In no country of the world except Japan is it so damaging to a
man to charge him with being a sinvergüenza, and when one
throws this accusation against another he must be prepared to
defend his judgment.
Estupendo
, including other such extravagant words as
maravilloso, fantástico
and
magnífico
. Few Americans and no
Englishmen have ever mastered these peculiarly Spanish
expressions, for we have reserved them for things like Cecil B. De
Mille movies and the circus. But observe my experience in Madrid.
I had rented a car and like others found much difficulty in parking
it, but at a restaurant nearby I became acquainted with a doorman
who seemed to have psychic powers in determining where empty
parking spaces would be. For this service I tipped him rather
generously, I thought, about a quarter in American money, which
he accepted grudgingly. Against my better judgment I raised the
tip to thirty-five cents, with no appreciable modification of his
manners, and then to forty cents, which brought only the same
surly acknowledgment. However, one day I went to this restaurant
with Víctor Olmos, the ebullient
Reader’s Digest
editor for Spain,
who wheeled into the parking area, slammed on his brakes, leaped
from the car and left it. When we returned, the attendant hurried
for the car (he dawdled disgracefully when getting mine) and
cried, ‘Señor, I found you a place.’‘Estupendo!’ Olmos said as he
gave the man a six-cent tip. The attendant’s face was wreathed in
smiles. ‘Fantástico!’ Olmos added. ‘Simply maravilloso,’ The
attendant nodded and I could see that he felt good all over. When
I next parked there I gave him a twenty-cent tip and cried
‘Estupendo!’ and he beamed. Later on it was fantástico and
extraordinario, and I had built myself a secure place in his
attentions. My car came promptly now, for like a good Spaniard
he needed words as much as he needed money, and the words he
wanted had to be the most expansive and inflated available. In
Spain words form a kind of currency which must be spent freely,
and to do this is not easy for an American, yet not to do it in Spain
is to miss the spirit of human relationships. For this purpose I
prefer estupendo. Its four syllables, properly pronounced, ripple
off the tongue, and if one drags out the
pen
for four or five
seconds, the effect can be seductive. For the American it can also
be corrupting. For example, when I showed Robert Vavra, whose
photographs illustrate this book, the first completed chapter, he
cried, ‘Don Jaime! Estupendo!’ For a moment I was delighted
that my work had found favor in his expert eye, but before I had
a chance to make an ass of myself I realized that he had been living
in Spain for a long time. What he meant was that the material
was not wholly offensive. Estupendo, properly used, means ‘It
might get by.’
Viva yo
. This phrase will not be found in dictionaries. Some
time ago there was a competition for the cartoon which best
expressed the Spanish character, and the winner, without a close
second, was one showing an arrogant little boy urinating in the
middle of the street and spelling out the words ‘Viva yo,’ which
could be translated as ‘Hurray for me,’ except that the guts of the
phrase is the implied second half, ‘and to hell with everyone else.’
A comprehension of the Spaniard’s addiction to Viva yo will help
anyone trying to make his way in Spain. When the little car barrels
right down the middle of the highway, forcing everyone else into
the ditch, you don’t swear at the driver. You say ‘Viva yo’ and
you understand what happened and why. When you pay seven
dollars for a seat at the bullfight and find it occupied by a man
who will not move, you don’t punch him. You say ‘Viva yo’ and
steal someone else’s seat. The spirit of Viva yo animates groups
as well as individuals and sometimes the entire nation. It crops
up in unexpected places and accounts for some very funny
newspaper stories: ‘Last night the music lovers of San Francisco,
California, stormed the box office and paid up to fifty dollars for
seats to hear the great Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus make his debut
in that city. Also in the cast was the Australian soprano Joan
Sutherland.’ When a group of Spaniards who had emigrated to
Australia changed their minds after a year and came scuttling
back to Spain, an editorial announced: ‘They said that they had
returned because they loved Spain better than any other country
on earth, they wanted to live within the embrace of the Catholic
Church, which was their spiritual home, and they had learned
that if they didn’t leave right away they would be drafted into the
Australian army for service in Viet Nam.’ The little boy spelling
out his philosophy on the street grows up to be a man determined
to live by that philosophy, and at times he can be aggravating.
Even the poorest Spaniard subscribes to the spirit of Viva yo and
is prepared to act upon it. This makes for some trying times, but
with gracia they can be weathered. If, however, one finds that the
constant exhibition of Viva yo irritates him, he should stay out
of Spain and probably Texas too.
As for the other Spanish words that one would naturally want
to use, most of them have found their way into the English
language and can be adopted without definition. Some of the
more common are: agua, alcalde, blanco, caballero, conquistador,
flamenco, fiesta, mantilla, paseo, patio, plaza, rojo, sierra, siesta,
tortilla and such bullfight terms as banderilla, banderillero, cartel,
cuadrilla, matador, picador, toro and torero. The word toreador
is also in the English dictionary but no one in Spain uses it any
longer, for it is held to be archaic.
While assembling the above list I discovered to my surprise
that pundonor has also become a good English word, although
in our language it identifies a specific point of honor rather than
a general attribute. And of course it does not carry the
philosophical connotations which it has in Spanish.
It was my intention when visiting the major cities of my
itinerary to make certain side trips to smaller towns and villages
which held points of unusual interest, and Badajoz presented an
opportunity for four such expeditions, all within Extremadura.
One of the side trips was not an opportunity; it was an obligation,
but of it I shall speak later.
The first trip took me into Roman Spain. How had Rome
gained control of the peninsula? By 150
B.C.
indigenous Iberians
were well established along the coasts and had probably wandered
inland, following rivers like the Guadiana. By 1300
B.C.
Celtic
invaders from the north had begun to displace them and had
pretty surely reached Extremadura. By 1120
B.C.
Phoenicians were
building lighthouses on prominent peninsulas and founding the
city of Gades (Cádiz), making it the oldest continously occupied
city in Europe. By 630
B.C.
Greeks had arrived, and two centuries
later the Carthaginians had taken charge of much of the peninsula.
Historic names such as Hamilcar and Hannibal then appeared in
Spanish history, the latter taking a Spanish wife and commanding
territory as far inland as the site of Mérida, but the Second Punic
War, 218-201
B.C.
, determined that Spain would pass under the
control of Rome. This control was easier to establish along the
coasts than it was inland, so what Rome could not gain in battle
she tried to win by guile, and it was in 147
B.C.
that the part of
Extremadura surrounding the future site of Mérida became
important.
Then Viriathus, a brilliant uneducated shepherd of the region,
decided that the continued pressures and treacheries of Rome
could no longer be tolerated. He led an uprising of Extremadurans
that was subdued only because the Romans invented some new
treachery which cost 9,000 Extremaduran dead and 20,000 men
sold into slavery, among them Viriathus. As a Roman slave he
learned much, and when through heroism he escaped, it was to
raise fresh troops and to lead a major war against the Romans.
At one point he controlled most of central Spain and even laid
siege to Cádiz. He inflicted heavy defeats on Rome, and an army
of magnitude was sent from Italy to subdue him once and for all,
but he outmaneuvered it and killed many. He became the first
hero of Spanish history, a native-born Extremaduran who had
repulsed Roman armies.
But then Scipio Aemilianus, adoptive son of the house that had
defeated Carthage, was dispatched with a major expedition to put
an end to the business. Refusing to fall into the kind of military
trap that Viriathus had sprung against previous Roman armies,
Scipio baited a trap of his own. He entertained three of Viriathus’
envoys and discussed peace with them, but while doing so he
suborned them with wine and gold and sent them back to their
leader, bedazzled by promises. The three ambassadors did not
report to Viriathus but lingered outside the camp until he was
asleep, then slipped into his tent and murdered him. Thus died
Spain’s first hero, a self-taught general of marked courage and
considerable skill; after his death Scipio pacified the peninsula,
and Spain became as much a part of the Roman Empire as Italy
was. In fact, the first two Roman settlements established outside
Italy and conferring citizenship were located in Spain.
The importance of Spain is illustrated by that unbroken chain
of Spaniards, that is to say, men born in Spain or of Spanish
parents, who made significant contributions to the Roman
Empire. Three emperors who well exemplified the glory of
Rome—Trajan, Hadrian and Theodosius—were Spaniards. So
were the two Senecas (in Spanish, Séneca), the second of whom
we shall meet in more detail at Córdoba. Lucan the historian,
Quintilian the master of rhetoric, Martial of the epigrams, men
of foremost rank in Roman literature, were also Spaniards. There
were others who served Rome well, the latest family being one
that came long after the empire, the Borjas (Borgias) from
Valencia, who supplied two popes, Calixtus III and the infamous
Alexander VI, father of Lucrezia and Cesare, and one saint, Francis
Borgia, third general of the Jesuits.
To see Roman Spain at its best, one must visit Mérida, thirty-six
miles up the Río Guadiana from Badajoz. Its history began only
in 25
B.C.
, when the Emperor Augustus authorized the veterans
of his Fifth and Tenth Legions to retire from active service and
take farms in the area, to be known henceforth as Augusta Emerita
(Augustus’ Veteran Colony), whence Mérida. A long bridge was
then built over the Guadiana, and Mérida became a chief link in
communication between Hispalis (Sevilla) in the south and
Salmantica (Salamanca) to the north.
Rome built greater cities in Spain than Mérida, but it was the
one whose monuments have been best preserved, and a visit to
its museum and excavations is like a trip to ancient Rome. It has
a wealth of important structures: an immense circus seating
30,000, where chariot races were held and where flooding enabled
boats to engage in naval battles; a well-preserved amphitheater
of 14,000 seats, where slaves were fed to wild beasts; an aqueduct
of giant proportions; and numerous arches and memorials. Three
sites, however, are of special attraction. The theater, which we
know to have been built during the second year of the city’s
existence, must have been a thing of marked beauty; it was a
perfect semicircle with four separate flights of seats reaching high
in the air. The proscenium utilized the full diameter of the circle
and was backed by five double-tiered pulpits, or forums,
supported by innumerable white marble columns. For about
sixteen hundred years the theater lay forgotten beneath rubble,
which preserved it, so that when serious excavations started in
this century most of the stones and pillars still existed and had
only to be raised to their original positions. Today the theater is
a masterpiece of imperial architecture, and one can sit in its lovely
semicircle and imagine how it must have looked when Plautus
or Terence was being presented. Or he can climb onto the central
forum, where statues of gods once more decorate the rostrum,
and imagine what it was to have been a Roman actor touring the
provinces. This theater is a national treasure of Spain and is again
