Iberia (17 page)
Authors: James Michener
you eat corn?’
pigs.’ They laughed again and asked if it were the same kind of
corn. I nodded, for in the fields of Extremadura I’d seen some
corn which if eaten young would have been as good as what we
ate at home. ‘Corn is for pigs and Mexicans,’ they said, and I
wondered if that was why Spain refused this food. When the
conquistadors invaded Mexico they found the Indians eating
tortillas, and in their pride, turned their backs on this major source
of food. Viva yo.
communication, for there was much they wanted to tell me. Forty
years ago, when the speakers were young…‘we had more than
two hundred people here. You can see the church, it’s rather fine.
But in recent years it’s been impossible to live in Extremadura.
The wages are just too low. So, many of our young men go to
Germany and work there for six or seven years.’
and her two cousins, and the priest’s nephew.’
absent. ‘How many would you say?’ I asked again.
Germany. A good many have gone to Barcelona.’
go to the Spanish city of Barcelona than to the German city of
Düsseldorf. A woman explained why. ‘When our men go to
Germany we know they’ll come back. In Germany they find no
Catholics, no girls to marry. So as they work they remember life
back home, some girl in this village. And they come home.’
He found a girl there. Life in Barcelona…’
another villager said, ‘in Barcelona it’s as good as it is in New
York. He was there one week and found a job at a hotel on the
Costa Brava. Tourists. Now he speaks French…my brother.’
argument, ‘if we could all go to Barcelona.’
and he did not speak, but he did make three most informative
gestures which I was to see often. With his right hand he fed
himself, signifying, ‘In Germany you eat well.’ With the thumb
and forefinger of his right hand he felt the cloth of his shirt,
meaning, ‘In Germany you can dress decently.’ And with two
hands he made the sign of a man driving an automobile. These
were the universal comments on Germany.
man nodded. ‘Then why did you come back to Extremadura?’
The man blushed and pointed with his head toward his wife.
was not good enough to pursue the nuances. Either the Spanish
government would not allow women to go or the pressure of
Spanish rural society was so great that any female who dared to
leave was considered as good as dead. From what happened next
I suppose it was the latter, for the villagers, seeing that it was going
to be some time before my car returned, took me on a tour of
Iberia
104
their village, and I heard a lament that I was to hear often in rural
Spain. ‘This house is closed. They went to Barcelona.’ Or, ‘This
house is closed. The sons went to Germany.’ One man said, ‘I
used to work in Jerez de los Caballeros. There were twenty
thousand people there then. Now there’s only fourteen thousand.
You must have seen the shuttered houses.’
They were taking me to the church from whose steeple the
injured man had fallen, and on the rude oaken door of the church
I read a poster in which some bishop of the diocese had long ago
laid down the rules which were to govern local life:
1.
Women shall not appear on the streets of this village with
dresses that are too tight in those places which provoke
the evil passions of men.
2.
They must never wear dresses that are too short.
They must be particularly careful not to wear dresses that
are low-cut in front.
It is shameful for women to walk in the streets with short
sleeves.
Every woman who appears on the streets must wear
stockings.
Women must not wear transparent or network cloth over
those parts which decency requires to be covered.
At the age of twelve girls must begin to wear dresses that
reach to the knee, and stockings at all times.
Little boys must not appear in the streets with their upper
legs bare.
Girls must never walk in out-of-the-way places because
to do so is both immoral and dangerous.
No decent woman or girl is ever seen on a bicycle.
No decent woman is ever seen wearing trousers.
What they call in the cities ‘modern dancing’ is strictly
forbidden.
The church was not open because with the sharp decline in
population it was no longer possible to provide a full-time priest.
In fact, I judged from what I was told here and elsewhere that
priests were in rather short supply. On one side of the church,
carved deeply into the stones of the wall and whitewashed, was
the name JOSE ANTONIO.
Wherever we went in that village the story was the same: ‘He
went to Germany,’ and I reflected that in the Golden Age of Spain
the men of Extremadura had gone out to Mexico and Peru to
build civilizations there, and none of their work had profited
Spain; now their descendants were leaving to build up Germany,
not Spain, and the creative energy of the land was once more
being perverted.
‘No,’ a woman reproved me when I raised this question, ‘the
men do send home money. There are many of us who would die
if it were not for the money from Germany. It’s not all loss.’
As she said this I came upon that sign which had blossomed
across Spain in recent months. The Franco government, always
alert to remind Spaniards of their blessings, had pasted on fifty
thousand vacant walls posters reading: ‘Twenty-five years of
peace.’ I pointed to the sign, and a man said, ‘He’s the only leader
in the world who can say that to his people. He did bring us a
quarter of a century of peace.’
Back in Badajoz, I sought out the structure which for a few
weeks in 1936 focused the eyes of the world upon this city. I was
told that plans were under way to tear it down and I trust this will
be done, for while it stands it is a monument to evil. If you go to
the cathedral and stand at the main entrance, you will see off to
one side the narrow and lovely Calle de Ramón Albarrán. ‘Who
was he?’ I asked half a dozen men from Badajoz. No one knew,
but several said, ‘Oh, that was a family well known in these parts.’
If you follow this street, looking at the fine doorways on either
side with their marble stoops which women wash each morning,
you will pass a neat barbershop and then the impressive entrance
to the College of Pharmacy, and at the far end, where the street
terminates before a massive red building, you will find yourself
facing the bullring. It is this building that is the terror and shame
of Badajoz.
Today it is simply another plaza de toros, round in shape and
with a billboard from which hangs a tattered poster announcing
the latest motion picture to be shown inside: Gregory Peck, Ann
Blyth and Anthony Quinn in
. Spanish is
defective in that in such a construction you don’t know in whose
hands the world is, because
su
stands for his, her, its, your, their
or one’s, and you must guess which. The interior is rather
attractive, in a nineteenth-century sort of way, for the tiers of
seats are made of rough stone and the slender columns supporting
the partial roof are of a handsome ironwork, with intricate
grillwork serving as capitals. On the grayish yellow sand, where
the bull would normally be fought, stands a forest of folding metal
chairs facing a very large improvised screen for outdoors movies.
A rusty yellow band of paint runs around the wooden barrier that
encloses the fighting area, while off in the distance to the left rises
a tall new office building of many floors.
On the morning of August 15, 1936, this bullring served as the
setting for one of the early climaxes of the Spanish Civil War. At
the outbreak of the rebellion of General Franco’s rightist army
forces against the legally constituted Republic, Badajoz like most
of Extremadura had come out in defense of the Republic, but
General Franco’s disciplined army units, beefed up with crack
Moorish troops from Africa, swept northward along the
Portuguese border, ducking into sanctuary in Portugal when
necessary, and by a flanking movement isolated Badajoz and
defeated the Republicans. The Spanish war now faced its first
public test: How would the Franco forces, when the world was
watching, deal with the citizens of a city that has surrendered after
fighting in defense of the government?
On that morning of August 15 Moorish troops swept through
the city, arresting any men suspected of having aided the
government, and many old grudges were paid off. Estimates vary
as to the number of prisoners thus collected, but Jay Allen, of the
Chicago
, who reached the city some days later, says that
after interrogating as many witnesses as possible he reached the
conclusion that there must have been about eighteen hundred,
including a fair number of women. They were herded into the
ugly plaza, marched past the cathedral doors and chased down
the Calle de Ramón Albarrán, where spectators on balconies jeered
at them as they scurried by. Into the bullring they were herded
while the seats in the stands filled with citizens eager to see what
was going to happen to their neighbors. Then soldiers of the
rebellion, infuriated by reports of atrocities which government
troops were supposed to have committed against captured rebels,
turned their machine guns on the mass of prisoners and shot
them down as they huddled against the yellow striped fence. Those
who tried to escape by running were shot in the way partridge
and deer are potted in the field. Of the massacre Allen said, ‘There
is more blood than you would think in eighteen hundred bodies.’
Later researchers, working upon a matter which has always
been shrouded in mystery and shame, concluded that the figure
given by Allen was too high. They pointed out that he did not
reach Badajoz until August 23, eight days after the massacre, and
that he relied only on the reports of excited and confused
witnesses, whose estimates would have to be guesswork. It is now
believed that the number who so died may not have been above
four hundred, and some question the event altogether. I have
never spoken to a man who would admit that he had been in the
bullring that day, but once at a café in Sevilla I was shown a man
who admitted to having been there. I asked if I could speak with
him, and friends approached him, but he stared at me across the
tables and shook his head no. Men in the bar said, ‘He told us it
was the worst thing a man could see on earth.’
I cannot permit the bullring at Badajoz to be my last memory
of Extremadura. I left the city one morning for a trip to
Alburquerque, with the blazing sun overhead in an unmarked
sky. There seemed no living thing abroad, neither insects nor
birds nor lizards, and when I was thinking that this was a man’s
land and that if a young Norwegian or Englishman or American
really wanted to test himself he would leave Cádiz in July and
proceeded slowly up through Extremadura to Salamanca, and
then he would know whether he was man enough to challenge
Spain, I saw across the drought-stricken field an old man riding
on a two-wheeled cart behind a slow-moving horse. I hailed him
and asked how things were, and he said, ‘I’m getting by. My two
sons are in Germany. But they’ll come back. Men always come
back to Extremadura.’
IIITOLEDO
The city of Toledo, a bejeweled museum set within walls, is a
glorious monument and the spiritual capital of Spain; but it is
also Spanish tourism at its worst. Anyone who remains in this
city overnight is out of his mind, and I was scheduled to stay four
weeks.
I was checked into a ratty hotel whose desk crew must have
been trained in the gorilla cage of a second-rate zoo, except that
if they had treated animals as they did humans, some society
would have prosecuted them. Throwing a key at me they snarled,
‘Room 210.’ They should have said, ‘Cell 210.’