Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Madrid was favored to win, but at the half the score stood Barcelona 1–Madrid 0. The crowd was disconsolate, but the man next to me said, ‘Don’t worry. Madrid is bound to win. This is the team that used to be world’s champion. They have pundonor.’

  Their vaunted pundonor did them no good when the second half opened, for Barcelona made a great sally at the goal and scored again, and the men around me groaned as if such a thing were indecent or unlawful. A moment later they were cheering wildly because the referee had disallowed the Barcelona goal on some technicality which no one could explain. I thought the decision was fishy and that it had come suspiciously late, and the next day the papers said the same thing. A statistical study had recently been made of Spanish football, proving what everyone had suspected, that a disgracefully high proportion of games was won by the home team, the theory being ‘If the home team wins, nobody riots.’ Tonight the referees seemed determined to prevent riots.

  Soon thereafter, Madrid tied the score, then quickly made a second goal, but the referee was so embarrassed at having robbed Barcelona that now he did the same to Madrid. The man next to me really wanted to kill the swine, but a friend reminded him, ‘They’re supposed to even things out,’ and the game ended Madrid 1–Barcelona 1.

  Some time later I was in Córdoba when Madrid visited there, and in the days before the game one of the executives of the Córdoba team said in the local paper, ‘The reason Córdoba has lost its last two games is that our fans have not been terrorizing the referees the way they do in Palma and Sevilla. Loyal fans are the twelfth man on the field. If you want us to beat Madrid, you must come out and scare the referee.’ I attended that game, and the fans did their part. From the opening whistle to the last they created a bedlam, and although they may not have scared the referee, they did me. In the second half, when a bad call was made, a young man leaped from the stands, grabbed a camera from a newsman, rushed onto the field, and swinging the strap in a full circle, cracked the referee on the head with the camera and laid him out on the turf. The crowd applauded and apparently the official got the message, because Córdoba won.

  The miracle of soccer as compared to American-style football is that the men who invented it came up with a game in which, because of the low scoring, ties are frequent. This means that if you bet on a game you must take into consideration three, not two, possibilities. Your team may win, or lose, or draw, and it would require a good man to predict accurately all the results of the fourteen games that appear each week on the betting list. The obvious wins and losses are easy, but what about those possible ties?

  It is this unpredictable aspect of football that has made it such an ideal gambling game. Today all over Spain you see grubby little bare-window shops with the magic sign 1 × 2. It is to these shops that the people of Spain flock to mark their ballots for the slate of games to be played on the coming Sunday. Each ballot lists the fourteen games, eight from the first division, three from the northern section of the second division, three from the southern section, plus two reserve games to replace any of the scheduled ones that might be rained out or otherwise suspended. Alongside each game are the fascinating figures 1 × 2. If you circle the 1 it means you predict that the home team will win. Circle the 2 and you’re betting on the visiting team. But circle X and you back a tie.

  If you guess all fourteen correctly, and are the only one to do so, that week, you stand to win a fortune. The twenty-first Sunday in the 1964–65 season saw many upsets and only one man guessed them all, winning 15,364,075 pesatas (about $256,000), but that was exceptional. More typical were the results last year. There were thirty-nine betting days and 808,916,155 bets, of which only 19,129 gained top position, or one in every 42,000. On five of the days no one guessed all fourteen results, so naturally those who hit thirteen won. On one day of many upsets only two people won, and they got about $130,000 each, but on another day 3,836 did and won only $112 each.

  Football betting is a mania in Spain and few are the homes with no addicts. Each year the newspapers carry agonized stories about some man who has studied the teams, made form sheets for the players, kept a record of which referees favor which teams and then gotten weather reports on the various playing fields before making out his list. With infinite care he has checked it, tried to anticipate where ties might fall and then decided on his fourteen outcomes. Where games are extra chancy he has bet a second and a third time, or even a twelfth, trying to cover all contingencies. He wins nothing. But his wife gets a first prize with fourteen correct. When asked what her system was she says, ‘I took my list to the butcher’s. He was cutting up bones, and every time he raised the cleaver I asked, “One, two or tie?” and he would whack the cleaver down and say, “One,” or whatever came into his head. Fourteen times in a row his cleaver was right.’ An amusing debate runs in the papers, ‘Does It Help to Know Anything about Football?’ and the consensus seems to be that too much knowledge inhibits freedom in spotting the ties. It is apparently better to wake up some morning and say, ‘You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if Barcelona ties Madrid.’ Few Americans who have lived in Spain for any time have escaped infection: ‘Let’s throw a hundred pesetas in the pool to see if we come up with something.’ Spoken like a Spaniard.

  One fact about the pools astonished me. On those rare Sundays when no games are scheduled in Spain, the pool is based on some league in Italy that no one ever heard of and about which he can learn little. The betting is just as active as on a normal weekend and everyone seems to have about the same amount of fun.

  I was able to resist the betting until I stumbled into the zany world of books written on the higher mathematics of the subject; then I became a sucker for each new theory and came home with half a dozen intricate systems based on permutations and combinations. I found there was a Norwegian system which would protect me against ties and an Italian system based on identifying a few sure wins, eliminating them and covering myself three ways on tricky games. Like thousands of Spaniards, I became fascinated by the pure mathematics of the thing; for example, supposing you are morally certain of the outcome of twelve games but have no clue as to how the other two will go. To cover yourself, you’d have to bet nine columns with the two dubious games marked thus:

  If you did that, you couldn’t lose. (If you are interested in either mathematics or gambling, draw up a table showing that to ensure yourself against all contingencies when eleven games are certain and three uncertain, you will have to bet twenty-seven columns.) Tables have been prepared whereby you can ensure yourself mathematically against any contingency, but the insurance is costly. For example, suppose you know the outcome of seven games, are completely confused about five and reasonably certain about the remaining two, you would bet the seven games in one column, the five confused games in three columns and the two chancy games in two columns, but to do this properly would cost you the betting fee for 972 columns, and one unexpected tie in the supposedly sure games would ruin everything. I favored the wild system worked out by Alejandro Abad, who gave personal consultations like a psychologist. He sold a large book of tables showing how to bet on one hundred and forty-four different columns properly arranged and get a sure win … unless something unforeseen happened. Other counselors, whose books sold for as much as ten dollars a copy, advocated other systems, but in spite of them a disconcerting number of top prizes still went to the women who sought advice from their butchers.

  My visits to Madrid were made pleasant by the fact that I had been invited to attend a well-regarded tertulia which met at four-thirty each afternoon in the Cafe Leon (on the signs, Lion, from the French Lion d’Or), across from the post office. Here, around old tables kept scrubbed by the courtly waiter Mariano, a group of men convened, as their counterparts had in Badajoz, to discuss everything except religion and politics. They saw no reason to discuss the former because all were Catholics and had nothing to argue about; they avoided the latter because they had found it wise in Spain to do so.

  The me
mbership was distinguished. José María de Cossío, of the Royal Spanish Academy, attended, and one who knew anything about bullfighting recognized him as the authority, his four-volume Los toros being the ultimate reference in argument; I was surprised to find that a man whose reputation I had known for so long was still very much alive. Camilo José Cela, another Academician, whose The Family of Pascual Duarte and other novels were respected in all Spanish-speaking countries, was there. The Conde de Canilleros, a historian from Extremadura, had strong opinions, as did Gerardo Diego, poet and member of the Spanish Academy.

  The tertulia was held together by the strong personality of its founder, Antonio Rodríguez Moñino, Spanish bibliographer of world-wide fame and now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who spends his academic leaves in Madrid. In addition to the Spanish members, the tertulia also attracted a goodly number of the Spanish professors from the United States and other countries who came to Spain on scholarships or sabbaticals. My favorite was a valiant debater named Ramón Martínez López, a Spanish professor at the University of Texas, for he had strong and hilarious prejudices on everything, which made him a delightful conversationalist.

  If I had wanted to explain to a stranger how a tertulia operated, I could have contrived no better experience than what happened accidentally one October afternoon in 1966. The group was seated in the leather-upholstered chairs about the marble-topped tables and I had asked them, ‘What percentage of Spaniards use the Castilian pronunciation I learned in college as opposed to the Andalusian or South American pronunciation?’ The question was good for about an hour of discussion as the men recalled their experiences and the opinions of their friends.

  ‘Figure it out this way. Years ago somebody convinced the intellectual community in the United States that gentlemen speak only Castilian. The word veces must be pronounced vay-thayce with a th and not vay-sayces with an ese. Well, in Spain itself we divide this way. In Cataluña nobody uses the th. In Galicia, maybe one-third of the people. In the islands, one half. The Basques, one half. Andalucía, none. Valencia, half. So you see, it’s restricted mainly to the Castillas and León.’

  ‘Percentages? Perhaps one-third of Spain uses Castilian.’

  ‘In Spanish America no one uses it except immigrants from Spain who want to lord it over the locals.’

  ‘And actors.’

  ‘That’s right. Because of some curious tradition, you must speak Castilian on stage. The way in Minnesota you try to speak Oxford English on stage.’

  ‘They were making this movie about Jesus Christ in Mexico City and the big hassle was, how should Jesus speak? They took the problem all the way to the cardinal, and he said, “It would sound sacrilegious if our Lord spoke anything but Castilian. But it would be pompous for a mere tax-collector like Matthew to do so.” That’s how they made the picture—Jesus Castilian, the disciples Mexican. And everyone said, “Sounded just right.” ’

  ‘I knew García Lorca and he never spoke Castilian. He said you couldn’t write poetry in it.’

  ‘He was right. I speak only Castilian. But the th sound was a late development. Probably not known before the sixteenth century.’

  ‘There was this university in the United States. Had on its faculty the best student who ever graduated from Texas, and they wrote me asking if I could prpvide them with a head for their department of Spanish. I wrote back and asked, “What’s the matter with López? There’s nobody around better than he.” And they wrote back and said that López didn’t speak Castilian and they’d feel uncomfortable with him.’

  ‘When Fernando de los Ríos from the Ronda region was elected to the Royal Academy he announced to the members, “Now that I’m an Academician I promise to speak respectable Spanish, and I’ve tried to say civilización the way you do, thee-vee-lee-tha-thyóhn. But I’ll be damned if I can get that third th out. So you’ll have to be satisfied with thee-vee-lee-tha-syóhn.’

  And so the discussion went, as it did day after day, but this time there was to be something different. By sheer accident an American professor visiting the tertulia dropped a bombshell by identifying a date as the year in which Magellan circumnavigated the globe.

  ‘What did you say?’ Dr. Martínez López of Texas snapped.

  ‘I said it was when Magellan circumnavigated the globe.’

  ‘Magallanes!’ one of the professors cried, using the Spanish version of the great explorer’s name. ‘My God, man, are you out of your mind?’

  ‘In 1521. When he circumnavigated the globe.’

  ‘My dear man! There is no reputable scholar in the world today who thinks that Magallanes was the first to circumnavigate the globe.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Apparently. But no one else I’ve heard of in the last hundred years has had such an idea. Does anyone in this tertulia think for a moment that Magallanes was first around the world?’

  With some temerity I raised my hand, and the Spaniards turned to look at me with the compassion they would have directed to an idiot. ‘Have you never heard of Juan Sebastian Elcano [in English del Cano]?’ they asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘My God! He was the first around the world. And he was Spanish.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ the American professor cried. ‘Magellan …’

  ‘My good man,’ Dr. Martínez López said, ‘King Carlos himself gave Elcano a coat of arms showing a globe inscribed with those glorious words, Primus circumdedisti me (You were the first to circumnavigate me).’

  The other Spaniards confirmed this, but the American was not overawed.

  ‘Merely because a king made an error …’

  ‘Carlos Quinto did not make errors.’

  And so the debate went on. On succeeding days the Spaniards lugged books and citations to the tertulia, including an Italian encyclopedia, proving that whereas Magellan (in Portuguese Magalhães) had started the voyage around the world, he had died in the Philippines, leaving its completion to his Spanish assistant, Juan Sebastián Elcano. The evidence was impressive and I began to think that here was a corner of history about which I was uninformed, but then the American lugged in his evidence, which was hard to ignore.

  ‘If in your insularity,’ he said, ‘you wish to maintain that a man could circumnavigate the globe only if he started from Spain and ended in Spain, then Elcano is your man. But if going around the globe means going around the globe, or, in effect, proving that the earth was a globe that could be gone around, then Magellan, who had already traveled to and from the Philippines by the eastern route and then had returned to the same point by the western route, was the first around.’

  ‘My good man,’ the Spaniards argued, ‘one day a group of ships set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda and one of those ships, the Victoria, went in an unbroken journey around the world, and when it had completed its journey Magellan was not aboard. Juan Sebastián Elcano was. What, in all decency, can you conclude from that?’

  The American replied, ‘Merely that the Victoria was the first ship, and Elcano the second man, to circumnavigate the globe.’

  The debate extended over a full week, and by the time it ended, with no satisfactory resolution of the point, everyone participating understood the facts and their implications. No one in the tertulia would admit then that he had changed his mind, but I would suppose that in their subsequent writing and teaching they would at least allude to the position contrary to their own.

  In the winter of 1967 the tertulia came into momentary prominence when one of its members held a press conference in Boston which reverberated around the world. When Dr. Jules Piccus joined the tertulia he appeared to be merely one more visiting American professor, this time from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He was a young man, bearded, prematurely gray, lively in manner and quick in argument. Members of the tertulia knew him mainly as a scholar searching the archives of the Biblioteca Nacional, and there had been many like him in the past, but on February 13, 1967, Dr. Piccus announced that one day wh
ile looking for a medieval manuscript he had found instead two manuscripts by Leonardo da Vinci which had been catalogued in 1866 by B. J. Gallardo but which had subsequently been misplaced. One was a notebook, the other a set of sketches obviously intended for publication. They should have been filed at numbers AA-119 and AA-120, but a century ago someone had carelessly tucked them away at numbers AA-19 and AA-20, and there they had remained. The announcement of their recovery launched a storm. ‘Why should treasures of a Madrid library be introduced to the world at a Boston press conference?’ was merely the most temperate of the Spanish headlines. ‘If you speak of this matter,’ Dr. Piccus told me one day at the tertulia, ‘please be sure to state clearly that I recovered the manuscripts. I did not discover them. The Spaniards had always known they were in existence. I happened to find out where,’ Not everyone took the misadventure of the Leonardo so seriously. Mingote used the subject for one of his finest cartoons. Against a wall which was adorned by the ‘Mona Lisa,’ freshly painted, sat Leonardo in his traditional cap, beard and long robe. He was writing the last page of a manuscript and saying these words: ‘Well, I’ve written it backwards so they can’t read it. Now if I could only think of some place to hide it.’

  Angus Macnab.

  My life in the tertulia, which was one of the most instructive things that happened to me in Spain, was marred by envy, because although this was the most pretigious tertulia then operating in Madrid, there was another which met in an opposite corner of the café which fascinated me and I longed to join it, but that would have been impossible. It was composed of six or eight elderly men, caricatures of Spanish gentlemen, in tweed trousers, hunting jackets, mustaches and with low rumbling voices. ‘It’s a huntsmen’s tertulia,’ one of my group explained. When I asked what they talked about, he said, ‘Horses, dogs and things they’ve shot.’ What impressed me most about this tertulia was that for long periods the members would sit just looking straight ahead and saying nothing. Occasionally one would mumble something about wild boars or stags and the others would nod. I was assured that it was a most exclusive tertulia and that its members looked on our group as young radicals who read books, something which none of them did.