Iberia by James A. Michener

  It was now past five in the afternoon and I had eaten nothing for seventeen hours, when the alcalde of Logroño said, ‘You must try our Rioja. We’re very proud of it.’ It was good.

  One of the alcalde’s assistants said, ‘That bottle came from central Rioja. Have you ever tasted one from lower Rioja?’ I hadn’t, but it too was good.

  A patriot from upper Rioja now proposed, ‘Our wine is the one that travels well, and when you’re in a foreign country and want a breath of Spain, order a bottle from our region.’ I found it to be extremely good.

  There were, I seem to remember, four or five other districts with outstanding qualifications, none of which disappointed me, and after I had done impartial justice to all I was introduced to a delightful newspaperman, Don José Vidal Iborra, who handed me a small book of eclogues that his friend José María Lope Toledo had composed in honor of Rioja wine, the titles of the chapters indicating the somewhat reserved praise that was here sung of this rare wine:

  II Hallelujah

  IV One More Time

  V Rioja and Nymphs

  XV A Poet Meets Rioja Head-on

  I was a novelist who had met Rioja head-on, but when I had studied through somewhat wavering eyes this book of prose lyrics I felt that the honor of American letters was at stake, and with my cup overflowing with Rioja, and I use the word overflowing not symbolically (I was holding my cup at a decided angle), I proposed a toast to Rioja and explained in what satisfied me as fluent Spanish that the first thing I had ever written in my life, so far as I could remember, was a translation into English verse of that memorable passage in Calderón de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream in which a shoeless man complains of his bitter lot until he meets another with no feet, and I proceeded to recite both the Spanish original and my sturdy rendition into English. At the end I contrived a nebulous connection between Calderón and Rioja wine, and although I fear I did not make myself wholly clear, I was roundly applauded, except that Señor Vidal muttered, ‘He’s got the wrong play.’

  I have only the kindest memories of Logroño, and if I cannot remember a single monument in the city or any public works, in Rioja wine I found a friend whose dark red countenance and crisp syllables evoke for me the spirit of pilgrimage wherever I encounter him.

  We entered the next town, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, at about nine at night, and I had the good luck to visit the church before I became entangled with the bibulous members of its confraternity, for thus I was relatively sober and was able to see the famous hen and rooster who account for this town’s fame. Santo Domingo was a real man who had lived nearby and had attained sainthood in one of the most attractive ways listed in the hagiographies. He was born sometime between 1010 and 1030 and died between 1090 and 1109, but where he came from is most uncertain. Spaniards claim him as a local lad; tradition says he probably came from either Italy or the French part of the Basque lands. At any rate, he felt himself drawn to a religious life and tried to enter various monasteries, but the examining monks found him too stupid. Accordingly, he built himself a small house by the pilgrims’ route and from this served the travelers, never seeing them in person, for he considered himself too dull for the great ones to bother with. Where roads were bad, he paved them, and is today honored as the patron saint of all who work on roads. Where rivers were high, he built bridges, and some that he built still stand. Where food was bad, he provided kitchens. And where the sick accumulated, he built refuges. He was as saintly a man as Spain has produced, and toward the end of his life, I believe, one of the monasteries which had rejected him was proud to accept him as a brother.

  Often as he worked he must have contemplated that delightful incident which had taken place to the east in the French city of Toulouse around the year 1080, when a German pilgrim and his son were much abused, only to be saved in the end by the miraculous intercession of Santiago. Word of the miracle flashed across Europe and was referred to in many documents from the last decade of the eleventh century, and it so typified the spirit of the Way of St. James that it became in time the Golden Legend.

  Three centuries after Santo Domingo’s death the good people of his village borrowed the miracle of Santiago at Toulouse and transformed it into the miracle of Domingo at Calzada. Today the story is told in this way:

  A German couple and their handsome young son, from near Cologne, stopped on their way to Santiago de Compostela at one of the shelters built by Santo Domingo de la Calzada. The innkeeper’s daughter became enamored of the young man and (in one of my favorite versions of the legend) ‘wolde have had hym to medyll with her carnally,’ but he resisted her advances. Next morning the family resumed its pilgrimage, but the girl, her love now turned to hate, denounced the son for having stolen a silver cup, which she had secreted in his knapsack. Constables were dispatched to overtake him and he was dragged back to the town and hanged for the crime, but Santo Domingo, aware of the lad’s innocence and chastity, kept his hands under the young man’s feet and prevented him from strangling. When the parents saw that their son remained alive on the gibbet they went to the justice to ask that he be cut down and set free. The justice, who had at that moment seated himself before a banquet of two roasted chickens, one a cock and the other a hen, replied, ‘Your son is no more alive than these chickens,’ whereupon the chickens sprang to life refledged and flew off the table. Astounded, the justice restored the young man to his family, none the worse for his experience, and they resumed their march to Compostela.

  To this day, on one of the pillars of the church of Santo Domingo de la Calzada chicken coops are maintained; they are decorated with life-size ceramic figures of a cock and hen, but inside, real chickens are kept to crow or cackle during services, and one of the prized mementos that a pilgrim can carry with him from his journey to Compostela is a white feather from one of these living chickens as a reminder of the fowl whose return from the dead proved that Santo Domingo had really saved the hanging boy.

  The confraternity of Santo Domingo, whose members look after the church and the chickens, meets in a marvelous old monastery which, since the time of my visit, has been converted into a government parador. I was led to the six-hundred-year-old cavern, which served as the meeting room, by certain members who had heard I was in town, and they launched the evening with some bottles of Rioja wine from a district near their town. I found nothing to complain of, so we tried a different kind and it too was satisfactory. In fact, we tried quite a few samples and they were all good, and I recited again and the evening grew so congenial that the confraternity elected me a full-fledged member; I have the certificate still, proving me to be the only Quaker in history obligated to watch over chickens used in the ceremonies of a Catholic church. For the patrons who will occupy the new hostel I can only wish that they have as much fun in the new rooms as I did in the old.

  Of Burgos I remember little. When we arrived at the reception which Don Luis had arranged, we were ridiculously late; it was around midnight, I think, but the hosts had thoughtfully arranged some bottles of Rioja, which was as good as ever. I believe that somewhere in the city there is a statue of El Cid Campeador, who came from these parts. From below, at three in the morning, it looks enormous.

  And then the next day, in the mysterious manner in which such things happen to pilgrims, I came upon four solemn events which stunned me with their power to evoke the past. The day started routinely with a cold roll and a cup of tea, neither of which could I touch. Then came an inconsequential thing but one which I remarked at the time as a good omen: we visited the famous Royal Abbey of Las Huelgas (The Leisure Times) whose mothers superior were so powerful that it was said, ‘If the Pope had to take a wife, only the abbess of Las Huelgas would be eligible.’ I roamed the place with double fascination, for it held an articulated statue of Jesus, which reminded me of Alvaro de Luna’s statue in Toledo, and it was to this abbey that Doña Ana de Austria finally came as abbess after her long imprisonment because of her love affair with the demon pastry cook of Madr
igal. She seemed very real to me as I studied the stones which had once known the passage of her feet, and I thought how rewarding it was to travel when one had such chances to meet old friends and to review old conditions.

  When we left Las Huelgas, Don Luis said, ‘I think you’d enjoy it if we got off the paved roads and used the ancient routes followed by the pilgrims,’ so we departed from the highway and went through much dust, which I did not enjoy, until we saw looming ahead a small mountain which carried on its crest the walled town of Castrogeriz, which was to be the scene of the day’s first adventure. It was an echo of a town, really, a set of near-ruins that had once been great in majesty but which were now occupied by shadows and old people; where thousands had once lived in a busy luxury, a few score now eked out a gray existence. We left our car because we wished to walk into Castrogeriz as pilgrims had done a thousand years ago, and as we marched across the flat and dusty land the city became a shining target. How pleased the hungry pilgrims must have been to see such a magnificent settlement rising in the sky before them! The ancient road climbed the hill, entered the walls and led down a very narrow street. Only a few shops were still in existence; the huge hostel that had once provided accommodations for hundreds each night was shuttered; the mammoth church, once glorious and filled with incense, now seemed close to falling down, and its sacristan was irritable, complaining of the trouble I was causing in wanting to see the gloomy interior.

  It was this voice that did it! As I heard the whining I was overcome by the most compelling sense of what it must have been like to be a pilgrim in those days. ‘They said its name is Castrogeriz. On a hill. I wonder if they’ll let us through the walls? See the townspeople protecting themselves behind their shutters. No food from them. That shopkeeper would cut your throat for an empty gourd. Even the church is closed. But look. That’s where they said it would be. The hostel’s open.’ And into the cavernous building the pilgrims poured, assured of hot soup and a place to sleep for one night … if they behaved themselves. As the guidebooks of the time said: ‘At Castrogeriz good bread.’

  Why should a complaining voice in this inconsequential town have had such power to evoke a sense of pilgrimage? I don’t know. Once I had walked sixty miles through this peninsula, carrying a pilgrim’s staff eight feet long, and as it swung methodically through the air (the point coming down every eight steps when I was walking fast, every twelve steps when I was tired) I had discovered what it must have been like physically to lug such a heavy staff across Spain; the kinesthetic sense of the staff swinging ever onward had drawn me forward with it. But not even the staff and the long walk had told me much about how the pilgrim had felt inwardly, but here in Castrogeriz, as I swung along the road and into the town, I became a pilgrim in reality as well as in imagination, and from that moment on I was to have a sense of what these distant hordes of people experienced as they picked their way from town to town across an inhospitable land, finding occasionally at some monastery or hospital a friendship so warm as to reward them for all the hours of isolation.

  My second adventure that day came in the equally small town of Frómista, where the serene little church of San Martín, built in 1066, is considered by many to be the finest complete piece of Romanesque architecture on the route. It is so pure and unblemished as to be something of a miracle, and its apse is so cleverly constructed of three interlocking semicircles of white stone as to constitute a triumph of the ordinary. Anyone who believes that stone, to be impressive, has to be ornate Gothic or delicate Corinthian should visit Frómista, whose simple church could profitably occupy a dozen pages of this report, except that in just a few hours I was to savor the essence of Romanesque elsewhere; my more lasting memory of Frómista is of something quite different.

  It was, as I recall, a very hot day when I studied this sturdy old church and I did not know where we were going to eat, for I had put my foot down and warned the marques that I couldn’t undertake many more lunches at five o’clock, especially when they were preceded by an hour’s investigation of Rioja. Don Luis accepted my caveat with grace, canceled a luncheon in some nearby town and set out to arrange a picnic which we would hold at some convenient spot along the pilgrims’ road. I considered this appropriate, since in the old days most pilgrims must have eaten along the way, but as we were standing in the doorway of the church, wondering where to spread our picnic, we were hailed by a singular man. ‘If you’re going to eat anyway, why not do so in my garden?’ he shouted.

  It was Father Miguel Bustillo Pérez, parish priest of Frómista, a tall, sixty-year-old man of rugged proportions. He had an impressive manner and a booming voice and looked more like a successful bricklayer than a priest. He led us to his small parish house, in back of which he had a lovely garden with trees and benches, and there we spread our picnic. He supplied the wine and much of the conversation; speaking of the old days in Frómista he reminded me of a friar who might have wandered out of the pages of Chaucer, and as he spoke, so fast that I often lost the thread of what he was saying, I saw in him a revenant of all the hard-working and hospitable friars who had helped pilgrims along this way. When he called to us he had known none of us and was certainly not obligated to extend any courtesies, but his inherent conviviality had made him do so. What was more important, it had made his powerful old church come alive and underlined the significance of my experience a few hours earlier at Castrogeriz. It was a fine, lingering afternoon we spent with Father Bustillo, in his garden, one of our better Spanish picnics.

  To the Spaniard a crucifix is a reminder of the central emotional event of his life.

  The day’s third meaningful experience started with one of the best things that can happen on a journey: I met an old friend. On an earlier visit to León I had been instructed in its history by a witty scholar-priest, pon Antonio Viñayo González, who looked like a figure from Giotto. He now had the pleasure of informing me that his guidebook to León had just been published; he did not think much of it, but I was to find it one of the best because of its erudition. He said that he wanted me to spend my time in the handsome old church and museum of San Isidoro because of its choice twelfth-century frescoes, well regarded by all historians of the Romanesque style. In one dome I found the best representation I had so far seen of that mysterious religious symbol, the tetramorph, in which the four evangelists are represented, for reasons which I did not then know, by human figures with heads of animals: Mark the Lion, Luke the Bull, Matthew the Man and John the Eagle. Among them Christ sits in starry glory, in robe of faded blue and gold and shawl of brick-red. The frescoes are very medieval, and their state of preservation is extraordinary, this crypt having always been cool and dry.

  Father Viñayo pointed out one aspect of the vaulting I had not read about: along one set of ribs the twelve months of the year are represented by peasants performing the chores appropriate for each season: March prunes the vineyards; July is a handsome young man reaping wheat; September makes wine; and October fattens his pigs on acorns. February, alas, which is my month, was a hunchbacked peasant of ugly mien, accomplishing nothing as he warmed his hands at a meager fire.

  I was about to leave, well content with what I had seen, when Father Viñayo, with that sixth sense which men who love inanimate things sometimes have, said, ‘I think you might appreciate the cloisters,’ and he led me away, from the vaulting and into as drab a cloister as I have ever seen. It had been built, I judged, in the eighteenth century of a gray stucco and was totally undistinguished. Indeed, I doubt if I could find in all Spain another so unpleasing as this, and I wondered what had gotten into the slim priest that he would think me interested in this mediocre thing. ‘It is this side,’ he said quietly, directing my attention to the fourth side of the cloister, the one nearest the mausoleum. And there I saw what had happened. San Isidoro had originally been joined to what must have been one of Spain’s most grand and somber cloisters, built in the earliest days of Romanesque art, but wars and other catastrophes had destroyed three
of the sides, and at some point in the eighteenth century, as I had guessed, a local nobleman had paid to have a new cloister built. Three new walls were put up and plastered in a drab and conformist pattern, whereupon the original remaining side had also been hidden in plaster to bring it into harmony with the others. Thus, without appreciating what he was doing, the eighteenth-century renovator had preserved in a plaster cocoon one of the treasures of Romanesque art. It had been less than ten years ago, Father Viñayo said, that a workman had uncovered the original.

  It is difficult to explain what now stood exposed in crystal purity, its stones as clean and white as when they were laid down. It is simply a cloister wall, with four or five arches, I don’t remember which, each low, unadorned, tremendously powerful and right, and each different in size and structure from its neighbors. It is a plain wall dating back to the early 1100s, but to me it was the soul of the Romanesque spirit, the secret of what I found beautiful along this pilgrim route. I would rather see these arches than the chapel at Eunate, handsome though it is on its barren plain, or the gemlike church at Frómista, or even the portico of San Miguel in Estella with its marvelous carvings, for those are all the externalization of the Romanesque spirit; at San Isidoro in León one sees the spirit itself, laid bare after years of encrustation.