Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Before I started to trace the story of Juana I wanted to see what modern Tordesillas was like, so early one morning I perched myself in the Plaza del Generalísimo Franco, where grass grew in the corners. Forty-four awkward stone pillars supported an arcade which in places threatened to collapse, while many of the houses fronting on the plaza showed walls that had to be propped up with poles. Several had been patched with a cheap stucco painted to simulate concrete block, and all needed painting. Such women as appeared tended to be dressed in black; they worked while their men in patched pants lounged in the shade. I noticed especially six brightly painted heraldic shields of Tordesillas being used as decorations around the plaza; they bore a set of flashy symbols consisting of keys, mountains, a river and three saddles. The last, I was to discover, were debatable additions, for there was much confusion as to what they signified. A bartender said, There was a big battle over there. Very crucial. Everything depended on what the volunteers from this town did. But like always they messed things up. They were late in their saddles [tarde en sillas] and after the battle was lost we were stuck with the name.’

  A customer said, ‘Wrong again. One of the old kings was hunting here and he had a fine afternoon, so he named the town Tarde en sillas, which means Afternoon in the saddles.’ Another said, ‘The name of the town comes from a word. Tardecillo, a little late. Has nothing to do with saddles.’ I said that must be wrong because three saddles appeared on the town shield, and he laughed. ‘A friend of mine painted those shields last year. To please tourists’; whereupon a fourth man growled, ‘They all don’t know anything. This town was named by the Romans before Spanish was a language. The name has no meaning.’

  The only things in the plaza that reminded me I was in this century were two signs splashed in dripping letters: ‘Viva Franco’ and ‘Gibraltar Is Spanish.’ The latter brought me back to Queen Isabel, for on her deathbed she had added a codicil to her will instructing her people never to surrender Gibraltar; with much effort she had won it back from a noble family that had usurped it for private use, and she foresaw its importance.

  I doubt that she could have foreseen the important role that Tordesillas was to play in the history of her family. It began ominously. On September 25, 1506, Felipe I, who ruled jointly with Juana, died at Burgos in the north. The queen was understandably distraught over losing the man who had bewitched her, and unluckily at this moment she fell under the control of a Carthusian monk, who consoled her: ‘With sufficient prayers your husband the king will revive. I know a case in which a king who had been dead for fourteen years rose to rule again.’

  These words helped launch Juana on a course without parallel. Keeping her husband’s casket beside her, she moved to various towns and monasteries in northern Spain, seeking some area which might inspire Felipe to return. On the night of November 1 in the monastery at Miraflores she commanded the casket to be opened to assure herself that the king was with her. Either on Christmas night or a few days prior, having moved to a new area, she opened the casket again, and one of her companions reported, ‘All had calcified into a solid mass and it did not have the odor of perfume.’

  In April, under the stars of an open sky, she inspected the remains once more, and this incident has formed the subject for several fine historical paintings. In July she was settled at Hornillos, where she gave birth to a posthumous child, and in the church she again tried to communicate with the sadly decomposed body, and for a fifth time in her room nearby. Finally, in February of 1509, after nearly three years of such wandering, she came to rest at Tordesillas, where she reluctantly consented to have her husband buried in the local monastery. Then, so as not to be parted from him lest he should, as the Carthusian promised, rise from the dead to resume his reign, she immured herself in a nearby palace, where she was to spend the next forty-six years of her life.

  How did the body of Felipe find its way ultimately to the grandiose tomb in Granada? After Juana had been locked up for two years her mind wandered so badly that she forgot the casket which had haunted her, she forgot the handsome young husband who had treated her so poorly, whereupon officials quietly disinterred the body for the last time and shipped it off to the royal pantheon in Granada, which had been Felipe’s choice in the first place.

  She posed quite a problem for the Spanish government. She was clearly the Queen of Castilla with claims to Aragón as well, and if sane should be ruling in Madrid; but if she was, as seemed likely, insane, she should be kept locked up and her son Carlos V should rule on her behalf. When Carlos arrived to assume the crown he visited his mother; he could speak Flemish, French, German and Italian but no Spanish, and in his brief conversation with her satisfied himself that she was indeed insane. It was under his instructions, therefore, that she was kept locked up, to become a constant source of scandal in the other courts of Europe. Ambassadors paid large sums for rumors of the queen. One reported that she urinated almost constantly, another that she was more animal than human, another that he understood she was quite sane. When a revolution broke out against Carlos, the revolutionists naturally sped for Tordesillas, where after an interview with Juana they pronounced her sane. To this day debate continues. All we know is that for nearly half a century she was kept imprisoned in a ratty old building which no longer stands.

  From its windows she could look below to see the Río Duero idling past the cliffs as if it were a lake. Trees filled the distance, and flat fields on which wheat and grapes had grown as long as men could remember. She could also see the road to Medina del Campo and must often have watched with vacant eyes as various messengers rode up that road with instructions from the king. When the sky was cloudless she could see the battlements of the castle at Medina, and on moonlit nights the scene must have been beautiful. In winter her palace was bitter cold, in summer stifling.

  We know what life was like in the prison at Tordesillas because Carlos V kept close tabs on his mother lest she escape and embarrass him; a wealth of documents exists, none more interesting than the list of persons in attendance on the queen which Amarie Dennis found in the archives of the National Library when doing research for her biography of Isabel:

  The governing staff within the palace was composed of the Marqués of Denia and his wife; the Count of Lerma, Francisco de Rojas, and his wife; Fernando de Tovar and his wife; Luis de Cepeda, majordomo; Doctor Santa Cara; Ana Enríquez de Rojas, a nun; Magdalena de Rojas, Countess of Castro; Francisca de Rojas, Countess of Paredes; Margarita de Rojas; and Beatriz de Bobadilla, an elderly servant who had accompanied Juana to Flanders in 1496. The rest of the staff, whose names are all listed, was comprised of seven yeomen, two overseers, a food provisioner and seven assistants, a librarian, a bailiff, three cooks, three assistant cooks, a tailor and his helper, a cupbearer and his aide, an apothecary, a shoemaker, a furrier, a man to attend the braziers, a watercarrier, a carpenter, a poulterer, a sweeper, a hunter of partridges, six servants to take care of the silverware, fourteen lackeys, six butlers, twelve chambermaids, one seamstress, four laundresses, five serving maids, one wardrobe keeper, one carver, two gate-keepers, three footmen, twenty-four montero [huntsman] guards, and five bodyguards. To serve in the royal chapel, there were fourteen chaplains, two altar boys and three sacristans. Aside from these, there were the wives and the children of a large proportion of the servants of the household.

  In other words, a hundred and fifty-five people to look after one addle-brained old woman.

  Juana la Loca constitutes one of the mysteries of Spanish history. I find it difficult to believe that she was sane, but on the other hand I find in European history several monarchs who ruled more or less successfully while no more sane than she. I suppose that with a council to guide her she could have governed moderately well; however, her son Carlos V was doubtless far more capable, though I am far from satisfied that he was as good for Spain as she would have been. Juana, completely Spanish, would at least have focused on Spanish problems rather than dissipate her kingdom in an att
empt to dominate Europe, and it is tantalizing to reflect that a sane son destroyed Spain whereas an insane mother might have saved it.

  There is one spot in Spain that everyone should see, for it pertains to the character of the country yet is so inconvenient to visit that there is no rational point from which one can say, ‘Let’s visit the Shrine of Guadalupe now. We may never have a better opportunity.’

  It hides in a remote corner of Extremadura and could be visited from Badajoz, but the road is poor. It stands not too far from Trujillo, but when I was in that city I was told the route was so inconvenient that I ought to by-pass the shrine. Religiously it is governed from Toledo, and once years ago I intended to set out from Toledo to see it, but friends refused to let me risk the miserable road. At the monastery of Yuste, I was almost due north of Guadalupe, but there was no direct communication. Now, from a totally ridiculous point of departure, I was determined to see the shrine, so one morning I set out from Salamanca, kept Yuste to the east and dropped down through Trujillo to try the ferocious road that appeared on the map with the proud title Route C-401. The scenery was exciting, with low mountains, long vistas and here and there small villages where life progressed much as it had four hundred years ago, but the road was so twisting, with eight or ten right-angle turns to the half-mile, that the couple riding in the back seat of our car got seasick and the driver complained that his arms were wearing out.

  But even if one had no concern with religion, the drive to Guadalupe would be worth the effort, for just as it seemed that all of us had had enough, the road climbed a sharp hill and below us we saw one of the choice sights in Spain: a compact monastery, so beautiful in all aspects that it is an architectural treasure, set down in a rustic small village surrounded by handsome olive groves that fill the valley. The road stops. There is no economic life, no transportation, no rich farming. In fact, if it were not for what happened here around 1325 there would be no reason for the village to exist.

  In the cloisters of the university some of the foremost scholars of the world assembled, but there have also been periods of darkness.

  One day a cowherd whose name is remembered, Gil Cordero (Giles of the Lamb), was looking for a strayed cow that had been grazing along the banks of a turbulent river which came out of these unpopulated mountains, and as he did so he saw projecting from the soil the brown and weathered statue of a Virgin, later to be known as the Virgin of Guadalupe (River of the Wolf, according to some; Hidden River to others). As her history was uncovered, it was seen that she was no ordinary Virgin.

  The last work of art done by St. Luke, the painter-physician-evangelist, was this carving of the Virgin, for which she posed on the Greek island of Patmos just prior to her death in Turkey. The statue was buried at the city that later became Constantinople, whence it passed to Rome. Around A.D. 600 Pope Gregory the Great ordered that St. Luke’s Virgin be paraded through Rome in an effort to end the plague, which she did. The statue was then sent to Spain, but when the Muslims overran the country devout followers carried the Virgin to the banks of this remote hidden river and buried her, where she slept undisturbed for more than six hundred years, until Gil Cordero found her.

  Her fame spread over Spain and was responsible for several victories over Muslim armies. As the Virgin of Extremadura she sponsored the settlement of the New World, where, after appearing personally to the Mexican peasant Juan Diego in 1531, she became even more popular than she was in Spain. From all parts of the world riches flowed into this remote shrine, until it became the wealthiest religious foundation in Christendom. The official historian of that period affirms that more than one hundred and twenty lamps of pure gold or silver burned at her shrine, that she had countless vestments heavy with jewels, and that the Hieronymite friars who tended the shrine had so much money that they ordered from Toledo cleaning buckets and broom handles of solid silver.

  It became traditional for rulers of Spain to come to Guadalupe to pay homage to the Virgin, and large buildings had to be erected to lodge the royal visitors whose names form an index to Spanish history; therefore, it was not unexpected when in 1928 King Alfonso XIII came here to supervise the canonical coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe; henceforth, she would be one of the official Virgin Queens of Spain.

  There are three reasons why one should visit Guadalupe: to see the Virgin, to see her robes, and to see the Zurbaráns, and in the company of Don Pedro Rivas, the practical-minded mayor of the village, I proceeded to do so. Don Pedro was a different kind of mayor, a farmer with a rough-and-ready approach to his position and a manifest delight in the dark Virgin of Guadalupe. ‘To approach her with due reverence,’ he said, ‘we must pause here in the anteroom. Look at those marvelous paintings! By Luca Giordano, who must have been an Italian. Aren’t they glorious? And big? Look at that dear little angel with the bare bottom who leads Mary’s donkey on the flight to Egypt. And the angels flying overhead with flowers. Isn’t that a fine presentation of the Virgin protecting her child?’

  I found the Giordanos (1632–1705) overpowering—nine huge canvases—but the eight polychromed statues of ‘the strong women of the Old Testament’ were delightful. They were carved in the fashion of eighteenth-century Versailles and showed shepherdesses with crucifixes, jewels, straw hats and those lovely flouncy skirts and aprons which milkmaids were supposed to wear at court revels. Ruth, Jael and Esther were especially charming, the first with wide black eyes and porcelain skin and under her arm a sheaf of gleanings from the fields of Boaz.

  ‘But this is the room!’ Don Pedro said with visible excitement as he led me to the shrine itself. How disappointed I was. There really wasn’t much to see, just a wealth of gold and jewels and ornate carving. The Virgin, apparently, was not visible to ordinary eyes, and I must have shrugged my shoulders as if to say, ‘Well, that’s that,’ when the mayor signaled two young frairs, who slowly turned a revolving pedestal. As they did so, the Virgin came mysteriously into view, and she was so resplendent that no amount of previous reading could have prepared me for what I now saw. In a niche with wings, each inch of which was covered with either gold or enamel scenes from the Bible, stood a relatively small Virgin, an adorable figure, with dark mottled face and black right hand which held a scepter. She looked as if she had lain in earth for six hundred years, but her charm derived from the tradition of dressing her in a gown and cape made of luminous cloth of gold encrusted with jewels. Her robes flared out, hanging straight across at the bottom and tapering upward to her crown and halo of precious stones, forming a delicate, bejeweled triangle.

  ‘¡Estupenda, eh?’ the mayor asked. She was. It was the only word which applied, for visually she was one of the most appealing religious figures I have ever seen. I doubt if the leading prelates of Spain, sitting in conclave, could have come up with a more appropriate figure to epitomize their country’s attitude toward religion.

  ‘Do you like the Jesus?’ Don Pedro asked. I looked about for a statue of Jesus and it was some moments before I discovered that in her left arm, which was of course invisible, the Virgin held a precious little doll-like figure of Jesus, also scarred in the face, also dressed in robes which duplicated the triangle formed by those of his mother. He too was crowned, but far less gloriously. As I looked at the two figures I reflected that it was at about the time when the series of buried Virgins was being uncovered in various parts of Spain that the country began to dedicate itself to Mary, long before the movement became common in other parts of the world, and I concluded that some two hundred years from now Spanish religion may well focus exclusively on the Virgin, with Christ having receded to a background position somewhat like that enjoyed by the Holy Ghost in Protestantism half a century ago. Already a Virgin like this adorable one of Guadalupe seems much closer to the heart of Spain than does a remote figure like Jesus.

  I am not one to waste time marveling at the routine tapestries held in the usual monastery treasury, but at Guadalupe I was stunned when Don Pedro and the friars showed me where
the robes for their Virgin were stored. One large shallow drawer after another was pulled out to display the many alternate sets of vestments. ‘This one filled with flowers woven in silver,’ explained the mayor, ‘was sent here from the Netherlands in 1629. This one laden with diamonds and gold was made in the time of Carlos Quinto. And this one, well, who can describe it? The most costly piece of fabric in the world. A hundred and fifty thousand pearls, handfuls of diamonds, gold so heavy the cloth can scarcely be lifted. We have loved our Virgin and we have wanted her to dress well.’

  ‘How many complete sets of robes has she?’ I asked.

  ‘These are just the precious ones,’ and he indicated some thirty drawers. ‘The lesser ones are over here. Peru, Chile, these three from Mexico with Mexican gold, Poland. She has many robes.’ I had stopped looking at the robes, for I felt smothered in pearls and gold; instead I tried to imagine how a large meeting room nearby must have looked on that fateful first of January in 1577, when King Felipe II of Spain entered by this door and his nephew, King Sebastián of Portugal, entered by that to conduct the meeting which started the curious story that I shall be speaking of at the end of this chapter. It must have been an extraordinary scene and I wondered how kings could have covered the journey from Madrid and Lisboa to such a spot.