The Black Madonna

by Peter Millar

  Involuntarily both Marcus and Nazreem caught themselves smiling. There was always something beguiling about someone who turned out to be unexpectedly self-deprecating.

  ‘Even today,’ he continued, ‘there are Christians who are as blind as the most fundamental cleric of the Taliban.’

  Marcus shot him a look. The conversation had gone off at an unexpected tangent. ‘Today those who are more likely to have their heads in the sand are the Evangelical Protestants, mostly American curiously, fundamentalists in their own right: the sort of people who believe Darwin was wrong, and God put dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith.’

  Marcus looked at the man as if he were psychic. Not only did he remember having made much the same point to Nazreem over their ill-fated dinner in Brick Lane, but here was this supposedly duplicitous Catholic cleric of some sort, referring out of the blue to the same breed as those he had just become so intimately acquainted with. He had not asked the big Texan and his hot-under-the-dog-collar comrade what their views on so-called ‘intelligent design’ were, but he had a fairly solid hunch that for all their show of learning, they would have housed serious doubts about the work of Charles Darwin.

  He deliberately let the smile fall from his face and put the question they had planted in his mind to the man direct:

  ‘Why did you want us to meet here?’

  The man gave a look of surprise that might and might not have been feigned. ‘Because we are going to Guadalupe together. Isn’t that what you wanted?’

  As an answer it came close to the deliberately obtuse. Marcus hardened his tone. If he was being led up the garden path then he wanted to know who had opened the gate. And why.

  ‘I mean here, specifically, by this statue? Of Cibeles, Kybele, whatever you call her.’

  The old man made wide eyes as if he was genuinely astonished by the question, although to Marcus’s bemusement he gave not the slightest indication of being annoyed by it:

  ‘Because I thought it would be easy for you to find, of course, as strangers in Madrid. And because,’ he gestured to the wide avenues of free-flowing traffic on either side, ‘it is a good place to start from to get out of the city fast.’

  ‘And that’s it? There was no other reason?’

  The old man was staring at him as if he had no idea what he was talking about. If it was a pretence, Marcus thought it was a good one. And yet …

  ‘You’re saying the statue has no special significance? That there aren’t some people who have a particular veneration for it? That it has nothing to do with another sort of religion.’

  The look of puzzlement on the old man’s face slowly gave way to a smile and then the smile broadened and a twinkle appeared in his eye. ‘I understand what you are getting at,’ he said at last. ‘You are teasing me. You have been doing your homework. I should not be surprised, given your background. You English,’ he said, ‘you are incorrigible.’

  Marcus was immediately tempted to correct the man about his nationality, but on second thoughts it was worth waiting to see what he came out with first.

  ‘I give in,’ he said simply. ‘You are right, of course …’

  Marcus held his breath. This was not quite what he had been expecting. Had the Texan been telling the truth and was this man about to admit it? Was there really a hidden agenda within a strain of Spanish Catholicism? And yet there was something that did not seem quite right here. If that was really the case, the old man was making surprisingly light of discussing it in the middle of a busy traffic roundabout in the middle of Madrid. Then again, like the proverbial needle in the haystack or the pea under the princess’s mattress, some things were invisible to those who did not know where to look or have the sensitivity to detect them.

  ‘You are right,’ he said again, with something of a sigh. ‘This is also a gathering place for the followers of another sort of Spanish religion.’

  Marcus and Nazreem exchanged a glance. Was it possible that he was going to reveal something neither of them had imagined, a cult object sitting openly in the heart of the Spanish capital, known secretly and venerated by thousands?

  ‘They come here to celebrate on important occasions,’ the priest was saying, still with that strange smile on his face. ‘It can be a moving occasion, especially if you are one of them. As I once was, fervently, and still am, I suppose.’

  Marcus was speechless. He had not expected to wring some sort of confession so easily.

  ‘And they all wear white, of course. The most extreme call themselves los fanaticos. They wear all white and call this lady here the Queen of Madrid. They would, of course, the royal connection, you know. It is forbidden by the police to climb on the statue itself but there is always competition amongst the bravest – what would you expect? – and in winter they have even been known to cover their goddess’s head with what they consider a more suitable hat.’

  Marcus caught his breath. Wasn’t that what Nazreem had said, just a few seconds before the old man had arrived: the hat on the statue was not quite correct: she should be wearing a Phrygian cap.

  He could see the man in front of him struggling internally as if he was trying to work out what to say, how much to reveal: ‘I am not certain of the correct word in English for this hat.’ And then a sly smile crept across his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I believe you call it a “beanie”.’

  ‘What!?’ Marcus looked at Nazreem and then back at the priest still smiling at them with blithe inscrutability. A beanie? The idea of a religious cult adorning a statue of their goddess with a little woollen hat suddenly seemed too absurd for words. ‘What is this cult you are talking about.’

  There was an almost puckish look on the priest’s face. ‘Réal Madrid. Football, of course. What are you talking about?’

  46

  The priest’s battered old Seat Punto rattled with difficulty up the steep slopes of the great ridge of sierras rising to the west of Madrid. The clogged suburbs of the big city had given way, first to brash new settlements with American-style hoardings for Sandeman Sherry, the Carlos III brandy of evil memory and the Movistar mobile phone network, then gradually to dusty roads with speeding trucks and eventually, as they began to climb, to quieter vistas of small red-roofed villages nestling in valleys of evergreens and ochre escarpments of rock that jutted out perilously above the winding tarmac road.

  The further they got from the hubbub of urban civilisation, the more the old man’s mood seemed to lighten and his conversation expand. At the same time the Spanish landscape seemed to drop the centuries. They passed close to Toledo, near enough to see its great fortress the Alcázar.

  ‘The castle. That is what Alcázar means. It is from the Arab,’ the old man said, waving airily at the monolithic stone structure rising above the Tajo river.

  ‘Sorry?’ said Nazreem.

  ‘It should not be so hard for you to understand. Alcázar is Al-qazr. The name is left over from the Moorish times. There are very many things in modern Spain that still recall El-Andalus. There are still those, are there not, who dream of restoring the Caliphate? It will never happen of course.’

  For a devout Christian, the old man turned out to be a surprisingly erudite font of knowledge about the Caliphate, the centuries-long Islamic rule on the Iberian peninsula during which even the fact that it had once been a supposedly Christian country had, if not been forgotten, been largely overlooked.

  ‘Christianity prior to the Islamic invasion was still very much in its infancy in Spain,’ he confessed. ‘Some people say that is why the Inquisition later was so extreme here: because the Church feared for its existence.

  ‘To have been a Muslim here in the thirteenth century would have seemed no stranger than to have been on one or the other side of the Iron Curtain in the Europe of the 1960s or 70s. It would have seemed an order of things that was set in stone, and yet it was all to be swept away. Of course, it would have been the same to be a Christian in fifth-century Egypt, or a pagan in third-century Rome.


  ‘Even in the place where we are going, which some call la alma de España – the soul of Spain, one of the most important Christian shrines in the country, maybe in all Europe, there is a memory of when it was part of the Islamic world.’

  ‘There is?’ Nazreem was genuinely surprised.

  The old man smiled. ‘Of course, the name.’

  Nazreem was mystified. Guadalupe meant nothing to her, in any language.

  ‘Like so much,’ the priest said. ‘It is a hybrid. Some of the names of settlements in Spain were only given late, or their names changed in between the transformation of the Caliphate into Castile. Like Alcázar, the name is a cross between a Latin word and an Arabic one: ‘wadi’ and ‘lupum’. In English you would say, “Valley of the Wolf”.’

  Marcus eyed the thick pine woods on either side and thought it would be easy to imagine wolves prowling wild in them. ‘But I always thought the Virgin of Guadalupe was in Mexico.’ After the mad-sounding theories of the Texan and his Protestant priest, he thought it worth it to hear the version from the man they had warned him against.

  ‘This country’ – he gestured with one arm at the landscape all around them, causing Marcus a momentary panic attack as the car lurched towards the side of the narrow road – ‘is Extremadura. It is the best part of Spain, but also the poorest. This was a land to leave behind, but also to carry with you. This is the land where the conquistadores grew up, this is the country whose legends, whose shrines they carried with them in their hearts. This is where those of them who came back returned to. The first native Indians from the New World were baptised in Guadalupe. That is why its name has conquered half the world, bestowed upon churches, islands, monasteries and thousands of little girls from Argentina to Peru. The original, meanwhile, like an old lady in her armchair, has fallen gracefully asleep. It was natural for the cult of the Madonna to be established there too.’

  ‘But what about the other black Madonna?’ said Marcus, still trying to get him to address the Texan’s story about the Mexican ‘holy virgin’ being of pagan origin.

  But the old man was off in another direction: ‘Ah, you mean Montserrat. We must be careful to be polite to our Catalan cousins. You have been to Altötting in Germany. You have seen the Madonna there. It is old, so is the one in Montserrat.’

  It took Nazreem to see what he was getting at. ‘But not that old, is that it?’

  Another shrug. ‘How old does old have to be? Unless,’ one eye in the rear-view mirror watching her reaction, ‘we are talking about so-called originals.’

  ‘Are we?’ asked Marcus. ‘What would an original be, in this context?’

  ‘I think you know. There was a story in the newspapers, not so very long ago, about a find in the Holy Land.’ Marcus could see the man’s eyes flicker back to the rear-view mirror and suspected he was not just checking the empty road behind them. So he knew about Nazreem, or had he just surmised? No, he knew all right.

  ‘There are people who have long believed in St Luke’s painting of the Madonna, but there are others who believe that the oldest images of the Mother of God were carved. The Madonna in Montserrat, that in Altötting, and indeed that in Guadalupe are carved figures. The question is which is the oldest’ – he paused for effect, or maybe just to concentrate on steering; beyond the edge of the narrow road a precipitous drop of scree and shrub fell away for maybe fifty metres – ‘and whether another has been found that is older still.’ There was a questioning note in his voice that was left unanswered.

  ‘What are we talking about here in terms of age?’ Marcus felt it was his job to keep the ball in the air.

  ‘The statue in Montserrat,’ Don Julio volunteered, ‘used to be known as la Jerosolimitana, the woman of Jerusalem, because it was believed that was where it had come from, that it had been carved there by St Luke and that it was only removed because of the invading Saracens: the Muslims again.’

  Again a glance in his rear-view mirror. Nazreem’s face was studiously emotionless, but not blank, as if she was lost in thought, calculating correlations of which Marcus knew nothing. He glanced out over the steep-sided valley and wondered what this country had been like when it had been part of the Islamic world, and what it had been like when it was the battlefront in a clash of civilisations and religions that had occurred six centuries ago, but was now once again rearing its head, this time on a global scale.

  ‘So how did it get to Montserrat?’ asked Nazreem.

  ‘No one knows, but according to one account it was there already by the year 718 AD.’

  Nazreem leaned forward eagerly. That was much older than she had dared hope. But in that case why were they heading first to Guadalupe.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Again no one knows how much of any of this is true, but there are no more references to it for over 150 years until it was allegedly rediscovered by some shepherds around the end of the ninth century.’

  ‘The ninth century is pretty old,’ said Marcus, turning to Nazreem. ‘Maybe we should have been on our way to Barcelona instead.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said their driver.

  Marcus turned back to him, inviting him to continue.

  ‘We mentioned the Madonna in Altötting.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nazreem, ‘but it was a copy, a mediaeval replica of an older original.’ She left unsaid the words ‘of a copy’.

  The old man nodded. ‘It is the same in Montserrat. It is a fine image, and very old, but not as old as the story. The scholars, the art historians are certain it is of Romanesque style, perhaps as late as the thirteenth century. Old but like I said, not as old as the story.’

  ‘And the figure in Guadalupe, it is different?’

  ‘Oh yes. Although in many ways it is very similar.’

  ‘Has it performed a miracle?’ asked Marcus with a straight face. Part of him wanted to know if he would find Guadalupe too adorned with plastic limbs and kitsch paintings.

  ‘Oh yes, for years it too was lost, but then it miraculously reappeared. Just when it was needed.’

  Nazreem leaned forward, her concern for the old man’s well-being overcome yet again by her passion to know more: ‘What do you mean, “when it was needed”?’

  ‘It was the latter years of the Reconquista, the reconquest. The Moors of Extremadura were resisting all efforts, and threatening to strike back, even at Castile itself.

  ‘One day up in this valley, the “valley of the wolf”, a cowherd was searching for a sick cow that had gone missing. When he found the animal it was dead so he started to skin it, making a cut in the form of a cross; as he did the animal came back to life and the cowherd suddenly saw a bright light and heard a heavenly voice.’

  Marcus smiled wryly at the way the man recounted the story as if it was a matter of fact.

  ‘At that very moment a woman appeared to him and told him to take the cow back to his herd, go down and find the priests and bring them back to dig on the spot where he had found the stricken animal, and they would find a holy image for which they should erect a sanctuary.

  ‘The cowherd rushed off to do as he was told, but when he got to the village found one of his sons had died. He immediately prayed to the Mother of God and the boy came back to life. They returned to the spot where they had been told to dig and uncovered the figure of the Madonna. News of the miracles preached from every pulpit in the country, the Christian troops were given heart and Extremadura was liberated. The rest is history.’

  Marcus was tempted to burst out laughing. The whole story reeked of opportunism, fraud and superstition. But he did not want to cause offence.

  ‘But the statue they found was much older than the others?’

  ‘So it is believed. It had been sent to the early church in Spain as a gift from Pope Gregory to the Bishop of Seville?’

  ‘This is the Gregory who gave us the Gregorian calendar? But I thought that was much later, the mid-sixteenth century.’

  The old man was shaking his head, amused. ‘N
o, no, no, not that Gregory. I am referring to Gregory the Great, although the later one is now better known.’

  ‘And this Gregory was around when?’

  ‘At the end of the sixth century. He became pope in the year 574 AD to be precise.’

  Marcus could hear a sharp intake of breath from the back seat. ‘And this dates from then?’

  ‘Perhaps. It has not been carbon-dated. Such a thing would be unimaginable with such a holy relic. But it is certainly not of a style that fits with any recognisable later artistic style.’

  ‘Then that means …’

  ‘What it means depends on the rest of the legend.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘That Pope Gregory had brought the statue to Rome in order to help cure the city of a plague, that before that it had been in Constantine’s own city.’

  ‘Constantinople.’

  ‘Indeed, having been taken there because it was the imperial capital.’

  ‘So where did it come from originally?’

  The priest took his eyes off the road for just a second to glance directly at each of them in turn. ‘From where? From Jerusalem of course.’

  ‘Are you trying to say that …?’

  ‘Oh yes, it is widely believed – and with some substantial justification – that the little statue which is known to the world as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, is the oldest known surviving image of the Mother of God. Or at least was, until now. That is why we are so fascinated – maybe even a little worried – by the idea that one has been discovered that may be older still.’

  The old man smiled and turned his head to glance once again at Nazreem in the rear-view mirror, at the precise moment they turned a bend to find hurtling towards them, downhill, on a one-in-five incline, a huge tipper truck. The old man span the wheel and the little car lurched to the right, perilously close to the edge of the road. Its wheels churned brown dust as the clanking, clattering behemoth of what was obviously a construction vehicle scraped their wing mirror before thundering past them.

  The car had stalled and jerked to a halt. The hulking truck continued rattling down the mountain track as if whoever was at the wheel had not even noticed their existence, much less the serious risk of running them catastrophically off the road. The old man sat there with one hand on his obviously palpitating heart. The other he used to mop strands of grey hair back from his brow. Nazreem was leaning forward solicitously with one hand on his shoulder. Marcus, however, had climbed out of the car and was staring futilely into the distance through the cloud of dust left by the lorry’s wake.