Iberia (16 page)

Important as this marriage was, it is surpassed in interest by
that of Catherine’s younger sister, the flighty Isabel, with John of
Gaunt’s younger brother, Edmund of Langley. They became the
ancestors of Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III and Elizabeth of
York, who was eagerly married by Henry VII to bolster up his
weak claim to the throne by linking himself with the House of
York. So Spanish blood, fairly thin by this time no doubt, passed
to Henry VIII and Elizabeth.

Not widely known is the fact that one of the first English writers
to deal with Spain was Samuel Pepys, who made an official navy
trip to Tangier in 1683-1684 and wrote a secret report of the
matter when he got home. His

Tangier Report
was not distributed
generally until 1935, when it appeared in the official papers of
the Navy Records Society, and the following excerpts will explain
why:

A Spaniard says, ‘Go with God’ and not ‘God go with you.’
Rather a hole in a suit than a patch.

 

Won’t piss in the streets, but will against your door.
They shit in pots and wipe their arses with linen cloths.

The laboring Spaniard eats five meals a day. And the greater part
of Spain eat nothing but what they make of water, oil, salt, vinegar,
garlic and bread, which last is the foundation of all.

Wear spectacles abroad, and some only to seem readers.

You may starve and tax them as you please so you do not beat
them, but give them good words; while we English fill our bellies
and you can do or say what you will to us.

The bus dropped me at the edge of Jerez de los Caballeros and
I walked up Avenida José Antonio toward the central plaza, which
was as ugly as the one in Badajoz. There I made inquiries, and at
first no one knew what I was talking about and I was afraid that
my long pilgrimage was to be fruitless, but finally a bartender
understood and said, ‘Cross the plaza, pass the bank and look for
Calle Capitán Cortés.’

‘It isn’t Cortés I’m looking for,’ I explained.

 

‘You go to house Number 10. That’s it.’

 

I followed his directions and found the Calle Cortés to be

narrow, attractive and clean, but there was no indication that
what I was seeking might lie in such a street. I wandered along,
looking at the houses, which seemed like a row of individual forts,
until I came to Number 10. It was low, smaller than its neighbors,
and bore no sign or distinguishing marks except that it was
immaculately clean, having been freshly whitewashed. I doubted
that this could be the house I sought, so I asked a woman who
was passing by. She was most charming, and with a reassuring
smile said, ‘This is it. You norteamericanos never believe it, but
this is it. You must be the fiftieth I’ve told this year.’ She banged
on the red door, pushed it open and called, ‘Señora Ordóñez.
Visitor from América del Norte.’

A very old woman, with gray hair and all her teeth, came to
the door, saying softly, ‘Come in. It is my pleasure.’

 

She led me into a small entranceway decorated with colored
photographs of Egypt taken from an air-line calendar, and stopped
before a dark alcove the size of a closet. ‘He was born in that
corner, the great Vasco Núñez, who discovered your Pacific
Ocean.’

 

‘You mean Balboa?’

 

‘If you want to call him that.’

 

I wished to stay in the alcove to pay my respects to the first
European to find the ocean which had meant so much to me, but
she insisted that I see her kitchen, a delightful room with open
beams, rickety doors, windows that didn’t quite fit, stairways built
of uneven stones and a characteristic that I had read about but
had never seen: the whole had been whitewashed so many
times—say twice a year for five hundred years—the limestone
had built up to such thickness that all corners were conquered by
a softly undulating cocoon of white stone. The doorjambs were
rounded; the crevices where upper walls met the floors had
become delicate quarter-circles, and nowhere in this room could
I see a harsh edge or a straight line, as if much living had smoothed
out the roughness. At three spots in the white room flowers stood,
more brilliant than French wallpaper, and outside in a very small
garden I could see where the old lady kept two fig trees, an arbor
of grapes and six or seven hens.

 

The house looked as if it had been built to illustrate a child’s
fairy tale, but Ana Ordóñez assured me it had long served as an
ordinary home. ‘My husband and I worked on a farm, but about
forty years ago we decided to move into town and bought this
place. At the time we didn’t know it was the house in which Núñez
was born.’ I was to find that in Jerez there was no Balboa, the
name we know him by, but there was a Núñez, which was his
official name. ‘After we had been here a while…remember this
was forty years ago when there weren’t so many travelers. Well,
people began to stop by to see where Núñez was born. People on
this street remembered the family, and this tiny alcove is where
the birth took place. No, I charge nothing to see it. I’ve had a good
life and my children watch out for me. I am honored to mind the
house where Núñez lived.’

 

I looked again at the alcove, thinking of my debt to this
poverty-stricken man of Jerez who had left Extremadura, tried
to make a go of it in the islands of the New World, but found
himself so deeply in debt that he had to smuggle himself to the
mainland at Panama in a cask of provisions. There his fortunes
improved, for his quick ear caught two bits of rumor: beyond the
mountains swept a vast ocean not yet seen by white men, and far
to the south along the shores of that ocean lay a land called Peru,
heavy with gold. Due solely to the determination and courage of
Balboa, an expedition forced its way through the jungle to the
crest of the mountains and from there looked down on the Pacific.
Among the soldiers was Francisco Pizarro, who first heard of Peru
from Balboa.

 

On his return to the Atlantic side Balboa dispatched enthusiastic
reports back to Spain, plus samples of his booty. His promise of
much gold excited the home government and he was made
admiral of the South Sea, but he was a driving man who aroused
the envy of others, and before long his superiors grew bitter over
his grandiose plans for conquering Peru. The governor of Panama
waited and watched and one day trapped him. A drumhead
court-martial convicted him of treason, not against Spain but
against the local governor. With no show of justice, Balboa was
sentenced to death. Like a common criminal he was publicly
beheaded in 1517, but his enthusiasm for Peru found refuge in
the mind of Pizarro.

 

In spite of this mournful history, Balboa’s birthplace caused
me to chuckle over a bit of delightful nonsense that occurred years
ago when I was a student in Scotland. One of the first newspaper
columnists, an Englishman with an irreverent sense of humor,
announced a poetry contest for schoolboys. He said that he had
heard so much adverse comment on boys of the current
generation, he wanted to show the people of Britain that some at
least were interested in things of the mind. For weeks he reported
the contest daily, with clergymen praising his effort and judges
saying that this was the sort of thing Britain needed. Finally the
winner was announced, somebody like Malcolm McGrory from
a rural school, and his poem was printed with pride:

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,

 

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

 

Round many western islands have I been

 

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

 

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

 

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;

 

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

 

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

 

When a new planet swims into his ken;

 

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

 

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

 

Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

 

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The columnist ended with a condescending paragraph in which
he said that this poem, uneven though it was, showed promise
for a boy of fourteen and that if young-McGrory applied himself
he might one day be entitled to call himself a poet.

Well, the roof fell in. From all over the British Isles people wrote
in, pointing out that Malcolm McGrory had filched his
prize-winning sonnet right out of the collected works of John
Keats. The columnist, as I remember, played it straight and tried
to place the blame for this fiasco on the judges, who should have
known better than to be hoodwinked in this way. He was then
off for another dozen columns bewailing the lack of honor in the
younger generation, and especially in Malcolm McGrory, who
would try to fob off onto the British public, many of whom read
books, a cheap theft of this sort. He predicted a very bad end for
Malcolm.

It is strange that Keats should have immortalized the wrong
man, so that even in death Vasco Núñez was cheated. In Jerez de
los Caballeros, I could find no statue to him, nor to the town’s
other outstanding conquistador, Hernando de Soto. (The nearby
town of Barcarrota claims De Soto, but this is an error.) There
was, however, a Plaza Vasco Núñez, an odd-shaped square at the
end of Avenida José Antonio marked only by a watering trough
for horses and a large metallic sign: Coca-Cola.

Friends came to Jerez to drive me back to Badajoz, and as we
were passing through a cork forest, whose silence was broken only
when a herd of pigs, grubbing for acorns, grunted at us, we came
to a clearing which housed a small village, from which two
members of the Guardia Civil ran out to halt us. Wondering what
law we had broken, we pulled to the side of the road.

‘What’s wrong?’ the driver asked.

The Benemérita pointed to where four villagers were bearing
the inert body of a man. ‘He fell from the church steeple,’ a
guardia said. ‘He was cleaning it. May God have mercy on him.’

‘What do you wish of us?’

 

‘Turn the car around. We’ve got to take him to Jerez.’ To me,
the man seemed quite dead, but the second guardia put his hand
over the man’s heart and said, ‘He’s still alive.’

 

Since the two guardia would not split up, it was arranged that
they would occupy the back of the car with the unconscious body
and that the man’s wife would ride in front. That meant that I
would have to wait in the village until the car returned, and this
I volunteered to do, so the car sped back down the road to Jerez
and I was left alone with a group of disturbed villagers.

 

A tall, very thin man in his late forties and his almost equally
tall wife, also thin, suggested that I come to their house in the
village and wait there. They led me about a quarter of a mile from
the road, accompanied by eight or ten villagers, and took me to
an immaculate cottage with a dirt floor, one table, a rope bed and
one chair. Although I offered the wife the chair, I was forced to
take it, and while I waited there for a couple of hours the villagers
sat on the floor about me and we talked of many things.

 

‘Is América del Norte really as rich as they say?’

 

‘We have many poor people. And even those who are not poor
have to work hard.’

 

‘As poor as Spain?’

 

‘Our worst, yes. Farmers like you, it’s better in America.’

 

‘Can black men live in América del Norte wherever they want?’

 

‘No, but things are getting better.’

 

‘Are there also Catholics in América del Norte?’

 

‘Many. In the little town where I live there are many.’

 

They sent for a neighbor who had some cigarettes and he
arrived to offer me one, very formally, and when I said I didn’t
smoke, he carefully folded back the top of his pack and returned
it to his pocket. Another neighbor brought a bottle of wine and
two badly chipped glasses and he and I had a drink.

 

‘How much a day do you make in the fields?’ I asked, because
it was obvious that these people wanted to talk about important
things.

 

‘Forty pesetas a day.’ (Sixty-seven cents)

 

‘For grown men?’

 

‘Yes.’ They told me that they stripped cork for the man I had
watched in the Casino de Badajoz, Don Pedro Pérez Montilla,
and they spoke well of him. ‘He has three automobiles,’ they said,
forming their hands into fists, about a foot apart, and moving
their elbows sharply up and down to simulate a chauffeur driving
a car.

 

‘How do you feed yourselves? Clothe yourselves?’

 

‘The credit goes to our wives.’ The man who said this nodded
slightly, not to his own wife but toward the mistress of this house,
and when I looked at her grave, dark face I could better
understand that wedding feast at Trujillo, when the rural
bridegroom had spent fifty-six cents, most of a day’s income, to
honor his stalwart bride with ice cream sandwiches.

 

The men and women who sat with me in the bare kitchen were
a handsome lot, rich in gracia. Their faces were strong and deeply
lined, but their eyes shone with humor. Their rough corduroy
clothes were cleaner than one would have thought possible under
the circumstances. I recalled the list of prices I had collected at
the stores in Badajoz, and now, against a wage of sixty-seven cents
a day for the head of the family, they seemed appallingly high. A
man’s suit of clothes for thirty-seven dollars. That would be two
months’ wages, and no wonder the men about me wore
homespun.

 

Then as I looked into the sober faces of the men who worried
about their friend who had fallen from the steeple, I had the
sensation that I was back in that farmhouse which I had visited
in Teruel, more than thirty years before, and it was apparent that
no matter how much urban Spain had prospered in the
intervening decades, little wealth had filtered down to the farms.
I could not recall any land other than India where the discrepancy
between the rich and the poor was so great. Don Pedro, who
owned the cork forest in which these men worked, drove three
cars but his workmen earned sixty-seven cents a day. In Badajoz,
during the nightly paseo, I had seen hundreds of people dressed
as well as my neighbors dress in Pennsylvania, but in no part of
America could I find farmers living at the miserable level that
these Spanish farmers lived. It was a miracle, I thought, that Spain
maintained its tranquillity when such conditions prevailed, and
I could understand why the Guardia Civil patrolled the villages.