Iberia

by James A. Michener

  ‘Now, if young José fails to win permission from his parents, he can’t marry either, but what he can do is send his father, through the offices of a judge, a registered letter setting forth the reasons why he intends to marry, and at the end of a reasonable time if he proves to the judge that his father did not respond to the letter, the court will grant him permission to marry. Again there’s been the cooling-off period.

  ‘There’s one more way out. If at any time young José and Rosita, regardless of their age, can steal away and find some priest to marry them, they’re legally wed—except that neither has a right to a share of the other’s inherited property—and their parents can’t do a damned thing about it except to organize a hunting party and go out and shoot the priest. It’s rather impressive how many priests are willing to run this risk. The Church tends to favor early marriage, and if a couple are truly in love the priest can usually detect it, but on the other hand, they don’t abuse the practice because they know that if the people of the countryside felt that they were going too far, the Church would suffer. Besides, the new law of April 24, 1958, has liberalized the system. It’s still complicated, like much in Spain, but it works.’

  Señor Ybarra asked if it was working in the case we had been discussing, and Don Luis said no.

  Don Luis had come to the Coto by special invitation and for a particular purpose. The herds of deer about the Coto had grown so numerous that they were endangering the sanctuary’s food supply, so a few huntsmen like Don Luis had been called in to kill off some of the bucks. ‘Would you like to join me?’ he asked, and we set off in a Land Rover at thirty miles an hour over the parched marismas. We passed about a hundred and fifty fallow deer but by now I had learned not to comment on them. However, Ybarra asked, ‘Are you going to thin out the fallow deer?’ but Don Luis said, ‘I’d prefer not to bother with them.’ Later I spotted a herd of at least a hundred red deer, but they were much too far away. Apparently they knew this, for they grazed quietly and took little notice of us except to look up now and then to stare across the cracked earth.

  The sun was beginning to set and Don Luis said he was afraid we’d not be able to approach any of the herds in the time remaining, but very far in the distance I spotted a group of about forty red deer in good position, and we drove to within a quarter of a mile of them, then descended to try to creep up on them. When we had reached a point from which I could not yet be sure that the herd contained bucks, Don Luis said, ‘This is about right.’ I asked if he intended shooting from there, for the deer seemed to me to be almost two football fields away, and he said, ‘Why not? Anyway, they won’t let us get much closer.’ As a matter of fact, the outlying watchers had already detected us and were alerting the herd, but as one handsome large buck stopped to sniff the air, Don Luis took careful aim and with one shot dropped him. Unable to believe that a hunter could be so accurate from such a distance, I stepped off the measurement, a yard a step, and it came to one hundred and seventy yards. The bullet had struck the deer in the head and death had been immediate.

  I felt uneasy about sharing in the killing of an animal on a game preserve, even though I could see from the size of the herds that it was necessary, so I was gratified when we turned from deer to the inspection of the lakes to which the aquatic birds of the north were beginning to arrive. This brought me into the activity of the Coto and I saw the useful role it played in European conservancy.

  The significance of the Coto is best expressed in what one of its directors told a Danish hunting club which had been solicited for funds and had been hesitant: ‘Gentlemen, if the lakes of the Coto are allowed to disappear, within five years there will be no ducks in Denmark.’ The money was forthcoming, and the same appeal had proved effective elsewhere in northern Europe. Consider merely the birds I watched while I was there.

  From Denmark came the graylag goose; from England the robin; from Scotland the woodcock; from Sweden the mallard; from Siberia the widgeon; from Germany the starling; from Holland the avocet; and from France the stilt. From Africa and Asia, too, the traffic was considerable. From Ethiopia came the bee-eater; from north Africa the hoopoe; from south Africa the stork; from west Africa the egret; from central Africa the kite; from various parts the spoonbill; from the Sahara the ruddy shell duck; from the Congo the purple heron. Destroy the Coto, and the life patterns of these birds and hundreds of others which I did not personally see would be altered, perhaps with serious consequences.

  To cross this apparently barren and remote area at night, with flashlights probing the low cover to spot the lynx or the fox or the silent herds of deer, is to see nature in one of its most impressive forms, because wherever you look you see evidence of wild things living in a precarious balance of water and grass and dune and tree. By some extraordinary accident these components are preserved here, in an area that man has not spoiled.

  Next morning Señor Ybarra started introducing me to the nesting areas of the Coto, explaining the wildlife in Latin phrases which he later interpreted into English by means of Roger Tory Peterson’s handbook. In his infectious lisp, highlighted by fascinating stories of bird behavior, he introduced me to several birds I had not known before and two for whom I developed a considerable affection. Before speaking of them I should like to relate some of the surprises Ybarra showed me.

  Along the ground at the edges of the swamps, in trees and higher shrubs, we frequently saw a gray-brown bird with a camouflage that could only have been developed as a mask for the bird as it perched among leaves. The disguise was well-night perfect, and sometimes I would stare at a branch for some moments without realizing that the leaves I thought I saw consisted mainly of this bird. ‘Observe its huge mouth,’ Ybarra said. ‘Caprimulgus europaeus. Flies almost blind, with its big mouth open like a seine for trapping insects.’ It was the nightjar, a bird peculiar to Europe and known popularly as the goatsucker because of the widespread belief that that is how it feeds.

  He also showed me a splendid bird of the Circus family, a hen harrier we later decided it was, which flew like our hawks in graceful sweeps, its black wing tips and white under-feathers making it a fine sight in the sky. I grew fond of watching its swift movements and concluded, perhaps incorrectly, that it attained higher speeds than the hawks with which I was familiar.

  I asked if the Coto had any peregrine falcons and after this was translated into Latin, Falco peregrinus, Ybarra said, ‘One pair! Would you believe that on land which used to nest dozens of pairs, only one remains? The reason? Too many chemical poisons spread on the grounds where they used to feed. Also, the old castles in which they nested are being torn down or renovated. This rare bird is almost gone from this part of Spain.’ I told him of seeing four pairs in the ruined castle at Sanlúcar, and he said, ‘Yes, in a few of the old ruins you can still find them.’

  In happier vein he told me of the bird-banding experiments carried on in the Coto. ‘We banded thousands of little egrets. And what do you suppose? Two of them wound up in the Caribbean. One in Trinidad. One in Martinique. If we understand correctly, this is the first time in history that we can prove birds to have emigrated naturally from the Old World to the New over the full width of the open ocean. And do you know what these clever birds did? They followed the same course as Columbus. Who taught whom?

  At the lakes we had an exciting time watching hundreds of coots and purple gallinules; the latter were the more beautiful, with subdued colors that shone in the sun, but the coots were the more fun. They were a heavy, blackish, ducklike bird with snow-white beaks and white foreheads, and they obviously enjoyed the water, diving and splashing like a bunch of children. They were aware of our presence, and if we made an unexpected move, they would take off in large numbers, tiptoeing across the waves as if in secrecy but making a huge clatter with their wings; I was surprised at the distance they required to get airborne, some thirty times their length. After they had been aloft for a while and were satisfied that we were not going to harm them, they returned to the
lake and landed like reluctant auks, their feet acting as brakes amid a noisy screeching. ‘The best water birds we have,’ Ybarra said. He preferred them to the showier ducks that would arrive later from Siberia.

  It was the inherent surrealism of Spain that produced a painter like Salvador Dali.

  The first of the two birds that captured my affection was the kestrel. ‘Falco tinnunculus,’ Ybarra said. ‘A true falcon but smaller than the ones you’ve seen in America.’ It was a bird that was handsome in any posture. When perched on a tree at the edge of the marsh, it was a compact, medium-sized bird about a foot long with a fine reddish speckled body and a bluish head and tail. For some reason which I could not explain, it carried itself with a sense of confidence and was so common throughout the Coto that I had adequate opportunity to study it. All things considered, it was the most enticing bird I saw in Spain. In flight the kestrel is magnificent, swooping in large arcs through the sky or hovering almost motionless above some suspected quarry. Seen from below, its wing tips are delicately speckled, so that they reflect light coming up from the lakes, and its tail has a sharp, clean bar near the tip. It looks much like the land of Spain, but Señor Ybarra told me that it is equally at home in England, where it is highly regarded.

  It was not surprising that I should have liked the kestrel, for it resembled the hawks which nested near my home in Pennsylvania, so that I was in a sense prepared for it, but if anyone had predicted that I would find my second choice in Las Marismas so appealing, I would have laughed at him. When I first saw this creature, for it was only with difficulty that I could accept it as a bird, it was standing in a meadow across which we had been riding in the Land Rover. It was enormous, with a wingspread when it waddled over the ground of about eight feet. From its clawlike feet to the top of its apparently bald head it would have measured another three feet. ‘In English it’s the griffon vulture,’ Ybarra said. ‘It flies up here from Africa, and without it Las Marismas couldn’t exist. It’s the scavenger that keeps us cleaned up.’ When we moved in on the first griffon I had ever seen, we found that it was hacking away at a dead rabbit. Later we found a dead calf at which some thirty or forty were feeding. Ybarra said that sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty descend on the carcass of a steer, but I never saw that.

  The griffons were so common in the Coto that I came to know them as friends, and the more I learned about them the more respect I had for them. They are a sandy brown, with a head that is always described as bald but which is covered with a silky down that wraps around to protect their face and neck as well. A circle of white feathers about the neck creates the impression of some drunken Velazquez noble in ruffs, for when they move on land, which they do constantly, they lurch and roll as if intoxicated. They are a noisy lot, quarreling, gouging at each other with hawklike beaks and pushing for the best position at the feast. Since their heads are much too small for their bodies, they look grotesque; they are awkward in all they do but possess a quality of stubborn endurance which makes them as interesting as any bird in the Coto and more useful than most. They serve an essential purpose, and if one dismisses them because they are ugly, as I used to do, he misses a major point of nature. They too are much like the land of Spain: awkward, formidable, sometimes repellent but always fascinating.

  While Señor Ybarra was instructing me on birds, Don Luis was setting me right on a famous fable attached to the Coto. From various books on Goya, I had gleaned the information that he often visited the estate at Sanlúcar de Barrameda owned by the Duque de Alba and that while there had fallen in love with the duquesa, with whom he had gone to the Coto. Certainly in the Hispanic Society of New York there is a portrait of the duquesa standing near a lagoon which has been identified as one in the Coto, but it was two other supposed portraits that gave rise to legend, the notorious ‘Maja desnuda’ and the ‘Maja vestida’ (Flashy Woman Nude, and Dressed).

  ‘Not a word of truth to the legend,’ Don Luis protested. ‘Both the previous Duque de Alba, who was ambassador to London, and his successor have presided over conferences of savants who have totally demolished that libel. Spanish historians have proved that the supposed love affair could not have taken place and art experts have demonstrated beyond question that the ‘Maja’ could not have been the duquesa. Three distinguished medical men, Blanco Soler, Piga Pascual and Pérez de Patinto, have proved in their book that she did not die from poisoning, as the legend claims. Please do what you can to silence this silly tale which has brought so much offense to one of Spain’s noblest families.’

  One afternoon Don Luis took me to the second floor, where a row of windows looked out upon the flat lands of Las Marismas, and said, ‘At these windows King Felipe IV stood with his arquebus … Like the one his son carries in the painting by Velázquez … And while he stood here the peasants down below drove a herd of deer past the window and he blazed away. After several tries he bagged one.’

  What interested me most among the many things Don Luis showed me was a long row of carefully framed photographs covering the years from about 1890 to 1931. Judging from the excellence of these shots, it was customary for hunting parties to bring along professional photographers, so that today the gallery of the palace contains an enviable visual record of those last days of monarchy. Duques, condes, famous bullfighters and occasionally some burgeoning industrial magnate fill the photographs, dressed in costly hunting clothes from London and driving even more expensive automobiles from Paris, but the unquestioned hero of the series is a tall, slim, impeccably dressed man with aquiline nose, long mustaches and imperial bearing. He is King Alfonso XIII, last of the Borbón rulers and probably the most regal and handsome king of this century.

  He was a vapid young man interested only in hunting. It is doubtful if he ever read a whole book, and when he was required by custom to visit a university it was understood that no professors or students with serious interests would bother him; a few noble youths experienced in hunting were to surround him so that he could speak of things he understood. The handsome photographs at the palace prove that in the hunt, at least, he was expert and that his love for the outdoors was both sincere and inexhaustible.

  One of the pictures I liked best showed him in a suit which only a king would be brave enough to wear: the background cloth was a quiet gray, beautifully cut to fit his austere build, but into it was woven a series of huge brown diamonds five inches tall, their points standing vertically. At first sight the king looks like an advertisement, but as one sees him in various poses and in the company of others, one realizes that he selected this suit on purpose, for when it appeared in a crowd, its wearer stood out as majesty.

  After I had seen a score of the Alfonso photographs—he must have been a frequent visitor to the Coto—I began to realize that my guide, Don Luis, must have come from a family that knew the king personally, for he spoke of details which otherwise he could not have known: ‘It is these three portraits which have the deepest meaning. Here is Alfonso in the last days of his reign. He’s more serious now, his troubles have begun and it’s sad to think that soon after this was taken he deemed it prudent to leave Spain, to which he never returned. He loved the Coto and during his exile he must have longed for it. Here’s a fine photograph of his family taken in Madrid a few years before his departure. His English queen … She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria … A splendid woman and very loyal to him. This is the oldest son, Don Jaime, who would have made a fine king except that he was removed from the succession because he was a deaf-mute. This is Don Alfonso, the unfortunate son who married a Cuban commoner and died in an automobile crash in Miami in 1938. This is Don Gonzalo, the youngest son, who also died in an auto crash.’ He pointed out the children one by one, ending with a handsome young man. ‘And this is Don Juan de Borbón, who now lives in Estoril, near Lisboa in Portugal.’ He said no more and I was unable to ascertain his opinion of Juan; it would have been improper for him to express one, because Juan, as the legal heir of Alfonso XIII, who died in 1941,
ought to become King of Spain when Generalísimo Franco goes, except that powerful forces, including Franco, prefer that Juan’s son, Prince Juan Carlos, take the throne. There could be trouble between father and son, and prudent Spaniards are reluctant to tell foreigners whose side they support. Pointing to the last of the three photographs, Don Luis said, ‘And this is Don Juan by himself … photographed in Portugal, where he lives in exile.’ He was an attractive fellow and others in Spain told me that he would make a fine king, but what Don Luis thought of the matter, I was not to discover.

  Wherever I turned among the photographs I found some aspect of Spanish history which attracted my interest. Here was the dictator Primo de Rivera standing over a wild boar which he had just killed with a lance. Over here was the Conde de Tarifa, who once owned the Coto, at the wheel of the Citroën swamp wagon he had bought for the use of Alfonso. This handsome woman was the Duquesa de Medinaceli, from one of the noblest families in Spain, standing with the man she had invited to the Coto, the famous matador Rafael Guerra, called Guerrita; the photograph must have been taken around 1910, when Guerrita was in retirement. This solemn-looking man was the Duque de Cádiz as he appeared in 1908; of his home city in that year it was said, ‘It has three hundred and sixty-six churches and no library.’ In 1966 a resident told me, ‘Today things are better. We have three hundred and sixty-five churches and one library. But mostly it’s closed.’ In this corner is Alfonso, clean-shave and just as good-looking that way as with his Kaiser-like mustaches; but the photograph which lives in my mind showed him ready for the hunt, a dashing king with enormous mustaches and a rifle cradled in his arm. He wore heavy peasant trousers with pronounced vertical stripes, English leather boots, and over all zahones, which formed a heavy leather apron divided down the middle and tied securely about each leg. He was an archaic figure, best suited to the seventeenth century; how admirable a subject he would have been for the brush of Velázquez. The camera barely does him justice.