Iberia (35 page)

I left the old convent and sat on a wall along the edge of the
cliff to read the famous stage direction of the third scene of the
second act; it had inflamed the readers of its period, including
Verdi in Italy, and is still remembered as one of the classic bits of
the romantic age:

The theater represents a piece of level ground wedged into the declivity
of a rude mountain. To the left, precipices and craggy steeps. Facing,
a profound valley traversed by a rivulet on whose bank can be seen
in the distance the village of Hornachuelos, terminating at the foot
of high mountains. To the right, the façade of the Convento de los
Angeles, of poor and humble architecture. The great door of the
church is closed, but workable, and over it a semicircular window of
medium size through which can be seen the shimmering lights from
within; closer to the proscenium, the door of the porter’s lodge, also
workable but closed, in the middle of which a peephole which can be
opened or closed and at the side a bell cord. In the middle of the stage
there will be a large cross of rough stone corroded by weather, rising
from four steps which can serve as seats. All will be illuminated by
a brilliant moon. From within the church will be heard the pealing
of the organ and the choir of monks singing their matins, while from
the left, very fatigued and dressed like a man in a hooded coat with
sleeves, a sombrero with drooping brim and boots, staggers Doña
Leonor
.

The simple plot is now prepared. Doña Leonor, burdened with
the guilt attached to her father’s death, will have nothing to do
with ill-fated Don Alvaro, who has joined the Spanish army in
Italy to seek an honorable death. She is allowed to inhabit a grotto
near the convent, disguised as a monk, and plans to spend the
rest of her life in a remote cell. Her soldier brother, seeking Don
Alvaro, also goes to Italy and unwittingly finds himself in the
same regiment as the Peruvian, who saves his life. In spite of this,
the brother is determined to kill Alvaro and goads him to a duel.
Alvaro kills this brother, whereupon the university student
intensifies his efforts to track down the Inca who has betrayed his
sister and killed his father and brother, but he has a hard time
finding Don Alvaro, because the latter has grown weary of a life
so stalked by doom and has decided to enter this same convent
as a monk, not realizing that Doña Leonor is living nearby. To
this rocky defile the student finally comes and in a scene of wild
passion duels with Alvaro and receives a mortal wound, but when
he calls for extreme unction he uncovers the fact that his sister
and Don Alvaro have been staying in the same holy place.
Assuming them to be sharing their guilty love and revolted by
the profanation, he stabs his sister to death and himself dies. What
happens to Don Alvaro we shall see in a moment.

The play introduced certain conventions of the romantic
theater. When the plot reaches an impasse at which the
masquerade of the soldier brother must be disclosed if he gives
his right name, and when there was no reason for him not to do
so, he turns to the audience and delivers these inventive lines:

DON CARLOS
: (
Aside
) I think I won’t tell the truth. I am Don
Félix de Avendaña.

At another point the hero uses for the first time on any stage a
gesture which will become traditional furniture on the romantic
stage:

DON ALVARO
: Woe is me! Woe is me! (
He presses the back of
his hand against his forehead and remains in great agitation
.)
Romantic excess reaches its climax in the closing scene, which
became notorious. I have never seen
Don Alvaro
on stage, but
I’ve read several contemporary reports of its reception and this
last scene was apparently a shocker. I wish the Spanish department
of some American university would stage the play if only that I
might see this final scene:
There is a long moment of silence; thunder sounds stronger than
ever, and lightning increases as we hear in the distance the chanting
of the Miserere by the holy community, whose members come slowly
closer
.
VOICE
: (
From within
) Here, here what horror! (
DON
ALVARO
recovers from his fainting spell, then flees toward the
mountain. Enter the
GUARDIAN FATHER
and the holy fraternity
.)
GUARDIAN FATHER
: My God! Blood spilled everywhere.
Cadavers. The penitent woman.

 

THE FRIARS
: A woman! Heavens!

 

GUARDIAN FATHER
: And you, Father Rafael!

 

DON ALVARO
: (
From a crag, completely convulsed in a diabolical
smile
) Seek, fool, for Father Rafael. I am the ambassador
from hell. I am the fiendish exterminator. Fly, miserable
ones…

 

ALL
:
Jesús! Jesús
!

 

DON ALVARO
: Hell, open your mouth and swallow me. Let the
heavens crash. Perish the human race.

 

Extermination…destruction…(
He climbs to the highest point
on the mountain and leaps off
.)

 

GUARDIAN FATHER
and
FRIARS
: (
Kneeling in diverse attitudes
)
Misericordia, Father! Misericordia!

 

Little can be said in defense of such an ending; in its way it is
as bad as the fake classicism it supplanted. Excess in either
direction was regrettable, but the grotesqueries of romanticism
had the added weakness of being open to burlesque, so when the
duke’s play had been on the boards for some years a cartoonist
offered this spoof: a demented poet, ranting his verses on a night
when the moon scuttled between clouds, stands tiptoe on a
precipitous cliff, with a rope around his neck, a dagger at his
throat, a lion at his rear and a crocodile waiting for him below.
The whole extravagance of romanticism is lampooned, and
especially the extravagance of
Don Alvaro
. Yet the play was not a
waste. It paved the way for realism and for a while provided much
pleasure and excitement. It also questioned the nonsense of
exaggerated family pride, but I suppose that during the years of
its greatest success this parody of pundonor was not so recognized;
the landed families of Spain must have seen the play and said
among themselves, ‘By God, that’s the way brothers should act
when an upstart meddles with their sister.’ In fact, if the play were
given in Sevilla tomorrow, I would expect the great families to

 

applaud.

 

After similar plays of the Romantic Movement had circulated

 

for some time, accompanied by novels and music of like vein, the

 

adjective
romantic
acquired a new definition which stressed not

 

a literary tradition emphasizing nature but a sentimental mélange

 

of sex and adventure summed up in the advertising phrase which

 

has come to characterize Spain: ‘Visit Romantic Spain.’ This tag

 

is both the damnation and the salvation of Spain and she had

 

better be careful what she does with it. By damnation I mean that

 

it encourages the country to engage in certain abuses solely

 

because tourists from abroad will pay money to witness them.

 

Thus, in recent years in tourist cities like Palma, the bullfight has

 

been burlesqued into a vaudeville show because tourists and

 

uneducated Spaniards prefer it that way. Flamenco, as I have

 

pointed out, has degenerated into a flabby night-club act, because

 

such debasement is profitable. In Spain generally stress is laid on

 

the past rather than the future, because it is the past that is

 

marketable. Romantic carry-overs like the imprisonment of

 

women, the excesses of pundonor and the backward look in the

 

arts are supported. Enough wrong judgments of this kind can

 

destroy a country, and thus Spain’s official adoption of

 

romanticism as her international badge is damning.

 

By salvation I mean that whether one likes it or not, this is the

 

concept available to Spain for peddling to the world at large, and

 

if she does her job well, she can earn needed income from it

 

without corrupting her soul. The enormous building

 

developments which we shall later see along the Mediterranean

 

coast of Spain are there because northern European capital

 

considers Spain romantic; financially, Spain would be ill-advised

 

to alter the image of herself which she circulates abroad. I can
best explain what I mean by reference to Hawaii, which is
something like five-percent Polynesian, fifty-five-percent Oriental.
Some years ago the Caucasian and Oriental businessmen who
were putting up most of the money for advertising the islands
said in effect, ‘It’s silly to keep on publishing those photographs
of hula girls and ukuleles and grass shacks. We’re a modern society
with fascinating Oriental customs, a great art museum, a fine
university and forward-looking industries. These are the facets
we should be stressing.’ So they took the hula girls off the
advertising and put on the alternatives, and incoming travelers
diminished by some startling percent. The rest of the world had
decided that Hawaii was the land of the hula girls, and if facts
proved otherwise, then to hell with Hawaii. Who would want to
spend the time and money to visit islands simply because they
had a good university, an art museum and challenging
confrontations between the Orient and the Occident? The tourists
of the world knew what Hawaii was better than the business
leaders, and after a disastrous hiatus, the posters reappeared with

 

hula girls, and everyone has been happy ever since.

 

Spain, I am afraid, is stuck with the romantic legend portrayed

 

in
Don Alvaro
; people shivering in Sweden and Germany want

 

sun and romance, and Spain has no alternative but to provide

 

them. The neat trick, as the people of Hawaii have learned, is to

 

peddle this romantic illusion to outsiders but not to oneself. For

 

the present, Spain has not yet mastered this trick; however, a few

 

leaders of the country are becoming aware of the facts and they

 

will probably adopt the policy of Hawaii’s canny leaders: ‘For the

 

tourists hula girls. For the natives IBM computers!’

 

But even as I was formulating these judgments in the rocky

 

defile of the Convento de los Angeles, I was false to my own

 

conclusions, because when I approached King Baudouin’s road

 

I decided to turn right toward San Calixto rather than left toward

 

the highway that would take me to Sevilla; I wanted to see the

 

refurbished monastery where Baudouin and Fabiola had stayed

 

and to compare it with the convent I had just seen. The monastery

 

was nothing, but as I reached it I found that the hunt clubs of this

 

part of Spain had convened for a trial of their packs, and some
four or five hundred of the best hunting dogs, lashed two-by-two
for safety in transportation, were preparing for a dash across the
desolate emptiness of these hills. It was a brilliant moment, with
rural costumes, the sound of horns, the yapping of the dogs and
on some distant hill the waiting stag. Five hundred years ago men
and women exactly like this, with dogs like this had come here
attended by servants no whit dissimilar to hunt over these barren
reaches. A thousand years ago, when Moors held the land, these
were, of course, cultivated fields supporting hundreds of families,
but with the expulsion of the Moors the lands had fallen idle and
would long remain so. My companion, listening to the confusion
of sound and looking at the huntsmen as they saddled up to chase
across the distant hills, asked, ‘Isn’t it romantic?’ It was…in both
senses of the word.
V
LAS MARISMAS

One wintry day when storm clouds hung low over Sevilla, I set
out on a journey to the south to complete a task I had set for
myself some years earlier. I had been planning a novel with a
Mexican setting, and because of the Spanish background of one
of my characters I required to know something of life on a Spanish
ranch given over to the rearing of fighting bulls. I had selected as
my prototype the historic and honored ranch of Concha y Sierra
(Shell and Mountain Range) and a matador living in Sevilla had
agreed to show it to me. He respected the Concha bulls because
of their heroic performance during the past eighty years.

‘The ranch lies in the swamps,’ he warned me as we set forth,
and this seemed an unlikely statement, since one visualizes a bull
ranch as occupying hard, rough soil which strengthens the bull’s
legs. ‘A common misunderstanding,’ the matador assured me.
‘It’s the nature of the grass, the minerals in the water…something
in the essence of the land and not its hardness. That’s what makes
a good bull. Anyway, the Concha y Sierras live in the swamps.’