Iberia

by James A. Michener

  BIENVENIDO WELCOME

  BIENVENU BENVENUTO

  WILLKOMMEN

  with the coat of arms that I remembered from my first visit, a ferocious-looking bull over whose head hovered a star.

  It was now past eight-thirty but the sun still lingered on the horizon, throwing a blaze of light across the eastern sky; over the earth itself a dull red glow lay like a fog, while at my feet ran the dark Turia, the combination of colors forming a most dramatic entrance to a city. My breath came more quickly when I realized that at some unpredictable moment I would turn a bend in the road and see once more that city which had been so often in my mind and so deeply in my heart. I was actually nervous at the prospect, but then the river turned abruptly and I saw before me, on a hill in the distance, the outlines of Teruel, and I remember thinking, Those buildings to the left and those big apartments to the right. They weren’t here when I knew the place. And the more I saw the more I realized that Teruel was not going to be the way it had been thirty-four years ago; the changes were to be of a magnitude that I would sometimes be unable to comprehend.

  But then, as if to make my return to this mystical city simpler, on my left I came upon a cluster of five once-handsome buildings, now torn and roofless, their yellow bricks crumbling in the night air. They looked as if they must have been there when I was first in Teruel, but some tremendous force had ripped them apart, say an artillery bombardment during the Civil War. What had they been, these handsome structures? And why so many in one group? A convent? A monastery caught in the cross fire of armies? I stopped three passers-by, old men walking home from their work, but they did not know.

  In considerable excitement I entered the city, and my first superficial impressions allayed my fears on the road, for Teruel looked pretty much as I had remembered it. The railroad climbing the mountains from Valencia still deposited passengers at the foot of that splendid flight of stairs. The Moorish towers, the finest still standing in Europe, were as handsome as ever in their coats of tile. The public square was still small and poorly designed and congested. And from his Roman tower the bull of Teruel still looked down upon the community of which he was the symbol. As I paid my acknowledgments to the bull, I thought of the strange manner in which this city had been born, because Teruel is one of the few settlements on earth whose moment of birth can be specified.

  Teruel is a young city, not much older than Madrid, and it is small. Its birth had been auspicious but there things ended, for it was now the least of Spain’s fifty provincial capitals, with less than nineteen thousand population. In October, 1171, when El Cid had been dead for three-quarters of a century, King Alfonso II was endeavoring to establish a defensible frontier between Christian Zaragoza and Moorish Valencia; one evening his troops decided to give battle next morning at a favorable spot marked by a hill; but the Moors offset his advantage by collecting that night a herd of wild bulls and fastening to their horns bundles of firewood which were set ablaze. The maddened bulls stampeded toward the Christian lines, with the Moors following behind. In previous battles this tactic had worked, for in the confusion caused by the fiery animals the mounted Moors had overwhelmed the Christians.

  But this time Alfonso’s men stood fast, and with catapults which lobbed boulders at the onrushing bulls, with long half-moon lances that severed their hamstrings, with pikemen who formed solid walls of spear points, the onslaught was repulsed. Infidel power was broken in the area and it would now be possible to establish a permanent border between the two forces. It was a crucial victory.

  While celebrating, the victorious Christians saw a sight which became the symbol of their triumph: one bull, the only survivor of the stampede, remained on the crest of the hill, shaking his head at the heavens in such a way that the brand still burning miraculously between his horns shone as if it was a star. ‘He has been converted to our side!’ the Christians shouted, and the hill which the bull had chosen for his last stand became the site of Teruel.

  The next thing I did proved symbolic. I got a haircut at the barbershop of Maximiano Gómez, Calle del Mariano, 12, which was an event of no importance except that as soon as Maximiano heard that I was interested in Teruel, he stopped cutting my hair, ran to a friend’s house and brought back a pamphlet on the city, which he insisted that I take and for which he would accept no money. ‘I want you to have the best visit possible in my city,’ he said. ‘It’s small and during the war it was much abused. But now it’s fine again.’ This meeting with Maximiano set the standard for all that was to happen to me in my chosen city.

  On my earlier visit I had stayed at a small hotel; this time a new parador was available, and in its dining room I was introduced to a speciality which I commend. The menu said simply ‘Entremeses variados,’ which from my attendance at theater I could translate only as ‘Theatrical entr’actes varied.’

  Teruel today from a bunker of yesterday.

  ‘What might they be?’ I asked the waitress, and she smiled condescendingly as if I were a relative come in from the country.

  ‘You don’t know what entremeses are?’ she said loudly enough for all in the room to hear, and without waiting to determine whether or not I wanted them she hurried into the kitchen and appeared sometime later with an enormous tray, from which she placed on my table, for me alone, twenty-one small saucers, each with a respectable portion of hot or cold food. It was a feast both to the palate and the eye. There were four kinds of fish, three meats including little balls of mutton highly spiced, eggs in aspic, four or five vegetables including the finest fried eggplant, olives, pickles, pimientos, potato salad, potato chips and hot toasted almonds. And it must be remembered that entremeses were merely the first dish of a four-course meal.

  Next day my bland good luck continued, for I met Señor Don Francisco Cortel Zuriaga, a native of Teruel and for the past fourteen years its director of publicity. He was a lively man of middle years and height, with a dark mustache and grayish brown hair; his stocky, rugged appearance made me think his ancestors must have come from the mountains of Spain. He could not be considered a literary man, but he possessed an unusual sense of what a writer might like to see, and he would not rest until it had been seen.

  ‘You know the Lovers of Teruel, of course?’

  ‘No, I haven’t heard about them.’

  His jaw dropped. ‘You were in Teruel thirty years ago and you didn’t meet the Lovers?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  This information was so disgusting to Don Francisco, so incredible, to judge from his reaction, that he sent out tor a guidebook and sat twirling his thumbs while I read the section on the Lovers. As soon as I had done so, he whisked me out of his office and across the square to a narrow alleyway that led up a small hill. ‘No man can know anything about Teruel unless he understands the Lovers.’ He took me to a tiny chapel attached to a church and there, as we stood surrounded by the tapestries that enclosed the place, he showed me a pair of marble tombs, one topped by the jacent statue of a handsome young man, the other by a girl of most exquisite beauty.

  The bull of Teruel.

  As I contemplated the tombs, Don Francisco was on his knees with his eyes at floor level. ‘See for yourself. Not legends, these two. Real people.’

  He invited me to kneel with him, and when I had done so I found that the lower portions of the tombs consisted of slabs of marble carved in an ornate geometrical design; it had many holes through which I could see into the caskets, lit by electricity and containing the mummies of the Lovers, dead for more than seven centuries.

  As I knelt there, a bus drew up and thirty or forty tourists from a distant part of Spain filed into the little chapel to pay homage to the only two people who have ever brought fame to Teruel, and I should like to report the history pretty much as the singsong guide recited it to the visiting group.

  ‘The year was 1217, Don Domingo Celada being judge of Teruel. In his city were two noble and influential families, Segura and Marcilla. Daughter of the first was th
e beautiful Isabel, whom you see here. Son of the second was the brave Diego over there. From the days when they played together as children they loved each other, but Diego’s family had fallen on hard times and was poor, wherefore Isabel’s father, the richest man in town, forbade their union.

  ‘However, Diego sought and obtained an agreement whereby he would leave Teruel and for five years try to build his fortune in the world, at the end of which time, if he had succeeded, he would return and wed Isabel. With the fire of youth he left the city, and since no one heard from him for the next five years, at the expiration of the term the head of the Segura family forced his daughter to marry the very rich Don Pedro de Azagra of nearby Albarracín, the hill town which we visited this morning.

  ‘The wedding was convened. The couple were married, but as the bells ceased ringing, there was a clatter at the Zaragoza gate and watchmen ran to advise the townspeople that Diego Marcilla had returned from his five years’ exile with great riches, ready to marry his beloved. Diego had not counted in his five years’ grace that first day on which he had fled Teruel. Isabel’s family had.

  ‘The young man ran to Isabel and pleaded with her to marry him, but she pointed out that this was impossible as she already had a husband. Diego then begged her to give him one kiss which he could bear with him as he wandered through the world. This, too, Isabel refused, whereupon, as a book in our archives reports, “Diego was not able to bear the anguish and tension of his enforced departure, and with a sigh died from pain at the feet of her.”

  ‘Next day, at this church of San Pedro his funeral services were held, to which Isabel came, dressed in her wedding gown. Silently she walked down the nave and advanced to the bier, where she knelt in order to give Diego the kiss which in life she had denied him, but as she did so, she died, falling prostrate upon the corpse of her beloved.’

  The two deaths from love, something never before heard of, so impressed Teruel that the citizens demanded that Isabel and Diego be buried side by side in the church, and it is surprising to find that the religious authorities acceded to this improper demand. Throughout Spain and the medieval world sped the fame of the Lovers of Teruel, and during repairs made to the church in 1560, the graves of the couple were uncovered and their mummies translated to the spot where they now rest.

  Naturally, the authenticity of a tale like this was bound to be challenged in later years, especially since the Italian Boccaccio in 1353 told practically the same tale under the title ‘Girolamo e Salvestra,’ except that he introduced considerable salacious and amusing material. The question thus became: did Boccaccio in 1353 hear reports of an event which actually happened in Teruel in 1217 and adapt it to his pen, or did someone from Teruel in 1400 happen upon the tale of Boccaccio’s and adopt it as a local legend? Powerful minds have addressed themselves to this problem, and for some decades at the beginning of this century it was pretty well agreed that the yarn had originated with Boccaccio.

  But recently this conclusion has been subjected to serious review, and in 1963 Señor Don Jaime Caruana Gómez de Barreda, cronista of Teruel, summarized all available studies and offered substantial reasons for believing that the tale had originated in real events which occurred in Teruel as stated, in the year 1217, when Don Domingo Celada was judge. (One wonders what might have happened to the cronista’s job had he concluded otherwise.) An aspect of the argument that has carried much weight with me is one which I have not seen in print in any books relating to the lovers. I offer it to Professor Caruana for consideration in his next edition: When a story is told in two different versions, only one of which stresses erotic elements, it is likely that the more erotic version came second; specifically, it is difficult to find instances in which popular taste borrowed an erotic tale from a professional writer and retold it with the erotic elements missing. Applying this tentative theory, it is unlikely that the simple folk of Teruel borrowed a naughty tale from Boccaccio and cleaned it up in their retelling; whereas it would be within reason for a sophisticated writer like Boccaccio to borrow a sentimental folk tale emanating from Teruel and to introduce erotic elements in his version. It therefore seems probable that it was Boccaccio who did the borrowing and the ‘sexing-up,’ as Hollywood terms it. Other curious reasonings supporting the authenticity of the Teruel version can be found in Professor Caruana’s book.

  In recent years Teruel, aware that it had on its hands one of the top attractions of Spain, enclosed the mummies unearthed in 1560 in a reverent new chapel and engaged the sculptor Juan de Avalos to fashion the two new tombs which we have seen. In doing so, he created a masterpiece of popular art. The caskets are made of grained marble and emblazoned with shields of the Segura and Marcilla families, but it is the lids that draw the crowds. On the Marcilla casket Diego lies, very tall, barefooted, sallow-cheeked and handsome. His hand reaches out across the open space separating the two and almost touches Isabel’s, but not quite; religious propriety would not permit him to do so since Isabel was already married. Isabel’s figure, draped in a loose-flowing gown, her fair head resting on two pillows, is one of the most charming portraits carved in recent years, and what is surprising, one of the sexiest. Indubitably she is a woman; indubitably she is lovely. As Don Francisco says, ‘Whether the Lovers lived or not, I want to believe they did.’ And so, apparently, does most of Spain.

  There are, of course, dissenters. Schoolchildren herded in to see the mummies sing a blasphemous little jingle:

  Los Amantes de Teruel

  Tonta ella y tonto el.

  Reversing the order of the last line so that it conforms to the chronology, this might be translated:

  Ah, the Lovers of Teruel,

  He was a dope and she as well.

  Without being aware of what I was letting myself in for, when I returned to the parador I studied the various books Don Francisco had brought me, and in cronista Caruana’s essay I came upon the passage in which he tries to explain why the Italian Boccaccio, hundreds of miles away from the scene, had dealt with the strange deaths, whereas no one in Teruel had even so much as mentioned them in writing until a good three hundred years later: ‘In Teruel nothing was written during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, nothing that had any literary character, neither a novel, nor a poem, nor any other form or genre of literature … Naturally, since Teruel had neither a great poet nor a literary man of any quality, no one sang or conserved the true happenings in the epic or lyric form which such a tradition merited.’

  That night I lay awake, pondering the case of a city in which for three hundred years no one wrote anything of merit, and I wondered what the citizens of that city had visualized their major responsibility to be. It would be difficult to find another city of nineteen thousand in which, during three centuries of vast change and heroic impulse, no one had written anything or painted anything or composed anything, especially when one of the most compelling natural incidents in world literature had occurred was introduced to a speciality which I commend. The menu said simply ‘Entremeses variados,’ which from my attendance at theater I could translate only as ‘Theatrical entr’actes varied.’

  Teruel today from a bunker of yesterday.

  ‘What might they be?’ I asked the waitress, and she smiled condescendingly as if I were a relative come in from the country.

  ‘You don’t know what entremeses are?’ she said loudly enough for all in the room to hear, and without waiting to determine whether or not I wanted them she hurried into the kitchen and appeared sometime later with an enormous tray, from which she placed on my table, for me alone, twenty-one small saucers, each with a respectable portion of hot or cold food. It was a feast both to the palate and the eye. There were four kinds of fish, three meats including little balls of mutton highly spiced, eggs in aspic, during his five years’ absence and for a couple of hours I wasted my time devising an explanation for this lacuna; finally I recalled that every writer who had dealt with the legend after Boccaccio had ruined his story through bo
thering about what the boy had done during these years. Whoever had told the story originally had hit upon an idea that could not be improved: ‘After five years’ adventuring in the great world, Diego returned to Teruel, entering by the Zaragoza gate.’ Take it or leave it; he was absent for five years and he came back.

  What was important, I realized, was not the detail but the universal fact that young men leave their villages in search of adventure that will make them famous or success that will make them rich, and the problem for the storyteller was to reflect the permanence of this theme. At about five in the morning, as dawn was breaking, I began to visualize the Zaragoza gate as it must have been in the Middle Ages. Now, when Diego left Teruel on his five years’ pilgrimage I could hear the stones of the gate admonishing him, saying that they had watched many young men leave on missions such as his and that the fame they had sought proved meaningless; the riches they had won were unrewarding, for the love they had abandoned would not be recaptured.

  Like most men, on the rare occasions when I am kept awake through a night I fall asleep at dawn, but on this long night I didn’t, for the dialogue of the stones preoccupied me during several more hours, after which I began pondering how a medieval writer might have depicted the triumphant homecoming, and I was thrown into a Greek-chorus type of passage in which the stones of the Zaragoza gate both welcome him as their long-absent son and comment on his journey, and I was winging away for another two hours. When I finally went down to breakfast the people I was with said, ‘Michener, you look all beat up. Where have you been?’ I replied, ‘If I told you, you wouldn’t believe it,’ for I had spent my night at the Zaragoza gate.