Iberia (44 page)

 

He hesitated for a moment, and I suggested, ‘And they came
down here to the Coto?’

 

‘Yes, but not to breed. However, they do come to ——,’ and
he mentioned an area not far from the Coto where a substantial
colony of perhaps the world’s loveliest bird, certainly its most
dramatic, had been breeding for several years with an apparent
prospect of continuing for many more. Experts in London and
Paris and Stockholm know about this phenomenon and it is
watched with care, because many of the flamingos’ normal
breeding places in Africa are being destroyed, so that within a
hundred years perhaps the African flamingo may cease to exist,
as many other rare species that now use the Coto as a breeding
ground.

 

‘All sensible men, who cherish the world as it has been,’ said
Ybarra, ‘are engaged, whether they wish to be or not, in a crusade
to keep whole species from being exterminated. If our human
population continues to explode at its present rate, and I see no
reason to suspect that the rate will diminish, the pressure on open
land like the Coto will become unbearable. In our lifetime we’ll
see it.’

 

‘It’s begun,’ Don Luis told us at dinner one evening. ‘In Madrid
there is much agitation, even among men who love the outdoors,
to dam off the overflow waters of the Guadalquivir and drain the
swamps of Las Marismas. It could be done with relatively little
effort, and all the land Michener has seen north of here could be
converted into rice fields and wheat.’

 

‘Why do that?’ I asked. ‘Spain’s got ample food.’

 

‘The phrase is “social necessity.” Spain wants entrance to the
European Common Market, but as long as we must be classified
as a backward country economically, it is not attractive to the
other countries to admit us as an equal partner. If we reclaim our
marshes and increase our food supply, then we stand in quite a
different light and the other nations may want us. We may have
to drain the marshes.’

 

Don Luis was speaking as if he were attached to the
government, and I started to ask what job he held in Madrid, but
talk turned to other matters and Yberra said, ‘The irony of the
situation, and its danger, is that the Coto Doñana is viable as a
truly great sanctuary only so long as Las Marismas exists out there.
Because then our birds have a substantial feeding area and the
millions of birds that live off Las Marismas form a kind of
biological unit with the ones in the Coto. Destroy Las Marismas,
and you destroy at least half our effectiveness.’

 

‘But doesn’t the Coto already control a good deal of Las
Marismas?’

 

‘A common misunderstanding. We own so little that you’d
hardly believe it. Considering our entire area…dunes, lakes, dry
land…we have only seventeen thousand acres altogether. And of
that, only about five hundred acres are marismas…and not the
best. You see, in the old days Las Marismas was so enormous, so
useless, that everyone said, “It’ll always be there. For the Coto
we’ll buy only the good land.” So now we have good land and
almost no marismas. And suddenly, with the prospect of draining
the swamps, Las Marismas has become very valuable, far beyond
our means to acquire it. Within five years, if men worked
energetically with bulldozers and dams, they could make Las
Marismas disappear.’

 

I left this gloomy talk and walked out beneath the eucalyptus
trees. Bartolo, the tame deer, ran up to nuzzle me accompanied
by his nanny goat, and in the shadowy distance I could see the
forms of fifty or sixty wild deer that always moved in close at
night. Beyond lay the flat lands of Las Marismas in whose depths
the camels wandered still free and birds nested without number.
As far as I could see there was only flatness and the slowly
returning waters that would soon make of the area an enormous
lake a few millimeters deep in which substantial rivers would
mysteriously form and islands where the fighting bulls would
congregate and rabbits and foxes and the endless herds of deer.
It was an area that I had seen in all seasons, whose dreamlike
transmutations I had followed from north and east and south. In
its heart and along its perimeter I had organized a dozen picnics
so that I might know it more intimately; I had seen it from Sevilla
and from across the river at Sanlúcar, that grubby little town I
loved so well. Instructed by Las Marismas, I had come to know
birds that I would otherwise have missed, the gape-mouth nightjar
winging past to trap insects, the clean and fiery kestrel, the
spoonbill and the vulture, that handsome and repulsive thing.
Was it possible that within my lifetime this concentration of
natural wonder was doomed? I could not believe it, and yet on
the previous day while roaring across the hard-baked marismas
I had seen a ridge of earth, a rather simple one about six feet high
that a bulldozer had thrown up with no great effort, and after we
had followed it for some miles I asked, ‘What’s the ridge?’

 

‘It’s an experiment,’ Ybarra said. ‘To see how difficult it would
be to prevent water from coming into Las Marismas.’

 

‘Does it work?’

 

‘When they seal off the other end, over by El Rocío, they’ll have
dried out about twenty thousand acres.’

 

The land of Spain! For the last three thousand years it has been
a challenge and on its relentless bosom men have made one ghastly
mistake after another, as the moribund village of Maranchón
demonstrates, but within the last decade there have been signs of
hope. In the barren reaches of Extremadura, where flood waters
used to rage three years in ten, and in many other parts of the
country, large earthen dams are being constructed which will
irrigate once-useless fields and bring them into productivity. In
the mountains hydroelectric systems are proliferating at a
surprising rate. Perhaps Las Marismas will have to be drained,
out of deference to opinions in Paris and Berlin, but there is a
possibility that it can be done leaving strips or areas where the
old conditions can continue. Knowing the greediness of men, and
especially the greediness of Spaniards, I doubt that any of Las
Marismas can be saved and I would expect it to have vanished by
1985. The Coto Doñana, because it has fallen into careful hands,
has a chance to continue, but only if its custodians are vigorously
supported by those who love nature and appreciate its subtle
influence on man. However, if Las Marismas vanishes, many of
the birds who now use the Coto will no longer have reason to do
so; perhaps even the vultures will stop coming when animals no
longer die on the flat lands, but I suppose the Coto lakes, filled
with rich animalcules, will still attract the ducks.

 

To have seen Las Marismas and the Coto while they were still
at their peak was to have seen the best that Spain can offer the
naturalist. For the immediate future these areas will continue to
be available for those to whom ecology is at least as sacred as
eschatology.
VI
SEVILLA

One of the top experiences a traveler can have in Spain is to visit
Sevilla for Holy Week, which ends at Easter, and the feria that
follows. I suppose there is nothing in the world to surpass this,
not Mardi Gras at New Orleans nor the Palio in Siena when the
exuberance of the Renaissance is re-created. Carnival in Rio de
Janeiro is an epic of noise and color, and for sheer celebration it
would be hard to equal Bastille Day in Tahiti, when the island
goes mad for two weeks; but these events lack spiritual depth.

In Sevilla each spring one finds combined within the span of
a few weeks six major diversions: the world’s most profound
religious spectacle plus a rustic fair recalling those of a thousand
years ago, plus a congregation of circuses drawn from all parts of
Europe, plus a bizarre open-air carnival, plus a daily program of
social events and stunning promenades on horseback, plus a series
of first-rate bullfights conducted in Spain’s most beautiful plaza.
And these six features are encapsulated, as it were, within the
confines of an ancient city studded with handsome buildings,
narrow streets where only pedestrians are allowed and exquisite
vistas along the riverbanks. At any time of year Sevilla is a
distinguished city, but during Holy Week and the days that follow,
it is without peer.

I have attended several of Sevilla’s spring celebrations, and
when I try to recall the essence of what I saw I picture myself
standing at four o’clock in the morning at the entrance to the
tobacco factory where Carmen spun her smoky web to entangle
a soldier. I am in a very old city and it is dark, for winter has only
just ended and the early rising sun has not yet returned, but along
the horizon to the south a dull glow is visible, as if fields were
being burned off before the planting.

No prudent farmer accounts for those fires. In a tree-lined park
on the edge of the city, Sevilla is holding revelry and the lights
will continue until dawn and for half a dozen dawns to follow,
and if one listens closely he can hear, coming to him over the
intervening space, the muffled sound of carnival and circus, of
promenade and castanets.

But it is neither this beautiful glow on the horizon that I
remember as the characteristic of Sevilla when I am away from
the city nor the sound of the revelry. It is the shadowy approach
of figures looming out of the dusk as they wander past the tobacco
factory on their way home from the festival. They come like ghosts
of ancient Spain, from Roman times or Visigothic or Arabic or
medieval Christian, moving in stately silence until some member
of the group begins softly to clap his hands. And it is then that
the sound of Sevilla, the sweet memorable sound of this most
dramatic of the Spanish cities, overtakes me.

The hands I hear do not clap as they would at a football game
nor even at a flamenco party. They tap in seductive night rhythm,
with variations which a person reared in Massachusetts or
Stockholm could not devise. They tap out the beat of some old
song, well known to all in the crowd, and before long a woman
walking through the night adds her staccato. Others follow, and
soon one has along the broad street before Carmen’s tobacco
factory a dozen or so persons clapping out this strange rhythm.

No one sings. No one chants the words of the mute song. There
is only the soft clapping of some dozen pairs of unseen hands,
but I get the impression that the participants are softly repeating
the words to themselves as they pass me by. No one speaks, and
when the group has gone the sound of clapping hangs in the night
air for a long time as the revelers proceed to some point near the
cathedral, or in back of the bullring, or at the beginning of the
narrow street called Sierpes (serpents), where they break apart,
each member going to his own home to sleep for a few hours
before the next day begins.

But before the first group has reached the point of separation,
other groups have come along the lovely dark street, which in the
growing twilight looks much as it did in the days of Carmen, and
they too clap softly in the night. And for more than a week, for
almost twenty-four hours each day, the visitor to Sevilla will hear
this compelling tattoo. It is the sound of Sevilla in spring, one of
the most persuasive sounds I have ever heard.

To savor the six-part spectacle you must set aside several weeks
and plan to arrive before Palm Sunday. Depending upon the date
of Easter, the six parts can cover from three to five weeks. Some
travelers skip the first three and arrive only in time for the final
crescendo, but this is a miscalculation which robs them of the
spiritual preparation necessary for the full enjoyment of the
spectacle. It is like listening to only the fourth movement of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, since that is where the human
voices appear, and missing the preparation which Beethoven has
laid out in the preceding three movements, when only the
orchestra is playing.

For the heart of Sevilla’s spring celebration is a religious
experience, and it throbs through the city for an entire week.
Beginning with Palm Sunday an atmosphere of sanctity settles
over the towers and the alleys of Sevilla, permeating every crevice
of the city, and so it will continue for the seven days which recall
the passion and death of Jesus. Bells start tolling from dozens of
steeples scattered through the city. Even across the river, in the
gypsy quarter of Triana, ordinary noises stop. Citizens dress in
their best black clothes, men and women alike, and at selected
parishes scattered through Sevilla two radically different types of
men begin to assemble at church doors: the religious men and
the laboring men. Spectators, who may number in the thousands,
gather in the streets outside the churches to watch these men, for
they are about to become the most important in Sevilla. Let us
follow one man from each group.

Don Francisco Mendoza Ruiz is a cautious man who works in
a bank and lives with his wife and three children in a fine little
house in the old Jewish quarter, where no automobiles are
allowed. After church on Palm Sunday he invites us to accompany
him home, where he takes down from a closet a set of boxes from
which he unpacks a costume that looks as if it had come from the
Middle Ages.