being used for dramatic presentations.
The museum housed in an old church in the center of the city
is more informative in that it contains a fine cross section of the
art uncovered in Mérida in the last two hundred years. Its massive
heads and clean-limbed statues are some of the best that have
reached us from Roman times, including an especially provocative
head of Augustus as a god, wearing a mysterious cowl over his
marble locks, but I preferred two smaller heads which legend
claims are his adoptive son and grandson, Tiberius and Claudius.
The statue of the former shows a fleshy young man with heavy
jowls, thick neck and flat-topped imperial hair. The face is
handsome but the mouth is thin and cruel, and if this is indeed
a portrait of Tiberius, it catches the spirit of that difficult man.
Claudius, on the other hand, shows a frail and narrow face, slight
neck and small ears. The hair is done in a more poetic manner
and is less flat. The marble face has a thoughtful look that could
be taken perhaps as vacant, and the mouth is weak like that of a
stammerer. Again, the essential personality of Claudius has been
captured.
But the glory of Mérida lies in the Roman bridge, a half-mile
long, composed of eighty-one huge arches. It crosses the two arms
of the Guadiana and today carries autobuses on its ample roadway
where two thousand years ago it carried marching legions and
their carts. It is a splendid construction, and those solid pillars
that bear the brunt of any flood are pierced by a small narrow
arch to permit the passage of excess waters. It was built of granite,
perhaps before the birth of Christ, and has this curiosity: the
arches are numbered beginning at the Mérida end and records
have been kept as to what happened to which. Thus we know that
Arches 11-16 were rebuilt by a Visigothic king in 686. Arches
21-22 were blown up by Spanish-English forces in 1811 to prevent
Napoleon from using the bridge during the siege of Badajoz.
Arches 29-31 were washed away during the flood of 1860, and
32-33 were lost in 1877. The Roman bridge was so important to
this part of Spain that in Extremaduran documents it was referred
to simply as ‘the bridge.’ It remains a majestic structure.
The arches have long served a double purpose, for they not
only support the bridge but also offer protected camping sites for
gypsy caravans that travel this road. I used to walk out across the
bridge and descend to the meadows on the far side, and there
under the arches I would see gypsy families, their beds spread out
beneath the arches, their tables set with spiced food, their women
in bright costumes, their men in more somber dress but each with
a rattan cane which was his badge as a horse trader. Beyond the
arch I would see groups of cattle, and I suppose that these camping
sites have been used in this way for the five hundred years the
gypsies have been in Spain. They are an undigested element in
Spanish life, beyond control of state and Church alike. Up to a
few years ago they were not even allowed in the armed forces, and
when Spaniards argued with me about discrimination in the
United States, I used to ask them about gypsies in Spain. Their
answer was, ‘Gypsies! They’re different.’
During my wanderings in Mérida I stayed at the Parador
Nacional, and because I shall be tempted to describe so many of
these paradors scattered about Spain, I had better describe this
one fully and have done with it. The noun parador is derived from
the verb parar (to stop). A parador is therefore a stopping place,
an inn, and these have been established by the government in
recent years to help meet the sudden and enormous influx of
tourists. They stand in spots which tourists would like to visit but
where private capital either could not or would not build adequate
accommodations, and in the opinion of travelers they are the best
system of inns in the world. Their charges are unusually low,
about a half or two-thirds of what one would normally pay for a
good hotel in Spain, and the plan seems to be for the government
to operate them only as long as necessary and when they have
proved their feasibility to sell them to private operators.
Where practical, the paradors are housed in ancient buildings,
such as old convents, monasteries, castles no longer in use,
hospitals dating back to the age of the Catholic Kings or inns in
which Columbus may have slept. One characteristic distinguishes
them all. In Spain interior decoration is apt to be pretty bad,
favoring dark massive objects unfitted to the human eye or
fundament, but the paradors have been decorated by some of the
most skilled art connoisseurs in Spain so that each is an experience
in good design; each contains handsome old furniture and is
embellished with paintings and brocades centuries old. The food
is exceptionally good; the personnel is trained centrally and then
sent out to the remote areas where the paradors are located. To
travel across Spain by halting each night at a parador is to know
travel at its best and most reasonable.
At Mérida the parador is housed in the Convento de los Frailes
de Jesús, which stands in the heart of town and dates back to
sometime around the year 1500. The numerous air-conditioned
rooms stand on several different levels, which indicate how the
old convent was added to as the number of friars increased, and
as one climbs extremely old stone stairs to his room, with its floor
of hand-hewn planks eighteen inches wide, it takes no imagination
to picture oneself in Spain four centuries ago. But the chief beauty
of this parador is the cloister of the convent, now used as a kind
of salon. It exists unchanged from its original days, a quiet,
beautiful square outlined by columns and arches. The former are
very old, but the capitals which top them are something you may
not see again in your travels, for they go back to Visigothic days,
that period during which raiders from the north of Europe swept
over Spain, drove out the Romans and established Christianity
as the state religion. The central part of the cloister is now a garden
filled with flowers and fine shrubs and with a well so old no one
knows its date.
During the year of which I shall be speaking I should be
visualized as living in such surroundings. Many of the paradors
I stayed in were more beautiful than the one in Mérida; some
were larger; others were in older buildings; and in still others the
food was so good as to qualify as some of the best in Spain. Of
course, large cities like Madrid, Sevilla and Barcelona have no
paradors, for there they are not needed, but in most areas of the
country they are within striking distance and represent the best
value in Spain.
I especially enjoyed the parador at Mérida because from it I
could walk to the Basílica de Santa Eulalia, and I want to spend
a few moments discussing this stalwart old medieval church, since
it established certain themes which will recur in this book. In
either
A.D.
303 or 304, when Christianity was fighting for a
foothold in Spain, a group of children in Mérida became infected
with the new religion, held to be both infamous and treasonous
by the priests of Rome’s official paganism, and much effort was
spent in trying to win the children away from Jesus, but they were
truly inspired with the new religion and refused to apostatize.
One day when a high official pleaded with special force, the girl
Eulalia, then twelve or thirteen years old, reared back and spit in
his eye. To teach the others a lesson she was burned at the stake.
Her tomb is reputed to be somewhere within the area covered by
the present basilica; however, when we get to Barcelona we will
find that certain partisans of that region are convinced that her
remains were translated there, where she is also the patron saint,
but serious students believe that two different saints are involved,
the Barcelona one being a literary version of the Mérida. At any
rate, their saint’s days are different, December 10 in Mérida and
February 12 in Barcelona. Much bitterness has been spent on this
issue, complicated by the fact that the city of Oviedo claims that
Eulalia’s tomb was moved there in 783.
On the ancient wall of the church appears in huge letters the
name JOSE ANTONIO, and beside the main entrance stands a
very old Roman temple. As I entered the basilica I had the good
fortune to meet a priest whose life had centered upon Mérida,
Father Juan Fernández López. From a very small village he had
come here to school at the age of six, had gone to Badajoz for his
seminary training and then returned to Mérida to work. He looked
as if he were still in his twenties, with a squarish face, dark
complexion and bubbling enthusiasm. He was an exciting guide
and I mention him in such detail because wherever I went in
Spain I was to meet either by accident or plan such men. They
are scholars in a quiet way, enthusiasts for their city or their
church, willing sharers of what they know. I shall not list them
all as I go along; let Father Fernández of the Basílica de Santa
Eulalia represent them, for they are one of the chief adornments
of Spain, a country where education is not widespread and where
the truly educated man is a kind of monument to himself.
Father Fernández was especially eager that I see two things: the
pair of old and friendly chapels flanking the main altar, for they
showed all the ancient grace of line and structure that I had missed
in the cathedral at Badajoz, and the pulpit. At the latter Father
Fernández wanted me to note particularly the bas-relief scenes
depicting the saints Servandus and Germanus, because he had a
tale to relate about how these boys who he claimed were from a
nearby village, but who were actually from Sevilla and Cádiz
respectively, had attained sainthood. I did not hear what he said
because I was attracted by a quite different saint carved on the
pulpit, and since he is to form the leitmotif of this book and the
subject of the last chapter, I had better introduce him properly
at this first appearance.
He was Santiago (St. James), the patron of Spain. He was
presented as a squat, sturdy man holding a staff, and a big-bellied
gourd and wearing a large-brimmed hat decorated with
cockleshells. He was a pilgrim, and judging from this first statue
of many that we shall see, a doughty traveler prepared for whatever
he met on the way. This was the famous Santiago. My heart
warmed to meet him, for he had played an intimate role in the
building of Spain.
Before I left Mérida I went to the two final buildings that help
summarize its history. The first was a gangling, ugly fortress at
the end of the Roman bridge. It was a square structure, much
longer than a football field on each side, and had been built
originally in 835 by Moors who had by then thrown out the
Visigoths and established Islam as Spain’s religion. In 1230
Christians again occupied the city, and the fortress passed into
the hands of that para-military organization, the Knights of
Santiago, who ruled it as their personal domain, a misrule which
lasted to 1500.
The final building was something quite different. Atop a small
hill at the south end of town stood a modern bullring, where
bullfights were held occasionally in the summer, and normally I
would not have bothered with what appeared to be an ordinary
modern edifice that could be duplicated in any of a dozen small
cities. The unique thing about the bullring in Mérida was that by
accident it stood precisely upon the spot where in Roman times
a great Mithraeum had stood, that mysterious and dark temple
to the rock-born Persian god Mithras, who had killed the divine
bull from whose body sprang all plants and animals on which
man exists. In any Roman garrison town, and at its height Mérida
housed 90,000 legionnaires, the Mithraeum was the most
important temple, because in its subterranean caverns occurred
the taurobolium, the ritual in which soldiers banded together to
purchase a pristine bull, then huddled beneath a grating on which
