Iberia

by James A. Michener

  But if all nations have similar peculiarities, few have suffered from theirs as much as Spain has from hers. Hundreds of perplexed travelers during the last three hundred years have commented on the fact that the country was filled with virtual paupers who maintained their classification as gentlemen by refusing to work; they starved but they remained gentlemen. Although such a system had deleterious effects on farming and manufacturing, it had the virtues of not being based exclusively on money or big houses; a man with one room and one suit, if he carried himself properly, could be just as much a gentleman as a man with a palace, and this universal eligibility has permitted a friendship between economic classes which has not existed in other European countries. The impoverished Don Quixote, and many of them exist today across Spain, feels no sense of embarrassment in addressing as an equal the duque or conde or marqués with whom he comes in contact, while to the recent millionaire he feels superior.

  The effect of all this upon the land has been tragic, and I remember one hot summer day riding through the heart of the Mesta territory, northeast of Madrid, and coming upon the village of Maranchón, so typical that it could represent all that had grown up in the sheep country. How beautiful and quiet this place was, with majestic old houses crowding each side of the somnolent main street. How enticing were the views I caught of the narrow streets that led off to right and left as I passed. Here was the inevitable sign, ‘Correos,’ plus an arrow, indicating that down this alley there was a house serving as post office. Another sign, common to all villages, read ‘Telégrafo’ and a third said ‘Teléfono.’

  In Maranchón I saw one shepherd, but he had no sheep. I caught sight of a woman ducking into a doorway and then I was in the outskirts of the village, but when I came to the little bullring, ‘Erected 1915,’ I had an overpowering desire to know more about this town, so. I wheeled my car about and parked on the main street. I walked up the grass-grown Calle Generalísimo Franco, to where it met Calle Calvo Sotelo, and I stayed there for some time just looking. Almost no one moved, for Maranchón was largely deserted. The fine houses were shuttered and the doors over which family shields had been carved were locked.

  No. 608, whose deep horn wound on the right flank proves he is a horse that works the bulls at Concha y Sierra, comes out of the Guadalquivir after his bath in the late afternoon.

  Where had the men gone? ‘To Germany, señor. They have all gone to Germany.’

  But these houses held women, too. Where are they? ‘They’ve gone to Barcelona, señor. The lucky ones are in Barcelona.’

  But your fields are rich. Why aren’t they tilled? The men have gone to Germany, señor. There they can make a living.’

  Maranchón lives in my memory as a permanent symbol of Spain, even more lasting than the depopulated villages of Extremadura, because it was more beautiful and in its day had known a more complete life. How really lovely that main street was! If it could be transported bodily to California it would be one of the treasures of the United States and artists would fight for the privilege of renting the rooms that stand behind its plain, perfect façades. Where have all the people gone? If Maranchón itself could speak, it would say, ‘For five centuries my people were abused by the Mesta, whose courts used to sit in that hall over there, sentencing farmers unjustly. Any man who had a good idea about caring for his land was muzzled. The fields that could have been so productive have gone to waste and the boys who once ran in these streets have gone to Germany and Barcelona.’

  It seems uncanny that a nation which made the miserable mistake of chasing after Mexican and Peruvian gold instead of developing manufactures should in the field of agriculture have made an equally destructive wrong choice, electing the quick money of the Mesta rather than the sustained productivity of an orderly system of farms. Just as the gold damaged the country instead of helping it, so the Mesta destroyed the land instead of making it productive. As I say, it is unusual to meet a Spaniard like Don Luis Ybarra, who understands the land, especially when he is a distinguished gentleman.

  ‘At the palace,’ he said one day, ‘we’re taking steps to correct our indifference.’

  ‘What is the palace? Culverwell mentioned it too.’

  “I’d like to show it to you.’

  The prospect of seeing a fresh section of Las Marismas under Señor Ybarra’s guidance was so inviting that we made plans to visit the secluded place. We left El Rocío and drove south toward the Atlantic Ocean west of Sanlúcar and soon were in the kind of sand-dune country that Culverwell had described. When we had about reached the seashore we turned back north on a miserable track and for the better part of an hour crawled along, trying to keep out of the water ditches on either side. When we escaped them we found ourselves stuck up to our hubcaps in drifting sand, and if bushes had not been plentiful, so that we could tear off their tops to throw under our spinning wheels, I doubt that we would have made it. At last, however, we broke through and found ourselves in a wild and barren land with a chain of small lakes off to our right.

  ‘Look!’ Ybarra cried. ‘Eagles!’ We stopped to watch two imperial eagles chasing a goose who must have had experience with them, for he not only dodged the upper eagle but did it in such a way as to stay well clear of the one waiting below. We cheered the clever goose and with this appropriate introduction I entered one of the rare spots of Europe, or the world either for that matter, the Coto Doñana (Wildlife Preserve of Doña Ana). We turned a corner in the road and saw a lake on which there must have been a thousand ducks. Ybarra said, ‘They’re back! Early, but they’re back.’ When we had passed this check point I saw ahead of me a compact, very old three-story stone building rising mysteriously out of the swampland, a true fifteenth-century palace set down here God knows how, a refuge inhabited in times past by kings who sat for Velázquez, by the Duquesa de Alba, who is said to have posed here for Francisco de Goya, and by the man whose spirit seems to haunt the place, King Alfonso XIII, who came here in his impeccable hunting suits and was driven over the swamps and dunes in a 1922 Citroën fitted with tank tracks. This was the palace of Coto Doñana, and in the past fifty years almost every leading naturalist in the world, if his specialty was birds, has caught his breath with excitement as he came upon this unbelievable building in the marshes.

  The Coto Doñana is a large area of wilderness consisting of part marisma, part sand dune and much water in the form of semi-connected lakes strung together like the beads of a rosary. On the north it reaches almost to El Rocío, on the south and west almost to the shoreline of the Atlantic and on the east almost to the Guadalquivir. It has many oak trees, not huddled together in a forest but standing each one by itself, with gaunt branches suitable for supporting nests. It also has a copious supply of shrubs and low grasses which produce seeds. It is thus an almost perfect haven for birds of every sort, from the eagle that needs a tall tree to the widgeon and coot that require water and grass. Since sometime around the year 1500 it has been known as a hunter’s paradise, because in addition to a bird life of unimaginable fecundity, it has also contained very large herds of red deer, and, since their introduction in the early 1900s, of fallow deer as well. When I say large I mean that in an average walk across six or eight miles of the Coto one may see forty different herds of deer, each containing fifty or sixty animals.

  For several centuries the Coto was set aside as a hunting preserve where bears and wolves and wild boars were protected from poachers, hence its name, and where the elite of Spain came on quite primitive safaris, as much to enjoy the wilderness as to hunt game. Kings and dukes, famous bullfighters and actors, visiting nobility and merchant princes made it to the Coto and stacked their guns in the racks of the palace. The area was owned by noble families living in the Cadiz region and was held by them for the enjoyment of their guests.

  Very early in the Coto’s history its owners realized that some kind of permanent building was going to be necessary, not only for the yearly guests but also for the gamekeepers, so the palace was built. H
ow were these stones brought over land with no roads? How could a building of this excellent quality have been erected in such a wilderness? The records of its construction are lost, but it is known to have existed in the sixteenth century. Hundreds of peasants must have labored a long time, hauling materials on their backs from dumping grounds at the edge of the Guadalquivir. Or perhaps the stone and timber came by boat to the open beach along the Atlantic, from which they were hauled in two-wheeled carts over the sand dunes. At any rate, the old palace was finally completed, centuries ago.

  It is not, as Señor Ybarra warned me, ‘a palace palace.’ It’s more like the fortress palace one finds in rural Italy, a large rectangular block resembling more an oversized farmhouse than an urban palace; but when one comes upon it after a trek over the dunes or the swamps it has a palatial grandeur, so that the name is not amiss.

  Among the noble hunters who occupied it in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of this were some who forgot the herds of deer and the lynx and fox and began to look at the bird life, and through them the fame of the Coto as a bird sanctuary began to spread. Throughout Europe naturalists who wanted to study the birds of England or Denmark or Russia found that to complete their information they must come to where their birds came, the Coto Doñana in southern Spain, and as so often happened in such matters, it was a group of public-spirited Englishmen who brought the Coto to the attention of the world at large and formulated plans for its acquisition by an international body that would protect it permanently as a wildlife preserve.

  Under the leadership of the Duke of Edinburgh, Lord Alanbrooke (of World War II fame) and Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, aided by Frenchmen and Germans and perhaps an American or two, including Roger Tory Peterson, the bird expert, the World Wildlife Fund was established to preserve areas where birds and animals take refuge, and one of its first acts was the purchase of the Coto, which was saved just in time from the inroads of modernization. The Fund has offices throughout the world, but its spiritual home is the palace. One of its principal assets in Spain is the talented man chosen as director of the Coto, the ornithologist Dr. José Antonio Valverde, who keeps an office in Sevilla. He is a learned and very amusing man, and anyone wanting to visit or support the Coto should seek him out.

  ‘Ah!’ Señor Ybarra cried as our car came to a halt under the eucalypts which surrounded the palace. ‘Our welcoming committee.’ A bedraggled nanny goat appeared to greet us, followed by a tame red deer with only one horn who made straight for me. Since it is not often that I get a chance to play with deer, I stepped forward to scratch my friend’s nose, but Ybarra grabbed me and drew me back. ‘Watch out for Bartolo! He was suckled by that goat and now thinks he’s one. That horn can raise hell.’ As he spoke, Bartolo took a leap at me, lowered his head and came right at my stomach with his one sharp horn. Ybarra kicked him away just in time, and he stood off to one side, his head cocked. Later he came at me more properly and we had the first of many fine visits. Ybarra was right. He thought he was a goat and even ate odd things the way his foster mother did.

  On my first night at the palace I met a widely informed Spaniard who was to serve as my principal mentor in Spain, although neither he nor I was aware of this fact at the moment; it was not until I had come upon him again in Madrid and in the various cities of the north that I appreciated what an unusual fellow he was, how wise and well-intentioned. He was an ardent patriot, had a keen appreciation of what was happening in Spain and would discuss it frankly. Had he known of any adverse comment on Spain that I intended including in this book, he would have stayed up all night trying to argue me out of it; if on the other hand I report upon certain aspects of Spanish life with affection, often it is because he instructed me about them.

  He was introduced as Don Luis Morenés y Areces, an avid huntsman from Madrid. He was about my height, somewhat on the heavy side but surprisingly light on his feet. He had a head much larger than that of the average Spaniard and heavy dark hair with slight streaks of gray, even though he could not have been more than thirty-five. His features were large: broad-set eyes, a substantial nose, a large, mobile mouth, a heavy neck running into shoulders that sloped like an athlete’s. He loved the outdoors and had a keen eye for all natural phenomena. He was a born huntsman and loved guns, which I do not, but in all else his interests and mine coincided; particularly, he had a boisterous sense of humor, a really rollicking Sancho Panza type of Spanish laughter, and as in the case of most good storytellers, a fair share of the yarns he told were at his expense, for he was in no way pompous. He spoke English and French with little accent and had what I especially appreciated, an almost total recall of places we had seen together or conversations we had held, often years before.

  The first question I asked him was typical. ‘Who was the Doña Ana after whom the Coto was named?’ and his meticulous reply was representative of thousands that I would receive in subsequent conversations: ‘There are three theories on that. Some say it was Ana, the Duquesa de Medina Sidonia. The family that produced the admiral who led the Great Armada against England in 1588. They come from down here and had an important seat at Sanlúcar. But Señor Ybarra believes it was Ana, the Condesa de Denia y Tarifa. The big family over by Gibraltar. They owned the place for a while. I’m of the personal opinion that it must have been named after Ana de Austria. Ah, but which Ana of Austria? The fourth wife of Felipe Segundo and mother of Felipe Tercero? I don’t think so. More probably the second wife of Felipe Quarto. She was his niece, you know, and the mother of Carlos Segundo. This Ana loved the hunt and often came to the Coto, which in honor of her visits was named Coto de la Reina Doña Mariana de Austria, to give her full name. This was contracted to Coto de la Reina Doña Ana, and then to Coto de Doña Ana, and finally to Coto Doñana. You would be interested to know that it was this queen who gave her name to the Marianas Islands in the Pacific Ocean.’

  He told me something else that seemed logical though surprising. ‘The Coto played an important role in the history of India. Some British officers stationed at Gibraltar during the years when Spain and England were allies against Napoleon were invited here as guests of the Spanish king, and while staying at the palace they saw him hunt boar with a lance from horseback, and when they were transferred to India they introduced the sport there. So Errol Flynn and all the other Bengal Lancers got their start here.’

  Don Luis then solved a problem for me. ‘You asked how the stones for this palace reached here? You wouldn’t believe it. They came from quarries north of London. When the English discovered our sherry wine and started to import huge quantities of it, their ships could think of nothing to carry back to Spain on the return trips. So for ballast they loaded up with granite blocks, but no one in Cádiz or Jerez wanted the stone, so they dumped it on the shore and men hauled it in handcarts to build this palace.’

  In the pause that followed, Señor Ybarra queried Don Luis concerning a girl who had made herself a depositada, and Don Luis said, ‘She’s doing as well as you’d expect.’ He then turned to me and explained. ‘In our country, getting a girl of good family married sometimes involves a lot of problems. Suppose that José, age twenty, wants to marry Rosita, age seventeen. In the eyes of the law and the Church they were old enough to do so when he was fourteen and she twelve, but until Rosita reaches the age of twenty-one she must have her parents’ permission. If they approve, okay. If they object, Rosita must wait till she’s twenty-one. Then she can marry José whether her parents like it or not.’

  I pointed out that many countries had similar rules. ‘Ah, yes!’ Don Luis agreed. ‘But what they don’t have is our depositada process. The girl is free at twenty to marry only if she leaves her parents’ home. If for any reason—and when good families are involved this is usually the case—she. continues to live with her parents in order to win from them a dowry, she cannot marry without their consent until she is twenty-five, but a recent law has dropped that age to twenty-one. Nor can she become a nun wit
hout their permission. It is in the interest of family continuance that this law exists, and we observe it. But it is also in the interest of Church and state that girls marry young and bear children while they are able. So a compromise is necessary, and here it is. A girl who cannot get her parents’ permission to marry can throw herself upon the mercy of the court, which will deposit her, hence depositada, in the home of a relative or friend so that others can inspect the young man and supervise the courtship for a period of somewhat less than six months. At the end of this cooling-off period, as we call it, if she still insists upon marrying her young man, the family into which she has been deposited acts as her parents.