Iberia (81 page)

There was a final reason for choosing

Iberia
as a title for this
book: the word is unusual in that it is just as beautiful in its
English pronunciation (Eye-beer-ee-ya) as in its Spanish
(Ee-bare-ya), a fact recognized by Matthew Arnold when he
inserted the word in the closing lines of “The Scholar-Gipsy,” one
of the stateliest passages of English poetry:

To where the Atlantic raves

And on the beach undid his corded bales.

 

Outside the Western Straits, and unbent sails

 

There, where down cloudy cliffs, through sheets of foam,
Shy traffickers, the dark Iberians come;

The short drive from Tudela to Pamplona ran due north
through the handsome country of lower Navarra, climbing as it
went, for I was approaching the Pyrenees, and although it was
now early July, the air was brisk and I could sense the vigor that
characterizes northern Spain. Then, as the car turned a corner, I
saw before me the smokestacks and factory walls of a prosaic
industrial city that might be termed the Youngstown of Spain,
and I thought how disappointed must be those foreigners
nurtured on Ernest Hemingway’s vision of Pamplona as it existed
in the late 1920s, when they saw this drab profile. Judging by first
appearances, Pamplona was no romantic center for expatriates
but rather a commercial hub more concerned about labor unions
than fiestas.

My first explorations of the city through its southern gateway
confirmed this judgment: I saw dozens of garages where
knowledgeable young men were tearing down Ford and Citroën
engines and rebuilding them. I saw glass factories and cordage
shops and lumber yards and carpenters’ benches. But when I
entered the wide avenue leading to the central square I entered a
new world, for now I found myself surrounded by a hornets’ nest
of small cars from all over Europe filled with some of the most
attractive young people I had seen in years: blondes from Sweden,
handsome dark-haired men from Italy, students in leather pants
from Germany and a substantial quota of Americans under the
age of twenty-five. There was noise and excitement. The heart of
Pamplona was apparently going to be much different from the
environs.

The first specific proof I had that a feria was about to begin
came when I saw Spanish men parading with long strings of garlic
about their necks, wearing them as women do pearls. I was to ask
many times what these strands of garlic reaching down to the
knees signified, but no one could tell me; doubtless it had
something to do either with ancient fertility rites or with charms
to banish ghosts during feria.

When I came to the public square it was as if I had entered
another city, one belonging to the nineteenth century. In the
center among scattered trees stood an old-style bandstand
featuring iron grillwork; about the edges of the square sprawled
a dozen cafés, their chairs and tables covering the pavement from
door to gutter; above the cafés rose several ancient hotels with
tall French windows that didn’t close; and everywhere there were
hordes of young people determined to have a good time.

I was supposed to meet Vavra at the Bar Txoco, but when I got
there all tables were filled with students from South Africa,
Germany, Sweden and Great Britain. They were a riotous lot,
some with necklaces of garlic, most stone-drunk at five in the
afternoon, with the feria not yet begun. Unable to find a chair, I
was about to leave when I heard a loud, insinuating ‘Psssst,’ and
I turned to face the man who would symbolize Pamplona for me.

He was in his late forties, a disreputable, baggy-kneed,
bleary-eyed, gap-toothed, fumbling, stumbling waiter from a
nearby café who made his living by luring customers away from
the Bar Txoco to his flea-infested joint and exacting from them,
for his pains, a shot or two of whiskey. He was the most debauched
Spaniard I had ever seen, a disreputable Sancho Panza, and as he
offered me a chair he whispered, ‘You want to meet a refined
Spanish girl? Speaks English.’ When I ordered wine he made a
new proposition: ‘Can I pour a shot for myself?’ The duplicity
with which he dispatched his drink without being detected by the
owner of the café was ingratiating, and as he placed my wine on
the table he asked, ‘You interested in marijuana?’ I was to see a
great deal of this one-man vice ring in the eight days ahead, for
he seemed to work all hours without sleep, fortifying himself with
cadged drinks and lurching about his corner of the plaza in a kind
of Renaissance debauchery. ‘Look!’ he whispered admiringly as
I sipped my wine. ‘Ernest Hemingway. And our lousy newspapers
tried to tell us he was dead.’

I looked to where he pointed, and my jaw dropped. There,
entering the plaza behind the wheel of a small, trim
Karmann-Ghia, came Ernest Hemingway, dead these five years.
He wore his famous hunting cap with the short brim, and field
jacket. His white beard looked exactly as it had during the last
years of his life, and his portly figure was the same. Even the
features of his expressive face was unchanged, and after he had
parked his car in the space reverently saved for him by the police,
he stepped into the plaza exactly as he had done forty years before
when gathering the impressions that later served as the foundation
for

The Sun Also Rises
.

‘Adiós, Hemingway!’ several Spaniards called, and a warm smile
diffused the bloated face of my degenerate waiter as he cried, ‘Don
Ernesto! Welcome back to Pamplona.’

With much ceremony Hemingway was offered the table next
to me, and two Spaniards asked for his autograph. Taking from
an inner pocket of his field jacket a stack of printed calling cards,
one face of which contained his photograph, he signed two and
handed them graciously to the petitioners, who then withdrew.

‘Are you Vanderford?’ I asked across the tables.

 

‘I am,’ he said, and I was about to ask him for one of his famous
cards when I was interrupted by two Pamplona newspapermen
whom I had known some years before when making a pilgrimage
to Santiago de Compostela. They wanted to know which
bullfighter appearing in the feria had lured me back to San Fermín,
or which parties at which café, and they were not prepared when
I explained that I had come primarily in hope of meeting with
Don Luis Morondo. The reporters hesitated a moment, as if they
did not know the name of the man who is probably the most
famous Pamplonan alive today. I thought it would be egregious
of me to describe him any further, and I was pleased when one
finally smiled and said, ‘Oh, you mean Morondo the musician!’

 

I did indeed. For some years I had owned a fine phonograph
record produced by Morondo and his chamber-music group
from Pamplona, and I was so impressed by it—a collection of
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century music sung a cappella—that I
had made inquiries in musical circles in New York and London
and found that among those who knew choral singing, Morondo’s
Pamplona group was considered one of the most polished
ensembles. ‘Can you arrange for me to meet him?’ I asked the
newspapermen.

 

‘Perhaps,’ they said, and I left them to attend a concert which
Morondo was giving to honor the opening of San Fermín. On
stage came sixteen singers, eight good-looking young women in
evening dresses backed up by seven young men and one older
man in tuxedos. Each man stood on a box of a different height,
so that all seemed to be equally tall. Each singer wore the
traditional red scarf of San Fermín. The group made a stunning
appearance, but was its singing to be as good as I had heard on
the record?

 

Then Morondo appeared, tall, slim, well groomed. He could
have been a Spanish grandee in his fifties. With a minimum of
gesture he launched his singers into a program which began with
fifteenth-century church music and ended with ‘Old Black Joe,’
in honor of the Americans who had crowded into Pamplona. The
Stephen Foster was sung in clear English and made an amusing
effect, but the highlight of the performance was a work that fitted
precisely the spirit of the feria, García Lorca’s ‘Lament for Ignacio
Sánchez Mejías,’ arranged for choral group. At the repeated
phrase, ‘At five in the afternoon,’ one could sense the beginning
of the tragedy that would end in the death of this fine matador.

 

The group could sing. The individual pyrotechnics of the
singers were less conspicuous than those of similar groups trained
in London or Paris and there seemed to be less variation in attack
and emphasis, but the ensemble singing, which is what such a
group must master if it is to achieve a good reputation, was as
good as any I had ever heard. There was less exhibitionism, less
dramatic effect for effect’s sake, than in a comparable American
group, but a much nobler end result. If one demanded exciting
solo work from either individual singers or the various choirs, he
would not find it here, but if one sought a powerful and authentic
total effect, here it was. The voices were wonderfully modulated,
finely matched and superbly disciplined. It was obvious from the
first note that Don Morondo had his group under control and
that they sang pretty much as he wanted them to sing. I left the
theater, thinking, It was worth the trip north to hear such music.

 

Next day I met Morondo, and close up he was even more
impressive than he had been on the podium. He was taller than
I had thought, had very blue eyes, a quiet voice and a most
infectious smile. He wore an attractive jacket with no lapels and
reminded me of a younger Toscanini. It was painful to discover
that his life had been that of nearly every creative figure in Spain,
an endless duplication of demanding jobs which taken together
had barely paid enough wages for him to live and do the work of
which he was capable. A pupil of a pupil of the Frenchman Dukas,
Morondo had in recent years simplified his life: he now served as
professor at the normal school, professor at the consistory,
director of the orchestra, director of the choral group, lecturer at
the university, plus teacher, advisor, consultant and friend to all
young musicians in the area. In spite of this deluge he maintained
a youthful appearance and a lively humor.

 

I began, ‘Maestro, I’ve come to Pamplona to see you because
in Avila I found myself perplexed about the problem of Spanish
music.’

 

‘I am too,’ he replied.

 

‘I’ve always heard of Felipe Pedrell [1841-1922] as the patron
saint of modern Spanish music…’

 

I was not allowed to finish, for at the name of that great
musicologist whose theories had inspired Albéniz, Granados,
Turina and Falla, Morondo’s face lit up and he cried, ‘He was the
master of us all.’

 

‘But what actually did he accomplish?’

 

‘He sent us back to Spanish themes, to the great work done by
unknown Spanish song writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. You might say that all we’ve done has been built upon
the bones of Pedrell.’

 

‘Two problems confuse me.’ I said. ‘First, Pedrell in Spanish
music seems to me like Squarcione in north Italian painting. Each
was a notable teacher, but neither left much of his own work for
us to hear or see. For twenty years I’ve been interested in Pedrell
and I’ve yet to hear a note he wrote,’

 

‘That can be corrected. I’ll bring you his songbooks tomorrow.’
‘Are there any recordings of his songs?’

 

‘Actual recordings? No. But you hear Pedrell in all Spanish
music. His songs live in all of us.’ (During the rest of my stay in
Spain I was not to hear a single note that Pedrell wrote, nor have
I yet, but I sensed him to be a more important musician than
many whose names and works I knew well.)

 

‘Second problem. The individual themes that Pedrell brought
to the attention of his group…Let’s say the ones I hear in the four
composers we named…They’re some of the greatest themes in
contemporary music. Better I’d say than similar national themes
I find in Brahms, Dvorák, Smetana or Bartók.’

 

‘I’d agree. They are supreme musical notations.’ Morondo
nodded. For eighteen years he had served as director of Spain’s
oldest symphony, the one Camille Saint-Saëns used to conduct,
and he knew well the music I was speaking of.

 

‘But Brahms and the others from the rest of Europe took poorer
themes and made of them great symphonies and concertos and
quartets. Why…’

 

Dr. Morondo interrupted me. ‘You want to know why Spanish
composers haven’t done the same?’

 

‘It seems to me they’ve abused the great material Pedrell handed
them. They’ve utilized it on a lower level than was necessary.’

 

To this criticism Dr. Morondo preferred to make no comment,
but some weeks later in Barcelona a more critical Spanish
musician commented on the problems I had raised in Avila:
‘When you demand that Falla and Albéniz take Spanish themes
and build from them what Brahms and Dvorák built from theirs,
you’re out of your mind. Germany and Austria of that day had
orchestras and opera companies and string ensembles that needed
the music these men were writing. Spain did not. One small
orchestra here, another there, a visiting opera company from
Milan, and an audience who wanted to hear only
Carmen
and
La
Bohème
. The Spanish audience still doesn’t want a symphony or
an opera featuring a large ensemble and a complicated structure.
It wants a short, individualized work and that’s what the Spanish
composer learned to supply. Zarzuela, not opera. Because
symphonies and operas are not within our pattern. Besides, the
material that Pedrell resurrected for these men was ideally suited
to individual types of presentation. In criticizing Falla and Albéniz
for not having produced in the grand manner, you are criticizing
not the composers but the Spanish people, and you are betraying
your own lack of understanding.’