Iberia (3 page)

 

Thirty-five years ago the road from Burriana to Castellón de
la Plana ran through orange groves, at the end of which stood the
charming little city that was immersed in festival when I saw it
for the first time. For two days I enjoyed about as fine an
introduction to Spanish life as a young man could have, for it was
the custom in Castellón in those years to conduct the traditional
evening parade along unique lines. In the center of town, as in all
Spanish localities, unattached men walked round and round the
plaza in a counterclockwise direction while unmarried girls walked
arm-in-arm in the opposite direction, so that in any one complete
transit a man who kept to the outer circle was constantly staring
into the faces of beautiful girls, each of whom he would encounter
twice. I know it is difficult for people who have never courted in
this way to believe how easy it is to conclude understandings in
two hours of such parading, but when one has actually
participated in the constant meeting and judging and winking
and nodding that takes place, he knows how effectively the
courtship is conducted.

 

Well, this evening paseo is the same in all Spanish small towns
and in some large ones too, but Castellón added a feature which
was most attractive. Only half the girls paraded in the square. The
other half rested in balconies overlooking the promenade, from
which they threw down onto the men passing below small darts
trailing colored streamers. Since I had been easily recognized as
an American, not many of whom got to a place like Castellón in
those days, I found myself the target of many such darts and I
brushed them away.

 

‘Stupid!’ a harsh laughing voice sounded, and I turned to see
that the satyr bargeman who had ferried me ashore that morning
was walking behind me and explaining in a proprietary manner
who I was. ‘Stupid!’ he repeated, gathering up the darts which I
had brushed from my clothing. He explained that it was not the
darts but the colored streamers that were important and must be
saved. ‘Because,’ he said in Spanish that I only half understood,
‘at the end of the parade you are entitled to visit any balcony
decorated in the colors matching the streamers you hold.’

 

We paraded as a team, and when I saw my bargeman in
ordinary clothes and shaved I realized that he was not much older
than I and already his thundering life in the surf hauling immense
weights had made him an old man. We collected many darts that
first night, and when the music stopped he led me to one balcony
after another, and we danced and drank and ate anchovies and
met the beautiful and shy girls who had pinned us with their
streamers. Since I was a stranger, and what was worse, probably
a Protestant, the older women of the houses kept severe watch
on me, but the bargeman whispered that any girl of Castellón
who had even a little intelligence would know how to slip down
into the square, and he was right.

 

Later that night he led me to a corner where two girls waited,
and the four of us went to a vaudeville show, where the bargeman
insisted upon paying for the tickets. I tried to prevent this,
knowing that I could afford the money better than he, but in true
Spanish style, as if he were a nobleman of the grand school, he
flashed the money I had paid him that morning for the ferry ride
ashore and said loudly, if I understood his Spanish correctly, ‘He
paid this morning. Tonight I pay.’

 

I remember the entertainment for two reasons: there I saw my
first zarzuela (brief light opera) and was captivated by it; and in
the vaudeville portion I watched two robust comedians who,
whenever they wanted an extra loud laugh, announced that they
had come from Burriana. At each mention of my nonexistent
seaport the crowd roared. It was like comedians in New York who
coax cheap laughs by saying they’re from Brooklyn or those in
Chicago who achieve the same effect by being from Peoria.
Apparently every community has a neighbor which it regards as
ridiculous and I had chosen for my landing place in Spain a town
that was the butt of the coast between Castellón and Valencia.
My bargeman did not laugh at the jokes nor did I.

 

What a marvelous fiesta that was, my first in Spain, with a huge
workman to guide me and orchestras and girls throwing streamers
and comedians making jokes about Burriana, and the great
warmth of Spanish hospitality as one knows it in a provincial city.

 

I cannot remember now how I discovered my technique for
exploring a strange land, for I have followed this procedure for
as long as I can recall. I enter the country unannounced and
without a letter to anyone. I stand back and look at the scene
before me, talk with anyone who cares to talk with me, then go
to the bus station and buy a ticket for the end of any random line.
This drops me in some village out in the country, and there I
spend a couple of days just sitting and looking and talking. This
produces some very dull days, but also some memorable ones.

 

At the end of World War II, I did this in Canton and saw
enough of China to nourish my imagination for decades. I used
the same system in Bali, and later in Japan I skipped out of Tokyo
and wound up in Morioka, a small city to the north, where I had
a series of experiences through which I gained an understanding
of Japan that would have been denied me otherwise. I often forget
Tokyo but never Morioka. With its lantern-lit little shops and its
sprawling rock-strewn river, Morioka will be with me always.
Anything good I have written about Japan stems from Morioka.

 

Now, in Castellón I went to the bus station and found that my
plan wouldn’t work. It seemed that the only buses then available
ran to Burriana, but there was a railroad which wandered about
the countryside, and on the advice of a straggler I purchased a
ticket to Teruel, thus projecting myself into a corner of Spain not
often visited by strangers.

 

The train that carried me there consisted only of thirdclass
carriages, a euphemism for boxcars lined with rough-plank
benches which were filled before the whistle tooted, so that more
than half the passengers had to stand. When started, the train
moved quite slowly and threw an unusual amount of cinders
through the screenless windows. It was jerky in motion, creaky
in sound, antique in appearance and utterly captivating.

 

For it was filled with human beings of a kind I had not met in
my college textbooks on Spain. Here there were no grandees, no
industrial giants. There were no caballeros in leather, no beautiful
women in mantillas. There was only a jostling crowd of extremely
poor people, dressed in the oldest of clothes, huddled together in
a dirty boxcar. This was a Spain for which I was unprepared, yet
as I settled down and began to make friends with these apparently
suspicious and silent people, I found myself among some of the
most congenial persons I had so far encountered in Europe, and
the interminable trip developed into exactly what I had hoped
for.

 

For the first hour the train chugged south along the coast
toward Valencia and the oppressive smell of the boxcar was offset
by the sweet aroma of oranges, but then the line diverged abruptly
to the west and we began to climb a steep valley marked by low
mountains, a rushing stream and poor forests. Most of the day
we climbed slowly upward, so that I became convinced that Teruel
must be perched on a considerable mountain, an impression
which has never left me. How dull, how tedious that long day’s
trip could have been, with cinders in my eye and hunger in my
stomach. The land was bleak, with scarcely a town or any human
element to relieve the monotony, and such stragglers as we did
see appeared to be shepherds, incredibly poor. Even their dogs
were scrawny and lovable.

 

But the more forbidding the terrain the more delightful the
peasants in my boxcar. These were tremendous men and women,
hard as treated leather, determined as the mountains among
which we were traveling. When at a junction I purchased a
generous supply of bread and cheese to throw into the common
pot, I gained admission to the group, as it were, and the wine
bottles were passed to me and the tins of anchovies and the
rock-hard ends of sausage. We were all so hungry by now that
our odds and ends of food seemed a feast and it was natural that
the men and women who sang best should offer us a series of
quiet songs, nothing boisterous and nothing to tempt a man into
unseemly bellowing, but rather a quiet, forceful series of
statements about love and rural life and the fiestas that occur in
small towns. I could understand few of the words.

 

But as the day wore on I talked much with these people of the
boxcar. They were peasants, even those who lived in towns like
Teruel and Castellón, and their life was indescribably hard; one
of the strangest bits of information I gathered in my long
conversations was that most of these people were wearing their
best clothes. It was something important to be making so long a
trip by train and they were wearing the best they had. How pitiful
they seemed, with trousers mended four times at the same spot
with four different swatches of cloth, with dresses in which whole
panels had been replaced by cloth of a different color. Shoes were
shabby beyond description and socks were filled with holes even
in the nonessential parts that clung about the ankles. The men’s
caps were mostly torn and the women’s shawls were ragged at the
edges, and not because of fringes either. Such teeth as had been
lost had not been replaced and many of these people showed need
for a doctor, to whom apparently they had no access. Speaking
only of outward appearances, these people were as
poverty-stricken as any I had ever seen.

 

But about them, in all they did, there was a stolid dignity and
a profound joy. When they sang it was as if they were in a
cathedral, for they took each note seriously but not pompously,
and their voices blended for powerful effect. When they spoke it
was only after weighing each word, not for its effect but for its
appropriateness. The volubility which one thinks of in relation
to Latin peoples was not evident here, but rather the taciturnity
of New Englanders or Scots. But in both the singing and the
conversations there was joy, and when a joke was told it brought
forth the guffaws common to all rural people.

 

It was a remarkable day, one of the best I would ever spend in
Spain, and at last our tired and cinder-throwing engine chugged
up the final hill and brought us into the station at Teruel. ‘Adiós,
norteamericano!’ the passengers said softly as I hauled down my
small bag and asked directions for the heart of the city. These
people had provided me with a solid introduction to Spain and
I would be forever indebted to them. I was loath to separate from
them, but the journey was ended and they were now headed for
their separate homes. I visualized them going to English-type
cottages with hollyhocks about the door, as if they were the
ordinary rural people of Europe. Later I would see what kind of
homes they actually lived in.

 

For me Teruel was the introduction into a new world, the hard,
remorseless, poverty-stricken world of provincial Spain. The lives
I saw in Teruel were terribly confined within some of the
narrowest circles I have ever known. The streets were equally
narrow, as if hewn out of solid rock. The architecture was not
pleasing, like the panoramas shown in my textbooks on Spain.
The restaurants were uncongenial, the theaters were ugly and the
band in the central plaza played off-key. But there was a
compelling durability about this town that one had to admire,
and the longer I stayed there the better I liked it. I remember
chiefly the acrid smell of roasting chicory or some similar coffee
substitute, so that even today whenever I chance upon the smell
of burning chicory I think of Teruel.

 

On my first morning in the city, according to habit, I wandered
out past the edges of town to see in what respects it might be
different from the Burriana region or from Castellón, and as I
was walking along a country road I heard a voice calling, ‘Eh,
norteamericano!’ I turned to find at the doorway to a house one
of the men with whom I had shared my bread and cheese on the
train the previous day, and he invited me into his home,
something that I later wished he had not done, for I can still see
it as it was that day, and having seen his home I could no longer
preserve storybook myths about this powerful land of Spain.

 

The walls were of stone unchinked with cement or mortar.
They had, however, been tightly packed with clay and were both
water- and wind-proof, forming a solid and pleasing barrier
against the elements. The floor was of packed earth, worn smooth
by centuries of use, for I judged the house to have been built at
least three hundred years earlier. No dust rose from the floor and
it was surprisingly even, for through the centuries the earth had
been leveled until it was now at least as flat as an average flagstone
floor. The house had two rooms, the partition between them
consisting of some of the poorest lumber I have ever seen, scarcely
good enough for the making of a cheap industrial crate in a
country like Germany. I could see through the wall at many spots
where warping had occurred or the chipping off of fragments,
for the boards were paper-thin, and this in an area where forests
had once abounded and where to a lesser degree they still existed.
If lumber was being harvested in the Teruel district, none of it
was filtering down to homes like this.

 

The house contained one table, one chair, one bed, one cradle.
That was about all. There were no cupboards, no shelves, no
rocking chairs, no benches, no sideboards, no bathroom, no iron
stove, nothing. A man some fifty years old and his wife of about
the same age had each worked in Teruel for forty years, for they
had begun at the age of ten, and frugally they had saved their
money, and at the end of twoscore years of labor this was what
they had accumulated.