No American writer that I know is going to have in death the kind of immortality that Spain confers on her authors; I was present when Dr. Gregorio Marañón died, a kind of Charles Beard plus André Maurois, and one would have thought that the king had died. Indeed, it was a kingly role that Marañón played, that of a great medical man who wrote essays on Spain’s periods of ascendancy. But when I dug deeper I found again and again that mournful refrain, ‘Pío Baroja lived poorly on his meager income,’ or, ‘After a life of complete privation he died miserably,’ and when I began to question not one person in the creative fields but many, I found that whereas it was wonderful in Spain to be a dead writer, to be a living one was something else. The Premio Nadal, which Señor Vergés’ company awards each year, brings the author only $3,333, and few can logically hope to win it. Most struggle a lifetime in near-poverty, abused by society and held in contempt by its rulers. If they write honestly they run the risk of being thrown into jail; if they do not write constantly they starve; and their funeral dirge is always: ‘They struggled to make a living and died filled with bitterness and remorse.’ I went through a period of acute depression when reviewing the lives of the gifted men who wrote the zarzuelas; so frequent was the statement ‘With his four chief works he made millions of pesetas for the managers of the theater, but himself died in poverty’ that I suspended my studies. The literary condition in Spain is rather the reverse of that in the States; American writers earn a good living but play no significant role in their society; Spanish writers earn almost nothing, but when dead they are enshrined.
One of the aspects of Spanish intellectual life which struck me repeatedly was the fact, reflected in these pages, that civic leadership so often rested in the hands of medical men. They wrote the best books, made the most daring statements and were revered as the element of society that could be trusted to support good movements. The doctors of Spain formed the stable, liberal cadre and I wondered why this was. I therefore asked a government official if he could arrange for me to meet a typical Spanish doctor who might care to discuss the matter.
I was taken to a huge apartment building, Avenida Generalísimo Franco, 520, whose rickety basketlike elevator crept precariously up a good many floors, opening first on one side then on the other, for it was all doors. It ejected me onto a vast, gloomy ledge with a central well that dropped straight down to where the doorman looked like a midget; it could have been designed by Piranesi. A somber door standing back from the chasm was marked Dr. Arturo Fernández-Cruz, and when the maid opened it I was admitted to the richly decorated apartment of a man of taste. Paintings hung on the walls, which contained many bookcases. Fine rugs and antiques, including what I took to be a valuable Chinese ivory of Confucius and a Thai ceramic of a princess, occupied me until the doctor appeared, and no man could have been better prepared to explain the dynamism of Spanish doctors than he.
He was a cyclonic talker and a man of wide interests. Of medium height, with a head of dark hair that reached down toward his eyes, he wore a mustache which seemed constantly in motion. His eyes were expressive, and his cheeks puckered in when he found delight in some idea which he had begun to offer only tentatively but which had matured into a kind of truth. Because he sat with his back to a solid wall of medical books in varied languages, many of them having been printed in the United States, he gave the impression of being a good medical man, which my friends assured me he was, but it was his reaction to other subjects which captivated me, and I think it wisest if I simply repeat his flood of ideas, for they better than my comments on them will provide a picture of the Spanish medic.
‘I suppose I carry a strong strain of the Visigoth in me. I was born in Sevilla, of the middle-class type that they describe as “muy fino y muy frío” [very fine and very cold], but I must have had Germanic inheritance because of the way my mind works. I was a professor at the medical school in Santiago de Compostela, in the heart of Galicia, where a man’s character is all-important. “Of course Juan’s a good violinist, he comes from such a good family.” I prefer it here in Cataluña, where performance is what counts. “Juan claims he’s a violinist. Here’s a fiddle. Let’s hear him play.”
‘The ideal Catalan, as I study the type in my office, would be Ben Franklin. If you understand his practical nature, you understand Cataluña. No, one more thing would be necessary. He’d also have to be able to sing.
‘But you came here to talk about doctors. Remember this. There is no analogy between the role of the doctor in Spain and the doctor in any other country. Our tradition stems from the great Jew Maimonides and the Muslim Averroës. A sick man must be cured, factually. We are not prone to philosophizing about medicine or the good life or the nature of cure. A man is sick, cure him. We set a high pragmatic standard and this gets to be known in the community. From Maimonides and Averroës we also inherit the high position enjoyed by the doctor. This was never a Spanish trait. It was a Jewish and a Muslim trait, and fortunately for us it was adopted by our society.
‘Our pragmatic attitude to medicine allows us much mental space for speculation in other fields. No group in Spain reads as much as we do. In all languages. We’re the educated ones … in medicine and everything else. You see my books. I don’t buy them because they have pretty covers, but because I need to know what’s going on in the world.
‘This means that we come to have the reputation of knowing more than we really do. But we try to know, therefore we are applauded by the people. Oftentimes the doctor is the only educated man a family will know. His opinion is given more weight perhaps than it deserves. But if you look at Spain’s position in the world at large, you find that it is only our doctors who stand at the top when judged internationally. We produce good men who do their best to keep up with what’s happening in Vienna and Massachusetts General.
‘Now, because of our unusual position in Spanish life, we find ourselves constantly invited to lead liberal movements. I suppose doctors the world over incline toward the left in politics, because we see society as a whole. We are driven to become intermediaries because of the trust imposed upon us, and as learned men we must lean toward social justice and a more liberal interpretation of society.
‘But let’s confine ourselves to Spain. The average family knows only two persons in whom it can trust, the doctor and the priest, and since the priest is obligated to support a certain status quo of which his church is a major component, the family can look only to the doctor for the liberal interpretation toward which it may be groping.
‘I’ve thought about this a great deal, because in Spain, doctors have been foremost champions of advance, as they are everywhere, and I’ve come to two conclusions. We are able to espouse liberal causes where others would be afraid to do so, because we have a prepared position to which we can retreat. If we are savagely rebuffed in attempting to get better housing, we can still live, because doctors are needed. We can absorb enormous defeats and still live. A priest might be thrown out of the Church. A newspaper editor might be fired and be unable to find work. But we have that prepared position.
‘The second factor is that because medicine was for so long the prerogative of Jews and Muslims, children of the best families won’t go into it. Only the middle-class families provide medical students. When I was a student in Sevilla we had a young duque in class. He asked me one day what I was going to be, and when I said, “Médico,” he said, “My God, I’d rather be a bullfighter.” To boys like me medicine was a form of democratic opportunity, the escape from mediocrity, and that’s true of all the doctors you see. Middle-class origins, first-class brains. That’s a powerful combination. But having come from such backgrounds, we have a natural interest in social betterment, as all doctors should, and I judge that accounts for our favorable position.’
The longer I talked with Dr. Fernández-Cruz the more obvious it became that he felt a personal identification with the Maimonides–Averroës tradition, and like thousands of his associates, was ready to act upon it.
One of the most moving things in Spain is the frequency with which one sees in small towns the rude statue to some local doctor who had led the community’s fight for social justice. In Badajoz, in Teruel, in a dozen nameless little villages I had seen these evocative monuments: ‘To Dr. Teófilo Gómez, predilected son of this village, to whom we are indebted.’ It seemed to me that about half the books I read on recondite subjects of Spanish life were written by medical men like Marañón, but my lasting memory is not of their scholarship but of their unfailing championship of liberal causes.
On the other hand, I also noticed that no matter where I went, it was the doctor’s house that was the most luxurious, his car the biggest. If he read more books than anyone else in the community, it was partly because he alone had the funds to buy them. I felt sure that the schoolteachers I met would have enjoyed reading more, but their condition was so pitiful that they barely kept ahead of their students; if the condition of the doctors of Spain represents one of the best aspects of the country, that of the schoolteachers represents one of the worst.
There was one publishing company which I particularly wanted to see, much to the astonishment of my Spanish friends, for I thought its operations threw much light on one aspect of life in Spain. To explain, I must detour to a cinema hall on Las Ramblas that carried a banner which I had seen across Spain: ‘Marisol: Cabriola.’ Along with the banner were motion-picture stills showing a delightful blond girl of unascertainable age named Marisol; when supposed to be winsome, she was photographed as thirteen, but when sexy in a refined sort of way, she looked more like nineteen. In either case she was adorable and apparently most of Spain thought so, for her movies were the most popular then being shown. I had intended for some six years to see a Marisol show and there would never be a better opportunity.
All Marisol pictures were alike, I was told, but this one had special features in that it had been written and directed by Mel Ferrer when he was not engaged in various movies that his wife, Audrey Hepburn, was shooting in Europe. And Cabriola was the name of a famous horse ridden in the ring by the Andalusian bullfighter Angel Peralta. Shortly after completing the film, Cabriola had been killed while fighting at Alicante or somewhere in the south, so that the movie was a kind of funeral ceremony for a notable beast.
The theater and all that transpired within was a fairyland. Children were everywhere, waiting for their idol to appear, but there were also many middle-aged women, wondering why their daughters had not turned out as well as Marisol. When the curtain finally opened, after eighteen minutes of advertising slides, a lovely gasp rose from the crowd and a story of complete improbability unfolded.
Marisol, photographed with a skill that I admired, came on screen as a gamin with a beat-up old horse and a cart in which she collected garbage in the slums of Madrid. She lived with her younger brother (this was apparently de rigueur in a Marisol film, since it allowed little girls to imagine how much fun it would be if they could escape parental control) in a makeshift hovel on the edge of the public dump. In addition to the horse that pulled her dump wagon she had another, one of the most beautiful mares ever bred (played by Peralta’s Cabriola, a gelding), but how she got her or why was never explained. Through a variety of plot complexities that were winsome if not logical, Marisol trained her horse to fight in the bullring, and with no explanation as to where the money came from, she suddenly appeared with the horse at the ranch of Angel Peralta on the edge of Las Marismas. She was dressed in a whipcord costume that must have cost four hundred dollars.
Now, all this time she was dressed as a boy, and part of the delight the children experienced was in whispering to their friends, ‘She’s really a girl but the matador doesn’t know.’ Since Marisol sings, an orchestra had to appear in Las Marismas. Since she dances rather well, a famous flamenco male dancer appeared with her in a dream sequence. I think one would have to be a misogynist not to enjoy such a film if seen in the presence of young girls and middle-aged women, gasping with apprehension when little Marisol found herself by accident in the middle of the bullring facing an enraged animal from whom Angel Peralta would rescue her. And of course there came that electric moment when the matador discovered that she was a girl, so that the film could end with her in another mysteriously provided costume riding behind him in the grand parade of Sevilla’s feria.
The publishing company I wanted to visit was called Editorial Felicidad, and there could not have been a happier choice of names, because it published the small hardbound books which were released in conjunction with each Marisol film. They consisted of the plot of the film, or the major incident of the plot, told in simple words and illustrated with scenes from the picture. The books did a tremendous business not only in Spain but also in Latin America, for Marisol was just as popular in Buenos Aires as in Barcelona.
‘We publish an edition of thirty thousand for Spain,’ one of the Felicidad people told me. ‘For Latin America even larger. With Cabriola, because the horse is popular in its own right, we’ll probably do better. And you must remember that a serious novel is lucky if it sells three thousand. The books are sold in bookstores. I saw one the other day that had sixteen separate Marisol titles, although there may have been some Rocío Dúrcal ones mixed in.’ Rocío is a late rival, a marvelous young lady with a face that is perfectly square and a somewhat better figure than Marisol’s.
‘Some years ago we published a biography of Marisol. Huge edition. You can’t buy a copy anywhere but maybe the president of our company will mail you one to North America. [He never did; no copies available.] She was born in the Calle Refino in Málaga to a middle-class family and her talent was mysterious. At the age of seven she was a professional, and the significant fact about her is that in all the following years she never made one false move. She must have had incredibly good advice. You’ve seen how careful they are in photographing her. Everything must be just right. A million parents in Spain pray at night, “If we must have a girl, let her be like Marisol.” I feel that way myself.
‘Boys starting to read will often buy our books, but mostly they sell to little girls and middle-aged women. But we find that even older boys will sometimes peep into the books and whisper to one another, “Well, if all girls were like Marisol it wouldn’t be so bad.” ’
I observed two interesting things about the Marisol fad. The situations in which she finds herself are those which could be especially alluring to girls being brought up in the restrictive customs of the nineteenth century. Marisol Goes to College. Marisol on TV. Marisol, Girl Reporter. Marisol, Detective. Marisol Learns Ballet. Marisol, Sportswoman. I doubt that one can present to the young girls of Spain such a standard of freedom without its having some effect.
The other facet of the craze is that in most of her pictures the plot, as we have seen, gives her an excuse to appear in men’s dress and most effectively too, but in this respect her rival Rocío is even more appealing, for she has a figure that seems to blossom when shown in formal men’s wear. This is, of course, a carry-over from the tradition we met in the zarzuela, for when a society aggravates the difference between the sexes, postulating a completely manly man and a womanly woman, the temptation to burlesque the nonsense is great. Unfortunately, this is a low form of art, as proved by that endless flow of abominable English movies in which sailors are given an excuse to dress as women, to the boundless delight of the unsophisticated British audience. In the legitimate theater next to my hotel on Las Ramblas I had an opportunity to see a play I had missed in Pamplona, La tía de Carlos, which Spain’s fine rubber-faced comedian, Paco Martínez Soria, takes back and forth across Spain, year after year, because audiences love to see him caper as the old lady from Brazil. He does a fine job, featuring long monologues in a crazy cracked voice; his nephew’s fiancée asks him if they dance in Brazil, and this is good for a nine-minute explanation of the rhumba, but the significant fact about his popularity is that like Marisol in men’s clothes, it is based on the exaggerated difference between the sexes. A
lso, he is very funny.
In Barcelona books are important, but music is king. My wife and I discovered this when we wanted to attend the opening of the opera at the famous Liceo, which stood just down Las Ramblas from where we were staying. ‘We can get you tickets but they’ll be dreadfully expensive,’ the government official said, and I nodded. Then he frowned. ‘But I’m afraid that even if you’re willing to pay, it won’t do much good, because you norteamericanos don’t travel with dress suits.’ I said I didn’t have one, and he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I could get you the tickets, but without a dress suit they wouldn’t allow you in.’ I explained that we would be happy to sit upstairs in one of the balconies, and he said, ‘Apparently you don’t understand. This is the opening of the opera. All Cataluña will be there. And the people in the balconies are more meticulous about their dress than those downstairs.’ It was impossible for us to enter the building, so we went like peasants to stand in Las Ramblas and watch the limousines arrive with the great of the region, and although we had attended opera in most of the fine houses of the world, and sometimes under rather gala conditions, we had never witnessed anything like this. The dress was impeccable, the excitement intense and there must have been a couple of thousand of us in the street, watching the entry of the Catalans into the Liceo.
Later in the week, when evening dress was not essential in the upper balconies, we were allowed to buy two rather poor seats for $9.40 each to see a performance of Turandot, and most of those in the tiers below us and on the main floor were in formal wear. The performance was excellent, and during one of the intermissions, which lasted forty-five minutes each because the Catalans wanted to be seen parading the handsome foyers, I had a chance to study the program for that season, and better than the words of some Catalan enthusiast it demonstrated the musical taste of this city.
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