn but was a teacher in Pamplona for most of his life. Before I can pose a question, he’s launched into an excited explanation of where the Basques originated. I had read theories alleging that the Basque might be of ancient Celtic origin and another that suggested possible commonalities with old Hungarian. But both of these apparently are wrong.
“Originally, we were Japanese. Thousands of years ago a group of brave warriors were banished from Japan. They wandered the earth and arrived here.”
“Really?” I pipe up, not able to disguise my incredulity even behind the thick blanket of a foreign language. I look again at my new acquaintance—an old white man a bit broad in the beam, his hair still showing traces of brown, his eyes as round as coins. “How come you don’t look Japanese?”
“Diet.”
He’d prepared for that one.
“Several Japanese scholars visited here not long ago,” he continued. “One of them was a language professor. We were both amazed at how much of our language we could understand. For example, the word for mother in Basque is ma. That also happens to be the word for mother in Japanese as well.” He nods his head significantly.
I don’t want to tell him that “ma” is the word for mother in nearly every language on earth, since it’s typically the first consonant-and-vowel combo a baby can pronounce. I also realize there is a bit of ethnic trendiness going on here. If, instead of the Japanese, the group with the reputation for hard work, intelligence, and cunning were Micronesians, somehow I suspect I’d be hearing tales of rafts rounding Tierra del Fuego and coming ashore on the beaches of Santander. When I change the subject to Roland, he immediately picks it up as if he’d been talking about it all along.
“The truth of the matter is confused,” he says. “Charlemagne did not come here with the purest of motives. You will hear that he entered Spain to liberate Christians suffering under the rule of infidels. Charlemagne had other ideas—to expand his empire. He crossed the Pyrenees, but nothing worked out as he intended. This is Spain! This is Basque Spain! He tortured the Basques of Pamplona and allowed his men to have a little too much”—and he says this phrase in English—“rest and relaxation with our women. When he was preparing to cross the Pyrenees, the Basque shepherds who lived around here heard about what had happened in Pamplona. And Basques are the best shepherds. We can talk to animals. Basques can talk to wolves. Our shepherds and the wolves slipped into the woods up near the steep pass when the time came. They blew their irrintzi [horns made of wild oxen]. And then we killed them.” He grins.
He points to my paperback copy of the Chanson de Roland and says with a sneer, “You won’t find much truth in that.” He explains that none of the protagonists at the time wanted to tell the truth about Roland because no one was served by it. The French didn’t want to admit that the death of Roland was the result of Charlemagne’s unchristian intentions. The Spaniards didn’t want to tell the truth because they welcomed French propaganda (and assistance) in the war against the Moors. And the Arabs? In the Basque version, they don’t figure into the telling. In the Chanson de Roland, they become the most feared people on earth.
That evening, Brother Don Jesus takes me to the third floor of the monastery’s sleeping quarters. I pass a dozen doors marked with the names of the other brothers. I never see them or hear them. Each door warns me in Spanish not to disturb. On the top floor the pilgrim’s quarters are several rooms with rough-hewn wooden bunks built three beds high into the wall. On a thin mattress I lay out my bag and turn on a flashligh
t. I pull out a new copy of the Codex Calixtinus, the twelfth-century tour guidebook I had discussed with Madame Debril. Among the Roland ashtrays and plastic Olifants, the monastery’s gift shop sells a fresh edition of the pilgrimage’s first Baedeker.
The Codex is attributed to a French cleric named Aimery Picaud. The book is amusing because the author’s pro-France/anti-Spain bias is the most comically exaggerated in history. His critical reviews of the towns and food along the way are filled with crazed invective. France is all elegance, and Spain is a country of poisoned rivers, granite bread, and lethal fish.
Naturally Picaud has an opinion of the Basques. As a gumshoe errant, I can’t help but wonder if his writing in 1160 wasn’t influenced by the same rumor I heard this morning, because it is for the Basques that Picaud saved his most ornamental condemnations. Picaud says the Basques of Navarra are a thieving people who force strangers to take down their pants. Their language sounds like the barking of dogs. They eat with their hands. In a bit of etymological overreaching, Picaud traces the origin of the region’s name, Navarra, to the Latin non verus, the land of liars. But once Picaud really warms up his pen, the reader can’t help but suspect that his loathing of the Basques reflects the French memory of what really happened in 778:
This is a barbarous people unlike all other peoples in customs and in character, full of malice, swarthy in colour, ill-favoured of face, misshapen, perverse, perfidious, empty of faith and corrupt, libidinous, drunken, experienced in all violence, ferocious and wild, dishonest and reprobate, impious and harsh, cruel and contentious, unversed in anything good, well trained in all vices and iniquities, like the Geats and Saracens in malice, in everything inimical to our French people.... In certain regions of their country, that is, in Biscay and Alava, when the Navarrase are warming themselves, a man will show a woman and a woman a man their private parts. The Navarrese even practice unchaste fornication with animals. For the Navarrese is said to hang a padlock behind his mule and mare, so that none may come near her but himself. He even offers libidinous kisses to the vulva of woman and mule. That is why the Navarrese are to be rebuked by all well-informed people.
I am developing suspicions, especially since while I’m in the Basque region, everyone—shopkeepers, bankers, priests—all tell me the exact same story. I bring up the subject, and the locals speak of 778 as if it weren’t so long ago. I feel like a detective arriving on the scene 1,200 years late to solve an old crime. Who killed Roland?
The next morning I walk out of Roncesvalles and I wander into the village of Espinal. A sign on a gift shop invites me to ring the bell if it is closed. A buzz produces a shadowy presence in the rear of the shop, a woman about fifty years old. Stepping around the corner of the counter to open the door, she runs her hand through a tangle of hair and whips the belt of a thick bathrobe into a knot.
On the left is a wall of religious objects, crucifixes, crèches, Virgin Marys. On the right is a wall of the local drinking jugs, called botas. Their long, tapered spout, which protrudes acutely at the base, allows locals to pour the wine—often at a distance —directly down one another’s throats without swallowing. But these botas are novelty gifts, delivering their contents through some potter’s best-slung rendition of a penis. In the position of a bota spout, the penises appear extremely cheerful and pose a bizarre contrast to the wall of suffering Jesuses on the other side. The woman shows me some of her other naughty merchandise. Each time she bends over to unlock a showcase, an errant breast tumbles out. She replaces it giddily. Spain has certainly changed since Franco died. I ask her about the recent murder of the Frenchman they call Roland. She laughs.
“We killed him, the Basques,” she says as if all history had taken place in the last couple of weeks. “We threw out the French then and now we’re trying to throw out the Spanish.”
It turns out the Basques aren’t the only ones with a story. One pilgrim version ended with Charlemagne walking to Santiago as the official First Pilgrim. Since Roland died in 778 and Santiago’s body was discovered in 814, this makes Charlemagne’s pilgrimage not merely the first, but quite likely the slowest. But what’s a little discrepancy among epic poets?
The local priests too had their Chanson de Roland, built on a juicy piece of eighth-century gossip. It was widely whispered in those days that Charlemagne’s libido often targeted his own sisters. This variation on the story made Charlemagne’s lust the source of the evil and Roland’s death inevitable since he was in fact Charlemagne’s incestuous son. This rendition certainly gives Ganelon’s bitterness and treason a sympathetic gloss. Since he was married to Charlemagne’s sister, he was, in effect, the future Holy Roman Emperor’s beard. How Ganelon must have seethed at the prospect of being humiliated by Roland—the product of his ongoing cuckolding by Charlemagne.
Other variations of the Roland story can be found throughout the continent, and even the epic cycle of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table is said to be an Anglo-Saxon response to compete with the intoxicating tales of Charlemagne and his counselor chevaliers.
The more I looked into the case, the better it got for my Basque innkeeper. For example, Charlemagne’s official historian, Einhard, never mentioned Roland in the written record until after the emperor’s death. Then, Roncesvalles gets only a small mention—probably to refute the stories of humiliating defeat and cowardice circulating orally around the mountains. Einhard delicately notes that in the Pyrenees, Charlemagne had no real problem to speak of “except for a reverse” at Roncesvalles owed to little more than “Wasconiam perfidiam,” literally “Basque treachery.” In the list of the dead, Einhard mentions several nobles and other worthies, among them a man with the unusual name Hruodlandus. Look carefully at that mouthful and you will see the orthographic ancestor of Roland. Then Einhard adds an astonishing kicker: “Nor could this assault be punished at once, for when the deed had been done the enemy so completely disappeared that they left behind them not so much as a rumour of their whereabouts.”
So Charlemagne did not return to Spain at all. He left his nephew/son’s body to rot in the future bus parking lot of Roncesvalles.
What had I stumbled onto here? If Einhard’s reluctant admissions are true, then what does that make of the Chanson de Roland? A cover-up? The poem’s not only wrong, but magnificently wrong, intentionally wrong. Could the Chanson de Roland be a brazen reversal of the truth, such as we often see in modem propaganda? Could France’s national epic be the first use of the Big Lie?
Over the intervening 1,200 years, historians who admire Charlemagne have gone to heroic ends to spin the events in Charlemagne’s favor. One nineteenth-century British historian, who signs himself, J. J. Mombert, D.D., grunts with regret that this story has “two or three particulars which few readers of this history might care to have suppressed.” He offers a dozen excuses for Charlemagne’s cowardice in Roncesvalles but finally throws up his hands at the end of one paragraph in italic exasperation: Charlemagne “doubtless tried to win, although he only came, saw—and went.” Something’s going on here, so I continue looking.
The irony of my investigation is that for most of history, despite so many competing versions of the story, everyone knew that the Basques had something to do with killing Roland and that Charlemagne had fled. But more recently, other, extenuating circumstances allowed an “authentic” French version to become preeminent. In the early nineteenth century, the fierce nationalism that gripped Europe had ripple effects everywhere. In literary circles this impulse manifested itself with the encyclopedic task of collecting a culture’s great works in one book called an anthology. A country’s fiction—assembled in one place —became an epic story on its own, with a beginning, a middle, and an end (always gloriously continued). A country such as England, for example, could proudly open its national anthology and find itself to be an island of constantly flowering talent whose blossoms could be plucked backward in time until one came upon the original bud—the tightly written, ancient work called Beowulf.
And the French? Where to “begin” French literature? For a while it was a problem. Then, in 1835, a graduate student discovered a manuscript of the Chanson de Roland in (of all places) a library in Oxford, England. This specific version of the story was elegant, probably the work of a troubadour hired by a French aristocrat so the poem could be read aloud on holidays. Specialists refer to the manuscript, for arcane reasons, as Digby 23, giving it all the charm and mystery of a distant quasar.
In it, Roland blows the Olifant, Charlemagne storms back into Spain, the sun stops dead in its tracks. We all know this story, because it is the one we all know—the classic tale of slaughter and righteous revenge. Throughout the 1800s, the French heavily promoted this version of the tale, and it became the First Work of French literature. It was internationally anthologized. French children were required to read this version in high school and still are. In translation by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics) or by any other translator, this version is the only one available in bookstores.
This Chanson de Roland imposes on the past a dramatic and flattering story. Few people probably care that much about the story of Roland, so there aren’t many who would want to challenge the Chanson de Roland as the first great work of French literature. But there are a few far-flung places where the cruel savagery of 778 continues.
In the rarefied world of academic textual critics, there are those (mainly French) who insist that the Chanson de Roland is the first great work. They say that the poem is an original work of art written by a single artist named Turold, who is mentioned in the last line. For these scholars, Turold is a real person who sat in his garret timing out the iambs of heroic verse. They say he is an epic poet whose talents compete with those of Homer and Virgil.