Iberia (48 page)

 

It was during the horse fair some years ago that I stumbled
upon a rewarding acquaintance. I had ridden a bus out to the
Guadalquivir to spend the day with the gypsies and had eaten, at
one of their kiosks, a mixture of grain, chopped meat and gravy,
and now I returned on foot to the heart of the city. I rested for
some time in the Court of the Orange Trees, using the stone slabs
provided there, and then went into that fine street along which
the Holy Week procession ends.

 

Spanish police are notoriously abrupt with pedestrians who
try to cross other than at traffic lights, so I waited in line for the
green to show, because I wanted to spend the rest of the day
wandering in the area by the bullring. I happened to look across
the street at the people waiting on the other side and saw there
two handsome young men whom I judged to be in their late
twenties. One of them, a tall slim fellow with unusually fine
features, I was sure I had seen somewhere before; these were the
days when Hollywood was beginning to produce many films in
Spain and I supposed he was an actor. Then it came to me. I had
seen his picture in an American paper. And his name, for some
curious reason, leaped to mind. He was John Fulton Short. And
he came from Philadelphia. And he was a bullfighter.

 

We met in the middle of the street and I said, ‘Aren’t you John
Fulton?’ which was the name he fought under. He nodded and I
introduced myself. He nodded again in much the manner that a
Spanish grandee nods to the baker peddling bread from a barrow.
‘Good luck, Matador,’ I said, using the traditional Spanish phrase,
and we crossed over, each headed his own way.

 

I learned later that the young man with him that day was Jerry
Boyd, an aspirant writer from America who happened to be
married to the daughter of one of my favorite artists, the fine
Jewish Shakespearean actor from Budapest and London, Abraham
Sofaer. It was Boyd, I later learned, who told Fulton, ‘My God! If
that’s who he said he was, he’s from Philadelphia too. Maybe we
better see if he’d be interested.’ John Fulton, in the manner of
matadors, knew nothing of books and had no special desire right
then to meet anyone from Philadelphia, for he was conspicuously
down on his luck, but he allowed Boyd to double him back, and
after a short walk, for I was moving slowly, they overtook me near
the bullring.

 

‘Are you from Philadelphia?’ Fulton asked. I replied that I was
and he gave me his card: ‘John Fulton, Matador de Novillos,
Hernando Colón, 30, Sevilla, España.’ He smiled and said, ‘Why
don’t you drop around?’ But Jerry Boyd intercepted the card
before I could take it and asked, ‘You did say your name was
Michener, didn’t you?’ When I nodded, he asked, ‘And you do
write books?’ I nodded again and he let me have the card, and it
was through this chance meeting that I embarked upon those
adventures of the spirit which led to the writing of this book.

 

John Fulton, art student and would-be matador from
Philadelphia, had a small second-floor apartment on a side street
which debouched into the Court of the Orange Trees, and here,
during a period of some six or seven years, came most of the
Americans who got as far south as Sevilla. Maharajas stopped
here and dozens of actors making movies in the area and writers
and newspapermen and artists from England. The hospitality that
John Fulton extended during the years was astronomical and he
offered it while being stone-broke and trying to make his way in
one of the toughest professions in the world. To be a bullfighter
in Spain requires from even the Spanish youth an endurance that
most men cannot visualize; but to be an American trying to crack
that vicious and closed society demands absolute courage.

 

How Fulton supported himself during those bleak and
wonderful years, I do not know. Most of us who trespassed on
his hospitality managed in some way or other to leave behind
donations: one brought the wine, another anchovies, another the
cheese. Hemingway made his contribution by check; a delightful
woman from Cleveland made hers by throwing memorable
flamenco parties at which she gave John a fee for his professional
help; I made mine by commissioning Fulton to paint me a picture,
for I judged that he had more chance to succeed as an artist than
as a matador.

 

I was right. He was an excellent artist and subsequently made
a name for himself as an illustrator of children’s books; for his
paintings he also acquired a distinguished list of patrons, including
Adlai Stevenson and the Baroness von Trapp. But whenever I
talked with him about the desirability of his attending art school
somewhere and applying himself to that profession, he replied,
‘I am going to be a matador.’ His dedication never faltered, in
spite of doubters like me, and I watched with sorrow as he beat
his head in futile rage against the indifference of Spanish
promoters. This handsome young fellow from Philadelphia might
want to be a bullfighter, but the impresarios of Spain did not
intend to help.

 

Those were marvelous days in Sevilla. In the afternoon we ate
at a small restaurant called El Mesón (The Inn), where substantial
food was served at reasonable prices in an atmosphere of bullfight
posters and butchered pigs hanging from the ceiling. Food in
Sevilla during the spring festival is apt to be dismal; some meals
served in the major hotels are shocking, but at El Mesón we ate
well. It was there I first tasted three fine Spanish items which
together made a meal. First we had a tall pitcher of sangría, a
drink made of harsh red wine, cognac, seltzer water, quartered
oranges, lemon juice, some pineapple squares and red cherries,
sweetened with not too much sugar and served with lots of cracked
ice and cinnamon. It was delicious, and travelers who learn to
like its different taste prefer it to other Spanish drinks.

 

For our second course we had gazpacho, an ice-cold soup which
can be compared to nothing. If you ever travel in Spain and come
upon a restaurant that serves gazpacho, take it, because no other
dish in the country will you remember with such affection. Once
when I had been out of Spain for some years, a neighbor found
in a gourmet shop in Princeton a shelf of canned gazpacho, but
since she could not be sure whether it was any good or not, she
bought only one can, plopped it in her refrigerator and when it
was ice-cold, called us over. When she served it with some
chopped onion, cubes of cucumber and bits of tomato, tears of
joy came to my eyes, something she had not been able to achieve
with flamenco records or colored slides of Spain, and next day I
drove all the way to Princeton to buy up the remaining cans. For
gazpacho is Spain. The cook at the Mesón told me how to make
it.

 

Take two stale rolls and reduce them to crumbs. Soak in water
until they form a thick paste and set aside. Into your blender put
two pounds of tomatoes, one large pared cucumber, two large
green peppers, a quarter-cup of pimientos and two small sweet
onions. Season with pinches of salt and pepper. Now comes the
tricky part. To this mixture you must add olive oil and vinegar,
which are the heart of the soup. A Spaniard will use one cup of
the former, a tablespoon of the latter. Americans, of whom I am
certainly one, prefer not more than a quarter-cup of oil and four
tablespoons of vinegar. At any rate, reduce all ingredients except
the bread to a liquid, then mix in the bread by hand and put the
result in a covered wooden bowl and place in the refrigerator for
six hours. Serve ice-cold and pass a serving tray containing
separate dishes of chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and
small cubes of bread. No part of this strange recipe sounds very
good, but taken together and properly blended, these ingredients
produce a soup which is as distinctive as vichyssoise.

 

For dessert we had membrillo and Manchego cheese. The latter
is the only good cheese Spain produces, a salty, coarse-grained
product from the Don Quixote country. When eaten along with
membrillo it makes a spicy dish, for membrillo is a grainy
gelatin-like dessert made of quince. It is both sweet and acid and
has a delicious chewy quality. Burnt orange in color, it is served
in generous slabs as if it were a cheese, and at the Mesón was extra
good, brought in from a small town near Córdoba which
specializes in its manufacture; I believe that it too can sometimes
be bought in the United States, but I haven’t tasted it yet.
However, the waiter warned me, ‘Be careful where you buy your
membrillo. Some of those other restaurants make theirs of sweet
potato.’

 

At night in this in-between period we would rout out a
near-blind flamenco singer, Gafas (Spectacles) they called him,
and in the old days he could chant flamenco with as great an
artistry as anyone in Spain, but now his voice was gone. We used
to rent an attic in the medieval part of town, import a set of
dancers and drag in a keg of wine, some bread, cheese and
anchovies, and dance till morning. It was with Gafas singing in
his cracked, wine-heavy voice, which no one could call beautiful,
that I learned his version of that haunting song whose music I
had first heard in Valencia years before, ‘Petenera,’ about the
forbidden Jewess who brought disaster to her village and herself:

Where are you going, beautiful Jewess,

 

All dressed up and at such an hour?

 

I am going to meet Rebeco,

 

Who is now in the synagogue.

Whoever named you Petenera

 

Didn’t know how to name you.

 

You should have been named

 

The perdition of men.

If you hear the bells,

 

Don’t ask who has died,

 

Because you will be told

 

By your own remorse.

One would like to know the origin of that last verse. Is it an
authentic Spanish statement anticipating John Donne? I suspect
it’s a late addition reflecting the popularity of Ernest Hemingway.

Whenever Gafas sang ‘Petenera’ to the rather banal music that
accompanies it, I felt that I was in medieval Spain, as I do today
when I hear it. In time this unimportant little song, to which each
singer had his own dozen verses, including usually the three given
above, came to represent for me the best of flamenco, and even
though it is not one of the great songs, I would rather hear it sung
well by a peasant voice like that of Gafas, tired and world-weary
at the end of the day, with the guitar flying in mournful accents,
than the finest formal chanting I have so far heard. It is in a very
real sense my particular song of Spain; in the years when I worked
submerged in Jewish materials I would often recall its phrases,
and they came to me not in the syllables of the various recordings
I had purchased, nor in the poetry, which is of good quality, but
rather in the cracked and reedy voice of Gafas as he sang in the
attics of Sevilla in those good days. Shortly after I heard him for
the last time he died, leaving behind no recording of his ‘Petenera.’

At John Fulton’s there was much talk of art, but as I have said,
I got nowhere trying to convince him that he should apply himself
to painting. In his apartment when I knew it, one found Mexican
matadors, Chilean painters, Minnesota architects and Vassar
philosophy majors in Spain for their junior year. The visitor who
gave me the most trouble was a Danish schoolteacher from
Copenhagen; she was in her late twenties and no beauty, but she
had a wonderfully soft quality about her and obviously loved
children, to whom she imparted her strong sense of values. She
taught, if I remember correctly, chemistry, which seemed an odd
subject for a quiet girl like her, but she explained, ‘There’s an
unusual need for chemists today. Especially in Denmark. And
those of us who have any skill in the field are kept busy.’ I judged
that her pupils received good instruction.

But one meets many schoolteachers in Spain. What set this
admirable young lady apart was the fact that on a previous
vacation she had conceived a grand passion for a young Welshman
who, like John Fulton, was determined to become a bullfighter.
The fellow had no prospects whatever, insofar as I could
determine, yet he hung on, year after year. At the beginning of
each summer his Copenhagen schoolteacher appeared on the
scene, with her savings from the term before, and together they
moved from one fair to the next, she blond and he swarthy,
clinging to the fiction that one day he would become a great
fighter, one day they would marry. The illusion kept them going,
and I was with them at the end of one season when the little
Welshman actually got an invitation to fight in the fair being put
together by an impoverished village.

It would be more accurate to say that he had been invited to
participate in the fair, because it wasn’t going to be a formal
bullfight; the Welshman would be welcomed he paid for his suit,
for his assistants, for a horse to be ridden by his picador and for
part of the bullring expenses. In return he would receive no wages
at all but would be allowed to test himself against an overage,
over-weight, wily old bull who had already in previous fights sent
two men to the hospital.

This offer presented a serious dilemma to the school-teacher.
Obviously the funds required of the Welshman could be provided
only by her, and if she laid out this substantial amount she felt
that she ought at least to attend, especially since there was a strong
likelihood that her matador would be wounded, if not killed. But
to attend the fracas, for that’s what it shaped up to be, would
require her to miss the opening of her school in Copehagen. She
asked me what I thought she ought to do, and I, as a conservative
who used to teach school myself, taking it very seriously, said
without hesitation, ‘You take the next plane to Denmark.’

Apparently I brought her to her senses, for she put down the
money for the fight, canceled her flight to Denmark and
accompanied her hero to the village festival. On the way she
explained, ‘They can’t fire me. Chemistry teachers are hard to
come by.’ I asked if her school board knew that she was spending
her vacations in Spain, living with a bullfighter. She replied, ‘I
suppose they know. At least the children do. They think it’s rather
sporting.’