Iberia

by James A. Michener

  His last act as regent was to leave Toledo and move in wearying stages to one monastery after another so as to be ready to consult with Carlos as the youth entered Spain for the first time, but the trip was so arduous that Cisneros fell ill. Fable claims that he died from anguish after reading a letter, which Carlos had sent ahead, rebuking him for assumption of powers and dismissing him from all offices. But historians believe that Cisneros had died before the letter arrived.

  The cathedral at Toledo contains a strange memorial to Cisneros, and it contrasts favorably, I think, with the flamboyant tomb of Mendoza. At the southwest corner of the cathedral stands the Capilla Mozárabe. When the Moors overran Toledo they offered the conquered two alternatives: convert to Islam or remain Christians and pay certain special taxes. The Mozárabes (would-be Arabs) were those who followed the second course. They remained Christians and through the centuries developed their own peculiar style of celebrating the Mass. In 1085, when Alfonso VI conquered the city, his wife and his religious advisor, both of them French, prevailed upon him to enforce throughout his realm the newly proposed Cluniac reforms, which required the adoption of the Roman type of Mass. The Mozárabe was thus frowned upon, which was right because it was through the various consolidations of power and uniformity proposed by the Cluniac reforms that the Catholic Church attained the cohesion it needed for the tasks ahead, and a single form of the Mass, understandable in all lands, was one of the greatest unifying forces. On the other hand, it was sardonic that the Mozárabes, having been allowed to practice their form of Mass by the Arabs, should now be in danger of losing it to Catholics. Stubbornly they held onto their version for four hundred years, from 1085 to 1485 and beyond, in spite of real pressure from Rome; finally Cardinal Cisneros decreed that if any people were so devoted to their form of worship their wishes should be respected, and at the southwest corner of the cathedral he authorized a chapel to be built for perpetual observance of the Mozárabe rite. It is this chapel, ugly on the outside, lovely inside, that disfigures the right side of the façade, but the spirit that animated Cisneros to this generous act is considered his finest memorial. Today only one hundred and fifty families still follow the Mozárabe rite, and they remember Cisneros with affection.

  Obviously Cisneros is a hero of mine, for wherever one meets his trail one finds greatness. It is my duty, therefore, to report that he undertook two additional responsibilities: he served as head of the Holy Inquisition for all Spain and many of its worst excesses were committed under his leadership. When Carlos, writing from Flanders prior to his arrival in Spain, suggested to Cisneros that reforms in the inquisitorial process might be advisable, the cardinal wrote back: ‘The Inquisition is so perfect that there will never be any need for reform and it would be sinful to introduce changes.’ It was also Cisneros who supported Isabel’s expulsion of the Jews from Spain, but later, when planning his Poliglota, he searched Europe for Jewish scholars expert in Hebrew and brought them to Alcalá de Henares, where he protected them as they taught.

  While renewing my acquaintance with the cathedral I continued to experience Toledo tourism, and I began to appreciate why personal services were so bad. Each morning as I walked downstairs, for the hotel elevator still didn’t work, I found fifty or sixty suitcases stacked in the lobby and buses waiting at the door. Foreigners streamed down the stairs, checked their luggage with bleary eyes and crawled into the buses, not to return. It reminded me of herding Texas cattle, and there was no reason why the overworked men behind the desk should bother to identify as individuals the animals moving in and out. In fact, I was surprised that the service was as good as it was, except that I was somewhat irritated one morning when the desk man looked up with surprise and said, ‘Dios mío, are you still here?’ Finally, one afternoon as I returned weary from a long walk through the city, the elevator was working. It lifted me to floor two-and-a-half and there conked out altogether, leaving me suspended for thirty minutes.

  In Spain one has a constant image of suspicious people peering out from half-opened doors to check upon who or what is passing.

  On the other hand, I had found a good restaurant and a waiter who actually laughed. Once when I tipped him rather more than usual, he confided, ‘I’m saving this to get to Madrid.’

  ‘You taking a job there?’

  ‘No. I love bullfights and Curro Romero is fighting on Sunday. He’s the best. Care to come along?’

  I was much tempted, because I had not yet seen Romero, but I had reached the point where my extended walks into out-of-the-way places were beginning to produce an affection for Toledo which I did not want to imperil. ‘You go,’ I said. ‘I’ll see Romero later.’

  ‘Don’t delay,’ the waiter warned me, ‘because he does such things with the bull that any day he might get hurt.’

  My walks took me into many corners of Toledo, one of the most interesting being the south side of the city, where the poor lived. I had not intended going there, but a donkey came by hauling a milk cart and I followed it for some time and found myself in a warren of medieval streets that led down the cliffs to the banks of the Tajo. In a few instances I saw the kind of poverty I had seen in the farm villages in Extremadura, but most of the houses I stopped at were those of what one might call the respectable poor, with adequate clothing and good food but not quite enough of either; and no matter how poor the house it usually was next to one with a television aerial. I spent some time with a pauper who made his living by walking into the country and collecting reeds which he bound into whisk brooms, tying their ends together with a rope he made from vines. He worked at the base of a tree near the river. ‘This is my factory,’ he said. It consisted of one very old knife for cutting his materials and a stick on which he wound his rope, with room at each end for him to stand on, so that when the time came to bind his reeds he could pull very hard against the stick held down by his toes; old beggars must have used this system in Egypt two thousand years before the birth of Christ. ‘I make enough to live on,’ he said. When I asked him how much, he said, ‘I can make three of these brooms a day, when the weather’s good, and I sell them for eight cents apiece.’ I asked if he could live on twenty-four cents a day, and he said, ‘I beg too.’ When his whisk was finished he showed me how to bang it against the tree. ‘Women appreciate it when you’ve knocked out the seeds.’

  I now came upon a courtyard which explained much about Toledo’s noise, for a group of six or seven young men were preening their motorcycles as carefully as men in London preen their Jaguars. The motorcycles were of a kind new to me, for although each had one front wheel, it had two rear wheels on which was slung a trucklike body capable of carrying, I should judge, about a quarterton. It was these motorcycles which made the noise and moved the cargoes of modern Spain. The rich in Spain have always loved automobiles; recently the middle class have been able to afford them too; but the poor can afford only their motorcycle trucks, and the government would face revolution if it passed laws forbidding them. If I were dictator of Spain, I would certainly not restrict the motorcycles, but I would earmark a large budget for the development of a muffler system.

  I was often stopped by Spaniards who wanted to talk about foreign countries or their own, and if the newspapers were afraid to talk politics, the people were not. Jokes were common. Generalísimo Franco was traveling through the countryside when his coach broke down. Desiring to know what his people thought, he walked alone to a farmer and said, ‘How’re things?’ and the farmer said, ‘Lousy. The government doesn’t know its ass from its elbow.’ Franco became angry and said, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ and the farmer said, ‘I’ve seen your face somewhere before,’ and Franco said, ‘You’ll find my name on all the principal streets, everywhere.’ The farmer dropped his hoe, looked up with delight and cried, ‘Oh! Señor Coca-Cola!’

  When I say that ‘I talked with this man or that,’ I am using the verb in a restricted sense. I read Spanish fluently, understand it partially and speak it poorly, but I have
memorized some twoscore old-style phrases of considerable gentility and these I can rattle off. so my speaking consists of something like this: ‘My esteemed señor, would you do me the favor of seeing …’ I begin rapidly, thus creating the impression that I know what I’m taking about, but I end like this: ‘if … you have … one … beer … cold … very?’ Encouraged by the speed of my opening, my listener responds at a natural rate, and when he does I understand about two-thirds of what he says, especially if it concerns a subject on which I know the basic vocabulary. Of course, in philosophical discussions I am often at a loss in critical moments because I fail to catch whether Miguel de Unamuno said that Spain was lost or that Spain was inspired. But I do not hold back because of my ineptness, and I have talked for many hours with many different kinds of Spaniards.

  I had now descended to the Tajo at the spot where a dam constructed centuries ago created a waterfall, and here I stayed through twilight; always before, I had seen the fall from the top of a cliff, distant and silent and lovely, and I was now surprised at how much noise it made. An old man came to sit with me and we looked for some minutes in silence at the ruins of the mill that jutted into the river. ‘You from América del Norte? Must be a great place.’ I asked him why he thought so, and he Said, ‘Our newspapers say so many bad things about it.’ I asked him if he’d want to go to America, and he said, ‘For the money, yes. Here it’s hard for a man to earn enough. But for the life over there … the speed … the noise … no, thank you.’ I asked him if Spain were easier now. ‘Much better. At last they’re getting some sense into their crazy heads in Madrid.’ Something moved close to me in the darkness and I jumped. ‘What’s that?’ ‘My cows,’ he said. And there, on an edge of Toledo I’d not seen before, a farmer was herding five black-and-white cows who apparently found a good living among the thickets that grew along the riverbanks.

  Whenever I wandered back toward the center of town I found myself engulfed in the deluge of tourists and I resolved to find out how Toledo copes with this industry. Leaving the cathedral one morning and keeping the cardinal’s palace on my right and the city hall on my left, I followed a narrow path to the beautiful Plaza del Consistorio, from which ran the Pasadizo del Ayuntamiento, a covered footway running through the heart of a store specializing in stones from early Christian times. Leaving this I walked along a chain of pleasant streets that brought me to Santo Tomé, the church which holds El Greco’s ‘The Burial of Count Orgaz,’ and a little farther on I stopped at San Juan de Dios, 20, at the damascene shop of Luis Simón, a handsome, fleshy man in his forties, with prematurely gray hair. He said business was slow at the moment and he’d be glad to show me around his factory, and from what I saw I judged that he specialized in good workmanship applied to the kinds of things that were bound to sell: penknives, ash trays, brooches, decorative swords. Taking a piece of steel and a blowtorch, he softened a mixture of wax, resin, red earth and olive oil and set the steel into it. As soon as the flame was withdrawn the mixture hardened and Simón was ready to work. ‘I employ fourteen people throughout the year. It took me five years to learn the trade, another five to become good, but now in Toledo we have a school of applied arts, and young men can speed the process. If they have skill they earn a good living. You’ll notice my men are all young. During the Crusade of 1936 we lost a whole generation of artists. Older men were killed off. Younger men were not trained. The steel I’m using, as you can see, is very soft. They make it for us specially in the mills at Bilbao.’

  Waiting for the bus.

  As he spoke he was scoring the steel with a sharp-pointed knife, laying down a series of fine lines with burred edges about 1/120th of an inch apart. When he had completed a section running in one direction he turned the steel and worked across the lines, so that in the end he had an area completely covered by crisscross lines of the finest delicacy. Luis Simón was obviously a master workman, but in answer to my question he said, ‘Of course, I could make any object you see in the shop. But today I’m too busy selling. The manufacturing I must leave to my men. This gold I’m using comes to us from Madrid but I believe they buy it from Germany.’ Across the burred edges of the steel he was running a strand of very thin gold wire of great brilliance, and when he had laid out an ancient Arabic design consisting of triangles and solid spaces, he gently tapped each wire into position, and as he did so the roughened edges of the lines caught at the gold and held it fast. He then picked up a small mallet and a blunt-headed instrument and with some force hammered the gold wires into permanent position, closing the edges of the lines about them. ‘That gold can never be pulled out now. Try it,’ and when I had unsuccessfully tried, he said, ‘We now bake the steel so that the gold forms a permanent bond and the empty spaces of steel become jet black. That’s what damascene work is.’ He showed me his salesroom, where an ash tray seven inches across, decorated in a gold-and-silver Moorish design of considerable intricacy, sold for twenty-seven dollars. ‘Twenty-four karat gold and pure silver,’ he explained, ‘but we have others of less complicated design, same size, for as low as sixteen dollars.’

  He was proud of the swords made in his shop, immense things with braided-steel handles. ‘We have our own forge, and water-temper the steel just the way they did in this street when a Toledo blade was famous throughout the world. The sword you’re holding is five feet long with a woven handle and we can sell it for nine dollars. But this one, smaller size, gold inlaid, is an exact copy of a sword used ceremonially by Queen Isabel … Try it, it’s completely flexible. Costs three hundred dollars. We also make fencing swords. This one for beginners, only four-sixty and completely flexible. Best fencing sword with inlaid handle, sixteen dollars. This one, of course, we’re proud of. The bullfighter’s sword. Heavy. Very strong. For beginners this one for six dollars. For the real thing, maybe fifty dollars. When my father worked here, all matadors’ swords came from Toledo, because we were the world’s finest sword makers, but starting about 1910 a firm named Luna in Valencia took away the business, and they did make good swords. Today most matadors get theirs from Bermeja in Madrid, and so it goes.’

  As to tourists, Señor Simón was in favor of them. ‘They are our existence. We can survive if we get twenty good customers a day. I try to meet each one because I have a funny sense about what people want and what they’ll be willing to pay. More than half our customers are French, but the norteamericanos come second and they tend to buy more when they do come. I speak French, English, Italian and a little German. My two daughters work with me. One speaks French and English; the other, French and German. I learned my languages by listening, when I was a boy working at the benches, while others did the selling. I’d repeat each word over and over. I used to work in a pretty big factory. Forty people. We had a deal with travel agencies. They’d steer their tourists to us and we’d sell a two-dollar bracelet for three dollars and give the agency a split. They watched us like hawks to see how much we were selling, and we’d try to work it so that the tourists wouldn’t buy then but would come back later on. I got tired of such business and started my own. No guides, no agencies, no runners. We pay commissions to no one. I emphasize this because Toledo has been badly hurt by the last printing of Mr. Fielding’s book on travel in Europe. He warns the norteamericanos, “Don’t buy anything in Toledo. You can get it cheaper in Madrid.” One norte-americano after another tells me, “Mr. Fielding told me to buy in Madrid, so I’m going to wait.” I say, “Can’t you make up your own mind?” but they say, “Sure, but who wants to be robbed?” Fact is, Mr. Fielding was right. The shops to which the guides take you do rob you, and you can buy the same thing cheaper in Madrid. But the truth is that if you come to shops like mine, and there are dozens like me in Toledo, even near the Zocodover, you get bargains that no one in Madrid can match. Look at my prices and compare. The guides know this and they have to protect themselves, so now they tell the norteamericanos, “Sure, Señor Simón’s price is a little lower. Why shouldn’t it be? Everything he sells is m
achine-made.” This is a tough business but we make our way.’

  As he spoke, an American woman came into the store to conclude a bargaining session that had extended over three days. ‘In spite of what Fielding says, I’m going to buy from you.’ She was satisfied that Señor Simón’s prices were about as good as she was going to find and she was prepared to place her order: ‘Six of the larger ash trays, four pairs of scissors, four penknives, six water jugs, six small swords for letter openers, one large plate, one larger sword …’ I understood what Simón meant when he said that with twenty customers a day he could get by. This woman’s bill was going to be close to two hundred dollars and she was delighted with the things she was getting. ‘This store is so clean and well lighted it’s a pleasure to do business here,’ she said. When she was. gone, Simón said, ‘It ought to be clean. The municipal government sends an inspector here once a month to be sure the shop looks appealing. In Toledo, tourism is a big business … the biggest we have, and we’ve got to do everything we can to offset the bad blow Mr. Fielding gave us.’