Iberia (123 page)

 

Grandiose as the dream was, it came true. When I first saw the
result, as lovely as the two inspired Catalans had intended it to
be, I liked it, and the more I saw the more I liked it. From top to
bottom there is not a false note on either the outside or the in.
The two men who contrived this building were men of vision and
joy, but I shall not try to describe in detail the perfection of their
construction: the beauty of arch ribs made of red brick with lines
of white cement, the manner in which the afternoon sun comes
through the tesselated windows, the Moorish arches on one floor,
as lovely as anything in Córdoba, the Gothic arches on the floor
above, the grandeur of the paintings, and the sweeping splendor
of the circular staircases. What I should like to point out, however,
is that even in the basement the excellence of Gaudí’s inspiration
is visible; in fact, it is more apparent there than elsewhere because
one least expects it. The pillars are so varied that they have a kind
of orchestral beauty, yet each with a function that proves Gaudí
to have been well trained in classic architecture. One of the most
impressive modern sights I was to see in Spain was this simple
yet magnificent basement.

 

I spent profitable hours studying the place and concluded that
it was a monument to the expensive relationship between any
architect and his client, for I could hear Antoni Gaudí assuring
his bishop, perhaps in the Restaurante La Peseta over a dish of
marinated pork and garbanzos, ‘Look, Bautista, you’re already
in up to your neck. Why not find a little more money somewhere
and we’ll dig a moat around the whole thing.’ The moat is there,
deep and wide and paved.

 

Unfortunately, Bishop Grau died in 1893, when construction
had been under way for only six years, and work was halted. Gaudí
was fired as architect and the unfinished palace stood as a Church
scandal. A poor district like Astorga had no excuse for having
such an edifice and for years it stood empty. When in 1905-1909
it was brought to grudging completion, subsequent bishops were
ashamed to occupy it, but in the 1960s Bishop Marcelo Gonzáles
Martín, who many believe may one day be the primate of Spain,
cut the Gordian knot and decreed, ‘The palace will be a museum
dedicated to showing life along the Way of St. James in the Middle
Ages.’ At last the dreamlike building has a function, which it
performs well.

 

I cannot join in the chorus of abuse which has been heaped
upon both the palace and the bishop who authorized it. It is not
something that I as bishop would have constructed for a city like
Astorga, nor is it a building I would have planned had I been the
architect. It is about as unfunctional a structure as one could
imagine, and yet, of all the buildings erected along the Way of St.
James in the last three hundred years, it and the new church at
Estella are the only ones that capture the spiritual grandeur of the
pilgrims’ way. I believe that the millions who trod these stones in
ages past would approve, in a contrary sort of way, of what the
two crazy Catalans did, for in its flamboyant yet dedicated style,
this bizarre palace represents the continuity of the spirit which
animated the pilgrims. A church ought to be big enough to absorb
unique personalities like that of Gaudí and Bishop Grau. I for
one was totally delighted with their majestic nonsense.

 

At Ponferrada, on the other hand, I came upon a structure
which elicited no delight. There, on a high hill overlooking a
network of valleys, which because of the gold and silver they
contained have throughout history been of strategic importance,
a massive castle was erected in the early eleventh century. Manned
by the Knights Templars, it played a major role in policing one
of the wilder parts of Spain, but today the empty old building
sleeps quietly on its hill, one of the best-preserved ruins of its age
in Europe.

 

Why does the old fortress provoke mournful connotations?
Not because of what I know took place here but because of what
I can imagine. In the Crusades the Knights Templars played an
honorable role, even though they sometimes found it necessary
to reject kingly and Papal leadership and go their own way. During
a report I once made on the siege of Acre in 1291, the final
Christian defeat in the Crusades, I found occasion to study the
Knights Templars in some detail as they evacuated the Holy Land
in retreat to Cyprus, where they set about establishing that kind
of semi-autonomous kingdom which had marked their occupancy
of Jerusalem. In the Holy Land they had been too powerful for
kings to discipline; they disciplined kings. But now they had come
on evil days, so in 1306 the King of France, Philip IV, and his
Francophile Pope, Clement V, decided that the time was at hand
to exterminate these fractious knights.

 

Accordingly, in 1307, in what has always seemed to historians
one of the worst connivances in history, brutal charges were
brought against the Templars, and dissident members were
produced to testify that when they had joined the Templars they
had been forced to submit to sodomy, that the rulers of the order
expropriated funds rightfully belonging to either Pope or king,
and worst of all, that at initiation ceremonies the Mass was said
backward and made a mockery.

 

In hideous manner with fire and torture the leaders were
executed. Lesser members were hanged. The rank and file were
scourged from their castles and turned loose to wander across
the countryside, and by 1312 this once great order was eradicated,
its holdings absorbed by Church and king. Looking at the
Templars’ castle in Ponferrada, I could not help speculating upon
the terror which must have overtaken this mighty fortress when
word reached Spain that the King of France and the Pope had
found the order heretical and had ordered it dissolved at whatever
cost. Which disgruntled underlings, thirsting for revenge, lied
about their superiors in this fortress? Which addlepated young
men swore that their seniors had forced sodomy upon them or
had profaned the host in ceremonial mock Mass? Sitting within
the stormy old fortress, I wondered what the death agonies of the
last master must have been. Was he one who abjured the order
in forced confession or was he one of those Templars who endured
all manner of torture to die at the stake in flame and silence?

 

In my report on Acre, I wrote some fairly harsh words about
the Templars, their selfishness and lust for power; but never did
I find them cowardly or deficient in honor, and the manner in
which they vanished, leaving their embattled castles behind, seems
one of the most poignant historical tragedies, and I know of no
spot more appropriate for brooding upon this matter than
Ponferrada, because in this same region, in 1476, Fernando and
Isabel, and more particular the latter, faced a similar problem and
solved it in a more humane way. The Catholic Kings decided that
the powerful Order of Santiago, the Templars of their age, had
served its purpose; it had defended the weak pilgrims and brought
security to the Way of St. James. Now it had become a mighty
force generating its own power and direction, and like the
Templars, it had to be suppressed; but the Catholic monarchs,
unlike the French, brought no shattering charges against the
knights of Santiago. Isabel simply maneuvered so that her husband
was elected head of the order, from which position he quietly
disbanded the knights, and anyone who has seen Henry de
Montherlant’s moving drama
The Master of Santiago
, dealing
with the last legitimate master, knows with what dignity Spain
eliminated its equivalent to the Templars.

 

At unexpected spots along the Way of St. James the traveler
finds a crucifix or a shrine reminding him that he is passing
through a religious country, or he hears an old legend which
recalls the age of faith. Few surpass that of Noriberto, the citizen
of Luxembourg, who in the year 1080 joined five other knights
for a pilgrimage to Compostela. They composed an oath of fealty,
whereby each man volunteered to protect to the death each other,
and five swore, but Noriberto, aware that he was not a courageous
man, said that he could not. Nevertheless, as a secondary member
of the six he was allowed to tag along, and when Felix, the
originator of the oath, fell ill in Spain, the others, each eager to
be first at the cathedral, forged on ahead, but Noriberto stayed
behind to nurse the sick man. Through his agonies Felix called
for help, and always Noriberto was there, but in spite of all that
he did, Felix died and Noriberto abused himself for his failure. ‘I
knew I was not worthy,’ he mumbled. But when the faithless four
reached Compostela they found that Noriberto had preceded
them, borne on a white charger by Santiago himself.

 

At the little town of Villafranca del Bierzo, I was to have two
experiences, and since neither was due to planning on my part,
they were doubly rewarding. At a roadside café I was accosted by
a man I did not know, an English traveler heading in the opposite
direction, and he handed me a book which he had finished, saying,
‘You might like it, seeing that you’re headed west.’ It was
Corunna
,
written by Christopher Hibbert and published in London in 1961.
I was happy to get a copy, for Corunna is the English name for
La Coruña; this was an account of Sir John Moore’s disastrous
retreat through Villafranca and his death in La Coruña on January
6, 1809. For the next hours I was immersed in this mournful
history, marking on the map the battlegrounds through which I
had just passed; over this terrain Moore had led his disintegrating
army, deserted by his disillusioned Spanish allies and harried by
Marshal Soult, and the behavior of the English had become so
barbarous that I began to understand why Don Luis had spoken
so harshly of Moore, for in the retreat, and particularly in the
events centering on Villafranca, one saw a rare thing: the
degeneration of a British army and the ineffectual efforts of
General Moore to hold his remnant together and to maintain
them in some kind of decent discipline. The true tragedy of Moore
was not the incompetence about which Don Luis had joked nor
the burial about which the poet sang, but that he allowed the
spiritual control of his army to slip out of his hands.

 

By the time the English reached Villafranca, discipline had
vanished. English soldiers abandoned the English women who
had accompanied them; when one woman stumbled into a swamp
the men following did not try to help out but used her head as a
stepping stone to their own safety. Food depots belonging to the
English were looted and those established by the Spanish army
were expropriated with no regard for the native troops.
Monasteries were sacked; homes were ripped apart; castles were
assaulted as if the Spanish were the enemy and not the French.
There was murder and pillage and insubordination, and never in
the long account of British arms did an army behave worse.
Whatever discipline did appear in the ranks seemed to come from
German mercenaries serving with the British; what personal
courage and good spirits, from the Irish.

 

A handful of stern-willed English officers did try to maintain
some kind of order: floggings were administered, a looter was
shot, rapists were ordered to be hanged. But nothing substantial
was accomplished, and when even greater tribulations overtook
them on leaving Villafranca, the army came close to actual
rebellion.

 

I was interested in what memories Villafranca retained of this
debacle, and in making inquiries I encountered a second bit of
good luck. I met a distinguished gentleman whose ancestors had
owned the castle of Villafranca during that terrible winter of
1808-1809. The Condes de Peña Ramiro occupy one of the
surprising castles of Spain, a low-roofed, round-towered structure
that looks rather more like an enclosed Norman farm than a
castle; but it is so definitely a part of the peculiar terrain of this
region that it has an ingratiating charm. It looks, for once, like a
castle in which somebody really lives.

 

The Condesa de Peña Ramiro is a handsome, hard-fibered
woman in her middle years, with a face that reminded me of two
things: some of the paintings by Velázquez, and those
strong-featured Quaker women of Philadelphia who use no
make-up except a flawless complexion and a radiant inner beauty.
When I presented myself at the garden gate that gives access to
the castle grounds, she led me to a cool, tree-shaded part of the
lawn, where we sat on old stone benches and discussed many
things before we got around to Sir John Moore and the
catastrophe of Villafranca. She said, ‘I trust you’ve stopped by
our beautiful Romanesque church of Santiago and seen the Puerta
de Pardón. It was very necessary in the old days, that gate, because
the road from here on to Compostela is terribly difficult. The old
and sick who reached this far often knew they couldn’t survive
the last hundred miles. So we established this door in our church
which anyone of faint spirit could enter and receive thereby all
the indulgences he would have gained had he persevered to
Compostela itself.’

 

Later she showed me the door, a stolid, heavy thing consisting
of five recessed semicircular arches displaying figures in pairs. It
was a simple yet very effective portal, with a prudent, peasant-like
roof projecting out from the church wall to protect the sculptures
from rain. Standing before it, I could imagine the spiritual relief
attained by those pilgrims whose strength had permitted them to
come this far but no farther; for them the long pilgrimage was
over; they had been excused from the final drudgery by a very
real pardon.

 

‘What happened to places like this when Napoleon was chasing
the English out of Spain?’ I asked, and the condesa summoned a
young man of the town who understood these matters, and he
sat with us through a long afternoon and said, ‘For a hundred
years the peasants remembered that winter. They looked on the
English and the French alike as the enemy, and there was no
jubilation when either entered the town. Burning, looting and
hunger. When I was a boy old men said that of the two the English
were worse, but technically it was the French who were the enemy.
It was all very confusing.’