Iberia (100 page)

When I say spire I do not mean the traditional church steeple
that ends in a cross. I mean something quite different. A French
visitor was also in the street, looking through field glasses at the
top of one of the spires, and noticing my interest, said, ‘One of
the true masterpieces of modern art. Regard.’ He passed me the
glasses, and at first I could not believe what I was seeing through
them. First of all, the spires were built in such a way that they
resembled pretzel sticks studded with salt crystals, except that at
the upper end they narrowed down to points of rock candy,
brilliantly colored. The spire was decorated with ceramic bits set
in plaster and color was reflected everywhere. ‘The sun lives in
each part,’ the admiring Frenchman said, and since many of the
ceramic pieces were finished in gold, the spire seemed to be a
finger of the sun.

‘Have you studied the tip?’ he asked, and how can I explain
what I saw when I did? I said it wasn’t a cross but I would be hard
put to say what it was. I could think only of Angkor Wat and its
repeated use of the cobra head with hood extended. Yes, it looked
much like a cobra, except that it was angular, off center, totally
bizarre and with the hood indicated by a score of ceramic balls
that looked as if they had been racked up for a celestial billiard
game. There was also something that resembled a fourleaf clover
and a series of golden protuberances that looked like either sails
or segments of a peeled orange.

‘Glorious, eh?’ the Frenchman asked.

 

‘What is it supposed to be?’

 

‘Who cares? It’s a work of genius. So who cares?’ He took back

the glasses and passed into the unfinished building, but I remained
in the street, studying the lower portions of the façade, for it was
here and not in the fantastic towers that the genius of Gaudí had
manifested itself. The entire front was a kind of garden rising
vertically from the pavement. Vines climbed upward to provide
niches in which statues of Biblical figures stood as if resting in
some countryside grape arbor. What in a traditional façade would
have been a pillar, here became a tree in whose spreading branches
perched stone birds. On either side of the main entrance, at eye
level, families of realistic chickens scratched, beautifully carved,
and wherever human figures appeared, animal life appeared also,
for it was obvious that Gaudí had loved nature; his definition of
religion encompassed all that lived.

I suppose the outstanding characteristic of the façade was that
when seen from where I stood, there was scarcely a square foot
that was not covered with ornament in some way. One night,
when I saw it illuminated by flares, it cast a million shadows and
the spires looked like decorations on a wedding cake. Few lines
were straight and some of the windows were wonderfully
inventive; the man who designed this facade knew what fun was.
It reminded me of two other structures I’d seen, one in Barcelona
and the other in Watts, the Negro section of Los Angeles. The
first, of course, was the Palau de la Música, and I assumed that
Gaudí had also built that, but I was wrong. In Barcelona at the
turn of the century there had been a flowering of the Catalan
spirit, and a different group of architects had been responsible
for the Palau. As for Los Angeles, in Watts in the early years of
this century an immigrant Italian tile setter named Simon Rodia
decided to build by himself a memorial to his love for the United
States, and it took the form of a cluster of huge towers one
hundred feet tall and built of iron rods handsomely interwoven.
He ornamented them with anything he could salvage from junk
yards: broken plates, green and blue soft-drink bottles, chipped
cups and saucers, flashy tiles from old bathrooms. From the
seashore he collected shells and from garbage dumps odd
containers, and all this he set into concrete slabs which formed
the sides of his structure. Working pragmatically and alone, he
spent thirty-three years on his task, creating what has been called
‘the greatest structure ever made by one man.’ Today the towers
have become an embarrassment to Los Angeles, for they have
begun to deteriorate and vandals have worked much damage; it
may be that they will have to be torn down, but if they vanish
something unique and beautiful will have been lost, as subtle as
the skin of a lizard, and committees have been formed to save
them, for many world critics judge them to be the one authentic
work of art to have been produced by California. At any rate, if
one has seen the Watts towers he is prepared for the Gaudí, and
vice versa.

I left the street and passed through the façade as if I were
entering the church, but inside there was nothing. Not even the
walls were up, except at the unfinished transept. ‘How long have
they been building this?’ I asked a caretaker.

‘A long time,’ he said, pointing to a crane I had not previously
seen. Some work was under way, but from the magnitude of the
task that lay ahead, I judged it would take a crew of thousands
forty or fifty years to finish. ‘Are they proceeding with it?’ I asked,
but the caretaker shrugged his shoulders.

I did find a placard which explained the façade. It was intended
to portray events connected with the birth of Christ, and the four
spires represented the major symbols of the faith which Christ
had founded: the cross, the walking stick of Joseph, the ring and
the miter, though what religious significance the last three had I
did not know, but I did not know that an architect of noble
imagination and vast intention had drafted this memorial to the
Holy Family but had somehow run out of energy. The demanding
task had staggered to a halt and I saw in the gaping emptiness
both wonder and tragedy and was driven to discover what had
happened and why.

I asked so many questions about the building that friends
arranged for me to meet the one man in Barcelona best equipped
to explain. I was taken to an attractive country-style house which
now stood well within the city but which must have been in a
rural area when built. An old-style fence with the kind of latched
gate I knew as a boy surrounded a pleasant yard, and at the door
of the house a girl obviously just in from the country bowed and
said in Catalan, ‘Dr. Bonet will see you shortly.’ She led me into
a library, where I found, in addition to the ninety volumes of the

Espasa-Calpe
, whole shelves of books about Gaudí. French, Italian,
American and especially German writers had compiled an
impressive series of essays on Gaudí and photographic studies of
his work, and from their titles it was obvious that their authors
considered him one of the important men of his generation. But
what was his generation? When did he live? I did not feel free to
take down the books, but since they all appeared to be of recent
publication, for they were largely in the new inter national format,
I judged that he must have died fairly recently.

The door to the library swung open and a slight, old-fashioned
gentleman in dark suit and vest, in his late sixties perhaps, came
into the room with that air of excitement which marks men who
love to talk about work that fascinates them. ‘Luis Bonet y Gari,’
the man said, extending his hand. ‘I am delighted to meet with
someone from América del Norte who knows the work of Antoni
Gaudí.’ I decided not to tell him that I was there because I knew
nothing about Gaudí, for it was obvious that he had much to tell.
He wore a black bow tie which stood out against the whiteness
of his shirt and hair. His eyes were unnaturally bright and he
spoke crisply.

‘I am, as they told you, the architect of the Sagrada Familia. I
was a student of Gaudís, and although no one can say what his
exact plans were for finishing the structure, I am at least in
harmony with his general ideas.’

‘When did he die?’ I asked.

Dr. Bonet was surprised that an expert like me didn’t know
this fundamental fact about the master, but he said courteously,
‘Born 1852 Antoni Gaudí i Cornet in the small Catalan town of
Reus. Struck down by an automobile here in Barcelona in 1926.
Unrecognized, he was thrown into a pauper’s bed in an
out-of-the-way hospital, where he died some days later without
having regained consciousness.’

‘Then the Sagrada Familia dates from the last…’

 

‘Another architect had made preliminary plans for a traditional
kind of church, but in 1882 Gaudí drew a set of sketches showing
how a structure more suited to Cataluña could be evolved from
the work then under way. He got the job and the result is history.’

 

‘How did he come upon the ideas he used in the facade?’ I
asked.

 

‘Ah! Where? As a young man I worked with him and discovered
many secrets about building in the new style, but how he
conceived that style I never knew. Obviously, he saw architecture
as an outgrowth of nature. Obviously, he was inspired by the
Mediterranean and all the cultural forces that grew up along its
shores. But above all else he was a Catalan, and something of our
essence flowered in him. He could have come only from Cataluña.’

 

I was afraid to ask the next question, for it would be tray my
ignorance, but I was caught up with the mystery of Gaudí, so I
asked, ‘Did he do much work in Cataluña?’ It turned out to be a
good question, because Dr. Bonet pulled down from his shelves
a score of books written within the last decade by non-Spanish
experts and in their pages showed me pictures of the work Gaudí
had done.

 

‘The amusement park here in Barcelona. Oh, don’t miss that!
It’s a child’s fairyland built in stone. Then the apartment houses
with their shining roofs. And don’t forget his beautiful Casa Vicens
not far from here.’

 

What really surprised me was a sketch Dr. Bonet showed me
of the church as it had been intended to look, for this showed
that the facade I had been looking at was not the main one at all
but merely the entrance to the south transept; the main nave had
not yet been started, except for the apse, which stood under the
cluster of lesser towers. The finished church would have eight
more of the giant spires; and the placard I had seen earlier was
wrong. The spires did not represent abstract attributes of the
church but rather twelve men from the New Testament: the four
already standing were those for Barnabas, Jude, Simon and
Matthew.

 

Dr. Bonet reviewed the plan with me and I could see that he
visualized the church finished as his master had intended. It would
require sixty or seventy years to complete, but the determination
to do so was present. ‘The four existing spires of the Sagrada
Familia have become for Barcelona what the Eiffel Tower is for
Paris or the Statute of Liberty for New York. They are the
recognized symbol of this city and of Cataluña. It is unthinkable
that the remaining eight should not be completed, because the
four we have are among the few works of true architecture built
in the last century. Throughout the world they are recognized as
such.’

 

But not in Spain. I was to find that among Spaniards familiar
with the problem, Gaudí is looked upon as a Catalan crank and
his work dismissed as irrelevant. One man in Madrid asked me,
‘What can you make of those towers? At their base, Gothic.
Midway up, pure Art Nouveau. At the top, Picasso cubist. It’s
junk architecture and it’s lucky for us it was left unfinished.
Perhaps a real architect can move in now and bring the mess to
some conclusion.’

 

I heard the same arguments in Barcelona. ‘The Sagrada Familia
should be turned over to a committee of architects under the age
of fifty. Make that forty-five. They should keep what’s already up
and finish the damned thing off in some kind of ultramodern
simplistic style and give us a church that can be used. The four
main towers can stand where they are. They’re no good, but they
do no harm.’

 

If a plebiscite on this matter were taken throughout Spain, it
would be meaningless, for most Spaniards know nothing of the
Sagrada Familia. If only those qualified to vote were polled, I
suppose the decision would be to finish the job quickly and
without regard to Gaudí’s imperfectly recorded master plan. If
the architects of the outside world were questioned, I believe they
would vote for finishing the church with due respect for Gaudís
plan but with modifications dictated by the probable taste of 1990.
(This would be my preference.) But to the devoted followers of
Antoni Gaudí, the only way to finish this monument is in strict
adherence to his wishes. This would require eight more towers,
an additional lesser façade depicting the Passion of Christ to
balance the existing Infancy, and a gigantic main entrance showing
Christ in Glory with a wealth of imaginative detail that I fear only
Gaudí himself could have devised. He was a unique genius who
carried his plans in his head and I doubt that they could be
reconstructed from the inadequate notes he left.

 

What will be done? No one knows. In fact, no one has even a
coherent guess. Men like Dr. Bonet are convinced that sooner or
later the people of Barcelona will recognize in this magic shell a
Catalan treasure and will insist upon its completion. A committee
has been formed to speed the work and collections are taken each
year; visitors from other countries often return home and write
out checks to further what one correspondent described as ‘the
most exciting thing I saw in Spain.’ But the city fathers, faced with
this gaping wound and the prospect of another century before it
can be healed, are understandably impatient to get along with the
work in some simplified manner. The debate is bitter.

 

As for Parque Güell, a garden area lying northwest of the
church, it is a child’s delight and faces the same problems as the
church. It was never finished, really, and the dreamlike buildings
have become dilapidated; I don’t see how they could be properly
refurbished without an expenditure of funds that could scarcely
be justified. For as long as they last, however, the inventions which
Gaudí poured into this park are a joy to the spirit: caves where
one can rest and towers that seem made of gingerbread, flights
of stairs lined with rocks of all hues and huge flat buildings whose
Assyrian-like pillars lean at odd angles. It was in this park that I
saw a work of Guadí’s that made my heart skip through sheer
pleasure: it was a swinging gate made of wrought iron. Its basic
design was a series of large squares onto which were fixed circles
fashioned to look like the ribs of a palm branch with the core off
center. The solidity of the squares, the beauty of the circles, the
unbalanced position of the cores and the airiness of the whole
concept represented invention of the highest order, and if I had
seen nothing else done by Gaudí, I would have known from this
gate that he was first rate.