Iberia (60 page)

 

If you guess all fourteen correctly, and are the only one to do
so, that week, you stand to win a fortune. The twenty-first Sunday
in the 1964-65 season saw many upsets and only one man guessed
them all, winning 15,364,075 pesatas (about $256,000), but that
was exceptional. More typical were the results last year. There
were thirty-nine betting days and 808,916,155 bets, of which only
19,129 gained top position, or one in every 42,000. On five of the
days no one guessed all fourteen results, so naturally those who
hit thirteen won. On one day of many upsets only two people
won, and they got about $130,000 each, but on another day 3,836
did and won only $112 each.

 

Football betting is a mania in Spain and few are the homes with
no addicts. Each year the newspapers carry agonized stories about
some man who has studied the teams, made form sheets for the
players, kept a record of which referees favor which teams and
then gotten weather reports on the various playing fields before
making out his list. With infinite care he has checked it, tried to
anticipate where ties might fall and then decided on his fourteen
outcomes. Where games are extra chancy he has bet a second and
a third time, or even a twelfth, trying to cover all contingencies.
He wins nothing. But his wife gets a first prize with fourteen
correct. When asked what her system was she says, ‘I took my list
to the butcher’s. He was cutting up bones, and every time he
raised the cleaver I asked, “One, two or tie?” and he would whack
the cleaver down and say, “One,” or whatever came into his head.
Fourteen times in a row his cleaver was right.’ An amusing debate
runs in the papers, ‘Does It Help to Know Anything about
Football?’ and the consensus seems to be that too much knowledge
inhibits freedom in spotting the ties. It is apparently better to
wake up some morning and say, ‘You know, I wouldn’t be
surprised if Barcelona ties Madrid.’ Few Americans who have
lived in Spain for any time have escaped infection: ‘Let’s throw a
hundred pesetas in the pool to see if we come up with something.’
Spoken like a Spaniard.

 

One fact about the pools astonished me. On those rare Sundays
when no games are scheduled in Spain, the pool is based on some
league in Italy that no one ever heard of and about which he can
learn little. The betting is just as active as on a normal weekend
and everyone seems to have about the same amount of fun.

 

I was able to resist the betting until I stumbled into the zany
world of books written on the higher mathematics of the subject;
then I became a sucker for each new theory and came home with
half a dozen intricate systems based on permutations and
combinations. I found there was a Norwegian system which would
protect me against ties and an Italian system based on identifying
a few sure wins, eliminating them and covering myself three ways
on tricky games. Like thousands of Spaniards, I became fascinated
by the pure mathematics of the thing; for example, supposing
you are morally certain of the outcome of twelve games but have
no clue as to how the other two will go. to cover yourself, you’d
have to bet nine columns with the two dubious games marked
thus:

 

Game A:
1 1 1
X X X
2 2 2
Game B:
1 X 2
1 X 2
1 X 2
If you did that, you couldn’t lose. (If you are interested in either
mathematics or gambling, draw up a table showing that to ensure
yourself against all contingencies when eleven games are certain
and three uncertain, you will have to bet twenty-seven columns.)
Tables have been prepared whereby you can ensure yourself
mathematically against any contingency, but the insurance is
costly. For example, suppose you know the outcome of seven
games, are completely confused about five and reasonably certain
about the remaining two, you would bet the seven games in one
column, the five confused games in three columns and the two
chancy games in two columns, but to do this properly would cost
you the betting fee for 972 columns, and one unexpected tie in
the supposedly sure games would ruin everything. I favored the
wild system worked out by Alejandro Abad, who gave personal
consultations like a psychologist. He sold a large book of tables
showing how to bet on one hundred and forty-four different
columns properly arranged and get a sure win…unless something
unforeseen happened. Other counselors, whose books sold for as
much as ten dollars a copy, advocated other systems, but in spite
of them a disconcerting number of top prizes still went to the
women who sought advice from their butchers.

 

My visits to Madrid were made pleasant by the fact that I had
been invited to attend a well-regarded tertulia which met at
four-thirty each afternoon in the Café León (on the signs, Lion,
from the French Lion d’Or), across from the post office. Here,
around old tables kept scrubbed by the courtly waiter Mariano,
a group of men convened, as their counterparts had in Badajoz,
to discuss everything except religion and politics. They saw no
reason to discuss the former because all were Catholics and had
nothing to argue about; they avoided the latter because they had
found it wise in Spain to do so.

 

The membership was distinguished. José María de Cossío, of
the Royal Spanish Academy, attended, and one who knew
anything about bullfighting recognized him as the authority, his
four-volume
Los toros
being the ultimate reference in argument;
I was surprised to find that a man whose reputation I had known
for so long was still very much alive. Camilo José Cela, another
Academician, whose
The Family of Pascual Duarte
and other
novels were respected in all Spanish-speaking countries, was there.
The Conde de Canilleros, a historian from Extremadura, had
strong opinions, as did Gerardo Diego, poet and member of the
Spanish Academy.

 

The tertulia was held together by the strong personality of its
founder, Antonio Rodríguez Moñino, Spanish bibliographer of
world-wide fame and now a professor at the University of
California at Berkeley, who spends his academic leaves in Madrid.
In addition to the Spanish members, the tertulia also attracted a
goodly number of the Spanish professors from the United States
and other countries who came to Spain on scholarships or
sabbaticals. My favorite was a valiant debater named Ramón
Martínez López, a Spanish professor at the University of Texas,
for he had strong and hilarious prejudices on everything, which
made him a delightful conversationalist.

 

If I had wanted to explain to a stranger how a tertulia operated,
I could have contrived no better experience than what happened
accidentally one October afternoon in 1966. The group was seated
in the leather-upholstered chairs about the marble-topped tables
and I had asked them, ‘What percentage of Spaniards use the
Castilian pronunciation I learned in college as opposed to the
Andalusian or South American pronunciation?’ The question was
good for about an hour of discussion as the men recalled their
experiences and the opinions of their friends.

 

‘Figure it out this way. Years ago somebody convinced the
intellectual community in the United States that gentlemen speak
only Castilian. The word veces must be pronounced
vay-thayce
with a th and not
vay-sayces
with an ese. Well, in Spain itself we
divide this way. In Cataluña nobody uses the th. In Galicia, maybe
one-third of the people. In the islands, one half. The Basques, one
half. Andalucía, none. Valencia, half. So you see, it’s restricted
mainly to the Castillas and León.’

 

‘Percentages? Perhaps one-third of Spain uses Castilian.’

 

‘In Spanish America no one uses it except immigrants from
Spain who want to lord it over the locals.’

 

‘And actors.’

 

‘That’s right. Because of some curious tradition, you must
speak Castilian on stage. The way in Minnesota you try to speak
Oxford English on stage.’

 

‘They were making this movie about Jesus Christ in Mexico
City and the big hassle was, how should Jesus speak? They took
the problem all the way to the cardinal, and he said, “It would
sound sacrilegious if our Lord spoke anything but Castilian. But
it would be pompous for a mere tax-collector like Matthew to do
so.” That’s how they made the picture—Jesus Castilian, the
disciples Mexican. And everyone said, “Sounded just right.”’

 

‘I knew García Lorca and he never spoke Castilian. He said you
couldn’t write poetry in it.’

 

‘He was right. I speak only Castilian. But the th sound was a
late development. Probably not known before the sixteenth
century.’

 

‘There was this university in the United States. Had on its
faculty the best student who ever graduated from Texas, and they
wrote me asking if I could provide them with a head for their
department of Spanish. I wrote back and asked, “What’s the
matter with López? There’s nobody around better than he.” And
they wrote back and said that López didn’t speak Castilian and
they’d feel uncomfortable with him.’

 

‘When Fernando de los Ríos from the Ronda region was elected
to the Royal Academy he announced to the members, “Now that
I’m an Academician I promise to speak respectable Spanish, and
I’ve tried to say
civilización
the way you do,
thee-vee-lee-tha-thyóhn
. But I’ll be damned if I can get that third
th out. So you’ll have to be satisfied with
thee-vee-lee-tha-syóhn
.’

 

And so the discussion went, as it did day after day, but this time
there was to be something different. By sheer accident an
American professor visiting the tertulia dropped a bombshell by
identifying a date as the year in which Magellan circumnavigated
the globe.

 

‘What did you say?’ Dr. Martínez López of Texas snapped.

 

‘I said it was when Magellan circumnavigated the globe.’

 

‘Magallanes!’ one of the professors cried, using the Spanish
version of the great explorer’s name. ‘My God, man, are you out
of your mind?’

 

‘In 1521. When he circumnavigated the globe.’

 

‘My dear man! There is no reputable scholar in the world today
who thinks that Magallanes was the first to circumnavigate the
globe.’

 

‘I do.’

 

‘Apparently. But no one else I’ve heard of in the last hundred
years has had such an idea. Does anyone in this tertulia think for
a moment that Magallanes was first around the world?’

 

With some temerity I raised my hand, and the Spaniards turned
to look at me with the compassion they would have directed to
an idiot. ‘Have you never heard of Juan Sebastián Elcano [in
English del Cano]?’ they asked.

 

‘No.’

 

‘My God! He was the first around the world. And he was
Spanish.’

 

‘Wait a minute!’ the American professor cried. ‘Magellan…’

 

‘My good man,’ Dr. Martínez López said, ‘King Carlos himself
gave Elcano a coat of arms showing a globe inscribed with those
glorious words, Primus circumdedisti me (You were the first to
circumnavigate me).’

 

The other Spaniards confirmed this, but the American was not
overawed.

 

‘Merely because a king made an error…’

 

‘Carlos Quinto did not make errors.’

 

And so the debate went on. On succeeding days the Spaniards
lugged books and citations to the tertulia, including an Italian
encyclopedia, proving that whereas Magellan (in Portuguese
Magalhães) had started the voyage around the world, he had died
in the Philippines, leaving its completion to his Spanish assistant,
Juan Sebastián Elcano. The evidence was impressive and I began
to think that here was a corner of history about which I was
uninformed, but then the American lugged in his evidence, which
was hard to ignore.

 

‘If in your insularity,’ he said, ‘you wish to maintain that a man
could circumnavigate the globe only if he started from Spain and
ended in Spain, then Elcano is your man. But if going around the
globe means going around the globe, or, in effect, proving that
the earth was a globe that could be gone around, then Magellan,
who had already traveled to and from the Philippines by the
eastern route and then had returned to the same point by the
western route, was the first around.’

 

‘My good man,’ the Spaniards argued, ‘one day a group of ships
set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda and one of those ships, the
Victoria
, went in an unbroken journey around the world, and
when it had completed its journey Magellan was not aboard. Juan
Sebastián Elcano was. What, in all decency, can you conclude
from that?’

 

The American replied, ‘Merely that the
Victoria
was the first
ship, and Elcano the second man, to circumnavigate the globe.’

 

The debate extended over a full week, and by the time it ended,
with no satisfactory resolution of the point, everyone participating
understood the facts and their implications. No one in the tertulia
would admit then that he had changed his mind, but I would
suppose that in their subsequent writing and teaching they would
at least allude to the position contrary to their own.

 

In the winter of 1967 the tertulia came into momentary
prominence when one of its members held a press conference in
Boston which reverberated around the world. When Dr. Jules
Piccus joined the tertulia he appeared to be merely one more
visiting American professor, this time from the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst. He was a young man, bearded,
prematurely gray, lively in manner and quick in argument.
Members of the tertulia knew him mainly as a scholar searching
the archives of the Biblioteca Nacional, and there had been many
like him in the past, but on February 13, 1967, Dr. Piccus
announced that one day while looking for a medieval manuscript
he had found instead two manuscripts by Leonardo da Vinci
which had been catalogued in 1866 by B. J. Gallardo but which
had subsequently been misplaced. One was a notebook, the other
a set of sketches obviously intended for publication. They should
have been filed at numbers AA-119 and AA-120, but a century
ago someone had carelessly tucked them away at numbers AA-19
and AA-20, and there they had remained. The announcement of
their recovery launched a storm. ‘Why should treasures of a
Madrid library be introduced to the world at a Boston press
conference?’ was merely the most temperate of the Spanish
headlines. ‘If you speak of this matter,’ Dr. Piccus told me one
day at the tertulia, ‘please be sure to state clearly that I recovered
the manuscripts. I did not discover them. The Spaniards had
always known they were in existence. I happened to find out
where.’ Not everyone took the misadventure of the Leonardo so
seriously. Mingote used the subject for one of his finest cartoons.
Against a wall which was adorned by the ‘Mona Lisa,’ freshly
painted, sat Leonardo in his traditional cap, beard and long robe.
He was writing the last page of a manuscript and saying these
words: ‘Well, I’ve written it backwards so they can’t read it. Now
if I could only think of some place to hide it.’