Spain (12 page)

Here and there across Spain, too, there are reminders that
Hispanidad
, the idea of a Spanishness common to Old World and New, does have some meaning. Most of the lamps in the Basilica of Montserrat, sent to replace those destroyed by Napoleon's soldiery, were given by faithful adherents of the cult in Peru, Mexico, and the Argentine. In the Sanctuary of the Great Promise at Valladolid, named for a pledge divinely given to a Jesuit priest in the eighteenth century—‘I will reign in Spain more than in any other part of the world'—there is a chapel presented by all the American republics which were once Spanish possessions, and in Columbus's monastery of La Rábida there are specimens, neatly packed in wooden boxes, of their separate soils, Students from Latin America still come to study at the Spanish universities. The elegant northern resort of San Sebastian owes some of its prosperity to the faithful attendance, season after season, of rich and socially-conscious South Americans.

In Madrid I once went to an exhibition of Inca jewellery lent by the Peruvian Government—an astonishing collection of beautiful things, necklaces and animal figures, great beaten breastplates or dreamlike headgears. I watched the Spaniards closely as they wandered around these treasures, and found that they had inherited in full degree the instincts of the conquistadores: like those blood-and-thunder connoisseurs, they did not much bother about the aesthetics, but ran their fingers instantly down the
catalogue, as they examined each object in turn, to find its precise weight in gold. And more subtly suggestive still of
Hispanidad
, of the paradoxical physical resemblance between Old Spain and New, is the sight of a sheep-herd on its way to market, along one of the dirt roads that wind through the mountains of western Castile. You can see the sheep from miles away, surrounded in their haze of dust, and hear the barking of the dogs and the whistles of the herdsmen; and as they advance across that bare dry landscape, their white mass now spreading, now coalescing, it is the easiest thing in the world to fancy that you are back with Pizarro in the Andean foothills, that Cuzco, not Segovia, lies over the hill, that there is a smell on the wind not of wild daffodils, but of coca, and that the animals approaching you are not sheep of Castile, but long-necked ruminative llamas, hastening with a pad of cameloid hoofs towards the City of the Sun.

One of the plaintive melodies sung by Spanish workmen may, if you hear it one morning from your bedroom window, strike you as vaguely familiar. It is a sad song about a nobleman's search for his dead wife, and the Spaniards took it with them to the Americas. During the great gold rush of 1849 the Mexican miners in California sang it so incessantly that their American and English colleagues learnt it too, parodied it, gave it a new set of words and called it ‘My Darling Clementine'.

The most improbable Spaniards, dyed by this martial past, often have something soldierly about them. I once came across a bust, in a garden-plaza of Ciudad Rodrigo, which I at first assumed to represent the Duke of Wellington, who won a famous victory there—so proud and commanding was its eroded stone face, so bravely decorated its uniform with braid and laurel wreaths. I asked a passing woman, however, just to make sure, and found I had been mistaken: that was no general, she said, but a well-known organist of Salamanca Cathedral—a saintly man, and a musician of universally respected talent. I ought not to have been surprised. In every Spanish music-case there lies a pair of batons.

In Spain nobody can quite escape the bugle-calls, and the emblems of war are everywhere. It may be an antique figure on a
Salamanca tomb, the man in all the panoply of mediaeval arms, the woman dressed in the nun's costume which she swore to wear throughout his absence at the battles. It may be a place of arms: the little mosque, beside the fairground at Granada, in which Ferdinand negotiated the surrender of Boabdil, the last Moorish king in Spain; or the bridge down the road from where the Catholic Monarchs watched their flag rise at last above the towers of the Alhambra. It may be the pock-marks of old gunfire, like the holes of the French shells all over the Torre del Cuarto in Valencia, or the scarred nave of the Romanesque cathedral of Lérida, which used to be a machine-gun range. It may only be some quirk of combat, like the gilded screen in Toledo Cathedral which was coated with iron to hide its value from Napoleon's looters, and has never been scraped clean. It may be the sarcophagus in Granada of the Gran Capitán Gonzalo de Córdoba, the greatest Spanish soldier of all—now all forlorn in a half-derelict church, once so famous a monument that for a century after the general's death a hundred banners flew daily above his tomb.

But more terribly, it may be a reminder of that last and worst of the Spanish wars, which tore this country apart in the thirties, and left it half hushed and numbed until only the other day: a broken bridge, perhaps; a row of crosses; the little cork grove, near Salamanca, where General Franco became the Caudillo; or some shabby city of the north, Gerona, Vich, or Tortosa, over whose cobble-streets and dowdy houses even now there seems to hang some residual ignominy of defeat.

The Gothic cathedral at León is one of the few in Spain that feel
light
—the Spaniards did not share the French taste for glass walls, and preferred a brawnier, grimmer style. León has a vast amount of marvellous glass, no
coro
to obstruct the central view, and a general sense of lucidity; and as if to exploit this feeling of revelation, the chapter has enclosed the west end of the nave with an enormous sheet of plate glass, enabling the tourist to press his nose against the window when a service is actually taking place inside.

This is an astonishing sensation. Immediately in front of you, a foot or two beyond the glass, an elderly Spanish canon will be sitting before his missal in all the glory of his golden vestments—champing at the mouth a little, perhaps, or fidgeting with his stole, so dose that you can almost smell the cough-drops on his breath or turn over the pages for him. To right and left, embedded in their stalls, the other canons sit reverently engrossed, birettas hung on the walls behind; and at the lecterns below them, rising and sitting in antiphony, two young precentors chant the liturgy —churchmen of immense enthusiasm, like up-and-coming barristers, who throw their whole physiques into their devotions, and do not neglect, now and then, to cast a swift glance behind
them, to see how that profane audience behind the glass is behaving itself. It is almost like being a Spanish priest yourself, to stand so close to those vivacious canonicals; or perhaps you may be reminded, without irreverence, of the great aquaria in America, through whose thick portholes you may squint to see the poor dolphins sporting themselves inside.

Spain is a Christian country in the way that Saudi Arabia is Muslim, Burma Buddhist, or Russia Communist. To the average citizen of the West, with his pagan or humanist social background, her Christianity is as exotically mysterious as any faith of fetish or of ancestry. Church and State may no longer be virtually synonymous, as they were in Franco's day (the Caudillo was
ex officio
a canon of Astorga), but for centuries the Catholic Church has been one of the ruling forces of Spain, and even now, the moment you set foot within her frontiers the tokens of the creed are as ubiquitous as prayer-wheels in Nepal. Christianity was for generations the binding force of this centrifugal nation. It was in the name of Christ that the Catholic Monarchs united Spain, earning for this country, by Papal Bull, the perpetual right to eat meat on Fridays. In a sculptured relief in Granada Cathedral Ferdinand and Isabel are shown accepting the surrender of Granada with their spiritual adviser, Cardinal Mendoza, so powerful a prelate that he was known as Tertius Rex; and it is properly symbolic, perhaps, that of the three, only the Cardinal is wearing gloves. It was in the cause of Christian unity that the Jews and the Moors were expelled—the Jews because of their ‘continual attempts to divert and turn faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith, taking them away from it and drawing towards their own diseased beliefs and opinions'. The ships of the conquistadores crossed the Atlantic loaded deep with crosses, missionaries, missals, and Christian convictions, and Spain in her heyday saw herself as the champion of Christian orthodoxy, whose task it was to unite the world in Catholicism; it was the defeat of the Armada by the English Protestants, in 1588, that cracked her confidence in her mission and herself.

In the Spanish context Christianity has always meant power and purpose. Within this stronghold, a heretic is traditionally a fifth
columnist—and indeed, five centuries after the fall of Granada it was a Spanish Christian general who coined that very phrase, to describe the secret body of sympathizers who would help the four Nationalist columns to seize Madrid for the faith. For the faith! As the whole course of the Reconquest was partly a war and partly an act of devotion, so to many Nationalists the Civil War, which brought Franco's regime to power, was the last of the holy wars. The Republic had rashly tried to break the Church's hold on education, and generally to separate religion from Government; the war memorials of their opponents usually describe the dead as having laid down their lives ‘for God and for Spain'. ‘Commend your soul to God,' cried Moscardó to his son, over the telephone line from the Alcazar, ‘shout
Viva España
, and die like a hero'—and thus he summed up the three estates of Christian
casticismo
, universal, patriotic, individual. The decisive moments of Spanish history have always occurred when Christianity has, by force or persuasion, welded the nation into one of its periods of purpose. One such moment was that
annus mirabile
, 1492, when the last Moors were defeated, the Jews were expelled, and the Cross first set sail, beside the Spanish flag, for the Americas. Another such moment, you may like to remind yourself as you peer through the plate glass at León, has only just come to an end.

This does not mean that every Spaniard goes to Mass. Before the Civil War it was estimated that only a third of the population confessed or communicated; today the proportion is probably less than half, with women predominating. Anti-clerical feeling in Spain, as distinct from anti-religious feeling, has often been violent. Church and power have so often gone together—‘Money is very Catholic', says a bitter Spanish proverb—and though the association of the two has done some great things for Spain, it has also helped to sour the attitude of the poor towards organized religion. The saddest statues in Europe are the mutilated figures of saints outside Tortosa Cathedral, which look as though they were hacked about by Cromwellian troopers or Muslim fanatics, but were in fact desecrated by furious citizens of modern Spain, half a century ago.

The Spanish Church has always been proud, and frequently independent. Its bishops have seldom been flaccidly subservient towards the Vatican, and in our own time the gentle Pope John ΧΧΙII so disapproved of Spanish policies that when a distinguished ex-Minister was nominated to represent this Christian State at the Holy See, his accreditation was refused (and he killed himself). Spain is a much more sceptical, ironic country than Italy, say, and within her frontiers the faith seems to have wider limits than elsewhere. At one end we have the severe intellectuals of the hierarchy, whose pale ascetic faces you may see in any Spanish cathedral, absorbed in their books in the dim-lit
coro
, or scattering like a meteor shower after vespers—each to his own small chapel in the transept, and thence through a little door into the evening light. I once walked into the cathedral of La Seo in Saragossa to find in progress the public examination of a newly nominated canon, and never did I feel more strongly the intellectual iron of Catholicism. In the background there hovered a couple of choirboys in surplices, and a stoop-shouldered beadle in a mouldy wig. At a table behind the coro the young canon was reading his thesis with gusto, speaking very fast about one of the abtruser theological conceptions, and sometimes emphasizing his point with a gentle slap of his hand upon the table. And bundled mysteriously on their benches before him were his seniors of the chapter, screwed up in cassocks, embroidered surplices, and stoles, one facing this way, another that, and all looking immensely old, eminent, and saintly. At first I thought these wrinkled objects were fast asleep; but I tiptoed across the aisle to their benches, and as I approached them I noticed that first one watery old eye, then another, then a third, was fastened upon me with an expression of infinitely lively awareness. I withdrew abashed, and there pursued me towards the door the tap of the beadle's censorious wand, and the rich voice of the candidate, pressing home a dogma.

At the other end stand all those miraculous relics which, to the cold northern mind, blur the edge between religion and superstition, and give to Spanish Catholicism an odour of wizardry. All over Spain there are miracle-working images of the Virgin, hallowed and well-loved objects with traditional powers of cure and
protection. They are usually squat, primitive, vaguely Oriental figures, blackened by centuries of candle smoke, and sitting upon their high plinths, their banks of flowers, or their altars like dark little idols. Most of them are mediaeval figures which were buried for their safety when the Moors conquered Spain, whose whereabouts was forgotten during the seven centuries of Muslim rule, and whose rediscovery after the Reconquest was regarded as miraculous. A typical story is that of the Black Virgin of Montserrat. This small, almost African-looking image, now to be seen as a small black blob among the multitudinous flowers, gems, and candles of its altar, was discovered by some shepherds who noticed strange lights flickering, to celestial music, outside a cave on the holy mountains; a sweet fragrance surrounded the image, a halo hovered about its head, and when they carried it down the steep mountain track it presently grew so strangely heavy that they left it where it was, and built around it a monastery that is famous now wherever Christianity is known.

Others claim a genesis even more remarkable. The Virgin of the Forsaken, the patroness of Valencia, was carved in the fourteenth century as the emblem of a charitable society; legend says that it was made by a group of pilgrims who asked the society for four days' supply of food and a sealed room, and who disappeared without a trace, leaving the image behind them and thus proving themselves to have been, beyond all reasonable doubt, angels. Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose monastery stands in a slouching mediaeval village in Estremadura, was discovered by a herdsman in the thirteenth century. A dead cow he was skinning suddenly came to life again, and as it staggered to its feet, so there appeared beside it a vision of the Virgin, who said that if they dug on the spot where the cow had lain, there they would find a miraculous image: they did, and Our Lady of Guadalupe presently became so famous that half the Kings of Spain paid homage to her, Don John of Austria gave her Ali Pasha's stern lantern after the Battle of Lepanto, Columbus named an island for her, and she possesses a wardrobe of several thousand dresses, marvellously worked and studded with precious stones.

There is something very touching to these old legends, and
something moving to the devotion that simple people still accord to these antique objects. Occasionally, though, an element more eerie creeps into a cult. One of the more alarming examples, to my mind, is the Virgin of the Pillar at Saragossa, which owes its fame to an apocryphal journey to the city by the ubiquitous St. James. On January 2nd in the year 40, we are told, St. James was visited at Saragossa by a vision of Our Lady, who descended from Heaven upon a pillar of jasper. Around this pillar, and the fifteenth-century figure of the Virgin that now surmounts it, a formidable Basilica has been erected. It is a severe rectangular building, with four tall towers and a central tumble of cupolas, and its pinnacles rise like watchtowers above the Ebro, dominating the plain of Aragón. It stands there rather like a Spanish Kremlin, and its interior is dark, mysterious, and very stuffy, as if no fresh air has been admitted for centuries, and all is stale breath, incense, and candle smoke.

High upon her pillar the Virgin stands, set against a background of indescribable glitter—she is said to be adorned with 8,000 diamonds, 145 pearls, 74 emeralds, 62 rubies and 46 sapphires. Around her people are always praying, priests are always hurrying, incense is always swirling, and sightseers are always mutely staring. She has been there for at least five centuries, and in those years, we are assured, there had not been a single daylight moment when she has been alone. It is not, though, these activities of devotion that give her shrine its chill fascination. It is something older and darker, something pre-Christian perhaps, that puts you in mind of magic and moonlight. Near the shrine there hang two unexploded bombs, which were dropped on this cathedral by the Republicans during the Civil War, but miraculously failed to explode—the Virgin had been officially appointed Captain-General of the city. And behind it, below that compartment into which the priests clamber to change her costumes or her jewellery, like dresses at an opera—through a small aperture behind you may see a small bare portion of the holy pillar itself. All day long the pilgrims pause at this spot, to stoop in the dark and kiss that piece of stone. The atmosphere is thick and queerly hushed around them, the candles flicker through the sickly lilies, somewhere a Mass is being
said, and nobody has ever broken it to those devotees that St. James never came this way at all, nor ever saw Our Lady beside the Ebro.

Perhaps it is true now, because so many people have believed it so long—thousands of Spanish girls are christened Pilar in honour of the Saragossa Virgin. Certainly there is to the more atavistic symbols of Christianity in Spain a dignity that comes not from themselves, but from the centuries of devotion, respect, and fear they have inspired. One of the best-loved figures in Spain is that called the Christ of the Plain, which hangs in the little Basilica of St. Leocadia below the walls of Toledo. Before this image, we are told, a young peasant girl and her faithless betrothed once asked Our Lord to arbitrate between them; the sad, emaciated figure above the altar lowered its right arm from the Cross to acquit the girl—and thus the arm hangs still, in the seclusion of the little church, down on the plain beside the arms factory. Another pleasant legend is illustrated in the fine cathedral of Santo Domingo de la Calzada, in Old Castile. In this small city, long ago, a young man who had been wrongly hanged for theft miraculously came to life again upon the gallows, and the bystanders hastened off to the Mayor to have him cut down; the Mayor was having his dinner, and was just about to start work on the two plump roast chickens that lay on the table before him when the disconcerting news arrived. ‘Nonsense!' he cried. ‘You might just as well say that these two birds on my dinner table could get up and crow!' Need I end the tale? They crowed to such effect that to this very day, in a kind of gilded coop inside the cathedral, two live white chickens, a cock and a hen, perpetuate their memory; they do an eight-day shift, but are excused duty in the winter because the buildings gets too cold.