Iberia

by James A. Michener

  ‘ “Stinki Rass,” ’ she said.

  They were even singing it under its own name; in the United States some school-board member would have insisted that new words be substituted, for this was one of the great revolutionary songs. ‘What do the words mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a song of freedom,’ the nun said. ‘Stinki Rass was a man who loved freedom.’

  The girls were singing a Catalan version of ‘Stenka Razin,’ the Volga folk song that speaks of the famous revolutionary who defied the tsar and surrendered his head on the public chopping block sometime around 1700. It was an unlikely song for Spain, the apotheosis of revolt against tyranny, and I was not satisfied that the girls knew what they were singing, so I made further inquiry, and the same nun said, ‘Stinki Rass fought against the tsar and was beheaded.’ When I asked why he was fighting, she said, ‘For freedom.’

  It was not the first time I had been perplexed by the contradictions of Spanish censorship. A man was arrested for spiriting Protestant Bibles into the country, but this Catholic school was honoring Stenka Razin as freedom’s hero. In a Spanish cinema house I saw an Italian motion picture about Benvenuto Cellini in which Pope Paul IV was shown defending the Catholic Church against the infamous troops of Spain, and periodically one character or another reviled Spain and Carlos V; they were the villains and were so specified, but the censor had not objected, yet not long ago an American was thrown in jail for having spoken disrespectfully of Spain.

  I remember when I was visited in my hotel room in a northern city by a newspaperman. He wanted to talk with someone from the outside world and spent several hours telling me how censorship operated in his field. ‘I have a friend in the French city of Hendaye, and each month he crosses the bridge into Irún and mails me the liberal journals from France.’ From a briefcase he produced four or five magazines which were obviously more valuable to him than food. ‘I know what’s going on in the world. I’m at least as good a writer as you are. I’m a professional, and I could write brilliant articles on what’s going to happen in the next ten years, where the government’s making mistakes. Michener, I know.’ He was close to having tears in his eyes as he translated from the clandestine magazine a series of titles which had attracted him: ‘De Gaulle and the Gold Standard.’ ‘Harold Wilson’s Four Major Problems.’ ‘The Failure of Johnson’s Viet Nam Policy.’ He tapped the magazines and said, ‘That’s what a man writes. What do they make me write?’

  He handed me a piece of paper on which, having anticipated meeting with me, he had typed out the titles of his last three articles: ‘¿Existe el hombre abominable de las nieves?’ (Does the Abominable Snowman Exist?), ‘El crimen en Chicago’ (Crime in Chicago), and ‘¿Es verdad que los ingleses aman Isabel Segunda?’ (Is It True That the English Love Elizabeth II?) He said that more intellectual ability was being wasted in Spain than in any other nation he knew, and he could foresee no end to it.

  Pau Lluis and I debarked at a seaside resort well south of Barcelona and walked over sand to a beach house where a group of students waited to pepper me with questions. Like the newspaperman of the north, they were as intelligent as those of similar age in America. For a long time they spoke of nothing but my country, and their knowledge of it was astonishing. They wanted to know what role McNamara was playing in the government and whether Bobby Kennedy would run for President in 1968. They were, like all Europeans, especially interested in the Report of the Warren Commission and were unprepared to accept it, but their rejection was not based on personal prejudice; they had read of certain books contesting the Report and had been influenced by them.

  Finally my turn to ask questions came. I wanted to explore the problem of how far politics intruded into the student riots, and as soon as the subject was broached I found a willingness to talk which quite surprised me. If students in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy had spoken so openly of their grievances, they would probably have been shot; I suppose that in Franco’s Spain if I were to betray the individuals who talked with me, they would also be in some kind of trouble, but of a much lesser degree, because these students showed no hesitancy, which they would have had to do with a stranger if their lives were endangered.

  ‘Pau Lluis is right. This is not a political movement, essentially. It’s an attempt to force choices now, before the big changes come at Franco’s death.’ The speaker was a girl who looked as un-revolutionary as a student could. She was quiet and obviously middle-class, with an interest in social problems. It was her opinion that the students and the young priests were trying to impress the government with the fact that they must be taken into account when the new Spain was formed. ‘We can’t have the old sloppy university teaching. We won’t tolerate it.’ To hear her and Pau Lluis one would have thought that Spain’s major problem was improvement of the university.

  A more radical young man, a would-be engineer, for the students I met were enrolled in practical courses, with no poets or philosophers intermixed, had a different opinion: Politics has had no part in launching these student riots. We’ve spent little time discussing specific steps to be taken when the change comes. I have no interest in politics, but of late I’ve seen that in the end we shall have to become involved. We will want certain things, just as the young priests do, and in the end the police will bang us over the head, and we’ll be in politics.’

  I asked what form this participation would take, and he said, ‘The students, the young priests, the young businessmen will say, “The New Spain must have this kind of freedom,” and the Old Spain will say, “Now you be still and we’ll make the decisions,” and somebody will have to get banged on the head. It’ll be us, and in the end we’ll have to align with labor and I suppose they’ll have to send the army against us, and there we are!’

  We pursued this for some minutes and there were those who agreed, up to the point of army intervention. ‘There will be no civil war,’ students like Pau Lluis believed. The engineer asked, ‘But if we are pushed too far?’ The students refused to say, ‘Then there will be war.’ Instead they said, ‘No one wants a return of 1936.’

  There was agreement, however, that I would see a good deal more student agitation within the next year, and even before I had reached home it had erupted in both Madrid and Barcelona. The students also warned me that labor, having taken heart from the example of the students, would begin to strike, and this too happened as they had predicted. They also said that the government, aware of these pressures, would liberalize the constitution; they had seen reports of this in the New York Times but not in their local newspapers, and again they were right, for shortly after, Generalísimo Franco announced a liberalization of the form of government, although not much relaxation in actual operation. In other words, the students understood rather well what was happening.

  There was heated discussion of a point on which I was uninformed and whose intricacies I could not follow: the government in Madrid had promulgated a fake student organization with appointed representatives, ‘no better than the labor syndicates,’ one of the engineers said, and the students were determined to by-pass it and elect their own representatives. Whereas politics in the abstract did not arouse them, this matter of a union did, and I could anticipate the pragmatic steps whereby they would escalate from university problems to national ones, and I suppose that this was why the Madrid government had cracked down so hard.

  At the conclusion of the meeting Pau Lluis surprised me by inviting me to his home, a comfortable apartment in the western end of Barcelona, where his small, attractive mother and businessman father were pleased to entertain me. They were perplexed, as all parents are, at having bred a son who had strong opinions, but they were proud that other young people sought him out as if his opinions were important. ‘What should Pau Lluis do about his education?’ his mother asked. She seemed no older than forty and must have married young. ‘It’s disreputable for a boy his age not to be attending classes.’ Her husband turned out to be an aficio
nado of the zarzuela and had a large collection of records; he was relieved when I turned the conversation away from his son, who was in trouble no matter how well behaved he might appear, and spoke of La revoltosa and Gigantes y cabezudos. The Fregs served a formal tea, much as I might have got in London except that the cakes were sweeter and the tea weaker. Señora Freg came back to her son’s education: ‘From what you hear, is there any chance that the university will reopen soon?’ I told her that in American circles it was believed that classes must reopen soon; it was only logical not to penalize an entire student body. ‘But this is Spain,’ she said reflectively, as if here it was not illogical to stamp out intelligence that seemed to be developing a mind of its own. Her husband remarked wryly that it was good to know that in California, too, people had trouble with their universities. ‘It’s not localized.’ The Fregs were proud of their studious son and dreadfully apprehensive. They showed this by their reaction to me; Pau Lluis had shown them a clipping about my lecture and they realized that he would not have taken the trouble to make my acquaintance if he were not an exceptional boy, but they also knew that he would not have done so unless he had a kind of radical approach which must ultimately place him in conflict with the police. I wanted to tell them that Pau Lluis was as stable a young fellow as, one could expect to meet under the current circumstances, but I lacked the Spanish. However, I mumbled something to that effect and I believe they got the drift.

  It was now time to leave Barcelona and I did so with reluctance, for the city had been a revelation to me, and my wife was pleased that I shared the enthusiasm she had developed years earlier. When speaking of Andalucía, I said that if I were a young workman stuck away in some bleak pueblo I would emigrate to Barcelona, and the more I saw of the city the more surprised I was that the influx from the south had not been greater; but it is necessary to complete the analysis. If I were a young Catalan with intellectual promise I think I would leave Barcelona and emigrate to Madrid, and I would do so for two reasons. I am inherently suspicious of separatist movements, whether active or sentimental, political or artistic, and I fear that Catalan nationalism would in the long run weaken me. Also, I would want to be in Madrid because for the next forty or fifty years it is there that the decisions will be made, and as a Catalan intellectual I might play an important role in helping make them. The figure of speech with which I opened this chapter was more relevant than I had supposed: Barcelona has the heady and dangerous quality of champagne and should be taken in moderation.

  One of the pleasant aspects of the city is that it serves as the sea terminus for the Baleares, which, with Palma as their capital, have long provided a romantic holiday land for vacationers from northern Europe. Here George Sand and Frédéric Chopin came when there were no hotels on Mallorca; today there is a heavier concentration of tourist facilities than elsewhere in Spain: sixteen hundred hotels, five thousand bars, ten thousand tourist shops and two and a half million visitors a year. Impossible as it seems, in the winter season one can leave Sweden by plane, spend three months in Palma in a top-class hotel with all meals and fly back to Sweden for a total cost of $248. At one hotel the manager told me, ‘And because we happen to be outside of town, if you stay with us, we allow you the use of a car at no extra cost.’

  My wife and I took a night boat to Palma, and asked the steward to call us an hour before dawn so that we could go on deck to watch the islands rising from the sea. How beautiful Mallorca was! First the mountains showed like a dark mass, sufficiently high to assure us that they would contain valleys, which are among the chief pleasures of the place. Then as dawn brightened, much of the darkness changed to green forests, so that Mallorca was going to be a verdant island. Next we saw lines of white cliffs dropping down to the water’s edge and these I had not heard about, so I asked a sailor, ‘Does Mallorca have so many cliffs?’ He peered into the uncertain light and said, ‘Hotels. They’re all hotels.’

  Now, as the sun approached the horizon, I saw for the first time the fortress on the hill that guards Palma, and before long its round gray towers caught the first direct rays of sunlight. I could imagine how impressive those battlements must have seemed to pirates moving in to sack the place, which happened frequently, or to armies obliged to lay siege to Palma. One part of the Baleares had had a chameleon-like existence; it had been occupied by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Muslims, and in the age of stability, when it was presumed to be Spanish, by a whole parade of European powers.

  Along all the beaches of the Mediterranean it is the foreign girl who attracts and perplexes the men of Spain.

  As I was reviewing this turbulent history, full sunlight burst over Palma and I saw, standing beside the sea, the great cathedral which since its inception has been the conspicuous symbol of Mallorca. It was a magnificent sight, this poem of stone rising from the waves, and if one complains that in cities like Toledo, Sevilla and Barcelona one can barely see the cathedrals because of encroaching houses and shops, the deficiency is repaired here, where the cathedral stands as free as a lighthouse on a promontory. The full sun was now reflected from the white hotel faces, so that more than ever they resembled cliffs and my wife said, ‘There ought to be sea gulls flying out of them.’

  I had made the trip to Mallorca not to see one of Europe’s major playgrounds but rather to pay my respects to the greatest Catalan of history, a man of cloudy reputation but grandeur of spirit, a bit of a charlatan but a leader of the Church and one of the most congenial figures in Spanish history, whose fame, has always been relished by a few and whose general quality must one day be recognized by the many. In the uncomplicated days of the medieval period when to be Christian was to be Gatholic and when, even though heresy might crop out here or there to be speedily exterminated, there was not yet open schism, the five major nations of Europe produced five scholastic philosophers. In the order of appearance the first four were Abélard of France (1079–1142), Albertus Magnus of Germany (1193–1280), Thomas Aquinas of Italy (1225–1274) and Duns Scotus of England (1265–1308). In Spain the comparable figure was the Catalan from Mallorca known throughout Europe as the Doctor Illuminatus, Ramón Llull (1235–1315). In English he is known as Raymond Lull (or sometimes Lully) and in Latin as Raymundo Lulio, but each of these names is deceptive as far as pronunciation is concerned, for it is Yool.

  The date of his birth to a noble family of Mallorca is significant, in that Christians recaptured the island in 1232, only three years before Llull was born, so that in effect he was a child of Muslim–Christian inheritance. For the first thirty years of his life he proved to be an ordinary fellow with certain extraordinary habits. He was a roisterer, married early to Blanca Picany, who seems to have been a stable woman of deep sensibility by whom he had children, including a son to whom he wrote a delightful book about growing up. The first unusual thing about Llull was that he wrote poetry, and very good poetry too, of a high lyrical pitch but not much spiritual content. Mallorca legend says that his life would have gone forward in customary routine, focusing on his good wife and his beloved children, except that one day he conceived a passion for a young unmarried woman of the city. He was driven to confusion by her pale beauty and one day rode his horse into the center of the church during worship so as to impress her with his love. She rebuffed him in various ways and there was talk of calling in her male kinsmen to chastise him, but at this point she chose a more dramatic gesture. She had her duenna arrange an assignation, and when she was alone with Llull she confessed that she was smitten with him but that one thing had deterred her from confessing her love, and having said this, she undressed to the waist and allowed him to see her breast eaten away by cancer and she only weeks from death.

  Spain’s ye-ye boys are giving signs that they refuse to take seriously the leadership of Church, army and landed families.

  The impact upon Llull was so staggering that he became more or less unhinged. The girl died on schedule, and he began that withdrawal from life which became so
pronounced that his wife had to sue the court for the appointment of a custodian for his possessions, and this was done. Henceforth Llull was in effect a penniless friar. After a pilgrimage on foot to Santiago de Compostela, he joined the Franciscan Order; and after a sustained mystical experience in which he beheld Christ five times, he conceived the idea that he had been chosen to convert Islam to Christianity. Later he realized that to accomplish this he must know Arabic; finding that faithful Muslims would not teach him the language when his avowed purpose was to subvert Muhammad, he escaped their boycott by borrowing enough money from his wife to purchase an Arab slave whose only job was to teach him Arabic. When the task was done and Llull could speak the language—he never learned Latin—he tested his powers by conducting a theological disputation with his slave, but the latter must have been a courageous man, for either he bested Llull in the argument, proving that Muhammad was superior to Christ, or he blasphemed Christianity; whatever the case, Llull flew into a rage and killed his slave. His remorse was so great that from this time he lived by only one rule, ‘He who loves not, lives not.’

  It would be a pleasure to recite the accomplishments of this brilliant man, but recently I came upon a passage from Havelock Ellis’ tribute to Llull, written in 1902 when Ellis was among the first writers in English to bring the Catalan philosopher to the attention of Europe, and this sums up the matter: