Iberia by James A. Michener
José Antonio.
Nor had the village changed. The central square was still unpaved; most of the houses were still unpainted; the dust was omnipresent and the heat still kept people indoors. The meanness of the life continued too: the earthen floors, the sparse furniture, the inadequate clothing, the harsh poverty of Spanish rural life. I recalled that day in Badajoz when our car had taken the injured man to the hospital, and in San Agustín the standard of living was the same. Of all the countries in which I have traveled, only India and Turkey have had rural poverty as grinding as that in Spain, and the much publicized ‘Twenty-five Years of Peace’ have brought little to the farmers.
Yet even as I thought this, I became aware of the improvement. Out beyond the village I could see electricity wires which had not been there a generation ago; in what once had been barren fields I could see where millions of young trees had been planted, as they have been throughout Spain. The roads were better and the village even had an automobile and two television aerials. The farmers looked poor, but nowhere did I see any in rags, nor did they look underfed. On balance I would say that in the country things were a little better than they had been before; but when one considered what had been accomplished in rural areas in Germany, Denmark and Britain, the comparison was disadvantageous. On the other hand. Spain had accomplished more than Turkey and much more than India.
On my return to Teruel, I picked up, along the road, a fine-looking young man in clerical garb who said he was hitchhiking home from his studies at the seminary in Valencia, and his pleasant chatter was so charming that I shall repeat it without interruption: ‘I’m twenty-two years old and entered seminary training at eleven. I was an orphan, you see, and was stuck away in an orphanage and this was the only way that I could see of getting out. I wasn’t a real orphan, I suppose, because my mother and three sisters were living, but my father died and we could scarcely live on what my mother earned, so it was decided that I should go to the orphanage, and I made up my own mind to go to the seminary. We have no students there from the middle class. I suppose when I become a priest I’ll be sent to some small village like the one you’ve been visiting, and I’ll bring my mother to live with me and I’ll find jobs in the village for my three sisters, who will live with me until they’re married. I’ve noticed a priest can usually find jobs of some kind for his relatives. You mention the novels of Pío Baroja, but we’re not allowed to read them. He’s much too anti-clerical, but the disappointing thing is that the Spanish novels we are allowed to read are so pro-clerical they aren’t much fun. But I understand the Church’s problem and obey its suggestions. I saw your motion picture Sayonara. All of us at the seminary did. It’s about two soldiers and two Japanese girls. Japan must be a wonderful country and I wouldn’t be unhappy to be sent there when I’m graduated, but I suppose I’m destined for Spain. This is a great country and there’s much work to be done.’
When the seminarian left in Teruel, I was assaulted, there can be no other word for it, by noise such as I had not heard for some years. At first I couldn’t identify it or its direction, but as I drove toward the center of the city I heard the rhythmic roar of motors off to the west and decided that Teruel must be holding some kind of auto race, and I set out to find it. I was wrong. It was a motorcycle race around a circular course that ran through a handsome new section of Teruel which had grown up in recent years on the other side of the ravine down which the Saracen bulls had charged the Christians in 1171. Before the war this area had contained no houses or even any barns. I took my place behind some bales of straw that marked a turn in the course and decided simply to look at what was on display in this new Teruel. The thirty or forty motorcycles which kept roaring past were the best that Europe built, and each driver wore an expensive leather suit with goggles to match. The competition was keen. Number 1, in green, drove at a sensational speed and could not be overtaken, but a real battle developed between 11 in red and 15 in the same color. The latter tried to drive 11 into the wall at the turns, and when 11 protested, rowdy 15 yelled the Spanish equivalent of ‘Up your bucket.’ The noise was unbelievable, for not only did the motorcycles thunder with their mufflers open, but as usual three huge loudspeakers suspended from public buildings kept up a constant chatter, while a Coca-Cola truck below played records over its public address system. The streets along which the race careened were wide, well paved and finely planted with trees. The houses, all of recent construction, were about what one would find in southern California, except that since Teruel has bitterly cold winters, said to be the worst in Spain, its houses had more provision for heating than California’s would have had.
Here lies Esteban Pérez Moral. Brigade of Engineers. Died on the front Teruel the 18th day of December 1937 at the age of 24 years. His father and brothers dedicated this remembrance. R.I.P.
It was the people, however, who were the most impressive. To watch the race cost about twenty-five cents, but the course was jammed, and I saw no one poorly dressed; their clothes would have fitted in without comment in Chicago or Edinburgh. It was a well-fed, well-groomed audience, and as the motorcycles roared around the walls of the bullring for their dash right at the bales of straw where I stood, I saw at least as many pretty girls wearing make-up as I would have seen in a similar American city. Their dresses were about as short, and if they were accompanied by young men, they walked hand in hand as they would have in a small English city. In fact, except for a rather heavy concentration of men in clerical garb, I could see nothing that would indicate I was in Spain.
In this cautious manner I checked each experience I was having in Teruel and could find no evidence that this was the city on which Franco’s forces had broken their teeth in the Civil War. The visible scars were healed. If in the sieges of 1937–38 the city had been mainly destroyed, it has now been well rebuilt. Not even in the ancient Jewish quarter, with its crowded streets, were there evidences of the war, but I did see set into the wall of a house built in 1400 one sign which startled me: ‘This building is insured against fire by the Great American Insurance Company of New York.’ If the Franco government has rebuilt Teruel in a spirit of forgiveness, no matter how grudging, then the outward bitterness of the Civil War has subsided. In the new suburb where the motorcycle race took place I saw much evidence of new construction sponsored by the government: new schools, new homes, even a new bullring, and a handsome new sports center where for fifteen pesetas (about twenty-five cents) a month young men can enjoy a swimming pool, a large gymnasium and a basketball court as good as that in any American city of comparable size. A sign said that the sports hall had been erected with funds from the Youth Front, so I suppose that only those boys whose families support the government can participate. I saw the tennis courts on an emotional morning: the day before, Manuel Santana had won the world’s tennis title at Wimbledon, Spain’s first title of the kind in history, and Teruel was celebrating.
Today, even though the sore of Teruel has not healed in my heart nor will it ever, I can accept most of the statement which the Franco government has recently drafted in English for inclusion in any tourist publication where reference to the war cannot be avoided.
For a century and a half Spaniards had tried to live in peace according to the formulas laid down by the French Revolution—generally speaking under a Monarchy, though twice under a Republic. It was impossible to implant a purely liberal policy in a country without a middle class, and with an almost feudal structure. And so we spent a century and a half hitting each other over the head, familiarizing the world with the spectacle of civil war, and introducing the word ‘pronunciamiento’ into most languages. The nation was filled with hatreds, and those hatreds provided a fruitful field of action for ideas and political groups which ended up by dominating the rest—Anarchism and Communism. And this was the outcome of a policy full of liberal phrases!
One day, in 1936, those hatreds exploded. The world still remembers that three-year war to which the Catholic Church gave the name of Cr
And then, when my opinion about modern Teruel had about crystallized, I stumbled upon an extraordinary building, a modern hospital built on the skyscraper design, with an elegant reception floor topped by tiers of rooms bursting with every modern medical device. I was shown around the building by the administrator. Don José Callado Ruiz, who had been born in nearby Cuenca and educated in Madrid. He was indistinguishable from hospital administrators in England or Holland, efficient, knowledgeable and proud of his institution. Where the ordinary hospital might have one iron lung, his had two, and incubators for premature babies, and gleaming trays of all the latest medical tools from Solingen in Germany, and x-rays galore and a splendid medical library. It was the kind of hospital that put the ones I knew in America to shame.
The survivor.
It had one fault, however. It had almost no patients. There were, I believe, four women on one floor awaiting childbirth; the rest of the gleaming installation was unused and had never been used. I tried to pierce the secret of this amazing building, for I had recently been in a hospital in America, and judging by the overcrowding there, this Teruel installation had space for about four hundred patients, and certainly in the villages I had been visiting there were candidates who could have profited from admission. Then, as I waited in the foyer, I understood a little better, for on the far wall, gazing balefully at whoever entered the hospital, was the frightening portrait of a fleshy young man in an open shirt. I had seen this hypnotic portrait before in many public buildings, this all-seeing, all-knowing young god of modern Spain, and his countenance was the only thing that had ever frightened me in the country. He was José Antonio, son of the tough dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, Marqués de Estella. Born in 1903, José Antonio had organized the Falange at the age of thirty and had been the bullyboy of the street-rioting that had helped discredit the Republic. His adherents roamed the street in (rucks, machine-gunning their opponents, and most Spaniards believe that if José Antonio had lived he would have challenged Franco for the leadership of Spain and might have become the country’s Fascist dictator, but shortly before the outbreak of war he was arrested by the Republicans and some months after the beginning of hostilities was tried, condemned and shot. Alive, he was a danger to Franco’s claim to leadership: dead, he became a patron saint, and at the end of the war his body was carried on shoulders from Alicante in the south to El Escorial, where he was temporarily buried among the ancient rulers of Spain. Later his corpse was translated to the newly built basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, where it lies in enormous solemnity before the high altar. I say that the visage of José Antonio is frightening because he looks exactly like a younger Herman Goering, and had he lived and triumphed he would each year have resembled Goering more. He would now be only sixty-three and good for another fifteen years’ rule, which is a frightening thought.
At any rate, the hospital he now supervised in absentia, the finest I had visited in a dozen years, was reserved for those who, like himself, were dedicated to a certain way of life. For members, the rates of the hospital were low and the service provided by the medical head, Dr. Antonio Moreno Monforte from the college in Zaragoza, was, I am sure, excellent. In England such a hospital would be crawling with patients and overworked nurses and grumbling doctors, for members of the Labor and Conservative parties alike would be eligible, and one had to sense the difference.
On the last day of my sentimental return to Teruel, Señor Cortel Zuriaga, the man who had shown me the tomb of the Lovers, took me to a high point overlooking the city, and with the cemetery at our backs, explained how the fortunes of the great battle for Teruel had fluctuated, and he spoke with decent respect for each side: ‘If the Republicans were to win the war, they had to capture this city. They did so, and then General Franco knew that he must retake it. It was as simple as that.’ And he pointed out the routes used by Franco’s rescue columns as they brought pressure to bear on the city, then held by the Republicans. ‘For anyone in Teruel it was a terrible war,’ he said. ‘It was a blessing when it ended.’ Then he said something about the bull that stood in the plaza, representing the city, and in these words summarized the spiritual significance of Teruel: ‘We saw the other day that the symbol of Teruel is a bull. But which particular bull? A Saracen bull sent against the Christians as an enemy. It came to destroy us, but we converted it. If the Spaniards in 1171 were able to accept such a bull as the symbol of their city, then other Spaniards in 1939 should have been able to accept their recent enemies.’ Apparently, after the first long year of revenge, that is what has happened.
As I stood looking down upon the city that has meant so much to me, I asked myself the question which perplexes many people who wish to visit Spain: ‘If I was once so committed to a Republican victory, how can I bear to visit Spain now?’ I have often wondered, for after the destruction of the Republicans, I went through a period of bitterness in which I did not care ever again to see Spain, and I would schedule my trips through Europe so as to avoid it. Then two things happened. One day, while talking to a group of Spanish exiles in Mexico, I asked myself, ‘Why should I allow Franco to deprive me of a land which is almost as much mine as his?’ More important, as I studied the world I came to the conclusion that each nation, at the end of a cycle of about twenty-five years, starts anew. What went before is historically important and probably sets a limit to what the newborn; nation can become, but the fact is that the past is past and a new nation is in being, with fresh possibilities for success or failure. That is why General de Gaulle has been so right in France; he is governing an entirely new country not bound by the debacle of 1941. That is why the young Germans are so right in disclaiming responsibility for 1935–1945; they’re a new moon, and they are correct in insisting that they be so treated. It is obviously true of China, though most of us have been reluctant to admit it. And one of these days it will be true even of Russia, and we had better be prepared to admit that, too.
It also applies to the United States, though we fight against it and blind our eye and conscience to the fact. The median age of our population is lower now. We are more overcrowded, more urban, and whether we like it or not, a permanently mixed nation racially. We are in the midst of swift change in education, technology, labor relations and religion. We are evolving a new morality, a new posture in world politics. Yet we refuse to understand that the advent of such change signifies also the advent of a new nation. The people of Spain seem more prepared to accept their new nation than we are to accept ours, and it may be this reluctance to accept the new that will destroy us.
As a matter of fact, I suspect that the rebirth of each nation occurs about every seventeen or eighteen years, but only the rare social scientist can recognize the change as it occurs. I usually seem to be about seven years tardy. America’s present cycle will end sometime around 1970, and if we try to govern our new nation by 1920 policies we shall be truly doomed. Spain’s last cycle ended about 1964, and it is the opportunity to watch a new nation coming into being that makes a visit to Spain so instructive and rewarding.
XIII
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA
Any reader who has come with me so far through the Iberian peninsula should be prepared for a pilgrimage across northern Spain to the sanctuary at Santiago de Compostela, the finest journey in Spain and one of the two or three best in the world. It is a twofold pilgrimage to a long-dead form of art and to a living religious shrine. To understand the latter, certain things must be known.
Fact. Two of the earliest disciples chosen by Jesus were the brothers James and John, sons of the Galilee fisherman Zebedee and his wife Salome. So energetic in their support of the new religion were the brothers that Jesus gave them the honorary sec
Tradition. In the Book of Acts it is suggested that after the death of Jesus and before the martyrdom of James, the disciples scattered to different portions of the world and proselytized for the new religion, without specifying as to who went where and with what results. Tradition, unsupported by documentation but strong in folk persistence, claims that while Matthew went to Ethiopia, Thomas to India, Jude to Persia, Simon to India and Bartholomew to Armenia, James Boanerges came to Spain, where after extensive labors he succeeded in converting nine Iberians to Christianity and was rewarded by the supreme gift of being visited at Zaragoza by the Virgin Mary, who was still living at the time. This tradition is popular in Spain but textual and historical critics in other countries find it difficult to accept. It should be noted, however, that the tradition specifically states that after this missionary effort in Spain, James returned to the Holy Land, where he suffered martyrdom.