Iberia by James A. Michener
I left the main exit road and headed for the cul-de-sac, which turned out to be a miserable track leading down a hill, the last part of which I had to negotiate on foot. The Torre Bermeja might be a fine structure but it was clear that the people of Granada thought little of it. Then it was before me, this soaring tower of my imagination, and it turned out to be a pair of square, dumpy things with undistinguished lines and little to commend them. ‘Is this the Torre Bermeja?’ I asked a workman who was hauling out rubble from a nearby cellar and he said, ‘La misma’ (the same); in Spanish the phrase ‘Lo mismo’ can have a fine sense of contempt, as if to say, ‘Believe it or not, this is it.’ An improvised wooden runway led up the side of the nearest tower to a gaping hole, and through this I peered into the interior, but it was even more drab than the outside.
‘It used to be a jail,’ the workman said. If so, it might have been a dismal one even by Spanish standards, which were never high. I scrambled down the hill to catch the other face of the tower, hoping that there was some point from which the old semi-fortress would look romantic enough to have justfied Albéniz’s composition, but there was none. I had before me a squat tower built of ugly brick in the worst possible proportions, as far removed in spirit from the music of Albéniz as one could imagine; yet there was about it a fine heaviness, a kind of brutality that was Andalusian. I was glad I had seen it, and had compared it to its music, for although I was not aware of the fact at the time, the experience prepared me for the intellectual adventure I was about to undergo when I got back to Córdoba.
I describe it as an adventure, although I doubt if others would, because it related to the nature of romanticism, and it was my concern with this out-of-date literary style that had first awakened my interest in Spain. I was about to visit one of the fountainheads of Europe’s romantic movement, and this side trip to the Torre Bermeja would serve as a relevant preamble; for what had happened in the relationship between Isaac Albéniz (1860–1909) and this tower was what happened whenever an artist became entangled in the romantic fallacy: a man of creative mind saw something in nature or history with an echo of the past, and around it he constructed an inflated fantasy, often bearing no relation to fact. Much of what had been written about Spain suffered from this fallacy; people looked at old Moorish structures and evoked from them a civilization that simply did not exist except in the imagination. Few things I did in Spain were more instructive than this visit to the Torre Bermeja, for it placed in proper perspective the romantic interpretation from which Spain suffers.
In the preceding sentence, and also in the opening of this book where I refer to the romantic cast of mind and its relationship to Spain, I use the word in its literary sense, referring to the Gothic novel, the tragedies of Victor Hugo, and that artistic movement common to all Europe in which imagination, emotion and introspection were stressed in contrast to classical understatement, and in which extravagant natural settings were chosen instead of arid Greek landscapes. When I returned to Córdoba I was thrown by accident into the heart of this literary romanticism, for as I was sitting one day at a café in the Plaza José Antonio, studying a road map and trying to decide how to get to the marshes lying south of Sevilla, I saw a name which had played a major role in the Romantic Movement: Hornachuelos.
I was surprised to find it a real place, a village of apparently trivial importance off the main road and situated on the bank of the Río Bembézar, which according to the markings on the map ran at this point through a defile. With some excitement I asked whether one could drive to Hornachuelos, and two Spaniards at a nearby table said, ‘Fine road. Because farther along is San Calixto, where King Baudouin of Belgium and his Queen Fabiola, who is a Spanish girl, as you know …’ The men gave a rambling account of how Baudouin had married the beautiful daughter of a Zaragoza family and how their honeymoon at the monastery of San Calixto had been interrupted by a revolution of some sort, ‘… in Belgium, that was, because here in Spain we don’t have revolutions any more, thank God,’ and how Baudouin had left his bride at dead of night and had sped down the very road I was studying. ‘I think the Spanish government built the new road especially for Baudouin and his queen,’ one of the men said.
‘At any rate,’ I interrupted, ‘I can use it?’
‘Best road in the district,’ he said. Then he had an afterthought: ‘While you’re there, don’t miss the Convento de los Angeles.’ As he said the words I could hear an opera chorus led by Ezio Pinza chanting the great prayer of the monks as they worship in the Convento de los Angeles.
‘You mean there’s a real convent by that name?’
‘Boys’ school now. But it’s perched on a site you’ll never forget.’
I returned to my map and saw once more that magic name, Hornachuelos. For generations it has captivated operagoers because Giuseppe Verdi’s La Forza del Destino takes place in and around ‘The Inn at Hornachuelos.’ I left the café, sought a bookstore, where I purchased a copy of the Spanish classic from which Verdi had borrowed his libretto. Don Alvaro, o la fuerza del sino (Don Alvaro, or The Force of Destiny, 1835) by the Duque de Rivas (1791–1865), then went back to the parador and packed my bags.
The type of gypsy family Falla remembered when composing for El amor brujo in Paris.
The road to Hornachuelos led down the right bank of the Guadalquivir and followed the old royal highway to Sevilla, now superseded by a new superhighway on the left bank. After a few miles I saw straight ahead and perched on a cliff overlooking the river one of Spain’s most dramatic castles, that of Almodóvar del Río, all crenelations and towers in good repair and as usual abandoned. Some miles farther on, the Río Bembézar entered the Guadalquivir, and this was my sign to turn north along the new road built for the King of Belgium. In a few minutes I saw, off to the right, a bare, whitewashed village nestling on the edge of a cliff at whose feet ran the river. This was Hornachuelos, the epitome of Andalusian villages, as clean and hard as the skeleton of an ox whitening in the sun. At the oak table of an inn that could have been the one in the opera, I took out the play which had served as the Spanish counterpart to Victor Hugo and the German romanticists.
The author was as romantic as his creation, a duque of great inheritance whose liberal convictions had led him to speak out against the royal tyranny of Fernando VII. Surrendering his seat as liberal deputy in the Cortes, in 1822 he suffered banishment and entered upon that long exile in Gibraltar, London, Italy, France and particularly Malta, where he wrote exalted poetry and cultivated his addiction to romanticism. Recalled to Spain when the tyranny of Fernando ended, Rivas entered the government as a minister, and when his tendencies had become less liberal, found himself in charge of putting down a liberal revolution, which when it succeeded threw him once more into exile, this time because he was a reactionary. Again he wandered and again he intensified his commitment to romanticism. In the end he had acquired most of the honors to which he was eligible and was recognized as one of the grand old men of Spain and of European letters.
His masterwork, Don Alvaro, is practically a textbook of the high romantic style. A play in five acts, it tells the story of a mysterious young man of unknown antecedents who woos the daughter of an impoverished noble family of Sevilla. The introduction of Don Alvaro is classic and the despair of playwrights who followed. At the end of the Triana bridge in Sevilla a group of townspeople are discussing yesterday’s bullfight, and here begins the description of the hero, whom we have not yet seen.
SECOND TOWNSMAN: The fight wasn’t as good as the previous one.
PRECIOSILLA: Because Don Alvaro, the rich fellow from Peru, wasn’t there. And either on horseback or on foot, he’s the best torero in Spain.
GALLANT: It’s true, he’s a real man.
Why wasn’t he at the fight? Because he was beweeping the termination of his suit for Doña Leonor’s hand; she still loved him but her proud father forbade the wedding: ‘My friend, the noble Marqués de Calatrava, is too haughty and vain to permit an immigr
Bystanders say of Don Alvaro that he ‘is worthy to be married to an empress.’ He is generous and tips well. He is valiant. ‘In the Old Park the other night seven of the toughest thugs in Sevilla jumped him, but he backed them like sheep against the mud wall of the riding school.’ Another recalls that ‘in his conflict with the captain of artillery he carried himself like a true gentleman.’
OFFICIAL: Then why doesn’t the marqués accept Don Alvaro? Because he wasn’t born in Sevilla? Gentlemen can also be born outside Sevilla.
PRIEST: Yes, but is Don Alvaro a gentleman? All we know is that he came here from the Indies two months ago bringing with him two Negroes and much money. But who is he?
FIRST CITIZEN: They say a great many things about him.
SECOND CITIZEN: He’s a most mysterious fellow.
UNCLE PACO: The other evening there were some gentlemen here discussing the matter, and one of them said that this Don Alvaro made his money from being a pirate …
GALLANT: Jesucristo!
UNCLE PACO: But the other held that Don Alvaro was the bastard son of a grandee of Spain and a Moorish queen.
The priest says that it was proper for the marqués to reject such a suitor, and the official asks what must Don Alvaro do, and for the first time a forewarning of tragedy is struck, the fate that will doom the young man.
PRIEST: He ought to find a different sweetheart, because if he persists in his rash pretensions, he will expose himself to the sons of the marqués when they return to break the skull of anyone who has trifled with their sister.
Because this is a romance, the two brothers are formidable, one a soldier dedicated to defending his honor, the other a hell-raising student at the university. Their sister, meanwhile, has been sequestered at the family hacienda to protect her from Don Alvaro. The stage is set for the entrance of the hero, and this direction indicates how he arrives:
Night begins to fall and shadows obscure the theater. Don Alvaro enters, muffled in a silken cloak and wearing a great white sombrero, half-boots and spurs. Very slowly he crosses the stage, gazing with dignity and melancholy this way and that, and exits by the bridge. All observe him in deep silence.
Where is he going? The observers guess that it must be to try to see Doña Leonor, whereupon the priest whispers in a broad aside to the audience, ‘I would be delinquent to my friendship with the marqués if I did not advise him this instant that Don Alvaro has been prowling about the hacienda. In this way perhaps we can avoid a misfortune.’ Don Alvaro does go to Leonor’s room, where the alerted marqués upbraids him. In one of the best inventions of the romantic theater, Don Alvaro, in a gesture of submission, throws his revolver at the feet of the marqués, but the shock of striking the floor discharges the weapon and its bullet kills the marqués, who, as he dies with Doña Leonor looking on in horror, utters the fatal malediction, ‘I curse you.’
The second act takes place at the inn of Hornachuelos, where we hear reports of how the brothers returned to Sevilla, seeking vengeance. The scene shifts to the Convento de los Angeles, then serving as a monastery, and at this point I closed my book and started north to see where the tragedy had culminated. After a few miles a narrow trail branched off from King Baudouin’s road and led through a recently harvested cork forest, which in turn led to the edge of a rather steep cliff. After one or two miles of this rather frightening road, I reached the canyon of the Río Bembézar, which lay far below. The road threatened to peter out but finally turned sharp left and ended at the entrance to the ancient convent, wedged in between a mountain to the left and the precipice to the right.
As I studied the site a taxi drove up behind me and a father and mother, he obviously a farmer, descended with a frightened boy of eleven. ‘This is your school,’ the mother said reassuringly, but the boy drew back and bit his lip to keep from crying. The father tugged on a bell rope exactly like the one that must have hung in that spot centuries ago, and the solemn bell began tolling, perhaps the same bell that under similar circumstances had set aflame the imagination of the Duque de Rivas one day around the opening of the nineteenth century. A friar, such as the duque might have seen, came to the gate and swung it slowly open to admit the small family. He allowed me to enter too, and while he processed the new student I was permitted to wander through the school, and I noticed on three different floors series of posters imploring boys to consider the priesthood as their vocation. The drawings were modern, as if they had been done in some first-rate industrial-arts shop in Milan or Rome; they had humor and color and made the profession of the Church seem a desirable vocation, with problems, defeats, triumphs and great spiritual satisfaction. The fact that three separate series of about a dozen posters each were displayed led me to think that the Church must be having a difficult time filling its seminaries, and it required no imagination to see the young boy who arrived with me electing the priesthood in such surroundings.
I left the old convent and sat on a wall along the edge of the cliff to read the famous stage direction of the third scene of the second act; it had inflamed the readers of its period, including Verdi in Italy, and is still remembered as one of the classic bits of the romantic age:
The theater represents a piece of level ground wedged into the declivity of a rude mountain. To the left, precipices and craggy steeps. Facing, a profound valley traversed by a rivulet on whose bank can be seen in the distance the village of Hornachuelos, terminating at the foot of high mountains. To the right, the façade of the Convento de los Angeles, of poor and humble architecture. The great door of the church is closed, but workable, and over it a semicircular window of medium size through which can be seen the shimmering lights from within; closer to the proscenium, the door of the porter’s lodge, also workable but closed, in the middle of which a peephole which can be opened or closed and at the side a bell cord. In the middle of the stage there will be a large cross of rough stone corroded by weather, rising from four steps which can serve as seats. All will be illuminated by a brilliant moon. From within the church will be heard the pealing of the organ and the choir of monks singing their matins, while from the left, very fatigued and dressed like a man in a hooded coat with sleeves, a sombrero with drooping brim and boots, staggers Doña Leonor.
The simple plot is now prepared. Doña Leonor, burdened with the guilt attached to her father’s death, will have nothing to do with ill-fated Don Alvaro, who has joined the Spanish army in Italy to seek an honorable death. She is allowed to inhabit a grotto near the convent, disguised as a monk, and plans to spend the rest of her life in a remote cell. Her soldier brother, seeking Don Alvaro, also goes to Italy and unwittingly finds himself in the same regiment as the Peruvian, who saves his life. In spite of this, the brother is determined to kill Alvaro and goads him to a duel. Alvaro kills this brother, whereupon the university student intensifies his efforts to track down the Inca who has betrayed his sister and killed his father and brother, but he has a hard time finding Don Alvaro, because the latter has grown weary of a life so stalked by doom and has decided to enter this same convent as a monk, not realizing that Doña Leonor is living nearby. To this rocky defile the student finally comes and in a scene of wild passion duels with Alvaro and receives a mortal wound, but when he calls for extreme unction he uncovers the fact that his sister and Don Alvaro have been staying in the same holy place. Assuming them to be sharing their guilty love and revolted by the profanation, he stabs his sister to death and himself dies. What happens to Don Alvaro we shall see in a moment.
The play introduced certain conventions of the romantic theater. When the plot reaches an impasse at which the masquerade of the soldier brother must be disclosed if he gives his right name, and when there was no reason for him not to do so, he turns to the audience and delivers these inventive lines:
DON CARLOS: (Aside) I think I won’t tell the truth. I am Don Félix de Avendaña.
At another point the hero uses for the first time on any stage a gesture
DON ALVARO: Woe is me! Woe is me!
(He presses the back of his hand against his forehead and remains in great agitation.)
Romantic excess reaches its climax in the closing scene, which became notorious. I have never seen Don Alvaro on stage, but I’ve read several contemporary reports of its reception and this last scene was apparently a shocker. I wish the Spanish department of some American university would stage the play if only that I might see this final scene:
There is a long moment of silence; thunder sounds stronger than ever, and lightning increases as we hear in the distance the chanting of the Miserere by the holy community, whose members come slowly closer.
VOICE: (From within) Here, here what horror!
(DON ALVARO recovers from his fainting spell, then flees toward the mountain. Enter the GUARDIAN FATHER and the holy fraternity.)
GUARDIAN FATHER: My God! Blood spilled everywhere. Cadavers. The penitent woman.
THE FRIARS: A woman! Heavens!
GUARDIAN FATHER: And you, Father Rafael!
DON ALVARO: (From a crag, completely convulsed in a diabolical smile) Seek, fool, for Father Rafael. I am the ambassador from hell. I am the fiendish exterminator. Fly, miserable ones …
ALL: Jesús! Jesús!
DON ALVARO: Hell, open your mouth and swallow me. Let the heavens crash. Perish the human race. Extermination … destruction … (He climbs to the highest point on the mountain and leaps off.)
GUARDIAN FATHER AND FRIARS: (Kneeling in diverse attitudes) Misericordia, Father! Misericordia!