Iberia

by James A. Michener

  Wherever we went on such excursions we met by accident Catalans who represented the best of their culture. Friends took us to the well-known Los Caracoles restaurant (The Snails) at the foot of Las Ramblas, and at the next table sat Joan Alavedra, an elderly man built square, with a rumbling voice, a wild head of hair and a thick homespun suit. He was a poet whom other Catalans respected for his integrity, and throughout the evening many came to pay their respects. When he heard we were in the room he wanted to tell us of his adventures with President Kennedy. It was a poet’s story, roundabout and not to the point, but very moving in its conclusion: ‘I am the man whom Pau Casals has honored, for it was my poem “The Manger” that he chose as the basis of his great choral composition. Same name. I was with him in Greece when The Manger was sung before the royal family. What a night of splendor. How Europe loves this noble old man. Last summer when he was at Prades over the border in France, conducting his summer festival, sixty members of the Barcelona music fraternity made themselves into a little orchestra and traveled from here all the way to Prades. With their instruments. When they got there they unloaded and stood in the street outside Casals’ house and played Wagner’s Siefried Idyl as a present for the old man. To let him know we still love him even if he can’t come home. Then they packed their instruments back into the cars and drove home to Barcelona, and as they came over the hills and saw Cataluña in the moonlight some of them broke into tears and one said, “How the heart of old Pau must break on a night like this. To be so near to Cataluña. To be so near.”

  ‘So when this great honor came to Casals in Puerto Rico he wanted me to share it with him, and I flew there to do so. We were to fly to the White House in Washington to receive in person the gold medal of freedom of the norteamericanos. Old Pau, as you probably know, speaks only Catalan in public. Only Catalan, and I would interpret for him. But the week we were to go your President was assassinated. Old Pau sat in his room, rocking back and forth, saying, “I can’t believe it. He was my friend.” Mrs. Kennedy invited him to participate in the funeral and I urged him to go. “Play one last piece at the grave of your friend,” I said, but he was afraid of the crowds.

  ‘The reason I’m telling you this, Señor Michener, is that when I came back to Barcelona my heart was filled with grief and I wrote a poet’s account of my visit to Pau and by extension to the Kennedys. It was called “Carols and Kennedy,” but in Catalan, of course, and within two hours of the time word flashed through the city that it was available, every copy was sold and I don’t even have one for myself. It now sells for more than five dollars on the black market. Because Pau and your President stand for the same thing in the hearts of the Catalans. They stand for freedom.’

  At another time it was Lluis Oncins Ariño, the unpremeditated Catalan painter who had spent the middle years of his life as the Spanish representative of the Reynolds Aluminum Company but who suddenly announced that he would henceforth be a painter. With a brooding palette of only four colors, ‘My cuisine,’ he calls it, dark purple, a blue that is almost black, a very dark red and a heavy orange, he paints heads representative of Spain’s varied regions. He has a curious Goya quality, but if you mention this to him he becomes bitter. ‘I am Oncins, metal merchant, with my own vision of a crazy world.’ When I pointed out that his best pictures seemed always to contain groups of heads, arranged awkwardly but with force, he said, ‘With four heads you can’t escape dramatic involvement, which seems to be what you prefer, because it’s easy to perceive. The real drama lies in the single head, if you could see it.’ When I tried to look again at a canvas I had liked, he growled, ‘Don’t touch the paintings. The hands of the non-artist corrupt.’

  I was somewhat ill at ease with Oncins, because he looked exactly like Hubert Humphrey and I expected him to talk politics; also, in his best work he reminded me much of the American painter Robert Henri, who had come to Spain from Philadelphia and had painted the grandmothers of the models Oncins was using. I started to tell Oncins of this, but he was impatient: ‘I’m not interested in other painters. It’s a savage job to find out what one wants to say, in one’s own way.’ In pursuit of this I asked him how he had settled upon his four strange colors, and he growled, ‘They settled on me.’ I obviously wasn’t getting very far with this hard-headed Catalan Hubert Humphrey, so I paid my respects and moved on, but after I had been back home in Pennsylvania for some weeks a traveler from Spain climbed my hill with a large bundle.

  ‘This painter in Barcelona heard I lived in Pennsylvania and he made me bring this to you. He said you were a tough man who asked sensible questions.’ And with that my visitor unwrapped a good-sized board on which, in his dark colors, Lluis Oncins had painted me from memory against a background showing stylized elements of the American flag. I looked like a Spaniard, a Catalan to be exact, but the likeness was good, except that he gave me somewhat more hair than nature allowed. However, the salient characteristic of the portrait was that I was shown with a glowing heart, painted in Oncins’ traditional dark orange because, as he had explained to the messenger, ‘Michener’s love for Catakuña was self-evident.’

  With another painter I had a much different experience. Norman Narotzky was an American working in Barcelona, for he was married to a girl of that city, and while I knew him a notable storm developed over a painting of his which synthesized his reflections on Spanish history. A friend told me of the work before I had a chance to see it for myself: ‘I’m afraid Norman was ill advised. You see, he’s done a pair of portraits of Fernando and Isabel and titled them “The Catholic Kings.” ’ I said I thought this was appropriate for an American, since it was these kings who had launched the discovery of our country, but my informant said, ‘I’m afraid you don’t understand. The portraits, which are really very fine, serve only as the kick-off point for what Narotzky really wants to say. Accompanying them are symbols of religious repression through the ages. The swastika, the stake, the crucified Christ wearing robes used by the Inquisition. It’s a real beauty! Norman has omitted nothing.’

  The two paintings, which I liked so much that I tried to buy them, evoked a scandal. A government official pointed out that since Spain was officially sponsoring a movement to have Isabel declared a saint, the painting was not only offensive to the nation’s historical sense but sacrilegious as well. He fulminated that his country did not intend to sit idly by and allow intellectuals to cast aspersions on the grandeur of the Spanish heritage. Others felt that for an American to speak ill of the Inquisition was unfair, unhistoric and probably subversive. Narotzky was investigated; inquiries were made at the American embassy; and the dealer who had exhibited the work was badgered by the police with all sorts of hampering restrictions.

  I found it was impossible for the tourist to understand the ins and outs of Spanish censorship. Whenever a newspaper was censored and taken off the streets clandestine copies circulated, and I read them avidly to detect what had offended and almost never was I able to do so; but my Spanish friends would take a quick glance at the paper and almost always spot the article that had caused the trouble. However, even when they told me which article it was, I frequently read it without appreciating why it had been found so offensive. The only insight I uncovered for myself came in a bookstore when I saw William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun published in Spanish as Réquiem para una mujer (Woman). When I asked the bookseller why the change, I found that he was a marked agnostic: ‘On the face of it the Faulkner heroine could not be a nun because she wasn’t a Catholic, so it’s not illogical for our censors to deprive the author of his cheap little play on words. But more important is the fact that we can permit nothing that would cast even oblique reflections on the Church. All of us know that well over seventy percent of priests maintain mistresses, and the general public approves, for it keeps the priests away from our own women, but to speak of this in a book? They’d never permit it.’ However, shortly after he spoke, a Barcelona publisher brought out a Catalan translation entitled Rèquiem par
a una monja.

  One Sunday morning as I was walking through the Gothic quarter, of which I never saw enough, for it is not often that one finds in the heart of a modern city an ancient one existing as a kind of soul imprisoned in stone yet mysteriously vital, I heard the lovely sound of rustic pipes and muffled drums. I could have been in a woodland except that the cathedral rose above me, and as I entered its plaza I saw that several hundred people or perhaps even a thousand, all dressed in Sunday clothes, had gathered about two orchestras that were playing a concert while worshipers heading for the cathedral or coming from it. after Mass passed by and nodded approvingly, even though the music was not religious

  The orchestras were special. Each was composed of a dozen members whose instruments had been determined centuries ago: one double bass, five country oboes, one trombone, three cornets and two fiscorns, which were small and gave forth piercing sounds. I was surprised to see there were no drummers, for I thought I had heard drums, but when I approached the orchestras I saw that the oboe players had tiny drums, not more than three inches across, strapped to their left forearms, and these they struck from time to time without interrupting their playing on the oboes. One of the fiscorn players had a cymbal even smaller strapped to his wrist, and this he struck with another which he held daintily between his fingers. The music these orchestras produced, one playing while the other rested, was delicate and unlike any I had heard before, the wedding of oboe and cornet being especially pleasing. Naturally, I compared this sardana, for so the music was called, with the oboe music I had heard in Pamplona, and although I much preferred the latter as being more raw and mountainous, I respected the sardana as being more artistic. Since the orchestras played for about four hours, I had ample opportunity to judge their work.

  This Italian painter on Las Ramblas reminds one that European visitors have been more welcomed in Barcelona than in other Spanish cities.

  As I was watching the fiscorn players, for I had not before seen this instrument, a strange thing happened all around me. A moment ago the Catalans in the plaza had been listening to the sardana; now, without anyone’s having given a signal, large circles had formed, containing men and women of all ages down to eight years old, so that the entire plaza was covered with people silently performing the folk dance that accompanies the sardana. I was astonished at how quietly this had happened, for there were at least eleven of these large circles, some with thirty members, and the dance was vigorous and beautiful, yet how it had started I couldn’t say.

  The sardana was like the movement of an animated clock that ran in both directions. Slow steps left, slow steps right. Left, right. Left, right, with arms held closely to the side. Then faster steps, with hands slightly raised. Then fast, intricate steps, with hands held high above the head and the body swaying beautifully as the tempo of the music increased. Finally the entire plaza in motion, with worshipers filing in and out of the cathedral and stopping to join the dance if they felt so inspired. Then a tinkling clang of the tiny cymbals, a ruffle on the toy drums, a wail on the oboes and the dance ended. In the flash of a moment the circles disbanded and the plaza was both silent and sedate for Sunday morning. After ten or fifteen minutes’ rest the second orchestra began and the dance was under way once more.

  I found that if I took my eye away from the plaza for even one moment, I missed the beginning of this strange dance. The fresh orchestra would play for perhaps eight minutes and nothing would happen. Stolid Catalans in dark suits would be looking off into space as if dancing were the most remote intention of their lives, and if at this moment I looked away, I missed the whole thing, because when I looked back, there they would be, in great circles, dancing slowly left and right.

  I was determined to see who gave the signal for this dance, so on several occasions I kept my eyes glued to a fixed spot where experience had told me a circle would be formed. One moment, not a sign of dancing. Then a girl, unaccompanied by any boy, sedately placed her purse on the flagstones. Nothing happened. Then a boy carefully took off his jacket, folded it and placed it atop the purse. Within seconds a dozen purses, jackets, walking sticks and coats were piled neatly in that spot, and around them the Catalans, strangers one to the other, began their slow sardana. More than anything else this strange beginning resembled the process by which ice forms across the surface of water; now it is fluid; now it is crystallized; the dance has begun.

  Toward one o’clock that afternoon the orchestras combined to play a very slow and mournful sardana and for a long time no circles formed. Then an old man, with tears streaming down his face, solemnly folded his jacket and placed it on the stones. He was joined by others, and some of them were crying too, and soon the plaza was filled with solemn music as a tragic song was repeated over and over by the orchestras. I asked a man sitting on the cathedral steps what was happening, and he said, ‘This piece is called “Patética.” We play it when some famous person has died.’ I asked whom it was memorializing, and he said, ‘Yesterday Maestro’—I didn’t catch the name—‘he died, and he was one of our best composers of sardana music’ I went down to stand with the musicians as they played, because I wanted to see how the music was written. It was written out by hand, ‘Patéica,’ and as the fiscorns shrilled their lament for the dead musician I saw that some of the players had tears in their eyes too, for music is something to be taken with great seriousness in Cataluña.

  If I were to choose one man to represent the intellectual curiosity which I found so marked in Barcelona, it would have to be Luis Lassaletta (1921–1959), for although his history was unique, it was also representative. He was a slim, extremely handsome young man whose father had been Spanish manager for the Hispano-Suiza company. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lassaletta senior was the only man in managerial status brave enough to remain in the city, which was obviously going to fall into the hands of the leftists. He paid for his bravery with his life, shot through the head without trial and for no reason except that he was an employer.

  His son Luis, fifteen at the time, was thrown into jail and kept in a hole in which he could neither lie down nor stand up, with water dripping on him and a bright light shining in his eyes. He later reported that it was only through the exercise of will that he avoided going insane. When the war was over and he was released from prison, along with his younger brother Jose Maria, he was so dedicated to freedom that he was determined to go to the freest place he knew of the African jungle. He grabbed a ship out of Barcelona, as young men like him had done through the centuries, and landed in Africa with enough money to sustain him for three months; but once ashore he exhibited skill in trapping wild animals and in training them. ‘He spoke to them,’ a friend says, ‘and they spoke back. With his intense eyes he looked into the hearts of his animals, and although he was known as a “great white hunter” he never shot animals … or at least, not for sport.’

  The fame of Lassaletta spread over Europe and he was consulted by zoo directors and naturalists. He was offered jobs by many different nations but his love was life in the jungle with his friends, and there he became a legend. In Gabon, in the Ubangi country, along the coastline of Lake Chad, he was the man who appeared suddenly out of the wilderness accompanied by Negroes bearing a live python or a cage containing a gorilla.

  Then one day during the Christmas holidays, which he was spending in Guinea, a Gabon viper bit him in the face. ‘Luis knew there was no anti-venom serum in the district, so he went to the hospital and told the doctors, “I am going to die. It will be three hours and painful but you mustn’t worry, because there is nothing you can do.” In the most dreadful agony he died, and the Barcelona papers mourned, “When Luis Lassaletta, who was the friend of all animals, dies from the bite of an animal, the world makes no sense.” ’

  I of course never knew Luis Lassaletta but I did have the good luck to meet his two younger brothers, and with José María, who has inherited Luis’ affection for animals, I spent some time. He kept in his back yard a tame hyena that h
e had captured in Africa, for it is now he who supplies European zoos with wild animals, and for some reason which I cannot explain I became close friends with this hyena; perhaps it was because I was lonely for my two dogs, whom I had not seen for nearly half a year; perhaps it was my fascination with his tremendous jaws which could bite through the thighbone of an ox. At any rate, this ugly beast and I had a great time. He seemed to know that I would play with him, no matter how rough he got, and there were times when he would take my forearm in his mighty jaws and bring his teeth against my skin and grin at me as if to say, ‘Can you imagine what I could do if I had a mind for it?’ I knew, and with my free hand I would bang him in the snoot, and he would roll over backward with delight.

  José María went to Africa to recover his brother’s possessions, among which he found a letter in which one of Luis’ bearers sought help for the murder of four people:

  Douala, French Cameroons

  14 July 1955

  Dear Sir, Professor of Help,

  I have the honour most respectfully to put this humble petition towards your understanding.

  My life is very poor and as such I shall be very grateful if master could give me a helping hand towards the battle of life by giving me some money for killing the understated persons as victims. Meanwhile the secret shall only remain the both of us.

  Names of Victims

  I John Osungwe a man

  II Andrew Oruh a man

  III Sadrack Mbeng a man

  IV Nkhnge Enota a woman

  All these are the enemies who try to kill me. I would be very grateful master could grant my plea.

  Your future customer,