Iberia (121 page)

The day’s third meaningful experience started with one of the
best things that can happen on a journey: I met an old friend. On
an earlier visit to León I had been instructed in its history by a
witty scholar-priest, Don Antonio Viñayo González, who looked
like a figure from Giotto. He now had the pleasure of informing
me that his guidebook to León had just been published; he did
not think much of it, but I was to find it one of the best because
of its erudition. He said that he wanted me to spend my time in
the handsome old church and museum of San Isidoro because
of its choice twelfth-century frescoes, well regarded by all
historians of the Romanesque style. In one dome I found the best
representation I had so far seen of that mysterious religious
symbol, the tetramorph, in which the four evangelists are
represented, for reasons which I did not then know, by human
figures with heads of animals: Mark the Lion, Luke the Bull,
Matthew the Man and John the Eagle. Among them Christ sits
in starry glory, in robe of faded blue and gold and shawl of
brick-red. The frescoes are very medieval, and their state of
preservation is extraordinary, this crypt having always been cool
and dry.

Father Viñayo pointed out one aspect of the vaulting I had not
read about: along one set of ribs the twelve months of the year
are represented by peasants performing the chores appropriate
for each season: March prunes the vineyards; July is a handsome
young man reaping wheat; September makes wine; and October
fattens his pigs on acorns. February, alas, which is my month, was
a hunch-backed peasant of ugly mien, accomplishing nothing as
he warmed his hands at a meager fire.

I was about to leave, well content with what I had seen, when
Father Viñayo, with that sixth sense which men who love
inanimate things sometimes have, said, ‘I think you might
appreciate the cloisters,’ and he led me away from the vaulting
and into as drab a cloister as I have ever seen. It had been built,
I judged, in the eighteenth century of a gray stucco and was totally
undistinguished. Indeed, I doubt if I could find in all Spain
another so unpleasing as this, and I wondered what had gotten
into the slim priest that he would think me interested in this
mediocre thing.

‘It is this side,’ he said quietly, directing my attention to the
fourth side of the cloister, the one nearest the mausoleum. And
there I saw what had happened. San Isidoro had originally been
joined to what must have been one of Spain’s most grand and
somber cloisters, built in the earliest days of Romanesque art, but
wars and other catastrophes had destroyed three of the sides, and
at some point in the eighteenth century, as I had guessed, a local
nobleman had paid to have a new cloister built. Three new walls
were put up and plastered in a drab and conformist pattern,
whereupon the original remaining side had also been hidden in
plaster to bring it into harmony with the others. Thus, without
appreciating what he was doing, the eighteenth-century renovator
had preserved in a plaster cocoon one of the treasures of
Romanesque art. It had been less than ten years ago, Father Viñayo
said, that a workman had uncovered the original.

It is difficult to explain what now stood exposed in crystal
purity, its stones as clean and white as when they were laid down.
It is simply a cloister wall, with four or five arches, I don’t
remember which, each low, unadorned, tremendously powerful
and right, and each different in size and structure from its
neighbors. It is a plain wall dating back to the early 1100s, but to
me it was the soul of the Romanesque spirit, the secret of what I
found beautiful along this pilgrim route. I would rather see these
arches than the chapel at Eunate, handsome though it is on its
barren plain, or the gemlike church at Frómista, or even the
portico of San Miguel in Estella with its marvelous carvings, for
those are all the externalization of the Romanesque spirit; at San
Isidoro in León one sees the spirit itself, laid bare after years of
encrustation.

Why do I like Romanesque buildings so much? Why do I prefer
them to Gothic? Or baroque? Or Corinthian? I can’t say, but I
suppose it’s for the same reason that I prefer Brahms to Schubert
or Keats to Shelley. When I see a fine example of Romanesque, I
feel that I am in the presence of the very best that an age could
accomplish, and it was an age that accomplished much. I am at
the wellsprings of art, those solid beginnings without which no
later art could have achieved much. I am standing with
stonemasons who saw things simply and who resisted the
temptation of flying off at strange tangents. There is something
perpetually clean and honorable about the best Romanesque, and
when I see it my whole being responds, as if the artisans who
perfected this style were working for me alone. I hear voices
singing in plainsong, or the oboes of Pamplona playing without
harmony. I am in a different age, with a different set of values,
and I find its simplicity exactly to my taste. The separatism of
Martin Luther, which is to come, does not yet assault me or
confuse. From those first days in northern Spain when I saw
Romanesque at its best, I have known that this was an architecture
put aside and saved until I should come along; in a strange city I
can almost smell on the evening breeze those quarters of the town
that house great monuments in this style; but never have I seen
any that have seemed more beautiful to me than the recently
uncovered cloisters of San Isidoro.

Yet how strange travel can be. Even as I formulated these
judgments, which in a sense constitute a condemnation of the
Gothic, which I have never appreciated or understood, I was about
to be shown this style at its most exquisite, and to have had these
two experiences side by side, in a city where I had least expected
either, still overwhelms me.

It was a surprise that Father Viñayo had arranged. We dined
extremely late, I remember, and it must have been toward two in
the morning, when I was about to go to bed, that the marqués
said, ‘Father Viñayo has a little surprise for us. Are you game?’ I
would have been ashamed to back down at such a moment, so I
accompanied the learned priest into the summer night and walked
some distance to León’s cathedral. There was a partial moon, and
in the looming darkness we began gradually to make out the spires
of what Father Viñayo said was Spain’s purest and simplest Gothic
building. In the night it looked like an ordinary Gothic church,
plain yet soaring, controlled but with a certain flamboyance. Its
two towers were well proportioned and its transept was prominent
enough to be a little cathedral in itself. If one appreciated an
unornate Gothic, León’s cathedral would be above average but
no more.

But as I studied the building in the starry night, with León
sleeping around me, one of Father Viñayo’s assistants inside the
cathedral threw a switch, and from different vantage points
around the square, large floodlights came on, and the sudden
transition from shadowy gray to brilliant whiteness was startling,
and I saw for the first time the feature that makes León unique
among the world’s cathedrals: more than half its exterior surface
is composed of glass. It is a symphony of windows, and where the
ordinary cathedral might have six, León has one hundred and
twenty-five, plus fifty-seven circular ones and three gigantic roses.
At first sight it seems impossible that a massive stone building
could contain so much glass and still stand.

Father Viñayo led us inside, and as we looked up we saw,
illuminated from outside, the famous stained-glass windows, one
atop the other, then others on top of them. I am not speaking of
small windows, but of full-sized ones twenty and thirty feet high,
each composed of myriads of pieces of colored glass. The apse
was a true miracle. It was when he saw this cascade of windows
that the future Pope John XXIII exclaimed. ‘León has more glass
than stone and more faith than glass.’

As I stood in the silence of the night and the vastness of this
huge building, I recalled my conclusions at San Isidoro, and while
I did not retract any of my love for the Romanesque, I had to
soften my criticism of its descendant. We left the cathedral, and
when we were in the street Father Viñayo’s helper turned off the
spotlights and the great pile of glass and flying stone resumed its
posture in the night. If one had to have Gothic, I thought, this
isn’t too bad, and I turned to thank Father Viñayo for having
shown me the windows.

‘Ah, but you haven’t seen them yet!’ he said.

‘The surprise is about to begin,’ Don Luis assured me, and I
wondered what he meant.

STANISLA° OZEN
KOWSKI. 1,585

 

Then, as we stood there toward three in the morning, with the
soaring cathedral above us in the darkness, and the helper inside
threw another set of switches, and this time it was from within
the cathedral that a battery of powerful lights flashed on, so that
from the street we saw what men had never seen before, until a
few years ago: a vast cathedral composed mostly of glass
illuminated from within, so that all the stones that supported the
cathedral were invisible and only the windows could be seen, each
one an incandescent jewel of the most intense color and variation.

 

The Spanish have a saying that sums up their attitude toward
religion: ‘To appreciate the cathedral you must at least go inside.’
Now this was reversed, for to appreciate León one must stand off
in the darkness and see with fresh eye the miracle as an ordinary
building springs suddenly to life, and with such brilliance that no
previous experience with light and glass and stone could possibly
compare. We stood in the street, awe-struck by the beauty of the
walls above us. We walked three times around the huge edifice,
or as far as the streets would permit, and finally we agreed that it
was at the apse, with its incredible windows, tier upon tier shining
like suns, and its forest of flying buttresses—which explain how
the curved space with so little stone remains upright—that León’s
cathedral looked its best. It is a rare sight, and if I were in Madrid
and someone proposed, ‘Let’s drive up to León to see the cathedral
lit from within,’ I would not hesitate to make the journey, for to
see this thing is to see something so different as to illuminate a
lifetime of travel.

 

I have seen most of the fine sights of the world and know how
exciting Angkor Wat can be at midnight with tiers of Cambodian
dancers, or the Acropolis at dusk, or Borobudur in a jungle storm,
but so far as sheer visual pleasure is concerned, I have seen nothing
to excel León’s cathedral at three in the morning, lighted from
within, and I say this as a man who likes neither stained-glass
windows nor Gothic.

 

On my earliest trip to León, I had had the pleasure of meeting
an inventive architect, Alfredo de Ramón-Laca, who had been
given the job of renovating a crumbling Renaissance hostel at the
edge of town and converting it into a modern hotel to be called
the Hostel de San Marcos. ‘It’ll be the finest in Europe,’ he
promised me, and we spent a day climbing over the ruins as he
explained each step. ‘We’re putting steel ribs right through the
heart of the old building, and when we’re through, all the original
beauty will remain, but in addition we’ll have three hundred
bright new rooms.’ He was especially pleased that a functioning
church, which formed the left wing of the building, would be
retained. ‘It will be this church which gives the place character.’‘I
don’t think anybody can make much of this,’ I said. ‘Come back
in eight months and see,’ he said.

 

This year I was able to stay in the hotel that Señor Ramón-Laca
had built, and his earlier enthusiasm proved justified, for he had
done what he promised: taken a classic building dating back to
the early 1500s and preserved its magnificent façade, converting
the whole into what is probably the finest hotel in Europe. At
least it’s one of the most reasonably priced.

 

I asked the manager to show me his prize suite, and he said,
‘We have one reserved for heads of states.’ I told him I wanted to
see one reserved for the heads of a Buick agency in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, so he showed me the Condestable Suite on the third
floor, overlooking both a plaza outside and a patio inside. It
consisted of two bedrooms, sleeping four people, with
seventeenth-century brocaded baldacchinos over the beds, a large
living room, all kinds of foyers and two baths. Each piece of
furniture, especially the heavy antique tables and cowhide chairs,
was a work of art. The east wall of the suite consisted of the
original stone wall of the fifteenth century, gray-beige in color
and magnificent in appearance, and all colors used in the rooms
harmonized with this wall. The spacious corridors connecting
the rooms were once cloisters, and a special feature which
attracted me was that the suite connected directly with the choir
of Señor Ramón-Laca’s church, so that one had what amounted
to a magnificent fifteenth-century carved hall as a private chapel,
with services taking place some sixty feet below at the main altar.
Private to this suite was a spiral stone tower leading to a dungeon,
plus a high-fidelity system for playing either popular or classical
music twenty-four hours a day, should one desire. The cost of
what must be one of the choice suites in Europe was ten dollars
a day per person, or somewhat less than the cost of a Spanish-type
motel in Tulsa. And to remind one that pilgrims actually used
these quarters, along one wall was scratched:

The financing of such a hotel is interesting. A National Institute
of Industry was established some years ago, using partly
governmental funds, partly private. It has three main
responsibilities: to provide tourist facilities, and this function is
financed one hundred percent by the government; to produce
the Seat motorcar on franchise from the Fiat people of Italy, and
this is only fifty-one percent government financed; and to build
autobuses, which are so important to Spain, and this is financed
twenty-five percent by Leylands of England, ten percent privately
and sixty-five percent by the government. So far the ventures of
the institute have prospered.