The darkness deepened rapidly, so that the moving figures on the sand, bound together by a swirling cape, became ghostlike and the shadowy matador as strange a creature as the animal he was fighting. Birds, startled by the unfamiliar scene, now began to cry, and from behind the barrier the foreman of the work crew called out, ‘That’s enough.’ The matador withdrew; a gate was opened; the heifer leaped at something that moved beyond the gate; the gate closed and the arena was still.
‘Shall we let in another?’ the alcalde called down.
‘We can’t see to cape it,’ the matador called back.
‘We’ll let her run through anyway,’ the alcalde shouted, and the ropes were pulled to make the various doors swing open. A heifer, larger than the first, ripped into the arena; obviously she could see in darkness better than the men opposing her, for within a few seconds she had bowled over three men, one after the other, and had ripped the cape out of the matador’s hand. He prudently fled behind the barrier and called, ‘Get her out of here. She has radar.’ The gates swung open and the little cyclone swept majestically from sight, having defended her terrain against all comers. The ring was closed down and the birds settled into the nests of which we had deprived them.
When the matador joined us he said, ‘I’d like to have seen that last one in daylight. She charged like a thunderbolt.’
‘She comes from a good strain,’ the alcalde said proudly, and we trailed back from the testing plaza to the ranch house, where Señora Pablos had laid out a vast country-style supper lit with torches, and under the starry Extremaduran sky we began to eat the crisp salad, the rugged potato omelette and something I was not often to taste in Spain, a good cheese. It was tangy and of excellent texture, and the men asked for seconds and I for thirds. ‘Where did you find such a good cheese?’ I asked, and the alcalde’s wife replied, ‘I make it. I came from a farm family and we always had good cheese.’ The night grew cooler, so the workmen started a fire and we finished our supper with sparks flying into the air and transforming themselves into stars. I took this opportunity to get an expert opinion from the matador. ‘In New York a young man told me there was a new star in bullfighting, Curro Romero. Is he any good?’
Matadors are notoriously envious, but this one said, ‘You should go to much pains to see Romero, for he is special. He is very slow with the cape, like a guitarist who is sure of himself and doesn’t have to stamp and whistle. At the end of the fight he is a genius, wrapping the bull around him as if it was a blanket. Never have you seen anything so slow. If you’re going toward Sevilla, watch out for him. He’s worth seeing.’
We then spoke of Trujillo during the various wars of succession and of how it so often backed the wrong contender, and of the conquistadors wandering across the Americas, and the alcalde repeated a prediction from Clodoaldo Naranjo’s local history. ‘I am not afraid to assert, almost prophetically, that the day is not far distant when the greater part of America will feel for Trujillo the same veneration that in its religious life it feels for those spots which were the birthplaces of messiahs and prophets.’
Thus ended my three casual expeditions out of Badajoz: to Mérida and its Romans, to Medellín and Cortés, and to Trujillo and its Pizarros. Now the obligatory trip was to begin and I headed south to the little town with the lovely name, Jerez de los Caballeros. In Spain, as in the United States, where we have several Portlands and many Springfields, names of towns are apt to be repeated in the various provinces, so some kind of distinguishing phrase is frequently added. Thus there is the great Jerez of the wine industry; it lies south of Sevilla on the old Christian-Muslim frontier and is called Jerez de la Frontera; and there is Jerez de los Caballeros on a hill commanding a large section of the Extremaduran plains. Who were the knights of the name? Originally they were a band of murderously tough Knights Templars who owned the city and were responsible for guarding the town against Islam; in the last chapter of this book, when visiting a similar city in the north, we shall learn what happened to these unfortunate Templars. When they vanished the rugged little city passed into the ownership of the Knights of Santiago, who used it as an anchor in their assaults on the infidel. Jerez de los Caballeros was an embattled city, and when I first saw its towers from a creaking autobus bouncing over dusty, unpaved roads, it seemed like a haven whose protection I would enjoy, but as the bus crawled closer I began to have doubts, yet it was imperative that I visit Jerez, for I was drawn there by a kind of pilgrimage.
The only thing I knew about Jerez came from a travel book written by an Englishwoman. She had had a miserable time, finding nothing to commend, but even her savage condemnation of the place—poor food, inhospitable people, bad beds, foul climate—had contained a whisper of attraction, as if to say, ‘If you want to see Spain at its worst, test yourself on Jerez de los Caballeros.’ English writers have a particular knack for describing a strange place in terms that are both repellant and attractive, especially when they write about Spain.
It is difficult to explain why the best writing on Spain has usually been done by Englishmen, but that seems to be the case. I have sometimes thought that it was because the sherry trade required Englishmen to live in Spain, but I could find no one directly connected with that trade who had written with any charm of the peninsula. I’ve also suspected that it might be the Englishman’s intuitive yearning for the sun which accounted for his preoccupation with Spain, but that doesn’t seem to stand inspection either. Whatever the reason, if you want good reading on Spain, read the English.
Richard Ford’s classic account remains unsurpassed. It came into being because Ford, son of the man who created London’s mounted police, married the daughter of the Earl of Essex and gained thereby a yearly income and a sickly wife whose doctor ordered her to travel in a warmer climate. In 1830 Ford took her to Spain, where they lived for three years and where she regained her health.
As a result of this stay, Ford acquired an immense library on Spain, and in 1839 when the London publisher John Murray happened to remark that he was looking for a guidebook on Spain, Ford volunteered. Five years later he delivered the manuscript for his famous Handbook for Travellers in Spain, but after it was printed in 1845 Murray grew apprehensive that it was too outspoken and suppressed it. Later an expurgated version was published and it became a classic. Finally, in 1846, a supplementary volume titled Gatherings from Spain was issued, and the two taken together are the foundation of Ford’s reputation.
I prefer George Borrow’s strange narrative The Bible in Spain, in which he recounts his experiences in 1836–1840 as an itinerant peddler of Bibles. As the book’s editor said: ‘It was in an atmosphere of hatred, intrigue and adventure that Borrow lived, striving manfully to print and propagate an alien gospel among the fanatical Spaniards.’ It is a robust book, opinionated, specialized and often infuriating. It is written in an apocalpytic style which recalls Doughty’s similar writing on Arabia and remains indispensable for anyone wanting to dig below the surface into Spanish matters, but I would think that Catholics might find it irritating. Two facts about the book interest me. Borrow too saw Spain first at Finisterre: ‘On the morning of the 10th of November, 1835, I found myself off the coast of Galicia, whose lofty mountains, gilded by the rising sun, presented a magnificent appearance.’ And he too started his journey at Badajoz, on January 5, 1836: ‘In a moment I was on Spanish soil, and having flung the beggar a small piece of silver, I cried in ecstasy, “Santiago y cierra España!” ’ (This is the traditional battle cry of the nation. Its literal translation is ‘St. James and close Spain.’ Its meaning is ‘Help us, Santiago, and let’s go, Spaniards, in closed ranks.’) Then Borrow adds: ‘I was now at Badajoz in Spain, a country which for the next four years was destined to be the scene of my labors. The neighborhood of Badajoz did not prepossess me much in favor of the country which I had just entered.’
Ford and Borrow are classics, but they are garrulous. For a short, highly condensed view of Spain one can do no better than V. S. Pri
tchett’s The Spanish Temper (1954). It requires only a few hours to read but is of such high specific gravity as to provide enough hard material to keep the mind working for weeks. Constantly Pritchett throws out challenging observations: ‘The very day when Fernando VII closed the university in Sevilla, he opened a school for bullfighters there.’ ‘Spaniards are born disciples of Seneca, natural stoics who bear and forbear.’ ‘If El Greco painted out of the day and the land, Goya paints out of the night.’ ‘It was a Spaniard who founded the first order of Commissars in Europe, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).’
For the essential romanticism of Spain, I suppose one should rely upon Somerset Maugham’s sardonic Don Fernando (1935), for although the great storyteller never wrote a novel about Spain, it haunted his life, and it was to this country that his alter ego Philip Carey in Of Human Bondage dreamed of escaping, a dream which was truncated by his involvement with Mildred. The essays in Don Fernando are exasperating, and some of them seem unduly precious, but they are fun and throw such an oblique light on Spain that the reader will often find himself discovering a new set of meaningful shadows.
A good analysis of Spanish character is Havelock Ellis’ The Soul of Spain (1908). Neither systematic or complete, the little book contains so much wry comment and so many particular judgments that it constitutes one of the best approaches to matters Spanish. On a recent rereading of this pivotal work I was impressed by something that had escaped me the first two times around. Ellis, like me, had made his basic acquaintance with Spain not through the mother country but through the colonies, in his case Peru. He thus saw the peninsula reflected, as it were, in the shield of Theseus, and apparently this is a good way to approach Spain, for then certain fundamental characteristics stand forth which might otherwise be missed. At any rate, Ellis loved Spain and wrote of it with deep affection, whereas many who approach it more directly fail to do either.
If the reader finds my account too favorable to Spain, I direct him to Silk Hats and No Breakfast (1957) by Honor Tracy, in which this witty Irish woman presents a bittersweet account of her travels in 1955. She saw little that was not contemptible and expressed her contempt by citing one pejorative incident after another. No aspect of Spanish life was sacred and none was accorded charity. It is an old-fashioned book in that everything foreign is held up to ridicule, and I would suppose that Spaniards despise it.
Finally, since the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 was a major historical event of the first half of the twentieth century and since I am not going to belabor it, I recommend two books: for the background, Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth (1943), and for the war itself, Hugh Thomas’ The Spanish Civil War (1961). With typical British impersonality and with a high regard for truth, Thomas picks his way magisterially through the debris of this anguished period to produce what will long be the classic account of the war. It seems to me that he writes the general truth concerning these sad events, and the fact that his book has been unofficially adopted by the Spanish people as the legitimate narrative of the war signifies that the winners at least do not consider it offensively wrong.
For light reading, and as an antidote to the acerb quality of Honor Tracy’s work, one could profitably look into H. V. Morton’s A Stranger in Spain (1955), in which this professional traveler relates Spanish history to events occurring simultaneously in England. This presupposes the hypothesis that real history was occurring in England, but that interesting by-plays were occurring at the same time in Spain. This makes England the universal measuring stick, but since Americans tend to know English history better than they do American, and certainly better than Spanish, there is an advantage to Morton’s system:
I never really grasped what a good claim Philip II had to the English throne. I suppose a Catholic genealogist at the time of the Armada would have infinitely preferred his blood-relationship with the House of Lancaster to Elizabeth’s tenuous Tudor connexion with the House of York; and perhaps had the Armada been invincible we might have heard a great deal about this.…
John of Gaunt’s adventures in Spain are an odd and fascinating little chapter in Anglo-Spanish history.… John of Gaunt, whose first wife was dead, married Constance of Castile, while his brother, Edmund of Langley, married her sister Isabel. In twelve years’ time John of Gaunt and Constance took an English army to Spain to claim the throne of Castile, though the expedition ended not in war but in wedding bells. They gave up all claim to the throne upon the marriage of their daughter Catherine to Henry III of Castile. This is the Catherine who is buried in Toledo, a woman who, as a little girl, lived in the Savoy and saw the Strand in those days when London was
… small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
She knew Geoffrey Chaucer, who must have taken her on his knee many a time, and she probably had as governess that much-maligned woman, Catherine Swynford, Chaucer’s sister-in-law and her father’s mistress. She would have remembered the turmoil of Wat Tyler’s rebellion and the sacking of her father’s place in the Strand.…
Catherine could not have had a happy life in Spain. Her husband was an invalid, and like so many queens of Spain she was left with an infant heir and lived in terror that he might be taken away from her. But he was not. He became John II of Castile and the father of Spain’s greatest queen, Isabel the Catholic. It is interesting to think that Isabel’s grandmother was the daughter of John of Gaunt.…
Important as this marriage was, it is surpassed in interest by that of Catherine’s younger sister, the flighty Isabel, with John of Gaunt’s younger brother, Edmund of Langley. They became the ancestors of Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III and Elizabeth of York, who was eagerly married by Henry VII to bolster up his weak claim to the throne by linking himself with the House of York. So Spanish blood, fairly thin by this time no doubt, passed to Henry VIII and Elizabeth.
Not widely known is the fact that one of the first English writers to deal with Spain was Samuel Pepys, who made an official navy trip to Tangier in 1683–1684 and wrote a secret report of the matter when he got home. His Tangier Report was not distributed generally until 1935, when it appeared in the official papers of the Navy Records Society, and the following excerpts will explain why:
A Spaniard says, ‘Go with God’ and not ‘God go with you.’
Rather a hole in a suit than a patch.
Won’t piss in the streets, but will against your door.
They shit in pots and wipe their arses with linen cloths.
The laboring Spaniard eats five meals a day. And the greater part of Spain eat nothing but what they make of water, oil, salt, vinegar, garlic and bread, which last is the foundation of all.
Wear spectacles abroad, and some only to seem readers.
You may starve and tax them as you please so you do not beat them, but give them good words; while we English fill our bellies and you can do or say what you will to us.
The bus dropped me at the edge of Jerez de los Caballeros and I walked up Avenida José Antonio toward the central plaza, which was as ugly as the one in Badajoz. There I made inquiries, and at first no one knew what I was talking about and I was afraid that my long pilgrimage was to be fruitless, but finally a bartender understood and said, ‘Cross the plaza, pass the bank and look for Calle Capitán Cortés.’
‘It isn’t Cortés I’m looking for,’ I explained.
‘You go to house Number 10. That’s it.’
I followed his directions and found the Calle Cortés to be narrow, attractive and clean, but there was no indication that what I was seeking might lie in such a street. I wandered along, looking at the houses, which seemed like a row of individual forts, until I came to Number 10. It was low, smaller than its neighbors, and bore no sign or distinguishing marks except that it was immaculately clean, having been freshly whitewashed. I doubted that this could be the house I sought, so I asked a woman who was passing by. She was most charming, and with a reassuring smile said, ‘This is it. You norteame
ricanos never believe it, but this is it. You must be the fiftieth I’ve told this year.’ She banged on the red door, pushed it open and called, ‘Señora Ordóñez. Visitor from América del Norte.’
A very old woman, with gray hair and all her teeth, came to the door, saying softly, ‘Come in. It is my pleasure.’
She led me into a small entranceway decorated with colored photographs of Egypt taken from an air-line calendar, and stopped before a dark alcove the size of a closet. ‘He was born in that corner, the great Vasco Núñez, who discovered your Pacific Ocean.’
‘You mean Balboa?’
‘If you want to call him that.’
I wished to stay in the alcove to pay my respects to the first European to find the ocean which had meant so much to me, but she insisted that I see her kitchen, a delightful room with open beams, rickety doors, windows that didn’t quite fit, stairways built of uneven stones and a characteristic that I had read about but had never seen: the whole had been whitewashed so many times—say twice a year for five hundred years—the limestone had built up to such thickness that all corners were conquered by a softly undulating cocoon of white stone. The doorjambs were rounded; the crevices where upper walls met the floors had become delicate quarter-circles, and nowhere in this room could I see a harsh edge or a straight line, as if much living had smoothed out the roughness. At three spots in the white room flowers stood, more brilliant than French wallpaper, and outside in a very small garden I could see where the old lady kept two fig trees, an arbor of grapes and six or seven hens.
The house looked as if it had been built to illustrate a child’s fairy tale, but Ana Ordóñez assured me it had long served as an ordinary home. ‘My husband and I worked on a farm, but about forty years ago we decided to move into town and bought this place. At the time we didn’t know it was the house in which Núñez was born.’ I was to find that in Jerez there was no Balboa, the name we know him by, but there was a Núñez, which was his official name. ‘After we had been here a while … remember this was forty years ago when there weren’t so many travelers. Well, people began to stop by to see where Núñez was born. People on this street remembered the family, and this tiny alcove is where the birth took place. No, I charge nothing to see it. I’ve had a good life and my children watch out for me. I am honored to mind the house where Núñez lived.’
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