Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Since no authority I have consulted supports this theory, I do not know what to make of Descola’s claim that the word Iberian is of Celtic origin.

  To the Romans, of course, the name Iberia referred to that region of the Caucasus now known as Georgia, and it is surprising to find that a respected authority like William Smith in his Classical Dictionary (1881) limits his definition of Iberia to the Asian area, ending with the aside, ‘No connection can be traced between the Iberians of Asia and those of Spain.’ (Strictly speaking, therefore, the most notorious Iberian of history was Josef Stalin.) The more authoritative Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities (1965) also defines Iberia as Georgia but does add a second definition: ‘One of the ancient names of Spain, derived from the river Iberus.’

  The Oxford English Dictionary cites Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionary, or an Interpretation of Hard English Words (1623) as reflecting general European usage in its simple definition of Iberians: ‘Spaniards.’ It was in this tradition, which I follow, that Isaac Albéniz in the years 1906–1909 composed his delightful suite Iberia, originally for the piano; six typical section titles are Sevilla, Ronda, Almería, Triana, Málaga and Jerez. For him and for all others who are mindful of the classical past, Iberia serves as a synonym for ancient Spain, and for the most evocative of modern Spain.

  In general usage, of course, the word has come to indicate the entire peninsula, including both Spain and Portugal. The first recorded example of this usage in English came no earlier than 1611, but today Lippincott’s Gazetteer (1952) says briefly: ‘The Iberian peninsula comprises Spain and Portugal,’ while The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966) relegates the traditional definition of Georgia to second place, defining the word primarily as ‘a peninsula in SW Europe, comprising Spain and Portugal.’

  Even though I am following the older definition, a chapter of this book could legitimately have dealt with Portugal, because in the years when I was visiting Spain, I grabbed at every opportunity to wander in Portugal; one of the most relaxed vacations I ever experienced came when a group of us rented a historic quinta (country seat) at Sintra, the exquisite hill town near Lisboa in which Lord Byron composed much of his heroic poem Don Juan. For more than a month I tramped over the hills he had known and down those tight and twisted lanes that he had loved. The Portuguese spoke of him with enormous affection, as if he had been with them only a few tourist seasons ago; his demonic presence hovered about me as I worked at my typewriter, because at some earlier date someone had told the Englishman who owned our quinta that he looked exactly like Lord Byron, and this had had a bad effect upon the man. The study I was using was literally lined with volumes on the poet. Apparently my Englishman had a standing order with booksellers in London and New York: ‘Send me anything printed about Lord Byron.’ He also had copies of several of the more romantic portraits of the poet, which proved that Byron did resemble the owner of the quinta, or the other way around.

  Wherever I wandered in Portugal, I discovered quiet Englishmen who had lived for decades in quiet crannies of this hospitable country. Portugal has always held a fascination for the English, who term it ‘our oldest ally and one of the world’s most civilized spots.’ I often suspected that these Englishmen were engaged in a conspiracy of silence, and one afternoon a group of them begged me, ‘For God’s sake, Michener, don’t tell anyone, and certainly not the rich Americans, how heavenly this place is.’ It was Europe’s most economical retirement spot; it had the best servants, the best wine, some of the best food, and a host of small localities from Porto in the north to Faro in the south to which an educated Englishman could retire in dignity.

  I am often asked to compare Portugal and Spain, and the simple truth seems to be that whichever of these two countries one visits first continues as his preference. No one can be more energetic in defense of a new-found land than the Englishman, Frenchman or American who has visited Portugal first and then moved on to Spain: he loves the first and is never easy in the second. I discovered this when I traveled westward across Spain with an American couple who had worked for some years at our embassy in Lisboa, for it was touching to watch how apprehensive they were of all things Spanish and how their spirits revived the closer they got to their beloved Portugal. ‘We wouldn’t feel safe drinking Spanish water, thank you. We’ve been all through Portugal and we’ve never seen villages as dirty as those in Spain. Doesn’t anyone have paint in this country? The fact is, we feel safe in Portugal but in Spain you never know. Our police are so much better.’ As we approached the western border of Spain it became a question of whether we should take our lunch in Spanish Badajoz, which I preferred because of the great seafood zarzuela I knew was waiting, or press on to Portuguese Elvas, which lay just across the border. ‘Oh,’ my embassy friends said, ‘we’d never want to eat in a Spanish restaurant if a clean Portuguese one were nearby.’

  Well, the first of the two countries that I saw was Spain and my affection has always rested there. It was not until my trip with the Lisboa couple that I saw the peninsula through Portuguese eyes, and when I did this I had to admit that of the two countries Portugal was the cleaner, the better organized, the better controlled; it was not illogical that the knowing English had elected this small country as their choice of Europe. But I also found that it lacked the culture of Spain; there was no Portuguese Velazquez, no Victoria, no García Lorca, no Santa Teresa, and of course no Seneca. The genius of the Iberian peninsula seemed to have resided principally in the more easterly regions, and it was for this reason that I preferred Spain.

  On two different occasions after long stays in Portugal, I crossed into Spain and each time those of us in the automobile felt a surge of joy, an expansion of the spirit and a sense of growing nobility as we entered Spain. Once the driver of our car dismounted, rubbed his hands in Spanish soil and exulted in being home again. My joining him irritated my wife, who like many women preferred Portugal. ‘You’re being silly and unfair,’ she protested. ‘Portugal is much finer than you admit it to be.’ The driver, who had been disappointed in Portuguese girls, replied, ‘There’s one thing I’ll admit. It’s the only country in the world where a man’s mistress is apt to be uglier than his wife.’

  There was a final reason for choosing Iberia as a title for this book: the word is unusual in that it is just as beautiful in its English pronunciation (Eye-beer-ee-ya) as in its Spanish (Ee-bare-ya), a fact recognized by Matthew Arnold when he inserted the word in the closing lines of “The Scholar-Gipsy,” one of the stateliest passages of English poetry:

  To where the Atlantic raves

  Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails

  There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,

  Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;

  And on the beach undid his corded bales.

  The short drive from Tudela to Pamplona ran due north through the handsome country of lower Navarra, climbing as it went, for I was approaching the Pyrenees, and although it was now early July, the air was brisk and I could sense the vigor that characterizes northern Spain. Then, as the car turned a corner, I saw before me the smokestacks and factory walls of a prosaic industrial city that might be termed the Youngstown of Spain, and I thought how disappointed must be those foreigners nurtured on Ernest Hemingway’s vision of Pamplona as it existed in the late 1920s, when they saw this drab profile. Judging by first appearances, Pamplona was no romantic center for expatriates but rather a commercial hub more concerned about labor unions than fiestas.

  My first explorations of the city through its southern gateway confirmed this judgment: I saw dozens of garages where knowledgeable young men were tearing down Ford and Citroen engines and rebuilding them. I saw glass factories and cordage shops and lumber yards and carpenters’ benches. But when I entered the wide avenue leading to the central square I entered a new world, for now I found myself surrounded by a hornets’ nest of small cars from all over Europe filled with some
of the most attractive young people I had seen in years: blondes from Sweden, handsome dark-haired men from Italy, students in leather pants from Germany and a substantial quota of Americans under the age of twenty-five. There was noise and excitement. The heart of Pamplona was apparently going to be much different from the environs.

  The first specific proof I had that a feria was about to begin came when I saw Spanish men parading with long strings of garlic about their necks, wearing them as women do pearls. I was to ask many times what these strands of garlic reaching down to the knees signified, but no one could tell me; doubtless it had something to do either with ancient fertility rites or with charms to banish ghosts during feria.

  When I came to the public square it was as if I had entered another city, one belonging to the nineteenth century. In the center among scattered trees stood an old-style bandstand featuring iron grillwork; about the edges of the square sprawled a dozen cafés, their chairs and tables covering the pavement from door to gutter; above the cafés rose several ancient hotels with tall French windows that didn’t close; and everywhere there were hordes of young people determined to have a good time.

  I was supposed to meet Vavra at the Bar Txoco, but when I got there all tables were filled with students from South Africa, Germany, Sweden and Great Britain. They were a riotous lot, some with necklaces of garlic, most stone-drunk at five in the afternoon, with the feria not yet begun. Unable to find a chair, I was about to leave when I heard a loud, insinuating ‘Psssst,’ and I turned to face the man who would symbolize Pamplona for me.

  He was in his late forties, a disreputable, baggy-kneed, bleary-eyed, gap-toothed, fumbling, stumbling waiter from a nearby café who made his living by luring customers away from the Bar Txoco to his flea-infested joint and exacting from them, for his pains, a shot or two of whiskey. He was the most debauched Spaniard I had ever seen, a disreputable Sancho Panza, and as he offered me a chair he whispered, ‘You want to meet a refined Spanish girl? Speaks English.’ When I ordered wine he made a new proposition: ‘Can I pour a shot for myself?’ The duplicity with which he dispatched his drink without being detected by the owner of the café was ingratiating, and as he placed my wine on the table he asked, ‘You interested in marijuana?’ I was to see a great deal of this one-man vice ring in the eight days ahead, for he seemed to work all hours without sleep, fortifying himself with cadged drinks and lurching about his corner of the plaza in a kind of Renaissance debauchery. ‘Look!’ he whispered admiringly as I sipped my wine. ‘Ernest Hemingway. And our lousy newspapers tried to tell us he was dead.’

  I looked to where he pointed, and my jaw dropped. There, entering the plaza behind the wheel of a small, trim Karmann-Ghia, came Ernest Hemingway, dead these five years. He wore his famous hunting cap with the short brim, and field jacket. His white beard looked exactly as it had during the last years of his life, and his portly figure was the same. Even the features of his expressive face was unchanged, and after he had parked his car in the space reverently saved for him by the police, he stepped into the plaza exactly as he had done forty years before when gathering the impressions that later served as the foundation for The Sun Also Rises.

  ‘Adiós, Hemingway!’ several Spaniards called, and a warm smile diffused the bloated face of my degenerate waiter as he cried, ‘Don Ernesto! Welcome back to Pamplona.’

  Some handsome things of great age should be left as they are.

  With much ceremony Hemingway was offered the table next to me, and two Spaniards asked for his autograph. Taking from an inner pocket of his field jacket a stack of printed calling cards, one face of which contained his photograph, he signed two and handed them graciously to the petitioners, who then withdrew.

  ‘Are you Vanderford?’ I asked across the tables.

  ‘I am,’ he said, and I was about to ask him for one of his famous cards when I was interrupted by two Pamplona newspapermen whom I had known some years before when making a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. They wanted to know which bullfighter appearing in the feria had lured me back to San Fermín, or which parties at which café, and they were not prepared when I explained that I had come primarily in hope of meeting with Don Luis Morondo. The reporters hesitated a moment, as if they did not know the name of the man who is probably the most famous Pamplonan alive today. I thought it would be egregious of me to describe him any further, and I was pleased when one finally smiled and said, ‘Oh, you mean Morondo the musician!’

  I did indeed. For some years I had owned a fine phonograph record produced by Morondo and his chamber-music group from Pamplona, and I was so impressed by it—a collection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music sung a cappella—that I had made inquiries in musical circles in New York and London and found that among those who knew choral singing, Morondo’s Pamplona group was considered one of the most polished ensembles. ‘Can you arrange for me to meet him?’ I asked the newspapermen.

  ‘Perhaps,’ they said, and I left them to attend a concert which Morondo was giving to honor the opening of San Fermín. On stage came sixteen singers, eight good-looking young women in evening dresses backed up by seven young men and one older man in tuxedos. Each man stood on a box of a different height, so that all seemed to be equally tall. Each singer wore the traditional red scarf of San Fermín. The group made a stunning appearance, but was its singing to be as good as I had heard on the record?

  Then Morondo appeared, tall, slim, well groomed. He could have been a Spanish grandee in his fifties. With a minimum of gesture he launched his singers into a program which began with fifteenth-century church music and ended with ‘Old Black Joe,’ in honor of the Americans who had crowded into Pamplona. The Stephen Foster was sung in clear English and made an amusing effect, but the highlight of the performance was a work that fitted precisely the spirit of the feria, García Lorca’s ‘Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,’ arranged for choral group. At the repeated phrase, ‘At five in the afternoon,’ one could sense the beginning of the tragedy that would end in the death of this fine matador.

  The group could sing. The individual pyrotechnics of the singers were less conspicuous than those of similar groups trained in London or Paris and there seemed to be less variation in attack and emphasis, but the ensemble singing, which is what such a group must master if it is to achieve a good reputation, was as good as any I had ever heard. There was less exhibitionism, less dramatic effect for effect’s sake than in a comparable American group, but a much nobler end result. If one demanded exciting solo work from either individual singers or the various choirs, he would not find it here, but if one sought a powerful and authentic total effect, here it was. The voices were wonderfully modulated, finely matched and superbly disciplined. It was obvious from the first note that Don Morondo had his group under control and that they sang pretty much as he wanted them to sing. I left the theater, thinking, It was worth the trip north to hear such music.

  Next day I met Morondo, and close up he was even more impressive than he had been on the podium. He was taller than I had thought, had very blue eyes, a quiet voice and a most infectious smile. He wore an attractive jacket with no lapels and reminded me of a younger Toscanini. It was painful to discover that his life had been that of nearly every creative figure in Spain, an endless duplication of demanding jobs which taken together had barely paid enough wages for him to live and do the work of which he was capable. A pupil of a pupil of the Frenchman Dukas, Morondo had in recent years simplified his life: he now served as professor at the normal school, professor at the consistory, director of the orchestra, director of the choral group, lecturer at the university, plus teacher, advisor, consultant and friend to all young musicians in the area. In spite of this deluge he maintained a youthful appearance and a lively humor.

  I began, ‘Maestro, I’ve come to Pamplona to see you because in Avila I found myself perplexed about the problem of Spanish music.’

  ‘I am too,’ he replied.

  ‘I’ve always heard of Felipe
Pedrell [1841–1922] as the patron saint of modern Spanish music …’

  I was not allowed to finish, for at the name of that great musicologist whose theories had inspired Albéniz, Granados, Turina and Falla, Morondo’s face lit up and he cried, ‘He was the master of us all.’

  ‘But what actually did he accomplish?’

  ‘He sent us back to Spanish themes, to the great work done by unknown Spanish song writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. You might say that all we’ve done has been built upon the bones of Pedrell.’

  ‘Two problems confuse me.’ I said. ‘First, Pedrell in Spanish music seems to me like Squarcione in north Italian painting. Each was a notable teacher, but neither left much of his own work for us to hear or see. For twenty years I’ve been interested in Pedrell and I’ve yet to hear a note he wrote,’

  ‘That can be corrected. I’ll bring you his songbooks tomorrow.’

  ‘Are there any recordings of his songs?’

  ‘Actual recordings? No. But you hear Pedrell in all Spanish music. His songs live in all of us.’ (During the rest of my stay in Spain I was not to hear a single note that Pedrell wrote, nor have I yet, but I sensed him to be a more important musician than many whose names and works I knew well.)

  ‘Second problem. The individual themes that Pedrell brought to the attention of his group … Let’s say the ones I hear in the four composers we named … They’re some of the greatest themes in contemporary music. Better I’d say than similar national themes I find in Brahms, Dvořák, Smetana or Bartók.’

  ‘I’d agree. They are supreme musical notations.’ Morondo nodded. For eighteen years he had served as director of Spain’s oldest symphony, the one Camille Saint-Saëns used to conduct, and he knew well the music I was speaking of.

  ‘But Brahms and the others from the rest of Europe took poorer themes and made of them great symphonies and concertos and quartets. Why …’