Algren at Sea (22 page)

The wind off the Sierra Nevadas that prevails against men as well as against trees.

Seville is the place where the harsh Saturday-night clamor of old Barcelona, jesting cries of sellers and jesting answers of buyers, the big free laughter of fishermen, whores, and bartenders, flower women and lottery vendors, fades to a churchly Sunday-morning hymnal. It is always Sunday morning in churchly Sevilla, where well-behaved girls with self-important behinds and big feet leave their embroidering to hurry to Mass but take their time coming back to embroidering.

It is a city of women watching the street from small barred windows, because the Moors not only built delicately, but strongly as well: it takes strong walls to keep women indoors, and the Moors never did devise a wall strong enough.

Yet their strategy was an improvement over the Byzantine school, that bricked the girls in solid. As this hadn't worked in Byzantium, the Moors let their women have windows—with bars if the windows were on the ground floor. When the window was too high to leap out of without breaking a leg, the Moors were progressive enough to leave the bars off. These left high arching apertures in which the great day, or the night thronged by stars, were framed.

But by high window or low, the common lot of the woman of Spain south, yet today, is a life sentence of doing embroidery while watching a street owned by men.

“Needle and thread for the woman, mule and lash for the man,” is the saying.

Neither the good girl nor the bad frequents the streets of Seville except to go to church or on a shopping errand. A respectable woman doesn't take a walk when she feels like taking a walk. She does her walking with her fingers, across a bit of fabric.

The good girl embroiders for her hope chest and the brothel woman
works for the Virgin of Macarena above her bed: to give thanks for last night's favors and in hope of men who are young and rich in the night to come.

Sons of officers and breeders of bulls who sit all day over long-stemmed glasses of manzanilla on the Calle de Sierpe speaking of bulls, horses, and women in one breath: of women of good family as of those protected by none but the Virgin. Young men who feel it is as right to be Spanish as confidently as the Englishman feels it is right to be English.

It is therefore unnecessary for the Spaniard to identify himself as Spanish, in the Italian and American manner. “Me Italiano!” the man you meet for a moment assures you. Or, “Ah'm from Tayxus” another shouts across a dining room.

Well, good, but why be so shaky about it, Dad? We aren't going to throw you out of the old Union. We need your oil.

At the Plaza de Toros of Seville we met Goytisolo and Andarra. Goytisolo had learned that his brother had been released in Barcelona, with no more reason given for releasing him than had been given for his arrest.

We saw the first bull, The Foolish Bull of Seville, storm out into the arena in a smoking fury, and a strong yellow smell mixed of urine and rage blew off his furious hide. Ladies coughed into handkerchiefs and men stood up to get a better look at this passionate brute who didn't know that, if he wanted to win, he was certainly going about matters the wrong way. Perhaps his wife had just told him she was leaving him—”Honey, you've supported me all these years; now go out and get a job for yourself.”

The animal did have one good idea, and that was to wipe out the other side. He got one good horn under the horse, and horse goes upsy, rider and all, rider comes downsy, and Goytisolo began reciting “At Five in the Afternoon.” I stood up and hollered, “Finish them both off!”

The bull didn't hear me because he had so much stuff sticking in him he looked like a fruitcake and it hurt. He had had enough of the picador and the picador had had enough of him. The point I'm trying to make is that they had had enough of each other.

The matador came out but he came out too soon, because the bull caught him with the flat of the horn, and up the matador went too. That was a great day for going up in Seville.

Torero
came down kneeling with the bull's nose in his face; the preliminary boys ran out.
Torero
waved them away to indicate he now had
the bull transfixed. I wondered what he was going to transfix him with, as his sword was yards away. His left pant leg had been ripped to the waist, and if it hadn't been padded he'd be riding that horn yet. Yet he boldly turned his backside directly on the bull and recovered his sword—there was one moment of truth as he stooped to recover it, but the bull hadn't read
Death in the Afternoon.

He was over at the fence, looking up at the judges, thinking he had won. The next move was to give him the matador's ear and half his pants, was his thinking. This seemed to me to be the right moment for someone to mount the fence with a sledgehammer, finish the bull off and jump down, as the animal was streaming blood.

Nobody had a sledgehammer in Seville, and with or without a hammer, nobody wanted to get that near to
Toro.
The thinking was that the longer everyone stayed out of his way, the better for everybody. So the preliminary boys merely trotted cautiously after
Toro
as he trotted till the very air stank of blood.

By this time even Goytisolo no longer liked it. Andarra didn't like it. I doubted even the bull enjoyed it. Personally I felt I could do without it. The whole team followed him till his legs gave way at last and one of the valiant clowns gave him the dagger.
Arriba España!

“I want Scotch,” Mme. de Beauvoir said.

“I want wicky,” Andarra said.

“Who's going to wipe up the blood?” I inquired.

The horns resounded and who should trot out but The Wise Bull of Seville looking for a friend. That The Wise Bull of Seville had been well brought up was immediately apparent, for he was a bull who remembered his promise to Mother. How she had planted her gentle hoof on the back of his neck and warned him, “Once you make a run at one of these fools, you've answered the first question, so you'll have to answer all the rest and the horses will drag you off like they dragged off your poor daddy.”

“Why did Daddy answer the fools, Mother?”

“He was a proud bull, Son. Too proud to take the fifth.”

The Wise Bull of Seville had been a mere calf when he'd promised his widowed mother to take the fifth. He had never had anything against people as such—some of his best friends had been people—but he had never seen so many at once as he saw now. Then he caught a whiff of Chanel that brought him to a dead stop nose up, for the woman who was giving
off something that smelled like
that
must be a beauty. He saw her, down front, a red-haired Andalusian, and lowered his horns toward her by way of indicating that he was a gentleman who had no intention of goring anybody.

Mother had been right, he saw then for sure. For out of the corner of his eye he saw people in yellow pants prancing and dancing toward him: they were surely up to something.

The Wise Bull of Seville got the feeling he better get the hell out of there; so he nodded a “Pleased to have met you, Baby,” at the lovely redhead and trotted quietly away.

After that it was touch and go, because some came running and some came sneaking, and one caught him a couple sharp shots with something in the back of his neck. He pretended not to notice. The Wise Bull didn't even snort, not wishing to be held in contempt.

They began to applaud his good manners—he would have been hurt had he understood they were clapping because he was boring everyone stiff.

When he finally realized they were clapping out of displeasure, he thought it must be the people who kept chasing him on the horse who was wearing everyone down. He resented the fellow for being so imperceptive.

Yet, he supposed, the fellow must be a steady employee with some seniority, while he himself was a newcomer; so he might as well be gracious about it, and trotted out through the same gate by which he came.

Well, what would
you
have done if
you
had been Potash and Perlmutter when Morris Fishbein came along?

And though he was proud of himself for having kept his word to Mother so well, at the same time he couldn't help feeling sad, for in his heart he knew he could whip anyone of those little peoples in the fancy pants. As a matter of fact he wouldn't mind taking a shot at that finky-looking horse.

Next time he wouldn't tell Mother—but oh, how proud she was going to be when she read in the papers that he had
won!

The penalty for engaging young bulls in mock bullfights while they are being raised for the arena is extremely severe, in order to discourage such sport among Spanish teenagers. The boys are fond of slipping over a fence after dark and teasing a young bull with a stick in lieu of a sword, and
then hitting out for the fence when he charges. The peril is not to the boy, but to the matador the bull will one day meet, for
Toro
learns fast and remembers well. A year later, in the arena, assuming it is the bull's first time out, a torero may pay with his life for not knowing it is the bull's second time out.

The bulls that followed were all foolish bulls. All answered the fifth and all wound up as bloody carcasses being dragged out by finky-looking horses.

We went to a coffee joint on the Calle de Sierpe to have a final
carraquillo
with Andarra and Goytisolo, who were leaving that evening for Barcelona. I realized then that my antagonism toward Andarra was really only toward his camera. And as he was leaving the whole south of Spain to me to photograph, I relented long enough to shake his hand and tell him I was looking forward to seeing the pictures he had taken.

“Yes,” Mme. de Beauvoir agreed, “that would be fortunate, as nothing will come of our own efforts.”

We would see about that: we decided to climb the Giralda, Seville's ancient tower; then to have dinner.

The hand of the Christian can be seen above the hand of the Moor, in the most famous belfry tower of Christendom erected in Praise of Allah: The Giralda.

The Moors turned a warlike, masculine, invulnerable mask to the world. But within the mask they were as vulnerable as flowers. They built with a feminine grace. The smile of a woman and the flow of water were their delights. They made light to fall like water and water to fall like light.

They built slowly, never working ahead of their feelings, and their feeling had delicacy. After they had left, leaving The Giralda unfinished, the Catholic kings plastered a heap of brickwork above it, thinking to complete what the Moors had begun.

But the Moorish hand can be followed to a clear and precise line. Above it, one is left with the same impression one might obtain had the last chapter of
Moby-Dick
been written by Dwight MacDonald. It has no significance. The Catholic kings assumed that energy was enough, but the Moors knew that it isn't how much stone you can accumulate into a pile, but how much heart you can get into the stone.

For my own taste the Moors built quite high enough. The Giralda is a long, slow climb up cobbled ramps similar to the upgrade journey to the
upper stands one takes at Comiskey Park if the Yankees are in town for a doubleheader.

Why the Moors were so fond of walking uphill so much puzzled me, as the landscape provided them with mountains. But when we reached the highest tower and saw Seville, river, rooftop and tower under an African sky, I understood why.

El Suspiro del Moro
—the sigh of the Moor—still breathes across this land. A nation without a country, a remote wave of the great Arabian inundation, they held the land for a thousand years yet never made it their true home. Cut off from Islam by desert and sea, separated from the Christians by custom, faith, and language, they could have kept their hold only by pushing up into France and making Europe theirs. There is no reason to believe Europe would have been worse off today had they succeeded. Or better. Had they not been defeated at Tours, their civilization would not have become the light of the world for a thousand years.

After Tours they ceased to be a conquering race, and developed a civilization wherein the arts of antiquity shone with new light. Their universities welcomed the youth of dark Europe into an intelligent, graceful, tolerant land. But, as their towers, even today, present an implacable masculine face to the world yet are softly feminized within, behind their terrible armor they too became feminized. Their final annihilation was complete, some bare few escaping down Africa's vast maw. The green land was left bleak by their departure.

Leaving, for their thousand years, nothing but empty towers showing like masts of sunken ships in a receding sea.

And that strange ancestral wail, full of longing and full of loss, one hears behind the Spanish singing.

The Moors aren't playing here anymore. They aren't playing anywhere anymore. Gone with Goth and Byzantine; gone with Assyrian and Greek. Gone with the Scythians and the Boston Red Stockings.

On the way to his exile the last Moorish sultan turned in his saddle on a height above Granada and looked for the last time at the city.

And wept for the thousand years.