Iberia (129 page)

 

But this prevalence of stone is also the curse of the region, for
land is inherited not by the eldest son alone but by all, so that
fields are divided and subdivided so often in the course of a
hundred years that the resulting areas are scarcely big enough to
support a family. What makes it worse is that each canny Galician
insists upon outlining his new field, however small, with granite
walls, until the area absorbed by stone equals about thirty percent
of the tillable land. And with each death, the fields grow smaller
and the fences bigger.

 

The results: During the last sixty-six years Galicians have been
going into voluntary exile across the world, so that the voluntary
depopulation of Galicia in this century equals the involuntary
depopulation suffered by the Scottish Highlanders in the last
century, and that was one of the most notorious land scandals of
history. The difference is this. In Scotland peasants were expelled
by greedy landlords. In northern Spain the crime against land
was perpetrated by the farmers themselves.

 

Galicians are said to have many superstitions, but these often
resemble the monitory yet enticing belief which one of them
described: ‘Like all country people, we have a mania about
protecting our girls until they are safely married. Now, where
does a country girl run the greatest risk of being seduced? At the
village well, of course, to which she must go daily and without
chaperones. In any village one can see girls swinging their way
provocatively to the well, hoping, one might say, to be
propositioned. So ages ago we created the water rat. Each well
has one and sometimes more of these fearful creatures. A water
rat can look at a man and nothing happens. But if he looks at any
girl, she dies. Then and there. So you can be sure our girls watch
carefully and behave themselves when they’re near the well. But
we’re also Galicians, as well as parents, so the myth doesn’t stop
there. For although the water rat does kill instantly, the death is
very sweet. So our girls aren’t too careful.’

 

The glory of Galicia is its chain of rías, those fjord-like
indentations of the sea that reach far inland with a burden of fish
and salt air and noble landscape. In some places the rías run
between meadowlands to create pastoral scenes of deep loveliness;
at other times they cut through low hills to produce islands, and
I have often picnicked beside them; here a sandy beach for
swimming, a forest reaching down to the water; there a ruined
castle on the hill; on that headland a long-forgotten church; and
each day a golden sun, the smell of salt, the unannounced
appearance of a low-sweeping fog and then the sun once more,
with everywhere the soft, sweet motion of the sea wandering
inland. Galicia has about a dozen of these rías, nicely
differentiated, and tourists in general seem not to have discovered
them.

 

But when I headed for the southern rías it was not to go
picnicking; I sought the small city of Pontevedra, near the border
of Portugal, through which a branch of the pilgrims’ route had
led up the coast from the seaports of Lisboa, Porto and Vigo.
English pilgrims in particular liked to come by boat to Vigo so as
to have a relatively short trip overland to Compostela. But
Portuguese also followed the route in large numbers and their
movement made Pontevedra a center of some importance.

 

The reader has probably noticed that the Way of St. James
lacked one thing to make it an almost perfect pilgrims’ route:
nowhere was the cult of the Virgin Mary exploited, so that a good
half of the mystical wonder of the Catholic Church was
unprovided for. At Oviedo, north of the main route, one could
detour to see relics of Christ himself, while international saints
like Martin of Tours, Nicholas of Bari and James of Compostela
could be known familiarly; but the Virgin Mary was not much in
evidence, and with her increasing importance in the Church, this
lack was felt.

 

It fell to the little town of Pontevedra to correct this. There, in
the years when pilgrimage to Compostela had diminished to a
trickle, a new cult grew up around a legend claiming that the
Virgin Mary had been the first pilgrim to the tomb of Santiago,
who had given his life for her son.

 

I went to a delightful little gingerbread sanctuary built in 1778
in the form of a combined cross and scallop shell, inside which
in a place of high honor I found a most saucy religious statue. It
was the Pilgrim Virgin, representing her as a primly dressed
eighteenth-century traveling lady in stiff German brocade, a
comfortable shawl with tassels, long black Restoration curls,
bejeweled staff and gourd, and a positively enchanting Jesus
dressed like a child’s doll. Atop the Virgin’s head stood a jaunty
cockaded hat festooned with cockleshells. To be accompanied on
one’s way by such a delightful lady must have been enjoyable, but
the true pilgrim, remembering the dangerous adventures of
preceding generations, must have longed for the harsher reality
of Santiago with his heavy road-worn shoes and staff. At a kiosk
near the sanctuary I bought a portrait of Santiago, and he too had
become a sickly-sweet cardboard figure; the granite-hard
Matamoros who had led Spain to victory, who had incited whole
armies and who had sustained pilgrims on their foot-weary march
of nine hundred miles had degenerated into a sentimental
nineteen-year-old high school senior with a premature beard.
Thus did the impetus of pilgrimage diminish.

 

It was in this gloomy frame of mind that I met José
Filgueira-Valverde, alcade of Pontevedra and my favorite Galician.
A very tall and robust man, he thundered onto the scene, crying,
‘Michener! How fine to see you back in Pontevedra.’ Before I had
a chance to speak he had laid out the day for me. ‘A few minutes
to see what we’ve been doing with the museum, a short tour of
the city to see how we’re saving the old buildings, then a drive to
Bayona, where I have a little surprise for you.’ The mayor is so
dynamic as to be exhausting, yet his delight in what he is doing
is so obvious that one keeps up. The museum, for example!

 

‘I told the government, “It’s foolish to have all the museums
in Madrid,” so we determined to have one here,’ he explained. I
had seen it some years before as a small building exemplifying
what one energetic man could accomplish, for even then the
museum was well known. Through the generosity of a local
benefactor it had acquired an excellent collection of prehistoric
goldware. It displayed whole cases of stone axes, Roman pottery
and Greek coins. Filgueira-Valverde had also encouraged the
Pontevedrans to do certain unusual things: ‘This is a Galician
city, so I said, “Let’s have a room which shows what a Galician
kitchen is like. Women would love it.” We’re also a seaport, very
important in Spanish history. So we found the shipboard cabin
of one of our sons who became admiral of the Spanish navy. We
rebuilt it board by board so our children can see what their
heritage is.’

 

In those days the museum was a positive delight, rambling as
it did over two old buildings joined together by a kind of
drawbridge. I liked especially two very old life-sized statues of
Biblical figures. When I first saw them I thought they were
familiar; I had seen them or their brothers somewhere before.
Now Mayor Filgueira-Valverde told me what these rare pieces
were. When Maestro Mateo’s Pórtico de la Gloria was originally
installed in 1188 it was an open-faced porch giving onto the public
square, but in 1738 when the new façade was added, making what
had been an open portico into an inside room, some eight statues
no longer fitted; they were removed and kept in a stable for nearly
two centuries. In 1906 their Compostela owner concluded a deal
whereby they were to be sold en bloc to a museum in America,
where they would have formed one of the Romanesque glories
of our museum world, but the Spanish government interceded
and offered them at the same price to Spanish museums, and
these two masterworks wound up in Pontevedra.

 

For what Mayor Filgueira-Valverde showed me next I was
unprepared: a new statuary wing as big as most ordinary
museums. He had just presided at the opening ceremonies of
what I judged to be a memorial to his own energy, for how such
a granite edifice had been paid for out of a small community
budget I could not guess. I would recommend this museum to
everyone, for it has been done with taste. ‘And pull,’ a Spanish
friend whispered. What this signified I was not to learn till lunch

 

At breakneck speed the mayor bundled me out of Pontevedra
and down to Vigo, which he passed with a merry tattoo of praise
for that famous seaport. His objective, however, lay beyond the
ocean port of Bayona, a town I had not heard of before that day,
situated near the Portuguese border, and there he showed me
something I could scarcely believe. On a high peninsula which
juts out into the Atlantic Ocean the Spanish government acquired
an abandoned castle completely surrounded by handsome walls
which overlook the sea from a considerable height. The castle has
been rebuilt to serve as a parador where rooms have one of two
exposures: the choice ones look out upon a series of colorful bays,
spotted with islands and marked by half a score of distant
headlands against which the Atlantic breaks in silvery splendor,
forming one of the most exciting vistas I have ever seen from a
hotel; the poor rooms merely look down upon eighty miles of the
surging Atlantic, one island and not more than four fine
headlands, reaching into Portugal. I doubt if there is any hotel
with a setting to equal this, yet the best accommodations cost
only eight dollars a day for a double room while a four-course
dinner can be chosen from some fifty dishes for only two dollars
and sixty-five cents. Not many Americans will revel in this luxury,
because as soon as the parador was announced, Monte Real it is
called, the English reserved it for almost a year ahead, having
learned from experience that one of the finest places in Europe
in which to vacation is this Portuguese-Spanish coast.

 

At lunch the mayor introduced me to an adventure which I
could have done without: he plopped before me a plate of the
ugliest food that the human being is capable of eating. They were
percebes, a kind of barnacle, which attach themselves to rocks
standing at the point where breakers crash in from the Atlantic,
and much of the excitement to be found in eating percebes stems
from the fact that each year men lose their lives gathering the
repulsive things. When served, they look like a plateful of
miniature rotting turkey legs with the skin on the leg turned black
and flabby and the nails on the toes become coarse. But when the
skin has somehow been torn away, beneath lies a stem of delicious,
chewy meat somewhat like octopus, while the hideous toes, if
properly gouged, can be tricked into giving up morsels of solid
meat that is much like the best crab. I enjoyed the repulsive things,
the more so later when I heard one morning a lusty old
fisher-woman shouting in a quiet street in Pontevedra, ‘Buy my
percebes! Buy my percebes! They are firm and thick like a
fisherman’s penis.’

 

The surprise that the mayor had prepared for me, however,
had nothing to do with seafood. Across from me sat one of the
most reserved and courtly Spaniards I was to meet, a man in his
early sixties, tall, aloof, gray in both dress and manner. He was
Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón, the director of the Prado
Museum, whom I had tried in vain to see in Madrid.
Introductions were made, and then ensued another of those rare
and memorable luncheons which can take place only in Spain. It
was about three-thirty in the afternoon when we sat down to eat.
It was after six when we finished, and in the interval we talked of
only two things: first of the Prado, and I surprised the director
by saying that one of my favorite pictures in his care was
Correggio’s ‘Noli Me Tangere.’ Filgueira-Valverde, with explosive
enthusiasm, interrupted to say that he had eyes only for Spanish
painting and he expatiated on how vibrant the Spanish school
had always been, from the earliest primitives through Zurbarán
and Velázquez and down to Goya. For him there could be only
one school, the Spanish, but when forced to state which of the
Prado paintings pleased him most he said quietly, ‘Roger van der
Weyden’s “Deposition from the Cross.” There can be nothing
better than that.’ Dr. Sánchez Cantón, as custodian of all the
paintings, refused at first to nominate a preference but did
grudgingly admit that Velázquez was good, and he told two stories
about his favorite painter. ‘An American woman who loved
painting walked into the Velázquez room with me one morning,
saw that forest of masterpieces and cried, “Impossible! It’s a trick
of the Spanish government.” And then the English woman looked
at the beggar and shook her head. “A poor man like this without
a peseta to be painted by the most expensive artist in the world!”’

 

I proposed a toast, saying, ‘For three weeks I vainly tracked you
through Madrid, and now I find you in a fish restaurant in
Bayona,’ to which he replied in a soft voice, ‘I suppose if one had
to pick a single picture it would be Velázquez’s “Medici Gardens
in Moonlight.”’

 

The second topic concerned a strange, tormented Galician
woman about whom Filgueira-Valverde was one of the world’s
leading authorities, having written several books about her. It was
late in the afternoon, with the sun dipping toward the surface of
the Atlantic and only husks of percebes on our plates, when the
mayor said, ‘The older I become, the greater I believe Rosalía de
Castro to have been. It has been a great source of pleasure to me
to watch Spanish and French critics come around to the view that
she was one of the fine poets of the last century. I am additionally
proud because of the fact that she wrote her best poems in
Galician.’ Dr. Sánchez Cantón left off being director of the Prado
and became again a Galician from Pontevedra, his home town,
and as the two men spoke with animation of the great Rosalía, I
understood why the little museum of Pontevedra had such a good
collection of master paintings. When you get two Galician cronies
like Sánchez Cantón and Filgueira-Valverde, one in charge of the
Prado, the other of the museum in their home town, something
has got to happen. Galicians are like that.