Iberia (68 page)

Whenever our class memorized a poem, we held a competitive
recitation, and in the case of ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore,’ I
won handily, which was not entirely fair because I

was
John
Moore. I had read everything I could find on him, and traced his
route from Lisboa into Spain and out again, and knew La Coruña
rather better than I did my home town. It was the first time in
my learning that a subject had completely overwhelmed me and
I it.

Therefore, it was with a sense of acquaintanceship that I sat in
Salamanca and reflected that a hundred and fifty-eight years
earlier, on November 13, 1808, General Moore had arrived in this
plaza to hear reports of a concentration of English defeats and
Spanish confusion. Suddenly, what had begun as an invasion to
consolidate English and Spanish forces against Napoleon had
become a trap in which Moore’s entire army, the best in the field,
was about to be swallowed up. If Moore had lived he would have
hated the memory of Salamanca, for here he heard nothing but
news of the most disheartening sort. The allies were in a state of
collapse and Napoleon was triumphant.

As a boy I had not yet learned about my hero certain facts which
were probably not in the books at that time, namely, that from
Salamanca he had sent off a most puzzling series of letters in
which he showed no hesitancy in predicting his defeat. To his
quasi-sweetheart, Lady Hester Stanhope, who imagined that she
was engaged to him and survived him to become one of England’s
outstanding eccentrics, he wrote that her little brother James, for
whom she sought a commission, ‘must get the
Commander-in-Chief’s leave to come to Spain. He may join me
then. He will, however, come too late; I shall already be beaten.’
In his diary he wrote: ‘We have no business being here.’ In his
dispatches, either to England or to his fellow commanders in
Spain, he wrote constantly of the probable need for retreat rather
than attack, and a palpable sense of gloom possessed him. In
Salamanca, General Moore had hardly been the hero whose
exploits I had memorized; in fact, he was something of a
fuddy-duddy and the disasters he foresaw were brought on partly
by his own indecision and fatalism.

On December 11 he evacuated Salamanca and headed for the
north, uncertain whether he was advancing to battle or taking
the first steps in what would degenerate into a forced retreat.
Rarely has a more confused and undecided leader led his troops
into unknown territory, and we shall leave him as he marches out
of the city but we shall meet him again in the north.

If you quit the Plaza Mayor by its southwest exit and wander
through a series of attractive narrow streets you will come
eventually to an austere little plaza presided over by the statue of
a professor in robes, Fray Luis de León, whose spirit guards this
place, and enclosed on four sides by old brown walls on which
students have used a mixture of hog fat and bull’s blood to scrawl
the dates of their doctor’s degrees, for this is the noble University
of Salamanca, once the world’s preeminent center of learning.

In the academic year 1567-1568 its rolls showed seven thousand
eight hundred students taking courses ranging from mathematics
to medicine and another five thousand hanging around the city
to audit lectures. Carlos V spoke the truth when he said, ‘This
university is the treasury from which I furnish justice and
government to my people of Spain,’ for the cachet of a Salamanca
degree could not be equaled. Throughout Europe foreign kings
and cardinals submitted disputes to this faculty for adjudication,
and if a professor from this university approved a debatable point,
that practically established it.

The scholars teaching here investigated all matters. It was a
Salamanca economist who first pointed out the national danger
involved in bringing so much gold into the country without
increasing at the same time the production of consumer goods;
he saw that ruinous inflation must follow. Far more than half the
intelligence of Spain centered in this school, and the roster of
graduates who attained fame is a roll call of Spanish power. The
most daring intellects, I suppose, attended Cardinal Cisneros’
university at Alcalá de Henares, but it had a relatively brief life,
whereas Salamanca continued through the centuries as the heart
and core of Spanish culture.

Bologna, Paris and Oxford, all founded in the twelfth century,
were the only schools that could compete with it, and during its
early life—it was founded about 1230-1243—it tended to be more
liberal and introspective than the others. It was powerful in
theology and often provided opinions on which the Spanish kings
based their defiance of the Roman popes, but its greater fame lay
in mathematics and science, in which it was a beacon light far
ahead of its competitors.

Not all students who came here prospered, and in fiction ‘the
student from Salamanca’ became a stock figure. In the Duque de
Rivas’ tragedy

Don Alvaro
, the younger son, who follows Alvaro’s
trail to Peru, is described in this way:

My cousin, who has just arrived from Salamanca, has told me that
Alfonso is the crazy man of the University, more swordsman than
scholar, and that he has the student bullies flabbergasted.

In an earlier play by Lope de Vega the earthy dialogue catches the
spirit of Salamanca as understood by the common people across
Spain:

BARBILDO
: How did you get on at Salamanca?

 

LEONELO
: That’s a long story.

 

BARBILDO
: You must be a very learned man by now.
LEONELO
: No, I’m not even a barber.

 

BARBILDO
: At least you’re a scholar.

 

LEONELO
: Well, I’ve tried to learn things that are important.
Date a Dios en tierna edad;
BARBILDO
: Anyone who’s seen so many printed books is bound
to think he’s wise.

 

LEONELO
: I admit that printing has saved many talented writers
from oblivion. Printing circulates their books and makes
them known. Gutenberg, a famous German from Mainz, is
responsible. But many men who used to have a high
reputation are no longer taken seriously, now that their
works have been printed.

 

Today the old classrooms, the cloisters, the marvelous library
and the chapels can be inspected in the dignified buildings that
enclose the plaza, and here one can catch a sense of what it must
have been like to attend a university in the late Renaissance when
ideas were exploding at such a furious rate. Each component at
Salamanca is perfect, as if time had frozen the old patterns.

 

As a matter of fact, that is precisely what happened. Under
pressures which will be made clear in this chapter, this grand
university, light of Europe, began to grope and fumble. First, any
student suspected of Jewish blood was excluded. Then it became
difficult for bright boys from untitled families to gain entrance;
vacancies were reserved for the nobility, who used the university
as a kind of gentlemen’s finishing school. At the end of the
sixteenth century Salamanca no longer taught mathematics in
any form and fifty years later enrolled not a single student in
medicine. The fine interchange of ideas that used to be carried
on with Oxford and Bologna was halted, and the sharp debate
that once characterized the intellectual life of the university was
silenced. Registrations dropped from seven thousand eight
hundred to a mere three hundred in 1824.

 

I know of no other educational institution in the world that
started so high as Salamanca to fall so low. Its eclipse was one of
the severest blows Spain ever suffered, for with its castration the
spark of national vitality ebbed, and any nation today that wishes
to attain similar results should start by closing down its equivalent
of Salamanca. Of course, the university did not physically
disappear; except for years of revolution and crisis it kept its doors
open and admitted a few hundred students who mouthed cautious
doctrine taught by frightened professors. During the hey-day of
the Spanish empire students from Mexico and South America
came to Salamanca so as to be able, when they returned to their
colonial cities, to boast as scholars had for five hundred years, ‘I
am from Salamanca.’ There was also an Irish College attached to
the university, and here young Catholics who could not obtain
an education at home studied for five or six years, a large
proportion of them finally becoming priests, so that much of
Ireland’s intelligence over long periods of time was trained in

 

Salamanca.

 

Today the university functions normally. It is neither the

 

superior center it once was nor the fraud that followed. It is known

 

within Spain as the school for lesser intellectuals of good family,

 

and few enterprising businesses would hire a Salamanca man

 

when they might get a sharp young fellow trained either at Madrid

 

or Barcelona.

 

Halfway between the university and the Plaza Mayor, at the

 

northeast corner of two narrow streets, stands a stalwart brown

 

Renaissance building four stories high, built in the early 1500s in

 

the shape of a fortress. In Salamanca one can find many such

 

buildings but this one has captured the imagination of all, because

 

its main façade is studded with sixteen rows of beautifully carved

 

conch shells, with varying numbers of shells to the row; some

 

contain as many as twenty-three, others only fourteen, but they

 

mark the bullding with elegance. This is the famous Casa de las

 

Conchas (House of Shells), whose owner was a member of the

 

Order of Santiago, and it illustrates how a capricious artistic

 

invention can sometimes convert an ordinary structure into

 

something enchanting.

 

When I am in Salamanca, I like to go to La Casa de las Conchas

 

at noon as the sun creeps into the Calle de Meléndez and begins

 

to throw the shells into lovely patterns of light and shade. I sit for

 

about an hour on the stoop of a shoemaker’s shop cater-cornered

 

to the shells and enjoy the sensation of seeing the tip of one shell

 

after another emerge from shadow into sunlight until finally the

 

whole shell glows. The carved shields that top the windows burst

 

into sunlight; the eagle pecks at the rays as they slide past and

 

soon his wings are golden.

 

From the nearby cathedral, a curious affair in which a very old

 

cathedral about to fall down was propped up by building a new

 

one alongside it, bells begin to toll the quarter-hour and enough

 

sun reaches the wall so that the protruding shells cast long

 

diagonal shadows. At half past twelve the shoemaker suggests we

 

have a cold drink; the whole façade is now in sunlight and will

 

stay so for some hours. I see that the stone wall is not entirely flat,

 

for the building is old, and here and there its stones have bulged,

 

but now the house can be seen at its best, glowing in sunlight,

 

and I wonder at myself for finding so much pleasure in watching

 

the metamorphosis of a building notable only because some crazy

 

architect slapped a couple of hundred conch shells across its face.

 

Still, if I returned to Salamanca tomorrow I’d perch myself once

 

more on the shoe maker’s stoop to watch this bewitching ballet

 

of sun and stone.

 

The ways of tourists are strange, and one afternoon as I sat in

 

the Plaza Mayor I heard some Frenchmen at the next table tearing

 

America apart. To the first barrage of criticism I could not logically

 

protest: Americans were uncultured, lacked historical sense, were

 

concerned only with business, had no sensitivity and ought to

 

stay home. The second echelon of abuse I did want to interrupt,

 

because I felt that some of it was wide of the mark: Americans

 

were all loud, had no manners, no education, no sense of

 

proportion, and were offensively vulgar in dress, speech, eating

 

habits and general comportment, but I restrained myself because,

 

after all, this was the litany one heard throughout Europe, here

 

expressed rather more succinctly than elsewhere. But when these

 

Frenchmen added a third charge I had to intervene: Americans

 

menace the world because they refuse to face reality.
I happened to have in my hand at that moment the official card

 

distributed by the French government honoring the twentieth

 

anniversary of the Allied landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944.

 

It was a well-presented design, as such things are apt to be in

 

France, and showed a heroic General de Gaulle leading ashore an

 

army of French soldiers and being greeted by stalwart members

 

of the underground who had already vanquished the Germans

 

occupying France. Far in the distance and bringing up the rear
were one American foot soldier and one English officer. I passed
the card along to one of my French neighbors and asked, ‘Is this

 

reality?’

 

He took the card, looked at it, smiled and said, ‘History is what

 

wise men say it is.’

 

‘Do you really believe it happened that way?’

 

He tapped the card, neither in approbation nor rejection, and

 

said, ‘This is what has been agreed upon.’

 

‘Have the charges you’ve been making about Americans also

 

been agreed upon?’