Iberia (128 page)
Authors: James Michener
The recent ruling which permits a degree of freedom for
non-Catholics is more significant than would at first appear, and
frankly I did not expect such liberalization so soon. Only a few
years ago a Protestant chaplain at an American military base was
arrested when he held a Sunday School picnic in an open park,
for this was held to be in violation of the law forbidding any
religion other than Catholicism to conduct ceremonies or
meetings for worship in public, yet I have explained that when I
arrived at Santiago de Compostela, the very heart of the Church
in Spain, the Church itself offered to facilitate my attendance at
a Protestant chapel. And when I was last in Madrid the newspapers
carried long illustrated accounts of the ordination of a native-born
Protestant bishop, but with the caption ‘Married and with two
children.’
Spain will remain Catholic, more completely so than either
France or Italy; newspapers will continue to report ecclesiastical
developments as headline news; and the Church will continue to
be a major force in the land. But a lively argument within the
Church will determine the social and political course it will take.
For example, during my last trip Spanish newspapers were giving
an inordinate amount of coverage to discussions in the Italian
parliament of a limited divorce law. I asked, ‘Why this sudden
interest in Italian politics?’ and a newspaperman told me, ‘We
don’t give a damn about Italy. But we’re much interested in the
attempt of a Catholic country to get a workable divorce law. We’re
forbidden to discuss a Spanish law. So we write about Italy as if
it were Spain. Everyone understands.’
As for the grandiloquent exhibition at Santiago de Compostela
on El día de Santiago, the outside observer has the suspicion that
whereas the oligarchy want desperately to believe that the present
system will prevail permanently, they have not convinced the
general population. When Admiral Núñez thunders, ‘We will
never permit either error or false doctrine to snatch away our
great treasure of Religious Unity,’ he is voicing more a hope than
a fact. If religious unity continues only as it is, the handmaiden
of those who rule, it must eventually be challenged; but if under
the pressure of younger priests it can change and adjust itself to
the spirit of Pope John XXIII, there could be real hope that in the
next time of change the churches and the monasteries will not be
burned.
It is rewarding to visit Compostela at any time, but in Holy
Years—that is, any year in which July 25 falls on a Sunday—there
are additional inducements, for then northern Spain holds
continual festival in honor of Santiago. The Holy Years fall in an
endless sequence of 6-5-6-11, and since the last occurred in 1965,
the next will fall in 1971 and 1976. I asked Father Precedo
specifically, ‘Are non-Catholics welcomed here during a Holy
Year?’ and he gave me a document which showed that during the
preceding celebration the senior government official in Galicia
had been Mohammed ben Mezian bel Kasem, a Muslim from
Spanish Morocco. ‘If we can tolerate a Muslim at the spot where
Santiago went forth to battle the Moors, we can surely welcome
Protestants.’
There were long periods when Holy Years meant little at
Compostela. In the early 1600s, after more than seven hundred
years as the spiritual center of northern Europe, it fell on bad
times because of an English pirate and a French king. In 1589 Sir
Francis Drake put together a large fleet with fourteen thousand
soldiers, with the announced intention of destroying Santiago,
‘that center of pernicious superstition.’ As his armada approached
the Galician coast, priests hid the bones of Santiago, and when
Drake retired, the location of the once-famous grave was
forgotten.
In 1681 King Louis XIV declared that thieves and pick-pockets
and false priests were so brazen in their robbery of pilgrims that
no Frenchmen would henceforth be allowed to make the journey.
Cynics suggested that what Louis was really trying to do was to
cut off the flow of money and trade goods into Spain, and he
succeeded.
For the next two hundred years the Way of St. James was largely
deserted, and then in 1879 devout priests rediscovered his grave.
From Rome special investigators arrived to check the authenticity
of the find, and after scientific studies by medical men and
archaeologists, declared this to be the ancient grave of Santiago.
The flood of pilgrims resumed, and a wise priest who worked at
Santiago wrote, ‘These remains, be what they may, have revived
the spirit of pilgrimage.’ Today that spirit continues as powerful
as ever.
There are within the region of Compostela four additional
pilgrimages worth taking which I had always felt constrained to
make. Two lie within the city itself and two outside, so it was to
the former that I now moved. On a bright sunny afternoon, when
giant figures on stilts paraded to the delight of children, an
enormous Moor proving especially popular, to judge from the
squeals he provoked, I walked through a chain of medieval alleys
to find myself at last on the edge of the city, at a spot where the
small Río Sar became visible, and there, along its banks, I came
upon one of the most remarkable churches in existence, a
structure so bizarre that I find difficulty in believing that it still
stands in this century.
As I approached the small stone building a band of children
gathered about me, singing sentences from a popular song, with
one enterprising boy of eleven shouting as the others sang, ‘Ten
pesetas, Englishman. Your only chance in this world to hear songs
in true Galician.’ I told him I doubted if he knew a word of
Galician, whereupon he joined the others in hideous wailing,
none of whose words I could understand. ‘That’s not Galician,’
I replied, and instead of arguing with me he halted his choir and
said solemnly, ‘All right, you want me to take you to the church
that’s falling down?’
I told him that I wouldn’t require his services; the church lay
directly ahead of me and I couldn’t miss it if I wanted to,
whereupon a devilish smile came over his childish features, and
he watched with growing pleasure as I approached the church
and found the door tightly barred. ‘You found it,’ he said with
evil glee, ‘but you can’t get in.’
‘Can you get me in?’
the woman sacristan, who had been on her way to open the church
from the moment I had first seen it. ‘You will like it,’ the boy said.
‘It’s the only church in Spain that’s always falling down.’
He was correct. It was the only church in Spain or elsewhere,
so far as I know, that is always falling down, and I did like it. The
Colegiata de Santa María la Real de Sar was built in Romanesque
style in the early years of the twelfth century and had a rugged
cloister attributed to Maestro Mateo of the Pórtico de la Gloria.
What makes the church unique, however, and a center for
pilgrimages by those who love architecture, is the fact that its two
lines of heavy interior columns are not perpendicular, like those
of a self-respecting church, but are cocked outward from the
central nave to such an extreme degree that they seem about to
topple over into the aisles.
The effect of this unnatural pitch is such as to induce vertigo.
You are reluctant to believe that anyone would build a church
like this on purpose, and your first impression is, ‘I must be dizzy.’
Then, when your senses have adjusted to this weird visual
sensation, you begin to argue with what you are seeing. ‘They
couldn’t lean so far over and not fall down.’ But they do, and
when the sacristan shows you the spot from which the pillars
exert their maximum effect, some leaning this way and others
that, your eye jumps back and forth between the extremes,
unwilling to accept what stands before it.
‘What happened?’ I asked the sacristan.
‘Even though the pillars are falling down, He can sustain them.’
She then took me outside to show me the massive flying buttresses
that had obviously been added at some later time. ‘When the great
earthquake struck Lisboa in 1755 the effects rumbled right across
Galicia and we lost many buildings. When the quake stopped,
people ran out to see if the church was still standing. It was, but
the walls were weakened. So these buttresses were needed to
reinforce the pillars at the top.’
and he said, ‘We believe that the architect originally planned it
to look somewhat as it does today. For some reason we can’t
comprehend, he wanted to show what could be done with pillars
off the perpendicular. But when the church was up, an
underground river was found to be eating away the foundations
and for that reason the flying buttresses had to be added, probably
long before the earthquake.’
It defies reason and abuses the senses, but it is a rugged building
that has been in the process of falling down for the last eight
hundred years, and barring further earthquakes and wandering
subterranean rivers, it looks good for the next eight hundred.
required only a few steps from the cathedral, for the far side of
the Plaza de la Quintana, the austere one which contains the
Puerta Santa with the twenty-four, is delineated by the wall of the
Monasterio de San Payo, now a Benedictine convent, deeply
engraved with that ever-present rubric:
JOSE ANTONIO
. I have
seen so many of these fearful signs on churches across Spain, and
without anyone’s ever commenting upon them, I suspect that
Spaniards may be just a little embarrassed by the whole-hearted
manner in which their bully-boy has been identified with their
religion. Had Germany and Italy won World War II and had beefy
men like Hermann Goering and Count Ciano been forced down
the world’s throat as authentic gods, then surely José Antonio
would have been their Spanish counterpart; but the ideals
represented by these three deities did not prevail, and today when
one sees the name of the Spanish Fascist cut into the walls of so
many churches, one feels a sense of anachronism.
inconspicuous church of the convent which contains an altar so
baroque, so outrageously gingerbread, that it serves as a corrective
to Romanesque austerity. Even the purist needs a touch of the
bizarre; any man who loves the cold asperity of El Viti ought to
relax now and then in the sunny warmth of Curro Romero’s
arabesques, and for me such relaxation is found in this convent
church.
decoration, flank the approach to the main altar, and from the
moment one sees these warning sentinels he prepares himself for
an orgy of gilt and exaggeration, for the pillars are twisting
Solomonic columns in which foliage inter-twines with plaster
angels, with horsemen whose mounts are rearing furiously, with
wreaths, whole landscapes, bas-relief scenes from the lives of
saints, and with a host of odds and ends thrown helter-skelter in
hopes that some might stick. Most did.
feet across and seventy high, which stands well to the rear. Every
inch of this huge construction is plastered not only with gold leaf
but also with figures of saints unnumbered, niches carved deep
with flowers, propitiatory tablets set off in high relief, life-sized
horsemen galloping forth at strange angles, good men ascending
to heaven and other good men being beheaded by pirates. Here
the smaller pillars which outline the altar are covered with so
many golden vines, shields and flying angels that they seem to be
crawling, while over everything there is such a wealth of glitter
and gold, of precious stones and violent movement, that the eye
is not permitted a moment of repose. Yet the altar and its two
forward pillars are so harmonious in their relationship that the
overall effect is pleasing.
countryside of Galicia, which hardy English travelers have
considered the best region in Spain. I like it very much, a hard,
cold, dour land resembling Scotland, where I took my graduate
education. The food is heavy, like Scottish food; the dress is
colorful, like Scottish dress; like Scots, the Galicians have to be
cautious if they are to subsist on their harsh land; the bawdy sense
of humor of the two peoples is alike; and the music of Galicia
comes from the bagpipe, an instrument almost identical in
construction and sound to that made famous by the Highlanders
of Scotland. Of course, when I compare the sturdy Galicians with
the Scots I knew in my youth I am not, God forbid, referring to
the pasty Lowlanders of Robert Burns and Walter Scott but to
the honest Highlanders of Ross and Skye and the Outer Isles.
observant traveler the secret of this land: the granite rock which
is both the glory and the curse of the region. From deep quarries,
which seem to abound, the Galician digs out a gray-and-white
flecked granite which he uses for everything. A farmer wants a
barn? He builds it of granite. He wants a corncrib to protect his
grain from rats? He builds one of solid granite. Garages, lean-tos,
small homes and large are all built of this fine stone, and nowhere
else in Europe could one find so many skilled stonemasons. This
sounds ridiculous, but in the fields even fences, which in other
parts of the world would be built of wood, are here built of granite:
long thin slabs, beautifully cut and stood on end to form stony
palisades. Galicia is the granite land.