Iberia

by James A. Michener

  ‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

  As his corse to the ramparts we hurried.’

  Books were then distributed, bearing not only the poem but the famous painting by Smith, and we read the history of Sir John Moore, the English general who in 1808 and 1809 led an invasion into Spain against Napoleon and without fighting one engagement turned around and retreated to the northern port of La Coruña, where at the moment of having brought his army into sight of the rescue flotilla, he was killed by a cannonball.

  Whenever our class memorized a poem, we held a competitive recitation, and in the case of ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore,’ I won handily, which was not entirely fair because I was John Moore. I had read everything I could find on him, and traced his route from Lisboa into Spain and out again, and knew La Coruña rather better than I did my home town. It was the first time in my learning that a subject had completely overwhelmed me and I it.

  Therefore, it was with a sense of acquaintanceship that I sat in Salamanca and reflected that a hundred and fifty-eight years earlier, on November 13, 1808, General Moore had arrived in this plaza to hear reports of a concentration of English defeats and Spanish confusion. Suddenly, what had begun as an invasion to consolidate English and Spanish forces against Napoleon had become a trap in which Moore’s entire army, the best in the field, was about to be swallowed up. If Moore had lived he would have hated the memory of Salamanca, for here he heard nothing but news of the most disheartening sort. The allies were in a state of collapse and Napoleon was triumphant.

  As a boy I had not yet learned about my hero certain facts which were probably not in the books at that time, namely, that from Salamanca he had sent off a most puzzling series of letters in which he showed no hesitancy in predicting his defeat. To his quasi-sweetheart, Lady Hester Stanhope, who imagined that she was engaged to him and survived him to become one of England’s outstanding eccentrics, he wrote that her little brother James, for whom she sought a commission, ‘must get the Commander-in-Chief’s leave to come to Spain. He may join me then. He will, however, come too late; I shall already be beaten.’ In his diary he wrote: ‘We have no business being here.’ In his dispatches, either to England or to his fellow commanders in Spain, he wrote constantly of the probable need for retreat rather than attack, and a palpable sense of gloom possessed him. In Salamanca, General Moore had hardly been the hero whose exploits I had memorized; in fact, he was something of a fuddy-duddy and the disasters he foresaw were brought on partly by his own indecision and fatalism.

  The hand of Salamanca has always extended a welcome.

  On December 11 he evacuated Salamanca and headed for the north, uncertain whether he was advancing to battle or taking the first steps in what would degenerate into a forced retreat. Rarely has a more confused and undecided leader led his troops into unknown territory, and we shall leave him as he marches out of the city but we shall meet him again in the north.

  If you quit the Plaza Mayor by its southwest exit and wander through a series of attractive narrow streets you will come eventually to an austere little plaza presided over by the statue of a professor in robes, Fray Luis de Leon, whose spirit guards this place, and enclosed on four sides by old brown walls on which students have used a mixture of hog fat and bull’s blood to scrawl the dates of their doctor’s degrees, for this is the noble University of Salamanca, once the world’s preeminent center of learning.

  In the academic year 1567–1568 its rolls showed seven thousand eight hundred students taking courses ranging from mathematics to medicine and another five thousand hanging around the city to audit lectures. Carlos V spoke the truth when he said, ‘This university is the treasury from which I furnish justice and govenment to my people of Spain,’ for the cachet of a Salamanca degree could not be equaled. Throughout Europe foreign kings and cardinals submitted disputes to this faculty for adjudication, and if a professor from this university approved a debatable point, that practically established it.

  The scholars teaching here investigated all matters. It was a Salamanca economist who first pointed out the national danger involved in bringing so much gold into the country without increasing at the same time the production of consumer goods; he saw that ruinous inflation must follow. Far more than half the intelligence of Spain centered in this school, and the roster of graduates who attained fame is a roll call of Spanish power. The most daring intellects, I suppose, attended Cardinal Cisneros’ university at Alcalá de Henares, but it had a relatively brief life, whereas Salamanca continued through the centuries as the heart and core of Spanish culture.

  Bologna, Paris and Oxford, all founded in the twelfth century, were the only schools that could compete with it, and during its early life—it was founded about 1230–1243—it tended to be more liberal and introspective than the others. It was powerful in theology and often provided opinions on which the Spanish kings based their defiance of the Roman popes, but its greater fame lay in mathematics and science, in which it was a beacon light far ahead of its competitors.

  Not all students who came here prospered, and in fiction ‘the student from Salamanca’ became a stock figure. In the Duque de Rivas’ tragedy Don Alvaro, the younger son, who follows Alvaro’s trail to Peru, is described in this way:

  My cousin, who has just arrived from Salamanca, has told me that Alfonso is the crazy man of the University, more swordsman than scholar, and that he has the student bullies flabbergasted.

  In an earlier play by Lope de Vega the earthy dialogue catches the spirit of Salamanca as understood by the common people across Spain:

  BARBILDO: How did you get on at Salamanca?

  LEONELO: That’s a long story.

  BARBILDO: You must be a very learned man by now.

  LEONELO: No, I’m not even a barber.

  BARBILDO: At least you’re a scholar.

  LEONELO: Well, I’ve tried to learn things that are important.

  BARBILDO: Anyone who’s seen so many printed books is bound to think he’s wise.

  LEONELO: I admit that printing has saved many talented writers from oblivion. Printing circulates their books and makes them known. Gutenberg, a famous German from Mainz, is responsible. But many men who used to have a high reputation are no longer taken seriously, now that their works have been printed.

  Today the old classrooms, the cloisters, the marvelous library and the chapels can be inspected in the dignified buildings that enclose the plaza, and here one can catch a sense of what it must have been like to attend a university in the late Renaissance when ideas were exploding at such a furious rate. Each component at Salamanca is perfect, as if time had frozen the old patterns.

  As a matter of fact, that is precisely what happened. Under pressures which will be made clear in this chapter, this grand university, light of Europe, began to grope and fumble. First, any student suspected of Jewish blood was excluded. Then it became difficult for bright boys from untitled families to gain entrance; vacancies were reserved for the nobility, who used the university as a kind of gentlemen’s finishing school. At the end of the sixteenth century Salamanca no longer taught mathematics in any form and fifty years later enrolled not a single student in medicine. The fine interchange of ideas that used to be carried on with Oxford and Bologna was halted, and the sharp debate that once characterized the intellectual life of the university was silenced. Registrations dropped from seven thousand eight hundred to a mere three hundred in 1824.

  I know of no other educational institution in the world that started so high as Salamanca to fall so low. Its eclipse was one of the severest blows Spain ever suffered, for with its castration the spark of national vitality ebbed, and any nation today that wishes to attain similar results should start by closing down its equivalent of Salamanca. Of course, the university did not physically disappear; except for years of revolution and crisis it kept its doors open and admitted a few hundred students who mouthed cautious doctrine taught by frightened professors. During the heyday of the Spanish e
mpire students from Mexico and South America came to Salamanca so as to be able, when they returned to their colonial cities, to boast as scholars had for five hundred years, ‘I am from Salamanca.’ There was also an Irish College attached to the university, and here young Catholics who could not obtain an education at home studied for five or six years, a large proportion of them finally becoming priests, so that much of Ireland’s intelligence over long periods of time was trained in Salamanca.

  Today the university functions normally. It is neither the superior center it once was nor the fraud that followed. It is known within Spain as the school for lesser intellectuals of good family, and few enterprising businesses would hire a Salamanca man when they might get a sharp young fellow trained either at Madrid or Barcelona.

  Halfway between the university and the Plaza Mayor, at the northeast corner of two narrow streets, stands a stalwart brown Renaissance building four stories high, built in the early 1500s in the shape of a fortress. In Salamanca one can find many such buildings but this one has captured the imagination of all, because its main façade is studded with sixteen rows of beautifully carved conch shells, with varying numbers of shells to the row; some contain as many as twenty-three, others only fourteen, but they mark the building with elegance. This is the famous Casa de las Conchas (House of Shells), whose owner was a member of the Order of Santiago, and it illustrates how a capricious artistic invention can sometimes convert an ordinary structure into something enchanting.

  When I am in Salamanca, I like to go to La Casa de las Conchas at noon as the sun creeps into the Calle de Meléndez and begins to throw the shells into lovely patterns of light and shade. I sit for about an hour on the stoop of a shoemaker’s shop cater-cornered to the shells and enjoy the sensation of seeing the tip of one shell after another emerge from shadow into sunlight until finally the whole shell glows. The carved shields that top the windows burst into sunlight; the eagle pecks at the rays as they slide past and soon his wings are golden.

  From the nearby cathedral, a curious affair in which a very old cathedral about to fall down was propped up by building a new one alongside it, bells begin to toll the quarter-hour and enough sun reaches the wall so that the protruding shells cast long diagonal shadows. At half past twelve the shoemaker suggests we have a cold drink; the whole façade is now in sunlight and will stay so for some hours. I see that the stone wall is not entirely flat, for the building is old, and here and there its stones have bulged, but now the house can be seen at its best, glowing in sunlight, and I wonder at myself for finding so much pleasure in watching the metamorphosis of a building notable only because some crazy architect slapped a couple of hundred conch shells across its face. Still, if I returned to Salamanca tomorrow I’d perch myself once more on the shoemaker’s stoop to watch this bewitching ballet of sun and stone.

  The ways of tourists are strange, and one afternoon as I sat in the Plaza Mayor I heard some Frenchmen at the next table tearing America apart. To the first barrage of criticism I could not logically protest: Americans were uncultured, lacked historical sense, were concerned only with business, had no sensitivity and ought to stay home. The second echelon of abuse I did want to interrupt, because I felt that some of it was wide of the mark: Americans were all loud, had no manners, no education, no sense of proportion, and were offensively vulgar in dress, speech, eating habits and general comportment, but I restrained myself because, after all, this was the litany one heard throughout Europe, here expressed rather more succinctly than elsewhere. But when these Frenchmen added a third charge I had to intervene: Americans menace the world because they refuse to face reality.

  I happened to have in my hand at that moment the official card distributed by the French government honoring the twentieth anniversary of the Allied landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944. It was a well-presented design, as such things are apt to be in France, and showed a heroic General de Gaulle leading ashore an army of French soldiers and being greeted by stalwart members of the underground who had already vanquished the Germans occupying France. Far in the distance and bringing up the rear were one American foot soldier and one English officer. I passed the card along to one of my French neighbors and asked, ‘Is this reality?’

  He took the card, looked at it, smiled and said, ‘History is what wise men say it is.’

  ‘Do you really believe it happened that way?’

  He tapped the card, neither in approbation nor rejection, and said, ‘This is what has been agreed upon.’

  ‘Have the charges you’ve been making about Americans also been agreed upon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they are now the truth?’

  ‘In Europe, yes.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ I said, turning away from the noisy Frenchmen to ponder the curious fate of Americans in the world today. I was at the moment especially depressed by some English books I had been reading, in which sensible writers with university degrees said the most extraordinary things about American travelers whom they had met in Europe. The Americans were all stupid and objectionable and loud and uneducated; and I sat at my table and made a list of the Americans I had met in recent travels: three Nobel Prize winners; two of the world’s finest playwrights; three good novelists much read in England and France; four nationally famous bankers who in their spare time serve on the boards of universities, opera houses and museums; a score of quiet-spoken professors; a woman who helps run the Cleveland art museum; the director of one of our great symphonies; and two very well behaved painters. These people were, by any standard, among the leaders of the world and certainly among the best educated and most gently cultured. Not one spoke in a loud voice; in fact, I had had to lean forward to catch what Tennessee Williams said, and the Ashcrafts, whom we shall meet in Pamplona, speak so softly they practically whisper.

  ‘Why does no European ever meet this kind of American?’ I asked myself. In the latest English travel books on Spain there was a constant procession of American boors and boobs, but the authors were well-versed men and must surely have come into contact somewhere with the kinds of Americans I knew. I concluded that English writers could not be charged with animosity, for this they did not intend; they were merely accepting blindly a kind of American Black Legend and compounding it monotonously. I cannot charge them with planned falsehood, but I can query their powers of observation and their fairness in recording what they see.

  In my travels I have encountered some pretty horrible English men and women. There was the chinless wonder in Singapore who for business reasons wanted to take me into the exclusive Raffles Club and spent some forty minutes coaching me on how I must behave, forgetting that I had spent two years at one of Britain’s best universities. He was so asinine he was funny. At the Sevilla airport I watched two formidable English women, the type who seem to be in constant supply, demand in piercing voices where their luggage was. In clear Spanish the porter replied, ‘Enter the building, turn left, ten minutes.’ The women, irritated by now, shouted their question again at the poor man, both speaking at once, and he with gestures explained once more, ‘Enter the building, turn left, ten minutes.’ The women looked at him with contempt, brushed him aside, and one said to the other in a loud voice. ‘Poor beast. He doesn’t understand a word we’re saying.’

  And so on. The point is that although I have seen such behavior ad infinitum I have refrained from writing about it as if it were standard English deportment overseas, because I know it isn’t. I have met too many English gentlemen to allow myself such error. I do not refrain from lampooning the English because I love them but because I have regard for fact.

  Sitting as quietly as my French companions would permit, I tried to discover what my true feelings were in this matter of honest description. In my travels I have never met any single American as noisy and crude as certain Germans, none so downright mean as one or two Frenchmen, none so ridiculous as an occasional Englishman, none so arrogant as some Swedes and certainly none so penurious as the Portugu
ese. For raw misbehavior no American could surpass a prime example from India or Egypt, and for the unfeeling, uncultured boob that I encounter so often in literature as representing the American, I suspect one would do better to look among the Russians.

  But in each of the national examples cited I am speaking of only a few horrible specimens. If one compares all English tourists with all Americans, I would have to admit that taken in the large the American is worse. If some European wanted to argue that seventy percent of all American tourists are regrettable, I would agree. If he insisted on eighty percent, I’d go along. If he claimed ninety, I suppose I wouldn’t argue too much. But when, like the Frenchmen to my left and the English writers under my arm, he states that one hundred percent are that way, then I must accuse him of being false to the facts.

  Of all the countries in which to travel, I find that today the American is judged more honestly in Spain than elsewhere. He is not loved, but neither is he abused. The average Spaniard objects to having American military bases on Spanish soil, but he acknowledges the need for protection. He is suspicious of the large number of American Protestants who come to Spain and is sure they are up to no good. He is aggravated by the sight of American military personnel spending large and easy sums of money, but he is gratified that the Yanks behave as well as they do. Because Spain is a dictatorship it is obligated to decry democracy, and since America is a leader among the democracies, newspapers run a constant commentary on our failures, especially in handling the race problem. Reading Spanish newspapers, one would judge that the United States was about to collapse, but at the same time the impression is given that she is a resolute ally on whom Spain can depend. Because Spain is a Catholic country, her newspapers must decry American excesses in sex, education and family life, and a lurid picture is presented, but Americans are also presented as courageous, good sports and dependable.