Iberia (87 page)
Authors: James Michener
Before the basilica we found more than a hundred autobuses
from all parts of Europe, for unexpectedly we had stumbled into
a jubilee celebration of the order, and when we entered the basilica
we found prostrate on the floor twenty-five young Jesuits about
to be ordained as priests. Faces to the stone, dressed in white and
gold, the candidates lay with their arms and heads covered by
squares of gold cloth while a cardinal intoned a lengthy prayer
over them while standing before a magnificent altar set among
entwined Solomonic columns of gray-brown stone heavily
ornamented in black and white and highly polished. Above the
prostrate figures rose a statue of Ignatius Loyola, the young
roustabout from Azpeitia who in 1521 at the age of thirty, while
fighting for the king at Pamplona, had been severely wounded in
the leg. During his convalescence, in a house that now stands
encased as a shrine within the heart of the basilica, the young
hellion had undergone conversion, and his years of travel and
study had ensued, including a stay at Salamanca and a perilous
brush with the Inquisition, which almost nipped his career at the
start. He had persevered in his new-found devotion and had
inspired others, Italians and Germans mostly, to an equal
commitment, and with them had founded the order which was
to shore up the Church at a time when it was beset by enemies
from within and without. If Martin Luther was the scourge of the
Catholic Church, then St. Ignatius was the scourge of Lutherans,
and it was his movement in defense of Catholicism that helped
establish a balance in Europe. He is my favorite Spanish saint, for
I find Santo Domingo, founder of the Dominican order, too
bloodthirsty for my liking—I cannot forget his persecution of the
Albigenses—and Santa Teresa too nebulous. But Ignatius, the
stubborn, worldly Basque who came to God late and then with
such fury—him I can understand and him I regard with personal
identification.
The history of the Jesuit Order in Spain has rarely been
peaceful, but the lead in repressing the movement has usually
come from neighboring countries. In 1759 Portugal decided that
it must expel the Jesuits from both the mother country and the
colonies. In 1764 France reached the same conclusion. So in 1767
King Carlos III of Spain announced the expulsion of the Jesuits
from Spain and the New World alike, but later they crept back.
In 1835, with the inauguration of reforms in government, they
were expelled again, but again they returned; and in 1932, with
the launching of the republic, they were ousted once more, but
with Generalísimo Franco they reappeared. The loss involved in
these expulsions was Spain’s, for even though the Jesuits might
be difficult to manage, it was they who were mainly responsible
for what education Spain offered, and they were usually expelled
at the precise time when the nation needed the international
insights which they offered.
Now, as the twenty-five young Jesuits lie prostrate, the order
seems secure in Spain, and as the priest prays he uses appropriately
the Basque tongue:
‘Ogi zerutik etorria
From the basilica of Loyola, whose magnificence had astonished
us, we pushed on to Santillana del Mar, site of the Caves of
Altamira, where in 1869 the world’s first concentration of
prehistoric art was discovered by accident. When first I heard
John Fulton’s reasons for wanting to visit Altamira, I must confess
I could not express much enthusiasm for what he had in mind.
He said, ‘I want to see how cave men drew their bulls and how
they colored them, because I have in mind to publish a book with
a series of bull pictures done as these early men did them.’
‘On rock?’ I asked.
I said to myself, ‘If that’s what a young man wants to do, why
For more than a thousand years before that day in 1869 when
the Caves of Altamira were discovered as a major glory of western
art, the small town of Santillana had been well regarded as an
exceptionally fine village. Here three or four country lanes
intersect and each is lined with rare old houses and churches that
date back at least to the year 870. In Santillana it was a custom
for proud families to emblazon their homes with heraldic shields,
so that today the town could well be set aside as a museum
showing what happens when everyone tries ‘to keep up with the
Barredas,’ for one house is finer than the next and this family
shield larger than that, until finally the Villa family offers an
escutcheon so tremendously big that the human figures on it are
known locally as giants. The guidebook warns: ‘This shield is so
close to the spectator that the effect is perhaps a little pompous.’
On the other hand, the Collegiate church is an unpretentious gem
of Romanesque architecture, and even the emblazoned houses
have an unusual charm in that their ground floors are given over
to the stabling of cattle, whose aromas permeate the village,
making it doubly attractive and homelike.
In other words, when the caves that lay below the village fields
were about to be discovered, which would bring millions of
visitors to Santillana, the town was already a poetic, pastoral
museum; today it is a national treasure in which the Barreda
palace has been converted to a handsome parador where one can
obtain good meals and from which he can study the shields and
explore the caves. There are few small towns in Europe more
worth a visit than this.
The caves, at first sight, were merely a repetition of what I had
come to know along tourist routes, whether in the Shenandoah
Valley or along the rivers of Europe. Compared to the Carlsbad
Caverns of New Mexico they are trivial in size, but they are clean
and well lighted and their small rooms give a sense of
underground living.
One area led to another of no conspicuous interest, but at the
end of the trip I came to a low-ceilinged room about fifty feet
long by thirty wide—as big as a motion picture house in a small
village—and when my eyes had adjusted to the restrained light
and when I looked upward I saw something so much grander
than I had been led to expect that I can describe it only as one of
the major surprises of my adventures in art. I had known the art
was there. I could visualize what the wild bulls looked like. I knew
what colors had been used to outline them, and I even knew how
particular animals stood. But knowing all this, I knew nothing
about the impact of this silent, hidden room upon the
imagination.
For example, I had always believed that the great bulls of
Altamira ranged along the walls of the cave. They are all on the
ceiling. I had supposed I would find no more than a dozen good
specimens. There are about thirty, each one a major work of art.
I had supposed the colors to be faded, as they are in other
prehistoric caves, and the bulls mere outlines which the mind fills
in with pigment. Instead they are as bold and fresh in their color
as if they had been painted last week. To stand at either the high
end of the cave or the low and to look across the expanse of ceiling
and see the animals rising and falling mysteriously along the rocky
surface is to see not a prehistoric drawing but a field of bulls the
way artists some seventeen thousand years ago must have seen
them on the seacoast plains bordering the Bay of Biscay.
The thing that surprised me most, as I recall this amazing room,
was the series of bulls constructed around rocky protuberances
which jutted down from the ceiling. Mostly these extrusions are
elliptical, but some are circular; they project eight or ten inches
or perhaps even a foot, forming kinds of rocky hummocks
standing forth from the rocky pasture lands. On these humps the
ancient artists, using a trickery not surpassed by Salvador Dali,
drew sleeping animals, wonderfully curled, with their feet tucked
under them and their heads resting on their forelegs. The sense
of reality thus created is magical; the bulls look as if at any
moment they might rise from their slumber. One of the first
French scholars to study Altamira summed it up in a phrase that
has not been equaled: ‘This cave is the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric
art.’
John Fulton, studying the manner in which the pigment had
been applied, pointed out something that I had not seen for
myself: ‘Nowhere in the cave is there a hunter, or any weapon
used in hunting. The men who drew these animals must have
loved them.’ I’ve since seen a study which claims that the circular
animals painted on the protruding rocks are wounded and about
to die, but I saw no evidence of this and I suppose Fulton was
closer to the truth. These are drawings done by men who studied
animals and who loved them, the way the farmers of present-day
Santillana love their beasts and share their houses with them, even
though in the end they must live off them.
The cave was enhanced by a poetically enthusiastic guide four
feet eight inches tall who spoke with swift impartiality a blend of
French, Spanish and English, intermixing his words in such a way
as to create the impression that he was speaking some ancient
language that might have been used by the cave men: ‘Regardez
les animaux qui suivent el campo, comiendo, pensando, corriendo
and lying down on their sides.’ I found that if I could catch only
a few words in each language I was able to build up a picture of
the cave as it must have existed when men spoke with similarly
fragmented thoughts.
One of the most interesting aspects of Altamira is a museum
some distance from the entrance to the caves, for it contains a
collection of the artifacts found on the site. The caves were
discovered when a huntsman’s dog fell into them one afternoon.
The dog was pulled out and the incident forgotten until six years
later, in 1875, when another in Spain’s long line of amateur
enthusiasts, this time Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, heard of the
cave and went exploring. It is interesting to note that it was only
after four years of intensive work that the small cave containing
the paintings was found by Don Marcelino’s daughter María, who
stumbled upon the scene where bulls wandered across the ceiling.
In 1880 Don Marcelino published his findings, only to be branded
a fraud. It was years before the authenticity and significance of
the find were recognized.
In the building of which I speak, a small exhibition has been
put together of the things Don Marcelino found and meticulously
catalogued. Here are the stone axes, the wedges, the arrow points
and the thin bones pierced to serve as needles, vestiges of a
complex civilization. Especially attractive to anyone interested in
art is a considerable group of sea shells, each containing the
dried-out remnants of paint used by the prehistoric artists: red,
black, gray, yellow, brown, white. Many of the pigments are the
same as those employed by artists today, particularly a raw ochre
which Fulton found in rock form on the beach nearby. If these
dried colors were ground in a pestle and mixed with oil, they
could be used now, and it is moving to think that in them we have
the specific materials utilized in making the oldest surviving
paintings in the history of art.
When I saw the shells I did not at first understand why they
affected me as they did. Then I remembered. In the atelier of the
American painter Karl Knaths at Provincetown on Cape Cod, I
had seen exactly this type of shell, used precisely in this way and
containing exactly these colors. In seventeen thousand years some
of the ways of art had not changed, and at last I understood why
Fulton wanted to paint his series of pictures using bull’s blood,
red ochre and native oils, for that was the way the whole exciting
business had begun.
I was profoundly affected by Santillana: the houses with their
arrogant shields, the good smell of cattle, the beautiful
Romanesque church, the timeless bulls wandering across the
roof-land meadows, and the seashell palette with its dried-up
paints. I wanted time to think about this concentration of
experience, so I walked slowly out of town and up the steep
Camino Comillas to the fork where a secondary road branches
off to Suances, and there sitting on a stone wall I had a splendid
view of the region. Low mountains hemmed in the village and
meandering stone fences outlined the fields. Red roofs marked
the houses I had enjoyed and huge barns proved that the land
was profitably farmed. This was northern Spain at its best, heavy
with trees and richness, and I wondered if it were possible that
the prehistoric men had lived above ground, reserving the caves
as religious sites or refuges in time of war. If they lived on this
particular bit of land they knew beauty at first hand, and it was
this natural beauty that had characterized their art. I took a few
steps backward, and I had crossed the watershed. Santillana had
vanished and I was looking down at the Bay of Biscay, where
rolling hills dropped to the sea, taking with them lonely,
weather-beaten trees and a very old church that seemed about to
plunge into the waves. Sunset was coming on and men were
leaving the fields and heading for homes I could not see. They
had been tending corn, which grows abundantly in these parts
but is eaten only by animals.
It was night and I returned to Santillana, where the only
argument that Vavra and Fulton and I were to have in five months
of delightful travel ensued. There was a chirping sound, and Vavra
said, ‘Oh, it’s owls.’
Without thinking that I was contradicting a professional
naturalist, I blurted out, ‘More likely frogs.’
disagreement before Fulton, who said that to his uneducated ear
it was neither frogs nor owls, so we turned to local experts. The
first five farmers, who had lived all their lives in the presence of
this sound, gave such radically different answers that I will merely
repeat them.