Spain (7 page)

And so to the great cathedrals, Romanesque, Transitional, Gothic, or Renaissance, which arc the flower of the Spanish
constructions, and which for the world outside generally epitomize the Spanish presence. As the skyscrapers are to New York so are the cathedrals to Spain: Avila, Barcelona, Burgos, Granada, Jaén, León, Málaga, Murcia, Palma, Salamanca, Santiago, Saragossa, Segovia, Seville, Toledo—masterpieces every one, and supplemented in every region of Spain by lesser structures that would be, in any other country, national brags themselves. They are museums too—the first of the public collections—and treasure houses, and repositories of Spanish history, and lively agencies of the tourist industry, and places of ancient pilgrimage, like Santiago de Compostela, or of public assembly, like the cloisters of Barcelona (where the civic tittle-tattle is exchanged on Sunday mornings, and the sacred geese waddle about their pond with a fearfully knowing air). In the porch of Valencia Cathedral the farmers' representatives meet each Thursday morning to approve, in formal caucus, the current distribution of irrigation water. In the cloisters of Zamora Cathedral there is kept, in a shimmer of rich colour and mediaevalism, one of the most dazzling collections of tapestries in Europe.

Every fair-sized Spanish town has a cathedral. Saragossa and Salamanca have two each. Madrid has been building one on and off since 1623, and has got as far as the crypt. Some are essentially genial—Murcia, for instance, whose tower was compared by Richard Ford to a drawn-out telescope, and which is pre-eminently a jolly, sailor-like, benevolent old structure. Some are more like fortresses than holy places, especially the military cathedrals of Catalonia—and above all Palma, the most magnificent expression of the Catalan spirit, which stands foursquare on its ramparts above the harbour, the very champion of Majorca, the first thing to challenge you when you reach the island by sea, and the last you can see over your shoulder when you drive away into the mountainous interior. Some are, more than anything else,
big
: the Renaissance cathedral of Jaén looks preposterously out of scale in that middling category of city, and the Gothic cathedral of Seville is defeated, in the grandeur stakes, only by St. Peter's in Rome—‘Let us erect such a grand temple,' said the canons of the chapter when they decided upon its construction,
‘that we shall go down to posterity, if only as madmen.' Some are just plain self-satisfied: Málaga, which has only one completed tower, and stands there like a much-decorated one-armed general, or Segovia, which has to compete for attention with a white fairy castle along the ridge, and is all too aware that it wins.

Let me pluck two buildings from these stupendous ranks, as colour-sergeants to represent them all. Let us first follow the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela, the Galician city immortalized by its legendary association with St. James—Santiago means St. James. In mediaeval times this city was outclassed only by Jerusalem and Rome as an object of Christian pilgrimage, and no palmer's collection of trophies was complete without the scallop shell of Santiago (worn on the hat, in those days, rather as today's pilgrims stick a picture of the Grand Canyon to their rear window, or flutter all over with souvenir pennants as they hitch their hikes to Oberammergau). It is a small city, neatly bunched in the Virgilian countryside of Galicia, all cows, straw hats, and hay wains; and you are scarcely within its perimeters, have scarcely sniffed the civic odour of sanctity and tourism, before you have emerged from Calle Franco—Franco Lane—and are in the cathedral square.

It is still, as it was for those ancient pilgrims, one of the great moments of travel. The square is immensely wide, and seems to be made of golden granite. In front of you there stands euphonious of name and princely of posture, the Hostal de Los Reyes Cató-licos, founded by Isabel and Ferdinand as a hostel for pilgrims, and now perhaps the most beautiful hotel in Europe. To the left is the Renaissance pile of the Prefecture in whose basement cells there are probably languishing a few not very desperate prisoners. Cars seldom cross this celestial plaza, but pedestrians are always about—tourists, hotel pages, policemen, priests; and surveying the calm but never torpid scene, which has a Venetian quality of depth and movement, stands the tall façade of the cathedral, unquestionably one of the great buildings of the world. It is like nowhere else. At one end of its enormous block there rises a pyramidical tower of apparently Hindu genesis. In front of its great door two staircases rise so jauntily from the level of the
square that they seem to be leading you to some blithe belvedere. And in the centre of the composition the twin west towers of the cathedral soar into the blue in a sensational flourish of Baroque, covered everywhere with figures of St. James in pilgrim guise, crowned with balls, bells, stars, crosses, and weathercocks, speckled with green lichens and snapdragons in the crevices, and exuding a delightful air of cheerful satisfaction.

The interior of this happy building is basically Romanesque. A glorious carved portico is its western entrance, telling the story of the Last Judgement in meticulous stonework, supervised by Our Lord and his Evangelists, attended by angels, patriarchs, and abashed monsters, arid having at its base a kneeling figure of the cathedral's master-mason, Maestro Mateo. A glittering statue of St. James, all gems and silver, stands above the high altar, and all day long a stream of pilgrims climb a little staircase to kiss its mantle. The aisles are lined with confessionals, each for pilgrims from a different country—in the heyday of this shrine an average of five thousand pilgrims came to Santiago every day between Easter and Michaelmas. On feast days there swings from the roof a gigantic censer so heavy that it takes six men to set it in motion, and when it once got out of control it hurled itself clean out of the door. I know of no building with more fizz than this long-beloved cathedral, and I wholeheartedly sympathize with the old superstition which still, to this hard-boiled day, makes educated men touch foreheads with that figure of old Mateo, to gain from the bump some small portion of his talent.

Very different is our second great fane, the Gothic cathedral of Burgos. Burgos is a political city—the home of the Cid, the ancient capital of Castile, General Franco's capital during the Civil War—and its cathedral too has to it a feeling of profound temporal consequence. There is no fun or flare to Burgos Cathedral. Its exterior is all grey solemnity. Its two grilled towers, gun-metal colour, look like the lattice-work masts of old American battleships. Its north door is always locked—to prevent the citizens of Burgos, so the guidebooks say severely, using the cathedral as a public throughfare. Grim grey steps lead you to the main doors; forbidding vergers jangle their keys inside; all through the
cathedral darkness lies, like smoke or night-time. Burgos Cathedral is French in architectural origin, but nothing in Spain feels more Spanish. There looms the great
coro
, black and square, and through the twilight there coruscate, wherever you look, wonderful shining or fretted things—huge golden grilles, gilded staircases, figures of saints, kings, or heroes, reliquaries in silver frames, vast and glorious reredoses, canopies, cupolas, the mitres of dead bishops and the banners of victorious kings.

In the Condestable chapel, beyond the high altar, there lies upon his splendid tomb Don Pedro Hernandez de Velasco, Hereditary Constable of Castile, who died in the fifteenth century, but whose marble thick-veined hands still warily grasp his sword-hilt. In the chapel of Santísimo Cristo hangs the miraculous Christ of Burgos, supposed to have been fashioned by Nico-demus, made of soft buffalo-hide and real hair, emaciated, tragic, and so lifelike that in the old days it used to be thought its fingernails had to be manicured. High on the wall of the sacristy stands the rusty old iron-bound chest called the Coffer of the Cid, which that resourceful warrior once filled with sand and pledged to some gullible Jews as a chest of gold. Burgos is a gnarled, dour, idiosyncratic building; and when you leave its gloomy old purlieus, wander down to the pleasant riverside gardens of the city, or drive away up the hill into the bare countryside all about, it remains in your memory not as a joy, nor even an inspiration, but as an iron glower in the mind.

Sometimes the sharpness of the Spanish style goes sour or muzzy—just as the clarifying drugs, if taken to excess, end by making you either muddled or megalomaniac. There is much that is ugly in Spain, and there is a good deal that has taken a step over the frontier of reality, and feels half crazy.

For all its beauties it is a Philistine country. Switch on your radio, as you drive away from Burgos, and you will find its programmes drowned in raucous commercialism. Stroll down to the fine old theatre, when you stop for the night, and you will almost certainly find it closed for lack of support: virtually the only theatres left in the Spanish provinces are the ramshackle
plaster-and-canvas stages of the travelling players—a company of whom once told me, at their muddy stand outside Vich, that their two most popular productions were
Peter Pan
and
La Dame
aux
Camélias
. Turn off your light when you go to bed, and you will find the night hideous with the hootings, exhaust roars and loud voices of a society that has not yet adapted itself to the machine age, and actually prefers noise. Cast around for a bookshop in the morning, and if you find one at all it will probably be the sort that hides its limited literature behind a selection of sunglasses, china matadors, and postcards of Andalusian beauties with revolving plastic eyes. The church music of Spain is usually screeching, saccharine, or
fortissimo
. The universities are only now recovering from the impositions of a repressive Catholicism and an intolerant neo-Fascism. The Inquisition's narrowing of judgement or intellectual initiative is still apparent in Spain, and there is a depressing shortage of properly educated, generally cultivated men and women—what in other countries of the West constitutes ‘the reading public'. The educationalist Francisco Giner tried to create such a class in the nineteenth century, and the generation of 1898 was the brilliant nucleus of one, but the Civil War put the Philistines in command, and the artists, writers, architects and publishers of Spain are only now recovering their verve.

This is nothing new. Spanish architecture, in particular, has often been impelled by vulgar motives—the desire to go one better or, more pertinently, one bigger. It was Charles V who, in 1526, deposited in the middle of the Alhambra the gigantic circular palace now named after him, crudely disrupting the precious frivolity of the place. It was the same king's royal council that sanctioned the building of a cathedral in the centre of the great mosque at Córdoba—against the fervent wishes of the local municipality, which bravely declared that the work destroyed in the operation ‘could never be replaced by anything of such perfection'. The fantastic Churrigueresque sacristy of the Carthusian monastery at Granada, and the vast cathedral humped up against the Giralda at Seville, were patently demonstrations of the Christian ability to build bigger and more elaborate buildings
than any old infidel. The exquisite Transitional cathedral of Salamanca was dwarfed in the sixteenth century by the enormous mass of the new cathedral that was built beside it—intended to proclaim not so much glory of God as the fame of Salamanca University. The Spaniards are perpetually erecting huge and awful figures of Christ, to dominate the sweet hermitages and shrines of earlier generations, and though their best restorers are among the most skilful in Europe, their lesser practitioners seem constitutionally incapable of leaving well alone.

The Spanish taste for strong leadership has done much to vulgarize the scene. The Escorial rises far above rhetoric, if only because of its fanatic dedication, but Franco's Air Ministry building down the road in Madrid, so lumpish, so grandiloquent—such a building is a very proclamation of autocracy's habitual mediocrity. Spain is littered with such tasteless monuments—the writhing symbolisms of innumerable war memorials, vast and sanctimonious seminaries, the indescribably dreadful Labour University at Gijón, the barrack-like hostels erected by the syndicates on the ski slopes above Madrid. The exquisite balance of Toledo has been upset by a huge military college on the other side of the river. The evocative little cave of Covadonga, where Pelayo the Visigoth, we are told, fought the battle that began the Reconquest—that haunting shrine in the heart of the Asturian mountains has been overwhelmed by a grandiose Basilica built across the valley. A massive convent has tarnished the best view of Avila; a bishop's palace built by Gaudi, like a
CARDBOARD OGRE
castle, stands grossly beside the pleasant cathedral of Astorga. It is almost as though the Spaniards deliberately try to disturb the equilibrum of the scene, to seize your attention by shocking your sensibilities, and make your hackles rise.

This is a disagreeable aberration from the Spanish norm—so decorous, so discreet, so sober. Much more attractive is the turn the genius takes when, sated at last with so much logic, it takes off into fallacy, and presently confuses the fanciful with the true. ‘Absurdity,' the historian Angel Ganivet once wrote, ‘is the nerve and mainstay of Spain.' This is the country of picaresque, whose eccentrics are usually likable and whose gamblers are always
optimistic—‘Patience and reshuffle', says the Spanish proverb gaily, calling for a new pack. Legends, myths, and fairy tales line the chronicles of Spain, and Spaniards cherish a strong taste for a dream-like kind of make-believe—most creepily embodied, perhaps, in the gait of the Bigheads, those swollen puppet-heads which Spaniards put on at fiestas, so upsetting the normal balance of their locomotion that they have to walk around the town in a peculiar rolling, strutting movement, like figures in a nightmare —this one a witch, this one a policeman, this one a painted old harridan with a fly as big as a mouse upon her nose.