Iberia (31 page)
Authors: James Michener
The performance was so dismal that all I could do was sit there
and recall the jokes I’d seen on television about flamenco. A
dancer does the foot-stamping bit and the comedian says, ‘He’s
mad at the floor.’ The dancer looks back over his shoulder: ‘He’s
very proud of his bottom. Wants to be sure it’s still there.’ The
dancer looks under his left shoulder: ‘He wants to see if he needs
a deodorant.’ The dancer stamps again: ‘He wants the janitor to
send up more heat.’ It was on that level.
When the miserable night was over I walked back to the
Maimonides statue and in that peaceful place contemplated the
mockery that Spain was making of certain of its treasures, simply
to collect a few tourist kroner or francs. I was in a rather bitter
mood, when the musicians from the show came out and one
asked me, ‘How did you like it?’ I did not know enough Spanish
to tell him, so I said, ‘I had rather hoped to hear something like
a peternera.’ The men stopped, for it was obvious that the name
of the song was a rebuke. The guitar which they had abused grew
heavy and the pomaded heads became ridiculous. ‘Qué lástima!
(What a pity!)’ the guitarist said. ‘Here we get few people who
know peteneras.’
Spain runs a considerable risk of cheapening the very things
that have made her attractive to tourists. She has enjoyed an
enviable reputation in reports of men like Mérimée, Havelock
Ellis, Somerset Maugham, Henry de Montherlant and the others
who have been captivated by an authentic Spanish culture
displayed with fierce honesty. If this culture is to be made a
mockery of, and by Spain itself, then there will be little reason for
anyone of good taste to bother with it. I cannot believe that the
notable visitors of the past, men like George Borrow, Richard
Ford, Sacheverell Sitwell and especially the keen French and
German travelers, would have tolerated a scene like the one that
was forced on me in the Córdoba restaurant; and had they been
required, as I was, to sit through it they could have described it
later only in words of scorn. It was cheap, and vulgar, and an
insult to the visitor; but even worse, it was an abuse of the cultural
heritage and it was this more than my own deprivation which
infuriated me.
I am not going to bore the reader, city by city, with an account
of my attempts to see in Spain a good flamenco; in each place I
was abused about as badly as I was in Córdoba. It was all junk,
save for a few nights when I happened upon a near-blind old man
whose voice was gone but who had the pundonor of his trade and
the gracia to communicate it to others. If on some subsequent
trip to Spain I were to be told of a bar where one could
occasionally hear real flamenco, I would travel a considerable
distance to hear it; but if, as I suppose, it has all been corrupted
by the quick tourist dollar, and if enough of the rest of Spanish
culture goes the same way, I would be better off turning flamenco
and Spain over to others, for it would no longer have much to
say to me.
As for Córdoba the city, my days there were delightful. I had
nothing much to do and spent long hours lounging in the sun at
one outdoor bar or another in the Plaza José Antonio.
Occasionally I would wander over to talk with old Bishop Hosius,
but for the most part I rested and caught up with a lot of reading
I wanted to do in the field of the Spanish novel.
My stay was made extra pleasant by the fact that I had a room
in the local parador, which stands some miles out in the country
on a fine hillside from which I could overlook the Guadalquivir
as if I were a caliph at Medînat az-Zahrâ, which lay not far away
on roughly the same spur of hills. For some reason which no one
explained in advance, this parador has developed the best
restaurant in Spain, better, I thought, than even the ultra-posh
ones in Madrid because its cuisine was more honest, and people
traveled long distances to dine here. The menu was not exceptional
in its variety, but each dish was properly prepared. For example,
I would not have expected to find in Córdoba the best sole à la
Colbert I have ever tasted, but there it was, delicately flavored
with butter and crisp along the edges.
Each day for a week my waitress warned me, ‘You’re missing
the best thing we do if you don’t take the rabo de toro.’ Now those
words had to mean
and I have never been a big partisan
of braised oxtail, which is what I supposed it was. ‘No, thank you,’
I said.
Her other suggestions had worked out so satisfactorily that I
was not easy in rejecting this one. For example, one day she said,
‘No matter what you think you want, take the stewed partridge.’
I recalled my unpleasant experiences with this delicacy in Toledo
and started to say no, but she whisked under my nose a serving
which she was delivering to a nearby table, and it was so enticing
that I allowed her to bring me a portion, and thereafter whenever
it appeared on the menu I took it, a truly fine dish. But the tail of
bull I avoided.
One day I had as my guests a pair of archaeologists who had
been digging in the Old Testament copper mines at Río Tinto,
northwest of Sevilla (they said there was a wealth of digging to be
done there in a civilization three thousand years old), and they
were delighted when they saw rabo de toro on the menu. ‘Famous
throughout southern Spain,’ they said, so I went along with them
and tried it. By itself it would have made the parador famous, so
after the archaeologists had left I went into the kitchen to ask the
chef how he made this dish, and even a quick glance at the place
told me all I needed to know about why this parador was so well
regarded for its food. The kitchen was both old-fashioned with
handsome clay pots and modern with stainless steel; immaculately
clean, it was also properly cluttered with vegetables and shellfish,
and the people working in it were a robust crew who had fun in
handling food and dishes. My waitress whispered that the
excellence of the place could be traced to the unmarried daughter
of a leading Andalusian family who had surprised her friends by
volunteering to work in the parador and who had ended by being
its chatelaine.
Her chief cook was hardly what I had expected, a bull-like man
who spoke in a confused rush with few verbs, but since he was
using Andalusian, a much truncated dialect, I may have missed
the verbs. He avoided all
sounds and most
d
’s and invariably
used
er
for
el
.
Castilian
mismo
madre
bueno
Jaime Ostos
el matador
los amigos
meemo
mare
er matao
lo jarmigo
cuiao
The last word, pronounced in drawling whine
, in which
the last syllable rhymes with
now
, means “take care” and is much
used in the region; it is practically the shibboleth of the true
Andalusian.
The chunky cook was pleased that someone wanted to know
how he made his rabo de toro: ‘So it’s a good bull’s tail, fat, much
gristle in the joints. Taste from the gristle. Cut, cut, pieces not
too big. Roll in flour, much salt, braise in fat. Cuiao! Don’t burn,
but cook well. Must have juice left for sauce. Everything is the
sauce. Cuiao! No spices. No pepper. Onions well fried for flavor.
Olive oil, but cuiao! Not too much. Garlic, celery, carrots,
mushrooms, but not one water. Cuiao! No water, or you make
soup. Bake one hour and half in hot oven. To serve put three
joints bull’s tail in ramekin, sauce, vegetables, two fresh onions,
bake few minutes to turn brown. Cuiao! No water, no wine.’
As I sat on my hillside looking down on Córdoba, I became so
preoccupied with Muslim Spain that I decided to take the journey
over the mountain to Granada, where my driving companion
had an excellent idea. He wanted me to approach Granada by a
special route, so short of the city he turned to the south and took
me a good twenty miles away. He turned into a narrow twisting
side road that led into the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, where
we came upon a remote village perched on the edge of a cliff, a
most frightening but beautiful spot. ‘Here we’ll have our picnic!’
he said, and as we unpacked the car and sat beside a stream which
tumbled into a valley far below, he pointed to the encircling
mountains and said, ‘Tourists spend a lot of time oohing and
aahing over the Alhambra, but it teaches them nothing about
Islam. It’s this that explains why Granada was able to hold on for
so long. The Christians couldn’t root the Muslims out of fastnesses
like this. For more than three centuries they tried, but with no
luck. This is Granada. Not the city back there.’
It was an ideal spot in which to contemplate the fortunes of
Islam; the combination of mountain and valley refreshed the eye
and the sight of people moving about the landlocked village at
the edge of the cliff gave one a sense of historical continuity. Under
Muslim rule their ancestors had lived in those homes and after
the collapse of the Muslim kingdom they had probably reverted
to Christianity. Royal lines had come and gone but these farmers
and smugglers had bothered little, and now, when their country
perched on the edge of a precipice of uncertainty as to what might
happen when Generalísimo Franco left, they were as unconcerned
as ever. This was really timeless Spain, even more remote than
the parched villages of Extremadura, for here movement in or
out was much more difficult.
‘The wonder of the Christian Conquest of Granada,’ my friend
said, ‘was not that it came when it did but that it came so very
late. For nearly eight hundred years the Christians of Spain
conducted what they describe as a permanent crusade. That’s why
no Spanish knights appear in what we call the Crusades. They
were occupied at home. But they rarely fought all-out battles. It
was mostly a “you let me hold Toledo and I’ll let you hold
Córdoba” business. Muslim armies served Christian kings and
Christian knights worked for Muslim caliphs, and a kind of
happy-go-lucky truce operated most of the time. By 1242 the
Christians had meneuvered themselves into such a favorable
position that one final push would have kicked the Moors out,
but they dawdled for another two and a half centuries. I suppose
when Spanish generals pictured themselves leading their armies
over terrain like this they lost heart.’
On the rocky earth by our picnic ground I traced out a series
of maps showing Spain in various periods, insofar as I could
remember them, and my friend was right. In 711 the Muslims
had conquered a defunct Spain with indecent ease. Had there
ever before been a nation so large that had collapsed so swiftly to
an invader with so few men? In one battle, the chroniclers tell us,
more than one hundred thousand well-armed Christians
evaporated before twelve thousand partially armed Berbers, and
the conquest of most cities was more like a procession than an
invasion; even Toledo fell with shocking speed. In contrast, when
the time came for the Christians to reconquer Spain, their advance
was slow. The final stage began in 1482, when Fernando and
Isabel, with a more or less united Spain behind them, were at last
able to bring the weight of the nation to bear on Granada.
On our way back to inspect the city we reached the mournful
point on the road known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro (The
Last Sigh of the Moor), where Boabdil is supposed to have paused,
as he abandoned Granada to the Christians, for one last look at
his noble city. Here he lamented his loss, whereupon his mother
remarked, ‘You do well, my son, to weep as a woman for the loss
of what you could not defend as a man.’ From this spot the towers
of Granada, set down among mountains, were exciting enough
to evoke a sigh.
We did not stop there, however, nor in the city itself, but went
to that hill east of the city on the road to Guadix where one can
look down upon Granada and perceive its structure. Two rivers
join, and instead of plunging through the mountains eastward to
the Mediterranean, start west across Andalucía to enter the
Guadalquivir near Córdoba. At their confluence a town grew up
prior to the Romans, under whom it flourished. It provided a
starting point for the Muslims when they sought a mountain
capital safe from Mediterranean pirates and Christian land armies.
The main body of the city crouched in valleys but the gypsy
quarter perched on a hill. ‘It’s the other hill you should study,’
my guide said, and it was from this favorable position that I looked
down onto the most famous hill in Spain. Its crest consisted of a
long, narrow wooded area completely enclosed by a turreted wall
inside which were many gardens, pools and rambling buildings,
the whole creating a sense of beauty and repose.
‘Which building is the Alhambra?’ I asked.
water, gardens and buildings. It all goes together to make the
Alhambra.’ Seeing it thus from a mountainside, I was able to
appreciate the inventiveness of the Muslim architects in converting
a considerable hilltop into a natural palace in which gardens and
fountains were as important as buildings.
Alhambra. My friend had gone to confirm our reservations at the
parador, which stands within the Alhambra and is a part of it,
and I went off into one of the gardens, and there an old man, clad
much as he would have been five hundred years ago, was gathering
figs, pulling the branches down with a crook and examining each
fruit to see if it was ripe. He gave me one, black as night and filled
with seeds. From all parts of the garden I smelled the heavy scent
of boxwood, and in the valley below, where the city stood, I could
see mists covering roofs. In the trees at the edge of the garden,
birds sang and beyond them rose the somber wall and the turrets
that protected it. This was the Alhambra; the buildings would
come later.
