Iberia (34 page)

I left the main exit road and headed for the cul-de-sac, which
turned out to be a miserable track leading down a hill, the last
part of which I had to negotiate on foot. The Torre Bermeja might
be a fine structure but it was clear that the people of Granada
thought little of it. Then it was before me, this soaring tower of
my imagination, and it turned out to be a pair of square, dumpy
things with undistinguished lines and little to commend them.
‘Is this the Torre Bermeja?’ I asked a workman who was hauling
out rubble from a nearby cellar and he said, ‘La misma’ (the
same); in Spanish the phrase ‘Lo mismo’ can have a fine sense of
contempt, as if to say, ‘Believe it or not, this is it.’ An improvised
wooden runway led up the side of the nearest tower to a gaping
hole, and through this I peered into the interior, but it was even
more drab than the outside.

‘It used to be a jail,’ the workman said. If so, it might have been
a dismal one even by Spanish standards, which were never high.
I scrambled down the hill to catch the other face of the tower,
hoping that there was some point from which the old semi-fortress
would look romantic enough to have justified Albéniz’s
composition, but there was none. I had before me a squat tower
built of ugly brick in the worst possible proportions, as far
removed in spirit from the music of Albéniz as one could imagine;
yet there was about it a fine heaviness, a kind of brutality that was
Andalusian. I was glad I had seen it, and had compared it to its
music, for although I was not aware of the fact at the time, the
experience prepared me for the intellectual adventure I was about
to undergo when I got back to Córdoba.

I describe it as an adventure, although I doubt if others would,
because it related to the nature of romanticism, and it was my
concern with this out-of-date literary style that had first awakened
my interest in Spain. I was about to visit one of the fountainheads
of Europe’s romantic movement, and this side trip to the Torre
Bermeja would serve as a relevant preamble; for what had
happened in the relationship between Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909)
and this tower was what happened whenever an artist became
entangled in the romantic fallacy: a man of creative mind saw
something in nature or history with an echo of the past, and
around it he constructed an inflated fantasy, often bearing no
relation to fact. Much of what had been written about Spain
suffered from this fallacy; people looked at old Moorish structures
and evoked from them a civilization that simply did not exist
except in the imagination. Few things I did in Spain were more
instructive than this visit to the Torre Bermeja, for it placed in
proper perspective the romantic interpretation from which Spain
suffers.

In the preceding sentence, and also in the opening of this book
where I refer to the romantic cast of mind and its relationship to
Spain, I use the word in its literary sense, referring to the Gothic
novel, the tragedies of Victor Hugo, and that artistic movement
common to all Europe in which imagination, emotion and
introspection were stressed in contrast to classical understatement,
and in which extravagant natural settings were chosen instead of
arid Greek landscapes. When I returned to Córdoba I was thrown
by accident into the heart of this literary romanticism, for as I
was sitting one day at a café in the Plaza José Antonio, studying
a road map and trying to decide how to get to the marshes lying
south of Sevilla, I saw a name which had played a major role in
the Romantic Movement: Hornachuelos.

I was surprised to find it a real place, a village of apparently
trivial importance off the main road and situated on the bank of
the Río Bembézar, which according to the markings on the map
ran at this point through a defile. With some excitement I asked
whether one could drive to Hornachuelos, and two Spaniards at
a nearby table said, ‘Fine road. Because farther along is San
Calixto, where King Baudouin of Belgium and his Queen Fabiola,
who is a Spanish girl, as you know…’ The men gave a rambling
account of how Baudouin had married the beautiful daughter of
a Zaragoza family and how their honeymoon at the monastery
of San Calixto had been interrupted by a revolution of some sort,
‘…in Belgium, that was, because here in Spain we don’t have
revolutions any more, thank God,’ and how Baudouin had left
his bride at dead of night and had sped down the very road I was
studying. ‘I think the Spanish government built the new road
especially for Baudouin and his queen,’ one of the men said.

‘At any rate,’ I interrupted, ‘I can use it?’

 

‘Best road in the district,’ he said. Then he had an after-thought:
‘While you’re there, don’t miss the Convento de los Angeles.’ As
he said the words I could hear an opera chorus led by Ezio Pinza
chanting the great prayer of the monks as they worship in the
Convento de los Angeles.

 

‘You mean there’s a real convent by that name?’

 

‘Boys’ school now. But it’s perched on a site you’ll never forget.’

 

I returned to my map and saw once more that magic name,
Hornachuelos. For generations it has captivated operagoers
because Giuseppe Verdi’s
La Forza del Destino
takes place in and
around ‘The Inn at Hornachuelos.’ I left the café, sought a
bookstore, where I purchased a copy of the Spanish classic from
which Verdi had borrowed his libretto.
Don Alvaro, ola fuerza del
sino
(Don Alvaro, or The Force of Destiny, 1835) by the Duque
de Rivas (1791-1865), then went back to the parador and packed
my bags.

 

The road to Hornachuelos led down the right bank of the
Guadalquivir and followed the old royal highway to Sevilla, now
superseded by a new superhighway on the left bank. After a few
miles I saw straight ahead and perched on a cliff overlooking the
river one of Spain’s most dramatic castles, that of Almodóvar del
Río, all crenelations and towers in good repair and as usual
abandoned. Some miles farther on, the Río Bembézar entered the
Guadalquivir, and this was my sign to turn north along the new
road built for the King of Belgium. In a few minutes I saw, off to
the right, a bare, whitewashed village nestling on the edge of a
cliff at whose feet ran the river. This was Hornachuelos, the
epitome of Andalusian villages, as clean and hard as the skeleton
of an ox whitening in the sun. At the oak table of an inn that could
have been the one in the opera, I took out the play which had
served as the Spanish counterpart to Victor Hugo and the German
romanticists.

 

The author was as romantic as his creation, a duque of great
inheritance whose liberal convictions had led him to speak out
against the royal tyranny of Fernando VII. Surrendering his seat
as liberal deputy in the Cortes, in 1822 he suffered banishment
and entered upon that long exile in Gibraltar, London, Italy,
France and particularly Malta, where he wrote exalted poetry and
cultivated his addiction to romanticism. Recalled to Spain when
the tyranny of Fernando ended, Rivas entered the government as
a minister, and when his tendencies had become less liberal, found
himself in charge of putting down a liberal revolution, which
when it succeeded threw him once more into exile, this time
because he was a reactionary. Again he wandered and again he
intensified his commitment to romanticism. In the end he had
acquired most of the honors to which he was eligible and was
recognized as one of the grand old men of Spain and of European
letters.

 

His masterwork,
Don Alvaro
, is practically a textbook of the
high romantic style. A play in five acts, it tells the story of a
mysterious young man of unknown antecedents who woos the
daughter of an impoverished noble family of Sevilla. The
introduction of Don Alvaro is classic and the despair of
playwrights who followed. At the end of the Triana bridge in
Sevilla a group of townspeople are discussing yesterday’s bullfight,
and here begins the description of the hero, whom we have not
yet seen.
SECOND TOWNSMAN
: The fight wasn’t as good as the previous
one.

 

PRECIOSILLA
: Because Don Alvaro, the rich fellow from Peru,
wasn’t there. And either on horseback or on foot, he’s the
best torero in Spain.

 

GALLANT
: It’s true, he’s a real man.

Why wasn’t he at the fight? Because he was beweeping the
termination of his suit for Doña Leonor’s hand; she still loved
him but her proud father forbade the wedding: ‘My friend, the
noble Marqués de Calatrava, is too haughty and vain to permit
an immigrant nobody to be his son-in-law.’

Bystanders say of Don Alvaro that he ‘is worthy to be married
to an empress.’ He is generous and tips well. He is valiant. ‘In the
Old Park the other night seven of the toughest thugs in Sevilla
jumped him, but he backed them like sheep against the mud wall
of the riding school.’ Another recalls that ‘in his conflict with the
captain of artillery he carried himself like a true gentleman.’

OFFICIAL: Then why doesn’t the marqués accept Don Alvaro?
Because he wasn’t born in Sevilla? Gentlemen can also be
born outside Sevilla.

PRIEST
: Yes, but is Don Alvaro a gentleman? All we know is
that he came here from the Indies two months ago bringing
with him two Negroes and much money. But who is he?
here discussing the matter, and one of them said that this
Don Alvaro made his money from being a pirate…
FIRST CITIZEN
: They say a great many things about him.
SECOND CITIZEN
: He’s a most mysterious fellow.

 

UNCLE PACO
: The other evening there were some gentlemen
GALLANT
: Jesucristo!
UNCLE PACO
: But the other held that Don Alvaro was the
bastard son of a grandee of Spain and a Moorish queen.
The priest says that it was proper for the marqués to reject such
a suitor, and the official asks what must Don Alvaro do, and for
the first time a forewarning of tragedy is struck, the fate that will
doom the young man.
PRIEST
: He ought to find a different sweetheart, because if he
persists in his rash pretensions, he will expose himself to the
sons of the marqués when they return to break the skull of
anyone who has trifled with their sister.

Because this is a romance, the two brothers are formidable,
one a soldier dedicated to defending his honor, the other a
hell-raising student at the university. Their sister, meanwhile, has
been sequestered at the family hacienda to protect her from Don
Alvaro. The stage is set for the entrance of the hero, and this
direction indicates how he arrives:

Night begins to fall and shadows obscure the theater. Don Alvaro
enters, muffled in a silken cloak and wearing a great white sombrero,
half-boots and spurs. Very slowly he crosses the stage, gazing with
dignity and melancholy this way and that, and exits by the bridge.
All observe him in deep silence
.

Where is he going? The observers guess that it must be to try to
see Doña Leonor, whereupon the priest whispers in a broad aside
to the audience, ‘I would be delinquent to my friendship with the
marqués if I did not advise him this instant that Don Alvaro has
been prowling about the hacienda. In this way perhaps we can
avoid a misfortune.’ Don Alvaro does go to Leonor’s room, where
the alerted marqués upbraids him. In one of the best inventions
of the romantic theater, Don Alvaro, in a gesture of submission,
throws his revolver at the feet of the marqués, but the shock of
striking the floor discharges the weapon and its bullet kills the
marqués, who, as he dies with Doña Leonor looking on in horror,
utters the fatal malediction, ‘I curse you.’

The second act takes place at the inn of Hornachuelos, where
we hear reports of how the brothers returned to Sevilla, seeking
vengeance. The scene shifts to the Convento de los Angeles, then
serving as a monastery, and at this point I closed my book and
started north to see where the tragedy had culminated. After a
few miles a narrow trail branched off from King Baudouin’s road
and led through a recently harvested cork forest, which in turn
led to the edge of a rather steep cliff. After one or two miles of
this rather frightening road, I reached the canyon of the Río
Bembézar, which lay far below. The road threatened to peter out
but finally turned sharp left and ended at the entrance to the
ancient convent, wedged in between a mountain to the left and
the precipice to the right.

As I studied the site a taxi drove up behind me and a father
and mother, he obviously a farmer, descended with a frightened
boy of eleven. ‘This is your school,’ the mother said reassuringly,
but the boy drew back and bit his lip to keep from crying. The
father tugged on a bell rope exactly like the one that must have
hung in that spot centuries ago, and the solemn bell began tolling,
perhaps the same bell that under similar circumstances had set
aflame the imagination of the Duque de Rivas one day around
the opening of the nineteenth century. A friar, such as the duque
might have seen, came to the gate and swung it slowly open to
admit the small family. He allowed me to enter too, and while he
processed the new student I was permitted to wander through
the school, and I noticed on three different floors series of posters
imploring boys to consider the priesthood as their vocation. The
drawings were modern, as if they had been done in some first-rate
industrial-arts shop in Milan or Rome; they had humor and color
and made the profession of the Church seem a desirable vocation,
with problems, defeats, triumphs and great spiritual satisfaction.
The fact that three separate series of about a dozen posters each
were displayed led me to think that the Church must be having
a difficult time filling its seminaries, and it required no
imagination to see the young boy who arrived with me electing
the priesthood in such surroundings.