Iberia by James A. Michener
Walking one night along the ramparts of Avila, I reasoned, ‘If Spain had kept her Moors, her agriculture and manufacturing would have prospered. If she had kept her Jews, her commercial management would have kept pace with England’s. If she had retained a few inquiring Protestant professors, her universities might have remained vital. And if she had held onto her Illuminati, her spiritual life would have been renewed.’ But then I had to face the greater reality. ‘If she had done these things, she’d now be a better Spain. But she wouldn’t be Spain.’
After my wide excursions afield—to the fair at Medina del Campo, to the dark Virgin of Gaudalupe, to the Avila of Victoria—I returned to Salamanca to visit for the last time those two rooms at the university, almost side by side, which were converted into shrines by the heroism of two philosopher-poets. The first was a stone-arched classroom left pretty much as it must have been on that day in December, 1578, when Fray Luis de León returned after an absence of some years. The rude benches without backs remain the same and the small windows in the outer walls. The lectern with its canopy is the same as the one at which the professor stood that eventful day. The room was crowded, not only because Fray Luis was the most famous of the Salamanca lecturers, a wise, gentle elderly man of sweet understanding and compassion, but because he had accomplished something that few men of his day could parallel.
In 1572, at the height of a brilliant career as Spain’s leading theologian and humanist, he was attacked by jealous persons in the university, who whispered to the Inquisition, ‘We all know that Fray Luis is half Jewish, so he’s suspect to begin with. But he has now translated King Solomon’s Song of Songs into the vernacular. He invites even the most ordinary man in Salamanca to read it. And that is heresy.’ Especially serious was the additional charge that often, after studying the original Hebrew version of the Bible, he would question the accuracy of the Latin. Fray Luis was apprehended and for several months was under interrogation, after which he was thrown into jail at Valladolid. where he heard only silence. At the end of a year he pleaded to be told what the charges against him were and who his accusers, but he heard nothing. His trial was intermittent and clandestine; all he knew was that he had committed some serious crime bordering on heresy, but its definition he never knew. Finally, after nearly five years of this, he was set free and, what was the more miraculous, allowed to return to his post in Salamanca. Of his experience in jail he wrote:
Here envy and lies have kept me imprisoned.
Happy the humble state of the wise man who retires from this nefarious world, and with meager table and house in the pleasant countryside passes his life alone; he serves only God, neither envied nor envious.
This was the morning of his reappearance, and notable persons came to the university to hear his reaction to his long persecution. As he made his way from his rooms, his gown slightly askew in his usual careless manner, the university plaza was crowded with silent students. Fray Luis walked with eyes straight forward, not daring to acknowledge the furtive glances of approbation which greeted him. As he entered the cloisters and elbowed his way through the crowd he came at last to the room in which he had taught for so many years, and when he saw its familiar outlines, with his friends perched on the narrow benches, and when he knew that among them must be those whose rumors had caused his imprisonment and who would surrender him again to the Inquisition within a few years (he was to die in disgrace at Madrigal de las Altas Torres), he must have wanted to lash out against the injustice he had suffered and would continue to suffer as a Jew and a humanist. Instead he stepped to the rostrum, took his place behind the lectern, grasped the lapels of his robe and smiled at the crowd with the compassion that marked all he did, and said in a low, clear voice, ‘As we were saying yesterday …’ And he resumed his lecture at the precise point of its interruption five years before.
Dressed in traditional black, the women of Spain can be the most delightful, robust and amusing in Europe.
Down the cloister from Fray Luis’ austere classroom is another of much different character, the Lecture Hall, dating from the fifteenth century. Its principal adornment is a group of four handsome stone arches that support the ceiling and a grisaille of Fernando and Isabel done sometime in the eighteenth century. Lists of men who have brought honor to Salamanca appear, but one of the greatest is missing and will probably remain so until the passions of this age are past, after which he will occupy the place of honor. To understand why, we must see this hall as it was on October 12, 1936, the Day of the Race.
At one end of the hall rose a three-stepped dais, done in red carpeting. It was lighted by two intricate chandeliers and ornamented with a large portrait of Francisco Franco. The dais contained ten long old-fashioned benches on which sat the dignitaries of the university and seven high-backed red-plush chairs occupied by the rector, the local bishop, generals from the victorious Franco army which had recently captured Salamanca and an extraordinary fire-eater type of man so common in Spanish history and so incomprehensible to outsiders. He was General José Millán Astray, leader of the Foreign Legion and the only hero to come out of Spain’s disastrous military adventures in Africa. He was a psychotic man, preternaturally thin, blind in one eye. lacking one arm and scarred across his entire body with mementos of defeat in desert battles. A major reason why he was a popular hero was the battle cry he had sponsored, ‘Long live Death!’ What this meant no one understood, but it, had a rich fifteenth-century ring, and Spain echoed Millán Astray’s challenge, ‘Long live Death!’
On this day the general had the pleasure of addressing a university gathering, and universities had long been his anathema because scholars were alien to his Legion and learning refuted his cry of ‘Long live Death!’ So with choice, sardonic words the mad general ripped into Salamancan life, excoriated people who bothered with books, cursed regional areas like Cataluña and the Basque country, and promised that when Fascism triumphed, all such aberrations would be cauterized with a flaming sword. Fascists planted in the audience cheered. Intelligence was condemned and students were summoned to an unending war of extermination. The cadaverous general sat down and the crowd roared its approval of the new world acoming.
Then the rector of the university rose, the distinguished philosopher-poet Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), author of the widely read The Tragic Sense of Life, and, with José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), Spain’s leading intellectual. He knew that he ought not let this nihilistic challenge go unanswered, but he was an old man; police forces of the new Spain surrounded him; and in the chair to his right sat Franco’s wife. If ever silence could have been condoned, this was the time, but Unamuno adjusted his robes of office, like Fray Luis before him, and began speaking in a soft voice: ‘I, as you know, am a Basque, born in Bilbao. And the bishop, whether he likes it or not, is a Catalan, born in Barcelona.’ He said that to speak of liquidating such men was silly. He then turned his attention to General Millán Astray and said a few simple things that some, at least, in the audience had been thinking but which fear had kept muffled. He said that the emaciated general was a cripple, a heroic one to be sure, but a cripple in both body and mind, and that because of his own withered nature he was determined to enforce on healthy Spain his sickly philosophy. Specifically, Unamuno said, there could be no sense in a rallying cry such as ‘Long live Death.’ Exactly the opposite spirit was required.
General Millán Astray, accustomed to total obedience in his Legion, could not tolerate opposition and especially not from a college professor. He leaped to his feet, waved his one arm and screamed, Down with intelligence! Long live Death!’
At this moment the mad general and the poet stood facing each other and neither would give way. ‘Long live Death!’ the general bellowed. ‘No,’ the poet replied. ‘Long live intelligence.’ Like the permanent contrasting forces of Spain the two men stood and because the hall was filled with blue-shirted Fascists, the general won. When Franco heard reports of the meeting and of how Spain’s leading inte
It was not necessary. Unamuno was already stricken and died shortly thereafter, leaving behind one of the most glowing memories of contemporary Spain, that of the philosopher-poet who defended the permanent values of Spain at the risk of his own life.
(Just as the telephone conversation between Colonel Moscardó and his supposedly sixteen-year-old son has been proved to be largely apocryphal, thus destroying a legend favorable to Franco, so doubts have been cast on the authenticity of some of the details of the Millán Astray—Unamuno confrontation. The original account came from a journalist, Luis Portillo, and was accepted by Hugh Thomas and many other serious writers. José María Pemán, one of the scheduled speakers that day and member of the Royal Academy, has denied that it took place, but Emilio Salcedo, in his life of Unamuno [1964], says that during the formal addresses relating to Spain’s role in the New World, Unamuno was inspired to take notes on a piece of paper which has come down to us. At the conclusion of the set speeches he rose to make a few observations based on his notes but was interrupted by the general, whereupon something like the scene I have described took place, though not in the highly dramatic form suggested by Portillo. I have discussed this matter with a fair cross section of Spaniards and they believe that an intellectual scuffle, pretty much as described by Salcedo, did occur.)
Today in the hall which his bravery consecrated there is no mention of Unamuno’s name and surely no bust or portrait, but often visitors sit in silence, their eyes closed, thinking of this courageous man and of his poem to Salamanca, where so much of his creative life had been spent.
Forest of stones that history tore
from the bowels of mother earth,
refuge of quietude, I bless thee,
my Salamanca.
In the depths of my heart I cherish
thy robust spirit; when I shall die,
cherish thou, my golden Salamanca,
my memory.
THE DEMON PASTRY COOK
For some two hundred years the kings of Spain had been trying to trick Portugal into surrendering its independence and becoming a province of Spain. This was not unnatural, because under the Romans, Visigoths and Muslims, Portugal had been an undifferentiated part of Spain and all prudent Spaniards hoped for the day when that would be the case again.
In 1576, when Felipe II sat on the throne of Spain, prospects for union began to brighten, for Sebastián (in Portuguese Sebastião), the twenty-two-year-old King of Portugal, was a moody, headstrong ascetic who loved only horses and refused to marry, even though he realized that if he died childless his throne would pass, ridiculous as it seems, to his granduncle Henrique, a childless cardinal in his dotage, whose principal pleasure was supervising the Portuguese Inquisition. If the young king died childless and the old cardinal did the same, the crown of Portugal would then pass into the hands of Felipe, who was Sebastián’s uncle, and the peninsula would once more be united.
Spies brought unbelievable news to Madrid. ‘Sebastián refuses to marry. He has epileptic fits and is afraid he’s impotent.’ And ‘His Jesuit advisors have convinced him that he has been chosen by God to lead a great crusade into Africa and rescue it from Islam.’ And ‘Poor Sebastián is so excited about his crusade that he can think of nothing else. Portugal is falling into ruin while he seeks only to make himself physically fit to captain his armies. Each day he trains, sleeps on the ground, rides horseback for miles and will speak to no one of government.’ And ‘He insists that every noble family in Portugal send at least one of its sons to fight in Africa against Islam.’ And ‘Portugal is bankrupt. King Sebastián constantly demands new taxes and no one can call him from his folly.’ And ‘The only persons who can gain the king’s ear are his Jesuit advisors, and they keep telling him, “March to Africa.” ’
In December of that year Felipe II proved that he was a just and honorable king. He summoned his Portuguese nephew to the remote monastery of Guadalupe to caution him against the folly of such a crusade, and when they met there on January 1, 1577, Felipe pointed out how slim were the chances of success, how imprudent it would be to strip Portugal of her wealth, her army and her sons, and how important it was for Sebastián to raise up a strong line of future kings. In other words, Felipe argued against his own interests, for he had only to encourage Sebastián to make a fool of himself and die in battle, and the throne of Portugal would come to Felipe. ‘Don’t go to Africa,’ he pleaded.
Sebastián, considering his Spanish uncle uninformed and cautious, said bluntly that he would go and he demanded Spanish help, reminding Felipe that only eighty-four years ago this same enemy had occupied part of Spain. Such an appeal Felipe could not refuse. He promised Sebastián a fleet and an army. Then the two kings worshiped at the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe and prayed for a Christian victory.
Sebastián hurried back to Portugal. ‘We shall save Africa!’ he announced, but in assembling his reluctant army he was so tardy and his plans changed so swiftly, that in the end Uncle Felipe had to say, ‘You have wasted too much time. I have changed my mind and shall not send the fleet and army that I promised.’ With this stroke he ensured the failure of the enterprise, and some of Sebastián’s lay advisors tried to warn him of this fact, but his Jesuit counselors insisted that the crusade go forward. How bombastic was the armada that sailed from Lisboa in June, 1578, eight hundred vessels under chaotic leadership. How ridiculous was the military adventure once Africa was reached, a young king who knew nothing of arms determined to seek out the enemy personally and destroy him. The adventure was a disaster, the worst item of which was the fact that when Sebastián finally died under an enemy onslaught, no one saw where he was killed or how. There was no witness to his death and his body was not then recovered, if indeed it ever was. He vanished from history as ineptly as he had appeared, a strange, quixotic youth who succeeded in nothing, not even in dying properly.
But he was dead and the precarious crown of Portugal passed into the hands of Cardinal Henrique, sixty-seven years old, childless tubercular and even more bumbling than Sebastián bad been. It seemed only a matter of time before Felipe II would inherit the throne and unite the two kingdoms. However, King Henrique showed unexpected spirit and decided to petition the Pope for special permission to marry the thirteen-year-old daughter of a duchess under the extravagant impression that he could sire a son before he died. Alas, the plan was tardy; the petition could not be acted upon by the Pope, and the old cardinal died without legal issue. Portugal became once more a part of Spain and would presumably remain that way forever.
That was in 1580. But as the years passed, Portuguese patriotism did not diminish and an understandable rumor began to circulate through the peninsula. ‘Suppose King Sebastião did not really die in Africa! Suppose he was so ashamed of his defeat that he crept from the battlefield and took an assumed name! Suppose he should suddenly reappear! Why, he’d be the legal King of Portugal! The Spaniards would have to get out! And that would be the last we’d seen of Felipe II!’ It was an enticing possibility. In the year 1592, when the rumor began to gain its greatest credence, how old would King Sebastián, the one in hiding, be? Only thirty-eight. He’d be heavier now, of course, but he’d have the same general appearance. Tall, with a slight impairment in the left side of his body, a superb horseman, daring, hot-tempered, regal in manner, blond. Yes, he would be noticeably blond, with sharp blue eyes and fair skin. Where could he be hiding this lost king who would save all?
She must also have seen the magpie flying to Medina del Campo.
Especially persuasive was the Portuguese explanation as to why Sebastián had gone into hiding. ‘It’s all very simple, if you think of it. Why did King Sebastião get into trouble in Africa in the first place? Because his uncle, King Felipe, offered him an army and navy and then took them away. Don’t you see? Felipe wanted Sebastião to be killed by the Moors, and if they hadn’t done th
When these rumors reached Felipe in El Escorial he told his aides, ‘We must keep an eye out for this make-believe Sebastián.’ The absent king, if he returned, could cause much trouble. For one thing, he would tear Portugal away from the empire, and this King Felipe did not intend to permit. ‘Watch for Sebastián,’ was the command passed to the king’s officials.
It is not surprising that the Iberian peninsula should have become preoccupied with such a bizarre problem as late as 1592, because in Russia at this time much the same thing was happening. There in 1591 the acknowledged heir to the throne, Prince Dmitri, had died, perhaps at the hand of Boris Godunov, who assumed the crown and whose reign was plagued by rumors that Prince Dmitri had not actually died but was merely hiding until it was safe for him to appear. At embarrassing moments a series of Dmitris did step forward, or persons claiming to be Dmitri, and Russia was threatened with civil war. If it could happen in Russia, it could happen in Spain, and the agents of King Felipe took extra precautions.