Iberia by James A. Michener
I am constantly fascinated by this empty-headed, charming fellow, because there is a strong possibility that he was a part-American whose name should have been Alfonso McKeon. Clearly he was the son of King Alfonso XII and Queen María Cristina of Austria; no one questioned that, but who Alfonso XII might have been was another matter. He was the son of Spain’s notorious Queen Isabel II, probably the most lecherous crowned head ever to rule in Europe, man or woman; if she is in second place it is only to Catherine the Great of Russia, and this I doubt. Obligated by dynastic reasons to marry her cousin, impotent and a homosexual, she said of him, ‘What can I report of a man who on his wedding night wore more lace than I?’
Since she and her impotent consort had numerous children, of whom five lived to become fine persons, each birth became the occasion for a good deal of open speculation as to who the father might have been, and since Isabel took a bewildering series of lovers in rapid succession, the guessing sometimes became confused. The father of her first child could have been any one of four: a general, an opera singer (tenor), a marqués or a young colonel in the army. This child died. Who the father of her second baby was no one cared to state, for this time there were six putative fathers, but the little girl, who lived to become one of Spain’s gentlest and noblest ladies, beloved by everyone, was generally known as Arañuela, after her mother’s prominent lover at the time, an ordinary soldier named Araña.
The next child, who also died, was attributed to either Obregón the singer, Arrieta the composer, Puig-Moltó the soldier or an unspecified marqués. Regarding the parentage of her later children the guesses were fantastic, for preceding their births Isabel had what might be termed a catch-as-catch-can series of lovers from all ranks of society, although she always maintained a preference for musicians and soldiers. What concerns history is the parentage of her first surviving male child, the boy who later became King Alfonso XII. Prior to his birth the queen’s favorite had been the soldier Puig-Moltó, who enjoyed a longer stay at the palace than most, but there is reason to believe that he could not have been in attendance when the child was conceived; he was absent on maneuvers. The honor of siring the future king probably went to an itinerant American dentist named McKeon, who, the gossips said, ‘did a lot more at the palace than fill teeth.’ For more than a year he was the royal favorite and this during the time when the future king was conceived. The extraordinary fact about Isabel’s children is that regardless of who their fathers were, each looked a true Borbón, while Alfonso XII and his son Alfonso XIII actually had Habsburg chins!
Griffon vulture.
When Don Luis and I finished our tour of the portrait galleries, Señor Ybarra suggested that we go out to see a remarkable oak tree. I replied that in America we had oaks of all kinds and there were further photographs on another floor that I wished to see, but Ybarra said, ‘Oak trees you may have, but none like this.’ So I went with him to a part of the Coto I had not seen before, and in the distance I saw a large oak whose branches and trunk were almost completely white. As we approached, I saw that it contained many nests, each about the size of a small table, built of hundreds of fairly good-sized sticks laid crossways like the nest of an eagle.
‘How many nests would you say?’ Ybarra asked.
There were clearly more than a score, and when I started to count only those on one branch I saw that the total must be over a hundred. ‘About three hundred and fifty,’ he said.
‘Eagles?’
‘No. One of the most beautiful birds to nest in Europe. The Platalea leucorodia, spoonbill.’ In fact, so many spoonbills nested in this particular oak that their droppings, made acid by the fish they ate, had not only colored the tree white but were also causing its death. The one thing that might operate against the Coto’s continuance as a sanctuary, for certain kinds of birds at least, was the constant killing off of the bigger trees by the birds themselves.
‘We don’t know what to do about it,’ Ybarra said. ‘We’re especially concerned about the spoonbills, because they began to come here only in 1959. Two pair appeared that year and apparently enjoyed their experience, because just as a satisfied customer at a summer resort spreads the news, they told their friends, and next year we counted two hundred and fifty-five pairs. I wouldn’t like to guess how many we have now. Twenty or thirty large oaks like this one, each with hundreds of nests. They’re about the loveliest bird we get, spectacularly beautiful.’
The spoonbill reminded me of another bird, and I asked whether the Coto attracted any flamingos, who have been known to breed in Europe, and a knowing smile came over Ybarra’s lips. ‘Do you really like birds?’ he asked; and when I nodded, he said, ‘It’s not generally known even yet, but some years ago in a series of pools leading off from the Rhone in southern France a large colony of flamingos bred for twenty years. Of course, naturalists heard about it right away. A sensation in bird circles. But we kept it a secret among ourselves. Perhaps two hundred men in eight or ten different countries. Because if the general public knew, they would swarm to watch the birds, and inevitably some damn fool would shoot them. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. So we kept it a secret and in due course the flamingos left their French lagoons.’
He hesitated for a moment, and I suggested, ‘And they came down here to the Coto?’
‘Yes, but not to breed. However, they do come to _____,’ and he mentioned an area not far from the Coto where a substantial colony of perhaps the world’s loveliest bird, certainly its most dramatic, had been breeding for several years with an apparent prospect of continuing for many more. Experts in London and Paris and Stockholm know about this phenomenon and it is watched with care, because many of the flamingos’ normal breeding places in Africa are being destroyed, so that within a hundred years perhaps the African flamingo may cease to exist, as many other rare species that now use the Coto as a breeding ground.
‘All sensible men, who cherish the world as it has been,’ said Ybarra, ‘are engaged, whether they wish to be or not, in a crusade to keep whole species from being exterminated. If our human population continues to explode at its present rate, and I see no reason to suspect that the rate will diminish, the pressure on open land like the Coto will become unbearable. In our lifetime we’ll see it.’
‘It’s begun,’ Don Luis told us at dinner one evening. ‘In Madrid there is much agitation, even among men who love the outdoors, to dam off the overflow waters of the Guadalquivir and drain the swamps of Las Marismas. It could be done with relatively little effort, and all the land Michener. has seen north of here could be converted into rice fields and wheat.’
‘Why do that?’ I asked. ‘Spain’s got ample food.’
‘The phrase is “social necessity.” Spain wants entrance to the European Common Market, but as long as we must be classified as a backward country economically, it is not attractive to the other countries to admit us as an equal partner. If we reclaim our marshes and increase our food supply; then we stand in quite a different light and the other nations may want us. We may have to drain the marshes.’
Don Luis was speaking as if he were attached to the government, and I started to ask what job he held in Madrid, but talk turned to other matters and Yberra said, ‘The irony of the situation, and its danger, is that the Coto Doñana is viable as a truly great sanctuary only so long as Las Marismas exists out there. Because then our birds have a substantial feeding area and the millions of birds that live off Las Marismas form a kind of biological unit with the ones in the Coto. Destroy Las Marismas, and you destroy at least half our effectiveness.’
‘But doesn’t the Coto already control a good deal of Las Marismas?’
‘A common misunderstanding. We own so little that you’d hardly believe it. Considering our entire area … dunes, lakes, dry land … we have only seventeen thousand acres altogether. And of that, only about five hundred acres are marismas … and not the best. You see, in the old days Las Marismas was so enormous, so useless, that everyone said, “It’ll a
I left this gloomy talk and walked out beneath the eucalyptus trees. Bartolo, the tame deer, ran up to nuzzle me accompanied by his nanny goat, and in the shadowy distance I could see the forms of fifty or sixty wild deer that always moved in close at night. Beyond lay the flat lands of Las Marismas in whose depths the camels wandered still free and birds nested without number. As far as I could see there was only flatness and the slowly returning waters that would soon make of the area an enormous lake a few millimeters deep in which substantial rivers would mysteriously form and islands where the fighting bulls would congregate and rabbits and foxes and the endless herds of deer. It was an area that I had seen in all seasons, whose dreamlike transmutations I had followed from north and east and south. In its heart and along its perimeter I had organized a dozen picnics so that I might know it more intimately; I had seen it from Sevilla and from across the river at Sanlúcar, that grubby little town I loved so well. Instructed by Las Marismas, I had come to know birds that I would otherwise have missed, the gape-mouth nightjar winging past to trap insects, the clean and fiery kestrel, the spoonbill and the vulture, that handsome and repulsive thing. Was it possible that within my lifetime this concentration of natural wonder was doomed? I could not believe it, and yet on the previous day while roaring across the hard-baked marismas I had seen a ridge of earth, a rather simple one about six feet high that a bulldozer had thrown up with no great effort, and after we had followed it for some miles I asked, ‘What’s the ridge?’
‘It’s an experiment,’ Ybarra said. ‘To see how difficult it would be to prevent water from coming into Las Marismas.’
‘Does it work?’
‘When they seal off the other end, over by El Rocío, they’ll have dried out about twenty thousand acres.’
The land of Spain! For the last three thousand years it has been a challenge and on its relentless bosom men have made one ghastly mistake after another, as the moribund village of Maranchón demonstrates, but within the last decade there have been signs of hope. In the barren reaches of Extremadura, where flood waters used to rage three years in ten, and in many other parts of the country, large earthen dams are being constructed which will irrigate once-useless fields and bring them into productivity. In the mountains hydroelectric systems are proliferating at a surprising rate. Perhaps Las Marismas will have to be drained, out of deference to opinions in Paris and Berlin, but there is a possibility that it can be done leaving strips or areas where the old conditions can continue. Knowing the greediness of men, and especially the greediness of Spaniards, I doubt that any of Las Marismas can be saved and I would expect it to have vanished by 1985. The Coto Doñana, because it has fallen into careful hands, has a chance to continue, but only if its custodians are vigorously supported by those who love nature and appreciate its subtle influence on man. However, if Las Marismas vanishes, many of the birds who now use the Coto will no longer have reason to do so; perhaps even the vultures will stop coming when animals no longer die on the flat lands, but I suppose the Coto lakes, filled with rich animalcules, will still attract the ducks.
To have seen Las Marismas and the Coto while they were still at their peak was to have seen the best that Spain can offer the naturalist. For the immediate future these areas will continue to be available for those to whom ecology is at least as sacred as eschatology.
VI
SEVILLA
One of the top experiences a traveler can have in Spain is to visit Sevilla for Holy Week, which ends at Easter, and the feria that follows. I suppose there is nothing in the world to surpass this, not Mardi Gras at New Orleans nor the Palio in Siena when the exuberance of the Renaissance is re-created. Carnival in Rio de Janeiro is an epic of noise and color, and for sheer celebration it would be hard to equal Bastille Day in Tahiti, when the island goes mad for two weeks; but these events lack spiritual depth.
In Sevilla each spring one finds combined within the span of a few weeks six major diversions: the world’s most profound religious spectacle plus a rustic fair recalling those of a thousand years ago, plus a congregation of circuses drawn from all parts of Europe, plus a bizarre open-air carnival, plus a daily program of social events and stunning promenades on horseback, plus a series of first-rate bullfights conducted in Spain’s most beautiful plaza. And these six features are encapsulated, as it were, within the confines of an ancient city studded with handsome buildings, narrow streets where only pedestrians are allowed and exquisite vistas along the riverbanks. At any time of year Sevilla is a distinguished city, but during Holy Week and the days that follow, it is without peer.
I have attended several of Sevilla’s spring celebrations, and when I try to recall the essence of what I saw I picture myself standing at four o’clock in the morning at the entrance to the tobacco factory where Carmen spun her smoky web to entangle a soldier. I am in a very old city and it is dark, for winter has only just ended and the early rising sun has not yet returned, but along the horizon to the south a dull glow is visible, as if fields were being burned off before the planting.
No prudent farmer accounts for those fires. In a tree-lined park on the edge of the city, Sevilla is holding revelry and the lights will continue until dawn and for half a dozen dawns to follow, and if one listens closely he can hear, coming to him over the intervening space, the muffled sound of carnival and circus, of promenade and castanets.
But it is neither this beautiful glow on the horizon that I remember as the characteristic of Sevilla when I am away from the city nor the sound of the revelry. It is the shadowy approach of figures looming out of the dusk as they wander past the tobacco factory on their way home from the festival. They come like ghosts of ancient Spain, from Roman times or Visigothic or Arabic or medieval Christian, moving in stately silence until some member of the group begins softly to clap his hands. And it is then that the sound of Sevilla, the sweet memorable sound of this most dramatic of the Spanish cities, overtakes me.
The hands I hear do not clap as they would at a football game nor even at a flamenco party. They tap in seductive night rhythm, with variations which a person reared in Massachusetts or Stockholm could not devise. They tap out the beat of some old song, well known to all in the crowd, and before long a woman walking through the night adds her staccato. Others follow, and soon one has along the broad street before Carmen’s tobacco factory a dozen or so persons clapping out this strange rhythm.
No one sings. No one chants the words of the mute song. There is only the soft clapping of some dozen pairs of unseen hands, but I get the impression that the participants are softly repeating the words to themselves as they pass me by. No one speaks, and when the group has gone the sound of clapping hangs in the night air for a long time as the revelers proceed to some point near the cathedral, or in back of the bullring, or at the beginning of the narrow street called Sierpes (serpents), where they break apart, each member going to his own home to sleep for a few hours before the next day begins.
Sculptor’s studio in Sevilla.
But before the first group has reached the point of separation, other groups have come along the lovely dark street, which in the growing twilight looks much as it did in the days of Carmen, and they too clap softly in the night. And for more than a week, for almost twenty-four hours each day, the visitor to Sevilla will hear this compelling tattoo. It is the sound of Sevilla in spring, one of the most persuasive sounds I have ever heard.
To savor the six-part spectacle you must set aside several weeks and plan to arrive before Palm Sunday. Depending upon the date of Easter, the six parts can cover from three to five weeks. Some travelers skip the first three and arrive only in time for the final crescendo, bu
For the heart of Sevilla’s spring celebration is a religious experience, and it throbs through the city for an entire week. Beginning with Palm Sunday an atmosphere of sanctity settles over the towers and the alleys of Sevilla, permeating every crevice of the city, and so it will continue for the seven days which recall the passion and death of Jesus. Bells start tolling from dozens, of steeples scattered through the city. Even across the river, in the gypsy quarter of Triana, ordinary noises stop. Citizens dress in their best black clothes, men and women alike, and at selected parishes scattered through Sevilla two radically different types of men begin to assemble at church doors: the religious men and the laboring men. Spectators, who may number in the thousands, gather in the streets outside the churches to watch these men, for they are about to become the most important in Sevilla. Let us follow one man from each group.
Don Francisco Mendoza Ruiz is a cautious man who works in a bank and lives with his wife and three children in a fine little house in the old Jewish quarter, where no automobiles are allowed. After church on Palm Sunday he invites us to accompany him home, where he takes down from a closet a set of boxes from which he unpacks a costume that looks as if it had come from the Middle Ages.
‘Heretics condemned by the Inquisition used to wear costumes like this,’ he says. After stripping down to shirt and trousers he massages his feet prior to putting on a pair of heavy-soled black shoes. ‘I shall be walking, walking,’ he says. Then he puts on a tunic which covers everything from neck to shoe tip. Each parish church will have for its members a distinctive color. Don Francisco’s is purple, and over it he throws a white cape which reaches to his knees. About his waist he ties a sash eight inches wide made of an expensive damask and allows its ends to fall free.