Iberia by James A. Michener
‘I told the government, “It’s foolish to have all the museums in Madrid,” so we determined to have one here,’ he explained. I had seen it some years before as a small building exemplifying what one energetic man could accomplish, for even then the museum was well known. Through the generosity of a local benefactor it had acquired an excellent collection of prehistoric goldware. It displayed whole cases of stone axes, Roman pottery and Greek coins. Filgueira-Valverde had also encouraged the Pontevedrans to do certain unusual things: ‘This is a Galician city, so I said, “Let’s have a room which shows what a Galician kitchen is like. Women would love it.” We’re also a seaport, very important in Spanish history. So we found the shipboard cabin of one of our sons who became admiral of the Spanish navy. We rebuilt it board by board so our children can see what their heritage is.’
In those days me museum was a positive delight, rambling as it did over two old buildings joined together by a kind of drawbridge. I liked especially two very old life-sized statues of Biblical figures. When I first saw them I thought they were familiar; I had seen them or their brothers somewhere before. Now Mayor Filgueira-Valverde told me what these rare pieces were. When Maestro Mateo’s Pórtico de la Gloria was originally installed in 1188 it was an open-faced porch giving onto the public square, but in 1738 when the new façade was added, making what had been an open portico into an inside room, some eight statues no longer fitted; they were removed and kept in a stable for nearly two centuries. In 1906 their Compostela owner concluded a deal whereby they were to be sold en bloc to a museum in America, where they would have formed one of the Romanesque glories of our museum world, but the Spanish government interceded and offered them at the same price to Spanish museums, and these two masterworks wound up in Pontevedra.
For what Mayor Filgueira-Valverde showed me next I was unprepared: a new statuary wing as big as most ordinary museums. He had just presided at the opening ceremonies of what I judged to be a memorial to his own energy, for how such a granite edifice had been paid for out of a small community budget I could not guess. I would recommend this museum to everyone, for it has been done with taste. ‘And pull,’ a Spanish friend whispered. What this signified I was not to learn till lunch.
The pilgrims walked, they rode horseback, they used mule carts, but always they passed through landscapes of exquisite beauty.
At breakneck speed the mayor bundled me out of Pontevedra and down to Vigo, which he passed with a merry tattoo of praise for that famous seaport. His objective, however, lay beyond the ocean port of Bayona, a town I had not heard of before that day, situated near the Portuguese border, and there he showed me something I could scarcely believe. On a high peninsula which juts out into the Atlantic Ocean the Spanish government acquired an abandoned castle completely surrounded by handsome walls which overlook the sea from a considerable height. The castle has been rebuilt to serve as a parador where rooms have one of two exposures: the choice ones look out upon a series of colorful bays, spotted with islands and marked by half a score of distant headlands against which the Atlantic breaks in silvery splendor, forming one of the most exciting vistas I have ever seen from a hotel; the poor rooms merely look down upon eighty miles of the surging Atlantic, one island and not more than four fine headlands, reaching into Portugal. I doubt if there is any hotel with a setting to equal this, yet the best accommodations cost only eight dollars a day for a double room while a four-course dinner can be chosen from some fifty dishes for only two dollars and sixty-five cents. Not many Americans will revel in this luxury, because as soon as the parador was announced, Monte Real it is called, the English reserved it for almost a year ahead, having learned from experience that one of the finest places in Europe in which to vacation is this Portuguese—Spanish coast.
At lunch the mayor introduced me to an adventure which I could have done without: he plopped before me a plate of the ugliest food that the human being is capable of eating. They were percebes, a kind of barnacle, which attach themselves to rocks standing at the point where breakers crash in from the Atlantic, and much of the excitement to be found in eating percebes stems from the fact that each year men lose their lives gathering the repulsive things. When served, they look like a plateful of miniature rotting turkey legs with the skin on the leg turned black and flabby and the nails on the toes become coarse. But when the skin has somehow been torn away, beneath lies a stem of delicious, chewy meat somewhat like octopus, while the hideous toes, if properly gouged, can be tricked into giving up morsels of solid meat that is much like the best crab. I enjoyed the repulsive things, the more so later when I heard one morning a lusty old fisher-woman shouting in a quiet street in Pontevedra, ‘Buy my percebes! Buy my percebes! They are firm and thick like a fisherman’s penis.’
The surprise that the mayor had prepared for me, however, had nothing to do with seafood. Across from me sat one of the most reserved and courtly Spaniards I was to meet, a man in his early sixties, tall, aloof, gray in both dress and manner. He was Francisco Javier Sánchez Canton, the director of the Prado Museum, whom I had tried in vain to see in Madrid. Introductions were made, and then ensued another of those rare and memorable luncheons which can take place only in Spain. It was about three-thirty in the afternoon when we sat down to eat. It was after six when we finished, and in the interval we talked of only two things: first of the Prado, and I surprised the director by saying that one of my favorite pictures in his care was Correggio’s ‘Noli Me Tangere.’ Filgueira-Valverde, with explosive enthusiasm, interrupted to say that he had eyes only for Spanish painting and he expatiated on how vibrant the Spanish school had always been, from the earliest primitives through Zurbarán and Velázquez and down to Goya. For him there could be only one school, the Spanish, but when forced to state which of the Prado paintings pleased him most he said quietly, ‘Roger van der Weyden’s “Deposition from the Cross.” There can be nothing better than that.’ Dr. Sánchez Cantón, as custodian of all the paintings, refused at first to nominate a preference but did grudgingly admit that Velázquez was good, and he told two stories about his favorite painter. ‘An American woman who loved painting walked into the Velázquez room with me one morning saw that forest of masterpieces and cried, “Impossible! It’s a trick of the Spanish government.” And then the English woman looked at the beggar and shook her head. “A poor man like this without a peseta to be painted by the most expensive artist in the world!” ’
I proposed a toast, saying, ‘For three weeks I vainly tracked you through Madrid, and now I find you in a fish restaurant in Bayona,’ to which he replied in a soft voice, ‘I suppose if one had to pick a single picture it would be Velázquez’s “Medici Gardens in Moonlight.” ’
The second topic concerned a strange, tormented Galician woman about whom Filgueira-Valverde was one of the world’s leading authorities, having written several books about her. It was late in the afternoon, with the sun dipping toward the surface of the Atlantic and only husks of percebes on our plates, when the mayor said, ‘The older I become, the greater I believe Rosalía de Castro to have been. It has been a great source of pleasure to me to watch Spanish and French critics come around to the view that she was one of the fine poets of the last century. I am additionally proud because of the fact that she wrote her best poems in Galician.’ Dr. Sánchez Cantón left off being director of the Prado and became again a Galician from Pontevedra, his home town, and as the two men spoke with animation of the great Rosalía, I understood why the little museum of Pontevedra had such a good collection of master paintings. When you get two Galician cronies like Sánchez Cantón and Filgueira-Valverde, one in charge of the Prado, the other of the museum in their home town, something has got to happen. Galicians are like that.
‘She was the soul of our people,’ the mayor continued, and as he spoke I reflected that he must be the only mayor in the world who was both a museum director and an expert on imagist poetry. ‘She had a tortured and miserable life, but she sublimated it in her poetry.’
Rosalía of the Castros, a name which in her case had special meaning, was born in Santiago de Compostela in 1837, the child of an unmarried daughter of one of the region’s important families. She was reared by suspicious relatives who did not hide from her the fact that her father, who continued to live in Compostela, could not marry her mother or acknowledge himself to be her father for a reason so final as to permit no discussion: he had been ordained a priest. Rosalía knew him and followed his career until he died, an inconspicuous padre in Padrón, the port at which the body of St. James had landed eighteen hundred years before.
Rosalía was a heavy, awkward girl who lived her poetry before she wrote it. ‘I believe she had an exceptionally wide field of consciousness,’ Filgueira-Valverde said. ‘She was always interested in thoughts, affections, intimateness, sentiment and the cultivation of one’s self and one’s philosophical analysis.’ She married a dwarf who was equally tortured, a writer who existed only on the fringe of movements without ever directing or understanding them, and the two had an unhappy life, although they did produce six children who shared their anxieties and accomplishments. At forty-eight Rosalía was dead, but she left behind three books of poetry, Galician Songs, published in 1863; New Leaves, published in 1880 when she was forty-three; and On the Banks of the Sar, which appeared in 1884, the year before her death, and it is these poems on which her reputation is founded.
She reminds me of Emily Dickinson, more acquainted with the world than Emily but like her the creator of a personal world which she described with passionate conviction. Her poems are disturbingly simple in construction, depending upon unexpected rhymes and rhythms.
Dig it with all speed, dig it,
Thought, you gigantic digger.
Dig a very deep hole, where we can bury
Remembrance of what’s over.
Rosalía had an intense identification with her natural surroundings and seems always a captive of them.
Give me your perfumes, loveliest of roses.
Oh, quench the burning of my thirst, clear fountains,
For it is scorching me. Clouds made of gossamer
Like veils of lightest lace now cover over
The bright beams of the sun at its most burning.
And you, you temperate and loving breezes,
Make a beginning of mysterious concerts
Among the oak trees of the shaded farmland
Through which the Sar passes with a light murmur.
I, like many pilgrims to Compostela, like especially her poems dedicated to the cathedral of the pilgrim spirit. They have been translated recently, under the direction of Filgueira-Valverde, by the American poet Charles David Ley, who has wisely not attempted to reproduce the almost accidental rhymes which Rosalía sometimes uses. Of the Pórtico de la Gloria she says:
In highest heaven
The band of musicians is starting.
Those who play the concert in Glory
Are tuning their instruments happily.
Are they alive? How can those faces
Which look so genuine be merely stone ones?
How could stone make those marvelous tunics,
Those eyes which speak of the life within them?
You who chiseled them with God to help you,
Master Mateo, your name’s immortal.
Since you remain kneeling there so humbly,
Speak to me now and tell me about it.
With your curly locks around you, you’re silent.
‘Saint they bump their heads against,’ I’m praying.
But in Galicia this strange woman is loved primarily for her skill in catching the life of the countryside, and in a series of poems that are at once completely feminine yet hard as the granite of Galicia, she speaks of the most ordinary experiences:
What’s the lad up to?
What can it be?
Now he looks at me with a face like winter.
Up at the mill, he wants me to dance with him
And won’t talk to me down in the village.
What’s the lad up to?
What can it be?
Occasionally, when she sings of the small incidents of Galician life, she gives her words an unexpected twist which throws them into a universal aspect; she has transmuted Galicia into the whole world, and the expansive horizons of which the mayor speaks when referring to his favorite poet become apparent, as in the longer poem in which she sings of the Feast of the Rock, held beside the sea in one of the Galician rías:
The quiet little tickles, the humorous tussles,
The shouts and the leaping, and good-natured tales,
Everyone tipsy and everyone quite merry
And Our Lady is stood there behind the cask.
As my affection for Galicia has increased, so my interest in this heavy and almost ugly woman has grown. To a newspaperman to whom she refused to give a photograph of herself she said, ‘Women such as I, who have not received the splendid gifts of physical beauty from nature, must be excused from exposing their faces to public view.’ And now, as the long afternoon waned, I asked Mayor Filgueria-Valverde and Dr. Sánchez Cantón a question which had concerned me for some time: ‘I’ve been studying the lives of your two most famous Galician writers, both women, Rosalía de Castro and the Condesa Emilia Pardo Bazán, whom I read years ago as a student, and I find numerous references to the fact that these two women, both residents of Compostela at one time or another, engaged in a long feud. Some claim that the condesa, who had all good fortune on her side with a great name and a better education, treated Rosalía very shabbily.’
I might have dropped a bomb with less impact than this literary question produced. At first they were astonished that an American wandering through Galicia had come upon this ancient female feud; then they were disgusted that such rumors had persisted; finally they were eager to clear up the matter. It was, of course, the ebullient mayor who led off with a fiery speech which reminded me of how seriously Spaniards take these literary brawls.
‘Michener, I give you my solemn word, knowing much about each of these great women, that it was not a feud. Rosalía must be seen as a romantic, a solitary, one who broods incessantly, whose life consists of this tiny corner of Galicia into which she digs with an intensity that most human beings never know.’ He spoke of the dead poet with tears in his voice and deep love, but then his voice changed and he became a resonant orator: ‘Pardo Bazán, on the other hand, was a complete woman, very intelligent, of suave temperament, sensual, an activist, extremely realistic, a critic of world literature, the translator of Voltaire, but above all a grand aristocrat. She was most erudite, and educated herself a second time in Paris in revolutionary ideals. Remember one fact when you think of the two women. Pardo Bazán, never wrote in Galician. Rosalía did.’
‘You have explained away the fight,’ I said, ‘but you speak with such fury that I’m sure one existed. What was it about?’
The mayor placed his large hand on my arm and said, ‘As one literary man to another I must tell the truth. It was the age-old case of a husband in a secondary position who fought the whole world in his wife’s name, not because he wanted to protect his wife but because he wanted to insult the world which had ignored him. He fought my father. He fought Pardo Bazán. He fought everyone. You can say of him that he was an archivist who filed his fights in neat order, a historian who kept good records of his triumphs and defeats. He survived his wife by thirty-eight years, during which his embattled defense of her became his life’s mission.’
‘But was there a feud between the two women?’ I persisted.
‘The family of Emilia Pardo Bazán had a castle in Cambados. They had many castles. Why would their daughter want to fight with a poor countrywoman who had no father? Why? Tell me why?’
I had hoped that these two scholars would tell me why, but like granite-hewn Galicians they hovered protectively over the ghosts of these two fine women, and from them I would learn no more of the passions which once
I do not invent such things. Obviously I could not have known either Emilia Pardo Bazán or Rosalía de Castro, and so far as I know, have never read a complete life of either, but somewhere years ago in my wanderings I picked up this strange story of the feud between the two women and I wish I knew what the facts were.
On my last day in Galicia I did what millions of pilgrims before me had done. I went to land’s end at Finisterre, that wild and distant point of rock which had been my introduction to Spain so many years before, and there at the foot of the lighthouse, on a headland looking westward to the New World with which Spain had been so deeply involved, I tried to summarize what I had learned of this contradictory nation in the years that I had known it. So much of what I had wanted to accomplish in Spain had ended in failure. I, who love music so much, had never once since that first night in Valencia witnessed a complete flamenco, and the failure was not in my trying; it is simply that flamenco cannot be ordered; one must be at the right place at the right time when duende is upon all present. The duende I had missed. Nor had I heard one note of Pedrell’s music, though I had traveled far to do so.