Iberia

by James A. Michener

  At Trujillo, farther north, I had the good luck to know Don Ignacio Herguete García de Guadiana, grandson of a famous doctor who had served the last two kings of Spain. Himself a businessman in Madrid, his aunt lived in Trujillo, where she occupied one of the noble houses fronting the main plaza. Don Ignacio was a short man, handsome in appearance, and the most rapid speaker I have ever known; he seemed a volcano of ideas and I could understand why he had prospered in Madrid. He had a countryman’s sense of humor and a deep appreciation of Spanish history. He also had three beautiful daughters, each destined to be taller than himself and representative of the young people of Spain.

  ‘It’s the plaza that counts,’ he said as he finished showing me his aunt’s house, with its tall ceilings and fifteenth-century adornment. ‘Come out on the balcony and see the best small plaza in Spain.’ We stood there for a long time as he pointed out the features of this architectural gem, so beautiful and compact that it ought to be preserved as a kind of museum. ‘Up there, as a solid backdrop, the old castle. Marvelously preserved. You must imagine it in 1470, when a famous gentleman of these parts, Colonel Gonzalo Pizarro, used to prowl the streets of this town on romantic forays. He sired a chain of illegitimate sons, the most famous of which was Francisco, who left here to conquer Peru. In the background you see a chain of fortress churches, each a rough jewel rich in memories. Now look at how that side of the plaza is composed entirely of flights of stairs interlocking at different levels and at different angles. It’s like music in brick. We used to block off the plaza and hold great bullfights, with people sitting on the flights of stairs. The pillared arcades which line the plaza are necessary in a place like Trujillo, because our noonday heat can be pretty strong. I know other towns have arcades too, but have you ever seen any that were more exactly suited to their setting than ours? That large house over there with the huge iron chain across the front? It dates back to the twelfth century and belonged to a noble family who befriended the Emperor Carlos Quinto, who stopped here on his way to marry Isabel of Portugal in 1526. The chain indicates that Carlos granted immunity from taxes to the owner. It belonged to the Orellana family, one of whom discovered the Amazon. My cousin owns it now, but this one over here is more famous. The big shield shows that it belonged to the Pizarro family. Long after the conquest of Peru, Pizarro’s descendants took the title Marqués de la Conquista and that building was where they lived.

  ‘The statue on horseback? You’ll be interested in that. It’s Pizarro in the uniform of a conquistador. It was sculpted by either the wife or the daughter, I’ve never known which, of the famous Spanish expert from New York, Archer M. Huntington.’

  For some time Don Ignacio continued to point out the marvels of this little plaza; there were seven or eight old homes with Ionic pillars and severe ornament which were works of art, but I lost my heart to a small building tucked away in a corner beyond the Pizarro palace and now serving as the town hall. Its façade consisted of three tiers of arches, each of the same width but diminishing in height, so that the top ones were very wide and flat, the middle wide and fairly flat and the bottom wide and properly tall. The combination was unique and vivacious, and during all the time I was in Trujillo I kept looking back to that delightful building, one of the most charming things I saw in Spain.

  The castle of Trujillo consists of great cubes of masonry formed into towers and long, blank walls. It is magnificently preserved and, bleakly empty. Throughout Spain we shall see many castles; in fact, the nation has adopted as its tourist symbol the legendary ‘Castle in Spain,’ and there are many fine examples, but nowhere one properly fitted out as it was in the fifteenth century. They are always either empty, or being used for grain storage, or redecorated into hotels, or perverted altogether, but nowhere can one see a castle as a castle, and I think this regrettable. At Medina del Campo, where Isabel the Catholic died, there is one which could easily be restored, and at Almodóvar del Río, west of Córdoba, one of the finest castles in the world, but it will be no use to visit either. If I suffered any major disappointment in Spain, it was that a country which had such great treasure in castles did so little with them, for I believe that if one were properly, restored, travelers would come great distances to see it, as a reminder of an age that has gone.

  While sitting in the plaza one day I had an unexpected glimpse of rural life. Earlier I had noticed a truck fitted out with seats which seemed to contain an unusual number of passengers, but I had thought no more about it. Now this same truck drew up to the plaza and disgorged fourteen primly dressed rural people, including a bride and groom. There was no jollity in the group, although a wedding had apparently taken place and I supposed that the celebrants were headed for some kind of banquet, but they were very poor people, very poor indeed, and as they passed I saw that the groom was a sunburned, stolid, square-faced peasant of about forty and his bride a particularly ungainly spinster about five years older. I cannot recall ever having seen a woman so unlike a bride, so ill at ease in chiffon. As she passed my table I smiled, and she returned the stare of one who had worked very hard and had come not to a celebration but to a one-day respite, after which the work would resume. They were not headed for a banquet but to an ice cream stand, where the groom stood beside the clerk dispensing the cream and counted out his guests, one at a time, and each received a small ice cream sandwich costing four cents. That was fourteen times four or fifty-six cents for his wedding feast. The country people stood in the sunlight eating their sandwiches, then climbed back into the truck. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked one of the men. ‘Medellín,’ he said, ‘we’ve come here to celebrate.’ He then added gratuitously a statement the significance of which I would understand later: ‘He came home from Germany to marry her.’

  The most domineering building on the plaza was the Pizarro palace, an uninspired baroque construction whose baronial shield was unlike any I’d so far seen. Counting its pedestal, it was three stories high, covered the corner of its building and wrapped around a considerable expanse of each wall. ‘I’m glad at least one of the conquistadors returned home to grandeur,’ I said, but Don Ignacio corrected me. ‘That wasn’t the home of the Pizarro you know. It was the palace of Hernando, and his story is perhaps even more interesting.’

  As I sat in the plaza talking with Don Ignacio and his friends I learned much about the Pizarros of Trujillo. Fiery old Gonzalo Pizarro, who lived to be ninety-eight according to legend, seventy-seven according to history, had been a hero at the conquest of Granada and had also served with that master Spanish soldier known simply as el Gran Capitán, who had disciplined Italy in the age of Columbus. Some claim that the old colonel lived in the castle that dominates Trujillo, others give him a smaller castle in the neighborhood, but the likelihood is that he lived in a house that formerly stood on the site of the present Pizarro mansion. Of one thing we are sure. Between wars he had a penchant for visiting his elderly Aunt Beatriz, who had taken orders in a convent, and after paying his respects to the old lady he liked to climb into bed with one or another of her maids. In this manner he had one son, Francisco, another Juan, and a third Gonzalo, each by a different mother, plus a daughter María, a second daughter Francisca, a third Graciana and a fourth Catalina, all by the mother of his third son. He also had two legitimate daughters and a son, Hernando Pizarro, a clever and prudent lad who wound up with the big house.

  There being no future in the Pizarro family for seven bastards, the first two girls became nuns, the last two married men from the region and the three boys became soldiers. When Francisco led his pitiful little army to the conquest of Peru, the first thirty-seven positions were occupied by men from Trujillo, and the five top positions were held by himself, his legitimate brother, his two bastard brothers and a half brother who was the son of his mother but not of the old colonel. The remainder of his army of 167 were from other parts of Extremadura. The manner in which Pizarro led his clan to victory is a saga of heroism and brutality, for it seems inconceivable that
so few Spaniards could conquer a land so vast and a civilization so advanced; perhaps only men trained in the hardness of Extremadura could have done it.

  In the fighting, Pizarro and his illegitimate brothers were usually in the forefront, with legitimate Hernando in the rear looking after business affairs, and in victory the same division of labor was observed. The Pizarro men were well advanced in years for such adventures, Francisco being in his fifties, but their sagacity offset their age and they became rulers of a vast part of South America. Then one by one the bastard brothers fell on evil times; there were betrayals and assassinations, so that it was only the canny bookkeeper Hernando who survived. His brother Francisco had married an Inca princess, Inés Yupanqui, and they had had a lovely daughter Francisca, who was Hernando’s niece and whom he married. In 1629 the grandson of Hernando (and also the great-grandson of Francisco) applied for the right to inherit the title originally granted to the conquistador, and this was approved, so that the house on the square became the seat of the Marqués de la Conquista. To look at its massive shield is to recall the history of both Spain and Peru, for the statues which grace it represent Francisco, his wife Inés, their daughter Francisca and her husband, canny Hernando, who was also her uncle.

  Judged from today’s perspective, the conquistadors of Extremadura seem monstrous men devoid of pity, cruel destroyers of civilizations as splendid as their own, and as hard as the barren land from which they sprang. Their crimes against Aztec and Inca can be understood, for the conquistadors were few and the enemy were many; but the callous manner in which they betrayed their fellow Spaniards was appalling. Typical is the history of Pizarro: he did not try to defend his protector Balboa when the latter was hounded to execution by the venality of his friends, but later he found himself accused the way Balboa had been and was assassinated by his friends. To us he seems to have been false to every promise he made, and his offenses against common decency comprise a catalogue; but from Spanish historians the judgment is otherwise, largely because Pizarro did bring into the Christian Church thousands of pagan Indians. As Presbítero Clodoaldo Naranjo wrote in 1929:

  Pizarro was the genius brooding over a vast empire, subduing enemy pueblos, founding cities, organizing institutions, sacrificing his own interests, loving his soldiers as if they were his sons, exact in discipline, faithful to his king, yielding to no man in pundonor, to no man in just administration of the public welfare, to no man in the high religious propriety of his actions. With the Cross raised high he commenced his enterprise, with the Cross aloft he founded his cities, and with the Cross sealed with his own blood he gave up his life.

  Louis Bertrand, leading French expert on Spain, in the fine historical summary he wrote with the Englishman Charles Petrie, supports the Spanish judgment:

  These conquerors have also been accused of destroying, through ignorance and barbarism, precious civilisations like those of the Aztecs and the Incas. This is making civilisation a laughing-stock. Let me repeat once more: those rudimentary civilisations have been overestimated in the most ridiculous way, with the object of lowering and defaming the Spaniards and Catholicism, held as responsible for this alleged destruction. Can one regard as civilised the Peruvians, who did not know how to write, and who reckoned years and centuries by knots tied in cords; or the Mexicans, who used infantile hieroglyphics for history and chronology; peoples who had neither draught beasts nor beasts of burden, neither cows, cereals, nor vines; peoples who were not acquainted with the wheel, and had not reached the Iron Age; peoples among whom man was reduced to the role of a quadruped, whose bloody religion admitted human sacrifices, and who had markets for human flesh? If the conquistadors destroyed much and practised needless cruelties—destruction and cruelties which are as nothing beside those of modern war—they blazed the trail for the missionaries who saved for history everything that was essential in those embryonic civilisations, and but for whom we should know absolutely nothing about pre-Columbian America.

  The final judgment, however, is the pragmatic one made by Mexico, whose citizens, remembering the brutalities of Cortés, still refuse to permit statues of the conquistador within their country.

  My reflections were broken by Don Ignacio, who ran off to intercept a friend, whom he brought to our table. ‘Dr. Ezequiel Pablos Gutiérrez,’ he said, introducing a lively red-headed man in his early fifties. ‘Medical graduate of Salamanca and alcalde [mayor] of Trujillo.’

  ‘How do you like our city?’ the alcalde asked, after introducing his wife and daughter.

  ‘I’ve fallen in love with that little building over there.’

  ‘The one with the three tiers of arches? That’s my office.’

  ‘You’re lucky.’ I said.

  ‘We’re thinking of converting it into a parador.’

  ‘When it opens, reserve me a room for a month.’ I could imagine nothing better than to have a room in such a parador and from it to survey the pageant that unfolded in the plaza.

  ‘Right now we have other plans,’ the alcalde said, ‘so jump in the car.’ He drove rather spiritedly along a country road leading east of Trujillo and soon we were in the heart of Extremadura, the low hills, the flat burning land and here and there the olive groves.

  ‘I like this land very much,’ I said. ‘I think I must be an Extremaduran.’

  ‘If a man is tough enough to love this land, he will never forget it,’ the alcalde said. ‘Never. I see men who go away. Big jobs in Madrid. Buenos Aires. But always they come back to the barren soil of Extremadura.’

  We drove for a dozen miles, it seemed, and Señor Pablos turned down a lane and headed for what looked like an Arizona ranch house. ‘This is my ranch,’ he said. ‘I raise fighting bulls here. Look!’ On the horizon I saw a herd of perhaps thirty sleek black bulls. In the setting sun they were handsome beasts, watching us with disdain as they continued their feeding. Between us and them there appeared to be no fences, but they were so far away that they presented no danger. ‘They never attack if they’re kept in a group,’ the mayor explained. ‘Only when they’re alone and insecure.’

  Don Ignacio’s car pulled up beside ours and we descended to enjoy a long, easy evening in the country. I noticed that Señora Pablos disappeared rather quickly, but her lively daughter and a young man who obviously hoped to marry her took charge of bringing horses for those who wanted to ride. Workmen from the ranch came with reports of what had been happening, and there seemed to be a good deal of muffled talking and arranging going on, centering upon a tall, very graceful young man who had joined the party, but I failed to detect what was under way.

  After the sun had set, leaving a fine reddish haze over the ranch, the alcalde said, ‘We’re going to ride back up in the hills. Horses or automobiles.’ At the head of our column rode six horsemen from the ranch, but before long they left us and cut across country toward the bulls we had seen earlier. Without disturbing the bulls they rode on to a fenced ravine where young heifers were grazing, and in a neat concentration of effort they cut out eight or ten and began herding them toward us. I still didn’t understand what was happening, but at the top of the hill we came upon a clean, pure little building, totally whitewashed and built in the form of a circle. It was a private bullring maintained by the alcalde for testing his animals. The tall young man was a matador, and the herdsmen were in the process of driving three heifers into the corrals for testing with the cape.

  Conquistador.

  It was almost dark when we finally took our places atop the wall of the ring, and the red of sunset had been replaced by a purple that already obscured the hills. Birds who normally nested in the ring flew gracefully back and forth as if trying to drive us away. The voices of the herdsmen were guttural as they reassured the heifers moving into the corrals, and the alcalde was excited as he directed the opening and closing of gates that shut each heifer off into its own small pen from which it would later catapult into the ring. It was so dark that I wondered if it would be possible to fight the hei
fers or even to see them.

  A moment of silence, then the alcalde’s reassuring voice, ‘Open that one!’ and as the gate to the ring swung open a heifer, from whom fighting bulls are reputed to inherit their bravery, erupted into the ring, raised a cloud of golden dust and began charging at anything that moved. Three workmen without capes provoked her by jumping out from behind barriers, then ducking back in as she charged headlong at them. Finally the matador stepped out with his magenta-and-yellow cape, at which the heifer dashed as if it were a lifelong enemy. Three times, four times, five, she doubled back on herself and slashed at the offending cape. In the darkness she seemed like a mysterious thunderbolt hurtling across space, and I could understand why it was popularly said that ‘the cow determines the bull.’ Such fury, if applied to a full-grown bull of a thousand pounds, with widespread horns and powerful neck, could make a formidable enemy.