Iberia (130 page)

 

‘She was the soul of our people,’ the mayor continued, and as
he spoke I reflected that he must be the only mayor in the world
who was both a museum director and an expert on imagist poetry.
‘She had a tortured and miserable life, but she sublimated it in
her poetry.’

 

Rosalía of the Castros, a name which in her case had special
meaning, was born in Santiago de Compostela in 1837, the child
of an unmarried daughter of one of the region’s important
families. She was reared by suspicious relatives who did not hide
from her the fact that her father, who continued to live in
Compostela, could not marry her mother or acknowledge himself
to be her father for a reason so final as to permit no discussion:
he had been ordained a priest. Rosalía knew him and followed
his career until he died, an inconspicuous padre in Padrón, the
port at which the body of St. James had landed eighteen hundred
years before.

 

Rosalía was a heavy, awkward girl who lived her poetry before
she wrote it. ‘I believe she had an exceptionally wide field of
consciousness,’ Filgueira-Valverde said. ‘She was always interested
in thoughts, affections, intimateness, sentiment and the cultivation
of one’s self and one’s philosophical analysis.’ She married a dwarf
who was equally tortured, a writer who existed only on the fringe
of movements without ever directing or understanding them,
and the two had an unhappy life, although they did produce six
children who shared their anxieties and accomplishments. At
forty-eight Rosalía was dead, but she left behind three books of
poetry,
Galician Songs
, published in 1863;
New Leaves
, published
in 1880 when she was forty-three; and
On the Banks of the Sar
,
which appeared in 1884, the year before her death, and it is these
poems on which her reputation is founded.

 

She reminds me of Emily Dickinson, more acquainted with
the world than Emily but like her the creator of a personal world
which she described with passionate conviction. Her poems are
disturbingly simple in construction, depending upon unexpected
rhymes and rhythms.

Dig it with all speed, dig it,

Rosalía had an intense identification with her natural
surroundings and seems always a captive of them.

 

Thought, you gigantic digger.

 

Dig a very deep hole, where we can bury

 

Remembrance of what’s over.

Give me your perfumes, loveliest of roses.

 

Oh, quench the burning of my thirst, clear fountains,

 

For it is scorching me. Clouds made of gossamer

 

Like veils of lightest lace now cover over

 

The bright beams of the sun at its most burning.

 

And you, you temperate and loving breezes,

 

Make a beginning of mysterious concerts

 

Among the oak trees of the shaded farmland

 

Through which the Sar passes with a light murmur.

I, like many pilgrims to Compostela, like especially her poems
dedicated to the cathedral of the pilgrim spirit. They have been
translated recently, under the direction of Filgueira-Valverde, by
the American poet Charles David Ley, who has wisely not
attempted to reproduce the almost accidental rhymes which
Rosalía sometimes uses. Of the Pórtico de la Gloria she says:

In highest heaven

 

The band of musicians is starting.

 

Those who play the concert in Glory

 

Are tuning their instruments happily.

 

Are they alive? How can those faces

 

Which look so genuine be merely stone ones?

 

How could stone make those marvelous tunics,

 

Those eyes which speak of the life within them?

 

You who chiseled them with God to help you,

 

Master Mateo, your name’s immortal.

 

Since you remain kneeling there so humbly,

 

Speak to me now and tell me about it.

 

With your curly locks around you, you’re silent.

 

‘Saint they bump their heads against,’ I’m praying.

But in Galicia this strange woman is loved primarily for her skill
in catching the life of the countryside, and in a series of poems
that are at once completely feminine yet hard as the granite of
Galicia, she speaks of the most ordinary experiences:

What’s the lad up to?

 

What can it be?

 

Now he looks at me with a face like winter.

 

Up at the mill, he wants me to dance with him
And won’t talk to me down in the village.

 

What’s the lad up to?

 

What can it be?

Occasionally, when she sings of the small incidents of Galician
life, she gives her words an unexpected twist which throws them
into a universal aspect; she has transmuted Galicia into the whole
world, and the expansive horizons of which the mayor speaks
when referring to his favorite poet become apparent, as in the
longer poem in which she sings of the Feast of the Rock, held
beside the sea in one of the Galician rías:

The quiet little tickles, the humorous tussles,

 

The shouts and the leaping, and good-natured tales,

 

Everyone tipsy and everyone quite merry
And Our Lady is stood there behind the cask
.

As my affection for Galicia has increased, so my interest in this
heavy and almost ugly woman has grown. To a newspaperman
to whom she refused to give a photograph of herself she said,
‘Women such as I, who have not received the splendid gifts of
physical beauty from nature, must be excused from exposing their
faces to public view.’ And now, as the long afternoon waned, I
asked Mayor Filgueria-Valverde and Dr. Sánchez Cantón a
question which had concerned me for some time: ‘I’ve been
studying the lives of your two most famous Galician writers, both
women, Rosalía de Castro and the Condesa Emilia Pardo Bazán,
whom I read years ago as a student, and I find numerous
references to the fact that these two women, both residents of
Compostela at one time or another, engaged in a long feud. Some
claim that the condesa, who had all good fortune on her side with
a great name and a better education, treated Rosalía very shabbily.’

I might have dropped a bomb with less impact than this literary
question produced. At first they were astonished that an American
wandering through Galicia had come upon this ancient female
feud; then they were disgusted that such rumors had persisted;
finally they were eager to clear up the matter. It was, of course,
the ebullient mayor who led off with a fiery speech which
reminded me of how seriously Spaniards take these literary brawls.

‘Michener, I give you my solemn word, knowing much about
each of these great women, that it was not a feud. Rosalía must
be seen as a romantic, a solitary, one who broods incessantly,
whose life consists of this tiny corner of Galicia into which she
digs with an intensity that most human beings never know.’ He
spoke of the dead poet with tears in his voice and deep love, but
then his voice changed and he became a resonant orator: ‘Pardo
Bazán, on the other hand, was a complete woman, very intelligent,
of suave temperament, sensual, an activist, extremely realistic, a
critic of world literature, the translator of Voltaire, but above all
a grand aristocrat. She was most erudite, and educated herself a
second time in Paris in revolutionary ideals. Remember one fact
when you think of the two women. Pardo Bazán never wrote in
Galician. Rosalía did.’

‘You have explained away the fight,’ I said, ‘but you speak with
such fury that I’m sure one existed. What was it about?’

 

The mayor placed his large hand on my arm and said, ‘As one
literary man to another I must tell the truth. It was the age-old
case of a husband in a secondary position who fought the whole
world in his wife’s name, not because he wanted to protect his
wife but because he wanted to insult the world which had ignored
him. He fought my father. He fought Pardo Bazán. He fought
everyone. You can say of him that he was an archivist who filed
his fights in neat order, a historian who kept good records of his
triumphs and defeats. He survived his wife by thirty-eight years,
during which his embattled defense of her became his life’s
mission.’

 

‘But was there a feud between the two women?’ I persisted.

 

‘The family of Emilia Pardo Bazán had a castle in Cambados.
They had many castles. Why would their daughter want to fight
with a poor countrywoman who had no father? Why? Tell me
why?’

 

I had hoped that these two scholars would tell me why, but like
granite-hewn Galicians they hovered protectively over the ghosts
of these two fine women, and from them I would learn no more
of the passions which once agitated this region. I was haunted,
however, by a picture which had somehow been built up in my
mind, I do not know how or with what authority: I see the great
Condesa Pardo Bazán, rich with honors as one of Spain’s leading
novelists, sought after by publishers in both Madrid and Paris, a
regal and handsome woman somewhat austere in manner. She
is attending a dinner being given in her honor and somehow she
is brought face to face with a countrywoman, big-boned and
awkward and unlovely, fifteen years older than herself, to whom
she refuses either a place at table or the ordinary civilities. The
novelist is wealthy from her books; the poet so far as we know
never gained a peseta from her poems, and between them as I see
them in this persistent portrait there is a gulf that life did not
permit to be bridged.

 

I do not invent such things. Obviously I could not have known
either Emilia Pardo Bazán or Rosalía de Castro, and so far as I
know have never read a complete life of either, but somewhere
years ago in my wanderings I picked up this strange story of the
feud between the two women and I wish I knew what the facts
were.

 

On my last day in Galicia I did what millions of pilgrims before
me had done. I went to land’s end at Finisterre, that wild and
distant point of rock which had been my introduction to Spain
so many years before, and there at the foot of the lighthouse, on
a headland looking westward to the New World with which Spain
had been so deeply involved, I tried to summarize what I had
learned of this contradictory nation in the years that I had known
it. So much of what I had wanted to accomplish in Spain had
ended in failure. I, who love music so much, had never once since
that first night in Valencia witnessed a complete flamenco, and
the failure was not in my trying; it is simply that flamenco cannot
be ordered; one must be at the right place at the right time when
duende is upon all present. The duende I had missed. Nor had I
heard one note of Pedrell’s music, though I had traveled far to
do so.

 

I had never once, in all my years in Spain, eaten a good paella,
even though my wife and I love rice and seek it out in restaurants
around the world. At Eliot Elisofon’s home in New York I’d had
a fine paella, and at a Greenwich Village restaurant I’d had one,
but never in Spain. As with flamenco, one must be at the right
table at the right moment, for otherwise he is fed dreadful stuff
which the cook has the gall to name paella.

 

Nor had I seen Curro Romero, he of the burning legend,
perform even halfway decently. I’d seen him patiently in more
than twenty corridas, that is, with forty-odd different bulls, but
never once acceptable. At Finisterre, Vavra and Fulton consoled
me: ‘Come back next year, and go to the feria at Sevilla and then
to San Isidro in Madrid and to San Fermín at Pamplona and on
to Valencia and Málaga and Vitoria and Bilboa and Barcelona
and wind up in Zaragoza, and maybe some afternoon you’ll see
him good.’ The schedule they proposed would require me to
attend some eighty corridas on the remote possibility that I might
see one acceptable, four hundred and eighty bulls to see the great
Curro Romero good in one.

 

‘The odds are against me,’ I pointed out.

 

‘Ah, but if you see him great…just once…’

 

Much of Spain is like that. If one is willing to come back four
hundred and eighty times, he may see something which will
forever haunt him, and to those who have seen these things the
odds are not excessive, for when duende is upon this land it offers
an illumination that cannot be found elsewhere. And of course,
the proposal made by my two companions, that I trek back and
forth across Spain for months in search of that golden moment,
would yield compensations other than the discovery of the
moment itself, and this I knew. The search, the renewal of
acquaintances with this land and people, would be worthwhile.
I am convinced that in Spain I shall never hear good flamenco,
nor eat a decent paella, nor see Curro Romero good, but I would
always be eager to return for the effort, because we seek duende
not to find it but to be assured that it exists at certain times in
certain men.

 

Strangely, it was not until I returned to New York that I
appreciated the gracia of the Curro Romero story, for there I met
once more Conrad Janis, who had told me of Romero in the first
place, and he said, ‘I was present in Madrid when something
happened regarding Curro which would interest you. His manager
told him at the end of 1965…Now understand, this was Curro’s
greatest season. Fights everywhere. So his manager reports,
“Curro, we’ve had to spend so much money buying off the
critics…to prevent them from writing the truth about your bad
days…Well, there’s to be no profit this year.” Curro asked, “You
mean all those fights, all that travel back and forth and nothing
left at the end of the year?” The manager said, “Well, we’ve lived
well and you did have that one great afternoon that everyone’s
still talking about.” Tears came into Romero’s eyes. I can vouch
for this. I was there. And he said, “To think that with the terrible
fear I have each time I face the bull…the agony…the disasters.
To face that all year. And at the end to have nothing.”’