Retrospective Diary of My Trip through Spain and
Portugal
Silke Hesse
16th
September 2011
I had been reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia on the plane from
Munich to Barcelona and finished it that night in my comfortable little balcony
room in Hotel Catalonia, Placa Catalunya. Like so many of Europe’s best
intellectuals, Orwell, who had initially come to Barcelona as an observer and
journalist, almost immediately decided that the fight against General Franco’s
fascism, of a kind with Mussolini’s and Hitler’s oppressive ideologies, was
important enough to risk one’s life for and hence joined the Republican army in
the Spanish Civil War. This was fought between 1936 and 1939 and won, of
course, by Franco who then stayed in power till his death in 1975. I was deeply
moved by Orwell’s love of the Anarchists and trade-unionists alongside whom he had
chosen to fight (the Left in that war initially consisted of an untidy
assortment of political and ideological groups) by his admiration for their passion
for individual freedom, their marked individuality, their egalitarianism,
bravery and human kindness, though all these virtues were unfortunately coupled
with extraordinary practical incompetence. They sent their troops to the front
without functional weapons and worse, without even rudimentary training in
using the occasional blunderbuss that might happen to work. No war can be
conducted in this manner, so it was not surprising that it came to a coup and the
efficient Communists took over. This meant that there were now what one might
call fascists on the Left fighting fascists on the Right; idealists like Orwell
were potentially victims of both sides. He himself escaped by the skin of his
teeth, because he was wounded and withdrawn from the front and also had plain
good luck. But in the early months of the struggle, Orwell believed, the
Catalonian Republicans in Barcelona, to whom his book pays homage, had briefly
created something like an ideal egalitarian society.
In the taxi from the airport I would need some
comprehension of Catalonian, even Spanish would do, for the driver wants to
tell me about his city and I understand next to nothing, hardly even that the
bull-ring on Placa España no longer hosts bull-fights but is being turned into
a shopping centre, which I should visit. Catalonia is the only province to have
banned bull-fighting. Its people have always done things their own way. When
the rest of Spain supported the Bourbons in the Spanish War of Succession,
Catalonia alone supported the Habsburgs and was punished for it.
17th
September
The rest of our group arrives and we wander
around the old city together, somewhat forlornly, as no one seems to know the
significance of the various heavy irregular grey stone and brick buildings. The
streets are a maze. But we do stop to admire the Palau de la Musica Catalana (completed in 1908) with its Art
Nouveau mosaic-covered pillars, every one of them an individual creation. Later
we will go to a flamenco performance there and marvel at the great hall’s
extraordinary stained glass dome and its rich internal decorations. Art Nouveau,
or Modernista here, often seems to be
where Spanish art picks up modernity. It is a style that turns nature into
ornamental beauty, much like the parks we will see throughout Spain turn
flowers into patterns. Yet in the Palau de la Musica, where ornament is
required, this style is gloriously appropriate.
We are treated to tapas (Spanish finger-food) for lunch. Tapas is a culinary art that
allows imaginative cooks to create little mosaics for the eyes and the taste
buds! On the way back, crossing the Ramblas promenade, which cuts through the
city to the iconic statue of Columbus down by the harbor, I become separated
from the group. By good luck I am soon found
again. This, we have been told, is the realm of pickpockets and there is a
heavy presence of patrolling police. As yet our group is a bunch of strangers;
and I, having followed blindly, had no idea where I was.
18th
September
This morning our guide Maria Jesus comes at
nine to give us her excellent introductory lecture on Spanish and Catalan
history. She tells us that by approximately 600 BC the Iberian Peninsula was
becoming the most westerly outpost of Mediterranean civilization, with Greek,
Carthaginian and possibly Jewish trading settlements founded even before the
Romans incorporated the Peninsula into their empire. Earlier there had been a
native population displaced by Celtiberians. When the Roman Empire collapsed in
the fifth century, the Germanic Visigoths who had infiltrated from the north
and had become, like the Romans, Christian during the fourth century, took over
the country and established their court in Barcelona in 415. They ruled Spain
till the Moors, Muslim Arabs and Berbers from north Africa, invaded across the
narrow Straits of Gibraltar in 711 and conquered almost the entire peninsula in
a matter of a few years. The small Christian kingdoms and dukedoms of the
north, Navarra (which extended into France), Aragon and Catalonia fought successfully
to “reconquer” what had once been Christian lands, often with the help of
European crusaders. Thus the city of Barcelona was liberated after only a few
decades. In contrast, the south experienced centuries of an eventually very
sophisticated Moorish culture and the more central provinces, like Castile and
Léon, were caught up in the bitter religious wars of the Reconquista for the better part of seven centuries. So Barcelona
has always been different from the rest of Spain, a Mediterranean trading city with
an undisputed Christian culture and a language of its own, which, though like
Spanish of Latin origin, is not naturally understood and spoken by Spaniards. In
1469 fate would then have it that, against all the odds, a future queen of
Castile, by now the largest of the Iberian kingdoms though unstable due to the
rivalry between grandees and cities with the monarchs, and a future king of
Aragon, eventually in control of all of the separate states of the northern
regions, including Catalonia, as well as Mediterranean possessions like Sicily,
were able to marry. Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon were both young,
intelligent and devoted to their tasks as rulers which they tackled
cooperatively, and they were both fervent Catholics, determined to turn Spain
into a unified and civilized Christian nation. Together they succeeded in
defeating the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, Granada, in 1492. To further
consolidate the unity of their nation, they then expelled the large Jewish and
Muslim minorities in their country, soon even those among them who had converted
to Christianity, and invited the Inquisition into their lands to enforce strict
uniformity of belief which they considered a prerequisite for religious purity
and a unified nation. It is the double legacy of the so-called Catholic
Monarchs, nationhood and coercive Catholicism, that has dominated the history
of Spain ever since.
Maria Jesus tells us, by way of illustration
and explanation, that she, like most of her generation, received all her
schooling in Jesuit and Carmelite colleges and that consequently, she has a
detailed knowledge of all things Catholic and a complete detachment from them.
Apparently nowadays only 3% of the Spanish population consider religion
important. In the rest of Europe it is 7%, we are told. The Spanish government,
of course, is secular nowadays; after Franco’s state Catholicism, secularism
was the only possible choice. - Maria Jesus takes us around the same streets we
walked yesterday but now they have a fascinating, multi-layered history in
which a confident urban culture tried to hold its own against monarchical
interventions.
Next on the agenda is Antoni Gaudi. Our bus
drives us to Mount Güell. The
industrialist Count Eusebi Güell employed Gaudi to design the infrastructure
for a garden estate of 80 or so houses which he hoped to establish high over
the smog of Barcelona. Only two houses were ever built. The park is full of
pavement hawkers with their wares attached firmly to display cloths so they can
pick them up and run from police at a moment’s notice; and they are certainly
edgy today. Gaudi here constructed a viaduct supported by slanting, tree-like
columns and a cloister-like walkway also under slanting tree-like columns. A
long curved bench on the edge of a square was designed ergonomically to support
the small of the back (a new idea in the 1890s) and Gaudi curved it this way
and that to encourage little groups to seat themselves together and chat. In a
large market hall he made the more distant columns successively higher to give
the strange illusion of distanceless distance. Everywhere he created appealing,
untidy patches of mosaic from broken crockery. Gaudi left some room for live
plants but the man-made ones seemed to have precedence. Was his an attempt to
outdo nature, to draw attention to natural beauty, or to playfully confuse the realms?
The practical thinking of a clever, environmentally conscious modern engineer,
who understood matters of stress and drainage, even of water conservation, is
everywhere to the fore.
The story-telling facades of Gaudi’s
enormous as yet unfinished cathedral Sagrada
Familia, which we visit next, often
look like unruly plants, even funguses, or occasionally the stalagmites of
limestone caves. In the inside, Gaudi the engineer devised a way of supporting
the lofty roof without flying buttresses. To persuasively demonstrate the
distribution of stresses to his workers, towards whom he had a collegial
approach, even supplying a school for their children, he created large plaster
models. Some of the figures on his great nativity facade were derived from
plaster casts of selected real life people. (In the age of photography this
should perhaps not raise eyebrows). As Maria Jesus explains to us: Gaudi had
three obsessions, nature, religion and engineering. In this building his use of
natural asymmetry regenerated the older Gothic cathedral style without
essentially changing it. Like the huge cathedrals of the late Middle Ages to be
found everywhere in Spain, Sagrada Familia too seems built to accommodate the
population of an entire city: a common religion as the glue to give a nation
unity, still much as the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, had
perceived and implemented it in the late 15th and early 16th
centuries.
Back in our bus, we pass the Casa Mila with its facade of wave-like
balconies. It is a proud oddity, almost a joke, to break up the dignified
conformity of nineteenth century streetscapes. Gaudi’s style too seems a
version of Art Nouveau; it draws attention to the decorative beauty of nature,
but it also co-opts nature for human purposes: it crowds it out.
The view from Montjuic and then a drive
along the harbor serve to remind us that Barcelona has always been a harbor and
trading city. The amazing Hotel Vell, like an enormous sail out to sea, speaks
of this. It costs €3000 a night to stay there. The Greeks were early settlers
on the Spanish coast. They founded their Emporion (trading place), now Empuries
north of Barcelona, as early as 600 BC.
The Romans of Augustus’s time turned Barcelona into a flourishing township,
still today crowned at the highest point of its centre by four of the six original
columns of a Temple to Augustus; we had seen it that morning. While some of our
group visit the Picasso Museum, we others inspect the Roman ruins excavated in
the Museu d’Historia , according to
my Eyewitness guide book “the most extensive subterranean Roman ruins
in the world” with the foundations of houses, shops, a commercial laundry, dyeing
vats, a factory that made fish sauce (garum), a winery and more stretching out
under today’s town. Symbolically speaking too, there is a Roman sub-stratum to
Barcelona, perhaps more than to the rest of Spain; its people have upheld
pragmatic and commercial Roman values which inured them somewhat to the religious
and national fantasies that would be bred in Castile. Maria Jesus comes across
as a good ambassador for Catalunya, open-minded, very interested in how we do
things in Australia.
That evening there is a large demonstration
march in the city. Having read of the protests in Madrid and other cities
against austerity measures in the wake of the European financial crisis, we are
surprised to be told that these marchers have quite different concerns. They are
demanding that the primary language of instruction in all schools should remain
Catalan with no option to choose Spanish as the first language. Their demands are
even more extreme than those made by the Basques. Catalans still seem to feel
that they need to build massive defenses against all that is Castilian and that
their language (it had been banned once again in the Franco era) is the best
protection they have. In an essay characterizing Spanish literary culture,
Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot writes: “Comparing [the Spanish language] with Catalonian,
it is noticeable that in spite of being
spoken by fewer people and having a more limited vocabulary, Catalonian has a
greater range of expressive possibilities and is far more open to every area of
human thought and life. It is more flexible and more receptive to new word formations
because it is a language that is still in its formative stage and because it
has tested and developed itself with the help of translations of both ancient
and modern literature to a far greater degree.” (185)
19th
September
This morning we drive north for
approximately two hours to Girona, a town with very expensive real estate, we are
told. It has become fashionable to live in the narrow lanes and cramped dwellings
of earlier days. As we arrive in Girona, Maria Jesus draws our attention to what
looks like a plantation of identically sized plane trees, all in close straight
lines. It is the new park, she says and people here are thrilled at being able
to walk in the coolness of its shade in summer. I had noticed square little
plantation nurseries of plane trees on the way up and assumed that they were
part of a tree planting initiative to combat climate change. Throughout our
trip we would be surprised at the number of solar generators and wind-farms that
have been built all through the countryside of Spain. But trees that have not
been planted for the harvesting of olives, fruit, cork or the like are still rare.
(I read somewhere that Castile’s trees were sacrificed to the vainglorious
enterprise of the Armada more than four hundred years ago and have never been
replaced.) Almost everywhere in Spain the parks we see present formal displays
of flowers boxed in by tiny hedges that outline geometric patterns, Versailles
style; very rarely are there trees. There seems to be a long tradition here of
controlling nature as tightly as the Inquisition once controlled the Spanish population;
and large trees are rarely neat. But once one leaves the towns and the
agricultural districts there can be vast stretches of semi arid country, much
of it looking like waste land.
Girona’s river, the broad slow Riu Onyar,
provides a beautiful mirror for the colorful house frontages on its banks,
built to replace the city walls destroyed by Napoleon’s troops. In many Spanish
cities Napoleon’s vandalism will be pointed out to us, with feelings often still
bitter. But no one ever mentions that the Spaniards had initially invited
Napoleon to come. We are headed for the old city: steep, increasingly narrow
lanes lined by heavy grey buildings often made from stones cut in Roman times.
The Via Augusta to Rome ran through this town. We pass Romanesque church
bastions before we come up to the ancient Jewish quarter whose inhabitants had
been ousted, here as in Barcelona, even before the Catholic Monarchs banned Jews
throughout Spain in 1492. This ban turned out to be so effective that there are
now apparently only three synagogues left (they originally survived only, we
are told, because they were hastily turned into churches) none with a quorum of
Jewish men to make them functional. To today’s tourists the crowded Jewish
ghettos in Spanish cities always seem particularly picturesque.
Figueres, our next destination, was Salvador
Dali’s home town. There he bought the former theatre, damaged during the Civil War,
and turned it into a quirky, pink gallery. It has large eggs on its roof and is
pock-marked with white pustules at regular intervals. The courtyard displays
the elaborately and provocatively meaningless Rainy Taxi which even our guide does not try to explain. In the
niches of the walls are countless golden Oscar trophies, only one arm of each slightly
out of place as in a tentative overcoming of Art Deco lifelessness. One of the
first pictures one sees in the gallery ahead is a mosaic-type portrait that
surprisingly, comes into focus when seen through a camera’s view finder designed to merge pixels. In one of the display rooms
May West’s facial features have been turned into furniture, her lips an
allusive couch in front of the horrifying over-dimensionality of her nose. There is a beautiful, classical painting of
Gala, Dali’s wife, and another of a loaf of bread on a plate, at first sight
realistic but strange because the light in the painting actually emanates from
the bread. The basement of the museum holds a large collection of Dali’s gold-
and silver-smith work. He seems to have been competent at any technique, at
home in the modern and classical worlds, capable of viewing things from ever
new perspectives, chameleon-like, a painter of dreams and unreality that masquerade
as reality. Was he holding the Spanish capacity for fantasy up for ridicule,
wonderment or analysis? Like Gaudi, Joan Miro and Picasso (a Malagan who
studied in Barcelona), Dali too has the Catalan insistence on a fierce and intractable
individualism that seems quite foreign to the more conformist Castilian.
20th
September
We leave Barcelona early, soon driving inland
through agricultural country. The earth here is pinky-beige, as are the hardly
distinguishable towns and villages built from it: wind-blown loess soil, it
seems, with not a pebble to weigh it down. Often it is carefully leveled and
terraced as though the slightest slope could cause a disastrous wash-out: a square
ground-floor pit with fruit trees, a second floor like a gallery around this
pit planted with corn, a third floor growing a third crop, maybe grapes. As we
approach Zaragoza, bare, steep-sloped, flat-topped mesa hills become more
prominent, creating an extraordinary landscape that looks no more stable than
dunes but must have existed for great periods of time. Orwell describes it in
his Homage to Catalonia; it is from
these mesas that they ‘defended’ the Republican front line a little north of here
in early 1937. With bare hill-top facing bare hill-top and both Republican and
Nationalist armies confined to their camps and dug-outs, too far from each
other to cause much damage, they staunchly stood for their sides and ideals throughout
chilly and tedious months of complete stalemate.
Zaragoza on the wide River Ebro, like so
many Spanish towns originally a Celtiberian settlement, was then a Roman town,
its present name a contraction of Cesaraugusta. Later it became a Muslim Taifa
during which time the great Spanish hero, El Cid, served its Emir after his
Christian master, King Sancho II, had been murdered. Our guide, Rosa, takes us first to the Aljaferia, once the summer palace of the
Emir. It was built within an older 9th century fortification. Much later,
in 1593, Felipe II converted the palace into a massive fort or bastion housing
army barracks. These battlements now give the visitor his first impression. In
extreme contrast, the scalloped archways of what remains of the Emir’s palace open
out onto a tranquil sunken garden; the walls of the Moorish rooms are decorated
with delicate, intricate plaster traceries in an older Muslim desert style that
would later be copied in Seville and Granada. After the Christian victory in
1118 under Alfonso I, the Aljaferia became
the royal palace and was later extended and richly decorated by Muslim Mudéjar
artists retained in the service of the Christian kings. In 2001 the castle and
palaces, which now also house the Regional Assembly of Aragon, were declared a
UNESCO World Heritage site.
The Aljaferia is typical of the places to
which tourists are taken by preference; they will satisfy the historical
tourist, trying to mentally reconstruct the jigsaws of history, but also,
perhaps, to tread the ground that kings and heroes, the celebrities of yore,
once trod; equally, they may satisfy the aesthetic tourist, determined to see and
examine in real life, but also perhaps to pay reverend homage to, the
officially declared things of beauty that he is often familiar with from books (with
their now usually excellent reproductions). I look round at the others in our
group, wondering what they may have come for;
but on this trip there seems to be an unwritten law that prohibits
talking of the impressions you have gained or sharing knowledge.
Rosa next takes us to La Seo (1352-81) the cathedral and bishop’s seat, now run as a
museum. Like most of the cathedrals we will see, it shows a great mix of
styles. One of its outside walls is decorated with colored Mudéjar tiles, a
rarely seen architectural detail. There
is today great satisfaction when cultures respect each other’s skills and
tastes and on this tour everything Mudéjar is given particular emphasis (as
though this could compensate for the persecutions). The high altarpiece of the
cathedral is of alabaster, a material, we are told, that requires great skill of
the carver. (Alabaster and porphyry, are apparently the only two rocks that are
found locally in Aragon.) The theme of martyrdom is prominent in the main
altarpiece. It shows us St. Lawrence, St. Vincent and St. Valero, and the gifts
of their relics made to the church. The Spanish kings still needed heroes,
eager to be martyred in their religious wars. The presence of the Catholic
Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who succeeded in ousting the last Muslim Emir
from Spain when they took Granada in 1492 after a ten-years war, seems everywhere.
Here we have their chairs on display, wrought in the decorative Plateresque
style which wedded itself to the Renaissance in Spain and rendered it unusually
ornate.
Rosa then shows us the city’s other great
church, the Basilica de Nuestra Senora
del Pilar, which is still a functioning place of worship and pilgrimage. Its
roof is adorned with eleven brightly tiled Mudéjar cupolas. Here the “Virgin on
the Silver Pillar” has pride of place. This pillar is normally covered by a
skirt which is changed every day except on the three days of the year that are feast
days of the Virgin when the pillar is displayed. We are lucky, Rosa tells us,
for the 20th September is such a day (though I could not discover its
significance in the religious calendar). There is a hole in the wall which
allows pilgrims to kiss the silver pillar and we see one or two of them kneel
to do this.
After a late lunch we drive on to Calahorra
in the Rioja, a fertile district of vineyards and vegetable farms watered by
the Ebro. Calahorra too had early been the site of a Celtiberian settlement;
later it was a Roman town called Calagurris that got caught up in the political
rivalry between Sulla and Mario, supported the rebel general Quintus Sertorius,
suffered when he was assassinated in 72 BC at Pompey’s instigation, but saw
better times once Caesar had defeated Pompey. In the 9th and 10th
centuries it was under Moorish control but was captured by the Christian king
of Navarra in 1054. So it too has a long history which I decide to take on
trust; I need to get my washing done.
In Calahorra we have the experience of
staying in a Parador. These are government owned and run hotels located in some
historic building. I could not discover what our three storey orange brick
hotel had once been, perhaps nothing illustrious enough to boast about. Our
rooms were big, well furnished sitting rooms that showed a somewhat uncertain
taste, had ridiculously creaky floors so that you dared not get up at night,
and very noisy pipes. The service was more than was needed, fresh sheets every
day, a bathmat covering the bedside mat, helpful staff and multi-course meals, always
with a large and very welcome plate of mixed steamed vegetables in unusual
combinations.
21st
September
This morning we drive to Iruna (its Basque
name) or Pamplona (named after Pompey). Our guide Christina takes us around the
narrow streets of the bull-run to the stadium in front of which Hemingway’s
head protrudes from a rock, in honor of the
novel The Sun also Rises which he
published in 1926 and in which the
Pamplona Los Sanfermines festival has
a central place. (We are also encouraged to visit his statue in his favorite
hotel on the Plaza Mayor during our lunch-break but staff there are busy mopping
the floor.) Hemingway’s novel revolves around a group of American and British
writers and journalists in Paris, most of whom have been through the ugly slaughter
of the First World War and have been either physically or mentally damaged by
it. They are reckless spenders, sustained from morning to late night by huge
amounts of alcohol, and driven by their desire for beauty and sexual
fulfillment. These latter are embodied by Brett, the stylish and lovely woman
whom no man can resist and who wanders from bed to bed, leaving her discarded
partners to fight with each other and then look after each other like comrades.
For these scarred veterans, human decency, the hedonistic pleasures of life, and
a rough sort of caring are now the only guiding values. In Pamplona, in the
rituals of the bull fight and the ecstatic festival atmosphere that surrounds
these, they encounter the unafraid bravery, skill and youthful male beauty that
distinguished medieval tournaments and that the young soldiers of the Great War,
and the wildly cheering crowds that sent them on their way, had falsely hoped
to encounter in modern battle. Pamploma is what young men dream of and what
today is perhaps best found in spectator sports, but spectator sports as
potential blood sports and pursued with the fervor of a religious rite. –
Alternately, Hemingway’s novel can be read as a description of the blight of
disillusionment that spread over Europe in the wake of WWI, threatening to
destroy all that was true and original, even the festival of Saint Fermin in
Pamplona. - Or it can be read as a retelling of the Carmen story about the passionate gypsy woman, willing to sacrifice
all for a night of love with the toreador, though unlike Carmen, Hemingway’s Brett
does not die at the hands of a jealous lover - here the men fight it out among
themselves - but decides to renounce the bull-fighter because his masculine
charisma and the charisma of the liberated modern woman are ultimately incompatible.
Christina explains that the custom of the
bull-run originated in the 18th century and arose from the need to
move bulls from their corrals to the place of slaughter with more speed and
efficiency. This could be achieved with the butchers running ahead to goad the
animals into pursuit. But the circumstance that this is only done once a year,
during the high summer week from July 6th, and that it involves the town’s population wearing
white with a red scarf which must be taken off the minute the bell rings to
mark the close of the festival, suggests
there is a ritual element too; the bull run is now linked to the spectacle of the
bullfight which in Pamplona is also restricted to that one week of the year.
Where does this Spanish custom originate?
The bull was of course a sacred creature in most of the Mediterranean cultures,
venerated for his strength and fighting spirit. But more directly it was perhaps
the very secretive late Roman Mithras cult, active also on the Iberian
peninsula (and strongly opposed by the Christian Church in the 4th
century), a cult that involved fighting a bull, that endowed the bull fight
with ritual significance. Bull fighting was, however, also a spectator sport in
Roman circuses, introduced to phase out gladiators. And wild bulls were hunted
in the outdoors. Then during the Reconquista period, Moorish and soon also
Christian knights like El Cid practiced their prowess in bull fights conducted
on horseback. When the knights dropped away, the general public started to take
up the sport on foot and famous matadors developed it into an art form in the
early 18th century. It probably continues to provide a pagan
counter-balance to oppressive Christianity in Spanish culture, for in spite of
animal welfare concerns, Catalonia is, as mentioned earlier, the only province
to have agreed to ban the sport. To any prospective bull-runners Christina
gives the advice always to choose the downhill section, as the front legs of a
bull are shorter than his back ones which means he will always outrun you
uphill. Her husband, she says, comes from a family that traditionally run with
the bulls and he has experience.
Christina also draws our attention to the
fact that one route of the Camino, the pilgrim’s way to Santiago de Compostela
that leads via Roncesvalles, passes through Pamplona. The routes are always marked
by the stylized, sun-like sign of a scallop shell, the emblem of the saint. In
the Middle Ages Compostela in Galicia in the far north-west of the country was
the most important Christian pilgrimage site after Jerusalem and Rome. In those
days half a million pilgrims a year flocked to where the body of St James the
Apostle supposedly miraculously came ashore in 813 AD, about 800 years after
his death. (We were told by our – perhaps cynical - guide that the king at the
time needed money and appreciated the potential of religious tourism to fill
his coffers.) The Spanish government obviously still thinks along these lines,
for an enormous amount of money has been invested these last years in the
renovation of the countless sights that could be of interest to tourists. The Camino
itself is, however, also still a great attraction. We see many pilgrims, their packs
adorned with scallop shells, making their way along the various roads of this pilgrim
route. The fact that those who walk the pilgrim way and get their cards stamped
at the check points have access to cheap accommodation undoubtedly swells their
numbers. In the olden days in Pamplona, Christina tells us, pilgrims could
sleep behind the altar in the Cathedral and be fed in its refectory.
After lunch we drive to Olite, once the
capital of Navarra, where our next guide, Xavier meets us. Xavier, he explains,
is the name of the patron saint here (Francis Xavier was a Basque and in
Navarra we are in Basque country), so all the local boys are called by that
name. The royal palace, which we have come to see, was built by the French-born
king, Carlos III the Noble between 1402 and 1424. Though it has the look of a
heavily fortified castle, it was conceived as a palace and beautifully
decorated by Mudéjar artists. A German traveler of the 15th century
wrote: “Having seen it at first hand there are no words to express, and it is
even impossible to imagine, the magnificence and extravagance of this palace.” Even
so, it was apparently not beautiful enough for the king’s wife, Leonor, who,
Xavier tells us, decided to return home to her father till her husband had
built her a garden for her reception rooms to match the garden adjoining his
own: a difficult feat for which a supporting vault and a watering system had to
be constructed. The palace also had a large aviary and, according to Xavier,
the animals of the king’s menagerie – a giraffe and a buffalo among them -
grazed on the surrounding meadows; the lions were presumably caged. Olite, one
of the few towns founded by the Visigoths, remained the king’s residence for almost
100 years till Navarra was conquered and merged with the kingdoms of Aragon and
Castile in 1512, four years before Ferdinand’s death. With Napoleon’s invasion
of Spain in the early 19th century, the abandoned castle offered to
become a convenient stronghold for the French troops. To prevent this, Spanish
patriots made the decision to burn it down in 1813. The basic structure was
restored by the Provincial Council of Navarra between 1937 and the 1960s (the
Franco years) and is still used for theatrical festivals. Part of it has been
turned into a parador.
22nd
September
Bilboa, the Basque capital, is a little
further from Calahorra than our tour planners had estimated, a good two and a
half hours drive. The road leads through forested mountain country. Our morning
bus lecture today is on the Basques, the first of the Europeans: their ancient
origins and long isolation, their culture which developed in situ over that
time, the importance to them of their language, Euskera, and the fact that
their traditional territories straddle the border between France and Spain. A
third of Basques currently live in France, where they are treated like other
French citizens, and two thirds in Spain where their ancient fueros, their
special rights and privileges, are once again respected. In the Spanish Basque
provinces all documents and signs are now in both languages (in the Franco era
Basque had been, as so often, repressed), educational institutions from
kindergarten to university teach both and students can choose their main
language. 50% of the population in the Autonomous Basque Province speak Basque,
while only 19% do in Navarra. There are five major dialects and there are
currently 600,000 Basques in Spain. Agitation for separatism seems to have
settled down, we are assured. I ask whether there is a distinguishable Basque physical
type and am given a politically correct admonition on racism. I have since read
that their genetic material shows them to be of the same origin as other
Europeans, though they do have a far greater tendency to have the Rh- factor
and there are no Basques with the B or AB blood groups, perhaps due to their
extraordinarily long residence in one place. They are excellent fishermen,
sailors and navigators, and competent in many fields of organization and
business. They are overwhelmingly Catholic. It seems strange that this group, which
appears to have no obvious cultural or racial characteristics except their
language to separate them from other Spaniards (and even their language, which
is related to no other language in the world, has now absorbed modernizing
vocabulary and structures from neighboring languages) should feel so passionate
about their difference and independence. Are they too perhaps, like the
Catalans, reacting against a specifically Castilian culture?
After picking up our guide Eva, we have a
brief tour through Bilbao with its colorful formal gardens and beautifully renovated
historic buildings and are told that until recently this city was grey and ugly,
a dirty industrial place, oppressed by the seven hills that encroach on its
valley. It was the town’s persistence in competing for a Guggenheim franchise,
which more worthy cities like Vienna had rejected, that turned around its
fortunes. The extraordinary building is now attracting 10 million visitors a
year as well as daring architects, eager to showcase their work here. The city,
already in possession of the World Heritage Puente Colgante bridge, now also
has an eye-catching Calatrava bridge and a spectacular new high-rise building,
about to be opened. We, of course, have come primarily for the Guggenheim
Museum and it is not the exhibitions it contains but Frank Gehry’s building
itself with its unruly curving, titanium-coated sails and hulls and its lofty
interior structures that takes our breath away. Only Richard Serra’s vast
ground floor sculptures that set the visitor on an uncertain path between
slanting walls of weathering steel which
can disorientate one’s senses, seem to do justice to the originality and
dimensions of the building. The temporary exhibitions probably attract the more
seasoned visitors. The large bright metal tulips on the outside deck and Jeff
Koons’ gigantic guard-dog puppy made of flowers that look as though they come
straight from one of the city’s formal gardens, seem like provocative jokes.
They too are the work of foreign artists. What the Basques have achieved here is
to bring the world to their city by letting the world display itself there.
Surprisingly for someone whose impressions of this people have been strongly
influenced by Australian reports of ETA’s terrorist activities, Bilboa’s
success has had nothing whatever to do with displaying Basqueness but only with
good business sense, hospitality and a willingness to engage with modernity. On
second thoughts, this openness is perhaps not so surprising. Due to the
strictly enforced law of primogeniture, the younger sons of Basque families
have long been forced to emigrate, south into Spain or, preferably, into the
world at large. The world is not new to them.
On our way back to Calahorra we drop in at
one of the Rioha region’s wine cellars. There we are taken through multiple
stories of ancient tunnels reaching deep into the hill, where temperature and
humidity never change and where the treasure of red Crianza wine from the local
Tempranillo grapes, tempered with small quantities of Graciano and Garnacha
grapes, which the others then taste (I myself now drink no alcohol), lies for
years to mature.
23rd
September
After an early start we have a morning
break at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, a small place with a huge cathedral. It
is situated on the main pilgrim route to Compostela and the saint for whom the
town is named, a pious young man who had applied to join the Bernardines but
been rejected, decided to make himself useful here by building roads and
bridges as well as a hostel, a church and a hospital to support the many
pilgrims that passed. To become a saint you must perform two miracles. One of
his was the following: A young German who was accompanying his parents to
Compostela, was framed by a servant girl whose attentions he had rejected. He
was accused and found guilty of stealing a silver chalice the temptress had
hidden in his bag. He was hanged. The distraught parents prayed to Santo
Domingo. Then, on going to the gallows, they discovered that their son was
still alive. They hastened to inform the judge who was about to begin his meal
of roast chicken. But he, being a rational man, refused to believe them. The
boy is as alive as the chicken on my table, he taunted. Immediately the chicken
came back to life and crowed and the horrified judge made good his error. This
is the story. The same story is told with only slight amendments in Portugal
where its cock has even become a national symbol. Our tour leader who tells us
this tale makes heavy weather of its absurdity and the superstitious ignorance
of by-gone times. Our times, one might say, err in their inability to comprehend
symbolic and literary language. Let me try to reinvent what happened. The judge
of this tale, about to gorge himself on a chicken, is reminded by it of the
cock that crowed when St Peter denied Christ (it came alive for him) and
hastily reconsidering (who knows, he may also have had more intimate knowledge
of the flirtatious woman; had not St Peter too been talking to a servant woman
on the night of the betrayal?) reversed his judgment. And the young victim?
There could be all sorts of reasons why the hanging did not go ahead or was not
successful. Perhaps he had fainted with terror and was unable to be executed in
this state. A timely moment of insight can be miraculous, as can a timely faint
or an executioner’s tardiness. But a story to reassure pilgrims that God will
support them on their long and perilous journey, and that Dominic, the pilgrims’
friend, will intercede for them, is more effectively told with the
exaggerations of the miracle tale. That is, of course, the form in which this originally
probably unremarkable story has survived the centuries and come down to us. (What
modern minds actually object to is less the fantastic story than the perhaps even
more fantastic assumption that there could be a God who is receptive to
intercession.) I mumble under my breath: why not read it as a symbolic tale? The
cathedral still incorporates in its wall a cage which has for centuries always
held two live chickens. But even without this curiosity the cathedral would be
impressive: a vast storehouse of forgotten treasures of religious art.
From Santo Domingo to Burgos we detour
along the winding country roads of the Camino, dotted with pilgrims alone or in
pairs carrying their heavy packs or resting in the picturesque villages on the
way.
Burgos is a city for the historical
pilgrim. It was the capital of Castile-Leon for more than 400 years till, after
the fall of Granada, the Catholic Monarchs, who had now created a greater Spanish
kingdom, moved on to Valladolid. In Burgos the aforementioned celebrated knight
and general El Cid (the lord), Roderigo Diaz de Vivar (1043-99), hero of the
great anonymous Spanish epic El Canta del
Mio Cid, had once challenged his new master, King Alfonso VII, to swear
publicly that he had had no part in the murder of his older brother King Sancho
II who had been El Cid’s lord. El Cid and his aristocratic wife Ximena are
buried in Burgos.
Our guide, Angela, arranges an “undrinking”
stop for us at the late 12th century Cistercian Royal Monastery of
Huelgas. Its powerful abbess, she tells us, was for centuries in charge of up
to 48 villages. But then came the day when the Pope decided to claim the
monastery’s wealth for himself; presumably St Peter’s Basilica had to be
financed. - We now drive up a steep hill, covered with ancient mixed forest, to
the Catuja de Miraflores. It is still
a functioning Carthusian monastery; this is a silent order but the monks, who
were once limited to one sentence every five years, are now allowed to speak
one sentence a week. We are assured here, as in Valladolid, that there are still many functioning
monasteries (15 and 30 are numbers I seem to remember) in these areas. The
superb altarpiece of the Miraflores church was apparently gilded with the first
gold brought back from the New World: taken from the pagan gods and given to
Mary, Jesus and the Saints! On either side of it the Catholic Monarchs,
Ferdinand and Isabella, kneel in homage and triumph. This was only the first of
innumerable extravagant altarpieces and giant monstrances made of New World
gold and silver that we would be shown during our tour of Central Spain. (Burgos
had actually been a wealthy town in its own right during the Middle Ages, due
to its wool trade. Spain had Merino sheep.) The town’s tradition of Catholic nationalism was revived in the
twentieth century when Franco made it his headquarters during the Civil War.
The Gothic cathedral of Burgos with its
beautiful lacy spires is the third largest in the country. Of all the
extraordinary art works and architectural features it comprises, none leaves a
more lasting impression than the star-shaped central dome that filters light to
the Crossing where El Cid and his wife are buried under simple marble slabs.
24th
September
Marlene is the guide who takes us around
Valladolid (once Arabic Belad-Walid – “Land of the Governor” and now pronounced
‘Vayaoli’) early this Saturday morning. Prominent in the largely still empty
streets are florist’s vans delivering white flower arrangements to the churches.
Almost every one we glance into is being prepared for a wedding. And at every
church door, it seems, there are aggressively histrionic beggars. The Cathedral
here was built too close to the river and has long had a problem with water
damage so that it has not received the usual attention. But we see some
beautiful facades, the exotically grotesque Isabelline sculpture on the
Collegio de San Gregorio and the richly decorative Baroque doorway facade of
the 15th century university. What surprises us modern purists, here
as all over Spain, is the unconcern with which styles are mixed on one building;
its four facades may be Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque with each
era quite unselfconsciously contributing its best. These mixtures seem almost
symbolic of the country as a whole: a squarish peninsula facing European France
and Britain in the north, the Mediterranean Orient on its eastern shore, the
exotic world of Muslim Africa in the south, and on the coastline it shares with
Portugal in the west, the vast oceans that lead on to the New World.
The city’s great, recently renovated Plaza
Mayor, lined with oxblood-colored three
storey houses, a contained area once used for bull-fights, gives its centre,
like those of most Spanish towns, a certain spacious grandeur.
Our last visit is to a house in which
Cervantes and his family lived for a while. Though the dramatists and
picaresque novelists before him had begun with the diagnosis of Spain’s
malaise, it is Cervantes’ version that became immortal in both its humanness
and its comic absurdity. His famous novel Don
Quixote, first published in 1605, shows Spanish society split into two
classes. There is the so-called upper class of knights, incompetent,
impecunious and useless dreamers and fantasists. Their attempts at rescuing
damsels in distress and punishing the wicked are invariably wrong-headed and
the cause of further trouble, the reason being that their ideas are all derived
from books, in this case foreign books of chivalry, and that these
self-appointed upholders of order are blind to real life and deaf to advice. Such
are the Don Quixotes of Spain. And then there is a lower class of realists who
simply want adequate food and rest and income and even enjoyment for themselves
and their families. But though these Sancho Pansas have good practical skills,
they are blinded by their urgent needs as well as their inadequate knowledge and
fear of the wider world. In consequence, they accept the leadership of the knight,
who for his part needs their practical help. He is of course just as blind as
they are but for different reasons and in a different way. Together the two
form a ludicrous and socially useless pair of nevertheless very loveable human
beings, who are utterly dependent on each other, good to each other and always
well-meaning. I read somewhere that Spain never had a true feudal system in
which, at least in theory, knights and serfs are tied together in a
relationship of mutual rights and obligations which benefits society. In much
of Spain, the two classes apparently existed in parallel worlds. Perhaps the
relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa could be seen as a comic
attempt to remedy this impasse.- The house of Cervantes in Valladolid is
presented to us as a humble and unworthy dwelling for this illustrious author; but
it has been incongruously furnished for tourists with beautifully crafted period
items. My question why Cervantes was in prison here is not answered. He is one
of Spain’s icons: El Cid, the Catholic Monarchs, Columbus and Cervantes make
their presence felt in every town. Incidentally, Columbus died in Valladolid
alone and forgotten in 1506.
During our lunch-break some of us walk in a
nearby city park, this time a park where the flower beds and dove-cotes are
shaded by large old trees. It is wedged between two busy roads and a long, wide
pedestrian promenade and gives the impression that it is larger than it
actually is.
In the early afternoon we leave for Madrid.
That we will pass through Segovia and stop there has been kept a surprise; a
friend of mine with whom I had earlier discussed the tour was amazed at the apparent
omission. The valley of the town that you drive into is traversed spectacularly
by a 1st Century AD Roman aqueduct built without mortar and still
completely intact and functional. What craftsmen the Romans were! I climb up
the steep steps leading to the Alcazar and discover that the original old town
lies here, its huge, late Gothic cathedral completely unexpected, for no one
has told us what there might be to see on this short stop. I pay the entrance fee
but then have no time to explore at leisure.
The road to Madrid had climbed quite
significantly since we left Valladolid, taking us on to the high, treeless,
arid central Plateau of Castile. Spain’s capital of over three million lies at
the very heart of the country and at 660 meters above sea level it also towers
above most of Spain’s other towns and cities, certainly a symbolically
effective site. We admire our Andalucian driver Pepe for finding his way to the
right freeway exit and our spacious hotel, situated just off the Paseo del
Prado and very near Madrid’s central railway station, Estacion de Atocha (which
not long ago was the site of an unexpected terrorist attack that claimed many
victims).
25th
September
Our guide Maribel (Maria Isabel) takes us
on a bus tour of Madrid this morning, nervously anxious all the while that we
must not miss our appointment to see the Palacio
Real; it is still the official royal residence though the King and his
family live in a smaller summer palace on the outskirts of the city. It is open
to visitors when there are no official engagements. Carefully watching the
clock, we drive past Madrid’s iconic bull ring, but then also past the little
Egyptian Debod temple situated on a lake in a park. It was a grateful gift from
the Egyptian government in recognition of Spanish engineering assistance. But it
was also the result of a rescue operation, for it would have been flooded by
the Aswan Dam. Maribel seems particularly keen to point it out, a thing of beauty
and great antiquity but also an indication that Spain is reaching out to the
world.
The Palacio
Real, built in 1734 after a fire destroyed the original palace, is a vast
and megalomaniac building of 2800 rooms.
The dozens we walk through in a tightly packed column of visitors that
determines the pace of inspection are decorated with such exaggerated opulence
that my imagination goes on strike and on coming home, I had initially forgotten
this tour had ever taken place. Released onto the wide square that the
externally simple and undecorated white buildings enclose, we get back on our
bus which now takes us to the narrow, picturesque streets of the city centre.
We stop to walk through the renovated Art Nouveau market hall, crowded to capacity
this Sunday, and marvel at the elaborate and photogenic displays of seafood , vegetables,
fruits, meat and pastries. (I buy two large bananas there, not having eaten
bananas since the Queensland floods had caused their price to skyrocket in
Australia.) The jewelry and clothes shops we walk past in Madrid, as in the
rest of Spain, tell of elegant and expensive tastes.
Our bus drops us off at the famous Prado
museum where we have some lunch. Since an elderly companion has attached
herself to me and solicits explanations for everything we pass on our slow and
gradually exhausting walk through the halls, I manage to see little more than
the Spanish section. But I do see Velasquez’s Las Meninas of 1656 (the young ladies in waiting) in the original and
that is an experience: the conscientious and dignified classical style of the
painting; the earnest and anxious attention given to the constrained little
princess at the centre of it all by her pretty attendants; the grotesque
figures of the dwarves chosen presumably to highlight the contrast with royalty
but painted so very kindly by the artist; the watchers everywhere: an attendant
at the door, a couple in the background, the king and queen reflected in an
unobtrusive mirror, and the artist whose great dark easel, that reveals
nothing, takes up so much of the painting. What an invitation to imagine the
complexities and undercurrents of
Spanish court life in which a little child, whose destiny it is always
to be in the public eye and who will therefore have to learn to control her
every movement, has to grow up.
In contrast, the selection of colorful
religious paintings by El Greco (1541-1614) here displayed seems grotesque in
style rather than subject matter, muscles and sinews that have broken loose
from their limbs to create a dance of their own, humans dematerialized,
dissolving, but never transfigured as the chosen religious topics might have
suggested. This “mannerism” displays a different sort of unease with reality. (Both
Velasquez and El Greco painted during the Inquisition which, in Spain, was both
religious and political, instituted, as
we saw, by the Catholic Monarchs to unite their country through total
conformism of thought, belief and custom, enforced through terror.)
Goya (1746-1828) came later. On the one
hand we have what one might call beautiful paintings like those of Maja or the
young Condesa de Chinchon or his almost harmlessly good-natured portrayal of
the family of Charles IV; then later there
are the terrible dark paintings, most horrifying of course the well-known
representation of Saturn Devouring his Children.
It is almost as if Goya had had two different sets of eyes for seeing the world
and the Prado seems to concur by splitting his paintings between two floors. There
were many reasons for the liberal-minded Goya to despair: the chaotic
Napoleonic episode from 1803-1813 in which both Spaniards and French committed
atrocities; the terrible 1811-12 famine in Madrid, where he lived, when 20,000
people starved; the fact that the legitimate Spanish king, when instated,
showed himself to be a reactionary absolutist; the ignominious role of the
Church; the unenlightened, superstitious minds of the Spanish people; also, of
course, Goya’s own illness which had left him completely deaf after 1792. You come out of these gallery rooms with the
uneasy feeling that there must be some fault-line running through Spanish
society that brings with it deeply troubling distortions. (Incidentally, the
Spanish Inquisition did not end formally till 1834.)
Walking home from the gallery, my companion
suggests we buy food in the Railway station. There isn’t much to choose from but
we get something anyway. As I am squatting, rearranging my satchel, I notice a
woman watching me. She points out that I have dropped my hat and I thank her.
On the big level crossing there suddenly seems to be a jostling crowd of
people. We have been warned but at the time I am concentrating on my companion
who is at the end of her strength and heading off in the wrong direction. We get
back to our hotel, eat our food together in my room and settle for the evening.
I am currently reading Quevedo’s The
Swindler (1608), a disturbing story of a society so dysfunctional and so
cruel to its weakest members, particularly children, that the disadvantaged
seem to have little hope of survival if they do not turn themselves into
skilled and ruthless thieves and swindlers and even learn to enjoy this life.
At the point I have reached, the protagonist (hero would be a misleading term)
has recently arrived in Madrid and joined an organization of swindlers and
pick-pockets, though at the time he would actually have had the means to live
honestly. Thieving has become a way of life. - Next morning when I wake I
realize that my bag is zipped open and my purse with money, identity cards and
two credit cards is gone. (Earlier that day I had actually padlocked my bag for
the first time but had taken the lock off when someone tried to ring me and
then not replaced it.) In spite of my annoyance I have to smile at the coincidence
of it all. It is fortunately easy to cancel the credit cards and hopefully no
one will tamper with my identity, the most recent form of swindle. At the hotel
I am told that the thief would certainly have been a gypsy.
26th
September
We are travelling to Toledo this morning,
once the Visigoth capital, and because we are early, we have time to drive to a
scenic point and view to the best advantage this old walled city piled up on
its rocky hill and in the embrace of the River Tagus. Then we meet up with our
guide Juan and enter it, like all tourists do, by flights of escalators. Walking
through the narrow streets is hazardous because deliveries can be made till
eleven and locals have the run of the streets all day. These old Spanish towns
are not museums, which can be lucky, because today is Monday and most museums are
closed on Mondays.
Toledo cathedral is important as the Seat
of the Primate of Spain; the Mozarabic mass from Visigoth and Moorish times,
which is more emotional and less rigid than the Roman mass, is still sometimes said
here. A beautiful reredos depicting the life of Christ adorns the high altar;
the choir is carved with scenes from the fall of Granada; and the Cathedral treasury
houses an enormous gold and silver monstrance from New World treasure that is
driven through the city (it is far too heavy to be carried) in the Corpus
Christi procession each year. The El Greco painting that the artist, who lived in
this town, created for the cathedral - it is titled The Spoliation of Christ and Christ’s loosened red garment is the
central focus- is a deeply religious work with no mannerist contortions. It
seems to express amazement that people should want to divest someone so
central, whose presence is so luminous, of his reputation and life. And in the
church of St Thomas, which has a fine Mudéjar tower, there is what is
considered El Greco’s masterpiece The
Burial of Count Orgaz which Juan analyzes for us.
My guide book speaks of Toledo as “a
melting pot of Christian, Muslim and Jewish cultures”. Juan also takes us to
the strangely named Sinagoga de Santa
Maria la Blanca. It is a Mudéjar building (which means, of course, designed
in the Muslim fashion) from the 12th and 13th centuries
that functioned as a synagogue. In 1391, a year of great unrest throughout
Spain, it became the site of a massacre of Jews, after which the Jews of Toledo
were expelled and the building turned into a Christian church in 1405. The
strange thing is that in this beautiful and elaborately adorned building there
is only one Jewish symbol; Juan points it out. It is hidden high up among other
ornaments: a six-point Jewish star composed of two triangles. How is one to
imagine this supposed tolerance which ended a whole century before the Catholic
kings expelled all the Jews in the country and which apparently made it
impossible for a Jewish synagogue to display Jewish symbols? The Muslims
tolerated the Jews but taxed them heavily. The Christians also taxed them. As
the Torah is the foundation of both Christian and Muslim religions, an
unhistorical mind could imagine the Jews functioning as respected go-betweens. But
of course in this era there was a great fear of unorthodoxy.
Back in Madrid most of our group have time in
the afternoon to walk down to visit the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and admire its
collection of modern art. Picasso’s Guernica
painting, commemorating the victims of the bombing of this Basque city during
the Civil War, is housed here. The tour leader and I, meanwhile, make our way
to the police station where after a lengthy wait we are allowed to fill out a
form reporting the theft of my purse. (We have been told we must do this just
in case of identity theft.) That evening we all go out to one of Madrid’s specialist
restaurants.
27th
September
We pick up Maribel early and head out of
Madrid, past a former hunting domain that has now become parkland, past the
extensive grounds of Madrid’s new university (the city has six universities)
and past the area where the Prime Minister and King Juan have their residences.
On the edge of the Sierra de Guadarrama Mountains a huge cross “The Holy Cross of the Valley of the Fallen”
draws attention to General Franco’s vast cemetery for the dead of the Civil
War. A bit further up the mountain lie the palace and monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial to which we
are headed. It is a strange, eerie building conceived, it would seem, by a sick
mind. The mind was that of Spain’s Habsburg king Felipe II, who had it built
between 1563 and 1584. Dedicated to Saint Lawrence who was martyred on a roasting
grill, its ground plan also has the shape of a grill, protruding handle and
all. Its exterior is severely, even tediously simple. A third of the building
is a monastery, run now by Augustinian monks, a section is still a boarding
school, and the last third is the royal palace. The private rooms of the king
and his daughter are as simple and unadorned as the building itself; but both
permit a view into the beautiful church where the monks celebrated mass and chanted
their prayers. There seems to be little else to do in these rooms but pray and
view beauty and sanctity from a distance. Half a century of the activities of
the Inquisition had obviously terrified not only the people of Spain but its
monarchs too. Beneath the church is the mausoleum of the kings of Spain. The
bones of those in the direct line are stored in identical funerary urns once
their bodies have sufficiently decomposed. This is checked at regular intervals.
Lesser members of royalty have their final resting places in adjacent rooms. Of
course, El Escorial also contains displays of works of art and superb collections
such as that of early maps. But basically it seems a place dominated by
nightmares of torture and death and the fear of eternal hell. This is what
religion seems to have come to under the Spanish Inquisition.
We move on to Avila, apparently the only
town in Europe with its picture-book walls, two kilometers long and fortified
with 88 circular towers, still completely intact. It was once the home of the
great Spanish mystic Teresa of Jesus (1515-82), also known as Teresa of Avila. Teresa
was a child of her times. She had had a converso
grandfather, a former Jew, who ran into trouble with the Inquisition, but she
was herself brought up a fervent Christian. As a child, she and her brother even
ran away on one occasion to seek martyrdom at the hands of the Moors. At a time
when religion had been commandeered and almost strangled by politics, Teresa
pioneered ways in which individuals could advance in the discipline of prayer
to a level where they made contact with the Divine in the hope of drawing it
back down again into the general practice of religion. To achieve this latter goal, Teresa travelled
widely in Spain, founding new convents in a great number of cities. We have
just been told that she is one of only two women awarded the title of Doctor by
the Vatican, Doctor of Prayer in her case, though, not unsurprisingly, she too had
problems with the Inquisition during her life-time. I am looking forward to exploring
her town. Unfortunately, a needy person has appealed to my conscience and
somewhat grumpily, I accommodate myself. Perhaps it was as well, for three
members of our group got so thoroughly lost in that little place that even with
the help of the police and a taxi they arrived at the bus half an hour late. I too
have a great capacity for getting lost. This is always a worry during free time
episodes for the discipline on our trip is necessarily strict.
We arrive in Salamanca in the afternoon,
crossing the river Tormes. That night I reread Lazarillo de Tormes, the first Spanish picaresque novel; it is
short and anonymous and was published in 1554. It depicts a society in which
food is so impossibly scarce – farmers don’t seem to exist - that the young and the blind and those who are
poor, or without special privileges, or working for a master who is himself
poor, or prevented from working by the honor of their class, have to use all
their ingenuity, trickery and brutality to survive. But in contrast to Quevedo’s
Swindler, this little novel does show
us that kind people also exist, although the men of the church are not
conspicuous among them. In the end the hero secures a living for himself; first
a priest employs him as a water-carrier on the condition that almost all the
earnings go to him. Then another priest makes him town crier but he has to marry
the mistress of the priest to get this job. Still, it’s not a bad deal, for his
wife also looks after her husband quite well. But this country, united by the
Catholic Monarchs half a century earlier and given over to clerics who looked
to their own advantage, seemed, by this time, to have become almost
dysfunctional as a society. (I have since consulted history books and
discovered that the previous centuries were possibly even more chaotic and
cruel.)
28th
September
Salamanca is a beautiful city, built almost
completely from the golden sandstone of the river Tormes. Antonia, our guide,
points out the landmark of the little round Romanesque church of Saint Mark
that will help us find our way back to the hotel and then leads on to the huge
Plaza Mayor, recently renovated. It is walled in by its golden classicist
buildings, uniformly decorated with round portrait plaques of the nation’s most
famous sons, Franco among them ( Isabella of Castile was a daughter, of
course). The square was built for the city by Felipe V in gratitude for support
during the War of the Spanish Succession (in which Barcelona had opted for the
other side only to suffer the consequences). Salamanca’s huge double cathedral
is an oddity; instead of demolishing the old Romanesque church, the builders
shortened one side of the transept and otherwise kept it intact. Its beautiful Gothic
altarpiece depicts 53 scenes from the life of Christ. Many of Spain’s
cathedrals and churches create such picture sequences, supposedly for the
illiterate people, though in all Spain’s cathedrals it is only the nobles who
get to sit between the high altar and the choir. The people behind the back wall
of the choir see very little. I would have liked to sit down and study how the
nuances of these Biblical stories vary in the different presentations we see,
something of course we never have time for. I become aware that my interest in
such things has been noted disapprovingly by the group leader, another one of
the many who have fought free of Catholicism. She suspects me of being a
Catholic sympathizer and sucker for miracles and has imparted this suspicion to
the others. So while John comforts me that he was quite happy to grow up in the
Catholic system, Richard, an enthusiast for all things Roman, feels called upon
to pull me up whenever he notices my attention straying that way. The spirit of
the Inquisition is hard to kill.
One of the Cathedral chapels, the Chapel of
St Barbara, we are told, was used to examine students on their doctoral theses.
The nervous student sat on a throne-like chair in the central position with his
feet touching the worn-down feet of the statue of the saint whose grave lay
before him. This was to give him strength. There was also room for a worrying
numbers of examiners on either side. Salamanca
has Spain’s oldest and most famous university. It was founded in 1218 and it is
still crowded with students, nowadays many of them from overseas doing
accelerated language courses. A group of
young theology students from the Jesuit university who know Antonia (she
seems to have many friends in the town) approaches us for a welcoming chat. We
are taken to the university library, a grand mansion decorated all over with Saint
James’ scallop shells (the original owner was a member of the Order of
Santiago) and to the other old university buildings, one enclosing a grassed
courtyard with a well at its centre. Students would obviously not have been among
Lazarillo’s customers. Lazarillo and his cruel but nevertheless useful mentor,
the blind man, are commemorated in a statue down by the river where we are
taken to admire the still functioning Roman bridge in the glow of its golden
sandstone.
Antonia drops us off at the Art Nouveau
museum. I had earlier begun to read a 1914 novel by Miguel de Unamuno, who was
for a time vice chancellor of Salamanca University, and been struck by its Art
Nouveau qualities: that aesthetic approach to life that co-opts nature,
entirely suppresses individuality and appears quite indifferent to the
real-life world. Niebla (Fog) seems
to me to be a very Spanish story. It tells of a young man, Don Augusto, who has
grown up under the guardianship of his long widowed and recently deceased mother
(a Virgin Mary figure). Though educated as a lawyer, he is wealthy enough not
to work. He is attended by two loyal elderly servants with a far better grasp
of life than their master (Sancho Pansa figures). One day, on a morning stroll,
Augusto is struck by a glance from the eyes of an unknown young woman
(everybody else knows this Eugenia, the piano teacher, and also that she has a
problematic fiancé). Augusto considers himself in love, although he can’t quite
remember what his paramour looks like and once or twice passes her by without
realizing. He approaches Eugenia’s uncle and aunt, with whom she is living, for
her hand. Since the suitor is upper class and wealthy they are immediately in
favor, but the lady, an orphan forced to give piano lessons, which she hates,
in order to pay off a mortgage on the house she has inherited, has her own
ideas. Don Augusto, rejected but still the noble knight errant, decides to
generously pay off the mortgage, thereby of course gaining control of the house
himself, to the fury of the young woman. When she upbraids him, he realizes that
it might actually not be a problem to relinquish her. She has awakened love in
him but now any pretty young woman will do. He starts a flirt with the laundry
girl, Rosario. Eugenia finds out and now appears to assent to his suit. Augusto
embarks on psychological experiments with her; she is still not a real person
for him. She for her part falls back on the picaro’s tricks. She persuades
Augusto to organize a job in a distant town for her work-shy but dashing
lower-class lover and then runs off to live with him, though she knows that for
him too women are exchangeable. Sorely humiliated, Augusto decides to visit his
author, Unamuno, who has invented him (and this character, Don Augusto, does
seem as much invented as Don Quixote whose life was entirely determined by
chivalrous novels). But he discovers that the “god” in control of his life no
longer knows what to do with his character and is determined to let him commit
suicide, as Augusto himself had earlier threatened. It makes no difference that
the protagonist now wants to live. On returning home, a distraught Augusto
overeats, in spite of the warning of his sensible servants, and dies of the consequences. Though
set in modern times, this little novel still follows the age-old patterns of
Spanish literature; the universal theme of loss of reality, has not changed. (If
you are compelled by political decree enforced by terror to pretend to believe
what is at odds with your experience of life, then life must lose its reality
for you and estrangement from society will also result.)
The Casa
Lis Museo Art Nouveau y Art Deco was built by a wealthy lover of Art
Nouveau as his residence. It is a two-storey building, the second floor a
gallery, and has an amazing stained glass ceiling-roof complemented by stained
glass windows. Its exhibits are perhaps less appealing though no less telling:
a phenomenal collection of mainly late nineteenth century fashion dolls, their pretty
porcelain faces almost identical, and another of small Art Deco sculptures of posed dancers.
There is also some jewelry along with a few paintings and the occasional item
of furniture. It is interesting to hear that in this conservative Catholic town
the spectacular building could not find a buyer for years till the city finally
acquired it. But they now seem sufficiently protective of it to have placed an
armed and uniformed guard to supervise the ticket counter, confiscate all
cameras, and impose the extraordinary rule that groups who have entered
together must leave together. Can you write and complain, Antonia whispers to
us, he is a leftover from Franco’s days.
After we have had lunch on the square, the
tour leader and I, who actually quite enjoy each other’s company, together
visit an exhibition in the archive for the Civil War. For me it is an
interesting illustration to Orwell’s book; there are photos, posters,
proclamations, weapons and uniform pieces on show. The translations of my
companion are very welcome here.
Back at the hotel in the afternoon I
realize that the modest Romanesque building opposite that looks a bit like a
church was actually Santa Teresa’s first convent, a Carmelite community. It is
unfortunately locked.
29th
September
Today will take us into Portugal to begin
the second stage of our journey but there is time for a brief stop in the
border-town of Zamora, once the inheritance of Uracca, the sister of the
warring kings Sancho II and Alfonso VII from the days of El Cid. Zamora, we are
told, contains the greatest number of Romanesque churches anywhere in Europe,
23 of them. Those few that we see are like heavy fortifications, places of
refuge in war. At this time religion had obviously not yet been conceived as
the great clasp to secure the unity and uniformity of the nation; it looks to
have been more diversified in its location and practice, simpler and more defensive.
Crossing the border to Portugal, it is
immediately noticeable that we are in a different country. The terrain becomes
hilly and the houses have a new look, whitewashed with accentuated
window-frames and slanting, orange-red tiled roofs, and often large painted ceramic
tiles on their facades, most frequently blue and white, that tell the story of
historical events. There are also detached houses in the countryside which
looks productively rural.
Our bus-lecture on Portugal tells us that
from approximately 2000 BC onwards, Celts and Iberians settled in Portugal,
displacing a Stone Age population.. When the Romans invaded in 218 BC, the
northern tribe of Celtiberians, the Lusitani, under their leader Viriagus, put
up fierce resistance. The Romans overcame it with a trick that enabled them to
massacre the Lusitanian warriors. Nevertheless, Roman rule once established was
generally beneficial to the country. During its later stages Christianity was
introduced. Then, when the Roman empire collapsed, various Germanic tribes, the
Suevi and the Visigoths among them, invaded; they too soon became Christians.
In 711 Muslim Moors from Africa invaded; in Portugal the Reconquista started
almost immediately. After a decisive victory against the Moors at the Battle of
Ourique in 1139, Duke Afonso Henriques declared himself King of Portugal, which
had till then been merely a province of Castile-Léon. Five years later, at the
Treaty of Zamora, Portugal’s independence was recognized. This, we would be
told again and again on our trip, makes Portugal the first nation state in
Europe still with its original borders and, along with Japan, the first in the
world. Throughout the millenniums, Portugal’s and Spain’s histories have always
run parallel. Even the establishment of their colonial empires in the late 15th
century, Portugal’s to the east and Spain’s to the west, occurred only a year
or two apart; in the early years the empire of little Portugal was actually the
more extensive. Like the Catalans and the Basques, the Portuguese are fiercely
defensive of their difference and their presumed superiority; Portugal’s sense
of self, our tour leader tells us, has always been dominated by its rivalry
with Spain. When there was no direct royal descendent in 1580 and the Spanish
King invaded and took over the crown with some dynastic legitimacy, the ensuing
60 years of Spanish rule were perceived as a national disaster. After the
Portuguese had restored their own king in the person of an illegitimate royal
son known as the Duke of Bragança in 1640, they had to fight for another 28
years until Spain finally recognized their independence once again. Our tour
leader confides to us that she doesn’t like the Portuguese as much as the
Spanish: they are too tense and serious, one never sees them smiling.
Our lunch stop is Bragança in the very
north of Portugal and not far across the border with Spain. It has a castle
built during the reign of Afonso Henriques and situated on a hill a little
distance from the town. Its walls still
enclose the original settlement of two or three dozen houses under the castle’s
protection. We walk up. Unfortunately the castle buildings are closed for
renovation so we have to made do with a stroll on the walls. They have a
commanding view over the countryside. A little restaurant serves us simple but
beautifully prepared food and then gives us each a tiny Portuguese doll as a
memento. With João (John) I, Bragança became the name of the third Portuguese
dynasty; previously there had been those of Burgundy and Avis.
Once out of Bragança, the terrain becomes
more and more mountainous. This leg of our trip will take two hours longer than
calculated because we constantly have to stop for road-works or switch between short
stretches of new freeway and windy old roads clinging to the slopes. The
freeway itself is an extraordinary venture; it simply eliminates deep valleys with
bridges on towering pylons and suspends curving ribbons of exit roads at giddy
heights. A former State Minister for Transport in our group estimates that the
project will take another five years to complete, at inconceivable cost. Who
will use such a road through this lonely area? How can it be made to pay for
itself? There is actually another
freeway a little to the south we could also have taken. No wonder Portugal has
a debt crisis, is the general opinion. - Once we get to the lower reaches of
the great Douro river valley its famous vineyards can be seen stretching out
over the slopes.
We reach Braga in the misty late afternoon
and head straight for our spectacular accommodation at the Hotel do Parque in
the sanctuary of Bom Jesus do Monte (Good
Jesus of the Mountain). Our bus snakes its way up, crossing the path of the
still functional funicular. We pass through romantic mixed forest and there are
wide views over the dusky city and distant hills. In a restaurant across the
way from the hotel we are later served good Portuguese food for dinner.
30th
September
Next morning early, our guide Juan joins us
for the day’s tour, initially down the mountain to Braga where we are dropped
off for half an hour’s stroll in the pedestrian zone. Most of the buildings of
the town are still closed, Braga’s 11th century cathedral with its
unusual crown-shaped towers and the adjoining museum of sacred art among them. Our
trip notes had told us that we would be given a lecture on the importance of
Braga as the ancient religious capital of Portugal but this does not take
place. I suppose we can find somewhere to read about it ourselves. On our drive
to Oporto, Juan lists for us the main industries of Portugal: nano-technology,
the manufacture of perfumes, the manufacture of port wine, the paper industry for
which vast tracts of land have been planted with Australian eucalypts that can
be harvested two years after planting whereas radiata pines need five years to
mature, and the technology for the E-tag which Australia now also uses on its
toll roads.
Oporto and its sister city Vila Nova de
Gaia on the south bank of the wide Douro River are a beautiful sight on that
sunny morning. The river is spanned by several elegant bridges, among them an
1886 double-decker metal bridge built by an assistant of Eiffel. We first drive
to our appointment at the Sandeman port wine lodge in Vila Nova. We are taken
around the old cellars, have the wine-making processes described to us, and are
allowed to taste both red and white ports. Attention is drawn to Portugal’s
early business relationship with Britain; Sandeman, a Scot, started his London
business more than 200 years ago. Throughout our stay we are repeatedly told
that Portugal’s 1386 alliance with England, the Treaty of Windsor, still a
functioning treaty, was the first of its kind in Europe and has lasted till
today. On the river outside the old wine barges, now retired as museums, lie
picturesquely at anchor.
On the steeper north bank of Oporto the
white and orange roofed buildings are piled up like children’s blocks. We are
briefly taken to the Cathedral, see its gold and silver baroque altar, spoils
from Brazil, look down on the city from the Cathedral terrace dodging the tour
buses as we go, have lunch in one of the narrow lanes that lead up from the
river and then drive on to Guimarães.
Guimarães is about to be accorded a
particularly high conservation status by UNESCO and inevitably, there is a fair
bit of last minute road building going on in the town. Our bus takes us to the
ruins of the castle on the hill, with its photogenic battlements, in which the
famous first king of Portugal, Afonso Henrique was born. The town is
consequently regarded as the birthplace of the nation. Beside the castle lies
the large Palace of the Dukes with its high French chimneys. Walking down into
the town, we pass the Church of Our Lady of the Olive Tree and the little olive
tree planted in front of it, ostensibly to provide oil for the sacred lamp. It has
replaced a now dead miracle tree. We pass a flower-decorated shrine showing
Christ collapsed beneath his cross, pass rows of medieval houses, and finally come
to the end of the pedestrian zone where our bus will pick us up.
On our way back, Juan gives us a few brief
facts about the Bom Jesus sanctuary where we are staying. We will have to look
at it by ourselves. In 1722, he tells us, the Archbishop of Braga decided to
turn a small existing shrine on the mountain into a pilgrimage site, suitable
for elderly people for whom the longer pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome or
Compostela were not feasible. The project with its stairway of 1000 steps, its
fourteen stations of the cross and its succession of ingenious fountains to
purify the senses and awaken the divine virtues of faith, hope and love in the
pilgrims, was completed 90 years later. In place of the old shrine a
resplendent baroque church was built. Today, the colorful formal gardens, the
symmetry of the stairway, the beautiful view across the valley to distant
mountains and, bordering on the pilgrimage path, the fairy-tale forest with its
giant granite boulders seem to attract people of all kinds. Those of us who feel
like it walk about separately in the late afternoon; surprisingly, this
mountain sanctuary even has a little lake for boating. The people we see around
Bom Jesus all look more like day trippers than pilgrims; but there is still a
functioning convent up here.
1st
October
We have a long drive ahead of us today and
we leave early. Pepe, our driver, has found and fixed the problem that has made
our last two days in the bus so uncomfortable; he shows us the fan-belt. It has
been burning up and spreading its fumes. The view along the freeway is
monotonous; for hundreds of kilometers the area around is planted up with slim
young eucalypts for the paper industry.
Around midday we reach Coimbra and pick up
our guide Maria, who takes us first to the ruins of the old monastery of Santa
Clara down by the river Mondego. This is a major archeological site. A first
attempt to build a Clarist convent for women here - the order had arisen in
1212 out of the Franciscan movement that valued poverty, asceticism and
charitableness – failed, due to opposition from the neighboring monks. But in 1314 Queen Elizabeth of Aragon, the
wife of the Portuguese king Dinis, lent her support. A charitable woman whose
husband objected to her largesse to the poor, she is linked with Elizabeth of
Hungary and Elizabeth of Thuringia by the legend that the bread in their
baskets turned to roses when their stern husbands challenged them. A spacious
Romanesque church, a hospital, a cemetery and chapel, and a palace to which Elizabeth,
also known as Isabel, would retire in her widowhood were built. Unfortunately,
extensive tree-felling in the river catchment was even then causing the river
to silt up; the level soon rose so drastically that flooding became a recurring
problem. A second floor for the church had to be built but eventually, in the
early 17th century, the nuns were forced to move to a new site on
the hill. Restoration and archeological work at this site began in 1910 when
the high Gothic church was still barely visible under the mud. It has continued
for the past century. We are taken through the trenches of the dig; when I ask
what something that seems to be glinting in the clay could be (it turns out to
be sun-spots on the oily surface) the tour leader reinforces her suspicions of
me with “a miracle, a miracle!” and creates a moment of hilarity. In
conjunction with old records, the artifacts found allow an amazingly detailed
reconstruction of life in this convent. Rather than a place of ascetic
deprivation, it seems to have been something like a sanctuary for women of all
kinds: aristocratic women who wanted to escape arranged marriages, their
servants, widows in danger of losing control over their property and their
children, young girls whose virginity and marriageability was best protected
behind convent walls, gifted women from the lower classes who could contribute
musical or other skills instead of a dowry, and of course also pious women
dedicated to the ideals of Saint Clare and willing to live an ascetic life of
service. In a warrior dominated society, in which women were valued for little
more than their blood-line and their reproductive capabilities, freedom and
self-fulfillment could here be found behind convent walls. This complex
community of women, which had to cater to so many different needs, existed as a
stable organization over many centuries. It is obvious that Maria, a lovely-looking
and well educated young woman, is excited by these revelations that an
alternative church so different from that of the male Bishops and Inquisitors
had once existed.
We now cross the river to Coimbra proper,
like Porto, a pile of white, red-roofed buildings on a steep hill. Maria takes us
up to Coimbra University where she herself studied. Since it is the beginning
of the winter semester, students in their garb, a neat black suit and cape, are
everywhere on the streets. But you need to have passed your first year before you
can thus distinguish yourself, Maria explains. The cape, we are told, will always
remain a valued possession for it has little tears inflicted on it as mementos by
the friends of the student: family on right, fellow students on the left, and a
dedicated lover can claim the middle ground though this tear has to be sewn up
if the relationship fails. The colored ribbons to distinguish faculties that
are still burned at graduation, red for law, yellow for medicine, dark blue for
the humanities, blue and white for science, are not worn at this time of the
year; Maria tells us the ribbons were originally used to tie up the student’s
books. Portugal’s first university was founded in 1290 in Lisbon by King Dinis
but it was moved to Coimbra in 1537 when the former royal palace was made
available for its use. The curriculum was then broadened in the second half of
the 18th century at which time the Humanities and Science were added
to the medieval faculties of Theology, Medicine and Law by the Marquis of Pombal.
After the terrible earthquake and tsunami of Lisbon in 1755, which greatly
disturbed Christians everywhere for the disaster seemed an unnecessarily brutal
punishment from God visited upon people just going about their business (in
which, admittedly, the slave trade featured large), the Marquis realized it was
important for national self-esteem to promote the scientific and rational views
of the Enlightenment. The Portuguese seem to have remained fairly true to the
reforms he introduced.
Though Portugal is a Catholic nation,
attitudes to religion appear to have been on the whole more relaxed here than
in Spain. Perhaps this is because, in 1640, when the Inquisition was raging in
Spain, Portugal was dedicated to the Virgin Mary by the grateful King João, whose
birth had been illegitimate. (Nobody would accuse him of wearing a crown to
which he had no entitlement.) After that no Portuguese king ever again wore the
crown. In paintings it is generally displayed on a side table. The Virgin Mary,
being a mother, a woman not under the command of a husband, and a human being
with profound experience of spiritual things, can bring out the gentler sides
of Christianity.
Christianity is, however, still of
intellectual concern in the country. Portugal’s Nobel Prize winning author,
José Saramago, re-imagined a human Jesus, who is morally superior to his Father
God, in his novel The Gospel According to
Jesus Christ. In another novel, The
Siege of Lisbon, he scrutinized the traditional Portuguese story of the
ousting of the Moors which led to nationhood. Raimundo Silva is a proof-reader
who has before him yet another conventional novel rehashing Portugal’s
foundation myth with all the inaccuracies that inadequate research and patchy
records, a misunderstanding of the mentality of the times, an uncritical
patriotic agenda, an inadequate authorial imagination and the distortions
encouraged by genre bring with it. He eventually gives vent to his intense
irritation with all this by introducing a negative, a “not”, at a crucial point in the text: the
large army of Crusaders who were at the time anchored in the Tagus estuary to
take on fresh water before they proceeded to the Holy Land refused to stay and help
Afonso Henriques, according to this altered account. When the deliberate
falsification is discovered, just in time to be defused with an errata, the
editors are unexpectedly lenient with their gifted proof-reader. But the newly
employed supervisor, Dr. Maria Sara, is curious about the reasons for this
lapse (which has the potential to lead to a story of even greater national
hubris) and encourages the proof-reader to write an alternative history. This
new novel, which we watch unfolding, has to admit that a few Crusaders did decide
to stay and help after all (there are records of this); but the messy and
stalling campaign succeeds only due to eventual famine in the city and the
rekindled enthusiasm of the long unpaid soldiers when they are given permission
to plunder. Initially that was to be the prerogative of the aristocratic crusaders
who, far from being champions of the cross, had to be bought to join the
campaign. It is the very un-Christian, un-heroic and primitive Christian
attackers of this civilized Muslim city that offend our moral sense; before
long, the author too loses patience with them. As he and his supervisor, Maria
Sara, discover their love for each other, the story begins to concentrate on a
love affair between the kidnapped concubine of a fallen knight and a brave,
enterprising and fair-thinking rank and file soldier. To sum up: it is not
heroic warriors or Christian fanatics that gave rise to the great Portuguese
nation, but ordinary men and women who loved each other and decided to create life
rather than death. And the name of the soldier-protagonist, Mogueime, has, the
author admits, a Moorish ring about it. (At the time of their defeat the Moors
had been in Lisbon for 300 years, plenty of time to mix with the rest of the population.)
On the wide square in front of the
university, fashionably dressed young people are gathering for a wedding when
we arrive. Students have the right to be married in the beautiful university
chapel of which we catch a brief glimpse before the doors are closed. Maria
points out the bell tower that rings noisily every hour to encourage the
punctual termination of classes. She then takes us into the University’s beautiful
18th century library, the Biblioteca Joanina, with its tempting
treasure of 300,000 old books. Thankfully many of them are now available on the
internet. Beneath the library is the student prison. Those who broke the law had
to spend their nights down there but turn up punctually for their classes each
day. (The Spanish playwright Calderon, studying at Salamanca, was once thus
imprisoned when he couldn’t pay the rent.)
After Coimbra, we take the freeway to
Lisbon. We pass the site of the large Roman town of Conimbriga and its extensive excavations with
never a sideways glance. And with only a brief comfort stop at a former railway
station turned into a cafe and pumpkin museum by the enterprising new owners, we arrive at Lisbon before
nightfall.
2nd
October
This morning our new guide Katya directs
our bus to the Belem district on the wide River Tagus, a few kilometers before
it joins the sea. On the previous day, there had been a large demonstration
against the government’s austerity measures here and though there is only a
fun-run for breast-cancer planned for today, a Sunday, the police are out in
force and the parking situation seems chaotic. There are vehicles whose wheels
have been clamped. When Katya asks a young policeman for advice he retorts
grumpily that he isn’t on duty for another half hour. We do find a park
eventually and then saunter along the foreshore to look at the landmark Belem
Tower fortress, built into the Tagus in 1515 but now adjoining reclaimed land. From
it the Virgin and Child, Our Lady of Safe Homecoming, look out to sea to
welcome back mariners. Vasco da Gama had reached India by sea in 1498, Brazil
was discovered in 1500, and Goa was conquered in 1510 to establish the first
base for the briefly huge Portuguese Empire. By the mid seventeenth century,
however, the over fifty forts had been reduced to nine with the Dutch the main
rivals.
In 1572 Luis Vaz de Camões, who had spent
time in India, published his heroic (and somewhat pompous) national epic poem
of the Portuguese discovery of India, Os
Lusiadas. The explorer Vasco da Gama is here assisted by the gods Venus and
Mars and hindered by Bacchus and Oceanus; there is not a Christian deity or
saint in sight. The poem emphasizes the perils of the journey; but there is
also mention of the Portuguese king’s vision in which the two great rivers of
India, the Indus and the Ganges, express the wish to be conquered by Portugal.
Unease about the legitimacy of the imperial venture does seem to have existed.
Though Os Lusiadas has become
Portugal’s national epic, the king at the time showed little appreciation and
the author died in the poor-house. By this time the Inquisition had also come to
Portugal, which may explain the king’s coolness towards the classically
inclined author. - But Columbus too (admittedly, after his third trip he had
been brought back to Spain in chains because of his ill-treatment of native
peoples) died alone and forgotten by all those who went on to benefit from his
discoveries.
The foreshore has its own monuments to
Portuguese seafarers. A large sculpture of
the heroes of the discoveries led by Henry the Navigator, the King’s
brother who encouraged Portuguese seafaring though himself not a navigator, was
erected in 1960 by the Salazar government in honor of the 500th
anniversary of the death of Henry. Another sculpture depicts an Armillary
Sphere, an instrument used by sailors to navigate by the stars. There is also a
mosaic compass on the pavement as well as a map, and the plane in which a
Portuguese made the first Atlantic crossing is on display.
Opposite the foreshore, behind lawns,
fountains and formal flower gardens, is the extensive Manueline Mosteiro dos Jeronimos (Katya insists
indignantly that its real name is the Monastery of Our Lady of Bethlehem) which
was built in the early 16th century, largely with money from the
spice (and slave?) trade. The style is characterized by decorative elements
like ropes and armillary spheres taken from seafaring and is unique to Portugal.
In spite of a bare shoulder or two, Katya’s among them, her pleasant smile
gains us a few moments in the sumptuous chapel where Sunday mass is being
conducted. The beautiful two-storey cloister with its fine Moorish-looking arches
is Katya’s favorite piece of architecture and she gives us time to admire it.
Strangely, Belem was almost unaffected by the earthquake and tsunami of 1755.
On our way to the Museum of Coaches, Katya
manages to skip the long queue and procure the obligatory little local custard
pastries for us straight from the kitchen. The coaches and their different
styles are interesting. The overland coach of Charles V, which must have given
him a rough ride, even has a toilet on board. Another is the coach in which two
little princesses were exchanged between the Spanish and Portuguese courts,
swapping places halfway, to marry respective future kings. It was a disaster in
the case of Portugal’s Queen Carlota. The decorations on the coaches are superb
and telling. Katya is good at pointing out their features.
On returning to Lisbon proper, Katya tells
us how she has overcome her resentment of the Spanish who always claim not to
understand the Portuguese language and so force her to speak their language.
(Our bus driver, who has a Portuguese wife, is an admirable exception.) Katya
says she found a linguistic treatise that shows that Spanish has far fewer
different sounds than Portuguese and people who have not grown up with sounds
usually can not hear them. So the Spaniards, seeing how deficient their
language is, can be excused!
Though Katya encourages us to let the bus drop
us off in the city where there are the shops to explore, quite a few of us go
back to the hotel and later that afternoon to the Gulbenkian Museum situated
almost opposite us in its beautiful park. Calouste Gulbenkian was a Turkish oil
magnate who used his wealth to collect art works and artifacts from all over
the world. He then bequeathed his collection to Portugal which had sheltered
him during World War II. It is an eclectic collection that contains great
treasures: superb carpets, jewelry, sculptures, paintings and to me most
memorable of all (in spite of the disapproval of Richard, who is there to spot
me) a little ivory triptych recounting the life of the Virgin. The collection seems
an appropriate gift for a nation that once had a far-flung trading empire.
3rd
October
Next morning Katya is with us again as we
drive to Queluz. This was originally a summer palace. It was then used by Maria
I (who later became the victim of her depressive madness) as her residence. It
is a far more intimate, modest and varied place than the huge palace of the
Spanish kings we had seen in Madrid and quite exquisite; exotic plants and
fruits feature as decorations, as befits a nation of explorers. And each room
has a character of its own; one observes how the styles in that period of rapid
historical change progress from Rococo on to eventual Romanticism. European
politics, always a threat to the tiny nation, caught up with the Portuguese when
Napoleon invaded the country in 1807. At the urging of the British, Napoleon’s
foes and Portugal’s traditional friends, the royal family along with most of
the aristocracy responded to Napoleon’s invasion and his threat to depose the
Braganças with a hasty and perilous flight to Brazil - there were around 10,000
on the initial fleet - leaving their subjects to fend for themselves as best
they could. The palace contains a painting on which, Katya explained, the half
naked and destitute people plead with the king and his retinue, enthroned on a
pink cloud floating somewhere across the ocean, to return and rescue them.
Someone in our group wonders why this painting is hanging in Queluz. In Patrick
Wilcken’s book on the flight to Brazil, the painting is described quite
differently: “The idealised figures in the foreground, bathed in warm colours,
gesture in adoration at Dom João’s ethereal seat in the heavens.”(146) A
cleverly ambiguous artist in precarious times? The bitterness still felt by
Portuguese people became tangible when Katya talked of the inappropriate
behavior of the regent when in Brazil: he was always stuffing food into his
pockets, she said, to eat on his walks around town. Beyond the formal courtyard
garden of the Queluz palace there is an azulejo-covered little boating canal on
which the royal family used to enjoy themselves in the days before their
defection.
From Queluz we drive to Sintra. There would
have been much to see in this beautiful lush mountain resort with its palaces
but the place was clogged with tour buses evacuating their waiting passengers
on a very tight schedule and we had probably loitered too long in the gardens
of Queluz. Consequently, there was no time for anything but a quick lunch and
the purchase of a few postcards in the steep little tourist shops.
On the way home Katya begins to talk about
the predicament of her country now threatened with bankruptcy. After the fourth
set of austerity measures introduced by the government, the income of
pensioners had now been reduced to €222
a month when the rent for an average apartment was €700; the minimum wage was
now €485 and the average wage €728. Her grandmother, who had been a rural
worker all her life and consequently had no superannuation, was supposed to
live on €222 a month! There were no jobs any more for the average worker
because they had all been moved overseas to make use of cheaper labor. Also, she
pleaded, we must remember that Portugal was subjected to the dictatorship of
Salazar for 50 years, that is for half of the twentieth century. And the 37
years between the Carnation Revolution that ousted him and now, years in which
Portugal had experienced many changes, had not sufficed to root out corruption.
Katya herself was owed €1,500 by a travel company who had employed her but she
had been advised that she had no hope of retrieving this money, a huge amount
for her, through the courts. The firms knew that up to a certain point it was
safe to act outside the law as long as only the little people suffered. While there
were plenty of rich people in Portugal - if you just looked at the shops you
could see that - it was the poorest of the poor who were expected to pay the
country’s debts that had ultimately come about as the result of a crisis in the
US. For us tourists it was at least a relief to know that our company has been
paying our Spanish and Portuguese guides large tips in recognition of their
unacceptably low wages. - It is people like Katya who should be in politics, was
the comment of the former politician among us. Katya, of course, has a little
baby now whose photo we have all seen. She obviously misses him on her days at
work. But I am quite sure she went to the demonstration yesterday.
This evening we are booked for a Fado and
folk theatre show. The venue turns out to be a long way up a steep cobbled lane
and I am glad that unlike some of the others I am wearing flat shoes. The
performances take place between the dinner-courses. The folk artists sing
little comic scenes: one is set in an inn, others are played out between a
courting pair. A group of young people reproduce the traditional cries of
street vendors and then perform the quick, energetic foursome folk dances of the
region. There is only one Fado singer. She performs on her own in a nervous
rigid stance that allows her to produce a tragic voice from deep within her
chest. “Fado singers want their audiences to dissolve in tears; it’s typically
Portuguese, complaining and complaining,” our tour leader comments. “The
Spaniards also had to cope with a dictator; Salazar was no worse than Franco.”
She can still not get herself to like the Portuguese people; even Katya has not
charmed her.
4th
October
We are leaving Portugal today. We cross the
Tagus on its amazing eleven kilometer long bridge. A bit later we stop in Evora
and sprint up the hill to view a surprisingly intact Roman temple of Diana
still crowning the town centre. Lunch is at the border-town of Elvas, which has
exceptionally well designed and well preserved fortifications; nowadays we consider
them picturesque. My good Eyewitness guide-book
tells me that Elvas was in the hands of the Moors for 500 years; after that it
was the site of frequent hostilities between Spain and Portugal. Eventually, in
the War of Independence, its well designed defenses won Portugal her crucial
victory. After lunch, we drive past the Spanish border town of Badajoz and on
to Merida where we will stay for only one night. So we are asked to deposit our
bags and wash our faces quickly and be ready for the waiting guide in just
twenty minutes.
Merida is a small town but even today it is
the capital of the province of Extremadura. Founded by Augustus in 25 BC as
Emerita Augusta, it was once the capital of Lusitania, one of three Roman
provinces on the Iberian Peninsula. Our guide, Louis, first takes us on a quick
bus tour through the town: the Roman bridge, the oval field that was once the Roman
race track, churches, museums, the Moorish Alcazaba, the amphitheatre, the Roman
theatre, excavated villas – it all passes too quickly to remember in detail before
we stop at the Roman Museum, designed most effectively by Rafael Moneo. Louis
is superbly organized. He is a man in his fifties whose wife, a teacher, could
not get work in his native Catalonia because she did not speak the language
fluently. So they have moved here. I presume that he too was once a teacher,
for his knowledge of his subject is meticulously learned and his management of
time is admirable. In the relatively short interval before closing, he takes us
through the levels of the museum, concentrating on the most significant
exhibits: statues, portrait busts, huge floor mosaics, jewelry, articles of
daily life, coins, ceramics, glass-ware, statues and more. Three identical toga-draped
headless bodies, made with factory efficiency, still stand awaiting important
heads. A statue of Mithras coiled about with a snake is evidence of a Mithras
cult on the peninsula. Then Louis leads the way into the amphitheatre where two
of the three levels of tiered seating are still almost intact. After that we go
to the theatre, by far the best preserved Roman theatre in the world. When
closing time is upon us, Louis takes those of us who still have the energy to
the temple of Diana, which he says would be more accurately called a temple to
the genius of the city, that is situated in the town centre. Eventually, he
shows us the way back to the hotel.
After dinner I have time to wonder about
the Roman world we have rushed through this afternoon. Their formula for
running a society seems so extraordinarily modern: efficient infrastructure
(roads, bridges, aqueducts, baths, shops, factories, stadiums and the like), a
sensible and just legal system, the opportunity for ordinary people to come to
wealth and honor, plenty of amusements to neutralize any spare time people may
have and create common topics of interest, an emphasis on sport and fitness, a
celebrity cult for a bit of glamour, an international economy to forestall
shortages, and religious tolerance on the condition that the state and its prime
representative have precedence over other gods. Isn’t that more or less how most
of the developed countries in the world are run today? Why were none of the
cultures that followed the Romans on the Iberian Peninsula convinced of the
genius of this formula? The Catholic Monarchs attempted to create a functioning
state by enforcing uniformity of thinking and belief and adhering strictly to
dynastic legitimacy. The Visigoths tried a more democratic model of electing
kings which led to infighting and unstable government. The Moors achieved a
measure of social uniformity by imposing a strict and exacting religious ritual
on all alike: five prayer sessions a day executed with great precision and a
long yearly fast that required considerable self-discipline. In a similar way,
the Jews were a community welded together by laws and rituals that
distinguished them from others. It is remarkable to think that all these Iberian
cultures postdated the Romans but none of them decided to use their secular and
ultimately hedonist model.
5th
October
Today’s long drive takes us through Extremadura,
the land of cork oaks: millions and millions of them for hundreds of kilometers
in plantations that often look almost like natural bush; the bark of the trees
is only harvested every ten years so there is little disturbance of natural growing
conditions. We are headed for Seville but soon leave the freeway for Aracena, a
little white town in the mountains where we have an appointment with a local ham producer. Our presenter is welcoming,
tries extremely hard to find enough English words to tell us of the rare
qualities of his product, and is delighted with compliments. The pigs they farm,
he tells us, are a breed with thin, long, strong legs and pointed snouts. They
are left to run wild in the vast cork- and holm-oak plantations, living off
acorns, chestnuts, mushrooms and other foods for which they forage. Due to
their fitness their meat is marbled and has no deposits of fat; it also takes
on the taste of the aromatic natural foods they consume. We are then shown a
variety of hams produced in other countries but left to find a slice of the
local ham for ourselves.
Aracena has another attraction, a vast
network of limestone caves under the mountain high upon which a Moorish castle
is strategically situated. The strange thing is that the caves were discovered
only a century or so ago by a swineherd chasing a lost pig. What an opportunity
missed to gain access to water, stored provisions and safety if the castle was
ever besieged! We tour the caves. The guide apologizes that due to his lack of
English we will miss out on his imaginative descriptions of the various
formations: stalagmites, stalactites, shawls, straws and the rest. The deep, completely
still underground lakes and the decorative and very individual little grottos
that have formed everywhere are what appeals most in these caves.
Our hotel in Seville is situated in the
pedestrian zone of Santa Cruz so we are dropped off for the ten minute walk
through the park and the confusing little lanes of the former Jewish Quarter. A
porter later trundles in our bags. The balcony of my room is so close to that
opposite that I could almost shake hands with its occupant across the lane.
6th
October
Today has been marked out for a trip to
Jerez de la Frontera. On the road down through the treeless plain in the
direction of the ocean, which we will never see on this trip, we watch fascinated
as a large black cloud from an industrial chimney extends its thin but
impenetrable layer over more and more of the otherwise sunny countryside. In
Jerez, the home of sherry, we first visit a sherry bodega: instruction, vast
halls of stored barrels, and then the tasting. But they have a gallery which contains
a full set of Picasso’s Vollard prints with fawns and satyrs and voluptuous
women in their joyous intoxication. ( I saw these prints in an exhibition years
ago and am glad I have the catalogue at home). Then we are off to an equestrian
show. The discipline of the horses is admirable and the routines performed are as
formal as court life on old paintings or the geometric flower beds of Spain. But
I find I have to suppress my irritation. I do not like seeing living things so
controlled and constrained.
On the way back to Seville I try to
remember Calderon’s great drama Life is a
Dream written in 1635. It tells of a king who reacts to portents that his
infant son will one day be a violent and patricidal ruler by chaining him and imprisoning
him from birth in a crude tower in a remote forest where, apart from a tutor
instructed to tell him about the world, he will see only wild creatures. As the
king ages, the matter of the succession becomes a concern; there are two
equally legitimate candidates second in line. The king decides to give his son,
about whom nobody but he and the tutor knows, a chance to prove himself a
worthy successor by moving him to the palace and its luxuries in an unconscious
state; if the experiment fails he can thus be told it was only a dream. It does
fail; the prince’s anger at the terrible life his father had subjected him to on
the whim of a prophecy, a decision that his tutor had obviously condoned, makes
him suspicious of all and violent towards those who approach him. He is
returned to the tower and told that his time in the palace was only a dream,
though he finds this hard to believe. Meanwhile the political situation has
changed because the people now know there is a legitimate heir. They mobilize
an army to free the prince and the king is defeated. The prince now has a
second chance. Realizing how insubstantial worldly glory is and how quickly
fortunes can change, he decides to behave as a moral human being rather than a
beast, forgives his repentant father and the tutor who had merely served his
lord, condemns instead one of the treasonous soldiers who freed him, and thus
restores legitimacy, stability and order to the country. Calderon’s is a
complex play with many messages. But it proclaims, among other things, that
human beings are free to choose a life of self-control, social responsibility
and obedience without needing much training and that anything forced upon them
is more likely to teach them violence than establish the desired habits and
attitudes. This is a message modern educators would applaud. Velasquez’s Las Meninas painting suggests that the
little princess it depicts still had many years of kind but rigorous training
in such things as standing still, doing nothing and wearing stiff uncomfortable
dresses ahead of her. And the horses we have just seen, with their lifetime of
strict, though probably also kind training to perform fairly pointless
routines? They too are a remnant of the Spanish Habsburg tradition.
Back in Seville where the temperature has
now reached 40° we stroll through the huge Plaza de España. Lavishly designed
for the Ibero-American Exhibition in 1929, it might have been in Portugal with
its azulejo-decorated boating canal and its azulejo homage to most of the Spanish
towns and cities one can find on a medium-sized map. For each of them in the
altar-like niches that fringe the main building there is a large tile depicting
a significant historical event that occurred in the town; we can recognize some
of the stories we have been told on our trip.
.
We have dinner tonight at a long table on
one of the little squares of the old Jewish ghetto and almost feel like a group
of long-time friends.
7th
October
Seville is a beautiful city. After the
discoveries of the Americas it was given the monopoly to trade with the New
World, a measure, as Fernando, our local guide, explains, to control this
onrush of new wealth as a national asset and limit the disruption to the rest
of the country. Whatever the rationale, it made Seville very rich. Of all the
guides we have had, Fernando is the best. He has an encyclopedic and very
precise knowledge of everything imaginable, amassed from a sheer delight in the
wealth and variety of the world, but he is careful to produce information only when
it is relevant or in answer to questions; he never shows off. On our short walk
through Santa Cruz to the Alcazar, which is due to open in twenty minutes, he
points out the old mill-stones let into the walls to protect them from the
carts navigating through the narrow lanes, the anti-fungal and sun-protective benefits
of white-washing with lime, a Seville orange tree with fruits useful only for marmalade,
he takes us into the foyer of the house in which the painter Murillo lived with
his extended family and tells how he fell to his death from scaffolding while
painting a ceiling when ill, he shows us a tiny shrine to Santa Teresa high on
a house wall, explains the palm fronds woven into the balustrades of balconies,
shows us the current French embassy, ironically located in a little square
Napoleon’s troops had destroyed, tells us of the generous response to a 17th
century collection for a retirement house for venerable priests and of a recent
successful local initiative to erect a Gothic wrought iron ornament in one of
the little squares, he shows us exotic New World plants in the park, the inn
that Don Juan liked to frequent, lists the many operas set in Seville, and comes
up with dozens of other interesting bits of information. To the delight of our
tour leader, a great admirer of Machiavelli, he mentions the Machiavellian
approach of Ferdinand and Isabella in using the Inquisition for political
purposes (Machiavellian, even though The
Prince was not written till 1513 and not published till 1532! Isabella was
actually a deeply religious Catholic.)
In the Real
Alcazar which we have to share with countless other tourists, Fernando
points out the little tell-tale signs which indicate that this is a mudéjar rather
than a Moorish building. He draws our attention to the intricate tile patterns
that skirt the rooms to waist height and protect them from flood waters and gives
us time to marvel at the dome of gilded and interlaced wood in the great
Ambassadors’ Hall. The palace was begun in 1364 for Pedro I, a Christian king
employing Moorish artisans from Toledo and Granada; at the time, Granada was
still Moorish. The Real Alcazar with its gardens appears completely intact.
Next we visit Seville’s cathedral, the
largest in Europe. The tower of the great mosque this cathedral replaced, now
known as the Giralda, was incorporated and raised by three segments to become a
Christian bell tower. The Cathedral contains some of the remains of Christopher
Columbus, now verified by DNA testing. It was useful that his son – he became a
learned priest with a famous library - is also buried in this cathedral. The
remains of Columbus had to be rescued when the French took over part of the
island of Santo Domingo where he had asked to be buried. His catafalque in this
church is borne by kingly representatives of Castile, Leon, Aragon and Navarra.
(It is always easier to honor someone after their death.) - We noticed an
improvised and untidy protest display against austerity measures in one section
of the Cathedral. - Though the Giralda tower is 34 revolutions high, it can be
climbed with ease on the broad ramp built to allow horses to walk up. The view
of Seville from the top is certainly worth the climb.
That evening we stand in line to get front
row seats for a performance of Flamenco in the courtyard of one of the old
Santa Cruz hotels. It is a small venue; the audience is only two rows deep, the
stage platform tiny. There are two guitars, one Spanish and one classical, a
singer who hums to himself, eyes closed, till he is quite in tune with the
improvisations of the guitars, and a male and a female dancer who can also be hand
clappers. The male dancer wears shoes with more than the usual tap-dancing
platelets so that his spirited, twirling dance is not only a performance in
itself but an instrument for creating the most extraordinarily complex rhythms.
The woman is a tap dancer too but in her case her body movements, the way she
uses her skirt and her beautifully expressive hands are the centre of attention
and the percussion rhythms an accompaniment. That afternoon the tour leader and
I had gone to the nearby Flamenco Museum together. In its central display the
range of stylized and prescriptively
presented emotions, or better passions, had been given the greatest emphasis. Earlier,
in Barcelona, we had seen flamenco on a large concert stage. The performance
had begun with a neat and proper dance by two soberly dressed women and a man,
had then presented a more passionate courtship dance, and finally shown the
second woman in an ecstatic solo dance in which she seemed more like elemental
fire than a human being. This had been full-scale theatre. The DVD I bought at
the museum, in turn, showed flamenco as it gradually develops when friends,
elderly and unglamorous friends in this case, come together and find they need
to give expression to the unspoken currents and tensions between them. I am
beginning to share the tour leader’s fascination with the range and versatility
of this art. It gives expression to the full scale of feelings which Spanish imperial
and Catholic culture has tended to be keen to suppress. Perhaps it serves a
similar function to the bull-fight. Though this Andalusian gypsy dance with its
Eastern, maybe Jewish, music is presumably ancient, it only began to emerge in
the 18th century when individuality and romantic emotionality came
into vogue.
8th
October
It is late morning when we arrive in Cordoba,
once renowned as the greatest city in medieval Europe and for long the capital
of Moorish Iberia. We walk in over the long bridge, before us the huge Mezquita
or mosque. Our guide, another Maria, explains the various stages in which the
prayer hall with its red and white striped arches had been built, the earlier
sections using Roman columns and brick segments in the arches, the later ones constructed
a little more cheaply. The most beautiful section is a finely and intricately
decorated prayer niche or Mihrab where a copy of the Koran was once held. After
Cordoba had fallen to the Christians in 1236, a chapel was built in a section
of the mosque in the later 14th century. This, Maria, assures us, is
what saved the Mezquita from destruction, for a consecrated Christian church
could not be destroyed. In 1523 a cathedral was then built to occupy the centre
of the mosque and the many doorways of the Mezquita were closed up to become
Christian chapels. In this way the building has become a strange and
disconcerting mixture of styles and purposes.
Next comes a walk through the town. The
narrow streets in this part of Cordoba are cluttered with shops for tourists,
cheap shops but also expensive jewelry shops. Wedged between other tourists we
are led along the street of flowers - the geraniums in their baskets have just
started to bloom again - to snap the obligatory photograph before turning back
downhill. Maria then takes us to a less congested area which was once the
Jewish section of the city. A statue of Maimonides, who came from here, can remind
those who know of him what brilliant mediation between cultures Jews were
equipped to provide. Though Maimonides authoritatively codified the laws and
observances which still unite Jewish people in a specific and unique community
and was Chief Rabbi of Egypt during his lifetime, his scientific no-nonsense approach
as a doctor, his humane and compassionate approach as an ethicist, his
metaphysics of the universal divine, and his willingness to accept ideas from
non-Jewish thinkers all could have provided a substantial common basis for
respectful mutual tolerance.
Seneca, the much earlier Roman Stoic philosopher
and writer, also famous as the tutor of Nero, was a son of this city too.
The long drive to Granada leads through
quite mountainous country with a string of ancient Moorish fortresses visible
on the peaks. It is late afternoon when we arrive at our hotel which is only a
few minutes walk from the Alhambra. That evening we have a premature farewell
dinner in a vine-shaded open-air restaurant from where we can see the great
Alhambra on the hill opposite stretched before us in the last light.
9th
October
For the first time on this trip the room I
have been given in our hotel is inadequate. It is ridiculously tiny, you have
to climb over the bed to get to the window side, and the walls are paper-thin. The
woman next door whose head lay inches away from mine all night has been
coughing non-stop. She seemed to be suffering from a bad bout of asthma. Would
I have noticed if she was in trouble? Is she one of our group?
When Isabel our guide turns up after
breakfast she is hoarse with a bad cold. Another guide offers her some tablets.
Unfortunately, she is also required to use a walky-talky up here and she keeps
on forgetting about it when she chats to people. You get mysterious snatches of
conversation along with other noises and are never sure what is intended for
you. But there is a bright blue sky and the temperature is pleasant.
We start by having a quick look at the
palace Charles V began to build for himself here because he didn’t feel
comfortable in the Moorish one. The palaces of the Moors were plain outside and
beautifully decorated but largely private inside whereas the Spanish monarchs
preferred ornate facades and spectacular reception rooms. Charles’ palace here is
relatively plain outside and circular around a courtyard inside, with the
courtyard presumably intended for bull-fights or other spectacles. It seems to
have been a compromise and was left unfinished, apparently due to a revolt by
the Moriscos who were supposed to pay for it; the building now houses a museum.
The Alhambra which we hurry through along with the crowds is beautiful. When I later
tried to recall impressions, the newly renovated marble lions that have so far
not been returned to their fountain because an archeological dig has begun
there, were my most vivid memory along with the star-shaped ceiling of the extraordinary
Sala de los Abencerrajes, of which Gaudi’s work seems at times an echo, the
tile mosaics on the lower walls, the intricate stucco tracery, the slender
columns, the views from the deep window niches, and above all the courtyards
with their still pools. These are always intended to provide a perfect mirror
that will complement the building they reflect; they also light up the adjacent
halls.
The terraced gardens of what was once the
Medina or village lead on to the formal gardens of the Generalife higher up the
mountain with their terraced flower beds, their clipped conifer hedges and
arches, and their fountains and pools. There the Emir had a large pavilion
suitable for entertaining on hot summer days; again the building is perfected
by its unruffled image in the pool. The view from up here ranges over the town
in the valley and the villages on the hills; in one of these the houses that
look ordinary from a distance are, we are told, built into caves. A steep, well
shaded and wide pedestrian walkway then takes us down into the town. It is
lined with large posters depicting wilderness areas from all over the world and
drawing attention to the need to conserve our environment. Down in the town, Isabel
wants to show us the prominent statue that depicts her namesake, Queen Isabel, when
she changed her mind and gave Columbus the crucial permission to sail. In the
cathedral precinct there is also the Royal Chapel which the Catholic Monarchs
built here for themselves and where they are buried. Among other things, it has
a little gallery with some of the best works of fifteenth and sixteenth century
European masters (Memling, Botticelli, Perugino, Rogier van der Weyden etc.);
they have come from Queen Isabel’s private collection.
One wonders why the Catholic Monarchs were
so keen to be buried here, so far from their homes. Did they want to safeguard
this last outpost of Spain with their permanent presence? Did they see their
Granada victory as the most important achievement of their reign with which
they hoped to be for ever identified? I suspect that these hard-working monarchs,
constantly travelling from city to city to secure support, quell disorder and
fight battles in their as yet still only nominally united and pacified lands,
were on some level drawn to the sophisticated Muslim culture they had ousted. There
may have been two things in particular that impressed them: the fanatical and
uniform religion which held Moorish kingdoms together and which they may have tried
to replicate in their Christian lands, but also perhaps the view of the monarch
that seemed to express itself in the exquisite palace and gardens of the
Alhambra: the monarch as a higher being, fashioned not primarily as a warrior
or administrator but as someone who demonstrated the heavenly paradise here on
earth for all to see and who had a right to surround himself with beauty. John
Edwards tells us that there were perhaps five views of the monarch circulating
during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. First, there was a prophetic and messianic
expectation that this Aragonese-Castilian marriage would save the country from
disorder and unite the Iberian Peninsula. Secondly, a biblical “high” doctrine
of monarchy was current in 15th century Spain: the monarch by the
grace of God. Thirdly, there was the feudal notion of monarchy as a contract
between the ruler, as primus inter pares, and his or her subjects. Fourthly, the
“late Roman Empire, of East and West, had bequeathed the idea of monarchy in
which the ruler was qualitatively distinct from his subjects, and this notion
naturally appealed to many a medieval ruler” (41). And fifthly, Spanish monarchs
were well aware that realistically, they also had to work opposite and alongside
their subjects, honoring the Cortes parliaments and the rights of cities and
provinces. The belief of Ferdinand and
Isabella in their exalted status, but also their yearning for redemption had
been only too visible in the many altars we saw on which they were included as
kneeling figures in the company of saints. But when Isabella felt death approaching
at the age of fifty-three the codicils of her will included a detailed and
realistic summary of the tasks that she and her husband had achieved and those
that still needed to be taken in hand or followed up by her heirs. This queen
who asked to be buried humbly in a Franciscan cassock clearly took both her
responsibilities as representative and guardian of the one true religion and as
administrator and far-sighted molder of her nation extremely seriously.
This is my last day with the group; most of
them will continue on to explore Morocco. There they will, no doubt, see more of
Muslim Arab and Berber culture. I spend
the afternoon wandering fairly aimlessly around the gardens; my mind and memory
are full to capacity. Glancing into the little shops near the hotel I notice
that they all sell cheap copies of Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra, a book which our guide this morning had credited
with rescuing this extraordinary Moorish palace for posterity. One would need
to live in the Alhambra for some months with the freedom to explore it at
leisure, like Irving did, to fully appreciate its extensive buildings, gardens
and fortifications. And one would need time and more historical knowledge to
imagine life there in distant Moorish days. The legends still told by locals in
the early nineteenth century which Irving collected when he was there would
have helped him get a feel for the place. That is difficult nowadays in the
midst of tourist crowds. Irving writes: “As I sat watching the effect of the
declining daylight upon this Moorish pile, I was led into a consideration of
the light, elegant and voluptuous character prevalent throughout its internal
architecture and to contrast it with the grand but gloomy solemnity of the
Gothic edifices, reared by the Spanish conquerors. The very architecture thus
bespeaks the opposite and irreconcilable natures of the two warlike people who
so long battled here for mastery of the Peninsula.” (51)
But like so much popular history, this
battle for mastery is probably also a simplification, for right through the
Middle Ages kingdom battled kingdom, whether Christian or Muslim, and lords and
cities battled their monarchs for mastery. Hugh Kennedy writes about the period
between 1273 and 1333: “The objectives of the Castilians were more complex than
might at first appear. They seem to have had very little desire to take over
Granada and complete the Reconquista. They did want to prevent Muslim raids on
their territory and to force the Nasrids to pay tribute, which was an important
source of income to the Castilian crown which was frequently in financial
difficulties. Essentially, the kingdom was more valuable to the kings of
Castile alive than dead: if it had been conquered, its lands would have to have
had to be distributed among the Castilian nobility [who were, of course,
trouble-makers for the crown]. In addition, the Castilians were already finding
it difficult enough to attract enough settlers to occupy the newly conquered
lands of Christian Andalucia.” (280) When it came to the
crunch, practical politics always won the day over ideology. Have I told the
story of the Iberian Peninsula too much like a morality tale? Perhaps. But we
need history above all to gain perspective on our own times, just as we need
travel for the opportunity it gives us to think about our own societies.
Books
Consulted
Baigent, Michael and Richard Leigh The Inquisition. London: Penguin, 1999.
Calderon de la Barca, Pedro Plays I. Translated and introduced by
Gwynne Edwards. London: Methuen, 1991.
Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote. Ozell’s revision of the translation of Peter Motteux.
Introduction by Herschel Brickell. New York: the Modern Library, 1930.
Edwards, John The Spain of the Catholic Monarchs, 1474-1520. Oxford: Blackwell,
2000.
Girardot, Raphael
Gutiérres “Die spanische Literatur”. In Kindlers Literatur Lexikon,
Vol. I, Munich: dtv, 1974, pp.
180-190.
Guerber, H.A. The Book of the Epic. London, Bombay,
Sydney: George G. Harrap, 1930.
Hemingway, Ernest Three Novels. Including The
Sun Also Rises with an introduction by Malcolm Cowley. New York: Charles
Scribener’s Sons, 1962.
Imman, Nick (ed.) Eyewitness Travel. Spain. London, New York, Melbourne, Munich and
Delhi: DK, 2011.
Irving, Washington Tales of the Alhambra. Granada: Ediciones Miguel Sanchez, 2002.
Kennedy, Hugh Muslim Spain and Portugal. A Political History of al-Andalus. London
and New York: Longman, 1996
McDonald, Ferdie (ed.) Eyewitness Travel. Portugal. London, New York, Melbourne, Munich
and Delhi: DK, 2010.
Orwell, George Homage to Catalonia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
Quevedo, Francisco de and Anon Two Spanish Novels. The Swindler. Lazarillo
de Tormes. Translated from the Spanish by Michael Alpert. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1969.
Ruiz, Teofilo F. Spain’s Centuries of Crisis. 1300-1474. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
Saramago, José The History of the Siege of Lisbon. Translated from the Portuguese
by Giovanni Pontiero. London: the Harville Press, 2000.
Wilcken, Patrick Empire Adrift. The Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro 1808-1821. London:
Bloomsbury, 2004.
