Iberia (43 page)

 

The griffons were so common in the Coto that I came to know
them as friends, and the more I learned about them the more
respect I had for them. They are a sandy brown, with a head that
is always described as bald but which is covered with a silky down
that wraps around to protect their face and neck as well. A circle
of white feathers about the neck creates the impression of some
drunken Velázquez noble in ruffs, for when they move on land,
which they do constantly, they lurch and roll as if intoxicated.
They are a noisy lot, quarreling, gouging at each other with
hawklike beaks and pushing for the best position at the feast.
Since their heads are much too small for their bodies, they look
grotesque; they are awkward in all they do but possess a quality
of stubborn endurance which makes them as interesting as any
bird in the Coto and more useful than most. They serve an
essential purpose, and if one dismisses them because they are
ugly, as I used to do, he misses a major point of nature. They too
are much like the land of Spain: awkward, formidable, sometimes
repellent but always fascinating.

 

While Señor Ybarra was instructing me on birds, Don Luis was
setting me right on a famous fable attached to the Coto. From
various books on Goya, I had gleaned the information that he
often visited the estate at Sanlúcar de Barrameda owned by the
Duque de Alba and that while there had fallen in love with the
duquesa, with whom he had gone to the Coto. Certainly in the
Hispanic Society of New York there is a portrait of the duquesa
standing near a lagoon which has been identified as one in the
Coto, but it was two other supposed portraits that gave rise to
legend, the notorious ‘Maja desnuda’ and the ‘Maja vestida’
(Flashy Woman Nude, and Dressed).

 

‘Not a word of truth to the legend,’ Don Luis protested. ‘Both
the previous Duque de Alba, who was ambassador to London,
and his successor have presided over conferences of savants who
have totally demolished that libel. Spanish historians have proved
that the supposed love affair could not have taken place and art
experts have demonstrated beyond question that the ‘Maja’ could
not have been the duquesa. Three distinguished medical men,
Blanco Soler, Piga Pascual and Pérez de Patinto, have proved in
their book that she did not die from poisoning, as the legend
claims. Please do what you can to silence this silly tale which has
brought so much offense to one of Spain’s noblest families.’

 

One afternoon Don Luis took me to the second floor, where a
row of windows looked out upon the flat lands of Las Marismas,
and said, ‘At these windows King Felipe IV stood with his
arquebus…Like the one his son carries in the painting by
Velázquez…And while he stood here the peasants down below
drove a herd of deer past the window and he blazed away. After
several tries he bagged one.’

 

What interested me most among the many things Don Luis
showed me was a long row of carefully framed photographs
covering the years from about 1890 to 1931. Judging from the
excellence of these shots, it was customary for hunting parties to
bring along professional photographers, so that today the gallery
of the palace contains an enviable visual record of those last days
of monarchy. Duques, condes, famous bullfighters and
occasionally some burgeoning industrial magnate fill the
photographs, dressed in costly hunting clothes from London and
driving even more expensive automobiles from Paris, but the
unquestioned hero of the series is a tall, slim, impeccably dressed
man with aquiline nose, long mustaches and imperial bearing.
He is King Alfonso XIII, last of the Borbón rulers and probably
the most regal and handsome king of this century.

 

He was a vapid young man interested only in hunting. It is
doubtful if he ever read a whole book, and when he was required
by custom to visit a university it was understood that no professors
or students with serious interests would bother him; a few noble
youths experienced in hunting were to surround him so that he
could speak of things he understood. The handsome photographs
at the palace prove that in the hunt, at least, he was expert and
that his love for the outdoors was both sincere and inexhaustible.

 

One of the pictures I liked best showed him in a suit which
only a king would be brave enough to wear: the background cloth
was a quiet gray, beautifully cut to fit his austere build, but into
it was woven a series of huge brown diamonds five inches tall,
their points standing vertically. At first sight the king looks like
an advertisement, but as one sees him in various poses and in the
company of others, one realizes that he selected this suit on
purpose, for when it appeared in a crowd, its wearer stood out as
majesty.

 

After I had seen a score of the Alfonso photographs—he must
have been a frequent visitor to the Coto—I began to realize that
my guide, Don Luis, must have come from a family that knew
the king personally, for he spoke of details which otherwise he
could not have known: ‘It is these three portraits which have the
deepest meaning. Here is Alfonso in the last days of his reign.
He’s more serious now, his troubles have begun and it’s sad to
think that soon after this was taken he deemed it prudent to leave
Spain, to which he never returned. He loved the Coto and during
his exile he must have longed for it. Here’s a fine photograph of
his family taken in Madrid a few years before his departure. His
English queen…She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria…A
splendid woman and very loyal to him. This is the oldest son,
Don Jaime, who would have made a fine king except that he was
removed from the succession because he was a deaf-mute. This
is Don Alfonso, the unfortunate son who married a Cuban
commoner and died in an automobile crash in Miami in 1938.
This is Don Gonzalo, the youngest son, who also died in an auto
crash.’ He pointed out the children one by one, ending with a
handsome young man. ‘And this is Don Juan de Borbón, who
now lives in Estoril, near Lisboa in Portugal.’ He said no more
and I was unable to ascertain his opinion of Juan; it would have
been improper for him to express one, because Juan, as the legal
heir of Alfonso XIII, who died in 1941, ought to become King of
Spain when Generalísimo Franco goes, except that powerful
forces, including Franco, prefer that Juan’s son, Prince Juan
Carlos, take the throne. There could be trouble between father
and son, and prudent Spaniards are reluctant to tell foreigners
whose side they support. Pointing to the last of the three
photographs, Don Luis said, ‘And this is Don Juan by
himself…photographed in Portugal, where he lives in exile.’ He
was an attractive fellow and others in Spain told me that he would
make a fine king, but what Don Luis thought of the matter, I was
not to discover.

 

Wherever I turned among the photographs I found some aspect
of Spanish history which attracted my interest. Here was the
dictator Primo de Rivera standing over a wild boar which he had
just killed with a lance. Over here was the Conde de Tarifa, who
once owned the Coto, at the wheel of the Citroën swamp wagon
he had bought for the use of Alfonso. This handsome woman was
the Duquesa de Medinaceli, from one of the noblest families in
Spain, standing with the man she had invited to the Coto, the
famous matador Rafael Guerra, called Guerrita; the photograph
must have been taken around 1910, when Guerrita was in
retirement. This solemn-looking man was the Duque de Cádiz
as he appeared in 1908; of his home city in that year it was said,
‘It has three hundred and sixty-six churches and no library.’ In
1966 a resident told me, ‘Today things are better. We have three
hundred and sixty-five churches and one library. But mostly it’s
closed.’ In this corner is Alfonso, clean-shave and just as
good-looking that way as with his Kaiser-like mustaches; but the
photograph which lives in my mind showed him ready for the
hunt, a dashing king with enormous mustaches and a rifle cradled
in his arm. He wore heavy peasant trousers with pronounced
vertical stripes, English leather boots, and over all zahones, which
formed a heavy leather apron divided down the middle and tied
securely about each leg. He was an archaic figure, best suited to
the seventeenth century; how admirable a subject he would have
been for the brush of Velázquez. The camera barely does him
justice.

 

I am constantly fascinated by this empty-headed, charming
fellow, because there is a strong possibility that he was a
part-American whose name should have been Alfonso McKeon.
Clearly he was the son of King Alfonso XII and Queen María
Cristina of Austria; no one questioned that, but who Alfonso XII
might have been was another matter. He was the son of Spain’s
notorious Queen Isabel II, probably the most lecherous crowned
head ever to rule in Europe, man or woman; if she is in second
place it is only to Catherine the Great of Russia, and this I doubt.
Obligated by dynastic reasons to marry her cousin, impotent and
a homosexual, she said of him, ‘What can I report of a man who
on his wedding night wore more lace than I?’

 

Since she and her impotent consort had numerous children,
of whom five lived to become fine persons, each birth became
the occasion for a good deal of open speculation as to who the
father might have been, and since Isabel took a bewildering series
of lovers in rapid succession, the guessing sometimes became
confused. The father of her first child could have been any one
of four: a general, an opera singer (tenor), a marqués or a young
colonel in the army. This child died. Who the father of her second
baby was no one cared to state, for this time there were six putative
fathers, but the little girl, who lived to become one of Spain’s
gentlest and noblest ladies, beloved by everyone, was generally
known as Arañuela, after her mother’s prominent lover at the
time, an ordinary soldier named Araña.

 

The next child, who also died, was attributed to either Obregón
the singer, Arrieta the composer, Puig-Moltó the soldier or an
unspecified marqués. Regarding the parentage of her later children
the guesses were fantastic, for preceding their births Isabel had
what might be termed a catch-as-catch-can series of lovers from
all ranks of society, although she always maintained a preference
for musicians and soldiers. What concerns history is the parentage
of her first surviving male child, the boy who later became King
Alfonso XII. Prior to his birth the queen’s favorite had been the
soldier Puig-Moltó, who enjoyed a longer stay at the palace than
most, but there is reason to believe that he could not have been
in attendance when the child was conceived; he was absent on
maneuvers. The honor of siring the future king probably went to
an itinerant American dentist named McKeon, who, the gossips
said, ‘did a lot more at the palace than fill teeth.’ For more than
a year he was the royal favorite and this during the time when the
future king was conceived. The extraordinary fact about Isabel’s
children is that regardless of who their fathers were, each looked
a true Borbón, while Alfonso XII and his son Alfonso XIII actually
had Habsburg chins!

 

When Don Luis and I finished our tour of the portrait galleries,
Señor Ybarra suggested that we go out to see a remarkable oak
tree. I replied that in America we had oaks of all kinds and there
were further photographs on another floor that I wished to see,
but Ybarra said, ‘Oak trees you may have, but none like this.’ So
I went with him to a part of the Coto I had not seen before, and
in the distance I saw a large oak whose branches and trunk were
almost completely white. As we approached, I saw that it
contained many nests, each about the size of a small table, built
of hundreds of fairly good-sized sticks laid crossways like the nest
of an eagle.

 

‘How many nests would you say?’ Ybarra asked.

 

There were clearly more than a score, and when I started to
count only those on one branch I saw that the total must be over
a hundred. ‘About three hundred and fifty,’ he said.

 

‘Eagles?’

 

‘No. One of the most beautiful birds to nest in Europe. The
Platalea leucorodia
, spoonbill.’ In fact, so many spoonbills nested
in this particular oak that their droppings, made acid by the fish
they ate, had not only colored the tree white but were also causing
its death. The one thing that might operate against the Coto’s
continuance as a sanctuary, for certain kinds of birds at least, was
the constant killing off of the bigger trees by the birds themselves.

 

‘We don’t know what to do about it,’ Ybarra said. ‘We’re
especially concerned about the spoonbills, because they began to
come here only in 1959. Two pair appeared that year and
apparently enjoyed their experience, because just as a satisfied
customer at a summer resort spreads the news, they told their
friends, and next year we counted two hundred and fifty-five
pairs. I wouldn’t like to guess how many we have now. Twenty
or thirty large oaks like this one, each with hundreds of nests.
They’re about the loveliest bird we get, spectacularly beautiful.’

 

The spoonbill reminded me of another bird, and I asked
whether the Coto attracted any flamingos, who have been known
to breed in Europe, and a knowing smile came over Ybarra’s lips.
‘Do you really like birds?’ he asked; and when I nodded, he said,
‘It’s not generally known even yet, but some years ago in a series
of pools leading off from the Rhone in southern France a large
colony of flamingos bred for twenty years. Of course, naturalists
heard about it right away. A sensation in bird circles. But we kept
it a secret among ourselves. Perhaps two hundred men in eight
or ten different countries. Because if the general public knew,
they would swarm to watch the birds, and inevitably some damn
fool would shoot them. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. So
we kept it a secret and in due course the flamingos left their French
lagoons.’