Iberia (70 page)

 

It was a quiet spot, marked with rough dignity rather than

 

formal beauty. The double-tiered cloisters were low and

 

unadorned, but they stood in such stateliness around the enclosure

 

that they seemed more attractive than ornate ones I had seen

 

elsewhere. In the center stood a low octagonal well, again of deep

 

simplicity, protected by a plain tiled roof.

 

The rooms followed the lead of the cloisters, for they too were

 

square and unadorned. ‘This is the old kitchen,’ one of the

 

Agustinas said, and when I commented on how large it was, she

 

explained, ‘Yes, for in those days we had hundreds here. Now we

 

are but twenty. And they speak of closing us down.’ I looked about
me at the medieval spaciousness, and she said gloomily, ‘I know.

 

It is large and we are small.’

 

Whenever the two nuns led me to a new part of the convent

 

they first rang a warning bell, and I could sometimes catch the

 

flight of skirts as someone disappeared around a corner, but if I

 

did meet a nun unexpectedly face to face, and who had not heard

 

the warning, she was always very old. ‘This is the hall where nobles

 

were received on visits,’ my guide said, and for the first time I saw

 

that long chain of portraits, painted in heavy brown by some

 

untalented artist centuries ago. They are not good art, but they

 

awaken powerful memories and convey an excellent idea of why

 

such royal convents were necessary in the old days.

 

This tall, thin-faced nun is Doña María, the illegitimate

 

daughter of Fernando the Catholic. This pleasant round-faced

 

nun holding a skull in her right hand is Doña María Esperanza,

 

also an illegitimate daughter of Fernando. This curious portrait

 

of a nun who looks half infant, half dowager portrays Doña Juana,

 

illegitimate daughter of Carlos V, while this austere nun proudly

 

holding a crown is Doña Ana María, illegitimate daughter of an

 

illegitimate son of Felipe IV and the actress María Calderón. And

 

here is the most memorable of all, a saucy-faced young woman

 

whom we must remember, for we shall study her strange career

 

in detail. She is a delightful-looking person with her coif awry; of

 

all the royal nuns she alone shows a peek of hairdo. She also is

 

alone in wearing jewelry and in her left arm she carries a cute little

 

puppy, and her whole manner is so provocative that one could

 

predict from seeing her that ‘this one will come to no good.’ As

 

a matter of fact, she ended her life as Mother Superior of the most

 

powerful convent in Spain, but her road to that eminence was

 

rocky. She is Doña Ana, illegitimate daughter of Don Juan de

 

Austria, the illegitimate son of Carlos V. He was the admiral whose

 

blue battle flags from Lepanto we saw in the museum at Toledo.
There are other portraits in this powerful row, many of them

 

the illegitimate daughters of royalty, and one begins to understand

 

why the existence of these girls, if they were allowed to move freely

 

in society, could have been a considerable embarrassment to the

 

crown. Since they were illegitimate they could not be offered in
marriage to other heads of state, which meant that any adventurer
might pick them up, sire a few children and claim hereditary
rights to the throne of Spain. Great care was taken to keep them
safely locked up and their imprisonment began at age five or six.
The legend attached to the portrait of Doña Juana, daughter of
Carlos V, tells the whole story: ‘Illegitimate daughter of the
emperor, died a novice at the age of seven years.’ A legend across
the frame contains a rather neat play on words:

 

Vivirás eternidad.

(Give yourself to God at a tender age, you will live eternally.)
Many of these little girls matured to become responsible leaders
of their convents.

‘And here is the chapel,’ the old nun intoned, ‘and the beautiful
marble tomb of Doña María, natural daughter of Fernando, and
here is the organ brought down from Germany to soothe the king
with soft music.’ She went to the keyboard while her partner
pumped a huge bellows, and soft wheezing sounds came forth as
they had done four centuries ago.

I was beginning to think that we would never come to the room
which had lured me to Madrigal, but now we passed along the
upper tier of the cloister while my guide rang her bell to disperse
any nuns working there and we came to a window from which I
could look down into the rather large garden of the convent,
where four nuns were weeding. ‘We eat what we grow,’ my guide
said, ‘and we don’t get fat.’ And then there we were! A very
ordinary anteroom containing two royal portraits, an inner room
with no window and only a big rough wooden door whose

panels opened one by one so that servants outside could pass food
into the room without being seen. ‘This is it,’ the nun said
reverently.

And I was in the room where Isabel of Castilla was born, known
to history as Isabel the Catholic, loyal wife of that Fernando who
sired the impressive line of illegitimate offspring. The more one
studies Spanish history, tracing out the actual sources and
operations of power, the more highly he regards Isabel. In
personality, devotion, intelligence, fortitude and above all in
administrative power, she makes all other women of her age and
most of the men seem puny. War, the presence of Muslims on
her soil and the philosophical upheavals of the age confronted
her, but one by one she triumphed over them, leaving when she
died a kingdom on its way to solidity where before there had been
only a hollow crown.

The representative fact about Isabel is that she bore five
children, some of whom were to become notable in European
history, and she gave birth to each in a different city, often after
days and weeks in the saddle, protecting her realm. She was a
colossus of her age, a woman who supported Columbus in his
discovery of a new world, and Anglo-Saxon scholars fail to do
her justice. For example, one major encyclopedia allots her only
sixty-four lines while giving her unimportant daughter Catalina
two hundred and forty-five merely because she happened to be
the first wife of Henry VIII. And Mary Queen of Scots, who
accomplished nothing compared to Isabel, is accorded a staggering
eleven hundred and eight. This is not only insular; it is ridiculous.

How did she happen to be born in Madrigal? When the Conde
de Luna was running Castilla on behalf of the weak and widowed
king Juan II, he engineered, if you remember, a marriage between
Juan and Isabel of Portugal, the lady who shortly thereafter caused
Luna’s head to be struck off and who later became demented.
Juan already had one son, Enrique, who was first in line for the
crown, and this Enrique would have a daughter Juana, who would
be second in line. Isabel of Portugal would also present the king
with a son, Alfonso, who would be third in line. Therefore, when
in 1450 the queen announced that she was pregnant it caused
little stir, for the crown was already protected with heirs, so while
her husband in his feeble way watched over the government she
hied herself

to the family palace at Madrigal, not yet a convent, and there gave
birth to a daughter, Isabel.

In the bare anteroom there was a portrait of her, and she looked
to be a stocky, heavy-faced, powerful woman with large eyelids
and a stunning air of command. Whether or not the portrait was
physically accurate I did not know, but psychologically it was. No
one ever reported her to be beautiful but many commented on
the fact that she was a tender mother, a wise ruler and a woman
of merciless determination.

While I had Isabel’s character in mind, I wanted to see Arévalo,
which represented the next step in her development, so I left
Madrigal by the southern gate, picked up a small road which led
to the east and after some twenty miles I came to Arévalo and its
brooding castle among the ruins. The town was strange in many
ways; through the centuries an unusual number of churches had
been built and the town found itself with a surfeit. Sensibly, some
of the unnecessary buildings had been deconsecreated and
converted into mental asylums, others into granaries.

Arévalo had a plaza, not the main one, which startled me, for
it was unpaved and had the low monotonous buildings common
five centuries ago, so that even when men in modern dress crossed
it, I had the sense of being back in the time of Isabel. I stopped
in a store facing the plaza and asked what accounted for this
timelessness, and the woman explained, ‘We keep it this way so
that motion picture companies can shoot their films here. We’ve
been in the movies many times. Look! To make this five hundred
years old you simply take down those two electric light wires and
that Coca-Cola sign.’ She snapped her fingers and I made the
imaginary transformation.

Today Arévalo is renowned for two accomplishments. It makes
the best bread in Spain and the best roast pig. Of the bread I can
say only that I ate it as if it were cake. Served in crusty small loaves,
it seems to be made of honey, cream, rock salt and coarse grain
which has lost none of its goodness through milling. Once I was
in the area with a friend who at each meal ate three loaves, by
himself. When I commented on this, he asked. ‘Why eat meat
when this is here?’

As for the pig, at the Figón de la Pinilla (Eating House of Mrs.
Pinilla), an old restaurant on the main plaza decorated with scenes
from plays and movies, the dish is served each Tuesday, on all
feast days and during the June feria. It is so well regarded in the
region that Arévalo’s poet laureate, Marolo Perotas, has cast the
recipe into heroic blank verse:

Everything is golden,

 

Everything is aromatic,

 

Everything is glistening

 

Because of the lard and garlic.

If the verses are reduced to prose, which hardly seems appropriate
for such a dish, the directions become simple: ‘Select a fat suckling
pig twenty-one days old and barely nine pounds in weight, because
if it is larger the result will be greasy, tough and coarse. Remove
all the hair and slit the pig open from head to tail. Then in a rough
black earthen casserole bake it at a temperature of 185°, and in a
little more than an hour and a half it is ready to eat.’ The result
was so good that I had to fault the poet for having kept to himself
the basting secrets. Suspecting that a good many herbs went into
the dressing, I slipped into the kitchen of the figón to interrogate
the cook. ‘Of course! Butter, onion, salt, lots of paprika, bay leaves,
garlic, lemon, parsley, thyme and white vinegar.’ I complimented
him, and he added, ‘Don’t go easy on the paprika.’ As he cooked
it, the roast pig of Arévalo was a rich, greasy, succulent feast which
Spaniards enjoy and foreigners approach with caution.

It was not for roast pig that Isabel of Portugal and her daughter
Isabel, who was to be known as the Catholic, came to Arévalo,
nor for the bread either. They came here to live in the castle, a
large gloomy place but one that could be defended, while the king
spent his last days in confusion and died. Young Isabel, still far
removed from the succession, was of little importance, so mother
and daughter stayed in the forbidding castle and slowly Isabel of
Portugal went mad. She used to scream at her attendants and
alternately love and berate her daughter. She beat her head against
the wall on one occasion, but for the most part she receded to
quiescence and sat for days staring at the walls of her self-made
prison. Her daughter was allowed little freedom, and her long
stay at Arévalo could just as well have been spent in any other of
the nearby towns, for they were monotonously alike.