Iberia (120 page)
Authors: James Michener
with outstanding qualifications, none of which disappointed me,
and after I had done impartial justice to all I was introduced to a
delightful newspaperman, Don José Vidal Iborra, who handed
me a small book of eclogues that his friend José María Lope
Toledo had composed in honor of Rioja wine, the titles of the
chapters indicating the somewhat reserved praise that was here
sung of this rare wine:
II
Hallelujah
Rioja and Nymphs
I was a novelist who had met Rioja head-on, but when I had
studied through somewhat wavering eyes this book of prose lyrics
I felt that the honor of American letters was at stake, and with my
cup overflowing with Rioja, and I use the word overflowing not
symbolically (I was holding my cup at a decided angle), I proposed
a toast to Rioja and explained in what satisfied me as fluent
Spanish that the first thing I had ever written in my life, so far as
I could remember, was a translation into English verse of that
memorable passage in Calderón de la Barca’s
in
which a shoeless man complains of his bitter lot until he meets
another with no feet, and I proceeded to recite both the Spanish
original and my sturdy rendition into English. At the end I
contrived a nebulous connection between Calderón and Rioja
wine, and although I fear I did not make myself wholly clear, I
was roundly applauded, except that Señor Vidal muttered, ‘He’s
got the wrong play.’
I have only the kindest memories of Logroño, and if I cannot
remember a single monument in the city or any public works, in
Rioja wine I found a friend whose dark red countenance and crisp
syllables evoke for me the spirit of pilgrimage wherever I
encounter him.
We entered the next town, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, at
about nine at night, and I had the good luck to visit the church
before I became entangled with the bibulous members of its
confraternity, for thus I was relatively sober and was able to see
the famous hen and rooster who account for this town’s fame.
Santo Domingo was a real man who had lived nearby and had
attained sainthood in one of the most attractive ways listed in the
hagiographies. He was born sometime between 1010 and 1030
and died between 1090 and 1109, but where he came from is most
uncertain. Spaniards claim him as a local lad; tradition says he
probably came from either Italy or the French part of the Basque
lands. At any rate, he felt himself drawn to a religious life and
tried to enter various monasteries, but the examining monks
found him too stupid. Accordingly, he built himself a small house
by the pilgrims’ route and from this served the travelers, never
seeing them in person, for he considered himself too dull for the
great ones to bother with. Where roads were bad, he paved them,
and is today honored as the patron saint of all who work on roads.
Where rivers were high, he built bridges, and some that he built
still stand. Where food was bad, he provided kitchens. And where
the sick accumulated, he built refuges. He was as saintly a man
as Spain has produced, and toward the end of his life, I believe,
one of the monasteries which had rejected him was proud to
accept him as a brother.
Often as he worked he must have contemplated that delightful
incident which had taken place to the east in the French city of
Toulouse around the year 1080, when a German pilgrim and his
son were much abused, only to be saved in the end by the
miraculous intercession of Santiago. Word of the miracle flashed
across Europe and was referred to in many documents from the
last decade of the eleventh century, and it so typified the spirit of
the Way of St. James that it became in time the Golden Legend.
Three centuries after Santo Domingo’s death the good people
of his village borrowed the miracle of Santiago at Toulouse and
transformed it into the miracle of Domingo at Calzada. Today
the story is told in this way:
A German couple and their handsome young son, from near
Cologne, stopped on their way to Santiago de Compostela at one
of the shelters built by Santo Domingo de la Calzada. The
innkeeper’s daughter became enamored of the young man and
(in one of my favorite versions of the legend) ‘wolde have had
hym to medyll with her carnally,’ but he resisted her advances.
Next morning the family resumed its pilgrimage, but the girl, her
love now turned to hate, denounced the son for having stolen a
silver cup, which she had secreted in his knapsack. Constables
were dispatched to overtake him and he was dragged back to the
town and hanged for the crime, but Santo Domingo, aware of the
lad’s innocence and chastity, kept his hands under the young
man’s feet and prevented him from strangling. When the parents
saw that their son remained alive on the gibbet they went to the
justice to ask that he be cut down and set free. The justice, who
had at that moment seated himself before a banquet of two roasted
chickens, one a cock and the other a hen, replied, ‘Your son is no
more alive than these chickens,’ whereupon the chickens sprang
to life refledged and flew off the table. Astounded, the justice
restored the young man to his family, none the worse for his
experience, and they resumed their march to Compostela.
To this day, on one of the pillars of the church of Santo Domingo
de la Calzada chicken coops are maintained; they are decorated
with life-size ceramic figures of a cock and hen, but inside, real
chickens are kept to crow or cackle during services, and one of
the prized mementos that a pilgrim can carry with him from his
journey to Compostela is a white feather from one of these living
chickens as a reminder of the fowl whose return from the dead
proved that Santo Domingo had really saved the hanging boy.
The confraternity of Santo Domingo, whose members look
after the church and the chickens, meets in a marvelous old
monastery which, since the time of my visit, has been converted
into a government parador. I was led to the six-hundred-year-old
cavern, which served as the meeting room, by certain members
who had heard I was in town, and they launched the evening with
some bottles of Rioja wine from a district near their town. I found
nothing to complain of, so we tried a different kind and it too
was satisfactory. In fact, we tried quite a few samples and they
were all good, and I recited again and the evening grew so
congenial that the confraternity elected me a fullfledged member;
I have the certificate still, proving me to be the only Quaker in
history obligated to watch over chickens used in the ceremonies
of a Catholic church. For the patrons who will occupy the new
hostel I can only wish that they have as much fun in the new
rooms as I did in the old.
Of Burgos I remember little. When we arrived at the reception
which Don Luis had arranged, we were ridiculously late; it was
around midnight, I think, but the hosts had thoughtfully arranged
some bottles of Rioja, which was as good as ever. I believe that
somewhere in the city there is a statue of El Cid Campeador, who
came from these parts. From below, at three in the morning, it
looks enormous.
And then the next day, in the mysterious manner in which such
things happen to pilgrims, I came upon four solemn events which
stunned me with their power to evoke the past. The day started
routinely with a cold roll and a cup of tea, neither of which could
I touch. Then came an inconsequential thing but one which I
remarked at the time as a good omen: we visited the famous Royal
Abbey of Las Huelgas (The Leisure Times) whose mothers
superior were so powerful that it was said, ‘If the Pope had to take
a wife, only the abbess of Las Huelgas would be eligible.’ I roamed
the place with double fascination, for it held an articulated statue
of Jesus, which reminded me of Alvaro de Luna’s statue in Toledo,
and it was to this abbey that Doña Ana de Austria finally came as
abbess after her long imprisonment because of her love affair with
the demon pastry cook of Madrigal. She seemed very real to me
as I studied the stones which had once known the passage of her
feet, and I thought how rewarding it was to travel when one had
such chances to meet old friends and to review old conditions.
When we left Las Huelgas, Don Luis said, ‘I think you’d enjoy
it if we got off the paved roads and used the ancient routes
followed by the pilgrims,’ so we departed from the highway and
went through much dust, which I did not enjoy, until we saw
looming ahead a small mountain which carried on its crest the
walled town of Castrogeriz, which was to be the scene of the day’s
first adventure. It was an echo of a town, really, a set of near-ruins
that had once been great in majesty but which were now occupied
by shadows and old people; where thousands had once lived in a
busy luxury, a few score now eked out a gray existence. We left
our car because we wished to walk into Castrogeriz as pilgrims
had done a thousand years ago, and as we marched across the flat
and dusty land the city became a shining target. How pleased the
hungry pilgrims must have been to see such a magnificent
settlement rising in the sky before them! The ancient road climbed
the hill, entered the walls and led down a very narrow street. Only
a few shops were still in existence; the huge hostel that had once
provided accommodations for hundreds each night was shuttered;
the mammoth church, once glorious and filled with incense, now
seemed close to falling down, and its sacristan was irritable,
complaining of the trouble I was causing in wanting to see the
gloomy interior.
It was this voice that did it! As I heard the whining I was
overcome by the most compelling sense of what it must have been
like to be a pilgrim in those days. ‘They said its name is
Castrogeriz. On a hill. I wonder if they’ll let us through the walls?
See the townspeople protecting themselves behind their shutters.
No food from them. That shopkeeper would cut your throat for
an empty gourd. Even the church is closed. But look. That’s where
they said it would be. The hostel’s open.’ And into the cavernous
building the pilgrims poured, assured of hot soup and a place to
sleep for one night…if they behaved themselves. As the
guidebooks of the time said: ‘At Castrogeriz good bread.’
Why should a complaining voice in this inconsequential town
have had such power to evoke a sense of pilgrimage? I don’t know.
Once I had walked sixty miles through this peninsula, carrying a
pilgrim’s staff eight feet long, and as it swung methodically
through the air (the point coming down every eight steps when
I was walking fast, every twelve steps when I was tired) I had
discovered what it must have been like physically to lug such a
heavy staff across Spain; the kinesthetic sense of the staff swinging
ever onward had drawn me forward with it. But not even the staff
and the long walk had told me much about how the pilgrim had
felt inwardly, but here in Castrogeriz, as I swung along the road
and into the town, I became a pilgrim in reality as well as in
imagination, and from that moment on I was to have a sense of
what these distant hordes of people experienced as they picked
their way from town to town across an inhospitable land, finding
occasionally at some monastery or hospital a friendship so warm
as to reward them for all the hours of isolation.
My second adventure that day came in the equally small town
of Frómista, where the serene little church of San Martín, built
in 1066, is considered by many to be the finest complete piece of
Romanesque architecture on the route. It is so pure and
unblemished as to be something of a miracle, and its apse is so
cleverly constructed of three interlocking semicircles of white
stone as to constitute a triumph of the ordinary. Anyone who
believes that stone, to be impressive, has to be ornate Gothic or
delicate Corinthian should visit Frómista, whose simple church
could profitably occupy a dozen pages of this report, except that
in just a few hours I was to savor the essence of Romanesque
elsewhere; my more lasting memory of Frómista is of something
quite different.
It was, as I recall, a very hot day when I studied this sturdy old
church and I did not know where we were going to eat, for I had
put my foot down and warned the marqués that I couldn’t
undertake many more lunches at five o’clock, especially when
they were preceded by an hour’s investigation of Rioja. Don Luis
accepted my caveat with grace, canceled a luncheon in some
nearby town and set out to arrange a picnic which we would hold
at some convenient spot along the pilgrims’ road. I considered
this appropriate, since in the old days most pilgrims must have
eaten along the way, but as we were standing in the doorway of
the church, wondering where to spread our picnic, we were hailed
by a singular man. ‘If you’re going to eat anyway, why not do so
in my garden?’ he shouted.
It was Father Miguel Bustillo Pérez, parish priest of Frómista,
a tall, sixty-year-old man of rugged proportions. He had an
impressive manner and a booming voice and looked more like a
successful bricklayer than a priest. He led us to his small parish
house, in back of which he had a lovely garden with trees and
benches, and there we spread our picnic. He supplied the wine
and much of the conversation; speaking of the old days in
Frómista he reminded me of a friar who might have wandered
out of the pages of Chaucer, and as he spoke, so fast that I often
lost the thread of what he was saying, I saw in him a revenant of
all the hard-working and hospitable friars who had helped pilgrims
along this way. When he called to us he had known none of us
and was certainly not obligated to extend any courtesies, but his
inherent conviviality had made him do so. What was more
important, it had made his powerful old church come alive and
underlined the significance of my experience a few hours earlier
at Castrogeriz. It was a fine, lingering afternoon we spent with
Father Bustillo, in his garden, one of our better Spanish picnics.