Iberia (80 page)

Long after the executions of Fray Miguel and Espinosa, long
after bitter Felipe II was dead, the dismal affair at Madrigal ended
on a note of gracia. Felipe III, who had already reigned for twelve
years, relented at the thought of his cousin Doña Ana de Austria’s
being immured in a cell and appointed her, when she was
forty-two years old, abbess of the largest and most important
convent in Spain, Las Huelgas, and there she ruled for many years,
firm, able and disposed to listen sympathetically when young
nuns came to her with emotional problems.

IX
PAMPLONA

Word had circulated through Europe and America that the mob
was gathering in July for the feria of San Fermín at Pamplona.
The two British bullfight experts Angus Macnab and Kenneth
Tynan were to be there. The American aficionados Darryl Zanuck,
Orson Welles, and Conrad Janis had reservations. Hemingway’s
mentor Juanito Quintana had assured us that he was coming, and
although the queen of bullfight fans, the stately Tigre from
London, couldn’t make it, she was sending as deputy her son
Oliver, a most attractive young man fresh out of Eton with a
penchant for running a few inches in front of the largest bulls.
The ineffable Matt Carney, whom I had not met, was coming
down from his bizarre occupation in Paris, and I looked forward
to making his acquaintance, and Bob Daley, who had just
published a good book on the bulls, would be there, but what was
most attractive to me, Robert Vavra, in charge of illustrations for
this book, was to be on hand, as would be the American matador
John Fulton, who was flying in from Mexico. I wanted to talk to
both of them. So with a good deal of cabling for reservations and
renting of cars, the mob set out for Pamplona.

My reasons for going were fourfold and none was connected
with bullfighting, much as I enjoyed it. First I wanted to see the
Navarrese city of Tudela; then I wanted to talk about music with
Don Luis Morondo; next I wanted to study Pamplona’s curious
cathedral; and finally I wanted to picnic once more in the
enchanted Pass of Roncesvalles. I would have traveled a
considerable distance to do any one of these things, and the happy
prospect of doing them all and in conjunction with the celebration
of San Fermín was enticing.

Tudela is a small city on the right bank of the Río Ebro and has
little to commend it except a public square with some fine arches
and a few church buildings that might concern an architect but
which had no interest for me. I was drawn to Tudela by a crowded
district which huddled along the river’s edge; eight hundred years
ago this area had been a warren of narrow streets from which a
great man had fled to adventures so preposterous as to make him
one of the major travelers of history, and it was to him that I
wanted to pay homage, for I was indebted to his work.

He was known simply as Benjamin of Tudela and probably he
had no other name, for he was a poor Jew who lived in the local
ghetto, but in 1165 he decided to see something of the world, and
long before I had ever seen the city of Tudela, I had imagined him
saying goodbye to the miserable Jewish quarter and sailing down
the Ebro to some port city that gave him access to the
Mediterranean and the known world of that time.

Now, seeing the Ebro as it passed Tudela, I doubted that he
could have sailed it. He must have walked, perhaps to Zaragoza
and then over to Barcelona, where he entered upon the
Mediterranean. At any rate, in the years following 1165 Benjamin
wandered through the Near East, trading and listening and making
notes. He visited more than three hundred places, and wherever
he went he asked about the condition of Jews in the region and
compiled a census of all families known to be Jewish, so that today
it is from Benjamin that we know about the Jewry of that time.
He was especially careful to note conditions in the Holy Land,
where the Crusades had pretty well eliminated Jews in 1099. But
when he reached these supposedly destitute lands he discovered
several enclaves in which Jewish families had persisted for a
hundred generations.

Benjamin was an indefatigable traveler and apparently a man
of courage, for he penetrated to areas that other Europeans had
not seen, and if his report, existing only in manuscript till 1543,
lacked the literary quality of Marco Polo’s narrative, it surpassed
the Venetian’s account in factual matters and antedated it by
more than a century. I owed Benjamin of Tudela much, for from
his tight and cautious writing I learned things that I required to
know in writing one of my novels, and now as I stood in his native
city, looking at the narrow streets that he must have known and
from which he had fled, I felt very close to him, for he had traveled
the lands that I had traveled, and he had written of things I had
written about, but he had done it when to do so required both
imagination and courage. I wish I had known this doughty old
Jew; I wish I could have sat with him on the shores of Lake Galilee
when he noted in his journal that fourteen Jewish families had
now crept back to this village or that, where all had been expelled
or murdered half a century before. I found in Benjamin a great
resilience of spirit and it was gratifying to walk the streets he had
walked.

There was another reason why I wanted to see Tudela: here I
would catch my first glimpse of the Río Ebro, to which the title
of this book is related. In pre-Roman times this river was known
as the Iberus and those who lived along it as Iberes. To the Greeks
the eastern half of Spain was Iberia, and thus the word entered
classical history. The French writer Jean Descola in his

A History
of Spain
(1962) offers quite a different derivation:

At about this time the country acquired a name. The Hebrews
called it Sepharad, ‘border’ or ‘edge.’ The Greeks christened it
Hesperia, ‘the Occident,’ or He Spania, ‘the sparse.’ More
significant, however, was the term ‘Iberia,’ which derived from
the Celtic word

aber
, ‘harbor’ or ‘river.’ And indeed, the first
known inhabitants of the peninsula were precisely the Iberians
who came from the valley of the Ebro.

Since no authority I have consulted supports this theory, I do not
know what to make of Descola’s claim that the word

Iberian
is of
Celtic origin.

To the Romans, of course, the name Iberia referred to that
region of the Caucasus now known as Georgia, and it is surprising
to find that a respected authority like William Smith in his

Classical Dictionary
(1881) limits his definition of Iberia to the
Asian area, ending with the aside, ‘No connection can be traced
between the Iberians of Asia and those of Spain.’ (Strictly speaking,
therefore, the most notorious Iberian of history was Josef Stalin.)
The more authoritative
Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature
and Antiquities
(1965) also defines Iberia as Georgia but does add
a second definition: ‘One of the ancient names of Spain, derived
from the river Iberus.’
The Oxford English Dictionary
cites Henry Cockeram’s
The
English Dictionary, or an Interpretation of Hard English Words
(1623) as reflecting general European usage in its simple definition
of Iberians: ‘Spaniards.’ It was in this tradition, which I follow,
that Isaac Albéniz in the years 1906-1909 composed his delightful
suite
Iberia
, originally for the piano; six typical section titles are
Sevilla, Ronda, Almería, Triana, Málaga and Jerez. For him and
for all others who are mindful of the classical past, Iberia serves
as a synonym for ancient Spain, and for the most evocative of
modern Spain.

In general usage, of course, the word has come to indicate the
entire peninsula, including both Spain and Portugal. The first
recorded example of this usage in English came no earlier than
1611, but today

Lippincott’s Gazetteer
(1952) says briefly: ‘The
Iberian peninsula comprises Spain and Portugal,’ while
The
Random House Dictionary of the English Language
(1966) relegates
the traditional definition of Georgia to second place, defining the
word primarily as ‘a peninsula in SW Europe, comprising Spain
and Portugal.’

Even though I am following the older definition, a chapter of
this book could legitimately have dealt with Portugal, because in
the years when I was visiting Spain, I grabbed at every opportunity
to wander in Portugal; one of the most relaxed vacations I ever
experienced came when a group of us rented a historic quinta
(country seat) at Sintra, the exquisite hill town near Lisboa in
which Lord Byron composed much of his heroic poem

Don Juan
.
For more than a month I tramped over the hills he had known
and down those tight and twisted lanes that he had loved. The
Portuguese spoke of him with enormous affection, as if he had
been with them only a few tourist seasons ago; his demonic
presence hovered about me as I worked at my typewriter, because
at some earlier date someone had told the Englishman who owned
our quinta that he looked exactly like Lord Byron, and this had
had a bad effect upon the man. The study I was using was literally
lined with volumes on the poet. Apparently my Englishman had
a standing order with booksellers in London and New York: ‘Send
me anything printed about Lord Byron.’ He also had copies of
several of the more romantic portraits of the poet, which proved
that Byron did resemble the owner of the quinta, or the other way
around.

Wherever I wandered in Portugal, I discovered quiet
Englishmen who had lived for decades in quiet crannies of this
hospitable country. Portugal has always held a fascination for the
English, who term it ‘our oldest ally and one of the world’s most
civilized spots.’ I often suspected that these Englishmen were
engaged in a conspiracy of silence, and one afternoon a group of
them begged me, ‘For God’s sake, Michener, don’t tell anyone,
and certainly not the rich Americans, how heavenly this place is.’
It was Europe’s most economical retirement spot; it had the best
servants, the best wine, some of the best food, and a host of small
localities from Porto in the north to Faro in the south to which
an educated Englishman could retire in dignity.

I am often asked to compare Portugal and Spain, and the simple
truth seems to be that whichever of these two countries one visits
first continues as his preference. No one can be more energetic
in defense of a new-found land than the Englishman, Frenchman
or American who has visited Portugal first and then moved on
to Spain: he loves the first and is never easy in the second. I
discovered this when I traveled westward across Spain with an
American couple who had worked for some years at our embassy
in Lisboa, for it was touching to watch how apprehensive they
were of all things Spanish and how their spirits revived the closer
they got to their beloved Portugal. ‘We wouldn’t feel safe drinking
Spanish water, thank you. We’ve been all through Portugal and
we’ve never seen villages as dirty as those in Spain. Doesn’t anyone
have paint in this country? The fact is, we feel safe in Portugal but
in Spain you never know. Our police are so much better.’ As we
approached the western border of Spain it became a question of
whether we should take our lunch in Spanish Badajoz, which I
preferred because of the great seafood zarzuela I knew was waiting,
or press on to Portuguese Elvas, which lay just across the border.
‘Oh,’ my embassy friends said, ‘we’d never want to eat in a Spanish
restaurant if a clean Portuguese one were nearby.’

Well, the first of the two countries that I saw was Spain and
my affection has always rested there. It was not until my trip with
the Lisboa couple that I saw the peninsula through Portuguese
eyes, and when I did this I had to admit that of the two countries
Portugal was the cleaner, the better organized, the better
controlled; it was not illogical that the knowing English had elected
this small country as their choice of Europe. But I also found that
it lacked the culture of Spain; there was no Portuguese Velázquez,
no Victoria, no García Lorca, no Santa Teresa, and of course no
Seneca. The genius of the Iberian peninsula seemed to have resided
principally in the more easterly regions, and it was for this reason
that I preferred Spain.

On two different occasions after long stays in Portugal, I crossed
into Spain and each time those of us in the automobile felt a surge
of joy, an expansion of the spirit and a sense of growing nobility
as we entered Spain. Once the driver of our car dismounted,
rubbed his hands in Spanish soil and exulted in being home again.
My joining him irritated my wife, who like many women preferred
Portugal. ‘You’re being silly and unfair,’ she protested. ‘Portugal
is much finer than you admit it to be.’ The driver, who had been
disappointed in Portuguese girls, replied, ‘There’s one thing I’ll
admit. It’s the only country in the world where a man’s mistress
is apt to be uglier than his wife.’