by Jan Morris
Nobody can be kinder than the Spaniard, with his overriding love of children, his lack of envy, his guileless courtesy. The Spanish crime rate today is still among the lowest in Europe, and there is probably no country, outside Hunza or the Sherpa provinces, where the visitor can feel so generally certain that the change will be correct and the price honest. Spain is often an irritating country, but rarely seems spiteful: even traffic accidents, for all the world’s conception of Spanish volatility, do not usually degenerate into violent tempers.
Even so, it is less than half a century since the blood ran down the Spanish gutters, since this very same kindly people murdered one another, burnt its own churches, martyred its own priests, slaughtered many an inoffensive woman, and proved that the Spanish fury was still a fact of life. Perhaps violence goes with simplicity. If so, Spain will harbour her reputation for many a long year yet, for as long as the mules pace her mountain tracks and the Algerian Owl looks down, all goggle-eyes and hauteur, upon the Edible Dormouse.
7 The Soldiers
War is a vocation of the Spaniards. They have lately enjoyed a long period of peace, but this is a rarity in their history, which is punctuated always by conflict. Their country is a castle, moated and ramparted, and inside it citadels are everywhere, giving it all a military air. There are resplendent castles on hilltops, like the shimmer of Vélez Blanco in Andalusia, part of whose inside was ripped out in 1903, and shipped to New York. There are Christmas-cake castles, all turrets and drawbridges, like the ineffable Coca near Segovia—every boy’s idea of a proper fortress. There are museum-castles, like Belmonte, south of Cuenca, whose janitor will wave you goodbye all the way down the long ramp of the fosse, only interrupting himself to consult his great gold watch to see if it is nearly closing time. There are trim private castles perched on humps, and there are sprawling Moorish castles, supervising white cities of the south, or peering rheumily down strategic valleys. There are castles that are still castles, with guns protruding from their loopholes, and frowning soldiers in their sentry-boxes. There are castles that are hotels, like the splendid fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo, near the Portuguese frontier. There are castles that are villages, like the quaint stronghold of Guadalest, near Benidorm, whose walk are full of houses, whose keep is the cemetery, and whose church belfry stands so high upon the ramparts that a long rope is left trailing down to the alley below, for the convenience of the bell-ringer. There are castles that are university departments, like the picture-postcard fortress of Peñíscola, on the Valencian coast, which has been beautifully done up with plate glass and panelling, and is garrisoned by foreign students. There are impeccable round castles like the one above Palma, in Majorca; there are shapeless crumbled castles, like old decayed teeth in the hills; there are castles so grand that the whole world knows them, like the Alhambra, and castles so unassuming that you have to look hard down back streets before you find them at all. The castles of Spain are lieutenants to her cathedrals. Castile itself is called after them, and their name has gone into half the languages of Europe: a castle in Spain is what the ambitious Crusader dreamt of, when he fastened his greaves to go to war.
They remind us that Spain was forged in battle. Her castles were frontier fortresses, pushed southwards century by century as the Moors were expelled, and the Spanish kings moved their capitals from front to front. Civil war has been a commonplace of Spanish history, and there are not many Spanish cities that do not boast of some heroic episode in the past, or cannot flaunt some warlike royal motto: Very Noble (says Seville’s, for instance), Very Loyal, Very Heroic and Invincible. Scarcely a corner of Spain has not been a battlefield, at one time or another, and Spanish soldiers served not only on Hadrian’s Wall, against the barbarians, but also with the Nazis in Russia, against the atheists. ‘Back to the struggle,’ wrote Byron of the Spaniards, ‘baffled in the strife, War, war is still the cry, War even to the knife!’
Even now Spain seems a country of soldiers, military in a kind that is almost obsolete elsewhere in the Western world. There are jet aircraft in Spain, of course, and American naval bases, and spanking little radar domes, perched upon high vantage-points, that are part of the Western defence system. The Spanish armed forces, though, both in their manner and their vast numbers, seem to spring from the huge conscript armies of yesterday, as though nuclear bombs have not yet entered the Spanish strategic assessments, and battleships are still the thing. All the scenes of old fashioned military life, such as are portrayed in nineteenth-century Russian paintings, can be seen in the flesh in Spain. Here are the reluctant conscripts, shouldering their first kit-bags, parading raggedly in the town square to a shouting of sergeants and the sniffing of a few disconsolate mothers. Here are the generals, leaving their swanky hotels in a cloud of flags, aides-de-camp, bowing managers and befurred women. Here you may see the draft on the railway station, waiting for a connection that is two hours late, their caps tilted over their eyes, their feet propped up in heavy boots, on their faces an expression of glazed fatalism, in their hands a pack of dirty cards. Here a parade comes down the road, bound for an exercise or an inspection, led by an equestrian colonel with drawn sword, and marching as though death or glory really were the immediate alternatives. The officer of Spain is still a proud and gaudy figure, even if he is sometimes to be seen, after duty, chugging off on a motor-bike to his afternoon job at the bank. The ships of Spain still put out to sea in a fine flurry of ensigns, trumpetcalls, and traditional goings-on. The troops who man the northern bastions, like Jaca in Navarre, or Seo de Urgel below the pass from Andorra, stand to their guns in postures so theatrically watchful that you might suppose the legions of France had already packed their palliasses to cross the Pyrenees. Outside a barracks in Avila I once saw a soldier, in a superb cameo of old-school military custom, actually place his bugle bell-down upon the ground in order to water the orderly-room flower-bed.
It is easy to laugh—the Spaniards were withdrawn from the world so long that in many ways they have a Victorian look. The Spanish forces may seem archaic, but nobody has recently doubted their ability to fight, and in Spain the profession of arms commands a special kind of esteem. Cervantes was a soldier, and so was St. Ignatius, who organized his Jesuits on rigidly military lines. St. Theresa wished she could go to war, Velázquez loved the military aesthetic. The poet Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga wrote some of his best lyrics on his saddle-pommel, the poet Jorge Manrique was killed during the storming of a Moorish castle in La Mancha, the poet Garcilaso de la Vega died while assaulting a stronghold in France. Lope de Vega wrote eleven thousand lines of epic verse while at sea with the Spanish Armada. Calderón the dramatist was granted a pension for gallantry in action against Catalan rebels. In Spain St. James is honoured first as the soldier he never was, and only secondly as the missionary he wasn’t either. This is a soldier’s country through and through, and if ever the flags ceased to fly above those castles, or even the orderly-room flowers to blossom beneath the watering can, Spain would be Spain no more.
It was war of the most swashbuckling kind that gave her that one moment of supremacy, early in the sixteenth century, ushering her once and for all into the ranks of the great nations. It was not really her first experience of a New World: the Reconquest itself had been a pioneering process, as immense empty territories were captured and settled with Christian colonists from the north. The Spanish exploit in the Americas, however, was one of the most astonishing adventures in the whole history of mankind, and brilliantly demonstrated the martial genius of this people.
If you travel north-eastwards from the Coto Doñana, across the Sierra Morena and the wastelands of Estremadura, you will presently come to the town of Trujillo, where the conquistador Pizarro was born. It greets you with some rotted ramparts, and to reach its central plaza you must wind a cautious way through narrow overhung lanes, cramped, dark and shabby. At first it does not feel in the least imperial, but before very long the alley broadens, you pass between a pair of tottering mansions, th
e sun suddenly blazes in your eyes, and there before you in the wide square stands a statue of Francisco Pizarro. The moment when you see this thing, when you burst out of the shadow into the dazzling sunlight of the plaza, to find that old adventurer gigantic upon his horse, head up, beard jutting, and helmet-plumes astream—this sudden moment at Trujillo is, at least to my tastes, one of the supreme revelations of Spanish travel. It was Pizarro, you will remember, who overthrew the Incas in one of the most outrageously audacious campaigns ever undertaken—183 men against an Empire!—who established Spanish authority in Peru, and who ruled the country himself with such arrogance that in the end he was murdered in his own palace, tracing in his blood on the floor, as he died, the sign of the Cross.
This tale comes instantly to life, as his statue challenges you there—with all the flare and effrontery of the conquistadores, all the marvellous dash, the cruelty and the blinkered faith, the colossal gambles and the unbelievable prizes, Pizarro in Trujillo sums it all up. The remains of his ancestral home lie up the hill, and one of those mansions on the corner of the square, with a vast coat-of-arms upon its corner-stone, belongs still to his putative descendant—whose title, such was the grandiloquence of those terrible old greathearts, is Marquis of the Conquest. As for the statue itself, it is only proper that there should be a replica of it in the Plaza de los Reyes in Lima; and even more appropriate that, by a happy quirk of sculpture, the conquistador is brandishing a formidable sword, but is provided with no scabbard.
Estremadura was pre-eminently the country of the adventurers, for many of them went to the New World specifically to escape its deadening poverty and parochialism. Often they returned rich, and the region is full of their memorials, poignant reminders of Spain’s brief dominion of the world. The old part of Cáceres, that city of the storks, is embellished everywhere with the heraldry of imperial nouveaux-riches, whose principal object of retirement seems to have been to bask in titled superiority to the family next door. Elsewhere in Spain, too, the empire-builders have left their crumbling mark. There is a small village in Aragón, called Corella, which is scarcely visited by strangers from one year to the next, but which is strikingly redolent of imperial activities: almost every big house boasts some memory of the New World—in this one was born a Governor of Peru, in that a famous general died—and half of them bear the escutcheons of families ennobled by the course of empire. Cuenca, that curious cliff-top city of Castile, has especially pungent memories of the conquistadores: most of its mansions, now sadly dingy, were built with American gold, and it was to this cold and froward city, whose most famous inhabitant was Torrealba the great wizard, that the last of the Aztec royal princes, Don Pedro, was brought to die.
Columbus was neither a Spaniard nor a conquistador, but he is naturally inescapable in Spain. You may see his great tomb in Seville Cathedral, the monastery of La Rábida where he completed his plans, the bridge near Granada where the messengers from the Catholic Monarchs caught him up, called him to the royal presence, and thus made the New World Spanish. In Barcelona, where they fondly like to claim that Columbus was born, they have erected a huge statue of him on a pillar above the quays, with a replica of the Santa Maria in the harbour at his feet. At Seville, a port which for many years held a royal monopoly of trade with the Americas, they preserve the remnants of his library, its books inscribed with his mysterious cipher. And some pungent suggestions of the great sailor linger at Palos de la Frontera, the little port in western Andalusia from which he sailed on his first Atlantic voyage. It is a port no longer, its harbour is filled in with green squashy meadows and bean fields, and an unfortunate memorial promenade has been built at the water’s edge, extending with the statutory Spanish plethora of lamp-standards across the marshlands to the estuary. The village still proudly remembers, though, Columbus’s fellow-captains, who were natives of this place; above the sea stands the stout old church, where a farewell Mass was said for the crews; not quite obliterated by a new highway is the old Roman well where the little ships were watered; and always beyond the houses the Río Tinto flows away past Huelva to the open sea. It is a place of great character, one of the few places on either side of the ocean where the person of Christopher Columbus is recognizable not as a wraith or an enigma, but as a master-mariner.
Scratches on the stones of Spain—such are these mementos of the great adventure. Sometimes a name on a signpost—Valparaíso, perhaps, Buenos Aires, Las Vegas, or Los Alamos—reminds you how much the Spaniards gave to the new countries of the West. More often an echo or a hint will emphasize how little of permanence they brought back. Drinking chocolate, they say, was first tasted by Spaniards at Montezuma’s court—nowadays they flavour it highly with cinnamon, brew it very thickly, and sip it with transcendent daintiness from tiny china cups. Some people say that the Spanish love of skulls, bones, and old blood was stimulated by the Aztecs, who had similar predilections. I like myself to fancy that contemporary Spanish architecture, which has a weakness for huge cliff-like structures, with small windows and monolithic façades, has been influenced by dim memories of the Pueblo Indians’ square mud villages: certainly the dry-wall techniques of Majorca, stone blocks balanced with uncanny exactitude one upon another, are directly related in manner to the gargantuan masonry walls of the Incas. In the Escorial there is a bishop’s mitre decorated with Aztec feathers. In Majorca there is a town called Inca. The park policemen of the Alhambra wear warm woolly ponchos, like Bolivian shepherds.
Here and there across Spain, too, there are reminders that Hispanidad, the idea of a Spanishness common to Old World and New, does have some meaning. Most of the lamps in the Basilica of Montserrat, sent to replace those destroyed by Napoleon’s soldiery, were given by faithful adherents of the cult in Peru, Mexico, and the Argentine. In the Sanctuary of the Great Promise at Valladolid, named for a pledge divinely given to a Jesuit priest in the eighteenth century—‘I will reign in Spain more than in any other part of the world’—there is a chapel presented by all the American republics which were once Spanish possessions, and in Columbus’s monastery of La Rábida there are specimens, neatly packed in wooden boxes, of their separate soils, Students from Latin America still come to study at the Spanish universities. The elegant northern resort of San Sebastian owes some of its prosperity to the faithful attendance, season after season, of rich and socially-conscious South Americans.
In Madrid I once went to an exhibition of Inca jewellery lent by the Peruvian Government—an astonishing collection of beautiful things, necklaces and animal figures, great beaten breastplates or dreamlike headgears. I watched the Spaniards closely as they wandered around these treasures, and found that they had inherited in full degree the instincts of the conquistadores: like those blood-and-thunder connoisseurs, they did not much bother about the aesthetics, but ran their fingers instantly down the catalogue, as they examined each object in turn, to find its precise weight in gold. And more subtly suggestive still of Hispanidad, of the paradoxical physical resemblance between Old Spain and New, is the sight of a sheep-herd on its way to market, along one of the dirt roads that wind through the mountains of western Castile. You can see the sheep from miles away, surrounded in their haze of dust, and hear the barking of the dogs and the whistles of the herdsmen; and as they advance across that bare dry landscape, their white mass now spreading, now coalescing, it is the easiest thing in the world to fancy that you are back with Pizarro in the Andean foothills, that Cuzco, not Segovia, lies over the hill, that there is a smell on the wind not of wild daffodils, but of coca, and that the animals approaching you are not sheep of Castile, but long-necked ruminative llamas, hastening with a pad of cameloid hoofs towards the City of the Sun.
One of the plaintive melodies sung by Spanish workmen may, if you hear it one morning from your bedroom window, strike you as vaguely familiar. It is a sad song about a nobleman’s search for his dead wife, and the Spaniards took it with them to the Americas. During the great gold rush of 1849 the Mexican miners in Cali
fornia sang it so incessantly that their American and English colleagues learnt it too, parodied it, gave it a new set of words and called it ‘My Darling Clementine’.
The most improbable Spaniards, dyed by this martial past, often have something soldierly about them. I once came across a bust, in a garden-plaza of Ciudad Rodrigo, which I at first assumed to represent the Duke of Wellington, who won a famous victory there—so proud and commanding was its eroded stone face, so bravely decorated its uniform with braid and laurel wreaths. I asked a passing woman, however, just to make sure, and found I had been mistaken: that was no general, she said, but a well-known organist of Salamanca Cathedral—a saintly man, and a musician of universally respected talent. I ought not to have been surprised. In every Spanish music-case there lies a pair of batons.
In Spain nobody can quite escape the bugle-calls, and the emblems of war are everywhere. It may be an antique figure on a Salamanca tomb, the man in all the panoply of mediaeval arms, the woman dressed in the nun’s costume which she swore to wear throughout his absence at the battles. It may be a place of arms: the little mosque, beside the fairground at Granada, in which Ferdinand negotiated the surrender of Boabdil, the last Moorish king in Spain; or the bridge down the road from where the Catholic Monarchs watched their flag rise at last above the towers of the Alhambra. It may be the pock-marks of old gunfire, like the holes of the French shells all over the Torre del Cuarto in Valencia, or the scarred nave of the Romanesque cathedral of Lérida, which used to be a machine-gun range. It may only be some quirk of combat, like the gilded screen in Toledo Cathedral which was coated with iron to hide its value from Napoleon’s looters, and has never been scraped clean. It may be the sarcophagus in Granada of the Gran Capitán Gonzalo de Córdoba, the greatest Spanish soldier of all—now all forlorn in a half-derelict church, once so famous a monument that for a century after the general’s death a hundred banners flew daily above his tomb.
