Iberia

by James A. Michener

  This year the following lectures were to be offered:

  The Cult of the Bull in Navarra, in Spanish

  St. James and Charlemagne in Legend, in French

  The Way of St. James in Italian Culture, in Italian

  Islamic Eschatology in the Sculpture at Compostela, in Spanish

  The Way of St. James in Portugal, by Dr. José Filgueira-Valverde, alcalde of Pontevedra, whom we shall meet later

  On this bright morning Don Francisco took me to the high plateau of El Puy, where on the night of May 25, 1085, occurred once more the familiar miracle: two shepherds saw a group of lights which formed themselves into a star. They said nothing, but on successive nights the star reappeared; so they warned the authorities, who as usual dug at the indicated spot, this time coming up with a delectable wide-eyed statue of the Virgin. The archaic and highly pleasing statue is now enshrined in one of the most beautiful churches, in Spain, a silken web of a building constructed of slim stone pillars and wood in 1930 to replace an older one and to show how the Gothic style can be adapted to modern tastes. As one might guess, stars of various size dominate the interior: on the backs of benches, in the chandeliers, on the candlesticks, in the cupola over the ancient statue of the Virgin and in the wooden ceiling. The Virgin of El Puy, as she is called, has always been an object of extreme veneration and in her bright new home, is more so.

  But this morning we did not talk about this old pilgrim shrine, because Señor Beruete had other things on his mind. ‘Is there a more exciting spot in Spain than this?’ he asked. ‘Below us the little city with its great wealth of monuments which the pilgrims knew. Around us the rim of hills and small mountains which have always been the protection of Estella. And everywhere the echoing march of pilgrims’ feet, by the thousands and thousands, as they came into this important stopping point.’

  ‘If I had to choose one year which represented Estella at its height,’ I asked, ‘which would you suggest?’

  Señor Beruete is a congenial man whose love for the old days shimmers in his eyes, and now he grew excited as he talked. ‘Imagine you are approaching the city in the year 1262, when pilgrimage was at its height. Last night you slept at Puente la Reina and early this morning you crossed the bridge. Now as you enter Estella you pass a circle of stout walls and find fourteen separate hospitals and dormitories awaiting you. If you should be Jewish, as many of the business travelers were, you’d find over in that quarter a fine synagogue. It’s a church now, Santa María Jus del Castillo, but in 1262 it was the center of a Jewish quarter which occupied much of the city. But I suppose you’d be a Christian, so you’d walk down the Street of the Pilgrims, which still stands, and ask at the plaza, which today looks exactly as it did then, for the best place to stay. If you were a Frenchman, you’d be sure to halt before the carving on the Palace of the Kings of Navarra showing Roland jousting with Moor Ferragut. Oldest representation of Roland in the world. And as you stood staring at it, some fellow Frenchman would take you in charge.

  ‘What did you look like in 1262? You wore very heavy shoes and would probably wear out two pairs walking to Santiago. You wore a linen undershirt with a heavy woolen robe over it. And you displayed the four essentials. Long staff. Gourd. Big hat and cockleshells.’

  ‘How many pilgrims a year might have reached Estella in those days?’

  ‘We had, as I say, fourteen separate establishments for them within the city, and outside the walls a series of large monasteries. On some days a thousand arrived, on others less than a hundred. Who can estimate the total? Perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand, year in and year out. We do know that in 1965, which was a special holy year for Compostela, two and a half million pilgrims appeared at Compostela, but of course they didn’t all pass through Estella. Eight hundred thousand, perhaps.’

  He led me down into the town and to the church of San Miguel, built around 1200, and there I was to see a carving which captivated me. The door of San Miguel presents the typical Romanesque arch composed of five receding semicircles, each containing a wealth of carving and a chain of human figures. Some critics have called it Spain’s major Romanesque work, but I prefer the portico we shall be visiting at Compostela. Here the door is guarded by a large stone panel depicting the Three Marys at the tomb of Jesus. The stone drapery of these figures is extraordinary and the gestures of the women so real that many critics consider this plaque the masterpiece of the doorway, but it was a less conspicuous part that attracted me.

  The pillars which support the semicircles are topped by capitals adorned with scenes from the life of Christ. The one which appealed to me was the scene showing King Herod at the moment when his scribes are endeavoring to unravel the significance of the birth of Jesus. It is a tableau so brilliant, so handsomely preserved and so psychologically sound that it seems a marvel. The capital has two faces at right angles to each other, and on the left-hand face a worried soldier reports what has happened at Bethlehem. On the right-hand face two excellently differentiated scribes consult the omens, while on the corner where the two faces meet, a worried King Herod ponders the news. The face of Herod is as fine as anything I have seen in stone, a masterful presentation of a bewildered and anxious king.

  Some years earlier, in preparation for a work in hand, I had read almost everything in print about this ugly and fascinating king, and I suppose I then knew him as well as a layman could; but nothing I encountered gave me a better understanding of Herod than I acquired from this statue in Estella. The variation between the two faces of the stone, the penetrating quality of the human countenances and the subtle arrangement of the tense bodies make this one of the finest statuary groups I have seen, and for me it surpasses even the Three Marys.

  Estella is so rich in such monuments that one could spend days here, tracing the secrets which have come down to us from the Middle Ages, but at lunch a stray question of mine catapulted us out of the pilgrim days and into the present. The lunch itself was commendable: savory snails in garlic sauce, followed by lima beans cooked with quail. The latter was so good that I would have been content to accept it as hors d’oeuvres, main dish and dessert in one; the squab was flavored with strong country herbs and the beans were so tasty and mellow that they seemed a different breed from the unsavory ones I had known elsewhere, but the meal ended with trout Navarrese, a large firm fish sautéed with bits of very salty ham. When I had finished I asked, ‘Am I confused about this? I seem to remember that Primo de Rivera, the dictator of the 1920s, bore the title Marques de Estella. Did he come from this town?’

  I had asked the right question. ‘How astonishing!’ Señor Beruete cried, his eyes alight with excitement. ‘It was my grandfather, defending the city of Estella in 1876, who had the ugly task of confronting General Primo de Rivera. Same name but uncle of the dictator. The government forces were bent upon destroying Estella, which had given Madrid much trouble, but my grandfather worked out a plan whereby the city was surrendered without too much destruction. Because of his victory Primo de Rivera was made Marqués de Estella, a title which passed on to his nephew. José Antonio inherited the title and was Marqués de Estella when he was executed by the Republicans.’

  ‘What was the war about?’

  ‘Carlists,’ Señor Beruete said, and that was all.

  It was a touchy subject, for Estella had been the capital of Carlist agitations in Spain and on several occasions had led in civil wars against Madrid. The trouble was deep-rooted and began in this way. In 1700, when the Habsburg line died out in the person of Carlos the Bewitched, Europe agreed to the installation of the Borbón, in the person of Felipe V, but only if it was understood that the Spanish and French thrones must never be united under one ruler. To give effect to this undertaking, Felipe V in 1813, as part of the Treaty of Utrecht, which we met earlier when discussing Gibraltar, took public steps to abrogate ancient Spanish custom whereby women like the great Isabel had ruled, and to substitute therefor the French Salic law, which excluded females from the inherita
nce. So that his intentions could not later be misconstrued, Felipe announced, ‘I ask the formation of a new law to govern the inheritance of this monarchy by the male line rather than the female, preferring that the most remote male descendant of a male, be always put before the closest female and her descendants.’ As an additional safeguard against the French it was decreed that to be eligible, any heir must have been born in Spain.

  In 1788, when the danger of French meddling had receded, Carlos IV was allowed to take the throne, even though he had been born in Naples, but to be on the safe side he asked the Cortes to annul the Salic law without announcing this fact to the general public, and this was done by the step known as the Pragmatic Sanction of 1789. Spain, although not aware of it at the time, was once more governed by its own ancient customs and a female could inherit the throne.

  So things continued until 1808, when Carlos IV abdicated, leaving behind two sons, Fernando, who became king, and Carlos, who had to be content with the insignificant role usually accorded royal younger sons. Fernando married three times without producing an heir, so it was understood that when he died his brother Carlos would become king; but Fernando, although decrepit and debauched, took a fourth wife who astonished Spain by quickly producing a daughter. Now who was entitled to the throne when Fernando died, his brother Carlos in conformity to Salic law, or his daughter Isabel in accordance with old Spanish custom?

  Fernando had compounded the confusion by first announcing, when it seemed likely that he would have no heir, that the inheritance should be governed by Salic law; but when his young wife became pregnant with her unborn child, who might well turn out to be a daughter, he changed his mind and informed the public of the existence of the secret Pragmatic Sanction of 1789, which restored the old Spanish tradition and thus legalized the succession of his daughter. Before his death he changed his mind several more times, back and forth until no one could say where the law rested, and a real uncertainty gripped Spain; but at his death the partisans of his three-year-old daughter were in positions of command and were able to install the child as Queen Isabel II, with effective control resting in a regency. Such a theft of the throne the followers of Carlos could not tolerate, so the fuse of the Carlist rebellion was lighted.

  I have dealt in some detail with this matter of the technical succession to the throne as a cause of Carlism, and of course the rebellion was legally rooted there, but many historians feel that this was merely a cover for what was in fact a revolution to the right in Spanish politics. Fernando VII was about as absolutist as a king could be—one British historian calls him ‘the most contemptible monarch ever to occupy the throne of Spain’—but even he was not reactionary enough to satisfy the social and religious fanatics of the north, who had developed a four-pronged mystique: dedication to the principle of legitimacy as interpreted by the Salic law; a profound commitment to Catholicism as the one basic principle on which Spain existed; a preference for an absolutist and theocratic form of government (when Fernando assumed the throne they had shouted, ‘Death to liberty and long live the absolutist Fernando’); and a determination to force the reinstitution of the Inquisition, which they described as ‘that most august tribune, brought down by angels from heaven to earth.’

  By a curious accident of history, this religious movement coincided with the separatist movements of regions like Cataluña, Navarra and the Basque lands, so that many strands were tangled in the Carlist flag and no one could be sure of what a given group stood for. The bulk of Spain was moving along lines directly opposed to the Carlists, except for the plank of fidelity to the Catholic Church, so it is not surprising that the Carlists lost their wars. But during the progress of the fight they did create a northern militia, the Requetés, who wore red berets and who were probably the best troops Spain had produced since the 1500s.

  The outnumbered Requetés lost their uprisings in 1833–1840 and 1870–1876, but in 1936, when they found that General Franco and his rebellious generals had views close to theirs, it was the Requetés who stormed to Franco’s aid, defeating the Republicans in one crucial battle after another. Indeed, without these shock troops trained originally as Carlists, Franco might not have won, so in a real sense Carlist ideals did eventually triumph. Ironically, they seem to have helped their bitter enemies, the non-Carlist side of the royal family, back to the throne, for it is the legitimate descendants of Fernando VII and Isabel II, the daughter whom the Carlists opposed, who appear to be in line for the crown, although which of the descendants will get it no one knows. Prince Juan de Borbón, born in 1913 as the son of Alfonso XIII, now lives, as we have seen, in exile in Estoril, near Lisboa. During World War II, while Franco inclined toward the Germany-Italy-Japan Axis, Juan openly backed the Allies, thus surrendering much of the support he could have had in the present regime. His handsome but weak-willed son, Prince Juan Carlos, was born in 1938 and has since been a virtual prisoner of Franco in Madrid. He is generally understood to be Franco’s choice for the throne, although a secret vote among top army officers showed that they preferred the young man’s father, Prince Juan. The Carlists seem further removed from the throne than they were in 1833. The direct descendants of the original Carlos lived in exile in France and Austria until 1936, when the last of the line was struck by a police van while crossing a street in Vienna. He died childless, but a few months before, he had issued a document which designated a nephew, Xavier de Bourbon Parma, as his legitimate heir, and this man’s son, Hugo Carlos, who recently made news by marrying Princess Irene of Holland, is now the Carlist claimant. Thus Juan Carlos and his Greek wife Sophia have the inside track for the throne, but the hopes of Hugo Carlos and his Dutch bride are kept tenuously alive.

  Each year on the mountains back of Estella, the Carlists of northern Spain convene in almost Druidic rites of dedication to the cause of placing their contender on the throne, and it has perplexed many as to why Franco has allowed these demonstrations. Some claim that like a canny emperor he allows first one potential successor and then another to grow strong. As we saw in Madrid, he appears to prefer Juan Carlos and Sophia of Greece but is said to be impressed by the Carlist plank: ‘Old-fashioned respect for established principles rather than adherence to so-called new legislation.’ But he must be alienated by the Carlists’ final plank: ‘The various distinct regions with their traditional laws and liberties to exist in a federation.’ This is northern separatism under a new name, and Franco will have none of it.

  The eight windows above are reflections only.

  This is the kind of anachronism that flourishes in Estella, and normally I would be opposed, but I found that I liked Estella precisely because it had always been such an ornery little town. If you read the history of this part of Spain, it becomes a repetitious account of how people who were against the government holed up in Estella and fought it out when all others had surrendered. When Fernando and Isabel decreed the expulsion of Jews from Spain, Estella refused to abide by the edict and gave them refuge. When Navarra was subordinated to central authority, it was Estella that led the banner of revolt. King after king broke his front teeth on this stubborn principality, and not even the Moors were able to destroy it. ‘For two hundred years the Muslims occupied that mountain over there,’ Señor Beruete says proudly, ‘and we remained Christian in this valley, and never were they able to cross the river and subdue us.’ How many sieges did the walls of Estella repulse? It must have been in the dozens. How many times did it resist overwhelming moral pressures? Ten at least. How many times did it go down to defeat still fighting? A good many. One king hauled his cannon right to the top of a nearby hill and fired point-blank into the city for a week, knocking down churches and cloisters, but still the people of Estella defied him. I can admire such a city, even if I do not share its chauvinism.

  Of Logroño, I have only the vaguest recollections, but they are most amiable. My ignorance can be blamed only on my friend, Don Luis Morenés, Marqués de Bassecourt, whom we have already seen hunting in Las Mar
ismas and working in the government at Madrid. On my first pilgrimage to Compostela I had been accompanied by Don Luis, and to travel through Spain with him is an experience for anyone who might have believed that Spaniards were indolent.

  Don Luis had us up at seven, offered us a standard Spanish breakfast of one roll and tea, then started us off to the next halting place on the pilgrims’ route. All morning we explored the secrets of this dusty and historic path; rarely did we hold to paved roads and rarely have I worked so hard. Since I took no breakfast, I preferred to lunch, but then we were usually in the midst of work, which would continue till about three in the afternoon.

  At this time we would head for the nearest large town, where a deputation of scholars would be awaiting us, and for an hour or so we would discuss what we had seen that morning. At four we would sit down to lunch, but the first hour would be occupied with drinks and further talk about the Way of St. James. At five we would eat, remaining at the table till seven, when Don Luis would shepherd us to a further series of towns whose scholars waited in the dark. At eleven we would reach our halting place for the night, and our dinner would be served about midnight, with more drinks and more fine conversation. At two we would retire, and at seven Don Luis would be waiting in the breakfast room with that cold roll and lukewarm tea. I doubt if any of the twelfth-century pilgrims worked as hard as I did under the lash of the marques, and I am sure none could have seen so much of the road.

  Well, at Logroño, which I am told is a fine-looking city, the lunch was long delayed but the wait was worth it, for in the interim I was introduced to one of the glories of Spain, the red wine of Rioja. It takes its name from a geographical district bordering a river, but of only one thing am I sure: the grapes that grow in this district have received a special dispensation which enables them to produce as fine an ordinary wine as any I have ever tasted. I liked it as much as the great Châteauneuf du Pape, which I came upon years ago in Avignon and which I have cherished ever since, discovering bottles in strange and out-of-the-way places, for Châteauneuf is widely valued by those who have encountered it.