Iberia (82 page)

 

‘But do you agree,’ I asked this Barcelona expert, ‘that the
themes themselves, those soaring, passionate Spanish groups of
statements we find in Granados and Falla…They’re better than
what Brahms and Dvorák had to work with, aren’t they?’

 

‘Much better. But if you ask me next, “Then why didn’t Spanish
composers build better with those building blocks?” I’ll have to
repeat that your question makes no sense. It just doesn’t relate to
the facts in Spain.’

 

Back with Dr. Morondo, I changed the subject. ‘The main
reason I wanted to see you was to ask whether I’m correct in
judging Victoria to be Spain’s foremost composer?’

 

A look of joy suffused Morondo’s agile face, and after nodding
his dark head back and forth he said, ‘There was the great one.’

 

‘I’d hoped you’d have something of his on the concert
yesterday.’

 

‘A little too profound for opening a bullfight.’

 

I told him of my embarrassing experience in thinking for so
many years that Victoria was an Italian, and he laughed. ‘Many
people still do. It’s Italy’s revenge for our stealing Colón.’ I then
explained how Victoria’s ‘Ave Maria’ had come to mean so much
to me, and Morondo began to hum the opening notes of this
composition, those marvelous sequences broken in rhythm and
emphasis. He conducted as he sang and I joined him in this
haunting masterpiece, but when we came to the ‘Ora pro nobis’
with its majestic theme and timeless devotion he threw up his
hands, halted his unseen choir and cried, ‘What dramatic use of
words and music. Victoria could do what none of us have been
able to do since.’ He then asked me if I knew Victoria’s
Officium
Hebdomadae Sanctae
(The Offices of Holy Week, 1585), and when
I said no he promised to bring me a score to study, and this he
did and to my pleasure I discovered that the nine
Responsories for
Tenebrae
which I liked so much were part of this noble work. The
Officium
has not yet been recorded in its entirety, so I have not
heard it, but from the fragments I have been able to acquire here
and there I judge Morondo to have been correct in calling it
Victoria’s masterpiece.

 

Before I left America, André Kostelanetz had advised me, when
in Pamplona, to visit the Pablo de Sarasate museum containing
mementos of the violinist who began in Pamplona and startled
the world with his virtuoso playing, and as I looked at the old
programs with their florid fruit-flower embellishments, I recalled
a dictum I had read years before: ‘Spanish music has always been
designed for the individual.’ If this is true then some of the
flamboyant compositions of Sarasate are closer to the essential
spirit of Spain than the symphonic work of Turina, which I like.
In praising Turina, I am perhaps being obstinate; but even though
Spaniards insist that the symphony is not suited to their cast of
mind, I prefer the reasoned symphony of Turina to the brilliant
incidental pieces of Albéniz and Granados; in fact, I have begun
to suspect that Pedrell was the evil genius of Spanish music. Had
he not come along to draw his followers into the bypaths of
antique themes, wonderful as they are, might not Spanish music
have matured into major forms as did the music of Hungary,
Austria and Czechoslovakia?

 

About the Pamplona cathedral I had no hesitation. It is the
ugliest beautiful church in existence, and to study it carefully over
repeated hours is an experience in art that proves invaluable to
people like dress designers and poets. The beauty is provided by
the cloisters, which cannot be equaled in northern Spain for
graciousness and intricate Gothic poetry; critics have praised them
in terms which I do not find excessive. The interior, with six fine
arches running down each side of the nave, with spacious aisle
and lovely chapels, is also a handsome creation, and when the
especially strong transept is added, with soaring stone arches
where it crosses the nave, one has a noble place of worship, not
particularly spiritual, perhaps, but clean and hard as befits the
north. I have always liked the beautifully carved tombs of King
Carlos III of Navarra and his Queen Leonora as they stand exposed
before the altar, for in them one sees carving of a high order, and
they lend both royalty and somberness to the soaring interior.

 

It is the façade which provides the ugliness. Originally it seems
to have been a perfectly good Gothic work suited to the cloister
and the spacious interior, but at the end of the eighteenth century
the architct Ventura Rodríguez, who had acquired a national
reputation as the man who could be trusted to improve old
churches, which he had done in other parts of Spain, was invited
to try his luck on Pamplona. He proceeded to tear down the
existing Gothic façade and to erect in its place a Greco-Roman
horror that makes the once-gracious building look like the
courthouse of Deaf Smith County, Texas. It is so bad it must be
seen to be believed. I had very much hoped Robert Vavra would
choose to photograph it for this book, but he said, ‘It’s so ugly
that no film can do it justice.’

 

The tall Gothic towers have become blunt and squat, one a
rigid duplicate of the other. Each is composed of many disparate
elements that add up to miserable failure. Eight rather good
Corinthian columns fail to convey any sense of loftiness because
they are capped by a pediment totally lacking in inspiration. The
main feature is a pair of horrible plaster angels in exaggerated
poses between two senseless urns. Over the main door leading to
the nave an Assumption of the Virgin of no discernible style
whatever was added in 1956, while on the right tower a sundial
has been placed, which because of the orientation of the church
can tell time for only a few hours in the late afternoon. Finally,
as if the twentieth century sought to help the eighteenth in the
job of destroying a beautiful building, atop the whole is a huge
and glaring neon cross.

 

I think a protracted study of the Pamplona cathedral should
be obligatory for anyone who plans to revise the work of others
who have gone before him. A composer who plans to update
Victoria’s ‘Ave Maria’ should see what happened when Rodríguez
updated a Gothic cathedral. A film director about to improve on
Molière should remind himself of the disaster that sometimes
overtakes such ventures. If a whole work falls out of style, as can
well happen, the fall will be mitigated by a certain inherent grace,
whereas if one refurbishes a Gothic cathedral with a Greco-Roman
façade, a couple of plaster angels and a neon cross, only confusion
can result. I was reminded of something Ernest Hemingway said
of motion pictures that had been made from his works: ‘I attend
each one with a trusted friend and a quart of gin and I haven’t
been able to last through any of them yet.’

 

There could be no locale more appropriate for recalling
Hemingway than Pamplona during San Fermín and no year more
suitable than this, for that morning in formal ceremony at the
town hall the alcalde had conferred on Hemingway posthumously
the distinction of the honorary red scarf of San Fermín, and the
crowd had nostalgically approved; so in the evening I invited to
the Caballo Blanco (White Horse), perched on the city walls, four
devotees of Hemingway who had known him in the final years.
I promised them mixed salad, a copious menestra and
conversation, and I was gratified when they appeared: Juanito
Quintana, who had served as prototype for Montoya in
The Sun
Also Rises
; Kenneth Vanderford, that strange Ph.D. from Indiana
whom I had met in the plaza; John Fulton, whom Hemingway
had befriended in the last years; and Robert Vavra, to whom
Hemingway had been especially kind.

 

When we took our seats in the handsome tavern—recently
assembled on this spot, using stones and floor plans borrowed
from various Renaissance ruins that were about to be torn down
in other parts of Pamplona—the two women who ran the place
brought bowls of mixed salad heavy with onion, olive oil and
sharp vinegar, and we remarked how fortunate the timing of San
Fermín was: it arrived just as the crisp lettuce, the red tomatoes
and the strong onions ripen, so that all during feria one can eat
this astringent dish. Tonight there would also be my favorite of
northern Spain, menestra. In hot olive oil cloves of garlic are
browned; vegetables of all kinds, including especially artichokes,
are added until a soup is formed, then shellfish previously cooked,
plus a boiled chicken. The whole is put in the oven until properly
blended, then served with onion bread and grated cheese.

 

When the menestra was finished and the flan was being served,
cold and shimmering and golden, the conversation began, and I
would like to report exactly what was said, retaining the
contradictions and false starts as they occurred that night.
Michener
: I’ve been reading Hotchner’s book on Hemingway and
I’ve asked you here to help on one point. Hotchner claims that
in that last year when we saw Hemingway, he’d already begun
to fall apart inside and was contemplating suicide. Did you
catch any glimpse of that?
Quintana
: I was close to him at that time. He never gave a hint
that he might commit suicide.

 

Vavra
: I certainly saw nothing. What impressed me was his
willingness to help Fulton. At the Miramar Hotel in Málaga he
took me aside and said, ‘Fulton has guts and I know you kids
are having it tough in this ambiente. I’d like to help.’ Well, a
lot of people said that in those days but nothing ever happened.
And like all the rest, Hemingway left without doing anything.
But about a week later, when I thought he had forgotten his
promise, he very quietly slipped me a hundred-dollar traveler’s
check. For weeks we didn’t cash it. Just sat looking at it.

 

Michener
: You notice anything strange about him, John?

 

Fulton
: One important thing. I’d read about his love for Maera,
who was one of the great old bullfighters, a real man, and I
simply couldn’t comprehend his sudden affection for Ordóñez
and Dominguín, they simply weren’t in Maera’s class as rugged
men.

 

Vavra
: At Málaga I heard Hemingway say, ‘Poor boys, Ordóñez
and Dominguín. They’re really having it tough. Fight in the
north one day, have to fly all the way to the south that night,
then fight again next day.’

 

Fulton
: Maera used to make such trips by car. And old cars, at
that. And arrive shaken up and without sleep. And go out and
fight Miuras. I never understood Hemingway’s sudden
debasement of his critical values.

 

Michener
: Did he know much about bullfighting?

 

Vanderford
: He knew a great deal. But the Spaniards love to put
him down. They ridicule his knowledge of the bulls.

 

Vavra
: But they ridiculed him only after his article criticizing
Manolete, the article in which he put Manolete down for the
very things that Spanish writers had been criticizing for years.

 

Vanderford
: Yes, especially then, but I don’t believe Spanish
bullfight critics have ever taken Hemingway very seriously, or
any Anglo-Saxon expert on the bulls. To show you how
Spaniards reacted to Hemingway’s remarks on Manolete,
K-Hito, one of the best critics, wrote an indignant article which
he concluded by stating that in the future, of the two
Hemingways, I was to be known as ‘Hemingway el Bueno,’
meaning that the real one was a bum.

 

Vavra
: Strange that he was so Madrid-oriented. Andalucía, the
cradle of bullfighting, never much interested him, nor did
Mexico.

 

Quintana
: I met Ernesto when he first came to Spain. He stayed
in my father’s hotel. Hotel Quintana, on the square where the
Bar Brasil now is. And he knew almost nothing about the bulls.
Couldn’t speak any Spanish either. I was a great admirer of
Maera and I introduced Hemingway to him. I was amazed at
how quickly this man could learn. He had a fantastic
identification with the drama of the ring and caught on
immediately. By the time he left Spain he knew bullfighting as
well as any of us.

 

Michener
: How did he treat you?

 

Quintana
: Always a marvelous friend. Once he said, ‘Juanito,
you’re never to worry about money. You’ve been my constant
friend and I’m going to take care of you.’

 

Michener
: Did he?

 

Quintana
: No.

 

Michener
: The Hotchner book says he kept you on his payroll.
Sent you money regularly from the States.

 

Quintana
: That book has done me much harm. If you want the
facts, as a friend I can trust, here they are. Ernesto paid me
faithfully every peseta he ever owed me, but only what he owed.
Never sent me a penny from America. Only for services I
performed in Spain. As a guide, that is. Since his death, people
who were connected with him send me letters all the time
asking for copies of this paper or that, so I get the photocopies
made and send them to the States, but no one ever sends me
expenses for the work. Nor even thank-you letters for my time
and money.

 

Michener
: The book says Hemingway was fed up with you. For
having failed to get tickets for the bullfights in Pamplona.

 

Quintana
: Señor Hotchner wasn’t even with Hemingway when
this was supposed to have happened. He hadn’t asked me to
get any tickets. In those days tickets were easy to come by. You
could buy your own. I remember when I first met Hotchner.
Little town called Aranda de Duero. Hemingway treated him
with indifference. Certainly the great friendship Hotchner
speaks of wasn’t visible to me…or to any of the rest of us.

 

Michener
: I take it you didn’t like the book.