‘Yes.’
‘So they are now the truth?’
‘In Europe, yes.’
‘Very interesting,’ I said, turning away from the noisy
Frenchmen to ponder the curious fate of Americans in the world
today. I was at the moment especially depressed by some English
books I had been reading, in which sensible writers with university
degrees said the most extraordinary things about American
travelers whom they had met in Europe. The Americans were all
stupid and objectionable and loud and uneducated; and I sat at
my table and made a list of the Americans I had met in recent
travels: three Nobel Prize winners; two of the world’s finest
playwrights; three good novelists much read in England and
France; four nationally famous bankers who in their spare time
serve on the boards of universities, opera houses and museums;
a score of quiet-spoken professors; a woman who helps run the
Cleveland art museum; the director of one of our great
symphonies; and two very well behaved painters. These people
were, by any standard, among the leaders of the world and
certainly among the best educated and most gently cultured. Not
one spoke in a loud voice; in fact, I had had to lean forward to
catch what Tennessee Williams said, and the Ashcrafts, whom we
shall meet in Pamplona, speak so softly they practically whisper.
‘Why does no European ever meet this kind of American?’ I
asked myself. In the latest English travel books on Spain there
was a constant procession of American boors and boobs, but the
authors were well-versed men and must surely have come into
contact somewhere with the kinds of Americans I knew. I
concluded that English writers could not be charged with
animosity, for this they did not intend; they were merely accepting
blindly a kind of American Black Legend and compounding it
monotonously. I cannot charge them with planned falsehood,
but I can query their powers of observation and their fairness in
recording what they see.
In my travels I have encountered some pretty horrible English
men and women. There was the chinless wonder in Singapore
who for business reasons wanted to take me into the exclusive
Raffles Club and spent some forty minutes coaching me on how
I must behave, forgetting that I had spent two years at one of
Britain’s best universities. He was so asinine he was funny. At the
Sevilla airport I watched two formidable English women, the type
who seem to be in constant supply, demand in piercing voices
where their luggage was. In clear Spanish the porter replied, ‘Enter
the building, turn left, ten minutes.’ The women, irritated by now,
shouted their question again at the poor man, both speaking at
once, and he with gestures explained once more, ‘Enter the
building, turn left, ten minutes.’ The women looked at him with
contempt, brushed him aside, and one said to the other in a loud
voice. ‘Poor beast. He doesn’t understand a word we’re saying.’
And so on. The point is that although I have seen such behavior
ad infinitum I have refrained from writing about it as if it were
standard English deportment overseas, because I know it isn’t. I
have met too many English gentlemen to allow myself such error.
I do not refrain from lampooning the English because I love them
but because I have regard for fact.
Sitting as quietly as my French companions would permit, I
tried to discover what my true feelings were in this matter of
honest description. In my travels I have never met any single
American as noisy and crude as certain Germans, none so
downright mean as one or two Frenchmen, none so ridiculous
as an occasional Englishman, none so arrogant as some Swedes
and certainly none so penurious as the Portuguese. For raw
misbehavior no American could surpass a prime example from
India or Egypt, and for the unfeeling, uncultured boob that I
encounter so often in literature as representing the American, I
suspect one would do better to look among the Russians.
But in each of the national examples cited I am speaking of
only a few horrible specimens. If one compares all English tourists
with all Americans, I would have to admit that taken in the large
the American is worse. If some European wanted to argue that
seventy percent of all American tourists are regrettable, I would
agree. If he insisted on eighty percent, I’d go along. If he claimed
ninety, I suppose I wouldn’t argue too much. But when, like the
Frenchmen to my left and the English writers under my arm, he
states that one hundred percent are that way, then I must accuse
him of being false to the facts.
Of all the countries in which to travel, I find that today the
American is judged more honestly in Spain than elsewhere. He
is not loved, but neither is he abused. The average Spaniard objects
to having American military bases on Spanish soil, but he
acknowledges the need for protection. He is suspicious of the
large number of American Protestants who come to Spain and is
sure they are up to no good. He is aggravated by the sight of
American military personnel spending large and easy sums of
money, but he is gratified that the Yanks behave as well as they
do. Because Spain is a dictatorship it is obligated to decry
democracy, and since America is a leader among the democracies,
newspapers run a constant commentary on our failures, especially
in handling the race problem. Reading Spanish newspapers, one
would judge that the United States was about to collapse, but at
the same time the impression is given that she is a resolute ally
on whom Spain can depend. Because Spain is a Catholic country,
her newspapers must decry American excesses in sex, education
and family life, and a lurid picture is presented, but Americans
are also presented as courageous, good sports and dependable.
Two points are amusing. Because Spain for many years was
lacking in consumer goods, it was obligatory to prove that the
United States had lost its soul in pursuit of such goods. Special
contumely was heaped upon our system of time payments.
‘Americans have the television set, but they never own it. It has
been loaned to them on time payments, and to meet those
payments they mortgage their souls.’ The soul of Spain, these
articles pointed out, was not corrupted by time payments. But
with the arrival of television the initial cost of a set was so great
that the average Spanish family could not advance the cash at one
time. A system of time payments was obligatory and one was
initiated, but if you ask a Spaniard about this he says, ‘Yes, but
the system we worked out doesn’t corrupt the soul.’
If on almost every topic Spain is reasonably fair to America,
on one it is not. Spain hates Yale University. I suppose that if the
government called for volunteers tomorrow to invade Connecticut
and raze Yale, it could have an expeditionary force by twilight; in
a period of three months I read four assaults on Yale, some
lamenting that a great university should have fallen so low, others
threatening reprisals. The trouble stems from the announcement
by a group of Yale professors in 1965 that they had found a map
proving that Christopher Columbus was not the first to discover
America in 1492 but that a Scandinavian had by 1118 and possibly
as early as 1020. ‘The lie was bad enough,’ a Spanish scholar told
me, ‘but to have announced it on the eve of October 12, El día de
la raza, when the world was preparing to honor our great Spanish
explorer—that was too much. With that action Yale blackened
its name.’
It is surprising to find that most Spaniards consider the Italian
Columbus as one of them, just as they nationalize the Greek El
Greco. At the same time they protest when the French government
includes Pablo Picasso in a list of French painters. When I
commented on this contradiction, a Spaniard pointed out, ‘You
Americans insist in your literature courses that Henry James and
T.S. Eliot were Americans, even though they emigrated to
England, but you also claim a painter like Lyonel Feininger and
a scientist like Albert Einstein, even though they did most of their
work in Germany.’
Apart from such natural chivvying, the American traveler meets
a more congenial reception in Spain than in other European
countries, but I suspect this will not be true much longer, for the
signs are that with affluence Spain will go the way of France. In
Salamanca I decided to take advantage of the favorable travel
conditions and visit a cluster of five small towns to the northeast,
for in them I would be able to trace out a network of lives that
had helped make Spain what it is today.
Madrigal de las Altas Torres (Madrigal of the High Towers),
could there be a more poetic name for a town, even though the
derivation must have been from some prosaic word like
madriguera (burrow or lair of animals)? And could any town so
named be lovelier than this, nestling sun-baked within its circle
of ruined towers? Today it looks almost as it must have in 1450,
its walls forming a complete circle, not large in diameter, its
narrow streets wandering beneath arches. The same notable
buildings are there, and when the church bells ring they send their
evening song out across the same fields of wheat.
Only the towers are not quite the same. They still stand, of
course, but many have lost their tops through crumbling, and the
once impregnable defenses are no longer so. In spite of all I had
read about Madrigal, I had not visualized what an excellent
monument it was, a gem of medieval life protected within its
walls.
The town is very ancient, dating back perhaps to Roman times.
When the Moors reached this far north Christians tried to halt
them here, and the town was destroyed in a series of sieges and
countersieges, but when the Moors triumphed it was rebuilt and
given both the towers and the name it bears today. It was the walls
that attracted the kings of Castilla, for once inside these
battlements they were safe, and it was here that Juan II, the one
who sponsored the Conde Alvaro de Luna, whose genuflecting
statue we saw in Toledo, built a palace in the early 1400s. Later it
was converted into an Augustinian convent where surplus females
of the royal line were hidden away, and it was in this convent that
I picked up the thread I was to follow through the five towns.
I first saw the convent from a distance, an ugly, low palace with
miserly windows and little to commend it. Walls in the shape of
a lozenge enclosed a large garden, and I judged the whole could
accommodate about three hundred nuns, but their lives would
presumably be rather hard, for the old convent seemed cold and
forbidding. I went to what must have been the main entrance to
the castle when kings lived here, but it was closed.
‘You enter by the side,’ a woman called from the street, and I
walked along the bleak wall until I came to a corner, where I found
the present entrance tucked away under three handsome stone
arches that formed a small protected porch containing a device
I had often read about but never seen. It was a torno (wheel), a
large lazy Susan with sides about two feet tall and set into the wall
in such a way that the nun inside the convent who turned it could
not see the person who might have deposited a bundle on the
other side. This was the way in which the unwed mothers of Spain
had traditionally turned their unwanted babies over to a convent
without being recognized. Many notable Spaniards had started
life in the turning of some torno.
I rang the bell which hung beside the contraption, and after a
moment the torno slowly revolved while a nun inside checked to
see if I had abandoned a baby.
‘What do you want?’ an unseen voice asked.
‘To see the cradle of Spanish history,’ I said, repeating a phrase
seen on posters advertising Madrigal.
‘Wait.’
There was a long pause, then finally a door, far removed from
the torno, opened and I was greeted by two of the shortest, oldest
nuns I had ever seen. ‘Come this way,’ they said, leading me into
the convent that had once been a palace.
